Thursday, November 10, 2011

Presidential Brains Make a Bloggah Wannah Hollah

Via Sully we see an article wherein a guy states that several recent crisis have been due to insecure leaders who are more ideological than intelligent:
Larison thinks that ideological thinking is what causes a refusal to accept threatening facts. I think that has the arrow of causation backwards: threatening facts are what prompt a turn to ideological thinking as a way of getting said facts out of the mental frame. And it is an insecure mind – insecure of its own judgment, or its own expertise, or its own authority, or what-have-you – for whom facts are threatening things.
Obviously that was the problem with Bush, who was juuuuust smart enough to know he wasn't really smart, but still insisted on being the smartest guy in the room:
Bush's problem was that he was just smart enough to know that he's not REALLY smart. Very smart people have a tendency to want to be around people as smart or smarter than themselves; kinda-smart people don't wanna spend all day being reminded they're not the smartest person in the room. So...you surround yourself with people who are simply thrilled to be there and have no problem nodding their head at everything you say. And before you know it, you're off and running to a terrible presidency. All because you're JUST smart enough to be threatened by really smart people.
And that's when you start doing things like "going from my gut!" or "God told me" etc.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your intellect(ual thinking) causes you to draw conclusions based in your own ideolog(ical thinking). A person whose ideology is in conflict with his intellect is double minded and as unstable as the wind.
Say what you mean and mean what you say...from the gut...because you believe it.

Xmastime said...

thats a nice bumper sticker, but facts and events change/are updated by the second; if your thinking cannot be fluid enough to adapt to them, you're probably not gonna make a good president.