How can megacorporations be so evil? Why do they deceive and exploit us so? Why are they destroying the paradise that is Earth before our eyes?
These questions can be answered by examining us – humans – in relation to non-human animals. Because everything big business does to humans, humans do to animals. We’ve been killing them unremittingly since the dawn of our history. We’ve been exploiting them for almost as long, deceiving them into servitude with food and shelter. When we expand our cities and industries, we destroy their paradise.
Do we harbor ill will toward animals? Of course not. We’re just smarter than they are, and don’t sympathize enough with them to treat them kindly. We’re a higher organism, exploiting lower organisms for our benefit. It doesn’t make us evil. Most species would do the same if thrust to to the top of the food chain.
Similarly, megacorporations don’t harbor ill will toward common humans. They’re just more powerful than we are, and don’t sympathize enough with us to treat us kindly. They’re not evil, just an even higher organism. They’ve outclassed us, like we outclassed mammoths and tigers long ago. And like we raise and slaughter cattle, they grind us down in sweatshops, or distract us with comfort and entertainment, while they slowly steal our planet away from us.
If humankind triumphs over the corporate elite some day – which, while I don’t consider corporations sinister, I dearly hope – perhaps we’ll begin to treat animals better. On that day, we’ll have understood how it feels to be hunted, used, and reduced to a resource, by giants indifferent to our lives.
Then we could grow into something more than an organism, something truly benevolent.