There is only economic value. That's all that matters. So when we actually" I mean, if you were able to go up 33,000 feet, or to another planet and look down on the Earth and say: what makes those people tick? What makes those societies operate? What is the kind of presumption, what are the principles that they operate in accordance with? We would see principles and presumptions that are remarkably similar to those that basically are at the heart of the corporation as an invention.
So I do think that you know the answer to your question is: yes, the corporation as an invention has had a profound effect on us. And the reasons for its ability to do that have to do with, again, its operating principles are ones that say it always has to profit, it always has to grow, it always has to get bigger, more powerful, and more profitable. That's part of its DNA. That's part of its operating code.
And that is exactly what it's done over the last hundred years of its history. It's gone from a fairly insignificant institution in the middle of the nineteenth century to a very significant one in the middle of the twentieth century; to a dominant one that is dominating us, not just in real terms, but in ideological terms as well, at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
R.K.: Now, evil, the kind of evil that psychopaths perpetrate, it's been around for a long time. But I wonder, now going along these lines, if the existence and the growth of the corporation hasn't increased the presence of psychopaths and psychopathic individual behavior among us.
J.B.: Yeah, I think, when I spoke with Robert Hare, who is sort of the world's leading experts on psychopaths, and I said: we all engage in psychopathic behavior. And he said to me: No. No, that's not true; either you are a psychopath, or you're not. But I am not sure I actually agree with that because the way that I see the corporation is that what it does within it is to suggest that when you're within its normative structure, it is okay to act in a psychopathic way.
So you may be the nicest person in the world, and you may be really a great husband and father, and whatever. And then, you go to work in the corporation and you're working for a video game company and you're job is not to be nice, your job is institutionally defined as making decisions that will sell product and so you decide that it's good to ramp up the violent content of a game that is being aimed at a nine year old kid, even though you wouldn't allow your own nine year old son, or daughter to look at that game. In your capacity as a corporate executive, that's okay. So that the incentives, the rewards, the punishment, the very keeping of your job in a corporation at the level of senior management requires you to do things that as a person you may not find right and requires the ability" so it does, I think, increase psychopathic behavior.
And there are people who do this kind of work, including Robert Hare who look, not like I did at the institution itself, but look at Wall Street from a psychological perspective and the way that the whole system of corporate incentives and rewards and punishment basically makes people more psychopathic. It encourages them to engage in psychopathic behavior.
And I think if you follow the line of thinking that I was involved" that I stated before, namely that the values of the corporation are now becoming more pervasive across institutions and society, within society itself, then it follows logically that we're creating a society that is effectively normalizing a kind of hyper, self-interested approach to life that arguably borders on, if not is psychopathic.
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