Luck, be a lady (or a mushroom cloud)

According to a new book by Ron Suskind, the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive warfare seems to be merely the practical instantiation of a principle pushed by Dick Cheney:

"The One Percent Doctrine," refers to an operating principle that he says Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind's words, "if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction — and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time — the United States must now act as if it were a certainty." He quotes Mr. Cheney saying that it's not about "our analysis," it's about "our response," and argues that this conviction effectively sidelines the traditional policymaking process of analysis and debate, making suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action.

Since I read about this last week, I've been trying to think up any real-world situation, any at all, in which applying the one percent doctrine makes logical sense and would be psychologically or practically advantageous.

The difference isn't applying it to good remote possibilities versus bad remote possibilities–odds are overwhelmingly against you in both cases, leading either to crushing disappointment or pre-emptive overreaction, by definition, 99 percent of the time.

If you defy those odds and turn out to be right, you score big. But if you turn out to be wrong, you waste a lot of time, energy and resources, and make a colossal mess.

As far as I can fathom, all the one percent doctrine is good for is insulating self-delusion in matters of extreme perceived importance in which you yourself have little or nothing to lose.

No wonder the Bush administration sees its intuitive appeal in matters of force projection.

And it turns out, as someone who does not believe in God and does not ever want children, the arguments I hear from well-wishing strangers trying to convince me I'm wrong on either count spring straight from the one percent doctrine as well.

For instance, one of the logical rationales for believing in God is that if you do it and it turns out to be a false belief, there's no harm done. But if you don't believe and you're wrong, you're in for an eternity of fire and brimstone.

Phrased another way, if you think there's even a one percent chance there is a God, you should assume there is and believe.

But for those of us who genuinely think there isn't, living as if there is, "just in case," would require being dishonest to ourselves now, in this world, to reap some hypothetical benefit in a merely possible beyond.

Similarly, Dick Cheney's heart palpitations also echo in the background of arguments put forth by those who just can't comprehend the fact that some of us don't want children.

Take the women who work with my mother and comment on how sad it is that I'm depriving her of grandchildren, who like to allay her alleged worries by insisting, despite never having so much as met me, that I'll change my mind.

Mind you, as a child during the height of the Cabbage Patch craze, I put baby dolls among the creepiest of quasi-humanoid forms, right up there with E.T. and Glow Worm, and wanted nothing to do with them. I never babysat as a teenager because I hated kids, thought they were gross and had no desire to interact or communicate with them. To this day I'm unnerved by religious paintings depicting the Annunciation, as they activate a wholly irrational yet mortal fear of spontaneous, miraculous conception. And though I don't make a habit of eating them, kids continue to offend every single one of my senses and simply have no place in the kind of life I want to live.

I'm well aware that the sun having risen every day in the past isn't itself a logical reason to believe it will rise tomorrow, but the odds of me changing my mind, barring some kind of catastrophic head injury, are, to be generous, about one percent.

Yet I get asked by kind-hearted souls who don't want me to live a life of regret after my ovaries whither, how do I know I don't want children if I never experience having them? Sure, I may think I would hate motherhood, in the here and now, but what if I grew to love it?

Essentially, seemingly forgetting they're talking about a human being and not a Brussels sprout, "How do you know you don't like it if you don't try it?"

Well, gee, when you put it that way, why not–I'll wager my time, my money, my looks and my very sanity on the remote possibility that you're right about what a future version of me might want.

The decision not to believe in something or not to do something is still a decision, considered thoroughly and arrived at actively at least as often as decisions in the affirmative. And that's something anyone fond of arguing the one percent doctrine to others to defend their own choices–be they mothers or Christians or trigger-happy vice presidents–could stand to be reminded of.

For while operating on faith is fine for those who hold the luxury of dealing in the possible, deciding on evidence tends to better serve those on the ground.