Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 48

It is easy for us near the bottom or in the middle of the food chain to scapegoat “rot at the top” for the country’s ills. We shake fingers at the leaders of Enron, or Ponzi operators who squander the life savings of many, or hedge fund managers or banks that lose billions and then get bailed out by Congress and become richer than ever. Some who have broken laws and get caught may even serve time in a prison for very important people.

Journalist Michael Kinsley insists that the real scandal is not as much what is illegal up there in rarefied air, as what is legal; meaning, CEOs and CFOs who, breaking no laws, after doing a mediocre to catastrophic job get showered by the company’s directors with tens of millions of bonus dollars—sometimes to keep them on, sometimes to dispatch them post haste. Some of those people at the top do nothing illegal, but lie to or stomp on anyone to advance themselves another rung up the success ladder and make their fortune.33

Port Royal’s naturalist, Wendell Berry, drawing on nature makes this point: “Rats and roaches live by competition under the law of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”34

Is there anything that has a greater claim on us than consuming, than getting ahead? Is there any law higher than the law of supply and demand? If what moves us most—wherever we find ourselves in the social hierarchy—is out-competing others, and that instinct is decoupled from duties of justice and mercy, we just may have made our bed with the rats and the roaches.