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"Robert Hare is the creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century history. It's the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of psychopaths -- the 1% of the general population that isn't burdened by conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators. Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills from real-life "games" they can win -- and take pleasure from their power over other people.
On that August day in 2002, Hare gave a talk on psychopathy to about 150 police and law-enforcement officials. ...
According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun reporters who rescued the moment from obscurity, Hare began by talking about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by pictures of top executives (accused of ethical lapses)...
'These are callous, cold-blooded individuals', Hare said.
'They don't care that you have thoughts and feelings. They have no sense of guilt or remorse.' He talked about the pain and suffering the corporate rogues had inflicted on thousands of people who had lost their jobs, or their life's savings. Some of those victims would succumb to heart attacks or commit suicide, he said.
Then Hare came out with a startling proposal. He said that the recent corporate scandals could have been prevented if CEOs were screened for psychopathic behavior. 'Why wouldn't we want to screen them?' he asked. 'We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?'
It's Hare's latest contribution to the public awareness of "corporate psychopathy." He appeared in the 2003 documentary The Corporation, giving authority to the film's premise that corporations are "sociopathic" (a synonym for "psychopathic") because they ruthlessly seek their own selfish interests -- "shareholder value" -- without regard for the harms they cause to others, such as environmental damage. ...
On the broad continuum between the ethical everyman and the predatory killer, there's plenty of room for people who are ruthless but not violent. This is where you're likely to find (top corporate executives).
"We all have knowledge and we mentally assign a level of confidence in each piece of knowledge we think we have. ...Though again, people often have extremely high degrees of confidence based on modalities other than science. Religious faith may lead a person to give up friends, job, loved ones, or even to die for his or her beliefs, and schizophrenics may murder family members or strangers in firm confidence that this is the right thing to do.
For the critical thinker it is important to avoid unjustified confidence, and to understand what factors may lead us to a high degree of confidence when we are in fact wrong. For example, we often assign a high degree of confidence to memories that are vivid and accessible, but the evidence shows that these factors do not predict accuracy. A memory may feel completely real, but be completely wrong.
Skeptics often encounter the “confidence” defense -- we are asked to believe anecdotal accounts based upon the reporter’s confidence in their accuracy. I have been told many times by believers that they were absolutely certain about specific facts of a case that turned out to be demonstrably wrong. In these cases it seemed to me that confidence derived from a desire to believe, and therefore have a clean story in support of the belief. But confidence is an effective form of persuasion -- we tend to trust other people’s confidence, even when we shouldn’t.
Science has largely quantified confidence -- that is, after all, was science is largely about: having a high degree of confidence in our explanations about the natural world."
"the company-as-psychopath idea ... rightfully belongs, in its full form, to Max Weber, the German sociologist. For Weber, the key form of social organisation defining the modern age was bureaucracy. Bureaucracies have flourished because their efficient and rational division and application of labour is powerful. But a cost attends this power. As cogs in a larger, purposeful machine, people become alienated from the traditional morals that guide human relationships as they pursue the goal of the collective organisation. There is, in Weber's famous phrase, a "parcelling-out of the soul".Two provisos here:
For Weber, the greater potential tyranny lay not with the economic bureaucracies of capitalism, but the state bureaucracies of socialism. The psychopathic national socialism of Nazi Germany, communism of Stalinist Soviet rule and fascism of imperial Japan (whose oppressive bureaucratic machinery has survived well into the modern era) surely bear Weber out. Infinitely more powerful than firms and far less accountable for its actions, the modern state has the capacity to behave even in evolved western democracies as a more dangerous psychopath than any corporation can ever hope to become: witness the environmental destruction wreaked by Japan's construction ministry."
"(Behavior of) Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer ... recounted in a sworn declaration by a former Microsoft engineer, Mark Lucovsky, who said he met with Microsoft's chief executive 10 months ago to discuss his decision to leave the company after six years.Disclaimer: I wasn't there. I don't know the facts of the matter. As reported by news sources.
After learning Lucovsky was leaving to take a job at Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and hurled it across his office, according to the declaration."
" 'Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.'
-- (attributed to) Benito Mussolini
Where the quote comes from remains a mystery, and while it is possible Mussolini said it someplace at some time, a number of researchers have been unable to find it after months of research. ...
It is unlikely that Mussolini ever made this statement because it contradicts most of the other writing he did on the subject of corporatism and corporations. When Mussolini wrote about corporatism, he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds. The article on Wikipedia on Corporatism explains this rather well. (N.b. that Wikipedia articles are continually being updated and may have changed since author Berlet wrote this.)"
"Man is naturally greedy and short-sighted, but the invention of corporate capitalism (as compared with free-market capitalism) has magnified that tendency. We have created powerful institutions who bribe government officials to do things that help the short term profit of companies, but which hurt the health, safety of citizens and long term profit of corporations.
Corporations are pseudo people with psychotic personalities, required by law to be devoid of conscience. They are not permitted to be concerned with the interest of the stakeholders: the employees, the customers, the people living where the corporation does business. By law they must consider only profit for the shareholders.
They will do things like bribe the government to allow them to dump pollutants such as pig manure into the water, then fob the cost of cleaning them up on the public, rather than building them into the cost of the product, the way you would in a true free-market economy. Lack of care of the soil is good for short term profit, but soil loss is disastrous for the crops of future generations.
The problem is, these corporations are actively working as hard as they can against the public interest. ...
So what does this have to do with extinction? As science creates more and more ways for even one man to wipe out the entire planet, you need extreme taboos to stop people from doing that. Jehovists don't have anywhere near enough inhibition. From my point of view, they are like Vikings who have accepted violence and destruction as perfectly normal. They don't even notice what they are doing. Everywhere they have spread they have stripped the planet bare, polluted its waters, overpopulated, made war, enslaved others, exuded greenhouse gasses with abandon, squandered the resources of earth in conspicuous consumption, exteriminated species after species and generally behaved like the proverbial savages they claim everyone else to be. They are far too vengeful to be entrusted with dangerous tools like the atom and biotechnology. Too bad. They already have them. ...
Man has little concern for other species on the ecological health of the planet as a whole. He ignores natural limits, simply because they are inconvenient. He imagines his economic activity can grow without limit, he can burn oil without limit, he can pollute without limit, he can extract resources from the earth without limit.
He is fiercely loyal to his country, his company, his team, his tribe, his family, no matter what evil things they have done.
Only a tiny fraction of the planet's inhabitants see themselves as citizens of planet earth first, and of some particular country second. Only a tiny fraction of the planet's inhabitants care about people outside their immediate families. Only a handful of the planet's inhabitants think deeply about the effect they will have on generations to come. It seem unlikely these altruistic survival traits will spread in time. Hanging on tenaciously to the outmoded us-vs-them mentality and short-term greed seals our doom. We deserve to die."