Idiotology

On March 18, 1958, the physicist Max Born wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell (then 85) in which he said:

I have read Khrushchev's long declaration in the New Statesman. I find it just as depressing as the letter from Dulles [Eisenhower's Secretary of State] published some weeks ago. The commentary by Kingsley Martin that these fellows are amazingly similar in their mental make-up is quite correct. One could just as well call them Khrushless and Dullchev, and, what they believe in, not an ideology, but an idiotology....

Russell replied on the 22nd:

Thank you very warmly for your letter of March 18 which expressed feelings exactly similar to my own as regards Khrushless and Dullchev and what you so aptly call their idiotology. I am sending my reflections on this matter to the New Statesman where they will be published shortly....[The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Volume III, p. 136]

I hadn't seen the obviously apt word "idiotology" employed relative to the Busheviks of our own era, but when I googled on it, the first hit was an article titled "Idiotology" (posted Sunday, 29 February 2004) in American Pundit. It begins:

There's a military term for President Bush's policy making process: incestuous amplification. It's defined as, "A condition in which one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation."

Bush has again shown his intolerance for dissenting viewpoints by firing the two members of his Council on Bioethics who advocated research on human embryo cells. He replaced them with three new members including, "a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out against the research that the dismissed members supported, and another who has written that abortion is immoral and biotechnology is a threat."

Of course no one but Bush himself really knows what his policy making process is like, but there have been a couple glimpses into it by high-level administration officials. John DiIulio, Bush's former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives said, "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," DiIulio told Esquire. "What you've got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

Mutatis mutandis.