Hannah arendt lying in politics pdf

Hence, the quintessential element is the abuse of this relationship of trust between individuals or groups. It is particularly in those cases that lies become unethical and damaging to society at large.

The basic issue that these papers raise is deception. According to Hannah Arendt truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealing Ahrendt, ; 4. A first argument why according to Arendt truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues follows from the notion that politics is all about action.

Such change would be impossible if we could not mentally remove ourselves from where we physically are located and imagine that things might as well be different from what they actually are. In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to change facts — the ability to act — are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.

We cannot create something new out of nothing and therefore we have to procure the space we need to make manifest our ideas. Politics derives from a vision that the world can be different from what it is now. Having a vision is something that enables political leaders to guide people into unchartered territory.

This means that in order to realize our dreams something else has to give way. Without the mental freedom to deny or affirm existence, no action would be possible. The deliberate denial of truth — the ability to lie — and the capacity to act are thus interconnected. Also the liar is a man of action who wants to change the world and in order to achieve that, he says what is not so.

There is no doubt that businessmen and politicians share the affinity with action. Just like politicians, businessmen thus have a desire to change the world. They took action and went off to create what they could see for themselves.

This is what innovation is all about. A new product or solution is imagination coming into action. Indeed, he will usually have plausibility on his side; his exposition will sound more logical, as it were, since the element of unexpectedness — one of the outstanding characteristics of all events — has mercifully disappeared. And this substitute, because of modern techniques and the mass media, is, of course, much more in the public eye than the original ever was.

They view their audience from a public- relations perspective. In order to convince the public, it is important to create an image that is coherent and consistent. He will sound more plausible and logical as the element of unexpectedness has disappeared. Not bothered by having to communicate unwelcome facts, the liar has the ability to sweet talk to every audience while adjusting his pitch to what people want to hear.

He has prepared his story for public consumption to making it credible. Hence, truthfulness is not so much a political virtue because it makes it harder to convince the audience and therefore to prepare the way to change.

As substitutes for more violent means, lies can therefore be considered as relatively harmless tools in the arsenal of political action. Also with respect to image-making, there is a striking parallel between politics and business. In the modern business environment huge amounts of money are invested in image-making. Madoff could do what he has done because he managed to create an image of reliability and trustworthiness.

It was done with extreme care. How a company appears in the public eye is of the greatest importance. More than ever, companies represent how we should live and to which group we belong. Something as simple as a soft drink has become an icon personifying a particular lifestyle. Those images are carefully crafted and unwelcome facts that have the potential to distort this manufactured image are met with hostility.

Substantial marketing and advertising budgets are deployed to maintain an image intact because there is a lot at stake. In this process, dangers because of the manipulation of facts constantly arise. Schoderbek and Deshpande estimate that impression management measured by the so-called impression management scale is significantly correlated to unethical conduct measured by the Ruch and Newstrom ethics scale as well as to over claiming measured by the so-called over claiming scale.

An illustrative example is the image that Philip Morris Inc wanted to portray through its brand Marlboro Colby, The cowboy riding his horse was an image of freedom and the good life.

Despite the fact that for a long time they have stopped using that image, it still is with us. A reality that has a counter side to it, though. Instead of selling a perceived happy lifestyle, Philip Morris sells cigarettes that were known to cause deadly diseases. What is interesting is that despite the fact that both Philip Morris and their customers are aware of the negative effects of smoking, these facts remain underexposed as they are hostile to the image.

As management is willing to report good news, but reluctant to disclose bad news, social and environmental disclosures run the risk to be to a large extent self-laudatory Hooghiemstra, In a study of Australian companies which were known to have breached various environmental protection laws, Deegan and Rankin show, for example, that the disclosure of positive information greatly outweigh the negative disclosure.

The mean amount of negative disclosures was only 5. Interestingly, the sample of prosecuted firms significantly disclosed more positive environmental information than firms that were not prosecuted. Firms apparently tried to deflect attention from the proven misconduct towards their positive environmental policies. According to Gray social reports are incomplete to such an extent that one must conclude that they are either a waste of time and money or even a deliberate attempt to mislead society as to the quality of CSR of the reporting companies.

In this situation, a firm can adopt the appearance of a CSR program, without actually taking care to prevent wrongdoing. They attempt to change perceptions without changing facts Hess, Unwelcome factual truths are therefore often transformed into opinions that can be debated.

Factual truth differs from opinion in the degree of claimed validity. Because facts are beyond dispute, they carry an element of coercion that opinions lack. From a political point of view, truth may therefore seen as despotic. Unwelcome opinions can be rejected or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess a stubbornness that can only be removed by outright lies.

Of course, facts and opinions belong to the same realm, as facts inform opinions. Opinions that differ widely may still be legitimate, but only as long as they respect factual truth. Hence, although politicians have a right to interpret the facts in accordance to their own vision, they are not allowed to change the facts themselves.

The reason why politicians may find it relatively easy to discredit factual truth as just another opinion is that contingent facts are not compellingly true. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses. But eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable and facts recorded by documents can be suspected as forgeries. There are many known examples in history in which facts have been deliberately misrepresented or lied away.

Facts that are ignored or deliberately lied away or that are otherwise transitioned out of the world may disappear forever, because their content often defies verification. Because of this contingent character, factual truth is always very vulnerable. Also in business unwelcome facts can be easily ignored because business communication is often about opinions.

In the stock market, a business is valued by its future potential of making profits, which depends on market expectations. Companies therefore have a major interest in communicating positive expectations in annual reports on the realization of business plans.

This kind of statements does, however, not have the status of factual truth. To verify whether a fact is true, we have to check its occurrence and this can only be done with respect to the past. But such markers are absent when talking about the future.

Any statement about a future event therefore reflects an opinion that only grows gradually into falsity or truth because of the elapse of time. This gives leeway for ignoring signals that contrast the expectations. Grant and Visconti show for 12 case studies of US and European companies involved in major accounting scandals that the background of the accounting fraud is a strategic misfit based on overambitious growth targets, multiple acquisitions and excessive debt financing. For businessmen who are in charge of realizing a future goal, admitting failure when things go wrong is indeed never easy.

The alternative — to change the image of the future and admit failure — may be too difficult and too costly. It is easier to continue along the same track ignoring the signals. As long as there is time, there is the thought of a possibility to catch up and use the elapse of time in combination with targeted action to cover up. The problem is that lies often start small and then grow bigger.

The incentives to lie the second time will be greater once one has started lying, because lying seldom cures the underlying reasons that caused the failures. When the problem that prompted the first lie reappears, the risk of having past untruths exposed is a powerful incentive to lie again Fleming and Zyglidopoulos, Obviously, it very difficult to say when lying starts if businesses communicate unrealistic opinions about the expected performance in future.

If predictions do not materialize, is it because they have been deceptively communicated like that, or is failure the result of unforeseen circumstances? Hence it is hard, if not impossible, to judge the extent to which people are lying when they make statements about the future. Without doubt some statements are likelier than others, but there are no clear indicators telling us when we have entered the world of error or fantasy or deliberate falsehood.

A goal may seem impossible from the start, but only the elapse of time will tell the real tale. How big must the deviation from an original prediction be before we can consider it a moral duty to inform stakeholders? Is it 5 percent or 10 or 50? There are no clear answers and this provides opportunities for companies to communicate predictions that they know themselves to be unrealistic.

Arendt refers to this group as the higher ranks of the civilian services. According to Arendt, these people can be characterized as problem-solvers with great self confidence who rarely doubt their ability to prevail and are accustomed to winning.

They are different from the ordinary image makers, in the sense that they are intelligent and in love with abstract theory and models. But the use of sophisticated modeling techniques in the preparation of policy runs the danger that politicians put an unrealistic faith in models and theory. Politicians tend to forget that any model that their advisors are using is a representation of reality, and never more than that.

At the same time, insofar as politicians have the appetite for action, their advisors will hardly have the time to wait until the theories and hypothetical explanations are verified or denied by facts. Instead they will be tempted to adjust facts to make them fit their theory.

Like in politics, also in the business world there is an increasing pervasiveness of the use of theories and methodologies. In , 78 of the top universities in the US offered courses on business planning, typically in the area of entrepreneurship or small business management Honig, It is obviously important for business leaders to use methods for planning purposes. Usually a planning department is responsible for putting together multi-year business plans.

Those plans are used by management to pro-actively align resources in order to realize envisaged targets. Guiding an organization into a particular direction becomes much easier if management has a sense of direction.

However, the research on how business plans affect profitability has yielded mixed results. Some of these studies found a positive relationship between planning and profitability, growth and performance.

By helping firm founders to make decisions, to balance resource supply and demand, and to turn abstract goals into concrete operational steps, business planning reduces the likelihood of venture disbanding and accelerates product development and venture organizing activity.

But other studies found a negative, or lack of relationship, between business plans and profitability Honig, One of the reasons for the negative impact of business plans on performance is that planning is constraining creative responses to environmental changes Mintzberg, However, no matter the level of theory that is applied, every plan suffers from the same defect, they remain what they are: plans. To a smaller or larger degree no complex business plan ever gets fully realized, but the desire to perform according to plan remains a strong motivator.

Predictability, although counter natural, is something that is highly praised by business executives and rewarded by shareholders Blake et al, No doubt it is vital to have plans and ideas about where we want to go, but we should not lose sight of the fact that there is nothing permanent about such plans.

No matter how hard we try, as long as plans have not reached the status of fact, they remain an intelligent guess about what the future might look like. Although the motive is different, just like image making, business planning may lead to a more or less conscious neglect of stubborn facts, just because they do no fit the assumptions on which the business plan is based. This explanation points at the interconnectedness of deception and self deception.

As discussed above, to change reality as it is, requires imagination. The danger associated with this kind of image-making and the consequent mass manipulation to make the audience believe the image is that it may easily evolve to self- deception. If others start seriously believing the truth of the image, the politician may also become more and more convinced of his vision. Successful politicians are thus susceptible to falling prey to self-deception.

This self-deception helps the liar to be much more trustworthy in the eyes of others. This may be a reason for political advisors not to inform their political bosses about disturbing facts. One is then acting from within the same boat as the victims and not from a cold distant place. Self-deception is often met with more permissiveness and tolerance than cold lying. The importance of mental freedom, successful image making, opinions and the use of business plans in business makes businessmen also susceptible to self deception.

In order to arrive at the different world that a businessman can see because of his visionary mind, he often lives and acts as if this new world already exists, deliberately deceiving his own mind as a consequence. The step from image-making to believing is a small one, and if the people who are creating those images are not careful, the image becomes a perceived reality in the minds of themselves.

Because self-deception allows the businessman to behave self-interestedly, while at the same time believing that he upholds his moral principles. This process is facilitated by various enables, such as language euphemisms and routinization of decisions. For example, instead of illegal accounting practices managers talk about aggressive accounting. These terms may become so commonplace that managers do no longer see the questionable behavior that they represent.

That also applies to decision making processes that become routine and therefore ordinary. A series of small steps away from ethical and acceptable practices, if sufficiently small, may therefore lead to an unconscious practice of lying. Another mechanism that evokes self deception suggested by the analysis of Arendt is that it is in the business interest to inform top executives selectively.

A example is provided by the construction fraud in the Netherlands XXX. In a TV program by Zembla exposed a clearing system for construction companies that colluded in price offers for public works.

In , the European Commission prohibited the practice of pre-consulting and in the Dutch government implemented this EU regulation and forbade the practice of ex- ante consultations. But, as the TV program showed, the practice still continued in When the fraud unfolded, many construction companies were persecuted and fined.

Because a company is more successful in presenting an honest image if the CEO believes his company to be fully honest. The Landis case is particular not because of its relative size. Though sizable in terms of absolute numbers there are more important bankruptcies that can be studied. What interests us in the Landis case is that it has several characteristics that makes trust in its future plans a crucial factor of success. Though Landis Group N. From onwards Landis is increasingly entering new business areas with which the management has had very little experience.

Its original focus was that of a supplier of information technology and more specifically of communication equipment. In order to reap the benefits of a growing market it reinvented itself from a local reseller into an international full-service distributor. The growth was made possible because of acquisitions that were facilitated by an IPO initial public offering that took place in Having floated the company on a stock exchange facilitated the access to capital which allowed Landis to take its expansion ideas even further.

But in order to sustain expansion in a competitive market, Landis needed additional capital to support its growth. For that purpose it raised a loan of million euro from a syndicate of nine banks. This transaction was completed during the third quarter of In March it raised another 45 million euro by means of a convertible loan which had to be renegotiated because of liquidity issues.

A breach of trust with the banks combined with a shortage of cash as a result of negative cash flows on the side of Landis called for different solutions. When the banks cancelled the loan and Landis reported a loss of 52 million euro for the year on April 11 the Board of Directors stepped down.

The liquidation of Landis became unavoidable when a rescue plan presented by an entirely new Board of Directors was turned down on April 22 of the same year. Landis went bankrupt on July 8 As a consequence employees lost their jobs and roughly million euro could be considered lost during the process which lasted not much longer than 4 years. One of the facts that contributed to the course of events as they took place is the way Landis financed its expansion.

First, during and after the flotation of the Landis business it acquired around million euro in cash mainly by issuing shares. Second, while listed, Landis acquired a large number of businesses by issuing stock. In order to sustain its growth it had to report positive results if the Landis management were to continue an expansion strategy of any kind. Management realized that a substantial decline in the Landis stock price would be an obstacle to growing the company by means of using its shares to acquire additional businesses.

A declining share price was something that had to be avoided at all cost. As the financial position of Landis was extremely fragile, at least in retrospect, a difficult dance had to be performed in order to maintain a positive image. This task was made even more difficult as market conditions started to change again.

The year marked a turning point. In the IT sector spending was at an all time high and general consent had it that growth would continue. Landis being in the center of the technology industry suffered as a result of the deteriorating market conditions. Presumably driven by the almost unlimited possibilities of new technology, an initiative was launched at the end of the last century to offer more extensive mobile services.

Licenses allowing telecom operators to utilize this so-called third-generation mobile services UMTS or "3G" were auctioned at record amounts. But their roll-out - initially expected in — has been taking place more slowly than originally planned, and the great expectations associated with their introduction contrast starkly with the difficulties facing the sector.

Fact is that management had taken a bet and was late in acting when things turned against expectations. A final explanation of what went wrong is the way in which Landis acquired target companies. Because of the growth-strategy management believed they had to adopt, Landis went through a whole series of acquisitions, some smaller, others bigger. Without doubt the number of entities that had to be integrated was higher than As a rule, the preparation before taking over the many companies as they did was insufficient.

In most cases the obvious minimum requirements that one has to satisfy before paying sizeable amounts for an acquisition target were not met. There are hardly any records indicating that proper market research had been done for any of the companies that were acquired. Financial due diligence was mostly limited to a quick scan. Maybe Landis management was not concerned about the acquisition at all, since most of it was paid in Landis shares.

Like no one else they had inside knowledge about the intrinsic value of their own shares. First, when we look at action and mental freedom it is clear that Landis was the brainchild of a group of entrepreneurs who could imagine a future.

Looking at growing markets, the management team tried to envisage what they had to do to address those business opportunities. As a consequence they began to transform Landis into the company that in their eyes was required to achieve their objectives. It is this fragility that makes deception so easy up to a point, and so tempting.

It never comes into a conflict with reason, because things could indeed have been as the liar maintains they were; lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected for which we were not prepared.

Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle. T he results of such experiments when undertaken by those in possession of the means of violence are terrible enough, but lasting deception is not among them.

There always comes the point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive. Truth or falsehood—it does not matter which any more, if your life depends on your acting as though you trusted; truth that can be relied on disappears from public life and with it the chief stabilizing factor in the ever-changing affairs of men.

To the many genres in the art of lying developed in the past, we must now add two more recent varieties. There is, first, the apparently innocuous one of the public relations managers who learned their trade from the inventiveness of Madison Avenue.

Public relations is a variety of advertising, hence has its origin in the consumer society, with its inordinate appetite for goods to be distributed through a market economy. Hence the psychological premise of human manipulability has become one of the chief wares that are sold on the market of common and learned opinion.

But such doctrines do not change the way people form opinions or prevent them from acting according to their own lights; the only method short of terror to have real influence on their conduct is still the old carrot-and-stick approach. Oddly enough, the only person likely to be an ideal victim of complete manipulation is the President of the United States.

This, of course, can happen only if the Executive branch has cut itself off from the legislative powers of Congress; it is the logical outcome in our system of government when the Senate is both deprived of and reluctant to exercise its powers to participate and advise in the conduct of foreign affairs.

T he second variety of lying, though less frequent in everyday life, plays a more important role in the Pentagon Papers. It also appeals to much better men, to those, for example, who are likely to be found in the higher ranks of the civilian services. A number of the authors of the McNamara study belong to this group and it is to them, after all, that we owe this truthful though of course not complete story of what happened inside the machinery of government. The basic integrity of those who wrote the report is beyond doubt; whether he knew them or not, they could indeed be trusted by Mr.

But these moral qualities, which deserve admiration, clearly did not prevent some of them from participating for many years in the game of deceptions and falsehoods. Still, they obviously were different from the ordinary image makers. They were eager to find formulae, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, which would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them, that is, they were eager to discover laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be.

Men who act, to the extent that they feel themselves to be the masters of their own futures, will forever be tempted to make themselves masters of the past as well. Instead they will be tempted to fit their reality—which, after all, was man-made to begin with and thus could have been otherwise —into their theory, thus mentally getting rid of its disconcerting contingency. The fallacy of such thinking begins with forcing the choices into mutually exclusive dilemmas; reality never presents us with anything so neat as premises for logical conclusions.

The kind of thinking that presents both A and C as undesirable, and therefore settles on B, hardly serves any other purpose than to divert the mind and blunt the judgment for the multitude of real possibilities. What these problem-solvers have in common with down-to-earth liars is the attempt to get rid of facts and the confidence that this should be possible because of the inherent contingency of those facts.

The truth of the matter is that this can never be done by either theory or opinion manipulation—as though a fact can be safely removed from the world if only enough people believe in its nonexistence.

It can be done only through radical destruction—as in the case of the murderer who says that Mrs. Smith has died and then goes and kills her. In the political domain, such destruction would have to be wholesale. Needless to say there never existed on any level of government such a will to wholesale destruction, in spite of the fearful number of war crimes committed in the course of the Vietnam war.

But even where this will is present, as it was in the case of both Hitler and Stalin, the power to achieve it would have to amount to omnipotence. That concealment, falsehood, and the role of the deliberate lie became the chief issues of the Pentagon Papers rather than illusion, error, miscalculation, and the like is mainly owing to the strange fact that the mistaken decisions and lying statements consistently violated the astoundingly accurate factual reports of the intelligence community, at least the reports quoted in the Bantam edition.

O f even greater interest, nearly all decisions in this disastrous enterprise were made in full cognizance of the fact that they probably could not be carried out: hence goals had constantly to be shifted. Rusk has recently added the aim of preventing World War III, though it seems not to be in the Pentagon Papers nor to have played a role in the factual record as we know it. All these goals existed together, almost in a helter-skelter fashion; none was permitted to cancel its predecessors.

The ultimate aim was neither power nor profit. We know today to what extent all these audiences were misjudged. According to Richard J. I t is this remoteness from reality that will haunt the reader of the Pentagon Papers who has the patience to stay with them to the end. Richard J. At any rate, the relation, or rather non-relation, between facts and decision, between the intelligence community and the civilian and military services, is perhaps the most momentous, and certainly was the best guarded, secret that the Pentagon Papers revealed.

For the beginnings of their role in Southeast Asia were far from promising. Eisenhower was old-fashioned enough to believe in the Constitution. He met with Congressional leaders and decided against open intervention because he was informed that Congress would not support such a decision.

The fact-finding branches of the intelligence services were largely separated from whatever covert operations were still going on in the field, which meant that they at least were responsible only for gathering and interpreting information rather than for creating the news themselves. Why are you failing us? The price they paid for these objective advantages was that their reports remained without any influence on the decisions and propositions of the National Security Council.

The divergence between the facts established by the intelligence services—sometimes by the decision makers themselves as notably in the case of McNamara and often available to the informed public—and the premises, theories, and hypotheses according to which decisions were finally made is total. And the extent of our failures and disasters throughout these years can be grasped only if one has the totality of this divergence firmly in mind.

I shall therefore remind the reader of a few outstanding examples. Finally there were, secondary only to the domino theory, the grand stratagems based on the premise of a monolithic Communist world conspiracy and the existence of a Sino-Soviet bloc, in addition to the hypothesis of Chinese expansionism.

A number of them have gone further and developed a theory of their own: America, emerging as the greatest power after the Second World War, has embarked upon a consistent imperialist policy which ultimately aims at world rule. It was rather an unbelievable example of using excessive means to achieve minor aims in a region of marginal interest. T he Bantam edition of the Pentagon Papers at any rate contains nothing to support the theory of grandiose imperialist stratagems.

This is not to say that a genuine American global policy with imperialist overtones would have been impossible after the collapse of the old colonial powers. The Pentagon Papers, generally so devoid of spectacular news, reveal one incident which, so far as I know, was never more than a rumor, and which seems to indicate how considerable the chances were for a global policy that then were gambled away for the sake of image making and of fighting nonexistent conspiracies.

Although the decision makers certainly knew about the intelligence reports, whose factual statements they had, as it were, to eliminate from their minds day in and day out, I think it entirely possible that they were not aware of these earlier documents, which would have given the lie to all their premises before they could grow into full-blown theory and ruin the country.

Certain bizarre circumstances attending the recent irregular and unexpected declassification of top secret documents point in this direction. It is astounding that this study could have been prepared for years while people in the White House, the Department of State, and the Defense Department apparently ignored it; but it is even more astounding that after its completion, with sets dispatched in all directions within the government bureaucracy, the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the forty-seven volumes, clearly indicating that those who should have been most concerned with what the study had to tell never set eyes on it.

T his sheds some light on one of the gravest dangers of overclassification: not only are the people and their elected representatives denied access to what they must know to form an opinion and make decisions, but the actors themselves who receive top clearance to learn all the relevant facts remain blissfully unaware of them.

Even now that the press has brought a certain portion of them into the public domain and members of Congress have been given the whole study, it does not look as though those most in need of this information have read them or ever will.

For the trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth which the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods. For the truth, after all, is that the US was the richest country and the dominant power after the end of the Second World War, and that today, a mere quarter of a century later, Mr.

In the contest between public statements, always over-optimistic, and the truthful reports of the intelligence community, persistently bleak and ominous, the public statements were likely to win simply because they were public. The great advantage of publicly established and accepted propositions over whatever an individual may secretly know or believe to be the truth is neatly illustrated by a medieval anecdote, according to which a sentry, on duty to watch and warn the townspeople of the approach of the enemy, jokingly sounded a false alarm, and was the last to rush to the walls to defend the town against his imagined enemies.

From this, one may conclude that the more successful a liar is, the more people he has convinced, the more likely it is that he will end by believing his own lies. In the Pentagon Papers, we deal with people who did their utmost to win the minds of the people, that is, to manipulate them, but since they labored in a free country where all kinds of information were available, they never really succeeded. The deceivers started with self-deception. And since they lived anyhow in a defactualized world, they did not find it difficult to pay no more attention to the fact that their audience refused to be convinced than to other facts.

T he internal world of government, with its bureaucracy on one hand, its social life on the other, made self-deception relatively easy. In the realm of politics, where secrecy and deliberate deception have always played a significant role, self-deception is the danger par excellence; the self-deceived deceiver loses all contact, not only with his audience but with the real world which will catch up with him, as he can remove only his mind from it and not his body.

The problem-solvers who knew all the facts presented regularly to them in the reports of the intelligence community had only to rely on their techniques, that is, on the various ways of translating qualities and contents into quantities and numbers with which to calculate outcomes, which then, unaccountably, never came true, in order to eliminate, day in and day out, what they knew to be real.

The problem-solvers did not judge, they calculated; their self- confidence did not even need self-deception to be sustained in the midst of so many misjudgments, for it relied on the evidence of mathematical, purely rational truth. That is a nice outlook for a gambler, not for a statesman, and even the gambler would be better advised to take into account what gain or loss would actually mean for him in daily life.