I think this framing quietly smuggles in a category error. Corporations do not behave like scaled up humans, so analyzing them with human intuitions about motivation, learning, or sanity is often misleading.

A corporation is not a person with beliefs, emotions, or a unified model of the world. It is a distributed optimization process composed of agents with local incentives, asymmetric information, and weak feedback loops. What looks like irrationality at the system level is often perfectly rational behavior at the component level. The result is behavior that would be pathological in a human but is structurally normal for an organization.

This is why corporations often resemble what we would call psychopathic traits if observed in individuals. Lack of empathy is not a moral failure, it is an emergent property of decision making that is mediated through abstractions like metrics, quarterly targets, and legal responsibility shields. Harm is externalized because the feedback is delayed, diluted, or borne by parties not represented in the decision loop. There is no felt guilt because there is no felt anything.

Humans update beliefs through direct experience and social feedback. Corporations update through KPIs, incentive realignment, and legal or market pressure. Those signals are coarse, lagging, and often gamed. So you get persistence in obviously harmful or stupid behavior long after any individual inside the company privately knows it is wrong. The system cannot feel embarrassment or regret. It can only respond when the gradient changes.

This also explains why appealing to realism at the individual level often misses the point. Understanding what is likely to happen is useful, but the likelihoods themselves are shaped by incentive topology, not by shared understanding. Even when everyone agrees something will fail, it can still proceed if failure is locally optimal or diffused. Conversely, things that seem impossible can happen quickly when incentives snap into alignment, regardless of prior beliefs.

So cynicism versus optimism is not about mood here. It is about whether you model organizations as intentional agents or as blind selection processes. Once you adopt the latter view, a lot of so called dysfunction stops looking like incompetence and starts looking like exactly what the system was designed to produce.

The depressing part is not that corporations become bureaucratic. It is that they often become very good at optimizing for the wrong thing, and there is no internal mechanism that prefers truth, coherence, or human values unless those happen to coincide with the gradient.