Capitalism is Organized Narcissism

Monday, August 13, 2001

We live in a society organized around private property, the right of private individuals and corporations to own the resources we all need in order to live. These resources, belonging to a small proportion of the top one percent of the population, include the natural products of the planet, what grows in the soil, the oceans and the forests, as well as all the products of human culture and history -- the techniques and knowledge and art we have created over the centuries. Even the techniques of nature encoded in the genes of plants and animals and the human body are now being swept up into the vaults of private corporations to be exploited to their financial benefit.

A society of private property is a society of deprivation. What is owned by a few is denied to the many. Obviously private property has to be defended by laws and their enforcement, that is, a state as the sole legitimate agent of violence. "No trespassing" signs are meaningless without an armed guard.

In my commentary a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that state-protected capitalism is a system of organized crime: it organizes the predatory activity of individuals against each other to make life safe for the winners. Today I'd like to expand on that theme by arguing that capitalism is the legitimation of psychopathic behavior.

First, here is some fairly typical corporate behavior. Responding to the Bill Moyers PBS special on the chemical industry, Richard Grossman points out that information has been available for many decades about "the mass production, use and dumping of toxic chemicals, and about persistent manipulations, murders, deceptions and usurpations by chemical corporation and government officials, " Anyone who chooses to look will find massive evidence of chemical corporation murder, pillage and lies. Anyone who chooses to look will see persistent corporate denial of people’s constitutional and human rights, and government complicity…"

Now here is a description of the psychopath by forensic psychologist Barbara Kerwin:

  • Most psychopaths could pass as normal people. They hold down jobs, they have relationships, though often superficial ones, and they manage to manage, however selfishly. But…more than most people, they are selfish, highly absorbed with securing the primitive comforts of life. They cannot delay their gratification, or set aside their resentments. … They are usually charming, eager to please, and quite often very smart. However, though they may function in the world effectively, they do not conduct their lives according to accepted moral codes and standards of behavior. They do not consider their crimes crimes. What seems a crime to us is to them an expedience, an act of entitlement. As intelligent as they may be, psychopaths lack …an awareness that they are participating in the overall drama of the human species. Accused of a crime, they believe that the world that owes them a living has done them wrong.
    •

    According to Kerwin, psychopathy is "not a mental disease or defect but a global attitude of selfishness that governs a person's interactions with others." More than just selfish, psychopaths are narcissistic. Narcissism makes people

  • dangerous…because it deprives them of the restraint that results from empathy and respect for others.…Narcissism permits them to ignore the humanity of their victims.… It …renders them insensitive to the act of killing. The blindness of the narcissist can extend even beyond the lack of empathy; narcissists may not "see" others at all.
    •

    The notorious Ted Bundy was a psychopath, according to Kerwin, who interviewed him at length. Bundy raped and mutilated at least thirty women, felt no remorse, regretted only that he'd been caught, and bragged that "he owned a girl like he owned a Porsche."

    If Ted Bundy's narcissism unleashed his sado-masochistic impulses, corporate narcissism gives free rein to the materialistic impulses of the chemical industry. There are plenty of other examples. There are many products corporation have known to cause suffering and death: guns, cigarettes, the Dalkon Shield, defective cars and trucks. Recall also corporate reluctance to make live-saving drugs available at affordable prices to people suffering from AIDS and malaria in third-world countries. But these are only the more conscience-popping examples. At the very heart of capitalism is the structural imperative to maximize income and minimize costs, and in this process of being driven by the requirements of the account books, workers and consumers are reduced to mere instruments. The manager of capital cannot see people as persons at all. He or she may feel empathy for friends and family or for the characters in movies, but genuinely felt empathy for customers and employees is counter-productive. We must conclude, then, that capitalism is institutionalized narcissism. It is organized psychopathy.

    From a moral point of view, a criminal is someone who is willing to seize whatever he can with no concern for the effect of that seizure on the lives of others. Crime is a short-cut to the object of one's desires; it's the road to what one wants that disregards the reality of other people, which ignores their experiences, their situations.

    Psychologically, crime involves the inability to respect and empathize with others -- in fact, a blindness to the reality of others as real people like oneself. The narcissist is a solipsist for whom only her own experiences are real and other human beings are, as it were, robots. The game of capitalism rewards its players for taking this attitude towards each other.

    To the extent that we play this game and allow our social relations with others to be stripped down to the cash nexus and the quid pro quo, we live as narcissists among narcissists. It's a cold world, this world of organized crime, the world of the film noir in which only the love interest provides a momentary respite from the Hobbsean state of war.

    Most people are not narcissists; they do understand and respond to the experiences and situations of other people, even people who are far away. The ties between us are deeper than the cash nexus a`nd the rule of law. We are bound by ties of affection. Ties of affection based on empathy for the situations of other people are exactly what cannot be felt by the psychopathic narcissist. The enthusiastic capitalist in pursuit of the profit margin may love and empathize with members of his family and circle of friends, but to have these feelings towards those with whom he exchanges money and commodities is ruled out by the structure of his work. If such feelings arise, they must be squelched.

    A fully civilized society, free of the incubus of private property, will be one in which ties of affection will extend freely to everyone we meet and to all those whose experiences we come to know about. Only then will we be cured of the social pathology of universal narcissism.

    I'm Clayton Morgareidge for the OMV.

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    Created by Clayton Morgareidge

    9/1/01