The common attributes abound and history's menagerie of corporate hybrids - commercial religions, ecclesiastical governments, academic businesses, governmental trading bodies, etc. - prove that the monsters are mutually fertile. All that is wanting then is a "common name", something like "dog" that transcends the apparent discrepencies between chihuahuas, bulldogs and great danes to indicate that we are in fact dealing with a single bundle of creation. This is a serious lack for without a clear category for their common existence it is difficult to think of, speak of or visualize them. Present candidate terms are rather clumsy or obscure - megasome, corpocyte, kyoseitai [short for Jp: kyodo seimeitai - "cooperative life body"]. For now we shall limp along with traditional organismic vocabulary (while praying for some gifted reader to invent or offer the fit and final Word). Japan was hardly the first to recognize organismic realities. The biological metaphorics for integrated collective bodies are ancient on both sides of the planet. Politics and medicine were sister disciplines in pre-Han China and the rulers' husbandry of the societal organism was dictated by the same common sense that informed the disciplines of human health and healing. The Hindu Brahmins of the period were also describing their community's castes in terms of the limbs and organs of a physical body (and predictably selecting themselves for the preeminent and metabolically privileged role of the brain). And further to the West, St. Paul was conjuring a new sacerdotal monad, the "mystical body of Christ", that would soon incorporate all of Europe. 'They [the emerging corporations] have all commodities under their control and practice without concealment all manner of trickery; they raise and lower prices as they please and oppress and ruin all the small tradesmen, as the pike devour the little fish of the water just as though they were lord's over God's creatures and free from all the laws of faith and love.' Martin Luther, "On Trading and Usury", 1524 Though Western biological similes were often no more than heuristic conceits (Hobbes' Leviathon , Frank Norris' Octopus , Franz Neumann's Behemoth , etc.) there was obvious foreboding of the organic nature of societal life forms and their increasing power over humans both inside and outside their membranes. It was not until the turn of this century, however, that ethology, biology and social psychology achieved enough sophistication to pursue the analogy seriously. Between 1890 and the 1920's organismic thinking picked up enormous momentum. Researchers in France, Germany and England established the concept of insect societies as "supraorganisms" and began to draw telling parallels between hives, nests and termitaries and highly integrated human organizations. Scores of studies were published on colonial organisms, cooperative life forms and other collective biological realities. The western classics on group consciousness also appeared from this ferment. Schaeffle's The Life & Limbs of the Social Body , Le Bon's The Crowd, and MacDougal's The Group Mind all clearly demonstrated that something psychologically new and evolutionarily significant emerged in human collectives, something far greater than the sum of the parts. At the end of the '20's, however, two obstacles - one political, the other conceptual - arose to derail the entire international inquiry. The political problem was fascism. Organismic thinking seemed to play right into the bloody hands of fascist ideologues. If indeed great social bodies were more powerful than men - outproducing them, outliving them, and supporting vast numbers of them - then they also were plausibly more important. (As an Osaka executive who destroyed evidence and himself to thwart an investigation of his firm wrote before dying: "Please accept this humble offering. I am but one. The kaisha [corporation] is many. My life is transient. The kaisha is forever!") The social organism was thus an evolutionary advance upon mankind much as the multicellular animal was an advance upon protozoa. And as a "greater whole" its commonweal "naturally" took precedence over its individual members'. From a corporatist standpoint then, anyone threatening the unity, efficiency or "health" of the collective body could and should be sacrificed with the same insouciance with which we excise a cancer or a gangrenous toe. Eliminating dissidents, in other words, was not a question of morality but of rational social medicine. For Western liberals who tacitly tolerated executions for treason and desertion in their own societies this thinking (and the organismic research that lent it credence) presented an ethically thorny and unwanted problem, especially at a time when the Nazi organism was threatening to engulf all of Europe. The conceptual problem was rather more straightforward: the absence of an equivalent of protoplasm to explain what really connects and integrates a social body's members. Language may allow individuals to interact but many mutually hostile organisms can arise in the same linguistic sea. What binds them internally? Group consciousness is fine in theory but what does it really consist of? If nothing can be physically pointed out or quantified, organismic research is mere poetry, unscientific and a waste of time. Neither of these difficulties phased the Japanese, however. Fascism as they understood it was a dandy idea. Didn't it come from the Roman fasces (a bundle of rods with a protruding axe-head) that symbolized social unity (bundle) under state authority (axe)? Didn't it virtually deify a strong central leader, extoll self-sacrifice and collective effort, and promote belongingness with uniforms, symbols and ceremonies? What else had Japan been working to realize since the Meiji Restoration? Organismic theory of course abetted these efforts and would play an important role in ultranationalist debates on the nature and primacy of the kokutai [the mystical body of the Japanese state]. As for the reality and substance of social bonds the Japanese had the enormous advantage of the ki concept which we discussed at length in the last issue ["Ki and the Arts of Sex, Healing and Corporate Body Building", Kyoto Journal #5]. Translated (too) simply, ki means psycho-biological vital force. Ki in the social sphere was seen as the living force of attention or directed consciousness, a force that carried energy from the perceiver to the perceived and tied them together, much as energy exchange bonds atoms and molecules. Social ki, while invisible, is as palpable as the wind to many Japanese and they have scores of expressions to describe its effects upon the minds & bodies of those sending and receiving it. Ki or attention's patterned circulation within a group bonds and integrates the members and determines their collective "structure". The strength and cohesion of any social body is therefore to be measured by how much of the members' ki or attention is devoted solely to the collective and its shared concerns. Attention to strictly personal matters, outside interests, other groups, etc. constitutes a weakening "leakage" of the collective's adhesive energies and esprit de corps. Japanese corporate bodies therefore employ dozens of tactics [company unions, company housing, group vacations, company sports teams, company drinking groups, cemetaries, etc.] to keep members' ki circulating totally within its membranes: The kaisha [corporation] is the community to which one belongs primarily, and which is all-important in one's life. Thus in most cases the company provides the whole social existence of a person, and has authority over all aspects of his life...[Its] power and influence not only affect and enter into the individual's actions, it alters even his ideas and ways of thinking...Some perceive this as a dangerous encroachment upon their dignity as individuals; others, however, feel safer in total group consciousness. There seems little doubt that in Japan the latter group is in the majority. Japan does thus seem to know what she's doing and the superior strength and vitality of her organisms (& the peculiar devotion of their members) may be looked at from the overlapping perspectives of genetics, socialization & attention management. Population Pruning & Right Wing Genes Like most other traits and preferences in a natural population the taste for organizational life is randomly distributed. Some people love hierarchical group existence - the uniforms & rituals, the secure routines, the superior/inferior relation-ships, the sense of merging oneself in a larger whole and greater destiny. Others detest it, with the majority falling along the normal distribution curve somewhere in between. Before the rise of vast socialist/communist bodies the right/left political distinction originally reflected this love/hate spectrum. In early Japan as elsewhere the primitive leftists were fractious, independant types who abhored hierarchy, establishments", authoritarianism and just wanted to be left alone. The rightists were most often joiner types who flocked to regimented security of the military, clergy and other bureaucratic power centers. Since even in those days the big bodies scoffed the lion's share of everything, they occasionally rankled the "little people" to rebellion. But because the anti-authoritarian lefties then as now took orders ungraciously, organized poorly, and were usually decimated in these confrontations, their gene pool slowly began to bleed away. Japan's most ingenious contribution to corporate eugenics, however, was devised during the Edo period. The samurai's kirisute gomen [literally, "honorable permit to slash & trash"], was an open-ended license to kill any commoner deemed "dangerous, disrespectful or offensive" with the same impunity that a breeder culls his flocks of undesired traits. This terrifying and oft exercised prerogative genetically pruned over 15 generations of the population of its most assertive and egalitarian DNA. Since artificial selection studies on plants and animals repeatedly show that such procedures can create or destroy stable heritable traits in as few as five generations, the contributions of samurai cutlery to contemporary Japanese "groupiness" should not be underestimated. Anthroculture: Rearing Corporate-Friendly Humans From a social engineering point of view, whether or not you have a genetically predisposed population, there are a variety of proven methods to enhance a people's reliance on authoritarian groups and curb their sense of or desire for personal autonomy. Japanese culture presents a curiously comprehensive catalog of such techniques.