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 US Supreme court in 1886. In essence, this case was a dispute over a railway route in the US and determined whether the 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 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 gives corporations a machine like quality which if it was a REAL 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. 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.

As we live in a type of corporatocracy, where corporates are the dominant organisational form on earth as they sell us most stuff (see Figure 1 and Figure 2) this may seem depressing. However, a ray of hope is to remember corporations have only been around for 0.16% of the time since humans evolved are simply inert machines. Much like a gun, corporate behaviour is only defined by the intention defined in its foundational coding, its incorporation statement, which can be rewritten. Perhaps, if we can change the intention, we can change the effect. Can we write a series heirarchical rules (tenets) which could be used to make the incorporation statement of a machine which does good?