Negative-space Civilization Critiques

Some people view corporate and institutional life as the essential expression of what it means to be human, and see the life of the administrator as the ultimate human life. There's an opposing, long standing tradition and maybe genetic disposition to hating institutional and corporate life. More contemporary writers like Edward Abbey present the same themes as a guy like Diogenes of Sinope did a couple millenia ago: political man and corporate man are dimunitions of what it means to be a human being, and the delusions of would be Alexanders are toxic to everyone, including Alexander himself.

Corporate and institutional life lead unerringly toward empire and centralization. Centralization leads to corruption and stagnation and dissipation of all virtue. The leviathan, the system that was conjured up to protect all devours all as it replaces the cues and guidance of natural necessity with its own.

The critiques of people like Diogenes are sort of negative-space, "not-do" advice, though. There's not a real formulation of what man's place in nature actually is. This critique is really the missing-garden-of-Eden critique. Fallen world man is city-man and institutional man. The sort of environmentalism espoused by a guy like Abbey or Richard Proenneke addresses some of the leviathan-system problems of civilization.