WELCOME TO UN-CORP

Washed up the Coasts of Capital

It is easy to demonize so-called "corporations." These public bodies are not solely defined by their structural primitivism & the history of their misuse since the time of Queen Elizabeth the First of England. Just like every other kind of human group, these chartered webs of intelligence-sharing can be characterized as more or less intelligent, more or less efficient & variably healthy in bodies, emotionalities and psyches of its participating members.

Consider the "incorporated" ant colony that I observed the other day in a wooded field. As I watched these little black-and-red critters moving bugs, grubs and crumbs, hither and yon among the grass blades & sticks, it began to astonish me how really haphazard was all their activity.

This was not the well-organized, efficient hive-mind army that I am always hearing people discuss. These beasts were chaotic. Wandering up and down along pheromone-trails, apparently at random, hoping to bump into something delicious and end up luckily back at the entrance to the colony. Tasty morsels were moved a few inches, dropped, forgotten, moved in another digression by another ant or two or three. All in all I would have supposed their were aesthetic landscapers, just slightly modifying the location of objects until it "feels right." Then wandering off.

As I pondered their goals I began to realize that my "them" was a problem. There is no law which says all the ants have to have a steady level of intelligence shared by all of them. Was their behaviour constant or varied? I watched longer and observed that periodically a few ants would join together, "quickening" their intelligence, working out a protocol and then intently moving the object back towards the hive. As long as this little tornado of a "field" stayed active they were moving on task. The rest of the time they were exploratory bunglers who -- as it well documented scientificially -- will sometimes follow each other in a vast circle until they die. Self-destructive stupidity with occasional arisings into trans-personal intelligence.

So to was history -- with many peaks of culture and few sustained or protected. So it is also with the Corporations. Unfortunately their constant shifting of managers and dominant coporate "pragmatic wisdom" has too often left the vulnerably weak in the face of toxic emotionality (subliminal nihilism, cynicism, sadism, etc), imbalanced skill sets (cogntive, ethical, etc.) and archaic habits of decision making (one person in charge, consensus, majority vote, etc.).

Both the re-tooling of existing corporate protocols and the potential establishment of alternative models of public corporation require an in-depth understanding of how to select people, how to train people, how to effectively interface them with each other and how to ensure vigorous and responsive action following intelligent decisions.

We need to produce and reinforce the 'smart ant' vortecies.