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Perception is reality. It has long been an axiom for soldiers. "All warfare is based on deception," said Sun Tzu, the great 4th century B.C. Chinese strategist whose prize pupil turned out to be Mao Tse-tung. The Greeks understood that principle when they set sail from Troy, leaving behind only a large wooden horse. Macduff knew it when he disguised his soldiers with branches from Birnam Wood as they marched against Macbeth. In World War II, the Allies created a phantom First U.S. Army Group, outfitted with rubber tanks and canvas landing barges (courtesy of the Shepperton movie studios). Its swirl of fake radio messages about an impending invasion at Calais helped keep the entire German 15th Army pinned down 200 miles east of the actual invasion site on Omaha Beach.
At the demilitarized zone that divides Korea, Ronald Reagan looked frowningly northward last week toward the showpiece village that the North Koreans have built there—complete with false fronts on the buildings and jolly villagers trucked in and out every day. Reagan was scornful of the Communist props. "It looks just like a Hollywood back lot, and it isn't any more important," he said.
Reagan is too hard on his California colleagues who, after all, built the movie sets that convinced people of the reality of George Gipp and Drake McHugh. And as Commissioner Gliedman's views demonstrate, the triumph of stagecraft lies in the change from perception affecting reality to perception being reality. The only question now is why the Potemkin plan should be limited to slum housing when it could just as well be applied to all kinds of problems that bedevil officialdom.
Hunger, for example. If $6 will buy a decal of a flowerpot to make a gutted tenement look cheerily affluent, it could just as well buy a decal of a large filet mignon, surrounded by heaps of buttered carrots and peas and mashed potatoes. If that seems too indulgent, perhaps simply a decal of a steaming pot of stew. That should enable quite a few families to imagine themselves well fed.
Unemployment? Why not a decal of happy workers toiling at an assembly line or a cheerful payroll clerk handing out imaginary paychecks?
There is no reason, for that matter, why the Potemkin program should be limited to domestic affairs. Instead of struggling with Congress to pay billions for MX missiles, the Administration could install decals of the missiles already on their launching pads. In Europe, similarly, the Administration could still the uproar over the new Pershing and cruise missiles by deploying decals instead. None of that is likely to deter the Soviets, but perhaps it would deprive assorted paint throwers and other protesters of an issue.
Once the Government has solved all these problems, a cynic might ask whether there was any purpose in having a Government at all. A decal of President Reagan reading a speech into a battery of microphones would serve just as well as a TV image of the real President reading a speech. Similar decals of Congress passing legislation or bureaucrats issuing regulations would create a reassuring illusion of Government not only hard at work but showing that it cares.
As Jefferson wrote—or should have written—in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these perceptions to be self-evident . . ."
— By Otto Friedrich