American Bankers have no shame
The Moral Stage of Wall Street from The New Yorker. Thanks, Ben.
Swiss bankers are not known as paragons of transparency and moral accountability, so it’s a nice surprise to read that the top officials of UBS, the foundering financial institution recently bailed out by the Swiss government, will forgo twenty-seven million dollars in compensation and bonuses. It appears that these Swiss bankers have a faint pulse of shame.
It has not gone remarked upon enough that their American counterparts apparently have none.” The rest of the article…
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1. December 2008 at :
“I did not have sex with that woman,” said the former President of the United States, and he did so, basing his denial upon a legalism as to what sexual relations actually were.
This was an illustration of the Guilt Concept in America. That concept is forever tied with legalisms; you aren’t in the wrong as long as no one can prove that you did something wrong. Thus, our financial wizards haven’t felt that they did anything wrong. This is part because their attorneys, a very suspect moral group have told them that what they did was within the bounds of the law.
Is there anything that can be done to correct this situation. Perhaps!. In a shame driven society a person would feel that the happening of the market collapse took place because of their own individual failings, not because they were guilty of a crime or improper behavior.
Essentially, our financial CEO’s aren’t ashamed or embarrassed because they think that they are not technically guilty and therefore clean with the law. What is really astounding is that they are being bettered by the Swiss, whose behavior about the WWII era accounts of Jews who died in the German Concentration Camps has been less then exemplary.
Of some interest is that when Westerners measure the maturity of societies they tend to laud the guilt driven societies and denigrate the shame based ones. Here we have a case where shame would be more appropriate than guilt.