Heart of Darkness is a morose, brooding novel written by Joseph Conrad in 1902.  It is the story of an introspective steamship captain named Marlow, who is hired by an imperialistic corporation known as the Company, to journey up the Congo River into the Belgian Congo to the "Central Station," a jungle enterprise run by a charismatic, powerful leader by the name of Kurtz.  Under his leadership, the Company has brutalized the natives in order to corner the market on ivory.  Eventually, Kurtz sets himself up as a sort of god to a tribe of cannibals and goes mad.

The story traces Marlow's growing horror and disillusionment with the cruelty and squalor he sees surrounded by the dense and dark jungle--all done in the name of profit--and the letdown he feels watching a man he once admired go insane with unchecked power.  After Kurtz's death, Marlow returns to a heedless, frivolous society preoccupied with materialistic concerns, and lies to Kurtz's fiancee, allowing her to believe that the man she still loves died a hero.

When I read the haunting quote by an unnamed administration official, referring to another leader of another imperialistic enterprise some 105 years later, I was curious about that choice of words.  I had heard of the book, of course, because it is a classic, but I had never actually read it.

So I did.

That choice of description, I found, was deliberate, because the similarities between the fictional character of Kurtz and the very real George W. Bush turned my blood cold. 

Here are just a few quotes from the Conrad novel, taken from the third part:


 

I found myself lumped along with Kurtz as a partisan of methods for which the time was not ripe...Ah, but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares.

It seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets.  I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of inpenetrable night...

His soul was mad.  Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and by heavens!  I tell you, it had gone mad...I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself...Both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.

Sometimes he was contemptably childish.  He desired to have kings meet him at railway stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things.  "You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability," he would say.

(on Kurtz as he lay on his deathbed) I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair...He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision--he cried out twice, a cry no more than a breath:  "The horror!  The horror!"

(upon Marlow's return to civilization) I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other...to dream their insignificant and silly dreams.  They trespassed upon my thoughts.  They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of danger it is unable to comprehend.

(on the media's reflection on Kurtz) Ultimately a journalist anxious to know something of the fate of his "dear colleague" turned up.  This visitor informed me Kurtz's proper sphere ought to have been politics "on the popular side"...and confessed his opinion that Kurtz really couldn't write a bit--"but heavens! how that man could talk.  He electrified large meetings.  He had faith--don't you see?--he had faith.  He could get himself to believe anything--anything.  He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party."  "What party?" I asked.  "Any party," answered the other.  "He was an--an extremist."

(speaking double entendre to the adoring fiancee of the now-deceased Kurtz) "His end," said I, with dull anger stirring in me, "was in every way worthy of his life."

As examined in the online literary critique service, Sparknotes.com,  Kurtz's madness, in the long run, is, "linked not only to absolute power...but Kurtz has no authority to whom he answers but himself, and this is more than one man can bear."   


Not only that, but it is the whole world that appears insane to Marlow: 

"It becomes apparent that (Kurtz's) madness is only relative, that in the context of the Company insanity is difficult to define."

In other words, in a world where the collapse and degeneration of an entire country into chaos and bloodshed can be summed up into two words:  "STUFF HAPPENS"--how, then, do you define madness?

It turns out that great literary classics become classics for the simple reason that their reflections on the human condition bear the test of time.

The psychiatric columnist for the Washington Post, Shankar Vendantam, has written a series of searing articles over the course of the past several months in which the methods and madness of George W. Bush are examined in the context of the human mind and its infinite power to fool itself. 

(Linking to each separate article would take more time and trouble than I want to go to right now, so I urge you to visit  the Post, type in Vendantam's name in the search-function, and read through pretty much everything he has written.  It will be an eye-opening exercise.)

For our purposes, I'm going to quote from four of Vendantam's pieces, so that you can see, in chilling detail, why it is that a high-ranking administration official would be moved (provoked?) into comparing George W. Bush to the imperialist antagonist Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of Darkness:


 

In Shakespeare's "King Lear," a powerful man comes to a tragic end because he surrounds himself with flatterers and banishes the friends who will not varnish the truth to please him.

[...]

In a series of experiments, the Dutch social psychologist Roos Vonk found that people tend to believe flattery directed at them, even though they recognize such praise as fake when directed at a third party.  Vonk said the error arises because people generally believe they are better than others recognize.

...Bush has hurt himself by shutting out people who disagree with him--as King Lear also did.--"What the Bard and Lear Can Tell a Leader About Yes Men," by Shankar Vendantam, Washington Post, March 19, 2007

Four years ago tomorrow, President Bush landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and dramatically strode onto the deck in a flight suit, a crash helmet tucked under one arm.  Even without the giant banner that hung from the ship's tower, the president's message about the progress of the war in Iraq was unmistakable: mission accomplished.

Bush is not the first president to have convinced himself that something he wanted to believe was, in fact, true...Self-deception has been uncovered in a wide range of situations, says Robert L. Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University who has studied the phenomenon...

Trivers says the primary use of self-deception appears to be that it aids people in deceiving others...

Deliberate deception among humans, futhermore, requires effort...If you can make yourself believe the untruth, for example, by marshaling evidence that supports your view and ignoring evidence that contradicts your position, it becomes much easier to persuade others...

"There is definitely a downside to self-deception," Trivers said.  "And that is you are putting yourself out of touch with reality, but it cuts down the risk of getting caught."--"When Seeing is Disbelieving," by Shankar Vendantam, Washington Post, April 30, 2007

Psychologists once conducted a simple experiment with far-reaching implications...When people described events in which they were the perpetrators of wrongdoing, they invariably said their actions had caused only brief pain to others.  Many said the hurtful acts were justified or could not have been prevented.

When people reported the same kinds of incidents as victims, however, they invariably described the actions as inexplicable, senseless, and immoral.  Victims never felt the wrongdoing was unavoidable.  And they reported that the pain lasted a long time.

...The different perceptions of victims and perpetrators in Roy Baumeister's experiment are a result of a phenomenon known as cognitive dissonance, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson argue in a new book titled, "Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me)."  When we do something that hurts others, there is a part of us that recognizes our action as despicable.  But that comes into conflict--dissonance--with our belief that we are good people.  The solution?  We reinterpret our hurtful actions to minimize our responsibility and downplay the pain we have caused.

...Bush's handling of the Libby case, and the way the nation as a whole has dealt with the Iraq war, reek of cognitive dissonance, Tavris and Aronson say.

..."Republicans who were most in support of the war continue to believe that weapons of mass destruction have been found and al Qaeda was in Iraq and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were in cahoots.  They reduce their dissonance by rejecting evidence they were wrong."

...Aronson said the bias toward self-justification explains the administration's shifting rationale for the Iraq war and why Bush could not have allowed Libby to go to prison.

..."It is an exquisite example of self-justification because the good guys are defined as those who are loyal to the cause even if the cause is wrong."--"Bush:  Naturally, Never Wrong," by Shankar Vendantam, Washington Post, July 9, 2007

In the face of mounting public and political opposition to the war in Iraq, recent reports from the White House suggest that President Bush remains serenely confident.

Bush's confidants report that the president believes he will be vindicated by history...No matter how tough the situation in Iraq,Bush remains confident about his decision to go to war because he believes that things would have been much worse otherwise.

...Bush's argument is based on something known as a counterfactual.  In his mind, the president has an alternate view of history--one that imagines Saddam Hussein still in power--and has come to the conclusion that deposing the Iraqi leader was better...Coming up with what-if scenarios is how people make sense of the world.

...But what is dangerous about counterfactuals is that while they may seem reasonable, they easily become a way for us to confirm what we already feel...The basic problem with counterfactual reasoning is that there is no way to test your theory...counterfactuals cannot be disproved.

...Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior and political science at the University of California, has found that the careless use of counterfactuals is one reason politicians and experts are often wrong about their predictions.

...(Tetlock) found that the politicians and pundits who were more cautious about using counterfactuals--who explicitly reminded themselves that they were coming up with scenarios that could not be verified--were more accurate on average than those who used counterfactuals blithely.

..."If you exercise restraint, you are willing to acknowledge dissonant possibilities..." (and in the opposite)..."you are far more likely to be spectacularly wrong."--"Bush and the Counterfactual Confidence," by Shankar Vendantam, Washington Post, July 30, 2007

The sea-captain Marlow's journey into the heart of darkness was much more than just a frightening trip into the dense and moody jungles of the Congo.  Unchecked power, he learned, led to unchecked madness--not just in the individual most tangled up in it, but in the society most affected by it.

This country was attacked on September 11, 2001, and everybody was driven slightly mad in the ensuing shock and terror.  Consequently, our society put its trust in a man and his enablers who were perfectly positioned to take bald advantage of our fear, to use and abuse it for the purpose of accumulating power, and in the end, to be driven truly insane by that power.

The charisma of George W. Bush caused many a more sensible person to shut away his or her doubts, to deceive themselves into believing that he was godlike and therefore worthy of that trust.  For Marlow, his first horrified reckoning with the truth came when he discovered that Kurtz had lined the pathway to his jungle cabin with the heads of natives pierced onto spikes; for most Americans, it was the barbarity of a war this country was deceived into fighting by the Great Self-Deceiver, a war without end, a war without cause, a war of insanity.

In the end, it would be fictional to assume that George W. Bush--the Great Self-Deceiver--would ever be appalled on his deathbed at the atrocities he has committed. 

Alas, it will be us, and those of us who trusted him, who will be saying,

"The horror!  The horror!"