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Siege

...by James Mason

Two Rules

Since having gone the rounds myself on more than just a few occasions, it keeps coming back to me more and more these days that most of the travails encountered in day-to-day life can be bound up in two areas and generally dispensed with in two very basic rules: Number One, CUT YOUR LOSSES; Number Two, NEVER MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE TWICE.

I was formally introduced to "Rule #2" after I had joined the staff of what was then the national headquarters of the Party. It was told to me by one of the oldtimers who was shrewd enough even then to make his career behind-the-scenes where the turn-over and the fatalities weren't so rife. To the sixteen-year old I was at the time, that simple statement illuminated an entire universe of clear thinking in the area of just plainly playing things smart and keeping control of yourself.

What I have termed "Rule #1" I arrived at independently some years afterward. It is because you're going to make mistakes eventually– everyone does, even the best– and if you're unable to master and overcome these initial errors, you won't survive to go on with the learning and maturing process. In other words, you're way ahead of the game if the mistake you commit the first time doesn't do you in.

"Rule #2" takes a backseat because it is only a matter of the intelligent learning process. However, it is to be emphasized due to an entire world full of people who never catch on to it. They just keep sticking their hand back into the fire. The trick is, of course, being able to know when one is confronted with a problem, the dynamics of which he has faced before as circumstances may be entirely changed. If there is another trick to this, then it has to be the ability to know that a mistake was made the first time around and precisely what that mistake was. In connection with this one, that same old-timer in the 1960's told me this: "The first time, it's the other guy's fault. The second time, it's YOUR fault."

Don't be found at fault.

"Cutting Your Losses" has to assume first priority because it involves applying acquired skills. Skills, by the way, which the timid and reserved never get the chance to develop. So you're caught right in the middle of a big one, with your hand in the cookie jar, so to speak. As I've said before in SIEGE, few things in life are as clear-cut as the cookie jar and you normally will have room to maneuver if you don't immediately make a bad, or potentially bad situation, into a worse one.

Avoid the human/animalistic tendencies to cop out or cave in, or, on the opposite side, to explode and do the inappropriate thing. Small concessions– if made intelligently– can sometimes be the only way of staving off major disaster.

In many ways, a lot hangs on what you DON'T say or do.

[Vol. XIV, # 10 – Oct., 1985]

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