No - 4 Herd Mentality & Corruption:

No - 4

Herd Mentality & Corruption:

People imitate each other. In an experiment, a man was asked to stare blankly at the sky in a busy street - pretending to see some thing unusual. 30% of the passersby looked up and passed by. When two people were staged to look up, the percentage went up to 40%. And when 10 people were staged to look up, almost every one looked up. Some even stood around in small clumps and started discussing climate change!

That is the power of imitation in a social environment. This blind veneration of crowd behaviour overrides reason, logic, rationale, and even social values. In the shipping industry we deal with Customs Departments, one of the most corrupt government machineries in India. Even I happen have school friends working in this department. When I look back, I can not imagine them indulging in such utter moral  depravation. But now they also do. Coming from strictly disciplined and moralistic middle-class parentage of yore, they experience no pin-pricks on their own conscience. They rationalize this far too easily. 

"Everyone around here does this. Even the national leaders do this in the open. The common man does it. So what the heck!"

That is devastatingly true. This may not be the only truth. There are other factors like bad policies, unfair man management practices in government departments, and poor infrastructures etc. But this aspect of crowd behavior is one of the most significant and virulent motivator in this stinky morass. As more people participate in this immoral orgy, more are sucked in. The effect goes exponentially through the roof. However, solution does not lie in this manifest copycat spread of the virus. The rudiments of clarity in policies, procedures, man management in government departments, accountability, transparency, and social education  are needed to address our decay.

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Brgds

Capt Rath

Econship Marine

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