LSO Award

I was at the gym recently, and while on the elliptical, read a short expose about Bernie Madoff in Vanity Fair, which I picked up off the magazine rack by the treadmills. It was written by his longtime personal assistant, who was totally unaware of his behavior until he was arrested.  Reeling from the effects of such a violation of trust, her feelings did a 180 from total dedication to and admiration of Madoff to feelings of disgust and real hate.

We all love to hate Bernie Madoff.  His greed.  His arrogance.  His lies.  How he bilked his best friends out of their riches.  His betrayal of trust, ruthlessly absconding with his clients’ life savings, leaving them destitute while living in the lap of luxury.

Madoff did with money what Hitler did with nationalism.  He created a system that made obscene the very thing his contemporaries valued most.  Hitler’s early appeal to the Germans was his passion for returning to them international status and respect.  Madoff’s success as an investor resulted from the striking returns his clients believed they could receive from his brilliant financial acumen.  Madoff’s madness began manifesting when his zeal for making money broke his moral compass just as Hitler’s did when his lust for power took possession of his soul.

The past couple of years I’ve heard myself say more than once that a person can’t get to midlife without having been betrayed as well as having seriously betrayed someone else.  Betrayal is in all of our shadows.  If each of us examines our conscience, we uncover behavior we prefer to hide not only from others, but most carefully from ourselves.

That’s why we love to hate Bernie Madoff.  He’s a blatant representation of what we hate in ourselves.  Our greed.  Our arrogance.  Our betrayal of trusts. 

As Americans, regardless of what spiritual path we choose, our national god is the all mighty dollar.  However our founding fathers tried to eliminate theocracy from our governing systems, in practice, our history proves that the dollar has ruled not only our economy, but our socio-political landscape through the institution of the corporation since the earliest colonies were established on our shores.

The very structure of the corporation, which legally requires its officers to act with fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, by definition, requires them to betray every other stakeholder in the greater community, if the best course of action for making the most money is in conflict with the community’s best interest.  Those interests may include their health as well as the health of the planet. 

So how is Bernie Madoff our, my, mirror?  We all work for and/or with corporations every day.  Given two simple reasons for business owners to incorporate, among many others, the tax structure and our litigious society, most entrepreneurs understand it is in their best interest to incorporate, even if they have come to hate what some corporations have done to the fiber of American business ethics, not to mention its environment.

However much I may rail against actions by our government to which I morally object, such as acts of terror in the name of freedom as we send more troops to Afghanistan, I realize they are also my acts.  I am an American.  I enjoy all of the advantages of being an American, of having the ability to create a corporation if I want to be self-employed.  Of having the resources to think about investing or not with crooks like Bernie Madoff. 

So how do we deal with this dark shadow?  What is practical and prudent?  Finger pointing is hypocritical.  Instead, I believe we must be open to new ways of thinking.  Of acting.  Of doing business.  There is no one solution to a broken infrastructure as complex as ours, but it is evident we need to begin creating new business models.  As all the systems – financial, political, social - continue to break down, the scandals are constant reminders that we need to be open to creating deep changes in America’s infrastructure.

I believe we live in the greatest time in history, in which we have the ability to choose to change.  Bernie Madoff, like Hitler, reminds us that we all have the potential, and the choice, to do great evil, or great good.   Collectively, we can affect change, and we can do it consciously, or be forced by the tides of change, as we have experienced in the past year. 

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