BTW, not understanding people often has nothing to do with not being able to predict what they will do in a given situation. More frequently it has to do with predicting up to *thousands* of things that people might do in a given situation and then not being able to figure out which of those is most likely. Given that, the Liberator should have seen all of the many ways his plan could have gone wrong...
That's a very good point.
Well, that's *a* way to not understand people. Liberator had more of another issue, which once he formed an idea of what will happen, he didn't stop to think whether it actually made sense. And mostly, I think the liberator had the opinion that it doesn't matter what happens since everything can be fixed.
I think the liberator wasn't so much clever as he was a really effective brute-force technician. He would form an idea, and test it. If it worked, great, if not, he would then tweak it and test again. You can get quite a lot of inventing done like that if you have enough resources and a good understanding of the material you are working with, and especially, when mistakes are low stake - just throw away the bad parts of your work and start again. That doesn't really work for large scale social experiments, though.
