Aeschines, I think I understand what you’re trying to say. What you’re describing is characteristic of Fund’ist Protestants, who have this tactic of “get 'em to convert, then we’ll explain the doctrines to 'em”, and of “cradle Catholics”, who are notoriously (and shockingly) ignorant of the teachings of their own faith, but insist that they believe all of them anyway. It is also a defining characteristic of managers at Wal-Mart (the corporate office says that the ratio of payroll to sales revenue is too high, which means we’re overstaffed, and therefore it must be so. What? We’re losing business because customers can’t find help on the sales floor? That means less sales revenue? Surely the corporate office has taken ths into account. Lay off some more sales people).
Dogmaticisim frightens me. It’s one thing to have a shared set of beliefs which creates cohesiveness in a culture, or to understnd what your particular religion teaches and why it teaches what it does and decide that, yes you really do believe that around 4 BC or so a virgin gave birth to a son who was God Incarnate. It’s quite another to say, I believe this because it’s in the Bible and the Bible is the Word of God (and on into the circular reasoning), or, I believe this because my parents taught it to me. This sort of thinking, carried to extremes, is just cuckoo. In most cases, however, no visible harm is done, except to the mind of the believer who must continuously short-circuit his or her own mental processes in order to sustain the belief system. Taken to an extreme, however, you get situations such as the mass burnings/drownings/other assorted forms of execution of witches, Catholics, or heretics that were carried out in in the wake of the Protesant Reformation.
In the case of a corporation, to believe layoffs are necessary in spite of immediate, visible evidence that a particular establishment is short-staffed, and is losing business as a direct result of not having sufficient staff to meet the needs of the customers because some bean counter in Bentonville crunched some numbers and arrived at this conclusion without any first hand evaluation of the needs of the store has real, tangible consequences. Workers who are already receiving poverty-level wages find themselves thrown out of jobs and onto the unemployment and welfare rolls, and in a tight job market, may not be able to find new employmet for several months. Customers are inconvenienced to a intolerable degree and eventually take their business elsewhere. The corporation itself is harmed because of the loss of sales revenue from the store. But most big corporations don’t draw their managers from intelligent, thnking folks with the ability to evaluate the needs of their individual store, and entrust them to make hiring/firing decisions based on the staffing needs of each department in order to keep the customers happy and the money flowing into the cash registers.
Any belief system that demands unquestioned obedience harms itself as much as its adherents. The student in religion class who asks what makes Christianity better or more worthy of belief than any other randomly selected religion and is sent to sit in the hallway is probably harmed less than the religious institution that is not prepared to answer such qestions. The rebuffed student simply decides not to believe anymore, and spends his Sundays watching football instead of in the pews. The Church loses a valuable community member, any offerings that person may have contributed, a pair of hands that might have helped in charitable works.
The corporation that expects its edicts from on high to be obeyed without question will probably not go bankrupt in a week, a month, or even a year, but will eventually suffer the fate of K-Mart. Demands to cut labor costs with no respect for the effects it will have on customer service will gradually drive away business until stores that have become unprofitable are forced to close, directly impacting the economy of the community. The corporation gradually begins losing revenue and is forced to close up shop while the accoutants and executive stand, slack-jawed, wondering why they are losing money when they did everything they could to cut costs.
Either way, everybody loses.
