If Bernie Madoff's crimes were "extraordinarily evil," as his sentencing judge declared, than how to we describe the crimes of Joseph Stalin, or the warp speed massacres in late 20th century Rwanda? How do we distinguish linguistically between a massive Ponzi scheme and genocide? It's not an idle semantic question. Hyperbole, pop culture's lingua franca, doesn't simply exaggerate; it also diminishes. It threatens to obliterate essential moral and aesthetic distinctions, undermining our ability to recognize gradations of good and evil, freedom and repression, or beauty, intelligence and talent.
Yes, Madoff ruined countless lives (literally, considering the effect of his fraud on charities as well as individual investors.) Yes, he stole on a grand scale and earned his imprisonment. Yes, apparently he had his share of neuroses, (like reported obsessive compulsive tendencies,) but who doesn't? Generally, he seems such an ordinarily evil man. His sins -- greed, selfishness, dishonesty, an absence of empathy -- are all distressingly common. Indeed, his story owes its symbolic resonance to the ordinariness of his character and crime. Extraordinary people stand apart. Madoff stands within and for the acquisitive, status hungry culture that lionized him, the tribalism that led so many Jews to trust him, and the corrupt financial and regulatory system that allowed him to prosper.
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Wendy Kaminer
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
Wonderful thought; I couldn't have chosen better words for it myself.
Obviously, there is some distinction between the taking of millions of lives in cold blood and swindling billions and billions of dollars on an individual-accountability level, but at the same individual-accountability level, where does the trigger-puller responsibility lay? Josef Stalin ordered around 30 million people dead, but on how many did he personally pull the trigger? A similar statement could be made about the Rwanda genocides, I believe.
Bernie Madoff, on the other hand, ran his business alone for quite a period of time before taking on associates to help him in his crime, and even afterward, watched the ticking of the numbers. Mentally, I want to compare that to Stalin being forced to watch live video feeds of his slaughter, but that's not quite right. I'm sure that Stalin believed he was doing the right thing for his people, just as Madoff believed he was doing the right thing by his people, in this case, the "acquisitive, status hungry culture that lionized him [and] the tribalism that led so many Jews to trust him".
A major difference in the comparison between Stalin & Madoff would be that Stalin had a lot of bodies to look at, whereas Madoff's "bodies" wouldn't be visible until he came clean about the game. Does it exculpate Madoff to any extent that neither he nor his other investors had to look at the collateral damage?
I'm not a pro thinker (except in my own mind :)), but I think you're making a really, really important point about the nature of our sensationalist culture to blur the myriad gradations between polar good and polar evil.
Excellent post, thank you. "Hero" is another overused term.
According to Jonathan Brendt's Inside the Stalin Archives, Stalin named people to be killed, and established quotas for killing and was as direct a murderer as you can be without plunging the knife in yourself. He died while planning a Russian holocaust.
There's a world of difference between Stalin, Pol Pot, etc and a guy who bumbled his way into a ponzi scheme and didn't really know how to get out; by some account he didn't even derive the normal ponzi operator's share and instead returned more money to investors and made charitable contributions. Some wealth was gained through his legitimate specialist business. (In fact, plenty of people warned that Madoff was running a shady operation, but some investors thought he was actually trading on inside info from his legit business; those investors got what they deserved.)