Corporations are best understood as externalising machines that perpetuate a landscape of psychopathic institutions that are exclusively concerned with perception management. As life on this planet is being liquidated, more and more humans are engaging in collaborative niche construction, retreating into human scale cracks within the dying mono-cult.
Externalising machines
The 20 year old documentary The Corporation, based on first hand experience reports and interviews with corporate CEOs, investors, and bankers, provides an excellent overview into how the ideology of capital powers corporations, linking the core of the logic of capital to the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
Corporations are best understood as externalising machines that perpetuate a landscape of psychopathic institutions in which humans are forced into abstract cookie cutter roles prescribed by the global mono-cult of neoliberal economics, and are no longer understood as collaborative biological living beings that form highly adaptive human scale cultural organisms that are integral parts of the planetary ecosystem.
The social ecology created by corporations shapes and influences the actions of
The war against life
Cancerous growth of corporate externalising machines has been at the core of colonialism, and over the last century, has expanded into all corners of the living planet.
This is not about “climate change”; we agree with the judge on that. It is about murder. At scale. Forever. And that is a bad thing, a very bad thing, an evil thing. When the United Nations recently said we have two years to save the world, that they are not being “melodramatic,” that economies will be “devastated,” they mean it. Not in some distant future. In the next 10 to 20 years, that’s what 1,000 public statements have said. It’s what 10,000 peer-reviewed papers have said. It’s coming. It is what it is. At some point, you’ll be stepping over body parts on the way to work, going “well, you know.”
– Roger Hallam
Life on this planet is being liquidated. Corporations are engaged in a war against biological life.
In stark contrast to the narratives of all the corporate feel-good PR, the ecological destruction of externalisation machines is growing, rapidly, resulting in extinction rates that are several thousand times higher than the background extinction rate over the last several million years.
This state of affairs is not helped by governments that have not only bought into the mono-cult of neoliberal economics, but that also find themselves in an institutional landscape that completely lacks any concept of a scale aware precautionary principle, such that effective regulation is never able to catch up with the speed at which corporate externalisation machines are liquidating the living planet.
In industrialised societies governments find themselves in the role of pretending to be “in control”. The more stratified societies become, the more the state religion of the belief in the God of the Invisible Hand allows the desires of capital rather than the needs of communities to shape policies. The example below refers to the distribution of political party donations in Aotearoa .
Technology corporations and management consultants gladly assist governments in the pretend game of “managing the economy”. Since the Cold War empires have increasingly shifted their focus from overt conventional war to economic warfare and psychological warfare.
Cultural and ecological cracks in the dying mono-cult
On the margins of society, AutCollab participatory research is showing very high levels of cognitive dissonance.
The extent to which the toxic cultural environment of the global mono-cult has created a hypercompetitive atmosphere in which institutions are almost exclusively concerned with perception management, is revealed in the lived experiences of intersectionally marginalised people:
Are you able to identify the biggest source of cognitive dissonance in your life? If so, what is it?
Having to work for corporations when I hate everything about them.
The relative privileges i have compared to so many people, even just within the trans community (and among neurodivergent folks), which allow me to diminish the struggles i do face. The fact i just continue to keep going day by day, literally having to shove down how overwhelmingly sad i feel that so many people are in dire situations without their basic needs and exist in warzones and witness so much horror and we are all expected to be ‘business as usual’, the ‘world doesn’t stop’ just because of the genocide of groups of people. I extend that sadness to nonhuman animals as well, and the dissonance i have to erect as the signs of animals’ lives being diminished as insignificant are always present, as are visual reminders on a constant basis (ads, restaurant overflow) of the sheer amount of torture and death undergone to both humans and nonhuman animals every single day in order for ‘convenience’ and a semblance of ‘normalcy’ in operation. these signs, from fast food chains being everywhere, to billboards, streaming ads and even convenience store displays, makes an inescapable pit of mental anguish—we hide the human suffering of the society and world around us through propaganda campaigns and literally pushing those of us who suffer the most out of sight and punish them if they do exist so publicly. but the window-dressings of animal products merely hide the conditions of their existence—the sheer amount of death is not a concern… i do my best by being vegan and avoiding products that contribute to the horror of the industry, but… The former dissonance, the dissonance of the suffering of fellow humans across the world, is a concerted effort by power to set up the dissonance. The latter is one i have to self-erect or i will fall apart over time. So i gave it a bit more space to fill the air. Both are heavy burdens, and trying to discuss how heavy it all is is met with a level of hostility for caring too much, being too bleeding heart or being told i cannot possibly have the capacity to actually care about so many beings suffering in the world. So it has that as an added weight. I want to add: i am considered low support needed, tho i am in process for assessment for autism right now. I work a full time job and rent, i have a little cat, who i feed the best quality wet cat food (meat; cats are obligatory carnivores) i can so that the sacrifice for that meat lends to the best health. I can drive. otoh, i have not taken a proper shower since 2017 and sponge-bathe uncommonly; i do make sure my clothing is clean, which goes a long way. it is really hard for me to do basic tasks on routine. still, it is hard for me to be genuine and admit that i struggle, that i am disabled in some ways and that i need help in others. i think in part it is because of how much suffering we see around us and in media—almost as if by design, with an economic system that hinges upon ‘well, you’re ok, because at least you aren’t in that situation’ in the backs of everyone’s minds to keep people on the routine of ‘normal life’ as if everything is fine. And of course, making us compete with resources to seek aid and help. So we can all just contribute to and get chewed up and spat out of the machinery, while people across the world have their plights scapegoated to show how lucky we are despite complaining so much. (Free Palestine)
Planning for retirement and congratulating people for having kids and pretending the future is fine while the planet is quickly roasting to death.
I work as a professional staff member at a university and academic staff expect to be treated as gods, yet are blind to the caste system the work in. As well as that, their critical thinking skills are sadly lacking in areas that do not involve academic areas of research and yet they insist all decisions are made by academic staff. Universities are a remarkably dysfunctional kind of organisation.
Asking for help from strangers or authority figures.
Behaviourism.
The ethical quandary of empire and its pervasive programming and my conflicting need for others and need for solitude.
Probably me and people with different political beliefs also within some of my relationships.
Since money is disconnected from the real value of many physical quantities and services, and this is deliberate, I should feel much richer than I am financially. But I don’t. Fortunately, I’ve been able to live on little money for part of my life and educate myself at the same time. However, both the competition for money and fame makes me sick. Plus, the domino effect of it all is that you have to prove you have enough knowledge to belong to this pyramid scam, by spending time and resources to get a higher level (a degree). If you learn outside the system, even if you excel, it doesn’t “count”.
Pressures of society, partner etc. To work and parent and be in control.
Everyone expecting you to be ok and cope when you are not ok and really struggling to cope with most aspects of life.
The biggest source of cognitive dissonance for me is valuing social justice, compassion and equality but being paralysed by my disabilities, anxiety and inability to help sufficiently that I end up not doing anything.
The disconnect between what people say and do: I don’t know if neurotypical people know how much their actions belie their words.
Living under capitalism and neo fascism as a queer, disabled, autistic person. I frequently have to weigh my own needs, desires, and abilities against the material realities of a society that doesn’t value me.
The fact that I’m supposed to be able to fake being happy or to be able to fake liking someone. Other people seem to consider this normal and easy. For me, it is impossible.
Healing from the religious trauma of the global mono-cult
More and more humans are engaging in collaborative niche construction to retreat into healthier human scale cultural and ecological cracks within the mono-cult.
Becoming conscious of human cognitive and emotional limits, and recognising that these limits are just as real, immutable, and relevant for our survival as the laws of physics may allow us to avoid the fate of earlier civilisations, and to embark on a path of radical energy descent.
The evolving web of relationships, mutual aid, and peer support initiatives on the margins of society is best understood in terms of emergent Ecologies of Care beyond the human. The journey towards a healthier relationship with the ecologies which we are part of starts with the most powerful tool at our disposal, the introduction and consistent use of new language and new semantics.
A production/consumption paradigm for what an economy is is a guarantee for ultimately destroying the planet and each other. Even when you talk about degrowth, if you’re working within that paradigm, you’re essentially doomed. We need to break away from that paradigm entirely. Care and freedom on the other hand are things you can increase as much as you like without damaging anything. So we need to think: what are ways that we need to care for each other that will make each other more free? And who’re the people who are providing that care? And how can they be compensated themselves with greater freedom? To do that we need to like, actually scrap almost all of the discipline of economics as it currently exists.
We’re actually just starting to think about this. Economics as it currently exists is based on assumptions of human nature that we now know to be wrong. There have been actual empirical tests of the basic sort of fundamental assumptions of the maximizing individual that economic theory is based on, and it turns out that they’re not true. It tells you something about the role of economics that this has had almost no effect on economic teaching whatsoever. They don’t really care that it’s not true.
But one of the things that we have discovered, which is quite interesting, is that human beings have a psychological need to be cared for, but they have an even greater psychological need to care for others, or to care for something. If you don’t have that you basically fall apart. It’s why old people get dogs. We don’t just care for each other because we need to maintain each other’s lives and freedoms, but our own psychological happiness is based on being able to care for something or someone.
– David Graeber, From Managerial Feudalism to the Revolt of the Caring Classes, 2019
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16 Responses
The fnaf series has explored various sub-genres of horror, from psychological to jump scares.
Hi Khag.
I remember getting into FIVE NIGHTS AT FREDDY’s in 2018 or 2019.
And yes it would explore all kinds of ecological horror and corporate horror.
Because the protagonists are animatronics – and they are based in this Chuckie Cheese environment
[which is technically a small business and NOT a public or a government department].
A lot of alienation is captured in this light.
Jorn:
I know a lot of people in the survey skipped the “Marketing to a government department” and “Helping a corporate with overtime” questions.
And I am remembering THE CORPORATION when it was first disseminated in early 2005.
Wouldn’t corporations be under the anti-social personality disorder umbrella?
[the fifth edition of the DSM has changed the criteria and norms for personality-based diagnostics quite a lot]
“Psychopathy” is more of a “people’s category” [as is the other one – sociopathy].
Thanks for the point about healing from religious trauma of the global monocult.
[DL Mayfield and Christine Greenwald both write very specifically and personally about religious trauma from their own professional perspectives and DL is writing another book with their partner Krispin – STRONGWILLED].
Some New Zealand students introduced me to the “planetary boundary” concept in the 2010s.
Background extinction rate * externalised extinction rate =
Sarah Wilson is writing a book called COLLAPSE.
Hallam – and the thousand public statements.
And the dysfunctionality of the universities and the empires.
You are correct that “psychopathy” is not in the DSM. The Corporation includes interview segments with Robert D Hare, who developed a psychopathy checklist. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_Checklist:
“Among laypersons and professionals, there is confusion about the meanings and differences between psychopathy, sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), and the ICD-10 diagnosis, dissocial personality disorder.[32] Hare takes the stance that psychopathy as a syndrome should be considered distinct from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV’s antisocial personality disorder construct,[33] although the DSM states ASPD has been referred to as or includes the disorder of psychopathy.[34] Although the diagnosis of ASPD covers two to three times as many prisoners than the diagnosis of psychopathy, Hare believes the PCL-R is better able to predict future criminality, violence, and recidivism than a diagnosis of ASPD.”
It is interesting to consider that the cookie cutter roles such as corporate CEO, bankers, fund managers, etc. have co-evolved with the dominant economic ideology. Given that psychopathic institutions have shaped these cookie cutter roles, it is unsurprising that these roles primarily attract people with corresponding profiles. People without strong psychopathic traits who find themselves in these roles will be pushed towards adopting such traits, and as a result will either experience extreme levels of cognitive dissonance and become addicted to the social status/powers of their role, or will quickly leave these roles.
The experience of the “institutionalised” inmates, especially those at the bottom of the pyramid scheme who have been coerced into the scheme to make economic ends meet, is comparable to religious trauma. Some institutions are worse than others, but as becomes apparent from the survey responses, many Autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and marginalised people are traumatised by the experience.
Being aware of the strong psychopathic tendencies of corporations is essential for understanding the limits of DEI “perception management” initiatives.
Yes, Jorn:
If DEI worked to an extent which kept you less aware of this type of behaviour and action – you would be vulnerable and in danger.
And DEI would not be doing its job and indeed would be undermining and eating itself.
Someone who does DEI right is – especially when it comes to intersectionality – well, that came from the tip of my tongue.
Now I have no great love of Hare [or really of just about anyone who makes a checklist and then wishes to sell it to me and my friends and people]
and though I do respect his insistence that Trait Psychopathy should be distinct from State Psychopathy [for lack of better words].
[though that may muddy the waters].
One thing that Hare and others developed was the idea of the versatile criminal.
And also the point about these levels of cognitive dissonance.
If you are not receiving much purpose or value outside your work – it would be very easy to become “addicted” to this form of social status and role powers [and especially again if you are feeling powerless].
The trauma was indeed evident.
When I was young ASPD covered some 4 in 100 [3 men; 1 woman].
[and I knew a lot of this from serial bullying and the profiles the late Tim Field would create].
Your comment about the obsession with checklists, productivity, and measurements in our society reminds me of one of David Graeber’s talks about BS jobs and the revolt of the caring classes, in which he comments on the religious nature of the modern discipline of economics and also on the cognitive dissonance people experience when hierarchical structures of power are institutionalised. I have added a fitting quote to the bottom of the article 🙂
There’s a continuance of polluting the natural environment with a business as usual attitude. Societally, we still discharge out of elevated exhaust pipes, smoke stacks and, quite consequentially, from sky-high jet engines like it’s all absorbed into the natural environment without repercussion.
Out of sight, out of mind!
Also, increasingly problematic is the very large and growing populace who are too overworked, worried and even angry about food and housing unaffordability for themselves or their family — all while on insufficient income — to criticize the fossil fuel industry, etcetera, for environmental damage their policies cause/allow, particularly when not immediately observable.
It does seem convenient for such very-profitable mega polluters.
Meanwhile, (neo)liberals and conservatives remain overly preoccupied with vocally criticizing one another for their relatively trivial politics and diverting attention away from some of the planet’s greatest polluters, where it should and needs to be sharply focused. Albeit, conservatives are generally more willing to pollute the planet most liberally.
Astronauts typically express awe and even love for the beautiful Earth below while they’re in orbit. I wonder how they feel when seeing the immense consequential pollution from raging massive forest/brush fires, like the ones viciously consuming Canadian forests for many weeks of last year [2023], that are basically due to human-caused global warming?
And if a large portion of the planet’s most freely-polluting corporate CEOs, governing leaders and over-consuming/disposing individuals rocketed far enough above the earth for a day’s (or more) orbit, while looking down, would the view have a sufficiently profound effect on them to change their political/financial support of, most notably, the fossil fuel industry?
Meantime, Canadian carbon taxes manage to induce some the shrillest complaints here, especially by the corporate news-media—even though it’s more than recouped (except for high-income earners) via federal government rebate.
Many drivers of superfluously huge and over-powered thus gas-guzzling vehicles seem to consider it a basic human right. It may scare those drivers just to contemplate a world in which they can no longer readily fuel that ‘right’, especially since much quieter electric cars are for them no substitute.
Once again, the disturbing mass addiction to fossil fuel products by the larger public is exposed, which undoubtedly helps keep the average consumer quiet about the planet’s greatest polluter, lest the consumer be deemed hypocritical.
I like most of this article. It approaches problems in a satisfying way. There are some very useful links here. But the insistance on the framework of psychopathy is quite disturbing to me. I know it was a small part of the article but I must elaborate. We cannot define abuse as anything other than abuse. To define so rigidly the “kind of person who abuses” – especially with words so vividly pulling on allusions to the medical industrial complex – is setting us up to miss abusers, and to pre-emptively marginilize those who don’t perform the right kind of personality. Ironically, setting them up for abuse. It strikes me as “pick me” behavior to see from autistics, considering we are often the target of such paradigms. After all, autism is often characterized by various extremes in empathy, so throwing ‘those who don’t feel empathy’ under the bus is a self-inflicted wound. Actions and action corrections are what matter. We are not more noble than cluster b people. Many of us autistics are traumatized to the point of falling under cluster b even. IMO even colloquial and alternate versions of these “psychiatric personality type” words should be challenged. They are all clearly meant to evoke a certain unavoidably ableist and static picture of “crazy”. When others say “psychopathy” they think of our bosses that they wrangled into that category as a way of sensationalizing those bosses’ particular abuse. When I hear “psychopathy” I think of how stigmatized psych labels are often just a sanctioned mechanism to medically abuse people. We can descibe trends in behavior without taking words and concepts with unavoidable ties to a long history of abusive medical practices. I also can’t help but notice that the Robert Hare version of psychopathy is explicitly and disturbingly carceral. When I hear “Hare believes the PCL-R is better able to predict future criminality, violence, and recidivism than a diagnosis of ASPD” my alarm bells go off. Any student of history could tell you how personality typing people by “criminality” typically ends up, and what it is truly motivated by. It is so obviously one of the many pseudosciences set up to culturally justify mass incarceration. I get that this is a blind spot for us all, as we grow up saturated in a culture that encourages this kind of thinking. But I ask you to please do more research on mental disability activists beyond autism, and on anti-carceral activism. You don’t have to agree with them about everything but the way you write suggests to me you have had minimal earnest exposure to those theories in the first place.
That said it seems you have already happened upon a much more useful framework, and thankfully spend the majority of the article on it: cognitive dissonance. Instead of presuming ‘evilness’ as a coherent construct, this structure (when used correctly) puts more emphasis on the fact that we all are heavily coerced to ignore our values around care, and that what ultimately matters is our actions. We cannot effectively fight destructive systems if we presume ourselves immune because we are “”less psychopathic””. Even if we are more aggressively alienated from social convention. I have seen far too many autistics, particularly white ones, assume that they are perfectly immune to all propaganda and their beliefs never contain contradictions from the wider culture. Working on ourselves is continuous, and we cannot let our blindspots grow.
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