Consider yourself fortunate if you are right 51% of the time. Listen to the old Galician Jew, settled at last in his old age in a little house in an Israeli kibbutz after a hard lifetime including a brush with the unimaginable horror of Auschwitz. He advises his grandson: “A man tells me he is right 50% − he is lucky, he does better than me. A man tells me he is right 60% − well, he is blessed, life has turned him over on the bright side. A man tells me he is right 70% − I look at him with narrow eyes but then, who knows, perhaps God has touched him, perhaps he should be President of the World. A man tells me he is right 100% − quick lock him up before he kills us all!”
Or as John Locke more philosophically put it: “In the greatest part of our concernment God has afforded only the Twilight, as I may say so, of Probability, suitable, I presume, to the State of Mediocrity and Probationship He has been pleased to place us in here.”
However, for some inexplicable reason, politicians think that, or at least act as if they are different to the rest of us. The great majority of them feel a compulsive need to be right all the time.
Perhaps they feel they won’t be elected next time if they are not right all the time. They get so paranoid about this that they end up pretending that they are indeed right all the time, insisting on it, stubbornly not backing down even in the face of the most obvious facts that contradict them, when a normal person would long ago have cut his losses and changed his tune.
One dreadful consequence of insisting on being right all the time is that it is very hard to get down to making difficult choices. When there are good arguments on both sides of a case the normal politician, wanting somehow to have the best of all worlds, reluctant to be seen giving up any right that may be available, agonises and does nothing – or, what is that same thing, sets up a committee or task force to examine the pros and cons and recommend what should be done with a view, of course, to ensuring the maximum amount of that commodity without which nothing is perfected − transparency. In that way a few months, perhaps even a year, is saved during which the danger of being proved wrong will not occur – so the politician thinks.
But, of course, during that lost time the inexorable wear and tear of time and circumstance is taking its deadly toll and the end result is much worse than if a less than perfect decision had been taken earlier.
There are scores of examples of the delay, contradictions, indecision and cost caused by the desire to be always right:
– Decades have come and gone and still we are struggling to sort out how we should access power supplies properly.
– We have to get the best qualified people or nothing will get done properly − but so-called ‘super salaries’ are routinely criticized.
– Discipline and standards have to be maintained or we are finished − but the vendors and squatters and reserve-encroachers and garbage-strewers and road hogs are voters so don’t come down too hard on them.
– Pay teachers and nurses and policemen much more − but what will other public servants say?
– Frame a new constitution – but think of all the trouble to get consensus and anyway with us (ie whoever is in power) as the guardian it’s all right.
– Appoint the right man for the job − but how can we forget the party loyalist who stood by us for so long?
The list is endless, and certainly not unique to Guyana. The root cause is the same.
Politicians are always hunting for solutions that are wholly happy. In vain – especially in poor developing countries. In a country like ours no solutions are wholly happy; once that is realized decision-making will become much easier and faster.
