Turning Losses Into Gains, Part I

The Silver Lining

By Robert Ringer

Sometimes it's difficult to muster up the positive mental attitude to see opportunity in a bad situation. Things get so out of hand that it's easy to become discouraged to the point of feeling despair. Those are the times when your mettle and sinew are really put to the test — sometimes very long tests.

The longest tests usually come in the form of mass oppression. To man's shame, history's list of brutal oppressions is a very long one. From the Jews in ancient Egypt to today's citizen slaves in North Korea, oppression has been an integral part of human history.

But there's also an interesting twist to oppression. It's a cloud with a silver lining. In virtually all cases, the oppressed eventually escape or overthrow their oppressors and, quite often, begin life anew on a higher plane than before their oppression began.

How this phenomenon occurs is summed up quite simply in the words of English poet Francis Quarles. In his description of the concept of compensation, he opined that "there is no worldly loss without some gain."

Which is to say that every adversity brings with it an equivalent or greater opportunity for success. We see this in a macro fashion in the rise of previously oppressed peoples, such as American and South African blacks.

And, of late, we watch in awe as Indians continue their incredible rise to the top of the economic ladder. Not American Indians, but the ones who live on that funny-shaped subcontinent of Asia. (American Indians haven't done so well, but that's been changing for the better at an accelerating pace over the past thirty or so years. At the rate they're going, it may just be a matter of time until they move into town and take over Las Vegas.)

The rise of India to its place of prominence in the modern world is fascinating. For nearly two centuries (1757-1947), the British had that vast Land of Enchantment by its political and economic throat. And, for the most part, Indians were loyal, well-behaved subjects. They even fought in the British Army during World War II.

Until the formation of the Indian National Congress in 1885, it appeared that India would be a permanent fixture in the British colonization scheme. But, as is almost always the case with oppressed peoples, once the freedom genie was out of the bottle, India's movement for independence became unstoppable.

In the end, it was left for Mohandas Gandhi to be the historically romantic figure most credited with driving out the Brits, but the reality is that the die had been cast long before his highly publicized fasting protests began.

There is no question that the British devoured India's vast wealth and kept its citizenry in check for nearly two hundred years. But there's a silver living in this dark cloud, too. To its credit, when Britain finally threw in its colonial towel in 1947, Indians took over a country with a ready-made, highly educated workforce. The British also left the India with a language that made it easy for them to communicate with the rest of the industrialized world, a democratic government that protected both individual liberties and private property, and a reasonably modern infrastructure.

They even rid the land of much of its Hindu-versus-Muslim bloodshed by chopping off the country's northwest corner in 1947, calling it Pakistan (originally West Pakistan), and giving it to the Indians in that region who were adherents of that infamous "religion of peace." Other than a little skirmish now and then, India doesn't have much of an internal Muslim problem anymore. (The recent Mumbai attacks were carried out by Pakistani Muslims.)

Given its pro-Western lifestyle and the fact that English is now the official language of the country, it would not surprise me if India became the world's number-one economic power in the next fifty years, surpassing both China and the U.S. in the process.

In Part II of this article, I'm going to make the case that the adversity-leading-to-opportunity syndrome is just as true on the micro level as it is on the macro level — with one big difference. And it's a difference that I believe will give you a more optimistic way of looking at the adversity in your own life.

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