Most People Are Just Doing What Is In Front of Them: We Need to Make Sure What is In Front of Them Shapes Good Behavior and Discourages Harmful Actions

We teach the medical students and residents that 1-3% of males and about 1% of females are sociopaths, but this number is probably a bit low. I personally think that all of us are capable of doing some pretty horrific things not because we lack empathy but because our understanding of the impact of our actions is far too regional. I remember seeing pictures of the German guards at Auschwitz celebrating Christmas with their smiling families and to me that was most chilling of all, the sheer normalcy of it all, the way we can compartmentalize killing and go home and help our kids with their homework or tuck them into bed.
We can push a button or cast a vote that starts a war because we do not fully imagine the suffering of the human beings downrange. Most people, if confronted with the true horrors of war, would oppose it, which is why most Europeans opposed our invasion of Iraq (13% was the largest minority in support) but a majority of Americans supported it. The difference was coverage and this sense of Otherness. If it was our family accidentally shot up in a minivan approaching a checkpoint on the way to school, most of us would do whatever it takes to stop the war. I still hear decent, otherwise rational people, shrugging their shoulders and saying that it is better to fight terrorists "over there" than to fight them "here." In a nutshell (besides the lunacy of believing there is a Law of Conservation of Terrorism) this summarizes what is wrong with our way of viewing other members of our species. We have empathy in the same way mafia families have empathy for their friends and family. Our task is to broaden that empathy to people we have never met.
In financial matters, most people are trying to keep their jobs and do whatever it takes to meet their quotas, please their boss, generate revenue. No one in private industry has an incentive to see the whole picture. Mortgage brokers, bankers, real estate agents, and speculators are not all evil; they are simply responding to market forces that pay them based on volume of deals done. Everyone sees their little piece of the playing field; there is no effective referee in the game thanks to Bush-era deregulation, so the system can do some pretty strange and destructive things. It can even blow up from time to time.
I do think a handful of people at the top, CEOs who pay themselves hundreds of millions of dollars, are entitled, narcissistic sociopaths, but the vast majority of people in the food chain are just doing what is in front of them. I think our job as progressives is to make sure that what is in front of them - the rewards and punishments that shape and reinforce behavior - encourage more things that are societally beneficial and fewer that are harmful. Creative rules that shape good behavior and gives people a financial reward for doing right is the way to go, such as tax credits to companies whose ratio of CEO pay to median employee compensation stays below some obscene level, or a progressive income tax (what an idea) that makes obscene pay packages not worth the haggling because most of it will get shared with the least among us anyway. Or giving bankers who work out new terms with borrowers who are in trouble a strong financial incentive for doing so.
One thing we don't need is greed-gone-wild, government-off-our-back-chanting legislators who spend hundreds of millions to get in control of a government they philosophically do not believe in.