Companies Used to Inspire Us, Now They Indoctrinate Us

A society is best understood by the relationship it has with its most valuable corporations

I was rewatching Band of Brothers recently and was struck by one particular scene near the end of the series. It’s 1945 and the war is almost over, and the soldiers of Easy Company are heading down the autobahn in army trucks past tens of thousands of German POWs marching in the opposite direction. Private David Webster stands up on the back of the truck he’s riding and starts yelling at the Germans.

“Hey you! That’s right, you stupid kraut bastards! That’s right! Say hello to Ford, and General fucking Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you – you have horses! What were you thinking?”

Webster’s emotional tirade adds weight to the theme of this episode, which is also its title – “Why We Fight”, in which Easy Company discovers and liberates a Nazi concentration camp. But his words also betray another interesting facet of post-WW2 thought.

Say hello to Ford and General Motors. The mention of these companies is important because it signifies the industrial might of the United States and the triumph of democracy over fascism. Notions of American Exceptionalism are closely tied to these legendary companies and others like them, and the progress that they symbolized.

As Webster screams at the vanquished ‘master race’ filing past, he is not just making a personal statement about his frustration at “dragging our asses halfway around the world [and] interrupting our lives” – he is also making a political and patriotic statement. He is not only lauding his and his comrades’ military victory over the Germans, but also America’s moral victory over Nazism.

I believe the writers of Band of Brothers have deliberately used Ford and General Motors here as a symbol of both the military and the moral victory.

The idea of progress is inextricably intertwined with the industrial, commercial, and consumer goods that US companies churned out in the 20th Century and this cultural narrative, the unfortunate shadow of the Military Industrial Complex notwithstanding, has long been one of the cornerstones of Western liberal democracy – the idea that hard work and national industry produces good times of plenty for all.

But now we have a new story. The corporations of the 21st Century do not epitomise the kind of progress that we hear proclaimed in Private Webster’s harangue, but a new kind of progress.

Think about America for a moment in the context of its flagship companies.

What are the names that spring to mind?

Most people if asked this question will probably name one or more of the ‘FAANG’ companies: Meta (formerly known as Facebook), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly known as Google).

These are the new titans, and they are the organisations most emblematic of our new cultural discourse – one that is grounded not in the notion of producing material goods to improve the lives of the citizenry, but in creating pleasurable digital services designed to turn the user into an addict.

More than this though, these companies are in the business of instructing their customers how to think. Between them, the FAANG companies control the flow of virtually all the information on the planet, and all of them are adherents to the globalist, Neo Marxist creed of wokeism.

Google and Facebook are both heavily engaged in censorship and downranking of content that does not conform to woke dogma, and Amazon and Netflix actively promote entertainment that bolsters it. Apple is perhaps the outlier here, having been conspicuously less overt in its promotion of woke themes, although these do shine through strongly in its advertising and branding. But we can thank Apple for blazing the trail – for how has this new intersectional, identarian religion been most effectively proliferated? Look no further than the sleek gadget that you are probably reading this on (and if you aren’t, then it will no doubt be sitting within arm’s reach).

There was a time when the people of the West looked with awe and pride at the Fords and the General Motors of American industry because these companies reflected their own hard-won ideals: an honest day’s work; building something tangible and tough from the ground up; blood sweat and tears; and the inspiring power of a community or a nation united behind a noble goal.

The people of the West now stare blankly into their screens, led along docilly by the algorithms of these new pillars of progress. Companies don’t make things anymore; they write lines of code that deliver intangible matrices of addiction. And the companies that do make things… they’ve all outsourced their production to China, where our goods are now made not by healthy, happy people, freely invested in a shared story of growth and progress, but by slaves to a malevolent and murderous regime, who are duty-bound to blindly believe the top-down story of Growth and Progress that they are fed by their overlords.

In much the same way, the people of the West have no shared story anymore, and this is epitomised in the form and function of our new commercial giants. Our story is dictated to us in high definition every minute of the day via the billions of LED screens that furnish our Big Brother reality (or lack thereof).

We are told what to think, and indeed, what we must not think. And we are shown what we must not say through the systematic silencing of those who say the wrong things. The corporations we most venerate no longer produce goods that will advance the national interest and bring prosperity and happiness to the people, they create digital cocaine, and through this same mechanism they preach to us, telling us who and what we must fear and prescribing simple, easy solutions. And so effective is the model that most people do not even know that their thoughts, their values, and their motivations are not their own.

I wonder what the modern equivalent of Private Webster might look and sound like. What war has he just fought? What moral victory has just been won?

Perhaps he’s a soy-latte-sipping social justice warrior with purple hair, a hammer and sickle tattoo, and a Che Guevara t-shirt, standing before a burning neighbourhood as BLM rioters loot stores in the background. Perhaps he’s shouting into a megaphone at a group of scared residents and business owners who are trying to tell the world what is going on in their community, but their social media posts have been fact-checked and labelled as misinformation.

“Hey you!” He screams. “That’s right, you stupid Nazi bastards! That’s right! Say hello to Facebook, and fucking Google! You stupid fascist pigs!”