JFK's prophetic speech against Tea Party nihilism

[HT: Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone]. Wow, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

Below I edited out [...] several sentences and paragraphs of JFK's final, undelivered speech, on November 22, 1963, which is mostly about Cold War nuclear preparedness, the space race, and fighting Soviet encroachment. You can read the entire text here.

Trade Mart Speech (Kennedy's Last Speech)

[...]

This link between leadership and learning is not only essential at the community level. It is even more indispensable in world affairs. Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country's security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America's leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason -- or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternative, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

But today other voices are heard in the land -- voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness. At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they see that debt as the single greatest threat to our security.  At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will "talk sense to the American people." But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.

[...]

Our foreign aid program is not growing in size, it is, on the contrary, smaller now than in previous years. It has had its weaknesses, but we have undertaken to correct them. And the proper way of treating weaknesses is to replace them with strength, not to increase those weaknesses by emasculating essential programs. Dollar for dollar, in or out of government, there is no better form of investment in our national security than our much-abused foreign aid program. We cannot afford to lose it. We can afford to maintain it. we can surely afford, for example, to do as much for our 19 needy neighbors of Latin America as the Communist bloc is sending to the island of Cuba alone.

[...]

This effort is expensive -- but it pays its own way, for freedom and for America. [...] There is no longer any doubt about the strength and skill of American science, American industry, American education, and the American free enterprise system. In short, our nation space effort represents a great gain in, and a great resource of, our national strength -- and both Texas and Texans are contributing greatly to this strength.

Finally, it should be clear by now that a nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future. Only an America which has fully educated its citizens is fully capable of tackling the complex problems and perceiving the hidden dangers of the world in which we live. And only an America which is growing and prospering economically can sustain the worldwide defenses of freedom, while demonstrating to all concerned the opportunities of our system and society.

[...]

We, in this country, in this generation, are -- by destiny rather than by choice -- the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward men." That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: "except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen waketh but in vain."

Our caveman brains like conspiracy theories

Now I'm reading the interesting bestseller on practical psychology You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney that describes the scientifically proven ways that our caveman brains gloss over most information, take foolish logical shortcuts, fool us to protect our fragile egos, and constantly re-write our memories to preserve a "consistent" image of ourselves over time.  

A few of these tricks of the mind are mentioned below, such as confirmation bias. There are many, many others such priming, hindsight bias, apophenia, the availability heuristic and the just-world fallacy, that are hardwired into our subconscious minds by evolution, and very difficult for our relatively younger conscious, rational mind to combat. 

Just about the best we can do is admit that all of us fall prey to these tricks of the mind. 

(Priming seems like the most insidious of them all: literally seeing a picture of something for a fraction of a second, or a certain odor, can trigger the deeper, animal subconscious mind to bias how the "thinking" mind perceives subsequent events or makes "rational" judgments. The crazy thing McRaney repeats over and over, in all these psychological experiments, is how well people explain why they think or act the way they do, and actually believe it themselves -- they don't think they're lying! -- when in fact their stated reasons are total bullshit.)

Apropos, I have my own theory about political conspiracy theories. One of my dear conservative friends has lately begun to fall for many of them. I'll give my best guess why. 

For conservatives, most conspiracy theories boil down to two things: 1) either they want to believe that a corrupt, power-hungry federal government is out to tyrannize freedom-loving Americans, and they'll latch onto any evidence or coincidence to support that view and discard anything that doesn't; or, more disturbingly, 2) their pro-wealthy ideology prevents them from accepting the obvious and perfectly legal ways that the super rich trade money for political influence at the expense of the rest of us; therefore, conservatives must look for more abstruse, far-ranging explanations for why "the system" seems to gang up on us average folks.  

Anyhow, I totally agree with Michael Shermer's conclusion that, "when conspiracy-mongering leads to absurd conclusions and diverts our attention from real, pressing political issues and leads people to become politically apathetic, it can be a dangerous waste of time."

Unfrozen caveman conspiracy theorist.

Conspiracy theories: Why we believe the unbelievable

By Michael Shermer

November 27, 2013 | Los Angeles Times

With the passing of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy last week, and the accompanying fusillade of documentaries purporting to prove there was a conspiracy behind it, we might expect (and hope) that cabalistic conjecturing will wane until the next big anniversary.

Don't count on it. A poll this month found that 61 percent of Americans who responded still believe that JFK was the victim of a conspiracy, despite the fact that the preponderance of evidence points to Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone assassin.

Why do so many people refuse to accept this simple and obvious conclusion? The answer: psychology.

There are three psychological effects at work here, starting with "cognitive dissonance," or the discomfort felt when holding two ideas that are not in harmony. We attempt to reduce the dissonance by altering one of the ideas to be in accord with the other. In this case, the two discordant ideas are (1) JFK as one of the most powerful people on Earth who was (2) killed by Lee Harvey Oswald, a lone loser, a nobody. Camelot brought down by a curmudgeon.

That doesn't feel right. To balance the scale, conspiracy elements are stacked onto the Oswald side: the CIA, the FBI, the KGB, the Mafia, Fidel Castro, Lyndon Johnson and, in Oliver Stone's telling in his film "JFK," the military-industrial complex.

Cognitive dissonance was at work shortly after Princess Diana's death, which was the result of drunk driving, speeding and no seat belt. But princesses are not supposed to die the way thousands of regular people die each year, so the British royal family, the British intelligence services and others had to be fingered as co-conspirators.

By contrast, there is no cognitive dissonance for the Holocaust - one of the worst crimes in history committed by one of the most criminal regimes in history.

A second psychological effect is the "monological belief system," or "a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network," in the words of University of Kent researchers Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton in a 2012 paper titled "Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories." A conspiracy theory, they wrote, is "a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal." Once you believe that "one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy (it) suggests that many such plots are possible."

With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become "the default explanation for any given event." For example, the Kent researchers found that people who believe that Princess Diana was killed by MI6 were also more likely to believe that the moon landing was a hoax, that HIV was created in a laboratory as a biological weapon and that governments are hiding extraterrestrials. The effect is even more pronounced when the conspiracies contradict one another. People who believed that Diana faked her own death were "marginally more likely" to also believe that she was killed.

A third psychological effect is "confirmation bias," or the tendency to look for and find confirming evidence for what you already believe and to ignore disconfirming evidence. Once you believe, say, that 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration, you focus on the handful of anomalies that fateful day and connect them into a seemingly meaningful pattern, while ignoring the massive evidence pointing to Al Qaeda. JFK conspiracy theorists ignore the massive evidence pointing to Oswald while seeking deep meaning in trivial matters, such as the man with the umbrella on the grassy knoll, or the puff of smoke behind the picket fence, or the odd noises echoing around Dealey Plaza. Each become pregnant with meaning when the mind goes in search of cabals.

Such conspiracy-mongering may seem harmless, but there's a dark side. Another study this year by University of Kent researchers found that"exposure to information supporting conspiracy theories reduced participants' intentions to engage in politics, relative to participants who were given information refuting conspiracy theories." They attributed this effect to "feelings of political powerlessness." What can any of us regular folks do if the world is run by a handful of secret societies (like the Illuminati) or families (such as the Rockefellers or Rothschilds) or operatives (think CIA or KGB) operating clandestinely to establish a new world order?

What happens in history matters, and where conspiracies are real - as in the case of the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln - we should ferret them out. But when conspiracy-mongering leads to absurd conclusions and diverts our attention from real, pressing political issues and leads people to become politically apathetic, it can be a dangerous waste of time.

Shrink: Good presidents are a little screwy

It seems that great leaders don't just think outside the box, they think outside the sane.

Said Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, author of a new book on the advantages of mental illness for leadership:

"Creativity and resilience is higher in people with mania and realism and empathy is higher in people with depression compared to normal subjects. The problem often with mentally healthy, average leaders is — even though they're not weak in the sense of not having any of these qualities — they often don't have enough to meet the very high demands of crises."

Well, if mental illness is desirable in a president then I think Michele "2 dollar" Bachmann is the obvious choice.

Dr. Ghaemi goes on to say that the problem with mentally healthy leaders is that they suffer, like most of us do, from a "mild positive illusion":

"We think that we're slightly more intelligent, slightly better looking, than we really are. We tend to overestimate our control over our environment. And that can be quite fine under normal circumstances. That may actually help us to get more done because of that confidence, but a political leader needs to be realistic rather than just optimistic for the sake of optimism."

Nope, then that disqualifies Michele Bachmann because she's way too optimistic about her chances.

Seriously though, do mentally healthy people pursue the presidency to begin with? These politicians must all be damaged goods in one way or another.

'Madness' And Leadership, Hand In Hand

August 20, 2011 | All Things Considered on NPR

URL: http://n.pr/r0Rzep