> Picture your cousin invited you to go do a little looting last summer and you demurred. Eventually he shows up with a bunch of new Nikes but is later arrested only to have his charges dropped and record expunged. How does that make you feel?
The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting. This implies, to me, that the author perhaps doesn't have a particularly strong moral compass of their own because my honest answer is:
"My cousin is incredibly stupid and lucky that they got away with this, I'm glad I didn't join them because even getting away with it I would hate myself. I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to dial back the contact with them"
I absolutely don't feel: damn I should have gone looting too.
Your moral compass is also not a physical instrument though. If everyone makes a point of adopting an orphan, or feeding the homeless, you'll feel pressure to do that, too. Likewise there are countries where evading tax is a national sport, and countries where people play it straight.
What he's saying is we have established rules that are there to protect a sometimes vague notion of fairness, and when people break the rules or enter a grey zone without punishment, it seems to move the line of what is acceptable, in a way that makes fools of people who thought they understood the rules.
I have a lot of sympathy for his ideas. All those examples are corrosive, and I've been around a few people on the same fringes. Ultimately bad behaviour will push out for behaviour, because it's a lot easier to get money and status that way.
> in a way that makes fools of people who thought they understood the rules
Exactly this. A system that incentivizes bad behavior and fails to protect/reward moral people exerts pressure on those with good morals.
Morals may stop you from repeating such behavior at first, but if it becomes a key to getting ahead then you can bet those morals will be slowly chipped away.
Only if you lack a foundation with deeply-held values.
When you know who you are, and are confident in your values, then no amount of pressure from the outside world can make you bend a knee.
That's not to say I'm there yet. I'm still a wishy-washy moral and ideological coward, but I'm slowly building my foundation through good role models (mainly old books from Russia).
The Russian monks are one example of moral fortitude. Whether or not their morals are agreeable, they certainly are unwavering.
And then you make contact with the real world and realize that, yes, morals are important, but just as holding a Civil War era to our standards is unproductive, you are going to need to pick your battles. There are lines I'm not going to cross. To take a life, or directly hurt others in malicious pleasure, for example. But I'm not going to be so rigid as to imagine that my moral compass can navigate every gray area with certitude. I'll do my best and God can judge me in the end.
Funny you should bring up Russia. In Russia, the only way to get anything done with government bureaucrats was to "lubricate" the wheels with some illegal bribes in the right pockets.
So a regular citizen could stick to his moral compass and spend eternity at the back of the line getting no government services whatsoever, or he could do what the majority of people did and pay the illegal "fees".
Yes. I'm not blind to the fact the Russian people were, at the end of the day, just people going about their lives; and these people were no different than you and I, just doing what they could to survive/thrive.
However, there were a few notable "malcontents" that went against this grain, in spite of the zeitgeist of their time, and the workings of the people around them.
Reading through old non-fiction accounts by Soviet dissidents (mostly lambasting their society), I cannot help but feel there are parallels between their struggle, and ours.
I would wager that almost no statistically significant (what a terrible term) portion of college students know who they are (barring children that have not gone through the gamut of schooling, and have worked most of their lives).
Perhaps replicating the experiment with adults in the 40+ age bracket would yield different results.
I would also like to see this experiment replicated in different countries. The cultural aspect of moral strength cannot be stressed enough (itself a form of peer pressure). But at that point, should we differentiate between morality achieved through individual action vs. morality achieved through one's environment?
>When you know who you are, and are confident in your values, then no amount of pressure from the outside world can make you bend a knee
Works great if you find this magic perfection. But in all likelihood you will not. You will be shaped by the biases of your upbringing and experiences that will put blinders on you. More so you will stick to your convictions with the justification of morality on your side, even when that is not the case.
That everything is essentially predetermined by my genetics, and how my environment has affected their expression; and that my free will and choices are just an elaborate illusion played by my biology.
But something in my biology is telling me to strive for something more.
> My cousin is incredibly stupid and lucky that they got away with this...
This little phrase touches on the mismatch between your view and the article. What Joe is arguing is that if people get repeated evidence that it isn't luck, that it is a routine occurrence, then they will shift their view.
At some point, if you see stuff like that happen a few times, you'll have your faith that it is stupid tested. There isn't a natural - or even moral - law saying people can't loot. It all comes down to social standards and law. A society that allows looting is pretty stupid though, it is really destructive.
I won't feel like that. I don't feel like that. I have felt like it licenses lesser moral transgressions though. "They got away with that, so I should be able to get away with [thing that is wrong but also considerably more mild]."
That isn't right, but it is a feeling. It's a feeling I dismiss. But, still, if it's a feeling I feel then I imagine it's a feeling others feel and I imagine that not everybody dismisses it either.
Corruption of that kind happens very, very slowly.
Would you have the same feeling if the metaphor was closer to home. Making assumptions here, but say a friend that contracts and pays less tax due to it. They are very successful but technically breaking a law or two, but everyone does it so who's the sucker?
I’ve already been in that situation and choose every time to pay the tax, keep things clean and straight forward. Our financial advisor used to poke fun at me and my business partner for how straight laced we were.
In year 7 of the company we got pinged for a random HMRC PAYE audit, we passed (with a couple of minor infractions that we simply didnt realise about - like buying bacon sandwiches for your staff every Friday is actually taxable) but it was still pretty stressful. If we had done half the stuff people had suggested we do because “everyone does it” we would have had a much worse time in that audit.
Yeh I have self employed friends and other directors who may or may not be as buttoned down as they should be and I’m sure they will be fine but I’m not wired that way and it’s treated me pretty well in life so far.
I hear from many people that my opinion of them matters to them a lot, that they follow my lead, that they loved working for me, that they think “what would Simon do here?” which is worth way more to me than skirting some rules for an advantage at the cost of my credibility, integrity and self respect.
> If we had done half the stuff people had suggested we do because “everyone does it” we would have had a much worse time in that audit.
you have to mentally remove this paragraph from your story. the scenario is that there are zero repercussions for failing the audit. you might think that it’s irrelevant to you, but the fact you bring it up shows it had at least some impact on you. maybe not enough to impact your actions today, but there’s a large spectrum here where the difference between enforcement or no enforcement is significant enough to impact the behavior of a slightly different person or of your own behavior in a slightly different scenario.
It's not about a moral compass, it's about the "market of deviance" (I don't know how to eloquently put the point I am making, maybe there's a better term).
If let's say, you are an employee of a company in a not-so-ethical market, and everybody around you acts unethically, then you have no way of playing against the market: you will either be fired for not doing your job, or you could call everyone on it, but no one will help you.
There's the other point to be made: if everyone around you acts unethically, then maybe it's your standards that are too high? Or maybe you are just delusional in your thinking about what "ethical" actually means.
Where do you get that intent as “clear”? I did not get it.
He is complaining that the absence of the application of the rule of law leads very easily to the elimination of society, because lots of people do not wish to just be suckers.
>The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting. This implies, to me, that the author perhaps doesn't have a particularly strong moral compass of their own because my honest answer is:
It’s a pretty uncharitable article that uses the noisier easier to find “people getting away with it” stories to lay seeds of discontent without producing any data to show how many people are getting away with it. It’s easy to find the stories that make people angry but no where reports “system works as expected 4,000,000 times this year” stories. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t but anecdata to support the authors world view is also uncool.
As we can see from the title, what matters is not the actual stats, but what people perceive. So if the system works silently and fails loudly, people are going to think it is more broken than it actually is.
That fact doesn't somehow make the author wrong. People don't check the rigorous studies of corruption to decide whether or not they should feel like a sucker.
There are also cases where we can widely observe people being punished or having other problems from some behavior but not the behavior itself. Bribery or drug use are two well studied examples. When you have a public awareness campaign that emphasizes how large the problem is people think "Gosh, I hardly ever see any one getting arrested for bribes or going to the hospital for using drugs, it must actually be safe if everyone is doing it" and the public awareness campaign backfires.
Also, it might be hard for them to mention the strongest examples of brazen corruption in leadership without being accused of being political, so I don't blame the author for using the even-handed examples drawn from all quarters -- which does make it easier to characterize as cherry-picked noise -- when the thesis of the article is that leadership, a necessarily tiny fraction of the 1% in the public spotlight, are growing increasingly shameless.
But the author well could have mentioned certain boundary-pushing, prosecution-taunting illegality by political actors in the United States, including actions rescued only by equally brazen presidential pardons -- actions in the public sphere that are almost without precedent.
Those kinds of actions, so few in terms of data points, could be characterized as 'noise' for their rareness, but the author's thesis (which seems sufficiently plausible not to be discounted out of hand) is that extremely brazen action by different kinds of leadership are at least leading indicators of institutional inability to deal with corruption and wrongdoing, preceding spillover into society at large -- and that maybe, due to the outsized impact that leaders have on society, those actions have an element of influence or causation.
Well, a thesis like that doesn't, to me, mark the author as being morally dubious himself for having it.
If a society is getting more corrupt, over the short-term, (see [1] for proof that at least some well-informed people think this one is), then an increasing number of individual members of society will be corrupted.
The author simply draws an obvious corollary that we may not have considered: hey, reader -- we are among those members of society. We should assume that we can, and will, be influenced if corruption increases, or if we're exposed to very public and visible examples of it.
That may be uncomfortable to consider, but I'm glad the author helped us consider it. Is it really only other people, other people's children and families, who are corrupted if they live and grow in a society in which corruption is on the rise?
(It's clearly an opinion piece, and I'm not sure how HN-ish it is, but it doesn't seem like a particularly trashy one to me)
> Yeah, that was my takeaway too. I have never watched looters on TV and wished I were there with them looting.
You've never seen some slimey techbro that knows 10% of what you do technically go on to make million on a more or less worthless app/product/etc? Knowing that what they sold was basically snake oil and now they will never have to work again while you trudge along for the rest of your life "doing the right thing"?
If so, you are basically a saint if you have not considered the grifter path.
Or whatever similar situation applies to you. I doubt you are the type who would benefit greatly in social status by having a bunch of new sneakers like the example was.
The point of the article is we're making grifting more profitable than honest work, and this is a pattern I've been noticing for since I've been alive. Strange only now folks seem to be noticing.
The other point you made was "fear of getting caught" which is simply not a part of the calculation for many in some cities any longer. This part is rapidly eroding into a joke in many communities, and lets just say most do not share your moral and ethical compass but do (so far) share a fear of getting caught.
Grifters have always existed, the decision to be a grifter has always been open to anyone, people who decide to work a more honest living understand that ripping people off is a viable path to enrichment, but they typically find the idea of doing so repugnant.
This is also kind of a non-engineer's way to view the world.
It's like:
1. Something might happen. The outcome could be good or bad.
2. You wait for the outcome.
3. If it's good, you won! If it's bad, you lost. Depending purely on the outcome, you feel good or bad.
Whereas a more engineer-y way to view things is:
1. Something might happen. The outcome could be good or bad.
2. You base your decision - you choose it in advance - based on the odds of the outcome.
3. It's too strong to say "the outcome doesn't matter," but assuming you calculated the odds correctly, there's no regret: the right choice according to the odds is the right choice, period.
I'll say this:
Even if I was a criminal, I would never choose to do something where I got arrested, on the slim chance that the charges would be dropped or expunged.
So in this example - even if I was a professional bad guy! - I would still tell my cousin he made the wrong choice. He chose very poor odds in doing something that got him arrested, and the fact that he came out ahead this one time doesn't change that.
> The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting.
IDK, I would say that the intent of this kind of writing it so make the reader feel a kind of "righteous anger" response; you know the visceral kind that damps down on slow rational analysis of the argument presented. Propagandising.
While having a moral compass is great in this case, because you LOST nothing. Sometimes it's a lot more damaging because in certain environments having it means giving up things to people who don't.
But I think the combination of a social environment where none of your peers have that thought, and being too young/not trained to think critically results in large groups of people just following their animalistic instincts.
> "I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to dial back the contact with them"
maybe
"I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to consider what the relationship is worth to me, and if its important, attempt to influence better behaviors otherwise dial back contact with them"
You're falling into the trap of thinking that there are "moral" people and "immoral" people and never the twain shall meet. This is empirically false: there are frameworks in which almost nobody will transgress (e.g. North Korea) and frameworks under which almost everybody will transgress (e.g. Nazi Germany). Most people benchmark their behavior from external cues.
The clear intent from the author here is to make the reader feel like they too should have gone looting. This implies, to me, that the author perhaps doesn't have a particularly strong moral compass of their own because my honest answer is:
"My cousin is incredibly stupid and lucky that they got away with this, I'm glad I didn't join them because even getting away with it I would hate myself. I'm concerned my cousin thinks this behaviour is ok, think it's time to dial back the contact with them"
I absolutely don't feel: damn I should have gone looting too.