Corporate world is analytic release of WtP

The corporate business environment is the analytic release of will to power; not very many business people are there to “do good”, or even to do good in the terms of their business’s stated goals, rather they are there because the work allows them to release flows of will to power in a directed way, some of which just happens to correspond to a business’s stated goals.

A manager at a business is told by his boss that his department is running too high numbers in a certain category of waste or cost; the manager then goes to his employees or subordinate manager and tells them they need to reduce those numbers. Often the cost is associated with the actual goals of the business itself, but that is irrelevant here-- only reducing the numbers matters at this moment. So the employees or lower manager start cutting corners and reducing positive productive benefits of the work they do in order to bring some dimension of costs or waste down, despite how this has a detrimental impact on the business’s goals and work in this area. This is an efficiency principle. But the manager who gives the orders doesn’t care whether or not the orders he receives are legitimate or not, he doesn’t care to compare the value of efficiency gained with the loss of real productivity and good that it costs. He simply follows the rules and cuts waste and costs of production.

The real reason is usually that someone is trying to make their financial numbers look better. They don’t really care that doing so represents a limit to the good and production that the company is doing. So long as it represents an analytic, linear gain of efficiency then it is desired and enforced.

Corporate business jobs do two things, which are the real motives of the people who work these jobs: they give you large paychecks, and they allow you to exercise will to power in a hierarchical structure where orders are obeyed. Giving orders and following orders is the first primary benefit of having such a job, because it allows you to will to power. The second primary benefit is that you get larger pay checks as you move up the corporate hierarchy. The idea that business workers are there for the goals or purposes of the business itself, much less to “do good”, is entirely a myth in 99% of cases.

What limits this behavior is simply the market reality that any business is faced with. They can only cut corners so much before they impact their positive production too much, they can only violate so many laws (every medium to large company purposefully violates laws) before they violate one too many and have to start paying a legal or financial cost for doing that.

The market reality mirrors the will to power + paycheck incentive reality that is really why people work in the corporate world. So in an economic sense it is the will to power that provides the energy and is the engine for business growth, while the larger market and legal realities act as an upper limit on that. This all also applies just as much to supposedly “charitable” and non-profit organizations as it does to for-profit ones.

Brilliant, extremely useful way of framing. I would want to immediately stress how the degree of analytic power increases radically as one gets closer to the core of the capital, which is the finance industry.

In 2012 I visited a friend in London, who is still working there in a trading firm, and we had some drinks with his colleagues afterward, which was revelatory to me, as I had until then never talked to bankers and speculators, and had only learned of the consequences of the acts of the shrewdest of them - so it was surprising to notice that I found them the most knightly people I ever met, as a group. They were gathered around their boss who was telling war stories, but it was this subtle soft spoken French guy who was making sure that there was going to be no ignorance around him. If ever the expression “hanging one someones lips” applied it was seeing these kids huddle around this made guy, who was quite possibly the most unpretentiously civilized person I have seen. It was weird, it turned a lot of stuff upside down. I talked to some of these guys lower on the ladder and found them to be quite aware of the tragedy and danger of the capitalistic condition, and I got the definite sense that they felt that London was perhaps a bit overleveraged with investments of power, that the risks they were turning into profits were actually pretty big. But hey, life is fucking life, you have a brain and are born in London.

Analysis is pressure.

It is the art of using resistances and make value flow into repeating patterns, so as to be able to manage (not predict) the outcome.
Not predict, as ones management is part of the situation. Prediction presumes passivity before what one predicts. Prophecy is hypocrisy unless one assumes agency.