Tremors

Quivering slightly, my hands strain for the keyboard. Maybe it's because this post threatens to contain more personal content than any before, (as evidenced by the chattier-than-usual style, innit). Or perhaps I am having withdrawal symptoms - after a staggering 24 hours away from my blog, and only (non-inflatable, non-imaginary) friend.

Today, something happened which shattered my confidence. It happened when I discovered that my friend had sex with my other friend's girlfriend of 3 years. Naturally, the political link is tenuous. Ostensibly, I mention it because in politics, bad things happen; nasty people will do nasty things; virtuous people stray off the path of righteousness. Truistic, you might assume. I'm not so sure. In politics, just as with friends, there is surely a correlation between moral resistance (whether provided by friends, family, colleagues), and the extent of wrongdoing. It is a fact of human nature that people will push boundaries, right until people force them to desist. Internal moral compasses (albeit conditioned by social norms) are flexible; our conscience allows us to go as far as people will let us. Evolutionary explanations abound, but I think there is a deeper message: it is incumbent upon us to act as a moral check on the behaviour of those around us, even if their ethical vertigo has not yet led to tangible wrongdoing.

In the run-up to the financial crash of 2008, bankers were being greedy; They were rich beyond avarice and yet they wanted more. A minority - and that is all it took - were subverting the system (by, say, repackaging sub-prime debt to mask its true value) long before the market caught up with them. Bubbles, then, like other painful consequences arise because people adjust their moral conceptions and expectations according to how other act. The problem with his relativist strategy, known to psychologists as 'herd instinct' is that the trajectory invariably heads in a negative direction. To put it bluntly: morality slides towards the doldrums.

So this is an explanation for how bad stuff happens. Systems are at fault, is the common explanation; processes, initiated by economists and governments, were unsustainable. I don't doubt that. But I feel that, underpinning those systems are people. Market economies, to use the obvious example, are comprised of the preferences of millions of apparently free-thinking, rational agents. For me, we have a responsibility to stand up for values we believe in (even if they are neo-ahmist and totally barmy), because if we follow the rest (or take too many cues from them), we cannot strive for the best moral framework.