I mentioned previously that I would be going over Douglas Rushkoff's Life Incorporated piece-by-piece (sometimes chapter-by-chapter); and although I'm a little behind schedule in posting my thoughts due to a web site redesign, my intentions remain the same. Rushkoff's book in a battle cry not against capitalism, as many will misconstrue it, but against corporatism, and the actions of corporate America that bleed the common American dry of their culture and freedom.

Rushkoff brings up early on the very real idea that corporations attempt to blur the line between what is factually important in American life and what is manufactured. He states:

"This fundamental blurring of real life with its commercial counterpart is not a mere question of aesthetics, however much we may dislike mini-malls and superstores. It's more of a nagging sense that something has gone awry - something even more fundamentally wrong than the credit crisis and its aftermath - yet we're too immersed in its effects to do anything about it, or even to see it."

Have you felt this way recently?

Rushkoff is careful not to rail too much against capitalism in his book. In fact, capitalism isn't necessarily the issue. What many fail to do is separate the differences between capitalism and corporatism - for it's the corporations that are putting strain on the capitalist way of life through greed and manufactured needs.

"Corporatism didn't evolve naturally. The landscape on which we are living - the operating system on which we are no running our social software - was invented by people, sold to us as a better way of life, supported by myths, and ultimately allowed to develop into a self-sustaining reality. It is a map that has replaced the territory."

Bringing up the map versus territory, Rushkoff invokes the thoughts of Alford Korzybski; and in doing so, reveals a fatal flaw in much of consensus American (and World) thought - the fatal flaw of literalism, and not being able to separate a way of explaining a "thing" with the actual "thing" itself. We've done it with religion time and time again, and we're also doing it with the economy. Corporations became the keepers of this map as they manipulated interpretations not to better humankind, but to increase their bottom line.

Delving into the industrial age, Rushkoff declares that this time "gave corporations a new way to create the illusion of a preordained social order: the machine." The ideas of the industrial age and the philosophies of Descartes and his champions presented a mechanistic view of the world in which wheels and cogs and other pieces were easily replaced and interchangeable - pieces in solitude - to keep the whole healthy.

Thanks to Descartes, this mechanistic view became a model for society. People became the cogs - replaceable - disconnected from their original holistic position. Corporatism shaped the world into one giant factory.

"Cubberley modeled our public schools after 'factories, in which the raw product [the children] are to be shaped and fashioned... according to the specificatiosn laid down.'"

Not even are schools are safe from this mechanistic views, despite the attempts of politicians to proclaim "no child left behind." Children are often educated to be drones in a corporate society.

People - through this misguided education - become both cogs and consumers conditioned to work the assembly lines of corporate America in order to do nothing more than spend their earnings to continue that flow - consumerism. Rushkoff portrays this as "citizens as consumers" and interjects that corporations use marketing to convince people that consumption is the "surest path to personal fulfillment."

All of this corporate thinking has resulted in a disconnected America - a disconnected community - that better serves the purpose of "divide and conquer" for the fulfillment of corporate gluttony and greed.

"The landscape of corporatism favors the selfish over the social, the brand over the product, and the central over the local."