All this is made worse and compounded by psychopaths and sociopaths

Editor's Note: In America if you aren't sick, diseased and dying no one makes any money. This isn't shocking in this predator and prey ecosphere where insurance and reinsurance are the "DNA of capitalism." Insurance companies made $1.5 trillion in 2024. Something else to consider: Although not a state, Washington DC has the highest median household income in the US. To understand what is going on here go to the end of this post and listen to the fascinating discussion between Tucker Carlson and Brigham Buhler "on how an unhealthy, over-medicated country means record profits for insurance companies." This is compounded by the biggest pharmaceutical and insurance companies being headed by demonstrable psychopaths. In light of the alleged assassination of UnitedHealthcare's CEO it is interesting to know that ancient cultures, tribes and communities, they would either outright kill psychopaths amongst them or banish them in order to preserve the integrity of the tribe. The question then becomes can these pharmaceutical and insurance corporations survive without psychopaths running them?
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Pfizer and Other Sociopaths

By Martin Hanson | January 4, 2024

"…if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science."

Winston Churchill spoke these words just before the Battle of Britain, but if he were alive today he could be referring to the Covid 'pandemic'. His reference to "the lights of perverted science" would have rendered his words even more fitting in the fight against rule by Big Pharma.

In an earlier essay I argued that New Zealand, together with many other nominally 'democratic' countries, is fascist, and in a follow-up, I went on to argue that Pfizer and other Big Pharma corporations are organized crime networks operating what amounts to a global protection racket.

What I left unsaid was that Pfizer and other corporations are also sociopathic – the purpose of this essay.

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In an open letter to the CEO of the UK General Medical Council, Dr Aseem Malhotra, an internationally distinguished and award-winning cardiologist stated that [emphasis added]:

The diagnosis made by the pre-eminent forensic psychologist Dr Robert Hare and law professor Joel Bakan over 20 years ago is that Big Corporations (such as Big Pharma) are psychopathic in their pursuit of profit. Institutionally, they show the same characteristic behaviours as individuals with psychopathic tendencies: callous unconcern for the safety of others, incapacity to experience guilt, repeated lying and conning others for profit."

Robert Hare is a leading forensic psychologist specialising in psychopathology. He developed the widely used Hare Psychopathy Checklist for assessing cases of psychopathy.

He also drew a distinction between 'psychopathy' and 'sociopathy' on the basis that the former are 'born', whereas the latter are 'made'. Psychopathy manifests itself in early childhood and is thus innate, while sociopathy develops as a result of environmental experience. In the struggle up 'the greasy pole', politics is likely a potent influence.

Since I doubt if anyone imagines that Big Pharma CEOs and politicians such as Jacinda Ardern and Justin Trudeau enjoyed torturing animals when they were children, we can assume their manifest lack of conscience is the product of life experience. For that reason, throughout most of this essay I shall describe the perpetrators as sociopathic rather than psychopathic.

Despite the clear distinction, the terms are often used interchangeably, and since I shall be quoting Joel Bakan, I shall begin with his use of the term.

Bakan deals with the nature of the corporation in his book "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power". In it, he shows how the world's dominant institution is essentially psychopathic, being amoral and without conscience. A YouTube documentary is based on his book.

Bakan shows that corporations not only put shareholders' interests (i.e. profit) above everything else, they are bound to do so (at least, in the United States) by law. As Bakan puts it, "corporate responsibility is thus illegal, at least when it is genuine."

I shall be revisiting this particular quote from Bakan's book later.

In lacking any consideration for human welfare, corporations thus fall within the definition of psychopaths (if it seems odd to regard an organization as having a personality, since the end of the 19th century, corporations have been legally considered in the U.S. as 'persons').

As management guru Peter Drucker said to Bakan:

If you find an executive who wants to take on social responsibilities, fire him. Fast."

Journalist and entrepreneur Brian Basham, writing in The Independent, recalls a senior UK investment banker saying:

"At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used sociometric testing to recruit social sociopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

The following two examples described in Bakan's book illustrate the nature of corporate psychopathy.

1. Exploding Fuel Tanks

On Christmas Day 1994, a mother and her four children in their Chevrolet Malibu car was hit from behind when stopped at traffic lights, causing the petrol tank to explode, badly burning all five of them. General Motors was sued, and in the trial, evidence was produced showing that GM knew the tank was positioned so far back that it could explode on impact.

This was not an isolated case; about 500 people were being killed in this way each year at the time when the new Malibu cars were being planned.

A company engineer calculated that each fatality could cost GM $200,000 in legal damages. Dividing this figure by 41 million – the number of cars GM had on the road, the engineer concluded that each death cost GM only $2.40. The cost of relocating the fuel tanks to ensure that they not explode in rear-impact crashes was estimated to be $8.59 per car. The company could therefore save $6.19 per car if it let people die in such fires rather than alter the design of vehicles to avoid them (Bakan, pp. 61-63).

Human life was never considered by General Motors.

Please go to Off-Guardian to continue reading.

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Discussion between Tucker Carlson and Brigham Buhler: UnitedHealthcare CEO Assassination and the mass monetization of chronic illness:

Related:

How Pharma companies operate with the FDA—show us the money, honey