Once upon a time Britain ruled over India. It was a fantastic time in history. Not for the Indians of course, but I’ve been reliably informed that the British quite enjoyed it. They did however have one problem, the local cobra population was quite large.
The British decided to offer a bounty for cobra corpses. This bounty was promising enough that the savvy locals set up cobra breeding businesses to sell dead snakes to the British. Upon discovering that they were bankrolling legless lizard orgies, the British ended the bounty. Rather than feed the snakes out of their own pocket, the penniless cobra breeders dumped their slivery stock.
The end result of all this was a huge increase in the Indian cobra population and thus the Cobra Effect was born!
Since then we have seen countless examples of intentions leading to opposite results. For one of the worst offenders try:
Zahir Tries to Turn Afghanistan Into America
King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan felt his country was lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of wealth and liberty. In 1946 he decided to spend his countries accumulated money reserves on a dam for the Helmand River. He hoped to modernise the area and make it a “Little America” in Afghanistan. Zahir paid for the American company, Morrison Knudsen, to complete the work.
President Truman, driven by the fear of spreading communism, started investing in development projects in poorer countries. Money flooded into Zahir’s project. Dams and canals started popping up throughout the Helmand province.
The 1950s and 1960s marked an upturn in Afghanistan fortunes. King Zahir created an Afghan constitution and founded a parliament with democratic elections. Zahir and the new Prime Minister Daoud gave women the right to education and allowed them to participate in politics.
Prime Minister Daoud was Pashtun and quite insistent that the new “Little America” be filled with his fellows. The Americans assisted in moving the scattered nomadic Pashtun tribes to their new peaceful future.
Can you feel the cobra’s grip tightening? Zahir didn’t.
Whilst the dams increased arable land, salt started to rise to the surface limiting the foods that could be sold there. Gone were the orchards and vineyards, now all they could grow was wheat. That wouldn’t have been terrible if the wheat did grow…but it didn’t. In 1969 a massive drought led to crop failure and starvation.
Prime Minister Daoud betrayed Zahir, seizing control of Afghanistan. In response to the destabilisation, the Americans left. The Pashtun tribes unified and became known as the Taliban. The only thing that was able to survive the hot dry land in the Helmand region was the poppy plant. Afghanistan is now the global leader in the heroin trade.
Zahir set out to make Afghanistan a prosperous, more egalitarian country and in doing so he created disaster.
You don’t need as lofty ambitions like the Shah to court disaster…
Daryl Tries to Save Children from Drugs
During the 1980’s, LAPD chief Daryl Gates founded the D.A.R.E programme with the help of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Its aim was to educate youths on the dangers of substance abuse in attempts to keep them on the straight and narrow.
The programme quickly gained popularity amongst students, parents and perhaps most importantly, politicians. Buoyed on by Nancy Reagan’s similarly simplistic “Just say no” campaign, D.A.R.E. spread across America eating up millions of dollars’ worth of funding.
A primary tool of the D.A.R.E. campaign was exaggerating the dangers of some drugs to scare the listeners. Fear is an incredibly successful tactic when used on adults but not so successful with risk loving teenagers. Worse still, if those teens catch you out on a lie, then it discredits all of the information you provide.
A study on the long term effectiveness of the programme in Houston Texas showed a “29% increase in drug usage and a 34% increase in tobacco usage among students participating in DARE”.
Scientists tell you that bumblebees can’t fly, but we know better.
D.A.R.E. Leaderships response to study.
I should point out that the scientists know that bees can fly.
But don’t be mistake in thinking in thinking that statistics will save you from the Cobra…
Tony Tries to Avoid Ideology
Tony Blair’s Labour government pulled in voters from both sides of the economic divide. He sold them on a neo-liberal future where public sector reforms would be driven by a scientific process, not an ideology.
“Modernising government is a vital part of our programme of renewal for Britain. The old arguments about government are now outdated; big government against small government, interventionism against laissez-faire. The new issues are the right issues: modernising government, better government, getting government right.”
Foreword to “Modernising Government” Written by Tony Blair (March 1999)
To do this he proposed “evidence-based policy”. This involved measuring the output of government reforms.
Evidence-based policy is brilliant when your policies actually work. The problems arise when politicians make errors. Do you allow someone in your political party to be publically humiliated or do you put pressure on civil servants to fudge that stats?
Soon the stench of incompetence driven corruption filled the air. Evidence-based policy had become Policy-based evidence. Public support in evidence-based governance eroded to the point where no one trusts statistics anymore and the only way you can gain a majority in government is to rely on the traditional ideologies. The very thing Tony Blair wished to drive into the past.
In Summary
Intentions are almost always lost to reality. There are good things that can be achieved by individuals and collectives but to achieve them we must understand that everything we do could make the world worse.
The only way to overcome this is to look at all the possible outcomes and grapple with the undulating masses of potential pitfalls lest they leave us all strangled in the coils of a cobra.