The idea is that a conscience is derived from natural empathy. Certainly the mammals have to have some. Most are predators but preying on your own young doesn't make your genes survive.
Civilization does one thing or another with empathy. In a stone age tribe, which is what man is evolved for, the tribe is an extended family extended some more. You get a co-operative group, and if a psychopath somehow showed up, a tomahawk would show up next, and the tribe would survive.
At some point, someone will try to make himself king, and it might work with the right amount of empathy going both ways. Empathy down can reduce over time and yield a stable but somewhat oppressive government. Too much oppression causes the tomahawks to come out.
A fairly natural process would be for the king/chief to be limited by tribal elders, and then from there a more formal government might form. It would likely be socialist. An upgraded form of tribe with a larger group.
If, on the other hand, empathy is trained out to some extent, it can become a slave state, and eventually capitalist. The rulers of a capitalist state reduce empathy down in justifying privilege.
Corporations are essentially paper characters which can be created to have no empathy whatever. That's where the serious oppression comes from, because a corporation like that will tend to pick leaders based on psychopathy. Not only does it produce rule by the worst, but it can produce power structures worse than any of the people in them. As it degrades to oligarchy, the system trains the empathy out of the executive class until they begin to raise psychopaths and turn the nation over to them. A ruling class that does not know what it is to be human.