is paved with bad ideas. This popped in my head the other day. This is related to “the good is the enemy of the perfect”.
If you become completely focused on never making mistakes, you won’t do anything. If you never notice, though, that you ARE making mistakes, you can’t improve. Logically, then, there are points where you just have to take your best guess and go, knowing full well that two steps down the path you might need to alter your plan, based on new information. This process, repeated over a lifetime, is the basis of wisdom.
It is an old saw, but I will repeat it: Good decisions are the result of experience, and experience is the result of bad decisions.
Academics, dealing as they do all day every day with abstractions, are generally unable to understand this. They look at the world, see imperfection, and demand perfection. Towards the end of perfection they are quite willing (in aggreggate: obviously there are exceptions, like that one oddball at that one university, and that professor at the other that just got denied tenure) to countenance in theory and practice the imposition of tyranny.
Now, the reality is that this solution by force–which is so viscerally attractive to people who don’t really DO anything, possess physical courage, or really even encounter principled vocal opposition, since they have the proverbial on/off switch to the microphones–does not make the world better. It makes it worse. Cuba is a horrible nation, that categorically would have been better off under Batista, if for no other reason than that people were allowed to leave, and that the economy had not collapsed. They still made good Cuban cigars back then.
I have often said that the theory of the people who have white collars is that anything done by someone else, that they don’t understand, must be easy. Why isn’t that deck finished? Why does it take so long just to paint a room? Why isn’t that truck loaded?
To the point: why isn’t our world perfect?
The reality is that “perfect” is a word which they define negatively, as the absence of things and people they don’t like. They have nothing positive to offer. They quite easily condemn “homophobia”, but are unable to offer homosexuals a solid reason to live, or sense of meaning.
Improving the world is something for people in overalls, not suits. It is something meant for people who know that your first plan always fails, who expect this, and who are quite willing to change their tactics to suit their strategic end.
What should our ends be? Global peace, a global standard of living such that people have the time to develop their souls, and sufficient morality in the world that governments are largely unnecessary.
These are my goals, at any rate. Note I am describing Presence, not Absence. To do otherwise is to plead guilty to infantile imbecility, which is a common enough condition, and one quite close to mental illness. Certainly it is a moral illness.