[lmkg]

> And I wonder, is this sort of moral decay necessarily part of the current corporate world?

I think it's as mundane as simple, Darwinian selective pressure. The ruthless ones perform better[1]. The people who have ethical constraints, or who consider the long-term, find themselves under-performing by comparison. They can choose to either mimic this destructive behavior or get marginalized as they are seen as ineffective and stubborn.

So basically, ethical behavior is unstable, and having one sociopath on a team will tend to make others act the same way. It's not exactly inevitable, but it's the natural tendency. If you want to stop it from happening, you have to work very hard and be very diligent.

[1] Or rather, they perform better in more visible ways, i.e. by more objective metrics and over a shorter time period.