Beyond Rationality : Contemporary Issues [1 ed.] 9781443834247, 9781443833424

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Beyond Rationality

Beyond Rationality: Contemporary Issues

Edited by

Carl Jensen and Rom Harré

Beyond Rationality: Contemporary Issues, Edited by Carl Jensen and Rom Harré This book first published 2011 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2011 by Carl Jensen and Rom Harré and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-3342-8, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-3342-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Rom Harré Part One: Characterizing Irrationality Chapter One............................................................................................... 11 A Catalogue of Follies Rom Harré Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 21 Evolved Irrationality Max Steuer Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 39 Ungrounded Grounds of Life: The Roots of Rationality R.E. Schmidle Part Two: Collective Irrationality Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 49 Conspiracy Theory and Rationality Lee Basham Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 89 The “Springboard to Dictatorship” and Collective Irrationality Fathali M. Moghaddam Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 105 Discourses on Conversion: The Case of the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord Carl Jensen

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Table of Contents

Part Three: Global and Corporate Irrationality and the Future Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 127 Risky Behaviour David Apgar Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 157 The Logicality of Targeting Civilians in Identity-based Conflicts Daniel Rothbart Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 177 The Future and Irrationality Joseph A. Schafer Afterword ................................................................................................ 191 Carl Jensen Appendix ................................................................................................. 199 Contributors............................................................................................. 201 Index........................................................................................................ 207



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Endeavours such as this book require the efforts of more than the editors and authors. Institutionally, both the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics and the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at the University of Mississippi generously contributed resources to fund the workshop that served as the genesis of our writings. Individually, Melissa Graves, Walter Flaschka, Christy Babb, and Stephen King from the University of Mississippi were the logistical geniuses behind the workshop who made sure that everything, from rooms at the inn to the audio visual setup in the conference hall, worked flawlessly. Graduate Assistant Jodi Ferguson receives our heartfelt gratitude for assembling the table of contents and index—skills she never thought she’d need as a Criminal Justice student. We also thank Marie Barnard from the University of Mississippi’s School of Applied Sciences who worked behind the scenes to arrange for Ole Miss to host the workshop and the staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing, who have been most professional, timely, and patient. Finally, none of this would have been possible without the love, guidance, and support of our families who allow us to spend our days chasing our own curiosity.

INTRODUCTION ROM HARRÉ

Recently, and perhaps more stridently than for many years, accusations of “irrationality” have been bandied about directed at people and their views and also to their modes of reasoning or lack of them. When the recent banking crisis loomed many people accused the bankers of folly. How could they be so stupid as to believe that property prices will always rise? Those who denied the reality of climate change were anathematized in more or less the same terms as those who believed that they had been kidnapped by aliens. Surely, there must be something different in the mental make-up of people who are willing and even eager to blow themselves to pieces in acts of religious protest and revenge. At the same time, commentators were also ready to declare, “one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.” Or to put the matter in more psychological terms, what strikes us as irrational in someone else’s thinking and acting is not seen in that light by the person so derided. Is there some universal standard for what is to count as rational thought, rational action and rational decisions? If there is, we have not yet hit upon it. This situation is hardly new, but discussions of “irrationality” by philosophers and psychologists have shed little light on these puzzles as they emerge when we try to understand contemporary discourses around this issue. The Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics seemed the ideal place from which to launch a new attack on the problems of the meanings of irrationality claims. To that end, a program of international workshop style conferences was inaugurated with a meeting on November 20, 2009. A list of the papers presented at that meeting can be found in an appendix to this volume. The meeting confirmed our impression that there was a wide and deep domain of problems in all sorts of guises and in all sorts of disciplines to be tackled both in the search for the Eldorado of a universal standard of rational thought and action and in the ways in which the irreconcilable claims of those who accuse and those who defend the rationality of many important programs and policies.

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Introduction

In this volume we have collected the work presented at the Second Beyond Rationality workshop session which took place over two days at the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. The range of topics was wide, but the coherence of themes and treatment suggested that they would make a timely volume. We have grouped the contributions into three parts. Part One, titled “Characterizing Irrationality,” deals with the analysis of accusations of cognitive irrationality, such as choosing short term goods over long term advantage, as well as the possible origins of the tendency to make irrational judgments. Part Two (“Collective Irrationality”) covers irrationality and rationality on a public scale, for example the apparent irrationality of willingly putting oneself under totalitarian rule. Part Three (“Global and Corporate Irrationality and the Future”) deals with mass irrationality and rationality on a larger scale, for example in the promotion and execution of genocide.

Part One We begin our study program in Chapter One with a survey of folly – doing and thinking things that we are capable of realizing are stupid and contrary to our own best interests, but which we do nevertheless. This is where it all started with Aristotle’s diagnosis of akrasia – the tendency to do what is worse though one knows what is best. We might say that folly is the everyday form that personal irrationality is likely to take. However, stupidity is not the explanation for folly – since follies are committed by people of all levels of intelligence and intellectual maturity. Max Steuer raises the question of how there came to be irrationality in human life at all. Chapter Two links the emergence of cognitive irrationality with the conditions for the evolution of the thoughtful management of life. Taking irrationality to be a feature of thought, he identified it with the tendency to persist in a belief when one has been given compelling arguments against it. But why does this tendency exist in such highly evolved beings as ourselves? The answer lies in the role of emotions in thinking. The answer is surprising - natural selection has not led to less irrational and emotion driven thinking because there is no advantage in “inclusive fitness” for people intolerant of irrationality. Emotion does not cloud judgment, it drives it. Emotions are critical features of how “the brain works,” as Steuer puts it, and emotional forces lead to one persisting in a belief when it has been shown to be mistaken.



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In Chapter Three, Robert Schmidle connects the problems of characterizing “rationality” and “irrationality” with Wittgenstein’s notion of a “hinge.” There are hinge practices, unexamined ways of acting that are the foundational activities of a form of life, and there are “hinge propositions” which express the content of hinge practices in such a way that their empirical character is manifest. Schmidle argues that the rationalities of forms of life are realized in their hinge practices. From this perspective there are no universal rational practices, but multitudes of possible forms of life, each of which has its own standards and paradigms of rationality. Furthermore, how we acquire the hinge practices that constitute the rational basis of our own practices is not through some superior personal logical insight but through the kind of apprenticeship to life that is described by Vygotsky in his conception of the social origins of “hinges,” to use Wittgenstein’s terminology. If we can understand the hinge propositions of another culture or form of life, then their attachment to certain hinge practices becomes intelligible.

Part Two Conspiracy theories are apparently tremendously attractive to many people. Lee Basham examines the notion of a “conspiracy theory” in Chapter Four from several different viewpoints, settling on the definition that such a theory involves causal explanations, and the appeal to intentional deception by some people. There is ample room for conspiracy theories even in democratic “open” societies since they, too, are hierarchical and to some extent secretive. How can a conspiracy theory be revealed as such? There are real conspiracies, some benign, some malign. Some conspiracy theories do hit the mark. The Nazi government was killing millions of Jews, Gypsies and other people. But how can we separate this kind of case from mischievous accusations or fantasies? George W. Bush did not plan the attack on the World Trade Center to justify attacking Iraq in search of oil. However, established governments do hide some of their projects from their citizens, even if these projects are benign. Basham notes that the present prior probability of the existence of a conspiracy in a given society influences the form that the conspiracy theory takes. If it seems likely that the authorities are managing a cover up, a fairly simple and psychologically modest theory will do. But if it seems unlikely that such a cover up is going on, then the items that make up the conspiracy theory are likely to be extravagant and even bizarre. Conspiracy theorists respect the scientific method to some extent. The move toward the creation of support for a conspiracy theory depends very heavily on the revelation



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Introduction

of “errant data.” Just as in physics, these are presumed facts that are inconsistent with the official story. Basham sums up his examination of the nature, plausibility and epistemology of conspiracy theories remarking that our best response to them is “studied agnosticism.” In Chapter Five, Fathali Moghaddam focuses on the complex pattern of conditions that make the emergence of dictatorial forms of government possible and even likely. Such forms of government are defined negatively by the degree to which the authorities act without the consent of the people. Moghaddam aligns “rationality” and “irrationality” with the distinction between conscious and unconscious sources of action. If certain conditions are present in a society and there are both people ready to support a dictator and a suitable candidate for power, then the slide to authoritarian rule begins. The unexamined social conditions of which people are unaware and thus serviceable as the roots of irrationality include economic insecurity, political instability, threats to collective identify, a sense of the decline of the society and the hint of the possibility of its revival. None of these conditions are likely to be consciously identified or overtly influential in the actions of individuals as they applaud the assumption of power by the likes of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini or Joseph Stalin. This analysis of the status of enabling conditions links neatly with Schmidle’s introduction in Chapter Three of Wittgenstein’s conception of a “hinge.” Moghaddam’s submerged factors of which the political actors are scarcely aware are realized in certain hinge practices on which the possibility of a totalitarian revolution turns. One of the contexts in which people declare themselves puzzled to understand “how could they do this” is the path by which adherents are drawn in groups that not only advocate violent attacks on other people and their institutions but carry out their threats. How does someone become converted to this stance to life? Conversion, apparently across the boundaries of reason, has always puzzled those whose hearts are not struck by the discourses of conversion. St. Paul’s change of heart and mind on the road to Damascus remains mysterious to most of us. In Chapter Six, Carl Jensen examines an example of a discourse of conversion which was successful in bringing people into the fold, a particularly virulent white supremacist group, which evolved from an isolated end-times religious sect. Supplementing Positioning Theory with Rothbart and Bartlett`s “Axiology of Difference” and Gilmartin’s “Lethal Triad” models, Jensen follows the emergence of three successive story-lines. These narratives draw on Biblical sources for the shaping of a journey, as the group moves from location to location. Each successive narrative is tied in with successive positions as rights and duties among the faithful change from



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the duty to preach the word of God to the right to self-defence, and the correlative right to resist the attempts by a “Jewish conspiracy” to create a world government. Here a new story-line emerged with a reworking of Adam, Eve and the Serpent to ground their supremacist beliefs. Eventually, authorities broke up the group. Positioning Theory is effective in this analysis because it lays great emphasis on the way that story-lines are tied to rights and duties which can be followed as the story-lines changed.

Part Three The assessment of risk is a case where irrationality among risk assessors in their ways of foreseeing failures and disasters is intimately integrated with the public domain. In an interesting new twist, David Apgar explores the self-inflicted economic injuries among those who neglect to experiment in their economic practices and resort to risk assessment to maximize their stock holdings, gaining little and perhaps losing much in the long term. What would the rational strategy be to halt the relative decline of the industrial basis of the U.S. economy? Apgar argues that this large scale economic phenomenon has its roots in the failure of management to undertake deliberate experimentation as the foundation of market strategy. Contributing to this neglect is the impetus that compensating management with stocks gives to efforts to estimate and mitigate risk. All this adds up to a kind of irrational myopia as to the best strategies to remain competitive in the current world economic order. Chapter Seven explores this “paradox” in a detailed analysis of the unexamined assumptions and practices that lead to it. In Chapter Eight, Dan Rothbart uses the discursive practices that were a dominant influence in initiating and promoting genocide in East Africa to show how this horrific example fits well under neither of our categories of rationality or irrationality. Perhaps it is a-rational. In the chapter, Rothbart explores what such a categorization might mean to our understanding of such large scale events. The Rwanda massacres and the ethnic cleansing in Darfur are examples of identity based conflict. The discursive practices that make these conflicts possible are celebrations of ethnic difference. Both conflicts are rooted in narratives. The story-lines that are related to the positioning practices of the conflicting groups involving an “axiology of difference” that runs “under the threshold of rationality.” By setting out the structure of the dynamics of the discursive promotion of these conflicts, Rothbart shows how the distribution of rights



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Introduction

and duties among the people forms the root of ethnic differences. The moral orders in these ethnic conflicts are generated by certain story lines: mythic narratives, iconic images and categories of duality. In the long running conflict in Darfur between the Arab militias and the indigenous African population, icons of “African degeneracy” are used to justify confining the African population to the lowest level of society. This is how the situation stands. The last chapter appropriately introduces another variant on the concept of irrationality. What should we say about the possible forms that irrationality may take in the human future? Joseph Schafer bases his reflections on the phenomena of “data.” It washes over and around us in floods and swathes. Most notable is the fact that there are so many ways of generating and distributing data compared with only a couple of decades ago. And it’s cheap! But is it rational to take it all as of equal value? Surely not - there are two processes that insert a measure of irrationality in the passage from source to ourselves as consuming subjects. One is filtering - only a small slice of the available data reaches us. Who does the filtering and why? Then there is interpretation. We do not know what to make of a mere swatch of data. We need someone to provide interpretations and that, too, is a door through which irrationality can pass. We favour one commentator over the other with nothing to go on since there is no long term test of interpretations. This is the future of irrationality - not being swayed by influences outside our control. Rather, it is naiveté and innocence in the midst of this flux. As Schafer says, “the real risk for advancing irrationality is when consumers do not know the data they access, filter and interpret [or have filtered and interpreted for them] is being shaped through some type of software or algorithm.” Paradoxically, just as irrationality of this sort is likely to become more common, so the very forces which lead in this direction can be designed to preclude this trend.

Conclusion Through our studies, we have gone from the follies of an individual to the vast domains of irrationality in the conflicts between populations and even between the present and future. We have seen that there is no universal form that rational ways of thinking and acting can take and so there is no end to the varieties that irrationalities can have. Emotion may be the persisting source of the ever changing but ever present gap between Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk. However, the link between story-lines, meanings and positions enables us to undertake deep analyses of the ways



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people manage their lives, be it tragic, mundane or even comic. The chapters in this book have mostly maintained a grimly serious intent, but irrationality is at its most productive when it is the mainstay of the absurd.



PART ONE: CHARACTERIZING IRRATIONALITY 

CHAPTER ONE A CATALOGUE OF FOLLIES ROM HARRÉ

The domain where we will look for follies includes beliefs, plans, actions, theories, opinions, decisions and other cognitive and material practices. Emotions are also a domain where follies abound but I will not consider them in this chapter. Our emphasis will be on discursive practices in which beliefs and opinions are formulated and presented and actions planned and interpreted. Furthermore, brain science is not just ancillary to this enterprise but actually irrelevant, since the cultural, epistemic and historical relativity of accusations of folly is one of the most striking characteristics of the overall domain of “irrationality.” Neuroscience is at least presented as bringing to light findings that are features of every human being. a. We know that the brain adapts to the tasks that a culture requires of it. b. The brain does what it does, and whether that eventuates in something rational or irrational is a matter of the sociocultural matrix in which the manifestation appears.

Preliminaries Beyond rationality, there is not one uniform domain of simple acts of irrationality. In making judgments of rationality or irrationality, there is an obvious tie to the having or not having a reason for an action, thought or opinion. One fragment of our critical usage takes the vocabulary in this way: an action, opinion and so on is rational if a reason can be given for it – only if no reason is at hand is it said to be irrational. However, the vernacular tends to take “irrational” in a broader sense. “Irrational” is a judgment appropriate for activities for which the available reasons or those offered in defence of an action or thought are bad or defective by some local standard. These reasons might be self-serving,

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Chapter One

self-contradictory, boil down to cowardice and so on. For the generic category of acts for which we blame stupidity, special pleading, selfindulgence, bad reasoning and so on, I will use the word “folly.” It is folly to lend money to people who cannot pay it back – and it is also folly to ascribe to a part of a system some attribute, the meaning of which is given only in the context of the whole system. Beyond rationality is not a uniform domain of the same kinds of irrational thinking and acting. There are myriad dimensions of discursive practices amongst which are some which lead people to think or do what others regard as follies. We note the biblical injunction not to try to remove the mote from another person’s eye without taking care of the beam in one’s own. However, this will not discourage me from trying. This discussion is about Potent Conversations rather than the actions they lead to or the opinions and beliefs they encourage or express. It is not about psychological traits such as stupidity or recklessness, but how these traits are realized in discursive practices. One of the follies we will encounter is to infer the existence of such psychological traits from the conversational practices of people. Of course, we tend to rate a Potent Conversation by the kind of act or opinion, belief and so on it is likely to lead to. Our aim might be to use explorations of the domain of discursive practices that lie beyond rationality as the search for forms of cognitive propriety, and to help to identify cases in which standards of cognitive propriety have been violated. Clearly, cognitive practices that are, by some dominant culture’s standards, “beyond rationality,” can reveal their own indigenous forms of cognitive propriety. Nevertheless, the folly of bankers did lead to people losing their homes, and the folly of climate change deniers could lead to a scorched and barren earth if their views gain political dominance. The study of the retrospective assessments of practices in terms not of their intrinsic characteristics (the work of this study group) but in terms of their deleterious consequences (and that too might be relative) is a project worth pursuing.

The Project The purpose of this program is to collect and examine bad reasons and bad reasoning as they are manifested discursively. Moreover, the program works within the presumption that failure to conform to the rules of logic is not enough to account for assessments people make of the performances of others as folly; for example, subprime lending, denying the reality of climate change, believing the Kennedys murdered Marylyn Monroe, and



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so on, may, in the moment, so to say, conform to the principles of logic – but with woefully inadequate premises. The program is also aimed at finding the extra-logical discursive frameworks, case by case, within which a folly can be seen to be in accord with what are taken to be locally good reasons and sound practice. From this starting point, an examination of the relevant counterfactuals branches out – what if they had taken a bit more trouble, looked a little further, taken historical antecedents into account and so on? For example, how should we judge Fleiss’s cure for hysteria by an operation on the nose against Freud’s method of extracting confessions of juvenile sexual improprieties of thought or deed? The irrationality of the former seems obvious, while to dig into the confusions of thought behind the “talking cure” is a much more tentative and difficult project. What if Fleiss had looked more carefully at the neuro-anatomy of the entorhinal cortex – what if Freud had been a bit more self-critical and sceptical? The discursive frameworks which sustain follies include much that can be studied by the analytical methods. Wittgenstein (1969) introduced a third range of such methods around his concept of a “hinge.” Work on this concept has led to a pairing of hinge practices, unexamined procedures of thought and action on which all sorts of discursive activities turn, and “hinge propositions” (doppelgangers of hinge practices) which, when examined, turn out to be factual but which have been treated as if they were necessary truths. Extraction of hinges and conceptual matrices which support “irrational practices” will make possible deeper critical assessments in the light of a larger framework than that in which the actors themselves were contented with the cognitive propriety of what they had been doing, thinking and so on – remembering that we too are working within some cognitive frame or frames.

Science as an Exemplar of Good Practice Suppose it had been suggested that the question addressed in this chapter – the cataloguing of follies – is very easily dealt with? Everything that does not conform to logic is a folly. We can test this idea by seeing whether scientific discourses and practices are rational under this criterion. Bertrand Russell is largely responsible for the doctrine that by revealing the logical form of propositions we can come to see their deep character, and thus be in a position to assess them critically. Unfortunately, turning to science, revealing the logical form of the relation between evidential propositions and law-like statements shows that logic does not permit an



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Chapter One

inference from “this phenomenon is thus and so” to “all like phenomena are thus and so,” a proposition which at any rate looks like a frame for a Law of Nature. Hempel’s Paradox displays the gap very clearly between logic and practical intuition. “All ravens are black” [P] would be supported, in common sense epistemology, by finding a black raven. But the proposition has a contrapositive of the same truth value as the positive derived by logic alone – “all non-black things are non-ravens” [Q]. So a white shoe, which is neither a raven nor black, supports the contrapositive by the same commonsense rule. Since Q entails P, a white shoe should support “all ravens are black.” Whatever rules of good practice operate in the assessment of the acceptability of putative laws by reference to evidence they do not square with the possibilities of the logical manipulation of the law-like proposition to yield consequences that are true if their source proposition is true. Clavius’ Paradox is another blow at a logicist treatment of the rationality of the sciences. A simple theory to explain an apparent general truth, expressed as “all S are P” might be “all M are P,” and “all S are M” so “all S are P.” This syllogism is valid whatever M might be. So we can construct a deductive theory for some alleged law-like proposition in indefinitely many ways, because there is no constraint on choice of M. Whatever we choose, the inference is valid. “All planets orbit the Sun,” “the Earth is a planet” so “the Earth orbits the Sun” is logically impeccable, but so is “all wooden things orbit the Sun,” “the Earth is made of wood” so “the Earth orbits the Sun.” Good practice in science involves a great many subtle considerations, such as good judgment as to the plausibility of a model of unknown causal processes, or the limits of an analogy and so on. Whatever these may turn out to be, conformity to logic à la Russell is no criterion of rationality. Logic rests its power on the principle that contradiction is anathema. There are some forms of “contradiction” that escape the Russellian way of embodying that proscription in formal principles of reasoning. These errors in thought are sometimes referred to as “pragmatic paradoxes.” A discourse presents a pragmatic paradox when it asserts something that, were it to be true, would contradict one of the conditions for the possibility of making that assertion in the first place. A notorious example is Kenneth Gergen’s claim that there are no moral universals (Gergen 1999). In order to make that claim, the proposition that he utters must be intelligible in the framework of some language. But there are moral conditions for language to be possible. These have been spelled out by Holiday (1988) in his Moral Powers, as trust between speakers and hearers, respect between members of a linguistic community and respect



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for the rituals by which meanings are established and maintained. Without these moral conditions, language could not exist as a medium of communication. So Gergen’s denial that there are any moral universals contradicts a condition under which the statement “there are no moral universals” would be meaningful – namely that there are languages.

The “Irrationalities” of Psychology “Scientific” psychology is a complementary case – the “best” practices of most of contemporary academic psychology are bad with respect to the task of acquiring reliable knowledge of human thought, action, emotion and perception, the traditional tasks of psychological research. The flaws that beset the current (but happily declining) mainstream are many, but among the most pervasive are the following: 1. Inferring an individual’s propensity to behave in some particular way from the statistical distribution of that way of behaving among a group of which that individual is a member. Nothing at all can be inferred from such a distribution about an individual (Lamiell 2003). 2. Violating Vygotsky’s Rule – which runs: do not analyze a psychological phenomenon into units or components that do not have the meaning that they had in their original location in a complex phenomenon. A striking example of the violation of this rule is Robert Zajonc’s experiments of the relation between frequency and liking (Zajonc 1980). The frequency with which a meaningless item is presented to an experimental “subject” does not represent the psychologically relevant features of the frequency with which people meet one another in everyday life. So an experiment which purports to “measure” the amount of liking generated in a subject for a meaningless item presented more or less frequently in the experiment is worthless as proof that liking something, or more particularly someone, is related to frequency with which a person encounters it. What meaning the encounters might have is the critical variable. 3. Category Mistakes – these have been noted since antiquity, but our modern sense of their destructive role in attempts to found a scientific psychology we owe to Gilbert Ryle. (Ryle 1949). His illustration of this fallacy is well known – a person is shown the Oxford colleges and then asks to see the University believing the University is of the same category as a college, namely a locatable building. Thus we have Descartes’ fallacy, the dualism of mind and body (Descartes 1641 [1949]): Matching a distinction in kinds of attributes, mental and material, with a hypothetical pair of substances apparently appropriate



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only to each category of attributes. We presume the mind to be of the same category as the body, namely a substance. The mind is not a material substance, so it must be an immaterial substance. But an examination of the alleged mental attributes of a person shows that they are dispositions, not occurrent properties. They could be dispositions of a purely material substance, though of a unique kind – a person. 4. Mereological Fallacies -- these have been pointed out so frequently that the way that they continue to be committed by neuropsychologists is something of a scandal. From Coulter in the 1980s to Bennett and Hacker, in the twenty-first century we have been warned against attributing to a part of a person an attribute the meaning of which has been established in the context of the whole person. People think, their brains do not! This leaves open the question of just how we should think of our brains and their organs in relation to human practices. 5. Task-tool Fallacies – taking attributes of tools for attributes of the tasks they are used to perform (e.g., neuroscience presented as psychology). This could be presented as a special case of the pervasive “mereological fallacy,” as it appears in psychology when a consequence is the deletion of persons. This is also an example of a pragmatic paradox since in order for there to be a society of neuroscientists they must treat each other as persons – and so to advocate a psychology without persons is self-destructive. Running through the confusions of thought that are so evident in mainstream psychology, and in many other contexts, is a particular kind of failure to dig down to the presuppositions at the root of inappropriate discursive practices. This point was highlighted particularly by Wittgenstein (1953). He noticed, as many had before him, that there were some intellectual problems that seemed to be intractable but yet people persisted in struggling with them for centuries. How could this be? Wittgenstein suggested in a number of worked through cases that the intractability of the problem came about because of the deep location of a taken-forgranted dichotomy which was presupposed in the creation of the problem field. For example, if we continue to presume the distinction between mind and body as that between two substances (the Cartesian myth), we struggle to understand how we can know that other people have mental lives, how mental processes can bring about material changes in the body and so on. However, the mind/body dichotomy is not the only way to think of human life – suppose we abandon it and take up others, such as private discursive performances in contrast to public performances (here we



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encounter Vygotsky again with his famous observation that all higher order mental functions occur first in social interactions and only later are appropriated by individuals). Another useful contrast might be between individual cognitive performances and cognitive processes that occur in the course of meaningful interactions between the members of a group. Or perhaps we might explore Wittgenstein’s suggestion that the distinction between living and non-living beings should frame the concepts we set up for managing our research (Wittgenstein 1953, 284). It is folly to persist in framing one’s activities in terms of a dichotomy for which there are alternatives, alternatives which can be shown to avoid or defuse the problems that seemed to be repeated endlessly.

Achieving Intelligibility If one were to ask for a formula which would allow us to achieve intelligibility and manage our activities in accord with canons of good practice, no such formula would be forthcoming. There are no transsituational and trans-cultural and trans-disciplinary canons. Those who deny the reality of climate change, those who lend money recklessly, those who are attracted to conspiracy theories and all the rest of us from time to time, are locked into micro cultures of cognitive practices, closed to those who peer in anxiously and with amazement from the outside.

Is One’s Own Experience of Follies of Value? Reflecting on the myriad bad decisions I have made (some discernibly bad almost as they were made, though more often unfavourably assessed in hindsight), I notice two main features of decision making. Some decisions are arrived at after much reflection and considering lists of pros and cons, while others are made on the spur of the moment. There does not seem, in hindsight, to be any advantage in careful reflection, at least with respect to the quality of the outcomes of each kind of decision process. So what seems to be a sure way to fall into irrationality, instant choice decision, has no discernible disadvantages. On reflection, bad choices, foolish beliefs and silly actions (in hindsight of course) seem to be tied into the usual rag bag of personal vices such as self-indulgence, impatience, stupidity and the like. However, one feature that ties in with the rationality beyond which my choices often lie is the tendency, not to be found in my life alone, of mistaking a short term pattern for a long term trend.



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Banal but Potent Psychological Explanations of Folly Stupidity and Some Kinds of Madness It may be that someone has the basic skills to reason more or less correctly. Failure to understand the situation, relevant considerations and so on is typical of people with mental troubles. Crazy beliefs and good logic are the keys to understanding the legal definition of insanity based on the M'Naghten Rule (Robinson 1998). Failure to Reason Correctly This can happen even when a situation and its demands are understood in a reasonable way. Bad reasoning is very common as the prelude to acts of folly, be they cognitive or practical. We all tend to fall into some of the classic fallacies such as affirming the consequent (e.g., if it’s raining it will be wet; it’s wet so it must have been raining) and not noticing that we have violated the rule against an undistributed middle term (all birds sing, and all birds build nests, so all singers build nests). Pragmatic Folly In its simplest form, we could exemplify this kind of folly in the case of the resentment of the alienated leading someone to choose a form of revenge against real or imagined oppressors that runs counter to one’s best interests according to other criteria. One surely regrets choosing the brief satisfaction of revenge at a huge cost to oneself in the long run; one might rightly accuse himself of folly in hindsight. Semantic Fields Fallacy The fallacy comes about through the presumption that the variety of uses of some important word in a language must be underpinned by a common meaning. In other words, one extracts a putative linguistic essence from a diverse semantic field and theorises in terms of it (e.g., introducing new categories of entities). Wittgenstein worked out many cases of this fallacy – suppose that the many ways we use the word “thought” must have an underlying common meaning, so we struggle to invent one. For example, people have defended the idea of thoughts as immaterial objects behind all sorts of cognitive activities. There are lots of examples of “being guided” -- but is there an essence of “guidance” common to them all? There is no such essence – only a network of similarities and differences (“war” is another example – “democracy” yet another). So there is no one way that words really guide the reader!



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Concluding Remarks These explorations have brought out two main points of importance for conversations of the moment. a. They have opened up a variety of situations in which conventional ideas of the rationality of thought and action can be called into question. Whatever the rationality of science is, it is not explicated by turning to the principles of logic. If we assessed the sciences in those terms, they would show themselves to be exemplars of irrationality. There are never enough reasons to accept hypotheses or reject them in accord with the strictest logical principles of reasoning. Nor are there ever enough reasons to distinguish between one theory and another. There are powerful cognitive practices beyond the bounds of conventional rationality that analysis allows or reveals as “good” and “bad” indigenous forms of conversational propriety and practical action. From where do those good and bad assessments come? b. However, there are some canons that are important in making negative judgments about the quality of some enterprises – the example of “mainstream scientific” psychology is rich in follies that render its findings of little value. The odd thing about this situation is how hard it has proved to be to get this enterprise back on track -- and how hard those whose careers have been wasted by a life time of producing artefacts of method have fought to retain their intellectual chains. c. On the positive side, the advent of cultural/discursive psychology has brought to the fore a mode in which conversations and other meaningful sequences of actions are ordered. This is the role of the story-line or narrative convention that shapes thought and action. Along with this insight has come the realization that the beliefs people have about their rights and duties to think, act and even to feel in certain ways, are powerful factors in shaping the way life goes forward, and, as analytical categories in explaining the unfolding of episodes.

References Descartes, R. 1641. [1949]. Meditations on the First Philosophy. London: Dent. Gergen, K. 1999. An Invitation to Social Constructionism. London: Sage. Holiday, A. 1988. Moral Powers. Brighton: Harvester.



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Lamiell, J. 2003. Beyond Individual and Group Differences. Thousand Oaks: Sage Robinson, D. 1998. Wild Beasts and Idle Humors. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ryle, G. 1949. The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchison. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. 1969. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell. Zajonc, R. 1980. “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences.” American Psychologist 35(2): 151 – 175.



CHAPTER TWO EVOLVED IRRATIONALITY MAX STEUER

Finding root causes is like peeling back an onion. Each explanation gives rise to further questions… —Joseph Stiglitz

Irrationality can be distinguished from simple mistakes in thinking and from holding mis-beliefs. The borders are fuzzy, but central tendencies can be identified. Several researchers explain irrationality and related aberrations by making reference to mental adaptations that were useful in the past, but are maladaptive now. In contrast to this view, it is argued here that the evolved emotional nature of thought provides a more convincing explanation of the contribution of evolution to irrationality.

What is “Irrationality”? We all agree that there is much irrationality in the world. What constitutes irrationality, and why it comes about, is more contentious. In this chapter, I explore the potential contribution of our evolutionary origins to certain manifestations of irrationality. The workings of our evolved brains are but one possible source of irrationality. Culture is another potential contributing factor. Separating the operations of our physical mental organs from the cultures in which they operate is not straightforward, but I will attempt to do so. In other words, I ask if natural selection, by shaping our evolved brains, has contributed to the prevalence of irrationality. My answer to this question is a much qualified “yes,” and I suggest that this influence does not come from the more direct route suggested by some researchers. My main conjecture is that the role of emotions in thinking itself is a major contributor to the irrationality which is so common in human affairs. To illustrate this proposition, I will begin by reporting on some exchanges I had with a colleague of mine in the

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Economics Department at the London School of Economics. These exchanges were prompted by the military coup in Greece in 1967. My colleague was a Greek national and he surprised me by being in favour of the Colonels’ coup. I knew him to be a fair minded and liberal thinker, like myself, and assumed that like me he would be opposed to military dictatorship. My colleague and I had a series of discussions about what had gone on in Greece. I knew virtually nothing about Greek history or politics, and was inclined to oppose the coup on fairly familiar grounds often used in defence of democracy. Our discussions usually began with my colleague outlining the special circumstances which obtained in Greece at the time. It was these special circumstances which led him to support the Colonels. I questioned whether the arguments he made were consistent with other views I knew he held regarding human freedom and other related matters. After some careful discussion, my colleague agreed that his defence of the coup was mistaken, and agreed that his position failed to take sufficient account of the importance he attached, and incidentally I also attached, to what could broadly be identified as democratic values. In other words, his defence of the coup was inconsistent with his other views. These other views were, in his view, of paramount importance, so he left my office after an hour or two of discussion expressing the view that he was now opposed the coup. After a couple of weeks, there was a knock on my door and my colleague was back. He wanted to explain to me that after due consideration of all the arguments, he had abandoned the view he expressed to me last time and he now supported the coup. The purpose of his visit was to allow him to explain the grounds for this change in position. If I fully appreciated certain elements of the Greek situation, I would see why he had reverted to his initial position of support for the Colonels, and he was confident that I would also support the coup, once I knew more about it. Another hour or two followed which covered essentially the same ground as in the previous discussion. The conclusion was the same. My colleague now felt that his support of the coup was inconsistent with other views he held and that these views took precedence, so he once again left my office holding the view that he was in opposition to the coup. Yet another fortnight passed, and my colleague was back once more. He wanted to explain to me why in fact he supported the Colonels and why military dictatorship was good for Greece, as implausible as that might seem. To be honest, I cannot remember whether we had three, four or five such sessions, all identical in content and conclusion. Eventually, I



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decided that there was nothing to be gained for either of us by continuing, and I hope I politely withdrew from further discussion of the matter. My reading of the situation is the following. My colleague was not prepared to be knowingly inconsistent in an upfront manner. It was fairly easy for him to live with an inconsistency if his nose was not rubbed in it. Indeed, the different views which led to the inconsistency all had value, or some deep attraction, for him. In a fully explicit way he was not prepared to be inconsistent. But consistency came at an emotional cost, so when he was away from the iron logic of my thinking, and perhaps more modestly, when he was away from the academic setting of our discussions, he could allow himself to ignore, or deny, certain relationships and live with the inconsistency. This is irrational. Believing “A” and “not A” at the same time is irrational. On my working definition for this chapter, along with holding inconsistent propositions, taking something which is irrelevant to be relevant represents another type of irrationality. Many people believe that the number thirteen is bad news, and to travel on the thirteenth day of any month is folly. Almost by definition, superstition is taking something to be relevant which is irrelevant. I include this practice in my definition of irrationality. A third form of irrationality, ignoring a relevant consideration, is common among smokers. Many face up to the dangers and are prepared to live dangerously. The irrational approach is to deny the risks involved in smoking. We all have heard the view that fate determines the time of death, and you cannot change that by smoking or giving up smoking. This wilful ignoring of relevant considerations is another form of irrationality. My definition of irrationality for the purposes of this chapter has a number of critical elements. While it involves inconsistency, or seeing relevance where it does not exist, or ignoring relevance where it does exist, a crucial aspect is the wilful, or persistent, nature of irrationality. For my purposes, irrationality is a feature of thought, not of action. Errors in thinking become irrational only if we cling to them when the fact that they are errors is convincingly displayed. I am aware that there are other definitions of irrationality-- both broader as well as narrower ones. I am not claiming that my definition is better, only that this is what I am talking about in this chapter. In principle I am happy to use a different word than irrationality to define my topic if that helps, but I think the term “irrationality” as used here is reasonable and sufficiently descriptive in a fairly conventional sense. Irrationality is different from mistakes of reasoning and different from holding foolish or weird views. However, both borders are fuzzy.



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An alternative interpretation of the behaviour of my colleague who changed his view of the Colonels’ coup is simple vacillation. Sometimes he believed one thing and sometimes another, and therefore there is no inconsistency; based on my definition, there is no irrationality. No doubt we are different people when in different settings. This can pose a problem for a host who invites friends from different parts of his or her life to a single party. One difficulty of such a gathering may come about because we favour more informal behaviour with some friends and acquaintances, and more formal behaviour with others. But when it comes to core values, most of us place a very high value on consistency. To be shown that one holds inconsistent views on matters of importance, and even on trivial matters, is a serious challenge. Some of our views are vital to our identity, to our self image. As a Greek national from a particular class and background, certain attitudes defined who my friend is. As an academic, certain other views also defined who he is. This emotional content to our thinking is a key to understanding evolved irrationality. One writer puts it in these words: Whenever someone makes a decision, the brain is awash in feeling, driven by its inexplicable passions. Even when a person tries to be reasonable and restrained, these emotional influences secretly influence judgment.” (Lehrer 2009, 5)

Of course, some positions we hold are less emotionally charged than others. Those that involve self image are usually so charged. I will have something to say about why the brain works this way, and in contrast to some writers, will suggest that the consequences of the emotional content in brain activity is not always for the best. I have asked a number of my colleagues if they think that turtles can be irrational. We all agree that they certainly can make mistakes. Mistakes are different from irrationality. The key difference is the wilful or persistent nature of irrationality in the face of compelling arguments otherwise. A favourite puzzle of mine involves the time required to produce three slices of toast on a grill that holds only two slices. In my experience, roughly two thirds of graduate students at the London School of Economics give the wrong answer when asked to calculate the minimum time required to make the bread into toast. These two thirds are not irrational. They are just mistaken. If, in the face of the now known better approach, they were to persist with the wrong answer, and persist in practice with the wrong method of toasting bread, that would be irrational.



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Evolutionary Biases Admittedly, this distinction between mistakes and irrationality is problematic. Haselton and Nettle (2006) have examined possible evolutionary sources of ingrained bias in human thought. They deal primarily with situations of uncertainty. Their core argument holds that the costs of false positives and false negatives are not equal. This leads to biased behaviour, judged from the point of view of having true estimates of outcomes. However, in certain circumstances, biased appraisal may yield better results from the point of view of benefits to the individual. It is not easy for me to see how these biases, held to be useful during most of our ancient evolutionary past, carry over to current decisions, except for a few unchanged examples such as fear of snakes and men overestimating their appeal to women. Perhaps what is called the “precautionary principle” is a modern example of useful bias. Whether it has evolutionary roots and whether it is irrational are both unlikely. Haselton and Nettle rarely refer to irrationality, but occasionally they do so: “We have reviewed a large number of cases where apparently irrational biases in cognition are explained by the existence of asymmetric error costs and significant uncertainty” (Haselton and Nettle 2006, 59). I am inclined to conclude that these biases, when and if they exist today, are examples of useful, or adaptive, mistakes rather than examples of irrationality.

Absurd Beliefs A particular class of mistakes, which verges on my concept of irrationality, is believing absurd things. While recognising the concept of absurd beliefs, there is the widest difference of opinion as to which beliefs are absurd. “One man’s platitude is the next man’s revelation.” If a particular absurd belief can be shown to be inconsistent with other beliefs of an individual, then that is an example of irrationality in my terms. Absurd or weird beliefs are remarkably widespread, but they are not irrational on their own (Shemer 1997). McKay and Dennett consider the evolutionary significance of false beliefs, but not necessarily of an absurd kind (McKay and Dennett 2009). They conclude that the brain is largely truth seeking, but a somewhat falsely positive self image, in particular, is adaptive. In criticising their approach, Carol Dweck writes, “…because different beliefs are adaptive in different situations and cultures, it makes sense to build a readiness to form beliefs rather than the beliefs themselves” (Dweck 2009, 518). This relates closely to my view that the



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evolutionary contribution to irrationality has more to do with how thoughts are formed than any adaptive feature of the content of thoughts. My guess is that on the definition of irrationality I am using--wilfully maintaining a contradiction, or holding things to be relevant which are irrelevant, or denying the relevance of things known to be relevant--no animals are irrational. It is often suggested that humans are the distinctly rational species. My view is that rationality is common among many living creatures and irrationality more than rationality is the defining feature of humans. Thinking processes have to evolve to a certain level of complexity, and especially complex language, and even more the arrival of literacy, in order for irrational thinking to take place on a large scale.

Irrationality and Inclusive Fitness A good question to ask is why has natural selection produced human brains that are not more strongly biased against irrationality? My first answer is that irrationality is not very damaging to inclusive fitness. I am not alone in holding this view. As academics, or anyone involved in the thinking game, we place a high value on rationality and are inclined to feel that irrationality is virtually a sin and likely to be costly to the holder. As with mistakes, the distinction between irrationality and believing false and particularly absurd propositions is problematic. Sticking with false views when they are shown to be inconsistent with other beliefs one holds is irrational. It is the inconsistency which is critical to irrationality, not the absurdity. Of course, false beliefs may have terrible consequences. As Voltaire explained, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Fortunately, much irrationality is only loosely related to action, and much has no consequences for action at all. Particularly when the task of selecting better strategies is inherently highly unpredictable, believing that the flight of a crow contains relevant information for the strategic choices at hand hardly matters. Similarly, believing both that next summer will be unusually warm and that it will be unusually cold has few consequences. It follows that natural selection would work only very weakly to produce brains that are strongly given to rationality. It could well be that in the modern world, where symbolic representation and abstract thought relate more closely to action, irrationality comes at a much higher cost than in the circumstances prevailing during much of evolution. If so, natural selection as it continues will lead to brains more strongly biased against irrationality.



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Few people are content to hold views which they themselves believe to be irrational. Far more common is to deny or ignore irrationality. Human brains are capable of holding so much information and so many beliefs that in my view it is inevitable that one or more of the three kinds of potential irrationality I have identified will be present in almost all of us. What turns the potential into actual irrationality is persisting in views after the irrationality is ferreted out and reasonably clearly demonstrated. This persistence in poor thinking is very common, and natural selection has not done much to remove it. One kind of explanation of current irrationality is related to the theory of the modular brain, if not synonymous with it; that is the idea that we developed thought routines which were good for the inclusive fitness of hunter gatherers, but give the wrong answers when engaging in sophisticated financial transactions, for example. The Haselton/Nettle view is that the modules were good for us then and good for us now. An alternative view is that they may have been helpful then, but they are simply irrational and not useful now. There may be something in this, but I have become quite persuaded of a completely different explanation of evolved irrationality which has to do with a theory of how the brain works, and why it has evolved in the way that it has. To put forward claims of this kind is not only very pretentious, it is in many respects not all that original

The Role of Emotions in Thinking My central conjecture, as I suggest above, is that thinking works through sensation, and that this can be a fundamental contributor to irrationality. That the thinking process is inexorably intertwined with sensation, or emotion, has become increasingly accepted. Antonio Damasio is a leading figure in this revolution in understanding, and there are others (Damasio1994 and 1999; Goleman 1996; Lehrer 2009). An orthogonal idea would be that the brain, or the thinking parts of the brain, operates something like a computer. The mental processes going on do not involve emotion, or so this view would maintain. Thinking, or reasoning if you like, is cold calculation. The results of thinking are made available to other parts of the brain, and it is here that emotion comes in. The thinking part, according to this view, hands over its findings to parts of the brain that care about outcomes. These latter non-calculating parts entertain feelings, or sensations with respect both to outcomes, and to the processes of trying to achieve them. Feelings, good and bad, are the drivers to action. Natural selection identifies certain feelings with actions that promote inclusive fitness. My contention is that this concept of a separation



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between calculation and feeling is mistaken. The brain is not like a Turing machine. Rather, in the very thinking process it uses sensations, or emotions, inextricably entwined with reasoning. My guess is that natural selection worked in this way, intimately involving sensation or emotion in thinking, because in earlier stages of evolution there was little or no separation of thought and action; therefore, sensation was close to thought, so close as to be part of the process. More powerful brains came about through a long process of incremental changes in this basic approach. The evolution of brains retained the basic approach of linking thought to sensation. However, in time, even if these origins are correctly identified here, and if it had been really advantageous to break or weaken this original link to emotion, that might well have occurred. But there are other reasons for retaining the entwining of thought and emotion. As it happens, there are serious problems with a brain that calculates free of emotion. For example, such a brain might have no incentive to stop thinking about a particular matter, or to start thinking about something else. Boredom and potential rewards are both sensation-linked and both have important influences on the allocation of thinking. I am well aware of the beneficial nature of gut feelings, and emotional thinking generally, which a number of writers propose. If there is something a bit original in my approach, it is in the suggestion that the emotional nature of thought is also an important factor in irrationality.

Evolved Irrationality Stuart Sutherland is a leading writer on irrationality. He is a fairly unusual author in this area in that he devotes some time to considering the evolved nature of human brains. In his book Irrationality, he identifies seven sources of irrationality, two of which are cast in explicitly evolutionary terms (Sutherland 1992, 230): Our ancestors in the animal kingdom for the most part had to solve their problems in a hurry by fighting or fleeing…It is probably for this reason that when under stress of high drive people act or think in such stereotypical ways…strong emotions, such as anger or fear, which can lead to highly irrational behaviour, were probably more useful at a time when confrontations between members of a species were solved by physical action not by more or less subtle verbal interchanges. Conformity and the emotion of embarrassment that keep people in line with group norms are almost certainly partially inborn…But allegiance to a group that makes modern society possible can readily be carried over into situations where it is inappropriate and hence leads to irrational behaviour.



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While this sails quite close to what I am going to propose as the main evolutionary contribution to irrationality, I believe it misses the point. There are two distinct elements in this passage of Sutherland’s. One is the suggestion that the need for speed rather than reflection during much of our evolution contributes to brains prone to irrationality. No doubt then, and no doubt today, there were and are circumstances where speed is better than reflection. But actions or opinions formed quickly in themselves have little to do with irrationality. A quickly decided thought or action may well be inconsistent with other held views and may well ignore relevant considerations. That is one of the prices of speed. Of course, there are advantages to speed as well. Irrationality, of the kind I am considering, is persisting with the contradictions or other fallacies when there is ample time to consider. The key question is why do we do that? The other element in this compressed paragraph from Sutherland is conforming. Again, the drive to conform does exist and it can contribute to irrationality. Conforming is a major motive for adopting a religion, for example. And when the tenets of that religion clearly conflict with other beliefs, we have classic irrationality. Again, I believe this is close to a good theory, but insufficient in itself. Elsewhere Sutherland writes, “It might be thought that the main cause of irrational behaviour is that emotion clouds judgment. Although this is a factor, it is not the most important” (Sutherland 1992, 3). I beg to differ with Sutherland on this point by considering the evolved function and interconnections of emotions with reasoning. However, out of fairness to Sutherland we should take note what he holds to be the other six sources of irrationality. The second reason Sutherland offers for the persistence of irrationality is very similar to what I propose above: Why has not irrationality been eliminated or at least greatly reduced by evolutionary pressure? One answer is that in our society (and presumably in the societies prevailing during most of evolution --my interjection) it does not require a great deal of rationality to find shelter and sustenance, and to rear a viable family…The bad effects of irrationality occur mainly when major decisions are being taken: mistakes made by engineers are revealed in accidents and those of doctors in avoidable deaths…In short, because of a lack of evolutionary pressure to increase rationality, the sophistication of our technology has far outrun the evolution of our brains. (Sutherland 1992, 230-231)

I fear that here Sutherland is muddying the water a bit by equating irrationality with mistakes. But, I agree with what I take to be the underlying point, namely, the contribution of greater rationality to inclusive fitness is virtually non-existent. Hence, natural selection has not evolved brains



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intolerant of irrationality. As we shall see, being tolerant of irrationality is different from being prone to it. If it mattered a great deal that one was irrational, natural selection would have done more to lessen it. It probably did not matter too much, and maybe it does not matter too much today (except in economic life). But there is a subtle point here. This is the positive strength of irrationality, not just the tolerance of it. Irrationality is more than something which just slips under the radar. It is a major player. Why is that a feature of our brains? Sutherland’s third point has to do with networks of cells which he sees as connected “at random” (Sutherland 1992, 231). Be that as it may, and I do not want to go into detail regarding brain construction, in effect this argument operates at an inappropriate level. It may be that our brains work in a way that opens the door wide to irrationality. The question for us is why has this come about, not how does the brain work to bring it about. If certain kinds of brains were more prone to irrationality, and other arrangements were possible, and there was an inclusive fitness cost to irrationality, we would see less of it today. Sutherland’s fourth explanation for the prevalence of irrationality has to do with mental laziness. I think this also is wide of the mark. Laziness leads to mistakes and a lack of energy to bother about getting rid of irrationality or be very troubled by it. Throughout, I have emphasised the wilful or persistent nature of irrationality. This is not a matter of laziness. People will fight hard and stay up all night in defence of their particular brand of irrationality. The fifth reason I find very odd, “…our failure to use elementary probability theory and elementary statistics and the concepts to which they have given rise” (Sutherland 1992, 232). This is simply an example of irrationality. An example cannot be an explanation of irrationality. I am inclined to see the anti-numerate culture as more like a fairly prevalent mistake in reasoning and thinking which is due to cultural bias and poor education. The failure to use readily available quantitative methods is irrational. Pointing out that this exists is not an explanation of irrationality, it is an example of it. The sixth reason for irrationality suggested by Sutherland is the difficulty of breaking with tradition. Tradition may bias a society away from mathematics, for example, and even people who would benefit from some mathematical understanding find it hard to break with tradition. Agreed. But why? Why is it so hard to break with tradition? I hope to suggest a glimmer of an answer shortly. Finally, Sutherland attributes much irrationality to the desire to be “right:”



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I have not stressed the final general cause of irrationality--self-serving bias--mainly because it is so obvious. Although I have shown that other factors play a part, it is hard to believe that the desire to be right or the wish to support one’s self-esteem do not play some part in people’s reluctance to give up a hypothesis, to change a bad decision, or to see a house they have just bought for what it really is (Sutherland 1992, 233).

My central thesis relates to what I see as a deep inconsistency between the quote above and what Sutherland wrote in his opening chapter. I repeat Sutherland’s point again. “It might be thought that the main cause of irrational behaviour is that emotion clouds judgement. Although this is a factor, it is not the most important” (Emphasis added) (Sutherland 1992, 3). I believe that emotions are the ubiquitous and critical factor in irrationality, though perhaps not in the way that Sutherland has in mind. I agree that there are emotional costs to changing one’s views. The question for me is why? Why do we not simply shift to a more rational view when exposed to one convincingly? Samuelson and Swinkels have adopted a more formal and utility based approach to the question of evolved irrationality (Samuelson and Swinkels 2006). Their central concept of irrationality places greater emphasis on action than on thought, which takes their work a bit away from present concerns. Yet, there are clear parallels. They note that, “Individual choice is often accompanied by internal conflict” (Samuelson and Swinkels 2006, 119). This could be a description of my Greek colleague’s dilemma with the Colonels’ coup. Samuelson and Swinkels see irrationality as wanting to have a healthy diet, for example, and yet eating inappropriately in some circumstances. Another example might be wishing to be faithful to a sexual partner, but having an affair when certain temptation is present. These examples can be interpreted as espousing “A” and “not A” simultaneously. A key element in their thinking is changes in preferences, or utility, depending on the choices on offer. The evolutionary question posed by Samuelson and Swinkels is: Why do we not have a preference for more surviving descendants directly, since that is what natural selection is all about, rather than a host of preferences with respect to subsidiary experiences which indirectly contribute to gene success? Their answer quite reasonably points to the overwhelming informational complexity of a direct preference as opposed to the efficiency of indirect contributing preferences. In order for an overarching preference for more viable descendents to be operative, one would have to have more knowledge of circumstances and causality than is realistic. This is especially potent when the context changes faster than natural selection can accommodate. As the authors put it:



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Chapter Two There is evolutionary value in having things in the utility function not because they have direct evolutionary consequences, but rather because conditioning our utility on these features makes our choices differentially responsive to the quality of our information (Samuelson and Swinkels 2006, 139).

Subsidiary sources of utility which are context dependent offer a way out of the need for an impossible to obtain volume of information which a utility for viable descendents requires. A cost associated with the role for indirect utilities is apparently contradictory behaviour, usually thought of as self-control problems. These preferences can be irrational in nature. This explanation, while quite reasonable, has no role for the emotional nature of thinking itself, and many examples of irrationality fall outside its range of explanation. Fundamental to the approach suggested here is the assertion that the human brain is not a calculating machine. This is not to say that it cannot do a bit of calculating from time to time. My thesis, found partly through introspection, is that emotions are a central feature in brain activity. They are critical in the way the brain works. I do not believe that computers have emotions or that emotions are a part of their “thinking processes.” For humans it is very different. Evolution has produced a remarkable organ that can remember, reason and imagine. It can run simulations or thought experiments. At every turn, feelings of positive and negative kinds play central roles in all of these processes. This is an extremely efficient organ for getting about. It involves logic, but is guided at every turn by subjective positive and negative feelings of many shades and hues. Mental choices are geared to what we might call aesthetic considerations. I am inclined to call curiosity and the desire to know a kind of emotion. The occasional joy to be had in figuring something out or solving some problem is an emotional experience. The nagging irritation, and in some cases panic and fear in the face of not understanding is a powerful stimulus to more thought, or to trying different possibilities. What I am suggesting here is not an attempt at poetry or mysticism. You could say, in opposition to my view, that solving problems or thinking in a better, or more relevant way, produces outcomes which raise the inclusive fitness of the lucky possessor of the slightly improved brain. And so, natural selection leads to brain development. My argument is that it is not only the applied outcome of brain activity which leads to individual advantage, but the very process of thinking is based on and utilizes rewards and punishments of an emotional kind. It would not have to be that way, so to speak. It just happens that an organ that works



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through emotionally intertwined thought is more effective for the issues, questions, and problems that are relevant to the natural selection process. So what does this have to do with irrationality? A great deal. Certain ideas, presuppositions, or mental pathways feel good to us. We are not prepared to relinquish them easily. This is not true of all ideas or mental propositions. For any individual, the emotional content of these mental pathways depends on his or her experiences and particularly early training. The long period of human dependence as a baby and a child, and the complex language and culture to be acquired and absorbed, is mainly developed through emotional responses. Thinking this way, whatever “this way” may be, feels good. Another way feels bad. There are thousands of ways of feeling good and thousands of ways of feeling bad. These work critically in brain activity. Why? Because natural selection favoured neural organs that worked that way. A less emotionally driven thinking machine is less efficient from the perspective of natural selection. Natural selection relies on consequences. The emotionally driven thinking system rewards and punishes as it goes along, not just through the consequences of thought. The brain has to decide, among other things, what to think about. A purely logical brain would scan all available possibilities and apply some filter to make the choice. This is just too demanding. It requires too much computing power and takes too long. The emotional brain guides the possessor through positive and negative feelings. This is not perfect, but it is what can be built up by the tiny steps of natural selection. Openness to irrationality is one of the costs associated with the way natural selection works on brain development. Not infrequently, positive feelings will be associated with actively holding two or more inconsistent positions, and/or negative feelings associated with abandoning one or more of them. For certain positions or ideas it is painful to drop or modify them. That is a cost to having this kind of brain. A recent example of irrationality is the refusal of many operators in the financial sector to acknowledge the likelihood of widespread default in the sub-prime market, and its probable consequences. Simply not seeing this possibility would be a mistake. Believing that home prices would rise forever is absurd, but refusing to adjust in the face of compelling argument is irrational. Greg Lippmann was one active financier who did appreciate the situation: Lippmann spent twenty hours with one hedge fund guy and thought he had him sold, only to have the guy call his college roommate, who worked for some home builder, and change his mind (Lewis 2010, 82).

Shades of the Colonels’ coup!



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Images of the World The economist Kenneth Boulding, while on leave at the Institute of Advanced Studies, wrote a fascinating book with the pretty obvious starting point that we do not deal with the world directly, but with our image of the world (Boulding 1956). Moving on from this modest beginning, Boulding found some interesting results. He went on to suggest that when evidence or reason more-or-less forces us to alter our image, we make the minimum, or smallest possible, or least costly change to accommodate the new position. This is suggestive, and a very “economics driven” way of thinking about changing our thinking. But as insightful as Boulding was, there was some vagueness in his thesis regarding the units involved in making the smallest necessary change. How do you measure what is a big change and a small change? Boulding appears to have thought that the size of change has to do with the content of the images under consideration. I would suggest that when change is made, it is made in a way that minimises the emotional pain necessary for change. Emotional pleasure and pain are the units for measuring the costs of alternative images of the world. The Boulding thesis, that we make the minimum change, however measured, to accommodate new information, rather suggests that we act rationally. And occasionally we do so act. But if the cost of adjustment is too high, high in emotional distress terms, we do not adjust. We live with the irrationality. This claim that I am making is different from the Boulding thesis. If we always adjusted, however minimally, that would mean there was no irrationality of the kind that I have specified. But often the cost, measured in sensations of pleasure and pain, is just too high, so in effect we opt for irrationality.

An Alternative View of the Emotional Brain No doubt the primacy of emotions, as well as the nature of emotions in brain activity, is widely recognised. I am inclined to take the book The Emotional Brain by Joseph LeDoux as representative of work in this area (LeDoux 1996). The subtitle of his book is revealing: “The mysterious underpinnings of emotional life.” While the book has marvellous discussions of the mechanisms of emotions--how they come about, what parts of the brain are involved, the evolutionary history of emotional development--there is no mention of the role of emotions in cognitive processes. He does not say they do not occur there, he just has no



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discussion of them when it comes to the cognitive aspect of brain activity, or so I would maintain. I gain some support for my view that the intimate involvement of emotions in thinking is not dominant in the literature from the book Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman (1996). Again, the subtitle is revealing: “Why it matters more than IQ.” I think it is fair to say that Goleman has a concept of “IQ” which is shorthand for cognitive activity as separate from emotion. Consider a passage such as the following. What factors are at play, for example, when people of high IQ flounder and those of modest IQ do surprisingly well? I would argue that the difference lies in the abilities called here emotional intelligence (emphasis in the original), which include self-control, zeal and persistence, and the ability to motivate oneself. And these skills, as we shall see, can be taught to children, giving them a better chance to use whatever intellectual potential the genetic lottery may have given them” (Goleman 1996, xii).

I am all in favour of not taking genetic endowment lying down. I am in full support of the Goleman project. But I argue here a rather different position, namely, the importance of emotions in what he is calling the IQ part of brain activity, and I am calling the cognitive part, or simply the thinking activity. I believe the following quotation from Goleman tends to support my view that in the literature there is a dominant concept of thinking as being apart from emotions. The individual sees a snake, and this is what happens: A visual signal first goes from the retina to the thalamus, where it is translated into the language of the brain. Most of the message then goes to the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed for meaning and appropriate response; if that response is emotional, a signal goes to the amygdala to activate the emotional centres. But a smaller portion of the original signal goes straight from the thalamus to the amygdala in a quicker transmission, allowing a faster (though less precise) response. Thus the amygdala can trigger an emotional response before the cortical centers have fully understood what is happening (Goleman 1996, 19).

On my reading, at least, the activity of “understanding what is happening,” as stated above, is separate from the emotions. To use Goleman’s excellent phrase, “the language of the brain,” I argue that emotions are involved here as well. In many cases, this makes it costly for people to think rationally. When paying this cost is deemed to be not worth it, irrationality appears to the individual to be the better option. It is a great blessing not to have too much emotional attachment to one’s thoughts and ideas. And the degree to which we are able to think rationally

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with little emotional strain is largely a matter of luck. It depends on the environment, particularly one’s childhood environment. One alternative thesis to the one I have presented here, and no doubt there are many others, would be that “thinking” in itself is free from emotion, or sensation, but emotional attachment to certain ideas comes later. This rival theory is, I fear, equally consistent with the evidence and reasoning I have suggested. It slightly rubs me the wrong way because it makes a demarcation, with emotion or sensation becoming attached to thought at one point, but not at another. My theory is consistent with the very interesting fact that certain ideas, like the nature of military government, might have heavy emotional involvement for one person, and little or none for another.

Painful Thoughts I agree with the idea that some thoughts are universally pretty hard to bear, a prime example being the thought of one’s own death, and perhaps even more, the death of a loved one. Do we need any elaborate theory of irrationality based on the emotional nature of thought processes when some ideas are painful to acknowledge, or very difficult to grasp such as the infinity of the universe? My answer is that indeed we often take the easy way out and are willing to put up with some irrationality if that is required. But a huge range of irrationality clearly has nothing to do with these obvious fears, as well as other sources of joy, such as feeling one is smarter than one really is. It is these seemingly innocuous views which nevertheless contain an irrational commitment which require the theory put forward here.

Conclusion Leo Tolstoy wrote in 1897: The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Sheer stubbornness in thought is a feature of irrationality. Some opinions are particularly hard to modify or abandon. The positions imprinted in childhood are likely to be especially emotionally charged. And even more than the particular thoughts, attachment to the very style or method of thought in general of an individual is a feature of our evolved brains.



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Drawing on some philosophy and some evolutionary psychology, an attempt is made here to explain evolved irrationality; irrationality being defined as holding on to contradictions and certain other mental quirks, in the face of powerful arguments to the contrary. This explanation emphasises the emotional nature of thinking. Emotional thought is an efficient way of evolving a brain, but it opens the door to a fair amount of irrationality. Rapid advances in natural science in our understanding of the working of the brain currently underway may tend to confirm the conjecture put forward here, or may serve to challenge it.

References Boulding, K. 1956. The Image, Knowledge in Life and Society. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Damasio, A. 1994. Descartes’ Error. G.P. New York, NY: Putnam. —. 1999. The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London: Heinemann. Dweck, C. 2009. Comment on McKay, Ryan T. and Dennett, Daniel C. “The Evolution of Misbelief.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(6): 518-519. Goleman, D. 1996. Emotional Intelligence. London: Bloomsbury. Haselton, M. and D. Nettle. 2006. “The Paranoid Optimist: An Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(1): 47-66. LeDoux, J. 1996. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lehrer, J. 2009. The Decisive Moment. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Lewis, M. 2010. The Big Short. Great Britain: Allen Lane. McKay, R. and D. Dennett. 2009. “The Evolution of Misbelief.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(6): 493-510. Samuelson, L. and J. Swinkels. 2006. “Information, Evolution and Utility.” Theoretical Economics 1(1): 119-142. Shermer, M. 1997. Why People Believe Weird Things. London: Souvenir Press. Sutherland, S. 1992. Irrationality. London: Constable and Company.



CHAPTER THREE UNGROUNDED GROUNDS OF LIFE: THE ROOTS OF RATIONALITY R.E. SCHMIDLE

This chapter proposes to illuminate the roots of rationality beginning with an exploration of Wittgenstein’s notion of hinges, which he introduced in On Certainty. In his view, hinges are basically non-epistemic, nonexperiential beliefs that are held as certain and beyond doubt if we are to live in a particular way. Wittgenstein first described hinges in this passage: “…the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn” (Wittgenstein 1969, 341). He goes on to clarify this idea: “We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put” (Wittgenstein 1969, 343). Not only are hinges constitutive of our worldview but, as I will explain later, they are also at times regulative of our behaviour in local orders. These local orders can be characterized as moral, natural, political, religious, etc. How we come to these hinge beliefs and how they influence our sentiments about rationality and our understanding of what is considered rational is the subject of this chapter. As we investigate this concept further we come to see that hinges are usually manifested in practices. Rationality, as applied to a person’s exhibited behaviour in a discrete local order, is a uniquely individual construct and one that is defined by and through discursive relations. Importantly, there is no such thing as a universal rationality. This is because the concept of what it means to be rational cannot be articulated abstractly; that is, it cannot be understood outside the concrete context of historical events and the complexities of local social life. Rationality is therefore based on contextualizing beliefs within actual historical situations, to include social practices. What is considered as rational or reasonable within the worldview of a particular group is therefore subject to varied influences such as those of culture,

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education, economic status, etc. Behaviour labelled by someone as irrational may indicate more about the positioning of that observer than it does about the validity or truthfulness of that description of a decision, belief or activity. In order to properly contextualize belief and lead us to a more complete understanding of rationality, we need to focus on the practical structures of both discourses and actions. It is within these structures that creation and regulation of meaning occur. Rationality is very much a practical notion in that it reflects the meaning assigned to empirical actions or practices in relation to a working framework. Meaning or sense making comes about by considering the privileged position of the use to which those actions are directed within a particular context. Since there is no universal, abstract rationality, there is therefore no place for theoretical and abstract truth independent of some context or practice. Wittgenstein postulated in the Philosophical Investigations, that the truth of a proposition is never independent of its use by humans in language games (Wittgenstein 1958, 226). In its practiced guise then, rationality reflects meaning, i.e., truth created through actions on the part of those subjects, who act as free and autonomous agents. Rationality also has an epistemic character in that it shapes the means (cognition) through which those agents come to understand their world through discursive interaction with each other in some normative context. This epistemic character is also reflected in this proposition: We should expand the narrative of rationality from a focus on “a rational person thinks this” to “a rational person thinks like this.” By changing the narrative, we open up space to explore and understand the process whereby we come to our notions of rationality instead of trying to interpret a particular person’s rationality in a particular context. The latter is a necessarily limiting approach. Discursive interaction is the cognitive process that yields both the production of knowledge for oneself and the acquisition of knowledge from others. Knowledge, which comes from interaction, is ultimately manifested in the shared worldview of the participants in a common discourse. So rationality is discursively developed and manifested in cooperative behaviour considered acceptable by agents who freely chose to participate in these mutually agreeable forms of behaviour. At the heart of connecting rationality to acceptable behaviour is an understanding of what compels others in a group to behave as they do. Said differently, when one person understands the reasons that motivate another person he has taken the first step toward accepting that behaviour (the other’s) as rational and consequently respecting the other’s rationality. This process of reaching an understanding with others also compels individuals to be held accountable



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not only for what they say but also to justify the validity of their own positions. Not understanding, or even attempting to understand, the reasons behind another’s apparently unusual behaviour can lead to labelling another’s behaviour as irrational; that is, not able to be interpreted. In much the same way, suicide bombers are labelled as irrational; that is, we cannot understand their motivation, when in fact their behaviour is rational to them in the context of their worldview. It is important to acknowledge that, while we may disagree or disapprove of another’s behaviour, those actions can be rational to the person acting in that manner and within his local normative order. Nevertheless, some people are actually and quite simply mad! I would further contend that one couldn’t act irrationally in one’s own mind, baring of course a delusional state brought about by illness, drugs, etc. This is because rationality is manifested in discursively developed and mutually acceptable behaviour. For example, one could imagine that all these people cannot act irrationally because they are sharing the same hinges. The rationality of one’s actions is therefore ultimately dependent on one’s viewpoint and on the acceptability of those actions to likeminded individuals who share the same discursively created values. Consequently, to knowingly act irrationally is not possible since that would be to act in a way that one acknowledges one’s actions as unacceptable in the moral or natural order in which one lives or hopes or proposes to live. Even someone who commits murder has justified or rationalized that act, if but for the instant in which he pulled the trigger. For that instant he was, in his own mind at least, acting rationally. Inevitably, one can only ever act in a manner that he believes is rational, even if others see those actions as irrational (i.e., at odds with the selfinterest of the subject). Ultimately, rationality is a form of sense making and as humans we are compelled to try to make sense of the world. What we cannot make sense of by reasoning we must simply believe, and that belief becomes for us a hinge. It is not a choice for us to believe since to not believe would be to delete meaning from the world. This notion is similar to one that Wittgenstein illuminated in his discussion of rule-following in the Investigations. There he posed the question “How do I obey a rule?” by saying that the question was really about justification for following a rule. “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’” (Wittgenstein 1958, 217). He goes on to say “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly” (Wittgenstein 1958, 219). And, of course,



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this is a grammatical remark. As I suggested earlier in this chapter, hinges can be both constitutive and regulative. It is the regulative function that we see foreshadowed in this discussion about rules from The Investigations. Like rules, hinges are followed blindly and they are reflected in everyday practices that are simply “what we do.” This rule-following is the manifestation of our drive toward sense-making and it is these normative constraints that provide the foundation on which we build a coherent world view. I am suggesting here that hinges, characterized as beliefs not subject to doubt, in fact form the foundation of rationality. Consequently, the roots of rationality are found in non-epistemic beliefs, and not in the calculations of reason. Hinges, whose creation is non-experiential and non-epistemic, contribute to a form of rationality constituted by those hinges. That particular form of rationality, like all forms of rationality, transcends the limits of reason as we “look to find a reason to believe.” Another point of consideration related to identifying the roots of rationality is to understand that once we recognizes a hinge for what it is, it is no longer a hinge. This is because having been recognized as a hinge belief, including recognition of the effect it has on one’s life in a particular local order, that belief now becomes epistemic in both nature and origin. We have made it (the hinge) the result of a cognitive process. It has, in fact, become at this point knowledge and knowledge is by its very nature something about which we can be wrong. Therefore, when a hinge belief is recognized as such it is no longer certain and beyond doubt, it is now merely an epistemic practice, or merely an empirical proposition. So far we have established a foundation of understanding about rationality and introduced the role of hinges in the creation of rationality. Next we explore in more detail the types of hinges and their relationship to rationality as manifested in everyday practices. First, we will examine the origin of hinges. Hinges originate in the observation of and participation in practices and actions in a moral or natural order that is in orders in which we make use of standards of correctness. For example, “It is wrong to believe the earth is flat,” “It is wrong to be cruel to animals.” Hinges can come from repeated experiencing of these events or from a single occurrence of such impact as to make repetition redundant. An example of the former is the proclivity of some people to walk around black cats rather than cross in front of their paths because of a belief in “black cat evilness.” An example of the latter would be the first televised portrayal of men walking on the moon, which, because of a reasoned belief in the infallibility of video technology, enabled all but the hard core (irrational?) sceptics to believe with certainty



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that man had walked on the moon. However hinges come about they are subsequently reinforced through continued repetition of actions to which they have contributed meaning, leading to expectations of behaviour that displays or manifests these beliefs. In our exploration of the origin and/or creation of hinges, the following question comes to mind: “To what extent is a teacher necessary in the creation of hinges?” For the answer, we look to Lev Vygotsky who believed that the fundamental process of human development is always collective, it is a process of psychological symbiosis that is fundamentally a kind of apprenticeship (Vygotsky 1978). Continuing on with this line of thought, he postulated that all of a child’s development occurs first at the social level and then at the individual level (Vygotsky 1978). The creation of hinges is effectively a social and discursive process that is affected by a teacher; it is the teacher that brings the student from the Zone of Proximal Development to the Zone of Actual Development. The behaviour exhibited by individuals in these stages is foundationally influenced by hinges and the creation of those hinges is enabled or accelerated by a teacher who imparts to the student the belief systems that define rationality in that local order. The child internalizes hinge beliefs after she has seen the practices displayed between others in her group. This is the collective process of the creation of hinges, enabled by a teacher or one whose actions in that capacity are interpreted by the child as one positioned as a superior or a more capable peer (Vygotsky 1978). There are two categories or types of hinges. The first type is a metaphysical hinge, one which concerns material things that constitute natural orders, i.e., those that make up an external system; for example, “cats don’t grow on trees.” The second type of hinge is a moral hinge, one which concerns behaviours that constitute moral orders, i.e., those that make up an internal system; for example, “doing your duty.” Importantly, one never “proves” a hinge’s existence or demonstrates its validity. Instead, hinges are fixing a certain form of life, which is simply displayed in everyday practices. It is through the observation of and participation in those practices that hinges are consequently identified. In examining the first type of hinge we can, for example, discover that one never doubts that cats don’t grow on trees, because you couldn’t doubt that and live in the world as we know it. Therefore, accepting a belief in trees that grow cats instead of branches is irrational in the context of a certain natural order. In the case of the second type of hinge, one never raises the question that doing one’s duty is not a way of behaving that is unchallengeable if we are to live in that particular moral order. Therefore, being dutiful is a moral hinge, since one never raises the question of



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whether or not I am dutiful if I am acting in that way. Acting that way is what it is to be dutiful. The driving force behind the rationality of these aforementioned hinges lies in the utility and/or social efficacy of the practices reflected by these hinge beliefs. Consequently, the practice of trimming tree branches is informed by the certainty that they are covered in bark and not fur and that when one cuts into a branch it will not be followed by the screech of a wounded cat. In much the same way, the practice of doing one’s duty requires that we accept that by expressing the declaration that “I am dutiful” in acting dutifully one is acting in accordance with a practice deemed rational in the moral order in which one lives. In some local orders, the hinge proposition “I am dutiful,” could be understood to mean that I have a duty, for example, to give money to the poor. On the other hand, this duty might be opposed to the rationality of other orders that believe that being poor is a personal choice and therefore the poor, as freely choosing autonomous agents, have selected their lot and deserve no recompense from others. Hinges, however, should not always be taken as implying only a particular action by someone. For example, one culture may view the moral hinge, “doing one’s duty” as acceptable as a spiritual and/or metaphoric practice, such as praying for the poor on Sunday. That same culture might view the hinge “doing your duty” as an unacceptable empirical or literal practice, such as giving alms to the poor. Both of these beliefs are hinges but they are manifested in practices at different levels, and are not necessarily in consonance or in conflict with each other. They simply reflect the different levels of hinges. In this example, at one level the practice of prayer is a hinge, yet at another level the practice of putting money in a jar is the hinge. These practices, however, have in common that they both display the regulative function that hinges play in our lives. The roots of rationality are found not in abstract and objective reasoning but rather in contextualized and discursively created hinges. These hinges are manifested in practices that come about when “the spade is turned” and one has no choice but to believe if one is to make sense of the bedrock that is the limit of reason.



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References Vygotsky, L., 1978. Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wittgenstein, L., 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. —. 1969. On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.



PART TWO: COLLECTIVE IRRATIONALITY

CHAPTER FOUR CONSPIRACY THEORY AND RATIONALITY LEE BASHAM

We wage a war to save civilization itself. We did not seek it, but we will fight it, and we will prevail. —United States President George W. Bush on the invasion of Iraq [She said] I’m supposed to blame the Al-Qaeda. The Al-Qaeda didn’t make a decision to send my son to Iraq. The ignorance that we deal with, with everyday people. Because they don’t know. People think they know but you don’t know. I thought I knew, but I didn’t know. [In tears] I need my son. God, it’s tougher than I thought it was going to be, to be here. —Lila Lipscumb, mother of soldier Michael Pedersen, Killed in Action, Karbala, Iraq, standing before the White House

Interest in conspiracy theory is growing among philosophers and cultural analysts. Probably the most powerful reason is the extraordinary conspiracy theories that have become popular in recent decades.1 But these researchers do not endorse any of these conspiracy theories; their interest in these astonishing claims is epistemic: How do we distinguish the conspiracy theories that ought to be believed from ones that should not? The progression in pop-conspiracy theory’s brutality and political proximity is certainly striking. The Euro-American mid-20th century’s old theories about communist infiltration from without, aided by a handful of “fifth columnists” within, have given way to equally popular conspiracy theories about mass murder from within, where the United States government either allows or wholly engineers brutal terrorist attacks upon 1

Many are diabolical and brilliant, many are insane and many are insanely entertaining. It’s a roller coaster ride. While we’ll discuss the philosophical literature at length, an engaging example of cultural and rhetorical analysis is Ginna Husting and Martin Orr’s “Dangerous Machinery: “Conspiracy Theorist” as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion.” 2007. Symbolic Interaction. 30(2): 127150.

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its civilian population to justify imperial resource wars without and a police-state within. This is the vast cloud of related theories known in the U.S. media as the “9/11 truth movement,” the reference of the “9/11 was an inside job” bumper stickers. A Google search of “9/11 conspiracy proof” returns 123,000 websites (Google search, March 14, 2011).2 Several popular films, including one with widespread theatrical release and a winner at Cannes, depict President George Bush as a co-conspirator in the deceitful manipulation of the public to manufacture support for an invasion of Iraq (Moore 2004).3 Less ambitious popular conspiracy theories include Bill Clinton executing dozens of political opponents and Barack Hussein Obama as both an “illegal alien” and closet Muslim conspiring to do what Osama bin Laden failed to: Destroy the United States economy, setting the stage for an Islamic takeover of North America and Western Europe. While these accusations have millions of faithful, at first contact they seem simply “beyond reason.” The typical response of mainstream media and much of academia is that such surprisingly popular theories are not merely false, to even entertain ideas of this nature is irrational. Popular pundit Bill Maher tells his Real Time audience, Crazy people who still think the government brought down the Twin Towers in a controlled explosion have to stop pretending that I’m the one who’s being naive….How big a lunatic do you have to be to watch two giant airliners packed with jet fuel slam into buildings on live TV, igniting a massive inferno that burned for two hours, and then think ‘well, if you believe that was the cause’. You people stop asking me to raise this ridiculous topic on the show and start asking your doctor if Paxil is right for you (Maher 2007).

The irrationality alleged is psychiatric. While an obvious ad hominem, in the mass media this accusation is frequent and well received. It would be pleasant if we could drop the issue of conspiracy theory with that. But the position is hard to sustain once we actually engage the conspiracy theorists and their theories. The good news is that our conspiracy theorizing fellow citizens are not obviously mad. Most of them are sane and their theories are often intriguing and constructed with a careful eye to shared standards of inference and sources of evidence. So it’s no surprise 2

Google search retrieved on March 14th, 2011. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), written and directed by Michael Moore. A collection of conspiracy theories, the overall method is effective. The largest grossing documentary in history, Fahrenheit 9/11 achieved this with relatively limited distribution and long lines of eager viewers.

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that the American Psychiatric Association in its vast directory of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), does not include conspiracy theorizing disorder. The DSM does discuss paranoia but the notion found there doesn’t to extend to most adherents of popular conspiracy theories. DSM IV tells us: The essential feature of Paranoid Personality Disorder is a pattern of pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent.... Individuals....assume that other people will exploit, harm or deceive them, even if there is no evidence to support this expectation. They suspect on the basis of little or no evidence that others 4 are plotting against them....(American Psychiatric Association 1994, 643)

A quick review of popular conspiracy theory websites, as well as dozens of interviews conducted over the last decade with self-identified conspiracy theorists, shows this does not describe them. Many conspiracy theorists do have a heightened expectation for conspiratorial possibilities—their estimate of society’s prior probability of conspiracy, itself a complex epistemic issue—but they do not simply assume their theories are correct. The evidence attentive adherents of popular conspiracy theories amass is impressive and they can recite it in articulate and thorough detail, while their less studied compatriots are quick to find it when challenged—they have perused it before and know where it is on the Internet. Though obvious internal contradictions, utterly implausible psychological motives and easily falsifiable claims about human history, science and our social structure dismiss any number of conspiracy theories as irrational, the most popular and influential remain largely unscathed by these basic critiques. Our problem is more difficult than we might have thought. Eventually we’re forced to wonder: What really consigns these theorists and their theories to the “irrational,” while simultaneously accepting as rational the theory that a group of Arab Islamists conspired to learn to fly giant passenger planes, hijacked four, and escaping law enforcement and eluding fighter interception, successfully attacked the Pentagon and New York City? The conspiracy theorists’ dispute with mainstream constructs, while at times misguided, is not driven by simple “paranoia”—the irrational fear of others. It is instead a complex epistemic dispute, one that goes to the heart of how we make reasonable judgments about the motives and methods at work in our hierarchical, increasingly centralized system of economic, political and cultural power. The role of 4 I have never met a conspiracy theorist who wore a “tin foil hat,” but I have little doubt one exists somewhere.

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hierarchy in this discussion can’t be over-stressed: It is hierarchy that blocks direct knowledge of the goals and reasoning of our leadership from those who are led.5 Epistemic access is power. Access we don’t have. Instead, we live in a sea of hearsay. Add a pervasive sense of doubt and conspiracy theories are quick to follow.

The Definition of “Conspiracy Theory” A clear idea of what we mean by “conspiracy theory” is important. This sets the proper stage for the epistemic exploration to follow. We must be careful not to adopt an understanding of conspiracy and its theory that needlessly constrains the phenomena or impugns the veracity of conspiracy theory as such. Conspiracy is real, even fairly commonplace. So contrary to the dismissal “that’s just a conspiracy theory,” conspiracy theories can often be true. We also must not allow cultural and linguistic habits to deflect our clarity about a phenomenon. Historically, conspire means “to breathe together”—to speak in an organized, predetermined way. So more broadly, a conspiracy is: The intentional attempt or success at deception by a group of individuals secretly cooperating for the creation or perpetuation of that deception.

This is the most basic definition imaginable. Turning to conspiracy theory, each of the following are necessary and jointly, sufficient:6 1) It is a causal explanatory theory 2) The explanatory theory involves an appeal to deception as a feature of its explanation of events 3) This deception is intentionally attempted by multiple, cooperating persons. So a conspiracy theory is,

5

Anger over this has in large part driven the Western mass demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, World Bank and related secret global economic talks, as well as many other recent demonstration and rebellions in non-Western nations. 6 If that project appears too ambitious treat the following as merely jointly sufficient. Either way, we are providing a realist, not a stipulative, definition. Stipulative definitions are useful tools in research, but the ambition here is to correctly identify an objective phenomenon of a very basic and universal kind.

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A causal explanation of events that appeals to the intentional attempt or success at the deception of those involved in, witnessing, investigating or otherwise affected by those events, on the part of a group of individuals cooperating for the creation or perpetuation of such deception.

Call this the “core definition” of conspiracy theory. But while this all seems simple enough, controversies concerning the definition are common in the philosophical literature: 1) A conspiracy theory must be contrary to the official story (Coady 2003; Raikka 2008) 2) A conspiracy theory must involve activity that is morally suspect (Pigden 2006; Keeley 2007) 3) A conspiracy theory must be of a historical event (Pigden 1995; Keeley 1999; Coady 2003; and Mandik 2007) 4) A conspiracy theory must not be widely accepted (Raikka 2008) David Coady argues that our linguistic habits indicate “conspiracy theory” only applies to accounts that are contrary to an “official story”— governmental or mass media accounts of events. This is an interesting suggestion. But we might worry it conflates salience with meaning. Conspiracy theories that challenge official stories are often more salient to us, because they suggest government or corporate deception and nefarious activity. So while it is true that the more controversial conspiratorial accounts of the age are often at odds with official stories, there is no need to restrict our definition in this way. Indeed, doing so unfairly portrays conspiracy theories as necessarily deviant. Conspiracy theories do not require an official story to oppose. Coady’s restriction is open to counter-examples that illustrate the point. Imagine a series of unlikely deaths. For some time it occurs to no one that they might be related. Only later discoveries—for instance, the dead were all in a position to expose the real and embarrassing motives for a government or corporate policy or project—provide the key to correctly understanding the stratagem behind all their deaths. Finally, someone makes the connection. She comes to realize that there is a conspiracy at work to kill those able to reveal the truth. She forms a conspiracy theory. Notice that at this point there is no official story about these murders. They are spread over three continents and lost in the noise of the tens of thousands of other murders that happen each year. But it’s strange to deny that there is a conspiracy and hers is a conspiracy theory. And this isn’t just a single example. Time after time the initial official stories are

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constructed in response to allegations of organized cover-ups. The conspiracy theory comes first.7 Charles Pigden and Brian Keeley also amend the basic definition; conspiratorial activities must be morally suspect. Keeley explains: …my 1999 paper…claimed that the goals of conspiracies are invariably nefarious: “I am aware of no popular conspiracy theory according to which some group of powerful individuals is secretly doing good but desperately hopes its schemes will not be revealed” (117). This point is useful for setting aside such things as conspiracies to throw surprise birthday parties and the like. Others (for example, Clarke 2002, 138) have noted that “nefarious” seems too strong a requirement. My response is to follow Charles Pigden (2006, 157), when he argues that an important proviso on the definition of conspiracy theories is that the conspiracies they posit must at least be morally suspect (Keeley 2007, 141)…

We might worry that this really adds nothing, because any organized deception is morally suspect, for that reason alone. But Keeley doubts a surprise birthday party is a conspiracy because he sees nothing morally suspect in deceiving someone about how they will be spending their birthday. My thought is that there is something morally suspect in this, but it is justified by the fun of all involved. Morally suspect is, at best, an ambiguous term. Though I see no problem in calling a surprise birthday party a conspiracy, Keeley’s right; we don’t usually speak so. Perhaps we hesitate to call them “conspiracies” and our prediction of such a surprise a “conspiracy theory” because the driving force of our interest in groupdeception is our significant fear of these complots.8 And what we significantly fear is the “morally suspect” in Pigden’s and Keeley’s sense. Which would explain their intuition: Few greatly fear surprise birthday parties. But we often fear ambitious political and economic conspiracies. This returns us to the concern we are conflating salience with meaning. Counter-examples apply, too. Acknowledging the relationship between fear and conspiracy doesn’t require us to amend our core definition, because it is a contingent relationship. For instance, as an enemy of the state I may hope and pray for conspiracies to destroy it. I may privately 7

Coady’s restriction also forces on us a distinction between conspiratorial theories (like the official story of 9/11) and conspiracy theories, which hardly seems helpful. 8 This also works with commercial conspiracies, like Apple conspiring to confuse the digiratti about the specifications of an upcoming product. These are conspiracies, too.

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seek out and uniquely predict particular ones. Now surely my personal theories are conspiracy theories, but no one fears them. They’re known only to me. Depending on the nature of the society these possible conspiracies oppose, they also may be obviously morally virtuous. Recall Eurasia’s “crypto-Jews”, who instead of abandoning their faith and practices when confronting murderous Christian and Islamic inquisitions demanding conversion, continued the faith in secret. Centuries later they resort to this same secret fidelity in the face of Nazi Jew-hunters. A repeated Jewish conspiracy of cultural survival; but is this really morally suspect in any reasonable sense? More important, it’s a mistake to confuse our moral evaluation of a phenomenon with the phenomenon itself. Consider that proven and popular form of individual deception, lying: “Making untrue statements one believes to be untrue for the purpose of deceiving others.” This, of course, is notoriously morally suspect. But there is no need to include that in the definition of lying. If I lie to you about there not being a plan for a surprise birthday party, even if we think there is nothing morally suspect in this, is this any the less lying? The case can hardly be different with “conspiracy,” a form of group deception, or its theory. In the literature we find that most definitions of conspiracy theory also restrict conspiracy theories to explanations of past events, not allowing them to be predictions of future events, too. Pete Mandik’s definition, Explanations of historical events in terms of intentional states of multiple agents, who, among other things, intended the historical events in question to occur and keep their intentions and actions secret (Mandik 2007, 206).9

Many conspiracy theories are of past events that still fascinate us today. But this addendum is of no theoretical importance. The epistemic issues we face in conspiracy theory do not hinge on the events in question being past events. Indeed, the future is what matters most. Any theory that portrays future events that result from a conspiracy, perhaps now active, perhaps yet to be, is a conspiracy theory. Many conspiracy theories are of present plots, and predict future actions. This is common in law enforcement investigations. There are also conspiracy theories that are conditionals cast entirely in the future tense, “The 9

Mandik’s definition is imperfect in several ways. For instance, conspirators need not intend the historical events in question to occur, they may have intended different events but were forced to hide their errors. See, for example, Keeley’s discussion of the Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing (Keeley 2009).

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government’s damage control team will move to imprison on false charges all those who are aware of its actual motives if these individuals decide to speak out.” Clearly a conspiracy theory, here only possible future events are mentioned. The most ambitious family of popular conspiracy theory, New World Order theory, largely consists of predictions of future events. Most variants of New World Order conspiracy theory envision the future of the world as a government-elite controlled, post mass die-off, neomedieval death camp. But there is no doubt New World Order theory is exactly what we have in mind when we call something a “conspiracy theory.”10 Related to Coady’s restriction, Juha Raikka suggests that a genuine conspiracy cannot be the believed by most or very many people, The Holocaust was planned and conducted with the connivance of many people and many organizations, as was the Great Terror of 1934–1939 in the Soviet Union, but it is contestable whether these should be called genuine conspiracies, as it was generally “known” what was going on. What was not known was who was responsible, how extensive the action was, and so on. But relatively early, most or at least very many people did have a suspicion that the official stories were not completely correct. Perhaps we should distinguish between genuine conspiracies and conspiracies whose existence is widely known or presumed (Raikka 2008, 194).

And: In 1941 a belief in the Holocaust was a belief in some sort of a conspiracy theory, as it denied the official claim that the Jews were merely being resettled. But now, Holocaust denial is a crime in some countries, for instance in the UK, and the belief in the Holocaust is certainly not called a conspiracy theory (Raikka 2008, 188).

This is interesting. For Raikka, genuine “conspiracies” are deception success stories; they must be largely and permanently successful in their deception to remain real conspiracies, so any conspiracy theory that portrays the truth and becomes popularly recognized as true ceases to be just that, a conspiracy theory. If the theory succeeds, the conspiracy is revealed. And in that, the theory ceases to be a conspiracy theory, because the conspiracy wasn’t genuine. The Nazis have been revealed for what 10

New World Order conspiracy theory can be thought of as a framing theory, a context of conspiratorial prior probability, for any number of consonant, more particular versions of this complex, nefarious conspiracy theory.

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they are. No conspiracy. I’m not sure this is exactly what Raikka has in mind, but it does seem to follow from his remarks. Setting aside the strange retroactive metaphysics here, the obvious response is that the accepted account of the Nazi Holocaust is a conspiracy theory, a correct conspiracy theory and fortunately for the moral progress of humankind, a widely accepted one. True, the Nazi Holocaust isn’t often called a conspiracy theory in many circles.11 But that’s because our attention isn’t on the prior Nazi plot and subsequent attempt to deceive the world and hide the atrocities, it’s on the atrocities actually done to the Jews. Even if common usage often drops the term “conspiracy theory” with popularity and orthodoxy, can we learn anything relevant about the proper definition of “conspiracy theory” from this observation? Consider “scientific theory.” While there are usages of “theory” where it means “provisional,” “not yet established by evidence” and similar notions, and many people drop the term when scientific orthodoxy is achieved— “quantum mechanical theory” becomes simply “quantum mechanics”—it wouldn’t be a particularly helpful insight into the definition of “scientific theory” to limit the term to not established, not-yet-orthodox accounts. The question of common usage also seems to be relative to the community involved. It’s interesting that our most prestigious and professional investigators of conspiracy, law enforcement, never drop this term; once a conspiracy, always a conspiracy. The fact one is convicted of conspiracy and this is widely publicized is, naturally, wholly irrelevant to them. I think this is the right approach. There is also a danger in a restriction like Raikka appears to have in mind. This concern applies to Coady’s restriction, too. Common usage can be biased for reasons that are at best self-serving, at worst, self-deceiving. This occurs particularly where difficult feelings, the legitimacy of one’s social order, even one’s vision of human life are at risk. Conspiracy theory threatens all of these. So when considering common usage, we should keep in mind that it is often a dodge, a linguistic evasion of clear thinking and honest evaluation, as are the arguments based on it. Recall long standing limits on “rape.” For centuries “by her husband” was said to be contradictory to “she was raped.” Why? “My husband raped me” was a violation of common usage. The motives for this had nothing to do with the nature of rape. It was a political project, enabling men to force sex on their spouses, protecting men from any accusation that if they did this, 11

A pop-exception is the engaging HBO drama Conspiracy, which on the basis of stenographer’s notes attempts to recreate the Nazi meeting that resolved to create death camps for the Jews.

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however they did it (beatings) for whatever motive (punishment and torture), they were rapists. I worry the restriction that a true conspiracy theory cannot be popularly believed functions to protect the orthodoxy that our society (and ironically, every other society) is a trustworthy one where important conspiracies rarely if ever occur. The implication is that those who question this comfortable vision of society through conspiracy theories are, by definition, probably mistaken because so few people accept their theories: “Who believes that?” This maintains the dangerously dismissive rhetorical force of, “that’s just a conspiracy theory.” Instead, if well-established popular beliefs were also acknowledged as conspiracy theories, the force of that dismissal would be emptied. So I’m sceptical that common usage’s dropping of “conspiracy theory” for popular, wellestablished views is a matter of the definition; it appears, instead, to be an act of political piety.12 In conclusion, instead of adopting one or more of these restrictions on “conspiracy theory,” we should opt for the core definition. It is straightforward, involves only the deed itself and lacks the ambiguities of amendments like “morally suspect” or “unpopular.” It’s also consistent with conspiracy theories about the present and future. Finally, it avoids confusing our particular interests in conspiracy theories, or our expectations about our society, with the very idea of conspiracy theory. Stepping back from the definitional controversy, what’s particularly interesting is that on most any reasonable definition of “conspiracy theory,” we are all “conspiracy theorists.” Just reflecting on the meaning of “conspiracy theory” provides an immediate insight into the accusatory connotation of “conspiracy theorist.” Charles Pigden provides a simple argument: 1) Unless you believe that the reports of history books and the nightly news are largely false, you are a conspiracy theorist. 2) If you do believe that the reports of history books and the nightly news are largely false, you are a conspiracy theorist. Conclusion: We’re all conspiracy theorists (Coady 2007, 193).13 12

The failure to recognize the al Qaeda theory of the events of 9/11 is a conspiracy theory, for instance. This sort of problem can also appear when we start dividing conspiracy theories into subtypes; political, economic, personal…and slipping selfserving constraints into the various definitions of these; constraints that entail that they are unlikely to be true, etc. 13 This is David Coady’s reconstruction of Pigden’s point. See Coady (2007), which provides a detailed defence of the ideas that conspiracy theory is integral to the “open society,” that conspiracy theorists are necessary in any healthy democracy and that their efforts should be encouraged and admired.

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That alone should give us pause when we see an explanation swiftly dismissed as “just a conspiracy theory” or someone censored as a “conspiracy theorist.” While clinical paranoia can lead to all manner of absurd conspiracy theories, accepting the validity of conspiracy theory as a manner of explanation is something we all do. Yet, we must be cautious, too, because the kind of allegations many conspiracy theories make against our governments and economic achievement are akin to the deeds of Eichmann and Stalin. If the leading popular accusations are true, our democratic Western way of life is corrupt in a way that rivals the Byzantine. If they are not, we face a crisis of democratic confidence among hundreds of millions of reasonable people, one that issues from a mass cynicism that is paradoxical in a society that is simultaneously widely believed to be truly free and “open.” We will revisit this paradox below when we address the problems associated with fixing the prior probability of conspiracy.

Objections to Conspiracy Theory There is some prior probability of conspiracy. Most human behaviour is honest and innocent. But conspiracy also occurs at every level of human interaction, from family, romance and sexuality, friendship, work, business, to local, national and international politics. It’s the social subspecies of that more basic individual human ability, deception. On most any definition of “conspiracy,” wherever two or more meet to hide an infidelity, plot a social or business ouster or secretly manipulate a market price, conspiracy is in action. All of these actions and many similar ones happen million of times a day. How high up the hierarchy does our species’ penchant for conspiracy go? The celebrated critical sociologist C. Wright Mills noted more than 50 years ago: The top of....society is increasingly unified, and often seems wilfully coordinated; at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless; at the bottom there is an emerging mass society (Mills 1956, 324).

If national and transnational economic and political conspiracies are really possible, then it is no small matter for us to discount (or dismantle) their existence. If our democratic systems are to function as institutions of popular will, we must be sure that conspiracies to manipulate the population and subvert their understanding and free choice are detected

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and destroyed. So it is a critical virtue of any real democratic system that it be constructed so that overarching manipulative conspiracies be easily discovered and extinguished. Coady amplifies this, Some political conspiracies may be harmless or even desirable, but the ideals of open and/or democratic governance create a strong prima facie presumption against conspiracy. In an open society citizens have a prima facie right to accurate and complete information about governmental processes, a right which is threatened by political conspiracies, since such conspiracies are typically directed at misrepresenting or limiting the availability of this information. Democracy requires that voting be conducted freely, and freedom requires a degree of accurate information about one’s choices; political conspiracy, which inevitably reduces or distorts such information, is therefore in conflict with the ideals of democracy (Coady 2007, 195).

We deeply value democracy. This lies at the heart of our anxiety over one form of ambitious conspiracy almost everyone admits occurs, election fraud. But our worries don’t stop there. Focusing on a nation that conceives itself to be the embodiment of democracy, the United States, we face a history of demoralizing intrigues: The decade of outlandish U.S. government deceits about Vietnam, the Atomic Energy Commission’s half-century of lethal deception about atomic bomb test fallout, the debacles of Watergate, Iran-Contra, Waco and Ruby Ridge. These are just some of the bestknown, widely-acknowledge recent examples. These cases don’t have the impact on prior probability they might or should, though. History recedes at a terrific rate in contemporary civilization, creating the illusion that we are somehow “born again” as a society, with a clean slate, every 20 years or so. This blinds us to what are really systemic vulnerabilities to conspiracy and a chronic pattern of institutional bad-habits. Institutions, far from changing, have only become more so in their secretive aspects. Because of this acceleration, today a conspiracy hardly needs permanent secrecy to succeed. Permanent secrecy remains ideal, but the temporal “blast zone” has consistently shrunk. Particularly in national politics, a conspiracy is successful if it’s not uncovered until after the deed is done, the payoff collected and both the major players and society have safely moved on to other things. Then its discovery is too late to politically exploit or punish. This happens very quickly today. “That’s ancient history” now appears to even apply to events as recent as ten years ago. A factor in this acceleration of history is the potential retaliation muck-raking faces among competing major parties and economic interests. Two can play that game, because all are

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compromised in one way or another. A truce of mutual amnesia is in everyone’s interest.14 Yet there’s no denying that we live in a remarkably secretive, hierarchically organized civilization. The major institutions of power— governments and global corporate conglomerates—combine astonishing institutional, financial and technological resources with extensive mechanisms of secrecy, both preventative and punitive. Financial gain, political power and maniacal ego-amplification have always proved strong temptations for unaccountable authorities. Such a civilization is ripe for allegations of organized, society-wide manipulations and deceptions impacting most everyone’s life. It’s no surprise that such allegations are increasingly common. On the face of things there is a significant prior probability of governmental and economic conspiracy. With the emergence of a truly global political-economic system, this possibility has never been more sobering. But it is hardly a new one. Two centuries ago, the father of capitalist economics, Adam Smith, reminded us, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick (Smith 1776, 135)….”15 Politics is one of these trades, too. So we must be vigilant. The problem is that vigilance works only when we can ascend to a point where we can ascertain what we need to. We need sufficient epistemic access if we are to detect and dismantle the most ambitious conspiracies. Do we have this access? Some philosophers claim we do. Others object to ambitious conspiracy theories on more theoretical grounds. Let’s review these objections: (1) The contention, originally voiced by Karl Popper, that as a class, conspiracy theories are unfalsifiable; (2) the hope, given a sophisticated defence by Keeley, that ambitious conspiracies will almost inevitably be revealed to the public by government investigations or agents of the free press; (3) that a vast number of people need be consciously involved in ambitious conspiracies and this will occasion both internal disintegration and/or public revelation (also defended by Keeley); (4) conspiracy theorizing and the sophisticated pursuit and defence of particular conspiracy theories reveals a defect in the personalities of the theorists, their refusal to abandon a theory, and related 14

While this dynamic is especially clear in two-party systems, it can prosper among any number. It’s surprising, but a society where all major centres of power engage in mutually recognized nefarious, conspiratorial acts therefore gains a new and powerful source of stability. 15 This quote was recently brought to my attention by Charles Pigden. See Pigden (2007) for an engaging discussion of conspiracy and its theory in world history.

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to this; (5) as public interest wanes and a steady stream of official condemnation and rejection continues, conspiracy theories become, in Lakatos’ striking phrase, “degenerate research programs” (Steve Clarke has developed both these objections); and (6) the very manner of explanation involved in conspiracy theories, explanations of behaviour based on beliefs and desires, is necessarily ad hoc, because so many different sets of beliefs and desires on the part of postulated conspirators are consistent with the same overt behaviours and observable events (Pete Mandik offers this problem) (Coady 2006; Episteme 2007).16 A full examination of these objections isn’t possible here, but a few remarks may help suggest the complexity of the issues. Popper’s objection is mistaken. Most conspiracy theories are falsifiable. This is the norm in legal trials where the conspiracy theory put forth by the prosecution is falsified by showing the defendants to be incapable of doing what is asserted of them. Such is the power of a “solid alibi.” The next objection assumes the trustworthiness of the very organizations that are often accused of being the sources or accomplices of the conspiracy. It ignores the many ways they might be manipulated, the manner in which hierarchy can intervene in their workings, and the over-ridding interest these organizations have in societal stability, even in the face of fairly rare but extreme governmental wrong doing. We will return to these concerns below. The third misses one of the most powerful features of hierarchical structure: Few people need be consciously acting on behalf of a conspiracy for it to take control of immeasurable resources and manipulate the behaviour of innumerable powerful, highly capable, but nevertheless ignorant individuals. So it ignores the effects of hierarchy on how people can (mis)understand the real purpose of their actions and communications. Controlling a conspiracy needn’t be like herding cats. For instance, in 9/11 conspiracy theories, it appears fairly easy to show that the number of people knowingly involved in developing the conspiracy and setting the attacks in motion could be as few as 25; few if any more would be required in any cover-up, as the reflexive forces of institutional selfdefence would quickly take hold.17 A few high placed officials, with the 16

See Coady (2006 and 2007) for interesting collections of papers discussing these general objections.  17 These calculations involve the number of people to procure and deploy the technology and knowingly use it in the service of the plot, as well as the high placed officials required to organize and then protect the action after the fact. Take the World Trade Center and the hypothesis it was destroyed with explosives. We can calculate the number of devices needed with a modest amount of time allotted to place them, and arrive at a surprisingly small crew. When it comes to who

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help of few ruthless operators, can in the right context achieve remarkable effects. We will also return to this below. The fourth overlooks what any good police detective knows: The better built the conspiracy, the more the investigator/theorist must persevere if she is to reveal it. The fifth objection imports from the philosophy of science an assumption that has no place in the study of human affairs; while nature does not, presumably, set out to deceive us, people frequently do. In a vast range of personal and public scenarios, it is even their first resort. So a “degenerate” status— failure to be able to generate a great many new, successful predictions, and reliance on auxiliary hypothesis to maintain the theory—is exactly what a fairly well-constructed conspiracy would eventually leave investigators with: A closed door to future investigation, a plethora of false-leads and disinformation produced by the conspirators and those they influence, all there to protect the conspiracy and the conspirators. This reflects one of the great epistemic strengths of conspiracy theory, its ability to take evidence that appears to be evidence against the theory and turn it into evidence for the theory. Public pronouncements and pseudo-investigations aimed to discredit the theory are exactly what the theory predicts governments or other institutions of public information will produce. A final objection: Conspiracy theory is necessarily ad hoc because a variety of different beliefs and desires are consistent with the same events. The motives in the conspiracy equally might be this or that, the reasoning equally might be that or this, so whenever we assert a particular motive and particular reasoning, our stance is ad hoc. But such an objection would have us dismiss belief-desire type explanations for most any event even slightly complex—in other words, the entirety of our normal psychological understanding of other human beings and ourselves. This is the position of eliminative materialists like Patricia and Paul Churchland. While I have the greatest respect for the issues eliminativists raise in Philosophy of Mind, this is not really an objection to conspiracy theory, but is instead a broadside against all ordinary psychological explanation (Churchland 1981). What Mandik needs to show is that no successor conception of behavioural explanation—say computational neuroscience—would have a place for a suitably updated form of conspiracy theorizing. This is implausible. Whatever the descendant concepts of that science, they will knowingly participated in the conspiracy, all sorts of entertaining possibilities exist. For instance, the small installation crew (no doubt now deceased) wouldn’t need to know it was installing explosives, “USGS Seismic Response Metering Device” says it all. When the editors of Popular Mechanics claim thousands would be required, they are unfortunately mistaken. When asked in personal conversation how they arrived at this number, the response was a puzzled, “Wouldn’t it?”

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only succeed if they can track the realities belief-desire conspiracy theories already do. After all, conspiracy is real. More important, the idea that to be a conspiracy theory, the theory must identify the exact beliefs and desires of conspirators is an artificial and extreme standard. It fails to recognize that most conspiracy theories can, like much work in science, acknowledge a general class of similar possible explanations, a range of generality and approximation about exact details, freely and rightly admitting that identifying the existence of the one that is correct is not necessary to establish a conspiracy. Instead, in order to correctly identify the existence of a conspiracy, we need only identify organized deception, whatever the many relevant and precise background desires and beliefs of the conspirators. Often police investigations rightly identify conspiracies, reveal them in court, but are unable to fill in many of the details of the actual thinking of the conspirators. All that is required is the defendants’ actions fulfil the definition of conspiracy—particularly collusion to deceive—not that we know every detail of their motivations (desires) and precise considerations (beliefs). What real life conspiracy theory often offers is a disjunction of closely related conspiratorial scenarios—a family of variants—and the proposition that one of these must be true, even if we can’t say which. That is certainly the case with much 9/11 conspiracy theory.

The Origin and Evolution of Conspiracy Theories Once we see that as a class ambitious conspiracy theories cannot be easily dismissed we are likely to become more interested in them both as explanations for events and as tools to help us ask basic questions about the nature of our civilization. Part of understanding popular conspiracy theories is to see them as a process with stages. Conspiracy theories originate and develop along two paths: (1) Conspiracy Theory as Initial Explanation (For instance, the “al Qaeda” Conspiracy Theory of the 9/11 attacks) or (2) Conspiracy Theory as Contra the Official Story (For instance, the 9/11 U.S. Government False Flag Operation theory: “9/11 was an Inside Job”) The perceived prior probability of conspiracy determines the birth and evidential development of conspiracy theories. A high prior probability of conspiracy supports path (1). When a salient event occurs or threatens to,

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we immediately suspect yet another intrigue is in play and begin to identify probable motives, methods and strategies of public deception. A low prior probability supports path (2). In a society with a perceived low prior probability of conspiracy, people will be hesitant to offer up or seriously entertain conspiracy theories, because these are thought to be initially unlikely. Contrasting two families can illustrate the notion of the prior probability of conspiracy in a society. Imagine a family that has very rarely seen serious deceits or betrayals among its members, lives together in peace and high mutual regard; a family that supports itself in ways that are transparent to most of the members, and lives in a manner where the daily activities of all or most of the members are observed by all or most of the other members most or all of the time. In this “good family,” members have a justified basic trust in each other and in the family leadership. The truth is open to all and a malevolent, conspiratorial betrayal would be an astonishing turn of events, one quickly discovered and retaliated against. Contrast this to a family that has a history of stunning lies by its elders and more influential members, a pattern of cliquish betrayals, a way of doing business in the larger society that makes deception and collusion a way of life, a constant sense of mutual distrust and frequent outbreaks of open contempt, and a segregation of members that makes it very difficult to know who is doing what with whom or why. A bad Mafia family, if you like. In the “bad family,” an expectation of betrayal and conspiracy is the norm, and conspiracy theories, having a fairly high prior probability, will animate much of the self-reflection of this family, and their actions, just as real conspiracies, small and large, animate much of the family’s internal dynamic. Contemporary Western political/cultural expectations make a limited class of initial conspiracy theories appealing to almost everyone. There are “bad families” we already recognize. When a synagogue is firebombed the natural suspects are Neo-Nazi white supremacists. Immediately after the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma was truck-bombed, Americans automatically concluded it was the work of an Arab or Iranian conspiracy. A decade later, when the World Trade Center was destroyed, it was easy for Westerners to believe a cabal of Middle Easterners was at it again. But for many Americans it is difficult to believe the United States federal government is the real culprit. They think the U.S. government more resembles the “good family.”18 18

Another way to pose the question is to ask why we believe national governments are not just the dominant crime syndicate in any particular territory? In what ways do we distinguish them from a protection racket with the predictable elements of

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So the first epistemic issue we face is--which family most resembles our political and economic hierarchy? The answer, for better or worse, will condition our evaluation of all subsequent evidence. If the good family, we will be unlikely to attend to or explore conspiracy theories like 9/11. These will have to be evidentially forced upon us. If the bad family, many events will invite conspiratorial explanations as our first and best guess. Behind the debates between those who find conspiracy theories legitimate and those who seek a way to block them from serious discourse, differences in the estimates of the prior probability of conspiracy theory are likely at work. This is clear in the anti-conspiracy arguments of Keeley and in parallel ones in popular mainstream media (Keeley 2005).19 It’s also common sense: Try to imagine anyone growing up in the bad family and, at least after making a “fearless inventory” of its habits and structure, not coming to expect conspiracy at every turn. So how much of our society’s current workings and its history resemble a backstabbing Mafia family? That’s the prior probability of conspiracy. To be persuasive, conspiracy theories involving elements of society that are perceived to be legitimate—the good family—face a special burden of proof. They require criticisms of the official story with what Keeley aptly calls “errant data:” Errant data come in two classes: (a) unaccounted-for data and (b) contradictory data. Unaccounted-for data do not contradict the received account, but are data that fall through the net of the received explanation. They are data that go unexplained by the received account…. Contradictory data are data that, if true, would contradict the received account (Journal of Philosophy 1999).

Facing a momentous event that ignites our anger, threatening our people, we demand explanation. What happened, who did it, why? Governing authorities respond with an official story. When major national and international media presents the official story as truth, it becomes the truth of not just the government, but of the culture’s dominant system of communication and persuasion. This is a powerful political act. As national governments endorse it and global media disseminate it uncritically, it develops a character that transcends individual cultures and the benevolent patron? That is: Is this a planet of gangsters? Or are there really two classes of power-groups with radically different purposes, methods and moral status? 19 Keeley’s “uncontrollability” object (objection (3), above) is found in the closing remarks of Popular Mechanics’ criticism of 9/11 conspiracy theories (Popular Mechanics 2005).

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national identities and becomes an almost unassailable conviction, the orthodoxy of the civilization. An aspirant to such status is the Al-Qaeda Conspiracy Theory. This theory has become a tenet of Western political ideology. It’s the root justification for the military invasion of two Islamic countries and the deaths of at least 100,000 people.20 It’s the theory at the centre of the War on Terror and the official justification for a foreign policy that has cost the United States more than one trillion dollars (Daggett 2010, 1). The moral and monetary burden this theory bears is tremendous. It’s one of the most influential beliefs in the 21st century. And it is a conspiracy theory: The attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were the result of a successful conspiracy among a small group of Islamic fundamentalists seeking to punish the United States for its support of Israel and intrusion into the House of Saud, the protectors of Mecca. These Moslems conspired to learn to fly jetliners in order to hijack them and turn them into suicide weapons. Avoiding discovery by law enforcement for years, they developed their plot, took numerous flight lessons, mastered martial arts, penetrated airport security, took over four passenger planes, escaped U.S. Air Force interception and succeeded in brutally murdering thousands of American citizens. While some conspiracy theorists started out with the premise that the U.S. government had launched these attacks for nefarious reasons, any acquaintance with 9/11 conspiracy theorists in the West reveals their scepticism toward the official story, usually begins with purported errant data. They experience an epistemic obligation to refute the Official Story before they can legitimately launch their own, alternative accounts. Yet, this isn’t necessary. A theory can be evidentially superior, more coherent with background beliefs, and more explanatorily powerful—in a phrase, more warranted—without any critique of its competitors. Nevertheless, most of the intellectual effort put forth in 9/11 conspiracy theories involves a critique of the official story. I suspect the reason for this is that these conspiracy theorists perceive a low prior probability that the September 11th, 2001 attacks could be the work of the U.S. government, or they at least perceive that their intended audience—the citizens of the United States and Western Europe—believe there is little prior probability

20 There is a great deal of controversy surrounding the number of dead. The 2008 ORB study puts the number between 900,000 and 1.2 million in Iraq alone, the 2004 Lancet study offered approximately 600,000 in Iraq alone, and the mediatracking Iraq Body Count website puts the toll at a minimum of 100, 444 as of 2011 (IraqBodyCount.org, retrieved April, 2011).

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of this. That is, to the average Westerner, the American government is more like the “good family” than the Mafia family.21 Once errant data ousts the official story, an alternative account is needed. The critics then transition to conspiracy theorists, producing alternative, conspiratorial theories. Ideally, these theories account for the errant data and do not suffer errant data of their own. The theorists then generate a conspiracy theory or class of theories. To do this, just like professional investigators of our more prosaic criminal conspiracies, they reach for the triangle of crime: Who has the Motive (Qui bono), the Ability and the Opportunity? That is, who would benefit from the event, who has the needed expertise and material resources, and who can bring this expertise and material to bear at the scene of the event? At the intersection of these three factors is our class of suspects, and how these three factors intersect defines the particulars of our conspiracy theory. Jointly, the triangle of crime generates a class of explanations. When these explanations involve secretive, multiple players, we have the class of conspiracy theories of the event. Next, the conspiracy theorist tries to narrow the range of suspects and their attendant conspiracies. Again, the process parallels law enforcement’s work. The prior probability of various suspects is compared: Who are the usual suspects, the more probable suspects within the class defined by the triangle of crime? Then theorists turn to other epistemic and theoretical virtues—simplicity, coherence with background information, psychological realism and lack of internal theoretical or evidential tensions. At this point, they identify a class of the most probable conspiracies or, ideally, a single one: The Conspiracy. This, to some extent, is a matter of the limited span of attention any idea can command in today’s seething information sea. But, once convinced of the high probability of one or another of these conspiracy theories, the theorists disseminate their findings to the public in a bid for justice, restitution and reform of basic societal vulnerabilities to such conspiracies. As their books, websites and indie films gain traction they force official notice. How might conspiracy theorists reason about the inevitable initial government and media response? We turn to this next. 21

Another, equally important factor is that they perceived that the prior probability of a Middle Eastern attack was much higher. Given that this prior probability is still somewhat low—few Americans expected attacks like those of September 11th from the Middle East—the perceived prior probability that the U.S. government would do such a thing is still very low. In other words, the two factors in this case demonstrate a commonplace, basic trust in the government by a great many of its citizens--probably the majority.

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Conspiracy Theory and the Prediction of Cover-up When popular conspiracy theories are contrary to a fundamentally important official story, one that rests upon the basic credibility of government and media, mutually supporting resistance from authorities in the government and the media is only natural.22 The entire communications system is recruited to undermine these conspiracy theories. Commissions are appointed to approve the official story, experts are recruited to endorse it and deny important elements of the alternative theories and newspersons and pundits mock and belittle the conspiratorial alternatives and those who believe and advocate for them. “Debunking” websites appear and simple labels like “truthers,” “birthers,” or “________ deniers” (insert issue in the blank—global warming, holocaust, 9/11…) are quickly substituted in the media for a discussion of the theories themselves. But this push-back is exactly what the conspiracy theories predict. The more damaging a conspiracy theory to the established order, the greater the reason every element of the hierarchy has to crush it, regardless of whether or not they are directly involved in the conspiracy itself. Consider American mainstream media in the context of 9/11. We can’t ignore that communications corporations have a profound interest in maintaining the stability of the dominant order. Their existence and extraordinary profits rest on this. Would a mass-media investigation revealing that the highest elements of the federal government are involved in the murder of thousands of American civilians be the story of the century, or corporate suicide? Probably both. Unleashing conspiracy theories that could undermine the very legitimacy of the federal government and lead to mass unrest, even wide-spread revolt and revolution is entirely contrary to their fundamental interest in a stable economic and political order. To say nothing of the utilitarian moral considerations: Would it be ethical, even if the truth, to persuade hundreds of millions of Americans that the federal government is harbouring domestic terrorists? And that national law enforcement has done nothing about it? The rebellion and chaos this could cause might easily create a death toll greater than the attacks themselves and the wars to follow. Should we really unleash a society-shattering truth simply because it is the truth? It would be surprising if this alone wouldn’t compel silence on the part of chief editors and corporate boards. There’s the also the subtler but 22

The governmental and mass media reaction to Wikileaks is an interesting illustration of this.

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persuasive point that any corporate media organization knows all this before they look. The story is toxic. So why look? American federal law enforcement faces the same scenario. Is it credible that investigators, or their supervisors, would conduct a thorough investigation and reveal to the public that high placed elements of the very government they represent (and enforce the will of) murdered thousands of American citizens? We might think damage control is more likely the order of the day. There’s little doubt an overwhelming priority of the federal government and its bureaucracy is the continuity of this government. Such is the nature of established national governments everywhere. Is there anything the federal government would not stoop to in order to stay in power? We can’t say, but it shouldn’t surprise us if the answer is, “no, nothing.” Again, any high-level law enforcement officer knows all this before they look. Their situation is quite clear. So why look?23 If agents go rogue, conduct investigations, and report to the mainstream media, they face a media that has already wisely walked away. Then there are the obvious penalties for any high placed informant who makes the attempt: At one extreme their death and the death of their loved ones and families, or lesser disasters, say of a penal nature or the loss of any decent career.24 Defiance doesn’t have to be effective to merit destruction; authority relishes retribution as a matter of general principle. When no one’s listening in the first place, the consequences attract little attention and so offer no defence. Car crashes are among the leading forms of fatality in our society and crimes are easy to frame people for, especially sex crimes: The mere accusation carries a powerful taint of guilt. Additionally, suicide appears to be common among those who have already displayed “delusional tendencies.” The convenience of these methods is hard to ignore. Home invasions by gangs bent on rape and plunder kill many every year, too. It’s also amazing what pictures of one’s children playing in the park, or of a girlfriend or boyfriend at the local grocery store, sent from an untraceable email address and without a word of explanation, can do in the imaginations of otherwise courageous men and women. And as a matter of unwritten policy in any organization that 23

President Kennedy’s assassination, and the details of District Attorney Jim Garrison’s controversial, failed attempt to convict Clay Shaw in connection with it, illustrate many of the difficulties civil rights lawyers and family members/ witnesses experience when publically repudiating any official story that has been widely disseminated by the media (here, the “lone gunman” account). 24 If a contemporary, widely recognized example is needed, Wikileaks comes to mind again.

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might face significant security issues, it is exactly the having of a family that is a prerequisite for career advancement and access to truly important information. We say we prefer people with families because we want them to be stable. What we mean in organizations that routinely practice secrecy is that these people be stabilizable. Organized crime has always known this. Our higher institutions of investigation are no different. Whether your family, your partner’s or your supervisor’s, there are always hostages on the line, facing retribution of all kinds.25 In a key move of his critique of ambitious conspiracy theories, Keeley argues: [An ambitious conspiracy] cannot be [conspiratorially] controlled because the world as we understand it today is made up of an extremely large number of interacting agents, each with its own imperfect view of the world and its own set of goals.... To propose that an explosive secret could be closeted for any length of time simply reveals a lack of understanding of modern bureaucracies (Keeley 1999, 124).

He’s right, people have many different agendas, but there are a few priorities most everyone shares. Last but far from least is active deceit, manipulation and distraction— “disinformation campaigns”—produced by pseudo-advocacy groups and other front-organizations, orchestrated by dominant political and economic interests. This strange issue takes many forms: A suspicious public can be pointed to “proofs” of a conspiracy only with the intent of then flamboyantly debunking these, “setting the conspiracy theorists up to knock them down,” embarrassing the entire sceptical project. Within 9/11 theories a persistent anxiety emerged that the high profile “missing plane“ argument against the official story of the Pentagon attack was a set-up to discredit the entire enterprise of questioning the Al-Qaeda theory, humiliating conspiracy theorists and immunizing bystanders to the larger issue.26 Once the “missing plane” critique was fully disseminated, convincing but fake footage of a jet liner entering the building would be 25

We shouldn’t dismiss this as Hollywood fantasy. The general method works every day in thousands of human-trafficking rings around the world and many other radically coercive institutions and relationships. For it to disappear where “national security” is involved would be much more surprising than for it not to. The United States proudly maintains its death penalty—in spite of the fact many innocent citizens have been executed. This is a political culture comfortable with extreme government coercion. 26 A well-devised series of images of the Pentagon, “Hunt the Boeing” http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm (retrieved April 10th, 2011) provides the classic missing 757 jetliner critique.

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released.27 Faux conspiracy theorists can also publicize seemingly absurd extravagances—the claim that the iconic footage of the planes entering the Twin Towers was computer generated graphics and that nothing ever struck them28—imbuing the entire project of attacking the official story with a touch of madness; a lunatic’s plaything, the realm of the surreal. Or faux conspiracy theorists can simply flood the public with a plethora of vague, suggestive, almost sensible but ultimately poorly evidenced theories, most of which are mutually inconsistent, generating a malaise of confusion and indeterminacy, paralyzing any intellectual clarity about the issues, drowning the carefully researched and well-argued critiques in a sea of pseudo-theories. Red herrings can also be deployed—the morality of making such accusations, the possible ulterior motives of the conspiracy theorists, ad hominem attacks on the lives of select advocates and related attractions—to distract our attention from the accusations themselves and the injustices and oppression these point to. Pynchon’s famous line in Gravity’s Rainbow comes to mind, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.”29 In varying degrees these same methods can also arise naturally, as rhetorical devices set up by otherwise well-meaning critics who are simply appalled at the prospect various conspiracy theories might be true, offended at the content of these allegations and disgusted at the prospect they might become widely believed; this strikes at their need for national solidarity, their basic vision of society and insults their affection for its centres of power. Yet the problem is that such noble ideological attachments and expectations can themselves be manipulated and even manufactured. There is the potential for effective shaping of public expectations against 27

Security camera footage was eventually released by the U.S. government claiming to be just this, but it was far from clear that it showed any airplane. 28 See http://www.antichristconspiracy.com/911.htm (retrieved December 7th, 2010) for an endorsement of this argument. For a surreal video analysis promoting this bizarre alternative, see http://septemberclues.info/wtc_airplanes.htm (retrieved December 7th, 2010) as well as a critique of the imperfect software supposedly used www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbYAV5fCGiM&fmt=18 as well as this tutorial on how to fake your own Twin Tower plane attack http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNXmgF2yAEc&NR=1 (retrieved December 9th, 2010) and http://acebaker.blogspot.com/2008/07/theory-of-edited-non-live911-airplane.html (retrieved December 6th, 2010). Baker argues that, “Thousands would have seen the planes if planes did it. We have very few people who reported seeing a plane, and a number who report no plane, the tower just exploded.” Surprisingly, this strange theory gains interest with acquaintance. 29 Page 251, Pynchon, T. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin Books. 

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conspiracy and subsequent reactions to its theory. Certainly useful. Conspiracy theorist Ace Baker tells us: Wikileaks is surely a U.S. counter-intelligence operation. It is simply a new portal for an old tactic. Government agents have long been packaging certain key pieces of propaganda as "leaks"…[this goes] to the goal of garnering unquestioning public acceptance of important lies, "leaks" propagate the "government can't keep a secret" meme. This is a key pillar in defense of large disinformation campaigns protecting, for example, 911. Recently AP news has started citing "Leak" as an allegedly reliable source, the same way they have for a long time cited "government sources" or "a 30 high ranking Pentagon official" or whatever.

While all these disinformation tactics are at least as old as the printing press—recall the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion—and have a history no doubt much longer—it was long taught that the gendered power-structure of Western society had its roots in an obscure culinary impropriety—today’s largely anonymous Internet-based public information system allows any of these tactics to be pursued at any length at virtually no cost or threat of exposure. In light of these epistemic vulnerabilities, we might not be surprised that in an ironic and brazen statement, influential legal theorist and presidential advisor Cass Sunstein argues that governments should conspire with nominally nongovernment front organizations to combat popular conspiracy theories (Sunstein and Vermeule 2008). But if the political elite of a world super-power is openly publishing white papers on the importance of using disinformation tactics, we can only boggle at the extent and aims of its actual projects. So if alternative, powerfully subversive conspiracy theories are true, or even pointing us in the right direction, these theories predict a mix of abuse and neglect by mainstream media and an attack of official misinformation, deceit and distraction, all working in one way or another to protect the prestige and stability of the political and economic hierarchy.31 So the conspiracy theorists will naturally contend that newspersons are controlled by editors and corporate directors who know which stories to run and which to mock or simply leave alone; that government “experts” have been paid off, coerced or manipulated by those who wish to conceal the truth; that truth commissions are exactly the opposite of that; and that even fair-minded, well-meaning investigators are 30 31

http://acebaker.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html, retrieved January 2011. This is true even if they are false but sufficiently popular.

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usually so wedded to the idea of a benevolent system that they are unable to be objective about the evidence or entertain alternative possibilities. Then there is the simple fact that whatever our station in life, it is much more comfortable to believe one has been attacked by a few insane zealots than betrayed by their own national leaders. A terroristic government is far more terrifying. It is also much more humiliating.

The Development and Evolution of 9/11 Conspiracy Theories All these elements—prior probability, errant data, the triangle of crime and the prediction of abuse, neglect and misinformation—are at work in today’s first family of conspiracy theories: 9/11.32 9/11 alternatives begin by trying to raise our judgment of the prior probability of a U.S. government conspiracy. “Operation Northwoods” is often cited: Facing Fidel Castro’s belligerent Cuban communist regime, the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the United States explored pretexts for invasion, pretexts which would have launched a war potentially killing tens of thousands of Americans and Cubans. These pretexts included staging riots outside of the Guantanamo Bay military base, attacking the base with mortar fire, sinking an American ship off Cuba and creating a counterfeit Cuban terror campaign in Miami and Washington. The plan even contemplated staging the shooting down of a plane filled with American college students and blaming the Cuban air force. Lists of the dead young students would be distributed to the media to manufacture public outrage (Department of Defense 1962).33 The document concludes, “The desired resultant from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances…”(Department of Defense 1962, 5). In other words, the United States would be justified to go to war. Fortunately, we’re told President Kennedy rejected these conspiratorial suggestions. But another president might have embraced them. Perhaps another president recently has. 32

While I don’t endorse these theories, they do provide a timely and striking illustration of the general pattern of development and defence of conspiracy theory. 33 The alleged Pentagon document is Department of Defense (1962). While many academics believe the document to be legitimate, others have suggested that it is a fake created by groups as diverse as the KGB, British Intelligence or Zionist activists. American mainstream media has largely treated the document as authentic. James Bamford first brought it to light in his critique of the National Security Agency (Bamford 2002). A copy of the document is currently in the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

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The conspiracy theorist moves on to errant data. The list is immense, but a sample might include the surprising absence of wreckage at the Pentagon, the lack of any impact marks on the building by the giant wingmounted engines or the weirdly divergent descriptions of the object that stuck the Pentagon—a Congressman describing a jet liner, an ordinary citizen eyewitness describing a small missile-like craft. Then there’s the striking resemblance to a controlled demolition at both the World Trade Center towers and the bizarre and seemingly deceitful detail that the FBI claims to have found a terrorist’s paper passport, surviving the fireball of impact undamaged, atop the wreckage of the towers. Or the incongruity that many of the men accused of being hijackers have since been found alive in their home countries.34 After a long tour of errant data—some of it easily explained away, some of it more convincing—the theorist concludes that this level of errant data cannot be misunderstanding and coincidence. The official story is false. So an alternative account is proposed. A popular one is that the U.S. federal government directly conducted the attacks of September 11th.35 There were no Arab terrorists involved. A missile was launched against the Pentagon, which explains the lack of wreckage and impact anomalies, and the jet planes that were flown into the World Trade Centers were merely a diversion to allow the public to believe Arab terrorists destroyed the buildings. Instead, thermite and/or explosives were distributed at key points of their architecture, explaining the appearance of not just one but two controlled demolitions. The buildings were brought down carefully, we’re told, so that politically sufficient damage was done—the slaying of a symbolic icon and a few thousand citizens—but not the excessive damage the toppling of the towers would have wrought on the financial district. This alternative theory must then explain away or otherwise account for evidence against it. If terrorists didn’t fly the airplanes into the WTC towers, who did? Not the airline pilots. Furthermore, if terrorists didn’t 34

More sophisticated errant data are often cited, but these are good starting points. See the efforts of American physicist Steven E. Jones for a sustained series of forensic science arguments concerning the World Trade Center collapse. We are also here ignoring the more ambitious “no-plane” scenarios. 35 Less ambitious theories simply add detail to the official story: The claim Osama bin Laden was a CIA operative or that the plan was suggested to him by intelligence agents who had infiltrated his organization and who were able to arrange for the box-cutters to be placed on the planes and able to time the attack with a U.S. air defence exercise that rendered in-flight interception unlikely. Citing press reports, these theories allege that in the weeks following 9/11, box cutters were found on jet liners never boarded by Al-Qaeda operatives.

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take control of these airplanes, why do we have eyewitness cell-phone reports from the planes describing Arab terrorists? These facts directly refute this alternative account and support the official story. At this juncture the conspiracy theory becomes more creative. In 1995, the U.S. Air Force deployed its first General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone. Operated by encrypted satellite feed, it can lift off, conduct search and destroy missions in the Middle East and land while being remotely controlled from intelligence and military installations in the United States. The command station can be as small as a van. The electronics of such a system could easily be secretly installed in several commercial jet liners. On command, the jets would be taken over by remote control. Bewildered airline pilots would watch their aircraft suddenly act as if they had minds of their own. When the pilots would try to report the bizarre turn of events, they would discover their communication systems were being jammed from within. If they attempted to find the source of the problems, they’d discover engineering access doors had been welded shut. The pilots would watch helplessly as their planes raced toward the towers, towards impact.36 New technology is said to explain the cell calls, too. In minutes, voice-mapping software can create excellent renditions of anyone’s voice. With eavesdropping, samples of passengers’ voices would be made and used in counterfeit calls to friends and loved ones. But who could do such a thing? Who had the motive, ability and opportunity? We turn to the triangle of crime. Most 9/11 theories argue that only a small, well-placed cabal in the federal government had all three. The motive was a resource war in Iraq and the development of a police-state at home and in Europe. The necessary abilities—missile attacks, demolition, high-tech remote controlled avionics and voice replication technology—are the specialty of military and intelligence. The opportunity—the ability to access the towers and the planes—is also something few outside the intelligence community or military can do. But who exactly was behind this? Here the theories are only suggestive. Many focus on the executive branch, in particular on “neoconservatives” associated with the think-tank, Project For A New American Century (PFNAC), including Secretary Donald Rumsfeld of the Department of Defense and Vice President Richard Cheney. The PFNAC’s report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” contains the notorious line often quoted by 9/11 theorists, “…the process of transformation [of the U.S. military into permanent global dominance], 36

It has to be said: This would make a good movie.

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even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor (Donnely 2000, 51).”37 This line is said to prophesize 9/11. Other theorists propose that the plan emanated entirely from the military. High-ranking U.S. military officers behind the plot confronted President Bush in a meeting at Offutt Air Force Base only hours after the attack. There he was coerced into cooperating with their plans, including the subsequent invasion of Iraq. Faced with a Kennedy-style assassination by “Islamic terrorists” if he resisted, Bush had little choice but be reduced to a Pentagon puppet.38 On some versions, Bush was informed the cabal already had the support of Vice President Cheney, who as the new President would gladly do its bidding if he refused to. This amazing collection of ideas went mainstream in Western culture with the Internet video Loose Change: Second Edition.39 It opens with a satire of the standard FBI warning, “…Any public performance, unauthorized copying or distribution through the Internet is strongly encouraged.” Directed and narrated by independent filmmaker Dylan Avery, Loose Change is a stylish, if somewhat simplistic presentation of the general theory outlined above.40 With a budget of only $5,000, it became arguably the most popular Internet film of all time with over 4 million views in the four months following its July of 2006 release and millions more when the film appeared on European television.41 It would not surprise me if hundreds of millions of people have viewed part or all of the film by now. At this point, we reach the societal reform and restitution phase in the life of a conspiracy theory: Can the theory recruit sufficient popularity and political influence to mobilize the courts and law enforcement, to force honest investigations, and to find, prosecute and punish the guilty? Can the theory enter mainstream political orthodoxy and create important changes in policy and law? In the case of 9/11 theory, the attempt is known as “the 9/11 truth movement.” It has failed in all of these goals. But as an epistemic creature, it continues to thrive.42 37

The unity of this line with the spirit of Operation Northwoods encourages 9/11 conspiracy theorists. 38 One of the first well-developed versions of 9/11 conspiracy theory, Thierry Meyssan’s 9/11: The Big Lie, proposes this. 39 What we’re left with, when “things don’t add up.”  40 For a more complete and technically persuasive effort, see the movie Zero: An Investigation into 9/11, a professional Italian production. 41 Pilkington, E. January 26, 2007. “’They're All Forced to Listen to Us.’” The Guardian. London. Retrieved July 12, 2010. 42 The fact it has politically failed is often cited as evidence for its truth.

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On Determining the Prior Probability of Conspiracy While the Al-Qaeda conspiracy theory remains dominant worldwide, alternative 9/11 conspiracy theories have strong support throughout the world. A 2008 poll by World Public Opinion shows large percentages of people either believe that the U.S. government “was behind the 9/11 attacks” or claim not to know who was, and only 46% of the 16,063 respondents from 19 countries claim Al-Qaeda did the deed (Kull 2008, 1). It’s no surprise that there are strong correlations between the respondents’ attitude towards the United States and their acceptance of its official story. Pollster Steven Kull reports, Those with a positive view of America’s influence in the world are more likely to cite Al-Qaeda (on average 59%) than those with a negative view (40%). Those with a positive view of the United States are also less likely to blame the US government (7%) than those with a negative view (22%) (Kull 2008, 3).

We’re back to the all-important issue of the prior probability of conspiracy. Again, it’s this background theory of reality—how conspiratorial our society is—that’s often what’s really at issue when we debate conspiracy theories, not the particular theories themselves. It is, instead, the moral and political orientation of today’s human hierarchy that is in doubt. Around the world and within our own friends and family, we find widely differing responses. Once we grant that there is a significant prior probability of ambitious, malevolent conspiracies, the question becomes, “how significant?” This question, more than any other, is the real problem raised by the prevalence of conspiracy theorizing. The phenomenal growth in conspiracy theorizing and the brutal kinds of theories that have become popular suggest society is shifting its estimate dramatically upwards. But if so, is this rational? A difficult question. Western civilization has always been rife with intrigues but a strong democratic tradition and culture of accountability coexist with this. Yet, there is an evolving rejection of the premise of transparency. We are forced to choose between two different background theories of our society: A trusting and a distrusting one. Self-consistency, a good fit with other background beliefs and comprehensiveness, lend some justification to a view. It’s clear that these two background theories can be similar in this respect. What remains to distinguish them is basic evidence for one over the other. At this juncture, it is difficult to show the trusting background theory is more justified, because we may easily lack much of the evidence required to decide.

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The problem is generated by the existence of competent conspiracies (the ones Raikka calls “genuine”). For instance, suppose we proceed by simple induction: If the conduct of the nation’s past was highly conspiratorial, the present is, too. This would require we gauge the level of conspiracy in the past. But if the level of successful, competent conspiracy in the past was high, we are not likely to be able to tell that today, because the conspiracies were conducted competently and never widely known. So it will appear the level was low, when it wasn’t. We face a similar problem when we restrict ourselves to current events. When we find massive intrigues are being uncovered daily in a society, we will conclude the prior probability there is high. But if we don’t observe this, we return to the problem of competent conspiracy; the intrigues are there but we’re not able to decisively identify them. A structural analysis of the hierarchies at work is a better approach, but if it tries to be more than very general, the problem of competent conspiracy reappears; competent conspiracy will largely succeed in hiding the political, economic and personal linkages people utilize in forming, executing and covering up their conspiracies. So I suspect in our current world the conspiracy theorists will always be with us. And, now and then, a few diabolical conspiracies.43 So from the view of evidence, the fact that a conspiracy theorist assumes a distrusting vision of the world doesn’t make her any more irrational then the fact many of us assume a more trusting vision of the world. But there is something to be said for the practical consideration that where a conspiracy theory is not obviously false, we should take its accusations seriously. In studying these, we can identify the vulnerabilities that help make these accusations plausible in the first place, with an eye to reducing these vulnerabilities in the future. This is a lesson often missed in the debate: In their theories, conspiracy theorists often locate real vulnerabilities to manipulation and deception, and surprising but important 43

Versions of this type of argument, in a different context, can be found in Basham (2001 and 2003). Keeley and Coady object that these observations lead to a “Global scepticism”—an extreme and crippling doubt—about the aims and methods, the entire trajectory, of one’s civilization. See Keeley (2003) and Coady (2006). But this exaggerates the reach of the problem. It’s limited to only those cases where credible, powerful motives for deception reasonably exist. Where these are lacking, the problem doesn’t appear. The vast majority of human interaction and our history lack these powerful motives. Most all of our goals can be met and our interactions conducted without any recourse to deception. Where there is no need, there is no motive. So the vast majority of history is left exactly as recorded, the present, as we believe it is.

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motives for why hierarchical power might exploit these, if not yesterday or today, then tomorrow.

Rational Responses to Conspiracy Theory: Agnosticism and Pragmatic Rejection The rational epistemic reaction to many popular conspiracy theories is probably a studied agnosticism.44 By “studied,” I mean that the theory is not obviously internally inconsistent, doesn’t invoke implausible psychological motives and reasoning, or contradict basic background knowledge we possess about human nature, basic science, and history. Parsimony has its role, too. But even if it passes these and similar epistemic tests, we’re often in no position to deny or embrace it. It’s an epistemically indeterminate theory. A theory is epistemically indeterminate if evidence and other epistemic properties cannot resolve its truth or falsity, or significantly distinguish the likelihood it is true or false. So we respond with agnosticism. The epistemic indeterminacy here is relative to particular persons at particular times. What is epistemically indeterminate to me today might not be tomorrow, or might not be to another person. This agnosticism derives not from an active, systematic distrust of national governments and corporate media. We need not distrust public institutions of information to recognize that our epistemic justification for trust in them is, in many situations where critical interests are at stake, very limited. The result: Epistemic agnosticism about the claims of these institutions when critical political or economic interests are at stake. Does this mean conspiracy theorists are irrational to pursue these theories? No, they are conducting a research project, pushing the boundaries of our epistemic powers. As part of a community of exploration, they legitimately adopt a stance in order to enable themselves to continue to map-out the possibilities. This is the norm in all research communities. Good researchers require zeal. And this takes the form of a provisional, revisable but very real and even passionate state of mind that is difficult, if at all, to distinguish from belief. As long as significant new evidence is being brought to light and credible alternatives are being identified, conspiracy theorists are embodying the best spirit of rational inquiry. If they reach a series of evidential impasses, this, too, is insight into the contours of organized deception’s potential powers and the effects of 44

I use the term “agnosticism” loosely. While “agnosticism” is a denial of knowledge, here I only mean the assertion of the lack of decisive evidence and other distinguishing epistemic properties.

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media neglect.45 Again, though it may seem surprising, in their investigations into our society and its vulnerabilities to manipulation, conspiracy theorists are, if we attend to their discoveries and make appropriate corrections, creating fine works for a better world. There is a scenario, however, where from a pragmatic stance, conspiracy theorizing becomes questionable, and as human beings, living lives as whole persons in the real world, it becomes pragmatically irrational; a self-inflicted wound that has no justifying characteristic. This is the pursuit of an epistemically indeterminate theory that depicts an irresistible, malevolent conspiracy. When we find ourselves in this scenario, pragmatic rejection of the conspiracy theory is the only rational course. Pragmatic, not epistemic, rationality guides us. Pragmatic rationality is a matter of protecting the character of our lives when evidence and prudence does not compel us. This sheds some light on what we really fear about the lives behind the conspiracy theories--that they are somehow diseased in a way that isn’t really a question of bad epistemology, but of something stranger. This is not a problem with one’s dedication to conspiracy theorizing, but with one’s attachment to a particular class of theories and the pointless harm this does to life’s character. We can make explicit the nature of proper pragmatic rejection, its precise limits and its rationale. “Pragmatic” simply means “instrumental to the satisfaction of a person’s desires.” On the assumption that we are nonpsychotic, capable investigators, without a desire for merely getting practice, the basic argument for pragmatic rejection of a conspiracy theory is simple: 1) If an investigation is bound to be futile as concerns the truth of the matter and there is no other significant epistemic reason to undertake or continue the exercise, then there is no significant epistemic reason for undertaking or continuing it. 2) If an action has no significant epistemic reason for undertaking or continuing it, and there is no pragmatic reason for undertaking or 45

Contra Clarke’s critique of conspiracy theorizing (Clarke 2007), “dead ends” aren’t necessarily dead ends. Not only are such impasses to be expected of competent conspiracies, their locations and nature carry specific, important empirical information about the public’s potential epistemic exposure to deceit and manipulation. Often this exposure and the assertion/argumentation that it has been exploited is what define the theoretical “core” of the research project, the “core” Clarke doubts 9/11 conspiracy theories possess. Upshot: One need not name names to produce a viable conspiracy theory.

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continuing it and there is also pragmatic reason for not undertaking or continuing it, then it should not be undertaken or continued. 3) So such an investigation should not be undertaken or continued. If it does nothing for our knowledge and only hurts our lives, we shouldn’t do it. When people nevertheless continue these investigations or are otherwise consumed by these conspiracy theories, it is here we find the irrational conspiracy theorists. It’s not that their theories are obviously false or otherwise “crazy.” It is not that the theorists are ensnared in a “degenerating research program.” It’s that they needlessly do violence to themselves, with no benefit to others. Instead, they only recruit more people to the epistemic and political futility of their theories. As a politically effective narrative of disenfranchisement, epistemically indeterminate conspiracy theory can be important. But without effect, it’s tragic. These people appear to be numerous in our society and may be growing in number. So consider those conspiracy theories that we cannot establish as true, or more realistically, cannot establish as more likely to be true than false. What is an epistemically indeterminate conspiracy theory that also depicts an irresistible intrigue that is malevolent? Perhaps something all too common: 1) The events and processes asserted to occur are currently epistemically indeterminate for us.46 This is the studied agnosticism scenario. 2) The intrigues portrayed by the conspiracy theory are, for us, irresistible. 3) Entertaining the existence of such intrigues is harmful to the character of our lives. An epistemically indeterminate theory may, if correct, point to events so devastating that it is nevertheless worth defending against—taking action that would undermine the prospects for success or even dismantle the conspiracy itself should it actually exist. In a phrase, we “play it safe.” We toss hand grenades into dark holes. We’ve seen this tactic many times before; sometimes laudable, sometimes sadistic. Both the NATO Alliance and the Warsaw Pact were, at least, a response to the fear that the other side was conspiring to bring about its annihilation, while on the surface both sides were openly praising their peaceful coexistence. The murderous 46

Or those which will occur.

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purges of party, military and intelligentsia by fearful elites comes to the same thing. These aren’t just terroristic threats to intimidate a potential opposition. They abolish opposition. Tyrants have predictable imaginations. They can’t determine what their more powerful and gifted servants might be conspiring to do--it could easily be something very dangerous. If not today, then tomorrow. So give the underlings a little surprise: Torture and then execute most of them. It’s amazing, how they confess. Get by on the terrified survivors and the new upstarts. Repeat every 15 to 30 years. It’s that kind of planet. Evidential indeterminism is not sufficient for pragmatic rejection; irresistibility is a relevant condition, too. “There’s nothing you can do.” When the existence of such intrigues is harmful to the character of our lives, we subject ourselves to needless, self-inflicted violence. An outlandish example includes the many versions of New World Order conspiracy theory: Post mass die-off, neo-medieval government death camps await us and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Another, more realistic example is the theory that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was the child of a post 9/11 U.S. Executive branch conspiracy to lie to, manipulate and terrorize the population of the United States into supporting the invasion. This is much more limited than claiming the U.S. government conducted the attacks of 9/11. Let’s call it the “Bush lied, people died” conspiracy theory. The opening quote from Lila Lipscumb, whose son died in Iraq, in contrast to President Bush’s words, points to just this theory and just this sort of suffering. It has dozens of variants. People, failing for whatever reason to conclude that this is what really happened, but unable to conclude it isn’t what happened, find relief from their fear and anger that “it was all a lie” with pragmatic rejection. Imagine those who reason: Maybe the administration of President Bush lied to the world or maybe it was just shockingly inept. I’ll never really be sure. So I’m not going there. It’s too late now and I don’t want to think about it anymore. If they lied, it’s a nightmare I don’t want to live with. It only hurts me to ask. I’m going to forget about this and focus on the future.

In some backwater of the mind the neglected conspiracy theory must nevertheless remain, so that if new evidence appears, we can recognize its implications. But we will not actively entertain, reflect on or seek to establish it anymore. Sound familiar? A common response to the invasion of Iraq. Is it viable? For the sake of our discussion, imagine that these people are right, that the conspiracy theory contemplated is, in fact, epistemically indeterminate. Moreover, that the intrigue it portrays,

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because its success is firmly established in the past, is the very essence of “irresistible.” Pragmatic rejection is a valid option. It’s the rational way. But there is an epistemic irony in all this: If we find pragmatic rejection of conspiracy theory becomes practically our way of life, we’ve learned something. We’re discovering something deeply disturbing about our epistemic relation to the basic processes of the political and economic structure we live in, a relationship in profound need of repair. In a mind sufficiently self-reflective, situated in a society sufficiently hierarchical, a society whose systems of power, goals and real manner of policy are sufficiently obscured, pragmatic rejection will eventually destabilize itself. This is the real power of pragmatic rejection. In the end it can press our fundamental question with an entirely general, ever-growing force: Is this an “open society?” As for 9/11: Are “Loose Change” style conspiracy theories evidentially indeterminate, irresistible and malevolent? Irresistible and malevolent, no doubt. But evidentially indeterminate? These and even more astonishing accusations are still in process, the debate still advancing. It remains to be seen if pragmatic rejection is the rational stance. But it may well be our ultimate refuge. And for many, with limited information, limited cognitive and emotional endurance, it already is.

Conclusion Conspiracy theories represent a revealing epistemic critique of our access to evidence in a hierarchical society. A studied agnosticism about the truth or falsity of many conspiracy theories often results. But theory by theory, if decisive evidence is unavailable, precaution futile and belief misery, we’re left with pragmatic rationality to guide us; pragmatic rejection is our rational recourse. In their popularity conspiracy theories are also a barometer of a steep rise in the perceived prior probability of high-level malevolent conspiracy. But our epistemic analysis indicates this is not a rising tide of irrationality. Basic tests of internal consistency and coherence with established background beliefs often contribute little. When our evaluation of a conspiracy theory comes down to questions of institutional deception, manipulation and neglect, it’s difficult to proceed in a way that doesn’t powerfully predispose us for or against the theory. Prior probability is a powerful, critical element of our evaluation. But whatever the truth about the tragic events of September 11th, 2001, on reflection it’s not obvious the official story is true. Nor obvious it’s not. This is the reality for a billion people who say they “don’t know” and the point of departure for

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epistemologists.47 Unfortunately, it often it ends with that. Call it the United States of Amnesia: Conspiracy theories about society-wide political and economic manipulation, abuse and mass murder are rarely refuted and laid to rest.48 Instead, they are forgotten or become museum relics emptied of significance.49 In the rush of contemporary civilization, memories are short, attention fractured and concentration quickly perishes. We just move on. The awesome spectacle of seemingly omnipotent governments and ideologically unified corporate global mass media along with a population driven by consumption and hedonism might create a sense of futility where subversive narratives are concerned. But then, in new form, the subversive narratives are reborn and powerfully spread. The growing pace and intensity of this cycle should give us pause, though. Perhaps the philosophical answer doesn’t lie in seeking new, intellectually sophisticated ways to ignore it, but in addressing the spreading desert, our scarcity of real epistemic access. And discovering ways this can be reversed in a world of unprecedented connectivity, so epistemic rationality can play a decisive role. Creative work lies ahead.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the London School of Economics Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies for their support of applied Philosophy, particularly the efforts of Rom Harré, Carl Jensen and Melissa Graves. I would also like to thank the participants of the Beyond Reason II conference for their open-minded, spirited and supportive questions and comments, and Otto Blaast for insightful orientation to the issues.

References American Psychiatric Association. 1994. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition. Arlington, VA: APA, p. 634. Bamford, J. 2002. Body of Secrets, New York: Random House. Basham, L. 2001. “Living with the Conspiracy.” Philosophical Forum 32(3): 265-80. 47

An extrapolation from the World Opinion Poll numbers mentioned above. They often develop supporting evidence and claims about the conspiratorial vulnerabilities of society very well. We’ve seen this in several examples.  49 The Kennedy assassination comes to mind; whatever we decide, it now has little active political significance and has been reduced to a subject for hobbyists. 48

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—. 2003. “Malevolent Global Conspiracy.” Journal of Social Philosophy 34(1): 91-103. Churchland, P. 1981. “Eliminative Materialism and the Propositional Attitudes.” Journal of Philosophy 78(2): 67-90. Clarke, S. 2007. “Conspiracy Theories and the Internet: Controlled Demolition and Arrested Development.” Episteme 4(2): 167-180. Coady, D. 2003. “Conspiracy Theories and Official Stories.” International Journal of Applied Philosophy 17(2): 197-209. —. 2006. Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate. Surrey, England: Ashgate. —. 2007. “Are Conspiracy Theorists Irrational?” Episteme 4(2): 193-204. Daggett, S. 2010. Costs of Major U.S. Wars. Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service. Department of Defense and Joint Chiefs of Staff Representative on the Caribbean Survey Group. 1962. Cuba Project (March 9, 1962). http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20010430/doc1.pdf. Accessed 22 July 2011. Donnelly, T. 2000. Rebuilding America’s Defenses, Project for a New American Century. http://www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefenses.pdf Accessed 22 July 2011. Husting, G and M. Orr. 2007. “Dangerous Machinery: “Conspiracy Theorist” as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion.” Symbolic Interaction, 30(2): 127-150. Keeley, B. 1999. “Of Conspiracy Theories.” Journal of Philosophy 96(3): 109-126. —. 2003. “Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition! More Thoughts on Conspiracy Theory.” Journal of Social Philosophy 34(1): 104–110. Keeley, B. 2007. “God as the Ultimate Conspiracy Theory.” Episteme 4(2): 135-149. Kull, S. 2008. “International Poll: No Consensus on Who Was Behind 9/11.” WorldPublicOpinion.org. http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/sep08/WPO_911_Sep08_ pr.pdf . Accessed 22 July 2011. Maher, B. 2007. Real Time [Television program] (September 14). Mandik, P. 2007. “Shit Happens.” Episteme 4(2): 206. Meyssan, T. 2002. 9/11: The Big Lie. London: Carnot Publishing Ltd. Mills, C. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 324. Moore, M. 2004. Fahrenheit 9/11 [Movie].

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Pigden, C. 1995. “Popper Revisited, or What is Wrong with Conspiracy Theories?” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 25(1): 3-34. —. 2006. “Complots of Mischief.” In Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate, edited by D. Coady. London: Ashgate, 147-173. —. 2007. “Conspiracy Theories and Conventional Wisdom.” Episteme 4(2): 219-232. Popular Mechanics. 2005. “Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report.” Popular Mechanics (February 5). Raikka, J. 2008. “On Political Conspiracy Theories.” Journal of Political Philosophy 17(2): 129–252. Smith, A. 1776. An Inquiry into the Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by Campbell, Skinner and Todd. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Volume 1, 135. Sunstein, C. and A. Vermeule. 2008. Conspiracy Theories--Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 08-03; U of Chicago, Public Law Working Paper No. 199; U of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 387. http://ssrn.com/abstract=1084585. Accessed 22 July 2011.

CHAPTER FIVE THE “SPRINGBOARD TO DICTATORSHIP” AND COLLECTIVE IRRATIONALITY FATHALI M. MOGHADDAM

Not…men and their moments. Rather, moments and their men. —Erving Goffman (1967)

When I mention to people that I am writing a book on “The Psychology of Dictatorship,” the response is invariably something like, “How interesting! As a psychologist you must find the personality of dictators like Hitler and Stalin really fascinating.” Of course, I do find the personality of dictators fascinating, but I have not taken the traditional approach to understanding dictatorship, societies where governments rule without the consent of the people, and my book is not focused on the personality of dictators. This is because I believe that in order to understand the psychology of dictatorship, we need to widen our horizons and study a lot more than just the personality of dictators. Indeed, the focus on leader characteristics as a way to understand dictatorship is reductionist and misguided. A far more realistic and constructive approach is to identify the conditions which provide the opportunity for dictatorships to come about, and to continue. These conditions serve as a “springboard,” from which a potential dictator launches himself to seize power and/or to continue in power (I write “himself” because the major modern dictators are male). There are potential dictators in all societies (you have probably come across one or two at your work or at school!), but only in some societies do the conditions come about for such individuals to “spring to” power and establish or continue a dictatorship. I conceptualize “dictatorship” and “democracy,” not in categorical terms, but as located somewhere on a continuum, with “completely closed” at one extreme and “completely open” at the other extreme.

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Completely Open ______________________Completely Closed Democracy Dictatorship In practice, no dictatorship is “completely closed” and no democracy is “completely open.” Given that modern democracies emerged out of dictatorships, they still have imbedded in them certain features (for example, the military and the church) that potentially could influence movement away from democracy and toward dictatorship. In a sense, every democracy is an underdeveloped dictatorship, and every dictatorship is an underdeveloped democracy, but with certain blockages that prevent movement toward the other extreme on the continuum of completely open-completely closed. In this chapter, I provide a brief outline of what I call the springboard model of dictatorship, underlying which are both rational and irrational processes. I differentiate between “rational” and “irrational” on the basis of conscious awareness of what one is doing and why. Freud argued that irrationality plays an enormous role in human life, and that even “…the most complicated achievements of thought are possible without the assistance of consciousness” (Freud 1900-1901/1953, 593). However, my concern is with “collective irrationality” rather than traditional “individualistic” irrationality, in the sense that I give importance to collectively shared narratives that are “out there” in society, and not just found in private minds; to the characteristics of the social world, and not just individual personalities or traits assumed to “cause” certain styles of behaviour. The traditional approach to understanding the psychology of dictatorship is evident in the few works by psychologists that are directly on dictatorship, Gilbert’s The Psychology of Dictatorship (1950) and Barbu’s Democracy and Dictatorship: Their Psychology and Patterns of Life (1956). Both these works were published immediately after the Second World War and are primarily a response to dictatorships in Nazi Germany and Communist USSR. Both focus a great deal on personality, but Barbu (1956) shows more concern for the relationship with macro processes and personality, as well as with macro processes and rationality—irrationality: [I]n certain historical periods, and in certain civilizations, consciousness plays a greater part in the mental structure of man than in others (Barbu (1956, 83).

Psychological research on the authoritarian personality, both in the immediate post Second World War period (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford 1950) and more recently (Altemeyer 1994), bears



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on dictatorship in a similar way, addressing the question: What kinds of individuals support dictatorship? Although research into questions about the personality of dictators (as in the case of Gilbert (1950), and Barbu (1956) ) and “pro-dictatorship” individuals (as in the case of Altemeyer (1994)) is interesting, a far more important question concerns the conditions in which it becomes possible for a dictatorship to come about and to be sustained. The personality of pro-dictatorship individuals is only part of this larger picture. There are always pro-dictatorship individuals in all societies, as there are potential dictators, even in Western democracies. What conditions enable prodictatorship forces to take over and establish and/or continue a dictatorship? It is this question that the springboard model of dictatorship addresses. In discussing the springboard model, my focus is on modern dictatorships, characterized as they are by the use of extensive bureaucracies and technological systems to force micro-management and control in even remote corners of societies. The traditional monarchs and emperors of the pre-modern era did not have this kind of “efficient” control, and so many parts of the societies they governed were only weakly under their command. We get a sense of what those cases were like when we consider the control of the central governments in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the 21st century. Despite the backing of the United States, the Afghan and Pakistani central governments have little control over vast regions of “their countries.”

Definitional A word of caution is in order about the definition of a dictatorship, as a society where the government rules without the consent of the people. Of course, this is a matter of degrees, and also a matter of what is meant by “consent.” After all, Hitler was elected! Khomeini brought into being the Islamic Republic of Iran, and his own dictatorial rule, through a national referendum! In modern democracies, advertising campaigns can be used to manufacture “consent.” Thus, a lot of care has to be taken in evaluating the term “consent.” Also, in some instances democratically elected governments make decisions with which the majority of citizens disapprove; does that mean the government has changed from democracy to dictatorship? In 2011, the majority of Americans disapprove of the American led war in Afghanistan and the majority of British people disapprove of continued membership in the European Union; yet the American government continues the war in Afghanistan and the British government continues as



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part of the EU – does that make these two governments dictatorial? I would suggest not, on the basis of two criteria that establish the minimal conditions for a democracy. The first criterion is the “town square test” (Shcharansky and Dermer 2004): Can a person go to the local town square and speak freely without fear of being physically attacked, killed, or arrested? America and the UK pass the town square test, Iran and North Korea do not. The second criterion for defining a dictatorship, which I propose is the most important criterion, is the “vote out” test: Can people change their most powerful leader(s) through regular elections? Again, America and the UK pass, but countries such as Iran and North Korea fail – the Iranian people are not able to “vote” out the current so-called “supreme leader” Khomenei, just as North Koreans are not able to “vote out” the party leader. In dictatorships such as Iran and North Korea, “supreme leaders” only change when they die or are killed or are forced to flee as a result of popular and usually violent uprising.

The Springboard Model The springboard model suggests that dictatorships come about and/or continue as a result of three sets of factors: First, collective processes that create and sustain the context or the “springboard” for the launching and maintaining of a potential dictator in power; second, individual processes that lead some individuals to support dictatorships; third, the presence of a charismatic potential dictator who takes advantage of the opportunity to use the springboard to dictatorship. These sets of factors are not fixed; rather, they are fluid, malleable, and they can influence one another. For example, the potential dictator can influence conditions to help create a “springboard” to dictatorship, as Hitler did in Germany in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s and as Khomeini did in Iran in the post 1979 revolution era. Thus, in some instances potential dictators play an active and decisive role in creating the conditions that allow them to “spring” to dictatorial power. In this section, I review the main characteristics of the context or “springboard,” which comes into place and influences behaviour often without people being consciously aware of this influence. The factors that contribute to the springboard can be categorized as being of two types: First, factors that help bring about dictatorship and second, factors that enable the continuation of dictatorship after this type of regime has been established. Of course, there is some overlap between these two sets of factors, so the distinction serves as a rather general guide and should not be applied strictly.



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Factors That Help Bring About Dictatorship The first set of factors creates the conditions, brings about the “ripeness,” that enables a dictatorship to become established. Conditions prior to this “ripeness for dictatorship” can range from a situation where there was more openness and perhaps even democratic conditions (e.g., Germany prior to Hitler coming to power in the 1930s), or there had been a revolution and the possibility of a more open society was temporarily opened up (as in Iran in 1978-1980, between the dictatorship of the Shah and the clerical based dictatorship established by Khomeini), or some other circumstance (as in the case of some African states in the later 20th and early 21st centuries, such as Zimbabwe, where the period of openness “between dictatorships” was longer). Collective Economic Insecurity Dictatorship is more likely to come about (and to continue) during times when a population is collectively experiencing economic insecurity. This need not be because of an actual decline in economic conditions. Rather, the insecurity could arise because of unmet expectations and fraternal deprivation, involving a collective-level rather than individuallevel sense of frustration with economic conditions. Economic instability is more likely to result in people feeling that they need strong leadership, and a steady helm to get them out of the crisis. In order to create a sense of economic insecurity, those advocating “regime change” use a rights-based narrative (“You are being deprived of your rights!” “It is your right to enjoy a better standard of living!”), and those defending the status quo typically adopt a duties based narrative (“We must all obey the law” “ It is our duty to obey authorities, otherwise there will be chaos and anarchy!”). Of course, after a revolution, the revolutionaries switch to a narrative of duties, because now they defend existing power relations (Moghaddam 2008, 121-122). Political Instability People often feel that democracy is “messy,” in the sense that decision making in democracies involves many different steps and multiple constituencies. Political instability is often associated with a sense of gridlock, and a feeling that “nobody is really in charge.” Decision making seems to get bogged down, and programs do not seem to make progress. Openness allows multiple voices with competing messages to flood the public space. Under such conditions of potential political instability and severe gridlock (when it becomes impossible to make and implement



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decisions), there is more likelihood that there will be a yearning for strong, centralized leadership, able to take decisive steps to lead society out of the current crisis. In a sense, the strengths of democracy, its tolerance for openness and multiple voices, become its weakness, contributing to conditions that enable potential dictators to come to power. Threatened Collective Identity In addition to threats from external and internal enemies, a feature of the conditions associated with dictatorship is the perception that the ingroup’s collective identity is threatened, that their culture, core values, and “way of life” generally are under attack. This perception of collective threat is manufactured through the influence of Machiavellian dictatorship. In his analysis of Hitler and Stalin, Alan Bullock (1991) shows how these two dictators managed to both shape the collective identities of their societies , and position their collective identities as threatened. In more recent times, Ayatollah Khomeini was probably the most effective at taking advantage of a perception of threatened collective identity, that of Islam. From the 1960s, Khomeini waged a campaign against the dictatorship of the Shah, which he positioned as destroying Islamic society, in order to establish a dictatorship under the banner of Islam. Personal Insecurity A sense of personal insecurity characterizes both the transitional period leading to dictatorship, and life in a dictatorship. Often a change does take place in the source of insecurity before and after the establishment of dictatorship. In dictatorships, common crime, such as muggings, street robberies, house burglaries, and so on, tend to be less prevalent, because of the absolute control of the state; but corruption of various other types grows in all the different corners of society. Lack of openness and the powerlessness of the ordinary citizen means that people are at the mercy of officials; even petty bureaucrats can wield a lot of power. The writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others show how the more desperate the situation, such as the Siberian concentration camp described in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the greater power of petty officials to make hell on earth for ordinary people who land in the wrong place at the wrong time. When we consider why petty official would want to act in this way, we need to consider the hierarchy of dictatorships – a topic we discuss later in this chapter.



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Perceived Impending Decline The establishment of a dictatorship, or a move toward even stronger, more centralized form of dictatorship, is often associated with a sense of impending decline. The dictatorship is “sold” to the people as a means by which such a decline would be averted; the phoenix rising is a common symbol of dictatorial power. Hitler used this theme continuously in his “redirecting” Germany from the “defeatist” course that had been set after the Treaty of Versailles, Khomeini claimed to be saving Iran and Islam from the “disastrous” course set by the “American Shah,” and Napoleon Bonaparte claimed to have “resurrected” France and saved the original intentions of the revolutionaries. In each case, the role of “dictator as saviour” from the impending decline required that power be concentrated in the hands of the one doing the saving: As Bonaparte increasingly concentrated power in his own hands (behind the watchwords of order, stability, and efficiency) he could be seen as progressing back toward the early revolution’s lost point of equilibrium, with the added attraction that he would owe his crown not to his birth but to his personal merit (Woloch 2004, 30).

Shared Mission for “Revival” Perceived threat from external and internal enemies, threatened collective and personal identities, a sense of impending decline – these can all be associated with societal collapse. But the rise of potential dictator as “saviour” requires a shared mission for “revival.” A collective “revival” narrative can take different shapes, the most obvious being religious and/or nationalist. In almost all cases, revival narratives evolve in a competitive context and are adapted to meet changing conditions. For example, Khomeini used an “Islamic revival” narrative to mobilize his hard core supporters, downplaying Iranian nationalist narratives because Iranian nationalism has pre-Islamic roots. However, during the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), Khomeini’s government had to give priority to Iranian nationalist narratives in order to achieve a more broad based mobilization of the Iranian population to fight the war, because religious narratives proved too narrow. Similarly, during the SecondWorld War, Stalin had to appeal to Russian nationalism, because narratives based only on communist ideology were less effective or even counter-productive (e.g., the idea of the solidarity of the working class might lead communist Russians to question why they should shoot the common German soldiers, their comrades).



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Counter-Elites Supporting Dictatorship Potential dictators will not achieve power without the support of the leading counter-elites. According to Pareto’s (1935) elite theory, all societies at all times are ruled by elites, using different ideologies. Irrespective of whether an elite uses the ideology of socialism or capitalism or Islam or Christian fundamentalism or Zionism or nationalism, the basic goal is the same, to perpetuate elite rule. However, all elites make the mistake of “closing up” and not allowing free circulation and social mobility, and since the time of Plato it was predicted that societies that do not allow open circulation will collapse (see Moghaddam 2008). Consequently, Pareto’s (1935) elite theory predicts that potential dictators have their greatest opportunity to come to power when society prevents open circulation and counter-elites are spearheading a coup or revolution, at the head of which is a potential dictator. Institutions Supporting Dictatorship In some societies there are specific institutions that serve to support dictatorship. The church and the military are foremost examples of such institutions. There are countless cases of Latin American dictatorships being supported by the Catholic Church in the 1950s and 1960s, the dictatorship of the state (absolute obedience to the head of government) paralleling the dictatorship in the church (absolute obedience to the Pope). Dictatorships in Islamic states, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, tend to combine the power of the state and the church. Central to the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, established by Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution, is the principle of governance by a supreme religiously qualified leader (valayat-e-faghih). The Supreme Leader (vali faghih) has the last word on all matters in all fields: For example, he can overturn decisions made by any and all government official, including the president and the Majlis (parliament). In countries such as Turkey for most of the 20th century, and in Egypt for most of the post World War Two era, it has been the military that supports a form of dictatorship. In both Turkey and Egypt, the military is heavily involved in economic activity, and support for dictatorship has been a means to continue this involvement. Cultural Traditions and Narratives that Support Centralized Charismatic Leadership In addition to specific institutions that support dictatorship, such as the church and the military, in some societies there are more subtle cultural traditions and narratives that serve the same purpose. The most powerful of these revolve around the family and the role of the father as “head of



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the household.” The Freudian tradition places a lot of importance on socialization practices in a family context where the father serves as a “local dictator,” teaching the children how to behave in relation to the dictator who rules the larger society with an equally iron fist. Integral to socialization practices are the narratives that children learn about the role of heroes and leaders. Of course, all cultures have myths about heroes, such as Hercules or Rostam, but in some cases the dictator becomes the personification of the mythical hero, “Stalin as saviour/father of the nation,” and so on. Availability of Charismatic Potential Dictator Dictatorships come into existence when the “springboard to dictatorship” is ready and available, but the potential dictator also has to be ready and available for the “launch.” A lot seems to depend on luck in this matter. For example, after the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa, Nelson Mandela was extraordinarily popular and would have been supported to continue his leadership role in one way or another – as Putin did in Russia, moving from the post of president to the newly strengthened post of prime minister. But Mandela stepped aside from power as soon as his term as president was completed; very unlike dictators such as Khomeini in Iran, Bin Ali in Tunisia, and so on, who either have to be forced aside or killed, or else they continue to rule until they die. Of course, in all of these cases, the dictator has to be charismatic in order to gain leadership position in the first place. “Crisis” Incidents There is a direct relationship between the potential dictator and the springboard: Potential dictators often help to prepare the springboard. As Hitler saw it, “The man who is born to be dictator is not compelled; he wills it. He is not driven forward, but drives himself” (quoted in Bullock 1991, 136). Hitler is here exaggerating the role of the dictator in shaping events, but the general idea is clear: The dictator is not passive, but purposely acting to bring about certain events. For example, throughout the period 1930-1933, Hitler mobilized his supporters to launch both political attacks in the media and physical assaults on the streets to weaken opposition forces and democratic procedures, in order to springboard to absolute power. Stalin came to dictatorial power through the “crisis” confrontations he staged with Trotsky and his other rivals throughout 1927, until the expulsion of “dissidents” from the communist party and the exile of the dissident leadership in early 1928. The same manufacturing and use of “crisis” incidents is found in modern dictatorships. Khomeini



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shaped and used the “hostage taking” crisis, when Islamic radicals invaded the American embassy in Tehran and took American diplomats as hostages in 1980, to eliminate his rivals and grab absolute power (Taheri 1988).

Factors That Help Maintain Dictatorship A second set of factors play an important role in enabling the continuation of dictatorship, after the potential dictator has launched from the springboard to grab power. Most importantly, the dictatorship continues through the propagation of narratives that position the dictator as legitimate and necessary, as all powerful and inevitable, and as infallible – impossible to remove. Again and again, one finds in dictatorships a perception shared among the people that “It is impossible to resist this regime, it is no use resisting because nothing will change,” and “We have to stay with this regime because otherwise our enemies will overpower us.” The shared nature of such narratives means that they are not dependent on any individual, and indeed they survive the coming and going of individuals. Rather, such narratives are integral to the interconnected hierarchy of dictatorships. Hierarchies of Dictatorship How does the dictator get his henchmen to do his bidding? We will see that the answer to this question leads us away from traditional issues, such as a focus on the “charismatic power of the dictator,” his “mesmeric personality,” and other such reductionist explanations that concern intrapersonal, dispositional characteristics of individuals. Instead, we answer this question by highlighting the role of hierarchies of dictatorships, interlocking and mutually upholding interests of a wide range of groups and individuals, wielding widely different levels of power. What is common to the various minor dictators in the hierarchy of dictatorships is that they are all ultimately beholden to the “supreme dictator” for their power positions. Dictatorships gain resiliency by having not one, but many different interlocking hierarchies of minor dictators – the connections and interdependencies being both vertical and horizontal. Each of these minor dictators enjoys monopoly power in a particular domain, and as we descend in the hierarchy from the “supreme dictator,” the territory controlled by minor dictators at each subsequent level becomes smaller. It is not that the “minor dictators” can chart courses of action independent of the supreme dictator. Rather, minor dictators are obliged to follow the lead



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of the supreme dictator, but through the power of the supreme dictator the minor dictators exert terror and demand obedience in their own territory. The personal style of the supreme dictator, such as Stalin’s hyper vindictiveness and concern with details, exerts a lot of influence on how minor dictators behave. What makes a person a dictator in the hierarchy? Those below have to obey in an unquestioning way. Each “minor dictator” owes his position to both those above and those below. The system is inter-locking, because the interests of each are met through obedience to orders from others. Disobedience is made more difficult by the inter-locking hierarchy: Others, including those above, below and parallel in the hierarchy, rely on the minor dictator to both obey and to command. The “supreme dictator” is also locked in, because the interests of all the minor dictators depend on his continuation. This is the main reason why in many cases dictators get “fixed in position” and are unable to resign when there is a rebellion. Just as opposition forces attempt to push the supreme dictator out of power, the many minor dictators and their associates (henchmen, families, friends, and so on) who rely for their livelihood on the dictatorship push for the continued rule of the supreme dictator. External Threats “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds With foreign quarrels”

In Shakespeare’s play Henry IV (Part II, Act IV, scene V, 216-217), the king on his death bed advises his son to rule by keeping “giddy minds” focused on external threats, so that they will have less opportunity to delve into issues at home. Both practical experience and empirical research shows this advice to be sound -- from the perspective of dictators. The strategy of keeping people focused on “foreign quarrels” and external threats has a number of consequences beneficial to dictators. First, external threat generally results in stronger internal cohesion and conformity. This includes pressure on dissenters and “critics” to remain silent and “toe the line,” in case they are labelled as a fifth column. Second, external threat results in “rallying around the flag” and stronger support for the leader in power. For these reasons, dictators are very quick to manufacture and exploit external threats, a classic example being Iranian government’s focus on “The Great Satan” (the United States) and “The Little Satan” (Israel) as enemies intent on destroying Iran.



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Internal Threats Dictators also find it highly useful to focus attention on “internal enemies.” Hitler believed that during the First World War Germany had been handicapped by a “fifth column” at home, and he was adamant that he would wipe out all internal dissent before embarking on foreign wars. His war against communists, Jews, and other “enemies” inside Germany was relentless. This fight against “internal enemies” serves important purposes, including: First, opportunities and justifications for eliminating competition for power; second, mobilizing supporters and strengthening the power base for leadership. Lack of Trust Social relationships in dictatorship are characterized by distrust. This includes relationships between “friends” and within families. Distrust is manufactured by dictatorial regimes, because through distrust it is possible to thwart collective action and collective resistance to dictatorship. Stalinist Russia represents the “model” for how modern dictatorships manufacture and rely on distrust, as shown by the brilliant analysis of private lives in Stalinist Russia by Orlando Figes (2007). Again and again, we come across cases of close friends and family members having to stand by silently while their loved ones were arrested or destroyed, or were actively betrayed to the authorities by other friends, neighbours, and relatives. At the heart of the distrust was Stalin’s paranoia about spy rings, espionage, conspiracies, and “traitors.” Collective Helplessness A major challenge for potential dictators who become actual dictators is that after coming to power, they must destroy resistance in order to remain in power. The particular strategies dictators use varies to some extent across contexts, as shown for example by Vincent Boudreau’s (2004) case studies of Burma’s Ne Win (where dissent was absolutely forbidden), Indonesia’s Siharto (where there was strong crackdown on opposition organization, so that dissidents found it difficult to engage in collective action) and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos (where there was a recurring pattern of reform and crackdown). Despite differences in strategy, the ultimate goal of dictatorship is to create a sense of collective helplessness in a population, so that the dominant narrative shared within and about a population is that “nobody can do anything to change the situation.” This was very much the dominant narrative in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Arab dictatorships until the “thaw” of 2011.



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Concluding Comments I have focused on the “springboard,” arguing that the characteristics of the individual potential dictator are secondary. Of course, I do not mean to imply that the individual characteristics of Hitler and Stalin and other major dictators are not important. These individuals are special in terms of their charisma, Machiavellianism, narcissism, craving for centralized power, illusions of control, self-glorification, and so on. They are also particularly adept at helping to create the springboard to dictatorship, through manufacturing “crisis” situations, for example. However, it is the springboard to dictatorship that must remain the focus of our attention, because this springboard makes it possible for one of the many potential dictators, who exist in every society, to launch to power. In line with this, my focus is on collective rather than individual level irrationality. In particular, dictatorships come about and are upheld through the appropriation of shared narratives that function in support of dictatorial rule. Such shared narratives are acquired through socialization processes that are part of the “natural” growing up of individuals, and do not depend on acceptance or rejection on the part of any particular individuals. Shared narratives that depict society as politically, economically, and morally unstable and facing decline, as in a crisis and needing “saving” by a strong enough champion, are likely to support the coming to power of a dictator. This is particularly true if institutions such as the church and the military, and also certain counter-elites, support a dictatorship. After a dictator has come to power, the dictatorial regime is more likely to survive and continue if the population perceive serious threats from external and internal “enemies,” if they distrust others in society, and if they experience collective helplessness in the face of regime forces. Finally, the enormous and growing resource inequalities in contemporary Western societies, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, raise the question of whether democracies really could slip into becoming dictatorships of sorts when resource inequalities grow beyond a certain level. When more and more of the wealth is owned by a smaller and smaller number of people, can democracy continue to “function?” Works by a number of authors, such as Unequal Democracy by Larry Bartels (2010) in his discussion of the “new Gilded age,” raise this question, and if current trends of increasing inequality in wealth distribution continue, then we in capitalist democracies will be forced toward an answer in the next few decades.



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Of course, the experiences of the U.S.S.R and communist Eastern Europe demonstrate that dictatorships can thrive even when the resource distributions in societies are “flat.” Greater resource equality and parity in income does not guarantee greater democracy and openness; Mao’s China and the horrors of the “cultural revolution” in the 1960s also show this. Just because the elites in China were attacked and economic, intellectual and other “differences” were lessened, China did not become more democratic. But the question still remains: Do citizens in the underclass need a minimal level of resources for a democracy to remain robust? Is there a danger that the growing underclass in the United States, the UK, and some other countries, and the increased accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, will create political, economic, and other forms of instability, and help to bring about the other conditions leading to a springboard to be used by potential dictators?

Acknowledgement This chapter has benefited from discussions I have had with Rom Harré, Richard Shweder, and Jaan Valsiner, although they are in no way responsible for its shortcomings.

References Adorno, T. W., E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D. J. Levinson, and B. W. Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper & Row. Altemeyer, B. 1994. “Reducing Prejudice in Right-wing Authoritarians.” In The Psychology of Prejudice: The Ontario Symposium, edited by M. P. Zanna & J. M. Olson, Volume 7, 131-148. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Barbu, Z. 1956. Democracy and Dictatorship: Their Psychology and Patterns of Life. New York: Grove Press. Bartels, L. 2010. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Boudreau, V. 2004. Resisting Dictatorship: Repression and Protest in Southeast Asia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bullock, A. 1991. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. New York: Vintage Books. Figes, O. 2007. The Whisperers: Private Lives in Stalin’s Russia. New York: Picador. Freud, S. 1900-1901/1953. “The Interpretation of Dreams (Second Part).” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of



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Sigmund Freud, Volume 5, edited and translated by J. Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Gilbert, G. 1950. The Psychology of Dictatorship. New York: Ronald Press. Goffman, E. 1967. Interaction Ritual. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Moghaddam, F. M. 2008. Multiculturalism and Intergroup Relations. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. Pareto, V. 1935. The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology. New York: Dover. Shcharansky, A., and R. Dermer. 2004. The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror. New York: Public Affairs. Taheri, A. 1988. Nest of Spies: America’s Journey to Disaster in Iran. London: Hutchinson. Woloch, I. 2004. “From Consulate to Empire: Impetus and Resistance.” In Dictatorship in History and Theory, edited by P. Baehr & M. Richter, 29-52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.



CHAPTER SIX DISCOURSES ON CONVERSION: THE CASE OF THE COVENANT, THE SWORD AND THE ARM OF THE LORD CARL JENSEN

[A]n obedient and such a nice boy. I am flabbergasted that they say he has done this. Someone must have brainwashed him. —Associate of confessed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad (Caruso 2010)

Scholars, intelligence professionals and others have long sought to understand how terrorist groups “radicalize”; that is, what trajectory do they follow from “normalcy” into violent activity directed against a government or state (see, inter alia, Reich 1990; Gilmartin 1996; Sageman 2004; and Moghaddam 2010)? The present chapter uses two social science theories—Gilmartin’s Lethal Triad Theory and Positioning Theory—supplemented by Rothbart and Bartlett’s Axiology of Difference model, to trace the evolution of a virulent white supremacist group, the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord (CSA), from its humble beginnings as a small Pentecostal church into a dangerous domestic terrorist organization which faced off against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1983. The combination of these models is particularly useful in developing an understanding, based on theory, of the conditions under which such an evolution can occur. The goal of this chapter is not to argue that such an approach is generalizable under all conditions; to be sure, every group follows its own path. Nevertheless, the analytical method employed herein may prove useful for examining similar groups to determine, in advance, their proclivity toward violence.

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Positioning Theory Seemingly, there are as many theories of radicalization as there are scholars who write about the subject. One perspective that deserves special attention, especially in the age of unlimited narrative through the Internet and other social media sources, is Positioning Theory (see Moghaddam, Harré and Lee 2008). Positioning can be seen as an extension of Role Theory, which has enjoyed a long history in sociology and social psychology (see, inter alia, Mead 1934 and Merton 1968). Role Theory proponents contend that individuals act according to semi-permanent or relatively fixed socially defined categories, known as “roles.” Positioning theorists, on the other hand, recognize that social interaction is a dynamic process, with individuals flexibly occupying many different “positions” as situations change. In this context, social interaction is seen as: [U]nfolding sequential structures of meanings, ordered in accordance with local rules, conventions and customs of correct conduct (Harré and Moghaddam 2003, 3)

Meaning becomes situation specific, with social episodes constantly evolving. That is not to say that roles cannot become fixed, as the Role Theorists would argue; rather, it is far more common for meanings to unfold and evolve over the course of time rather than remain static. The epicentre of the theory resides in its conceptualization of positions, which concern the rights of actors and their duties to others. These rights and duties are often understood rather than explicitly defined. Based on his position, an actor has a right to act in a certain way or the expectation of particular privileges. In exchange for these rights, he has the duty to act in an understood manner toward others. For example, I have the right to expect that my spouse will listen to my tales of sorrow and woe after a long day at the office; however, I have the duty to keep my tales to a suitable length and let her vent as well. The second part of Positioning Theory concerns acts and actions. Louis differentiates the two as follows (2008, 25): [P]ositioning theory introduces a distinction between actions (behaviours that are intended performances, such as writing to the newspaper) and acts which are what the behaviours mean socially (a plea to achieve a goal, a protest against another’s behaviour, etc.)

Acts can be both linguistic and non-linguistic. Certainly, groups can and do invent their own words and languages. In the case of cohesive, clandestine entities, such as terrorist cells, an individualized lexicon



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provides extrinsic and intrinsic value. On the one hand, it can keep prying authorities from understanding a group’s goals, tactics, and plans. It also allows the formation of stronger bonds between members, who share a unique language unknown to others; this helps underscore the “specialness” of the group and can validate its message, at least in the minds of members. Acts can also be non-linguistic—Louis (2008) describes Israel’s agreement to allow an Arab to serve in the Knesset as an act viewed by some as a noble compromise and by others as a serious betrayal. Finally, episodes unfold as narrative conventions, which are termed story lines. According to Louis (2008, 26): A story line is like a script, directing behaviour which may be implicit or explicit (Abelson 1976). But whereas scripts are often researched as consensual and evoked by a situation, story lines are proposed to be actively constructed and contested. Story lines give meaning to actions and define them as acts; they order goals and strategies as well as tactics and means.

Story lines may indirectly affect acts and actions; they gradually evolve over time, an attribute that has particular relevance for the examination of terrorist groups and the prediction of violence. Moghaddam, Harré and Lee represent the interaction of these three forces diagrammatically as the Positioning Triangle (figure 1):

Figure 1: Positioning Triangle (Moghaddam, Harré and Lee 2008, 12)



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Figure 1 should reinforce to the reader the mutuality of all three aspects of positioning (Moghaddam, Harré and Lee 2008, 12): Presumptions about rights and duties are involved in fixing the moment by moment meanings that are to be given to what people are doing or saying. Both are influenced by and influence the story line drawn implicitly from a local repertoire.

Lethal Triad Theory and the Axiology of Difference While Positioning Theory is useful for examining social interactions in general, it benefits from other models that more explicitly link it to terrorism. Gilmartin’s Lethal Triad theory explains the conditions under which isolated groups can turn violent; the author describes his theory as “three social-psychological components that interact to nurture a given group's beliefs and behaviours” (1996, 1). Isolation According to Gilmartin (1996), most terrorist groups do not emerge fully formed and mature. Rather, they require time to indoctrinate members, define their philosophy, and devise strategies and tactics. First and foremost, they need to separate from the larger society. Historically, this meant relocating members to some physically isolated location; increasingly, it may include self-isolation, with adherents immersing themselves in jihadi or extremist websites. Through constant repetition of a group’s goals and propaganda, and by the exclusion of alternative viewpoints, individuals lose the ability to think critically; eventually, members reflexively encode new belief systems and learn to never challenge the group’s “sacred” tenets. Projection Once isolated, groups redefine the world. They “project” grievances on perceived enemies, blaming them for real or imagined wrongs. If Gilmartin’s theory has any explanatory holes, it is here. There are many groups, from Boy Scouts on wilderness retreats to monastic hermits, who choose to isolate themselves; most never advance to the stage of pathological projection. How can one bridge the theoretical gap? Positioning Theory may offer the answer. Projection, especially as it exists in terrorist groups, requires a particular story line, an extreme narrative that oftentimes portrays events in stark black and white—the enemy is not just bad or “the other,” he becomes “the spawn of Satan.” The “good” are



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in fact “the perfect”—the chosen ones imbued with a wisdom and responsibility others cannot recognize. Rothbart and Bartlett discuss this in their Axiology of Difference model, which they describe as “group positioning associated with threat narratives [that] establishes an axiology of ingroup (sic) virtues and outgroup (sic) vices” (Rothbart & Bartlett 2008, 230). In terrorist groups, the construction of such differences is often so extreme as to serve as a barometer of group intentions. As the narrative evolves, so may the group. Gilmartin further asserts that group members also project all decisionmaking responsibility on to the leader. This may be an overreach, at least in the case of many current terrorist groups; in fact, some organizations, such as the Animal Liberation Front and the new “home-grown” version of al Qaeda, promote autonomous action on the part of their members. This provides an additional layer of security between leaders and followers, who may or may not have ever met. Consequently, the narrative becomes ever more important—it may provide the only link between a leader and her minions. Pathological Anger The final step of the Triad is pathological anger, which grows out of isolation and projection. Collectively, group members see themselves as victims of an outside force. According to Gilmartin (1996): As [group members] project blame onto this entity, they grow emotionally volatile. Their explosive anger can fuel actions that range from scapegoating (sic) ethnic minorities to bombing and gassing outsiders indiscriminately. As their anger grows, group members believe they are in a position of "righteousness" or "justification." Because of their isolation, group members come into significant contact only with others who share their world view and emotional reaction to it. They neither test nor challenge the group hypothesis and feel no sense of individual accountability. As a result, they can commit heinous acts without experiencing significant emotional turmoil or guilt. In essence, the group process has created situational sociopaths who suffer no remorse no matter what they do.

Figure 2 is a diagrammatic representation of the Lethal Triad.



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Figure 2: Gilmartin’s Lethal Triad (Gilmartin 1996)

Irrationality Extreme narratives provoke extreme responses. It is altogether tempting to attribute different and unpopular points of view, especially if they differ from one’s own, to weak or irrational minds. For regular citizens, such nonchalant characterizations can lead to misunderstandings and, on occasion, conflict. For law enforcement or security personnel, for whom thorough knowledge of a group may be a matter of life and death, such oversimplification can be catastrophic. One need think no further than the tragic confrontation between federal law enforcement personnel and the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas in 1993, in which 86 people ultimately perished; had the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and FBI better understood the Davidians’ theology and level of commitment to their religion, it is possible that such loss of life could have been avoided. The case of the CSA provides another example where law enforcement confronted a group with an unconventional religious perspective; fortunately, the eventual arrest and surrender of its members ended peacefully. Toward the end of its existence, the CSA came to embrace a virulently anti-Semitic and racist religion known as Christian Identity (CI). To be sure, there are many versions of CI. In its most extreme form, adherents claim it offers a Biblical justification for white supremacy. Through what some would call theological sleight of hand, believers in the “dual-seedline” form of CI hold that the serpent in the Garden of Eden also had sexual relations with Eve in addition to tempting her with an

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apple; Cain was their progeny and became the forbearer of the Jewish race. Hence, Jews are the “Spawn of Satan,” the sworn enemy of any true Christian. Non-Aryans are considered “Pre-Adamic” and do not enjoy equal status as humans. Put another way, Blacks, Hispanics and others become the equivalent of “beasts of the field,” to be used for slave labour or any other function which Aryans, the true children of God, decide. As such, the dual-seedline theory fits nicely with white supremacist beliefs, vilifying the Jewish race and consigning anyone other than a “pure Aryan” to non-human status. 1 For many schooled in more conventional interpretations of the Book of Genesis, CI may seem like the fantastic, irrational creation of warped minds. However, one should consider Durkheim and his colleagues who had a more circumspect view of religion (Durkheim, Cosman, and Cladis 1912, 2008, 3): There are no religions which are false. All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence.

Merely defining something as “irrational” allows it to be easily discarded as the product of substandard thinking. In fact, CI has a long history and more than a few adherents who have produced a body of “research.” Understanding CI’s tenets and how they fit the needs of groups like the CSA can offer insights into future behaviours. Positioning Theory provides a framework for such an analysis.

Case Study: The CSA2 The present article provides a retrospective analysis of the CSA and its road to radicalization by employing Positioning Theory, which complements and completes analysis using Gilmartin’s Lethal Triad model. Positioning explains the important narrative and storyline evolution of the group, which is crucial in understanding how the CSA changed from a small, evangelical Christian community into a white supremacist, domestic 1

For more information on Christian Identity and its relationship with supremacist beliefs, see Barkun (1994) and Quarles (2004).  2 Unless otherwise noted, information from this section was taken from several personal meetings between the author and Kerry Noble which occurred from 1997 until 2000. Mr. Noble is a former leadership figure in the CSA who has since renounced white supremacy and serves as a consultant for law enforcement. The author also relied upon Mr. Noble’s 1998 memoir Tabernacle of Hate, which chronicles his time with group (Noble 1998). 



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terrorist organization in fewer than three years. Were this form of analysis available in the early 1990s, the trajectory of the group could have been better understood. The utility of Positioning Theory, however, is not retrospective—it is prospective. The present case study provides a method which could be adapted to fit the needs of both academe and law enforcement. Employed wisely, it could help correct the type one and two errors that can prove deadly-- underestimating truly dangerous groups while unfairly targeting those that pose no real threat. CSA: The Back-story In its earliest incarnation, the CSA emerged from the “Jesus” movement of the late 1960s/early 1970s. Led by James “Jim” Ellison, in the 1970s, the group embraced a Protestant, fundamentalist, dispensational, Arminian, theology; there was no racial component contained in the group’s philosophy in its early days (Brannan 2006). Ellison was a charismatic leader; he had been involved in several “end times” churches in the 1960s and saw his role as a teacher. In 1970, he was severely injured in a workplace accident,3 which he miraculously survived. Seeing this as a “sign from God” to establish an isolated community of believers to await God’s judgment of America, he and seven families established the Cherith Brook Farm in rural Missouri. At that time, Ellison’s philosophy mirrored that of many Pentecostal communities which believed that the “end of time” was imminent; America had become irredeemably sinful, a modern day Sodom which stood as an affront to God. By relocating to Cherith Brook, Ellison and his congregation had taken the first step in Gilmartin’s Lethal Triad—they had isolated themselves, cutting off all ties with the outside world, thereby focusing attention exclusively on the “message” Ellison wished to convey. According to Noble (1998), Cherith Brook Farm possessed other attributes which made it especially susceptible to spiritual evolution. Unlike established congregations which embraced staid and littlechanging orientations, Ellison and his group saw themselves as dynamic and evolutionary: They were on a spiritual voyage, led by a pastor who enjoyed a special relationship with God, as evidenced by his remarkable survival from death. The group sought biblical justification in all it did, but there was a noted lack of biblical sophistication among its members. Hence, almost any action could be justified as long as there was some tie to the Bible, however tenuous. As well, outsiders who claimed to be 3 Ellison was working in a building under construction when it collapsed around him. Incredibly, he survived and recovered in an amazingly short amount of time. 



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biblical experts had little difficulty convincing the congregation that their interpretation of the scriptures was correct; this would prove critical when CI “experts” infiltrated the church and succeeded in transforming its theology. Finally, the group believed that God spoke personally and regularly to members of the congregation; as such, the threshold for accepting some small sign as “prophecy” was quite low. For example, a strange dream was sufficient for members to believe God was speaking to them. Positioning Analysis: Constructing the Analytical Model Rothbart and Bartlett (2008) discuss the importance of “myth” in deciphering group actions. Understanding the construction of the CSA myth is crucial in understanding the group. In the first place, the myth became integrated into every phase of the community through its constant telling and re-telling. Church services were daily affairs; physical isolation from society made it impossible to escape Ellison’s message. The myth was further reinforced, indeed rendered inerrant, through “legitimizing authority.” The first and highest authority was the Bible—every aspect of the group’s existence had to pass biblical muster. However, given the wide range of stories in the Bible and the doctrinal un-sophistication of the group, this proved to be a relatively easy standard to meet. Second, outside “experts” who “talked a good game” had success in moulding the myth for their own purposes. Positioning analysis will be applied to three distinct phases in the group’s evolving narrative; each was critical in changing Cherith Brook into the CSA. As well, each aspect of the “positioning triangle” proved mutually reinforcing; the evolving storyline established particular positions for the group and its members, which in turn produced predictable and deterministic actions. The first, and foundational, phase of the group’s evolution was the “what” phase: What sort of world existed and what should believers do? The second phase established “how” God planned to bring about the end of the world. Finally, in the “who” phase, God would reveal to his “warriors” their responsibility in helping bring about His final judgment



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Phase 1: The “What”

Figure 3: Positioning Triangle 1, CSA

Figure 3 represents the first stage of the CSA’s journey into radicalization. By the mid 1970s, the group had left Cherith Brook and relocated to a spot in the Ozarks known as Mountain Creek. According to Brannan (2006, 209): Early on the group had lived on a farm they named, “Cherith Brook” which in the Old Testament had been the brook by which Elijah had been fed by ravens. When the brook dried up, Elijah went to a place called Zarephath where he was fed by a widow.

The move had great spiritual significance for the group. In members’ minds, they were re-living the journey of Elijah; their myth expanded accordingly. At that time in the CSA’s existence, its primary storylines were not significantly different from thousands of other Pentecostal congregations. Members believed they were living in the end-times. The proof was all around them—the world was corrupt, evidenced by crime, drug use, and the loosening in morals witnessed in the 1960s and 70s. Despite these beliefs, they were decidedly not racist. Accordingly, members saw their identity shift—they re-named themselves Zarephath as they more closely identified with the biblical Elijah and his journeys. They positioned themselves as “pilgrims” with corresponding rights and duties. As “the enlightened,” they were first and



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foremost entitled to knowledge that unbelievers lacked. They could divine God’s prophetic signs and recognized His hand in all events. Through this knowledge and their faith, they were entitled to eternal salvation, a salvation denied to the non-believing masses. Ellison also added his own particular elements to the group. Rather than acting as an all-powerful leader, he proclaimed that Zarephath members were part of a Corporate Body of Christ. To that end, he preached equality. As the group evolved, that element in particular would diminish. Along with their rights came duties—as the enlightened few, Zarephath members had the responsibility to spread God’s word as they understood it among believers and non-believers. As well, because they had located themselves far from cities and towns where crime and immorality flourished, they had a responsibility to offer refuge to those who desired to escape the corruption of “the world.” Finally, in what proved to be key, they saw themselves on a continual spiritual journey— this allowed the group to readily embrace new ideas, especially those that sprang from “prophecy” or outside “experts.” Their duties led directly to actions—Zarephath became a safe zone which welcomed those escaping corruption. This self-identification reinforced the isolated nature of their existence and the strengthening duality between their “good” community and the “evil” outside world. As well, Ellison continued to encourage the notion of the “journey.” God had not yet revealed all His truths but, importantly, they believed He would if only they followed His proper path.



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Phase 2: The “How”

Figure 4: Positioning Triangle 2, CSA

By 1978, Zarephath had become Zarephath-Horeb, as pictured in figure 4. They moved from Mountain Creek to a 224 acre property which had formerly been owned by Campus Crusade for Christ. According to Brannan, paraphrasing Noble (2006, 209):4 Finally, after challenging the prophets of Baal, Elijah went to “Horeb” also known as Mount Sinai. The group believed that Zarephath-Horeb was their own Mount Sinai.

The end-times storyline embraced by the group in the mid 1970s had one major shortcoming--while it spoke vaguely about the end of the world, it did not include a level of detail that would make it a compelling myth. While there was a “what,” there was no “how.” By the late 1970s, this issue had been addressed. Anti-government literature and the influence of outside “experts” revealed the “how” to the members of Zarephath-Horeb. 4

The group’s repeated relocations during this period allowed the Zarephath-Horeb narrative to embrace Elijah’s journey. It is likely, however, that the many moves were made primarily for pragmatic purposes (e.g., finding a suitable location for a survivalist camp) rather than to emulate biblical storytelling. 



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Satan was not some unseen force, working in mysterious ways. Rather, he had taken control of various world leaders and conspirators. His plan for ruling the world was through the installation of a “one world government” in which national sovereignty was replaced by a single, central authority. This one-world government would be tyrannical, outlawing religion and trampling on individual rights, such as the ownership of firearms. Taxation would be unbearable. This particular world view is not the exclusive domain of white supremacists, but is shared among a wide variety of groups and individuals, including many in the militia movement and some who hold ultra-conservative beliefs. While believers acknowledge that the direct hand of Satan is hidden, they believe that various clues to the conspiracy reveal themselves to those with special “knowledge.” For example, many claim that the United Nations is a key part of the conspiracy; occasionally, politicians reveal their true goals, such as the first President Bush’s 1991 call for a “new world order.” The one world government would, in their view, be antithetical to religion. As such, it would usher in the age of the tribulation, the start of God’s ultimate battle with Satan. While God would ultimately prevail, the earth would undergo a series of disasters and disorder unprecedented in its history. To make matters worse, the end times were not just close, they were imminent. Because the Zarephath-Horeb congregation believed God had taken great pains to reveal His truth to them, they interpreted that as a further sign that they had been “chosen” as special people. God wanted them to prevail through the tribulation. This new storyline produced new positions for the group. No longer merely pilgrims, they now had the right to survive physically. Along with the special knowledge of salvation God had originally provided, they received political knowledge as well. In addition to eternal salvation, they also had the right to self-preservation in the here-and-now. This was a critical shift in the life of the group. At this point, their identity moved from the merely spiritual into that of concrete action. In order to survive, they had to prepare. Accordingly, they took their cue from “survivalist” culture; salvation meant more than just faith, it also meant developing the ability for self defence. As the group’s philosophy became more militarylike, so did its organizational structure. At one point, Ellison’s position in the group was that of a relative equal; as survivalism began to dominate the group’s zeitgeist, he became more and more authoritarian. His right to obedience increased as his duty to equality receded. The shift in the group’s storyline also produced shifts in its perceived duties to others. Now, in addition to spreading the spiritual word, the group had a duty to spread the “one world government” political word as



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well. In addition to offering a safe haven for those escaping the corruption and crime of cities, it had a responsibility for offering protection and teaching self defence and survival skills. The perceived rights and duties led to direct action. Zarephath-Horeb began to resemble a fortified compound much more than it did a “safe haven.” At this point, weapons purchases began in earnest and continued throughout the life of the group. At the beginning of 1978, the only weapon owned by the group was an old .22 hunting rifle. When the FBI raided the compound in 1985, the number of weapons present had increased dramatically, both in terms of number and capability (see text box 1 for an inventory of the weapons seized by the FBI).

• • • • • • •

Thirty gallon drum of cyanide Numerous automatic assault weapons Fully operational LAW rocket Lewis machine gun C-4 explosives Numerous rifles & pistols Thousands of rounds of ammunition

Text Box 1: Weapons Seized from the CSA Compound, 1985 (Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation 1987) In addition to purchasing weapons, the members of Zarephath-Horeb began learning how to use them. Eventually, they developed a survivalist training camp that was an equal to intensive training programs offered by elite branches of the U.S. military. Not only did Zarephath-Horeb train its own members, but the group eventually trained a potpourri of 1980s domestic terrorist actors, to include members from many notorious white supremacist organizations. At this point, positioning analysis provides a clear roadmap of a group that is evolving into militancy. While the First Amendment of the United States Constitution clearly allows for groups and individuals to express racist, unpopular, and anti-government sentiments, the combination of



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storyline, position, and action provides a holistic picture of not just extreme words, but the likelihood that they will produce extreme deeds. Phase 3: The “Who” Even as the group’s storyline expanded to encompass survivalism by the late 1970s, it continued to espouse a defensive posture. Self-defence implies that one will react only when attacked. That, in and of itself, is permissible under the law. Zarephath-Horeb required one final step to enter into the fray of domestic terrorism. That step came in the early 1980s (see figure 5):

Figure 5: Positioning Triangle 3, CSA

By phase two, the group had identified Satan operating through some mysterious group that sought to impose the “one world government”; that concept, however, still remained amorphous and removed from the everyday reality of Zarephath-Horeb. In other words, the enemy was not “personalized.” Beginning in the late 1970s, the group became acquainted with Christian Identity, described above. CI resonated with Ellison. At this point, the enemy became very personal—no longer was he some undefined



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plutocrat, but rather an entire, identified race. Not only did CI fit the group’s political worldview, it could also be justified biblically, at least in the mind of Ellison. The new enemy was the Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), white supremacist-speak for the surreptitious Jewish-controlled cabal that supposedly controls the U.S. government. CI further defined its chosen race—the Aryans, who perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, made up 100% of the membership of Zarephath-Horeb. CI also reinforced the immanency of the tribulation—the high rates of crime seen in America’s large cities in the early 1980s were said to be the first wave of the end-times. Media representations of crime often included perpetrators who were members of minority groups. The final battle, then, would start as a race war. To Ellison, this all made perfect sense. He now had an identifiable enemy, one who could be easily targeted. This new storyline produced new positions—the CSA emerged as the paramilitary wing of Zarephath-Horeb; for all intents and purposes, it became Zarephath-Horeb. Group and individual identity went from survivalism to supremacy. These new positions provided new rights and duties. Salvation now came through ethnicity as well as faith. Since the government, which the CSA termed “Babylon,” was already under the control of Satan, any act taken against it was justified. The self-defence posture of the ZarephathHoreb days was replaced by an aggressive, proactive one in which each member had the right to engage in illegal activity. In fact, acting out against the ZOG was not only a right, it was a duty. Members were required to both promote ethnic purity and, more importantly, wage war on the government. By this point, Ellison demanded near total obedience—in the early 1980s, he had a dream that he was descended from the biblical King David and began referring to himself as “King James of the Ozarks.” These rights and duties produced certain actions, which crossed the line into criminality and soon came to the attention of the authorities. Ellison’s acquisition of weapons escalated; soon, he was stockpiling illegal weapons, an action that would eventually land him in prison. In addition, he was found to be consorting with and providing refuge to known white supremacist terrorists, such as members of the Order, who murdered a Jewish radio talk show host and who conducted a string of spectacular robberies in the 1980s. Ominously, it appeared that the CSA was preparing in earnest for an actual war; for example, they acquired 30 gallons of cyanide, ostensibly to poison the water supply of a large city. The CSA’s “journey” came to an end on April 19, 1985, when the compound was surrounded by several hundred federal agents who came to



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serve a search warrant and arrest Ellison and various CSA leaders on weapons and Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act charges. A three-day standoff ensued, after which Ellison surrendered. He was convicted of federal charges but released from prison in 1987, after agreeing to serve as a federal witness in a trial against six reputed members of the Aryan Nations.

Conclusion The process by which groups “radicalize” remains ambiguous. Each appears to follow its own trajectory with little consistency between paths. Positioning Theory provides a means to study behaviours that bridge thought to action: A group’s storyline produces positions which in turn motivate actions. When combined with other theories, such as Gilmartin’s Lethal Triad Theory and Rothbart and Bartlett’s Axiology of Difference model, it becomes an especially powerful tool for law enforcement and security personnel who can often divine storylines that, in and of themselves, are unusable: The First Amendment to the United States Constitution clearly protects speech, however unpopular or extreme. However, if storylines and narrative can be understood in a context that suggests a path to illegal actions, it can help form an investigative strategy. The primary goal for law enforcement agencies today is not reaction to a crime after it occurs; the 9-11 attacks clearly demonstrated the nonviability of that approach. Instead, authorities have been tasked to act proactively and prevent crime before it occurs. This is a formidable task, one for which many agencies are ill-equipped. A retrospective analysis of the CSA using the positioning triangle proved helpful, at least in an explanatory context. Whether it can prove equally beneficially when applied prospectively is not known; nevertheless, the results of the present chapter appear promising. At the very least, it is clear that merely dismissing a seemingly strange and unfamiliar worldview as “irrational” is dangerous—the level of commitment of CSA members would have propelled them into violent action had law enforcement not intervened; the fact that their theology may have been “weird” would have been irrelevant. Knowledge and understanding of narrative and storyline is, then, essential; realizing how myth can translate to action is most powerful. Therefore, further research is clearly warranted.



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References Abelson, R. 1976. “Script Processing in Attitude Formation and Decision Making.” In Cognition and Social Behaviour, edited by J. Carroll and J. Payne, 33-45. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Barkun, M. 1994. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Brannan, D. 2006. “Violence, Terrorism and the Role of Theology: Repentant and Rebellious Christian Identity.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of St. Andrews. http://research-repository.st-andrews.ac.uk/ bitstream/10023/342/6/FinalThesis.pdf. Accessed 22 April 2011. Caruso, D. 2010. “Times Square Plot May Have Cost as Little as $7K.” Associated Press. http://www.homeland1.com/domestic-internationalterrorism/articles/817532-Times-Square-plot-may-have-cost-as-littleas-7K/. Accessed 12 April 2011. Durkheim, É., C. Cosman, translator, and M. Cladis, editor. 1912, 2008. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Federal Bureau of Investigation. 1987. “Covenant, Sword, Arm of the Lord.” http://vault.fbi.gov/The%20Covenant%20The%20Sword%20The%20 Arm%20of%20the%20Lord%20/The%20Covenant%20The%20Sword %20The%20Arm%20of%20the%20Lord%20Part%202%20of%202. Accessed 22 April 2011. Gilmartin, K. 1996. “The Lethal Triad: Understanding the Nature of Isolated Extremist Groups.” FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin 65(9): 1-5. Harré, R. and F. Moghaddam, editors. 2003. The Self and Others: Positioning Individuals and Groups in Personal, Political and Cultural Contexts, 21-39. London: Preager. Louis, W. 2008.” Intergroup Positioning and Power.” In Global Conflict Resolution Through Positioning Analysis, edited by F. Moghaddam, R. Harré and N. Lee, 21-40. New York: Springer Science+Business Media LLC. Mead, G. 1934. Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merton, R. 1968. Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: Free Press. Moghaddam, F. 2010. The New Global Insecurity. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Security International.



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Moghaddam, F., R. Harré, and N. Lee. 2008. Global Conflict Resolution Through Positioning Analysis. New York: Springer Science+Business Media LLC. Noble, K. 1998. Tabernacle of Hate. Prescott, Ontario, CA: Voyageur Publishing. Quarles, C. 2004. Christian Identity: The Aryan American Bloodline Religion. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Reich, W., editor. 1990. Origins of Terrorism. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Rothbart, D. and T. Bartlett. 2008. “Rwandan Radio Broadcasts and Hutu/Tutsi Positionings.” In Global Conflict Resolution Through Positioning Analysis, edited by F. Moghaddam, R. Harré and N. Lee, 227-246. New York: Springer Science+Business Media LLC. Sageman, M. 2004. Understanding Terror Networks. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.



PART THREE: GLOBAL AND CORPORATE IRRATIONALITY AND THE FUTURE

CHAPTER SEVEN RISKY BEHAVIOUR DAVID APGAR

The tools for lengthening the time horizon that U.S. industrial chief executive officers (CEOs) have used increasingly over the past 50 years of stable domestic growth impair the agility that they need to deal with growth markets on the other side of the planet undergoing tumultuous change. Firms are not adapting to that change because top management no longer makes regular use of deliberate experimentation to refine strategy. Financial planning methods such as balanced scorecards have displaced the skills and stock compensation has weakened the incentives that strategy experimentation requires. This matters because balanced scorecards and stock compensation have been two of the most widespread tools for lengthening top managers’ time horizons. Adapting to today’s rates of market change will require a different approach – disciplined strategy testing and balanced top management compensation. The first section makes the argument that U.S. manufacturers are not adapting to change because top management is not using deliberate experimentation to refine strategy. The second section reviews the emerging evidence that planning methods based on financial requirements have displaced the skills that strategy experimentation demands. The third and fourth sections argue that stock compensation has furthermore weakened the incentives for strategy experimentation. The fifth section concludes with a description of the disciplined strategy testing and balanced executive compensation that will be needed for U.S. industrial firms to adapt to faster rates of change in their growth markets.

The Rarity of Strategic Clarity United States manufacturers are losing the capacity to adapt to change in their domestic and export markets at a time of unprecedented evolution in patterns of trade. In fact, the most common topic for research proposed

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by members of Corporate Executive Board best-practices programs for finance executives over the past ten years has been adapting to change. Morgan Stanley’s Jonathan Garner calls it the “third transition.” And even though his point is that the recent U.S. loss of share in most manufacturing sectors to developing Asia mirrors U.S. gains of 100 years ago (the second transition) and British gains of 150 years ago (the first one), the speed of the loss is alarming. In the ten years to 2009, the U.S. share of global manufacturing declined from 26% to 20% while China’s share grew from eight percent to 19%, India’s and Brazil’s each grew from one percent to two percent, and even Europe’s held steady at about 29%. Indeed, the United States share peaked in 1955 at 45% (Garner 2010). The trend has been apparent for a long time in sectors as diverse as cars and machine tools. GM, Ford, and Chrysler led world auto production up to the 1980s. By 2009, however, China made 140% more cars, and Japan 40% more cars, than the United States. Even Germany, a country one quarter the size of the United States, built 91% as many cars as the U.S. in 2009 (OICA 2010). The United States similarly led machine-tool production through the 1970s. By 1991, however, there were just five major U.S. producers compared with 20 in Germany and 28 in Japan (Finegold 1992). By 2007, U.S. machine-tool production trailed that of Japan, Germany, China, Italy, South Korea, and Taiwan, although it admittedly led eighth-place Switzerland (Gardner Publications, Inc. 2010). A RAND study puts this decline in perspective, concluding that U.S. producers responded to volatile demand in the 1980s by accumulating backlogs while Japanese producers focused on filling new orders much more quickly (Finegold 1992). The pattern across sectors reflects changes in manufacturing productivity, which has grown four percent per year over the past ten years in the United States compared to India’s ten percent and China’s fourteen percent. Garner points out that Chinese output per hour stands at just 21% of the U.S. figure – but its cost is even lower at eleven percent (Garner 2010). The combination of sluggish responsiveness and slow-growing productivity is dangerous for the United States at a time of major change in patterns of global consumption. For decades, U.S. over-consumption of three percent to five percent per year – measured by the current account deficit, or the amount by which U.S. consumption exceeds production – has powered global growth, and especially the growth of Chinese industry. That must change as U.S. debt to foreigners approaches a full year’s output.



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For the United States just to balance its current account– meaning the U.S. would consume no more than it produces – consumption in the rest of the world must grow more, and in the U.S. less, than the economy by roughly three-and-one-half percent of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), or $475 billion. This is more than the GDP of Pakistan. It also represents a huge shift of growth out of U.S. markets to the rest of the world. The challenge for U.S. manufacturers could not be greater – to learn to serve growth that will be faster abroad than at home. Growth is no longer a home-team advantage for U.S. firms. These facts suggest U.S. manufacturers are losing the capacity to adapt to change even as change in the world accelerates. The loss of any capacity as fundamental as adaptation must have deep causes. The increasing rarity of strategy experimentation by top leadership appears to be just such a cause. In a company, adaptation to change and strategy experimentation are closely related. In fact, adaptation without strategy experimentation is only a matter of luck. You might think otherwise, however, from the basic business advice of the business analytics movement: Just download enough data and derive the best strategy. It’s hard to think of a sector, nevertheless, where competitive conditions are so static that managers have much practical ability to predict what strategies will work without testing them. There are, of course, plenty of tools for explaining success and failure after the fact. Without labs that can mimic the complex conditions of a living business, though, managers must experiment their way to success. Companies that get their strategy right from the start are lucky – and likely to miss future changes. So a decrease in strategy experimentation really can explain the larger failure among U.S. manufacturers to adapt to change. There are, unfortunately, few obvious measures of the degree to which companies deliberately try out and adapt new strategies. The increasing rarity of such experimentation, nevertheless, can be seen from growth in top management vagueness about strategy. The reason is that strategy experimentation requires extremely precise articulation of each successive strategy variation that a company puts to the test. If a leadership team fails to be clear about what it is testing, it cannot use near-term results to make improvements. For example, suppose two Italian restaurants open, one vowing to provide great food and the other promising food that is great because the chef uses farm-fresh fruit, vegetables, and herbs. And suppose they both do poorly. Having found fresh ingredients insufficient as a means of



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drawing more customers, the second one will be in a position to start experimenting with other strategic moves such as new menu selections. The first, however, will be unsure whether to change ingredients, selections, or both. If it tries both, moreover, it will have trouble attributing results to the two changes. Specific strategies – even when they’re incomplete – generate clearer feedback about what works. Alarmingly, there are plenty of signs that vagueness about strategy is becoming pervasive in U.S. industry. Gone are the great strategy stories of the 1970s, 80s, and even early 90s. In the 1970s, for example, FedEx proposed focusing on packages small enough to sort profitably in a single location – Memphis – regardless of origin and destination. Several airlines proposed increasing utilization with hub-and-spoke systems until congestion made it profitable for an outlier like Southwest Airlines to promise point-to-point routes even between smaller towns in the early 1980s. In the late 1980s, Wal-Mart’s super-stores grew in tandem with the idea that a great supply chain including Chinese production could drive prices low enough at decent service levels to draw buyers across town to low-rent commercial sites in the suburbs. Capital One’s strategy in the 1990s was to employ scientific method (NOT just data) to marketing pitches in order to extract information about retail financial needs many times faster than much larger card competitors. At the same time, Caterpillar mounted a campaign to adapt its products to the needs of diverse niche markets as aggressive as anything the now-famous Chinese white-goods manufacturer Haier has managed. Pfizer tried to organize R&D around families of related scientific problems. AT&T refocused its strategy around the infamous “last mile” of wire to end-users owned by regional operating companies. And Microsoft tried to find a way to outsource innovation to independent developers without losing market leverage through selective closure of its operating system. But what are the great strategy stories of the last fifteen years? FedEx and UPS have both tried to be more efficient. Several airlines have tried to become more efficient by cutting out hot, unpaid meal service. Food retailers have added salads because heart problems are shortening their customers’ life expectancy. Financial services firms explored mortgages without down payments and Goldman Sachs developed a new non-public funding mechanism that gave Facebook a $50 billion valuation without any strategy for growing revenue at all. The big three domestic auto companies tried to shift the majority of their U.S. manufacturing base to SUV production. These are tactical shifts, not strategic experiments.



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The closest thing to a clearly articulated strategy innovation in the past fifteen years was the shift in retail to category-killers like Bed & Beyond, which built market power under the radar of U.S. anti-trust law. When it comes to individual firm innovations, though, strategy has become vague. Media General’s 2004 performance metrics – published by Kaplan and Norton in their book Strategy Maps as one of several examples from companies belonging to the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative – provide a good if unintentional example of strategy vagueness. The firm’s high-level performance scorecard sets out a number of efficiency metrics related to internal processes leading to five performance goals from a customer perspective. They are to provide accurate, compelling, and relevant content, as well as integrity, fairness, and objectivity in delivering that content. They include giving advertisers access to desirable audiences as well as quality service. And the final goal is a commitment to community involvement (Kaplan and Norton 2004). The last goal is the only one that gives a hint of a truly distinctive strategy. For a clearer picture of what the firm’s strategy may have been, consider what its critics had to say. Robert McChesney, of the independent media advocacy group Free Press, claimed (2006): Their vision is of owning an empire of company media towns with one monopoly newsroom servicing all the outlets in a town, and a massive reliance on inexpensive syndicated fare.

Media General holdings like the Richmond Times-Dispatch tend to serve conservatively-oriented communities in the southeastern United States with conservatively-oriented reporting. That garners community support for the firm’s local newspaper, television, and Internet crossholdings. It would certainly make sense to use those local cross-holdings, in turn, to create scale economies in the production of content and advertising and leverage in negotiations with advertisers (Apgar 2008). The firm’s balanced scorecard as of 2004 made no mention of any strategy as explicit as that, however. And strategic assumptions that go unarticulated tend to go untested. In fact, Media General has had to fight battles on two fronts in recent years as employees have posted complaints about working conditions and shareholder activists have tried to shake up the board. The Media General example may be typical – there are plenty of distinctive strategies but no one is taking the time to spell them out. Strategy experimentation is impossible, however, without clear articulation of the distinctive variations that it puts to a test. And without strategy



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experimentation, we leave adaptation to chance. No wonder signs abound of an adaptive failure by U.S. industrial firms. The next section looks for a root cause of this failure. It shows how planning methods based on financial requirements have displaced the skills that strategy experimentation requires.

Lost Recipes The skills required for strategy experimentation by senior management have atrophied as static, exhaustive lists of financial requirements favoured by financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams have displaced trial-and-error strategy development. The endless lists of line items in our quarterly financial plans turn out to be the opposite of what we need to develop strategy experimentally. To develop strategy through trial and error you need, at a bare minimum, a list of factors that can explain results. After all, without a clear set of expectations, there can’t be any such thing as errors for our trials to generate; without errors, there won’t be anything from which we can learn. A science of strategy development, therefore, comes down to what kinds of factors are useful and what kinds of lists of them we should keep. In brief, top management needs to focus on the changing, short lists of manageable factors that best explain outcomes. Let’s take these four requirements of strategy experimentation in reverse order. The idea that factors useful for articulating and testing strategy are the ones that best explain outcomes is notoriously vague – as vague as the kind of strategies we’re trying to avoid. Fortunately, the field of risk management provides a clear criterion. We need the factors that best explain results in the sense that no others have larger expected worst-case impacts (WCIs) on final results. WCIs usefully combine the two things needed for a factor to explain surprising results. One is the sensitivity of results to the factor and the other is the volatility of the factor. If cell phone sales are more sensitive to processing speed than to recharging time, for example, then processing speed has greater potential impact on results than the time it takes to charge a battery. And if processing speeds are also more variable than recharging time from one phone to another, then processing speed is clearly the more important factor for understanding sales. WCIs pick up the combined effect of both of these aspects of a factor.



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WCIs are especially useful because you can define a worst-case scenario for each factor you are evaluating and compare the expected impact on results of that scenario with impacts of worst-case scenarios for other factors. A worst-case scenario for processing speed might, for example, be 30 seconds to load a complicated application while a worstcase scenario for recharging might be an extra hour. The worst-case impact of processing speed would then be the difference in sales for two phones that are identical, except that one needs 30 seconds more than the other to load a complicated application. If the impact on sales of the extra application-loading time is 10,000 units per week and the impact of an extra hour of charging time is 10 units per week, then processing speed has a worst-case impact that is 1,000 times greater than battery charging time.1 Focusing on the factors with the greatest WCIs turns out to be the most powerful way to prioritize assumptions and simplify planning that we have. WCIs reliably pick out the factors that best explain outcomes. But trial-and-error strategy development requires one other thing of the factors on which you need to focus. They must also be manageable in the sense that you can forecast them better over time through better execution or better prediction. Manageability keeps you from focusing on factors that are not very different from the results you’re trying to predict or explain. Suppose you’re interested in profit, for example. Then revenue and cost will both turn out to be factors with high WCIs. But they are as hard to predict as profit. What you need are predictable factors with high WCIs that drive revenue and cost. Manageable factors loosely fall into two categories – those that are mostly controllable and those that are mostly uncontrollable. The controllable ones capture essential elements of execution, and specifically what we are doing that is different. Nucor’s development of technology to use scrap metal rather than iron ore in steel production is a good example. The uncontrollable ones capture risk factors or risk drivers that we can learn to forecast over time. A typical example would be using weather forecasts to predict demand for heating oil. Both types are predictable but for different reasons. Before moving on to the kinds of lists of factors experimental strategy development requires, it’s worth characterizing the manageable, high-WCI factors highlighted so far. They differ subtly but powerfully from the factors that appear in the vast majority of balanced scorecards. The 1

Each worst-case scenario must be equally remote. For example, each must be the worst case among 100 cell phones on the market or the worst case in, say, 1,000 days of operations.



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difference is that they comprise something closer to recipes than lists of ingredients. Financial requirements are like lists of ingredients. They tell you what a goal – be it an appetizer or a profit target – requires. Recipes provide much more information because they tell you how to achieve that goal. If lists of ingredients are necessary conditions, recipes are sufficient ones. Recipes’ specificity means they are more likely to be wrong. Think how many wrong recipes you’ve seen under correct lists of ingredients. That may be why many CEOs prefer to enumerate financial requirements – revenue floors, cost ceilings, and so forth – over specific ways to hit a target. It’s hard to be wrong about requirements because they actually contain less information than a goal that presupposes them. But it’s easy to be wrong about a specific strategy for achieving the goal. The manageability requirement forces the factors we watch to be more like steps in a recipe than items in a list of ingredients. The focus on factors with high worst-case impacts ensures their relevance. The two requirements taken together – high WCIs and manageability – identify factors that really let us say something about how to achieve a business goal. With this clarification about the kinds of factors experimental strategy development needs, we can add two criteria on how long and how changeable our lists of factors should be. For trial and error to be effective in developing strategy, the lists need to be short – confined to the manageable factors with the largest WCIs – and should change as management tries new strategies to hit its targets. There are practical reasons for both criteria. Trial-and-error strategy development requires short lists of factors because you can never be sure how to attribute differences between actual and expected results. If your quarterly profit ends up too low by 15%, for example, you can never be sure whether it is because the outcome of a key factor was also lower than expected or whether it is because you were wrong about the factor’s impact on results – or because you were missing a critical factor. Short lists of factors make it easier to use side-knowledge to make educated guesses about which factors really explain a performance surprise. Experimental strategy development also requires these lists to change. After all, the point of experimentation is to make changes when a strategy is not working as expected. And most changes in strategy call for changes in the lists of salient factors you watch to predict and explain results. If the amount of the difference between actual and expected results that you cannot explain actually falls once you make a change – then you have



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learned something about what works. And greater knowledge will probably help you hit your targets in the future. So trial-and-error strategy development needs changing short lists of manageable factors that effectively explain outcomes. The question is how these four criteria stack up against mainstream planning practice in U.S. manufacturing firms. The answer is – not well. Data availability and the statistical limitations of regression analysis have increasingly led financial planning analysts to favour static, exhaustive lists of financial requirements. The lists are exhaustive because data mining techniques made possible by cheap computing power encourage FP&A teams to track vast numbers of factors regardless of their manageability, volatility, or expected impact on final results. Consider each of these, starting with manageability. Since management reporting systems track variables that are easy to measure, they tend to accumulate variables like lines of an income statement rather than variables that measure things people actually do. You are much more likely to find a variable tracking cost of parts in a typical management report, for example, than time spent negotiating procurement contract flexibility for those parts. So these reports tend to accumulate measures of broad effects like financial requirements rather than tactical steps that give rise to them. It is the latter, however, that are more likely to reflect levers of competitive advantage. Manageability and measurability, in this case, are opposed. The same is true of volatility. It’s not that management reports shun volatile indicators. But few reports delete or demote indicators that rarely change. Think how many top-level performance dashboards dutifully report plant manpower figures. And yet these figures rarely change – absenteeism is not a big problem in today’s U.S. workplace. When First Data began to flag volatile indicators in its management reports seven years ago, finance executives considered it a breakthrough. Most current performance management systems don’t even use expected impact on results to screen or prioritize the factors they track. Here the problem is partly technical. To assess the power of an indicator to explain results, you must estimate something like its worst-case impact on results. Managers are loath to make these kinds of estimates, however, even when the purpose is only to facilitate the analysis of results. And there is little incentive to do so when cheap computing power is spitting metrics out of data warehouses by the hundreds. The proliferation of factors gives rise to a further problem. If it’s difficult to attribute changes in results to just a few factors, it’s next to impossible to attribute those changes to hundreds of factors. One way that statisticians deal with a multiplicity of factors is to look at data from



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multiple periods of time – more observations allows better attribution of results across multiple variables. Since the attribution of results to many factors requires outcomes from many time periods, however, FP&A teams resist changes in the list of factors they track. This makes sense when the goal is to learn the statistics of various factors. But it makes no sense when the goal is to learn their impact on results. The multivariate analyses loved by financial planning analysts show the average impacts of many factors over long periods of time – but they cannot reveal those factors’ changing patterns of influence and they cannot show which relationships are strongest at the present. In other words, they cannot show what has come to matter most to success. Such a problem seemed to bedevil Ingersoll Rand ten years ago. Herb Henkel took over the helm in 1999 to restart the engines of the venerable New Jersey maker of locks, equipment, and electric vehicles. He adopted an initially-clear approach resembling Lou Gerstner’s transformation of IBM into a solutions provider. Old metrics die hard, however, and the firm continued to track indicators from both the old and the new strategies in its top-level scorecard. For example, Ingersoll Rand monitored growth through innovation, customer intimacy, and operational excellence. While the third of these was just as relevant to Henkel as his predecessor, the second matters more to solutions providers while the first belongs to manufacturers striving to be in best-in-class (Kaplan and Norton 2004, 314). These goals conflict – just think what kind of marketers you would hire to achieve them. Would they be relationship managers or product advocates? You can’t have it both ways (Apgar 2008, 85). The tendency to keep alive every indicator on the Ingersoll Rand scorecard contributed to confusion about strategy. Henkel eventually embarked on a series of acquisitions of best-in-class equipment providers. Between 2000 and 2005, Ingersoll Rand undertook 60 acquisitions. It was as if Henkel wanted to promise his customers he would find them the best components for the solutions they required but wanted to make them, too. When the dust settled, equity analysts complained that Ingersoll Rand offered the best solutions to its customers’ needs – but at a 30% premium to market, reflecting the typical cost of seizing a supplier (Qingfen 2006). Long, static lists of metrics rarely facilitate change. To summarize, data availability and the needs of regression analysis have increasingly led FP&A teams to favour static, exhaustive lists of financial requirements. Trial-and-error strategy development, however, requires a focus on the changing, short lists of manageable factors that best explain outcomes. Static, exhaustive lists of factors are neither changing .



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nor short. And as for the factors, financial requirements are rarely directly manageable – they tend to measure effects rather than causes. Nor is there any need for them to be volatile or for results to be sensitive to them, so they often have low WCIs and provide only weak explanations of results. The prognosis, moreover, is not good. The skills required for strategy experimentation will continue to atrophy as computing power grows. The reason is that plentiful data will tempt more top managers to deal in lists of requirements, not recipes for success. As the next two sections argue, furthermore, stock-based executive pay appears to weaken the incentives for strategy experimentation even as it grows in popularity.

Stock Compensation Rising If current financial planning methods have displaced the skills that strategy experimentation requires, stock compensation has weakened the incentives for using it. Stock compensation is encouraging leadership teams to devote more resources to monitoring and mitigating widelyshared risks – and less to trial-and-error searches for unique drivers of success and failure. Before looking more closely at the incentives stock compensation provides in the next section, it’s important to review how stock has come to dominate top management compensation for U.S. manufacturers. According to a paper by Carola Frydman and Raven Saks, stock has risen as a share of median total compensation for the top executives of large U.S. companies2 from about 25% in the mid 1970s to about 40% in the mid 1980s, about 50% in the mid 1990s, and over 60% from 2000 to 2005 (Frydman and Saks 2007). The story is similar if you look at the impact of changes in stock value as well as compensation on executive wealth: The median share of compensation sensitive to stock performance varies between seventeen and 33% in the four decades from the 1940s through the 1970s, then rises to 47% in the 1980s, rises further to 60% in the 1990s, and finally drops back slightly to 58% between 2000 and 2005 (Frydman and Saks 2007, 71). Frydman and Saks point out that a lot of the rise in top executive compensation since 1980 reflects the increasingly widespread use of stock options. The share of top executives in the 50 largest U.S. firms receiving

2 Median compensation is calculated for the top three executives of the 50 largest US companies by sales. Three-quarters of the sample were manufacturers.



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stock options rose from 20-25% in the 1950s to 80-85% in the 1990s (Frydman and Saks 2007, 65). Compensation specialists have long considered stock compensation a good way to align the interests of managers and owners and stock options were a particularly popular form of it until accounting rules required firms to reflect option grants as a reported expense in 2005. For example, when Michael Jensen and Kevin Murphy found that, on average, boards raised CEO pay by just $3.25 for every $1,000 increase in the value of outstanding stock, they urged companies to increase stock in the compensation of CEOs (Jensen and Murphy 1990). They assumed that better alignment of CEO incentives with owner incentives was not only valuable to owners but came at no cost in company performance. Boards of directors agreed and jumped on the Jensen and Murphy results. Brian Hall and Jeffrey Leibman showed that stock compensation increased after Jensen and Murphy published their results and called for stronger alignment of owner and manager interests in 1990 (Hall and Leibman 1998). For the purposes of this paper, there is a problem with the theory that stock-based executive compensation improves performance by aligning owner and manager interests. The theory assumes that members of the board of directors and the CEO all know which strategic options are best. Where that is not true, we need to ask whether alignment incentives may do unintended damage to the process of finding out which alternatives work best – that is, to strategy experimentation. In their seminal 1976 paper on agency costs, Michael Jensen and William Meckling argue that the expenditure on non-pecuniary benefits (perquisites) of a manager who owns all of a company will differ from the amount she spends if she owns only a portion of it. The reason is that the manager will buy perks until their marginal utility falls below her share of their cost. If she owns less than 100% of the stock, her share of those costs will be lower – and the level of perks she buys will be higher (Jensen and Meckling 1976). The power of the analysis for many practitioners comes from its implications for the expenditure of firm resources (net of benefits to the firm) on anything of known value to the manager. That includes a wide range of potential expenditures and activities that the manager will pursue to varying degrees depending on her stake in the firm. Any stake less than 100% represents a fall from the purported state of grace of an ownermanager that could have serious negative consequences for the firm. The analysis is less clear-cut if the manager is unsure of the benefits of the expenditure to the firm. Suppose she is undertaking a risky strategic



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initiative and must decide how much to spend on mitigating the risk. The manager may spend too much on risk mitigation if she worries she will lose her job should things turn out poorly. She may also spend more on mitigating the risk if she can’t diversify it as well as the outside investors. Suppose that a CEO invests her firm’s resources in crude oil production. Outside investors may offset the new exposure to oil prices by investing in retail distribution of heating oil and shrug it off. The CEO, however, may worry more about the firm than her portfolio. Once again, she would spend more on risk mitigation as a partial owner than she would spend as a full owner. But now it’s less clear whether that is good or bad. We’ll come back to this issue below. The call for more stock compensation made sense despite the fact that Jensen’s theory of stock compensation initially focused on the impact of company performance on the structure of executive pay. It’s true that the interest of this paper is in the other direction – namely, whether the structure of executive pay compromises company performance by discouraging strategy experimentation. And it’s true that the question is worth asking because of its relative neglect compared with the impact of performance on compensation. It would nevertheless be wrong to think management theorists have ignored the impact of pay on results altogether. One reason is that there is good reason to believe stock compensation lengthens executives’ time horizons – a belief older than the sustainability movement. Most boards rely on accounting results to determine executive bonuses (Murphy 1998). A board that pays its CEO only cash leaves itself open to tactics that pull profits forward or defer costs to make current results look better even if they will make future results worse. By including stock in the bonuses of top executives, boards ensure those executives bear some of the long-term consequences of their actions as determined by market analysis and subsequent trading. In fact, commentators surveying the wreckage of the 2008 financial crisis have urged the use of stock compensation structured explicitly to provide long-term incentives – despite widespread fear that simple stock options played a pivotal role in causing the collapse. For example, Sanjai Bhagat and Roberta Romano propose restricting incentive compensation to stock sellable two or more years after the executive leaves office. The purpose is to: [P]rovide superior incentives for executives to manage corporations in investors’ longer-term interest, and diminish their incentives to make public statements, manage earnings, or accept undue levels of risk, for the sake of short-term price appreciation (Bhagat and Romano 2009, 1).



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The idea that stock-based incentives can lengthen executives’ time horizons explains a classic compensation conundrum. If stock provides such healthy performance incentives, runs the puzzle, then why do CEOs pay out so much less of it to their mid-level managers than they receive from their boards? Top marketers admittedly get a lot of incentive compensation, and it may include stock-based bonuses. So do chief financial officers (CFOs). Apart from a few star salespeople, CFOs, and investment bankers, however, remarkably few business leaders running divisions of big firms receive anything like the amount of stock compensation routinely paid to CEOs. Don’t CEOs want to align their business leaders’ incentives? The answer may be precisely that stock-based incentives reward longer-term performance effects – and this may not be the foremost priority of the CEO, even if it is a priority of shareholders. Alternatively, CEOs may feel they should take responsibility for long-term performance in the corporate office while setting shorter-term goals for their division heads. There is a lot of debate about the evidence for the broader performance effects of stock compensation. In his 1998 survey of the field, Murphy explains the difficulty of ascertaining a performance effect: The scarcity of empirical evidence linking stock-based compensation to shareholder returns reflects financial economists’ belief in efficient capital markets: the current stock price incorporates all publicly available… information (Murphy 1998, 43).

Since increases in CEO stock compensation must be publicized, prices should react immediately if the compensation is expected to affect performance. Unless researchers can identify the precise date at which a change in CEO pay becomes known, however, they will either find no effect or have trouble attributing excess returns to the change in remuneration and changes in other factors immediately preceding it. Murphy asks, for example, whether early studies purporting to find small effects of pay announcements reflect market confidence in stock incentives or clever timing of CEO requests for more incentive compensation preceding upcoming unrelated positive performance news (Murphy 1998, 44). One last curious point in the emergence of stock as the dominant component of public U.S. manufacturer CEO compensation is the relative lack of attention on the part of management theorists to concerns of the labour force. It’s not just a matter of asking whether stock compensation leads CEOs to neglect workers. It’s that the perspective of workers tied to



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a specific company may usefully complement the perspective of shareholders in guiding the company to better performance. Consider two companies similar in all respects except that the CEO of one receives most of his incentive compensation in the form of stock and regards himself as an agent of the shareholders while the CEO of the other receives little stock in her incentive compensation and regards herself as the leader of the firm’s work force. Discussions of the board of the second company will balance the perspective of the work force as represented by the CEO against the perspective of shareholders as represented by the other directors. Discussions of the board of the first company, however, will proceed without any explicit representation of the perspective of labour. Yet labour’s contribution to the value created by these firms may be far greater than that of their capital investors. The modern theory of the firm assumes it can ignore the issue of the representation of various stakeholders’ interests in corporate governance because the maximization of firm value sought by shareholders should be consistent with the consensus interests of every other such group (Pareto efficiency). Workers may be comfortable with a board trying to maximize firm value, for example, because such efforts should ensure the steadiest possible set of job opportunities over time. Portfolio theory highlights a problem with the assumption, however. Suppose the two firms described above share precisely equal expected future cash flows but plan to achieve them through different strategies. Let’s say the stock-heavy CEO of the first company has selected a strategy exposed to relatively few widely-shared risks. In the terms of portfolio theory, it has a low beta (as discussed further in the next section). Suppose the stock-light CEO of the second company has selected a strategy with more widely-shared risks but with less risk overall. The second firm has a high beta. Since the expected cash flows of the two firms are identical and the first one has a lower beta, the first one will enjoy a lower cost of capital, a higher price/equity ratio, and a higher value (Markowitz 1952, 77-91).3 And yet, we have stipulated that the second firm is exposed to less risk overall. Its jobs will probably be more secure, on average, than those of the first. It is less likely to fail. Why should its value be lower than that of the first when the two firms expect identical profits? The next section takes up this issue. 3

The first firm will have higher value even if the two firms have issued debt to risk-averse bondholders so long as those bondholders focus on portfolio returns as shareholders do. See also Sharpe (1964). 



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At stake here is the broader assumption that because workers have interests that conflict with performance – such as longer vacations – the interests of the workforce are wholly irrelevant to performance. The example above suggests this may be false if workers tied to the fate of their company are sensitive to unique risks that may sink the firm but that shareholders can easily diversify. Useful as other stakeholders’ perspectives may be, stock compensation remains very popular in the U.S. Its popularity is not due to clear, unambiguous evidence that it improves firm performance, however, or that the longer-term perspective it promotes comes free of other performance costs.

The Distorting Lens of Shareholder Portfolios This section continues building the case started above that stock compensation is undermining the incentives for strategy experimentation. The argument here is that a single-minded focus on shareholder interests dulls CEOs to unique risks that stockholders can diversify and discourages senior management teams from searching seriously for evolving potential unique drivers of results. The first key point is that the beta-sensitivity of stock compensation makes it more responsive to systemic risks than firm-specific ones. The idea comes straight out of the capital asset pricing model of classical portfolio theory as invented by Harry Markowitz and developed by William Sharpe. It means intuitively that the outcomes of widely-shared risks will affect the price of a stock expressed as a multiple of its earnings more than will those of risks unique to the stock. Beta reflects the sensitivity of a security’s returns to the returns of the overall market.4 You might think of the beta of a security as the ratio of a typical change in its return to the underlying change in the market’s return. If a one percent increase in the return of the market portfolio tends to raise the return of a security by half a percent, for example, then its beta is 0.5. At the heart of portfolio theory is the counter-intuitive idea that the return of each security really depends only on its beta and the return of the

4 Returns mean the internal rates of return implied by investments in stocks at market prices and streams of future cash dividends made possible by expected earnings. They are closely related to the inverse of price/earnings multiples – and specifically the inverse of price/earnings multiples adjusted for expected earnings growth.



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market portfolio.5 In other words, the returns of a security will reflect exposure to risks that affect market returns but not exposure to other risks. Since investors hold diversified portfolios, runs the argument, they buy and sell individual securities at prices reflecting only the way those securities change the risk of the overall portfolio. But which risks affect the return of the market portfolio? Only widely-shared risks can do that – risks like exposure to economic growth, interest rates, inflation, broad levels of confidence, and so forth. Since every stock is exposed to unique risks unrelated to others, the unrelated risks form a background noise that remains just as noisy regardless of which stocks an investor holds. So the nature of those risks does not matter to the return of the overall market. And that means they do not matter to the return of the securities exposed to them (even if those risks can have a big potential impact on earnings). That makes stock returns and closely-related price-earnings multiples a poor guide to the riskiness of an individual company. And it raises the question whether the investor’s perspective – with its emphasis on widelyshared risks that are hard to diversify and its insensitivity to unique risks that are easily diversified – produces a distorted picture of the effect of strategic decisions. Indeed, if part of the goal of a strategy is to raise or lower a firm’s overall risk level, then its stock return or price/earnings multiple will be a misleading indicator of the strategy’s potential to do so. At this point the careful reader may object that even though returns and price/earnings multiples reflect just systemic risk, a firm’s earnings reflect every risk that impinges on the bottom line. Even if the price/earnings multiple stubbornly remains steady in the face of rising unique risks, the price should fall when those risks hit earnings. Part of the justification of stock compensation, however, is its capacity to lengthen managers’ time horizons by providing additional information beyond current earnings. Peering under the hood of the price of a company’s stock, you quickly see that it is not current earnings that reflect the future – CEOs are past masters at manipulating them – but rather the price/earnings multiple (or, equivalently, the growth-adjusted return) that captures the impact of strategic decisions on the firm’s future. Bad decisions are supposed to suppress that multiple. But they won’t if the decisions raise only unique risks that investors can diversify within larger portfolios. One indication that stock compensation may make CEOs especially sensitive to widely-shared risks is that firms paying CEOs the highest total 5 It also depends on the risk-free rate of return. Many things can affect earnings, of course.



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compensation – a list that mostly reflects stock compensation – tend to have betas below the market average of 1.00. In fact, firms of the twelve most highly paid U.S. CEOs in 2009 had a median beta of 0.80 and a mean of 0.85 (Barr and Goldman 2010). The median and mean betas of the twelve largest U.S. companies by revenue over the same period were 1.07 and 1.37 (ABG Analytics 2011). Of course, cause may work in the other direction – low levels of widely-shared risk and low betas may lead boards to pay CEOs more stock. But that makes little sense. If anything, you would expect boards in industries with more widely-shared risks and higher betas to pay their executives more stock to align their interests more closely with owners. There’s even a little evidence that industries with low betas try to strengthen the unique-risk sensitivity of their CEO compensation. By calibrating CEO bonuses to the relative performance of their companies vs. peers, a board can strengthen the sensitivity of pure stock compensation to unique risks. Perhaps the most surprising fact is that firms base so little of their stock compensation on relative performance. Where you do find compensation based on relative performance is in financial services, a sector with relatively low exposure to widely-shared risks and low betas. Fifty-seven percent of financial services firms pay CEOs explicitly for relative performance (where the average bank beta is 0.75) while only 21% of industrials do (where the average automotive beta, for example, is 1.50) (Murphy 1998, 75). Banks’ greater use of relative performance compensation shows that low betas probably do not generally lead boards to pay CEOs more stock. So cause would seem to flow the other way – higher stock compensation may be leading CEOs to avoid widely-shared risks and lower the beta of their firms. This does not mean that firms paying lots of stock to their CEOs are less risky. It means only that they have steered clear of widely-shared risks that affect market returns – in other words, they have avoided systemic risk. If such firms turn out to fail or stall as often as those that pay less stock to their CEOs then it must be because greater relative exposure to unique or idiosyncratic risk makes up for their lesser relative exposure to widely-shared or systemic risk. This brings us to the second key point of this section. Leadership teams that concentrate on widely-shared risks pay less attention to the search for evolving potential unique drivers of success. Evidence on the failure rate of firms with high and low CEO stock compensation, unsurprisingly, is lacking. There is nevertheless some evidence that low stock returns correlate with high failure rates. Lorenzo



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Garlappi, Tal Shu, and Hong Yan (2007) use data on expected default frequencies from Moody’s KMV to reproduce a relation between low stock returns and high expected default rates found in earlier papers by Dichev (1998), Griffin and Lemmon (2002), and Campbell, Hilscher, and Szilagyi (2004). The relation is strongest for medium and large firms. Garlappi et al. suggest shareholder recovery expectations might explain some of the details of the link between default risk and low risk premiums in stock returns. This section suggests an alternative explanation since medium and large firms are most likely to use stock-based executive pay. The alternative explanation is that a lot of firms with low betas may have high levels of unique or idiosyncratic risk. Remember that low stock returns reflect low betas, not low overall risk. Indeed, you might expect firms with low betas to carry higher unique risks than other firms if stockbased pay has led their managers to focus disproportionate resources on systemic risks. This explanation for a correlation of default risk with low returns (high price/earnings multiples) for large companies seems more robust than conjectures about such firms’ shareholders’ expectations about recoveries in bankruptcies. Even more compelling is the finding from Matt Olson’s and Derek van Bever’s stall-points initiative at the Corporate Executive Board that most corporate growth stalls since the 1950s reflect firm-specific – not systemic or market-correlated – risk factors (Olson and van Bever 2008). More specifically, Olson and van Bever find that 88% of the growth stalls (defined as sustained declines of over six percent per year following sustained growth) they studied among 600 major companies since the 1950s are due to controllable factors. These controllable factors are overwhelmingly firm-specific. Consider the four that account for over 50% of the growth stalls in their sample: Late reaction to core-business threats (called “premium position captivity”); innovation management failures; talent management failures; and premature core-business abandonment. Each of these reflects firmspecific strategy errors – or the failure, as the authors point out, to recognize wrong assumptions. And what about the kind of widely-shared risks on which stock-based pay concentrates the minds of top executives? Widely-shared risks like regulatory actions, economic downturns, labour-market rigidities, and political complications explain just twelve percent of the growth stalls among 600 of the past half-century’s largest companies. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that growing stock-based pay has focused leadership teams on containing widely-shared risks but let firm-specific risks grow like weeds.



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Taken in its entirety, this paper proposes a new explanation why high stock-based CEO pay might slow down adaptation. It’s not simply that high stock-based pay focuses senior executives on widely-shared risks only relative to something else – where that something else turns out to be firm-specific risks. The growing focus on widely-shared risks has rather given rise to a management approach that makes little room for the definition and testing of potential firm-specific drivers of success. In most companies, the management of widely-shared risks is a topdown process whereby executive committees assign responsibility for broad categories of risks to senior managers. These widely-shared categories of risk may include talent and skills availability, process integrity, customer satisfaction, and economic growth. The senior managers then task their teams with managing their risk baskets but take responsibility for them as a whole. Since widely-shared risks are, by definition, widely shared, definitions and even probability distributions of outcomes are often widely available. The only challenge is monitoring and managing the firm’s exposure to them. Stock analysts reinforce this focusing with questions on widely-shared categories of risks known to affect price-earnings ratios. The definition and testing of potential firm-specific drivers of success is entirely different and most closely resembles the methods of trial-anderror strategy development discussed in Section II. Any effective search for these risks will involve ongoing speculation based on discussion and experience as well as careful testing through the review of performance results. As firms have formalized their management of the kind of widelyshared categories of risks found in balanced scorecards, many have devolved responsibility for those that are harder to categorize – that is, for those that are firm-specific – to enterprise risk management consultants. The consultants, in turn, tend to structure rote exercises for junior executives lacking the experience to hypothesize or the authority to test new and unforeseen threats to their firm. Instead of the creative and collaborative exercises by senior management that they need, firms get bureaucratic procedures implemented on the run by isolated and overworked deputies. It’s a recipe for surprises from firm-specific risks that grow below the radar screen of price-earnings multiples and other market indicators of riskiness. The good news is that this explanation of why stock-based CEO pay might slow down adaptation is testable. The bad news is that it’s hard to measure the strategy experimentation on which adaptation depends. Effective tests will require time, surveys, and paired case studies. Two



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brief examples illustrate the kinds of comparisons that can illuminate the relation between pay and strategy experimentation. As the sole contenders for the worldwide commercial airplane market, Boeing and Airbus are very similar in the scope of their operations, the range of their products, and the profile of their clients. They differ in how they compensate their CEOs, however. Boeing’s Jim McNerny receives yearly compensation around $15 million that includes significant stockbased pay. Louis Gallois, CEO of Airbus owner EADS, receives yearly compensation closer to three million dollars, and while it includes a significant amount of stock, that stock vests only over five years. This section’s thesis suggests McNerny’s significant stock-based pay might have discouraged strategic experimentation, leaving Boeing less nimble than Airbus. Ironically, this has become a staple concern of investment advisors in the sector.6 Despite quibbles about Airbus profitability, it has won more orders than Boeing every year in the past decade except 2006 and 2007. And with the A380, despite production delays, Airbus has succeeded in manufacturing a commercial airplane with the capacity to handle the increasingly dense traffic in East Asia. British Petroleum (BP) and Exxon offer another strategic pairing. It’s been argued that BP’s incomplete devolution of strategy-setting authority to division leaders created a serious structural risk exposure (Apgar 2008, 19-24). But while the firm may not have fully addressed such structural problems and may have left itself exposed to repeated risk management lapses like Deepwater Horizon, it showed great dexterity announcing a major strategic shift to Arctic drilling in hoped-for cooperation with Russian oil giant Rosneft just nine months after the Gulf of Mexico disaster. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of its Russian venture, it is leading the oil majors to a new focus on emerging markets. Exxon, following the 1989 oil spill from the Valdez, scarcely changed its strategy at all, drawing criticism for its slow reaction in cleaning up Prince William Sound. In 2009, the firm still used more single-hull tankers – thought to be especially risky – than the ten other largest oil companies combined. The logic of this section would lead you to expect that Exxon CEOs, including current incumbent Rex Tillerson, receive more stock-based pay than BP CEOs. And indeed, this turns out to be true. For example, Exxon’s board paid Tillerson seventeen million dollars in restricted stock for 2009, dwarfing the six million dollars total compensation that Tony 6 See for example the Motley Fool discussion at http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/01/20/airbus-beats-boeing.aspx.



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Hayward received from BP’s board for the year preceding the Gulf spill (Forbes n.d.). To sum up the previous two sections, the initial evidence and the logic of portfolio theory suggest high stock-based executive pay leads CEOs to focus on widely-shared risks. The relation between low returns and high default risk and the large proportion of growth stalls due to firm-specific risks, furthermore, imply that management teams are spending too little time on them and may be focusing on widely-shared risks at their expense. Paired comparisons can help establish the extent to which stock compensation drives leadership teams to emphasize the management of widely-shared risks over the search for evolving potential unique drivers of success. This matters since stock has come to dominate CEO compensation for U.S. manufacturers despite limited evidence of its impact on performance. The incentives for strategy experimentation by U.S. industrial CEOs appear to be atrophying much like the skills for strategy experimentation. The final section describes what U.S. industrial firms facing fast-changing market conditions demanding high adaptability can do to restore the skills and incentives that strategy experimentation requires.

Unbalance the Scorecard, Balance the Compensation This final section proposes concrete steps to help managers adapt quickly to market change through strategy experimentation. CEOs and managers should follow up on the argument in Section II about the loss of skills required by strategy experimentation by devoting more time to trialand-error strategy testing and less senior time to planning based on financial requirements. And boards should consider less use of stock-based pay and more use of deferred stock payments based on relative performance even as long-term survey analysis tests the precise impact of stock-based pay. Some further remarks on stock compensation follow a practical guide to strategy testing. Reinvigorating strategy experimentation will require a performance system that tests potential manageable causes of success and failure rather than exhaustive lists of financial requirements. But that’s good news. Testing manageable causes of success and failure consumes just a tiny fraction of the resources required for requirements-based planning. And that means you can make plenty of time for it by pulling back only slightly on traditional FP&A. Two sets of practices have proven central to disciplined strategy experimentation that can rapidly reveal which factors are emerging as the



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primary drivers of a company’s results.7 Elsewhere I have called them assumption-based metrics and strategy gaps. Assumption-based metrics essentially help you state your strategy’s cause-and-effect assumptions so clearly that you can test them quickly – an antidote to the loss of strategic clarity described earlier. Strategy gaps summarize what short-term results tell you about the accuracy and adequacy of those cause-and-effect assumptions. Assumption-based metrics are changing, short lists of indicators that can supplement or replace a manager’s traditional performance scorecard or dashboard. The indicators measure not only progress toward the manager’s main performance goal but also the most important manageable factors that drive and explain results. Toyota and GE use assumptionbased metrics throughout their operations in the form of the standards at the heart of Toyota’s kaizen operating system and the statistics at the centre of GE’s version of six-sigma performance management. The critical step in defining the most useful set of assumption-based metrics for the operations, division, or company under your control is to determine which of your assumptions matter most. The simplest way to do that – a distillation of the actual practices of several different firms – starts with a simple list of every assumption you find yourself making to project short-term results. It makes no difference whether those results aim at a profit, contribution, return-on-invested-capital, revenue, market-share, satisfaction, or quality target. Each of these assumptions will be about a factor – whether controllable, uncontrollable, or a mix of the two – that affects your results. To the right of the list of factors you will need three columns of numbers. The first is the outcome you expect in the short term for each factor. If one of your factors is the defect rate on a new chip that makes the appliances you manufacture smarter, for example, then this number might be a value like eight parts in a million. The second number is a worst-case scenario for each factor. The worstcase defect rate for the chips you have procured may, for example, be fifteen parts in a million. The worst-case scenario for each factor will be different because each factor is different. But you should try to define these worst cases to the same standard. For example, you may envision

7

These practices reflect discussions, presentations, and reports from 2001 to 2008 from the following Corporate Executive Board best-practices networks for finance executives: the CFO Executive Board, the Controllers’ Leadership Roundtable, and the Treasury Leadership Roundtable. More information at www.executiveboard.com.



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your worst cases each to be the worst thing you can imagine happening to the corresponding factor once in four years or 1,000 days. The third number is the impact on your expected results if in fact the worst case for that factor occurs – but nothing else goes wrong. If your goal is to earn ten million dollars in operating profit, for example, you may estimate the impact of a fifteen parts-in-a-million defect rate to be to reduce profit by four million dollars. The last column of numbers defines WCIs for each factor – and each assumption about a factor – that you consider in projecting results. They allow a quick rank-ordering of factors. In almost every case, four or five of your factors will have much larger WCIs than the rest. For purposes of strategy testing, and indeed for most of your planning needs, you can ignore all of the rest of the factors you have listed – even if the list is as long as your quarterly management report. Factors with high WCIs are simply the ones likely to explain most of your performance surprises. They are therefore the ones that can help you decide what to change if you are not tracking to a goal. Nothing else could be as important – and that is the reason for focusing on them. The good news is that the list will always be short. The bad news – or, rather, the good news if you want to be realistic about the way our business problems evolve – is that the list will change. The careful reader will remember from the previous sections that these factors are also supposed to be manageable. Manageable factors, once again, are those that are predictable by virtue of the control over them that the manager exercises or, in the case of uncontrollable factors, the potential to forecast them better over time. We naturally select factors that are manageable when we think of assumptions. The reason may be that we make assumptions precisely to focus on what can help give us a little foresight about what we’re trying to accomplish. Lists of important assumptions seem, in any event, to produce lists of factors that are more manageable in the sense of having more predictive power than abstract lists of important factors unrelated to any explicit assumption-making exercise. You now have a set of assumption-based metrics for testing strategy over the next month or, in the case of financial services and a few other fast-changing sectors, over the next week. Strategy gaps, the other tool needed for strategy experimentation, pinpoint what to do with your actual results. Your actual results for the month (or week) will almost certainly be higher or lower than your expected results. If you target results you really expect, then actual results will probably be higher than expected half the



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time and lower half the time. When your actual results exceed what you expect, you have a positive performance gap. When actual results are lower than expected, you have a negative gap. Strategy gaps are the part of that performance gap that your current assumptions cannot explain. For example, suppose you hope to earn ten million dollars this month by selling smart vacuum cleaners. When these machines sense cat hair, let’s say, the new chip you have designed lowers the pitch of the motor so as not to offend the delicate ears of the resident rat-catcher. After ranking the assumptions behind your ten million dollar projection by WCI, you have determined that two factors matter most. The WCI for the chip’s defect rate, as in the example above, is four million dollars. The other factor, let’s say, is weather – where the WCI of average temperatures 20 degrees Fahrenheit below normal will cut profit by three million dollars due to lower-than-expected shedding and hence poor cat-sensing performance. Now let’s suppose that you enjoy normal weather for the next month but the defect rate for the chips is poor at twelve parts per million. That is roughly half way from your expected level of defects (eight) to your worst case (fifteen). Profit is worse than expected at five million dollars. By defining the part of this difference between actual and expected profit that your current assumptions cannot explain as a strategy gap, you can succinctly organize the lessons from your first month of sales. Start with the portion of the shortfall that your current assumptions do explain. The defect rate was worse than expected but not as bad as your worst-case scenario. Unless you already have better analysis available for the relation between defect rates and results, you may feel it’s reasonable to expect such a defect rate to explain a two million dollar shortfall – half of the WCI you estimated for the factor. But actual profit, at five million dollars, fell an additional three million dollars below expectations. This three million dollars is your strategy gap – you unexplained performance gap – for the month. What explains your strategy gap? It could be that you are mistaken about the relation between defect rates and results. Or you could be missing a factor as important as defect rates and the weather. You must make a judgment here. The important thing is that any strategy gap that is as large as the WCIs for the critical assumptions you are testing indicates there may be a missing factor. This is actually a remarkable piece of information. Even without the luxury of the kind of business that allows easy statistical analysis – and even without knowing what additional hidden factors you may be missing – assumption-based metrics and the strategy gaps they generate can warn



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you that you may be missing a factor just as important as the critical ones you have already identified. Nestle has an ingenious way of generating strategy gaps. In essence, Nestle asks its global product managers to explain the variation in product sales realized across different regions – and asks its regional managers to explain the variation in their regional results across different products. Any variation of specific product sales within specific regions that neither group of managers can explain amounts to a strategy gap that triggers a search for a better regional and product strategy (Apgar 2008, 162-166). Assumption-based metrics may seem a little like good hygiene. They are logical ways to think about results when you don’t have the resources or the kind of business that allow fast, incisive statistical analysis. But it is worth recalling how these tools differ from traditional requirements-based financial planning. First, assumption-based metrics change whenever large strategy gaps signal the need for new assumptions and thus refinements in strategy. Requirements-based financial planning, however, asks for the same metrics across performance periods and business units in order to build up a database of results allowing statistical analysis – particularly when the focus is on widely-shared risk factors. Second, assumption-based metrics are few in number – never more than seven (eight if you include an indicator for unwanted spill-over effects like pollution) and usually only four or five plus an indicator for the main performance goal. To the contrary, requirements-based financial planning allows – and even encourages – as many indicators as lines in a financial plan or budget. Third, assumption-based metrics are manageable in the sense of being predictable because they reflect assumptions. Requirements-based metrics often reflect components that add up to a result that are just as hard to predict as the result itself. And fourth, assumption-based metrics are by definition those that best explain results because they are selected for their high WCIs. Requirements-based analysis rarely places such a restriction on the variables it collects. Assumption-based metrics will not necessarily reflect the balance of a traditional scorecard between short-term effects like profit and customer satisfaction and long-term causes like training and process quality. As managers test their assumptions, reject some, and try out new ones, however, assumption-based metrics will pick out what at the moment most matters to results. That may seem to reinforce short-term managerial thinking, but it really reflects the uncertainty of the future. In addition to reinvigorating strategy experimentation, firms that that need to become more adaptable should reduce their emphasis on stock-



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based executive pay. The problem, as argued above, is that straight stockbased pay may encourage top managers to think like portfolio investors rather than founders or workers focused on the unique risks of the firm. To encourage long-term thinking, boards may want to consider deferred stock compensation based on relative performance. That should maintain the counter-balance of stock-based pay to the short-term emphasis of accounting-based cash bonuses while focusing on unique risks. However they do it, at any rate, boards must balance incentives for agility and long-term thinking. A related point is that CEOs should not use price-earnings ratios to gauge riskiness. Doing so may well reflect the market’s best estimate of the market-related risk embedded in strategy changes. For all the reasons given above, however, it’s likely to give short shrift to the unique risks – risks, that is, which a portfolio investor can diversify – to which a strategy initiative is exposed. United States companies benefited from the longer-term thinking that balanced scorecards and stock compensation encouraged over a long period of relative stability in domestic manufacturing markets. The encouragement came through different channels – an explicit balancing of short-term and long-term goals in the case of balanced scorecards and an offset to the short-term incentives of cash bonuses in the case of stock compensation. As the pace of change picks up in the growth markets available to U.S. manufacturers, however – markets that are increasingly located on the other side of the globe – tools for long-term thinking are failing to free top executives to adapt. The leaders of U.S. manufacturers must reinvigorate strategy experimentation through trial-and-error searches for unique drivers of success. And their boards must rebalance top executive compensation away from its reliance on stultifying stock-based pay.

References ABG Analytics. n.d. “Fortune 500 Betas.” http://www.abg-analytics.com/stock-betas.shtml. Accessed 25 January 2011. Apgar, D. 2008. Relevance: Hitting Your Goals by Knowing What Matters. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass Barr, C. and D. Goldman. 2010. “20 Highest Paid CEOs. Equilar Data Reported by CNN.” http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2010/news/1004/gallery.top_ceo_pay/i ndex.html. Accessed 25 January 2011.



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Bhagat, S. and R. Romano. 2009. Reforming Executive Compensation: Focusing and Committing to the Long-term. Leeds: Leeds School of Business Research Paper Series. Campbell, J., J. Hilscher, and J. Szilagyi. 2005. “In Search of Distress Risk.” Working Paper, Harvard University. Dichev, I. 1998. “Is the Risk of Bankruptcy a Systematic Risk?” Journal of Finance 53: 1131-1147. Finegold, D. 1992. The Decline of the U.S. Machine-tool Industry and Prospects for Recovery. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Forbes, n.d. “Rex W. Tillerson.” http://people.forbes.com/profile/rex-wtillerson/31576. Accessed 26 January 2011. Frydman, C. and R. Saks. 2007. “Historical Trends in Executive Compensation.” http://www.vanderbilt.edu/econ/sempapers/Frydman1.pdf. Accessed 16 January 2011. Gardner Publications, Inc. 2010. “2010 World Machine Tool Output and Consumption Survey.” http://www.gardnergroup.com/consump/country.html. Accessed 8 January 2011. Garlappi, L., T. Shu, and H. Yan. 2007. “Default Risk, Shareholder Advantage, and Stock Returns.” The Review of Financial Studies 21(6): 2743-2778. Garner, J. 2010. “Emerging Markets Call the Shots in World Manufacturing.” The National. http://www.thenational.ae/business/economy/emerging-markets-callthe-shots-in-world-manufacturing. Accessed 5 January 2011. Griffin, J., and M. Lemmon. 2002. “Book-to-Market Equity, Distress Risk and Stock Returns.” Journal of Finance 57(5): 2317-2336. Hall, B. and J. Leibman. 1998. “Are CEOs Really Paid Like Bureaucrats?” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113(3): 653-691. Jensen, M. and W. Meckling. 1976. “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs, and Ownership Structure.” Journal of Financial Economics 3(4): 305-360. Jensen, M. and K. Murphy. 1990. “Performance Pay and Top Management Incentives.” Journal of Political Economics 98(2): 225-264. Kaplan, R. and D. Norton. 2004. Strategy Maps. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Markowitz, H. 1952. “Portfolio Selection.” The Journal of Finance 7(1): 77–91. McChesney, R. 2006. “FCC Scandal Explodes with Second Revelation of Suppressed Media Ownership.” CommonDreams.org.



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http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0919-27.htm. Accessed 24 October 2007. Murphy, K. 1998. “Executive Pay.” Center for Effective Organizations. http://www-marshall2.usc.edu/ceo/publications/pubs_pdf/g98_9.PDF. Accessed 18 January 2011. OICA. 2010. “Production Statistics.” http://www.oica.net/category/production-statistics/. Accessed 22 July 2011. Olson, M. and D. van Bever. 2008. Stall Points. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Qingfen, D. 2006. “Continental Shift.” China Daily. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/200603/13/content_533447.htm. Accessed 24 October 2007. Sharpe, W. 1964. “Capital Asset Prices: A Theory of Market Equilibrium under Conditions of Risk.” Journal of Finance (19)3: 425-442.



CHAPTER EIGHT THE LOGICALITY OF TARGETING CIVILIANS IN IDENTITY-BASED CONFLICTS DANIEL ROTHBART

Since 1989, an overwhelming majority of large-scale violent conflict— 89.3%—has involved deep-seated hostilities related to categories of identity (ethnicity, religion, and culture) (Bercovitch and Jackson 2009, 3). The existence of ancient and often well-known hatreds between various protagonist groups offers some insight into the astonishing prevalence of this aspect of modern warfare. Yet, such hatreds also shed light on the broader understanding by protagonist groups of the enemy’s actions, motives, and defining character. Preceding the eruption of many identity-based conflicts, negative perceptions of the “Other” are elevated to the status of absolute realities, of sacred truths. Notions of the dangerous Other, which emerge from the in-group’s beliefs about their vices, criminality, and malice, become embedded as part of their essential character. Complexity, subtlety, and uncertainty are replaced by simple constructs, self-evident categories, and formulaic sequences of ideas. Dualistic narratives of in-group victimization inflicted by the threatening out-group tend to define in-group identity and out-group difference, and in so doing, shape a logical course of action for the in-group to take. In these cases, the in-group tends to define itself through notions of innocence, righteousness, and strength. Such reductive constructs are intensified by the prevalence of riveting examples of enemy brutality, criminality, and even degeneracy, which in turn become reified as iconic images that serve as unquestioned realities. Within Western Europe, the emblem of the swastika, or the action of a flat, raised palm, illustrate poignantly how iconic images can capture the essence of absolute evil. Through the conscious and unconscious creation and employment of such icons, the enemy’s malice becomes obvious to all members of the ingroup, demonstrating the apparent necessity of violent action against the enemy Other.

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In this chapter, I focus on certain identity-constructs that drive two recent ethnic-based conflicts—the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the ethnic cleansing in Darfur that reached its peak in 2003-2005. In the section concerning Rwanda, I examine how the Hutu extremists in Rwanda, known as “interahamwe,” launched a propaganda campaign of ethnic hatred against the Tutsis, their fellow countrymen. Portraying Tutsis as obsessed with the conquest of Rwanda and the extermination of Hutus, the extremists implored the general Hutu population to take “defensive” actions in a war for survival. Similar patterns of enmity characterize the Darfur conflict, which I address in the section following. In the Darfur crisis, the Arab militia group known as the Janjaweed collaborated with the armed forces of the government of Sudan in a campaign of ethnic cleansing, and arguably genocide, against neighbouring tribes. As the tide of accusations against enemy militants swept quickly through the region, large segments of the civilian population became engulfed in the orgy of violence.1 In both conflicts, the array of constructs of the dangerous Other shapes both the “realities” of the existential threat posed by the enemy and the “necessity” for violent response. Stories of violence and victims, dangers and safety, and enemies and heroes foster the creation of normative boundaries. As storytellers ascribe blame to the Other and condemn their evil-doings, they solidify in-group virtues. Devaluation of the Other creates a kind of security in simplicity that remedies the fears brought about by chaos and violence. An axiology of difference emboldens the ingroup to create, maintain, and reinforce certain social bonds (Rothbart and Korostelina 2006, Chapter 3). Characterizations of group difference cannot be explained or examined by resorting to familiar epistemic categories such as knowledge/opinion, true/false, or rational/irrational. Such characterizations go beyond, or beneath, the threshold of rationality, and in so doing, establish a justification for vigilance, sacrifice, and, in some cases, outright attack. Once the narratives of out-group threat evolve into the full-blown rhetoric of war, injunctions for “defensive” action become logically apparent, plain for all (within the in-group) to see. These injunctions in turn sow the seeds for a conflict spiral. A desire for safety,

1

Empirical researchers have shown that, on a global scale, the devastation of warfare disproportionally affects civilian non-combatants in relation to military combatants. In an aggregate of protracted conflict of all kinds, civilians comprise approximately 75% of all fatalities of war, if we include among the fatalities the non-battle deaths, such as disease, that arise from needs deprived as a result of war’s tumult (Annan 1999). 



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as well as a hope for peace, is often the prelude to protracted—or perpetual—conflict. In my analysis below, I rely on certain assumptions about the nature of ethnic identity. My first assumption is that when we self-identify as a member of an ethnic group, we affirm that we belong to a community of like-minded and like-acting people. I also rely on the premise that an ethnic community is a named human population with shared ancestry myths, histories, and cultures that generally claims an association with a specific territory (Smith 1996, 6). In certain respects, however, ethnicity is intangible, liminally situated, defined by the zones “between” people. Ethnicity is more a force that shapes social relations, familial bonds, and social mores than a specific biology or bloodline. The lived tradition of an ethnic community is never finished, final, or fixed with respect to a single set of social constructions. It is continuous, “on the way” to being different from what it is currently (Shotter 1993, 90). The motive for group membership is virtually universal—as social creatures, human beings gain comfort and solace in the face of life’s dangers, frailty, and finitude by bonding in social groups. But our tribal nature also provides the source for some of life’s dangers in our encounters with neighbouring communities. Attempting to define who “we” are in relation to other groups gives rise to commonplace dualities of inclusion/exclusion, us/them, we/other, and inside/outside. In other words, every ethnic community defines itself by what, and who, they are not. Group membership is defined through a cluster of rights, as well as duties to perform, or prevent, certain actions. In conflicts fuelled by ethnic identity issues, a system of group positioning underpins the interactions between conflict protagonists. For any positioning system, group divisions are defined through commitments to the rights and obligations that guide actions. These commitments are reinforced through storytelling practices and realized through speech and other acts. Different storylines are linked to different normative orders, and contain presuppositions about what actions count as right, legitimate, or appropriate (Harré and van Langenhove 1999, Introduction; Harré and Moghaddam 2003, Chapter 1).

Rwandan Genocide Enmity between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda did not begin in 1994. The ideology of racial hatred in Rwanda has its historical roots in colonial rule. When the Belgians took control of Rwanda in 1916, they instituted policies that distorted racial divisions between Tutsis and Hutus. The Belgians believed the Tutsis possessed “nobler,” more “naturally”



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aristocratic features than the “coarse” Hutus. They placed Hutus in forced labour camps, road construction gangs, and forestry crews, so that by the 1930s Tutsi leaders enjoyed a complete and unprecedented monopoly of “traditional leadership positions” in Rwanda (International Centre Against Censorship 1996, 10). This situation was reversed, however, after a Hutu uprising in 1959, which left the majority of Tutsi chiefs dead or in exile and ushered in the “Social Revolution” of 1959. Full independence came on July 1, 1962, and in the legislative elections of 1965 only the Hutu-based MDR-Parmehutu party of President Grégoire Kayibanda fielded candidates. Thus, a full reversal of power was achieved, and deep-seated racial hatreds persisted even after Rwanda acquired full independence. In reaction to the years of extreme pro-Tutsi ideology they had suffered under Belgian rule, Hutu extremists did not rest after the Social Revolution righted past imbalances, but sought to go further; by the late 1980s and early 1990s, these fanatics were portraying Tutsis as essentially degenerate. After the October 1990 invasion of the Ugandabased Rwanda Patriotic Army (RPA), some Hutu extremists began to claim that Hutu survival demanded the utter elimination of Rwandan Tutsis. A transforming moment in the radicalization of Hutu opinion occurred with the assassination of Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, in a plane crash near Kigali’s airport on April 6, 1994. The country erupted into an orgy of violence, and the systematic campaign of extermination by the interahamwe (Hutu death squads) resulted in 500,000 to 800,000 murders and more than two million displaced from their homes. However, the degree and the swiftness of the violence which broke out after Habyarimana’s assassination would not have been possible without the foundation of political propaganda that preceded it. The existence of antiTutsi propaganda was not a new phenomenon, but represented a shift from the anti-Tutsi ideology of the 1950s to one which claimed that Tutsis had always dominated Hutus, willingly exploited a caste system of institutionalized injustice, and routinely practiced brutality against them. Such an ideology perpetuated myths of the Tutsi as “power-hungry” and “terrible warriors,” portraying them as an “intelligent,” “tricky,” “doubledealing,” and “dishonest” people whose presence in Rwanda served as a direct threat to the Hutus, who saw themselves as the “genuine” Rwandans. Underpinning this ideology are numerous social-psychological constructs about group differences that work on a discursive level to normalize acts of violence that would otherwise seem unspeakable. These constructs can be classified into three basic types for distinct analysis: (1)



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mythic narratives of group difference, (2) icons of the enemy Other, and (3) normative categories of in-group/out-group duality. As noted above, each of these constructs operates to mutual effect to establish a logicality of action that shapes the campaign of violence against the enemy. Mythic Narratives When neighbouring communities share a history of violent struggle, certain episodes of past violence acquire a cognitive intensity in the group’s collective consciousness. Over generations of storytelling practice, such cherished or reverenced episodes become venerated, and acquire an aspect of immortality over the experiential world; they attain the level of myth and are lifted outside the tide of sequential events. Certain places, times, and encounters are selected and revered as the mythic tales of the past, and cast as prototypes for a normative order in which the out-group is situated hierarchically below that of the in-group (Appleby 2000, 173). Mythic narrative is not limited to accounts of the past. For example, a conflict protagonist telling a story about the out-group’s longstanding criminal deeds will frequently cast an eye towards the future, imagining how the current course of events could change based on various scenarios. Decisions the in-group makes about what actions to take cohere with an idealized vision of injustices that should be redressed here in the real world, a vision often projected backwards and forwards in time simultaneously. Whether real or imagined, the mythic event is interlaced with value judgments—good/bad, right/wrong, and sacred/profane (Ricoeur 1974, 423-425). Proclamations about the enemy’s threats tend to oscillate between retrospective framing and anticipatory projection. This forward/backward projection of an idealized vision of the world establishes a sense of continuity to the enemy’s threat, in which the alleged criminality of the past portends an ominous future. And based on the way myth operates, the source of the threat is not found in a complex, nuanced set of political interactions but in the enemy’s essential being, in their character traits of malice, degeneracy, greed, or inhumanity. Seen in this light, the responses of the in-group have moral worth, at the very least to thwart the advances of invaders. Their decision to respond to the enemy’s threats with violent action is cast as existentially imperative, and forms part of the framework that defines the purpose (or telos) of the embattled in-group. The in-group actions are right, commendable, praiseworthy, pure, noble, angelic, saintly, or possibly godlike. Such actions promote and cohere with an



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idealized vision of “the good.” In so doing, notions of in-group moral superiority and out-group degeneracy are intensified. For example, in the prelude to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, Hutu extremists exploited a myth that Tutsis were not genuinely Rwandan— they were, instead, outsiders who have infiltrated Rwanda and have stolen positions of power from the rightful recipients, the Hutus.2 The mythic history employed by the Hutu extremists essentialized the Tutsis as invaders, conquerors, and criminals. Simply belonging to the group that had stealthily invaded the country and stolen Hutu resources erased claims to any individual rights a particular Tutsi might appear to possess. Ancient distinctions were also mythologized, and propaganda-centred notions of separate Tutsi-Hamite and Hutu-Bantus “races” flourished, deepening divisions. The myth of the “feudal” Tutsi who operated as a “race of arrogant lords” was solidified. In the 1990s, racial hatreds were aggravated through the release of state-sponsored media that captivated public attention with increasingly elaborate character-assassinations of individual Tutsis, stories of past atrocities, and narratives of Tutsi plans for conquest. The Tutsis were denigrated in the national media as degenerate, criminal, and vicious. Indeed, these broadcasts and news stories, by nature of their ubiquity, gave the Hutus a sense of empowerment that fomented their appetite for violence, as the demonization campaign by anti-Tutsi propagandists fabricated identity differences that did not exist. Hutu extremists fostered notions of an embattled identity, casting Tutsis as lusting for complete domination of the Hutu race. The dissemination of this myth easily established and essentialized Tutsi criminality and degeneracy. In December 1990, the magazine Kangura issued an anti-Tutsi declaration and call to arms for all Hutus. Known as the “Ten Commandments,” this declaration fuelled Hutu hysteria in support of a campaign of Tutsi extermination. The commandments included references to Tutsis as power-hungry, wicked, and deceitful. The injunctions for action conveyed in Commandments Five, Six, Seven, Nine and Ten established what every Hutu “must do” for survival (Semujanga 2003, 197). The combined effect of these commandments works as a call to eliminate the Tutsi threat. Commandment Eight insists that the Hutu must “stop feeling any pity for the Tutsi,” and provides a moral loophole for any Hutu experiencing qualms about killing the Tutsi; this loophole argues that killing them is necessary since they are enemies of the republic. Commandment Eight comes as a logical conclusion to the narratives of 2

For an analysis of this propaganda campaign see Rothbart and Bartlett (2008).



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knowledge and action outlined in the other nine: Spread Hutu ideology, “counter Tutsi propaganda,” and kill the interlopers. This anti-Tutsi campaign, neatly outlined in “Ten Commandment” form (itself a powerful myth mirroring religious law) galvanized Hutus to participate in a campaign of extermination. According Hutu extremists, the only way to prevent their own extermination was to sacrifice all Tutsis, even friends, neighbours, and relatives. The following issue of Kangura demonstrates this: Kangura December 1990, 10–11 (Chrétien 1995, 290–291): In truth, no one is unaware that we have been attacked by enemies of Rwanda. These enemies of the country prepared themselves a long time ago, since they were pushed back at the time of the first attacks, they didn’t stop there, they went to prepare a war which will not leave anybody alive. In preparing that war, they have constituted a network of accomplices among business people, among the military and the civilians, among the Rwandan journalists and foreigners.

Figure 1: Anti-Tutsi Ideology in the Immediate Pre-Genocide Period



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Figure 1 replicates one storyline and the relative positions adopted and used to justify extreme acts. This figure illustrates the real-world effects of social-psychological constructs about group differences that work on a discursive level to normalize acts of violence. Within this web of stories and positions, the actions that protagonists carry out will not only appear justified but the only honourable course. Thus, a small shift in the storylines and narratives that make up a group’s interpretative repertoire can lead to an escalation of violence as the acts appropriate to these rights and duties are recalibrated. Such shifts reflect a critical transformation in the relative placement of conflict parties, that is, in the relative positioning regarding in-group/out-group identity. Iconic Images In protracted violent conflict, images of the enemy have powerful effects on those who consume them, and their appearance marks a major stage in the characterization of the Other as dangerous. The evolution of an image from factual depiction to icon lifts the image above the immediacy and locality of a particular encounter; icons by their nature exceed their empirical base, serving as a kind of shorthand to additional meaning concealed within normative constructs. Emerging from specific storylines pertaining to localized episodes, icons function as graphic expressions of eternal characteristics of good and evil. A particular episode, event, action, or encounter is thus privileged, venerated, and sometimes sanctified in this transition from particular image to timeless icon. Certain images function as prototypes of the enemy’s unjust, immoral, uncivilized, or even inhuman character. By linking sensory images to cognitive content, the icons exhibit a projective capability, opening imaginative avenues to a charged realm typically inhabited by figures (whether imaginary or real) of the scared past. The use of icons suppresses uncertainties and doubts about the Other; complexities of character are replaced by simple, reductive ideas (e.g., “snake in the grass”). The process of icon-formation collapses the enormous range of real-life experiences into powerfully compact representations. The consumption of icons produces an immediate effect in which the full potency of what is represented (heroism, maliciousness, deception, un-cleanliness) is unleashed within the mind of the viewer and irrevocably transferred to whatever is associated with the image. In the case of the genocide in Rwanda, Hutu propagandists resorted to species-attribution, portraying Tutsis with evocative images of insects, reptiles, and predators. They depicted the Tutsi as groups of cockroaches



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preparing inconspicuously for invasion; the idea of an infestation of cockroaches in anyone’s home is enough to send shudders down the spine. Hutu propagandists also portrayed the Tutsi as snakes posing as “real” Hutus. The snake imagery here reinforced characteristics of secrecy, malice, and predation. This imagery translated easily to stories of how Tutsi men coerced their women to seduce Hutus for the purposes of taking over Rwanda (Klinghoffer 1998, 10). Once the Tutsi were tainted by being visually and imaginatively associated with vermin, it was a simple step to implore Hutus to exterminate them. Hutus were told to “get to work,” “clear the bush,” and “clean around their houses,” which were, of course, euphemisms for killing Tutsi made palatable (and justifiable) by the use of graphic imagery (Klinghoffer 1998, 45). Categories of In-group/Out-group Duality A third type of social construct that underpins protracted violent conflict concerns exclusionary categories of group difference. These normative categories that reduce all group differences to a set of dualities work in tandem with mythic narratives and iconic images to perpetuate violence and hatred even when change does occur. The dangerous Others are cast as homogeneous, unchanging in their behaviour, committed to long-term fixed beliefs and values, and able to act across a wide-ranging, even global, arena. They appear to act as a single entity and speak with one voice, which is usually attributed to a glorified leader. The enemy is essentialized through its vices. “They” are bad, vicious, or unjust; “We” are good, virtuous, or just. In such narrative retellings, the threatening Other rarely, if ever, acts justly. Over the course of a prolonged and brutal conflict, protagonists tend to define socio-political boundaries as impenetrable divisions between the conflicting parties. When hatreds intensify, such differences are elevated to the level of a social ontology that is intertwined with the so-called “laws” of the ethnic, racial, religious, political, or nationalistic order. And the boundary divisions that are presumably set by such laws are linked closely to normative imperatives to be vigilant at home and strong abroad. These imperatives are linked to demands to redress past injustices, avenge long-standing grievances, and eliminate the source of evil. With such a normative order, the home population tends to turn from complex reality to comforting simplicity, narrowing its vision to focus on two basic outcomes--victory abroad and security at home. Lurking behind this beguiling equation lays the glory and comfort of a belief in in-group purity. The in-group, safely ensconced in its own circle of perceived victimhood, learns not to see, hear, or speak about the victims of its own militant forces.



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A normative order has a temporal dimension. Protagonists of conflict live simultaneously in the past, future, and present. Memories of past calamities alone would be radically incomplete as a motive for violence without a normative vision of the idealized future. A conflict protagonist telling a story about the enemy’s longstanding criminal deeds will inevitably shift attention away from the past and cast an eye towards future possibilities, imagining how the current course of events could change based on various scenarios. Decisions the in-group makes about what actions to take cohere with an idealized vision of “the good,” a vision often projected backwards and forwards in time simultaneously. The notion of the right course of action is inseparable from a vision of betterment, of promoting good and preventing bad. Memories of a group’s mythic history are encased in a pre-formed logicality of action that affirms and enshrines a set of decisions leading to conflict in the present. The narrative of inevitable conflict, tacitly supported by its apparent logicality based on past examples, follows from demands for vigilance, obedience, strength, and sacrifice (Frohardt and Temin 2003). In some cases, the story of impending incursion and conquest by the Other establishes a rationale for pre-emptive attacks against the “invaders” as a measure of “self-defence.” The application of an axiology of difference (those normative dualities of good/bad, virtuous/vicious) to present or future scenarios thus confers a sense of stability to in-group identity and consistency (even fairness) in the implementation of norms. Normative categories of group difference come to characterize additional groups that are associated with the enemy Other. In narratives depicting enemy/civilian collaboration, civilians are portrayed as acting in concert with the enemy, harbouring enemy militants, offering them safe haven, providing them with material support, or celebrating their victories and lamenting their losses. Civilians who are non-party to the conflict are often cast as unjust, dangerous, and therefore malicious. In these narratives, civilians can absorb many of the enemy’s negative characteristics by acts that are perceived as collaborative. Ostensibly fixed characterizations of the Other as evil, wilfully destructive, and possibly uncivilized can spread to taint other groups that come to be associated with the enemy or the enemy’s cause, contributing directly to long-simmering hostilities, and shaping conflictual relationships among protagonist groups (Rothbart and Korostelina 2011, Chapter Two).



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Crisis in Darfur In certain respects, the Darfur crisis echoes other protracted conflicts in which the reins of political power are concentrated in the hands of an elite group at the expense of the majority of citizens. A cadre of elites living primarily in Khartoum has established systems of paralyzing control over the communities living at the periphery of power. By filling leadership positions in the central government, the elite have ruled Sudan in ways that solidify extreme power. Inequities in various sectors of Sudanese society are conjoined with inter-tribal rivalries that fuel the flames of ethnic hatred. To complicate matters further, multiple forms of powerinequities underpin inter-tribal rivalries among the marginalized communities. This lethal combination of political controls and tribal hostilities produces the perfect conditions for protracted violence in the form of coordinated military assaults by the Janjaweed and the government of Sudan against the Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawa tribes. In this section, I examine how the central elite have exploited intertribal rivalries in Darfur in their military campaign against the rebel forces. Special attention is given to the receptivity of the primary agents of ethnic violence, known as the Janjaweed. The social-psychological underpinnings of the Janjaweed malice against their African neighbours exhibit striking parallels to that of the Hutu extremists against the Tutsis of Rwanda. And the triplet constructions—mythic narratives, enemy icons, and normative categories of in-group/out-group duality—operate as a basis to rationalize the violence that masquerades as just and necessary action. Darfur: A Multiplicity of Conflicts Large portions of the Darfur population have been subjected to a campaign of ethnic cleansing at the hands of a coalition of forces from the Sudanese government and an Arab militia group known as the Janjaweed.3 In village after village the attackers systematically kill or torture the men, rape the women, and abduct the children. The assaults against these groups often begin with unprovoked air strikes by government bombers, fighter jets, or helicopter gunships. In coordinated ground assaults the Janjaweed then sweeps into a town or village riding horse-back or driving make-shift military vehicles. These fighters are supplied with weapons from the 3

According to a U.N. Commission of Experts, ethnic cleaning is “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terrorinspiring means to the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas” (United Nations Security Council 1994).



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central government; they also don the uniforms and insignias of the national army. The attackers target the essential material resources of the inhabitants. Livestock are killed, fields torched, wells poisoned, farm equipment destroyed, and communal buildings levelled, including health clinics, schools, and municipal buildings (Tanner and Tubiana 2007, 2526). Throughout these military campaigns, government officials recruit criminal elements from the Arab tribes, enticing them with cash, promises of war booty, and the opportunity to seek revenge on their hated “African” neighbours. The Sudanese military distribute weapons, identity cards, uniforms, and money to select tribal members, many of whom were known criminals (Flint 2009, 17-18). An example of the brutal attacks they perpetrate against civilians is recounted in vivid testimony by an exJanjaweed combatant who admits to killing innocent villagers in over fifty attacks on Darfuri villages: The people who trained us came from the north, from the government. They gave us orders, and they say that after we are trained they will give us guns and ammunition... They were wearing the uniforms of the military... I tell you one fact. The Janjaweed don't make decisions. The orders come from the government... One very well-known and regular visitor was Interior Minister Abdul Rahim Muhammad Hussein. We will be split into two groups, one on horses, one on camels... The aircraft went ahead of the Janjaweed. We saw the smoke, we saw the fire, then we went in... Whenever we go into a village and find resistance we kill everyone. Sometimes they said wipe out an entire village... We hear kill! Kill! Kill! And we shoot to kill... Most were civilians most were women... Innocent people running out and being killed including children. And those who escape will die of thirst. There are many rapes. But they don't do it in front of others. They take the victim away and rape them. (BBC News 2006)

Many humanitarian organizations claim that over 300,000 Darfurian civilians have been killed since fighting erupted in 2003. A 2009 study of the morality rate in Darfur estimates that the total death toll of Darfuri civilians is 298,271.4 And the sources of death within this population reveal a critical pattern about war’s victims—most fatalities are caused by diseases brought on by the devastating conditions left in war’s wake. Eighty percent of these victims succumb to disease, most often from the 4

Actually, this figure is calculated as the mean between a range of estimated fatalities of 178,257 and 461,520 with a 95% confidence index (Degomme and Guha-Sapir 2010). 



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effects of malnutrition, diarrhea, and waterborne diseases. The coordinated attacks of the Janjaweed militia forcibly uproot non-Arabs from their villages, leaving the land open for looting and confiscation. The plight of internally displaced civilians in Darfur represents a humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportion, with large portions of the Fur, Zaghawa, and Massalit tribes most affected. According to the United Nations, the number of internally displaced Darfurians exceeded 2,420,000 on January 1, 2008 (United Nations Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sudan n.d.). The conflict in Darfur illustrates a particular kind of hostility known as structural violence. Structural violence is not defined as person-to-person assaults, although this form of brutality may be its consequence (Galtung 1969). Structural violence is a system’s faceless form of inequity, cloaked under layers of public speeches, official reports, and imposing buildings. This is the kind of violence that is situated within institutions of power that often leaves its victims vulnerable to many kinds of abuses. Today, the structural violence in Darfur is present in four sectors of society: • In the realm of social services, the central government has effectively abandoned its responsibility in the areas of health care, housing, education, and agricultural production throughout Darfur. The extreme poverty of Darfurians in contrast to the wealth of political officials has intensified bitterness towards the central elite in Khartoum (De Waal 2007, 20). • In the political realm, the central government has imposed laws that are politically detrimental to Darfurians. The national government has sought to weaken the power-base of Darfur by implementing a pernicious divide-and-rule strategy. For example, the 1994 decision to partition Darfur into three federal states intentionally diminished the political power of the Fur, which is the largest tribe in Darfur. • In the cultural realm, ideologically motivated policies of the central government have had an oppressive effect on non-Arab Darfurians. Certain government policies foster an Arabism that is viewed as threatening to the traditions of many Africans in Darfur. • In the realm of civilian safety, a state of lawlessness in Darfur has undermined security, with particularly devastating effects on women. For its part, the national government acts as a willing collaborator to the Arab militia in its large-scale campaigns of banditry, luring certain criminal elements into the conflict by allowing them to confiscate the booty of war from attacks on the non-Arab tribes. This state of



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lawlessness in particular reveals the deadly alliance between the Janjaweed and government forces. So why have so many Arabs taken up arms against their African neighbours when both groups have suffered at the hands of government neglect, greed, and in some cases vengeance? Why has inter-ethnic skirmishing escalated to the point of ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide? To address these questions we turn to the ethno-politics of the Janjaweed that define who they are and what they do. Who Are the Janjaweed? Although they are the prime agents of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, the Janjaweed are not an ethnic group in the way the Fur, Massalit, and Zaghawa tribes are. In this conflict setting the “naturalness” of certain Arab communities blends with the “artificiality” of military/political manipulation by the Sudanese leadership. It is said that “whoever speaks Arabic is an Arab.” But the criteria for defining Arab identity in Sudan cannot be reduced to a single defining factor. Arab identity in Sudan is complex, extending beyond language and culture to include elements of religion, region, and ancestry. Such identity reflects a blend of historical fact, popular belief, and political commitment. And claims to Arab identity represent social constructions that are determined inconsistently by combinations of race, kinship, skin colour, culture, language, region, and religion. The identity of southern Sudan is characterized by traditional African religions and Africanism. The term “Janjaweed,” which means “horsemen” or “devils on horseback,” entered the Darfuri vocabulary in the late 1980s to represent a constellation of various social groups. The Janjaweed do not have historical roots in any historical or cultural tradition of Sudan. Sociologically, it finds its members from six groups: Former bandits and highwaymen, demobilized soldiers from the regular army, young members of the Arab tribes engaged in long-terms clashes with neighbouring African groups, common criminals recently released from jail, and young unemployed Arab men (Prunier 2005, 97-98). For many Darfuri Africans, tribal existence is connected to the rootedness of land. The sense of solidity, permanence, and longevity of the soil itself functions as a dominant (if unquestioned) icon for the stability of the community. For these groups, it is as if the community grows directly out of the soil (Malkki 1995). The notion of ethnicity provides a sense of stability in space among those who are bound by a territorialized existence. But for Arab nomads, rootedness is secondary to their sense of



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temporal stability; their sense of identity is not dependent on putting down roots, as it were, in a single territory or a particular region. After the combined forces of the Sudanese Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice Equality Movement (JEM) scored a military victory on April 25, 2003, in al Fasher, capital of North Darfur, the national government intensified its campaign to recruit Arab fighters. Under the command of Sudanese forces, these recruits were organized into militia bases in al Fasher. By the end of 2003, the Janjaweed were absorbed into various martial forces of the national government, such as the popular defence forces, the Border Intelligence and Border Guard units, and the nomadic police (Haggar 2007, 128). In the early stages of the Darfur crisis, the government converted these disparate groups into an organized military group through military training, indoctrination, and promises of material reward from payments and wartime booty. The government sought to exploit the marginality and poverty of many Darfuri Arabs by enticing their young men to serve in a campaign against their hated non-Arab neighbours. The government even supplied them with the uniforms and insignia of the national army (Flint 2009, 17). The camps from which the Janjaweed launched their attacks became the site of extensive government activity. A first-hand account of such activity comes from the testimony of Omda Khidir Ali Abdel Rawman, who was imprisoned in a Janjaweed encampment in 2004 for aiding the rebel militia: Helicopters came two to three times a week, carrying weapons, ammunition, and money. The salary for the soldiers was SPD 350,000 [$137], but they only received SPD 200,000 [$87] because the officers creamed off the top. Prisoners who were educated read the slips for them. They were angry when they found out they were being cheated. …In 2004, two camps were organized one was run by the Central Reserve Police, with three months’ weapons training for 200-250 men each time. Some went on to further training in Khartoum and, we heard, in Syria, too. The other camp was under the army. The training here lasted only one month and was without weapons, for 150-200 men at a time. There are three types of Janjaweed: • Border Guards, with military IDs and salaries. They were the elite. • PDF [Popular Defense Forces]. They were given uniforms, guns, ammunition, and food, but had no salaries. They got SPD 100,000 [$39] for every operation they went on. • Mustanfareen [reserves]. They were recruited by force and given uniforms but no salary. If they refused, they were fined five camels or put in jail. When I arrived the Janjaweed were living under trees and in rakubas [open-sided thatched shelters]. The prisoners were made to build



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Aside from the lure of government promises for money and war booty, the Janjaweed were driven by an historic sense of domination over their African neighbours. Many Arabs recruited in the government campaign may have been motivated, in part, by feelings of shame, humiliation, and guilt associated with their own marginalization. Many of the disenfranchised young Arabs who joined the Janjaweed militia sought to achieve cultural legitimacy by tainting their African neighbours as “inauthentic” Sudanese and “degenerate” racial inferiors. Drawn by the appeal of acting as political equals with the nation’s elite in Khartoum, these Arabs readily adopted the political aims of those in power and served as the militant arm of a corrupt administration. Many of the Janjaweed fighters regard the African tribes with disdain, casting Black Africans as unworthy of “real” Sudanese identity. Based on the mythic history espoused by the Arab extremists, African Darfurians are essentialized by a mythic narrative that dictates their permanent marginalization, and assigns them permanently to Sudan’s “outer regions.” This narrative fosters notions of a stigmatized existence; the Africans are characterized as poor, uncultured, uneducated, and “unworthy” of the rights, however unrealized, tied to Sudanese citizenship. Their “imperfect” speech, for example, stigmatizes them as uneducated. They are often confined to positions that reinforce perceptions of their “rightful” place in the lower echelons of society—farm labourers, construction workers, and seasonal workers. Their diminished status is rationalized within mythic narratives as eternal and fixed (Tanner 2007, 11). The vitriolic hatred of the Janjaweed for African Darfurians is intensified by their reliance on icons of African degeneracy. The animal imagery employed by the Janjaweed to characterize African tribal groups insinuates the existence of an impenetrable boundary that divides Arabs from non-Arabs in Sudan. Throughout the conflict, Janjaweed militia in Darfur spewed out racist slurs against their non-Arab victims, calling members of the tribal groups “slaves” and “insects.” They rationalized the military campaign against civilians with a fully developed racist ideology. Even the Janjaweed women played a part in the hostilities, orchestrating racist songs to accompany acts of sexual violence. They sang songs in praise of the government and the attackers while accompanying the assaults and encouraging the brutality of rape: The blood of the Blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power of al-



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Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you Blacks, we have killed your God …You are gorillas, you are Black. (Amnesty International 2004)

The Janjaweed in these instances operate from a sense of a normative order of ethnic/tribal positioning among Darfurians. Such positioning is linked closely to imperatives to oppose the enemy, convert the contaminated, or act according to the (ethnic, racial, religious, political, social, or economic) “laws” of nature. The normative order of group differences generates these “do-or-die” imperatives via a nexus of group positioning, iconic modelling, normative ordering, and a logicality of action. The reliance on notions of a normative order is not uncommon in ethnic conflicts. From a social-psychological perspective, the act of externalizing an evil onto a stigmatized group effectively ejects that evil from the midst of the in-group, creating a border between the sacred and the profane, the clean and the unclean. Devaluation of the Other offers a sense of comparative security that seems to reduce otherwise unmanageable fears brought about by naturally occurring hardships. In this way, members of the in-group are “saved”; they live in a state of grace (on the correct side of the border) and are purified in their dealings with the “unclean” Other, regardless of what those dealings might entail. The conversion of private hatreds to public denigration tends to cast notions of group difference as exclusionary polarities. The notion of essential difference is charged with moralistic meaning, linked to injunctions to solidify boundary divisions in order to preserve in-group safety and purity. And as storytellers ascribe blame to the Other and condemn their evildoings, they solidify and safeguard in-group virtues. The institutions and policies of the faithful are glorified—indeed almost purified—when contrasted with those of the vilified Other.

Conclusion In both conflict settings analyzed above, the rationale for actions taken against a perceived enemy are intertwined with notions of group difference, via the triplet construction of mythic narratives, negative icons, and notions of a normative order. As the “realities” of group difference take shape among the conflict protagonists, the violent struggle with the enemy is characterized as a necessary, inevitable, and righteous step for the in-group to take. In Rwanda, the broadcasts by Hutu extremists about Tutsis acting as “feudal lords” provided fertile ground for the anti-Tutsi ideologies of the early 1990s. Hutu radio broadcasts made it seem as



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though it was obvious that the Tutsis had to be eradicated to prevent Tutsi domination. Such inflammatory broadcasts were linked to demands to redress past injustices, avenge long-standing grievances, eliminate the source of evil, and return Hutus to their “rightful” positions in Rwanda. The conclusion that Tutsis should be removed from Rwanda followed seamlessly—and without pause—from descriptions of the Tutsi as evil and poisonous. In Darfur, the powerful elite in Khartoum enticed the native Arab groups to collaborate in a campaign of ethnic cleansing by exploiting the inter-tribal rivalries that emerged from the marginality of groups, both Arab and non-Arab, living at the periphery of power. Those in power recruited those motivated by the shame, humiliation and guilt associated with their degraded status into the Janjaweed militia, offering them the opportunity to achieve comparative elevation by stigmatizing Darfurian Africans as inauthentic Sudanese and racial inferiors. Yet, the essence of the Janjaweed identity is grounded in both the lived traditions of Darfurian Arab tribes and the military politics of the civil war in Sudan. This martial force represents a hybridization of ethno-political constructions that was exploited effectively by the central government for their own military purposes. In both conflicts, ethno-political constructions about group differences reveal the a-rational sources of the conflict and its downward spiral of violence.

References Amnesty International. 2004. Sudan, Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War: Sexual Violence and Its Consequences. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR54/076/2004/en/f66115ea -d5b4-11dd-bb24-1fb85fe8fa05/afr540762004en.pdf . Accessed 22 July 2011. Annan, K. 1999. “Reflections on Intervention: Statement at Ditchley Park, UK, June 26, 1998.” In The Question of Intervention, 3-16. New York: United Nations Department of Public Information. Appleby, R. 2000. The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. BBC News. 2006. “Excerpts: Ex-Janjaweed Fighter Story.” (Updated 17 October 2006). http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6060856.stm. Accessed 22 July 2011. Bercovitch, J. and R. Jackson. 2009. Conflict Resolution in the TwentyFirst Century. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Chrétien, J. 1995. Rwanda: Les Medias du Genocide. Paris: Karthala.



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De Waal, A. 2007. “Sudan: The Turbulent State.” In War in Darfur: And the Search for Peace, edited by A. de Waal, 1-38. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Degomme, O. and G. Debarati. 2010. “Patterns of Mortality Rates in Darfur Conflict.” The Lancet 375: 294 – 300. el-Din, K. 2007. “Islam and Islamism in Darfur.” In War in Darfur: And the Search for Peace, edited by A. de Waal, 92-112. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Flint, J. 2009. Beyond “Janjaweed:” Understanding the Militias of Darfur, Geneva, Small Arms Survey. Switzerland: Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies. Frohardt, M. and J. Temin. 2003. Use and Abuse of Media in Vulnerable Societies, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace. Galtung, J. 1969. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6(3): 167-191. Haggar, A. 2007. “The Origins and Organization of the Janjawiid in Darfur.” In War in Darfur: And the Search for Peace, edited by A. de Waal, 113-139. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Harré, R. and L. Langenhove, editors. 1999. Positioning Theory: Moral Contexts of Intentional Action, Oxford: Blackwell. Harré, R., & F. Moghaddam. 2003. The Self and Others: Positioning Individuals and Groups in Personal, Political, and Cultural Contexts, Westport, CT: Praeger. International Centre Against Censorship. 1996. Broadcasting Genocide: Censorship, Propaganda and State-Sponsored Violence in Rwanda 1990-1994. London: Article 19. Klinghoffer, A. 1998. The International Dimension of Genocide in Rwanda. New York: New York University Press Malkki, L. 1995. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 495523. Prunier, G., 2005. Darfur: A 21st century genocide, 3rd edition, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ricoeur, P. 1974. The Conflict of Interpretations. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Rothbart, D. and T. Bartlett. 2008. “Rwandan Radio Broadcasts and Hutu/Tutsi Positioning.” In Global Conflict Resolution through Positioning Analysis, edited by R. Harré, N. Lee & F. Moghaddam. New York: Springer. Rothbart, D., and K. Korostelina. 2006. Identity, Morality, and Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books



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Rothbart, D. and K. Korostelina. 2011. Why They Die: Civilians Devastation in Violent Conflict, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press Semujanga, J. 2003. Origins of Rwandan Genocide, Amherst, NY: Humanity Books. Shotter, J. 1993. Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language, London: SAGE Publications. Smith, A. 1996. “Ethnic Identity.” In Ethnicity, edited by J. Hutchinson & A. Smith. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Tanner V. and J. Tubiana. 2007. Divided They Fall: The Fragmentation of Darfur's Rebel Groups. Geneva, Switzerland: Small Arms Group, Graduate Institute of International Studies. United Nations Deputy Special Representative of the UN SecretaryGeneral for Sudan. n.d.. Darfur Humanitarian Profile No. 30. http://www.unsudanig.org/docs/DHP%2030%20%201%20January%202008%20-%20narrative.pdf. United Nations Security Council. 1994. Commission on Experts, Final Report. S/1994/674 - 27 May 1994. New York: United Nations.

  



CHAPTER NINE THE FUTURE AND IRRATIONALITY JOSEPH A. SCHAFER

Though criminologists do not routinely use terminology such as “irrationality,” the study of crime is the consideration of a specific form of irrational conduct. What causes an individual to engage in illegal conduct when all logic would suggest compliance is the most rational course of action? How can punishments be designed so a “rational actor” will see potential consequences outweighing potential gains arising from the commission of a deviant or criminal act? My focus in this chapter is couched in a slightly different set of questions and considerations. Prior chapters have offered tremendous insights into how irrational conduct evolves, variations in how we might define and conceive of such behaviour, and wonderful case studies of irrationality (intentional or otherwise) in action. The issue I have been asked to consider is how irrationality might operate in the future. The position I am taking is that irrationality in the future will, in some ways, be different than irrationality of the past. These differences may not exist at the theoretical level (how and why people engage in irrational action); rather, they will be most noticeable in the pace, mechanisms, and potential volume of irrational thought and action. This will be particularly true in societies and generations within societies where technology is more widely adopted. Technology has the potential to either accelerate or restrict the pace of irrational thought and action (Bell 2004b); being a bit cynical about such matters, I fear the former is the more likely future. One caveat should be issued for the following discussion. When specific technologies and applications are mentioned, they have been selected for their illustrative value. In every instance there are a number of similar examples that could have been used. My choice to mention any given example is based on the issue(s) and potential(s) highlighted by that case. Technologies and applications are changing at a very fast pace… often a pace that outpaces the speed of writing, printing, and distributing a

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book. The included examples are not intended as endorsements, indictments, or predictions that any given case in point is the future of XYZ. They are offered to simply demonstrate a broader trajectory or point.

Thinking about the Future The discipline of “futures studies” is not oriented toward strict prediction. Looking no further than the daily weather forecast vividly demonstrates the perils in presuming we can predict future events with absolute certainty. Futures thinking is a process intended to help us betterunderstand three main issues: possible, probable, and preferable futures (Bell 2007a; Cornish 2004). Possible futures are those events and evolutions that could happen. Probable futures incorporate an additional element to such considerations by attempting to gauge the likelihood those events and evolutions will actually arise. Preferable futures are decidedly different; they involve consideration of what an idealized future would include or characterize. The latter issue is often lost, at least in more explicit and overt discussions of the future. In beginning to think about the future of irrationality, it is important to consider a corollary concept, the law of accelerating change. This law suggests that events and issues often evolve not at a linear pace, but at an exponential rate; that is, the pace of change in the past does not always accurately reflect the pace of change in the future. Consider global population as one example. It is estimated that around the turn of the nineteenth century the world’s population reached one billion. In the late 1920s, it is estimated the world’s population reached two billion people. If change took place at a linear rate, we would expect that sometime around the middle of the current century we would see the global population reach four billion. If it took 120-125 years to double the global population from one to two billion, a consistent rate of change would dictate the same period of time should be needed to double the population from two to four billion. In actuality, global population reached four billion in the mid1970s; the doubling period required less than a half century to occur because the rate of change accelerated. The 20th century was witness to tremendous advances in both technology (e.g., medical sciences) and also culture (e.g., those medical sciences penetrating into the less developed parts of the world where mortality rates were the highest). Families that once would have two out of eight children reach the age of adulthood were now seeing five or six children reach that same threshold. This allowed populations to grow at a rapid rate, primarily in less developed parts of the world.



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Two elements in this particular example are relevant to the subsequent discussions in this chapter. First, the acceleration of change is not always infinite. Global population is actually growing not on an exponential curve, but on an S-curve—a path on which it is expected to continue in the coming decades. Data suggest that global population growth is reaching its plateau and that rates will be relatively flat by mid-century. Second, change is not simply a matter of technology and scientific advancement. Those developments interact with social and cultural traditions and values to mediate when and how the possible actually influences circumstances and conditions. For example, for the past half century family planning resources have existed in a variety of forms to allow a husband and wife to generally determine when they wished to stop the growth of their family. Most of the global population increase in the past century has occurred in less developed nations. Technology and medical science allowed for this growth to be regulated (in the aggregate). Resources, infrastructure, and economics, however, slowed the spread of family planning in these regions; this situation was further exacerbated by divergent religious and culture views regarding various family planning options. The technology and science of family planning exist, but social, cultural, and religious forces have limited availability and adoption of these options in some parts of the world.

Data, Data Everywhere The world around us is increasingly becoming a world of data, at least in the developed world. Existing tools are ensuring the penetration of this phenomenon into less developed regions and the acceleration of change will almost surely guarantee this trend continues at a faster and faster pace. Many parts of the world will never know a time when most households were connected to wired telephone networks or owned a desktop personal computer. Residents will jump from living without access to such amenities straight into an era of ubiquitous mobile computing and wireless communication. Johannes Gutenberg’s moveable type printing system revolutionized the production and pricing of words printed on paper, making literacy increasingly normative in the Western word. Analogously, the digital technology revolution has (and will continue to) revolutionize the ability of citizens around the globe to access myriad forms of data and information (Barabasi 2003; Moynagh and Worsley 2008). Interestingly, whether literacy rates will rise in less developed parts of the world remains to be seen; technology has the potential to make text-based communication, learning, analysis, and interactions increasingly obsolete.



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Generating Data Consider the advances that can be observed in only the past twenty years regarding matters of creating, disseminating, and accessing information. Assume the role of a community activist trying to inform the public about your city’s plan to rezone a particular neighbourhood. In 1990, one of the only practical ways to reach a substantial portion of the local population in a quick and easy manner would have been to garner the attention of some aspect of the local media (newspaper, radio, or TV). Short of that visibility, you would have needed to pursue educating the public about your cause in some other fashion. Generating knowledge and concern among a sizeable proportion of the population required the investment of appreciable time and/or financial resources. As an activist, you might have gone door-to-door to inform affected residents, you might take out advertisements in local media, distribute flyers and so forth. Every time you sought to send a new set of information to those interested in supporting your cause or at least hearing your perspective, you would have to repeat one or more of these processes. Not only would this require time and money on your part, there might be a notable lag between when information was ready for release and when it would be received by target consumers. Today, the process of generating and distributing knowledge can occur in myriad different ways that require negligible costs (presuming you already have a computer, Internet access, and/or a Smartphone), and less investment of time on your part. The process can occur in a fashion that pushes information to the public almost instantly. This would not necessarily make your activism efforts any more successful, but in some ways it does make them easier. You would still need to generate an audience to follow you (presumably via assorted social networking applications; e-mail lists are increasingly anachronistic) and this perhaps would be the greatest challenge you would face. In reality, this is simply an evolution of the same problem you would have experienced in the 1990s (getting people to sign up to receive your information, to take active steps to follow your updates, and/or to actually pay attention to what you had to say about your issue). Once you have captured an audience (which today can grow far more rapidly with a successful social media campaign), you can focus your efforts on generating data and knowledge for that audience. The distribution of that information requires far less time and money than was the case in the past.



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Alternatively, consider that you are a member of an amateur band named GOBA (Greater Oxford Bagpipe Aficionados) and you are trying to generate a following. In the past, doing so would have required securing public performances in local venues and perhaps producing a record, cassette tape, or CD (which potential fans would have to buy, because you would not likely have the resources to produce and disseminate the recording free of charge). Today, GOBA could use a variety of free and low-cost tools to record and disseminate its songs without ever making a public appearance. The members could potentially generate a global fan base without ever leaving Oxford. Fans could opt to download music and video free of charge, or even purchase production-on-demand GOBA shirts, hats, bumper stickers, and other items. Neither of these examples should suggest an easy or fast path from passionate obscurity to success in either public advocacy or musical performance. Many traditional challenges and barriers remain relevant. As an activist, your cause has to be something people will understand, believe in, and support. As a member of GOBA, you still have to play a mean bagpipe and people still have to want to listen to bagpipe music. These are not foregone outcomes. What has changed since the 1990s in these and myriad other circumstances is who can create and control the dissemination of ideas, media, and data. In the early 1990s, developed societies were structured with highly centralized control over the production and distribution of data and materials through limited and regulated mechanisms directed by the few. Less than two decades later, we have entered a point in time where data and materials can be produced and distributed by the masses. One of the starkest changes in the past twenty years is not the increasing volume of data that surrounds us every day; it is who generates and controls that data. This trend is no longer limited to the developed world. Recent protests and activism in Iran, Egypt, and Libya demonstrate the power and capacity of the public to generate and distribute data and knowledge. Only highly repressive regimes (e.g., North Korea) where telecommunications technologies remain tightly controlled remain immune to this evolution. I do not mean to imply the open generation, control, and distribution of data is innately good, nor is it innately bad. It is both. Much of the data that surrounds us is worthless, of low quality, of questionable veracity, or simply irrelevant. Other data are embarrassing (viral videos of teens being beaten by peers), illegal, pornographic, or of no value. Yet we do see ways in which the ability of the public to create and share content is enabling and helpful. As just one example, consider Ushahidi.com, a website launched in 2008 as violence swept through Kenya in the aftermath of a



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highly contentious election. Local activists and journalists were trying to document the human rights crisis but it was difficult to seam together all of the reported acts of violence. A group of ad hoc volunteers from around the world learned of the effort to document the Kenya crisis and created an Internet platform that allowed individuals to report events in a manner that was user generated and open to the public. The original platform was not developed for profit; it was an open-source application. In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake and the subsequent cholera outbreak in Haiti, the Ushahidi platform was used so Haitian citizens could report problems through a centralized system emergency responders could use to direct resources and equipment in the proper areas, while avoiding blocked roads, fallen bridges, and other obstacles. As this chapter goes to print, Ushahidi continues to expand using paid and volunteer staffers. Their intention is not to make anyone rich; rather, the website and its staff seek to create new and better “tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories” (Ushahidi 2011). It is not simply that we have increasing access to data. We have increasing abilities to contribute to data within and about the world around us. That is a powerful and important transformation. We have access to content and information generated, edited, and endorsed by huge numbers of people. We have the individual capacity to share our thoughts and beliefs about infinite topics and issues with the entire world. This evolution will likely produce both favourable and unfavourable outcomes. What is important is that we have never before seen a period of time in which so many people have the potential to shape the data received by virtually everyone else in the world. Filtering Data We are seeing advances in the filtering of data and information to the presumed (and perhaps irrational) benefit of the user. Filtering and organizing data is not a new objective. Where Google excelled beyond any of its predecessor search engines was in its ability to filter the entirety of the web to push not just relevant information at the searcher, but the most relevant information. Parallels can be seen in the filtering and recommendation services found on many commercial websites. Based on our past shopping patterns and, in some cases, our ratings for various items (e.g., movies), systems will recommend other products we might wish to consider. For a consumer trying to decide which movie to watch on a



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Friday night, this filtering is relatively innocent and few are likely to be concerned with the underlying assumptions the software uses. Concerns with the integrity and accuracy of matching systems are perhaps minimal when it comes to viewing movies (we can always stop mid-stream if we do not like the recommended selection). It is perhaps a bit more substantive if a consumer spends money or invests emotionally in a more expensive product or even a dating recommendation. In reality, most current commercial applications do a nice job matching the consumer and the consumable. Companies have a vested interest in developing and deploying software that will be effective in filtering; in effect, they have a vested interest in providing a rational choice for the consumer. This situation may shift as predictive software is increasingly used to sort more and more information in our daily lives. What prevents a business from “rewarding” an online vendor for pushing their products to the consumer? In some circumstances this is allowed. In others it may be forbidden, but is there any serious attention given to the matter? What prevents the emergence of a modern “payola” scandal?1 Beyond situations where consumer irrationality is shaped by predictive systems encouraging certain purchases, there are broader implications to be found in information filtering. Few readers are likely to find themselves lacking available news and information. The rise of the Internet and mobile computing has made it possible to access more data than one person can consume on even relatively narrow topics. A number of websites seek to help consumers with this situation by filtering web content and pushing the most materials most relevant to the reader (see, inter alia, McCracken 2011). These systems rely on initial and on-going input from users to refine the process of matching content and consumer; over time, they should do a better and better job. As before, such systems are not innately good or bad. They have benefit in that they help consumers maintain a degree of awareness about information they otherwise might not find. If I cannot adequately review the content of 30 periodicals, filtering software might actually ensure I am a better informed citizen (given the choice between reading filtered content and being so overwhelmed I stop reading altogether). Alternatively, might such systems serve to reinforce my dogmas, ideologies, and world views? 1

Payola received considerable attention in the United States in the 1950s. This term is used to describe a situation in which undisclosed incentives are provided to secure the inclusion of a product in a commercial broadcast (see Coase 1979). The original scandal was generally focused on radio disc-jockeys being paid to play certain records, presumably to advance sales of said records (hence the term “pay to play”). 



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If the only information I receive about baseball is from stories discussing my favourite team, do I have a full awareness of that sport? Am I wellread in politics if I only read stories that favour or support my party or belief system? Certainly, I can serve as an crude filter when I read a conventional newspaper, opting to not read certain columnists or articles based on my interest, but at least I know such contrasting perspectives exist and sometimes I have to review at least some content to find out it is contrary to my beliefs or interests. Interpreting Data Filtering data is increasingly important given the accelerating and expanding volumes of data available to consumers. In many situations, however, people do not simply want data to be filtered. They want assistance making interpretations from that data or want to have such interpretations automated to meet their needs. In writing about the future of wealth, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler (2006) expect that future economic power will not be driven by industry, service, or even data. The position of advantage will go to individuals and corporations that can produce knowledge. This knowledge will often be produced by accessing, filtering, and interpreting data; power and wealth will be dictated not by the production of data, but by the production of actionable knowledge derived from huge volumes of data. In the 1990s, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) used computer technology to revolutionize crime analysis as a tactical and strategic decision making tool (Bratton and Knobler 1998). Prior to this era, police agencies had ample data (file cabinets full of paper reports) but very little capacity to interpret that data. By the early 1990s, personal computers were cheap and increasingly ubiquitous; associated data management software made it easier for users with relatively modest training to extract knowledge from large amounts of data. NYPD had moved to the point where they were increasingly capturing crime data electronically rather than in hard copy. Software systems allowed the agency to analyze that data, including the use of geographic systems. The agency could do more than simply count the number of auto thefts in a given period of time. They could quickly and easily analyze auto thefts by day of the week, time of day, vehicle type, location within the city, proximity to major roadways, and many other dimensions. This enabled the agency to derive actionable interpretations from the data; they could make choices about where, when, and how to deploy policing resources in response to the study of a specific problem.



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The NYPD was on the innovative forefront not only because it was using crime analysis to support decision making. The agency was doing so in a near real-time manner. In the past, crime data in many agencies was analyzed once a year to compile an annual summary report that did little to inform management actions. Extant computer technologies allowed NYPD to meet twice per week to interpret data and select management actions based on what was needed immediately to address a given crime problem in a given part of the city. Rather than waiting for auto theft to become a very serious problem, action could be taken to (in theory) resolve a rising crime wave before it became too serious. This example helps demonstrate what NYPD needed. The agency did not need more data (they had mountains of incident reports); they needed a better capacity to interpret that data in a way that would support action and decisions. Looking forward, the capacity to interpret of data will likely accelerate, become increasingly automated, and extend to the point of interpreting not only large amounts of data, but also individual incidents and situations. For decades closed circuit television (CCTV) systems have been used to monitor a variety of public and commercial areas. Widespread monitoring was an intensive and often expensive process requiring a large number of humans to monitor multiple cameras keeping alert for the behaviour of concern. For example, CCTV systems configured in a public square of a European city might be alert for traffic problems, fights, break-ins, or other disorderly or criminal acts. Human observers would have to watch multiple cameras, either simultaneously or serially. The systems offered considerable protection (often with recording capacities as a failsafe when the watcher was not watching), but at a price. Systems are now being tested that use artificial intelligence and image interpretation software to enable computers to “see” and interpret what is happening in the field of view of a given camera. Ideally developed, such a system would not require a human observer to notice a fight, a possible drug deal, or a prostitute seeking a client. Instead, the system would be able to keep track of the entire range of captured images, perhaps noticing, for example, that an individual placed a backpack near the pavilion at a park and then left that area. They system would be able to alert a human handler who could review and make additional interpretations, as needed, about alerting public safety personnel of a situation. The work formerly done by multiple camera operators with a certain degree of error (e.g., missing a critical event) could be automated and facilitated by a single operator with a lower degree of error. This is the likely future for helping people sort through the masses of data that confront us on a daily basis. The systems will not be perfect.



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There will be false positives and false negatives. The advantage they (presumably) will offer is lower rates of error and lower operating costs. These systems do not remove the human factors, including tendencies toward bias and assorted shortcomings in our cognitive processes. Rather, these systems will shift the human factor from the level of the operator to the level of those writing the computer algorithms. Irrationality may be reduced or channelled, but it also might become less visible. Worse yet, it might be intentionally integrated into a system and purposively hidden. Data and Irrationality The real risk for advancing irrationality is when consumers do not know the data they access, filter, and interpret is being shaped through some type of software or algorithm. A corporation might design a Smartphone application intended to help consumers locate their products; this may be done in a transparent and overt manner. Or it could be done in a more colluded fashion by paying the application’s designer to elevate the rankings or prioritization or a particular product. As consumers increasingly rely on data to make choices, it is reasonable to wonder whether consumers will take the time to understand the data and analytics used to produce knowledge. Are systems and sources simply trusted (“I’ve always had good luck with this application in the past”) or are they truly understood and vetted to ensure they are leading the consumer to truly make the choice they want to make?

Possible Futures for Irrationality Does any of the chapter’s discussion up to this point relate to the volume, nature, and ease with which people might engage in irrational though or action? My position is there is, indeed, at least the potential for a nexus between the idea of (ir)rationality, these emerging technologies and social trends, and potential future evolutions in culture and technology. We are seeing a fundamental change in how people access, organize, filter, and interpret data to understand the surrounding context and environment (Cornish 2004). We can expect this trend to continue and even intensify given current evidence. The result could be an appreciable change in how people make judgments and decisions. This could include modifying whom people perceive to be “experts” on a given matter, a choice that becomes pivotal if we continue to rely on “experts” to provide trusted insights, information, recommendations, and other input that guides and governs thought and action (Bell 2004b).



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The ultimate and enduring impact of the rise and proliferation of wireless communication technologies (e.g., cellular telephones and the Internet) may not be a legacy of facilitating new forms of communication. I would submit the ultimate legacy of the wireless communication revolution will be a fundamental transformation in how people use data (Friedman 2006; Moynagh and Worsley 2008). My point in this essay is that we are experiencing continued transformation. We are seeing changes in who creates and controls data; a shift from data being in the hands of few to being generated by the masses. We are seeing changes in when consumers can access data; this is a shift from access that was limited to access that is unlimited across time and places. We are seeing changes in who can access raw data. Formerly, raw data were controlled by the few; increasingly raw data are accessible by the masses, though the masses will often use analytic applications to do so, perhaps without even realizing raw data are the foundation of the procedures they are using. For example, a citizen accessing a police department’s website to generate a map of residential burglaries in their neighbourhood may not realize websites application is allowing them to access (perhaps indirectly) raw data to customize their map. Finally, we are seeing a major change in our social expectations, which arguably is the biggest change of all. People increasingly value and expect the right to routinely access data (or the accompanying analytical outputs) to go about their daily existence. In the past, if I wanted to buy a new television or lawn mower I could have opted to peruse any number of buying guides, but I had to access those tools. Doing so either meant I subscribed to a particular magazine or necessitated borrowing a guide from a friend or public library. This required time and effort I might not wish to invest. Today, anyone can rely on user ratings on myriad websites (some integrated into the online marketplace, others operated independently) to quickly find out the thoughts and reviews for a product or category of products to inform a purchasing decision. Many of these trends began years ago, but we have entered the period of accelerating change. Major advances are being measured in months, not years; shortly they may be measured in weeks or even days. Users may not even recognize they are relying on these technologies. For example, Internet radio applications rely on or (in some cases) even contribute data as they rely on the outcomes of analytical tools. Irrationality has the potential to become more common, though the same tools leading us in that direction could likely be designed to preclude this trend. The question is whether those designing data acquisition and analysis applications will consider this possibility and work to design tools



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that will help us achieve a future of less, rather than more, irrationality. Will consumers make the conscious effort to understand the presumptions and choices inherent within the data and systems they utilize? Those presumptions and choices structure the resulting output used by the consumer. Do people take the time and expend the energy to understand interpretations or do they act with little consideration about the underlying principles, assumptions, and choices that dictate how analytical systems function? This situation is concerning as a general set of questions if data and systems are designed and operated with benign intentions. This situation is far more concerning if data and systems are designed and operated with more malicious and hostile intensions.

Questions for Future Consideration: Preferable Futures for Irrationality As indicated at the onset, the intent of this chapter is not to attempt providing a definition or picture of “the future” of irrationality. Rather, my focus has been on providing an overview of trends and trajectories that seem to be relevant in thinking about the future of irrationality. As is often the case, when I consider the future of any given topic, I find myself asking more questions than providing answers. In concluding the chapter, I offer the reader a set of questions to consider as we look toward the future of irrationality. What are the implications of increasingly basing judgments on usergenerated data? Do we always understand the data we are accessing was generated by other users? Do we pay attention to how many cases or data points were used to generate the output (what is the sample size)? Do we even know that information as a consumer? Who or what are “quality” or “trusted” sources? A user may develop a degree of comfort with a given source for data, but does she understand what biases or motivations might be guiding the output she utilizes? Is my favourite product rating application truly free of bias and undue influence, or is it operated by those wishing to steer me to purchase their products and services? Is automated filtering good or bad? Am I more informed and efficient by virtue or receiving filtered news that I will actually read as opposed to only having access to newspapers, news programs, or websites of a general nature? Is it better that I actually read news and other information, even if it is filtered toward my interests if the alterative is not paying attention to the news at all because it is “boring” or “meaningless” to my life? Does filtered information make my life better or more constrained?



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Are predictive analytics and other systems designed to interpret data always “good?” We may like the idea that transportation authorities have better tools to help them identify air travellers who are demonstrating behavioural patterns that might suggest harmful intentions. We may want school officials to be more accurate in their ability to identify “high risk” students more prone toward violence or dropping out. There may be value in corrections officials being able to be more accurate in predicting whether a given offender poses a strong future risk of recidivism. The same tools that enable these more socially desirable outcomes could also be used to predict someone’s sexual orientation, political beliefs, income, personal vices, etc. That which we might wish to keep private can quickly become public in ways we cannot control. And there will be errors and misclassifications that have harmful outcomes for some small number of individuals. How will society distinguish between those who are irrational, misinformed, or insufficiently informed? If irrationality is both a product of our brain and our culture (as Steuer suggests in chapter two of this volume) how will societies interpret the actions of their members? At what point are individuals expected to be responsible for the (ir)rationality of their actions and choices when there is increasing reliance on usergenerated data and interpretation systems? In the absence of situations in which we are forced to define and defend our values, beliefs, and positions and absent divergent viewpoints (which might persuade our belief systems to shift), is someone expressing an unusual belief system irrational or simply misinformed? At the very core, will we even recognize and conceive of irrationality in the same manner as we do today?

References Barabasi, A. 2003. Linked. New York: Plume. Bell, W. 2004a. Foundations of Futures Studies, Volume 1. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. —. 2004b. Foundations of Futures Studies, Volume 2. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Bratton, W., with P. Knobler. 1998. Turnaround. New York: Random House. Coase, R. 1979. “Payola in Radio and Television Broadcasting.” Journal of Law and Economics 22: 269-328. Cornish, E. 2004. Futuring: The Exploration of the Future. Washington, DC: World Future Society.



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Friedman, T. 2006. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Grioux. McCracken, H. 2011. “Personalized Magazine Apps: Cutting the Web Down to Size.” Time Business. http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2065112,00.html. Moynagh, M., and R. Worsley. 2008. Going Global: Key Questions for the 21st Century. London: A & C Black. Toffler, A., and H. Toffler. 2006. Revolutionary Wealth. New York: Knopf. Ushahidi. 2011. Products. http://ushahidi.com/products. Accessed 14 April 2011.  



AFTERWORD CARL JENSEN

Irrationality is our default state, and overcoming it is hard work. —New Scientist Magazine (2010)

In this, the final chapter, we discuss what we have learned about irrationality and what remains unknown. Readers will note that we do not strictly follow the chronology of the chapters. We do this intentionally, in order to present a more coherent summation. Because this is a volume dealing with irrationality, we thought it appropriate to defy convention and mention the last chapter1 first to underscore the timeliness of our enterprise. The New Scientist Magazine quote above suggests that irrationality is hardwired into our mental and emotional DNA; the authors of the present volume would no doubt agree and further suggest that the near term future will bombard civilization with ideas, situations and stories which may seem false, alien or just plain strange. We may very well be entering an “Era of Irrationality.” This may seem odd, given the ubiquity of information today (in chapter nine, Joe Schafer terms it “data, data everywhere”). After all, shouldn’t the marketplace of ideas benefit from this profusion of material? Shouldn’t we exhibit more, rather than less, rationality? As Schafer points out, the answer might be “yes” if our brains performed more like computers. However, they don’t—humans regularly fall victim to a host of infirmities which impede their ability to act as “rational actors.” Some of these include confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, anchoring bias and representativeness bias. Rather than helping us avoid these biases, the Internet may act as an “enabler,” trapping us in what Eli Pariser calls “filter bubbles,” where information is tailored to our own particular tastes (Pariser, 2011). The danger, of course, is that we bypass information that is challenging or uncomfortable. This is the cyber version of Gilmartin’s isolation variable discussed in chapter six; when we only venture into known territory, we see the same sights and 1

Joe Schafer’s “Future of Irrationality,” chapter nine.

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receive the same stimuli. Absent new thoughts and ideas, especially those that challenge our view of the world, our critical faculties decline. We lose the ability to step back from our accustomed ways and examine their viability. It should not surprise us, then, if the twenty-first century becomes suffused with all manner of conspiracy theories (chapter four), ethnic conflict (chapters six and eight) or worse. Of course, if computers increasingly develop the capacity to reason as some experts believe, their ability to discern the “rational” may assist us with our own decision making. The question is, to what extent will we allow them to act as surrogate “trusted confidants?” If they speak, will we bother to listen? The Beyond Rationality workshop sought to explore the boundaries of irrationality—what it is and how it affects us. This was, to be sure, an ambitious goal. Two days of near constant discussion from a variety of disciplines2 did not answer the question, but it did provide some remarkable convergence and established paths forward for future inquiry.

Characterizing Irrationality … akrasia is defined to be at least a kind of action which is contrary to reason and culpable. The very notion of explaining that kind of thing is incoherent. —Huemer (1991)

Huemer’s admonition notwithstanding, the ambitious and overarching goal of workshop participants was to navigate the uncharted and choppy waters of irrationality. First of all, could we even suitably articulate the concept? In other words, would it be possible to agree on some common ground between precise definition and the agnostic banality of “one man’s irrationality is another man’s revelation?” The authors made headway into establishing, if not a definition, at least some characteristics that accompany irrationality. Perhaps the best way to begin characterizing irrationality is to decide what it is not. In the first place, there was agreement that irrationality is not synonymous with stupidity—as Rom Harré discusses in chapter one, seemingly wise individuals fall prey to folly just as intellectually challenged ones do. Second, irrationality is not merely the province of the “crazy.” After all, who among us has not engaged in some behaviour we later considered irrational? If asked to assemble a list of “irrationalities,” many of us would no doubt place conspiracy theories near the top. Yet despite the insistence 2

Philosophy, Sociology, Criminology and Criminal Justice, Psychology and Business, to name a few.



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of many conspiracy-minded folks that the United States government is covering up evidence of alien landings or was involved in the 9-11 attacks, Lee Basham reminds us in chapter four that the psychiatrists’ Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) does not have a category for “conspiracy theorizing disorder.” Even conspiracy’s closest proxy, Paranoid Personality Disorder, requires that behaviours rise to the level of “pervasive” before they are considered a psychological problem. After deciding what irrationality is not, workshop participants attempted to establish boundaries for a potential definition. Clearly, irrationality manifests itself in a variety of ways. It can emerge as actions and behaviours that work against one’s self-interest, contradictory viewpoints that exist simultaneously, and/or the wilful ignoring of relevant information. In chapter two, however, Max Steuer presents an interesting conundrum—natural selection implies that we should be getting smarter as a species; as a self-defeating behaviour, irrationality is clearly not smart. How, then, does one reconcile natural selection with a world that appears to be getting less, rather than more, rational? Steuer answers the question thusly: To assert that irrationality is an exception to evolutionary adaptation may miss the point. He argues convincingly that the issue has to do with our mental processes. As an evolutionary response, the human brain developed heuristics based upon emotion. This made sense for survival—thinking through every situation was time consuming and overly complex; it wasted valuable time that could be better utilized in “fight or flight.” Hence, emotion became a central fixture in thought, one crucial to survival, especially in years past. Unfortunately, the processes of emotion do not always transfer easily or well into more modern “rational” times. Certain forms of irrationality may be artefacts of an earlier, less cognitively complex period. In chapter three, Bob Schmidle writes that noted philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein spoke of “hinges” which he characterized as particular beliefs that are not subject to doubt. All choices are filtered through one’s hinges. Attempting to understand something as rational/irrational is ultimately a subjective determination based on context, subject to one’s own hinges; therefore, rationality can only be discovered through discourse and contextualization. Does this suggest, then, that irrationality exists primarily as a social construct, dependent, at least to some degree, on the perspective of the observer? In some ways, it is reminiscent of Einstein’s famous thought experiment involving two individuals, one on a speeding train and one standing on a platform. Both observe the same phenomenon but come to vastly different conclusions concerning what



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they saw. Which observer was correct? According to Einstein, both were, within their own frame of reference. Rationality may act in a similar fashion. If one believes that becoming a martyr for his religion guarantees eternal salvation, then that martyrdom becomes his most rational course of action. In that case, not donning a suicide vest to blow up a group of civilians along with oneself may represent the height of irrationality. In an interesting turn, David Apgar suggests that irrationality can result from too much seeming rationality. In chapter seven, he opines that the “balanced scorecard” approach to corporate management, in which large numbers of disparate metrics are crunched by increasingly sophisticated computers, has weakened business leaders’ resolve to engage in “strategy experimentation.” According to him, this apparently logical, evidencebased approach has inhibited the ability of American businesses to adapt to change, putting them at a strategic disadvantage to other manufacturing economies, such as Japan. He also notes that what may seem like rational practice at first may prove counterproductive if one looks more closely. For example, conventional wisdom holds that providing executives with stock options should be an incentive to better performance by appealing to their self interest. In fact, Apgar argues that it merely leads to a desire on their part to minimize personal risk, regardless of the effects it may have on the company. What does all of this mean? In the first place, “irrationality” may not be as rare as we imagine. It seems to be an integral part of the world we inhabit. As well, gauging rationality is often difficult and dependent upon context; what may seem strange from one perspective makes perfect sense when viewed differently. The contributors seemed to agree that irrationality is, in fact, discursively constructed and highly dependent upon historical events, culture, social life, and position. So while we cannot establish a universal standard for what is “rational” at any given time, we have begun to carve out an understanding of the process by which it is created. In a practical sense, labelling those we don’t understand as “irrational” and leaving it at that is both cognitively lazy and dangerous. Part Two of the book discusses irrationality on the level of the small group and presents examples where misunderstanding can turn deadly—in the worlds of conspiracy theorists, cults and dictators.



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The Social Construction of Irrationality Part Two begins with two seemingly irrational states of affairs— dictatorships and those who believe in conspiracies—and concludes that each may be infused with its own sense of rationality, at least in the minds of adherents or those who stand to benefit from such an arrangement. Kerry Noble, the warrior priest of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA), a virulently anti-Semitic terrorist group, confirmed as much—in a series of personal conversations, he expressed incredulity that he was ever involved with the CSA. Noble was sentenced to prison for his activities; while there, he had much time to contemplate his deeds and beliefs. Following his release, he spoke eloquently of his disavowal of Christian Identity on the one hand and clinically about the evolution of the Cherith Brook Church into the CSA. He often wondered aloud how such a thing could have occurred. Quite simply, it occurred through a series of steps involving a constantly evolving narrative. The steps were incremental and, to those involved, quite logical. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Part Two is the acknowledgement it makes to the social dimensions of irrationality. For example, it is easy and comforting to see the rise of Nazism as the singular and idiosyncratic result of a cabal of sinister anti-Semites led by a charismatic fanatic during a unique time in history. It is much harder to understand how a seemingly rational society bred such behaviour. The “Springboard to Dictatorship” model outlined by Ali Moghaddam in chapter five discusses how autocracies are socially constructed. The process is anything but irrational— individuals throughout the society calculate and plot courses of action they perceive will bring them benefit. As of this writing, the so-called “Arab Spring” is unfolding before the world’s eyes. Where it will end is anyone’s guess. Optimists see an opportunity for some countries to develop democratic structures while others fear that one form of dictatorship will be replaced by another, such as that which occurred in Iran following the fall of the Shah. Now is the perfect time to test the “Springboard” model. If Moghaddam is correct, what will emerge will have less to do with the personality of a single figure or kismet than the confluence of interests served. It will also have little to do with irrationality. As mentioned earlier, another arena in which the word “irrationality” is liberally bandied about is that of the conspiracy theorist discussed by Lee Basham in chapter four. Often the subject of ridicule, those who see a conspiracy behind every event are branded as fools or worse. Despite this harsh pronouncement, those who believe in conspiracies are occasionally correct: From time to time, hierarchies and governments engage in bad and



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outrageous behaviour; history is replete with examples. Exposing those outrages is an essential part of an open society. Of course, the hierarchy will fight back. Regardless of whether one considers Wikileak’s founder Julian Assange a scoundrel or a saint, it is hard not to marvel at what many view as the irrational response of the United States government when it came to the leaked military and State Department cables of 2011. Many employees of the U.S. intelligence establishment were threatened with losing their security clearances if they merely visited the Wikileaks site, ironically placing them in the position of knowing less about what was transpiring in the world than the general public. The panicked governmental response could not have been formulated solely to limit the spread of classified information—that genie had already been released. Instead, it seems more likely to have been a “loyalty check,” an attempt to ensure compliance with a system of classification designed for the Cold War. The government’s reaction was reminiscent of the hyper-paranoia of the Nixon administration when confronted with the leak of The Pentagon Papers. In the case of Wikileaks, then, who acted as the irrational party? Despite their fear of transparency, governments often stand to benefit from all the information circulating in today’s world. Lee Basham (chapter four) further notes: Call it the United States of Amnesia: Conspiracy theories about societywide political and economic manipulation, abuse and mass murder are rarely refuted and laid to rest. Instead, they are forgotten or become museum relics emptied of significance. In the rush of contemporary civilization memories are short, attention fractured and concentration quickly perishes.

The information age has become the information overload age. Faced with an overabundance of data, we can tailor what we view, visiting those sources of information we choose, based on our own personal preferences. Ironically, people may actually end up learning less today than their predecessors did in years past, choosing instead to reinforce what they already believe while ignoring anything that challenges their position. Those on the margins will likely become further marginalized; they may more readily see irrationality where none exists and will increasingly be viewed as irrational themselves.

Globalized Irrationality, the Future and Paths Forward If today represents the Era of Irrationality, what may tomorrow bring? In chapter eight, Dan Rothbart discusses ethnic conflict; sadly, its discursive



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nature may make it particularly suited for the twenty-first century. As noted by Jensen (2001: 924): In addition to disseminating information, recruiting members, and concentrating power, the emotional appeal of (Internet) messages may stir fervour through the social dynamics of the cyber-sense of group... Members of religious and ethnic groups can be united in cyberspace regardless of where they happen to reside. Therefore, although the Internet may make national boundaries less important, it may make ethnic and religious divisions more pronounced and more important to individuals.

Rothbart’s analysis underlies a central theme of the first part of the new millennium—we live in “counterintuitive” times. Ubiquitous access to all sorts of information is making at least some of us seem less, rather than more, rational and tolerant. The problem, however, is certainly not in the information, which is agnostic. It is more likely a result of the filters we construct and those that are constructed for us. A recurring finding in many of the chapters is that what appears irrational at first may, in fact, have an underlying rationality, at least to the actors involved. Conversely, seemingly rational strategies, such as those outlined in chapter eight may in the long run prove self-defeating. With what, then, are we left? A line from Rom Harré in our Introduction provides perhaps the central “takeaway” from our efforts: We have seen that there is no universal form that rational ways of thinking and acting can take and so there is no end to the varieties that irrationalities can have.

Irrationalities are by and large a social construct; we examine them through unfolding and evolving narratives. Story lines constantly advance in an effort to gain advantage; therefore, the “crazy” cult leader or inexplicably ruthless dictator may, in fact, act in a way that makes complete sense, at least to him. Understanding irrationality in this way also provides potential tools to better analyze the world around us. When, then, is the next step for “beyond rationality?” A third workshop involving the limits of rationality with regard to the concept of “resistance” was held during the fall of 2010 at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Whereas “resistance” has historically has been used as a synonym for irrational or reactionary behaviour, today, we recognize it as a constant of human conduct. The relationship of resistance to rationality or irrationality is neither determined nor fixed at any historical epoch or with respect to any topic. Among other things, workshop participants grappled with the central issue of to what extent are



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social scientific conceptions of “resistance” sui generis, or to what extent are they borrowed from the natural sciences by metaphor and analogy? The results of this workshop will be presented in the next volume in this series.

References Huemer, M., 1991. Aristotle and Incontinence. http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/arist1.htm. Accessed 4 June 2011. Jensen, C. 2001. “Beyond the Tea Leaves: Futures Research and Terrorism.” American Behavioral Scientist, 44(6): 914-936. New Scientist Magazine. 2010. “The Rational Case for Irrational Thinking.” New Scientist Magazine (November 10). http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20827863.100-the-rationalcase-for-irrational-thinking.html. Accessed 3 June 2011. Pariser, E. 2011. Eli Pariser: Beware Online "Filter Bubbles." TED Talk (February 2011). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s. Accessed 5 June 2011.



APPENDIX LIST OF PAPERS PRESENTED AT THE FIRST BEYOND RATIONALITY WORKSHOP LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE NOVEMBER 21, 2009  Introduction Rom Harré, London School of Economics and Political Science Rational Frameworks Sandra Jovchelovitch, London School of Economics and Political Science Irrational Sciences Ivana Markova, London School of Economics and Political Science Meta-irrationality Supervening on Local Economic Rationalities Max Steuer, London School of Economics and Political Science Irrational Decisions in Military Command Robert Schmidle, Georgetown University Positioning and the “Forging” of Identities Nikki Slocum-Bradley, Comparative Regional Integration Studies Programme, United Nations University Evidence and the “End of Medicine” Uffe Jensen, Aarhus University Balancing the Categories of “Moderation” and “Extremism” in Academic and Lay Discourses Nick Hopkins, University of Dundee

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Reactionary Discourses Mohammad Sartawi, London School of Economics and Political Science Nothing is So Irrational as our Continuing Efforts to Discover/ Impose/Generate Rational Accounts of Price Setting Markets Charles Smith, City University of New York

             



CONTRIBUTORS

Editors (in alphabetical order) Dr. Rom Harré began his academic career in mathematics, and from 1960, he was the University Lecturer in the Philosophy of Science at Oxford University and Fellow of Linacre College. During that time, he developed an interest in iconic thinking and the uses of models. In the 1970s, he turned to social psychology in an effort to make this field of psychology more oriented to symbolic and linguistic processes. Of this came The Explanation of Social Behaviour with Paul Secord. Continuing along these lines in recent years as Distinguished Research Professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC, he has been a leading advocate of psychology as a moral science, pioneering the new approach of Positioning Theory. He divides his time between Washington and his role as Director of the Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science at the London School of Economics. His most recent book, Pavlov’s Dogs and Schrödinger’s Cat, is a study of the uses of animals and plants as scientific apparatus. Dr. Carl Jensen is the Director of the Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at the University of Mississippi and a Senior Behavioral Scientist (adjunct) at the RAND Corporation. Prior to that, he served as a Special Agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation for twenty-two years. In the FBI, Dr. Jensen worked as a field agent in the Atlanta and Cleveland Divisions, a Forensic Examiner (Cryptanalysis) in the FBI Laboratory and an Instructor/Researcher in the Behavioral Science Unit (BSU). While in the BSU, he founded the Futures Working Group, an organization dedicated to developing ethical and effective strategies for the future of policing. Upon his graduation from the U. S. Naval Academy in 1978, Dr. Jensen served aboard the nuclear fleet ballistic missile submarine USS George Washington Carver and then as an aide to the Commander of Submarine Group Five. In addition to his Bachelors degree, Dr. Jensen earned an M.A. in Sociology from Kent State University and a Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland. He is the author and co-author of numerous articles, books, and book chapters and has lectured throughout the world.

202

Contributors

Contributing Authors (in alphabetical order) Dr. David Apgar is the founder of ApgarPartners, a consultancy that focuses on assumption-based metrics to identify hidden risk factors. He is currently working on ways to increase Turkish employment through enhanced credit for customer-favored businesses, optimization of World Bank Group project evaluation to generate more incisive development lessons, and a mobile application called GoalScreen that implements the planning method described in his chapter of the present volume. Over the last ten years, he launched best-practices networks for corporate controllers and treasurers as a managing director at the Corporate Executive Board and ran high-profile risk-management projects for the BIS and JPMorgan as a McKinsey engagement manager. During this time he wrote a frame-breaking book on evolutionary performance assessment called Relevance: Hitting Your Goals by Knowing What Matters (JosseyBass 2008) and the widely-used risk management critique Risk Intelligence (Harvard Business School Press 2006). In the decade before that, he served as a vice president for financial institutions at Lehman Brothers as well as a senior economist in the Clinton Administration Treasury Department and the Senate Finance Committee. He has a PhD in Policy Analysis from the RAND Graduate School, an MA in Physics and Philosophy from Oxford and a BA in History and Literature from Harvard. Dr. Lee Basham has a Ph.D in Philosophy, with an area of specialization in Metaphysics and Epistemology. His publications include “Living with the Conspiracy” (Philosophical Forum), “Malevolent Global Conspiracy” (Journal of Social Philosophy, with a reply by Brian Keeley), and “Conspiracy Theory, Ubiquity and Resilience” in Conspiracy Theories, the Philosophical Debate (David Coady, editor). His “Nothing You Can Do: The Pragmatic Rejection of Malevolent Conspiracy Theory” and “Political Epistemology, Theory of a Ghost Plane” are forthcoming. Basham is a professor of Philosophy at South Texas College. Though he does not hold a security clearance, he knows that often what’s most enjoyable about secrets is keeping them. Dr. Fathali M. Moghaddam is Professor, Department of Psychology and Director of the Conflict Resolution Program, Department of Government, Georgetown University. He previously worked for McGill University and for the United Nations. His most recent books are: The New Global Insecurity (2010), Words of Conflict, Words of War (2010, with Rom Harré), How Globalization Spurs Terrorism (2008), and Multiculturalism



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and Intergroup Relations (2008). More about his scholarly work can be found on his website: fathalimoghaddam.com. Dr. Daniel Rothbart is a Professor of Conflict Analysis at the Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution and a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at George Mason University. In the area of philosophy of science, he published extensively in leading interdisciplinary journals. He authored two books: Explaining the Growth of Scientific Knowledge: Metaphors, Models, and Meanings and Philosophical Instruments: Minds and Tools at Work. He also edited two books: Science, Reason and Reality and Modeling: Gateway to the Unknown: A work by Rom Harré. His book, Identity, Morality, and Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict, reflects his recent research regarding the sources of protracted conflict between identity groups (religious, ethnic, nationalistic). Another book, entitled Why They Die: Civilian Devastation in Violent Conflict, is forthcoming in 2011. Professor Rothbart earned a Ph.D. at Washington University, St. Louis. In addition to his positions at George Mason University, he was Visiting Research Scholar at Linacre College, Oxford, Dartmouth College, and University of Cambridge. Dr. Joseph A. Schafer is Professor in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He holds a bachelors degree from the University of Northern Iowa and graduate degrees from Michigan State University. Dr. Schafer’s research focuses on policing, organizational change, leadership, communities and crime, citizen perceptions of police, and futures research in policing. He was the 2006-2007 President of Police Futurists International, is a member of the PFI/FBI Futures Working Group, serves on the advisory board for the Public Safety Leadership Development Consortium, and was a visiting scholar in the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI Academy (2006-2008). His recent writings include editing Policing 2020: Exploring the Future of Crime, Communities and Policing (2007), co-editing Policing and Mass Casualty Events (2007), co-writing Policing the Future (2012), and (co-) authoring research articles appearing in various academic journals and policing periodicals.



204

Contributors

Lieutenant General Robert E. Schmidle, Jr., USMC, serves as the Deputy Commander for U.S. Cyber Command, Ft. George G. Meade, MD. As the Deputy Commander, he directs the forces and daily activities of U.S. Cyber Command. In this capacity, he also coordinates the Department of Defense computer network attack and computer network defense missions. Lieutenant General Schmidle is a native of Newtown, Connecticut. His command assignments include: Commanding General of First Marine Aircraft Wing, Commanding Officer of Special Purpose Marine Air-Ground Task Force (Experimental), and Commanding Officer of Marine Fighter/Attack Squadrons 251 and 115. Previous operational assignments include multiple tours flying the F-4 and F/A-18 aircraft as well as serving as the operations officer and air officer of an Infantry Battalion, First Battalion 9th Marines. Additionally, Lieutenant General Schmidle has served in the following key staff assignments: Assistant Deputy Commandant of the Marine Corps for Programs and Resources (Programs), Deputy Chief of Staff for Integrated Product Team 1 for the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review and USMC lead for the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, Deputy Director for Resources and Acquisition in the Joint Staff J-8, Director of the USMC Expeditionary Force Development Center and the Military Secretary for the 32nd and 33rd Commandants of the Marine Corps. Lieutenant General Schmidle graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. He also holds a Master of Arts in Philosophy from American University and is currently working on his doctorate at Georgetown University He is a distinguished graduate and prior faculty member of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College as well as a distinguished graduate of the Marine Corps War College. Additionally, he has been published on a range of topics from military history to social psychology and philosophy. Max Steuer is an economist having worked mainly in the Economics Department of the London School of Economics, with leaves of absence notably at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Ghana. He is currently Reader Emeritus at LSE and a Research Associate in the LSE Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS). Max Steuer played a major role in the development of graduate teaching in economics at LSE, including the M.Sc. course Methods of Economic Investigation and the Ph.D. Seminar in Research Strategy. He has approximately fifty articles in professional journals and his books include The Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on the United Kingdom (Steuer et.al.), Mathematical Sociology (with Janet Holland), and most recently



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The Scientific Study of Society. His latest paper is “The partially private UK system for air traffic control,” Journal of Air Transport Management, vol. 16, 2010, pp. 26 – 35. Steuer wrote the film script for the feature film The Committee, directed by Peter Sykes and staring Paul Jones, with music by Pink Floyd. He is a member of the Evolutionary Work in Progress group in the CPNSS at LSE. Steuer is currently working with sociologist Peter Abell and statistician Henry Wynn on the determinants of CEO remuneration, which they suspect might be excessive.



INDEX

9/11, 50, 54, 58, 62, 64, 66, 67, 69, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 121, 193 9/11 truth movement, 50, 77 Aarhus University, 199 Abell, Peter, 205 Adam, 5 Afghanistan, 91 Airbus, 147 al Fasher, Darfur, 171 Al Fasher, Darfur, 171 Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, 65 Ali, Bin, 97 Al-Qaeda, 49, 58, 64, 71, 75, 78, 109 Al-Qaeda Conspiracy Theory, 67 Altemeyer, Robert, 90, 91, 102 American Psychiatric Association, 51, 85 American University, 204 Animal Liberation Front, 109 Apgar, David, 5, 127, 131, 136, 147, 152, 153, 194, 202 ApgarPartners, 202 Apple, 54 Arab Spring, 195 Aristotle, 2, 198 Aryan Nations, 121 Asia, 102, 128, 147 Assange, Julian, 196 Associated Press, 73 AT&T, 130 Atlanta, Georgia, 201 Atomic Energy Commission, 60 Avery, Dylan, 77 Axiology of Difference model, 105, 109, 121

Ayatollah Khomeini, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97 Babylon, 120 Baker, Ace, 72, 73 Bamford, James, 74, 85 Barbu, Daniel, 90, 91, 102 Bartels, Larry, 101, 102 Bartlett, Thomas, 4, 105, 109, 113, 121, 123, 162, 175 Basham, Lee, 3, 4, 49, 79, 85, 193, 195, 196, 202 Bed & Beyond, 131 Belgians, 159 Bennett, Maxwell, 16 Beyond Rationality workshop, 2, 192 Bhagat, Sanjai, 139, 154 Bible, 112, 113 Bin Laden, Osama, 50, 75 Blaast, Otto, 85 Boeing, 147 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 95 Boudreau, Vincent, 100, 102 Boulding, Kenneth, 34, 37 Branch Davidians, 110 Brannan, David, 112, 114, 116, 122 Brazil, 128 British government, 91 British Intelligence, 74 British Petroleum, 147, 148 Bullock, Alan, 94, 97, 102 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, 110 Burma, 100 Bush, George W., 3, 49, 50, 77, 83, 117 Byzantine, 59 Cain, 111

208

Index

Campbell, Johnny, 87, 145, 154 Capital One, 130 Captain Kirk, 6 Cartesian myth, 16 Castro, Fidel, 74 Caterpillar, 130 Catholic Church, 96 Center for Intelligence and Security Studies, 2, 85, 201 Central Intellignce Agency, 75 Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, 1, 201, 204 Cheney, Richard, 76, 77 Cherith Brook Farm, 112, 113, 114, 195 China, 102, 128, 155 Christian Identity, 110, 111, 113, 119, 120, 122, 123, 195 Chrysler, 128 Churchland, Paul and Patricia, 63 City University of New York, 200 Clarke, Steve, 54, 62, 81, 86 Clavius’ Paradox, 14 Cleveland, Ohio, 201 Clinton, Bill, 50, 202 Coady, David, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 79, 86, 87, 202 Cold War, 196 Comparative Regional Integration Studies Programme, 199 Coulter, Gerry, 16 Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 195 crypto-Jews, 55 Cuba, 74, 86 Damascus, 4 Damasio, Antonio, 27, 37 Darfur, 5, 158, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175, 176 Dartmouth College, 203 Deepwater Horizon, 147 democracy, 18, 22, 58, 60, 89, 90, 91, 93, 101, 102 Democracy and Dictatorship, 90



Dennett, Daniel, 25, 37 Descartes, 15, 19, 37 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 51, 85, 193 Dichev, Illa, 145, 154 dictatorship, 22, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 195 Drew University, 204 Durkheim, Emile, 111, 122 Dweck, Carol, 25, 37 Earth, 14 East Africa, 5 Eastern Europe, 102 Egypt, 96, 100, 181 Eichmann, Adolf, 59 Einstein, Albert, 193, 194 Elijah, 114 Ellison, James, 112, 113, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121 Episteme, 62, 86, 87 Europe, 76, 128 European Union, 91 Eve, 5, 110 evolution, 2, 21, 26, 28, 29, 105, 111, 112, 113, 127, 164, 180, 181, 182, 195 Exxon, 147 Facebook, 130 Federal Bureau of Investigations, 75, 77, 105, 110, 118, 122, 201, 203 FedEx, 130 Figes, Orlando, 100, 102 Financial Planning and Analysis, 132, 135, 136, 148 Fleiss, Wilhelm, 13 Ford, 128 France, 95 Freud, Sigmind, 13, 90, 102, 103 Freudian tradition, 97 Frydman, Carola, 137, 138, 154 Ft. George G. Meade, Maryland, 204 Fur, 167, 169, 170 Futures Working Group, 201, 203

Beyond Rationality: Contemporary Issues Garden of Eden, 110 Garlappi, Lorenzo, 145, 154 Garner, Jonathan, 128, 154 Garrison, Jim, 70 General Electric, 149 General Motors, 128 Genesis, 111 George Mason University, 203 George Washington University, 74 Georgetown University, 201, 202, 204 Gergen, Kenneth, 14, 15, 19 Germany, 90, 92, 93, 95, 100, 128 Gerstner, Lou, 136 Gilbert, Gustave, 15, 90, 91, 103 Gilmartin, Kevin, 4, 105, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 121, 122, 191 God, 5, 49, 86, 111, 112, 113, 115, 117, 173 Goffman, Erving, 89, 103 Goldman Sachs, 130 Goleman, Daniel, 27, 35, 37 Google, 50, 182 Graves, Melissa, 85 Gravity’s Rainbow, 72 Great Satan, 99 Great Terror of 1934–1939, 56 Greece, 22 Griffin, John, 145, 154 Guantanamo Bay, 74 Gulf of Mexico, 147 Gutenberg, Johannes, 179 Gypsies, 3 Habyarimana, Juvenal, 160 Hacker, Peter, 16 Haier Group, 130 Haiti, 182 Hall, Brian, 45, 138, 154 Harré, Rom, 1, 11, 85, 102, 106, 107, 108, 122, 123, 159, 175, 192, 197, 199, 201, 202, 203 Harvard University, 202 Haselton, Martie, 25, 27, 37 Hayward, Tony, 148 HBO, 57 Hempel’s Paradox, 14



209

Henkel, Herb, 136 Henry IV, 99 Hercules, 97 Hilscher, Jens, 145, 154 Hitler, Adolf, 4, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 100, 101, 102 Holiday, Anthony, 14, 19 Holland, Janet, 204 Hollywood, 71 Holocaust, 56, 57 Hopkins, Nick, 199 House of Saud, 67 Huemer, Michael, 192, 198 Hutu extremists, 158, 160, 162, 163, 167, 173 Hutu-Bantus, 162 Hutus, 158, 159, 160, 162, 165, 174 India, 128 Indonesia, 100 Ingersoll Rand, 136 Institute of Advanced Studies, 34 Institute of Conflict Analysis and Resolution, 203 interahamwe, 160, ^ĞĞ,ƵƚƵ džƚƌĞŵŝƐƚƐ International Business Machines, 136 Investigations, 41 Iran, 60, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 103, 181, 195 Iran-Contra, 60 Iraq, 3, 49, 50, 67, 76, 77, 83, 95 Irrationality, 28 Islam, 94, 95, 96, 175 Israel, 67, 99, 107 Italy, 128 Janjaweed, 158, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175 Japan, 128, 194 Jensen, Carl, 4, 85, 105, 191, 197, 201 Jensen, Michael, 138 Jensen, Uffe, 199 Jews, 3, 56, 57, 100, 111 Jones, Paul, 205 Jones, Steven E., 75

210

Index

Jovchelovitch, Sandra, 199 Justice Equality Movement, 171 Kangura, 162, 163 Kaplan, Robert, 131, 136, 154 Kayibanda, Gregorie, 160 Keeley, Brian, 53, 54, 55, 61, 66, 71, 79, 86, 202 Kennedy, John F., 70, 74, 77, 85 Kennedys, the, 12 Kent State University, 201 Kenya, 181 Khartoum, Sudan, 167, 169, 171, 172, 174 Kigali, Rwanda, 160 King David, 120 King James of the Ozarks. ^ĞĞ ůůŝƐŽŶ͕:ĂŵĞƐ Knesset, 107 Komitet Gosudarstevnnoy Bezopasnosti, 74 Kull, Steven, 78, 86 Lakatos, Imre, 62 Latin America, 96 Law of Nature, 14 LeDoux, Joseph, 34, 37 Lee, Naomi, 3, 49, 106, 107, 108, 122, 123, 175, 193, 195, 196 Lehrer, Jonah, 24, 27, 37 Leibman, Jeffrey, 138, 154 Lemmon, Mike, 145, 154 Lethal Triad, 4, 105, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 121, 122 Libya, 100, 181 Linacre College, 201, 203 Lippmann, Greg, 33 Lipscumb, Lila, 49, 83 Little Satan, 99 London School of Economics, 1, 22, 24, 85, 197, 199, 200, 201, 204 Loose Change, 77 Louis, Winnifred, 106, 107, 122, 147 Machiavellian dictatorship, 94 Maher, Bill, 50, 86 Mandela, Nelson, 97 Mandik, Pete, 53, 55, 62, 63, 86



Marcos, Ferdinand, 100 Markova, Ivana, 199 Markowitz, Harry, 141, 142, 154 Massalit, 167, 169, 170 McChesney, Robert, 131, 154 McGill University, 202 McKay, Ryan, 25, 37 McNerny, Jim, 147 Mecca, 67 Meckling, William, 138, 154 Media General, 131 Memphis, Tennessee, 130 Miami, Florida, 74 Michigan State University, 203 Microsoft, 130 Middle East, 68, 76 Mills, C. Wright, 59, 86 Missouri, 112 M'Naghten Rule, 18 Moghaddam, Fathali, 4, 89, 93, 96, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 122, 123, 159, 175, 195, 202 Monroe, Marylyn, 12 Morgan Stanley, 128 Mount Sinai, 116 Mountain Creek, Arkansas, 114, 116 Mr. Spock, 6 Murphy, Kevin, 138, 139, 140, 144, 154, 155 Mussolini, Benito, 4 National Security Agency, 74 National Security Archive, 74 NATO Alliance, 82 natural selection, 2, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33, 193 Nazi, 3, 55, 57 Ne Win, 100 Neo-Nazi white supremacists, 65 Nestle, 152 Nettle, Daniel, 25, 27, 37 New Jersey, 136 New Scientist Magazine, 191 New World Order conspiracy theory, 56, 83

Beyond Rationality: Contemporary Issues New York, New York, 37, 51, 72, 85, 86, 102, 103, 122, 123, 174, 175, 176, 184, 189, 190 Newtown, Connecticut, 204 Nixon, Richard, 196 Noble, Kerery, 111, 112, 116, 123, 195 North America, 50 North Korea, 92, 181 Norton, David, 131, 136, 154 Obama, Barack, 50 Offutt Air Force Base, 77 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 55, 65 Olson, Matt, 102, 145, 155 On Certainty, 20, 39, 45 Operation Northwoods, 74, 77 Oxford colleges, 15 Oxford University, 201, 202, 203 Oxford, Mississippi, 2 Ozarks, 114 Pakistan, 91, 129 Pareto, Vilfredo, 96, 103, 141 Pariser, Eli, 191, 198 Pearl Harbor Attack, 77 Pentagon, 51, 67, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 196 Philippines, 100 Philosophical Investigations, 20, 40, 45 Philosophy of Mind, 63 Pigden, Charles, 53, 54, 58, 61, 87 Pink Floyd, 205 Plato, 96 Police Futurists International, 203 Pope, the, 96 Popper, Karl, 61, 62, 87 Popular Mechanics, 63, 66 Positioning Theory, 4, 105, 106, 108, 111, 175, 201 Positioning Triangle, 107, 114, 116, 119 Project For A New American Century, 76 Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 73



211

Public Safety Leadership Development Consortium, 203 Putin, Vladimir, 97 Pynchon, Thomas, 72 Raikka, Juha, 53, 56, 57, 79, 87 RAND Corporation, 128, 154, 201 RAND Graduate School, 202 Rawman, Omda Khidir Ali Abdel, 171 Real Time, 50 Richmond Times-Dispatch, 131 Role Theory, 106 Romano, Roberta, 139, 154 Rosneft, 147 Rostam, 97 Rothbart, Daniel, 4, 5, 105, 109, 113, 121, 123, 157, 158, 162, 166, 175, 176, 196, 197, 203 Ruby Ridge, Idaho, 60 Rumsfeld, Donald, 76 Russell, Bertrand, 13, 14 Russia, 97, 100, 102 Rwanda, 5, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 173, 174, 175 Rwanda Patriotic Army, 160 Ryle, Gilbert, 15, 20 Saks, Raven, 137, 138, 154 Samuelson, Larry, 31, 32, 37 Sartawi, Mohammad, 200 Satan, 108, 111, 117, 119, 120 Saudi Arabia, 96 Schafer, Joseph, 6, 177, 191, 203 Schmidle, Robert, 3, 4, 39, 193, 199, 204 Secord, Paul, 201 Shah of Iran, 93, 94, 95, 195 Shahzad, Faisal, 105 Shakespeare, William, 99 Sharpe, William, 141, 142, 155 Shaw, Clay, 70 Shemer, Michael, 25 Shu, Tal, 145, 154 Shweder, Richard, 102 Siharto, 100 Slocum-Bradley, Nikki, 199 Smith, Adam, 61, 87, 159, 176

212

Index

Smith, Charles, 200 Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 94 South Africa, 97 South Korea, 128 South Texas College, 202 Southern Illinois University Carbondale, 203 Southwest Airlines, 130 Soviet Union, 56 Springboard to Dictatorship, 89, 195 St. Paul, 4 Stalin, Joseph, 4, 59, 89, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102 Steuer, Max, 2, 21, 189, 193, 199, 204, 205 Stiglitz, Joseph, 21 Strategy Maps, 131, 154 Sudan, 158, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 175, 176 Sudanese Liberation Army, 171 Sun, 14 Sunstein, Cass, 73, 87 Sutherland, Stuart, 28, 29, 30, 31, 37 swastika, 157 Swinkels, Jeroen, 31, 32, 37 Switzerland, 128, 175, 176 Sykes, Peter, 205 Syria, 171 Szilagyi, Jan, 145, 154 Taiwan, 128 Tehran, Iran, 98 The Psychology of Dictatorship, 90 Tillerson, Rex, 147, 154 Tolstoy, Leo, 36 town square test, 92 Toyota, 149 Treaty of Versailles, 95 triangle of crime, 68, 74, 76 Trotsky, Leon, 97 Tunisia, 97, 100 Turkey, 96 Tutsi-Hamite, 162 Tutsis, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164, 167, 173



Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 90, 102 United Kingdom, 56, 92, 101, 102, 174, 205 United Nations, 117, 167, 169, 174, 176, 202 United Nations University, 199 United Postal Service, 130 United States, 5, 49, 50, 60, 64, 65, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 86, 91, 99, 101, 102, 118, 120, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 137, 140, 142, 144, 148, 153, 154, 175, 183, 193, 196 United States Air Force, 67, 76 United States Constitution, 118, 121 United States Cyber Command, 204 United States Department of Defense, 74, 76, 86, 204 United States Executive branch, 83 United States Geological Survey Seismic Response Metering Device, 63 United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, 74, 86 United States Marine Corps, 204 United States Marine Corps Command and Staff College, 204 United States Marine Corps War College, 204 United States Naval Academy, 201 United States of Amnesia, 85, 196 United States Senate Finance Committee, 202 United States Treasury Department, 202 University of Cambridge, 203 University of Dundee, 199 University of Ghana, 204 University of Maryland, 201 University of Mississippi, 2, 201 University of Northern Iowa, 203 University of Pennsylvania, 204 Ushahidi, 181, 182, 190

Beyond Rationality: Contemporary Issues USS George Washington Carver, 201 Valdez oil spill, 147 Valsiner, Jaan, 102 van Bever, Derek, 145, 155 Vermeule, Adrian, 73, 87 Vietnam, 60 Voltaire, 26 Vygotsky, Lev, 3, 15, 17, 43, 45 Waco, Texas, 60, 110 Wal-Mart, 130 Warsaw Pact, 82 Washington University, St. Louis, 203 Washington, D.C., 74, 86, 103, 175, 189, 201 Watergate, 60 Western Europe, 50, 67, 157 Wikileaks, 69, 70, 73, 196 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3, 4, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 39, 40, 41, 45, 193



213

World Bank, 52 World Bank Group, 202 World Trade Center, 3, 50, 62, 65, 67, 72, 75 World Trade Organization, 52 World War I, 100 World War II, 90, 95, 96 Worst-Case Impacts, 132, 133, 134, 137, 150, 151, 152 Yan, Hong, 145, 154 Zaghawa, 167, 169, 170 Zajonc, Robert, 15, 20 Zarephath, 114, 115, 116, 120 Zarephath-Horeb, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120 Zedong, Mao, 102 Zimbabwe, 93 Zionism, 74, 96 Zionist Occupied Government, 120 Zone of Actual Development, 43 Zone of Proximal Development, 43