The Education of an Idealist

I believed that the most important part of decision-making was not the justness of one’s intentions but the effectiveness of one’s actions.

hile I once viewed the conflict in Bosnia as a last gasp of ethnic chauvinism and demagoguery from a bygone era, it now seems more of a harbinger of the way today’s autocrats and opportunists exploit grievances, conjuring up some internal or external threat in order to expand their own power. Those of us who reject these tactics have yet to figure out how to convincingly reach people who are frightened by false claims.

Katty Kay and Claire Shipman, who discussed their book The Confidence Code, which argues that “success correlates more closely with confidence than it does with competence.”

Like so many twenty-first-century challenges, Ebola was not a zero-sum fight in which some countries could “win” by pursuing their interests in a vacuum.

Polling already showed that the more repressive governments became in trying to keep a lid on brewing discontent, the less legitimacy they had with their people.

The rule of law was an essential foundation for peace and economic development, and even though the apprehension of war criminals would not itself usher in lawfulness, it could possibly deter other would-be mass murderers.

He boosted my spirits, telling me that as long as I fixated on getting things done and “not the bullshit,” I would earn a reputation for competence. I took his message to heart, telling my team that our prime asset was our doggedness. “We just have to care more,” I said. Our comparative advantage would be that we would never give up.

acronym GSD—Get Shit Done—used to praise people who were effective in government,

He talked about the range of factors that made the Holocaust possible, including “the willingness of those who are neither perpetrators nor victims to accept the assigned role of bystander, believing . . . the fiction that we do not have a choice.”

As Mother Teresa famously said, “If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”4