“It’s the Thought That Counts…” or Is It?

You Got Me What?! for Christmas

We love to say it’s the thought that counts… especially when children are involved… or disappointing Christmas gifts.

Children may spill the breakfast-in-bed surprise for mother’s day all over her 10,000 count linen sheets when jumping with the joy of the surprise… they may have egg shells in the omelet, and only put half enough water in the juice concentrate, and may have burned the toast… but, Hey! It’s the thought that counts.

We have other statements that go along with this. “They meant well.” “They were well intended.” “They tried.” “They did their best.”  And perhaps there is some practical wisdom in these words, promoting emotional restraint in our response to human failure and disappointment in practical outcomes. For surely there is a difference in dealing with the well-intended as opposed to the malicious. But do we not also say, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Ancient Wisdom Knew

Indeed, in practical terms, on a daily basis, we face the reality with which Proverbs 17:12 has long reckoned, Let a man meet a mother bear robbed of her cubs rather than a fool in his folly.

Ronald Reagan knew it well, quipping, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.’”[1]

So did C. S. Lewis, who noted, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive… Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”[2]

T. S. Elliot made a similar observation to point, writing, “Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important… They do not mean to do harm—but the harm does not interest them.”[3]

Stupid is as Stupid Does

It reminds me of the incident in Anna Sewell’s book, Black Beauty, when Joe Green, the stable boy, nearly kills Black Beauty by ignoring the commands for care given to him by the head groom, and the boys father defends the boy to the groom. The groom, John Manly, acknowledges that the boy did not intentionally try to hurt the horse, and the father grabs that lifejacket, saying, “I am glad you see it was only ignorance.”

John Manly is having none of it. In this world, we are judged by our actions and not merely by supposed intentions… which only God knows for certain. He cries, “Only ignorance! only ignorance! how can you talk about only ignorance? Don’t you know that it is the worst thing in the world, next to wickedness?—and which does the most mischief heaven only knows. If people can say, ‘Oh! I did not know, I did not mean any harm,’ they think it is all right.”

It’s not.

In law and life, we are held accountable for the damage we do to others whether in ignorance, indolence, or actual maliciousness.

What’s a Little Mass Murder Between Friends

Do we say that Mao’s starvation of over 30 million people in one year is okay because he was actually trying to do something good for humanity? No… nor should we. It was not an act of God. That starvation was precipitated by thousands of arrogant choices driven by his narcissism… dreams of proving himself Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the new model of human potential for a new kind of humanity. He committed and commanded millions of individual actions that used and abused the population trying to force them into his plans for them. He murdered and tortured and lied to drive that national lemming march off a cliff that almost anyone with economic sense could have told him was there. If you asked any of those who perpetrated evil on his behalf, almost every single one would defend themselves saying, “I meant well… I was trying to make a better world… I was trying to help.”

Think I’m kidding?

Want evidence?

After Mao forced the farmers away from their homes to work on communal projects, and forced women and children into the fields to replace those men in growing the nation’s food, the overlords in many places took to making them work naked. This led to the rape of these women by overseers. When called to account, they said that they were doing good… they meant no harm… they were just helping these women find liberation from “old feudal morality.”[4]

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

This hits on the heart of the human struggle. We are poor at judging intentions because the human heart is corrupt and deceitful. We rarely have a good handle on our own intentions, never mind someone else’s. People have an almost infinite capacity for self-justification.

Hitler and Stalin and men like them weren’t plagued with guilt, they were making a better world and if a few million people have to die to make that happen, it’s worth it. When you think about it the right way… that’s really a privilege, a kind of honor. When their beautiful world springs from the ashes, the rest of humanity will thank them.

GenZ Sugar Plumb Dreams

When teaching high school, I asked my GenZ students what they wanted for their lives. Every one wanted the same thing. With an earnest heart, they confessed some version of, “I just want to change the world.” The fact that they were gender confused, sexually perverse, deeply depressed and selfish and incompetent at even the most basic aspects of life was not to be considered. They had firm convictions that the world was a terrible place and they were just the person to make it better.

There is NOTHING Christian in Socialism

Of the thousands of people on my various Facebook platforms who name the name of Jesus with great earnestness, many bleat out the hopes that the Socialists, Marxists of every stripe, communists, progressives, and Post-modernists have spoon fed them: Open borders where “no one is illegal,” mercy on the criminally-minded who “were raised badly,” or “marginalized”, super-high minimum wage for those with no job skills through “no fault of their own,” free housing cuz “it’s a hard world,” free-college because “everyone deserves an education,” free-healthcare, for surely it’s “a human right,” forcing shots to “love our neighbor,” minimum income guarantees because “we should love the poor.”

You Keep Using that Verse… I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

This is Christian love to them. This is God’s call to love the sojourner among us and love the stranger in the land. (Leviticus 19:33-34)

This is Christ’s celebration of “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.” (Matthew 25:35-36).

Mine Is To Do and Kill

When challenged on the actual outcome of those practices being championed by the left, I was told directly by one such saint that it was the Christian’s job to obey, and God’s job to worry about the consequences. When asked if he actually believed that God regularly intended us to institute practices that were destructive to both those helping and those getting help, and whether these commands might have better and worse ways of being fulfilled in our Christian service, he merely repeated his bleating, “It’s my job to love, and God’s job to worry about the consequences.”

Me? I can’t think of a worse way to try to help people.

Doing Good is Not the Same as Feeling Good

It’s not enough to feel good about what we do. We must actually do good. And that demands a keen understanding of what good looks like… that takes a logical mind focused on lots of data, and a careful observation of cause and effect in the history of man. And that shapes wisdom.

And wisdom learns to see the end of a matter from its beginning. Wisdom learns to achieve good results in complex situations even when working through compromised people with corrupt and selfish hearts.

Wisdom knows that it is not just the thought that counts… but the outcome as well.

~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD

[1] Ronald Reagan, press conference, August 12, 1986

[2] C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” 1949; published 1970), p. 292.

[3] T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (1949), Act II.

[4] Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine (2010), p. 283-84; Yang Jisheng, Tombstone (2012), p. 126, 398-401; Chang & Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story, p. 434-35