Mirrors and Opposites

In the 1960’s, after JFK was assassinated, I’ve heard that the belief among the Soviet public was that it was the work of VP Lyndon Johnson. He, after all, benefited from the death and became President of the US, while his belonging to the same party and country wouldn’t have deterred him. I’ve heard this, although admittedly I couldn’t corroborate it when I went to write this post.

In the 1980’s, the Soviet Union’s president Mikhail Gorbachev “is said to have asked British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher: ‘How do you see to it that people get food?’ The answer was that she didn’t. Prices did that.” (Thomas Sowell, Basic Economics Fifth Edition, p. 11.) (Similar wonder happened when Boris Yeltsin visited a supermarket in Texas in 1989.)

Shortly after George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, he met with Vladimir Putin and, as he narrates in his autobiography Decision Points,

I raised my concerns about Russia’s lack of progress on democracy. I was especially worried about his arrests of Russian businessmen and his crackdown on the free press. “Don’t lecture me about the free press,” he said, “not after you fired that reporter.”

It dawned on me what he was referring to. “Vladimir, are you talking about Dan Rather?”

(For my readers under a certain age: in September of 2004, right before W’s reelection, Dan Rather of CBS presented to his audience documents purporting to be from the 1970’s and reflecting incredible poorly on Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard. They were forgeries, insufficiently vetted—one might use the term “disinformation” or “conspiracy theory” to characterize the blatant and opportunely timed lie—and Rather was fired, though only after several doublings-down on CBS’ part. How Rather has reemerged as a journalistic authority—one who just won a Peabody Career Achievement Award—is beyond me.)

Shortly thereafter, in a moment of irony you couldn’t make up, Vladimir Putin fielded a question from a Russian journalist asking “President Bush recently stated that the press in Russia is not free . . . What is this lack of freedom all about? . . . Why don’t you talk a lot about violations of the rights of journalists in the United States, about the fact that some journalists have been fired?”

What these three examples (one true, one alleged, one maybe having happened or not) reflect is the trend that people assume others operate the way they do—that we do this without meaning to or realizing it—and that this applies even to people we consider our archenemies, opposed to everything we stand for and everything we believe.

This also shows up in a famous scene from 1987’s Spaceballs. The villain, Dark Helmet, swipes Lone Star’s powerful ring by offering him a handshake: “The ring! I can’t believe you fell for the oldest trick in the book! What a goof. What’s with you, man? Come on. You know what, here, let me give it back to you. Oh! Oh look at that you fell for that too! I can’t believe it, man. So Lone Star, you see that Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.”

But Good isn’t dumb: Good just implicitly assumes that all others operate the same way they do. Their go-to assumption isn’t to expect people to lie. The flip side of this is also true: habitual liars can be the most distrusting of people (something Dennis Prager highlights in his The Rational Bible commentary). Other times, though, habitual liars can take it for granted that other people operate like “simpletons” and wind up underestimating everyone else out of habit . . . so this isn’t the case as an absolute rule. But there is, certainly, a broad tendency for people to assume that other people operate the same way they do without even realizing it.

I also think this was behind a recent back-and-forth between President Joe Biden and the oil industry.

On Friday, June 10, Biden took a break from blaming Putin for high gas prices and turned his fire on the gas industry. As summarized by NBC,

President Joe Biden slammed Exxon Mobil on Friday for what he described as the oil giant’s greedy reluctance to produce more petroleum.

“Why don’t you tell them what Exxon’s profits were this quarter?” Biden advised a reporter. “Exxon made more money than God this year.”

On Tuesday, June 14, the trade association American Petroleum Institute sent an email including a 10-point plan to “help address our current energy challenges by increasing supply and underscoring the connection between energy security and national security,” recommending that DC policymakers limit the length of the permitting process, rescind lingering steel tariffs, reinstate canceled sales and leases on federal property, among other things.

On June 15, Biden responded with a letter that I…somehow…can’t find the text of anywhere, just news outlets quoting it and linking elsewhere. Regardless, Biden apparently said a bunch of sternly worded things like “At a time of war — historically high refinery profit margins being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable.”

This prompted another response from Oil the same day, where they pointed out things like “Globally, we’ve invested double what we’ve earned over the past five years -- $118 billion on new oil and gas supplies compared to net income of $55 billion. This is a reflection of the company’s long-term growth strategy, and our commitment to continuously invest to meet society’s demand for our products.” I’m not an expert on oil (as I’ve had to admit before), but I find this a pretty convincing collection of facts.

Finally, when asked about this reply on June 21, President Biden responded, “He’s mildly sensitive. [“He” being the CEO of Chevron.] I didn’t know they’d get their feelings hurt that quickly.”

Maybe that’s just an evasion, but it looks like the same sort of assumption that other people operate the way he does—after all, this is the same man whose primary season campaigning was beleaguered by his habit of insulting voters who asked him challenging questions. I think his feelings have a tendency to get hurt more quickly than those of a CEO in the habit of releasing fact sheets.

But Biden might be oblivious to exactly that kind of deep-seated behavior in himself. And that would lead him to assume that other people, even if they’re opposed to him, must be playing the same game. But maybe they’re not. Maybe the US government isn’t planning economies and firing journalists, and maybe Biden’s opposition aren’t seething over wounded feelings and injured egos. It would broaden his perspective to realize that, just as it probably broadens ours to recognize the very pervasive human mistake he’s making by not realizing that.