Patience
"Men talk of killing
time, while time quietly kills them." - Dion Boucicault
By 1842, Charled Darwin had
230-page essay outlining his theory of Natural Selection; and yet he
waited for another seventeen years (cooridnating his work with that
of Alfred Russel Wallace) to publish the first edition of On the
Origin of Species. He knew he
was right, but he refused to become righteous.
Abraham
Lincoln tolerated a long string of incompetent generals, a viciously
divided cabinet, and even the borderline treasonous behaviour of
McClellan because he kept he eye firmly on the long-term plan, the
big picture, the real deal: get the country through the bloodiest war
in its history intact. Because of his patience with his generals,
his staff, his opponents, he acheived much more for his efforts than
he imagined when he was elected, and our country in the better for
it.
Impatience
will kill us. Apathy, adrenaline and anger addiction, greed,
bigotry, ideological fanaticism, displaced rage are the malignant
symptoms of our haste to be done with disappointment of expectations,
grief, love, depression, anticipation of success.
What
kind of civilized society should have anything but contempt for the
"I just want mine, now, and fuck you if you can't take a joke
you pathetic, socialist loser." attitude of the typical
techinical school graduate? What kind of rational educational system
rewards a tiny fraction of its most idosyncratically talentented
students with the vast majority of its financial and emotional
resources, and narrowly trains the rest to be wedged sideways into a
vastly compromised economic system?
All the
plagues of modern political life revolve around the endemic inability
of Americans tolerate a little discomfort. We are the richest
country in the world, and we arrogate to ourselves all the
prerequisites of our forunate history leads us to believe we deserve.
This is one of the worst and most pernicious cognitive biases: the
habit of humans to mistake the results of historical contingency for
a validation of a ideology.
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