May 12, 2012
Capitalists and Other
Psychopaths
By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ
THERE is an ongoing
debate in this country about the rich: who they are, what their social role may
be, whether they are good or bad. Well, consider the following. A recent study
found that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are “clinical
psychopaths,” exhibiting a lack of interest in and empathy for others and an “unparalleled
capacity for lying, fabrication, and manipulation.” (The proportion at large is
1 percent.) Another study concluded
that the rich are more likely to lie, cheat and break the law.
The only thing that
puzzles me about these claims is that anyone would find them surprising. Wall
Street is capitalism in its purest form, and capitalism is predicated on bad
behavior. This should hardly be news. The English writer Bernard Mandeville
asserted nearly as much three centuries ago in a
satirical-poem-cum-philosophical-treatise called “The Fable of the Bees.”
“Private Vices, Publick
Benefits” read the book’s subtitle. A Machiavelli of the economic realm — a man
who showed us as we are, not as we like to think we are — Mandeville argued
that commercial society creates prosperity by harnessing our natural impulses:
fraud, luxury and pride. By “pride” Mandeville meant vanity; by “luxury” he
meant the desire for sensuous indulgence. These create demand, as every ad man
knows. On the supply side, as we’d say, was fraud: “All Trades and Places knew
some Cheat, / No Calling was without Deceit.”
In other words, Enron,
BP, Goldman, Philip Morris, G.E., Merck, etc., etc. Accounting fraud, tax
evasion, toxic dumping, product safety violations, bid rigging, overbilling,
perjury. The Walmart bribery scandal, the News Corp. hacking scandal — just
open up the business section on an average day. Shafting your workers, hurting
your customers, destroying the land. Leaving the public to pick up the tab.
These aren’t anomalies; this is how the system works: you get away with what
you can and try to weasel out when you get caught.
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.
There are ethical
corporations, yes, and ethical businesspeople, but ethics in capitalism is
purely optional, purely extrinsic. To expect morality in the market is to
commit a category error. Capitalist values are antithetical to Christian ones.
(How the loudest Christians in our public life can also be the most bellicose
proponents of an unbridled free market is a matter for their own consciences.)
Capitalist values are also antithetical to democratic ones. Like Christian
ethics, the principles of republican government require us to consider the
interests of others. Capitalism, which entails the single-minded pursuit of
profit, would have us believe that it’s every man for himself.
There’s been a lot of
talk lately about “job creators,” a phrase begotten by Frank Luntz, the
right-wing propaganda guru, on the ghost of Ayn Rand. The rich deserve our
gratitude as well as everything they have, in other words, and all the rest is
envy.
First of all, if
entrepreneurs are job creators, workers are wealth creators. Entrepreneurs use
wealth to create jobs for workers. Workers use labor to create wealth for
entrepreneurs — the excess productivity, over and above wages and other
compensation, that goes to corporate profits. It’s neither party’s goal to
benefit the other, but that’s what happens nonetheless.
Also, entrepreneurs and
the rich are different and only partly overlapping categories. Most of the rich
are not entrepreneurs; they are executives of established corporations,
institutional managers of other kinds, the wealthiest doctors and lawyers, the
most successful entertainers and athletes, people who simply inherited their
money or, yes, people who work on Wall Street.
MOST important, neither
entrepreneurs nor the rich have a monopoly on brains, sweat or risk. There are
scientists — and artists and scholars — who are just as smart as any entrepreneur,
only they are interested in different rewards. 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.
Enormous matters of
policy depend on these perceptions: what we’re going to tax, and how much; what
we’re going to spend, and on whom. But while “job creators” may be a new term,
the adulation it expresses — and the contempt that it so clearly signals — are
not. “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.
Mandeville believed the
individual pursuit of self-interest could redound to public benefit, but unlike
Adam Smith, he didn’t think it did so on its own. Smith’s “hand” was
“invisible” — the automatic operation of the market. Mandeville’s involved “the
dextrous Management of a skilful Politician” — in modern terms, legislation,
regulation and taxation. Or as he versified it, “Vice is beneficial found, /
When it’s by Justice lopt, and bound.”
An essayist, critic and
the author
of “A Jane Austen Education.”
