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December 14, 2010
How Faux Science supports Bad Policy
As the late Barbara Tuchman pointed out in March of Folly (1984), powerful and respected governments sometimes pursued policies that were contrary to their nations’ best interests long after they should have recognized that fact. Although Tuchman was clearly writing as an historian, the psychological implications of her analysis are unmistakable and compelling. Even more to the point, her insights serve to remind us how bitterly our policy in Afghanistan is still divided over the same issues we couldn't agree on four decades ago in Vietnam, another poor nation with a history of resisting foreign domination. Then, as now, we were pursuing the same failing idea: that we could win the "hearts and minds" of a people with entirely different cultural and religious beliefs simply by sending our armed forces over to act as their police.In a similar vein, the idea that persistence in harmful behavior (as defined by outsiders) is both "addiction," and a "disease" requiring imprisonment is a bizarre notion that has evolved into a core belief of the drug war. Yet drug warriors themselves are clearly unable to that their demand for blind obedience to an oppressive law is tyranny. Have they forgotten how this nation freed itself from England? Or do they think all US laws are equally just, logical, and deserving of obedience?
Such flagrant incongruity in core beliefs was once called cognitive dissonance, however the far Right now seems as bereft of irony as they had always been of humor. Which brings me, by a roundabout way, to my point: the "drug czar" is just as powerless over his policy's enforcement bureaucracy (the DEA) as its "scientific" agency (NIDA) is bereft of scientific credibility; yet neither our mainstream press nor our scientific establishment seems willing to admit those glaring deficiencies.
In other words, because "truth" is whatever the establishment's propaganda organs can bring themselves to admit, any significant changes in a bad policy will require a lot more revision than one might think.
Doctor Tom
Entry revised on 12/18/10
Posted by tjeffo at December 14, 2010 04:15 PM