‘Pretense of knowledge’ is leading the world down a dangerous path

By David McElroy · November 16, 2015

I don’t know how to make angry jihadis suddenly quit hating westerners and wanting to kill us. I don’t know how to stop everyone from doing evil things. I don’t know the perfect response to the attacks in Paris Friday.

But I have a pretty good idea that “bomb them back to the Stone Age” isn’t going to work.

After a bloody attack such as the one in Paris, the first instinct is retaliation. That seems to be human nature. The French have already sent tons and tons of bombs to blow up rocks and sand in the desert city which is considered to be the capital of the Islamic State. (Some western politicians say we should call the group Daesh instead, but I’m not going to get into that naming controversy.)

Dropping bombs on remote desert cities is popular with scared and angry voters — whether they’re French or American — but even if you kill the right people, you’re playing whack-a-mole. As you kill certain leaders and fighters, new ones emerge to take their place. (It’s a lot like the War on Drugs in that respect.)

When terrorists attacked this country on Sept. 11, 2001, there was a cry for blood, too. Soon afterward, George W. Bush sent U.S. troops to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the government there, because it had given sanctuary to the training camps used by terrorist groups. Shortly after that, he also invaded Iraq, even though Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with the attacks on the United States.

How has all that worked for us?

We overthrew the Afghan government and installed one more to our liking, but the Taliban won’t go away. The new government is weak and can’t control the country. U.S. troops are still there after all these years. If U.S. troops pulled out, it’s unlikely the new “moderate” government would last long.

We overthrew the Iraqi government and sent that country into a political and military quagmire that’s made life even worse than before we “liberated” the people. Guess what? The people there don’t like each other. They don’t have much of a desire to all get along as one big, happy family. Our attempts to impose western-style democracy have left the place filled with violence, hatred and uncertainty.

In the meantime, the U.S. government continues to operate drones that bomb various places in the region. We kill some bad people — some of whom were probably plotting bad things — but we also have a history of killing innocent people, including 19 innocents at this Afghan hospital.

So what has all this death and destruction achieved?

It has allowed some people to feel as though they’ve gotten some revenge at times. It has cost many, many billions — maybe trillions — of taxpayers dollars. It has destabilized the region further. It hasn’t stopped terrorists from launching attacks. It has killed many, many innocent people, turning their friends and families into lifelong enemies of Americans. And it has strengthened the power of those who want to build an Islamic State to attack the West.

Everything that has been done since 2001 — as the response to terror attacks — has made our enemies stronger and made us more unsafe here. So why are the French making the same mistake?

The French are bombing the Islamic State because of political pressure to “do something.” They’re making this mistake because there’s an assumption that we know what to do — and military retaliation is the obvious answer.

In his Nobel Prize lecture in 1974, economist Friedrich von Hayek warned that the “pretense of knowledge” led people to make mistakes based on their assumption that they know more than they do. He was talking about economics, but the same thing is true in other areas of life. All of us tend to assume we know things — based on assumptions which we’re not even aware we’re making.

Every one of us was given a framework with which to interpret the world. Most of the time, we’re not even aware of what that is. (And sometimes there are multiple frameworks that work together.) For religious people, it’s frequently a framework that sees everything in terms of God vs. evil. For most people in most countries, we’re given a nationalistic framework in which our nation is good and right, while our government’s enemies are evil. For others, the framework is all about science. Everything is interpreted in light of what the science of the day has determined to be true or false.

The list of possible frameworks goes on and on, but not a one of them is complete and accurate all by itself.

Most of us grow up assuming the world makes sense on some level, and we spend many years trying to force everyone else to conform to our understanding of the way things ought to be. It’s jarring to finally see the chaos for what it really is — because it forces us to accept that the interpretative framework we’ve been given isn’t perfect — but it’s a first step out of the cognitive dissonance that causes us to spend so much time trying to subtly (or even overtly) control other people.

For a lot of people on the conservative side of the mainstream today, the framework is one that sees certain people and certain groups as likely to be evil. Every time someone in one of those groups commits evil, it strengths the framework and “proves” that outsiders aren’t to be trusted very easily.

For a lot of people on the more liberal side of the mainstream today, the framework is one that sees people as basically good. Inside that framework, there can be a simple purity of seeing the oppressed and poor as morally good and worthy of our trust. Every anecdote about such a person being good and overcoming long odds to become successful strengthens that framework. It is “proof” for those who already believe it.

The interpretive framework you bring to the world determines what your starting assumptions are — about Muslims, about refugees, about responding to attacks, about war, about all sorts of things.

We all have a tendency to think our intellectual or spiritual or emotional framework has given us the obvious context within which to interpret what’s going on. We all think we know — and it’s just a pretense that we know.

I know know what to do. There isn’t a perfect plan. But it’s completely clear that what has been tried so far isn’t working. And it’s completely clear that the things we’ve been doing since 2001 are making things worse.

When a plan fails, the most common next step is “do it again but lots more of it,” because that’s easier than admitting we’ve been wrong. Ever since 2001, we’ve been making horrible mistakes and making things worse. When our efforts have failed, we’ve gone back to our subjective frameworks and found ways to blame someone else — the other side of the domestic political fence, of course — for the failures.

Few people have been willing to question their core assumptions.

But none of us seems to have the answers. Nobody has a plan that will fix everything. And what we think we know tends to be the pretense of knowledge that Hayek warned us about.

For more than a century, we’ve been digging a hole for ourselves in the Middle East — ad when I say “we” about all this, I really mean the governments which claim to represent us, of course. Even if we don’t know exactly what to do now, the first step is to quit digging the hole even deeper.

There is no magic plan that can make people quit hating those who they hold responsible for killing their friends and families. The best thing we can do is leave them alone. We should work diligently to stop attacks on our soil, of course, but we should openly and publicly get out of their territory and leave them alone to work out their own problems — whatever that means for them.

This isn’t a perfect solution. As far as I know, there isn’t a perfect solution. But it’s a first step toward disengagement with an enemy that can’t be defeated and controlled by our military power.

I know better than to think this will happen, of course. Scared and angry people want bombs falling on the enemy.

So French planes will bomb now. U.S. planes will bomb other places. Russian planes will bomb them, too.

It’s a game of whack-a-mole. The terrorists will keep coming back as long as we take this approach — and our killing of innocents will keep giving them an endless supply of recruits for their bloody battles.

It’s depressing, but nothing I say is going to change the way of this world.

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