. . . the enormous size of the modern corporation cannot be explained as due to increased efficiency; many specialists regard the size now typical of the giants as already in excess of the requirements of efficiency. In truth, the relationship of corporate size to efficiency is quite unknown; moreover, the scale of the modern corporation is usually due more to financial and managerial amalgamations than to technical efficiency. But inevitable or not, the fact is that today the great American corporations seem more like states within states than simply private businesses. The economy of America has been largely incorporated, and within their incorporation the corporate chiefs have captured the technological innovation, accumulated the existing great fortunes as well as much lesser, scattered wealth, and capitalized the future. Within the financial and political boundaries of the corporation, the industrial revolution itself has been concentrated. Corporations command raw materials, and the patents on inventions with which to turn them into finished products. They command the most expensive, and therefore what must be the finest, legal minds in the world, to invent and to refine their defenses and their strategies. They employ man as producer and they make that which he buys as consumer. They clothe him and feed him and invest his money. They make that with which he fights the wars and they finance the ballyhoo of advertisement and the obscurantist bunk of public relations that surround him during the wars and between them.
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Systems
Science & the arts are systems of contingency (though they have deep epistemological differences, whereas fundamentalist religions & conspiracy theories are systems of certainty. Systems of certainty are, by both definition & experience, fantasy. I was about to say that systems of certainty are infantile, but in fact most six-year-olds have a better sense of the world’s uncertainty than the various peddlers of fundamentalist faith. The hatred of the quasi-Christian & quasi-Islamic fundamentalists is a function of the difficulty of maintaining a simplistic worldview.
