False certainty and wallowing in rumor
Life-lessons come in many forms: some from experience, some from parents, relatives, friends, some from osmosis – it’s in the air, baby! Some lessons are drawn from books. These are book-lessons drawn from real life.
To begin:
Sometime toward the end of the madcap decade of the 1920s, the brilliant young mogul in charge of production at the MGM movie studio in Hollywood, Irving Thalberg, sat opposite a famous writer in the studio commissary and offered up a few words on the nature of leadership, leaders, and the led, remarks which the writer thought showed extraordinary shrewdness and largeness of vision.
Thalberg speaks.
“Scottie, suppose there’s got to be a road through a mountain – a railroad and two or three surveyors and people come to you and you believe some off them and some of them you don’t believe, but all in all, here seem to be a half-dozen possible roads through those mountains, each one of which, so far as you can determine, is as good as the other.
“Now suppose you happen to be the top man, there’s a point where you don’t exercise the faculty of judgement in the ordinary way, but simply the faculty of arbitrary decision.
“You say, ‘Well, I think we will put the road there’ and you trace it with your finger and you know in your secret heart … that you have no reason for putting the road there rather than in several other different courses, but you’re the only person that knows that you don’t know why you’re doing it and you’ve got to stick to that and you’ve got to pretend … that you did it for specific reasons, even though you’re utterly assailed by doubts.
“… When you’re planning a new enterprise on a grand scale, the people under you mustn’t ever know or guess that you’re in any doubt because they’ve all got to have something to look up to and they mustn’t ever dream that you’re in doubt about any decision.”
Lesson: It is better, sometimes, to be decisive than right. Sometimes there is no “right.”
Complication: Because people are generally pig-headed, fractious, not to say downright malicious, there are always individuals who delight in criticizing even the most well-thought-out decision. In addition, people are generally good at sniffing out uncertainty, which is one reason dissent from official opinion is a feature of democracies. In the Thalberg case, Hollywood was never especially democratic. Indeed, the studio “system” in place under Thalberg was autocratic to the core.
“National hallucination,” under which falls the widely shared delusion, among Republicans, apparently, that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump, is not new.
An episode of mass public delusion took place in Great Britain during World War I, as the historian Barbara Tuchman records in her book, “The Guns of August.”
“In the sudden and dreadful realization that the enemy (Germany) was winning the war, people … seized upon a tale,” Tuchman writes, that assuaged their feelings of anguish, at least for a while.
Late in August 1914 – the war was barely a month old – British and French forces were falling back everywhere while suffering tremendous losses of men.
Then, “on August 27 a 17-hour delay in the Liverpool London railway service inspired the rumor that the trouble was due to the transport of (friendly) Russian troops who were said to have landed in Scotland on their way to reinforce the Western Front” and thus rescue the allies.
The rumor mushroomed, so that Russian reinforcements were spotted everywhere. On troops trains. On a station platform in Edinburgh. Someone even claimed to have seen 10,000 Russians marching in London “on their way to Victoria Station.”
“The most reliable people had seen them – or who knew friends who had,” Tuchman writes. An Oxford professor. English and Scottish army officers. Sir Stuart Coats of Aberdeen informed a brother-in-law in the United States that 150,000 Russian troops had filed across his country estate.
The rumor was so pronounced that it spread to German war planners, becoming “a military factor.” The phantom” troops never made it to France, however, despite expectant throngs awaiting their arrival at Paris train stations.
An official denial of the story of the Russian troops didn’t appear in the London papers until the middle of September, by which time the rumor had been reported on in the American press.
Lesson: People succumb easily enough to rumor, especially when a falsehood, spread widely, comforts them, buoys them up, or confirms some preexisting assumptions. The thing takes on a life of its own.
An even grimmer reality is another Tuchmanian: “What a people thinks at any given time can best be presumed by what they do.”
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.