SELF INTEREST

Someone once told me that the word Poli means many and ticks means blood-sucking animal. The solemnity and the scope of what took place with the recent NFC scandal left no doubt in my mind that the word Politics, really means many blood-sucking animal. However, understanding of human behavior not the party is fundamental to comprehend the machinations that formed the current scandal. After all, it is human that breaths life into the party and not vice versa.

David Hume once said, “Man is motivated by and only by self-interest. Only considerations of utility can sway man to act one way or another.” Therefore, you can put any party to run the country but as long as it’s human the quotation will always be relevant. For example, I had recently tried to respond with a comment to an article entitled Call for Parliamentary Select Committee on Defence, which was posted on Tony Pua’s blog. The comments I tried to post were a sincere view of the issue, which was not meant to serve any political agenda or support any individual. Unfortunately, it was not posted on his blog because it does not serve his interest even though my comment may serve the interest of the public. It was not a surprised to me that when I browsed his blog further I stumble upon comments posted which, only supported his agenda but more importantly his interest. The only way to understand why he made such decision is to understand the incentives he face hence his preference for one outcome versus another.

Understanding human behavior also means that whoever is responsible for the NFC scandal should not go unpunished. The tactics of cover up these days are old school. Today people are more upset about government covering up something or saying one thing and doing another. In short, people don’t like the feeling of being lied to and with the case of NFC; this is exactly the feeling of the Malaysian people. Apart from this, the NFC scandal carries cost to reputation, because reputation is much harder to clean than to tarnish. This is why to right this wrong, the government needs to give more than what they think is fair, and it is obvious that the only place to gauge what is fair is by asking and listening to what the Malaysian people think is fair. This is important, as it is a known fact that people judge trustworthy based on the organization’s reputation. It also important to the organization as preserving reputation helps keep honesty and suppresses the incentive to act on bad intentions. In short, punishing wrong-doing keeps people in line and promotes cooperation.

Commonsense insists that people have reasons for what they do and this may be true. But it doesn’t necessarily allow us to predict in advance either what they will do or what their reason will be for doing it. Once they do it, of course, the reasons will appear obvious just like my incidents with trying to post comment on Tony Pua’s blog. We think change is beneficial but it could also be disastrous given the fact that we don’t have the ability to predict the outcome. We have the impression that our particular beliefs are all derived from some overarching philosophy, but the reality is we arrive at them quite independently and often haphazardly. We feel we are so advanced and yet we cannot unravel a simple knot tied by a part time mathematician working alone without a computer – Fermat’s last theorem puts things in perspective. This is why it is not strange that we have the tendency to mistake change for progress.