Dublin Opinion

“But most of them are honourable, good, solid people. And the point is that if you put your balls on the table, you get the reward or you get the kick. It can go one way or the other. Guys are now feeling the squeeze and if it goes on, a lot of them are in trouble. I was lucky. If you’d asked me a year-and-a-half ago, I’d have said the market would still be flying now.”

This is from the second most popular item viewed by readers of the Irish Times website at the moment, and is the opinion the ‘likeable, UCD-educated civil engineer and former captain of the under-21 Wexford Gaelic football team’, Donal Caulfield.

He’s a property developer and the subject of the first extract from a new book by Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan simply called ‘Builders’. Actually, that should be “BUILDERS!!! Fuck yea!” in the style of Team America.

To put the quote in some context, it was said in response to this question:

“But surely all that spending and extravagance (Caulfield admits to being a recovering shopaholic) simply confirms suspicions that developers were making obscene profits on the backs of struggling homebuyers?”

I’m highlighting this particular quote because of the emphasis on risk, that the developers are the ones taking the risk, ‘putting their balls on the table’ – the machismo is important – and that they deserve ‘every euro they get’.

It seems to suggest that they are the only ones who suffer if the risk doesn’t work out. Also, as we are seeing at the moment, it’s highly debatable whether they are taking a risk at all because of the interdependence of developers, banks, the Irish government and ultimately, the tax payer. On top of that it demeans the work and effort of ordinary people who take a risk simply by buying one of their over priced houses (which is caused by unregulated land speculation, exacerbated by banks lending to competing property developers fuelling speculation, offering larger and larger loans to mortgage holders, and made worse by unscrupulous estate agents all of which is compounded by a government who chose to look the other way) and who have much more to lose.

So where does this mania for ‘risk’ come from? Is it that there are only a small number of individuals within a society who have that unique business ‘charisma’ and who have the qualities to be a real entrepreneur; those heroes and leaders of men, who are the only ones with the ‘balls’ to say ‘to hell with the risks and I’m going to make things happen?

Or is it that in every society there are always a small number of sociopaths who act irresponsibly and recklessly, all because they don’t give a stuff what happens to any one else and who are only interested in their own short term benefits.

Martha Stout in her book The Sociopath Next Door describes the archetypal sociopath:

“He or she is more spontaneous, or more intense, or somehow more “complex” or sexier, or more entertaining than everyone else. Sometimes this “sociopathic charisma” is accompanied by a grandiose sense of self-worth . . .

In addition, sociopaths have a greater than normal need for stimulation, which results in their taking frequent social, physical, financial, or legal risks.”

This is not to say that property developers are sociopaths, but it does suggest that the culture of extolling ‘risk taking’ is one that borrows from the behavior of the sociopath, to the point that it’s engrained in the culture of capitalism itself.

The following is from John Green’s excellent post on the topic which also provided the Stout reference above:

As Thomas Frank has convincingly described in The Conquest of Cool and elsewhere, since at least the 1950s the prevailing ethos of capitalism has been the glorification of the rebel, the hipster, the nonconformist. Marketing organizations even that far back were encouraging a “Just Do It” mentality among consumers: Live life to the full, don’t think of the morrow, let the kid inside you flourish, be irresponsible, don’t feel guilty, purchase our product now, on credit, and enjoy, give voice to the inner you and fuck society and its conventions, stick it to The Man by buying our bike/car/T-shirt/records. Far from co-opting 1960s rebellion, Frank explains, businesses actively espoused the idea of rebellion as a lifestyle, if not before, at least at the same time as the counterculture was taking on “The Hegemon.” This glorification of the rebel without a cause has resulted in a society that doesn’t just condone sociopathic behaviour: It actively encourages it. Go look in Business Week and Forbes at the sorts of behaviour that are regarded as praiseworthy: ruthlessness, the capacity for making “hard” decisions, risk-taking.

Go back and have a look at what Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were up to, then consider how they were regarded by the business world before they got found out. And, without wanting to be accused of stating the obvious, have a look at Hare’s checklist for psychopathic behaviour and see how many of the characteristics he identifies are exhibited NOT JUST by the present incumbent of the White House, but by the previous one as well. It seems pretty clear to this reader, at least, that we as a society are colluding in self-destructive behaviour whenever we praise, ignore, fail to face down, or fail to render accountable those individuals or businesses that lay waste the planet or ruin people’s lives for the sake of a quick buck, a profit margin, a legacy, self-aggrandizement, or caprice. Guiltless excess has been the watchword of capitalism for nigh on 50 years, not just during brief periods in the 1960s or the 1980s, and at the risk of sounding like an alarmist, we need to recognize that capitalism as a whole is sociopathic and requires surgery: This is a sociopathic society.

The things is that only 4% of the population in the US are known to be sociopaths and I expect it’s the same everywhere. So why is a whole culture so willing to praise those who are in a minority to begin with and whose behaviour is so destructive?

Well, for the obvious reason. It’s good for business, and Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan as guilty of perpetuating it as those pseudo-risk takers who are so willing to describe their favorite party piece: putting their balls on the table for everyone to see.