Matt Yglesias has a smart post on the death of autonomy among American law-makers: the most powerful representatives on health-care reform deplore the impossibility of passing good legislation and blame their own irrepressible desire for corporate cash. I.e. we cannot really expect them to put the tax-payer before their own greed.

Now it's not surprising that they think this way, but it is surprising to see them talk openly this way. Sometimes plain honesty isn't a virtue, it's a sign of an oblivious corrupted soul, so blind to the demands of decency and basic moral rectitude that they no long think of corruption as something one ought to at least hide, if not avoid altogether.

Now this example isn't isolated. It is a sign of a broader syndrome of the incredible shrinking Self. It used to be appropriate to think of our Selves as a very special kind of thing. It was an object that caused certain events in the world and was responsible for the consequences of those actions. It wasn't just an insignificant cog in the cosmic machinery of cause and effect. It reflected badly on your Self when it produced bad outcomes in the world and it reflected well on it when good things resulted. Even if it was a cog, it was a damn special cog. All that seems to have changed and we are much happier to let the broader cosmos - or the System - take the blame for our actions. We just move with the wheels.

I have a family friend who is an arms dealer. If you asked him to give you a gun so you could go shoot a few people in the street, he would probably refuse. Even if you paid well. However, he is happy enough to sell arms on the open market to be used by genocidal maniacs on far-flung islands in the far east.

I have friends in finance. If I asked them to help me steal an old lady's handbag in the street they would probably refuse (even if it was a sure thing). But they're happy to defraud clients for millions through the discreet use of derivatives. I mean, that is what they are hired to do; 'over the counter', but not quite above board. I have acquaintances in the health insurance business... I guess I don't need to get into the details there.

But this kind of list goes on. And these people feel great about what they do. Because they are good at it. Business is no longer about doing any good, selling something useful. None of these people do any good, it's about doing something, anything, well, as long as it is profitable and (barely) legal. Ethics - in the broad sense of doing something worthwhile - has been replaced by Etiquette. Purse-snatching is so unseemly. Screwing a client on an obscure hedging strategy, on the other hand, is clever and smooth. Providing material assistance for a drive-by shooting, ugly; selling arms to a regime suppressing an ethnic minority, entrepreneurial smarts. After all, if you didn't do it, someone else would. What you do changes nothing. You are but a cog with no effect on how the world works, replaceable and insignificant. As long as the causal chains stay long and complex enough, you can feel small enough in the scheme of things for the guilt to wash over you without getting wet. But what is really the difference between mugging and financial fraud? (If you do either well, you won't get caught.) The difference is cosmetic. Financial fraud is simply très chic.

This brings me to another political example. Reading the Financial Reform package put forward by the Obama administration last week, I got annoyed. After handing the financial sector 14 trillion dollars in subsidies, guarantees and non-recourse loans, to save the world from the mess these finance wiz-kids had created, serious change was to be expected. The package involved mere tweaks and acronym-shuffling. The collective commentary reaction was a shrug. After all, the administration has other fish to fry with the economy in free-fall; the banking lobby, flush with 14 trillion in new crisp bills, is incredibly powerful on the hill; the various regulators are already owned by the banks. So who's to blame for this failure? The bankers? They are merely looking out for their shareholders, as is their duty. The shareholders? They have no power over the executives in any case. The politicians? A politician can't resist a generous contributor, we all know that. That's the way the System works. Sure, of course, everyone is to blame! But when the system is constructed so that the blame is so finely spread out, it's hard to have enough anger to go around.

So here's a plea: give me one name. One (or two...). There is a certain relief to having a focus for one's emotions. It's hard to get mad these days. During the Bush years there were a pretty clear set of culprits. You knew who's portrait to use as a dartboard. That made life easy. Emotions need objects - anger needs to pin the blame, fear needs a threat, grief needs a concrete loss,. Without clear objects in sight all you get is a vague sense of frustration, angst, terror, depression. Objectless emotions are annoying. Getting a grasp on what you feel is already a partial relief. And getting such a grasp also lets you know where in the fine clockwork System to throw the spanner.

(Coda: I realize that on health care reform, there is a clear criterion - the public option - that helps define who to blame and who to shame. On the financial reforms, there is as far as I can see no such simple way to crystallize the debate. Which is why serious reform will probably fail.)