{"id":4152,"date":"1999-09-01T01:00:00","date_gmt":"1999-09-01T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/about-us\/history\/letter\/september-1999-the-elements-of-folly\/"},"modified":"2022-11-27T01:50:51","modified_gmt":"2022-11-27T01:50:51","slug":"september-1999-the-elements-of-folly","status":"publish","type":"rbc_letter","link":"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/about-us\/history\/letter\/september-1999-the-elements-of-folly\/","title":{"rendered":"September 1999 – The Elements of Folly"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Folly is as old as Adam and Eve and as new as today’s headlines. How can we combat this perennial blight? Here is a handy guide to how to avoid it, mostly by being aware of the tricks the mind can play…<\/p>\n

When modern people talk about the news of the day, they are usually talking about folly. It should be noted that news is not an accurate reflection of everyday reality: headlines are not made of the things that routinely go right, but of the things that more rarely go wrong. The real news – the stuff that people want to hear and chat about – is composed of accidents, political and economic crises, crime, war, and other forms of conflict. Folly may be found at the heart of these arresting developments more often than not.<\/p>\n

Social commentators in days gone by identified folly for what it was, and cited historical precedents as warnings against repeating them. The short attention span of today’s consumers of news leads its purveyors to treat follies in particular contexts, as if they were unique. But it is not difficult for a historically informed person to detect the presence of folly in a newsworthy event, trend or situation. It shines through the editorial fog like a red traffic light.<\/p>\n

In a society that almost seems to have lost its memory in the pursuit of what’s new, the consistent pattern of folly in current affairs is seldom called to public attention. Anyone who points out that a seemingly fresh development is fundamentally the same as something that happened centuries ago risks being brusquely told to “get with it.” While looking ahead to the future, modern pundits tend to forsake the benefits of looking back beyond the recent past.<\/p>\n

Does it matter? Yes, where folly is concerned, because it is an ever -present source of ruin. We moderns forget and overlook it at our peril and expense. By being conscious of it and of the mischief it wreaks among us, we as citizens can exert whatever influence we can on our public officials to steer them clear of it. Better still, an understanding of its nature may help us to avoid it in our own lives.<\/p>\n

But first we must know what we are talking about. Folly is an elusive concept that comes in many varieties. Though the word is etymologically linked to “fool,” there is a quantitative difference between folly and simple foolishness. Anyone can act foolishly sometimes. People under the spell of folly act foolishly again and again.<\/p>\n

The primary dictionary definition of the word is “foolish belief or act,” which adequately covers the small-scale folly that takes place daily. It is largely to guard against the damage this does to the body politic that we have rules, laws, police forces, judges, juries, and jails.<\/p>\n

The secondary definitions in dictionaries come closer to what historians and philosophers mean by the word: “useless and expensive undertaking” or “action that ends or can end in disaster. ” Mentioning no names, it is not hard to think of useless undertakings close to home that have been responsible for heavy drains of taxpayers’ money. And we do not have to run our memories back very far to find cases of questionable business ventures that have ended in financial disaster for the investors concerned.<\/p>\n

Even these refined definitions, however, fall short of describing the whole phenomenon. That is because there is something mysterious about folly which precludes spelling it out in completely rational terms.<\/p>\n

The mystery is that it tends to be repeated in the face of compelling evidence that it will reap dire consequences. If folly were a legal concept, it would be called recidivism, a recidivist being an offender who repeatedly commits crimes in the knowledge that doing so is almost certain to land him back behind bars. Similarly, if folly were a disease, it would have to be classified as chronic. For it has recurred year after year, century after century, since the beginning of the recorded history. Indeed it is such a standard and basic feature of the human condition that it is one of the first subjects man ever wrote about.<\/p>\n

Blame it on the subconscious<\/h3>\n

The world’s first published author, Homer, dealt extensively with it, as did the immortal playwrights for whom its unavoidability became the leading theme in Greek tragedy. Homer’s tale in the Odyssey of the Greek conquest of Troy makes a dramatic illustration of how irresistible it can be. The Trojans were vehemently warned that the wooden horse the Greeks had given them had soldiers hidden inside it. But they did precisely what they were told not to do when they hauled it within their city walls.<\/p>\n

Barbara W. Tuchman used the fall of Troy as the first case study in her 1984 best-seller, The March of Folly. In it she made the point that modern folk still tend to regard folly fatalistically, only instead of blaming it on the gods, they blame it on the subconscious : “[Psychologist Sigmund] 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.”<\/p>\n

The theory that folly is inherent in human nature raises the question of how our species has ever been able to advance in the face of the set-backs it so regularly occasions. The answer is that just enough people have always learned just enough from past follies not to re-commit them. So if folly is chronic, it is by no means incurable, given a healthy vigilance for its symptoms when they begin to show.<\/p>\n

Tuchman is concerned in her book with folly of the political sort, which she calls “the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest.” She traces the phenomenon from the fall of Troy to the American debacle in Viet Nam. Her key contention is that social and technological progress has had no effect on the workings of folly over the ages. What King Rehoboam did in losing the Israeli Empire circa 930 B.C., the British did in the 1700s in losing their American colonies. What the British did then, the Americans did in the 1960s and ’70s in losing the war in Viet Nam.<\/p>\n

What did they do? Here, for future guidance, is a partial checklist drawn from Ms. Tuchman’s findings:<\/p>\n