When a person says something like:

“We should hurry up and get on with this war, then the share prices will rise and the cost of oil will drop”

they are trying to sound like mature, objective tactical thinkers. They are saying that “we have an objective, a goal, and we should make whatever tough decisions are necessary to achieve the goal”. And what is more, I am a man, my son.

However the reality is that they demonstrate a complete inability to marry the negative consequences of their own actions, with the actions themselves. Like a child, they are unable to say “I made a decision which lead to actions with both positive and negative consequences, I should weigh up both and decide whether my action was successful”. It is the the child who steals from his mothers purse to engorge himself with sweets although his brothers and sisters will starve as a consequence, it is the child who taunts another child in the playground in order to engraciate himself with the bullys, who later bully him, it is the many experiences which teach us that our own actions have repercussions.

That tactical thinking that made us bully our old friends in order to make new friends is something that disappears rather quickly with that first fat lip or thick ear.