Ends and Means

I was thinking about my last two posts, and came up with the thought that one of the ways that people start off on that slippery slope is that they believe that the ends justify the means.  When you watch a film, especially monster movies, or disaster flicks, a lot of times the characters have to make tough choices.  A lot of the villains in apocalyptic movies didn't start off as horrible people, they had to make hard choices, and chose poorly.  In the film Mad Max, in order to keep the peace in their society, the leader institutes an event called Thunderdome, where two contestants battle it out to the death in a gladiatorial arena.  The leader believes that this is the only way to prevent the violence and war that had ruined the world in the first place.  The Thunderdome is a horrible means, but they justify it with the fact that there's no fighting in their society.  In our lives we have to make tough choices, and it's up to us to decide what we can live with.  We shouldn;t allow ourselves to rationalize poor decisions by justifying them with ends.  How you got to the end is just as important as by what means you get there.  Like most things, its all about the journey.