Part 5: Standing still.
Consider the
following anecdote. This anecdote has nothing to do with Mozambique,
and yet this anecdote has everything to do with Mozambique.
The game show "Who
Wants To Be A Millionaire" spawned spinoffs in countless
countries all over the world. When they tried the game in Russia,
observers notices something peculiar about the audience
participation. If you remember, game had a feature where you could
poll the audience with a "lifeline" to ask them the answer
to a trivia question. In America, the audience managed to correctly
answer the questions when polled over 90% of the time. In Russia, the
correct response rate was abysmally low. The leading theory is not
that Russians are stupid (that would be the second-leading theory).
The idea is that the audience wanted to sabotage the contestant so
he/she wouldn't win.
Seem far fetched?
Consider that when the contestants did eventually receive their
money, the same audience booed them. Seriously. Some lucky bloke wins
a million rubles on a game show and is booed by the envious audience.
The same is very
much true here. Although there is no game show to compare with, the
idea is the same: If people can't win themselves, they desire to see
their neighbors not win as well. Call it greed, jealousy, envy, any
synonym you can think of. But it doesn't stop there. In many cases,
the prevailing thought is "If I can't win, then he needs to
lose."
The problem, to
think of it scientifically, is that people are living with a zero-sum
mindset in a non-zero-sum world. What that means to say is that
people think that for every winner there is a loser. Therefore if the
other is losing, I will be, by default, the winner.
Non-scientifically,
it means people can't imagine a scenario in which they both come out
the better. We refer to this as a win-win situation. If you enter a
negotiation, let's say to transport some farmer's corn to the city,
and you and the farmer come to agreeable terms, you will later try to
change the terms and charge more. This is not necessarily to try to
get more money out of the farmer, but because you think that since
the farmer is so happy with the agreed-upon terms that you must have
been taken for a ride and are getting swindled.
If somebody and
their neighbor both have a TV and the neighbor suddenly gets a DVD
player to go with his TV, this does not start a rivalry to keep up
with the Joneses. It results in a vicious series of rumors and lies
saying that he got the money for the DVD by stealing from his
workplace, or by shipping a kid off to a relative, or his wife
received it as a gift from a paramour.
I've heard from
people that have saved their money responsibly for a big purchase.
Word travels so fast that the next day when they show up to work they
are interrogated by their colleagues as to how they got the money for
a stove, or fridge, or a mattress, a motorbike. And they are
interrogated with real disdain and animosity. As in people pointing
fingers in their faces asking where they got the money from.
At soccer games,
when a team scores a goal, there is not often cheering and clapping
for the side that scored. There are instead laughs and insults and
jeers directed at the team that allowed the goal. There is often a
desire to, as we say here, see someone move backwards rather than see
anyone move forward.
There have been
several times that I have gone to get somebody outside the orphanage
to come to perform a job, be it temporary as helping in the
construction or even on a more permanent basis. There was one time I
went to talk to a man about working as a guard for us. I stopped at
his house on two separate occasions asking for him. Not being home, I
left a message with his neighbors (because that's how things work
here when your neighbors live 10 feet from you) to have him come to
the orphanage to ask about a job.
After he didn't
come the second time I gave up and figured that was his way of saing
he didn't want the job. After later bumping in to him four months
later I asked him why he didn't want the job. To his astonishment, he
revealed that his neighbors had said I arrived accusing him of
stealing from the orphanage and to stay away from it for a while. His
neighbors had deliberately sabotaged him to prevent him from
attaining a job with us.
As we played the
potluck game with both the boys and the girls there was a recurring
feeling that manifested. As you recall, I either knew how to win or
skewed the rules at the last minute to ensure that I won. There was
absolute anger that resulted from this. The girls gave up halfway
through and quit the game. The message I wanted to get out the of the
game was that is sucks being the loser. The other message was that if
you hate being subjected to biased or unfair treatment, why do you
then subject others to the same. This is something I'm always telling
them, though. The Golden Rule, if you will.
The other idea I wanted to get the kids
to understand was how to win. The kids had inferred that the person
with the most money was the winner and the others were loser. They
had made two errors in their assumptions. The first is that the
"winner" was the person with the most money at the end of
the game. The second error was in believing that in order for there
to be a winner, there needs to be a loser.
So how do you fix
that?
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