Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Ledeen

"So be it" lands like a gavel: not resignation exactly, but a brusque permission slip to stop romanticizing human competence. Ledeen, a polemical writer steeped in foreign-policy combat and ideological argument, is doing something canny here. He borrows the gravity of theology - God, creation, fallibility - to underwrite a decidedly unsentimental view of politics and history. The move isn’t devotional; it’s rhetorical. If fallibility is baked into the species, then calamity isn’t a shocking exception. It’s the default setting.

The phrase "profoundly fallible" sharpens the blade. This isn’t the gentle liberal idea that people make mistakes and learn. It’s closer to a doctrine of permanent malfunction: reason is unreliable, institutions are leaky, and leaders are improvisers who mistake their own narratives for reality. Then comes the punchline: history as "error and accident". That framing rejects the comforting story that events are guided by wise planners or moral progress. It also swerves away from purely structural determinism; "accident" implies contingency, the tiny hinge moments that turn empires.

Subtextually, it’s a warning and an alibi at once. A warning against utopian projects that presume human rationality will cooperate. An alibi for harsh policy choices: if the world is a pinball machine of mistakes, insisting on clean outcomes becomes naive, even irresponsible. The sentence’s bleak efficiency is the point: it offers a worldview where tragedy is not merely possible but predictable - and where the only truly childish act is being surprised by it.