09 November 2008

The Corporation Cannot Love You

Do you love your company? Your government? Are you counting on either one to take care of you when the chips are down?

Think again.

According to psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, wrote a remarkable book entitled A General Theory of Love (2000), love in humans (and what behavioral psychologists call "attachment" in mammals) is mediated by the brain's limbic system. Mammals have this system, reptiles don't. That's why you can't get your pet snake to greet you as enthusiastically as your dog.

With regard to corporations they wrote:

A company has no limbic structure predisposing it to recognize its own as intrinsically valuable. People who extend fidelity and fealty to a corporate entity - legally a person and biologically a phantom - have been duped into a perilously unilateral contract.

Steeped as they are in limbic physiology, healthy people have trouble forcing their minds into the unfamiliar outline of this reptilian truth: no intrinsic restraint on harming people exists outside the limbic domain.


In other words, your corporation cannot love you. Neither can your government.

Something to bear in mind even when we elect officials of high ideals and soaring rhetoric.

1 comment:

Undergroundpewster said...

But can humans engineer an artificial limbic system? And does K-9 wag its tail for the Doctor out of love or because of programming?