Feeling cheated
WHAT do Steve Smith and Mark Zuckerberg have in common? Facepalm. And also that strange, very public moment where arrogance prevents you from truly acknowledging the gravity of your sins.
What was Steve Smith thinking when, under questioning, he refused to step down from captaincy of the Australian cricket team?
He had ’fessed up, on millions of TV screens, how his leadership team had plotted to cheat South Africa by tampering with the ball in the Third Test. It was a premeditated act. He should have walked. The entire leadership team should have left the field, caught and bowled.
Instead, Smith’s first instinct was to hang on to his position, his superhero status built over many brilliant innings, unable to process how completely he had lost the trust of a nation.
He thought an apology would be enough. Sorry. It’s not. And I won’t accept one from Zuckerberg either.
What intrigues me, though, is the stunning moral disconnect, the idea that any form of cheating should be allowed to prosper, that you just need to have a thick skin and admit you made a mistake.
That words and promises to do better are enough.
That consequences are for other people who get caught.
When the Cambridge Analytica data breach first broke, Facebook supremo Zuckerberg basically winced and bore it.
His first response was not to apologise.
“We … made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it,” was about as far as he went.
Facebook’s share price dived and Zuckerberg, ironically, then resorted to full-page newspaper advertisements to say he was, indeed, truly sorry.
“This was a breach of trust and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time,” he said under the headline “We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.” Correct. You don’t. This is what happens when the filter bubble you live in bursts.
The rest of the world rushes in, displacing a manicured, reflected life with self-shocking chaos.
The rug gets pulled from under your feet.
The hashtag #deletefacebook becomes a movement.
Your dashboards light up as fans dump their profiles.
Cricket fans would if they could, watching their cricket god self- destruct at breakfast. How did it come to this? Steve Smith, like many celebrities, receives the world through the prism of his own success, where his sporting skill has been tied with a silken thread to the exultation of the masses.
His Test batting average of 61.37 from 117 innings has had the press comparing him to Bradman. But he is not the “Don”, real or mythical.
To emphasise the contrast, let’s cut and paste the Bradman myth into the Third Test in South Africa.
His players are standing around in the dressing room, leading 2-1 and desperately keen to clinch the series. Bradman, intense as always, flicks the brim of his baggy green cap.
“When considering the stature of an athlete or for that matter any person,” he says precisely, “I set great store in certain qualities which I believe to be essential in addition to skill.
“They are that the person conducts his or her life with integrity, courage, and perhaps most of all, with modesty.
“These virtues are totally compatible with pride, ambition and competitiveness.” The players nod. They signed up to these values. It goes to the core of what it means to be an Australian, forged from the battlefields of Gallipoli, where our entire nation was cheated.
Somewhere along the way, between Bradman and Smith, between the family business and Facebook, our values have been eroded by a conquest-at-all-costs mindset.
We know, as a culture, this is wrong. But there’s a part of us, too, that blithely enjoys the benefits as long as we’re kept in the dark. A nostalgic part of me aches for an earlier time, before I was born, where people knew and trusted each other. Where a handshake was a bond. I don’t want to live in the past. I understand that it’s not all that it’s cracked up to be. But this morning, I had a daydream Donald Bradman founded Facebook. And I can’t help wondering how different life would be.