Manufacturing Obedience

In 2016, Wells Fargo fired 5300 employees for opening millions of fake accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge. These were not executives: they were branch staff, customer service representatives, and personal bankers. When the scandal became public, initial coverage framed it as individual misconduct. The problem with that framing was that number “5300”. You cannot explain mass participation through individual bad character. Instead, you have to ask what conditions cause thousands of ordinary people to do something they know is wrong. Stanley Milgram started asking this question in the early 1960s, partly in response to the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had organized the logistics of the Holocaust. Eichmann’s defense was that he had simply followed orders. Hannah Arendt, covering the trial for the New Yorker, coined the phrase that has not since been improved on: the “banality of evil.” Her point was that Eichmann was not a monster; he was a bureaucrat doing what…