The Noose

In 1956, the sociologist C. Wright Mills published his now classic study, The Power Elite. Mills was, as I say, a sociologist. In other words, he was a student of present social conditions in the United States--a present that is, today, close to 60 years in the past. Let us attend to the United States he described for us so long ago:

"The economy--once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance--has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions."

"The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized, executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, and now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure."

"The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government, and, although well versed in smiling public relations, now has all the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain."

"As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity...There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions...If there is government intervention in the corporate economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense, this triangle of power is the source of the interlocking directorate that is most important for the historical structure of the present."

NOTES:

1. All of the above quotations are from C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1956), pp. 7-8.

2. The phrase "interlocking directorate" is a technical term in sociology for "the noose that was placed around your neck when you were born."

3. In the nearly six decades that have come and gone since Mills made these salient observations, the noose that he described has only tightened.

4. If you believe that you can somehow conduct your life unaffected by the fact that you rise from bed each morning with such a noose pulled tight around your neck, you have fully accepted the condition that Etienne de la Boetie described as "voluntary servitude." You are, in effect, a willing slave.

5. The noose is ordinarily employed as a leash. Only if one steps out of line does it become a hang-man's rope. Your willing compliance is what is wanted, not your execution. A dead slave is to no one's advantage.

6. "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean-Jacques Rousseau