It wasn’t until I was over an hour into The Corporation that I realized I had seen it before. One line in particular reminded me that I’d watched the documentary for a class in high school. At around the 1:02:30 mark, the filmmakers interject and say “It sounds like you’re advocating private ownership of every square inch of the planet”, to which interviewee Michael Walker (then Executive Director of the Fraser Institute) replies “Absolutely”. That moment startled me when I was fifteen, and nine years later it startled me again.
I don’t know why I was taken aback. Almost everything in the documentary leading up to and following this exchange is bleak, so Walker’s response should come as no surprise. Nevertheless, it was still unsettling to hear his frank endorsement for relentless, exhaustive ownership. I think that bluntness was what I found most disconcerting about the interviews. Many of the people acknowledged that there were moral considerations attached to their actions and the actions of the companies they represented, but then they immediately shrugged off those considerations using some justification or another. There was the commodities trader who candidly remarked that non-business thoughts were “fleeting” when compared to the prospect of a commission. Similarly, the then Vice President of Initiative Media explained that someone had once asked her if she felt guilty for “essentially manipulating children”, to which she simply answered “Our role is to move products, and if we know [our methods work], then we’ve done our job”. These examples illustrate how we’ve developed a system that allows players to simultaneously recognize and disregard all non-profit driven dimensions of their work. And that’s frightening. It’s one thing not to be aware that your behaviour is damaging to others; it’s far more troubling to know the effects and move forward anyway. The latter approach breeds the kind of mentality that encourages lawyers to take the 14th amendment, which was enacted in an attempt to remedy the inhumanity of slavery, and use it to achieve legal personhood for corporations. (Incidentally, I found it entertaining that someone said McDonald’s as a person would be “young, outgoing, and enthusiastic” when McDonald’s crafted its own humanoid mascot as a lanky, yellow-jumpsuit-wearing clown with alarming face paint.)
I don’t pretend to have extensive knowledge of the business world (so it’s a good thing I’m taking this class!) but based on the overview in this documentary, I do think it’s inevitable that corporations will do worrying and even abhorrent things. The structure in place enables people at every level to focus on discrete objectives and ignore (consciously or unconsciously) how their activities fit into a broader, more long-term picture. I’m not sure greater regulation will solve the fundamental problems with the status quo, especially given how corporations seem to break the rules fairly regularly and in astonishingly audacious ways. Instead, I suspect we’re in need of an overhaul in our understanding of concepts like success, wealth, and productivity. Until there’s a shift in our priorities, the notion of socially responsible corporations is at best a worthy goal and at worst a blatant lie. The good deeds that companies trot out may have a very positive impact on a particular space or community, but they’ll still be hollow gestures if we continue to more or less accept that corporations are just ruthlessly self-interested.
