“I’ve found a flaw.”
The voice in the congressional hearing room on October 28, 2008 was that of the most renowned economist in the world, the one who had guided the largest economy in world for eighteen years. Now, at the age of 82, Allen Greenspan had discovered that a fundamental assumption on which he had based his decisions was not correct.
“The whole intellectual edifice…collapsed in the summer of last year,” he told the committee investigating why the world economy was in meltdown.
“Were you wrong?” asked a congressman.
“Partially.”
Yes, and Evel Knievel was similarly partially wrong when he calculated his motorcycle jump over 19 buses and crashed breaking 37 bones.
March 17, 2008: An embattled Hillary Clinton, fighting for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States, describes some of the experience that qualifies her for that job: “I remember landing [in Tuzla, Bosnia] under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” Others who were present dispute her account, but she sticks to her story till video shows a scene that doesn’t look at all like the one she described. She hastens to assure the world that her slip was not a problem because she really knows better. She even wrote about the same incident in a book and told the story accurately there so, see, her memory isn’t that bad.
So let’s get this straight: she knew that’s not how it really happened and that – that makes it OK?
February 12, 2008: Justice Antonin Scalia of the United States Supreme Court tells a BBC interviewer that torture does not violate the Constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment as long as the intent is to extract information rather than to punish. According to Justice Scalia, who is known as an “originalist” who believes in interpreting the Constitution exactly as its authors intended, the only people we could torture without violating that document, are those who have not been convicted of crimes.
We can imagine him explaining this rationale to James Madison.
Greenspan, Clinton and Scalia are not idiots. They have had the best educations our civilization has to offer, further enriched by decades of experience. Yet in these cases they look like the emperor parading down the street naked. Greenspan and Clinton have at least partly acknowledge their mistakes in these instances. Scalia has not retracted his statement on torture and presumably stands by what he said.
What happened? How can such smart people be so stupid on matters of such importance?
The Hindus call her Maya, the goddess of illusion. When we look on the dance of Maya, we think we see reality. But things are seldom what they seem when Maya takes the floor. We find it hard to take out eyes off her because she shows us what we will ourselves to see instead of what is.
Allen Greespan has spent a lifetime focusing on economics, the study of human beings and what is valuable to them. In 1996 he warned the country of its “irrational exuberance,” but in the end he was betrayed by his own faith in rationality. Maya deluded him. He failed to realize that faith in human rationality isn’t rational.
The problem with Hillary’s Bosnia sniper gaffe is not that it was the error of memory. It was an error in self-perception. Her image of herself as a woman under fire worked its way into a false memory that she repeated even though it contradicted her own writings. She wasn’t just describing an event, she was describing her self. The sniper bullets were not just a detail, they were a reason we should make her the most powerful person on earth. Her misunderstanding was not about what she did, but who she was.
And Justice Scalia no doubt viewed himself as the guardian of the hopes and dreams of the framers of the Constitution, even as he made public statements far more supportive of the oppressive, bloody regimes against which the founders rebelled.
Each of these statements was the direct result of a misperception about the self of the speaker. The problem was that they thought they were looking out the window at the world when they were actually looking into a mirror at their own reflected images. And in each case, these learned and intelligent officials were surrounded by others who reflected back to them the image they had so carefully built up, and amplified it in the process.
The person who looks into a magic mirror and thinks he’s looking at the world is a narcissist. The people who surround him and reflect his deluded image back with amplification are Echoes. When the two combine, they form a closed system like an echo chamber where delusion itself becomes the ruling force. Intelligent people become stupid, decisions are made not by any person, but by the delusional system itself.
This is narcissocracy.
