The end justifies the means

Right now you are probably reading this on an electronic device running a silicon chip which was mined by some kid in Congo. You benefit in one way or the other from the by products of capitalism which was only made possible through slavery, your car runs on gas which is actively hurting the planet and causing a hurricane right now in some other part of the world.

I am not trying to make you feel bad about any of these things, but rather to spark a reflection on whether the results we have now make up for all the wrong means we employed to get here. You can also ask yourself the question if the means don’t matter as long as they get us positive and desirable results. It would be a waste of time for us to try and figure out what an alternative solution could have been, it’s always easy to say what could have been done afterward, but that’s not fair.

All our technological advancements, our advance development, our modern society and all the amazing things we now see happening all around us today came at a cost. It took the sacrifice of so many great minds who were ready to go far and beyond to make all of this happen, but today looking back at how far we have come, lets consider what it took to get here.

Getting this far

Getting this far was no easy feat, it required a lot of research, development, experimentation, discovery and a lot more things we know nothing about. Many decisions had to be taken by people at different levels in society, so many mistakes had to be made and so many lessons had to be learned. When you look at the rules of society you notice that they are constantly evolving and this is because whenever we come into contact with new information we have to adapt.

The people of the old had to work with limited information as compared to us today, so a lot of the choices they made were uniformed and unfortunately might have caused some degree of harm but were required for us to get to a higher level of knowledge. This without even mentioning that human rights and ethics are concepts which are very recent, back in those days it was all about profits and power that was the only metric everything was done by (at least in my own opinion). The results of all that work and all the good/bad which was done is what we see today: the economies we have the societies we built and all the innovations we keep developing, would you judge the means as being good or bad or in the middle.

Do the means matter

Of course the means do matter, we can’t just go around destroying lives and causing havoc just to obtain some positive results, unfortunately in our bid for productivity and efficiency that’s just what we do, coming short of breaking all the guardrails put in place by society. I think what determines the means is the importance of the task at hand based on a very objective analysis, which is to say that many people must agree that breaking the rules is a necessity, this shouldn’t just be your call or that of a few.

Some changes are very important and require drastic measures to make them happen,

Some examples include; Marie and Pierre Curie who studied radioactive materials to bring about the discoveries in physics and chemistry they are known for today, Franz Reichelt who literally jumped to his end while trying to test a flying suit, Sir Humphry Dany who had a habit of inhaling and smelling the chemicals he used for his experiments, that led to numerous chemical poisonings.

Without such sacrifices, we wouldn't have the information we have now, and we might still be lacking in a lot of things. There is not a general rule which can be stated for every situation but depending on each case and through an objective analysis we have to make the call.

What else could have been done?

Unfortunately we can't live multiple lives simultaneously and so it's difficult to tell where we would be if things were done differently, the only thing we can do is move forward hoping that we made the best choices considering the information we had at hand. Looking back at such decisions it's easy to forget the context, factor in the information available and consider the state of mind of the persons involved. I'm not saying that they necessarily made the good decisions, but maybe they made the bad decisions based on the bad information they had. It is difficult for me to believe that a person could choose to make a bad decision over a good one, but it's rather more believable to think a person had a personal interest in a bad decision or did it out of ignorance.

Conclusion

Some decisions need to be made, some sacrifices need to be done for the greater good and for a brighter future. Determining which decisions and which choices require such level of sacrifices is important, because not every one of them rises to this level, that's why you have to keep an eye on the bigger picture.

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