In the case of Vietnam, no amount of information would serve to reform American reformers. The efforts of the American Intelligence community to gather data were generally quite successful. The problem was that policy makers had closed their minds to the evidence and its implications. American stupidity in Vietnam was not founded on agnosticism or ignorance but misinterpretation—a determined refusal by those in power to acknowledge as valid any views conflicting with the prevailing official misperceptions which confused nationalism with communism.

When events fail to confirm beliefs, the mental condition of cognitive dissonance exists until some adjustment of or to the incoming data can be made. Usually in the face of challenge, the schema becomes rigid, and data conflicting with it are sacrificed for the sake of emotional and ideological stability. During the Johnson years, the administration was frozen in a dream world completely at odds with clear evidence that official policies were not just ineffective but counter-productive. As would happen again five years later, it remained for the media and the people to save the country from the government, since those loyal to the President had become incapable of making realistic assessments of the effects of their actions on the real world.

It is noteworthy that the Kennedy team liked to refer to themselves as "Crisis managers". In a similar vein, before becoming President, Richard Nixon wrote a book which covered his six favorite crises up to that time. One must wonder to what extent our leaders may be disposed to create crises to test themselves, to discover how much control they have, what their limits are and who they are. Too often, rulers give themselves the choice of the disastrous or the incorrigible and then choose both.

Since many of the major, specific problems confronting contemporary civilizations are not cultural universals, they should be (theoretically, at least) solvable. Poverty, racism, sexism, family disorganization, political exploitation, ideological oppression and war are not defining characteristics of the human condition. They are all products of certain circumstances which could be altered. Whether they will be altered or not is the solemn matter we address here. The great human tragedy is that we know which conditions to alter and how to alter them in order to eliminate most of the problems mentioned above. Nevertheless, we usually fail to do so because our leaders keep us from adapting to new conditions while our schemas keep us from compensating for our cultural limitations.

Indeed, it is the mark of a truly wise person to be able to put himself in his own place—to view the world accurately from his own perspective. Making due allowances for one's own values permits accuracy in perception

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