On this 5th anniversary of the Great Financial Collapse, the squeamish optimist to whom I had been laying out my views on why things like that happen, did not believe that everyone in the financial services industry is a sociopath. I admit to a bit of exaggeration and that she was hoping for better. But it can’t really get much better in a species whose brains are slow to evolve and are currently wired for survival in really hard and dangerous times: Sometime between the Pleistocene epoch and about 40 thousand years ago. During these unsettled stretches of our evolutionary history, also known as the Quaternary period, our immediate early ancestors lived by some fairly simple rules of thumb, like kill anyone that might be competing for resources or, for that matter, kill anyone you come across, just in case.
I suppose she may have a point about my blanket dismissal of everyone in banking – shorthand for the financial services industry – as afflicted by psychopathy. Given that one to four percent of the population, the same proportion of the population that works and schemes in banking, is estimated to be of that ilk, perhaps not everyone in the industry is certifiably psychopathic. If they were, it would mean there is no psychopathy elsewhere. And I’m pretty sure there are pockets of it everywhere.
So, how do we explain that practically everyone in banking participated in a giant Ponzi scheme to bilk almost everyone else on this planet. The costs are staggering and still being tallied. It wasn’t just the lower levels of the banking pyramid, those people writing mortgages for NINJA’s (no income, no job, no assets), that tipped us all into the giant economic dumpster. They were aided and abetted by government who sanctioned such behaviour and by others who packaged and resold the mortgages, which were no better than pre-digested food.
The ‘how to’ bible for psychiatrists, the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” if I may paraphrase, points to psychopaths as people who will do quite reprehensible things, without remorse, to get what they want: Deception, aggressiveness, conning, etc. So, did the bankers engaged in the great fraud go home after a day of hard bilking feeling sorry for what they did? If they didn’t, would this point to psychopathy (or sociopathy)? Perhaps, perhaps not. But that is not the right question to ask if we are to diagnose the mindset which prevailed during this unsettled period. Because there is another reason why someone may feel no remorse for what is clearly not a victimless crime.
If you’ve convinced yourself that you are helping the person you’ve just, in reality, ensured will soon lose their home, or that you are doing something good for the economy by repackaging worthless mortgages and selling them to trusting investors, then why should you feel remorse. This doesn’t, obviously, qualify such a person as a psychopath. This is willful blindness. For the sake of precision, though, willful blindness is really not possible if there is no free will, and there is growing evidence that free will is not so free. But to the extent that we are responsible for our actions, willful blindness must be distinguished from psychopathy.
However, is willful blindness any different than psychopathy as an excuse for doing harm? The outcome is the same in both cases. Indeed, it can be argued that willful blindness is worse, since it is a self-inflicted condition, as opposed to unfortunate brain wiring in the other case. I suppose we can ultimately blame evolution for making the need for more, also known as greed, so astonishingly difficult to resist. In fact, willful blindness is something to which every single human on this planet is susceptible and engages in more often than not.
The issue, then, is not which is worse, self-delusion or psychopathy, but the degree to which we self-delude and the resulting harm to others of such mental legerdemain. If we fail to look up from our comic book on the bus, just in case a pregnant lady might be ogling our seat, for example, this may be not be desirable, but is hardly on the same scale as throwing hapless banking clients and, ultimately, the entire world economy, into the financial abyss.
I, for one, would give mental health counseling and treatment to psychopaths but throw the entire sane banking crowd into the slammer, without regard to the uncontrollable-greed-made-me-do-it lament.
