The Corporation

By law, corporations must focus exclusively on bringing profit to their investors; any other activity, if it cannot be justified as a cost, is forbidden. This puts the focus squarely on the bottom line. Any person so obsessed would be defined as antisocial, and any person who has no scruples about harming others in the quest for money would be termed psychopathic. In this way, corporations exhibit sociopathic tendencies.

A psychopath is someone who bends others toward giving what they normally would not turn over. The psychopath will use charm, manipulation, threats, lies, or whatever else can help achieve the end of acquiring other people’s money or property.

Corporate investors, board members, and officers have limited liability. Thus crimes committed by corporations often cannot be pinned on anyone in particular beyond the “person” of the corporation itself. Since a corporation often employs tens or hundreds of thousands of workers, and because consumers rely on its products, regulators are reluctant to impose penalties severe enough to inflict major losses on the corporation.

The result is that, in situations where a human psychopath might suffer arrest and imprisonment, a corporation can run free, limited only by costs imposed on it through lawsuits or public disapproval. Where an intelligent antisocial criminal might find ways to avoid the costs of his misbehaviors, a corporation can more easily escape its responsibilities by thinking and acting like a psychopath. 

If a psychopath’s excesses earn condemnation from his neighbors, he may commence a campaign of false contrition, apologizing to the offended, insisting his actions are innocent mistakes, and otherwise charming others into accepting him back into their good graces. At this point, the psychopath can quietly resume his covert efforts to steal from or otherwise harm his targets.

Likewise, a corporation that gets caught misbehaving might launch a publicity campaign that portrays it in a beneficent light, as if it were simply a good citizen who made some honest errors. This campaign will continue until citizens buy into it or forget about the offenses. At that point, the corporation may very well return to its old habits.

Because corporations are legally required to do only that which improves profitability, and because psychopathic behavior can pay off handsomely, sometimes corporations are effectively driven to behave badly. This quirk in the system means that corporations, when called to task, will always protest that they are socially responsible whether they mean it or not. Thus it is irrelevant to ask whether a corporation has reformed; it has done what it needs to do to stay profitable; reforming is moot.