I just read a post thinking about a terrorist organization as being simply criminal. It is an interesting, and a common, thought these days. How does the National Socialist German Worker’s Party differ from the Mafia? So, I jumped Dr. Seuss in order to use the line about puzzling until my puzzler was sore. Would you believe that I got beat up by Dr. Seuss?

It was an amazing fight and you can see the rematch on our Pay-Per-View special. He hit me with conjunctions that I had never joined before and he could really take an adjective. The only thing that was effective against his alliteration was a barrage of interjections and a verb to the left. This is a rematch that you are going to want to see.

Then it hit me. Dr. Seuss must have had something hidden in his glove. The biggest problem with treating the actions of a regiment of a landless nation as a string of crimes is that you cannot see what is coming. Any military campaign has an objective to be achieved and each battle is a part of achieving that objective. You do not play the game as much as you play the opposing player. As a result, prosecuting a war as a crime spree causes you to act reactively to an opponent’s moves instead of countering the enemy’s overall strategy.

Being beaten up by Dr. Suess may have made me a better stand up philosopher. I realized that this type of atomic thinking, seeing a problem as a collection of independent objects, is not that uncommon. How regularly do we assume that we can effect one group of people without it effecting the rest of the population? The law of unintended consequences is all about not seeing the big picture. Any optimum solution to a problem addresses only the problem and you will still have unintended consequences to deal with.

In shifting our desire to improve the world to conflict prevention, we have separated the cause and effect of events in our world by further than our eyes can see. This is never going to work; yet, we will be unable to see what we are actually doing. The easiest way to eliminate all crime is to eliminate all laws. That would not prevent the crime in the world today; however, it would stop us from seeing it. Maybe it is better to see the big picture of a world over which we have little control and no ability to produce perfection than blinding ourselves to our own evils by ignoring the connections between people, actions and places.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.