What with all the media tells us about concentration camps, sweatshops and migrant workers, corporations knowingly exposing their employees to toxic products or fouling rivers and communities with them, it is easy enough to wonder:

              What sort of human beings could choose, or even accept, to make a living abusing and killing other people in such a way? How can people be so cruel? How can such people live with themselves?

             And we hardly need the news and history books to set us to wondering. The other day I met a real-estate agent who had talked an old, single woman into selling her desirable house and property and buying a smaller place in a barren part of the county where no one was eager to live. His reward: commissions on both the sale and purchase. One of the most pernicious pollutants is the used motor oil that millions of ordinary individuals pour or allow to leach into the ground. I remember a colleague who, jealous of a writer working in our office, began telling the boss that in between tasks this writer was sneaking off to work on his essays. How many big and little stories we all could tell. And in moments of honesty each of us can certainly also recall when we have been the exploiting, polluting or backstabbing one.

            But in the midst of such thoughts let us not forget the beauty of the system, which is that the office rat does not think she is a good person, she knows she is one, and she would be glad to tell us why. She is not depriving a writer of a means of earning a living, but helping an important organization, helping a good boss, helping her other colleagues who, unlike the writer, are fully committed to their jobs.

             The slum landlord is proud that he is one of the few people willing to provide housing to the poor. Many who kill animals for sport and sport alone believe they are providing a valuable service, thinning animal populations, protecting farms, gardens and drivers on the highways, saving later animals from starvation. And like most people — like cigarette-company executives who support the arts, or the artist whose art work offends the residents of the city where it is displayed — the hunter doesn’t simply think he is providing a service, he wants to be thanked.

              An entrepreneur goes into the hills of some poor country and gives peasant families cash in exchange for their teenage daughters and sons. A monster, you might call him, ignoring how he is providing peasants the cash they need to get out of poverty, ignoring how he is providing thousands of European and American sex tourists a few hours of much-needed fun, ignoring how he is providing the children a chance to come to the big city and try to build a better life. Perhaps he adjusts the children’s schedules and loans them some money so they can go to school in their spare time. The beauty of the system is how it works for everyone.