Epstein Blindness: Understanding the system that creates monsters

This is so good.... From a behavioral economist. (20minutes - well worth the time)

Your Brain Won't Let You See What Epstein Really Was - Barry's Economics

Summary

Why we love tracking monsters - the neuroscience
- When we punish someone who betrays us, we get a hit of dopamine
- Paradoxically, we become less reactive to systems abuses. You know that the system is unfair, but don't get the same dopamine hit pursuing systems change as punishing individuals.

The system that produces monsters is not a conspiracy.
- It's the result of wealthy people doing terrible things without consequences.
- Extreme wealth protects the wealthy from consequences for bad behavior. Legal protection, media.
- It's not a bad apple. It's a bad apple barrel. Systemic rot.

Lessons from the challenger disaster: The normalization of deviance.
- There were many O-ring failures that caused the tragedy. The O-ring failures had become so common that they were ignored. Until they produced a major disaster.
- The organization had normalized flying with a known design flaw.

When deviance is common and unpunished, it becomes normalized.
- Extreme wealth is the system that grows monsters.
- Billionaires are more likely to become politicians, hire good lawyers, own all the media platforms. The result is a system of impunity.
- The rest of the population struggles. We want to see the monsters punished, but don't understand how to change the system that creates the monsters.

When a monster emerges, people focus on the monster and not the system that created it.
- It's easy to create moral outrage online, but it rarely leads to action that could change the system.
- You don't stop monsters by hunting them one at a time. You close the monster factory, by reforming extreme wealth inequality that enables grotesque indecency.

Until we dismantle the Epstein economy, we are all complicit in the Epstein Economy.