This essay was a finalist in the How We Saved the World essay contest, where people wrote as if it was 2050 when the world was working, saying how we got there starting with something they did. Here's the intro to this presentation of results, with links to the other finalists and an invitation to make comments about the contest.

14

Fighting the Behemoth. Reclaiming Our Souls

It is 2050 in America, and I’m happy to say that the corporatization of America is finally over. The connection between that fact and the current American atmosphere—where people work cooperatively in all kinds of creative and productive ways—is now clear. I’m way too old to talk in front of audiences anymore, but my remaining years are golden with happiness because I’ve seen the world come to its senses—and I know I had something to do with it.

I didn’t know I was becoming an activist. I just knew that the story in front of me was breaking my heart so I had to tell the world about it. I started writing What the HOA Is Going On?  in 2023 and it was published in 2026. Most people thought my suggestion—that individual people resist the corporate culture—was naïve. “You can’t fight City Hall,” said a politician pal. “It’s human nature,” said my friend the attorney. “That’s just the way we humans are built, we’re selfish.” But my takeaway from a long life is that people are capable of almost anything. Sometimes it seems that goodness is a shy, beautiful animal that scares easily, so you have to make a safe home for it. What kind of environment, I often wondered, would bring out the good in people?

Certainly not HOAs (Homeowner Associations), I concluded, after a number of years living inside one, where decent, intelligent people behaved cruelly and foolishly, due to the inhumane HOA system. I learned that HOAs harmed people financially and psychologically but that harm went unrecorded; as corporations, HOAs are protected. Some years of study later, I learned that the HOA system is just a big scam where corporate entities make profits from ordinary people. I wanted, badly, to spread the word. The few books that hinted at the unfair situation were densely worded textbooks that no one read. And HOA  homeowners didn’t seem to have a clue. What would break through?

A story, I realized. The emotion of a story would penetrate the layers of obfuscation.

Breaking the norms of corporate secrecy, I told the story of my own HOA. I described real people and showed how the system ground them down. I shared financial records to show how corporate management wasted our money. When my book first got published, in 2026, neighbors shunned me. They said I’d “betrayed my community.” But I knew it was the HOA—like all corporations—that killed any sense of community, by imposing corporate values on top of human values.

Like putting a snake on top of a small, beautiful animal.

For years, there had been a growing unease inside America. A wrong turn had been taken. Something had been lost. By 2012, when I moved into my condo, corporate culture, like a growing stain, had seeped from the business world into every part of American life: health care, education and our homes.  This is what’s wrong, I realized. We were being taken over by an invisible, mindless army. I was 68 years old in 2012 and far more interested in resting than protesting. But the astonishing unfairness of HOA life –a corporate culture imposed on unsuspecting purchasers who just thought they were buying a home—hooked me. Why do my neighbors accept this new culture—where a woman could lose her home if she paints her door red—so readily? If a band of thieves began stealing cars, I knew everyone would fight back. But it wasn’t cars or money that was being stolen. It was people’s souls. Corporate culture was diminishing souls, all over America. How to fight back?

The corporate culture uses the same words we do—“school,” “home,” “neighbor,” “community.”  But the meaning of those words changes—subtly but seriously—the moment the corporate door clangs shut. Most people are too focused on everyday tasks to notice or articulate the difference. I wanted my book to show people what was being done to them, without blaming them. I wanted to show how ordinary people became part of an oppressive system—not because they were bad—but because they were, like all of us, hard wired to be inside, rather than outside, the “group.” And until we saw that—and learned to not cave to group pressure—we were at the mercy of the behemoth corporations. We had to fight back.

I had studied psychology; I knew about group dynamics. But I never knew how strong the pull of the group was. I studied the social experiments where people did crazy and awful things they would never do in real life, just because the group was doing them.  I looked at my own behavior and saw how I had caved to group pressure. I put those examples in the book. If human beings were ever to break out of this cycle of madness and misunderstandings, we would have to evolve.  And one of the  most important places to evolve was to learning how to resist group pressure so we could become our best, whole selves.

When my book was first published, I didn’t hear much reaction. Then a library in Oregon invited me to talk. The library had also invited a psychology professor. That night, the professor conducted one of his exercises that allowed people to experience the scary feelings of going against the group. “We have this instinct leftover from being in a herd,” he explained. “But we don’t need it anymore.” The professor authored a book about his evolving experiments. An Oregon teacher read the book and tried out the exercises in her classroom—and after two months, she announced amazingly, bullying had just about disappeared! And empathy had entered her classroom. “The kids are learning better too,” she wrote.

Other teachers copied what the Oregon teacher had done. Then another book came out. An HOA attorney, his conscience bothering him after a career of pushing people out of their homes, wrote a tell-all called One Lawyer Repents. His book was turned into a movie. So was mine. A Netflix series based on a memoir from inside the insurance company was the top TV show for months. Then a new media company did a reality show on resisting group pressure. It became fashionable to resist group pressure. It became fashionable to be good. By 2035, the American people—previously so divided—were on the same page.

The books and movies and podcasts about resisting group pressure and understanding the harm that corporate culture was doing to the soul of America were selling like hotcakes. Following the money, corporations sold all those books and promoted all those movies that urged people to replace corporate values with human values. People took them seriously and began to change the shape of their lives. Valuing their own spirits, people chose products and activities and legislators that fed those spirits. And then—ironically, delightfully—we saw that the corporate culture had eaten itself alive.

The truth-telling books, articles, and movies kept coming. So did the ideas for resisting group pressure. No one wanted to return to the stale old culture where money was king. Once that spell broke, the interest and excitement in preventing such a thing from happening again was huge. Architects and social scientists began studying how to create environments that allowed the good in people to flourish. And a whole new era began.