The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

If the mind is open enough to perceive that a given policy is harming rather than serving self-interest, and self-confident enough to acknowledge it, and wise enough to reverse it, that is a summit in the art of government.

It qualifies as folly when it is a perverse persistence in a policy demonstrably unworkable or counter-productive.

myths are prototypes of human behavior

Renaissance—which is to say the period when the values of this world replaced those of the hereafter—was

reform was difficult to achieve, owing to the vested interest of the entire hierarchy in corruption,

Their three outstanding attitudes—obliviousness to the growing disaffection of constituents, primacy of self-aggrandizement, illusion of invulnerable status—are persistent aspects of folly.

coarse but witty man-about-town of the type that gains notoriety by being abusive.

As it has ever been, staying in office was the primary thought.

Pownall had formulated a principle worth the attention of all who rule at any time—that government must conduct itself with regard to the feelings of the governed, and ignores them at its peril.

“There was something about him,” said an acquaintance, “that even treachery could not trust.”

“The whole of your political conduct has been one continued series of weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence, and notorious servility, incapacity and corruption.”

Insistence on a rooted notion regardless of contrary evidence is the source of the self-deception that characterizes folly.

Marquess of Carmarthen, one of the king’s friends, who demanded in a debate, “For what purpose were [the colonists] suffered to go to that country, unless the profit of their labor should return to their masters here?”

Eisenhower was deeply concerned about the prospect of deficit budgets, as was his Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey, who said flatly that not defense but disaster would result from “a military program that scorned the resources and problems of our economy—erecting majestic defenses and battlements for the protection of a country that was bankrupt.” (That was thirty years ago.) The New Look was motivated as much by the domestic economy as by the cold war.

In a dependent relationship the protégé can always control the protector by threatening to collapse.

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.” In the relations of subordinate to superior within the government, its object is the development of policies that upset no one. It assists the ruler in wishful thinking, defined as “an unconscious alteration in the estimate of probabilities.”

On the basis of the law of vital interest, it was predictable that the United States would ultimately back down in Vietnam and the North prevail.

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

He quoted 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.”

According to the Stoics, reason was the “thinking fire” that directs the affairs of the world, and the emperor or ruler of the state was considered to be “the servant of divine reason [appointed] to maintain order on earth.” The theory was comforting, but then as now “divine reason” was more often than not overpowered by non-rational human frailties—ambition, anxiety, status-seeking, face-saving, illusions, self-delusions, fixed prejudices.

Although the structure of human thought is based on logical procedure from premise to conclusion, it is not proof against the frailties and the passions.

“And when the soul is opposed to knowledge, or opinion or reason which are her natural laws, that I call folly.”

Plato

Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others—only to lose it over themselves.

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

In its first stage, mental standstill fixes the principles and boundaries governing a political problem. In the second stage, when dissonances and failing function begin to appear, the initial principles rigidify. This is the period when, if wisdom were operative, re-examination and re-thinking and a change of course are possible, but they are rare as rubies in a backyard. Rigidifying leads to increase of investment and the need to protect egos; policy founded upon error multiplies, never retreats. The greater the investment and the more involved in it the sponsor’s ego, the more unacceptable is disengagement. In the third stage, pursuit of failure enlarges the damages until it causes the fall of Troy, the defection from the Papacy, the loss of a trans-Atlantic empire, the classic humiliation in Vietnam.

Refusal to draw inference from negative signs, which under the rubric “wooden-headedness” has played so large a part in these pages, was recognized in the most pessimistic work of modern times, George Orwell’s 1984, as what the author called “Crimestop.” “Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments . . . and of being bored and repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

This leaves the field open to protective stupidity. Meanwhile bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.