Let's not forget about the love of power as another "root of evil"

In our phone Theology Discussion on Monday night, in connection with the subject of greed (avarice) I brought up the issue of power as another "source of (all) evils". It seems to me that in the contexts of states, empires, and world-spanning corporations, the love of wealth and the love of power are tightly connected.

Although material resources and their control are the subjects that Marxist/Marxian approaches take as basic -- a point of view which I, as a "cultural materialist", share -- human society also seems to be afflicted with the presence of an all too common free-floating urge to dominate for domination's sake, as well as for economics' sake.

Control freaks, psychopaths/sociopaths, and dominators/empire builders of all sorts, regardless of their particular psychopathologies, seem to me to be disproportionally involved in the creation and operation of the institutional "structures of sin" that some of us have been discussing.

I can believe the claim that the top levels of complex societies are so hospitable to psychopathic character traits that they have increasingly been colonized or infiltrated by psychopaths to the extent that one can reasonably talk about our institutions as "pathocracies", dominated by "pathocrats" -- a domination that will eventually self-destruct because "pathocracy progressively paralyzes everything". [The quote is from a long, complicated article about "Political Ponerology" by Andrew M. Lobaczewski. "Ponerology" is a fancy word for the study, or science, of evil. I'm in the process of exploring the the Politcal Ponerology book's website and a Ponerology blog. Lobaczewski, a clinical psychologist who lived and worked in Poland under both the Nazis and the Stalinists, published his book in 2005. (The Amazon.com readers' reviews will give you a pretty good sense of what it's about.)

Going from the complex to the simple, I have a couple of favorite cartoon illustrations of power as a root of evil.

The New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton's subject is money, wealth, and the absurdly rich. (Money Should Be Fun is one of his great collections of cartoons, many of which can be viewed on his site.)

One of his cartoons that has stuck in my mind for years has a couple of tycoon types talking in an airplane. One says "When you're young, it's about sex, money, and power. Then you get older, you weed out, you simplify....and you find that power is enough."

Another one, I'm not sure if it's from a cartoon or it's just a verbal gag: a guy is asked which is more important, money or people. Without hesitation he says "people". Then he adds: "after all, what good is money if you can't use it to manipulate people?"

I think those two jokes get at some basic realities of our society.

Coming at it from the other end, corporations have been analyzed in the psychological framework that's appropriate to individuals. A pretty defensible conclusion is that if a business corporation were a person, it would be diagnosed as a psychopath.

As a legal and potentially immortal person, with limited liability, and with the sole goal of maximizing profits and wealth, the corporate persona exhibits the following traits that indicate psychopathy: • Callous unconcern for the feelings for others • Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships • Reckless disregard for the safety of others • Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit • Incapacity to experience guilt • Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviours.

Note, however, that although ordinary people get caught up in the institutional dynamics created by the psychopathy of the institution itself as well as by the psychopathy of some of the most powerful leaders, most of the ordinary people are, well, ordinary. That is, they aren't psychopaths, even though they have to find ways to adapt to the psychopathologies around them. Presumably, that can be psychologically costly.

If you're interested in this line of inquiry, you can google "corporations" and "psychopath" and get a couple of hundred thousand entries. Most of the early ones are about a 2004 book by Joel Bakan, titled The Corporation: the Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, and its companion documentary film, The Corporation. The next most popular source is a psychologist, Robert Hare, author of Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (1993) and co-author of Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work (2006).