I get 4 requests a day to be the agent of a multi-million dollar money transfer. The writers try all the angles: dear brother in Christ, dear friend, I'm dying of cancer, my family is destitute, villains killed my father, I want to build an orphanage. There are always a few million dollars in it for me, personally. Mass mailings offer me or my dog a credit card, in case the transferred millions don't stretch far enough to pay for the siding job I buy on the phone.
Pretty soon, I start to see predation everywhere: "What do you mean, my dog needs a blood test, my brakes need new calipers, I should take a science class? What you are really telling me is that you just bought a new rug and you can't quite afford a sofa to match it, and I'm the mark who's going to make the difference." "What do you mean, you love me? You just want safe sex and two incomes."
There's a literature out there in game theory about something called the prisoner's dilemma, an elegant demonstration of a quite general truth: when people work entirely for their own good, when cooperation and mutual benefit disappear, the outcomes become pretty bad for everybody. When folks cooperate and trust each other and think about each other's welfare, massive efficiencies result, the wealth of nations starts to flow toward the cooperators. It's an automatic and entirely secular process.
Let us get very straight what ethical work is about. It is not a matter of preventing bad things from happening. Many bad things will happen. But if the literature of predation comes to dominate the consciousness of America, if elementary cooperation comes to seem naive, quaint (like the Geneva Conventions), charming even -- then a machine has been set in motion that will produce evil as clouds produce rain, naturally, inexorably, steadily, pervasively.
The work is -- that that not happen, that structures of cooperation be preserved.
Posted by shea0017 at November 22, 2004 12:00 PM