Organised Crime Derived from Economic Injustice, Individual Corruption, and the Danger of Knowledge: A Critical Analysis of Breaking Bad
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines Breaking Bad through a philosophical and criminological lens that foregrounds the relationship between knowledge, power, economic injustice, and moral failure. The study argues that its central problem lies in the destabilising potential of specialised knowledge when detached from ethical judgment and practical wisdom. Walter White’s transformation is analysed as a progressive reconfiguration of agency, in which technical expertise becomes a mechanism of domination within an alternative institutional order constituted by organised crime derived from a lack of economic justice. Drawing on Foucault’s power/knowledge nexus, Heidegger’s concept of technological enframing, and Aristotelian phronesis, the article demonstrates how intelligence, when confined to instrumental rationality, produces not autonomy but moral blindness. The criminal economy depicted in the series is interpreted not as a breakdown of social order but as a structurally coherent system that absorbs and amplifies such forms of knowledge. In this context, individual corruption is neither sudden nor exceptional. It emerges through cumulative processes of rationalisation, affective distortion, and the erosion of ethical limits. By situating Breaking Bad within broader debates on the epistemic conditions of modernity, the study contributes to discussions on the ethical boundaries of expertise and the unintended consequences of knowledge operating beyond normative constraints.
Author: Yaşar Alkan
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7211967728