Corporate Cynicism

Whenever I’m on the phone with a telemarketer or a customer service representative, I’m torn.

I’m on the phone with a person, but I’m interacting with a corporation.

I don’t know who had the bright idea to create an entity devoid of emotion and buffered from liability. It’s awful.

It’s awful because it brings me into conflict over what to do and how to act. Jesus tells us to love our enemies, to do good to those who persecute us, and not to resist an evil man. I can understand that. Maybe I can’t always do it, but I can understand it, a little bit. Because even if a person is doing something evil, they’re still a person.

But a corporation is… it’s like a *thing*. It’s like a machine.

And all good corporations make life harder by *pretending* to be people. They pretend to have relationships with their customers. I get admail all the time that purports to reward me for my friendship. It uses the language of friendship. Corporations pretend to do favors and they pretend to be kind and they pretend to have emotion. But a corporation is just a thought, and an idea can’t have an emotion.

And a corporation doesn’t care that it’s pretense is a mockery of something real.

But I’m sad, because I’m torn. I feel like I’m being forced into a world where I have to be mean and cold and calculating because I’m fighting against machines. It’s like when I’m programming and I have to be distant and abstract.

Because when Jesus talked about loving your enemies, I think he was talking about people and not mental constructs. And I’m angry because it’s polluting my mind to be forced into that nasty mode of thinking. How can I deal with people as people at the same time that I’m gearing myself up to deal with a soulless machine?

It’s not right and it’s not natural and I don’t like it.