juuular
Joined 8 years ago
Joined 8 years ago
The difference is in terms of punishment and enforcement mechanisms. The person who keeps doing something bad out of fear that there's no way out is, in a sense, a failure of society as a whole. The person who is doing something bad as a way to get a leg up thinking they can get away with it is a failure of themselves to understand that society comes with a social contract.
The end results and the ultimate suffering are the same. For the first situation, we want to educate people such that they are more aware and can avoid falling into that trap, and give them ways to get out of the trap that minimize damage. For the second situation, we want to isolate the damage they can cause and prevent them from causing more damage because they are fully conscious of what they are doing and what is going on, and that makes them more dangerous.
If you mess up and get into an inextricable situation, there should be a way to resolve that with the promise of personal growth (along with guard rails to prevent repeating the same mistakes). If you deliberately cause an inextricable situation so you can profit off of it, the only resolution is to isolate the person who caused it from committing further harm until they go through personal growth such that they don't want to cause that harm anymore because they understand that harming others also means harming themselves in the big picture.
Corporations might do it for a different reason — seeking capital above all else — but the end result is the same.
Any organization that gathers enough power would be capable of bringing about a Chinese Great Leap Forward, a Soviet Holodomor, or a German Holocaust.
Some of the worst abuses in history were made possible by the invention of the corporation. Ever hear of the East India Company? They are responsible for 100s of millions of deaths, many genocides, and the eradication of entire cultures.
The difference is that we now regulate corporations to hopefully prevent this level of power and abuse. We seem to be moving towards a new era of East India Companies though, so I'm not sure why you think only a "government" could commit atrocities.
Hell, the Irish famine was caused by the British adhering to free market principles. In that case corporations and the government teamed up together to kill 15% of the Irish population for no particularly good reason.
Governments do not have a monopoly on atrocity.
Edit: Nestlé probably has a bodycount approaching the governments you listed.
edit: ymmv, hard work & organizational skills still required
Reverse engineering yet another ebook format (Nemanja Mijailovic) https://mijailovic.net/2022/12/25/hkpropel/