Oh man, don’t suck aaaallll the joy out of it, Dave.

Dave, I appreciate that you are very pro big business and capitalism – that is fine by me, you have your reasons.

But aren’t you ignoring the big psychopathic elephant in the room?

High level functioning psychopaths tend to be who sits at the head of the table in most of the major corporations around the world. It’s hypothesised that this is what makes them better businessmen, less emotional clouding around business decisions (as psychopaths do not really have emotions). They are better at manipulating and talking the talk (this is in fact the only skill that psychopaths possess, studies show that the skill set of a psychopath is very limited). And once they’re in a position of power – their influence is rather alarming. Of the 4% of people in the world estimated to be psychopaths (of which perhaps 1/4 fall into the crazed murderers category) a further 25% of perfectly normal people are estimated to be particularly susceptible to adopting the psychopathic world view. Eg – they can easily ditch their morals when under the influence of a psychopathic leader (this is how come Hitler managed to whip up such support despite the fact he was obviously a psychopath)

There may be some good guys out there doing well for themselves, but they would be in the minority.. In order to get on top and stay there you have to be ruthless, manipulative and sneaky – which will all come far easier to a psychopath than anyone else, hence their domination in these roles.

It’s not all down to Hollywood man, science seems to have it in for large corporations too, they’re the ones putting for the studies which show this link.. And it’s nothing new, many of the large pharmaceutical companies (eg Bayer) and chemical companies (IG farben) were originally headed by Nazis that were brought to the US under project paperclip..

Shanti, I think you should check your figures — you’ve said the 1% of the world’s population are crazed murderers — story?

This was supposed to be about the Muppets.

Fair enough, good point, psychopaths and muppets are a tad far away from each other :)

David comes from the Gordon brittas school of business.