To the long, dismal list of fatally broken institutions — GDP, governments, schools, corporations — we can add the mysterious Libor, and its conveniently comfortable calculation. It’s difficult to overstate what a pillar of the global economy Libor is — it’s used in setting interest rates that affect the daily lives of pretty much every citizen of every advanced economy across the globe. And it’s difficult to overstate how troubling it is that this, too, is an institution rigged by the few, for the few; that this institution too, is, corrupted.

This scandal isn’t about price-fixing. It’s not about a bank. It’s not even about power and privilege, corruption and compromise. It’s about life, tragedy, and human potential. It’s about the capacity to create a worthwhile future. It is, in short, about you and I, and the places we seek for ourselves in the world.

Let me couch this for you in the pedestrian terms of financial hydraulics — the tawdry terms which seem to substitute for thinking in what’s become of our thin, shallow economic and political discourse. The most basic function of a financial system is to price money. If a financial system can’t undertake that simple task effectively — if the price of money is fixed like a roulette wheel stuck on red — all else must necessarily fail: investment must become malinvestment, speculation must precede creation, “profit” must become divorced from benefit, and wealth is effectively transferred from poor to rich, in a form of quiet but lethally effective institutionalized theft.

Now, let me couch this for you in the human terms of political economy — the terms in which you and I should rightly conceive of an “economy” as the sum of the enduring human good; not merely as a set of pipes for the grease of finance to be injected into.

Who authors the destiny of nations? Which compact governs the relations between the powerless and the privileged? Whose rights are sacrosanct? How are fortunes earned — and spent? What does “wealth” mean? If money is in a basic sense a currency in which the fruits of enterprise past are safely kept, to seed the soil of prosperity tomorrow — and if the value of that money itself is corrupted — can one be said to be a participant in “an economy”? Or is one more a pawn in a rigged game of self-destruction; a mark in a Ponzi scheme; a dull-eyed pack animal to which the engines of extraction are yoked? Does “freedom” — in the most primitive sense, autonomy from the circumscription of one’s own inalienable rights, those basic liberties which don’t just accrue to us, but inhere in us — still allow one freedom? Who’s who — master and servant, mechanism and operator, principal and agent, sovereign and serf?

These are the terms of the debate we’re not having. These are the words that are left unsaid. These are the concepts and ideas on which prosperity itself was built. These are the unspoken phrases that flit like ghosts through what’s left stammeringly unspoken by the finely-suited pundits and so-called “leaders” too cowering and afraid, too tempted and silenced, too timid and too petrified to challenge the primacy of a system that’s leaving millions to choke on the fumes of the collapse of their own futures.

When, exactly, did it become acceptable to sell out? To become a sociopath for a few million bucks? “Ah,” you darkly mutter. “We all sell out.” Yet on such a norm of easy shoulder-shrugging compromise nothing great can be built. Unless you believe that Abraham Lincoln, too, for a few extra bucks, might have joined Barclays as a Senior Advisor for “Human Resources.”

Our institutions are corrupted — but it’s not just money that corrupted them. It’s the norms that you and I endorse, every second of every day, with every tiny decision we make, that value money over meaning; privilege over purpose; expedience over development; convenience over sophistication; McPleasure over eudaimonia; system over existence. Tempted by a devil’s bargain, deep down, in our defeated hearts, you and I have already surrendered. Faintly, in the distance, we protest, we shout, we object. You and I consent to the system. And the system consents to us.

“The banker rigged the rates, and stole from you and me.” Who stole what from whom? Was it the banker who stole a dollar a day from us — or we who stole a life worth living from the banker? Who consents to a deal with the devil — you? Or you and the devil? When the deal is struck, has the devil stolen your soul? Or have you stolen, for a few searing moments, the devil’s due? If the basis of the contracts that govern men is consent, have you and I, with our furious pursuit of more-bigger-faster-cheaper-now-at-any-cost already consented to the compact of our own undoing; already tempted the banker with the devil’s glittering deal — and damned the banker to tempt us right back?

Let me tell you a secret.

There is no system. You and I aren’t the system. The bankers aren’t the system. The politicans aren’t the system. Whom and what we elevate to exalted office isn’t the system.

There are a multiplicity of systems. For example, I’ve proposed redesigning the economy around the idea of a national balance sheet, which redefines profit and wealth to matter in human terms. Simon Johnson and numerous others have proposed banks be broken, split, limited. Roger Martin has proposed that the overweening pursuit of shareholder value be upgraded to the pursuit of human value. Michael Porter has suggested that shared value be the linchpin the economy is held together by. Gary Hamel has suggested we redesign the corporation as more a vehicle for human accomplishment than a military machine. Richard Florida has suggested that we optimize for creative capital — not just financial capital. And that’s just a tiny list.

One remains trapped in a life one doesn’t fully live until one sees the multiplicity of one’s potentials; the possibilities one can arc towards. So it is with societies. We will, I’d venture, remain trapped in these lives, in these places, by these institutions, until we see that there is no system, but a multiplicity of systems. A multiplicity of systems — arrayed in ranks, shepherded into first, second, third, and last place by the norms we share; by the values we’re capable of mustering. A range of design choices that, like life choices, bend one’s trajectory towards the heights — or into the depths.

Like lives, economies and societies must be chosen. Not merely decided upon, by tired, fearful old men in ornate rooms — but actively chosen, and rechosen, constructed and reconstructed, by the norms we choose to enact, and the values you and I choose to live, every second of every day.

You and I — we are more than pawns, marks, algorithms, “consumers,” margins. At our highest and fullest, you and I are here in the human world. And the systems we consent in every moment to be governed by, through the ideals and values we share, can damn us not just to deal with the devil, but to become the devils — to evoke from one another the smallest and worst in our natures.

And yet you and I must fight fatalism. There are billions of stars in this galaxy. We’re moored to a rock perched on the edge of a single one. There is no system. There is only the journey past the edge of impossibility. Who’s who, mechanism and operator, sovereign — and serf?