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sawboyrick
Active Member
Registered: 08/11/07
Posts: 1
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Reply with quote | #1 |
The Means Justifies the End
One evening I was drying the dishes, watching the TV in the kitchen, when I realized that the show I was watching was using a plot that had been played for me many times before. You’ve seen it. We all have. It portrayed a person that was so evil that you have no sympathy for him. He places innocent people’s lives in jeopardy for his own selfish reasons. The plot can take any number of shapes, a child doesn’t receive a required operation, young girls are abused and left lifeless on the side of a road, a nation is put in terror because of some special interest actions to get revenge for an unnamed event. No matter the circumstances, each evil doer is depicted as an uncaring, wicked person who feeds on the suffering of others. Midway through the show, you think it would be better to just send the person back to his maker and let us get on with our lives.
Then the resolution comes. It is swift and blinding justice. Evil is destroyed at the hand of an unlikely hero. It’s usually a “good” person who would have never done something as radical as this before, but was driven to action by the situation that had disrupted the communities’ existence, and robbed them of everything they treasured most.
The program I had just watched had all these necessary components. And, of course it ended with the same haunting question that they all do, “Does the end justify the means?”. I was left to ponder this. Does the end ever justify the means?
The “end” is, of course, the outcome of a resolved problem. When the smoke leaves the room, and everyone goes home, what do we have as a result of this event? The “means” are the actions performed by some associated parties en route to the resolution of the problem. In this case, the end of the TV show I watched had a potentially dangerous person, who already had hurt many people, die before any other innocent person fell victim. Had the pattern been allowed to continue, someone would have eventually been killed. It was only a matter of time. But the means to stop this disaster from occurring was to kill the potentially dangerous person before any more innocent ones were harmed.
So there I stood, dish towel in hand, asking myself, “Does the end ever justify the means?”. I thought about it quite a while. I reasoned that so many people are out there making this a very hard life to live by insisting that their selfish desires are more important than our right to a peaceful existence, that something should be done about it! Life would be so much better without them. And what of the victims? They are usually the ones who can least protect themselves. Must they suffer at the hands of these low level life forms?
But as my heart turned to the light, I realized that to fall pray to these feelings was to a line myself with the very evil I was fighting against. The evil of man versus man. The attitude that my desires were more important than another’s life. I am not saying that there should be no capitol punishment. I fully believe that society must have a plan for dealing with these problems. But there are laws and ordinance to govern these situations. What I am saying is that there is no place in our society for an individual to take the law into their own hands to “right the wrong”.
But it is more then this. It is the concept of “end justifies the means” that bothered me the most. It bothered me because it reaches into so many facets of life. It became a constant point of pondering, because I knew that to understand this precept was the key to understanding true wisdom, the key to happiness, the key to a life well lived.
After much thought, I concluded that the facts point to just the opposite. The end does not justify the means. On the contrary, the means justifies the end! Think about it... the means justifies the end. It always does. Let me share with you some of the lines of thought that followed this initial event by reviewing memories of my own past years. As I have reflected on my life, and the events that shaped and molded it to what it is today, I became more and more convinced of this reverse logic. I think that when you learn what I have learned, you too will feel that the end never justifies the means, but rather “the means justifies the end”.
__________________
Rick P. Avery |
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