While essential preparation for good leadership includes not just thorough familiarity with, but also habituation of the laws, customs, principles and traditions that cause community to cohere; life like music is often complex, subject to change of time and season. Regulation, while necessary, is no simple dance.
The power to dismiss dissent is older than the right to be heard. The former path is more straightforward, less encumbered, and more readily pursued than the latter; but the wise have learned through trial that whilst true kings have neither time nor inclination to suffer fools; the courage and humility to consider, interrogate and investigate new claims to knowledge, new vistas of perspective, even the apparently preposterous, is not always a waste of time.
The master player knows the most coveted card in the pack is neither mighty ace nor king, but wild joker with power to impersonate not just both these, but every other card in the pack (by virtue of thorough understanding their roles and potentials).
The dismissive ruler relying more on understanding the past may well condemn not only self, but also those who follow, not just to the wrong side of history, but to history itself, permanently disqualified from a future failed to be comprehended, fascinated by a past assumed permanence.
Principles may be unchanging, but to assume how they are to be interpreted in any given time and context, only certifies one’s failure to understand their very nature and purpose. The Mighty Sabbath (the moment of cyclical change) represents both law and exception. Prudence and folly oft appear identical twins.
YeKengalé 