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Lady Gaga earned $62 million last year
When I look at charts of CEO compensation, like Forbes' list of top-salaried chieftains in 2011, I slip into something of a trance. For example, when I stumbled upon the New York Times' charticle in the Business Section of the Sunday Times a week ago, and I saw how the top two hundred CEO pay packages broke down into stock options, bonuses, base salaries and what-all, I began, empathetic creature that I am, to imagine how it feels like to have 84 million dollars gushing into my various on-and-off-shore accounts, and from there into my philanthropies, off-shore tax shelters and antique bureau drawers. And what I imagined I'd feel was high as a kite. Not a mellow, contented, or psychedelic high, but a crisp, speedy chill of a high that, if I had to induce it with drugs would mean a slow, steady drip of cocaine, adrenaline, and androgens.
I don't bother trying to imagine what it's like to simply BE rich, like the Wall-Mart heiresses, or winners of divorce jackpots like Ellen Barkin, because I'm pretty sure it's not like being high. My guess is that it's more like having great hair. You didn't ask for it (although, I guess, Ellen Barkin, after Revlon's Ron Perelman dumped her in 2006, really did), but now that you magically have millions, billions, whatever, it feels like something that's part of you, not the way that your nose or your skin or all those other parts that money can buy are part of you, but integral, indivisible from who you are, like your habit of fiddling with your ruby whenever you're nervous, or your respect for all Oprah has done, considering where she came from. You can let your interest and dividends pour over you, and don't have to spend your life fighting for more.
The rare woman, like Lady Gaga, who earned 62 million last year, says things like, "I don't want to make money; I want to make a difference." I believe her. Although I suspect she suffers from a pricey shoe habit, I don't think that it's the bottom line that moves her.
Even among alpha males, though, my guess is that the use of preposterous pay packages as an intoxicant is mostly recreational. In spite of the rhetoric about needing to pay corporate officers millions in order to retain top talent, for most corporate kings of the hill, financial compensation is secondary to the challenge and the power of being Mayor of the biggest city (or boss of the biggest media empire) in the world. Some of them would do it for free.
But if insanely inflated compensation packages were addictive, what would it mean? Might the rush of ego engorgement that a top-tier CEO package triggers make its recipient desperate for another, and another? In time, would the thrill wear off but the need increase? Would it take bigger and bigger doses to hold anxiety and pain at bay? Would everything associated with that package, the friends and handlers, the university clubs and bars and yes persons, the numerous homes and the benefit dinners that hover around big pay packages like a cloud of fleas, make a mogul itch for more?
Might a CEO pay package addict begin to neglect his family? (I can say "he" because only 3.5% of the top 50 CEO pay package recipients are a "her.") Might he panic and go into withdrawal if his supply is reduced? Might his ability to respond to, or even perceive, ordinary people begin to atrophy until he lost his humanity? Might he rob his children, risk the health of the planet, or the economy, the balance of power that keeps democracy vital, just to get one more quarter's hit?
And what about actual drug money laundering? Was John G. Stumpf,(shown here) the Time's #27 earner and Wells Fargo's CEO, complicit in the uncomfortably close relationship to Mexican drug cartels of ihis child company, Wachovia? Can the need to climb ever higher on Forbes' list push good men to the wrong side of the law?
John Stewart recently argued to Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, authors of All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, that Wall Street's compulsion to maximize financial intake at any cost is a form of addiction. But if it is,should the rest of us seek help to stop being enablers?
Because chronic addiction is rarely a solitary problem; without family and community to offer the addict an alternative to using, won't a junky lack the motivation to fight off a relapse? Would it be accurate to call the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a successful intervention for wealth addicts that worked until the fall of the Berlin Wall to keep our distribution of wealth in a functional equilibrium? In the Depression of 1929 the threat of Bolshevism enabled FDR to impose limits and controls on monopolists and other compulsive wealth accumulators, much the way that the threat of prison can sometimes scare an addict straight.
If so, we are now in a period of experimental legalization in which wealth addiction (if it exists), is socially sanctioned, even romanticized, and comes with no penalties and few checks. We are not confronting the afflicted (if that's what they are) and begging them to seek help (if that's what they need). We are not sending them to detox or rehab or putting them on maintenance drugs or properly modest salaries.
As an incurable addiction metaphor addict, I feel driven to believe that we are busily enabling a generation of compensation addicts, but as a cognitive dissonance junkie, I am equally compelled to question any belief I entertain simply because it's fun. Especially since, from a scientific standpoint, we simply cannot know.
These moguls will not submit to letting scientists do fMRI's of their dopamine pathways while they learn that the value of their company stock has doubled or shrunk. We may think that the Koch brothers are willing to throw hardworking people out of their homes just to get their corporate performance numbers up in time for a pay package vote, but this sort of thing could as easily indicate some other disorder--- arrested development ("Mine!"), paranoia ("Socialism!), or even a different addiction---like an addiction to problem-solving, to being important, or to seeing one's name at the top of a ridiculous number of lists.
One of the reasons I'm fascinated by the psychology of addiction today, is because its language is so versatile and flows so easily into other topics and fields of a different order. We speak of being addicted to oil, to consumption, to fast food, to commercial porn, to sprawl, to phones, plastic surgery, and games. I do it all the time, and watch others do it, too. But the risk of using substance abuse as a paraphrase for what ails us on a social level is that it will obscure solutions as often as it reveals them. We may all be addicted to oil, and our insatiable habit may be killing us, but quitting could kill us, too, so it isn't a very useful analogy. We say "we're addicted" as shorthand, meaning we know we need to stop but feel unable to do it, lacking the motivation or the means.
But swap the addiction metaphor for a gaming metaphor and our top earning CEOs aren't psychologically damaged at all, just extraordinarily competent players in a ferocious and pitiless game. If there's anything disturbing about them in that case, it's that the point spread of their victories is making the game so predictable it's no longer fun for the rest of us to bet on. If so, then the way to change the situation ---if that's what you think is called for---would not be to punish or attempt to cure the compensation monopolizers, but simply to change the rules or find a new game.
Changing and enforcing new rules would be difficult enough, especially with so many hopefuls in the lower tiers who think the old rules put them in line for the next jackpot. Nevertheless, if you're going to be rigorous about the associations and analogies you use to think with, it's best to stay aware of how well or poorly various comparisons prepare your mind to tackle the problem at hand. The inability of some men to know when they've made enough money may look, walk and talk like an addiction, but thinking about it that way won't get them to kick the habit.
