Warrior, Worker, Entertainer, Whore – and Corporations as God

The nature of the State is that it wants to enslave you and make you live in fear. Worse, it believes you are a sacrifice to what the rulers believe you should be sacrificed to.

I read a lot of science fiction in-between ages 12 and 14. When your mind is stretched like mine was by science fiction, it never goes back to its original shape. That happens to everyone who is susceptible to it. Terence McKenna called it a psychedelic drug, and he was right.

I don’t read that much sf anymore, but I still do read some. I watch an occasional movie, too.

One movie I do watch repeatedly is Blade Runner, which is one of my favorite films. Like all science fiction – literature, movies, TV – it very rarely gets the specifics right, but in general, it’s very often right on the money.

One of the things that stuck me about Blade Runner is that there isn’t any portrayal of what kind of government runs the world. There are cops, but they don’t run society.

What appears to run society are corporations, specifically the Tyrell Corporation. It’s housed in a pyramid-shaped building with a flat top, hundreds of stories tall. The portrayal of society in the movie is that it is one both ancient and modern, both advanced and degraded – and the flat-topped Aztec pyramids, used for human sacrifice, were a symbol of the degradation of an advanced society. Perhaps it was meant to portray that humans should be sacrificed to corporations? And the State? Makes sense to me.

The movie is telling us that corporations are more powerful than governments, and when they get too big and powerful, it’s a sign of the degradation of society. And that is the case today.

I call modern corporations “Cosmodemonic Transnational Megacorporations.” In the world of Blade Runner, they are Cosmodemonic Interstellar Megacorporations.

Mussolini defined fascism as “corporatism,” so I’d guess the world of Blade Runner is a fascist world.

Corporations don’t care about human life, only profit. That’s the way they always have been. For example, contrary to the myth, the American War for Independence was not about taxation.

It was about the largest corporation in the world – the East India Company (aka John Company) being given a tax rebate of millions of pounds to run its small American competitors out of the tea business.

The war was caused by a corporation, one that put money ahead of life. But then, don’t they always?

In the world of Blade Runner the Tyrell Corporation has learned to grow genetically-engineered people. I assume it’s in artificial wombs, which has been a staple of science fiction.

If test-tube babies aren’t bad enough, the replicants are genetically-engineered to fulfill certain roles.

Roy Batty, who appears to have wolf DNA inserted into him, is engineered to be a Warrior. Leon, who looks like a turtle (and who gets very upset when asked questions about turtles) is mentally slow and engineered to be a Worker in dangerous environments.

Kris, playful as a raccoon (in one scene she sprays a black mask across her face) is engineered to be a “comfort girl” – a Whore. Zhora, who is an Entertainer, performs with a snake (and tries to strangle her pursuer).

When corporations get the power to engineer people, including inserting animal DNA into them, they will do it. And at that time, corporations will be playing God. Not, I’ll add, that they aren’t trying to do it already.

There has been at least one movie that I am familiar with that is somewhat of a spin-off of Blade Runner - Soldier, with Kurt Russell.

It’s set a few hundred years in Blade Runner’s future, and Russell is also a genetically-engineered soldier. At the end he shows himself to be human, just as at the end of Blade Runner Roy Batty shows himself to be human, just as all the replicants showed themselves to be human and not just non-human “skinjobs,” as one police officer referred to them.

The purpose of Corporations (which are creations of the State) and our "educational system" is to turn you into a Working/Consuming Machine. The purpose of the State is to turn you into a Killing Machine.

I can't say I learned much in college but one thing I did learn in a literature class is the difference between the Machine State versus the Natural State. You can see this theme in H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, in which the Morlock's represent the Machine State and the Elio the Natural State. You also see it in the Star Wars movies, in which Darth Vader is more machine than man (and therefore represent the Machine State) and the Ewoks represent the Natural State.

And what do the Morlocks and Darth Vader do? They murder. The Morlocks are worse - they're cannibals. Both, of course, are monsters.

Since art imitates life, there is a Machine State and a Natural State in reality. In my opinion the State is a machine that wants to turn us into a machine, and society when free from the depredations of the State, is an organic growth that should be the best we can find in this life. We won't find any of that from the State.

Workers and Warriors – that’s all the fascist marriage of State and Corporations wants from people. To turn them into machines – organic machines, like the Borg. And all they supposed is need to cheap sex and cheap entertainment. Whores and bread and circuses.

Organic machines sometimes engineered through genetics, sometimes through drugs, and always though propaganda.

In fact, if the State and Corporations had their way, we’d be engineered to look like the Moties in The Mote in God’s Eye - Warriors all blades and Workers with two arms on one side and one on the other.