I have been a reader and fan of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series for many years. I enjoy not only the stories and the characters and the world he has created, but also the philosophy of the Rules that figure in each book. (His heavy-handed Ayne Randian social pronouncements are another matter, but let's not get into that.)
I understand that he is hard at work at the eleventh book in the series, which will conclude the story of Richard Cypher's struggle against Emperor Jagang and the Imperial Order. And which will no doubt contain an Eleventh Wizard's Rule to go along with the ten others he has introduced with each of the books in the series.
But it came to me that there is another Rule that can be added to the list, which has some value to my fellow readers and citizens.
And here it is:
Rule Number 12: Actions don't matter. Results do.
In a way, this is a restatement of some of the earlier rules, especially the second Rule: "The best of intensions can have the worst results." But it extends and generalizes that and other rules.
What do I mean? For a lot of people, actions or even intensions are all that count. I meant well. I did the right thing. It isn't my fault. Blah, blah. For reasonable people, we easily recognize that that's not enough. We have to be held responsible for both our actions and for their consequences.
Here is a quick example of what I'm trying to get at that I came up with some time ago:
A salesman returns from a sales trip. His manager asks him how well it went. Clearly, the manager isn't interested in hearing about how many presentations the salesman conducted. He has no interest in how well the pitches were performed. He doesn't, truth be told, care what obstacles the salesman encountered. All he wants to know is one thing: how much did you sell.
And the truth is, the salesman did not, and can not, determine how many sales he made, or how much they were worth. The people who determine that are the customers. It is their decisions that count, not the salesman's actions. Of course, there are many things the salesman can do to make those decisions more likely to go his way (or not), but ultimately, he does not determine his success; his customers do. That's why the job of a salesman is so stressful!
There are many examples in which incredible efforts are made, and great actions taken, but the real results are either inconsequential or damaging.
The big example of this in the world today is the wholly misguided efforts of the Bush administration in conducting what they call the War on Terror. Through their efforts, our lives have been rendered more perilous, our security more endangered, our civil rights shoved aside, and our economy guided toward prostration.
Because the War they should be conducting is entirely different from the one they have been. Our conflict is not one of body counts and bullets, but of ideas and the fabric of peoples' lives. The Bush circle cannot see that no matter how many they kill or torture, we lose if killing and jailing and torturing is all they do.
The above are just two examples. The reader can no doubt think of many more. But where we really need to impliment this rule is in evaluating the actions of our political leaders. Bush and his people have fail; we know that, though it's a truth that isn't being spoken. Democrats have an opportunity to make a difference.
Results matter.