Global Culture

Thanks to EM from “Mind Unbound” for her inspired satire of a certain kind of Declaration that could very well have been the manifest that lawyers wrote when ideating the modern concept of a Corporation:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that in the pursuit of happiness we shall all compete against each other for the rights of the Victors, and that among these rights are counted the right to rewrite history to favor the Strong, the right to suppress the weak, and the right to withhold the spoils of Victory from even the most desperate among our own kind, such right deriving naturally from the Victorious right of Possession.

We hold furthermore that the entire realm of nature, from which Humanity is rightfully excluded and over which Humanity divinely presides, has no inherent rights whatsoever, and that any privileges extended to nature by Humankind shall derive directly from those Human needs which may arise naturally in the direct and immediate interest of Humanity’s own survival.

In the same way that anyone can’t help but empathize with the contents of the Declaration of Independence and the self-evident truths it states, most people should react negatively to the quote above, and yet it very well describes the most common attitudes taken by global corporations taking over all aspects of nature, culture and other commons. Corporations are the indisputable Victors of our era and are claiming their rights as if they had been granted by humanity.

As Tomas Jefferson did in 1776, we need to find out what are our most cherished dreams, not as races or countries but as members of a global village (as used by McLuhan). We need to identify the patterns of global culture that would take our global society to accomplish the goals of liberty, equality and fraternity. And once we do, we should not stop until a new world order (pun intended) that values humanity above any and all artificial constructs has prevailed:

when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security

While this quote was taken from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, I’m sure every country has a similar safeguard mechanism built-in. It’s time to invoke it.