Thank You Mr Chertoff: Gut Feelings, Intuition, and the Bush Administration

[Loisenman]

Thank you Michael Chertoff. I’ve been waiting for the chance to write about this administration and intuition. So you had a gut feeling that the Islamic terrorists are going to attack us soon. Don’t we all!

Yes you have access to more information than the rest of us and could be integrating this below awareness and comimg up with something significant---even though you say there was nothing specific besides increased activity in Al Qaeda training camps. But balancing this is the proclivity of this administration to play the fear card when they want to change the subject. More and more Republicans are falling off the Iraq war bandwagon. Seems to me if this gut feeling were anything other than a political ploy you would have raised the terror level to the next color---silly as that might be. Instead you just tried to raise the fear level.

Whether or not you actually had a gut feeling about this---you are only a lackey. But your boss Bush is known for going with his gut and he has consequently helped give intuition a bad rap. I feel a need to defend my topic of study against his now infamous incompetence and the incompetence of most everyone on whom he depends.

Intuition has a very complex relationship to gut feelings. (For another take on this relationship from a different perspective---see http://intuition-indepth.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html">Reason vs. Intuition.) As far as I can see the intuition of Bush and his administration is effective only when geared to winning power. I would even say it is magnificent on that score. They are incredibly inventive, even uncanny in their judgment here. Also they appear to leave no stone unturned in their desire to seek their own political advantage. But their intuition doesn’t seem to work very well for them when the task is instead to look after the best interests of the country. Their gut feelings and whatever else they integrate into their decisions have been for the most part wrong and very often spectacularly so. I suspect part of the problem is lack of motivation at the deepest level. They just don’t care about the well-being of the country--- and certainly not about governing as an art. Instead it is all about them and their raw power. How could their gut feelings work so well for them some of the time and not at all at other times? Read more...


By Lois Isenman

[Loisenman]

1. oopps--correct urls

correct url for rest of article: Intuition In-Depth

correct url for http://intuition-indepth.blogspot.com/2006/11/reason-vs-intuition_12.html">Reason vs. Intuition