The ability to make accountability disappear seems to be one of the greatest tricks we've learned in modern society. You hit the nail on the head, this idea of setting an environment where criminal behavior is emergent is a great trick. If you do it right and the emergent behavior is revealed, you will always have the defense of "I did not intend for this to happen," deferring blame to complexity and other things outside one's control. Is there a handbook or something that outlines these types of tactics?
The broad concept here certainly isn't new, we could cite everyone from Richelieu to Machiavelli. But I think you're right about the systematic erasure of accountability being a more modern affliction, and I'm tempted to ascribe it to communication and data-handling technology. No matter how circuitous Henry II's "turbulent priest" comment was, he made an open-ended declaration to a specific audience, one loyal to him and full of military men. At best, people could say he ought to have known what would happen. At worst, he implied that inaction was treasonous and so his words had the force of an order. Which is not merely hypothetical; Henry was apparently condemned in his time by people who knew what he'd said.
These days, we've gotten much better at directionless provocations.
'Stochastic terrorism' was coined back in 2011 to describe mass media rhetoric which produces statistically-predictable violence from an unknown source. Where Henry spoke to his court and produced a murder by his knights, someone speaking online or on television can stir violence from someone they've never met, who will quite likely be the sort of person easily written off as "disturbed" or "not behaving rationally". The specific occurrence is accurately dismissed as unpredictable, without admitting that on average such actors will be exposed to the content.
Similarly, giving an employee a target creates an obvious expectation. If you direct someone to triple their sales in a month, they might tell you "I think that's impossible to do legally." If they then do it anyway, you lack plausible deniability even if you didn't instruct them to commit a crime. But today, you can punch a sales target into HR software and assign it, with no feedback channel, to 1,000 employees you'll never meet. Some will break the law, but when the whole thing goes Wells Fargo, you had no reason to know. If employees complain up the chain, the message can disappear or decay "between" layers, with no way to show that any one party knowingly concealed anything.
This seems to happen everywhere conspiracies and fraud used to operate. The "smoke-filled rooms" choosing political nominees get replaced with common-knowledge biases across donors and superdelegates. Price-matching means cartels get replaced with 'independent' but reciprocal high prices. Targeted bribery gets replaced with generalized expectations of favorable laws, post-retirement board seats, and so on. Honestly, the more surprising thing at this point is when people do make these things explicit and get caught.
> Honestly, the more surprising thing at this point is when people do make these things explicit and get caught.
I suppose the effort involved to insulate oneself from liability is eventually seen as an unnecessary burden when one is accustom to getting away with things. I imagine a thief on his first heist who has spent a great deal of time planning and plotting only to find that it was actually quite easy to pull off, the security wasn't nearly as strong as he expected. Maybe on the next heist he is less cautious, and on the next heist even less, until he gets to the point where he's casually strolling in wearing flip-flops and sunglasses and just takes what he wants. Of course this is when he gets caught and the news paper shows this ridiculous image of an offensively cavalier thief who is supposedly a great heister. Then the public is shocked how such a dope could be a great thief (where is his mask and great stealth), but they only know the lazy thief, not the thief when he was disciplined. The lazy or stupid thieves are the ones that get caught.
I don't think it is all that modern - see the infamous "rid me of this turbulent priest". As for a handbook likely not as it would be what turns a perfect crime to a convictible one.
In the old days a master was responsible for those under him. People were owned, they were not viewed as people with their own agency. Anything bad they did was treated as a sign that their master failed in disciplining them properly. With the increasing complexity of organizations, this idea of a high level boss bearing the entire responsibility for all of his underlings becomes unreasonable. We also have a different view of individuality now -- this particular development is modern. So I attribute this disappearing act of accountability to the increasing complexity of things and perhaps too much faith in individual autonomy. But I agree that people have always naturally tried to make accountability disappear, it's just that we are really really good at it now and the world is often too complicated to come to the bottom of any matter efficiently.
Good in principles for avoiding self creation of abusable situations but I'm not sure about in practice.
The problem is complexity creep really and there is little serious effort in "code maintenance". The law itself demonstrates such problems. The Justinian Code was one example of a famously successful refactoring and ironically its creator despite his talent was also very corrupt.
One ancient solution which probably wouldn't scale well with needed complexity was "reading of the laws" - a periodic reading aloud of all laws on the books and if any were forgotten and went unobjected to they were automatically repealed as essentially irrelevant.
Just hard limiting complexity isn't a very good solution given increased complexity of the world and scale it often ammounts to "if I can't understand it ban it". It is populistic and anti-intellectual and a bit of a meme - that what can be easily understood is better and what can't is worse. Except reality doesn't work that way - the main reason why we bother with extra complexity and difficult to understand fields is because it works better.
Needless complexity may be a good concept to define abusability but defining it is tricky just like pinning down Hollywood accounting - where do you formally draw the line between overmarketing and intentionally torpedoing profit margins without proof of intent?
Maybe no hard cap, but a soft one imposed by way of criminal liability up the chain for a pattern of illegal behavior at the bottom, even where the higher-ups didn't know and purportedly didn't intend it. Complexity and missing accountability and controls is then a direct personal threat to decision makers. Of course, we'd probably get bigger cover-ups.
It's worth noting, though, that Henry II was reviled for that remark. It may have replaced a reign-ending crime with a political outrage, but Henry was still barred from mass and otherwise held responsible for a predictable result.
The modern breakthrough seems to be ability to act without any direct action. Indirect communications mean that a speaker doesn't need any connection to the person whose action they're compelling, and mass communications mean that the threshold of explicitness drops from "reasonable person understands" to "someone is crazy enough to take this literally". Math-washing and automated systems make it possible to take a decision you can't explain and apply it to an unknown set of people. The result is everything from Wells Fargo fraud to legal systems that bill suspects for their own wrongful searches.
It's not a new thing, and that's worth remembering, but we seem to have gotten vastly better at it in the last few decades.
Maybe. The art of war may be a good candidate as well. It is all games of power in the end. The only twist in modern dealings is that you have to maintain an identity of innocence while doing nasty things, but I guess deception like this has always been a key part of warfare. We just have a greater focus on the innocence game than ever before. Then again, there has always been questions of piety and alignment with the greater good. Things just look different now, but they are the same old games. It's like we are adding different numbers and claim it to be entirely different from previous calculations, but in the end it's the same game, just different characters.
> Then again, there has always been questions of piety and alignment with the greater good.
The intresting thing is there's no specific source of "piety" in the religiously/ philosophically divided West. Even if someone's moral failings get exposed, currently, every devil has an advocate.
