The view that India is a society riddled with corruption and almost terminally crippled by it is a stereotype that is reinforced in the Indian newspapers on a daily basis. A brief glance at the front page of The Times of India newspaper, there are stories of bribing of MP’s votes in a nuclear deal and army officers found guilty of a housing scam. Evidence of the perception – and the stereotype of corruption the country appeared in comments by two Indian Supreme Court justices during a 2007 bail hearing of a former state chief minister who had been sentenced for violating the Prevention of Corruption Act of 1988, “The only way to rid the country of corruption is to hang a few of them from a lamp post,” the justice declared adding, “Everywhere, we have corruption. Nothing is free from corruption. Everybody wants to loot the country”.
Is rampant corruption merely a question of basic human immorality, or is there something more complex that happens in our relationships with one another and the ways in which we derive our self-esteem? A popular social sport in the elite clubs of Bombay is to chatter about the extent to which the various clubs are corrupt, especially how much a large brown envelope under the table should contain in order to gain membership.
Imagine if you will, in a mahogany walled meeting room of one of these old colonial clubs, the all-male, elderly Executive Committee are having their quarterly meeting, when suddenly, a man barges into the room and begins a lengthy tirade against the committee. He is accusing them of gross misconduct and corruption in the form of receiving bribes from contractors and of giving free club membership to members of the police to get them “on-side”. The Chairman, visibly frustrated, censors the dissenting voice by having the man forcibly removed from the room. What this dissenting voice has to say is effectively silenced. The Chairman then adjusts his tie, and instructs everyone to turn to item 78 on the agenda - whether to invest in an additional swing in the children’s area, near the swimming pool area. Without exception, everyone in the room is struggling to suppress an array of emotions, including the Chairman who continues to pet his tie in the way a child might pet a small dog.
It is true to say of the executive committee that the dissenting voice is no longer among them; they are free from his presence, from his insulting laughter and his comments. But in some respects, nevertheless, the repression has been unsuccessful; for now he is making an intolerable exhibition of himself outside the room, and is shouting and banging on the door. More repression ensues as the security-staff are told to remove the man immediately. Which after about 20 minutes, they do.
What this reminds us is that censorship and suppression never quite works effectively or compliantly. This is perhaps one of the most powerful teachings of psychoanalysis – that repression is rarely entirely successful. That evening in the bar, the man who is dispelled from the room, along with fellow club members, are sipping their whiskey’s and begin to question the motives of the Chairman – “If the allegations aren’t true, why didn’t he let him talk?” says one person, adding “was he in on a deal?” Of course, many others in the bar overhear the now animated conversation, the volume fuelled by alcohol so much so that a journalist is busy taking notes on his blackberry on the table behind them. Two days later, a news item appears with the headline “Corruption at One of India’s Elite Clubs”.
But what of the expelled man who made the original accusations? What happens to him now? He is of course at home, not to be seen at the club, concerned whether the two police officials might be exercising the real price for their ‘free’ memberships, by hurting him or a member of his family, as the anonymous phone call suggested. Meanwhile, the Executive Committee decide it is important that they have the right to permanently evict any member from the club in the future, should they feel that they aren’t “serving the interests of the club well”, whatever that means. So at the next AGM, they propose an amendment to give the committee the powers to effectively dismiss any dissenting voice and essentially remove the members of their basic civil liberties.
Sadly in many working groups, dissenting voices are intolerable; to be silenced and or characterised as mad, in a manoeuvre to justify the expulsion of individual(s) and any accompanying more sinister acts that may ensue. But why such terrorism towards dissention? Why such fear of thinking and speaking out? According to Freud and I think this is a hugely neglected aspect of his work, many adults never acquire a true moral conscience. In other words, what they have is no internalised prohibitions on their own behaviour, no true sense of feelings of guilt concerning how they behave or the consequences of their actions. What these adults have instead is social anxiety. This social anxiety concerns firstly the fear of being caught doing the wrong thing in the eyes of one’s peers or social circle and secondly, a fear of loss of love which contains an inherent loss of regard by others.
So the herd-like behaviour, devoid of thinking, is essentially about a fear of not being loved. Of course a person with a higher sense of self-esteem, of greater regard for oneself, is less likely to act immorally. After all, if your moral compass is strongly internal and of your own, you won’t need to receive your self-esteem from others or in a stack of bribes in quite the same way.
What this also implies in my thinking is the best way to deal with people who lack a true moral conscience is to “out” them, or ostracise them and increase the very thing they fear most, social anxiety.
Of course, one might also attempt to emotionally hold a sense of rage, as well as, empathy. Easier said than done perhaps; after all, it is the poor who suffer most at the hands of corruption.
