We’ve been hearing a lot of speculation that the Afghan debacle is more than it seems – that rather than being a typical outcome of activity by some of the dumbest, most ill-informed, and most blinkered individuals ever to occupy places in the U.S government, it is instead a dark, convoluted conspiracy aimed at some goal sinister beyond words.

Some of this is from the usual suspects who see conspiracies every time a cat falls out of a tree, and some by more reputable people. The core concept here can be expressed simply: “There has to be something else going on. Nobody could be that stupid.”

Ah, my dear naïve children of the Springtime… I’m afraid that your first encounter with the real world remains before you.

It’s easy to see where such a conclusion comes from. The mindboggling nature of the decisions made and actions taken by Biden, Milley, and Austin et al speak for themselves: closing down your major base because the enemy asked you to… depriving your ally of technical and maintenance support, rendering all your high-tech weapons useless… leaving billions of dollars worth of military hardware to be scooped up by the enemy… attempting to send them billions more in cash… handing the enemy a list of the names (and presumably addresses) of the exact people he most wants to kill… leaving security in the hands of an enemy that more than anything in the world wants to embarrass, humiliate, and kill you…

At this point, we only need to turn to the words of French avant-gardist Jean Cocteau, which I translate as, “No matter how many times you deal with it, stupidity is always astonishing.”

Because not only can people be that stupid, they are, and have been, and will be, world without end.

A few examples will suffice:

• On December 10, 1941, Adolf Hitler, in an outburst of flippancy rare in international affairs, declared war on the one nation capable of defeating him, a nation that at the moment was not in a political position to declare war on him first.
• In January 1962, Decca Records rejected the Beatles: “Guitar music is on the way out.”
• In 1958, Mao Tse-tung declared that planting four or five seeds in the same hole could double, triple, even quadruple grain yields. The result was a nationwide famine with up to 65 million starved to death.
• In 2016, the most obnoxious and hated woman in recent American history was so convinced that her election would be “a coronation” that she neglected to campaign, even after several scandals broke out.
• Across the world, girls’ sports teams are overwhelmed by fully equipped males claiming, in, like, their opinion, man (as the Dude would put it), to be females. Feminists, dedicated to fairness and equal treatment for women, are okay with this.
• In 2020, a massive electoral fraud effort was put into play involving several state governors, hundreds of public and electoral officials, and thousands of election workers, all to ensure the victory of… Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
• Or, more to the point, the 1842 retreat from Kabul. A British force commanded by Maj. Gen. William George Keith Elphinstone was surrounded by Afghan forces at Kabul. Elphinstone negotiated an “agreement” with the Afghans in which the British handed over most of their weapons and gunpowder to the Afghans, who would then “guarantee” their safety as they marched to Jalalabad, ninety miles away. Elphinstone eagerly agreed, even though the Afghans murdered his two negotiators. The British left the city and, a short distance away, were attacked by tens of thousands of Afghans. The entire column – 4,500 troops and 12,000 civilians – was massacred. One man – the Army medical officer -- was allowed to escape to inform the British in India what had happened. (This sounds familiar, you say? Hmm… well, I guess you’re right.)

Many of those of normal intelligence have a misconception about stupidity. They believe that somehow the stupid are aware of generally accepted logic and the rational methods of getting things done, and ignore or overlook them for some reason. But that’s not it. The fact is that the stupid have their own personal systems of “logic” and “rationality” that appear perfectly workable and acceptable to them, systems that they follow religiously in the much the same way that you might follow an instruction sheet for putting together, say, a piece of furniture. The stupid have a worldview. The problem is that it’s at right angles (sometimes Riemannian right angles) to the actual universe as it exists.

Here's an example: many years ago, I worked with a man we’ll call Jimmy. Now, Jimmy was in the habit of committing the most insane offenses imaginable, such as setting the office on fire (he actually did this). These occurred not once, or occasionally, but on a nearly weekly basis, as if he had a list that he was diligently attempting to complete. The first few times we concluded that he was effing with us, as we used to put it. But he wasn’t, as was clearly shown by the fact that every time disaster was averted and the blaze put out, Jimmy would walk up with an intense expression on his face and say “But there was a reason why I did it that way…”

And that’s it. He had reasons, and that’s all that counts. He had some bizarre, convoluted, cartoon concept of how things work and he followed that concept to the bitter end. It made no difference if an easily foreseeable disaster ensued, if the building burnt to the ground, if the Taliban took over in less than a week. He had his reasons, and that was what mattered.

It’s the same thing here -- the only difference is scale.  If one subnormal is bad enough, consider what a platoon or a battalion can do. Today, we have an entire government of Jimmies (and Joes, and Lloyds) who have their reasons. (Another Jean – Renoir – once said, “The truly terrible thing is that everyone has their reasons.”)

There’s no point in going over the reasons, the concepts, the worldview, whatever you care to call it. The American leftist system is today so convoluted as to be a pocket universe, so complex that its different sections might well be totally out of contact with each other. One singular group of leftists – say, Marxist feminists -- can take action according to one set of leftist rules without any knowledge that a different – or even opposing – set so much as exists.

A Boomer leftie may hearken back to Vietnam, secure in the knowledge that any American defeat serves the progressive movement.  A 21st-century wokie, on the other hand, may take the antiracist viewpoint, totally ignorant of the fact that Afghans are more Caucasian than most of the population of New York City. A bureaucrat may simply want to assure that things are being done in exact accordance to the most recent memo he got, down to the last misplaced comma. (E.g., the guy who shouted at the Brit special forces that they were embarrassing him in front of the Taliban.)

And atop it all we have an aged, decrepit, senile “liberal” who has no idea what is going on but is simply operating on autopilot, doing what he’s “instructed” to do while beneath him “his” administration hits every sandbar, reef, shoal, and lifeboat in its path on its voyage to dissolution.

Clearly, you don’t need a conspiracy to explain any of this. Throw all these elements together -- the Biden leading the blind -- apply Occam’s Razor, and there you have it: a disaster from which there is no possible hope of a comeback, the destruction of the Asterisk presidency little more than six months in, with three-and-a-half years of agony remaining, a media that, for the first time in sixty years, has turned against a left-wing politician, the guarantee of further conflicts that neither Biden, his administration, nor the U.S. military is in any condition to handle, an upcoming hostage situation featuring torture and beheadings,  inevitable terror attacks and the deaths that will ensue, the disgust and loathing of the European globalists whose cooperation is necessary for the American leftist agenda, and, in little more than a year, a GOP megatsunami that will sweep the Dems into oblivion.

Nobody plans for results like this. It takes something bigger than conspiracies. It takes stupidity.

As to how we got into this... Well, Cocteau has an answer there too (he must have been really bugged by this topic): “The problem with the modern age,” he said. “Is that stupidity has begun to think.”

All we can say to that is, “Oui, mon ami.”

Image: Library of Congress

To comment, you can find the MeWe post for this article here.