The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

“Fate” as a character in legend represents the fulfillment of man’s expectations of himself.

That would have required thought instead of mere reaction, and pause for serious thought is not a habit of governments.

Emotionalism is always a contributory source of folly.

Failure of communications appears to be endemic to the human condition.

Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better, for the sake of his position, not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information

“cognitive dissonance,” an academic disguise for “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” Cognitive dissonance is the tendency “to suppress, gloss over, water down or ‘waffle’ issues which would produce conflict or ‘psychological pain’ within an organization.” It causes alternatives to be “deselected since even thinking about them entails conflicts.”

was a decision in his own interest, not the country’s.

Only an exceedingly rare ruler reverses that order.

Johnson

This is an interesting paragraph about welfare and civil rights creating a society free of poverty. Wtf

No one is so sure of his premises as the man who knows too little.

Got dang

a ruler never hears the truth and “ends by not wanting to hear it.”

Gunnar Myrdal,

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John Quincy Adams’ dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, “there will be America’s heart … but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

When objective evidence disproves strongly held beliefs, what occurs, according to theorists of “cognitive dissonance,” is not rejection of the beliefs but rigidifying, accompanied by attempts

to rationalize the disproof.

“Show the thing you contend for to be reason,” Burke had said, “show it to be common sense, show it to be the means of attaining some useful end, and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please.”

When desire disagrees with the judgment of reason, he said, there is a disease of the soul, “And when the soul is opposed to knowledge, or opinion or reason which are her natural laws, that I call folly.”

“Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on [office],” he wrote to a friend, “a rottenness begins in his conduct.”