By Cliff Montgomery – Mar. 23rd, 2012
“[The upper class behaves like a person who beats] the neighbors’ expensive cars with a baseball bat, with the sole objective of owning the most beautiful car in the neighborhood.”
Business Insider
The upper class of a nation – which the Occupation movement famously describes as “the 1%” – are more likely to lie in negotiations, ignore driving laws, cheat to better their odds when competing for a prize, take candy from a child and endorse unethical actions at work, stated a survey released in February by the National Academy of Sciences.
And this is not the only recent report to document the actual mindset of our corporate overlords.
“The University in St. Gallen, Switzerland…has come out with a study that compares traders with psychopaths,” declared Business Insider last September.
“The surprising result was that not only do traders act like psychos, they’re worse,” continued Business Insider.
The St. Gallen study directly compared the observed behavior of a control group made up of 27 “normal” individuals with a “study of 24 psychopaths in German high-security hospitals,” states the news source.
The ‘normal people’ referred to are financial traders–“stock guys, FX/commodities traders and derivative types,” according to Business Insider.
The experts were shocked to discover that “the stock market professionals [revealed]…a penchant for immense destruction.”
To tell it flatly, “the performance of the 27 dealers is even worse than the psychopaths,” stated Business Insider.
The business news source also reminded its readers of those qualities which combine to form “a textbook definition of a psycho:
- Unreliability, disregard for obligations, no sense of responsibility.
- Considerable superficial charm, verbal facility and average or above average intelligence.
- Inexplicable impulsiveness.
- Poor judgment and failure to learn from experience.
- Untruthfulness and insincerity.
- Anti-social behavior.
- General poverty of deep and lasting emotions.
- Obsession over self-perceived shortcomings
- Fantastic and objectionable behavior, after drinking and sometimes even when not drinking—vulgarity, rudeness, quick mood shifts, pranks.
- Lack of any true insight, inability to see oneself as others do.
- An impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated sex life.
Wait, it gets even better.
“In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses,” according to The London Guardian.
“They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital,” which incarcerates “people who have been convicted of serious crimes.”
“On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses’ scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact,” the paper continued, “on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.”
“The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for,” stated the Guardian.
“Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people,” added the newspaper. “Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience” also are sure to help a social climber’s prospects at many corporations.
“This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths,” cautioned the paper. But “it is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills.”
“As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities,” declared the Guardian, “the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down.”
Thus top executives now behave like a new aristocracy, squeezing from their peasants – which constitute the overwhelming majority of human beings – fortunes which far exceed the aristocrats’ actual contribution to the labor process.
In fact, the aristocrats’ princely fees sometimes bankrupt the very businesses they claim to serve. But “they are no more deserving of the share of wealth they’ve captured than oil sheikhs,” stated the Guardian.
“The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the [corporate] press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents,” continued the newspaper.
The rich often describe themselves as ‘wealth creators’. In fact, “they have preyed on the earth’s natural wealth and their workers’ labor and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet,” declared the paper.
And of course, a few years ago the bosses’ mass psychopathology nearly ruined the world economy. It certainly ruined many of us.
The self-proclaimed ‘wealth creators’ of neo-conservative mythology “are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen,” stated the Guardian.
We at The American Spark completely agree.
