This ruthless flattening of all relationships into cold number-go-up optimization is one aspect of the "Machine" that Paul Kingsnorth is warning about.
Outstanding writing as usual! Noblesse Oblige oddly enough was a concept my mother always discussed with me growing up and this article really drives the point home perfectly in that modern corporate business models simply don’t allow this to be practiced meaningfully anymore. My grandfather and his business were the model my mother used to talk about noblesse oblige. He was a successful businessman in our small town and owned the first ford dealership then later the Chrysler dealership. He had employees that worked for him for decades. Were his employees perfect? No, but as long as they were loyal to him they always had a job and if they got in a spot of trouble he would help out. One employee was a wonderful man but you knew at least once every couple months he would be too hungover to come to work, he never caught any grief and it was quietly ignored because when he was there he would do anything my grandfather asked and he never drank on the job. You would get nitpicked and shitcanned in any modern work environment for that now because they don’t care about how loyal you are only that you filled out the required form for the day off. The people that worked there were like family members who watched me grow up from birth. Eventually after my grandfather passed away and all the small town dealerships were mostly just forced out of business by the drive to consolidate the dealership system by the car companies into larger regional dealerships. I’ll never forget that feeling of seeing people be under the wing of what would have been the small town American version of the local lord and seeing these men and women work for a single person their entire adult lives and getting to know their children and grand-children all because one person felt a duty and responsibility for those that worked under him. At some point I know those folks could have struck out somewhere and could have been paid a little bit more but I know that they didn’t because they knew that no matter what happened in their life no other employer would have their back like my grandfather and that’s something that’s hard to quantify in a corporate benefits package.
This was good, if a little bleak. I’m more hopeful the corporate culture will dissipate as the competency crisis manifests itself. Employers think AI and cheap labor and empty finance buzzwords will keep the good times rolling, but it’s unsustainable, both commercially and politically. Higher functioning societies will chill out with the discrimination BS and have more sane human-scale operations.
Making the accusation of racism or sexism even now just seems antiquated and absurd. Having a “Severance” kind of life is also unappealing. The pendulum will swing back and we need to keep pulling it back.
Great article and a very relevant topic. The part where you explain how Jeremy Irons character is forced to behave this way is what I think more and more people are realizing, and all ethics training/testing in the professional world are facade.
I have been in situations multiple times where a semi unethical situation is also a pitfall and I am ignored because they assume I’m just being a Boy Scout.
The scene where Paul Betney explains how he burns thru a million a year is so educational imo
The movie is better if one pretends it has no relationship with the GFC or, indeed, the real world at all. In that vein it’s an extremely good novel disaster movie. Unfortunately, it can’t be separated from its nature of being an apologetical for Wall Street to give normies a completely false impression of things.
I didn't get the impression of apologetics, but a mass of investors getting caught up in easy money while ignoring the clear warning signs, which seems close to the truth.
It serves to reinforce the false impressions most people have of high finance and Wall Street. Foremost is the idea that financial crises are something akin to a natural disaster — they are things that “just happen.” While good fodder for drama, it’s not accurate. The impression one would get from the movie is that Wall Street firms are mainly populated by uber-smart people who — through the use of mathematical modeling far beyond us mortals — can catch glimpses of the future, which they use to make an honest dollar or two. It helps reinforce the common impression that financial trading is some very skilled profession demanding the same sort of intelligence one finds in astrophysics.
This is helped along by the cloud of obscurancy carefully maintained by Wall Street, which the movie does nothing to dispel, making off-handed references to financial jargon without making clear to the audiences what is actually being talked about. Unless one already have some idea of what CDOs, subprime MBSs, CDSs, or the like are it likely has the same effect as listening to Star Trek technobabble — it communicates to the audience that these are Smart Men dealing with Difficult Problems You Can’t Understand.
Paul Bettany’s character has the most explicit and direct apologetical with his little speech in the convertible, a sort of “woe is us” for Wall Street where he makes the bold claim that Wall Street is some sort of unthanked hero tipping the scales in favor of Mr. and Mrs. John Suburbia while they ungratefully slander them. I suppose one could argue that this is merely the view of his character but a contrary refutation of any sort is never supplied. For myself, I even view Tuld’s speech, which you quoted, as an apologetic. I’m sure a lot of Wall Street men tell themselves more or less that, that it’s just How Things Are and Doesn’t Really Matter Anyway, but it certainly delivers the wrong message to the audience (and, once again, is presented without counterargument).
It’s just the usual Hollywood MO, providing what are at best half-truths without ever giving the audience an accurate picture to reinforce the Official Truths. In the case of the GFC, that would be that Wall Street is a rentier industry that provides negative value to ordinary Americans, that high finance is more akin to gambling than it is to even climatology, that Wall Street firms going under was not the world ending (and if anything would have improved their lives), that rather than being nobody in particular’s fault the GFC was very much caused by Wall Street for known and definite reasons (i.e. financial crashes aren’t things that “just happen sometimes”), and so on.
Absent the political will for a full repeal of the Civil Rights Act, what's a good headcount threshold that would enable experiments in free association - 100? 500? 2500?
I don't know that you'd want to do full repeal anyway, given the risk of F500s being allowed to continue their sharp practice and also engage in blatant antiwhite/antimale discrimination.
Our system is 'barbaric' if we understand that term to reference something savage rather than merely incomprehensible. Financialization is a con-game. That's why the logic of it makes no sense to a well-adjusted person who doesn't spend every second of their day trying to figure out how to make a buck or screw over someone else.
In the end, it's better to be a White person living under White 'socialism' than to be a White person living under jewish 'socialism'.
And that's what we have now.
The entire jewish people live on the 'noblesse oblige' of their high-finance leadership, with the White race being a gigantic extraction zone to be exploited for the benefit of the jews.
If you doubt me, think about why - of all things - the jew-whore Trump would promote government-funded IRAs *for children* directed to 'low cost index funds'.
The only people who consistently make money in the stock market are the people who run the stock market. Their billions were once yours.
The twist is that this doesn’t just make firms colder. It also makes them more fragile, because you’ve traded mutual obligation for a transactional culture that only works as long as the spreadsheets make sense. We don't need fewer John Tuld archetypes. He knew he would do well because he would be able to deliver profits once again, and people would flock back in.
Democrats continue to discriminate on the basis of race and sex today because in the past there was discrimination on the basis of race and sex. That’s unconstitutional and a violation of the Civil Rights Act the Democrats passed in 1964 and the working class knows it. They will never again support the Democratic Party en masse.
This ruthless flattening of all relationships into cold number-go-up optimization is one aspect of the "Machine" that Paul Kingsnorth is warning about.
Outstanding writing as usual! Noblesse Oblige oddly enough was a concept my mother always discussed with me growing up and this article really drives the point home perfectly in that modern corporate business models simply don’t allow this to be practiced meaningfully anymore. My grandfather and his business were the model my mother used to talk about noblesse oblige. He was a successful businessman in our small town and owned the first ford dealership then later the Chrysler dealership. He had employees that worked for him for decades. Were his employees perfect? No, but as long as they were loyal to him they always had a job and if they got in a spot of trouble he would help out. One employee was a wonderful man but you knew at least once every couple months he would be too hungover to come to work, he never caught any grief and it was quietly ignored because when he was there he would do anything my grandfather asked and he never drank on the job. You would get nitpicked and shitcanned in any modern work environment for that now because they don’t care about how loyal you are only that you filled out the required form for the day off. The people that worked there were like family members who watched me grow up from birth. Eventually after my grandfather passed away and all the small town dealerships were mostly just forced out of business by the drive to consolidate the dealership system by the car companies into larger regional dealerships. I’ll never forget that feeling of seeing people be under the wing of what would have been the small town American version of the local lord and seeing these men and women work for a single person their entire adult lives and getting to know their children and grand-children all because one person felt a duty and responsibility for those that worked under him. At some point I know those folks could have struck out somewhere and could have been paid a little bit more but I know that they didn’t because they knew that no matter what happened in their life no other employer would have their back like my grandfather and that’s something that’s hard to quantify in a corporate benefits package.
This was good, if a little bleak. I’m more hopeful the corporate culture will dissipate as the competency crisis manifests itself. Employers think AI and cheap labor and empty finance buzzwords will keep the good times rolling, but it’s unsustainable, both commercially and politically. Higher functioning societies will chill out with the discrimination BS and have more sane human-scale operations.
Making the accusation of racism or sexism even now just seems antiquated and absurd. Having a “Severance” kind of life is also unappealing. The pendulum will swing back and we need to keep pulling it back.
Great article and a very relevant topic. The part where you explain how Jeremy Irons character is forced to behave this way is what I think more and more people are realizing, and all ethics training/testing in the professional world are facade.
I have been in situations multiple times where a semi unethical situation is also a pitfall and I am ignored because they assume I’m just being a Boy Scout.
The scene where Paul Betney explains how he burns thru a million a year is so educational imo
The movie is better if one pretends it has no relationship with the GFC or, indeed, the real world at all. In that vein it’s an extremely good novel disaster movie. Unfortunately, it can’t be separated from its nature of being an apologetical for Wall Street to give normies a completely false impression of things.
I didn't get the impression of apologetics, but a mass of investors getting caught up in easy money while ignoring the clear warning signs, which seems close to the truth.
It serves to reinforce the false impressions most people have of high finance and Wall Street. Foremost is the idea that financial crises are something akin to a natural disaster — they are things that “just happen.” While good fodder for drama, it’s not accurate. The impression one would get from the movie is that Wall Street firms are mainly populated by uber-smart people who — through the use of mathematical modeling far beyond us mortals — can catch glimpses of the future, which they use to make an honest dollar or two. It helps reinforce the common impression that financial trading is some very skilled profession demanding the same sort of intelligence one finds in astrophysics.
This is helped along by the cloud of obscurancy carefully maintained by Wall Street, which the movie does nothing to dispel, making off-handed references to financial jargon without making clear to the audiences what is actually being talked about. Unless one already have some idea of what CDOs, subprime MBSs, CDSs, or the like are it likely has the same effect as listening to Star Trek technobabble — it communicates to the audience that these are Smart Men dealing with Difficult Problems You Can’t Understand.
Paul Bettany’s character has the most explicit and direct apologetical with his little speech in the convertible, a sort of “woe is us” for Wall Street where he makes the bold claim that Wall Street is some sort of unthanked hero tipping the scales in favor of Mr. and Mrs. John Suburbia while they ungratefully slander them. I suppose one could argue that this is merely the view of his character but a contrary refutation of any sort is never supplied. For myself, I even view Tuld’s speech, which you quoted, as an apologetic. I’m sure a lot of Wall Street men tell themselves more or less that, that it’s just How Things Are and Doesn’t Really Matter Anyway, but it certainly delivers the wrong message to the audience (and, once again, is presented without counterargument).
It’s just the usual Hollywood MO, providing what are at best half-truths without ever giving the audience an accurate picture to reinforce the Official Truths. In the case of the GFC, that would be that Wall Street is a rentier industry that provides negative value to ordinary Americans, that high finance is more akin to gambling than it is to even climatology, that Wall Street firms going under was not the world ending (and if anything would have improved their lives), that rather than being nobody in particular’s fault the GFC was very much caused by Wall Street for known and definite reasons (i.e. financial crashes aren’t things that “just happen sometimes”), and so on.
Absent the political will for a full repeal of the Civil Rights Act, what's a good headcount threshold that would enable experiments in free association - 100? 500? 2500?
I don't know that you'd want to do full repeal anyway, given the risk of F500s being allowed to continue their sharp practice and also engage in blatant antiwhite/antimale discrimination.
500 would be big enough to do interesting things.
We'd also have to destroy the "I'm underpaid, you bastards make too much money" mentality, which will be at least as hard as overturning the CRA.
"Changing this will require changes that will make both capitalists and progressives scream bloody murder." Yep, bring it on.
Our system is 'barbaric' if we understand that term to reference something savage rather than merely incomprehensible. Financialization is a con-game. That's why the logic of it makes no sense to a well-adjusted person who doesn't spend every second of their day trying to figure out how to make a buck or screw over someone else.
In the end, it's better to be a White person living under White 'socialism' than to be a White person living under jewish 'socialism'.
And that's what we have now.
The entire jewish people live on the 'noblesse oblige' of their high-finance leadership, with the White race being a gigantic extraction zone to be exploited for the benefit of the jews.
If you doubt me, think about why - of all things - the jew-whore Trump would promote government-funded IRAs *for children* directed to 'low cost index funds'.
The only people who consistently make money in the stock market are the people who run the stock market. Their billions were once yours.
The twist is that this doesn’t just make firms colder. It also makes them more fragile, because you’ve traded mutual obligation for a transactional culture that only works as long as the spreadsheets make sense. We don't need fewer John Tuld archetypes. He knew he would do well because he would be able to deliver profits once again, and people would flock back in.
Excellent essay. THIS is why I am on Substack.
Democrats continue to discriminate on the basis of race and sex today because in the past there was discrimination on the basis of race and sex. That’s unconstitutional and a violation of the Civil Rights Act the Democrats passed in 1964 and the working class knows it. They will never again support the Democratic Party en masse.