I believe, and have for many years, that where a rule of law is operative, the most effective weapon to use upon those who are abusers of what sort or another is to shed light upon their doings. Indeed, I have long thought that this is the best indicator of the strength of the rule of law – that once sufficient light (publicity) shines upon a given subject, those whose responsibility it is to perform the relevant governmental tasks will attack the problems, as opposed to those performing the illumination.
Given this, my first thought was actually to use Flashlight Crusade as a working title (and indeed, have registered that domain as well). My wife suggested Diogenes.com, after the well known pauper who spent his life looking for an honest man. However, given the number of cockroaches about, I don’t want something the image of something handheld, where the cockroaches go back to doing the same old thing as soon as the holder moves on. I want this stuff to stick around, and continue to illuminate the subjects covered so that said cockroaches have to start acting like responsible human beings if they have any desire to avoid being stomped. If they act like responsible, respectable human beings, they become responsible, respectable human beings. And unlike Diogenes, I happen to believe most humans are basically honest, likable folks. However, many professional fields (including my own) are set up such that people are trained in them by basically being told, “This is the way things are done,” and expected to conform because that is what is necessary. Given this as a reality, it is very difficult for an individual practitioner to stand up and say, “No. That is not the way to be treating people who put money in my pocket and food on my family’s table,” especially given that the mechanisms for changing these behaviors place one at a competitive disadvantage – in other words, if you try to be morally better than the competition, your business is likely to fail. And the motivations for continuing the prevalent (disreputable) practices and even enhancing them are large – these tend to be those who succeed wildly in the given fields. Quite simply, the existing practice is that individual practitioners (and group practitioners) “go along to get along”. They do things the way the industry has always done them, so that must be okay, and because if they don’t, they are not likely to succeed. Suffice it to say that my plan is to give them, as well as consumers, the ability to improve this situation.
I don’t believe my ability to shed light is unique, nor do I believe myself immune to making mistakes and inadvertently committing the errors I go on about. I am intentionally trying to set up the conditions of maximum transparency here, for myself as well as everyone else, so that people can call me on my errors as well. I’ll never improve if I don’t know I’ve fallen short. I happen to believe that appropriate accountability for everyone is a good thing. Most people have heard variations upon Oliver Cromwell’s famous “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” One of my tenets of day-to-day life is to realize that Cromwell himself was failing his own challenge. So I try to conduct error checking on my own, but the point of all this is that if you have your own Searchlight, Flashlight, or even Lamp to wield, please let me know. I can’t be a crusade all by myself.