Francis Berger
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The Corporate Person and The Objectives of Long-Term Evil

7/26/2021

9 Comments

 
I have reached the tentative conclusion that corporations, the concept of the "corporate person", and the inculcation of the corporate mindset in human consciousness are all direct causes of the interconnected, intertwined, technocratic global totalitarianism to which the world has succumbed.

More to the point, demonic forces have harnessed corporations, the "corporate person", and the inculcation of a corporate mindset to pull off the trick Satan had been trying to pull off since the beginning of history - the incorporation of everyone and everything in a system that is inherently opposed to God. 

When modern people abandoned God in favor of atheism, leftism, and materialism, they abandoned all notions of long-term thinking rooted in reality. Convinced that their experience of "reality" was confined to the boundaries of earthly lifespans, modern people adopted an exclusively short-term, hedonistic, fear/lust-based mode of thinking.

Long-term perspectives and objectives are the foundation of serious Christian thinking. Though serious Christians have short-term objectives and motivations, they understand the necessity of aligning short-term worldly aims with long-term spiritual aims.

Put another way, a serious Christian understands that the proper organization, arrangement, and subordination of short-term, temporal objectives against the backdrop of long-term, eternal objectives is a major task of mortal life. Moreover, that the alignment of the short-term with the long-term provides the framework for essential spiritual learning.


Without this frame of thinking, salvation, damnation, eternity, and heaven become utterly meaningless! 

By turning their backs on God, moderns have turned their backs on the essence of spiritual consciousness, particularly the essence of Christian thinking, which in terms of consciousness, was always rooted in long-term rather than short-term thinking. 

This mode of thinking inevitably seeped into all human organizations, institutions, and forms of governance, the operations of which also became rooted in short-term, hedonistic, fear/lust-based objectives (think profit-driven companies, society destroying governments, etc.). The purpose of mortal life degenerated from a spiritual orientation toward God and the long-term objectives of heaven and eternity to a worldview dedicated to squeezing all the kicks you could out of life before the meter ran out.

But here's the rub. Forsaking belief in long-term spiritual objectives does not equal the non-existence of long-term spiritual objectives.

Modern people have cast aside a long-term, spiritual mode of thinking.  Unfortunately, Satan has not. Preoccupied by purely short-term, worldly aims, modern people have relegated all long-term objectives to the Prince of This World who, in turn, has harnessed and weaponized the power of the corporate person to enslave the world.

The late Roger Scruton, a staunch defender of the concept of the corporate person, noted the following regarding a corparate person's positive ability to maintain and execute long-term objectives in the world (slight editing and bold added): 

Let us return in thought, therefore, to the world of thing institutions, and try to discover what the individual lacks in that world. The primary thing that is missing, I believe, is the longterm view.

No obligation endures there-not even the obligations of love and friendship--beyond the lifetime of the individuals who undertake them; nor does any obligation exist towards those who are not present to reciprocate it.

The unborn and the dead are not only disenfranchised: they have lost all claim on the living. Their claims can be acknowledged only if there are persons who endure long enough to enter into personal relation, both with us, the living, and with them.

The true public spirit - the spirit from which civil society and all its benefits derives-requires just such a projection of our duties beyond the grave.

The care for future generations must be entrusted to persons who will exist when they exist: and if there are no such persons surrounding me, how can I have that care, except as a helpless anxiety?

I can enter into no personal obligation that will bind me to past and future souls, nor can you. Only a corporate person can enter such an obligation, and only through corporate persons, therefore, can the relation to the unborn and the dead be made articulate and binding. (Thus when, as in aristocracies, this relation is made articulate through the family, the family ceases to be the bond of present love, and becomes an institution, with a personality distinct from those of its members.)

That this relation to the unborn and the dead is necessary for the fulfilment of the rational agent is something that we should not doubt. For it forms the premise of self-justification.

The individual is justified by the knowledge that he did right by those who survive him, whom he never knew, and who promised him nothing; and equally by those who preceded him and bequeathed to him unknowingly their store of trust. In the broadest sense, then, the corporate person is necessary to the ecology of rational agency, and without it our aims will be as truncated as our lives.


Though I appreciate Scruton's insights regarding the positive potential of corporations and the corporate person, they are marred by the emphasis on this-worldly aims and an utter lack of understanding regarding the nature of spiritual creativity. Nevertheless, Scruton does touch upon something significant - in temporal terms, the corporate person can serve as a vehicle for Good in the long-term (despite the entropy and decay that is an intrinsic part of the world).

What Scruton neglects to emphasize is that it can only do so if it and the people guiding it are resolutely aligned with God and Creation - an alignment in which such long-term objectives are the default setting.

All corporate persons operating today possess long-term objectives, but none of these long-term objectives are aligned with God and Creation, which implies that all corporate persons operating today are directly under the dominion of Satan and are opposed to God and Creation.

Satan has usurped the true public spirit Scruton mentions, the spirit from which civil society and all of its benefits derive. While the people leading, managing, and working for corporations continue to be driven by primarily short-term, worldly aims, the corporations themselves have adopted long-term, negative spiritual aims that are directly opposed to the positive, long-term spiritual aims of Christianity.

​More specifically, the corporate person is now steadfastly dedicated to material enslavement, temporal destruction, and soul damnation.

Of course, modern people are oblivious of this. Having lost the ability to think in the spiritual "long-term", they cannot conceive of any force that would work toward long-term spiritual objectives, be these objectives Good or evil.  
9 Comments
bruce charlton
7/26/2021 07:31:29

That's excellent!

It also shows how secular conservatism serves the agenda of The Left, is actually a part-of the Left - even when deployed at an abstract level by one of the best of recent professional philosophers. Since conservative theory operates in a framework that excludes God and creation, it cannot help but align-with and support the demonic agenda.

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William Wildblood
7/26/2021 13:26:07

Poor Roger Scruton. He was a force for good in many ways in the context of the widespread leftism he battled against during his lifetime but he could never take the final step and become a Christian. Was he just too much of an academic intellectual in the final analysis? I mean did he rely too much on thought and not enough on the mind in the heart?

The time has passed when people like Scruton can do any real good. Now anyone of his ilk just acts as a kind of safely valve to let off some of the steam from the secular worldview while it continues undisturbed.

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Francis Berger
7/26/2021 21:01:13

@ William - Full disclosure - I am not all that familiar with Scruton. I mean, I have heard of him before and read a few of his articles here and there, but that's about it.

Having said that, I completely agree with you about the limitations of men like Scruton. Showing up to the spiritual war armed with nothing but secular conservatism is like showing up to a gun fight armed with nothing more than a pea shooter.

Francis Berger
7/26/2021 21:18:04

@ Bruce - It was your link to one of Edward Feser's posts that led me to this Scruton article. As you say, any conservative theory that does not include God and Creation cannot help but align against God eventually (because they value material ideals and idols such as civil society, etc.)

On a side note, Feser wrote an interesting post in which he explains that the RCC is in fact a corporate person. I enjoyed the post because he does an excellent job tearing R. Dreher to shreds, but I am not so sure about his positive attitude to the RCC as a corporate person. I also found the appeal to "not abandon your mother" to be . . . well, retrograde in terms of Christian consciousness.

https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2021/05/do-not-abandon-your-mother.html

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islanti link
7/26/2021 10:37:03

Wonderful. Thank you.

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Francis Berger
7/26/2021 21:01:35

Cheers, Islanti.

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William Arthurs
7/26/2021 12:55:59

This all from memory as I have no access at the moment to my Scruton books. Scruton, who did at one point train as a lawyer, writes about legal personality as a legal fiction that is a creation of Roman law. But I am not aware that RS sufficiently distinguishes the distinct type of legal personality that a charitable trust possesses, most probably derived from the waqf (charitable foundation) in Islamic law, a concept brought back to England by the crusaders. It may be no coincidence that the earliest charity still in operation in England, the Bridge House Estates, dates from this time (1282). The legal concept of a charity, being derived from a different system from Anglosphere civil/ common law, does not exactly fit with the legal status of a modern corporate non-profit: and the original religious (sharia) objects of a charity -- maintaining a masjid, madrasse, etc in property permanently set aside for these purposes --- do not exactly fit with the now purely secular interpretation of corporal works of mercy which non-profits engage in today.

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Francis Berger
7/26/2021 21:09:29

@ William Arthurs - Yes, the creation of the corporate person can indeed be traced back to the Romans.

As Scruton says in the linked article, the corporate person does have the ability to extend beyond individual lifetimes, which basically grants it the opportunity to extend its activities indefinitely into the future. This is all very good if the corporate person is aligned with the Good; not so good if the opposite is true.

I get what you are suggesting about charities. There were certainly many God-aligned charities in the past and I am certain that there are still some charities in the world that at least attempt to do Good, but I would estimate most contemporary charities are firmly aligned with the System and its corporate model - in much the same manner secular NGOs are.

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Crosbie
7/27/2021 05:45:06

What an extraordinarily promising line of enquiry!

Corporations are replacements for idols it seems: something strong and immortal to protect us. But not actually idols. Julian Jaynes and René Girard tell us idols were truly alive to the ancients. Christ drove out idols and demons by telling the truth. We moderns know corporations do not actually live, so we represent them with abstract symbols instead of living figures. As corporations have no life of their own, they are Ponzi schemes, subsisting on the power of living members until no new hopefuls can be found.

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