"Act to avoid constraining the future"
Nov. 21st, 2016 02:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishThe necromancer Wake, in response to the apprentices' concerns of using their power appropriately:
Being good is not a wise course. I should not care to see you set out to do good, either.
The consequences of defeat are permament; the consequences of victory persist until the next defeat. So with good; what you do that is good persists until the next evil. This is very simple, if you can reliably decide what is good. Good would be a struggle to create a series of victories as little broken as you might arrange.
Each of you may live a long time; each of you is of significant strength. You could do good, if you could judge all the consequences of what you might do. Yet the world is immense; a full understanding of consequence is direly difficult to obtain, even should you live for thousands of years to see how what you have done works on the world, and yet good remains a judgement.
Remember that the least constrained future that anyone has yet managed prefers the rule of law to the whims of wizards.
--Graydon Saunders, A Succession of Bad Days (Commonweal 2)
Being good is not a wise course. I should not care to see you set out to do good, either.
The consequences of defeat are permament; the consequences of victory persist until the next defeat. So with good; what you do that is good persists until the next evil. This is very simple, if you can reliably decide what is good. Good would be a struggle to create a series of victories as little broken as you might arrange.
Each of you may live a long time; each of you is of significant strength. You could do good, if you could judge all the consequences of what you might do. Yet the world is immense; a full understanding of consequence is direly difficult to obtain, even should you live for thousands of years to see how what you have done works on the world, and yet good remains a judgement.
[Commentary by the apprentice Edgar: Same as not building in the flood plain. Simple rule. Figuring out where the flood plain really is, for the flood you don't get every ten years but every thousand, that's hard to do. If you pick everywhere it might be, you don't leave yourself much farmland.]Act to avoid constraining the future; if you can, act to remove constraint from the future. ...
Remember that the least constrained future that anyone has yet managed prefers the rule of law to the whims of wizards.
--Graydon Saunders, A Succession of Bad Days (Commonweal 2)