Ian Welsh

Came across a long story about a man’s military career. Basically, he was a West Point graduate and refused to lie: He wouldn’t sign forms that he knew were wrong. He lasted four years in the military, because almost everything he had to sign was a lie, and he wouldn’t do it.

This is worth a long quote:

Readers may regard the anecdotes above as mildly interesting, but trivial because rifle serial numbers and vehicle status are not that important in the grand scheme of things. They would be more impressed if I had refused to sign a document covering up an atrocity or something like that.

In corrupt organizations, whether it be Enron, the NY Police Department during the time that Frank Serpico was an officer, the Mafia, or the U.S. military, newcomers are tested before they are “trusted.” As Al Pacino said over and over in The Recruit, “Everything’s a test.”

Relatively new NYPD officers like Serpico, also played by Al Pacino, were invited to accept small bribes to show they were “one of us” before they were permitted knowledge about bigger stuff. Mafia wannabes are required to commit crimes confirmed by Mafia guys before they are allowed into the inner circle.

This has two purposes:

• to identify and screen out any “boy scouts” or undercover agents who are squeamish about corruption

• to get something on everyone so no one can later change his mind and snitch

Signing false documents is a court martial offense. It violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If you sign a false document, you both gain entry to the “club” and you put yourself in a position where you cannot get out because if you ever go over to the media or authorities, they can trot out the false documents they know you signed to discredit and court martial you.

He goes on to talk of applying to be a real-estate salesman. They wouldn’t hire him because he had a rental property himself, had money in the bank, and no dependents. In other words, he didn’t need the money and therefore couldn’t be coerced by his boss.

A vast amount of life is like this. In my old corporate career, I remember being in a legal compliance meeting (the most junior person there). There was a discussion of a law, and the senior VP wanted us to simply track possible violations, not stop and report them. I read out the key section of the law and said “I don’t see how that law can be read as “just keep a spreadsheet.” He insisted. I said, “Of course, you’re the Senior VP. Just write a directive telling us to do that and sign it.”

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We obeyed the law. But I was never invited to another such compliance meeting. Of particular note is that I was the only person who stood up, even though there were half a dozen people in the meeting, many senior to me, and I know some agreed with me. But they had careers, families, and were already compromised. In fact, of course, I protected them: They are the people who would have taken the blame, not the VP, if a regulator ever actually called us on it, because no way was that VP putting his John Henry on the directive.

This sort of thing goes all through modern life. We compromise (and I haven’t always stood up, though I’m pretty stiff-necked). Often it isn’t illegal, per se. It’s lying to employees (yeah, they actually probably are going to lose their jobs, but we can’t tell them that yet.) It’s hurting employees to make a number on a spreadsheet you know doesn’t actually matter, but senior management wants that number and standing up to senior management is a bad idea, you have to just give them what they want all the time so they think you’re a go-getter.

Of course, in many cases the best way to give senior management what they want is to lie. Move those numbers from one quarter to another; count future income now, or income that’s probably going to happen as for sure. If all that doesn’t work and it’s not something they can know without knowing more about operations than they ever do, just lie to them.

Sometimes this happens pro-actively, sometimes it’s a response to management who won’t listen. “I don’t care that it can’t be done, make it happens.” OK, buddy, if you won’t listen, I’ll just change the numbers.”

These things are rife. On Wall Street in the 00’s, everyone knew that whole classes of mortgages were based on lies. They were actualy called “liar’s loans.” It was common knowledge. Everyone knew that there was housing bubble (except a lot of economists, who are great at lying to themselves) and there they were  telling clients that real-estate is a sure thing. Goldman Sachs was telling their clients everything was fine while they placed a huge bet on the other side.

The entire economy, and most of politics runs on lies (Obama lied about everything of importance to progressives, to their faces. Trump of course, doesn’t tell the truth, and probably doesn’t know the truth. But no one cares because he’s just more extreme about what is normal.)

You make these compromises, over and over again, and they kill your soul. You must believe that this is okay, that it’s how things are done, that it doesn’t make you a bad person.

But it does. It makes you a bad person. Doesn’t make you nothing but bad, you, like Joe Biden, probably love your son or family or dog or something.

A society where you must lie, repeatedly, to get power, where you must do evil over and over again to get power (or even a decent living) will be shit, and the more the virus of dishonesty and meanness spreads, the more shit it will be.

This is why the one thing I try to do as a writer is always tell the truth as I know or believe it to be. Might be wrong, but I’m not lying when I say something. The only time I ever didn’t tell the truth as I knew it was for about two weeks around Obama’s victory period when I made the mistake of trying to influence his incoming administration by offering the sugar plum vision of how popular he could be if he was the next FDR. It was wrong to do, a moral failing and mistake, and I’ve never forgotten it.

You lie and you compromise yourself. It’s that simple. I was lucky, I could walk back, admit the wrong (I’ve written about this before), and continue on. But the more you do it, the harder it is, and, in many cases, if you’ve done serious wrong-doing, you’re compromised for life.

I don’t know an easy way out of this. The fact is that we have created a self-perpetuating hell. I do know that a lot of it comes down to fear; that the more we make the good life something only some people can have, with the price always being compromising yourself (don’t kid yourself, not one percent of corporations actually don’t require managers to compromise themselves in multiple ways), well, people crumble. They’ve got that dog or son to look after or they’re ambitious and hey, everyone does it, so if the price is lying and fucking every worker who reports to them, they do it.

So the first step, because people are weak and scared, is to create a society where everyone’s needs are met at a decent level; where losing your job doesn’t mean plunging into poverty. This is something almost no one has done, in Canada you certainly don’t want to be poor, it’s ass, let alone in the US where it means life in Hell, and then probably an early and degraded death.

Faced with a life of misery or an end to their integrity, most people will lose their integrity. When that’s almost everyone with any power, well, your society will be hell.

And those are the societies most of us live in. (Remember all the oil companies and tobacco companies lying? Yeah.)

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