The Indifference Engine: How to Profit While the World Burns (and Feel Nothing About It)

Christian Baghai
5 min readApr 8, 2025

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Missile hits a maternity ward in Ukraine. Baby’s dead. Mom’s screaming. Over in Manhattan, Chad the hedge fund guy sips his $9 oat milk latte and wonders if this will goose Lockheed Martin stock by 3%.

Welcome to the modern world, folks! Where suffering is streaming, bombs come with branding, and nobody with money gives a rat’s ass — unless that rat is tied to quarterly returns.

See, this isn’t just some billionaire being an asshole. This is the system working exactly as intended. Capitalism isn’t broken. It’s not “failing.” It’s running hot, slick, and clean — like a chainsaw through a preschool. And the guys holding the chainsaw? They’re wearing suits, getting tax breaks, and calling it innovation.

So let’s break this down, shall we? Let’s peel the smug, Botoxed face off the profit machine and see what’s really under the hood.

🧠 I. The Profiteer: Sociopaths With Spreadsheets

You think capitalists are human like you? That they cry when they see kids blown to pieces on a playground?

Wrong. That’s inefficient. Empathy slows you down. It makes you hesitate. Can’t hesitate when you’re shorting defense contractors at 9:31 a.m.

These people have the emotional range of a f**king toaster. And that’s by design.

They don’t see faces.

They see line graphs.
They don’t hear screams.
They hear dividends.

They’ve outsourced morality like it’s customer service. “Sorry, your conscience has been transferred to another department. Press 9 to be morally vacant.”

📉 II. Philosophy for Billionaire Jackals

Let’s talk ideology. Because these people don’t just accidentally not care — they believe not caring is holy.

Ayn Rand

The high priestess of selfishness. According to her, caring about people makes you a loser. You know who wins? The guy who steps on everyone else’s neck, builds a rocket, and charges you rent for the oxygen you breathe.

Milton Friedman

He turned “f**k the world” into economic policy. The only job of a company is to make profit. Feed the homeless? Only if you can brand it and deduct it.

Nietzsche (but dumber)

“God is dead and so are food stamps.” That’s how they read him. These people think they’re Ubermenschen. Really, they’re just greedy assholes with PR departments.

🔁 III. The Infrastructure of Indifference

This system has been engineered to reward the kind of person who could watch Mariupol get flattened and say, “This could be a buying opportunity.”

  • The Market Is God.
    If the market says missiles are profitable, then f**k diplomacy.
  • Fiduciary Duty.
    That’s the capitalist word for “I’d love to care, but it’s literally illegal to grow a spine.”
  • Financial Abstraction.
    You don’t drop the bomb. You just fund the bomb. You index the bomb. You hedge the bomb. Somewhere, there’s a kid bleeding out next to their dead dog, and your ETF is up 2.3%.

“Not my problem,” says Chad, adjusting his Patagonia vest.

🔍 IV. Numbers > People

Capitalism 2.0 doesn’t even need people anymore.

  • You can’t monetize a dead child.
  • You can’t bundle despair into a bond.
  • But you can buy into surveillance tech that sells fear and facial recognition after the war.

See how this works?

Markets aren’t tools anymore — they’re oracles. They don’t advise — they command. If Raytheon stock goes up, that’s divine prophecy. If Exxon makes $8 billion during a climate apocalypse, that’s the Invisible Hand giving you the middle finger.

🧨 V. The Final Equation: Conscience < ROI

Here’s capitalism’s sacred formula:

  • Screaming mother = 0.
  • Cratered city = 0.
  • Unstable region = $$$.

If you can’t scale it, brand it, or sell it — it doesn’t matter. People aren’t people. They’re either customers, workers, or waste product.

Dead kids don’t move the needle unless you can use their corpse to justify more police drones or higher insurance premiums.

That’s the bottom line. Literally.

☢️ VI. The Optimized Sociopath

These aren’t “bad apples.” This is an orchard of monsters, bred in business schools, nurtured in think tanks, and unleashed on the world with PowerPoints and press releases.

They aren’t failing the system.
They are the system.
And the system loves them for it.

You don’t win a bonus for integrity. You win it for firing 10,000 people while increasing shareholder confidence.

🎯 VII. You and Me? We’re the Collateral

We’re not humans to them.

We’re clicks, churn, risk exposure, lawsuit probability, public opinion volatility.

You’re only valuable if your existence enhances Q4 earnings. Otherwise? You’re drag. You’re inefficiency. You’re a fking obstacle**.

They don’t care if you’re poor, sick, grieving, evicted, or dead.

Unless, of course, your death helps them close a contract.

🎬 Conclusion: The Collapse of the Moral Imagination

What we’re seeing — whether in Ukraine, Gaza, Flint, or Maui — isn’t a one-off. It’s the result of moral rot disguised as economic rationality.

You want to fix it? Then stop worshiping these ghouls. Stop pretending business school teaches wisdom. Stop mistaking market success for moral worth.

Because if we keep letting capital decide what matters, here’s what’s coming:

  • More war.
  • More exploitation.
  • More data points.
  • Less soul.

And while they sip their lattes on top of the ruins, you’ll be left wondering what happened to your dignity, your humanity, and your f**king planet.

So yeah — capitalism isn’t broken.

It’s just evil. With a logo.

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Christian Baghai
Christian Baghai

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