By Thom Oxford | Fuck The System
Somewhere this week, a decision got made — in a boardroom, a spreadsheet, a private jet’s Wi-Fi — that ended someone’s health insurance, gutted a town’s only employer, priced out a whole generation from owning a home.
Nobody in that room hated the people it landed on. Most of them will never know their names.
That’s not a bug in the story. That’s the story.
We want our villains to want the damage. It’s cleaner that way — gives us someone to point at, something to punish, a moral universe that still makes sense. But most of the harm extreme wealth produces isn’t committed by anyone who wants it. It’s produced by people who’ve simply stopped finding it relevant.
Hannah Arendt spent a career trying to explain this, after watching a bureaucrat send people to their deaths without, by all evidence, feeling much of anything about it. Not hatred. Not sadism. Just a total absence of thought about what was happening on the other end of the paperwork. She called it the banality of evil. The uncomfortable part wasn’t that monsters do monstrous things. It’s that you don’t need a monster. You just need someone who’s stopped looking.
That’s my hypothesis about the extremely wealthy: not that they’re secretly monsters, but that extreme wealth is an environment that manufactures the exact behavioural profile clinicians use to describe sociopathy — lack of empathy, disregard for the welfare of others, exploitation without guilt, absence of remorse. Not because these people were born that way. Because the muscle that would normally stop that profile from forming has nothing left to work against, and atrophies until the behaviour is indistinguishable from the diagnosis, whether or not the diagnosis technically applies.
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Strip empathy down to its mechanics and it’s not some noble innate trait. It’s a radar system.
It’s how you read a room, anticipate a reaction, avoid a fight you can’t afford, keep the peace with people you depend on. Most of us can’t walk away from the consequences of pissing someone off, so we develop the instrument that tells us not to. That instrument gets sharper the more precarious your position is, because precarity is exactly what it evolved to manage.
The extremely wealthy don’t have that problem. Worth a hundred billion dollars, there’s functionally no one whose anger you need to correctly anticipate to stay safe. Lawsuits get settled. Bad press gets managed. Angry customers, laid-off workers, entire towns whose water supply you polluted — none of them have real leverage over your security or comfort.
When the radar has nothing left to detect that actually threatens you, it doesn’t stay on out of principle. It goes quiet — and a person operating without it doesn’t look any different from someone who never had it. Not because they became evil. Because the environment stopped requiring the one organ that would have kept them from acting like it.
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Civic duty is the same logic scaled up — empathy for a whole society instead of the person across the table. A willingness to maintain the shared rules because you need the shared rules to survive.
Democracy, regulation, taxation — all of it exists, in part, as a negotiated peace between people who need each other whether they like it or not.
That peace only feels worth maintaining if you’re still inside the transaction. Once you have enough money to buy your way out of every function the state was providing — safety, infrastructure, a functioning information ecosystem — the rules stop looking like a shared project and start looking like a tax. Not always a literal one, though frequently that too. A tax on your freedom of movement.
Democracy wants to regulate your company. Democracy wants a cut of your fortune to fund a commons you no longer need. From that height, order isn’t a public good you have a stake in. It’s friction.
Nobody running a private equity rollup or automating away a warehouse floor thinks of themselves as indifferent to the people it hurts. They think of themselves as rational. Necessary. Agents of progress.
That word is doing enormous work in how extreme wealth gets to feel good about itself. Creative destruction. Disruption. This is just how markets work. It’s the ideological packaging that turns not-looking into a virtue — rigor, vision, an unsentimental willingness to do what has to be done.
This is what makes structural sociopathy more dangerous than individual malice, not less. A sadist is easy to identify and easy to condemn, and condemning one costs the rest of us nothing. Indifference dressed up as progress doesn’t announce itself as a moral position at all. It just quietly redraws who counts as relevant to the calculation.
And wealth doesn’t just remove the incentive to notice who’s affected. It engineers the distance that keeps you from ever being in the room where you’d have to. Layers of subcontractors, management, lawyers, algorithms, PR — all of it sits between every decision and the face it lands on. You could be a genuinely empathetic person and still never encounter the moment that would activate it, because the entire apparatus around extreme wealth is built to keep you out of that room.
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This is where I expect pushback, so let me get ahead of it. Mega-philanthropy doesn’t disprove any of this. It’s the same pattern wearing a nicer coat.
Look at the mechanics. A donor-advised fund lets you take the tax deduction the instant you hand the money over, with no requirement you ever actually distribute it — it can sit invested indefinitely. Private foundations only have to pay out 5% a year, meaning most “philanthropic” wealth just keeps compounding, quietly, under a charitable label. Even the system built for the rich to give back was shaped to preserve their control, not transfer any real power to the public.
Control is the actual point. A tax dollar goes through budgeting, elections, appropriations — contested, messy, accountable to people who never chose to need it. A philanthropic dollar answers to exactly one person: the donor, pursuing whatever theory of change they personally find compelling, with a tax break as a bonus for their trouble. That’s not a diluted version of civic duty. It’s the replacement of a shared, negotiated process with a unilateral one, dressed as generosity.
The Sackler family funded wings at the Met, the Guggenheim, the Louvre, for decades, while Purdue Pharma helped drive an opioid crisis that killed hundreds of thousands of people. The philanthropy and the harm weren’t in conflict. The philanthropy was, in part, the insurance policy against the harm ever sticking to the name.
Are there sincere billionaire philanthropists out there, genuinely trying to give away power along with money? Probably.
But notice what that requires: acting against every incentive the system around them provides. That doesn’t undercut the argument. It’s what the argument predicts. Extreme wealth doesn’t make empathy or civic duty impossible. It makes them a matter of individual willpower fighting a structure engineered to reward the opposite. Rare, by design.
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If this were a story about a few clinical sociopaths who slipped through, the fix would almost be simple: screen better, find the bad actors, remove them.
But that’s not what’s happening. The system doesn’t need to find sociopaths. It breeds the behaviour in anyone who ends up insulated enough, for long enough, from the consequences of their own decisions. Which means the fix can’t just be about character. You can’t shame someone into feeling a threat that no longer exists for them.
What you can do is put the threat back. Rebuild the conditions where the wealthy actually need the rest of us to agree to things — where their fortunes, their companies, their legacies depend on a public that can say no and make it stick.
Not because it will make them better people. Because it will make their indifference, for the first time in a while, expensive again.
FVCK THE SYSTEM