I had a thought the other day: the invention of the corporation is responsible for the pollution of the environment and mass destruction of war today.
What drove the creation of the corporation? Wasn’t it that business owners didn’t want to bear the burden of liability when their company caused serious harm, or when someone wanted to sue them for something they allegedly did? The corporation was invented to protect the sole proprietor from lawsuits; instead of being personally sued, the corporation would be sued; and if the corporation had to declare bankruptcy, that was it; the owner of the corporation, though he may have plenty of money, could not be touched.
This seems relatively reasonable–what entrepreneur would want to build a business if the risks of being legally raped were extremely high?–but there’s a different way to think about this: it is a way of acquiring ridiculous power without having to bear the responsibility that’s supposed to come with that power. To have the ability to supply mass quantities of energy to millions of people, for example, such as would be the case with a nuclear power plant, is clearly to be in a position of extreme power. Yet it means bearing the responsibility of ensuring that your power plant doesn’t melt down and leak radiation in dangerous amounts, amounts that could cause mass sickness and death to humans and life in general. If it seems harsh that the owner of a nuclear power plant be sued for poisoning the environment, or the water system, or the meat we eat from the animals grazing the wilderness in the area of the power plant, then just think of how such consequences balance with the power acquired by actually running a nuclear power plant. With great power comes great responsibility, they say, and the invention of the corporation drives a wedge between these such that business owners can have the power without the responsibility.
This has resulted in industry, technology, and through that, war, accelerating at unprecedented rates, rates that we cannot control and cannot prepare for. Corporations just keep plowing forward without hesitation, without fear of repercussions to the actual people who run them. It’s like a heavy eater at a buffet of cake after being told he could eat as much as he wants without getting fat. Without any consequences, it’s full steam ahead.
It makes me wonder if we would have progressed with our technology a lot more slowly–slowly enough to be able to manage the effects it has on our environment, war, society, and so on–if business owners knew that they would always be personally liable for their actions and those of their business. They would be a lot more hesitant to create great big monolithic machines and vastly superior technologies knowing that the possible defects of these machines and technologies–the ways they could break down or cause unwanted side effects–could cause people to become upset enough to bring lawsuits to bear against them. I don’t think we would see no advancement, but rather advancement at a much more cautious pace–a pace that permitted business owners and technologists to gain a lot more knowledge and certainty about their innovations to be sure that the risks of things going wrong are low enough to be worth taking. And at that rate, we may easily be able to manage the effects that these advancements have on our environment and the world in general a lot more effectively.
The way I see it, before the corporation was invented, a balance was maintained between these three factors: 1) great power, 2) great consequences, and 3) great responsibility. With greater power comes greater consequences, but so long as this is balanced by greater responsibility, human beings tend to be mindful of the consequences. I think that by pulling the rug out from under responsibility, the invention of the corporation created an imbalance between these factors. There is now less concern for consequences, and the increased rate of advancements in technology and the rate at which our world is changing is the result. Can this rate of advancement continue indefinitely, or will the consequences eventually become so great that they become our undoing?