Integrity in the Workplace

well it is great here to be with you I should probably start off by saying the only reason most people invite me back is they didn't understand what I said the first time around and they're thinking maybe second time around maybe you'll make sense this question of integrity has become a huge one it's really incredible to think that out of all of the buzzwords you could have maybe picked that people would keep coming back to for the 21st century integrity would probably not be being one of them if you were guessing 20 years ago I'm sure all of you read papers every day the paper I like to read every day is the Financial Times and it's almost impossible not to read the 50 and on every single page see some story somewhere connected that has something to do with integrity somewhere in it so we find ourselves surrounded by this now the trouble is when you talk about integrity we've already heard it said where we immediately start with a question of definition what are these words mean and that is actually something which is very important for us just to take a pause and think about a couple of just over a couple of years ago now I was in very old private bank in in London where I've been in to ask to come and speak to the board and the advantage of this particular private bank is not only do they have a supply of fine wine from a chateau they happen to own but they also have their own Michelin star chef in the boardroom which i think is a must for any form of financial institution that wants credibility after I'd finished about speaking with them one of their guys there said Michael I need to tell you a story that I think you're going to really enjoy he says one of our major clients was taking his son to be interviewed by one of England's most famous schools to get entrance into the school and the way the school entrance exam system works is you do various tests and so on but it ends with you been interviewed by the headmaster and the way the interview is set up is the headmaster sits on one side of the desk the son sits on the other side of the desk and the father sits behind the son so the path but he can't see his sons face so he actually gets to here and see how the son performed and the interview seems to be going very well and then the headmaster asked this twelve-year-old boy a fascinating question he said what is it that terrifies you the most that's an interesting question isn't it while the twelve-year-old boys report a pause for a moment and then having looked down at the floor he looked up and he said oblivion and that's a fascinating answer isn't it because oblivion like many wars had shades of meanings but whatever it is it's not good I mean oblivion can mean to cease to exist in someone's memory that's what politicians live in fear of it can mean to continue to exist in a state of existence Ness but whatever it is it's not good and the headmaster was obviously visibly impacted by the profundity of this answer the boy was given a place at this school and now the father is driving his son home in his Range Rover and the set of celebrating and congratulating his son all he can think of is while he's driving down the road is my son lives in terror of oblivion and so he's just waiting for the moment to come when he feels he can ask the question this is now eating away in his heart and mind and as soon as it feels right he sort of looks over to his son and says you know when you were being interviewed by the headmaster and the headmaster said what terrifies you the most and you said oblivion he said why why did you say that and the boy said well that was the name of that really scary right at the funfair we went to last week so you see what happened is the headmaster detected a profundity in that boys answer that actually wasn't there and very often we we banned words around we think we know what we're talking about but we've never actually agreed on what it is now because of my background I get to speak in a lot of different financial institutions around the world and very often you'll see the word integrity appear in their brochure sometimes even translated into a into a heart or part of their motto into Latin integra tests in order to give it more gravitas we're all looking for a way to somehow build it in but the trouble with words that come from Latin are derived from Latin and sometimes we even use in Latin mean that we'd have no clue what we're talking about now if you were to pick up the oxford english dictionary and look up the definition for the word integrity the the version I have actually starts with a whole series of negative definitions it talks about the idea of being uncorrupted undivided sinless and then it offers a positive definition to be whole so when we talk about integrity we're talking about that idea of being integrated there being a completeness or wholeness an integration to your life in your existence and the reason why this question becomes huge in business is that most people who work in the real world find that very soon their life feels anything but integrated it feels split they have to be one thing in one setting something else in another setting representing different things to different people in different ways and life feels anything but integrated it feels utterly divided and that's a hard thing to live with so what I want to try and do if I can is that the very least even if you disagree with everything else I have to say this lunchtime is leave you with a series of questions which you're going to have to answer and I'm going to borrow an outline from someone else who's thought about this before me and I'm sure he won't mind he hasn't used it for a while and his name is Aristotle and he lived quite a long while away he wrote a very famous book called the rhetoric in Aristotle's rhetoric he used three categories which I'm going to use in a different way to which he used but it's a very useful outline in order to think through this issue clearly he about Atos ethos pathos pathos and logos now those would those words roughly translate into our idea of ethic and ethic to live by passion what does it actually drives us and controls us and I love what is the word which informs our existence and helps us figure out the rest on the right path rather than the wrong one so I want to take each one of these and then just say a few words and at the end of each one I'm going to leave you with a few questions regardless of what you may believe or think I hope those questions will be useful every human being has to it has to answer them in one way or another so let's just start with the idea of ethos ethos now interestingly when Aristotle wrote his book rhetoric if one of the comments opening comments he made was this he said whenever you listen to a professional speaker speak whenever you listen to a rhetorician or politician the question you must ask yourself is not what is the ethic they espouse the question you must ask yourself is what is the ethic they live by in other words can you trust them first question you have to ask yourself is is someone trustworthy doesn't matter what the standard is that they claim they represent what is the standard they actually live by and this question of who we can trust and who is ultimately trustworthy is one of the things that's now driving so many of our political and economic considerations right now who do you trust I mean who do you really trust now the interesting thing is that when we talk about ethics and integrity we have to realize that we live in a world that is ethically and morally governed every relationship that we have is ethically and morally governed our friends are people whom we trust we believe that they will keep our confidences they will keep their promises they won't betray us so all of our friendships are morally and ethically governed we look for integrity all of our business relationships are ethically or morally government now very often we think that's not the case but actually that's simply not true it's not the case that we don't do business with people we don't trust if we're doing business with people we don't trust we demand a higher rate of return on that investment decision in order to justify the increased risk represented within it we actually make moral decisions all the time in the business world because unless we see that higher rate of return we're not going to get into that relationship we much rather get into a much more safe relationship that's the same rate of return so we're actually employing various moral and ethical considerations and I mind all of the time when we're actually thinking things through the question is where do they come from where do we actually get those standards where they derive from how do we use them the trouble is we often do it so so all do it so subconsciously we're not actually consciously aware of what we're doing and that normally makes normally for very bad business thinking when we're not actually clear about why we're doing something everything is morally ethically governed there isn't a single organization in this world that doesn't have morals and ethics at its core not one now if you don't believe me try this little experiment go in join the Mafia and after you've joined them you tried lying to them stealing from them cheating them or betraying them you will discover they have a very highly developed sense of what is right and wrong and their compliance Department is unlike any other you've ever encountered in the world the question is not is there a moral and ethical center the question is how far does it extend within the Mafia those moral and ethical commitments are absolute and they extend only within the circle of the family within the family is absolute and inviolable you violate it there you're literally finished but outside that so-called you can do whatever you want the question isn't is there a more unethical center to our existence the question is how big a circle do we draw is it around just ourselves is it around the family the corporation our country the world the question isn't is it there the question is how big a circle do we draw all of our relationships no matter how we look at it are governed by these things and we simply can't escape them now a little while ago I saw there was a very fascinating TV series called lie to me and never any of you saw it it was based off the real-life research of an Oxford University I who did his dropp'd Oxford called dr. Paul Ekman and what Paul Ekman realized is that when anyone's somewhat went when any sorry I'm all the jetlag and travel so what Edwin really is that when any one lies to you there's a universal expression on face which has nothing to do with culture background or anything and if you can learn to read those telltale signs you can figure out when someone's lying to you now he makes a lot of money right now advising security agencies around the world and also some very well-heeled businesses how to spot those lies because that's very important information now as you would imagine if you're interested this kind of thing his research was actually made into a TV program called lied to me and I love this TV program it made you think it was challenging and then it was cancelled after two and a half series I was actually speaking in the US a little while ago and I mentioned how I gave the illustration and I said heel in it and then it was canceled after two and a half series and afterwards a guy came up to me and introduced himself I said hi I'm with the network that commissioned and financed that show and I said you are said why did you cancel it I loved that show he said well the problem with that show was it only appealed to people who really wanted to think when they're watching TV and there aren't that many people so there's there's no money in it this discussed to reinforce one of my own pet personal theories that the total amount of intelligence in the world is fixed but the population has been growing anyway what eggman does is you would imagine as having spent his whole life thinking and researching how to detect a lie he's also given some thought to the consequences of what happens when we do lie and here's one of the things he actually he actually uh he actually wrote he says trust is a matter of faith that the person who you trust won't exploit that trust intimacy in close working relationships bromance and friendship requires and in fact depends on trust yet it is well known that the last person to realize that he or she is being betrayed is the person suffering the betrayal why because the betrayed person's trust blots out the recognition of any signs behind that breach of faith all the signs that everyone else so easily picks up on we don't want to learn that our trust has been betrayed that the person we hired is embezzling that our children are stealing money from our purses it is terrible to discover that our trust has been misgiven consequently most of us willfully avoid any clues to his discovery once Trust has been betrayed can it ever be restored not always and not by everyone even when the betrayal is forgiven and the betrayed does not want to give up that relationship it may be very difficult to ever completely trust again and that is the price of pain about very serious math that is the price of lying about very serious matters the loss of trust that may never be restored suspicions on the other hand the opposite of trust undermines relationships and results in the suspicious person's misery let me say that again suspicions on the other hand the opposite of trust undermines relationship and results in the suspicious persons misery all of us face choices about short or trust do we based on faith take the risk of being misled by trusting or do we take the risk of not only just believing a truthful person but never been able to establish close connection because of chronic suspicion I think it's very insightful what he says every relationship that we have is governed and driven by these questions of trust and they're all morally and ethically informed we're looking for people of integrity in our relationship will far do business with them and none of us would entrust our money to anyone to handle in our behalf if we felt there wasn't some integrity on their side that we could trust them to now the trouble is when we extend this into the business world we then ask the next question which is this yes but can I afford to be moral you need to understand the business I'm in well if you explain to me the business you're in and you tell me that about the market and I do some research I can get my calculator out and I can cost you exactly how much it will cost you to adopt a compliant and epinet open ethically compliant a position in whatever business you're in there is a cost of compliance and the compliance is high but the cost of failure can be catastrophic in 2001 for those of you who can remember that far in 911 after the terrorist attacks on in New York stock markets around the world collapsed now what not many people remember is that by early 2002 they had largely recovered now a couple of months after that we had the scandals of WorldCom Enron and that kind of stuff any of you remember that the markets around the world fell further and faster after the moral scandals of Enron and welcome and they did after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 telling you that what the market feared the most was not a terrorist attack from without but a moral collapse from within it raises funda questions about who we can actually trust I can remember speaking at a bank that has one of the world's largest private clients bases in the entire world and they asked me to come and spend a week for them speaking to their head of global head of investment their global head of risk and eight of the largest private clients they actually have in the world and after the second or third day one of these guys put up their hands and said to me because the market was still quite low when do you think confidence to the market will return and I can remember thinking them so I felt proud this guy was asking me for investment advice he makes more money every second than I earn every year so I said to him well let me give you a simple answer to that question if you believe the kind of moral ethical failure that we've seen is a one-off confidence will return fairly soon but if it's endemic then we have a major problem on our hands and all the color drained from everyone's face in that room and one word immediately popped into my mind cell the time to get out of this you see the cost of compliance is high but the cost of failure is utterly catastrophic it can completely destroy us in the destroys as individuals you can destroy our families he can destroy corporations that keep them even you can even bring down countries what is the ethic you live by who do you trust and when you get those ethics from we all have to be able to answer those questions now secondly patos pathos what is it that motivates you what is it that drives you what is it that gets you out of bed in the morning and actually makes it worthwhile for you to do what you're doing in the first place now we very often talk about being successful in this world and that's a goal but the question is successful at what as the Roman Catholic thinker very carefully put it GK Chesterton he said look a millionaire is successful at being a millionaire and a donkey is successful at being a donkey whenever we say something is successful we're simply saying it is something is successful at being at whatever it is so the question is how do we define that now I am I don't know I'm not actually speaking from it now I have it with me I have a new one of these a little new iPad Air's I absolutely love the little thing my wife's hoping one but her birthday but I believe it's all important we learned to live with the sense of disappointment there supposing you you see me speaking from my my iPad I wish I'll probably be doing on Sunday morning in the church I'm speaking in and you come up to me you say oh Michael you enjoying using that iPad you have any success with that and I say you know what it's incredible I love this thing I own a small coffee shop in Oxford do you know the most common order in the coffee shop we have an Oxford is two medium-sized cappuccinos and the iPad air is the precise size it needs to be from which to serve two medium size cappuccinos I'm buying one for every single one of our waiting stop and from now on every cappuccino we serve will be served off one of these iPad Air's if that was my response to your question are you having any success with that you would look at me and you would say Michael I I don't think you know what an iPad is for well what are you for what is it that brings that purpose to your life in existence it's not enough just to be driven as one very ancient poet said there is a way that seems right to a man but that part can lead to death there are all kinds of things that seem right to us at a time but it actually takes us towards a destination that we wish we never went to in the first place what is it they're not just simply drives you but helps guide those passions the well-known author CS Lewis he talked about compared death except according to bean the captain of a ship he said if you're the captain of a ship is there are three types of questions you need to ask yourself he said number one how do I stop from sinking he called that personal ethics number two how do I stop from bumping into other ships and boats he called that social ethics and number three why am I out here in the first place that's your essential ethics where do you get that answer why from what is it that actually informs that for you logos thirdly now the Greek word Lobos is aristotle used it is actually the root of the English word logic so where we get the word logic from we also translate it word you've ever been to church a Christmas time and you've heard in the beginning was the word and the Word was God and was with God that's the word logos now it's more than just simply word it meat it's about it is about word it's about logic is about meaning what is it and what is the word it could act it informs your life if you're going to answer this question about pathos and you're also going to answer the question about ethos at some point we're also going to have to try and figure out what is it what is the word over our life and in our life that somehow brings and fuses all of this with meaning in the first place now in the past we used to talk a lot about vocations now we talked about professions now there are some people who try to make distinctions between professions and vocations and I'm not particularly interested in that debate the sad thing about losing the word vocation is the idea of vocation is that entailed the idea of calling then tell the idea that that may it may actually be some kind of purpose for you and me that we if we are fulfill actually brings that completeness to our existence which is why an understanding of vocation and calling is so important why am I out here in the first place where do I actually get that from now interestingly this is another one of those questions which the Bible actually speaks to very very very directly and then if you remember when Jesus Christ first met some of the first disciples they were fishermen and he came up to them and he asked him a question he says have you caught any fish and they said no we've been out all night where the waters are deep and we caught nothing and he says to them well why don't you let down your nets here in the harbor now these are relatively polite young boys and they don't want to insult a stupid carpenter who obviously knows nothing about fishing so they explain it to him in words of simple syllables look we've been out all night yeah that's when you go fishing otherwise they see you cut the fish see you coming where the waters are deep that's that's like where the fish live Hey and Jesus interesting he looks at them and he simply says let down your net and a guy there called Paul says very well I'll let down my nets and he lets down his net and he captures so many fish his boat begins to sink for the first time in his life Paul went fishing for no other reason than his Lord had told him to someone whom he had record who he recognized had authority over his life had simply said look this is what you're to do now do it and for the first time in his life he went fishing not to catch any fish he didn't believe it only there the only reason why he did it was he believed for someone who knew why he was here in the first place was telling him this is what you should do and as soon as he has that experience the first words that come out of his lips are fascinating Paul looks up at the person of Jesus Christ and he says you need to depart from me because I'm a sinful guy and Paul's first real conviction with sin doesn't come from being in some kind of religious meeting it happens in the workplace because as much as we talk about ethics morals integrity in a room like this when it really matters when the rubber hits the road that's that what changes everything now there is a way to talk about ethics and integrity in a way that sounds utterly tyrannical because the simple truth is we all make mistakes and those in a single person in this room for whom that isn't true no matter how noble our intentions we all get things wrong interestingly I was getting ready to speak to a big accountancy firm a couple of years ago and I thought you know what I'm going to get online and I'm gonna watch some of the lectures from some of the world's leading business schools around the world to see what they're teaching my business ethics just to see what they're saying and one very famous institution which I'll leave unnamed their professor was up at the front speaking to a group of very eager university students and this is what he said he said ladies and gentlemen it has been scientifically proved that human beings are basically good whenever we put under pressure and whenever in a difficult spot we'll always choose to do the right thing and all the students sat there nodding and taking notes now I don't know how you feel about that but I can remember watching that shaking my head thinking I'm not sure what world you live in but it's very difficult the one I live in here's what I actually think is slightly more insightful most businessmen and women I made around the world when they started out when they were young they had the intention of leading a noble life most of us when we're young we imagine succeeding in whatever profession were in and people admiring us for it who would like to be the kind of people that people look up to trust emulate aspire to respect but the simple truth is is the further and further we go through this life the more compromises we seem to make it feels like we give a little bit here a little bit there we feel like we're cut in a hundred different directions eventually we're not we find ourselves in a position when you never even imagined we would be in most of us dream and aspire to lead in a noble life but we never really seem to get there I actually find this description much more accurate written by someone about 2,000 years ago this is what they said he said I do not understand what I do what I want to do I don't do it but what I hate to do I keep on doing I have the desire to do what is good but I simply don't carry it out although I want to do good evil is there a right with me in my inner being I delight in God's law but I see another law of work within me waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner I find that much more realistic if you're interested in reading more of that by the way you'll find it in a book called Romans which is collected in the Bible in Chapter 7 and I actually think that's a much more realistic description of the world in which you and I live we actually want to do that which is right we struggle to actually carry it out no matter how noble our life may be there seems to be something which is simply gone wrong for all of us and we wrestle with it which is why talking about integrity can seem too radical while I simply can't do it I aspire to it I know it's there I'd love it to look that way it simply doesn't what do I do which is why then there are three other questions and I'll end on this we all have to be able to answer if we want to deal with the issue of integrity without it becoming tyrannical because it's not enough to ask why this integrity matter in business it does it gathers governs all of our relationships whether we want to acknowledge it or not the next question we have to ask is what on earth do we do when integrity fails that's something that we're all going to encounter here are the three questions that we need to be able to answer one integrity fails in our life number one who do I talk to whenever there's a failure of integrity our life the first question is I need to know who I need to talk to about this and if you can't answer that question in your corporation for example you'll simply bury it your hope it goes away and no one finds out and it could destroy you I remember speaking many years ago in South Africa on a similar theme subject to this and a company called Arthur Andersen had dissolved off the face of the planet three days earlier don't if any of you remember Arthur Andersen I remember looking at them said and if I were to tell you if I'd come here a week ago and I were to tell you that in a week's time from now Arthur Andersen will cease to exist because of a major ethical failure of one of its people would you have believed me we need to know is there anyone we can talk to secondly we also need to answer no answer to this question is there any hope for me in this if we can see no hopeful path through as a result of where we failed and where we've gone wrong then we're there left again with very little option but to fail bury our failures and again hope that somehow they never come to light but all of those buried things eventually just come just they come out I can remember when I used to talk about business ethics a little while ago sometimes people would laugh a lot all the time but now with the increasing number of financial scandals industrial scandals and so on all of a sudden people are counting the cost in a whole other way we need a hopeful path which then raises the third question is there any process of redemption which can actually get me out of this mess doesn't matter where you're talking about your personal life your family life your corporate life or even you think about it a governmental level these questions have to be answered is there anyone I can talk to is there any hope for me through this process and if there is what on earth is the process of redemption that helps put things right again one of the things that really appealed to me about the Christian faith when I became a Christian was that I was terrified of becoming a hypocrite before I was a Christian before I was a Christian I was very happy with my life I was already fulfilled I seem to succeed everything I did I came from a successful family I'll succeed in whatever everywhere I went I you know life was easy for me and I didn't trust Christians to be honest with you I thought about Christians the same way I thought about communist they have nothing but they want to share it with me and the idea of becoming a Christian felt a bit like having a huge existential downgrade in life everything I enjoy I can no longer do things I really don't enjoy I'm gonna have to start doing in other words if my life is like eight to nine out of ten right now if I become a Christians going to be one out of ten why on earth would I want to downgrade myself so far well after a long process of nine months of looking into it I came to the conclusion the Christian faith was actually true that kraid created a huge existential crisis for me because I didn't want it to be true I didn't want the Christian face to be true because I didn't want it to affect my life because I knew it will change my life and I thought to make my life worse however truth has always been something important to me and eventually after a while I thought you know what I simply can't pretend any longer I'm gonna have to become a Christian I wouldn't found a group of friends of mine one evening I said to them hey guys I'm gonna go and speak to those Christians over there after I finish speaking to you I'm gonna become a Christian I'm telling you this because from now on I won't be enjoying myself anymore and that's exactly what I say and as I went over and found this group of Christians I honestly it honestly felt to me like I was about to sacrifice on the altar of truth my only shot for happiness in this world and the incredible thing that happened after that was just finding this incredible sense of forgiveness and peace with God as soon as I made that decision because we've all messed up in our life there's something wrong with all of us it doesn't matter how noble we try to be my my oldest daughters she's now 18 but by the age of 14 she'd grown her hair all the way down to the lower part of her back so she had very very long long hair and I was going away on a long trip and my wife said to me my daughter came to me rather and said daddy I don't need to be surprised when you come home my hair's gonna be I'm gonna have a haircut it will be much shorter and I'd often you know complimented on her hair so you know okay I knew things were going to be dramatic when I landed at Heathrow and as I was getting into the car that's gonna drive me home my wife rang me and said Michael when you get home you were to say nothing to Lucy apart from she looks beautiful so I knock on the door and my daughter Lucy opens the door and her hair's been cut all the way up to here and so I'm a man under Authority I'm do as I'm told and I smiled I said Lucy you look beautiful now a couple of days later my wife she leads the cello section in an orchestra in Oxford and she was out of rehearsal so I'm just alone with my daughter we're watching TV and now I have the opportunity to ask her the question I've been dying to ask her for 48 hours so I just breathe in and out slowly to make sure I'm calm and you know smile so it comes out in the right way and I say Lucy what prompted the change in hairstyle was were you bored do you want do something new and she said well she said I saw this documentary on TV a couple of months ago on the BBC about this charity that looks after six and seven-year-old girls who have leukemia and they were saying that they lose their hair because of the treatment and they have a real problem sourcing wigs hair donors to make wigs for these little girls so she's thought what I'll do is I'll have my hair wash and she had it plaited and tied in the particular way so it could be cut off and then mailed off to this charity to to make wigs for some of these girls and I remember looking at Lucy and she was an avid reader my youngest daughter my oldest daughter and I said Lucy do you remember reading Little Women and she'd read Little Women and there's a scene in that book when the eldest daughter sells her hair to buy a train ticket for her mother so her mother can go and visit her father who's dying in a military hospital and that thousands of miles from home as the mother takes the money from her daughter she looks at her daughter and says your hair will regrow but you'll never be more beautiful to me than you are right now and as Lucy told me what she had done that seemed to be the only fitting line I had for her and I said Lucy do remember the line from that book and she said yes and I just repeated it to Herman the incredible thing about the human condition is not that we never see anything good in anyone it's in the very same heart where we see everything which is good and Noble the desires for greatness we also see all of this brokenness and pain and greed and envy and lust as well it's all mixed up in our heart and those are the kinds of people we are which is why there is this incredible peace that comes when you can actually find real forgiveness for what we've actually done wrong so there is a way of talking and thinking about integrity which is utterly tyrannical if there's no hope of redemption from when we actually mess up and get things wrong and that's for me one of the most powerful and compelling things about the Christian gospel it allows us to be honest about our failures and then to figure out how on earth we can both find personal peace and then actually work towards a bigger reconciliation and rescuing the situation has gone terribly wrong without having to live we're trying to cover everything up all the time and keep everything hidden integrity matters it governs all of our relationships and no matter what you believe or whether you even agree with the conclusions I've come to today at the very least I hope the questions I've asked have been helpful for you because we're all gonna have to find a way to answer those questions one way or another in our in our lives I think we're gonna go into a time of general Q&A but just one last thing because I know some of you will have to move on and leave if you are interested in pursuing some of these questions you want to go deeper and further then I'd want to let you know that something called an alpha course is being put on and arranged if you want to find out more I know Bishop Nick who is down here at the front what have information about that we'll got to give it to you so please do speak to him about that you all know me as Nick I call him bill sometimes I did last night several times on the platform just my personal affectionate nickname for him but Nick to the rest of you and it's an opportunity to get together once a week here a short talk have some food and then discuss some of the questions which actually are the most important in life which are about our meaning purpose direction and why we're actually here and how we actually make sense of the world in which we live and so if you're interested in going to that go along give it a go you will not be disappointed do we have a question yes I had a question I have fantastic talk by the way but um I realized at about the age of eighteen that I had this incredible knack for picking stocks whatever stock that I said by was a key to short sell right they were all going to fail so you know I realized this quite quite early on and and began doing this professionally and until one day one of my employees came in and he had the stock we had picked is to quote unquote buy which translates as short sell is was iridium the global satellite telephone network and he was going around on this tip and telling everyone who had wronged him to buy iridium stock so that they would lose their money and he didn't see anything wrong with that as far as he was concerned he had been wronged and he was just setting things straight and so he had so I'm trying to explain about integrity and he believes that he has integrity right so how do you get through to someone that just is blind to this kind of thing okay so you're saying because he felt wronged he was happy to go and give this wrong ship to everybody else right Wow okay we were talking about this a little bit yesterday actually because what you're talking about is what's called victim culture and it's basically taken over so much of our thinking in this world if you feel that you've been victimized if you've been wronged the nice thing about it is that you feel that you can do terrible things to other people and they deserve it in other words you deserve everything that did you and you deserve even more so when you feel victimized in your heart it justifies feelings of anger and hatred towards other people as they deserve it so on the plus side of feeling like a victim if you get angry with people irrationally angry to do stupid things you normally wake up the next day feeling a bit bad about it but if you victimize you wake up the next day feeling great about it because they they got what they deserved so that's about the only plus the problem is that when you've been victimized that might the mentality that takes over is this you begin to think that everything that I'm doing is rationally explicable through to love and being right self-righteousness and every that you do if you disagree with me is only explicable to hate so you step in to correct that person at that point they don't interpret it as gosh I'm wrong I need to change they interpret then your attempted corrections you don't understand and you probably hate me which makes the situation even worse so when you're dealing with a victim victimized culture what you have to try and do is reinstall a whole different mindset now if you want to I can send you a link to a talk on this rather for about an hour but the three most powerful words in the English language right now are I am offended so if any of you want to send your HR department into a spin in whatever company you're in just go back and say I'm very offended about something and you'll see all the color drain from their face because that's the cardinal sin MHS you can't cause that you can't cause offence so we've weaponized our emotions and anyone therefore who violates how we feel in terms of what we think and feel should have happened then is deserving of all the firepower that we can actually give back to them and it makes her very unstable a very unstable situation what you have to try and help that person see is that whatever wrong day have feel felt and whatever wrong they have done that doesn't justify the wrong that they now want to actually do to someone else now the reason why would that went into too much detail why this is so catastrophic is historically in the past we used to talk about honor cultures and would encourage people to act with honor and we respect the people who acted with honor and we also talked about dignity cultures where the goal wasn't so much to defend your honor but to act with dignity and normally most cultures in the world could be analyzed through they either want to preserve their honor or they want to act with dignity in an honor culture and in a dignity culture you take responsibility for your response does that make sense someone's done something wrong to me the question isn't how do I wrong then someone's not something wrong to me the question is how do I respond honorably how do I respond with dignity Amit says in a victim culture if you have been wronged you don't think about honor and dignity what you think about is how you can simply get revenge so that's basically what's going on in the mind of that person the trouble is it's going to destroy them so that's I can have a longer talk with if you want to and suggest something that you want to do you want to see there is a book that you may find helpful if you find this a lot it's written by a cognitive psychologist called Aaron T Beck it's called prisoners of hate I was published in 1999 and it actually looks at this phenomenon which has now become a global issue but it's a very good question thank you I've got one Michael so is it possible to get to the same place without Christianity as far as morality and ethics oh I think everyone in the world develops a sense of morality and ethics about what we think is right what we think is wrong and how we should act what where things get hard as what we do when we fail now what the Christian faith has something very unusual to speak to therefore is when we fail when it comes to systems and morality and ethics so look most cultures in the world are going to ask us to aspire to something then we sense some form of better behavior some kind of standards something that we should actually do and some some of those things you find a fairly universal does it make sense in terms of how we may need to treat people and what-have-you most cultures condemn stealing for example regardless of whatever their other beliefs may be the problem is is how do you handle failure and at that point there are only a series of things which are available to you one is well you somehow try to earn your way back in the second seek forgiveness but outside of the Christian faith forgiveness is earned so let me give you an illustration let supposing after the gentleman's first question at the back he asked me his question and I insult him I say what a stupid question can't believe you are such a stupid question you have the intellectual capacity more commonly associated with forms of pond-life invisible to the naked eye now supposing that's my response to him and I guess you're wondering that's from a British TV program called Blackadder that was popular a long time ago and this supposing I I that's what I say to him for some reason he takes it to be insulting and I just move into the next question and then after about five minutes my bottom lip begins to to quiver okay and you know I hold it in and after everyone leaves the auditorium as I walk out I pat him on the back and I say hey please forgive me I walk out the door now if that was you I insulted you publicly in front of everybody and as you were leaving automatically please forgive me walk past you would you forgive me be honest No okay the supposing I publicly humiliate you in this audience and then after a few minutes I have breakdown into uncontrollable sobs of Tears on this stage I crawl off the stage and on all fours I come around to where you're sitting and I clasp onto your ankles and through sobs and cries I beg for your forgiveness in front of everybody now do you forgive me and I see you're quite hard to please this group yeah the answer is you will forgive me when you think I have suffered enough for the wrong I have done I made sense when I when there's enough angst when there's enough pain when there's enough emotional upset maybe something bad has befallen me I've lost my health I lost my job you know I've got some kind of embarrassing disease you know but when I've suffered enough does that make sense then I've earned it now you forgive me in every culture of the world forgiveness is earned so why do we earn it by paying it back or we earn it through our guilt doesn't make sense in order to be forgiven but in the Christian faith it's totally gift for different because you can't earn forgiveness in the Christian faith what is unusual about the Christian faith is that God is offering forgiveness to us even before we've realized we've done something wrong in other words the message within the Christian faith isn't if you come and beg God and cry out he may forgive you for all the bad stuff you've done he already knows all the bad stuff you've done he decided to come into this world and rescue us and pay the price for us to be forgiven and offers us forgiveness as a gift even move all we thought of asking for it and therefore you only can receive it as a gift we talked a little bit about this about this last night and so that's one of the big distinctives with my Christian faith is that even your forgiveness that me says it can't be earned but it is something which is offered the incredible thing is that when you encounter this kind of reconciliation it changes the way you want to live so coming back to my personal story after I got converted and became a Christian 24 hours later I was with a woman who was one of the reasons I I didn't want to become a Christian in the first place she was the six-foot-one model and I was pretty sure that my my plans with her were going to be altered by God if he actually existed and and I walked into the room where she was and she looked at me and first thing she said was Michael you're different something's changed what's happened to you and I said well I'm not sure I can explain it and so she said well try so I said well they said I became a Christian yesterday and she looked at me she said well what enough does that mean I said I'm not sure I can give you a very good answer right now all I know is I'm not the same person I was before so she leant forward looking me straight at the art inviting in the eyes and said do you want to sleep with me now I've been unsuccessfully trying to woo her for the last couple of months so as soon as she asked the question I remember sitting back in my chair looking now and saying you know if you'd only asked me 36 hours ago the answer to your question would have been yes I said but today the answer to this question is no and as I said no strange thing was I wasn't at all disappointed with my own answer so there is something about receiving this form of forgiveness it is very transformative in your life it doesn't simply change what you feel you have to do it change is what you want to do and I think that's part of the power of what is also unique within the Christian faith it's a good question thanks another question on the back end one down okay so gosh I mean there's a lot of things built into that question the very fact that things should change the way we want to behave to other people actually does change the way that business should be run from a Christian point of view so it should be transformative and there are all kinds of things which actually are very important which we all ignore where God which if we ignore we get into trouble with I'll give you an example in the early parts of the Bible and what Christians call the Old Testament all of that's governing God's dealings with Israel Israel's an agricultural economy right at the heart of any agricultural economy are weights and measures that's the unit by which you define value which is why again and again you read in the Old Testament that God abhors inaccurate weights and measures in other words if you correct if you corrupt the unit by which you measure value within the economy it's going to affect everything else and ultimately destabilize it so the answer is is actually think there's an awful lot in there that actually guys it in one sense it'll take a whole other talk the question that you're asking to one level is what on earth there's the Christian picked it talked about work and life and how we should live and what difference does it make to work and if you want and you want to be bored for another hour I can actually send you a link where I will bore you for one hour online with a talk that I did on that subject and you can listen to it it's originally a talk I developed for Goldman Sachs but there's another version available more public online that you can have if you'll find that useful so the answer is no we have to actually stand up and the other things you also have to stand up for justice so the fact that you're willing to forgive someone or wrong that you have done to you doesn't mean therefore that they should also be excused whatever legal ramifications may flow in that way because there are things that also need to be upheld also for the preservation for any society to hold and so sometimes that restoration process that we actually go through may involve going through certain things that we would rather not face but the ultimate hope in and through it all is actually maybe there's something even greater and better at the end of all of this process regardless of whatever we may lose in the short term for a much bigger long-term goal and that's something that has to inform all of our thinking your questions very well placed you mentioned a little bit about capitalism I'm not sure exactly what to say about that apart from this the Christian gospel talks all about freedom but freedom isn't doing whatever you want if you do whatever you want whenever you want however you want to that's not freedom that's anarchy and there are some parts of the world where I travel and that's exactly what's happened and when Anarchy breaks out in the society you don't increase in you don't experience an increased amount of freedom within it you experience the loss of it so freedom is not doing whatever you want whenever you want however you want to freedom is a moral concept and it only exists within a moral framework you remove that framework you don't have an increase of freedom in society you experience the complete loss of it now what we try to do with our legal regulation within even capitalist systems therefore is we make morally moral promises enforceable that make sense contract law in one sense is nothing more than saying hey if you make a promise and someone relies on it and you both agree that promise is going to be enforceable so what we often try to do through force of law is passed laws to try to make sure that those kinds of moral and ethical standards which are absolutely essential for any economy to thrive need to be put in place so the idea of freedom even within a capitalistic system isn't doing whatever you want whenever you want however you want as I say that actually this results in the destruction of the system you actually need to maintain a standard within it in order to support the system itself I mean we could say even more about this but I don't want to bore you too much give me into derivatives next which is what my research area was in but that will really bore you for a while a good afternoon Michael I'm the gentleman whose ex ed told him when he asked him what integrity was that I said I may not be able to tell you concisely and precisely what it is but I can tell you what what it isn't and just so you'll know and everyone else it I was reaching to try and say something profound but I was actually grocery shopping in there I wanted to move on quickly as well we here in Bermuda have a saying perhaps you're familiar with it people go along to get along go along to get along it's much like fences make good neighbors as well particularly in a place as small as perm you know I find when people go along to get along there is some value and think I think in getting along with people but in going along along the way we tend to make small compromises small adjustments to our values and over a period of time it has a an impact and an effect and we see that many organizations is probably the obvious example but we see it in business organizations as well and I think that that's part of the problem we have today particularly here in Bermuda where as I say we're so small and it's important that we do get along and the other the flip side to that is that when people who we think and we would uphold as people having an take integrity and showing some integrity we don't seem to uphold and value them as much as the other people who stay and continue to go along to get along and that I think is a real real problem and how do you tackle that okay you mean with people who leave because of integrity is I think I need to know I think I'm talking about general to go along together society and in general I mean one you know you haven't used the name here and I won't either but one only need look at Washington and what goes on there and how people seem to go along to get along for some greater goal which is may perhaps party unity power continuing to stay in control but there's a tremendous price that's paid each step of the way okay sure well what why don't we wrap up on this question this maybe we could want to wrap up on us and I'm very happy to stay here at the front and take any other questions individually from you for as long as you you feed me some feed me something to eat and give me something to drink okay I won't make any comments about Washington DC apart from to say that obviously is a British citizen from our point everything started going wrong in 1776 and it's been getting worse ever since and any time the Americans in this room wish to end their rebellion against the British Empire and rejoin the motherland we're very happy to you know negotiate terms we're negotiating lots of things at the moment the we very often think that compassion and conviction are enemies of each other and that's simply not true so we often think that to be compassionate and how we deal with someone means to give up all of our convictions or to act with conviction necessarily means you should be devoid of compassion so the the one of the challenges with the go along to get along kind of mentality is very often lots of small things get buried but they end up some point all coming out at once in one huge go which is very disorientating for the person who you've been getting along with because it certainly sounds like they did something very small and now all of sudden you fly off the handle whereas actually what's been happening from your perspective is well this is now this you know this is what the millionth time now and this is the millionth than one and that said I'm done now so one of the things that we have to work very hard on in any society is how on earth should we actually learn to actually bring up areas of difficulty but in also but also with compassion in a way that helps preserve relationship and we've lost that the trouble is is that we've come to define civilization as in a way that we define civilization by how we what we agree on and how we handle and how we all hold together with the same line but the true hallmark of civilization isn't how it handles agreement the true hallmark of a civilization is how it handles disagreement and that's what we've lost right now we're losing the ability to disagree well with ourselves and also remain friends so what I will say about Washington DC is one of my trips over there several years ago the guy who was looking after me was at that time chief chief of staff talked to one of the presidents and afterwards took me out for a lunch dinner and we're sat in a restaurant and I said to him you've obviously been in DC for a while he said yes I said what's the biggest difference and he said if you came here 20 30 years ago sat in this restaurant said you would have seen very senior high-powered politicians from opposite ends of the aisle who've been beating each other up in the in Congress or the Senate sitting here with their wives laughing and joking together over a glass of wine he says today we're scared to do that because we will be accused of selling out or compromising or accused of some kind of conspiracy he says we can't handle that anymore so we have no con tact with each other whatsoever so I said well that's a problem then it means if you don't know each other as friends and you have no connection outside what happens in that debating chamber then how enough you ever bring any form of peaceful resolution to anything this was ten years ago and the guy said it's getting worse I don't see much hope right now so the idea of getting along is very important this of what it so to get along with a person means I need to affirm you as a person as a human being I can connect with you and have fellowship with you and talk with you about all kinds of things but there may still be some sticking points between us where I'm going to have to say no I don't actually think that's right I think that's wrong I don't know what the demographic in this room is but let me mean let me move it into a slightly different things if it makes it even clearer most of us are so desperate to be liked and loved in this world we go around projecting an image of ourselves to other people the trouble is that people fall in love with the image not with the reality which is why you can be very rich very powerful very popular and very lonely because people only have access to the to the image around you they don't get to know the real you the people who know the real you you know all your weaknesses with failings you know that bad side to your character the people who know you that way and that they love you and they they're your friend those are the closest relationships you have it's not because they approve of everything you do or agree with everything but you know they actually value you even though there are some fundamental points of difference between you those are the closest friends you can have and so we're living in this increasingly lonely world because people don't know how to build those kinds of friendships anymore so so it's not a question of constantly blurting out for people difficult and awkward things and making everyone for your thing it's a question about trying to build a relationship within which is strong enough does that make sense so that you can raise some of those things so they don't all simply pile up and then explode in a very disastrous way and the practice of forgiving others then becomes part and parcel of it okay so it's a very great question oh you've done very well you've all been here for a very long time some of you even have work to do so I want to thank you again for giving me a hearing I'm loving being here in Bermuda it's been very kind I hope this has been helpful to you and thank you very much for the invitation [Applause]

Channel: Evangelical Church

Views: 5,035

Rating: 4.7014923 out of 5

Keywords: Evangelical Church of Bermuda, Michael Ramsden, RZIM

Id: 2afEp-VwmNs

Length: 56min 21sec (3381 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 21 2018