Delusional Politics

by Hardeep Singh Puri

  The alternate scenario is also equally interesting. The elected representative is a strong personality, and the mandarins buckle under and are not able to speak truth to power. Delusional decision-making or delusional politics can and does take place in both scenarios.

  It is only when I had the time, intellectual freedom and ability to think outside the framework of a formalized system, that the full implications of what was going on in the world became clear. I was part of a think tank in New York around that time and had the unique privilege of watching another extreme variant—various delusional characters in full play in the geo-political sphere. Unhinged characters giving advice to poor unsuspecting governments—which, for the most part, was self-serving—and offering to use their ‘margin of persuasion’, a euphemism for ‘lobbying’. Looking out of my corner fourth-floor office with a full-frontal view, across First Avenue of the headquarters of the United Nations with the flags of the 193 member states fluttering majestically, I was reminded ever so often of what Bertrand Russell said: ‘The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.’

  A casual conversation between David Cameron, the then prime minister of the United Kingdom, and his foreign secretary, William Hague, at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in May 2012, unleashed events that led to the holding of a referendum and subsequently Brexit, for which there was no constitutional requirement. It effectively succeeded in beginning the end of the United Kingdom, which, by virtue of the series of actions and reactions unchained and likely to follow, could end up, if corrective action is not taken, as the United Kingdom of just England and Wales.

  At the height of military success in World War II, Hitler decided to take his army to Russia in the middle of severe winter. In effect, he opened not one but two additional fronts in 1941. He was not the first. Napoleon had done much the same more than a hundred years earlier in 1812.

  In Nepal, an entirely bizarre action on 1 June 2001 by the heir apparent of the ruling family resulted in fratricide, regicide, matricide and suicide. 1 Whether the queen, mother of the heir apparent, was solely responsible, or the former was egged on by a devious and scheming uncle is less than material. 2 A country was thrown into disarray and chaos. It is still reeling from that one action when the crown prince went berserk because he had been denied permission to marry the young woman of his choice.

  In each of these cases, it is necessary to ascertain why the concerned persons took the actions they did. Were they aware of any other choices or decisions whose consequences could be anticipated and evaluated? Were they of sound mind? Were they on opiates? Did they just underestimate the consequences of their actions and took these decisions without factoring in the consequences?

  Many examples of delusional politics are available in South Asia, including in India itself. In Sri Lanka, an elected president decided to define his legacy by erecting huge white elephants in his home district Mattala, a port in Hambantota, and the Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport. 3 What purpose do these mega infrastructure projects serve? They provide an ego boost to the leader. But what else? He succeeded in driving up his country’s debt. Sri Lanka now faces the prospect of more than 90 per cent of its GDP being earmarked for debt repayment. 4

  Since this is not sustainable and the Chinese are not into philanthropy or altruism, the debt has been converted into equity and parts of Sri Lanka have been sold to the Chinese. 5 That could also be the pattern in Pakistan on account of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), unless better sense prevails. 6 My colleagues familiar with the dynamics of the bilateral relationship between China and Pakistan, variously described as ‘all-weather’ and ‘time-tested,’ try to convince me that it will all be smooth-sailing. In my view, this is more likely to evolve in an asymmetrical fashion, converting Pakistan into a client state of China.

  However, my intention here is not to catalogue or list all the delusional politicians of our time or their delusional decision-making. It is a much more limited exercise to take three case studies of three important democracies: United Kingdom in 2015 post Brexit; the United States in 2016 post Trump; and the story of India which I attempt to trace on a wider historical canvas.

  Who was ‘delusional’? The Congress party which facilitated India’s freedom struggle and was in a governance role during the bulk of its existence as an independent country? Or its leaders during the last ten years of providing a quality of governance which resulted in its winning less than 10 per cent of the seats in the Lok Sabha—the threshold required to be recognized as the designated ‘opposition’ in parliament? Or a self-made man of humble origins, who called for a Congress-mukt (Congress-free) India, whose campaign produced an absolute majority in the Lok Sabha after an astonishingly large gap of thirty-seven years?

  Then again, a probing question: Why did voters reject the more qualified of the two presidential candidates in the United States? The voters didn’t opt for the candidates’ experience and credentials in governance but instead for a man who during the course of the campaign and after being elected behaved in the most unconventional manner. What explains the Trump phenomenon?

  And, in between, what was the need for a referendum on Brexit? Only delusional politicians act against their own and their country’s best interest in the belief that they are making history.

  How will these three democracies reconcile their own internal fault lines, their delusional politics? Countries, like institutions, have to be assiduously built, step by step, brick by brick. Lest there comes along a delusional politician who either out of a fit of hubris, megalomania or bad advice takes one or more decisions that can have long-term adverse consequences and can result in the unravelling of countries.

  Why choose India, UK and the US? Quite simply because they are democracies; they are countries I know and have had the privilege of living in and have been able to study in some detail.

  At the centre of delusional politics, invariably, is the delusional politician who, in turn, is often encouraged and egged on by pseudo expertise, and self-serving and motivated advice. With the benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to characterize and dismiss such historical figures just as ‘delusional’ or ‘intelligent but unhinged’. Deeper analysis, however, shows that all of them had serious character flaws. Such leaders pursue delusional policies that can only prove catastrophic. The interplay between the so-called great ‘minds’ and ‘ideas’ often produces toxicity.

  I do realize that this runs the risk of straying into the study of individuals. Having defined greatness in terms of great minds and ideas, one is gravitationally pulled down or dumbed down to what average minds do—discuss events—and what small minds do—talk about ‘people’.

  To define the compass, this book is about the greatest gift of mankind, a great idea: democracy. Unfortunately, that great idea has to be comprehensively surveyed for the sake of its survival in terms of individuals who have to provide leadership. And this must necessarily cover events.

  Another caveat, delusional politics is not confined to the actions of delusional politicians at the level of the nation state. Governance at the level of the multilateral system has much to answer for—hence a chapter on this subject. There is a chapter each on the fight against international terrorism and the politics of trade. Delusional decision-making in both of these areas has severely impacted and influenced the advanced state of entropy the world finds itself in today.

  My first book, Perilous Interventions: The Security Council and the Politics of Chaos, looked at the genesis of flawed decision-making in the United Nations Security Council in 2011 and 2012, and thereafter, the use of force and the arming of rebels. Those policies led to the unravelling of countries. This book, Delusional Politics, looks at the dynamics within three democracies. What will the leaders of these three do to their own countries and the world around them?

  An interesting question that continued to come up during the exercise of writing this book was whether there is
any link between mental illness and delusional politics in general. Do those who hold extreme political views and/or are known to act irrationally suffer from some form of mental disequilibrium or illness? As far as I am aware, there is no scientific or medical evidence for this. Totalitarian states have had little or no hesitation in locking up dissidents or opponents of the regime for the simple reason that they refuse to conform to the prevailing political philosophy and oppose the ruling dispensation.

  Sluggish schizophrenia, a diagnosis that was in use in the erstwhile Soviet Union, was formulated in the Soviet psychiatric establishment. The psychiatrists who developed this perhaps genuinely believed that one had to be psychologically delusional to oppose or question the Bolshevik project of building a socialist state.

  Interestingly, I found little empirical evidence to establish a difference between people suffering from delusions and those with mental illness. I was astonished and alarmed to know that behavioural science or psychology does not focus on how seemingly normal persons, without any known history of mental illness, can display delusional behaviour in their actions on a regular basis. The people around them come to accept this as normal. Such behaviour then tends to be rationalized as part of a ‘belief’ devoid of objectivity and facts.

  Policies followed by Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun, Joseph Stalin, Maximilien Robespierre and several others brought death and destruction to tens of millions of people. Examples of evil incarnate in history are not confined to the past. Many democratically elected leaders of the twenty-first century display streaks of recklessness, megalomania, bizarre self-obsession and political views that are difficult to characterize. Are they mentally unstable and, therefore, delusional? Or, are they delusional without being mentally ill? Is being pathologically delusional less serious or more serious than being just delusional?

  Perhaps each recipient of a mention in history’s hall of shame would have to be carefully analysed and studied separately.

  In the case of Hitler, new research based on the papers of his private physician shows that as the war progressed he became progressively more dependent on drugs. Three phases are mentioned by Norman Ohler in his new book, Blitzed, Drugs in the Third Reich: 7 ‘The first one are the vitamins given in high doses intravenously. The second phase starts in the fall of 1941 with the first opiate, but especially with the first hormone injections. Then in ’43 the third phase starts, which is the heavy opiate phase.’

  The crucial question that arises is the following: Could the war have had a different outcome if Hitler’s doctor, Theodor Morell, had not put him on a vitamin injection therapy and then graduated him to opiates subsequently?

  CHAPTER 1

  The Credibility Crisis

  ‘I covered two presidents, LBJ and Nixon, who could no longer convince, persuade, or govern, once people had decided they had no credibility, but we seem to be more tolerant now of what I think we should not tolerate.’

  —Helen Thomas 1

  Is ‘truth’ finally dead? Not really. It has been in a coma for quite some time. We’ve have just been reluctant to take it off life support.

  The most telling examples of the need to refer to ‘truth’ in the past tense can be found in the deteriorating and toxic relationship between the government and the media in most ‘democracies’.

  Partisan media outlets have been on a steady increase since the late 1980s. These allow consumers to enjoy the self-constructed confines of their own ideological bubbles. This ‘homophilous sorting’, as the Economist terms it, 2 allows like-minded people, in a sense, to form their own realities. So, when public figures—be it celebrities or politicians—who are viewed favourably in these ideological clusters are positioned under unfavourable light, the credibility of the allegation lies not within the facts but within emotions. The ‘truth’ is not determined by facts; ‘truth’ is determined by what feels true, regardless of whether or not those feelings have any basis in facts. 3

  This combination of increasingly polarized media outlets and tight-knit ideological communities whose beliefs are shaped by preference over fact lies at the core of truth’s decline. This trend is evident in each of the three democracies discussed in this book—the United States, United Kingdom, and India—and in all these cases, the trend is signalled by a divergence of political reality from the dominant political narrative.

  As I discuss in this chapter, these democracies have fallen into the dangerous comforts of ‘post-truth’ politics. The Oxford Dictionaries named ‘post-truth’ as their 2016 Word of the Year. They define post-truth as: ‘Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ 4

  The year 2017 has its own variant of this. ‘Fake News’, a term heavily popularized by US President Donald Trump, has been named the word of the year by Collins Dictionary due to its widespread use around the world. Defined as ‘false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting’, 5 fake news takes over from Brexit—which was named the definitive word last year after the June 2016 referendum in favour of the UK’s exit from the European Union (EU).

  For societies to accept ‘post-truth’ politics as the norm—which has not happened yet in totality but is on the horizon in the US, UK, and India—there must be a fundamental shift in the basis for political beliefs from fact-based credibility to belief-based credibility. In other words, in the post-truth era, people’s realities are moulded not by evidence but by whichever narratives complement their pre-existing biases. As historian Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in 1962 in his book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America:

  When ‘truth’ has been displaced by ‘believability’ as the test of the statements which dominate our lives . . . ingenuity is devoted less to discovering facts than to inventing statements which can be made to seem true.

  The post-truth era is indeed upon us, as is manifestly apparent from two historic tests of democratic politics recently: the 2016 referendum to determine the fate of the United Kingdom’s membership in the EU and the 2016 US presidential election. In both instances, we witnessed a surge in populist rhetoric, capitalizing on the public’s economic or social angst by appealing to the public’s emotions rather than their rationale. Politicians on the campaign trail morphed public discourse by tampering with truth. As author of The Post-Truth Era Ralph Keyes describes, ‘we “massage” truthfulness, we “sweeten it”, we tell “the truth improved”.’ 6

  In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in the United States, several studies looked at the media coverage of the campaigns. Consensus across the various studies was that policy discussion on the campaign trail was largely absent, overshadowed by discussion on the candidates’ personalities and controversies. 7 News media, of course, exacerbated this problem, choosing, for instance, to focus on Hillary Clinton’s blunders with her email server rather than her policy proposals.

  Priority issues for political campaigns have been shuffled, both in terms of candidates’ talking points and coverage thereof. As Keyes explains, ‘On our media-driven scale of values, celebrity trumps honesty.’ 8 The value of truth is in decline. As a result, we are replacing political reality with political narratives. The irony is that in the media coverage of the Trump/Clinton election contest, their character and integrity became issues, only to be jettisoned conveniently to fit ideological preferences.

  Political Narrative vs Political Reality

  I am a student of history. Historians essentially like to contextualize and organize events in order to provide a better understanding and meaning of those occurrences. They create chronologies and narratives. Creating narratives is relatively straightforward. Given enough evidence, a certain degree of consensus can be reached. Historians, however, are definitely not without their biases or ideological preferences. There is no such thing as clinical empiricism. The assertion that ‘facts speak for themselves’ is open to questioning. What is a ‘f
act’? My favourite example is taken from E.H. Carr’s What Is History? 9

  The fact that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is a fact. Was he the first to do so, how many did so before him and thereafter? Were these numbers in hundreds, thousands or millions? In short, the historian has to give shape to facts. This is where his/her preferences, biases and ideological predilections become important in the shaping of his/her product. Even a chronological listing of facts need not be entirely free from deliberately introduced impurities. And yes, there is a greater propensity of such externally introduced elements for slant, twist or distortion in narratives of a political nature.

  Narratives constructed in the context of politics—whether by politicians, governments, or pundits—are ‘necessarily the product of a particular perspective’. 10 Thus political narratives cannot by any means mirror the clear-cut process of preparing clinical historical narratives.

  Political narrative, in its simplest form, is a mere retelling of events which are then woven together into a timeline. Even in this case, narratives can be distorted by cherry-picking particular elements to include or exclude from the narrative. In media coverage of the 2016 US presidential election, for instance, even if one were to overlook the political charge of news stories produced by partisan media outlets, the sheer number of articles focusing on a story rewrites political narratives. Such was the case when former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey reopened the investigation in Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails some days before the election. The story was on the front page of all news outlets; regardless of how the story was covered, the volume of coverage itself was enough to influence the electoral calendar. Even absent deliberate political bias, political narratives cannot help but promote a particular perspective.