We hear via social media and community discussion about people taking advantage of vulnerable others in unconscionable ways. People who are elderly, or ill, or lonely, or isolated. One person’s bad luck or misfortune is another person’s golden opportunity.
A lot of it goes unnoticed, in the maelstrom of daily life. The person who says they need to have surgery which is described by then as urgent and necessary, and is given a sizeable loan for that purpose, but who puts the amount in an interest-bearing account instead, and delays the surgery for as long as he can. The person who makes themselves indispensable to an elderly person living on his own, and then persuades him without witnesses present to sign over the land title deeds to his property to her.
People who invite their family and friends to invest in companies from which their life savings and the money they had invested - for their children’s weddings or their education or their own retirement - never emerge again. No accountability, no regulation, no returns. Unrecoverable loss.
The person whose schoolfriends join together to pay her child’s heavy medical bills at a private hospital, and then discover that the child had been moved by her parent to a local hospital instead, and that the person they helped had kept the balance money for herself. The tradesperson who charges a hidden commission on purchases he gets for a homeowner. The trusted bookings agent for a travel company who defrauds his employer by channelling the fees of incoming tourists into an unauthorized bank account set up by himself under a generic name, copying the letterheads and invoice forms of the company he is working for and substituting his own bank account for that of the company - to which, as an employee, he has a legal obligation not to act in a fraudulent way.
Horrified, we hear of people in public positions of authority, entrusted with the care of vulnerable children displaced by war, famine or disaster, trafficking the children they claim to have saved, using the children’s situations of poverty and economic desperation as leverage.
All these incidents show people who, when confronted or exposed, show that they really believe they were simply doing what came naturally to them in the circumstances. There was a gap in knowledge, or awareness, or capability, on the part of someone they knew, or worked for, or had been to school with, or were related to; and they felt entitled to insert themselves into that space and enrich themselves via the other person’s trust, innocence, frailty, generosity or sense of ‘old-fashioned’ honour.
At what point do self interest, sharp thinking and survivalism become exploitation? Not illegal acts, technically, but actually in fact unethical? The classic 1940s film ‘The Third Man’ shows this in a famous scene between two former friends in post war Austria. Orson Welles plays a man called Harry Lime, who is an American business operator working amidst the chaos caused by WW2, selling penicillin to the people via the black market.
When his friend Holly arrives at his request to accept his job offer to join in this enterprise, he discovers that his old buddy has been ‘watering down’ the penicillin he sells, charging higher prices and selling lower grade quality of the stock to ill and impoverished people: not selling the concentrated amounts that would make them well, but, like a predatory drug dealer, callously taking advantage of the great suffering and desperation of the people affected by the recent war. People - including children - had died as a result of the bad quality penicillin sold to them by Harry Lime. The debris of recent bombings lies around the city in which this scene is set: the ornate public squares are deserted, and beautiful local girls are keeping company with Americans in exchange for silk stockings, high quality chocolate, and small amounts of cash to keep their families alive.
The exposure of Lime’s conduct takes place in the carriage of a Ferris wheel, in a macabre deserted amusement park in Vienna. As the Ferris wheel carriage sways, suspended high in the sky, Lime opens the door and invites Holly to look at the scene below. They themselves are so far up that the people ‘down there’ on the ground below look like dots.
He says to his shocked friend: ‘Victims? You’re being melodramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving, forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that...
stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you look down there and calculate how many - dots - you could afford to spare? And free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax.’
This is how an exploiter thinks. Whether they delay repaying loans given to them in good faith, or marry someone for money, or for property, or share dividends, or kill them for money, or land title deeds, the person they are extracting resources from ceases to be a human being in their eyes, but becomes a ‘mark’, a target. They look at them and see only how much money they can make from them. And they always say, as Lime does, ‘There’s no proof against me’. Indeed, it may be difficult to prove the crimes of these people, as so much of what they do is covered up, or obscured, or overly reliant on eyewitness reports, or described as ‘hearsay’ or ‘conjecture’ or ‘false accusations’ by the legal defenders they hire with the money they have unethically appropriated.
‘Nobody thinks about human beings,’ asserts Harry Lime, closing the door of the carriage. ‘Governments don’t. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat. I talk about the suckers, and the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their Five Year Plans. And so have I.’
Harry Lime’s self-justifying monologue in this scene is very famous. I believe Orson Welles claimed to have improvised some of it, immersed in character as Harry Lime. The most famous speech, known as ‘the cuckoo clock speech’, takes place as they come back to ground and Lime takes his leave of his former friend, whom he has just, in a brief and menacing sequence, implicitly threatened to kill for knowing too much about his illegal activities, up in the carriage above the desolate city:
‘Don’t be so gloomy ...After all, it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said - in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.’
Well, well. As young Elizabeth Bennet asked her favourite aunt, in Pride and Prejudice, 200 years ago, where does prudence end, and avarice begin? At what point do we say ‘this is criminal’ when the perpetrators themselves describe it as ‘self help in times of other people’s trouble’?
No comments:
Post a Comment