For a glimpse into the strategy, psychology and ethics of the corporate world, read the Dilbert cartoons. They can range from humorous and ironic to cynical and chilling as they reveal the deviousness of the human character unleashed by the influence of power, authority and money. A recent example from March 17, 2012 is particularly poignant.

Dilbert and Alice are sitting at a board meeting while their boss is outlining the corporate response to proposed government legislation. “Our company opposes passage of the new internet law because it would be bad for our business,” he pronounces. “But that sounds selfish,” he adds, “so we’ll issue a press release saying the new law would impinge freedom of speech.” Alice, with her usually caustic bluntness, summarizes, “So…we’re selfish liars.” To which the boss retorts, “You can’t get more free than that.”

A few moments considering this exchange will yield unsettling results that are, unfortunately, substantiated by recent research.

The University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, together with the University of California, Berkley, recently published studies in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that substantiate the inclination of the wealthy to lie, cheat and break the law. The studies conclude that, “It’s people at the top of the income scale for whom honesty, integrity and generosity seem to be a challenge” (Ibid.).

The authors of the paper are quick to provide the qualifier that these findings do not necessarily describe or predict the behaviour of single individuals. Like all such sociological studies, the conclusions are a generalization. But they do confirm the findings of other studies that wealthy people “have a reduced concern for others” (Ibid.) and that CEOs of large corporations can have higher psychopathic profiles than prison inmates “diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders” (Guardian Weekly, Nov. 18/11).

This is not a mere academic matter. For consumers, for governments, for voting citizens and for society as a whole, it is an advertisement to be cautious of promises, claims and guarantees made by the rich and the powerful. In our economic, industrialized and technological world, this usually means investors, corporations and their representatives. Generous offers commonly come with hidden attachments that, if not devious, can be misleading and hollow. Assurances of environmental safety, economic improvement and social benefits are often exaggerated or patently false. Risks are routinely minimized while merits are maximized.

The promotion of smoking by tobacco corporations is a classical example. It boggles the ethical mind how an executive with information that cigarettes cause cancer and death could diligently defend and promote such a product. A more current example is the funding by the fossil fuel industry of anti-science movements with the sole purpose of confusing the global warming issue so that corporations can delay regulations on their profitable extraction of gas, oil and coal — climatologists argue, with increasing desperation, that we must change energy sources and cut greenhouse gas emissions immediately to avoid catastrophic consequences.

Ethics hasn’t dissuaded the wealthy from investing wherever the returns are highest. The quest for profit seems disconnected from the negative social, cultural and environmental consequences. Those with money to invest seem undeterred by the inevitable oil spills that will result from the Northern Gateway pipeline and the subsequent stream of super-tankers enticed into demonstrably dangerous waterways. Salmon farming, against withering scientific evidence of extensive damage to marine ecologies, doggedly continues to operate their open net-pens. Industrial fishing of our oceans represents a pillaging that can only end in ecological and social disaster. Genetically engineered crops and the centralized control of seeds by transnational corporations are proving to be exercises in power and profit rather than being of benefit to humanity.

Indeed, the subject of wealth and ethics has become particularly relevant during the last few decades given the shift in economic power away from the lower and middle classes toward the affluent few. Whether or not this trend is a measure of their consolidation of influence and control is a moot point. But the pressures of lobbying, financing and investing seem to be eroding democratic processes while favouring the ascent and security of the wealthy.

All this has environmental implications. If most people in a society have concerns about the health and viability of the ecologies that sustain and enhance the quality of their lives, but the power structure is indifferent to those concerns, then the machinery of industry and investment will continue to exploit and abuse nature in the interests of profit.

The environmental result, so far, is a deepening planetary mess, mostly because of the initiatives of the wealthy and influential. Of course, society has also benefitted hugely from their ingenuity and assertiveness. The comfort, safety, convenience, affluence and health of our collective well-being owes much to the wealthy and their initiatives. But their ethical lapses have also led us into an intensifying ecological crisis that is becoming entrenched, structural, systemic and dangerous. Indeed, unless these negative effects are dramatically curtailed by a redirection of initiative, investment and governance, the consequence could be catastrophic for everything we know and value. Perhaps the time has come for the wealthy to realize that Earth and all its inhabitants can no longer afford their kind of freedom.

Civilizations are like corporations. At some point in their evolutionary rise as innovative and unique organizations, they fail to adapt to changing circumstances and drift into fatal vulnerability. History, of course, is crowded with the wreckage of civilizations that declined into oblivion after failing to rejuvenate themselves. Corporations follow the same route, as outlined in the ideas of Professor Noam Wasserman of the Harvard Business School and Christine Comaford, an expert on corporate structural dynamics (Globe & Mail, Jan. 28/12).

As Wasserman notes in his book, The Founder’s Dilemma, corporations that are rapidly successful because they have discovered new and unorthodox strategies or products often find that their “strengths early on tend to become pitfalls, [their] Achilles heel.” Comaford reiterates this observation with terms such as “Founder’s Syndrome”, “Founderitis”, and “severe reality distortion field”. All refer to a corporation’s inability to adapt to changing competitive circumstances because its old successful vision no longer fits evolving realities.

The corporate world is littered with vivid examples of Founder’s Syndrome. Despite selling 10 million cars by 1924, the Ford Motor Company almost collapsed in bankruptcy when its founder, Henry Ford, failed to embrace the fresh engineering that was remaking the auto. And when Walt Disney died, the stock value of Disney rose dramatically, apparently because his founding influence was blocking innovation. The latest victim of this dynamic is the maker of the Blackberry, Research in Motion, a corporation whose original ideas are being outdated by other electronic designs.

So, how is Founder’s Syndrome avoided? For Comaford, “the key is to establish a vibrant set of outsiders who ask tough questions.” For Wasserman, “you need people internally who push back and consider not just the best-case or expected scenarios, but worst-case situations, where you might have to adjust the vision radically.” The corporate trick for survival is constant evaluation and criticism — even of the founding principles that everyone holds sacred to the corporation’s identity.

Now transpose this corporate dynamic to our present civilization. Our modern
era is essentially founded on the principles of the Industrial Revolution. About 250 years ago, Europe underwent a dramatic change as human and animal energies were replaced by fossil fuels — first coal and then petroleum. Human effort was amplified enormously. (To test this notion, simply try pushing your car instead of moving it with the engine.) And the sophistication of the entire process was heightened by the marriage of industry with science, a partnership we call technology.

The consequences were incredible: massive production and distribution of consumer goods, huge utilization of natural resources, unimagined growth in food production, exponential generation of wealth, global travel and communication. But, like a corporation that has found an especially successful niche in the business world and risen with meteoric speed, our civilization is now showing cracks of vulnerability — the attributes of its success have now become its weaknesses.

Marvellous as this technological civilization is, serious indications are now
evident that the environmental impacts of this success cannot be absorbed by our planet’s ecosystems. The sustainability of unrestrained growth, powered by ever-rising quantities of fossil fuels, has become a legitimate concern. If this unfolding crisis of civilization were a corporate problem, Comaford would recommend, “a vibrant set of outsiders who ask tough questions.” Or for Wasserman, “you need people internally who push back and consider not just the best-case or expected scenarios, but worst- case situations, where you might have to adjust the vision radically.”

These “outsiders”, of course, are the environmentalists, climatologists, biologists, other scientists and critics who are asking “tough questions” and pushing for a radical change of “vision”. To those who are supporting and perpetuating the founding principles of the Industrial Revolution, together with its existing economic system, these “tough questions” are interpreted as subversive irritations that are undermining the success of a seemingly good idea. How can those who clearly benefit from such success, doubt the generous and lavish rewards that come from it?

The journey from a peak to a valley down a cliff  can be very sudden and very brief. Ask RIM. Ask Kodak. Or ask Yahoo that almost instantly lost over $20 billion in value because it refused to innovate in a changing communication world.

We live on a planet of rapidly deteriorating ecosystems. The disturbing environmental destabilization being unleashed by our civilization is pervasive, structural and profoundly serious. More than destabilizing, the results could escalate to fatal if they are not addressed immediately and dramatically. The critics who are trying to alert the system to these dangers are not enemies but merely perceptive “insiders”, fellow members of the corporate body who care profoundly about the well-being of humanity and the natural world that contains, sustains and enlivens everything we hold rich, dear and sacred.

As a civilization, indications are that we are facing Founder’s Syndrome, an outdated vision of success so fixated on past accomplishments that it fails to see their shortcomings. The warning signs are flashing for those astute enough to notice. If these alarms are disconcerting, so be it. Failed civilizations are far more tragic than failed corporations.

About 250 million years ago, all the distinct continents on Earth existed as one large land mass called Pangea. Over millions of years, at a speed comparable to the growth of fingernails, the shifting tectonic plates of the planet fractured and separated Pangea into the different continents we know today. Some of the puzzle’s pieces still fit together, although many of the shapes are now deformed by various geological dynamics. The east side of South America, for example, fits nicely against the west side of Africa, and North America can be moved across the Atlantic so that the Caribbean snuggles into the northwest bulge of Morocco.

The division of Pangea into separate continents had huge environmental implications. First, and perhaps foremost, it meant that species could no longer move freely around one large land mass. The fractures that filled with oceans isolated them, the drifting segments slowly developed very unique ecologies, and distinctive plants and animals evolved in adaptation to those local peculiarities.

This was the situation encountered by humans as they began moving around the planet about 70,000 years ago. Just a mere 500 years ago, during a surge of exploration and colonization, Europe was sending ships to North and South America, to Asia, Africa and elsewhere. The continents, once ecologically isolated for millions of years, were now being reconnected – not geologically by the movement of tectonic plates but by the physical movement of humans transporting commercial products, plants, animals, viruses and their own particular cultures. The world would never again be the same.

Clearly, this process did not suddenly begin with the arrival of Columbus on a remote Caribbean island in 1492. Commercial products and ideas were travelling between Europe and Asia before then. The Bubonic Plague reached Venice from an eastern seaport a few years prior to 1348, before ravishing Europe in successive waves of pandemic death. But the diseases to which Europeans had developed some immunity – smallpox, measles, mumps, chicken pox, rubella, typhus and cholera – were transported to the New World by later explorers, with devastating consequences to the native populations. Think of this as the beginning of globalization.

Globalization is, in effect, a return to Pangea. In the blink of a geological eye, all the barriers that once separated the continents into distinct ecologies are now being dismantled by the international movement of goods, species and people. Norway rats reached most of the world’s ports on sailing ships, traumatizing every ecology where they arrived – sometimes remedial efforts compounded the trauma by introducing other species that were supposed to predate the rats. Eccentric immigrants imported rabbits to Australia and starlings to North America, both species inflicting devastating damage across their respective continents.

Indeed, globalization is a kind of ecological short-circuiting that throws biological systems into pandemonium. More than 250 foreign marine species now inhabit San Francisco Bay, transported there by ballast water discharged by freighters from around the world. The same process has brought an estimated 300 exotic plants and animals to the Great Lakes. The Asian carp that now threaten the entire diversity of the Missouri and Mississippi River systems came from a few fish that washed away from nearby ponds during a flood – these voracious fish are now poised to reach the Great Lakes, expanding their sphere of ecological catastrophe. Atlantic salmon, which belong in the Atlantic Ocean, were deliberately imported to the Pacific for commercial reasons, with complex impacts that could damage an entire marine ecology.

Globalization has essentially removed the barriers of time and space that once protected ecologies from contamination and disruption. Diseases, fungi, insects, mammals, amphibians, birds and plants are all distributed helter-skelter around the planet by ships, planes, cars, luggage, souvenirs, shoes, bodies and just about anything else that moves. The various results are species displacement, population explosions and extinctions.

Ecologies that are wholly incapable of dealing with oil get blanketed in it as international pipelines and global tanker traffic disperse this crude energy from sites of supply to demand. AIDS, a world killer of millions, escaped from an isolated African village because of the mass movement of people around the planet. An obscure disease such as West Nile virus spreads across North America after it inadvertently arrives in a mosquito aboard an airplane arriving in New York from southern Europe. Deadly influenzas skitter around the world with the tides of international travellers.

This globalizing process is even wreaking havoc on distinctive human cultures, as travel, technology and media contaminate unique ways of thinking and understanding. Well-adapted lifestyles are destroyed during this great homogenization process. Languages, essential to preserving and perpetuating cultures, are being obliterated at the rate of one per week. And globalization confuses and debilitates national and local politics as every trade agreement erodes the democratic process by shrinking individual autonomy and robbing resident people of self-determination.

Large as Pangea must have been, it had valleys, deserts, mountains and rivers that would have constrained the movement of species. But, in the New Pangea, no obstacle is great enough to halt the massive tide of movement that is sweeping over the planet. The ecological disturbances it creates are unparalleled in Earth’s history.

Everything that science can tell us about the environmental challenges unfolding around us must pass through layers of attitudes and values before we can identify or remedy them – “If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have seen it,” was Marshall McLuhan’s noted comment on this subject. Evidence alone will neither make us aware nor change our behaviour when all experience must be filtered before it registers as real. This difficult subject is illuminated by Professor Michael Hulme of the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia. Although his expertise is climate change, his insights apply to broader environmental subjects (New Scientist, Sept. 5/09).

Professor Hulme proposes that we consider four myths of our Western culture, the “stories we tell that embody deeper assumptions about the world around us” – and here he means “myths” in the anthropological sense, the frameworks we create to give meaning to our individual and collective experiences.

Myths, in this sense, are culturally true – not absolutely true – and are continually changing with time and circumstance. Indeed, conflict within a culture usually occurs when newly-evolving myths generated by fresh evidence and experience collide with old myths, precisely what is happening today as we measure the inability of our natural world to maintain its equilibrium under the impact of our collective human behaviour. This conflict of limits is also a conflict of myths.

The first myth Professor Hulme proposes is the Edenic one. It uses “the language of lament and nostalgia” to reflect our loss of simplicity and innocence, and urges a return to circumstances when we lived in greater harmony with the natural world. In this myth, our environment is understood as giving and generous, as fragile and sacred. The power we have amassed to affect it makes us apprehensive. Our fear is that our wisdom is not sufficient to manage nature’s intricate complexity. The damage we do could be fatal, tantamount to another expulsion from Paradise.

Second is the Apocalyptic Myth. Its “language of fear and disaster” reflects our anxiety about the future. In a time of radical change – history on steroids would accurately describe our present age – this anxiety is amplified. Implicit in this myth is our inherent sense of humility and insecurity, an awareness that we must not disturb the physical and biological forces that regulate the living world which we must inhabit.

Third is the Promethean Myth, “named after the Greek deity who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to the mortals” – we got our fire but Zeus punished Prometheus eternally for the theft. In this myth, we use the power of technology to exercise control over nature, “revealing our desire for dominance and mastery”. But this authority also comes with a “lack of wisdom and humility to exercise it.” In this myth, we have little sense of the great design we are working within, little awareness of the potency of our power, or how we are to live harmoniously with the multitude of natural forces operating the physical and biological complexity of our planet. This myth reminds us of the folly of reaching beyond our ability to regulate and control the planet that keeps us.

Fourth is the Themisian Myth, “named after the Greek goddess of natural law and order.” This myth couches environmental issues in “the language of justice and equity.” It implicitly condemns us for inflicting harm on others by emitting toxins, by disturbing weather and ecologies, by destroying habitat that wrongs plant and animal species, and by depleting resources that will be unavailable for future generations. The planet, in other words, is a moral place where we must carefully consider the consequences of whatever we do.

These four myths are all at play, in different combinations, within each of us. We use them to identify and interpret the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and to give motivation, direction and meaning to our actions. They are the means by which we guide and judge our behaviour.

Our predicament today is that the change occurring around us is so rapid and dramatic that we can’t adapt our myths quickly enough. The technological power at our disposal is so huge and our numbers are so many that we are re-shaping the planet as never before in human history. The myths loom in front of us as dilemmas, on a scale and intensity that matches the steroidal history we are moving through. The particular myth that we each might favour – how we are inclined to interpret the world – yields our assessment of our present environmental situation, and this establishes our relationship with others who may stress different myths. As the speed and intensity of our civilization increases, the tumult increases.

Those favouring the Edenic Myth lament the loss of an old innocence. Those disposed to the Apocalyptic Myth anticipate widespread mayhem from our injudicious behaviour. Those with faith in the Promethean Myth trust in the power of technologies. Those inclined toward the Themisian Myth are concerned with the morality of all we do. And modern science, with its pervasive and obsessive quest for information and understanding, provides insights that heighten the intensity of each of these myths. We experience their collisions as conflicts reverberating throughout our social, political, ethical and material lives.

Professor Hulme doesn’t suggest how these conflicts will or can be resolved. But, like the Greek myths themselves, knowing about them heightens the awareness of living by reminding us that the chasm of tragedy is always just a mistake away.