Is A One Percent Justification Meme Spreading?

By Gary Berg-Cross

In The One Percent Doctrine Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind discussed the Bush Administration hunt for terrorists after 9/11 and its conflation with a justification for attacking Iraq. The title comes from VP Cheney’s position that:

“ If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.”

With the war drums beating for an attack on Iran some, like Robert Parry (Consortium News) see an early Return of Cheney's One Percent Doctrine:

But it should be clear what the game is. Israeli hardliners and American neocons want a return to former Vice President Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine….. That is, if there is even a one percent chance that a terrorist attack might be launched against the United States, it must be treated as a certainty, thus justifying any preemptive military action that U.S. officials deem warranted.

That was the mad-hatter policy that governed the U.S. run-up to the Iraq War, when even the most dubious - and dishonest - claims by self-interested Iraqi exiles and their neocon friends were treated as requiring a bloody invasion of a country then at peace…

One % positions and their murky data provide weak justification for war but seem enough for people predisposed to hawkish positions. As Suskind himself argues t not every 1% hypothesis gets treated enough to get what Cheney calls “a response”. Besides being some broad rationalization of an angry, militant response the One Percent idea also has as an aspect of confirmatory bias that I’ve previously discussed. This means we can actually ignore data that doesn’t fit our hypothesis. Analysis leading to other conclusions is “undesired.”

In practice I believe that many people operate on something like a 1% approach and do it dynamically. That is, they may only require a small hint of something being possible to confirm it in their mind. Then over time on top of a 1% possibility we strengthen our belief by using a fraction of new evidence and selected analysis. One winds up with a .1 or .01% doctrine or principle.

This is the type of thing, I believe, one sees in layman beliefs and debates over climate change. Barely half the U.S. public thinks carbon pollution could warm Earth. It’s just too complex and as noted in The Psychology of Climate Change Denial:

Even as the science of global warming gets stronger, fewer Americans believe it’s real. In some ways, it’s nearly as jarring a disconnect as enduring disbelief in evolution or carbon dating…Our response to disturbing information is very complex. We negotiate it. We don’t just take it in and respond in a rational way.”

On one side there is an enormous aggregate of evidence and analysis such as in an IPCC report ranging from weather statistics and extremes, atmospheric measurements, climate history, glacier melting, changes in animal migration, arctic melting, rising sea level, stronger floods and droughts, the spread of tropical diseases and the decline of sensitive species. Against this a non-believer cites one little piece of evidence from how scientists discuss analysis in emails! It’s more of a .1% principle than even a 1%.

This has some relation to defining characteristic of true believers like VP Chaney, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum who seem to be spreading the meme for a low evidence belief. They have disdain for serious analysis and believe instead in a narrow view of reality that is emotionally backed by a cohesive group of fervent believers. You hear them in some Republican debates howling support for 1% claims such as a war on Religion or how Fannie and Freddie caused the real estate bubble. disturbing. Believing and understanding otherwise is something they don’t want to think about. So what they do in political debate is what they do in daily life - create a bubble world where the 99% possibilities are not present or accepted. Keep uncomfortable ideas at a distance is likely to lead to a serious problem 99% of the time or so.

Beyond Hypocrisy –True Believers Becoming What They Hate

By Gary Berg-Cross

I was reminded of the hypothesis that we sometimes “become what we hate” by some recent events that are part of our national discussion in a very political season. Many of them involve some hypocritical moral stance such as religious freedom or fairness. But many of them are political. Here’s one from the whipped up voter fraud front:

"former head of the Arizona Republican Party and of the Arizona Christian Coalition....Sproul is connected with the Republican National Committee-funded voter registration organization, Voters' Outreach of America Inc." - Sproul's firm is accused of fraud and the destruction of voter registration forms.”

The article also went on to provide a backhand to Sproul, noting that he also failed to pay his workers and his office rent.

This can be looked at as the latest form of political hypocrisy. A long standing one is the claims of some conservative politicians and some fundamentalist preachers to lead a moral, family centric life and then wind up in sex scandals.

Certainly claims of hypocrisy are big sparring points in political debates. Rick Santorum defended his support for G.W. Bush's "No Child Left Behind" education plan and soliciting earmarks in this week's debate, claiming that Mitt Romney was a "hypocrite."I guess he's right about that. Mitt seems insincere about most things.

But as a self-proclaimed Christian, Santorum’s attack on President Obama’s Christian faith & “theology” itself seems a highly hypocritical one and un-Christian to boot:

“It's not about your job. It's about some phony ideal, some phony theology....Oh, not a theology based on the Bible, a different theology. But no less a theology.”

At times it seems that the group of national conservative candidates are angrily tangled up in their own, shallow inconsistent thoughts, but happy to launch talking point attacks with hateful labels like "food stamp president." On the whole shallow, right wing conversations have helped to create irresponsibility and political impasses. The result are real messes which politicians can point to as problems and scapegoate others as responsible for them. After all the other side won't "compromise." It's all done with a underlying hatred and a sense of otherness.

Perhaps these Pols are hollow people, blinded by a cause and the need to arouse their base. But their choices can also be attributed in part to the contradictions found in what Eric Hoffer discussed as the seemingly paradoxical behavior of True Believers:

“the man of fanatical faith who is ready to sacrifice his life for a holy cause.”

Leaders of the mass movement “must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope”

“If they join the movement as full converts they are reborn to a new life in its close-knit collective body, or if attracted as sympathizers they find elements of pride, confidence and purpose….” (p. 13)

The true believer is “without wonder and hesitation.”

“An active mass movement rejects the present and centers its interest on the future.” (p. 82)

The mass movement hates independence and individualism.

The focus is on “obedience” and “one mindedness.”

“Uniformity” must be developed. (p. 101)

Our modern true believers are righteous and can’t hear themselves pontificate about the moral values they seem to be expressing in attacking “different moral values” and questioning anyone's religious faith when arguing for “religious freedom”. Much of this seems to be a phony, shallow discussion of a war on religion; while, as some note, there is a real war on women and individual rights. But another factor is that perhaps they have just adopted some aspects of what they hate.

This builds on the old idea that hate draws us into dangerous grounds. When we hate something it gives us focus. That’s something important in war, but (now) also in political campaigns. You don’t have to be Machiavelli to know that anger and hatred makes us strong and offers some protection, but also isolates us. To hate someone like Obama, or something like his affordable health care program simplifies, motivates and clarifies. Hatred provides a focus and perspective, but has obvious downsides. Religious thinkers such as Walter Wink in Engaging the Powers have described hatred as an important ingredient seducing us and transforming us as people, tribes and cultres into something else:

"The very act of hating something draws it to us. Since our hate is usually a direct response to an evil done to us, our hate almost invariably causes us to respond in the terms already laid down by the enemy. Unaware of what is happening, we turn into the very thing we oppose…..the way violence spreads by mirroring itself in its victims. In a sense it’s like a virus, infecting everyone with whom it comes into contact. It’s so invisible that no one realizes that the violence itself is the enemy; instead we use it to defeat those whom we believe to be our adversaries, little realizing that we have become the enemy. (Page 195)

Adversarial hatred has been part of many of our wars and over time we have become good at manufacturing hatred of the latest, perceived enemy. Isn't Iraq, no Iran, just like Hitler's Germany? Rene Girard suggests that the United States emerge victorious from WWII with a compromised morality and acceptance of "enermizing" things. In a sleepy protective stance we adopted, as Ike noted later, a permanent war economy and a militarized conception of national security. During the cold war the US seemed to become more militant, waging dark conflicts, backing tyrants that favor us etc. A returning John Adams might see that we have become something too much like an empire hunting monsters aboard and quietly acquiescing to torture and the degradation of parts of humanity in the name of Democracy and tolerance. Now after a Cold War we see the world in binary, moral terms with our duty to police the world protecting our idea of freedom and justice. But we have become what the core of our Founders feared with a large standing army staffed by a permanent military and when necessary involuntary conscription (e.g. the National Guard) and supplemented by private, militant armies.

Rene Girard explained such things and much of human behavior as based on “mimesis”, which is an encompassing expression of imitation. We see unconscious imitation and its the compromising effects in conflicts of all types:

“The more a tragic conflict is prolonged, the more likely it is to culminate in a violent mimesis. The resemblance between the combatants grows ever stronger until each presents a mirror image of the other.”

The consequences?

“ We have created an invisible apparatus of surveillance and espionage that seems incapable of distinguished patriotic protest from sedition, is unaccountable to public authorities, and inaugurates wars without consent of the Congress. We have increasingly come to rely on military intervention instead of diplomacy, force rather than negotiations. We are one of the major purveyors of armaments to nations all over the globe, many of whom purchase weapons at the cost of the welfare of their own people and the destabilization of their own regions.” (summarized in The Spirituality of Nonviolence: On Not Becoming What We Hate)

It is sad to contemplate the possibility that the hatreds of military conflicts now seem to have become a steady part of political culture war conversations with claims about the otherness of fellow citizens, appeal to mythic past, divisive claims our one's own rights to the exclusion of others' rights and an intolerance for honest conversation. Now questions in national debates get booed down by what seems to be True Believers with extravagant claims on the truth.Too many have become what in the light of the day they may say they hate.