The Bay of Pigs Disaster—Historical Proof that All Reality Is Not Subjective, Part 1:
In his book, Dr. Goleman gives two important, real, historical examples of what can happen when groups of people develop information packages and anti-information packages and then try to apply them to real life. In both cases, individual people started out with their own information and anti-information packages. Then each of those individuals met up with lots of other individuals who each had their own information and anti-information packages. These people were attracted to each other, and found they could work well together, because all of their information and anti-information packages were very similar.
The information and anti-information that everyone in the group agreed upon was automatically put into the information and anti-information packages of the group. Wherever everyone’s information and anti-information packages didn’t agree with each other, one of two things happened. If most people in the group perceived an idea to be information, it got added to the group information. If most people in the group perceived an idea to be anti-information, it got added to the group’s anti-information.
In effect, these are both examples of a politics of ice cream situation in which the vanilla ice cream civil rights movement never took place. Instead, each member of the group perceived that they could succeed at their own goals most effectively by cooperating with a group of people who each shared most of those goals. Obviously, the social instinct is at work here. In order to make the group function most effectively, everyone agreed with the general consensus of the group. If everyone agreed that a certain idea was either true or false, that consensus was automatic. If most people agreed that an idea was either true or false, everyone in the minority agreed with it, instead of disagreeing and causing conflict within the group.
Everyone who disagreed with the majority had a few different ways they could deal with their disagreement. First, they could feel that they must be wrong because nobody else in the group seemed to agree with them, change their mind, and feel that the group must be right. Second, they could feel that they were probably wrong because nobody else in the group seemed to agree with them, and feel that the group was probably right. Third, they could feel that they were right and everyone else in the group was wrong, but not voice their disagreement for the sake of not disrupting the group, or for the sake of not losing their standing in the group.
Pursuing this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion leads to a conclusion that doesn’t seem logical at all. Everyone joined these groups because they perceived that working with other people who shared their overall goals offered them the most effective means of succeeding. However, at some point a majority of people in the group made a fundamental mistake. The minority of people felt that they shouldn’t say anything for the sake of keeping the group working together. So now instead of working together to achieve the common interests of everyone in the group as effectively as possible, this minority of people were working together to make mistakes as effectively as possible!
In his book The Politics of Experience, Dr. R.D. Laing talks about a concept he calls “I becomes we becomes they”. I talked about this in various ways in my last book too. These are perfect examples of it. First individuals possess individual interests. Then they join together to cooperate in pursuing their individual interests. Then the group of people takes on its own identity and becomes an independent, invisible decision-making force. Each individual perceives it to be more powerful than himself, even though the group is made up of individual people.
And finally, for anyone out there who’s still saying, “Dude, all reality is subjective, man,” when I show you how many people have died believing something must be true just because they felt it should be true, hopefully you’ll reconsider.
Richard Nixon (and if those two words already makes it sound like the story is going to end in disaster, don’t worry, I’m just getting started), while vice president to Dwight Eisenhower, made the suggestion that the U.S. should train and outfit a guerilla army of Cuban exiles who could invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro. President Eisenhower liked the idea and put the plan into motion.
By the time John F. Kennedy was elected president, the CIA had a plan developed. Two days after President Kennedy took office, the head of the CIA outlined their plan for him. President Kennedy liked it and gave it the go-ahead.
In April, the highly developed plan was launched. Fourteen hundred Cuban soldiers invaded Cuba to overthrow President Castro. Fourteen hundred. That’s it. Some friends of mine live in an apartment complex that has more people than that.
By the second day, the invasion force of 1,400 soldiers was surrounded by a Cuban army of 20,000 soldiers. Now, perhaps I should point out that ever since the American Civil War almost exactly 100 years before the Bay of Pigs invasion, it’s been generally agreed upon that in order for a military offensive to succeed, the attackers need to outnumber the defenders by about 3 to 1—not to be outnumbered by the defenders by about 14 to 1. If the combined Cuban military had consisted of 500 people, the Bay of Pigs invasion would’ve stood a pretty good chance of success. But instead, the fraction of the Cuban military that met the invasion was 40 times bigger than that. And remember, this is an invasion plan that was developed by the CIA we’re talking about here.
By the third day it was over. The surviving invaders had surrendered and were sitting in prison camps.
And that’s just the condensed version of what went wrong. No one in the president’s advisory committee thought to ask the State Department’s experts on Cuban affairs how much public support President Castro had. They all assumed that an invasion would provoke a popular uprising, but any of their Cuba experts could’ve told them, based on their daily updates of affairs in Cuba, that the vast majority of Cubans supported their president.
The plan also included an escape route in case things went wrong with the invasion. The invasion force was supposed to be able to retreat to the Escambray Mountains and hold out there. That contingency was drawn up when the invasion was planned to land on a different beachhead, before the invasion was moved to the Bay of Pigs. The Escambray Mountains are 80 miles away from the Bay of Pigs, through dense swamps and jungles. Anyone of today can buy an atlas of Cuba at the bookstore and see that for themselves. But for some reason, when the CIA, the President of the United States, and his closest advisors were planning the invasion, none of them noticed that oversight.
What the hell kind of a well-developed plan was that????
In the last book, I talked about sensory illusions in aviation, like the Graveyard Spiral. Dr. Irving Janis has studied group psychology and has compiled this list of sensory illusions that affect group decision-making:
Invulnerability: If things seem to be going well for the group, everyone assumes that things will continue to go well for them. No individual dares to threaten everyone else’s good feelings by suggesting that maybe the next thing isn’t going to go well just because everything has been going well so far.
Pool hall hustlers and Las Vegas casino gamblers use this illusion on individuals all the time. If you play three games against someone, win two and lose the other just barely, and then he suggests betting five bucks on the next game, and wins just barely again, he might try to talk you into betting double or nothing on the next game. You are playing pool, but he’s playing a much bigger game than that. If he wins again just barely, he can make it look like if you play for double or nothing again, you’d still have a good chance of winning and breaking even. If you play for double or nothing five games in a row and lose them all, now you’re down eighty bucks. Now you might be so desperate to win back your money that you can’t afford to stop taking the bet. And now you really are playing his game…
And for table dealers at Las Vegas casinos, the job is even easier, because they don’t have to play an active role in creating the illusion or maintaining it. If you go in and start winning, and keep raising the stakes on your own, it doesn’t matter if or when you finally lose. As far as it relates to you, the table dealer has an infinite amount of money on his side. If you fall into this illusion and keep raising the stakes, it’s pretty well guaranteed that your luck is going to run out before the house runs out of money, so whenever your luck does run out, the house is going to clean up. And even if you don’t fall into this illusion, or even if you do and quit while you’re ahead, as long as they bring enough people into the casino, it’s a statistical inevitability that some of them are going to fall into this illusion and lose, and the house is going to continue making money. Hence the term “profitable gambling industry” instead of “gambling charitable organization”. Casinos stay open by making money, not by losing money.
Now what do you suppose would happen if a U.S. president decided that in order to make money without having to raise taxes he was going to form a presidential gambling advisory committee and go to Las Vegas and play poker for half a billion dollars a game?
Unanimity: First, everyone seems to agree with the group, like I said. Among the majority who create the dominant viewpoint of the group, the fact that everyone seems to agree with everything the group does just keeps convincing them more and more that they’re right. The fact that everyone seems to agree helps to convince everyone that they’re going to succeed, because they’re all going to be working together, and nobody seems to see any reason they’re going to fail.
Of course, these things could be happening because minority members in the group don’t dare to speak up. Or it could happen because majority members of the group subtly and subconsciously discourage anyone from disagreeing with them, because they feel that their ideas are risky but believe that they have to succeed, and that the best way to make them succeed is by getting everyone to work together.
People come out and say things like this all the time: “I’ve made my decision, and this is what we’re going to do.” But considering that 80% of interpersonal communication is conducted non-verbally, how difficult would it be for someone who everyone recognized as the leader of the group to communicate that statement without ever putting it into words?
Suppressed Personal Doubts: Like I said, if an individual disagrees with the group, he’ll naturally feel like he’s being forced to make a decision between attempting to preserve the survival of his DNA by cooperating with the group on something that he doesn’t think will work, or on alienating himself from the group.
If the group was working on something that related to their own immediate survival, this wouldn’t be a hard choice to make, because immediate survival is a higher instinct than the social instinct. But what if the stakes were someone else’s survival, and not the survival of anyone in the group? Like, a group of politicians deciding to send soldiers to invade a rival country, even though their strategy was completely ill conceived and had no chance of success, and they were sending the soldiers on a suicide mission? Oh, and by the way, I am still talking about the Bay of Pigs invasion, not the Iraq invasion, in case you’re wondering…
Mindguards: A mindguard is basically a bouncer who kicks out any dissenting ideas. This could be an actual person who actively suppresses personal doubts in order to create the sense of unanimity among the group. Alternately, it could be an invisible force that alters information slightly each time it passes through one of many people, as each person tries to interpret it according to the way it seems to fit best with the group’s goals and the information package they’re using to try to reach those goals.
You’ve heard of the party game “operator”, perhaps? You get a bunch of people to sit in a circle. Then one person whispers a message in the ear of the person sitting beside him. The next person can ask him to repeat himself once, but once only, by saying “operator”. (That’s something people had to say once upon a time, when telephone connections weren’t very good.) Then that person has to repeat the message to the person sitting beside him. After the message passes through 30 people or whatever, it sounds nothing like the original message. If you start the game with a message like, “I like to pick daisies,” by the time it reaches the last person it can turn into something like, “Your mother washes socks in hell.”
In the last book I talked about the double filter problem in interpersonal communication. If I have an idea and I want to communicate it to you, first I have to put it into words that I think best communicate the idea. Then you hear the words and interpret them according to whatever the words mean to you. If I’m thinking of a loaf of pre-sliced sandwich bread and I try to put that idea into words by saying “loaf of bread” to you, and you’re from France, now you’re thinking of a baguette—a long, thin, unsliced loaf of bread with a dry crust, which is how they traditionally make bread in France. Then if you say “bread” to a Mexican, now he’s thinking about a tortilla. And we’re only talking about bread here; we’re not talking about how to invade another country.
There’s a funny joke I’ve heard that puts this scenario into words pretty well. (Or at least, I think it does…) I see things like this happen at my job all the time.
The owner of the company comes up with a new idea, so he types it up in a memo and sends it out to all his employees.
The workers in his factory take one look at it and tell their foreman, “This is sh*t and it stinks!”
The foreman tells his supervisor, “The workers tell me this has the odor of manure.”
The supervisor tells his manager, “The workers say this smells like fertilizer.”
The manager tells his director, “The workers say this bears the essence of something that makes plants grow.”
The director tells the vice president, “The workers say this seems like something that will make factories expand.”
The vice president tells the president, “The workers think it’s a great idea.”
The president tells the board of investors, “The workers love this idea, so let’s do it!”
At each stage, each person was telling the idea he had of the situation to another person by putting the idea into words that he thought the other person would understand. Each person had a different perception of the world, however, which included different perceptions of what constituted a good idea, and of how people were supposed to talk. As those two variables changed more and more the further they got from the people who had the original idea, the idea that was being transferred from one person to the next got further and further removed from the original idea.
This is just a joke, of course, but I think it makes a good illustration of something everyone has seen happen at some point in their lives.
Now, as you may remember, in my last book I told you about my friend the former army chaplain who said, “If you want to practice Christianity, follow the teachings of Jesus. If you follow the teachings of Jesus as it’s been passed down to you by other people who follow him, you’re practicing Christianity several times removed.”
Whatdya think? Hmm?…
Rationalizations: Individuals do this all the time. If you make a mistake, you try to find a good reason why something else made you fail. If you’re about to do something that probably won’t work but that you’re depending on working, you try to find reasons to prove to yourself that it will work.
Sometimes this can actually work, and it actually helps people preserve the survival of their DNA. In the last book I talked about stories of mothers who see their sons being crushed under the back ends of pickup trucks, who defy the laws of physics and lift the back ends of the trucks off their sons all by themselves with their bare hands. The mother saves her son, so she preserves the survival of her DNA. In the conditions of our evolution, a lot of the threats our ancestors faced were very direct physical ones—being buried in rockslides, mauled by lions, whatever.
Is this rationalization exactly? I’m sure it could fall into various categories depending on the individual. I’m willing to bet most of these mothers devote so little thought to what they’re doing that nobody has figured out how to categorize their decision-making processes reliably. So just toke a little weed there or whatever you do, and let’s just pretend that I’m very perceptive to human behavior.
The mother sees her son being crushed to death under a truck. The idea that leaps into her consciousness is “my son is being killed”. That’s followed by the idea “he’s under that truck”, which is followed by the idea “I need to lift that truck”. So the idea “the truck is very heavy” ends up way, way, way down on her list of priorities of things to think about—or maybe her brain turns it into anti-information.
Is this rationalization? Considering that virtually no rational thought takes place between the time the mother sees her son being killed and the time she saves him, I think it could probably best be described as “the abandonment of rational thought.” However, if you were to ask the mother later why she did what she did, she’d probably tell you, “Well, I saw my son being crushed under that truck, so I did what I could to try to save him.” Even after the fact, the pieces of information she’s working with are the same ones that constituted her information package at the time she made the decision. She still isn’t saying anything about, “The back end of that truck weighed half a ton.” So even if this wasn’t rationalization at the time she made the decision, now that she’s talking about it afterwards, she’s explaining her perception of the situation that led to her decision by piecing together the information she thought was relevant to the situation, and disregarding—or not even noticing—information that didn’t seem relevant to her, despite how relevant it appears to anyone observing the situation from a distance.
Now let’s tell that story again, but let’s change a few words. Let’s change “mother” to “politicians”. Let’s change “son” to “soldiers”. Let’s change “being crushed under a truck” to “invading a country”.
Now we have politicians plotting to send soldiers to invade a foreign country. If the invasion succeeds, it will prove to be the most effective means for the politicians to preserve the survival of their DNA, by helping them win elections, overthrow a Communist government, and all the other things politicians care about. Unfortunately, the defending military outnumbers the invasion force by about 140 to 1, and virtually nobody in the country wants to overthrow their government. Like the mother seeing her son being crushed to death under a truck, these politicians are attempting a course of action that defies the laws of physics. But in this case, that course of action is going to be carried out by other people’s sons in another country, so no amount of primal rage on their part is going to change anything.
A lot more rational thought—supposedly—is being put into the decision-making ahead of time, but the utter failure of their foolhardy plan still takes the politicians completely by surprise. If you asked them afterwards, these politicians probably would’ve said the same things the mother would’ve said: “Well, it just seemed like the right thing to do.” One difference is that the mother succeeded, but the politicians got their asses kicked. Another difference is that the mother’s explanation is understandable, while the politician’s explanation sounds like it’s supposed to be some kind of a joke.
If you consider the very realistic possibility that the American politicians put a few thoughts like, “Oh, they’re just stupid third-world peasants, and we’re Americans, so outnumbering our troops 140 to 1 won’t do them any good,” and, “We’re Americans and we know the best way for people to live, so all those oppressed people must want to overthrow their Communist dictator, so why bother asking the Cuba experts what things are like down there?” suddenly, all the pieces fall into place.
And just in case I need to remind you, I am still talking about a war that politicians started over four decades ago. If politicians are still making these same mistakes today, that’s hardly my fault, is it?
Ethical Blinders: Once a group of people agrees that they are righteous and they know what they’re doing, that must prove that everything they’re doing must be good, right? As in, “the ends justify the means”. So it doesn’t matter if other people might have a problem with what the good and righteous decision-makers are doing, because those people just aren’t smart enough to understand what the good and righteous decision-makers are doing. But don’t worry, they’ll understand in the end.
Well, the big problem with that is, every group of people in the world feels that they’re right about whatever they believe in. So the fact that you feel that your group is right doesn’t prove sh*t.
As I said in the last book, the subjectivity of the other people creates the objective situation the decision-makers are dealing with. Or as another saying goes, “the means create the ends”. Once you start out with a situation where the ends seem to justify the means, between the time you put the plan into effect and the time it succeeds (or at least, is supposed to succeed), the situation changes, because all the people involved who don’t know what the ends are, are going to perceive that something important is happening that affects them, and they don’t know how it’s going to turn out, so they’ll start reacting to the unfolding events to try to make them turn out the best for them.
If, for instance, you have a great idea for how some other country’s government should work, and the easiest way you can see to help the people in that country set up that government is by invading the country and setting the government up for them, what do you think everybody else is going to do in the meantime? All the people in that country just might say, “Holy sh*t, those imperialistic American a**holes are invading us! We better do whatever we can to try to fight them off before they conquer us!” And here at home a bunch of citizens are going to start protesting and saying, “What the f*ck is wrong with our government???? Why are we starting wars and invading other people’s countries and killing their people and getting our own soldiers killed???? This is a war crime!!!! We’d better impeach you a**holes!!!!”
What? I’m still talking about history here!
Stereotypes: We’ve all heard about this one. You get an idea in your head about what a group of people is supposed to be like, and then you make your decisions accordingly. You might start out by making a few observations about a few members of the group and then apply those stereotypes to everyone in the group. Or you might learn your stereotypes from someone else. That person might’ve made that basic mistake, or they might be spreading propaganda about the people to warp your perception of them intentionally. Blacks, Mexicans, Native Americans, Chinese, homosexuals, Irish, Italians, Jews, Arabs, Germans, Poles, Japanese, Vietnamese—every group of people that has ever had a derogatory term applied to them has been stereotyped.
Stereotypes can also be positive, but that doesn’t make them any less misleading. Are Black people stupid lazy people who beat their wives and sell crack and collect welfare checks? Or are they beautiful muscular, athletic people who are great dancers and have lots of soul? Neither one, they’re people who do all same basic things every other group of people does. If you move to a slum full of beautiful muscular athletic people who are great dancers and have lots of soul, you’d better not be surprised if some of them still want to rob your apartment.
I think I’ve pretty well covered this one by now: We are great and mighty Americans. Those stupid, dirty third-world peasants can’t possibly win a war against troops trained by the U.S., no matter how badly they outnumber us. Communists are evil people, so their peasants must be waiting to overthrow their government the first chance they get. Democracy and capitalism are the best forms of government and economy, so everyone must want them. Et cetera, et cetera.
Still talking about Cuba here…