The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [238]
The successive measures taken with regard both to the American colonies and to Vietnam were so plainly grounded in preconceived fixed attitudes and so regularly contrary to common sense, rational inference and cogent advice that, as folly, they speak for themselves.
In the operations of government, the impotence of reason is serious because it affects everything within reach—citizens, society, civilization. It was a problem of deep concern to the Greek founders of Western thought. Euripides, in his last plays, conceded that the mystery of moral evil and of folly could no longer be explained by external cause, by the bite of Atē, as if by a spider, or by other intervention of the gods. Men and women had to confront it as part of their being. His Medea knows herself to be controlled by passion “stronger than my purposes.” Plato, some fifty years later, desperately wanted man to grasp and never let go of the “sacred golden cord of reason,” but ultimately he too had to acknowledge that his fellow-beings were anchored in the life of feelings, jerked like puppets by the strings of desires and fears that made them dance. When desire disagrees with the judgment of reason, he said, there is a disease of the soul, “And when the soul is opposed to knowledge, or opinion or reason which are her natural laws, that I call folly.”
When it came to government, Plato assumed that a wise ruler would take most care of what he loved most, that is, what fitted best with his own interests, which would be equivalent to the best interests of the state. Since he was not confident that the rule always operated the way it should, Plato advised as a cautionary procedure that the future guardians of the state should be watched and tested during their period of maturing to ensure that they conducted themselves according to the rule.
With the advent of Christianity, personal responsibility was given back to the external and supernatural, at the command of God and the Devil. Reason returned for a brief brilliant reign in the 18th century, since when Freud has brought us back to Euripides and the controlling power of the dark, buried forces of the soul, which not being subject to the mind are incorrigible by good intentions or rational will.
Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, named by Tacitus as “the most flagrant of all the passions.” Because it can only be satisfied by power over others, government is its favorite field of exercise. Business offers a kind of power, but only to the very successful at the very top, and without the dominion and titles and red carpets and motorcycle escorts of public office. Other occupations—sports, sciences, the professions and the creative and performing arts—offer various satisfactions but not the opportunity for power. They may appeal to status-seekers and, in the form of celebrity, offer crowd worship and limousines and prizes, but these are the trappings of power, not the essence. Government remains the paramount area of folly because it is there that men seek power over others—only to lose it over themselves.
Thomas Jefferson, who held more and higher offices than most men, took the sourest view of it. “Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on [office],” he wrote to a friend, “a rottenness begins in his conduct.” His contemporary across the Atlantic, Adam Smith, was if anything more censorious. “And thus Place … is the end of half the labors of human life; and is the cause of all the tumult