Winning Loyalty

I am, what you’d call a late entrant in the area of watching Korean dramas.  With the exception of a few meals at Korean restaurants and enjoying the odd bit of eye candy of Korean girl groups, I was never into Korean soft culture until the circuit breaker, when I found myself with sometime and easy access to Netflix.

One of my most recent discoveries was a series called “Whisper,” which tells the story of an honest judge and policewoman who team up to bring down a very corrupt but very powerful law firm that has built up its business in the arms trade. The most interesting character in this drama is the head of this law firm - main villain. He is the son of a “slave” who built an empire through brains and hard work. The man is a spider in a web of connections with those with power. If he wasn’t a character in a Korean drama, he’d probably be on the cover of Forbes Magazine.

The crux of the entire series is the scene when he teaches his daughter how to gain the loyalty of person to the extent that the person will do literally anything for them. His advice is as follows:

1. Take Away EVERYTHING they have;
2. Help them climb up when they reach rock bottom

If you look at this advice, you’ll realise that the man in a genius. Who wouldn’t want to be loyal to the people who helped them when they were down?

Every bit of “feel-good” and “self-help” wisdom tells you that the people who really care about you, are the ones who are there for you when you are down and out and are unable to offer yourself, let alone anyone else anything of any possible value. The human brain is such that once we get out of the proverbial doldrums, we’re bound to think better and act more favorably to those who bothered speaking to us when we were down.

The villain in Whisper is correct in his second point. We are inevitably loyal to those who helped us when we were down. What most of us tend to don’t do is to question the first piece of advice, especially when it comes to our “friends” who are in positions of power and influence. I mean, who on earth would even question the person who was there for us when we were at our lowest point?

Yet, its an important piece of advice, especially when you apply it to the current global economic disaster caused by the current pandemic. Most of us have reached or are reaching low points in our personal finances. Jobs and other sources of income are hard to come by, yet bills like mortgages need to be serviced. Nobody has any clue as to how when an economic recovery will happen and even then, it will be sometime before any of us see a recovery in our personal finances.

In such situations, we’re bound to accept a helping hand regardless of where it comes from. If you look at “talking points” and conversations that people had before the circuit breaker in April, it was on the topic of government assistance.

Singapore’s government was perhaps one of the more sophisticated in dealing with this. The government announced in February that was preparing for an economic slowdown and proceeded to make sure that the public knew that it was asking the president permission to draw down from the reserves (which is a “given” in practice as the president is “selected” by the government). There were also great pains to announce there were an unprecedented four budgets, which were designed to help us get through the economic storm.

It was only at the end of June, when the government decided to call for a snap election and it was only after the election that the government announced that the economy had been in a double-digit recession. You have to hand it to the government to timing things well.  The first payout came in April, while we were getting used to life under lockdown. The second was in June, a month before the election.

In fairness to the Singapore government, it’s not the only one to try and pull this off. Donald Trump’s biggest political stunt was to try and get the stimulus cheques sent out to have his signature. Think about it – you can say what you want about the man prescribing medications he has no business prescribing and mismanaging things because the feelings that matter are not the ones that you talk about but the ones you have when you look at that cheque and then look at your bills.

Politicians know that we’re less critical towards our “benefactors” in downturns. We’re in no position to start questioning sources of money, when the need to pay bills remains pressing and money is a scarce commodity. Who in their right mind is going to question the motives of the guy offering something that you need most?

The saying that we should always remember the people who helped us in hard times rings true. However, at the same time, it’s also important to remember how we got into the hard times and the role that our benefactors may have had in putting us there.