The blues in contemporary society often have to do with the rough and ill-advised wedding of evolutionary themes to the causes of Progress. Improvement and change are obviously related, as the former is not possible without the latter, but assuming, for instance, that constantly pushing forward will result in improvement, even in being more likely to survive, shortchanges the complexity of lived experience. Unreflective belief in evolutionary ideas, or evolutionism, presupposes belief in evolution as progress and seems to give permission to encourage specialized traits whose exclusive value is to make reproduction more likely. Perhaps the corporations-as-legal-people device, which, ironically, emerged from the legislation to recognize slaves as persons, stands unconsciously on the mythological ground of evolutionism. If corporations are creatures, perhaps that accounts for evolution’s conjunction with progress spawning corporate industries designed to pursue reproduction (be fruitful and multiply—profit and grow) above all other values. What hand did this have in creating the efficient reproduction of the industrial myths (in this case, mechanisms of mind)? Was this responsible for climate change, globalization’s shadow, and other triggers of the human suffering in progress in what Steve Lerner calls Sacrifice Zones?[i] In the mechanical evolutionary mind, the sacrifice of fellow human beings to corporate profit and even the death of entire species, potentially including our own, becomes collateral damage measured against the reproductive gains to be secured. Humans have been sacrificing other humans since long before the birth of corporations and profit-making evolutionary thinking, but never before has so vast and inexorable a social machine been created to encourage this process.

 

Alongside this biocidal reality, it can be argued that the evolution of industrialism has provided benefits in the potential for a better quality of life for more people. This is probably true in wealthy nations where there is the possibility of healthcare, even while true preventative (health rather than triage) care is out of reach for most. Even in the most powerful countries, medical attention is often needed to address the health problems that result from the modern industrial lifestyle and environment itself. “Benefits of Industrialism” is often deployed as a rhetorical strategy created to mask growing human costs.[ii] It also must be said that industrial developments make possible the wider circulation of the words you are now reading, and the instructive discomfort of exposure to unfamiliar worldviews due to changes in travel and information technology. But even those who have escaped the factories in this generation have not freed the Psyche/Soul of contemporary people from the grip of the factorial imagination.

 

There are benefits which accrue to those in a position to take advantage of the structures of industrialism, people able to distance themselves from reminders of the blues, but they will not be celebrated here as they have more than enough ideological momentum. Ex-pastor and war correspondent, Chris Hedges, nostalgically moralizes along these lines while in conversation with Bill Moyers,

more attention needs be paid to the notion that the corporate value of greed is good. I mean, these deformed values have sort of seeped down within the society at large. And they’re corporate values, they’re not American values . . . American values were effectively destroyed by Madison Avenue when, after world war one, it began to instill consumption as a kind of inner compulsion. But old values of thrift, of self-effacement, or hard work were replaced with this cult of the “self,” this hedonism. And in that sense, you know, we have become complicit, because we’ve accepted this as a kind of natural law. And the acceptance of this kind of behavior, and even the celebration of it, is going to ultimately trigger our demise. Not only as a culture, not only as a country, but finally as a species that exists, you know, on planet Earth.[iii]

There never was an America truly free of “greed is good,” but it is often the we used to be better than this fiction that helps resurface and valorize humane values. Certainly, the contemporary era has multiplied the archetypal nature of greed by immortalizing it in corporate ubiquity.