When Humans and Reptiles Collide

But as was the case with RBS or Lehman, the uncritical appraisal of such personalities allows the firm to become not only blind to their self-destruction but also a hotbed for bullying. The psychopathic mentality is also the mentality of a bully, where they excel at sizing up and singling out their targets the same way a cobra stares down a mouse. Often inflicting pain for their personal perverse pleasure.

A hyper-masculine culture of bullying executes its Orwellian function by keeping employees in check and stopping them from asking questions, risking the company’s survival in the long run. In researching the link between psychopathy and bullying at work in Australia, Clive Boddy found that twenty-six percent of all bullying at work could be traced back to a psychopathic supreme manager. When a psychopath is your boss, the rate of bullying at work increases to sixty-four times a year compared to the average nine times a year. As was the case with RBS, Enron and Wall Street, psychopaths at work diminish the productivity and the moral climate of the organizations, affecting how the company treats its suppliers, its tax returns, its customers and employees.

A psychopathic boss also allows for a surge in white-collar crime or in the world of finance a hard days’ work, where the FBI reported in 2005 that the financial sector was experiencing a pandemic of white-collar crime such as fraud. For Greenspan however, fraud was simply a nonissue, as he told Born over lunch that, “well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for it.”

To quote the management guru Peter Drucker, “if you have a business executive who really wants to take on social responsibilities, get rid of him fast. He doesn’t have the right sense of priorities in running a business.” While only one percent of the general population is intrinsically psychopathic, if we were to believe the republicans who say that corporations are people, according to psychologist and FBI consultant Robert Hare, the corporate personality is that of a prototypical psychopath. Drucker is not one of the few rotten apples. He’s merely explaining the structural psyche of corporatism in its totality.

The corporation is inherently irresponsible by putting everybody else at risk for the financial bottom line. It tries to manipulate everything, including public opinion, to achieve its goals. It is grandiose, always insisting that, “we’re number one, we’re the best,” even days before its bankruptcy. And it refuses to accept responsibility for its actions, feeling no remorse in continuingly externalizing the ecological, economic and the moral cost of doing business onto others. To quote the investment manager Robert Monks, “the Corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that the shark is a killing machine. There isn’t any question of malevolence or will.”

Despite the countless examples of corporate misconduct (pollution, sweat shops, and forced evictions of the poor seduced into signing subprime mortgages to name a few), we still gawk over supreme managers like Summers or Goodwin the same way we gawk over Lebron James, Lil Wayne or Lisa Anne. (Which makes me wonder, who is Nailin’ Paylin these days?) Under the lie of trickle down economics, the same way the rich man’s piss trickles down the urinal we call society, what we received from the ruling class was not its wealth but its modus operandi of success. At anyone and everyone’s expense.

It is the ethos promoted by reality TV, where we would gladly accept 24-hour surveillance and public humiliation to be the next Tyra Banks or Pauly D.