One morning, I got out of bed, turned on my computer, and my Netscape email client automatically downloaded that day’s news pane. On that particular day, the news was that two hijacked planes had been flown into the World Trade Center.
These were my first three thoughts, in order:
I guess I really am living in the Future.
Thank goodness it wasn’t nuclear.
and then
The overreaction to this will be ten times worse than the original event.
A mere factor of “ten times worse” turned out to be a vast understatement. Even I didn’t guess how badly things would go. That’s the challenge of pessimism; it’s really hard to aim low enough that you’re pleasantly surprised around as often and as much as you’re unpleasantly surprised.
Nonetheless, I did realize immediately that everyone everywhere would be saying how awful, how terrible this event was; and that no one would dare to be the voice of restraint, of proportionate response. Initially, on 9/11, it was thought that six thousand people had died. Any politician who had said, “6,000 deaths is 1/8 the annual US casualties from automobile accidents,” would have been asked to resign the same hour.
No, 9/11 wasn’t a good day. But if everyone gets brownie points for emphasizing how much it hurts, and no one dares urge restraint in how hard to hit back, then the reaction will be greater than the appropriate level, whatever the appropriate level may be.
This is the even darker mirror of the happy death spiral—the spiral of hate. Anyone who attacks the Enemy is a patriot; and whoever tries to dissect even a single negative claim about the Enemy is a traitor. But just as the vast majority of all complex statements are untrue, the vast majority of negative things you can say about anyone, even the worst person in the world, are untrue.
I think the best illustration was “the suicide hijackers were cowards.” Some common sense, please? It takes a little courage to voluntarily fly your plane into a building. Of all their sins, cowardice was not on the list. But I guess anything bad you say about a terrorist, no matter how silly, must be true. Would I get even more brownie points if I accused al-Qaeda of having assassinated John F. Kennedy? Maybe if I accused them of being Stalinists? Really, cowardice?
Yes, it matters that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t cowards. Not just for understanding the enemy’s realistic psychology. There is simply too much damage done by spirals of hate. It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world, whether it be the Jews or Adolf Hitler, about whom saying negative things trumps saying accurate things.
When the defense force contains thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of heavily armed soldiers, one ought to consider that the immune system itself is capable of wreaking more damage than nineteen guys and four nonmilitary airplanes. The US spent billions of dollars and thousands of soldiers’ lives shooting off its own foot more effectively than any terrorist group could dream.
If the USA had completely ignored the 9/11 attack—just shrugged and rebuilt the building—it would have been better than the real course of history. But that wasn’t a political option. Even if anyone privately guessed that the immune response would be more damaging than the disease, American politicians had no career-preserving choice but to walk straight into al-Qaeda’s trap. Whoever argues for a greater response is a patriot. Whoever dissects a patriotic claim is a traitor.
Initially, there were smarter responses to 9/11 than I had guessed. I saw a Congressperson—I forget who—say in front of the cameras, “We have forgotten that the first purpose of government is not the economy, it is not health care, it is defending the country from attack.” That widened my eyes, that a politician could say something that wasn’t an applause light. The emotional shock must have been very great for a Congressperson to say something that . . . real.
But within two days, the genuine shock faded, and concern-for-image regained total control of the political discourse. Then the spiral of escalation took over completely. Once restraint becomes unspeakable, no matter where the discourse starts out, the level of fury and folly can only rise with time.
Assistant Village Idiot, I sympathise with your desire to go over the old talking points again. I like to do that sort of thing myself sometimes. Like, I'll find people to argue with about Kerry and the swiftboating. I didn't like Kerry that much, he just turned into the only alternative to the Bush ongoing disaster, but he didn't deserve what he got from the Swiftboat liars who certainly didn't deserve nearly the media attention they got after their first lie was exposed. But the truth is, it's a dead issue. The swiftboat liars won and Kerry lost, and arguing it out now is mostly a waste of time.
We have no obligation to go over your talking points about how invading iraq and spending a trillion or so dollars to kill a million or so iraqis for no particular result was not actually a mistake. If we were to argue it with you we would be giving the impression that it was debatable, that there are two sides that could be valid, that you might perhaps have a point. But the fact is, your side lost that debate. You tried to argue with the facts and you lost. Get over it.
Eliezer was using a generally-known situation to illustrate his point. If you think that in this generally-known situation the public is wrong and we ought to listen to you and realise that you're right and the consensus is wrong, OK, good luck. I was facing exactly that situation after 9/11 and I lost hands down.
So when I don't tell you that you're a dirty neocon traitor, and if you want to talk that way you don't deserve to live in america and you ought to go somewhere the people are like you and want to destroy america the way you do, it's because I'm a nice guy and I don't play it hardball the way your guys did after 9/11. But that isn't something you are owed. If people treat you better than you treated them when the tables were turned, it's because they happen to be better people than you.