Who cares today about having a ‘good name’?

THE EDITOR: Watching the ending of the film version of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and seeing how the main protagonist, John Proctor, refused to give up his “good name” by not signing a false confession to witchcraft, which would have saved his own life and that of other falsely accused, I feel less alone in my continuing harping in my letters about that sense of rightness that should govern our lives and give us our good name, but to which so many of us are woefully indifferent.

What crosses my mind in many of these letters is the thought of what the people will say in response to our varied behaviours, but evidentially that never seems to cross the mind of many.

In terms of everyday experience, to choose one instance, I resign to the way some vendors will charge us, at Divali time, $30 for chataigne that they would normally sell at $10, with the appropriate greeting and no thought of the contradiction between the obvious exploitation and the uplifting spirituality of the occasion, nor how diminished they must seem in the eyes of the victim.

In another instance, after continuing to call a State organisation for over three years to provide a service for which it is responsible, those at the other end continue to make promises they know they will never keep, with little sense of how the organisation’s image/good name can be tarnished by such irresponsibility.

About those who govern our lives you wonder at the continuing incompetence and corruption and how little politicians care about their “good name” in the eyes of their constituents.

The recent floods tell a sad story of incompetence and indifference, the premier body responsible insulting our intelligence by talking of miscommunication and the floods wreaking havoc as something of minimal importance. And there is no more brazen indifference to what the public thinks in the award of huge contracts by the State to companies under investigation by the State. The issue of their “good name” in the eyes of the people never seems to arise.

To ask why things have changed from the time of Proctor in The Crucible, when your good name was paramount, to the present, when for many such virtue has no real meaning, is to look perhaps at those social institutions which provided such values and how they are losing potency in the face of a pervasive sense of feeding the ego and satisfying the self in the present associated with these modern times.

The self is our God and once that is satisfied who cares about that misnomer called a “good name.” But Shakespeare in Othello could not have put it better: “Good name in man and woman…/ Is the immediate jewel of their soul:/ Who steals my purse steals trash;/ ’tis something, nothing:/ ’Twas mine, ’tis his and has been slave to thousands;/ But he that filches from me my good name/ Robs me of that which not enriches him/ And makes me poor indeed .”

What a laugh, many may scoff. Do you take a “good name” to the bank or pay for a Range Rover with it? (Act 3 Sc 3 158-165.)

DR ERROL BENJAMIN, docbenj742@outlook.com

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"Who cares today about having a ‘good name’?"

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