I grew up an athlete, I played on all kinds of teams and in
all kinds of sports… In high school, I was identified
as a ‘‘jock’’ and I would have self-identified as such…
and if there is one thing that is true in sports, that
one suffers failure far more than success…
and that is true within life… human beings fail far
more than they succeed… look at every single success
story written and it is paved with failure, a whole lot of
failure… for example, Abe Lincoln… his life story is one
of failure… before he became president, he was an Illinois state
legislator and then spent 4 terms as a congressman from Illinois…
but both before and after he lost several elections…
he failed as an owner of a general store that sold booze,
he was a fairly good lawyer, but of course lost cases…
his career was filled with both success and failure,
as is the case with everyone who has ever succeeded…
The poster child for one who has had both success and failure
has been Thomas Edison, who had some great success and some
great failures… and he spent years working at both…
it is not the success or failure that is important, it is
what happens afterwards that defines a person… Edison
never gave up, and neither did Lincoln… Gandhi failed
as did MLK, as did every single person who has ever lived…
and we can take this example of knowing that failure is not
just possible but is most likely the outcome of most of our actions…
we have to take the driver’s test more than once, we have failed
at test in school and had to take over, we failed in job after job…
that is the human experience… I have been fired from more jobs
than I can count… so the fuck what? The important part of failure
is that we learn far more from failure than we do from success…
Perhaps that is why I am so wise? Perhaps…
and we understand that not only do people fail, but events can fail,
as for example, the French Revolution can be counted as a failure,
but it managed to change the world… we can also count political
events, such as the conditions that created the French Revolution
or the Russian Revolution, as failures of state… the English
Revolution can be seen as an attempt to correct a mistake…
and the return of the monarch can also be seen as a correction
to that correction… recall that the first attempt at a
American constitution failed… Our current constitution
is the second attempt… the first attempt was called the
''Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union"…
and it lasted for 1781 to 1789…
and we learned from that first failure…as we should have…
and we come to another misidentification… which is the idea
that because the Russia revolution, communism failed, that
communism is a failure… it is only a failure if we give up on it…
the fact is that a political system that fails is not a total and
complete failure never to be tried again… if Lincoln had done
that or if Edison had done that, we never would have heard
about them… but they never stopped trying…
so, communism is not a failure having failed once, or even
twice… the history of the light bulb for example says that it
took over 1,000 attempts to create a successful light bulb…
what if Edison gave up after 10 or a 100 attempts?
we must retry and retry and retry again communism until
it works…
once Edison, in response to a question said,
‘‘I have not failed 10,000 times, I’ve successfully found
10,000 ways that will not work’’…
we can see that democracy can fail, as IQ45 is actively trying
to destroy democracy, but that doesn’t mean that democracy is
a failure and shouldn’t be repeated again… no, a thousand times, no…
we treat systems failure as just an example of what not to do,
and then repeat the experiment and try to do it right this time…
we repeat the experiment of communism again, and try not
to make the same mistakes this time…
failure is not the end, but the beginning of the experiment…
let us learn and then try again, and again and again…
a million times if need be…
Kropotkin