The Crushing Weight of a Decision
Stretched across time
When you hang around creative geniuses, you never know what insight will be thrown at you.
Walking along Ngong Road with one of the leading violinists in the region, she hinted at the lives one has to crush to get insanely rich. Billionaire rich. She explained:
How many lives have to be destroyed for them to make those billions? Think about it.
And I did. She did have a point. A week later, I posed the same question to other friends and they resonated with her argument. All the while, at the back of my mind, I thought about the unaccounted weight of a decision.
For the longest time, Google’s tagline was ‘Don’t be evil’. I liked this more than their current one — ‘Do the right thing’. How do you know you’ve done the right thing?
The right thing for a member of a crime syndicate is a heinous act, likely to cause misery and destruction. For a power-hungry cartel, it is to seize an opportunity to rise through the ranks in a city or country controlled by goons. For the son, it could be to prevent their parents from ever being caught, vividly seen in Ozark.
Because the right thing is hinged on the person making it, and the context they are in, the weight of a decision bears multidimensional scales.
Crushing decisions
Optimus Prime sent a signal for all Autobots to assemble.
Agents of Unicron were sent to collect a key that would lead to Earth’s destruction. Unicron was a planet-feeding machine. To achieve its cosmic satisfaction, it could infect a transformer with its dark intentions, as it did with Scourge. Optimus could not allow that to happen, because it would also signal the loss of their planet, far from Earth. They had to stop Unicron.
The usual sidekick, Bumble Bee, rode with him. Neither of the two warring teams knew that the key was split into two. This hidden detail allowed the team to fight like their lives depended on it. And their lives did depend on it, up until Scourge grabbed Bumble Bee, drove a blade through him, and took away his spark.
There has never been a sadder moment in the entire Transformers series than that one. How can the movie proceed without Bee? True, Optimus is a vital beacon of hope, but Bee is the life force of the team. He was also Optimus’ oldest friend.
The weight of the loss was heavy on Optimus. He had led him straight to death. It tore him inside. On the other hand, he still needed to secure the other half of the key to prevent their unification.
Such is the weight of a decision.
It is no different from the losses we see in the ICU. Attempts to resuscitate a patient can end in futility. The team then calls the time of death. They deglove, debrief briefly, and proceed to care for the other patients whose lives are still hanging in the balance. The loss of one life shouldn’t hinder us from taking care of the others.
But it can affect a doctor’s or a nurse’s care.
Or a family loss. The Wallace family was distraught when their father, Finn Wallace, was murdered by a bullet through the head. Efforts to find the killer disrupted the regular businesses the gangs had always relied on. The weight of such a loss tips decision-making. It’s hard to let business continue as usual when your father is gone. You’d need nerves of steel.
Google’s tagline prompts the question — what is the right thing to do in such situations?
While these decisions are difficult, others seem rather simple at first sight. These are the hidden decisions. The weight follows later, long after the damage has been done.
Cryptic decisions
Consider the moment when the decision was made to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The order was given miles away from the targeted cities. The impact of such a decision does not weigh as heavily on the commander-in-chief as that of the pilot who had to drop the bomb.
The moment it landed on the city, in a matter of seconds the bomb created a blast radius hotter than the surface of the sun. The one who made the decision, however, was miles away, far from the crater the bomb had created inside Japan. Relegating responsibility to other people reduces the weight of decision-making.
What about an intervention such as liposuction? This is a novel technique never before invented in the history of life. The effects of liposuction can be marred by the need for the subjects to hide some ugly outcomes while casting more light on fruitful ones for obvious reasons. Nobody wants to feel like they have made the wrong decision.
But before the procedure is done, one has to sign a consent form. The document details that one is of sound mind when signing it, and has been made aware of the potential outcomes of the procedure. The weight of the decision then falls off from the doctor onto the patient. This is another form of hidden decision, where the burden of the intervenor is now placed on the patient. The health practitioner then makes their money.
The weight of such decision-making is cryptic since a good practitioner will hope the outcome is good and long-lasting. This is a weight they shoulder with them. The one who just wants to make money wouldn’t care less.
The consent form was signed. Whatever happens to the patient thereafter is up to them. These are the patients who have no idea of the impact of such decisions.
Now think about large companies like Google and Tesla. The decision-making at the top has effects rippling down to the smallest agent at the bottom. The impact one reads inside the boardroom differs from how it’s felt inside the corridors of a station in a far-off state or country.
The board members could endorse it, but it could be deleterious to the consumers. Pregnant mothers who took thalidomide in the 1950s had babies with stumps. The impact of such a decision, to take the medication to prevent nausea in pregnant ladies was endorsed inside a room. The decision to stop it as a hazardous drug for pregnant ladies took over 10 years.
In the meantime, someone made billions. Such examples ran through my mind as my friend told me about what it takes to make large sums of money.
It’s difficult to know if what you’re doing is the right thing when the impact is spread out. When your company grows to a global scale, your conscious scope of awareness reduces much faster than if you were talking with your partner. It’s inevitable. Dunbar numbers highlight something similar.
And once the crushing weight of your decision hits, the impact can be shattering.
I doubt there can ever be a rock lead singer as emotionally in touch with the song as Chester Bennington. Bless his soul. In every Linkin Park sensation, the emotion is heavy because of the icing on the cake that Chester brought to the group. In one of my favourites, he sings:
In every loss, in every lie
In every truth that you’d deny
And each regret, and each goodbye
Was a mistake too great to hide
Four lines to show how one can easily dismiss an action but run the risk of having it bite you right in your…
Do we still want to make a truckload of money? Of course. But are we ready to bear the weight of the decisions at the present and in the future when they circle back?
What I’m trying to say is…
A presidential act can have a significant impact long after the president leaves office.
It can also be profoundly acute, like the Kenyan Finance Bill, 2024, or have its shadow lurk into the future, like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Decision-making for oneself versus other individuals, countries, or companies has multiple ways in which the impact can be felt. Rational decision-making should focus on the structure of the process and not the outcome, yet the outcome is the weight that will in turn affect us.
Rationally or irrationally, we can never run away from it.
We have to live with it.
You can’t cross that divide.
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube