Hypersensitive Sociopaths

Some celebrity chef named Mario Batali publicly compared bankers to Hitler and Stalin. Well, our financial Masters of the Universe, a group whose skin is as thin as their morals, got rankled about it and called for a boycott of Batali’s restaurants, some of which are apparently quite posh. This was the offending comment:

“So the ways the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed and taken most of it into their hands is as good as Stalin or Hitler and the evil guys,” Batali said. “They’re not heroes, but they are people that had a really huge effect on the way the world is operating.”

So the guy knuckled under and apologized. I guess it was a good business decision because a lot of those Wall Streeters are probably his highest paying customers. But compare what he did with what Wall Street banks did to their their customers. He hurt Wall Street’s tender feelings and then said he was sorry; they bilked everyone, trashed the economy, got bailed out, and then turned around and said “What’s the problem?” They haven’t apologized for a thing. It hasn’t even crossed their minds that they should. They destroy millions of lives and then flip everyone the finger, but when the kitchen help gets uppity and mildly insults them they grow whiny and butt-sore (then they become vindictive). For such ‘big men’ they sure are touchy. I haven’t brushed up on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders lately, is hypersensitivity to criticism a symptom of sociopathy?

But the chef was wrong about one thing. The banksters aren’t really comparable to Hitler or Stalin, who weren’t motivated by personal profit. Whatever else you might say about them, “greed is good” wasn’t their motto. They acted for deeper if more monstrous reasons. The bankers, on the other hand, are just low criminals, seedy and greedy crooks who’d starve out the local senior citizen center for an extra hundred bucks. They’d steal the dessert off your plate if you looked away. They’re more like Mafia gangsters minus any mystique, charisma, or code of honor. The only thing they have that remotely resembles a philosophy would be a few comic book concepts lifted from the CliffsNotes version of Atlas Shrugged, and these are only used to justify their thefts after the fact and maintain their privileges, i.e. “Don’t tax the job creators” and “Don’t coddle the moochers and looters”, etc.

[Cross-posted at Bad Attitudes]