You fucked up. You chose the wrong font. The boss doesn't like it, so from now on everything has to be in her preferred GARAMOND 12 PT . That's until next week when she's sick of GARAMOND and you get yelled at for it and so from then on everything is in her preferred BROADWAY 12 PT .
She could just be crazy. But, more likely, you're walking a dangerous line at the office. You're thinking reactively. Walking this line leads to keeping a job rather than performing a job, and to repeating mistakes rather than inventing solutions.
And the following is what happens when you're job is internationally and historically significant and the problem isn't a font, it's…oh I don't know…genocide.
We learned a lot from World War II. We learned to never appease a fascist dictator. We learned to be ready, always. We learned that people are capable of the terrible and the nobel and the brave and the dastardly. We learned that reaction to conflict causes conflict. We learned that, as with all wars, the effects don't cease with the mortar fire.
The political debris of WWII led to the wars we face today. In the book Fiasco , Thomas Ricks, annunciates Paul Wolfowitz's push for intervention in Iraq and for the removal of Saddam Hussein:
"Wolfowitz came to believe that the policy of containment was profoundly immoral, like standing by and trying to contain Hitler's Germany... . This orientation toward Nazism would prove central to his thinking on Iraq [and it would appear Bush and Cheney's, helping to explain their constant comparisons to World War II]..."
But, not only did the comparison to WWII give excuse, it gave necessity. Ricks continues: "If one was convinced that Saddam Hussein was the modern equivalent of Hitler, and his secret police the contemporary version of the Gestapo, then it was easy to see—and portray—anyone opposing his aggressive policies as the moral equivalent of Neville Chamberlain: fools at best, knaves at worst."
For all the bad press Wolfowitz gets, all the it-doesn't-get-more-ironic cartoons of him in Satan's throne, and all the unethical things he did at the World Bank and beyond, he probably wasn't that wrong. The problem was that a) he thought that there was an objective morality and b) he was thinking reactively. Many people ended up tracing the Iraqi War to Wolfowitz's door.
In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine , James Traub tells the unnervingly similar tale of now French Foreign Minister, Bernard Kouchner. Like Wolfowitz, Kouchner had family perish in Nazi concentration camps. This affected Kouchner and became the mold by which his political philosophy was formed.
Kouchner wanted to help desperate masses. He created the Nobel Peach Prize-winning organization Médecins Sans Frontières , Doctors Without Borders, to reach across national boundaries, to help those in need. He did much admired humanitarian work -- and often did this work before walls of cameras and forests of microphones.
The problem is that, again like Wolfowitz, Kouchner is reactionary. And, reading the article, I wonder if Traub is insinuating that Kouchner had a heavy hand in beginning the Gulf War.
Traub writes, “And in 1991, when Kouchner and others dramatized the plight of Iraqi Kurds fleeing attack by Saddam Hussein, the Security Council authorized a massive humanitarian effort to cross into Iraqi territory…Humanitarian access proved to be the thin edge of the wedge.”
Is Traub saying that under the guise of these good, these seemingly magnanimous intentions, Kouchner had a large role in beginning the Gulf War? If so, is Traub far off? And, if he's not far off, why was Kouchner driven to help the Kurds?
Truly, reactive thinking is not the only thing to blame for the shortcomings of Kouchner and Wolfowitz. There's also Ego to consider. Both of these men have colossal Egos -- something I infer only from reading about them -- and when you are trying to fix something you think is immoral or intervene with international aid in an otherwise domestic situation, Ego cannot be involved. The efforts must be purely purely purely altruistic.
These men learned from history. But did they learn the right lessons? Maybe. Maybe both wars were simply inevitable.
Regardless, it's necessary to think proactively and within any situation -- especially regarding morality. We certainly should learn from history; after all, history repeats itself. But never word for word. And never in the same font.