“How many bags do you want?” So indicated the screen at Whole Foods. “Are you sure you only want one?” I turned to my friend Rick, who often supervises the self-checkout registers. “They ask more questions about how many paper bags I use than anything else,” I remarked. “Must be a lot of bag theft!”
“You know who steals the most shit? Guys in nice-looking suits,” he answered before I could open my mouth. Not that I would have guessed that. “You figure it’d be some young kid swiping a bag of cookies,” he went on. “Nope, it’s well-dressed, civilized guys walking out with $65 of good cheese.” So it went while conversing in the belly of the corporate beast.
Are we civilized or domesticated? Civilized means getting along cooperatively with others within large groups, literally, “citified.” To do so, we develop and propagate systems of law and cultural norms and live comfortably within that realm of human imagination for our entire lives. Unless for some of us, cheese being as tempting as it is, we don’t.
Domesticated is different. Domestication what we do to farm animals and pets: we breed them to become emotionally tame instead of wild and to become passive, dependent, and compliant. That is what the corporate beast is doing to us; we’re being systematically domesticated. Passive dependency is being bred into us and epigenetically passed down through generations, making people more compliant.
Yet, within each of us still lives a primitive emotional beast just itching to get out; we are animals, after all. We’re hunters through and through, the best on the planet, the top-of-the-chart apex predator. We scan, we plan, we execute.
Our will to survive is all powerful. We have families to protect and must guard against an uncertain future. Of course we take more paper bags than we should and walk out with fancy, imported cheeses we’ve not paid for. “Are we not men!”
The corporate beasts know about all this, of course, and they don’t like it, not one bit. From a civilized accounting standpoint, however, theft is just a cost of doing business, and surprise, surprise, it’s tax deductible!
The virtually immortal corporate beasts human civilization has created, like Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market, embody the apex predator within us, especially our aggression, greed, and hunger. Corporate beasts scan, plan, and execute too, and can do it faster and with ever-greater intelligence than we individuals can. As we fill our bellies, so too Whole Foods Market fills its own. Our civilized selves call this system of behavior – sustaining and enlarging self by feeding off others – Capitalism, but it looks like good old-fashioned predation to me.
Corporations are scanning us and a digital record of our daily movements, expenditures, reading habits, friends, and more is gathered and planned for exploitation. All the data that we are is sold to other corporations willing to pay. Scan, plan, and execute: the predator’s credo.
It’s harder than ever to opt out of our place in the economic food chain. It’s not like we can just walk into an empty forest and build a new life. We can dream of “getting off the grid,” but how many of us will actually do it? To the contrary, well domesticated, we willingly offer ourselves to the corporate beasts and blithely accept their obligatory “Terms of Service” without even blinking.
And so some of us steal cheese.
