ABSURDO FOR PSYCHOS

The Corporation is a brilliant movie, whose main force is that it both supports a real left-wing stance but carries it in a universal language that honest right-wingers can accept, and with some help from sensible capitalists and capitalists with a soul. But this force is part of Michael Moore’s, whose contributions to the movie are besides amazing and quasi-inspired (concise, impartial, accessible, close to home, to the bone, only the essential), and The Corporation would never have existed without the warnings, the imagery and the articulate criticism he patiently elaborated in Roger and me, Downsize This and The Big One before he felt called on to an even higher destiny.

The most clever point made by the film was that a corporation is a psychopathic person as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV). Again, the comparison between a corporation and a psychopath appears in outline in all of Mike’s early works, under different forms : the description of the obsession of profit over everything else, of the corporates as “aliens”, of the schizophrenia of the workers who lay off before they are laid off themselves, of the cynicism of the responsibility game…

The three works that I quoted are exhibits A, B and C for Moore vs The Corporation. They form a consistent whole. Downsize This is the extension, systematization and formalization of his personal experience with GM in Roger and me. The Big One shows the propagation of said extension and depicts of the walls that you meet when you break the silence, and particularly censorship. It's incredibly percipient, deadly logical and powerful... It's not only sound, it's permanent and with always more consistence and evidence. The Corporation is only a spin-off of one of his themes. An excellent one, an important one, but a spin-off. Everybody owes it all to Michael Moore anyway, as Jonathan Demme recently acknowledged it. Everybody. I mean, all those who chose to deal with the essential.

Here is an excerpt from Downsize This, which shows where the origin of the whole idea of the insanity of corporations comes from, down below. And not only that : also, how to fight it.

Fire with fire. Madness with madness.

Apart from the fact that it’s a magnificent text and one of the best he ever wrote, everything’s there – everything.

Excerpt from "Why Doesn't GM Sell Crack?"

DOWNSIZE THIS, Chapter 33

by Michael Moore

Today the guy in the seat next to me is the owner of an American company that makes office supplies-in Taiwan. I ask the executive, "How much is 'enough'?"

"Enough what?" he replies.

"How much is 'enough' profit?"

He laughs and says, "There's no such thing as 'enough'! "

"So, General Motors made nearly $7 billion in profit last year-but they could make $7.1 billion by closing a factory in Parma, Ohio, and moving it to Mexico-that would be okay?"

"Not only okay," he responds, "it is their duty to close that plant and make the extra $.1 billion."

"Even if it destroys Parma, Ohio? Why can't $7 billion be enough and spare the community? Why ruin thousands of families for the sake of $.1 billion? Do you think this is moral 7'

"Moral?" he asks, as if this is the first time he's heard that word since First Communion class. "This is not an issue of morality. It is purely a matter of economics. A company must be able to do whatever it wants to make a profit."

Then he leans over as if to make a revelation I've never heard before.

"Profit, you know, is supreme."

So here's what I don't understand: if profit is supreme, why doesn't a company like General Motors sell crack? Crack is a very profitable commodity. For every pound of cocaine that is transformed into crack, a dealer stands to make a profit of $45,000. The dealer profit on a two-thousand-pound car is less than $2,000. Crack is also safer to use than automobiles. Each year, 40,000 people die in car accidents. Crack, on the other hand, according to the government's own statistics, kills only a few hundred people a year. And it doesn't pollute.
So why doesn't GM sell crack? If profit is supreme, why not sell crack?

GM doesn't sell crack because it is illegal. Why is it illegal? Because we, as a society, have determined that crack destroys people's lives. It ruins entire communities. It tears apart the very backbone of our country. That's why we wouldn't let a company like GM sell it, no matter what kind of profit they could make.

If we wouldn't let GM sell crack because it destroys our communities, then why do we let them close factories? That, too, destroys our communities.

As my frequent-flier friend would say, "We can't prevent them from closing factories because they have a right to do whatever they want to in order to make a profit."

No, they don't. They don't have a "right" to do a lot of things: sell child pornography, manufacture chemical weapons, or create hazardous products that could conceivably make them a profit. We can enact laws to prevent companies from doing anything to hurt us.

And downsizing is one of those things that is hurting us. I'm not talking about legitimate layoffs, when a company is losing money and simply doesn't have the cash reserves to pay its workers. I'm talking about companies like GM, AT&T, and GE, which fire people at a time when the company is making record profits in the billions of dollars. Executives who do this are not scorned, picketed, or arrested-they are hailed as heroes! They make the covers of Fortune and Forbes. They lecture at the Harvard Business School about their success. They throw big campaign fund-raisers and sit next to the President of the United States. They are the Masters of the Universe simply because they make huge profits regardless of the consequences to our society.

Are we insane or what? Why do we allow this to happen? It is wrong to make money off people's labor and then fire them after you've made it. It is immoral for a CEO to make millions of dollars when he has just destroyed the livelihood of 40,000 families. And it's just plain nuts to allow American companies to move factories overseas at the expense of our own people.

When a company fires thousands of people, what happens to the community? Crime goes up, suicide goes up, drug abuse, alcoholism, spousal abuse, divorce-everything bad spirals dangerously upward. The same thing happens with crack. Only crack is illegal, and downsizing is not. If there was a crack house in your neighborhood, what would you do? You would try to get rid of it!

I think it's time we applied the same attitudes we have about crack to corporate downsizing. It's simple: if it hurts our citizens, it should be illegal. We live in a democracy. We enact laws based on what we believe is right and wrong.

Murder? Wrong, so we pass a law making it illegal. Burglary? Wrong, and we attempt to prosecute those who commit it. Two really big hairy guys from Gingrich's office pummel me after they read this book? Five to ten in Sing Sing.

As a society, we have a right to protect ourselves from harm. As a democracy, we have a responsibility to legislate measures to protect us from harm.

http://www.michaelmoore.com/dogeatdogfilms/whydoes.html

The absurd is not absurd. It's a devastatingly efficient logical tool for rational and honest minds. In philosophy, reductio ad absurdum, or "reduction to the impossible", is commonly used and an old favorite of Aristotle. It's a type of logical argument where one assumes a claim for the sake of argument, arrives at an absurd result, and then concludes that the original assumption must have been wrong, since it led to this absurd result. This is also known as proof by contradiction.

In Mike's text, the premise is not his, but a statement made by the owner of an American company that makes office supplies-in Taiwan : "Profit is supreme".

Good. The writer takes this premise and follows it until a contradiction shows that it was false. If profit is supreme, why doesn't a company like General Motors sell crack? he asks. Crack is a very profitable commodity.

This contradiction shows the necessity of the ethical factor, which would be invisible otherwise. It shows even more : its very existence, since GM CANNOT sell crack, more than it doesn't want to.

Therefore, the use of formal logic allows the author to show us how precious are those "obvious" and invisible existing limits, put by the government, and how INSANE it would be to allow them to be shaken.

Personally, I think this method actually changes people's minds. And Aristotle does too.

Rational and honest minds, of course.

Fire with fire = water. Madness with madness = reason. Less with less = Moore. Porno for pyros. Absurdo for psychos. And if it doesn’t work, don’t be surprised, and don’t lose heart : you should have known from scratch that rational and honest minds are hard to find.