Over the Christmas break I lost my wallet. I stupidly left it and my mobile phone on the roof of my car and then went for a drive to the video shop. Of course, when I got home the wallet was no longer where I left it – although miraculously my mobile phone was still on the roof – but that’s a story for another time.
Anyway, after unsuccessfully retracing my journey to try and find it, I assumed that my wallet was gone for ever, either flung into the scrub on a high speed corner or picked up by some stranger with no conscience who would have subsequently taken the cash, attempted to use my credit cards and discard the rest of it in the nearest rubbish bin. Isn’t that just human nature and what we come to expect from people these days?
Surprisingly though, my wallet turned up in the mail today with a letter from the post office saying that it had been deposited into a letter box on the other side of town and was being here forth returned to me. All my credit cards and other bits and pieces that were in my wallet when I lost it were returned as well – everything except the one hundred dollars I had inside it.
Now I’m not worried about the hundred dollars, and I would probably have given the cash to whoever returned the wallet as a reward for their honesty. Even though honesty shouldn’t need to be rewarded I guess it is becoming quite rare these days so you tend to want to reward it when you see it.
Anyway, what is interesting is that someone had obviously stolen the hundred dollars and yet still had enough of a conscience to make an effort to return the wallet to me. A thief with a conscience you could say.
If I put myself in their shoes though, I wouldn’t think of myself as a thief. I would delude myself that it isn’t stealing, rather it’s a case of finder’s keepers and that I’m actually being a good person by going out of my way to return the wallet. That would certainly ease my guilty conscience – but I think anyone else looking on would see it merely as a fabrication of my deluded mind to try and justify my actions.
So, I don’t really blame this person because I may well have done the same thing myself. I guess it just reveals at what price we are prepared to silence our conscience for a quick gain. For example we aren’t prepared to go to sleep knowing that we have put someone through the inconvenience of having to replace all their credit cards and driver’s licence and other indispensible bits and pieces – yet we are happy to sell it out for a gain of at least a hundred dollars.
On a deeper note, we are all quick to criticise wrong doers in this world – the thieves, bludgers or maybe those that go against the tide of political correctness such as the “greedy” corporate executives or big polluting industries. But the paradox of good vs evil in human nature exists within all of us, maybe not on such a large and visible scale as with some, but it exists all the same. So maybe we are all thieves with a conscience.