Masaharu Nonaka: Inspiration for American Business Leaders & Managers
Why honor would fix the West, or at least, clean it up a bit
Yes, middle-management doesn’t pay what it used to, but poor pay has never stopped the hungry and desperate from being mop, plunger, or perjurer for anyone.1 Human Resources answers Diogenes in the market: an honest man? How about one with a spine? If courage is honesty’s corner-stone, its easy to see why the human-money world is endlessly shaky, troubled, troublesome, and always a a few nickles, dimes and quarters away from collapsing on its owner’s heads. People don’t worry about what they step on underfoot. At worse, you have to buy a new pair of shoes.
But the less bones, the easier it is to mold and organize the masses into consumer demographics, worker drones, armies, chicken cutlet patties, nuggets, or whatever is needed for the task at hand. What then was built? Ozymandias universalized banality in the tyranny of every-day animal humor and stupidity and the basic needs of whats left of what’s left of humanity (that’s not a typo) - a perpetual public works that neither concerns itself for the public,2 or “works.” Civilization, like business itself, isn’t for people or good people - its for those ruthless enough to survive.
The apparent reality of human activity in its totalizing and ceaseless organizations is so powerful, it has the appearance of “as if (it works),” but don’t underestimate the counter-balancing Power of a few dollars, fields of wheat, some glitter, gold, breasts, and the mental, spiritual, or actual duct-tape that holds the human world and mind together. Project it to the world - and people can’t help but be made to bow down. The line between reality and art was blurred as a matter of business countless eons ago, and who needs god when you can sell better, “realer” fantasies than any of the quaint and now-unsuitable options that Christianity or monotheism used to offer the world? Who needs Jesus when you have pop-music, Coca-Cola, Nintendo and Pfizer?
After centuries and millennia of further degradation, conditioning, medication, so many other “fixes” and “cures” that also didn’t work3, and advertising slogans, where could one even begin to find a creature resembling what humans used to be, when their lives and societies were about creating people and peoples, and their values were central to survival and how they lived and acted therein?4 Where could one even find a “human-being” in a mindlessly-mindful Nihilistic age of slavishness and Troubles that has lost hope in man, and has no future?5 Even if anyone present had an answer, and I personally promise you, they don’t - the only thing you could be sure of is, the product will not resemble the packaging. There’s otherwise a reason modern art, commercialism, and almost all parts of the larger theater production of the business-world can only become more cynical and absurd, as is illustrated by Nabisco commercials now created as to be indifferentiable from what the kids call “brain-rot” - or what I'‘ll define here as “intellectual content at the end of time - intentionally mindless as to end time - the legendary materials produced by a ‘people’ somehow slugging and lurching onward well past their expiration date.”
We can suppose there are no heroes, and what few there are must be destroyed, as a byproduct of the shame and hatred of the masses. Never mind the reproduction of Socrates rational-self-interested thought and mind into the millions and billions, what happens when you kill off Achilles, or, remove his choice? No choice, is not a choice, the same as endless choice is not a choice: Fate had Achilles by the balls from day one, and only later was the story changed to have him by the heel, but what happens in a world that can no longer produce heroes, or, individuals, even among classes of individuals? It should seem obvious, but myth, like reality itself, like the species that creates it, becomes incoherent. Nothing was lost. Remember, it only had “the illusion of as if” to begin with. What we learned from the Greeks? To chisel gods into eternity, and men into stone. To be good actors and orators, not that civilization expects or even allows men to speak for themselves. Rather, that has been part of the design philosophy.6 Eichmann wasn’t going to do anything otherwise, or create any art or peoples of his own, so his very physiology tells you his place here - in the perfect mold.
When it comes to bait-and-switches, rug-pulls, Trojan horses7, and treacherous contracts that will be honored until first inconvenience, nobody has taught the denizens of history how to scam, blunder, and slave their way to the top, like Christianity and the world of American Business it inevitably created. As with warfare of all variety, American Business has taught the world to speak, and follow suit, even if the suit has never been so recognizably hollow, even if people are completely unaware of the pretensions of the history of fashion - all aristocratic and noble-dress was modeled after a culture’s military attire. So it is our collars and cuffs recall plate armor, and the neck tie comes from the Slav soldier’s kravat, and with enough money, anyone can dress up to look like Captain Stupid,8 especially as reflected in modern leadership where its clear even the average human political class member was never going to “be fit” to run a factory farm at this kind of scale. The rest follows the American Company motto: “don’t ask us, we just work here.” Otherwise it seems the most quintessentially human thing to take the pay-out, keep your head down, shut up, and do your job.
In these manners, nobody has taught the denizens of history how to scam, lie, and blunder their way to the top like Christianity, of which its governmental corporate models of organization prove indomitably, that Christians, Europeans, and Americans are the top-grossing scam-artists, liars, and crooks of all time. While individual members of these classes might take pride in how they make their living off the weak, stupid, and generally those who can’t afford to protect themselves, the slum-total is undeniable: domination without word or chance. Long gone are days of honors and duels, where a man’s life had any imagined and agreed upon value, where man’s word, his promise, was worth his life itself. With billions of his descendants running around as hapless and voiceless as ever, no wonder men and women alike gave up on that dream: it floated off into the abyss on the power of hot-air and pettiness.
Yes, the cynicism and jokes are real, that Americans are not a serious people or culture, best exemplified by the banality of their media, organizations like ‘human resources,’ the mickey-mousification of mind, man and world as an education of the species, or war against everything resembling primal reality. Reality? It is that which is replace-able and represented by symbol, and its commercial, to derive real profit from ghostly stand-in for value. Reality is that which can be commercialized, made into a commercial, and broadcast into any medium or service (ancient or new) with its intended effect of occupation of mind, body, and spirit of its intended receiver. That which can be put into a commercial, is that which can be trivialized, banalized, explained away and ‘captured,’ so to speak, as to have no power whatsoever. What is real, is what is commercialized, and what is commercialized, is that which runs its course, generally along the lines of pure necessity with low-bars set for intelligence and action, in the single channel broadcast where a possibility once then becomes a necessity forever, and what was sacred and rare, now becomes commercial, standard, stock-footage and chicken-feed for the herd.
Other nations may have their claims to fame, culture, religion, state, and original cultural productions and history, but nobody does money and its pretensions like Europe, and nobody imitates Europe better than America. Like Rome or the Church following its one-way path through to its fatal conclusions - the dissolution of all previously held values and identities,9 so it is, history has never witnessed “a people” who had to undergo so many generations obsolesced, and so many identities manufactured by state and corporation, within the span of a single generation, let alone ceaselessly, generation to generation, ever more confused and meaningless: you’d be a nation of mentally-ill nut-jobs who call this “normal” too, if you lived through what they did. The cures fabricated for the disease fabricated, and its profitable answer in dangerous mind and life-altering chemicals, provides another clue. Historically speaking (thinking of large spans of time), the total destruction of both history, the past, as well as the future, at the behest of present active and passive forces, has been profitable, and nobody has profited more off the destruction of old musty Europe (its land, people, and values) than America. This holds true in corporate or military endeavors before and after the 20th century and its first two world wars.10
Why choose allies or axis, when you can play both sides? Switzerland, that good historic “middle-man” or “fence” exemplified this as a nation, its mirror reflection found in Eichmann, Incorporated, be it Cola, Ford, IBM, General Motors, Standard Oil, and so forth. These long-standing corporations like Cola exist to remind the world that there’s nothing so real or historic, that image and brand fabrication can’t program and reprogram said image anew. Everything can be cleaned, scrubbed, forgotten, unremembered. Public perception is easy to control, in tandem with how much guns, money (and psychological operations, or advertising) one throws at the problem.
What the American CEO and business leader really proves, above all else, is that you get caught, or wind up in jail, you’re simply bad at American business. Theranos, FTX, the 2008 Banking Scam, the 2024-2025 world banking scam11 , and countless other organizations are all classic and iconic American businesses and their model at work. Given that almost everything sold in American is a scam, a scam by real rich people, or a real scam by fake rich people, its clear the world is their industrial oyster farm, and humanity are the necessary mucus that must be stripped of its slimy grasp on the pearl of life. The billions must be forced into the unreality of the collective-corporate imagination, rather, what could be described as an intentional lack of imagination, or they might begin to fathom that, as the organization has no depth, so it is they have no future. Simply put: they’re shucked, and it was never going to be any other way. Nobody was denied here: they wanted to buy the lie - so they do, and to this day.
The truth of it? The Corporation exists in its own legally-unprecedented and protected reality, one where concerns like reality and death, primal reality, become imaginary objects on the way to inevitable ends. Everything is made unreal by way of the commercial, and the image, or, the imaginary picture. Marketers know the best methods and means of Socrates and Aristotle, as well as the artist and bard. Of course, all marketing, pleasantly-beheld speaking, and rhyme is derivative of poetry and other high oratory arts, ones who, historically speaking, have only ever been 2% of the world population. Poets and artists have always been the smallest minority - but the intellectual classes more than enough-effective to lure all who hear it, “in.”
Whether inside or outside the cave, give people a “reason” and a “rhythm” they can’t say no to, and an image of which to view the world,12 and reality can be yours. There’s a price, some now, and some later, or, maintenance, but as with all sacrifice deferred, then it can only come later. Contrary to the beguilingly neurotic desire for permanence at the heart of Western Values and psychology: nothing lasts. In the meantime, its big business to keep so many pointless, placeless, unhistorical bodies13 busy.
In this arena, whether a statement on form, function, or fashion, from the bottom to top of the gold-plated pyramid of corporately engineered human “values”, people will kill you or your reputation, over your shoes alone. Those too slow, or dated to keep up, fall behind, like modern Neanderthal-offshoots being ambered in present time. The rest of the intelligent and superstitious hoot and holler: the devil always takes the hindmost, hence a species could even concoct such a saying, and this applies whether that’s a corporation, or the nation from where it hails. Where they slip up and trip up, both fail together, and there’s nothing so big it cannot fail. More damning are the statements said, or better yet, unsaid but visible in design choice alone. In America, this is generally in bad taste, imitative and derivative style if any style is affored at all, since these are someone’s organization’s cheap-as-possible money-projects.
This is why in America, for instance, the residential neighborhoods resemble factory products, the schools resemble the factories, and the factories resemble the prisons, and the prison reminds you there is no choice except the first two, not that anybody has a choice of where they belong, and whether children, teenagers, worker drones, or prisoners, the people are treated, talked to, and addressed, as if they’re children. Daddy has plenty of cookies, but he chooses when and how to share, and he needs to draw the process out, like an absurd and grotesque scene from one of Quentin Tarantino’s stupider movies. More so, you can tell from the advertising, the messages, the signs, the language, the censorship, the brutal repression everywhere hidden and apparent, that advertisers, government officials, celebrities, and the intellectual classes alike think the poor consumer class that makes up 90% of America are total hapless fucking idiots, not even children, but sub-human cattle. Turn on any media, and some mindless extrovert will be screaming at the top of their lungs, as if to destroy your own thought, hollering as to why you and the world should be excited to buy another stupid product, from another stupid brand, from another who cares shut up and buy this nihilistic consumer orgy. You’ve seen it before, you’ve heard it before, but this one is marketed by a really loud attractive fucking idiot (the biggest lure and bait for the 90% sucker class) - which is why this never fails when everything else does: vanity, absurdity, not progress at all, but a dead-end.
Everyone who reads their scripts knows exactly what not to say to maintain plausible deniability, though, reality and its simulation run thin, and its people out of patience. The truth is in the untruth, or simply leaving it out, which is why America pretends there isn’t nation-wide and global-wide chaos, unrest, war, famine, and brutal repression and competition present, that is rocking the world and market to dread each night. If you go to any third-world country, or large American city, you can see the truth of it in the streets. Bangladesh isn’t unlivable, it’s simply ahead of its time, a visitor to the past, leading the way to the future. In any of these devastated and “impoverished” lands, you can see the Apocalypse already happened. And some people are still waiting for “the end?” Or just as laughable and bad: “a change”? You’ll be waiting a long time, but at least the lobby has magazines and snacks. Bread and Circus, Inc. creates and promotes the commercials for more bread and circus.
As for humanity “living” now, both their noise and their silence is a loud confession among so many pointless conspiracies and theories. Those satisfied at present have Disneyland, Cola, Prozac, the legal system, and whatever else needs to be imagineered for them, while those whose values, personalities, and character don’t align with the Corporation-State fungineers, are still not allowed off the American reservation. In this manner, Huxley’s corproation-state in Brave New World was a far more humane and reasonable organization, insofar as they recognized total and max production and consumption just short of collapse was their business model, they could only then house those specifically engineered to fit the narrow molds. Those who were defective, who couldn’t be the brainless products and consumers they were designed by the Corporation-State to be, were given their freedom, and sent to live on an island (and no, they weren’t clones having their organs harvested for the wealthy). Yes, nothing lasts forever, nobody lives forever, but we extend our lives by robbing and feeding off others, and even Titans and Gods, legends and heroes are food for Kronus’ gut bacteria.
What legacy industries and their giants teach, is the history of business is that of dinosaurs - thunder lizards - ones who still roam the Earth, and others who went extinct. Businesses that were once emblematic of entire industries, a god-like symbol and statue, the IT guys, the IT crowd, quickly reveal themselves to be incompetent, zombie organizations who, in the end, die off forever, only to be mentioned in strange articles like this one here. You’re just one of the IBM family, and now they’re dead.
Along with IBM, Sprint and countless other giants relate that, one can offer a subpar service and product, arguably hold industry itself back by being the hack standard that ties up existing resources, competes with and crushes out all superior competition that doesn’t have the means to compete. That’s not a complaint, but an observation that nothing is fair in war, and that is called strategy. In another word, research and development, and even, design. If you sell a higher end product to people who expect a literate response, the term becomes design philosophy.
Being first in and best dressed can at most set the stage, but it doesn’t ensure life immortal. Or maybe the cost of such a fantasy has always been legacy, best exemplified in the treacherous Greek pantheon and the stories that come from such families: if you’re people aren’t murderous, treacherous, incestuous nutjobs who are hungry at all cost for power, they’re not fit to be ruling class. The proof? They die off, as does their legacy. Rather, for many, they’re going to wish against all reality, their legacy could be forgotten, but it seems that the worst of the worst of human behavior inspires everyone, and in more ways than “one” - as in, “one correct answer or method.” Whole industries and their giants rise and fall, before they become the fossils, and bedrock, and fuel for the next scene and plot.
Beyond the neuromantic wasteland realms of the corporation and its sleek production values, one finds their cost as slum-total: the ghettoization of all large population centers; devastated lands and peoples; families uprooted and torn apart; polluted rivers, oceans, and continents; and most damaging, the warping of the human psyche in the name of the dollar: a planet turned into pre-programmed consumer cattle by media and education, or, war and its strategy.
That cost-cutting became the hallmark of business, speaks to the stinginess of those involved and how little they care for the end results, and what happens after that. There are no world wonders from present or past recent century (nothing to carry forward), and time’s up anyhow. There is no more time to think in terms of years, generations, peoples, legacies, and the future, not that this was ever “realistic” to begin with - but it speaks to the spirit of a people who were still people. Regardless, human existence has been reduced, and is slowly being simmered to death in a quarterly model that peaked years ago, and has been sputtering violently into evaporated droplets ever since. Running out of cheap labor, new frontiers, and new people and their culture to exploit has been the most disastrous event to happen to civilization, next to the large-scale waste production byproduct of the corporate production.
The pollution of the lands and seas reflects the pollution and destruction of their people - wasting and using-up cultures in the name of as many dollars out of the ever-limited days here. These large organizations rise and fall like the waves which take the surf and turf with them. Long voyages require food sources, so grab a garbage patch, and learn to swim. What happens in climaxed environments, when all animals are drowning in the same shallow river? What happens in a fake and manufactured world unconcerned with real hygiene? The trash draws the animals, the trash and the animals pile up, as do the parasites and diseases. Ecosystem collapse is inevitable. When there is no self-sacrifice, there is a guarantee there is no hygiene, not that hygiene means anything anymore, beyond what a corporation sells it to be.
While modernists, futurists, and other mainstream business moguls used to dazzle and delight their citizenry with visions, promises, and hopes for the future, they don’t even feign to hand out an I-O-U anymore, where not actively wincing and horrified over the present, the future, or the intentions and total lack of concern from the higher ups. People look at the dingy world that the corporation abandons as quickly as it fabricates it14, and ever smaller, wherever it goes, and are left asking, as if survivors of the lamest Apocalypse ever, “what happened?” The end of the world. Didn’t you hear the catchy jingle? Take me to the river, drop me in the water? It’s true, you can’t step into the same river twice, but there are some rivers you’d never want to step in the first place.
We philosophize in the ruins. Nobody can ever sell their souls fast enough, but the subtext of the design philosophy, everything between the brick and mortar and between the lines, tells you more of what the higher ups think: Someone needs to keep these dumb, hopeless beasts of nihilistic burden busy, and why wouldn’t that be us? Who else could write your slogans, scripts and advertisements? Who else could provide you and your children a factory farm to live and die on? If it wasn’t for government, how could there ever be peace? If it wasn’t for the corporation, who could afford to back the government?
What has this history of business proved? When it comes to nebulous terms in high-tech, high-class cultural categories, such as "leadership,” or “business,” one is speaking of the upper classes who, in their ongoing track-record of decimation of themselves and others, reveals that most Americans aren’t fit to run a day-care center, let alone an organization or business. That’s not written as an insult to their intelligence, but a humanly concerned value judgment on their competence that carries the assessment of aforenoted value judgment: these people aren’t capable of taking care of, being responsible for, or raising children (apparent everywhere in America). How then could they be responsible for even larger, more unwieldly and dangerous organizations of “grown up” human beings? Answer: They can’t. They don’t, they won’t. An institution is formed when you no longer have original thoughts, or the need for original thoughts. Original sin in this garden really means “an original thought.” Who could ever recognize such a thing? Monotheistic gods, like any corporation that is its own god in a larger pantheon of industrial efforts, hates competition. Competition is the only thing that kills or at least dethrones the contender. Even worse than dying, is your legacy and memory dying, which is to say, competition is the only thing that wins hearts, minds, therefor bodies, especially where the competition is unfair, for people understand this to be a fact of life, which is why morality, now corporately created cults and government bureaucratic religion, or law, was and still is, the basis of all things human - our sole and single line of real development. Technology and tools are busywork, not even necessary to life, like so many luxuries become needs, but its not a beginning or end of development itself, though the Corporation-State knows real power under the god mammon to be so: singular, but when your God, Power, Devil and money work in concert to create a funny trinity, the plot line and people become incoherent to themselves and one another. It almost makes you forget that America is the utopia realized, and its as real as Disneyland.
So it is, the thrashing of giants wakes gods in one earthquake, and puts men to an easier sleep in another. Culturally and artistically speaking, as is with many historical cases, Japan delivers where America fumbles its balls and bombs.
This is where the rarest of rare breeds shines - the honorable human, one absent from the sort of laughing stock that compose the low and high classes of a country like America. Just as their organized religion has always been a hostage-taker of free thought, a burner of witches, a destroyer of mind and body, so their organized business came to be a more mild-mannered, boring reflection of the same nihilistic busywork based on its prehistoric assumptions and a people grown lazy and put on auto-pilot, but better, because its actually real. The only reason “corporation” means something seemingly special when “cult” sounds “crazy,” is simply its economic model - it’s otherwise classic and common human organizational scheme that are laughably indistinct, though business leaders tend to shy away from the silly hats and dresses of the other ruling-class types, the priests. Increasingly, everyone has been imagined to have rights, or vanities and luxuries, where formerly, that was reserved for men in dresses and funny hats.
As it stands, the business of this is the same as it ever was: most of you will toil in the fields until you break and die, while a few nutty people wear crowns and drive around in Rolls Royces,15 yet everywhere the most basic egoism and vanity indulged: the one and the masses, or the masses and the one, of which, the work keeps the masses of bodies busily occupied. Where they won’t work, jails and mental-institutions will do, which is where Nonaka’s heroism stands in stark contrast to an age of cowards that future generations will remember with scorn, if they remember them at all. As with our present to our past, humanity and its legacies of the future only have further to drift, lose sight of, and be alienated to their own past, culture and language. No past is the same as and as good as “no future” or “the halting thereof.” If there’s nobody to carry forward, then there is nothing to carry forward except empty ritual, which seems to be the elimination of human memory, family, and parentage. Perhaps this is a yet-finished design of the present, happening into the future, where eventually, no jails or concentration camps will be needed, for the individual will already be reduced to a non-entity who carries their microcosm of self around in an insane world at war that can ultimately, along with the planet, only 1) reject man - in theory, because he’s never good enough, and 2) reject man in actuality, because nothing lasts anyhow.
This is where honor is created by choice - irrational - it isn’t given by mere word, organization affiliation, or other happenstance associations. This is why Achilles is remembered. Given the choice, he took immortality, over a long happy life, though, that might not mean much for a simple hero such as Achilles. In stark contrast, Odysseus is remembered for his cunning, but it seems the world won’t be able to forget the human resources department, and the Last Eichmann’s utopia, fast enough. Life doesn’t happen there: it’s where humanity retires in a sickness unto death, and this is why Nonaka stands as no-nonsense witness to a degenerate age, where, pardoned to live, the many-all-too-many then beg and demands the strong and honorable to die, or at least take the poison the same as everyone else. We’re all the same, right? Dead wrong - as every brave and honorable man has witnessed in his own sacrifice through history.
It’s practically a fluke to find human values of any kind in any corporate body, and suffering “redundancies,” or another way for the corporation to state, “there’s too many of these worthless animals in our employ.” In protest to his own bloodless disposal and termination, Masaharu Nonaka, 58, a middle management salary-man for the Bridgestone Tyres group, protested out of loyalty by stabbing himself in the stomach with a knife. Rather than honor his clear wishes of what would follow in ritual beheading, the corporation sent Nonaka to the hospital, where he died, reducing the ancient honorable Sudoku down to what even The Guardian, that online news rag, refers to as “hara-kiri.”
But there’s no reason this heroic and redemptive act should be limited to the middle-tier management classes. Yes, it’s common for the lower ranks to be so dispossessed of life as to require the installation of nets to keep them from self-terminating, but this bravery should be an aspiration of those who would gamble with not just their own life, but that of the world and its future. Funny how, for life on this planet, a few fools are always fatal to it? It is here the Japanese are far more foreign than Americans could ever pretend them to be familiar, for America’s greatest mistakes have always been that of living a Cinderella existence, and not the distance and difference of people and peoples. And who doesn’t fail to appreciate the carriage before its turned back into a pumpkin?
Simply put, America, and especially American business people, are far too cynical for words and values like honor, love, fidelity, loyalty, humanity, morality, are laughable here, except to the marks who bought the lies they were sold, quaint, naive, moronic - no purchase/value. One simply asks for too much, using five-dollar words in an advertiser’s world of dollar menus. These people jump from towers of high finance, not for honor, or values, but simply because “they lost it.” Lost what? Their lives? No, that which is worth even less than their lives - their money. These people have no clue what life is, without America’s shallow game of money to give it meaning or value. In short, by their own measures, human life, even their own life, isn’t worth the paper its printed on. This isn’t an insult, but an observation that, according to America’s own debt clock, the American owes the world 330 thousand dollars, an absurd and imaginary number whose unreality ensures it will never be paid, or, the species will be kept nihilistically busy until “the end of time,” or in Western terms, “the duration of Judeo-Christian Monetary Values.”
Responsibility, a long vision and game of the longest future and people, sticking to one’s word and deeds, as if they matter, are unknown to these people, outside whatever is needed in the moment, the nickle, the dime, the quarterly play of personal-gain. Otherwise, These aren’t serious people who need to be taken seriously to dominate the world or maintain the cobwebs of your presence everywhere. You can be the laughingstock Jerry Springer guest of the planet and its very production and model, and still function, even in crippled and morbid fashion.
In a world of chicken-shits, and the people who maintain them, Nonaka’s bravery stands out, mythological transcendence breaking open the world of everyday slavery, where one of millions and billions of corporately-tamed and trained animals is human enough to take life and death seriously? It’s unconscionable, yet, exemplary! Inconceivable, yet refreshing, and encouraging, but honor is not found in what passes as modern leadership.
American CEOs like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos had it made, until they started taking rich people’s money, which is always risky, since the rich people do not like to be treated as the common cattle-crop American, but more obvious, rich Americans have the resources to actually do something about it. CEO Elizabeth Holmes was fined for half a billion dollars, and is serving an eleven year prison sentence, but Americans could never imagine making the hard calls or sacrifices themselves. Instead of justice, Elizabeth Holmes is the quintessential American CEO whose very health business reflects the massive ego involved: another royal member of the family wants to live forever. Where fame won’t do, or doesn’t last, infamy is good enough.
Another example of unheard of bravery in a world of mass-organizational-cowardice-amongst-prowress, are cases out of China. Zhang Shuhong, CEO of a Chinese toy company, sacrificed himself honorably, merely for selling toys created with lead paint. Where the sacrifices aren’t self-made, the Chinese state enforces them: two Chinese officials were sentenced to death for bribery, corruption, and ultimately, knowing that they were selling poisoned milk, whose end results killed children, an embarrassingly perfect symbol for business under social democracy. Had they honorably taken their own lives, they would yet be exemplars in an age of American-style business that answered the unasked question, “how quickly can you poison your children and destroy your future?” The answer: never swiftly enough.
A reminder that, the only place standards can exist in America, are on he factory floors where products are produced with precision. Beyond whats fabricated, as product, commercial, or otherwise, you can’t actually hold anyone to any standard. More so, you couldn’t actually hold American CEO’s, management, and “leadership” to any real standard outside of “did they make a profit this quarter or not,” because there would be no “leadership” left, especially if the bar of litigation was as low as “deceit, bribery, and murdering children.” If Americans cared about these things, the world would come apart at the seams; the entire American economy and the lies it runs on, would collapse! Why wait for what you created yesterday, to show up tomorrow? Why not do the Honorable thing now, when there is no profit or payout?
There is no story, heroism, or “being to be” there. Man, where wise, has always sought to escape the same old drudgery of and for the masses around him. He knows the others are content with it, even happy with it, the only thing that matters is that, he is not. Just as the Hero, or Criminal, exemplifies himself, what not to do, in fact, in his own Will to stupidity and his self-sacrifice, is inversely a right held by the few - not only to sacrifice themselves, but to sacrifice others in their self’s stead. I assure you, whether one, or a billion, the calls are made when they are made, and only the most man (and not mere animal), will actually think, and think twice, but largely, the sacrifice of the superfluous masses are a given, as is their privilege to be the snackrifice to old and new world orders, but these are risks that somebody must be willing to take. If the individual can’t or won’t be responsible for their own life, then that Power is consolidated down for the mass-entities of the Corporation-State to decide, as its very formation, then its habitual existence, rest on deferral of ever more micro and macro powers of worker unit, to larger powers.16
The corporate world rounds down, eliminates, downsizes, not just problems, but all primal and temporal reality, constrains all reality and mentality to it - a resistance of resistance working and monetizing more resistance still. The very fight is the denial of a fight, a contentment in what’s assumed to be understood, good, right, copacetic, agreed upon,17 that’s really a repression of resistance: stop resisting, “do what’s good for everybody,” is a warning or threat.18 There’s endless fluff pieces from what passes as thinkers and morality circa 2025A.D., but the only thing “unnatural” about man is his delusion and monument to permanence, which is to say, its unnatural to fight primal reality and the beings who embody it19, its otherwise unnatural to extend the life of things which should have died, which like a bridge or body, has breaking points that nothing can change or “reverse” when damaged. Heidegger comes to mind: an understanding that, among eternal recurrence of the same, history is actually rare,20 whereas beings handing themselves down to their future is the norm throughout, the fight that their claim is in fact a “the fight is over, forever.” Similarly, an institution is formed so brains can stop having to think, and the children can never grow up; or they’re eaten by their parents; or the children themselves must be made to not produce “the new,” that “the they” (communal life, culture that everyone is born, abandoned, “thrown” to) are so enamored by, and in need of, to begin with.21 Too much of “the new” would mean “different,” or change - facing “reality,” and nobody has ever liked that. All actions, reactions, and inactions here are a profound statement not about modern life, but general being in time, specifically here regarding fatally-sophisticated, anxious, Western minds, and how they react when faced with the possibility of their own extinction - cue the need of “infinite mobilization” (of the same).
The people can only buy what’s sold to them.22 It’s been said humans are not robots, but given the chance, they will behave like them without fail. It seems Zeus and Mars figured this out long ago, and so historicity was made, readily apparent in power as to run eternally backward and forward, to be true of all time, wherein beings appear and organize, where spirit cuts into life, as life itself: war father and love mother, Thanatos and Eros - a resistance - a constraint of essence, a binding of all time through egos, personalities, and religions, to flow back and forth from singular point of origin or source, whereas specialization, motility, distance, organization, decay, splitting of atoms and cells is the normative motion of being through time.
But why let your time and life be dictated by others? Just as being born at the right time is important, so is dying at the right time, and the ongoing crash of market, businesses, and corporations is nutritious food for a real human future, or, where still standing, its end in stagnation and complacence. Another bad commercial, another stupid script, another day in Disneyland and the bland world made to reflect the commercial. How could anyone forget it, when everyone and where are polluted with its plastic wrappings, litter, and slogans?
Whether robbing rich people, poisoning babies, or sacrificing the masses to ever more down-sizable labor and pay, you can be sure that there is hope yet still that these people may redeem themselves, in contrast to the fact that cowardice, along with its anonymity made intentionally easy even in a world where “private, polite society” was murdered over 50 years ago (the TV was accomplice, the marketers the culprits). David Lynch’s Henry Spencer turned “a people” - “I’m on vacation” - and apparently permanently so. One can’t help recall Johnny Rotten belting the lyrics to Pretty Vacant: There's no point in asking, you'll get no reply, oh just remember I don't decide, I got no reason it's all too much…
You'll always find us - out to lunch
A permanent lack of all responsibility, impossibility of educating/fixing the masses, is the dominant trait and fact of modern American life and business, except where individuals, peoples, and organizations are so poor or weak as to be forced to be held responsible for themselves. That is to say, honor, like honesty, is not welcome in a globalized, homogenized, corporate simulation, given the sort of performances, payouts and expectations that are placed on those few who have purchase here, or as stated before, the means ($) to attack their enemies, and defend their family, business, etc., at the expense of others, to the profit of themselves and others still. Unlike locations and heroes of humanity’s past, the Last Eichmann’s cobweb leaves no tensile strength for heritage, while insisting on conservation, stasis, culture’s happiness it hates in stagnation, hence the need and attractor of novelty (the new). Meanwhile, Achilles retires to live the good life, while still insisting he live forever. Remember you fondly, and forever? Who could tell any of you apart?
Of course, we’d be remiss to expect standards to exist or be reinforced where there are in fact none23, where both the few and the many take more than they ever give, or create -of which, standards could not be shared and upheld in such an anonymous, mass organization, where people and groups are cut to disappear forever as quickly as they were hired. It’s not enough to share words and brands, experience and supreme wisdom of sterling instinct, must be in common. Having something to stand for, to lose, and to stake on the line, is otherwise a privilege, one in which the masses and their managers delegate elsewhere, similar to their brains.24 Who knew that “keep away” would become the definitive game of mankind, namely to keep the individual away from any sense of self-worth, or self-importance. The worst thing in the world in all competition, for any reigning champion, is the contender who says “I can beat your record.”25
It’s fortunate that the cost, or debts of humanity, is preserved for future generations, or there’s no other way you’d be able to shackle them to previous generation’s ignorance and simplicity. Can I Interest you in land on the moon? How about to have your own star named after you? A pet rock? How about a JPG file for 2 million? A four year college degree?
Said debt is passed on to be carried by some other body, be it economic, political, and all the individuals who comprise it. For those so brave, we look to you to lead the way, the redemption of the future, paid for with the sacrifice of the last few human beings who haven’t been totally bred into docile, domesticated oblivion in the service of anti-service to world-historic nihilistic forces of a zombie people still sputtering along on the long-standing dreams of a long-gone people who died out with last century’s steam-power. Honor is not a hope, but the real gold, the real value, not merely its stand-in: and when actually possessed, it is not an object or ideal that can be established, set, chosen, or regulated by someone else.26 Honor is to be so fated, and nothing else. The Sun may rise in the East, but let us hope it leads the way of an honorable setting here in the West. Let brave American leadership, not merely name, but create new stars, inspired as it were by Nonaka and his indomitable Will to see his honor through in completion of that ancient, honorable art of Sudoku.
Yes, the corporate world and everything it manufactures is designed to be unreal, and wielded against real people, but the war and implements of war produced therein, the body counts that pile up in history’s slumps, eruptions, and ditches, are indeed real when nothing else is.27
Sayōnara!
-ZM
4/14/25
The era of the shit-stick: everything made small, and ever smaller, encouragement only in smallness; the last Eichmann lives longest.
Impotent concern-trolling (i.e., save the planet, save the whales, save the worker drone) is not real concern. It’s oblivion.
e.g., lobotomy
Culture isn’t material goods or money. No serious Philosopher or Religion ever concerned themselves with “money” for its own sake, the idea of “profit” or “money” being nowhere present in Plato’s Republic, or any serious thinker or artists since then. Worse, human civilization was clearly never “meant” to handle so many bodies at scale, especially where said bodies aren’t self-monetizing (the mentally ill have to be monetized, whereas, the “healthy”).
No, the lazy, quarterly future that has been running out of its own needed easily-exploitable people, frontiers, and resources is done-for. It doesn’t matter whether people see or believe it - the same with all warfare through all history.
See the business model of lawyers: perhaps civilization’s most intelligent tick or leach, who figured out how to best monetize the poorest and the richest.
Marshall McLuhan predicted the economic collapse of Japan back in the 1960’s, by the Japanese’s adoption of the Phoenician alphabet alone: for market-purposes, the world is one big ponzi scheme, and social-democracy is the sort of mob-like organization that enforces itself with Italian bookkeeping and coercion. You might be a nice country or people, but you wouldn’t want to make the US wreck up the place, would you? Evidence need not even be planted.
I’m reminded of Chris Rock’s Michael Jackson joke: “He showed up to court looking like Captain Crunch. Better take your black-ass to Banana Republic and get a suit.”
What does this mean? All ur base r belong to us.
Space here reserved for WWIII
This is happening now, but will be historic, assuming the Christians won’t tank the world again as they do.
Aristotle: “The soul never thinks without a mental picture.” Important to note, Aristotle’s idea of inner art gallery, painter and critic, precludes the idea of aphantasia - “inability to see or use mental images.” Other people seem to think and feel in images, and the words are formulated after. While it’s unknown how many people are aphantasiac (a funny modern term for an even funnier condition, betraying its object and study), its clear that Voltaire further refined the idea when he noted that some people are so hopelessly simple, they can only think in terms of basic pictures or ideas/words. Zarathustra: “a man walking among animals…the broken bits and pieces of mankind…” Aristotle’s idea also doesn’t account for the day and night between extroverts and introverts, which is to question the nature and order of these “mental pictures” and how they relate to “internal monologue” or “one’s own voice,” of which it’s further observed, that many people seem to lack an ability to think much, in the sense that in studies and elsewhere, it is not uncommon for people to lack an internal monologue, which doesn’t even begin to then examine the differences and divides between those who have no internal monologue, and those who have di/tri/multiple-personality-ologue of the introvert and intuitive types of personalities. In short, with these disabilities, one can assume the majority of humanity has always been like spearing fish in a bucket, from those with higher vantage points that threw the bucket-situation together in the first place. Note, it’s not like there’s a clear science or order as to what, who, or where this is, especially in relation to the individuals own psychic, semi-permeable membrane of ego, but all of civilization, its religion, philosophy, and “the thought of life itself,” has been built upon it, with values created therein, thereby (the ego, a spirit, or conceptual hallucination, of the body). Zarathustra on sacrifice: “one loses nothing when they lose their life (body).”
“Unhistorical Body” - A drifting body left to fall into something else’s gravity; a body freed from the reality of history, identity, culture, purpose (teleology), etc.
Like large warehouse-retail - cheap buildings mean to be abandoned or destroyed when finished.
Classic Simpsons, mirroring reality.
C.G. Jung - “The road to state slavery.”
Assuming “consent” in anything human is fatal.
Don’t think - it’s too troublesome. Soma - all the benefits of Christianity and Alcohol…
“Natural” - fallacy of thought.
Rare doesn’t mean “valuable” by default, and perhaps many “rarities” pile up, and quicker than ever before (modernity, light-speed culture) to fill the void of human existence with lights, noise, busy-work, and other forms of collective oblivion, or, fate.
Terence McKenna would say: “Culture is not your friend. It’s a reassuring enclosed space largely for children, and people who never grow up. It’ll make you a janitor, a movie star, many things, regardless of whether its healthy or good for you…religion is a plot against free thought…etc…”
Aristocracies / ruling classes have always called common people “bad” / “dishonest”
One is the other, And Other is the one (pretend thought, possible empathy)
Such immense and endless cowardice requires a world of spit-swapping. I recently heard a commercial about “life celebrations,” and if you weren’t already aware of the jargon, or quick to pick up on the sophisticated say-nothingness of the lingo, it would be understood if you didn’t know it was a funeral home selling graveyard plots. Death, dying, funerals, nothing real or primal was mentioned at all.
Even Philosophy and Literature is a civilized game of savagery and spirit. Zarathustra: “Let my on-going be their down-going.”
Bring back honor-dueling too, it would help the animals here blow off some steam and settle simple matters that cost everyone else too much.
On The Corporation-State:
Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states.
A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now will I say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples.
A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.”
It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life.
Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them.