“Honesty is the best policy,” some
of us still try to teach our kids. A few of us may also throw in
“Cheaters never prosper,” but it’s getting more and more
difficult to say that with a straight face to a trusting little girl.
By now anyone not comatose realizes the
extent to which cheaters are not only prospering, they are denying
prosperity to anyone not in their tiny clique of schemers, scammers
and kleptocrats, elected and otherwise. But this shouldn’t have
been a surprise. If the laws against theft – the ordinary kind,
shoplifting or boosting a flat-screen TV or Beemer – were repealed,
would your personal moral code keep you honest? Maybe; but many would
say to hell with it, I’m grabbing what I can while there’s still
something left to grab.
And that’s all the bankers have done.
Governments – elected by us, the 50 per cent plus one – legalized
the finance industry’s more sophisticated but far more damaging
brand of theft, allowed the financiers to stack the ratings agencies
and securities commissions and other so-called regulators with their
accomplices, and so they went on a rampage. Wouldn’t you?
And if you were an elected official
hungry for a lucrative corporate directorship upon leaving public
service, would you do anything that could derail the gravy train? Ask
Tony Blair.
All ethics are situational. My wife and
I are from two wholly different cultures; I from a wealthy Western
democracy, she from a farm in a poor Southeast Asian country that has
had nearly as many military coups as elections. I’ve worked for a
living since I was 16, but my work was rewarded. In her world, just
surviving took a struggle; rewards were what she and her family
dreamed could happen some day, with the right combination of smarts
and good fortune. And, if necessary, cheating a bit.
She bought me a fancy designer leather
wallet one day, proudly revealing that she had paid a fraction of
what it was worth, because it had been stolen and recycled into the
black market. She still doesn’t understand why I refused to accept
it. She tried to make another deal for an air-conditioner for the
house we have built upcountry; a former brother-in-law is in the
delivery business, and a proportion of the deliveries “go missing”
as a matter of routine. No one, certainly not the police, asks many
questions if he or she gets a nice new TV or rice cooker once in a while at
a nice discount.
I’m no saint. I do follow the
“honesty is best” policy in theory, and it usually stands me in
good stead: Friends and employers trust me, which is rewarding in
more ways than one. But if it’s clear the theory is not going to
work in a certain situation, I change lanes faster than Lewis
Hamilton.
How does one work through such
contradictions when bringing up a child in the way she should go?
Cheaters do prosper; people who don’t accept “discounts” are
losers, we see that more and more. Is there any point in clinging to
a philosophy, nurtured in the formerly privileged West, that
increasingly appears based on little but wishful thinking?
I suggest that there is. Morally
decadent societies have always collapsed in the past, resulting in
massive human misery, sometimes for centuries before those societies
could resuscitate themselves; sometimes they never do. In the modern
ultra-connected world, the preservation of a survival morality, based
on human rights and co-operation, not on theft, is more crucial than
ever. And yet it appears to be under threat from powers more
formidable than we have seen since the falls of fascism and Soviet
communism.
It might be up to the privileged to
carry the torch of survival morality.
According to my analysis of modern Thai
history (an analysis with which my Thai wife heartily disagrees), the
most meaningful reforms were instituted by a man of great privilege,
Thaksin Shinawatra. Let’s make no bones about it, Thaksin is the
poster boy of the argument against the “cheaters never prosper”
adage. His enemies hate him not because he was a crook, but because
he was far better at it than they were. And after he weaselled his
way into the premiership, he used his power to make himself and his
cronies even more wealthy. But – and this is what really irked the elite – he also introduced reforms that
reduced poverty, and installed a universal health-care system many
Americans could only dream of.
I’m privileged too, always have been.
I like to think I came by my prosperity more honestly than Thaksin
did, but that might be gilding the lily. Just being born in Canada
gave me advantages denied to most of my fellow human beings; a good
family, a good education, good health, supportive mentors all came my
way like warm breezes, welcome but not summoned, perhaps even
undeserved. Warm breezes, while others endured blizzards of hardship
and tragedy.
It’s still like that. I’m not
wealthy by Western standards, I work six days a week to support
myself and my family, but we have a nice life. Under the recently
increased minimum wage in central Thailand (bitterly opposed by the
Mercedes-driving right wing), a labourer working six days a week
would earn about C$230 a month. Most months I net more than 13 times
that.
So I can afford to turn down the
black-market leather wallets and discounted “missing”
air-conditioners, and still give my little girl a good education. And
as long as I can in a world desperately short of role models, that
curriculum will include “honesty is the best policy”.
That’s my privilege.
