1. The Black Box Principle
or, Asking the Unanswered Question
“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”
– Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim”
In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, a team of military officers was put together in the Pentagon to produce an analysis of what had taken place. The universally accepted public version of the affair was that the Kennedy administration had, with firm resolution, forced the Soviets to unilaterally back down, and remove their missiles from Cuba. However, it soon became apparent to members of the Pentagon team that a secret agreement must have actually been negotiated to end the crisis, after nuclear armed Jupiter missiles belonging the U.S. were quietly removed from Turkey and Italy in April 1963. Explicit evidence confirming the existence of the secret agreement only came to light years later, beginning in the late 1980s.
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Why are things the way they are? A question simple to state; yet like many simple questions, not at all simple to answer.
As to why human society “is the way it is”, the difficulty of discovering an answer lies in the fact that we have been formed to exist in that society, and so are governed by innate mental processes – instincts and learned behaviors – for this purpose, which seem to us so natural, fundamental, and immanent that they generally escape awareness, and in fact are often entirely opaque beneath the level of consciousness. Therefore, for purposes of its investigation, human society, with all its “crooked timber”, might best be treated as a black box: an entity whose inner workings are not amenable to direct examination, but perhaps can be deduced from observation of what goes into it, and what comes out, as gained from experiment and the record of history. As described above, this type of “black box” methodology revealed the likelihood of a secret agreement to end the Cuban Missile Crisis – a situation otherwise obscured by the realities of politics. The seemingly inexplicable, in the form of a highly one-sided diplomatic triumph, was thereby explained.
So it is that the essays that follow will also take a black box approach in an attempt to shed light on the obscurities of human experience. They will begin with an examination of the fundamental property of consciousness, proceed with a consideration of belief and knowledge in the worldviews of individuals and societies, and finally go on to treatments of social groups, power, and ideology.
Of course, a meaningful result is only likely to be gained from a meaningful effort – that is, one based such relevant evidence as might be available, rather than preconceptions. This is by no means an easy task, however, given the influence of unconscious prejudice, the possibility of fallible interpretation, and the vast range of evidence available, which, nevertheless, can in no case be complete. Thus it is certain that there are errors in what has been presented here; it can only be hoped that they might eventually be subject to correction, if worthy of such.
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At the end of each of the following essays there will also appear a brief personal afterword from the author, which is offered on the principle that the nature of the observer must always have a bearing on whatever observations are made, and thus may prove relevant.
As for the qualifications of the author, it must be said that in any formal sense they are meager. No membership in the academic world exists, and while a degree in higher education is possessed, it is not in history, sociology, psychology, or any field directly related to the subjects at hand. Such evidence as has been presented herein is due entirely to the admirable work of others; all that is brought to the present effort is an attempt at a synthesis of this evidence.
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The story of the Pentagon report on the outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis is described in the book Inner Circles, a memoir by Alexander Haig, in the chapter “Missiles and Mythology”.