wendell berry: random thoughts for a friday

"The folly at the root of this foolish economy began with the idea that a corporation should be regarded, legally, as "a person" But the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were imoortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of moeny. The stockholders essentially are usurers, people who "let their money work for them", expecting high pay in return for low pay. The World Trade Organization enlarges the old idea of the corporation-as-a-person by giving the global corporate economy the status of a super government with the power to overrule nations.

I don't mean to say, of course, that all corporate executives and stockholders are bad people. I am only saying that all of them are very seriously implicated in a bad economy"
Wendell Berry: In the Presence of Fear

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings."
Wendell Berry