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Greed is not for the Greater Good - Part III

The Ungraceful evolution of Mephistopheles

In Part II I discussed regulations and certain aspects that need to be carefully considered. I overlooked one crucial point which I will mention here. My own extensive experiences tell me that the regulations are often also simply not applied correctly or effectively by the regulators. You may recall the Bernie Madoff case where it transpired one US official had been raising the alarm about the possibility of improprieties many years ago, but nothing had been done. I know off people that have formally contacted the SEC and other agencies on numerous occasions about breaches of FCPA requirements, breaches of Sarbanes Oxley Act provisions and other regulations and legislation, without any response. The only one that apparently formally responds is MSN (Are they an authority yet?), and they are 2 months late in responding to an impersonation notification which I am aware off. They are apparently so concerned with this impersonation claim that they have suggested the reporting party send the evidence by snail mail. Is it possible that MSN doesn't trust Hotmail anymore?

As one of my close family members wrote recently when I wrote a long philosophical email trying to make sense of our current situation, they "just want to get on with life and be happy". I obviously do not want to discourage the ideal of living life and being happy, but unfortunately to achieve this stage one must put in effort and thought, as it doesn't just fall from heaven. The current economic crisis is a great way to purge the past mistakes and look forward with renewed vigour to a different way of doing things. I fear, as you do, that the opportunity has been missed and that we have instead re-enforced the idea that mistakes should not be punished in equal and opposite manner to rewards for positive performance. This has given the financial sector and big business , mercantilism and the purveyors of global regulatory frameworks, the satisfaction and confidence that they will be able to continue with even greater effectiveness to prostitute and undermine the democratic process. We are in a way at the same point as the passengers of one of the planes on the way to Philadelphia, during the 9/11 incident, where just a handful of people realized that panicking was not an option and that drastic action was required to emasculate the hijackers and avert further damage to the Greater Good.

My parents who are of your generation, born 1937 and 1943 respectively, used to motivate and encourage me to question the status quo and to see the history and developments leading up to where we are now. If you don't know the past, you can't make sense of the present or where you are heading in the future. With great foresight they predicted the current mess we are in while I, as a member of the new generation, decided to break away from the old paradigm and focus on ever increasing pay checks and consumerism, because that was the motto of the day when I entered the workforce. I worked, together with all those of my generation, For the Greed is Good, rather than For the Greater Good. It sounds similar if you say it if you blur the sound of the letter "d" and "t", but the difference in meaning is obviously substantial. While I am not going to claim that the periods post and pre 1950's were exclusively and singularly categorized as either the latter or the former, I would say that on a continuum, For the Greater Good was more pre dominant before the 1950's. As per the heading of this essay, Greed is not for the Greater Good.

I therefore think my parents and your generation were off a different mold entirely and share very similar thoughts and beliefs before the disaster that happened with the baby boomers, of which I am a tail end representative. I will comment on that historical phenomenon in a later Part of this essay.

I started writing this response, after a puppet show organized by my two girls. Both are very vivacious and another reason for us to carefully consider all the issues we are discussing because of their future and that of your children and grandchildren and the other future generations with whom I am well acquainted through meeting them with our boys.

The older boys and girls towards the end of their school years at high school are similar to youngsters everywhere. A difference is that this generation is much more wired in with internet and Face Book, Twitter and such communication tools. The problem I perceive is that, although they have endless questions, besides us there appear to be very few adult figures that are able to answer and support them effectively. It seems like everyone is pre occupied with "living life and being happy", and therefore unable to coach and develop their wards as is their responsibility. We spent literally 6 months, weekend after weekend, hosting up to 20 young adults and having extensive discussions until the small hours of Saturday and Sunday morning, discussing the universe, Taoism, whether God exists, business and economics, relationships, EQ, music and art and all other matter of interesting topics.

One big issue I think will affect us for a long time to come is the lack of reading skills and interest in reading by the majority of young adults. Apart from our children, who are brought up in a house with about 3000 books or more, all their classmates read less than 1 book per year, based on surveys done. The problem with that is that the future generations, although having much greater access to information, are and will be unable to do much with that information because they are unable to read and digest. I found this in the young people I have hired and worked with in professional firms and it frankly scares me as I have noted in other news articles on our website, as noted in "Plagiarism and its impact on Corporate Governance". Somehow the idea that Corpore Sana is the result of Mens Sana has been forgotten. Or maybe it was the other way around?

The Thinker - Auguste Rodin

As a result of my recent research which is still on-going, I have made some good progress in the domain of neuroscience. You see, one of the first points about brains is that they are a muscle, and just like any muscle they need to be exercised regularly, with the right type of exercise to engage and develop different parts of the brain. A second point I confirmed with a neuroscientist called Deric Bownds in the USA, whose blog is very interesting to read (at http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2009/04/delayed-brain-development-in-humans.html) is that the older emotional limbic parts of our brain are more reflexive, and we require the more recently evolved prefrontal cortex that stores ethical rules to inhibit inappropriate behaviours. The older brain, however, also contains automatic routines that support social bonding, and inhibit harmful reflexes which I need to explore further. What it basically means, from what I understand so far, is that our original brains that are around 2 million years old are more responsible for basic emotions, whereas the higher developed brain, the frontal and neo cortex, are relatively young in terms of evolution in comparison, 100,000 years old.

It is therefore no surprise that there is a constant fight between good and evil, so well documented in the world's Holy Books, such as the Bible, The Quran and the Torah, which all focus on this conflict, essentially a fight for supremacy between the newer part of the brain and the older brain. So when Buddhism tells us that all human life is suffering , the first Noble Truth, and that all suffering is caused by human desire, the second, it seems that we one can almost exclusively attribute this second Noble Truth to the older part of our brains. This may well be the reason why castration of males results in a dramatic reduction of activity in the older part of the brain, a fact already known to early castrators in places like China, where they noted a remarkable reduction in aggression in Eunuchs, or a reduced tendency for fight or flight responses, related to the amygdale, a part of the older brain.

I was watching a program on TV about some strange tribe of humans found on the island of Palau in the Philippines together with my son last night. The program tried to work out why the humans living there and becoming extinct, possibly some 1,500 years ago, were of such small (1.20 m) stature, while their teeth were the same as other average humans. It covered a scientific expedition and research at a small island cave where the remains of a strange sub species of Homo sapiens had been found recently. One of the answers to that question was that teeth take a relatively longer period to adjust than other parts of the body, and that the smaller stature had been caused by a lack of nutrients on the island, which would have been very isolated when the humans first arrived, estimated at around 3,000 years ago. To me their hypothesis confirmed that certain parts of our bodies can evolve much quicker when the need arises, much more rapidly than the 2,000,000 or 100,000 years for our parts of the brain, referred to before.

The fact that an evolution is going on can be seen from some simple statistics, which may be challenged for their scientific provenance and accuracy, but could nonetheless be quite interesting to keep track off. The point was raised by my wife who asked me to define "inculcate" recently, as she had seen an ever increasing number of politicians and public figures sue this word in Malaysia recently. As a result I checked the search string "inculcate ethics" on Google on 1 June and found 98,000 results, not a large number by any means. After a week I checked the same search string again to find how many additional search results were found. Today, on 6 June, there were 93,600 results. A reduction of 4.5 % in one week is not a good sign, but maybe my sampling technique is deficient. I will keep track on this one and report it back over the next 12 months. Let's see whether inculcating ethics will slide inexorably towards extinction contrary to my hypothesis that the newer brain should supersede the old.

Society starts at home. So does the extermination of Mephistopheles. This responsibility cannot be abdicated to other institutions, be they political, religious or philosophical in nature. The buck stops with you and me. In the next Part IV I will discuss the rise and falling of the Middle Class, and the historic reasons for this. It will also cover the reason why this should concern us greatly.

Click here for PART IV