For what would you sell your honor?

I was catching up on reading, and saw a piece about how FEMA had made reimbursements to several people in New Orleans, victims of Hurricane Katrina.  These weren’t your typical compensation payments, though.  According to the reporter, they were examples of how the government can get it wrong.  And they sound terrible:  housing reimbursement payments were made to prisoners who are tenants of the federal government already.  Dollars intended for helping displaced families were instead spent on lavish vacations.  In at least one case, dollars earmarked for housing were used for a sex change.

To me, this isn’t a problem of our government failings.  This is a problem of Civics.

Does anyone remember Civics class?  Probably not, because in America we don’t teach these things much anymore. It’s the role of citizens in a government and society.  You can get through 12 years of public education without talking about it or the word “honor”.  It’s as outdated as “chivalry”.  Let’s talk about it now.

In my class on venture capital at the University of California, Berkeley, I had an opportunity to talk about honor.  I asked a very simple question:  “For how much would you sell your honor?”  This seems like an easy question to answer.  Most people consider themselves upstanding, honest folk.

But frankly, most people sell their honor and their principles extraordinarily cheaply.  After my conversation about honor in class, the holiday break arrived.  Subsequently, I was delighted to hear from a student who had been having holiday dinner with his family at a restaurant.  The waitress had mistakenly not charged them for an item.  His family saw this as a windfall, my student saw it as a test.  You see, he wasn’t willing to sell his honor for $9.95.  He corrected the error with the waitress, and explained to his family why.

As humans, and even as Americans, we can rationalize all sorts of self-serving behavior.  “The government owes me the money”, “it was the waitress’s mistake”, “the corporation has so much it won’t miss this money”, “my wife will never find out” or even “you made me hit you”.  But next time you are faced with a test, and you feel yourself making a rationalization (and you know deep down inside when you start rationalizing), stop for a moment and ask yourself “Is this worth my honor and my soul?”