Re:But, everyone is motivated by self interest. General George Washington was the richest man in N. America back in his days and his battles with the British for independence were for selfish reasons that happened to give us a great country.
That is a false assumption. There is an old and important paper by Spengler on this subject.
If your assumption was true, you would not find ER nurses and doctors dying right now to save Covid patients. Nor would you have the situations where one person risks his/her life to save another in a split second without thinking. Thought does not arise in this second example. There are others.
Second, in your thinking, one's idea of a solution is something that benefits a target (usually oneself, or his/her family, or his/her collective) in a short time frame. He/she rarely looks beyond the next election cycle, even more rarely looks beyond next year, and yet more rarely looks ahead more than five years. And when does one consider the next generation, except for lovely language to that effect?
So what you see as "a great country" must clearly no longer be great (even if it ever was great in any sense except for a short time in the world's history, based on money and power) if there is such an effort to "make America great again". It either is great or it isn't great. Take your pick.
So when I said a poor (really unwholesome or impure, but I don't want to get into these definitions here) intent leads to failure, I meant exactly that. I did not give a time frame. Murderers get away scot-free, perhaps, in their life time. You may not think of that as failure, if you assume their death is the end of their story. I will posit that even that assumption is false, but we will get into difficult subject matter if we go in that direction.
Every such intent (of the kind I was referring to) has consequences. The chain of causation is terribly complex, and consequences show up in ways you and I cannot calculate. [e.g., the Proud American war of terror made ISIS, and sent hordes of people from the Middle East into Europe. Bad intent at work].
I don't want to argue this, but I'll use it as an example. Just think about it and make any conclusions you like. A leader decides trade is an issue that will help his voting block and maybe bring in $100B or some such number every year. The details are not important. So he bangs on this like a one-trick pony. He was looking backwards, Now supposing he looked forward, as a true *leader* (lead is to move forward) would, and asked "what will happen to people if a pandemic arises?". Our "leader" did not think to ask this. So he dismantled everything related to this. Now examine intent. The consequence of this failure? Maybe $6T and counting. Good bargain --- trading a few hundred billion for 6-8 trillion or more? Bad intent.
This is not an issue of taking sides. You do not have to be in an important position to see that every intent in your mind has consequence. You simply cannot calculate the consequence. However, if the intent is not about you, the end result is guaranteed to be a harvest even if you starve. So you always have to ask yourself the question --- what is all this for? And then answer it honestly. That honesty comes VERY HARD,
No one says you need to starve, though keeping good intent may make life hard. To get around this, life teaches us balance. That is a very important word. You'll see that many of the people you tend to look up to in life have not just good intent, but also "balance". So when you see someone throw a tantrum and flail and demand respect and lose balance, you know poor intent is dancing in there. |
