Pathology of the Corporate State

Martin Luther King Jr. saw the injustice and oppression of society and all his life he fought against it. He pointed out how our society itself has become ill and said he is proud to be maladjusted to the injustice of society happening in his time.

“Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word “maladjusted.” This word is the ringing cry to modern child psychology. Certainly, we all want to avoid the maladjusted life. In order to have real adjustment within our personalities, we all want the well‐adjusted life in order to avoid neurosis, schizophrenic personalities.

But I say to you, my friends, as I move to my conclusion, there are certain things in our nation and in the world which I am proud to be maladjusted and which I hope all men of good‐will will be maladjusted until the good societies realize. I say very honestly that I never intend to become adjusted to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to become adjusted to religious bigotry. I never intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, to self‐defeating effects of physical violence…”

What if the norm of our society is ill? What if our adjustment to society makes us act pathologically? Dr. King urged us to examine our taken for granted world by calling into question psychology’s notion of ‘maladjustment.’ Militarism, economic inequality, poverty and racism are symptoms of a larger illness in society. Political analysis tends to point to the cause of oppression in social systems through the framework of ideologies such as socialism and capitalism.

Prominent intellectuals such as Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky astutely identify and articulate how we live in a corporate state and elucidate the dark consequences of the current US Empire. Yet, what we are seeing are symptoms. Depth analysis that goes beyond the sociopolitical realm is necessary. In order to bring true healing to society, investigation into the real causes of oppression requires understanding at the psychological level. Only then will a true cure for society begin to arise.

Psychopathy

Untamed corporate power has become a destructive force in the world. Transnational corporations harm the environment and poison the food chain. They hijack elections and plunder democratic values, stealing childhood and ruining the minds and futures of young people with debt and standardized testing. They discard the elderly, abandon the weak and poor with a rapaciously profit-driven medical system.

What is now lurking behind the scenes in society is a predator, seeking for their prey and going in for the kill. In our time, this artificial entity called the corporation has become embodied as a being with ordained personhood. The notion of corporate personhood gave them legal rights and granted tremendous power, which over time has risen above the rights of human beings themselves.

This beast hides its exploitative and aggressive nature in a carefully crafted friendly and progressive image. Many media organizations and law firms have followed down the corporate path and been infiltrated by animalistic desires, becoming vehicles that provides a PR front for these cannibals to carry their agendas.

Corporate personhood is like a machine with cunning intelligence that viciously attacks their targets. It tears man’s heart apart and chews up conscience. This system turns humanity into mimicking a model of personhood that is predatory and self-aggrandizing; one that is constructed upon a hollow internal structure.

Such a system resembles the diagnosis of a certain personality disorder known as the psychopath. The nature of psychopathy has gained wider awareness in recent years. Psychopathy expert Robert Hare (1993) noted psychopaths as individuals without conscience and described how they are “social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life” (p. xi).

So, in a sense, the corporate state is a psychopathic system that plays trickery to maximize instinctual and selfish desires. In this deception, hierarchy is used to create a complex maze to keep people from understanding this system of control.

In modern times, systems of representation are used to mask these forces of oppression, seizing free speech and the flow of money. With unprecedented levels of government secrecy and manipulation of information, these deranged individuals keep their insidious actions in the dark. By way of this deception, they are able to manufacture consent with virtually no opposition.


Psychopathy & Corporate state

In modern America, corporations have become enthroned as the new kings, which took enlightenment ideas of individual rights and freedom and subverted them to narrow selfish aims. Narrow-sighted corporations in a sense have become machines that see everything in terms of this month’s profit margin. Within this limited spectrum, the native’s vision of a sustainable future was treated as naive and inferior. Their foresight of giving one’s heart to seven generations into the future, seeing those faces peeking through a cloud was viewed as a childhood imagination and ridiculed.

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