I guess it doesn’t matter how worse things can get, people always get used to them. It happened when Germany intensively bombarded London, it happened when the US bombarded Japan, and it is happening again during the COVID-19 pandemic. How could anyone imagine that a lot of people would refuse to be vaccinated against a deadly virus? Unbelievable!

This book rescues our ability to see ethics and morality through the shadows of pragmatism. Sometimes, the most appropriate, humanized, and proven solution takes time (vaccine) while many people, in the urge to rapidly solve a problem, advocate for a short term solution (herd immunity) at the cost of many lives. Today, we know that herd immunity doesn’t work because the virus mutates, sometimes to a more contagious and lethal variant.

No, the book doesn’t talk about the pandemic. Not a single word. But we can extract the human nature in times of war and apply to many other situations. Like the excited programmer who coded a new feature in a hurry to release it fast, just to realize later it went out full of bugs and security flaws. If they only had spent sometime designing the solution before coding it, many issues could have been prevented.