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By Root 2159 0

devoted her book The March of Folly to famous historical examples of disastrous decisions, ranging from the Trojans bringing the Trojan horse within their walls, and the Renaissance popes provoking the Protestant succession, to the German decision to adopt unrestricted submarine warfare in World War I (thereby triggering America’s declaration of war), and Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack that similarly triggered America’s declaration of war in 1941. As Tuchman put it succinctly, “Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as ‘the most flagrant of all passions.’ ” As a result of lust for power, Ester Island chiefs and Maya kings acted so as to accelerate deforestation rather than to prevent it: their status depended on their putting up bigger statues and monuments than their rivals. They were trapped in a competitive spiral, such that any chief or king who put up smaller statues or monuments to spare the forests would have been scorned and lost his job. That’s a regular problem with competitions for prestige, which are judged on a short time frame.

Conversely, failures to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of interest between the elite and the masses are much less likely in societies where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. We shall see in the final chapter that the high environmental awareness of the Dutch (including their politicians) goes back to the fact that much of the population—both the politicians and the masses—lives on land lying below sea level, where only dikes stand between them and drowning, so that foolish land planning by politicians would be at their own personal peril. Similarly, New Guinea highlands big-men live in the same type of huts as everyone else, scrounge for firewood and timber in the same places as everyone else, and were thereby highly motivated to solve their society’s need for sustainable forestry (Chapter 9).

All of these examples in the preceding several pages illustrate situations in which a society fails to try to solve perceived problems because the maintenance of the problem is good for some people. In contrast to that so-called rational behavior, other failures to attempt to solve perceived problems involve what social scientists consider “irrational behavior”: i.e., behavior that is harmful for everybody. Such irrational behavior often arises when each of us individually is torn by clashes of values: we may ignore a bad status quo because it is favored by some deeply held value to which we cling. “Persistence in error,” “wooden-headedness, “refusal to draw inference from negative signs,” and “mental standstill or stagnation” are among the phrases that Barbara Tuchman applies to this common human trait. Psychologists use the term “sunk-cost effect” for a related trait: we feel reluctant to abandon a policy (or to sell a stock) in which we have already invested heavily.

Religious values tend to be especially deeply held and hence frequent causes of disastrous behavior. For example, much of the deforestation of Easter Island had a religious motivation: to obtain logs to transport and erect the giant stone statues that were the object of veneration. At the same time, but 9,000 miles away and in the opposite hemisphere, the Greenland Norse were pursuing their own religious values as Christians. Those values, their European identity, their conservative lifestyle in a harsh environment where most innovations would in fact fail, and their tightly communal and mutually supportive society allowed them to survive for centuries. But those admirable (and, for a long time, successful) traits also prevented them from making the drastic lifestyle changes and selective adoptions of Inuit technology that might have helped them survive for longer.

The modern world provides us with abundant secular examples of admirable values to which we cling under conditions where those values no longer make sense. Australians brought from Britain a tradition of raising sheep for wool, high land values, and an identification