If you want to understand Sam Bankman-Fried and what he symbolizes about our culture, you could do worse than to understand the cultural environment in which he grew up.
The son of two Stanford academics who ooze a sense of privilege and moral superiority, and looking through the lens of his upbringing it’s suddenly easy to understand how he became a moral monster.
There’s something deeply unsettling about SBF’s parents. Frightening, even.
You get the feeling that, as cliched as it might be, these are people who hold themselves as members of a higher caste, to whom the rules and mores governing the proletariat simply do not apply. People… pic.twitter.com/sao1C1y1ro
— Robert Sterling (@RobertMSterling) March 28, 2024
SBF’s parents submitted letters to the court in support of their son, trying to persuade the judge that he should get a light sentence. Rather than portraying a sob story meant to elicit a sense of pity, the Bankman-Frieds spent their efforts trying to convince us that he is simply a misunderstood moral paragon.
No doubt that is how they see him, because that is also how they see themselves, despite having personally benefited hugely from the fraud and arguably having participated in it.
SBF’s mom submitted a 6-page letter, so I won’t go through it all. But I will give you a flavor of it and give you my argument for why I think it represents something much more than a mother’s plea for mercy.
From the first paragraph, Barbara Fried tells us what matters to her: credentials.
Dear Judge Kaplan: I am Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother. | am also a law professor at Stanford, where | have taught for the past thirty-five years, and before that was an attorney at Paul Weiss in New York and a law clerk on the Second Circuit.
She is speaking as a highly credentialed person to another highly credentialed person. I am a law professor. You are a judge. We are of the same class, you know. We are not plebs to be held to the same standards as others.
Cringe.
Sam is not like most other people, and any effort to understand him through the lens of ‘normal’ behavior and motivations is going to misunderstand him. | want to talk about the Sam | know, in the hope that what | have to say will shed light on his motivations and actions and ‘what would constitute a just and humane punishment in this case.
This highlighted sentence could be read in a few different ways, and the kindest is that what Fried is saying here is that Sam shouldn’t be held accountable because, well, he is broken in some way. This is how a normal mother might appeal to the judge: he has had a hard life, so be kind.
That is NOT what she means at all, as you will see. She means that Sam is BETTER than most people and should be accorded treatment based on his superior moral worth.
Almost all of us are egoists; we cannot help but put ourselves first and see the world as an extension of ourselves and our own desires. From a very early age Sam was different. When he was about four, we were eating breakfast outside with friends. A woman came over to our table and said, Is he your son,” pointing to Sam. | looked over at him and nodded. A toddler had fallen on the ground and Sam was kneeling next to her, trying to help her up. She said to me, “He is an unusually empathetic child.” | was taken aback to have a total stranger say that to ‘me, because | hadn’t thought about Sam in that way before. As Sam got older, that part of him became more apparent, He was a quiet child, introverted, and demanded and desired very little attention from the outside world. But he was paying close attention to others.
See? SBF is one of the most empathetic people on earth! Sure, he ruined many lives, and did so intentionally. But Sam did so for all the right reasons!
Sam is not only a really empathetic guy, but he is a deep thinker and reader of academic literature.
Did I say academic? Starting young, he was reading academic philosophy!
One day, when he was about twelve, he popped out of his room to ask me a question about an argument made by Derik Parfit, a well-known moral philosopher. As it happens, | am quite familiar with the academic literature Parfi’s article is a part of, having written extensively on related questions myself. His question revealed a depth of understanding and critical thinking that is not all that common even among people who think about these issues for a living. ‘What on earth are you reading?” | asked. The answer, it turned out, was he was working his way through the vast literature on utilitarianism, a strain of moral philosophy that argues that each of us has a strong ethical obligation to live so as to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves. The premises of utilitarianism obviously resonated strongly with what Sam had already come to believe on his own, but gave him a more systematic way to think about the problem and connected him to an online community of like-minded people deeply engaged in the same intellectual and moral journey.
Sam is like me! We are both academically inclined! And did you know we are both deeper thinkers than most? Even other academics!
We are the creme de la creme!
Did I mention Stanford? Did you know that Sam grew up on the Stanford campus, with the best people surrounding him?
The next part of the letter is particularly precious: Sam is a VEGAN, don’tcha know?
While he was still in high school, Sam started to think hard about the implications of utilitarianism for how he should live his life. His conversion to veganism was one outgrowth of that quest. Sam lived on steak and fries until he was eighteen years old. After looking into the treatment of factory farm animals in his freshman year at college, he became a vegetarian. After looking more deeply into it, he became a vegan. His determination to remain vegan in prison, where the absence of vegan food has forced him to live on commissary junk food, reveals a lot about his strength of character and moral commitment, He has lost 30 pounds since he was remanded to prison in August. He has never once complained to us or, as we know, the prison authorities. He has just made do because it was important enough to him to do so.
Seriously?
Yes, she is serious. Sam is so moral that he turned into a vegan!
All this is on the first page of a 6-page letter. She is seriously leading with this. And she is leading with this because this is how elites think. The fact that he defrauded and immiserated thousands of people is nothing compared to the fact that he is so principled that he is a vegan.
A vegan!
While in high school, he also started to think seriously about the implications of utilitarianism for his work life, talking to a lot of people about what the most valuable use of his talents might be if his goal was to improve the well-being of others. While at MIT, with advice from others, Sam found an answer to the question. He decided to use his quantitative kiln high-paying in finance and give away his earnings to the most effective charitable organizations working in areas he cared most about. In short, like many other deals people in his generation, he chose a life of earning to give.
This explains all the expensive property he owns and the lavish spending on himself and others, including his family. He bought his parents a $16 million home with FTX money.
The letter goes on, but you get the point. The problem is not just that SBF is a sociopath but that he grew up in a milieu filled with sociopaths. Sociopathy was selected for, in fact.
This is not to say that most academics are sociopaths. They aren’t. But academics as a breed focus on things like intelligence, abstract thinking, and the ability to articulate principles (without practicing them) that imbue them with a sense of superiority over those who don’t. This attitude pervades the transnational elite.
Bankman, Fried, and SBF himself have been wildly successful in their fields because their fields select for people like them and reinforce the characteristics that make them moral monsters. That anybody could seriously appeal to SBF’s kindness to chickens as a reason to excuse his indifference to human suffering is bad enough; that such appeals have worked until SBF entered a courtroom tells you very much about the moral environment in which these people have thrived.
Moral monsters have often done well in the world, but usually through simulating the behaviors they know others value. Sociopathy is not always maladaptive–many CEOs and successful world leaders are secret sociopaths who have figured out how to channel their talents into behavior that aligns their interests with those of others.
In a way, that is what has happened here; only the others they are pleasing have values that are at odds with those of the average person, and causing harm to normal people is perfectly acceptable, as they are merely plebs. The interests of their own class are all that matter.
Hence the focus is on Gaia, and not the immiseration of the human beings who will be sacrificed to her. It’s not so much that they genuinely care for Gaia or cows, but focusing on these issues provides a sheen of moral behavior while caring for other human beings is difficult and really not worth their time. It is virtue signaling, not virtue that matters.
This is why Al Gore can travel the globe in a private plane, live in a monstrous mansion, and decry the unwillingness of others to sacrifice for the good of Mother Earth.
Luckily, the judge didn’t buy a word of it.
Read the full article here
