The Arsonist's Reward: Why We Fix Instead of Prevent

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”

B. Franklin

Pay attention to how we talk. We treat depression. We heal trauma. We fix relationships. Every problem gets framed as something that needs intervention, something that demands a solution. This isn't just word choice—it reveals how we think about human struggle.

Modern medicine and psychology have given us incredible tools. We can cure diseases that killed our ancestors, treat mental health conditions they couldn't even name. These aren't small victories—they're massive leaps forward that have eliminated real suffering. But here's what happened: our success made us cocky. We started thinking we could ditch the boring stuff—the prevention, the building resilience, the creating strong communities—because hey, if something goes wrong, we'll just fix it later. Why work on your mental health when you can pop a pill? Why build social connections when therapy exists?

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Traditional societies got plenty wrong (and we were right to move past most of it), but they understood something we've forgotten: stopping problems before they start usually works better than scrambling to fix them afterward. They built support systems, taught coping skills, created rituals that strengthened people for whatever was coming. Boring? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.

But prevention has a fatal flaw—it's invisible.

In "The Black Swan", Nassim Taleb asks us to imagine a legislator who, on September 10, 2001, manages to pass a law requiring bulletproof, locked cockpit doors on every plane. This person prevents countless hijackings that never happen. How much recognition do they get? Zero. Meanwhile, the officials responding to actual disasters become heroes. We throw parades for firefighters, not for the people who removed fire hazards.

Economist Frédéric Bastiat wrote about this in "That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Not Seen". We're wired to notice immediate, dramatic effects while completely missing the indirect, long-term consequences. The successful prevention operation doesn't grab headlines. The person who quietly solved the problem before it became a problem gets forgotten.

This creates what researchers call "a culture of arsonists". When you reward firefighting over fire prevention, you end up incentivizing the very problems you claim to solve. The manager who creates last-minute crises becomes indispensable for solving them. The therapist who treats symptoms instead of root causes builds a practice around repeat customers. Organizations start rewarding drama over stability.

We've built a society that runs on reaction instead of prevention. We wait for the crisis, then celebrate whoever shows up to manage it. But maybe the most revolutionary thing we could do isn't finding cleverer ways to fix what's broken—it's remembering what worked before it ever broke, and asking ourselves why we abandoned it.

What are we missing in our rush to engineer solutions for everything?