An essay about a question people don’t like being asked

I laughed in the wrong place again.

Somebody said we have to do something for the children. I asked why. The room went cold while everybody there decided what kind of man I was.

Nobody argued with the question. There was nothing to argue with. That’s the part that took me years to notice. I hadn’t given an answer. I’d asked for one. That was the offense.

The answer usually comes back like this: because they’re children, and they have to be protected.

Which is the same sentence again, said harder. So I ask again. Why?

Here’s where people split.

Some go down. They think about it and land on something they’ll stand behind. Because I don’t want a kid to go hungry, and I’ll pay for that. That’s an answer. It has a price on it and a name attached. I’ve got nothing left to ask a man who says it. Those conversations are fine, and nobody remembers them.

The rest go up. Louder, not deeper.

That difference matters more than it looks. A belief can be explained. A badge only has to be worn. Asking a man to explain his badge isn’t disagreeing with him, but it feels like an attack, because you’ve asked him to say what he actually thinks and he isn’t sure.

I should be honest about which thing I’m doing.

Usually it’s a favor. Most of the time the man saying it has never thought about it. He isn’t telling me what he thinks. He’s repeating something he heard, and he’s never taken it apart to see whether it holds. The question doesn’t ask him to defend it. It asks him to look at it. Given a minute, most people do fine. Nobody ever gave them the minute.

Sometimes it isn’t a favor. Sometimes a man is telling me at length how much good he’s doing, and the question is aimed right where it looks aimed. I don’t apologize for those. The good isn’t the problem. The counting is. Nobody counts out loud unless he expects to get paid for it.

The same ladder holds up the other one. We have to help these poor people — poor meaning whatever it needs to mean, and usually not money.

Why?

They need help.

All right. How are you helping?

I pay my taxes.

He says it without embarrassment, because he doesn’t feel any. He means it. That’s the part worth sitting with. He isn’t lying to me.

But listen to what he said. He didn’t say he helped. He said he complied. And complying is the one thing on the list that took no good intentions at all. The money left whether he meant it or not. It would have left if he’d been asleep, or against it, or dead that month.

Money went out because the law said so. Credit came back because he’s a good man.

Somebody made money on that trade.

Look at the three answers in order. First, something ought to be done. Second, the same thing, louder. Third, the doing has been handed off completely, and what’s left in his hand is a receipt — for a payment he couldn’t refuse, toward a result he can’t name. Somebody told him it was a medal.

He’s wearing it. He’s proud of it. Say otherwise and you get the look.

Now ask what would have to happen for it to be over. There’s no answer. Not a bad answer — none. The question doesn’t make sense to him.

That isn’t an accident. It’s in the design, and it starts with who gets picked as the beneficiary. Children. The poor. The vulnerable. The community. Future generations. Every one of them is somebody who can’t come back later and say thanks, we’re fine now, you can stop. Somebody who could say that could also refuse to say it. No organization goes looking for proof it should shut down.

So the bill can never be marked paid. There’s nobody who can sign the receipt.

That leaves the results, where there are any. And here it does something nothing else does.

When it doesn’t work, the answer is never stop. The answer is not enough yet. The failure gets used as the reason to do more of it.

Try that in a business and you’re broke. Try it in a lab and you’re fired. Do it with good intentions and it’s called commitment.

That’s why the intentions matter, and not for the reason people think. Good intentions don’t excuse the harm. They stop anybody from fixing it. A man who took your money to help you needs the help to have worked. When it didn’t, he can’t say so, because saying so makes him a man who did harm. So he doesn’t say it. He asks for more.

It would be better if he were lying.

A crook wants your wallet. He takes it, he’s done, and he goes to dinner. He’s almost polite about it — he has a stopping point and he keeps to it. You can pay him off, predict him, arrest him, or outlast him. All four are ways out, and all four are available to you.

None of them work on a good man. You can’t argue him out of a position he got to by being good, because winning the argument means turning him into somebody worse. He won’t do it. Neither would you.

C. S. Lewis said this in 1949, writing about people who wanted to cure criminals instead of punish them. The worst tyranny, he said, is “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims.” A greedy man gets full and stops. A man fixing you never does. You’re the project, and the project is never finished.

None of that makes the guy at dinner a villain. He got handed a receipt, somebody told him it was a medal, and he believed them. That isn’t stupidity. That’s what a decent person looks like inside a system built by people who were counting on it.

So the question isn’t whether we should help. Sometimes we should. And when we should, somebody can say so out loud, with a number attached and their name on it.

The question is what would make them stop.

Ask it. If there’s an answer, it’s a program, and grown people can argue about programs. If there’s no answer — if asking sounds like an attack — it isn’t a program.

It’s just the weather now.

—L. Charles Silva is the author of Memory Laundering, in which the paperwork is also spotless.