Nice article. Why do they act like jerks? Two possible explanations: 1) Because near the top of the foodchain, you'll often find the sociopaths - and it doesn't help that the corporation, having a clear goal but no capacity to feel, has a certain tendency to "act" like a sociopath anyways. 2) Niklas Luhmann might help us here. For him, complex systems like a corporation perform a process called autopoiesis. They basically constantly regenerate and revitalize by "talking to themselves". Communications from the outside are disturbances to this process. The more complex the system becomes, the simpler (or rather, more universal) the code of communication needs to be. "Pay / Not Pay" has proven to be one of the, if not the most universal code we've come up with, so far. The corporation as a system simply doesn't understand communications that can't be coded as "Pay / Not Pay". "Dear Mr. Corporation, please, I just got laid off and my wife needs her medication. Can't you please [...]" "DUH?! PAY / NO PAY???!!!"
That article had a lot of words for one word: Scarcity. When everyone feels like their might not be enough, they are willing to do anything to get "their fair share." To deepflows's first point, corporations have no moral or ethical directive. The people that control them do. Corporations are a legitimized way for people to take advantage of sociopaths behavior that leads to wealth generation. If we really acted in our specie's best interest all the time wealth (the storage of excess) doesn't really need to happen on the scale modern corporations are capable of. This isn't an original thought, but I don't remember who said/wrote it. Internet? Can I get a hand on sourcing this?