Are Corporations Psychopaths?
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Are corporations psychopaths?
A corporation is a legal entity that is created under the laws of a state, designed to establish the entity as a separate legal entity having its own privileges and liabilities distinct from those of its members. In the movie, ” The Corporation”, the narrator says that corporations these days are all pervasive and that they are today, what the church, the monarchy and the communist parties were to the earlier times ( meaning that the corporations at present, are to us what his monster was to Dr. Frankenstein. Our own creation has now overwhelmed and overpowered us).
We , the humans, created the corporations to serve us (i.e. to produce for us the goods and services that we need to sustain life and also those goods that we want for our own pleasures). In the past, corporations were guided by charters on how to function, how much of a product they would produce, whom they would produce for and how much it would cost, but as time passed corporate lawyers managed to attain for themselves a more flexible set of rules and that is when the corporations began to control our ways of life.
The Corporation is a powerful and poignant illustration of the way that large firms and businesses in America have placed ever increasing profits and the stakes of their shareholders over the welfare of the society as a whole. An interesting analogy was putting the Corporation through the checklist for a psychopath, and in doing so, revealing the corrupt and shady practices of many of Americas most beloved corporations.
It raises many important questions and identifies many outstanding problems that Americans as a people must rise up to challenge and correct if they are to move into a sustainable and bright future. The Corporation emphasizes the importance of individual awareness and human agency in an otherwise dark picture of a world where institutions such as government, which have been put into place to protect the common man and the citizen from over-encroachment by the private sector, have themselves become agents for corporate profit and channels for corporate greed. While the film does a beautiful job in addressing all these problems, doesnt reach any solid or feasible conclusions as to what is to be done, and leaves the audience contemplating a dismal future.
The film is not without its shortcomings, however. The director is masterful in selectively including evidence from well respected scholars and commentators such as Noam Chomsky and people familiar with the pathology of mental illnesses and disorder such as a former FBI psychologist, and weaves both of their stories together in an all too simple and powerful revelation that the corporation can be understood as a psychopath, or displaying the same characteristics as a psychopath. Despite the powerful and masterful use of such filmmaking