Master Circumstances

Honoré de Balzac was a noted French novelist and playwright.  His magnum opus is considered La Comédie Humaine, a multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories, depicting French society during the Restoration and the July Monarchy, 1830 to 1848.  Balzac is considered one of the founders of realism in European literature, built on his unfiltered observation of society.

He wrote, “There are no principles; there are only events.  There is no good and bad; there are only circumstances.  The superior man espouses events and circumstances to guide them.  If there were principles and fixed laws, nations would not change them as we change our shirts, and a man cannot be expected to be wiser than an entire nation.”

That is true.  Morality is mutable.  We like to pretend we are civilised, that a higher calling governs us.  That is a lie.  Even religion becomes a vehicle for prejudice and fault, justifying oppression in the name of some divine.  Since it is unsatisfactory to be the victim of circumstance, the correct path is to seek power and influence, so we shape the world to our own needs.  If we do not, others will.

Nixon Going to China Proves the Point

President Richard Milhous Nixon spent his entire political career as America’s foremost anti-communist.  In 1972, he flew to Beijing and shook hands with Mao Ze Dong, ending 23 years of diplomatic isolation between Washington and the People’s Republic of China.  The Sino-Soviet split had opened a strategic gap.  Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, exploited it without hesitation, regardless of decades of stated ideological principle.  Nixon put the logic plainly: “Great nations act based on interest, not sentiment.”  The political maxim that followed, “only Nixon could go to China,” captures Balzac’s point.  Only a man with zero prior commitment to flexibility could reverse course this completely and still command his own coalition’s trust.  Principle did not move him.  Circumstance did, and he mastered it rather than let it master him.

Business Leadership Runs on the Identical Logic

Wilmot Reed Hastings Jr. built Netflix into the dominant DVD-by-mail rental company in America.  He then dismantled that same business himself, launching a streaming platform in 2007 that directly cannibalised the DVD service, generating his own revenue.  Blockbuster, the market leader Netflix had been chasing for a decade, held onto its rental-store model as a fixed principle and filed for bankruptcy in 2010.  Hastings held no comparable loyalty to his own original model.  He read the circumstance: streaming bandwidth was becoming viable, and moved before the shift forced his hand.  Balzac’s superior man does not defend the business he built.  He defends the business the moment demands, even when that means burying the one that came before it.

The lesson scales down to any leader facing a decision that contradicts his own stated position.  A fixed principle, held past the point it serves its purpose, becomes a liability disguised as integrity.  Nixon abandoned decades of anti-communist rhetoric the moment strategic advantage demanded it.  Hastings abandoned his own most profitable division the moment technology made it obsolete.  Neither man was wrong to hold the earlier position.  Both men were right to abandon it once circumstances changed, and neither waited for permission or consensus before acting.

Principles feel stable because they demand nothing of us in the moment.  Circumstances demand everything, immediately, with no guarantee of vindication until years later.  Balzac’s superior man does not wait for circumstances to resolve themselves favourably.  He reads them accurately and moves first.  Nixon did it with a nation’s foreign policy.  Hastings did it with his own company’s core revenue.  Neither one asked whether the move was principled.  Both asked whether it was correct, and history answered the question for them.

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Terence Nunis | Executive Chairman, Equinox Zenith | Author, The 1% Playbook: The Billionaire Cheat Code