فصل 4: پوست دیگران در بازی شما

Chapter 4 The Skin of Others in Your Game

How to be a whistleblower—James Bond isn’t a Jesuit priest, but he is a bachelor—So are both Professor Moriarty and Sherlock Holmes—Total intelligence in the P.R. firm Ketchum—Putting the skin on terrorists.

A MORTGAGE AND TWO CATS

Imagine working for a corporation that produces a (so far) hidden harm to the community, in concealing a cancer-causing property that kills thousands by an effect that is not (yet) fully visible. You could alert the public, but you would automatically lose your job. There is a risk that the company’s evil scientists would disprove you, causing additional humiliation. You are aware of what Monsanto shills did to the French scientist Gilles-Éric Séralini, who, until he won his defamation suit, lived in total scientific disgrace, the reputational equivalent of leprosy. Or the news will come and go and you may end up being ignored. You are familiar with the history of whistleblowers, which shows that even if you end up vindicated, it may take time for the truth to emerge over the noise created by corporate shills. Meanwhile you will pay the price. A smear campaign against you will destroy any hope of getting another job.

You have nine children, a sick parent, and as a result of taking a stand, your children’s future may be compromised. Their college hopes will evaporate—you may even have trouble feeding them properly. You are severely conflicted between your obligation to the collective and to your progeny. You feel you are part of the crime, and unless you do something, you are an agent: thousands are dying from the hidden poisoning by the corporation. Being ethical comes at a huge cost to others.

In the James Bond movie Spectre, agent Bond found himself fighting—on his own, whistleblower style—a conspiracy of dark forces that took over the British service, including his supervisors. Q, who built the new fancy car and other gadgets for him, when asked to help against the conspiracy, said, “I have a mortgage and two cats”—in jest of course, because he ended up risking the lives of his two cats to fight the bad guys.

Society likes saints and moral heroes to be celibate so they do not have family pressures that may force them into the dilemma of needing to compromise their sense of ethics to feed their children. The entire human race, something rather abstract, becomes their family. Some martyrs, such as Socrates, had young children (although he was in his seventies), and overcame the dilemma at their expense.

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates behaved like a mensch: “I, Sir, have a family, you know, and was not born ‘from oak or from rock’ ”—this is again an expression of Homer—“but from human beings, so that I have a family too, and indeed sons, men of Athens, three of them, one already a teenager and two who are children. But nonetheless I will not beg you to acquit me by bringing any of them here.”

Many can’t.

The vulnerability of heads of households has been remarkably exploited in history. The samurai had to leave their families in Edo as hostages, thus guaranteeing to the authorities that they would not take positions against the rulers. The Romans and Huns partook of the practice of exchanging permanent “visitors,” the children of rulers on both sides, who grew up at the courts of the foreign nation in a form of gilded captivity.

The Ottomans relied on janissaries, who were extracted as babies from Christian families and never married. Having no family (or no contact with their family), they were entirely devoted to the sultan.

It is no secret that large corporations prefer people with families; those with downside risk are easier to own, particularly when they are choking under a large mortgage.

And of course most fictional heroes such as Sherlock Holmes or James Bond don’t have the encumbrance of a family that can become a target of, say, evil professor Moriarty.

Let us go one step further.

To make ethical choices you cannot have dilemmas between the particular (friends, family) and the general.

Celibacy has been a way to force men to implement such heroism: for instance, the rebellious ancient sect the Essenes were celibate. So by definition they did not reproduce—unless one considers that their sect mutated to merge with what is known today as Christianity. A celibacy requirement might help with rebellious causes, but it isn’t the greatest way to multiply your sect through the ages.

Financial independence is another way to solve ethical dilemmas, but such independence is hard to ascertain: many seemingly independent people aren’t particularly so. While, in Aristotle’s days, a person of independent means was free to follow his conscience, this is no longer as common in modern days.

Intellectual and ethical freedom requires the absence of the skin of others in one’s game, which is why the free are so rare. I cannot possibly imagine the activist Ralph Nader, when he was the target of large motor companies, raising a family with 2.2 kids and a dog.

But neither celibacy nor financial independence makes one unconditionally immune, as we see next.

FINDING HIDDEN VULNERABILITIES

So far we have seen that the requirement of celibacy is enough evidence that society has, traditionally, been implicitly penalizing some layer of a collective for the actions of a person. This is never done explicitly: nobody says, “I will punish your family because you are criticizing the big agrichemical firms,” when in effect this is what happens in practice when there is the threat of the reduction in the volume of the objects under the Christmas tree, or the degradation of the quality of food in the refrigerator.

I have f*** you money, so I appear to be fully independent (though I am certain that my independence is unrelated to my finances). But there are people I care about who can be affected by my actions, and those who want to harm me may want to go after them. In the campaign against me waged by Big Ag, the public relation firms (hired to discredit those who were skeptical of the risk of transgenics) couldn’t threaten my livelihood. Nor could they tag me with the “antiscience” label (the central part of their arsenal) since I have a history of standing for probabilistic rigor in science expressed in technical language, and several million readers who understand my reasoning. It is a bit too late for that now. In fact, by creating analogies between some cherry-picked passages from my writings taken out of context and those of the new age guru Deepak Chopra, they have caused some people to suspect that Chopra was a logician, an application of Wittgenstein’s ruler In Fooled by Randomness: by measuring the table with a ruler am I measuring the ruler or measuring the table? Far-fetched comparisons are more likely to discredit the commentator than the commentated.

So these P.R. firms resorted to harassing New York University’s staff by using web-mobs to flood them with emails—which includes overwhelming a defenseless assistant and people who had no idea I worked for the university since I am there only quarter-time. This method—of hitting you where they think it hurts—implies hitting people around you who are more vulnerable than you. General Motors, in the campaign against Ralph Nader (who uncovered flaws in their products), desperate to stop him, resorted to harassing Rose Nader, his mother, calling her at three in the morning—in the days when it was hard to trace a telephone call. Clearly it was meant to make Ralph Nader feel he was guilty of harming his own mother. It turned out that Rose Nader was herself an activist and felt flattered by the calls (at least she was not left out of the battle).

I am privileged to have other enemies than Big Ag. A couple of years ago, a university in Lebanon offered me an honorary doctorate. I accepted out of respect, counter to my habit of refusing honors, (largely) because I get very bored during ceremonies. Plus, in my experience, people who collect honorary doctorates are typically hierarchy-conscious, and I abide by Cato’s injunction: he preferred to be asked why he didn’t have a statue rather than why he had one. The staff of the university became automatically the target of my detractors, of Salafi-sympathizers among the student body, and of people who were ticked off by my enthusiasm for and defense of Shiite Islam, and my desire to return Lebanon to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Greco-Roman world to which it tangibly belongs, away from the disastrous and fictional construction called Arabism. Visibly, deans and presidents of universities are far more vulnerable than independent persons, and animals know where weakness lies. By the minority rule, all it takes is a very small number of detractors using misplaced buzzwords of the type that makes people cringe (such as “racist”) to scare an entire institution. Institutions are employees—vulnerable, reputation-conscious employees. Being Salafi is not a race but a political movement–cum–criminal organization, yet people fear being labeled racists so much that they lose their logical faculties. But in the end the efforts of the detractors were to no avail: on one hand I cannot be harmed; on the other the university would have more to lose from the withdrawal of an honor than from harassment by Pan-Arabists and Salafis.

These methods of going after vulnerable people associated with you are eventually ineffective. For one thing, odious people (and Salafi sympathizers) tend to be dumb, along with people who act only in mobs. In addition, those who engage in smear campaigning as a profession are necessarily incompetent at everything else—hence at that business too—so the industry accumulates rejects who are prone to ethical stretches. Did any of your business-smart, streetwise, or academically gifted peers in high school declare that their dream was to become the world’s expert in smearing whistleblowers? Or even work as a lobbyist or public relations expert? These jobs are indicative of necessary failure in other things.

Further:

To be free of conflict you need to have no friends.

Which is why Cleon was said to have renounced all of his friendships during his office.

So far we have seen that the link between the individual and the collective is too fuzzy to interpret naively. So let us consider the classical situation of the terrorist who thinks he is immune to harm.

HOW TO PUT SKIN IN THE GAME OF SUICIDE BOMBERS

Can someone punish a family for the crimes of an individual? The scriptures are self-contradictory—you can get both answers from the Old Testament. Exodus and Numbers show God as “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third or fourth generation.” Deuteronomy makes a separation: “Fathers shall not be put to death because of their children, nor shall children be put to death because of their fathers. Each one shall be put to death for his own sin.” Even today the question isn’t fully settled, nor is the answer clear-cut. You are not responsible for the debts of your parents, but German taxpayers are still responsible for war reparations for crimes committed by their grandparents and great-grandparents. And even in ancient times, when debt was a burden that crossed generations, the answer wasn’t clear-cut: there was a balancing mechanism of periodic (literal) cleaning of the slate, with jubilee debt forgiveness.

However, the answer is clear in the case of terrorism. The rule should be: You kill my family with supposed impunity; I will make yours pay some indirect price for it. Indirect responsibility isn’t part of the standard crime-and-punishment methodology of a civilized society, but confronting terrorists (who threaten innocents) isn’t standard either. For we have rarely in history faced a situation in which the perpetrator of a crime has a completely asymmetric payoff and upside from death itself.

The current narrative is that terrorists think they are going to heaven and will meet virgins that look like their next-door neighbors. Not quite true: many just seek a perceived heroic death, or to impress their friends. The desire to be a hero can be quite blinding.

Hammurabi’s code actually makes such a provision, transferring liability across generations. For, on that same basalt stele surrounded by Korean selfie sticks, is written the following: “If the architect built a house and the house subsequently collapses, killing the firstborn son of the master, the firstborn son of the architect shall be put to death.” The individual as we understand it today did not exist as a standalone unit; the family did.

Gypsies have rules that remained for a long time opaque to outsiders; it was probably not until the movie Vengo (2000) that the general public discovered a dark custom among Gitano tribes. In a case where a member of one family kills a member of another, a direct relative of the killer will be delivered to the family of the victim.

The unusual nuisance with jihadi terrorism is that we are totally defenseless in front of a deluded person willing to kill scores of innocents without any true downside, that is, no skin in the game. In Northern Phoenicia, Alawis are terrorized by Salafis wearing bomb-filled jackets that they can activate in a public place. There is almost no way they can be “caught” without activation. Killing them on sight leads to false positives, but we can’t afford false negatives. As a result, we have instances of private citizens cornering and “hugging” perceived self-bombers in places where detonation would be least harmful. This is a form of counter-suicide bombing.

Explicit communal punishment can be used where other methods of justice have failed, provided they are not based on an emotional reaction, but on a well-outlined method of justice defined prior to the event, so that it becomes a deterrent. One who is sacrificing himself for a perceived upside for a given collective needs a deterrent, so it is a form of injection of skin in the game where there are no other methods. And the skin is visible: that very collective.

The only way we have left to control suicide-terrorists would be precisely to convince them that blowing themselves up is not the worst-case scenario for them, nor the end scenario at all. Making their families and loved ones bear a financial burden—just as Germans still pay for war crimes—would immediately add consequences to their actions. The penalty needs to be properly calibrated to be a true disincentive, without imparting any sense of heroism or martyrdom to the families in question.

But I feel queasy about transferring a crime from one unit, an individual, to another, a collective. What I do not feel bad about is preventing the family of the perpetrators of terrorist acts from benefiting from those acts—many terrorist groups reward the families of suicide bombers, and this can be safely terminated without any ethical dilemma.

NEXT

In the last two chapters we examined the good and the bad of dependence and the constraints on our freedoms coming from skin in the game. Next, let us look at the thrills (of the right type) of risk taking.