I told you I was trouble
I'm going to talk a lot about Mad Men and a little about public choice theory.

In the most recent episode of Mad Men, the ad agency picks up a new product - a women's weight-loss belt that supposedly slims by creating vibrations that simulate calisthenics. Draper gives the belt to his secretary, Peggy, and asks her to try it out and report her thoughts on it. Peggy quickly learns that this vibrating girdle is probably popular with women for reasons other than weight loss. She tentatively explains this to Draper, who blurts it out to a conference room full of ad agents (all men) later in the day. While Peggy's standing at the front of the room, presenting her report.

None of them say a thing to her about it, of course. They josh about it for a minute or so ("I guess we're out of a job", "hey Bill, didn't you say your wife had one of these?"), typical locker-room banter. They even congratulate her on giving a good presentation. But all you, the viewer, need are two shots: one of the men swinging back and forth in their rotating chairs, laughing and slapping each other, and one of Peggy, standing alone at the head of the table, looking down awkwardly at the papers in front of her.

I take from this two things: one, the incredible technical mastery that Mad Men has displayed, in its writing, editing and cinematography, in recent episodes. Second, how it's possible for an institution to have malicious effects without a single person in it having malicious intentions.

The grandest unspoken tension in Mad Men is the tension between men and women. Every now and then someone will say something incomprehensibly crass, but for the most part there's no active, evil repression - no fat white men with cigars sitting around a conference table, plotting on How To Keep The Bitches In Line. It's just guys sitting around a lunch table, mourning that Draper's new girl has started to let her figure go. It's just a boozing old ad exec thinking he's putting his secretary's mind at ease when he tells her that she's "the finest piece of ass [he's] ever had." It's just Don Draper, telling his secretary to "act like a man" when she timidly asks for a raise. None of them think they're being insulting. Hell, all of them are probably convinced they're being charitable. They have a very clear, subconscious view of what a Man's Duty is and what a Woman's Duty is, and the Woman's is to Look Good and Stay Quiet. And there's an entire institution - the corporate world, the dynamics of courtship and marriage - that supports them.

And that, I think, is the real tragedy (and why Mad Men is such a heavy show). Evil people you can deal with. Evil people can be caught, exposed and tried for their crimes. But an institution isn't run by an evil person. It isn't run at all. It's a network of interactions that have been blessed by tradition. It's habits multiplied by people multiplied by time. And you can't change an institution until you change all three of its factors.

Whenever someone singles out George W. Bush as everything that's wrong with America, or the Pope as responsible for hamstringing sexual education in the Third World, or the Federal Reserve as the villain behind global recessions, I have to sigh in a tired way. There is no conspiracy. There is no arch-villain. There's no one guy running the show. Bush, Benedict and Bernanke happen to be the executives or figureheads of large institutions - big machines that existed for centuries before they were born and will run for decades after they die. They only got as "bad" as they did because they were raised in a world that rewards the wrong things.

An institution is not one thousand people all conspiring to do evil. An institution is one million people with no incentive to do good.