From a judicial efficiency standpoint, “good” is any outcome where the jury arrives at a verdict based on correctly interpreted evidence. If you’re unconvinced, just think of the opposite: a jury that has overwhelming evidence for a certain outcome but chooses the contrary. One would assume ignorance, strong-arming, or corruption was at play. As long as the evidence reaches the threshold above “reasonable doubt” (however that’s defined), then a priori this is a “good” outcome: a legal system that maximizes the chances of being correct.

But how can an outcome where an innocent man goes to jail ever be good? When the truth is known, a “good” outcome is whenever the jury finds the truth. Guilty when guilty, and not-guilty when innocent.

Definition 1 says Dmitry’s verdict was “good”, since the jury followed the evidence, but Definition 2 says the verdict was “bad”, because an innocent man went to jail. How can we resolve this?

This situation doesn’t have to be resolved because both definitions belong to different domains. Definition 1 sits under the law, which uses juries as a resolution mechanism under conditions of uncertainty. In a world where we don’t know the truth, what’s good is maximizing our probabilities with the evidence presented to us. Definition 2 concerns axiology, which doesn’t care about uncertainty. Axiology asks “in a perfect world, what is good?”, and in a perfect world, no innocent man ever goes to jail.

Law is a dispute resolution mechanism built for uncertainty, and axiology is asking what goodness looks like without it. To ask whether the outcome of Dmitry Karamazov’s trial was “good”, is really to ask whether we’re talking about axiology or law.

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B2B SaaS companies are no different in this sense, but their cost structure is. Unlike a pencil maker, they don’t require any raw materials or special machinery to make their product - the only meaningful input to making software is labor. Sure, it’s specialized software engineering labor, but in the end it’s just labor. For this reason, B2B SaaS is particularly vulnerable to what will be undoubtably be a tremendous labor saving technology: AI. This leads us to 3 premises that this essay is based on:

1. AI will continue to improve over the next 10 years

2. These improvements will allow software engineers will become 10 to 100 times more productive

3. Labor will continue to make up around 95% of software development costs

If these assumptions hold true, then we can derive that software development costs will conservatively become 7 to 17 times cheaper over the next 10 years. This means the build vs. buy decision looks a lot different for would-be purchasers of SaaS tools, and I’m having a very hard time seeing how the majority of B2B SaaS companies don’t go completely extinct.

Consider a simple CRM vendor. As a customer, I may pay hundreds of thousands per year for the right to use this software. Today, this economic model makes sense, it would cost many times my annual subscription to build a CRM from scratch. But if software development costs were 17 times cheaper, then what would cost $1,000,000 could be done with $59K. I am obviously using sample numbers, but the dynamic is the same - the economic decision of the buyer will eventually flip to favor build over buy. With AI enhanced productivity, one internal senior engineer or PM could build and maintain many times their cost in SaaS subscription savings.

The obvious foil to this prediction is that I am just making up numbers. While this is true, it’s the directionality of the trend that is impossible to argue against. Below is a chart I made that should help to visualize the dynamic.

Once the software development cost comes down to where total cost of ownership (TCO) is less to build than to buy, the seller’s business is finished. However, we must also remember that AI will make SaaS companies more productive too, allowing them to drop their prices leading to lower TCO for the buyer. This is represented by the slope of the “Buy” line. I think it is reasonable to assume that the TCO for building will drop much faster than SaaS companies will drop their prices. Remember that the lack of a marginal cost allows SaaS prices to be based on an abstract “value-based pricing” model, which is why SaaS firms have notoriously high margins. While this does give them wiggle room to go down in price (goodbye cold brew and fitness stipends!), the compression will still fail to match the drop in build TCO.

Moats

Admittedly, my analysis thus far has simplified the value of the average SaaS business to be purely about cost. While this is true for the majority of B2B SaaS businesses, it certainly isn’t for all of them. There are many SaaS tools that offer something that simply cannot be built, no matter how cheap software development gets. These are the B2B SaaS businesses that will survive the Saaspocalypse.

Let’s look at the traditional moats that exist B2B SaaS today, and why they may or may not protect businesses in the future.

Scale Economies

Scale economies are cost efficiencies gained through size and scale. As we just learned above, this may extend your lifespan, but its value as a moat diminishes significantly. This will only be a relevant moat for the largest of B2B SaaS companies; Microsoft, Google, etc.

Switching Costs

B2B SaaS tools are very sticky. Once you’re on one, it is very expensive and time consuming to switch to another. Many times companies are stuck in a situation where they have a better option, but the switching costs are too high to justify the move. In this scenario, the moat for the incumbent software tool is its high switching costs. However, as with scale economies, this is just a cost argument. AI productivity improvements for software development includes migration costs, making this moat no longer viable.

Network Effects

Having a strong network effect means that additional users of the software improve the value to existing users, creating a virtuous flywheel. The best example of a network effect is a telephone - the more people that have telephones, the more useful the telephone is to you. This is a rare moat for a B2B SaaS company to have, but there are a few examples. LinkedIn has a virtually impenetrable network effect moat that will be unaffected by AI. It doesn’t matter how cheaply you can replicate LinkedIn’s code, if you don’t have the end users, you have a useless tool.

Cornered Resource

Having a cornered resource for a SaaS business means having access to a proprietary data set that benefits your product offering. There are quite a few examples of businesses with this moat, including ZoomInfo, Bloomberg, and Palantir. Like network effects, this moat will allow a SaaS business to survive the impending cost reduction since their offering doesn’t just rest on price.

What comes next

To recap, our simplified thesis is the cost structure inversion brought on by AI will eliminate any SaaS business that doesn’t have a network effect or a cornered resource. I’d now like to explore what I think this change looks like from the customers perspective. I think this will look like one of the following:

1. The customer does the building themselves.

2. The customers pay a much smaller set of SaaS vendors (perhaps as low as one or two) that give them their entire IT stack, highly customizable, for a subscription cost less than #1.

Which of these a company chooses will depend on things like size and industry. For large companies, it will make sense for them to go with #1. For smaller companies that have lower software dependance, it may make sense to go with #2.

The future may also look like some combination of both: AI companies that sell “IT as a Service”. Instead of 100 software vendors you need one, let’s call them OpenIT. OpenIT will build all your existing IT stack perfectly customized to your company and allows you to flexibly make changes in real time (is this SaaSaaS? I hope so). The customer would likely still need some IT staff to: 1) ensure OpenIT builds the tool correctly, 2) helps steer the AI to adapt the software to changing business needs, 3) maintain and oversee ad hoc errors and requests. But even so, the IT team will need to be a fraction of its current size. In practice this looks like the final substantiation of Low-Code/No-Code.

Either way, the benefit of this to the customer will be immense:

• They’ll get exactly what they want, tailored perfectly to their business. No more crazy workarounds or “this feature is coming in Q4”. Any enhancement could be added quickly and cheaply. The full value of software would be unlocked for every business.

• Since all the tools are built internally or with one or two vendors, integration workloads would be reduced significantly. The AI could build each tool in a custom manner that allows it to seamlessly connect to other areas of the stack.

• Significant Cost Reduction. This will come from many sources, but the biggest would be great reduction in SaaS spend and software maintenance overhead (internal roles or professional services)

• Future AI compatible. Since the stack has been fully built by AI, it stands to reason that it will now be ready for all future AI advancements. For example, what will be easier to release an AI agent into, an interconnected web of 100 different SaaS tools? Or a single IT stack built custom by an AI?

Counter Arguments

Where does this argument fail? Below are a few counterpoints that I can think of.

If software development costs get close to zero, won’t that mean SaaS businesses will be able to build as much new software as they want too? The combined pace of development could make their offerings more appealing to customers.

Yes, they definitely can, but all the other SaaS vendors will be doing the same thing, causing a SaaS price death spiral since the supply for a given software solution will skyrocket. The only ones who will survive the price death spiral (who don’t have a non-cost moat) will be the hyperscalers. This is why I said scale economies is still a moat for about 5 companies. Everyone can try to become OpenIT, but everyone can’t be OpenIT. This still leads to SaaSpocalypse.

In Premise #3 you said that software costs are 5% non-labor. This may not be true in the future, and it may not even be true now.

I’ll admit I based this number on my personal experience with vibes mixed in. I think you can definitely make a case for this today - are cloud infrastructure and dev tools more than 1/20th labor cost? Maybe in some cases but it certainly hasn’t been in my experience.

AI capabilities are far away from 100xing software developers. This prediction may be true, but its decades away.

Fair enough. But it is very hard to argue that this isn’t something that will eventually happen. It’s just a matter of when. 5 years? 15? I think it’s much closer to the former than the latter.

Conclusion

In the end, given that AI improvements continue, I have a hard time of thinking of scenarios where the Saaspocalypse doesn’t happen. If you’re a SaaS business, the thing to ask yourself is: “if my customer could build my tool, line for line, would they still pay to use my software?” If the answer is no, then you need to start digging your moat, and finding a cornered resource or a network effect would be a good place to start.

I never thought I’d write about a reality TV show, but I found myself getting more engrossed into Love Island than I was Succession or Severance (both of which I enjoyed immensely). Which got me thinking… why? Sigmund Freud once said that “it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.” And while I am normally good at renunciation, it turns out that Love Island caters to pure instinct.

Didn’t the wisest man in Athens say something about how the unexamined reality show wasn’t worth watching? If so, then I happen to agree.

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Love Island is technically a dating show. Originally British, it has since spawned versions across the Anglosphere with Love Island: US and Love Island: Australia. The premise is simple: place attractive twenty-somethings into an isolated villa without phones or alcohol for eight weeks, watch them couple up, continuously introduce increasingly attractive newcomers, and crown the last couple standing as the winners.

Love Island stands out from most dating shows because it’s relatively unstructured. For the most part, contestants just mingle for every waking hour (reportedly getting quite bored), while cameras record everything. The producers then sift through hundreds of hours of daily footage, pulling out the storylines complete with rising tension and carefully timed reveals.

The show begins with ten contestants (called islanders) - five men and five women - who are put into “Couples”, which is the central dynamic of the show. Being in a “Couple” provides safety from being “dumped from the island.” It’s important to note that a “Couple”, as defined within the rules of Love Island (in which I will use a capital “C”), may or may not match the everyday meaning of a small-c couple, aka, an actual relationship. On the Island, contestants can be in a Couple without being a couple, and they also can be a couple without being in a Couple. However, both mismatches tend to be temporary since failing to form a romantic Couple typically results in being dumped from the island.

Each week there is a formal “re-coupling” where the Couples are re-made by allowing one set of contestants to pick who they want their new partner to be. Many times, this leads to the same Couple as before, but sometimes it forces the islanders to make tough decisions. Early on, contestants leave the show by being the last person standing after a re-coupling. It’s a lot like musical chairs… if everyone playing was a model. As the season progresses, you eventually end up with fewer and fewer couples, with the winners determined by viewer voting.

Contestants unable to secure strong partnerships get eliminated, new attractive participants are added into the villa, and each week’s re-coupling allows contestants to update based on the events of the previous week.

The entertainment value of the show revolves around the tension of whether couples stay together or not. Remember, any couple that exists in the villa is, at most, just a few weeks old, which inevitably leads to a lot of turnover. The peak of this tension is when the risks and stakes of breaking up are both at their highest.

The chart below illustrates this idea. The X-axis represents the stakes - or the degree to which breaking up feels meaningful, translating to higher entertainment value for the viewer. Since the stakes of a breakup are higher for a month-old couple than for a day-old couple, this axis doubles as a proxy for time. The Y-axis, on the other hand, represents the risk that a given couple will break up. In other words, it tracks the likelihood that something will go wrong. This is the primary lever for the producers to manufacture drama.

Quadrant 1 - A lot happening but it doesn’t matter

The top left quadrant is the show’s introductory phase, meant to familiarize us with the contestants and the contestants with each other. You’d think this would be entertaining, but you’d be wrong. A lot is happening, the islanders are sizing each other up, relationships are forming and dissolving in minutes, etc. However, the entertainment value is low because the stakes are low. It doesn’t feel meaningful because there hasn’t been enough time for committed relationships to form or for the viewer to get to know the contestants.

Quadrant 2 - Nothing happens

Love Island differs from other dating shows, like The Bachelorette, in that the ending is the least interesting part. I don’t think I’ve ever actually finished a Love Island season; it’s just not why you watch. The boredom arises from the opposite problem as Quadrant 1 — the stakes are high, but it doesn’t matter because the risk of a breakup has fallen to near zero, and the show loses its raison d’etre.

Quadrant 3 - The purest form of entertainment right into your veins

The best part of the show is when both the stakes and risks reach their peak, which happens around 60% of the way through. The climax comes with two separate events that happen in quick succession - Casa Amor and Movie Night. Both are interesting for their own reasons, but they share real risks for the couples and enough time has passed for it to feel meaningful.

Casa Amor

Casa Amor undoubtedly begins the 5-7 episode streak that is the peak of the show. At a certain point, all contestants of a specific gender, let’s say the men, get sent to a different villa, with an equivalent number of new women. At the same time the original group of women contestants get an equivalent number of new men staying with them at the villa. The contestants stay in their newly assigned villa for 3 days in complete isolation before converging back to a single villa. The “original” contestants get to decide if they want to “bring back” one of the new contestants. I cannot overstate the intensity of the drama this produces. The “new” contestants are hell-bent on getting selected to come back, and the original contestants must decide if they are going to betray their existing couple for someone new. The process by which these decisions are revealed to the viewer is masterfully manicured reality TV gold.

If you want to get a sense of what a Casa Amor reveal looks like, this clip shows a contestant bringing back someone from Casa Amor, despite being in a strong couple beforehand (sorry for the quality).

Movie Night

If you assumed that “whatever happens in Casa Amor, stays in Casa Amor”, you’d be mistaken. Anything scandalous that wasn’t brought up naturally gets revealed during Movie Night.

There’s a phrase I first heard from Alex Danco called “social fog of war”, which describes the necessity of information obscurity to ensure social cohesion. This means limiting common knowledge - or the degree to which others know that others know that others know...and so forth. Scott Aaronson in his essay on common knowledge describes this best:

Whereas, in social contexts, very often you’re managing a delicate epistemic balance where you need certain things to be known, but not known to be known, and so forth—where you need to prevent common knowledge from arising, at least temporarily.

I have an unpublished essay that uses these concepts to explain the disproportionate amount of drama and upset feelings caused by weddings. Normally, people don’t know their exact place in a specific social hierarchy - it is obscured by the social fog of war. But weddings lift the social fog of war by letting everyone know where they stand through determining who gets an invite, who’s in the wedding party, who sits at what table, etc. This moment when the fog lifts cause things to become known that aren’t supposed to be known.

The underlying importance of Movie Night, and hence why it comes after Casa, is to ensure everything that happened at Casa becomes common knowledge. Movie Night encapsulates the delicate epistemic balance that is the social fog of war, and it causes a tremendous amount of chaos. Without Movie Night, “Bro Code” could prevent dramatic information from reaching the women, and vice versa.

II.

There is an interesting dynamic related to authenticity that is pervasive throughout the show. The explicitly stated goal of contestants is to find love, but everyone knows that’s not the real reason. It shouldn’t be a surprise that love-based reality shows have a very poor track record of helping people find love. Considering the contestants know this, we can assume their primary motivation is to become a famous influencer. This also shouldn’t be a surprise, nor is it very interesting by itself. What is interesting is that the ultimate faux pas for a contestant is to reveal that they are just there for clout. Letting their true motivations slip is usually a death knell — the public turns on them (which matters for voting), and the contestants also turn on them (probably because they know the public will).

So, if your objective is to become an influencer, but you need to pretend like that isn’t your objective, what do you do?

The obvious answer is to get the watching public to like you, to become a “fan favourite”, if you will. Ideally you have some combination of “qualities” that are suited to becoming an influencer. One way to improve your chances would be to analyze what’s made successful fan favourites historically and then mimic their traits. While in theory this could work, I don’t think it happens in practice. Strategically acting inauthentically for long periods of time ( seven days a week for weeks on end!) is extremely hard to do. Sure, Jeremy Strong or Daniel Day-Lewis could do it, but we aren’t dealing with professionals. Far from it.

If intentionally changing your personality is too hard, then the only other option is quantity, which means maximizing one’s days on the show. It doesn’t matter how boring you are, the more time you can be in front of the audience, the more Instagram followers you will get. Believe it or not, someone actually has a graph for this:

The astute reader may question the causality — it may not be the quantity that leads to fame, but instead those with influencer “qualities” tend to last longer. This may be partially true, especially for the real talents, but overall it doesn’t change the strategy: it is very hard to become famous from Love Island if you quickly get kicked off Love Island.

To stay on the show, the contestants need to actually play the game: find a couple, convince the other contestants and the public that it’s authentic, and don’t get dumped. This is the hilarious paradox of the authenticity of the contestants. Their implicit motivation is fame, but to achieve this they must maximize their time on the show, which means trying to fall in love. Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that most contestants are acting authentically!

III.

Usually once per episode I find my mind has drifted off attempting to figure out what weird human quirk makes this enjoyable to watch. Specifically the parts where a happy couple is imploding before my eyes. I don’t think it’s schadenfreude. I don’t feel joy or pleasure when watching the misfortune of contestants, but I am highly entertained. Why?

The most interesting answer to this question is the biological argument. What we are watching is gossip in its purest form, and we are wired to like it.

In 1996, Robin Dunbar argued in Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, that human language evolved due to an evolutionary need to gossip. The argument goes something like this:

Many mammals live in groups to improve their reproductive odds. The great apes are especially social, managing complex social hierarchies. Large groups have many advantages, but maintaining their cohesion is hard. There needs to be a mechanism that builds trust and regulates cooperation, or else the group fractures. Non-human apes do this through grooming.

The problem with grooming, however, is that it doesn’t scale. Grooming is inherently a one-on-one activity that must be done between nearly all members of the group, meaning time spent grooming grows as group size increases. Since grooming is essential for maintaining social bonds, larger groups must dedicate more time to grooming, cutting directly into their time spent on critical tasks like finding food.

This limitation effectively caps group size, leaving us with a biological trade-off: groups can only grow as large as the time they can reasonably spend grooming. For most primates, this cap seems to be around 20% of their time. This is illustrated through our closest relative, the Chimpanzee. Chimps have a mean group size of 55, and dedicate roughly 20% of their time to grooming.

The average group size for early humans was much higher than 55, about three times, which Dunbar famously put around 150. If humans used social grooming to maintain a group size that big, we would have to spend more than half our time grooming. So we didn’t, says the theory, we started talking instead. And not talking about abstract concepts like gods, we started gossiping about other humans. Since gossiping allowed us to form social connections quicker with more than one person at a time, it expands the group size cap inherent to social grooming, and allowed humans group size to grow.

Much like how reproduction is incentivized by feeling good, gossiping releases significant amounts of oxytocin, which is a hormone that seems to do a lot of childbirth related things but also boosts social bonding, positive emotions, and stress reduction. Our body makes it feel good to talk about others, because maintaining our group size was an important evolutionary trait.

I think this is as good a theory as any for why we like reality shows, especially dating shows. They recreate a small band of humans and use artificial rules to maximize the amount of gossip. You also have no risk of the gossip turning on you — it’s only upside!

IV.

When first trying to come up with a way to conclude this post, I came to the realization that my essay was turning into a Love Island episode — with a drawn out ending where nothing substantial happens. Therefore, I hope you can appreciate me saving you the time and abruptly ending here.

The story of German national identity goes something like this: German culture was an essential part of European history beginning in the High Middle Ages, yet politically it existed as a decentralized collection of kingdoms and duchies. We don’t see centralized unified German state until 1871, when Otto von Bismarck bucked this trend and achieved German unification. The young nation then found itself on the losing end of two world wars, the latter which saw it commit some of the worst atrocities in modern history. All of this was (rightly or wrongly) blamed on German national identity, which the post-war occupiers focused on eliminating. Having completely internalized their shame (much to the relief of the rest of the world), the Germans looked around at each other after reunification in 1990 and asked, "where do we go from here?"

Even 35 years after the Berlin wall fell, this is mostly where we’re at today. The 4th largest economy in the world, the de-facto leader of the European Union, has a national identity that is notably different than its peer nations. This essay is an attempt to evaluate the historical stories of Germany’s past to try and answer the question of how German national identity will evolve into the future. The source material for this essay consists of Germany: Memories of a Nation by Neil MacGregor, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, Blood and Iron by Katja Hoyer, Aftermath by Harald Jahner, and After the Reich by Giles MacDonogh.

II.

In 1945, after six long years of war and much their country destroyed, the Nazi’s formally surrendered. It’s important to put into context what the allies were thinking at this moment: here is this relatively new country, formed through "iron and blood", that has, within a 25-year window, started the two greatest wars the world has ever seen combined with unconscionable atrocities. They tried a harsh treaty in 1919, which failed. They tried appeasement in 1938, which also failed. Germany was now under occupation, an opportunity that would not likely come again, leaving one chance to achieve the stated goal of "never again". The decision had to be made on what to do: should they split Germany back into a pre-1871 collection of independent states? or maintain unification but expunge all militaristic and nazi-oriented cultural elements? Despite the wishes of France, they chose the latter.

Step one of this plan was to target Prussia. Prussia was the largest and most well-known of the German states; Bismarck, Fredrick the Great, Wilhelm II, and Kant, were all from Prussia. Prussia was blamed for its highly militaristic culture, going back centuries. Voltaire famously quipped “where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state”, in reference to Prussian military expenditures, which neared 75% of state budget in peacetime. (For reference, in 2025 the US spent 11% of state budget on its military). Therefore, in February 1947, the allies decided to wipe Prussia off the map. The preamble to the declaration read:

"The Prussian State which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany has de facto ceased to exist."

For reference, here are two maps of German states, one from 1920, another from 2025. You can see that while many states remain, such as Bavaria and Saxony, Prussia is nowhere to be found.

To this day, modern Germans do not hear about Prussia outside of history class or perhaps a walking tour of Berlin. The allies post-war objective was achieved in this sense — Prussia no longer exists.

Another "never again" tactic, championed by Churchill in particular, was the ethnic cleansing of all European Germans back to Germany. A surprisingly under discussed fact of post-WWII history is that between 1945 and 1950, 15 million ethnic Germans were expelled from eastern Europe and forced to resettle in Germany or Austria. The primary justification for this move was that it would help stabilize the region after the war and into the future.

In addition to eliminating the concept of Prussia and re-settling, the allies did extensive de-Nazification, re-education of brainwashed youths, and wrote a pacifist-oriented constitution to go along with a decentralized central government.

The post-war occupation of Germany was tremendously successful from at least one perspective: Germany has not invaded anyone since. The militaristic national identity of Germany was stripped away, which paved the way for a western-aligned economic powerhouse. But while the allies were successful in stripping away the old identity, it was up to the German people to come up with a new one. Let's now go back into history for potential sources of German national identity.

III.

Even without any bad stuff, Germany has this problem where many of the people and places that could be used for their national identity are not within its modern borders. For this we can first blame the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was famously "neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire"; instead, it was a loose collection of states that occupied most of central Europe for hundreds of years. The states that made up the Holy Roman Empire were mostly German, and many of them did not wind up within the borders of modern Germany.

Take for example, the oldest German university. Universities are a common source of national pride for intellectual achievements. Oxford was established in 1096 and has been a tremendous source of English exceptionalism. The same goes for the Sorbonne in France or Harvard in America. For Germany this is Charles University (Karls-Universität). This great university was created as the first German speaking university to compete with the Sorbonne. The problem with this quintessential German university? It’s in Prague and stopped speaking German after 1945. Would Harvard still be a source of American pride if it wasn’t in America and stopped speaking English? Or Oxford if it was in Ireland?

Or take the great city of Strasbourg, which rests upon the river Rhine. This city was home to perhaps the greatest of all German writers, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was also the residence of Johannes Gutenberg when he perfected his printing press. It’s now part of France.

What of the great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant? He was born in the Prussian city of Königsberg and literally never left. I don’t mean that he never lived anywhere else, I mean he basically didn’t take a single step outside the city for his 79 years of life. Today that city is called Kaliningrad and became Russian in 1945.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to Germany; many other countries have a similar situation: Istanbul for the Italians or Alexandria for the Greeks. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule - no country has so much of their cultural history living outside their modern borders as does Germany.

This phenomenon also applies to people as much as places. The most famous example is the founding father of the German people: Charlemagne. Charlemagne formed the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century and is considered "the father of Europe". When he died his empire fractured into east and west, which became the Holy Roman Empire and the Kingdom of France, respectively. This kicked off a 1,200-year animosity between Germany and France about who gets to claim Charlemagne as their own. This was taken very seriously as many French kings would become anointed using Joyeuse, Charlemagne's sword, which now sits in the Louvre.

So, who gets to claim Charlemagne? If the name is any hint, the rest of the world considers him French, even if they don’t know it. Charlemagne is his French name; Germans call him Charles the Great. I suppose it's not impossible to form a national identity around contested figures, but what would it mean if another country had legitimacy to claim George Washington or Mahatma Gandhi as their own?

These historical facts may complicate the picture but are not without precedent. Germany unified in in the 19th century despite many of these same issues, how did they do it?

IV.

In 1871, a Prussian statesman named Otto von Bismarck successfully unified a collection of central European states into a modern German nation (if you want a full account of this, see my essay on Bismarck). Bismarckian identity was driven primarily by two factors: language and war.

Language

When trying to unify a collection of states, a common language is a great place to start. Luckily for Bismarck, the majority of those living within the Holy Roman Empire spoke German on a day-to-day basis. This was due to the widespread popularity of Martin Luther’s bible, which was famously written in everyday German rather than Latin, the language of the elites. Having a common language allows communication, trust, and written stories to help align independent states.

The best example of using German writing as a source of shared stories was the brothers Grimm, whose catalog of original and popularized works includes Cinderella, The Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White.

The brothers were tremendously important for their contribution to the formation of German identity. They were writing in the early 1800s which was a tumultuous time for all of Europe, but especially for the German states. Napoleon’s conquests had ended the Holy Roman Empire for good, organized religion was in steep decline, and nationalism was spreading across Europe. These factors caused the German states to ask themselves, "what are we? what does it mean to be German?" There wasn't yet a great answer, aside from "definitely not French".

The brothers’ stories greatly developed German culture, helping form the basis for Bismarck's Germany.

However, the brothers Grimm were re-evaluated after 1945. Their lesser known, antisemitic tales were held up by the Nazis as a source of great pride, which tainted their entire canon. MacGregor adds:

In consequence, the [Grimm] stories were for a later generation stained not just by this official [Nazi] endorsement, but by a concern that the violence and cruelty in the tales might also be an enduring trait in the national character, and one not always redeemed by traditional German virtues.

Defense & Militarism

If there are any laws of history, one would be that war unites people. While a shared language and culture may be a prerequisite for unification, it’s rarely the catalyst. Instead, it's war that binds a nation together. This is especially true for defense: small independent states are much easier to conquer than large, unified ones. Countries that unified for defensive purposes include Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Malaysia, any country with "United" in its name", Belgium, Netherlands, Japan, and many more. It's almost harder to find countries that didn't originate this way.

You only need to read the lyrics of various national anthems to get a sense of the importance of war in shaping national identity. Here is the Malaysian national anthem, Negaraku, which is largely about defensive unification:

My motherland,

The land where my blood spills,

The people live,

United and progressive!

Or take the The Star-Spangled Banner. While everyone is familiar with “And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” the lesser-known latter verses of get even more descriptive: ⁠"Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution."

Although my favorite example is the French National Anthem, La Marseillaise, which is almost comically violent.

The blood-stained standard is raised,

Do you hear in the countryside,

Those blood-thirsty soldiers ablare?

They're coming right into your arms

To tear the throats of your sons, your wives!

To arms, citizens,

Form up your battalions

Let's march, let's march!

Let blood impure

Water our furrows!

And who might those “blood-thirsty soldiers” be? The Germans, of course.

With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that the German unification in 1871 was initiated through war against France. Bismarck tricked Napoleon III into attacking, which spurred nationalistic fervor amongst the German states, allowing him to unify. Here is a speech Bismarck wrote admitting the path to unification was to be done not through speeches, but through war, giving him the nickname "The Iron Chancellor".

The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power [...] Prussia must concentrate its strength and hold it for the favourable moment, which has already come and gone several times. Since the treaties of Vienna, our frontiers have been ill-designed for a healthy body politic. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood.

But while Bismarck's greatest achievement was unifying Germany, his greatest failure was the trajectory it took once he was gone. The national identity of Bismarck’s Germany melted away after 1918 and 1945. Germans now have a high aversion to anything that even remotely smells of militarism. Look no further than the Hermann Monument, built in 1875 as a symbol of Arminius’ victory over the Romans, which is now looked at as cringey at best, shameful at worst. There are many that don't want stories like this being included in the German identity. In 2009, the 2,000-year anniversary of the victory, there was no parade or celebration held in Germany. There were, however, celebrations in the town of Hermann, Missouri. Go figure.

V.

With all that, where could German national identity go in the 21st century?

If there is one area where Germany is certainly leading the world, and I believe to be a source of their new national identity, is owning one’s mistakes. There are few countries that have erected monuments in the middle of their capitals dedicated to their own shame. Yet in the heart of Berlin, only a few hundred yards from the Reichstag, is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. There are other friendly modern nations with genocidal pasts (Turkey and Japan) that, to this day, won't even acknowledge them. It may seem paradoxical to list shame as a source of national pride, but I think this works in a “more enlightened than thou” sense.

Modern German national identity is also greatly bolstered by how they view themselves economically. It was Germans that invented the printing press, the car, and the diesel engine. It's Germany that is the economic powerhouse of Europe, with a reputation of intense dedication to quality and industriousness.

Germany’s national identity is also strongly tied to the EU project. Rather than focusing on past national glory, it emphasizes building a peaceful and united Europe. It’s about looking forward rather than back. If anyone is right for the task it's Germany, who's history is tied to an entity that operated similarly: the Holy Roman Empire.

Although there is a degree to which Germany's de-militarized, and fluid national identity is due to the 70 or so years we’ve lived in a unipolar world. Germany didn't need a military (or a strong national identity for that matter) because the Americans were guaranteed to keep the peace. But times are changing. As the US pulls back from Europe, Germany has begun to rearm. Will this lead to a reinvigoration of Germany's historical stories that were much maligned post-1945? Or will the future looking, peaceful, European economic juggernaut narrative keep hold?

I'm also not so cynical to think that this is a binary choice. Yes, it is possible for Germany to rearm itself and use history as sources of national identity, without trying to conquer Europe and set up death camps. This could be the only outcome that leads to a unified Germany into the future. When times get tough and foreign dictators come knocking, you need to look backwards for inspiration to move forward. To quote Goethe, "He who cannot draw on 3,000 years is living hand to mouth.”

Over the last 10–15 years, the media landscape has decentralized, shifting from traditional sources to what’s now called "alternative media." The internet has given anyone the ability to publish their opinions and build a large following across various online mediums. Before this shift, people had to rely on a relatively fixed set of media outlets—newspapers, magazines, or radio channels—for news and analysis.

On balance, I think the rise of alternative media is a good thing. More consumer choice is generally better, especially when it comes to information. But this is obviously not a hot take. In fact, it might be the coldest take I could have. If there's one thing that's true about alternative media, people who consume it LOVE talking about how great it is. What you hear much less often, and what I want to discuss in this essay, are its problems. There are some unique dynamics that arise from the consumption of alternative media that are non-existent with traditional sources.

But before we dive into that, let’s take a step back and look at how we got here.

The Rise and Fall of Traditional Media

(A quick note on definitions. When I talk about traditional media, I am referring to a conglomeration of different things, including news shows like FOX, MSNBC, and CNN, and newspapers like the NYT, WSJ, and WaPo. When I talk about alternative media, I am talking about the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people who post about news and analysis on YouTube, Podcasts, Substack, Twitter, TikTok, etc.)

Traditional media enjoyed a very cushy existence for the first 50 year. The barriers to entry were high, so only a few networks, national newspapers and magazines existed. Interestingly, this lack of choice wasn't seen as an issue. Societal trust was at an all-time high, and for whatever reason traditional media outlets were quite unbiased and homogenous, none venturing far beyond the center of the Overton window. Competition between outlets occurred primarily around getting the best scoop, such as WaPo breaking Watergate.

This dynamic began to change in the 1990s when Roger Ailes introduced a competitive concept to get more viewers: don't be unbiased, instead give people want they want. It was a revolutionary idea that turned Fox News into the media empire it is today. Seeing the meteoric rise of Fox News, the other media outlets soon followed suit. This was traditional medias first introduction to the idea that, to quote Ailes, "people don't want to be informed, they want to feel informed." This trend was exacerbated by the internet, where for the first time the traditional media outlets had some serious outside competition. They leaned harder into the biases of their viewers since this allowed them to partially stem the hemorrhaging of viewers, which gets us to where we are today, where each traditional outlet largely gives you one biased point of view.

(It's important to note though that "biased" does not mean "makes stuff up", as I talk about in here, it instead means to report on a selective subset of the overall context of a situation.)

The rise of alternative media began in the 90s with the advent of the internet but has gotten hugely popular in the last 10 years through Substack, Twitter, Podcasts, and YouTube. The creed of alternative media is nearly identical to the founding hopes for the internet: democratizing speech means anyone anywhere can publish, the dynamics of competition and debate will allow only the best, truest opinions to the top, which will usher in a utopian era of enlightened discourse. We have choice now! We can follow the best people in the world and get news and analysis from whoever and are no longer shackled to a small number of traditional outlets!

This is a little tongue in cheek, but I don't think it's off base to say that anyone who engages with alternative media is very bullish on alternative media. This leads to my primary concern around alternative media, which is the overconfidence of those who engage with it.

Overconfidence

Most people who engage with traditional media 1) know it's biased but 2) watch it anyway. Let’s start with the first point. Because there are so few major outlets, their biases are constantly scrutinized. No one watching Fox News has gone their whole life without hearing that Fox News is biased. And where does that criticism often come from? Other traditional media outlets. When a network publishes something false, who calls them out? Their peers. This awareness seeps in, even if viewers don’t actively seek it. It forces a quiet acknowledgment—however small—that their preferred outlet has an angle. And of course, this isn’t a revelation. If someone claimed MSNBC or Fox News was unbiased, they’d sound delusional. We don’t just know these outlets are biased—we know that everyone else knows it too.

Which gets us to #2: if people know it's biased, why keep watching? Given a choice between unbiased Option A and biased Option B, most would claim they’d pick A. If you care about updating your world view based true information, you should prefer the least biased source. Additionally, you’d want others to see you choosing it because admitting a preference for biased media doesn’t exactly scream intellectual credibility. So, again, why would people continue to watch traditional media when they know it's biased? Because they have an out. And it would sound something like: "sure, it’s biased, but there aren't many alternatives, and everything else is biased too." Whether or not that argument holds up, it provides just enough justification to keep tuning in.

This gets us to the main point of this section. It's a bit circular, but one of the benefits of traditional media is that people know it's biased. Having a high bar of skepticism when you engage with new information is good and means you’re more likely to approach new information with a grain of salt, albeit probably a small one.

Alternative media on the other hand does not have this dynamic. Everyone who is engaged with alternative media is highly confident that the slew of Substack newsletters and podcasts that they follow are unbiased. Why such confidence? Well, for the inverse of the two reasons we just talked about. First, they don't have anyone telling them their publication is biased. Instead of reading a traditional media outlet that gets called biased all the time, they are instead reading an obscure Substack with a name like "Napoleon's Bulldog". Not only is no one telling them “Napoleon’s Bulldog” is probably biased, no one has even heard of it. There are just too many alternative media outlets to make it likely that you will hear any external checks on your preferred tweeter/podcaster/blogger.

But perhaps the biggest reason for the overconfidence we see in alternative media is that the burden of consuming biased media is now on the consumer. No longer can we use the excuse of "well they're all biased and there's no other options". There are a TON of other options, many of which are high quality. If you are frequently consuming a highly biased alternative media source by your own volition, you would be a dummy. But you're not a dummy. And since you’re not a dummy, your alternative media source must be unbiased. Are you starting to see the problem? Since there is no longer an excuse to justify watching biased media, people will subconsciously trick themselves into believing they are watching unbiased media as a self-esteem preservation technique.

Let’s call this the Alternative Media Overconfidence Principle: regardless of an alternative source’s quality relative to a traditional outlet, people will exhibit strong confidence that it is highly superior.

Confirmation bias just keeps ruining everything

If done right, alternative media can provide far better information than traditional sources. The problem? Doing it right is hard. That’s what I want to explore here.

Traditional media operates within a narrow band—ranging from bad to decent—while alternative media swings wildly between pure nonsense and genuinely brilliant unbiased insight. Some may say this isn’t an issue. That the dynamics of competition will make sure the best stuff rises to the top. To which I’d ask: Are you sure about that? Confirmation bias hasn’t disappeared. It’s human nature to seek out information that reinforces what we already believe. In fact, this was one of the main criticisms of traditional media—they exploit our biases to keep us engaged. So why wouldn’t alternative media fall into the same trap?

Individual content creators operate under the same incentive structure as traditional media: maximize followers. Many have left their old jobs and aren’t eager to return to a 9-to-5. Do you really think most will opt for the less popular but more balanced take? Or will they lean into what their audience wants, in turn getting them more subscribers?

Consider which headlines would get more clicks:"Here's why all Trump voters are deranged fascists" or "An unbiased analysis of Trump's first term"? Or, "Liberals want to turn America into a Communist hellscape" vs. "Weighing the pros and cons of socialized medicine"? The creators pushing the latter two won’t build audiences anywhere near the size of those pushing the former. The market of ideas rewards outraged bias, not nuance.

I understand that "confirmation bias is really bad" isn't exactly an original take. My point is that just because we have gotten away from traditional media doesn't mean we’ve gotten rid of confirmation bias, which has been the culprit all along.

Conclusion

I have a quote in my notes and I can't find the source, but after the invention of the printing press a bishop apparently said, "printing will make reading the infatuation of those who have no business reading." I am not blind to the fact that my critiques can be taken as a modern version of this quote. However, my point is not that the average person cannot be trusted to decide their information sources. My goal is to raise a concern, such that it can be made aware of and hopefully improved.

We are entering a world where there are tens of thousands of different information sources to choose from, and it is up to every individual to properly vet and curate their own sources. As I said, this is a good thing, but we must be prepared that this may lead to a dynamic where the average person consumes worse information sources with increased confidence. This isn't a great mixture for flourishing societal discourse.

While this is concerning, it's not a reason to go back to traditional media. We should continue to ensure we are continuing to critique our new alternative media landscape with the goal of improving it. Luckily, we don't have to ask for permission this time.

The coincidence was uncanny. I just finished a book about the moral implications of justified murder, just to have everyone talking about the moral implications of justified (or unjustified) murder! Amazing.

The novel follows Raskolnikov, a poor law student captivated by the "new ideas" of rationalism and utilitarianism coming to Russia from the West. In his community there is a wealthy pawnbroker who embodies cruelty - exploiting the poor, hoarding her wealth without giving back, and subjecting her niece to both mental and physical abuse. Convinced of the moral and practical righteousness of his plan, Raskolnikov decides to murder her and use her money to advance his legal career, intending to help those in need. Dostoyevsky masterfully presents a compelling case for utilitarian murder, demonstrating how the math seemingly adds up: the world would indeed be better off without the pawnbroker.

Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the Lock hospitals—and all with her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange—it’s simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence!

Raskolnikov follows through with the murder, but his plan quickly unravels. Moments after killing the pawnbroker, her abused yet kind-hearted niece walks in and discovers him standing over her aunt’s body with a bloody axe. To protect himself and his plan, Raskolnikov must kill the niece as well. This is Dostoyevsky's first critique of utilitarianism: if one murder can be justified for a perceived greater good, a second murder can just as easily be rationalized. This exposes the fundamental flaw in using utilitarian motives for extreme actions like murder—there is no clear limit to the harm that can be justified in pursuit of some "greater" outcome. A world where everyone disregards moral rules to maximize utility would descend into chaos, not improvement.

But this is a strawman and Dostoyevsky knows it. No one would suggest that anyone can ignore moral or legal rules and act in the way they feel best. That would be crazy. A better argument (specifically one made in the 19th century), is that only "great-men" can ignore the rules. Raskolnikov, smart enough to understand this, is forced to justify the murder by convincing himself that he is one of these great-men.

“In his article all men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?”

“What do you mean? That can’t be right?” Razumihin muttered in bewilderment.

Raskolnikov smiled again. He saw the point at once, and knew where they wanted to drive him. He decided to take up the challenge.

“That wasn’t quite my contention,” he began simply and modestly. “Yet I admit that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like, perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only difference is that I don’t contend that extraordinary people are always bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right … that is not an official right, but an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfillment of his idea, sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity..."

This is the theory that Raskolnikov uses to justify the murder of the pawnbroker: certain people are exempt from societies laws and can perform actions contrary to said laws for the greater good.

The critique of this theory unfolds in the latter chapters, as Raskolnikov, racked by guilt, suffers a complete mental and emotional breakdown. His guilt stems from the realization that he is not a "great man" like Napoleon or Caesar, which further accelerates his descent into despair. Ultimately, Raskolnikov turns to Christianity for redemption and is saved at the end of the book.

But this raises a critical question: if Raskolnikov only feels guilty because he isn’t a "great-man", where is the actual critique of the steelmanned theory? Would his actions have been justified if he was a "great-man"? Dostoyevsky relies on the reader's common sense to conclude that the answer is: obviously not. Yet this reliance on common sense is circular—Dostoyevsky appeals to our Christian sensibilities of realizing this is wrong to argue for why we need Christian sensibility.

Dostoyevsky claims utilitarianism is insufficient in acting as a moral framework because at the extremes it can incentivize people to do crazy things like kill people. He believes having an objective moral framework, like Christianity, is preferable. (My reading on him is that he feels this less in a “because God is real and he says so” sense, but more in a “humans are inherently irrational and fickle so we should stick to some objective measure of morality” sense). While he is correctly arguing that utilitarianism breaks down at the extremes, he doesn't consider that theological objectivity does too.

I say "at the extremes" because the majority of moral frameworks get you to the same place most of the time. It isn’t until you run into extreme examples where things go off the rails. Yes, utilitarianism may go off the rails in this sense quicker than Christianity, but they both suffer from this problem.

I am reminded of an SSC essay I read a while back that relates moral systems to BART.

The different lines are like different moral systems (theological, utilitarian, deontological, etc.). When you are going from Daly City to West Oakland, it doesn’t matter which line you use, they all go to the same place. But as you keep going to the ends, lines that were previously on the same route now take you to opposite sides of the map. Quoting from Scott’s essay:

The further we go toward the tails, the more extreme the divergences become. Utilitarianism agrees that we should give to charity and shouldn’t steal from the poor, because Utility, but take it far enough to the tails and we should tile the universe with rats on heroin. Religious morality agrees that we should give to charity and shouldn’t steal from the poor, because God, but take it far enough to the tails and we should spend all our time in giant cubes made of semi-precious stones singing songs of praise. Deontology agrees that we should give to charity and shouldn’t steal from the poor, because Rules, but take it far enough to the tails and we all have to be libertarians.

The challenge, as always, is figuring out where to draw the line. At what point between charity and “spending all our time in giant cubes singing songs of praise” should we dispense with Christian morality? Conversely, at what point between charity and “fill the universe with rats on heroin” do we dispense with utilitarianism? Does murdering evil pawnbrokers or Healthcare CEOs cross that line? We don't need to know his thoughts on healthcare reform to know that Dostoyevsky would think it did.

With Christmas approaching, where better to start than with Christ himself?

Dominion by Tom Holland

Tom Holland is one of the world’s leading classical historians. When he isn’t hosting his podcast The Rest of History, he does things like translate Herodotus. After decades of trying to understand classical societies, he found it increasingly difficult to empathize with the seemingly odd things they would do. Homer’s Achilles is stubborn, power hungry, and petty, yet he was viewed as the heroic ideal to the Greeks. If a Spartan baby was unfit to be a soldier, he would be left on a nearby hillside to perish; incomprehensible to a modern reader. The societies from antiquity have very little moral overlap – the way they viewed right and wrong – with anyone from colonial America or Napoleonic France, let alone today. Why? What is it that makes us so different from them?

Holland says it’s Christianity all the way down. The abstract nouns that you believe in — equality, freedom, love, compassion, charity, liberty, abolitionism, equity, feminism, etc. — are all derived from Christian thought, the letters of Paul in particular. This book has similarities to Nietzsche's “Rome against Judea” ideas, but while the German philosopher has no shortage of references, Dominion is more historical rather than philosophical. However, instead of the history of an event, Holland outlines the history of ideas.

While this book isn’t short (600 pages), I would categorize it as a relatively easy read. It’s likely that my lack of Christian knowledge prior to reading this produced an outsized impact (I’ve never been to church), but even so, Dominion in many ways changed the way I look at the world, which is the highest praise I can give a book.

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Your Book Review: Two Arms and a Head by AmandaFromBethlehem

In 2006, a philosophy student named Clayton Schwartz got in a motorcycle accident in Mexico leaving him paralyzed from the chest down. He lived as a paraplegic for two years before committing suicide, during this time he wrote a book titled Two Arms and a Head. My recommended read is not the book itself, but instead a review of the book. (Also the winner of the ACX 2024 Book Review contest).

If your first reaction is “that’s devastating, but millions of paraplegics live fulfilling lives and don’t feel the need to end it all”, then you definitely should read this because that exact topic is covered at length. Other topics discussed include: the nature of freedom, ableism, and the ethics of suicide (this is not a light, happy read). You will not look at paraplegia the same way again. Schwartz’s goal with his book was to move the Overton window on medically assisted suicide and I think he’d be happy to know things have shifted substantially since 2008.

You can read the review here.

The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

Will and Ariel Durant were highly influential 20th century historians. Their magnum opus was The Story of Civilization, which is 11 volumes covering the entire history of the Western world (and some of the East). Besides being a masterclass of history, The Story of Civilization tops the list of best bookshelf centerpieces. Once you first see their blindingly colorful 1960s book jackets, you will start to see them everywhere. I wasn’t able to resist…

After a lifetime of learning and writing about thousands of years of history, it makes sense that their last book would be an attempt to distill what they had learned. The result is The Lessons of History; a short 100 page guidebook that tries to extrapolate lessons to inform future generations. The structure of the book is by conceptual human constants such as religion and secularism, liberty and equality, capitalism and socialism, war and peace. Since this post is not a full book review, I'll just leave a few of the best quotes:

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

The men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.

One lesson of history is that religion has many lives, and a habit of resurrection. How often in the past have God and religion died and been reborn!

The fear of capitalism has compelled socialism to widen freedom, and the fear of socialism has compelled capitalism to increase equality.

Since men love freedom, and the freedom of individuals in society requires some regulation of conduct, the first condition of freedom is its limitation; make it absolute and it dies in chaos.

The Goddess of Everything Else by Scott Alexander

This short essay is about the cruelty of nature contrasted with the subtle victories of our better angels. Scott’s 2015 poem is the rebuttal to anyone who says “but that’s just how we’re wired”. The brutal laws of nature created life but we are not forever bound to their rules. This poem is the transhumanism Book of Genesis.

The Goddess of Cancer represents the raw forces of survival – violence, competition, and endless reproduction without purpose beyond sustaining itself. Her creatures exist to KILL, CONSUME, MULTIPLY, CONQUER, cycling through a self-perpetuating pattern of dominance and survival. She embodies the blind instinct to persist, indifferent to any concept of higher purpose.

Alternatively, the Goddess of Everything Else embodies cooperation, empathy, and the desire for purpose beyond mere survival. She inspires creatures to look beyond their base instincts to organize and dream of a life that includes friendship, love, art, and eventually complex societies and transcendence. She doesn't force change directly; instead, she subtly guides creatures to evolve over time, aligning their desires with higher aspirations without violating their original nature.

This is a deeply philosophical treatise on the progression of intelligence and life through cooperation, and I can’t help but feel deeply optimistic after reading it. If we end up with some new religions in the next few hundred years, they’re going to look a lot like this.

You can read the essay here. If you would prefer to watch rather than read, an animated short was also made by a third party.

The Wager by David Grann

David Grann is one of those authors where every book he releases becomes a feature film. His first two you may have heard of: The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon. His latest book (which Scorsese is currently filming) is called The Wager. Grann’s books makeup a genre called narrative nonfiction, meaning they’re researched as well as a history book, but the pages turn like a mystery beach read.

The Wager takes place in the mid 18th century aboard a British naval vessel that gets shipwrecked off the coast of modern day Chile. The events that unfold make up one of, if not the, craziest stories of humanity I have ever read. I feel like once a year I’m reminded that being a sailor in the 18th century is one of the worst possible hells imaginable.

The most interesting part of this book to me was the power of British order and rule of law. These guys are starving on an island half-way across the world, yet still manage to meticulously document everything they do and get signatures for all major decisions. This book is as much an insight into legal history as much as it’s about a shipwreck. Whether you are a casual or serious reader, I highly recommend this book.

There is another reason to vote for a specific outcome, and that is signaling. You may not think the Proposition or candidate will directly lead to better outcomes, but instead you want to send a message, hoping for improved outcomes in the long-term. Let's look at a few examples of how and why someone would signal with their vote:

Example 1: Say you are passionate about curtailing crime. There is a recall on the ballot for an alleged “soft on crime” DA. You investigate the details and see that the DA has only been in office a few months, and while perhaps they could have been tougher, "soft on crime" is probably an exaggeration. Despite this, someone voting to send a message would vote to recall this person anyway. Why? Because what’s more valuable than either outcome is sending a message that people are fed up with crime. This message could then influence other politicians to get tougher on crime to avoid the fate of being recalled themselves.

Example 2: Say you are passionate about improving the lives of the less fortunate and reducing income inequality. On the ballot there is a Proposition for raising the minimum wage. You remember from economics class that raising the minimum wage can have serious negative outcomes, such as higher unemployment for the people that the minimum wage is trying to help. If you’re voting to send a message, you’ll vote to increase the minimum wage anyway, even if you believe raising the minimum wage could harm more than it could help. Why? Because what’s more valuable is sending a message that people are fed up with inequality and the inability of people to make a living. This message could then influence politicians to think more about enacting policies that will do that.

Example 3: Let's say you are disillusioned with the current state of politics, and you hate both parties. You know that you don't hate each party exactly equally, and the most rational route is to vote for "the lesser of two evils". However, you decide to send a message by voting for neither party. You instead vote for the Green or Libertarian parties, or you don't vote at all. Your goal is to send a message to those in power that they need to start fielding better candidates. (This is an example of a protest vote, which is a certain type of signaling vote).

I believe the intention of someone signal voting is the same as voting for something because it’s “better”. With a signaling vote you are doing the same thing, just a couple steps removed. You may know that the decision is not ideal (like not voting instead of choosing the lesser of two evils), but if the message that you are trying to convey is received (candidates get better), it will be “better” in the long term. At least that’s the idea.

“Sending a message” implies that there is someone receiving it. Who are we sending our message to? The first order receiver is probably just everyone, specifically politicians, the media, and the general voter. Although the ultimate receiver is likely to be politicians, broadly defined.

Is this a good method? In my opinion, sometimes, but not usually. Determining if you should vote to signal, I would consider two factors: the importance of the decision and the reception and interpretation of the message.

The importance of the vote

As we made clear in the examples, usually when you are voting to signal, you may not be voting for a side that you think is better. You are essentially conceding that you are willing to tolerate things to get temporarily worse, with the assumption that they will eventually get better (assuming the message is received). 

Looking at Example 1 (recalled DA), you know that recalling DAs usually leads to a transitional messy period, and this DA wasn’t even that soft on crime. You concede that things will probably get slightly worse if they are recalled. However, if your message is received and DAs across the state get tougher on crime because of it, then it will be worth it. If you want to get tougher on crime, I think it makes sense to recall the DA because the “importance of the vote” is relatively low. I think it's likely that the value of the end message, relative to the downsides of a recall, is worth it for this person.

What would be an example of an important vote? Let’s come up with an extreme example to make the point. Say there was a Proposition to set the minimum wage to $1,000 an hour. Or a presidential race between Abraham Lincoln and Pol Pot. “Importance” is subjective, and while these examples are intentionally absurd, they are indisputable in regards to their importance. In either of these examples, it would be a really bad idea to decide to signal. You likely should not abstain from voting for Lincoln just to “send a message”. If you are going to do a signaling vote, make sure the vote in question is relatively low stakes.

Reception and interpretation of the message

The next factor in deciding to cast a signaling vote is reception of the message. In other words - will your message be received and interpreted correctly? Usually, any result will lead to some sort of message, but will it be yours? The resulting message of an election can easily be hijacked. 

One example of an attempted hijacking was the successful recall of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin. A lot like our example, he was soft on crime, and was recalled, rightly or wrongly, for that reason. Those in Chesa’s camp tried to change the message from “San Franciscans are fed up with crime” to something along the lines of “San Franciscans are all closet conservatives conned by right wing billionaires into thwarting national criminal justice reform.” Thanks to local journalists like Heather Knight (no relation), this message never took hold. 

The problem, of course, is that it’s hard to know when your message is going to get hijacked. I think the best approach is to assume the more controversial and polarizing the decision, the more likely the message will be hijacked.

But even if there isn’t an active campaign to hijack the message, there is still a chance your message is misinterpreted by those you are wishing to signal. Let’s look at approving a high minimum wage, for example. We want it to be interpreted as “the people are fed up with inequality”, but it could also be read as: 1) people are voting for their self-interest without concern for second-order effects, 2) voters “just don’t understand economics”, or even 3) no message at all. What are the odds our preferred message is the one that people take away?

Or take our example of not voting to signal to political parties to improve their candidates. Our intended message is for the political parties to put out better candidates, but low voter turnout could be interpreted as: 1) we need to expand voting access, 2) the younger generation is awful and self-absorbed, or 3) we didn’t have enough money to spend on advertising. Again, how sure are you that the right message will get across?

Out of all the examples we talked about, only the DA recall has a clear interpretation. As long as the recall narrative was about “being soft on crime”, it’s difficult to imagine other politicians and the public interpreting it in some other way.

Conclusion

To put it all together, I think voting on something to send a message, and not because you believe it’s better, is sometimes an ok strategy, but usually not. If you are going to do this, I would consider the following:

1. Is the direct outcome of the vote relatively unimportant to you and non-consequential?

2. Are you confident that your message will be received, interpreted, and actioned on in the way that you intended?

If the answer to both is not an astounding YES, I would avoid signaling and just vote for whichever outcome you think is better.

Most people would describe the book to be about the intersection of math, art, and music (it’s not). Douglas Hofstadter became so frustrated about this misconception that he published a new book 30 years later titled I Am a Strange Loop, which presented a more succinct and less abstract version of what he was trying to say in GEB. 

This review is mostly structured around I Am a Strange Loop, which conveniently also serves as a review of the major themes of GEB. Consider this a low stakes bait-and-switch, for which I hope you'll forgive me.

I.

Let’s talk about the levels of reality. 

If someone asked, “what caused Hurricane Katrina?”, a normal answer would be about warm ocean water evaporating, or something. This is a high-level explanation that is useful in explaining the cause of a hurricane. You could go a level deeper and say hurricanes are caused by a bunch of water molecules interacting with each other. This is also correct, it’s just not very useful - whenever anything occurs, it's ultimately due to atoms interacting with other atoms interacting with other atoms. You could then go one level deeper and begin describing the specific water molecules involved in Hurricane Katrina. Of course this would be insane, there are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 H2O molecules in a cup of water. To describe how each one contributed to the hurricane would take more time than the age of the universe. Despite the lowest level of reality - atoms interacting with each other - being responsible for everything, we do not and cannot use this level for explanation or understanding. Instead, we are forced to abstract to a higher level.

Above atoms (physics) is the world of molecules and chemical reactions (chemistry), and above that is the world of cells (biology). But even the biological level is insufficient to understand the function of complex systems. Take the heart, for example. Analyzing billions of individual heart cells does not help us understand what a heart does. Instead, we need to transcend the biological and venture into the realm of philosophy, where we seek to understand purpose. The purpose of a heart is to pump blood. The concept of a “pump” is not visible at the atomic level, nor the molecular level, not even at the biological level. But in one word, “pump”, I can describe to you the interaction of septillions of atoms and billions of cells. Not only is this the best way to explain a heart, but it’s also the only way. Our entire existence is just molecular physical processes that we abstract to higher levels to understand.

This abstraction can be seen outside of nature too. Take this example from GEB:

Anteater: Perhaps I can make it a little clearer by an analogy. Imagine you have before you a Charles Dickens novel.

Achilles: The Pickwick Papers - will that do?

Anteater: Excellently! And now imagine trying the following game: you must find a way of mapping letters onto ideas, so that the entire Pickwick Papers makes sense when you read it letter by letter.

Achilles: Hmm... You mean that every time I hit a word such as "the" I have to think of three definite concepts, one after another, with no room for variation?

Anteater: Exactly. They are the 't'-concept, the 'h'-concept, and the 'e'-concept, and every time, those concepts are as they were the preceding time.

Achilles: Well, it sounds like that would turn the experience of "reading" The Pickwick Papers into an indescribably boring nightmare. It would be an exercise in meaninglessness, no matter what concept I associated with each letter.

Anteater: Exactly. There is no natural mapping from the individual letters into the real world. The natural mapping occurs on a higher level-between words, and parts of the real world. If you wanted to describe the book, therefore, you would make no mention of the letter level.

Achilles: Of course not! I'd describe the plot and the characters, and so forth.

Anteater: So there you are. You would omit all mention of the building blocks, even though the book exists thanks to them. They are the medium, but not the message. 

Additionally, the lowest level physical processes are completely irrelevant to whatever goal that we are trying to achieve. If a mechanical engineer is building a car engine, it does not matter what the trajectory and velocity of each molecule will be. What matters is that, with certainty, the piston will be pushed out when heated to the correct temperature and combustion occurs. 

Abstraction is a process by which complexity is made comprehensible, giving us the ability to understand.

II.

Let’s now look at another example of abstraction: the mind. In the same way we can’t understand a hurricane by looking at water molecules, Hofstadter claims we cannot truly understand consciousness by looking at neurons. 

Below is Hofstadter’s consciousness abstraction pyramid.

Starting at the bottom are neurons, the lowest level. Above neurons are groupings of neurons called symbols, which represent standalone concepts. For example, when you see a dog, a group of neurons fire together, representing “dog”. The symbol for a dog is simply this group of neurons that activate when you see a dog. Groups of symbols make up thoughts, such as “Achilles walked his dog in the rain.” Lastly, at the top, there is “I”, which is a collection of thoughts that combine to form a sense of self – more on this later. 

However, not all living things make it to the top of this hierarchy. The further up you go, the “more conscious” you are said to be. While everything is made up of atoms, not everything has neurons, less have symbols and thoughts, and even less have a sense of self. This results in a “consciousness hierarchy”.

Normal adult humans maintain a fully developed sense of self – which Hofstadter claims is the maximum degree of consciousness. But some humans have less than others, infants and the senile are two examples. Below that are dogs – do dogs have a sense of self? If a dog looks at itself in the mirror does it think “that’s me”? Maybe, what matters is the position relative to others. It doesn’t matter if a dog has a sense of self, but rather that it is less than a human and greater than a bee.

The idea of relativity within the hierarchy is important because it acts as a ranking of how much we care about something or someone. Why do you kill a buzzing mosquito but not a barking dog? Why are vegetarians ok with eating plants but not animals? Should the mentally ill be forced into institutions? Why do you cry when your dog dies but not your goldfish? These are all questions that deal with your consciousness hierarchy. We do things to beings on one level of the hierarchy that would be unthinkable at other levels.

Hofstadter’s intention when he introduces us to this concept is that consciousness is not binary, but gradient. Just as a dog's sense of “I” is less developed than a human, different humans have varying degrees of consciousness too. 

Which brings us to “I”.

What does it mean for “I” to be at the top of the consciousness hierarchy? Just as understanding a heart's function transcends analyzing cells, grasping the essence of “I” cannot be done through neurological examination. This “I” synthesizes our actions, desires, and beliefs into a unified self-awareness, providing a philosophical foundation for understanding our very existence. Remember that the philosophical level deals with purpose, the purpose of a heart is to pump, whereas the purpose of our thoughts (aka desires, beliefs, etc.) is our sense of self.

Here is Hofstadter:

"Why did you ride your bike to that building?" "I wanted to practice the piano." "And why did you want to practice the piano?" "Because I want to learn that piece by Bach." "And why do you want to learn that piece?" "I don't know, I just do — it's beautiful." "But what is it about this particular piece that is so beautiful?" "I can't say, exactly — it just hits me in some special way."

This creature ascribes its behavior to things it refers to as its desires or its wants, but it can't say exactly why it has those desires. At a certain point there is no further possibility of analysis or articulation; those desires simply are there, and to the creature, they seem to be the root causes for its decisions, actions, motions. And always, inside the sentences that express why it does what it does, there is the pronoun "I" (or its cousins "me", "my", etc.). It seems that the buck stops there — with the so-called "I”.

If this “I” is responsible for everything that we do, it must exist, right? Hofstadter says no. Your sense of “I” is an illusion that acts as the necessary abstraction for us to understand our actions and desires. Just as the concept “pump” doesn’t actually exist, your sense of self doesn’t exist either, they are both just concepts that we use to understand and survive in the world. Remember that humans abstract to higher levels because we are unable to understand the lower levels. Our sense of “I” is an abstraction that allows us to understand our motivations.

Here is Hofstadter again:

In which the starring role, rather than being played by the cerebral cortex, the hippocampus, the amygdala, the cerebellum, or any other weirdly named and gooey physical structure, is played instead by an anatomically invisible, murky thing called "I" , aided and abetted by other shadowy players known as "ideas", "thoughts", "memories", "beliefs", "hopes", "fears", "intentions" , "desires", "love", "hate", "rivalry", "jealousy", "empathy", "honesty", and on and on — and in the soft, ethereal, neurology-free world of these players, your typical human brain perceives its very own "I" as a pusher and a mover, never entertaining for a moment the idea that its star player might merely be a useful shorthand standing for a myriad of infinitesimal entities and the invisible chemical transactions taking place among them, by the billions — nay, the millions of billions — every single second. [Humans] can't see or even imagine the lower levels of a reality that is nonetheless central to its existence. 

III.

We now must take a short detour to describe a key concept in Hofstadter's work: the strange loop. Unlike a linear hierarchy where each level distinctly surpasses the previous (A > B > C), a strange loop creates a paradoxical circuit where the hierarchy loops back onto itself (A > B > C > A). A strange loop is a hierarchical structure where, as you move upwards or downwards, you eventually find yourself where you began.

The best way to understand strange loops is through images. Below is a famous print by M.C. Escher called Ascending and Descending.

As you can see, as you move up or down the staircase, you eventually find yourself right where you started. Another visual example of a strange loop is Escher’s Waterfall, where the waterfall seems to flow into itself like a perpetual motion machine.

These images are useful in allowing us to visualize the concept of a strange loop. But the problem, of course, is that they aren’t real… But don’t worry, Hofstadter has identified some other, non-visual strange loops.

Take for example, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Hofstadter claims that in Bach’s The Musical Offering Canon 5 “continues to rise in key, modulating through the entire chromatic scale until it ends in the same key in which it began.”

You can listen to it here.

Since I have little to no musical background, especially in classical, and cannot verify this claim in the slightest, here is Hofstadter again from GEB:

What makes this canon different from any other, however, is that when it concludes - or, rather, seems to conclude - it is no longer in the key of C minor, but now is in D minor. Somehow Bach has contrived to modulate (change keys) right under the listener's nose. And has so constructed that this "ending" ties smoothly onto the beginning again; thus one can repeat the process and return in the key of E, only to join again to the beginning.

Another example of a strange loop is Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which I will now describe in grossly oversimplified terms. In 1931, Gödel embedded the phrase “this statement is false” into a mathematical equation. If the statement is true, then as it says, it's false. But if the statement “this statement is false” is false, then that means it's true. But if it's true, then it says it's false! Etcetera.

The astute reader may recognize this as the Liar Paradox, which has been around for thousands of years. Gödel’s innovation was that by embedding it into a mathematical equation, he was able to prove that formal systems like arithmetic have statements that are true but cannot be proven from within the system itself. This might seem like semantic nonsense, but Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem is considered to be one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the 20th century. 

(Fun side bar on Gödel. When studying for his US citizen test, he found a loophole in the Constitution that would permit American democracy to legally turn into a dictatorship. He told his friends, including Einstein, about the existence of a flaw, but never the specifics. We still are not sure what he found. Gödel’s Loophole has been called “one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law”.)

Despite Hofstadter spending more time on Gödel and his theorems than anything else, I actually find it non-essential to understanding the actual thesis of his books (particularly IAASL). That is, you don’t have to fully understand the incompleteness theorem beyond knowing that Gödel discovered a strange loop within the heart of mathematics. 

We have now covered the titular triumvirate that is Gödel, Escher, and Bach. Congratulations. You now know more about GEB than most people – it is, in fact, not about the intersection of math, art, and music, but instead about proving the existence of strange loops through the works of these three men.

IV.

If the title of Hofstadter’s latter book didn’t give it away, we now get to his primary insight: you are a strange loop. Meaning your sense of self, the abstraction process through which you identify as “you”, and the interactions you have with the world, are the result of a strange loop occurring in your brain.

As your current “I” - an abstract illusion that acts as a collection of all your up-to-date desires and beliefs - interacts with the world, it causes a feedback loop that leaves you, after the interaction, with a slightly modified “I”. It is a paradox where our sense of self is derived from, but also drives, the lower levels of our existence. Neurons make up the desires that culminate in “I want that”, which in turn leads to the manipulation of atoms causing new neurons to fire. 

What? 

Imagine you decide you want to learn the guitar. This aspiration is the result of neurons made up of atoms, firing at once to create symbols and thoughts, culminating in “you” picking up and practicing the guitar. During your first practice session, you interact with the world in a myriad of ways: your fingers on the strings, the sounds of the strings, the feedback from a teacher or listener, and the emotional responses to playing. As we know, this is just atoms moving around other atoms, but these atomic movements lead to new neurons to activate in your brain, new symbols to form, resulting in thoughts that ever so slightly modify your concept of “I”. You no longer want to learn the guitar, you are learning the guitar. This is why experiences fundamentally change you, sometimes big, sometimes small.

Another example would be someone that maintains a daily journal. Their current desires and reflections are translated into the physical action of graphite being transferred from pencil to paper. If the author re-reads their entry a few years later, they may have some new experiences that react with the old entry to spark new ideas. The “I” from a few years ago arranged graphite lines on a piece of paper, which caused a future “I” to change. This is the strange loop. Your “I” changes atoms, which changes your “I”, which changes atoms… and so forth.

I quote Hofstadter:

And thus the current "I" — the most up-to-date set of recollections and aspirations and passions and confusions — by tampering with the vast, unpredictable world of objects and other people, has sparked some rapid feedback, which, once absorbed in the form of symbol activations, gives rise to an infinitesimally modified "I"; thus round and round it goes, moment after moment, day after day, year after year. In this fashion, via the loop of symbols sparking actions and repercussions triggering symbols, the abstract structure serving us as our innermost essence evolves slowly but surely, and in so doing it locks itself ever more rigidly into our mind. 

Somehow, the world works in a way where atoms are just moving themselves around in a seemingly random way. Any “purpose” we could try to assign to these movements we have already determined to be an illusion. 

We can now take this idea to its logical conclusion. If “you” are just a high-level abstraction of incomprehensible lower levels, and we all share these lower levels (my atoms are identical to your atoms), then it implies that your strange loop (your sense of self) can exist outside yourself. 

Take for example anyone that you have lived with for a long time: parent, child, spouse, sibling, etc. The act of deeply knowing someone is to get a copy of their strange loop into your head as well. To understand someone else's desires and beliefs is no different than understanding your own. If you walk down the street and see something in a store window and your first thought is “wow, my wife would love this!”, you are experiencing someone else’s strange loop in your own head. The root desire is no longer “I like this”, but “they like this”. 

The implication is that you – as defined by your beliefs, desires, goals, and aspirations – exist in dozens of other people! Of course, the strange loop that exists in others is not as strong as the “original”, but it still exists nonetheless. Above we discussed the fact that consciousness is gradient and not binary, and the same goes for strange loops. Hofstadter uses language as an analogy to the idea of duplicate strange loops. While you will never be a “native speaker” (like you are with your own strange loop), you can still become fluent. Here is Hofstadter talking about his wife, Carol.

Although it took me several years to learn to "be'' Carol, and although I certainly never reached the "native speaker" level, I think it's fair to say that, at our times of greatest closeness, I was a "fluent speaker" of my wife. I shared so many of her memories, both from our joint times and from times before we ever met, I knew so many of the people who had formed her, I loved so many of the same pieces of music, movies, books, friends, jokes, I shared so many of her most intimate desires and hopes. So her point of view, her interiority, her self, which had originally been instantiated in just one brain, came to have a second instantiation, although that one was far less complete and intricate than the original one.

Two people that have spent decades together not only maintain a well-formed version of the other's strange loop, but they also begin sharing one. In addition to deeply understanding each other's desires and beliefs, these desires and beliefs have fused into one. The book gets oddly romantic in a sort of nerdy, scientific way. Here is Hofstadter talking about his wife again.

We had exactly the same feelings and reactions, we had exactly the same dreads and dreams, exactly the same hopes and fears. Those hopes and dreams were not mine or Carol's separately, copied twice — they were one set of hopes and dreams, they were our hopes and dreams. I don't mean to sound mystical, as if to suggest that our common hopes floated in some ethereal neverland independent of our brains. That's not my view at all. Of course our hopes were physically instantiated two times, once in each of our separate brains - but when seen at a sufficiently abstract level, these hopes were one and the same pattern, merely realized in two distinct physical media.

When someone dies, the original strange loop goes away, but copies of them continue to exist in all those that knew them. Which gets us back to Hofstadter’s wife, who you may have noticed is referred to in past-tense. Carol died tragically from brain cancer when their children were toddlers. While this is unfathomably tragic, it also acts as a potential critique of his book: is this entire idea around multiple strange loops just a way for him to cope over the untimely death of his wife? 

He addresses this concern head on and says that he was working on these concepts long before his wife passed. He is right, in a certain sense. GEB, which contains nearly all the building blocks that make up IAASL, was written years before he even met Carol. Despite this, it's impossible to say that some of the chapters in IAASL weren’t heavily influenced by her passing. And I wouldn’t expect them to be! As we have just seen, an event as large as that is certainly going to alter his strange loop in a dramatic way. 

V. 

I enjoyed both of these books for very different reasons. I Am A Strange Loop presents a well-structured, coherent theory of the mind. Even if you don’t fully subscribe to the theory laid out in the book, there is an array of tangential concepts that are intensely thought provoking.

On the other hand, Gödel, Escher, Bach is a completely different beast. It has achieved almost mythological status in our current zeitgeist. It is also perhaps the most common answer of the tech intelligentsia to “what is your favorite book?” Maybe true, but probably signaling.

That’s not to say it isn’t a very, very good book, but I cannot overstate the difficulty of reading it. This difficulty is what has given it longevity, GEB would lose its raison d'etre if it were ever tamed. If you want Hofstadter’s structured thesis, go read I Am a Strange Loop. If you want to be taken on a journey that, through its intellectual dead ends and fascinating-yet-irrelevant-to-the-main-point concepts, will challenge your mind and ever so slightly alter your strange loop, then read GEB. Part of the experience is dealing with its varying mediums, from dialogues to images to puzzles to pages of symbols. GEB is what you get when a young polymath decides to show off. 

Most books are relaxing to read. GEB is the intellectual version of a marathon. With the strong link between mental exercise and neurodegenerative disease prevention, it may be prudent for doctors to prescribe chapters of GEB. 

It will also take you a long time to finish. It is then fitting that Hofstadter invented a concept in GEB that describes the “difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity.” 

I give you, Hofstadter’s Law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.”

Lapham’s Quarterly is a quarterly periodical that contains quotes and essays from the greatest minds of history about a specific topic. This issue, About Money, includes excerpts from Hammurabi, Ben Franklin, Mozart, and more.

Let’s dive in.

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The Value of Labor

1748 - To my Friend A. B.,

As you have desired it of me, I write the following Hints, which have been of Service to me, and may, if observed, be so to you. Remember that time is Money. He that can earn Ten Shillings a Day by his Labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle one half of that Day, tho' he spends but Sixpence during his Diversion or Idleness, ought not to reckon That the only Expense; he has really spent or rather thrown away Five Shillings besides.

Benjamin Franklin writing in “Advice to a Young Tradesman”, coining the phrase “time is money”.

This quote helps to understand Franklin. One of the world's last renaissance men, Franklin prided himself in his “industriousness” and efficient use of time. He basically invented “rise and grind”.

Franklin’s personality left a large imprint on the DNA of America. As our first international celebrity and the architect of some of our oldest institutions, there is an argument to be made that Franklin contributed to the stereotypical American work ethic that is prevalent today.

Balancing Accounts

1780 BC - If a merchant entrusts money to a broker for some investment, and the broker suffers a loss in the place to which he goes, he shall make good the capital to the merchant.

If anyone fail to meet a claim for debt, and sell himself, his wife, his son, and daughter for money or give them away to forced labor, they shall work for three years in the house of the man who bought them, or the proprietor, and in the fourth year they shall be set free.

Hammurabi, King of the Babylonian Empire, was most famous for his legal code which was the first to codify “an eye for an eye”.

The first law above focuses on investing. To clarify: “If an investor entrusts money to an entrepreneur, and the venture loses money, the entrepreneur is legally responsible for paying back the investor.” Modern investing does not work this way. If I invest in a company, and it fails, I am not legally obligated to get my money back. This is a pretty good deal for the investor… In fact, it’s so good that I can’t see why anyone would bother being an entrepreneur in ancient Babylon. Given this context, the law seems puzzling: why favor the investor so strongly?

It likely has to do with information asymmetry. “Entrepreneurs” for most of history were not what you would think of today - they were just guys with an idea. A venture could have been “hey, I heard about some cheap leather in a far away land. Want to fund my voyage and we’ll split the profit 50/50?” Without this law, an unscrupulous entrepreneur could easily fabricate a loss and defraud the investor. This would defer investors from ever investing in anything. Thus, Hammurabi's law aimed to foster investment and honesty in early economic ventures. The downside was that only extremely safe ventures were undertaken, because the entrepreneur would be on the hook for the money even if it was legitimately lost.

Which brings us to the second law, which shows what happens if the debt wasn’t repaid: debt bondage. Historically, most societies were creditor-oriented, favoring lenders. In contrast, modern societies typically protect debtors, a relatively recent shift. The worst thing that happens to defaulters in developed nations is bankruptcy, the punishment being it becomes hard to get another loan. This is painful, no doubt, but it’s a whole lot better than slavery.

Work is hard

1778 - This I am now doing in the fond hope that some change may soon occur; for I cannot deny, and indeed at once frankly confess, that I shall be delighted to be released from this place. Giving lessons is no joke here, and unless you wear yourself out by taking a number of pupils, not much money can be made. You must not think that this proceeds from laziness. No! It is only quite opposed to my genius and my habits. You know that I am, so to speak, plunged into music— that I am occupied with it the whole day— that I like to speculate, to study, and to reflect. Now my present mode of life effectually prevents this. I have, indeed, some hours at liberty, but those few hours are more necessary for rest than for work.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, writing when he was 22 about how he doesn’t like his job.

This passage is awfully humanizing for someone who seems so ethereal. To be honest I don’t have much to add here other than that child prodigies have to work too.

Free Silver!

1896 - If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we will fight them to the utter-most. Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!

William Jennings Bryan, famously known as 'the Great Commoner,' was a three-time presidential candidate and a renowned orator. 

Want to know one of the biggest political issues of the late 19th and early 20th century? Silver. The free silver movement, aimed to expand the money supply by backing it with silver in addition to gold.

In the late 1800s, the Silverites' advocacy for a bimetallic system stemmed from a unique economic challenge of their time: deflation. Yes, you heard that right. The issue of the day was not inflation, where prices go up, but deflation, where prices go down.

But isn’t deflation a good thing? Your $10 goes from buying one chicken at the beginning of the year to two chickens at the end of the year. Who wouldn’t want that? Debtors don’t. In a deflationary scenario, while $10 might buy more, it also means debts become heavier burdens, as the real value of money owed increases. Conversely, inflation can ease debt burdens, making the real value of what's owed decrease over time. When a monetary system is fixed to gold, inflation tends to be very low because the money supply cannot expand without additional gold reserves.

The majority of debtors at this time were farmers, who got their loans from bankers in New York. Ongoing deflation meant farmers' debts became greater in real terms, while the bankers profited from the increasing value of repayments. You probably can see where this is going… Advocates of the Free Silver Movement argued that introducing silver alongside gold as a currency standard would induce inflation. This inflation was seen as a means to alleviate the farmers' debt burdens and counterbalance the bankers' growing profits.

Despite Bryan’s talents as an orator, “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”, the Free Silver Movement ultimately failed. The biggest reason for the failure being the discovery of large gold deposits in Alaska and South Africa, which expanded the money supply and eased deflation. 

Touring America

1832 - In nations where the aristocracy dominates society and keeps it immobile, the people eventually become accustomed to poverty as the rich do to opulence. The latter do not concern themselves with material well-being because they possess it without effort; the former do not think about it because they have no hope of acquiring it and do not know it well enough to desire it. In those kinds of society, the poor man's imagination is diverted toward the other world. Though gripped by the miseries of real life, it escapes their hold and seeks its satisfactions elsewhere. By contrast, when ranks lose their distinctions and privileges are destroyed, when patrimonies are divided and entitlement and liberty spread, the longing to acquire well-being enters the imagination of the poor man, and the fear of losing it enters that of the rich. A host of modest fortunes are amassed. Those who possess such fortunes enjoy sufficient material gratifications to conceive a taste for them and not enough to be content with them. Hence, they are forever seeking to pursue or hold onto pleasures that are as precious as they are incomplete and fleeting.

Alexis de Tocqueville was sent by the French government in 1831 to try to understand American society, which resulted in the seminal work Democracy in America.

The contrast that Tocqueville is making between Europe and America is ultimately one of class structures and upward mobility. America’s relative lack of a rigid class hierarchy is a key advantage it had versus Europe in the mid 19th century. 

While there isn’t much direct evidence of influence, much of this quote aligns with how Hegel viewed historical progress (I wrote about some of his ideas here). Tocqueville's observations on American society's fluid class structure mirror Hegel's concepts of historical progress and the lord-bondsman dialectic. Additionally, Hegel believed that Christianity provided the lower classes with recognition, which Tocqueville echoes with the line “the poor man's imagination is diverted toward the other world.”

Quotes

Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody. - Benjamin Franklin, 1755

Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil. - J. Paul Getty, c.1950

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February. - Mark Twain, 1894

"Sometimes, history needs a push" - Vladimir Lenin

The above quote touches on a long debated historical question: can history be explained by the outsized impact of “great” people or heroes? Or do bottom-up human and social dynamics govern the course of events? 

Leo Tolstoy had a strong opinion on the matter, as a major theme in War and Peace is about the limits of leadership and an outright rejection of the great man theory. Karl Marx is known for his theory of history called historical materialism, which also rejects the great man theory and instead explains history through changes in class and labor. 

I use Tolstoy and Marx as examples because of their proximity to this story, but also because the events that occurred in Russia up until 1917 are easily explained through their theories. It was only a matter of time before the societal changes happening at the beginning of the 20th century were going to bring about an end to the tsar.

However, what happened in November of 1917 can only be described as the great man theory at work. Our world would look a lot different if Lenin was not around to give history a “push”.

This essay will be a book review of A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes, one of the most coveted books on the Russian Revolution. As Figes apologizes in the introduction of the book, I will do the same here: I am sorry for the length. 

Let’s dive in.

Part I: The Decline of the Romanovs

The Romanovs were the ruling family of the Russian Empire for more than 300 years (1613 to 1917). The family had a great cast of characters that you may be familiar with: Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Ivan the Terrible. The word for emperor in Russia is tsar (or tsarina). In Gothic, it would look like kaiser, but its origin is Latin, and would look like caesar.

Over their three century long rule, the Romanovs had some highly effective conquerors who grew the Russian Empire significantly. By 1895, they had conquered their way to the third largest empire of all time (beaten out only by the Mongols and the British), accounting for 17% of the Earths land area. This included 16 modern-day nations including Russia, Poland, Finland, Ukraine, Mongolia, and more.

However, after many years of prosperity, the effectiveness of the tsarist regime began to falter. 

The story begins with the Russian famine of 1891. Caused by a series of unfortunate weather events and government mismanagement, the famine resulted in 375,000 to 400,000 deaths. Figes writes about the famine: 

In short, the whole of society had been politicized and radicalized as a result of the famine crisis. The conflict between the population and the regime had been set in motion and there was now no turning back. In the words of Lydia Dan, the famine had been a vital landmark in the history of the revolution because it had shown to the youth of her generation 'that the Russian system was completely bankrupt. It felt as though Russia was on the brink of something.’

The tsar at this time was Alexander III, a conservative by tsarist standards, he opposed any reform that would threaten his autocratic rule. He was effective at maintaining order but died in 1894, which suddenly made his 26-year-old son Nicholas II the new tsar of Russia.

Nicholas gets a lot of attention in this story because he was a below-average leader during an extraordinary time. Although he was also a deeply tragic figure. He loved his family deeply and did not want the throne, but felt he had to maintain his ancestors 300-year streak of unadulterated autocratic rule.

Revolution and War

One of Nicholas’ first big blunders was the 1904 Russo-Japanese War, caused by rival ambitions in Manchuria. This war is historically significant because it was one of the first conflicts with modern weapons. Artillery cannons begin to look closer to something you would see today, as opposed to a cannon you would see in the American Revolutionary War or the Napoleonic Wars. Additionally, machine guns and turrets became widely used. 

However, most of this modern weaponry was being used by the Japanese.

The biggest problem was the sheer incompetence of the [Russian] High Command, which stuck rigidly to the military doctrines of the nineteenth century and wasted thousands of Russian lives by ordering hopeless bayonet charges against well entrenched artillery positions.

The war can be summed up in a mental image of Russian cavalry charging on Japanese artillery. If you also consider that the war was 6,000 miles away from the Russian capital, being supplied by faulty railroads, they never had much of a chance. The numbers vary, but roughly 60,000 Russian soldiers died in the conflict.

In January of 1905, mass demonstrations began in the Russian capital of St. Petersburg sparked by the trifecta of humiliation of the war with Japan, hunger, and peasant exploitation. To quell the demonstrators, state police opened fire on the crowd and killed hundreds of civilians. The day became known as “Bloody Friday''. In June of the same year, peasants also began rioting by seizing land and tools in protest of the bureaucracy imposed on them. Throughout the year, the tsarist regime executed 15,000 people and exiled 45,000, which didn’t make the situation better.

The revolution had been truly born, and it had been born in the very core, in the very bowels of the people. In that one vital moment the popular myth of a Good Tsar which had sustained the regime through the centuries was suddenly destroyed.

These events collectively made up the Revolution of 1905, which culminated in the October Manifesto, a document begrudgingly issued by Nicholas that promised basic civil rights and an elected parliament. 

This is a key part of the story. So far, the events look like what happened in, say, the United Kingdom, where the people slowly chipped away at the rights of the monarch until they ended up with a system that was democratic. But did the October Manifesto and subsequent constitution go far enough?

This was, in truth, the main dilemma that the liberals faced after the October Manifesto - whether to support or oppose the government. So far the revolution had been a broad assault by the whole nation united against the autocracy. But now the Manifesto held out the prospect of a new constitutional order in which both monarchy and society might — just might — develop along European lines.

The new government body, called the Duma, ended up not having much power at all, which set Russia up for another revolution 12 years later.

Revisionists look at this part of the story very closely. If Nicholas had ceded more power to the Duma, there may have not been the need for a revolution. Additionally, a parliamentary government may have avoided entering WWI, which would have changed the entire history of the 20th century. 

It's also worth looking at why the 1905 Revolution failed. Why was the tsar able to remain in power? First, the various opponents failed to unify politically or tactically. The striking workers, rebelling peasants, and armed service mutineers didn't coordinate their actions at all. Second, the military largely remained faithful to the tsar. History shows that it's hard to have a successful internal revolt without the support of the military.

Lastly, there was no aligned vision on what the replacement government should have been. On one hand, it's easy to blame Nicholas for not ceding enough power to the Duma, but on the other you could blame the revolutionaries for not proposing a comprehensive replacement. There was a wedge created within the opposition around the October Manifesto. The liberal socialists felt it didn’t go far enough and wanted to continue the revolution, whereas the moderates thought it was a good first step towards political reform. 

But in large, the people were blinded by the hopium.

Most of the Duma members shared [the] faith that Russia had at last won its House of Commons' and would now move towards joining the club of Western liberal parliamentary states. The time for tyrants was passing. Tomorrow belonged to the people. This was the Duma of National Hopes.

Nonetheless, the leader of the Duma was assassinated in September of 1911, wiping out the dreams of traditional political reform. We will never know what could have been if this had been successful, but it’s sure entertaining to theorize.

The Great War

Fast forward to June 28th 1914 and there is another assassination that’s important to this story. A radical Serbian named Gavrilo Princip shot the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as he is visiting Sarajevo. This led Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, which caused the two stronger allies of each country, Germany and Russia, to declare war on each other. The most cited cause of World War I was the web of military alliances across Europe. While this was true, examining Russian motives a little closer can give us a better picture as to why this struggling nation decided to go to war.

One way to view Russian history is to see a country deeply confused about its identity. It so badly wants to be European (specifically, German) but it feels like it can’t shake its Asian-ness. Russia at this time has what I can best describe as Stockholm Syndrome in regard to German culture. Figes focuses on this a lot:

This fear of Germany stemmed in part from the Russians' cultural insecurity - the feeling that they were living on the edge of a backward, semi-Asian society and that everything modern and progressive came to it from the West. There was, as Dominic Lieven has put it, 'an instinctive sense that Germanic arrogance towards the Slavs entailed an implicit denial of the Russian people's own dignity and of their equality with the other leading races of Europe.’

It’s relevant to note that Germany was the cultural and scientific epicenter of Europe (and hence the world) at the time. The unification led by Otto von Bismark in 1871 set Germany up for 40+ years of dynamic success. Many of the greatest minds of the day were either from or lived in Germany, including philosophers like Marx, Hegel, and Nietzsche, along with scientists such as Einstein and Planck. 

But let’s not forget that Russia’s decision to enter the war was ultimately on the shoulders of one man - Nicholas - who had personal motives outside of alliances and cultural insecurities. For starters, Nicholas was cousins with the leader of Germany, Wilhelm II (they were both also cousins of George V of England).

On one hand, I long for the day we can get back to the world of great mustaches that was the late 1800s. But I digress.

Nicholas was likely making his decision to enter the war based on what was best for preserving his power. Figes believes that instead of looking at the war opportunistically, he was choosing between the lesser of two bad options.

This placed Nicholas in an impossible situation. If he went to war, he ran the risk of defeat and a social revolution; but if he didn't, there might equally be a sudden uprising of patriotic feeling against him which could also result in a complete loss of political control.

Whatever the true reasons for his decision, he mobilized the military which prompted Germany to declare war against Russia in August 1914.

Tensions had been high for a long time in Europe, especially with Germany. The Germans were squeezed in between two powers that they were not on the friendliest terms with: France and Russia. For this reason, Germany devised a plan decades before called the Schlieffen plan, to defeat both France and Russia if it ever came to it. The plan was based on the fact that Russia was strong but extremely slow. If Germany could quickly invade France and knock them out within a few weeks, then they could move their undivided focus to Russia, ensuring they don’t have to sustain a two-front war.

As described in the Schlieffen plan, the Russian military has historically been characterized as strong but slow. This characterization is largely correct; however, Russia’s problems in the first world war went much deeper than just slowness. The Russians got completely destroyed in World War I. They hadn’t learned as much as they should have from the war with Japan, such as focusing too much on cavalry (yes, horses). Their supply lines were non-existent and hence they were unable to arm, cloth, or feed their men. 

Without artillery or supplies of ammunition, they held out as best they could, suffering heavy losses. Many men fought with nothing but bayonets fixed to their empty rifles.

Additionally, most of the Russian army was made up of peasants being led by landowners. These were the same landowners who the peasants had been actively rebelling against for the last ten years. The social issues of the country carried over to the army, which preserved the feudal customs such as soldiers addressing officers by their honorary titles and constantly cleaning their boots. This led to a slew of morale issues, including constant mutinies and desertions.

The sole redeeming facet of the Russian military effort in World War I was their general Aleksei Brusilov, who was unbelievably able to deliver some decisive victories against the Austro-Hungarians. Despite being a pretty optimistic guy, Brusilov eventually realized the effort was hopeless.

Brusilov had shown that under competent commanders the imperial army was still capable of military success. Had it not been undermined by Stavka, his offensive might have served as the springboard for the restoration of the army's morale, perhaps even one day leading towards its eventual victory. But it is doubtful whether even this would have been enough to save the tsarist regime, such was the extent of the political crisis in the country at large. In any case, with the failure of the offensive it now became clearer than ever, even to a monarchist like Brusilov, that, in his own words, Russia could not win the war with its present system of government. Victory would not stop the revolution; but only a revolution could help bring about victory.

A fun revisionist hypothetical to play with is if the Russians were even half-way competent, and Brusilov had been given what he needed, there is a strong chance the US would never have needed to enter the war. 

The last relevant event that occurred before 1917 was the death of Rasputin. If you’re wondering why I haven’t brought up Rasputin yet, it’s because I don’t feel like he matters that much to the story. I look at him more like a symptom than a cause.

By the time we get to 1917, any trust remaining with the monarchy was hanging by a thread. But as the last breaths of power left the Romanov Dynasty, a new ideology was rising in the west.

Part II: The Rise of Communism

Fueled by the Industrial Revolution, life began to change rapidly in the 1800s. Young people left their family’s farm to move to the city and work in a factory. The below chart shows the percentage of the labor force working in agriculture over time (note: Russia isn’t on the chart, but it would most closely resemble Poland since it was apart of the Russian Empire).

The tsarist regime's ultimate failure was its inability to handle the consequences of modernization. This chart is what is meant by modernization.

Capitalism became much more relevant for societies with factories rather than farms. In purely agrarian societies, farmers are mostly independent and use their own land and labor to feed themselves and their families. Farmers (that weren’t serfs) owned the means of production, but workers in the factory did not. The mass migration of people to cities, with no labor regulations to speak of, led to some awful working conditions and a tremendous amount of inequality. The majority of people in Russia at this time were getting the worst that capitalism had to offer, and they were pissed about it. However, bad working conditions and inequality alone are not usually enough to start a revolution. People need something to rally behind.

The question then turns to the most important idea in this story: communism. The origins of communism trace back to Karl Marx’s magnum opus, The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848 as a critique of the poor conditions across capitalist Europe.

But Marx was a German living in London, so why was Russia the country whose name will forever be associated with his greatest idea?

Literacy and Ideas

In 1800, only 5% of the Russian population could read. Compare this to 50% in England and 30% in France. Although by 1897 the Russian literacy rate had grown to 21%, and by 1917 it had reached 43%.

Figes spends a lot of time on this: 

The link between literacy and revolutions is a well-known historical phenomenon. The three great revolutions of modern European history, the English, the French, and the Russian all took place in societies where the rate of literacy was approaching 50 per cent… Ironically, in its belated efforts to educate the common people, the tsarist regime was helping to dig its own grave.

Despite spending time and money educating the populace, the tsars ironically also heavily censored the reading material allowed inside the country. We often associate communists as the ones restricting ideas, but this censorship model was always how Russia operated.

When the censors read the revolutionary rhetoric of Marx, which told the workers to unite and overthrow their capitalist overlords, they surely decided to censor it, right?

Wrong. In one of those amazing little quirks of history, for some reason the censors decided NOT to block The Communist Manifesto because they thought no one would understand it. Of course, in a land devoid of ideas with an exploited population, something as fiery as Marx spread like wildfire. Figes insinuates that Marxism took hold in Russia due to the lack of any competing and contradictory ideas.

The censor forbade all political expression, so that when ideas were introduced there they easily assumed the status of holy dogma, a panacea for all the world's ills, beyond questioning or indeed the need to test them in real life. One European intellectual fashion would spread through St Petersburg: Hegelianism in the 1840s, Darwinism in the 1860s, Marxism in the 1890s and each was viewed in turn as a final truth.

This seems important. If your society only gets a few ideas, does that make people more likely to latch on to the few ideas they do get? Perhaps.

Either way, Marx’s ideas took hold in Russia with the vigor of religion.

Many people have argued that Marxism acted like a religion, at least in its popular form. But workers believed with the utmost seriousness that the teachings of Marx were a science, on a par with the natural sciences; and to claim that their belief was really nothing more than a form of religious faith is unfair to them. There was, however, an obvious dogmatism in the outlook of many such workers, which could easily be mistaken for religious zealotry… This dogmatism had much to do with the relative scarcity of alternative political ideas, which might at least have caused the workers to regard the Marxist doctrine with a little more reserve and skepticism.

But Figes goes into a final reason:

When people learn as adults what children are normally taught in schools, they often find it difficult to progress beyond the simplest abstract ideas. These tend to lodge deep in their minds, making them resistant to the subsequent absorption of knowledge on a more sophisticated level. They see the world in black-and-white terms because their narrow learning obscures any other coloration. Marxism had much the same effect on workers. It gave them a simple solution to the problems of 'capitalism' and backwardness without requiring they think independently.

Does becoming literate and/or educated as an adult cause you to become “resistant to the subsequent absorption of knowledge on a more sophisticated level”? If that’s true it would seem pretty significant.

To briefly summarize, here are the proposed reasons for why Russia was the tinderbox for a Marxist revolution:

1. Brutal working conditions and inequality for factory workers in the cities 

2. The population was rapidly becoming literate

3. The censors forbade most ideas, preventing proper discourse about the ideas that got through

4. #2 and #3 uniquely combined to cause newly educated adults to become irrational zealots

I think I buy this argument. Russia had a tremendous scarcity of ideas, the population was primed with earth-shattering theories like Darwinism, they’re getting the worst that capitalism had to offer, and they got presented with a theory that promised to solve their material needs. Marxism became a simple solution for a complex set of problems broadly labeled as capitalism.

The February Revolution

Getting back to our story, riots broke out on March 8th 1917, to protest the food rationing imposed as a wartime necessity. 250,000 men and women took to the streets to express their dissatisfaction with the food shortages, the war, and autocracy.

(If you're confused by “The February Revolution” being in March it's because the Russians at this time used a Julian calendar. We use a Gregorian calendar, which means it took place in March.)

One key difference between this protest and the one in 1905 is that the soldiers joined the side of the protesters.

The soldiers, by contrast, were seen as 'ours' - peasants and workers in uniforms - and it was hoped that, if they were ordered to use force against the crowds, they would be as likely to come over to the peoples side. Once it became clear that this was so - from the soldiers' hesitation to disperse the demonstrators, from the expressions on the soldiers' faces, and from the odd wink by a soldier to the crowd - the initiative passed to the people's side. It was a crucial psychological moment in the revolution.

The February Revolution was a protest against the monarchy, and after decades of trying it finally worked. On March 15th, 1917, Nicholas II anticlimactically abdicated the throne, ending 304 years of Romanov rule. The ease with which the tsar was overthrown was representative of how much his power had declined. The current parliamentary leaders in the Duma then formed the Provisional Government, which was to be democratic.

It is important to say, though, that the February Revolution was not the communist revolution. Within the Provisional Government there were a handful of left-wing parties vying for power, one of which happened to be the Bolsheviks, and on April 16th, their leader returned to St Petersburg.

Vladimir Lenin was born in 1870 to an upper middle-class family. Radicalized by his brother’s execution in 1887, he began leading various socialist groups in and out of Russia. He was exiled many times and prior to 1917 he was living in Switzerland waiting for his moment to return.

The February Revolution was exactly what Lenin was waiting for: an opportunity to implement his reforms. It's important to note that this wasn’t just an opportune time for him, but also for the Germans. The German’s saw Lenin’s return as beneficial for their war efforts since Lenin and the Bolsheviks publicly promised to pull out of World War I. So, in what is another great historical quirk, the Germans help facilitate Lenin's return to St. Petersburg.

But by the time Lenin arrives in Russia he was practically a stranger. Aside from a brief stay in 1906, he had spent the previous seventeen years exiled abroad. Virtually none of the workers chanting his name upon his arrival even knew what he looked like. “I know nothing of Russia”, Lenin once said to a friend. Yet it didn’t matter, Lenin had complete domination over the Bolshevik party. 

No other political party had ever been so closely tied to the personality of a single man. Lenin was the first modern party leader to achieve the status of a god: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Zedong were all his successors in this sense. Being a Bolshevik had come to imply an oath of allegiance to Lenin as both the leader and the 'teacher' of the party.

As Lenin was leading the Bolsheviks, another party competing for power in the new government were the Mensheviks. In general, the Mensheviks were not as radical, and felt a more gradual approach to Marxism was the best way forward.

The Mensheviks were democrats by instinct, and their actions as revolutionaries were always held back by the moral scruples which this entailed. This was not true of the Bolsheviks. They were simpler and younger men, doers rather than thinkers. They were attracted by Lenin's discipline and firm leadership of the party, by his simple slogans, and by his belief in immediate action to bring down the tsarist regime rather than waiting, as the Mensheviks advised, for it to be eroded by the development of capitalism. This, above all, was what Lenin offered them: the idea that something could be done.

The further you go on a political spectrum, the simpler the message gets. This is true today as much as it was with the Bolshevik radicals in Russia. On the other hand, the moderate Menshevik’s message required nuance, something that was greatly lacking in Russia in 1917. For example, here was how they wanted to approach socialism:

Both the Mensheviks and the SR adhered rigidly to the belief that in a backward peasant country such as Russia there would have to be a 'bourgeois revolution' (meaning a long period of capitalism and democracy) before Russian society, and the working class in particular, would be sufficiently advanced for the transition to a socialist order. 

Too nuanced god damnit.

The Rise of the Bolsheviks

Lest we forget, Russia was still fighting in World War I, and the new Provisional Government has decided to initiate a new offensive against the Austro-Hungarians. Historians see this as the key mistake that ultimately led to the downfall of the new government. The leaders gambled everything on this offensive hoping the people might rally behind them in a national defense of democracy. It's not clear to me why they thought the war would go any better than it had under the tsar - the soldiers were still under-supplied and poorly motivated after spending three years fighting.

But we already know who wanted to end the war: the Bolsheviks.

As Brusilov saw it, the soldiers were so obsessed with the idea of peace that they would have been prepared to support the Tsar himself, so long as he promised to bring the war to an end. This alone, Brusilov claimed, rather than the belief in some abstract 'socialism', explained their attraction to the Bolsheviks. The mass of the soldiers were simple peasants, they wanted land and freedom, and they began to call this Bolshevism' because only that party promised peace.

Additionally:

The soldiers wanted only one thing - peace, so that they could go home, rob the landowners, and live freely without paying any taxes or recognizing any authority. The soldiers veered towards Bolshevism because they believed that this was its programme. They did not have the slightest understanding of what either Communism, or the International or the division into workers and peasants, actually meant, but they imagined themselves at home living without laws or landowners. This anarchistic freedom is what they called Bolshevism.

I really want to drive this point home. It's easy to look at the parties vying for power after the fall of the tsar, and think that the people of Russia were rationally debating the pros and cons of who they wanted to support and why. This is entirely the wrong way to think about it. People complain about the average voter in the US today - but more than half of the population of Russia at that time couldn’t even read. 

Here is Figes again, writing about a Menshevik speaking to some soldiers:

Sometime during March a Menshevik deputy of the Moscow Soviet went to agitate at a regimental meeting. He spoke of the need for peace, of the need for all the land to be given to the peasants, and of the advantages of a republic over monarchy. The soldiers cheered loudly in agreement, and one of them called out, 'we want to elect you as Tsar', whereupon the other soldiers burst into applause. ‘I refused the Romanov crown', recalled the Menshevik, 'and went away with a heavy feeling of how easy it would be for any adventurer or demagogue to become the master of this simple and naive people.'

Come July, the failed offensive causes violent anti-war protests to break out in the streets of St. Petersburg, in what is called the July Days. The Provisional Government (correctly) blamed the Bolsheviks for fueling the anti-war sentiments. This caused Lenin to flee, feeling that the entire Bolshevik cause had failed. 800 members of the party ended up behind bars, including one Leon Trotsky. 

Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks only a few months before, in what I can only imagine was the 1917 Russian version of Lebron James’ “The Decision”. Trotsky was the most well known revolutionary in the country and a master orator. While Lenin continued to act as the grand strategist, Trotsky became the face of public representation. 

Come October, Lenin was beginning to believe that the only way for the Bolsheviks to succeed was to take power by force. This was a hot take among the Bolshevik leadership - many believed they should take over through democratic means: winning seats to get a majority within the Provisional Government. Yet Lenin pushes back:

‘We must not be deceived by the election figures: elections prove nothing... The majority of the people are on our side.’ Reminding his comrades of Marx's dictum that 'insurrection is an art’, Lenin had concluded that ‘it would be naive to wait for a "formal" majority for the Bolsheviks. No revolution ever waits for that... History will not forgive us if we do not assume power now.’

This is Lenin at his absolute best, and an event that demonstrates the decisive effect of a single individual on the course of history. If Lenin had not been around to lead the party during these few weeks, the chance for a coup would have come and gone.

On November 7th, 1917 the Bolsheviks stormed the scantily defended Winter Palace, and took control of the government.

The Great October Socialist Revolution, as it came to be called in Soviet mythology, was in reality such a small-scale event, being in effect no more than a military coup, that it passed unnoticed by the vast majority of the inhabitants of Petrograd. Theatres, restaurants, and tram cars functioned much as normal while the Bolsheviks came to power. The whole insurrection could have been completed in six hours, had it not been for the ludicrous incompetence of the insurgents themselves, which made it take an extra fifteen.

The truth was, the insurrection was only supported by a minority of the population, and was even opposed by many of the Bolshevik leaders themselves. This is a classic misconception about the revolution: that the Bolsheviks took power with overwhelming support of the populace. 

Why was the government so easy to overthrow? No one bothered to send any military opposition. In the end, anyone who could summon such a force quite simply assumed an immediate collapse of the Bolshevik government. No one initially decided to do anything about the Bolsheviks because they assumed failure was imminent.

Part III: The Bolsheviks in Power

On March 3rd, 1918, the Bolsheviks delivered on their most popular “campaign” promise: ending the war. In surrendering to Germany they lost almost all of their European territory, along with a third of their population. If they had been able to hold on for a little while longer things would have looked much different - the Germans would surrender only 9 months later. Russian losses in World War I were staggering, with military casualties reaching around 2,000,000. For reference, American and British fatalities were 1,000,000 combined.

A few days later the capital was moved from St. Petersburg (which was renamed to Petrograd, because St. Petersburg was “too German”), to Moscow. This move represented Russia’s separation from Europe, Petrograd was a European city, whereas Moscow embraced Russia’s Asiatic traditions.

The Fight for the Soul of Russia

Although leaving World War I would not bring peace to Russia. Anti-Bolshevik forces eventually realized the Bolshevik government wasn’t going to imminently implode, so they started a civil war. The opposition force was called the White Army and their goal was to oust the Bolsheviks and return Russia to the pre-revolutionary order.

The White army was hilariously top-heavy. Out of the first 3000 troops recruited, only 12 were non-officers. The Bolshevik Red Army on the other hand had the opposite problem - they had too many rank-and-file soldiers with no officers to lead them. The Whites were better trained, and pound for pound would have decisively defeated the Reds in any battle if it were not for the Red’s tremendous numerical advantage. The Red Army at times outnumbered the Whites ten to one.

It’s also worth noting that the Whites had the backing of the Allies. At first glance this looks like an early attempt by the West to combat communism, but that’s a misinterpretation of the situation. Remember that World War I was still raging and the Allies were pissed that Russia dropped out. The leaders of the White Army promised to re-join the war once the Bolsheviks were defeated, which was all the Allies needed to hear before they began supplying them with munitions. (On a side note, the great irony of the Schlieffen plan was that the opposite ended up happening - the Germans eventually got their single-front war, just not the one they were expecting.)

How were the Bolsheviks doing? It’s hard to say if they were doing well or doing poorly…but they were definitely doing. Soon after they took over, a general terror began on anyone deemed to be wealthy. “Loot the Looters” was the phrase used to justify the stealing of anything owned by the bourgeois. The movie Doctor Zhivago does a good job depicting what this was like - there is a scene where the main character comes home to dozens of people living in his flat.

Soviet officials, bearing flimsy warrants, would go round bourgeois houses confiscating typewriters, furniture, clothes and valuables 'for the revolution'. Factories were taken out of private ownership, shares and bonds were annulled, and the law of private inheritance was later abolished.

Additionally, Lenin implemented an economic system called “war communism”, which had the explicit goal of winning the civil war. This is one of the first parts of the book that Figes begins to dive into the economic system and its underlying philosophy. War communism was the prototype of Stalin’s economy - all private trade was abolished, all major industries were nationalized, the government assumed control of the labor market, and agriculture was collectivized. This was the most extreme economic experiment ever run. Even socialists outside of Russia were not sure what was happening:

Foreign socialists were shocked by the violence of the Bolsheviks' hatred of free trade. The Bolsheviks did not just want to regulate the market - as did the socialists and most of the wartime governments of Europe - they wanted to abolish it. 'The more market the less socialism, the more socialism the less market' that was their credo.

Ok, what’s going on here? The ungenerous interpretation is that the Bolsheviks were all extremists and this was Lenin’s goal from the start. The more generous read is that this was a war-time necessity to ensure the army had the supplies it needed, like a Defense Production Act on steroids. However, Figes explains that the key motivation behind war communism was to wage war against the enemies of the Bolsheviks. Remember that the previous owners of industry were all likely actively assisting the Whites, this was the best way to neutralize them.

Aside from war communism, the Bolsheviks used another tactic in the war against the Whites, which became known as the Red Terror. However, the Red Terror was preceded by two events that we need to briefly dive into. 

First, we return for a final time to Nicholas, who had been on house arrest for the last year. The Bolsheviks debated putting him on trial, which Trotsky would have won decisively, but they eventually decided against it. Learning from the French Revolution, putting the tsar on trial presumed a priori that he could be innocent, “leaving the moral legitimacy of the revolution open to question”. On July 17th, 1918, Nicholas and his entire family were shot in the basement of the house they had been confined to. The only member of the family to survive was their spaniel, Joy.

The second event that directly kicked off the Red Terror was an assassination attempt on Lenin on August 30th, which left him severely wounded. In order to understand the magnitude of this, we have to remember that Lenin was a quasi-deity to the Bolsheviks. Lenin's close call with death made the Bolsheviks realize there were too many enemies within their midst, so they decided to kill all of them.

Habeas corpus who? Anything labeled as “counter-revolutionary behavior” could put you behind bars, exiled, or shot; and any burden of proof was non-existent, it was guilty before proven innocent. Lenin had said that it was better to arrest a hundred innocent people than run the risk of even one enemy going free. The enforcers of the Red Terror were the Cheka, the secret police force that would turn into the KGB a few decades later. The atrocities of these guys feels like it's out of the middle ages, remember this was only 100 years ago:

The ingenuity of the Cheka's torture methods was matched only by the Spanish Inquisition. Each local Cheka had its own speciality. In Kharkor they went in for the glove trick' - burning the victim's hands in boiling water until the blistered skin could be peeled off, this left the victims with raw and bleeding hands and their torturers with human gloves'. The Tsaritsyn Cheka sawed its victims' bones in half. In Voronezh they rolled their naked victims in nail-studded barrels. In Armavir they crushed their skulls by tightening a leather strap with an iron bolt around their head. In Kiev they affixed a cage with rats to the victim's torso and heated it so that the enraged rats ate their way through the victim's guts in an effort to escape. In Odessa they chained their victims to planks and pushed them slowly into a furnace or a tank of boiling water. A favourite winter torture was to pour water on the naked victims until they became living ice statues. Many Chekas preferred psychological forms of torture. One had the victims led off to what they thought was their execution, only to find that a blank was fired at them. Another had the victims buried alive, or kept in a coffin with a corpse. Some Chekas forced their victims to watch their loved ones being tortured, raped or killed.

An estimated 100,000 people were executed in the Red Terror.

Just so you don’t go thinking there are any good guys in this story, the White Army was also committing atrocities against a group that they felt was their biggest enemy: the Jews. Antisemitism had always been pretty bad in Russia, but it spiked to even higher levels by the counter-revolutionaries since most of the Bolshevik leaders outside of Lenin were Jewish. The accusations followed the traditional anti-semetic playbook, that the Jews were pulling the strings controlling everything. Figes writes:

Many pogroms were accompanied by gruesome acts of torture on a par with those of the Red Terror. In the town of Fastor the Cossacks hung their victims from the ceiling, releasing them just before they choked to death: if their relatives, who watched this in terror, could not pay up the money they had demanded, the Cossacks repeated the operation. The Cossacks cut off limbs and noses with their sabres and ripped out babies from their mothers' wombs. They set light to Jewish houses and forced those who tried to escape to turn back into the fire. In some places, such as Chernobyl, the Jews were herded into the synagogue, which was then burned down with them inside. In others, such as Cherkass, they gang-raped hundreds of pre-teen girls. Many of their victims were later found with knife and sabre wounds to their small vaginas. One of the most horrific pogroms took place in the small Podole town of Krivoe Ozero during the final stages of the Whites' retreat in late December. By this stage the White troops had ceased to care about world opinion and, as they contemplated defeat, threw all caution to the winds.

The Whites killed more than 150,000 jews.

By April 1920, the Whites had lost the war. The size of their army was likely the primary cause, but the core issue was their inability to put politics over tactics. They didn’t realize that the fight was for the soul of the nation, not a war against an army. It was a battle of ideologies, not soldiers. The Whites failed to rally nearly any peasants to their cause, and the ones that did join, soon left in mutiny. The peasants didn’t like the Bolsheviks, but the Reds at least stood for something different, for change, which was more than the Whites could say. The Whites just promised to bring things back to the way they were, and the people wanted nothing to do with that.

The Bolsheviks in Charge

With the end of the civil war, we get to see an unencumbered view into Bolshevik Russia. For starters, they ironically developed a massive upper class. Top members of the party lived in compounds previously owned by the nobles of the monarchy. In a similar vein, the bureaucracy ballooned to epic proportions, under a complete command economy, the number of “officials” exploded. By 1920 there were 16 factory officials for every 100 factory workers, and in the most extreme example, 71% of the workers at the Putilov metal plant were petty officials and clerks. “All the strikes of these years complained about factory officials living off the backs of the workers.”

A few months after the war, Lenin replaced the straightforwardly named war communism with the equally straightforwardly named New Economic Policy (NEP). The NEP was an adjustment to war communism that allowed individuals to own small and medium sized businesses, although the state continued to maintain control of large industries. 

Lenin also looked to science as the way to control human behavior to turn people into “cogs of the state”. Perhaps apocryphally, Lenin goes to the house of Ivan Pavlov, of salivating dog fame, to see if it would be possible to remove the individualistic tendencies of the Russian people. While any work with Pavlov failed to materialize (or most likely never occurred), a party leader named Aleksei Gastev developed many theories in line with the cogs of the state approach: 

Gastev's aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of 'human robot' (a word, not coincidentally, derived from the Russian verb to work, rabotat). Since Gastev saw machines as superior to human beings, he thought this would represent an improvement in humanity. Indeed he saw it as the next logical step in human evolution. Gastev envisaged a brave new world where 'people' would be replaced by proletarian units' so devoid of personality that there would not even be a need to give them names. They would be classified instead by ciphers such as 'A, B, C, or 325, 075, 0, and so on'. These automatons would be like machines, 'incapable of individual thought', and would simply obey their controllers. A 'mechanized collectivism' would 'take the place of the individual personality in the psychology of the proletariat'. There would no longer be a need for emotions, and the human soul would no longer be measured 'by a shout or a smile but by a pressure gauge or a speedometer.

A few comments on this. First, it's really easy to see where Rand and Orwell’s inspiration came from. But it’s not clear to me how much of this was just the idealistic vision of some leaders, or something that was actually attempted. On one hand, inspired by what Ford had done in America, they are just trying to perfect factory efficiency, which is something I can get behind. I don’t really have an issue of turning a worker into a robot, at work. Although the latter half of the paragraph makes me want to get my Guy Fawkes mask and spray paint “who is John Galt?” onto the nearest government building.

Despite moderate success with getting support from workers who lived in the cities, the Bolsheviks failed to get any support from the peasants. They looked at the villages of poor farmers as backwards, representing the type of place that Russia wanted to get away from. They were never able to split the peasantry along class lines. The egalitarian nature of the peasant communities led them not to see themselves as poor and their neighbors as rich, they just saw each other as fellow villagers. They became highly skeptical of the intelligentsia from the city telling them they should despise their neighbor.

Part of the Bolshevik tactic to break the peasants was to attack the only other institution vying for power in Russia during the 1920s: religion. Atheism being a core tenet of communism, they attempted to replace G-O-D with G-O-V. Things then got a little weird…

In private life, as in public, religious rituals were Bolshevized. Instead of baptisms children were ‘Octobered’.

There was also an atheist art - one especially blasphemous poster showed the Virgin Mary with a pregnant belly longing for a Soviet abortion and an equally iconoclastic theatre and cinema of the Godless. 

…and indeed for adults who also changed their names - were drawn from the annals of the revolution: Marx; Engelina; Rosa (after Rosa Luxemburg); Vladlen, Ninel, Ilichand Ilina (acronyms, nicknames or anagrams for Lenin); Marlen (for Marx and Lenin); Melor (for Marx, Engels, Lenin and October Revolution); Pravda; Barrikada; Fevral (February); Oktiabrina (October); Revoliutsia (Revolution); Parizhkommuna (Paris Commune); Molot (hammer); Serpina (sickle); Dazmir (Long Live the World Revolution); Diktatura (Dictatorship); and Terrora (Terror).

Yes. There was someone in Russia in the 1920s whose legitimate name was Dictatorship. 

1921 poster contrasting the march of the three kings to Bethlehem (top), with the march of the workers towards communism (below).

It is worth noting that the Bolsheviks were exceptionally progressive when it came to social issues normally tied to religion. They were the first government to legalize abortion and make it available upon request, and decriminalized homosexuality.

The cultural war against religion eventually turned hot, when the Bolsheviks began shutting down churches and shooting priests. In the end, the effort was completely unsuccessful, and if anything it rallied people closer to their religion. (This feels especially obvious in hindsight).

Due to some bad weather in late 1920 and early 1921, the Russian countryside faced one of the worst famines in history. The Russian Famine of 1921 was exacerbated by the rules the Bolsheviks had employed to win the civil war. Since they took all the peasant’s stockpiles to feed the soldiers, there was nothing left to tide them over after a particularly bad winter. In the end 5,000,000 people starved. The US actually sent temporary humanitarian aid, which the Bolsheviks begrudgingly accepted. 

Lenin's health declined quickly towards the end of 1921. He had a series of strokes over the last few years of his life, each one leaving him more and more debilitated. Most of Lenin’s effort during this time is on the question of succession. In a series of letters titled Lenin’s Testament, he heaped criticism on the current leaders, specifically Trotsky and Stalin. However, the letters failed to prevent Stalin from exiling Trotsky and taking full control of the USSR. 

After a final stroke, Lenin died in January 1924 at the age of 53. Stalin made sure that his body was embalmed and put under a massive monument in Moscow. In the same way as having Alexander the Great's body gave credibility to Ptolemy, the soul of the country was still with Lenin, whose power only grew with death.

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Figes wrote it in a compelling way that kept my attention throughout. He analyzed the “why” of situations and didn’t just focus on the “what”, which is important in an 850-page history book. 

Which gets us to the length. There were times when it felt way too long, and times when it felt way too short. It’s probably the right length for the breadth it captures, but there are parts of the story that I am interested in diving deeper into, specifically Lenin and Leninism. It’s also worth noting that Figes is a Brit writing in 1996 about Communist Russia, so his slant towards capitalism and the West is a given. I thought he mostly represented issues fairly, but I don’t know if I would even recognize what that looks like. The metaphor is a lifelong atheist listening to another lifelong atheist attempting to steelman the views of a devout religious person. It might be a good steelman, but how do I really know? I wonder what looks different if a socialist writes this book; but it seems hard to argue that the revolution and Bolshevism wasn’t a huge mess.

Although to give credit where it's due, many times throughout the story Figes would present two theories on why someone did something (usually left vs. right), proceed to explain why they are both wrong and then present a third theory that seemed to be correct. Overall, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in the Russian Revolution.

So, what are the big lessons of the revolution?

I don’t consider myself a socialist or a communist, but I’ll stick up for them here: what we saw in Russia in the 1920s was not socialism or communism, it was Leninism. Lenin’s version of communism strayed far from the original ideals of Marx and socialism. So “we tried communism and it failed” feels a little strawman-y to me: no sane person is suggesting 1920s Leninism gets tried again. 

As an aspiring revisionist I wonder what would have happened if the Mensheviks had been the ones to take power instead of the Bolsheviks. It’s not very often that we get to try different methods of human coordination on scales like this, and their nuanced take may have been more successful.

Another lesson would be to look at what excessive inequality can do to a society. Inequality is just a number until the people go hungry and tear the upper-class out of their homes. This revolution was started how revolutions usually start, not by over-regulation or excessive pronouns, but by inequality, atrocities, and hunger.

This story also shows how badly a group of intellectuals armed with theories can screw things up. Most of the Bolshevik leadership were from high class families, heavily educated, but had never stepped foot into a factory. They fought for what was best for the workers & peasants but didn’t happen to involve any in the process. 

We also see what happens when society becomes too progressive too quickly. I like the metaphor of tug of war with conservatism on one end and progressivism on another. Society works best when we are slowly inching our way along. But when one side slips, we get pulled too far to the other side, and chaos ensues. The Russian Revolution gives us a clear picture into how ugly things can get when the rule of law breaks down. The number of “unnatural” casualties in Russia in the early 20th century were greater than 15 million people across war, famine, and genocide. 

However, perhaps the biggest takeaway is how powerful an idea can be, especially when society is ready for that idea and there exists great characters capable of capitalizing on it. To again emphasize this last point, I will leave you with a quote from Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World. 

One of history's greatest mysteries was how Stalin, a famously skeptical man, was tricked by Hitler in the spring of 1941.

To understand how this happened, we need to start in 1939, as the entire world watched to see what Russia would do in response to German expansion. Hitler had just taken Austria and Czechoslovakia, and had his sights set for Poland. Britain and France were realizing that appeasement wasn’t going to work, and finally drew a line in the sand with regards to Poland. In order to defend the relatively weak country, they naturally looked for help from Russia. But for a variety of reasons, Russia didn’t want to help them.

First, the Soviets were annoyed that they hadn’t been invited to previous appeasement talks in Munich. Second, the USSR was a communist totalitarian dictatorship, not exactly the natural ally of two liberal democracies. Third, and most importantly, Russia had historical claims over a large portion of Poland and hated the idea of an independent Polish nation. The animosity also went both ways. Poland was days away from getting steamrolled by the German military, and they still said they would not allow Russian troops to enter their country to defend it. Lesser of two evils, I guess.

This presented a challenge for Britain and France whose only offer to Stalin was that the Germans were historically aggressive and mean. Which, in hindsight, was 100% correct. The reason Russia should have defended Poland was because the Germans ended up being aggressive and mean. But Hitler made Stalin an offer he couldn’t refuse: half of Poland. 

The partitioning of Poland was a secret agreement though. What the rest of the world saw was called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, signed in 1939. Here is a description from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer:

The published treaty carried an undertaking that neither power would attack the other. Should one of them become “the object of belligerent action” by a third power, the other party would “in no manner lend its support to this Third Power.” Nor would either Germany or Russia “join any grouping of Powers whatsoever which is aimed directly or indirectly at the other Party.”

This didn’t make them allies, but they agreed to remain neutral if the other started fighting someone else. This kicked off two mutually beneficial years for both sides, including a fair share of great historical correspondences. For example, here is Hitler’s Christmas note to Stalin:

“Best wishes [Hitler wired] for your personal well-being as well as for the prosperous future of the peoples of the friendly Soviet Union.” To which Stalin replied: “The friendship of the peoples of Germany and the Soviet Union, cemented by blood, has every reason to be lasting and firm.”

But despite the friendly words, Hitler’s true intentions were very clear - bide time with Stalin until the West was defeated, then turn around and delete Russia from the map. From a military strategy standpoint this wasn’t a novel plan, German generals since time immemorial understood that you never fight France and Russia at the same time. But why did they need to fight Russia at all?

This was one area Hitler’s ideology started getting in his way (more on this in the next section). Hitler viewed the countries in Eastern Europe as rightfully belonging to Germany, he saw Bolshevism as inherently Jewish, and he viewed Slavic people as less than dirt, better than Jews, but still less than dirt. Here is a quote from Mein Kampf:

“And so we National Socialists take up where we broke off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement toward the south and west of Europe and turn our gaze toward the lands of the East. When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way to us here . . . This colossal empire in the East is ripe for dissolution, and the end of the Jewish domination in Russia will also be the end of Russia as a state.”

Hitler had always planned to attack Russia; the only question was when. In the meantime, as the western democracies had their hands full with Hitler, Stalin saw an opportunity to get some old Russian territory back. In 1940 the Red Army invaded the Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, and launched an unsuccessful attack on Finland. Britain and France didn’t say much because they were still banking on Russia fighting Germany, who they saw as the bigger foe. 

The other reason the Allies didn’t publicly denounce Stalin’s acquisitions was because they were too busy getting rolled by the Wehrmacht and its highly effective blitzkrieg strategy. 1940 was a very bad year for the allies as the British force narrowly escaped complete annihilation at Dunkirk, and the entirety of the French army was cut off and captured. Within six weeks the Battle of France was over, and Hitler strolled into Paris.

With France out and Britain bunkered up on their island, Hitler began planning his attack on Russia. In the spring of 1941, Operation Barbarossa began, and the Germans invaded Russia from three different directions. 

The Russians were caught totally unprepared. Here is Shirer again:

Most places along the border the Russians were not even deployed for action and were overrun before they could organize resistance. Hundreds of Soviet planes were destroyed on the flying fields. Within a few days tens of thousands of prisoners began to pour in; whole armies were quickly encircled. “It is hardly too much to say,” the usually cautious Halder noted in his diary on July 3 after going over the latest General Staff reports, "that the campaign against Russia has been won in fourteen days." In a matter of weeks, he added, it would all be over.

We are now back to the question I asked at the beginning of this section: how in the world was Stalin not ready for the attack on Russia? Aside from the military buildup along the border, or the German conquest of neighboring territory, or how Germany publicly deceived Chamberlain like three times -  Hitler literally said in his best-selling book: “When we speak of new territory in Europe today we must think principally of Russia and her border vassal states.” How in God's good name was the famous paranoid-to-the-point-of-insanity Stalin unable to see this coming?

Since Rise and Fall was published 30 years before the Soviet records were released, Shirer doesn’t have much to offer us when it comes to answering this question. Thankfully for you, dear reader, I did some supplemental research.

It appears that Stalin was no fool to the prospects that he would eventually need to fight the Germans, he just missed on the timing. Stalin figured that the Germans would not try anything until they had finished the war in the west. And by “finish” he meant ending France (check), but also getting submission from the British, whose naval blockades prevented the Germans from getting any ships out of the North Sea. With the British still kicking, he figured Hitler wouldn’t risk attacking him. 

This was a miscalculation by Stalin because Hitler decided to go after Russia anyway. Despite the many warnings he received, Stalin refused to believe it. Therefore, the answer to the question is probably “ego”. Stalin was known for having unflappable confidence in his decisions, and this situation was no different. Having confidence in your decisions isn’t a bad thing if you don’t get blinded in the face of new information. I am reminded of the famous Churchill (or is it Keynes?) quote: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

Ideology lost the war

It's a widespread notion that the Nazis lost the war due to their racist ideology, a belief likely fueled by our desire for poetic justice. But is it true? Let’s look at two arguments for racist ideology influencing the results of the war.

The most common example is about Jewish scientists. Many of the leading physicists at the beginning of the 20th century lived in Germany and were Jewish. The argument goes that if the Nazi’s had not been anti-Semitic, then they would have been able to retain the talent and gotten the bomb first. In fact, it was a displaced German Jew (Einstein) that suggested that the Germans may build a bomb and proceeded to pressure Roosevelt to build one first. 

While there is no question that Hitler demolished the thriving German physics community, I no longer think that antisemitism alone prevented Hitler from building the bomb. Even if the Nazis weren’t racist, they still would have failed to build the bomb.

Let's start with aggression. Physicists in general tend to be on the pacifist side of the spectrum, so even if someone says, “we need a bomb to support our invasions, but don’t worry we aren’t racist”, you are unlikely to get a chorus of support. Of course, we could further strip aggression out of Nazi ideology too, but at that point they have lost their raison d'etre, and we are looking at something else entirely.

Second, Hitler and the other Nazi leadership were not that interested in the bomb. Here is Shirer:

As for the German atom bomb project, which had given London and Washington much worry, it had made little progress due to Hitler's lack of interest in it and Himmler's practice of arresting the atom scientists for suspected disloyalty or pulling them off to work on some of his pet nonsensical "scientific experiments" which he deemed more important.

If the Nazis had been obsessed with building the bomb, then perhaps you could argue that having more scientists around would have helped, but that just wasn’t the case at all. Hitler was more focused on other military innovations - such as the world's first fighter jet - which for a variety of reasons ended up not helping him very much. Even with the limited resources and personnel dedicated to building the bomb, Nazi paranoia got in their way more than racism. If Himmler was hampering the success of the project by suspecting disloyal “Aryan” scientists, it’s hard to argue that racism exclusively prevented them from getting the bomb.

One way that the Nazi racist ideology did directly impact their ability to win the war was in how they treated Soviet POWs and the occupied populations of the western soviet states, most of which were made up of Slavs.

As we learned above, once Western Europe had been taken over by the Nazis, Hitler’s attention turned to Russia. While in hindsight it was his biggest mistake, at the moment it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. First, the German’s knew they had the element of surprise. Second, considering the Nazi’s took France, “Europe’s greatest land power”, in 6 weeks, why would the clumsy and unorganized Russians fare any better? Lastly and most importantly, the people of the Soviet vassal states would want to join with the Germans as they got liberated from Stalin.

This last point is what I want to focus on, because it was likely the biggest factor in Hitler’s failure on the eastern front. The idea that invading the Soviet Union would cause political instability and cause the government to crumble is not without historical precedent - it’s exactly what happened 25 years prior during the First World War. Hitler’s advisors focused on this heavily: 

"Hopes of victory," Kleist said, "were largely built on the prospect that the invasion would produce a political upheaval in Russia . . . Too high hopes were built on the belief that Stalin would be overthrown by his own people if he suffered heavy defeats. The belief was fostered by the Fuhrer's political advisers." 

This theory wasn’t wrong per se, but the Nazi racial ideology got in the way. Just behind antisemitism, the Nazis were highly anti-Slavic. Since the western soviet states were mostly Slavic, the Germans saw the conquered people in the East as sub-human and treated them accordingly. This resulted in slave labor, direct violence, and indirect violence of the subjugated people, leading to roughly 14 million deaths. This was more than British, American, German, French, and Japanese military deaths in the war, combined. One example of “indirect violence” was the Nazi’s Hunger Plan, which took foodstuffs from the civilians to feed the German military knowing that this would result in millions starving to death. It is hard to argue that this wasn’t racially motivated once you look at the relative civility shown to the “respectable” races on the western front like the Scandinavians, British, and French.

The obvious result was they didn’t just not join with the German liberators - they fought even harder to resist them. Stalin may have been bad, but Hitler had shown that he was clearly worse. This led to something the Nazis had not yet seen so far in the war - staunch resistance. 

"The conduct of the Russian troops," General Blumentritt wrote later, "even in this first battle [for Minsk] was in striking contrast to the behavior of the Poles and the Western Allies in defeat. Even when encircled the Russians stood their ground and fought."

While the Nazi front in the east eventually stalled due to the weather, if they had been picking up liberated local allies along the way, fighting through the winter would have been much easier. There is a chance Russia wouldn’t have even lasted until winter. If the Germans had been respectful of the conquered populations and given to them what they were not allowed to have in Bolshevik Russia - religious freedom, economic freedom, self-determination, etc. - Operation Barbarossa easily could have gone the way of 1917. At the very least, the Nazi’s would have faced significantly less resistance, such as what they saw on the western front. Shirer seems to agree:

Those events may now be briefly narrated, but not without first stressing one point: terrible as the Russian winter was and granted that the Soviet troops were naturally better prepared for it than the German, the main factor in what is now to be set down was not the weather but the fierce fighting of the Red Army troops and their indomitable will not to give up.

Had the Germans been able to take Russia, the rest of the war would have looked a lot different. Therefore, if there was somewhere that racial ideology impeded the Nazi’s goals, it was their atrocities during the war in the east. 

Miscellaneous:

• The Nazi's called themselves the Third Reich. The first Reich was created by Charlemagne in the 700s, and the second by Bismarck in 1871.

• The Third Reich, which boasted it would last for a thousand years, often being called the "Thousand-Year Reich", only lasted twelve years and four months.

• Hitler's last name was almost Schicklgruber. Many wonder if he would have had success rising to power with a name as silly sounding as that. Hitler rolls off the tongue so much better, whereas "Heil Schicklgruber!", does not.

• Stalin’s Foreign Minister was named Vyacheslav Molotov. He is the name sake of the Molotov cocktail, coined by Finnish soldiers in 1940 as they defended themselves against the Red Army.

• When the French surrendered in 1940, Hitler made sure to have them do it in the exact same train car where the Germans surrendered to the French after World War I. To do this, he had it taken out of the French Museum where it was on display. After the French surrendered, he proceeded to blow up the train car.

• Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian military officer who helped Hitler and was eventually put in charge of occupied Norway. I didn’t know this word, but his name is now in the dictionary meaning “traitor”.

  

Bismarck achieved what hadn't been accomplished in a millennium: the unification of his homeland. But what elevates him above your average unifier was that the country he created… was Germany. Depending on where you put the causality, without Bismarck you likely don’t get either world war, because without Bismarck you don’t get Germany. 

Bismarck is easily in contention as the greatest statesman of all time. But don’t take it from me, biographer and historian Jonathan Steinberg says Bismarck pulled off “the greatest diplomatic and political achievements by any leader in the last two centuries.”

Born in 1815, Bismarck’s world was much different than the one we know today. Instead of a country called “Germany”, there was a collection of smaller states existing in central Europe. These states had some similarities, the big one being their language, but they also had substantial differences in their cultures and religions. The “German Question” was the name for the ongoing debate during the 1800s about how to finally achieve unity. 

The entirety of German history before the 19th century can be viewed through the lens of unification. Whatever tribes, kingdoms, or states that existed at the time would occasionally unify for their collective military goals, but they would eventually devolve back down to self-rule.

One of those unification attempts was the political entity known as the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted for 1,000 years. The Holy Roman Empire sounds a lot cooler than it was, the famous quip is that it was neither Holy, Roman, nor an Empire. Instead, it was just a loose network of alliances where inter-state rivalries prevented centralized power from ever accruing. Sometimes these rivalries were fostered by France, who really did not want a huge unified German state to their only exposed flank.

Speaking of France… Napoleon was the one who ended the Holy Roman Empire when he conquered most of Europe by 1814. However, when Napoleon eventually lost and his armies retreated back to France, the war-torn German states realized they needed to organize themselves better in order to prevent any future invasions. So, in 1815 the successor to the Holy Roman Empire was born, the German Confederation. 

The German Confederation was a little better than the Holy Roman Empire, but not by much. One problem was that in order to pass an important decision, all 39 states had to unanimously agree. Remember that the original government of the independent American colonies, the Articles of Confederation, failed for similar reasons. Whenever you have a group of states, they never want to give up their autonomy to a higher central authority, but not having a strong enough central authority leaves the confederation impotent and ineffective. The US states had an easier time giving up power than the German states, as it is much harder to give up self-governance after you have been doing it for a thousand years!

In addition to the unanimity issue, there was also a high degree of inter-state competition within the German Confederation. The two largest states, Prussia and Austria, were constantly competing over who controlled the confederation. This eventually led to a civil war in 1866 where member states allied with one of the two belligerents.

Prussia being one of the most militaristic states ever, has no issue defeating Austria. Most of the time Prussia was spending 65-80% of state revenue on the military. US military spending by comparison, which is considered relatively high, is around 18%. Voltaire famously said, “Where some states have an army, the Prussian Army has a state.”

While the war marked the end of the German Confederation, Prussia formed the uniquely named North German Confederation, which consisted of all the states that fought alongside it during the war. The southern states that allied with Austria were left alone, and Austria was fully out of the picture.

While they no longer cared about Austria, Prussia and the rest of the North German Confederation had forgiven the southern states for fighting against them and wanted them to join their union. The Prussian leaders badly wanted a unified Germany for a couple of reasons. First, was to be able to compete better with the French and the Russians. But the second reason was not about economics or power, but about nationalism. Here is a quote from historian Katja Hoyer, author of the book Blood and Iron:

Since the end of the Second World War, the word 'nationalism' has become so associated with right-wing politics that it is worth reminding ourselves that the form it took in nineteenth-century Europe was heavily coloured by liberal and romantic ideals. Like the Brothers Grimm, many believed there was beauty in national culture, identity and language.

Remember, the mid 1800s was a time of toppling monarchs and the introduction of the modern nation state. Of course romantic nationalism was on the rise. In fact, you could say it was even necessary as people transitioned from the idea of divine rule to rule of the people. The German states felt this especially strongly, because unlike the other powers of Europe, their people shared a language and culture but did not have their own country! As I said above, there is literally a term for this: the German Question.

This all sounded great, but the southern German states weren’t that interested in unifying with Prussia and the rest of the northern states. Perhaps the biggest reason for this was religious differences. The Reformation had divided the German states with majority Protestant in the north and Catholic in the south. The southern Catholic states were concerned that by joining the North German Confederation they would be the minority religion and be oppressed (which was a valid concern because that is exactly what happened). 

The North German Confederation was now faced with a challenge: how could they unify with a group of states that didn’t really want to join? Military occupation would have been easy, but forcing unwilling states into a union rarely leads to a long and fruitful relationship. Additionally, despite their differences, the German states saw each other as one-people, and would unlikely have been able to justify German on German fighting. They needed to get the southern states to want to join. 

Enter Bismarck.

The Unification of Germany

Bismarck at this point was leading the North German Confederation and knew that the best way to get the southern states to join with the north was through war. His public rhetoric was consistent with this line of thinking, here is an excerpt from 1862: “Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided… but by iron and blood.”

Bismarck did not mean war in the sense of invading the southern states, nor did he mean joining with the southern states in a war of aggression against a different country. By war he meant defense. Only in defense would the southern states be willing to band together with the north.

One way to start a war of defense is to keep yelling insults at your neighbor until they punch you in the face. Bismarck decided that the obvious neighbor to insult was their mortal enemy, France. Although, instead of explicitly insulting them for eating frog legs and snails, or whatever, Bismarck knew he needed to be more subtle. He didn’t want the French to know that he was trying to start a war. Luckily for him, an opportunity presented itself that he would famously take full advantage of. 

Spain had just had a revolution where they overthrew their current monarch and then offered the crown to Prince Leopold. Leopold happened to be closely related to the current Prussian King Wilhelm I. At first, Leopold was going to decline the offer, but after pressure from Bismarck he accepted. 

The French did NOT like this. Remember that they absolutely hated (hate?) the Germans, and now they were about to have a very Prussian monarch ruling the country to their southern border? That’s gonna be a no from me, dog. France proceeded to send a telegram to Wilhelm demanding he withdraw Leopold’s candidacy, renounce any claim to the Spanish throne forever, and publicly apologize to France.

Wilhelm, who was a firm but amicable guy, told Bismarck to politely decline the French offer. Bismarck seized his chance and wrote an altered, more disagreeable summary of Wilhelm’s message, and proceeded to leak it to the press. The French public felt insulted by the message and wanted to fight, within days Napoleon III mobilized his country for war. Just as Bismarck planned, this stirred up German nationalistic fervor and brought the southern German states right into his arms.

The war, known as the Franco-Prussian War, was expected to be a bloody and long conflict, but it would not be so. The Germans took Paris within six months, stunning the French and all neutral observers. Bismarck drafted a new constitution that included all the German states (but still no Austria) and Wilhelm accepted his new role as the emperor of the German Empire. And on that day, in 1871, Germany was born.

With Germany unified, Bismarck soon faced a bigger challenge: keeping it unified. Here is Hoyer again:

Bismarck could not make disappear the stark cultural rifts of a people that had been fractured for so long. Differences of regional loyalties, culture, custom, dialect, religion, history and (increasingly) social status would eventually fade and be replaced by a carefully managed concept of nationhood.

Part of this meant making sure that each state felt like they had proper representation in the new government. (This should sound familiar if you are familiar with US history). Below is a graphic showing how the new government was structured. My apologies for the bad quality, this comes directly out of Blood and Iron, and I couldn’t find a high-res image on the internet.

The Bundesrat and the Reichstag were very similar to the US Senate and House of Representatives, respectively. This seems to be the time-tested compromise between smaller and larger states. The big difference between most modern democracies though was the presence of the Kaiser, who would continue to be chosen by male-preference primogeniture from House Hohenzollern.

There were a lot of other things that Bismarck did to maneuver his way around the differing interests of states - a lot of backroom dealmaking and such. I won’t go into those here, but relevant to this is his famous quote: “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”

Let’s now look at some of Bismarck’s other achievements post-unification.

Economy

The German empire saw a staggering amount of economic growth right from the outset of unification. Bismarck did a few things that may have helped. He established a single currency, standardized measurements and weights, expanded the railways, and signed trade deals with other countries. He also helped get Germany’s literacy rate to 99%, one of the highest in the world.

Another important thing that he did for the German economy, being a laissez-faire capitalist, was to leave it alone. Throughout Bismarck’s time as chancellor, there was nearly no regulation of financial or business conduct. Being a highly educated, well-connected country during the industrial revolution means you didn’t have to do much in order to see tremendous economic growth. This of course led to some of the not-so-good parts of unfettered capitalism: worker exploitation and horrible working conditions. Combined with the fact that Karl Marx was from Prussia, a German socialist counterforce (called the Social Democrats) quickly grew.

The capitalist that he was, Bismarck was fearful of the rise of socialism. While the German constitution ensured that he couldn’t outright outlaw the party, he tried a few workarounds to hamper their success. These workarounds included: banning trade unions, socialist literature, and party organization events. Despite these efforts the Social Democratic party continued to grow.

You may be wondering why I included failed suppression tactics as “one of Bismarck’s other achievements”. Well, it's what he did next when he realized his original plan wasn’t working.

Bismarck began trying to win the support of the socialists by passing legislation that they would be interested in:

• Sickness Insurance Act of 1883: provided up to 13 weeks of sick pay

• Accident Insurance Act of 1884: workers comp, funded by employers which incentivized them to make the workplace safer

• Old Age and Disability Act: pensions to those over 70 and to those that couldn’t work (social security)

This is actually insane. Remember that these types of programs did not exist anywhere in the world. While they weren’t the first instances of welfare - the Romans were famous for feeding the poor with excess grain - these laws were the foundation of modern welfare. This was also the first time worker’s compensation was put in place.

(On a side note, if you have spent any time learning about health care systems, you would have run into one called the “Bismarck model”. Which, depending on who you ask, has some of the best outcomes of all the different systems. Austria, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, and of course Germany, use Bismarck models.)

Did Bismarck actually believe in these measures? Or was he just being a shrewd statesman by wheeling and dealing favors to opposing parties? This speech of his says that he did at least believe in the concept of welfare:

The whole problem is rooted in the question: does the state have the responsibility to care for its helpless fellow citizens, or does it not? I maintain that it does have this duty [ . . . ] There are objectives that only the state in its totality can fulfill. [ . . . ] Among the last mentioned objectives [of the state] belong national defense [and] the general system of transportation. [ . . . ] To these belong also the help of persons in distress and the prevention of such justified complaints as in fact provide excellent material for exploitation by the Social Democrats. That is the responsibility of the state from which the state will not be able to withdraw in the long run.

Of course, this speech could also just be him politicking, but historian A. J. P. Taylor thinks otherwise.

It would be unfair to say that Bismarck took up social welfare solely to weaken the Social Democrats; he had had it in mind for a long time, and believed in it deeply. But as usual he acted on his beliefs at the exact moment when they served a practical need.

What do we make of this? On one hand we had a laissez-faire capitalist who banned socialist books, but on the other hand implemented the first of its kind modern welfare legislation. This is a great example of how the world doesn’t actually partition the way it does via modern US politics. Bismarck did not see a contradiction between lightly regulated business and providing welfare to the citizens of Germany.

Foreign Policy

Bismarck’s foreign policy was very deliberate in its goal: to preserve the fragile new nation of Germany. He was dealing with enough headaches at home, there was no reason to provoke any external ones too. Bismarck knew the other European countries were eyeing Germany suspiciously, so he was intentional in stressing to them that he was not interested in taking territory, and that the “German Question” getting answered did not mean a reshuffle of European power relations. 

But of course it meant a reshuffle of power relations. Germany became, overnight, the most powerful European country! They had the biggest economy, the largest population, and were led by the aggressive and militaristic Prussians. This was obvious to all of Germany’s neighbors, specifically France, who saw right through Bismarck’s appeasements and freaked out. 

Quick sidebar - I know I keep saying “and France freaked out”, but it really was true, and you only need to look at their geography to see why. They are well protected by mountains to their south and southeast and by water to their west and northwest. But their northeastern border with Belgium and Germany has no natural borders at all (after WW1 they even tried to make one). This was why they wanted to prevent a unified Germany more than anything and were very perturbed when it eventually came to be.

What would you do if your mortal enemy grew 12 inches, gained 100 pounds of muscle, and developed cauliflower ear? You’d call your friends for backup. France released a joint statement with Britain and Russia saying that no German territorial expansion would be tolerated in Europe. Even though this was just confirming exactly what Bismarck said - that he had no territorial ambitions in Europe - the statement was still unsettling to him. Some French generals had been vocally talking about a war of revenge against Germany for the Franco-Prussian war. If that was something that would eventually happen, Bismarck needed to be sure that Britain and Russia were also not against him. 

To counter this threat from France, Bismarck decided… actually, let me just have him explain: “The secret of politics? Make a treaty with Russia.” However, he knew that any public treaty would ruffle France’s feathers, so he formed a secret pact with Russia saying that they each agreed to remain neutral if the other was to be attacked by a third party. The biggest fear of Bismarck (along with all subsequent German generals) was fighting a two-front war against France and Russia. Fighting one at a time was fine but fighting both needed to be avoided at all costs.

The secret to Bismarck’s foreign policy was he carefully studied the national interest of other countries and used that information to avoid conflict. Where national interests overlapped with Germany, he would make a mutually beneficial deal. Steinberg again:

In international relations, it meant absolutely no emotional commitment to any of the actors. Diplomacy should, he believed, deal with realities, calculations of probabilities, assessing the inevitable missteps and sudden lurches by the other actors, states, and their statesmen. The chessboard could be overseen and it suited Bismarck's peculiar genius for politics to maintain in his head multiple possible moves by adversaries....He had his goals in mind and achieved them. He was and remained to the end master of the finely tuned game of diplomacy. He enjoyed it. In foreign affairs he never lost his temper, rarely felt ill or sleepless. He could outsmart and outplay the smartest people in other states.

In fact, Bismarck’s view of the political landscape was so strong that he knew how World War I was going to start, 26 years before it did. In one of the more prescient quotes of all time: “One day, the great European war will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”

Bismarck’s record on foreign policy during his tenure can only be described as successful. His goal was to use diplomacy and treaties to preserve peace on a very violent continent, which he was able to do.

Bismarck’s Blunders

Bismarck’s biggest blunder, which he would also probably admit, was how he handled the situation with the Catholics.

Remember that the southern states were very Catholic, and the northern ones were very Protestant. Although they joined Germany, the southern states were still highly skeptical of being in a Protestant empire. What scared them even more was the growing secularism in Europe after the French Revolution with the separation of church and state. Bismarck knew that the biggest cultural rift in his Empire was religious divisions, and he did not want that to be the reason Germany split again. Combined with the fact that Germany’s enemies were Catholic (France and Austria) and the sheer number of Catholics in Germany (37% of the population), he became increasingly concerned that the Catholics would conspire against the Empire.

Bismarck was correct about this concern, but the way he handled it was bad. His plan was to separate church and state and clamp down hard on the Catholics. Below were some of the actions that were taken:

• Prohibition of any public statement by priests in political affairs. This led to the imprisonment of an archbishop

• Outlawing the Jesuit Order (the most hardcore Catholics) across the entire empire

• Forced education of the clergy to go under state control and made ecclesiastical positions require passing a state sanctioned test and approval

The first result of these measures was to increase the religious fervor of the Catholics. I feel like nowadays we have learned the lesson that religious repression tends to have the opposite effect, but that was not clear to Bismarck. Second, these laws (specifically the education one) also affected and therefore angered the Protestants, who were the core of Bismarck’s support. The end of these laws came with the rise of socialism, which Bismarck saw as a greater threat, and realized he needed Catholic support to prevent it.

This situation was very similar to the one with the socialists: Bismarck had an enemy, he tried to snuff them out, it ended up backfiring, so he changed plans and corrected course. The course correction was better in the case of the socialists, but his ability to update his strategy based on new information was admirable and very Bayesian indeed.

The Fall of the Iron Chancellor

The end of Bismarck’s reign coincides with perhaps his greatest blunder: the government he created. Bismarck was a traditional monarchist who made sure that the Kaiser had a lot of power in the government. There were some checks and balances from the Bundesrat and the Reichstag, but not many. The Imperial Chancellor position, which Bismarck held, was appointed by the Kaiser and essentially acted as a proxy - if the Kaiser wanted a proxy. If the Kaiser wanted to delegate, then the chancellor had a lot of power, but if he wanted to rule, then the chancellor was mostly a powerless position.

The Kaiser-chancellor relationship was designed by Bismarck around his relationship with Wilhelm I. Wilhelm didn’t really care about politics, so he delegated almost everything to his Imperial Chancellor. This worked great because Bismarck could call all the shots, while still having a Hohenzollern monarch at the “head” of the government. 

However, when Wilhelm I died in 1888, his grandson Wilhelm II (who I will call “Willy” to avoid confusion) took over. The problem was that Willy was nothing like his grandfather. He was a young, ambitious ruler who desperately wanted to make a name for himself, which meant he did not delegate much to his chancellor. In 1890, nineteen years after he unified Germany, Bismarck was forced to resign by the new Kaiser. He spends his remaining years writing memoirs and taking pot shots at Willy, until his death in 1898.

Bismarck had a lot to say about Willy: “a hothead [who] could not hold his tongue, was susceptible to flatterers, and was capable of plunging Germany into a war without knowing what he was doing." Yet again, despite the personal animosity, Bismarck was correct. Willy did eventually plunge Germany into a war against both Russia and France, something Bismarck would have never done. While World War I did not spell the end of a unified Germany, it was the end of the government that Bismarck created. 

In hindsight his blunder was obvious, our modern sensibilities understand why hereditary monarchies (even limited ones) are bad - you are guaranteed to get a dud who ruins everything. On top of that, his inability to create a true democracy (if that was even possible in Germany at the time), may have caused the World Wars. While it may be too far to blame Bismarck for the World Wars, we can perhaps fault him for knowing one was coming and not doing more to prevent it. 

Despite his government only lasting 47 years, the unified country he created has lasted 152 and counting. Does Bismarck deserve credit for this at least? I think so. The leadership of a country during its fragile early years is what forms the institutions and norms that allow it to last for centuries. Just as George Washington laid the bedrock for national identity during his first two terms as president, Otto von Bismarck did the same for Germany, with repercussions that we still live with today.

The natural next question, then, is why?

Culture

Culture as the source of American exceptionalism would dictate that there is something about the US that causes its people to work smarter and harder. This cultural edge is what caused the US to become the world’s superpower. There are many ways to break down “culture”, but I am going to focus on two that are commonly cited: Protestant work ethic and individualism.

“Protestant work ethic” was coined by Max Weber in his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. The argument basically goes like this: in Protestantism, success in one’s work is a sign of virtue and favor from God; therefore it incentivizes hard work and entrepreneurship. Since Protestantism has been the largest religion in the US for most of its existence, its ideals permeated the culture, causing us to work harder and be more entrepreneurial than other societies.

But here’s the problem: Max Weber was a German. He was writing about the German Protestant work ethic after seeing Germany experience an insane economic boom from 1870 to 1905. Germany also has no shortage of Protestants considering the religion started there. While this does not counter the existence of a “protestant work ethic” (the Germans aren’t exactly known for being lazy), it doesn’t explain why it would be the cause of American exceptionalism exclusively. If you said that Protestantism explains British, Dutch, German, and American exceptionalism, I might buy it, but American only, not so much.

What about individualism? The argument here, like the one above, is that the individualistic nature of the US leads to more personal autonomy and bottom-up decision making. Per Hayek, this leads to optimal decisions as opposed to a tops-down bureaucratic approach. The argument for individualism as the secret to US exceptionalism is what sits on top of it: capitalism. Although the issue, again, is that this isn’t unique to the US. There are many countries that are “more capitalist” and “freer” than the US that are far from reaching superpower status.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that culture doesn’t matter, it does matter. In fact, you could even go as far as to say it is a prerequisite, but it is far from the primary driver.

Government System

Another frequently cited reason for the US’s strength is its system of government. The founding fathers were the first people to take the ideas of the Enlightenment and put them into practice. The genius of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, spearheaded by James Madison, is so great that it has given the US a huge edge over other countries. Further, if other countries wanted to have the same level of success as the US, their first step would be to model their governments similarly.

First, there are many other countries with democracies who aren’t anywhere close to becoming a superpower. There is a lot of subjectivity on determining which democracies are “better”, but it's hard to say that any can be so much better as to dictate superpower status. Also, what are the odds that the first country to implement a democratic republic happened to get it perfectly right the first time? Seems highly unlikely to me.

Second, democracies don’t have a great track record when it comes to economic development and world domination. The two previous world superpowers - the Dutch from 1600 to 1750, and the British from 1750 to 1918 - were not very democratic compared to democracies today. Additionally, all the following semi-modern empires/countries at their strongest were not governed democratically at all: Imperial Japan, Bismarckian Germany, Nazi Germany, Napoleonic France, and Russia at any point. Therefore, the interesting point is not how the US’s system of government contributed to its primacy, but how did the US become a world power despite its government? (To understand more about why the world is becoming more democratic, see my book review on The End of History and the Last Man).

Why the US is the world’s superpower

The real reason for US primacy is simpler and far more random: geography. The United States has been bestowed with by far the best geography and it's not even close. If America’s rise to a superpower is 1 part culture and 1 part government system, it's 8 parts geography. 

So, what makes up “good” geography? The areas we will explore in this section are borders, size, rivers, farmland, and resources. Much of this geographical analysis comes from Thomas Pueyo and Peter Zeihan.

Borders

A good border is one that makes it challenging for an opposing country to invade, such as deserts or mountains. Switzerland is the poster child for good mountain barriers - they are literally surrounded by mountains - which is extremely effective with preventing invasion, hence why during WW2 Switzerland was virtually the only European country not invaded by Germany.

The best border though is an ocean, of which the US has two. It's nearly impossible to stage a successful invasion thousands of miles away. We consider D-Day a challenging amphibious invasion and that was only 100 miles (and the Germans were relatively ill-prepared). In addition to the defense benefits, being bordered by the Atlantic and the Pacific gives the US direct shipping lane access to both the European and Asian markets.

This then just leaves the northern and southern borders. To the south is Mexico which has the southern Rockies going right through the country, making it very hard for them to maintain a stable state (let alone an invasion). The northern border, then, includes two of the most homogenous and friendly countries in the world. The US-Canadian border is the longest undefended border on Earth.

Size

The US is the third largest country on Earth by land area behind Russia and China. However, if you were to look at usable land (aka not mountains, deserts, or frozen wastelands), it easily jumps to number 1. Most of this usable land is farmland, of which the US has the most arable acres of land in the world.

Being able to grow your own food has the obvious benefit of being cheaper (lower transport costs), but it's also a boon to security. Not having to depend on other countries for food means an already unlikely blockade against the US would be a complete failure. (Of course, this would require us to start growing something other than corn and soy.)

There is another, less obvious, benefit of having so much useful land - wages.

Manifest destiny was such that American settlers were “destined” to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. This philosophical justification, or whatever you want to call it, meant that the US territory expanded rapidly throughout the 19th century. This new land happened to be highly fertile and was interconnected through an extensive river network. There was so much land, in fact, that the government just gave it away. Roughly 10% of US territory was given away for free to 1.6 million homesteaders. This led to many people from the east coast moving west in search of better opportunities.

The impact of the workers migrating westward was to artificially increase wages in east coast factories - less workers led to higher wages for the existing workers. These high wages served a few purposes. First, they incentivized innovation from the capitalists; when the labor costs increased, it spurred the need to find alternate (cheaper) ways of building things. Second, high wages caused a mass migration of immigrants from Europe, giving the US a population to support its industrial base. Having a large population makes it a lot easier to become a superpower, and the US has the third highest.

Rivers

The US has the most extensive navigable river system in the world. Here is a quote from The Accidental Superpower:

The Mississippi is the world's longest navigable river, some 2,100 miles long from its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico to its head of navigation at the Twin Cities in Minnesota. That's about one-third longer than the mighty Danube and triple the length of the Rhine. And the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America's temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.

Ok, but who cares? The first benefit of rivers is cost reduction. The cheapest way to move something from point A to point B is, and always has been, to float it. Since transportation costs are baked into the price of a good, this makes goods cheaper and increases the range with which your goods are competitive. Great news for US producers of goods.

Second, the US river system is what allowed the states to stay together and preserve national identity. The miracle of the US is that it managed to stay together during the 1800s. Any country as large as the US, especially back then, would likely be fractured into small subsections that maintained their own culture and sense of identity. These small mini societies would not interact much with each other because they were all “a few days' ride away”. This eventually would lead to differences so large that secession ensues.

This only happened once in the US, and it had less to do with multiple sub-cultures but instead a binary division based on a single issue. The extensive river system connected the country not just economically, but culturally.

Resources

The icing on the cake for the United States is they also have the one resource that is imperative to becoming a world superpower: oil. When the US was first industrializing there were easily accessible oil fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio. As the country expanded they found a little more in Texas, Oklahoma, and then California. These fields were enough to satisfy the needs of the country but were not so much that the US got a massive windfall from exporting oil. This was important because getting too much oil very quickly is bad. Selling oil to the entire world at a windfall profit tends to lead to mismanagement and a lot of corruption. There is even a name for this: the resource curse.

Just as the US begins to run out of oil deposits towards the end of the 20th century, fracking gets invented, which boosts the US to become the biggest oil producer in the world.

Why does this matter

While individually, having strong borders, size, rivers, or resources can be a boon to a specific country. Having all of them is more than enough to become a superpower. These factors combine to give the US the best geographical hand out of any country, ever.

We have shown that the US is a superpower mostly due to its geography, but who cares? I don’t want the takeaway to be that since our geography is good nothing else matters and we can just sit back and chill. The other things do matter. But understanding that something as benign and random as geography being the secret to our success is a humbling proposition. 

For one, it can dampen nationalist impulses. It's a lot easier to justify nationalistic rhetoric when your country has shit geography, and you manage to overcome it. Two, it removes some of the firepower out of the “cultural preservation” arguments. While we should want to protect from fundamentalism, changes in culture probably won’t move the needle much when it comes to the success of the US. Lastly, from a finance standpoint that is 100% not to be taken as investment advice, it likely means that the S&P is still a great place to park your money.

Although, if you needed to get from Asia to Europe, how would you do it? Remember that sailing around Africa only became an option when the Portuguese figured it out in 1488. Therefore, the best option for ~2,000 years was effectively…to walk.

Of course, some routes were better than others. For example, going through Russia was bad due to their notoriously harsh winters and the Caucasus Mountains presented a challenge to pass. This led to some common choke points that most routes tended to pass through. 

Even today, if you wanted to walk from Tehran to Venice, your best route would be to go through one of the world's most interconnected cities: Istanbul.

If you were to show an alien a geographical map of the Earth and ask them to choose the best place for a city, Istanbul would be a pretty good choice. Not only is it a key choke point between two continents (half of it is in Europe and the other half in Asia), but all sea trade between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea must go through it. 

This means that the strip of land bordering the Bosporus strait was, and continues to be, one of the most important geographical regions in history. It is no wonder that this city has been called the “city of the world’s desire.” Even today, Istanbul is the most populous city in Europe, and serves as Turkey’s economic and cultural hub.

I had the pleasure of going to Istanbul last year and found myself interested in the history of this ancient city. I was finally inspired to write this piece after reading Matt Lakeman’s Notes on Nigeria, hopefully it compares.

Byzantium

The city has gone through four major re-brands over the millennia. It was called Byzantium from 667 BC to 408 AD, Constantinople from 408 to 1453, Kostantiniyye from 1453 to 1930, and Istanbul from 1930 to today. 

There’s even a fun song about it…

Most cities don’t have this many names, but most cities don’t change hands and religions and ethnicities as much as Istanbul has. This is ultimately why Istanbul is so interesting: it’s a blend of Christianity and Islam, Asian and European, Greek and Roman and Arabic and Turkish. We’ll get to all of these, but first let’s start at the beginning. 

The city we now call Istanbul first entered into the historical record with Herodotus, who told us of a Greek named Byzas, who “founded” the city in 667 BC and named it Byzantium. Around this time, interactions between Eastern Europe and the Middle East were beginning to ramp up. Being right in the middle, Byzantium started getting passed around quite a bit.

Byzantium remained a Greek city state until Darius the Great folded it into the Achaemenid Persian Empire in 513 BC. It then briefly gets independence before getting sacked in 411 BC by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War as an attempt to cut off a key Athenian trade partner. Athens counters and took it back three years later. Eventually it was conquered by Alexander the Great around 340 BC (although he never actually stepped foot in the city). After the collapse of Alexander’s empire, Byzantium remained quasi-independent until around 190 BC when it became a Roman client state.

Or, if you prefer a timeline:

Despite being highly valuable, Byzantium was always on the outskirts of these large powers, it was never the heart of any empire. This was about to change.

Constantinople

By 300 AD the Roman Empire had reached its later stages and the succession battles were getting bloodier and bloodier. At the end of one of these wars the emperor Constantine takes power.

After winning the civil war he decided he didn’t really like Rome and thought it made sense to move the capital closer to the frontier of the empire. The famous apocryphal story says he identified the location for the new city in a dream. Either way, the new city that would become the capital of the Roman Empire was - you guessed it… Byzantium. Which was soon renamed to Constantinople.

Like any new homeowner, Constantine wanted to spice up the place, and the best way to do this in Roman times was to procure something Greek. The Romans idolized Greek culture and were very familiar, just as we are, with their greatest works. One of these works was the Serpent Column that was erected in Delphi to celebrate the Greek victory over the Persians 700 years before Constantine’s time. This was the perfect monument to put in his new city, so Constantine had it moved, 600 miles, from Delphi to Constantinople where it still stands today:

While the statue is cool, what Constantine did next actually impacted your life directly. There are some people in history that I call “butterfly effect” people where a single decision they made ended up having massive ripple effects that affected basically everything. Constantines being that he decided to convert to Christianity. 

This was a really, really, really, big deal because Christianity was still small at the time and resembled a cult rather than an actual religion. Christians and other non-believers of the Roman imperial cult had been persecuted for hundreds of years. When Constantine took power only 5-10% of the Roman citizenry were Christians, but by the time of his death it was closer to 50%. What would have happened if Constantine had chosen another religion? Perhaps Christianity would have fizzled out like the dozens of other cults at that time.

Either way, Istanbul isn’t just “formerly a Christian city” it was effectively the original Christian city.

About a hundred years later you get the fragmentation of the Roman Empire as it split into East and West. The Eastern Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, kept its capital as Constantinople. This “new” empire peaked in 565 during the reign of an emperor named Justinian.

As the Western Roman Empire had all but collapsed, Justinian had managed to greatly expand the borders of the Byzantine Empire. He also implemented sweeping legal reforms with his Corpus Juris Civilis which was one of the first works in jurisprudence that enshrined a principle we still live with today: Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat, or in case you don't know Latin: "Proof lies on him who asserts, not on him who denies."

Justinian’s wife, Theodora, who surely deserves her own essay, was an incredibly colorful character. Her most famous story is one of Churchillian bad-assery when riots in Constantinople caused Justinian to debate fleeing the city, she famously said:

May I never be deprived of this purple robe, and may I never see the day when those who meet me do not call me Empress. If you wish to save yourself, my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich; over there is the sea, and yonder are the ships. Yet reflect for a moment whether, when you have once escaped to a place of security, you would not gladly exchange such safety for death. As for me, I agree with the adage, that royal purple is the noblest shroud.

But Justinian’s greatest achievement was building Istanbul’s crown jewel: Hagia Sophia, which looms over the city like an ageless titan, a testament to human ingenuity and resilience.

Looking like it was pulled right out of Star Wars, this building would be impressive if it were built today, let alone 1,500 years ago. You can count on one hand the number of buildings this old that still impose the sort of gravitational field that radiates around them.

Originally built as a church, Hagia Sophia was the largest religious building in the world for over 1,000 years. It remained a church until the Ottomans converted it to a Mosque in 1453, which has led to some very interesting religious workarounds. Jesus is also a relevant figure in Islam so they keep some images of him, but cover up others. I don’t pretend to know the theological reasons behind what gets covered up, but it definitely feels like you are in a church that got switched to a mosque.

You can see above the tarps covering some of the images of Jesus. You also can clearly see the Arabic text circle things that were put up after the fact. 

If two religions weren’t enough, there are also columns that have engravings of the Greek God Poseidon’s trident. Istanbul has a lot of earthquakes, so in some variation of Pascal’s wager, Justinian hedged his bets and made sure that if there was going to be an earthquake it sure as hell wasn’t going to be because Poseidon was mad.

Perhaps my favorite part of the Hagia Sophia is the vestibule mosaic over the south door, created in the 10th century. It depicts Mother Mary sitting with baby Jesus (which for some reason isn’t covered up), with Justinian on the left bearing the Hagia Sophia as a gift, and Constantine on the right offering the city itself. This mosaic is the best encapsulation of the city as it relates to Roman and Byzantine history.

While the Hagia Sophia has maintained a presence in the city for 1,500 years, the same cannot be said for the Byzantine Empire, which slowly declined over the next 700 years. In 1204, the weak Constantinople was sacked by Latin crusaders on their way to Jerusalem during the fourth crusade. Being on the best land route from Europe to Asia also has its downsides. 

Constantinople limped along as a regional power/city state for the next 250 years until it was sacked again in 1453 by Mehmed the Conqueror, who turned it into the capital of the Ottoman Empire. 

Kostantiniyye

Technically the name Constantinople didn’t change with the takeover by the Ottomans, Kostantiniyye was just the Arabic translation (pronounced: con-stan-tin-ee-yeh). However, I think the change is notable, as 1453 marked one of the city's biggest transitions.

The Ottoman conquest of Kostantiniyye began the Islamification of the city. Aside from the symbolic changes, such as the conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque, the religions and ethnicities of the people also began to change. This wasn’t by force, it just happens that when you are a Christian city you get European Christian migrants, and when you're an Islamic city, you get more Muslims and Middle Easterners.

Right as Mehmed moved in, he began building a brand-new administrative center in the heart of the city called Topkapi Palace.

The palace was very large for its time, and it had to be, because the Sultan’s entire family lived there. And when I say “family” I basically mean “small army”. The Sultan didn’t have a wife - instead he had dozens to hundreds of concubines of which he had dozens to hundreds of children with. On top of this, all the Sultan’s brothers (of which there were dozens) also lived within the palace too. But when I say “lived within” I really mean “imprisoned”, as the Sultan’s children and brothers were not allowed to leave the palace. Find my essay about Ottoman succession practices here.

An attraction that originated early in the Ottoman reign is the Grand Bazaar. Often considered the world’s first shopping mall, it is one of the Earth’s largest covered markets with more than 4,000 shops. It was even the top tourist attraction in the world in 2014. The bazaar’s origins date back to Mehmed who erected the edifice to stimulate trade in the city he had just conquered. 

I didn’t love the Grand Bazaar. It's a little claustrophobic considering it has 250K - 400K daily visitors, the equivalent of 3 Coachellas or 5 full football stadiums. Not really my scene, but it’s worth checking out.

Mehmed’s attempt to stimulate trade worked, as the Ottoman Empire grew significantly until its peak in the late 1600s. At their largest, the Ottomans controlled the Balkans, North Africa, and a sizable portion of the Middle East.

However, the Ottoman Empire slowly declined through the 18th and 19th centuries. They were so dysfunctional by the end of the 1800s that Czar Nicholas I labeled them the "sick man of Europe".

Speaking of the Czar, the Ottomans did not have a great relationship with Russia when World War I broke out. They had been fighting over the Caucasus region for a while and a quarter of all Russian trade passed through Kostantiniyye when traveling from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. With the Russians firmly on the side of the Allied powers, the Ottomans decided to join Germany and the Central Powers. 

This turned out to be a bad move, and Constantinople was occupied by Allied British and French troops in 1918. This was the first time the city had been captured since Mehmed the Conqueror, 465 years earlier.

Istanbul

The modern period is best defined in terms of Turkification. The Turkish people are an ethnic group that have lived on the Anatolian peninsula since the 11th century and formed the majority ethnicity in the Ottoman Empire. For thousands of years, Constantinople was a melting pot of ethnicities - Arabs, Kurds, Greeks, Armenians, Turks, and others, but in the late 1800s there was a steep rise in Turkish Nationalism. This led to skepticism of non-Turks, especially ethnicities that had ties to enemy countries, such as Greece and Russia.

This Turkish nationalism led to two big genocides between 1913 and 1923: the Greek Genocide and the Armenian Genocide. These two events combined for 1 to 2.5 million deaths of Anatolian Greeks and Armenians, and those that weren’t killed quickly fled to Greece or Armenia. Over the 100 year period from 1913 to 2013, Turkey saw a collapse of these populations - Greeks went from 6% to 0.4%, Armenians went from 10% to less than 0.1% - and Turks rose from 40% to 71% of the population. To this day, the Turkish government does not acknowledge either of the genocides. 

While the origins of the Turkish Nationalist movement date back to the late 1800s, it really kicked into gear at the end of WWI. With the Allies occupying Constantinople, a competent Ottoman general and statesman, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, consolidated power in the city of Ankara in the center of the country. He eventually led the Nationalists in the Turkish War of Independence to reclaim Constantinople in 1923 and founded the nation we know today as Turkey. The name Ataturk was given to him after the fact and literally means “father of Turks”.

Ataturk is the George Washington of Turkey and is the face you see on every Turkish Lira. Aside from his questionable involvement in the genocides (which was at best that he turned a blind eye), he was a strong leader that reversed decay and catapulted Turkish society into modernity. The first big change he implemented was republicanism. No longer would there be a Sultan with absolute power, but instead representatives who are elected.

Second, Ataturk saw that a key to western success was secularism, or the separation of church and state. The Ottoman Empire was the opposite with Islam consistently having a heavy hand in decision making. Ataturk made sure that there was no religious interference in government affairs.

Constantinople was also not immune to Turkification. Its name changed once again, this time to a Turkish name: Istanbul. It also lost its status as capital - Ataturk kept the capital of Turkey in Ankara after reclaiming Istanbul. Much of this probably had to do with convenience as Ankara was the base of operations in the Turkish War of Independence. However, it also was a symbolic gesture separating the new nation of Turkey from the Ottomans. By the end of the Ottoman Empire, Obi Wan may have called Constantinople “a wretched hive of scum and villainy”, bloated with corrupt bureaucrats - moving the capital was a symbol of change. 

Turkey not only mirrored the Western ideals of secularism and republicanism, but it also began to cozy up to the West in more practical ways, such as defense. They say nothing is certain in life but death, taxes, and the Russians wanting Constantinople. With the USSR as powerful as ever, Turkey needed some allies to ensure they didn’t lose their most valuable city. This led Turkey to join NATO in 1952. Since then, Turkey has consistently had one of the largest militaries in NATO. As of 2020 they had the second highest percentage of GDP contributed to their military at 2.8%, behind the US at 3.7%.

Turkey is in a pretty rough neighborhood. In addition to having a big scary neighbor to their North, they don’t really get along with Greece and Armenia (for genocidal reasons), and to their south they border…Syria. They also have turmoil internally with the Kurds, who have wanted their own country since as early as 1920 but never got it. In fact, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group without a state, and Turkey has insisted that they remain that way.

The combination of these factors has necessitated that Turkey maintain a strong and involved military. Constantly putting down Kurdish revolts has also made them very used to operating within their own borders, something the US military can’t do. This has led the Turkish military to occasionally get involved in domestic politics - as there were four coups or coup attempts from 1960 to 2000. 

This is all to set up the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdogan (pronounced: air-do-wan), who first entered the political arena as the mayor of Istanbul. The best synopsis of Erdogan is this ACX post on The New Sultan, but I will give a very brief summary.

Erdogan eventually got promoted from Mayor of Istanbul to the Prime Minister of Turkey in 2003, where he effectively remains today (technically he is now the president). Erdogan started off continuing the secularist traditions of Ataturk but eventually pivoted towards more religiosity. One example being the 2020 change of Hagia Sophia from a museum (which it had been since 1931) back to a mosque. 

Erdogan has turned Turkey from a sort-of-democracy to a sort-of-dictatorship. Suing dissenters for corruption, packing the courts, and frequently changing the constitution, has made Erdogan one of the most powerful people in Turkey since Ataturk. The most generous reading of this is that he needed to break the hold that the military had over the country. After nearly getting deposed in the 1997 military coup, Erdogan realized he needed to consolidate power to not be overthrown himself.

Whatever his motive, the freedom scores of Turkey have steadily been dropping. Here is a quote from the ACX essay on Erdogan:

On Freedom House's measure of press unfreedom (where 0 is best and 100 is worse), Turkey went from 58 to 71 during the Erdogan years. On a political unfreedom score from 0 to 40, it went from 23 to 30. Turkish presidents are allowed to sue citizens who insult them; Erdogan's predecessor did this 26 times, his immediate predecessor 139 times, and Erdogan himself 1800 times.

When I was on a tour in Istanbul, Erdogan was in the news for walking around Central Park. I decided to ask our guide what he thought of Erdogan, to which he replied: “he wouldn’t dare walk around like that in Istanbul, he wouldn’t make it 100 meters.” Although our tour guide was a college educated secularist, the type Erdogan doesn’t usually appeal to. 

However, there is one thing that Erdogan has done decently well while ruling Turkey: the economy. Although it has gone down since 2013, at its peak Turkey’s GDP per capita was triple what it was when Erdogan came into office.

The regression you can see in the chart over the last 10 years has caused Erdogan’s popularity to slump during his second decade of rule. One of the key economic issues has been inflation: 

Inflation that high usually doesn’t lead to a happy populace - but it does lead to happy tourists! The purchasing power in Turkey, as represented through the Big Mac Index, is $2.68, which is 48% lower than the US.

More common in poorer countries, you still get that phenomenon in Turkey where the overlap between your consumer surplus and a seller’s producer surplus is quite large. There are many times when you think you are getting a great deal, but the seller is actually ripping you off! 

I’ll now rapid fire through some other cool parts about Istanbul.

Mosques are awesome

Mosques are really beautiful structures, and they are everywhere in the city. Any skyline view of Istanbul will have hundreds of minarets (the pillars surrounding a mosque) protruding up. The number of mosques per capita greatly exceeds churches in any western city. One reason for this is that Muslims go to mosques a lot more than Christians go to church. Churches are popular on Sunday, but mosques are used every day, hence the need for more of them.

The other impact of having so many mosques is the prayer calls that happen six times per day. Here is an example:

Food

Turkish food is exactly what you would expect: Mediterranean with some Middle Eastern influence and more fish. As for the quality, the food in Istanbul was good if you knew where to go. Staying in the touristy area there were a lot of very aggressive hosts on the street trying to get you to eat at their empty restaurant. The food at these places was pretty average, but the drinks were especially bad. It felt like someone went to a random bar in NYC, wrote down three cocktails they had, came back and made sure every restaurant in Istanbul offered those exact drinks. It was like an Aperol Spritz, Moscow Mule, and a Mojito. One of the friends I was traveling with made the fateful mistake of ordering a vodka martini and getting a cup of vodka accompanied with the non-English speaking waiter calling him a “big boss!”. Considering Muslim’s aren’t known for being drinkers, this isn’t surprising - stick with the Turkish beer.

However, when we ventured out to the more local areas, especially when led by a food tour guide, the food experience was quite amazing. The below video is from one of the kebab places we went to, which was phenomenal even though it doesn’t look like much. The restaurant is called Kebapçı İskender, which is on the less-touristy Asian side of the city.

Two of the restaurants we went to served our food with those ornate metal domes over the plates. You rarely see this in the states, maybe at the nicest restaurants (certainly not ones that I go to), so getting two in the span of three days felt like it was potentially an Istanbul thing. My guess is it's playing on an old Ottoman tradition, given they look like this:

Cats!

One thing that you will definitely notice as you walk the streets of Istanbul is the number of cats you see. It is estimated that Istanbul is home to around 250,000 feral cats, alongside a very strict no kill no capture policy.

The cats first arrived during Ottoman times when the proliferation of wooden structures led to a rat problem. But other cities had wooden structures and rats too, right? Why don’t Western cities have a ton of cats running around?

The best guess is it has to do with Islam's very positive attitude towards cats, which ultimately allowed them to stick around. Either way, Istanbul does not have a rat problem… but New York on the other hand…

Verdict

Overall, I loved Istanbul. The people were amazing and the history was rich. If you are looking for something a little different next time you go to Europe, but don’t want it to be too different, then look no further than the city with many names.

Additional Reading

In preparation for this post I read Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes which I would highly recommend. (Also, the reason she says three cities and I said four is because she isn’t differentiating Constantinople from Kostantiniyye). This book covers the entire history of the city

If you want something that focuses more on the Ottoman period, I would go with Constantinople: City of the Worlds Desire, 1453 - 1924 by Philip Mansel. This one was pretty in depth, and I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone.

Whenever we consume information, whether a book, article, or video, there's a familiar echo in our minds: "is this biased?" This question grows louder when the topic is tinged with politics. Similarly, when we hear about information that others consume, we may drop the question entirely and think: "this is undoubtedly biased." 

The issue with this framing, though, is that everything is biased, leaving us with a question that always resolves to “yes”. In this essay I want to introduce a different question for you to ask. Instead of evaluating information sources in a binary way (biased or unbiased), I want to suggest using a method called “context completeness.” This method requires you to think about what percentage of the context a specific media source is giving you. For example, a news source with a context completeness ratio of 50% would be giving you half of the relevant information or evidence, while leaving out the other half. 

So instead of asking “is this biased”, you should be asking “what is the context completion ratio?” I know, it doesn’t roll off the tongue and it might be the nerdiest thing you have ever heard, but that doesn’t mean it's not helpful.

Despite the veneer of numeracy, context completeness is not a quantitative measure. While I wouldn’t say it's subjective, it's impossible to actually calculate. However, it's still a useful mental framework. 

A source with 0% context is making a claim without any evidence at all. It doesn’t necessarily mean the claim is wrong, but there is no way to verify it. Another name for this is entertainment, as it's akin to getting your information from the latest episode of Succession. Sources with 0% context completeness are usually awesome, they’re just not good ways to get new information.

On the other hand, sources with 100% context completeness are rare, and even if you do find one, you probably won’t like it. Having 100% context means 1) there is a mountain of evidence and information, likely more than you have time for, and 2) it's going to be extremely boring. Academic papers are probably the only sources that get close to 100% context. The ideal context completeness for something like news is probably between 70% and 80%. This gives the source enough context to show an accurate picture, but not so much that its entertainment value sinks low enough to be unreadable. 

The entertainment-context dichotomy is a good way to spot a source with low context completeness. The more entertaining, usually the less context is being provided. This isn’t always true, but it's a decent proxy. Additionally, if you find your-self nodding along in agreement (or disagreement), or getting “fired up” about what you are reading or watching, odds are it has low context completeness. 

On the flip side, two indications that a source has high context completeness are:

• They are considered unbiased by nearly everyone (this is rare)

• They are considered liberal by conservatives, and conservative by liberals (it doesn’t have to be political groups, just anytime two opposing “sides” both say a source is favoring the other side)

Someone may have their hand up at this point with the question “but what if the context that is being provided is fake or made up?” It's a good question, but my response would be: first, fake context is not context, so 0%. Second, you may be surprised to know that information sources very rarely make up context, they just choose it selectively. This is the assumption that context completeness is based on. 

Let me say it again so it's crystal clear for those in the back: most media outlets, political YouTube shows, and even bloggers, don’t usually outright invent facts. Instead, they form conclusions based on selectively chosen evidence. Scott Alexander has an article discussing this here and here. Let’s look at two examples from the article and apply a context completeness ratio to them.

Where better to start than with InfoWars, which ran an October 2022 headline: “New Vaccine Data Shows Alarming Number Of Stillbirths And Miscarriages Caused By Covid Shot”, citing this chart:

At first glance, this chart looks pretty worrying. Our first instinct may be to question if the data is made up or not, but it's not, it comes from VAERS, which is co-managed by the CDC and FDA. Infowars took this real information and logically concluded that the 4,000% increase in miscarriages in 2021 was due to the COVID vaccine.

Although, as you may have surmised, they omitted vital context surrounding the data in the chart, such as the fact that the data relies on women voluntarily self-reporting. If Infowars had had a higher context completeness ratio, they would have added:

• Since the VAERS data looks at a small slice of total miscarriages - women who received a vaccine in the last year - any increase in the number of women who received a vaccine in the last year would increase the VAERS numbers, and a lot more women got a vaccine in 2021 than in 2020.

• Remember that it's self-reported, women in normal years don’t have vaccines on their mind, and likely don’t report their miscarriages to VAERS after getting one. In 2021 and 2022, vaccines were on everyone's mind, leading to more people remembering to report. The same thing happened in 2008-2010 with the HPV vaccine, which eventually dropped back down to normal levels.

• There is no verification by VAERS that the reports are true or not. I could go right now and report a miscarriage to VAERS. 

And this is just context for the chart itself, there are a ton of studies about this exact subject with different conclusions that could have been referenced.

Note that I am not attacking InfoWars conclusion directly, instead I am focusing on the missing context of their conclusion. But it is important to call out that they didn’t lie. They may have pushed a conclusion with a context completeness ratio of less than 10%, but the numbers in the story were not fabricated. Now, did they nefariously withhold context to fit their narrative? Are they just really really dumb? Probably both, but they didn’t technically lie.

Let’s look at one more example, but this time from the left.

The Washington Post had a headline from a few years ago titled Scott Walker’s yellow politics, where they take issue with the (then) governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, who had a proposal to make welfare benefits dependent on a drug test. The author of this story goes into why this is a bad idea because welfare recipients barely use drugs at all! To back this up, she cites a study: “In Tennessee, more than 16,000 applicants for public assistance were screened for drug use under a new state law; exactly 37 tested positive, or about 0.2 percent.” The author implies that since welfare recipients use drugs so seldomly, there is no need to force drug tests for benefits. 16,000 is a lot of people too, so small sample size certainly isn’t an issue.

Again, some key context was left out. It would have been nice to know:

• “Screened for drug use” didn’t mean a drug test, it meant asking welfare recipients a Yes/No question on if they took drugs or not. It was self-reported.

• Depending on how you calculate it, the percent of US drug users across the entire population is 5-10%. Since this study indicates 0.2% of welfare recipients take drugs, that’s like 98% less than the general population.

However, just like InfoWars example, WaPo didn’t lie. This was a real study, with real numbers, they just left out the fact that the government asking people if they took drugs obviously led to a low rate of affirmations.

Aside from putting in this obviously flawed Tennessee study, the author does include additional context and studies about the welfare drug-test debate. Despite failing to include any studies that point to drug use potentially being higher among the poor, this article is probably closer to 50% context completeness. Not bad, but not great.

Again, I am not taking an issue with the author's overall point, just with the amount of context she decided to include.

I also want to call out that these articles were not cherry picked - you can go to the website of any news outlet or blogger and choose virtually any article, each one will have left out some degree of context.

Conclusion

As you can see from these examples, both these articles would qualify as biased, which doesn’t help us at all. If everyone is biased then no one is biased. The more effective question, that places an information source on a spectrum rather than a transistor, is “what's my context completeness ratio?” We must understand that information can be selected and presented in a myriad of ways, and rarely is it comprehensive or fully contextualized. Context completeness equips us to evaluate the information we consume not in unary terms of biases but by allowing us to appreciate the degree of the context provided.

Media sources spanning from Infowars to the Washington Post present true information but remove varying degrees of context to fit their narrative. This is why “banning misinformation” is problematic. Would either of the aforementioned articles be misinformation? They both stated true facts, they just withheld context, is that misinformation? Perhaps a better way to define misinformation would be something like “presenting oneself as news but having less than 5% context.”

In fact, we used to legally enforce high context completeness on broadcasters from 1949 to 1987, it was called the fairness doctrine. This is probably unrealistic in the information age, but the concept is intriguing nonetheless.

Lapham’s Quarterly is a periodical that contains essays and quotes throughout history about a specific topic. This issue, on war, includes excerpts from George W. Bush to Elizabeth I to Thucydides.

Let’s dive in.

The Trumpet of Rightful Destruction

2003 - We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them. 

Tim Collins, Commanding Officer of the British Army, speaking to his troops on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. A copy of this speech is allegedly hanging in the White House.

The reason I decided to include this excerpt is because of how it encapsulates the justification of modern warfare. If you showed this quote to any general before the 1900s, they would think it's blasphemous. War for most of history was almost exclusively about territorial acquisition and control, invading a country to “free a people” would not have been a justification that mattered.

A cynic might say “The real reason for invasion was still about control - specifically of oil. This rhetoric is just to sell the idea to the people and the soldiers” While the cynic might be right, it doesn’t really matter for the point. The fact that this framing is even being used to convince the citizenry and the soldiers says a lot about modern warfare. Democracies need to ensure that there is substantial public support of a war (particularly at the beginning of it), and ensuring that we are the “good guys” is an essential part of this.

Addressing the Troops

1944 - There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again. You may be thankful that twenty years from now, when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you won't have to cough, shift him to the other knee, and say, "Well, your granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana." No sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, "Son, your granddaddy rode with the great Third Army and a son of a goddamned bitch named Georgie Patton!" 

George Patton, General of the US Army, rallying his troops before the invasion of Normandy. Notice the rhetorical difference between this and what Collins said in Iraq.

Not much to add here, but if motivating your troops is one of the qualities of a good general, then it’s no wonder that Patton is considered one of the best.

War Comes Dressed in the Spirit of Friendship

1914 - 

Tsar to Kaiser, July 29, 1:00 A.M.

Am glad you are back. In this serious moment, I appeal to you to help me. An ignoble war has been declared to a weak country. The indignation in Russia shared fully by me is enormous. I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war, I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far.

Nicky 

Tsar Nicholas Romanov II, exchange of telegrams between the Russian Tsar and his cousin, Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm II of Germany, on the eve of World War I. Colloquially called the “Willy-Nicky Telegrams”. The Russian army mobilized on July 29, the Germany army on July 31. The first shots were fired on August 20. 

While it's not uncommon for leaders to have correspondence before a war, this one stands out as a little more interesting. First, the Tsar and Kaiser are cousins, and their familiarity is obvious given the telegrams are signed “Nicky” and “Willie.” Second, this exchange fully encapsulates why World War I began: a web of alliances and leaders “overwhelmed by the pressure forced on them”. 

One question we can ask is if Nicholas was genuine in his message. Was he actually asking Wilhelm to stop Austria-Hungary? Or was he just trying to clear his name and ensure the blame for beginning the war resided with Wilhelm? While it may have been a little of both, historians largely agree that Nicholas was hesitant to go to war with Germany, his hand being forced by the powers that be.

Thinking Big

1972 - 

Nixon: See, the attack in the North that we have in mind... power plants, whatever's left - petroleum, the docks.... And I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

Nixon: No, no, no... I'd rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for chrissakes. The only place where you and I disagree is with regard to the bombing. You're so goddamned concerned about civilians, and I don't give a damn. I don't care.

Kissinger: I'm concerned about the civilians because I don't want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.

Richard Nixon, President of the United States, and Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor, discuss their options in Vietnam.

This exchange is wild. Dick Nixon was a hardcore dude, there aren’t many people in modern history who can make Kissinger look like a pacifist.

Disarmament Treaty

1063 - Dearest brothers in the Lord, these are the conditions which you must observe during the time of the peace which is commonly called the Truce of God, and which begins with sunset on Wednesday and lasts until sunrise on Monday.

1. During those four days and five nights, no man or woman shall assault, wound, or slay another, or attack, seize, or destroy a castle, burg, or villa, by craft or by violence.

2. If anyone violates this peace and disobeys these commands of ours, he shall be exiled for thirty years as a penance, and, before he leaves the bishopric, he shall make compensation for the injury which he committed. Otherwise, he shall be excommunicated by the Lord God and excluded from all Christian fellowship.

The Truce of God was a measure by the medieval Roman Catholic Church to suspend warfare during certain days of the week and for certain church festivals and Lent.

Enforcing laws without an army or a police force is effectively impossible…unless of course your citizens are God-fearing . This fact about religions, how they can enforce rules without violence, has always interested me. Using the threat of excommunication was more than enough to pacify the pious peasants that made up High Middle Age Europe. 

It's not a coincidence that religious fervor rose dramatically after the fall of the Roman Empire. Without any army to enforce laws throughout Europe, we shifted to an alternative: God.

Reflecting on Spain

1937 - My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. I had time to feel this very vividly. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaninglessness of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment's carelessness! I thought, too, of the man who had shot me wondering what he was like, whether he was a Spaniard or a foreigner, whether he knew he had got me, and so forth. I could not feel any resentment against him. I reflected that as he was a Fascist, I would have killed him if I could, but that if he had been taken prisoner and brought before me at this moment I would merely have congratulated him on his good shooting.

George Orwell, from his memoir Homage to Catalonia about fighting in the Spanish Civil war. Orwell went to Spain in 1936 to fight on the side of the Republicans against the Fascists, but he was shot by a sniper in 1937. The war attracted international attention and drew volunteers from many different countries, who saw it as a crucial battle in the global fight against fascism.

This excerpt is so Orwell, it's great. I cannot recommend Homage to Catalonia highly enough. 

Between the Devil and the Deep-Blue Sea

U.S. servicemen's chances of death in battle:

The Civil War is no surprise, but if you had asked me the second most deadly U.S. war from a percentage standpoint - there is NO way I would have guessed the Mexican-American War. 

Why War?

1931 - 

Dear Mr. Freud,

…Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war? It is common knowledge that, with the advance of modern science, this issue has come to mean a matter of life and death for civilization as we know it, nevertheless, for all the zeal displayed, every attempt at its solution has ended in a lamentable breakdown…

…I know that in your writings we may find answers, explicit or implied, to all the issues of this urgent and absorbing problem. But it would be of the greatest service to us all were you to present the problem of world peace in the light of your most recent discoveries, for such a presentation well might blaze the trail for new and fruitful modes of action.

Yours very sincerely,

A. Einstein

Albert Einstein writing to Sigmund Freud about the possibility of using Freud’s research to end war. Einstein was famous for his pacifism, especially in the aftermath of World War I.

The fact that Einstein unironically calls up his buddy to solve the problem of warfare looks incredibly naive to modern eyes: “Hey Freud, do you mind solving world peace for us? Thanks!” However, Einstein’s optimism for solving the world’s largest problems is the result of the age that he lived. The 50 years from 1870 to 1920 represent the greatest period of change in human history. During Einstein’s lifetime, he saw us go from candlelight to lightbulbs, horses to cars and airplanes. Not to mention his own discoveries. It’s not surprising, then, that he felt warfare was just another problem to be solved.

Freud’s answer, which I didn’t include, is largely pessimistic. He argued that war is a fundamental part of human nature and civilization, and while it might theoretically be possible to prevent war through the establishment of international law, he did not believe that this was likely to happen.

Quotes

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. - Leon Trotsky

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. - John Stuart Mill, 1862

The nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards, and its fighting done by fools. - Thucydides, fifth century BC

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. - Albert Einstein

An accountant named Achilles is on his way to work. It is a beautiful spring day, but it is oddly quiet, no one else is out on the street. The only thing Achilles hears is some ducks playing in the pond to his left. As he walks by the pond, he notices a commotion in the water. “I wonder why those ducks are all worked up?” Achilles thinks to himself. He then squints over at the pond and realizes the commotion isn’t ducks at all, it's a drowning child! Achilles jumps into action, throwing down his computer bag, and sprints toward the pond. He dives into the water and reaches the child just as her head is falling below the surface, just in time! Achilles pulls the child out of the water, successfully saving her life. He says goodbye to the child and walks back to his house to get a dry pair of clothes. As Achilles walks home, he suddenly realizes he will be late to work, but it doesn't matter, the little annoyance pales in comparison to the act of saving a life. Achilles smiles because he feels like a hero.

I suspect that anyone who is reading this would do exactly what Achilles did. Not only would you do it, but it would be incomprehensible if you didn't. If Achilles shrugged off the drowning child and kept walking because he didn’t want to get his suit wet, it's almost objectively true that he isn’t just immoral, but evil. 

You may be thinking "if you know I would save the child, why are you calling me evil in the title of the essay?" Good question. The reason I titled this essay "You are Evil", is because if you believe that not saving the drowning child is evil, then you are evil. 

I also think by the end of this essay you will agree. My condolences.

Claims

In 1972, philosopher Peter Singer made this exact argument in a groundbreaking paper titled Famine, Affluence, and Morality. The basis for his claim was around charitable giving and his argument was simple: if you are not giving almost everything you own to charity, then you are immoral. What makes this paper so interesting is how logically sound the argument is. While the outcome is uncomfortable, it is hard to show that it's wrong. 

Singer’s argument has four claims, let’s look at each:

Claim #1: ​​“I begin with the assumption that suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad.”

Ok, this seems like an uncontroversial statement. If someone disagrees with this, then they are likely working with a different moral framework than the rest of us, and this paper is not targeted at them.

Claim #2: “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”

So, if we can prevent bad things from happening without a significant cost, then we should do it. Seems reasonable enough, but what does “comparable moral importance” mean? This was Achilles’ muddy suit. It did cost him something to save the child: the time of having to go home and change clothes, making him late for work. However, this was not of “comparable moral importance” with the act of saving the child. If Achilles had to decide between saving the drowning child and pulling someone out of a burning car, then we would have a harder time blaming him for choosing one or the other, because those things would be of comparable moral importance; but a dirty suit and being late are not.

Claim #2 is where most of the objections to Singer’s argument come from, and we will examine these objections in more detail later. 

Claim #3: The luxuries that those in affluence enjoy and spend money on, are not morally significant. Or said by Singer: “When we buy new clothes not to keep ourselves warm but to look "well-dressed" we are not providing for any important need. We would not be sacrificing anything significant if we were to continue to wear our old clothes, and give the money to famine relief.”

The luxuries that those in affluence enjoy and spend money on, are not morally significant. But what are “luxuries”? I fly coach, which I don’t consider very luxurious. Singer is using luxuries to refer to a broad set of purchases, which includes anything that you don’t need. A coffee from Starbucks that you could have made yourself? Luxury. That new t-shirt when you already have 20? Luxury. That wine tasting trolley through the Sonoma wine country? Luxury. Anything that goes beyond you or your family's basic needs would be a luxury. 

But it’s the latter part of the claim that’s the important part: “not morally significant”. We can argue on whether coffee is a luxury, but it's uncontroversial that it’s not morally significant. Putting a roof over your head, or feeding your family, is morally significant: it would be immoral to not do these things if you were equipped to do so.

Claim #4: By donating to relief agencies, we can prevent death and suffering.

When it comes to death, GiveWell estimates that it takes $4,500 to save one life. This amount is surely much higher than when Singer wrote his paper in 1972, but it doesn’t invalidate the claim. Of course, if you want something less quantifiable, there is also “suffering”, which certainly gets prevented for a much smaller sum (it costs $5 for an insecticide treated mosquito net). 

There are also a lot of “inefficient” charities that waste a ton of money through negligence or bloated administrations, wouldn’t that refute this claim? Not really, even if only a fraction of your money goes to helping people, it still helps people more than not giving. Of course, it would be better to give to a charity that maximizes outcomes, which is what Effective Altruism is about, but again, I don’t think this invalidates the claim. Even if saving a life went from $4,500 to $1 million, you are still likely preventing a lot more death and suffering than buying your 20th t-shirt. Either way, I don’t think it is possible to refute the claim that donating to charities prevents suffering and death.

Putting all four claims together, we get Singer’s argument: If we acknowledge that suffering and death are bad, and if it is easily within our power to prevent something bad without morally costing us anything, then we ought to do it. Since the luxuries we spend money on are of no moral significance, then we should donate all of our excess money to charities that have proven to reduce death and suffering. Or, said succinctly, it is immoral to not give everything above that which is required for survival, to charity. Not doing so is morally equivalent to refusing to help the drowning child.

Objections

Calling everyone immoral is quite a bold claim, let’s now see if we can find some holes in Singer’s argument. Claims 1, 3, and 4 seem hard to dispute. Suffering and death are bad, buying Starbucks isn’t morally significant, and donating to charity does reduce suffering and death. However, let’s re-examine Claim #2 again.

Claim #2: “If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.”

Proximity

Remember that Singer uses Claim #2 to connect saving the drowning child with donating money to charity, so let's see if we can break the analogy. One place to start would be proximity - the drowning child is right in front of you, whereas charity saves someone unknown to you that is very far away. Is there a moral equivalence to proximity?

Proximity would have been an issue for most of human history, which is likely why this argument was only made in 1972 instead of during the Enlightenment or by Aristotle or someone. This argument would not have worked for someone in the 1700s. They would have argued - how do I even know there is suffering occurring elsewhere? How can I make sure my money reaches those who need it? All of these doubts would have prevented them from seeing the moral equivalence between saving a drowning child and sending money across the planet.

However, today the situation is very different. We can receive real-time information about suffering across the world, along with the ability to reliably deploy capital instantly. This was just not true at any time before the technological improvements of the last 50 years. While proximity is certainly useful to describe why we don’t give all our money to charity (we focus on what is in front of us), it doesn’t help to invalidate the argument.

Presence of others

Ok, so maybe proximity isn’t a strong objection, what about the presence of others? In the drowning child example, Achilles was the only one around, so not helping would have been immoral, but when it comes to charity, there are hundreds of millions of people that can also help. Wouldn’t this imply that since there are so many others that can donate instead of me, it absolves me from being morally obligated to donate?

Let’s apply this logic to the drowning child. Say there were 25 other people there too, but they didn’t do anything to save the child, would it be then ok if you didn’t do anything either? No, of course not, you are obligated to act whether the others did or not. The same argument can be applied to that of charity. Now, if someone else saved the child before you, then you no longer have to do anything because the issue has been resolved. This would be the same if someone gave so much money to charity that they eliminated poverty. Until that happens, you are still on the hook. 

Just as with proximity, presence of others does a lot to explain why we don’t do anything, we even have a special phrase for it. However, it doesn’t absolve us from the obligation.

Demandingness

The demandingness objection goes something like this: the moral obligation to millions (billions) of people thousands of miles away is too demanding for anyone to achieve, and therefore cannot be thought of as a moral obligation. The Kantian principle of “ought implies can”, says that in order to be morally responsible for something that we ought to do, we must first be able to do it in the first place. Therefore, since living in near poverty due to giving everything one owns to charity is impractical, something that Singer himself claims, we are absolved from the moral duty due to our inability to perform that action in the first place. Demandingness is a common argument against Utilitarianism, the philosophical school which Singer’s essay falls into.

I can go either way on demandingness, on the one hand, if we are unable to do something because it is too hard, our moral framework should accommodate that. On the other hand, how do we know that we are just not living up to our moral framework? How do we separate something that we don’t want to do from something that we physically can’t do? I’m not really sure. 

Why does this matter?

Remember that the goal here is not to charity shame you, but instead to introduce a philosophical argument that I find interesting. What this essay exposes, to me at least, is a potential hole in the consistency of our collective moral framework. It would be as if somehow mathematicians were able to prove in certain scenarios that 1 + 1 = 3. 

I also think that the implications of everyone being immoral matter. If everyone is immoral, then no one is immoral. It can be used as an out for anyone who gets the moral high-ground argument pulled on them. If someone says to you “Oh, you don’t care about [Important Cause of the Month]? That’s very selfish of you.” The rational answer would be: “Considering you don’t give most of what you own to save lives and reduce poverty to those that need it most, you are about as selfish as I am.”

Therefore, if you are like me, you may acknowledge that you are “evil”. Although, by using a definition of “evil” that is veiled in a philosophical highfalutin mist, you won’t be losing any sleep.

If you are interested in learning more, I highly recommend this video which dives deeper into this subject:

No, this essay is not about the final season of Succession, but it is about succession. What if I asked you, “How would you design the best system for choosing a leader?” A key consideration you may have is how to get the most effective leader in charge, because obviously having a competent leader is objectively good. You may also consider the peaceful transfer of power. If your system doesn’t have an adequate way of switching leaders, your competent leader may end up fighting with others vying for the position, causing chaos for constituents. With these considerations, your response would probably include something about having elections every X number of years based on meritocratic principles with potential term limits.

However, what if I modified the initial question to include two constraints: 

Constraint #1: the new leader must be blood-related to the existing leader

Constraint #2: the new leader must be male

These are the two constraints that most societies in history were working with when choosing their own succession methods. Let’s look at two examples.

England

It's worth noting that the succession methods of England changed throughout its 1,000+ year history. However, one constant was Christianity. This affected their succession process by restricting Constraint #1 to also require legitimacy. Not only did the new heir have to be blood related to the king, but they also had to be born of a church sanctioned marriage. Therefore, if the king had a child out of wedlock (ie. a “bastard”), they were out of contention for the throne.

With these constraints in place, the natural next question is which legitimate male child gets the throne? And what if there aren’t any male children? 

The English used a system called male-preference primogeniture, which helps to answer the above questions. In regard to prioritization, we all know that the eldest male child gets the throne.

As for the latter question, the implications of the king having no male direct descendants differed throughout the years, but almost always led to a contested succession. During the early years of the English monarchy, the throne would pass to the king's closest male relative. This often meant that a younger brother, nephew, or cousin of the king would inherit the throne. However, there were many times in English history where no legitimate son led to the proximity of blood, which prioritized directly-related females (daughters) over male relatives more distant in the family line. This is why Victoria, and even Elizabeth II, became queen instead of the king’s brothers or nephews. A variation of these two systems was used for more than 1,000 years until 2013, when they dropped most of the constraints, making it an absolute primogeniture (eldest child of any gender, legitimate or not). 

The value of primogeniture is that there is less debate around succession. Given that succession is one of the most common reasons for war and political upheaval over millennia, having a clear definition of who is next in line is highly valuable. Despite this, the transfer of power was not always smooth in England. The eldest male son was usually not disputed, but when there was no legitimate male son and the rules weren’t clearly defined, things got a little hazy. 

A great example of this is shown through perhaps the most famous English monarch: Henry VIII, who notoriously struggled to conceive a male heir.

After countless failed attempts at producing a male heir with his first wife, Henry infamously broke from the Catholic Church to marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn. This resulted in a completely divided nation of Catholic vs. Protestant, all in hopes of bearing a legitimate male son. When Anne and Henry could not produce a male heir either, Henry beheaded Anne for “treason.” However, it's widely accepted that she was beheaded because Henry wanted another go at having a male heir with a different woman, Jane Seymour. 

Jane Seymour was successful in providing Henry with an heir, giving birth to Edward VI in 1537. When Henry died in 1547, Edward went on to become king at the ripe age of 9 years old. While this transfer of power was smooth, I would argue that a 9-year-old cannot be a “competent” leader. Edward was a sickly teenager and ultimately died at age 15 with no male heirs of his own. Rather, he had two childless older sisters, Mary I and Elizabeth I, whom he decided to exclude from the line of succession before his death. Alternatively, he decided that his cousin, Jane Grey, would become queen so that her male heirs could succeed the throne. 

As expected at the time, these actions led to conflict and bloodshed. Jane Grey was only queen for 9 days before she was overthrown by the more popular Mary I. During her contested reign, Mary was unable to conceive children, and upon her death the throne was succeeded by her half-sister, Elizabeth I. When Elizabeth also died with no children, the throne was given to the King of Scotland, and we were back to our direct descendent males-only club for the foreseeable future.

To bring us back to the point, the constraints of legitimate and male led to what can only be described as complicated. Additionally, Henry VIII had several illegitimate children throughout his life, including two known illegitimate sons. In a different part of the world, either illegitimate son may have had a direct claim to the throne and could have ended the need for beheadings, bloodshed, and religious turmoil. This leads us to a society with different rules: the Ottoman Empire.

Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman empire was founded in 1299 and acted as the major power in Eastern Europe and the Middle East for more than 600 years. They were ruled by sultans, who had a very different succession practice than England. First, the Ottoman Empire was Islamic, which did not place the requirement of marriage onto the sultans. This meant the Ottomans were not bound to legitimate heirs. 

Instead of wives, the sultans had a system of concubinage, which was a well-established practice in the Islamic world. Concubines were women in a dedicated relationship to the sultan, without legally being the sultan’s wife. A sultan could have tens to hundreds of concubines, who resided in the imperial harem.

You may see where this is going… The sultan had many heirs. For example, Sultan Murad III allegedly had more than 100 children.

Putting aside any moral judgements you may have; this system has obvious differences to the English system. First, the sultans and their many kids would never run into the male-less issue that Henry VIII faced. Second, the Ottomans did not have a formalized process for assigning one of the many male children as the successor to the throne. What they did instead was something called “open succession”.

Open succession could also be thought of as “survival of the fittest”, and was the primary method for assigning a male heir in the Ottoman Empire from 1300 until the early 1600s. During his reign, the sultan would appoint all his sons to various administrative roles across the empire, giving them all experience working in government. When the sultan died, his sons would then fight amongst themselves until a victor had been declared. As you can imagine, this process was very bloody. To make matters bloodier, once a son was crowned sultan, he would commit fratricide and kill all his brothers (many of whom were babies).

Now, most of the time the sultan did not leave the empire to a complete free-for-all after his passing. Through a handful of tactics, he could ensure that his favorite and most competent of his sons received positions that gave them a leg up during the impending melee. Any sons appointed to roles located at the palace in Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) would have a huge advantage over sons positioned hundreds of miles away. Time was everything after the passing of a sultan, and being close to the heart of the empire was a decisive advantage.

Not surprisingly, the Ottoman word for “successor” shares the same Arabic root as the word for “conflict”. All but one of the successions during the 200 year period during the 15th and 16th centuries were resolved through combat.

This system lasted until Sultan Ahmed I (1603-1617) decided to end the practice of fratricide to reduce the violence associated with succession. In its place, he introduced the Kafes system based on agnatic seniority. Agnatic seniority is just a complicated way of saying that the prioritization is brothers ahead of sons, oldest to youngest. However, doesn’t this still mean we have dozens of brothers, and to a lesser degree sons, that may want to kill the sultan and take the throne? Yes, it does. The Kafes system addressed this by keeping all potential successors in a middle-age version of house arrest until the sultan died (kafes literally means “cage”). The new sultan would then come out of house arrest and begin leading the empire.

(I think this is why it is relatively uncommon to see brothers of the monarch at the top of the succession line. They tend to want to kill each other anyway, so adding control of the kingdom to the mix tends to make this even worse.)

While the Kafes system did eliminate fratricide and the bloody succession wars, it also meant the Ottomans no longer received the most “competent” leader as sultan. Many of the new sultans during the Kafes system had no experience with anything and had been locked in the palace for most of their lives.

The system of agnatic seniority also increased the average age of the sultan and decreased the average reign. The average reign prior to Mustafa I (1617) was ~22 years (median 24 years), and after Mustafa it was 12 years (median also 12 years) (link).

Competence vs. Smooth Transition

The English and the Ottomans had very different systems of succession, but what are we solving for here exactly? If you recall the question I asked at the beginning of the essay, the two considerations raised for designing a system of succession were competence and smooth transfer of power. The importance of competence should be self-explanatory, but smooth transfer of power may require a little explanation. Transfer of power that was not smooth led to a ton of problems. Aside from the obvious bloodshed and societal degradation of a civil war, the rule of law itself would break down during times of uncertainty. Remember that laws as trivial as “is this small town allowed to have a market?” could be dictated by the current monarch. If the transition of power was contested, there was huge uncertainty around basic decisions governing everyday life until someone took the throne.

The competence of the leader and smooth transition of power represent a trade-off. Of course, this trade-off doesn’t exist today because we have a democracy, and hence are not bound to the bloodline of our leader (Constraint #1).

With this in mind, let’s look at how the English and the Ottomans differed in this area. Evaluating the English succession system, one glaring issue arises: prioritizing the eldest-male child had nothing to do with their competence as a leader. Their older sister or younger brother could be 10x the leader but have a tiny chance to become king or queen. Why didn’t they just choose the best or most competent child of the king instead? Well, because that would be subjective. Primogeniture (eldest son first) gives an objective determination of who the next leader is, which is key for resolving disputes and ensuring a smooth transition of power. We can see from the English system that they felt that a smooth transition of power was more important than the competence of the leader. 

The Ottomans, prior to 1600, were the exact opposite. They went all-in on the competence of their leader through the “open succession” method, but that led to a virtual impossibility of having a smooth transfer of power. It’s interesting then that the Ottomans eventually switched their system to one of agnatic seniority instead of the merit-based system of open succession. This shows that they may have also felt a smooth transition of power was more important than a leader’s competence. Let’s graph this out.

I don’t think there is any argument in this ordering when it comes to the smoothness of the transfer of power. The data proves it out strongly. The Ottomans did not have a significant war of succession after 1600, whereas before they happened almost every time. The English on the other hand, had succession issues semi-often over their entire history. As for competence, I see any instance of a succession war as leading to a more competent leader, hence the trade-off. However, I’ll note that it's difficult to actually prove “competence” by any quantitative measure. 

Another interesting difference between the English and Ottoman systems are their pool of potential heirs. The English restricted the stock of potential heirs through the constraint of marriage, whereas the Ottomans had no constraints with dozens of heirs.

After 1600, the English and the Ottomans were both using a hereditary prioritization system to the order of succession but had massively different stocks of heirs. What differences did this lead to? The obvious benefit of the Ottomans having dozens and dozens of brothers and sons is that there was never a question of who was next in line, which is why the post-1600 Ottomans are further right than the English on the above scale. 

But remember that this is a trade-off: if the post-1600 Ottomans had a smoother transfer of power than the English (due to larger stock), that also means they had lower competence. Why would that be? For the reasons described before, the new sultans were now much older, and had no life experience due to being locked away their entire upbringing. The English, with their lower pool of heirs, had the occasional “no-son” issue, which reduced their smooth transfer of power. However, this would have led to more competent leaders since the more effective leader would ultimately win the succession battle. (See Elizabeth I, one of England’s most beloved leaders).

Concluding Thoughts

In conclusion, the succession systems of the English monarchy and the Ottoman Empire offer contrasting perspectives on how societies have historically grappled with the challenges of succession. The English system, with its constraint of legitimacy and a preference for primogeniture, prioritized a smooth transfer of power (in theory), even at the expense of the competence of the leader. The Ottomans, on the other hand, initially embraced a system that sought to select the most competent leader, but eventually shifted towards a system that favored a more peaceful transfer of power.

Both systems teach us valuable lessons about the trade-offs between the competence of the leader and the smoothness of the transfer of power. Today, democracy has largely replaced the constraints of hereditary succession, allowing for a more merit-based selection of leaders. But we must not forget the lessons of history as we continue to shape our political systems to ensure both competent leadership and peaceful transitions of power. By examining these historic succession systems, we can better understand and appreciate the progress we have made and the challenges that still lie ahead in the pursuit of the ever out of reach goal of effective governance.

Thank you to my editor (ie. girlfriend) Laurier for helping out with this essay.

In my last post, I talked about the underlying reasons for the Ukraine war. After writing it, I was still conflicted with the determination of causality for the position of: "NATO expansion caused the Ukraine War". To recap the argument, the first order cause of the war is that Putin felt threatened. The second order cause is the expansion of NATO, which some would say is the "root cause". 

According to this theory, the fault of the war in Ukraine rests squarely at the feet of the US. But that got me thinking... the cause of the US allowing new countries into NATO was the country's desire to join NATO in the first place. So now we have three separate causes.

This is important because depending on which cause we determine to be the "root cause", it shifts the blame about who is at fault for the war. If the 2nd order cause is the root cause, then the US is to blame, if it’s the 3rd order cause, then it’s the former Soviet countries fault. So there you have it, the fault of the invasion of Ukraine lies at the feet of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and… Ukraine? Wait, that can't be right. Let's go down another layer. 

Ok, this narrative is better. Russia's lack of natural borders has historically caused it to be extremely aggressive towards its neighbors, causing these neighbors to apply to NATO, causing the US to let them in, causing Putin to be threatened, causing the invasion of Ukraine. So it’s Russia's fault!

But wait, we can just add a 5th order cause as “no natural barriers”, which in turn causes Russia’s historical…you get the point. Do you see the issue? We can just look at the causal chain of events leading up to the war, choose a specific link in the chain, and say "this is it, this is the root cause".

It feels like when you are talking to a little kid, and they keep asking "why?" to every answer you provide. Eventually, you get to the big bang or the laws of nature.

Kid: “Why did Russia invade Ukraine?”

Me: “Because Putin felt threatened”

Kid: “Why?”

Me: “Because the US allowed new countries to join NATO”

Kid: “Why?”

Me: “Because former USSR countries applied to join NATO”

Kid: “Why?”

Me: “Because their sovereignty was threatened by Russia’s historical aggression”

Kid: “Why?”

Me: “Because Russia doesn’t have any natural barriers like oceans, mountains, or deserts to protect their key cities.”

Kid: “Why?”

Me: “Because the tectonic plates didn’t connect around Russia to form oceans or mountains.”

Kid: “Why?”

Me: “Because THAT’S JUST WHAT HAPPENED AFTER THE BIG BANG”

With this mindset, every effect has a causal chain, or many causal chains, that go from the first order cause, all the way down to the big bang and/or some version of “because that’s just the way it is”. My question is really around the best way to assign "root cause" to a specific cause in the chain. 

Let's start with trying to define “root cause”…

Defining “Root Cause”

One place for us to start would be with those that have a financial incentive to find the root cause of something: the business world! As one would expect, the business world has a three letter acronym for doing just this: RCA, or Root Cause Analysis. One method of RCA is the “Five Whys”, pioneered by Sakichi Toyoda in the early 20th century. The “Five Whys” works exactly as you would expect, we start with an effect and determine the root cause by asking “why?” five times.

But why did we land on 5, why not 3? or 6? If Toyoda provided a reason for choosing the number 5, then perhaps I could be convinced, but no such reason seems to exist. Let’s keep looking.

Thwink.org has proposed a definition of root cause, using the following five characteristics:

1. It is clearly a major cause of the problem symptoms.

2. It has no productive deeper cause.

3. It can be resolved.

4. Its resolution will not create bigger problems.

5. There is no better root cause.

For our example, using this definition likely places us at our 4th order cause, which is Russia’s aggression. Let's go through each:

1. It is clearly a major cause of the problem symptoms.

True, Russia’s aggression is definitely a major cause of our current problem. To prove this out, I’ll use the same statistic that I used in my last post: since 1812, Russia has been involved in 12% of all global conflicts, which is double the next highest (USA) with under 6%.

2. It has no productive deeper cause. 

Also true, the cause of Russia’s historical aggression is their lack of natural barriers, which I think satisfies as “not productive”. This is the clause of the definition that prevents us from going deeper (literally) to geological realities. 

3. It can be resolved. 

This is where the difference between determining root cause for resolution vs. blame, starts to diverge. However, for the purposes of preventing future wars I think this one could be true. While we can’t “resolve” Russia’s historical aggression, in theory it seems like it's possible to resolve future aggression. 

4. Its resolution will not create bigger problems.

Similar to #3, this isn’t really relevant for us. Although resolving Russia’s aggression would certainly not create bigger problems.

5. There is no better root cause.

This is a really important one, because it touches on something that I have been intentionally trying to avoid, and that is multiple causal chains. There are plenty of potential causal chains for the Ukraine war that I just haven’t mentioned. Here is an example: Putin was bullied as a child (3rd order cause) --> Putin has an inferiority complex (2nd order cause) --> Putin feels that expanding the empire would make him look “great” in the history books (1st order cause) --> Invasion of Ukraine (effect). I don’t necessarily think this specific causal chain is correct, but it is possible. The point though, is that in order to determine that “Russia’s historical aggression” is the root cause, we would need to identify all other causes in all other causal chains. This is an exercise that would take a lot of time, and a lot of subjectivity. 

Is there any other way to think about this?

A Different Mindset

The technical term for what we have been trying to analyze so far in this essay is called Event Oriented or Cause-and-Effect Thinking, which views events as occurring linearly. Instead, it may be better for us to think about this problem using systems thinking. The best primer on systems thinking is easily Dancoland, and it's a fun read as well.

Here is a graphic that helps to show the difference.

Someone using linear thinking may say that rain is caused by the build-up of excessive moisture in the clouds, which is caused by evaporation, which is caused by the sun. Therefore, the root cause of the rain is the sun. Now, this isn’t actually wrong, the sun does “cause” the hydrological cycle, but it's not very useful for us in determining why it rained. If someone was genuinely curious why it rained, they would be unsatisfied with the answer “the sun.” 

On the other hand, a systems thinker would start with something like below, in their attempt to determine why it rained.

However, even the hydrological cycle wouldn’t fully explain all of the systems that rain is a part of. We would need to include global temperatures, wind, and other factors with their own systems to determine why it rained. Luckily, there happens to be a name for this multidisciplinary field: meteorology. 

What would a systems diagram look like for geopolitics? Specifically, the Ukraine War?

Here is my poorly drawn example of what the system could have looked like between Russia and Ukraine prior to the war. The first thing you will notice is that the two major stocks in this system are Russia’s security concern and Ukraine’s security concern. The blue part inside each box can be thought of as water that flows in and out, and when reaching the top results in some new action. The green “+” next to the arrows indicates positive feedback, meaning it will increase the stock in question. For example, Ukraine spending money on defense will make Russia’s security concern go up, which will in turn increase their own defense spending or non-military action like propaganda or hacks. This will then increase Ukraine's security concern even more.

You may already see the issue. There is nothing in this system that will reduce either Russia’s or Ukraine’s security concerns, making this an unstable system. The positive feedback loop will eventually cause one of two things to happen, either Ukraine’s security concern reaches the point that they will petition to join NATO further increasing Russia’s security concern, or Russia’s security concern reaches its pinnacle, and they invade. Ultimately, this system will end with one of two exits: either Ukraine joins NATO or Russia invades (red boxes). Once one of these red boxes gets reached, we then move to a different system, with entirely different dynamics than this one.

Now the point in showing this diagram is not to say it is the definitive system of incentives that led to the invasion of Ukraine (it’s far from it). Instead, it should act as an example of what systems thinking could look like for geopolitics. 

Knowing that the system ended with invasion, what caused the invasion based on the graphic? The answer is less obvious than it was when we were using cause-and-effect thinking. The decision to invade was part of a system of underlying incentives that happened to result in invasion. Systems thinking doesn’t replace causality, it just redefines root cause. 

In reality, there are hundreds of factors contributing to Russia’s security concerns, and different systems interoperating in a way that makes the true underlying dynamics very hard to map. Human systems are very hard to get right, meteorologists have it much easier.

As we can see, it doesn’t make sense to “blame” a particular actor in the system, but instead to fault the dynamics of the system itself. This does not mean that no actor in the system is morally culpable, it just means we need to look at the moral implications separately. We can find the war immoral while still understanding its ultimate cause was the result of system driven motives. The murder of an adulterer is still immoral, even if we understand the motive for doing so.