Month: August 2025

The most subtle aspect of this debt-morality connection is how it prevents us from questioning the legitimacy of the debt itself. Once we accept the axiom that “good people pay their debts,” we stop asking whether the terms were fair, whether the interest is exploitative, or whether the lender engaged in predatory practices by taking advantage of someone in desperation. Religious traditions that once had strict prohibitions against usury—exploitative lending—now find their adherents defending the moral right of banks to charge whatever interest rates the market will bear. The moral weight of debt becomes yet another tool of systemic oppression, adding psychological burden to financial exploitation. The economic question of whether a debt should be repaid has completely overshadowed the more important question of whether it is moral for the debt to exist at all.

Richard Dawkins first popularized the concept of memetics, which describes how ideas spread and evolve through human cultures, much like genes. It is a valuable framework to understand the history and, more importantly, the story surrounding debt. Malcolm Gladwell further identified what makes specific ideas “sticky”—they contain elements that make them memorable and actionable. Seth Godin also expands this concept, calling exceptionally infectious ideas “idea viruses”—concepts so compelling they spread from person to person, growing stronger as they move through networks of human connection. Bingo. The most successful idea viruses don’t just inform; they transform how people perceive reality. And few ideas have proven more infectious than the belief that “good people pay their debts.”

When political theorist Hannah Arendt walked into Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, she expected to see a monster. Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, had coordinated the logistics for the mass deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and concentration camps—surely this man would be the embodiment of evil itself. Instead, Arendt found something far more unsettling: Eichmann was “terrifyingly normal,” just an ordinary bureaucrat who had stopped questioning all moral judgment and followed his system’s logic without critical thought. Arendt described this phenomenon as “the banality of evil.”

This “banality of evil” reveals how ordinary people enable systematic violence by accepting institutional frameworks without question, treating what someone designed as if it were simply the way things must be. This happens not through malice, but through moral disengagement and institutional compliance.

This exact psychological mechanism operates in economic systems. When systematic violence requires the participation of millions of ordinary people, it must be wrapped in moral frameworks that make that violence appear not just acceptable, but necessary, even righteous. People don’t mindfully choose to enable horror—they follow institutional logic, complete their assigned tasks, and when the violence happens out of sight, it stays out of mind. As Douglas Rushkoff points out, “it is easier to destroy our world from a distance.”

Recently, I watched this blanket left on a sidewalk I pass every day. For two weeks, no one who works in the building wants to take care of it. The natural response is, “they don’t pay me enough to care.” Of course, this hasn’t absolved me from picking it up either. Do we care about the community? How it looks? How it feels? Are you part of it? None of these things have a price tag.

It doesn’t mean you will get the credit you deserve. The right thing to do is often the hard thing to do, which means you may have made the right decision, but you don’t get to feel good about either.

Do they not have one available? Did they want to feel the wind in their hair?

Plausible. But more likely:

It says something about their status and affiliation.

It’s the same reason people smoke, have tattoos, or wear suits to work.

People like us do stuff like this.

Not having a lot of work doesn’t necessarily mean we have a fulfilling career. We should care about the quality of work, which may mean a lot of work. All good projects have a price tag. When we don’t see a purpose, impact, or reason, we become despondent, and quiet quitting takes over. People are not afraid to work hard. The monotonous assembly line work makes us scared to get our hands dirty.

It’s tempting to believe something is wrong with individual actors who don’t handle their business. But competence isn’t usually the problem. It’s only one part of the equation. It’s time. Energy. Choices. Resources. Security. Safety. And so on. All that weighs heavily in our decision-making. When someone isn’t doing the thing you would do, a better way to think is, what is that person in short supply of? And perhaps, we create an opportunity to contribute with this lens.

The speed of work matters. But urgent isn’t necessarily the same as necessary. And when the default setting is “Go, go!” we are setting ourselves up for long-term failure. Every day can feel like a race; the question is: a race against whom? In a world where we have sold our time for money, psychologically, it can ruin us to think the clock is against us, changing the quality of our work.

The amygdala is so powerful that we can create emergencies that are simply not there. Work isn’t always an emergency. But when the boss says “take care of this,” we act like the job is on the line. Perhaps, it’s best to check if the sky is falling before acting. Something interesting about our news cycles is that they create an emergency that isn’t there.