Sony Thăng 🙏

Talking about a thought experiment, anthropologists, think-tanks and designed mysteries.

Here’s a thought experiment they don’t teach in American schools.

Imagine a foreign power, significantly stronger than the United States, decided after a disputed intelligence assessment that the American government posed a threat.

It assembled a coalition, invaded, removed the government, disbanded the military, releasing hundreds of thousands of armed men into unemployment, and installed a transitional authority composed largely of exiles who had been living in the foreign power’s country for twenty years.

It then spent the next decade conducting night raids on American homes.

It ran detention facilities where Americans were held without charge and in some cases tortured.

It operated checkpoints in American cities where American citizens were stopped, searched, and sometimes killed by foreign soldiers who did not speak English and could not distinguish a civilian from a combatant and in many cases did not particularly try.

A generation of American children grew up in this environment.

Would you describe those children’s resulting hostility to the foreign power as:

(A) A rational response to their lived experience

or

(B) Evidence of a cultural pathology that requires theological and anthropological analysis?

You already know the answer.

You knew it before I finished the sentence.

The exercise is only necessary because the question is never asked the right way around.

—

They sent anthropologists.

After the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were not going as planned, the U.S. military launched the Human Terrain System, a program that embedded social scientists with combat brigades to help soldiers understand local culture, tribal dynamics, religious practices, and community structures.

The idea was:

If we understand them better, we can manage them better.

Notice what is missing from that sentence.

Not: if we understand them better, we might reconsider what we are doing to them.

Not: if we understand them better, we might recognize that their resistance is a rational response to our presence.

Just:

Understand them better to manage them better.

To make the occupation more efficient.

To reduce friction.

To make the subjugation smoother.

They sent anthropologists to explain why the people they were bombing were upset about being bombed.

And then were puzzled when the bombing continued to produce upset people.

The program was eventually shut down following criticism that it violated research ethics, after several embedded researchers were killed.

The researchers were killed by the people they were sent to understand.

The people were upset because they were being bombed.

The circle is complete.

—

There is an American think tank for every mystery that isn’t a mystery.

Why does Iran have a nuclear program? Twelve scholars, four reports, two conferences, one documentary on PBS.

Answer available without a think tank:

The United States overthrew their government in 1953, backed the Shah’s secret police for more than two decades, supported Saddam Hussein when he used chemical weapons against Iranians in the 1980s, has maintained crushing economic sanctions for nearly half a century.

And two sovereign states that abandoned or dismantled their nuclear programs, Iraq and Libya, were subsequently invaded or bombed into chaos.

That’s not analysis. That’s a sequence of events that any Iranian government, of any ideology, would respond to in roughly the same way.

But the think tank exists because the answer cannot be we gave them every rational reason to want a deterrent.

That answer has consequences.
That answer implies accountability.

That answer walks five feet into common sense and common sense leads somewhere nobody in that building wants to go.

So instead:

Scholars. Reports. Conferences. Documentaries.

The mystery is maintained.
The machinery keeps running.
The budget gets renewed.