Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (The MIT Press)

by Christof Koch

Yet more insidious, much more widespread than individual failings to heed warnings, were the explicit and implicit attitudes of racial arrogance and cultural condescension in the minds of the people who could have made a difference. Admiral Kimmel, the officer in charge of the Pacific Fleet, made it perfectly clear in an unguarded moment during one of many congressional investigations: “I never thought those little yellow sons-of-bitches could pull off such an attack so far from Japan.” More than fifty years later, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz held his opponents in equal disregard, dismissing bin Laden as “this little terrorist in Afghanistan.” Widespread stereotyping blinded the people in power: “How can uneducated people living in caves with towels on their heads threaten us, the most powerful nation on the planet?” The events that led to the financial meltdown of Lehman Brothers and that almost crashed the markets in September 2008 are another example of such pathology of thought. Here, it was the widely held belief that investment risk was under control and could be leveraged away by suitable financial instruments that led to a global recession.