A Quotable Quote

“There are no nations! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There is no Third World! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems—one vast and immanent, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichsmarks, roubles, rin [???], pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural [sic] order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things . . .

“You . . . howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, and AT&T and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world now. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state—Karl Marx? They pull out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories and minimax solutions like the good little systems analysts they are, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do.

“We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies . . . The world is a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable laws of business. The world is a business . . . !!”

(Part of a speech by the American tycoon Jensen, in the novelisation of the film Network, Sphere Books Ltd, 1977, pp.130-1.)