BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Three little words so hard to say - 5 views
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"We had become a little too confident that we thought we could see the big picture, and now the big picture has come back and hit us rather hard where it hurts."
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anonymous on 24 Aug 10This reminds me of the Boorstin quote, "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge."
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We know in our heart that it's not black and white, it's not 100% one policy and no percent another policy
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"That's where politicians make a huge error," she says. "Because life's not like that and people know that. We know in our heart that it's not black and white, that it's not 100% one policy and no percent another policy.
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It's a strange world where even the complexity of words is frowned on, to the extent that a politician would rather use another even if it meant something quite different.
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Is it the public that demands certainty, craving bedtime stories to help us sleep soundly rather than face up to the rather obvious fact that the future - and to some extent the present - is unknown?
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There are three words you will hardly ever hear a person in power use - "I don't know." Why is doubt, which most of us experience every day, virtually unheard of in politics
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"The answer is it depends." "No, no, no, no, no, does it or doesn't it?" "Well it really does depend because I mean..."
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Doubt seems a dangerous thing in politics. If possible, you don't admit it. Not about your values, nor your analysis, nor the policies that will magically bring about the change that you are certain is needed.
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Paul Seabright, an economist at Toulouse University, says it's a feature of all modern societies that we know little about what's going on.
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"If you read Tolstoy's War and Peace, he has some wonderful descriptions about how battles which look very clear to military historians never seem that way to the people involved in them, that when you're actually in the smoke and the roar of the cannons, you have no idea what's happening. Even the generals have no idea what's happening." Tolstoy intended these passages as a parable of society as a whole, to show there's no vantage point from which to get the big picture.