Why does Andrew Wiles, the mathematician, cry?

This post is different from the ones I typically write, focused as they are on current events in business and society. Instead, I wrote this post in response to a BBC video documentary posted on Youtube, which I found moving and perplexing. I am interested in readers' responses to these videos. 

In 1995 Andrew Wiles, a British mathematician, proved a theorem, known as Fermat’s last theorem, which had stumped mathematicians for three and a half centuries. In proving it, he opened up a new vista in the abstruse world of topology, highlighting unexpected links between different domains of mathematical inquiry. At the end of this blog post I describe the theorem, and what it posits, for those who are interested. In the body of this post,  I include two video segments that I extracted from a BBC documentary on Youtube, describing his discovery. (Also, here is the link to the full BBC video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkz45Ivr12k)

If you click on this first video below, you will note immediately that Wiles begins to cry as he describes his moment of discovery, likening it to the sudden illumination of a dark room,  Feeling somewhat embarrassed he then turns away from the camera.

                                                                First video

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To recapitulate he says,  “At the beginning of September I was sitting at this desk, when suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation.. It was the most important moment in my working life…(he is tearing)..  nothing I ever do again.. (he is overcome by feeling)..  I’m sorry.. (he turns away from the camera). 

My question is, why does he cry? 

I have asked many of my colleagues this question. Here are four possibilities.

Explanation 1: Wiles is paradoxically moved by his sense of loss just as he recounts his glorious achievement.  As he begins to say, “nothing I ever do again..,’’ the listener can fill in the missing words, “will ever match my experience of that moment.” It is as if as all of his subsequent work will pale in comparison to his moment of illumination. How will he be able to take this prospective work seriously?

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Explanation 2: It is a common experience that people cry at the happy ending of an otherwise sad movie. Why should this be? One conception is that while watching the movie, people steel themselves against feeling overwhelmed by the movie’s sadness.  But upon experiencing the happy ending, they can now acknowledge their sadness. In effect they now feel that it is safe to cry.

A great undertaking, shot through with frustration, creates this same dynamic. One has to bear up under the tension and frustration, lest these feelings overwhelm one’s ability to do good work. Only upon reaching the goal, is it safe to acknowledge the overwhelming impact the frustration has had on one’s emotional life.  Indeed, Wiles had circulated an earlier version of the proof a year earlier, which proved faulty. After another year of encountering dead ends, he was prepared to relinquish his entire effort. This suggests that his illumination came at a moment of despair.

Now in the video, Wiles notes that the BBC reporter is interviewing him as he is sitting at the same desk where he made his discovery and experienced his revelation. Perhaps the stimulus of the desk, as a cue, triggers his reliving the tension and release associated with seven years of strenuous effort and frustration that led up to his moment of illumination.

Explanation 3: Wiles had a kind of religious experience through which he came into touch with the profound and unexpected unity of mathematics. He was both the agent of, and witness to, this profound unity.  Indeed, in the documentary Wiles describes the experience of a paradox. At the moment he was ready to finally give up, he realized that the reason his effort, based on work by the mathematician Flach, had failed, provided just the explanation for why an even an earlier attempt based on a theory by Iwasawa was at first unsuccessful. But paradoxically this revelation showed him how Iwasawa’s theory could now provide a way forward! I think that paradoxes intensify the experience of having uncovered hidden connections. When a contradiction leads to a truth, two distinct arguments, are now seen as two sides of the same coin. 

But why should someone cry at such a revelation? Drawing on the second explanation, perhaps we cry at the revelation of an unexpected unity, because the discovery makes it safe for us to acknowledge the day-to-day alienation we all feel as finite beings in a completely mysterious universe. After all, few of us know why the universe exists and why any one of us was born. Normally, we keep this feeling under wraps because it is too difficult to bear. But when we experience unexpectedly our link to this universe by witnessing its coherence, when in effect it reveals its secrets to us, it is safe for us to acknowledge the repressed pain of our existential separation. Hence we cry.

This explanation has the merit of connecting us to one of the greatest puzzles of our culture. How is that mathematics, a human invention, should give us a language for describing the universe, an object that stands outside of culture and is of course indifferent to human striving. How strange that a product of our mind is connected in this way to the most basic elements of matter! It is no accident in this sense that Pythagoras, the founder of a school of mathematics in ancient Greece ,was also a mystic.

Explanation 4: Recall that Freud, argued that religious experiences, stimulated by what a colleague of his called the “oceanic feeling,” move us emotionally because they help us relive the infant’s sense of unity when at the mother’s breast. Freud’s explanation has that distinctive character that makes many of his ideas appear ironic. In other words, he is saying that profound religious experiences, which at first glance appear to express a great cultural achievement, are “nothing but” the feelings of an infant whose psychological life is after all primitive.

Perhaps Wiles too experienced this oceanic feeling, but because his was not directly a religious experience, based for example on a belief in a God or a spirit to whom he could then be permanently connected, he recognized that his experience was as temporary and fleeting as it was profound. This sense of both having and then losing moved him to tears. He did not simply lose the prospect of doing work in the future that could engage him, as our first explanation suggests, Instead he lost his connection to the universe. This experience may be similar to losing a great love, though in Wiles case, the loss was inevitable and meaningful, while in the case of a lost loved one, the loss may seem arbitrary and cruel. 

Freud’s conception drew me to another segment of the BBC documentary (click on the video segment below)
                                                                   Video two

As Wiles notes, as a ten-year-old boy he was fascinated by Fermat’s last theorem. He says in the video,  “there is no other problem that will mean the same to me. I had this very rare privilege of being able to pursue.. in my adult life what had been my childhood dream. I.. know that it’s a rare privilege, but if one can do this, it is more rewarding than anything I can imagine.”

In a way, consistent with Freud’s conception, Wiles, invokes an early experience, though in this case, of childhood, not infancy. But why does Wiles insist that it is such a rare privilege to solve a problem first encountered when one was a child?  One hypothesis is that Wiles is describing the experience of a certain kind of childhood innocence. What does that innocence consist of? A ten-year-old boy experiences human culture, as itself all encompassing and self justifying. Not yet touched by fears of death, the despair that accompanies the belief that the universe is indifferent to our happiness, or that human striving ends in tragedy, the child anticipates gaining freedom and power by joining in the work of creating culture. In this sense his innocence protects him from feelings of alienation. Indeed, this is the source of his innocence.

In this sense, Wiles is expressing the positive side of what Freud called the Oedipus complex. This is the moment when the child identifies with his elders who promise to turn over to him their work of creating culture, if he is willing to bear the discipline of educating and preparing himself.  The child relinquishes the infant’s bliss at the mother’s breast for the prospect of gaining freedom and power by joining father’s world. This prospect for a ten year may very well be enthralling. After all, children express this when they excitedly talk about what they will be “when they grow up.” Wiles is saying that in solving Fermat’s last theorem he recaptured the innocence of the oedipal child, the belief that father’s world is its own justification and offers unlimited opportunities. 

This suggests in addition, that one reason a person like Wiles is able to soldier on for seven years to achieve something glorious, despite the psychic pain he experiences, is that he retains in his memory the fantasy of a  child's delight in joining father's world as a free and powerful person. In effect, the two video segments are joined, and not simply by my selection of them. Rather,  the second gives an account of how Wiles was able to tolerate the pain of working despite the frustration he faced, the first what happened when at last the frustration was lifted.

If this explanation has merit it also poses some questions about Freud’s conception of religious experience. Freud argued that religious experience reproduced what is now called the “pre-oedipal” child’s experience, when mother was everything. But if a religious experience opens up a path for useful work, for engaging in the work of building culture, rather than just passively accepting God’s love, perhaps it too provokes the child’s excitement of joining the father’s world, where at least in the western tradition, God is also a father. My brother Norbert told me that the composer Handel wrote that he “saw heaven” upon writing the Messiah in just 24 days. It is likely that Wiles and Handel had the same emotional experience.

This line of argument also leads us to the questions that my colleague Howard Schwartz has raised about post-modernism. What happens if and when we come to believe that human culture is intrinsically toxic or destructive, that the Western tradition for example, which gave rise to the glory of modern mathematics, is at its core, flawed.  Does this suggest that our children will no longer have the privilege of experiencing innocence, and that we will lose interest in preparing them to take on the work of building civilization? Howard speaks of an “anti-oedipal” culture, in which the father is seen as an illegitimate authority figure, blocking our return, as pre-oedipal infants, to our mother. His argument suggests that we are at risk of creating an infantilized culture, or what others have called a culture of narcissism. What is the evidence for this?

I am interested in people’s thoughts about all the questions raised in this post.

Fermat's last theorem 

In the seventeenth century Fermat, suggested that the formula known as the Pythagorean theorem and shown as  

A²+B² = C² , or when sounded out., “A squared plus B squared equals C squared,”

is true only when you square the numbers, or raise them to the power of two. In this case you are stating the schoolboy’s formula that in a right triangle,  the sum of the squares of the length of each side is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse.

A  triangle that fits this formula is when one side is 3, one is 4 and the hypotenuse is 5 

We have in this case

 3²+4² = 5² or  9+16=25

 

Fermat said that if you try to find three numbers that fit the formula

A³+B³ = C^{3 ,}

In other words, the numbers are cubed, you will never find them. The same goes for raising numbers to the powers of 4 and so on. Fermat wrote in his notebook that he had found a wonderful proof of this theorem but alas, the margins of his notebook were too narrow to permit him to write it down! We now know that he was mistaken. It took late 20^th century mathematics to solve a seventeenth century theorem

Will HP's accusation that Autonomy cooked its books stand?

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This past November Hewlett Packard (HP,) a $130 billion company, and the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world, announced that it was writing down $8 billion of the $10.3 billion it paid to purchase Autonomy, a British software company. HP’s spokesperson argued that Autonomy had engaged in "serious accounting improprieties" and "outright misrepresentations” that created an unrealistic picture of the company’s worth. It linked these accounting improprieties to $5 billion of the $8 billion write-down. Michael Lynch, Autonomy’s co-founder and CEO, disputed the charge, and noted that HP had not provided any details justifying the accusation, or the size of the write down. As one report notes, “Mr. Lynch has come out swinging, denouncing HP's assertions as ‘completely and utterly wrong.’” Moreover, Autonomy’s British auditors, who had earlier investigated an employee’s charge of such improprieties, found no evidence for them.

While it is difficult at this point to surmise which party is telling the truth, or more realistically, where parts of the truth may lie, it is clear that Autonomy is a going concern with a thriving business. It produces software that enables companies to search structured and unstructured data, for example data from videos, radio programs, voicemails and text. The company is part of the emerging world of “big data” through which companies and government agencies can “scrape” and analyze very large data sets, for example in tracking the online behavior of millions of consumers. At the time of its acquisition, Autonomy had over 400 OEM partners, more than 400 vendors and integrators, and over 20,000 customers, including BP, Halliburton, Royal Dutch Shell, BAE Systems, AstraZeneca, United States Department of Defense, United States Department of Homeland Security, Citigroup and Symantec. Moreover, in January of this year, HP announced “a significant customer win” when NASCAR, the premier stock car auto racing organization in the United States, agreed to use Autonomy’s software “to power a Fan and Media Engagement Center. The software will be used to monitor print, radio, video, Web and social network sources and analyze fan sentiments on races, drivers, sponsors and all NASCAR activities.”

I believe that Autonomy did not perpetrate fraud as did Enron or WorldCom, but I think it is clear that Autonomy did engage in aggressive accounting practices. As one report notes, “The firm recognized revenue upfront that under U.S. accounting rules would have been deferred.” It also struck "round-trip transactions”—deals where Autonomy agreed to buy a client's products or services, while at the same time the client purchased Autonomy software. If for example, Autonomy sold company X, $1 million worth of software, by promising to buy $.5 million of services in return from X, the net impact on HP's revenue should be positive $.5 million. Yet in one round trip transaction, with a software company called VMS, Autonomy booked the cost of the VMS software it purchased, as a marketing expense -- it used the software to make marketing presentations --rather than as the cost of the software that Autonomy originally sold to VMS. But when analysts look at the intrinsic profitability of a business, they focus on the direct expenses of producing a service, “the cost of goods sold,” while ignoring overhead items such as marketing expenses. HP's accounting tactic exaggerated the profitability of its original sale of software to VMS. 

An alternative hypothesis for explaining the write-down is that HP overpaid for its purchase. It is common knowledge for example, that when a company announces its intent to acquire another firm, the stock price of the latter goes up while the stock price of the former goes down. Overpaying is expected. It is also likely, as so often happens, that HP found it difficult to integrate Autonomy into its operations. Discussing the latter’s performance some 18 months after its purchase, HP’s CFO told analysts, "License revenue was disappointing, sales execution was a challenge, and big deals were taking longer to close."

One reason for this disappointing performance may be that the co-founder and CEO of Autonomy, Mike Lynch, described as a “domineering” figure, was very hard driving and had created a great deal of pressure for sales. As one sales person reported to a newspaper, “Autonomy (prior to its acquisition) used a homegrown computer program, called SMS, to record salespeople's contacts with potential clients and calculate their rates of closing sales. Executives would sometimes use the data to craft broadly distributed emails calling out under-performing salespeople,  Those whose rates fell below a standard deviation  would be criticized or fired, the former salesperson says.”

Another news report noted that at one point, “Autonomy stocked piranhas for a while in the office fish tank.” Of course, this may be folklore, but even as folklore it highlights peoples’ perception of the setting as ruthless.  It makes sense, in this context, that once HP bought the company, and Lynch became a divisional executive with delimited power, the pressure for performance he stimulated, diminished as well. This is a common problem when large companies buy owner or founder-led businesses. Entrepreneurs are motivated by both the prospects of great success and the fear of catastrophic failure. Once the prospect of “hunger” is banished through access to the acquiring company’s resources, people feel less hungry to succeed.

The Autonomy purchase and its subsequent write-down, while big news, was overshadowed by a more important event that nonetheless gives added meaning to the purchase itself.  When the then HP CEO, Leo Apotheker, announced his company’s purchase of Autonomy, he simultaneously told reporters that HP would be selling its PC division, which on a stand-alone basis would have been the biggest personal computer manufacturer in the world.

This was riveting news, particularly since, when in 2002, HP first bought Compaq Computer to create its PC division, there was considerable bloodletting, leading the HP board to sack Carly Fiorina, the charismatic CEO, who pushed for the purchase. Ten years later, the PC division accounted for one-third of HP’s revenue and one-fifth  of its profits. As a result, the day after Apotheker announced Autonomy’s purchase, and the sale of its PC division, HP’s stock price fell 20%, eliminating some $13 billion in value. The board promptly fired Apotheker.

In retrospect, it appears that Apotheker’s decision to sell the PC division was part of a larger strategy to move from the world of hardware to software, much as IBM had done when it sold its PC division to Lenovo. Autonomy’s purchase, I propose, was an incidental tactic to underline this shift. Strikingly, as the Wall Street Journal reports, Apotheker tried to buy two other software companies both of which the board rejected, before agreeing to his bid to buy Autonomy. As the Journal recounts the story, Apotheker, in advocating for Autonomy’s purchase told Ray Lane, the chairman of the board, "I am running out of software companies to buy.” As this turn of phrase suggests, he was facing time pressure to underline his strategy of moving to software, and needed to buy, as the saying goes, “something, anything.” 

This suggests that one additional reason for the write down was that Apotheker and the board, facing time pressure and scarce opportunities, overpaid for what felt like a “last chance” acquisition.  Autonomy in this sense was valuable, less for the foothold it provided in the world of software, though its technology was certainly sound, and more as an object of desire to signal both to the market and to powerful HP’s executives, that the company was moving irrevocably into the world of software. 

Indeed, the executives of large corporations sometimes face insuperable obstacles when they try to transform companies from within. They face guerrilla warfare, as divisional executives, for example, in the case of HP, the executive team in charge of the powerful printer division, resist the transformation. Sometimes the only recourse is to buy and sell whole divisions, in this way shedding obligations, commitments and the political coalitions associated with them. This may be one reason that Apotheker and the HP board were willing to pay a premium for a company that was already highly valued by the market relative to its actual earnings. As one report notes, “The markup, about a 50% premium over the stock at the time, wasn't unusual for a software deal, but Autonomy's valuation was already on the high side. Its market value of about $6 billion was seven times annual revenue and 15 times operating profit.”

Was Apotheker’s strategy of moving to software sound?  One stimulus for the strategy was the effort, begun before Apotheker became CEO, to build a new hardware ecosystem based on a proprietary tablet computer and an operating system, WebOS, purchased from Palm, the failed tablet company that could not compete with multifunctional smart phones. HP saw this strategy as a way to compete in the emerging “post-PC” world in which tablets rather than desktops took center stage. Yet the tablet, called Touchpad, sold poorly and Apotheker shut it down. At the same time, the margins HP earned on its PCs were small, in the range of 5%, while, as the following table shows, the number of PCs it shipped had been slipping. Indeed, this shrinking market is one reason that Dell Computer is going private. It needs to shield itself from the stock market that is already discounting the future prospects of the PC. 

 

In short, after HP failed to reposition itself as a tablet manufacturer with a proprietary operating system, Apotheker was confronted with the task of selling a low margin product, the PC, in what looked like a shrinking market. It seems reasonable in this context that HP’s next step was to move fully into the world of software. Indeed, when the board fired Apotheker and appointed Meg Whitman in his place, Ray Lane, the board chair, noted that, as the one time head of E-Bay, Whitman had been a buyer of technology on a large scale, and was very familiar with “unstructured data,” the sweet spot for Autonomy’s products and services. The same month she was appointed, Whitman herself said, “That the company under her leadership would stay the course and continue to transition to an enterprise software business.”

So why fire Apotheker? One fact is clear, HP’s customers were very upset with Apotheker’s announcement that HP would sell its PC division. This was one reason for the drastic drop in the stock price the next day. Many customers were wholly vested in HP’s products and services, buying PC’s, printers, servers, and networking equipment from the company. HP’s PC product line, it turns out, was a strategic asset stimulating the sale of other equipment as customers bought what are called “end-to end,” or more proverbially, “soup-to-nuts” solutions.  Indeed, after the announcement, a reporter got hold of a leaked memo from Cisco, an HP competitor that sells networking equipment, in which Cisco executives viewed Apotheker’s announcement with relish. The Cisco memo writer anticipates a big pickup in business, suggesting that, by “divesting the PC business, HP removes the bond between its other hardware, software and services groups, resulting in a disjointed company.”

Similarly, one trade website, Information Week Now, notes that after the PC decision was announced, “our polling of IT buyers showed that even though HP hasn't said a peep about printers, 32% of respondents said they were less likely to buy HP imaging technology now.” The website goes on to note, “On stage at Information Week's conference early last week, Lane, (HP’s board chair), acknowledged that 99% of HP's core infrastructure business was servers, storage, networking--the hardware that runs today's businesses. And yet everything HP has talked about for the past year--unstructured data, mobile, cloud--while important trends for the future, isn't where its customers look to HP today. It's fine to paint a vision of the future, but it's not fine to leave your customers behind.”

This last phrase, “leave your customers behind” is telling. If HP is to become an enterprise software company it will indeed leave some of their current customers behind and perhaps many of them in the lurch. In this sense HP’s customers are a drag on its evolution, and their current claims on HP’s resources could undermine HP’s future prospects. To be sure, by selling its PC division, HP would certainly lose a lot of revenue, but it would also accrue the capital it needed to purchase more profitable software businesses with their own new revenue streams. I suggest that Apotheker was fired because the board believed he could not manage this transition. 

This perspective sheds some new light on HP’s claim that Autonomy engaged in fraudulent accounting. The concept of market exchange highlights the idea of reciprocity. Money is offered for value proffered. But from a psychodynamic perspective exchange entails dependency and it is not uncommon for providers to resent the customers on whom they depend. For example, academics have an old saying, “if it were not for the students the teaching would be great.” These feelings highlight, that while exchange entails reciprocity, it may also mimic war or conflict. Customers always want more than the provider can profitably give. This is also why the phrase, “buyer beware” (in Latin, “caveat emptor”), has such an ancient lineage. 

This perspective also sheds some light on an interesting turn of phrase Meg Whitman used in describing HP’s strategy to its customers. “HP's strategy is quite simple; to provide the solutions for the new style of IT. We'd like to engage with you to provide the business outcomes you need and frankly require in the coming years." I find the use of the word “frankly” suggestive. As the term suggests, Whitman is telling her customers something they may not want to hear, an aggressive act, hence her need to be frank. And as she suggests, she can tell customers what they need, not the other way around.

The idea that one’s customers are one’s antagonists is to some degree a forbidden idea. So much business lingo is organized around the concept of serving customers and becoming their partners. Psychoanalysis suggests that while forbidden ideas may be repressed or displaced, they never disappear. This suggests that HP’s war against Autonomy- charging it with fraud, is a displacement of HP’s attack on its own customers. In effect, Autonomy is a scapegoat for the very difficult strategic challenge that HP faces. This is consistent with the idea that Autonomy was also once a stand-in, so to speak, for the new world of enterprise software, when it was first purchased. After all, looking at the purchase practically, it was Apotheker’s third choice. In both cases as stand-in and scapegoat, it was not just a company with real assets, but a symbol of HP’s prospects as well as difficulties. Indeed, it is common that people, who at one point are seen as heroes, are later seen as laughingstocks. As the song says, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall.” The deflation is the flip side of the inflation.

It may seem strange that a symbol can stimulate fundamental business decisions such as charging a company with fraud. But we have only to remember the passions that are stimulated when for example a citizen burns his country’s flag in protest.  Materially, the flag is simply piece of cloth, a rag, but symbolically it represents a panoply of thoughts and feelings. The ways in which we symbolize settings, objects and people shapes the concrete ways through which we relate to them. When Autonomy became a symbol of HP’s entry into the world of software it also became a symbol for the frustrations and difficulties of entering that world.

My prediction is that HP’s charge of fraud will not stand, but that its strategic challenges will persist.

The State Department report on the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya.

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The U.S. State Department recently released a report on the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and four other people by Jihadists in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 of this past year. Briefly, a well-armed militia attacked the U.S. consulate’s Benghazi compound, setting its buildings on fire. Ambassador Stevens and a security officer, who were visiting from Tripoli, the capital city, died of smoke inhalation. An hour-and-a-half later, militia members followed a CIA truck to its secretly located building some distance away, called in State Department documents, “the Annex.” They used RPGs to kill two CIA agents. Everyone now agrees, that the attack was not, as the Obama administration first suggested, a spontaneous demonstration in response to an inflammatory video depicting Islam as corrupt and murderous. Instead, it was planned and executed by well-armed jihadists.

In response to the killing, the State department convened a task force to review why security at the consulate was insufficient. The resulting report, released this past month, is thoughtful and judicious, and is anchored in a discourse of what it means to effectively assess and mitigate threats. The report exemplifies the good practice of “after-action reviews” through which leaders and executives debrief a mission or program and try to learn from their mistakes. Yet the report misses the forest for the trees and is peculiarly off-key. The question is why?

Consider three sensible arguments the report writers make.

·      The consulate's vulnerability was heightened because personnel seconded to it were relatively inexperienced, and often on temporary assignments of less than 40 days. The result was “diminished institutional knowledge, continuity and mission capacity.”

·      Following good practice, consulate officials had well-defined “tripwires,” such as the city’s crime rate, or attacks on westerners, which could alert consulate staff to the possibility of an attack on the consulate compound. But, the report goes on to argue, these, “Tripwires are too often treated only as indicators of threat rather than essential trigger mechanisms for serious risk management decisions.”

·      Communication between Washington, Tripoli, and Benghazi “occurred collegially at the working level,” but it was, “constrained by a lack of transparency, responsiveness, and leadership at senior bureau levels.”

This discourse has all the earmarks of reasonableness and rationality. It applies the lessons of threat assessment and management, and makes recommendations for better results in the future, e.g., better communication at senior levels, better staffing practices, and a more thoughtful use of tripwires. But I want to argue that the report is nonetheless misleading and insufficient because it is focused at the tactical rather than strategic level. It pays no attention to a wider narrative that shaped the Obama administration’s decision making at the level of foreign policy; a policy that colored all tactical decisions. This narrative presumes that the U.S., through the judicious use of military measures and modern “nation-building” practices, can help people in lawless settings evolve democratic and civil societies.  Indeed, this narrative is why the Obama administration at first suggested that the attack on the consulate was spontaneous, in response to an anti-Islam video produced in the U.S. It was not that jihadists, unleashed by a revolutionary situation the U.S. helped create, were out to kill us as well as their Libyan enemies. Rather, we had inadvertently trampled on their religious sensibilities.

I want to argue in this blog post that the purpose of the State Department report was not to improve practices, but to protect decision makers from the psychological burden of wrestling with the contradictions and tensions implicit in this wider narrative. It functioned as what organizational psychodynamics calls, a “social defense;” a collective process of psychological denial.   

Consider how the report fails. It turns out that senior State Department officials gave the Ambassador wide berth to make his own threat assessment decisions. The vision of local officials applying protocols, some acceptable, some not, to secure the consulate’s safety, or of seniors officers collaborating, or not, on consulate safety, is misleading. As the report itself notes, “The ambassador did not see a direct threat of this nature and scale on the U.S. mission in the overall negative trend line of security incidents (in Benghazi) from spring to summer of 2012.” In other words, Steven’s discounted signals of threat. The report goes on to note, “His status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments.”

This suggests that the State Department after-action review should have been focused on two entirely different questions. First, what compelled State Department officials, perhaps against their better judgment, to defer to Stevens, and second, why did Stevens discount signals of threat?

Why the deference? After his death, Secretary of State Clinton, President Obama, and others referred to Stevens as the ideal diplomat. Describing Stevens and his colleagues, Obama said, “They knew the danger, and they accepted it. They didn't simply embrace the American ideal. They lived it." There seems little doubt that Stevens’ actions during the uprising against Gaddafi, and this was before he was appointed ambassador, were deservedly considered heroic. As ABC, the news organization, reports, “During the early days of the Libyans' fight to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi, Christopher Stevens, not yet ambassador, wrangled a ride on a Greek cargo ship and sailed into the rebels' stronghold city of Benghazi.” (Benghazi, it should be noted, was the seat of the revolution.) The ABC report goes on to note, “He arrived at a time when the crackle of gunfire could be heard each night. Stevens and his team didn't even have a place to stay, but found space in a hotel briefly, moving out after a car bomb went off in the parking lot.” Stevens and a political officer, “spent their days and nights building up the U.S. government’s first on-the-ground contacts with the Transitional National Council, as well as with members of the emerging civil society and newly freed news media.”

There is also little doubt that Stevens represented and deeply believed in the democratic ideal. Consider for example the video Stevens released, shortly after he was appointed ambassador, through which he addressed the Libyan people. At one point in the video, shot in Washington D.C., he says, “I am in Washington preparing for my assignment. As I walk around the monuments and memorials commemorating courageous men and women who made America what it is, I am reminded that we too went through challenging periods. When America was divided by a bitter civil war 150 years ago, President Abraham Lincoln had the vision and courage to pull the nation together and helped us move forward toward a shared goal of peace and prosperity.” (In the video he is at the Lincoln Memorial). In other words, he is suggesting that the Libyan civil war and the U.S. civil war were cut from the same cloth. This means that Libyans, despite their country’s history of violence, fragmentation and oppression, can aspire to the kind of constitutional and civil order that U.S. citizens, for the most part, have come to enjoy.

The reference to Lincoln is particularly telling, and highlights the strengths and limitations of what is called the “idealist” as opposed to the “realist” strain in U.S. foreign policy.  Lincoln is usefully thought of as the second, or in fact the “true” father of his nation, and his greatness lies partly in his ability to use force in the service of civilization, without losing his own moral compass, humanness and civility. But it takes a distinctive culture to produce such a leader. We could say that Stevens’ analogy, and the strain of idealism he represents, is partly hope, but also partly projection, imagining that the social context that gave rise to Lincoln can be replicated in Libya. This projection of American history and sensibilities onto other cultures and countries reinforces the belief that they can traverse our path to democracy.

We have now one plausible account of the deference,  but can we account for Stevens' judgments about the situation? One thing we can rule out; Stevens was by no means naïve, and understood the risks he was personally facing. His diary, found by a CNN reporter at the burned and now abandoned consulate, shows that he believed Al Qaeda was targeting him for assassination.

In this regard,  while the discourse about risk assessment and mitigation in the report is reasonable, it fails in one elementary way, and on its own terms. The report does not consider the relationship between risks and opportunities. That a setting such as Benghazi is risky, is a given. The question is, what is to be to be gained by having a consulate in Benghazi despite these risks? Or to put the matter differently, what were the risks of not having a consulate in the city?

I think the answer is apparent, and was the basis for Stevens' judgment. For the same reason that Benghazi was the seat of the uprising against Gaddafi, it was thus also a threat to creating a centralized political authority in Tripoli. The tribes in eastern Libya had long been hostile to Tripoli’s power, and resented their subordination to Gaddafi’s army and his associated elites in business and politics. As we have seen elsewhere, a revolutionary situation is just as likely, if not more, to lead to chaos and fragmentation, as to a new political order based on representation and civility. After all, this is one reason the CIA had established a sizeable station in Benghazi to begin with. Its senior personnel understood that the tribes in Eastern Libya, wanted to secure their rightful share of weapons from Gaddafi’s arsenal, and they worried that Al Qaeda inspired jihadists would get them.

This suggests that Stevens established a consulate in Benghazi, described as “lawless town,” in the State Department report, to begin the work of linking the elites of Benghazi to Tripoli. He planned to do this by helping to build what are called “civil society” institutions, such as businesses, schools, government agencies, NGOs, courts and media. For example, one State Department memo, released in a cache of memos to the world- wide-web, refers to U.N. supported initiatives such as;

·      Preparing lawyers for constitution drafting.

·      Engaging lawyers in the Libyan diaspora to train local lawyers.

·      Forming a local chapter of NAPEO, the “North Africa Partnership for Economic Opportunity,” to educate participants about public-private partnerships.

·      Ensuring that the TOEFL English language exam is offered in Libya, and,

·      Training aspiring entrepreneurs in business skills.

These are practical steps, familiar to practitioners of nation-building.  But the reader, unaccustomed to this work, can’t help but wonder if they are off-kilter and potentially irrelevant efforts in the context of a lawless city in a nation of tribes. Indeed, one measure of this irrelevance is a peculiar paragraph in another State Department memo, dated December 2011. It notes that, “Many Libyans have said that the U.S. presence (in Benghazi) has a salutary calming effect (my underlining) on easterners who are fearful that the new focus on Tripoli could once again lead to their neglect and exclusion from reconstruction and wealth distribution, and (therefore) strongly favor a permanent U.S. presence in the form of a full consulate.” In other words, the powerful tribes and families in Benghazi would welcome a U.S. presence to protect them and assure them their fair share of the spoils, rather than depend on their own militias and force of arms. This may be where idealism shades into naiveté.

In addition, the narrative of democratic empowerment protected senior officials in the state department and in the Obama administration from the psychological burden of facing the unfortunate that, that from 2003 on, the U.S. considered Gaddafi to be an ally. As a Wikipedia entry notes, in December of that year,

“Libya renounced its possession of weapons of mass destruction and agreed to decommission its chemical weapons program. Relations with the U.S. improved as a result, while U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair met with Gaddafi in the Libyan desert in March 2004. The following month, Gaddafi travelled to the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels signifying improved relations between Libya and the EU, the latter of whom ended its remaining sanctions in October.

Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal reported, from 2003 to 2011, the CIA had close ties to Gaddafi’s secret services!

 Let us return to the two questions that I suggested the State Department Report should have addressed. What compelled State Department officials, perhaps against their better judgment, to defer to Stevens, and why did Stevens discount signals of threat? The answers are now apparent. First, Stevens was the ideal representative of the idealist strain, yet he had the physical courage, the realistic perspective and the diplomatic skills to operate in a lawless setting. Second, Stevens believed that absent civil society institutions in Benghazi, the country could break apart under the press of tribal warfare. The risks of not having a consulate in Benghazi were greater than the risks of having one. Stevens did not discount signals of threat, he simply saw and responded to a larger one.

It is a common feature of strategies and their associated narratives, that they contain tensions and contradictions. This is the underside of their breadth. The U.S. wants to advance democracy through open means, but it cannot and has not discounted the reality of armed non-state enemies who have no history of living in democratic settings. Indeed, this is why the CIA had its own secret annex in Benghazi, while the State Department had its public consulate. (There is good reason to believe that Jihadists only discovered the Annex when, after the fire at the consulate compound, they followed a CIA truck from the consulate to the CIA’s building). The physical separation of the two, while based on the need for secrecy, also symbolized the tensions of integrating the idealist and the realist orientations.

The U.S., for better or worse, is impelled to represent democracy in the clash of civilizations. But at the same time it has built up a security apparatus that enables it to protect U.S. security, political, and economic interests without regard to who is the “good guy,” or democrat; hence the alliance with Gaddafi prior to his overthrow. I also think Stevens was considered a hero not only because he was a courageous practitioner of what is called “expeditionary diplomacy,” but because he had a realistic understanding of the threats the U.S. faced and an abiding belief in the power of democratic ideals and practices to mitigate these threats. He offered for a moment, a synthesis of the idealist and realist strains, and his murder suggests that he paid with his life for trying to integrate the two.

We can now understand why the State Department report was inadequate and why it focused on tactical issues. Of course, the task force was not authorized to consider issues of strategy. But its focus on tactics also helps deflect attention from the painful realization that the work of integrating the two strains of foreign policy, work that every president has to take up, is difficult, consequential, and can lead to the murder of valued and honored diplomats who represent the “best the country can offer.” This is why I called the report a “social defense.” It deflects attention from what is guilt inducing, painful and has surprised us, to what can be managed and predicted. 

There may be a lesson here as well about "after-action" reviews. They may fail to give us real insight into our failures if we do not consider the strategic context that shaped our decisions.