Fighting Evil by Becoming Evil

Mr Holdsworth looks at the recent GameStop short squeeze on Wall Street.

 like many of you, I’ve been watching with interest what’s been going on but if you aren’t up to speed, I’ll try to summarize what little I understand about it.

I think it’s safe to say, that most people hold Wall Street Bankers in very low moral regard, so when anyone scores a win against them, most people cheer. Something like that seems to have been happening over the past few days. The simple explanation is, a group of independent, we might call, “little guy”, investors got together though a group or a subreddit on the social networking site, reddit. And they hatched a plan to exploit a common investment practice used by hedge fund billionaire types which is itself, considered exploitative. So, they all committed to investing in an unlikely and low value stock and coordinated their effort it would skyrocket in value against the expectations of the hedge fund managers which means they would get caught unaware and lose billions in the process. And that’s what seems to have happened so far. So queue everyone from the left, the right, and the mainstream media cheering on as the rich finally feel some pain, or so the narrative claims.

And in my curiosity to understand what was going on, I thought I’d jump onto Reddit to see how this happened and how it’s currently unfolding, from the source itself. And what I found in the group in which this whole scheme found its genesis, was pretty much what you’d expect. It’s a lot of us against them rhetoric, a lot of people getting swept up in the moment, acting on adrenaline, and cheering each other on as they continue to do battle with the Wall Street Billionaires. And while the rest of us may cheer them on, there was something revealing in the way that these Redditors described themselves and their adversaries that is reminiscent of a problem that seems to reemerge every time people try to overthrow unjust powers. What I saw in those threads was a lot of malice and hatred directed towards their adversaries, in this case, Wall Street Banker types. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t find that difficult to understand. There are people in there sharing stories about how their families and their lives were ruined by Wall Street in the 2008 crisis. So, for many, it’s personal and it’s easy to sympathize with. What I think is worth exploring is whether this approach is productive in reducing the evils that we perceive in the world or whether it just replaces the evil we oppose with more of the same evil.