Creepy Language Example #271

Okay. Today, guys, we’re going to unpack a phrase. A phrase so pervasive, so omnipresent, in these post-econ-crisis days, that it barely registers recognition. It has oozed from under the doors of the corporate legal offices that, presumably, gave birth to it, and now, in light of the hilarious mockery that our unfettered-free-market friends have made of its true if dubious original meaning, it has oozed from under the doors of B-of-A, and Morgan Stanley, and Citi, crawled from the financial district to midtown, and there established itself even in such paragons of good writing as the New York Times' website.

Ready for it? Or have you guessed? Here’s a hint. It rhymes with “shmo shmiligence.” That’s right! You got it! It’s the phrase "due diligence".

The implications of this phrase, if you think about them, are horrifying. Number one. That diligence is something we owe, something annoying to do but occasionally necessary, for legal reasons, something that we can whine about having to do, take a resigned deep breath, roll our sleeves up patiently, suffer through, and then gladly forget about.

Number two. That dicey and complex situations, financial or otherwise, only require some diligence in order for their diciness or complexity to be safely ignored. Diligence just means, really, attention or care—so due diligence implies that all we have to do when confronted by a potentially risky decision or situation is to pay attention for a little while, be thoughtful and careful for a little while, take a glance around—make sure there are no eighteen-wheelers barreling down the highway before we dash across it. Or before we decide to just stand in the middle of it for awhile, "safe" in the knowledge that there were no cars coming when we first hopped the guardrails.

The problems here are obvious. Re implication number one: If, in fact, some period of finite diligence is all that a given situation requires of us, then the concept of its being “due” or “owed” by us 1) creepily commoditizes “caring” and 2) is insane. Diligence is not something that a duty to ethics or an awareness of “risk management” (unpack that phrase) or a fear of failure compels us to “owe;” it is something that the power we hold over others, whatever form it may take, requires us (now see implication number two) to adopt as a constant state of mind.

It follows, incidentally, that the financial people who are presently the most famous sinners at the shrine to Diligence are criminals not because of their shocking selfishness or their shocking stupidity, but because of their shocking abuse of the power that came with their positions. They had a responsibility born not of some individualized ethics but of the fact that they had the power to fuck over other people. We all have this power, of course, in some measure, and all share this responsibility. But the more power you have, and the more directly you sought out that power, the greater the responsibility you have not to fuck people with it. Those people who of late chained “due diligence” to their Mercedes and dragged it behind them on the Merritt Parkway on their way home to Greenwich made a series of very deliberate, and by all reports, soul-crushing, decisions in order to gain an enormous amount of power, and their flagrant abuse of it consequently renders them criminals of the highest order.