From the activities of most individuals and organisations there are two functions omitted with tragic consequences. Those two functions are ethics and quality control.
Ethics enables you to select and undertake only those activities that will aid your own and others’ survival.
Quality control performed on your products or services ensure you improve your standards and actually deliver that which you intended.
ETHICS
One can look around this society and see ample evidence of a lack of ethics being applied in the actions of individuals, corporations, governments and international bodies.
This is a monumental tragedy in the making. A civilization wrecking catastrophe. For you cannot create a prosperous, enduring civilization composed of unethical individuals.
One of the foremost constitutional theorists of the founding generation, John Adams, observed, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
He wasn’t the only Founding Father to hold this view. Indeed, James Madison wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”
Less than 200 years later, with the ethic level of the individual and therefore society plummeting we have a position statement adopted by the US government that has the specific intent of suppressing the survival potential of other countries.
US imperial planner, George Kennan, an architect of the first cold war, wrote in 1948, “Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.”
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/d4
And this is the forerunner of the current doomed efforts by the US to retain its position as the only world super power by undermining Russia with its sponsored and ultimately futile proxy war in Ukraine.
No wonder some regard the powers behind the US government as the principle terrorist organisation on the planet!
Medical research is not immune from unethical behaviour. From a blog post from 2017:
“A pooled weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices.
In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices.”
Where did we lose our moral compass?
Look no further than psychiatry. For behind every bad condition will be found a psychiatrist.
In 1947 the then president of the World Federation of Mental Health, Brock Chisholm, said, “The reinterpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong are the belated objectives of nearly all Psychotherapy.”
If you cannot tell right from wrong then anything goes and those doing wrong are immune from censure. Until the hammer falls and their untimely demise ensues as it inevitably does for unethical behaviour.
QUALITY CONTROL
In some organisations an element of quality control is employed on the production line but rarely to the extent it should be and most often not applied to the actions of executives and staff.
The necessity to perform an after production check was brought home to me with a thud in two of my areas of endeavour.
One was software development where experience taught me that it was incredibly conceited of me to assume that just because I had written the code that it would perform as desired. I needed to run the code to check that it worked.
Another was when painting a balustrade. I would be on one side of it painting both sides then lean over to look at the site out of view and despite my best efforts at painting surfaces not in view I would inevitably find missed patches, dribbles and thin bits that needed going over.
I observed that you cannot guarantee something was done unless you inspected it post production.
In my experience most people do not perform a post production inspection. I recall my wife saying many years ago to our children, “It’s not clean just because you passed a rag over it. It’s clean when the surface has no dirt on it!” This why inspection is important.
If you want to increase your personal satisfaction in a job well done, take to doing post production inspections in all areas of your life.
WHAT’S THE PRODUCT?
The single best aid to applying the data in this article is prior to engaging in any activity to develop the habit of asking yourself the question. “What is the product I wish to attain with my efforts?”
If the product is majorly beneficial then it passes the ethical test.
When your actions are concluded, if the product attained matches the product desired then it passes the quality control test.
If not, some remediation is required to close the gap between desired and attained.