Questions and Answers part 4

We all live with the consequences of the answer other people find acceptable for the questions they have.  Right now the news is full of the story of a terrorist attack on a French magazine.  The acceptable answer to the men who carried out this raid was violence and death to those who had insulted their religion.  This insult was a consequence of the editors acceptable answer to the question "should I publish this material mocking the Islamic faith".  But why would someone ask this question and give this answer?

There are a whole tangle of reasons as to why this would happen.  Modern culture opposition to authority and tradition is one reason.  This is born out of the amazing amount of death and suffering that followed on from the unquestioning obedience to authority which lead to Europe being destroyed by war twice.  But like all answers we accept, it brings with it its own shocking consequences.

  The desire to prove freedom of speech by exercising it in the most shocking ways possible is another.  Sadly this leads to more and more unseemly content as what was shocking to the public 10 years ago gradually becomes the new normal, and more extreme content is needed to prove the point.  And again, what started out as a reasonable, acceptable answer to the question "do I really have freedom of speech?" turns into something that brings death and destruction.

It's hard to see how these two opposing sides can be brought together.  It is often said that the pen is mightier than the sword.  And this is true to a certain extent - winning the minds of the people you are fighting is far easier than killing them all.  But what can be done if there is no communication between the two sides?  If there is no communication, the pen - the spread of ideas - has no effect.  And so we devolve back down to the use of the sword as the only acceptable answer.

This idea has clearly taken root in the minds of the Islamic terroristic organisations.  The root of their power is the acceptable answer of their ideas.  The fruit of their power is in the barrel of a gun and the point of a knife.  So they impose their answer in two ways; firstly the pen - propagating their doctrines as an answer to the evil they see in the world.  Secondly imposing their answer on those who do not accept it.  How to tackle this problem?

Feel free to leave an answer in the comment section - we'll see if there are any acceptable ones!

Questions and Answers Pt 3

For every question there is more than one answer.  The answer that we choose is not necessarily the correct one, or the best one, but the one we find is most acceptable to us.  And this is why there are so many different answers to situations - everyone sees the question in a slightly different light and tries to convince others that their way of seeing things is the best.  Few things confirms our worth like someone agreeing that we have found the best way.

This is one reason why there are so many different political ideologies.  Each one has it's good and bad points.  Each one is the acceptable answer for it's followers.  And, or course, each one has it's downfalls - the problems that it creates as it tries to solve other problems.  Even those who fervently believe in the theory find themselves frustrated by what happens in practice.  Communism ends up making everyone poor.  Capitalism ends up making some extremely rich and some extremely poor.

All answers work for some people and fail others.  The same is true on an individual level.  Answers that work for someone else may or may not work for you.  Therefore we find many people who have been trapped into accepting an answer that does not work for them.

How does this happen?  It happens because we can be presented with a bad answer in a very acceptable way.  We can be persuaded into accepting all kinds of things that are detrimental to us because of good marketing.  Now, part of good marketing is creating dissatisfaction with your current situation and offering a way to improve.  The answer they offer for you to accept will clearly solve the problem that has been brought to your attention, but like all other answers there will also be the side effects that were not considered.

So, the long and the short of todays post?  Think.  Consider more than one answer before making a choice.  Consider more than one outcome of accepting a particular answer, because there will be bad as well as good consequences to almost any answer you accept.

Questions and Answers again

Finding answers verses accepting answers was the subject of the last post.  It's going to be the subject of this post too.  There are a few more things that I am going to share.  The first one is born out of a situation I had at work a few years back.

I was working as an assistant manager of a grounds maintenance company.  I had joint responsibility for 17 mowing crews, which worked out to about 50 people.  We had a computer system that spit out the jobs for the day and track them.  We would  upload the jobs in the morning and fire them out to the crew leaders phone.  We wouldn't do it in the evening because there was a risk that the idiots who worked for us would complete them or delete them.

Early one morning (6am) I opened up the shop all on my own and went to upload the jobs.  The system wasn't working.  The crews started to filter in and stood around waiting to go.  Each person is being payed hourly.  Each crew starts early to get to all the sites in the schedule without running into too much traffic.  And I can't get the computer working to give them the jobs.  What am I to do?

What should I do?  That is one of the biggest questions that we face all the time.  And unlike the question we looked at yesterday (1+1=?) there are a whole lot more answers.  Usually when we ask this question we have to have an answer pretty quickly.  Truth be told, in situations like this, not answering the question (by doing nothing) is a form of answer in itself.

I didn't do nothing.  What I did was send all the crews out to start the work.  The crew leaders knew the site they had to go to first as we were on a regular weekly schedule.  I knew that this would create a bit of a headache for the administrative staff - made up of just one person.  And sure enough went she got in she was seriously mad with me.  The president of the company called me into the office and warned me never to do that again.  But he never answered my question "what should I have done?"

I still think that I did the right thing.  The whole point of the company was to cut the grass of our clients in a timely manner.  Keeping the crews waiting until the computer problem was sorted out would have cost money.  Administrative tasks are there to support, not control the people carrying out the job.  But I learnt an important lesson there.  People will always see the problems that you cause, not the problems you avoid.

So, how does this relate to answers?  Because the choice that I had was between two answers.  Both had things to recommend them, both had problems they would cause.  I had to deal with the problems caused by the answer that I accepted as the best to act on.  Unfortunately those around me didnt react with understanding of the problem I was facing, but frustration at the problems I caused.  I got no credit for the problems I avoided.

Many times we are going to be in similar situations where we only see the bad fallout from the answer someone else has accepted as the best.  They may be very aware of the damage they are causing but often they are trying to avoid a different answer which has a different set of problems following.  Life is very rarely a purely positive/negative choice, or able to be resolved to a simple mathematical equation to tell right from wrong.

I guess the whole point of this is to show the difficulty of finding the right answer.  No-one is able to find the answer that doesn't have negative effects somewhere.  We all need to make the effort to be a little more understanding of things people have done to us that left a negative impact.  They were probably trying to do the right thing as best they saw how.