A rchive Date
[ 14-07-2002 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Economics ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/byfield.html
Everybody makes their own rules
By TED BYFIELD -- Edmonton Sun
July 14, 2002
We're hearing much lamentation among investors these days, accompanied by great deploring from the media, over the wrongs, moral deficiency, and outright dishonesty of gentry in the corporate world.
Two five-star companies, Enron and WorldCom, have been discovered issuing false financial statements, hoodwinking investors, misrepresenting their company positions by billions of dollars, while stock markets reel downward in consequence.
How, the victims and others ask, could men in such esteemed positions possibly have allowed themselves to wallow in sleaze and corruption? Where were the accountants who were supposed to keep them honest? Right in it along with them, apparently.
But how could such a state of affairs come about? Where was their honesty, their integrity? What happened? It's a good question, but for an answer you have to go a long way back.
To begin with, these men had been brought up by parents who had probably endured the Great Depression and fought the Second World War. They looked at their kids and said, "I don't want them to go through what I went through."
So they made sure that things came easily for their children. They were raised in cities, not farms. Where their father couldn't afford a car until he was maybe 30, these kids had one at 16.
They attended schools from which most harsh realities had been removed. The strap was pretty much gone. The phenomenon of the "social promotion" had come into being, so the humiliation of repeating a grade was unknown. Matriculation examination results were considered confidential, whereas in their parents' day, everybody's marks were published in the newspapers.
Most important, however, they were taught to believe in "the self." The self was the be-all and end-all of everything. Self-realization, self-actualization, self-esteem, these were the goals, not only of education but of life.
Morality, meanwhile, was presented as a "personal thing" and never actually called morality. It was replaced by "values." You had your values; I had mine; he had his. The important thing was that you must never seek to impose your values on someone else.
Now this implied, of course, that there was no such thing as real values, an objective standard against which everybody's values could be measured. For teachers to even suggest such a thing was out of line. It implied that some values were true and some weren't, or some closer to the truth than others. Wasn't this the sort of thinking that led to intolerance and wars? Certainly, it was. So to think that something was really bad, not merely bad in somebody's opinion, was in itself a major evil.
Long before graduation, these people would have become sexually active. But here too, all the old rules had disappeared. As long as the parties "consented," anything went. The pill was available, and if it failed, abortion was similarly available.
Then came the business world. The buzzword here was "appropriate." Whether a certain course of action was right or wrong was rarely, if ever, asked. To even think in such terms had by now become meaningless. A few people in universities and various think-tanks were examining something called "ethics," but since no one could really say where ethics came from, to question whether something was "ethical" was almost as pointless as asking whether it was right.
What mattered is whether it was "appropriate." The great virtue of the appropriate was the facility with which it could be quietly changed. What was inappropriate yesterday could become appropriate today. Not only did it change from one day to the next, but also from one industry to the next, and from one boardroom to the next. Thus something that would have been inappropriate in a corporate balance sheet last year would become wholly appropriate next year.
"But is it honest?" some ancient board member might ask. There would be an exchange of glances, a tolerant smile. Did such a man really belong on this board? Perhaps he had outlived his usefulness. Honesty, he surely knew, was all a matter of personal opinion, a matter of "values."
And that, I suspect, is how the whole thing happened.
Letters to the editor should be sent to letters@edm.sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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