Ishaan Nag – My diary of the human society.

A research paper published by Stefan Fiorin on behalf of the LEAP institute of the Bocconi University found, in the experiment conducted in 5 towns of Afghanistan in 2021 before the Taliban takeover, that the percentage of teachers who were willing to whistle-blow teacher absence when there was monetary reward and a possibility of repercussion for the accused reduced drastically when they were not faced with a monetary reward, from 15 percent to 10 percent. What does this strange, almost irrational behavior from a rational consumer’s standpoint, tell us?

Also worth considering is the fact that tendency to whistle-blow did, in fact,  increase when there was no possibility of repercussions towards  the absent teachers.

This seems to prove the existence of a subjective, ever-changing economics of morality.  The kind of economics which is both dictated by and also dictates our world. It is true that our lives and livelihoods are supported through monetary gains, and we do, of course, prefer to earn less rather than more. History has proven with colonialism that we go to the farthest and darkest ends to prefer more to less. However, it seems that there is either a drastic change in our intrinsic values, or that close knit communities are inherently more  altruistic.

With increasing income inequality around the world, funds which can surely be used to solve world hunger withheld by our egoistic selves, the former does not seem to be very true. The latter, however, does make sense. One may attribute the low levels of willingness to whistle-blow  to the fact that these teachers form part of a closely knit, small community (which is ironically acknowledges as a limitation of the conducted study), thus giving rise to high levels of altruistic solidarity.

The shift from “Gemeinschaft”(communities) to “Gesselschaft”(civil/urban societies) in the industrial revolution era Europe, as recognized by Ferdinand Tonnies, had given rise to myriad social problems and rifts, as populations changed from being small, closely knit with great common understanding to being a messy amalgamation of different such communities with different worldviews, struggles , and diversity, or rather, differences which were seemingly impossible to reconcile.

I have nothing against intercultural understanding and in fact encourage it. Mingling with different people and not only being tolerant but also welcoming of differences are and should be very celebrated characteristics of the modern day ideal global citizen. Yet, even the most outgoing of us have a comfort zone. The most selfless of our beings would rather let a stranger be sacrificed instead of their own family, and that is not without a reason. I argue only for a “neighbourhood” society, a society where people with different superficial characteristics and backgrounds may interact and form such communities based on common ideological or emotional ground.

Let us mingle with others, and form closer communities with those we are more comfortable with, regardless of creed or culture. If we were more egoistic towards our communities, we would be more altruistic within, and thus, I feel, peace among humanity would be more easily facilitated.