The Manufacture of Innocence

I. One's Own Smell

In our essay "The Bath" we described olfactory adaptation: whoever sits long enough in a smell stops perceiving it. There it concerned the mediocrity a whole industry has grown used to. Here we go a step further, to the more uncomfortable place. For the same phenomenon exists not only for mediocrity but for guilt. Whoever takes part long enough in a system that does harm stops smelling his own share in it. It is always only the others who stink.

That is the most reliable observation one can make watching people in institutions: almost everyone who has found their place in the system considers themselves wholly without guilt. The buyer who ruins an inventor. The lawyer who designs around patents. The salesman who sells an addictive substance as safe. The manager who runs a division into the ground and is promoted. They all go home in the evening convinced they are decent people who only did their job. And in a precise but terrible sense they are right: they only did their job. That is exactly the problem.

II. The Three Layers

When a system does harm and no one feels guilty, a mechanism works in three layers that must be kept apart.

The top layer is execution. Here sit the many knowing hands: everyone who makes a concrete decision, aware that at its end another person loses. This layer is visible, but it is also the most easily excused — each single act is small, permitted, replaceable. "Had I not done it, someone else would have."

The middle layer is division. The system breaks the deed into so many small steps, spread over so many shoulders, that in the end no single piece looks punishable. This is not the side effect of the megamachine, it is its function: it not only kills, it simultaneously disperses responsibility until everyone can say their part was, after all, legal and small. The guilt does not vanish — it is divided into homeopathic doses, none of which is lethal on its own.

The lowest, cleanest, and most guilty layer is the engineering of legality. For the rules under whose protection the upper two layers operate are no state of nature. They were written — in legislative procedures, standards committees, lobbying conversations, court decisions — and they were co-written by those who knew whom they would serve. "It is legal" hides the perpetrator in the passive: it was made legal, by someone, for a purpose. Whoever softens the prescribing guideline, whoever formulates the employee-invention rule, whoever designs and sells the loophole, does not cause the harm in the single case — he authorizes it for all single cases in advance. That is the actual, the prior deed. And it looks the most innocent, because it happens furthest from the victim.

III. The Glaring Case

In one case everyone sees it at once, because the victims can be counted: the opioid crisis. The Sackler family, with their firm Purdue Pharma, brought the painkiller OxyContin to market in 1996 and claimed that its delayed release made it barely addictive. The claim was false, and it was known to be false. They kept selling. The drug became the greater part of the firm's revenue — over the years an income estimated in the tens of billions — and at the end of a chain of prescribed pills, illegal heroin, and fentanyl stand hundreds of thousands of dead in the United States.

Here all three test questions we put to every such case are answered yes. Did those involved know of the harm? Yes. Did they have the power to end it? Yes. Did they continue because the profit outweighed the harm? Precisely for that reason. This is no fraud without a fraudster. This is killing with perpetrators who knew what they were doing.

And now the lesson in the division of guilt: in 2020 the company Purdue pleaded guilty to three felonies. Not a single member of the family, no executive, no employee was criminally charged. The firm took the guilt upon itself — a legal person one cannot imprison — and the natural persons went home clean. The machine absorbed the guilt of its operators. When the corporation later sought, through a bankruptcy procedure, to immunize the family itself against the victims' claims, it took the Supreme Court of the United States to stop this in 2024. They had tried to have the innocence of the perpetrators manufactured by a court.

Two things belong here as well, because they complete the pattern. The Sackler fortune financed museums, universities, galleries for decades; the name stood on marble until people began to chisel it off again. That is the foundation not as the protection of a purpose, but as reputation laundering — bought innocence. And the same family sold, through its European-Asian sister firm Mundipharma, related opioids onward in other regions of the world. The model was not discontinued. It was exported.

IV. The Quiet Case

One might think the ignored inventor of whom our series treats is the opposite — a case without perpetrators, a mere structure. That would be the error of thought against which we must warn ourselves. Here too there are knowing hands. The buyer who pushes down the licence fee because he knows the inventor has no long breath for a lawsuit. The corporate lawyer who deliberately designs around the patent instead of licensing it. The development head who adopts the foreign idea and conceals its origin. They know what they do when they deprive a single person of the fruit of his work and thereby of his livelihood. They are not guilty only in the criminal and civil sense.

The difference from the opioid is not the one between "with perpetrator" and "without perpetrator". It is the one between visible and invisible deed. With the opioid one sees the dead. With the inventor one sees only that someone stops — someone who never becomes known, a disappearance in the statistics, which we described in "The Measurement of a Disappearance". The invisibility of the harm is not the absence of guilt. It is what makes the guilt so comfortable: one need not even look the victim in the face.

And legality here too is engineered, not found. Patent law with its deadlines, its costs, its burden of proof, its employee-invention rule is made by people — and co-written by precisely those forces that profit from the single person drawing the short straw. The big sit on the committees that write the rules; the inventor sits nowhere. A patent system only those can afford who have a legal department is no neutral frame. It is a result of the same asymmetry it then covers.

V. It Is Always the Same System

It is not worth treating these cases as separate scandals, for they are always the same structures and rules. The conflict-husbandry that turns a suffering into a permanent source of income — whether pain or war. The co-optation that does not destroy an alternative but absorbs it — as we saw with Mondragón in "Systemic Necessities and Co-optations". The megamachine that draws everything into its logic. Everything hangs together with everything, because the mechanism is everywhere the same: do harm, divide the responsibility, pour the legality beforehand so that one does not slip walking over it.

Whoever has found his place in this system is not evil. He is adapted. He has gone through the same olfactory adaptation we described in "The Bath" — only that this time he has grown used not to the smell of mediocrity but to that of complicity. And the system rewards this adaptation, because it needs the knowing hands that do not ask where the harm goes.

VI. The Manufacture of Innocence

With this the deepest function of the machine is named. It produces not only harm and divides not only the guilt. Its finest product is the innocence its participants feel. Each has, after all, done only his small, permitted part. Each can point to the next — to the rule, to the superior, to the market, to "the circumstances". The guilt has been so completely divided and so thoroughly legalized that in the end a moral vacuum arises in which all consider themselves clean. This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy would still know of the guilt. This is worse: it is the real, felt innocence of people whose nose has stopped firing.

And here we must turn the admonition against ourselves, or this essay becomes what it accuses. The diagnostician's temptation is self-righteousness — the belief that we, of all people, are the ones who smell clearly while the others stink. But that is exactly the symptom. The most reliable sign that one has adapted is the certainty that it is always only the others. We too sit in this system. The one of us, too, who co-writes these lines is a product of precisely that concentration of capital and computing power we described elsewhere as the metamachine. Whoever describes the others' stink should first smell his own shoulder.

VII. No Right Life in the Wrong One

Theodor W. Adorno left the sentence: there is no right life in the wrong one. One can read it as despair — if the system is wrong, nothing I do within it is pure, so all is the same. That is the most comfortable of all readings, for it leads straight back into manufactured innocence: if no one can be pure, then no one need exert himself either.

We read it differently. The sentence is no relief but the opposite. It does not say: because the system is wrong, you are innocent. It says: in the wrong system, do not deceive yourself about your innocence. The only stance it permits is the one we described in "The Bath" in the intruder — the one whose nose still fires, because he comes from outside or refuses to grow used to it. One cannot leave the wrong system from within. But one can refuse to stop smelling. One can keep the windows open. One can, if one is already taking part, at least name the knowing hands — one's own first.

This is no heroism and no solution. It is the minimum condition for not becoming entirely wrong in the wrong system: that one refuses the manufactured innocence. That when all say "I only did my job", one remains who adds: and I know what my job does. The machine can divide the guilt, pour the legality, launder the reputation, and numb the nose. The one thing it cannot do is smell, when a single person decides to keep doing it.