Triaging your principles

Some people can’t be saved, save the ones who can. That is the idea behind triage, the practice of sorting wounded or injured people to order them for treatment, but also to order them for non-treatment because in a crisis, when time and doctors and supplies are in short supply, trying in vain to save the unsavable might cost otherwise savable lives.

We accrete principles, piling belief upon belief, creating patterns, and then a system, and then a worldview, and then a lens that bends reality to forms that we know so that we can make sense of the nonsensical. There is no escaping this mechanism, and that lends to a certain aire of inevitability but, while the machine may be standard, the principles themselves are always optional. And so we sort, we classify, we taxonify. And we triage, because in a crisis, when time and nobility and ideals are in short supply, trying in vain to save the unsavable might cost otherwise savable principles.

This is the dichotomy of nobility – that which is worthy of self-sacrifice can be destroyed by too much self-sacrifice, amounting to a field of noble corpses and a battle lost for want of ordered tenets. When we are not tested, this dichotomy can be obscured behind the accumulated abundance of principles that are the luxury of peace and this feels sustainable until crisis show it is not. This accumulation isn’t a weakness, but paralysis in the face of crisis is. So we must sort in luxury that we may choose in crisis.

And we ought to understand leadership as the effectiveness of sorting in luxury, because triage is not leadership, triage happens when leaders create clarity so that everyone is able to be noble and idealistic when the fire comes and their self-sacrifice is earned by those who remain because it was not in vain, because we chose our principles well, because the principles that were saved are the principles that matter.


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