Stolen Gas
Robert Cringely has a great column this week about the cunning malefactors in today’s corporate world who have learned to skirt the bounds of legality in their business dealings, doing bad things and getting away with them by hovering so close to the border of right that it’s hard to tell when they stray into wrong. In fact, they’re so good at it now that it’s often not worth pursuing it when they screw you:
Alas, there is a lot of sharp business being conducted recently. Enron, Tyco, Adelphia, Worldcom, bad brokers, bad bankers, and now bad lawyers are everywhere among us. Every week some big company is paying a $100 million fine for knowingly and blatantly doing something against the law. And though they pay the money, they never admit guilt. They never come truly clean. And the result is that we all become cynics. We trust less and less and some of us consider behaving sharply ourselves because we know that for every $100 million fine payer there are probably 10 other companies just as guilty who weren’t caught.
But Cringely also makes a larger point about the fate of any creative idea that finds success in the marketplace: that, as it tries to consolidate and retain its hold on the business, it inevitably betrays and then forgets whatever ideals it represented in the first place, and becomes a creature of pure survival:
At some point in every market leader the creative energy runs out and what’s left is just corporate power, which is to say smart business. It is all technique from then on. That’s when companies are beaten not just in the marketplace but any way they can be beaten. “Winning isn’t the important thing,” said Vince Lombardi, “it is the only thing.”
It seems to me that this principal probably applies to all fields of human endeavor. Maybe a person’s creative life is a special kind of car that runs on a special kind of gas that only you can make, drawn and refined out of the muck of your subconscious. And it’s a great ride, while it lasts. But once the raw materials are gone, and there’s no more gas, the car just stops. At that point, you should probably get out and find a new one.
There are alternatives, though. You could steal some gas from someone else, or concoct some bastardized, sullied version of whatever it was you used to use. Your vehicle maybe won’t run as well as it used to, but it’ll move, and that’s ok, because somewhere along the line you forgot that your original goals encompassed something more that simple forward progress. So you stay in the same car, fueled now with stolen gas instead of the dreams and the ambitions that it started with, and you get to Point B, and then you get to Point C, and then, on the way to Point D, Death taps you on the shoulder and mutters something in your ear, and you shamble slowly into oblivion, and discover that it’s not much different than the place where you’ve lived since that day, long ago, when you first ran out of gas. That seems like a really crappy way to travel.
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