Designations

Your Failure Has No Redemption

Failure stalks me. It is an untiring adversary. A dark miasma which slips through the calm veil of an evening to work its way under my skin, to gnaw past muscle and fat and squirm its way into my bowels. Perhaps you know this feeling too. Perhaps we fight the same anxious beast. Perhaps. But if only we were to listen to the constant refrain of businessman and charlatans, to embrace their siren song of success then we would see, at last, that failure is but a necessary stepping stone on the path to righteousness. A right of passage for the worthy. A emblem of our struggle to wear triumphantly upon our breast as we absorb the acclaim of the masses, or at the very least the ‘likes’ of our erstwhile friends.

Such are the bleak thoughts that assail me this morning.

And assail me they have, like the headlines that cram their way onto every pixel of my screen, a surreal cacophony of pain and anguish, hate and indifference. The people of the US are staging a revolt, fueled by generations of injustice, banging against the bars of their cage, screaming to be heard against the din of helicopters, teargas and grenades, and though I live thousands of kilometres from the epicentre of these stories, safe in the peaceful suburbs of this somnambulant city, still it cuts me to the quick.

As I watch the carnage unfold, I hear a shrill, looping refrain:

Move fast and break things.

This aphorism, emerging with an amoral enthusiasm from the bowels of Facebook in the latter part of the 2000’s was a clarion call to not only embrace failure, but to tease it into being. To purposely create a flavour of creative chaos in which the consequences of failure were less important than the occasional serendipitous side effect. Let us not concern ourselves with the uncomfortable truth that those ‘things’ which might get broken were usually humans, because as Neil Gaiman once wrote, ‘[you] can’t make an omelette without killing a few people.’

In coining this company motto, Mark Zuckerberg (rather than Gaiman) was leaning heavily on the received wisdom of decades of business self-help books which implore the reader in no uncertain terms to never let a failure stand in their way, because within each failure is the germ of our eventual success, a lesson we can employ in our climb to the top, a nuggety anecdote to laugh about one day as we quaff single malts with our equally vainglorious cronies.

This advice sensibly downplays the consequences of failure lest our fragile egos be forever dented and never allow us to try again. This is certainly a noble thought. The business world, of which the US president in 2020 proudly claims membership, takes this idea ad extremis, coddling its sensitive CEOs with saccharine truisms about the improving nature of such struggle, salving the hurt with visions of a mystical redemption that lies just beyond the next failure. But those of us, like Zuckerberg, who inhabit the bleeding edge have behaved the worst; collectively embracing the idea that to be truly successful in the digital age we must constantly usher failure into being.

Know this: entrepreneurs operate in a world in which the consequences of their failures are forgiven in advance.

Life, however, is neither a novel nor an obituary. There is no narrator to underscore the redemption inherent in failure. Let us be absolutely clear that the summary execution of George Floyd for no other real reason than the colour of his skin is a deep and horrible injustice, and as one man in a vast multitude of souls who have suffered similarly, this failure cannot be redeemed. A human life is not a stepping stone to success. We should have no further need of death to learn that a black life matters.

I live in a mostly prosperous and peaceful nation,a long way from Minneapolis. Aotearoa New Zealand is a young democratic country with a puppy-like enthusiasm for international attention. We are not without our problems, not free of racism and injustice, not without our very own violent history of oppression, and not immune either to the consequences of American failure.

I consider, for a moment, our response to the pandemic. It is but a ghost here now, a vague and unsettling feeling that descends on us when we are outside the bubble of our immediate families, the prickling sensation on our neck as we stand in a supermarket line. In the Americas, both north and south, it is corporeal still, ripping through communities with vicious abandon and leaving thousands dead in its wake.

Throughout this tragedy, moving fast and breaking things in a manner that would make any silicon-valley startup proud, the President has ushered in a new era of failure. With a stern but somewhat befuddled mien, he bears witness to a broken nation. The civil unrest unfolds on my screen with dystopian clarity, the bright flames of Minneapolis searing themselves into my imagination and calling to mind the brutal prescience of Yeats in his poem ‘The Second Coming’:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I pause to catch my breath and remember where I am. I stare out of my window into the garden, and beyond that to the pleasant street on which I live. There are no burning cars. No one standing on the roof of the bus stop with their fist raised in the air while teargas swirls around the streetlamp. I feel a fraud to concern myself with such things. I walk outside for a while, breath in the cool June air. I tickle my dog behind the ears. I recall that I, too, am in business, making and breaking things out of code like some errant potter that is never satisfied with his work. What sort of hypocrite am I to throw such terrible accusations across the vast ocean when I live here in such comfort? Why this anxiety, given the privilege I enjoy?

Because anxiety is failure’s herald.

It warns us when a situation is spiraling beyond our control, whether real or imagined, a spur to goad us into action so that we might avoid the irredeemable. I fear that in this small corner of the globe we might learn the wrong lessons from these events; that we might bolster our police with more firepower and body armour, and more licence to use force instead of decency; that the demonisation of the poor might continue unababted, even while the most vulnerable suffer. Worse yet, I fear we might return to normal, a normal that served many of us — especially those with brown skin — very poorly.

Failure is not a trinket to be worn by the rich and powerful, like some gaudy medal of dubious authenticity, fodder for some self-aggrandising anecdote about struggle and sacrifice. When those who govern have been inoculated against failure, when they feel there will be no consequences for their ineptitude, then it is us, the governed who must be afraid.