Creative Sparks: The Corporation (Addendum)

Cycle 12 Day 8. 05:25 in the morning, Tuesday, April 14th.So just a quick addendum to my previous episode on The Corporation.I think the title of the comic is most aptly going to be The Corporation.Because corporation, etymologically, is from corporatio in Latin: to combine in one body, corporare.So we have many bodies, many individuals, many bodies, many individual bodies combined into one body.And that’s basically at the tenet of this: that we’re sacrificing our own body, our own mind and being, our own individuality, to build up this new, bigger body.But it grows to a scale where that bigger body is so unwieldy that there is no connection between it and the individuals going into it.And it’s to the loss of all bodies inside of the corporation, but also to all bodies outside of the corporation that are intertwined with and in relation with this bigger body, this composite body.So the word corporation I think is the most apt word to use for aggregate human organizations that have grown to this scale.And I would actually suggest that we find another common term in English, or in our own language, which more closely reminds us of this fact, because not many of us are speaking Latin in our day to day.So maybe if you’re a French person, because you still use the word corps for body, even living bodies.In English, you just use it for dead bodies.But that’s also telling.There’s a corpse in the corporation.So the corporation is a corpse.We have our bodies, our corpus, and we put them inside of the corporation, but they turn into corpses.And the corporation itself turns into a corpse.And through that, through the gradual incorporation of our bodies, our corpus, our individual corpuses, the corporation, the organizational body, is growing.And to the extent that it’s growing, with every incremental step of the growth, it’s turning into a corpse.More and more into a corpse.And then you could make a twist in Swedish by having a korp, a raven, scavenging away at this corpse.But that would just be a word pun in Swedish mixed with English, so it doesn’t make any sense.In Swedish we would call that Göteborgshumor, as the city of Gothenburg is known infamously for being especially fond of making these word-pun jokes, these dad jokes as they’re called in American English.Yeah, that was the addendum.But I think the title is for sure The Corporation.And then you could go into, inside of the comic book, you could go into this, at the end maybe, of the comic book, of the comic strip, you could get into this etymology of the word corporation.Because that’s basically summing up the whole crux of this issue that we have with scaling human endeavors, that I’ve seen for such a long time.And I’m not the one to come up with these ideas, obviously.Many other people must have iterated on them before.But actually, I haven’t read that much literature on the unwieldiness of the scale of things.So maybe it’s something I could write a book about, actually, not just a comic book.So maybe that’s for a later creative spark episode, about the formulation of the ideas at the core, the core tenets, for a book on human scale and how it f***s us up.But that’s for a later date.Yeah.Then, in closing: stay blessed, fam.Ciao. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit victorsalander.substack.com