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The Means Determine the End

By on November 3, 2011

Maybe it is the Occupy Wall Street movement, or my offhand watching of a violent space fantasy show via Hulu+ that has me thinking along these lines, but so be it. The deal is this: you can’t reach a goal by using a method to reach it that is completely contrary to your goal. To be specific, your means ARE your goal.

For example, if peace is what you want, you can’t achieve it through war. After you have won a war you don’t have peace, you have a cessation of hostilities. You have a defeated people who will remember their defeat, and rise up at the first opportunity. The only way to peace is through justice. It is through talking, negotiation, understanding, and compromise. It is through love.

If you don’t believe me, talk to the Israelis and the Palestinians. How is violence working for them? I’ve lived my entire life, and will likely eventually die, fully within the timeframe of their conflict. I’m not making this up. Violence never, ever leads to peace.

This is what makes me despair about the “war on terror”. We may be able to crush our enemies through sheer firepower for a time, but they will be back. They always are. Not unless we are talking about genocide, but that isn’t peace, it’s horror. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t defend ourselves, just that we can’t imagine that it is going to be different this time — it won’t be.

So I guess what I want to say is once you’ve figured out your goal — whatever it might be — then figure out how to achieve it in a way that completely, utterly, epitomizes that goal. Otherwise you are defeated before you begin. Ghandhi knew this, Martin Luther King, Jr. knew it, the Occupy Wall Street movement seems to know it (at least so far) and we should know it as well. That is all.

Sorry for the divergence. I now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

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Filed Under: Roy Tennant: Digital Libraries
Roy Tennant About Roy Tennant

Roy Tennant is a Senior Program Officer for OCLC Research. He is the owner of the Web4Lib and XML4Lib electronic discussions, and the creator and editor of Current Cites, a current awareness newsletter published every month since 1990. His books include "Technology in Libraries: Essays in Honor of Anne Grodzins Lipow" (2008), "Managing the Digital Library" (2004), "XML in Libraries" (2002), "Practical HTML: A Self-Paced Tutorial" (1996), and "Crossing the Internet Threshold: An Instructional Handbook" (1993). Roy wrote a monthly column on digital libraries for Library Journal for a decade and has written numerous articles in other professional journals. In 2003, he received the American Library Association's LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Excellence in Communication for Continuing Education. Follow him on Twitter @rtennant.

Comments

  1. Judiciously Anonymous says:
    November 4, 2011 at 11:22 am

    I agree with everything in this post, but wonder how far you can take the reasoning herein. Specifically, can you achieve equality by institutionalizing inequality?

  2. John Farrier says:
    November 28, 2011 at 5:07 pm

    Your argument is ahistorical. Sometimes peace is achieved through justice (whatever that means), but it is usually achieved by the overwhelming defeat of one side. There is, for example, a reason why Germany is no longer ruled by Nazis, and it’s not due to talking and understanding. Peace was brought about by the violent destruction of the Third Reich.

    So to say that “Violence never, ever leads to peace” is inaccurate.