Michael Murphy
As a boy in Wilhelmine Germany during the First World War, future historian Sebastian Haffner devoured daily army bulletins. At just seven years old, he was already a ‘fanatical jingoist and armchair warrior’, meticulously tallying troop strengths. He was confident that the Kaiser’s army would soon triumph.
The bulletins, however, were rose-tinted, designed to bolster morale rather than inform. As the front deteriorated, they increasingly resembled a fantasy league, with regiments holding favourable positions only on paper. When defeat finally came, it shocked the nation. Haffner likened the feeling to ‘someone who year after year has deposited large sums of money in his bank’ only to discover ‘a gigantic overdraft instead of a fortune’.
Today, this experience is all too familiar. Like Germans deceived by rosy war bulletins, educated people are often blindsided by major events, misled by wishful thinking disguised as analysis. From Brexit to the rise and resurgence of Donald Trump, big events are routinely confounding mainstream predictions. Errors are inevitable when discussing the future, but something is amiss when they consistently tilt in the same direction.
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