ON: The Root of All Evil

Money, money, money

Song of the Week: “Price Tag,” by Jessie J. - “The sale comes first and the truth comes second”

Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir Careless People received very little fanfare before it was published on March 11. In fact, nobody knew it was coming - not the librarians, reviewers, or rival publishers - until around 72 hours before publication. 

That unusual silence was very strategic: for seven years (2010-2017), Sarah Wynn-Williams was a high-ranking executive in global policy at Facebook.¹ Now, she’s a whistleblower, drawing attention to sexual harassment, corruption, and anti-democratic collusion at her former employer.  

Meta immediately took legal action, demanding that she stop promoting the book and that her publisher cease all sales. They claimed that the book was false and defamatory, and that Wynn-Williams was simply a disgruntled employee who was angry because she had been fired years earlier for “poor performance and toxic behavior.” 

They were partially successful: her publisher maintained its right to sell Careless People, but Wynn-Williams was not allowed to promote it. 

Of course, predictably, Meta’s actions backfired. Suddenly, everyone wanted to get their hands on a copy of what Rolling Stone called “the Facebook memoir Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t want you to read.” It debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and remained on the list for the next seven weeks. 

I, of course, am no exception. As soon as I heard about it I joined the hold list for one of the copies my local library was frantically ordering, and this week I stayed up late several nights devouring the memoir like it was a page-turning thriller. To be fair, it kind of is.

Just Business

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism traces Wynn-Williams’s trajectory from an idealistic New Zealand diplomat optimistic about technology’s potential for encouraging democracy and promoting progress to a jet-setting executive horrified by her own complicity in evil. 

The book takes its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel of idealism and excess The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy - they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made” (179). 

While Wynn-Williams is critical of many power players at Meta - including current head of global affairs Joel Kaplan, who she alleges sexually harassed her for years - the Tom and Daisy of her story are Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.²

Zuckerberg comes across as an thin-skinned, oblivious man-child: fixated on having fancier toys than other tech billionaires, wanting to be treated as a king without putting any effort into diplomacy, and so obsessed with winning that his employees intentionally lose to him at Settlers of Catan and Ticket to Ride. 

Sandberg is somehow worse: despite the fact that her 2013 book Lean In established her as a worldwide feminist voice, she is narcissistic and mercurial. Sandberg uses her female employees as unpaid labor and props for her press tours, sexually harasses them, and punishes them for daring to disagree without her or take time away for their families. 

Wynn-Williams describes one egregious example of Sandberg’s hypocrisy when several executives are flying on a private jet shortly after the 2017 Women’s March.

Sheryl picks over some fresh cut fruit that’s been arranged for her, still in her pajamas, which are silky and perfectly tailored. I breathlessly start to tell her about the history she missed while she slept. She looks bored immediately. I press on about the Women’s March, how people are marching everywhere, tiny towns, red states and blue, and not just in America. She cuts me off, changing the subject to her weekend plans, meeting up with friends, the possibility of going dancing sometime in the future, redecorating her ski house, something about her apartment in Los Angeles, and some story about her boyfriend Bobby and how he’s trying to buy a private jet or staff for a private jet or something. She seemingly could not care less…”What was she wearing?” Sheryl asks. I’m so relieved that she’s engaging that I don’t totally understand the question. I start to tell her about the pink hats that are showing up in marches all around the world. Sadie’s making eyes at me to stop.

 “No, no, not that,” she scolds. “What did Melania wear?” (295-6). 

While this behavior is repulsive and hypocritical, it pales in comparison to the damage that Sandberg and Zuckerberg do through Facebook itself. All they care about is their personal power, and Facebook’s endless expansion no matter the cost. 

Even as Wynn-Williams and her team attempt to work with world governments to improve access and limit the spread of misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, other teams secretly use their power to seek tax breaks or untapped markets no matter the ethical cost. 

Desperate to expand into China, Zuckerberg works for years with members of the Chinese Communist Party, building special software that will track users, report on their actions and conversations - including with non-Chinese citizens! - and censor pro-democracy activists. 

In an internal memo, the project’s leaders outline the pros and cons of handling much of this censorship in-house. The pro is that they will control more of the operations in China, and thus will maximize their profits.  

One of the cons? “Facebook employees will be responsible for user data responses that could lead to death, torture, and incarceration” (306).  

Ultimately, they conclude, they should push to do the censorship themselves. It’ll be more profitable.³

Meanwhile, in the United States, the team embeds a specialized advertising adviser in the Trump campaign, helping them create ads filled with inflammatory disinformation that target specific voter demographics.⁴

They don’t just use targeted advertising for political purposes, either. In 2017, a document leaks internally revealing that the company’s Australian sales team is offering advertisers the power to specifically target teenage users of Instagram with beauty and weight-loss products when their messages or posting patterns reveal they feel “‘‘worthless,’ ‘insecure,’ ‘stressed,’ ‘defeated,’ ‘anxious,’ ‘stupid,’ ‘useless,’ and ‘like a failure’” (333). When the press hears the rumor, Facebook’s PR team lies outright about the tactic. Their Australian sales head is furious: they’re disavowing the best part of his pitch!

In another horrifying multi-year saga, Facebook rolls out a half-finished, buggy mobile version of the site for the people of Myanmar and then hires a single contractor in Ireland to moderate it. When Wynn-Williams and her team raise the alarm that people are using the app to share anti-Rohingya hate speech and coordinate violent attacks, she’s dismissed. She tries to hire a policy expert who can speak Burmese to help manage the situation; the hire is blocked by her boss, Kaplan, to punish her for resisting his advances.

Only a few months later, the Rohingya genocide takes place, with tens of thousands of people being raped and murdered, and hundreds of thousands displaced. Facebook, she reflects bitterly, was instrumental in enabling the violence.

Wynn-Williams admits, in retrospect, that she was willfully ignorant of some of Facebook’s evil, and that her persistent and naive belief she could change it for the better made her complicit in many of their actions.⁵

When she finally does try to take action - filing an official complaint against her bosses with HR - she is fired and forced to sign an NDA. Today, Wynn-Williams works as an international policy expert on ethical issues surrounding artificial intelligence. She has filed official documents as a whistleblower and written this memoir, she says, because she thinks that Meta’s enduring power both politically and as a major player in AI research makes them more dangerous than ever. She concludes: 

That’s what this company is, and I was part of it. I failed when I tried to change it, and I carry that with me. 

You’d hope that people who amass the kind of power Facebook has would learn a sense of responsibility, but they don’t show any signs of having done so. In fact I see the opposite. The more they see of the consequences of their actions, the less of a fuck Mark and Facebook’s leadership give. Instead of fixing these things, this ongoing suffering they caused, they seem indifferent. They’re happy to get richer and they just don’t care. It feels crude to put it that way, but it’s true. They profit from the callous and odious things they do. Which seems so crazy. They could’ve tried to fix these things and still been insanely rich and powerful. They were in the rare situation where the money was there in abundance. They could have afforded to do the right thing. They could have told the truth. They could have exercised basic human decency. It was all within their power. Instead, they focused on commencement speeches, vanity political campaigns, vacation properties, raising artisanal Wagyu beef from macadamia-eating cows, whatever their latest plaything was. 

And it seemed that none of these choices, these decisions, these moral compromises, felt particularly momentous to Facebook’s leadership. 

They didn’t seem to lose sleep over any of it. 

It’s simply what they did day-to-day. 

Just business. (373-4) 

The Ethics of Greed

Midway through reading Careless People, I had a bit of an emotional meltdown. I use Facebook Messenger every day to communicate with my family, and I’ve been documenting memories and building relationships with acquaintances for thirteen years on Instagram. It’s where I keep in touch with former classmates, share my hobbies, and make new friends. Am I complicit in this evil? Is everyone who has a Facebook or WhatsApp or Instagram account? 

“It’s like a cancerous monster whose tendrils have penetrated every relationship and experience in our lives for the last two decades,” Taylor said when I talked to him about it. 

The truth is, I don’t know how to react. Because Facebook isn’t the only sinister company run by greedy, selfish people who only care about their own power and wealth. Even if you quit Amazon Prime and refuse to buy anything from the e-commerce giant, an enormous portion of the internet runs on Amazon Web Services. Google, Apple, and Microsoft - the other three in the “Big Five” aren’t much better. Brick-and-mortar stores, transportation companies, utility providers, and product manufacturers also treat cruelty, greed, and exploitation as a matter of course. In late stage capitalism, it is nearly impossible to live your life separate from companies acting unethically. 

I’m reminded of a scene in the supernatural comedy The Good Place, where the characters realize that the simple act of buying someone flowers (say, for Mother’s Day this weekend!) has such complex and negative effects compared to centuries ago.

“Every day, the world gets a little more complicated,” Michael concludes, “and being a good person gets a little harder.” 

Of course, those decisions get a lot easier if you decide that money is your ethical North Star, and having as much of it as possible is your primary purpose. If all you care about is getting richer, you can take any action and not lose an hour of sleep over it. Your profits are their own justification.

In Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (2025), journalist Katherine Stewart examines the unholy alliance of tech oligarchs and libertarian business owners, populist conspiracy theorists, right-wing philosophers, and Christian nationalists who have been working for decades to control the United States. 

The book is gripping, terrifying, and sometimes darkly funny; it may be the most important recent book in helping to understand our current political moment. 

Of course, a lot of the power players are driven by ideology: they’re white supremacists, or homophobes, or Christian dominionists like the Sons of Jacob in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). But another group - which Stewart dubs “The Funders” - are primarily motivated by greed. Some are familiar: the row of tech oligarchs who bought seats at Trump’s inauguration. Others are much more secretive.

The distinguishing feature of the Funders is that they have chosen to invest their fortunes in the subversion of democracy. Given their successes in business and the cultural power of money in America, they are often pictured, even by their critics, as masterminds overseeing an intricate and well-conceived plan to rule the world. I regret to report that they do not appear to be, on balance, geniuses. Too often, they operate on the basis of remarkably simplistic, reactionary ideas about politics and society. And they are dangerously wrong in their biggest idea - that destroying democracy is a means of creating wealth. (34-35)

The Funders are the ones who provide political candidates and lobbyist groups with the money necessary to buy those targeted Facebook ads, go on cross-country publicity tours, and influence legislation in their favor. They are willing to defund public education, clear cut National Parks, burn diplomatic bridges, and turn democracy into an oligarchy to make themselves even richer. And they do so by weaponizing the anger of working- and middle-class voters to elect candidates who will only exacerbate wealth inequality in the United States. 

It’s difficult to conceive of the scale of these people’s greed and power. 

So often when we talk about wealth there is an inability or unwillingness to distinguish between the comfortable lifestyle enabled by a career as a lawyer, doctor, or even entertainer, and the obscene, mind boggling wealth of these billionaires. That kind of wealth doesn’t happen as a result of education, hard work, or careful financial management. It only happens as a result of exploitation. 

TikTok user @realestatebulldog uses grains of rice to help visualize the difference.

“The American Dream,” he concludes, “has been stolen from you.” 

The scale of these oligarchs’ greed and power is unique to human history, but their priorities aren’t. From Ancient Egypt to to 18th century France to America’s own Gilded Age, people have always hoarded wealth at the expense of others. The carelessness and greed displayed by people like Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg is depressing, but it’s not surprising. 

No, what really pisses me off is when people say they’re doing it for Jesus.

Two Masters

Most of the power players in Money, Lies, and God claim to be Christians. So do Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and many prominent members of their administration. Fifty-six percent of all Christian voters voted for Trump, including 56% of Catholic voters and 78% of white evangelicals, driven by concerns over immigration and Trump’s promises of cheaper eggs. 

And yet, despite the fact that they so often claim to hold a monopoly on following God and the teachings of the Bible, the only thing these people truly worship is wealth. 

Jesus, the teacher who Christians take their name from and claim to follow, has nothing to say about abortion or homosexuality. He is utterly uninterested in claiming territory, establishing an empire, or exercising military might. What he does talk about constantly, however, is money. 

Two hundred and eighty-eight verses in the Gospels - 10% of all the recorded information about the life and teachings of Jesus - mention money, either directly or as a metaphor. 

Conservative Christian legislators and activists do everything in their power to reduce the amount of taxes that the wealthy are required to pay. Jesus tells his followers to “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s” (Mark 12:17) - in other words, to pay their taxes! 

Trump sells Trump-branded Bibles, and celebrity pastors like Joel Osteen and Carl Lentz use tithes and offerings to pay for designer clothes and private jets. Jesus flips tables and chases merchants out for turning the temple into “a den of thieves” (Matthew 21:13). 

Empowered and sanctioned by Trump, Elon Musk and DOGE have eviscerated programs that feed hungry kids, provide counseling for veterans, and improve healthcare at home and abroad in the name of saving money. 

“Do not store up for yourself treasures on earth,” Jesus warns, “where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (Matthew 6:19-21).

A few verses later, Jesus is even more blunt. “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”

People and Things

We may not all be billionaires, but we all have an influence on what our culture deems acceptable or unacceptable. What do we prioritize when we make our decisions? Who do we vote for? What do we teach our children? 

Recently, a University of Waterloo student got a co-op job at the Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify after a video pitching herself went viral. In a Reddit thread discussing the video, one commenter suggested that this wasn’t necessarily a win: the CEO of Shopify has been a vocal Trump supporter, despite Trump’s repeated threats to Canadian sovereignty and economic stability. A dozen people jumped in to defend her - and Shopify. “In this economy,” one wrote, “I don’t think anyone cares as long as they get a job.” 

I’m not linking to the video, because I don’t want to blame this student specifically. In a certain sense, that commenter is right: we all have to eat and pay for a roof over our heads. We all prioritize our own needs over the needs of others. We all make complex and uncomfortable choices based on calculations that change constantly. 

But does that mean we need to baptize necessary evils as aspirational, self-evident goods? 

The British fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett was a secular humanist, not a Christian, but I love the way he writes about sin in his novel Carpe Jugulum (1998):⁶

“Sin, young man, is when you treat people as things,” the witch Granny Weatherwax declares. “Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” 

“It’s a lot more complicated than that–” the priest she’s talking to protests. 

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

The Value of a Life

I read a third brand new non-fiction book in the last few weeks: John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis.⁷

While John is most famous for his young adult fiction and YouTube work, in the last few years he has become increasingly concerned with global health. He and his brother Hank run a business, Good.Store that donates all of its profits to help improve maternal health and tuberculosis treatment worldwide. John is also a board member for Partners in Health, a non-profit that works with healthcare providers in poor countries to make sustainable and culturally informed improvements to healthcare infrastructure. 

Everything Is Tuberculosis is a wide-ranging examination of the history of tuberculosis, a disease that has killed as many as 1 out of 7 humans who have ever lived, and still kills more than 1.25 million people each year. In 2023, TB killed more people than malaria, typhoid, and war combined. 

The connective thread that runs through the book, however, is the story of Henry Reider, a young TB patient in Sierra Leone who John met in 2019 while traveling with Partners in Health. Henry was cheerful, gregarious, and dying of drug-resistant TB. The friendship that John built with Henry over the years that followed is what inspired him to become an advocate for better worldwide TB treatment.⁸

One of the most infuriating things about contemporary TB, John writes, is that it is a disease of global inequality. Scientists developed effective treatments for the disease decades ago, which is why it is no longer a public health threat in rich countries. But those treatments are often not available in poor countries, because drug companies have made them too expensive. 

Danaher, for example, has developed a TB test that is both fast and extremely accurate in detecting drug-resistant TB. In distributing it, they have followed the business model of companies that sell razor blades or printer ink: they make the testing machine relatively inexpensive and the individual cartridges expensive. “In fact,” he writes, “Danaher CEO Rainer Blair once noted that GeneXpert provided ‘a razor-blade business model in a mission-critical application,’ as if bragging that the company’s profit is built around price gouging the world’s poorest countries and those who serve them” (139). 

John notes that, globally, allowing TB to run rampant doesn’t even make economic sense: cost-benefit analysis has demonstrated that every dollar invested in global TB treatment “yields $46 US in benefits” (139). 

But the economic equation is beside the point, he says. “People are not just their economic productivity. We do not exist primarily to be plugged into cost-benefit analyses. We are here to love and to be loved, to understand and to be understood. TB intervention is an exceptionally good global health investment, but that is not why I care about TB. I care about TB because of Henry.’” (141) 

John points out that, when we talk about what kind of treatment is “cost-effective,” we’re really talking about whose lives we deem worthy of saving. His brother Hank was diagnosed with cancer in 2023, and his (successful!) cancer treatment cost a hundred times that of the drugs needed to treat Henry’s drug-resistant TB.

My brother is my oldest friend, my closest collaborator, and his work has been transformative in many lives. I would never accept a world where Hank might be told, ‘I’m sorry, but while your cancer has a 92 percent cure rate when treated properly, there just aren’t adequate resources in the world to make that treatment available to you.’ That world would be so obviously and unacceptably unjust. So how can I live in a world where Henry and his family are told that? How can I accept a world where over a million people will die this year for want of a cure that has existed for nearly a century”? (155)

Faced with a world where people go hungry while others drink champagne on private jets, it’s easy to despair. It’s easy to lose faith when religious leaders steal from the poor so they can fill their pockets and their churches with gold. I don’t know if we have the power to completely dismantle structural injustice constructed and maintained by the rich and powerful. But we can refuse to worship the false god of money. We can fight to imagine a kinder and fairer world. 

Because here’s the thing. Henry did not die of tuberculosis. He had a mother who refused to abandon him and walked miles every day to bring him food and comfort. He had a doctor who staked his career and his own health on treating him. And, thanks to Partners in Health, Henry was the first person in Sierra Leone to receive a personalized cocktail of specialized drugs that allowed him to recover. 

Today, Henry is a university student. He’s a YouTuber who uses his platform to talk about tuberculosis, global wealth inequality, and everyday life in Sierra Leone. He is alive.

“Mere despair never tells the whole human story, as much as despair would like to insist otherwise,” John concludes.

Hopelessness has the insidious talent of explaining everything: the reason X or Y sucks is that everything sucks, the reason you’re miserable is because misery is the correct response to the world as we find it, and so on. I am prone to despair, and so I know its powerful voice; it just doesn’t happen to be true. Here’s the truth as I see it: Vicious cycles are common. Injustice and unfairness permeate every aspect of human life. But virtuous cycles are also possible. In fact, it is because of one that Henry is alive, and that others will live because of Henry. (166)

When it comes to the root of all evil, what should I add to my syllabus?

I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!

1. Now renamed Meta, and encompassing several incredibly powerful properties including Facebook, Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

2. Kaplan, incidentally, is close friends with Supreme Court Justice and rapist Brett Kavanaugh, and supported him throughout his hearings.

3. While Facebook has ultimately been unsuccessful in getting into China as a social media platform, it still makes more than $18 billion in ad revenue a year from Chinese companies.

4. They offered a similar service to Hilary Clinton’s campaign. She refused.

5. She also has a practical reason for staying put despite her misgivings: as a New Zealand citizen and mother of two who experiences severe complications during both births, she is reliant on Facebook for her work visa and her health insurance.

6. Seize the jugular vein. It’s a novel about evil vampires who suck the life force from others to enrich themselves. Complete fantasy, obviously.

7. I have also, coincidentally, been feeling pretty cynical and bummed. As my friend Craig quipped this week, “I think I’d be a bit worried if you weren’t depressed after basically going on an extended ‘global human exploitation’ research bender.”

8. Henry is also the name of John’s son, a fact that immediately bonded him to the young man.