We are taught very early that lying is wrong. Cheating is shameful. If you want to get ahead, you have to work for it. At school, the lesson comes back to us in different forms. Work hard, be honest, respect the rules. Good character matters. Then we grow up. And somewhere between childhood and adult life, we discover that the world does not always operate according to the rules we were taught.
A child is told to work hard and trust the process. Years later, he graduates from university and discovers that getting a job may depend as much on who he knows as on what he knows. An employee can spend years doing her work honestly and watch someone with better connections move ahead. Someone refuses to pay a bribe and discovers that a matter that should have taken a day can suddenly take weeks. We have a phrase for this: “We have to be practical.”
It sounds harmless enough. But often what it really means is that we have to learn to live with unfairness. Do not challenge the powerful person. Do not make an issue out of something everybody else has accepted. Do not insist too loudly on a rule when breaking it happens to be more convenient. This is how corruption becomes normal.
But often what it really means is that we have to learn to live with unfairness. Do not challenge the powerful person. Do not make an issue out of something everybody else has accepted. Do not insist too loudly on a rule when breaking it happens to be more convenient.
It does not always arrive in the form of a suitcase full of cash. Sometimes it is a phone call to move a file. A favour that allows somebody to bypass a rule. A decision made because somebody important asked for it. A door that opens for one person because someone knows somebody on the other side. That is where moral education begins to fail.
Tell a child that everyone deserves a fair chance, and then use your influence to secure an unfair advantage for your own child. They notice. Tell them cheating is wrong, and then find a convenient excuse for it when the outcome benefits you. They notice that too. Young people are not as naive as we sometimes imagine. They recognize hypocrisy. This does not mean every dishonest person is simply a victim of the system. People make choices, and they are responsible for those choices. But systems matter because they can make some choices easier than others.
If a government department expects its employees to follow the rules, those employees need protection when somebody powerful asks them not to. If an organization wants people to speak honestly, employees cannot reasonably be expected to tell the truth while knowing that doing so may cost them their careers. And if we want people to believe in accountability, accountability has to mean the same thing for everyone. Because rules only become real when people believe they are applied fairly.
An ordinary citizen is punished for breaking a rule. A well-connected person makes the same problem disappear with one phone call. The lesson does not need to be explained. This is one reason so many young Pakistanis become cynical as they grow older. We should also be honest about our own role in creating that cynicism.
It is easy to complain about favouritism when somebody else is benefiting from it. It becomes considerably harder when the favour is being offered to us. Most of us say we want a fair system. But the real question is whether we are willing to accept fairness when it works against our own interests. Whether we will stand in the same queue when we could make a phone call. Whether we will allow our children to succeed on their own merits when we have the influence to make the path easier for them. That is the real test of character.
Not whether we can recite the right values. Not whether we can tell our children to be honest. Not whether we can complain loudly about corruption when it is somebody else’s corruption. The test comes when the shortcut is offered to us. When the rule can be bent. We worry constantly about the values of the next generation. We ask why young people are cynical, why they are so quick to assume that merit is a fiction and connections are everything. Perhaps we should spend a little more time looking at the example we are setting for them. Because if we want young people to believe that honesty matters, we cannot simply tell them that it does. We have to build a society in which they can see that it does. We have to give them reasons to believe it.