DR ERROL N BENJAMIN

IS THE allegation recently in the media of GPs claiming to be specialists a symptom of how the old-time self-respect that we once valued, to mean a sense of remorse over wrongdoing, is now something of an anachronism?

It may be accepted that all of us in our vulnerability as humans, whether deliberately or inadvertently, are susceptible to compromising our self-respect for self-gain in some form or another, but one would have expected that professionals of such ilk would have acquired not only a sense of the moral implications of their wrongdoing, but also the possible consequences to themselves and their professional integrity and to desist from such behaviour.

One can hardly expect the average Joe or Beharry on the street to engage in such a balancing mode of thinking in trying to satisfy his immediate needs at the expense of his intended wrongdoing. But why such contradiction in the behaviour of those who are expected 'to know better?'

Is it the art of connivance and manipulation that a superior intellect often spawns in some, feeding their egos, indeed their narcissism, so that they can acquire a sense of power and control over others, with the self-interest in serving themselves trumping the self-respect that should show remorse over wrongdoing?

This is a deeply complex issue in which the best of us and the worst of us, indeed all of us, succumb at some point or the other, but the evidence suggests that at the upper echelons of the society this indifference to self-respect and personal dignity to what the people will say, or what history will say, or what your legacy will be, seems a normative behavioural pattern that hardly augurs well for the leadership roles that people of such intellect are expected to play in a developing society.

Like our young "specialists' who, allegedly, tried to buck the stages of specialisation without a thought about the injury that could be inflicted upon the people who trusted their expertise.

Or our politicians in leadership positions who use the people as 'ladders to gain the utmost round, but then scorning the base degrees by which they did ascend (Brutus pointing to Caesar's use of the 'base degrees" as a ladder to fulfil his political ambition, turning his back on them when that is accomplished (Act 2 Sc 1 21-26).

Or on the same continuum, politicians who support such leaders assuming leadership roles as rewards for their slavish loyalty, with hardly the knowledge or will to serve the people.

Or the law, being the travesty it has become, with justice bleeding as its advocates betray an unimaginable indifference to its fulfilment.

And these 'noble' professions aside, not withstanding the politics as the art of manipulation to serve the self, there are the price gougers who would 'dig out your eye' without battering an eyelid.

And as for the murderers among us, we are to them as 'flies to wanton boys...they kill us for their sport.' (Lear on the heath having been abandoned by his two daughters - King Lear Act 4 Sc1 37-