It's been a great break for me (still is), while I wait for the semester in Monash to start in July. With the spare time I have when I'm not away or meeting people, I've been catching up on some reading, and some of them touch a little on an intriguing subject: Economics
One primary idea in the subject is the element of 'incentives' and how the study of incentives can tell a lot about matters of any kind, even predict certain scenario outcomes because human decision generally revolves around a simple formula:
Rewards (or the expectation of Rewards) over Effort (or the amount of Effort perceived)
It is by this idea that it can be explained why a group of thieves find it justifiable (by their own standards) to perform a high risk robbery because of the incentives they are eye-ing at, why the zealous cop is willing to risk endangering his life and limb (big effort) to catch these thieves because of the award and recognition that entail brave acts of this kind (big reward) and, (closer to home) why the ubiquity of bribery, which is actually a business of sorts, makes events like, the sun rising up in the east and Christiano Ronaldo being 'fouled' (often by an enigmatic, invisible force ;) pale in comparison.
One thing that the thief and cop both have in common is the Reward they strive to achieve outweights the Effort involved to accomplish the crime/job. Yet ,they differ in how they mentally form the idea of their rewards.
Most economists agree, while collectively most people have more or less predictable responses because of the incentive concept, a man as an individual is capable of having a different idea of an incentive. After all, we're stuck in a postmodern society, where "want" is prioritized over "need", (or made the same), "feel" is prefered over "think". For this reason, they have come up with different categories of incentives, like the Financial Incentive, Social Incentive, and so on.
I think one man's words and I believe, one man's innermost desire pretty much messed up this equation of Reward over Effort. He believed,
"I must do my utmost to act in harmony with my conscience and my better self" -Vaclav Havel
That was his idea of a Reward, and evident in his words, he had a willingness to pursue this choice even with the prospect of a high amount of Effort involved, because after 'calculation', it was worth it. What a challenge, especially when the "worse self" always seems to prevail over the "better self". In a moment of rage, disappointment or frustration, the very principles a person tries so rigorously to build into his/her character can vanish, like they were never there. Yet, the lines of a poem go:
"If you can...watch the things you gave your life to broken
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools...
...Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it..."
The arduous journey to better one's self never ends as long as we are in it.
