The Paradox of the Precedent

When I worked as a preschool teacher in Yemen in the late 1990s, there was a child in my classroom - the daughter of a well-respected tribal family. She was fiery, funny, endlessly playful. And when she was frustrated, she showed it with her body: by hitting the other children.

I remember the feeling vividly. On one side was deference - not wanting to offend her family, especially given my own family’s place in the tribal hierarchy (I was also explicitly warned by the school about this). On the other was responsibility - I couldn’t allow a precedent to be set in my classroom that hurting others was acceptable.

That was the paradox:

• To intervene risked offense, conflict, and the possibility of larger consequences.

• To look away risked something subtler but just as dangerous: the quiet embedding of a precedent.

Precedents are powerful because they multiply. The first tolerated act becomes a norm. The norm becomes culture. The culture becomes expectation. In families, it looks like behaviors we “let slide” becoming family patterns. In schools, it looks like small allowances shaping climate and culture. In governance, it looks like silence around injustice hardening into policy.

I’ve been writing recently about memory. How easy it is to forget the cost of precedents, and how forgetting makes us vulnerable to repeating them. The paradox is always there: confronting precedent early often feels harder than letting it go. But letting it go means it doesn’t go away - it grows.

In that Yemeni preschool, standing firm wasn’t about punishment. It was about refusing to set the precedent that harm was permissible.

Scale it up, and the lesson is the same: whether in classrooms, institutions, or governments, the precedents we allow today become the culture our children inherit tomorrow.

From the classroom to the strategy room, precedent is the architecture of culture. The paradox of the precedent is that we only see its full weight in hindsight. The challenge is to act before it calcifies.

Because once the architecture of the precedent is in place, it doesn’t just hold up a single act, it holds up - and upholds - an entire culture.

cc: Wesley Clark, Thinking Machines Lab


Sincerely,
Amber Eltaieb