Marching Back to Folly

I have previously mentioned one of my favorite books, Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly. As I noted in an earlier post, she defines "folly" as the KNOWING pursuit by governments of policies contrary to self-interest. It is not enough that governments made bad decisions--governments are made up of fallible humans who make mistakes and bad choices. Folly requires the knowledge that the course taken is wrong AT THE TIME and involves not only a failure, but also a refusal, to learn from experience.

At the end of her chapter on Viet Nam, she summarizes the tragically flawed misadventure. “The follies that produced this result begin with continuous overreacting: in the invention of endangered `national security,' the invention of `vital interest,' the invention of a `commitment' which rapidly assumed a life of its own, casting a spell over the inventor.”

"A second folly was illusion of omnipotence…a third was wooden-headedness and `cognitive dissonance,’ a fourth was `working the levers’ as a substitute for thinking.”

“In the illusion of omnipotence, American policy-makers took it for granted that on a given aim…American will could be made to prevail. This assumption came from a can-do character of a self-created nation and from the sense of competence and superpower derived from World War II….it was failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill.”

“Wooden-headedness, the `don’t confuse me with the facts’ habit, is a universal folly never more conspicuous than at upper levels of Washington.”

“A last folly was the absence of reflective thought about the nature of what we were doing, about effectiveness in relation to the object sought, about balance of possible gain as against loss and against harm both to the ally and to the United States. Absence of intelligent thinking in rulership is another of the universals, and raises the question whether in modern states there is something in political and bureaucratic life that subdues the functioning of intellect in favor of `working the levers’ without regard to rational expectations."

She concludes this section with a quote from William Pitt, reflecting on England’s 18th-century folly in its dealings with revolutionary America. He described a nation’s self-betrayal “by the arts of imposition, by its own credulity, through the means of false hope, false pride and promised advantages of the most romantic and improbable nature.”

In her final chapter, she states that “the question is whether or how a country can protect itself from protective stupidity in policy-making.”

“Aware of the controlling power of ambition, corruption and emotion, it may be that in the search for wiser government we should look for the test of character first. And that test should be moral courage."













"...the problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government as educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity of character and to reject the ersatz."

She wrote this in 1984.