With Washington’s pay caps roiling Wall Street, it’s worth taking another look at the culture of bankers depicted in Too Big To Fail. In a tweet this morning linking to the WSJ's package on the Fed’s entry into the pay morass, the publication’s editor for online operations, Alan Murray, commented: “What's surprising is how little the banks did to self-police and head this off.”

After reading Too Big To Fail, it’s not surprising at all. If ever there was a group in need of adult supervision, it’s bankers. As Sorkin shows, the financial system suffers from dysfunctional competitiveness.

Normally, competition brings out the best in us. It focuses effort and eliminates waste. But in the world Sorkin depicts, a very small group of bankers vie for the same prizes. So competition has created a culture of greed, mistrust and petty retribution.

You can see this in the hatred between Christopher Flowers, the former Goldman (GS) banking-expert-turned-private-equity-billionaire who is an expert on financial firms, and Paulson. Or the deep ambivalence between AIG (AIG) and its own adviser, JPMorgan (JPM), that devolves into name-calling and a dispute over an engagement letter (in other words, while AIG is melting down, everyone is bickering over JPMorgan’s fees.)

A recurring theme of the Barclay’s deal that didn’t happen is each bank’s resentment at having to contribute to a deal that will help Barclay’s become a real competitor as a broker dealer. Yes, the bankers finally banded together under pressure from Geithner and Paulson to get it done—but they did so only under extreme duress. And, of course, there’s the odd turn of events where Goldman’s CFO offers to buy Lehman’s toxic assets real cheap. But when Paulson seems to be following up on that, he phrases it in such a way that Lehman is sure it’s being picked apart by Goldman at Paulson’s command.

What’s so sad, at least when you’re reading Sorkin and know what’s around the corner for all of these guys, is how a bunch of very rich people can’t put their differences aside to avert disaster. They’d rather go over the cliff tearing one another's hair out than stop the rush toward doom. It was Jamie Dimon who pushed Lehman into insolvency when he called Fuld to support his own guys demanding more collateral. Dimon, too, is in the center of AIG: unwilling to give up hope that he might be able to pounce on some of their assets. He even makes a bet with his top banker, Tommy Lee, that there will still be value in AIG even after JPMorgan has dropped them in the government’s hands.