There are many who agree today that our common ethics have taken a turn over the past three decades and not necessarily for the better. Be it work, business or social ethics, our general behavior has taken a subtle but downward spiral into something most of us are not comfortable with.
And many pundits will be quick to point out that it was the extraordinary oil boom years of the late 1970s and 1980s that had propelled us onto this path. The economic burst injected so quickly into this country during that period, they claim, led to the fragmentation of established ethics and mores.
Perhaps that may be too harsh a statement, but certainly among the generations spawned since, we witness firsthand the “me first” mob, the “I am better than everyone else” crowd, the “government owes me” horde, the “silent objector” factions and a host of others that were once alien to this peninsula.
Today, many of us have tales to tell of real-time encounters with such behavior. At the work place, it is not uncommon that work discipline remains the farthest thing on the minds of quite a few of the staff. Be it their tardiness, their time-consuming obsession with the stock market during duty hours, their failure to complete assignments tired as they are due to late night frolicking or simply “don’t care” attitude, all contribute to actions that are not well received.
And if they happen to be in the civil and government sectors, then it indeed affects the rest of us who have pending issues lying on their desks, often for months on end. Adopting a “nobody holds me accountable” demeanor, such attitudes inflict untold woes on those waiting for their transactions to be processed.
Heads of public sector departments compound the misery meted out by their own unaccountable activities. One has only to witness the decaying infrastructure around them to understand the noble achievements of our civil sector department heads.
In the business sector, the spoken word that was once used to conduct business in place of the written contract is not worth the breath it expels today. Even contracts written in triplicate are habitually ignored or violated. Today’s promises in the marketplace are as easy to predict as our dry weather, and seldom are they honored.
Unscrupulous employers are abusing employee rights, while contracts are being granted to companies with dubious track records.
When businesses fail, recouping is often at the expense of the workers who may be deprived of their livelihood. The practice of grafting to get things moving is not an uncommon grievance, and although there have been some high-profile bribery charges highlighted by the media, these may just be on the surface of something else.
On a social level, the family bond has had its shares of trials. Distance now separates relatives, and it is not the distance of mileage. Where once family related on a consistent level, today our gatherings are pretty much confined to weddings and funerals. The young have distanced themselves from the old, the educated from the ignorant, and the rich from the less fortunate. The extended family environment is gradually fading into oblivion.
Interaction with others may be set upon what’s in it for them, and not necessarily genuine concern. We are less tolerant with those who may disagree with us, and more prone to herd together with like-minded individuals, isolating ourselves further and further. Social divisions, once fluid, are today set in rigidity. Our behavior in public, on our roads and streets, and at the workplace shudders with volumes of unethical behavior.
And while King Abdullah at the helm is trying to reverse this trend, he cannot go at it alone. Our sense of ethics has to be rediscovered. In a peninsula that gave birth to Islam, if we are just to adhere to the basic principles and guidelines set forth by this great religion, such practices would practically disappear overnight. But we have to begin by exercising those principles individually.
