Corporation

A traditional corporate entity is a collective joined together by articles of incorporation in pursuit of profit. Although it may be comprised of individual parts such as directors, officers, and shareholders, a corporation is a legal entity in and of itself. This was determined by Santa Clara County vs Southern Pacific Railway in the U.S. Supreme court in 1886. This case precedent was a dispute over a railway route and determined whether the U.S. Supreme Court identified a private corporation as a “natural person” under the U.S. Constitution and therefore entitled to protection under the Bill of Rights.

Figure 1. Corporations are legally horrible people!

Behaviour

Figure 2. Corporate oligopolies sell us our food.

The prime driver of all 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 REAL person would meet the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy. These overall traits 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. And 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.

Figure 3. Corporates oligopolies own our media.

This may seem depressing as we essentially live in a corporatocracy (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). However, a ray of hope is to remember corporations are simply inert machines, much like a gun, its behaviour is only defined by the intention defined by its founding incorporation statement. Perhaps, if we can change the intention, we can change the effect. Can we write a series foundational rules (tenets) which could be used to make the incorporation statement of a machine which does good?