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Shoshana Zuboff’s latest column in Business Week …

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Wall Street’s Economic Crimes Against Humanity

By refusing to consider the consequences of their actions, those who created the financial crisis exemplify the banality of evil, writes Shoshana Zuboff

[ Snip … ]

Each day’s economic news leaves me haunted by Hannah Arendt’s ruminations on Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as she reported on his trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker 45 years ago. Arendt pondered “the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and evil” and sought to capture it with her famous formulation “the banality of evil.”

Arendt found Eichmann neither “perverted nor sadistic,” but “terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

REMOTENESS FROM REALITY

He was a new type of criminal, a participant in “administrative massacre” who committed his crimes “under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.” Eichmann had no motives other than what Arendt described as “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement…he never realized what he was doing.That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together,” she concluded, “…was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”

The economic crisis is not the Holocaust but, I would argue, it derives from a business model that routinely produced a similar kind of remoteness and thoughtlessness, compounded by a widespread abrogation of individual moral judgment.

As we learn more about the behavior within our financial institutions, we see that just about everyone accepted a reckless system that rewards transactions but rejects responsibility for the consequences of those transactions. Bankers, brokers, and financial specialists were all willing participants in a self-centered business model that celebrates what’s good for organization insiders while dehumanizing and distancing everyone else—the outsiders.

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Read the rest here …