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As the ancient story goes, it was a pleasant Mediterranean day in about 310 B.C. when Diogenes went to the Athens market. Even though it was broad daylight, he carried a lantern.
Diogenes was not known for accumulating useless items, or indeed, for accumulating anything at all. He was a pioneer minimalist who owned as little as possible. He slept in public buildings and begged for his food. He railed against luxury and violated every possible social convention.
If he were around today, we'd call him a mentally
disturbed homeless person
and we would curse the
American Civil Liberties Union for filing suits to get to
courts to protect his rights. But he lived 2,000 years ago
in Greece, some of his sayings have been passed down, and
he was a contemporary of Aristotle, so he is instead known
as a philosopher -- indeed, as the founder of a school of
philosophy known as Cynicism.
Diogenes the Cynic was carrying a lit lantern around the marketplace, and naturally someone asked why.
I am looking for an honest man,
he replied.
Many people take this tale as an indictment of commercial ethics, but there's another way to look at it, namely that Diogenes was playing the odds. He had a better chance of finding an honest man at the market than if he had gone to the temple or the academy.
Despite the accounting scandals that have rocked Wall Street and sent the Dow-Jones into a nose dive, Diogenes would probably make the same decision in modern America.
If he went to one of our temples with his lantern, he might encounter a bishop who had been covering up the pederasty of the priests under his supervision, or perhaps a televangelist who had been siphoning off funds meant for charity when he wasn't enjoying the company of a trollop.
He could find any number of professed Christians who
support public prayer, in schools and elsewhere, when Jesus
told his followers that when you pray, do not be like he
hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in he synagogues
and on the street corners to be seen by men.... When you
pray, go into your room, close the door and pray....
It might take Diogenes a while to find an honest person in
those venues.
And if the philosopher ventured to the academy, he might encounter Joseph Ellis fabricating some adventures in Vietnam, or rampant grade inflation, or Michael Bellesiles unable to produce the data to verify his claim that guns were rare in antebellum America. There, too, a long search might be required.
But at the market? I was an English major and I would rather read books than keep them, so my business skills are close to non-existent, but our system requires that you be self-employed -- that is, a business operator -- if you want to enjoy minor pleasures like a reasonably idiot-free workplace where you can smoke cigars and enjoy racy stories without fear of creating a hostile environment for some delicate sort. And so, I'm in business, more or less, and have been for 19 years.
It has been my experience that almost all the time, when a firm agrees to provide a certain product or service at a given time and price, that's what happens, even if people have to stay up all night to make it happen.
Now, it could be that honesty and ethics have nothing to do with this phenomenon -- perhaps it's only good business to keep your word. But that's close enough to suit me.
Further, the firms I'm thinking of are generally ma-and-pa shops, run by people who like what they do and try to make some money doing it: repairing cars, cooking meals, fixing computers, filling prescriptions, etc.
When you move up the business ladder, though, things do change. To our old cable company, TCI, I was not a paying customer whose desires mattered -- I was a pair of eyes to be sold to Rupert Murdoch so that I could get his Fox News instead of the PBS that I was already paying for.
To Microsoft, I'm not a customer capable of making an informed selection about which operating system, web browser, email client, word-processor or local-area network I want to use. I'm someone to be forced into doing it the Microsoft way.
To Qwest, I am not a customer worthy of service improvements if the company has some money in the bank, but part of a cash cow to be milked so that the numbers look good so that prices are high when Joe Nacchio and Phil Anschutz unload some of their stock.
This could continue indefinitely, but the trend seems
clear -- the bigger the enterprise, the less likely it is
to remember why the business started in the first place,
and the more likely it is to focus on something like
beating the quarterly income estimates produced by
analysts.
Still, Diogenes had it right. There's a better chance of finding his honest man at the market, rather than at the temple or the academy. After all, we know about the Enron and Worldcom scandals and all the others because some people had the integrity and the courage to blow the whistle.
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