Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the ruler of Lydia, an Iron Age kingdom in Western Asia Minor.
One day there was a violent thunderstorm, an earthquake broke open the ground and created a crater where Gyges was tending his sheep. Seeing the big hole, Gyges was filled with curiosity and gingerly climbed into it.
At the bottom, he saw a sarcophagus with window-like openings in it. He peeped in and saw a corpse with a very shiny object on its skeletal finger. Upon closer examination, Gyges realised it was a ring. He took it, put it on his finger and quickly climbed out of the crater.
Every month, the King of Lydia held a meeting to assess the state of his flocks of sheep. As expected, Gyges was in attendance, and as he waited his turn to report, he turned the setting of the ring towards the inside of his hand. When he did this, he became invisible to those around him, and they went on talking as if he was not present. He wondered and turned the setting outwards. Then he became visible once more.
On realising this, he arranged to become one of the messengers at the King’s service. After a while, he became the Queen’s lover and she plotted with him how to take over as the ruler of Lydia. One day, when he was in the King’s presence, he turned the ring inward, became invisible and attacked the King. The King died and he took over the kingdom.
What would you do if you had a ring that made you invisible? Plato, the renowned philosopher, said people only behave morally because they are afraid of the consequences if they are caught behaving badly.
This week, a video went viral on social and mainstream media — and another followed —in which a Standard 7 pupil, using indecorous language, threatened to kill his Standard 4 schoolmate because the latter had constantly bullied him, threatened to beat him up, taunted him with being an unwanted child and even accused him of being gay, an imputation that caused hatred between him and his school community.
And as sure as death and taxes, what followed was our characteristic feigned righteous indignation towards this boy’s language and intentions.
In our umbrage, we morphed into lawyers, philosophers, priests, and counsellors on social and mainstream media.
We each had an opinion, and just like farts, simply because they are free, we aired them, even when we didn’t have to. But we did anyway.
Some were loud and smelly, others were soft but deadly, and all were expressed unashamedly. We sympathised, impugned, and castigated in equal measure. Parents demanded his suspension, lawmakers called for an understanding and the scribes urged more restraint in the use of social media.
Subsequently, the boy took to social media once more to apologise for overreacting and being inappropriate.
This begs the question, like Gyges, has social media become the ring that makes us invisible? Does its absence of humanity embolden us to write nasty things, hurl epithets and tribal slurs, and post pictures that we would not say or do to someone’s face? And if there were serious immediate consequences to our online actions, would we act more morally?
This impersonality associated with social media is perhaps the reason why corruption has reached staggering heights. Think about this for a moment. Before the advancement of technology, when you wanted to get rich quick, you had to physically rob a bank. The risks of exposure, capture, or even death were exponentially high. And that is why only a few fools dared, where even the angels feared to tread.
However, today, all one needs to do, through a few keyboard strokes, is realign a few binary numbers in favour of their accounts or those of their proxies, and Voila! They become overnight millionaires.
This illusion of invisibility and disinhibition has inflicted upon us moral myopia — the inability to see ethical issues clearly because we do not experience first-hand the consequences of our online actions.
We become so absorbed in other aspects of the situation such as attracting retweets and the highest number of online followers, meeting sales targets or accumulating an election financial war chest, that ethical issues become obscured.
As a result, our perception of reality becomes so distorted that ethical issues become indistinct, and their negative repercussions far removed from our persons.
I submit, therefore, that rather than hold costly national referenda on Punguza Mizigo, the Building Bridges Initiative Or the Ugatuzi Initiative, we ought to have instead, an honest conference with ourselves. And the plebiscite question should be the cardinal golden rule — should others do unto me as I have unjustly done unto them?
If your answer is a resounding NO, then henceforth, we will act more responsibly on social media, more ethically in public service, more professionally in the private sector and godlier in religious vocations.
We ought to behave morally for its own sake, rather than for the potential benefits to us. It should not be for the instrumental good that it brings about.
In economic-speak, an instrumental good is something that is good because of some consequence it brings about, for example, money is an instrumental good because it is a means of getting other goods or services that we like, such as buying a pair of red high heels or going on vacation.
The good that is inherent in money enables us to get the more ‘gooder’ things that we enjoy than the money itself. If this was not the case, money would just be mere razor-thin coloured paper.
Finally, my unsolicited advice to the Consolata student is this: Some fires are not put out by pouring water on them, but by sucking the oxygen out of the room very slowly, but deliberately. Eventually, they die out. So the next time anyone labels you negatively, do not react. It only fuels them. Simply walk away, with your head held high, and with some swagger too, because acting to the contrary, makes you a victim. And victimhood is the currency bullies love to cash in on.
It is not what they call you, but what you answer to – W. C. Fields
