This article has been published on Huffington Post here.
The courts got it wrong. Corporations aren’t people. They are unruly dogs.
We’ve let corporations take over the country the way an insecure dog owner lets their crazy dog take over the household.
You know what this looks like: The needs of the humans get tossed out the window as all the people in the house are forced to scramble after the dog’s demands.
Crazy behavior in a dog comes out of confusion about who’s in charge. When a dog’s owner isn’t clear on who’s the boss, the dog attempts to fill the role. The only thing is, dogs don’t know how to run a house. So arbitrarily, the dog decides his job — “guard the doors” for instance — is the most important job in the world. Soon, no one can get in or out of the house without navigating the biting dog.
The same dynamic applies. At some point, we gave the corporations a job: “Go get the money.” Without our firm leadership, they’ve taken it to be the most important job in the world. Lacking an internal barometer of what is right, they look to their investors for continual pats on the head: “See, I got the money,” they pant. “See! I did good! See?!” Big treats are demanded all around.
We are bending our lives and our government around the corporations’ outsized sense of their own importance. This is crazy.
Now, if a dog’s job were to “get the ball,” we know that there are times when getting the ball is not the chief priority: for instance, when the ball lands in the middle of your newly planted garden, or when a 2-year-old is clutching it.
This is obvious to us, but may not be obvious to a dog. The dog needs to follow the owner’s cue, not blindly lunge after every ball.
Similarly, we, as actual humans, know that there are more important jobs than “Go get the money.”
There are times when the “Go get the money” game damages the greater good — the greater well-being of the planet and its people — as well as the health of the general public’s pocketbook. Examples abound, from forcing governments to accept genetically modified foods, to privatizing water supplies, to dumping someone’s health insurance when they get sick, to trading toxic sub-prime mortgage “products,” to forcing vaccines for over-hyped flu epidemics … we can make a very long list.
The damage of this maniacal behavior in pursuit of the money ball is obvious to us, but quite clearly is not obvious to corporations. They are relentless. They are exceptionally shortsighted. Plenty are corrupt and have corrupted our government.
Forget the political pundits. We need to be taking tips from Cesar Millan.
As Cesar tells dog owners, we need to retrain ourselves to be calm assertive pack leaders. Corporations are not human. They are not supposed to be running this place. That’s our job.
Sadly, like many timid owners, we’ve become afraid of the aggressive dog. But it’s either stand up and reclaim leadership now, or we will live in fear for the rest of our lives due to the crazy dogs.
We need to start acting like this is our house. We need to regain mastery, ownership, our sense of purpose. Then we can communicate it clearly to the corporations. Just like a dog, corporations needs strong rules, boundaries and limitations. We need to be clear to the corporations about their correct role: they serve the master of the house — the human — not the other way around.
Cesar believes that almost all aggressive dogs can be rehabilitated when the owner becomes a strong, stable, consistent pack leader. Perhaps there’s hope, then, that we can rehabilitate the corporations. We could give them a new job and reward them for their calm submission: Go serve human beings.
The key to rehabilitation is changing our behavior. Pack leaders, Cesar reminds us, never waver from their leadership role and neither should we.
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