Although logic is a human invention, sometimes it tends to be ignored, and disasters occur.

The Battle of the Bulge is considered the bloodiest with most losses in American history, in which 19,000 American soldiers were killed, in addition to seventy thousand wounded and missing, all within one month of World War II, at the hands of German forces.

In the last months of the war, the Germans did not have enough soldiers to win a counterattack (the battle lasted from December 16, 1944 to January 25, 1945), and what was left were mostly children under 18 with no combat experience. They also did not have enough fuel and food. The terrain in the Belgian Ardennes, other than the bitterly cold weather, was an obstacle to them, and the Allies were so certain that no German commander with an iota of brains would counterattack, so they chose to leave the lines somewhat weak and unsupplied. Suddenly the Germans attacked anyway, and the massacre occurred.

What the American generals neglected is the extent of Hitler’s disorder, as he was living in his own world, far from reality and reason.

A generation later, in the Vietnam War, then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara considered the world to be a big arithmetic problem, and therefore put everything in “a quantum” and built his career on the idea that any problem could be solved if you obeyed the cold truth of numbers, statistics and logic. He considered one of the measures of success in the Vietnam War was the body count, and how many Viet Cong had been killed by American forces? Killing enough of them will destroy their morale.

General William Westmoreland, the commander of the American forces, used to say: We will continue to bleed them until Hanoi wakes up, and they will have to re-evaluate their position, and thus the war turned into an arithmetic equation.

But the bodies of the Viet Cong increased and accumulated, and the war did not stop, and the reason was the failure of the “equation”, because the leaders of Vietnam were not “rational”, and did not calculate the costs, benefits and huge loss of life, and take their decisions in light of it!

Here it became clear to the Americans that they had neglected the “feelings of the Vietnamese people”, something that cannot be captured on the charts and numbers of the dead on both sides. They, both leaders and private individuals, have demonstrated their willingness to fight for years, as one New York Times reporter wrote, for victory.

In this context, Ho Chi Minh, addressed the Americans as saying: You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, but you are the ones who will get tired first.

In what looks like pride in the accomplishments of American forces, General Westmoreland once told Senator Hollings, “We’re killing them 10 to one. Hollings replied, “The American people don’t care about the ten, they care about the one.

However, it was all hard to believe inside the statistical mind of someone like McNamara. It was like defying the laws of physics, or a typo in a math equation, but that’s the way the world works, some things just don’t count.

From this we see that the danger, as we often see it in investment, is when people become like McNamara, obsessed with data, so confident in their models and that they leave no room for error or surprise, yet there is a possibility that things will be crazy, stupid and inexplicable, and remain that way for a long time.

We should always ask “why is this happening?” and not expect that there will be a reasonable answer. Those who thrive in the long run are those who understand that the real world is an endless series of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.

John Nash, one of the smartest mathematicians, was also schizophrenic, and spent most of his life convinced aliens were sending him coded messages. When asked about this, Nash replied, “The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me in the same way that my mathematical ideas did, so I took it very seriously.”

The first step to accepting that some things don’t count is to realize that the reason for our innovation and advancement is that we are fortunate to have people in this world whose minds work differently from ours, like Nash, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs, who are equally intelligent and absurd, and that we will never get anywhere if everyone viewed the world as a set of rational rules to follow.

The absurd Iran-Iraq war, which lasted for eight terrifying years, was on your mind throughout writing this article !

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By Ahmad alsarraf