SALİM KADIBEŞEGİL

“It wouldn’t look good on us!”

This simple and essential expression in the Anatolian culture, which hits the nail on the head, is the epitome of “reputation”. It is generally uttered by the oldest person in a family. It is like the title of a book consisting of a few volumes treasured especially by the people whose surnames can be seen in business life.

The thin line between the things that would look good on us and the ones that wouldn’t is the backbone of “the moral heritage” of a family. It is not written anywhere. You cannot take a class in it. There isn‘t a prescription telling the age of people who can use it and how to use it. However, if the oldest people in your family said “It doesn’t look good on us” about a situation, there would be dead silence. Some people would feel embarrassed. Tens of scenarios would be written in seconds about how to compensate for what was done. Nobody could dare to make financial calculations to compensate for it!

What looks good on us!

The things that look good on us or the ones that don’t are the output of the shared values of social life. As long as a family is a part of society and the members of this family are the people who live and act in society, we will be surrounded by complex feelings caused by “morality and ethics“. Right, wrong, good or bad things will suddenly start showing us “what looks good and what doesn’t look good” on us.

This is the virtuous side of life. However, there are also deeds of houses, plots, shops or fields, and bundles of different foreign currency lying in huge steel safes. Since there is not a safe large enough to fit morality in, we don’t look for it in these safes in vain!

For centuries, “religions” have been a guide to moral people and correspondingly to moral society. Customs, traditions and habits have been used directly or indirectly to emphasise being “moral”. However, hasn’t humankind faced such moral corruption that could be witnessed in the Dark Ages in a great number of organisations which see morality as a matter of “principle”?

We stole.

We conned people.

We thought abuse, corruption and ignoring human rights and dignity were the foundation of “surviving” and “being strong”. We first destroyed “nature” and then ourselves.

This is the situation of families. Is there a different situation in companies and governments?

Transparency International

I receive a newsletter on corruption, bribery and abuse from Transparency International every day. Oh my God! You could easily see that we were in the gutter all around the world just by looking at the headlines in the newsletter. Moral erosion has become a real business model! Look at the Panama Papers. You can find whoever you look for in them: politicians, business people and people who claim that they represent civil society. Anyone from heads of state to an indispensable organisation in terms of corruption, the Olympic committee.

I cannot be as optimistic as I used to be about the fight against corruption, bribery and abuse that B20 is insistently trying to keep on its agenda. Because this is about “values”. When universal business habits come into play, “finishing a job as soon as possible” becomes a performance criterion rather than what looks good and what doesn’t look good on us. Then, it doesn’t matter whether B20 prepares reports and makes suggestions like the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Decision making on “good”!

At the beginning of 2000s, we conducted a reputation workshop with the top managers of one of the leading industrial companies in Turkey. We discussed what kind of an attitude we should adopt towards bribery, corruption and abuse. Everyone involved said: “We should not make any concessions on them. We should never let anything like those stick on our company and our brand. It wouldn’t look good on us.”

However, when we moved on to the possible scenarios during the economic recession which was continuing in those days, there were different answers and comments. For instance, “We have trouble with raw materials. Our production can hardly make ends meet. We import raw materials. Customs employees drag their feet. It is obvious that they are waiting for an “envelope”. If this envelope does not go to the place it’s meant to, we will not be able to clear our products from the customs. Our production will halt. That will cause a chain reaction in all the other jobs. It will also have a financial price, of course.” The managers, who said we shouldn’t make any concessions on those issues just an hour ago, suddenly became “indecisive”. There would be a financial price, but how? I just wanted to say “You’ve just said it wouldn’t look good on you!”

I remember only one example of this issue in the business world, and it is about P&G. P&G wanted to invest in one of the South American countries in 1980s. According to their professional assessment, there was a growing market in there. The market conditions were suitable. It was worth investing millions of dollars in it. But what happened? The bureaucracy of the related country demanded some money, even if it wasn’t called a bribe, in order to accelerate the process and to moderate the conditions in favour of P&G. P&G postponed its investment at the risk of falling behind with the competition. It told the reasons for that decision in an appropriate way. When the country’s bureaucracy gave up that demand, P&G made the same investment in there.

”Multinational bribery cases on the rise”

The title of the first article on the blog of China Daily, which was published on 22^nd August 2016, read “Multinational bribery cases on the rise”. An OECD report which analyses the relationship between multinational companies and local governments in terms of bribery from 1999 to 2013 reveals the situation presenting dreadful figures. The Washington Post releases the news to the public using a tragicomic title:  “How the world’s biggest companies bribe foreign governments—in 11 charts”

Here is some striking information from the report: OECD examines 427 events found out in 86 countries between the above-mentioned years. 60% of the companies involved in bribery are big. Underhand tactics centre on mining, building, transportation – storage, and information and communication technology. 50% of the top managers are either involved in bribery or know about it! 80% of the bribes are for the managers of public institutions. Here is a more interesting piece of information: 7% of the bribes are given to the heads of state! If we look at the managers of the public institutions and the reasons for taking bribes, we see that 57% of the managers work in purchasing and tender departments and 12% of them work in customs departments. The amount of bribes that can be found out and that these managers thought would look good on them is three billion dollars!

The aura of bribery

The aura of bribery also surrounds political life, of course. For instance, it has not been long since “a special law” was passed in our country so that a global company “can produce goods on agricultural land“. Zarrab’s relationships with politicians, which are like a serial, are now out in the open. “What time is it?” has become a joke in our daily lives. One of the titles that we do not see very often in history books is: “The Disease that destroyed the Ottoman Empire: Bribery and Corruption”. We are so used to bribery not only in our country but also in the world politics. That’s why, we are no longer surprised by it.

When we look at the background of all these events, we see that none of the sides think whether underhand tactics look good on them or not. How good these tactics look on them is determined by their bank accounts!

Heritage that has nothing to do with morality“.

However, there are also issues on the social agenda of politics. For example, we are going through an intense crisis over Syrian refugees. When millions of displaced people ran away from tanks and howitzers and came to the borders of Turkey with their kids, we could have said “We don’t want you!” as the European countries are doing now. We could have left them for dead against Bashar al-Assad’s mercenaries. We could have said “Do whatever you want. This is not our war”. Would that “look good on us”?

The European community and the USA tried to ignore the refugee problem. When refugees turned up at their borders, they took the easy way out by building perfunctory camps. They were actually buying time to put wire fences to their borders. Then, they told Turkey: “Don’t send them to us, and we’ll give you as much money as you want.” This was the attitude of the European countries. We can discuss whether that looks good on them in terms of human rights, democracy and high ideals that they can never praise enough.

When British Petroleum was about to be established exactly a hundred years ago, some states were “invented in those days” as part of the project which would destroy Ottomans and secure oilfields, and borders were drawn with pieces of wood in the desert. In fact, today’s refugee crisis shows that those states and borders have failed. Europeans led by the UK and France, which are still refusing this problem, are the key players of this situation. The USA wouldn’t go out of play, of course. It was given a leading role in 1920s. Thus started the never-ending ordeal of the Middle East. Since the things done in those days had nothing to do with “morality“, their “heritage” showed up as more than five million refugees and a hot war in which one million people have been killed so far.

Let’s have a look at the heirs of this “heritage that has nothing to do with morality“.

First of them is the industry that we call “arms” whereas they call “defence”. There must be war so that we can keep the wheels turning! So that we can end up developing an atomic bomb when science sits a test about morality. Science cannot avoid facing the fact that hundreds of thousands of people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki even if it says “It doesn’t look good on us“. The international arms industry does not have anything to do but to grease its wheels in Syria, in Yemen, in Bahrain and partly in Turkey, in the Middle East.  Africa has already been the main stage of all the rehearsals as of early 90s. Iraq and Iran had been at war for 10 years in 1980s. More than one million people died. Then, it was understood that the same companies sold weapons to both sides.

The second player is, of course, finance. Armourers get their money so quickly and make so much profit. They must be mad not to take part in this play! The same scenario can be seen in the beginning of the spiral of economic recession in Greece, which was studied in an article by Aziz Yardimli in IN Magazine. This vicious circle is the cash version of the stocks printed in the London Stock Exchange to fight against Ottomans.

These two players need a “toy”. “Energy” which started out as oil and which has now been scattered to a great number of areas is their toy.

This trio has been managing the world since the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes, one of them steps forward when the other two move back. Sometimes, they change their roles. They do not care about “what looks good and what doesn’t look good on them“. That’s why, they hand down everything except for “morality“.

We have two pieces of mathematical data which will prevent us from arguing about the sustainability of human life. The first one is the rapid increase in the world population. Our world population, which was 1.2 billion in early 1900s, is now over seven billion. The earth has limited sources: agricultural land, water, forests etc. Nature has lost its power of self-renewal. We have been consuming what we already have for a long time. We have this mathematical data. The other one is global warming. Global warming caused especially in the last 200 years is highly threatening the sustainability of life for all the living things mainly because of climate changes. This is the second piece of data.

This inevitable fact that we live in is not a new discovery. All the reports prepared as of 1950s draw attention to this unfortunate course of events. However, this is the heritage that we have! We can discuss whether it involves morality and if it does, how much morality it involves.

I wish it was our turn now. I wish we were in the gutter of bribery, corruption and abuse as the quiet majority of more than seven billion people. I wish we could bribe nature so that it could renew itself and carry out repairs which would guarantee future generations’ quality of life. I think it would be a good moral heritage and it would “look good on us”.