Allegorie der Hoffnung
In my family, I’m known as the finder. When someone misplaces something, I have ways of helping them figure out where it is. In cases where this does not work, I am then allowed to do whatever I have to do to find the missing item. I am by no means perfect in this regard, but I do have a fairly high success rate. When an item has been misplaced by me, the task of finding it becomes trickier. As much as I endeavour in my life to be organized and logical, sometimes I do things that just don’t make sense. So, when I try to do things like retracing my steps, or relying on my routines to untangle the knotty mystery, I end up getting frustrated when my efforts do not bear fruit due to some random action by me that I can’t explain. Just last month, I was almost late getting back to work from lunch because I could not find my keys. When I come home, one of the first things I do is put my keys down in the same place. I do this every time, habitually. I have to; my mind is much too convoluted to remember such a mundane thing. Only this time, my keys were not where they were supposed to be. No amount of thinking or reason could help me locate them, because the situation was so out of character for me. I literally had to go to every place that I had been during the entire time I was home and look everywhere in that area. This was both time consuming and frustrating. Eventually I did find the keys, and when I did, I could not think of a single reasonable or logical explanation for why I had placed them there.
I imagine a lot of people experience the phenomenon of diminishing returns when it comes to the effort they invest in looking for something. I know that sometimes, when I look for something that I want or need but haven’t used in a while, it seems that it doesn’t matter how hard or efficiently I look, the thing will not be found until it is ready to be found. Often, I will find things by chance, when I’m not looking for or even thinking about them. There have been times, even, when, while looking for something, I will find something else that I was looking for at a previous time but had given up on.
Today, I had the relatively simple (for me) task of lecturing a class of twelfth-graders on the pros and cons of Free Trade versus Fair Trade. I understand that this can be a pretty boring topic, especially for last class on a Friday afternoon, but I tend not to have much difficulty keeping an audience’s attention, and these are good kids. To their credit, they seemed to think that they liked the idea of Fair Trade, and several even offered examples of companies that sell Fair Trade products. Some openly wondered why more companies don’t engage in these sorts of practices. On an impulse, I offered them a hypothetical situation. I asked them to imagine that they own a business that employs a large number of people. At the end of a typical year, after all expenses are paid, their own personal profit is $1 million. They agreed that this would be a good thing for them. I then asked them to imagine that they have the opportunity to increase their own personal profit to $2 million by incorporating more technology and machinery, thereby increasing efficiency, but making 70% of their workforce obsolete, and resulting in their layoffs. I know it’s an overly-simplified scenario, but I was curious.
“It would suck to have to fire all those people.”
“I couldn’t do it. No way.”
“Why would anyone do that when they’re already making a million bucks a year?”
“Something like that would have a devastating economic impact on a community.”
I hadn’t planned to say what I said next. It just happened, organically. It was completely in the moment.
“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
The way they looked at me after I’d said it made me feel something. It was something really necessary. While I wasn’t looking for it, I had found something that I needed.
I imagine a lot of people experience the phenomenon of diminishing returns when it comes to the effort they invest in looking for something. I know that sometimes, when I look for something that I want or need but haven’t used in a while, it seems that it doesn’t matter how hard or efficiently I look, the thing will not be found until it is ready to be found. Often, I will find things by chance, when I’m not looking for or even thinking about them. There have been times, even, when, while looking for something, I will find something else that I was looking for at a previous time but had given up on.
Today, I had the relatively simple (for me) task of lecturing a class of twelfth-graders on the pros and cons of Free Trade versus Fair Trade. I understand that this can be a pretty boring topic, especially for last class on a Friday afternoon, but I tend not to have much difficulty keeping an audience’s attention, and these are good kids. To their credit, they seemed to think that they liked the idea of Fair Trade, and several even offered examples of companies that sell Fair Trade products. Some openly wondered why more companies don’t engage in these sorts of practices. On an impulse, I offered them a hypothetical situation. I asked them to imagine that they own a business that employs a large number of people. At the end of a typical year, after all expenses are paid, their own personal profit is $1 million. They agreed that this would be a good thing for them. I then asked them to imagine that they have the opportunity to increase their own personal profit to $2 million by incorporating more technology and machinery, thereby increasing efficiency, but making 70% of their workforce obsolete, and resulting in their layoffs. I know it’s an overly-simplified scenario, but I was curious.
“It would suck to have to fire all those people.”
“I couldn’t do it. No way.”
“Why would anyone do that when they’re already making a million bucks a year?”
“Something like that would have a devastating economic impact on a community.”
I hadn’t planned to say what I said next. It just happened, organically. It was completely in the moment.
“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
The way they looked at me after I’d said it made me feel something. It was something really necessary. While I wasn’t looking for it, I had found something that I needed.
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