There is a persistent illusion that has accompanied power for as long as power has existed. It consists in believing that whoever acts fast is necessarily strong, and that whoever waits is condemned to suffer events. The history of men, like that of trees and mountains, teaches rather the opposite. Patience is not resignation, it is a force that needs no noise to assert itself. Impatience, for its part, is not always the gesture of courage, sometimes it is the confession of a fragility that refuses to look time in the face. Immanuel Kant wrote that patience is the strength of the weak and that impatience is the weakness of the strong, a sentence that looks like a paradox until one takes the time to observe it closely, with the very calm it demands of itself.
Speed is not strength
Whoever owns little learns, almost out of necessity, to negotiate with the world. He knows very well that certain seasons cannot be rushed.
The seed does not germinate because someone demands it. It germinates because the earth, the rain and the light carry out together, without haste, a discreet work that no decree can hurry along. Whoever holds power, by contrast, grows used to seeing his orders turned into facts, and ends up confusing speed with mastery. The world, however, never lets itself be fully tamed. The more power grows, the greater the temptation to accelerate the course of things, and when reality resists, impatience rises as an anger directed against time itself.
Recent history offers numerous examples of this impatience raised to a doctrine of government. A power that decides to compress into a few years what social transformation requires over generations almost always ends up causing damage that prudence would have avoided. Forced industrialisation, reform decreed from an office without consulting those who had to live it, modernisation imposed as an administrative timetable, share the same original flaw, the conviction that political will can substitute for the social time that any real transformation requires, a timetable that never matched the timetable of real life.
That flaw is not exclusive to authoritarian regimes, though it is often easiest to see there first.
It also appears in democracies convinced that an electoral mandate amounts to an authorisation to accelerate processes that, by their nature, require prolonged maturation. The ballot box grants legitimacy to govern, it does not grant the capacity to compress social time at will, and when a government confuses the two, it usually ends up managing, year after year, the frustration it produced itself in the first place.
The explanation, moreover, is rarely as noble as simple technological acceleration suggests, a slow process produces no headlines and no immediate political credit, and haste responds less to the real urgency of the problem than to the personal schedule of whoever holds office, a schedule almost always foreign to the time society needs to absorb a deep change.
The processes that do manage to transform something lasting tend to share an uncomfortable trait for the politics of the short electoral cycle, they are negotiated over years, sometimes decades, before turning into an agreement able to outlive the government that signed it. No one remembers with any precision the months of deadlock that preceded those agreements, only the final result, and that selective amnesia feeds the illusion that important things get resolved quickly, when in reality they rarely do.
The inner sovereignty of those who do not govern the facts
The Stoics saw in patience a form of inner sovereignty. Epictetus, in the very first paragraph of his Enchiridion, recalled something power forgets systematically, that we govern neither events nor other people, only our own way of responding to them.
Marcus Aurelius, who wielded one of the vastest powers of his time, left in his Meditations a testimony different from that of so many rulers who came after him, that of a man who administered an empire while still insisting on governing himself first, before presuming to govern the course of events. His patience was not born of powerlessness, it was born of lucidity about the real limits of any will, however vast that will might be. That lucidity is precisely what a good part of contemporary power seems to have mislaid on its way toward immediate efficiency.
That distinction, seemingly modest, is in reality a liberation. It turns patience into a form of freedom, the freedom not to be a slave to the instant.
Baruch Spinoza, in his Ethics, invites us to distrust the passions that carry us along without our having chosen them. Impatience is born almost always of the desire to bend the world to our immediate expectations. It is a sad passion, in the Spinozist sense of the term, because it refuses to contemplate reality as it is and can only conceive of what it would like reality to be. For Spinoza, bondage does not depend on the other who commands, it depends on one’s own passions, neither understood nor examined.
Impatience is one of those passions. It makes us act before understanding, decide before observing, impose before listening. The greater the power available, the easier it becomes to give in to that bondage, because the means to impose one’s own will are, precisely, within reach, and what lies within reach is rarely examined calmly.
Governing one’s own reactions requires a training that no office grants automatically. Power does not make the person who wields it patient, it often produces the opposite effect, because it accustoms one to expect immediate obedience from one’s surroundings and ends up demanding the same immediacy from reality as a whole.
The age that celebrates immediacy
Our age has turned immediacy into an almost religious value. Messages cross continents in seconds, social media demand instant opinions on facts that have not finished unfolding, and financial markets react before a human being has had time to form a complete thought.
Certain algorithmic trading strategies execute operations within a range of ten to a hundred microseconds, and across much of today’s electronic markets an order can be completed in under ten milliseconds. (BIS Working Papers, No. 955, Bank for International Settlements)
A political leader is today often judged on the speed of his reaction on social media, more than on the quality of his judgement. A disaster occurs and within minutes a statement is demanded, a culprit, a concrete measure. No one seems willing to tolerate the silence that precedes the real understanding of a complex event. That silence, however, is exactly what serious reflection needs in order not to be wrong about a matter that, by definition, will take weeks to become fully clear.
The twenty four hour news cycle produces the same effect on collective memory. A grave event occupies public attention for a day, sometimes two, and is then replaced by the next one. Nothing closes, nothing is fully understood, and yet everything appears to have been handled with due urgency.
The algorithms that order what we see were designed to reward the immediate reaction, not delayed understanding. Content that requires several minutes of sustained attention competes at a disadvantage against content that provokes a reaction within the first second, and that asymmetry ends up shaping which kind of political discourse survives in the public space and which one disappears from sheer slowness, because attention itself has become the most contested raw material of the century.
Permanent urgency does not only wear down those who govern, it also trains those who are governed to demand instant answers where deliberation used to be tolerated. That training has precise political consequences. A society that can no longer bear to wait is a society easier to persuade with quick promises and simple explanations, because complexity, by definition, needs time to be laid out honestly.
We have learned to accelerate machines, but we have forgotten that minds grow at the pace of forests.
What lasts was built slowly
Patience, then, is the wisdom of those who know that every lasting work respects the rhythm of the living, a wisdom that has nothing in common with the resignation of the defeated. Cathedrals were not raised in haste. Notre Dame de Paris took more than a century to take shape, and several generations of builders followed one another without ever seeing the building finished.
The construction of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris stretched from 1163 to 1345, one hundred and eighty two years during which at least seven different master builders succeeded one another. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Charles Darwin took more than two decades between his first observations during the voyage of the Beagle and the publication of On the Origin of Species, a span of time the evidence required in order to settle before facing the world, one no editorial haste could have shortened without weakening the theory itself. That solitary, individual wait later withstood a century and a half of scientific scrutiny, something few hurried hypotheses can claim.
The patience a new idea demands, however, does not end inside the head of the person who conceives it. Alexander Fleming observed the effect of a mould on a bacterium in 1928, but between that isolated observation and the first production of penicillin at a scale able to save lives systematically, more than a decade passed of collective trials, uncertain funding and failures spread across dozens of laboratories. Darwin’s patience was that of one man alone with his notes, Fleming’s demanded, in addition, the patience of an entire scientific infrastructure willing to sustain a project with no guarantee of success.
The great movements that expanded rights, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, the processes of decolonisation, were not settled in a single legislative term. They were sustained across generations, against governments that preferred immediate calm to deferred justice, until the patient accumulation of pressure finally overcame the comfort of those in power. Those who led these causes rarely saw the whole of what they demanded fulfilled, and they carried on regardless, knowing that victory, if it came, would belong to a generation other than the one that had sown the first gesture of resistance.
The most solid loves take root the same way, in time shared, not in the flash of desire. What is built in an instant tends to come undone with the same ease with which it appeared.
The river never grows impatient with the rock. It shapes it drop by drop, year after year, with no need to strike it, until the stone itself comes to carry, on its surface, the memory of that passage.
None of this turns patience into passivity. Telling apart waiting with lucidity from resigning oneself without examination is, perhaps, the hardest political exercise there is, because it requires holding the tension between the real urgency of a suffering and the time its solution actually requires, without ever mistaking one for the other.
That, perhaps, is the true face of strength, the strength of one who learns to walk alongside time rather than impose on it a will that time, sooner or later, always ends up ignoring. Time is less an adversary than a companion, one that owes nothing to anyone, and it reveals, with a patience no urgency could ever borrow or buy, what truly deserves to last…
G.S.
Sources
- Quantifying the High-Frequency Trading “Arms Race” (BIS Working Papers No 955)
- Notre-Dame de Paris | History, Style, Fire, & Facts
- Epictetus, Enchiridion (reference edition, no link)
- Baruch Spinoza, Ethics (reference edition, no link)
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (reference edition, no link)
- Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (reference edition, no link)
