the inmate's journal : the corporation xxvi : mr. blood iii

Your problem, Jude, is that you sentimentalize beauty, truth, love, power, dreams … you sentimentalize everything … an indication of your inexperience and unwillingness to confront the fundamentally prosaic nature of reality.  You are right to point to dreams as dominating human behavior, but the leader achieves mastery precisely because he is powerful enough to refuse dreams the domination they demand.  Life is just life, life is mundane.  Everything exists to be used, to be eaten, and to die.

 

What the common people don’t realize as they’re leaving the magic show is that death is the only exit door.  Life is a magic show, and those who live most fully are those at center stage … the magicians.

 

Some think that artists—not business leaders—are the great conjurers, and the best artists are certainly not unskilled in their craft.  But art’s danger—its solipsism—is that its transformations never leave the virtual world.  Literature transforms books to books, music sound to sound, and painting image to image.  It conjures worlds from itself and—true—the people feel as a result, but nothing in the physical universe is changed; art effects nothing and exists only for itself.  These have been clichés for a century.  Art is thus not the keeper of beauty, as some claim, but its bastard son.  Beauty most fully is the corporation’s.

 

We thus encounter in our discussion an old question, but dressed in new clothes—What is beauty?  What does it mean to be beautiful?

 

Think of the ancient parable of the elephant and the blind men.  Who is most beautiful—the blind men, the elephant, or the reader?  Certainly not the blind men; each of the blind men is equally silly—not to himself of course; to himself he is a god, as serious as stone.  Each blind man claims the whole while seeing only a part.  Not the reader, who laughs, thinking he somehow lives outside the blind man’s cage.   But the elephant, not because he sees everything, but because the question of sight, of whole and parts, is irrelevant to him.  He is mute, utterly indifferent to the rage and interpretations swirling around him.  The elephant is the Bank as incarnate in its leader, the blind men are the people, and the readers are the people who need to think of themselves as intelligent.

 

Beauty is the capacity to indifferently and calmly allow others to maintain whatever opinions they might have of you—regardless of the degree of virulence with which those opinions might be held.  It is the corporation’s calmness—not its profits—that the mad and passionate, the prophets, resent.  It’s what you resent, Jude, because you, like every commoner, feel that your passion somehow takes precedence over life.  But the powerful are always calm and it is the calmness of the magician in the midst of his conceit, his vocation of deceits, that is the calmness of beauty, something that the conglomerate of environmentalists, scholars, artists, and priests can never understand.  They are all spiritual toddlers, unevolved in the methods and ends of power.  

 

The Bank is not only beautiful, because of its indifference, but it is loving, because it shields the people from madness and desire, the very attributes you extol.  New Bank provides the people with work and hope, numbing them from despair, giving them the means to distract and entertain themselves from the cradle until the grave.  Any leader worthy of his position knows that he is a purveyor in beauty and love through the techniques of transformation.  That he gives the people shelter and meaning in a world that is relentless in its brutality and meaninglessness.  That he enables them to believe in progress though life and history refuse this belief.  Thus the leader unites love, power, and beauty through his magic show … a show that continues to be believed solely because the people need to believe.

 

Jude, you have been working for New Bank for 10 years.  You have been through betrayals and donuts, emails and orgies.  People have lied to you, envied you, used you, ignored you … in short, you have had the opportunity to grow up.  Yet you continue to defend madness and desire, quests and divinity, dreams and God, as if pimples still ruled your face.  When are you going to become a man?

 

You have a choice.  To wholly accept what has been said and, as a consequence of your acceptance, to assume the post of executive vice-president of strategic planning with a salary of half a million, annual bonuses up to that amount, stock options, a generous expense account, comprehensive benefits, and a luxury car.  Or to question what has been said and leave New Bank immediately.  In the latter case, you will be cast from society, living on its margins desperately, furtively, despised, poor, lower than a homeless dog, increasingly incapable of integrating with those who define normalcy and, as a result, turning pathetically to artificial stimulants and depressants to maintain a sense of power within yourself.  But soon the gap between societal reality—carved in buildings, laws, and carefully groomed lawns—and yours—carved only on the water of your heart—will become so large that you cannot help but fall into it.  Then you will not realize—for it will be too late—that the mad never define dreams and madness; it is only the privileged sane.  Definitions are the prerogative of magicians.

 

Thus you’re encouraged to choose to fully participate in the only true expression of love and power in the only true world … or choose to enter your false one and be a disintegrating dilettante in its mess halls and crematoriums.  Thank you, that will be all.