Why Corporate Fraud Is So Rampant: Wall Street's Cop
We're not even scratching the surface.
1) YES, the culture is corrupt.
2) WHY is the culture corrupt?
3) WHY/HOW did we let it get that corrupt?
4) Why did we even start down that path?
5) Why did we let others start us down that path?
Complacency & personal vs group greed kills groups. You can't cheat an actively honest electorate.
In every social species, and in every organized nation, every process is too important to to be left to the presumed process owners.
5 comments:
American "rugged individualism" is part of the myth of the frontier that is used to justify the cultural view that "greed is good."
The rationale also brings in Adam Smith's "invisible hand" as a justification of extreme liberalism spilling into licence. That is a myth, too. Smith said no such thing and to read him otherwise to read selectively and out of context.
Add to that curious interpretations of the Bible, which are yet other myths.
All these myths are advanced to as rationales for pseudo-freedom as license. Thus, Lloyd Blankfein can assert with a straight face that he is "doing God's will."
The causality is cognitive bias, on one hand, and, biologically, it is grounded in certain neural pathways being opened due to use and others unopened. Or maybe a paucity of mirror neurons that results in lack of empathy and social awareness.
Studies show that these decline as one ascends the scale of social status, where the upper echelons are divorced from contact with the lower. Studies also so that this increases from the study of economics.
The result is a cultural bias that gets reflected in key institutions and personal behavior.
It appears, therefore, that the causality is cognitive-affective. We need to look into why the culture is overproducing this bias and why the selection process is rewarding it, because it is seriously reducing the adaptive rate by hampering co-operation and coordination for social purpose and even species survival.
Brain worms.
I think you're on the right track there Tom.
Sociopaths have their famous ability to charm via access to common neural pathways. They express their nature and the successful ones immediately start creating more "elbow room" for themselves, all the while being anywhere from passively to actively supported (even loved and adored) by their victims. It seems very similar to situations where someone who is abused siding with the abuser. It's not that surprising insomuch as we come from a feudal past, where the most cunning, charming and cruel reigned supreme (no matter who was called the "Ruler" at the time).
The question is, can we educate ourselves to see this socio/psyco pathic behavior and counter it's powerful self-healing properties, so that we may be able to grow beyond the SUPPORTING role that we, for thousands of years, have been so carefully and so expertly selected for?
I might add that I don't think it's really anybody's fault. To use another axiom, we just did what seemed to be the thing to do at the time.
Unforgiven, we have the mechanisms to detect and stop these sort of personalities to abuse 'the system'.
The problem is these mechanisms have evolved to only work on a natural environment, where groups are proximal and small. These mechanisms are not scalable to civlization levels or big societies. And I'm not talking even about millions, I'm talking about thousands persons groups (small towns and villages).
Hence these individuals run rampage and do as they please.
Involuntary altruism, i.e. altruism at the point of a gun, is self-contradictory social cancer.
Rugged individualism is attacked because it is the only thing stopping involuntary altruists from enslaving humanity.
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