For the last few years, I’ve been maintaining 3 different blogs: this one; my business one; and a health-related one.

Too cumbersome.

From now on, I’m just going to use my business blog — “Jack’s Ruminations” — to do all of my blogging.

Sports radio, and media generally, are asking the following question: “Why all the intense interest in Linsanity?”

My answer is that in one week, Linsanity has melted three firmly entrenched assumptions in the NBA:

1. Asian-Americans can’t play
2. Your 15th guy is useless (or at best, is a glue guy)
3. You can’t win with less than two All Stars

#1 means that you should expect a flood of Asian-American players in the NBA within the year. Linsanity is the unplugging of that bottleneck.

#2 means that NBA GMs and coaches will be looking much closer at their 15th players (and D-Leaguers) and undrafted players to see what they have to offer. Is there a diamond in the bunch? (I seem to remember a short, white, talented American point guard who went undrafted. Bet he gets a fresh look.)

On #3, I would suspect that most basketball fans would disagree. But I watched this week as Linsanity emerged (starting with the Utah game), and saw all the elements needed for a team to make a deep run in the playoffs. And I mean without Melo or Stat.

Doesn’t mean they’d win it all. But they could. Just like Detroit in 2004, and Dallas in 2011.

But I don’t want to use this post to belabor sports analysis. Instead, let me just say that if Linsanity really did blow up the above 3 assumptions, then the NBA is about to be revolutionized — turned on its head.

The lockout didn’t do that. But Jeremy will.

What would be amazing about such a revolution is that all it entails is a change in our collective state of mind. Pre-Linsanity, that collective mind was over there. Post-, it’s over here. And now everything is changed.

I think OWS will have a similarly profound mind-altering and seismic affect on American culture.

It all comes down the title of a Beatles song: “All You Need is Love”.

The short of is that circa 2012, America is a land dominated by Corporations that live and breathe money. Messages driven into us through television and other Corporate media are that money is the path to all things good — be they happiness, love, food, health care, warmth, or just about anything else.

That this is the current dominant meme of the country is confirmed to me every time I open an email from the Obama political folks. Back in 2008, I signed up on an Obama site to voice my opposition to Obama flipping his position on FISA. I entered my email to sign up, and so I get their mail.

Now, I did vote for Obama in 2008, and will again in 2012.

But let me just say that I look dimly at the emails I get multiple times per week from that political organization. Just about every email ends by asking me to donate some money.

Now before the fellow was elected, I could understand why they asked for money. It costs money to get ads on television to reach old people.

But since he’s been President? The guy can get on TV any time he wants. For free. It’s called the “bully pulpit”.

This is what irks me about Obama. He’s got a free bully pulpit. But he won’t use it. Instead he asks us for money so he can run ads in October.

This is Mr. community organizer. Mr. use-the-web. If anyone could see the moral bankruptcy of asking your base for money every time you communicate with them, I would think it would be the Obama people.

But not even them. Because we are all infected with the “money buys everything” meme.

OWS is a living contradiction to that meme. In an earlier post, I explained that OWS was fluid non-hierarchy, in contrast with the monolithic hierarchy that defines the Corporations.

Taking another angle, OWS is about humanity, not money; Corporations are about money, not humanity.

I believe OWS has a chance to blow up the money trance under which we are all living.

Just imagine what the world, let alone this nation, will look like when we People throw off the yoke of this money illusion.

To me, sports is a mirror of society.

Linsanity is probably the most compelling sports story in recent memory — among the whole nation, not just within the sports ghetto.

I believe this story is compelling for the reason I wrote about here. I believe this remains true even is true even if no one but me has this idea in their conscious head.

But their heads have all seen: One anonymous 23-year-old kid from Palo Alto has flipped the NBA on its head just by doing what he’s good at.

What power!

To me, this is a sign that OWS — with its legions of anonymous, sad-sack, 20-something kids from everywhere — will flip this nation on its head just by doing what they’re good at.

And what they’re good at is lovin’.

I’m a bit of sports junkie, and had actually heard of Lin before this week. So no surprise I was in on this story from the beginning.

Since Wednesday, I’ve been asking my wife: “Heard of Jeremy Lin, yet?” I’m interested to hear when the Linsanity story crosses the threshold of the sports ghetto, and goes mainstream. My wife hearing about it will represent when that theshold has been crossed.

And trust me, Linsanity goes well beyond basketball. Well beyond sports, generally. Well beyond the place of Asians in our American culture.

No, the Linsanity story is the universal story of human redemption. This morning, I finally told my wife about the Linsanity story that has unfolded over this past week (she had gotten tired of my daily question), and, in response, she said: “That’s the Cinderella story.”

Exactly. But it’s more than just about the triumph of the underdog. No, the Linsanity story is about the incredible and sudden melting of monolithic hierarchies, in real time, right before our very eyes. “And a child shall lead them,” somebody once wrote.

Which brings me to OWS. I’ve blogged about how OWS is a reaction of the People to the monolithic hierarchies that dominate our nation, and puts lie to the notion that our nation is an efficient meritocracy.

Among the 3 major American professional sports, basketball is the one that most resembles our current culture. A culture in which Mitt Romney can offer a $10,000 bet and have no clue what that means for the rest of us.

What does this have to do with basketball?

In basketball, a small handful of players makes most of the money, and gets almost all of the accolades. And once you’re in, you’re in for life. Stardom in the NBA is a rigid monolith. The hierarchy is endemic.

Basketball example: Last year, Dirk Nowitzki was the Jesus Christian savior of sports. Like a knight of mythology, he slew the dragon of evil from Miami in the playoffs. We watched in amazement and joy last June as these magical things came to pass.

This December, when the NBA restarted after a lengthy lockout, Dirk showed up fat and out shape. For the first two months of the season, Dirk flat out sucked.

And yet when the all-star team was named this past week, Dirk was on the team. To his credit, Dirk said: “I don’t belong there. I suck this year. These younger guys belong.”

But Dirk doesn’t define the monolithic hierarchy that is the NBA. It’s way beyond him. So he goes to the all-star game.

That everybody who watches and plays in the NBA understands this monolithic quality is shown by how the stars of the league are slowly migrating to play on the same teams, in big cities.

It is in the face of this seemingly impenetrable and irresistible monolithic hierarchy that is the NBA, that Linsanity emerges.

Like a harbinger of truth. A rapier of our fears.

Linsanity, coming in this first week of February of 2012, in the depth of this winter of our discontent, is a sign of hope for the children of OWS. It is an early sign of Spring.

If Jeremy Lin can do this to the NBA, you OWS children can do this to our enslaved nation.

OK. So I’m probably the only person in America drawing these threads from Linsanity. But I will say that something weird happened last night. On the ESPN website, every night, there is a moderated chat room called “Daily Dime Live” (DDL).

The participants in DDL chat about the games currently going on. As one game ends, and another starts, they shift their discussion to the new game.

But last night, after Jeremy slew the Lakers, the DDL got stuck. The kids couldn’t get Lin out their minds. Like a collective episode of ADHD, the kids could not shift their attention to the next game.

They wrote: “LINcredible. LINsanity. VioLIN. LINterpreation. Chris MulLIN. etc, etc.”

It was endless. It went on for hours.

Something in the firmament shifted last night. Yeah, it was only a sports game. In a sport of declining popularity, no less.

But it was a sign. It was an omen. A promise of better days to come.

God bless America (even if God doesn’t exist).

The singularity has arrived. Just not in the way that folks like Kurzweil and de Grey have been blathering about.

Instead of humans merging with technology, humans have now merged with Corporations. And Mitt Romney is Exhibit A of this unholy merger.

To understand this, consider former president George W. Bush. IMHO, that guy was the crown prince of the royal family of the military industrial complex (“MIC”) about which Eisenhower warned us in 1961.

George’s grandfather, Prescott Bush was a founder of the MIC during WWII. His son, George H.W., became King of the MIC. His first son, George W., was the crown prince.

These people were and are pro-Corporate. Particularly, pro oil-, military hardware-, finance-, and intelligence-Corporate (the key industries that make up the MIC).

But the key point here is that these are people. They’re unmistakably human. George was a former drunkard, C-student, moron. How many Corporations behave like that? No successful ones, that’s for sure.

But look at Romney.

Bland, devoid of human qualities. Romney’s opponents lob criticisms at him as if he were human. They paint him as a flip-flopper, a liberal, etc. etc. But nothing sticks to him. He’s Teflon Man in a way that Obama (the conflict-avoiding smoking addict) could never be.

No human criticisms stick to Romney because he’s not human! Consider:

• the $10,000 bet he offered to Perry
• his “Corporations are People” statement
• his “I just followed the tax laws [that I helped write]” response to the release of his tax returns
• his “they’re just jealous” assessment of OWS

What is a Corporation? It’s a value-free organism that lives and breathes money. Every issue of the day is viewed, by a Corporation, through the prism of money.

That’s Romney!

So it hit me that the election this Fall between Obama and Romney will be the next shoe to drop in the People vs. Corporations civil war. (OWS being the first.)

It will be the first election in recorded history pitting a human against an irresponsible anaerobic organism that feeds on money.

And as we sit here in February, the human just might lose.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 25 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Assuming that this observation is sound, the obvious next question is: What can we employees of large corporations do about it?

The first thing we can do is work for a humanizing multi-national corporation. If this sounds like an oxymoron to you, check this out: I am aware of a least one huge multi-national corporation that provides a “sabbatical” program for “tenured” employees. That is, the longer a person is employed by the company, the longer the sabbatical the employee gets.

I’m told that some long-term employees of this company have taken six months to hike Tibet. Others have taken a year to set up a bio-dynamic organic farm. The examples of what people do with their extended breaks is as varied as our individual dreams.  The common thread is the re-humanization of the employee base.

Another thing this company does is to provide a first class day care for preschoolers, complete with play-based active learning. In addition, the corporate campus is essentially a state park complete with jogging trails and the like.

But I suspect that this particular large corporation is the exception, rather than the rule in corporate America. So then the question becomes: What can we do as employees to stay supple and flexible and youthful in our deadening jobs?

In post-modern America, our corporate lives are proxies for our vanished family life. Yesterday, I had lunch with two men of Middle Eastern extraction. At lunch, they described how still in that region, family is paramount in the lives of the people.

Those days are long past in America. Just as food corporations replaced our moms in the kitchen for our food, corporate life now stands in for what passes as family life. Our bosses are like mom and dad, co-workers like siblings, workers in other groups like cousins, and HR like our kindly grandmas and aunts.

In my view, this “corporate family” dynamic is partly what explains the “going postal” tragic phenomenon in corporate America. IMHO, there is much more to this story. But these troubled people seem to confuse corporate layoffs with family rejection.

Well, the bright side of corporate family life is that our workers truly can become some of our dearest and trusted friends. To you folk I say: go hike together,

Hiking is not just exercise, though exercise is a key component. It’s exercise in the sun. And it’s an activity that begs for company. There’s nothing like a 2-3 hour hike in the hills with close, trusting colleagues with whom to share our frustrations as well as our dreams.

Another idea: book an appointment with the ergonomic folks and have them retrofit your work space. Maybe get  a standing desk. Our bodies were never meant to hunch over a computer monitor for hours in a day.

A related recommendation is take the stairs. Walk to the furtherest corner to get your mid-morning coffee. Hold walking meetings in which the participants walk the corporate campus. In general, use the corporate campus to exercise your body gently, but constantly.

I guess the bottom line here is to realize that for all the benefits of evident security the corporate job provides, realize that, long-term, it is a deadening process. Once that is realized, the humanizing practices that can counter-act this effect become self-evident.

Final point: this post reminds me of cancer treatments like chemotherapy. These treatments are necessary, especially for cancers of a certain degree of progression. But although necessary, they are also quite harmful to the body. So people undergoing these treatments are best served by being aware of these “side effects”, and taking measures to ameliorate them.

The problem in American medicine is, however, that the downsides of treatments like this are typically underplayed.

Corporate jobs are what keep vast numbers of us safely in our homes, with functional healthcare, rather than on the street. As such, they are necessary in our culture.

But if these jobs have a natural deadening effect, then we are all better off to just say that out loud, and then take steps to ameliorate the worst of it.

This is a long post. To save you reading all the gory details, let me first deliver these ideas in the form of a tweet:

Corporations are zombies. The longer we work for them, the more we become like them, and less like the children we once were.

Now tweets are not exactly the best medium for conveying complex, subtle notions. Case in point: the phrase “corporations are zombies”.

I realize that this phrase sounds pejorative. But it’s not. It’s a legal definition.

Zombies are the undead — the living dead. So the above phrase can be restated as “corporations are the living dead”.

How are corporations living beings? Well, the U.S. Supreme Court seems to treat corporations as people, under the Constitution.

But if corporations are living people, then how are they also dead things? The answer comes down to money. The lifeblood of a corporation is money. Money is a dead thing. Doesn’t mean it’s bad. Just means it’s dead.

If you or I slice our own jugular veins, we’ll bleed to death. That’s called suicide. How does a corporation bleed to death? It runs out of money. That’s called bankruptcy.

Now since money is dead, Corporations are dead too. Well, at least they are legal fictions.

It’s amazing to me that dead, legal fictions have such incredible power in our present culture. This power is such that pizza is now a vegetable. Got that one from a client of mine.

But the incredible power that I am discussing in this post is the amazing deadening effect that corporations seem to have on their employees. It doesn’t mean that every corporation has this effect on every one of their employees. Just that it seems to be a pervasive effect.

To define this corporate deadening effect, it helps to look at our children. What characterizes children?

To me, it’s their flexibility. Their amazing capacity for curiosity, learning, growth, and transformation, in all ways — physically, socially, emotionally, and cognitively. The self-repair capabilities of children alone is amazing.

Now compare this to very old people. Very old people tend to be inflexible. Not all of them. Just most. Especially the ones on their death bed. (With some notable exceptions.)

Now I come to employees of large corporations. Each employee has a job. For the vast majority, this job is sharply defined, involving more or less repetitive actions. The job is sharply defined not only in the scope of the work, but in its location within the monolithic hierarchy of the corporate org chart.

In most such jobs, the qualities of curiosity, learning, growth, and transformation are typically not valued. At least, not nearly as much as consistency/steadiness/sameness.

Why am I thinking about these things? It’s probably due to four dynamics: (1) I’m a consultant, who is an employee of a very tiny corporation; (2) I have a young daughter; (3) I have clients that span “garage” startups, to funded ones, to public companies, to law firms, to patent “trolls”; and (4) it’s Thanksgiving week — a quiet business week — affording time for reflection.

I go hiking with some of my clients, and engage in extended conversations — outside the scope of our work — with many more of them.

Some of the people who are my clients move in and out of startups and corporate jobs, and between corporate jobs.

What I’ve noticed is that it is when my client/colleague/friends are in the process of moving in the above way, they become much more interesting as human beings. That is, they evidence more curiosity, learning, growth, and transformation during these times. They are more flexible.

Another example is colleagues of mine with whom I go hiking who are employees but who are not in the process of moving. I’ve noticed that ones who are employees of monolithic hierarchies tend to need to “slough off” the “deadening effect” of their jobs early on in the hike. Usually that’s the uphill portion of the hike. Then on the downhill, these people have “cleared” themselves of this effect, and have once again become flexible child-like people.

Employees of really small startups seem immune from this deadening effect.

What’s the upshot of all this? Am I saying that corporations are “bad” or that the people who work for them are “bad”?  Hardly.

As I said, corporations are legal fictions, hence incapable of being “good” or “bad”. And the people working for them are just people, like all of us, doing the best we can, given what we believe. They’re not “bad” either, just for doing their jobs.

All I’m writing about here is this odd effect that seems to be unstated in our culture. The effect is that the longer we’re in a corporate job, the “older” we seem to become (i.e. closer to death). Then when we undergo radical moves, in and out of these jobs (not just intra-company transfers), or into a startup, it’s like the movement wakes us up to our youthful humanity.

Note that what I’m saying here is not that some people are by definition more innovative or creative or curious than other people. I’m saying that all people have the capacity for these youthful things. After all, we were all once children. I’m just observing the dynamics that seem to bring these child-like qualities out in people versus deaden them.

This is a nascent observation of mine. I’m not saying it’s gospel. Just saying that this is what I’m seeing.

And I’m throwing it out here to see what you think.

Accordingly, I start by pruning the term “rigid”. The phrase “rigid monolith” is redundant. All monoliths are rigid. Check out the definition of “monolithic”:

2. a : cast as a single piece <a monolithic concrete wall>b : formed or composed of material without joints or seams<a monolithic floor covering>c : consisting of or constituting a single unit

What does it mean to say that OWS has no hierarchy? To find out, watch the following video (highlighted at http://www.nycga.net/about/):

Since 2003, I have predicted that the coming “war” in America, will be in the form of People vs. Corporations.

But I was never comfortable with that pithy description. I mean, for example, in my consulting practice, I run my own little corporation, Jack Polymath LLC.

Now if I identify myself as a member of the “People” in the coming People vs. Corporation war, and yet I run my own little corporation, it would seem that I have some ‘splainin’ to do. That’s what this post is about.

This post is about the kind of hierarchies that OWS opposes. They don’t oppose any and all hierarchy. What they oppose are large, monolithic, and rigid hierarchies. These are hierarchies of people in which the lives of the “leaves” of the hierarchy tree are many orders removed from the life of the person at the “root” of the tree.

What kind of hierarchies are these? Org charts of multinational Corporations. Org charts of the U.S Government.

The older a Corporation is, the larger it grows, and the more rigid and extensive its hierarchy becomes. At some point, people in the company don’t even know each other. Everyone is just blindly serving the Corporate interest, with no feeling of human responsibility in anyone for the actions of the Corporation.

The U.S. Government is similar. The incumbency advantage of sitting Senators, and even of most of the Congressmen, is such that these people treat these positions as if they were lifetime appointments.

Due to this monolithic, rigid quality, Corporations and Government lose their touch with basic human decency.

If this discussion seems too esoteric for you, consider the hierarchy at Penn State University as of a week ago. Joe Paterno was the shadow head of that monolithic hierarchy, for over 40 years. From the outside, until this week, the monolithic Penn State hierarchy looked like a paragon of human virtue. At least that was the persuasive PR of the monolith.

But then this week, we all found out that the PR was bullshit. Instead of virtuous, the core of Penn State was revealed as rotten — rife with the worst of human depravity.

We, those outside of this monolithic rigid hierarchy, were shocked to hear of multiple individuals in that hierarchy, from the very top (Paterno, and Spanier), to the very bottom (the janitors), to the folks in the middle (McQueary), all behaving exactly the same way: shielding a child molester in their midst. Shielding him from the coming impalement he justly deserves at the hands of fellow prisoners (or the suicide he will probably choose).

Are these bad men? Joe Paterno? Mike McQueary? Graham Spanier? I doubt it. At least, I doubt that they are materially worse than you or I.

I believe that their shocking behavior is part and parcel of living our lives inside massive, rigid, self-perpetuating hierarchies, and blindly serving the interests of those hierarchies.

Another example: I believe that Big Pharma and Big Food are killing America. I’ve written a little about it here.

But even with this belief of mine, do I also believe that the people who work within these industries are bad people? Hell no! I believe that the vast majority of people in those industries are just doing their socially acceptable job.

I’ll say the same thing about the Nazi Holocaust. Were the thousands of people that worked in this “industry” — from the train drivers, to the camp cooks, to the Jewish kapos, to the scientists — all bad people? I highly doubt it. I believe the Milgrim experiment laid rest to the notion of “evil other people”.

IMHO, we are all, each and every one of us, “evil”, when we blindly serve the interests of large, monolithic, rigid hierarchies. It’s mob rule, only worse.

Mob rule creates temporary chaos, but then dissipates.

Large, monolithic, rigid hierarchy, on the other hand, creates endemic human depravity. A single human thread binds Sandusky at Penn State, GMO wheat in America, and Zyklon B in Auschwitz.

That thread is monolithic, rigid hierarchy.

“Corporation” is the best name I could think of for that concept. But as you can see, it’s a rather misleading term.

Tonight’s topic was Occupy Wall Street. I asked him whether he knew from what country the idea for occupying Wall Street came. He didn’t. I told him it came from a source outside of America. That piqued his interest. So I invited him to guess.

Now Mike is a world traveller. Been to six of the seven continents of the world. After we eliminated Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, South America (and Central America), and Antartica from the answer pool, he was still stumped. The conversation must have dragged on for over 5 minutes.

Finally, when I said “North America”, Mike paused, and said: “Canada?” He acted like it was a trick question. When I affirmed that Canada was the source, he said what almost all Americans would say: “But I kind of see Canada as just part of America”.

Now, I was born and raised in Canada. Left that country at the age of 25 to attend law school in California. Never went back. Growing up in Canada, you know you’re different than the Americans. You’re just not sure how.

I’ve lived in America now for almost half my life. I think I have a pretty clear picture of the differences between the countries. But rather than me give you my theories, why not just describe the circumstances behind the Canadian entity that proposed occupying Wall Street.

Well, the entity is the Vancouver-based magazine AdBusters. Here is their July 2011 blog post titled “#OCCUPYWALLSTREET: A shift in revolutionary tactics”.

Notice that that blog post is written by a Canadian looking out at recent events in Spain and Egypt, and suggesting that those events are models for Americans to pursue on Wall Street.

Now think about that for a second. What American — what American media organization, what American politician, what American think tank — would ever look around the world, at “second-rate” democracies and “third world” countries no less, and argue that we Americans ought to heed their lessons?

None!, I tell you. America is the most myopic nation on the planet. Now, of course, I am a citizen of only three countries on two continents (my American passport is my favorite one). So how I can say that?

I can say that because America’s navel-gazing is 100%. A country can’t get any more myopic than America. Hell, I bet even closed North Korea is more “world aware” than the average American. If there are any hunter-gatherer clans still in existence in 2011, then maybe, just maybe, those clans might rival America on the score of insularity.

Back to Occupy Wall Street. If you’re uncomfortable with this epochal national movement having its origin in Canada, then the next fact should really bother you. The group most responsible for picking up on AdBuster’s July blog post and instantiating those abstract ideas as reality on the streets of lower Manhattan is the shadowy international group known as “Anonymous“.

Anonymous is truly an international group. It’s members span the globe.

So there you have it. Our national struggle against the Corporations, which is being led by our youth, was conceived in Canada, and magnified by shadowy figures from the entire world.

This is all very interesting to me.

And I must say I’m just a little bit proud that my nice and friendly “homeland” played the “birth-giving” role to this crucial American movement.