I think when I first heard the old saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, I thought it meant the good intentions that you never acted on. “I should call”, and so forth. Now… no. It’s more like the yellow brick road in Oz, leading to a purported paradise that… isn’t. And the good intentions are the ones that you act on because you truly believe they’re good things.

And they lead to Hell. Maybe not for the person who starts it, at least, not at first. Certainly for those who see things differently. As always Pratchett’s been there first. In Eric some of the good intentions are “for the children”, and of course there’s more than one comment from Granny Weatherwax that evil begins and ends with treating people as things.

See… utopian beliefs – all of them – are inherently anti-human. They start from the assumption that the people in them will all want the same things that the utopian wants. It doesn’t matter what spectrum of politics this comes from, either. The basic assumption is the same. I’ve yet to read a utopia – or philosophical tract – that doesn’t make this mistake. People are either part of the utopian vision, or they’re too dumb or too evil to know what’s good and must therefore be excluded (the benign version), educated, or eliminated. For the greater good, of course. It’s all and always for the higher good – which is why no matter what it’s selling it’s another gold brick on that highway to Hell. There’s a reason so many religions include the notion of spiritual cleansing to remove the evils of human life: without it it wouldn’t take very long for any paradise to turn into just another version of the world we live in, or worse. Human nature always wins that battle unless you take the humanness (and the nature) out and leave a perfect critter that’s not capable of any of our sins (many of which are also virtues. It’s all in how, when and why they’re used).

Communism would work perfectly if we were all angels. So would Randian principles. Or Plato’s Republic. The thing is, we’re not angels. We’re wired to place more value on something we work for than on something that costs us nothing, and we’re wired to judge how well we’re doing at anything on what we see of the people around us. Given that, no matter what the perfect society is, it’s going to fail – and the failure will be ugly. Evil, in fact. This is why the only societies that have managed to last any length of time (measured in centuries) without slaughtering either their own misfits or an external enemy (real or imagined, it doesn’t matter) have been… oh wait. There haven’t been any. The more open societies that tried to minimize control tended to do better on the “not killing off their misfits” front, until someone else came and destroyed them, or they got themselves into a muddle of self-doubt and started lurching erratically in whatever direction the leaders currently favored.

One of the truly interesting things about all this is that businesses tend to be something of a microcosm of this, and the publishing industry is showing all the signs of what happens when the yellow brick road gets to the Emerald City and the paint starts flaking off, and gosh, isn’t’ it warm in here? Maybe I should take these green glasses off and look behind that curtain over there… In short, “well-intentioned” doesn’t count diddly when it comes down to the final play. If you meant well and it went horribly wrong and you didn’t acknowledge your mistake and try to make amends for the damage you did, well, you still killed all those people and ruined all those careers, and their suffering is on your hands. It’s part of what Sarah said yesterday: what you’ve got, you keep. The bad as well as the good.

So, as one of those who got kicked off the yellow brick road by the gatekeepers, I’m going to find my own path, and own whatever I do, good or bad. All I can promise along the way is that I’ll do the best I can and when I get it wrong, I’ll try to fix it. That’s ultimately all anyone can do – and all they should ever try to do. Anything more leads straight back to that road and its seductive whispers of all the good you can do with all that power.