"Consistency will turn any good cause into a bad one"

I should like to point out some of the advantages and even joys of inconsistency. I do not claim that inconsistency, in itself, is a virtue. There is something neutral and rather unassuming about it, and I dare say that it can be abused. I am not advocating incoherent babble, and I rather like rational discourse. Besides, the case of inconsistency cannot be made consistently without inviting a logical conundrum.

    Instead, I would suggest that we owe our lives to vacillation, indecision, and unprincipled action. You would not now be in a position to mind what I am saying, or agree with it, if it were not for the late Mr. Khrushchev, who behaved, as we all know, like a disgraceful opportunist in 1962. Did he not back out with his rockets? Wasn't he simply yellow, as they say? Did he not throw overboard the most sacrosanct principles of Marxism-Leninism? And no one in the whole Kremlin had the guts to stand up and say that selling out to imperialism is bad. No, all those old militants just had one thing on their minds; they wanted to save their own skins, and in the process they happened to save our skins as well. Consistency would have dictated quite a different course of action. It generally does. Let me mention just a few examples:

Take any economic doctrine whatsoever, apply it, proceed logically with your project, and you will eventually destroy the very economy you had set out to save. 

Act out the fundamental tenets of capitalism to their ultimate consequences, and you will end up with a state of civil war and/or a Fascist dictatorship.

Attack the social system you live in by any means at your disposal, and you have terrorism; defend it by any means, and you have a Gestapo running the place.

Be a rigorous ecologist and defend nature against man with no holds barred, and you will end up leading a Stone Age existence.

Build communism, be uncompromising about it, and your militancy will take you straight into what is rightly known as the socialist camp.

Pursue economic growth at any price and you will destroy the biosphere.

Join the arms race, be consistent about it, and you will blow yourself to pieces.

Et cetera.

In this sort of situation, which has become quite frequent, principle isn't what it used to be. For those who are still looking around for a maxim to follow, I would suggest this: Consistency will turn any good cause into a bad one. It is a luxury we can no longer afford. For philosophers who are interested in keeping their thinking as straight as possible, this must be an unwelcome thought, but for people at large it will not come as a surprise. In our parts of the world, a vast if not vociferous majority of citizens has come to realize, I believe, that their only chance of survival is based not on one or two Big Ideas but on a constantly changing set of marginal options. They are quite prepared to face a lengthy and contradictory process of muddling through, of trial and error.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Second Thoughts on Consistency