J.B.: You know, we're always a product of nature and nurture, right? So we're in part a product of these genetic maps that constitute us and we're also constantly interacting and changing in relation to these environmenst we're in. So a simple answer to your question would go something like this: that in any society you have a kind of prevailing set of norms that define what we consider to be a reasonable, normal range of behavior.
Then, we place outside of that aberrant behaviors like what we're talking about, psychopathic personality disorders and so on. I guess one way of looking at this is that we are living in a society where that question of what is normal is shifting and the domination by corporations of our society and in both tangible concrete and also cultural and ideological terms is shifting what we think we are as a society and what we think is sort of normal behavior, or at least a range of reasonable behavior.
And it's shifting it in a direction towards what we're calling psychopathic behavior being not only within the range of normal, but also rewarded and celebrated. And that I think is what explains the twenty percent of psychopaths in corporations and on Wall Street. If our system is increasingly dominated by corporations as institutions and also by the ethos that constitute corporations, then it makes sense that our very sense of what we are as a society and who we should be as individuals is going to be dominated by that as well, as I've been suggesting.
And that then I think creates a sense in which what we used to think was aberrant may be normal, and may be celebrated and may even be desirable. And that is where I think we are as a society. That" and that's a very dangerous place to be, and we've seen in history this happen again.
So what it means is that people who are genetically predisposed to be psychopaths and psychopathic are going to be people that succeed and that end up in powerful positions and influential positions over what other people should be like. Whereas in an older time, or another time, or maybe a time that never existed where virtues of compassion, of communal attachment of solidarity were celebrated, then it was easy to say, well, those people who are purely self interested who have that genetic framework, they are aberrant and they should try to be different.
So my concern is that we're moving towards a society where it's the people who are genetically disposed to not be psychopathic who are going to be deemed to be abnormal, or in need of being trained out of whatever their genetic predilections are.
R.K.: Wow! Talk about moving to a jungle culture- law of the jungle culture.
J.B.: I don't believe" we're not inherently as human beings" we're not inherently that way. It's about how we are in these broader institutional frameworks.
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