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Early in life I learnt that the people who have the greatest power are not the tyrants, the bullies or the authorities. They are the quiet people. Gandhi was, inevitably, a role model; others have followed. The latest is Anna Hazare. How do you deal with someone whose quiet protest strikes a chord in the hearts of the ordinary people like you and I?

When a crowd sees riot, it fights; when it sees sincerity, it listens. What it does subsequently depends on the response it receives to legitimate demands.

I think that the movement Anna Hazare is starting in India will spread far beyond the sub-continent and into the hearts of millions, perhaps billions, who recognise the part corruption is playing in the destruction of our world. That corruption is not just financial, though that is at the top of the list. It is power corruption, abuse of position, rejection of responsibilities and denial of rights.

It is abominable in the full sense of that word.

How can you jail a man for being willing to sacrifice his life trying to put an end to corruption? That is what the Indian authorities have tried to do. Shame on them. They should be listening, for if they don’t they will regret it deeply later on – and so will the rest of us. I am not a rabble-rouser, believing that quiet persuasion, one-on-one, is the most effective way of learning and teaching. To be effective, however, that quiet persuasion has to make an impression. Not a violent one but an effective one.

How can the ordinary people begin to do that?

The most powerful weapon is example. We do not persuade others into better behaviour by lecturing them but by showing them the way. Dignified protest leaves authority helpless. You can jail some of the people; you cannot jail them all. We could also demand transparency. More transparency would lead to a higher standard of honesty in political and commercial life.

Where and how should the dignified protests be made?

We have a raft of social media. Certainly they are capable of misuse but then so is the motor car. That shouldn’t stop us driving. Conventional media, social media, all should be used to make the voices of anti-corruption heard. If everyone made just two attempts a day to communicate their views about corruption to those in authority it would bring huge pressure to bear. It would not immediately change everything.

But it would be a start.

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Rushing back from ten days in London – lunch and dinner daily and meetings and visits in between – and a quick visit to Ipoh for acquaintances and business, my old friend Charles Letts managed to squeeze his schedule to allow him to give a splendid birthday party last night. Nothing unusual about that in today’s hectic world. Except that it was Charles’s 93^rd birthday party. If, at 93 we are all as active as that we shall have much to be thankful for.

How does someone of that age manage to keep going, remain so active and just survive for that amount of time? It is not as though Charles has led a quiet life. I am not going to sing Charles’s praises here, he would hate that, but I am going to examine the energy store he still seems to have, what drives people like Charles on and how we can all learn from such remarkable role models.

I’ve been looking at others of his age or thereabouts to see what they have in common that keeps their wits about them and gives them the determination to do what Kipling described as “force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve their turn long after they are gone”. Luck plays an important part, of course. But we all have that in common – both good luck and bad luck.

The defining characteristic of all these amazing people is interest. Interest in others, interest in everything that is going on, interest in the future, not in the past. When Charles and I have lunch from time to time, he asks me questions. In return I ask him questions.

Not just the “How are you today?” sort of questions but about the state of the world, the wars, the economies, the riots, everything in fact that makes for such a fascinating, desperate, wonderful, terrifying world. Everything, in fact.

People tell me sometimes that they are simply not interested. ‘Poppycock’, I reply. It is easy to become interested. Ask questions. If you do not believe this, here’s a suggestion. For the next 24 hours try to start every conversation – with whoever – with a question. Again, not the “How are you?” question but an intelligent question about what is happening in the world.

“Everyone?” “Yes, everyone, the taxi driver, the shop assistant, the waiter in the restaurant, as well as your friends, bosses, business acquaintances, and especially family.”

If you do that, you will quickly become interested – and so will they.

There is an old biblical saying “Ask and you shall receive”. I profoundly believe it having used it as the basis for building and managing a business. With respect I should like to modify it to create a second saying:

Ask and you shall survive.

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All the definitions of wisdom seem to lack that final clarity we like have with our thoughts. So what is wisdom? Several people have asked me recently, hoping that a crisp, all-embracing definition would open the door to a better view of the finance-torn, troubled world we inhabit.

No such definition exists as far as I know. Those attempting to be comprehensive fail for being too general, or what I call the apple-pie, motherhood and pre-marital chastity variety of wisdom. Rather than seek the grail of perfect description I thought I would offer a few selected pieces from the extensive list of good words I have amassed – and occasionally contributed to – over the years.

William James said “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook”. Especially true for authority, you may think. Wittgenstein put it another way: “Things that are most important are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”. The whole financial and political world would do well to contemplate that in relation to its current pronouncements and guidance.

The famous scientist Peter Medawar put it succinctly: “People who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief.” Take your pick. Ralph Waldo Emerson added his view: “There are more than a million methods but few principles. Grasp principles and you can choose your own methods. Try methods, ignoring principles, and you will have trouble.”

Our declining financial wisdom is partly due to our failure to appreciate this and partly because we have mixed up principles of behaviour with principles of logic. Though related, they are often separate when action is called for.

I don’t know who said it but I agree with whoever it was: “Perfection is not when there is no more to add but when there is no more to take away”. A long time ago I concluded that “Those who find their own purpose discover the purpose of life”. It is a prerequisite to achieving wisdom, for sure.

In a short article I cannot begin to address wisdom about more than one aspect of life so I have concentrated – this time – on wisdom as it affects us in our dealings with money.

The conclusion we must inevitably reach in this area was well summed up by Michael Lewitt when he said: “Debt begetting more debt is a poor prescription for sustainable long-term economic growth. Economic demand will ultimately have to become savings-driven or it will again collapse. What the U.S. really needs is an economic Marshall Plan to rebuild itself, with all of the sacrifice and public service that would entail.”

For U.S, read World.

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The remarkable technological progress of the world in the last fifty years is due to the discovery, dissemination and increasingly creative use of knowledge. Education systems from government-sponsored compulsory school attendance to generous benefactors’ grants have focused on information and its use for everyone’s benefit.

Information is a tool and the ethics of how properly to use it have been neglected. Since humans are not always reliable this has led to abuse and distortion both of information itself and of its applications. Social networks are the latest to come under public scrutiny for their part in the recent UK riots.

While many will pour over ways to regulate the use of information it may be worth asking whether regulation itself can – or, indeed, should – ever offer controls that will substitute for personal wisdom. The carpenter cuts himself a couple of times with his chisel and learns its potential dangers; he handles it more carefully thereafter.

This is not just experience; it is how experience is translated into action. Wisdom is the ability to judge what is true, right and lasting, and then to apply it to practical situations. The key word in this definition is lasting. There is no wisdom involve in advancing a world without a future.

Wisdom is awareness that life is transient, change is inevitable, and kindness can be the only constant. It recognizes human flaws and imperfections while retaining the joy of being alive. Wisdom is in the spirit of empathy and shared suffering. As we strive to do our best, wisdom lies in compassion for the struggling. Can we teach wisdom? Only when we encourage people to understand that it comes from an attitude, not a checklist.

Wisdom is epitomized by the following story.

A certain man was overcome with problems that led him into a semi-drunken state, causing two of his friends’ significant inconvenience. Both friends learnt of the problem. One friend gave him a well-deserved scolding and departed, indignant at both the inconvenience he had caused and at the implicit slight of him causing it to this particular friend. He was duly mortified.

The other friend said “How can I help?”

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When as many of the looters as possible have been brought to book, when the broken glass is cleared and the dust of the last few nights has settled it will be time for Britain, Continental Europe and the rest of us to fathom what were the underlying causes of the UK rioting and what should be done to remedy it. The events are not just mindless; they have many causes.

Rule No 1 about being a parent, a teacher, a mentor or authority of any sort is that you prepare those in your charge for independence – and then let be independent. That involves allowing them to make mistakes from which to learn, giving them personal responsibility and letting them stand on their own feet. This can be a painful process for both the carer and the cared for. Our parenting and education systems do not appear to be teaching the skills to do this.

Everyone has to learn the correct balance between individual rights and the rights of society. Individual rights that damage society are not rights but unwarranted licenses. Society’s rights are no longer taught or explained to many young people. These used to be significantly promoted by religious bodies. For reasons we all know, the moral authority of some of these bodies has waned and nothing has taken its place.

Even the people who were role models seem increasingly to be flawed, perhaps simply because they are more exposed than hitherto. I ascribe some of the moral decline to the poor behaviour by “role-model jobs” – heads of governments, big corporations, of religions, of any organisation where they are constantly visible. That includes heads of families, too.

The benefits of the internet and of social networks are somewhat diluted, but not negated, by the dangers such swift and often ill-thought-out exchanges can bring. This is a problem looking for a solution from within since no external control of the internet is yet possible nor, hopefully, ever will be. Restraint on information and freedom of expression has to be minimal if the nanny state is not to take over and create yet further dependence.

Authority should be used sparingly but firmly. “Very few rules, toughly enforced” should always be a leader’s aim. To this end the police are critical to law and order. In the last twenty years they have been taken off the beat, inundated with paperwork and denied efficient policing, ostensibly in the interests of the individual’s rights. I have mentioned before the stupidity of denying them water canon, the most effective crowd riot control system yet developed.

Even the police themselves have become somewhat corrupted, attributable – at least in part – to the pernicious habit of plea bargaining. Admit “A” and we’ll ignore “B” is not a good basis for justice however much it suits the courts.

The road back from rioting is a long one.  Let us hope that all the contributory factors are addressed not just the ones that bring back order immediately.

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Budget cuts to help reduce deficits, whether in USA, Europe or elsewhere, are painful. If they were not, they would not be cuts. So how will they affect the essential services – defense, police, medical, food distribution, water processing and administration to keep payments moving? The list is long.

That is because ‘essential’ is a relative term. Is your mobile phone essential? It wasn’t a few years ago. Is you car essential? It could not have been before the internal combustion engine was invented. Are air-conditioning and central heating essential? I grew up without either and very tiresome it was, too.

All cuts affect the vulnerable first. Whether poor, young, old, sick or just not very intelligent, cuts in services to deal with anything have their greatest impact on those who need them most. How can budget deficits be reduced without making life difficult for the people for whom it is not very good anyway?

The basic problem with government spending is that it generates its own costs. To move a dollar from one person to another often costs if not a dollar then fifty cents. That is a total waste of resources.

Rather as the charities are sometimes criticized for having high administrative costs, necessary government disciplines impose checks on the use of public money that themselves reduce the amount available to help those for whom it is intended.

The simplest way to deal with this is to tax the better off more highly. That, in the end, is what happens. The world has a widely accepted view that the rich should not be taxed in what they see as a punitive fashion. This is because the rich arrange their lifestyle around the places where tax on their incomes or wealth is lowest.

The consequential self-fulfilling prophecy is that wealth migrates to the places that need it least in an attempt to protect itself from what it sees as excessive taxation. The hierarchy of wealth kicks in, everyone looking to improve their situation by perhaps fifty percent to ensure freedom from poverty.

Several extremely wealthy people like Gates and Buffet have already led the way by giving some of their wealth to those less well off. This is highly commendable but the amounts involved are insignificant in the arena of massive government subsidies which cause the deficits.

As we have watched the gap between the rich and the poor widen – it has doubled in the last thirty years – we have encouraged the rich to make more money because by doing so we think we will spend our way out of impending recessions. This thinking has proved fallacious and we are now faced with the painful but inevitable conclusion that we must redistribute wealth if we are to avoid the ‘have-nots’ taking it forcibly from the ‘haves’.

Excessive wealth is not the fault of those who have amassed it. They have been playing the capitalist game according to the rules. It’s the rules that need changing, for everyone’s sake.

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The events that trigger riots are often simple but the underlying causes seldom are. I think the widespread uncertainty and loss of confidence to which I referred in my voicemails of 25 & 26 July (‘Sleepless everywhere’ and ‘Healthy wealth distribution’) are directly connected with the madness taking place in Britain. The causes are many, deep and not soluble in the short term.

There are three groups reacting to these maniacal property destroyers – police, politicians and the man in the street.

The police have a doubly difficult job to do since their top man and his No 2 recently resigned over allegations connected with phone hacking. No organisation wants to lose its top people, especially when the cause is ‘allegations’. Police response to the rioting appears to have been weak. They have never been given the obvious riot weapon, water cannon, most effective in a temperate climate where even a good dowsing cools people off very quickly.

The police have had a more difficult job because of the soft dealings with criminals by the courts. I don’t want youngsters banged up in drug-ridden, sex-starved prisons but I do want them faced with the people they have hurt, compelled to make retribution and given responsibility for something so that they learn to be responsible.

The politicians are in no stronger position. Sneaking media magnates into your official residence by the back door is hardly transparency and smacks of collusion for purposes you would rather not have revealed. About half the British House of Commons members were found with their hands in the expenses till and had to pay back and in many cases resign. Some landed in court.

The man in the street is at a loss to understand why so much of his income is devoted to the law makers and peace keepers only to discover that it apparently does not achieve its purpose. The average Brit responds to crises with stoicism and a determination to put things right as quickly and quietly as possible. S/he will do the same this time.

However, muddling through, that great British technique, will not now work for long. The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, expressed surprise after the last, recent financial crisis at why people were not angrier with the banks. Look at London, Birmingham, Liverpool today, Governor.

You want them to be more angry than that?

[There was no Daily Paradox on 09Aug11 as it was Singapore’s National Day]

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The world’s financial mess needs to be sorted but we do not know either who can or who will do it. We had a defining financial crisis three years ago and we were told it had been dealt with. Well, was it or wasn’t it? The bankers are clear that all is well since they have returned to top bonus payments.

Sorted or not the crisis is back with a vengeance and now we have the heads of central banks, Finance Ministers, the IMF and politicians of every party rushing about like headless chickens. But nobody will tell us who is in charge of stabilizing the world’s critical financial system.

What are politicians for?

You could spend the rest of your life reading the definitions of politics and still be none the wiser. From rambling descriptions about “collective decisions” to the self-congratulatory definition “the art of the possible”, they all seem to omit questions of service, example and the best interests of others. Perhaps those are too romantic views of politics today.

The ordinary voter has the impression that politicians spend an inordinate amount of time seeking what they regard as the necessary self publicity to get re-elected. Certainly, they devote much of their lives to making promises that seldom come true. Do we expect too much from them?

Our first reasonable expectation of politicians is that they order the social and economic aspects of society to protect those under their control from danger. Without this society becomes anarchic as it is already doing sporadically in many countries. Democratic societies expect this peaceful stability to be combined with opportunities to develop wealth and provide for ever-extending old age.

Have electorates developed demands that cannot be satisfied?

The democratic system is fundamentally one of bribery. If politicians give enough to voters, voters will re-elect them with adequate powers to be even more generous next time. Mutual back-scratching was not the intention of politics but mutual prosperity seems to have dominated the voter-voted relationship to a dangerous degree.

Doing what is right is more difficult than doing what is popular. Both are qualified by time. The need for opportunities to throw out one political doctrine and inject another means that there must be elections at regular and not-too-infrequent intervals.

Democracy has been described as a flawed system for as long as one person one vote has existed. It needs reexamining to see how it can be modified to provide a longer view of each country’s and the world’s needs. Where is such a study being done? When can we expect a recommendation from it?

We must define what we expect from politicians. If we do not do so soon, it may be too late.

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Happily not many people get obsessed with building nuclear reactors in their kitchens. Even Mr Handl, the Swedish enthusiast for such activity, admits it was pretty stupid to let his curiosity drive him to experiment. I think that nuclear reactors will be safe enough to supply more of the world’s energy demands in the future – but not plants sited in the sink. And certainly not home-made efforts.

There is, however, an insidious and more serious bomb lurking among the dishes on the draining board, antibiotic-resistant salmonella. This bug, which can cause everything from a relatively mild attack of D & V to death lurks in unexpected places and is extremely difficult to get rid of. Carried on the shells of eggs it is easily destroyed by cooking. So why is it such a threat?

Like all bugs it is not before cooking that matters but after. Handling food is a major problem today when many pre-packed foods are not retorted to levels of heat safety. Even if they are, once the safely treated food is open it becomes a haven for all kinds of bugs stalking your home in search of somewhere to grow.

Before celebrity chefs hit our screens with their culinary performances food used to be handled better. Chefs did not use their hands to assemble dishes on plates, indeed the rather more civilised behaviour of allowing guests to help themselves from a serving dish was common providing both a bug barrier and a convenient way of letting you to choose what and in what quantities you wanted to eat.

Then the ‘plated’ brigade took over, rather as man-made commandments stared to dominate the moral scene. “Thou shalt eat what we say, no more, no less.” That is when the chef’s fingers started substituting for the serving spoon, and chef’s fingers have many places to go en route to your dish at table.

As we have seen in such sensitive places as hospitals, good hygiene is a difficult standard to maintain. In crowded cities, in climates that never see a good bug-killing freeze, where water is scarce or in societies where traditional habits of hygiene are less than first class, bugs stalk unwary eaters all the time with painful and occasionally fatal consequences.

As with most things in life the remedy is few but scrupulously observed rules, the most important of which are regular hand-washing and not mixing cooked and uncooked foods. More attention to hygiene and perhaps less to fancy food presentation are what are required. ‘Garnish’ is a word that, when it appears on menus, warns me of what may be going on backstage.

We all enjoy a good meal. Let’s make it tasty and bug-free.

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The sight of the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, reassuring the world about the solvency of his country’s banks encourages me to ask what is congruent and what is not.  Politicians live and die by the credibility of their promises. They are elected to do things they have chosen from the menu of life as likely to appeal to their constituents. They are re-elected when their term is up if they are perceived as having delivered what they promised.

The situation applies to more than simply politicians – it applies to us all when we aspire to lead, whether officially through an elected or appointed position or unofficially as leader of an uprising or cult. To be credible in the first place requires some consistent relationship between what we say and how we behave. Our forecasts will be believed if the rest of our lives appear responsible.

Unfortunately there have been a number of examples of poor congruence between proclamation and performance in the recent past. This is disturbing all of us since we use the example of others to measure our own performance. We like to see if we are better or worse than the next person, especially since we largely abandoned the convenient if not always practical absolute standards set by early religious theory.

Many leaders are very congruent. Their activities do not get reported because they are not sensational. What appears in the media are the less consistent behaviours of people like Strauss-Khan, Murdoch, Mubarak, al-Assad of Syria, the Head of the Metropolitan Police in UK and now Sean Price, the Chief Constable of Cleveland, UK. There are many others.

Our world depends on credible forecasting. It cannot always be right but we need guidance about the future turn of events in which we are not specialists and over which we have no control. When we see that advice coming from people whose behaviour contradicts what they are saying we become stressed by the incongruence of it all.

Developing a network of Terrific Mentors, hopefully worldwide before too long, I am often asked what are the qualifications of the people I invite to become Mentors to the increasing number who find life incongruent. While there are several qualities and skills I look for, good Mentors will always be different from each other and not mere clones of some theoretical ideal.

Among the few things I aim for them to have in common is congruence of public appearance and private behaviour. Without it their Mentees will be confused and their mentoring dysfunctional. The act of becoming a leader, whether as politician, business head, civil servant, professional or in any other capacity requires a consistency all too often lacking.

Without that as a basic standard their followers will not pass the personal Stress Tests we all now experience daily.