The People vs. Dogma

If you let the dogs of corporatism loose in your society, and you allow them to corrupt the culture of Washington, and make Washington for sale…Then you will lose the last line of defense for the country after all, which is the willingness of its people to die for it. Because they won’t believe in it anymore.

Eugene Jarecki – Why We Fight

Now, I'm a little less willing to throw around terminology like corporate dogs, mainly because I am in some ways a part of that corporate machine, even if it is in a different sense. But that statement holds power, not just in terms of the military-industrial complex, but the underlying struggle that may make it impossible for the customer-centric utopia many of us spend so much time advocating to actually come to fruition, at least for those already at the top.

We ask for a buy-in that requires sacrifice and focus, a real desire of good for the customer, but it's a futile effort to squeeze things like compassion from a discompassionate machine. I guess the answer lies somewhere between the speed of the arms race of tools for the people versus how quickly the cogs can change 100 years of corporate dogma. If one is too fast, or the other too slow, these incompatibilities could mean a marketplace that doesn't include many of the names to which we're accustomed today.

Of course, putting that quote in these terms probably trivializes the very real issue Eugene is actually talking about. Check out the movie. Good stuff.