Loading.....
When Humans and Reptiles Collide
Corporate Psychopaths, the Financial Meltdown, and the Cult of the Supreme Manager
Staff Writer: Ken Cates
Introduction
With the passing of the five-year anniversary of the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, I am still convinced that a bigger financial crash would plunge the world into an economic abyss with in my lifetime. Those who caused this mess are still running the economy, and the only prosecution was that of the mid-level Goldman trader ‘Fabulous Fab’ Tourre. A result that is neither fabulous nor fab for the public good.
What happened five years ago was a result of society falling for those who were worshipped by the mainstream and financial media as sages and messiahs. Men with reptilian, if not psychopathic characteristics that gambled our economy away and pushed the losses onto us, rewarding themselves for their failures through tax funded bonuses and golden parachutes.These were men who thought themselves infallible as they ruled over their coworkers as their capricious lord, who crushed the livelihoods of anyone who dared question their conduct.
On the success of Stalinism among intellectuals, Hannah Arendt argues that the key factor can be attributed to the annihilating tactic of replacing all debate about the merit of an argument, a position or a person, with an inquiry about motive rather than the merit of the argument itself. Through the crackdown on those who asked necessary questions, we have treated our saviours as freaks and worshipped freaks as our saviours. In part, what allowed the economy to crash was our unquestioning faith in bullies, crooks, and delusional idiots, who profited off our misery and despair.
The following stories are few of the many examples where those who displayed highly questionable characteristics have ruined their organizations through their ego and their self-absorbed delusions that they imposed. These were leaders who crushed any reasonable questioning of their conduct as they went on to prove themselves to be threats to their employers and beyond. Leaders who welcomingly embraced Stalin’s annihilating tactic like a tyrant of a third world banana republic.
Just Another Angry Guy
March 1998, Washington D.C. How Brooksley Born was treated by the best and the brightest in finance can be summarized under a single phone call. When Born’s deputy Michael Greenberger walked in at the end of the call, he remembers the blood draining from her face as she barely uttered, “that was Larry Summers. He was shouting at me.’’ Outraged at the slightest hint of financial regulation, Summers screamed that he had a dozen trade association reps in his office saying that her questions in itself were doing them enormous damage. “He conveyed in a bullying fashion, threatening her to stop”, Greenberger recalls.
As chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), it was Born’s job to regulate commodity futures and option markets in the United States. Her time at the CFTC was when the US was facing, “the strongest U.S. economic performance in a generation,” says Summers, who was then Treasury deputy. For Born, developments in the financial sector were anything but assuring. Two years prior to her appointment, the Bankers Trust had run Procter & Gamble and Gibson Greeting Cards to the ground, selling them complex and falsely valued derivatives of which P&G was totally clueless about. 18 Ohio towns lost $14 million, and the City Colleges of Chicago lost almost $96 million in their dealings with derivatives.
When she circulated a concept release that merely suggested U.S. authorities start exploring how to regulate the vast global derivatives market, she was just doing her job. However, Newsweek’s Committee to Save the World (Chair of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, Summers, and then Treasury secretary Robert Rubin), would simply not stand this outsider’s insolence. The dressing down and the marginalization of Born by the financial kingpins continued until her resignation in 1999, nine years before her warning had become a reality. Thus, the five-year anniversary of the crash is also the fifteen-year anniversary of Born’s prophecy. If we had listened to her back then the worst of the collapse could have been avoided.
October 7th, 2008. London.
Three weeks after the collapse of Lehman, an end of a career could never be as cinematically perfect. “In the time that you have been speaking your share price has fallen thirty-five percent. What is going on?” When Sir Frederick, Fred the Shred, Goodwin – then chief executive of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and the 2002 Forbes businessman of the year – was asked this question at the end of his presentation, the egomaniacal dynamism and the pathological aggression of his namesake was nowhere to be seen. In a couple of days the British government nationalized RBS and threw it £37 billion of tax dollars. £16.5 million of which went to Goodwin’s pension.
Earning his nickname through the mass shredding of jobs and his determination to cut costs, as RBS’s supreme manager Goodwin was the key figure in institutionalizing the culture of a quick buck and the fast deal. His managerial style could be best summarized in his 9:30 am ‘prayer meetings’, where he would review his lieutenants performance and publically humiliate them, as the other executives present looked down and prayed they wouldn’t be next this time. As his fame grew, he correspondingly began to embody the psychological flaws of an egotistic authoritarian personality. “The bullying is all I remember about him,” a former executive recalls. “He was just another angry guy.”
Paul Moore, the risk manager of the bank, not only had the legal duty to make sure his bank was conducting responsible lending, but he was also one of the few in RBS who saw a catastrophe coming. When he tried to persuade his coworkers, one manager told him that behaving ethically would never let him reach his sales target. Another manager simply leaned over the desk and said, “I warn you. Don’t make a fucking enemy out of me.” A month after he took his concerns to the board, he was fired for losing, “the confidence of key executives and nonexecutives.” He broke the omertà of hierarchical culture, rendering himself unemployable in banking as a whole.
March 13th, 2013. Canada.
The bad feeling that Valerie felt on the first day of her run in student politics proved to be more than dead-on. To save what was still left of her soul, forfeiting her position on Election Day was the only way left to do good for her fellow students.
In mentally preparing his new team for his electoral crusade, Scooter, the student union president-to-be, seemed to believe that the best story to convey to the team on day one was his fight for the vegetarian purity of his pizza. When the ever-so-small strip of meat stuck to the tong had seemingly defiled the virgin purity of Scooter’s order, the minimum wage working pizza boy had to be purged for his sacrilege. With an undoubting and likely unfounded can-do-spirit, Scooter bragged of his victory for getting this random employee fired to his team. To the president-to-be, the pizza was worth saving while the pizza boy’s stream of income was not.
Scooter ran unopposed and won with five percent of the electoral vote, lower than the approval ratings of U.S. Congress or of Wall Street. By resigning from this electoral charade through a Facebook open letter, Valerie became the university’s new hero by speaking truth to power. With fairness and defiance, her letter confronted her formal team for its pandemic of groupthink, its near reptilian hostility towards out groups, and the overall lack of democratic sentiments.
Groupthink is what feasted on the mind of Bush when he incinerated Iraq as he lied in the name of democracy and WMDs; and of ‘the Committee to Save the World’ who did the exact opposite by banning any regulations on derivatives. If Facebook likes were to count as votes, she would have won with more than three times the vote of her former team.
Does Summers, the Shred, or Scooter remind you of your boss or your coworker? Do you know anyone near you who suffered the same fate as Born, Moore, or Valerie? If the answer is yes, there’s a good chance your employer would be the next Lehman or AIG, no matter how big or small in size. There’s an even a bigger chance however, that your boss – and for that matter Summers himself – is a psychopath. A characteristic that is partially a product of the moral void we call our society and our educational system. A trait all too visible in the recklessness of the financial sector: before, during, and after the crash. A mentality I could only describe as that of a cold-blooded reptile.
If Your Job Is An Airplane It’s Infested With Snakes
A Georgetown Zoologist once noted that, “the reptile, can break into the mammals nest and eat all the young, and be burrowed into the still-warm and living flank of the mother, before any reaction is evident … reptiles don’t even know that they are lucky, while mammals don’t believe that reptiles can exist.” By the time you noticed that there’s a psychopath in your work place, like the mother who doesn’t know her children are already devoured, it is often too late and the damage is done.
One of the most studied of personality disorders, functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) research indicates that psychopaths are unable to experience basic human emotions and feelings of guilt, remorse, or empathy. The characteristic of a psychopath can be attributed to superficial relations, the manipulation of people and opinions for their usefulness, a powerful sense of self/egomania, not taking responsibility for their actions, impulsivity and thrill seeking behavior, grandiose statements and the lack of long term goals, irresponsibility and the putting of others at risk and pathological lying. It is a mentality of self-absorbance driven by personal gains through any means necessary.
According to an FBI bulletin on corporate psychopaths, the superficial charm and grandiose sense of self of some psychopaths enables them to make favorable, long-lasting first impressions. The captivating stories of their lives and accomplishments can result in instant rapport, allowing them to hide their true remorseless selves.
Moreover, their façade is often seen as the trait of an ideal employee by board members of the workplace. Their superficial charm is often mistaken for charisma, their irresponsibility for risk taking and entrepreneurial spirit, thrill seeking and impulsivity for action orientation and the ability to multitask, empty yet grandiose statements for visionary and strategic thinking and emotional poverty for calmness and the capability to make tough choices. Choices that are no brainers for a psychopathic mind.
In times of chaos in the workplace, the psychopath is able to present him/her-self as the knight in shining armor that will rescue the company, even if the chaos was orchestrated by the corporate psychopath for his-or-her own benefit, often leading to his or her promotion in the corporate hierarchy. Indeed, people like Goodwin, Summers or Lehman CEO Richard Fuld have made their names as tough decision makers with bombastic personalities. 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. It is the creed of our educational system, where the focus of education itself has been redefined in terms of training, career networking and monetary success, rather than critical thinking or self-reflection. It tries to install in us the right sense of priorities, the values of the corporations it has come to serve. It is the physical manifestation of the ethos of unfettered capitalism, making all of us victims of psychopathy according to Dr. Hare.
An Education for Reptiles
In his 1967 essay, Education After Auschwitz, Theodor Adorno wrote that the purpose of education should be to make absolutely sure that another Auschwitz would never happen again. To do this he argued that education must teach the societal play of forces operating beneath the surface of political forms. “This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems,” he says.
If values were not taught more than skills, Adorno believed that another Auschwitz was always possible. Instead, education has done the exact opposite, marginalizing, defunding, or abolishing the humanities and everything deemed financially useless. The teachings of morals and values have been pushed into the realm of the trivial and the irrelevant, as deans, professors and university board members are showered in endowments, consultant fees and corporate paychecks.
Skills and utility are everything in college today. It embodies the words of the industrialist Richard Teller Crane, who declared that no one with, “a taste for literature has the right to be happy,” since, “the only men entitled to happiness … are those who are useful.” It is through this ethos that we have come to produce hoards of amoral system managers. These managers have become the insurance company employees who use pre-existing conditions to deny your treatment and health coverage for the sake of profit. Or the Goldman traders who had no problem in selling AAA rated securities that were privately labeled as POS: Piece of Shit. “The human consequences,” writes Chris Hedges, “never figures in to their balance sheets.”
All education has come to pursue is analytical intelligence, based on ready-made answers to rigid and specialized answers that we regurgitate to be useful. We are socialized to obey and to never challenge the status quo. We are trained to be gullible, to believe the words of intellectual and moral midgets like Summers, Greenspan or Bush – a graduate of Yale and Harvard business school – without question. The unlearning of the mammalian values of compassion, social justice and critical thinking through education is one of the main reasons why we were unable to see how reckless lending and derivatives trading would destroy jobs, livelihoods and our capacity for moral choice. We are taught to fix a broken system, never to challenge it when its operation becomes too odious to take part.
After Valerie’s resignation, team Scooter decided to fight back through Youtube. Like hoards of North Korean news anchors employing the verbal tactics of Mean Girls, they continuously talked about how they were offended, sad and speechless in what they called a personal response of a coordinated smear campaign. They are clearly unaware that the white supremacists of the 1960s were also offended when the coloreds fought for their equal rights, as were the Islamists who firebombed Danish embassies worldwide over a couple of cartoons.
For the student union, the personal seems to be completely interchangeable with the political, as is the case with Putin’s Russia or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Like the tea party republicans, team Scooter lives in a bubble of wishful thinking and misinformation. Not only cutting themselves off from reality but also accelerating their own infantile regression, where a challenge to the structure of student politics has been rendered as a personal offense. Like Goodwin, Summers or Bush, they present themselves as spoiled children who seemed to have never read a book for themselves in their lifetime.
As was the case in Auschwitz, as noted by Noam Chomsky, the inability to self-reflect makes it possible for anyone to be both saints and gas chamber attendants. It is not a question of will or malevolence. But there’s still hope. Like a drilling out a cavity or escaping a cult, the mammalian values of compassion can still be taught. If we fail in doing so, we condemn ourselves to death.
Read a Book, Say You Were Wrong, and Save the World
“Do I know you well enough to call you fellow plunderers?” When Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, was asked to open a speech for a newly convened environmental task force in his company, this would’ve been the last thing he could have imagined himself saying. This was the early days of environmentalism and he was quite hesitant to give the speech at first. When a copy of Paul Harken’s The Ecology of Commerce landed on his desk, he read through it desperate for ideas.
As he immersed himself into the book he came across the phrase, “the death of birth,” which was E.O. Wilson’s expression for species extinction. For Anderson, the phrase acted as, “a point of a spear into my chest, and I read on, and the spear went deeper, and it became an epiphanal experience, a total change of mindset for myself and a change of paradigm.” Through his spiritual journey he came to notice, “the way I’d been running Interface is the way of the plunderer.” It dawned to him that sometime in the future, “people like me will end up in jail.” His mission for sustainability as a renegade industrialist has continued ever since.
The corporate careerists who have the nerve to call themselves academics have butchered creativity and robbed us of the human spirit of literature, philosophy, history and sociology. In Empire of Illusion, Hedges tells us that the true function of literature is, “a tool to enlighten societies about their ills. It was Charles Dickens who directed the attention of middle-class readers to the slums and workhouses of London. It was Honore de Balzac who, through the volumes of his Human Comedy, ripped open the callous heart of France. It was Upton Sinclair who took us into the shanty towns and the stock yards of Chicago in The Jungle.”
What makes us human is our ability to question and think. Without it, innovation and creativity is a joke, making us no better than the Walking Dead. (Although the ‘the Shopping Dead’ would be more accurate I think). We need the metaphorical spear more than ever, for the sake of the survival of our species as well as our economy.
The question over how we let our economy collapse is partially a question of managerial character and conduct. We have blindly trusted the so called wizards and ignored reality to embrace an illusion. Our obsession with the fast buck at work and building the perfect resume at school has allowed us to demonize the compassionate and common sense holding coworker as nay-saying business prevention officers, in a time when we needed their questions the most. Our moral desensitization has made it easier than ever for reptilian psychopaths to infiltrate our surroundings, as we gawk over their façade as role models to be immolated.
What the business world needs the most right now is a leader with high character and compassion, which not only raises the moral at the workplace but also has significant financial returns.
According the research of Fred Kiel, when the CEO is a person of high character the return on assets can rise as high as 8.39 percent, while for low character CEOs – who possess the moral intelligence of a 9th grader – asset retention is a negative 0.57 percent. The compassionate CEO thinks of how his or her decision would impact those who are involved. They are never about the self, salaries or status; they admit their mistakes, communicating trust and respect to the employee.
For Kiel, what drives workforce engagement and talent retention is compassion. The driving engine of innovation in the workforce is forgiveness. And character, how a boss treats others at work, is something that can be taught through habit. It is the only way in which a corporation can escape its lowly stamp of reptilian origins and become a force for good.
In his final days in the public view, Greenspan publically admitted that his worldview itself was fundamentally wrong in a 2009 congressional hearing. All that remained of him was an empty shell of a broken man. He’d been living an illusion for forty years of his prestigious career and dragged down the entire financial system as the illusion fell apart.
So Scooter, in case you’re reading this I need to make things clear. Despite the troubling signs I don’t consider you a full-blown psychopath but rather a victim of the ideological bubble of a broken system. However, you’re victim-hood gives you no right whatsoever to act like a petty egomaniacal bully. All I ask of you is to admit you were wrong and tell Valerie you’re sorry, preferably on Youtube. And read a book for yourself so you don’t become the next Alan Greenspan or Fred the Shred. Personally, I recommend the Empire of Illusion.
Ken Cates has double majored in international relations and political science at the University of Toronto, while currently pursuing a certificate in freelance writing at the schools continuing studies program. Inspired by writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges, Ken writes about religion, politics, ethics, society, and on the little
Share the post "When Humans and Reptiles Collide"