Paul Erickson > Quotes

“For Osgood, weapons not only made people tense; the arms race made humans positively irrational: Emotional tension produces stereotypy in our thinking; it restricts the range of alternatives we can conceive of, rendering us more rigid than flexible, and shortens our perspective, substituting blind reactions to immediate pressures for long-term persistence toward ultimate goals. In other words, paradoxically, the psychological conditions of prolonged deterrence produce the very states of mind which make it harder and harder to maintain deterrence.”
― Paul Erickson, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality

“At the 1964 Berkeley conference “Strategic Interaction and Conflict,” Schelling cast about for a less rubbery, more descriptive term: “It would be useful if rationality were not a loaded term which implies it’s better to be rational, or that people who are rational are socially desirable, so they can’t be eccentric or crazy. If we could Latinize the term so that one word means ‘economic theory of rationality’ and another means something else, we’d be better off.”
― Paul Erickson, How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind: The Strange Career of Cold War Rationality