Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

When I was still quite a young man I looked out at the world as it was and I said “No.  We can do better.”

My first attempts at changing things were quite feeble.  I gave to what seemed to be worthy charities and set up foundations.  I spoke publicly about the growing environmental and social crises.  I became politically more active.  Years went by, wasted years, while I realised that my foundations and charitable giving was about as useful as a thimble would be in emptying out the ocean, and my political activities were if anything even less impactful.

I realised I was going about this from a entirely the wrong angle.  I had assumed, as a businessman, that the people who were involved in charity and politics knew what they were doing.  In retrospect that assumption seems laughable, but hindsight of course is 20/20.

In business if you find yourself facing a barrier there is no virtue in reforming the system to make it easier for others to overcome the same barrier.  You don’t sponsor anti-corruption measures in the Congo, you pay your bribes and make your killing.  If you can sponsor a law that will favor your industry at the expense of the taxpayers, you do it without hesitation.  The political organizations I had become associated with were either ruthlessly focused on a very narrow objective, as a business would be, without any view of the larger picture or else they were concerned with sweeping reforms to make the system as a whole work better.  Neither of these models seemed to me to be capable of producing the results I was after.

This was when I quietly began to pull back from my charitable and political causes and refocus myself on my business interests.  I began to pull together a team that could study the ways in which we could use the power of the company and my own wealth to extend my influence and shape the trends of the nation and the world to conform better with my personal vision.  The only guidlines that I gave them were that we must be quiet about our activities and we must be ruthless in pursuit of our aims.  The world was at stake and it deserved no less than our most concerted efforts.