(This is Part 10 of a series. Go back to Part 9.)
4. Putting end above means (the fourth source)
This destructive paradigm, which seems to be a continual temptation to the human mind, essentially says that the end-in-mind is so beautiful, so desirable, so crucial that it justifies virtually any means used to obtain it.
An example: The misery among the citizens of the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign was so great that the only way to justify it was to invoke a brilliant end, a communist utopia somewhere in the bright future in which a "workers paradise" would exist. In the meantime, the present was dismissed as merely a necessarily ugly stage on the way to the desired end-point.
This future shining light of a communist utopia was then used to justify the most abject means—ubiquitous control of the populace, shortages of essentials, and not least, tortures, vast gulags and murder on a scale that beggars the imagination. Indeed, it's estimated that 30 million people died in the process of going toward this "utopia".
As discussed elsewhere in these pages, the real principle at work is this: The means we use to achieve our end is the true end we achieve.
Thus, what the Stalinist era is primarily remembered for
is its brutality, inhumanity and misery. The means it used were the primary end it achieved.
Another example is the Pol Pot regime in Cambonia. One-third of the population was killed to satisfy Pol Pot's idee fixee that a peasant's paradise required the elimination of anyone who was not a peasant, i.e., anyone at all who was educated.
Once again, a supposedly desirous end was used to justify the most savage means—and those savage means are what that era is remembered for and as. Instead of a peasant's paradise, the suffering of that time is what was achieved.
The fixed idea is typical of situations where the end is being put above the means. It is a rigid paradigm that puts ideas and ideals above life itself, with disastrous results.
The paradigm that the end justifies the means is often accompanied by Orwellian language, which is used to give a shiny gloss to craven policy actions.
This phenomenon has become commonplace even in the U.S. in recent years. For instance, the act to allow greater pollution by electric utilities is called the "Healthy Skies" Act. The act to allow vastly greater logging in national forests is called the "Healthy Forests" Act. The act that severely degrades civil liberties in the U.S. is called the "Patriot Act", and so on.
One of the first casualties of the end-justifies-the-means paradigm is language. False distinctions are made, so that language itself begins to degrade. For instance, prisoners of war have now been reclassified by the U.S. as "enemy combatants" so that the Geneva Conventions—to which the U.S. is a signatory—do not apply.
When we adopt the belief that the end we want to achieve is so important that it justifies us in using any means, we go down a slippery path indeed, one which almost always results in dire long-term consequences.
As an example, whatever short-term advantages the U.S. thinks it might be gaining from the use of torture and "extraordinary rendition" abroad, are totally swamped by the grave and long-term damage to the moral standing of the U.S. in the eyes, hearts and minds of the world.
Thus, as the saying goes, we're "winning the battles and losing the war". This is usually the long-term and lasting consequence of the end-justifies-the-means paradigm, a notion which has most likely resulted in more suffering than any other single idea in human history.
(This is the end of Part 10. Go to Part 11.)
—jim sloman, 12.12.05
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