depravity

We've previously cited the vital increases of production via the division of labor and cooperative effort.  For a more primordial perspective the word “production” might better be replaced with “subsistence” or even “survival”.  Yet before addressing the dominant bearing money has on these fundamental means of sustaining human existence;  we should first note that (like it or not) both are social (others oriented) phenomenon.  So from conception to the casket ‘others’ are a very real life & death determinant.  The significance of this is greatly amplified when one considers that our ‘survival instinct’ or ‘will to live’ is persuasively rumored to be the most ingrained cardinal commander of our strongest impulsions.  The preceding will hopefully help account for a human propensity found in a quote I encountered just yesterday - namely:
    When I was seven years old, I was once reprimanded by my mother for an act of collective brutality in which I had been involved at school.  A group of seven-year-olds had been teasing and tormenting a six-year-old.  “It is always so,” my mother said.  “You do things together which not one of you would think of doing alone.”  ...  Wherever one looks in the world of human organization, collective responsibility brings a lowering of moral standards.  The military establishment is an extreme case, an organization which seems to have been expressly designed to make it possible for people to do things together which nobody in his right mind would do alone.
                -- Freeman Dyson, Weapons and Hope

Note that Dyson is suggesting that the same basic principle operant in a spontaneous episode involving a few seven-year-olds also applies to thousands of men in their prime totally immersed into a tightly controlled, highly regimented, patently propagandic environment.  Well to that I'd just have to say -- pretty perceptive!  Then there is that phrase of his.....