A sense of being on the outside looking in continues to stoke suspicion of the corporate order.

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Making those who are comfortably ensconced on the inside of something feel squirmy isn’t actually such a bad tactic, when you’re on the outside looking in.  Perhaps this is why the tactic has persisted from one generation to the next. 

But if this is only a kind of “cover” issue, what’s on the inside?  I’ve begun to wonder how much of what’s really troubling both generations is a sense of exclusion and marginalization in a vast and possibly pointless System.

Like my generation in our youth, contemporary young people seem to look at corporate society and mainly see something huge and impervious.  They haven’t spent enough time in a corporate environment to have reached positions that are more comfortable and less demeaning.  They also don’t typically have enough experience to see all the fumbling and ineptitude that typically lie beneath the surface—or, on the more positive side, the wealth of human relationships and interactions around which any enterprise actually revolves.  What’s visible to them is just the sleekly impersonal skin of the corporate headquarters buildings, omnipresent logos, and an endless barrage of advertising.  They appear pretty well snowed and intimidated by it.

It would be only natural, then, for at least part of the enduring antipathy for corporate culture to involve people’s natural sense of alienation from a thing that hasn’t included them in any meaningful way.  To confront something that’s enormous and surface-slick that doesn’t appear to give a damn about you, or your ideas, or any of the wiggly life force inside of you, is probably inherently pretty demeaning, and more than a little threatening. 

I suspect it’s easy to hate something like that.  Or to want to make it squirm whenever you get a chance.

 

(c) COPYRIGHT 2000 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.