In the book 'A Message to Garcia,' in the 6th paragraph, what exactly is meant by the sentence, " No man, who has endeavored
to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh appalled
at times by the imbecility of the average man?" I've read this one section about 7 or 8 times now and still don't fully understand it. Here's the full PDF for reference, the whole book is only a little over two pages.
https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/pdf/hubbard1899.pdf
As far as I can understand it, the author is trying to say that most leaders prefer to place their trust with a handful of competent individuals rather than a large group of people that don't know what they're doing to accomplish a task.
The wording is very awkward, but (along with reading the last part of the sentence that you've omitted) it sounds to me that he's implying that the only thing stopping a person with large aspirations that requires the help of many is the willingness of that many to put forth the effort to actually accomplish a task. Laziness is a disease worse than a muscle illness.
>>8182939
I see, thank you for your insight Anon.
>>8182900
He's saying that in any task where many people are needed to accomplish it, you will find yourself invariably disappointed with the inability of the average man whom you might call upon to aid.
>While I won’t say that this is necessarily a true story, I will say that no one I know has actually read the acclaimed Message to Garcia or any other book on the Commandant’s Reading List for that matter. In fact, before I made this strip I asked some of my friends if they had even heard of it, and one of them actually told me they had no idea what I was talking about.
>I remember hearing it often though, “Message to Garcia time!” when something important needed to get done. I have never read this book; I can’t honestly say whether it’s good or bad. I’m pretty sure everyone knows the gist of it, but for being such a short book I’m slightly surprised that people haven’t read it. I guess my reason is that I just never really cared enough to do it, nor do most grunts I suppose. I know at one point in time, it was mandatory that Marines read the books on the List. Whether this rule was extinguished or just got lost in the bigger picture of fighting a war on two fronts I don’t really know for sure. I do know that military books tend to be written by military men (and women), and hence are overtly drawn out and boring.
>The Commandant’s Reading List, like MCI’s, are one of those things that remain lingering around the Marine Corps with the intention of making us better–but ultimately end up becoming a check-in-the-box at best in practice. Back when I had some remote hope or wish of picking up via cutting score, I recall doing all of the required MCI’s. They didn’t help me in any real sense, in fact I don’t remember anything from any of them. While the mail system for them is no longer in place, I’m not sure if anyone really took those things seriously from the moment they were invented. After all, what Marine didn’t just find the answers in their books and have their Squad Leader sign the answer sheet? For obvious reasons this system doesn’t exist anymore, but MCI’s are still just as vapidly completed as they have always been.
I suppose a “good NCO” is supposed to enforce these things, but ultimately when you’re training to get shot at every day in some shit hole across the planet and learning about all the ways you can die–these things start to become largely irrelevant for young infantrymen. Maybe this is just a grunt perspective–but I assure you that this is the perspective of all of the Marines I’ve ever deployed with.
>I will say though, Starship Troopers was a good book long before it made the list.
