So far, interviewers have been asking me questions about how The Tyranny of Good Intentions came to be, and what it was like to write it. This page is about what it is like, now, to have written it, and offers some second thoughts about it. Mainly, I have been finding layers of meaning that I didn’t consciously put there. For me, this has been interesting. I thought readers might enjoy them too.
My main regret, so far, is that I wish I’d been more careful about some of the names. For example, to my discomfort, I realized that a dog bears the name of one of my cousins. I have assured her that it’s a very nice dog, definitely the nicest dog in the book. Family issues seem to have been avoided. More broadly, some of the names are undoubtedly shared with real people. However, you have my word that this is not a roman a clef. I have no doubt been inspired by people I have known, and some of the characters reflect hybrid combinations of people I have known. However, I have not deliberately put any person I have known into the story, either under their own name or others.
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An Abundance of Tyrannies
[Note: What follows is an expanded version of a piece that appeared in the October 3, 2025 edition of Rhodes Connect, an online newsletter.
The Tyranny of Good Intentions is a satire about politics, using a condominium and its board of directors as a microcosm of political life. It traces the struggles of hapless protagonist Andrew Walmer as he faces realities of board politics and, simultaneously, tries to reassemble a broken marriage and preserve his job as a political science lecturer.
In the story, tyranny exists in multiple forms. The condominium is a literal tyranny, ruled by an obsessive board president who marches about in what appear to be military surplus pant-suits, looking for infractions of bylaws and demanding punishments. Compliant board members endlessly congratulate themselves about their commitment to community service and consequently are insulated from self-doubt. Andrew is revolted by the resulting ‘tyranny of self-confidence,’ and feels obliged to remain on the board in order to inspire reform. However, change requires people to change their minds. Andrew discovers that persuasion is a much more arduous process in practice than it is in the democratic theory he teaches.
Knowing why we have done something can be as difficult as persuading someone to change an opinion. Andrew and Francine, his wife, confront this reality in the disintegration of their marriage. They meet the challenge through love and careful reflection, scraping away the stories they have been telling themselves about their impressive moral principles, partly by focusing more careful attention on one another. Similarly, because they care about one another, Andrew and a trans person he has offended during a lecture become unlikely allies after his offence triggers an impersonal complaint adjudication process, itself a kind of tyranny of good intentions whose impressive rationales discourage skeptical thought about how it is affecting the people it is intended to help.
The tyrannies of good intentions experienced by Andrew and Francine are not literal tyrannies and, strictly speaking, they are not really about good intentions. However, there is a definite resemblance between what Andrew and Francine experience and more literal tyrannies. The noble principles that they told themselves were the basis for their actions served, mainly, to provide them each with rationalizations for actions that stemmed from motives that remained unexplored. And the rationalizations blinded both Andrew and Francine to the immediate consequences of their actions on each other. So something very like a kind of internal tyranny was happening to each of them, as they marched ahead to damage their marriage with eyes firmly closed.
A great deal of the harm that is done in the world is done in the name of high principles and noble intentions. And it is done with a kind of blindness to immediate impacts on other human beings. Andrew and Francine work together to peel away the ‘good intentions’ and address the underlying motives that led them to act as they did. Sadly, they seem to be rare exceptions in making this effort.
Authors sometimes speak of the writing experience as a form of self-flagellation. However, this is not the way it was for me. I experienced it as a kind of private entertainment. I would eagerly retreat to my writer’s chair, looking forward to what I might be able to dream up next for Andrew and his cronies. What about having Andrew eat surströmming as part of an effort to recruit a board member, for example, and then be preempted by the president? What about a re-enactment of the Monte Python dead parrot sketch involving a board member in the middle of a directors’ meeting? Writing is, and should be, fun. Writing this book was. I hope readers enjoy it too. And I hope that, like me, readers will enjoy the experience of mulling the story over, revisiting it, and finding that it gives them new discoveries.
JackStilborn 