I absolutely love evenings at my house. Everyone is home, everyone is moving around, and the energy is just fantastic. It is also the only time in the day where my daughter is allowed to watch a little bit of TV. Occasionally I allow myself to sit down with her so that we can enjoy her shows together. As I observe my daughter’s attentiveness to the TV screen, I am amazed and how much she is influenced by the characters in her favourite shows and by the principles and messages that they communicate. At the moment, she is a big fan of Dora the Explorer as well as My Little Pony. Her entire world revolves around the characters in these shows. She has a huge collection of Dora books, a Dora wrist watch, a Dora backpack, My Little Pony clothing and bedding, and an enormous collection of stuffed animal characters from both shows. To a certain degree, Dora the Explorer and the Ponies, especially Pinkie Pie, are my daughter’s role models.

Human Values Surrounding Our Children

Popular children’s TV shows today further, by and large, healthy and good human values (see Huffpost article). Honesty, trustworthiness, caring, hard work, and loyalty are all ever-present themes that guide these shows and their storylines. As a consequence, these shows and their role model characters play a foundational role in shaping the belief systems of our children in their formative years.

Now let’s have a look at adult role models and understand the values that guide them. As we will see, the difference between the values that are taught by the role models of our young children is quite extreme.

Human Values Surrounding Us, the Adults

To identify the people whom adults most look up to, and therefore are likely role models, I looked at various lists that measure popularity. Biography looked at the most influential people from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century and concluded that Marilyn Monroe took the top spot. The top two celebrities on the Forbes Celebrity 100 of 2020 list are Kyle Jenner and Kanye West, and the top 3 people in the most recent Forbes World’s Most Powerful People list are Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Cristiano Ronaldo is the most followed person on Instagram in 2020 with two hundred fifty eight million followers, according to Statista. According to Fortune, the most admired companies of 2020, and thus their leaders, are Apple (Tim Cook), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), and Microsoft (Satya Nadella). If we line up all these people in a row and compare them, we see a handful of similar traits among all of them. They are self-consumed, arrogant, occasionally lacking transparency, and calculating. A handful are even downright mean.  

How is it that within a short few decades, we go from looking up to people and characters who champion caring, honesty, trustworthiness, loyalty, etc., to admiring people who live by the codes of arrogance, egotism, deceptiveness, and so on? Even more perplexing is that we don’t simply shed one set of values and adopt a new set; it is that we live with both. This is especially pronounced among parents because we try to instil good, healthy human values in our children when they are young. We encourage them to be honest and trustworthy. We teach them to care for others, to share what we have with them, and to work hard in order to achieve success and acknowledgement. Simultaneously, many of us head to work on a Monday and plot to undermine a colleague whose team is threatening ours, lie to a distributor to get a more favourable cost, and withhold information from a boss to manoeuvre into his or her position.

Living in Tension Between Opposing Values

The issue with this reality is that there is no harmony between these two value systems; there is no yin yang dynamic that allows you to live with both and have balance in your life. In Basic Human Values: An Overview, S.H. Schwartz writes that “people everywhere experience conflict” when pursuing different value systems. According to Schwartz, there is real struggle between seeking change and seeking conservation, and real tension between pursuing self-transcendence or self-enhancement. In other words, it is impossible to live honestly with both value systems. We are lying to ourselves in some shape or form. Perhaps this is why we try and teach ourselves to have two faces: a personal face, and a professional face. This never-ending “acting job” cannot be healthy, neither physically nor mentally. If we think about it, we are asking people to have split personalities and split-personality-disorder  has potentially life-threatening risks for those affected.

What is even more concerning about a society that claims to live with both a healthy “human value” system, and a more destructive “corporate value” system, is that one will most likely eventually prevail, and the odds are favouring the “corporate value” system. The proverb “one bad apple spoils the barrel” is fitting because it underscores how easy it is for destructive forces to influence their surroundings. If we factor in the absolute time spent at work compared to at home, the chance that the human value system can prevail looks even bleaker. There is a very good chance that we are progressively conditioning ourselves to fully adopt the corporate value system as our universal value system. Once this happens, it will be a very unpleasant world indeed.

Weakening Human Values & Psychopaths at Work

One of the most striking and worrying consequences of a world driven by a corporate value system, is the number of psychopaths in leadership positions in companies around the world (see “The Psychopathic CEO”). I suspect that when most of us look for a reference to define what a psychopath behaves like, we think about the character that Christian Bale played in American Psycho. He is intelligent, self-consumed, meticulous, lacks emotion, and enjoys killing. Much of this is true, but not all psychopaths are killers.

According to Psychology Today, which aggregated the research from a wide range of respected thinkers, the symptoms of psychopathy are the following: superficial charm and glibness; an inflated sense of self-worth; a constant need for stimulation; lying pathologically; being manipulative; a lack of remorse or guilt; shallow emotions; and lack of empathy. I have met a few people in my career who display these symptoms with abundance. What I find shocking is that these people find it easy to move ahead in organizations without accomplishing much. One person in particular was thoroughly disliked by her team because she did very little aside from bullying them with orders. When it came to sharing results, not only did she take credit for them, but she also embellished the actual impact on the business. Somehow these corporate psychopaths are able to charm the right people, pull the right strings, and influence the right conversations so that they fluidly step up in rank and responsibility.

In 2010, a study of 203 managers across several companies conducted by Paul Babiak, Robert Hare and Craig Neumann concluded that the rate of psychopathy in corporate management was three times higher than that in the general population. While the absolute number of all psychopathic leaders is relatively small, the fact that they excel in corporate environments today is a testament to the absurdity of what we now accept as normal in our working lives.

Are We Heading Towards the Abyss?

Therefore, not only are the two value systems incompatible, not only is there a strong chance that the corporate value system will likely prevail over the human value system, but the degenerative effect on humanity can be significant. This is enormously concerning for the health of society.

This current societal reality has taken generations to develop, and has been influenced by many societal, economic, technological and political forces. It is therefore important, first and foremost, to understand the biological starting point. In other words, we need to understand the fundamental values that we are genetically predisposed to. For any parent, it will come as no surprise that babies are born with a basic moral code, in the same way that babies are born with the most obscure and random personality and behavioural traits. I found it so amusing, but also highly interesting, that my daughter, in her first year, displayed behaviours that she simply could not have learned by observing my wife or me. She would be so incredibly fidgety in her crib with movements that were all too familiar to me, or she would strike these momentary poses that were spitting images of my wife. Therefore, in the same way as certain attributes are handed down within a family, other attributes are handed down within a species.

It is also important to look back at recent history to understand the decisions that we have made resulting in our current world of conflicting value systems. Whether it is the financial deregulation that resulted in the meteoric rise of the financial services and banking industries, or the invention of social media that resulted in an increasingly vain and anxious daily way of living, or the heavy investment in reality TV that resulted in the introduction of a new type of role model, each decision has had an effect on the values that we deem important.

Finally, it is important to understand the milestone moments in every human being’s life that can have a notable effect on that person’s values. S.H. Schwartz writes: “It is common to speak of three systematic sources of value change in adulthood: historical events that impact on specific age cohorts (e.g., war, depression), physical ageing (e.g., loss of strength or memory), and life stage (e.g., child rearing, widowhood).” To this list I would add professional experiences (e.g., job loss, which is commonplace today), technology adoption (e.g., social media, mobility), and increased globalization (e.g., cultural interconnectedness, competition). 

Clearly, there are many dynamics fuelling the divide between the human value system that we grew up with and the corporate value system that we grow into. Looking at the whole picture, the task to reverse the direction of any aspect of this growing divide seems daunting. However, given the growing dissatisfaction among people in all corners of the world with the direction in which society is going, the desire for change is ever growing (see more reading here).

If there was ever a time in history to discuss the chasm that has developed between healthy human values and destructive corporate values and provide a point of view on where we can start to make healthy changes, it is now.