On 01/15/2014 12:34 PM, Arlo Barnes wrote: > A friend of mine claims a necessary but not sufficient condition is that > there is a strong corporate involvement in government, like all the > contractors (IBM among them) in WWII.
I've often agreed with this. But I'm starting to disagree because our growth toward global government has been (is) much slower than our growth toward multi-national corporations. Our corporations are not yet identifiable with government. But they are close. With extensive lobbying, organizations like ALEC, tax breaks for locating facilities, control of large swaths of land in 3rd world countries and even out into the oceans, etc., I'm having trouble imagining a government that has weak corporate involvement. And if such involvement is universal, then it can't be a distinctive characteristic of one government from another. > Also, there is the etymological > metaphor<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche#Similar figures of > speech>- a fascis / fasces, as used as a symbol by the Roman legions, > was/were an ax used to chop kindling, with said kindling bound by leather > strips around > the handle of the ax for easy transport. My 9th grade history teacher > claimed that in fascism, people are uniformly and completely directed > towards a common societal goal ([...]) in the same way that the kindling > sticks > are bound to support the handle. I wonder if that's a bit of overreach. if that were the extent of our definition, we could call any group (of people or, say, insects) fascist as long as they were uniformly and completely directed towards a common societal goal. But the implication of the kindling sticks is that any one stick is indistinguishable from the other sticks. So, it's less about uniform, complete orientation and more about depersonalization ... or objectification ... or specialization ... the idea that any given human is really more of a replaceable cog in a machine. If that were the case, then what we're really saying is that fascist regimes are tightly analogous to mechanism/machines, a well engineered society ... which puts the Star Trek Federation at risk of being fascist. ;-) -- ⇒⇐ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
