A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the moral compromises individuals make for the sake of corporate profit.
Wendell Berry suggests that corporations are not just business entities; they represent a collective moral compromise where individuals prioritize financial gain over ethical considerations. By selling their allegiance to these institutions, people often abandon their principles and contribute to a culture that values monetary success over moral integrity.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about corporate ethics in a business class.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
I finally knew... why Christ's prayer in the garden could not be granted. He had been seeded and birthed into human flesh. He was one of us. Once He had become mortal, He could not become immortal except by dying. That He prayed the prayer at all showed how human He was. That He knew it could not be granted showed his divinity; that He prayed it anyhow showed His mortality, His mortal love of life that His death made immortal.
Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained. And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry.
I'm called 'the poorest president', but I don't feel poor.
If a small thing has the power to make you angry, does that not indicate something about your size?
Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we're not alone.
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