Unintended Consequences and the Euphemisms that Enable Them

Philip Damon taught writing and literature at the University of Hawaii for 34 years, and his fiction, non-fiction and social commentaries have been published widely. Among the mystic and holistic traditions, he has followed many practices. His “Sacred Democracy” columns appear monthly in readthedirt.org.

If ever a euphemism had consequential propensities, it’s the opening two words of this title. Yes, euphemisms abound among us, most laughably regarding bodily functions, but in every walk of life. They can be as harmless as “going potty” and “hooking up,” or as evil as a phrase like “collateral damage.” Imagine the actual terms for any such event.

Actual and factual alternatives to “collateral damage” depict horrible happenings, which someone or some ones prefer not to have reported in detail since they always entail embarrassing specifics. Narrative writers, in contrast, are taught never to euphemize, and to deal almost entirely in specifics. A descriptive picture is worth a thousand repetitions of “collateral damage,” as events always occur — causally, graphically — in vivo. And yes, narrative characters often euphemize profusely: thus wryly illustrating its commonality.

No narrative can succeed despite a failure of specifics, but it isn’t rare to hear credulous or sympathetic journalists “report” the same verbal niceties that are announced by the military or a company. Then along comes a Seymour Hersh, or an Amy Goodman, who fills in the blanks with actual facts, and suddenly all those ugly specifics are up on display. Then someone gets exposed and blamed, takes the fall, is disgraced, at least for a while, until it all blows over. Then history eventually glosses over the calamities, labeling the participants and euphemistically filing away, as called for, our cultural myths.

What makes a euphemism like “unintended consequences” so consequential is its softening ring of inevitability. It doesn’t sound like a lame excuse, or a self-serving self-justification, so much as a force of nature, randomly interfering with our best-laid plans. In life, the unexpected inevitably happens. It’s the cost of doing business, in war or on the open market — whereas it is why we buy insurance: Assuring us that we have a win-win.

And yes, all of that is sometimes true. Yet isn’t the phrase also an avoidance of responsibility, for something done hurriedly, heedlessly, or on an agenda? Nor are we so philosophical about it either then, when planning a project. It looks super promising then. The mind works tricks that way, and the trick is on the doer. But some powerful doers have domain over our cultural euphemisms, and can pass their costs of doing onto those who don’t. So it becomes the wider, not exactly expected, kind of consequence we call collateral damage. We could also call it the expected unexpected, or the unknown known.

From this perspective, an “unintended consequence” is now degrees of separation from the actual event in question. Having achieved the status of full-fledged euphemism, moreover, it has a kind of exculpatory ring in our imaginations. No longer a reminder to the prudent or a warning to the impulsive, it is another example of our cultural confusion between the ideal of “freedom” and the vice of “license.” Industrial projects in particular are funded and permitted on cold-blooded promises of precaution with little regulatory oversight. It’s become a right, after all — a Constitutional freedom — to wage commerce. Yet without a sense of genuine responsibility, how is it anything but licentiousness that is in truth being enacted? Freedom, without responsibility, is a euphemism for license.

There was once a time when persons in the world could do less harm. Until clubs were implemented, it was a bare-knuckle proposition and a battle of dimly-lit wits. (And acts of bully-ness were probably euphemized even back then.) But people are now armed and corporations are now people. The license to do harm possessed by either is scary to consider — and perpetually so in the case of corporations. Not so long after those hunter-gatherer days, when there weren’t yet any stand-your-ground laws but simply a choice of fight or flight, a new rule of thumb came along that made it all make sense: “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” In an even older tradition, it was known as karma.

“Karma” is the un-euphemized sibling of unintended consequence. It implies consequence to be reaped by the sower, though, and not by extras on the edge of the set.

There is no way to know whether a corporation expects collateral damage on an industrial project — to nature, community, both. But they do know (stinky stuff) happens. Sooner or later, Murphy’s Law meets the Peter Principle: disaster strikes. If a car-maker opts not to make a minor adjustment on a model, however, because it is cheaper to settle a few thousand deaths, it damn sure calls into question how the Founders would judge a Constitutionally sanctioned licentiousness of profit, and the collateral harms it causes.

Meanwhile spiritual ideas like karma and what St. Paul warned of add spice to the ironies of unintended consequence, along with the cost of doing business. If consequence rebounds on persons, human or corporate, it might take a lifetime or longer, and who’d even know? Certainly classical tragedy is built on unintended consequences, and warriors are hoisted on their own shields. Paul is saying that we’re each living a karmic story, as we grow by monitoring our euphemistic defense mechanisms. We’re all works in progress.

Corporate and human people aside, though, how about nations? Isn’t the USA also a work in progress? And what if national bodies also reap what they sow? If so, nothing could provide a sadder example of unintended consequences than U.S. foreign policy, as described by the late Chalmers Johnson, in his three-volume “Blowback” series. An Asia scholar and a consultant to the CIA, Johnson applied the Agency’s own ominous euphemism in his heart-breaking account of why people around the world now distrust America in ever-increasing numbers. While agents over the decades could hardly foresee what forms blowback would end up taking — as they installed puppet despots who enabled corporate-American exploitation of their resources and human populations — they had an almost mystical prescience that a future awaited us looking very much like karma.

Too smart to buy their own promises, the same couldn’t be said for their bosses.

Just thinking….