Yesterday's solution may be today's problem
by George Jonas
National Post
January 2, 2010
Few days pass without my learning a life lesson -- or unlearning one, as the case may be. Life lessons are tricky. The truer they are, the more likely their opposites may also be true. It's this yin-yang thing the Chinese go on about, I suppose. Heads or tails may make all the difference in the world, but they're still the two sides of the same coin.
Take the Biblical suggestion that "a soft answer turneth away wrath." Well, there's no question it does; I know it from personal experience. The trouble is, a soft answer can also invite wrath, or at least aggression, from someone wrathfully or aggressively inclined. A soft word can be a veritable wrath-magnet. Soft words may be the worst things to reach for if you want to avoid a fight. Reaching for menacing words may be better, and sometimes the best thing to reach for is a machine gun.
Or, as the Roman writer Vegetius famously put it: "If you want peace, prepare for war."
No wonder getting along in this yin-yang world is so dicey. Often you have to be a Taoist philosopher just to get through the day. The same thing that saved your bacon in the morning may get you hanged in the evening, and you may not always know whether it's morning or evening just from looking at the sky. That's why Darkness at Noon was such an apt title for Arthur Koestler's seminal book on the nature of communism.
It's Mark Twain's cat, though, that best summarizes the dilemma. It becomes a wiser feline after jumping on the hot stove because it never jumps on the hot stove again, but it doesn't become too wise because it won't jump on the cold stove either. If there is an example that illustrates better the limits of experience, I don't know what it is. Experience is dandy -- but, as Mark Twain's cat will tell you, it has its limits. Yesterday's solution may be today's problem and vice versa.
The instrument panel of human existence displays innumerable gauges, dials and switches. Difficult as it is to master such complexity, you figure if you learn what each button, knob and lever does, and memorize what each gauge measures, you're home free. Wrong. You pick a button on the panel and ask Socrates, Confucius, Freud, Marx, or some other sage what happens if you push it.
"When?" comes the reply. "In childhood? In your dotage? Before meals or after?"
That's how you discover that existence is a machine whose controls function in unpredictable and contradictory ways, depending on the time of day, the system's moods, the operator's religion, the solar spots and whether it's the year of the rat or the tiger. Multiply any one knob by a thousand other knobs and levers that operate in similarly rhapsodic ways, and you'll see the difficulties you encounter in the driver's seat. No wonder many people prefer to be their own back-seat drivers rather than take a chance on getting behind the wheel of their lives. And even though I'm speaking metaphorically, I do have an actual parallel in mind.
When I was learning to fly, my instructor showed me the big red knob that served as the throttle.
"Push it in for more power," he said, "and pull it back for less. What do you think will happen when you do that?"
"I suppose," I said cautiously, "more power will make the plane go faster and less power will slow it down."
"Not necessarily," was his reply. "More power will make your airplane climb and less power will make it descend. Think of power as your altitude control, most of the time. Your speed control is your elevator, here."
"The elevator, eh?" I asked. "In spite of its name?"
He nodded.
"Why call it the elevator, then? Why not call it -- I don't know -- a speed-stick?"
My instructor shrugged. "If things were called by their real names," he said, "anybody could fly."
This was kind of a life lesson for me. If things were called by their real names, anybody could fly -- but things are rarely if ever called by their real names, so only those who figure out what things really are and really do, in spite of their names, become pilots.
This is your task: First find out what things are called, and then figure out what they should be called if they were called by their real names and actual functions. Think of Big Nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, then think of Canada's human rights commissions. Think of George Orwell's Ministry of Love, then think of government agencies called "department of justice" or "environmental protection" or "pay equity" and call them as you see them.
Then you're flying.