Darleen > That uncertainty to the thinker end of both parties could be exactly what we need to create a positive change.
Meanwhile, belief has taken the place of reason and has taken the US back into the "Dark Ages".
interventionmag.com
>>Convincing America to accept Bush’s version of the election on faith, rather than empirically examining the ballots, was one of the great conjuring tricks of our age. For the Bush campaign, success would be self-legitimizing; quickly shaping new realities would render old realities irrelevant. The Bush administration, however, has been far more successful in shaping the public’s perception of reality than in shaping reality itself.
One could say that the Bush administration succeeds precisely because it is so adept at denying reality. For Dick Cheney, deficits don’t matter; for Donald Rumsfeld, the insurgency in Iraq was confined to just a few dead-enders; for Paul Wolfowitz, Iraq’s oil revenue would finance Iraq’s own liberation; and for Bush, the continued violence in Iraq has been cited as proof we are succeeding. We are, to use the president’s words, victims of our “catastrophic success.” Well, if that isn’t the mother of all understatements, oxymorons, and mixed-messages, all at the same time.
Notions of “catastrophic success” and the idea that “deficits don’t matter,” only produce cognitive dissonance for those unfortunate enough to have contact with the real world. But Bush lives in a virtual bubble, where his virtuous intentions are assumed sufficient to guarantee a good outcome.
This style of leadership hearkens back to the pre-Enlightenment era, where the moral character of a leader was assumed to be more important than his intellectual qualities. The thinking was that the head of state was God’s representative on earth and that the fortunes of the state would rise or fall depending on the extent to which the leader exercised his authority in keeping with God’s will.
This is a charismatic form of leadership -- personality matters more that political judgment -- and this kind of leadership does not have a good track record. In his landmark study, The Open Society and its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper delineated how detrimental the charismatic style of leadership is to social progress. When a leader’s policies and judgment cannot be questioned because it is presumed that the leader is exercising God’s will on behalf of his subjects, cataclysmic errors of judgment can arise because prudent checks and balances are forgone -- after all, a leader channeling a deity’s will should be enabled, not questioned.
Questioning a charismatic leader is tantamount to thwarting God’s will, at least from the pre-Enlightenment point of view. We can see this perspective at work in the Bush administration: When Joseph Biden, a democratic senator from Delaware, asked president Bush how he knew that invading Iraq was the right course, the president replied, putting his arm on Biden’s shoulder, “My instincts. My instincts.”<< |
