Devil’s Advocate

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Don’t Look Up

The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet economically successful species, that continues on after a large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?

For a species to have reached such plenty economically as ordinary people could live better than medieval kings had in Europe and yet be so petty and reckless, essentially squandering what the species had built up, with indifference even to an upcoming cataclysmic event, is what the astronomer-protagonist in the film is left marveling at just before his life, along with those of friends and family sitting around his dinner table, is instantly ended. “We really tried,” he says. I suspect that climate-activists may be saying the same thing regarding the abject refusal of enough of our species and its power-brokers to take combatting carbon-emissions seriously enough.

“Most social life seems a conspiracy to discourage us from thinking” about “what, if anything, can we do about death—now, while we are still alive?”[1] Even so, “there is a rare type [of person] for whom death is present every moment, putting his grim question mark to every aspect of life, and that person cannot rest without some answers.”[2] So it is that in the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa beseeches Yama, the king of death, to answer his burning question on whether there is an afterlife. “When a person dies, there arises this doubt: ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does not,’ say others. I want you to teach me the truth. This is my third” wish.[3] Although the answer is beyond the reach of human cognition and perception, Yama reveals that the essence of a person, one’s essential self, or atman, survives the death of the body. Nachiketa’s undaunted urge to know the truth anyway points back to how much thoughts of death are part of life. That Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is based on the assumption that the instinct for self-preservation is primary in human beings is yet another indication of how important it is to us to put off our own death for as long as possible.

So it is a “red flag” in the film, an indictment on human nature, that so very few people are thinking about the prospect of their own death even though the two scientists and then even the U.S. president have announced on television that a comet is hurling through space, heading directly at Earth in what is known as an extinction event. Initially, two television hosts dismiss the two astronomers who had calculated that the comet would hit Earth and be of such magnitude that our species would go extinct; those journalists are more interested in the romantic life of a young singer. Not even the U.S. President, or her chief of staff, are much interested, at least until after the midterms, for their party could lose control of both chambers of Congress. It is only when the political calculation changes that the White House decides to make a public announcement. This prudence is short-lived, however, as the president calls for the space shuttle to abort its mission to bomb the comet into a new trajectory that would miss the planet. An Elon-Musk-type, new-age CEO of a cell-phone company has so much influence on the president, no doubt from having made donations to her campaign, that she heeds his direction to abort the in-progress space-shuttle mission to bomb the comet to divert it from hitting Earth, and instead send risky, untested drilling machines to land on the comet in order to blow it into pieces, which would then presumably fall harmlessly to the Pacific Ocean to be harvested by the U.S. navy so tech companies using computer chips could profit wildly. The CEO is a businessman, even though he angrily rebuffs the astronomy professor for pointing out, “You are a businessman,” who thus has absolutely no formal education in astrophysics and spacecraft technology upon which to make the judgment to abort the mission that would probably have diverted the comet. Instead, his idea is to send untested drillers to land on the comet to dig holes in which to place bombs so the comet would blow up into profitable chunks. The astronomy professor is correct when he calls out the cell-phone techie, but the president sides with the latter nonetheless.

Regarding just how pathetic the president, her immature chief of staff, and the techie businessman are, at the end of the movie, the professor turns down the president’s offer to join her, the businessman and other elite personalities on a spacecraft that returns to Earth when it is again habitable. You enjoy your (obnoxious) chief of staff; I’m all set here, he tells the finally contrite president by phone. Faced with an imminent extinction event, the level-headed astronomer makes the judgment that it is better to die with friends and family then go on living with superficial comet-deniers for whom already having a lot of power and wealth, respectively, is not enough, and other people are to be used in line with power-aggrandizement and higher profits.

Science fiction is an excellent genre for bringing up contemporary controversies without setting off alarm-bells and thus having one’s message blocked by the opposition. The allusions to President Trump and Hilary Clinton, and the tech titan Elon Musk are hardly subtle. That the film was released in 2021 means that the relationship between the president and the techie CEO are not based on the later relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk. Instead, the president character is, I submit, based on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The president in the film is engaged in “comet-denial” as a political slogan similar to how Trump was engaged in climate-change-denial during his first term, is a woman like Hilary Clinton in subsuming everything, even the destruction of the species, under political calculation, and easily forgetting to save her chief of staff in the end, perhaps as the Clintons left Brent Forster in their wake before Bill Clinton was president. The political-calculating, selfish president in the film is herself an indictment on American democracy, for presumably she was elected. At a certain point in the film, people need only look up to see the comet for themselves to realize that the U.S. president was lying. The comet in the movie, like climate change in our world, is real, and it is the political and economic elite that in both the film and real life drop the ball, even though the respective stakes are both huge. Of course, in both cases, the American people are to blame too.

It is strange, in watching the movie, how indifferent people generally are to even the possibility that they could die in a bit over six months. Even after Ivy League experts ironically favored by the White House confirm the calculations of the astronomy professor, the president decides to play political games rather than take the first possible opportunity to divert the comet. Then she decides to do the bidding of her techie billionaire donor and “turn lemons into lemonade” by recklessly (in terms of rocket technology) helping him to profit from the comet once it has been pulverized and felled to the ground. Lemonade cannot be made if the lemons are handled recklessly rather than rendered usable. Just before dies, the astronomy professor remarks on the species to his friends and family, “We had everything.” The implication is: and yet we blew it, because some powerful people in business and government wanted more. Even though the techie billionaire had developed a very advanced and financially lucrative cell phone, it is as if that man perceived himself as not having enough, and thus as needing more.

The desire for more is a good definition of greed. Even given declining marginal utility, there seems to be no base limit of wealth that is enough in terms of a person not risking even everything to profit more.  A rational person might realize that pushing the comet out of the way of Earth should be priority number 1, and that NASA and other space agencies around the world should be entrusted with that task, or else all current wealth could be lost, as you can’t spend it when you’re dead. It is as some powerful people in the business and political American elites dismissed even the 99.97% chance that the comet would smack into the Earth because greed and power-aggrandizement are instinctual urges that lie by distorting both cognition and perception. We “modern” humans may be so used to being so narrowly self-interested in accumulating money and power that we regard the indifference shown in the film to a catastrophic event to be surreal or even as too incredulous to even be believed in a film!

Even though the movie ramps up the explosive and sudden climax to keep viewers titillated in movie theatres, the same dynamic of indifference and denial applies as our species stews unabatedly in a hotter and hotter climate that one day may be very difficult or even impossible for our species to continue to live on Earth. This prospect having become realistic when the film was made, and definitely in June, 2025, when both parts of the E.U. and U.S. suffered from long heat-waves, should be enough to make resisting coal and other business interests and their captured politicians by making climate a high political and economic priority, but alas, too many people are like the people in the movie, who are taken in by the comet-deniers and profiteers, as if the masses of people were consisting of Nietzsche’s herd animals that are oblivious as they are being taken to the slaughter house. Presuming that we could just move to Mars or the Moon, and that we could even profit by doing so is the sort of thinking that does not work out in the movie, so the lesson is that it is reckless for us to deny climate-change and postpone cuts in fossil-fuel emissions under the assumption that we will be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat just in time when the time comes to pay the bill as species. To be sure, whereas the comet hitting Earth is a sudden event, the baleful effects of climate-change are gradual, yet accumulating, and thus human nature is less well-equipped to take immediate action rather than putting it off. Even so, the denial for partisan advantage and the proclivity of managers in companies to compartmentalize at the expense even potentially of the survival of the species even within a few generations are the same. Perhaps Nietzsche was correct in claiming that ideas are really instinctual urges, and reasoning is the tussling of contending urges—the most powerful of which reaches consciousness. Rather than being a check on passions, reason is itself a manifestation of instincts. The lesson of the film is that there is no guarantee that the instinctual urge that dominates others is in line with self-preservation and even the medium-term (and even short-term) survival of the species.

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1. Introduction to Katha Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).
2. Ibid.
3. Katha Upanishad, 1.1.20, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).

Conclave

In the film, The Godfather, Part III (1990),  Cardinal Lamberto laments that Christianity, like water surrounding a stone that is in a water fountain, has not seeped into European culture even after centuries of being in Europe.  Watching the movie, Conclave (2024), a person could say the same thing about the Roman Catholic Church, though the ending does provide some hope that internecine fighting and pettiness for power, even aside from the sexual-abuse epidemic by clergy, need not win the day.

Concerning the dead pope, we are told at the beginning of the movie that he never had any doubts about God; what he had lost faith in was the Church. Through the movie, the reason is obvious. At one point, the new Cardinal Benitez from Kabul, Afghanistan aptly characterizes his fellow cardinals as “small petty men” concerned with power. Even thusly characterized, the cardinals elect Cardinal Benitez as pope, and it is only fitting that he chooses the name, Innocent. It is in the innocence of a person who has no ambition to be pope and is genuinely surprised to be elected that the Church has hope.

The outcome of the election is subtly anticipated early on by the notably unique sincerity in the blessing of the food that Cardinal Benitez gives at the beginning of the conclave, and is implicitly guaranteed by the rebuttal that he later makes in front of the other cardinals to Cardinal Tedesco’s claim that the Church is at war with Muslims. After the second bomb, Tedesco declares, “We need a leader who fights these animals,” who are the Muslims in Europe. Cardinal Benitz disagrees: Inside each of us is what we are fighting. This is exactly what Mary Magdalene tells Peter and the other disciples in the upper room after the resurrection in the film, Mary Magdalene (2018); rather than waiting for Jesus to come on clouds to vanquish the evil Roman soldiers, the change starts within, “in the transformation of our own hearts.” Accordingly, the kingdom of God is already here even as it is not yet—pending us vanquishing the enemy within, which is done in part by being compassionate to people who are suffering.

In the conclave, “the men who are dangerous are the men who do want it.”  Cardinal Bellini says he doesn’t want it, but he does. He has progressive views (e.g., more of a role for women in the Curia), which he refuses to hide in his campaign, and this strategy makes him appear to have integrity, but he doesn’t. Even though he is a Christian, and even a cleric, he angerly rebukes Cardinal Lawrence’s claim, “This is a conclave, not a war,” by saying of Cardinal Tedesco and the conservatism which that cardinal represents, “This is a war!” This is the first of two mentions of being at war—Tedesco’s war with Muslims being the second.

Even Cardinal Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, who laudably seeks the truth concerning Cardinal Tremblay and even Cardinal Benitez, is a partisan. The homily that he gives on the first day of the conclave subtly favors the progressive platform of Cardinal Bellini, whom Lawrence was still supporting to become pope. Cardinal Lawrence lauds the Church’s diversity in being comprised of people in different countries, whereas Cardinal Tedesco wants an Italian pope. “Certainty is great enemy of unity,” Lawrence tells his brothers. “Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. . . . Faith walks hand and hand with doubt. Otherwise, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.” This message is in line with Cardinal Bellini’s liberal platform because the presumption of certainly saturates Cardinal Tedesco’s ideology. As the Cardinals sitting at tables at the first dinner, Cardinal Tedesco observes that the tables are “divided by language.” He suggests to Lawrence that the next pope be Italian so it is not Cardinal Adeyeme, a black African. Cardinal Lawrence is rightly disgusted and leaves the table. Lawrence even prays with Adeyine as he cries, and puts his hand on Adeyine’s hands even though Lawrence knows that Adeyine had impregnated a teenage woman when he was 30.

Furthermore, at some point in his search for the truth concerning whether the dead pope had fired Cardinal Tremblay, Cardinal Lawrence tells a bishop, “No more secrets; no more investigations; let God’s will be done.” That Lawrence himself later investigates by entering the sealed-off papal apartment is justified by what he uncovers not only concerning the dead pope, but also Cardinal Tremblay. Finally, Lawrence is justified in keeping Cardinal Benitez’s medical secret after that Cardinal's election. Even though Benitez’s rather unique medical situation technically violates church law, Lawrence earlier said to Cardinal Bellini, “I thought we were here to serve God, not the Curia.” 

As truth-oriented as Cardinal Lawrence is, faith without love is for naught in Christian terms. In this regard, Cardinal Benitez steals the show; he is the true protagonist in the end. Just as Mary Magdalene’s rebuttal to Peter on the nature of the kingdom of God gives the film, Mary Magdalene, so much theological value for audiences, it is Cardinal Benitez’s rebuttal to Cardinal Tedesco that the Church is at war with Islam that not only gets that cardinal elected, but also provides the theological value, and thus hope, of Conclave. Take on the enemy within—one’s own hatred of Muslims—rather than fight them, Benitez tells his brothers. He could have gone further by preaching to the petty, power-seeking men: feel and exercise kindness and compassion to Muslims; go out of your way to serve them, especially those who dislike you, for something more is involved spiritually than the much easier, "love thy neighbor as thyself." Then you will find that you have conquered the enemy within and entered the kingdom of God.

Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding.

The prosecutor, Tad Lawson, having liberated death camps, rebuffs the General Matt Merrin’s pressure, and the four defendants get life sentences.  Whether Merrin’s claim that the U.S. needs the support of the German people in the Cold War is valid or not, pressuring a prosecutor is clearly depicted as unethical and so Lawson comes off as virtuous in resisting the exogenous pressure even though he is in the American military. It is certainly ironic that the victor army would push for lighter sentences for the vanquished; typically the question is whether a trial by the victors can be fair. Israel’s kidnapping and subsequent trial of Eichmann brought this question to the forefront. A trial in Germany would have also brought up this question. Britain would have been a good choice that would have avoided the conflict of interest.  In the film, Lawson successfully resists exploiting a conflict of interest by deciding not to curry favor with the general by urging the judges to go light in sentencing the defendants.

To be sure, chief judge Haywood has an opportunity to give a light sentence to one of the defendants. Ernst Janning, an expert jurist before the NAZI period and the Minister of Justice under Hitler, is the only one of the defendants who should have known better than knowingly convict innocent people, including Irene Hoffman for having sex with a much-older Jewish man, and sterilizing others, including Rudolph Petersen for being mentally impaired. Janning gives an impassioned speech to the court in which he admits his guilt, and that he should indeed have known better. Haywood holds Janning responsible for the latter’s use of the judicial system to send Jews and Poles to the death camps anyway; the crimes are simply too heinous for justice to be ignored. In the final scene, Haywood tells Janning that he should have known that it would come to such crimes the moment he convicted a person Janning knew was innocent. Using the gutted-out infrastructure of a judiciary to enable the state to engage in mass murder seems to particularly bother the chief judge. That is to say: a jurist who has written juridical books has no excuse in making a mockery of a judiciary.

After the last scene, the film indicates that none of the actual defendants of the American trial of jurists were still in prison as of 1961, when the film was made. Janning is loosely based on Louis Schlegelberger, who was State Secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice. He got a life sentence for conspiracy to perpetuate war crimes and crimes against humanity. He instituted procedures for the persecution of Jews and Poles, and thus played a vital role in the mass extermination. As much as such severe harm deserves harsh justice, he was released just a few years after having been convicted for “health reasons” even though he died in 1970. Similarly, Rudolf Oeschey had his life sentence commuted to 20 years, but he was released in just 8 years. Guenther Joel, chief prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice, got a 10 year sentence but was released in 1951. The same for Ernst Lautz, the Chief Public Prosecutor of the People’s Court. Herbert Klemm, State Secretary in the Ministry, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released after just 10 years. Oswald Rothaug, a senior public prosecutor in the People’s Court and Chief Justice of the Special Court, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released in just 9 years. Justice was clearly not served, and the film acknowledges this frailty of justice “in the real world.” The implications are that none of the fictional defendants would actually serve a life sentence, and the American military, which had tried and failed to get its way in the sentencing, ultimately gets its way. Any relief from Lawson resisting the pressure to urge light sentences such that justice wins the day is short-lived as the viewers read the film’s caveat at the end that in the end, all of the actual defendants of the jurist Nuremberg trial were still in prison as of 1961.

Interestingly, Maximilian Schell, who plays Hans Rolfe, the German defense attorney who applies NAZI thunder in severely questioning Irene Hoffman—such zeal being objected to by Lawson but allowed by the chief judge—beat out Spencer Tracy, who plays the chief judge who comes down on the side of justice (and is fair in ruling on the objections during the trial) and thus resists manipulations by “friendly” former NAZI civilians and the American military and a U.S. Senator, to get the Best Actor Oscar in 1961. Spencer Tracy is so mild-mannered throughout the film that his acting was typical rather than exceptional, whereas Richard Widmark, who plays Lawson, should have been in contention with Schell for the Oscar. Both actors are impassioned and frustrated, hence they both drew on strong emotions in playing their respective roles. Perhaps both should have gotten the award. The world, however, is not so just, as the movie makes clear in the end even if justice momentarily has the upper hand.

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

To Aaron Swartz, the subject of the documentary, The Internet’s Own Boy (2014), the major concern in his day regarding the internet was not the ability of a person to create a blog or use social media; rather, the problem was in the trend of the power of the gate-keepers, who tell you were on the internet you want to go, concentrating. In other words, the issue concerned what commands our attention. More specifically, who gets access to the ways people find things on the internet. “Now everyone has a license to speak; it’s a question of who gets heard,” he said.  Although he was a computer wiz, he also had political aspirations; both of which were on display as he lobbied against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was introduced in Congress in October of 2011. Unfortunately, the combination of his computer and political skills got the attention of the FBI, which engaged in a relentless pursuit of him until, under the pressure, he committed suicide at the age of 26. His short life was one of idealism that should not have been squashed by an unstoppable criminal-justice system, especially when influenced by political pressure from corporations and politicians. Lest the overzealousness of law enforcement obscure a vision of Aaron’s idealism, it can be viewed as public access being restored to the public domain in terms of the internet.

Tim Lee, the founder of the internet who notably did not cash out but rather kept the web open, influenced Aaron. Although he bristled at the constraints in working at an internet company, he was also not primarily motivated by money. Instead, he was motivated by fairness as it applies to the public good. Whereas high-tech firms are oriented to their own private good, the public good implies public access—something about which Arron felt strongly. In other words, he detested the privatization of the public internet by private gate-keepers. “The public domain should be free to all, but it is often locked up” by corporations, said Brewster Kahle of The Internet Archive. Aaron’s motivation and activity hinged on the question of how public access could be brought to the public domain. This was “one of the things that got him in so much trouble,” said Kahle.

Pacer, a company that made about $120 million a year charging for access to the public records of courts, caught Aaron’s attention. By law, the courts could charge only what is necessary to run Pacer. As that company was interested in charging “customers” much more, hence narrowing the public’s access, Aaron downloaded 20 million pages of court documents. This was not illegal, and yet the FBI began staking out his parents’ house. Once able to analyze the documents, he discovered “massive privacy violations.” Yet is was the restricted public access, caused by wealth disparity, that really caught his attention. As Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media asked rhetorically in the film, “The law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?” Put another way, the privatization of the public domain can be viewed as the onslaught of plutocracy, the rule by wealth, over democracy.

Besides access to common law, knowledge is vital to a republic. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson agreed on this point. Aaron looked at the gatekeepers of academic articles—private companies like Jstor—which were charging substantial fees for public access (whereas scholars working for universities could access the articles for free). Such gatekeepers can be distinguished from the journals/publishers of the articles. Although a journal rightfully charges for a copy, if a public library (or government-sponsored university) has purchased one, shouldn’t the public have access to the issue? Should libraries have to pay substantial fees to the gatekeepers?

At MIT, Aaron downloaded articles on Jstor. It is not clear what he would have done with them. He had downloaded databases simply to analyze their content rather than make it public. MIT found his computer in a computer closet and gathered evidence to build a case. At the time, he was working at Harvard. If he didn’t have a status at MIT and thus had to hack into the system, MIT had a case. After all, people should not be allowed to unilaterally plug their laptops directly into computer systems. Even so, that police assaulted him on his way home and that U.S. Secret Service, which under the Patriot’s Act, can investigate “schemes using new technology,” took over smacks as going too far, especially if the police were MIT’s own. This would suggest too much power having been given to the university administration whether by its board or the government of Massachusetts. Having its own police power, a university administration can find itself charged with the taint of abuse of power sans accountability. After all, a university is more like a business than a government, hence democratic safeguards are not necessarily in place.

Looking at Aaron’s downloading itself, Carmen Ortesz of Massachusetts’ district attorney’s office says in the film, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data, or dollars.” Aaron’s attorney retorts, He wasn’t stealing; he wasn’t selling what he got or giving it away.” When he had been a student at Stanford, Aaron had downloaded the Westlaw database to find relationships between sponsoring organizations and favorable research results. He didn’t release the documents. So the criminal prosecution of Aaron for downloading Jstor articles was as a commercial violation yet no evidence of motive existed; it could not be assumed that he would sell or otherwise make the articles available to the public. The problem was that he had put his name to a blog post, “Gorilla Manifesto,” in which open access is advocated.

For his part, Aaron points out that sharing knowledge with friends is not stealing; rather, doing so is a moral imperative because corporations act as gatekeepers to make money—essentially clipping away at the public domain. This is none other than “theft of public culture,” he says in the film. It is interesting the police felt the need to assault him and yet the thefts by the powerful gatekeepers were somehow legal. He told his girlfriend, “I’ve been arrested for downloading too many academic journals,” as if acquiring knowledge were a crime worthy of the perpetrator being held in solitary confinement as he was. Even Jstor must have viewed the criminal justice system as going too far, for the company dropped the case, saying it had been the government’s decision to prosecute. In fact, Stephen Jeymann, the politically-aspiring assistant district attorney of Massachusetts who interestingly kept the case for himself, told Aaron that he still could face 35 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million. This raises the ethical question of whether an individual should be made to suffer inordinately to serve as a deterrent.

If the public good is the reason why, then what then of the for-profit companies that were essentially privatizing parts of the public domain? MIT, which had moral authority, was mute when the defense asked for assistance. The university characterized this stance as neutral, but Aaron’s lawyer said it was actually pro-prosecutor.

In the film, David Sirota points to the problem of selective deterrence from political ideology. He points out that the Obama administration did not prosecute the financial institutions and individuals for crimes that led to the financial crisis of 2008, yet while devoting resources to prosecuting selective deterrents, including Aaron’s case. It is no coincidence, Sirota claims, that Obama left office as a billionaire, which he had not been when he was a legislator in Illinois’ government and law instructor at the University of Chicago. I would add that Goldman Sachs’ $1 million contribution to Obama’s ’08 presidential campaign is also relevant. Clearly, Obama’s “Wall Street Government” was doing the bidding of the powerful rather than standing up for public access of knowledge.

Aaron hit his stride in spite of his pending trial when he put his computer skills to use in lobbying against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which initially had many co-sponsors in the U.S. Senate. Specifically, he wrote software making it easier for people to contact Congress. The bill was ostensibly against online piracy of music and movies, but, according to Aaron, the legislation was really about the freedom to connect. A company could cut off a website from the internet or force Google to cut links to the site; a claim of copyright infringement, without due process (i.e., a trial), would be all that would be necessary. In the film, U.S. Senator Wyden of Oregon says the bill poses a threat to freedom of speech and civil liberties. “It makes no sense to destroy the architecture of the internet to combat piracy,” he points out. In a particularly revealing “macro” comment, the senator points to the power of private powers in the American democratic system. “Typically, the legislative fights in Washington are fights between different sets of corporate moneyed interests—all duking it out to pass legislation. The fights that are the closest are when you have one set of corporate interests against another set of corporate interests and they are generally financially matched in campaign contributions and lobbying. The ones that aren’t even fights typically are those where all the money is on one side—all the corporations are on one side—and millions of people are on the other.” In other words, under the rubric of popular sovereignty (i.e., representatives representing their respective constituents as a group), the interests of private concentrations of wealth (i.e., corporations) essentially own the Congress and the White House.

In this case, constituents spoke up and their representatives in Congress noticed. Suddenly all but a few of the myriad co-sponsors (sponsored in turn by powerful private interests) dropped their support. People boycotted GoDaddy for its pro-SOPA support. Obama reversed his support, which interestingly suggests that he had been siding with the corporate interests rather than the People even though he was purportedly for “real change,” including greater democracy. Obama was going after Arron’s community, including not only hackers, but also democracy activists because they are able to make trouble for those who are already in power, corporate and governmentally. Obama’s administration went after Aaron in order to scare as many in his community as possible so they would not make trouble. Secrecy serves those who are already in power. Aaron was a threat because he was working toward open access to the public square even though reasonable people can disagree as to what rightly goes in there. Interestingly, Aaron had warned of the inordinate NSA spying.

SOPA didn’t pass. In fact, it was withdrawn. Aaron’s community won. Interestingly, the federal government charged Aaron with nine additional counts. Eleven of the thirteen total charges were for violating the terms of service of sites. Orin Kerr, a  lawyer, says in the film that such a type of indictment is unfair. Bryan Stevenson of Equal Right Initiative laments the excessiveness that had taken hold in the American criminal-justice system such that by Aaron’s day, “Anything we are angry about instinctively triggers a criminal justice intervention.” Even looking at a security guard the wrong way can trigger his “need” to call the local police, who have come to be prone to “overkill” in over-estimating degrees of threat. The impulse to “observe,” intimidate, threaten, indict, and prosecute has come to be triggered by people who are merely mad at something. The impulse, in other words, had become too sensitive even by Aaron’s time. Unfortunately, countervailing accountability on the occupants of that system has been hard to come by. The People en masse can pressure governments to contain even the passive aggression inflicted on citizens—particularly those who object. Though this is unlikely, considering how much energy it takes to stimulate a large number of people such that their elected representatives take notice. With regard to the People squeezing in where the corporate-governmental axis is dominant (hegemonic), the corporate lobbyists and the beneficiaries of corporate campaign contributions depend on the illusion of public accountability even as publicly they pay homage to the strong American democracy for and by the People. 

The Big Short and Concussion: A System on Sterroids

Watched one after the other or, more realistically, a day or two apart, "The Big Short" and "Concussion" provide an excellent picture of American business and society. As much as the revelations in the films are shocking, I'm more shocked that the American people just take things as they are. "Oh, that's just the way things go in the world," they might say as if this serves as a defense. In other words, we will doubtless get "same old, same old," at the ballot box in November. The disjunction between people's reaction to the substance of the films and the way the people vote is nothing short of astonishing to me. How can people be so shocked at Wall Street and the NFL, and yet continue to vote for the same epigones? We continue to use the same big banks and watch football as if the films were somehow really fictional. I suppose we get what we deserve. 

The key to understanding both films is actually made transparent in another film of the same sort. If you see "Spotlight," pay attention to the chief editor's point that the system, including all the parts..meaning people doing their jobs...was at fault...not just Cardinal Law. Hence, in "The Big Short" and "Concussion," we can reasonably extend the culprits even to the business ethics scholars who said nothing at the societal level about the rating agencies and the conflicts of interests in the big banks, as well as about the NFL. When you have a system wherein everyone is just doing his or her job, and yet is an accomplice, assigning blame to a particular part becomes artificial. It is the system itself--of business, government, and society--that is deeply flawed and thus in need of fundamental change. 

Monsignor

Monsignor, a film made in 1982—in the midst of a very pro-business administration in Washington, D.C.—depicts a Vatican steeped in matters of finance centering around a priest whose degree in finance makes him a prime candidate to be groomed for the Curia. That cleric, Father John Flaherty, helps the Vatican operating budget during World War II by involving the Holy See in the black market through a mafia. In the meantime, he sleeps with a woman who is preparing to be a nun and subsequently keeps from her the matter of his religious vocation. The twist is not that Flaherty is a deeply flawed priest, or that the Vatican he serves is vulnerable to corruption inside, but that those clerics who mercilessly go after him are devoid of the sort of compassion that their savior preaches.

The pope, exquisitely played by Leonardo Cimino, demonstrates how upper-echelon leadership can transcend the managerial foci that so preoccupy partisans. Put another way, the social distance that tends to come with organizational figure-heads can give “the big picture” characteristic of “having perspective” some role in seeing to it that narrow organizational politics do not have the last say even in terms of what the criteria are to be. I suspect that too many CEOs go with the advice from their subordinates, and thus unwittingly buy into the managerial criteria charged with garden-variety one-upmanship. In such cases, organizational politics triumphs over what is really important from the standpoint of organizational mission statements.

In the film, the pope presides over the traditionalist cleric’s castigation of Flaherty . The pope later reads of Flaherty’s sordid deeds, and then speaks with the man presumably condemned. Rather than defend himself, Flaherty says, in effect, “guilty as charged!” Rather than take Flaherty’s misconduct as the most telling facet of the case, the pope observes that the traditionalist’s tone was that of jealousy, without any hint of sympathy for his brother in faith. The traditionalist’s utter lack of brotherly love stands out in retrospect to the pope as further from Christ, hence more serious, than Flaherty’s corruption. This prioritizing of values is made known to the viewer with the sight of Flaherty’s mentor, rather than the head traditionalist, as the next pope. In fact, the mentor reinstalls Flaherty in the Vatican after the contrite yet corrupt priest has spent some years in exile at a monastery. The film ends with the two men embracing, with facial expressions revealing true brotherly love—a real contrast from the cold, stern expressions of the traditionalists who had been so confident that the “prosecution” of Flaherty would result in one of their own as pope.

The message presented by the film is therefore that in a religion in which God is love, hardness in place of brotherly love is without any legitimacy whatsoever; it is worse than unethical conduct. This is one way of saying that religion does not reduce to ethics because more important things are involved. This is not to excuse corruption in the Vatican; the hypocrisy alone is repugnant to anyone who takes the clerics in the Curia at their word that they are following Christ in their living out of the Gospel. Even so, going after such hypocrisy without even sympathy for the human nature, which we all share, evokes the Pharisees whom Jesus goes after in the Gospels. A Church run by Pharisees does more than unethical conduct to undercut the faith espoused by Jesus because matters of the heart are more deeply rooted than conduct as far as Jesus’s preaching is concerned. 

Hollywood Bribes China

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, known as F.C.P.A., “forbids American companies from making illegal payments to government officials or others to ease the way for operations in foreign countries.”[1] The practical difficulty facing American companies doing business around the world is that in some cultures bribes are so ubiquitous they are simply a part of doing business.  For American companies to refuse to participate in what is generally expected can be a competitive disadvantage, particularly if substitutes exist and the practice is widespread.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.

1. Edward Wyatt, Michael Cieply, and Brooks Barnes, “S.E.C. Asks if Hollywood Paid Bribes in China,” The New York Times, April 25, 2012.