The 'do bugger all about it' wasn't aimed at society. It was aimed at internal company reports. PFAS was known to be harmful by DuPoint but they kept making it. Nicotine and tobacco industry. Global warming and oil industry.
What I honestly don’t understand is what the individual employees of these companies think. I’d love to see a documentary with interviews of a wide swath of employees (different levels within the companies) and how they rationalized this aggregate behaviour. Do they not have children and grandchildren? Do they think they don’t breathe the same air and drink the same water?
Certainly some, probably low level employees, didn’t feel they had the luxury of questioning their company’s ethics and looking for work elsewhere, but what about all the more senior people who presumably sat in boardrooms and spun ways to continue pouring shit into the environment with reckless abandon? What am I missing?
Fictionalised, quite accurately perhaps, Michael Cristofer as Phillip
Price and Bruce Altman playing Terry Colby in Sam Esmail's "Mr Robot"
both do an outstanding job of capturing the shrugging banality of evil
at genocidal scale. The feeling I got from that (Esmail is a first
class writer) was of those inside accounts of the Nuremberg trials
with Eichmann laughing
The banality of evil is that murdering a million people is just
something you do on a nondescript Wednesday afternoon over wine and
canapés while everyone is watching the clock to get out to the golf
course.
There is no "rationalisation". No moustache twisting or maniacal
laughter. No drama. No thought at all. It is the "amorality", the
total absence of moral thought that is horrifying beyond anything
Colonel Kurtz could conjure up at the dark end of the river.
> they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones,
their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel
like it is significantly more difficult to explain,
I will check that out, but one point: I don’t see the Nazi atrocities as good comparables. Those examples are people doing horrible things to other people. In the current instances of people at major corporations poisoning the air, water, and land, they are doing horrible things to themselves, their loved ones, their descendants. It is like a slow motion mass suicide. I feel like it is significantly more difficult to explain, as it can’t be rationalized as crimes being done to some demonized group that isn’t seen as deserving of protection. How can self-harm (and harm to your own loved ones) be moralized in the same manner that Nazis felt their acts to be moral?
