CHAPTER THREE THERE IS NO “I” IN PSYCHOPATH
So we’ve had a look at some examples of individuals and organizations whose actions suggest somewhat psychopathic tendencies. They display an extreme lack of empathy and conscience, coupled with a desire to protect their power and a willingness to take risks in the pursuit of power.
In this chapter, I want to explore the idea that to survive and thrive inside an organization, a person’s ethics and values need to map closely to the primary survival priorities of the organization. Anyone whose ethics conflict with their employer’s priorities will either leave of their own volition or get pushed out, a little like how the body’s immune system expels a virus. Some people will turn into whistleblowers, exposing fraud and corruption inside their place of employment. This usually doesn’t end well for them.
As we’ve seen, organizations are driven to survive and prosper, and it stands to reason that individuals who can help organizations achieve those objectives will do well inside of them. But how does an organization know that it’s on track to achieving its goals of growth and survival? Different kinds of organizations have different metrics that are of primary importance. For example, a business pays attention to parameters like revenue and profit, dividends paid out to shareholders, and market share.
Political parties care about a different set of objectives—how many seats they won in the last election, polling numbers, campaign donations, and membership numbers. Religious organizations will have other goals, which are probably a combination of the first two. They are also interested in revenue (coming partly from donations and tithing, partly from sales of religious merchandise, and partly from diversified investment portfolios in stocks, real estate, and businesses), membership numbers, and attendance levels.
At the risk of sounding obvious, any employee who isn’t “on board” with delivering the objectives of the organization she works for will have a hard time getting hired in the first place. If she does manage to get in the door, she will struggle to get promoted to positions of leadership. It’s the person who jumps in with both feet, who drinks the Kool-Aid, and is ready to be a good soldier without asking questions, who will succeed. Some of the most challenging situations I’ve had in my career involved questioning the decisions my superiors were making. I’m sure you’ve all had similar experiences. Nothing irks a boss more than for an underling to ask, “Should we be doing this?” It shines the spotlight back on the ethics of the superior in a way that they are likely to find irritating and discomforting, especially if they are a psychopath.
Imagine for a moment one of those wealthy, influential corporate executives that you have seen in the media—$22,000 Zegna suit, chauffeur-driven Benz 600SL, cavernous shiny office with a stunning view of the city, living in a mansion or penthouse apartment, surrounded by staff who jump at every opportunity to gain favor and a possible promotion. Imagine you are that person—a “master of the universe.”
If you were that person, would you ever want to give that lifestyle up? Even if you’re not a psychopath, you might do everything in your power to keep things precisely the way they are. Why not? You’re on top of the pile, and life is excellent. You probably don’t see anything at all wrong with wanting to stay on top. In your mind, you’ve worked hard and made sacrifices to get where you are. You deserve your success. People will have to pry that power out of your cold, dead hands.
What kind of corporate culture is someone like this going to propagate inside the organization they run? If the success of the organization determines their continuing personal success, then you would expect them to engender a culture that places great stock in the continued success of the organization and its executives. Of course, this is also their job.
But what if there is a conflict of interest between the continued success of the organization and reforming the organization? Let’s say the organization has some fraud going on, and the CEO is made aware of it, but the scam directly contributes to the financial success of the organization and its executives.
What will this person do if they find themselves in a situation where the success of their organization, their personal success, and “doing the right thing” are mutually exclusive?
Wouldn’t you expect them to put the success of the organization ahead of the reform?
If they didn’t need a revolution to get to the top, it’s highly unlikely they are going to start one once they get there—dramatic change produces dramatic unknowns, which creates instability, which, in most cases, makes your chances of holding on to power tenuous (although there are cases where volatility can work in your favor).
Even if this person at the top wanted to make revolutionary changes, they might not be allowed. Most significant organizations have an entire tier of senior management who, like the CEO or the president or the pope, rose through the ranks to get to where they are. The system is working out pretty well for them, too. Even if a rogue manager manages to make her way to the top of the food chain and then decides to make revolutionary changes, we should expect the rest of the management to try to stop her. Like Pope John Paul I (who died, some suspect murdered, thirty-three days after he became pope), she may find that her days of upsetting the applecart are extremely limited.
This is undoubtedly truer if her colleagues are psychopaths.
I’m not talking about making specific cosmetic changes once they get to the top—every leader wants to do that. They might have their pet projects they want to support or particular policies that will get more airtime than they have previously or specific projects their backers want to see enabled. I’m talking about massive, sweeping changes to how the system works—cleaning up corruption, draining the swamp, changing a culture, making government more transparent, or curbing the military.
HOW THEY TREAT CUSTOMERS
I think you can tell a lot about the management and culture of a company by the way it treats customers.
If you’re an employee working in the customer service department, you’d better be on board with the company’s policy. I once had a boss who assumed every customer was trying to rip him off. When I did my best to convince him that most people are reasonable, he accused me of being naïve. He was later accused of embezzling $500,000 out of the company he ran and disappeared to Bangkok before charges were brought against him. The company went into liquidation. I guess he presumed everyone thought like him.
If the company treats customers like disposable numbers or an unfortunate but necessary problem, but you care about making them satisfied, you’re going to end up frustrated or fired.
There are very few businesses that make customer satisfaction a serious priority. I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but whenever I come across excellent customer service in Australia, it is so unexpected, I am shocked. “Treat your customers well” doesn’t seem to be a hard idea to wrap your head around. Why, then, is it so uncommon in the real world? Is it because organizations are run by people without any empathy?
Apple is one company that seems to have an excellent code of customer support. Their “Genius Bars” are always staffed by super-friendly nerds willing to try as hard as they can to resolve customer problems. I can’t tell you how many iPhones I’ve had replaced within five minutes of walking into an Apple store to report a problem.
That attitude came from the top. One night in 2005, after watching Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld, I posted a question on my blog asking how to get my podcasts into Apple’s (then brand new) podcast directory. The next morning, I opened my email to find the answer to my question—from sjobs@apple.com. How did the CEO of Apple find time to write me an email to answer a question that, no doubt, many lower-level employees at Apple could have responded to just as easily? When Steve died in 2011, I heard lots of people tell stories similar to mine.
But as we all know, more often than not, trying to get decent customer support is a frustrating and maddening exercise, where companies seem to throw every possible obstacle in the way of solving their customer’s problems. We’ve all sat on a helpline to a telco, bank, or insurance company, talking to someone on a call desk in a foreign land, who is underpaid, undertrained, overworked, and apparently incentivized by how quickly they can get you off the phone (often by “accidentally” hanging up the call). Companies hire vast teams of belligerent lawyers to write customer contracts the length of War and Peace that have pages and pages of fine print designed to avoid having to redress customer complaints legally. The ethics of these companies are easy to see, despite what they might claim on their websites. Saying, “We care about our customers!” isn’t the same as actually demonstrating that care. The customer comes last, not first (which is reserved for profit). Anyone working in customer service for one of these companies who tries to insist that they should treat their customers with more respect is likely to last as long as the person at Apple who doesn’t care about customer support.
People whose values don’t map closely to those of the organization, either won’t get employed in the first place, will get fired, or will remove themselves from the organization. Or they won’t even apply to work for the company in the first place.
If you’ve ever had the experience of working in an organization where you felt compelled to challenge the ethics or values of the status quo, you might have found that your superiors and colleagues didn’t always exactly appreciate your input. You might have found yourself terminated, reassigned, “managed out,” or having to resign after an antagonistic relationship developed with your management. Dissent and free thinking tend not to be tolerated inside “command and control” cultures. This weeding-out process is designed to lead to a homogenous environment, where everyone thinks the same, has the same values, and stays “on message.”
This can also happen in entire societies, where dissenters are deemed “un-American” or “a traitor to the glorious revolution” or “not righteous enough” and are shunned, deported, imprisoned (even for smoking a harmless joint), excommunicated, or executed. In cultures like these, it becomes increasingly difficult to change the dominant mind-set as the culture has calcified under several layers of hierarchical intransigence. Even senior executives or honest politicians, who are brought in to an organization because of a specific skill set they have or through an acquisition, can find their efforts to make a difference stymied if they don’t fit well within the dominant culture.
Typically, organizations try to hire people who are judged to be a “decent fit” for the company’s culture and values. The result is that very few people who do get hired will question the dominant cultural values, either because they naturally agree with them or because they understand the consequences of being the squeaky wheel (and it isn’t getting oiled; it’s getting managed out). Managers will naturally try to create a company culture that rewards certain kinds of behavior and punishes others. If you have a healthy organizational culture, this might result in creating an atmosphere where people do the best work of their lives. But if you have a toxic culture, it can mean that people will do dishonest things they wouldn’t do otherwise. Of course, every organization thinks its culture is fine for the reason mentioned above—people who aren’t a “decent fit” for the culture probably either don’t get hired in the first place or leave once they figure out how toxic it really is.
So we end up with organizations with minimal internal dissent, with few left who can or will call foul if they see it going off the rails. According to academic Dennis Mumby’s book, Communication and Power in Organizations, you typically end up with cultures where “everything from organizational symbols, rituals, and stories serve to maintain the position of power held by the dominant group.”82
At the very least, this stifles innovation and creativity. At worst, with a psychopath at the helm, it can lead to disaster. Take, for instance, General Motors. In 2014 their recently appointed CEO, Mary Barra, confessed that the GM culture was permeated by “bureaucratic processes that avoided accountability.” And she should know—Barra followed in her father’s footsteps when she started working for GM in 1980, as a co-op student, when she was only eighteen years old.
She said the culture included such things as the “GM salute,” which involved “a crossing of the arms and pointing outwards toward others, indicating that the responsibility belongs to someone else, not me,” and the “GM nod,” when everyone agrees to a plan of action after a meeting “but then leaves the room with no intention to follow through.” Employees also didn’t take notes at safety meetings “because they believed GM lawyers did not want such notes taken.” Words such as problem and defect were banned inside the company. Instead, employees were instructed to use softer words, such as issue, condition, or matter. During her first year as CEO, General Motors was forced to issue eighty-four safety recalls involving over 30 million cars, and Barra was called before the Senate to testify about the recalls and deaths attributed to a faulty ignition switch. Thirteen deaths were ultimately blamed on the GM culture.83
Of course, GM mentioned none of these cultural issues on their website. A snapshot of their “Our Culture” page from April 2013 (thanks to the Wayback Machine) claims, “We believe in accountability from every member of our team, and we demand results from everyone. In short, the GM culture is all about creating excellence—and providing our team members what they need in order to contribute to that success.”84
Rule number one of building an organizational culture should be “Thou shalt not believe one’s own bullshit.” Of course, as a result of that natural weeding-out process I mentioned earlier, the people who wrote and authorized that statement about accountability likely believed it was true.
Now let’s compare the GM nod to reports of the culture at Apple. According to Adam Lashinsky’s book Inside Apple, the company uses a management technique called DRI (Directly Responsible Individual). “You go to a meeting at Apple, there will be a list of items on the agenda. Next to the action item is a name. The name is the DRI, the one person who is responsible for getting that done—not the several people, not the two in a box executive management that other companies have. The one person.”85
Getting back to hiring people who are a “decent fit”—the plan to manage cultural homogeneity starts in the interview process. Organizations try to keep disruptive individuals from joining by filtering them at various stages. Even before a job interview, prospective employees will be filtered out from a glance at their resume and a peek at their online profile. If the candidate makes it to the interview stage, they will be asked carefully engineered questions to weed out potential troublemakers. They may even have to sit for a psych test designed by I-O (industrial and organizational) psychologists. Previous employers will be called, searching for any reason why this person may not be a “fit” for the corporate culture. Anyone who has even a whiff of a reputation for not toeing the line will likely end up on the discard pile. Even attempts over the last twenty years to encourage more significant gender and racial diversity inside organizations haven’t stopped them from filtering candidates based on their “cultural fit.”
According to one 2012 research paper that looks at the attitudes of job interviewers,86 half of those surveyed ranked “culturally fit” as the most important criterion at the interview stage. The same study claims that “employers really want people who they will bond with, who they will feel good around, who will be their friend and maybe even their romantic partner.” And, no doubt, people who will support the organization’s values, which, of course, are likely also to be the hiring manager’s values. If you’re hiring someone into the military, you’re unlikely to want to be friends or get romantic with someone who attends peace rallies every weekend—and vice versa. Like attracts like. A toxic culture will attract and hire people who fit right in.
So, it’s highly unlikely that many organizations are going to hire people with the complete opposite worldview to the interviewer or hiring manager.
At some companies, however, the hiring process deliberately seeks diversity. For example, according to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook: “You’re trying to pick people that fit into the culture of a company. You want a very diverse group with very diverse life experiences looking at every problem. But you also want people to buy into the philosophy, not just buy in, but to deeply believe in it.”87
Apple’s culture famously includes extreme levels of secrecy, often compared to working for the NSA, and a deep conviction that you are there to change the world. It works for them, too. When Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, the company was near bankruptcy and famously got a $150 million investment from Microsoft to stay afloat (the Macworld audience booed during the announcement anyway88). By the time Jobs died in 2011, a mere fourteen years later, Apple was the most highly valued company on the planet.
As of September 2019, GM’s market capitalization was around $55 billion. Apple’s market cap was about $960 billion. Selling cars is obviously different to selling laptops and phones, but does culture—attitudes toward customer service and taking responsibility—have a role to play in the success of Apple?
I don’t want to suggest that Apple is perfect. Many people have suggested that Steve Jobs may have been a psychopath. But something about the corporate culture of Apple seems to be set up to treat customers with care.
Unfortunately, most corporate cultures don’t work that well.
WHISTLEBLOWIN’ IN THE WIND
When someone makes it through the hiring filters but later discovers that their values and ethics don’t align with their employer’s, she has a handful of options:
- She can resign, walk away, and look for a place to work where she feels her values aren’t going to be challenged.
- She can stay and try to change the organization from within.
- She can stay and agree to do things that aren’t in accordance with her values to keep her job.
- She can resign, become a whistleblower, and try to change the organization from the outside.
I have much admiration for whistleblowers. It takes a ton of guts to put your life and career on the line to speak out publicly about wrongdoing, particularly in your industry. They often provide revelations of how psychopathic cultures work. Both by the content of the whistleblower’s revelations but also by the way the organization involved responds to them and treats the whistleblower.
Unfortunately, most organizations don’t appreciate the honesty and courage that it takes to speak up. They don’t see it as an opportunity to make genuine change. They often go on the attack. If you threaten a psychopath’s power, expect them to retaliate.
All four of those options are going to place emotional and psychological demands on the person. Changing jobs is usually stressful and requires learning a new culture, developing new relationships, leaving old ones behind, and sometimes moving location. Agreeing to perform tasks that aren’t acceptable to your personal moral code also involves a certain amount of personal turmoil, from finding ways to justify it to yourself so you can sleep at night or hiding it from your loved ones and friends to avoid their judgment, right up to legal and professional consequences if you are found out. You basically agree to join Team Psychopath.
Option two, staying inside the organization and trying to change it from within, requires an enormous amount of mental and emotional energy. It would add significantly to our cognitive load and occupational stress. How much energy we want to put into trying to change an organization from within is perhaps determined by the amount of investment (psychological, emotional, or financial) we have in the work the organization is doing. Option two can take the form of working within the four walls of the organization or become a whistleblower while still employed there. Both can lead to substantial personal consequences.
Let’s look at some examples where employees have spoken out against their organization’s culture—and what happened to them.
THE SPY WHO SPIED ON THE SPIES
Edward Snowden is a former CIA “computer wizard” (his words), who left the agency to contract to Dell as a technologist, cyberstrategist, and “expert in cyber counterintelligence” on their National Security Agency and CIA accounts.
According to Snowden, one of his jobs there was to look for new ways to break into internet and telephone traffic around the world. He became concerned with the legality and morality of what the agencies were doing and, in early 2013, he experienced what he called his “breaking point,” after seeing NSA Director James Clapper blatantly lie about their monitoring activities on television.
On March 12, 2013, during a United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing, Senator Ron Wyden asked Clapper the following question:89
“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
Clapper: “No, sir.”
Wyden seemed shocked by Clapper’s response because he already knew the truth. With a look of disbelief on his face, perhaps wondering how many laws Clapper was breaking, he tried to give the NSA director another chance.
Wyden: “It does not?”
Clapper: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
Snowden was appalled at the outright deception and decided he had a personal responsibility to let the people know they were being lied to by their government. Just imagine for a moment what must have been going through his mind at the time. He must have known what the consequences of his actions were likely to be. At best, he’d likely spend the rest of his life as a fugitive. Alternatively, he could spend it in prison—or worse. How disturbed about his country’s actions must he have been to trigger a course of action that would involve such a massive personal sacrifice?
After Clapper’s testimony, Snowden resigned from Dell and took a job at the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, which contracted to the NSA, to gather data and then release details of the NSA’s worldwide surveillance activity. A few months later, he took a leave of absence from work and flew to Hong Kong where he met with respected journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras (who later won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Citizenfour, about Edward Snowden), to whom he released an unknown number of NSA documents. While at the time of writing it seems that the contents of only a small percentage of those documents have been released, they have contributed significantly to our understanding of how the NSA and its “Five Eyes” partners (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom) have been secretly and illegally collecting incredible amounts of private information about global citizens. As Snowden has said, “The biggest change has been in awareness. Before 2013, if you said the NSA was making records of everybody’s phone calls and the GCHQ (the Government Communications Headquarters, a British intelligence and security organization) was monitoring lawyers and journalists, people raised eyebrows and called you a conspiracy theorist. Those days are over.”
Did Snowden get a commendation from the American government for revealing how the NSA Director had lied to the American people? Did he get a reward? A parade?
Yeah, you know the answer.
He was charged by the U.S. government (and this, remember, is during the Obama years, not Trump, not Bush) with theft of government property and two counts of violating the Espionage Act—despite the fact that the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said in 2015 that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the NSA to collect Americans’ calling records in bulk, proving that Snowden was absolutely correct in having concerns about the legality of the program.
His personal life has been completely turned upside down. Deliberately attaching his name to the leaks, so his former colleagues wouldn’t be accused and interrogated, he tried to seek asylum in Latin America but ended up stranded in Russia after the United States canceled his passport.
When Obama later signed the USA Freedom Act, which restricted the kind of bulk information American intelligence agencies could collect on U.S. citizens, Snowden’s disclosures were a significant factor.
Whether or not Snowden is a hero, a coward, or a traitor (the stated view of former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry)90 is not a discussion for this book. I merely use his story to illustrate an example. When he witnessed activities that were against his ethics, Snowden not only refused to go along with them; he decided to work to undermine them—at enormous personal cost.
By the way, nothing happened to NSA Director Clapper. After the Snowden dump went public, Clapper admitted that the NSA did indeed collect metadata on millions of American’s telephone calls, which directly contradicts his statement to the Senate in the previous year. Wyden accused Clapper of not giving a “straight answer” during the hearings. Congressman Justin Amash openly accused Clapper of criminal perjury and called for his resignation. Senator Rand Paul said, “The director of national intelligence, in March, did directly lie to Congress, which is against the law.” Clapper just apologized, saying his response was “erroneous.” Then-President Obama said he had “full faith in Director Clapper’s leadership.” And that was that. Clapper resigned in 2016 and ended up working at the Australian National University in Canberra.
During his eight years in office President Barack Obama hunted down whistleblowers and journalists using the draconian Espionage Act of 1917, with more prosecutions than all previous U.S. administrations combined.
According to Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org:
The absolute twisted passion with which the administration under Obama’s leadership has pursued whistleblowers is just appalling. There’s just no other administration that comes close.
For his “war on whistleblowers,” former New York Times reporter James Risen called Obama “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.”91
How a society treats its truth-tellers is, I think, a good indication of how psychopathic it has become.
HOW TO END A WAR
One of Snowden’s most prominent supporters is also one of his inspirations: Daniel Ellsberg.
Ellsberg is someone whose conscience lead him to anonymously release classified documents, but, unlike Snowden, he did it while still employed.
After getting a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, Ellsberg worked for the Pentagon in the 1960s and spent two years in South Vietnam. In 1971, he was working for RAND Corporation, an American nonprofit global policy think tank originally formed in 1948 by the Douglas Aircraft Company and Major General Curtis LeMay (who previously commanded the U.S. firebombing of Japan during World War II, which is estimated to have killed more than 500,000 Japanese civilians and left five million homeless) to offer research and analysis to the United States Armed Forces. During his time at RAND, he contributed to a top-secret study of classified documents on the conduct of the Vietnam War that had been commissioned by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. These documents, completed in 1968, and which later became known collectively as the Pentagon Papers, revealed that the U.S. government had knowledge that the war could not be won and that, according to the New York Times, “demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson Administration had systematically lied, not only to the public but also to Congress, about a subject of transcendent national interest and significance.”
Disillusioned about the Vietnam War, Ellsberg decided to secretly photocopy the Pentagon Papers, eventually passing them to the New York Times, The Washington Post, and seventeen other newspapers, which revealed to the general public the deception. Ellsberg surrendered himself to the authorities and was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 and other charges, including theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years.
In an attempt to destroy his credibility, G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer (the same guys who were later responsible for the break-in behind the Watergate scandal when they worked for the unbelievably named Committee to Re-Elect the President, or CREEP), broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to steal his patient file, hoping to find damaging personal information. They found the record, but it didn’t give them the ammunition they hoped for. When the court found out about the break-in, which had been sanctioned by John Ehrlichman, President Richard Nixon’s counsel and assistant to the president for domestic affairs, as well as further evidence of illegal wiretapping against Ellsberg by the FBI, the judge dismissed all of the charges.
By the way, if you want to read perhaps the craziest autobiography ever written, pick up a copy of Liddy’s book Will and be amazed as he talks about how he toughened himself up by holding his bare palm over a naked flame until the skin bubbled. Decide for yourself whether or not you think he fits the description of a psychopath.
Today Ellsberg is a vocal and public supporter of fellow transparency activists, such as Snowden, Chelsea Manning (sentenced to 35 years in prison in the United States for leaking military secrets to Wikileaks including the infamous Baghdad airstrike video “Collateral Murder”), and Julian Assange (the founder of WikiLeaks, who, at the time of writing, is currently in jail in the United Kingdom and then facing extradition to the United States).
HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO
One former Goldman executive, Greg Smith, found out the cost of being a whistleblower. Previously the head of Goldman Sachs U.S. equity derivatives sales divisions, Smith did resign and go public with his concerns about the company in 2012, in a letter published in the New York Times.92
Among other things, he called the company culture “toxic and destructive” where they referred to clients as “muppets” and put the company’s profits ahead of clients. After quitting, Smith signed a book deal with a reported $1.5 million advance (which sounds like a lot but was only three times his annual salary at Goldman). Then Goldman’s PR forces set out to discredit him, leaking his year-end reviews (where he supposedly asked for a $1 million bonus and was cranky when he didn’t get it), and giving off-the-record briefings to various media outlets about Smith’s lackluster performance at the bank.93
They also provided a “Briefing Toolkit” to all employees to equip them for awkward conversations about Greg Smith, suggesting, for example, that they should imply that he was too low on the totem pole to know anything about anything inside the company and to call him a hypocrite for taking the firm’s money for over a decade. When it came out, his book was largely criticized by reviewers94—and yet customer reviews on Amazon give it an average of four out of five stars.95
How would you feel if you had the PR forces of a massive corporation turned against you, trying to destroy your reputation? It might be enough to make you think twice. The fear of that happening to them might be one reason why decent people don’t blow the whistle on a toxic organization.
And why would an organization feel the need to destroy the credibility of a guy like Smith? It seems to me that they could have said: “We thank Greg for making his concerns known and will address them very seriously because we want to run an organization that is completely ethical.”
Of course, that’s not how psychopaths would handle the situation. They must protect their power at all costs.
When an organization gets into trouble and loses its way, many decent people jump ship and find a place to work where they can feel better about what they are doing. Not all of them go public with their concerns.
The people who don’t jump ship tend to be those who either don’t mind what the company is doing (i.e., their values are aligned with those of the organization) or who don’t think they are competent enough to land another job as good as the one they have. Better the devil you know and that sort of thing.
There might also be a few who think they can change the organization from within. That’s a brave move, and I applaud those people, but I’m skeptical that it ever works.
The result is that most of the people who remain to run the toxic organization are themselves toxic. If a company is already toxic, with psychopaths in positions of power, the board might also struggle to hire decent people to run it from outside. If you’re a seasoned senior executive with a strong moral code, why would you choose to join a toxic organization and work with psychopaths when you can join one that is healthy? Unless, of course, you’re a psychopath yourself. Or you think you have what it takes to right the ship.
THE INFORMANT
Psychopaths who work inside a toxic organization will often prosper. They will happily go along with unethical or criminal activities if it means promotion or personal power. Sometimes they too become whistleblowers, but often for the wrong reason. Let me tell you the story of Mark Whitacre, the man who single-handedly brought about one of America’s largest and most famous antitrust cases.
On paper, Whitacre looked perfect. He was a scientist with a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry from Cornell University who, within six years of graduating, was the president of the BioProducts Division at the Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM). ADM is an American food production company founded in 1902, a billion-dollar behemoth selling everything from soybeans to high fructose corn syrup sweeteners. It pretty much dominates the cornerstone ingredients of the American diet and was ranked No. 48 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.
In 1992, Whitacre was promoted to corporate vice president of ADM. That was also the year he started working with the FBI. As it turned out, several of ADM’s senior executives, including Whitacre, were involved in illegal price-fixing of the lysine market with several of their global competitors. Lysine is an amino acid that plays a significant role in, among other things, building muscle protein.
Whitacre approached the FBI to bring their attention to the lysine cartel. He agreed to secretly wear a wire to work to record his fellow executives and global cartel partners to gather evidence against them. He also agreed to get his colleagues to confess to their crimes on film, using secretly placed cameras planted by the FBI inside meeting rooms.
Why, you might ask, would a corporate vice president of one of the world’s largest food manufacturing companies, who was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, agree to conspire to bring down his colleagues? Was it out of a sense of ethical concern? Was he trying to do the right thing by American consumers who were paying far more than they might have under a free market for their lysine?
Unfortunately, it was none of these concerns.
As it turns out, much to the horror of the FBI agents, who like their confidential informants to be squeaky clean, Whitacre had embezzled $9 million from ADM during his time there and hoped that by drawing the FBI’s attention to the lysine price-fixing, they wouldn’t discover his other crime. And they probably wouldn’t have—if he hadn’t directly brought their attention to it with a confession.
Whitacre spent nine years in prison for embezzlement, wire fraud, and price-fixing. Today he is working as the chief science officer and president of operations for Cypress Systems Inc., a Fresno-based biotechnology company. Matt Damon played him in the 2009 film The Informant.
For the price-fixing, ADM paid a fine of $100 million. At the time it was the most significant antitrust fine in U.S. history.
ADM vice chairman Michael Andreas, son of the CEO Dwayne Andreas, was sentenced to twenty-four months in prison and a $350,000 fine. Why did he get off so lightly? I don’t know—but it can’t hurt that his father is “America’s champion all-time campaign contributor.”96
By the way, this wasn’t the first (or last) time ADM was accused of price-fixing. In 1920, the company was subject to a suit for fixing the price of linseed oil brought by the U.S. Department of Justice. ADM was also subject to a class-action lawsuit in 2004 for allegedly fixing the prices of high-fructose corn syrup. They settled the case before it went to court for $400 million. They have also pleaded guilty to corruption, charged with several major federal lawsuits related to air pollution, and accused of tax dodging.
Strangely, I can’t find any of these stories mentioned on the company’s website. On the contrary, it claims that it “conducts business fairly and ethically at all times.”97
ADM was named the world’s most-admired food-production company by Fortune magazine for three consecutive years: 2009, 2010, and 2011. Go figure. What does that tell you about how our society rewards psychopathic behavior?
HOLLYWOOD NIGHTS
The 2017 sexual abuse allegations against American film producer Harvey Weinstein are another example of broken, toxic cultures that can extend to an entire industry. Although rumors of Weinstein’s “casting couch” practices were apparently rife throughout Hollywood for many years, he got away with it, partly, it seems, because he had built up around himself a “wall of invulnerability,” in part through his support of leading Democratic politicians. He boasted of being friends with the Clintons and Barack Obama, providing cash for their campaigns and lending celebrity support to their initiatives and personal brands.98 Directors, producers, journalists, investors, and agents all ignored or downplayed Weinstein’s alleged behavior because of his influence in the industry. Rich movie stars valued their future income higher than protecting their female colleagues. An entire city later claimed they had no idea what was going on, despite movie stars like Uma Thurman having tried to get her agents and director Quentin Tarantino to protect her when Weinstein allegedly shoved himself on her in the mid-1990s.
But come on—did we really expect anything different from Hollywood?
AUSTRALIAN STORIES
We have whistleblowers in Australia, too. In 2012, an employee working for Australian mining services company Thiess (today known as CIMIC) reported to management that “the firm or its agents may have broken Australian or Indian corruption laws when it sought to win a $6.8 billion coal mining contract in India in 2010.” Two years later, when nothing had been done about the incident, the employee took the allegations to the CEO and the company’s ethics committee. Instead of doing what I’d expect from a healthy company—commending the employee and making the relevant Australian authorities aware of the allegations—the management reportedly fired the employee instead.99
A former senior executive of another CIMIC division later testified that “a blind eye was turned to corruption and whistleblowers (were) forced out.”100
On top of that, the chief financial officer of the company was later found guilty of falsifying the company books.101
What would you surmise about the culture of that company?
In 2016 it was revealed that another significant Australian company, the Commonwealth Bank (CBA), fired one of their senior IT managers a couple of months after he refused to sign an IT contract that he thought smelled funny. He later reported that before he was fired, he took his concerns directly to the CEO and CIO, but they both ignored him. His claims eventually resulted in a major bribery investigation and jail time for one of the bank’s executives.102
Sometimes a whistleblower’s courage can lead to the exposure of psychopathic behavior across an entire industry.
CBA employee Jeff Morris was hired as a financial planner in 2008 and was quickly shocked at how corrupt the bank was. He turned whistleblower and claimed the bank was “absolutely rife” with corruption, which went “all the way to the top.”103
His revelations that “there were crooked plans stitching up literally widows and orphans, and there was a crooked management team covering it up” and that the bank’s “remuneration system that was designed to encourage people to do whatever they had to do to make their bonuses” ultimately lead to an Australian Royal Commission into the entire banking industry. The Australian government tried to prevent the inquiry from happening and assured the country that it wasn’t necessary, and everything was just fine. Maybe not surprising, considering the Prime Minister of Australia at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, was a former Goldman Sachs CEO.
Despite the government’s assurances, the inquiry found the Australian financial services industry was indeed rife with widespread fraud and corruption—and, as Jeff Morris had claimed, that it went all the way to the top. According to the commission’s final report, “there can be no doubt that the primary responsibility for misconduct in the financial services industry lies with the entities concerned and those who managed and controlled those entities: their boards and senior management.”104
Remember, in an earlier chapter, I mentioned that some psychologists believe the rate of psychopaths in the financial services industry is even higher than 10 percent?105
Gordon Gekko was influential here, too.
Another significant Australian bank, the National Australia Bank (NAB), didn’t fire employee Dennis Gentilin when he informed management about fraudulent trading in 2004. Instead, there was an internal investigation that finally lead to the jailing of four of his colleagues and the resignations of NAB CEO Frank Cicutto and chairman Charles Allen.106 Although he wasn’t fired, Gentilin says he found the experience of being a whistleblower “grueling and harrowing” and went on to write an excellent book about his experience, The Origins of Ethical Failures.107
In the Royal Commission’s view, fifteen years later, the NAB’s new chief executive Andrew Thorburn, and new chairman Ken Henry, hadn’t learnt the lessons of the bank’s past misconduct and held them out for “special criticism” in the final report.108
Both men—following in the steps of their predecessors—also fell on their swords.109
The Royal Commission revealed that an entire industry can be psychopathic. If that’s true of industries like Hollywood and banking, why not an entire economy?
Of course, it isn’t just large organizations that engage in these kinds of retaliatory practices. Small businesses often get rid of outspoken staff by laying them off, reducing their pay, cutting back their hours, or moving them to another job that is, in effect, a demotion.
With the declining power of unions, it makes it difficult for an employee to act against their employer if they feel they have been mistreated. Lawsuits are costly and time-consuming, especially when you are going up against a company with deeper pockets. People often decide to just move on with their lives.
The Australian government doesn’t like whistleblowers in their ranks, either. In 2017, Australian Tax Office employee Richard Doyle went public about the ATO’s allegedly overly aggressive debt collection practices against small businesses and individuals. Did he get a medal for exposing something in the public interest? A bonus? A free dinner voucher for two? No. As of September 2019, he’s facing a 161-year prison sentence.110
There have also been some pretty scary crackdowns on journalism in Australia recently. We’ve seen several raids by the Federal Police on journalists and publishers because of stories that were critical of the government and its policies. Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, senior lecturer, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland, called the raids “a clear threat to democracy.” Even the right-wing Institute of Public Affairs called the raids “disgraceful,” and Australia’s former Human Rights Commissioner has called Australia the most repressive of the Western democracies.
On Tuesday, June 4, 2019, “Australia Federal Police raided the home of News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst investigating the publication of a leaked plan to allow government spying on Australians.”111
A lot of journalists in Australia, who have been happy to throw Wikileaks and Julian Assange under the bus, are now complaining loudly about their own situation. Under Australian law, it’s not just the sources that leaked the classified information that face jail—it’s also the journalists. They can face up to 15 years.
On the same day Smethurst’s house was raided, another journalist, Ben Fordham, who works for both Sydney radio 2GB and Sky News (a Murdoch TV station), said he was contacted by the Home Affairs department about a story he published the day before about asylum-seeker boats arriving from Sri Lanka. Fordham said the ministry was looking for the source which he refused to provide and was told he could be subject to an investigation.112
Then the very next day, the AFP also raided the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the government-funded media company. This raid was over articles written in 2017 about alleged misconduct by Australian forces in Afghanistan.
These journalists and their sources should not only be protected by the law; they should be rewarded for keeping the public abreast of vital information. They should not be worried about going to jail for doing their job.
Do you get the sense that an entire government can be psychopathic?
THE POPE’S BUTLER DID IT
In 2012, Italian journalist Gianluigi Nuzzi published a book entitled His Holiness: The Secret Papers of Benedict XVI. It included confidential memos and letters written to the pope and other senior Vatican officials. One of the letters was written by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the papal ambassador in the United States. He had complained to the pope about corruption in Vatican finances and said that his transfer to the U.S. had been an effort to shut him up. Viganò, who had previously been the secretary-general of the Governorate of Vatican City State, also wrote about an internal Vatican investigation, which uncovered the blackmailing of gay clergy by individuals outside the Church. Nuzzi had received the memos and letters from the pope’s personal butler Paolo Gabriele, who was later arrested. Gabriele claimed to have stolen the documents to fight “evil and corruption” and put the Vatican “back on track.”113 His ethics forced him to act.
Was he congratulated by the pope for his strong moral code? After all, isn’t Christianity all about morals?
Of course he wasn’t. He was found guilty of theft and forced to serve a prison sentence of eighteen months—in the Vatican, instead of in an ordinary Italian prison, as would typically happen. Why? They were concerned he would reveal more Vatican secrets.
Leaked notes from a private meeting between Pope Francis and Catholic officials in Latin America allegedly had the new pope confirming that the rumors of a “stream of corruption” and a “gay lobby” inside in the Vatican were all true.114
How does an institution like the Catholic Church end up with so many sexual predators in its senior ranks? Coincidence? Percentages? Or do predators, like psychopaths, attract and promote people of the same mind-set so they can protect each other?
In 2018, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court released a report115 that claimed over one thousand children in that state were systematically abused by over three hundred clergy over the course of 70 years.
“All of them were brushed aside by church leaders who preferred to protect the abusers and their institution above all,” the report reads.116
The report claimed the church had “a playbook for concealing the truth.” Protecting the institution instead of child victims sounds to me like the behavior I’d expect from a psychopath.
In recent years there have been many international child sex abuse investigations targeting high profile individuals and organizations ranging from American universities (e.g., Penn State) to Britain’s entertainment and political establishment (Jimmy Saville, Rolf Harris, Elm Guest House, etc.).
Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier who was friends with Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Prince Andrew, committed suicide in prison under mysterious circumstances. Until 2019, he had managed to avoid much time in jail despite multiple charges of sex trafficking of underage girls going back to 2005 and even a guilty plea in 2008. U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta approved a lenient plea deal for Epstein regarding a case involving prostitution with a fourteen-year-old girl. A decade later, when Acosta was interviewing with Donald Trump’s transition team, he allegedly said he had been told to “back off” Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence.”117 Acosta went on to become Trump’s Labor Secretary—but resigned when the story about his 2008 deal with Epstein became public.
Many of these cases involve a similar pattern of decade-long cover-ups by people—including politicians of various parties, the media, and police—who knew or suspected what was going on but decided not to say or do anything about it. There were probably a variety of reasons why none of them spoke up, one of them being that their values and the values of the organizations they were protecting intersected.
Politicians who are religious, and who need the support of Christian voters to maintain power, are understandably reluctant to be seen launching investigations or making accusations about churches. Religious police officers also sometimes turn a blind eye to religious criminal activity because they don’t want to besmirch the reputation of the church to which they belong. In many cases, religious politicians and police are on close, friendly terms with their local priests, bishops, and pastors. They have been golfing buddies for years and have supported each other’s careers.
For example, in 2018, it was revealed that police in the Australian state of Victoria forced one of their detectives to drop an investigation into one of Australia’s worst Catholic pedophile priests.118 We can only begin to imagine how many similar incidents must have taken place over the last fifty years, pressure being placed on police to drop investigations into all sorts of sensitive topics.
When politicians are the subject of an investigation, senior police commanders who rely on them for career advancement might find it opportunistic to ignore evidence and to lose files, while politicians from all parties are worried about protecting the system. In 1983, the British government minister Geoffrey Dickens assembled a dossier on influential and notable child abusers. He told his family it was “explosive” and would “blow the lid” on the abuse. But after he handed the dossier over to the Home Secretary, it was conveniently lost. According to The Observer, the Dickens dossier was only one of 114 potentially relevant files on child abuse by the British elite that were found to be missing. One British minister has said that files had been lost “on an industrial scale.” A former cabinet minister, Lord Tebbit, has revealed the culture at the time was to protect “the establishment.”119
Very few of us possess the courage to turn whistleblower like Snowden, Gabriele, Manning, Boyle, and Ellsberg—but some people will quit working for organizations, voluntarily or not, if they don’t feel comfortable with the tasks they are being asked to do.
The question, though, is why more people don’t quit under such circumstances? Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, there is a certain degree of stress involved in changing jobs. And we all know that the grass isn’t always greener on the other side, better the devil you know, and so forth. Maybe, we conclude, all organizations do corrupt or distasteful things, and we need to hold our noses and push on, sticking our heads in the sand.
Could another reason perhaps be that we assume that the people at the top of the organization know more than we do and, therefore, can make better decisions? Even though their choices may seem unethical to us, we assume they are privy to better information and as a consequence are making the right decisions?
This idea that the people in charge have more information and more experience is sometimes correct but not always—and even when it is true, it doesn’t mean that their decisions are necessarily ethical.
For example, many people in the West probably decided, in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, that our political and military leaders had better information than we did, and therefore their decision to invade was justified, even though the UN General Secretary declared it illegal.120 Of course, as we later learned, the information they claimed to have (e.g., that Iraq was getting ready to use weapons of mass destruction [WMD] on the West and that Saddam Hussein had given material support to the 9/11 hijackers) was complete nonsense. Even though quite a few experts on Iraq came out before the invasion,121 telling the world Saddam didn’t have WMD, it was easier for most of us to think that our political leaders knew what they were doing. Perhaps it would have been better for all considered if we had all been more skeptical of our leadership and demanded they present more evidence to support their claims before they started a new war, which has since led to nearly two hundred thousand civilian deaths,122 and, according to former U.S. President Barack Obama,123 created the power vacuum that allowed ISIS to erupt onto the world stage.
So, it’s a mistake to convince ourselves that the people at the top always have sufficient and accurate information and are making rational, logical, and unemotional decisions. We cannot evade responsibility for the actions of our governments by recusing ourselves from having to make our judgments. Instead, we must always be questioning our business, political, civic, and religious leaders, demanding evidence and challenging their positions until we are convinced that they are on the right track. If we do that regarding our country’s politics, we might be branded a conspiracy whacko or a commie (depending on what era you are living in). If you do it inside of an organization where you work, you’ll probably find yourself in the unemployment office. So, taking it upon yourself to be the Skeptic-In-Chief is an unrewarding and challenging path to follow, however noble. But if you don’t do it, who will? If you’re not the person who is going to stand up and say, “Not on my watch,” then who?
Once we start to view our leaders as potential psychopaths, it makes it easier to question their decisions.
BREAKING A FEW EGGS
When we work for an organization where our bosses and colleagues don’t seem to have a problem with the ethics of the tasks they are being asked to do, it’s easy for us to “go along to get along.” Most of us don’t like conflict and don’t want to put our jobs at risk. We turn a blind eye here and there, and before you know it, we have reconciled to ourselves that what we’re doing can’t be that terrible because everyone else is doing it, too. Of course, what we fail to realize is that the people who did have a problem with it have left the company, and the only people left are those who could stomach it—or who agreed with it wholeheartedly.
However, I don’t want to suggest that every single one of the people working at senior levels inside toxic organizations are cold, calculating, mustache-twirling connivers. In many cases, they might think that what they are doing is benign or positive in the long run. Perhaps they genuinely believe that sometimes you have to do distasteful tasks to achieve a beneficial outcome. In philosophy, this is known as consequentialism—but in more common parlance, it’s called “the ends justify the means” or “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.”
While I don’t want to spend too long on consequentialism—that could be another entire book—I do want to look at a few different examples of it.
Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s “Great Purge” and his collectivization of the Soviet agricultural sector might be examples of consequentialism. His desire to force the Soviet Union into a more productive economy and to rid her of internal counter-revolutionaries (real or imagined) may have, in his mind, justified breaking a few—or a million—eggs. He might have concluded that it was better that a million people should go to the gulags than have two hundred million people starve or murdered during the next invasion. As it turned out, when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union a few years later, only twenty-seven million Soviet people died, thanks partly to Stalin’s push for rapid industrialization in the previous few years.
The dropping of atomic bombs on Japan during World War II, resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, is often rationalized by people in the United States as being necessary to prevent a land invasion of Japan, which would have potentially led to even more deaths.
Earlier in WWII, the RAF and USAF dropped hundreds of thousands of phosphorus bombs on civilian centers in Germany—650,000 on Dresden alone. Tens of thousands of innocent people died, mostly women and children noncombatants, “simply for the sake of increasing the terror,” according to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.124
Of course, this was justified as a means of helping the Allies win the war.
From 1990 until 2003, the United Nations imposed debilitating economic sanctions on Iraq, resulting in the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million people (depending on which source you believe)—half of them children. Denis Halliday, the appointed United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, resigned in 1998 after a thirty-four-year career with the UN, saying, “I don’t want to administer a program that satisfies the definition of genocide.” Halliday’s successor also resigned in protest, calling the effects of the sanctions a “true human tragedy.” The stated aim of the sanctions was to eliminate Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
When asked by Lesley Stahl of CBS News if the price of 500,000 dead children was worth it, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who at the time was Bill Clinton’s UN Ambassador, replied, “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”125 Although the total number of dead children is now debated, Albright’s response, to a number she apparently accepted at the time, is the point.
Consequentialism is used every day by people working inside a variety of organizations—and by us as consumers.
Let’s consider the use of Third World labor to build our high-tech electronics.
By most reports, the working conditions at Chinese factories, such as Foxconn, are deplorable.126 Workers live in crowded dorms, are forced to work long hours, and are punished with hard physical labor and the withholding of wages if they don’t do what they are told. In January 2012, about 150 Foxconn employees threatened to commit mass suicide in protest at their working conditions. Few people in Western countries would find these conditions acceptable, yet we all own the products they manufacture—the BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, Kindle, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nokia, and Wii U. If we think about it at all, we justify it to ourselves by saying that there isn’t anything we can do about it, or perhaps we tell ourselves that at least they are getting a wage and it would be worse if Foxconn stopped employing them. Or we tell ourselves that even if we stop buying their products, others will continue to buy them, and so there isn’t much point. And, likely, people working for Apple, Dell, Acer, Google, Blackberry, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Amazon, Sony, and Microsoft tell themselves something similar so that they can sleep at night, too.
And we’ve already seen how consequentialism even makes its way into organizations that are supposed to be the founders and protectors of our moral codes—religions. How many high-ranking popes, cardinals, and bishops in the Catholic Church were involved in moving child-raping priests around from diocese to diocese, or knew about the practice but did nothing about it except buy the silence of the victims, to protect the reputation and funds of the Church and their careers? When even religious leaders are guilty of sacrificing their ethics because “the ends justify the means,” how much hope can we have for corporate CEOs?
Intelligence organizations are excellent at using consequentialism to justify their actions. From the 1950s until the 1970s, the CIA secretly and illegally performed a range of experiments on human subjects called Project MKUltra,127 intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture, to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control. The research was conducted at eighty institutions, including forty-four colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies, via a series of CIA front organizations. A 1957 CIA report stated:
Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles.
How many people must have been privy to the nature of these experiments? Hundreds? Thousands? Did they justify it to themselves by thinking, “If it helps us defeat the Communists, it’s all worthwhile”?
The use of torture (or “enhanced interrogation,” to use the popular euphemism), physical and sexual abuse, rape, sodomy, and murder by the United States military at Abu Ghraib is yet another example. How many military personnel were able to rationalize these practices? Only one, Sergeant Joseph M. Darby, was horrified enough to become a whistleblower and make publicly available the Abu Ghraib photos. As a reward, he and his wife were shunned by friends and neighbors, their property vandalized, and they now reside in protective military custody at an undisclosed location. His wife, Bernadette, reported, “We did not receive the response I thought we would. People were, they were mean, saying he was a walking dead man, he was walking around with a bull’s-eye on his head. It was scary.”128
“People aren’t pissed because I turned someone in for abuse,” Darby told Mother Jones. “People are pissed because I turned in an American soldier for abusing an Iraqi. They don’t care about right and wrong.”129
With stories like Darby’s, it’s no wonder many people decide to turn a blind eye and keep their heads down, doing what’s asked of them, and taking a Xanax to help them sleep at night.
It’s easy to understand why many of us will prioritize keeping our jobs, our income, and our lifestyle intact, even if it means allowing something ethically dubious to happen on our watch—especially if those affected are people we don’t know personally, so we don’t have to see the results on a daily basis.
Maybe consequentialism has even been hard-wired into us by evolutionary biology. As long as our immediate tribe benefits from an action, who cares what happens to that other tribe over the hill? They don’t even speak the same dialect as us, and they worship strange gods. If our ancestors cared more about the over-the-hill tribe than they did about their own, or even if they cared about the two equally, they might find themselves kicked out of the tribe, thereby impairing their opportunity to pass on their over-the-hill-tribe-caring genes to the next generation. This seems to be the evolutionary basis for attitudes like xenophobia. Primate studies show that chimps and bonobos, our closest evolutionary relatives, also exhibit an inherent fear of outsiders.130
Is it somehow cognitively and emotionally more comfortable for us to visualize and internalize the “ends”—that is, some reward—than it is to internalize the consequences of our actions on others—how our actions might affect someone else’s happiness?
It doesn’t take a psychopath to turn a blind eye, but by doing so, we make the psychopath’s jobs easier.
Let’s go back to what it takes to change the system from the inside. There are also issues of expediency and the perceived effort required to buck the system. Doing what’s expected of you by your boss and colleagues is much easier than challenging the culture of an organization. People who try to significantly change a psychopathic culture are likely to face immense pressure to desist.
PROTECT AND SERVE
Of course, we also can end up with psychopaths in the police force driving toxic law enforcement cultures.
In the excellent ’70s film Serpico, based on a true story, Al Pacino plays the role of Frank Serpico, a New York cop who discovers a hidden world of corruption and graft inside the NYPD. After witnessing police violence and payoffs, he decides to go on the record to his bosses. For his trouble, he is harassed and threatened by his NYPD colleagues, leading to him being shot in the face during a drug bust when his colleagues don’t provide backup.
When Pacino was making the film, he asked the real Frank Serpico why he had stepped forward. Serpico replied, “Well, Al, I don’t know. I guess I would have to say it would be because… if I didn’t, who would I be when I listened to a piece of music?”
I love this quote. It speaks about his character and integrity.
Why didn’t the other cops in the NYPD at the time do or say anything? Is it possible that every cop was just naturally comfortable with graft and corruption? Or did they go along to get along?
The NYPD doesn’t seem to have fixed its culture since Serpico’s days. Adrian Schoolcraft joined the NYPD after the attacks on New York City on September 11, 2001. In 2008, he became concerned about arrest quotas and investigations, believing an overemphasis on arrests lead to wrongful arrests and terrible police work. After raising his concerns inside his precinct, he says he was harassed, receiving a terrible evaluation (despite having previously won the Meritorious Police Duty Medal in 2006, and in 2008 being cited for his dedication to the New York City Police Department and the City of New York).
At one point, he found a paper in his locker reading: “If you don’t like your job, maybe you should get another job.” He claimed that he was sent by the department to psychological counseling and reassigned to a desk job. When he brought up his concerns to NYPD investigators, he was placed under “forced monitoring.” Not long after that, twelve high-ranking police officers, including the Deputy Chief Michael Marino, entered his apartment while he was at home, getting a key from the landlord by telling him that they believed Schoolcraft was suicidal. They then had him involuntarily committed to a psychiatric ward, handcuffed to a bed and prevented from using a telephone.
When his father finally tracked him down six days later and had him released, Schoolcraft was suspended from the force and stopped receiving a paycheck. In the following weeks, NYPD officers continued to regularly visit his house, knocking on his door and sitting outside.
Schoolcraft was finally motivated to hand over a series of recordings he had secretly made of his conversations with his superiors, including during the home invasion, to alternative newspaper The Village Voice. They became known as “The NYPD Tapes.”
In March 2012, the paper published an article that revealed that a secret NYPD investigation had vindicated Schoolcraft, finding evidence of quotas and underreporting of crimes. The New York Times said the report concluded there was “a concerted effort to deliberately underreport crime in the 81st Precinct.”
Schoolcraft filed a lawsuit against the NYPD, eventually receiving a mere $600,000 in compensation. Deputy Chief Michael Marino retired on a disability pension in 2014, which means he will receive $135,000 a year, most of it tax-free.131
Does the NYPD’s handling of the Schoolcraft incident suggest that it has a healthy organizational culture? Who are they protecting and serving?