Republic, Lost_ How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It - Lawrence Lessig [17]
The previous two chapters should suggest a related disability that is also fairly predicated of us: We don’t do well responding to bads that stand between good and evil. We teach our kids the difference between good and evil. We craft blockbuster movies to test good versus evil. But to grow up is to recognize, and to live, the bad that stands between good and evil. And the challenge, always, is to motivate a response.
For while we respond appropriately to evil, we don’t respond well to good souls who do harm. We don’t identify the harm well. We don’t act to stop it. Indeed, even when we see the harm clearly, we deny its most obvious source. We can’t imagine this decent soul has caused it. So we scour the scene for the obviously corrupt or evil one, as if only the evil could be responsible for great harm.
Yet we all know better than this. We all recognize Yeltsin, or his character. It is our father. Or our mother. Or our uncle, or wife. Or us. We believe the dependency is his or her responsibility, not ours. We tell ourselves, There’s nothing I can do. And so we don’t.
It is because we are so familiar with this subtle form of bad—and with our weakness in the face of it—that we are in turn also so suspicious, or cynical, when certain puzzles confront us, and we see an obvious source—money in the wrong place.
The job of the decent souls we call “scientists” is to tell us truthfully whether BPA is safe, or whether cell phones will give us gray lumps behind the ears. But we’re very quick to believe that even these good souls can be bought—again, not just by bribes, or through fraud, but in the subtle and obvious ways in which we all understand that money bends truth. So merely telling Americans that money is in the mix is enough for most Americans to jump to the ship Cynical. An institution that depends upon trust to be effective will thus lose that trust, and therefore become less effective, if it lets money seep into the wrong place.
I mark these as obvious points, yet we forget them, always. We know them; they guide how we live and negotiate our day-to-day life. But when we talk about the great failing that is at the center of this book, Congress, it is as if we return to the moral universe of kindergarten. We have an enormous frustration with our government. All sides try to identify the source of our frustration with this institution in the evil or stupid acts of evil or stupid people—senators, or worse, congressmen! Americans believe “money buys results” in Congress—almost literally. Some believe congressmen take bags of cash in exchange for changing their votes. They speak as if they believe that members of Congress entered public life because they thought public life was a quicker path to quick cash. They wouldn’t have their son or daughter marry a member of Congress—at least the member of Congress who lives in their abstract thoughts.
Yet when we actually meet our congressman, we confront an obvious dissonance. For that person is not the evil soul we imagined behind our government. She is not sleazy. He is not lazy. Indeed, practically every single member of Congress is not just someone who seems decent. Practically every single member of Congress is decent. These are people who entered public life for the best possible reasons. They believe in what they do. They make enormous sacrifices in order to do what they do. They give us confidence, despite the fact that they work in an institution that has lost the public’s confidence.
Don’t get me wrong. Of course there are exceptions. Obviously some are more and some are less decent; some are more and some are less publicly minded. And no doubt, why politicians make the sacrifices they make is hard, psychologically, to understand. But however much you qualify