I thought I was done wittering on about Brian Thompson, the late CEO of United Healthcare, but here we are. His name lingers like the corporate perfume of systemic rot—an enduring testament to how we’ve elevated unethical behaviour into performance art. It got me thinking: what if we brought back a bit of old-school accountability? In Ancient Rome, outlaws lost their citizenship, legal protections, and status as people. That’s right—booted out of polite society. Meanwhile, we’ve done the opposite: we hand out golden parachutes and slap their faces on business magazine covers.
To some, Brian Thompson was a good man – apart from the insider trading, of course. He was successful, a nice guy, funny, and had a good family, and a few million-dollar homes. What else could you ask for? But his success came in the way of blood money. It seems we need fewer people who think like this, not more.
Then I recalled The Purge franchise. And sure, The Purge is a dystopian fantasy, but let’s up the stakes. Picture this: bounties on corporate villains. Not literal carnage, of course—let’s leave that for the big screen—but the return of real consequences. Instead of allowing their PR teams to smooth it all over with buzzwords and philanthropy crumbs, what if we made it socially unacceptable to be a snake in a suit? What if moral suasion—the lost art of persuading someone to do right because it’s, you know, right—actually came back into fashion?
Nietzsche nailed it ages ago. We’ve got two moral codes: one for people and one for money. And guess which one wins every time? All it takes is enough cash and the right rhetoric, and suddenly, everyone forgets who’s really getting fleeced. This is the banality of evil in its purest form: not grand acts of villainy but a shrugging normalisation of corruption. We don’t even consider it corruption. We see it as business as usual. We support and work for these businesses.
The tragedy is that we’ve become so desensitised to it that we are adept at ignoring the stench of moral failure that even calling it out feels quaint. But it’s not hopeless. Some of us still notice. Some of us still care. The real question is, how long can we keep tolerating this farce before we remember that morality isn’t just for the powerless?
Meantime, I just imagine these grubbers being stripped of power and protection, running scared from the likes of Luigi Mangioni.
Philosophics 