I once knew—socially—a guy who served as a roaming CEO for a private equity firm. Basically they’d buy a company, and bring him in, and he’d fire a bunch of people. He was a hatchet man.

He was a really friendly guy, witty, caring, fun to hang out with. Once we got on the subject of the diffulcuties of management and he told this story of an executive that he was trying to mentor, but who didn’t make the cut and he had to fire them. He seemed genuinely sad that he couldn’t make it work.

The thing is, this is a guy responsible for firing thousands or tens of thousands of people in his career. His whole job is basically to fire people. But he only thinks and ruminates about the one executive. That one bothers him, the thousands don’t even really register to him.

These people fundamentally do not see people 2+ levels below them as human, fundamentally. And to the extent that, in the abstract, they understand that the plebs at the bottom are not different than the people they know and care about, there is a wall in their minds that prevent them from linking their own actions to the tragedies that befall their victims. They will tell themselves that they were actually victims of circumstance, that the market determined their fate, and that there was nothing that could be done. Or it was their own fault.

So when it finally breaks through and they see the hate in the public’s eyes as we point our fingers at them and say “you did this” they are genuinely baffled.