The glitter and the Gold

After reading my article "Is it enough to be a nice person?" here on the blog, about winning and how Egyptians don’t have the spirit of competition and being great, a friend of mine had an interesting argument…

He believes that Egyptians do indeed have that spirit inside them. It’s just a matter of what they think the right path is to get there. It’s a matter of what they are willing to do to reach that high level of achievement. He was talking about an issue that I personally have had trouble with accepting even though I've lived all my life here in Egypt. It is the simple idea of ETHICS… the thin line that differentiates real winners, real leaders, and basically anything “real” from everything that is fake or shallow.

When we say “all that glitters is not gold”; the thing that sets the difference between them I believe, is a lie. A small “white” lie that makes one think this is really Gold, when it’s not.

In Egyptian schools, people start cheating in exams at a very young age. I’ll try to be optimistic and say that it’s in high school, even though we all know better. And why do they care to cheat? It’s not because they’re afraid to fail, because they know for sure that they’re not going to. They just want to make sure they get almost all the answers right so they get as close to the “full mark” as they can; they want to rank higher. And why is that? Because they want to be winners, they want to feel proud and to score high enough to be admitted in the best colleges and universities; not to mention what their parents want. It just didn't occur to them that the right route to getting there would be to study harder and sacrifice more not cheat better.

When you start adopting this attitude in life, thinking that if you never get caught it will be okay, then there’s no stopping you. People start working, and it’s easier for them to play a little with the numbers in a sales report, or change the dates to make it look better, than actually working harder at it. It is okay to manipulate someone into doing what he doesn't think is right for your professional benefit. It’s easy for someone to give/take a small bribe to get things done. Hell it even sounds natural sometimes; you don’t see anything is wrong with it, people are not even ashamed anymore to take money that isn't their right.

I use to think that this maybe the case in public sectors only, where there’s no monitoring and people’s education and financial level drives them to do what they do, but how naive I was to think that. Apparently most of the sales deals in several different industries in the private sector and in very reputable companies are sealed that way - and only that way! And what’s the motive behind all that? Achievement, winning, wanting to get your targets in time for the quarter end in order to get a raise or some recognition; wanting to buy equipment for your company with the lowest cost to get a promotion or a pat on the back. If these people didn't care enough, if they were satisfied with average performance, they wouldn't have gone through these measures to get things done. But little do they know, all their “achievements” aren't real. Their bubble is one poke away from bursting in their face and the faces of those around them.

We keep pointing fingers at our government, angry and frustrated at how corrupt it is (before and after the revolution). But we don’t realize that this is a deep rooted attitude that shapes the people working there even before they work there. It is not the authority that makes them unethical and corrupt – although it plays a great role – but it's the attitude that's been planted long ago and never corrected that does. Honesty and integrity are rare in this country and that’s why I always boil inside when people say “e7na sha3b motadayen”. No we’re not. E7na sha3b beysally w yesoom. Bas! We tend to detach completely our morals, ethics and value judgments from the core teachings of our religion (all religions actually). We forget that it’s all about “el a7’la2”, manners, and think that the end justifies the means. It totally does not!

Well, in fear of contradicting what I said in that previous article, maybe Egyptians are obsessed with winning after all (though I still don’t think they’re many). The dilemma now lies in how they are willing to reach this Greatness. And this again puts us Egyptians at a much lower rank than people in “those” countries who aspire for greatness and reach it with integrity; given that we also point fingers at those people and say that they have no religion and no faith. Well at least they have morals.

Life is fair, ladies and gentlemen, and your short and easy route to winning might get you there alright, but it will never keep you there for long. That “turtle” that kept crawling to the finish line and never stopped at anything will soon catch up with the lazy rabbit.

Cheers!

Dedicated to Ahmed Khairy, thanks for the counter argument :)