US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 27, Catastrophic Failure: Enron, Katrina & Politics in the mid-2000s (Con't)

In the summer of 2002... I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush... The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

—Ron Suskind, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush" (2004)

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