The full quote is much more impactful and is something I come back to when I think about more mundane things like moving up in roles in a company:
> “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
> “I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even _existed_. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
> “First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
> “You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those _other_ people are fools.
> “Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the _New York Times_ can. But that takes a while to learn.
> “In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to _learn_ from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And _that_ mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.
> “You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
> ….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.
This is making a strong argument that the more highly classified a piece of information is, the more likely it is to be bullshit, because the fewer people who know the subject matter have had the opportunity to dispute it.
Naturally human nature is to think the opposite, that the most highly protected secrets have been carefully evaluated because they're so important, when the relationship is actually the inverse.
Maybe there should be a maximum period of time that any given information can remain classified, and maybe it should be short.
Many types of information do not require any experts to validate it.
Person X committed crime Y.
Prime minister blah is having an affair with bleh.
There is a secret base at location T studying V.
Most pieces of juicy information aren’t like secret scientific studies for anti gravity machines. They are just mundane things with excitement because of who is doing them and who it’s happening to.
It's all still susceptible to the same principle. You think Prime Minister Blah is having an affair because the French translators with the highest clearance you're using haven't been watching a particular children's television show and so are unknowingly mistranslating the references to it in the transcript. If the tape had been released on the internet some schoolteacher in Canada would have pointed that out.
You’re overthinking it. Information is rarely that complex. “Here’s footage from a hidden camera in a private jet of a prime minister banging his mistress”.
Information is always that complex. "Intelligence" is a bunch of rumors and innuendo that get mushed together into an analyst's report.
Even when you have what you believe to be incontrovertible evidence, because this is spy shit you have the possibility of a foreign intelligence service finding your hidden camera and using it to feed you whatever they like. And the fewer eyes you have on it, the less likely you are to discover the inconsistency with reality.
But… all of the things you mention, like much in life, are susceptible to misinterpretation.
Do you know, or does it just appear that way to the best of your knowledge. The black/blue, or white/gold, dress is a good example of seeing something doesn’t make it true, or false.
The much bigger, much more critical, secret is knowing someone did something because you, or more likely someone under your direct command, was involved in the action. In which case the secret is the culpability more than the action itself.
The experts in this case are the analysts whose job is trying to figure out the sorts of things you mentioned from intel that’s almost always patchy, misleading, simply wrong, gathered from different, often conflicting sources. Sure, there’s also a lot of simple factual information, but the juiciest, most classified parts are likely intel reports that are by necessity a result of interpretation.
I think it’s so true - I remember when I first read that and suddenly huge amounts of geopolitics and political decision-making suddenly made sense.
Unfortunately, I feel that a lot of political leaders, bureaucrats, intelligence analysts, etc. never reach that stage of realising that much of our intelligence is mistaken, wrong, incomplete, misleading etc. - so they’re always operating in that ‘can’t learn from anybody who isn’t in the club, just pretend to listen while immediately dismissing anything they have to say, no matter their expertise’ stage… And it affects democracy too - from their perspective, why listen to the will of the people, because they don’t know what we know.
And let this be a warning whenever you read something from an unnamed ‘intelligence source’ or ‘Government source’ in the press…
> “Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the _New York Times_ can. But that takes a while to learn.
This is a part that would be good to remember in UFO discussions. You have no idea of what supposedly all this secret information about UFOs are, or about the context that is being suppressed, or even how much there is as opposed to Chinese whispers recirculating the same exact original datum, wikiception-style, slowly rising from some garbage better discarded to 'the intelligence community has reports'...
Thank you for sharing that. It's a beautiful set of ideas. I read it aloud to my wife and we're talking about it now the implications for all knowledge levels. Fascinating thing to share.
And used every resource he had available at the time to discredit him.
People telling the truth are anathema to people trying to take advantage of them.
Niall Ferguson had a more balanced view of Kissinger than Christopher Hitchens.
He was not an honorable man.
He's advocated for an AI arms race, written a biography praising Nixon, and I find his view on foreign policy just as dishonorable as in the 70's, it just has less influence these days.
The next time I encounter a genuinely intelligent person "debunking" a conspiracy theory because it "is" "impossible" to keep a secret among too many people I'm going to post a link to this and then observe how they post-hoc rationalize to protect their locally generated version of reality.
I think all corruption ultimately runs on ignorance of this simple phenomenon.
As someone afflicted with holding on to junk that might be useful someday, myself, I often pity Trump on the matter of the “boxes.”
It’s so clear that he has 1) desperately insecure compulsions to exploit information asymmetries, but also 2) a shallow bombastic character that probably rarely ever has had access to truly advantageous facts or the subtlety to effectively exploit them.
All the little glimpses into his overactive engagement with those boxes are so intimate and so pathetic. Stepping down from all those secrets beyond even what he always suspected other people had squirreled away, but also that he hasn’t been able to exploit like he always assumed he would…
It’s just a sad sad scene. Well, and also very embarrassingly stupid.
> “Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.
> “I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even _existed_. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.
> “First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.
> “You will feel like a fool, and that will last for about two weeks. Then, after you’ve started reading all this daily intelligence input and become used to using what amounts to whole libraries of hidden information, which is much more closely held than mere top secret data, you will forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you’ll be aware only of the fact that you have it now and most others don’t….and that all those _other_ people are fools.
> “Over a longer period of time — not too long, but a matter of two or three years — you’ll eventually become aware of the limitations of this information. There is a great deal that it doesn’t tell you, it’s often inaccurate, and it can lead you astray just as much as the _New York Times_ can. But that takes a while to learn.
> “In the meantime it will have become very hard for you to _learn_ from anybody who doesn’t have these clearances. Because you’ll be thinking as you listen to them: ‘What would this man be telling me if he knew what I know? Would he be giving me the same advice, or would it totally change his predictions and recommendations?’ And _that_ mental exercise is so torturous that after a while you give it up and just stop listening. I’ve seen this with my superiors, my colleagues….and with myself.
> “You will deal with a person who doesn’t have those clearances only from the point of view of what you want him to believe and what impression you want him to go away with, since you’ll have to lie carefully to him about what you know. In effect, you will have to manipulate him. You’ll give up trying to assess what he has to say. The danger is, you’ll become something like a moron. You’ll become incapable of learning from most people in the world, no matter how much experience they may have in their particular areas that may be much greater than yours.”
> ….Kissinger hadn’t interrupted this long warning. As I’ve said, he could be a good listener, and he listened soberly. He seemed to understand that it was heartfelt, and he didn’t take it as patronizing, as I’d feared. But I knew it was too soon for him to appreciate fully what I was saying. He didn’t have the clearances yet.