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The Moral Corruption that Made Sam Bankman-Fried Possible [1]
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Date: 2022-12-13
Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange, FTX Trading Ltd., has been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission, with defrauding investors. The Bankman-Fried saga is a reminder of what happens in a society where money is placed at the heart of public life, and where a person’s value is tied to how much they are worth.
Moral Corruption
Adam Smith, is known as the “Father of Economics” for his work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In that work, he discussed how capitalism was able to produce an enormous and unprecedented amount of wealth. However in his lesser known work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith cautioned that ,
“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise or, at least, neglect persons of poor and mean conditions, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
The Rot that Guides Society
We live in a society that fetishises the rich. Whether it’s Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, we are treated to a myth of how special the wealthy are. The rich are not just rich, they are smarter, and worthier than the rest of us. In such a society, wealth buys more than just a lot of things. It buys social position, and even buys intellectual and spiritual standing. Who has not read or seen a list of books that Billionaire X reads, or seen pages and pages written about some not-very smart idea pushed by a rich person. This myth of the virtuousness of the rich is corrupting our society. We want to know what the rich read, what they think, what they do, where they holiday, what they eat. The wealthy have become the epicenter of our lives. It’s not teachers, doctors, nurses, cleaners, or other hard-working Americans that we have been taught to praise and to try and be like. We give them passing praise. If a nurse recommends a book that doesn’t get millions of likes on Twitter, if a teacher talks about ways to make the world better, nobody is interested. If a billionaire says something dumb, he will unearth an army of defenders. Surely, we imagine, nobody can have luck into wealth? Surely, you have to be a genius to be rich? Surely you have to have some special insight into absolutely everything, to be rich. But as Smith realized, being rich does not come with any special insights or qualities.
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