More Than Allegory
In addition to a re-examination of the Emperor's New Clothes, I bring you my latest reflections on the questions we don’t ask, the answers we don’t hear, and what keeps us from becoming fully human.
In the famous folktale about “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, the child says the quiet part aloud: the Emperor is naked. By contrast, the adults in the story disconnect their thoughts from their speech, and they enact the story told by the con artists — the weavers. To do otherwise would mean appearing incapable or stupid. The moral of this story seems self-evident but also persistently ignored in the recurring cycles of mania about the latest Emperor’s new clothes.1
So, in this post, I’ll pick up where I left off in “Seize the Means of Perception: Alternatives to Survival through Ignorance”, and I’ll share a few reflections on a Frequently Unasked Question (FUQ): What drives us to ignore the obvious?
Before we continue, allow me to briefly draw your attention to a promotional message. I’ve been publishing responses to FUQs on M2 Dialogue (M2D), where I explore the art of maintaining balance at the intersection of matter and metaphor. If the subject interests you, feel free to subscribe at https://m2dialogue.substack.com/.
For the daring souls who sustain their attention beyond the reading of the FUQ response, I included my latest reflections on the stumbling blocks obstructing the path to becoming fully human.
What Drives Us to Ignore the Obvious?
Dangerous convictions. That’s a two-word response inspired by my recent re-reading of the third chapter in Margaret Heffernan’s Willful Ignorance: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril. I can even offer you a one-word answer: ideology.2
In Love with Ideas: Costs and Benefits
We ignore the obvious because our ideologies fuel dangerous convictions, and because, as Heffernan writes: “It’s as easy to fall in love with an idea as with a person. Big ideas are especially alluring. They bring order to the world, give meaning to life.”
We cannot tolerate life without meaning, so we understandably gravitate to big ideas. We defend them as maps and sources of meaning. We even accept loss of contact with reality to affirm our beliefs and to avoid cognitive dissonance. To this end, we employ every form of motivated reasoning, every defense mechanism in the book.
The problem with “big ideas” isn’t their size. It’s their integrity. They either have it, or they don’t. It’s either strong or weak. It’s not hard to evaluate big ideas on these two basic dimensions. But it often seems psychologically impossible to acknowledge errors in our evaluations.
When Prophecy Fails
Some readers may not be satisfied with a mere description of willful ignorance in psychobiological or psychoanalytic terms. As a response to this FUQ, a description without examples and stories may be too abstract. In the third chapter, Heffernan offers several colorful examples as she delves into big ideas and their adherents’ reactions to their failure. Here, I’ll highlight two examples.
First, in his 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails, the social psychologist Leon Festinger illustrated a broadly observable tendency in human responses to the failure of big ideas. When events (or non-events) deliver irrefutable disconfirmations, big ideas do not exit quietly; in fact, they typically grow bigger. Festinger studied a small apocalyptic cult most of whose members doubled down on their beliefs after the non-occurrence of the prophesied apocalypse. Doubling down further disconnected the cultists from reality, but it also dissolved their cognitive dissonance.
Here’s another example: Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve. In the epigraph to the chapter on dangerous convictions, Heffernan quotes Greenspan’s 2008 comment about the inescapability of ideology:
Ideology is a conceptual framework, it’s the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology.
Greenspan’s ideology imbued him with dangerous convictions, but this danger may not be immediately obvious. He believed, for example, that markets self-correct, that financial institutions can forecast and manage their own risk, that the removal of regulations and other constraints imposed by government would lead humanity, as Heffernan puts it, to “ever greater heights of freedom, creativity, and wealth.”
What made Greenspan’s convictions dangerous wasn’t their propositional truth or falsehood. In fact, depending on the context, these beliefs could conceivably inform sensible decisions. The danger of Greenspan’s convictions was precisely in their insensitivity to context, in their immunity to disconfirming evidence, and in their evangelical fervor.
Based on these characteristics, Greenspan’s convictions seem oddly comparable to the ideology of the apocalyptic cult described in Festinger’s study. Another interesting parallel is that, in both of these ideologies, there’s a progenitor. For the members of the doomsday cult, the progenitor was Marian Keech, a suburban housewife who believed, based on automatic writing, that the earth would be flooded on December 21, 1954. For Greenspan, the “stabilizing force” on the path to his ideology was Ayn Rand, whom Heffernan describes as “an adulterous, failed screenwriter”.
There’s also an important difference between these two ideologies. Marian Keech’s ideology survived a single disconfirming non-event, but it didn’t outlive its adherents. By contrast, Greenspan’s ideology has survived multiple disconfirmations, and it may survive many more.
Frank Partnoy, a prominent critic of Greenspan, has enumerated these disconfirmations starting with “Patient Zero” in 1987 to Enron in 2002. I’ll just mention four examples:
“Patient Zero” is Andy Krieger, a currency options trader at Bankers Trust. His $80 million mismarking of currency options exposed his employer’s weak internal controls.
The 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) represented a failure of risk management.
The 2008 financial crisis represented a failure of markets to self-regulate.
The bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 represented a failure of financial models to estimate the risk of large asset bubbles.
The worldview Greenspan defended from these disconfirmations formed in his late twenties and early thirties when he became a devoted acolyte of Rand. In his autobiography, The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan described Rand as a “stabilizing force” in his life. He also published a defense of Rand in the New York Times after an unfavorable review of Atlas Shrugged, Rand’s second novel. One can hear the evangelical fervor in Greenspan’s writing.
Justice is unrelenting. Creative individuals and undeviating purpose and rationality achieve joy and fulfillment. Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.
Leon Festinger wrote: “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.”
Is there anything scarier than a mind in love with an idea? Is there anything more tragic? Or more understandable? The problem, of course, is not in the love of an idea but in disorders of love, which is the subject of another post. My point here is that what drives us to ignore the obvious doesn’t disappear with the dissolution of a millenarian cult or with Alan Greenspan’s retirement. Ideology survives dissolutions and retirements.
Learning from History: Mission Impossible
Insert here your preferred platitudes and truth bombs about how little we learn from history. In 2014, I reflected on this irony in an opinion piece titled "Corporate Fraud Is Shockingly Common". I wrote it on the sixth anniversary of the collapse of Bear Stearns. I managed to get the piece published because of a “cosmic bow” to this anniversary: a new revelation of fraud (Dewey & LeBoeuf) provided the latest reminder of how little our markets had changed to reduce the risk of similar implosions.
In this contribution to The Fiscal Times, I reflected on the rise of “routine anomalies”, a term I had coined with a former boss to describe the rising frequency of events that defy traditional risk models. I argued that the rising frequency of routine anomalies reflected the impact of perverse incentives that reward poor performance, excessive risk-taking, and outright breaches of fiduciary duty.
More than a decade has passed since then. The perverse incentives are now more perverse, not less. They still fuel fraud in increasingly blatant forms. Nonetheless, Greenspan’s dangerous convictions are still with us. So are Marian Keech’s. Ideology appears immune to disconfirmation, and we continue to ignore the obvious at our peril. Tomorrow, and tomorrow and tomorrow.
Despite the Danger
It’s not hard to explain the long-term survival of dangerous convictions. Frank Partnoy’s Case Against Alan Greenspan sounds strong in part because it also helps explain the dominant view of Greenspan as a mystic savior. Psychological explanations may require more effort than purely political theories, because politically, the survival of Greenspan’s ideology seems utterly unsurprising. I’ll just mention three reasons.
His ideological consistency helped him build political capital.
His tenure at the Fed was associated with a period of relatively low unemployment, low inflation and high growth. In an epistemic climate generally unconcerned with distinctions between correlation and causation, the association sufficed to plausibly legitimize Greenspan’s ideology.
His brilliant and even charming use of “constructive ambiguity” helped him kill stories. As he explained: “I’ll just say a little bit this way and a little bit that way, and I’ll completely confuse them, so there’ll be no story.”
The truth is there is a story: the story of mispriced risk — systemically and systematically mispriced risk. This will be the subject of a future post.
Invisible Only to the Incapable and the Stupid
Here, I’ll conclude by returning to the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. The H.C. Andersen version of the story points to a clear answer to the FUQ: What drives us to ignore the obvious? The swindle works because of a dangerous conviction: the Emperor’s new clothes are only invisible to the incapable and the stupid. The fear of being described with these adjectives drives everyone but the child to ignore the obvious.
P.S.
Does anything reveal human stupidity and incapacity as clearly as what humans sacrifice in order not to appear stupid and incapable? This, too, may be an FUQ for a future post.
Becoming Fully Human
Over the past two years, I’ve examined at least five phenomena keeping us from becoming fully human. I started with four: willful ignorance, economic nihilism, kleptocracy, and violent marketing. Most recently, in “Severance: Where Matter Meets Metaphor”, I pointed to another obstacle that, with inspiration from Jacques Ellul, I described as the “Original Sin of the Technological Society”. I traced the origin of this fragmenting force all the way back to the invention of the phonetic alphabet, which severed sound from meaning.
Thinking about these five obstacles often brings me back to the artist’s role in our responses to cultural and technological challenges. Marshall McLuhan and Ezra Pound have written about the artist as an “antenna of the race” or an “early-warning system” that responds to accelerating changes decades before their transforming impact occurs.
In response to messages from the future, artists build Noah’s arks, and as I explained in my post about severance, I’ve not only built my ark, but already added two compartments. Again, to learn more, subscribe to M2 Dialogue.
The more I think about the questions we don't ask, the answers we don't hear, and what keeps us from becoming fully human, the more I realize that our best responses to what drives us to ignore the obvious will come from art and poetry long before they find their expression in science, technology or business practices.
This is why I’m adding a third compartment to my Ark for my work with artists and cultural institutions. If you’d like to learn more, email me at lev.janashvili@gmail.com. (Write “Third Compartment” in the subject line.)3
Let’s Talk
As usual, if you’d like to discuss anything I’ve published on this blog, book a free video meeting. As a reward for reading this post to the end, I’ll even answer another FUQ: How to win in games we don’t even know we’re playing?
Footnotes
As all great stories, the Hans Christian Andersen folktale about the naked swindled emperor points us to the intersection of matter and metaphor. There are many masterful introductions to this liminal space. One of these introductions inspired the title for this post, and I’m happy to recommend Bernardo Kastrup’s More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth and Belief.
For my introduction to the subject of ideology, read “Life Inside Isms: Surviving Ideology” where I argue that: “Living inside isms, we can cultivate anti-isms to move us to the post-ideological horizon. Anti-isms are freely available to anyone who recognizes them as such.” As Hillel the Elder says, everything else is commentary. Go and study.
I hope you don’t find me acting in poor taste when I include a footnote within a footnote, but I’d like to point you to my previous attempts to channel Ben Hillel:
In the interest of transparency, I should also disclose that Hillel has not been an inerrant guide. On at least one occasion, we had a major glitch in our communications across time. This glitch led me to publish “Start a Substack! A 'channeled' message for readers seeking shelter in the wilderness of the kleptocratic attention economy”. I have since atoned for this erroneous transmission following my disenchantment with Substack. I remain humbled by the knowledge that, in trans-temporal communications, something is always lost in translation.
The “Third Compartment” is a space for artists and patrons attuned to Messages from the Future and moving beyond language-based responses to what drives us to ignore the obvious. While language-based responses engage the faculty of cognition, inhabitants of the Third Compartment dare to seize the means of perception. Within a week, I intend to send out invitations to the Third Compartment.