Businessman as a psychopath?!

“ Agent Seaver: Businessman as a psychopath?

Agent Prentiss: They have the same characteristics, they just use their skills differently.”

-       Criminal Minds (CM), Season 6, ’25 to Life’.

 

I was as shocked as Agent Seaver, with the profiling of the ‘Businessman’ as a criminal suspect. (By ‘Businessman’ with a capital ‘B’, I refer to the ultra capitalists such as the multinational corporations, industry moguls, corporate banks, and such, rather than the small medium enterprises, or the petite bourgeoisie. Also ‘Businessman’ rather than ‘businesswoman’ because she is still arguably an anomaly and would be associated with aggressive, masculine attributes anyway, in our phallogocentric society) Yet, I realized it was not from disbelief but of shock that this idea was ‘said out loud’ through the cultural media of the ‘Businessman’ itself (TV shows themselves commodities a product of and contributing to the ‘Businessman’s’ pocket). Granted that the show is fictional, we, the ‘little people’, could see it as a crevice of resistance achieved through the writer. However since it was given space to manifest within the turf of the ‘Businessman’, it could also represent a sadistic ‘tease’ of unattainable resistance, or else an illusory perception of ‘actual resistance’ for temporary catharsis.

Would it be too extreme to call a ‘Businessman’ a psychopath?

There is a saying, “It’s nothing personal, just business”. There’s always the notion of not mixing emotion with calculation in the business world, a concept embodied by the ‘homo oeconomicus’ (rational economic man) – that difficult decisions like massive worker layoffs have to be done based on the profit motive and not on the fact that innumerable people may end up homeless and starving. While this is cruel, it may not appear psychopathic, yet. Upping the ante, Michael Moore exposed in his documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story”, how blue-chip companies are taking out insurance policies on workers, and gaining thousands and millions when the workers, also known as ‘dead peasants’ in the insurance contracts, die, without handing over a cent to the grieving families to aid in any medical or funeral expenses. Not direct murder but it begins to draw the similarities between the ‘Businessman’ and the psychopath, both having a lack of common moral and ethical understanding and an overt ignorance of the needs and rights of others, as Thornton would describe psychopathology.

Of course not all ‘businesses’ are evil and not all ‘businessmen’ are psychopaths but no one could be so ‘well-conditioned’ as to be blind to the highly destructive potential of doing business especially the way the capital B ‘Businesses’ do it. Yet it is accepted, and not without much effort at reconciling the extreme ideas of rational calculation and corporate violence. At this point I am reminded of Taussig’s discussion of ‘State Fetishism’. However, I think that the influence and conditioning of ‘capitalism’ is even more pervasive and at a very individual and personal level. For those ‘uninitiated’ (for instance business studies students) who want to emulate the success of the capital B ‘Businessmen’, it is social practice but it is also a conscious personal decision to wear ‘business attire’ to fit in and be embodied by the capitalist or business society, to wear make-up, to drink, smoke and do whatever to humour a client and seal the deal. They are in fact themselves polishing the glossy sheen of the mask of capitalism, embodying and perpetuating the construct simultaneously. There is not really a specific list of do’s and don’ts but just the business deal, and the limit of one’s ambitions, or the lack of a limit. I think that a lack of a limit to one’s ambitions borders on the driven and the greedy, or else in accordance to the theme of this post, psychotic. Freud conceptualized the super-ego as a sort of control against the overt desires, feelings and actions of an individual, hence a serious lack of a limit to one’s drive, could signal a faulty or underdeveloped super-ego, less sensitive to differences between socially desirable and undesirable behaviour – another characteristic of a psychopath.

Yet I think it is also the ambiguity and space for personal choice that capitalism also thrives on because the highest capitalist class escapes blame and the pathology remains individual rather than social. These aspiring uninitiated emulators, probably located in the middle class, also provide a convenient buffer between the upper and lower classes. They absorb at least some public finance increments through income tax, GST and such, while idolizing and maintaining the upper class at the top of the class strata. And there goes the revolution.

However, what exactly IS the initiation process and how probable is it to be initiated into the ‘Businessmen’ strata all the way at the top of the proverbial totem pole? As Moore exposed a supposed-to-have-been confidential letter from Citibank to its most filthy rich customers, the figure of top 1% richest in the States gives the answer as, not likely.  As an uninitiated, I can only imagine, with the help of some movies that you need to have one over the ‘Businessman’ if you could ever manage to (read – blackmail), to be expected into the rich and powerful club, but then again blackmail is itself a psychopathic crime concerned with control and power. Thus to join them you have to be capable of making moves with an ‘underdeveloped super-ego’, just like them. And at the successful maintenance rate of 1%, the only comforting thing is that the problem is not widespread (though the effect of the problem is).

Actually, am I even right to put the social figure that is the ‘Businessman’ in the hot seat, attacking with the (unqualified) diagnosis of psychopathology no less? I realize that this figure does not usually exist and act alone but represents an organization. Sometimes the individual ‘Businessman’ himself is anonymous and rather represented by an army of lawyers, security personnel and personal assistants. Or am I just doing what Taussig would explain to be ‘fetishizing’ the ‘Businessman’ due to the access denied to me of some kind of knowledge of that different social circle

Whatever the deal is, I AM in horror and in awe of what the ‘Businessman’ stands for.

 

~ by confusionethics on February 27, 2011.