Thought I'm Wrestling With: Where does the Evil Come From?
Why do so many modern institutions feel designed to wear us down?
For the past few months I’ve been entangled in an ongoing conflict with an insurance company. Without getting into the details, the general theme is that I feel as though I’ve complied with all their (excessive) documentation requests and should be owed money, while they continuously say I need to attach additional information, and file more appeals to make my case compelling.
The saddest part, I know I’m not the only one dealing with this issue. In fact, insurance companies have ‘earned’ the reputation of being devious and exploitive.
Recent headlines of State Farm changing policies while the California forest fires were taking place speak to the sinister practices c-suite individuals will employ to protect profits. Cases of people being denied coverage or services by UnitedHealthCare surfaced in the wake of the CEO’s assassination, illustrating the hoax insurance companies employ. Advertise and promise blanket protection, then quickly renege when the customer actually needs to cash in on the deal.
This phenomenon extends past insurance companies. There are a multitude of systems that function more as self-preservation machines than human-serving institutions. Here’s a list of industries and sectors that are notoriously difficult to navigate or have developed reputations for sinister, exploitative, or self-serving practices:
Big Pharma
Health Care and Hospital Systems
Government Bureaucracies
Student Loan Servicers and For-Profit Colleges
Telecom and Internet Providers
Tech Giants and Social Media Companies
Airline and Travel Companies
Subscription-Based Software and SaaS
I’m sure there’s many more but these are what came to mind.
Just reading this list probably stirs resentment or angst in you. Apologies for digging up an old wound.
But it begs the question: where does the evil come from? Are these industries all run by villains twirling their mustaches? Or is it something more ordinary—incentives, apathy, culture, silence? Let’s look at the facts at hand.
Incentives shape behavior. As much as we would wish a utopian, selfless society existed, reality will never conform. Charlie Munger’s famous quote is, “Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome.”
The economic foundations which these companies and industries were built on are inherently contradictory to the product/service they provide.
For example, YouTube’s algorithm is specifically designed to slowly pull you to the extremes of content. Not give you a 5 min relaxation break to then go about your day.
Have you ever clicked on a video, then notice an hour has gone by and you’re now chasing a conspiracy theory of whether rabbits were scientifically altered at a point in time to produce kangaroos?
That’s extreme, but there’s a mountain of research showing how social apps are designed in ways that actively undermine the outcomes they claim to serve.
Take Hinge. “The dating app that is meant to be deleted.” Well if you delete it too quickly Hinge would lose its customers. Dating algorithms aren’t easy, and this doesn’t even touch on the science of compatibility vs. similarity when it comes to relationships. But I would be hard-pressed to bet against the odds that Hinge/Bumble/Tinder/etc could perform backend changes to more successfully deliver their ‘proposed’ mission statement to customers.
But they are not interested in helping you find a relationship. They are interested in your wallet, and stringing a dopamine carrot in front of your face to get you to pay. If you happen to find your relationship, you’re probably the outlier, not the norm. That customer churn rate is factored into their business model, yet I’m sure a part of them wishes you return for business in the future.
When talking about these industries I listed out above, there is this general theme of referring to them as an individual conscious being. Evil being, but nonetheless an individual with set of characteristics you diabolically oppose. When you talk to your friends, you say “I just hate these travel companies.” As if Delta, American, Spirit, and SouthWest are siblings of the same household, raised under parents with perverse ethics and morals.
But my recent experience with this insurance company has offered me a perspective or reality I never really considered. Human beings, just like you and me, work at these places. This is a subjective take, but I believe most humans have a general conscience to them that leans more favorably towards the goodness vs. the evil end of the spectrum.
C.S. Lewis writes about this in Mere Christianity when talking about the Moral Law and the Law of Human Behavior.
If something happens you might have two impulses. One to help others and one to seek safety for yourself. But then a third thing appears which says you ought to suppress the impulse to run away and follow the impulse to help. The thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot self be either of them.
The law of human nature is not simply a statement about how we should like mankind to behave for our own convenience, for the behavior we call bad or unfair is not exactly the same as the behavior we find inconvenient and may even be the opposite. (An enemy traitor may be someone who helps us, but we don’t necessarily see them as a good person. Vice versa)
These are just excerpts that shed light on a very real human phenomenon many of us have felt, but probably were never able to fully articulate. We have hearts. We have conscience. The display of their calibration is not always ideal, but we know they are there.
So, with that in mind, I sit here and think. “Does every employee at this insurance company wake up in the morning with the sole goal of making my life a living hell?” The answer is most likely no. They are humans, that should I meet them in any other circumstance, I might even be friends with. I might have a laugh at the bar with them. I might pick their kids up from practice on a carpool schedule.
Which then brings me back to the underlying issue. If humans are empathetic, how do corporations become these Machiavellian institutions—brilliantly engineered to frustrate users into submission. Because on the outside, we would think most of humanity would have a true sense of disgust when hearing/reading/onboarding to the insidious business model the company has. Or if their manager says, “Hey Niki, if we deny every claim that comes in today, regardless of its merit, I’ll give you a $5k bonus.” Sure it’s enticing, but the conscience in Niki would most likely have a hard time digesting that method of business. (I get economic incentives are a touchy and tricky subject. These are generalizations—maybe to a fault. Humans will go to extreme ends to survive, I get that).
It's tempting to imagine a smoky boardroom where executives hatch villainous plans. To paint every employee as some evil conformist that never speaks up against authority. As a Nazi regime reborn in disguise.
But I think the truth is scarier: there’s no one person orchestrating this. No puppet master. Just a thousand small compromises that calcify into corporate norms.
Eliyahu Goldratt says, “The goal of business is to make money.”
In the strategy marketing world, we were always presented with an initial brief that listed ‘Business Goal’, then right below it, ‘Consumer Goal,’ for the next year. Why, because as strategist we needed to find the thread that connected the two. Fundamentally they have to be different or it’s not a business. Someone needs to produce value, and the other party has to want that value.
Problems erupt when the thread between the two becomes increasingly distorted, resembling nothing but a black box. And it’s so tempting to blame that on c-suite leadership, high level managers, or boardroom stakeholders. Though they have a weighted say at the table, I don’t think they are the sole perpetuators of shady practices.
In large corporations, it’s easy for an individual employee to feel removed from the final delivery, or worse, inconsequential to it. But the truth is that they are still a part of the sausage making. Their individual choices and incentive structures compound and directly contribute to the overall functionality of the institution.
The greatest trick these institutions probably pull is divorcing moral accountability from their outcomes. Not through overt cruelty — but through a slow erosion of responsibility, distributed across a thousand rationalizations.
So while you don’t think the decisions you make at a grassroots level impact the bottom line they do. In a similar manner, just think of our voting practice. Individually our votes hardly matter, but it takes the collective nation to reach an outcome.
(Though, I must throw this quote in for additional head scratching. Mark Twain famously said, “If voting made a difference, they wouldn't let us do it.”)
My dad always says, “People vote with their wallets. As much as they want to support what’s noble, their individual bottom line is always top of mind.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe it really is just individual incentives, trying to take care of themselves and their family, that shape the reality of these big corporations. What initially seemed like a reasonable business model gets pressure tested to the limits and out emerges a beast that was never a part of our wildest imaginations.
But I could also see a hesitancy in humans to not be confrontational. A somewhat devious manager could devise a strategy that is beneficial to the company, and since no one wants to speak out against a group, they hold their hesitations to themselves.
This is known as Pluralistic Ignorance/Abilene Paradox: when a group collectively decides on a course of action that none of the individuals actually want, simply because they believe everyone else wants it. Or a situation where individuals privately reject a norm or idea, but assume others accept it, so they go along with it — reinforcing the very thing they disagree with.
Take this example: A marketing firm is brainstorming ideas for an upcoming campaign. Someone proposes a transgender awareness initiative tied to the product. While no one in the room is transphobic, one analyst believes — based on data and market trends — that the campaign may be a statistically risky business move. However, fearing they'll be labeled a bigot for voicing that concern, they stay silent. Unbeknownst to them, many others in the room share the same hesitation — but they, too, keep quiet for the same reason. The result? The campaign moves forward, despite widespread private doubt, all because no one was willing to speak up first.
The way this shows up in the managerial example is, the plan might very well help each person on that team make more money. Knowing that people are incentivized by their own wallet, then leads people to believe they are also in favor of the plan since it promises increased profits. Thus, no one speaks up to confront the shadiness or the strategy or the harmful human element they are imposing on the customer.
Maybe it’s a combination of all the above. Maybe I’m missing critical human behavior elements that a sociologist could fill the gaps in with.
All I know is that in our current capitalist society has produced torment weapons that masquerade as human-serving institutions. We clearly see emergent evil – systems that produce harm without individual malice. You, me, and our neighbors all suffer the consequences of it, yet never seem to be able to correct their behavior. Why is that?
Maybe there really is an incredibly intelligent select group at the top, pulling the strings of the world as we know it, and we are victims of their cynical concoctions.
Maybe the Illuminati is real.
Maybe Epstein really did kill himself.
Maybe we are just too dumb to connect the dots.