Crisis, Crime and Cribble

Crisis is a matter of the Greek. Hippocrates and Galen used the term to describe a “turning point” in the evolution of an illness – but krísis literally meant judgment, based on the word krínein, a verb denoting “separation, distinction or judgment”. It is speculated that the origin of the word goes even deeper, to the Proto-Indo-European language, to its root krei-, which already meant to “discriminate”, “distinguish” or “sieve”, and originated two terms in Latin - cribrum and crimen. These two words, in their turn, originated two expressions that one would not suspect to be linked – cribble and crime. Until recently, that is.

Today, everyone has the mouth filled with the word “crisis”. The media bore us and feed us with an almost eschatological description of every aspect of the crisis, in a speech that is more voyeuristic than hopeful. Everyone knows that the common Portuguese takes much more gratification in witnessing a disaster or an accident, than in simply being positive about something. This is how the media sells – how the media sells itself.

But a return to the roots should serve as forewarning – and understanding. This crisis is associated to crime: who disputes it? Crimes committed by countless economic players who acted without any responsibility or ethics – who simply wanted to be seen by the public eye as untouchable models of virtue and yet were, after all, so poisoned by vice as anyone else. Crimes committed with the complicity of all those who defended opaque and unregulated systems, who called for ideas of self-regulation, but objectively served people who shamelessly used (and abused) this lack of control for their personal benefit. Crimes committed against millions of struggling citizens of this planet, fighting lessor or major survival challenges for reasons alien to them – and crimes that these citizens could never have committed because they were crimes of the privileged.

But crisis is also cribble. This is the component that should pragmatically be of great interest to us because the cribble will sieve the thick and the inadequate and let the agile and those of thin granulometry through – and we want to be among the latter.

We must understand that an economic crisis is not a disaster, but a moment of judgment - where the competent are separated from the incompetent, the ready from the unready, the flexible from the inflexible, the aerodynamic from the inefficient, the excellent from the mediocre.

And we want to be among the first – those who pass, those who survive, those who adapt. Adapting isn’t staying the same as ever and waiting for the storm to vanish, but being bold and imaginative. In the year of Darwin, there is no better metaphor than understanding that the environment puts us under a selective pressure and either we adapt or die.