[I]nstitutions are the principle means by which conflict is produced and managed in society. Peace is incompatible with institutional activity. State… - Butler D. Shaffer

As the creators of sophisticated technologies, we have made ourselves increasingly machine-like; robotic servants of institutional systems we have been conditioned to revere, whose purposes we neither understand nor control, and of which we are afraid to ask questions. Our corporate-state world plunders, enslaves, controls and destroys us, all in the name of advancing our liberty and material well-being. Most of us are dominated by an unfocused fear of uncertainty, a longing for the security of emptiness.

Businessmen came to embrace the industrial theology of ‘responsibility,’ and learned a new set of cartelizing catechisms. The campaign to reform trade practices and promote ‘fair’ competition had little, if anything, to do with business ethics, efficiency, ‘justice,’ ‘fairness,’ the elimination of waste, or any of the other rationalizations employed on behalf of ‘industrial self-rule.’ It was, instead, part of a strategy designed to secure the political supervision indispensable to the group domination of industry members. Only in the structuring of economic behavior, it came to be thought, could the status quo be maintained against the inconstancies and uncertainties of the marketplace.

In furtherance of the war effort, the WIB centralized the economic life of America into a highly structured bureaucracy under the effective direction and control of leading business interests. Matters relating to the production, pricing, and allocation of strategic goods and services were handled not by the impersonal forces of the marketplace, but by the quite personal direction of businessmen armed with governmental authority. American industry had, in short, become ‘mobilized’ in the most literal, military sense of the word. Depending upon how one viewed the practice, American businesses found themselves subject to political ‘coordination’ or ‘regimentation’ in furtherance of collective goals.