Recently, I finished the book ‘Operation Suicide’ (I spoke about this in another blog)
It’s an extraordinary tale from the Second World War.
I suppose that’s what drove me back to go and watch ‘Darkest Hour’, where Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill in one of the most extraordinary acting performances I’ve ever seen.
There is a part of that film, though, that really touches me, which is one of the reasons I returned back to it.
One of the characters in the film is Churchill’s Secretary, and she develops beautifully as a character throughout the film. There is a point where Churchill realises her brother is dying in a group of troops he has basically condemned to death to save the rest of the people in Dunkirk.
The way that it’s presented in the film must be the way it was received (if it ever happened); it’s not so hard to condemn 4,000 people to death when you don’t know their names.
It’s really, really hard to condemn one when you do.
This is what happens when we take things out of the abstract, and you can apply this to many, many things that are happening in society at the moment.
Let’s say, for example, that your politics were left of centre (I don’t care if they’re left or right, but let’s just say left for this example), and let’s say the person walking beside you down the street had politics that were right of centre. Let’s say you disagreed with that a lot.
It might be easier to laugh at someone who was right-wing who fell over in the street and smashed their face. It might be harder to do that if they were walking beside you and you knew their name.
As we fall out with people more and more, as society fractures greater and greater, as we shout and scream and exist in our echo chambers and think we’re always right, try taking things out of the abstract.
Maybe the person, or the group of people you disagree with, are humans too. Maybe they think and feel and hurt.
Maybe they have a bag of bricks that they carry around as well.
Maybe their opinions are a fusion of lots of different things that have happened to them, not all of them good.
Maybe you won’t be able to change their minds.
Maybe you’ll just have to accept that the world is colourful.
Condemning 4,000 soldiers to their deaths to save 300,000 soldiers seems like a no-brainer, but condemning one to death whose sister works with you, whose name you know, seems horrendous.
Killing the few to save the many is a stroke of genius (when it works), that’s the price of leadership.
Sometimes the price of leadership is to stay in the abstract (what is best for all of us)
Sometimes, in order to know which is the right course, we have to drop out of the abstract.
Blog Post Number - 4283