“Of mice and men”
The title, “Of Mice and Men” is a line in a poem by Scottish poet Robert Burns and the whole line goes: “The best laid plans of mice and men often goes awry.” In 1937, American author John Steinbeck wrote a best-selling novel with the above title. It was made into a movie, which I did not see because it was before my time, but I must have read the book in my freshman English class in UP as the title stuck in my head and I remember the general plot of the story.
It is about two migrant field workers in California during the Great Depression in the 1920s who dreamed and made great plans of eventually buying and owning their own farm, and living off the bounty of the land. The kept on retelling their dream and plan that it had become so real to them, and even had another co-worker chipping in his life savings to join their dream. But a number of events thwarted their plans and in the end one of the men killed the other, and their plans and their dreams went awry.
The Philippine political season has started and I can imagine the plans and dreams of politicians that are now coming to fruition. The most recent example is the political plans of former presidential spokesman Roque. From an activist, environmentalist professor/lawyer, partylist Congressman, then a presidential spokesman was a long and circuitous journey that meant denying and backtracking from his previous beliefs and convictions.
I am quite sure he had planned well and dreamed of the outcome of becoming a senator. The events in the last few weeks, his ouster from his job, his loss of influence, his political drift from partylist candidate to a reluctant senatorial candidate were likely not part of the plan. Still, this is not the end of his plan as he could have a Plan B, which will bring him back to the expected outcome of his plans.
But at the moment, it fits the truism that no matter how well you plan and how much resources you have, there is no assurance that you will achieve what you want.
Many years ago in a course in computer programming we had to flowchart step-by-step the program commands. And in the flowchart, there are decision junctions where the flowchart would move to a different direction if the decision was “Yes” or No”. In strategic planning classes, we were also making “decision trees” where we were confronted with two or three options.
These shows that in planning, there is always a need for a Plan B, a Plan C, or a Plan D. Multiple options and their derivative conclusions have to be explored. The advent of fast computers has actually made possible the projection of the consequences of the different options, but you have to have very realistic assumptions for the results to make sense, because there is always the “law of the unintended consequences” which are failures to assume human reactions.
In stock market parlance, this is the “Random Walk Hypothesis” which states that previous events are not good predictors of future events, which means future events are a toss of the dice.
Not totally sold on the everything happening by chance, I look at the moral dimensions of planning and outcomes. Going back into history and looking at where the world is now, it seems to me justice is a major factor. In most instances, injustice lost and justice won, the Golden Rule which is in all religions of the world prevailed. There must be a GOD.
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