CHAPTER TWO PSYCHOPATHIC ORGANIZATIONS
To begin to understand the extent of the damage that psychopaths can do, we first need to appreciate how and why they end up running organizations. We need to examine the fundamental nature and purpose of organizations to try to understand what drives them, what makes them tick.
And the first thing to understand is that, just like psychopaths, organizations are also driven by the need for power, whether they are a business, a government, an army, a police force, a school, or a religion. To serve its purpose, an organization needs to survive and grow. And to accomplish those things, it requires power, which comes in the form of wealth and influence.
Of course, not every organization fits into this model. There are rare varieties that don’t want to grow. For example, old hippies running a small cafe selling hemp cookies and soy lattes might be completely content to keep their business small. There may even be organizations that don’t want to survive. For example, a short-term fund-raising committee to build a new wing on a hospital has a limited lifespan by design. But these are exceptions to the rule, and such small and short-term organizations don’t play a significant role in determining the direction of society.
Psychopaths are attracted to power. They may sometimes seek this in smaller organizations, like a small business, a local parish, or the local police force. The ones we should be most concerned about, however, are those that influence society, the most significant organizations, the ones that try to shape public policy and public opinion. Therefore, from now on, when you read the word organizations in this book, please assume I mean the “significant and powerful” kind.
“We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”
—Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene32
Every organization starts as a group of people with a common objective, and they are necessary for accomplishing tasks too big for a single person. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea of people coming together to get something done. What is concerning is what happens when organizations amass a certain amount of power and become toxic. The theory that I want to explore is that this outcome (toxicity) is built into the very fabric of organizations and isn’t some kind of unexpected malfunction. It’s precisely the kind of behavior we should expect from organizations, especially if psychopaths run them. If we anticipate toxicity as a probable outcome, then we can prepare contingencies or, even better, engineer models to prevent it from happening as much as possible.
Although there are many different kinds of organizations, the three I will focus on are business, religious, and political—including the media, military, police, and educational organizations—as these dominate the affairs of most of the modern world.
Organizations exist to marshal human activities toward a common goal, but they also play a substantial role in our survival as individuals. In many ways, the organization acts as a giant survival machine.
Richard Dawkins, in his classic 1976 text, The Selfish Gene, promotes the idea that, from a biological perspective, the raison d’être of human existence is to act as “survival machines,” giant-sized protection mechanisms for our much smaller, highly valuable cargo—our genes:
Individuals are not stable things, they are fleeting. Chromosomes too are shuffled into oblivion, like hands of cards soon after they are dealt. But the cards themselves survive the shuffling. The cards are the genes. The genes are not destroyed by crossing-over, they merely change partners and march on. Of course they march on. That is their business. They are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose, we are cast aside. But genes are denizens of geological time: genes are forever.
Dawkins makes the argument that a human being is merely a “vehicle” designed (by evolution) to safeguard and copy its precious cargo—the genetic code—and uses this model to explain the biological basis of selfishness and altruism. While you might think that the purpose of your life is to eat, drink, and be merry, or to worship this god or that, or to become wealthy and famous, Dawkins suggests that your actual purpose is to act as an incredibly sophisticated and oversized bodyguard of a microscopic collection of proteins.
Our primary purpose in life is to get laid, have kids, and protect them long enough that they can survive without us—so they, too, can get laid and continue the cycle. And to achieve these three things, we perform many elaborate tasks. We get an education so we can get a decent job. The job provides a reliable income, which means we can afford a place to live and to eat and to pay for basic health care. These things increase our chances of achieving our prime objectives—i.e., get laid, have a kid, and raise it.
Organizations help us do all of those things.
The organization acts as a new, supplemental support mechanism for our genes. It provides us, via a regular income, with sufficient high-quality nutrients and protection from the elements, increasing our chances of successful replication.
One way of looking at this is that organizations are built by humans to help themselves survive and, in turn, to pass on their genes. And in order for organizations to help its humans survive, it’s fundamental that the organization itself survives.
Perhaps organizations are the next step in the evolutionary ladder? If a human being is designed to protect the survival of the genes, then perhaps organizations are designed to protect the human being—and, in turn, protect the genes? The organization is like a suit of armor wrapped around the human, providing it with wealth and power (at varying levels, depending on your position inside the organization) and therefore allowing the genes inside those humans to stand a better chance of surviving.
A suit of armor is actually a decent analogy because when you take the human out of a suit of armor, it continues to exist and can be worn by another human. If you take some or all of the humans out of an organization, it, too, may continue to exist and can be inhabited by other humans. Take, for example, IBM. Charles Ranlett Flint, who founded the company in 1914 (although at the time it was called the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company), died in 1934. It’s reasonable to assume that nobody who worked at the company in 1914 is still there today, and yet the company survives. The Catholic Church has been around for 1700 years and is still going strong (despite some recent and inconvenient attention to its history of turning a blind eye to child rapist priests).
Although organizations are created by humans to achieve larger objectives, to give them more power to shape the world around them, at the most basic level they exist to help us enhance our individual lives. Business organizations are formed to create wealth. Political organizations are constructed to create political influence. Religious organizations are invented to influence what people think. All of them involve power of some kind. They shape how people in the society around them live.
The people who work in organizations believe they will be a vehicle to make their own lives better—monetarily, politically, or religiously—and, sometimes, all three. They are all designed to increase money and power (“social capital”) for their founders. There is nothing inherently wrong with that ambition—unless the organizations become toxic, which, unfortunately, they often do.
Organizations exhibit other biological attributes. They merge through acquisitions, in a similar way to plasmodial slime mold, which live freely as single cells but aggregate together to form multicellular reproductive structures in times of food shortages (or, in business terms, economic downturns).
They form alliances and partnerships, symbiotic relationships with other organizations whereby each benefits from its relationship to the other.
Organizations even have their own version of chromosomes—a board and management team. Each organization is usually governed by less than a couple of dozen people. They make the decisions that determine how the organization looks and acts. Change one of those key players, like altering a chromosome in a living organism, and it slightly changes the behavior of the organization.
The organizations we create are programmed from birth to survive and grow. Instead of existing to build new copies of themselves like biological organisms, organizations exist to grow more social capital. With greater social capital comes the ability to survive and thereby protect the genes of the people inside the organization. They do whatever they can to manipulate their environment to engineer survival.
From a distance, when we see an organization choose its survival over doing the right thing, it appears to be a moral lapse. After all, what does it matter if the organization survives or fails? In theory, the death of the organization isn’t the end of the people inside it. It’s just a construct, a paper dragon, a logo, a decent idea while it lasted. But remember—organizations are survival machines, and they aren’t going to go down without a fight. And if I make the connection between the survival of the organization and the survival of the genes of the people inside it, it becomes clearer why the people at the top of the organization feel compelled to do whatever it takes to keep it alive.
So organizations continually fight to survive. Every organization invests enormous amounts of time, effort, and money to perpetuate its existence. They fight off predators and hoard resources.
RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
Organisms have sophisticated biological mechanisms for filtering out rogue cells that are threatening their health—organizations do, too. They are called “performance reviews.”
Darwinism suggests that organisms evolve through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual’s ability to compete, survive, and reproduce.33
Organizations also survive by increasing their ability to compete, survive, and reproduce (they reproduce capital); they are “red in tooth and claw” as Tennyson put it.
This is what I call “Organizational Darwinism.” Survival of the fittest, when it comes to organizations, means the one that can amass the most social capital (power) will usually survive.
Utopian views of capitalism suggest that only the businesses that best serve the needs of the market will survive. This might be true in a market where a level playing field exists, but when enterprises control enormous amounts of power, there isn’t a level playing field. The power differential between well-funded Company A and start-up Company B means the playing field is tilted dramatically in Company A’s favor. All too often, these businesses will do whatever they can to destroy their competition by means fair and foul. For example, they might use their influence to try to coerce the compliance of politicians to introduce laws that favor the older, richer company, through the employment of lobbyists, promises of campaign funding, and hints of post-government jobs. Or they might use their army of lawyers to negotiate their way around existing legislation. They might use their influence with the media, due to their advertising budget, to spin positive stories about the company’s actions and negative stories about their competition for as long as they possibly can.
For example, in 1888, Westinghouse started selling a cheaper AC electricity delivery system developed by Nikola Tesla that threatened the dominance of Edison Electric’s DC system. In response, Edison published an 84-page pamphlet titled “A Warning from the Edison Electric Light Company” and sent it to newspapers and companies that had purchased or were planning to purchase electrical equipment from Edison competitors. The pamphlet warned them that the AC system was dangerous and subject to patent disputes that could find customers ending up in court at a future date.34 They didn’t say, “May the best product win—that’s how capitalism works.” They tried to exterminate the competition.
I once heard a senior executive at Australia’s largest telecommunications company, Telstra, refer to the practice of putting start-ups out of business as “killing the baby in the crib.” There are lots of ways that significant companies go about killing start-ups. Some classic tactics include launching spurious lawsuits against them; betting that the start-up will run out of money paying for lawyers and subsequently go out of business; and acquiring them with promises of new markets and better funding, only to shut them down with claims of “shifting priorities.” This happened a lot during the early days of the internet industry. Look at the lengths the taxi industry has gone in trying to stop competitor Uber from getting a piece of their action.35
If we get back to the idea of protecting the genes, the leaders of these businesses almost have to destroy their competition. It’s incumbent upon them to do whatever is necessary to dominate; otherwise, they risk losing their job and, with it, their substantial salaries and reputations. If I don’t survive in my position, what will friends and family think of me? Will my wife and children still love me if I am not a winner? And if I don’t do what’s required, won’t I just be replaced by somebody else who will? These fears tie directly into Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, e.g., our ability to provide for our families and to be loved. These fundamental human needs are often, subconsciously, at the heart of much of our behavior—along with the prime objectives mentioned earlier.36
This kind of behavior is also true with non-business organizations. Political parties want to destroy their competition—at the ballot box, with intrigue, or with guns. There are plenty of examples throughout history of domestic political parties going to war with each other for domination. Revolutions, such as the American and the Russian, are simply wars between political parties.
Civil wars fall into the same category.
The Russian Revolution was a civil war between the Royalists and the Socialists, who themselves fractured into the Bolshevik and the Menshevik factions and fought each other, mostly non-violently, for control.
Even during peacetime, political parties are always fighting to survive. They struggle to get more campaign contributions, to get more positive press coverage, and to get more votes. They will sometimes do sneaky things to damage their opponents, such as gerrymandering or launching fake news campaigns. In years gone by in countries like America, political machines like the infamous Tammany Hall would use fraud, bribes, and hired groups of thugs to get their preferred candidates elected.
Australians might recall the efforts of Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party (Australia’s largest conservative party) in the late 1990s to crush Pauline Hanson’s new One Nation party, which was threatening to win too many votes in the Liberal Party’s base. He established a secret “slush fund” by which he funded political attacks against One Nation, while simultaneously adopting many of their far-right policies.37
In the early twentieth century on the left side of politics, there were desperate efforts of political parties in various democratic countries to shut down communist parties who posed a similar threat to their own voter bases.38
Religions also have a long and bloody history of battling it out for supremacy, even within the same belief system. In the late fourth century, the Emperor Theodosius was blackmailed by Bishop Ambrose of Milan into banning nearly all religions and philosophies that competed with his preferred sect of Nicene Christianity. They were exterminated—temples were destroyed, sculptures were torn down or defaced, scriptures were burned, and philosophers, like Hypatia of Alexandria, were torn to shreds. Competing versions of Christianity, such as the Arian sect, were declared heretics and forced to convert to the only allowed version. Freedom of religion was banned under a Christian theocracy.
A few decades later, the Visigoths, also Christians but of the Arian variety, attacked Rome, murdering and raping their way through the Christian population. And so it went for centuries—Christians, urged into battle by popes and bishops, attacked other Christians who didn’t agree with their views on Jesus and killed Jews who they often blamed for plagues and famines; Muslims came along and fought against Christians, even though they both believed in the same Abrahamic god; Sunni Muslims fought Shi’a Muslims for supremacy, even though they both recognized Muhammad as the prophet; Christians later invaded countries in the South Pacific, who each had their own religious beliefs that were thousands (or even tens of thousands) of years old—and did their best to replace those religions with their own. In the East, Hindus persecuted Buddhists, who fought against Taoists. Christianity eventually turned on itself again, with Catholics and Protestants killing each other for centuries—because that’s how Jesus would have wanted it.
Organizations always fight to survive. But there should be a line they don’t cross. There’s no reason why an organization can’t fight within the rules. No reason why they can’t fight and remain ethical.
However, if psychopaths are in charge of those organizations—business, political, or religious—we should expect those organizations to exhibit additional psychopathic behaviors. They will fight to protect their power, regardless of the consequences.
#WINNING
Another day, another corporate scandal. At least that’s the way it seems sometimes.
Every time another scandal hits the news, the inevitable questions arise—why would they do such a stupid thing? How could they? Where did they go wrong?
But that’s the wrong way of looking at it. We should expect organizations to build and protect their power, and, if psychopaths are in control of the culture, they will go to extreme lengths, even doing things that are unethical or illegal.
Let’s take a look at a handful of recent examples of terrible organizational behavior from around the world and then ask ourselves if they could have played out differently. If a person with empathy and a conscience, (i.e., a non-psychopath) was running these organizations, how would they have managed the process?
And let me be clear about something at the outset. I am not a psychiatrist, and I am in no way accusing any of the following people of being psychopaths. Nor am I suggesting that the cultures of these particular organizations are now or have ever been psychopathic.
I’m just asking questions.
VOLKSWAGEN
One of the most significant corporate scandals in recent years was that of Volkswagen (a company created by the command of Adolf Hitler, which has a long history of alleged cooperation with dictatorships39) and their fraudulent diesel emission reporting.
In September 2015, it was revealed that the company had been deliberately manipulating the level of nitrogen oxide emissions that their diesel cars produced in a test environment. They used special software, designed by the company, to tell when the vehicle was being tested in a laboratory. It then fudged the emission results to make them look better than they actually were.
And not just by a little bit.
When researchers tested the cars in a real-world environment, they found that one model exceeded U.S. emissions limits “by a factor of 15 to 35” while another exceeded the limit “by a factor of 5 to 20.” Eleven million vehicles worldwide are alleged to be implicated.
The company has admitted fault, and their CEO, Martin Winterkorn, stepped down. He claims that he knew nothing about the issue until just before it hit the media, and he blamed it on “the terrible mistakes of a few people.” That’s his version of a “few bad eggs.”
As of September 2019, Winterkorn and other executives, including the former CEO of Audi, have been charged with fraud.40 Prosecutors claim Winterkorn knew all about the scheme and failed to put a stop to it.
So let’s stop for a moment. Ask yourself: if a regular person knew that their company was doing something illegal, what would they do about it? Would they admit it and fix it? What kind of person would cover it up and lie about it? The type of person who thinks “I’d rather lie and try to get away with it instead of putting my billion-dollar company into a position of having to pay some fines, re-engineer our products, and put my job on the line.”
Of course, I’m not saying Winterkorn or his co-accused are guilty. I’m speaking purely hypothetically.
Sure—we all lie from time to time. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for selfish reasons. But we’re not talking about a teenager being caught smoking a joint behind the school or a president being caught getting his jollies from an intern in the Oval Office. We’re talking about a senior executive who employs thousands of people and sells millions of cars deliberately (allegedly) destroying the environment. Surely a person in that position should be expected to be honest, to do the right thing. That company can afford the fine. That CEO can afford to take some lumps. He’s probably already wealthy.
Winterkorn, for example, was paid more than 15 million euros in 2014, making him the highest-paid executive out of Germany’s blue-chip stocks.
ENRON—SURVIVAL OF THE NASTIEST
Another story you might have heard about is that of Enron. In 2001, it was revealed that the Texas-based outfit, one of the world’s significant electricity, natural gas, communications, pulp, and paper companies, with claimed revenues of nearly $111 billion during 2000, had been systematically using accounting fraud to bolster its reputation. Business magazine Fortune named Enron “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years, from 1996 to 2001. Chairman and CEO, Ken Lay, who was also co-chairman of President George W. Bush’s reelection committee in 1992, died of a heart attack before he could go to jail. Another key player in the scandal, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, was sentenced to twenty-four years and four months of imprisonment (however, in 2013, ten years was cut from his sentence).
When the company went into bankruptcy, 20,000 employees lost their jobs and many of them their life savings. Investors lost billions of dollars.
Although it might look at first glance that Enron is an example of an organization most definitely not being a survival mechanism for the people inside of it—after all, 20,000 people lost their jobs and their life savings—remember that this only happened after the company died. Up until that time, lots of people were working inside the belly of the beast. Do you really think none of them knew that the books were being cooked? Surely at least the people working in the accounting department must have at least had an inkling. But, as far as I know, none of them spoke out about it; there were no whistleblowers. After all—why would you look a gift-horse in the mouth? Keep your head down, say nothing, and hope they keep paying you.
And we might wonder—where were the investment industry’s financial analysts and financial media during all of this? Where was Wall Street? Why didn’t they work out something was amiss at Enron? It wasn’t until February 2001, when a journalist at Fortune finally asked how Enron could keep its high stock value, that the façade started to be questioned. A couple of months later, when Wall Street analyst Richard Grubman questioned Enron’s unusual accounting practices during a recorded conference call, CEO Skilling replied, “Well, thank you very much, we appreciate that… asshole.”41
That didn’t win him many friends outside of the company (apparently there were plenty of high fives internally), but I have to wonder why Wall Street analysts didn’t ask that kind of question years earlier. Was it because their firms had interests in the continued growth of Enron stock? The joint interests between public companies like Enron, financial analysts, and the financial media are often hard to unpack. Not to mention the various banks that were involved.
About four years after the Enron collapse, Citigroup agreed to pay $2 billion to investors who accused the bank of aiding Enron in its accounting scandal.42 Other banks to pay settlements to Enron investors included Goldman Sachs, Royal Bank of Scotland Group Plc, Royal Bank of Canada, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Toronto-Dominion Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Credit Suisse Group, Merrill Lynch & Co., Fleet Bank NA, Barclays Plc, and Deutsche Bank AG.43
And Arthur Andersen, the fifth-largest accounting firm in the world, was deeply involved in helping them.
Most of these external players are still around today (except Arthur Andersen, which collapsed as a direct result of the Enron debacle). If the allegations about their knowledge about Enron’s actual financial situation are correct, they all played a part in choosing their corporate profits over doing the right thing.
Let’s take legendary investment bank Goldman Sachs as one example. Sure, they paid a $7 million fine—a mere slap on the wrist—to Enron creditors. But Enron was just one of the scandals Goldman has been involved in over the last two decades.44
They have been accused by many of playing a significant role in creating (and subsequently profiting from) the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, along with a string of other controversies. How many of these scandals did they benefit from while using their political influence and an army of lawyers to avoid repercussions? Taking a $7 million slap on the wrist now and then is a small price to pay for a company that makes $7 billion in profit a year and paid out $16.7 billion in employee bonuses after a bailout by taxpayers.45
Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi once characterized Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid” sucking money instead of blood, allegedly engineering “every major market manipulation since the Great Depression… from tech stocks to high gas prices.”
What could have made Enron’s Lay, Skilling, and Chief Accounting Officer Richard Causey think their plan wouldn’t backfire?
Skilling, previously a consultant for McKinsey & Company, apparently believed that the only two things that motivated people were “money and fear.”46
I don’t want to accuse him of being a psychopath, but that sounds pretty psychopathic to me.
The money motivated him—in 2001 he was named CEO of Enron and handed a $132 million salary—for a single year.
According to Forbes:
“He fostered a culture at Enron that could be termed survival of the fittest–or the nastiest. His personnel system was known as “rank and yank.” The idea was that the bottom 20 percent would be fired. The others would be rewarded lavishly. Of course, few were rewarded as lavishly as Skilling, who sold more than $66 million in Enron shares even as he encouraged others to buy. When asked about Enron’s accounting, Skilling developed a standard reply: “I am not an accountant.”47
Psychopathic cultures tend to develop when psychopaths are in charge.
Skilling was found guilty of conspiracy, insider trading, making false statements to auditors, and securities fraud, so we can assume he knew something about accounting—and the scam that Enron was engaging in. So let’s assume that he also was smart enough (McKinsey isn’t known for hiring dullards) to understand what the potential consequences would be when it all came crashing down. Either he didn’t care—or, more likely, he thought he would somehow get away with it.
Did he and Lay think at all about the potential consequences to their 20,000 employees or investors? It doesn’t seem like it. What kind of person can put the lives of 20,000 people who work for them at the risk of losing their livelihoods and life savings?
Once the company had started to play funny business with their accounting, hiding liabilities to make their balance sheet look stronger than it actually was, they had two options: admit they had been deceiving everyone and accept the personal and professional consequences of the admission—or up the ante, get even more plates spinning. Lay and Skilling chose the latter path.
And it’s easy to understand why. A confession would have meant their personal reputations, wealth, careers, and lives would have been in tatters. It might, though, have saved the company from bankruptcy and thereby saved the jobs of their employees. But instead they chose to continue the charade and see how long they could get away with it.
It’s easy to judge from the sidelines and say, “I would have done things differently if I’d been in their shoes”—but would I? $132 million a year buys a lot of self-denial.
But of course, they should never have started cooking the books in the first place.
Was their behavior what we should expect from psychologically healthy people running a large company? Or is it another example of psychopathic behavior—lying, cheating, no concern for the rights of others, winning at all costs—inside an equally psychopathic culture that allowed them to get away with it for so long?
The interconnectivity of interests between Enron, accounting firms, Wall Street analysts, and the financial media must be similar to the overlapping interests in other sectors. Take, for example, the start-up industry in Silicon Valley.
THE PUMP AND DUMP
Let’s imagine a start-up technology company called Bloogle whose whizz-kids have developed a fresh new product that is going to revolutionize some industry. They need investors to grow. If a venture capital (VC) firm invests in Bloogle, the VC will start talking the company up to her contacts at media companies that cover the technology industry. “Bloogle is going to be the new Google!” they might declare. The media companies then start pumping up Bloogle’s prospects and the way it will revolutionize things because in doing so they create excitement—excitement leads to readers; readers lead to advertising—and advertising leads to the dark side. All of a sudden you have hundreds of start-ups trying to do the same thing as Bloogle and all of the other investors trying to find their slice of the Bloogle pie. Over the next year or two, there is a lot of heat, and frothy excitement over the space Bloogle is in—so much so, that the VC that initially invested in them can exit their investment, either with a trade sale or IPO, which involves selling off Bloogle to the market—who have been reading all of the hype about Bloogle in the tech media and can’t wait to invest their life savings into the new “new thing.” Whether or not the new “new thing” turns out to be a flash-in-the-pan or the real deal doesn’t really matter anymore to the VC or the tech media. They have accomplished what they set out to do—make short-term money. They are on to the next thing. The new Bloogle. And—rinse and repeat. The VC and the media company understand the game; they both have vested interests in the short-term success of Bloogle but no real long-term interest in either the company, the founders, the employees, or the general public who jump on board the IPO.
Even if a journalist with some integrity does want to bust the Bloogle bubble, they might find their work cut out for them. There are too many interests invested in not seeing the hype bubble get burst.
For another example of the Silicon Valley “Pump and Dump” scheme,48 have a look at what happened to bitcoin and related “cryptocurrency” stocks in 2017–18.49 Lots of hype pushed the price of bitcoin from around $2000 in July 2017 to $20,000 by December. A few months later it crashed back down to $8000, and then down to $3300 by December 2018. Then, in early 2019, the hype cycle started again. Somebody, somewhere, is profiting from the boom and bust cycle.
An experienced journalist friend of mine once explained why financial journalists don’t tend to ask probing questions at annual general meetings. If they do ask questions that put pressure on the board of the company, their editor gets a call immediately afterward from the CEO of the company and is told: “Pull that person into line or your paper will get shut out—no more stories and no more ad spending.” The editor calls the journalist into her office, and he either gets the message and pulls his head in, or he is moved to reporting something other than finance—or, if he’s particularly strong-willed and doesn’t like having his integrity challenged, he can leave, and go work somewhere else. Either way, the CEO of the company wins, and the hard questions go unasked. Other financial journalists then hear that story and learn from their colleague’s experience.
The same is true for journalists covering politicians. Irritate the wrong people by asking inconvenient questions, and your career could be in jeopardy. In 2018 it was revealed that high profile Australian television journalist Emma Alberici was ordered to be terminated by the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australia’s national broadcaster funded by the federal government) because of a complaint from then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. “They [the government] hate her,” chairman Justin Milne, a former business partner of Turnbull (they ran an internet company called Ozemail back in the 1990s, where I was employed at the time) wrote in an email to the ABC’s managing director. “I think it’s simple. Get rid of her.”50
You end up with a neutered media which is too afraid to ask questions.
CLIMATE CHANGE AND EXXONMOBIL
ExxonMobil is the largest direct descendant of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, and, as of 2019, the world’s eighth-largest company by revenue and the tenth-largest publicly traded company by market capitalization.
According to the LA Times, ExxonMobil was at the forefront of research into climate change in the ’70s and ’80s. While the company readily accepted the reality of climate change and incorporated it into their internal business models, externally they denied it, referring to the concept as “unproven” or “sheer speculation,” as CEO Lee Raymond did at an annual meeting in 1999.51
So what should we conclude about the executives of a company like ExxonMobil? Executives who knew their business could destroy the climate but chose not only to ignore all of that in their external statements but to actively sponsor confusion?
Over the years, according to Greenpeace, ExxonMobil has spent more than $30 million on think tanks and researchers that promoted climate denial.52
For decades now, ExxonMobil and their colleagues in the fossil fuel industry have adopted and adapted the methods used by Big Tobacco in the ’60s and ’70s to cast doubt on the science that was attacking their sector. They sell DOUBT.
According to an infamous 1969 tobacco industry memo:
Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the “body of fact” that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy. Within the business we recognize that a controversy exists. However, with the general public the consensus is that cigarettes are in some way harmful to the health. If we are successful in establishing a controversy at the public level, then there is an opportunity to put across the real facts about smoking and health. Doubt is also the limit of our “product.”53
In 1998 a leaked American Petroleum Institute memo explained how a dozen public relations professionals, think tanks, and fossil fuel lobbyists had developed a mass scale misinformation project to cast doubt on climate science. They called it their “Global Climate Science Communications” (GCSC) plan.54 Its goal was to convince “a majority of the American public” that “significant uncertainties exist in climate science.” The memo claims that “victory will be achieved when average citizens understand uncertainties in climate science and recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.’ ”
You’d think they might care enough about their own families to put stopping the destruction of the human race above corporate profits, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
A good friend of mine, Australian futurist Dr. Peter Ellyard, author of Designing 2050,55 assured me back before COP 15 (the 15th Conference of the Parties held at the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen) that world leaders on the issue would make serious progress because they now realized, he said, that their grandchildren’s lives were at risk. Of course, instead of producing a legally binding treaty between all members of the UN as it had been hoped, COP 15 ended in “vague, nonbinding comments about how other people should use less fossil fuel,” as one commentator said. With the presidency of Donald Trump, climate change is no longer even seen as a threat to American national interests.56
So much for the grandchildren.
We have to assume that the people running these fossil fuel companies all know the truth about what their companies are doing to the environment and the future of the human race. And yet they continue to fund dubious science and to bankroll the election funds of politicians who will prevent new government policies being introduced that will curb their industry.
What can we deduce about these people? They aren’t just ripping off investors or automobile buyers; they are knowingly destroying the planet for the sake of short-term profits. Does that sound psychopathic to you?
What about all of the people inside their organizations who must know the truth? Are they all living inside psychopathic organizational cultures?
The urge to survive, to keep their power and position and the wealth that comes with it, is stronger than the urge to stop destroying the planet.
RICH RELIGIONS
Let’s look at another kind of corporation—the religious type.
Major religions and their various churches are often also significant corporations that control incredible amounts of wealth and, usually, receive tax breaks from governments. However, unlike other forms of organizations, the religious kind will often justify their wealth not by the profit motive but by claiming they use their money to do “good works” in society.
But is that really where the bulk of church wealth goes?
According to a 2012 report by The Economist, the Catholic Church in the United States spends a tiny percentage of its annual revenue on charity.57
The Economist found that, of the estimated $170 billion spent by the church in 2010, only 2.7 percent ($4.25 billion) was spent on “national charitable activities.” By the way, to put that number into some kind of comparison, General Electric’s entire revenue in the same year was only $150 billion.
The magazine claims that “the finances of the Catholic Church in America are an unholy mess” and “the financial mismanagement and questionable business practices would have seen widespread resignations at the top of any other public institution.”
Where did the rest of the church’s wealth go? Perhaps surprisingly, given the amount of media attention it gets, only $3.3 billion of their funds over the past fifteen years has gone to settle cases over molestation and the rape of children by priests in America—“thousands of claims for damages following sexual-abuse cases, which typically cost the church over $1 million per victim.”
Can you imagine what would happen to any other corporation that had paid out billions in compensation for its employees systematically raping thousands of children?
However, these penalties may rise significantly in the coming years as more attention is directed at child rape by Catholic priests and how it was deliberately swept under the rug by the church leadership.
The church also spent around $98 billion (57 percent) on health care networks, followed by 28 percent on colleges, with parish and diocesan day-to-day operations accounting for just 6 percent.
Spending nearly $100 billion dollars a year on health care is a pretty impressive feat, but as pointed out by Mother Jones: “Catholic hospitals are required to follow health care directives handed down by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops—a group of celibate older men who have become increasingly conservative over the past few decades.”58
Add to that the fact that “between 2001 and 2011, the number of American hospitals affiliated with the Catholic Church grew 16 percent, even as the number of public hospitals and secular non-profit hospitals dropped 31 percent and 12 percent,” and you might start to wonder if it’s a good thing that a religion that has historically turned a blind eye to child rape and condemns homosexuality and the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV should be responsible for a growing component of American health care. When Cardinal Timothy F. Dolan was the archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee in 2007, he sent a letter to the Vatican asking permission to transfer $57 million into a cemetery trust fund to protect the assets from victims of clergy sexual abuse who were demanding compensation. In the letter, he explained that he foresaw “an improved protection of these funds from any legal claim and liability.”
The Vatican approved the request in five weeks.
Dolan, who was promoted to the role of archbishop of New York, delivered a Bible reading at Trump’s 2017 inauguration.59
Okay, let’s stop again for a second. I’m going to talk more about the Catholic Church and sexual abuse later, but I need to ask right now—what kind of person hides money from the victims of sexual abuse? And what kind of organizational culture supports that kind of action?
The Vatican itself apparently controls at least $8 billion in assets, although the actual figure is probably much higher.60 Even Cardinal George Pell’s old stomping grounds, the Sydney Catholic archdiocese in Australia, controls over $1.2 billion in funds.61 As of 2014, it had spent only $9.4 million in compensation to victims of sexual abuse.62
For another example, take The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the official name of the Mormon Church). According to financial information released by the site MormonLeaks in May 2018, the LDS church has a stock portfolio worth $32 billion63 and sucks in about $7 billion a year in tithing from its members, who are coerced to donate at least 10 percent of their gross income annually if they want to stay in the church’s good books.64
Starting in 2005, the LDS church spent an estimated $2 billion building a shopping mall, City Creek Center, which opened in downtown Salt Lake City (the location of the church headquarters) in 2012. As unseemly as a church owning a major glitzy temple to consumerism might seem, the Mormon apologetics site, FairMormon, claims it was justified as a decent investment:
“Some have insisted that funds would be better if directed to charitable works such as feeding the poor. The Church does have an extensive humanitarian effort. Critics on this point often overlook the fact that Church funds are best managed not by sitting in a bank account, but through prudent investment. Investment in land and real estate development is often a wise and ultimately profitable investment approach. It is entirely possible that the City Creek Center Mall will eventually become a money-making venture, as the Church collects rent from mall merchants. This investment strategy would allow the Church to, over time, recoup its initial outlay or even make money that could be further dedicated to the Church’s religious and humanitarian goals.”65
However, it doesn’t seem to be much of an investment, according to Keith B. McMullin, who has “for 37 years served within the Mormon leadership and now heads a church-owned holding company, Deseret Management Corp. (DMC), an umbrella organization for many of the church’s for-profit businesses.”66
McMullin explains that City Creek exists to combat urban blight, not to fill church coffers.
According to BusinessWeek: “Will there be a return?” he asks rhetorically. “Yes, but so modest that you would never have made such an investment—the real return comes in folks moving back downtown and the revitalization of businesses.”
So what’s the real reason for building a shopping mall? It may have something to do with the fact that American churches are often exempt from paying taxes on real estate properties they lease out, even to commercial entities.
DMC also runs “a newspaper, 11 radio stations, a TV station, a publishing, and distribution company, a digital media company, a hospitality business, and an insurance business with assets worth $3.3 billion.”
BusinessWeek reports that:
According to an official church welfare services fact sheet, the church gave $1.3 billion in humanitarian aid in more than 178 countries and territories during the 25 years between 1985 and 2010. A fact sheet from the previous year indicates that less than one-third of the sum was monetary assistance, while the rest was in the form of “material assistance.” All in all, if one were to distribute that $1.3 billion over a quarter-century evenly, it would mean that the church gave $52 million annually. A study co-written by Cragun and recently published in Free Inquiry estimates that the Mormon Church donates only about 0.7 percent of its annual income to charity; the United Methodist Church gives about 29 percent.
In other words, the LDS church spent more on a single shopping mall in its hometown than it did on humanitarian aid over twenty-five years.
Many smaller churches are doing pretty well also.
Australia’s Pentecostal Hillsong Church spans 12 countries and has 35,000 members across Australia. Its founders, Brian and Bobbie Houston, apparently live like millionaires, and their empire earns $50 million a year.67
As has been widely reported in the Australian media, Brian’s father, Frank Houston, another one of the founders of the Hillsong empire, was a confessed pedophile. When Brian found out, he failed to tell the police. His church then tried to avoid paying out compensation to one of Frank’s victims.68, 69
Despite all of this, the current prime minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, a Pentecostal Christian, calls Brian Houston his “mentor”70 and recently tried to take him to the White House to meet Donald Trump.71
I’m sure a full tally of the wealth of religious groups around the world would be stunning. In Australia alone, the federal government provides an estimated $31 billion every year in tax relief for religions—and this continues in an era where we always hear about how broke the country is and how the government needs to cut back on essential community services.72
Of course, there may be arguments for the amount of wealth and tax benefits that these churches have accrued, but the fact remains that they are wealthy corporations and, therefore, we should expect them to exhibit the same kind of behavior as other, non-religious organizations—self-protection at all costs. And, as such, it should not surprise us to find psychopaths running them.
We should not be surprised to learn that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child said Catholic Church officials had imposed a “code of silence” on clerics to prevent them from reporting cases of child abuse by clergy to police and moved abusers from parish to parish in an attempt to cover up such crimes.73
To the average person, the idea of systematically and deliberately covering up the rape of children is disgusting and inconceivable. To people managing a religious organization that wants to protect its assets, this kind of behavior is acceptable.
Forgive me a moment while I go down a bit of a rabbit hole about the Catholic Church and sexual abuse. I promise there’s a point.
Over the last decade, the Catholic Church’s involvement in covering up the sexual molestation of children has become very public. In Australia, the federal government recently conducted a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.74
The commission held fifty-seven public hearings over five years, involving 1300 witness accounts and more than 8000 personal stories from survivors of sexual abuse, with approximately 60 percent of the total relating to religious institutions and 60 percent of the religious incidents relating to the Catholic Church. The final report concluded that thousands of children had been sexually abused in many institutions in Australia and “the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions”:
“In many religious institutions, the power afforded to people in religious ministry and the misplaced trust of parents combined with aspects of the institutional culture, practices and attitudes to create risks for children. Alleged perpetrators often continued to have access to children even when religious leaders knew they posed a danger. We heard that alleged perpetrators were often transferred to other locations, but they were rarely reported to police.”75
The most high-profile case was that of Cardinal George Pell. At the time the charges were brought against him in 2017, he was the third highest-ranking official of the Vatican. In the subsequent February 2019 trial, where he was accused of sexually abusing two boys in 1996—a trial so secret that the Australian media was banned from talking about it until it had concluded—Pell was found guilty by a unanimous jury on five charges of sexual abuse. A panel of judges denied his later appeal. As of September 2019, he is appealing again, this time to the High Court of Australia.76 He is still a cardinal, a “Prince of the Church.”
Similar inquiries, particularly relating to the Catholics, have been held around the world. In May 2018 it was announced that all thirty-three bishops in Chile were resigning after a sexual abuse scandal rocked the country.77
How did the Catholics let this happen?
In 2001, while the future Pope Benedict XVI was still Cardinal Ratzinger and the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (formerly known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition), he authored a document entitled “De delictis gravioribus” (Latin for “On more serious crimes”), which was then approved by Pope John Paul II.
A 2006 BBC documentary, Sex Crimes and the Vatican, alleges this “secret Vatican edict” instructed the world’s Catholic bishops to put the Church before children’s safety. The film claims Ratzinger enforced the document, which included an oath of secrecy, enforceable by excommunication, for twenty years. Ratzinger allegedly advised Church leaders not to report incidents to the police.78
This letter built on the existing 1962 church document “Crimen sollicitationis,”79 which set out the process for church authorities to follow when a priest or bishop was accused of making sexual advances to a member of the church. Both documents stressed that such issues were to be dealt with internally by the church under the strictest of secrecy. No outside authorities were to be involved. Don’t take it to the cops. Like La Cosa Nostra, the Vatican handles its own dirty business.
A whistleblower lawyer who was fired from the Vatican for publicly criticizing the way it handled child abuse, Fr. Tom Doyle, appeared in the BBC film and claimed that the Vatican’s policy was to cover up abuse. According to Hans Kung, a Swiss Catholic priest who, along with Ratzinger, was one of the youngest theologians at the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965:
There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up cases of sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981–2005). During the reign of Pope John Paul II, that congregation had already taken charge of all such cases under oath of strictest silence. Ratzinger himself, on May 18th, 2001, sent a solemn document to all the bishops dealing with severe crimes (“epistula de delictis gravioribus”), in which cases of abuse were sealed under the “secretum pontificium” (“the pontifical secret”), the violation of which could entail grave ecclesiastical penalties.”80
A standard church practice around the world was to transfer priests who had been accused of sexual abuse to another parish—where they still had contact with children.
We have to wonder why an organization like the Catholic Church, which, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, is “a society founded on moral principles, aiming at higher ends, and dispensing spiritual benefits,” would choose to cover up allegations of sexual abuse within its ranks rather than do the moral thing and expose them? According to the report “The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States” aka “The John Jay Report,” commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, one of the critical factors in the abuse not being adequately dealt with was an “overemphasis on the need to avoid a scandal.”81
The Australian Royal Commission seems to concur:
“Many leaders of religious institutions demonstrated a preoccupation with protecting the institution’s ‘good name’ and reputation. Actions were often taken with the aim of avoiding, preventing or repairing public scandal, and concealing information that could tarnish the image of the institution and its personnel, or negatively affect its standing in the community.”
Unlike corporations, the leaders of a religious institution (such as bishops of the Catholic Church) probably aren’t worried about protecting their own personal wealth (with the exception of “megachurches”), as they tend to be on relatively small salaries, with all of their personal needs taken care of by the church. Cardinals in the Catholic Church, like George Pell, are considered a “Prince of the Church” and are rewarded with a lifetime appointment. But it does seem plausible that they might be concerned about protecting the wealth and reputation of the institution, as their career and personal reputation are tied closely to it. If you’ve been involved in the church since you were a teenager and spent your life rising through the ranks until you’ve become a bishop or a cardinal, you probably have a natural tendency to want to protect the institution—not to mention avoiding “grave ecclesiastical penalties” (which, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, can involve excommunication and being banned from the sacraments). It’s easy to imagine that someone who has spent their life inside the church might find excommunication and being banned from the sacraments a horrifying punishment. If the church suffers on your watch, you might also find yourself out of a job—and what does a fifty-year-old ex-bishop do for a career?
And yet I have to wonder what kind of religious people would allow harm to come to their parishioners, while systematically covering up the crime of child abuse and protecting the perpetrators? I can’t imagine doing something like that, can you?
But this kind of behavior makes absolute sense for a psychopath, someone devoid of empathy, who only is concerned about protecting their power.