These foolish things

Fool me once, shame on me,’ goes the saying notoriously mangled by former US president George W. Bush. “Fool me twice, shame on me.” Well, shame on him, on several accounts. He’s not the only one to get fooled, though.

We all do. Almost always by politicians. Invariably by clerics. Frequently by the media. Often enough by friends and relatives and supposed well-wishers. And no, it’s got nothing to do with All Fools Day, which comes but once a year. It’s a daily occurrence.

In some cases, the same tactics are rolled out year after year. Their absurdity is irrelevant, because we get fooled again and again.

Take, for instance, what could be described as the 99 per cent factor. As a kid, I was somewhat disconcerted by the price tags on Bata and Servis shoes, for instance. They were always a certain amount of rupees and 99 paisa. Why would they bother, I wondered.

My parents explained the assumption that Rs 29.99 would seem more attractive than Rs 30, notwithstanding the negligible difference, because the average consumer would be more tempted by something that was less than Rs 30 than, for instance, the same thing retailing for the rounded-up figure.

But why? It’s effectively the same thing, isn’t it? How many paisas, pence, fils, cents or whatever the denomination would you have to save before it added up to any kind of difference? Doesn’t matter. The technique is a psychological success, hence it remains entrenched, regardless of how vociferously the odd punter might rail against it. It’s hard to see it disappearing.

What does that tell us about human nature? Why is scepticism such a rare quality? How does it differ from cynicism? Commercial retailers are not half as deplorable as political vendors. However deceptive the former’s price tags might be, at least they are there for everyone to see. The deception in the case of the latter is unmatched. Take, for instance, the fact that so many Indians
voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party on the basis that Narendra Modi made it to the top from humble beginnings.

How often does such leadership translate into policies that really help those who help themselves? The record is unimpressive. But hope reigns supreme. Why? Because the likes of Modi say so.

Who believes them? Well, desperation breeds gullibility. It’s easy to latch on to hopes, no matter how ridiculous they might seem, because the alternative looks even bleaker.

Another aspect of the same phenomenon relates to casus belli. A dozen years ago, the majority of Americans deemed it appropriate to attack Iraq because a great many of them accepted the official implication of Baghdad’s involvement in 9/11. It wasn’t the case, and none of the available evidence suggested otherwise.

More than a decade on, though, all too many of those who propelled the West into a war it couldn’t possibly win continue to insist it was the right thing to do, because the available intelligence bore out the suspicion that Saddam Hussein’s regime was on the verge of developing weapons of mass destruction.

Well, it wasn’t. And those who sexed up the intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic were largely reacting to the demands of their political masters. But so what? The cruel Saddam is history. No harm done, right?

Well, no. Wrong. Hundreds of thousands of deaths later, much of Iraq is contested territory. Between Daesh, an entity that did not exist until the American-led invasion, and Iran, denigrated back in the day by the US president as a component of the Axis of Evil, but now a crucial component of the pushback against Daesh.

Daesh has, meanwhile, emerged as a key point of attraction for the easily fooled, with hundreds rushing to join it from countries such as Britain, Australia and France. Most of them are Muslims by birth or conversion, and their gullibility in all too many cases proceeds from their unstable state of mind.

Western nations wring their hands over what these recruits might get up to when they return to their countries of birth, but surely the primary issue is that most of them won’t. Their alienation from the societies in which they grew up all too often propels them towards fatal consequences.

April 1, though, is just another date on the calendar. Some All Fools’ Day jokes work only too well, while most of them invariably fall flat. What’s far more alarming is the human tendency to be fooled time and again, every day of the year, by the political or media elite.

Back in the 1960s, after a chance encounter with an acquaintance who had lately been roped in as a presidential adviser by a military dictator, the Pakistani poet Habib Jalib, channelling his interlocutor, railed against yeh das crore gaddhay jin ka naam hai awaam — these 100 million asses, the public is their name.

The irony in which his verse was steeped may have been lost in the mists of time. And it’s by no means restricted to April 1.

More than a decade ago, the American documentary-maker Michael Moore wanted for the soundtrack of his eventually Oscar-winning film Fahrenheit 9/11 the song Won’t Get Fooled Again by The Who. He wasn’t able to obtain the rights to it, and made do with The Animals’ We Gotta Get out of This place.

The track harks back to the Vietnam era. But it’ll do as the song for today.

 

Mahir Ali is a Sydney-based journalist