I remember a day when the building seemed to be perpetually two steps behind its own breath, and nothing was, in fact, “on fire,” yet everything was treated as if it were—as if public life had turned into a room full of overly sensitive alarms, the kind that go off at the steam from a cup of coffee. And, in that constant noise, a new “temporary” measure was announced with the solemnity of someone bestowing a medal, wrapped in words so grand they seemed to smother any question. The effect was immediate: when a promise comes packaged as protection, most people feel embarrassed to ask for details, as if asking were a form of selfishness. I saw it on people’s faces: that slight recoil, that nod of agreement before understanding, as if the body were saying, “better not be the annoying one at a moment like this.”
But I was in a smaller room, where what mattered wasn’t the beautiful sentence but what would happen the next morning. There was a specific kind of silence there—not the silence of fear, but the silence of those who know that the most expensive mistake is not the one that happens; it’s the one that repeats itself under a new name. What caught my attention was how the decision had been made, because it had no trail, no stamp, no “why” that could later be tested, no “until when” that could end on its own, and no clear list of costs and possible harms. It was anything but a policy. It was more like a shortcut—like a makeshift bridge someone builds to cross a hole, but which, if no one demands the road be rebuilt, ends up becoming the road itself. And one day you no longer remember the hole; you only remember that you’ve always crossed there and that it’s dangerous to question it.
That day, the inevitable happened—not because anyone was malicious, but because haste has a stupid kind of intelligence, truly stupid. An intelligence that works for acting, but fails at predicting. There was a side effect: small enough to be denied and large enough to injure real people. And when the effect surfaced, the organization’s oldest instinct rose like an animal waking up: the instinct to find a body to put on the ground and say, “it was this.” Because when you offer up a culprit, you buy relief; and relief is a tempting currency, especially when the public is restless, the press is hungry, and leadership wants to close the matter before it takes root.
I watched the beginning of this contraption assemble itself with almost sublime efficiency: someone suggesting that “we need to make an example,” someone saying that “trust depends on accountability,” someone reminding everyone that “we can’t look weak.” And within minutes, the conversation was sliding toward a kind of justice that doesn’t correct the system—it merely feeds the appetite of the invisible court. A thought came to me like a knife: the problem isn’t making mistakes; the problem is making mistakes in a system that turns error into eternal guilt. Because eternal guilt creates fear, and fear creates lies, and lies create repetition, and repetition creates disaster.
That was when someone on the other side of the table asked a question that changed the air in the room without raising their voice. A simple and brutally practical question, the kind that cuts through the spell without humiliating anyone: where was the record of the process? Where were the criteria that defined the measure? Where were the discarded alternatives? Where was the named owner and, above all, where was the so-called “deactivation clause”? The damn clause never existed; we made it up to signal some kind of efficiency. If there was no planned deactivation, then it wasn’t temporary. And the room hung suspended for a few seconds, as if everyone realized at the same time that they were about to sacrifice a person in order not to look at a hole in the ground. I had gotten tangled up in the plot without even reading the script—actually, I hadn’t even been hired to be there.
I remember feeling uneasy, because in that moment it became clear that our culture was trying to solve a structural problem with an emotional solution, as if it were possible to fix an engineering failure with an exemplary punishment. And then someone said something that sounded small but carried a whole world inside it: the goal was not to “remember forever who did what,” but to build a system in which what lasts forever is the learning, not the stigma. From that point on, the conversation turned—not to protect reputations, but to protect the future.
What happened next was almost anticlimactic—and precisely for that reason, civilizing—because there was no hunt; there was a review. There was no lynching; there was a trail. There was no generic apology; there was accounting. And we started with what always prevents repetition: we turned the event into a public internal report, written in human language and grounded in technical criteria, recording what happened in sequence, which hypotheses guided the decision, which points were blind, which signals were ignored, which incentives fueled the haste, and which controls failed—not out of malice, but out of nonexistence. And we made a point of separating two things organizations confuse out of moral laziness: responsibility and guilt. Because responsibility is the obligation to repair and adjust; guilt, when it becomes a mark, only teaches people to hide.
There were consequences, yes—but consequences of the kind that improve the system rather than merely satisfy the public. The most serious consequence was structural: we required that any emergency measure be born with an expiration date, with verifiable criteria for renewal, with a “label” detailing costs and externalities, with a named owner, and with a decision trail that could not later be erased. We also created a recurring forum in which past decisions were revisited not to punish, but to learn. There, memory was not a weapon; it was a brake. And a brake only works when it doesn’t depend on the mood of the person driving.
The most interesting part was watching behavior change without anyone giving a speech. Because when a trail exists, haste loses its charm. When a deactivation clause exists, the temporary stops becoming a habit. When cost transparency exists, rhetoric shrinks. And when error ceases to be a social sentence, people stop lying and start warning early. And warning early is what saves lives and institutions. That’s when I understood the dynamic: public memory isn’t about collecting culprits like trophies; it’s about preventing power, haste, and vanity from using forgetfulness as a solvent.
What remained, in the end, was not anyone’s name, because names are foam and time washes them away. And they shouldn’t remain, since the purpose isn’t to tattoo people; it’s to train structures. The memory that matters is the one that preserves patterns, not faces—it preserves how the exception tried to become the rule, how urgency tried to buy a shortcut, how fear tried to invert the burden of proof, and how the culture almost preferred a scapegoat to real correction. Because it’s this record that gives the community something better than revenge: immunity.
And if I had to summarize the solution hidden inside the story, without falling into the moralizing you don’t want, I’d put it this way: the system needs to remember what happened with rigor and forget who erred with humanity. Because remembering what happened is the only way not to repeat it, and forgetting who erred is the only way to keep people honest enough to reveal the mistake before it grows. When you achieve that combination, you don’t create a flawless society; you create a strong one—one that fails without destroying itself. And that is the most practical definition, and the deepest aspiration, of any human being who seeks to evolve.
