{"id":59310,"date":"2021-09-13T08:50:36","date_gmt":"2021-09-13T13:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59310"},"modified":"2021-09-13T08:50:36","modified_gmt":"2021-09-13T13:50:36","slug":"the-banality-of-financial-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=59310","title":{"rendered":"The Banality of (Financial) Evil"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Banality of (Financial) Evil<\/a><\/h3>\n

The financialized American economy and State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a putrid heap.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go ahead and be evil, because everyone else is evil, too<\/b>, because being evil serves everyone’s interests far better than maintaining integrity, for integrity will cost you more than you can afford.<\/p>\n

In other words, lying, fraud, embezzlement, misrepresentation of risk, material misrepresentation of facts, half-truths, the replacement of statements of fact with propaganda and spin: these are not the work of a scattered handful of sociopaths:\u00a0they represent the very essence and heart of America’s economic status quo.<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase\u00a0the banality of evil<\/i>\u00a0to capture the essence of the Nazi regime in Germany:<\/b>\u00a0doing evil wasn’t abnormal, it was normal. Doing evil wasn’t an outlier of sociopaths, it was the everyday “job” of millions of people, and not just Nazi Party members.<\/p>\n

Not naming evil is the key to normalizing evil.<\/b>\u00a0Evil must first and foremost be\u00a0derealized<\/i>\u00a0(a key concept in the\u00a0Survival+<\/a>\u00a0critique), detached from our realization and awareness by naming it something innocuous.<\/p>\n

Here is a telling excerpt from the book\u00a0Triumph of the Market:<\/a><\/p>\n

Normalization of the unthinkable comes easily when money, status, power, and jobs are at stake…. Intellectuals will be dredged up to justify their (actions). The rationalizations are hoary with age: government knows best, ours is a strictly defensive effort, or, if it wasn’t me somebody else would do it. There is also the retreat to ignorance, real, cultivated, or feigned.<\/i><\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Banality of (Financial) Evil The financialized American economy and State are now totally dependent on a steady flow of lies and propaganda for their very survival. Were the truth told, the status quo would collapse in a putrid heap. Go ahead and be evil, because everyone else is evil, too, because being evil serves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24078,1769,10851,1849,950,587,827],"class_list":["post-59310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-charles-hugh-smith-2","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-financial-markets","tag-fraud","tag-of-two-minds","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=59310"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59314,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59310\/revisions\/59314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=59310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=59310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=59310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}