The Corporate Trap

Home schooling allows for a more personalized angle to history. Instead of learning about our rulers, we can see things from the perspective of our own family. This makes everything more relatable. We can explain things more directly, making it easier to understand our situation and even our own psyche. Madness and obsessions, good habits and bad habits, personality traits of all sorts come to the forefront of history, and we become as a consequence the progression of this. We see more clearly where everything came from and where it may be heading.

An interesting story in this respect is the story of my Norwegian great grandfather on my grandmother's side. He lived during the second industrial revolution, when chemistry, electricity and telecommunication took off in a big way. His name was Harald and his wife's name was Vally. He was gifted with a fine mind for engineering. At the age of 19, he was fully educated as a chemical engineer with top marks. He had no trouble getting a good job in the rapidly expanding chemical industry. He became a chief engineer in what was to become the corporate chemical industry we know today.

With the corporation providing the young man with health insurance, a pension plan and a house to live in, he could spend his entire salary on himself and his wife. The corporation become his life long provider, allowing him to live without savings, something that was unheard of in his branch of the family until then. Harald and Vally became the archetypical upper middle class couple of the day, living in the now with no worry about the future.

Previous generations had been obsessive savers. Not only were they determined to have some gold for their old days, they were determined to give their children enough capital to either buy a farm or start some other undertaking. Life was a struggle for survival. Capital had to be amassed over time. To live without savings would mean utter poverty and the risk of starvation or early death from cold or diseases. The spend thrift lifestyle of Harald and Vally must have come across as reckless to their parents and other people still stuck in the pre-corporate era. However, today we see them as almost prudent. Unlike people of today, they had no debt.

The corporate lifestyle is now the norm. Few people save for themselves. We trust in our pension plans and in government and corporations to take care of us. We're all like Harald and Vally these days, and it's likely to end in much the same way as it ended for them.

When Harald died unexpectedly at age 64, he had no savings. All that there was for Vally was a meagre widow's pension. Utter poverty would have been her end if it wasn't for her son in law who stepped in to buy her a place to live. Had it not been for the fact that my grand father was a wealthy man, Vally would have ended up in a small room somewhere, completely unable to keep up her old ways, and this is likely to be the end of many people today. Our pensions are unlikely to keep us afloat. Without savings, we will have to seek support from our children. Without children, we will face utter poverty.

Many people are currently making the same mistake as Harald and Vally did back in their days. We trust too much in corporations and the state. We have no savings of our own. We're completely dependent on the system. If the system fails, we're lost.

Remnants of the 2nd industrial revolution at Vemork, Rjukan

By I, Skotten, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link