The G8 fiddles while petro-civilization burns

…The Pulitzer Prize-winning Tuchman made a career of tracking human idiocy across the millennia. Her thesis in The March of Folly is that even when political leaders have the information they need to make an intelligent decision, and know what decision ought to be made, they consistently fail to make it. They act against both common sense and self-interest.

“A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. … Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?” Tuchman writes in her opening paragraph.


Her prototype, and metaphor, is the Trojans taking in that wooden horse filled with treacherous Greeks. The Trojans know the horse is a ruse. They bring it in anyway. Troy falls. The Greeks triumph.

From the ancient Trojans to the louche Renaissance popes who provoked the Protestant secession, to the British who lost America in the 18th century, to the Americans who made their fatally poor decisions in the Vietnam War of the 20th century, Tuchman painstakingly catalogues the information the political leaders were aware of and could have used to make better decisions, but didn’t.

Were she alive today, Tuchman would be twitching to write another chapter and this one would follow the grandest folly of them all. It is the story of rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and ocean and the global political establishment’s utter inability to cut them down.

Globe and Mail