Invasion of the money snatchers

IN 1811, an alien race infiltrates humankind. No one notices, even though soon the aliens are everywhere, feeding on us and growing stronger. Within two centuries, they command the actions of billions of human beings, and their alien philosophies have seeped so deeply into our brains that we barely remember life being anything different. And still we fail to notice: We see the people but not the pods.

I know what you’re thinking: the new J.J. Abrams property with Matthew McConaughey attached to star, right? But no. Actually, probably yes. But it’s also an idea so fascinating that I may have to steal it: Aliens are among us, and they are corporations.

“Greed, Inc.” is a work of nonfiction, although author Wade Rowland confesses that he “idly considered writing this book as a work of science fiction, taking a cue from ... movies such as ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ ” His inspiration was the fact that corporations fit the bill of what we consider “life”: They grow, reproduce, adapt to and interact with their environment, convert matter or energy -- including human energy -- to their own benefit, and so on. Of course, they also lack physical form and self-awareness, so when it comes to life, they are more accurately described as artificial life.

The idea that corporations aren’t mere groups of people but distinct life-forms shouldn’t be startling: Corporations, writes Rowland, won the legal right to “personhood” through a series of court cases over the last century. In all the ways that are useful to them, they enjoy the status of individuals, including “human rights” to free speech, privacy and fair trial. They may be pathological individuals, as noted by Joel Bakan in “The Corporation,” and lack any sense of moral right and wrong beyond the profit motive, as Rowland hammers home in “Greed, Inc.,” but we’ve had time to get used to the idea of corporations as self-motivated entities.

Usually, when otherwise decent people decide that it’s too expensive to recall an exploding automobile or lobby against safety standards, or falsify drug trials, or otherwise prioritize a balance sheet over human welfare, we look for the bad eggs -- the individual employees who have sullied the corporation’s good name. Rowland says we should instead look at the corporation, which functions as a kind of puppet master. It’s not that businesspeople are simply that evil or immoral, but that they are small parts of another being that is. Corporations, in fact, are not really managed by people, he argues; rather, humans end up being managed by corporations.

Rowland’s argument neatly explains how corporations have managed to increase their social influence radically over many decades -- an effort requiring the unconscious collaboration of generations of lobbyists and executives. Self-interest, once considered a vice, is now often viewed as a virtue, and consumerism (that is, feeding the corporations) has become nothing less than a duty, at least according to President Bush’s decree, after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that good citizens should “go out and shop.” It’s undeniable that the aliens have been quite effective at terraforming Earth, altering its environment into something that suits them better. Plus there’s just something so right about the idea that suit-wearing executives are mind-controlled zombies.

“Greed, Inc.” includes a stimulating and satisfyingly outrageous collection of corporate misdeeds, but its aim is not to describe the aliens so much as to explain where they came from. “Human instincts favor moral behavior,” Rowland attests -- and he is firm on this, so the question is: If people are basically good, how have we ended up ruled by immoral institutions?

His answer is that Adam Smith got it wrong. The market doesn’t merely harness the innate selfishness of human beings and redound it to the public good; it also promotes selfishness, causing it to flourish where otherwise it might not exist. Building on the false assumption that people are fundamentally selfish, we have created a social system that causes us to act as if it were true:

“Humans always adapt, to some degree, to the technologies they use. It is said that in domesticating animals, for example, humans domesticated themselves, switching from an adventurous life of hunting and gathering to a more secure, sedentary life of farming and animal husbandry.... We have trained ourselves to be self-interested and self-indulgent, to obey the work ethic and the consumer ethic.”

There is clearly some truth to this, although it struck me as a stretch to suggest that if it weren’t for capitalism and the corporate world, we not only wouldn’t have iPods, SUVs and People magazine, we also wouldn’t want them. But then, my formative years were the 1980s: Maybe it’s impossible for a person indoctrinated by that decade to think otherwise. It’s hard to know how deep the alien mind control runs.

“Greed, Inc.” casts a wide net, and by the time this boat reaches shore, it’s dragging an enormous cast of villains and -isms to blame for our predicament. Rowland lets fly not just at corporations and capitalism, but also at materialism, Darwinism, objectivist theories of morality, rationalism and technology, and he’s not that thrilled with science, either. In fact, the few people to earn a kind word from Rowland are Luddites. By the final pages, he descends into a funk about the state of the world and, despairing of the future (“the suggestions for reform I’ve made here will assuredly be dismissed as impractical, dangerous, wrong-headed, and, yes, irrational”), starts taking whacks at whatever comes near.

But you have to applaud his bravery in offering solutions, not just criticism, even if the solutions comprise just two pages. Some seem entirely sensible, and the rest are at least excitingly radical, such as capital punishment for corporations that enter new markets without government permission. You have to admit that there’s something appealing about the idea of a corporation being executed. Score one for the humans!