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Brief Introduction to Big Body Thinking

“Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse.” - Sophocles

"We live in the age of corporate organisms. Though no formal announcements have been issued it's becoming harder to ignore that they have wrested control of the earth from Homo sapiens and supplanted us as the planet's dominant species. It is they - the multinationals, government bureaucracies, religious hierarchies, military bodies, et al. - not individual humans, that generate our era's character - its patterns of wealth & poverty, its technological progress & ecological peril, its entertainment & political agenda. They have, in short, taken over, and nowhere more so than in Japan. " From "E Pluribus Yamato - The Culture of Corporate Being", Whole Earth Review, Winter 1990

Big Body thinking is a form of metamedicine that applies germ theory insights to the direst diseases of our Earth and body politic. But instead of just focusing on microscopic pathogens, it also looks for disease agents that are very, very large.

Malignant is as Malignant Does
The Big (corporate) Bodies it discovers are far larger than any individual, act like tumors in the biosphere, and draw their life force from attentional energy that they parasitize from our minds. They are the mega-organizations that have emerged amongst us with primitive growth-obsessed agendas and no heart or soul at all.

Big Body thinkers maintain that these huge hierarchical entities are true living systems and the primary agents devastating the planet, paralyzing our evolution, and killing democracy. Until we identify and deal with them as a dangerous new class of being, we will exhaust ourselves fighting their myriad symptoms and never cure their plagues.

As befits a metamedical view, Big Body diagnoses also offer prescriptions and remedies. Like most tumors, these social neoplasms can be melted back to harmless scale with the right kinds of therapy. The therapies of choice:

a) immediately strengthen the body politics' activist immune system,
b) expose Big Bodies as a dangerously pathological new life form,
c) shrink them back to human scale with all legal & political means available, and
d) dejuvenalize and liberate their terminally incorporated inhabitants.

Inventor, entrepreneur and tireless activist, Ken Reiner is a co-founder of the Alliance for Democracy and one of the pioneers of Big Body thinking in modern progressive politics. Here he introduces the concept at a 2006 conference and we include below the original of his thought.

Watch Ken Reiner introduces Corporism in Activism & Non-Profit

Corporism - the Original Pamphlet

Huge corporations now control America's body politic by reason of their bald-faced purchases of the three branches of the American government and America's major media.

by Ken Reiner
May 9, 2003

I view the continuing growth of corporate power and its despotic control of governments throughout the world, including our own, as a socio-economic disease.  While Mussolini and others named it "Fascism," I call it "Corporism" because that name better reveals its underlying institutional structure.  I would define Corporism as the domination of government and society by the emergence and power of the giant publicly-traded multinational corporations and financial institutions, organized in totalitarian hierarchies, which singly and in combinations buy or destroy their competitors, corrupt the politics of nations, and seize, hoard, and wield for themselves most of the wealth of the human race.

We must recognize that we do have this cancerous disease, what it is doing to us and the world we live in, how it came about historically, and how and why it continues to be generated and sustained now in our society.  Just as computer viruses find their ways into the software of our computers and destroy their operation, Corporism, promulgating itself by financial, legal, and technological means, has infected society in ways that lead to the hoarding of human resources, increasing insecurity and misery for the bulk of the world's population, perhaps even to worldwide holocaust.  We must conquer this disease if we are to survive.