Power players are generally narcissistic. They may have had good intentions once, but narcissistic traits thrive when money, power and prestige are involved. I’m not going to pretend I have the qualifications to declare every successful person a narcissist. That’s not fair as well as not true. The survival mechanism requires a certain amount of egocentricity and selfishness. However, greed and ego have always been at the root of evil.
Corporations are immortal complex systems which are run by human beings and consequently reflect our traits. Organizational decision-making focus on robust growth which often disregards the impact on others or the long term impact on itself, just like most living things. The survival mechanism is short-sighted that way, i.e. running away from the tiger even if it means jumping off a cliff isn’t much different from promoting a profitable drug even though it is known to disable and kill many. Heck, when the Public Health Service (PHS) discovered in 1959 that at least 10% of their stock piled polio vaccine was contaminated with SV40, a kidney virus that promoted several cancers in animals, they decided to use up the contaminated product anyway and quietly find a cure for cancer. It took them four years to use up the vaccine, and we are still waiting to for the cure to cancer.
Read the 2003 Institute of Medicine report on the contamination of the polio vaccine and Dr. Mary’s Monkey for a hypothesis about the unintended consequences of the covert PHS actions.
Although in some cases there will be a single person (a narcissistic personality) or conspiracy among similiarly minded players, I think in most instances it is a mistake to spend too much energy searching for a single source or single point of failure. When complex systems fail, it is usually because of a convergence of cascading events. That's not to say Svengali figures like Hitler and Trump haven't swayed history with their fever dreams, they have. But remember, the ordinary folks in Germany went along with the vilification of the Jews and German children turned in their parents to the Gestapo based on an untrue and manipulative narrative, just like ordinary Americans stormed the US Capitol Building on January 6, 2021. These people were not leaders, they were followers and their cultish devotion to the narrative fueled the spread of evil and destruction. Ironically, these small players may have felt the most virtuous for their bad actions. Like the followers of Jim Jones, they drank the Kool Aid. Many or most of them have been so brainwashed that they have lost the ability to think critically or entertain any concept that contradicts their belief system. This is a pattern we also see among those identified as liberals modeled by leaders like Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau whose disparagement of the unvaccinated border on hate-speech.
Although there are players who must be held accountable for the harm they caused as were the German war criminals in the Nuremberg Trials, I think that rather than fixating on identifying ring-leaders of the cabal who are profiting from our current dystopian world-view, the more important question to ask right now is:
How do we curb the contagious spread of authoritarian scientism?
Maggie Russo is the author of “Dance with the Devil: Love in the Age of Covid”