by Jim Mcinvale

Created on: March 29, 2008

The overhead lights went out, turning the podium to a golden island in a sea of darkness. The crowd noise subsided and all eyes turned to the stage. A nondescript middle-aged man walked to the podium and clipped on a mike. He opened a notebook and started reading without an introduction.

"Had Dante Alighieri written his Divine Comedy seven centuries later, he probably would have added one more circle to Hell and filled it with office cubicles. He would plaster it with corporate visions and management expectations, department policies and staff meetings. Satan with a pitchfork replaced by a manager with a mission statement.

This is corporate Hell, and I know it well. Mind numbing, soul eroding eternal days. Utter meaninglessness and insignificance exceeding any torment ever contemplated by the Florentine poet. The damned buried so deep in an organization chart that they can't ever hope to see what end their labors serve. So removed from any direct purpose or tangible product that concepts like good and evil lose all meaning.

What variety of sinner resides in this circle? What vile deeds earned them residence here? Better still, who is responsible for this modern day malady? After all, it wasn't visited upon them by some evil alien race, although, a disgusting legion of management consultants certainly helped usher it in. The sad and inevitable answer is that we did it to ourselves.

Okay, I'm being a little dramatic. A quarter century in the corporate gulags can do that. Nevertheless, the world system, our socio-political-economic environment raises some provocative questions. First, the one previously posed: What is it about us that drove us here? Here being the complex and highly organized system based on production for profit in the open market capitalism in its corporate manifestation. Second, how did the system become such an incubator of corruption? Was the corruption inherent, or did it evolve? Third, what keeps everyone playing? Why do humans continue to participate in a system that benefits a few at the expense of many? A system that destroys the physical world, while it parasitically consumes the human hosts from the inside out. Finally, what is the way out?

There must be something fundamental in what we are, and how we behave as groups, that explains how we arrived here, and where we are destined to go. The current system is simply the most recent step in an evolving social process. Someday it will spawn its own replacement. What will that be? The answer

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