The problem is, someone like Donald Trump can never truly be a winner because he will never admit failure. And someone who is never willing to fail is incapable of learning or growing. They will just move from failure to failure doing different things, repeating past mistakes, without ever actually learning or progressing or adapting. They’ll probably do some good things too, but always in an unrefined and haphazard way, booming and busting. Because an inability to admit imperfection means that you don’t have a good way to evaluate or perfect your better moves. You need failure to improve success.

And so we have a situation now where political parties back candidates they know are definitely a questionable choice and stick with them through their bad choices and bad behavior and never learn anything, rather than learning how to strategically lose, to learn from their mistakes, and then try again and do better the next time.

That childish unwillingness to admit or learn from our mistakes prevents any possibility of ever actually doing better or actually achieving the ends that we desire in the way that would be best. This also happens at the legislative level, where people are willing to push through laws and ideas despite their issues, and let’s figure out the problems afterward because we need to be seen as having accomplished something.

There is some truth in this approach, in that we do need to accept that nothing can ever be completely perfect or avoid all mistakes, and there will always be problems that will need to be dealt with as they come up. And if you’re going to wait for the perfect solution or the perfect person to do anything, you’re never going to have anything to go forward with now, when you need it.

The problems start piling up when you take that wisdom too far, to such an extremity, that you become completely unwilling to fail and unwilling to accept and admit mistakes and failures, just rushing ahead blindly in the desire to be seen as doing something. The problems arise when you become so determined to win and so determined to be seen being a doer and a winner (a very common political goal) that you may actually put forward something that actively stands in the way of a better solution or retards the goals that you are trying to reach.

And this happens far more often than we would like to admit. Sometimes the best laid and best intended efforts fail in their results, but we do not remove them or repair them or challenge them because what really matters to us is to have been seen to have done something, and it would be too big a challenge to the effort and the expense of what we did if we admit that it did not work. Why would anyone give us power and millions upon millions of dollars and thousands of hours of effort if we admitted that what we did with it just didn’t really work? And once the system is in place it will have its own institutional incentives that keeps the whole ball rolling along, regardless of where it’s going.

This is something that Thomas Sowell has complained about a lot with regard to intellectuals and politicians who gain their success from the advancement of their ideas and do not have to pay the price for their failure in practice, but instead leverage their failure into an even stronger argument for themselves and their importance and their position. There are many programs we have in place, as well as many people that we have in place, that have not succeeded in achieving the results they were expected to achieve, especially not within the time or means in which they promised to achieve them.

And yet the demand for their advancement never lessens, and they become even more and more necessary as the results they promised actually become less and less evident. The less they achieve their stated goals, despite getting what they asked for from us, the more they need to ask of us. More support, more money, more effort, more defeating of their enemies. At what point do you say, hey, you’re never going to get everything all your way, and you got what you said you needed, and nothing has changed. But they say that it’s even more important to elect them again, because the situation is even more dire now, the need more urgent. The problems they promise to address will never be solved or retired, because if they did then the fixers own importance and necessity would be lessened. You end up with professional revolutionaries campaigning on a never ending war that never seems to quite tilt in either direction toward any resolution.