You don't have to believe people are altruistic to be left-wing

The Left is supposed to believe in an essentially benign human nature. Casting a nod to Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the noble savage, there is a strain of left-wing thinking that holds that beneath the perversions inflicted by our capitalistic, racist, patriarchal culture, there exists a basically cooperative, peaceable, altruistic human nature. This stance is traditionally invoked in contrast to that of the Right which sees human nature in an irredeemably pessimistic light.

A recent experiment by University College London which found that people were willing to sacrifice money to reduce the pain of others seems to lend credence to this optimistic view.

In the experiment, participants revealed themselves as ‘hyperaltruistic’ - they would give up a monetary reward in order to spare another person the pain of an electric shock. They were happy to take more electric shocks themselves to earn more money, but they were unwilling to raise the number of shocks if someone else was receiving them.

Inevitably, this experiment has been contrasted with the famous 1961 Stanley Milgram one in which participants inflicted what they were thought were painful, possibly lethal, electric shocks on a stranger, when ordered to do so. ‘Man is a wolf to man’, many have interpreted Milgram as demonstrating, while the recent UCL experiment seems to show an altruistic, sacrificial human nature on display. But actually the two experiments have more in common than you’d think.

They actually both demonstrate altruism at work. While the altruism in the UCL experiment is worn on its sleeve, altruism is also, paradoxically, an integral part of Milgram’s set up. What Milgram put on display was obedience, not sadism. Participants did not like giving the electric shocks (it should be pointed out also that a third of participants refused to give them); they sweated, they shook, they laughed hysterically, but they still gave the shocks because they bridled at disobeying the authority figure telling them to do so. Ironically what held them back from disobeying and not carrying out the shocks, was, in part, a strong desire not to undermine the authority figure. “It is a curious thing that a measure of compassion on the part of the subject, an unwillingness to ‘hurt’ the experimenter’s feelings, are part of those binding forces inhibiting disobedience,” wrote Milgram is his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority. Altruism, in fact.

But what both experiments prove, if that is not too strong a word, is not that the vast majority of people are inherently altruistic, but that they are not psychopaths. In the UCL experiment, “those with subclinical psychopathic traits … were more likely to inflict harm on others as well as themselves for a bigger payout.” When Milgram’s experiment was altered, so that people were told it was perfectly ok if they went up to the highest shock level, only a couple of, psychopathic, participants did so. Most delivered shocks below the level where the person they thought they were shocking would feel any discomfort.

I would predict that were you to conduct the UCL and Milgram experiments back to back with the same participants, you would end up with the same people refusing to shock and then agreeing to shock. Which sounds paradoxical, but isn’t.

What that would show is not that people have two sides to their personality but the realisation that non-psychopathic people, are, under certain circumstances, quite capable of acting psychopathically. Altruism and compassion can easily be subverted, overwhelmed, or channelled in specific directions (such as a desire not to hurt the authority figure’s feelings).

The reason why Milgram’s experiment still resonates is that it shows the overwhelming importance of institutions in shaping human behaviour; the power of institutions is such that it overpowers subjective feelings. In the Milgram designed experiment, cruel people did not shock more than kind people. And obedience, according to Milgram humanity’s fatal flaw, has become, if anything, more entrenched since he wrote Obedience to Authority in the early 1970s.

A political outlook rooted in the belief that people are essentially altruistic and decent is doomed to misunderstand the problem that confronts us. It would be futile to replace all the ‘bad’ people at the top with ‘good’ people. Either the good people would swiftly become bad, or they would be replaced by others who didn’t let ethical scruples get in the way. In order to effect real change, you have to address how the system works. You have to change how institutions behave, not the people that make them up.

Looked at another way, it is not psychopaths who are leading our elite corporate and governmental institutions astray. Apparently, 4% of corporate CEOs are psychopaths, four times the rate in the general population. But that still means that 96% of corporate executives are not psychopaths.

The mistake made by the researchers who have interpreted the UCL findings is that they assume that the subjective, altruistic, feelings laid bare will somehow “guide social decision making”. It is naïve in the extreme to assume that in the ‘democracies’ in which we live, our collective, unadulterated voices will determine social decisions. As things stand, the dominant voices belong to corporations and to governments. Most people are mute, except when they echo governing assumptions. Especially now, the views and interests of the 1% and 0.1% have an overwhelming influence, through think-tanks, the media (which they largely own), and the funding of political parties. And ideas, unlike wealth, trickle down through society.

Moreover, what the UCL experiment shows is that people don’t like hurting others face to face. This finding is reminiscent of the John Nash game theory experiments undertaken on Rand Corporation secretaries in the 1960s. They were expected to betray each other, but instead they cooperated. But with the anonymity of distance, dispensing hurt and hostility becomes much more possible. It is quite common for people to like immigrants they know, but hate immigrants in general or believe it’s a disgrace that the disabled person they know is waiting months for their living allowance, while thinking millions of others are faking it. This is why a media that accurately reports what is happening in the world is so crucial.

While altruism is real, human beings can be many other things as well. But our inner nature is not the problem; the giving away of power to amoral institutions is.

Will the disordered always rule us? Capitalism, anti-capitalism and psychopathy revisited

“Humankind cannot bear too much reality,” said the poet TS Eliot. The shunning of discomforting truths lies at the root of various superficial explanations of financial and economic crisis. The blaming, for instance, of men, irresponsible borrowers or psychopaths all point to a refusal to accept that systemic causes are at work. Because there is a resolute unwillingness to change the economic system, culprits must be found that allow that system, capitalism, to remain uninterrogated.

The psychopath theory of financial crisis is prime illustration of this tendency. As I have written before, the fact that psychopaths are four times more common in senior management positions than the general workforce, is used to account for the destructive outcomes precipitated by the psychopathic institutions these people work for. Corporations – peculiarly selfish, manipulative, lacking in remorse or empathy, obsessed with surface image, irresponsible and grandiose – escape scrutiny because all attention is focused on the psychological flaws of some of the people employed by them.

Thus, with a wave of the ideological wand, the institutional flaws in society are glossed over in favour of the fruitless tail chasing of personal failings. A dearth of emotional empathy among senior executives, however much it can be demonstrated to exist, does not lead banks to create derivatives based on shifting sands of personal debt, it does not prompt corporations to systematically avoid tax and, as this article exposes, it does not spur pharma companies to make small modifications to drug patents in order to extend their life, thus precluding vital advances in treatments by others. In all cases, institutional interests do.

Arrested development

So it was with a distinct feeling of so what-ness that I encountered some admittedly startling statistics in the clinical psychologist Oliver James’ book, They F*** You Up. The book is about how early experiences, rather than genes, have a crucial effect on how we turn out as adults. Unempathetic early care, says James, often leads to personality disorders in later life (psychopathy is an extreme form of personality disorder). While 13% of the general population have a personality disorder, he says, it is present in a majority of high achievers be they in politics, business, the arts or showbusiness. “Early care that lacks empathy,” he writes, “creates an immature adult with arrested development, prone to the reckless and amoral acts of a young child, to the ‘me, me, me' selfishness and inflated grandiosity found in the fantasy life of the toddler.”

While many people with personality disorders do not progress in their careers, a minority, conversely, are extremely successful. “Many of the traits that accompany Disorder are also an advantage in reaching positions of power,” writes James. “Being a chameleon, with the self-monitoring, game playing distance that often accompanies dissociation, has been shown to enhance career success in organisations. If concealed well enough, an omnipotent drive to control others can motivate the industriousness that is so vital to success … ruthlessness is easier if you lack empathy for the emotions of others, as borderline people often do, and being ruthless is usually necessary if you are to reach the very top.”

The question is, does it matter? Does it matter that some senior executives have simply no remorse for the harm they cause while the mentally healthy majority rationalise it as unavoidable or ultimately for the best? It is arguable that the latter situation is far more sinister because to change it involves penetrating a highly resistant ideological carapace. However, I think what James is primarily talking about is the effect internally in the firm of so many calculating, self-obsessed, emotionally retarded managers, rather than their outward impact. And he believes that, though the problem may wax and wane, the personality disordered will always be in positions of power. “There is no obvious solution to this problem,” he writes They F*** You Up. “To run a large business or government department requires extremely hard work, and it may even be that the Disordered are the best equipped to make what others would be a sacrifice of their personal lives.” Ruling elites are always more disordered than the populations they rule over, he claims.

Ultimately, I do think the ubiquity of the disordered at the summit of society does matter, though not in ways that immediately spring to mind. There are implications here for oppositional, anti-capitalist movements.

Stalin was a psychopath

The first point to note is that the problem of the successful psychopath or personality disordered manager is not just prevalent in capitalist organisations. There is an unmistakable alignment between the aims of capitalist corporations – destroying the competition and achieving monopoly status – and the personal aims of ambitious senior managers, beating rivals and contributing to the success of the corporations, oblivious the externalities and costs to others. But other types of organisation are not immune. Speak to the employees of government departments, charities, universities, schools or quangos and you will soon realise that senior managers making other people’s lives a misery is not a malaise confined to commercial organisations. Money is not the only motivation, power is as well, and you can find power in definitely non-capitalist organisations such as,  historically speaking, ruling Communist Parties (Stalin is widely considered to have been a psychopath) or contemporary public sector institutions.

It is unquestionably true that the public sector has mimicked the private sector in the last 30 years. The thumbprints of right-wing economists such as Milton Friedman and James Buchanan are all over the Anglo-American public sector, evident in a disdain for the public service ethos, ubiquitous outsourcing and an obsession with measurement and targets, as proxies for growth or sales. But even a public sector cleansed of all capitalist imitations would not be rid of hierarchy or unaccountable management power.

And society itself has been psychologically remoulded. In a later book, Office Politics, James says the disordered traits of the ruthless, the calculating, the remorse-less and the narcissistic at the top of society in the US and Britain “have spread widely through those populations”. According to Professor Jean Twenge, who seems to have made a career out of tracking psychological traits over time, narcissism has dramatically increased in the US since the late 1970s. By 2006, two-thirds of American college students scored above what had been the average narcissism score in 1982.  Narcissistic people tend to have insecure high self-esteem, to be insensitive to others and to have a preoccupation with their own success. In the 1970s, the social ecologist Murray Bookchin (more of whom soon) pioneered the concept of the “market society”, the idea that the amoral, selfish values of capitalism were now longer confined to the economy but had burrowed deep into society itself. In vogue philosophers like Michael Sandel are belatedly discovering exactly the same concept and it is undeniable that western societies are more “marketized” than they were thirty years ago. The old left-wing dictum, change the institutions and you will change human nature, still holds, but the question now arises, who exactly is going to change the institutions?

What’s the cure?

If there is an “antidote” to the personality disordered executive or politician it seems to be the same as the cure for capitalism – radical democratisation. Psychopathy or personality disorder thrives in hierarchical organisations. “Triadic [personality disordered] behaviour flourishes where ruthless, devious selfishness is advantageous and where an individual is very concerned to gain power, resources or status,” writes James. Bastions of power in corporations that offer the opportunity to rule over subordinates, or niches in governments that permit the manipulation of public opinion would both be closed by radical democratisation. I have no evidence to demonstrate this, but I would hazard a very strong guess that personality disorder among managers in the Mondragon federation of co-operatives in the Basque country in Spain, where all managers are elected by annual assemblies of workers, is very much lower than in capitalist corporations. “At work there is potential for people to find a nucleus of friendships and to feel valued,” write Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level. “This potential is usually undermined by the hierarchical stratification of people into various gradations of order-givers and order-takers, which ensure that employees act not as a community, but as property, brought together and used to earn a return other people’s capital.”

It is no accident that contemporary oppositional movement such as Occupy and the 15m movement in Spain  endeavour to be leaderless movements, based on direct democracy, denying representatives the niches to dominate others. They embody a conception of politics which rejects the strange Janus-faced character of modern representative government. The money-saturated weakness of mainstream parties which sees them all cling like limpets to a failed consensus, allied to an adversarial practice in which, come election time, each faction tries to annihilate the other through negative campaigning and the manipulation of public opinion.

The thought of Bookchin, which pre-figures even if it doesn’t directly influence, Occupy and the Indignatos, comes from a completely different place. Embodied in Bookchin’s concept of dissensus, disagreement is not something to be frightened of or eradicated, but to be positively encouraged as a consequence of genuine, face to face political participation. Echoing the philosopher Hannah Arendt, he thought political freedom was a fraud without participation in government.  He believed that the effect of the “market society” he identified could be counteracted by new institutions, face to face assemblies of the population. In contrast to the eminently selfish institutions of capitalism, these would be selfless institutions, aiming to foster capabilities in their participants that were denied or squashed in the world outside.

But there is a problem here. These new democratic institutions, shorn of the pathologies of representative government or corporations, inevitably have another role – that of challenging for, and achieving, economic and political power. They would first espouse a minimum programme of reforms but later a maximum programme of forming a “dual power” to challenge and ultimately replace representative political institutions and capitalist corporations. We are plainly nowhere near that situation at present, but the question, I think, should be put. Would the degree of centralisation inherent in enabling these horizontal organisations to challenge hierarchical power, provide a breeding ground for exactly the psychological pathologies James speaks about? The history of the Left is replete with examples, from Lenin to Julian Assange, of charismatic individuals dominating the institutions they helped to create, and of radically democratic institutions, from the French revolutionary sections to the soviets of 1917, being perverted or destroyed to buttress hideous dictatorships. I’m not arguing for a second this happened for immutable psychological, rather than ideological, reasons, but it indisputable that the modern Left has seldom managed to oppose the status quo without lapsing into cliques and factions irrelevant to the mass of people and frequently speaking a different language. If the Left does succeed, in the coming decades, in becoming much more popular will it not be hampered by similar psychological flaws as the society from which it emerges?

Bookchin, in his later years, said it was unavoidable that vanguards, minorities of people with more knowledge and commitment, would come into existence. “The main problem of political organization is how to institutionalise the relations between those who know more and those who know less,” he argued, “and to do so in such as way that the more knowledgeable leaders – and leaders do exist even in confederal movements! – do not turn into bureaucrats or authoritarians.” This strikes me as a political tightrope from which it is easy to slip. It’s not hard to see why many oppositional movements eschew taking power in favour of activism, but to take that position is to indirectly justify current power arrangements from which you are always trying to extract concessions.

Faraway so close

This has maybe strayed from the original point of the article. What I believe should never happen is that, faced with the insights of people like Oliver James that the powerful are frequently disordered, leftists lapse into psychological explanations for systemic problems. James himself illustrates the flaws in this approach. Of all developed nations, he says, Japan is the least disordered. An attention to early infant care, a sense of connectedness and order, mean that there are far fewer psychopaths or narcissists in Japan compared to the US and Britain. Culturally, Japan is very different.

But the economic problems of Japan and the US and Britain are remarkably similar. All three nations suffer from chronic corporate and personal debt and cannot escape from economic stagnation. Japan pioneered Quantitative Easing, a policy which has now become the lynchpin of economic policy in the US and UK, and which has become more fervently practiced in Japan after earlier bouts of it failed. This similarity indicates that all three countries are in the grip of an economic system, capitalism, whose characteristics have absolutely nothing to do with national culture or levels of personality disorder. It’s still the system, stupid.

You don't have to be a psychopath to work here but it helps. Does Darth Vader run Goldman Sachs?

“Know the power of the dark side” says Darth Vader to Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back. But we haven’t, it seems, taken Darth’s wise, if husky, counsel to heart. According to management researchers we are naively unaware of the dark’s malign and boundless influence. “Dark leadership” they claim, was the force behind the global financial crisis.

Once great companies were brought to their knees by “impostors” acting as their leaders. Dark, dysfunctional leadership has destroyed firms with historic reputations. Employees have lost their livelihoods, shareholders their investments and, perhaps most troubling of all, capitalism has lost some of its credibility.

Corporate psychopaths, says Clive Boddy, a Professor at Nottingham Trent University, are one type of dark manager. In a paper for the Journal of Business Ethics entitled “The Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis” Boddy says corporate psychopaths “probably” or “largely” caused the global financial meltdown.

Commentators, says Boddy, no longer accept that all managers work selflessly for the benefit of the organisations that employ them. Corporate psychopaths are an example of this selfish, destructive manager.

Psychopaths are the one per cent of people who completely lack a conscience. They are charming but ruthless and entirely out for themselves. As a result, they are a menace to the companies they work for and society as a whole.

These psychopaths rose to senior positions within financial corporations where they were able to influence the moral climate of the organisations that employed them, Boddy claims. They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single-minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self-aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.”

How did these monsters manage to get so powerful? Well, before the 1980s, companies were more stable and slow to change, Boddy writes. Corporate psychopaths were more noticeable as “undesirable managers” and their “selfish, egotistical personalities” didn’t get them very far. But then the corporate environment became more dynamic and chaotic and corporate psychopaths made their way to the top of organisations which they were able to destroy from within.

Bollocks

There’s one slight flaw in this theory. It’s complete bollocks. Far from these “undesirable managers” rising invisibly through the corporate hierarchy until they reached the corner offices of financial behemoths, they were eminently desirable and desired. Brian Basham, “veteran City PR man, entrepreneur and journalist”, writes approvingly of Boddy’s corporate psychopath theory for the UK Independent newspaper. But mid-way through the article Basham relates a conversation he had with a “senior UK investment banker” about the attributes of successful banksters. The senior investment banker makes a confession:

“At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”

“Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits,” writes Basham.

This major investment bank, for some mad reason, preferred the characteristics of psychopaths to the “old fashioned concept of noblesse oblige” equality or fairness.

Never-ending growth

But when Basham tries to locate the source of the malaise he, too, drifts swiftly into fairy land. He thinks the financial sector’s search for “never-ending growth” is to blame.

I hate to the interrupt the catharsis of hating heartless bankers but the search for never-ending growth is universal in capitalist societies and not restricted to the intangible, abracadabra money-creating world of finance. Every week newspapers fret over whether economic activity in the services or manufacturing sector is above 50 per cent (that means growth hurray!) or below 50 per cent, which means contraction (we’re all doomed!). Governments manically chase the willow the wisp of growth. Without growth, in this society, we’d live in a permanently depressed economy, with the blights of high unemployment, poverty and homelessness for company. Without growth, in technical terms, you’re screwed.

Growth is, to use a word that is coming back into fashion, systemic and the financial sector, like every other sector of the economy, hasn’t stopped pursuing it, even if it has stopped achieving it.

Greggs the Bakers, to take one example, is not a bank - you can’t get much more tangible than a sausage roll - but it, too, has a never-ending search for growth and has been very successful in achieving it. It now has more high street shops in Britain than McDonalds. The way companies, including but not only banks, operate, is to secure and augment market share, destroy the competition, make as much money as they can and achieve as close to monopoly status as possible. In other words, grow.

Rip out their hearts

Basham has seen Dick Fuld, former CEO of Lehman Brothers on video, snarling that he wanted to rip out his competitors’ hearts and eat them before they died. It’s terrifying, he says. But it’s also not unique. I personally can attest to one manager in a non-financial company who wanted to render a competitor so poor they couldn’t even afford shoes. Some people do take the injunction to destroy the competition rather too literally. But they aren’t all psychopaths. They are all senior managers in capitalist firms, however.

Here is Dick Fuld in action (note the applause after he says he wants to rip his competitors’ hearts out)

Basham’s neat separation of good and bad capitalism, like Ed Miliband’s emphasis on predatory capitalism, ignores the allure of finance in the first place. It wasn’t just the likes of Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup that were, to use a technical economic term, “at it”. Manufacturing companies like Ford and General Electric diversified massively into finance for the rather prosaic reason that they could make far more money out of lending to people than through their core business of making cars, light bulbs or fridges. “Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company’s profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines,” says a New York Times article.

 The dominance of finance is not an aberration, but a simple recognition of where the biggest profits can be made.

Basham, in approving of the corporate psychopath theory says that, in unregulated times, the least-principled rise to the top. But how, prey, did the times get so unregulated? Through continuous and expensive lobbying by financial corporations and banks, that’s how. The US Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 which legalized speculation in commodities and derivatives like credit default swaps, didn’t happen all by itself.

Can Basham name a single corporate CEO, psychopathic or non-psychopathic, who lobbies for more regulation? That might as well have been a rhetorical question.

Psychopaths didn’t lobby for financial deregulation anymore than they employed themselves in investment banks.

Functional, all too functional

Deregulation and the ensuing crisis, scandals and bankruptcies did not come about because of bad people or dysfunctional leadership. Leadership was all too functional. In the words of American economist, Richard Wolff: “Capitalism systematically organizes its key institutions of production – the corporations – in such a way that their boards of directors, in properly performing their assigned tasks, produce crises, then undermine anti-crisis reforms, and thereby reproduce those crises.”

It’s all the difference the world. To use an analogy, Manchester United is not a football club because Manchester United Plc employs people who are good at football anymore than Lehman Brothers acted psychopathically because psychopaths wheedled their way into leadership positions at the firm. Manchester United is designed and constituted to be a football club so it seeks to recruit people who can tackle, catch left-wing crosses swinging in the wind, or are lethal from 12 yards. Investment banks seek psychopaths for the same reason that Manchester United seeks young men who can score 30 goals a season.

It isn’t complicated and the fact that intelligent people can’t see it must mean there is a reason for their willful blindness. There is a taboo at work here. As Jack Nicholson once said, “The truth? You can’t handle the truth.”

I don’t want to burst Boddy’s carefully constructed career bubble (actually that’s a lie) but it is quite possible to work selflessly for the benefit of the company that employs you and for that company to behave selfishly, psychopathically even. The aforementioned General Electric has a giant tax department with the sole purpose of avoiding tax. GE actually received a tax benefit in the US of $3.2 billion in 2010. “We have a responsibility to shareholders to legally minimize our costs,” explains a GE spokeswoman (the second, unspoken part of the sentence is “everyone else can get f*****”). That’s an institutional reason for selfishness. No psychopaths needed. Fairness and noblesse oblige are also conspicuous by their absence.

But the expectation that managers should be selfless is, in any case, mystifying. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest,” said Adam Smith. That sentence has become one of the foundations of market economics. Our own personal selfishness, in other words, leads to an overall benefit to society. Self-aggrandizement and the desire for self-enrichment are expected, desired even, in capitalism. But now, according to Boddy, those same selfish qualities have become the reason for disaster. I must have missed something.

Friedrich Hayek, the free marketeer who had such an influence on Margaret Thatcher, said society would prosper if everyone was motivated by personal gain. Now we are told by capitalist ideologues like Boddy that the problem is too much selfishness. You have to admire the flexibility.

The psychopath theory of the financial crisis needs further development and research, says Boddy. And like investment banks during the boom, there is immense potential for expansion. Why not apply the theory to 9/11 for example? The reason Al-Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center was because it was run by psychopaths. What we need is a new Al-Qaeda with leaders committed to fairness and equality. If that sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is.

Surely the role of psychopaths in causing the Second World War has been underplayed? The National Socialist German Workers’ Party must have been honeycombed with psychopaths. Unfortunately for the theory, Reinhard Heydrich, the man who conceived and planned the Final Solution, was partial to the very non-psychopathic activity of playing Beethoven string quartets with friends in his spare time.

The truth is far more disturbing. With all due love and respect to the Occupy Movement, it isn’t the one per cent of psychopaths that you need to worry about, but the other 99 per cent.

The 99 per cent

The Milgram Experiment, which has been examined in this blog, explains why attributing outcomes no-one likes to psychopaths is a monumental cop-out. In the experiment, first conducted 50 years ago, members of the public were instructed to give electric shocks to a “learner” if he got memory testing questions wrong. No real shocks were actually delivered, the “learner” was acting, but the participants thought they were really hurting someone. One or two per cent of people relished giving the shocks – up to 450 volts - and inflicting pain. They were real sadists, maybe psychopaths.

 The vast majority – around 70 per cent of participants – didn’t like what they were doing but went on dutifully giving electric shocks on instruction, even passed the point they thought the learner might be dead. They took no pleasure in delivering the shocks - they shook, sweated, they even laughed hysterically at themselves – but they obeyed, and did it anyway.

The motives of the sadists/psychopaths and the ordinary folk were completely different. But their actions were the same.

As the creator of the experiment, Stanley Milgram, said, subjective feelings were irrelevant. When a person merges their unique personality into an organisation, they become a mere vessel, and are no longer an autonomous person. “It is the essence of obedience that the action carried out does not correspond to the motives of the actor,” he concluded, “but is initiated in the motive system of those higher up in the social hierarchy.”

In case of the investment bank that used psychometric testing to find psychopaths because they were so suited to senior finance roles, non-psychopaths would have had to mimic their behaviour or find somewhere else to work. Their own motives and personalities were irrelevant.

In the 18^th century, the French philosopher Montesquieu said, “First men make institutions but afterwards institutions make men”. It is a simple piece of wisdom. If we want real change we had better change institutions because changing people is a road to nowhere.

On one point, however, Boddy is correct, if for the wrong reasons. He says that if the corporate psychopaths theory of the financial crisis is accurate, “we are now far from the end of the crisis. Indeed, it is only the end of the beginning.” The second part is true.

Here is a more rational view of the corporate psychopath (it's not about individuals)

Interlude: All of them Witches, psychopaths in high places

Proof, if it were needed, that the lessons of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment have not been heeded comes from an article in the UK Guardian on Saturday – an excerpt from a new book by Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test.

In the article, Ronson talks to Robert Hare, FBI consultant on psychopaths and author of the 20 item psychopath checklist:

“Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Hare. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

Ronson then goes off to interview an American corporate CEO, wondering if he is a psychopath.

Now Hare also featured in the book and movie, The Corporation.  He applied the psychopath checklist to the behaviour of corporations and found a remarkable match-up – superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, lack of empathy, irresponsibility, short-term goals – etc

But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t blame individual psychopaths in high places for “ruining the economy” (presumably he means the financial crisis) and simultaneously say that entities like corporations behave psychopathically. And thus ruin economies.

It may well be that there are an unusual number of psychopaths at the top of corporations. There might be lots of executives who get a kick out of firing workers or destroying rival companies. But it also doesn’t matter. Because there are also lots of non-psychopathic individuals at the top of corporations who don’t enjoy firing workers, but end up doing it anyway.

As The Corporation says, most corporate executives lead morally compartmentalized lives. “The people who run corporations are, for the most part, good people, moral people. They are mothers and fathers, lovers and friends, and upstanding citizens in their communities, and they often have good and sometimes even idealistic intentions.” They don’t, however, change “the corporation’s fundamental institutional nature: its unblinking commitment to its own self-interest”.

There is a parallel in Milgram’s experiment (see previous article). A few people who took part were clearly sadists. They enjoyed giving what they thought were electric shocks and gleefully went on to the end of the board. But most people who gave 450 volt electric shocks were not sadists and took no pleasure in what they did. But they did it just the same. In this context, and those of corporations, feelings don’t matter, actions do. As Milgram said: “Subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed into action”.

If we concluded that the top levels of corporations and governments were honeycombed with psychopaths we could, in theory, try to hunt them all down and replace them with better, well-balanced people. But it would be futile. The well-balanced people would either not last five minutes, or else would do what the institutions required them to do.

 In the words of economist Richard Wolffe, "Capitalism systematically organises its key institutions of production - the corporations - in such a way that their boards of directors, in properly performing their assigned tasks, produces crises, then undermine anti-crisis reforms, and thereby reproduce those crises."
 
"Hence," he says, "attention is slowly shifting to questioning the one aspect of capitalism that was never effectively challenged, let alone changed, across the last century and more: the internal organization of corporations."

Psychopaths are not required for economies to be ruined.

The debate over whether the psychopath maketh the corporation or the corporation maketh the psychopath might appear an enjoyable down the pub, chicken and egg question. But it’s more than that. Depending on the answer, we could take a significant step to understanding the state we’re in, or retreat further into the comforting delusions of mind-numbing conservatism.