Diogenes Fernando is feeling no pain thanks to a goodly measure of Aunt Harmonium’s bootleg arrack. And if he smells like a tart’s handbag after a liberal splash of Aunt Euphonium’s Eau de Cologne, so what? Who cares about the sidelong glances if it helps banish the dreaded COVID-19—and surely the legions who swear by its protective properties can’t all be wrong. Meanwhile, he’s just had a tête-à-tête with Uncle Testosterone—or a conclave, as self-styled ‘Don’ Testosterone, a devout lapsed Catholic and great admirer of Pope Innocent III, likes to call it—to plot a course through the moral maze created by the COVID Conundrum. Which is: should one strive to profit from something that righteous citizens might regard as something one should not strive to profit from, ie, COVID? Or should one do what comes naturally to a thrusting young entrepreneur, and make hay while the sun shines, so to speak? Surprisingly, considering his staunch devotion to gangster capitalism, Uncle Testosterone takes the view that so-called disaster capitalism might be taking ruthless opportunism a bit too far, given the circumstances. Diogenes, on the other hand, is inclined to favour the ‘every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost’ school of crisis management. Thus, while Uncle Testosterone claims the moral high ground, Diogenes risks landing himself in a ‘swamp of moral turpitude’, as his Ancient Greek philosopher namesake, known to friend and foe alike as Diogenes the Cynic, probably once said.
Aspersions aside, our Diogenes recalls the less extreme view voiced by a scion of Sri Lanka’s tourism and hospitality industry: “People, planet and profit, the three P’s, are our watchwords—and the most important is profit, because without it we wouldn’t have the money that pays for the other two!” Quite. And he is not alone. Google ‘profit’ and you get 970 million hits, while ‘capitalism’ rates 150 million, ‘disaster capitalism’ 24 million, and ‘compassionate capitalism’ a mere 10 million. The moral of which suggests that being nice is truly not what makes the world go round. It also highlights something else Diogenes happened across. It seems that back in 1982, the UK government seriously considered hiring psychopaths to restore order in the aftermath of a nuclear war because the police “would be too busy helping ‘inadequate’ people”. The BBC quoted a government official as stating that “it is…generally accepted that around 1% of the population are psychopaths”. These people, she wrote, would be “very good in crises” as “they have no feelings for others, nor moral code, and tend to be very intelligent and logical…” Furthermore, on this very day another UK media outlet is saying that “we have barely begun to comprehend the damage caused by the first [COVID] lockdown, let alone recover from it. And yet we’re pushing the nuclear button once more”. Whoa! thinks Diogenes, the nuclear button? Have things come to that? Are governments once more considering employing psychopaths to sort things out? It’s certainly true that the greater good—doing the best for the most—demands dispassionate decision-making by ‘very intelligent and logical people’ who are ‘very good in crises’. But psychopaths? The very thought, he thinks as he reaches for the bottle, is enough to drive anyone to drink.