It wasn’t all their fault

Bankers are feeling the psychological brunt of being world-wide hate targets

I’ve worked as a psychologist in investment banking for over 14 years, dealing with the top institutions, with men and women from all corners of the globe.

Although I am based in London, I spend over half of my year in Mumbai, New York, Singapore and London. This week, I’ve been in contact with many bankers, and each session has concentrated on a “horrendous level of hate and ignorance” directed at them in the press. These ‘fat cats’ who have allegedly created ‘casino capitalism’ aren’t the only ones being affected; so too are their wives, partners and children, in social situations and in the school playground. 

Does any group in society deserve this  sort of hatred and name-calling? Are we merely casting our own greed aside and displacing a convenient target?

Each banker in my sessions has insisted that blaming the current demise of global financial systems on bankers and bankers alone reduces a complex and ethically clouded situation to the levels of a ridiculous cartoon.  As one furious banker put it, “So it all boils down then to greedy bankers in their Ferraris screwing it up for the little guy”. 
This particular banker drives a modest car, lives in a small apartment, takes his children to cricket practice and plays the drums. Like many, he may lose his now worthless retirement savings, and he has no pension to secure his home and his family’s future.

Of course, if you are a banker who is now unemployed, your focus is on your immediate security needs: seeing head-hunters and re-mortgaging your property, yet the distaste of the negative caricatures is nevertheless hurtful.

What is happening now at a popular level is that critics of the banking system disown any examples of their own greed in the past in favour of projecting general hatred in the direction of the Unknown Banker. When you read about the accusations of selfish ‘casino capitalism’ ask yourself honestly, how different are these people to those who tune into Who wants to be a Millionaire or Kaun Banega Crorepati on television?
Sigmund Freud has taught us that everything we do and say is rich in complexity and that all of us are riven with contradictions; he would say, that every human being is an unflagging drama of desire and dependence with a good dose of greed and misery thrown to complicate matters.

How can we blame bankers for their greed, when we ourselves are caught up in excess: obsessed with building more shopping malls, bridges with no rivers, and mindlessly purchasing larger apartments as though financial wealth equates with personal happiness? Freud said that what we hate most in others is ultimately what we hate in ourselves. The portrayal of bankers as ruthless greedy individuals is a part of ourselves we wish to disown.

To cast the investment banking world and the players in it as some sort of homogenous entity is as ludicrous as saying all Italians in Italy listen to opera and eat cheese. Like any community, there are the good guys and villains. The numbers of bankers earning these reported excessive earnings are in the minority. By virtue of the banker’s role in the economy they are linked to the boom/bust cycle of capitalism, and therefore live in the realistic expectation that bonuses will vary greatly from year to year. 

One of the reasons I chose to carve out a career with this industry is the opportunity to work with some of the smartest, hard-working, creative and motivated individuals I am likely to encounter. When they come to see me, they don’t just want to become better leaders or traders, they want to be better people. One banker told me that his eight year old son was accused in the playground at school of having a father who was going to make lots of people lose their jobs.

Hate is always dangerous and no crisis in history has ever been turned around by hate or collective illusion. The global financial meltdown requires us to work together, across our crude stereotypes and comfortable ghettos, using that beautiful human skill called thinking. We cannot afford to be unconscious. A profoundly systemic problem such as this requires systemic solutions and those only come from people joining rather than dividing. By attacking bankers, we not only undermine and distract a critical group that can enable positive change, we also take our own eye off the target with our indulgent name-calling, rather than fixing what is a huge social problem that affects us all.  We must put ourselves in another’s shoes, even if they aren’t the same as the boots you wear and a tad uncomfortable.

Right now, pointing a finger in the eye of a banker will make the whole world blind.
The writer is a psychologist