Each opinion, every hypothesis, comes buttressed with quantitative and qualitative data. Taxi drivers and waiters talk with us about them. Friends, worrying about 401K losses, nod sagely about the recouping of their lost wealth.

The Greek poet, Constantine Cavafy, wrote in “Waiting For the Barbarians”, that although the anticipated future never materialized, the act of anticipation itself instilled the hope of security.  So we too— from any perspective, bearish or bullish— attempt to stabilize our anxiety in the present, attempting to gain our bearings and to assert our former sense of command, deeply injured in recent months. Perhaps if we act as if we know, we can make it so. Sometimes wishful magic extends beyond the boundaries of childhood.

I realized that the whole “Bartleby” perspective was simply posturing: a cute, literary reference which really goes nowhere. Negation does not lead to reflective space. It leads (after destruction) to avoidance. In fact, Melville’s Bartleby character is a poster child for one of Karen Horney’s three central characterological types: the avoidant personality.

Among its distinguishing traits are: detachment, emotional distance, and aloofness. “Don’t bother me”, like Bartleby’s “I prefer not to” is his mantra, while maintaining a defended sense of superiority. Occasionally, there are moments of ease from what HS Sullivan calls this “distance machinery”. Indeed, the Bartleby type is capable of intense short term relationships (as well as spontaneous moments of creativity) as long as they do not unduly interfere with his life.

As far as reflection goes, Horney comments upon his swings between appreciation for such human traits as goodness, sympathy and generosity while operating with cunning self-interest. Rather than wrestle with this contradiction, the Barleby character prefers rationalization.

No, Bartleby is not the model for reflection and reassessment of societal dysfunction. His viewpoint only contributes to the distortion of clear vision.

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.

Opposing knowledge were the final days of 21st Century Weimar: thousand dollar bottles of champagne at over-priced exclusive clubs for the finance teams that had worked feverishly to bring in the deals; private plane chartered to international soccer matches; hob nobbing with C-Suite bankers in the Colorado snow; wind surfing off the most perfect secret spot in an undisclosed South American country.

The secret was that bad debt was spreading virally throughout the world, as bankers and investors gobbled up its dubiously rated super secure ratings. The speed with which merger and acquisitions had to be consummated in that final year, meant little sleep. And the terrific profit margins for lenders that had typified the growing generation of risky debt, began to diminish rapidly. Yet the players could not withdraw because their organizational roles required that they continue to play. If one bank refused a deal, then another would take it; and reputation was at stake. Standards loosened. Yet, while personal reflection of participants within the context of psychological business consultation was focused right on target, nothing of this was permitted in the workplace because the goal-determined purpose of the work required a uniformity of belief in corporate alignment. And this was affirmed in industry alignment.

Slowly, the clients I knew, began to revise their career plans. They were paid well to leave, either to pass the baton or to close up shop. Remarkably, the knowledge underlying their individual anxieties became lost to their work organizations. So that when the larger societal world caught up with the dilemma, the organization could truly claim ignorance: not only had knowledge been off-limits, but also those who knew and couldn’t say, were no longer around. Incentives to stay demanded the ignorance of the group; and incentives to leave made sure the group’s ignorance could be validated