Radical Social Advancements
My books offer not just an analysis of the fundamental causes of our social problems and dreams or outlines of a future where they are solved that are of little practical value in creating it, but tools: precise policy agendas. I designed them to be wielded by the people as demands on our government to break it free from elite shackles and act based on the majority’s needs and a moral vision. The agendas include some that ensure the elite’s shackles disintegrate, never again to appear. Each agenda is a brick in the foundation for a just and democratic society where a high degree of prosperity will be much more equitably shared.
However, economic and political system advancement agendas on the scale I propose no one person can perfect. For the necessary mass movement to form around them, collective wisdom must come into play. I look forward to engaging in constructive dialogue to optimize my proposed agenda for a peaceful revolution. Together, we can ignite the torch of a New Enlightenment Era.
Uniquely Perilous Times
The extreme wealth and power of 18th-century elites dominating their societies led to a lack of a sense of fairness and empathy, and oppressive behaviors, which motivated the Enlightenment Era revolutions. However, they were inherently just as likely to behave with a sense of entitlement and disregard for others as anyone from the general population would be in their position. This is not the case for modern-day elites, making our need for fundamental social advancements more urgent than it was before the American Revolution.
About two-thirds of the U.S.’s top 0.1% in income are top managers of corporations, a highly influential group.[1] Researchers have studied their personality tendencies, which determine their public policy preferences, and the degree to which they influence our political system. Top corporate managers have life-altering power over many people in their employment and elsewhere. They are using their control of massive corporate and personal financial resources to dominate the policymaking process of our dysfunctional political system.
Princeton University researchers’ analysis of 2000 public policy outcomes over three decades revealed: “Policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans… The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy.” As a result, we are experiencing social decline trends that threaten our nation’s survival. I describe many aspects of the decline on this website’s Dark Times page and other pages and in my books.
The corporate world is often characterized by cutthroat competition in the climb up to the top of the corporate ladder to positions of extreme wealth and power. The competition is most intense in large corporations where the rewards at the top are massive. Competitors know that if they win, their institutional role requires an exclusive focus on increasing corporate profits and market share that is undeterred by moral or social harm considerations. In this context, it is not surprising that ruthlessness, exploitativeness, narcissism, lack of empathy, selfishness, manipulativeness, greed, and egotism are personality characteristics that advantage people in the struggle for the wealth and power inherent in top corporate positions when they exist with excellent political skills. Corporate elites’ personality characteristics result from the motives to be at the top of large corporations and the requirements to get and be there.
Among CEOs’ most significant acts in pursuit of maximum profits are those that minimize workers’ wages and other costs to employ them, diminishing people’s well-being from whose work they are benefiting. Top managers’ have very “successfully” profit maximized for their corporations and themselves. Corporate profits and their compensations are at historic highs, while 40% of Americans have difficulty meeting their basic needs. The vast inequalities generated by corporate managers have significantly harmed tens of millions of Americans, our economy, and society.
Furthermore, corporate elites are abusing technology to minutely regulate the movements and speech of low-ranked people in their corporations. They control millions of human lives to a degree Stalin never dreamed of, and technological advancements are increasing their ability to do so. Amazon is a prime example. Advancements in artificial intelligence will empower them to be far more socially harmful.
Most of us know it is unwise to enable individuals to have an overwhelming influence over society because it leads to the corruption of their character. This problem has been recognized for centuries. Lord Acton famously said in 1887, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We are experiencing the result of this dynamic on people who were extraordinarily immoral before the corrupting influence of extreme wealth and power. Our political system, which has radically diverged from a democratic one, is captured by some of our nation’s most rapacious and ruthless pursuers of personal wealth and power.
We all have personalities that limit our behavior somewhere on a moral spectrum. At the top of the corporate world, their spectrum is shifted toward the depraved; for psychopaths, it’s at the most troubling end. Media reports create the prevailing view that psychopaths are violent criminals. However, psychopaths are not necessarily violent or criminals. A psychopath is a person who lacks a conscience and the ability to empathize, is deceitful, manipulative, feels no remorse, and acts only in his self-interest without regard for the effect of his actions on others. Superficial charm often accompanies these traits, enabling psychopaths to mask their lack of a conscience or capacity for empathy. Many of our nation’s elites have a significant degree of the traits that characterize psychopathology.
Stanford University researchers estimated that 12% of corporate leaders are psychopaths. (The prevalence of psychopathology in the general population is about 1%.) Psychopathological tendencies extend beyond this 12%, but they did not determine how far beyond or the correlation between the depth of psychopathology with the size of the corporation and status within it. The highest-status people in the largest corporations, where power and wealth are most concentrated, are more likely psychopathological and to a more extreme degree. Other researchers’ estimates on the prevalence of psychopathology among corporate managers vary between about 4% and 21%.[2] My forthcoming book, Amazon as Metaphor, describes several examples of CEOs whose behaviors were likely manifestations of psychopathological minds.
Some of the few large corporation elites who speak publicly may seem charming or charismatic. Beware of what’s behind skillfully erected facades designed to create a public impression about them and their intentions that serve their interests. Judge them based on the consequences of their behavior since much of their behavior is hidden from public view, not their words or demeanor.
[1] Capital In The Twenty First Century, Thomas Piketty pg. 302
[2] Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk Paul Babiak, Ph.D., Craig S. Neumann, Ph.D., Robert D. Hare, Ph.D. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 28: 174–193 (2010) Published online 6 April 2010 in Wiley InterScience
Corporate psychopaths common and can wreak havoc in business, 9/13/16 https://www.psychology.org.au/news/media_releases/13September2016/Brooks/
We Must Act Now on Corporate Capitalism’s Growing Threat
Technological advancements will enable an economic system that concentrates ownership and control of productive capital in an elite to accelerate our social decline. Elites will replace workers with sophisticated, AI-powered machines and computers, which will exacerbate existing inequality between those who own the means of production versus those whose only income comes from labor wages. The rate of growth of our grotesque inequalities threatening our nation’s survival will increase unless we fundamentally reform our economic system.
If our economic system were based primarily on worker-owned and controlled businesses, the growing sophistication of artificial intelligence and automation would transform from a problem creating unemployment to the enormous benefit to humanity it should be. Workers’ work hours will be replaced by machine work hours with the benefits equitably shared rather than directing them to a small productive capital ownership class.
Worker ownership and control of businesses will enable workers to have more time for leisure and creative activities. Just as worker-owned and self-directed businesses will more equitably share monetary rewards, so will they of the rewards of freed-up time resulting from the growing ability to perform functions with less labor. Among the dozens of public policy proposals I detail in my books are those in The New Enlightenment and Amazon as Metaphor that will create an economy where most businesses will be worker-owned and self-directed enterprises (WSDEs) if instituted. Also detailed are the many reasons we must accomplish this transformation of our economic system. This website has an extensive summary of The New Enlightenment’s content on WSDEs.
Our Grotesque Inequalities Pose a Too-Little-Recognized Threat
Robert Hare, Ph.D., one of the world’s leading experts on psychopathology, stated: “Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate … psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”
Profoundly immoral individuals controlling billions of dollars are also empowered to target great harm to individuals and families. Their power to do so is particularly extreme in societies where they can access a huge reservoir of people under severe economic stress to act as criminal operatives since they are more vulnerable to corrupting influences than they otherwise would be. Societies such as the U.S., where vast inequalities exist, have such a reservoir. Ninety-six million American adults can’t come up with $400 for an emergency without selling something or borrowing money. A significant percentage of them—likely all of the more than 1% psychopathological—would do almost anything for $20,000. People are more likely to accept payment for unethical and criminal acts the more economic stress they feel.
Twenty cents have more significance to you if you are a person of average income and wealth than $20,000 has to the super-wealthy. They likely can enlist any of over a million people to commit even the most horrific acts for this insignificant expenditure. (Just the psychopathological 1% of the ninety-six million adults is 960,000.) To understand how little $20,000 is to the super-wealthy, consider: Since billionaires have average returns on their investments of about 6% per year, those with “just” $1 billion typically watch $60 million come in each year, which averages $165,000 per day, without doing anything. Six hundred seven have over a billion dollars in the US, and their average wealth is $14.3 billion. So, on average, each watch $858 million per year or $2.36 million per day come in, doing nothing. Having $20,000 less would be insignificant. $20,000 is 0.00014% of $14.3 billion; 20 cents is a 17% higher share of the median household’s wealth. Of course, $1,000 would be even less significant for a super-wealthy person, and many economically stressed people would commit crimes, even felonies, for this amount.
Research has unveiled a sub-group of white-collar offenders who are violent either personally or through hired third parties. These “red-collar criminals” tend to commit violent crimes of the “instrumental” kind—goal-oriented, with no evidence of an immediate emotional or situational provocation. In contrast, reactive violence is committed with a high level of spontaneity and no apparent goal other than to harm the victim immediately following a provocation. Typically, the motive for the violence of those red-collar criminals studied has been to prevent the detection or disclosure of their fraud schemes.[1]
The prevalence in the C-suite of a sense of entitlement, a propensity to deceive and manipulate, a lack of empathy and remorse, a grandiose sense of self-worth, and viewing others merely as resources to be exploited likely has resulted in many more red crimes than are publicly known.[2]
Regarding the prevalence of red-collar crime, one researcher stated, “Lots of people are getting away with murder.”[3] It is a dangerous misconception among law enforcement personnel and the general public that white-collar criminals are non-violent. We give profoundly immoral people the power to commit atrocities, so we should not be surprised if some are, in many forms.
When criticism wounds a corporate psychopath’s inflated view of self or someone interferes with their high-priority plans, they target the offender, and likely more often than we know, violently. Although corporate psychopaths’ intelligence may make resorting to violence to achieve their ends uncommon, we do not know how uncommon. Since top-level corporate psychopaths tend to be intelligent and resourceful, likely only a tiny percentage of their atrocities committed against targeted individuals, including murders, have been attributed to them. Likely, most of their crimes are contracted, and probably their murders are made to appear as accidents, suicides, or deaths from natural causes.
Be forewarned: If you get in the way of or anger a super-wealthy person, not only does he have the power to dispose of you easily, he is much more likely than the average person to attach the significance to it that you do to disposing of a piece of paper. Furthermore, technological advances have enabled wealthy psychopathological members of society to track and bug you wherever you go and penetrate every aspect of your life by hacking into your communications and computer files. Their unprecedented financial resources and technological capabilities make psychopathological elites more dangerous than ever in history. Also, the number of psychopaths with access to astronomical amounts of dollars is unprecedented. Based on the above facts, it is certain there are many massive monsters in our society lurking in the shadows, performing stealth strikes at will.
Although the prevalence of psychopathy in corporate elites as measured by researchers is alarming, they likely substantially underestimate it because the diagnostic process partially depends on an interview. Since C-suite psychopaths are intelligent, they would perceive the best way to respond to interview questions to create the impression they would like to create. Intelligent psychopaths’ manipulative skills would make it unlikely that they are judged to have a personality disorder, especially psychopathology.
Furthermore, PCL-R scores are an insufficient measure of antisocial personality disorders that should disqualify people from powerful positions because the destructiveness of the afflicted persons is proportional to their power. For example, although 90% of criminals classified by the PCL-R as psychopathic are diagnosable with “antisocial personality disorder” (ASPD), only 30% with ASPD qualify as psychopathic.[4]
For some people, including many without diagnosable psychopathology or ASPD, the drive for increasingly massive amounts of money continues far beyond the point where they can spend it on improving their lifestyle based on a kind of pathological addiction. To some, money is like a powerful, addictive drug. They need larger dosages to maintain the same level of ‘‘high’’ (state of euphoria). The more they get, the farther they get from enough. This insatiable greed and the resulting massive wealth and extravagant lifestyle motivate corruption, including of our political system, and a sense of entitlement in what has become our ruling class/kleptocracy.
A super-wealthy elite is setting the agenda for humanity’s future through their dominant roles in our economy and political system. And they influence all of us through mass media and educational institutions. Their agenda serves their interests at the expense of everyone else. Corporations of a form that advantages immoral people and that motivates creating harmful externalities even by moral people that rise to their top threaten humanity’s survival.
[1] Red Collar Crime, Frank S. Perri, International Journal of Psychological Studies; Vol. 8, No. 1; 2016
[2] Ibid.
[3] The Atlantic, The Killer in the Cubicle, Rene Chun, October 2018, pg. 34
[4] Counselor magazine, Psychopathology, Part 1, 8/18, Norman Hoffman, etal.
Another Danger Ahead
Research shows that in times of high economic stress in society, people are more inclined to back assertive, dominant, and narcissistic leaders in government. The people with these traits dominating our economy are creating a social environment for people with similar characteristics to be more likely to rise in politics, potentially as leaders of newly empowered right-wing political parties.
A society with systems that concentrate its profoundly immoral members with an incapacity for empathy in its most powerful positions is not sane. It will continue to decline into more extreme dystopian depths or disintegrate.
The general population must now take control of its destiny.
Now is the Time for a New Enlightenment
We urgently need fundamental advancements in our economic and political systems.
My books provide detailed agendas to accomplish them.