I’m “old school,” meaning I’m old and so is the schooling I had. I get bemused smiles and disbelieving eyebrows when I talk about the rarity of cheating or lying during those days.
“Oh sure,” people seem to say, “and everyone did their homework.”
One day when I was in high school and well before computers, Bombo an old guy (at least in his 50’s) and favorite uncle, father, and friend, took me to his work on the Trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. It was a cavernous area, with a ceiling several stories high overlooking a floor crowded with people and kiosks featuring specific groups of stocks. Traders would walk up a specialist and call out a price and share amount to buy or sell, sometimes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The two might bicker until they agreed on a price. Then the specialist would yell “Sold!”, jot down the details on a palm-sized note, and pass it to someone inside the kiosk. That was it. No signed contract, not even a handshake. Bombo told me these verbal agreements were sacrosanct. If either party broke the agreement, he was not allowed on the floor – ever again. Their word was their bond (and stock in trade). It was the glue that connected thousands of investors to sellers and had been that way since the founding of the Stock Exchange.
Bombo had a long and successful career, fueled by these verbal agreements.
Seems quaint, doesn’t it.
Then, over the next few decades, Bombo’s generation’s way seemed to fade. Lying in business became accepted as “just business.” Legal lying – by omission or parsing of words – became rampant. Over twenty years after President Nixon’s exit for lying about Watergate, President Bill Clinton, when grilled in front of a grand jury about sex with Monica Lewinsky (which the whole world already knew about), famously countered with: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”
Raising kids in those years, I started to wonder if the idea of integrity had become old school.
I decided to tell them why integrity works better than the alternative. I pointed out that, if they cheated on an exam instead of learning the course material, they’d be in trouble the next year when they needed to know that material for follow-on courses. I noted that, if they lied to a friend, what was to stop the friend from lying to them? And if they did that to everyone, why wouldn’t everyone do it to them? In which case, how could they – or anyone – count on anyone?
Today, as the media replaces the word “lie” with more politically correct euphemisms (“misinformation”, “disinformation”, “false”, and “untruth”), and as I compare Hitler’s Big Lie about Jews to a presidential candidate’s Big Lie about immigrants (Haitian immigrants eating pets, FEMA paying for illegal immigrants instead of disasters, foreign countries emptying prisons and pouring illegal immigrants into the US and the like), I think about my day with Bombo and an incredibly successful trading system functioning solely on personal integrity.
Seems quaint, doesn’t it.