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Inside the Psyche of the 1% -- Many Actually Believe Their Ideology of Greed Makes for a Better World
Nov 4, 2013 | Alternet | Don Fitz
If the 1% are to develop the same level of understanding of others that the 99% has, they will need to walk in their shoes.
Do
the rich and super-rich tend to be psychopaths, devoid of guilt or
shame? Are the 1% lacking in compassion? Does their endless accumulation
of possessions actually bring them little to no happiness? To each of
these, the answer is “yes”—but a very qualified “yes” with lots of
subtleties. Even more important is what these issues suggest for
building a society which does not ravage the last remnants of wilderness
and rush headlong into a climate change tipping point.
Strange concepts of psychopathy
The
word “psychopath” often elicits an image of a deranged murderer.
Despite Alfred Hitchcock’s chair-gripping “Psycho,” stabbing victims in
the shower is not a typical activity of psychopaths. They are more often
con artists who end up in jail after cheating their victims. Classic
definitions of psychopathy include features such as superficial charm,
anti-social behavior, unreliability, lack of remorse or shame,
above-average intelligence, absence of nervousness, and untruthfulness
and insincerity. [1]
Most
of those in the mental health industry sternly observe that a strict
set of consistent rewards and consequences is the only treatment that
works with psychopaths. But they admit that even this treatment might
not work too well. Progressives may dismiss observations by
psychologists because the field tends to explore a behavioral pattern as
it exists in a certain Western culture at a given point in history and
then imagine that it characterizes all people at all times. Psychology
has a long tradition of bending to current race, gender and sexual
orientation biases. Its class bias is reflected by the dominant
portrayal of psychopathy.
Consider
what William H. Reid, MD, from the Department of Psychiatry at the
University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio writes about
psychopaths:
I
have no wish to dehumanize people when I say that those who purposely
endanger others in our streets, parks, and schools, even our homes, are
qualitatively different from the rest of us. I care less and less about
why they’re not the same as the rest of us; the enemy is at our
door…There is no (reasonable) ethic which requires that we treat him as
other adults; indeed, to do so is foolish. [2]
Reid
cautions his readers: “We must stop identifying with the chronic
criminal, and stop allowing him to manipulate our misplaced guilt about
treating him as he is: qualitatively different from the rest of us. [3]
The
author insists that good people must have the stamina to do what is
necessary to protect themselves from the psychopathic criminal:
…life
is full of situations in which we need to do something distasteful…Most
of us agree that we need to slaughter animals from time to time. We do
it as humanely as possible, but we get it done…We also agree that some
public health needs are important enough to require the suspension of
some rights of people who have not been convicted of any crime…” [4]
Reid
chides those who recoil at the thought of suspending rights: “While we
have been interminably discussing this weighty issue, the psychopaths,
who don’t trouble themselves with contemplations, have been gaining
ground.” [5]
Where
did these insights appear? Not in a transcript of a Rush Limbaugh
interview. Not in an Ayn Rand novel. Not from someone fondly reminiscing
of Ronald Reagan.
These words are excerpted from an essay in the scholarly volume Psychopathy: Anti-Social, Criminal and Violent Behavior. The
text is predominantly a collection of reports and syntheses under
academic headings of “Typologies,” “Etiology,” “Comorbidity” and
“Treatment.” The portions quoted illustrate that intense hostility
directed towards victims of the criminal justice system is within the
acceptable continuum of published academic thought on psychopathy.
A demon with two horns
The
words from Reid reflect what is called the “categorical view.” It
maintains that the difference between “psychopaths” and “normals” is as
clear-cut as the difference between left-handedness and
right-handedness.
A
contrasting perspective, with a large amount of research to back it up,
is the “dimensional view.” It regards psychopathy and other
“personality disorders” as exaggerated expressions of normal behavior.
Just as we are all more or less compassionate, we all have the ability
to be manipulative and deceitful. We act so when we think that
circumstances warrant it.
Some
people think circumstances warrant it a whole more than others do.
“Pure” psychopaths are examined in case studies of flim-flam hustlers;
they make the evening news; and they become topics of TV shows. But
there are many more “marginal” psychopaths who score high on some
aspects of the disorder but not on others.
The
dimensional view also recognizes that psychopaths can be more or less
successful. A fellow psychologist once told me that she feels that the
psychopaths she sees in therapy are the less successful ones. While most
psychopaths are a little more intelligent than average, she thought
that successful psychopaths are much more intelligent and run
corporations as well as the military, government, and educational and
religious institutions.
The
concept of “successful psychopath” is not new. An early text described
“complex psychopaths” who were very intelligent and included
unscrupulous politicians and businessmen. [6] By the 1970s it was more
widely recognized that “this category includes some successful
businessmen, politicians, administrators.” [7] In other words, the
unsuccessful psychopath might go to jail for swindling dozens of people
with home improvement scams while successful psychopaths might swindle
millions with bank deals, get bailed out by friends in government, and
never spend a day in jail.
Perhaps
the most fascinating aspect of the medicalization of the disorder is
how the psychiatric establishment departed from science in order to
grant partial exemption from being characterized as psychopaths to the
wealthy. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
the American Psychiatric Association, in order to receive a diagnosis of
“anti-social personality disorder” (i.e., psychopathy) a person must
exhibit at least 3 of 7 listed behavior patterns. These include
“arrest,” “physical fights or assaults,” and “failure to sustain
consistent work behavior.” [8] This means that those who can pay off
cops (or never have charges pressed against them due to their social
status), or pay someone else to commit violence on their behalf, or own
companies instead of having to work for a living are all less likely to
receive an official label of “psychopath.”
An
increasing number of psychologists are becoming aware that traditional
research was limited by the bias of only looking at people in jail. One
wrote that subjects in psychopathy research “were usually
institutionalized at the time of testing, and consequently our research
may not accurately capture the internal structure and dynamics of the
successful antisocial or psychopathic individual.” [9]
Support
for the concept of successful and unsuccessful psychopaths is provided
by the discovery that the “Psychopathic Personality Disorder” syndrome
actually has two factors. [10] Statistical analyses have revealed an
“emotional detachment” factor, which includes superficial charm and
skill at manipulating others, as well as an “anti-social behavior”
factor, which includes poor impulse control and the tendency to engage
in activities that are illegal.
Multiple
studies have confirmed that run-of-the-mill psychopaths (often studied
while in jail) score particularly high on anti-social behavior while
successful psychopaths score higher on emotional detachment factors. For
example, Babiak [11] looked at “industrial psychopaths” and found that
they scored higher on “emotional” factors than “deviant life style”
factors. Functioning smoothly in the corporate world, they had a
“charming façade” that allowed them to easily manipulate others.
In
a study of “disordered personalities at work” other researchers [12]
were able to give personality tests to business managers and chief
executives. They contrasted their personality scores to psychiatric
patients and “mentally disordered offenders.” Compared to the mental
patients, the corporate executives showed greater “emotional” components
of personality disorder and less “acting out” (such as
aggressiveness).
The
authors concluded that “participants drawn from the non-clinical
population [i.e., business managers] had scores that merged
indiscernibly with clinical distributions.” There were no clear-cut
differences between “psychopaths” and “normals.” The most likely
explanation of psychopathy is that, like any other personality
dimension, it has a bell-shaped curve: a few people have almost none of
the characteristics, most people have some characteristics of
psychopathy, and a few people have a lot. The most visible outlets for
people high on psychopathy scales are petty con artists and corporate
conniving. Operating in different worlds, their psychopathy expresses
itself in different ways.
Now
that it is clear that a streak of psychopathy runs through the 1%, it
would be worthwhile to go back to those who espouse that “there is no
ethic which requires we treat him [the psychopath] as we treat other
adults” and ask if that would apply to corporate psychopaths as well.
Will editors of scholarly volumes seek out articles heaping abuse on the
1% with the same vigor with which they find articles despising prison
inmates? Will academics proclaim that “public health needs” dictate that
we suspend civil liberties of corporate executives even if they “have
not been convicted of any crime?” Will professors compare the “needed
treatment” of the 1% to the “necessary slaughter” of animals?
Since
academics know very well where funding for their research comes from,
my guess is that they will be a wee bit less harsh on the corporate
class than the jailed burglar who provides no grant money. We can be
confident that the Tea Party will not be proposing that, if corporate
psychopaths who blast the tops off of mountains wreak a thousand times
the havoc of petty thieves who steal copper wire from air conditioners,
then their punishments should be 1000 times as great.
Yet,
it is important not to overstate the evidence and suggest that every
capitalist is a psychopath. Not all corporate executives score high on
scales of psychopathy. This is likely because many actually believe
their ideology of greed makes for a better world.
What causes human compassion?
Compassion
reflects the opposite of psychopathy. When those with wealth and power
plan to strangle social security, they never say they intend to hurt
people, but rather they want to help them stand on their own. When
corporations drive native people from forests, they tell us it is part
of their grand scheme to stop climate change. Are we to believe that
they are just as compassionate as everyone else…but that they reveal
their compassion in their own way? There is now good evidence that there
are, in fact, class differences in levels of compassion.
By
definition, the rich and powerful have more material resources and
spend more of their time telling others what to do. Those with fewer
material resources get told what to do. As a result, the rich value
independence and autonomy while those with less money think of
themselves as more interdependent with others. [13] In other words, the
rich prize the image of the “rugged individual” while the rest of us
focus on what group we belong to.
How
do people explain the extremely unequal distribution of wealth? Those
with more money attribute it to “dispositional” causes—they believe that
people get rich because their personality leads them to work harder and
get what they deserve. Those with less money more often attribute
inequality to “external” factors—people’s wealth is due largely to
events beyond their control, such as being born into a rich family or
having good breaks in life. [14]
People
with fewer financial resources live in more threatening environments,
whether from potential violence, being unable to pay medical bills, or
fearing the possibility of being evicted from their homes. This means
that social classes differ in the way that they view the world from an
early age. Children from less financially secure homes respond to
descriptions of threatening and ambiguous social scenarios with higher
blood pressure and heart rate. [15] Adults with lower incomes are also
more reactive to emotional situations than are those with more money.
This
means that people with fewer financial resources are more attentive to
others’ emotions. Since low income people are more sensitive to
emotional signals, they might pay more attention to the needs of others
and show more altruism in response to suffering.
This
was the thinking behind research linking higher income to less
compassion. In one study people either watched a neutral video or one
depicting a child suffering from cancer. People with lower income had
more change in their heart rate and reported feeling more compassion.
But they did not rate other emotions as higher. Social class could be
linked to compassion more than to any other emotion. [16]
In
another study, people reported their emotions toward a partner when the
two of them went through a hypothetical job interview. Lower income
people perceived more distress in their partners and expressed more
compassion toward them. Again, they did not report more intense feelings
of other emotions. Nor did participants show more compassion toward
people with the same income level as their own. [17]
Like
most psychological research, these findings are limited by their use of
university students. This makes it hard to conclude that their findings
apply to those not in school. Of course, it is quite possible that
effects would be even stronger in situations that are far more intense
than the somewhat mild experiences that occur in psychological
laboratories. A greater problem is interpreting psychological findings
as showing absolute differences between groups rather than shades of
grey.
It
would not be accurate to claim that research proves that the 1% have no
compassion while all of the 99% do. But it strongly implies that the 1%
feel less compassion, whether watching a videotape of suffering or
participating in a live social interaction. Also, lab studies are
consistent with findings that people with fewer financial resources give
a higher proportion of what they do have to charity. In economic game
research, they give more to others. [18]
This
line of research confirms that (1) people with fewer financial
resources identify with a larger “in-group;” (2) “attention to and
recognition of suffering is a prerequisite step before compassion can
take place;” and (3) “moral emotion is not randomly distributed across
social classes…” [19] Compassion toward the suffering of others is less
likely among the 1%.
The happiness paradox
The
endurance of the story of Scrooge reflects a deeply ingrained
understanding that replacing compassion with a devotion to accumulating
wealth will not bring fulfillment. But it is not that simple. What I
call the “happiness paradox” flows from two consistent yet seemingly
contradictory findings:
1. At a given point in time, higher income is positively associated with happiness; but,
2. Over time, per capita income can rise greatly with no rise in happiness.
Let’s
look at the first of these. It is true that there is a positive
correlation between income and happiness. People who make more money
describe themselves as happier. But the diminishing returns of the
happiness curve are profound. The greatest reason for the correlation is
the huge jump in happiness as people move out of poverty into the world
of survive-ability. At higher income levels, more money is associated
with extremely small increases in happiness. In fact, moving from the
ninth to the tenth (top) income category only increases happiness 0.02
point on a 10-point scale. [20]
Similar
effects occur when comparing countries. Those living in rich countries
are happier than those living in poor countries. Again, there are
diminishing returns, due to the large effects of moving out of abject
poverty. Once an income of $10,000 was reached during the 1990s,
additional income did very little. [21] A 10% increase in income in a
country with half the income of the US was associated with an increase
in happiness of 0.0003 on a 10-point scale. [22]
While
smaller increases in happiness occur with advances to successively
higher income levels, even this effect is wiped out in comparisons
across time. US per capita income has increased dramatically since WWII,
while happiness has not changed or even decreased slightly. Between
1946 and 1991, real income rose from $11,000 to $27,000 (in 1996
dollars) but happiness was constant. [23] Another study found that from
1940 to 2000 people in the US earned three times as much with no
increase in happiness. [24] The most spectacular growth in the
capitalist world occurred in Japan, which saw a six-fold increase in per
capita income from 1958 to 1991. Yet, there was no change in happiness.
[25]
These
portraits are all painted from people’s self-reports of how happy they
are. Looking at happiness in a more “objective” way suggests that it
could actually have decreased at the same time that material possessions
were increasing. Presumably, people who are happy have fewer bouts of
major depression. If increased income resulted in more happiness, then
there should have been less depression among Americans who grew up
during times of greater prosperity. Exactly the opposite occurred.
Compared
to those born in 1925–1935, those born in 1945–1955 had twice the
probability of a major depressive episode, and those born after 1955 had
the highest rate of depression. [26] Suicide may be the most objective
measure of happiness (or unhappiness). Data reveal that America’s
economic growth spurt occurred simultaneous with a rise in the suicide
rate of 7.6 per 100,000 in 1950 to 12.4 per 100,000 in 1990. [27]
Though
it would be false to say that money cannot buy any happiness, it would
be even worse to say that money can buy lots of happiness. Why then is
having more money at a given point in time associated with more
happiness (even if only slightly so) while increases in income over time
fail to bring more happiness? It is largely because of class divisions
and the obsession of capitalist culture with material objects.
When
a generation of objects first comes into being (whether jewelry, cars
or cell phones), only a few can afford them. The many who cannot buy
them endure a fabricated emptiness. Over the next few decades (or years
or months) the price of the object falls, ownership becomes commonplace,
and a new fad is concocted to stimulate desire. Though the process
predates capitalism by many centuries, it is the glorification of object
possession in capitalist society that inflates it beyond reason.
Before
the 1920s, give or take a decade or two, capitalism was producing
largely for needs, with the luxury items of the rich being the
exception. But as it became clear that it was possible to satisfy the
basic necessities of the vast majority, the 1% began a brave new
adventure into the world of manufactured needs and planned obsolescence.
Products designed to go out of style or fall apart became more frequent
until they became the norm following WWII. [28] Of course, people
accepted this fetishism of things to a great or lesser degree—some
Christians still thought that spirituality was more important than
bowing to golden calves. One of the best known psychological critics of
the emerging life style was Abraham Maslow, who coined the phrase
“deficiency orientation” to explain those who wrap their lives around
the illusion that happiness can be found in material goods. [29]
Sociologists
wrote of “aspiration level theory,” “positional goods” and “status
symbols” to describe the purchase of objects whose major value is to
demonstrate that the owner possesses something that most others do not.
Studies documented that people who prize material possessions are
significantly less happy. [30]
Karl
Marx wrote of the prime directive of capitalism being to “Accumulate,
accumulate!” [31] Decades before the end of the twentieth century,
capitalism had spread its pathological world view and created a new law
of accumulation:
Manufactured Needs = Manufactured Unhappiness
It
is well documented that possessions do not bring happiness; but, then,
what does? Recent research has confirmed what philosophers have written
and religions have preached for millennia. Happiness is associated with
close personal relationships and control over essential parts of one’s
life. [32] One study which interviewed college students found that those
who were the most happy (1) spent more time with others and (2)
reported more satisfying relationships. A society dominated by the 1%,
however, pushes us in the opposite direction. In 1985, 75% of Americans
reported having a close friend, but by 2004 that had fallen to 50%.
[33]
One
of the more interesting experimental studies had some participants do
five favors for people in a single day. Weeks later, they still felt
better than those who did not practice altruistic behavior. [34] Life
might be less pleasant among those whose urge to get ahead makes them
less compassionate and less likely to do unsolicited nice things for
others.
The exponential addict
The
1% could easily find compassion getting in their way as their actions
affect an increasing number of lives. Gaining enough wealth to move out
of poverty makes a significant difference in the life satisfaction of a
person who has little. Gaining the same amount of wealth has no effect
on the happiness of the very rich. They must grab the wealth of many
impoverished people in order to have a perceptible increase in
happiness. As for a drug addict, the rush from an increase in material
possessions of those who already have more than enough is merely a
temporary fix.
Soon
they will have to prevent even more from rising out of poverty if they
are to get another short-term happiness rush. Whether the rush is from
the actual possessions or the power that they manifest, it still won’t
be enough. They must increase the rate of wealth accumulation that they
push through their veins. If those with spectacular quantities of
obscene wealth are to get their next high, they cannot merely snort
enough happiness objects to prevent masses of people from rising out of poverty—they have to manipulate markets to grind an ever-increasing number into poverty.
The
petty psychopath and the grand corporate psychopath seek happiness
through the act of obtaining material possessions as much as having
them. A major difference between them is that the grand psychopath has
the ability to cause so much harm. Even more important, the amount of
harm that corporate psychopaths cause grows at an exponential rate.
Their financial schemes are no longer millions or billions, but now
trillions. Not content to drive individual farmers off their land, they
design trade deals that force entire countries to plow under the ability
to feed their own people and replace it with cash crops to feed animals
or produce biofuels.
Finding
that the pollution of small communities generates insufficient funds,
they blow off the tops of mountain ranges for coal, raze boreal forests
for tar sands, attack aquatic ecosystems with deep sea drilling, and
contaminate massive natural water systems by mining gold or fracking for
gas. While the petty psychopath may become proficient enough to become a
godfather, the grand psychopath is driven not merely to planetary
destruction but to a frenetic increase in the rate of destruction at
precisely the moment when the tipping point of climate change is most
haunting.
A
natural question might seem to follow: Would getting rid of the current
batch of corporate psychopaths benefit the world greatly? Actually, no.
It would do no good whatsoever because what psychologists call the
“reward contingencies” of the corporate world would still exist. The
fact that capitalism prizes accumulation of wealth by the few at the
expense of the many would mean that, even if the worst corporate
criminals disappeared, they would soon be replaced by marketplace
clones.
Progressives
should avoid using the same “categorical” model so adored by right wing
theorists for its utility in hating the poor. A much better explanation
for psychopathy among the 1% is that the corporate drive to put profits
before all else encourages norms of manipulating people without
compassion. The more readily corporate leaders succumb to this mind set,
the more likely they will be to climb the ladder. As the corporate
mentality dominates society, it reproduces its attitudes and
expectations of behavior throughout every organization, institution and
individual it touches.
In challenging what the market does to our souls, Alan Nasser said it so well:
A
certain kind of society tends to produce a certain kind of person. More
precisely, it discourages the development of certain human capacities
and fosters the development of others. Aristotle, Rousseau, Marx and
Dewey were the philosophers who were most illuminating on this. They
argued that the postures required by successful functioning in a market
economy tend to insinuate themselves into those areas of social
intercourse which take place outside of the realm of the market proper.
The result, they claimed, was that the arena for potentially altruistic
and sympathetic behavior shrinks over time as society is gradually
transformed into a huge marketplace. [35]
As
mentioned, there are differences in compassion and types of psychopathy
between high and low income people. But the differences are not large.
Perhaps, even in the corporate board room, many feel the old norms of
group loyalty. It is also possible that differences are small, not
because of the unwillingness of corporate executives to be
ultra-manipulative, but because capitalism pushes everyone toward a “use
people” mode.
Thus,
building a new society involves going beyond equalizing material
wealth. It means changing the core nature of interpersonal
relationships. This requires vastly reducing the emphasis on material
possessions. Relationships of people to people can never flourish as
long as relationships of people to objects reign supreme.
As
long as society continues to be deeply divided between those who tell
others what to do and those who get told, it will not be possible to
establish the emotional sharing that is the basis of widespread
altruism. If the 1% are to develop the same level of understanding of
others that the 99% has, they will need to walk in their shoes. If they
continue to be the ones who live their lives telling others what to do
while the rest of us continue being told what to do, they will not
develop levels of compassion typical of the 99%.
This
means that in office jobs, they should be able to share the joys of
typing letters rather than ordering others to type for them. If we
decide mining is necessary, those who are now the 1% should get to know
that work life. In work at home, they should not be excluded from
washing toilets but should participate in the same human activities as
the rest of society. Creating a world of universal compassion requires a
world of shared experiences.
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About the Author
Don Fitz teaches Environmental Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is editor of Synthesis/Regeneration: A Magazine of Green Social Thought and produces Green Time in conjunction with KNLC-TV.
