Lessons from the Vatican
Roll back to December 2015 at Vatican City.
Members of the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s administrative body, sat contritely along the huge and sumptuously frescoed walls of the Apostolic Palace’s Clementine Hall as the tiny figure of Pope Francis at the far end was reading them the riot act. He accused them of every corporate sin you can list, from greed and vainglory to spiritual fossilization and downright heartlessness.
I must admit, I felt for them as they shifted uncomfortably on their chairs or stared glumly at their feet while reproach after reproach rained down on them.
After all, what had they really been guilty of except doing their job, which is to practice the ways of a 2,000-year-old corporation? And here was their new boss, a Vatican outsider, telling them they got it all wrong?
Pope Francis could have been more diplomatic and just given them copies of “The Perverse Organization and its Deadly Sins” by Australian author Susan Long. Here’s how she paints the picture.
It’s not countries like China or Mexico that stole our jobs. It’s our current version of capitalism that gave the jobs away.
“Things go wrong in social systems when agreements are broken, connections are not made, roles and boundaries are confused, authority is abused, consultation is absent, when the ‘right hand’ does not know what the ‘left hand’ is doing, and when information is confused, ignored or absent” — all things the Pope accused his cardinals of.
Long is a professor at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University and an expert in psychodynamics and systems analysis. In her view, modern corporations have been perverted by the narcissism of our times — the gospel of self, of greed and consumerism, of acquisition and exploitation. In such a world, she argues, managers are encouraged to turn a blind eye to all the things any sense of decency would compel them to look at and act on.
Greed takes root; so do arrogance, personal entitlement, false loyalty, the inability to distinguish between the needs of the organization and the individual. “Many corporations are psychopathic,” she concludes.
To call his own organization psychopathic is obviously not an option for Francis. In Roman Catholic theology the church is the body of Christ. To declare it perverted would be blasphemy.
But at least Francis had the decency to go after his own people, not after any of the others he could have listed as enemies — Protestants, for example, atheist intellectuals, money-grubbing materialists, even Muslims.
A bit of introspection before we accuse others never goes astray. We might learn to accept, for example, that the blame for the social, economic, political and environmental dangers threatening us these days lies with ourselves, not with some handily concocted others.
It’s not countries like China or Mexico that stole our jobs. It’s our current version of capitalism that gave the jobs away. We hear a lot of unrealistic promises to bring them back. We hear far too little about reforming the kind of economic and political thinking which let them go in the first place.
According to the theory that capitalism runs in cycles, we’re at the end of one and should be moving on to the next one. We’re not, some critics argue, because the infamous top one per cent is in control, making a killing, and won’t let go.
Maybe that’s too simplistic. In this day and age of interconnectedness, it’s not the few who are responsible — it’s all of us. Yet, for whatever reason, we seem to be stuck in something that’s spawning more and more disparity, discontent and unrest across the globe.
The problem is not globalism as such, nor capitalism as a way of doing business. The problem is the psychopathy identified by Susan Long, the cult of legitimized greed that is diverting the wealth of nations into far too few pockets.
We may not need more popes, but we do need a new public mindset, and the sooner the better, because we’re running out of time.