Faustian Pact

Imagine that you are in one of the capsules on our magnificent Singapore Flyer. The devil is standing beside you and he hands you a rifle and makes you an offer. He points to the people below and offers you $10,000 for every person you gun down with the rifle. The people seemed like tiny black ants from your vantage point and barely appeared to move. The devil promises that you will not have to bear any consequences for your actions. He guarantees that you will never have to see the faces or that of his/her families of the people you shot. There is no need for provide any compensation in return for his generous offer. A few snaps of the trigger and you will become the rich man that you have worked so hard to be. Do you reject his offer or start counting the black little dots to calculate how rich you can become? What will you do?

Such incredible situations do not happen in real life. Many will point out that there is no such thing as a devil. But there is a point to this ridiculous story I have just described. Over the past few months, I have came across several documentaries, shot and produced by activists and other passionate film-makers, regarding a variety of subjects, ranging from the Sudan civil war to animal abuses to environmental issues. I have no particular interest in most of the issues that were so fervently portrayed within these films but I have always liked the humbling effect it has on me when, through these documentaries, I see what a big wide world we have out there and how little I know and feel about so many things.

The diversity of our world is not the topic of my post. I want to write about something closer to home. In all the documentaries that I have watched, there is a central theme that is common across all of them. The root cause of almost all of our problems in the world today, I think, stems from the greed of man. It may not sound like a lot today since the economic recession of the past couple of years had made a poster-child of the greedy Wall Street banker. But to go beyond the cliché notion of greed, which is typically portrayed as intentional and deliberate, I am suggesting that an alternative kind of greed is more prevalent. One that is more naïve and unpremeditated but nevertheless, just as caustic and destructive as the former. There is a difference between knowingly greedy and unknowingly greedy. Let me explain with an example.

In one of the documentaries I watched regarding the evils of privatization of the water industry in poor African countries, the film-maker interviewed one of the former executives of one of the biggest water company worldwide. He revealed that the World Bank pushed Bolivia into accepting the privatization of their national water supply when Bolivia could not afford to repay the loans to the World Bank. The president of the ruling council of the World Water Committee used to work as a vice-CEO for the giant water company and the 2 vice-presidents of the council are currently working for the same company. For getting the company the water contract for Bolivia, the president of the committee as well as other members got generous kickbacks as well as guaranteed future employment with the company. It was a paltry sum of money to pay for a multi-billion dollar contract. The result of this illicit affair? The privatization effort caused widespread water shortage in almost all parts of rural Bolivia which in turn sparked a civil war that forced the Bolivian government to renounce their decision to privatize the water industry. More than 100,000 Bolivians died from water contamination in the years preceding the war. Children mortality rates in Bolivia still stands at more than 10%, one of the highest in the world, primarily due to the lack of clean water. The interviewed executive admitted to playing a part in this arrangement between the water company and World Bank and confessed to have received better bonuses (in the region of $50,000-$60,000) for his role. Only after retiring from his job and a chance encounter that exposed him to the tragedy in Bolivia that he helped to create, did he realize the horror of his action, the true legacy of his greed. Before that, he simply assumed he was part of an organization that provided a better, albeit more expensive, water solution to the developing country and didn't think much else of the downstream effects after that.

It almost always starts out that way. What harm can there be if one gets an extra bite of the pie if at the end of the day, everyone gets to benefit anyway. That justification sets one down that slippery slope where it becomes so easy to lose sight of the original kind intention and quickly become mired in internal conflicts between his greed and conscience. This is what I mean by unknowingly greed and I think this form of greed has struck closer to home, in a bigger and more pervasive way that people care to admit. People deserve the basic right to eat, drink and sleep. While other countries around the world struggle with satisfying the first 2 of these basic needs in the form of pollution and contamination of their food and water resources, we in Singapore struggle with the third, the right to sleep, which translates into the right to own a decent, comfortable home to live in and start a family.

I have no doubt in my mind that there is no grand conspiracy between the property developers and relevant authorities to continue to fan the property bubble that is threatening to make even public housing unaffordable to the common man on the street. There had been many posts regarding this issue and I am not about to start another. But surely of the multitude of causes for the housing problems, one of them has to be that of greed. An escalating property market aids GDP growth which is the ultimate barometer for the government's performance (and pay packet) in our country. Someone somewhere must be thinking that not only is he/she getting some sweeteners from this property boom, existing property owners are getting richer so why not? But she does not see the downstream effects his/her unknowing greed has caused in terms of lower birthrates, crippling mortgage payments etc.

This phenomenon is not only true for property. We can argue the same for other issues like the rich-poor divide, freedom of speech, unfettered foreign immigration etc. The political hegemony casts a blanket of ignorance over the ruling elite where they cannot see or hear the cries of discontent from the common man. It is hypocritical to suggest that they are not the beneficiaries of their policies when their annual compensation exceeds 40 times that of the common citizen. What is particularly scary is the self-righteousness stemming from the belief that they are doing only what is right for the people despite being the direct beneficiaries from their decisions. I believe that they think they are doing the right thing but I worry that they do not know if they are not. The awful truth is that when the devil whispers his seductions of power and fortune besides your ear, he is often harder to resist than you think. When you don't have to look the person in the eye and see the horror of what you are doing, it is easy to pull the trigger on that faraway little black dot below.