"I'm Just Doing My Job"
PART 5: How our obsession with work perpetuates the banality of evil.
If capitalism was divided into a Venn diagram between “maximizing profit” and “maximizing welfare,” there would certainly be an overlap, even if the latter is a corollary or incidental byproduct of the former. Scott Galloway, noted NYU marketing professor, appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher in March to discuss Crony Capitalism, because the demonstrably terrible things currently happening under capitalism is, of course, not Real Capitalism. He packages free-market truisms within a starchy mysticism, lending his rat-a-tat-tat talking points a heft of profundity. He described capitalism as “full-body contact violence at a corporate level” that creates “prosperity and progress that rests on a bed of empathy,” before diagnosing the “combining of the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism” as the root cause of America deviating from its more noble and dignified economic aspirations. It’s worth noting—even if it’s belaboring what should be an obvious point—that America did not become a more intrinsically socialist society after the CARES Act distributed $5 trillion mostly to big businesses and oligarchs.
A more even-handed progressive critique of capitalism is not one based on whether it is an economic system capable of achieving some good and some human progress. Even Karl Marx spent the opening third of Kapital praising the revolutionary aspects of capitalism, noting it as a liberatory outgrowth of feudalism. The main point of contention is that, without a universal safety net and labor protections, the kind of empathy capitalism is capable of producing will be entirely contingent on the goodwill of employers who are bound by a systemic profit motive that encourages myopia—if not outright greed—which perpetuates easily preventable human suffering.
Give people shitty incentives, expect shitty behavior.
The free market is a reflection of social progress, not an engine for it. In Season 4 of Mad Men, it’s the summer of 1965, and one of Sterling Cooper’s clients, Fillmore Auto Parts, is being picketed for refusing to hire Black Americans in its Southern stores. Peggy Olson suggests hiring Harry Belafonte as a company spokesperson to broadcast a racially progressive image. “Our job is to make men like Fillmore Auto,” Don Draper responds, “not to make Fillmore Auto like Negroes.” At the risk of violating Godwin’s law, the Holocaust and the Milgram experiment are grotesque illustrations of ordinary people rationalizing themselves into some horrendous depravities when “just doing my job” is deployed as an excuse for aiding institutions that either commit or willfully ignore atrocities. In Sterling Cooper’s case, their job was to sell auto parts, not agitate for social justice; as long as the ad agency is affixed to Fillmore, its role is to protect their client’s balance sheets. Contrary to the ahistorical ramblings of libertarian turbo-dorks, the free market was not responsible for advancing Civil Rights (or any social movement throughout American history); it took sustained and coordinated collective action for Black Americans to abolish legal segregation.
This scene highlights many defects of capitalist logic. If someone’s mandate is to maximize shareholder value, this could be accomplished by trying to get Coca-Cola to replace water for as many people as possible around the world—or as their marketing division put it, “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?” Ascending to the corporate and political apex at this bought-off moment demands a certain comfort with serving power regardless of its demands, to understand you’re a professional working for more powerful professionals. Cornel West describes the three pillars of incorporation as, “conformity, complacency, and cowardliness.” An insistent and defiant and proudly unteachable passivity locks all this into place.
Companies can stimulate artificial demands they can satisfy, or bury evidence of them destroying the future liveability of our planet, and nobody within these institutions can question this rationalizing madness because their roles are fixed. The cushion of wealth and blithe sociopathy—combined with a culture built to protect overt acts of malfeasance—all conspire to dampen meaningful accountability. Even “good CEOs” are constrained by their professional obligations: If they pointed out that profits are wreaking colossal harm, they would be performing their job poorly.
Hannah Arendt grappled with the puzzling question, Can one do evil without being evil? while reporting for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann—the Nazi operative responsible for organizing the transportation of millions of Jews to various concentration camps as part of the Final Solution. Arendt found him to be rather ordinary and bland, “neither perverted nor sadistic.” Eichmann’s bureaucratic emptiness suggested no such diabolical maliciousness, but only prosaic careerism and an absolute thoughtless symbiosis with Nazism. These collective characteristics of Eichmann were dubbed “the banality of evil.” This concept is so perplexing because the individual human perpetrators are often marked by absolute humdrum: They’re following orders, just doing their jobs.
Most of the people who run this exploitative dystopia machine aren’t necessarily evil themselves, at least in the comic book villain sense. To think of them as pure evil assumes there’s an essence to an individual that transcends their time and place and context and conditions. Our present was created by every human who has lived before us and is perpetuated by every living human acting within accumulated institutions and institutional thought and out of cultural mechanisms of sorting and separation. It is determined and deformed by dead market relationships that strip us of most motivation beyond short-sighted self-interest; concepts like private property have metaphysical permanence that is socially constructed but structure our daily lives, our desires, our emotional responses. Humans are ensorcelled from one degree to another by their present. Everyone is the sum total of their experiences and actions; their experiences are determined temporally and spatially, which influence their actions.
The “decent citizens” of the world require a semblance of evidence, ethos, normality, majority consensus, ideology, law, and a sense of morality and mission to validate evil. This is exactly why Arendt argues for us to wage battle against evil in the recesses of our morality and thought, to question and challenge social and historical fixations, patterns, legacies, or what she calls “the burden of mankind.” We created a chaotic and irrational existence, and without a larger system to absorb our culpability, we feel rudderless, left with nothing but our own moral choices. America’s constant compulsion for productivity and personal success can be craven and irresponsible and todderishly testy, but at its worst, has led to some dangerous outcomes.
Lawyers, consultants, and CEOs, for example, all inhabit a role in which they are supposed to follow a particular code, which revolves around helping a client or organization achieve the desired outcome, so long as they don’t violate the canon of legal or business ethics. The CEO of a pharmaceutical company maximizes shareholder value even if that means “getting as many people addicted to your drug as possible (and then selling them anti-addiction drugs).” The lawyer serves the best interest of their client even if that means representing said pharmaceutical company, burying anyone who tries to sue for damages in a mountain of paperwork, and imposing any legal obstacle possible that could prevent any trial. And the consultant devises schemes on how a pharmaceutical company can optimize its business strategy.
In late-2019, an anonymous ex-McKinseyite penned a revealing and scathing exposé of the elite global consulting firm McKinsey and Company, describing them as “capitalism distilled,” and then going on to write:
“And as capital’s most effective messenger, McKinsey has done direct harm to the world in ways that, thanks to its lack of final decision-making power, are hard to measure and, thanks to its intense secrecy, are hard to know. The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires.”
McKinsey is a powerful and profitable global force, largely because the organization is very adept at solving problems in a very particular way. Management consultants work for management, after all, and they are equally effective at selective omission and targeted troubleshooting: It refuses to sweat anything it chooses to regard as the other stuff. The other stuff, like how their clients treat humanity, is other stuff, and so, by definition, is outside the scope of the engagement. The client decides what ought to be done, and McKinsey assembles the smartest and best-credentialed people available to find an organizational solution to a dynamic and difficult set of problems. This is all perfectly bloodless in the management consulting way, but it’s not without some carnage. The office culture created here is not just cutthroat and paranoid, but increasingly high-handed and stridently amoral.
It’s striking, though not surprising, that all this well-credentialed cleverness and machine-tooled efficiency tends to deliver the same solution and same outcome, which is more for the client and less for everyone else. All the merciless cullings and organizational refinement, all those shifting variables, and all the brilliant minds working it over have delivered a long list of howlingly malignant client work. Their roster of organizational makeovers includes helping the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia track its dissidents, devising a bread price-fixing scheme for Loblaws, and advising Purdue Pharma on how to sell more opioids. In late-2019, a report from the New York Times revealed the firm deployed its thoroughbred data nerds and weaponized quants to help the Trump administration improve the efficiency of its deportation regime. Pathologically committed to its job, McKinsey deftly worked angles and analyzed data so thoroughly, they managed to horrify and discomfort Trump administration ICE officials, advocating for “measures the agency’s staff sometimes viewed as too harsh on immigrants.” Clinton voters significantly outnumbered Trump voters in the consulting firm.
It’s easy to see how this allure, and the larger worldview informing it, appeals to well-heeled Ivey types of every political stripe. McKinsey brands itself as the most luxurious and state-of-the-art solution to the age-old business problem of squeezing the maximum return out of people at the minimum cost. The broader vibe is cooly sensible, an elegant finessing maneuver to administer remotely brutal work that bears a brutal human cost, but in such a way that it doesn’t look brutal. Since the desired outcome was fixed, employees can rationalize their actions through a twisted conception of ethics: They don’t actually advise clients on what policies to have but advise them on the optimal way to carry them out. In this sense, McKinsey also sells a certain sleek aesthetic, a useful justification for ethically dubious decisions.
While some McKinsey employees were disturbed by the firm’s work with ICE, this self-vindication is still endemic in the corporate and legal worlds: It’s not me doing this, I am inhabiting the role of serving the client. A person rarely chooses evil for its own sake. Rather, they choose ideologies, clichés, half-truths and lies, and convenience. They surrender to fashion, as well as historical and contemporary frames of mind, some of which gather momentum through some type of “necessity.” Participation in evil is always said to be due to a lack of choice, in the name of personal or national interests, a concrete or imagined danger granted primacy over morality and empathy. Corporate lawyers who chose to be corporate lawyers and chose to represent some crusty pervert like Harvey Weinstein have, at some point in their career arc, constructed a story about a professional alter ego completely delineated from their “true” selves—even if they have at least some inkling that the functions of their jobs further enables harm.
The root of all evil is pathological self-interest. It’s remarkably easy to get lost in the day-to-day mechanics of a job, the big-picture futility in all of it is both ephemeral and elusive. Most Americans live in a sort of weightless suspension between their last paycheck and their next one, inhabiting no identifiable reality but the one blurring in front of their nose. The tragedy and cynicism involved in gaining power and wealth in America lies in chipping away at or outright abandoning any moral center. The methods involved in attaining success often preclude people from doing anything meaningfully altruistic with it. Naturally, the power void is filled with mutants of ego, outliers from the rest of humanity in terms of both the depth and breadth of their appetite, and the contours of their behavior are only intermittently recognizable as “normal.”
All these thrice-divorced yacht hobgoblins and servile consultants and buttery business lordlings pay to crowd the country club orbit and look all fancy and glamorous on their Instagram stories doing so, but there are latent traces of dirt underneath their fingernails. “You want a Lamborghini? Sippin’ martinis?” as Britney Spears sings, “You better work, bitch.” These people have to maintain a luxurious lifestyle somehow, even if their methods amount to a platinum blonde/orange tan combo that remains horribly dated or taking long lunch meetings while underlings shelter other rich people’s money from taxation. We may sneer and snicker at influencers’ desperate quest to win approval from their viewers, but they only serve as parodic exaggerations of the ways we comport ourselves to navigate office politics or thorny moral dilemmas to nothing beyond vacuity and self-congratulation. As Barrett Swanson writes in Harper’s Magazine:
“…we are all forced to bevel the edges of our personalities and become inoffensive brands. It is a logic that extends from the retailer’s smile to the professor’s easy A to the politician’s capitulation to the co-worker’s calculated post to the journalist’s virtue-signaling tweet to the influencer’s scripted photo. The angle of our pose might be different, but all of us bow unfailingly at the altar of the algorithm.”
This pandemic was ghoulish in the most contemporary of ways, unearthing a profound nihilism and ulcerating futility behind the hoary myths of The Dream Job and productivity and meritocracy. They constitute a flimsy little Potemkin village concealing a latently vicious Wall/K Street Ponzi scheme. Our contributions are too often unrecognized, and they amount to a virtuosic apathy that keeps the whole rickety, malfunctioning enterprise humming towards no identifiable destination. Various real crises and deadlines ominously pass without really being addressed, its root causes and guilty perpetrators masked by sheer oblivious mania. America is helmed by lumpy blowhards and profligate failsons who would gladly back into fascism for lack of any conviction deeper than a distaste for those with less than them.
The nonstop frantic hamster wheel of the news cycle is a gateway into something very much like an out-of-body experience. It’s not an especially desirable experience, but it’s one that recognizes plain institutional incompetence in face of such a crystalline and tragicomic shitshow. In the long and grueling days of the Trumpenreich, pundits and Twitter addicts spent a lot of time saying “This is not normal” with a claustrophobic pomposity—even as the cascading disasters increased in intensity and frequency. But getting through this life without succumbing to either delusion or despair requires a constant act of doublethink, so we are left to normalize all of it—the threats, the barrage of information, the demands on us, and the expectations of us.
Our Darwinian healthcare system is functionally gatekept by full-time employment—last March, when an uninsured woman in L.A. was hospitalized for COVID, the bill for her testing and treatment was $34,927.43. Our federal government has been hollowed out from decades of right-wing ideological assault; it struggles to protect women’s reproductive rights and it fails to guarantee vacation, sick leave, or paternity leave. Paroxysms of unaccountable police violence and unresolved racial disparities reached both a grim reckoning and brutal apotheosis when a smartphone camera caught a nine-minute-long lynching of George Floyd. Subsequent widespread protests and sporadic riots were met with a prominent Senator calling for the deployment of troops on Black Lives Matter demonstrations in a New York Times column. Battalions of uniformed state agents were dispatched to tear gas protesters and kidnap and toss them into unmarked vans. Every few months, the west coast is literally on fire. Conversely, a winter storm shut down Texas’s entire power grid and turned the state into a mini-Katrina. Now, the ocean is on fire. It turns out, there are no capitalists in foxholes. Fortune 500 companies panhandled taxpayers for trillions in handouts because a few weeks of inactivity collapsed the entire economy. Opiates and carcinogens remain wildly lucrative revenue streams. America’s most profitable, cannibalistic companies relentlessly (and successfully) lobby to be exempted from taxes, criminal penalties, environmental laws, and their own business failings. CEOs cash out to the tune of millions while nearly half of Americans can’t cover a $400 emergency expense. Our employment and 401(k)s stand at the whim of speculative bubbles and a stormy market. Every endless day of Donald Trump’s malicious dunce reign becomes a new fragment of an endless blundering present. The toxic mundanity of the new “normal” brought about a slew of bleak burlesque that seemed to interrupt itself before the first quintuple-byline cataclysm would even reach its climax.
Every fault line in this brittle, fractured country has been exposed. For so massive a trauma, it’s rather startling how dull it all is from one moment to the next. It’s a tepid combination of flabby unworkability and pallid denial within a diminished and overmatched nation. Through sheer repression and delusion, America has staggered through this pandemic remaining retrograde and proudly plutocratic in many ways. “What is America’s goal,” Ed Yong asks in The Atlantic, “to end the pandemic, or to suppress it to a level where it mostly plagues communities that privileged individuals can ignore?” COVID seems like a precursor to increasingly entropic climate change that projects to cause the mass disposition of life, if not mass death. But those who die will not be part of the narrative of civilization—they will be gangrenous limbs severed from the world market.
It is vanity, and perhaps American exceptionalism, to assume that decline or collapse should feel more significant than this. Instead of some epic catastrophe, we are in the midst of a slow and steady subsumption of everything into the market. This process will not be without disruptions that could be described as apocalyptic. But because of our hyper-normalized reality, the collateral damage will not be evenly distributed, and they will be instantly metabolized into a bland quotidian happening that drifts along a Ship-of-Theseus-style continuum. Even as America’s wealth is siphoned from the wallets of everyday workers to a small few, there is a sense that no one is really in charge. Blame is concealed by an ungodly number of systemic veto points. The buck is passed on to some other manager, shuffled around by people with enough overlapping self-interest to not do anything about anything. Everyone else is either too self-absorbed or too frantic, distracted, exhausted to do much about it.
Fortunately, we have the free will and the responsibility to ourselves and each other to prevent this looming planetary Armageddon. Even if we can’t, a life spent in the pursuit of a virtuous end will be more rewarding and meaningful than one that acknowledges this horror and accommodates itself to it. For that is how evil perpetuates: Not through incitement as much as indifference.
fan-fucking-tastic. Great work, man. This runs along similar lines to a book I'm reading, "the death of homo economicus." Just how this logic of capital is affecting our own lives, plus the long term societal stuff that'll bite us in the ass, some more than others.
some random Sunday reading here and BAM! what a well-written thought-provoking article.
I'm writing a book about a small group of heroes who stood up to Hitler during WW2, and your section on the "banality of evil" changed my way of portraying one of their tormentors; he was just doing his job, not personally evil, just "doing evil".
Thanks for your work on this newsletter. Looking forward to reading more.