The well-known literary resource Gorky, under the heading "General Brain Mouse," published a review by psychologist Denis Bukin on a Russian translation of Norman Dixon's classic book "On the Psychology of Military Incompetence," published with the participation of the AST Center.
In 1976, Norman Dixon published a 600-page work On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, in which he tried to answer the age-old question: why do most army personnel not resist orders from their superiors, even when they are obviously absurd? Psychologist Denis Bukin explains why the work of an English scientist is still relevant in many ways.
One of my teachers defined organizational psychology as a branch of zoopsychology. Why zoopsychology? Because this is the science of the mice in the boss's head. This concerns warfare much more than politics and business. When it comes to combat operations, there is no such thing as an "army", "regiment" or "company", and even more so generalizations like "Americans" or "Houthis" do not make sense. People do things and they are also commanded by people with their own mice in their heads. Are these people making decisions... or are they mice? Now, by introducing a shortened terminology unusual for a review, we can say what Norman Dixon's book "On the Psychology of Military Incompetence" is about. It's about the mice in generals' heads: how these mice wind up under high-crowned caps; how generals' careers are made by those who belong in mouse zoos; how internal mice influence decisions; how people, military and civilian, die senselessly from these decisions, and how generals then avoid responsibility for the game they kill. they create. It's not such a strange scenario, because incompetent commanders don't look like maniacs who escaped a straitjacket only by misunderstanding. The authors of grandiose military failures are often nice guys: friendly, accommodating, funny, and even kind - in a word, real gentlemen.
The book is based on the history of the British Army, whose atmosphere is well known to Norman Dixon. He served in the Corps of Royal Engineers for ten years, was wounded and received the Order of the British Empire, then retired. After his military service, Dixon went to university and earned a degree in psychology. He was engaged in research on subthreshold perception and preconsciousness, topics that are not fashionable in modern psychology, but have not lost their relevance. Subthreshold perception refers to stimuli that do not reach the threshold of conscious perception and therefore are not recognized, are not considered, but are noticed on the unconscious and preconscious levels. They pass by consciousness, imperceptibly slip through the filter of criticism. Therefore, they often influence minds and deeds more strongly than stimuli that come into the focus of close attention and are consciously criticized. Then it concerned advertising, including the notorious 25th frame, but not only. For example, in propaganda, an opinion that is directly imposed on the viewer of a video risks being rejected. If it is not introduced directly, while the viewer's focus is on something else, it passes by critical thinking. And if it repeats itself many times… Norman Dixon's work is well-known in the specialist literature, has been frequently cited, and has had a major impact.
Roughly speaking, Norman Dixon was a psychoanalytic scientist, which undoubtedly leaves its mark on his books. I don't know if he smoked cigars, but he goes into the childhood story of his characters in detail. And what he got from the old school of psychoanalysts was his amazing powers of observation and vivid descriptive language. Using Dixon's method against himself, I would assume that he had seen enough of his superiors and had wanted to understand the origins of their strange decisions all his army life. Anyone who has lived for a dozen or two years in the army, in public service, or at least in an office, will understand him perfectly.
The idea of high-ranking military incompetence has been and continues to be in the air, although it is not customary to speak loudly on this topic. "Those who served in the army don't laugh in the circus," says a cynical proverb. And this is not only our national problem. The popularity of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Anglo-American film Doctor Strangelove, or How I Stopped Being Afraid and Fell in Love with the Bomb, indirectly speaks to the assessment of the military by civilians. General Jack Ripper, the commander of the American air force base, goes crazy and sends strategic bombers carrying nuclear weapons to the USSR. Everyone mindlessly follows the orders of an obviously crazy general. The exception is British Air Force Colonel Lionel Mandrake, who is cautious and seemingly an outsider in the army: he keeps a reasonable start and tries to prevent World War III. The film was and remains in demand by the public. In 2000, readers of the British magazine Total Film ranked it 24th in the list of the best films of all time. Today, after a quarter of a century, the film retains high ratings. From this, it can be concluded that for society, the incompetence of senior military officials is a secret of Polichinelle. Everyone whispers about it, but few have tried to scientifically describe its origins and causes.
So, what is military incompetence? Norman Dixon puts forward 14 of its manifestations, and the key ones come first: unjustified waste of forces and resources, primarily people; stubborn conservatism; a tendency to reject inconvenient information; underestimating the enemy and overestimating one's own capabilities; avoiding responsibility and talent in finding scapegoats for one's own failures. A well-defined set of symptoms and syndromes. But what is the nosology? What is the origin of the disease?
The first part of the book contains a dozen examples of the great failures of the British army: from the Crimean and Anglo-Boer wars to the battles of both World Wars. Dixon does not write a new military history, but highlights the personal role of the commanders in the events, drawing a line to their character and personality traits. Let the Russian reader not be confused by the national specificity of the material. First of all, even a person who is far from the army, but is quite erudite, is at least firsthand familiar with the events described. Secondly, the personalities of the British military leaders are typical enough to find a couple of analogies from Russian history and modern times for each. Indeed, many had leaders with the same traits, so the mechanisms of managerial incompetence can well be considered international and timeless.
In the second half of the book, Professor Dixon looks for commonalities in the judgments and behavior of generals who led their armies to failure. He summarizes character traits and inclinations in two directions: the norms and rules adopted in the military community (the second part of the book) and the features of personal psychopathology that make people unable to make good decisions and take responsibility (the third part).
"Why is it so difficult?" - another reader will object, having reached the second half of the book. And he will remember "Hanlon's razor" from Murphy's laws - half-joking, but often fair aphorisms. The maxim of Hanlon's razor goes like this: "Never attribute to malicious intent something that can easily be explained by stupidity."
Questions about the education of British officers have arisen before, and there was a reason. In 1933, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence (the famous Lawrence of Arabia) lamented in a letter to military theorist and historian Basil Little Gard: "If your book could convince some of our new military to read, mark, and study things beyond manuals and tactical diagrams, it would do a lot. I feel a fundamental, paralyzing lack of curiosity about our officers. Too much body and too little head. An ideal general would know everything in heaven and on earth." And army anti-intellectualism is truly international. In 1914, American General Leonard Wood issued an order: "... all military education should be strictly practical; exclude books, as far as possible, except for reference purposes." The cult of physical development reigned and still reigns in English universities. Sport is the prerogative of gentlemen, a matter of status and prestige. The worst thing that can befall a student is the fame of a bookish man, a "nerd." In the army, whose officers have been formed over the centuries from people of high birth, athletic achievements have become the main criterion for career selection. This does not mean that deliberately stupid people without abilities are selected for the army; in fact, intellectual activity and education are suppressed by the internal army culture. Of course, as war becomes more volatile and technically complex, ignorance and mental inertia lead to failures.
However, to blame everything solely on the military's lack of education is to err against the truth. Dixon does not deny the generals' stupidity, but points out important details. The first is that stupidity is not so common, and it's not always about it or not only about it. The second is how do uneducated people with poor intellectual abilities rise so high on the career ladder? If this happens, it means that it is a matter of the norms and rules of the army environment and the personal psychological characteristics of individuals, as a result of which they are unable to effectively command troops. The entire second half of the book is devoted to the study of these issues.
Professor Dixon does not complain about life, but builds logic on scientific psychology. As for the theories he uses, the reader will not find fashionable neurobiological references and color maps of brain activity in a CT scanner here. The book was published in 1976 and is based on psychoanalysis, Festinger's cognitive dissonance, Hans Selye's stress model, and the experimental psychology of the time. "The explanatory part of Dixon's book is based on several outdated theories," modern reviewers repeat the refrain. I would argue with this statement. Indeed, the alchemical experiments of recent decades with the transformation of psychology into physiology in a cramped tomograph chamber have brought little closer to understanding the mechanisms of the psyche. Firstly, the brain is too complex, and the CT scan is too crude for such studies. Secondly, if you'll excuse the computer analogy, "programs" as opposed to "hardware" are too important in the human psyche, while modern tools of neurobiological research see just the functioning of "hardware". In the future, when research methods become more advanced, great discoveries await us. But while 21st-century neuroscience either agrees or sluggishly argues with 20th-century psychology and offers few hypotheses of its own, psychoanalysis remains the best science of mental "programs," which means that the theories Norman Dixon uses are quite good for their purposes.
For example, the author makes extensive use of Freud's concept of the struggle between moral prohibitions learned in the family and forbidden natural impulses. A person who is prone to violence and aggression is looking for a community of the same people, and most importantly, an organization in which he can either legally manifest this aggression, or have at hand ways to protect himself from the internal conflict of his own inclinations with his conscience. Similarly, an alcoholic tends either to the company of fellow drinkers if he wants to continue drinking, or to the group of Alcoholics Anonymous if he can no longer drink. Thus, a peculiar psychological environment is being formed in the army with similar needs and similar complexes.
Now let's take the example of a boy from a family where aggression against his parents is prohibited, but is encouraged against peers: sports, academic rivalry, or sanctioned social harassment. Growing up, such a boy will find a suitable atmosphere in the army, where insubordination and criticism of superiors are severely punished, limited aggression towards inferiors is allowed, and the enemy is rewarded. Especially if he sees the example of his father before his eyes and copes with anxiety for the future with clarity of goals and principles that fathers / commanders confidently offer. This creates a lack of mental flexibility and paralysis of any attempts to discuss plans with superiors. This is how commanders carry out deliberately failed plans, without even trying to bring up counterarguments and proposals. Who's to say that such calculations are not relevant these days?
Dixon examines many important social norms of the British (and not only) army, which are either hopelessly outdated or applied more widely than they should be. Anti-intellectualism and the cult of physical development at the expense of education and mental flexibility are not the only ones. The psychology professor dissects army institutes with the coldness of a scientist, considering both their benefits and harmful side effects from thoughtless use. And by the way, it would be unfair to accuse him of negativism: coldness does not mean cynicism. The author does not deconstruct honor, courage and integrity at all, but only shows the places where they turn into snobbery and disregard for those below, overestimation of one's own capabilities and underestimation of the enemy and donkey stubbornness.
In order not to turn the review into a retelling, let's choose from the list of reasons for incompetence, according to Dixon, another one - the struggle with effeminacy. The desire of commanders to look masculine in front of their colleagues (but in fact the fear of looking feminine) dictates certain behavior imposed by the standards of masculinity. It would be nothing if it weren't for the word "dictates". The decisions of people guided by fear are imposed by this very fear, which means they are stereotypical, predictable, and ultimately inflexible and unfree. Generals who are afraid of losing their image of masculinity are prone to excessive risk, neglect protection, and condone senseless losses. Their behavior becomes ostentatious bravado. The paradox, known to any psychotherapist, is that men who doubt their sexuality behave in an emphatically masculine manner. This is what is called compensatory behavior. Dixon considers many factors that eventually lead to military incompetence, both institutional for the military community and personal and individual.
It is worth mentioning about the language in which the book is written - this is important. The 600-page text is no joke, but Norman Dixon's writing is funny and in many ways caustic. In literary terms, he follows a long tradition of English humor-albeit a dark one, given the subject. The translator has quite managed to preserve this undoubted dignity.
The trouble with psychological literature is that, with a few exceptions, it is devoted to violations and deviations. In many ways, this is justified.: Just as a doctor begins with a course of pathology, a psychologist begins with disorders and psychoses. But with this tendency, any psychologist's story takes on a specific connotation that spoils the mood of a layman. The book "On the Psychology of Military Incompetence" has such a connotation. Perhaps realizing this, towards the end of the book, Dixon placed a chapter describing the best military commanders. Among them, by the way, is our compatriot, Marshal Zhukov, whom the author seemed to admire. Firstly, Zhukov was not afraid to argue with Stalin, defending rational arguments. He was strong enough psychologically that he was not hindered by either career considerations or the fear of appearing uncomfortable. From the point of view of most of the failed characters who fell under Dixon's magnifying glass, contradicting the "father figure" is an unthinkable violation of all the rules. Secondly, an autocrat and a disciplinarian, Zhukov was at the same time popular among the troops. This means that his authority was dictated not by pathological self-love, but by sincere consistency and rationality.
"His character was the exact opposite of an authoritarian personality. He was unconventional, unorthodox, flexible rather than rigid, warm-hearted, impetuous and non-reactive (for example, an ardent supporter of tanks), cared about the welfare of his troops and did not take unnecessary risks of heavy losses. He was... non-Puritanical, creative, and intellectual. Perhaps most importantly, he... radiated self-confidence and... was ready to break through the sacred networks of protocol and hierarchical administration," concludes Dixon's ode to the Soviet marshal. It is clear that one can argue with this opinion, and this is great, because any discussion, including the reader with the author, makes you think, look for parallels, ask questions and look for answers. Not as applied to history, but to the current state of affairs.
