Friends Betray Friends & Enemies Collaborate

“If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development”.

                     - Aristotle

History offers us the possibility to understand our present; it can also act as a brake on the imagination: “However painful this might be for a historian to write, Haitians would be better served forgetting their past and looking at their current problems afresh”[1]. 

Given the record of failed reforms, this is understandable advice. Economist Vilfredo Pareto puts the problem succinctly: “Assume a collectivity made up of a wolf and a sheep. The happiness of the wolf consists in eating the sheep, that of the sheep is not being eaten. How is the collectivity to be made happy?”

For those who dream of a better Haiti, this is not a useful assumption. To move beyond this impasse, I’m reminded of Hegel’s remarks about the inter-dependencies of master and slave. 

Yes, there are friends and enemies. But when friends betray friends and enemies collaborate, a space opens up for the world to be the kind of place where unlikely things like a free and prosperous Haiti remains possible.

Political instability, random violence and rampant desperation will be countered the same way the colonizer was defeated, through unexpected coalitions. 

So the historian should prescribe more rather than less history!

[1] Philippe Girrard, Haiti : The Tumultuous History – From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation, 15.