The source of corporate power is the same as that of parental power (expressed as the power of economic class and cultural eldership) and institutional academia and religion and even marriage – which is why they each mutually support one another and mutually dominate our lives and our culture: it’s the ability to dispense approval or else withhold it and criticize, which directly affects the core realities of our lives. These institutions hold our identity itself in their hands – the ability to think of ourselves as decent people, productive people, with self-directed lives, worthy of mating and reproducing, with access to transcendent meaning. (a Pruneau rule)