The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life

by Robert Trivers

  EGYPT AND EGYPTAIR DENY ALL

  A most unusual accident occurred on October 31, 1999, when EgyptAir Flight 990 took off from New York’s JFK Airport bound for Cairo. It climbed to 33,000 feet, flew normally for about half an hour on a calm night, and then suddenly (in about two minutes) plummeted to the ocean below, killing all 217 aboard. Later work by the NTSB proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the plane was deliberately brought down by its second copilot. (Long flights have two crews: one for takeoff and landing and one for flying some of the routine work in between.) The copilot used a little deception to achieve his aim, but there is no evidence of self-deception involved in the disaster (beyond whatever may have been going on in the head of the suicidal copilot). But afterward there was a furious, long-lasting effort by EgyptAir and the Egyptian government to deny the cause of the crash, a denial that entrained self-deception and that continues to this day. Nearly every conceivable counterargument was advanced, including small bombs near the cabin or the rear, active Israeli agents nearby taking out the thirty-four Egyptian army generals aboard, and so on. This is a case of a post hoc attempt to create a false narrative to protect oneself, and we can readily appreciate Egyptian sensitivities. Because the copilot was soon reported to have murmured a standard Muslim prayer (and in Arabic at that!) before he put the plane into its dive, EgyptAir was about to acquire the unenviable reputation of being “unsafe at any speed” due to internal terrorism. If you can’t trust the flight crew to try to stay alive, how on earth can you trust the flight?

  Given nearly daily Egyptian resistance to NTSB findings for more than a year from well-trained aviation engineers, with the Egyptian government proposing numerous, sometimes very sophisticated alternatives, this crash is unusually well studied. Yet the basic facts were clear very early. There was no evidence of a bomb at all—fore, aft, or anywhere else. Bombs typically leave at least three kinds of evidence: instrument readings on the flight recorder, voices and sounds on the cockpit recorder, and a certain debris pattern at the bottom of the ocean. Instead, twenty minutes into the flight, the second copilot (fifty-nine years old) maneuvered out the first one (thirty-six years old) by bullying him. He first suggested that the other, who was flying the airplane, take a break and get some rest. When the first one angrily replied that this should have been agreed upon at the start of the flight, he said, “You mean you’re not going to get up? You will get up. Go and get some rest and come back.” In a few moments, the man got up and left the cockpit. The second copilot then buckled himself in next to the pilot (age fifty-seven). After eight minutes of pleasant banter between two old friends, the second copilot found the pen of the first, or more likely, pretended to: “Look, here’s the new first officer’s pen. Give it to him, please. God spare him,” he says to the captain, “to make sure it doesn’t get lost.” Pilot: “Excuse me, Jimmy, while I take a quick trip to the toilet.” Copilot: “Go ahead, please.” Pilot, exiting: “Before it gets crowded, while they are eating, and I will be back to you.” As easy as that, the second copilot had the airplane to himself.

  About twenty seconds later, the copilot said (in Arabic, his native tongue), “I rely on God,” and the autopilot disengaged. Four seconds later, another “I rely on God,” and two things happened: the throttles moved from fast to minimum idle and the massive rear elevators dropped, raising the tail and pointing the nose down. The copilot apparently choked the power and pushed the control yoke forward. The airplane dived steeply, and six times in quick succession, the copilot said calmly, “I rely on God.” As the nose continued to pitch downward, the inside of the plane changed from no gravity to negative gravity, with objects hitting the ceiling.

  Somehow, sixteen seconds into the dive, the pilot managed to return and yelled, “What’s happening? What’s happening?” He got no answer other than “I rely on God.” Then the two evidently fought for control of the airplane. The pilot tried to move the nose up and the copilot held it down, so that the elevators split, one down, one up, a most unusual configuration. (That they split is a design feature allowing either pilot to overcome a mechanical jam and fly the airplane with only one elevator.) The plane descended at a maximum rate of 630 feet per second and at a downward angle of almost 40 degrees. Somewhere along the line, the copilot turns off the engines while the pilot shouts incredulously. The plane hits about 550 miles per hour at 16,000 feet, when the pilot’s efforts seem to have reversed the dive. The plane then soars steeply back up to 24,000 feet, loses its left engine, and dives at high speed into the ocean. This must have been the most horrifying roller-coaster ride of a lifetime, lasting as it did for two minutes.

  The NTSB did a voice-stress analysis that showed a sharp contrast between the copilot and the pilot as they fought for control of the airplane. The pilot’s voice rose steadily in pitch and intensity, as one would expect from a person under growing stress and panic. But the copilot’s never changed. Through a total of twelve utterances of “I rely on God,” his voice never betrayed any stress or fear. He intended what he did and he was calm in his intention.

  The only part of this story we do not know is why the copilot brought the plane down. Was it the presence of those thirty-four generals aboard? He was not known to be politically active. Was it the fact that he had been warned only a few days before by a very senior pilot (himself riding as a passenger on this flight) to grow up before he caused himself serious problems? He indeed had a reputation for inappropriate behavior at the hotel in New York where the airline personnel stayed: following women (uninvited) toward their rooms, for example, and similar behavior, nothing dangerous, perhaps more on the pathetic side. He was carrying items in the plane for use back in Egypt, a part for his car and so on, so perhaps the decision was made shortly before he enacted it. If he was acting vindictively toward EgyptAir, the presence of all those generals may have made the suicide more dramatic and costly. We will never know, because part of Egyptian denial was either never to investigate the copilot’s possible motives or to hide whatever they found out. If NTSB investigations in the United States were typically run this way, we would have no objective data on the causes of airplane crashes. This is a case of self-deception intruding at yet a higher level—the international one—to impede the truth at an international cost. Surely we all benefit from reducing civilian crashes.

  Of course, Egypt is far from alone. For example, in the United States hardly anyone is conscious of—much less concerned by—the fact that the US economic embargo has prevented Iran from directly acquiring replacement parts for its aging airplanes. The country imposing the embargo is the same one that sold the planes, so here is a country acting in gross violation of international public safety for purely petty reasons when it alone has a legal obligation (original contracts signed) to provide replacement parts. This is a form of economic warfare, perhaps with the meta-message, “Go screw yourself and may your airplanes crash, too.”

  SAVED BY LACK OF SELF-DECEPTION?

  Perhaps we can end on a more positive note with the reverse of what we have described so far: the celebrated safe landing of a plane in the Hudson River shortly after takeoff from La Guardia Airport in New York on January 17, 2009, saving all 155 lives. The plane was headed for Charlotte, North Carolina, and apparently struck a column of geese at three thousand feet, disabling both engines simultaneously. The captain (fifty-eight years old)—who was not at the time flying the plane—immediately made a series of decisions, none of which was brilliant or exceptional, but all of which showed immediate rational calibration toward a serious danger, one for which the pilot had long prepared. The first thing he did was to take control of the plane. “My airplane,” he announced to his first officer, the standard procedure for a takeover. “Your aircraft,” the officer (age forty-nine) responded.

  The pilot first decided against landing at two possible airports and chose the large Hudson Bay instead. He cut speed by lowering wing flaps and made sure that the nose was raised on landing. It was experienced as a “hard lan
ding” by the crew in the rear of the plane, with utensils flying around, but there was no damage to anyone in the craft, beyond a flight attendant’s broken leg. In the captain’s own words:Losing thrust on both engines, at a low speed, at a low altitude, over one of the most densely populated areas on the planet—yes, I knew it was a very challenging situation. I needed to touch down with the wings exactly level . . . with the nose slightly up . . . at a rate that was survivable . . . and just above our minimum flying speed, not below it. And I needed to make all these things happen simultaneously.

  The pilot had several advantages. He was very experienced and competent, having been the top Air Force Academy cadet in his class in flying ability and having flown military jets before becoming a commercial pilot. He was trained as a glider pilot, precisely what was required in this situation, the key being to keep both wings out of the water while landing on it. He had taught courses on risk management and catastrophes. He remembered from training that when in a forced landing in water, you should look to land near a boat. Within moments of landing, there were so many boats nearby, large and small, as to risk swamping the already rapidly sinking aircraft. Children as young as eight months and eighteen months emerged alive. Two women who ended up in the frigid waters were rapidly rescued.

  The remarkable scene was a source of excitement for several days. The key is that the captain was highly conscious throughout, very well prepared, and ended up doing everything right. When asked whether he prayed, he said he was concentrating too hard: “I would imagine someone in back was taking care of that for me while I was flying the airplane.”

  CHAPTER 10

  False Historical Narratives

  False historical narratives are lies we tell one another about our past. The usual goals are self-glorification and self-justification. Not only are we special, so are our actions and those of our ancestors. We do not act immorally, so we owe nothing to anyone. False historical narratives act like self-deceptions at the group level, insofar as many people believe the same falsehood. If a great majority of the population can be raised on the same false narrative, you have a powerful force available to achieve group unity. Of course, leaders can easily exploit this resource by coupling marching orders with the relevant illusion: German people have long been denied their rightful space, so Dass Deutsche Volk muss Lebensraum haben! (German people must have room in which to live!)—neighbors beware. Or the Jewish people have a divine right to Palestine because ancestors living in the general area some two thousand years ago wrote a book about it—non-Jewish occupants and neighbors better beware. Most people are unconscious of the deception that went into constructing the narrative they now accept as true. Nor are they usually aware of the emotional power of such narratives or that these may entrain long-term effects.

  There is a deep contradiction within the study of history between ferreting out the truth regarding the past and constructing a false historical narrative about it. As we have seen in this book, we make up false narratives all the time, about our own behavior, about our relationships, about our larger groups. Creating one for one’s larger religion or nation only extends the canvas. Usually a few brave historians in every society try to tell the truth about the past—that the Japanese army ran a vast, forced system of sexual slavery in World War II, that the United States committed wholesale slaughter against Koreans during the Korean War and against Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians in the Vietnam War, that the Turkish government committed genocide against its successful subgroup of Armenians, that the Zionist conquerors of Palestine committed ethnic cleansing against some 700,000 Palestinians, that the United States has waged a long campaign of genocide and murder against American Indians, from the nation’s founding to the murder by proxy of more than a half million in the 1980s alone, not counting before or after, and it has sought through military means to determine the fate of the entire New World for well over a century. But most historians will tell only some version of the conventional, self-aggrandizing story, and most people in the relevant countries will not have heard of (or believed) the factual assertions I just made.

  One noteworthy fact is that the younger the recipient of the knowledge, the greater the pressure to tell a false story. So we are apt to tell our children a heroic version of our past and reserve for our university students a more nuanced view. This of course strengthens the bias, since views learned early have special power and not everyone attends college, or studies history if they do. Fortunately, the young often appear naturally to resist parental and adult nonsense, so there is at least some tendency to resist and upgrade. Just the same, there are strong pressures on professional historians to come up with a positive story, in part to undergird what is taught more widely.

  Make no mistake about it. People feel strongly about these matters. One person’s false historical narrative is another’s deeply personal group identity—and what right do you have commenting on my identity in the first place? Many Turkish people may well feel that I have slandered their country regarding its Armenian genocide, while I believe I have merely told the truth. The same may be true (though less strongly) for some Japanese people regarding their country’s practice of sexual slavery during World War II. Most Americans could hardly care less. So we wiped out the Amerindians—so what? So we repeatedly waged aggressive war on Mexico and stole nearly half their country. They probably deserved it. And, yes, since then we have fought a staggering series of wars ourselves and by proxies—even recently supporting genocide in such diverse places as Central America, Vietnam, Cambodia, and even East Timor, while blocking international action against it in Rwanda—but so the hell what? Only a left-wing nutcase would dwell on such minor details. Isn’t that what great powers do, and aren’t we the greatest?

  Israel is no different from any other country or group in having its own false historical narrative, and Israel’s is especially important because it exacerbates a set of troubled international and intergroup relations. The narrative is also one that is accepted almost wholesale in the United States, the most powerful military nation in the world. As the old joke goes, why doesn’t Israel become the fifty-first state? Because then it would have only two senators. Again, feelings run high. Some regard as anti-Semitic any attack on the behavior of Israel (or its underlying narrative). I regard this as nonsense and follow instead what seem to me to be the best Israeli (and Arab) historians—and their (largely Jewish) American counterparts—in describing a false historical narrative used to expand Israel at a cost to its neighbors by waging regular war on them to seize land and water (with near-constant US support), all in the name of fighting terrorism, while using state terrorism as the chief weapon. The narrative inverts reality: Israel wants only peace with its Arab neighbors (from as early as 1928), who to this very day reject peace at every turn and seek the total destruction of Israel and its Jewish population.

  But what are we to do? Yes, feelings run high, but false historical narratives are a critical part of self-deception at the group level, often with horrendous effects on others—if not on those practicing them. To discuss the subject, we need examples. Are we to leave out this important topic because on any given example feelings are easily bruised and controversy aroused? I see no sense in this. A theory of self-deception is not of much use if it can’t be applied to cases of actual human importance. Of course, I am more likely to be personally biased on these topics than on, say, the immunology of self-deception, but for me the risk of appearing foolish, indeed self-deluded, is preferable to the cowardice of not taking a position.

  The point of this chapter is to paint a few false historical narratives in enough detail to see clearly some of the lies we tell about our histories, how they were constructed and maintained, and the purposes they may serve. We will also consider the costs. It has famously been said that those who do not know history are destined to repeat it, or as Harry Truman put it: “The only thing new under the sun is the history you do not know.”

  THE US FALSE HISTORIC
AL NARRATIVE

  The false US narrative can be summarized with a few key facts, their rationalization, and the function of the rationalizations. The key fact is the slaughter and dispossession of an entire people (or set of peoples) to make room for Europeans (and their African slaves), a feat also accomplished by treaties not kept. Too late did Amerindians learn never to sign a treaty with a white man. For the latter, treaties were merely temporary agreements to be abrogated as soon as it was advantageous to do so.

  It is fully apt that Christopher Columbus should have been elevated to historical status for discovering the Americas. On the one hand, he did no such thing. There were more than 100 million people awaiting him when he arrived. And ships had also recently arrived from Africa, Polynesia, Phoenicia, and even other European countries. On the other hand, Columbus was unique in that he combined exploration with an explicit plan for subjugating the locals and extracting their wealth and labor. This of course is not what he is celebrated for.

  His first visit in 1492 merely allowed him to look around, and this is the one preserved in historical memory. The arrival of his three cute little ships—the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria—connoted a naive, peaceful arrival to “discover” a brand-new land. The second time (in 1493), he arrived more fully prepared: seventeen ships, at least twelve hundred men, cannons, crossbows, guns, cavalry, and attack dogs trained to rend human flesh. Yet this second visit is lost from historical memory entirely. It is the key visit, but no one mentions it.