On ethics

As some you might recall from your tertiary education, the world is all "ethical" nowadays. The professional organisations and academic institutions of the world are all enforcing this wonderful new regimen of right and wrong upon all of the world's young (and sometimes not so young) population.
It is my opinion that the impact of all of these above efforts to inculcate ethics in young adults is trivial.

Why? Well, let's start with some anecdotal evidence: Almost nobody I have known has ever taken any ethics class seriously, whether it be for young accountants, engineers or, heaven forbid, lawyers. In fact, many people found the courses laughable. And it isn't that the lecturers didn't try to make the courses relevant. There are always a bunch of modern case studies accompanying every lecture, "proving" that conflict of interest is wrong, and protecting the rights of the community is good.

But the question still remains: why is this schedule of ethics failing? I guess it comes down to a few of things:

1. Teaching a person Ethics 101 does not an ethical person make (and it is dull).
   
2. The pay-off for being ethical in modern society is currently trumped by the pay-off of being unethical.
   

I don't want to go into each point in too much detail, but some comment is in order. From the first point it is evident that we need some other method of incorporating ethics into our lives and understanding the impact of collective ethical behaviour in our work and personal lives. The second point necessitates the shifting of the goalposts – making it profitable for us to be ethical as a collective, and shunning those who are unethical at the expense of others.

Now, for an interlude. I have always been a staunch believer learning through books is always bested by learning through experience. There might not be much debate about this, but I feel it very important to mention that by making a choice in real life, just to see it backfire, is the best way for anyone to learn. You learn by the whip of life – run like a maniac around the school yard, and you are bound to stub your toe, and cry. If you make a bad decision, there are bad outcomes for you. A good decision allows you to shoot ahead and is profitable. Interlude concluded.

What does this interlude have to do with anything related to ethics? I think it has everything to do with ethics. I believe that it is the answer to most of the problems we have to do with unethical behaviour. The reason is that modern society has managed to instil many disconnects between our decisions and the outcomes of those decisions. These disconnects fool our mind into making bad decisions more often without us knowing the negative outcome until it is too late.

The impact on our personal lives is evident. Example:
Our money is mostly held electronically, which means that there is a disconnect between spending money and intuitively knowing that there is now less to spend (not to mention that humans are hopeless at comprehending the value of numbers higher than 7). This leads to a collective increase in debt, which has the unfortunate long term outcome of people living for the bank. The other side of this coin is that banks actively encourage people to go into debt, since the repayments of debt are, generally-speaking, the main income stream for banks. I am not here to debate the economic value of debt, but the example seems to show that disconnects create situations where one party can benefit at the unfair expense of others.

I am not supposing that we should all move back to having cash under our beds or that we should banish EFT's and banks from society. I am also not saying that it is possible to remove all disconnects either. But what we need is a stronger link between the decisions people/companies/politicians (politicians aren't really people, are they?) make and the negative outcomes they have on others. When a banker makes decisions which harm us, that banker needs to feel the pain from stubbing his toe and cry. The same goes for all of us in positions where we could harm others.

This concept is often called having “skin in the game”. We need this to be a more integral feature of modern society in order for us to encourage ethical behaviour. No amount of teaching and lecturing and idealistic conferences on human rights will change the status quo, unless “skin in the game” is made part of everybody's lives (including politicians and bankers). If this concept is not assimilated into society, the pay-offs for being unethical will never change. And if the pay-offs won't change, simple game theory tells us that it is unlikely that the collective behaviour will change.

A purpose

It is in chance happenings that you can find proverbial "meaning" in life. You could have months and months of normalcy, and a single extraordinary event causes your life to pivot in ways you could never predict. We all know the feeling: you unexpectedly meet an old friend, or an introduction to a quirky person suddenly gives you a fresh perspective in life.

Nassim Taleb calls this type of event a Black Swan - an event which is fundamentally unpredictable, and causes the status quo to change. In his books (which have become very popular), he seems to focus a lot on Black Swans in the "macro" world more than how they impact your personal life. But if you think back on your life, it might now be obvious that it is not defined by little, predictable steps, but rather a series of very defined and unpredictable events.

A review of my life shows that there are a multitude of small events that have had a massive influence on where I am now. Most of these escape my memory but they remain important nonetheless. Had a friend not dragged me to a university dance, I would not have met Michela; had my parents not decided to move to the Western Cape, I would never started surfing... I could go on and on. The point is that each of these events could not have been predicted, and each had a vast impact on my life.

What many people (including younger Machiel) sometimes seem to miss, is that no matter how hard you try, it is not possible to predict much of the future, and that means it's usually futile to even try. We can make predictive judgements on risky behaviour, but most other prediction is fraught with difficulty. The inherent randomness in nature and complex collective behaviour of humans makes it unrealistic for us to plan our good and bad fortune.

What you can rather do, is to expose yourself to good fortune and protect yourself from bad luck. This is what Taleb calls being "antifragile". There are ways of being antifragile in most spheres of life, but is sometimes a counterintuitive way of approaching life. So far, finding ways of being antifragile is a little hit and miss as well, and I have seen how two people approach the same problem with an antifragile mindset and get two exact opposite answers. Luckily, it is quite easy to test which answer is really antifragile, since time should eliminate the weaker answer. (Spot the equivalencies here to gene mutation, social order, and investing strategy?)

So, how do you make your personal life more antifragile and susceptible to positive, unpredictable events? Here's a list of things I recommend every now and again:

• Travel to new places
• Force yourself to do new things
• Talk to strangers at social events
• Read history to learn from others
• Actively expose yourself to adversaries

This list is not extensive, but it is definitely a good start. It also leads to one of the main goals of the blog, which is to document how I practise what I preach, and the impact it has on my life.