I con­tin­ue to write about is­sues re­lat­ed to moral au­thor­i­ty, moral­i­ty and ethics-all born out of a sense of right­ness which is based on no­tions of fair play and jus­tice, hon­esty and in­tegri­ty in­form­ing our ac­tions-for such are the cor­ner­stone of civilised liv­ing. But so much has been hap­pen­ing in this coun­try in vi­o­la­tion of these car­di­nal pil­lars of civ­i­liza­tion, that one must won­der as to where we are head­ed as a so­ci­ety. The now in­fa­mous Clause 34 car­ries with it an in­sin­u­a­tion by many, and of­ten down­right con­dem­na­tion, that the gov­ern­ment has been less than hon­est in its hur­ried procla­ma­tion to fa­cil­i­tate par­ty fi­nanciers who have been ac­cused of crimes against the state and the FATF (Fi­nan­cial Ac­tion Task Force) is now threat­en­ing to black list T&T for its fail­ure to bring mon­ey laun­der­ers to jus­tice which in­evitably in­vites the spec­u­la­tion as to whether the sys­tem is fa­cil­i­tat­ing the rich and pow­er­ful.

Mov­ing from the pub­lic to the pri­vate do­main, some doc­tors and lawyers would not hes­i­tate to charge poor peo­ple ex­or­bi­tant fees nor would hired work­ers flinch in con­ning you out a fair day's work! In less­er mat­ters too, you will be sold ar­ti­fi­cial­ly ripened figs that would rot in a day and the pee­was you buy at a huge price would look pret­ty, pret­ty on the out­side but are of­ten rot­ten on the in­side. This cross-sec­tion of our so­ci­ety, whether pro­fes­sion­al or lay­man, rich or poor, big or small, re­veals one com­mon de­nom­i­na­tor: we as a peo­ple would not al­low one io­ta of a sense of what is right or wrong to im­pede us from ad­vanc­ing our in­ter­ests. And for many this is no big deal for you can't take a moral and eth­i­cal sense to the phar­ma­cy or the gro­cery, or can such an eth­ic buy you pas­sage with­in the cor­ri­dors of pow­er. But for the knowl­edge­able and peo­ple who re­al­ly care for the true de­vel­op­ment of this coun­try, this ab­sence of a nat­ur­al propen­si­ty to be con­scionable about what we do makes us no dif­fer­ent from the beasts of the field and in the long term "...hu­man­i­ty will prey up­on it­self /As mon­sters of the deep" (Shake­speare's King Lear Act 4).

Dr Er­rol Ben­jamin

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