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Four days.
A 60-year-old woman lay dead in her cubicle before anyone noticed. Wells Fargo issued condolences — and kept working.
Years earlier, the same obsession with growth had driven employees to open millions of fake accounts just to survive impossible quotas. When the scandal broke, it wasn’t management who were charged but the corporation, the legal “person.” It paid $3 billion, then rebranded and moved on.
A corporation cannot feel shame or grief. It settles. The stock dips, business resumes, while tellers and customers carry the exhaustion, anxiety — and sometimes death. This is what happens when a fiction gains rights without responsibility.
The law can punish Wells Fargo, but it cannot make it care.
The corporation began as a royal license to extract on behalf of the crown: spices, land, furs. Charters were finite, revocable. Yet a few refused to die. The Hudson’s Bay Company, born in 1670, survived until recently as a retail shell. From such extractive tools grew the modern corporation — unbound by place or purpose, existing only to persist.
To please investors who wanted ventures that outlived founders, lawmakers gave corporations legal identity. A convenience became a creed. When U.S. courts extended the Fourteenth Amendment to them, the fiction was complete: the corporation as super-person, immortal, rational, limitless.
At its root is the story of necessary control: the belief that institutions must impose order on unreliable human beings, that stability requires something larger than life itself.
Human life is messy and impermanent. People die, move, forget, and forgive. Corporations do not. They promise stability in a world of change.
Behind that story is an old fear — that without something larger, a hierarchy, a “person” that never dies, chaos would reign. So we gave the corporation not just our labor, but our trust. We let it coordinate us, plan for us, even speak for us.
But permanence has a price. When the corporation became immortal, people became replaceable. And when its survival became the measure of success, life itself became a cost to be managed.
Corporations embodied the myth that reason should rule feeling: they could decide without emotion, optimize without pause, grow without end. But life doesn’t seek infinite growth; it seeks balance. It circulates, adapts, transforms.
When corporations take on the mantle of reason and permanence, we invert the natural order. We made the living serve the lifeless. When these machines poison rivers or burn out workers, the law doesn’t grieve — it tallies a fine. In this world, money is morality: sin, pay, repeat.
We rarely question this structure because we grew up inside it. When people say, “The company took care of me,” or “The company betrayed me,” they speak of it as a being. We’ve built entire languages around the illusion: HR, brand identity, corporate culture — all efforts to give a pile of contracts a soul.
But that “soul” is story, not life.
Through the Story Lens, the corporation feels real: logos, tone, and moral stance. Through the Life Lens, the illusion crumbles. There is no “company,” only people in relationship, bound by agreements that can always be rewritten. We treat the fiction as the constant and ourselves as the variable. We keep the company alive even when it forgets we are.
Through the Life Lens, this isn’t about a company paying for mistakes but about a system so insulated by fiction that a human can die unseen within it.
That’s not evil — it’s blindness: mistaking the map for the territory, the model for the world, the corporation for the person.
To reclaim the real, we begin with simple recognitions:
The question isn’t whether corporations should exist, but whether the stories we create still serve life. If not, it’s time to rewrite the charter: not with new slogans, but by grounding our work again in life itself: in relationships, needs, and rhythms that make us real.
The Wells Fargo case closes one chapter and opens the next. When we made the corporation a person, we also created a new metric to keep it in line: money. Since it cannot feel pain, the only way to punish it is to make it pay. So we built a world where money became the universal language of consequence.
That’s how fictions multiply.
We invent one illusion — the corporation as person — and another to manage it: money as reality. Each layer pulls us further from life until we forget that every economy and system exists only because living beings cooperate, care, and create together.
If you believe corporations deserve your loyalty, keep feeding their hunger for growth.
But if you feel the quiet sickness of serving abstractions that can’t love you back, flip the lens. See them as temporary vessels of coordination, not beings. See their fines not as justice but as reminders of how far we’ve drifted from the real. Remember: life — fragile, messy, impermanent — is our only real continuity.
Because when we grant story the power of people, people become expendable. But when we return life to the center, even our organizations can breathe again. And that breath leads to the next question:
If money is what a corporation feels, what does that make money itself?