The purpose of this round of hearings is not to hear further apologies or expressions of regret.
These words were spoken yesterday at the banking royal commission. They were spoken to CBA executives, but should be more generally heard. The purpose of the inquiry is not to extract a “sorry” from a sorry sector’s lot. The purpose is to understand the sector.
“Sorry” has its value in many other contexts. Without it, our social bonds would fray. But this is the “sorry” that is conscious of its need to be said. The full and proper “sorry” is not a rationale for having behaved like a twit, but an avowal that we did.
“Sorry” may be appended by a short history of how we came to behave like a twit and it may be a chance for us sorry twits to atone. “Sorry” must be mined from the gut at great risk of herniation. To have value, “sorry” must be true. But, the real purpose of the “sorry” is not to be truthfully uttered but to be really, truly heard.
Sign up for a FREE 21-day trial and get Crikey straight to your inbox
The finance sector has no gut. It is not a creature, but a machine whose army of parasitic nanobots are dispatched to suck ordinary people into the bondage of debt. There is nothing inside the most significant global market force but putrefaction. To understand this sector as human or even as truly comparable to any other form of trade is to understand the blood-type of a stone.
The sector is not “inhuman” but it is, inevitably, not human. Thus, it cannot be sorry and even if some of its representatives are truly sorry for the fictitious capital they quite legally write into reality each day, their “sorry” has no value as an utterance. It only has value as a cheque.
Most often, the “sorry” of an institution comes at no cost and sometimes, it brings profit. We could argue that the “sorry” of the Rudd government to Aboriginal people divided from their families was of greatest value to the Rudd government and the nation-state. Even as Rudd uttered “sorry”, he funded future regret. The so-called “emergency response” to a report on child abuse in remote Northern Territory communities was ongoing in 2008 and its work of separating families and estranging people from their most basic rights was work he had approved.
The year after “sorry”, Rudd introduced the BasicsCard, a cashless welfare card that separated Northern Territory supermarket queues into white and black. He may have been sincerely sorry for the apartheid of the past, but he was not faithfully sorry to its present, which was concealed by the myth of apology.
The firm, sector or institution enacts its “sorry”. There is possibly no enduring value in the “sorry” simply said. Just as the finance sector cannot be understood as a form of scaled-up barter, its true “sorry” cannot be the individual apology scaled up. Although, its purpose is the same: to offer reparations at personal cost.
Sorry is, or should be, the hardest and most valuable word for an individual to impart. If it were an easy word, it would require no internal struggle and have no external value when offered, which is its ruddy point.
Still, we can probably expect a future sorry pageant. Bankers will tell us all how sorry they are and they will explain their identical behaviour in a variety of ways. They will not say that their complicity with cruelty is a fact of the financialised present, but they will attribute it to individual failing.
Like Rudd, they may be truly sorry. Like Rudd, they will be more faithful to the preservation of the institution they represent than they are to their regret. Which will be their moral failing, of course, but the inevitable failing of a system that is not merely “too big” to fail those other markets now dependent on it, but too deluded to recognise its central failure.
This is one of many accounts that presage this apology. In asking the question “why do good people do bad things?”, many commentators apply the logic of the personal apology to the institutional sort, and fail, like those institutions, to see intrinsic failure.
Why do good people do bad things? Largely, for the same reason good people have bad debt. It’s a matter of survival, and we can’t be truly sorry for that.
Leave a comment
I laughed at the prospect of a bank CEO (“earning(?)” enough to be able to more than live on what would be left over after they lost $2 million) nabbed accepting a freebie from a client (with dubious pedigree?) for a luxury holiday in Fiji – suddenly finding his moral compass during these procedures?
And funny watching Comyn – of the Comynwealth Bank – in the chair professing these “new morally acceptable practices” he’s ready to implement – while looking like he’s waiting to see how much the Royal Commission has been able to find out of what the banks have “really been up too”?
The proof of genuine contrition is – would you do the same thing again if you knew you couldn’t be caught out? As far as the banks are concerned, we all know the answer to that.
Bank CEOs are so sorry that they have agreed to return 10 years of bonuses. And given the egregious fraud they presided over, they have each agreed to 5 years unpaid community service.
I’d emigrate to any planet where that could occur.
Final Report :- ‘The Effects of the Magnetic Field of Money on the Moral Compass of Finance.’?
To see the finance sector merely as “….a machine whose army of parasitic nanobots are dispatched to suck ordinary people into the bondage of debt” shows a Marxist with a poor understanding of the economically based philosophy of Marxism.
Banks etc should ideally be compelled to be purely servants of the productive economy, but that’s easier said than done even in nominally Marxist states.
The commission’s current stated intent to understand is what I and many others want them to do. Meanwhile Helen carry on as usual with stuff like today’s impenetrable ramblings about sorry.
mark e smith would do better to enlighten us as to the relevance of stuff like his impenetrable ramblings about the economically based philosophy of Marxism.
Just what does “mark e smith’ want the commission to do? Why does the commission need to understand that, rather than applying logical counters to demonstrated failings?
Banking criminality of the massive extent again highlighted by the Hayne Royal Commission is driven by greed = more profit, higher pay for executives (though not shared with the workers). Hayne noted in his Interim Report:
“Almost every piece of conduct identified and criticised in this report can be connected directly to the relevant actor gaining some monetary benefit from engaging in the conduct. And every piece of conduct that has been contrary to law is a case where the existing governance structures and practices of the entity and its risk management practices have not prevented that unlawful conduct.”
So the problem is a capitalism that is behaving exactly as its supporters intend.