Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Compromise seems like a promising solution to deadlocked political confrontation but in practice, not so much. What kind of compromises are good compromises? Supposedly, they're the ones where everybody loses and everybody wins; sounds deep but what does that mean? Can compromise be measured? Can one side compromise more than the other? The King Solomon solution of cutting the baby in half is certainly a compromise, and the mother had to compromise 100%, giving up her child to the woman willing to let the child die. It's always been the weakness of compromise that the side that wins is the side that cares the least what the result is. This is the reason conscientious people reject to compromises.

Ironically, even though compromise is intended to smooth relations among differing parties, many small compromises build up like scale, calcifying an intricate mechanism so that it doesn't run smoothly anymore. Compromises give a mixed message of how things should work, and only one generation in the future, no one will recognize that it was compromise that created the Frankenstein, but instead think the founders had some deep wisdom & understanding of the original problem that could only be dealt with an unnecessarily complex solution. Soon, all solutions are unnecessarily complex and misleading; compromising the compromises, until purity is gone and only compromise remains.