> They just don't care at all about e.g. human suffering or destruction of environment they cause to maximize return on capital.
I think you have just described evil.
I think you have just described evil.
Corporations are made of humans, who, it’s been shown, care about other humans a lot of the time. I think the more we rely on these power structures for our own self preservation, the more we start to weaponize them against weaker forms (normal people) as a form of active defense.
I like the reference to Cthulhu, it really is like a higher order life form. Workers are the cells, infrastructure the body, and the c-suite is of course the ravenous mind. You as a human don’t care what happens to a cell in a Petri dish, the same way corporations don’t care about what happens to individual people. As a human, I find this evil, and wonder if there are perhaps other higher order life forms (economic systems) we can construct that aren’t as harmful to their own composition.
We seem to agree that structures like corporations are best seen as something that transcend the individuals that they comprise. And I think there are less harmful forms of organization, or at least what corporations can do should be limited by e.g. states and unions significantly more.
I avoid (and criticize) the use of "evil" because it usually muddies more than clarifies, and has weird metaphysical connotations. "Harmful" I think captures it better.
The "evil" category often makes people think that the "evil" entities have some motives and logic of operation that "good" people just can't understand or relate to at all.
There was a sort of internally coherent logic and motivation for Nazi death camps (and to many similar horrors). I don't agree with it at all and I find the results of it extremely harmful and such logic must be vigorously resisted. And to vigorously resist it, it has to be understood.
However, I'm not at all sure that I would have resisted the death camps if I were to formulate my views in the same situation as Nazi germans were. I could well be a Putinist in current Russia. And I probably wouldn't think I was evil.