Fiduciary Duty
Corporate objectives are codified in their founding incorporation statements (ICs) which exhibits as behaviour in its leadership via "shareholder primacy". This profit seeking behaviour then propagates through the organisation to staff behaviour via "fiduciary duty" (See Figure 1) ensuring all parts of the system work in the pursuit of financial gain of shareholders. This binding principle gives corporates the traits of an inhuman, unfeeling, machine. Furthermore, this structure works as a funnel selectively promoting the worst human traits.
Research has found people with narcissistic traits tend to get promoted 39% faster in their progression to CEO and that there are at least three times as many psychopaths in executive or CEO roles than in the overall population. Psychopaths constitute around 1% of the adult population and 20% of (North American) prison populations, they are reported to be responsible for about 50 % of all serious crimes potentially due to their lack of empathy. However, unlike psychopaths, a corporation is merely a machine and founding heuristics can be readily modified.
Corporate irresponsibility has been known since their inception. When the corporate structure was first invented, the powers that be codified their founding agreements so they could only form for short periods of time, after which they would have to be dissolved. The reason for this limitation on their operational life was that the authority feared that as the corporate structure limits liability a Pandora's box might be unleashed in perpetuity with noone to blame. However as corporates became increasingly powerful they effectively lobbied for the removal of dissolution controls and became profit generating automatons. Today the vast majority of global externalities originate from just 90 corporate entities around the world.