Springs, Cables, and the Rebirth of America

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Last year, I came across an essay written by 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca, winner of a Free Press essay contest. She spoke of The taut cable of high expectations and the bad consequences that occur when that cable is slackened.  The essay reminded me in a passage in Antoine de St-Exupery’s novel of ideas, Citadelle, about which I had recently been thinking.

In this book (published in English under the unfortunate title Wisdom of the Sands), the protagonist is the ruler of a fictional desert kingdom.   One night, he visits the prison which holds a man who has been sentenced to death in the morning is being held. He muses that the soul of this man may well contain an inward beauty of some form–perhaps his sentence should be commuted?…but decides otherwise:

For by his death I stiffen springs which must not be permitted to relax.

The particular context in which I had been thinking of this St-Exupery passage was the situation in San Francisco.  Failure to enforce laws–while endlessly searching for ‘inward beauty’ in the perpetrators of a wide range of crimes–had resulted in a relaxation of those springs of which St-Exupery wrote. And not only in San Francisco.

Our society at present suffers from both the loosening of Ruby LaRocca’s ‘taut cables’…which act to pull people upward…and St-Exupery’s ‘springs’…which reduce the incidence of disastrous falls. Over the past several years, both of these (related) failure modes have become increasingly dominant.  I believe that we were on a track to a very dark time…see my post Head-Heart-Stomach…but that we now have a real chance to turn things around.  There really does seem to be a new feeling among a high proportion of Americans and across several dimensions of attitudes and opinions.  Not all Americans, of course…but a lot. And while there are many ways things can go wrong, there is plenty of reason for hope.  We’ll discuss some of the threats and challenges later (soon), but for the moment, let’s briefly relax and breathe a sigh of relief as to what has been–at least for now–avoided.

Nothing is saved forever, as Connie Willis noted in one of her novels, but in America, something very important has been saved, at least for now. It will need to be saved many more times in the future, both the near future and the far future, but for now, thankfulness and celebration are appropriate.

(I discussed the Ruby LaRocca essay and the St-Exupery passage previously, here)

12 thoughts on “Springs, Cables, and the Rebirth of America”

  3. Just lovely.
    We need a muscular return to the rule of law.
    Not just that we keep the law, but that our government can bring itself to enforce the law.
    To a recognition that the lawless have no place in our streets.
    To a message that if the lawless are unwilling to change, strict incarceration awaits.

  5. I was watching the Gutfeld Show on YouTube a few days ago and they had on their daily panel a best-selling-author and Canadian psychologist, Jordan Peterson.

    And he said something interesting about America. That every 20 years “America seems to reinvent itself”.

    I hope this is the beginning of a turn-around.

  7. From afar it seems that those who ‘relax the cables’ do not seem to bear any effect from the repercussions. The retail stores that were stolen from daily with no official restraint beyond not exceeding a set dollar amount bore the brunt, totally as far as I know, of the effect on their ability to stay in business, i.e., their bottom line. Those who decided it was quite sufficient to only prosecute those who stole ‘above the limit’, while ignoring those who stayed a bit under, suffered no consequence. AFAIK.
    In little ways, slowy expanding the limits, the stays that bind us into a somewhat peaceful and harmonious community or society are loosed in multiple venues. The above being but one example. You can add to the cauldron so conveniently placed the changing of standards for LEOs and military, in search of ‘equity’ between people who obviously have differing physical abilities. Pilots, firemen, LEOs, paratroopers, SEALs, you name it have all had their ‘standards’ attacked as sexist or even racial, when in fact the standards were set for very good reasons in most cases. Who suffers? Who gets to feel the backlash from lowered or erased standards? Many can be named depending on the occasion, but those who decided it would be just wonderful to allow the 5’2″ ballerina to be a paratrooper get nothing but praise in return, and possibly re-election to their sinecure to boot.
    The same holds true for civil service employees who make errors in judgment and actual measurable a actions. They receive no feedback and thus continue their inept decision making. They have no skin in the game. A certain Dr F comes to mind as the paramount example.
    This will not change until there is appropriate feedback whether positive or negative, an additional reason for its current existence is that the government employee who mucks things up never feels the effect that someone in private industry ever can avoid – running out of money. The private sector gets feedback every day, sink or swim, do or die, while those really in power over the populace have no such sword of Damocles hanging conveniently above their desk. Perhaps they can be purchased a discount, installation included, if we order enough. Swords, that is.

  8. I don’t have a clue where a teenager that spends 15 hours a day translating Latin is headed, I really hope it’s not toward early burnout. Certainly Ms. LaRocca isn’t doing it because anyone expects it of her. It’s one thing to traverse solid ground using these taught cables for guidance, entirely another to use one to cross the abyss. Barbed wire is also supposed to be stretched tight.

    In terms of stiffening springs, I have to imagine that if Stalin had been asked for justification for any or all of his countless victims, he would have answered along the same lines. Your example doesn’t give the reason for the condemnation or if it’s even in the book I couldn’t find out with a quick search. If one imagines that the prisoner was condemned for speaking against the regime it casts a rather different light then if he had murdered his family. It matters just which springs one would stiffen by quenching them in blood.

  9. MCS…a fair point. The ruler does not give the reason for the condemnation, perhaps he reviewed that in advance, maybe he had to approve the original sentence.

    ‘Citadelle’ was never completed or edited; St-Ex disappeared while on a reconnaissance mission in 1944, flying a P-38 with the American forces.

  11. It strikes me that what Daniel Penny did on the subway is an example of St-Exupery’s “springs.”

    Calibration of the springs is importance, as MCS’s above comments suggest…too tight, you get tyranny and/or rampant Karenism; too loose, you get social chaos.

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