“Everything has a price; nothing else matters.”
So goes the basic principle of Babylon as found in Scripture. This is also the fundamental nature of the international Business Culture, not to mention Corporate America. Their god is Mammon. The Bible makes the point the final end of this religion is destruction. The Children of Babylon make deals with whomever is willing, but of course the most important partners are the State and the Church (“Harlot Church”). The latter gives power to support the world according to Babylon, and Babylon rewards them with material support.
It is particularly discomforting to recognize no country in the world more exemplifies this better than the US. Sure, I found the Dutch relentlessly secular and materialistic, but they at least had a heritage and culture which gave life some flavor. I found the Belgians hopelessly locked in regional factionalism, and it made them delightfully passionate about things they did well in each locale. Germans were a little too close to our ways, but were a lot more patient, at least, and could express a certain pride in their technical accomplishments. I saw too little of the Danish to notice anything more than way too much interest in profligate sex with foreigners. The Swiss were mostly proud of their rugged individualism in the places I visited. The Austrians were unfailingly gracious and charming. The Americans were boorish, utterly lacking in manners and civility, and clung to their own little view of reality — I generally avoided them in Europe, and didn’t often let locals know I was one of them.
Corporate America can out-produce and make war like no other nation. And as soon as we win a war, we have no idea what it is we have accomplished. The best we know to do is export our hideous lack of culture, and try to cultivate the same mechanical regimentation infecting our lives, and call it “democracy.” When we march away, we leave our corporations to continue extracting whatever it was provided the actual reason we went to war. Meanwhile, outside the corporate compounds, the locals go on with their former lives as much as possible. We haven’t really changed a thing, and have proved absolutely nothing good by beating the stuffing out of them. Our superiority has never been a matter of morality, but always the result of our passion for profitability.
Think about it. Yesterday, I shared my experiences with the hide-bound rule chasing mentality in America. There is a reason you can’t get real customer service from anything bigger than a 12-man operation: It doesn’t pay. That is, all the blather about customer satisfaction is a lie, a sales pitch. On rare occasion you can get something taken care of by customer service, but only because it falls within some flow-charted, scripted response. Just try to ask about something rather unusual and you’ll get a standard response which filters out anything not in the script. We have some amazing creative people in the US, but they do not work in corporations. The concept of actually knowing their business died long ago.
You see, there was a time when people here did tend to know what was going on, but having them on the payroll cut into the profit margins. Once the business had a very good system in place, tweaked and adjusted by the experts, the whole thing was sold and the experts were fired. In comes a huge workforce of idiots who read scripts. It all seemed to happen about the same time, within a single generation — about 1950-1970. Sure, the roots go much deeper, but the obvious effects appeared over those two decades. Most significant elements in the destruction of America actually coalesced during the end of the 19th century here. By the early 1900s, the powers that be were implementing the foolish fruit of earlier intellectual moves. In other words, whatever we might have had in the guise of the “Spirit of America” was long dead when the general stasis manifested.
People mistakenly long for that period before the dead body began to stink. They forget it was a long decline before death. Our “Civil War” was the first symptom of really bad things coming, and the Union victory sealed our fate, culturally. If you honestly believe it was about slavery, you aren’t informed enough to be reading this blog. It was always about a crushing, highly centralized control.
That centralized control can only be accomplished with uniformity. Uniformity might be efficient, but it is death. People are not uniform. To drop them into neat little categories kills them, in effect. It makes them a mere matter of expense against profit. This is the reason government bureaucracy and corporate bureaucracy appear the same to the five senses. Real humans are messy and wasteful, because real humans each need to learn what went before, what makes us different from gorillas, which seldom remember anything from one generation to the next. In the process, each of us has to make sure what is and isn’t unique about us. Today, the most trivial idiocy is mistaken for “individuality” — because that’s the sort of thing which makes for a good trash trinket market. Real individuality can’t be achieved if you can’t get above the gorilla level, which is where bureaucrats want to be and where they need to keep us.
America: We are Babylon.
