Of one and many

The gibe goes like this. If you lift from one source it is called plagiarism, but if you lift from many it is research. Likewise, if you steal from one house you are a burglar, but if you steal from many you can be a political leader. Almost two hundred years ago, an enlightened Frenchman named Proudhon cautioned against it. Property was theft, he said.

Maybe it has to do with the critical mass of wholesale versus retail. You pay more if you buy one, but a good deal is yours if you buy many. When a petty thief gets caught, we beat the daylights out of him and then shave his head, put a string of shoes around his neck before he is paraded on the street for a walk of shame. Then, an outlaw gets elected to public office, we garland him and he gets the guard of honour. Unfair, very unfair, but there is nothing you and I can do about it.

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It is perhaps the conflict between one and many that makes the difference. A single operator is a common whore but one who runs the brothel is a madam. If you blow up one building you are a terrorist, but if you blow up an entire country, you are a visionary. If you take one life you are a psycho, but if you kill thousands you are a statesman. If you dictate one country you are a dictator. But if you dictate all the countries, you are the leader of the free world.

What can you say? You cannot deny the law of the large numbers, which basically means the number of successes increases, as the number of experiments increases. More the merrier is always true. After all, many is nothing but more of one, although the equation changes as the number changes. One hand can strike a blow, but two hands can make a clap. One leg is a prop, but two legs can walk. One finger can point at something, but five fingers can hold it in grip.

Makes sense? Come to think of it, morality changes with numbers. If one man kills many, it is a case of multiple murder. But when many kills one, it is a case of unruly mob. If you marry once you are a family type, but if you marry again and again you are a lewd person. Excess of anything is bad. In plain English, more is not always merrier. At times you must worry when it happens. If one person speaks the truth, ten persons can prove it false. One is a voice, many is a chorus.

Morality changes when it changes from one voice to a chorus. In 19th century France, Alfred Dreyfus was a French Jewish army officer, who was falsely charged with giving military secrets to the Germans. Emile Zola was the lone voice to defend him against a chorus of false incriminations. Similar thing happened in 20th century USA. Alger Hiss was a Harvard graduate who rose in the U.S. civil service until the House Un-American Activities Committee charged him with the crime of spying for the Soviet Union. Hiss spent five years in jail and lived for the next 42 years unsuccessfully trying to clear his name although there was no evidence that he was a spy.

More is important because it overpowers. Li Shaoqi, the President of China, was manhandled during the Cultural Revolution, being pushed, kicked and beaten in presence of soldiers and government officials. Four men in Pakistan publicly raped a young woman named Mukhtar Mai, because her brother was caught walking with a girl from the higher caste.

No matter how bizarre, morality is a lot like electoral votes when the majority decides the winner. There are moral undertows in moral waves. The strong may be wrong, but the weak is always meek and the right may be encapsulated in many wrongs, which is also true the other way around. People have died for centuries defending truth and justice. Entire populations have been wiped out, women ravaged and children killed. Prophets, messiahs, reformers, revolutionaries, idealists and zealots have been hanged, pilloried, dismembered, poisoned, incarcerated, banished, deported, flogged and humiliated on account of trying to sort it between truth and falsehood.

The Goebbelsian Doctrine hinges on that dilemma. If a lie is told ten times, it can appear to be true. The quantity drives the quality as if morality is a commercial venture that runs on break-even. The lie appears to be true, and the wrong appears to be right. It is always a few who see that difference while most others live in illusion.

It brings us to Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Imagine mankind as living in an underground cave, which has a wide entrance, open to the light. Deep inside are human beings facing the inner wall of the cave, with their necks and legs chained so that they cannot move. These prisoners live all their lives seeing only shadows on the wall and hearing the voices, which are only echoes from that wall. If one of them ever manages to get free and steps outside the cave, he will see the light of the sun and embrace a different form of realism and morality.

So, people live in false pretense and pretension is popular. There are people who speak what others want to hear and appear to be what others tend to see. It happens in love and war; it happens in hope and despondency; it happens in loyalty and royalty; and it happens in truth and perjury. Familiar looks strange and strange looks familiar. Numbers can change it. It can change with numbers.

Eating is appetite, but overeating is gluttony. Talking is communication but talking too much is garrulity. Habit becomes addiction when it is compulsively repetitive. In some cases repetition can bring monotony. Quality changes in quantity like the mass of substance changes in speed.

The upshot is that the vice of one can be the virtue of many. When one man participates in a wrongdoing with another man, he is an accomplice. When the voting population of a constituency elects a wrong candidate, it is called democracy. It is pathetic when one man condones crime. It is a republic when an entire country does the same thing.

If light hits something it is absorbed but some, according to spectrum, is reflected and that is when we see colours. The sea filters out these individual colours in the same order, red quickly turns to black at 5-10m, violet being the last to vanish. The same rule applies to morality, its colour changing at the growing density of human considerations. What stands out in one, fades out in many.

Morality is gamesmanship, people trying to outwit people. Hypocrisy is the alter ego of morality, because it just pretends that it is not pretending.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.