I was watching the Netflix documentary series “Dirty Money” the other day and thinking afterwards, oh, how we need our villains to keep us distracted.
Volkswagen deceives the world about toxic emissions from its diesel engines. Valeant Pharmaceuticals gouges patients and the medical insurance industry with exorbitant drug prices. Facebook amasses a vast fortune by peddling the private information of its unsuspecting users.
“What happens inside a company that leads to this kind of infraction?” asks the documentary’s narrator.
What indeed. The obvious answer is greed, a human trait so well-known and documented, it’s one of the original deadly sins.
Greed cuts both ways — as an essential drive in the pursuit of human enterprise on the one hand, as a destructive road to excess on the other. At its most ambiguous, it undermines any hope for moral progress and dooms us to a stalemate between the best and worst of human nature.
How much easier and comfortably distracting to chase after the villains of this flawed world of ours — the rogue players, as organizations covering up their misdeeds like to call them.
This is not to say that individuals who abuse power shouldn’t be held to account, but underestimating the forces that shape them is a mistake as serious as letting them off the hook.
Vladimir Putin is more than just another political strongman who developed inside his private moral vacuum. He’s a product of Russian history and its obsession with heroes.
Donald Trump may be a shameless buffoon who bluffed his way into the White House, but in that very role he’s the fulfilment of everything unsavory lurking in the dark corners of the American Dream.
Mark Zuckerberg is not just another out-of-control opportunist, he’s the logical result of a business model that glorifies self-interest.
Jeffrey Epstein was not just another pervert. He took playboy power at its accepted face value and ran with it all the way.
If corporations like Volkswagen, Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Facebook play by the widely accepted motto that maximizing profit comes first, how are individuals inside them supposed to maintain their moral compass?
If governments decide that their priority is to cut costs, how are their civil servants supposed to keep track of where help is needed the most?
If moral neutrality in the pursuit of efficiency and success is the new corporate and government paradigm, how are we to hold individual people, no matter where in the scheme of things they fit in, to common standards of decency?
By parading the villains as scapegoats and leaving the morally neutral world that spawned them untouched?
Azzo Rezori,
St. John’s
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