EDITORIAL — Scandals on the scale of indifference

Everybody is splitting hairs over a lamp post that costs over two hundred thousand pesos. Scandalous, they say. Of course it is scandalous. But so is a piece of bread costing twenty-eight pesos at the mall.

Everybody is shocked to discover that a thirty-second spot on tv to plug the candidacy of a senatorial hopeful would cost at least a hundred and eighty thousand pesos. And yet nobody is shocked that a doll's dress would cost more than the dress of a real person.

Does human discomfort surface only as a matter of scale? A businessman may hesitate to raise the salaries of his workers by a hundred pesos. But the same businessman will not hesitate to leave the same amount as tip to the waiter who served him coffee.

The coffee he had, which he did not even finish, was worth three hundred pesos. A single tablet of paracetamol to relieve the fever of a senior citizen costs many times less. The coffee comes in seconds. For the paracetamol, granddad has to line up and prove his age with an ID.

A scandal ought to be a scandal whatever the scale. The moment we make distinctions, we begin to make discriminations. Scales do not pass judgment on the matter of ethics or morality but merely impose levels of tolerance to the stimuli.

We do not condone rip-offs. But we find the hypocrisy that is apparent in the way we overlook other scandalous things on account of their smaller scale even more scandalous. At least in the huge rip-offs, they are so brazen there is hardly any pretense.

But the fact remains that we are being ripped off everyday at every opportunity by those we allow to rip us off with our indifference and hypocrisy. They may happen to be just small indiscretions yet they still form the basis for our indoctrination as willing victims.

Our willingness to be stirred according to scale has allowed those who would rip us off to play us accordingly. They push the envelope gradually but with increasing audacity, testing the limits of our tolerance, knowing that in the end we won't know the difference.