Review

Comment

Morality

23 November 2023

7 min read

Sam Bankman-Fried: doing the math on morality

The calculated character and philanthropy of crypto-criminal Sam Bankman-Fried is analysed by Krish Kandiah, who finds it doesn’t to add up.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Sam Bankman-Fried at a crypto-conference, 2021.

Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’ biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire is quite the compelling read.

For a start Lewis has an incredible ability to explain complex economic and business scenarios in a way that is not only accessible, but also gripping. It is no wonder his previous books have been turned into Hollywood blockbusters.

Lewis also has a knack for finding the humanity in almost any given situation. Whether he is writing about the system for picking a world-beating baseball team, the global economic crisis or, in this case, the rise and fall of a cryptocurrency exchange, he delves deep into the characters at the heart of the stories, exposing their strengths and weaknesses, their struggles and values.

The publication of Going Infinite last month also coincided with Bankman-Fried’s real time court case, ending in a guilty verdict for, in the words of US attorney Damian Williams, “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history – a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto.”

This fraud centred on Sam Bankman-Fried’s company FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. It emerged as one of the largest in the world with billions in deposits. All helping Bankman-Fried, aged just 29, to become recognised by Forbes magazine as the 41st richest American.

For all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other.

My personal interest in the man behind the fraud was shaped by three things. Firstly, as an adoptive and foster parent of two children who are on the autistic spectrum, I was interested in what Lewis would say about the common speculation that Bankman-Fried is also on the autistic spectrum.

I was also intrigued by Bankman-Fried’s philosophical approach to philanthropy and how Lewis would present the problems with the movement known as Effective Altruism.

Finally, I was interested in just to what extent Bankman-Fried’s commitment to mathematical algorithms overshadowed his moral awareness, given that it may well ultimately result in a sentence of 100 years behind bars.

Autism

Lewis invites us into as much of the inner world of Bankman-Fried as he can. He writes about his loneliness in childhood and his struggles with social conventions, for example. One particularly powerful moment is when we are allowed to eavesdrop on a video call with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Bankman-Fried cannot do the call without simultaneously playing a video game. He doesn’t want to see Ms Wintour’s face while she is speaking and only looks at her when he is speaking.

While Lewis readily points to traits that are commonly associated with people on the autistic spectrum – Bankman-Fried’s struggle to comply with social norms and difficulties understanding facial expressions, for example – he avoids using the term “autism”.

It seems that Bankman-Fried himself is aware of his neurodivergent traits and is not afraid to talk about the way they impact his emotional and existential intelligence.

At one point he writes to his girlfriend:

“I don't feel happiness. What's the point in dating someone who you physically can't make happy?"

He went on to say:

“In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul”

I found statements like these hard to read, but insightful. As a culture we are growing in our understanding and appreciation of a range of areas of diversity, however this has yet to be robustly applied to enable both widespread social acceptance and self-acceptance. The fact that Lewis chooses not to use the term autism may be a symptom of this.

Altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried was a very visible member of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. EA is a fascinating philosophical approach to philanthropy which challenges individuals to consider their lives in terms of maximising their resources for the benefit of the world. Bankman-Fried’s answer to the question “How can I do most good with my life?” was to plan to earn a very large sum of money, ideally an infinite sum of money, that could then be used to help solve huge global issues such as the threat of nuclear war or another global pandemic.

There are many criticisms of the EA movement, and, Lewis explores several of them during the course of the book. Perhaps most obviously, for all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other. In fact, there was a major falling out between the effective altruists at his first company Alameda Research where half of the employees left because of his leadership style. Charity, it seems, did not begin at home.
It is also unclear how much money Bankman-Fried actually gave away to philanthropic causes. And it is alleged that just a month after FTX collapsed, the company even began trying to claw back the charitable donations it made. According to direct messages on X with journalist Kelsey Piper, Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically-driven approach was "mostly a front".

"Some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known," he wrote to Piper, "and some of its most beloved people are basically shams."

The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is uncertain whether Bankman-Fried had good intentions at all or whether the lure of billions of dollars became so irresistible that whatever virtue once existed was sacrificed to vice.

There was another dark side to Bankman-Fried’s EA philosophy. He seemed to be fascinated by the question of just how far he could go in his calculations of trade-offs and risks in the supposed cause of saving the future of humanity? What was the highest risk he would take? What boundaries would he cross for financial gain? What would need to be sacrificed on the way? The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

Automatism

Sam Bankman-Fried was not afraid to be honest about his struggles to process and express empathy in socially acceptable ways. He once said:

"There's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake.”

However, what he seemed to struggle with in empathy, he apparently tried to make up for in logic. The following example is helpful.

Lewis records that Bankman-Fried saw Donald Trump as an “existential risk” to democracy and good governance and decided the best way to remove the threat was to offer to pay him not to run for president—an idea Trump was reportedly open to.

“His team had somehow created a back channel into the Trump operation and returned with the not terribly Earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5bn. Or so Sam was told by his team,” Lewis writes.

I have some admiration for Bankman-Fried’s out-of-the-box thinking. He was speaking Trump’s language. He was trying to save the world. He was trying to solve a problem. Logically it was sound. But his $5,000,000,000 calculation was fundamentally flawed. It took no account of democratic values, of the consequences of feeding an ‘existential threat’ billions of dollars, or the illegality of bribery and corruption on that scale.

The same miscalculation haunts the EA movement. While earning infinite amounts of money to save the world or prevent the climate emergency sounds logical, it fails to factor in the dark side of humanity: greed, lust, pride or gluttony, or whichever vice stopped Bankman-Fried from giving away his promised sizeable sum of money and led him rather to committing one of the largest frauds in history. The tech-bro altruistic movement also doesn’t factor in the bright side of humanity: compassion, humility, generosity, sacrifice. It doesn’t account for the human things that keep us going as we pursue justice - proximity to the people we are serving, faith or beauty.

The verdict against Bankman-Fried shows us that hard logic, like lofty ideals, is not enough to protect us from the bad we might do or propel us unswervingly towards the good we should do. The equations are flawed. We are more than machines. We are not social or biological robots. Our emotions and reactions can never be completely predictable or automatic because we are human beings, each of us with our unique strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately, this is what I liked about Lewis’ book – his portrayal of Sam Bankman-Fried not in terms of how much money he made, or how many years he will spend behind bars, not as Crypto-King or Lord of Frauds, but as a uniquely talented and flawed individual who wrestles with some of the biggest existential paradoxes, and who is still, by the way, only 31 years old.

Article

Comment

Grenfell disaster

Trauma

6 February 2025

6 min read

Grenfell: how long should we remember?

There are good and bad ways of remembering.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A white building wrap around a tower is topped by a green heart and the slogan: Grenfell Always In Our Heaets.

Grenfell Tower, Summer 2024.

Rc1959, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For nearly eight years now, Grenfell Tower has remained standing as a reminder of one of the most painful days in recent British history. The news that the government intends to dismantle the remains of the Tower has split local opinion. Some of the bereaved and survivors suggest that the government has scarcely consulted them. For many, the building is a tomb, still containing the memory, if not the actual remains of their loved ones whose bodies could not be recovered. They understandably fear them being forgotten when the building no longer stands as a reminder. Last year I sat in on a gathering where bereaved families and survivors of the fire told their stories in the hearing of representatives of the companies who were responsible for the cladding which caused the fire to spread. The memories and emotions are still raw and unhealed.

On the other hand, many local residents would like it taken away, as its constant, looming presence is a painful reminder of that dark night. They also see the logic in bringing down a fatally damaged and increasingly dangerous structure that costs the taxpayer millions each year to keep from collapsing under its own weight.

The key issue at the heart of this debate is how we remember - especially, how we remember pain. In the rhetoric around Grenfell, as with many other tragedies, we often hear calls to ‘always remember’ and that we must ‘never forget’ the wrongs done which caused the deaths of those 72 people. The Grenfell Memorial Commission, which was charged with thinking about what memorial should stand on the site of the building in future, claimed as its aim to “make sure the Grenfell tragedy can never be forgotten.”

Such calls to ‘never forget’ are powerful. They seem a proper tribute to those who died, they ensure that those culpable are not let off too easily, and that justice is properly done. To blithely forget such horrendous evils seems an affront to justice, and a morally culpable act.

Yet must we always remember the hurts and pains of the past? Can we imagine a future where such memories fade into the distance and no longer cast their painful shadow over our lives?

Whether and when Grenfell Tower comes down, is yet to be determined. Yet only when we keep in mind the destination of the journey of healing can we make good decisions...

Theologian Miroslav Volf asks all these questions in his book The End of Memory. He describes good and bad ways of remembering. We can remember to cherish the dead, to learn lessons for the future, to ensure justice is done. Yet we can also remember to nurse grievances, to cling onto grudges, to imagine horrible pain inflicted on those who wronged us. Memories of wrongs done to us can imprison and define us purely as victims, never in control, always subject to the actions for others, with no agency of our own.

Volf’s Christian faith tells him that the human race is beckoned towards a new world, in the full presence of God, of what he calls ‘final reconciliation’. It is a place where we will be captivated by a vision of the beauty and goodness of God, a vision that we only dimly glimpse in this world. He asks the question: in such a world, will we remember all the wrongs done to us? Can we imagine still clinging onto the memory of the sins and crimes that others inflicted on us? Even if that were in principle possible, would we remember all the harm done to us? And the harm we did to others? If not, which sins would we remember? Which ones would we forget? Would not such memories blight the joy that such a world would surely offer?

Reflecting on his own youthful and painful memories of interrogation in communist Yugoslavia, and other tragedies such as the 9/11attacks, Volf imagines getting to the point where we don't forget the terrible things that others have done to us, but when we actively don't remember them. They still occupy a place in our minds but are instead relegated to a corner of our consciousness, under our control, no longer rearing their ugly and painful heads when triggered by other events. Such an ability not to remember, he suggests, is a good thing:

"Non-remembrance of wrongs suffered is the gift God will give to those who have been wronged."

At the same time, Volf is careful not to imagine getting to this point too easily. Wrongdoers cannot for a moment insist that those they have wronged forget their misdeeds. Such non-remembrance can only happen when truth has been told, sins punished, and justice done. Yet when all that has taken place, that ‘final reconciliation’, Volf imagines, might even embrace the unimaginable - an ultimate reconciliation between the wronged and the wrongdoers.

Is it possible to imagine children whose parents were killed because of the negligence and culpable cheating of contractors who knowingly put unsafe cladding on Grenfell Tower, ever being reconciled to and even embracing the perpetrators? Volf suggests we can, while recognising that this can only happen when the crime has been identified, fully recognised, repented of profoundly, forgiveness offered and accepted and the appropriate penalty paid.

While such a process remains incomplete, the obligation to remember remains, and reconciliation cannot yet take place. But true healing from such hurts is not to be forever dominated by them, defined by them, or to live in constant enmity and resentment because of them. It is, instead, to gain the strength and ability not to remember them, not to be defined by them, and even - possibly, perhaps - to find reconciliation with their perpetrators.

The Grenfell Public Inquiry that reported last year was an important step for the bereaved and survivors. It was not the end of the journey. Far from it. The process of enacting justice through prosecution of the guilty lies ahead. But as an exercise in truth-telling, in giving perpetrators the opportunity to own up and confess their guilt, in a truthful recognition of what went wrong, it was a vital step towards the possibility of reaching that stage when the memory of Grenfell no longer defines its victims. It opens up the possibility at some point in the future, where they might be in control of their memories rather than their memories controlling them.

The Danish Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that we humans need to learn both “the art of forgetting” and “the art of remembering”. To know when and how to do one and when to do the other is the gift of God and an art of true wisdom.

Whether and when Grenfell Tower comes down, is yet to be determined. Yet only when we keep in mind the destination of the journey of healing can we make good decisions about such fraught and emotionally charged issues. The Tower cannot remain as it is - everyone acknowledges that . Yet it's hard for many to think about its disappearance without knowing what will replace it. Which is why plans to demolish the Tower must go hand in hand with the plans for the lasting Memorial that will stand on the site. Yet that can only happen if it serves the goal of being able truthfully to remember no longer the pain and injustice of the past.

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