[lbo-talk] Ed Wallace in Ft Worth Star Telegram: "The Corporate Sociopath"

[Philip Pilkington]

Wasn't there a relatively popular anti-globalisation book or film arguing
along these lines a few years ago? The premise was something like:
corporations are recognised under law as individuals and yet if we gave them
this status they'd soon be wearing a straight-jacket. As silly as this
argument was, its probably less so than this one. At least the argument
about the corporation as psychopath was considering behavior from an
institutional standpoint, albeit succumbing to the temptation to apply
psychologising terms. The problem with playing shrink is the following: the
criteria used here are those of one of the major diagnostic manuals,
probably the DSM. These criteria are extremely vague; ask any decent
psychiatrist and they'll tell you that these diagnostic manuals are pretty
useless in reality. Alternatively go on Wikipedia and look around a few of
the disorders listed therein; you might, provided you're somewhat
self-reflective, come down with an acute case of "psychiatric hypochondria",
if not you'll at least be able to start arbitrarily diagnosing those around
you with a variety of personality disorders. Psychiatry is, and always has
been, more of an art than a science.

If we were to ask a real psychological question it would be this: why is
much of our media so trigger-happy when it comes to labeling things with
psychological and indeed psychiatric labels? Is it a desperate attempt to
understand social and economic problems through placing the blame on some
other person, some sort of "evil man" who has a Mercedes and bad attitude?
Is it a contemporary variation on some sort of primitive anthropomorphism?
Perhaps its a response to major intellectual reification in thinking about
social processes through recourse to a language already reified. Who knows?