Politics possibly has the greatest implications for our lives because of how we answer questions of knowledge.  As citizens, we need to evaluate information that the media spins to us, see through the propaganda, and support candidates and officials that accurately represent our values.  Our leaders also need an epistemology to distinguish between truth and falsehood.  And this becomes especially important in issues of war and peace, where a wrong decision can result in death.  In making the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, President George Bush employed an epistemology that accepted the reality of weapons of mass destruction, a link between the terrorists who attacked the World Trade Center in 2001, manpower and budget assumptions, the inclination of the people of Iraqi to welcome our troops, and the probability that our domination of Iraq would bring peace and security to the Middle East.  Although history may someday endorse the decision that Bush made, there is little question that there was a gap between what was believed and what was real in making that decision.  Most of the information I used for my China book was from the academic wing of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Foreign Assessment Center.  The quality of data was in proportion to how close I got to the data.  Raw data was of high quality.  Data that analysts had interpreted for decision-makers was less credible.  I suspect that intelligence information that reaches the President and the National Security Council is so filtered and distorted by political needs that those conclusions may have little semblance to reality.  It’s at these higher councils of government we need people who can ask the probing questions to ensure they are getting accurate information.  In college, I built war gaming programs that simulated attacks between the US and the USSR, based on the reception and transmission of incomplete information under degrading conditions of time and stress.  The assumption in international politics, which I think is a false assumption, is that the global order is like a chess board, with all pieces on the board for the world to see, and all that we need to do is apply rationality and forward thinking to achieve optimum results.  I think foreign affairs is more analogous to a more murky card game, where victory hinges on luck and bluff in addition to skill.  Our political leaders need a penetrating grasp of epistemology to see through deception to make the correct decisions, and my great fear is that they do not.  The cost of a bad epistemology can be the death of our planet.        

        My field of computers attracts many sharp people, people with intelligence on the far side of the bell curve and whose income are on the upper slopes of the tax bracket.  Because of their achievements, many of these people are arrogant—proud of themselves and disdainful of others.  I’ve observed that time and again the most catastrophic mistakes arise not from a lack of knowledge or failures in software or hardware, but because of arrogance—people that think they know but do not know.   The myopia of the brilliant is a condition where intelligent people make stupid mistakes.  These people are not just smart, but they are also forceful.  They think it’s shameful to admit ignorance, and place great confidence in their brilliance—brilliantly constructing problem-solving systems and forcefully acting on their results.  The problem is that these people are reluctant to re-examine their assumptions.  They consider it a sign of weakness.  We see this especially in politics—in building too many dams and highways and in starting ill-conceived wars.   In describing the Viet Nam debacle of the 1960s, Russell Baker wrote that these people in government “had a lust to know everything.  They had a vision of total information.  Intelligence.  One still senses a vocal genuflection when the word passes over their lips.  God may be love, but knowledge is power.  Theirs was a faith in Total Intelligence.  In their dream of ultimate fulfillment, absolutely everything was knowable.  The astounding thing, of course, was that the harder the White House labored to know absolutely everything, the less it knew about relatively few things that it was in the business to know about.”

        In addition to arrogance was another phenomenon that Yale psychologist Irving L. Janus called “groupthink.”   Groups such as project teams adhered to group norms – an assumed consensus-- and pressured each other to uniformity.  An illusion of invulnerability and the rationalizing away of conflicting self-censorship gripped the group.  This pressure combined with the fear of losing influence or even your job made it difficult for anyone to make principled stands. But reality is a hard teacher, and even the mightest herd must deal with the world as it is.  For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church institutionalized a position of a person whose job it was to challenge the qualifications of a potential saint called the Devil’s Advocate.  I think the government and businesses would also do well to have such a Devil’s Advocate—someone who could not be fired unless they were not showing enough courage in challenging conventional wisdom.  Truth must be a marriage between epistemology and ethics.  Almost always in businesses and government, the truth is available.   A means must simply be made so that we recognize that truth and act on it.   

      There are times companies have penalized me for telling the truth.  My decision to leave Wells Fargo was in response to my manager’s unwillingness to recognize what I saw—obsolete processes that was costing the company clients and dollars.  However, there is also the right way and the wrong way to tell the truth, and perhaps I could have communicated that just as forcefully but more tactfully. 

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