Corporation

Figure 1. Corporations are legally people!

A traditional corporation, although comprised of individual parts such as directors, officers, and shareholders is legally recognized as a single "natural person". As such it is entitled the same protection as any other human protected by the US Bill of Rights except one key difference, you cannot put a corporation into jail.

Behaviour

Figure 2. Corporate oligopolies feed us.

The prime driver of corporate entities is self-survival the second, is their fiduciary duty to pursue revenue for the financial gain of employees and shareholders. These paramount, binding principles give corporations a machine like quality which if it was a natural person would meet the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. These general traits of corporations are compounded by the fact that people with narcissistic traits tend to get promoted 39% faster in their progression to CEO resulting in at least three times as many psychopaths in executive or CEO roles than in the overall population.

Why is that so bad? They get the job done after all!

Psychopathic behaviour is bad, for everyone, as they only amount to 1% of the adult population but are reported to be responsible for about 50% of all serious crimes and constitute 20% of (North American) prison populations. This will only get worse with the emergence of of A.I. as power will further centralise into the few who hold these traits.

Figure 3. Corporates oligopolies write our media.

Solutions

Past solutions?

Figure 4. Corporate oligopolies make our cars.

Numerous startups are launched on the premise of challenging and transforming the existing norms and conventions. Yet, the reality of funding poses a challenge: a significant number of these new companies rely on venture capital investments, which are inherently driven by the pursuit of profit. This financial dependency can make it difficult for a company to prioritize anything over profit-making. Even in cases where ethical considerations are explicitly valued, such as Google's initial "Don't Be Evil" motto—which was notably dropped from its code of conduct in 2022—commercial interests often end up taking precedence over ethical ones.

Proposed solutions.

To resolve these issues, we need to step away from the traditional corporate structure and start again. We need to organisations as we all need to work together, but how? Could we enact Tenets in a read only format baked in from the start and enforce their adoption with transparency?