A Psychopathic System

The great writer Kurt Vonnegut titled his final book A Man without a Country. He was the man; the country was the United States of America. Vonnegut felt that his country had disappeared right under his – and the Constitution’s – feet, through what he called “the sleaziest, low-comedy Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.” He was talking about the Bush administration. Were Vonnegut still alive in the post-Bush era, he would not have felt that his country had returned.

How had our country disappeared? Vonnegut proposed that among the contributing factors was that it had been invaded – as if by the Martians – by people with a particularly frightening mental illness.

People with this illness were termed psychopaths. (The term nowadays is anti-social personality disorder.) These are terms for people who are smart, personable, and engaging, but who have no consciences. They are not guided by a sense of right or wrong. They seem to be unaffected by the feelings of others, including feelings of distress caused by their actions. Straying from a decent way of treating people, or violating ethical codes causes no anxiety, the anxiety which is what causes the rest of us to moderate our more greedy impulses. If most children feel anxiety when they are pilfering the forbidden cookie jar, psychopaths feel just fine.
~ from The Rise of the Second-String Psychopaths by David Schwartz ~

I think Schwartz has well captured one of my chief critiques of the capitalist system, in general, and the Milton Friedman version, in specific. In order to succeed within this system, an individual or corporation must forsake their conscience!

Profit is king and almost ANY means to obtain it is considered fair game. You can treat your workers like dirt and, as long as you pad the bottom line, you won't lose a second of sleep over it. You can destroy vast stretches of Mother Earth and, as long as your stock price increases, you will laugh merrily all the way to the bank.

You even can bring a nation or the entire world to its financial knees and, as long as you enrich your bank account and that of some of your stockholders, you feel very, very good about yourself.

The worst part is that having a conscience is an impediment to success. If you treat your workers well, protect the environment and pay your fair share of taxes, there is a good chance you will go out of business or be bought up by another company far more ruthless than you. So, while we like to point the finger of blame at this individual or that corporation, the real villain is the system itself.

It breeds psychopaths.