Corporate personnel can perceive immorality yet continue serving enthusiastically

Evidence

Living in the space between the corporate and noncorporate social worlds is key. Psychoanalysis has shown the ways in which the collective psyche, unlike the individuals that make it up, can never develop self-awareness, which explains the common phenomenon of CEOs and high-ranking corporate managers who shun, mostly privately, the abusive practices of the very corporations they run. Because the student is not integral to the personnel of a business corporation, she feels justified in her indignation, whereas the CEO and the manager do not: they are, in the final analysis, morally, though not necessarily legally, implicated. But the moral anchor of the two is one and the same. … The indignation lasts no longer than the moment when she has been made a generous offer by a corporation. The typical student in business, management, or economics will decline such an offer at the peril of insanity. Once “in office” the indignation either vanishes or goes underground, this latter replicating the familiar pattern of the CEO or manager who comprehends the immorality of her own corporation but continues nonetheless to serve it, often with enthusiasm and hard work. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 372

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the moral compartmentalization themes in White Noise’s critique of consumer complicity and the broader critique of structural evil. — connects to: Corporate vices are engendered by structure, not by individuals — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 142
• DEFINE: Describes ‘dualistic fragmented existence’ — the psychological segregation of value-worlds from fact-worlds that enables corporate participation.