The Second Annual Howard Littlefield Award for Putting the Con in Economics Awarded to Boozer Allan Hamilton - 4

Awarded by Pig Bodine, M.Sc., Ph.D., BM2, BEM, MAD, MDMA

National delusions

There exists a broad current within the US in the latter half of the twentieth century that has gone unnoticed. This is as expected, since it is difficult to have an objective view from within. BAH sets it in stark relief against the backdrop of filtering, prediction and smoothing.

Though it is not possible to give it a well-defined starting point, it surely was well underway with the Kennedy Regime. Perhaps it was a hangover from WWII and the so-called Great Depression, where it proved necessary to hide the truth behind a veil in order to continue as a nation. Roosevelt knew this, and certainly WWII was fought behind such a veil. The nation gained an image of sacrifice and deprivation that were totally out of touch with the reality of its situation vis-à-vis the entire world. It also coincides with the birth of television and mass media which becomes more concentrated, a powerful propaganda and mythos generator that can cloud any vision of reality, abetting a continuity of underlying regime represented by variable personalities and parties.

Whatever the cause, the US began to immerse itself in a fantasy world of its own making. Kennedy built myths of courage around himself and the nation's role in WWII, and began to promote the US as a superman ready to battle the powers of what we considered evil. Certainly the machismo image of men fighting for right in authors like Hemingway (even if it happened to be o the side of communism in the Spanish Civil War) added to this self-image. By Kennedy's time, the evil was Godless communism, and had been for some time as seen from the national hysteria of the McCarthy era.

Such outbreaks of national paranoia are not so uncommon and have been with settlers here since the Salem witch trials. Boozer's model shows a disturbing periodicity in many societies, including the US, of what he terms "national mood swings bordering on national manic depression." Read the accounts of hysteria regarding devil cults and abuse of children in the late 1980s and into the 1990s in which innocent people were imprisoned, their children taken from them, their lives destroyed, while wild claims of hundreds of thousands of children being slaughtered annually by devil worshippers were met by the FBI with proof that this was not and could not be happening. This caused cries of FBI and local and national government complicity, a nonsense that lives on in the works of authors who claim current world leaders and celebrities are reptilian aliens who eat children (see the bestselling author David Icke). It took a decade or more to free many of the innocents. The opposite mood swing occurred with an internet bubble, to be discussed below.

Within this self delusion (which is predicted and explained by BAH), the US predictably entered into a self-defeating clash with reality by choosing sides in the civil war in Vietnam. The loss to a small nation running a guerilla war is considered a huge surprise, but even that is a myth. Guerilla war ended by 1968 when the war turned into infantry versus infantry. The reality was that Vietnam was war by proxy between the US and an alliance of the Soviet Union and China supplying their proxy North Vietnam. Without such support it is doubtful the war would have been lost, though that is not necessarily true. The loss was less military defeat in outright set-piece battle than political loss of will in encountering a tenacious, determined and well-supplied enemy, fulfilling the Chinese taunt that the US was a "paper tiger." In the last respect, the Vietnam War was far different that that in Iraq.

The clash with reality brought up social upheaval tied in part to the war and in part to the myth of freedom which clearly was not true for blacks, and in fact never had been. This led to more mythology, movements like the hippies, and distrust of authority.

But the nation could not survive in a funk of self-pitying withdrawal from a world which continued to interject surprises like the Iranian takeover of the embassy (in good part a reaction to our support for a tyrant whose demise was long overdue). It reeled from degradation of its military, again in a clash with reality (if you doubt this, see the wishful thinking series of Chuck Norris and Sylvester Stallone films) with a foiled rescue attempt and later deals for hostages that President Reagan disbelieved while admitting them on national television in perhaps one of the most surrealistic presidencies the nation had known up to that time.

BAH predicted not the exact takeover of the US embassy but some uprising against US dominance in the middle east most likely led by one of the less stable, more powerful nations that Israel could not be used to control. This could have been Saudi Arabia or Iran or Iraq, all with dictatorships we supported. Iran was certainly most predictable and was given the highest probability, with Saudi Arabia the lowest probability.

At any rate, the God-intoxicated Carter defeated the practical, forthright but not swift Ford in an election centered on corruption with both a Vice-President and President admitting to felonies and stepping down from office. The model does not predict that Ford would pardon Nixon, surprisingly enough, but in smoothing back it shows that the pardon was a mistake, leading to a presidency even more aloof from the nation and far above the law. Moral infraction of a lurid nature would be punishable for a president, but not outright lying.

Carter presided over some of the debacles described above and BAH predicted the nation would find a myth spinner for president after these failures on the heels of Vietnam. In fact, the model claimed a myth spinner who would live in a world even more divorced from reality, believing in the reality of motion pictures over history and inventing science fiction as a tool to attack the great enemy, the Soviet Union. BAH predicted the arising of a Gorbachev to preside over the necessary and impending collapse of the Soviet Union, a man Reagan would be led to embrace. It also predicted the myth that Reagan's science fiction had brought about this collapse, obscuring Reagan's Keynesian pump priming with this science fiction as the excuse. And in the end it predicted his dealing for hostages, given the nature of the man desired by the public and his inability to sense reality. Of course, the rest is history as they say, and the model did not predict his illness which was likely upon him when he came into office.

The popularity of this grandfather figure would lead to election of a bureaucrat who had held almost no elected office, a perfect running mate for the delusional president according to BAH. The man would have little vision and no skill in dealing with the public, but as a competent civil servant would be practical, reflected in his attempt to curb defense spending and other government spending during recession.

The model predicted the Soviet war in the middle east and the Soviet fall from favor with Vietnam, both a result of the Soviet's own national delusion. It predicted the Iran-Iraq war and its aftermath, and also the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In fact, this was eminently predictable, almost deterministic given the delusional leader Saddam Hussein and the support given him by the US. It did not predict the shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner while the US supported Iraq in the Gulf. But BAH predicted that the practical President would sense the right time to call off the war.

The classically conservative policies of the president predictably cost him the election, since the nation cannot abide conservatism. The man raised up would be jovial, youthful, and energetic. He would also be fiscally conservative and profit from an irrational bubble of spending. That this would occur was easily predicted as the nation became exuberant about winning a war, garnered a stock of capital and believed the myth of their children as geniuses. Boozer called this the youth boost, part of the national hallucination in which parents gave away money in huge allowances called venture capital for their semiliterate children to play as adult businessmen and creative designers. An example of what he terms institutional psychosis.

Among the interesting events predicted by BAH was publication of a book raising the generation of World War II to a mythic superhero status (this predicted five years before the book appeared). That such a myth could be built was certainly predictable (given the nonsense taught US citizens that the US and Britain defeated Hitler, far from the reality of Stalin's destruction of the German army, with the US and British part miniscule by comparison), but that it would be built was far from predictable. This is a result of the model's ergodicity, since all allowable events will occur (but as the discussion below will show, much is buried in self-censorship to maintain the myth). At any rate, such a book did appear, written by one of the entertainers of news programs named Tom Brokaw. The model could not predict the author other than he would of necessity be a celebrity entertainer who passed as an intellectual.

The Brokaw book played an important part in later reality shocks suffered by the nation. The failed presidency of the man in office was not difficult to predict given that he would steal the Republican Party's holy grail of a balanced budget and fiscal sanity, or that he would be youthful and somewhat progressive. The way this was engineered was not clear, however, since his peccadillo in the oval office could not be predicted. But if not that, something else, most likely sexual given the national desire for castigation and moral purity and its fear and hatred of sexual activity (also predicted, by the way).

The next President would be so out of touch with reality that when a highly predictable attack on the United States occurred, he would take advantage of it to plunge the nation into a new paranoid psychosis, this time not against devil worshippers but instead Muslims as terrorists. In fact, BAH is criticized because this event was so predictable one could have seen it coming without a model (thought critics tend to overlook the fact the original form of the prediction came in the late 1980s). So was the invasion of a middle eastern nation and the ensuing bogging down predictable, and this time it had to be Iraq. No other nation fit the bill in terms of strategic positioning or opportunity. And as Boozer put it (actually he claims BAH puts out this sort of language) back in 1988 when this prediction was made, "There will rise up a Republican calling himself God-fearing, conservative and Christian. A man of small accomplishments to bond with the most superstitious of God-intoxicated loonies, who will magnify those small accomplishments into a myth of being a familiar of God raised up by God to defeat the heathens, to bring the country to the path towards God, who God cleaned up from alcohol and other drugs, a man claiming to not read. And none will guess the ex-drunk will grow into a New Caligula, sending his legions to conquer the world by giving the truth of Godly government, just as Caligula sent his troops to defeat Poseidon and silence the waves."

Calling Bush a Caligula and likening his crusade in the middle east to Caligula's sending legions to stop the waves and thereby defeat Poseidon as the act of a superior God is unlike anything I have read by anyone. It is why Boozer gets into so much trouble and is so ignored (but also rich, since he quietly puts his money where his predictions are, though he refused to sell any of his technology to corporations or governments). But it seems an apt analogy.

The myth of the Greatest Generation created a longing for similar greatness on the cheap, and when the President promised just such greatness and without a draft, without casualties and paid for by those thankful liberated masses, without even the relatively small hardships of the Greatest Generation, the nation fell for it, another collision with reality that is still in progress at this writing. And this is where the story stops.

The election of 2006 was predicted before 2000 as well, by the way, at least in its large measures of power change, including the margins. Its predictability was easy, it seems, since the outcome of the invasion and occupation of Iraq was also predictable. An occupation not easy, not proud, instead making the nation again appear feckless. And of course, for a nation with no experience of war within its citizenry for the most part, with very little such experience in its leaders, this is the kind of illusion one expects. And gets.

To indicate what I am talking about here by delusion, consider the following media-generated irony. There appeared an article in the business page of metropolitan daily in a city that considers itself a tech hotbed about a Cisco manager moving to India, because, as he put it, that is where the action is. Amidst the article rests a sentence asking if this move foreshadows a brain drain from the US. Disregarding the fact that the man is a manager, and thus not someone on the front line of creation, consider the fact that he originated in Europe. From Holland, originally, then France, Italy and Switzerland before coming to the US. To add the irony, beside the above referenced article appeared another discussing a program at Sematech headed up by an Indian immigrant. Brain drain? Hardly. The US experiences net brain inflow across its boundaries, and without it would have a fast dwindling intellectual infrastructure. That is why it is so amusing to watch the US again cut off its nose to spite its face by attempting to halt immigration. Its latest round of paranoia fostered by terrorism instead of devil worshippers (though many are terrified by Muslims in general) has hurt this intellectual base with potential graduate students moving to Europe. Finding qualified candidates for graduate programs in science, mathematics and engineering has become a chore for the second tier of universities.

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