Ethical dissonance
Recently, I have been thinking about a specific cognitive dissonance: Ethical dissonance. Working at a large financial institution (FI) during the financial “crisis” is creating a lot of ethical dissonance for me. Already the fact that I put the crisis in quotes is a symptom of that: On the one hand, the higher ranks in the big FIs have profited greatly from their own disastrous decisions because the public bailed them out. None of the banksters had to give their bonuses or earnings back to right their wrongs. Then on the other, the real crisis is not in the financial services sector – it is amongst all the unemployed and former homeowners. It is amongst the rest of us who didn’t profit from scrupulous financial “innovation.” And that “innovation” continues, together with the profiteering off the backs of the rest of society. So, I think all that – and then I get paid by one of the FIs. Granted it’s not one of the worst (first attempt to minimize the dissonance). And I have to make a living somehow (another one). Plus, I am not working on any of those “innovative” products (piling up the anti-dissonance arguments). But, the bottom line is: I cannot get out of the ethical dissonance. Somehow I know that if all of us who are feeling this dissonance would quit, we could change this society that is so build around the adoration of the size of the paycheck (hmmm, I wonder what that replaced 😉 ). And I also know that to really remove the ethical dissonance, I would have to quit my job. In some ways, though, that feels like self-sabotage but maybe that is just another excuse I conjure up to relieve the dissonance without doing what is right.
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Looking into this issue in trying to prepare a presentation on the need for professional reflection within the mental health industry, where Evidence Based Practices are required when treating “illnesses” for which there’s no evidence. Where Big Pharma makes billions correcting “chemical imbalances” that have never been found. One of the most common dissonance ploys is the projection of “need”….as in “You need your medication”….and on and on.
While I don’t work in the financial sector, I work for a publicly-traded company so I have wondered about this myself. In the end, though, I decided that continuing to support myself and my family was allowed by the hierarchy of needs, and by continuing to have most of my banking needs fulfilled by a federal credit union, I was doing my part!