This satirical document provides a "micro-primer on corruption" intended to teach children how to succeed through unprincipled and self-seeking behavior. It recommends instructing children on denying facts when caught, claiming ignorance, playing for time, and ultimately changing the subject or becoming abusive. The summary mocks the idea of teaching corruption as a way for children to achieve success.
This satirical document provides a "micro-primer on corruption" intended to teach children how to succeed through unprincipled and self-seeking behavior. It recommends instructing children on denying facts when caught, claiming ignorance, playing for time, and ultimately changing the subject or becoming abusive. The summary mocks the idea of teaching corruption as a way for children to achieve success.
This satirical document provides a "micro-primer on corruption" intended to teach children how to succeed through unprincipled and self-seeking behavior. It recommends instructing children on denying facts when caught, claiming ignorance, playing for time, and ultimately changing the subject or becoming abusive. The summary mocks the idea of teaching corruption as a way for children to achieve success.
A Micro-primer on Corruption If you are caught in the act, just deny it.
his is EPW in an introspective mood at the end of the
year. Just look at us. From issue to issue, we plod our lumbering way from kernel density functions to the labyrinthine by-lanes of postmodern prose, from stern Notes and Commentaries to sterner Perspectives and Editorials, from the dry tabulation of data to their even drier interpretation. When we are not wagging our finger at the world, we are boring the worlds pants off with our laboured turgidities. Where is the family in any of this, where the tiniest space for caring and sharing, where the possibility of offering to parents something with which they can inspire and ennoble their offspring? Occasionally, at least, should this weekly not make an effort to reach out with hope and promise to the needs of the next generation, with positive and encouraging little tracts for the times that reflect the manners and morals and mores of the contemporary world? The thought emboldens us to try our hand at writing a helpful little primer on one of the most pressing requirements of success and achievement in the modern worldcorruption. Parents who read aloud pieces such as the present one every night at bedtime to their moppets might expect the latter to display a marked improvement in their attitudes and conduct, to take rapid strides towards achieving an irredeemably hardboiled unprincipledness. One could begin by instructing children on the virtues of corruption by quoting to them from Joseph Hellers Catch-22: From now on Im thinking only of me. Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way? Then, said Yossarian, Id certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldnt I? It might be added for the benefit of the children (if they havent already cottoned on to it, the devious little things), that Yossarian would be an even bigger damned fool to feel any other way if nobody
Economic & Political Weekly
EPW
decEMBER 26, 2015
vol l no 52
was thinking only about themselves. To feel as Yossarian does
constitutes what the infants will recognise, after they have become trained economists, as a dominant strategy equilibrium. Not that they should be required to draw pay-off matrices every time they do something self-seeking and anti-social: these things should become second nature, and come instinctively to them, just as it will come instinctively to them to steer their BMWs against the traffic lights without their having to solve a set of complicated differential equations in order to understand the dynamics of their vehicles motion (much less the morals of their behaviour, guided as it is by inter-temporal utility-maximisation). It only remains to instruct the toddlers on what they should do when they are caught in the act and invited to defend themselves on a television panel show of the variety that is now a staple feature of every Indian intellectuals evening from 9 pm onwards. Here are the easy steps they must be invited to adopt. First deny the facts. When that becomes untenable, claim ignorance of the facts and assert their unknowability. When that becomes untenable, play for time. When that becomes untenable, indicate loss of video, and then audio, contact. When that becomes untenable, keep asking whats so wrong about the alleged misdeeds. When that becomes untenable, talk about the distinction between legality and morality, while carefully dealing with neither. When that becomes untenable, change the subject. When that becomes untenable, blame the critic. When that becomes untenable, smirk, shout, and become abusive in a gradually orchestrated progression. It is bound to work. As that great philosopher P G Wodehouse, who deserves a place on every bookshelf next to Spinozas Ethics, always maintained: Stout denial is the thing. Stick to stout denial. You cant beat it.
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