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Antiwork

How can a modern corporation be evil? Knowing what we know about human behavior, how can they not be?

Yale University professor Stanley Milgram’s famous shock experiments from the early 1960s on the nature of evil revealed that every day people can be pressured to doing evil. Professor Milgram experiment and the disturbing results have been examined repeatedly and most interpretations over the decades have focused on subjects’ unquestioning adherence to an authority’s commands. The idea that ‘it is not my decision, I am just doing my job’ allowed a lot of people to go all the way through the experiment believing they were causing great pain to others, simply because someone told them they it was required. Corporations are the very embodiment of this social structure. Those who are doing the cutting of benefits for workers, laying off staff, providing a product that is less than it is advertised are doing so at the command of the share holders, who demand they take these actions. The prospect of…


Yale University professor Stanley Milgram’s famous shock experiments from the early 1960s on the nature of evil revealed that every day people can be pressured to doing evil. Professor Milgram experiment and the disturbing results have been examined repeatedly and most interpretations over the decades have focused on subjects’ unquestioning adherence to an authority’s commands.

The idea that ‘it is not my decision, I am just doing my job’ allowed a lot of people to go all the way through the experiment believing they were causing great pain to others, simply because someone told them they it was required.

Corporations are the very embodiment of this social structure. Those who are doing the cutting of benefits for workers, laying off staff, providing a product that is less than it is advertised are doing so at the command of the share holders, who demand they take these actions. The prospect of maximizing profits for the shareholders seems to free them of any responsibility of any wrong doing they might commit to that end. Even when those acts are illegal?!!?

As we allow those who are successful to evade any responsibility for their wrong doing because when a corporation goes bankrupt …. the investors lose a lot of money, and …. yes some people will lose their jobs, but if the market still demands that the work be done, then another company will take up the job, and hire those skilled workers. Probably a lot of small companies will be formed to replace the one maga corporation. Those small companies will spread the wealth to so many more working people than the few ultra-rich in their literal towers on Manhattan.

Please next time a mega corporation is found guilty of crimes (I am looking at you Wells Fargo) or hurting consumers and threatened with corporation-busting fines or lawsuits, let them fail. Do not protect them just because they are big.

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