Sam Bankman-Fried, Moral Monstrosity

Were there any signs? Everybody wants to know? 

Were there any signs that Sam Bankman-Fried would go from billions to nothing overnight? Were there any signs that wunderkind Bankman-Fried,  darling of the moneyed set, had no idea what he was doing? Were there any signs that he could not be trusted? Not because he was running a Ponzi scheme but because he had no understanding of what he was doing?

Cover-boy, darling of the business media, SBF was a vegan with a hyphenated name. He seems never to have had a real haircut and ran around in ratty tee shirts and cargo shorts. Beyond the massive spread he had in the Bahamas, he seems to have little use for the trappings of success. Or better, for the signs of being a responsible adult.

His mother had long argued that personal responsibility was an antiquated notion and that people should replace it with efforts to recover from mistakes. He was a living, breathing embodiment of crackpot parental theories.

You might consider all of that to be a sign of an overgrown manchild? Or else, if you do not know any better, you might take it to be a sign of a modern genius.

In principle, he promoted effective altruism, a theory that told him to give away his money to the less fortunate, the better to show that he was not in it for himself. He was a one-man band for income redistribution. Of course, he did not just give money to great causes; he was a major donor to Democratic politicians. He supported all the major leftist causes. One would be forgiven if one imagined that he was buying what used to be called protection.

Daniel Henninger tries to get a grip on it in a Wall Street Journal column:

As his cryptocurrency company’s value soared into vaporous billions, Mr. Bankman-Fried said he wasn’t in it for the money. He described himself as a proponent of “effective altruism,” or high-return charity, an idea he learned while at MIT from a philosophy graduate student. Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30, said he might keep 1% for himself and give the rest away through his FTX Foundation.

One might suggest, humbly, that someone who says that he is not in it for the money, but for the thrill he gets by giving it away, is only in it for the money.

Besides, what made Democratic politicians such a worthy and needy charitable enterprise. The issue will become-- who decides who receives the SBF largesse? If this is not power trip, one that has people lining up to suck his #@# I have never seen one.

As for holding on to 1%, when your wealth is in the billions, you can do just fine on 1%.

Beyond that, imagine the zealous co-eds who thrill to the SBF lifestyle, who love feeling that they are not wage slaves. After all, if you want to save the world, an especially vapid idea, are you not trying to seduce the pretty young things who hold to the same  beliefs?

How would this look different if SBF decided to invest his money, to help people to expand businesses and to build up America’s industrial capital? How many mooning coeds will buy into the SBF goal, to prevent pandemics and nuclear war? How many would buy into a program about industrial redevelopment?

Once upon a time a preacher called this the vanity of vanity. It is not about doing good or even feeding the hungry. It is more like a public spectacle of superior moral virtue.

But why has this urge to assert public virtue in outsize ways become a mass movement? People who did good used to be humble. Now they won’t get out of our faces.

Henninger calls it moral grandiosity. To say the least:

The purpose of this moral grandiosity isn’t to engage one’s opponents but to marginalize them, to place them beyond the pale of what the new gatekeepers of virtue define as acceptable discourse.

It’s not merely about giving charity to the poor, the destitute and the needy. If your cause is polar bears, you are making a political statement. If your cause is abortion rights you are making a political statement. You are not acting like a religious institution, known for charitable giving, but are trying to promote an agenda. And, given your propensity to altruism, no one has a right to dispute your principles.

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