Actually, it's what you know, not who you know
Sometimes modes of corruption are normalised
To know or not to know, is that the question?
Well, no it’s not the question, according to the well-used saying:
It’s not what you know, but who you know.
This saying emphasises to any young and promising upstart that whether you know or don’t know, that’s not what matters in the real world. Because in the real world, what matters is who you know.
Yes, if you know the right people, opportunities will come your way. Need acceptance into a university? Need a job? Need that traffic fine taken care of? Want box seat tickets to the game? If you know the right people, they can pull the strings for you, right?
While this kind of favour-culture may be lapped up by those who can, and envied by those who wish they could, the question must be asked: is it simply the normalisation of corruption?
Sure, in many cases such may be generosity exercised by those who can. Bob owns the stadium,1 and this allows him to invite his friends to a game as he pleases. Why not? It seems like no harm is done.
But what if Bob is the vice-chancellor of a fine university and he owes Peter a good backscratching, so makes arrangements for Peter’s daughter Eva to get into the university, despite her dismal high school grades. Eva happily rides the wave of family connections. After all, she’d hate to disappoint daddy and bring the family into disrepute by not becoming ‘educated’.
But in reality, Eva is not the brightest. She’s only going to university because of the status it brings. She will spend those three years feigning knowledge while the real game revolves around building her social networks, her image, and finding her future husband.
He will have to be similarly enmeshed in a wealthy family of string-pullers. It can’t be for love. Girls marry their father’s likeness. That preordained milestone met, she will continue through life, knowing who can get her what.
But stop daydreaming Eva, you still need to graduate.
This means ‘passing’ her exams. Meanwhile, hard-working students who study in the hours between their two jobs, after helping auntie in her yard, and sending money to their struggling parents back home look at Eva yet say nothing. They know. Why? Because they are not stupid.
Envy is foreign to the intelligent and self-reliant.
They know that Eva is not very bright. She knows it too but won’t dare admit it; it’s her shadow. She resents the bright hard worker because secretly she knows she’s a fraud riding on other peoples’ successes. She’s never had the opportunity to truly test herself under difficult circumstances with real consequences if she messes up. It’s a bubble.
The self-reliant student knows exactly the game she’s playing. They know that without daddy’s networks and her own good looks, Eva would be in some grubby apron serving fast food between smokos until she met a rough-brained boozer who made her feel less lonely at night. Five years later, she’s receiving welfare and raising three children alone.
But that’s not how it is. Although Eva knows next to nothing, she’s got daddy and daddy knows people. So please daddy. Please hubby. And ruin anyone who dares threaten her bubble.
Nature gives every life-form its own way of wending through the world.
But where do you draw the line? When it is about who you know, what is right and proper and what is wrong and corrupt?
Is it based on the extent of harm done to others? Is it based on breaking the rules, making the game unfair for others? Is it about inequality, a secret resentment of the wealthy and well connected?
Suppose Eva graduates, thanks to some background support from daddy’s pal Bob, the university vice-chancellor (nobody need know about that). Eva graduates, throws her mortarboard high and the professional photographer captures all the vanity.
But Bob had to keep his hands clean, so he asked Lex to make it happen. Lex is not a good man, but he is very loyal, so he switched Eva’s exam paper with Jack’s on the records system. (Jack is one of those smart hard-working kids mentioned earlier.) Eva got great grades, and hard-working Jack failed three topics.
How Jack? How could you let your parents down? We raised you all these years.
Jack hit the road the next year and ended up in a rough city, working in a petrol station, struggling to pay the rent. Noisy neighbours above and violent crime outside late at night.
But Jack is self-reliant and smart, so don’t worry about him. He persevered, trained his craft and actualised his greater potential. Five years from now, he will be leading a successful company licencing software to global logistics companies, with a good wife, a happy two-year-old with more on the way, and a meaningful life. And it was the realness of that difficult time in the bad part of town that forged Jack’s unstoppable resolve and gave him something Eva would never know—true confidence in one’s capabilities.
Meanwhile, Eva has her framed degree on her framed wall in her framed house, living with her framed husband in her framed world. Daddy feigns a pride in her. He doesn’t know what real pride feels like. There are many things they do not know and will never come to know. It’s the bubble.
Sometimes modes of corruption are normalised.
Recognise that behind the riches and the glitz is a very poor world indeed. And this is not about opposing wealth or influence (both can be used to do good). It’s about ignorance among the elite. Real leaders are good, knowledgeable, and wise.
Knowledge is the source of true wealth. Knowledge is golden. Knowledge is what you exercise to build yourself up from nothing, in any direction you choose by applying that knowledge. Knowledge is the vehicle for successful action, self-directed, self-reliant action and sound results.
Knowledge is certainty, confidence, choice. It is freedom and power. It is a sword with which to illuminate the deeper unknowns of life and death and all that moves in between.
If you have knowledge, you know what is meaningful and worthwhile; you marvel at life in all its possibilities. And if you don’t know, but you have connections, you’re still ignorant.
Now, truth be told all this rambling, pitting the connected against the knowledgeable is just a caricature. Life isn’t really like that. Eva, Peter, Bob, Jack, Lex, the ken-doll hubby and the boozing hubby; all these people would be complex, nuanced human beings in the real world.
But to what extent do they each realise it?
To what extent do they live it?
At Mount Parnassus in Central Greece, inscribed on the Temple of Apollo was the well-known Delphic maxim, which continues to illuminate the world to this day:
Γνῶθι σαυτόν (‘Know thyself’).
Thus, it’s who you know … or is it?
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The people and their circumstances mentioned in this article are entirely fictional.