Read it!
Find it here: http://weeklysift.blogspot.com/2010/12/carefully-restrained-creatures.html#12062010first
--Kim
Corporations are Sociopaths
Yesterday I once again saw the Budweiser Christmas commercial. You've probably seen some version of it in previous years: It's classy. Not a word about beer or anything else you might buy from them, just those iconic Clydesdales pulling an old-fashioned beer wagon down snowy lanes, hauling a Christmas tree up to some lovely country manor, while a narrator sends holiday wishes "from our family to yours."
It's hard not to be touched. What a great bunch of folks those Budweiser people must be.
Miller made a similarly non-commercial Christmas commercial (though they did end on an image of a six-pack): Christmas lights at their brewery flashing on and off to the tune of "Wizards of Winter". Coke has had so many touching Christmas commercials that it's hard to pick a favorite. Ditto Pepsi. Even Victoria's Secret manages to produce something appropriately heart-warming at Christmas.
We all have feelings about corporations sometimes. Our economy forces us to have relationships with them, and it's hard not to project a human personality onto anything you have a relationship with. So while we easily recognize that some corporations are our enemies, we also can't help thinking of some of them as our friends.
For example, there's the corporation whose product you hope someone gives you this year. Or the one that made that one special car that you had all those adventures in -- it ran for years and years and never gave you any trouble. Or the corporation you worked for and maybe still work for -- you served your customers well and got paid for it; wasn't that good? What about Google, who provides all those useful tools for free? Personally, I have soft spots for Apple and Sony -- it's fun to wander around their stores at the mall and see what's new and cool.
Almost every week I say something nasty about corporations, and occasionally I review books like Merchants of Doubt or Doubt Is Their Productthat explain how corporations make products that kill people -- and then manipulate the situation to make sure they can go on killing people as long as possible. But that can't be all corporations, right? Corporations are probably like people. There are good ones and bad ones, corporations that make cigarettes or asbestos, and other ones who just want a chance to put out an honest product at a fair price. Right?
It would be nice to think so, but no. I believe that when you come down to it, all corporations are fundamentally the same: They're sociopaths.
A sociopath (or, if you want to get technical, someone with antisocial personality disorder) is a person without a conscience, who lacks any authentic empathy for other people, and is motivated mainly by a desire to "win" at some social game of his or her choosing.
Just like corporations, the vast majority of human sociopaths are not serial killers. As psychologist Martha Stout describes them in The Sociopath Next Door, they can appear to be pillars of the community -- businessmen, teachers, ministers, and even psychologists. In fact, if appearing to be a pillar of the community helps them win whatever it is they're trying to win, then they'll learn how to cast that image. If that means they have to do some actual good deeds once in a while, they'll manage.
So if you meet a sociopath in a tightly controlled social environment, chances are he or she will behave perfectly, even charmingly. If you were in their way and they could easily get away with it, they might kill you. (I mean, why not? It's not like it's wrong or anything.) But most of the time, killing people is way more trouble than it's worth, so they don't bother.
Just like corporations.
Diagnostic criteria for sociopathy include symptoms like: persistent lying or stealing, apparent lack of remorse or empathy, cruelty to animals, recurring difficulties with the law, disregard for right and wrong, tendency to violate the boundaries and rights of others, irresponsible work behavior, and disregard for safety.
Any of that sound familiar? Or what about the behavior that Stout says is the most surefire way to spot a sociopath:
- [T]he combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark on a conscienceless person's forehead as you will ever be given.
- It should be obvious that BP is by far the leading victim, but I've yet to see a single expression of sadness for the company and its losses.
- I was in one board meeting, and I said, "I started this to do positive things with the world and to do good in the Amazon, not necessarily to get a big payout." And one of these guys looked me in the eye and said, "Well, the problem is, then you went out and took $9 million of other people's money."
Thom Hartman claims this is why executive pay is so high:
- [W]hat part of being a CEO could be so difficult -- so impossible for mere mortals -- that it would mean that there are only a few hundred individuals in the United States capable of performing it? In my humble opinion, it's the sociopath part.
- CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.
- Only about 1 to 3 percent of us are sociopaths -- people who don't have normal human feelings and can easily go to sleep at night after having done horrific things. And of that 1 percent of sociopaths, there's probably only a fraction of a percent with a college education. And of that tiny fraction, there's an even tinier fraction that understands how business works, particularly within any specific industry.
- Thus there is such a shortage of people who can run modern monopolistic, destructive corporations that stockholders have to pay millions to get them to work. And being sociopaths, they gladly take the money without any thought to its social consequences.
- CEOs of community-based businesses are typically responsive to their communities and decent people. But the CEOs of most of the world's largest corporations daily make decisions that destroy the lives of many other human beings.
That's the rationale behind government regulation and behind antitrust laws that keep the marketplace competitive. The idea that corporations should be free to do what they do best is incredibly stupid: What they do best is to act without conscience or remorse. Instead, we need them to be, in President Cleveland's phrase, "carefully restrained creatures of the law", so that we may interact with them only in tightly controlled settings.
Don Blankenship, the anti-union anti-safety-regulation CEO who last April presided over the deadliest American coal-mining disaster in 40 years, has announced that " it is time for me to move on." He rides into the sunset without expressing the slightest remorse to the families of his 29 dead employees.
I'm sure some of you are getting ready to point out to me that there is no Budweiser family, except maybe in the Czech Republic.
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