Corporations Don’t Kill People; People Kill People

The American National Rifle Association (NRA) and gun zealots generally are fond of saying that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” That is, of course, true, and it should lead sensible people (none of whom work in the NRA’s public relations department) to work to keep guns out of the hands of people who cannot be trusted to use them responsibly. This includes young children, criminals, and emotionally unstable people with poor impulse control.

The same could be said for a corporation: it is a tool that can be used in various ways, some of which are downright evil. The problem with both guns and corporations is that they are a source of power, and thus there is the risk of corrupting the owner – and they are highly attractive to already corrupt or morally deficient people.

In fact, corporations are far more deadly than guns, in that one gun can kill or threaten a few people, where one large corporation can, and has, killed thousands. Collectively, corporations are exponentially more dangerous than guns, because guns didn’t cause the climate crisis, ocean dead zones, sky-rocketing asthma rates, birth defects, deadly pollution, or exploitation of developing countries. Corporations have done all of these and much more.

Guns can be kept out of the hands of irresponsible or antisocial people by various means: Trigger locks keep youngsters from shooting each other while playing; background checks make it more difficult for criminals and nutters to get guns, and waiting periods allow the emotionally unstable to cool down before buying a gun and murdering someone. We used to have similar controls on corporations: they were time and purpose-limited, for example. Our forebears had very unpleasant experiences with large organizations and knew all-too-well the dangers of accumulating great power and wealth in few hands.

Corporations have proved highly attractive to the corrupt and immoral. Anyone who thinks they ‘need’ or ‘deserve’ an office renovation costing USD $1.2 million, for example. Enron. Worldcom. Nortel. Satyam. The list is long and grows constantly. (Note the crooked ‘Audit Firms,’ in reality just more corrupt corporations enabling each other.) The excellent documentary The Corporation performs a psychological analysis of corporations, and concludes that, based on observed behaviour, corporations are sociopaths.

If you lust for power, glory, and money today, the corporation is the tool of choice. In the past, the psychopaths went off to the colonies to ruthlessly exploit the natives, or waged war, or became slave traders, or were fortunate enough to born into the nobility. The options were somewhat limited because the nobility controlled everything and was relatively small in size. Nowadays, corporations provide many more opportunities for personal empire, as every CEO strives to eliminate anything that obstructs his lust for dominance.

We should have learned from our forebears. They tried to protect us by limiting the power of corporations and individuals. We foolishly allowed those who lust for power to rewrite the rules, and now, once again, the psychopaths are largely in control. This is why we have continual economic crises, ecological crises that threaten to wipe out civilization and most of humanity, quite possibly the Iraq War, and so on. No sane person would engage in behaviour that caused those consequences.

But psychopaths hide behind the corporate façade; they use it as an excuse to do evil in the name of “just business.” It is long past time to pay our ancestors the respect they are due by paying attention to the lessons they learned, usually the hard way. We need to limit corporations in size, scope, and duration. We need to hold executives personally accountable for the evil they do. There is no justification for deliberately doing evil: not profit, not “responsibility to shareholders,” not personal glory and greed, nothing.

Just as a gun owner who murders someone is held responsible, so should executives whose companies cause harm be jailed or executed. Just as we don’t throw the gun in jail and let the murderer go free, we should be imprisoning executives whose “guns,” the companies or divisions for which they are responsible, cause harm.