Rationality Will NOT Save Us.

Anne Strainchamps: The question of how and why we come to believe lies fascinates filmmaker Errol Morris. It's a theme that runs through all of his films, The Thin Blue Line, the Oscar-winning Fog of War, and his brand new documentary about former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It's called The Unknown Known.

Errol Morris: I'm really fascinated about how we propagate error, how we come to believe false things and how we stick with those false beliefs no matter what. Once convinced that we know the truth, even if it isn't the truth, even smacking upside the head with a two by four isn't going to to change much of anything.

Strainchamps: You wrote this series of pieces recently in The New Yorker about a neurological problem. I don't even know how to say it. 

Morris: Anosognosia.

Strainchamps: There you go. 

Morris: The anosognosiak's dilemma.

Strainchamps: Yes.

Morris: It's a neurological problem that prevents you from knowing that you have that neurological problem. 

I was writing about something called the Dunning-Kruger effect, where these two scientists had done an elaborate series of social science experiments about, if you're incompetent you're usually too incompetent to know how incompetent you really are. 

That incompetence prevents you from an awareness of your incompetence. 

The Dunning-Kruger effect, what a wonderful effect. They called it a kind of social anosognosia. It's interesting. In these two movies that I've made, really they are movies about war. The Fog of War and now The Unknown Known, again about war and how we stumble into it for reasons often that can't be reconstructed, that aren't rational. There was a screening of The Fog of War here at the University of Wisconsin campus last night. 

One of the most striking things about that story is that McNamara saw himself as a supremely rational man, that the problems of the world could be solved with rationality, and at the very end of movie he tells us -- and it's one of the really sad lines that I've ever put on film. He says rationality will not save us. It's this idea that somehow there are forces beyond our control that somehow drag us into conflict.

Strainchamps: Is that moment in the film? Actually, I think we've got it queued up. This is when he's talking about the decision to bomb after the Gulf of Tonkin torpedo attack.

Robert McNamara: Where are these torpedoes coming from? We don't know. 

Presumably from these unidentified craft. There were sonar soundings. Torpedoes had been detected. 

Other indications of attack from patrol boats. 

We spent about 10 hours that day trying to find out what in the hell had happened. 

At one point the commander of the ship said we're not certain of the attack. 

Another point they said, yes, we're absolutely positive, and then finally later in the day Admiral Sharp said, yes. we're certain it happened. 

So I reported this to Johnson and as a result there were bombing attacks on target in north Vietnam.

Morris: What's so interesting about this is that... I'm struck just listening to it here in the studio. 

We went to war on the basis of something that never happened. 

We later learned that that second attack in the Gulf of Tonkin did not occur. If you like, it's the WMDs of 40 years before Iraq.

Strainchamps: I'm thinking about our concept of the banality of evil. In a way, what you're interested in or what we're talking about is sort of the banality of the accidental reasons we go to war. It's not as though people all planned or knew even that this was going to be the pivotal moment. 

They got some information, they made a few mistakes. It was probably accidents and errors that kind of compounded from one person to another as they passed bits of information down a chain, but the result was a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people.

Morris: In the case of Vietnam, 58,000 American service men and literally millions of Vietnamese.

Strainchamps: So it seems to me that one of the things that fascinates you is that chain of deception, those lies.

Morris: I'm not sure that I would even call them lies. It's all unanswerable. There's this idea. Everyone's familiar with it: the marketplace of ideas. Somehow if everybody is allowed to chatter away unendingly the truth will will out.

Strainchamps: Right, this idea that we live in an increasingly transparent society.

Morris: This is something I don't agree with it. The Truth doesn't magically appear for any of us. The marketplace of idea--thank you, Adam Smith--doesn't produce Truth. But it's the job of all of us, journalists, historians, investigators--you name it--to pursue the truth. The truth is outside of us and beyond us. We may never be able to grab a hold of it, but we search for it. We try to find out what is true and what is false to the best of our abilities.

Strainchamps: Well, thank you. It's a great place to leave it. Thanks so much for being here.

Morris: Thank you for having me.

Strainchamps: Errol Morris is an Oscar-winning director. His films include The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War, and his latest, The Unknown Known.