Nov. 04, 2018
On Wednesday, Oct. 31, the communications office of the President-elect [Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO] issued a communique #071:
"The President-elect announces his proposal for a Citizen's Responsibility Law; auditing and oversight of businesses will be suspended."
The communique lists, as salient points, a mixture of administrative measures, political decisions and omnipotent decrees. Judge for yourselves:
"There will be no inspectors within any federal agency. Mexico will be one of the countries with the greatest honesty in the world: AMLO."
(Note: If there weren't a colon between the word "world" and "AMLO", the statement would be a warning about the future.)
That is not all, the document adds:
MV Note: The complete communique, published on AMLO's website, elaborates: "there will no longer be any inspection of stores, companies, workshops, doctor's offices, restaurants. There will be no inspectors in the entire federal government: no health inspectors, inspectors of business, of the environment, etc., Inspections are suspended."The communique describes a panorama where there will only be random reviews of enterprises [possibly 1% of them]. For the rest, the owner's word [given on a website] will be enough to show that they know the laws and will act responsibly.
That is not all, the document adds:
businesses "won't need lawyers; public accountants aren't going to be needed."If I were a member of one of these two professions, I would be worried, but happy to live in a world without litigation or tax audits. (And if he adds that there will be no diseases? Sorry, my medical friends.)
And there is more. The next President suggests that he views trust as a personal form of currency and as the determinative axis of what he calls a "new pact" with citizens ...
"There will be a new pact with the citizenry; it will be based on trust, I am sure that all citizens will act in a responsible manner, and citizens who fulfill this will receive public recognition."
MV Note: AMLO's website announcement adds: "It depends on my behavior as president, if I give a good example, so it will go down below. In this way, I am confident because I know that at the top there will be no corruption, there will be no influence, I will not allow the corruption of anyone, not my colleagues, my friends or my family members. There will be zero corruption, zero impunity that has to do with me. I will be very aware of it at the top."Is it possible that with such good will, with his decrees and with his personal example, the next President can change Mexican society? Beyond personal opinions, let's see what experts say about individual and collective behavior. In his book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, concludes (from experiments) that there are factors that inhibit dishonesty:
a code of honor, ethics or a signed manifesto, moral reminders at precise places and times, and supervision.
...In The Lucifer Effect, Philip Zimbardo [psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University] states that human behavior is subject to forces of context or systems that will cause a good person to perform bad actions. These are not decrees made by the authors, they are conclusions drawn from serious experiments.
There does not seem to be evidence that the behavior of society changes with the example of a President. Nor by eliminating supervision. That force of the context or system is nothing more nor less than that of the culture! That is to say, in order to change behavior, the system (culture) must be changed.
But wait, the next President does not believe in this, for him the word "culture" is synonymous with Mexican-ness, nationality. It seems to me that he feels offended when he is told that corruption is cultural. However, he manages to say, when he talks about ending corruption,
There does not seem to be evidence that the behavior of society changes with the example of a President. Nor by eliminating supervision. That force of the context or system is nothing more nor less than that of the culture! That is to say, in order to change behavior, the system (culture) must be changed.
But wait, the next President does not believe in this, for him the word "culture" is synonymous with Mexican-ness, nationality. It seems to me that he feels offended when he is told that corruption is cultural. However, he manages to say, when he talks about ending corruption,
"it does not depend on a single man, a leader, a president, it depends on everyone".
MV Note: The full communique concludes: "Let's all help to end corruption. ... Mexico currently ranks 135th in corruption in an evaluation by Transparency International. Of 170 countries evaluated, Mexico ranked 135th in corruption. In a very short time, Mexico will be one of the countries with more honesty in the world, with the participation of everyone."Let's hope that someone explains to the President-elect that behavior is changed by modifying the incentives, the daily practices, by eliminating the cheating (which, it has been proven, is contagious) and the illegal actions.
The communique also mentions that the next President is inviting the state governments "to join this change in the political culture that seeks to end corruption ..." Has AMLO read this?! It says "political culture." Why does it recognize that there is a political culture that should be changed, but not a citizen culture?
I applaud that people will see themselves as full-fledged citizens. I mentioned earlier that Zimbardo proposes a "new heroism" in sick societies, like ours, to reassess behaviors which are ordinary today, such that they become the exception. Culture — understood as the social system of unwritten rules — is changed for the better when we see positive examples. Changing the behavior patterns of children and youth will be particularly powerful.
If the government led by AMLO is able to administer the right incentives, it can go down in history in gold letters. Otherwise, nothing else about it will go down in history.
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*Eduardo Caccia has a bachelor's degree in Business Administration and has done studies in literary analysis. He has been a professor at Panamerican University and the University of San Diego. He has written hundreds of articles on marketing brands and cultural code topics in the magazine Expansión, the newspapers Reforma, Mural, El Norte and La Jornada. He is a founding partner of the company Antropomedia, specialized in digital anthropology and understanding the functions of social networks and technology in our daily lives. He also founded Mindcode, the neuromarketing company that creates innovative brand positioning. @eduardo_caccia