I was gon' invade a country, but then I got high

A great movie my mum intro'd me to is a romantic comedy called The Tao of Steve. It's about a guy who's overweight, not super ambitious, but can easily bed women anyway--thanks to the tao of being Steve.

At one point the two leads of the movie have this exchange: (Dex is our hero, and Syd is the woman he's interested in)

Dex: Doing stuff is overrated. Like Hitler. He did a lot. But don't we all wish he woulda just stayed home and gotten stoned?
Syd: Oh, I see. So you're only options are to get stoned or commit genocide?

Though one sees Syd's point, I feel like... there's something to what Dex is saying.

One day I was strolling down the hill to buy groceries and thinking about people who are super accomplished. We think of Being Accomplished as uniformly good, but is it?

I was thinking of the Bush administration and how stupidly they conducted the invasion of Iraq. Assassins' Gate

Just to give one random example that my peacebuilding prof liked to point out: If you decide to dismiss an army, there is one very key thing you need to do first --> collect their guns. You don't send the entire army off to their homes, armed--especially when the army almost totally consists of the one societal group that has just lost power to its old rival.

If my middle-of-the-road prof could have conducted the invasion more intelligently, that means the administration had at its disposal the best advice known to man on how to conduct this already ill-advised invasion, and they either didn't read/access the advice, or they heard it and thought they knew better. Either way, they thought they knew better.

But these were not stupid people. Take one example, Paul Wolfowitz: son of a Cornell professor, took uni classes while still a high school student, had a full scholarship to school, went on the MLK march to Washington, went to Cornell and the University of Chicago, taught poli sci at Yale and later held other big professorships, was a senator's aide, worked on committees under Nixon and Ford, for the Pentagon under Carter, the Dept of State under Reagan, was part of admin for GHW Bush, Ambassador to Indonesia, later became President of the World Bank, aaand was a foreign policy adviser to the Bush admin. ...Where he used 9-11 as an excuse to push for overthrowing Saddaam. He also speaks Arabic, French, German, Hebrew and Indonesian.

Bush's peeps were very intelligent and accomplished people. And perhaps because of all that, had so much hubris they didn't listen to one piece of advice when they invaded Iraq--one of the most ethno-religiously difficult countries in the world--and instead thought they knew best.

You can probably apply this to your favorite banks and corporations as well.

Yes Dex, sometimes we wish smart people would just stay at stay at home and get stoned.