The Philosophy of systems
I DID SOMETHING I AM PROUD OF TODAY.
It was a tough thing. It took me two weeks to decide how to handle the problem. But I finally did it today.
A lady approached me here on DPA and informed me that she faced a peculiar difficulty.
Her husband lives abroad. They have two children - a girl and a boy, in that order. The husband comes every year and it is actually a successful distant marriage. However, the man recently decided to move all his family to his overseas base. He started processing their immigration paper. DNA was called for by the embassy. There was need to for the parents to have DNA test to show that they are the parents of the two minor children. (The embassies now do not want you to claim our nieces and nephews as your children).
There was a problem. The woman knew all along that the second child (the boy) was not sired by her husband. Soon after her husband's visit that year, she got pregnant from another man. But everybody and the husband believed the child was the biological son of the husband. (The real biological father does not know).
In view of this paternity testing requirement, the woman was forced to tell her husband the truth.
Your know how any average man would react upon learning of such. He wanted to end the marriage and disown the boy. But the woman approached me and requested for my intervention. I thought about it for two weeks. Then today, I contacted the man and we spoke for two hours.
In the end of our difficult discussion, there was progress. He will not terminate his marriage and he will not disown his son. I convinced him. I spoke to him like my own younger brother.
I told him he had a decision to make and it was not the decision he thought. Rather than deciding whether to terminate his marriage and disown the boy, he must first decide whether to be judged by the standards of an ordinary man or by the standard of a great man.
I explained to him what an ordinary man is expected to do in this sort of situation. The ordinary man is expected to divorce the woman, disgrace her and disown the boy. But a great man would not do what the ordinary man would do. Great people do not act or think like ordinary people. Great men don't see the world the same way the ordinary men see it.
I told him about the real essence of power. The real power is the power that has not been exercised. It is like loaded gun with one bullet. You are powerful until you fire that gun. But once you fire that gun, you become totally powerless. Can you imagine it? With a gun with one bullet, you can cause 50 men to surrender because none of the 50 men wants to be the one to die. But once you fire that gun and kill even ten with one bullet, the remaining 40 men will kill you. So, power is useful when you have not exercised it. I told the man that he would be powerful if he did not exercise his power.
I told him of the story of Napoleon, the Emperor, and a man that was condemned to die. The condemned man was brought to Napoleon for him to give his final approval for the man to be executed. The man stood before the Emperor shaking, but sure he was to be put to death. Everybody expected the Emperor to give his approval. But Napoleon said to the man: "I want to show you how powerful I am. I will do so by sparing your life". That was the true essence of power. You are not powerful when you do what everybody expected you to do. Rather, you are powerful when you deviate from the popular expectation without losing face. By sparing the life of that man, the man lived every minute to acknowledge the power of Napoleon. But if he had been put to death, he would only have acknowledged his power for just few minutes before his execution.
Ladies and gentlemen, I felt good about what I did because this man will no longer divorce his wife. He will continue to love her and he will love his son too. I connived him that sociology is stronger than biology. This child grew up to see him as dad and he had seen that child as his son. That is the sociological reality of their existence. The biological question is neither here nor there, and it should not be allowed to interfere in their happiness. And now, he will have a wife that would love him to death, who will appreciate that she married a truly great man.
EU
NOTE: There is some detail that I omitted. The couple had only one child and it was a girl and the second child was not coming. The woman was under pressure to produce more children, hopefully a boy in other to secure her position in the family, as she saw it. The pressure forced her to get pregnant when after her husband's visit, she did not get it. Bear that in mind before you judge the woman.