Was listening to a thing on King Charles and his political views, his traditionalist anti-modernist political views weren't too interesting in themselves but they did address the issue of "disenchantment," that unlike classic kings and churches the modern world of companies and markets seems very disenchanting, and for him that's why we need to RETVRN.
But this does hit on one of my recurring thoughts, why are companies so disenchanting? "They are abusive and exploitative" you say, well I've got news for you about kings, churches, and families, being abusive does not stop people from being enchanted. This is one those things that I think we don't even consider that anyone could be enchanted with them so we don't think to ask why we are not. (I should say that this does happen a bit at the consumer end but not at the employee end)
There's a simple answer and that's "time," these aren't old enough. Maybe in the year 2200 the people will crave a return to the traditional values of Amazon.com.
Never felt satisfied with that though, and the other answer I've had is that, unlike church, family, and king, a fundamental part of how corporations work is firing. You can be cut loose from a family or excommunicated from a church, but this is not core to how those institutions work.
Don't really know if this even makes sense to wonder about, but I return to it every once in a while
I think you're really on to something there.
The relationships that characterize, say, an aristocracy are in some sense stable; am aristocrat with no money at all is just as much an aristocrat as he was when he was rich.
Or, to put it another way, the Catholic Church might excommunicate someone, but the pope is not going to declare that, due to declining profits he is going to shut down the church and he wishes all the former bishops luck in their next religious posting.
The relationships in business are *all* subject to being dissolved at a moment's notice the instant that they are no longer profitable, and when you are layed off that's often a signal of total apathy: what happens to you specifically not only doesn't matter, it *can't* matter.
I would question the premise that the modern world isn’t enchanted. Nike, after all, was the Greek Goddess of victory before it was a shoe company, and Nike the company sought to embody the ideals of victory and athletic excellence in the minds of their customers. They weaved a dense mythology of what their shoes meant and what relation it had to victory, mostly by advertising, including endorsements from people who had attained success in athletics, whose real stories helped to buttress the myth making of Nike’s advertisers. Now, Nike’s shoes are enchanted, in the most literal way possible in the modern world, and you know it because some people are willing to spend several hundred dollars for a sneaker that cost ten dollars to make.
Right but what happens if the market shifts? That enchantment is called "branding" and it is not done for its own sake but to sell shoes.
It exists for as long as, and *only* as long as it sells shoes and can be abandoned at any time should it fail to sell shoes.
One characteristic of the modern world that I don't know how to quite articulate is that it used to matter what happened to you, as in, you specifically, Bob Smith of 133 Maple Street. The things that happened to you might be caused by your social position and might, in fact, be extremely bad for you but it was important to society that they happened to you specifically.
Currently it doesn't really matter what happens to you specifically. What happens to you might be sad or happy but there's no specific reason why it *should* happen to you and nobody is willing to do much for or against it.
The bureaucratic global order mitigates against the ever-shifting mirage of the market but it still understands you primarily as a fungible instance of a certain demographic.
The thing about a cog in a machine is that it usually needs to be there for the machine to function, so people will do a lot to insure that it doesn't pop out of the machine.
A better metaphor for our modern situation is the dollar bill. Why should I spend this dollar bill with the dog-eared edge rather than that dollar with the small tear?
No reason whatsoever. All dollar bills are interchangeable so there's no sense in tracking what happens to a specific one.
I think Anton Chigurh made a similar point.
Another thing is, a religion, say, the Catholic Church, or the Mormons, may well exploit their parishioners but the relationship is fundamentally not really analogous to an employer/employee relationship, and particularly the idea of "useless" parishioners being expelled from places of worship, while perhaps not unheard of, certainly strikes me as a less central behavior than laying off or firing an expensive employee.
Or, another difference, Churches tend to make money because making money allows them to perpetuate their worship and beliefs; a company like Nike creates a brand because it allows them to make money.
Honestly the belief that all human interactions can be understood in market terms strikes me as a huge component of becoming disenchanted with the world.
Tying it back to King Charles, it's a little notable that this is happening in Britain, a country somewhat unusual for having the aristocracy be really small.
(he's not capable of actually solving the problem. He might become capable one day, but right now, he isn't.)
One can certainly envision a different history, in which the French Revolution never happened and the fall of the European monarchies never happened and we still did have the struggles that were probably inevitable, but they ended up being resolved very differently.
There's also an issue of "the tribute vice pays to virtue" here. Families, countries, churches all claim to be morally-motivated, whether or not they actually live up to that. Corporations, in general, don't; they are perfectly up-front about being profit-seekers, which makes it harder to romanticize them.








