Signum: 118 U

Another ironic point, which the history textbooks might fail to elaborate, was that Justice Black made his observations not long after the US was about to engage in a second civil war. Socialists, communists, and populists of many flavors rose up in pockets of armed resistance against corporate interests during the Great Depression. The US Supreme Court averted civil warfare through a questionable move in 1937. In that decision, now called "The Switch In Time That Saved Nine," corporations adopted enough tenets of socialism to avoid civil war: allegedly, they gave employees the right to a 40-hour work week along with some other bennies, and then invented a new tradition called "corporate culture." Though it would take another sixty years to prove, in return we lost the right to a judiciary that can successfully contest the will of corporate interests, except in a few showcase incidents.

I could go on about the political and legal fallout of 118 U.S. 394, right up to another landmark year of 1995, but you can read about that elsewhere. Something strange happened in 1886 – something pivotal that rejected a century of major events in US history which had contested the corporate form, and projected ahead into a century of governmental drift until almost no human collective could, through government alone, contradict these new and different beings.

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Setting differences aside for a moment, consider how might a biologist describe this new species? As luck would have it, some legal theorists who analyze corporate law actually have applied techniques borrowed from biology. Gunther Teubner, in particular, built on work by social theorist Niklaus Luhmann to apply autopoiesis – a biological theory used to describe how a system self-organizes. Dr Luhmann suggested that a group of persons tends to exhibit a "group individual" or zeitgeist, which then perpetuates on behalf of that group, to an extent. Dr Teubner also examined how some corporate law develops for no observable reason other than to perpetuate more corporate law (and by the way, he’s quite a fan of 118 U.S. 394)… in short, observing the zeitgeist at work.

Luhmann’s "group individual" corresponds closely to the "legal person" defined for a corporation. Either notion provides a clear example of what is esoterically described as evocation, or in other words, the process of summoning a spirit. Zeitgeist, spirit, demon, djinn, golem, servitor, tulpa – take your pick, depending on the root culture. Each term describes suprahuman sapience and immortal powers (read: freed from either death or taxes) followed by cautionary tales scattered throughout human cultural mythos. Perhaps we could learn a thing or two from the wisdom of the ages.

Actually, the notion of evocation runs quite true to the original cast of corporate form. Alchemical advisors to the British Crown during the 16^th century appear to have set the stage for creating the first corporations. Their esoteric work focused on a place called the Royal Exchange of London, with the intent of establishing (read: evoking) a contemporary fiction called the "Brytish Impire." Much to the contrary, as of the 1560s the Brits were perpetually broke, let alone anywhere near to becoming an "empire." Nonetheless, certain royal advisors needed cash to be able to keep buying lots of occult books, among other things. Up popped a new belief based on the glory of England, rallying ’round their Virgin Queen, a new hope based upon a fiction – the "Brytish Impire" – printed in manuscripts that were adorned with engravings of the Empress surrounded by alchemical symbols.

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