[Skybird]

German ediiton of Der Spiegel gives a short article refrring to a study done by the university of St. Gallen, Switzerland. The compared two groups, psychopaths and investement bankers, via a questionaire. To their great surprise, if not shock, they found the level of destructiveness in investement bankers to be surpassing that of psychopaths by a very significant margin. They aimed at doing damage to the other for the mere sake of it, and made more unscrupulous decisions on the basis of much greater egoism and willingness to take risks, than psychopaths who were interviewed by the same questionaire.

This does not mean, so say the authors, that all bankers are mentally ill, but it means that they often show a much greater aggressiveness than psychopaths in the meaning of that it leads them to not only taking insane risks and accepting to do damage, but that they aim at trying to crush their rivals and defeat them in business by actually destroying them. Not so much maximising profits but the destruction of the other for the sake of this destruction itself becomes the drive of their decision making and acting. The project leader says that especially noteworthy is that bankers acting this way DO NOT gain higher accumulated profits than "tamer" bankers, and that they do not focus on a working method of constantly and properly accumulating incomes with calm and disciplined strategies, but that just gaining more than the other and minimising the other's income becomes priority of their decisions.


Frightening, and worse a finding than I would have expected. That modern economies live by extremely unhealthy and destructive images of man's "ideal" behavior", I already assumed. Mind you that capitalism claims greed, selfishness and envy to be positive drives for society that help to improve the overall wealth of all. But that you can quantify that empirically by use of clinically used questionaires, is horrifying, because it shows how bad it really is. It also leaves little reason to be optmistic and hopeful for the future.

The project leader compared it to a man who uses a baseball bat to go after the same cars of his neighbours like the one he owns himself, to improve his own shine by demolishing the others' cars.

Christian Bale in "American Psycho" on my mind. It's a really mean little movie, and there is so much truth in it.