8 years ago
12
If Corporations Are People, Why Do They Have To Be Such Jerks?
Businesses occupy a unique place in contemporary America. “Corporations are people!” Mitt Romney famously cried out during the 2012 Presidential campaign, illustrating a continued history of the US...
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If I could get away with murder, bribery, theft, and a long list of other crimes and might have to pay a small percentage of my income if I get caught, I'd probably be a massive jerk, too.
and if you had no morals. well said, anyways.
I mean, individuals go to jail. Corporations don't.
I'll believe corporations are people when they get the death penalty in Texas. And I don't mean dissolving the corporation. I mean literally killing leadership that makes up the corporation. Otherwise, how can they be people if they're not punished like people?
Yeah, they only get the benefits without any of the negative consequences involved for bad behavior.
Look, we hear about "evil" (I use this loosely) things corporations do all the time. A corporation has one sole purpose, make money. It doesn't act with compassion, it doesn't care that your daughter has cancer and you need the insurance (this article exists somewhere), you're costing it money, it will find a way to fire you. This is inherently NOT human! Humans are not robotic goal chasers.
I've always thought that if corporations are to be treated as people in that context, they should also be subject to mental evaluations.
Corporate culture and structure reward psychopathic behavior in employees:
And if you read about the traits of psychopaths, it pretty much describes corporations themselves...
Or http://autism.about.com/od/SymptomsofAutism/bb/Checklist-Of-Autism-Symptoms.htm. Autism.
I think given that companies are required by law to only care about corporate profits and shareholder value, it's more like autism spectrum than anything else. It's not so much that they're actively evil, but that because of their structure, they just don't get normal behaviors. Even when doing the right things, they do it for the wrong reasons, or do so in ways that the rest of us find weird or creepy. Starbucks wanted a race conversation and went about starting said conversation with forced messages on plastic cups. A psychopath would understand human relations well enough to not do that because it's annoying and won't start the conversation. McDonald's thought nothing of telling a burger flipper to tip his pool boy and au pair, something most normal people would find insulting because people who get food stamps don't have pools or pool boys. But since they're hyper focused on profit, and incapable of understanding human emotions, they end up screwing this up all the time.
Those are pretty funny fringe examples, but to be honest the majority of the time corporate actions are intentionally and methodically manipulative. Entire billion dollar industries exist around studying and implementing the most effective tools of manipulation.
This is where Facebook came from after all, mapping the most intimate and human thing of all - interpersonal relationships - in order to leverage them as a tool in marketing, among other things.
I think it's far more intentional and malevolent than what the autism analogy implies. It's not that they "don't get it" - quite the opposite. They get it, have turned it into a science, and have decided to exploit it for their own ends.
I dunno, I still see it as not getting it. Most of them seem shocked that something they saw as a good thing is seen by others as evil. Maybe it depends on the firm, but there are enough examples of backtracking on programs and apologies that at least some companies are more like ASD than psychopathy.
To add something positive to this thread, maybe corporations should not be people, but get back to the root of what they are made of, people. Touching Article.
https://hbr.org/2015/06/you-innovate-with-your-heart-not-your-head#
It'd be an interesting day if for an election in the future; a corporation was able to run and be elected for the office of President of the United States or something equally awful. Just imagine, being politically run by Amazon or Google for four years.