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.
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.
While episodic social upsets driven by psychopaths and their followers are both painfully obvious and abundant to the point of distraction in the historical record, it is enlightening to place these upsets into the context of Babiak & Hare‘s psychology experiments. In these experiments, as treated further in another post, the minds in a random…
lesson learned (n): A law that prevents the recurrence of past social upsets. Most laws are passed in response to particular situations. Root cause analysis exposes the underlying dynamics that lead to particular situations. Based on these underlying dynamics, we can design fixes that prevent particular situations from arising. The Constitution of the United States…
YouTuber @JanetWeiss5166 asked me on 15 October 2025 “Can you help the following facts go viral?” I added bullet points and rendered in italics the part I edited and my addendum. In March 2024 the Supreme Court ruled against the state of Colorado seeking to keep insurrectionist Trump’s name off the state ballot, citing the…
The statistics commonly published on the demographics of psychopaths do not provide practical guidance of interest to public safety, but we can extract such information with a few algebraic computations. Published Statistics The statistics commonly published on the demographics of psychopaths: Pgp (1.2% in 2008) is the percentage of the general population who are psychopathic…
Babiak and Hare (2006) conducted psychology experiments in which the antics of what they called “hucksters” were shown to randomly-selected audiences, after which each audience member was interviewed about their impressions of the huckster. The audience members fell into approximately equal thirds in their responses, numbered herein according to the order of their mention in…
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In considering the alternatives to corporate democracy we face the same problem domain as did the ancient Greek inventors of democracy. The Athenian solution inspires the scenario outlined above, whereas in the Spartan solution we would settle for a more centralized organization that systematically filters out those whose attitudes and psychological profiles have been found through experience to impede rather than propel productive work and beneficial organizational and social development.
A potential problem with the Spartan approach in modern corporate society is its susceptibility to corruption in practice. One might easily envision, for example, a nightmare scenario in which the Machiavellian schemers gain control of the pre-filtering program and turn the whole system on its head. Many of us know all too well how commonplace and pervasive this dynamic can be.
This is the thinking behind the Athenian approach outlined above wherein pure democracy is expected to foster an environment whose inherent dynamics work of their own accord to constantly neutralize and sideline counterproductive behaviors, inexorably paving the way for unlimited progress, sustainable productivity, entrepreneurial agility and societal improvement ad infinitum.
The only twist for the Athenian school is that it takes a good measure of individual Spartan courage and discipline to keep a strong democracy strong. The end is swiftly sighted when democratic principles begin to yield the right of way to corruption and the insidious creep of tyranny. People worn out by the routine just stop caring, bog down in the bureaucracy and succumb to the inexorable encrustation of functionally obsolescent hierarchies and the machinations of those who thrive in the stifling conditions that always set in around them.
An Argument for Corporate Democracy by Reductio Ad Absurdum (ibid.)
The historical lessons of tyranny and democracy must be re-taught and re-learned for implementation inside of the corporate veil. While these lessons have evolved over time they have not substantively changed. Inevitably they will nevertheless be perceived differently when applied within the corporate context. This is not because they are different or achieve different results in that context but because of the inertia of public perception about corporate tradition and executive privilege. The paradigm shifts when companies begin to outgrow themselves. An entity too big to be privately owned is too big to be privately run without devolving at length into a thinly-disguised tyranny as subject as any political tyranny to the pitfalls of complacency, corruption and oppression.
In considering the alternatives to corporate democracy we face the same problem domain as did the ancient Greek inventors of democracy. The Athenian solution inspires the scenario outlined above, whereas in the Spartan solution we would settle for a more centralized organization that systematically filters out those whose attitudes and psychological profiles have been found through experience to impede rather than propel productive work and beneficial organizational and social development.
A potential problem with the Spartan approach in modern corporate society is its susceptibility to corruption in practice. One might easily envision, for example, a nightmare scenario in which the Machiavellian schemers gain control of the pre-filtering program and turn the whole system on its head. Many of us know all too well how commonplace and pervasive this dynamic can be.
This is the thinking behind the Athenian approach outlined above wherein pure democracy is expected to foster an environment whose inherent dynamics work of their own accord to constantly neutralize and sideline counterproductive behaviors, inexorably paving the way for unlimited progress, sustainable productivity, entrepreneurial agility and societal improvement ad infinitum.
The only twist for the Athenian school is that it takes a good measure of individual Spartan courage and discipline to keep a strong democracy strong. The end is swiftly sighted when democratic principles begin to yield the right of way to corruption and the insidious creep of tyranny. People worn out by the routine just stop caring, bog down in the bureaucracy and succumb to the inexorable encrustation of functionally obsolescent hierarchies and the machinations of those who thrive in the stifling conditions that always set in around them.
An Argument for Corporate Democracy by Reductio Ad Absurdum (ibid.)
The historical lessons of tyranny and democracy must be re-taught and re-learned for implementation inside of the corporate veil. While these lessons have evolved over time they have not substantively changed. Inevitably they will nevertheless be perceived differently when applied within the corporate context. This is not because they are different or achieve different results in that context but because of the inertia of public perception about corporate tradition and executive privilege. The paradigm shifts when companies begin to outgrow themselves. An entity too big to be privately owned is too big to be privately run without devolving at length into a thinly-disguised tyranny as subject as any political tyranny to the pitfalls of complacency, corruption and oppression.