Luke 3:12-14
As a society, we have become accustomed to inauthenticity. Some forms of deceit are so familiar we think of them as simply the way things are done today. Sales people cold-call, claiming to be conducting or following up surveys; others claim they know about our credit deals, PPI (Payment Protection Insurance), mobile ‘phone contracts and the viruses on our computers. Representatives from utility companies visit our homes, claiming to be investigating the misuse of rival companies’ tariffs but really want us to transfer to them. Building companies tout for work by sending people to conduct property inspections. Many introduce themselves using carefully chosen words designed to leave the impression they have some official status or are performing a public service.
Do these people think they are being dishonest? Are they even thinking in traditional honest/dishonest catagories? In my experience, they think they are doing their jobs in the way they are meant to be done. This is nothing new: the same phenomenon studied after World War 2, when the Nazi leaders put on trial for war crimes claimed that the will of Hitler was decisive and they bore no personal responsibility for following orders.
During the 1950s and 1960s, psychological experiments not only demonstrated the willingness of ordinary people to go along with a majority view, even when they knew it was wrong, but also to obey authority and act against their own consciences to inflict unnecessary pain on people. Professor Philip Zimbarde’s notorious prison experiment saw students so absorbed into their role-play that the ‘prison guards’ began to abuse the ‘inmates’. Just a few years ago, a college re-enactment of the Holocaust was abandoned because in the mock concentration camp the ‘guards’ began to physically abuse the ‘Jews’. By comparison, industry norms may seem very ordinary but the difference is only one of degree.
Business is business’ was originally the English title of a French play written in 1903 and it quickly came to express the assumption that society’s usual standards of personal morality do not apply to business. A few years after the play was first performed in London, the Minister of Westminster Chapel, Dr G Campbell Morgan, said, ‘I am sometimes told that, that business is business! That means that business is rascality’.
Do you think standards of integrity and honesty are the same in domestic and business life? To what extent do you think Jesus of Nazareth would agree with John the Baptist that the usual standards of authenticity and honesty should apply to the ways we earn a living?
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