Does everyone do it?

"Everyone does it!" is the exclamation whenever you confront someone who does something that should offend the conscience. That, at least, is the excuse we give whenever we refuse to deal with the collapse of public morals. We refuse to accept, we refuse to admit, that we are responsible, passively, for the collapse of public morals. When we use the exclamation "Everyone does it!" we are, passively, admitting that we are responsible for the state of things.

It used to be that when we observed wrongdoing, we would speak out. Even then, we would do it passively: we'd wait for the brave among us to point out that something being done was wrong, or was being done wrongly, like a respected preacher or an opinion leader whom we automatically deferred to regarding matters of public morals. Those days are long gone, or at least they seem to be.

What happened at the Volkswagen Group, the venerable German manufacturer of cars, seems to confirm that we no longer even care that bad people are doing bad things with our tacit knowledge. Closer home, we look at the big questions of the day and bemoan the state of things without admitting that we are responsible for the state of things.

Every now and then I take a drive in Nairobi and I am surprised, though I shouldn't be, about the way motorists take liberties with the Highway Code without any consequences. The result has been a traffic mess that seems intractable. The economists point to the millions of man hours we lose every year to traffic jams, the National Transport and Safety Authority records the numbers of deaths and injuries caused by traffic jams and the courts prosecute thousands of traffic offenders for petty traffic offences every year. Yet few of us are willing to take responsibility for the state of our roads.

We are all responsible, yet none of us are: Everyone does it. Each one is in a hurry to Get There First, regardless of the cost or the inconvenience to others. We will cut in front of others, we will speed when we shouldn't, we will disobey the commands of the police or the traffic lights. We will do what it takes to come out ahead even if the advantage is short-lived or costly in the long term. There is a fear that pervades our psyche that if we do not do what we fear the other guy is doing, we will somewhat come out the worse.

The fear that if we play by the rules, we will lose, consumes us. We got to this point by allowing the bullies and the thugs among us to take what they wanted without paying for it, we allowed the corrupt among us to steal without paying the price, and when we allowed the little indignities visited on us to come to pass without standing up for what was right. That fear now lets the madness consume us in every little way, whether it is a smooth drive to the office or the slight discrepancy on our change from the supermarket.

It isn't that we are willing to engage in sharp practices because everyone does it. We engage in them because we are afraid of not being ahead if we do not. Unless we are honest with ourselves about our fear of losing out, we will never be able to take the first step to sort out the state of things. We must be brave enough, once again, to point out that if we stand up to the bullies, the thugs and the corrupt, life could be better for all of us.