The New/Old Feudalism

 Corporations have perhaps been the most persistent and pervasive way that feudalism has survived, maybe starting centuries ago.  

With web 2.0, maybe I, maybe like many, experienced a sense of freedom, for some time, years even, from their demands, constrictions, even economic and emotional predation.  The owners of all this technology seemed to be satisfied with simply being significantly rich and sticking to the work they were satisfied with, which I found benefits in, frequently and soon daily, for free.

I don't know when the combination came to my attention of their overwhelming wealth and their companies' invasive, relentlessly invasive really, harvesting of, sucking up of, whole consumption of, and wholesale marketing of, my information.  What first seemed optional for me to give, at some point, stopped being that way.  And that began to make a sick sense--to them I am, or my identity is, a product.  The old or ancient corollary started to come to light:  for the lord of the manor, are the peasants human workers, or are they livestock?  For the sake of the manor, perhaps, it doesn't matter.

But feudal power structures were, and are, qualitatively different from those of democratic institutions.  So the manor essentially ends at the ballot box, at the voting booth.  Or it did.  Then came Citizens United.  Then came the Heritage Foundation.  Somewhere in there came Reagan.  Charisma with no skill for governance, perhaps with no conscience--useful, feudal, for feudally minded people.  But not enough, and neither of course was Clinton, though his economic policies did make the rich richer.  But then, then came Trump.

To have a king, a malleable one, with no soul politically speaking, no ideals, nothing except the same craving for wealth and power as theirs, and with some of Hitler's horrific gifts for stirring up the worst sorts of darkness in his followers, not to say "This is sick but we'll heal from it together," but to say "you are right, our enemies are outside of us and can be identified by their differences from us," and to plunder not just castles and museums like Hitler did but the wealthiest country in history, natural resources included.  So, they lined up, and, as lords must do to their king, even one they ultimately control, they bowed down.

Fearful of what's ahead, and of not being able to find more freedom.  Grateful, though, that I am very loved and not alone.