The evil that corporations do

I originally wrote this essay as a reply post on a forum I frequent. I've cleaned it up a little for posting here, but the content remains the same.

The actions of corporations can always be traced back to humans in the end; the failings of corporations are ultimately attributable to human failings. The question is merely: what human failings are these, and how can they be avoided? In no particular order, and without excluding other possibilities, the failings most responsible are: lack of foresight, ethical dissociation, and greed.

The first is doubly at fault here, for in my opinion this failing was expressed in the invention of the concept itself and the rules governing it. With foresight, after all, the structure of corporations could have been optimized to inhibit the ability of these human failings to negatively affect the behavior of the organization; so to assert that corporations do unnecessary evil is merely to assert that they are either suboptimally designed as a system, or entirely unnecessary themselves. But foresight is more directly involved in the actions of corporations, as well. Lack of foresight in decision-making is of course never good, but with corporations it is more of a problem than usual. Why?

Because humans are ill-equipped in general to deal with large-scale questions and problems. Rather, we are conditioned, both by evolution and society, by nature and nurture, to be (more or less) good at resolving problems and difficulties on the personal scale, not on the macro scale. The problem is compounded by the fact that humans in the business world are not dealing with one another merely as human beings: they are dealing with one another as representatives of abstract concept-entities (corporations themselves) defined by a certain set of rules created not by top-down or even bottom-up design but by the incremental warping of an original, simple idea (a group of people given a mandate by the state for a specific purpose) to suit the needs and politics of the time. Moreover, the interactions of corporate entities and the economic and legal systems are, to say the least, far from trivial. The complexity is just bewildering! Expecting humans to be able to deal with such a thing effectively en masse is ridiculously optimistic. And so when they make mistakes, as they inevitably do, these mistakes, precisely because they're on such a large scale, can have terrible unforeseen consequences.

The second of these is a bit harder to explain. When I speak of ethical dissociation, I mean the tendency of people to reject responsibility for actions that are, in their view, not attributable to them. In a corporation, very little is "reasonably" attributable to one person alone, and so what happens is that nearly everyone rejects responsibility for the actions of the whole, and feels no compelling urge to stop practices that they would never sanction personally, especially when there is a great deal of pressure on them (as there often is) not to act in a way detrimental to the company. This tendency to merely concentrate on "one's own job" and not feel responsible for the actions of the company means that a few people unafraid to act in unethical ways for their own benefit, or even just well-intentioned people whose intentions are merely misdirected by a corporate mindset, can authorize unethical behavior on the part of the company.

Finally, greed is simply the motive for a company's behavior in general, and hence usually the motivation for its evil as well as its good behavior. Greed is not always a bad thing. It's merely when it is combined with other factors, such as ethical dissociation, or when it is immoderately strong, as I would argue it is in this case due to various factors, that it really becomes a problem. I have already discussed ethical dissociation, and it should be relatively obvious why this makes greed dangerous - for such dissociation can make any powerful motive dangerous. The important question is why greed is such a powerful motivator. Frankly, I could devote a whole essay to this, and maybe I will someday, but for now I'll keep it as short as I may.

Greed in and of itself is merely the desire to possess. When one thinks of greed, however, what else almost immediately comes to mind? Money! For good reason, too: money is in modern times the universal possession-prerequisite. If one does not yet possess something, money is in most circumstances the most direct means to obtaining it. Now of course humans are rational beings, capable of forming plans to acheive goals. To achieve X, one must do A, B, and C. Desire for X thus leads one to desire in turn A, B, and C; and thus to achieve A, then B, then C, then X. In the case of possession, the step proximate to obtaining the objective is always "get some amount of money". Thus, as possession is one of the stronger desires of human nature, and as we are very often in desire of possessing something we do not yet have, most humans live in a near-constant state of desiring money. Desiring money is indeed a habit in modern society, more than that: it's part of the culture. Money is perceived as good, it is assigned intrinsic value, it is equated with such powerful words as "success", "wealth", even "contentment".

That in a nutshell is why greed is such a powerful motivator. There are many other aspects to this, of course: conspicuous consumption, advertising, the very conception of "ownership" and its cultural backbone, and the sheer psychological strength of the desire to possess itself. But all of these are more or less corollaries to the above. Money is of universal value; it both a power- and a possession-analogue. As such, its psychological effect - the desire it inspires - is correspondingly strong, and the consequences of yielding to it, of not moderating this desire, are correspondingly dangerous.