Dear Friends,
It seems to me, it’s stupid to treat someone without ethics like someone who has them. Such action is the same as giving payment which the recipient hasn’t earned. It’s like a business paying someone to destroy their infrastructure. People who have shown themselves to be scoundrels in our personal lives are ostracized. No one wants to be around a user, liar, and taker. The normal reciprocation found in human relationships is exploited by people without ethics. Corrupt actions are the source of their corroding reputations. When dealing with people in our personal lives we are wise and smart enough to understand this paradigm… but when dealing with people in positions of authority, we become stupid. So we treat those in authority as if they have ethics… even after proof that they have none.
Ethics are reflected in actions. Someone who engages in stochastic terrorism, even rationalizing or calling for violence, is not an ethical person. Dehumanizing those who disagree is another sure sign of a lack of ethics. Moreover, exploiting the law for power, wealth, or to pervert justice is not what ethical people do. A judge who is consistently overturned because he or she rules by politics instead of law, can’t be acclaimed as ethical. Bureaucrats who detest those they “serve” are the opposite of ethical. We all know a corrupt cop when we see one, but how many of us recognize a corrupt prosecutor? Those who engage in corrupt acts are corrupt people. The same can be said of those who engage in ethical acts can be considered ethical.
To be treated as ethical one should prove oneself ethical first, or at least not prove otherwise. The ethical get a slew of benefits. When someone has never lied, their word is trusted. That doesn’t mean they are incapable, but the probability of them lying is less than that of someone who lies when the truth would serve them better. Moreover, once someone has a reputation of truthfulness, the cost of getting caught in a lie increases in proportion to the reputational loss. When someone is granted the benefit that should be withheld for only the ethical, to the unethical, it diminishes the value of ethics. Why ever tell the truth if a liar’s word is held in equal or higher esteem than a truth teller’s? In such a paradigm ethics becomes a liability, and corruption becomes an advantage.
When the corrupt get the wages of the ethical the whole incentive structure of the system becomes perverse. As I mentioned above, if lying has no cost, lying will become endemic. The same goes for every other short term advantage that corruption brings. If taking bribes has no cost then everyone will take bribes. In short, capitalism functions even in dysfunctional systems, but in a dysfunctional way. In the supply/demand view, if the cost of a thing goes to zero, you can expect the demand to rise in proportion. So if the cost of corruption goes to zero or near zero, the supply will rise to meet the increased demand. This translates into a lower standard of living for most, due to extractive economies, and high crime. The high crime comes from the people following their corrupt leaders.
Tolerating and worse, cheering unethical behavior in our leaders then is stupid. It helps no one in the long term but harms us all. In a collapsing society no one benefits. This is a result of bestowing the wages of ethical behavior to those who are corrupt. It removes the cost of corruption and thus increases the demand and supply. We all can recognize corruption when we see it, though many of us are willing to tolerate it if it’s on our side. That’s falling victim to a fallacy, because corruption is on no one’s side but its own. The answer then is to be utterly intolerant of unethical behavior in our leaders. Those who prove themselves corrupt by their actions must be removed from power. To do anything less is to invite societal collapse and the humanitarian disasters that follow.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
