Where the story goes
Maybe you need to conceive the chariot of history as drawn by three horses. If they pull all three in the same direction, that will be the direction of the wagon. But the horses are free to pull it in different directions and that leads to unpredictable results.
The strongest horse, normally, is made up of the fundamental and constant interests of the nation, then the common sense of rulers, to the extent that it operates. In a word, from rationality.
But the second horse is called “case”. That is, those important facts that no one was able to dominate and that no one could foresee. For example, in the past two years and around the world, the pandemic. Now we have the gas and electricity crisis.
Already here we can make a distinction. We are not to blame for the pandemic, but for the gas? The phenomenon is world-wide and of such proportions that it seems impossible to have come absolutely unexpected. One day, when the dust has subsided, the big experts will explain to us that the fact was obviously “foreseeable”. But currently the solons have not warned us at all and the tile hit us on the back of the neck, surprisingly. Nor was it more accurately predicted Ukrainian crisis whose consequences, in a few months, could be epochal.
Apparently they once asked Harold Macmillan what major problems his cabinet encountered and he replied: “Events, my dear, events”. Unforeseen and unwanted events, yet unavoidable: that’s the question.
The third horse: Hitler, Mussolini, Putin and human error
But perhaps what is most surprising for its importance is the third horse, that of the folly. I do not use the word as a technical term (after all it is not) but as the set of human errors. Rulers are often men superior to others for intelligence, culture, realism, but they remain human, “too human”: with their obsessions, their fetishes, their obscure ones, like all of us. Except that the consequences can be on a completely different scale. The individual has his own personal conception of the world. Unfortunately this corresponds to saying that we all have a distorted view of reality and that this inevitable error of perspective can lead to dramatic consequences for an entire state.
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