Native Americans have a saying that means something akin to “when a horse is dead it’s time to dismount”. Einstein repeated the same sort of sentiment when he suggested that a sign of stupidity, real stupidity, was to repeat what has many times not worked, what in fact has never worked, yet to hope for a different result.
The meaning is simple, when a venture is beyond saving, or a procedure does not make an outcome better, when direction is demonstrably wrong, when everyone else has already tried the same thing and failed, then to add only more effort to it is futile. This description of a dead horse scenario is often applied to describe the stupid efforts in business and social matters in concern of the actions of executives and politicians, where despite all the evidence showing that the only sane course of action is to admit defeat, or at least change direction dramatically, their chosen approach is often to develop strategies that apply to the “dead horse” situation.
To buy the horse a new saddle is stupid, to change its food is stupid, to groom it is stupid. The horse is dead, no matter what way the horse is subsequently treated following its death, it will not trot nor gallop again. We find ourselves at this point with capitalism, where it has had its gallop and now it is dead. I say that because what has to be, and is being, done now can only be described as enforced expenditure, because it is not capitalism that we are living in in these times. The world has harvested natural resources to produce goods that people need and desire so as to make their lives better, that was capitalism. Efficient, productive, demonstrably accelerating the people into the future regardless of if they wanted to be in it or not. It was a somewhat positive system with some horrible baggage that some would argue was not necessary; exploitation, land appropriation, war, but it got man to the moon and it invented the electric toothbrush.
We all do this to some degree though, pursue less than reasonable strategies when we know in our rational mind that we are dealing with a dead horse, and we do it because we just don’t want the horse to be dead. That doesn’t make it not dead though, and it doesn’t mean we don’t know it is dead. When we hear a politician bloviating the merits of cracking down on crime, by increasing the budget of the courts, or talking about the record funding channelled through the NHS toward their chums that provide private services, we know what we are seeing is the dead horse. These people know this strategy will fail overall, but that is unimportant because they will personally succeed.
I was married once, after a couple of relatively sedate years my marriage became a dead horse, I went out to work for this dead horse, I paid bills for it, I bought this dead horse holidays, I bought it a house and a new car, I put the dead horse at the forefront of everything I did. The dead horse was the most important thing in my life for another four years after it was truly dead. I almost gave the last shred of my sanity to this dead horse, then one day I decided to acknowledge that it was in fact dead, by then though it was far too late to do anything meaningful about it other than walk off. A dead horse had taken years and money I’d never ever get back. Like the Native American I’m now up on a new horse, ever moving forward, sometimes at a trot, sometimes at a gallop.
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