“The March of Folly” is what historian Barbara Tuchman titled her chronicle of the role of willful stupidity in World History. Her working definition of “political folly” is “the pursuit of policy against self-interest”, of which one operative criterion is “self-deception”, or as I prefer to call it, the unwillingness to think about what you’d rather not think about. The ancient Greeks called it “hubris”, but 2,500 years of further data from the laboratory of History have elucidated the phenomenon of political folly beyond the Greeks’s initiatory hypotheses.
Tuchman’s list of exemplars of political folly included the Renaissance Popes’ provocation of the Protestant Reformation, the British Government’s unnecessary provocation of American independence, and how America “betrayed itself” in the Viet Nam War. To that list, now we can add the idiots who were instrumental in China’s decision to include Tibet in the Olympic Torch Route, whose willful stupidity includes the (to use a criminal law term of art) “aggravating circumstance” of actually planning to mount (sarcastic phallic allusion intended) the torch on Mount Everest, one of the most prominent symbols of a land against whose people, and against whose traditional religion, the atheist Chinese Communist Party is mortally hostile. Read the rest of this entry »
