Reading the final chapter of The Brothers by Stephen Kinzer, I find my post yesterday on the so-called intelligence community to have been spot on. John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen could be described as having been the quintessential neocons long before that term came to be. They both believed in American Exceptionalism as deeply and fervently as they served the interests of the plutocracy. In short, they were arrogant, self-righteous jackwads of the highest order. And one would be hard pressed to decide which jackwad kissed up to the Nazis more fervently before and during WWII. Going meta in his summation, Kinzer describes the psychological factors that we all share in varying degrees, which created the conditions that caused the CIA under Allen and the State Department under Foster to have largely failed in their respective missions. They not only suffered from severe cognitive dissonance regarding their objectives and methods, but failed to recognize that they werent even getting the results that they wanted. “- People are motivated to accept accounts that fit with their preexisting convictions; acceptance of those accounts makes them feel better, and acceptance of competing claims makes them feel worse - Dissonance is eliminated when we blind ourselves to contradictory propositions. And we are preparred to pay a very high price to preserve our most cherished ideas. - Moral hypocrisy is a deep part of our nature: the tendency to judge others more harshly for some moral infraction than we judge ourselves. - Groupthink leads to many problems of defective decision making, including incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, failure to examine the risks of the preferred choice, poor information search, selective bias in processing information, and failure to assess alternatives. - We are often confident when we are wrong. . . . Declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. - Certain beliefs are so important for a society or group that they become part of how you prove your identity. . . . The truth is that our minds just arent set up to be changed by mere evidence.” Does that sound familiar?
Posted on: Tue, 30 Dec 2014 19:07:33 +0000