VI. A History of Western Stupidity

To the extent that Western Civilization is a distinctly identifiable historical adventure, its origins are discernable in and associated with the rise of ancient Greece. As Greek culture developed and flourished, it became clear to all that an excess of power led to a comparable amount of stupidity. After first presenting his vision of the philosopher-kings in The Republic, Plato had his doubts and concluded that laws were the only safeguard against abuses of power. Too much power concentrated anywhere is simply too dangerous, as it invariably leads to injustice. Arbitrary power was recognized as an inducement to stupidity which in turn undermined the effectiveness of power. Stupidity could thus be seen as a check on excessive power, rendering it counter-productive as it became unjust.

Since we still revere Greek thought and honor Greek ideals, it is worth noting that these ideals were not of physical objects reduced to essence but archetypical models of theoretical ultimates which could not possibly be realized. Philosophers reveled in associating such idealized abstractions but always in static, non-algebraic modes of thought, and in the purest philosophy of mathematics, the Greeks failed to develop any system of symbolic notation to express dynamic functions.

As mathematical idealists, the Pythagoreans, for example, were in love with whole numbers. A veritable crisis in doctrine arose when the square root of two was found to be irrational. This posed a threat to their schema, as it indicated that their mental world was somehow inaccurate, insufficient, incomplete and imperfect. Worse yet, it could not be made accurate, sufficient, complete and perfect by adaptation and/or expansion and still remain "Theirs". So, how did these great Greek mathematical philosophers handle this cognitive crisis? Pretty much as would anyone else: they suppressed knowledge of the square root of two.

Likewise, they suppressed that other scourge of Pythagorean idealism —the dodecahedron. In this, they were so successful that hardly anyone now knows much less cares what a dodecahedron is. Nevertheless, anyone interested in Greek stupidity should note that Pythagoreans knew of five perfect solids—the tetrahedron, the cube, the octahedron, the icosahedron and the dodecahedron. The first four were conveniently associated with the four elements which constituted the Greek world—earth, air, fire and water. The fifth was regarded as a symbol of the quintessence of the other four, thus presumably representing some unworldly, supernatural and perhaps even dangerous power. Ordinary people were to be kept unaware of the dodecahedron as a matter of something like "Cognitive security". In fact, Pythagoreanism was popular until its practitioners were found to be dealing in this alarming and subversive subject, whence they were suppressed and some lynched, thus initiating the West's long and venerable tradition of persecuting intellectual heretics.

Such actions were justified in the classical world by a schema which dealt with both ideals and ideas in terms of a desired moral end rather than accuracy and practicality. Any object or observation might provide a starting point for a train of thought, but then a logical philosophy could be constructed based upon it without any particular concern for congruence with reality. Worse yet, a contrived system could be constructed for a particular moral purpose—i.e., to justify a particular desired policy— and many were and still are to this day.

If Greeks were stupid in their philosophical ways, Romans were stupid in pragmatic, practical ways. Far from being thinkers, Romans were doers—short-range opportunists of the first order. Julius Caesar, for example, never had a long-range plan. His schema was to act to his immediate advantage, with his most brilliant stratagem being moment-to-moment scheming. His assassination was the price he paid for his overwhelming success. He aroused resentment and jealousy in others in the way the Big Man on Campus might be hated for being so popular.

In its most characteristic and basic form, the Roman mind was dominated by a conservative, self-serving schema in which there was a conspicuous lack of imagination, creative fantasy and playfulness. Basically, the Romans really were not much fun to be around. The opportunity of the moment might be seized, but there was little creative in Roman culture. Its literature and art were wooden, and there emerged no genius in mathematics or science. If the Romans had any genius at all, it was in applied intellect. For example, as engineers, they built to last, with some of their roads and aqueducts still in use today.

Romans fully expected their stand-pat, stagnant culture to last as long as their works in engineering. They deified "Law and order"—a defining component of the modern centurion's schema. They delighted in framing laws and profoundly loved systems. They defined the future in terms of the past and had no concept of progress. They dominated for centuries and might have endured in fact as well as name for centuries more had they not, like Caesar, been so successful in their practical conquests and rigid in their devotion to themselves.

Some four hundred explanations have been suggested for the fall of the Roman Empire, so one more will not matter. It may well be that the Empire fell and for hundreds of years kept on falling because the Romans were stupid. More precisely, the decline and fall was due to socio-economic imprudence compounded by a monumental measure of self-induced ignorance and was a grand example of applied stupidity—the reciprocity of ignorance and misguided power.

The Empire struck out because the Romans were insensitive to the social aspects of trade and finance—the twin underpinnings of their military juggernaut. They were simply unable to appreciate what they were doing to themselves and what kind of world they were creating. As their conquests spread, the lines of administration stretched to the point that even interpretation of dicta could not suffice to maintain both law and order. One of them had to go, so order was sacrificed for the sake of legal fictions, the image of invincibility and the fantasy of imperial propriety.

To put it simply, Rome could not survive its success. It became a case study of the neurotic paradox in action, with cravings for quick profits blinding those with naught but short-term gains on their minds to the social ills they were creating. Roman Senators and their cronies set the tone of legislators and their lackeys down through the ages as they skinned and fleeced their way through the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. Fertile land was tilled to the point of sterility, with nothing being done with fertilizers to rebuild it as the Chinese, at the very same time, were doing in their fields. Nor did Romans condescend to help the impoverished peasants of the lands they overran and ruined. Rome had no future because it had no concept of a future as anything but a continual adventure in exploitation.

Romans lived for the moment and thereby guaranteed that there would be, for them, no tomorrow. They enjoyed the good things in life—slavery, brutality and materialism. Consistent with their practical bent, their religions were blatantly commercial. Winning divine favor was considered a matter of paying value for value in an essentially economic religion, with the gods certainly owing the Romans something in return for the sacrifices made to them. It was in this spiritual void that Christianity took root and flourished by appealing to the many have-nots, who had nothing material to sacrifice.

The political empire of the Romans was replaced by the spiritual empire of the Catholic church. For some thousand years, this institution defined the schema and life of Western Civilization. By any standard except the splitting of theological hairs, it was a time of cultural stagnation interrupted only when crusaders sallied forth to visit terror and destruction on the Holy Land.

As part of our common heritage of misunderstandings from the past, the term "Crusader" has survived as a designation of honor and virtue. This is rather incredible, considering that the original crusaders were little more than loosely organized mobs of cutthroats. Seldom in history have such vicious gangs of self-opinionated invaders robbed and slaughtered in such righteousness. If there is any lesson to be learned from the crusaders, it must be that the lowest acts of cruelty and violence can be motivated and hidden by the loftiest of ideals. Excesses are usually dangerous to everyone, and nothing goes to excess like religious zeal, since there is no internal check on power employed in a just cause.

One unanticipated boon of the Crusades for the Western world was the greater knowledge and awareness of peoples and cultures brought back by the brigands who returned, and this became a contributing factor to the outburst of secular enthusiasm for life which characterized the Renaissance. The fifteenth century saw a rebirth of interest in all dimensions of Western culture. Of particular interest to us was the renaissance in stupidity. No longer was idiotic irrelevance confined to scholastic arguments and monastic debates. A universe beckoned, and stupidity rushed out to fill the void. While, for the previous ten centuries, stupidity had been part of the exclusive domain of the Church, it suddenly was applied to any number of worldly pursuits.

Stupidity emanated like a burst of miasma from the stale closet of theology into the chaos and confusion of daily life. There was stupidity in exploration, stupidity in invention, stupidity in statecraft, medicine, art and war. Whereas until this age, only monks had been misinformed, Gutenberg's press made it possible for everyone to be misinformed. This was a tumultuous period when the zenith achieved in artistic expression was matched by the nadir attained in political morality. Whatever else it was, this was the period when a new religion of humanism and interest in worldly affairs challenged and to a degree supplanted the dogma of the Church and concern with the life hereafter.

As leaders of the Church, the Popes of this period (1470-1530) might be judged as unfortunate examples of Christian amorality. However, that would be to miss the point that they had eagerly embraced the secular norms of the age as standards for judging their behavior. They never did comprehend their successes according to their new standards designated them as failures to people who clung devoutly to the old. Their new schema of dedication to worldly achievement made them blind and deaf to the institutional dissonance and dissatisfaction their behavior engendered. As they plunged into the world, they became immune to the criticisms of those committed to the religion they were dragging into disrepute.

It would have been bad enough had the secular spirit of the age merely glazed the Vatican in a superficial way. However, the venality, amorality and avarice of worldly power politics was carried to excess by the Renaissance Popes. Sixtus IV (1471-1484) typified the new standard-bear-er. He could not have been less interested in the internal health of the Church. His great successes were all secular: he improved the city of Rome physically, invigorated the arts and made the papacy a powerful monarchy. On the other hand, his great failures were all moral: he conspired with assassins, blessed cannons and indulged in simony, nepotism and war—all without shame.

The renaissance in papal stupidity was compounded by the self-serving nature of Vatican advisors, who were caught up in both the spirit of the age and the political character of their environment. As Alexander VI (1492-1503) observed, "The most grievous danger for any Pope lies in the fact that encompassed as he is by flatterers, he never hears the truth about his own person and ends by not wishing to hear it." This danger is inherent in every political organization: if advisors are going to advise first and foremost to secure political favor, then everyone is going to lose one way or another, more or less, sooner or later. In fact, it is a basic, fundamental cause of stupidity common to every human organization.

One reason the Church was so unresponsive to complaints and ill-disposed to reform was that it had a long and venerable tradition of inciting and ignoring critics. More than a millennium of criticism had made it thick-skinned and prone to dismiss calls for reform as part of the routine bother an established power had to expect from frustrated idealists.

By the early sixteenth century, serious dissatisfaction with and by the clergy had widened and deepened. This discontent was clearly expressed in every medium available both within and outside the Church. Specifically, in 1511, Erasmus laid the ideological groundwork for Luther's impending attack with the publication of his biting satire In Praise of Folly. To everyone but those in power, an outbreak of dissent appeared both imminent and justified.

Had the Popes honored Catholic values, they would have prayed, studied and preached, and it was by the traditional standards of poverty, humility and chastity that their behavior was condemnable. However, by worldly standards, the Renaissance Popes achieved a degree of success by disregarding their vows and embracing stupidity. As Erasmus noted in his Colloquies, it would have been inconvenient for "Wisdom to descend upon them...It would lose them all that wealth and...all those possessions." He further noted that many pimps, bankers and others would have been thrown out of work. These vested interests were strongly committed tothe new morality, complemented the Popes' stupidity and proved to be the Protestants' greatest allies.

Not only had the standards of the Popes used for judging their own behavior shifted, but their rapacious pecuniary policies converted supporters into opponents. The emerging middle class became increasingly resentful of the insatiable demands of the papacy for more and more money to finance holy decadence, so even by the new worldly standard of economics, the Church was a vexation. The break was successful, when it finally came, because princes and priests reinforced each other's concerns about the tax money being used in Rome to abuse the Bible. Like most successful sinners, the Popes made the institution they were allegedly serving pay for their indulgences: the Church they secularized lost half of its constituency to the Protestant secession.

The specific abuse that caused the final break was the granting of indulgences. Although the faithful were offended by the general depravity of Rome and the reluctance of Popes to reform, the commercialization of spiritual grace was an insult as well as an expense which touched the devout in a very tangible way. The money grubbing Church had prostituted itself to the point that the sale of future indulgences actually encouraged sin, and this is what the Protestants were protesting.

Abuse of the Church by its officials was to continue ever after, but 1517 was still a turning point in history: the Church simply failed to turn. This was the year when Martin Luther nailed the clergy to the Church door. As an agent of the Reformation, Luther was inspired by the idea that the Church should live up to itself. It was this peculiar notion which led him to become the greatest whistle blower in history.

Luther's official antagonist, Pope Leo X, was the man on the spot at this rather dramatic moment, and he did not have a clue as to what was going on. If he had, he would not have known what it meant, being insulated to the point of being unaware of the issues in dispute and thus comprehending nether the specific protests nor that the general condition of the Church had been deteriorating for the previous fifty years. Even if he had known what was going on, he would not have known what to do.

Once the protests became public and widespread, not even his Loftiness could feign ignorance of the revolt which crashed upon the Church.In 1518, when asked to vote a tax for a crusade against the Turks, the Diet of Augsburg replied that the real enemy of Christendom was "The hell-hound in Rome". The popular feeling was that the proper concern of the Church was neither art nor war but the spiritual needs of the faithful. Just as Christianity had developed to fill a spiritual void in the Roman Empire, so did the Protestant movement develop in response to the spiritual vortex created by the internal corruption of the Catholic empire. Thus, it was not so much a response to a failing of the Christian schema as it was a reaction to its replacement by a secular ethic.

The Popes, by their very success according to their new standards, alienated those faithful to the old morality while simultaneously fostering hostility among the princes, who became increasingly jealous of the prosperity and influence of the Church. In this context, the conservative nature of the Protestant movement is worth noting. In an ideological sense, Protestants rejected the worldly Popes and returned to the scriptures to find meaning in their faith and lives. In this way, they were typical of many revolutionaries who break away from establishments which have betrayed ideals and been corrupted by power. As it turned out, Protestants were actually interested as much in the economic gains to be made by disemboweling the Church as in doctrine. However, it was not squabbling over riches but theological disputes reflecting doctrinal differences which riddled the Protestant movement from its inception and shattered any chance it might have had at unity and strength.

In the emerging modern world, the power of belief in oneself as a major source of stupidity was personified in Philip II of Spain. No failure of his regal policy could shake his faith in its essential excellence. He firmly believed that, as king, he could do no wrong, since he was convinced that all his labors were for the service of God. His selection of the Duke of Medina-Sidonia as Admiral of the Armada was done against the Duke's protestations of his own ill-health, inexperience and lack of qualifications. Philip disregarded these protests and, in 1588, the fleet suffered the disaster he courted. For his role in the debacle, the Duke was promoted to rank of Supreme Commander in Politics and War by his persistent, headstrong king.

George III of England was only slightly more reasonable. As his tutor Lord Waldegrave put it, he would seldom do wrong "Except when he mistakes wrong for right". When this happens, the good Lord continued, "It will be difficult to undeceive him because his is uncommonly indolent and has strong prejudices." Poorly educated and resolute to the point of obstinacy, he was a menace to his own empire even when he was sane. Of course, as a threat to the system, he was aided by his ministers, most of whom were both unfit for office and corrupt.

Most of them were unfit because they were elitists trying to maintain traditional roles in a changing world, and in this sense, the King epitomized the plight of the ruling class. A determination to conserve old ways in the face of new conditions made official behavior increasingly irrelevant if not counter-productive, so the government consistently converted problems into crises, thereby undercutting its authority and prestige.

It is still difficult to evaluate British colonial policy for the period from 1763 to 1776, as it is not yet clear what it was or even if there was one. There may have been none; there may have been many. If there was one, it was a policy of deliberate and systematic stupidity, but Edmund Burke could not find any. Although the net effect of governmental action was clearly self-defeating, he considered that to be the result of haphazard, individual decisions. There certainly was no colonial policy set out on paper. Nevertheless, there seemed to be some underlying principle at work, for no matter what the specifics of the situation, officials were consistent in their ability to take any colonial situation and make it worse.

If policy at the time was unclear, action was confused. Official British behavior toward the colonies was weak, contradictory, irresolute and unconstitutional. The government's record was one of backing and filling, passing and repealing acts, threatening and submitting. The only constant was that everything the British did turned out to be wrong. Not once did they do something right or just happen to stumble onto anything sensible by sheer accident.

In the long litany of British blunders which transformed loyal colonists into Americans, the Stamp Act exemplifies the absurdity of official ineptitude. This was a case where the law was, fortunately for the government, ineffective. As it was, it cost those who created it, supported it and tried to enforce it political points. However, had it been successful, it would have cost the British one or two million pounds a years in lost trade to collect about £75,000 in taxes. This was but typical of the way common sense was sacrificed to political principle. The tax on tea, which led to the Boston Tea Party, was another example. It would not even pay to collect itself, but it was retained, apparently, just to demonstrate how perversely stupid the British could be.

In retrospect, it appears that there was indeed a British colonial policy during this era. It was an irrational, subconscious assertion of the nobility's right to suppress the rising commercial interests in England. To the extent that this policy damaged the merchants, it suited the landed gentry, which was simply doing its worst to prevent England from obtaining an empire. Fortunately for England, the nobles were rather studied in their supercilious mismanagement of affairs. As an expression of classism, colonial policy was an attempt by aristocrats to shoot Britain in the purse,and they missed. Even without the United States, the Empire developed and flourished to degrees unimaginable had Parliamentary mismanagement continued.

When armed rebellion broke out, the government persisted in its efforts to lose the colonies and added an idiosyncratic touch to routine idiocy when brothers Vice-Admiral Richard and General William Howe were assigned the contradictory roles of being a military commanders and peace commissioners. Just how they were to reconcile these was never made clear to anyone—especially to them, and they never really succeeded in either. This double failure may have been, to some degree, deliberate because the Howes were basically sympathetic to the American cause, since older brother Lord George Augustus Howe had fought alongside New England troops until his death at Ticonderoga in 1758. In addition, the Howes were opposition Whigs and reluctant to win a victory which would rebound to the credit of the Tory government. It was probably this personal sympathy for the rebels and political hostility toward the government which led peace commissioners Richard and William Howe to allow General Washington's army to escape from sure destruction time after time in the early stages of the war .

In its battle for independence, America's best ally was not the French Navy but the British government's casual approach to the war. The classic case of this was Lord Germain's failure to coordinate General Howe's 1777 campaign, which ended up in Philadelphia, with that of General Burgoyne, which ended up in the dumper at Saratoga. The order directing Howe north from New York simply reached him too late. Although difficulty in communication is common in human affairs, most people make an extra effort to get their messages through when important matters are involved. Perhaps Lord Germain could not condescend to take mere colonists seriously, so a second secretary was left to write General Howe. The letter missed the boat, and Burgoyne was stranded.

It cost the British about £100 million to lose the colonies, and whatever the cause, it was not ignorance. The ministry had known of colonial discontent and the futility of their own policies. These were matters which were routinely debated in Parliament and occasionally caused riots in the streets of London. The ruling majority stuck to its schema of repressing emerging commercial interests with policies which grew increasingly inept and ineffective. The situation deteriorated into a vicious cycle with each failure engendering more colonial animosity which, in turn, calledforth sterner measures of futile repression. Until it was too late to save the American colonies, the government would not modify its superior attitude toward the colonists nor toward the merchants upon whom the British Empire would be built.

The endemic reluctance to benefit from experience evinced itself in an early form of French stupidity when the fourteenth-century Valois monarchs repeatedly devalued their currency whenever they were desperate for cash. That this policy wrecked the economy and angered the people was lost on the leaders until finally their persistence in this aggravating practice provoked a rebellion. This was but another case of insulated rulers, convinced they were right, bringing ruin upon themselves.

With the Bourbons, French stupidity burst into true brilliance. As the consummate monarch, Louis XIV certainly consummated his country with his ceaseless wars, and in his way, he contributed more than anyone else to the collapse of his way of life. As an absolutely self-centered ruler, he allowed neither good sense nor reasonable compromise to restrain his unlimited power as he prepared France for the deluge. National unity was his grand objective, but in a land weakened and impoverished by his insatiable pursuit of power and wealth, his legacy was one of bitterness and dissent.

Along with adventurous militarism, Louis was afflicted by the disease of divine mission which had claimed Philip II a century earlier. He suffered the usual symptoms of conceiving himself to be an instrument of God's will and convincing himself that his own were the Almighty's ways of bringing holiness to the world. His single stupidest act was also his most popular: the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 converted his country from a land of toleration into one of persecution as the Catholic multitudes set themselves upon the Huguenot minority.

The long-term effects of the revocation were clearly negative, but they paled when compared to the results of centuries of the asymmetric distributing goods and power in France. The concentration of material wealth and coercive power lay in the hands of the landed aristocracy. Like their British counterparts, who were doing their stodgy best to abort the Empire, the French nobles in the eighteenth century were intent on creating a revolution by manipulating their power to their own short-term advantage. Caught up in the neurotic paradox, they lived in luxury while the supporting peasants were allocated just enough to sustain their support. While it lasted, it was a system of injustice supporting power, with producers having nothing to say about the distribution of their products anddistributors passing judgment on themselves and their system. The wonder is not that there was a revolution but that it was so long in coming.

In order to foment a revolution, the ruling class must fail to distribute goods according to the demands of the people. Thus, the trick is to control the demands. When demands increase and the supply system remains constant, a band of revolutionaries appears promising to satisfy those demands. In the case of eighteenth century France, the aristocracy really did not have to do anything new or different to precipitate the revolution. Accumulated grievances simply built up to the breaking point so that once they were given the opportunity for expression (as they were with the summoning of the States General in May of 1789), revolution burst upon the land. It was the stupid failure of the rigid French establishment to adjust and respond to the conditions it created that caused the revolution.

The French Revolution was archetypical in that the anarchy and chaos of misapplied ideals brought on a reversion to autocracy as soon as an able administrator could assert himself. Although the revolutionaries defeated both their foreign and domestic foes, they could not control themselves. (This factor of effective self-control is ever missing in the human equation.) Napoleon seized power after the desire and need for order became popularized by the excesses and abuses of freedom.

Napoleon's career serves as an example of the positive correlation of power and stupidity. As his power grew, his judgment weakened. In this respect, he appears very human, as people use their wits to gain power and then use their power and lose their wits. Although one might assume that those in power would need their wits more than others, and indeed they may, the mighty seldom seem to have even common sense, much less uncommon wisdom. It may well be that stupidity is power's way of moving on. As it corrupts judgment, stupidity encourages others to become powerful, thus permitting the expression of new combinations of developing trends.

Actually, Napoleon's rise and demise serve as a lesson for all students of Western Civilization. He was thoroughly modern in that he was totally amoral and as great as anyone could be without being good. He was extremely efficient up to and even including the point that he destroyed himself through arrogance and overextension. (There is a peculiar irony in the ability of humans to be so effective at self-destruction.) Along the way, Napoleon brought organization to chaos and occasionally brought worthy ideals to life: for example, he selected officials according to their intelligence, energy, industry and obedience rather than their ancestry, religion or other criteria unrelated to job performance. Although he was very efficient at achieving his ends, his basic problem was that there was no self-imposed end to his ends. His urge for self-aggrandizement was insatiable, and it motivated him to both succeed and fail. He could not perceive that the pursuit of his own best interest came to be in his own worst interest because there was no greater purpose controlling his development and directing his behavior. He personified action for its own sake and burned himself out proving that his power had meaning only if it could be used to gain more power.

That he attained so much power was partly because his mind was logical, mathematical and retentive and partly because he was unscrupulous and insensitive to misery and suffering. He was a careful, precise planner whose fatal error was one any good fighter might have made—he could not anticipate that the Russians would not give him a decisive battle in 1812. He could not consider this possibility because he made the typically human mistake of judging others by his own values, and "Not fighting" was not an element in his own schema.

History, usually so sparing with second chances, was generous to the Bourbons, but they proved totally unequal to their opportunities. Their attitudes and behavior warranted and elicited the condemning comment that they had "Learned nothing and forgotten nothing". They attempted in a hopeless way to turn the clock back and live by the schema that had once produced a revolution, and again, they brought themselves down as they failed in their efforts to regain the property and privileges of the old regime. The more trenchant observation was that they had "Learned nothing and forgotten everything".

Had doctors learned how to forget their limiting attitudes in the nineteenth century, a once heretical idea would not have become an orthodox dogma. In the late 1840's, the germ theory of disease was very much at odds with popular theories that illness was an expression of God's wrath against a sinner and/or caused by the breathing of bad air. The only thing poisoned by bad air was objectivity, which hardly could thrive in such an anti-intellectual atmosphere. When Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis briefly introduced sanitary measures in a maternity hospital in Vienna, he was greeted with vituperous denunciations. Until he insisted that doctors wash their hands between performing autopsies and examining patients, mortality rates stood at 18%. Within a month they dropped to 3% and a month later to below 2%.

A year of success by Dr. Semmelweis was too much for his critics. His contract was not renewed, so the good doctor went to Budapest to repeat his performance with the same conclusive results. He then authored a book codifying his methods and analyzing his data statistically. Both book and author were roundly ignored, rejected and disdained. Ten years of Hungarian sarcasm were all he could endure. His mind snapped, and he died in a mental institution.

Despite Dr. Semmelweis's work, in 1880, it was still possible to debate the validity of the germ theory as a functional explanation of disease. However, during the next twenty years, the work of Lister, Koch and Pasteur silenced such debate and established the germ theory as the explanation for cause of disease. Unfortunately, there is something singular about the human mind, in that an explanation for a phenomenon usually cannot be accepted as just that but comes to be regarded as the explanation for it. In this case, once the germ theory was established, it served to block recognition that mosquitoes could carry and spread malaria (meaning "Bad air") and yellow fever. Fortunately for untold millions, Drs. Ronald Ross and Colonel William Gorgas learned their medicine far from the established medical schools—centers not of higher learning but of higher orthodoxy. Once again, fact battled fancy, as heretics had to demonstrate time and time again that mosquitoes, not filth, conveyed these two dread diseases. By 1900, the formerly unorthodox germ theory had become enshrined as the bastion of medical belief, so it was only with phenomenal persistence that Dr. Ross was able to convince his colleagues that more than one theory might be right and Dr. Gorgas to show how the spread of the diseases could be controlled.

One of the common marvels of the human mind is its effectiveness in preventing people from recognizing facts which fail to conform to conventional ideology. As something of a counterpoise, the liberal tradition permits all ideas to flourish so that the one that best fits the facts may finally prevail. However, any ideal can be misapplied, and this one certainly was when the tolerance of liberals eased the way of the Communists to power in Russia in 1917 to the long-term detriment of liberalism there and elsewhere. Under the Tsars, the liberals convinced everyone including themselves that living conditions were so terrible that they could not possibly get any worse, but the Communists set out to prove them wrong. At first, liberals blamed Revolutionary excesses on the civil war and post-War allied blockade: too late, they learned that one of the Communists' chronically favorite excesses is the suppression of liberalism.

This stupidity of Russian liberalism was personified in Alexander Kerensky. In all of history, it is impossible to find so consistent a record of well-intended blunders as his. His pitiful attempt to lead a democratic Russian state put him in the class of Woodrow Wilson as one of the great misplaced idealists in an age of misplaced idealism.

By way of contrast, it is difficult to find in all of history so thorough a repudiation of liberalism as was personified by Lenin, who swept the feeble Kerensky off the political stage. Lenin considered ruthlessness the greatest virtue, and once convinced of his course of action, he despised debate. He proved that fanatics need not necessarily be stupid, if a crisis does in fact call for firm, decisive action. The stupidity of fanatics is that they so routinely foment crises so as to justify and perpetuate their fanaticism.

If there is a single, simple lesson to be learned from the career of Lenin, it is that the clever use of slogans is paramount, as slogans shape the perceptions people have of experiences and thus control comprehension of what is happening. "All the land to the people" was the cry of the Bolsheviks before the revolution, although by 1916, 89% of the total cultivated land and 94% of the livestock was owned by the peasants. "All land from the people" would have been an appropriate slogan when, in 1929, Stalin stole the land back from the peasants and restored them to serfdom. Not only was this an outrage, but it was incredibly stupid, because collectivization is simply not an efficient way to organize agriculture. However, that is what Communist ideology called for, and, as it also passed with Stalin's penchant for power, that is what was done.

Until well after World War II, Russia was, by any standard, much worse off under Communism than it had been under the Tsars. Nevertheless, the myth persists that everything improved directly after the revolution. This attests to the power of propaganda in the formation of perceptions and the structuring of comprehension. Of course, the Communists in Russia must now be accorded a kind of brutal success. At the cost of cruelty and tyranny that would have shamed the Tsars, Russians have come to enjoy a material standard of living higher than ever before.

Although Communist ideologies are expressly nontheistic, they are rational expressions of an underlying religion which, through stupefication, promotes cohesion and inhibits criticism. These ideologies include strong elements of ritual and provide detailed guides to correct action. Belief in the edifying effect of a pilgrimage to Lenin's tomb reinforces veneration for him. Similarly, sing-song incantations of maxims from Mao's Little Red Book once served to honor him. All such systems use slogans and symbols to reinforce belief, build social cohesion by providing the devout with an exalted sense of righteousness and inhibit comprehension and criticism of what is actually happening. In the guise of explanations, ideologies serve not only to codify behavior but to also to unify spirits and motivate people. Of course, as we have seen recently in China and eastern Europe, even totalitarian ideologies are not total in their control ofinformation: some knowledge may seep in and undercut all the determined opposition of ideologues to change and improvement.

The Russian Revolution was played out against the setting of World War I, and if there ever was a event which deserves its own chapter in a book on stupidity, that war is it. (However, in the interest of brevity, we will have to content ourselves here with a few selected lowlights.) It was a grand fiasco, with all sides bent on matching each other blunder for blunder—a war in which sanity was lost in the midst of millions of madmen adoring their own madness and fairly reveling in their own stupidity. The British would muddle through; elan would carry the French to victory; German arrogance would prevail; Russian peasants would serve the Tsar as cannon fodder—and it went on for years. It was a world in which pointing out the obvious could be considered an act of treason, but for every whistle blower who noted that something was amiss and asserted that the war was not working, there were millions who could not hear the whistles for all the cheering at parades and shouting of propaganda.

Even before the war, the French made an incredible strategic error by repeatedly ignoring warnings from Military Intelligence about the German Schlieffen plan to sweep through Belgium and then hang a left toward Paris. Fortunately, for the French, the German High Command came to their rescue. Faulty execution of the plan prevented the Germans from capitalizing on the French collapse. With stupidity so evenly balanced on both sides, the war quickly became a stalemate.

For sheer tactical idiocy, however, nothing could match that of the generals who clung to their "Attack" schema long after it had been rendered clearly obsolete by modern weaponry. Time after time, wave after wave of troops proved that direct frontal assault was a futile exercise in carnage. Everyone knew it but those in command. It took a few years and millions of casualties for this idea to trickle upward in a convincing fashion to those who found explanations for failure everywhere but in their own planning. In fact, it probably never would have made it on its own but was carried along with field officers as they gradually were promoted to staff officers with the passage of time and then could make their views known to some practical effect.

In a war of black ribbon blunders, few campaigns can match the disaster at Gallipoli, and among the debacles there, none compares in stupidity to an advance made by the Allies at Anzac Bay on Aug. 6, 1915. A column moved to within a quarter of a mile of the ridge with only twenty Turks ahead of them. They could have easily taken the high ground and turned the entire campaign into a glorious triumph. Turkey would have then been knocked out of the war. Bulgaria would then not have joined the Axis powers. Austria would have been vulnerable, Germany isolated and the war over. So, what did the troops in the column do? They stopped for breakfast!

The only thing that could possibly have been any stupider would have been if they had stopped for tea! This was but one example of the general British inability to comprehend the importance of time in affairs of action. Again and again, throughout the war, simple delays of minutes and hours spelled the difference between easy victory and disastrous defeat. The British knew the war was not a cricket match but nevertheless conducted their efforts with a casual indifference to time born of leisurely bowling when ready; they never could quite grasp the notion that at a given moment fifty men might accomplish what thousands could not do an hour later. As for the troops breakfasting at Gallipoli, when they were finished, they were finished. The Turks had reinforced the ridge, so the well-fed column traipsed back down the hill for lunch.

Fortunately for the Allies, the German Admiralty was there to save them. In September of 1915, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was ousted from control of the German Navy for protesting the restriction of submarine warfare. He called for the sinking of every enemy ship afloat and every neutral vessel in the war zone. This was, of course, the policy adopted early in 1917, so he was dismissed for calling for the right policy at the wrong time. His replacement, Admiral von Capelle, rejected, in 1916, a proposal that the shipyards increase submarine production by a factor of five. His rationale must rate as one of the stupidest remarks ever made— "Nobody would know what to do with so many U-boats after the war" —and it probably sounds even worse in German.

Aside from the human suffering created by the war, it also was a colossal economic disaster for Europe. Never has there been so crushing a refutation of Marx's theory of economic determinism. The war impoverished and destroyed people, rulers and states. It cost thirty-three times all the gold money in the world at the time. Almost all of this was devotedto the art and science of destruction. If Marx had been right and economic motives ruled, there certainly would have been no war.

If the magnitude of stupidity induced is any measure of motivation, fear must be, unfortunately, a more powerful motivator than profit. Like so many emotions, fear is not so much a blinder as a fixator, in that the paranoid fixes on one feature of a situation while dissociating from and forgetting the relevance of other factors. The French policy toward Germany after World War I was a classic example of fear cum stupidity. The French fear of Germany contributed to the creation of a "Frankundstein" monster via the terms of the Versailles Treaty which not only failed to bury German militarism but provided a basis for propagandistic rationalizations which Adolf Hitler used to ease his way to power.

Not only did the Treaty and the world-wide economic depression of the early 1930's play into Hitler's hands, but he was able to exploit given conditions because he well knew the limitations of ethics, objectivity and accuracy. He knew that truth was useless for capturing crowds, so he was not particularly interested in it. What he was interested in was power, and he knew that to get it, he had to tell the Germans what they wanted to hear (which happened to be what he believed anyway). He provided them with something in which and someone in whom they could believe. That the basis for his schema was self-hatred and nonsense made it no less appealing to a people who felt betrayed and humiliated. He provided Germany with a way out of the miserable aftermath of World War I, and only too late did it become clear to the devout that the way out was a way down to a cultural carnage that would have shamed the Devil himself.

Before the war, the British attempt to appease Hitler was both a sad and classic example of groupthink. More specifically, it was a case of an anti-war group contributing unintentionally to the outbreak of war by basing policies on their own wishful thinking. In 1938, the Chamberlain government had absolutely no interest in information that challenged their naive assumptions about Hitler's peaceful intentions. In acts unprecedented in the annals of diplomacy, German generals sent three messages to the British urging a firm stand against Hitler, but the British ambassador to Germany, Neville Henderson, played "Mindguard" and advised ignoring them. Basically, His Majesty's Government insisted on perceiving Hitler as a nationalist who would combat Communism. Official views of events were so totally askew that the Czechs were castigated for threatening peace simply because they did not want to give their country away to Hitler at the Munich Peace Conference. To the credit of the Foreign Office, there were critics of Chamberlain's policy, but they were ignored in the Cabinet's inflexible pursuit of folly.

When war did come, some of the revelations it brought with it were shocking to the point of enlightenment. For example, it was quickly discovered that Singapore was a pregnable fortress, the fall of which was made all the more likely by the belief that it was invulnerable. It might indeed have been impregnable had the Japanese attacked from the sea as expected. However, being at war, the Imperial Army was hardly disposed to cooperate with its enemies, so it invaded overland instead. Singapore found itself added to the undistinguished list of presumably impregnable fortresses which, like the Maginot Line, were invulnerable to everything but imagination, maneuver and attack.

Those three elements mixed with fatal overdoses of wishful thinking and complacent preconceptions on the part of those responsible for defense provide an explanation for the debacle at Pearl Harbor. Again, groupthink played a crucial role in the realization of the unthinkable, with warnings being repeatedly ignored if they contradicted the popular belief that "It couldn't happen here". Thus, in March, 1941, when two aviation officers presented a paper concluding that an attack at dawn on Pearl Harbor launched from Japanese aircraft carriers could achieve a complete surprise, it was considered and dismissed because the commanders at Pearl believed the Japanese just would not take that chance.

Washington did not help clarify matters: all of their warnings were ambiguous. Still, it is a commander's job to protect his base, so in the event of ambiguity, prudence would suggest caution. The basic mistake base commander Admiral Husband Kimmel made was in assuming an attack would not occur at Pearl Harbor. It is only fair to mention that the ambiguous warnings were received amidst background "Noise" of many competing and irrelevant signals. The failure to heed the warnings, such as they were, was due to the tendency of people to note and give credence to data that support their expectations, as analysts are generally inclined to select interpretations of data or messages which confirm prevailing hypotheses. In this particular case, both perceptions and interpretations were shaped by the self-confirming schema that the Japanese would attack somewhere else—probably thousands of miles west of Hawaii.

On December 7th, in the complacent state of presumed invulnerability, two more warnings were missed. The incoming planes were detected on radar and reported to army headquarters where they were misidentified as an expected flight of B-17's from the mainland due in at about that time. Once again, we find data interpreted according to expectation if convenient. No one attempted to confirm that the planes spotted were in fact the expected bombers: it was just assumed they were, and that ended that. Also, a destroyer sighted and attacked a midget submarine trying to sneak into the harbor. This action was reported to naval headquarters where the sub was dismissed as a false sighting, of which there had been some before.

The contribution of groupthink to the disaster at Pearl Harbor was that it inhibited anyone from breaking ranks and asserting that the base was vulnerable. That would have been contrary to group norms and probably would have been a wasted gesture anyway. Usually, people do not contemplate scenarios that contradict group assumptions. The resultant communal mindset may boost morale, but the false sense of security provided is produced by distorting perception for the sake of the pleasing image.

As for the Japanese, they accepted the risk of attack out of necessity. The Empire had to expand or die, as the leaders had become prisoners of their own ambitions. Nevertheless, in a war of miscalculations, the attack on Pearl Harbor ranks as one of the worst. It was one of the few things that could have galvanized Americans into a united war effort, but this point probably was wasted on the Japanese, who misjudged America by their own imperial standards and assumed that Roosevelt could lead the country into war whenever he wanted. They did not realize they were doing the one thing that would bring an expanded war upon themselves.

As it turned out, Pearl Harbor was only the most striking example of the Allied propensity to ignore warnings during World War II. Before the battle for the bridge at Arnhem in September, 1944, the British were clearly warned by the Dutch underground that the paratroopers would be dropping right onto German tanks. Unfortunately, General Montgomery had a plan, and since the panzers were not in it, a compromise had to be found, and it was: it was blithely assumed the tanks were out of gas, and the debacle went off on schedule.

Similar warnings were given the Allies before the Battle of the Bulge a few months later when refugees told of masses of German troops concentrated just out of sight of our armies. However, these reports were dismissed rather than checked out, and other reports of a coming offensive filled intelligence files but were given scant attention. Fortunately, the GI's had learned something from their recent experience and in their jaunty way made an explicit point of winning the battle before Monty could come up with a plan to save them.

It should not be concluded that part of an officer's training is an extended course on "Warnings: How to Ignore Them". Major General John Lucas proved this in a backhanded way as commander of the American landing at Anzio in January, 1944. This was an unfortunate example of an army fighting the previous battle. General Lucas had been at Salerno, where a divided Allied force had nearly been pushed back into the sea, so despite the total lack of confirming evidence and in the face of reports of minimal opposition, he remained convinced that the Germans were nearby in force just waiting to pounce as soon as he moved inland. It became a self-realizing delusion, since the General's insistence on heeding warnings which did not exist, his desire to avoid another Gallipoli and a conservative interpretation of his orders gave the Germans time to trap his troops on the beach. Rome's liberation, which should have taken five hours, took five months instead.

In the treasure chest of American stupidity, the Bay of Pigs invasion is justly stashed away in the bottom drawer. As the classic example of groupthink, the decision to attack Cuba was pure, clear, crystalline, ideal, quality stupidity. In a culture given to bigger and better stupidity, Vietnam and Watergate have since eclipsed the Bay of Pigs in the American popular mind, but for the connoisseur of Presidential blunders, this little gem has lost none of its luster over time. We were all most fortunate that the stakes in this disgraceful misadventure were so limited.

The sad thing is that, based on the information given him, President Kennedy was really justified in ordering the invasion. The fault was not in his decision as such but in the data presented to him and the climate in which discussions were conducted. It is important to note that his advisors were all shrewd, astute and as capable as anyone of objective and rational analysis. Nevertheless, collectively, they led themselves into an unmitigated debacle. The whole proved to be considerably worse than any individual part.

Although the data presented to the President may have indicated the advisability of invasion, he certainly did not get a balanced picture of the situation. The information provided was that selected by the CIA, which chose to ignore reports of Cuba's military strength by experts in both the State Department and the British intelligence. The basic problem was that the leaders of the CIA, Director Allen Dulles and Deputy Director Richard Bissel, had become emotionally involved with the plan to the detriment of their ability to judge it. Not only did they cull out data conflicting with their commitment to disaster, but they limited consideration of the plan to a small number of people so that it would not be too harshly or thoroughly (i.e., fairly) scrutinized and criticized. They were so much in love with their plan that they could not be objective about it anddid not want anyone else to be objective about it either. When the time came, they did not so much present it as sell it to the White House.

Among the President's advisors, groupthink took over as members of the in-group became cohesive and suppressed deviations from the prevailing belief of the team in the plan. The goal shifted from hammering out an effective plan to that of obtaining group consensus. When Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. expressed opposition to the plan to Robert Kennedy only days before the invasion, Bobby's response was that it was too late for opposition. There is a time to debate, a time to decide and a time to do. The questions then arise: when is it too late to oppose a faulty plan? When is it too late to correct a mistake? When is it better to go with a decision than to improve it or scrap it? Is it more important for people to be together than for them to know they are going down together?

To his credit, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles was one of the few members of the State Department who was critical of the invasion plan. It is a sad commentary on people and the political process that he was the first to be fired after the fiasco—that is, getting canned was his reward for being right when everyone else was wrong. On the other hand, Dean Rusk, who had suppressed Bowles' doubts, was retained as Secretary of State because he was so nice.

Although the Bay of Pigs invasion was as close to an ideal case of stupidity as we should ever hope to see, it hardly compares in size and scope to the debacle in Vietnam. American policies and actions there are now generally recognized as having been quite stupid, but the whos, hows and whys remain as debatable as ever and probably never will be completely clear. American involvement in Vietnam was a case of compound stupidity, with ignored warnings interlaced with wishful groupthink. The escalation of the mid-1960's was pursued in the face of strong warnings from practically everyone who was concerned and powerless, but naturally, these were totally lost on those in positions of irresponsibility. Again, we find conscientious statesmen ignoring both experts and everyone else voicing concern over the military, political and moral consequences of deliberately planned idiocy. Within the American political community, criticism could usually be stilled quite easily because no one wanted to be the one responsible for losing Vietnam to Communism. The fact that we never had it to lose was one of those relevancies lost on the mighty.

Nevertheless, in the cause of retaining what it never had, the American government was determined to be misled by misinterpreting events in Vietnam. The cause of the war was that Americans were thought they were fighting Communism while the Vietnamese were fighting colonialism. From 1945 onward, we consistently misconstrued all evidence of nationalism and the fervor for an independent Vietnam. This did not meanwe ignored facts so much as we failed to perceive them in their relevant context. We insisted on perceiving events in Vietnam in a global context of a Communist conspiracy to rule the world.

This misperception was facilitated by the self-serving invention of labels to justify our sacrilegious, self-defeating cause. The "Commitment" to the "Vital interest" of "National security" became a positive feedback system which took on a life of its own as those in power came to believe in and become imprisoned by their own rhetoric. As it turned out, all the power committed to Vietnam in the name of "National interest" worked against us. In fact, in terms of American interest, the war was clearly a self-generated blunder, as we had no perceivable interest in the area at any time.

As our leaders came to believe increasingly in their own clichés about American policy toward Vietnam in the late '60's, phoney, invalid optimism was replaced by genuine, invalid optimism. Consequently, during the Johnson years, there was an abundance of unrealistic planning due to overambition, overoptimism and overignorance in the Oval Office. As always, the key to stupidity lay in the discrepancy between what was believed and what was happening, and not only was the official government schema out of sync with Vietnamese reality, but it was systematically programmed to endure unaffected by events in Southeast Asia, which thus remained beyond American comprehension.

As the Vietnam debacle developed during this era, the Johnson administration turned inward, consulting more and more with military priests, who had learned the lesson at Munich (i.e., that appeasement does not deter an aggressor) too well and were determined to apply it where it did not fit. To such people, there was invariably only one solution to any problem—escalation. This escalation became a perfect example of a positive feedback mechanism going to uncontrollable excess, as there was no mechanism within the government which could check policies accepted without reservation by those devoted to the incestuous administration. Fortunately, the war was very much debated by citizens who found the more they questioned and learned, the less they understood. A gnawing doubt became a growing awareness of the fundamental absurdity of ourinvolvement, and then gradually the realization spread that the establishment was out of its mind. It was America's good fortune that the insanity of its leaders could be checked by the common sense of a few million skeptics.

Leaders do not usually appreciate this built-in restriction on their power to wreck the system, and Richard M. Nixon was one who became increasingly vexed as the descent of his administration to new depths of political morality was made evident by the media and then finally halted by public outrage and Congressional power. The irony of the Watergate fiasco was that Nixon ran on a "Law and order" platform in 1968, but four years later, his campaign was characterized by burglary, bribery, forgery, perjury and obstruction of justice. Even this litany of crimes would have come to naught politically had executive sessions in the Oval Office not been taped and the tapes retained. It was the combination of these incredibly stupid blunders with the crimes themselves which led to the President's resignation.

As might be expected, groupthink played a major role in this debacle, and members of the White House staff did indeed share the overoptimism and sense of invulnerability common to groupthinkers living in an unreal world defined by their own separate, narrow, closed standard of immorality. As usual, when people are absolutely devoted to their plan, cause and themselves, warnings of impending disaster were ignored.

This failure to heed warnings was due to both the nature of the Nixonian schema and the tenacity with which it was held by loyal staff members. The schema itself was basically one of methodology—specifically, that any creepy means could be employed to maintain the image of the hollow administration. This was the subconscious guide for strategy and behavior which was shared by the Nixon staff and which led them to perceive the Watergate scandal as a public relations problem. In doing so, they were at least consistent: they perceived everything as a public relations problem.

The impact of this schema's limitations was compounded by the persistence of the President's staff in adhering to it despite its obvious draw-backs. At every stage of the Watergate morass, there was a consistent failure of those involved to face irrefutable facts even when they were known to be irrefutable. With all signs indicating failure, loyal staff members carried on very much as usual and so validated the signs.

If there is a lesson to learn from this pocket review of history, it must be that stupidity flourishes with ageless consistency. It is sad to note that it is as common in modern America as it has ever been anywhere.

Notes