Bizcuits | Unreasonable power

Leanda Lee

Those who bluff and bluster around us with total unreasonableness unsettle us. They can be objects of fascination. In what world do they live? How can they sleep at night? Theirs is a different language where our perception of their wrongs is incensed when we fail to illicit from them any sign of contrition. No apology and even more bewilderingly, not even an acknowledgement or twitch of recognition that they have overstepped the line.
They don’t play by our rules. That’s unnerving.
Rules and norms in society and business are important for they increase certainty – certainty that a cause will have a range of effects and we will be more likely than others to benefit from our own investments. However tenuous it may be, we have a semblance of control when others play by the same rules. When they know our rules but refuse to recognise them, they have an insidious power over us.
I’ve had a week of dealing with such a person and I’m exhausted. Countless hours have been squandered trying to figure out what he wants, for the game-plan keeps changing. There have been contradictions, twists and turns. If I could determine the reasons for or the desired outcome of the unreasonable behaviour, I could work with it but direct requests merely produce a tirade of accusations. With these people the rules of social- and professional-exchange and anticipated cause and effect relationships don’t apply. I concede that my presumption of there even being a point to this unreasonableness may be wrong.
How can one be reasonable in the face of unreasonableness? Standing the moral high-ground can place us in a weak position. Does unreasonableness have to be fought using the tools of the unreasonable? I once had a boss who would end a losing argument with the accusation that what I was proposing was sinful: sin merely being another point on the unreasonableness continuum.
There are other benefits of being unreasonable. The oft quoted, “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people,” by George Bernard Shaw beseeches us to be different to innovate and progress with ideas that would offer more than incremental benefits, especially in business and social development. The management guru books say unreasonableness is about breaking the mould, about refusing to be limited by the expectations of others. It’s about being audacious, about challenging the status quo, special interests and power-brokers. GBS’s reflect upon changing processes to meet visionary goals, they weren’t meant to excuse the actions of the strange and warped in their petty egotistical power-play and drastically heterodox, or unknowable goals.
I’ve seen a great deal of unreasonableness of the lessor sort in Macau. The government’s recent statement on predictions about gaming revenue drop (MDT, Dec 8) is one such instance. Firstly, we’ve seen no evidence to support the prediction – what are the factors to which the government is privy that drives such a prediction? Are there to be further restrictions on transit visas? Tighter controls on cross-border cash-flows? More rigorous identification checks of VIP players? Stronger oversight of Junket operators? Or is it merely driven by dutiful adherence to Li Gang’s warnings that “Only by diversifying the economy can Macau prevent economic crisis”? To this last point, I note that definitions change subtly in Macau. Diversification now seems to have morphed: instead of increasing the size of the non-gaming business, we can diversity industry by decreasing the size of the gaming business. Either way, the statistics’ boffins will be happy to have their ratios quoted.
Secondly, it’s not reasonable to wait until now to present such important predictions that were made “some time ago”. Some citizens might be comforted to know that the government has prepared for this eventuation by building reserves, but it’s a pity the detail hasn’t been offered to the community and SMEs for them to attempt similar preparations. Information asymmetry creates power imbalances; not something that should be caused by a community’s leaders.
For many years I’ve been watching out for unreasonableness of the visionary sort in Macau. I’ve been looking for a Macau vision, by Macau and for Macau, something unreasonable and becoming more unreasonable by the passing of every 20th of December.