I worked for a few years at a company that made software for casinos, and this was absolutely not the case there. Casinos absolutely have fully shameless villains at the helm.
More seriously, everyone is the hero of their own story, no matter how obvious their failings are from the outside.
I’ve been burned by empathetically adopting someone’s worldview and only realizing later how messed up and self-serving it was.
"Yes, I agree there are some downsides to our product and there are some people suffering because of that - but no one is forcing them to buy from us, they're people with agency and free will, they can act as adults and choose not to buy. Now what is this talk about feedback loops and systemic effects? It's confusing, go away."
This category is where you'll also find most of the advertising business.
The self-righteous may be the source of the greatest evil by magnitude, but day-to-day, the indifferents make it up in volume.
At 8am every morning, the executives walk across the casino floor on their way to the board room, past the depressed people who have been there gambling by themselves the entire night, seeing their faces, then they go into a boardroom to strategize ways to get them those people to gamble even harder. They brag about it. It's absolute pure villainy.
It's trivially easy to spot gambling addicts in the data, and in markets with better protections for gambling addicts they have to approach marketing quite differently. In some places you're allowed to ban yourself from the casino, and it's super illegal for the casino to market to you, so there are tons of protections to prevent all emails, texts, phone calls from hosts, physical mailers, ads of any form from reaching you.
The suicide anecdote is what caused me to quit. I'm ashamed to admit I asked my team to use an "IsDeceased" flag in the calculation for host bonus compensation, for when a patron dies while assigned to them. After that, I tried to transfer to the non-casino corner of the business where they were trying to sell our software to sports stadiums, and when they killed that off a few months later, I left the company. This was circa 2016, at a casino in the rust belt, but I'm not going to get more specific than that.
So, casino industry perhaps is a convenient pinata when in reality it's not the specific industry, it's the system.
We can have all sorts of interesting discussions about how to balance human independence with shared social costs, but it's not inherently "evil" to give consenting adults products and experiences they desire.
IMO, much more evil is caused by busybodies trying to tell other people what's good for them. See: The Drug War.
Even when the self-righteous are at their most dangerous, they have to be self-righteous and in power, e.g.:
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.or:
រក្សាន្នកគ្មានប្រយោជន៍ខាត។ បំផ្លាញអ្នកគ្មានការខាតបង់I think you and your colleagues should sit back and take it easy, maybe have a few beers every lunchtime, install some video games on the company PCs, anything you can get away with. Don't get fired (because then you'll be replaced by keen new hires), just do the minimum acceptable and feel good about that karma you're accumulating as a brake on evil.
Do these people have even minimal self-awareness?