Psychopathy was not a thing in 1954, nor was it mentioned in 7 Samurai. Sure, psychopathy and social predation have existed since the rise of societies across the Ice Ages, but it was not really talked about until Alfred Hitchcock’s film noir classic Psycho (1960). In that movie, psychopathy was depicted and ultimately analyzed in clinical detail, but only after the villain’s schemes and fetishes had overwhelmed the hapless victim who stimulated them and the dogged detective who tried to solve the mystery. In 7 Samurai, by contrast, all we knew about the villainous bandits is that they were hungry and cruel, just like the villagers upon whom they preyed. Like the villagers they had been ravaging for years, they were fighting for survival. Unlike the villagers, they were fighting moreover for their own predatory brand of economic triumph in desperate times while the villagers, though sometimes criminally opportunistic of necessity, were trying on the whole to do everything right. They grew their own food, made their own lives and tried to keep both.

13 Assassins was different. It broke new ground in our awareness of psychopathy as a force that pervades every level of society, in this case right up to the venerated boardrooms of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It also aptly depicted psychopathy as a force that can’t be reasoned with. The arch villain, brilliantly played by Goro Inagaki, never slowed the cutting of the gory gash he inflicted on Japanese society — not because he was ambitious, as his place in the Shogun’s palace was already assured by inheritance and by the routine courses of neoptistic family politics — not because anyone got in his way, as anyone who knew about him was desperately trying to get out of his way — but simply because he was a psychopath.

Early in the story, the villain’s seemingly unstoppable blood-soaked rampage of ordinary everyday choice, which in the feudal Japanese society of the 19th Century was officially beyond reproach and unassailable through normal protocols, drove the responsible parties in the Shogun’s chain of command, originating by implication with the Shogun himself, to what everyone soon came to recognize as the only way to deal with psychopaths other than permanent imprisonment. The matter, in the impeccable yet opaque language of decent Japanese society, would be “settled quietly”.

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Top-down business structures in which decisions are made at the top and flow down through the organization to the people that carry them out can be thought of as exploitable social hierarchies. This sort of business structure — the corporate business structure as it is widely accepted today — constitutes an attractor for psychopathic personalities born with a predatory instinct that leads them to exploit such hierarchies for personal advancement and financial gain. The more psychopaths accumulate in the upper echelons of such organizations, the more are needed in the middle layers to protect them from the competence of the rank and file. This dynamic is what democracy was invented to counter. Wherever democracy is denied access, dictatorial hierarchies develop, grow and fester, often under the guise of “centers of excellence”.

The Institute for 21st Century Agoras seeks to amend this situation in which dictatorial centers of administrative neglect masquerade as innovative centers of technical excellence.

Wherever democracy is denied access, a minor dictatorship will take its place. That’s why democracy must be mandated at every level, as though it were an all or nothing proposition — because, in other words, it is.

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(20260418) To the challenge that “Co-ops don’t innovate” I have replied that “Corporations don’t innovate either.” They suck the cash flows out of innovative people and channel them up to the pretenders at the top.

Co-operatives exist as a co-equal network of peers. Everyone has a stake and everyone has a say. Profits are shared, so that everyone is motivated to innovate in anticipation of the financial rewards owed to them by the organization and by the society in which it legally operates, not just the tacit approval and empty accolades of the stuffed suits above them. AI can be used moreover to estimate the financial rewards due to each contributor based on data-driven analysis of the proportionate value of their contributions to the organization and to society. Bye bye psychopaths, bye-bye political cabals and bye bye scheming brown-nosers. It would all be measured in honest effort, innovation and the resulting data.

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1. An amendment to the Bill of Rights is passed making it illegal for publicly-traded companies to impose policy that infringes the basic rights of its employees under the Constitution.
2. Laws are passed requiring all publicly-traded companies to replace traditional management procedures with democratic processes encompassing but not limited to:
   • due process wherever applicable under the wider law
   • elections in place of promotions or reorganizations
   • executive compensation and incentives
   • employee compensation and benefits
   • strategic planning and business development
     • within the company’s established charter
     • charter amendable through the initiative process
   • hiring, firing and career development
   • lobbying, political donations and campaign support

How does Statement A differ in principle or in practice from Statement B:

• Statement A: Such laws as described above would erode the competitive strength of publicly-traded companies.
• Statement B: Democracy as traditionally applied erodes the competitive strength of democratic states.

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1. Democracy extends to your employer.
2. Democracy extends to you as an individual.
3. Company policy extends to you as an employee.
4. You spend more waking hours at work than you do on your own.

Respond to the statement

that your experience of democracy is largely controlled by company policy or at the pleasure of management.

Where there is no democracy, there is no justice. There is only power and subjugation. We rebelled against that condition to form a new nation at a time when most people were entrepreneurs or apprentices. With the rise of corporations, bubbles of tyranny began to form and filled up all of our space and time with power and subjugation. The democracy we sought for everyone was consumed. The fix is simple: abolish the dictatorial business structure of the corporation, and screen and bar the predators that exploit it from productive human society.

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