People need to take mortal responsibility for their actions, and the actions of those under them. Not moral responsibility, MORTAL responsibility. Moral responsibility would mean that you accept the consequences of the decisions you make being right or wrong (in a very “good and evil” kind of way). Mortal responsibility is just what it suggests; life and death business.
There are a number of jobs in this world of ours that require people of outstanding care, dedication and courage. These everyday hero’s are trusted with our care and safety for a period of time, be it long or short. Speaking of shorts, sometimes these hero’s wear outfits that would seem strange anywhere else, for example the knee-high-socks-and-shorts combination worn by an overweight, 50 year old bus driver. Yeah, that mental image is going to haunt you.
We put our trust in others, it’s part of our interaction with other people that forms the basis for our society. I trust a pilot that he’s not going to suddenly try and find out if his plane can swim. I trust my bank manager that he’s not going to invest my savings in booze and strippers (that’s what I need it for). I trust a tattooist that he’s not going to make the coy fish on my arm look a lot like a cock (happened to a mate of mine).
The point is that these people are given a great deal of trust and when that trust is broken, the consequences are severe. It used to be the captain of a ship was responsible for the safety of his crew and passengers, he safeguarded their lives with his own. The captain was expected to go down with his ship, should the worst happen. This really gave captains an incentive to make sure their ship was going to make it to port. When your options are “everyone arrives safely” or “death” you really get some motivation happening there. Apparently that doesn’t happen quite as often these days, as we’ve recently realised with the Costa Concordia’s Captain doing a runner like a pissed teenager legging it from the scene of an intimate couple between mum’s Hyundai and a tree that “wasn’t there a moment ago”.
Later on in history, aircraft pilots found themselves in much the same situation, mostly because your odds of surviving a plane crash aren’t brilliant if you’re sitting right at the point end when it hits the mountain (not that anywhere else on the plane is a whole lot better, or so I’m lead to believe). That and it was often considered “bad for business” if a pilot was seen to board a passenger jet wearing a parachute.
Other examples include Generals standing their ground at the end of a battle that didn’t quite go their way, or quietly going out into the garden with their service revolver after learning about a particularly embarrassing oversight (like losing their boss’s country to an invading army). Even Hitler did it, he saw the end coming, realised he had failed completely and punched his own ticket.
Recently in history, we’ve experienced a shipwreck of another kind, the financial cruise liners of several economies have run aground on the rocky shores of Ohfuckwe’vebeenspendingimaginarymoney-land. Someone else we trusted has gone and made a mess of things. Our bankers.
Traditionally at this point we would usually see bankers and stock brokers climbing out on the window ledges of their offices and performing a very well-dressed impersonation of a particularly chunky rain storm. But that’s the problem, they didn’t.
Instead they all looked a little bit ashamed, shuffled their feet, delivered a half-hearted we’re sorry” and fired a bunch of people that worked for them, some of them lost their banks and had to shack up with friends in other banks for a while. It was like the scenes after a massive natural disaster when people end up sharing tiny houses with strangers because they have nowhere else to turn. Except the houses are multi-billion dollar banks.
All of this was a few years back, and now we’re feeling the damage that that has caused. If these philandering phuckwits had done the right and proper thing by taking a running leap out of their 35th floor office window we wouldn’t be hearing worrying stories about a second recession. They’d be dead, which usually prevents people from rooting the economy the second time round.
It also serves as a very poignant reminder of the kind of consequences catastrophic failure end in. The next round of bankers looking to sell a bunch of useless assets might stop and think about what they were planning on doing next year, because if everything went tits-up again their plans might be reduced to “testing theory of afterlife”.
So there you go; how suicide prevention hotlines have ruined the economy.
It’s up to you to stop this from happening again. If you get the chance to meet the senior executives of a large bank, do me a favour and point out how refreshing the air is outside the 35th floor window. Maybe they should check it out.
-Worst Guy Ever
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