Review

Comment

Morality

23 November 2023

7 min read

Sam Bankman-Fried: doing the math on morality

The calculated character and philanthropy of crypto-criminal Sam Bankman-Fried is analysed by Krish Kandiah, who finds it doesn’t to add up.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Sam Bankman-Fried at a crypto-conference, 2021.

Cointelegraph, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Going Infinite, Michael Lewis’ biography of Sam Bankman-Fried, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire is quite the compelling read.

For a start Lewis has an incredible ability to explain complex economic and business scenarios in a way that is not only accessible, but also gripping. It is no wonder his previous books have been turned into Hollywood blockbusters.

Lewis also has a knack for finding the humanity in almost any given situation. Whether he is writing about the system for picking a world-beating baseball team, the global economic crisis or, in this case, the rise and fall of a cryptocurrency exchange, he delves deep into the characters at the heart of the stories, exposing their strengths and weaknesses, their struggles and values.

The publication of Going Infinite last month also coincided with Bankman-Fried’s real time court case, ending in a guilty verdict for, in the words of US attorney Damian Williams, “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history – a multibillion-dollar scheme designed to make him the king of crypto.”

This fraud centred on Sam Bankman-Fried’s company FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange. It emerged as one of the largest in the world with billions in deposits. All helping Bankman-Fried, aged just 29, to become recognised by Forbes magazine as the 41st richest American.

For all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other.

My personal interest in the man behind the fraud was shaped by three things. Firstly, as an adoptive and foster parent of two children who are on the autistic spectrum, I was interested in what Lewis would say about the common speculation that Bankman-Fried is also on the autistic spectrum.

I was also intrigued by Bankman-Fried’s philosophical approach to philanthropy and how Lewis would present the problems with the movement known as Effective Altruism.

Finally, I was interested in just to what extent Bankman-Fried’s commitment to mathematical algorithms overshadowed his moral awareness, given that it may well ultimately result in a sentence of 100 years behind bars.

Autism

Lewis invites us into as much of the inner world of Bankman-Fried as he can. He writes about his loneliness in childhood and his struggles with social conventions, for example. One particularly powerful moment is when we are allowed to eavesdrop on a video call with Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Bankman-Fried cannot do the call without simultaneously playing a video game. He doesn’t want to see Ms Wintour’s face while she is speaking and only looks at her when he is speaking.

While Lewis readily points to traits that are commonly associated with people on the autistic spectrum – Bankman-Fried’s struggle to comply with social norms and difficulties understanding facial expressions, for example – he avoids using the term “autism”.

It seems that Bankman-Fried himself is aware of his neurodivergent traits and is not afraid to talk about the way they impact his emotional and existential intelligence.

At one point he writes to his girlfriend:

“I don't feel happiness. What's the point in dating someone who you physically can't make happy?"

He went on to say:

“In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul”

I found statements like these hard to read, but insightful. As a culture we are growing in our understanding and appreciation of a range of areas of diversity, however this has yet to be robustly applied to enable both widespread social acceptance and self-acceptance. The fact that Lewis chooses not to use the term autism may be a symptom of this.

Altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried was a very visible member of the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. EA is a fascinating philosophical approach to philanthropy which challenges individuals to consider their lives in terms of maximising their resources for the benefit of the world. Bankman-Fried’s answer to the question “How can I do most good with my life?” was to plan to earn a very large sum of money, ideally an infinite sum of money, that could then be used to help solve huge global issues such as the threat of nuclear war or another global pandemic.

There are many criticisms of the EA movement, and, Lewis explores several of them during the course of the book. Perhaps most obviously, for all Bankman-Fried’s (and his friends’) talk of altruism, they weren’t very good at being nice to each other. In fact, there was a major falling out between the effective altruists at his first company Alameda Research where half of the employees left because of his leadership style. Charity, it seems, did not begin at home.
It is also unclear how much money Bankman-Fried actually gave away to philanthropic causes. And it is alleged that just a month after FTX collapsed, the company even began trying to claw back the charitable donations it made. According to direct messages on X with journalist Kelsey Piper, Bankman-Fried agreed his ethically-driven approach was "mostly a front".

"Some of this decade's greatest heroes will never be known," he wrote to Piper, "and some of its most beloved people are basically shams."

The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is uncertain whether Bankman-Fried had good intentions at all or whether the lure of billions of dollars became so irresistible that whatever virtue once existed was sacrificed to vice.

There was another dark side to Bankman-Fried’s EA philosophy. He seemed to be fascinated by the question of just how far he could go in his calculations of trade-offs and risks in the supposed cause of saving the future of humanity? What was the highest risk he would take? What boundaries would he cross for financial gain? What would need to be sacrificed on the way? The quest to do good in the world seemed to have become more like a gambling obsession with Bankman-Fried, a game in which the ends justified the means.

Automatism

Sam Bankman-Fried was not afraid to be honest about his struggles to process and express empathy in socially acceptable ways. He once said:

"There's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake.”

However, what he seemed to struggle with in empathy, he apparently tried to make up for in logic. The following example is helpful.

Lewis records that Bankman-Fried saw Donald Trump as an “existential risk” to democracy and good governance and decided the best way to remove the threat was to offer to pay him not to run for president—an idea Trump was reportedly open to.

“His team had somehow created a back channel into the Trump operation and returned with the not terribly Earth-shattering news that Donald Trump might indeed have his price: $5bn. Or so Sam was told by his team,” Lewis writes.

I have some admiration for Bankman-Fried’s out-of-the-box thinking. He was speaking Trump’s language. He was trying to save the world. He was trying to solve a problem. Logically it was sound. But his $5,000,000,000 calculation was fundamentally flawed. It took no account of democratic values, of the consequences of feeding an ‘existential threat’ billions of dollars, or the illegality of bribery and corruption on that scale.

The same miscalculation haunts the EA movement. While earning infinite amounts of money to save the world or prevent the climate emergency sounds logical, it fails to factor in the dark side of humanity: greed, lust, pride or gluttony, or whichever vice stopped Bankman-Fried from giving away his promised sizeable sum of money and led him rather to committing one of the largest frauds in history. The tech-bro altruistic movement also doesn’t factor in the bright side of humanity: compassion, humility, generosity, sacrifice. It doesn’t account for the human things that keep us going as we pursue justice - proximity to the people we are serving, faith or beauty.

The verdict against Bankman-Fried shows us that hard logic, like lofty ideals, is not enough to protect us from the bad we might do or propel us unswervingly towards the good we should do. The equations are flawed. We are more than machines. We are not social or biological robots. Our emotions and reactions can never be completely predictable or automatic because we are human beings, each of us with our unique strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately, this is what I liked about Lewis’ book – his portrayal of Sam Bankman-Fried not in terms of how much money he made, or how many years he will spend behind bars, not as Crypto-King or Lord of Frauds, but as a uniquely talented and flawed individual who wrestles with some of the biggest existential paradoxes, and who is still, by the way, only 31 years old.

Article

Belief

Church and state

Comment

Politics

6 August 2025

6 min read

Danny Kruger, Christian values, and the dangers of thin religion

Thick or thin? Christianity’s role in Britain’s cultural crossroad

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

A backbench MP stands in an almost empty chamber and speaks

Danny Kruger addressing Parliament.

Parliament TV.

In case you hadn’t noticed, a speech given to an audience of about seven people in a sparse House of Commons recently went viral. Danny Kruger’s recent call for a Christian restoration in the UK has generated a lot of attention.

I've noticed two distinct responses in recent days. On one side, there are three (or more) cheers for Danny. He has been interviewed at Christian festivals, lauded for a brave, deeply considered and soulful appeal to the Christian heritage of the nation. He has been thinking deeply about this for some time as demonstrated in his book Covenant, sometimes seen as a manifesto for a renewed Conservatism based around the claims of family, community and nation, and summarised in this Seen & Unseen article. As one of the most prominent voices against the recent bills to permit assisted dying and the termination of full-term embryos, he is clearly reeling from the impact of these devastating recent votes in the Commons that, more than anything else, seem to demonstrate how far the nation has slipped its Christian moorings.

Yet it’s not hard to stumble across another reaction. A former Bishop of Oxford called Kruger’s claim that the UK was a Christian nation anachronistic and counter-productive. Others have pointed out that many Jews, Muslims or hardened atheists would not be delighted to be told that ‘it is your church and you are its member.’ Others question whether there can be such a thing as a 'Christian nation'.

Some have picked up on a darker side to all this. Recent riots outside hostels for immigrants in Rotherham and Norwich showed protesters carrying flags of St George, even brandishing a wooden cross. Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson, and Nigel Farage have recently been speaking much more openly about the ‘Christian values’ on which Britain is founded, and many on the extreme right seem to have latched onto Christianity as at the heart of what they see as a cultural, civilisational war. Kruger’s talk of the gap left by Christianity’s demise being filled by Islam and, what worries him more, a kind of ‘wokeism’ that blends ‘ancient paganism, Christian heresies and the cult of modernism’, sets up a stark opposition. He goes on: “That religion, unlike Islam, must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine. It must be banished from public life.” Does that language stray a bit too close to the aggressive language of more extreme voices on the right?

Now I have some sympathy with this. I have written before of how I also fear the pagan gods are making a return. Like Danny Kruger, I too believe the recent votes in the House of Commons are a dark and dangerous turn toward death not life. Yet I can’t shake a nervous feeling that, without some careful thought, we might be summoning up shades we might not be able to control.

The signs – and the solution - lie in the past. For centuries, Christianity, like all other religions, has been used as a weapon in civilisational wars. It happened in the Crusades of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. It happened in the Balkan wars involving Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia in the 1990s and 2000. It happened in the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, where your neighbour being Protestant or Catholic was a reason to kill them.

Theologians and sociologists sometimes talk of ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ religion. ‘Thin’ religion is simply a badge of identity. It often blends religion, politics and nationalism and serves as a motivation to unite people around a cause, such as Hindu nationalism, Muslim victimhood, or Christian supremacy. It is religion seen purely as a label, a badge of tribal identity over against other religious identities, however deeply felt. It is often nostalgic, ranged against enemies who are determined to destroy it, denigrating those who are not part of the religion as less deserving of value. It sees the Christian god as one of many gods – our god – which we must fight for against other gods, rather than, as Christian theology has always taught, the one true God who sits above all other gods, the God of the whole earth. It is paradoxically a manifestation of the kind of the kind of culture that Danny Kruger hates: “a return to the pagan belief that your value is determined by your sex, race or tribe.” Tommy Robinson’s faith seems as good an example of this as any. This is ‘thin’ religion.

I propose a simple test. If someone advocates Christian values and regularly goes to church, then they have a legitimate voice.

‘Thick’ religion, however, is different. It is not just a badge of identity, but entails a set of distinct beliefs and practises. It means submitting yourself to the disciplines of the faith. In the Christian context, it a belief in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that Jesus is the Son of God, that he died for the sins of the world, rose again on the third day and will return one day to judge the living and the dead. It involves a serious attempt to live the Christian life, to love your neighbour, and even your enemy, helping the poor and vulnerable, praying regularly, being consistently present at church worship and so on.

Christian hymns have always had a fair amount of militant imagery, from ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ to ‘Fight the Good Fight’, and more contemporary ones about God ‘fighting our battles’. Yet this has always meant a serious fight against enemies within – pride, greed, anger and spiritual lethargy. When it became focussed on human enemies, as it did in the Crusades, a line was crossed from ‘thick’ into ‘thin’ religion.

It's not always easy to tell the difference between those who adopt thick and thin Christianity. I propose a simple test. If someone advocates Christian values and regularly turns up at church, then they have a legitimate voice, and are worth a hearing. If they turn up weekly to hear the Bible being read, to take part in Holy Communion alongside other people, regardless of their ethnicity, wealth or background, pray regularly, then, we can assume, they are serious about it. They are submitting themselves to the discipline of learning Christian faith, seeking to love their neighbour and trying as hard as they can to love their enemies. They may fail from time to time but these are the signs of someone who has grasped the grace of God which is the heart of Christian faith. Danny Kruger passes that test. Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage, as far as I know, don’t.

If some shout loudly about Christian values, about the danger of losing the heritage of our civilization and yet show no interest in going to church, living the Christian life, praying or even trying to love their enemies, then we should take what they say with a large pinch of salt. They have no skin in the game.

When the heart of Christianity is hollowed out, it becomes moralism. It becomes the law not the gospel, as Martin Luther would say. The cross literally becomes a stick to beat others with. Paradoxically, it is only ‘thick’ religion that ends up founding and changing cultures. Early Christianity, the kind that converted the western world, was definitely ‘thick’ religion. It was not just a badge of identity. It had a whole set of distinct beliefs and practices that marked Christians off from the pagan world around them. It did not set out to advocate for political causes in the power corridors of Rome, build a Christian civilisation, lobby Caesar for ‘Christian laws’. It set out to produce people with ‘a sincere and pure devotion to Christ’ as St Paul put it, loving God, neighbour and enemy. And they changed the world by accident.

Thin religion is a dangerous thing. It uses religion as a tool for dominance and conflict. It makes sceptics think we need less religion in public life. Thick religion is good religion. It forms good people. It builds healthy societies. It’s the kind we need more of, not less.

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