“The definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Everyone one knows Einstein said that. Expect he didn’t. He probably didn’t even think it.

Einstein, who was pretty handy in the lab, knew that the scientific method is to repeat the same experiment over and over again in the hope of getting the same result, and establishing that result as an empirical or theoretical fact.

But the Biden administration returning the US to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and attempting to force the reopening of a Palestinian consulate in Jerusalem? Now that is insanity.

The UNHRC is a known and dismal quantity. It is a propaganda outlet for the enemies of western liberalism: dictators, war criminals and bigots, and sometimes France too. Its anti-Western theatricals are egged on by Russia and China.

This deeply flawed body is morbidly obsessed with Israel, and it pumps lies about Jews and Israel into the bloodstream of the global media and the heart of the UN, which is supposed to replace tyranny and war with rationality and peace. The Biden administration would like to believe otherwise, but there are no grounds for this at all.

The Biden team reckon they know better than the facts. This is because they refuse to accept the fact that Donald Trump did a good thing by withdrawing the US from the UNHRC because it incites hatred against Israel; and because the Democrats refuse to accept a rebuff to their faith that international law, and all and any international institutions, are always forces for good.

It is an article of international law that to open or alter the status of a diplomatic mission, you need the consent of the host country’s foreign ministry. Israel’s foreign minister, Yair Lapid, opposes opening a Jerusalem consulate for Palestinians; not least because it would collapse the new government.

Antony Blinken, the Secretary of State, knows better. When Lapid came to Washington, Blinken announced that the US would proceed regardless. This is a fact already established, and one of several facts those who care about Israel should digest.

Our compulsion to erroneously attribute an unscientific statement to Einstein exposes an awkward fact about human nature: we are neither as rational nor as scientific as we like to think we are. If we were, we wouldn’t get the purpose of repeating an experiment completely back to front, and we wouldn’t encourage similar delusions among our friends and family by sharing it on Facebook along with that picture of Einstein sticking out his tongue.

I am comforted by that picture though. It suggests that the eggheads who have reshaped our world through incomprehensible theories are still human, and that the institutions that rule us aren’t run by bloodless control freaks. I prefer it to the second-most common picture of Einstein, the one in which he rides his bicycle in a tight circle. This, I suspect, is what we and our institutions are really like.

When the empirical facts refuse to comport with our prejudices, our response is not to reconsider our assumptions, but to shoot the messenger and demand a new set of facts. This reflex is especially strong in institutions, because institutions are rational systems, at least in theory, and are programmed to keep going along the same path until they run out of steam or meet a stronger object coming the other way. The technical term is “path dependency”. Perhaps Einstein was mocking the path dependency of his benighted peers when he did his bicycle stunt.

The policies of the Biden administration are a parody of path dependency and a paradigm of institutional self-deception. This administration prizes ideology and images over the difficult job of dealing with the world as it is. It defines the national interest as erasing the successes of the previous administration. It responds to thoughtful disagreement from its allies with pique and pettiness. And the Secretary of State, who is Jewish, is committed to partitioning Jerusalem.

Not to take Einstein’s name in vain, but what would the sainted trick cyclist, or any rational observer, say about this repetition of failed experiments in the hope of a better result?

Dominic Green is the editor of The Spectator’s world edition