Hat tip: Joel Fishman

Thought set free from experience is unlimited by the constraints of experience or of probability. If history is not relevant, then the future is free from the past. Therefore, theories cut loose from experience are usually blindly optimistic. They begin not from how things are but how they ought to be, and regularly underestimate the complexities and difficulties concerning how you get there from here. They tend to be abstract and unembarrassed by the need for empirical indicators of their major assumptions.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards; Rationalism & Reason in Politics (New York: AEI/Simon and Schuster, 1982), 10

Notes Fishman: “When I read this quotation, I think about Oslo and a situation where people begin acting with full confidence and conceding real things on the basis of unfounded assumptions. (The main unfounded assumption was that the other side really wanted to make peace.) The optimism described is one step away from secular messianism. For example, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, according to Arafat’s biographer, Barry Rubin, believed that ‘putting up with attacks and casualties would eventually be rewarded when Arafat offered a reasonable deal, conciliation, and full peace.’ The heady optimism which Jeane Kirkpatrick described is but one step away from secular messianism. The antidote for this dangerous state of mind is to base one’s conclusions on a much broader base of knowledge, particularly of past experience. That is the reason that Peres repeatedly insisted that history is irrelevant.

My comment: Kenneth Levin has described this phenomenon in great detail in The Oslo Syndrome. More broadly this quote applies in a disturbing way to current Liberal Cognitive Egocentrism with its inveterate tendency to imagine that everyone would be nice if only we were nice to them. Here we end up not with ruthless fantasy (on the contrary, the fantasy is pleasantly “nice”, a kind of moral narcissism in which we feel very good about our generous souls), but acts as an enabler to ruthless demopaths and their even more violent allies in revolutionary and jihadi circles. In the end, it illustrates the Rabbinic saying, “He who is merciful to the cruel, will be cruel to the merciful” (Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:16). They already are.