The Banality of (Structural) Evil

With the recent murder of Brian Thompson, an uncomfortable and not-so-silent debate has been roiling throughout the internet and around the country.  Many polls show a significant percent of Americans are actually sympathetic to the suspected murderer.  In fact, after the obligatory condemnations of vigilantism, many quickly turn to talk about how downright evil healthcare is in America.  “I don’t condone murder but . . .” many conversations go, leaving unsaid a very disturbing notion: that such evil must have a perpetrator and that perpetrator needs to be punished, severely.

When it came out that one of the bullet casings in the murder had etched on it the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose,” it reminded me of a moment many years ago when I worked as a consultant for a large insurance company.  My job was to teach management to write more clearly and persuasively, the thinking being, I guess, that an employee with improved writing skills would somehow equate to a more efficient employee and thus larger profits.  I didn’t question it closely since it was a very well-paying gig, something that as a then-adjunct professor of English I much appreciated.  I conducted writing workshops in which I gave employees exercises on writing clear, concise business correspondence.  In addition, I asked them to submit one of the documents they had written for their job.  At the end of the workshop I would go over their document with them.  Having worked as a consultant for this company for years, I was privy to thousands of unredacted internal documents, many of which were of a highly sensitive nature.  They trusted me with their secrets, the way a confessor would a priest.

After one workshop, I recall meeting with a young actuarial employee to go over his sample.  For those who aren’t familiar with the insurance industry, actuaries are the Las Vegas bookies of the profession, usually brainy nerds with degrees in math or statistics, who can calculate 7 to the 7th  power in their heads.   In insurance companies, actuaries predict the future, betting on who’s going to die and when, their talents bringing millions into the coffers of their companies.  In this particular case, the employee was just out of college, friendly and gregarious, and as new fathers we shared notes on the difficulties of juggling jobs and young families.

As we went over his writing sample—in this case a report going to senior management about ways to save the company money on life insurance policies—I remember being perplexed by one term: “delayed death lag.”  When I asked him to explain it in laymen terms, he said something along the following lines:  Imagine, he said, an old couple in Iowa who have a life insurance policy with the company and the husband suddenly passes away.  From that point until the surviving wife cashes the death benefit check and funds are withdrawn from the company account is considered the death lag.  During that lag period a number of things have to happen: forms have to be filled out, a death certificate produced, questions are asked and finally answered to the satisfaction of the company.  The longer we can delay that lag period, he explained, the better it is for the company.  The delay can equate to millions of dollars in profit.

When he finished this explanation, I couldn’t help smiling.  Of course, I said, the wife needs this money for things like burial costs and living expenses.

“That’s what life insurance is for,” he said condescendingly.

“But isn’t all this delay death lag business really downright wrong?” I asked.

“All insurance companies do it.”

“That still doesn’t make it right.”

“I don’t make the rules.  I’m just doing my job.”

Just doing his job, I thought.  But shouldn’t the grieving wife have been part of his job? This nice young man certainly wasn’t the face of evil, I thought.  The evil ones were the greedy CEO’s who “made the rules” he was merely following.  Right?

Hanna Arendt, covering the Eichmann trial, wrote, “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal . . . [and] this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”  It wasn’t just the Hitlers and Himmlers and Goebbels who were responsible for the Holocaust, though after the Nuremberg trials when we marched them out to the gallows, we the victors felt a certain moral purity, as if we’d washed our hands of that evil.  But what about the many terrifyingly normal Germans, average citizens who were part of a larger, structural evil that they’d participated in, often unwittingly, just doing their jobs?

But why blame just that young actuary for the delayed death lag?  What about the millions of others just doing their jobs?  In fact, what about me?  Was I, in my professorial, sanitized, ivory tower, exempt from blame?  I continued working for this company for many years simply because the pay was too good to turn down.  I could have said something, acted as a whistle-blower and sent a copy of that report to the media?  But I didn’t.  I remained silent and looked to others to blame for insurance malfeasance, for hurting old widows out in Iowa.

I’m not arguing that leaders shouldn’t bear more of the blame for committing this sort of structural evil than the rank and file.  But if Brian Thompson is guilty of evil, then so is that young man.  So am I.  And so are the millions of us who turn our backs or close our eyes to things we do in the day-to-day mantra of just doing our jobs.  We are all to blame. We are to blame for letting them–for letting us–get away with murder.  We may not have pulled the trigger but don’t we still shoulder some of the blame?