The English word “moral” (adj. moral ; n. morality; v. moralize) is not sexy. It is stained forever with images of self-righteous old men saying worthy things, then rushing off (from church or wherever) to lie, steal and coerce the weak in secret. That has been the never-ending history of poor leadership worldwide. The usual mis-used tools are propaganda, rules, punishment, ideology and religion. Not surprisingly, more and more of us have said “enough of this crap!”. The trouble is, we do need something like “morality” to live together. That is, we need some common sense rules for getting along, being fair, and putting some limits on what we do to other people, or even to our own minds and bodies. (Maybe somebody should invent a new word for this stuff). Most of the time, most of us do pretty well. Otherwise we would have killed each other off long ago. However, there is no doubt though that some people go off the tracks more than others, and at certain times in history whole cultures go a bit crazy. War is the worst example, but any culture or subculture may also have plagues of bad behaviour. American merchant bankers come to mind. Mainland China at the moment is at a pretty low point (it is not alone of course). There is almost no public trust in China now, and the president of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Li Hanlin, has just concluded from a study that “fewer than 4 in every 100 people surveyed said they had a clear concept of what social morality meant, while more than half believed that nowadays China has no specific moral standards to be followed.” (http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2013–01/01/content_16073536.htm). That certainly states the failure of “Chinese communism”. The real failure of course has been in moral leadership. Most people are not very good or very bad. They are swayed easily by bad examples, bad leadership. Human leaders often fail, from family level to national level. The idea of having a single, supernatural God + a magic book (Bible, Q’ran, Talmud .. whatever) is to have good leadership to copy, and which will never fail. As we know from a few thousand years of history, that hasn’t worked too well either. More suggestions?