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.

Then that thought was replaced with a happier one: America could be saved if Obama loses in 2012, followed by the Republican who wins driving the country completely over the cliff, handing us over to the Corporations. Then Obama would come back to lead the People in its charge against the Corporations.

Of course, nobody makes a comeback like that.

And then along came Occupy Wall Street. Bingo! I now see how America will be saved.

The kids will drive this Occupy Us thing, bringing along the rest of the 99% — left and right, old and young, white and not so white, straight and gay … all of us. Then, when it becomes obvious that this movement will not subside, and can not be subdued, Obama will swoop in from the wings, and take over leadership of the movement, accepting credit for it too.

It will be just like Lincoln getting credited for the abolition of slavery when he was a laggard on the issue all the way through the 1850s and even into the first part of the Civil War. He came late to the party, but history gives him the lion’s share of the credit.

Obama will be serve an analogous role on People vs. Corporations.

If you know anything about the Enneagram, you’ll recognize this as a classic “7″ play. And as I blogged years ago, Obama’s 7-ness is core to the reason why I predicted in 2006 that he’d win the presidency and lead us on this epic struggle.

Man, I feel so much better. Hated my first idea about Obama’s role in saving America. Was dubious about my second idea. Am bullish about this third one. Bullish enough to blog it.

That’s OK, Obama. Sit quietly while the Occupy Us movement grows. Stay quiet, just as you did during the Arab Spring. When it become obvious to everyone that this movement is prevailing, swoop in like it was your idea the whole time, and I for one will cheer you.

It will be a cynical cheer, to be sure. But a heartfelt one.

There’s something happening here; What it is ain’t exatly clear; There’s a man with a gun over there; Telling me I got to beware

Although those lyrics were written in 1966, they almost perfectly describe the first two weeks of Occupy Wall Street.

I’m 48 years old. I was 4 years old, growing up in a small Canadian town, during the Summer of Love. Technically speaking, I’m a Gen X, not a Boomer.

But man, I love the Sixties. I love the psychedelic music. I love the passion of the children of that day. I love Angela Davis’ fro. I love The Graduate.

And most of all, I love the anti-corporate meme running through those children.

Of course, those “anti-corporate” children grew up to become the very same asshole middle-aged Boomers who put Mr. Bush into office not once but twice. A paradigm example of a classic “turncoat” Sixties progressive who, years later, became a political reactionary is Michael Weiner, a.k.a Michael Savage.

On the surface, there is so much in common with the children of Zuccotti Park, and the flower-children of the Sixties. Check out this meditation flash mob from a couple of days ago:

Straight out of 1969.

But while style and message are similar between these children and those of the Sixties, there is a crucial difference. History says that the anti-corporatism of the Sixties was just a passing phase among the children of the day. It was a style to wear, not so much a cross to bear.

The children of Zuccotti Park are altogether different. Their anti-corporatism is no luxury. They are in that place not just on an adventure, but for first level Maslow hierarchy reasons of survival. They are in Zuccotti Park because there is nowhere else left for them to turn:

These youth have their backs to the wall in a way the youth of the Sixties never did.

The youth of the Sixties raised the anti-corporate flag, but then dropped it altogether by the time of Reagan. The flag had been lying on the ground for the past 30 years. Trod and spat upon — not only by the 1%, but by most of us.

These children in Zuccotti Park, and their fellow travelers in other cities, have picked up the flag.

One of the links above is to a Youtube clip of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” (performed by CSN in 1971). The climax of the song goes:

By the time we got to Woodstock, we were half a million strong, and everywhere there was song and celebration. And I dreamed I saw the bombers, riding shotgun in the sky, turning into butterflies above our nation.

Allow me to paraphrase and update for 2011:

By the time the children got to Zuccotti Park, and they were followed by the unions, and the working people, and even the Tea Party, I hope they’ll be half a million strong. And if that happens, I know there will song and celebration. And if Mayor Bloomberg calls on the National Guard to “keep the peace”, I hope that their modern urban weaponry will turn into butterflies above our nation.

The children of Zuccotti Park are picking up the anti-corporate flag. And this time they’re going to plant it on the corner of Broad and Wall. Politely, to be sure.

But for keeps this time.

From that realization, I made a few “out there” predictions. Some actually came true. I even won a bet over one of them.

But over the past 8 years, I’ve been waiting and wondering. When would this war start? How would it start? Who would start it?

I knew it would be the children. In the essay to which I linked above I wrote:

The last kicker in the theory is youth. After twenty years or so, there’s a whole new crop of kids out there. And in America, it seems to be the youth who serve the function of kicking the lazy, sleeping cow awake. So as we look out to the youth of America today, we ask: Which of that sorry bunch is going to kick us all awake? And awake to what?

(Hey, before you go laughing at the Americans, just look at the rest of the world. At least we Americans go through profound changes every twenty years or so. The rest of the world stays stuck in ruts measured in centuries, not decades. Change and growth is the beauty and genius of America. America is the Grand Human Experiment.) [Note: I wrote the last paragraph in 2003. Long before the Arab Spring. "Ruts measured in centuries" are ending all over the world. Topic for another post.]

Not only did I know it would be the youth, but I guessed that they would “wage war” in a way never before seen in America:

This gives me optimism that the next “war” truly will be the “war to end all wars”. … [T]he reason … is that this “war” will be “fought” by the American People in a way that will be radically different from the way every major war has been fought up until now. History says that it has to be. Specifically, I believe the next “war” will be “fought” with the “weapons” of love and self-reliance.

… [W]hat makes Americans special is that:

1. among all the People of the world, it is we American People who are most defenseless in the face of the Corporate assault on People; and
2. among all the People of the world, it is we American People who are most free to make the choice to “buck our own culture”

Spend some time trolling the web about Occupy Us. Whatever you want to say about it, I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s a movement that is unambiguously anti-corporate. I’ll further offer that the movement is proceeding via love and self-reliance.

Love in the pervasive, all encompassing non-violence. Self-reliance in the tremendous self-organizing of the children in Zuccotti Park (e.g. medical center, library, shipping and receiving, meditation circle, etc. etc.).

And I’ll say that those children in Zuccotti Park are certainly “bucking their culture”. They evoke such a strong scent of the Sixties that the New York Times all but ignored this historical movement for its first two weeks. And the movement started only blocks from the headquarters of the NYT.

The Sixties is my next topic. Here is a passage from my essay about the role of the Sixties in what is happening in Zuccotti Park:

The applicable Awakening for our present time is what Strauss & Howe call the “Consciousness Revolution” (1964-1984). American society knows this period by the name the “Sixties”. …

Once written out, this pattern – “to understand the next Crisis, look to the major prior Awakening attempts that failed” – seems so obvious that one wonders why the authors missed it. Why did everyone else who read the book apparently miss it too?

The only reason I can think of is that these people looked back at the Sixties – recalling the flower children, hippie communes, Transcendental meditation, Timothy Leary, the SLA and Black Panthers – and couldn’t imagine what from that troubled time would be worth risking the nation for. If that’s the case, they weren’t looking close enough.

So yes, to all Fourth Turning acolytes, I’m declaring that the inception of Occupy Wall Street on September 17, 2011 is the Black Tuesday, the Fort Sumter, and the Boston Tea Party of this current saeculum.

“It” wasn’t 9/11. It was 9/17/11. Two weeks ago today.

And I called it eight years ago.

Well, OK, I didn’t exactly “call it”. But I did describe it pretty well, no? Certainly better than the authors themselves, at any rate, don’t you agree?

I have many, many thoughts about this movement. But before I get to my thoughts, I thought I would start with explaining my feelings. To do that, watch the following video taken at 4a.m. the other night in Lower Manhattan:

First time I watched this, tears came to my eyes. Now, I’m not the most empathetic person, in touch with my emotions and all. But love and beauty, expressed clearly, can bring me to tears. That’s what I saw in this video.

I found the youth in the above video beautiful. All of them.

The poignancy of the words “hope” and “change” coming from these children moved me when those were touchstone words of the Obama campaign of 2008. These were the children that had put that man into office.

These are now the destitute and desperate, and pure of heart children who can no longer afford to wait for the tardy Mr. Obama. They have taken matters into their own hands.

And they’ve done so with love and beauty.

I was hiking with my business colleague this morning and we were saying that if a business meeting took us to New York, we’d pack our sleeping bags, fly “TransLove Airways”, and camp out with those kids, if just for a night.

I’ve been waiting since 2003 for signs of the spark that would end this interminable Fall, and bring us to our long awaited Winter. Yet the longer the Fall dragged on, the worse the Winter would be, I thought.

But these children in New York, these beautiful loving children are the harbingers of the Winter that has just now begun. And no matter how dark and cold this Winter gets, the faces of these kids remind me that Spring will once again come to our great land.

Maybe 20 years from now. Maybe when my little girl is the age of these kids. But come, it will. And it will be sweet.