The Irony of the Political

 

The Irony of the Political

Peter Schultz

 

                  Common sense holds that “the ends justify the means.” So, in order to stay healthy or regain one’s health, one might have to undergo strenuous, even brutal medical procedures. The interesting thing though is that, very often, in politics “the means justify the ends.”

 

                  Take the Vietnam war, for example. The ends were to be the establishment of a non-communist South Vietnam, a nation that would ally with the United States and contribute to fortifying “the free world” by helping to contain communism. Obviously, though, those ends were not achieved and, so, they should not and could not be used to justify the means employed to achieve them. Failure in the end cannot justify the means employed.

 

                  On the other hand, when the means are thought to justify the ends, a different “logic” arises. For example, if the means used, because they are said to confirm the virtues of the United States, e.g., in opposing communism and doing so at great cost, may be said to justify the end results of that war even though the results represented failure. As Ronald Reagan and others liked to say, the Vietnam war was noble, which implies that the means employed justified the end results despite those results being failures. The means were noble, so the war, despite its bad, was justified. The means justified the ends. The means redeemed the failures. Ironically, the political often overrides common sense.

 

                  Moreover, this often means that the means become the ends, and failure does not even look like failure. When the means become detached from the ends, it is all too easy to tolerate failure without questioning the ends themselves. Acting virtuously, even in a lost cause or lost causes is thought to redeem the actions. This helps explain why political elites, even after suffering failures, over and over, persist in their actions. Because in defiance of common sense, the means are taken to justify the ends, even when the ends are unachievable. But common sense dictates that if ends are not achieved, then the both the ends and the means employed should be subjected to the strictest of scrutiny.