Monday, May 30, 2011

You don't need to be crazy to work here, but it helps

Last week Comedy Central re-ran a recent episode of The Daily Show where the guest was English journalist Jon Ronson, author of a book called The Psychopath Test. In the interview it came out that although 1% of the population is estimated by psychologists to be psychopathic, 4% of corporate CEOs were thought to be psychopaths. So the odds that the person sitting in the cubicle next to you is one is only 1 in 100, but the odds that the guy running the whole company is a psychopath is 1 in 25.

This supports my theory that one does not have a certifiable mental disorder to climb the corporate ladder, but it doesn't hurt.

Moreover, to have the inclination to be in charge of others, to wield power, is almost certainly indicative of not being sane enough to deserve having power.

But the rest of us are just crazy enough to justify our leaders, from our supervisors to the President, being in those roles. Without some common level of mild insanity there'd be disorder of a magnitude that would drive us all nuts.

1 comment:

  1. It's that "damn the torpedos" instinct that helps people (and psychos) succeed.

    ReplyDelete

So, what do you think?