12/07/10

Chris, Vin and the consultant's paradox

“Only the farmers have won. They remain forever. They are like the land itself.
You helped rid them of Calvera, the way a strong wind helps rid them of locusts.
You’re like the wind, blowing over the land - and passing on.”

Have you watched The Magnificent Seven recently?

I did, late on Friday, for the first time since I was a teenager.

Maybe it was because it was a Friday, and my head was still full of work.
But this time I saw it less as a western remake of a Japanese classic, and more as an allegory of the consultant’s essential paradox.

(I’m not saying it was written to be that - just that was how I saw it…)

The plot surrounds a Mexican farming village which, sick of having its hard-grown crops regularly appropriated by a gang of bandits, employs the services of seven hired guns to drive them away.

But the story is about how these supposedly hard-bitten mercenaries end up going emotionally native, raising their commitment to the defence of the village well beyond the level of the merely professional.

This baffles both the bandit leader (“You came back - for a place like this. Why? A man like you. Why?”) and ultimately the surviving guns themselves, who upon departure muse ruefully on how, yet again, the clients have ended up getting so much more gain from the pain than they did (“Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.”)

I hear you brother.

For the inevitable paradox of the hired gun is that to effectively be one, you can’t actually care - but unless you do actually care, you can’t be an effective one.

If you don’t put your heart as well as your talents into the mission, the mission won’t be successful.

But if you do, then you’re a fool, because it’s never actually your mission.

Ay caramba…

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