You just need a handful of people to independently see a few opportunities to profit from different activities (which are related in non-obvious ways) and together they can effect great malice without any single individual being aware of their collective malice.

The Upton Sinclair principle ensures that the perpetrators of malice are not aware of it: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Only the victims of malice can see it as such, the perpetrators are the last to see it.