"Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By “oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By “corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a “person,” with “rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, “a corporation… is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance… It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Chapter 6, p. 186.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Long_Emergency
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
The Long Emergency
95 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by The Long Emergency →
Related Quotes
"Above all, and most immediately, we face the end of the cheap fossil fuel era. It is no exaggeration to state that re…"
"What is... not comprehended about this predicament is that the developed world will begin to suffer long before the o…"
"It has been estimated that the world human population stood at about one billion around the early 1800s, which was ro…"
"Malthus… has been the whipping boy of idealists and techno-optimists for two hundred years. His famous essay proposed…"
"Malthus was certainly correct [that demand will outstrip supply], but cheap [and easy-to-find hydrocarbons like coal,…"
"We are already experiencing huge cost externalities from population hypergrowth and profligate fossil fuel use in the…"
"The high tide of the... [industrial] age also happened to be a moment in history when human ingenuity gained an upper…"
"At the same time, the world is overdue for an extreme influenza epidemic. The last major outbreak was the 1918 Spanis…"
"The so-called global economy was not a permanent institution, [...] but a set of transient circumstances peculiar to …"
"It has been... hard... to make sense of the gathering forces that will fundamentally alter the terms of everyday life…"