Losing it, Big Time

Bernie Ebbers goes crazy for shower curtains, John Thain thinks it’s entirely reasonable to spend a million dollars on doing up his office while laying off people whose lives haven’t been cushioned by the same level of riches that he has accumulated, Madoff convinces himself that it’s ok to call up friends asking for a bailout, putting their wealth at risk in order to dig himself out of a bottomless pit. You have to wonder what is going on in the minds of these people that enables them to justify it to themselves.

There is a school of thought in psychology known as constructivism, which casts some ordered light on the subject. Jean Piaget (best known for his work on child development) explained how the processes of accommodation and assimilation enable individuals to construct new knowledge from their experiences. This enables them to change their perceptions to better fit the world around them. This can work in a positive direction, but clearly in these cases we see how the absence of sufficient exposure to most peoples’ world distorts their sense of what is ‘normal’, rendering them incapable of understanding why so many are incredulous at their insatiable appetite for material one upmanship.

The British psychologist and writer Oliver James quotes some interesting stats showing how with increasing income inequality the level of emotional stress in society goes up, so these individuals may just be symptoms of a wider malaise, but surely still accountable in some way. Maybe we should, as Maureen Dowd says, ‘Bring on the shackles. Let the show trials begin’, or perhaps we can use psychology to avert similar problems in future. We should insist on our senior executives spending regular periods of time living and working with normal or disadvantaged people in order to keep them in touch with the real world. Maybe they should also spend time in their sales departments as regular sales folk, to remind them just how hard it is to generate the million dollars of profit that they just spent on some foible.