I recently returned from a trip to LA where I visited a number of my friends who work in the film industry. One friend of mine, who works on a popular and acclaimed TV series, was talking about a young actress she used to work with who’s fallen out of favor. This actress has gained weight, had highly publicized battles with both drugs and alcohol and doesn’t seem to be working much these days.
Our discussion involving the actress turned into a discussion of the rise-and-fall of actors and actresses and why that phenomenon occurs repeatedly. The main question was: why do actors think because they’re on top one day that means they’re going to be on top a year from now, or five years from now? Her view was that it’s inevitable that actors are going to rise quickly and then fall quickly. She said “Why don’t they look back at Molly Ringwald and understand the same thing is going to happen to them?” I thought about this for a minute and answered “No one thinks they’re not going to be number one when they’re on top, and people and institutions always repeat the same cycles of boom and bust no matter what the subject is – look at the mistakes the US State Department and CIA have made, repeatedly, yet they keep employing the same policies again and again and again!”
This conversation got me thinking about cycles, hubris and how difficult it is to break them – no matter what subject you’re discussing. Whether it’s the rise and fall of a popular actor or actress, the rise and fall of empires and corporations or the US foreign policy establishment making the same mistakes again and again and again – cycles define our existence for better or for worse. There’s a popular saying that “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result” – which is untrue, that’s actually not the definition of insanity. But it is, to use a very California word – extremely lame to expect that employing that same negotiating tactic or intelligence collection maneuver is going to result in a different outcome than it did the last time it was employed. A lot of the blame for this can be placed on the institutions in which we’re educated. We’re all taught the same theories and instructed on the policies which flow from those theories – and in the interests of “balance” we’re not really encouraged to make “value judgments” on the success or failure of those policies (or theories) in many cases, lest our judgment be clouded.
Institutions are institutions – no matter whether you’re talking about Hollywood and its star-making machinery or the US State Department and its repeated failures in foreign policy. Our job, as students and eventual players in the field of statecraft, is to figure our how we can develop and make effective new strategies which break the various cycles of failure that sadly, seem to have come to define much of our foreign policy over the past 60 years.
