Drinking the Kool-Aid

I just watched "Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room," which is just a remarkable story of a group of guys that we're all supposed to want to be like - charming, smart, ambitious and fun - who, in the pursuit of success, blew up a company like a balloon and when it popped took 20,000 employees and their futures with them. The consequent folding of Arthur Andersen, the financial company that destroyed accounting evidence of the Enron dealings, folded and took with it the jobs of 85,000 more people!

My dad says that he doesn't believe in conspiracies. That there are too many people involved and he just finds it implausible that people can be that organized. Technically, though, it only takes two to make a conspiracy which is the most plausible thing in the world and in this case there was Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. But this is a perfect example of something that looks and feels like a much bigger conspiracy than it is. They may never have sat in a room and said we're going to do this thing. Instead, it demonstrates how power and money can corrupt so completely and so thoroughly that no one ever HAS to conspire. People see what they want to see and believe what they want to believe when huge amounts of money (or power) are at stake.

The biggest banks in the world, politicians, traders and financial analysts lined up to drink the Kool-Aid and take their check. If these guys at the top said something was true then it must be. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, the bigger the lies, the bigger the liars and the bigger the accomplices. This is how modern terrorism works. One or two people at the top know what's really going on and everyone else is just buying into the vision, seeing what they want to see. They believe what they're told and by the time they know otherwise, it's too late. So it's easy to claim ignorance, just like the banks did when they said they had no reason to believe what they were doing was wrong, because technically they didn't know. One guy in the movie says he knew things were amiss but he didn't ask because he was afraid of the answer.

It's really an excellent movie, worth watching because it makes you realize that every corruption is a version of this story. Think about the war in Iraq. Every lie begets another lie and the lies get bigger and with more at risk. There's no other way to play that game. Everyone who buys it has to keep buying into it, otherwise they have to face themselves and their mistakes. You can't just turn around and say you were wrong and go back, there's no going back. At Enron, they just kept hoping each new lie would pay off and fix all the previous ones.

The big theme of the movie is "ask why," which ironically, was Enron's advertising tagline. Too much of what happened is a result of no one asking why, which, again is reminiscent of too many tragedies in human history. It's easy in these instances to look back and wonder why people didn't ask what was happening, why people didn't demand the truth, why they believed the lies. Yet in the present, we're all drinking the Kool-Aid somewhere when we should be asking why.