• Sometimes we apply the wrong patterns or analogies to a problem.

• Sometimes we apply the wrong patterns or analogies to a problem. We depend on pattern-matching much more often than logic to find the answers to problems. No comparison is perfect, but they can be extremely useful guides. But when our patterns are too abstracted, too much reduced from the real world, it’s easy to make false matches. Fingerprint experts examine a certain number of points to identify individuals; if they reduced that they might end up with a lot of false positives.

Plenty of scientists and social scientists have made misleading comparisons. Seeing the revolutionary changes in Europe at the end of the 1700s, J.B. Lamarck concluded that animals, too, could change their forms by effort, and pass the changes on to their offspring. The solar system model of the atom, first proposed by Nagoaka in 1904, was helpful to researchers at the time, but ultimately misleading: electrons are not little planets in circular orbits around tiny suns. "Analogical problem-solving is difficult because the patterns to be recognized are not skin deep. It requires seeing the abstract similarities between two problems, that is, the similarities in their constraints and goals. It also requires understanding the solution's functional role, in this case . . .” (Cummins 185). Comparing the psychology of enslaved people and people in concentration camps, with little documentation from slave testimony, led Stanley Elkins to invent the "Sambo" personality pattern to explain slave behavior (Fischer 256). Religious people, too, can get in the act, as when Anglican clergy referred to the natural order described by Isaac Newton to support their authoritarian notions of social order and hierarchy (Wertheim 131-2). Here's a lovely one:

An English social scientist, Geoffrey Gorer, has explained the historical relationship between Anglo-America and Europe in terms of a national Oedipus complex, in which ‘England, the England of George III and Lord North, takes the place of the despotic and tyrannical father, the American colonists that of conspiring sons’ (Fischer 192).

Even if Freudian psychobabble had any basis in fact, nations are not people. Nations don't have neuroses. The South (of the U.S.) doesn't have a mind. Islam does not have plans. The economy does not have intentions. When we start basing policy on what the army thinks, or the university, or history, we'll mess up good.

Quite often false analogies simply enable the lying class, as when the deep thinkers proclaim social movements a “cancer” or an “infection”, to be treated by the political equivalent of surgery, antibiotics, and quarantine. Indeed, our changing models of health and sickness over the centuries --witchcraft, the balance of elements, germ theory, and so on-- undoubtedly affect how we see the “body politic.”

It's a bit tricky when we try to guess officials' political attitudes from their private lives. What does it tell us that so-and-so hired undocumented immigrants to tend the lawn, or cheated on her taxes, or cheated on her husband? Such information can be clues to politicians' general attitudes, when combined with other information, but are hardly good predictors of how they will vote on a particular issue.

Useful analogies can help us recognize types of problem or situation, and appropriate responses, while false analogies lead us far astray. I grew up shortly after World War Two, and like many others I was familiar with the Munich allegory: the cowardly capitulation of cowardly short-sighted appeasers to Nazi aggression. When the Best and Brightest invaded Viet Nam “to avoid another Munich” their argument made sense to me. Then they bombed the hell out of North Viet Nam, assuming that, as with Nazi Germany, they had only to knock out its industrial capacity to stop its armies. Only later did I learn the startling differences between South Viet Nam and Czechoslovakia, and between Ho and Hitler. Those false analogies helped kill a million people, give or take.

And what experience do we draw upon to understand Iraq? Invading Iraq is going to be a mess because Viet Nam was a mess, or because Israel’s grab for Arab land has brought nothing but sixty years of reciprocal terrorism, or because I damn sure wouldn’t want any Arab soldiers occupying my town. We must invade because all I know of Arabs is that they kill for no reason, and Saddam is an Arab, so he must be about to attack the U.S.

Here, of course, all the other limitations of how we process information come into play: after many decades of propaganda, we build our stereotype of a billion Muslims by mooshing together in our minds a few crafty crusaders like Osama with the debauched, godless, calculating control freak Saddam, and the horny clueless teens who strap on bulging bombs as their ticket to pussy in Paradise. (I forget which Scripture produced the antidraft slogan of the 1970s: Women Say Yes to Men Who Say No-- Faludi 1999 p. 308.) It’s crazy; most of us don’t trust the information we get from our government or the mass media, and yet we regularly kill and die on that basis.

Or to mention another common comparison, equating Hitler with Osama, or with Dick Halliburton* for that matter, does not help us understand what action to take. These are quite different kinds of killers, with different aims, technologies and constraints. Psychologist and death camp survivor Bruno Bettleheim even compared U.S. antiwar activists to Hitler Youth (Faludi 1999 p. 300). False comparison can only push us into stupid mistakes.

Sometimes I think that, rather than comparing two things, usefully or not, we end up substituting one for the other. A woman I know campaigns against euthanasia (killing sick people), not because she knows of anyone euthanized, but because that crime seems like the logical expression of a world that not only devalues but murders vulnerable people; it fits so perfectly it must be happening on a vast scale. Also, her work on behalf of these victims lets her express grief and rage, without requiring that she confront the crimes she does know about personally.

On a larger scale, for decades after the Viet Nam war people pestered Congress to rescue nonexistent POWs. They regarded denials by the media, military and government as exactly what they expected, given all the betrayals they had experienced through war, job loss, falling status, and changing gender roles. Their campaign expressed that they would not betray forgotten soldiers, as they themselves had been betrayed and forgotten.


• We need imagination; but don’t be handing over the keys to con men.
I used to think that imagining something meant making it up. But really, using our imaginations means activating and applying what we know to new circumstances. One of my favorite films is Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of a novel by Philip K. Dick. It seemed incredibly imaginative to me, this world of bioengineering and climate change, godlike corporations, seedy bureaucracies and tangled cultures, systematic cruelty and unpredictable kindness, vast loneliness and instants of intense connection. I wonder where he got those ideas? Contrast this with the impoverished science fiction of Saturday morning cartoons, or many video games. The vision of Dick and Scott is so compelling because they know a lot about people and the effects of technology.

The process of imagining can help us mobilize knowledge to address real-world problems as well. Business gurus and “personal counselors” alike help clients focus on their goals; sometimes they promise that the clients can achieve anything if they “visualize” it strongly enough. “Once I heard a lady say from the pulpit, ‘You need to visualize your Lexus. Go down there on the lot and visualize it, and believe that God is going to give it to you” (White 77). The claim is absurd. We can’t conjure up good health, fancy cars or the End to World Hunger (the ostensible goal of Werner Erhard’s Hunger Project) just by imagining them. But, especially for people whose lives are so chaotic they’re afraid to make plans and commitments, this “visualizing” process can be a sneaky form of planning. If I have a realistic goal and think about it often enough, I’m naturally going to consider the steps involved in achieving it.

Adolf had this kind of single-minded focus; perhaps Osama does too. (Somehow mental concentration just doesn’t fit my image of Bush Junior.) People with one aim and a drastically simplified model of the world can strike boldly and persistently. In the end, of course, Adolf’s tunnel vision proved to be his undoing, blinding him to everything from the Russian will to resist to the development of the A-bomb.

In theory, democrats should be less prone to such fatal ignorance-- if you love the world and the people in it, you pay more attention. Not that lefties were well prepared for the terrorism wars. But as we tackle very large, seemingly intractable issues like our destructive economic system, experienced political workers like Candie Carawan remind us how huge and impervious Jim Crow seemed not so very long ago; and still folks knew they had to bring it down. “I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom” nicely suggests the mental discipline of generations of civil rights activists.

By the same token, it’s very hard to reach for what we can’t imagine, and that’s the real strength of the corporate media. I’ve never seen and rarely heard tell of a society where waste and abuse were not indispensable to its day to day functioning. How can we fight for a future we cannot visualize? For instance, when asked to imagine a more just society, many women could not describe anything more than marginally different from their current experience. “Though our focus group members had great respect for sex equality, it remained an abstraction removed from their daily world. For these women, equality was a word without a texture, a voice without tone, a form without life-- as remote as some arcane scientific theory about the beginning of the cosmos. . . . ‘Being equal means . . .’ Like cars running out of gas, our focus group women sputtered to get started. Sentences were truncated; verbs had no subjects. Little cross-conversation developed. . . ” (Henry 153).

Scott (1990 p. 101-2) points out that even under the worst conditions, slaves and peasants imagine and fight for a more just world; but in almost all the examples he gives, that imagined better world is still in thrall to kings and priests. If we don’t have an independent fund of knowledge and experience, our wished-for utopia might turn out little different from the current sick mess; kinder gentler bosses, perhaps, but with the structures of domination still in place. (Scott says further that, because the bosses tend to freak out, even a reformist challenge can have revolutionary outcomes [1990 p. 74], and in that he’s probably right.)


It’s not just the lack of imagined alternatives we have to struggle against. We also have to resist the way professional persuaders hijack our imaginations to use them against us. Have you ever told a lie? Once I lied. I told my boss the reason I was late for work was that there was a wreck on the highway. “Looked like a blue van flipped over the guardrail,” I said. I could have said more, but a smart liar never says too much-- that makes it too easy to check. Incomplete stories are actually more credible, because they hold less that might contradict what we believe already. No, the purpose of the telling detail is to get the listener to do the liar’s work for them, to use their own knowledge to picture the bloody smoking ruin, the shattered glass, the gawking bystanders, the shriek of torn metal and scream of the sirens. Like the footsteps and slamming doors in an old-time radio drama, mere scraps of information can suggest to us elaborate scenarios or invoke profound emotions. This ability to trigger the imagination of the audience is the foundation of great poetry and art. It can also mislead us dramatically.

“Junius Browne of the New York Tribune collected from officers details of the Battle of Pea Ridge (March 1862) and wrote a brilliant, but entirely imaginary, eye-witness report. To the chagrin of the two correspondents who had actually seen the battle, Browne’s dispatch was acclaimed by The Times of London as the ‘ablest and best battle account which has been written during the American war’” (Knightley 26). Kaddafi’s arms dealer, rogue CIA agent Edmund Wilson, used to intrigue customers and employees alike by mysterious references to Big Secrets and friends in high places (Goulden & Raffio 49, 125, 147, 178, 198). Self-proclaimed real estate moguls sell us get-rich-quick tapes from gracious terraces overlooking palatial yachts (they don't tell us whose). Con artists know that you set up the Big Store with care, and then let the sucker convince himself. Preachers surround us with images and exhort us to pray for a “personal relationship with Jesus”-- no wonder folks come to feel they know every blonde hair on His pretty head.

(A new treasure came in the mail the other day, a free miracle prayer rug, courtesy of St. Matthew’s Churches of Tulsa. The Prayer Rug is an 11 X 17” sheet of paper with an optical illusion Jesus printed on one side. “Look into Jesus’ Eyes you will see they are closed. But as you continue to look you will see His eyes opening and looking back into your eyes. Then go and be alone and kneel on this Rug of Faith or touch it to both knees. Then please check your needs on our letter to you. Please return this Prayer Rug. Do not keep it.” The brochure offers testimony such as “I FELT ABSOLUTELY NO MORE PAIN.” “GOD BLESSED US WITH $10,700. HE WENT OUT AND BOUGHT US A CAR . . . enclosed is a donation from both of us. . . .”)

It’s the mark of a good prosecutor, too, to fashion a coherent moral epic from the fragments of evidence available. “Studies of criminal trials show that members of a jury reconstruct the scrambled, piecemeal, incomplete evidence presented by witnesses into a narrative story wherein events have clear causes, and people have intentions. A juror may construct more than one explanatory story, but he is likely to base his verdict on the one that is most coherent and plausible” (Jeremy Campbell 219).

It all goes back to our extraordinary ability to fill in gaps in the information we get from the world.

Robert Teeter . . . has made a study of how people create these schematic portraits out of wisps of data. He shows short videotapes and still photographs of politicians, plays recordings of snatches of speech, and asks people to make dozens of judgements on the basis of what they see and hear. He finds that viewers and listeners conjure up intricate life histories, ambitious interpretations, which seem coherent and smooth, almost seamless, as if they had been woven from the genuine cloth of experience instead of the man-made fabric of opinion. No obvious gaps appear in these creations, which are strikingly consistent and replete with plausible embellishments and confident strokes of portraiture . . . . 'You show them a man wearing a knit shirt with a little football helmet embroidered on the front and they'll say he's a football coach, that he bowls, drinks beer, the whole picture.' These creations form the basis for inferences and predictions about character, intelligence, trustworthiness, and they are remarkably stable (jeC 113).

So perhaps my friend, a union staffer, should not have been surprised that in 2004 many nurses of Local 1199 preferred cowboy-booted, folksily incoherent aristocrat George Bush to brash blueblood Howard Dean, whose MD signalled to them arrogance and abusiveness. They took the few scraps of information they had, and rather than figuring out what more they needed to know, and how to find it, they fabricated stories complete enough to justify their political decisions.

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A nineteenth century Kentucky miner, about the coal operators’ elaborate justifications for mistreating their employees: “They worked their men for a song-- and the men sung it to themselves” (Gaventa 93).
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The resulting commitments can be more powerful than anything based on a campaign platform. You could call this participatory deception: we supply our masters the raw materials for an elaborate fantasyland.

Nor is it any wonder that some of the staple lies of our time are so boring and repetitive-- they’re drawn from the same tired pop culture or subculture sources. The aliens in UFO accounts tend to be remarkably similar to those in popular movies and TV shows, for example (Shermer 95; Matheson 200, 218, 271), and reflect very modern anxieties about unfathomable and unnaccountable technocracies (Matheson 215, 216, 299, 300). Likewise religions change to respond to current crises: “Therefore, much of the prophecy and revelation arising around the turn of the present century is not so much startling for its revelatory information as it is startling in its sheer predictability. Whether apocalyptic, purified, or naively hopeful, much of the current fashion in revelation consists of visions of the future that are painted entirely in the colors of the present” (Kennedy 26).