Corporate Assaults on Personhood

Reflections on Harm Caused by Unbridled Business Greed (Vol. 4; Issue 38)

Two middle-aged women I know were recently ambushed by major international corporations. The first one, Jane, a high level manager for Disney, was terminated after 19 years of dedicated service; the second, Sally, a 25-year veteran of Microsoft who works as a senior executive reporting directly to the Chief Information Officer, received notice of a layoff last August. Both women feel “crushed.” They devoted much of their lives to these firms. The companies profit motives eclipsed these persons’ loyalty and competency. Post-termination placement services offered to both proved insufficient, and little effort was made to place them in a different position within their companies.

My neighbor’s 25-year-old son, a young man who’s never done well academically, receives a different kind of mistreatment from the grocery chain Ralph’s. They pay him minimum wage even though he’s just worked there a year and has twice won “employee of the month.” His manager gave him “outstanding” ratings on two work performance evaluations. Nonetheless, she never gives him more than 25 hours a week. The union provides him some benefits, but he’d get additional health and dental coverage, as well as vacation time, if he worked full-time. Obviously, Ralph’s, as a corporation, saves money by keeping him part-time. While they maintain their self-interest, he cannot earn enough money for a car and a room in a house away from his family’s home. He feels “stuck.”

The insensitive treatment of these women and the young man represent only one way corporations threaten personhood. The unprecedented size and power of international corporations enable multiple layers of evil. As noted, they discard or under-employ people without regard for its effect on employees’ lives. That level of mistreatment is obvious. In addition to such “profits over people” behaviors, these businesses inhibit people from seeking “the good life,” steal information, and powerfully exert influence on our unconscious minds.

When Freud was asked to define maturity, he responded: “lieben und arbeiten,” which means to love and to work (Erikson, 1963, p. 265). Later, other psychoanalysts helpfully added the phrase, “to play.” In brief, then, from a psychoanalytic perspective, loving, working, and playing constitute the good life. Along these same lines, Maslow’s (1943/2022) five-step hierarchy of needs lists, in order of importance: physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization. If you wrestle your way through the first four, you are free to discover your authentic self. Psychoanalyst Erich Fromm (1956/2013) elaborated upon some of the higher level needs, which include capacities for relatedness and identity.

The three people just described now struggle with work, which, in turn, impedes their capacities for love and play. They certainly will not be able to even imagine self-actualization. Their ability to relate socially, and to find a meaningful sense of identity, is constrained. The two women fortunately have some savings. If the Ralph’s employee did not live with his parents, he would likely join the tragic ranks of the unhoused. None of these persons will be capable of enjoying anything like a good life until they obtain full-time employment.

Once you achieve the highest levels Freud, Maslow, and Fromm describe, you would think you’d become more autonomous, more free. What seems most malevolent about these firms is how they inhibit autonomy and freedom.

What an irony that the hard-core behaviorist, B.F. Skinner, predicted a half-century ago that corporate interests would ultimately clash with human ones. He, too, proclaimed that corporate narcissism, if not its outright psychopathy (see Brueckner, 2013), would sabotage humanity. A Skinner fan, Biglan (1995) identifies the major “catastrophic consequences” of corporate greed as polluting the planet, negatively altering patterns of consumption, problematically influencing lifestyles (as in promoting internet gaming addiction), and distributing false information.

In his book, The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm—anything but a behaviorist—echoes Skinner when writing:

The principle underlying capitalist society and the principle of love are incompatible. (p. 131)