Rooting for Failure

Imagine this scenario.

You’re in a plane, taking off from Washington DC.    There’s a guy piloting the plane.  You trust him, automatically.  He’s the pilot.

That pilot and co-pilot pass out.  We don’t know why.  But a guy gets up and says “I’ll fly the plane.  You can trust me.”   And since nobody else knows how to fly the plane, they all say “Yeah!  Fly the plane!"

So, duly elected, the new pilot gets in the cockpit and starts to fly the plane.

But soon after that, we find out that that pilot plans to fly the plane, say, into a tall building in New York City.   Now if you’d all known that, you would have even settled for someone who said he’d played flight simulator to fly the plane.  But you didn’t.  The guy in the cockpit, now the pilot, the leader of the plane … has an agenda in which the plane … and those in it … are expendable.

The pilot may believe that the instant the plane crashes he and perhaps some of you will be lifted up and live in a land of milk and honey with nubile virgins for all … so he’s really sincere in his plan.  And as it turns out, he was responsible for gassing the cockpit and taking the pilots out in the first place.

But not everybody on the plane believes that.  Most of them probably think he’s nuts at this point.

I’ll bet you hope he fails.

“But, but  …. If you root for the pilot to fail, you’re rooting for the plane to fail!”

No!  If this pilot succeeds, the plane fails!