The tragedy that becomes indifference begins with an unexamined difficulty of human capacity awash in information.

There are too many details to understand. We take in what we can tolerate, mark it in its importance to us at the moment, and move on. There is just so much any one of us can absorb. While our sound bite culture may evoke compassion through imagery we absorb directly— the ghastly photograph, the sound of an infant crying — its immediacy suggests a superficial emotional resonance, devoid of understanding. Stripped of human complexity, our emotions are played both by technological end products and our own haste to assimilate what passes for knowledge before we continue our knowledge-grazing in other fields. Moving on, we avoid genuine knowing, while we preserve our denial in the twin conceits both of understanding and of unexamined trust in others’ fairness and due diligence.

Gretchen Morgenson of the Times beautifully illustrates these challenges to complexity and the underlying anger and compassion that understanding should evoke in her January 11 article about the FDIC’s “least costly” purchaser of Indy Mac.

The dilemma is in the “passivity” of the passive investor— a passivity that might go unexamined by regulators, as a function of its label. It reminds me of a story, told about Benjamin Whorf, who observed long ago that fires in oil fields occurred most frequently around “empty” oil barrels, because the word “empty” connoted nothing, rather than a lack of fullness still imbued with oily residues. Workers on cigarette breaks felt free to toss their butts into these barrels— and presto: instant conflagration!

For Indy Mac, the difficulty arising is the “passive” investor’s involvement n that classic practice, commented about even in pre-Biblical texts: the pillaging of widows’ and orphans’ savings. Through clever alliances, the hundreds of millions of investor dollars— mostly of elderly investors— disappeared through questionable overcharges and user fees. However, the corporate position statement, the sound bite that soothes, states, “while we have sympathy for the investors who lost money…their anger should be directed” elsewhere. That elsewhere being another firm with obscure connection to the one doing the disclaiming. Yet the firm seems to agree with our possible anger which is both anticipated and redirected. It sides with our good-will, and says, “look somewhere else”.

Of course, we WANT to move on to somewhere else. We’ve spent too much time thinking about this ugliness. Even with Ms Morgenson as our competent guide, helping us to connect the dots, the tangles of this web require a spreadsheet to understand. And even with the data before us, our eyes fog and plead with us we move on to the next article or the Style Section—- leaving behind the defrauded elderly—who, presumably are not our own, so are easily understood as an abstraction. To think of them as “investors”, just as we are “investors”, would be truly disconcerting: who, how, could we trust, when TRUST is really what we seek, after trust has been so recently destroyed in the markets’ “corrections”. To be without it would lead to true depression!

The gap is enormous between what we can absorb easily and the work that understanding requires. The pleasant corporate disclaimer, seemingly allied both with the readers’ social concerns and the plight of the suffering, presents a paradox: it denies reality as it affirms our need to be comforted. Ms Morgenson is correct about passivity. But it is within us as investors as much as within Indy Mac’s saviors. We want to believe in closure, in the rationality and fairness of corporate action. And we are relieved when we are provided with this by a corporate spokesperson. Discerning the lie requires both the attention of hardier souls, like Ms Morgenson, who show us the way, and our willingness to be shown.

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Joy in Discovery of Received Wisdom
• » Dynamics of My Emerging Blog Relationships

• BROWSE / IN Management Markets
• « The Irrationality of Sacrifice In Satisficing
• » The Current Economic Climate

• RELATED / YOU MIGHT FIND THESE INTERESTING
• No related posts