I need you to pretend a few things.
That you don’t know what a cart is. Or a horse.
That you are a logical machine.
That you are told a cart is something laden with merchandise, that the horse is what moves the cart and that the purpose of the whole endeavor is to transport the merchandise from A to B.
Then you will be asked to stack the three elements according to their importance.
How likely are you to arrange them in this order:
Merchandise, cart, horse?
It would be perfectly logical, right?
Remember that you don’t know anything else but what you’ve just been instructed.
That the ‘action’ is ‘transport merchandise M, laden in cart C – moved by the horse H, from A to B’.
Mere logic convinces you that the most important thing here is M. Simply because the whole brouhaha revolves around M. Followed by C – closest to M, and only then by H. Right?
Only mere logic is seldom enough… Each of those three has its own merits and their relative importance depends on many things.
On what the owner thinks about each of them. If all three belong to the same person.
On the relationship between the person asked to determine their relative importance and each of those elements.
The owner of the merchandise will certainly consider his property to be more important than either horse or carriage. But will consider the horse more important than the cart if the merchandise has to arrive sooner rather than whenever. Or the carriage more important than the horse if the merchandise is fragile…
The owner of a single horse will try to protect the animal. Simply because he will also need it tomorrow.
The owner of the trucking company will ask the drivers to drive the horses to their limits. Simply because he has so many of them.
And so on.
My point being that logic is almost never enough.
We must also understand what’s going on there before passing judgement on something.
Otherwise we’ll end up scratching our heads.
Click the drawing above and read what tborash has to say about the whole thing. He’s right too, you know.
nicichiarasa 