The Royal Bot
You may not have noticed it, but the world has changed. As you know, I teach an ethics course, so I think about the issue of what are the fundamental causes of ethical dilemmas. I started my list with the overwhelming cause of all ethical stuff, which is filthy lucre, money, do-re-me. You know that I’ve expanded the list well beyond just that, but let’s take a moment to consider money as the root of all the evil. The older I get and the more I see of the world, it’s a place that is driven far too much by money. I spent 45 years on Wall Street, so the concept of the dangers of money culture is hardly new. I feel as though I can better understand money culture because I lived amongst it and, indeed, was a part of it for many years. I do feel that in the grand scheme of things, I was far less money focused than many others of my peers, but it would be wrong of me to stand back and point my finger at the culture and say, “What did you do?”
When I started in banking in 1976, it was for several reasons, but none more than the fact that I really wasn’t sure what exactly I was most passionate to do as a career. Banking struck me as a generalist path that would give me the time to sort out what career path would suit me the best. I used to say that I felt I would try banking in New York for a few years until I decided what I really wanted to do and where I really wanted to live. Naturally, everyone knows how that story goes and how 45 years later you wonder why you were in banking in NYC all that time. For me, the reason had less to do with money than you might imagine. Don’t get me wrong, the money was damn good, but the real reason was that banking was going through its most innovative stage of development and the landscape of banking was changing more than it had for hundreds of years. I recall when I went for my first mortgage in 1977 from a local savings bank on Long Island, the middle-aged female loan officer was challenging me on my ability to handle such a large mortgage (it was a $64k house with a $54k mortgage based on a gross combined salary of $29k for my first wife and me). With a bit of defensiveness, I asked if she considered my future earning potential in banking (I was, after all, a newly minted Ivy League MBA!). She put me squarely in my place by saying, “Let’s face it, neither of us has gone into banking for the money, right?”
At the end of 1978 when I got my first bonus of $3,000, I was blown away. None of us had even known that bonuses were a possibility. And that is where it all began for me, as my friend Bob Frank would write about, the winner-take-all economy had arrived on my doorstep. Differentiation via compensation would become a primary driver on Wall Street, even though many of the old timers still didn’t believe it. When the Wall Street Journal reported that several people at Bankers Trust would be getting bonuses of $500,000, the internal joke was that the correct interpretation of that misleading comment was that several people might combine their bonuses to add up to $500,000. And that was just the beginning. I will just mention that the largest bonus I ever gave someone who worked for me was in 2006 when I gave a young Asian female hedge fund manager a bonus of $80 million. And here’s the thing about a money culture, no one I ever gave a multi-million-dollar bonus to ever thought they were being treated fairly. Enough was never enough. That’s also why I hold myself ever so slightly above the fray since I was almost always very appreciative of the bonuses I got (and trust me, they were never into eight figures).
Nevertheless, ethics almost always starts with money and greed. The other root causes on my primary list are power or control and ego or emotion. It’s not hard to come up with examples of how the lust for control or the inability to control lust can create an ethical conundrum. There are endless stories, songs, poems and movies to prove that point. A logical addition to the list is fear. What caused me to add it was the example of the guards at a concentration camp. It would be hard to tag them with money, control or emotion, but easy to see how fear would place them in a struggle to do the right thing. At the end of last semester in my course, in deference to several passionate students, I added justice and sex as potential root causes and said I would road test them this coming semester to see if others agreed that they deserved such exalted importance in the ethical complex.
Tonight we watched the Harry and Meghan Netflix 4-part documentary. I’m not really what you would call a royals watcher, but it would be hard not to have noticed the last year or two of commotion being created in the UK starting with the wedding of Harry and Meghan, the Commonwealth traveling success of the dynamic and paparazzi-attracting duo and culminating with the birth of their first child, Archie. This all seems to have led to a maelstrom of yellow journalism spearheaded by The Daily Mail of London that characterized Meghan as a spoiled and manipulative bitch who was tearing apart the monarchy during a time of great monarchical grief with the deaths of first Prince Philip and then Queen Elizabeth herself. It seemed almost to be a reboot of the Princess Diana story with the popular media both loving and hating her to death. In fact, it seems almost impossible to discern the basis for the attention, much less the bi-modal sensibility about the young mixed-race American minor celebrity. It reminds me of that old trope about why a dog licks himself when the answer is the self-evident, “because he can.” Why do the tabloids do this? Because they can and because the people who dote on the royals are bored.
I recently wrote about an Op/Ed piece that I read that claimed that the right-wing reactionary horror show that we call Trumpism, is based largely on boredom and bitterness. My sense after watching the Harry and Meghan documentary is that boredom may be the best answer as to why Meghan Markel has drawn so much fire. She is biracial and represents a meaningful directional change in the monarchy that looks and feels like the majority of the Commonwealth population that supposedly bow to the Crown. So why does the monarchy and the press seem to want to collude to unseat Meghan’s growing relatability and popularity with the masses? I suppose it could be because they fear an ultimate loss of control (Kingdoms and Dynasties do fall eventually), but that may be the zebra to the horse of the simple greed that a juicy racially-linked royals story could drive.
One aspect of this story that caught my attention was that when Harry and Meghan chose (they would say unwillingly) to exit the royal chamber, the social media machine that so governs our lives these days, went into overdrive with millions of negative tweets that were driven by only 83 Twitter accounts that acted as bots to drive negative sentiment about Meghan. Why? It makes good money for the tabloids to keep this on the front pages.
I watched as H&M drifted from Kensington Palace to Frogmore House to a rented McMansion on Vancouver Island, to the Beverly Hills estate of Tyler Perry and eventually to their own home in Montecito with what looks like Mediterranean charm and a great and direct view of the Pacific. It is hard to imagine how two ex-royals (Duke and Duchess of Sussex) can afford such a lavish lifestyle. This is especially so since they are so very Blanche DuBois-like, “dependent on the kindness of strangers” like Tyler Perry. And then you read that Netflix may have paid them $100 million for the four-parter I watched and suddenly they are just another contestant alongside The Daily Mail vying for the ethical greed award for 2022.