Sociopaths are people who are completely devoid of any sense of empathy or caring. Other people simply don’t exist other than as things to be manipulated and consumed, with no more emotional consideration than when you unwrap a candy bar, throw out the wrapper, and devour the calories. Everyone regards such individuals with horror, except where it comes to business and politics, where suddenly the existence and tolerability, even desirability, of sociopathy becomes controversial.
I’m not writing about this sociopathy of the elites themselves today, or about the bizarre collective sociopathy of masses which often exempts, accepts, and celebrates it. Such issues, however, do go toward the general critique of representative government in itself, and from there to elitism in itself. (I define the term elitism as the tolerance of or desire for the existence of hierarchical elites, especially in politics and the economy.)
What I want to briefly lay out here is the fact that corporations are inherently sociopathic. By their intrinsic design and imperative they must aggressively and relentlessly seek to sociopathically manipulate and consume. We’re all familiar with the corporation’s legal duty to maximize profit at the expense of all other values. Henry Ford was successfully sued by his shareholders for trying to overcome the inherent contradiction of capitalism by paying his workers a wage sufficient to sustain themselves as consumers. While there’s some question of how far this duty extends in principle, in practice it’s always interpreted to mean that corporate management, no matter what its subjective view of things, should always be doing every legal thing it can, no matter how morally evil it may be. Where an evil would be illegal, the corporation’s duty is to get the law changed. In practice the corporation should always be pushing the envelope where it comes to bribery and extortion. And even every other law is supposed to be broken if management thinks they can get away with it or make some patsy take the fall. So in the end the barrier of legality isn’t supposed to exist either.
For the persons involved, where they aren’t actively evil themselves, we have what Arendt called the banality of evil. She was talking about how “normal” people easily slid into the Nazi routine as officials, bureaucrats, functionaries, or just people doing normal jobs. Today, as corporations consistently commit all the same crimes of territorial aggression, robbery and mass murder (so far the murders are mostly in poor countries like Nigeria and Nicaragua), it’s even easier for the individual to be banally evil in his actions, since here it’s not an overtly hateful, belligerent political organization and regime, but merely a profit-seeking business, and we’re all acculturated to assume such activity as the social norm. Those who “work for the corporation” are further indoctrinated and acculturated to accept this as normal, even if a particular corporate culture doesn’t go out of its way to do this. The corporation eventually comes to select for those who are naturally sociopathic. It also must subvert the educational system itself, hijacking it toward the corporatist agenda. This helps maximize both the prosperity of natural sociopaths in their student careers, as well as the indoctrination of the rest. As sociopathy in the schooling, in the media, in the imagery and discourse of society at large, and in the corporation itself becomes ever more refined, it is eventually distilled to actual psychopathy.
No one has responsibility, as Ted Nace describes (chapter 14, p.203):
A corporation is a complex entity, not a unified mind. As Adolph
Berle and Gardiner Means pointed out in The Corporation and Private
Property, the essence of a corporation is the fragmentation of accountability
among various internal groups. Those who occupy the key leadership
position (the professional managers) aren’t necessary its owners;
those who are owners (the stockholders) are generally neither in charge
nor legally liable; and those who are supposed to be exercising strategic
direction on behalf of the owners (the board of directors) are rarely sufficiently
informed nor sufficiently empowered to actually fulfill their
theoretical function.
So we have this machine which not only doesn’t care what it does, but is programmed to systematically destroy society. It has a legal mandate and in internal cultural imperative to do this.
The other broad aspect of corporate sociopathy is the way the corporate concept is designed to separate rights and responsibilities. The policy of limited liability, civil and criminal, overtly and in principle seeks a sociopathic imbalance of rights vs. responsibilities. Where the corporation itself gains fraudulent rights, this is procyclical with the way legislatures and courts add to its powers and shed its responsibilities. A goal of corporatism is to legalize crimes where committed by individuals acting in the capacity of corporate cadres.
Nace quotes political commenter Arthur Miller (p. 96):
As with constitutional law, so with the private law of contracts, of property, and of torts. Judge-made rules in those fundamental categories had the result of transferring the social costs of private enterprise from the enterprise itself to the workingman or to society at large. Tort law provides apt illustration. Under its doctrines, a person who willfully or negligently harms another’s person or property must answer by paying money damages. The analogue of contract, which is a consensual obligation, a tort is a nonconsensual legal obligation. Who, then, bore the costs, in accidents and in deaths, of the new industrialism? Not the businessman. Not the corporation. The worker himself. (Often those workers were children.) And who bore the costs of pollution and other social costs? Society at large. How did this come about? In tort law judges created doctrines of “contributory negligence,” “assumption of risk,” and the “fellow servant rule,” all of which served to insulate the enterprise from liability. By “freely” taking a job, said the judges, the workers “assumed the risk” of any accident that might occur.
Where the crimes can’t be literally legalized, the license to commit them and the legal responsibility for them are separated. The latter is the more common example. We have Wall Street’s intentional destruction of the economy as the result of its monumental con jobs (in particular fraudulent inducement of mortgage borrowing), the pollution crimes of BP and many others, Monsanto’s torts wherever pollen from its GMO Frankenplants contaminates natural crops, just to name a few major examples off the top of my head. These are all legal crimes for which no individual is ever held accountable, and usually the corporation itself is also let off free as a bird. One example of where the crimes are actually legalized is the CFMA, which declares simple gambling by the banks, indistinguishable from a bunch of drunks at a bar betting on a football game, to comprise legal contracts. Of course, when a solitary bum bets his children’s lunch money at the track and loses, it’s terrible for that family. When the government lets the banksters do the same thing with trillions and then pays off these bets with taxpayer money, millions of children must go hungry.
The wealth corporations amass through such banal evil is then used to subvert the rule of law, from the legislative process to the courtroom. Again, both by its structural mandate and its internal culture the corporation is driven to try to get antisocial laws passed, socially beneficial laws and rules overturned or abolished, and to render any worthwhile laws which do exist neglected, disregarded, or twisted.
Greed fundamentalists among the elites first developed the systematic plan to use corporations as a vehicle of maximal rent-seeking in the mid-19th century, and worked assiduously through the state legislatures and federal courts to accomplish what was in sum a crypto-feudal coup against democracy and theoretical capitalism. They received ideological assistance from the rise of Social Darwinism, which provided both a propaganda basis for their greed and, in the form of substantive due process, a legal doctrine the SCOTUS could use to justify its corporatist activism. Together Social Darwinism and substantive due process, in the form of the Lochner doctrine, enshrined corporate sociopathy as literally “the law of the land”. We see again the same pattern: The inherent sociopathic process selects for itself, distills itself, becomes conscious of itself. Inertia becomes will; sociopathy becomes psychopathic evil.
Today we’ve reached the terminal stage of this devolution. The neofeudal “elites” wish to undertake the final enclosure of all real assets – land, natural resources, physical space itself, buildings, infrastructure, and all the products of the mind. At the same time they want to cut all ties with human beings other than the ties of exploitation. They want to eradicate all semblance of government, law, and civil society, except insofar as they are either weapons of domination or of pacification. They want to take totalitarian control of the Earth itself, enjoy a total licentious prerogative to do anything they wish (and have this license enshrined as their “rights”), while being absolved of literally ALL social or legal responsibility. These sociopaths, these willful outlaws, want to actually secede from civilization. They want to steal all the benefit of human interaction but incur zero reciprocal responsibility or obligation. They want to burn off all relationships between human and human, distilling them to the primal confrontation of master and slave in the middle of a wasteland. Since neither slaver nor slave can be human, these fundamentalists wish to completely eradicate civilization and humanity itself. They are in fact post-civilizational barbarians. As David Korten put it (quoted in Nace):
As corporations gain in autonomous institutional power and become more detached from people and place, the human interest and the corporate interest increasingly diverge. It is almost as though we were being invaded by alien beings intent on colonizing our planet, reducing us to serfs, and then excluding as many of us as possible.
The corporation wants to systematically define human beings out of juridical existence, except insofar as they’re defined as debtors or criminals.
The corporation has been the primary mode of organization for this anti-civilizational devolution to the terminal post-civilization barbarism. It has concentrated and distilled all the worst sociopathic and anti-social aspects of the hominid experience. It has distilled them, systematized them, rendered them conscious, formulated them into an ideology and strategy. It is now the main practical vehicle of this plan for the final destruction of civilization. Through the doctrines, administrative structures, and ruling techniques of globalization, the corporation intends to completely dissolve the nation-state except for the rump functions I mentioned above. In the next post I’ll describe more fully this program, and how the corporation is inherently anti-sovereign.
For now I’ll conclude with the warning that the only way we can avert this hideous outcome planned for us is to smash the corporate power.
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