The Demand for Obedience, and Reverence for Authority: The Lifelong Flight from Responsibility and Judgment (I)

The Demand for Obedience, and Reverence for Authority: The Lifelong Flight from Responsibility and Judgment (I)

By Arthur Silber

Introduction: A Valuable Opportunity

In one of those happy accidents occasionally encountered during the examination of complex issues over a period of years, a new article provides me a remarkable opportunity. The article offers a distilled example of certain analytic failures I've discussed a number of times. But that is only on the first and most superficial level of consideration.

Below the surface, the article reveals the operation of mechanisms of denial that I've also examined in the past. These mechanisms can be detected in the commentary offered by almost every contemporary writer, among well-known and prominent writers and also in the remarks of relatively obscure bloggers.

An extended analysis of these issues will allow me to trace the ways in which the mechanisms of denial work, and how these mechanisms result in the more obvious analytic failures. In addition to reviewing some observations I've already made and showing, in connection with a new and unusually revealing example, how they operate, I will provide additional information I've long planned to write about.

The article to which I refer may represent a surprising choice to many people, even to some regular readers here. It's by Andrew Bacevich: "Non-Believer." Bacevich is commonly regarded as a strong critic of America's aggressively interventionist foreign policy. Not surprisingly, his new piece has already been widely linked by many of those who are "antiwar," usually with enthusiastic approval for his views. I myself have linked Bacevich's writing on several past occasions. While preparing these new posts of mine, and in reviewing some of Bacevich's earlier essays (including a few I hadn't read before), I realize that I was in error in praising Bacevich to the extent I did. But then, my own understanding of these issues has increased considerably in the last several years.

Continued. . .