No matter how much I explained that the trip leader was at the police station armed with only a flip phone and had no access to email, they would not relent in their anger at him. They were looking for someone to hang, and he would do nicely. (I don’t hesitate to point out that he is Black and they are all White.) 
​
They also were furious that he had not already secured a bus to get everyone to the airport at a moment’s notice. I pointed out that even in the U.S. he would have been hard-pressed to have arranged a bus so quickly and to have it wait on-call. I also explained that, although the Tambo airport was only thirty miles away, it is a large and difficult airport to navigate, that it often had long lines, and that clearance to fly to the States included individual pat-downs of every passenger by security. All this delay would have to be factored into the timing of any departing flight.

The VPs were having none of it. One of them speculated that given the special circumstances, the airline would certainly suspend security checks! I just cannot make this stuff up. The three kept hammering away as I tried to reason with them and protect the trip leader. Our words grew heated. At one point, one of the VPs, the one who was afraid of flying, yelled, “You sound defensive!” To this day, I do not know how I refrained from yelling back, “And you are being highly offensive, you ignorant racist jackass!” Anyway, that’s what went screaming through my mind.

All the while, through the window I could see the camera crews outside adjusting their equipment. They were almost ready for me. The VP for communications came to the office door several times to get me ready, but the other VPs shooed her away. Eventually I realized that the only way for me to get out of this was to let the bully VPs take it out on the Black employee in South Africa. As we called his cell by speakerphone, I anticipated that they would rip right into him when he answered. Instead, they all looked at me. Cowards. They expected me to do their filthy work. 

I greeted him and then sternly but without raising my voice, chided him for neither magically arranging for a bus to appear nor somehow commandeering all the police vans and drivers in the city of Pretoria. He and I were friends, and he knew me well enough to read my tone and put on a show of indignity to make it sound good. The VPs were satisfied, or at least that is how I read their smug expressions. That deplorable task out of the way, I was free to go talk to the media now without any preparation.

Later on, when I was done with the press, I called the trip leader to apologize for my earlier sternness. He knew the players and had grasped the situation but appreciated my call nonetheless.

Fortunately, the press conference went fine—almost. For the broadcast, one TV station juxtaposed my statements with contrary claims from a lying secret source whose voice was electronically distorted (cannot make it up!), but I was later able to correct the record during a post-return press conference. The journalistic malpractice on display was astonishing. We eventually got everyone home safely albeit several days later than necessary due to delays spawned by finger-pointing tantrums. As for the bullying VPs who ambushed me, they just crawled back under their bridges to troll another day.

My title promises that this essay will discuss when it is proper to KISS in the workplace. Apologies if you are looking forward to a thoroughgoing discussion of the accusations against New York governor Andrew Cuomo and his alleged workplace behavior.* If the native of Queens is guilty, then he must face the music, and perhaps that music will be performed by another product of Queens, the rock group KISS. Unfortunately, if you were hoping for a paean to those spandex-clad, make-up-laden hard-rockers who dominated the 1970s airwaves, I am afraid this essay will still disappoint.
​

​No, this essay is about the virtues and value of applying a well-known but frequently overlooked heuristic. If you are still with me, a heuristic is a fancy way of saying a problem-solving method.

​Some time ago I wrote a piece extolling the efficacy of Occam’s razor, a superb tool for reaching conclusions with consistency and rationality. When analyzing conundrums, Occam’s razor cuts through the nonsense by eliminating all extraneous explanations in favor of known evidence. Often, Occam's heuristic is articulated as “the simplest explanation is the best one,” a reductive but acceptable interpretation of Occam’s razor.​

​​Have you ever excitedly purchased a product that turned out to be so daunting to operate that you just wanted to chuck it out? Of course you have. In fact, the very device you are reading this piece on may fit that description. Do you click once or twice? Do you swipe up or down? Do you command the machine, or is the machine commanding you?
​
Perhaps you have owned an overly elaborate coffee maker that beeps every hour on the hour no matter what you do. Why would anyone want a coffee maker that beeps the hour? What kind of diabolical design is that? Or, do you ever wonder about that weird lever behind the rear seat of your SUV? You know, the one you are afraid to pull in case it releases the seat from the floor. How will you reinstall the seat? Best to just leave it be and admonish the kiddies to “never ever pull that lever!” See. It even rhymes.

Sigh.

​​Chances are, you possess many such devices and some you've even abandoned to moulder in a dank corner of your domicile because they are, well, just too much.

Don’t you wish that the engineers and designers behind these Rube Goldberg devices had stuck to the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid?​

In one room, Gulliver finds “a most ingenious architect, who had contrived a new method for building houses, by beginning at the roof, and working downward to the foundation." Another groundbreaking innovator uses hogs to plow and manure fields but only after he has planted acorns “at six inches distance and eight deep” to get the hogs to root.

One reformer authors an attempt to refine the art of conversation by requiring individuals to lug large sacks of objects. When they encounter another so-encumbered acquaintance, they communicate wordlessly by presenting items from their sacks “since words are only names for things.” 

As Swift demonstrates, it is all-too tempting when trying to complete a complex task to get caught up in the procedure and lose touch with the most important elements. Decades ago, I used to build theatre sets for a living, and I could really drive my boss nuts. Sometimes when I had a difficult piece to work on, I would take time to concoct a custom tool or a jig to make my job easier, and my boss would hit the roof. Most often, he was right that my time would be better spent just getting to work on the project, but I was too enamored of my own cleverness to refrain from designing and creating these one-use tools. I was further encouraged by the fact that every now and then, a little gadget of my invention would turn out to be most advantageous.

Once, we had to build a set with eccentrically curved steps that diminished in size as they ascended. It was difficult to replicate the curve precisely for each step, so I created a device that would trace the curve of one step onto the next one no matter the size. My boss, as per usual, was seething as I crafted my novel tool, but it worked so efficiently that he eventually resorted to using it for this and other tasks. When I left that job, my curve-tracing tool hung on a pegboard next to the hammers. My boss and I never spoke of it.

I relate this saga to indicate how, regardless of the occasional success, I failed to engage in the art of KISSing. Whenever I was tempted to make another new tool, my choice should have been governed by a basic calculation balancing time spent making the tool against time saved by using the tool. Far too frequently, my self-regard overran my ability to make an honest assessment. Truth was, I just loved making those stupid tools. If I had instead applied the heuristic of Keep It Simple, Stupid, the calculation would become even clearer: Would making the tool save more time than it would waste, stupid? In most cases, the answer would have been "nope."

In our everyday, we face this dilemma time and again and make the wrong choices with alarming frequency. Some people, though, are masters of the art of KISSing.

It did not take long for the committees to get their acts together and change their mindsets. Faculty and students who needed funding for travel, study, equipment, books, and so on were able to access what was available while the committees balanced oversight and equity with minimized friction. Committee members made decisions strictly on the merits of the applications and did not penalize for petty errors. We had to have deadlines, but we also had provisions for retroactive decisions where necessary. The default position shifted so that the committees understood their charge was to distribute funds, not to horde them. In other words, I convinced them to always start with yes, one of my core principles.

In the process, I learned something about the nature of arbitrary decision-making. Lurking on the extreme edges of the old system were two enemies of equity. On one side, was my predecessor’s reputed predilection for handing out funds pretty much upon request with scant discernment. On the other was an overly bureaucratized committee system that did not allow for uncertainty.
​
I came to embrace a truth that has guided my building of processes and systems ever since. Higher ed, like most industries, is rife with laments about the unwarranted impositions of bureaucracy, and rightly so. Bloated bureaucracies, with their proscriptive and prescriptive unreason--the proverbial red tape--can be oppressive. 

Nonetheless, I learned that the enemy of efficiency is not bureaucracy, per se. Nor is the enemy the executive officer who directs activities with few checks (even while cutting a few checks). The true enemy of efficiency is the arbitrariness that invariably accompanies extremes of overly bureaucratized or overly capricious administration. No matter the size of the organization, the governance system needs to be carefully calibrated to be both benign and helpful in order to eliminate the inequity and arbitrariness of both extreme bureaucracy and extreme capriciousness. The task of a system-builder and leader is to find that sweet spot in the middle, build upon it, and maintain it.

Having control of bags o' money may sound swell, and it really is, but relinquishing control to a rational process is even sweller.

​Is it ever okay for a boss to yell at employees?

I am not talking about being stern or raising one’s voice. I mean yelling, as in flat-out screaming as an expression of anger and an attempt to exert control. Again, I am not referencing a slightly elevated volume or even harsh language. I am not speaking about stern looks or flinty expressions of disappointment or ire. This essay is about bosses who just yell.

​Take this instance of what I mean. I once had a boss blast me with the insult "I hate your words!" She then ripped into me so loudly that someone across the hall closed the office door. That is what I am talking about. Nasty, malicious shouting unleashed to silence, insult, or mortify an employee. By the way, I still have no idea what I said that set her off. She was just bonkers.

No.

Of course, with all things management, there is a nuance to unpack. Some yelling may be appropriate or even necessary, but very rarely and only in very narrow circumstances. I can imagine scenarios where an employee is acting out in public or screaming at a colleague or  colleagues are screaming at each other and only the boss’s raised voice will halt the tirade. I can imagine these scenarios because I have lived them and had to, as a boss, loudly intervene myself. I had to noisily assert my authority to stop the shouting and then set about assuring that a more civil tone would prevail. Such things happen. If they happen often, they are a symptom of a larger problem. Whatever the cause, though, yelling should lurk at the very bottom of the boss's well-supplied tool chest.

A boss who yells purely in anger or animus, even if infrequently, is out of line, plain and simple. Yelling may provide the boss some degree of control but only temporarily. In the meantime, the humiliated employee and any witnesses will harbor a combination of fear and resentment that can gestate into raw contempt for the boss no matter how out-of-character the boss’s anger was. Unwarranted yelling is a sign of weakness. It is never more than an attempt to release frustration and exert raw power to overwhelm a subordinate. Because the employee is subordinate and usually has no ability to fight back, it is the crassest and most pathetic form of bullying and a mark of craven cruelty. A sincere, appropriately public, and well-timed apology may mitigate the resentment, but there will still be much goodwill to make up.

There is a special place in hell for bosses who yell.

​The ramifications of a boss’s bullying can be massive and long-lasting. A boss who regularly yells will create deep divisions among employees. Most will cower and comply while others will hunker down and hide. The smallest group will want to stand up to the abuse. None of these employees will have any real respect for the boss who relies on fear to lead, though, and the rupture and discord among them is a sure mark of a failure of leadership and an unhealthy workplace. Expect sinking morale, decreased productivity, and rampant turnover.

​In fact, perhaps the special place in hell that is reserved for screaming bosses is a perverse replica of the hell they produced in their own workplace. Maybe, for some of the worst, they will end up with someone just like them or even themselves as their own boss!

In "No Exit," Sartre made the point that "Hell is other people." I posit that for the particularly pusillanimous class of hell denizens, the yelling bosses, maybe the most deserved and torturous hell is just other yelling bosses.

The mid-eighties production standards of Dylan’s song “Tight Connection to My Heart (Has Anyone Seen My Love)" muddies the recording and has limited its appeal, but the lyrics are superb. In the last verse before the final chorus, he tells us of the beating of a man in a “powder-blue wig” who is later “shot / For resisting arrest.” At the very end of the verse he states flatly,

This could strike you as a bland non sequitur or a cleverly inverted profundity since we usually perceive something at a distance, say a traffic tunnel, as far smaller than it is. (Yes, junior, our big car will fit through that little tunnel.) In truth, though, the lines are a commentary on the incidental nature of most outrages. Dylan’s trick is to reverse the chronological order of the episode by introducing the concept of distance before the “Close up” event that proceeds it. 

You may quibble with Dylan here. I may quibble with him, for that matter. Perhaps an example is in order. We are all aware of the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers and the fact that video of that slow-motion murder sparked or re-sparked a massive national uprising and shifted public opinion. Applying Dylan’s take demonstrates that while Floyd’s murder loomed large in the public eye, for those experiencing it at the time, perhaps even for Floyd himself, it was just a series of discrete moments and decisions that culminated in homicidal tragedy. Floyd certainly sensed he was dying, but his cries for help (including, movingly, to his late mother) suggest that he held out hope that the police would relent or that there would be an intervention. In other words, he did not accept the inevitability of his circumstances because they were not inevitable. Any number of things could have prevented his death, from the mundane to the sublime. That none of them did was unforeseeable in that present, and any inevitability we sense in such a drastic scene is only imposed in hindsight.
 
I cannot know for sure what the experience was like for Floyd, his murderers, or his witnesses on the scene, of course, but that is how I read the situation. To Dylan’s point, as horrible and huge as that incident--what a shockingly inadequate word--as that catastrophe must have been for those present, not one of them, not even Floyd himself, could ever know how immense it would become for our nation. His homicide, unlike the tunnel that the car (or train) approaches, as monumental as it is up close, is even larger in the distance. In the song, the man in the powder-blue wig dies, also at the hand of the police, but in that moment no one could predict how substantial the atrocity, real or imagined, would become by being enshrined in Dylan's song. In other words, the act of witnessing or participating in such an abomination cannot indicate with any precision how significant such an event might become to those who are removed in time or space from it.

To be clear, my intent is not to diminish the murder of George Floyd by comparison to the fate of a likely fictional Dylan character but to demonstrate how his death led to and became something beyond all expectation. Would Floyd have chosen to die if he could know of the movement his death would inspire? Would anyone? W.B. Yeats ponders a similar conundrum at the end of "Leda and the Swan," which describes another violent catastrophe with vast repercussions:

As with the doctrine of perspective he sketches in “Tight Connection,” this statement seems to upend our normal point of view. Isn’t it usually that the forest looks chaotic and confusing when you are in its midst but calm and orderly from a mountaintop above? No, in this monologue and in keeping with the lines from his song from the eighties, Dylan again suggests that distance can lead to greater insight, context, and understanding. By the way, this the exact reverse of the more conventional philosophy of perspective that Jonathan Swift utilizes in Gulliver's first two voyages.

The January 6th insurrection at the Capitol offers a perfect example of Dylan's philosophy at work. Several who participated later claimed that they were just swept up with the crowd and had no intention of entering the building let alone rioting. They speak of their experience as though they regarded themselves as unwelcome visitors on an unofficial tour, nothing more. They imagined that they were there as much to see the sights as to shout slogans. Like the mere tourists they feigned to be, they even took selfies with police and stayed inside the guide ropes. Step back to a distance (physical or temporal), and we can see that their mere attendance, no matter their intent, ensures that they contributed to the havoc. Their profession of unawareness does not exculpate them from the charge that they willingly joined a mob that committed acts of destruction, injury, homicide, and sedition. For these folks, though, it may very well have seemed just a particularly rowdy tour group at the time. Nonetheless, consider that one of the people who died during that attack was trampled by the mob. Anyone who was part of that unlawful crowd, whether they were in attendance in that moment or not, is culpable for her death because their presence alone contributed to the overall size of the mob and subsequently the stampede. There can be no mob to trample her if there are no people to create a mob, so every member of that mob is complicit in her death as they are in all the day's consequent deaths, injuries, and terror.

Interestingly, both of Dylan’s examples—a killing by police and “plunder and murder”—feature violence and occur at the end of the two works in which they appear. As always, there is a consistent thread in Dylan's art. In the movie monologue, the “fair garden” evokes Eden, and even the adjective “fair” seems archaic and vaguely biblical. The vicious disorder he describes evokes end times, which has long been a Dylan preoccupation. Even his 1980ish deep dive into christianity centered on a church that promotes an "inaugurated eschatology" with an apocalyptic bent. It is not surprising, then that Dylan would expand his view from a narrow focus on Eden to a wide-angle on a world of brutality and mayhem as if to suggest that we exist in a bubble or garden of false security. Prepare for a decline, all ye who bask in contentment! In fact, the sentence before this passage in the movie monologue uses the phrase “things fall apart,” from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” which itself is eschatological in theme:

One may be tempted to affect an attitude of sustained hyper-vigilance to forestall unwanted consequences, but this approach is neither practical nor ultimately effective. A general awareness though that one’s small actions can loom large in the future is in order. I admit that my truism here should seem boringly obvious, and yet how often is its objective veracity still overlooked or downplayed?

The only readily workable solution to the dilemma of unintended consequences is to identify your core principles and, if they are sound, stick to them. Be decent whenever possible. There is that word again, decent. Simply assure that you consistently work with integrity, and you will be largely protected from negative ramifications or at least will be prepared to address and counter them. Stick to your principles, and at they end of the day the consequences will be yours to own honestly. And always remember, as the bard says,
         What looks large from a distance
         Close up ain’t never that big.

Remember way back when, when you could reminisce about the good old days without some wise guy coming along and telling you that much of your memory is just a fantasy. Yeah, that way back when never existed.

Humans have a tendency to look on the past with warmth and even longing. This is true when reviewing history as well as when reviewing our individual experiences. You have probably heard someone say something like “My family had it rough when I was coming up, but we always had each other.” The person then goes on to wax wistfully about how they were desperately poor, surviving paycheck to paycheck and occasionally living in the car or a shallow ditch, and yet they were ever so much the richer for how their nightmarish existence drew them together.

I am indulging in hyperbole, of course, but you recognize the pattern. As we move away from the past, we tend to start smoothing the rough edges of memory. Sometimes, our new perspective allows us to see things we could not see before or recontextualize our experiences or recorded history to understand them better. But too often, we are just selectively editing the real picture. It is like observing a rock, first up close with all its coarseness and jaggedness and then at a distance as a smooth surface. I don’t know if it is because our memories are inherently faulty or we just have a desire to idealize the past, but having no training as a psychologist, I haven't the expertise to consider this phenomenon from a clinical standpoint. Instead, my approach will be more prosaic and pragmatic.

Nostalgia is a longing for a version of the past that is imbued with a great deal of sentimentality. Of course, there is much to admire and even desire about the past, but nostalgia erases the undesirable or clads it in a shiny new veneer. Certainly, we need to comprehend the past to better understand our present and even our future. The problem with nostalgia is that notion of sentimentality, though, which is like seeing that rock from across a field and admiring its flawlessness despite an awareness that up close we would easily recognize its coarseness, cracks, fissures, edges, and pockmarks.

Nostalgia works much the same way, and it is fraught for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is simply wrong. It is a distortion and misapprehension of our past, and if we cannot grasp the past, we certainly cannot fully grasp the present or anticipate the future. 

Second, in eradicating or editing the reality of the past, nostalgia can lend itself to delaying or even denying righteousness and justice. Those who long for a greatness in America that allegedly marked the period of the 1950s and early 1960s peer through a narrow scope that eliminates the oppressive circumstances that minority populations of every type and women lived under. To pretend otherwise is just not factual.

Nostalgia, though, smooths all those sharp edges like a cultural opioid. Our nostalgic minds tell us that white men back then were all epitomes of masculinity, which they lorded over their paragons of femininity, who in turn enjoyed carefree lives. Blacks, in this fantasy, occupied some space in the background, but they put up a noble fight for justice, which everyone except really bad people supported. All this is absurd, but, worse still, it necessarily casts any present-day fight for justice as wrongheaded, counterproductive, and quixotic.

Third, nostalgia is inherently pessimistic. The hyper-nostalgic phrase “make America great again,” implies three falsehoods about time: that there is some sort of greatness endemic to the past, that we no longer can experience greatness, and that we are on a path that leads us even further from the achievement of greatness. This last falsehood is the nature of nostalgia, to idealize the past while implying that the future is bound to be bleaker. The “again” in “make America great again” may promise some ability to recapture past greatness in the future but only by fabricating a past that never existed outside of febrile minds. Left to its current path, the “carnage” that the proponents of making America great again claim marks the present can only culminate in a dismal future. The phrase itself offers not hope but a sense of a lost cause, a noble defeat that must be revenged.

In reality the past is, like the present, neither all or largely good nor all or largely bad. It is a mix. People love depictions of, say, eighteenth-century Europe as a world of fancy clothes and beautiful people, but whatever beauty and nobility existed then was offset by the reality of the age. The massive issue of class and the disregard for most life aside, even the upper crust had no running water. Until you are willing to conquer the matter of the close stool, spare me your desire to live in the past. If you doubt me, read Jonathan Swift’s satiric poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732) for a fine example of the difference between illusion and reality, and remember, “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia, shits!” And if you are up for even more fun read Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s rejoinder “The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to write a Poem called ‘The Lady's Dressing Room’” (1734), which offers an alternative perspective: "You'll furnish paper when I shite." To be transported to that time, as one romantic television portrayal fantasizes, and to thrive, you would have to start by radically adjusting your attitude about basic hygiene.

Several of my recent blogposts have offered examples of behaviors, particularly among bosses, that are considerably less-than admirable. Now, I am a firm believer that one should acknowledge, own, correct, and learn from one’s mistakes as a matter of course. Doing so requires strength of character and mind. In contrast, dodging mistakes is a mark of cowardice and fecklessness. Still, it is not enough to learn just from one’s own mistakes. There is another rich vein of error to mine for lessons: the mistakes of others, particularly those that manifest debilitating habits of mind or reveal adverse patterns of action.

​Chronic error can be a great teacher.

It stands to reason, then, if positive paradigms do not always simply transfer one-to-one from person to person, then learning from and applying negative paradigms will not necessarily be a matter of just doing their opposite. Just because x is wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that negative x is correct. Life is way more complex and much more fun than that.

You can make a similar analogy about raising and neglecting a child, writing and deleting a poem, staying healthy and succumbing to illness, climbing and falling off a ladder, establishing the truth and spreading lies, or any manner of acts of creation, wellness, integrity, or progress versus its annihilation.

By contemplating the relative strength of good and bad, I am not trying to pick a theological fight here about the nature of evil and of virtue, and I am no Manichaean. There are many nuances I will not consider here, nor will I define “good” and “bad.” Instead, at the risk of being overly reductive, I will simply attempt to demonstrate that on a pragmatic, daily basis, bad is stronger. ​

To be bad is to be primarily a destroyer, a destroyer of hope, of progress, of success, of order, of minds, of lives, etc. To be good is to be primarily a maker who generates and reinforces those things. Good requires one to be ever vigilant and to stand up to the destroyers. Since being bad is so easy, it is also enticing. Destruction, close up, can masquerade as progress—at least you’re getting something done--and because being bad is enticing, it tends to attract many adherents. Most of us are only occasionally bad, but a critical mass are dedicated to it. Consider the insurrection and attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. Because there was relative ease of access, insurrectionists readily breached the building and wreaked mayhem in short order. Securing and cleansing the building in the aftermath requires far more effort and time. Securing and cleansing our democracy will demand more still. To be good means eschewing the allure of easy acts of destruction, which by itself is an exertion that requires much energy. Worse still, one can be tricked into being bad while it is exceedingly unlikely one could be tricked into being good. Notice I wrote "being," not "doing."

It is easier to break than fix, to stain than wash, to kill than grow, to forget than learn, and to deny than own the truth.

You may conceive some counter examples of when destroying is actually an act of good. For instance, tearing down a dangerously dilapidated warehouse may be a great benefit to a community. Nevertheless determining the goodness of an act is a weighing of the means and the ends. If the end is inherently good (removing a hazardous eyesore), then the act (tearing down a dilapidated warehouse) must be considered with that end in mind. Destroying in such a case may do no harm, so it is likely an act of good. Still, it is not enough to mean well, and it is rarely if ever acceptable to do bad in order to achieve a positive.

Being bad is easier than being good in part because there are many ways to be bad while there are far fewer options to do good. Let’s consider the global pandemic. We know that taking certain precautions, such as wearing masks, social distancing, avoiding gatherings, and even closing workspaces are, until full deployment of the vaccines, the only tools we have to slow this plague from sweeping over us. Some, though, have said all along that we should just let the disease take its course since it kills a mere 1% or 2% of its victims. I am not talking about Covid-deniers here but those who advocate doing nothing so that we will develop “herd immunity.” Given the math of allowing even 1% of the country’s 327,000,000 people die (a fun arithmetic problem for the kiddies, by the way) and the fact that many still live with persistent and even disabling symptoms long after recovering from the infection, why do so many find the inherent evil of mass death and disability so enticing? Sweden tried just letting the disease run its course, by the way, with disastrous results. Nonetheless, in the moment, it is just so much easier to do nothing, to pretend that this invisible scourge will not affect us much and will eventually go away, to deny that all those deaths and all that suffering are not too high a cost. So, strip off your mask, attend a large indoor gathering, risk getting Covid, and endanger others. It is easier in the short run to roll the dice and deny the potential consequences than to face reality and take personal responsibility.

In past crises, such as World War II, Americans reportedly came together and made many sacrifices in the spirit of unity. One could argue that America’s collective resolve and the defeat of the Nazis and their allies was worth the horror of war. I won’t argue otherwise. But if it were not for the defeat-of-Nazism part, would all that accord alone have been worth the casualties? Of course not. The Second World War is an extreme example, though, as is the movie Failsafe. We rarely encounter such starkly fraught choices. Even so, with Covid, as we surpass the number killed in the Great War, I can detect no similar universal self-denial for the common good, far from it. Some sacrifice much while others carry on as usual, unwilling to so much as wear a mask in public. Indeed, the disease has, in many ways and in convergence with other factors, brought out the worst in people. Similarly, while I will be forever grateful that the U. S. and its allies stood up to and defeated European fascism and Japanese imperialism, I would be lying if I did not see the subsequent harm that also arose from the means of global war and the deaths of hundreds of thousands, such as the spread of totalitarian communism, the rise of the military industrial complex, the paranoia of the Cold War, and other evils, some of which plague us to this day. 

"So, what about head to head, toe to toe, mano a mano? Which is stronger, good or bad? Since we are speculating about essential qualities and not beings, it is impossible to have them contest directly one-on-one. Good and bad can only confront one another through actual entities, proxies that are never essentially good or bad themselves, so it is difficult to ascertain. Nonetheless, logic dictates that bad has all the advantages. Even psychologically bad wins. If ten people compliment you and one offers a minor criticism, which do you remember? College professors lament amongst themselves that no matter how many positive reviews they receive from students, a single negative one will be all they can focus on. Sometimes, one negative review will stick in a professor’s craw for years despite otherwise universal support from students. Our brains are wired to favor the bad.

Physically, it is the same thing. While aging has some positives (I hope), most individuals long to escape the inevitability of decrepitude in order to retain the vigor of youth. As time progresses, everything deteriorates and everything passes. Assuming robust existence is good and decay and destruction are bad, we can see how bad will always conquer. But, there is renewal, you say. For every loss there is a gain. Every winter leads to spring. Yes, perhaps, for now, but not over the long haul. Eventually, the sun explodes. Besides, if you are suffering and dying, the fact that someone else somewhere else is being born may be cold comfort.

Versions of the axiom that “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice” have been attributed to many, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I disagree with this sentiment. Not that any of us will be around to find out, but I don’t see how justice prevails on a cosmological scale. Justice is a human construct, an artificial concept that has no natural manifestation in the world, which is why we struggle with it so much. For the record, this has not always been my position. I long believed that the fight for justice could succeed once and for all, and that perhaps I would see evidence of that even in my lifetime. It gave me hope. Over many years, though, as I viewed the world through the lens of justice, I came to conclude that justice is primarily a human comfort. In fact, the only longterm outcome I can discern with any certainty is that the arc of the universe bends toward entropy. Four out of five physicists will agree.

Again, I am not making a theological argument here but a pragmatic one. And do not get me wrong. Although I profoundly believe that bad is stronger than good, that injustice is more powerful than justice, I am not callously advocating for giving into bad or tolerating or perpetrating injustice. Quite the opposite. Because bad is so mighty and because justice is so vulnerable, we must be ever vigilant in the fight for good. Each individual’s contribution to the cause for good will require strength, sacrifice, and perseverance, and collectively we can prevail if only for a while. Justice will not simply happen because it is supposed to. Justice, like good, is a concept that must be applied, reexamined, revamped, and reapplied constantly, for it is as flawed as the species that invented it.

No, this essay is not a call for us to be bad because bad is easier and because bad will likely triumph in the end. Nor is it a claim that bad is better because it is stronger. Adherents to the belief that stronger is inherently better generally also subscribe to the notion of a zero-sum game, which posits that there can only be one winner in any contest and no virtue in sharing success. As a philosophical or ethical stance, the narrow outlook of the zero-sum game warrants ruthless behavior and is conceivably a mark of inherent badness itself.