The Corporate Justice System
Part 3 of Culture Armageddon
We aren’t robots, and our constitution isn’t written in source code. When someone commits a crime, lawyers re-interpret the law to fit the context, which is not much different than reinterpreting the law to adapt to changes in society. In other words, justice and legislation are intertwined.
The US has many systems for making and enforcing laws, but each of them trace back to one of several historical motifs. Congress, our representative government, hails back to the Roman era. The president is an elected monarch. The Supreme Court are our modern-day tribal elders. All of them are balanced against each other based on historical strengths and weaknesses of each.
What about deciding on lawbreakers? Our jury system is effectively a localized democracy. We can’t have all 300M people on the jury bench, so we pick random people in the area and trust them to pass judgement. The lawyers assume that the jurors are not experts of the law, and advocate with this in mind. Then each juror is given an equal say in the deliberation room. If the case is a DUI, we don’t give a bonus to the juror whose brother was killed by a drunk driver. If the case is a hate crime against black people, we don’t give a bonus to black jurors. We don’t assume that white jurors won’t know what it’s like to be victimized. In fact, a black juror is likely to be eliminated in the jury selection phase, where jurors that have the potential to advocate are removed from the bench.
Of course, groups of people socially enforce additional rules using their own justice system, and the workplace has always been a source of these rules. Many jobs have a dress code. Some jobs require people to work certain hours. While these rules are created by a dictatorship and enforced through intimidation, there hasn’t been an uprising because the Corporate Justice System has traditionally been libertarian. After all, why should a business that sells shoes care whether their employees voted for Trump or donated to the Clinton Foundation or think Black Lives Matter is a hate group? These opinions have nothing to do with selling shoes.
Enter social media. Now, it is possible (and often simple) to doxx someone on social media. To doxx means to reveal the personal/professional identity of someone online and spread this identity to those who share opposing views. Now, the same shoe company that doesn’t care about Black Lives Matter is being boycotted by thousands because of a tweet from one of their employees. Their public reputation is being tarnished by left-leaning newspapers and television. The facebook page of that shoe company is bombed with negative reviews and threats of violence. One of of the 100,000 people who received the doxx will be a fanatic who will protest, attack people entering the shoe company, or burn the company to the ground. Companies respond by becoming more involved in the personal opinions of their employees. Freedom of speech is sacrificed in the name of protectionism and sensitivity. No company stands up and says “Our Employee thinks BLM is a hate group. We don’t think BLM is a hate group, but we do believe in freedom of speech”. Corporations are not rewarded for taking the moral high road.
“Corporation, n. an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility” -Ambrose Bierce
As mom-and-pop diners and hardware stores are replaced with franchise arms of the same parent corporation, a few elites have gained control of the Corporate Justice System, representing millions of establishments. The same handful of executives are on the board of directors at most major companies. We are giving these people more control of our culture than any elected official, and we are deciding that control based on business acumen, one of the worst signals for finding thoughtful, responsible, cultural leadership. It is no surprise we all work in a place where we attend training classes on white privilege, but can’t even entertain the idea of pure individualism: that correlations between groups of people and maledictions are caused by the people themselves. We have been watching these corporate leaders vomit the same myopic moral code and then eat their regurgitation and repeat, over and over again, to the point where we call people nazis who have never been to Europe.
The engine of liberty and freedom had seized, and we needed someone with a huge hammer and no fucks to strike the piston head with full force. That man happened to be Donald Trump. Because no one before Trump could challenge the Corporate Justice System in this way, we have no way of knowing if there is something special about Trump, or if he was at the right place at the right time. With the amount of protests and cry-bullying on the rise, none of us GenX-ers were going to take the chance to find out if we could get someone less amoral for the job, especially after our choices were limited by the primaries.
