Success and Failure Are Hard to Tell Apart
Story★★★★Paul Toumier, Swiss physician and counselor, suggests that it is not easy to tell the difference between success and failure, or to know where the line between the two is drawn. Take technology, for example. We take great pride in our technological advances, but it may well be that our successes in technology will lead to the destruction of the human race-humanity’s ultimate failure.
Tournier writes, ... it is often difficult to say which side has really won a war-sometimes not the one with the military victory, but inf act the vanquished, who have bequeathed to their vanquishers the fundamental principles of their civilization. It is, then, extremely difficult to define failure and success, the line of demarcation between them is so elusive.
Is the atomic bomb a success or a failure? Today’s success will be revealed 1 Erwin W. Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995), 155.
The point
Paul Tournier explores how success and failure blur; technology's triumph might destroy humanity; the vanquished sometimes conquer through cultural inheritance.