Black Cassandra

There was once a fortress whose walls had begun to crack. For years, the men inside held conferences about the cracks. They wrote reports about the cracks. They promoted people who had become very good at explaining why the cracks were manageable. Then one day, a few men stopped talking about the wall and started rebuilding it. They climbed into the broken places themselves. They hauled stone. They changed the design. They angered people whose careers had been built around maintaining the old wall exactly as it was. Slowly, against resistance, the fortress began to change. Then the governors became nervous. The work was becoming visible. Important people were watching. So someone suggested that, for credibility, the rebuilding should be handed to the senior masons who had spent their entire careers maintaining the original wall. After all, they had rank, titles, and the proper credentials. They looked right standing on the battlements. So the builders were told to step aside. The old masons arrived, inspected the new work, nodded gravely, and began restoring the fortress to standards everyone already understood. Soon the walls looked respectable again. And when they cracked in exactly the same places, everyone was shocked. That is the danger with reform. Institutions often say they want change right up until change starts looking unfamiliar. Then they reach for the safest face in the room and call it credibility. But if the people who built the old wall are always considered more credible than the people willing to rebuild it, the wall was never really being reformed. It was simply being repainted.