James Gorman was smoking hot over the attack upon Goldman, Sachs & Co. by an escaping employee. This is interesting because Gorman is CEO of Goldman rival Morgan Stanley. The same day Greg Smith's see-ya column appeared in The New York Times, Gorman uttered a series of statements, all of which bobbed by on the media. He told his staff (as Jamie Dimon told his) not to circulate the column to clients; of course by then the op-ed was as ubiquitous as the Joseph Kony YouTube video. At a breakfast interview with Fortune, Gorman chastised the Times for publishing Smith's blowoff at all. "To pick a random employee, I just don't think it's fair, and I don't think it's balanced," he said, demonstrating an unfamiliarity with how op-eds work. As for the random part, the heretofore obscure Smith, whose initials are suspiciously GS, apparently found The New York Times, a well-known newspaper, not the other way around. Gorman continued, drawing more attention to the kiss-off op-ed: "I think the purpose of an op-ed piece is to find somebody whose opinion is respected, is an influencer of the debate. ... I'm not interested in what one single employee says. They're not in a position to damn a whole company." True, but who is? If individuals don't count, who does? Groups of five? Ten? M.D.s? Partners? Lloyd Blankfein, an influencer no doubt, is unlikely to dump all over Lloyd Blankfein's leadership style.

Gorman's message, redolent of a pre-Internet age, seemed to be: Well, we can't just open the media to everyone. After all, Smith is a nobody whose opinions are meaningless; he had no direct reports! Alas, there may be many Smiths out there, not all of them involved with cough drops, ready to bitch, moan, complain, complicate. They're writing letters in their heads; a bunch of Herzogs. True, Smith is not exactly a whistleblower; he offered no illegalities. He, a midlevel Oswald Spengler, saw cultural decline; he believed it had devolved into toxicity and conflict; he discerned a widening gap between everyday eyeball ripping and the Goldman ideals he taped next to his computer. He undoubtedly thought he was a veritable Martin Luther of equity derivatives. Maybe he was wrong, misguided, disgruntled, vengeful, a sociopathic whiner with a mean pingpong forehand. He was almost certainly, as Gorman suggested, a fallible witness to a firm of surpassing complexity. The problem is, Smith, like Luther, did not testify alone. He would never have found op-ed space if he hadn't been preceded by years of anti-Goldman, anti-Wall Street ground clearing, some fair, some not: media attacks, congressional tauntings, suits and settlements, finger-pointing decisions out of Delaware. Smith was both meaningless and inevitable.

This raises one of our favorite subjects: the strange career of reputation on Wall Street. Let us reiterate: Rep isn't what it used to be in days of stiff collars, WASP hegemony and cigar-infused partnerships. Traders preside. Transactions predominate. Big money dances the mambo. Durations are fast; ethical relativism is a practical faith. Relationships involve hooking up and getting out before things get weird. There are good clients and bad clients; generous, deal-intensive clients and cheapskates that do something significant every Olympic year; sophisticated and unsophisticated clients; client clients and clients that are really counterparties. There are more sides to deals than an origami giraffe. Let's show sympathy for Gorman, Blankfein, et al.: They've got these Proustian distinctions to monitor, plus they're playing off clients, shareholders and regulators. Clients generally want loyalty, service, the best ideas available for the lowest possible fees, while investors demand leverage, risk and muppet-mauling when it comes to making money. Regulators? They read the Times nervously to see who's complaining the loudest. They can't decide whether banks are utilities or engines of innovation.

And now you've got to worry about employees making like Young Werther. It's enough to convince you that Wall Street is heading back to stakeholder governance. How can you pay these folks the vast sums they've come to expect and also operate as an arm of the Ethical Culture Society? Meanwhile, the exodus to buyout shops, hedge funds or boutiques is like the drip-drip of doom. Folks can now personally monetize relationships. Damn. All this suggests a financial ecosystem that has grown unstable, in transition, disaggregating like the media itself. Capital levels are rising, rules choke off paths to profits, the macroeconomy threatens, and competition grows more intense. It's true, Smith probably won't scare off the best clients, who already know the score. And these tempests have a way of submerging into forgetfulness. But a contractionary Zeitgeist seems to be tightening its grip. It says something when these imperial agglomerations of capital can be shaken by the lament of an unknown guy named Smith.