Megacorporations

The term megacorporation is on the more ambiguous side of language, which is already ambiguous in contrast to the fixed, objective nature of concepts.  Some might define a megacorporation as a corporation that spans countries, has a monopoly, and has its own functional private army, which others might define a megacorporation as having only some of these traits or other traits that would only be possible if it had an immense amount of power.  Again, the arbitrariness of language and conflicting definitions do not mean the concept of businesses and power are not clear in light of reason because words are not the concepts they convey.  The larger a corporation is and the more social, financial, and perhaps even political power it has, the closer it is to being a megacorporation or the more of a megacorporation it is.

The world of 1990-2023 has seen a handful of companies accumulate extreme amounts of revenue, social influence, and in some cases even subsidiary companies.  Amazon, Google, Disney, and Apple are some of the best examples of reportedly massive companies, some of which have acquired or started subsidiaries in various industries or to focus on more niche markets.  Amazon has Whole Foods, ComiXology, and Zappos, among other subsidiaries, and Disney has Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Marvel Studios, and so on.  Megacorporations of these kinds are already part of everyday life for many people as workers or consumers instead of just hypothetical logical possibilities or the lore in science fiction stories.  With this degree of power comes an otherwise unprecedented ability to enrich or destroy the lives of a vast number of people--in the hands of the people at the top of each corporate hierarchy, that is.

Forsaking rationalism, or, more likely, having never been rationalistic at all in the first place, is what leads people to think that megacorporations are either worthy of admiration by default or inherently evil.  A megacorporation can only be morally good or depraved depending on the specific beliefs, motivations, and actions of its leaders, and there is nothing about heading an enormous company or working for it that makes a person automatically irrational, selfish, or malevolent.  Moreover, this much is absolutely certain without experiential examples to prompt this discovery, and only a fool would believe anything to the contrary one way or another: if some actions and beliefs and intentions really are immoral, then a megacorporation's staff must carry out those actions or have those beliefs and intentions, not simply exist as people who have high positions in megacorporations.

Such large businesses do provide jobs to many people, even if the conditions and pay need to be improved in many of the actual megacorporations functioning today.  Some giant corporations like Amazon even offer jobs (like some warehouse positions) that are very easily accessible to the general population and could almost effortlessly, as far as hiring processes go, be obtained by someone with no relevant experience.  Even if it takes social and political pressure, some might even extend helpful benefits to their lowest-ranking workers and/or institute a company minimum wage significantly higher than that of the American federal minimum wage, which is in dire need of being updated.  Again, Amazon is an example of this despite the criticism it receives as a megacorporation.

With so many workers and such distances between them and top management, at the same time, corruption and abuse could be more easily concealed from the top to the bottom of a corporation with only a sliver of the power of a megacorporation.  Just allowing non-rationalists to operate at such high levels of power without any sort of attention, however, is likely to end in nothing but the powerful business leaders drowning in delusions driven by greed and arrogance, for many people are not rationalists.  Either rationalists can rarely put up with non-rationalists enough to become major public figures or they are thwarted in attaining corporate or political power by masses too irrational to know absolute certainty from assumptions and necessary truths from things that are far from the heart of reality.  The real problem with how many megacorporations would be run is not that they surpass any arbitrary size (there is no size of a company that automatically makes its leaders stoop to irrationalism, selfishness, and cruelty), but that rationalists would almost never be the ones in power.