© David Staume 2006

Our greatest control is always at the beginning

You’re standing at the top of a mountain peak, and beside you – balanced on the edge – is a huge rock. All you have to do is stretch out your hand and give it a push and it will obey you. The choice is yours. Do you leave it where it is, or do you send it hurtling down the mountainside? How wonderful to have such power at your fingertips!

Well enjoy it while you can, because this is the greatest power you will have. Our greatest control is always at the beginning. Push the rock and it will obey you, but that’s the end of your authority. It may cause untold damage, injury, and loss of life – none of which you intended – but there’s nothing you can do about it once you have set it in motion. It’s an extreme example but it illustrates an important rule. Once the moment of decision has passed, control diminishes. It may diminish slowly and imperceptibly, or it may collapse dramatically, but it will definitely go downhill.

However, while control diminishes, responsibility doesn’t. Pushed rocks, fired guns, all life’s actions follow the same rule: once events are set in motion, control diminishes and responsibility begins. There are only two things that act to reduce your responsibility: additional acts of will by other parties, and the events coming to an end. The fact that some of the events that followed your action were unforeseen probably diminishes your responsibility not a jot.

There are a number of lessons in this. First, that it is easy to trigger forces and events, but that it is very difficult to remain in command of them and steer them in the right direction. This is the lesson of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a story where a sorcerer leaves his apprentice in charge of his workshop while he is away.

One of the apprentice’s jobs was to cart water from a downstairs well to an upstairs tub. After a few trips up and down the apprentice gets tired, and he decides to use the sorcerer’s spell-book to enchant a broomstick to do his work for him. So he casts the spell, the broomstick gets to work, and all goes well until the apprentice falls asleep, and the broomstick keeps filling the tub. When the apprentice wakes he finds the floor of the workshop awash with water, and he realizes that he doesn’t know how to make the broomstick stop. In desperation he splits the broom in two with an axe, but to his horror this just clones the broomstick and the two clones pick up a pail each and resume carting. Just as a massive flood is about to sweep everything away, the sorcerer returns, breaks the spell, and reproaches his apprentice. Triggering things is easy; the difficult part is staying in control.

The second lesson derives from the first. We should never undertake any action of any kind without knowing, as much as we can, the forces that we are going to set in motion. It’s an ideal of course, because we cannot know everything, but we must remember to reflect at the beginning, to consider the consequences then, before it’s too late.

If politicians were more conscious of this law they would take more time to decide on courses of action, and they would respect the role of senates and other mechanisms of review.

The instigators of revolutionary movements and wars invariably believe that they can keep control of their creations, but it’s simply not possible. History shows us this again and again, when more often than not, the consequences of their violent actions return to mow them down.

Whether it’s physical actions, feelings, or ideas that we set in motion, our moment of greatest power is not in the middle or at the end, but at the beginning. It’s a great law because it’s much more efficient and fun to initiate something and watch it gain pace by itself, than to drag it every step of the way like a reluctant donkey. But because our greatest power is at the beginning, that’s precisely where we must apply the greatest care.

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