Musings on a Tuesday morning...
Ever focused on his perennial hunt for an increasingly annoying Roadrunner, Wiley Coyote runs into a building that he, and everyone watching, knows is full of dynamite. He lights a match because it's dark inside. After years of warnings about the sorry state of flood levees in New Orleans, and days of warnings about the severity of a Category 5 hurricane bearing down on the city, the entire Bush Administration goes on vacation as the city drowns. Despite years of warnings and reasoned, coherent argument, the most powerful nation on the planet invades a country with the population of Texas and an economy the size of Idaho, and loses.
What all of these scenarios share is the response when the disaster, sooner or later, inevitably occurs. Rather than accepting responsibility for catastrophic acts of willful stupidity, the protagonists loudly assert their status as innocent victims of the vicissitudes of fortune. Bad luck. Unavoidable misfortune. Nobody could have possibly imagined.
This last excuse is what makes policy wonks like me crazy. The whole
point of having a civil society is to be able to anticipate and respond to the world as we find it. When a smoking, crisp Wiley Coyote looks at you with pitiful resignation, the humor flows in part from the restoration of cosmic balance. It is karmic justice, even though you know that in about ninety seconds, he's going to do it again.
But at least Wiley only does it to himself. When governments screw up, economies are thrashed, people die. So it's always disturbing when governments resort, over and over, to that long, slow, look of innocence betrayed by fortune.
And here is the problem. Blaming bad luck denies responsibility for your actions. It says that there is no other way it could have happened, nothing that you could have done differently. It says there is nothing to be learned. It allows the Acme Company to grow wealthy providing new tools and technologies for Wiley's self-destructive fixation, over and over again. But because cultures aren't cartoons and the damage is real, willful refusal to anticipate disaster and learn from mistakes causes damage that lasts. Societies that never learn, ultimately fail.