OK, this is a place for me to organise my thoughts. I want to lay out my beliefs into some sort of logical philosophy. If you are reading this and you are not me, then please don't take offence, I do not want to tell you how to live your life, just make it clear in my own mind how I should live mine. That said, feel free to continue reading, comment, discuss or ignore.
One thing I see a lot of in the world is blame. When there is a scandal, someone has to resign. When someone screws up whilst driving its hand on horn time. When a large puddle of blackcurrent juice appears on my floor its a race between my two daughters to be the first to protest their innocence.
The thing is though, knowing who spilt the juice doesn't get the mess cleared up. I know that neither of my daughters actually wanted to spill the juice and when they did, they were embarrassed and upset that they had done. So what is to be gained by finding out who did it? Nothing. The guilty party has already punished themselves by feeling bad. There was no malice or intent. The problem is, there's juice on the floor, the solution is, get everyone to help clear it up. Job done!
This is very simplistic of course but as a fundamental idea, it holds true. In larger events and criminal events, of course there has to be accountability but it is rarely the case that blame is the most important part of the process. Yet still it is our natural instinct to blame first and solve later, if at all.
Take the recent News of the World phone hacking scandal. Absolutely deplorable behaviour. The main focus of the controversy was of course that a journalist hacked murdered schoolgirl Milly Downer's phone. The worst part was that when the voicemail inbox was full, the journalist deleted some of the messages, offering her parents the hope she was still alive and accessing her voicemail. So, Rebekah Brooks resigns, the News of the World closes down and Rupert Murdoch himself is dragged before a committee and gets a pie in the face. The whole story is now a fading memory to most of us, a done deal. So what has the frenzy of blame actually achieved. Rupert Murdoch is still very much the dominant power in the UK media. Rebekah Brooks will not be queueing up at her local Jobcentre Plus any time soon, she will land another high end job because she has too much experience at the top end not to be snapped up by someone else. The News of the World closure has left an unknown (to me) quantity of journalists who are adept at phone hacking to go freelance or look for work in other newspapers. So, angry mob sated, yes. Problem solved, no. And besides, after all this, can anyone name the journalist who hacked Milly's phone?
Our culture demands that we blame, then punish, then ask questions if we still have the energy. This is counter-productive on all levels. Big scandals like the News of the World get a ineffective working over and in our day to day life, we stress ourselves out for no reason.
As a final example, I put forward driving. How many of us get angry at other drivers for doing stupid or inconsiderate things on the road. Very hard not to sometimes. So lets lay out some basic facts. Firstly, you are never again going to see the driver who has annoyed you. You are not going to chase them down, force them off the road and confront them, no matter how much you fantasise about it. Secondly, if you think about how angry you are and what the driver has actually done, you'll usually find that you are way out of proportion. If you were face to face with that person, how much would they have to do to make you that angry? Finally, when someone does something stupid, we are very quick to assume that they are stupid. We've all uttered "idiot" or "moron" from behind the wheel at some point. Think about you own driving, how many "stupid" things have you done in the last year? Lets say three, in a year, three mistakes. How often do you drive? Many of us drive every day some less so. Lets make the maths easy with the reasonable assumption that its easy to make three mistakes a year while driving three hundred journeys in that year. That's one mistake every hundred journeys. Think how quickly you see one hundred cars on any journey, doesn't take long. I say its a reasonable assumption that one in every hundred cars you see is going to make a "stupid" mistake on that journey. The thing is, the roads are not full of idiots and morons, they are full of ordinary people. Tired and stressed people who just want to get where they are going and who will occasionally, just like you and me, make a mistake. When those mistakes occur, they may present you with a problem. Usually it will be something like "I am now too close to the car in front". Sometimes it will be "I now have to wait at this junction another twelve seconds". So solve the problem. Slow down until you are two seconds behind the car in front or get your wife to phone Grandma and tell her you're going to be twelve seconds late for tea and buns. Then forget about it. Your anger isn't going to hurt the person responsible for your twelve second delay and the chances are they didn't mean it and would say sorry if they could. So why get stressed about it? Let it go.
So, in conclusion, when life throws a problem at you, solve it. When its all better, use your spare energy to worry about who's to blame, if you really think its worth it.
