The Kettle's Boyled: Doing the same thing over and over

Albert Einstein is best remembered for his theory of relativity, but also for some of his pithy quotes. My favourite one is ‘Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance, you have to keep moving.’ I also like the one where he said ‘Two things are infinite; the universe and human stupidity.’ A lot of people like to drop an Einstein quote into conversations now and again, but many of these have one thing in common, he never said them. His most misquoted line, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,’ comes straight from a document produced by a substance abuse support group and was written several years after his death. But Albert never said it.

That’s not to say it isn’t a good quote. In fact it seems that more and more it is a very apt way of describing a lot of the news we’ve seen and heard in recent times. The notion that people might learn from past mistakes seems to have gone out of fashion.

I remembered this ‘Not Albert’ quote last week when I got caught behind a convoy of trucks and tractors heading for Dublin. Thanks to science and satnav, I was able to quickly divert and get away from this parade and leave them to a futile diesel-burning exercise whose only purpose was to boost the careers of a number of bandwagon-jumping politicians and parties. If ever there was a way to reduce the price of diesel, this was not it. They should have learned from the IFA/Bord Bia debacle just a few weeks ago, but they didn’t.

The Irish Road Hauliers Association was already in talks with government while this demonstration was taking place. The IRHA has a structure, they actually represent people, and they are not self-appointed arbiters of anyone’s views. The organisers of this protest, on the other hand, demanded government speak to them, but who was government supposed to speak to? All the random protesters individually?

Three political parties, predictably enough, jumped on the bandwagon just as some of them had during the IFA protest. Like a dog at a lamp post, this seemed merely an attempt to mark their territory so that they could claim kudos for any progress made by the IRHA. But nobody knew at the outset who the leaders were, who authorised them to speak on behalf of us all, and what their aims were other than a vague desire to pay less taxes and to blame government for the actions of Putin and Trump in Ukraine and Iran.

Anyone blindly following a protest whose only guaranteed outcome will be to increase divisions between rural Ireland and urban dwellers, while not knowing who was organising it or what exactly they wanted, needs to have a chat with themselves. Einstein wouldn’t have seen any logic in it.