“Don’t Take Reality into Account” Principle

The Don’t Take Reality into Account Principle is a wartime strategy for managing fear: optimism is used like a sedative, keeping people from panic and doubt. But the scenes around it expose the danger of that strategy. When reassuring broadcasts and urgent calls to defend a city tell incompatible stories, people may be left less prepared to act, not more confident.

Purpose and contradiction

The principle is described as intended to work like a sleeping pill: people should not panic, succumb to doubt, or become hysterical. Its purpose is to preserve morale at a decisive moment, when fear might otherwise immobilize a population. Yet the narrative immediately asks what such reassurance costs. If people are not made aware of how grave the situation is, they may see no reason to exert themselves. Optimism can settle into passivity, while the information meant to sustain confidence blunts even the instinct for self-preservation.

The maxim therefore contains its own practical contradiction. A message of confidence may prevent despair, but if it conflicts too sharply with what people can see, it risks discrediting the voices asking them to act. The problem is not simply that the official account is optimistic; it is that reassurance and mobilization pull in opposite directions when one denies the urgency on which the other depends.

Competing accounts of the war

Earlier, rumor gives the Tivoli Hotel a different kind of false certainty. People trade claims that the city will be bombed and that an uprising is imminent, though no one knows what uprising is meant. An unidentified plane drops leaflets saying Holden Roberto’s army is outside Luanda and urging the population to kill Eastern European commanders of MPLA units. In September, the narrator is the only person from Eastern Europe in Angola. PIDE gangs prowl the city without effective authorities to restrain them, and every knock at the narrator’s door carries a threat. This atmosphere is the opposite of the sleeping-pill strategy: fear multiplies in the absence of reliable information.

The broadcasts of Comandante Ju-Ju offer a more organized public account. As political commissar of the MPLA general staff, he reads the war communiqués on the radio each evening. When events go well, they are brief and calm; when they turn bad, his accounts grow longer and more ornate, with more adjectives, self-praise, and scorn for the enemy. The narrator can hear the difference even when open windows and distance obscure the words: a short broadcast suggests that the forces are holding or have taken something, while an unusually extended one signals trouble at the front. The changing style makes the communiqué itself an indirect measure of conditions that its language tries to master.

The facts reassurance cannot erase

The battlefield scenes give the principle material limits. Comandante Ndozi’s newly formed unit faces shortages of ammunition and fuel as well as inexperienced troops. Wounded men lie in a truck waiting for gasoline, with no doctor on the front; Ndozi fears that some will bleed to death before they can be taken to Luanda. He expects the enemy to strike again and says the unit may have to give up the town because it will have too little ammunition to defend it. His own account of green soldiers firing blindly shows how fear can consume ammunition without making them effective fighters. After one attack, a half-ton of cartridges has yielded only two enemy dead; in another, the unit enters its objective after firing away every cartridge, only to find that the enemy has already fled.

The isolation of the southern front makes such constraints still harder to disguise. Comandante Farrusco’s unit has 120 men across a region described as one-third the size of Poland, with a single road through waterless bush and too little transport for the whole unit to retreat on foot. On the road to Pereira d’Eça, convoys have been lost in ambushes and none has reached the unit there for a month. A burned-out truck, scattered supplies, and charred remains mark the consequences of that isolation. These details are not abstract signs of difficulty: they determine whether troops can move, be supplied, or survive.

Luanda’s apparent connection to the wider war is equally precarious. The MPLA has only one plane in the city, an old DC-3 flown by Ruiz. He carries ammunition from Brazzaville, supplies besieged towns, and returns serious casualties to Luanda. He has to assess whether an airport is still held by flying over it before landing, and a motor failure could ground the plane because there are no spare parts or mechanics. Against this fragile supply chain, public confidence cannot manufacture transport, ammunition, fuel, or medical care.

The crisis of credibility

When Holden Roberto announces that he will enter Luanda that day, artillery has been firing since dawn, the city is panicked, and the front is only fifteen minutes away by car. At the same time, the population is told to remain calm. The previous day’s leaflets had presented Holden as a figure of authority through the claim that God ruled in heaven and Holden ruled on earth. The gulf between that grand claim, the appeal for calm, and the approaching danger makes the struggle over information visible in the streets as well as on the radio.

Later, Comandante Ju-Ju’s daily communiqué remains very optimistic even though half the country is in enemy hands. The contrast sharpens the principle’s central warning: an account designed to protect people from despair can also leave them unable to judge what must be done. In this wartime world, propaganda, rumor, and observable hardship compete to define reality. The maxim names an attempt to silence that competition; the narrative shows why silence may be mistaken for confidence, and why confidence unsupported by the facts can end in distrust and inaction.