In a much read column, WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ claims that Wall Street bankers are ten times more likely than the average citizen to be “clinical psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” Capitalism in his world is predicated on bad behavior. “You get away with what you can and try to weasel out when you get caught,” he says of business people.
But he leaves his harshest criticism for business school:
“I always found the notion of a business school amusing. What kinds of courses do they offer? Robbing Widows and Orphans? Grinding the Faces of the Poor? Having It Both Ways? Feeding at the Public Trough? There was a documentary several years ago called “The Corporation” that accepted the premise that corporations are persons and then asked what kind of people they are. The answer was, precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.”
Funny, I went to business school at Yale, I worked for a time at Goldman Sachs, I was CFO of a large media company, and then for a decade ran my own venture firm. And in all that time I met a ton of good people. People who cared a lot more about doing right than getting filthy rich. There was this one tax guru at Goldman who spoke with a lisp, went to Princeton, and always seemed like he might be hiding something. But I digress. At Yale, a lot of the courses I took involved complex math and public policy (many of my classmates from Yale went onto careers in non-profit organizations). I believe the idea was to help widows and orphans not rob them.
I’ve had enough exposure to tenured faculty members, surgeons, high level musicians, psychologists, CIA agents, and librarians to know that each of these groups has a far higher propensity towards acute mental illness–even psychopathology–than successful capitalists. Hell, my college economics professor–a guy named Mr. Kilby–used to climb out the window mid-lecture to go feed his dog Bert. Thank goodness it was a first floor window.
But I do agree to a point that our current economic situation leaves the door open to question the goodness of capitalism and the practitioners of that faith.
♦◊♦
I’m a capitalist. I’d like to think I am the Tom & Jerry’s variety, with a roving ice cream truck, a jolly attitude and jeans sagging half-way down my ass crack. That may be a hopelessly idealistic view of what I do. But being a capitalist doesn’t make me, by definition, mean or stupid.
My world view goes like this. The concentration of wealth in this country and this world is extremely dangerous to all, including the wealthy. The amount of national debt across the developed world is equally destabilizing. In the United States, we are more focused on locking people up than educating them. And our massive national debt at least in part can be traced to an obsession with national security. If none of those things kill us, our continued total dependence on fossil fuel and the accelerating use of our environment will.
I don’t think unbridled capitalism, or a handful of rich guys, should be saddled with that long list of terribles. The reality is that we are all equally responsible. This is our country and our planet.
I don’t think the problem is capitalism, Wall Street psychopaths (really?), but rather what I call the disease of more. We have all allowed ourselves to get trapped into this rampant level of consumerism which rots our souls and makes us miserable. Capitalism by itself is just a tool to make stuff: cars, ice cream, iPads. What we do with that stuff is really up to us. And we’ve become Pavlovian dogs who chase and chase and chase the stuff of life like some kind of narcotic that will fix what ails us. But it never does because inside the trap of the disease of more no matter how much you have–even if you are a billionaire–you don’t have enough to be happy.
♦◊♦
The greatest gift of my life was to achieve a certain amount of success as a business titan by the age of 30, and to realize that it didn’t mean shit. I lost my house, my marriage, and was in danger of losing my baby children. No amount of money could cure what ailed me. And my disease had nothing to do with my being a capitalist.
One thing I do agree with DERESIEWICZ on is the way in which the disease of more has deluded us all into believe that wealth is somehow related in any way to morality. He sees the rich as evil to fight the common perception that the poor are not poor but somehow morally lacking.
“Poor Americans are urged to hate themselves,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” And so, “they mock themselves and glorify their betters.” Our most destructive lie, he added, “is that it is very easy for any American to make money.” The lie goes on. The poor are lazy, stupid and evil. The rich are brilliant, courageous and good. They shower their beneficence upon the rest of us.
A single mother holding down a job and putting herself through community college works just as hard as any hedge fund manager. A person who takes out a mortgage — or a student loan, or who conceives a child — on the strength of a job she knows she could lose at any moment (thanks, perhaps, to one of those job creators) assumes as much risk as someone who starts a business.
My primary motivation in starting The Good Men Project was to celebration men doing good in all forms, most particularly under challenging circumstances and outside the bright lights of celebrity and wealth. The guy in Sing Sing is my hero. So is the guy taking pictures in Iraq. And the father of an autistic child. Obviously it’s not because of money. Money, and more, are irrelevant in the face of a much deeper morality.
♦◊♦
One way to think about our problems is to examine more closely how we deal with poverty here in the United States and around the world. Do we hate the needy? Do we treat them with resentment? Or do we show them compassion?
Again, my argument is that capitalism is just an economic engine. It has no inherent morality. In fact it can be used specifically to help the poor. In the last year I have become heavy involved financially in the micro finance industry in Mexico. This is where collectives of incredibly poor women band together to take out tiny loans to expand home spun businesses like cooking food or selling roadside items or providing childcare. The group underwrites the loans. Amazingly, despite their individual poverty the default rate as a group is very close to zero. The women slowly work their way to a better life for themselves and their families directly as the result of loans provided in a capitalist system.
Personally I have found that the best way to cure the disease of more is to go into a prison. Talk to the inmates. Try to understand what landed them there and what it’s like to be locked up like some kind of animal. The supposed morality of wealth quickly evaporates. Even in the presence of the most hardened criminals, my heart has softened and I have come to see that the world is profoundly unfair and my judgements about right and wrong, good and bad need to be re-examined on a much deeper level.
Recently my 16 year-old son went on a service trip to the Dominican Republic. This was no luxury service trip. They lived in the mountains and planted coffee. They went to the Haitian border to witness the treatment of Haitians attempting to get across and get food for their starving families. They went to the biggest dumpyard in the country where children lived amidst burning trash, scavenging for metal. And they went to an orphanage where normal children had been confined to cribs for so long without being attended to that their bodies had become deformed.
When this group of a dozen teenage boys came home they talked about faith and service in a way that truly inspired me. The idea that service is not something that you do to or for another person. “Service is the act of witness, of walking with another in their journey, of receiving Grace by honoring those less fortunate,” their charismatic leader said.
♦◊♦
Our problem isn’t capitalism or the supposed psychopaths on Wall Street, it’s our collective disease of more. It’s our unwillingness to see poverty and education and imprisonment as a collective problem. It’s our focus on the next thing we want to buy rather than the person we want to help.
Sure tax and regulatory policy are important. But none of it will mean shit unless we all wake up from this belief that more is better.
I didn’t read the original article quoted here, it seems clear from the quotes that it is overly hyperpolic and lacks nuance, but I do think there is one thing that was missed in the response. The quote asks “if corporations are people what kind of people are they?” It doesn’t ask “if corporations are people what kinds of people are they made up of?” Corporations themselves if personified have the ethics of a mass. No one person feels responsibility for the whole only his part of it. Thus a low level employee might dump toxins in a river feeling… Read more »
Tom-your article re: The Disease of More did not address many of your fellow Americans who are living in poverty or close to it. They have low-paying jobs or can’t find jobs and often have no access to affordable health insurance. They do not have the luxury of having The Disease of More.
This growing underclass is the result of some in the upperclass committing every crime but murder to feed their Disease of More at the expense of the rest of us.
@Chris R Bremen thanks for taking the time to consider my position. Let me respond to some of the thoughts you put to me. Regarding your surprise that I didn’t refer to downstream unpleasant effects as ‘externalities’, my position is actually the opposite. Externalities implies a dualistic view of the world and I not only believe in, but along with quantum physicists, know that everything is connected, and to a degree that goes way beyond consequences we can see in the physical world. My argument is that we bring consciousness to strategy, to our business models, our business processes and… Read more »
“Our problem isn’t capitalism or the supposed psychopaths on Wall Street, it’s our collective disease of more. It’s our unwillingness to see poverty and education and imprisonment as a collective problem. It’s our focus on the next thing we want to buy rather than the person we want to help. Sure tax and regulatory policy are important. But none of it will mean shit unless we all wake up from this belief that more is better.” You hit the nail on the head in a fashion, and missed it by a mile in another. What is this “collective” stuff? We’re… Read more »
Just four thoughts, none are originally my own: 1: Free your mind, and your ass will follow. I love that song, can’t remember the artist. If you are enslaved by your own addictions, the first step is free yourself from yourself. 2: The Buddha’s main teachings: (my paraphrasing) a: life is suffering b: the cause of suffering is craving or desire c: to escape suffering, eliminate cravings as much as possible 3: North Americans are the 1%, compared to the rest of the planet. People don’t starve to death here. The poorest often die of overdosing on very expensive narcotics.… Read more »
If we Americans really wanted to look at greed straight in the face, we’ll have to critically examine the article of faith that “the customer is always right.” We would have to examine our views of consumerism and give up some of the sense of entitlement that comes from being a consumer. That is a massive uphill battle, when it’s so much more convenient to blame the evil 1%. The assumption seems to be: “As a consumer, what I want is what I want, and I deserve to have it, and I’ll not accept any criticism of my desire to… Read more »
I agree with you that the criticism of business schools was a bit harsh. When I attended Bentley there was a heavy emphasis on service learning. In my freshman year, as part of our service learning classes that were part of english and a few other subjects, we tutored people at the Pine Street Inn. It was a lot for a first year college student on top of the normal course load, but it was an experience that I wouldn’t trade for anything. I do think as a society we do tend to think of “more” as “better” far too… Read more »
Tom, I recently wrote a piece on what’s wrong with the profit motive whoich didn’t cut it for GMP’s publishing requirements. As I argued in that piece, my issue with capitalism is what has happened as globalisation has combined with the assumption that the profit motive is sacrasanct in any for profit enterprise. There are horrific crimes upon humanity done in the name of the profit motive such as perpetuating business models that rely upon fossil fuels when technology could have replaced that reliance decades ago. With globalisation the decision makers are too far from the harm they do and… Read more »
Ure, if your requirement is that every involved in any enterprise be subjected to all of its downstream unpleasant effects (I was surprised you didn’t call them “externalities”) that is completely infeasible. How could such a system ever function?
Using fossil fuels isn’t psychopathic any more than a person having more than two kids is. If you want to play by the rules you propose, then being responsible for a vast surplus of present and future humans is surely a more anti-social and destructive act than a little pollution.
Begging your pardon, but your college economics professor was a professor. Even if he was a businessman, he was also a professor, which is an entirely different profession.
I have worked in a business office for 20 years. Most of the psychopaths are in the upper echelons of the company – any company. They are the ones who twist your words, scheme, omit facts, and ostracize in order to get a higher bonus or paygrade. The majority of the people I’ve met and worked with in business are decent, but then, I’m not an executive.
Kitti I don’t understand your point. I said that my economics professor (who is not a capitalist but an academic) was nuts to refute the idea that only high level capitalists are psychopaths.
Twenty years as a therapist specializing in addictions has proven without any doubt in my mind that as a nation we are addicted to more. My clients and their families will testify over and over again that the change they witnessed in their loved ones was exactly like watching someone suffering from a disease that ate the loved one’s brain: “he isn’t my dad any more: he’s changed…and I want my dad back.” What I often reply is, “you don’t want the old dad back…you want the new and improved and real dad who understands recovery and lives it.” So… Read more »
Absolutely Denise. We all want the new and improved and real versions of our loved ones. And ourselves. Somehow we seem to have lost track of that on a vast scale.
“When this group of a dozen teenage boys came home they talked about faith and service in a way that truly inspired me. The idea that service is not something that you do to or for another person. “Service is the act of witness, of walking with another in their journey, of receiving Grace by honoring those less fortunate,” their charismatic leader said.” And would those boys be willing to give up much of their lifestyle in this country so that perhaps other countries could have more, is what I ponder. Not picking on your children, I’ve read things like… Read more »
Julie, Has it ever occurred to you that the answer to ” Should I teach them it’s all individual failings to work hard enough? Or should I teach them that it is indeed a systemic issue and a culture of More?” is always going to be “both”? You mention a “suffering” school and a “funded well” school, so I wanted to share a story from my childhood. I grew up in New Jersey. While I was in elementary school the state set about “reapportioning” funds in the education system to correct exactly the problem you describe. Only what they discovered… Read more »
I’m pretty sure you won’t believe me when I tell you I’m one of the most both/and people you’ll ever meet. But I am.
I’m happy to believe you, I’m just confused, then, about some of the comments you made. For example, you wrote: “Can we cure ourselves of the “More” so that others don’t have to live with less?” Yet the point of “both” is that this need not be a question we answer. You talk about underdeveloped countries, yet if we acknowledge that the underdevelopment is, at least in some part, the responsibility of that country’s governance (or lack thereof), then there’s no reason why we would have to give up “More” in order for the population of that country to also… Read more »
Well, we get lots of goods from other countries yes? Cheaply made. Produced by people perhaps not in the best working conditions. Some may have and some may have terrible conditions to make goods that come here. Would people be willing in the US to spend more, buy less of those goods, so that the people in those nations could have better working conditions for example. Or say, produce out of season. Or mass amounts of produce farmed by immigrant workers perhaps not paid well, but we get it cheaply and sometimes with subsidies etc. Or the use of credit… Read more »
I think the best phrase you use here is “I figure we in the US live at a false high.” I find this interesting, because most economists believe that other countries actually live at a false low. This can take one of two forms. First, Paul Krugman wrote a fairly famous article back in 1997 about what the Philippines looked like before “sweat shops” moved in. He notes that there was at least one village where the people made their living by scavenging at local big-city garbage dump. Comparing subsistence farming and scavenging to factory work was a “no brainer”… Read more »
Julie I am really not sure why you need to bring up the relative wealth of our kids. My son goes to a Jesuit high school in South Boston where most of the kids come from Dorchester, Milton, and Southie. I would say most are middle to lower middle class. One of the big take aways from the trip was just how much service work there is to do right in our back yard. You don’t need to go to a foreign country. And to answer your question, yes my son would give up all he has if I would… Read more »
Could be yours, could be anyone’s. Like I said, I have no idea what your kids would do. I’ve seen stories like this is all I’m saying. And I see and have talked to many who feel and have actually acted superior to the kids they help out. One case in particular was at my kids school and it was really really hard to experience and I talked to the fellow for a long time, and he didn’t get it. Anyway, I have no doubt, based on you and your work, that your kids are loving. I’m just aware we… Read more »
A big part of the year long training that the boys went through before going on the trip was exactly to make sure they didn’t feel superior but they treated service as a walking with, witnessing, loving.
Agree that we all need to think hard about these issues.
NYT Author of “Capitalists and Other Psychopaths” Responds To GMP Critique: http://bit.ly/K9Xc9n
Great article Tom, strong rebuttal…And I agree with you up to a point. I think it’s true we all bear responsibility for our lot in life as individuals. I also believe it is true we have a responsibility as members of a society to take part in correcting the issue.
However, I strongly believe the old saying is true: with great power comes great responsibility. And money = power.
For sure those with more have a responsibility to think carefully about what that means in terms of responsibility. But the instinct to point fingers and collect up the 1% as the devil incarnate is, in my view, wrong headed in that it completely ignores the fact that we live in a democracy with shared responsibility for our lot. We can elect different leaders. More than that we can reach across the divisions and see the common humanity all, even the very poor and the very rich.
Reminds me of a passage from a Chris Hedges article in Adbusters last year: “The game is over. We lost. The corporate state will continue its inexorable advance until two-thirds of the nation and the planet is locked into a desperate, permanent underclass. Most of us will struggle to make a living while the Blankfeins and our political elites wallow in the decadence and greed of the Forbidden City and Versailles. These elites do not have a vision. They know only one word: more. They will continue to exploit the nation, the global economy and the ecosystem. And they will… Read more »
“It will be up to us to keep alive the intellectual, moral and cultural values the corporate state has attempted to snuff out.” I am with you on this much Jake.
I think the way companies are run is the problem. Here is an analogy to demonstrate. I say to Tom Matlock that next friday I am getting a raise and because I am friends with Tom I am going to give him $20 no questions asked. Tom is delighted, he is so looking forward to his money. Friday rolls around that I explain to Tom that my raise wasn’t a big as I was expecting and I can only give him $10. Now as an individual Tom is probably still delighted that he is getting $10 and is ahead of… Read more »
Not sure about the exact analogy John but I agree that much is wrong with short term profit motive. When I am building businesses I really try to establish a long term plan and strategy where everyone involved comes out a winner. And I try to keep the focus on that mutually defined goal of success and the concrete goals we all have to take to get there.
Tom, Excellent article. I’ve been working with men, and the women who love us, for more than 40 years. As you point out, wealth isn’t the problem. People can use their wealth to help others or simply to get more and more of what never really satisfies. I’ve worked with people in prisons–too many of which are men. Many are there because of problems with drugs or with our drug laws. Addiction is a problem for many. One man summed up his real addiction. “My drug of choice is ‘more.’ Too much is never enough.” I think this is an… Read more »
As a recovering addict Jed I obviously agree emphatically to all.