Goldratt claimed that “People are Good” – how can we understand that?

Writing in pain is problematic.  Pain causes negative emotions, which distort the ability to understand the underlying cause-and-effect. 

I’m in pain, so you have to read me carefully, and raise your doubts.

Comment: The article was written before the explosion at the hospital in Gaza. To my mind it doesn’t make any change to the analysis of EVIL.

My great mentor, Dr. Eli Goldratt, defined the pillars behind the Theory of Constraint, and “People Are Good” is one of the pillars.  Collaborating with Dave Updegrove on defining the insights of TOC we have explained the insight this way:

 Can we understand the wicked behavior of Hamas? 

Can we treat them as good people?

Some comments to Goldratt’s pillar:

1. The key message is that it is important to do our best to uncover the assumptions and circumstances that the other party faces, so we’ll be able to understand the behavior and know better what to expect.  This is instead of immediate blaming, which doesn’t help to achieve any value, actually it only causes anger, and in extreme cases even a desire to avenge.
2. There are cases where assuming that “People are Good” is definitely invalid.  The case is when all what the other side wants to achieve is to make us suffer, and achieving that makes them happy.  This is EVIL, and yet we better understand the causes of EVIL, as it’d give us clues on how to protect ourselves. 
3. When one side enjoys the suffering of the other side: there is definitely no win-win.  This is the only case where we should actively look for win-lose! 

Let me clarify some facts regarding the Israeli-Hamas catastrophe:

• Hamas does not look for freedom of occupation!!! 
• They don’t fight for having a Palestinian state to the side of Israel. Their formal vision is to allow some Jews to live in the one Palestine state as only second-class citizens.
  • Their unclear big dream for the future:  be part of a big Arab Islamic state, not just a Palestinian state.
• Unlike the West Bank Territories, Israel doesn’t occupy Gaza.  Israel interferes in Gaza just for keeping the security, not always successfully.

Wars are the ultimate case of lose-lose.  How come we had so many wars?

Most wars start because of one of two core causes:

1. A clash between different religions.
   • For the purpose of this discussion, a basic rooted belief that is so strong that it is accepted as “absolute truth” is treated here the same as a “religion.”  So, extreme racism, including antisemitism, is treated here as a religion.
2. Dispute over land.

Both are hard to settle.  But the first is the one with the potential of becoming truly evil.  The cause behind religious people doing terrible things to other human beings, is that religion gives the impression of perfect knowledge of what is right.

Let me clarify an issue:  when you read the holy scripts of the well-known religions (not racism), the underlining intentions are:  DO GOOD! 

However, it can be also interpreted as allowing to punish non-believers that sin just because they believe in somewhat different ‘truth.’  Of course, the distorted interpretation is done by people that see something to win from the particular interpretation, usually gaining power over other people.

I think that when Goldratt verbalized “Never Say I Know” (another TOC pillar), he meant this: we human beings cannot know the full and absolute truth.  So, no matter what we observe and deduce we should never assume we know, and always should give room for doubt.  When we see in reality a signal that is not in line with our current knowledge, we should be able to consider the possibility that our knowledge has a flaw that we should fix.  Note, having a flaw doesn’t mean that what we had believed and thought is absolutely wrong (!), it should only point to the need to update the knowledge, like some corrections of the key interpretation.

Some more relevant facts.  While Hamas doesn’t look to any peace settlement, the Palestinian Authority announced that they are ready for a certain two countries settlement.  Solving the conflict is HARD, and it is not clear whether the Palestinian Authority has truly accepted the condition of leaving in peace with an Israeli state.  Land issues have a huge impact, and on top of that there are security issues; after all who gives us assurance that such a settlement would hold?  To my own horror, some extreme Jewish Orthodox leaders claim that GOD gave us the land, so we are forbidden to give part of it away to another nation.

A key assumption for me is that it is possible to analyze emotions in a way that would let us predict certain behaviors, and hopefully also lead us to good enough prediction of the consequences.  It seems to me that when our logic leads us to realize the possible consequences of our actions, it might give us the strength to control and limit negative emotions.

The destructive emotion that is natural, but should be strongly restrained is: looking for REVENGE!

Revenge leading lethal disputes to continue on and on, spreading EVIL all around.  While Israel has to make sure it’d never find itself in such a catastrophic event, it should take measures to keep the revenge emotion out of any act!

I wrote in the past about having to learn from surprises: https://elischragenheim.com/2016/11/10/learning-from-surprises-the-need-the-several-obstacles/. 

Israel was vastly surprised twice:

1. A major belief was that Hamas was intimidated by the military power of Israel.  Was that the core flaw behind the inability to predict such an attack?
2. A failure of the Israeli Army to react quickly to such a surprise, is another surprise caused by another flaw in viewing what is required for a fast response.

There is a lot of talk in Israel on the need to make in depth inquiry after neutralizing the immediate threat.  The biggest obstacle for any beneficial learning is to be very careful from blaming those who made the mistake, while others might have probably made exactly the same mistake.  The valuable benefit would be to learn the core flaw(s) in our current thinking, thus improving our capabilities to ensure a better, and much more secure, future.