The Tale of the King and the Philosopher

"A golfer is playing a round with his buddies. On the sixth hole, a hole over water, he proceeds to hit six balls into the water. Frustrated over his poor golfing, he heaves his golf clubs into the water and begins to walk of the course.

Suddenly he turns around, jumps into the lake, and dives under the water. His buddies think he has changed his mind and is going to retrieve his clubs. But when he comes out of the water, he doesn’t have his bag or clubs. As the wet golfer walks away, one of his buddies asks, 'Why did you jump into the lake?'

The man responds, 'I left my car keys in the bag,'" said the Moon to begin, after saying Basmalah and greeting with Salaam.

The Moon then proceeded, 'They say that there was a king a fataway land, asked a man who was a physician, premier among the physicians of the kingdom. The man was treated with great dignity and honor by the king, and held a distinguished professorship. Since he was a noted physician, he was a savant and a philosopher and the King seek a counsel of him. The king was very eager to gather knowledge, and he preferred philosophers to all others. He strove to acquire knowledge, and loved it more than many pleasures in which kings indulge. The philosopher said politely, 'O my King, philosophers learned in whatever law and whatever language always strove and labored to seek knowledge, and to give expression and order to philosophy. They were taken up with this task, and they agreed and disagreed with each other over it. They loved it more than all other things at which people work, and it pleased them more than any amusement or any other pleasure. For they held that there was nothing of which they labored at that was of greater reward, or of greater recompense, than those things their souls used to work at and teach.

And they set down stories and similitudes in the art they understood, and they succeeded in expansion of our lives, and arrived at clever thoughts and great learning. And they questioned things to draw from here what they wanted with smart words and with sound and firm reasons; and they composed most of these stories in allegories of wild animals and birds.

Thus they combined thereby three good things. First, they found them useful in reasoning, taking them up according to custom in order to say discreetly what they wanted, and to affirm sound logic. Second, these stories stood them in good stead with the scholars, because they amplified for them the knowledge they showed them of philosophy when they thought about it and realized its understanding. Third, they made use of them for the entertainment and edification of students and children.

O sire, if one who labors to seek knowledge reads books studiously yet does not strive to do right and follow truth, he will not obtain the fruit that he might gather, except toil and trouble. Then, if one studies but does not put it into practice, one will be like the man of whom the savants have said found a treasure as he crossed a field. When he had dug it up, he saw a treasure such as no man had ever seen.

Now he said to himself, 'If I just pick up what’s lying around here bit by bit, I may lose the great enjoyment that is to be had from it. Why don’t I get some peasants to carry it to my apartment for me, and I will follow after them.'

And so he did. Every one of them took what he could to the apartment, and then they pretended to him that they had brought the entire treasure in this manner. This having been done, the man went on home, but found nothing, for each of the others had taken for himself what he had hauled. So all he got was the trouble of digging it out. And this is because for all his concern he didn’t know how to do what he needed to do, for lack of attention and preparedness.

And one should not be like the man who decided he wanted to study grammar: a friend of his who was educated wrote down the parts of speech for him on a chart, and the student stayed at home with it and read it a lot, but he neither recognized nor understood what was in the chart, and yet he memorized it and thought he could read.

Then he tried it out with some learned men, trying to be as knowledgeable as they. When he said a word mistakenly, one of those learned men said, 'You err in what you say; it should be said thus and so.' But he replied, 'How could I be wrong? I’ve memorized what’s on the chart!' And they laughed at him because he didn’t know how to understand; the learned ones took him for a very big idiot.

Knowledge clarifies learning, much as oil lights the darkness of the night. So education improves the condition of the one who wants to learn. But one who knows something but does not use his knowledge will not benefit from it.

It is like the case of the man whose house, they say, a burglar entered by night. He had been sleeping when the thief broke in, and he told himself, 'I’d better keep quiet until I see what he takes. As soon as he has found all he wants, I’ll get up and stop him.'

So the thief went through the house and took what he could find, while the owner went back to sleep. Then, after the burglar had made off with everything he could, the owner woke up and found that the thief had taken everything he had.

And the knowledgeable one should not despair or lose confidence; for one may be assisted when one least expects it. This is like the story they tell of a man who was very poor man who turned a robbery to his own advantage, and none of his relatives helped him out by giving him anything.

At home one night, he saw a thief. He said to himself, 'Actually there’s nothing in my house for this thief to take, so let him try his best!'

Looking through the house for something to take, the thief saw a large earthen jar containing a little bit of wheat. He said to himself, 'I don’t want my work to go for nothing!' So he took a bandanna he’d worn over his head and spread it out on the floor. Then he emptied the wheat out of the jar into the bandanna to carry it away.

Now when the poor man saw that the thief had transferred the wheat into the cloth to take it away, he said, 'There’s no suffering this. For if this thief makes off with the wheat on me, even greater poverty and hunger will accrue to me; and never do these two things accrue to a man without driving him to the point of death.' And so he hollered at the thief, and picked up a stick he had at the head of his bed, and assailed the thief.

Now when the thief saw him he fled at once, and in so doing dropped the bandanna in which he was carrying the wheat. The poor man took the bandanna, and returned the wheat to its place.

This story, represents what is called a conflict of interest. A conflict of interest is a situation in which some person P (whether an individual or corporate body) stands in a certain relation to one or more decisions. On the standard view, P has a conflict of interest if, and only if, (1) P is in a relationship with another requiring P to exercise judgment in the other's behalf and (2) P has a (special) interest tending to interfere with the proper exercise of judgment in that relationship. The crucial terms in the standard view are 'relationship,' 'judgment,' 'interest,' and 'proper exercise.'

Conflicts of interest may come from any field. In government, Conflicts of interest come in two overlapping forms. First, the interests of different parts of government may conflict. As democratic institutions developed, newly empowered parliaments sought to limit the king’s influence. Monarchs maintained power by providing favors and official positions to legislators. Hence, early efforts were closely tied to an emerging view of the separation of powers, even if some of the benefits were private. Second, the concept refers to conflicts between public roles and private financial interests. Today, the first form is less prominent than the second.

An individual may play many roles simultaneously. Those who hold government or political positions as legislators, ministers, party functionaries, judges, presidents, prime ministers, or civil servants also have other responsibilities. They are family members, businessmen, tribal elders, religious leaders, or even criminals. A characteristic of modern complex societies is that people shift roles over days, weeks, or years. What is appropriate or even required in one role may be inappropriate or illegal in others. Public roles may require a level of objectivity, evenhandedness, and transparency not imposed on one’s private life. Institutions and organizations create their own rules and ethical standards that attempt to socialize people to further the bodies’ aims. These are enforced by legal sanctions and internal rules and by moral suasion and political pressures.

Conflicts of interest arise when a person mixes up his or her roles, furthering, say, the interests of her family or her business when acting as a bureaucrat, judge or politician. Behavior based on one’s devotion to family, tribe or religion may be illicit if carried out in one’s official capacity. Sometimes, of course, private and public interests coincide. A leading business person who becomes mayor of a city may seek to promote economic development, thus benefitting both himself and the municipality. Even in such cases, however, the correspondence is unlikely to be perfect. The businessman might steer contracts to his firm, limiting competition and raising prices. A mayor who accepts outright payoffs in connection with economic development projects may both improve the city’s health and enrich himself, but he does this in a way that imposes excess costs on taxpayers. Bribes increase the cost and number of projects to inefficient levels and distort priorities toward elaborate, specialized projects where bribes are easy to hide.

Conflict of interest is a broad umbrella term that incorporates all sorts of tensions between official and private roles. Illegal corruption and fraud are a subset of this concept where the benefits to the official are financial. The payoffs may induce the official to violate the terms of his official position in return for private gain, or they may be extortion paid to induce the official to do what he ought to being doing anyway. Fraud is an offense that need not involve a third party. The official simply steals from the public coffers.

Conflicts of interest mainly create a problem when personal economic gain conflicts with one’s responsibility as an agent. One may be an agent of broad public values, as when a judge applies the law. However, one may also be an agent of a political party, a geographical constituency, or an interest group, whether economic or social/ideological. If a public body is constituted for the purpose of bringing together diverse interests to make policy or to advise politicians, then it is legitimate for its members to seek to further the interests of their own principals, however narrow they may be.

O sire, but the knowledgeable man should not become attached to an example such as this and give up seeking and doing what he must to obtain his livelihood; neither should one be guided by those to whom fortunes come without their will or effort; for few are those who strive for things involving great deeds. For every knowledgeable man strives to see to it that his profits be the greatest and most certain, that he may avoid those things that will prove toilsome and make him concerned and troubled; so that he may not be like the pigeon who seizes and kills her own fledglings and for this reason never stops producing others right away.

So they say that God, Whose Name be blessed, has put a limit to everything, at which man arrives. And whatever is beyond these limits is as whatever does not reach them, for they say that whoever works for this world, his life is against him, while in the case of one who works for this world and the next, his life is equally for and against him.

And they say a layman ought to amend three things in his life, and to give his soul in surety for it: the task of this world; making a living; and living amongst others. And they say there are some things that are never directed to any good work: one is much rambling and idling about; another is to slight the mandates of God; another is to believe in everyone who flatters you; another is to deny another is wise."

"Hearing this," the Moon was about to close her discussion, "the king nodded, but whether he understood or not. And Allah knows best."

It's time to go, the Moon dimmed her light and hummed,

tertulis, kisah cerita kita

[It's written, our stories]

begitu indah masa laluku

[So beautiful, my past]

dia menangis di pelukanku

[she was crying in my arms]

lalu berkata, 'Pertahankan aku!' *)

[then said, 'Defend me!']

Citations & References:
- Thomas Cleary, Calila and Dimna: Oriental Tales from Medieval Spanish, 2012, Kindle Edition
- Susan Rose-Ackerman, Corruption and Conflicts of Interest, in 'Corruption and Conflicts of Interest: A Comparative Law Approach,' edited by Jean-Bernard Auby, Emmanuel Breen, and Thomas Perroud, 2014, Edward Elgar Publishing
*) "Masa Lalu" [The Past] written by Dodhy Hardianto

Bahasa