It’s two years after the Great Unraveling of 2008, that time in the closing days of summer when it became evident that the Bear Stearns failure was not an isolated event. Lehman Brothers was plotzing like a drunk with a knife in his back, and its collapse triggered the cataclysm from which the economy has yet to recover. So what have we learned?

I was pondering this as I was watching the testimony of Lehman’s former CEO Richard Fuld before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission last week. Now we’ve got it straight. None of it was his fault, you see. It was the Fed. It should have rescued the firm that he rammed into the ground.

Blaming the Federal Reserve for the legendary shortcomings of Lehman Brothers is like a child blaming his parents for not coming faster to the rescue when he sticks his hamster in the microwave. Nobody in his right mind believes him, but, hey, that’s his story. It’s so off the wall, so much at variance with the historical record, ranging from journalistic inquiries to every book produced on the crisis to the report by Lehman’s own bankruptcy examiner, that his latest litany of excuses had a surrealistic air.

Fuld can repeat his fantasy version of events as much as he wants. By now, it doesn’t matter. We have a general idea of what happened, which can be summed up neatly: Lehman leveraged its way into insolvency, due to a culture of recklessness, poor decisionmaking, accounting fakery, and mismanagement. But that isn’t what we have learned from the crisis. Those are just the bare-bones fact, not the lesson. I figured that out while I was watching Fuld’s testimony last week.

What we’ve learned from the crisis, from the destruction of our savings, from the job losses many of us have experienced, from the credit crunch that has strangled lending to small business—the moral of the story is that people like Fuld haven’t learned any lessons. They haven’t changed. They are as arrogant and clueless today as they were when they were pulling their firms and this economy into ruination. The lesson of the crisis is that the Dick Fulds of this world have no remorse, no sense of responsibility, and no shame.

I have to admit that I find this to be surprising. I’d have expected that by now the people responsible for the financial crisis would have fessed up and at the very least admitted that they screwed up. But in his testimony last week, Fuld was as stridently in denial as he was during his famous appearance on Capitol Hill after his firm went belly-up. His prepared testimony must be perused to capture the essence of this man’s disconnection from reality.

He comes right to the point. He is proud to have spent his entire career at Lehman—including the 14 years he spent as CEO, during which he presided over a company that presided over an addiction to toxic subprime securities and leverage second to none. That he views it all in retrospect as simply a mistake, sort of like failing to balance his checkbook. You have to understand, leverage or depleted capital didn’t cause the demise of Lehman. It was other people...out there.

You don’t even have to go beyond page one to read this malarkey. It’s right there in the second paragraph: “Lehman’s demise was caused by uncontrollable market forces and the incorrect perception and accompanying rumors that Lehman did not have sufficient capital to support its investments. All of this resulted in a loss of confidence, which then undermined the firm’s strength and soundness.”

That’s a prelude to his primary point, which is not that Lehman didn’t gorge on toxic-waste derivatives like King Farouk at a buffet table, but that everybody else did—and they got away with it.

“Those same forces threatened the stability of other banks—not just Lehman. Other firms were hurt by their plummeting stock prices and widening CDS spreads,” he continued. “But Lehman was the only firm that was mandated by government regulators to file for bankruptcy.” Allow me to translate that. When he says “CDS spreads,” he’s referring to a particular type of derivative into which Lehman recklessly sunk massive amounts of borrowed money. What “widening” means is that the market finally, belatedly realized that those derivatives were crud. Lehman, he feels, should have been bailed out from its reckless risk taking by the Fed. It’s the best definition I’ve found of the Wall Street bailout credo, “nationalize risk, privatize reward.”

Now, the fact that this is a hunk of hooey, that the Fed would have been pouring its money down the drain—as Ben Bernanke made clear in his testimony—is not quite the point. What matters is that two years later Fuld still doesn’t get it. This is the man, remember, who says he never heard of the Repo 105 asset-shifting scheme when he was CEO, a claim that the Lehman bankruptcy examiner swiftly contradicted.

This kind of serial cluelessness is a contrast to the far less damaging (in hindsight) corporate scandals of a decade ago, the Enron-Worldcom era corporate self-immolations. The reason is not that the CEOs of that era’s scandals were so eager to jump into Lake Remorse, but that they were pushed there by prosecutors. That’s the missing element, you see.

There are reports that the SEC is about to target Fuld. Even if that actually happens, don’t expect that the prospect of civil penalties is going to extract an ounce of contrition from this fallen banker or any of his ilk. They’ve learned their lesson: no remorse, no contrition, and not a speck of honest reflection. They’ve told their story, and they’re sticking to it.