A corporate attitude.

- It may sound reactionary, I know. But we can all feel it. We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsabilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries- we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsabilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. Whe think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie?

- Ask not what your country can do for you...-

- Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.- 

- It's probably part of my naivité that I don't want to put the issue in political terms when it's probably irreducibly political. Something has happened when we've decided on a personal level that it's all right to abdicate our individual responsability to the common good and let the government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interested business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.-

- You can blame some of it on corporations and advertising surely.-

- I don't think of corporations as citizens, though. Corporations are machines for producing profit; that's what they are ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsabilities to corporations.-

- But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The workers' obligations are to the executives, and the executives' obligations are to the CEO and the CEO's obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board's obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders-slash-customers they've been fucking over in their own name. It's like a fugue of evaded responsability.-

[...]

- Corporations aren't citizens or neighbors or parents. They can't vote or serve in combat. They don't learn the Pledge of Allegiance. They don't have souls. They're revenue machines. I don't have any problem with that. I think it's absurd to lay moral or civic obligations on them. Their only obligations are strategic, and while they can get very complex, at root they're not civic entities. With corporations, I have no problem with government enforcement of statutes and regulatory policy serving a conscience funcion. What my problem is is they way it seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it's illegal or there are any practical consequences for ourselves, any activity is OK.- 

[The pale king, D.F. Wallace, Little, Brown and Company, 2011]