In an article entitled, “One-Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society,” Kevin Roose reports on his experience of infiltrating a party for members of Kappa Beta Phi, “a secret Wall Street fraternity” (Roose, 2014). In writing a book about young Wall Street executives, the author was curious as to the behavior of older, successful Wall Street executives. When he learned of the exclusive fraternity for Wall Street executives, Kappa Beta Phi, he thought that he'd like to visit one of its meetings as a part of his research. This article reports on that experience and the author's conclusions based on the experience:
He was fortunate in crashing the party, and so he was able to observe the proceedings. It was an initiation party for new members who had to dress in female “drag.” As a part of the initiation, each new member alone or with another new member, took turns in performing a small skit or act. The acts were comical, but they also demonstrated a number of characteristics which rather shocked the author: To begin with, they often contained jokes about the financial “meltdown” which occurred in 2008 and afterwards in which millions of people lost their homes, personal savings, and/or retirement accounts. Other jokes were racist or homophobic, crude and insulting, and elitist for the “1 percent” (the super rich who were at the party) or at the expense of the 99 percent (who own virtually no wealth). Secondly, it was a celebration of wealth, power, and social and financial elitism which disregarded the fact that so much of the wealth had been the result of financial misdeeds, cheating customers, and government bailouts, of which the participants were all recipients.
Finally, Roose was discovered when he tried to take pictures, and he was thrown out of the party. In thinking and writing about this experience, Roose came to three significant conclusions: “The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality” (Roose, 2014). The participants demonstrated no guilt or responsibility for the creation of the circumstances which resulted in one of the worst financial depressions in modern times and hurt millions of people. “The second thing I realized was that Kappa Beta Phi was, in large part, a fear based organization” (Roose, 2014). By this, he means that there were commonly expressed in the skits and otherwise in the party's ideas and attitudes towards race, individual people, classes of people, and aspects of society which these same executive would not state in public as doing so would bring them personal and professional condemnation. Nevertheless, in private, they felt safe in expressing these ideas and attitudes to each other. Finally, he had the realization that, “many of these self-righteous Kappa Beta Phi members had surely been first-year bankers once. And in the 20, 30, or 40 years since, something fundamental about them had changed” (Roose, 2014). By this, he means that from rather idealistic young college graduates, the experience of wealth and power had corrupted these men, leaving them insensitive and crude despite their wealth and power.
Thus, for Roose, this party of the Well Street top executives came as a revelation of the world and lifestyles of the super rich: “When you’re a member of the fraternity of money, it can be hard to see past the foie gras to the real world” (Roose, 2014).
This was a very interesting article. It was very strong in its description of the negative things which the author observed at the party and in contemplation of it afterwards. It was strong in its conclusions based on the author's experience. It was weak in explaining and seeking to understand the points of view of the wealthy executives who were the participants in the party. However, of course, the objective of the article was to expose the behavior of these executives in private, away from the public eye, not to understand or analyze them psychologically.
The dominant emotion expressed in this article by the author is shock and surprise, shock and surprise that such wealthy and powerful men could be so crude and childish in their private behavior, shock and surprise that the powerful executives had and felt no fear in revealing to each other their prejudices and biases which, otherwise, are very anti-social and “politically incorrect,” shock and surprise at how unfeeling and unsympathetic they were to the millions of people that they hurt in some way or another.
As such, this reading is a very useful one for a course in Communication, Management, and Ethics because it provided interesting and instructive examples and analysis of these matters as they occur in the “real world.” It demonstrated clearly and graphically how the concepts of communication, management, and ethics were simply not a matter of concern for the executive in attendance at the party, but, in fact, these concepts were intended to be violated and flaunted in the antics of the financial executives. The point of view and opinions of the author in describing the events of the party and his conclusions about what he saw provided insight to the reader seeking to better understand the difference between the theory in a class of Communication, Management, and Ethics and the real thoughts and behavior of top business executives in the world they populate apart from academic theory. A comparison between the behavior, ideas, and attitudes of the top financial executives at the Kappa Beta Phi party and a simple code of ethics for business (Humbert, 2003) demonstrates the disparities which the author of this article discovered in his real-life experience.
References
Humbert, P.E. (2003). Top 10 principles for positive business ethics. Resources for Success.
Retrieved from: http://www.philiphumbert.com/Articles/10BusinessEthics.html
Roose, K. (February 18, 2014). “One-percent jokes and plutocrats in drag: What I saw when I crashed a Wall Street secret society. New York. Retrieved from:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html
