Penn State, Goldman Sachs, Enron, University of Virginia, SuperPACS, the Catholic Church–we live in an era of institutional scandal. If you want to know why we are careening from one major institutional scandal to the next, there’s a simple answer: the psychology of power has changed.
To be sure, there’s nothing new about a scandal. The oldest human texts, from the Bible to the Bhagavad Gita, are full of them–and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the very first cave painting was an editorial cartoon exposing a hunting accident.
There’s also nothing new about a powerful institution getting embroiled in a scandal–“scandal” is practically the twin of “monarchy.”
But in the past, there’s been a sense that when powerful institutions fail to police themselves effectively, they have in fact failed. The moral codes they lived up to may have been deficient, but they were at least trying to live up to them. In the modern era, which is filled with more institutions of greater complexity than ever before, we seem to be seeing an increasing inability of powerful institutions (and the people who run them) to follow even the most cursory moral code. Continue reading With Great Power Comes…Amorality?