Contents Contents Hence Title Page Copyright About DANGER FLAGS Danger Flags #1: Fear And Love Danger Flags #2: Overlooking Danger Flags #3: Internal Strife Danger Flags #4: Hatred Danger Flags #5: Neglect Danger Flags #6: Bravado Danger Flags #7: Structural Problems Danger Flags #8: Being And Doing LIMIT BREAKS Limit Breaks #1: Time Limit Breaks #2: 168 Limit Breaks #3: Actions Per Minute Limit Breaks #4: Automation Limit Breaks #5: WIP And Decay Rate Limit Breaks #6: Theory Of Constraints Limit Breaks #7: Combined Arms Limit Breaks #8: Overwhelming Force Limit Breaks #9: Hidden Logic Limit Breaks #10: Cutting LINGUA FRANCA Lingua Franca #1: Condescension Lingua Franca #2: Heroes Lingua Franca #3: Revolutionary Lingua Franca #4: Fascism Lingua Franca #5: Truth Lingua Franca #6: Pathos Lingua Franca #7: Philosophy Lingua Franca #8: Ethics and Morals Lingua Franca #9: Perfectionism Stay In Touch Epigraphs “Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity…” – Aristotle *** “Our deepest insights must–and should–appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them.” – Nietzsche *** “The Pope! How many divisions has he got?” – Stalin Title Page PRAGMA Sebastian Marshall Copyright Copyright © 2017 Sebastian Marshall All rights reserved. About 25 July 2017 Kiev, Ukraine Kiev is idyllic in the summer, but most people aren’t paying attention. If you do pay close attention, you can start to trace the lines beneath old Kiev, Soviet Kiev, and new Kiev. And as you do, there’s a slight haunted feeling. A lot of blood has soaked into these streets. A couple years ago, my close friend Kai Zau and I were having a conversation when, very suddenly, a phrase was spoken that weighed very heavily. “Life is a game you can lose.” I forget which one of us said it originally, but it doesn’t matter. It was clearly something true and important, something oft-neglected during times of luxury and ease. You can lose. In olden days, you might not even be able to control that. A thousand years ago, you might have been farming in a little village when brigades of deadly horse archers showed up and laid your civilization to waste. Unpredictably, out of nowhere. Life is a game you can lose. It seems like most of us have more control and choice now than we did 1,000 years ago; much more control, even, than people had 50 years ago. Many tragedies are preventable. Many good things can be made to happen. Many bad things can be avoided or mitigated. But most people don’t dedicate themselves relentless to this… it seems like they almost don’t realize the magnitude and gravity of — well, of life itself . People are so often breezy, casual, careless... which would even be alright if they were willing to accept the consequences thereof. The consequences of being careless, of course, are rather predictable. But, no — people feel crushed when some area they’ve neglected bites them; when hindsight shows them how much of their life they’ve wasted; when a preventable bad event occurs because it wasn’t prevented. The title of this book is Pragma — we’re looking to develop more pragmatism. Not all of the book is easy reading, but if I’ve written well enough, all of it should be highly profitable. The first section is Danger Flags , a concept that is simple but critically important: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it. We look at a bunch of historical cases of bad things happening from as far back as the Punic Wars and the assassination of Julius Caesar, to as recent as three Cold War episodes. The goal is to be able to spot people who are likely to do bad things, and to mitigate against those — and likewise, to spot dangerous elements in one’s own character and work to improve those, to be more trustworthy and reliable. The tone gets a bit lighter in Limit Breaks . We inquire: what are the limits holding us back from making a terrific life? How do we break through those limits? We cover time on large and short scales, action, automation, project success rates, bottlenecks and constraints, perception, combinations, success and failure, and getting right to the heart of an issue. Limit Breaks contains a lot of immediately practical items that can be put into action right away for higher effectiveness. Finally, in Lingua Franca , we look to drill deep into the nature of thought and communication. We become very skeptical of words and look to trace the underlying meaning of them. Many words have changed meanings, many important concepts don’t have words associated with them, and language has been a chief battleground across history for shaping how people think, communicate, and act. We’re going to sort our language out, in order to be able to think more clearly and lucidly. Each of the chapters here was originally published at The Strategic Review. If you’re not already subscribed, you can get a steady dose of history, productivity, and sheer practicality for free every Thursday at: http://www.thestrategicreview.net/ And if you like this sort of thing, you’d also probably like the Ultraworking Pentathlon: http://www.ultraworking.com/pentathlon Some of the concepts we cover here in Pragma will be difficult reading — harsh truths that rarely see the light of day. History’s ghosts will speak to us – if we will merely listen. Sometimes they speak calmly and elegantly; other times they speak in dread wails. Harsh truths – often unpleasant – but what is the alternative? To stay willfully blind to the greatest risks and challenges? To let the consequences of negligence overtake us? No, a thousand times no – pragmatism is the way. We walk the Earth now, but will not forever – and there’s so much to do before the bell rings. So let us take our blinders off, arm ourselves, and venture forth now into hard and dark realms. Let us take a place at the feet of the ancients and listen to their wisdom – so that perhaps we might take our place alongside them. There is so much to be learned. Are your boots on? Are your eyes open? Shall we? MARSHALL DANGER FLAGS DANGER FLAGS Danger Flags #1: Fear And Love Danger Flags #1: Fear And Love IL TORMENTO DELLA CORDA The shouting and screaming ceased. And while listening to the torments of another man was obviously discomforting, the silence was perhaps more ominous. Soon, all too soon, the clacking and rumblings of heavy iron keys are worked into the reinforced locks of the prisoner’s jail cell in the Bargello Fortress. The guard is neither malicious nor sympathetic; there is a matter-of-fact mannerism about him as he thumbs indifferently through a huge iron keyring and turns to the prisoner’s leg shackles, unlocking them, unchaining the man from the wall. The guard waits a moment to see if the prisoner will rise on his own power. If not, he’ll call for assistance to drag the man to the chamber. The prisoner rises. For just a half of a moment, the prisoner attempts to enjoy himself as he’s at liberty to walk under his own power. He walks in front of the guard, knowing the short route, follows it along. But this attempt to maintain a stoic detachment does not entirely succeed; he is unable to sustain the brief enjoyment at the momentary liberation from the leg shackles as he sees now the entrance to the torture chamber. He blinks twice and sees the magistrate waiting, also bored and indifferent. There’s no sadism in the man’s face. He’s doing his job. The guards do their work while the magistrate watches, tying the prisoner’s arms behind his back, marching him up to the raised wooden pavilion and forcing him to ascend it, and then tying the ropes to a sturdy wooden beam on the ceiling. The magistrate speaks: “Do you wish to confess, Niccolo?” And the prisoner replies politely: “No, Signore, I have nothing to confess.” The magistrate nods to the guards as he replies: “A pity.” And one of the guards gives the prisoner a swift kick in the side to push him off the pavilion’s edge. He is in the air for only a split second when the rope catches, and the prisoner hears his shoulders crack in an awful sound of bone breaking and sinew tearing before his he actually feels the pain. “Bastardo! Bastardi! Maledice!” And with that, any stoic composure that Niccolo Machiavelli had tried to summon is now gone. He screams for the better part of an hour before blacking out, waking up hours later in the jail cell, the iron shackles back upon his legs. *** HARD REALISM Adversity marks a special quality on those who survive it. Almost 2000 years before Machiavelli, it was the disgraced Athenian general Thucydides who wrote The History of the Peloponnesian War – and is thus considered the father of scientific history and political realism, the same realms in which Machiavelli would do his famous works. There were many victorious Athenian and Spartan Generals – they did not often become excellent theorists and historians. Machiavelli was likewise well-familiar with the greatest poet in Italian history, Dante Alighieri – who was also from Florence, also lost a political conflict, and also was disgraced and exiled some 200 years before. Would we have had The Divine Comedy if Dante had kept to his secure position as a diplomat and statesmen? Almost certainly not. So too it went with Niccolo Machiavelli. He was imprisoned and tortured for almost exactly a month, from 12 February to 13 March 1513. The year previous, 1512, the illustrious Medici family had re-conquered Florence. Machiavelli had been one of the most important diplomats, chancellors, and occasional military leader of the Florentine Republic. He had served on diplomatic missions to all the most prominent kings and dukes of the era, and had led a reorganization of the Florentine military. When the Medici re-conquered the city, the obviously talented Machiavelli was placed under house arrest. The next year, a conspiracy emerged against Giovanni Medici. Machiavelli was most likely not involved, but he was a prominent rival and well-connected and might have had information. Following the customs of the day, he was arrested and tortured via strappado , a brutal method of suspending a person in the air by rope until their shoulders broke and ligaments tore. Machiavelli likely would have been tortured to death or executed, except for a stroke of very good fortune for him. On 21 February 1513, while Machiavelli was imprisoned and being tortured, Pope Julius II died of fever. In one of those strange turns of history, the target of the assassination conspiracy that had led to Machiavelli’s arrest – Giovanni Medici – was elected Pope Leo X. In a moment of graciousness, he pardoned those under arrest in Florence after ascending to the Papal Throne. Disgraced and brutalized, but alive, Machiavelli retreated to a family farm south of Florence. Five months later, no doubt still feeling the grim aftereffects of the torture in his shoulders and arms, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote his seminal work – Il Principe – The Prince. Hard realism. Very hard realism. *** IL PRINCIPE Machiavelli is nowhere near as hardcore as his reputation might suggest. Actually, the first 14 chapters of The Prince are a somewhat dry cataloguing of the different types of governments. There’s insights in there – for instance, a government with a single extremely powerful ruler is harder to conquer, but easier to govern if conquered. When the Persians were conquered by the Macedonians, they did not rebel even when Alexander died. There had been no “lesser nobility” – no dukes, no barons; it was all just the Persian King and servants. The loyalty and obedience of the population that had been installed by the Persian Monarchs was simply transferred to the Macedonians who replaced them. Contrarily, a kingdom with lesser nobles might be easier to conquer by allying with a discontent baron or duke, but then any conqueror faces many potential challengers who think themselves a better king when they attempt to govern. This is all insightful, but not particularly hardcore. You read it; you think: “oh, that makes sense”; you nod; you move on. It reads more similar to Aristotle than what you’d expect something, well, Machiavellian to be. And you must remember that as Niccolo Machiavelli took to his pen and ink blotter, his arms and shoulders were likely still creaking and semi-mutilated. How much that have effected the man’s mind? Immensely, no? There is a certain honesty – glory, even – that can come through in the writing of someone who feels they have nothing to lose, someone with no reputation to protect, someone who has already faced the unthinkable and survived. And while the first 14 chapters of The Prince are somewhat dry, it is Chapter 15 where Machiavelli’s fireworks truly begin: “It is my intention to write something that will be useful to he who understands it – and so the truth of what actually happens seems more useful to me than whatever people merely imagine might be. There have been many imaginations of republics and kingdoms that have never actually existed, but how men actually live is so far removed from how we imagine we ought to live, that he who neglects reality for imagination brings about his own ruin rather than salvation. ” *** AN IMPORTANT JOURNEY Hail and well-met, traveler. I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that sometimes you have to go down before you go up. The good news is that, while that path might seem a longer one, it is actually far less treacherous and far more joyful than the alternative. For the record, this is the first of my 2017 essays. I write from the east coast of the United Arab Emirates; Fujairah, to be precise. I went to sleep early on New Year’s Eve; on the morning New Year’s Day I started by reconciling my accounts, calculating my income and expenses for the month of December, outlining and reviewing my projects and how my time has been spent recently, and then I sat down to begin to lay down our roadmap for this journey, for Danger Flags. Arabia, and Fujairah in particular, it is a serene but strange place. I’m sure there must be some other Americans here besides Kai Zau and myself, but I have not seen any of them. It is very hot outside, and very dusty. It feels, simultaneously, both far more primitive and far more modern than the cities we usually haunt. This coastal city speaks to me, at least for now, and inspiration has struck. Regardless, what are we doing here? One of the most important things in life is choosing which people you will spend your life with. This is the friends you choose, the business associates you choose, really, everyone who you welcome into your life and share it with. I think it’s probably one of the two most important things in life, alongside choosing what work you will do. If you choose the people to spend your life with correctly and well, you’ll have a tremendous mix of virtuous people, good and supportive friends, loyal allies, excellent colleagues. You’ll work on good projects, you’ll bring in terrific people on those projects, those people will likewise invite you to excellent collaborations. You’ll have people to think with, to muse with, to problem-solve with. In dark times, it’s the people that are closest to you that might be your salvation. Contrariwise, there’s no faster path to damnation than choosing wrong who is in your life. This might be as small of an error as choosing to eat food from a chef with a dirty kitchen or choosing to have your plumbing fixed by a haphazard plumber. The former gives risk of food poisoning, the latter of having your pipes leak and damage your home. The wrong doctor can literally kill you; the wrong lawyer put you at tremendous risk; the wrong teacher can make your children hate learning. All of this is obvious enough, and we’re rightfully afraid from eating in an unclean kitchen or being operated on by a surgeon with unclean hands. But what of those closest to us? How are they chosen and selected? Have you given this enough thought? If fortune is with you, you might see a surgeon less than three times in your life. But every single day you’ll be among the people you choose to work alongside, the people you choose to love and share life with, the friends with whom you debrief, celebrate, analyze, and look to ascend life’s challenges with. *** DANGER FLAGS The concept of Danger Flags is a simple one that’s emerged in my social circle over the last two years, and were codified somewhat over the last six months. It’s a simple concept, but often neglected: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it. It’s similar to how a well-trained auditor might be able to spot fraud right away, whereas people less skilled and less experienced in finance and accounting might miss it. There’s very often warning signs, but the lay public cannot see them without training and study. Here were my original (private) notes on Danger Flags from some months ago – -- Danger flags are over and beyond the person’s skills/experience. -- EX, it’s okay for an inexperienced person to screw up a task they’re not experienced for. -- But if someone that’s usually reliable flips out periodically and screws up a task, that gets an extra danger flag over and beyond their skillset. -- You need to avoid putting people with danger flags in situations which triggers their danger flag. EX: some people are very good conversationalists 1-on-1, but fall apart in a group of people and start acting very rudely. Thus, you need to flag that that person can’t be put in a group of people. -- Danger flags are mentally expensive to manage, because you need to think about special exceptions for that person instead of whether they’d generally be well-suited for something. -- People that are very good but have uneven skillsets often have a lot of danger flags, which means they can’t be trusted, introduced, or given authority. It sucks. -- It’s better to have one sharp skill than be bad at everything with no danger flags, but one sharp skill or “intermediate and solid at most things” in one’s skillset + no danger flags probably performs better for one's life. -- Weaknesses aren’t necessarily danger flags; they’re subtly different. -- It’s expensive to try to remember what danger flags someone has. If someone has one, they might have 20. It’s binary, it’s either yes or no. I went a step further; again, this was originally from my private notes – -- For Sebastian, a single danger flag and you can’t be inner friend circle. -- Not everyone should adopt that rule, but SM already has a great close circle of friends that he loves, the conversation and effectiveness is always high, and has around ~2500 solid acquaintances around the world, many of whom he’d wish to get to know better. Thus, having no danger flag people around intimately is a huge quality of life boost, and an acceptable luxurious line to draw in the sand to make life a lot easier. Others might be happy to have close friends who are danger flagged and carefully avoid or mitigate their weaknesses so they don’t screw something up badly and do something terrible. Managing that is expensive. -- It’s okay to employ danger-flagged people if the area that triggers their danger flag is isolated and their job description is clear and doesn’t put them in that situation often or ever. On the other hand, some people get very self-destructive when anxious (a generalized problem that can appear at any time), and you basically don’t want to hire those people ever. But if someone is weak in groups of people or easily distracted if someone socializes with them, well, you get them their own office and have them work solo and that’s fine. This topic seems incredibly straightforward to me – you can often spot things in people in advance that predict future destructive behavior, and those should be “flagged” and either avoided or (sometimes) very carefully managed. But this topic is broadly neglected, and it’s easy to understand why – it’s really rather unpleasant. The consolation is as we have said above – sometimes you have to go down before you go up. In this series on Danger Flags, we wish to achieve three things: 1. We want to learn common danger flags, to build the mental models of them, and to know when we’re on terrain that is dangerous or treacherous. We want to be able to know in advance when a bad outcome might happen in an important area, when someone we count on might be unreliable, and so on. Learning these is very important. 2. We want to navigate danger-flagged situations skillfully. This might be filtering out and avoiding people with particularly bad danger flags, this might be setting formal policies for one’s life around what type of people we’ll associate with, and it might be setting up management and structure so that negative character traits and patterns don’t surface at inopportune times and to disastrous results. 3. Most difficultly, we want to spot aspects of our own character that really ought to be “danger flagged” by other people, and we want to mitigate and eliminate those aspects of ourselves to become more solid, reliable, consistent, effective, and useful people. We want understand ourselves and our flaws, and then manage, improve, train, and gradually scrub out unreliability, whimsy, discourtesy, naivete, foolhardiness, and so on. The last point is the hardest – it is harsh to stare at the Sun. One’s eyes burn. So be it – going down, briefly, is often the fastest and most reliable way up. *** DANGER FLAGS #1: FEAR AND LOVE Machivalli’s The Prince is incredibly quotable; it gets quoted all the time. Most of these quotes are divorced from context – both from the context of the work itself, and from the history of the era. Most of the quotes from The Prince , thus, are far off the mark from the lessons Machiavelli was actually driving at. Regarding fear and love, the English paraphrasing is often, “It’s better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” This quote is very far off the mark. Rather, the true lesson there is the focus of this chapter. Here is what Machiavelli wrote: “A question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved , when, of the two, either must be dispensed with.” Note well, Machiavelli said it’s preferable to be both if possible. But at times when both are not possible, he said it’s safer to be feared than loved. Note: safer , not better . But even with that said, if it’s still the year 2017 and you live in the West, you probably do not understand what he means when he says “fear.” *** YOUR DELIGHT SHALL BE THE FEAR OF THE LORD If you’re still in these modern times while reading this, you likely cannot comprehend of fear as a good thing. Perhaps the death-knell of “fear as a virtue” was American President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 inaugural address , which began – “I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our people impel. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Of course, Niccolo Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1513, over four centuries before Roosevelt’s laying the crisis of the Depression at the footsteps of "fear itself." No, when Machiavelli wrote of fear being safer than love , he most certainly did not mean “unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Rather, Machiavelli is talking about the historical “reverence and awe” felt towards what is undoubtedly great and noble. This hearkens far more to the tradition of the Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, and later Christianity and Islam – than to modern progressive understandings of fear. The first reference to “fear of God” is when Abraham is willing to sacrifice his son at God’s command – and God, seeing this loyalty and fealty and reverence, tells him not to do so, it is unnecessary, and promises blessings to Abraham and his descendants. Perhaps the best description of “fear of God” is from Isaiah 11: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit. The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him— the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of might, the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord— and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.” This, of course, sounds incredibly odd to our modern ears. “…wisdom and understanding… counsel and might… knowledge… and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.” What? *** EXALTATION AND AWE We are still somewhat puzzled by this concept. Perhaps this would lend insight. Wikipedia: Fear of God: Judaism – “ Having the fear of God is most often considered to be a positive sign of spiritual well-being. It is raising ourselves up in a sense of awe to our possibilities and divine glory. […] Bahya ibn Paquda characterized two types of fear as a lower "fear of punishment" and a higher "fear of [divine awe] glory." Abraham Ibn Daud differentiated between "fear of harm" (analogous to fear of a snake bite or a king's punishment) and "fear of greatness," analogous to respect for an exalted person, who would do us no harm. Maimonides categorized the fear of God as a positive commandment, as the feeling of human insignificance deriving from contemplation of God's "great and wonderful actions and creations."” Does that clarify? … no, perhaps not, we are still puzzled. Let’s explore love, then, first. *** UNRELIABLE LOVE Machiavelli – “Upon this a question arises: whether it be better to be loved than feared or feared than loved? It may be answered that one should wish to be both, but, because it is difficult to unite them in one person, it is much safer to be feared than loved, when, of the two, either must be dispensed with. Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you. And that prince who, relying entirely on their promises, has neglected other precautions, is ruined; because friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind, may indeed be earned, but they are not secured, and in time of need cannot be relied upon; and men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared , for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.” It is easy to read the opening lines of that passage, and the closing lines, and miss the nuance of the middle. Machiavelli is saying that when you are in power and doing favors for people and treating them nicely, they will promise you everything – their blood, property, life, and children – but those promises won’t be fulfilled when crisis hits or war breaks out. That’s not-at-all the modern understanding of love ; certainly, it’s not a mother’s love who would give her life for her children. And yes, he invokes punishment – that is part of it – but this phrase seems particularly important: “Friendships that are obtained by payments, and not by greatness or nobility of mind… cannot be relied upon.” Greatness or nobility of mind… hmm… *** SAFER TO BE RESPECTED THAN LIKED I would formulate Machiavelli’s position, for modern readers, like this – “It’s good to be both respected and liked, if you can be both. But sometimes, work requires you to choose between being liked or respected … sometimes you must discipline someone, or make a hard decision, and the thing which is correct and which engenders respect may make you disliked for the moment. In that case, it’s safer to be respected than liked, and choose such. Because if you choose to be lax, comfortable, kind, and do immense favors to people without requiring they do their duties, they’ll say they love you and promise you everything. But when you actually need to call on those promises, when you most need them, they do not respect you and will not follow through. Respect endures far longer than liking, and is thrown away less fast in times of troubles.” Machiavelli’s “fear” is much more like the modern English word “respect” than it is like Franklin Roosevelt’s “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” Indeed, Machiavelli’s next line after the more famous paragraph is – “Nevertheless a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred; because he can endure very well being feared whilst he is not hated… ” An element of the fear of punishment may or may not be required – it might be required – but the root of Machiavelli’s “fear” of it is greatness and nobility of mind … we must just as well call it “respect,” no? *** DANGER FLAG: LIKING WITHOUT RESPECT This brings us to the first Danger Flag of our series, then – liking without respect. It is, of course, best to be both liked and respected … if you can be maximally kind and do favors and reward people luxuriously with also getting the job done , you should do so. But when getting the job done conflicts with being liked by people , you should get the job done. This of course makes perfect sense, does it not? You can even get by with respect without liking when necessary – think of a harsh athletic coach who cares for his athletes, but works them very hard. “I hate the bastard, but he’s a good coach.” Yes, that’ll work. The opposite does not work. *** GUIDANCE, I: BEWARE PEOPLE WHO RUN ON LIKING AND EMOTION I do not agree with Machiavelli that people are “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous” – they certainly can be, but they can also be gracious, steadfast, true, brave, and faithful. People vary. But it’s certainly a danger flag when you notice someone who runs on liking ; they’re the most likely to be fickle, false, etc – liking is a notoriously fickle thing. Our tastes change, our emotions change, something that we enjoyed yesterday might become boring or mundane the day after. Some years ago, I loved seeing an animated spirit of excitement from someone I just met, who perhaps wanted to work together. I’ve learned, often the hard way, that people who get excited quickly and easily also become unexcited quickly and easily. Aristotle wrote in the Nichomachean Ethics that, “Friendship requires time and familiarity; as the proverb says, men cannot know each other till they have 'eaten salt together' ; nor can they admit each other to friendship or be friends till each has been found lovable and been trusted by each. Those who quickly show the marks of friendship to each other wish to be friends, but are not friends unless they both are lovable and know the fact; for a wish for friendship may arise quickly, but friendship does not. ” This might be another way of saying that you need time to assess whether someone is admirable and worthy of respect, and you need to go through shared trials to build that baseline of respect into enduring friendship. People who are very excited very quickly, before a foundation of respect is established, also tend to become unexcited quickly – often with disastrous results, if you were relying on them. Liking without respect – a danger flag. Be ware of it. *** GUIDANCE, II: SHARED TRIALS, SMALL MISSIONS AND PROJECTS I can think of few things in life as painful, aggravating, and destructive as having fickle and unreliable allies and friends – in the moments of greatest trial, they are nowhere to be found. The answer to this is not to search for people who are excited quickly upon knowing you, or who flock to your banner with great promises and enthusiasm – but rather to run many small missions and projects with people, to get to know them and have them get to know you. Even something as small as throwing a small dinner party or salon with someone will produce a number of small aggravations and little tiny calamities that need to be navigated. These stressful moments that call for sacrifice and leadership then let you assess how well you work with someone, and whether you can build harmonious partnerships, relationships, and friendships effectively together. Indeed, it’s not the good times that show you who your truest friends are. Most people, though, do not consciously build a series of projects into their lives, and thus, they have no way of truly getting to know people they meet. You can socialize with someone by going drinking and going to fun little activities for years and know very little of them; participating in a single competition or intense short project can inform you much more of someone’s character. Likewise, when you endure a shared trial with someone, and triumph, a baseline of respect comes to emerge. Events or projects that are incredibly leveraged or which call for sacrifice to complete show you even more – because in those situations, someone has to take leadership, and strictness and bluntness becomes more called-for. You can see if a person bristles or rises to the challenge. If someone truly respects you on all levels – from the small to the glorious – some sort of liking and shared understanding tends also to emerge; it’s nearly automatic. Even failing that, you can work with someone who genuinely respects you but doesn’t maximally like you. The opposite, as we have already said and has been known across history, is a recipe for disaster. *** GUIDANCE, III: GRIM DETERMINATION, MISSION ORIENTATION In the past, I’ve sometimes written about “hot determination” and “cold determination” – and always advised people to cultivate the latter. Well, I’ve evolved the language a bit – grim determination is how I phrase it now. Many people these days chase so-called “passion” – yet often, their passions change like the winds, leading to nothing, aggregating to nothing, resulting in nothing. I used to be like that. The solution is not to commit to projects with a “this will be fun!” sort of breezy attitude, but with an intense and grim determination. Begin to think about your own project selection more like a very skeptical and conservative investment manager than as a hopeful and naive first-time entrepreneur. The easiest way to cultivate grim determination is a much nicer-sounding phrase: Mission Orientation. This is where you pick which missions and causes you’ll join very carefully, but then throw yourself fully and completely into the mission until it completes. Short-term feelings of discomfort or boredom are ephemeral; they don’t matter. Signing up to discharge a duty, complete a mission, or succeed at a project – and then failing to do so – should be a cause for major alarm in one’s life. “It wasn’t for me” is not a good way to put it, ever. While you’re on a mission and someone is counting on you, you should be fanatically grimly determined to complete it. When the mission completes, you may choose not to do that type of thing again, but as with everything, quitting due to boredom or excitement wearing off becomes a habit. A particularly bad habit, I dare say. And you know, everything in life gets boring and unexciting sooner or later. Those people who finish and succeed at discharging their duties no matter what might suffer more in any given month than the person who quits at the first sign of trouble, but they wind up becoming known and respected and renowned in their circles, and leading magnificent lives. If you truly cannot discharge your duties effectively in a career or job, of course, that means it’s time to change vocations. You should still do so in a way that wraps up loose ends and leaves no one hanging. This is the mature and long-term effective way of dealing with things. *** GUIDANCE, IV: ADMIRATION And our final piece of guidance is one that’s made an incredible amount of difference in my own life. These days, I look to exclusively work with people I admire . I recommend you do the same. Of course, you’ll have to deal with a lot of people in life, and not all of them you’ll admire, and you should be cordial to everyone. But for your own inner circle, your close colleagues, the people you share your life with most intensely, genuine admiration smooths the path to excellent collaborations. When you know you genuinely admire someone, and you’ve built that admiration over years of shared trials and collaborations, that does not whimsically fade the way that liking and pleasant emotions can fade so quickly. It might take years to truly cultivate your life such that all of your closest associates and colleagues are people you admire, but those are years well-spent. Admiration is durable and strong, a good ground to build upon, far moreso than mere pleasantness or fun, which tend to shift course like the winds as boredom comes and goes. Liking without respect – certainly this is among the most dangerous things, because it’s so easy to be seduced and misled by it. Do danger flag it when you see someone who runs heavily on liking alone. But if one’s emotion matters immensely, perhaps genuine admiration is the culmination of both the truest respect and a great deal of liking – it may take years to build into the fabric of one’s life, but is undoubtedly worth it. Danger Flags #2: Overlooking Danger Flags #2: Overlooking WHY YOU HAVE LOADED GUN IN BRIEFCASE? It is the 15th of October 1934. A somewhat chubby, shabbily dressed, somewhat stupid-looking man is entering the lobby of the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. The first security guard, behind his desk, is reading a newspaper. He glances up, makes eye contact with the chubby shabby man, and goes back to the newspaper. As the chubby man is about to enter into the office areas of the institute, a younger and more vigilant security guard gets a bad feeling. “Hey, you! Stop!” Chubby man freezes on the spot. “The briefcase, let me see!” And the chubby man sighs and hands it over, feeling helpless and defeated. The guard walks over to a table, sets it down, opens it up to look and inside, and – what the hell? “Hey, backup!” he yells to the other guard. He turns to the chubby man: “Don’t move! What the hell you do?” Inside the chubby man’s briefcase is a loaded Nagant M1895 revolver. They arrest and detain the chubby man. *** PHONE CALLS Yagoda gets the phonecall in Moscow. The man was arrested. Damn. He works the phone rapidly, calls his people in Leningrad. *** OKAY, YOU IDIOT, GET OUT OF HERE The chubby shabby man had been sweating, in a state of nervous panic, when the guards come back. “You are idiot, don’t do again. Get out of here.” He doesn’t believe his ears. As he’s released from custody, he’s walking unsteadily to leave the building when a different guard at the front desk calls out at him. “Hey, you, your briefcase is there” says the guard, and waves dismissively. The chubby man feels alarmed, but picks up the briefcase and walks outside before daring to check. Then, trying to act casual as he peers into the briefcase, the chubby man’s eyes widen. The gun is still inside. And still loaded. Over the next two months, the majority of security guards at the Smolny Institute would be transferred away, leaving only a skeleton crew of security at the most important government office in Leningrad. Two and a half months later, on 1 December, the chubby man re-enters the building. This time, there are no guards at all at the entrance. He makes his way to the third floor and meanders until he sees Leningrad’s First Secretary, Sergei Kirov, emerge into the hallway. The chubby man shadows a pace behind Kirov, opens the briefcase quietly and withdraws the gun, and shoots Kirov in the back of the neck before fleeing down the stairs. *** THE ROUNDUP Genrikh Yagoda had been picked by Stalin in July 1934 as People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, a role that meant overseeing the regular police and the NKVD, the secret police and intelligence service. Right away, Yagoda was set to some grim work – dealing with Sergei Kirov. Kirov was seen by Stalin as one of his largest potential rivals. Earlier in 1934, when there were elections for the Central Committee at the Communist Party Congress, Kirov received only three votes against him among the entire delegation of over a thousand, overwhelmingly the most popular person there. Stalin received somewhere between 100 and 300 votes against, though the exact number was covered up. While the exact details aren’t quite precise for obvious reasons – conspiracies are often poorly documented – we know that the chubby and mentally unstable assassin had been both directly and indirectly assisted by Yagoda’s NKVD under Stalin’s instructions. In the aftermath of Kirov’s assassination, a number of his friends and confidants were quickly killed as well. Kirov’s close friend and personal bodyguard, Commissar Borisov, died when he “fell from a truck” the very next day after being arrested by Yagoda’s NKVD agents. The first announcements of who killed Kirov were attributed to a “fascist plot” of “foreign reactionaries” and it was claimed that the assassin had been armed by a “foreign embassy or consulate” – but this line of thinking was soon discarded; Stalin saw a bigger opportunity at hand. Stalin tasked Yagoda, then, with fabricating and contriving evidence against a number of other prominent potential rivals that undoubtedly had nothing to do with Kirov’s death. The Old Bolsheviks Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenav were quickly arrested, interrogated, and tortured by Yagoda and his agents to extract confessions. These would be used in the Moscow Show Trials, as part of Stalin’s Purges. Wikipedia: Lev Kamenev – “The men were tried in January 1935 and were forced to admit "moral complicity" in Kirov's assassination. Zinoviev was sentenced to ten years in prison and Kamenev to five. [...] In August 1936, after months of careful preparations and rehearsals in [Yagoda’s] Soviet secret police prisons, Zinoviev, Kamenev and 14 others, mostly Old Bolsheviks, were put on trial again. This time the charges including forming a terrorist organization that allegedly killed Kirov and tried to kill Stalin and other leaders of the Soviet government. ” Wikipedia: Grigory Zinoviev – “Before the trial, Zinoviev and Kamenev had agreed to plead guilty to the false charges on the condition that they not be executed, a condition that Stalin accepted, stating: "that goes without saying". Nonetheless, a few hours after their conviction, Stalin ordered their execution that night. Shortly after midnight, on the morning of August 25, Zinoviev and Kamenev were executed by shooting. ” *** AND SO IT GOES FOR YAGODA Genrikh Yagoda was very aware of all of this macabre work – it was his agents planning and outputting all the various harshness, extracting confessions and torture, fabricating evidence. He, too, knew of the false promises being made to people who would confess. They would be told they wouldn’t be executed and their families wouldn’t be harmed if they confessed. Inevitably, both would be false. The confessed and convicted men would be executed, and all too often, so would their spouses and children and close friends. Yagoda no doubt knew that Zinoviev and Kamenev were innocent; indeed, some of the charges they confessed to were outright absurd. All of these men killed directly (via assassination) or indirectly (via fabricated evidence, show trial, and execution) were not guilty of the things they actually confessed to, but rather were seen as dangerous rivals to Stalin’s power. You would think, thus, that Yagoda would have gotten wary and cautious at some point, no? And yet, he seemed to be utterly surprised at his own arrest and being placed on trial. Wikipedia: Grinrikh Yagoda: Arrest, Trial, and Execution – “In March 1937, Yagoda was arrested on Stalin's orders. Yezhov announced Yagoda's arrest for diamond smuggling, corruption, and spying for Germany since joining the party in 1917. Yezhov even sprinkled mercury around his office, then blamed it on Yagoda as an attempt to assassinate him. ” Nikolai Yezhov had been Yagoda’s subordinate, but now Yezhov's first mission became to incriminate his old boss in a wide variety of fantastic crimes, hence the sprinkling of mercury to claim an assassination attempt. Yagoda was shocked and he did not go as quietly as the others – “Yagoda was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the Soviet government at the Trial of the Twenty-One in March 1938. Unlike some of the other defendants, he put up resistance in the dock … Solzhenitsyn describes Yagoda as trusting in deliverance from Stalin even during the show trial itself: “Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I appeal to you! For you I built two great canals!" And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.”” Yagoda was stripped naked and beaten severely as a final insult, before being shot. *** DANGER FLAGS, #2: OVERLOOKING We arrive at the second chapter of our series on Danger Flags . Again, the basic concept of Danger Flags is an easy one to understand: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it. Why, then, are we often so blind to bad things that might occur? Why are we surprised when a predictable bad thing… happens? We can likely understand why Sergei Kirov was not fearing for his life even as his security melted away – no Soviet high officials to that time had been so brazenly assassinated, and – outside of Stalin who was still not quite yet Stalin – the man had no enemies. We can also perhaps understand why Zinoviev and Kamenev were not prepared to be arrested for this random thing they had nothing to do with. They were the first of the prominent Show Trials, and how could they have guessed that Stalin’s government would go in that direction? But really, Yagoda of all people really should have known better. Yagoda was systematically incriminating and destroying a number of people, in a brutal and repressive fashion, seeing broken promises of mercy left and right followed by brutality. The only common thread among those people in high places he prosecuted was being a potential powerful rival to Stalin. And, of course, in a government that heavily relies on repressive secret police, the head of the secret police is no doubt a potentially powerful rival. Is this not obvious? How could Yagoda miss it? Why was he so surprised when it happened to him? This is the thrust of this chapter. *** THE HUMAN TENDENCY TO OVERLOOK Danger Flags are valuable little mental models to recognize and acknowledge. They can stop a lot of pain and misery from happening, by predicting and preventing bad things that can happen. They’re also a great compass for self-improvement. For instance, nearly all varieties of discourtesy are danger flags, and whenever you catch yourself being discourteous, this should be a flag to you to scrub that out of your character. People notice. Oh, they might not even notice that they noticed. But they do. Or, at least – the sophisticated and discerning people notice. But often, we don’t notice. We become blind to our faults and the faults of others, and that leads us downwards. Not the good “go down before going up” downwards, but the “downwards forever to perdition” downwards. Yagoda-downwards. He pleaded, “For you I build two great canals!” Alas. Guilty. Bang. *** OVERLOOKING OBVIOUS COMING PROBLEMS: PAIN Why do we overlook obvious problems? “Many problems are caused by people’s mistakes. But people often find it difficult to identify and accept their own mistakes. Sometimes it’s because they’re blind to them, but more often it’s because ego and shortsightedness make discovering their mistakes and weaknesses painful. Because people are often upset when their mistakes are pointed out to them, most people are reluctant to point out mistakes in others. As a result, an objective diagnosis of problems arising from people’s mistakes is often missing and personal evolution is stunted. […] It is at this stage that most people fail to progress. More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively. ” – Ray Dalio, Principles Well, that’s a simple and straightforward answer – pain. But let’s not breeze past it too fast. What is pain? It’s a perceived sensation that’s a certain type of unpleasant. When we feel it, it makes us want to avoid that sensation. And how do we avoid pain? By avoiding painful stimuli. We'll come back to this point momentarily. *** OVERLOOKING OBVIOUS COMING PROBLEMS: JUSTIFICATION Think for a moment about Yagoda. He’d had a lot of people killed and done a lot of terrible things. The natural human response to doing terrible things isn’t to self-reflect – again, that’s painful – it’s to seek justification for why. There’s no doubt to me that Yagoda “talked himself into” every one of his assassinations or framings. “Oh, Kirov was getting too big for his britches. Oh Lev, he thought he knew better than others.” No matter how trivial or spurious it might have been, Yagoda would need to do something other than look in the mirror each day and say: “I’m a mass-murdering hack working for a brutal tyrant, killing any competent rivals to the tyrant even if they’re genuinely part of the same cause as me. If I became seen as a rival to the tyrant, I’ll be killed too.” No, of course not. We in fact know he didn’t think that way, because he was surprised at his own arrest and impending doom. *** OVERLOOKING OBVIOUS COMING PROBLEMS: BELIEVING WE’RE THE EXCEPTION Much of all of this insanity had been unleashed by, or at least sanctified, by the People's Commissar for Justice Nikolai Krylenko. Wikipedia: Nikolai Krylenko – “Krylenko was an exponent of socialist legality and the theory that political considerations, rather than criminal guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment. Although a participant in the Show Trials and political repression of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Krylenko was ultimately arrested himself during the Great Purge. Following interrogation and torture by the NKVD, Krylenko confessed to extensive involvement in wrecking and anti-Soviet agitation. He was sentenced to death by the Military Collegium of the Soviet Supreme Court, in a trial lasting 20 minutes, and executed immediately afterwards. ” It’s common among humans to believe we’re the exception to external forces. Krylenko advocated a theory that “political considerations, rather than guilt or innocence, should guide the application of punishment” – he of course did not realize or consider that it might be politically valuable for him to be killed by his own system. *** OVERLOOKING OBVIOUS COMING PROBLEMS: INTERNAL VIEW The man who replaced and had Yagoda killed was Nikolai Yezhov. Wikipedia – “[Yezhov] became People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (head of the NKVD) and a member of the Central Committee on September 26, 1936, following the dismissal of Genrikh Yagoda. […] Destruction of the old bolshevik cadres as well as Yagoda himself — all potential or imagined enemies of Stalin — was not a problem for Yezhov. As a devout Stalinist and not a member of the organs of state security, Yezhov was just the man Stalin needed to intensify the terror and rid Stalin of potential opponents. Yezhov's first task from Stalin was to personally investigate and conduct the prosecution of his long-time Chekist mentor Yagoda, which he did with remorseless zeal. Ordered by Stalin to create a suitably grandiose plot for Yagoda's show trial, Yezhov ordered the NKVD to sprinkle mercury on the curtains of his office so that the physical evidence could be collected and used to support the charge that Yagoda was a German spy, sent to assassinate Yezhov and Stalin with poison and restore capitalism. It's also claimed that he personally tortured both Yagoda and Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky to extract their confessions. ” So, Yezhov is just as brutal as Yagoda, perhaps even moreso. He also framed people and mis-managed any pretense of justice. Sprinkling mercury on curtains? It’s almost theatrically silly. Moreover, Yezhov was now killing his predecessor . Surely, at least Yezhov must have realized that the Soviet machine would someday eat him at some point? But, no. After being arrested, tortured, and placed on trial – “Yezhov, like his predecessor Yagoda, maintained to the end his love for Stalin. Yezhov denied being a spy, a terrorist, or a conspirator, stating that he preferred "death to telling lies." He maintained that his previous confession had been obtained under torture, admitted that he purged 14,000 of his fellow Chekists, but said that he was surrounded by "enemies of the people." He also said that he would die with the name of Stalin on his lips. ” What can we make of this insanity? Certainly, we see elements of justification in Yezhov – “he admitted that he purged [killed] 14,000 of his fellow Chekists, but said he was surrounded by “enemies of the people.”” So – there is that. But over and beyond that, I contend that Yezhov was using an internal view of his actions. Internally, by whatever measures and thoughts and philosophies he had, his worldview made sense. His actions made sense. He believed that the best road to take was the one of complete loyalty to Stalin, that Stalin was a good and great and glorious and whatever, and that by being loyal to Stalin his life would work out well. A simple external perspective – asking himself how he would be seen by others, inviting feedback and criticism, taking a neutral position – might have shown him to being doing some ugly, ugly stuff. Likewise, he was constantly evaluating Stalin based on internal view ; he was evaluating Stalin as a devoted Stalinist. A neutral external view of Stalin would show him killing anyone who starts gaining popularity or power. Given that Yezhov was gaining some power, he really ought to have known Stalin would take his life too. But – again, seeing the world objectively causes some measure of pain, and most people are unwilling to experience pain in the moment, and so Yezhov went about doing his macabre work without much self-reflection, leading towards its inevitable outcome. Indeed, his successor – Lavrentiy Beria – had him strapped naked and beaten ferociously before being executed, following the treatment that Yezhov had inflicted on Yagoda. *** ASSORTED DANGER FLAGS We have certainly dug up some earth here. Let’s see if we can refine it. I contend that all of the following are danger flags – *Inability to face pain *Regular justification *Believing someone is the exception *Only taking an internal view and not an external view All of these contribute greatly to overlooking problems – in both oneself and others. If you meet someone who can’t handle pain (including constructive criticism), who justifies themself often, believe they’re the exception, or only runs on “internal view” – this type of person is almost certainly unfit for important roles in one’s life or organization. In the absence of those four points, most flaws can be corrected, many areas with a lack of skill can be trained up, weaknesses can be overcome or navigated around. With those four danger flags in place to a high degree, improvement becomes almost impossible. When someone flinches from anything undesirable or painful, they can’t evolve; when they justify themselves, even external failures or terrible things don’t shake them awake; when they believe they’re the exception, they can’t learn from obviously bad outcomes repeatedly happening to others in the field; when they take an internal view only, this means that everything is a series of delusions built on top of each other and reinforcing each other, which makes it nearly impossible improve or navigate around. *** TRAINING: PAIN TOLERANCE If you realized you had a hard time dealing with painful thoughts and ideas, the answer is probably not to just go to the biggest and craziest and most painful thing possible, but to gradually increase your pain tolerance for difficult intellectual ideas. The most effective training is probably not from confronting gigantic fundamental worldview and identity aspects of oneself, but instead far simpler things like slightly greater athletic performance once fatigue kicks in, the ability to continue working effectively once you get tired, and regularly soliciting criticism from more skilled people in your profession or field. All of these are to some degree unpleasant, but get easier over time. Pain tolerance can be gradually built – again, you don’t want to go too fast and get into a panic or get in over your head – it can be gradually built. The ability to persist through endurance training when it starts to hurt does seem to generalize to the ability to push through on difficult intellectual work. Likewise, talking oneself into and completing a little more work when truly tired makes you realize the body and mind has excess resources and capacity and makes pain less terrifying and dreadful, until it becomes somewhat mundane. Still annoying and unpleasant to some degree, but mundane instead of dreadful. Criticism, of course, is nearly universally valuable when coming from credible people who care about you. By regularly soliciting and implementing it, that actually does go from painful to pleasurable over time – seeing flaws and weaknesses eventually is a joyful thing, since you know you’ll correct them and improve as a result. *** TRAINING: AGAINST JUSTIFICATION This is simple enough. Never make excuses or justify yourself. It’s a process. If you currently make excuses, it’s a process to cease doing so. A great way to ensure you’re not making excuses is to do this whenever you’re tempted to do so: *Assert the responsibility is yours first. *Explain what happened. *Explain how you’ll do better next time. So instead of, “Sorry I’m late, there was a lot of terrific…” Instead, you would say, “It’s totally unacceptable I’m late, I need to make sure I’m here on time. There was traffic, but that’s no excuse – on a rainy day, I should leave my home at least an hour before rush hour starts to ensure I'm here on time.” There is the larger point about justifying right and wrong… that could be its own entire piece, and I’m not sure I could even cover it adequately, but I’ll point out that typically when we feel the need to justify ourselves, it’s either because we don’t want to accept responsibility for failure or because we believe what we’re doing is wrong on some level. This isn’t always true, but if you catch yourself justifying, that would be a good time to examine your behavior around there very thoroughly. *** TRAINING: BASE RATES AND NEUTRALITY Finally, in regards to believing one is the exception and excessively taking internal view and neglecting what’s really happening, there are some good ways to get over those. The first is that, in any new endeavor, you should look to find the base rates of success and failure in that endeavor. Then your first assessment of how likely you are to succeed or fail should be set to the base rate. If 90% of companies fail, then your base rate of failing if you start a company is… 90%. If you believed you’re the exception or took the internal view only (say, looking at the great things your new company can do, but not searching for what the market dislikes about you, neglecting risks, not noticing impact areas you’re weak on)… well, you might estimate you’ve got a 50% to 70% chance of success. And then you’d fail. I almost universally recommend people try to figure out the base rates of success and failure early on anything they want to do. But sometimes I get pushback; someone will say, “If I knew the real base rates, I would never get started.” Eh, I disagree. The base rates aren’t written in stone; most of the time, there’s no natural law about them. If your base rate of failure is 90%, that doesn’t mean you’re stuck there. Many companies, for instance, fail because they’re undercapitalized – they don’t have enough money in the bank. That means a company can be a good company, can be succeeding, but if they have a bad three months in a row, they go out of business. If you were “totally sure this is going to work,” you might fail to notice that a lot of good companies die when they hit a cash shortfall, and you might not build up cash reserves or lines of credit or fundraise aggressively enough. Likewise, there’s a term in business called “single source dependency” – it refers to having a single supplier, marketing channel, or buyer from you account for a critically large part of the business you do. Single source dependency kills a lot of companies. If you knew going into a business that a lot of companies in your space died because they were relying on a single critical outside organization, you might give a paranoid amount of focus to ensuring you have backup suppliers, multiple channels of new customers, and a diversity of existing customer base – so a single loss doesn’t put you under. If you find yourself saying, “We’ve got a great company here, we’ve got a 95% chance of success” – you’re doing something wrong. If you say, “Most companies fail; 90% fail and only 10% succeed. So we’re paranoid about this, we work constantly to have enough money in the bank, have a really amazing team, only have excellent people on the team, fanatically work to ensure we have the best products and services, constantly check out what the competition is doing to see if they’re putting out better products than us, connect with customers constantly and then never take our customers for granted…” – when someone talks like that, indeed, they have a much better chance of success than 10%. It’s very easy to fix believing you’re the exception or getting stuck in a death spiral of the inside view alone – constantly assess base rates of success and failure and chances of events happening, as if you’re a neutral observer. It breaks you out of undue hope or fear, it gets you off optimism and naivete, it brings you towards a neutral base where you can make improvements and ensure things work out. *** BUT WHAT COULD THOSE SOVIET SECURITY CHIEFS DONE? Yagoda assassinates Kirov; Yezhov has Yagoda killed; Beria kills Yezhov. And now it’s Beria’s turn. Wikipedia: Lavrentiy Beria: Stalin’s Death – “Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that Beria had, immediately after Stalin's stroke, gone about "spewing hatred against [Stalin] and mocking him." When Stalin showed signs of consciousness, Beria dropped to his knees and kissed his hand. When Stalin fell unconscious again, Beria immediately stood and spat. ” Beria had survived Stalin’s reign. Stalin died on 5 March 1953. And indeed, after Stalin’s death Beria became one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union for a brief time. Well, a very brief time. About a month. Downfall – “On 26 June 1953, Beria was arrested and held in an undisclosed location near Moscow. Accounts of Beria's fall vary considerably. By the most likely account, Khrushchev prepared an elaborate ambush, convening a meeting of the Presidium on 26 June, where he suddenly launched a scathing attack on Beria, accusing him of being a traitor and spy in the pay of British intelligence. Beria was taken completely by surprise. He asked, "What's going on, Nikita Sergeyevich? Why are you picking fleas in my trousers?" Molotov and others quickly spoke against Beria one after the other, followed by a motion by Khrushchev for his instant dismissal. When Beria finally realized what was happening and plaintively appealed to Malenkov to speak for him, his old friend and crony silently hung his head and refused to meet his gaze. Malenkov pressed a button on his desk as the pre-arranged signal to Marshal Georgy Zhukov and a group of armed officers in a nearby room. They burst in and arrested Beria. ” Did he did with dignity? … nope: “Beria and all the other defendants were sentenced to death on 23 December 1953. When the death sentence was passed, Beria pleaded on his knees for mercy before collapsing to the floor and wailing and crying energetically, but to no avail. The other six defendants were executed by firing squad on the same day the trial ended. Beria was executed separately. He was shot through the forehead by General Pavel Batitsky who had to stuff a rag into Beria's mouth to silence his bawling (his final moments bore great similarity to those of his own predecessor, NKVD Chief Nikolai Yezhov, who begged for his life before his execution in 1940). ” I have suggested you should danger-flag people with an inability to face pain, people who regularly justify their actions instead of reasoning and accepting responsibility, who believe they’re the exception or only take an internal view of success and failure and neglect an external view. If you have these qualities in yourself, you should gradually train them out of yourself and become more reliable and steadfast and strong as a result. But what you should you have done if you were in the Soviet Union? Could you have survived? And the answer, actually, is yes – if you merely did two things. (1) Stay out of politics entirely, and (2) do something else that was useful. Mikhail Kalashnikov was born in 1919, and died in his bed in 2013. He did this by being… useful. When he was wounded as a tank commander fighting the Germans, he paid attention to what problems other soldiers had: "I was in the hospital, and a soldier in the bed beside me asked: ‘Why do our soldiers have only one rifle for two or three of our men, when the Germans have automatics?’ So I designed one. I was a soldier, and I created a machine gun for a soldier. It was called an Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic weapon of Kalashnikov—AK—and it carried the date of its first manufacture, 1947. " He reflected later that if it wasn’t for the Nazis, he probably would have made tractors and lawnmowers. So what could Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria have done? (1) not gone into politics, (2) done something else useful instead. The Soviets had great regard for their Chess players, their sportsmen, their engineers and those working on the Space Race, their weapons manufacturers, and so on. Sometimes a particular field is just despicable in a given era, and to enter that field in that era is to enter into despicability – with all its attendant consequences. If you wanted to be involved in the defense of the Soviet Union, you wanted to be Kalashnikov and not Yagoda, Yezhov, or Beria. Contrast Kalashnikov's way of speaking and acting with all those commissars who brought upon their own doom: "When a young man, I read somewhere the following: God the Almighty said, 'All that is too complex is unnecessary, and it is simple that is needed' ... So this has been my lifetime motto – I have been creating weapons to defend the borders of my fatherland, to be simple and reliable." Simple, hard-working, driven, useful – and not coming to be danger-flagged by all the various treacherous politicians and commissars of the era. Kalashnikov just did his work. In any event, overlooking certainly leads to downfall. Do danger-flag and be exceedingly cautious around people with an inability to face pain, people who justify themselves, and people who believe they’re an exception and who won’t external perspectives. If you see these aspects in yourself, train to get rid of them. Pain in the moment is hard, and perhaps undesirable, but in the long run – far, far better than the alternative. Danger Flags #3: Internal Strife Danger Flags #3: Internal Strife TYPE 3: "THE GREEDY, DEMANDING CHARACTER" “ This kind of person affixes himself to others like a leech and clings obsessively. Although extremely dependent and passive, he constantly demands that others take care of him and gratify his wishes. If he considers himself wronged, he does not seek redress through his own efforts but tries to persuade another to take up the cudgels in his behalf -- "let's you and him fight." His loyalties are likely to shift whenever he feels that the sponsor whom he has chosen has let him down. Defectors of this type feel aggrieved because their desires were not satisfied in their countries of origin, but they soon feel equally deprived in a second land and turn against its government or representatives in the same way. The greedy and demanding character is subject to rather frequent depressions. He may direct a desire for revenge inward, upon himself; in extreme cases suicide may result. “The greedy, demanding character often suffered from very early deprivation of affection or security. As an adult he continues to seek substitute parents who will care for him as his own, he feels, did not. “The interrogator dealing with a greedy, demanding character must be careful not to rebuff him; otherwise rapport will be destroyed. On the other hand, the interrogator must not accede to demands which cannot or should not be met. Adopting the tone of an understanding father or big brother is likely to make the subject responsive. If he makes exorbitant requests, an unimportant favor may provide a satisfactory substitute because the demand arises not from a specific need but as an expression of the subject's need for security. He is likely to find reassuring any manifestation of concern for his well-being. “ In dealing with this type -- and to a considerable extent in dealing with any of the types herein listed -- the interrogator must be aware of the limits and pitfalls of rational persuasion. If he seeks to induce cooperation by an appeal to logic, he should first determine whether the source's resistance is based on logic. The appeal will glance off ineffectually if the resistance is totally or chiefly emotional rather than rational. Emotional resistance can be dissipated only by emotional manipulation. ” -- from the United States Central Intelligence Agency’s “Counterintelligence Interrogation”, July 1963; declassified and approved for release into public domain January 1997; emphasis added *** REGARDING INTERNAL DOCUMENTS AND OPERATIONS MANUALS It’s a poorly-known fact, and somewhat of a minor tragedy that it’s so poorly known – every document created by the U.S. government automatically enters into the public domain, without copyright, if it’s not classified. These operations documents are incredibly useful to learn from – indeed, almost any ops documents or training materials that began as internal-only in an effective organization is worth learning from. You can learn immensely more, and far more quickly, by studying how Toyota builds cars than by reading the latest pop bestseller on business or leadership; you can learn far more about physical fitness from the U.S. Army guidelines on running and strength training and nutrition and recovery than you can from the latest fad diet; when internal materials are available on how high-stakes negotiations are conducted, these are almost always more direct, practical, and useful than reading general theories of negotiation that might be tested or untested – and even then, hopeful and “easy-seeming” materials tend to spread more easily and become more popular than uglier, harder, but often critically-necessary truths. One of the more famous operations documents of our era, which is read and re-read by almost everyone effective I know, is Ray Dalio’s “Principles” – which began as internal-only at Bridgewater, the largest and most successful hedge fund of all time. You’ll see often references in Dalio in my writing. Again, internal-only is a good criteria for whether something is likely worth reading. Dalio’s Principles started internal-only before being leaked (and only afterwards released publicly), thus it has that terse, direct, “you’ve already bought in if you’re reading this” feel to it. It doesn’t spend half the time selling you on the trueness of what it’s doing and all its core assumptions, and it doesn’t have that “sanitized quality” that writing for the general public typically carries with it. Of course, the reason most public writing is sanitized is because almost all people don't want to say something that will cause a bad reaction in the general public for no gain to themselves. No one does; everything written for general publication is sanitized, and often it’s the most harsh, critical, and counterintuitive elements that are left on the cutting-room floor. U.S. government documents are interesting in that there’s surprisingly little interest in them, and the majority were written before the Internet came of age. While technically you could get your hands on just about anything through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, this only typically happened when academic researchers wanted to delve deeply into materials, or when a major scandal happened. But nowadays, you can find immense amount of these materials online. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has some incredibly interesting documents on assessing ecology and measuring environmental health over time. It takes a while to parse them – the guidance in them is typically used by specialists who already know the field, and they typically don’t explain basic well-known terminology – but a lot can be learned from them. Similarly, in 2016, the U.S. Army had over 475,000 active soldiers and 540,000 reserves. Any guidelines for soldiers’ health needed to take into account making the material simple, easy, straightforward, and effective for over one million people of different ages, different levels of motivation, different baselines of physical fitness and different jobs to be done. Their materials on running, weight-lifting, nutrition, recovery, and injury-prevention are worthwhile. They have to be, or people die. Likewise, the Navy has over 300,000 sailors and 100,000 reserves; you’d imagine their guidelines on swimming to be a pretty good place to start learning, wouldn’t you? Finding these materials can be as simple as a Google search when you’re going into a new field. You can read about how the Treasury goes about assessing the money supply, how the FBI practices firearms safety… even how various bureaus and agencies go about record-keeping, accounting, and logistics. It’s all incredibly useful and practical stuff, needing to be both foundationally correct for the most motivated members of those services, as well as a variety of everyday people going about regular and routine jobs. If any of these training materials or operations documents are fundamentally flawed, very bad things happen. And while it’s fashionable to make jokes and denigrate the American civil service, after having studied a lot of history as well as surveyed the civil services of some other modern governments, I’m comfortable stating that there’s never been a country anywhere near as large and diverse as the United States that was even close to as well-governed and effective. Really, the only other major candidate in modern times would be the British Empire. So – learning from what civil servants, soldiers, and people in high-stakes situations in government are actually doing for their operations, their lessons, and their trainings is incredibly valuable, as well as looking for excellent documents released from the private sector. I mean, where are you getting your information on how to effectively do things? Storytellers like Malcolm Gladwell? *** PARTICULARLY HIGH STAKES: THE COLD WAR BEGINS The United States was ill-prepared for the Cold War. American isolationism before World War I and World War II are well-known, but American “gentlemanly idealism” is often not well-known enough. The first major American code-breaking and cryptography organization, the Cipher Bureau, was founded in the aftermath of World War I in 1919 and jointly funded by the State Department and the Army. But this ran against the currents of American idealism and hope. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson ordered closing down the project, saying: “Gentlemen do not read each other's mail.” On 7 December 1941, that date which will live in infamy, the Japanese led the sneak attack assault on Pearl Harbor, killing over 2400, wounding over 1100, sinking six ships, destroying 188 aircraft, and wreaking a lot of other havoc and carnage – while American forces were caught unaware. Even following the entry of America into World War II, the Axis Powers were seen as sort of an aberration. Max-hostility would be needed to put down their attempts at global conquest, but it was thought that the aftermath of the war would usher in genuine peace and prosperity. Perhaps still feeling foolish and bashful at the World War I slogan of “the war to end all war,” such pronouncements were not explicitly made in pithy catchphrases, but the feeling was that something altogether more sane, stable, and peaceful would emerge from the aftermath and endure. Of course, Joseph Stalin did everything he could to convince American leadership of his goodwill and good intentions, and American leadership genuinely wanted to believe that a peaceful world would emerge after the carnage. It’s the American way; we Americans so want to believe. Seeming on the verge of universal peace, Stalin’s 1946 Bolshoi Theater Victory Speech shocked, horrified, and confused those would had been his allies merely a year before. Stalin – “Comrades! […] It would be wrong to think that the Second World War broke out accidentally, or as a result of blunders committed by certain statesmen, although blunders were certainly committed. As a matter of fact, the war broke out as the inevitable result of the development of world economic and political forces on the basis of present-day monopolistic capitalism. […] As far as our country is concerned, for her this war was the fiercest and most arduous ever fought in the history of our Motherland. But the war was not only a curse. It was also a great school which examined and tested all the forces of the people. The war laid bare all facts and events in the rear and at the front, it ruthlessly tore down all the veils and coverings that concealed the actual features of states, governments and parties, and brought them onto the stage without masks and without make-up, with all their defects and merits. The war was something in the nature of an examination of our Soviet system, of our State, of our Government and of our Communist Party, and it summed up their work and said, as it were: Here they are, your people and organizations, their life and work scrutinize them carefully and treat them according to their deserts. This is one of the positive sides of the war.” Well, this not what the Americans and the English and the French and Nationalist Chinese wanted to hear. Stalin goes on to violate his agreements of free and open elections in occupied Soviet territory, and Churchill fires back on 5 March 1946 in his “Sinews of Peace” speech – “ From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow. Athens alone-Greece with its immortal glories-is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation. The Russian-dominated Polish Government has been encouraged to make enormous and wrongful inroads upon Germany, and mass expulsions of millions of Germans on a scale grievous and undreamed-of are now taking place. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy. ” In July 1946, the Chinese Civil War reignites; it had been on hold as the Nationalists and Communists set aside their differences to fight Imperial Japan. In October 1949, the Nationalists withdrew to Formosa Island – Taiwan – and the Communists had occupied mainland China successfully. On 25 June 1950, Kim il-Sung led North Korean forces equipped by Stalin and Mao in the invasion of South Korea. *** COUNTERINTELLIGENCE IN 1963: FROM EUROPE TO KOREA TO EVERYWHERE Many – perhaps most – of the events of the Cold War caught the Americans unaware at first. Soviet leadership, now firmly under Stalin, had grown up in an environment of conspiracy and crime. Stalin for his part had personally led bank robberies, extortions, riots, and the like. He dealt with the Nazis, signing their famous non-aggression pact and jointly carving up Poland, and – while caught slightly flat-footed by Hitler’s opening a second front through attacking the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa – nonetheless adapted. Both Soviet ideology and Soviet experience were far more suited to a murky world of conspiracy and espionage than the American experience. After all, Soviet leadership had already navigated the covert insurrection followed by revolution in the Russian Empire, and then had developed a vast apparatus of secret police and infiltrators to destroy internal enemies first, and to begin to subvert foreign organizations shortly after consolidating. Little-remembered now, but Stalin had multiple agents on site at the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos; four years and three weeks after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, the Soviets conducted their first successful nuclear detonation on 29 August 1949, largely driven by his spies stealing atomic plans and science. Stalin had rebuffed Korean communism while the Chinese Civil War was still raging, but after the Communist takeover of mainland China, he and Mao greenlit an invasion of South Korea. When dawn broke on 25 June 1945 in America, Kim il-Sung had invaded South Korea. American diplomats moved unusually quickly in getting the United Nations Security Council to condemn the action that same day. A rare blunder from Stalin in the field of belligerent diplomacy occurred – he’d instructed his Ambassador to the United Nations to protest all proceedings, and thus, with the Soviet Union absent, North Korea was identified as the aggressor on 25 June in the UN Security Council, on 27 June a resolution was passed recommended UN members furnish assistance to South Korea to repel the invasion, and on 7 July established the United Nations Korean Command to send soldiers under American leadership to repel the invasion. The Korean War had begun. Fighting went back and forth numerous times, and the entirety of the Korean War is beyond the scope of this chapter, but one item particularly puzzled American leaders – North Korean forces were particularly good at coercing confessions from captured prisoners-of-war. This led to a deep study of the topic. Certainly, American and English forces had at times been captured by the Nazis or Imperial Japanese, but they didn’t make the sort of confessions and denouncements that came out of the Korean War. In 1950, the first usage of “brainwashing” came into effect in English while attempting to explain this phenomenon. The Korean War came to an armistice that divided the country in 1954, but even as it happened, Soviet funding of insurrection started growing everywhere : Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. The whole world turned into a slowly simmering battlefield, that would turn into flashpoints when Communist forces perceived themselves as having enough gravity to go into open war. By 1963, Fidel Castro had taken hold in Cuba and the Vietnam War was heating up. All the successful Soviet espionage, the successful Communist interrogation and coercion techniques from 1946 to 1953, and the covert insurrections that boiled over rapidly once reaching critical mass had caught American leadership very much off-guard. The Central Intelligence Agency had been formed in 1947, but its mission had been somewhat vague and murky, and there were debates on what it should do. As the success of Soviet espionage and Korean War coercion and interrogation came to light, and as similar Communist plans started being enacted around the globe, the CIA quietly became one of the paramount American organizations for the research of psychology and how people react under stress and pressure. *** DANGER FLAGS #3: INTERNAL STRIFE We continue exploring Danger Flags , a simple concept that’s often profoundly neglected: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it. We are looking to be able to build our mental models of common danger flags so we can spot them out in the world, so we can take adequate measures in danger-flagged situations, and so that we can identify problems in our own behavior and ways of thinking and gradually train to become more solid, more effective, better people. In this chapter, we’re concerned with recognizing a variety of Internal Strife that can plague and torment people. Indeed, people with high degrees of internal strife – and there a number of variants of it – are prone to rapidly reverse course and do incredibly destructive things. We’re using a backdrop of counterintelligence material developed in the 1960’s in a highly leveraged and incredibly dangerous and fast-moving environment, which was only declassified three decades after originally being written. Of course, this can be heavy stuff. In an ideal world, perhaps, I would find a way to lighten the tone. This stuff can be so dark , no? And yet, it is the world as-it-is. Similar to an engineer ensuring that a building doesn’t fall down during an earthquake, we have to consider a variety of dangerous and unpleasant scenarios, so that we can build things that are beautiful and functional. If the topic starts to become too gray or too dark, of course, there is plenty of Malcolm Gladwell out in the world as a change-of-pace; but for our part, we dive into the hard and practical stuff that is so poorly covered elsewhere. *** THE NINE MAJOR PSYCHOLOGICAL-EMOTIONAL CATEGORIZATIONS The declassified 1963 “Counterintelligence Interrogation” document ranges from the boring and practical, to the horrific and macabre, to the highly insightful. In the preface, it begins: “There is nothing mysterious about interrogation. It consists of no more than obtaining needed information through responses to questions. As is true of all craftsmen, some interrogators are more able than others; and some of their superiority may be innate. But sound interrogation nevertheless rests upon a knowledge of the subject matter and on certain broad principles, chiefly psychological, which are not hard to understand. The success of good interrogators depends in large measure upon their use, conscious or not, of these principles and of processes and techniques deriving from them. Knowledge of subject matter and of the basic principles will not of itself create a successful interrogation, but it will make possible the avoidance of mistakes that are characteristic of poor interrogation. The purpose, then, is not to teach the reader how to be a good interrogator but rather to tell him what he must learn in order to become a good interrogator. ” Obviously, it’s extremely unlikely – statistically speaking – that you’ll ever interrogate anyone. But that’s not the point. As with any operations document, you’re looking for general principles. The vast majority of us will never do industrial engineering either, but the general mental models of eliminating waste, batch-processing, eliminating bottlenecks, and economy of motion are very easily applied to any domain. Studying how Toyota built the most economical, effective, and profitable automobile company in the world is worthwhile. Similarly, people are people – learning how professionals in an extremely high-leveraged and high-risk situation assess people is incredibly worthwhile. The people learning interrogation in the 1960’s were doing such things as debriefing potential defectors from the Soviet Union to see if they were genuine and were bringing real information. This is obviously a very high-stakes game; a double-agent with incorrect information could be devastating. Most of the document has some historical value, but not much practical value for those of us simply trying to build mental models to further our performance and understand people better. The extreme situations presented do not apply to us. However, “Types of Sources: Personality Categories” offers a wealth of interesting details. In it, the manual outlines nine basic types of personalities, what types of traits and behaviors tend to come in packages together, what motivates each type of person, and how they’re likely to respond and act going forwards. It’s imperfect, but an incredibly interesting jumping-off point for learning what makes people tick and predicting future behavior. Here’s the full description of their first type, “the orderly-obstinate character” – “The orderly-obstinate character. People in this category are characteristically frugal, orderly, and cold; frequently they are quite intellectual. They are not impulsive in behavior. They tend to think things through logically and to act deliberately. They often reach decisions very slowly. They are far less likely to make real personal sacrifices for a cause than to use them as a temporary means of obtaining a permanent personal gain. They are secretive and disinclined to confide in anyone else their plans and plots, which frequently concern the overthrow of some form of authority. They are also stubborn, although they may pretend cooperation or even believe that they are cooperating. They nurse grudges. “The orderly-obstinate character considers himself superior to other people. Sometimes his sense of superiority is interwoven with a kind of magical thinking that includes all sorts of superstitions and fantasies about controlling his environment. He may even have a system of morality that is all his own. He sometimes gratifies his feeling of secret superiority by provoking unjust treatment. He also tries, characteristically, to keep open a line of escape by avoiding any real commitment to anything. He is -- and always has been -- intensely concerned about his personal possessions. He is usually a tightwad who saves everything, has a strong sense of propriety, and is punctual and tidy. His money and other possessions have for him a personalized quality; they are parts of himself. He often carries around shiny coins, keepsakes, a bunch of keys, and other objects having for himself an actual or symbolic value.” Is that not incredibly fascinating? Indeed, a quick skim of my memory does see a correlation between non-impulsiveness, frugality, less self-sacrifice, desire to control the environment, making only tentative commitments, more care and attention to detail of personal property, and so on. Of course, these things are imperfect. Indeed, the introduction to that section warns, emphasis added on the most important line – “The number of systems devised for categorizing human beings is large, and most of them are of dubious validity. […] The ideal solution would be to avoid all categorizing. Basically, all schemes for labeling people are wrong per se; applied arbitrarily, they always produce distortions. Every interrogator knows that a real understanding of the individual is worth far more than a thorough knowledge of this or that pigeon-hole to which he has been consigned. And for interrogation purposes the ways in which he differs from the abstract type may be more significant than the ways in which he conforms. […] With all of these reservations, then, and with the further observation that those who find these psychological-emotional categories pragmatically valuable should use them and those who do not should let them alone , the following nine types are described. The categories are based upon the fact that a person's past is always reflected, however dimly, in his present ethics and behavior. Old dogs can learn new tricks but not new ways of learning them. People do change, but what appears to be new behavior or a new psychological pattern is usually just a variant on the old theme. “ Those caveats in place, their nine categories are – 1. Orderly-obstinate 2. Optimistic 3. Greedy and demanding 4. Anxious and self-centered 5. Guilt-ridden 6. Wrecked by success 7. Schizoid 8. The Exception 9. Average or Normal In this chapter, we are less interested in their categories #1-4, #7, and #9. They can be interesting, particularly the “magical-thinking” schizoid-type who is totally ungrounded in reality, but we are most interested in those people that are fighting internal strife. *** DANGER FLAG: WRECKED BY SUCCESS “Adversity is sometimes hard upon a man; but for one man who can stand prosperity, there are a hundred that will stand adversity.” – Thomas Carlyle From the counterintelligence document – “The character wrecked by success is closely related to the guilt-ridden character. This sort of person cannot tolerate success and goes through life failing at critical points. He is often accident-prone. Typically he has a long history of being promising and of almost completing a significant assignment or achievement but not bringing it off. The character who cannot stand success enjoys his ambitions as long as they remain fantasies but somehow ensures that they will not be fulfilled in reality . Acquaintances often feel that his success is just around the corner, but something always intervenes. In actuality this something is a sense of guilt, of the kind described above. The person who avoids success has a conscience which forbids the pleasures of accomplishment and recognition. He frequently projects his guilt feelings and feels that all of his failures were someone else's fault. He may have a strong need to suffer and may seek danger or injury. ” Now, isn’t that something? Clearly, with the briefest moments of reflection, we all know someone like this. And we can see right away why this is a danger flag. Echoing Carlyle, they can soldier on through adversity… but when at the gates of prosperity, they begin to break down. And note, this is not some New Age thinking about the power of belief. Whoever the lost-to-history writer of the CIA’s counterintelligence interrogation manual was, this was a rather clinical and blunt person, interested in very practical outcomes. We will deal with addressing this in ourselves and others momentarily. *** DANGER FLAG: GUILT-RIDDEN “The guilt-ridden character. This kind of person has a strong cruel, unrealistic conscience. His whole life seems devoted to reliving his feelings of guilt. Sometimes he seems determined to atone; at other times he insists that whatever went wrong is the fault of somebody else. In either event he seeks constantly some proof or external indication that the guilt of others is greater than his own. He is often caught up completely in efforts to prove that he has been treated unjustly. In fact, he may provoke unjust treatment in order to assuage his conscience through punishment. Compulsive gamblers who find no real pleasure in winning but do find relief in losing belong to this class. So do persons who falsely confess to crimes. Sometimes such people actually commit crimes in order to confess and be punished. Masochists also belong in this category. ” It’s difficult for me to toe the line here on not venturing into current events; anything I might say to expound on this could be interpreted politically. But to take a mild example, I suppose we all know people who are intentionally rude or combative towards authority figures like border guards, customs officials, or police who pull them over on a routine traffic stop. It’s well-known and widely agreed – most law enforcement officers will admit it in private, and some have even written and declared it publicly – that if you’re friendly, polite, cooperative, calm, and address an officer as “Sir” or “Maam”, they will treat you more cordially and be less potentially hard on you than if you’re standoffish. This doesn’t get into how things ought to be; that’s not the point. The point is, there is a certain pattern of behavior and type of personality that, as the expert put it, “may provoke unjust treatment in order to assuage his conscience through punishment.” Odd, is it not? And yet, does it not explain a lot? Again, we will come back to this to address practical implications in a moment. *** DANGER FLAG: GENERALIZED VENGEFULNESS We began this chapter quoting type 3, “the greedy, demanding character.” The key quote is thus – “Defectors of this type feel aggrieved because their desires were not satisfied in their countries of origin, but they soon feel equally deprived in a second land and turn against its government or representatives in the same way. The greedy and demanding character is subject to rather frequent depressions. He may direct a desire for revenge inward, upon himself; in extreme cases suicide may result. ” Now, I should clarify that I’m not advocating “turn the other cheek” against legitimate and persistent hostility; this is a modern ethos that I do not agree with. Self-defense and counterpunching are both appropriate in a wide variety of situations, and perhaps the next time we do a series contrasting ancient views with modern ones – something similar to what “Uncommon Virtues” was – we’ll likely cover this topic. With that said, true enemies are a rarity. Constantly nurturing grudges is a dirty-burning fuel at best; most of the time, it merely saps one’s energy. The most effective people I know almost universally do not bother trying to avenge themselves when petty trivial things happen to them unfairly, but instead look to get out of that situation and get back to work as soon as possible. The interesting insight from the author of that document, which certainly explains why a defector would often cross back to their original home country’s service so often, is that excess grievances and hatred for no particular reason are typically a sign of the person who is carrying those grievances and hatreds, rather than the circumstances they came from. Obviously, then, if the hatred and aggrieved feelings are internal but mistakenly expressed as external whenever it is convenient, this becomes a person you can easily fall out with or have bad experiences with, and is very dangerous. Again, we will deal with practical implications in a moment. *** DANGER FLAG: REBELLIOUSNESS AT NOTHING IN PARTICULAR And finally, Category #8: “The Exception” – “The exception believes that the world owes him a great deal. He feels that he suffered a gross injustice, usually early in life, and should be repaid. Sometimes the injustice was meted out impersonally, by fate, as a physical deformity, an extremely painful illness or operation in childhood, or the early loss of one parent or both. Feeling that these misfortunes were undeserved, the exceptions regard them as injustices that someone or something must rectify. Therefore they claim as their right privileges not permitted others. When the claim is ignored or denied, the exceptions become rebellious, as adolescents often do. They are convinced that the justice of the claim is plain for all to see and that any refusal to grant it is willfully malignant. ” This use of the word “exception” is a little differently than we used last chapter, “Overlooking,” to denote someone who ignores base rates of statistics and thus overlooks impending potential problems to their own detriment. It’s also a little different from current modern-day usage of the word. It’s perhaps worth focusing less on the “feeling of suffering a gross injustice” and more on the obviously and easily noticed trait of general rebelliousness over really petty and trivial things. It’s easy to notice someone who regularly gets worked up over nothing; indeed, it’s common for young people to do so, since they don’t have enough experience to know when it’s practical to assert themselves or to shrug things off and go along with them; likewise, being able to be assertive without being aggressive is a learned skill that many young people do not possess. I wouldn’t read into this too much if someone is rebellious to some extent over slightly trivial things under the age of, say, 35 in a Western country or slightly earlier in a country where people grow up faster. But once a person has some experience, generalized rebelliousness at nothing in particular is certainly a danger flag. Now, let’s address what these cases have in common. *** INTERNAL STRIFE AS A CATCHALL FOR MANY DANGER FLAGS To echo a quote from Carlyle we’ve used in the past, albeit in a different context – “The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual…” Well, we’ve largely thrown “the spiritual” over the side of the boat in the modern world, to be replaced by psychology and culture. Nevertheless, indeed, people have feelings and impulses deeply embedded in them, things they’re typically unaware of – and things that others with an untrained eye might not see. I believe the vast majority of unreflected-upon internal strife is a major danger flag. Certainly, the majority of us have our insecurities and failings and situations where we become unduly anxious or impatient or whatever. Indeed, many great inventors and athletes and leaders wrestle with their internal demons. But someone who is unaware of internal strife in themselves and periodically expresses itself through destructive action, that person is incredibly dangerous to be around. Most of us already recognize this at least somewhat intuitively. Sooner or later, we realize that a person who is always “down on their luck” might never break through. We realize that people who feel immense amounts of hostility towards organizations they’ve been a part of in the past are incredibly more likely to eventually feel hostile to any organization they’re part of now or might join in the future. But over and above that, the key for spotting these types of danger flags are recognizing behaviors that are not the result of external circumstances, but rather an expression of internal strife directed outwards. *** RECOGNIZING AND FIXING THESE DANGER FLAGS IN YOURSELF Perhaps you resonated to some extent with one of the types of personality and character written above – that should not be so surprising. Most people who are very normal and have no internal pressures on them are less inclined to go seeking and searching for better ways of doing things. If you read memoirs of great inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, and leaders, very many of them are haunted by some sense of insecurity or wounded pride or anxiety or similar. The first key would be recognizing those aspects in yourself. This is of course not any fun at all; it’s staring at the Sun. Your eyes burn and you want to look away. This is natural. The people who look quickly away, though, remain at risk. The second key would be to recognize where those internal pressures express themselves poorly as actions and behavior, and then train alternative actions and behavior into place. For instance, I would wager that a fair handful of our readers here have addictive personalities – certainly a higher percentage than the general population. That is perfectly fine – so long as you recognize the situations where it can lead you down to perdition, and take countermeasures against them. This might be never having a single drink, avoiding known substances of abuse, or setting explicit limits and self-monitoring around different types of leisure or games or entertainment. The exact force that can propel substance addiction can also lead to a person falling in love with a domain and driving relentlessly towards mastery in it. There are people addicted to physical exercise who become elite athletes, and there are people addicted to alcohol who ruin their lives on drink. Being the former is preferable to being the latter, which leads to our final point. The final key for oneself is to recognize and channel potentially destructive aspects of personality into healthy, worthwhile, and effective behaviors and patterns of action. I have something of a love of truth and a hatred of a stupidity and lies. While that might sound like humble and subtle bragging, I assure you it’s not – I formerly got into a lot of stupid arguments on the internet, sometimes got into stupid and unproductive arguments in real life, and at times was intemperate in the subject matter I wrote about to my own detriment. All of those I gradually set about to remedying – I think Danger Flags , for instance, cuts about as close to how radically honest I can be without getting myself into trouble. I removed myself from arguing on the internet entirely – a waste of energy – and will avoid a variety of forums of discussion that lack open-minded genuine searching-for-truth. Finally, I set some explicit rules and criteria around whom I’d get into arguments and discussion with, and spent years – perhaps 3-5 years – looking for the type of people like Kai Zau, Justin Mares, Taylor Pearson, and so on, that also drive endlessly towards truth and for whom taking opposite positions and fleshing them out is always uplifting, pro-social, and productive. I set guidelines about arguing – if I give someone advice and they start to argue without reflecting, I immediately shrug and treat them kindly and move on, but don't engage. It’s saved a lot of grief, since these days I almost exclusively debate and discuss with only open-minded people. That’s of course a personal example, and it’s hard to say exactly what internal drive makes me dislike things that are untrue or sloppy. This can manifest itself in a regard for driving science and discovering the truths of the universe, or it can manifest itself in getting into useless arguments. Likewise, something like a hyperactive conscience could lead one to try to codify a set of principles, live by them thoroughly every single day, and journal one’s errors while working towards self-improvement, or it could result in self-sabotage whenever success seems to be coming to one. With some awareness of one’s internal drives and personality, you can gradually train to change default bad behaviors and express those drives in healthy and effective ways. *** AS FOR DEALING WITH PEOPLE WITH INTERNAL STRIFE… I was going to try to give you guidelines on how to work with them, but if you spot any strong hatreds, immense guilt, self-sabotage, discontentment, or masochism – you’re probably just better off avoiding those people entirely. This is something to be worked on on one’s own; almost by definition, these attributes make people into potentially very dangerous colleagues, associates, or friends. But with that said, I’ll note that there’s some people that seem to handle “just business” and transactional interactions just fine, but get let-down and disappointed by people who “really should know them” or some such. If you spot a person who is diligent and effective with people they don’t know, but who are erratic and do erratic things with the people they’re closest with, you’re better off keeping them at arm’s length. Often you can actually work with those people, but if you generally like to run on “social norms” (as opposed to “transactional norms”) and generally like camaraderie, goodwill, and friendship – these are all things I like and prefer as defaults – you’ll have to check your inclinations around someone who gets most aggrieved towards the people they’re intimate with, but who are decent enough to people they’re not intimate with. As a morbid and unfortunate example, but probably illustrative, you can think of someone who is a decent employee at work, but who goes home and takes out their resentment on their family. This person is best avoided entirely, of course, but it’s probably not the end of the world if you work with them in an impersonal and detached, very professional way. Though you should, of course, avoid becoming family members or close friends with such a person like the plague. *** IS THIS ALL JUST SOME NEW AGE THEORY? I don’t think so. And indeed, the core we took these lessons from were people dealing with life-or-death decisions that effected thousands if not millions of lives at times. This chapter, indeed this whole series is somewhat heavy, but I tried to keep this chapter from any heavier than needed to be. But this is the type of thing they were dealing with – “ The true defector (as distinguished from the hostile agent in defector's guise) is likely to have a history of opposition to authority. The sad fact is that defectors who left their homelands because they could not get along with their immediate or ultimate superiors are also likely to rebel against authorities in the new environment (a fact which usually plays an important part in redefection). Therefore defectors are likely to be found in the ranks of the orderly-obstinate, the greedy and deriding, the schizoids, and the exceptions. “Experiments and statistical analyses performed at the University of Minnesota concerned the relationships among anxiety and affiliative tendencies (desire to be with other people), on the one hand, and the ordinal position (rank in birth sequence) on the other. […] investigators [tentatively] concluded that isolation typically creates anxiety, that anxiety intensifies the desire to be with others who share the same fear , and that only and first-born children are more anxious and less willing or able to withstand pain than later-born children.” Isn’t that just mind-blowing to read? The logic is on clear display, in a situation of the highest stakes. It makes immediate sense. There, just dropped casually into there, is noting that birth order effects levels of anxiety and affiliative tendencies, and “anxiety intensifies the desire to be with others who share the same fear” – isn’t that just mind-blowing ? And yet, it seems true. The rabbit-hole goes deep, does it not? There is so much wisdom and experience out in the world to synthesize and learn from, to glean insights from all sorts of professions and industries and fields, widely dispersed, across the ages. If you're willing to stare at the Sun. That is, I suppose, what we’re doing here. The more I realize how much sophistication is possible in one’s ability to read a situation correctly and make accurate predictions about the future as result, the more genuinely humbled I feel. It's always joyful to focus on the upsides of success and production, but avoiding dangers and treacherous terrain are just as important. If you can do both successfully, certainly you can do some marvelous in life. And yes, the rabbit hole… the rabbit hole goes deep. Danger Flags #4: Hatred Danger Flags #4: Hatred SILENT SUFFICIENTLY LONG “Under what conditions did Man invent for himself those judgments of values, "Good" and "Evil"? And 'what intrinsic value do they possess in themselves? Have they up to the present hindered or advanced human well-being? Are they a symptom of the distress, impoverishment, and degeneration of Human Life? Or, conversely, is it in them that is manifested the fullness, the strength, and the will of Life, its courage, its self-confidence, its future? On this point I found and hazarded in my mind the most diverse answers, I established distinctions in periods, peoples, and castes, I became a specialist in my problem, and from my answers grew new questions, new investigations, new conjectures, new probabilities; until at last I had a land of my own and a soil of my own, a whole secret world growing and flowering, like hidden gardens of whose existence no one could have an inkling — oh, how happy are we, we finders of knowledge, provided that we know how to keep silent sufficiently long. ” -- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals *** DANGER FLAGS #4: HATRED What’s that term for easy and pleasurable reading? “Beach reading”? We delve now into hatred , trying to get our mind around it. Easy and pleasant subject matter, no? Light and breezy, eh? A veritable barrel of laughs? Perhaps not. I suppose this is not beach reading. Or, well, actually … Hatred is, obviously, very heavy stuff. Heavy stuff – by nature of not being “beach reading” – tends to get under-studied, under-exposed… neglected , even. And yet, is hatred not one of the most powerful of animating forces? I say that neutrally ; I don’t mean “powerful” as good. A nuclear meltdown, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, is certainly powerful – as are heavy tanks, long-range bomber airplanes, raging forest fires, and so on. No, hatred doesn’t lend itself naturally to beach reading. But it’s an incredibly important topic. Clearly, there is a lot of hatred living inside many people across the world. A failure to understand, reason through, and synthesize what hatred is , what it means , what it predicts – this can certainly get us into trouble. Maybe we can even try to enjoy ourselves in the process of this exploration. No promises in that regard, though! *** PREMISE 1: ALL HATRED IS, TO SOME EXTENT, INTERNAL Hatred is an emotion, or perhaps a collection of related emotions. Hatred does not live “out in the world,” but rather in the minds and biochemistry of people who feel hatred. We should distinguish right away, then, the internal aspect of hatred, and the external aspect of actions that are done out of hatred. These often get blended together – sometimes for convenience, sometimes out of poetic license, or sometimes out of sloppy thinking. The adjective “hateful” is a decent modifier of actions done while in a state of hatred, or originating from hatred. So we could say that “he hatefully lashed out” – but, the hate started internally . I don’t believe there is hate out in the world, independent of human minds and emotions. There are hateful actions – actions taken while someone is feeling hatred, or conceived and begun out of hatred – but hate itself must be said to be an internal thing. Hatred, raw hatred, it lives inside a person’s mind and emotions – their cognition and biochemistry. We’ll come back to this point in a moment. It’s rather important. *** PREMISE 2: IN ENGLISH, THE WORDS “HATE” AND “HATRED” ARE INSUFFICIENT TO UNDERSTAND THE PHENOMENON All language is to some extent flawed – in domains that are hard to express in pure mathematics and analytic logic alone, words and verbal language are the main way we communicate with others and understand ideas. If you learn a little bit of different languages, you start to see that some languages have words that others do not, which make it easier to express and understand concepts that are harder to understand in another language. The German word “schadenfreude” has entered into modern English lately – it means roughly, “feeling joy at someone else’s misery.” The original German “Schaden” means “harm” and “Freude” means joy. Literally, “joy from someone else being harmed.” The Japanese have a number of nuanced words and phrases for social situations that we lack in English. There’s one along the lines of “tschitsuraischimas” (I’m spelling it wrong) which means “I acknowledge and partially apologize for changing the social dynamics of the interaction as a result of my entering or leaving it.” So if two people are having an intense conversation at a restaurant, and a waiter or waitress comes to take an order, they’ll say “tschitsuraischimas” – “You two were talking in an intimate conversation. By entering and saying something, I have changed the dynamics. I apologize.” Likewise, when three people are having a good conversation and one of them has to leave, they’ll say this phrase. “There were three of us, now, when I leave, there will be only two of you and it will be different. Tschitsuraischimas.” Going from three people in a conversation to two in Japan, you’d say it. From two people to three, you’d say it. If there were 10 people loosely conversing at a party and you departed, though, you wouldn’t say it – since the dynamic is basically the same. Just knowing this word and phrase makes you smarter socially. It gives you an easy way to recognize if the dynamics of conversation and socializing are changing as a result of you coming or going. In Japan, it’s automatic. In English, we can’t even easily conceive of the idea. The word “happiness” in English lacks nuance; we use this one broad word like a machete. You can get a lot done with it, but it’s not particularly subtle or refined. Other cultures have very different words for happiness; often, there’s no direct translation of the English word “happiness" – indeed, euphoria, joy, contentment, bittersweetness, pleasure, flourishing, and satisfaction all are significantly different and varied forms of happiness. There is more intense and less intense happiness; there are “pure” and “mixed” forms of happiness; there are varieties of in-the-moment happiness and longer-term arcs of a “happy life.” “Hatred” suffers thus – the word is a blunt instrument. No understanding of hatred can happen without realizing that “pure hatred” is an incredibly rare thing; almost all hatred has different varieties of it mixed with other emotions and types of thinking. I believe it’s literally impossible to understand “hatred” and its effects on a practical level without clarifying this in one’s own thinking. *** DOWNWARDS-LOOKING HATRED The majority of hatred that’s directed outwards can be said to be “upwards-looking” or “downwards-looking” – in other words, if you hate something, do you see it as more powerful and superior to yourself, or as less powerful and inferior to yourself? There are no perfect English words for this, and there is not a clean divide; this is messy territory. But, briefly, someone feeling “downwards-looking hatred” might use words like annoyance, disgust, and patheticness in describing why they dislike something. Since it’s typically seen as bad etiquette to describe yourself as feeling hatred, you might say you’re “concerned” or “think it’s unfortunate .” In modern America, the concept of rank is far less emphasized – even actively worked against – and expressing direct superiority over something is seen as taboo and bad social form. It’s easier to understand this type of hatred by thinking about a historical caste system – a member of a higher caste being forced to travel or be around members of a lower caste would often feel upset, often be prompted towards a downward-looking hatred of the “unclean,” “uncouth”, “uncivilized” people around the higher-caste person. It might be described as “concerning” or “unfortunate” or “pathetic.” It might be felt as annoyance and a general dislike and discomfort. This is not always, but often, downwards-looking hatred. *** DOWNWARDS-LOOKING HATRED TENDS TO BE LESS SALIENT Downwards-looking hatred tends to be less salient – it tends to effect the person feeling the hate less strongly – than upwards-looking hatred. This is for a lot of reasons, but one of the largest is because one feels less threatened, and feeling threatened is very salient. If a well-armed samurai is feeling hatred towards a peasant who is perceived by the samurai as being rude and out of place, the samurai literally had the legal right to cut the peasant down. Likewise, the samurai would typically be armed with two swords and well-trained in swordsmanship; the peasant would typically have (at most) a crude knife or improvised weapon, and be poorly trained with it. The samurai would typically have better nutrition and be physically larger and stronger. When a samurai and peasant entered into hatred towards each other, thus, the samurai will feel it’s less salient and significant, and often the feelings will be less intense – because there is less of a threat and less potential consequences. *** UPWARDS-LOOKING HATRED Upwards-looking hatred is directed towards something perceived as more powerful or superior to oneself. Envy and jealousy often come alongside upwards-looking hatred. Envy, briefly, is wanting what someone else has. Jealousy is additionally thinking the other person should not have it. It’s possible to envy someone without hating them – you can envy a person and admire them, even – but it’s almost impossible to not feel some hatred alongside jealousy. This might seem like a small point, but is actually very significant for recognizing Danger Flags out in the world. An envious person might feel, “I wish I had a big house like them.” A jealous person might feel, “How come they have a big house and I don’t? ” Obviously, it’s hard to feel envious or jealous towards someone you don’t think has any superior attributes of their life to yours. If you feel like your life is better in every way (that’s significant to you), you cannot envy or feel jealous towards someone. You might envy or feel jealous of a small part of someone’s life – say, if you’re more materially wealthy but have more obligations – and that can prompt envy or jealousy. But both envy and jealousy are only felt towards things we wish we had on some level; some aspects of seeing what someone else has as superior or more desirable in some way. There are many other varieties of upwards-looking hatred. Resentment tends to be upwards-looking hatred, as does the type of hatred that arises from feeling generally threatened, or feeling insignificant around someone. *** SUPERIORITY IN SWORDS AND HUMAN ENDEAVORS Now, this is where hatred gets confusing. We have a broad sketch of “upwards-looking hatred” and “downwards-looking hatred” – it’s easy enough to see that jealousy often coexists with hatred, and that jealousy is always (to some extent) upwards-looking. The vast majority of sane people do not want things that they see as worse in every way to what they already have. It’s also easy to see why upwards-looking hatred is typically more intense and more salient than downwards-looking hatred. The stakes are consistently higher when engaging with someone who has more power than you; you have more to lose and less chance of winning if conflict breaks out. It’s inherently threatening, at least a little bit. But what is “superior”? Certainly, superiority can sometimes be measured objectively – in battle, a well-forged steel sword has superior cutting ability and durability to a shoddily-forged iron sword. But given that most domains of human endeavor do not have such objectively clear-cut superiority about them, superiority itself becomes a set of perceptions and internal evaluations. Which leads us now into strange territory. *** STRANGE GENEALOGICAL TERRITORY “No one has, up to the present, exhibited the faintest doubt or hesitation in judging the "good man" to be of a higher value than the "evil man," of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, utility, and prosperity generally, not forgetting the future. What? Suppose the converse were the truth! What? Suppose there lurked in the "good man" a symptom of retrogression, such as a danger, a temptation, a poison, a narcotic, by means of which the present battened on the future! More comfortable and less risky perhaps than its opposite, but also pettier, meaner! So that morality would really be saddled with the guilt, if the maximum potentiality of the power and splendour of the human species were never to be attained? So that really morality would be the danger of dangers?” Okay. I should rush to note that I don’t recommend Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morals” – where that quote is from. I don’t recommend it at all, but I really don’t recommend it for people who aren’t already very familiar with his work. If you plan to read Nietzsche at all – which really should be done carefully, if you do it – Beyond Good and Evil is a strange mix of aphorisms of varying accuracy, and Thus Spake Zarathustra is a fictional allegory that prompts thinking and demands one’s own interpretation. If you read Nietzsche at all, be careful, and start with Zarathustra or BG&E. I don’t recommend Genealogy at all, and certainly not as a starting place. With that said, Nietzsche covered some interesting terrain in Genealogy . He was looking for where morality came from. The dominant “English” idea at the time – the one Nietzsche would refute – was that people praised any action that helped them, and so, doing pro-social and moral things started by being praised directly for being helpful, and over time, this origin in utility was “forgotten” and just became morality. Nietzsche thinks that’s both incorrect and a dumb idea – “The utility of the unegoistic action is supposed to be the origin of the praise it receives, and this origin has allegedly been forgotten: but how is this forgetting even possible? Could the usefulness of such actions at some time or other perhaps just have stopped? The case is the opposite: this utility has rather been an everyday experience throughout the ages, and thus something that has always been constantly re-emphasized. Hence, instead of disappearing out of consciousness, instead of becoming something forgettable, it must have pressed itself into the consciousness with ever-increasing clarity.” He then dove into the history of morality, spending a lot of time looking at what things were praised in ancient Greek and Roman times, and how those eventually got replaced with the Christian morality which supplanted Greek and Roman paganism. He came to a very strange conclusion: modern Christian morality comes from an internal struggle between warrior aristocrats and priest aristocrats – “The reader will have already surmised with what ease the priestly mode of valuation can branch off from the knightly aristocratic mode, and then develop into the very antithesis of the latter: special impetus is given to this opposition, by every occasion when the castes of the priests and warriors confront each other with mutual jealousy and cannot agree over the prize. The knightly-aristocratic "values" are based on a careful cult of the physical, on a flowering, rich, and even effervescing healthiness, that goes considerably beyond what is necessary for maintaining life, on war, adventure, the chase, the dance, the tourney — on everything, in fact, which is contained in strong, free, and joyous action. The priestly-aristocratic mode of valuation is — we have seen — based on other hypotheses: it is bad enough for this class when it is a question of war! Yet the priests are, as is notorious, the worst enemies — why? Because they are the most powerless. From their powerlessness, their hate grows into something immense and terrifying, to the most spiritual and most poisonous manifestations. Those who have been the greatest haters in world history and the most spiritually rich haters have always been the priests. ” Strange territory, no? *** THE RESSENTIMENT MAGIC TRICK One of the core ideas of Nietzsche’s Genealogy is that people do not like to have other people superior to themselves, and that morality is a priestly way to regain superiority. Since warriors would have their swords, armor, horses, and military training, they were indisputably superior in the martial sense, and could impose their will on any priests (or indeed, any non-warrior) that they chose to. This led to what we’re calling upwards-looking hatred: the feeling of powerlessness, the feeling of being threatened, jealousy, resentment, and so on. This led to a “ressentiment,” a re-writing of values, an inversion of values – the priests would condemn anyone who used violence or physical force as “morally inferior,” and they would not get to enter the Kingdom of Heaven and such. Somewhat unnecessarily inflammatorily, Nietzsche calls the natural warrior morality “master morality” and the priestly morality “slave morality.” Slave morality – Nietzsche’s term which I do not quite like – would deny the moral value of certain ways of doing things, and would note that doing things that way is (morally) inferior . I think there is, for what it’s worth, some truth in this. It’s not completely accurate, and unnecessarily harsh in going about it, but there’s something there. And while the exact particulars of how and why this came about aren’t important, it does have a large implication for modern hatred. *** MIXED-DISTANCE HATRED The most brutal and awful of conflicts often emerge when both two sides of a conflict both believe they’re superior in different ways . If one agreed on a standard of superiority – say, winning a Chess game – it would be easy to sort out who is the superior Chess player. When two people have different views about the appropriateness of physical conflict, verbal conflict, direct confrontation, moral purity, and so on and so forth – it can lead to a conflict where neither side agree on what will settle the conflict, thus often putting things into a permanent unstable equilibrium. Few people like to admit when they feel hatred, but both upwards-looking hatred (especially jealousy and resentment) and downward-looking hatred (especially obvious in caste-based societies) are rather easy to detect. Mixed-distance hatred has all the intensity of upwards-looking hatred – things are still at risk and there’s the increased salience of fear and loss – but while simultaneously having the unfortunate aspects of downwards-looking hatred – dismissiveness, brusqueness, lack of any mitigating admiration on any level, lack of nonchalance, no quick dissipation after conflict, and so on. This is perhaps the subtlest type of hatred to detect in oneself and others, in thoughts and language patterns. *** ON THE NECESSITY OF DETECTING HATRED AS A DANGER FLAG A person in a furious rage, acting like a rabid pitbull, is obviously easy to notice and immediately concerning. But the subtler forms of hatred are important to detect as well; they predict all sorts of predictable-with-hindsight bad future actions, and likewise, they eat away at a person, literally sapping them of energy. The largest and most obvious reason to Danger Flag hatred is that it’s typically kept in check by relative levels of power and superiority – if and when those change, the person is prone to act very differently. Someone with upwards-looking hatred, particularly jealousy and resentment, are incredibly dangerous if they take power or if there’s relative changes in the amount of power between them and another person. Long-festering grudges can explode, seemingly without warning, if a person “no longer needs” whatever was holding them back, or if they suddenly have resources to go indulge in their grudge. Many of these things are perfectly obvious with hindsight, but going further, they can also be viewed with foresight if you look cautiously for any elements of hatred in a person as you get to know them. In short, I believe people who nurse and carry hatred around with them are prone to doing all sorts of damaging things in the future, and it should be a cause for concern when noticed. *** AND SCRUBBING HATRED OUT OF ONESELF Even if there’s no great reversals in relative standing, followed by horrific outbursts of pent-up hatred, there is another good reason to look to gradually eliminate hatred in yourself and your friends and allies – it’s very emotionally taxing. All forms of hatred increase salience – the significance and drain on your attention of whatever is the object of your hate. Put simply, hatred is at least distracting, if not outright damaging. Downwards-looking hatred is probably less distracting, but is still distracting. Upwards-looking hatred is at least distracting, but can also do outright damage to a person’s hormonal systems, adrenalin, cortisol, immune function, and so on. Heightened sensitivity and awareness to a perceived danger – and upwards-looking hatred typically feels dangerous – literally grinds away at the body’s reserves. It’s a very bad place to be; it can lead to a person who otherwise would be healthy to slowly break down from the inside. We can see why demagogues and such increase hatred – the increased salience and adrenalin can often be put to instrumental ends, but for my part, I don’t think it’s ever worth the cost for a leader to carry around. Furthermore, even in cases where the object of one’s hatred seems very worthy of hating – Hitler, Stalin, etc – even in those cases, I believe the emotion of hatred is a drain on cognition and can lead to rash behavior. If you were actively involved in planning to destroy Nazi Germany, you would simply set your mind to doing so. Once the decision is made, calmness and a neutral view of things will outperform. Oftentimes, hatred will cause someone to seek out revenge over and beyond what’s needed to achieve the goal , leading to dramatic overreaching and eventual downfall. In the case of implacable enemies seeming very worthy of hatred who need to be destroyed, a lack of the constant extra-stimulus and salience from the hate means more health and more cognition and less distraction when going about making and implementing the plans to, e.g., have Patton lead the distraction force while having the Allied forces land at Normandy. *** ON THE ELIMINATION OF HATRED, BRIEFLY "It is said that one day the Buddha was walking through a village. A very angry and rude young man came up and began insulting him. “You have no right teaching others,” he shouted. “You are as stupid as everyone else. You are nothing but a fake!” "The Buddha was not upset by these insults. Instead he asked the young man, “Tell me, if you buy a gift for someone, and that person does not take it, to whom does the gift belong?” "The young man was surprised to be asked such a strange question and answered, “It would belong to me, because I bought the gift.” "The Buddha smiled and said, “That is correct. And it is exactly the same with your anger. If you become angry with me and I do not get insulted, then the anger falls back on you. You are then the only one who becomes unhappy, not me. All you have done is hurt yourself.”" “ Fake Buddha Quotes ,” incidentally, is a marvelous site. That one is modernized and simplified, but is based on original Buddhist scriptures. The original was similar – "I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One was staying near Rajagaha in the Bamboo Grove, the Squirrels’ Sanctuary. Then the brahman Akkosaka Bharadvaja heard that a brahman of the Bharadvaja clan had gone forth from the home life into homelessness in the presence of the Blessed One. Angered & displeased, he went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, insulted & cursed him with rude, harsh words. "When this was said, the Blessed One said to him: “What do you think, brahman: Do friends & colleagues, relatives & kinsmen come to you as guests?” "“Yes, Master Gotama, sometimes friends & colleagues, relatives & kinsmen come to me as guests.” "“And what do you think: Do you serve them with staple & non-staple foods & delicacies?” "“Yes, sometimes I serve them with staple & non-staple foods & delicacies.” "“And if they don’t accept them, to whom do those foods belong?” "“If they don’t accept them, Master Gotama, those foods are all mine.” "“In the same way, brahman, that with which you have insulted me, who is not insulting; that with which you have taunted me, who is not taunting; that with which you have berated me, who is not berating: that I don’t accept from you. It’s all yours, brahman. It’s all yours. "“Whoever returns insult to one who is insulting, returns taunts to one who is taunting, returns a berating to one who is berating, is said to be eating together, sharing company, with that person. But I am neither eating together nor sharing your company, brahman. It’s all yours. It’s all yours.”" Now, you can view the story on two levels – the first is the straightforward reading of it. If someone is getting insulting and hating and such, you can “eat together” with them in that unfortunate game and mutually indulge in insult and hate together, or you can decline to do so. That’s straightforward – and useful. But go a step further and you can see that can apply to any stimulus that prompts hatred in you . It’s easy to understand the quote in terms of someone acting hostile towards you, and you declining to participate. It’s a little trickier to realize that that’s only one specific instance of a stimulus that could prompt hatred and hostility . To take a trivial example, think of “celebrity culture” – Paris Hilton some years ago, Kim Kardashian right now, the saga of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, that sort of thing. Some people enjoy this and enjoy participating in it. But one of the most poignant observations I ever heard which prompted a huge shift in me is that complaining about celebrity behavior and hating on celebrities is part of celebrity culture. Even one level up, complaining about how people are obsessed with celebrities is still part of celebrity culture. Disliking celebrity culture could be a minor instance of upwards-looking, downwards-looking, or most likely, mixed-distance hatred. But in all those cases, complaining about and chastising it is participating in it – you’re eating at that table. Likely a more effective way to go about it is to move towards neutrality – genuine indifference being just one form of neutrality. Occasionally I’m traveling in a country I don’t know well and I'll notice people getting ferociously excited about some sports match. Sometimes I literally don’t understand which teams are playing, or even what game is being played. As such, even when people take to the streets to celebrate or riot after a victory or defeat, the whole thing prompts very little emotion, and I’m not distracted from my work and my life. *** TRAINING TOWARDS NEUTRALITY AND MISSION ORIENTATION Neutrality can be hard to reach – I certainly have a whole host of things that aggravate me with whatever mix of latent hatred that comes with alongside it – but it’s something I look to move past when I recognize it. In terms of Danger Flags, anyone who carries a considerable amount of hatred around with them is worth avoiding if possible, and at least, not becoming intimate or close associates with. But all of us have little stupid things that bother of us. What then? And in this case, that old stalwart Mission Orientation provides part of the answer. If one of your normally solid allies is in a rage at something, you can just ask – “Okay. So what do we want to do about it?” When I say “neutrality,” I don’t mean fatalism or pacifism. I mean, deciding what outcome you want to have happen – what the relevant mission-oriented priority is – and setting to work on that. In some cases, yes, the correct action will be storming the beaches of Normandy. Even in those cases, hatred is still probably not the most effective viewpoint for the Supreme Allied Commander to be taking while planning the assaults and making decisions effecting millions of lives. Most cases are less weighty – most hatred is a distraction. In downwards-looking hate’s cases, it’ll often be someone who seems to be acting like an idiot around you and you getting distracted by it. In those cases, you either directly effect the situation – perhaps asking politely if a person will turn their music down, if that’ll work – or removing yourself from the situation, or re-focusing and training to be effective even when distracted. Upwards-looking hatred can be safely discarded if it’s a stupid jealousy; just figure out what resource you want and go get it. But even in cases where you’re genuinely threatened, the hatred itself is a distraction – if possible, get out of the situation and get to safety. If necessary – a physical bully you can’t ignore – start physically training, learn martial arts, perhaps arm yourself if you’re in a dangerous enough part of the world where that’s called for. Regardless, the hatred wears away at you and you pay a great cost by carrying it around – or at minimum, it’ll be at least a minor distraction from getting to the desired mission outcome. And again, open-minded people who are typically solid can be helped along in this with a genuinely neutral, “Okay. So what do we want to do about it?” Not engaging it, not trying to calm them down, nor arguing for or against. Just, “So what do we want to do about it?” As for mixed-distance hatred? Well, that’s the trickiest. I don’t have any real guidance, except to say that the current day’s morality is probably a little overrated. But that’s well-beyond the scope of this piece, and we will simply continue with Danger Flags next chapter. In the meantime, here’s hoping your meals and work are good. Danger Flags #5: Neglect Danger Flags #5: Neglect WOOD. ALL WOOD. AND HAPHAZARDLY BUILT. “Some of his earlier messengers to Syphax had reported that the Carthaginians’ winter huts were built almost entirely of wood, and those of the Numidians of interwoven reeds and matting, disposed without order or proper intervals, and that a number even lay outside the ramparts of the camps. The news suggested to Scipio the idea of setting fire to the enemy’s camp and striking a surprise blow in the confusion. “Therefore in his later embassies Scipio sent certain expert scouts and picked centurions dressed as officers’ servants. While the conferences were in progress, these rambled through the camps, both that of Syphax and Hasdrubal, noting their approaches and entrances and studying the general plan of the camps, the distance between them, the times and methods of stationing guards and outposts. With each embassy, too, a different lot of observers were sent, so that as large a number as possible should familiarize themselves with the lie of the enemy camps. As a result of their reports Scipio ascertained that Syphax’s camps was the more inflammable and the easier to attack. ” -- B.H. Liddel-Hart, Scipio Africanus *** THE HARDEST THING TO DO “When I teach ice climbing I tell students, "the hardest thing to do is one thing at a time." “But ears are deaf and the brain bombarded so with a palsy-like, start-stop stutter the student scatters attention everywhere at once. He removes an ice tool then decides it would be better to move a foot but simultaneously figures he should look ahead to see where to move and suddenly one of the remaining two points of contact blows and the rope does its part. Hanging on it the student wonders what happened. As if he/she hadn't been present. Which is, practically speaking, the case: so overwhelmed by sensory input and the demand for decision/action a temporary autism results. “The hardest thing to do is one thing at a time. Whether in the moment or across the entirety of life.” -- Mark Twight, “ Make a Damned Choice ” *** INFLAMMABILITY The Second Punic War had broken out between Rome and Carthage – and Hannibal Barca led his famous crossing of the Alps to invade Italy by surprise and begin savaging the Romans. The Romans barely survived the repeated ambushes and brilliant strategy and tactics of Hannibal; in 216, the greatest disaster in Roman history until that time happened when Hannibal lured the Romans into a trap at Cannae and killed over 50,000 Romans – an unimaginably large number in the pre-modern era. Somehow, though, the Roman Republic neither collapsed nor surrendered, eventually turning to a strategy of fighting delaying actions against Hannibal, attacking loose troops who had drifted from the main body of Carthaginians, and avoiding direct battle with Hannibal himself. But Carthage was in North Africa, and their main base in Europe was in modern-day Spain. Spain was a death-trap for the Romans, a rugged country that was much better understood and navigated by the Carthaginians and their allies. In 211 BC, Publius Scipio’s father and uncle were killed by Hannibal’s brother in Spain. The younger Scipio was the only one who volunteered for the command in Spain; though technically below the legal age to lead troops at age 25, it was given to him. He proceeded to become a brilliant commander who moved extremely slowly at times while probing for weaknesses, then exploded like a flash of lightning once he found them. After wrecking havoc in Spain, even while Hannibal was still running free in Italy, Scipio took the fight to Carthage’s homeland in Northern Africa. Scipio’s most famous battle was the final battle of the war, the Battle of Zama, where Hannibal returned from Italy to defend Carthage, and where Scipio needed to figure out how to neutralize 80 deadly war elephants. Zama was a masterpiece to be sure, but for my money, the night fire attacks at the Battle of Utica in 203 BC are far even more impressive. The amount of details that needed to be gotten correct to have them work was immense, but once those details were noticed, it did an insane amount of damage to the Carthaginian forces with almost no risk to the Romans. It was perhaps the most perfect battle, and for my part, I think it’s quite possibly the decisive moment that lead to the Romans winning the war. Liddel-Hart – “About the first watch the troops were formed up in march order and moved off on their seven mile march, and about midnight arrived in the vicinity of the hostile camps, which were just over a mile apart. Thereupon Scipio divided his force, placing all the Numidians and half his legionaries under Laelius and Masinissa with orders to attack Syphax’s camp. The two commanders he first took aside and urged on them the need for caution, emphasizing that “the more the darkness in night attacks hinders and impedes the sight, the more must one supply the place of actual vision by skill and care.” He further instructed them that he would wait to launch his attack on Hasdrubal’s camp until Laelius had set fire to the other camp, and with this purpose his own men at a slow pace. […] “As had been foreseen, once the leading Romans had set the fire alight, it spread rapidly along the first row of huts, and in a brief while the whole camp was aflame, because of the closeness of the huts and the lack of proper intervals between rows. “ Fully imagining that it was an accidental conflagration, Syphax’s men rushed out of their huts unarmed, and in a disorderly flight. Many perished in their huts while half asleep, many were trampled to death in the frenzied rush for the exits, while those who escaped the flames were cut down unawares by the Numidians posted at the gates of the camp. “Meanwhile in the Carthaginian camp the soldiers, aroused by the sentries’ reports of the fire in the other camp, and seeing how vast was the volume of flame, rushed out of their own camp to assist in extinguishing the fire, they also imagining it an accident and Scipio seven miles distant. This was as Scipio had hoped and anticipated, and he at once fell on the rabble, giving orders not to let a man escape to give warning to the troops still in camp. Instantly he followed up this by launching his attack on the gates of the camp, which were unguarded as a result of the confusion. “[…] soon the whole camp was aflame, the same scenes of confusion and destruction being here repeated, and those who escaped through the gates meeting their fate at the hands of Roman parties posted for the purpose. … “ According to Livy, forty thousand men were either slain or destroyed by the flames, and about five thousand were captured, including many Carthaginian nobles. As a spectacle of disaster it surpasses any in history.” *** DANGER FLAGS #5: NEGLECT In our lives, almost certainly the stakes will never be as high as they were for either Rome or Carthage – whichever of those two great powers had lost the Second Punic War would almost certainly have been annihilated. Such were the brutal customs of the day. Scipio followed up the night attacks with another series of rapid victories, defeated Hannibal the next year, and the peace terms imposed on Carthage crippled it as a society. In the Third Punic War 50 years later, Carthage was completely destroyed as a civilization. I believe the night fire attacks on Syphax and Hasdrubal are what won the war for Rome – after all, Scipio was consistently outnumbered in Africa. At the decisive Battle of Zama the next year, Scipio had 5000 less soldiers than Hannibal. Had Hasdrubal and Syphax been able to preserve their forces and give any semblance of a fight – even if eventually defeated – it’s likely Scipio does not have the manpower to conquer Carthage. And here is the damning thing: the night fire attack should not been possible . It was only made possible by laxness and neglect on the part of the Carthaginians and their allies. Scipio was already known by that time as one of the most cunning Roman commanders, known for surprise attacks, and yet the Carthaginians neglected some basic well-known elements of military discipline that would have made those devastating attacks impossible. The stakes will almost certainly never be as high in your life as they were for the Romans and Carthaginians in North Africa, but the general pattern of neglect leading to ruin is certainly common in any day and age. That is what we dive into in this chapter. *** THE NATURE OF NEGLECT AND TRAINING Before we talk about Neglect as a Danger Flag , we should recognize something – No action can be said to be neglectful if a person doesn’t and couldn’t know the correct way of doing it. A physician cannot be blamed for failing to wash his hands 500 years ago, before the germ theory of disease was known. This does not pardon a neglect in learning the correct way of doing things, of course – a person who overconfidently gets into a discipline without investigating what is required for success has flaws as well, and we will address that an upcoming chapter of Danger Flags. Nevertheless, deciphering the correct way of doing things and training and drilling those things into yourself and anyone serving under your leadership are essential first and foremost. Fire was always a problem in the ancient world, including among military camps with all the haphazard cooking, cleaning, weapons and armor repair, warmth and entertainment at campfires, and so on. Likewise, Syphax’s camp had another major blunder – many soldiers had put up their nighttime tents outside of the walls and fortification of the camp, thus making them more vulnerable to assault, and making things more confused and disorganized if the whole army needed to rally to attack. Now here is an interesting question, and we’ll never know the answer: did Syphax know that this was foolish and was he being neglectful? Certainly, Hasdrubal knew – the Carthaginians had a well-developed military tradition, and knew the basics of fortifications, defenses, and fire breaks. Syphax was from the Berber Masaaesyli tribe of Numidia, who are described in all the ancient sources as nomadic. They were fierce cavalry fighters, but – like most mounted societies – it’s very likely they did not assail cities very often. Perhaps they would have built lesser fortifications in the normal course of war amongst themselves, and taken to flight rapidly on horseback if an enemy attacked. I think this is very possible – and if so, the neglect for the ill-built camps falls entirely on Hasdrubal Gisco, the Carthaginian commander. *** BAD TRAINING, LACK OF TRAINING, BAD HABITS Much of what seems to be neglect in an individual, then, is simply bad training – or a lack of training altogether. In those cases, one’s base patterns of actions and habits will emerge. In these cases, a person is not being neglectful if doing something wrong – and training might correct it. In this case, it would not be a danger flag (though you would want to note that training is required). But there’s no doubt, to me, that Hasdrubal would have known better. Why didn’t he ensure that all the forces on the campaign against Scipio have good fortifications? *** PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTANCE We come to our first reason for neglect – while “bad training” leads to behavior that looks a lot like neglect, it is not neglect itself per se. Reactance, though, reactance is a nasty sort of thing. Wikipedia: Reactance (psychology) – “Reactance is a motivational reactance to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms.” Reactance is a little-known but critically important concept. In response to any perceived loss of freedom, people tend to want to assert themselves – even if it goes against what’s actually good for them – “An example of such behavior can be observed when an individual engages in a prohibited activity in order to deliberately taunt the authority who prohibits it, regardless of the utility or disutility that the activity confers.” In other words, in response to being told you can’t do something, or that you must do something, you’ll tend to feel reactance. It feels bad, and you might want to express yourself – if possible, by breaking the rule or mandate; if not, often by acting out in some other way to express that you’re still free. Not everyone feels reactance and some people feel it more strongly than others – this is our first predictor of neglect , and the first danger flag to look out for. Any time you hear someone complaining about needing to do something trivial, this should be a minor warning sign that they feel the need to assert themselves. Getting the job done quietly and without fuss takes less energy and is healthier for whoever is doing it, as we discussed last chapter, in Danger Flags #4: Hatred . And that’s true for even the most minor of cases – major hostility to authority or rules without any clear reason for hating the rules is a very bad sign. The Carthaginian Army, for what it’s worth, was a patchwork army from many different cultures. They were known for being ferocious in battle, but for less military discipline than the Romans – Hannibal and other Carthaginian commanders often had to execute people disobeying orders in particularly brutal ways to ensure constant discipline. Relatedly, Syphax was very proud and had been courted by both the Romans and Carthaginians as an ally. It’s very possible that Hasdrubal knew that Syphax was fortifying incorrectly and sloppily, but didn’t want to “rock the boat” and generate stress and hostility among an ally… the end result, of course, would be 40,000 of their combined troops killed in the surprise attack. *** DISTRACTIBILITY Whereas you might be excused for not knowing how to fortify a military camp, not being distractible is a core human life skills; anyone who allows themself to remain distractible in high-stakes situations has made serious errors. This is a huge source of neglect – as Mark Twight said about ice climbing, "the hardest thing to do is one thing at a time." We can identify here there more potential predictors of Danger Flags related to Distractibility – whimsy, love of novelty, and escapism. Whimsy and novelty-seeking mean doing things differently at different times, for no good reason. This is not the deliberate experimentation of the scientist, or the constant re-examining of any sort of leader. And whereas looking for novelty in the arts or in throwing a party is fine, it’s absolutely not-fine in domains that are high-stakes and have best practices associated with them. “Ah, let’s forget about fortifying the camp tonight.” “Ah, let’s try climbing without safety gear.” Escapism is a mix of novelty-seeking and giving in to reactance – all of these elements will lead to the person with these patterns doing things incorrectly, often with disastrous consequences. *** DANGER-FLAGGING NEGLECT Neglect is when a person doesn’t do something they know they ought to do. People who feel reactance strongly, are easily distractible, are whimsical, novelty-seeking, or escapist are more likely to neglect something crucial. Any time you see those attributes in someone, you should note it. It’s a danger flag, which predicts future neglectful behavior. But before you blame the person’s character, you must check if their training has gone through – which is, incidentally, also what you should do if you see any neglectful behavior in yourself. *** SITUATION-SPECIFIC TRAINING, AND GENERAL ORDERS FOR SENTRIES The role of a sentry is to notice anything out of the ordinary and report it immediately… errors in this role have been particularly deadly and destructive in military history. It’s also surprisingly hard to get at all the edge cases of being a sentry – the natural tendency, if a sentry sees a fire near them, is to fight the fire… which can lead to them abandoning their post. Thus, often enemies will set fires as a diversion. I’ve called “ General Orders for Sentries ” perhaps the finest operations document of all time – it addresses all the core duties of an American armed forces sentry, gives them precisely in memorizable format, and has a longer expanded explanation of each principle. The General Orders are: "1. To take charge of this post and all government property in view. 2. To walk my post in a military manner, keeping always on the alert and observing everything that takes place within sight or hearing. 3. To report all violations of orders I am instructed to enforce. 4. To repeat all calls from posts more distant from the guardhouse (or the Quarterdeck) than my own. 5. To quit my post only when properly relieved. 6. To receive, obey, and pass on to the sentry who relieves me, all orders from the Commanding Officer, Command Duty Officer, Officer of the Day, Officer of the Deck, and all Officers and Petty Officers of the watch only. 7. To talk to no one except in the line of duty. 8. To give the alarm in case of fire or disorder. 9. To call the Corporal of the Guard or Officer of the Deck in any case not covered by instructions. 10. To salute all officers and all colors and standards not cased. 11. To be especially watchful at night and during the time for challenging, to challenge all persons on or near my post, and to allow no one to pass without proper authority." The expanded version of Order #8 is particularly insightful – "While this is rather straightforward and obvious, keep in mind that a fire or disorder of some kind might be a deliberate distraction to keep you from observing some other disorderly or subversive activity. If you are certain that a fire is not meant to be a distraction, you should fight the fire if you have the means to do so. Remember, however, that your first responsibility is to report whatever is amiss." This order would have prevented the destruction of Hasdrubal’s and Syphax’s forces if followed. It’s particularly impressive because it respects human nature. If you say “don’t fight the fire, at all, ever” – the order will be sometimes disobeyed. By repeatedly stating that fighting the fire might be acceptable, but is far less important than the sentry duties, this hews close to human nature. *** SITUATION SPECIFIC TRAINING AT LARGE You can’t ever blame someone or hold them at fault for not doing something they didn’t know they should do. I’d go a step further and say that if someone hasn’t been adequately trained, you can’t really expect them to perform well at all. Sentries in the American armed forces are drilled constantly and spot-quizzed on the various General Orders for Sentries, over and over again. They’re punished if they get the answers wrong repeatedly. If they break the rules of being a sentry, it’s very serious and can end any advancement in their military career. It’s taken very seriously and trained accordingly. Thus, before you danger-flag someone who is getting things wrong, you should look into their training. Plenty of people can perform well with training, but cannot if they don’t know what to do. If you’re leading, it’s on you to ensure everyone knows what to do and has been trained accordingly. *** GENERALIZED TRAINING FOR BEING STEADFAST AND RELIABLE Neglect is a danger flag. If someone doesn’t know what to do, it’s not neglect – it’s bad training. What if they do know what to do and aren’t doing it? A big problem. Avoid that person. What if that person is you? Ah, that would be concerning. But if you’re prone to being neglectful, that’s not the end of the world. You can train generalized anti-neglect easily enough. People are more prone to reactance and distractibility if their bodies and minds are unhealthy. Generalized athletic training, a better diet, regularly getting exhausted through physical exercise, and sleeping well at night all go a long ways to training you to do the right thing. On top of that, you can sharpen your mind and concentration through endurance training, mindfulness meditation, or any activity where you need to push through discomfort. If there’s currently things you know you ought to be doing that you’re neglecting regularly, it makes immense sense to sharpen your mind and endurance. The ability to use technology to your advantage (and not to your disadvantage) can also be trained. There’s many apps like SelfControl and Freedom to limit specific websites or internet access in general. You can learn to use calendar apps as well as to-do and project planning apps over time. For addictive websites, there’s often browser plugins to make them less addictive – I use Distraction-Free Youtube (which turns off Comments and Related Videos) and Facebook Newsfeed Eradicator (which clears out the most addictive elements of Facebook). You might need to spend a few weeks studying, testing, installing, and practicing with technology to get it working with you. And then, finally, and perhaps the hardest of all, is learning to slow down and do what needs to be done. Neglect is a serious thing – perhaps the most serious of danger flags. If you’re regularly neglectful, it’s frankly impossible to work with the best people and regularly produce top results. A few small pieces of neglectful behavior can sometimes lead to those conditions that led to 40,000 Carthaginians and their allies to die in flames and be cut down like dogs without even getting a chance to fight back. Well-trained sentries, slightly better camp construction, and slightly more diligent training from the commanders would have entirely prevented that horror from befalling their forces. Yes, neglect is an extreme thing. So once you train your mind and body, and your awareness, and get technology working for you, the final piece of the puzzle is working constantly to focus in on what really matters and doing that first and well, before anything else. Admittedly, this can be hard, but what other choice is there? As Twight says, “The hardest thing to do is one thing at a time. Whether in the moment or across the entirety of life.” Danger Flags #6: Bravado Danger Flags #6: Bravado ALEA IACTA EST “Then, overtaking his cohorts at the river Rubicon, which was the boundary of his province, he paused for a while, and realising what a step he was taking, he turned to those about him and said: "Even yet we may draw back; but once cross yon little bridge, and the whole issue is with the sword." […] Then Caesar cried: "Take we the course which the signs of the gods and the false dealing of our foes point out. The die is cast.” -- Suetonius, The Life of Julius Caesar *** DANGER FLAGS #6: BRAVADO The premise of Danger Flags, again, is simple – before someone does something bad, there’s often predictable warning signs. First, a confession: I almost titled this chapter “Optimism” instead of “Bravado” – after all, think of the meaning of these two words. Isn’t bravado merely a particular specialized case of optimism ? It’s optimism blended with… a sense of daring and enterprising, implying a sort of carelessness… but, almost by definition, bravado which is done prudently will not be called bravado afterwards. But, Danger Flags is dark enough as it is; I couldn’t bring myself to title this chapter “Optimism,” as though optimism is a dangerous thing. It is, of course, but I could not bring myself to title this chapter as such. In any event, when Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon, Rome is plunged back into Civil War. Little remarked-upon, almost every key figure involved in the starting of the Caesar/Pompey Civil War died badly within a decade. Pompey was murdered on the shores of Egypt; Caesar was of course assassinated on the Ides of March; Marcellus was murdered by one of his companions; Cato committed suicide in Africa; Cicero was proscribed by Anthony and Octavian and slain; once overtaken by Octavian, Mark Anthony committed suicide and died in Cleopatra’s arms. The Roman Republic, which Caesar and Pompey had fought for mastery over, egged on by jealous patricians, was destroyed in the process – mooting their point of honors and glory sought. An unknown figure, Octavian, rose to be Augustus Caesar – but his own children all died before inheriting, the Empire going to his step-son Tiberius, and then led rapidly down into murder and butchery. In retrospect, we can say the whole thing worked out very badly for everyone involved in starting it. We can focus on two specific aspects of the Civil War to learn key lessons – first, the errors and blunders on the part of the Optimates that led to Caesar crossing the Rubicon and conquering Rome, and second, the errors Caesar made that led to his assassination on the Ides of March. *** THE BACKGROUND TO THE RUBICON “In the event, nothing worked out as Caesar had planned. Instead of coming back home to a second consulship, a Gallic triumph, games honouring his daughter and general acknowledgement as Pompey’s equal as the two foremost men in the Republic, he returned as a rebel. His opponents held very different ideas about the manner in which he should return, and so increasingly did Pompey. There were attempts at negotiation, many offers of compromise, but in the end it proved impossible to find a settlement that all were willing and able to accept. Stubbornness, pride and suspicion on all sides, as well as deep personal enmities in a few cases, all contributed to this impasse. So did misplaced optimism, leading to the belief that opponents would back down.“ — Adrian Goldsworthy, “ Caesar: Life of a Colossus ” We see bravado on full display here; or in Goldsworthy’s language, “misplaced optimism.” Caesar and Pompey were undoubtedly the two most powerful figures in Rome; previously, they had been close allies along with the third most powerful man in Rome, Crassus. The Crassus/Caesar/Pompey alliance had led to all of them gathering strength and power tremendously, but it became unstable when Crassus died on a foolish military adventure in the east against the Parthians. Pompey had married Caesar’s daughter, and the two were very much in love, but tragically, she had died of illness, breaking one of the strongest ties between the two men. Their relationship grew colder. The issue that led to the Civil War is a bit confusing if you’re not familiar with Roman law and customs. Basically, in that day and age, there was no “state prosecutor” – criminal charges were brought by any member of the leading classes of Rome in the form of a personal lawsuit. These trials did not benefit from the two thousand years since then of legal precedent, checks and balances, standards of evidence, and what not. They typically came down to bribery and political wrangling; occasionally, justice would be done at them, but they were far more obviously political than procedural; the concept of “fairness under the law” was not really how things worked in those days. But – any Roman actively serving a military command or elected position was exempt from prosecution. Since his last election as Consul, the highest Roman office in normal times, Caesar had received and been serving a military commission for 10 years in Gaul (modern France) fighting the Gallic Wars, which were a tremendous victory for Rome, albeit at an extremely high price. Caesar wanted to run for Consul again, and didn’t want to resign his military commission until he’d already been elected – so that he couldn’t be prosecuted in the interim. At first, this was agreed – it wasn’t uncommon for generals leading troops in the field at the time to be allowed to stand for election – but a variety of rivals of Caesar had started to hate him, and then announced he would have to disband his army and enter Rome unarmed as a private citizen to stand for election. The issue was, Caesar was certain to be prosecuted immediately on doing so. The only reason it hadn’t already happened was that Caesar was surrounded by one of the two largest Roman armies of the day in Gaul. Adding to the menace and high stakes, in the decades before, multiple members of Julius Caesar’s party had been murdered while under nominal arrest; Caesar believed, no doubt correctly, that he would be killed if he entered Rome as a private citizen. Complicating matters, Caesar had already been promised legal immunity until the election, and it was guaranteed by one of the most powerful offices of Rome, the tribune – a tribune under normal circumstances couldn’t make laws, but could veto any law, and in extraordinary circumstances, could call for assemblies of the people independent of the Senate to pass laws. Caesar was wildly popular among the tribunes, who were firmly in his camp – they were directly elected by Rome’s lower classes, who saw Caesar as their champion. Things started getting rough when Roman senators and patricians started ignoring the law and the tribunes, in at least a breach of tradition if not doing something outright illegal. Eventually though, seeing the pressure build, Caesar agreed to relinquish almost all of his armies except a token force until the election. Goldsworthy – “In private, Caesar’s tone was more conciliatory and he seems to have written or sent representatives to many leading figures including Cato. He offered to give up Transalpine Gaul and all save two of his legions, so long as he was permitted to retain the rest of his command and make use of the privilege granted to him by the tribunes in 52 BC. This would have balanced the forces under Pompey’s command in Italy but seriously impeded his capacity to fight an aggressive war. Cicero became involved in the negotiations, for he believed everything should be done to prevent conflict and felt that the overwhelming majority of senators agreed with him. He spoke to Caesar’s opponents and friends, and the latter agreed to a further concession, allowing him to keep just Cisalpine Gaul and a single legion. It was still not enough. Cato declared that he could not agree to anything presented in private rather than before the whole Senate, but ultimately neither he nor any of his closest allies were willing to accept anything that would allow Caesar an unhindered path to his second consulship.” *** BUT NEGOTIATIONS BREAK DOWN Goldsworthy – “Following one of the Senate’s meetings, Pompey summoned all of the senators to his house outside the city’s boundary, seeking to reassure them of his steadfast support and willingness to fight if necessary. Caesar’s father-in-law Piso asked that he and one of the praetors be permitted six days to travel up to Cisalpine Gaul and talk directly to Caesar before the Senate did anything else. Other voices suggested an even larger deputation. Lentulus, Cato and Metellus Scipio all spoke against this, and these ideas went no further. Instead, on 7 January 49 BC the Senate passed the senatus consultum ultimum, calling on ‘the consuls, praetors and tribunes, and all the proconsuls near the city to ensure that the Republic comes to no harm’. There was no specific mention of Caesar – whereas the reference to proconsuls was obviously intended to place Pompey at the centre of things – but its target was obvious to all. Caesar claimed that Lentulus, Pompey, Cato and Scipio, along with many of his other opponents, were now all determined on war.” Thus, Caesar's compromise was rejected. Shortly afterwards, the Senate suspended normal law and entered into a state emergency – meaning, the tribune veto could not be used. This was questionable at best, legally speaking, since Rome was not actually fighting a real emergency, but rather, one faction was trying to stop the other faction (Caesar’s) from standing for election in a way that previously had been possible. Anthony and Cassius were warned by a senior senator that they weren’t safe in the city, and snuck out dressed as slaves to join Caesar’s camp. He then marched on Rome, stopping and hesitating at the boundary of the city – the Rubicon River. To cross it meant he and his soldiers were outlaws with an automatic death sentence upon them. "Even yet we may draw back; but once cross yon little bridge, and the whole issue is with the sword." And after reflection, he crosses the little muddy stream – and so the die is cast. *** BRAVADO: ROME FALLS QUICKLY Caesar crossed the Rubicon with one legion, and Rome fell into disarray. Pompey fled east, and the Optimate party that had ruled Rome also quickly fled on Caesar’s arrival. Caesar left Mark Anthony in control of Rome, and marched rapidly for Spain which was where most of Pompey’s troops were stationed, conquering that area in less than a month, and then marching east to face Pompey. The speed of it all greatly surprised the Optimate party, who fell into disarray – many of their leading members were defeated in cleanup actions over the next 1-2 years. Some committed suicide and Pompey was famously murdered in Egypt by a local governor who wanted to win favor with Caesar, but the majority of Caesar’s defeated enemies were pardoned – an important point we’ll come back to in a moment. This brings us to our first Danger Flag we need to note. Caesar’s enemies had acted at least questionably in legal terms, probably illegally to some extent. And yet, they failed to prepare that Caesar would come further over the top and invade. To be sure, Caesar didn’t want civil war – you can see it from the repeated attempts to negotiate and make concessions that Caesar sent via letter and messengers to Rome – but shockingly, the Optimates were completely unprepared for Caesar to march on Rome after they declared a state of emergency. This is bravado at its finest; or, more darkly, optimism. *** BRAVADO AS A DANGER FLAG Where does bravado come from? In this case, we see the Optimate party stuck in their own point of view – and refusing to see Caesar’s. From their perspective, their legal maneuvers might have been questionable , but they did not see that Caesar would see them as outright illegal – and act accordingly. Once again, then, we must danger-flag people who only see their own point of view. This leads easily to underestimating and failing to calculate what bad things could happen. Relatedly, and just as dangerous, is seeing only upside and not downside. Clearly, the party opposed to Caesar did not think he would cross the Rubicon with his soldiers – or else, obviously, they would have been better prepared. But why wouldn’t he? How could they not see it? Caesar's life was at stake; all knew it. The Optimates had countermanded past legitimate legal agreements and declared a very questionable state of emergency for political reasons, violating the sanctity of the tribunes. Caesar considered – and many historians are sympathetic to his point of view – that they started the Civil War by doing this. *** THE PATH TO THE IDES OF MARCH Alas, we know how Caesar’s story ends. The Civil War had broken out in January of 49 BC. Caesar had both conquered Rome and defeated Pompey by July of 48 BC, and was named to the emergency office of Dictator . Showing wise restraint, Caesar resigned the office after only 11 days and being elected to consul, leading Rome back to a more normal state of affairs. At the close of his consulship, he was elected dictator again – for one year – and used his battle-hardened troops to both mop up some Roman problems in Pontus very quickly (“Veni, Vedi, Vici” – “I came, I saw, I conquered” – came from defeating Pontus so quickly) – and then he mopped up resistance to him among Optimate loyalists in Africa, with Cato committing suicide. Returning to Rome in 46 BC, he was named dictator for 10 years, and – in hindsight, foolishly – was named “dictator for life” one month before his assassination. *** CAESAR’S MERCY It hasn’t been remarked upon enough in popular history that Caesar had defeated both of the organizers of his assassination on the battlefield, and pardoned them. Caesar had famously said – “Let us see if in this way we can willingly win the support of all and gain a permanent victory, since through their cruelty others have been unable to escape hatred or make their victory lasting – save for Lucius Sulla, and I do not intend to imitate him. This is a new way of conquest, we grow strong through pity and generosity. ” The Sulla he referred to was the winner of the last round of Roman Civil Wars, when Caesar was only a child – Sulla had put to death everyone who opposed him from his adversary’s party. Caesar didn’t want to do that – he both deeply wanted to be loved and respected by people, and also foolishly believed that if he was a good person, he would be safe and “escape hatred” – a “new way of conquest, growing strong through pity and generosity.” Wikipedia: Marcus Junius Brutus – “When Caesar's Civil War broke out in 49 BC between Pompey and Caesar, Brutus followed his old enemy and the present leader of the Optimates, Pompey. When the Battle of Pharsalus began on August 9, Caesar ordered his officers to take Brutus prisoner if he gave himself up voluntarily, but to leave him alone and do him no harm if he persisted in fighting against capture. […] After the defeat of the Optimates at the Battle of Pharsalus, Brutus surrendered and wrote to Caesar with apologies. Caesar immediately forgave him. Caesar then accepted him into his inner circle and made him governor of Gaul when he left for Africa in pursuit of Cato and Metellus Scipio. In 45 BC, Caesar nominated Brutus to serve as urban praetor for the following year.” Wikipedia: Cassius Longinus – “Cassius returned to Rome in 50 BC, when civil war was about to break out between Julius Caesar and Pompey. Cassius was elected tribune of the Plebs for 49 BC, and threw in his lot with the Optimates […] News of Pompey's defeat at the Battle of Pharsalus caused Cassius to head for the Hellespont, with hopes of allying with the king of Pontus, Pharnaces II. Cassius was overtaken by Caesar en route, and was forced to surrender unconditionally. Caesar made Cassius a legate, employing him in the Alexandrian War against the very same Pharnaces whom Cassius had hoped to join after Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus. However, Cassius refused to join in the fight against Cato and Scipio in Africa, choosing instead to retire to Rome.” Brutus and Cassius, of course, were the ringleaders of the plot to assassinate Caesar – and they did so. *** OPTIMISM AND BRAVADO On the Ides of March, a group of 60 senators gathered around Caesar to give him a petition. When Caesar waved them away, Lucius Cimber grabbed him by the toga. Caesar yelled, “Why, this is violence!” Drawing daggers hidden beneath their togas, the senators stabbed him repeatedly. When he saw Brutus among the conspirators, Caesar is said to have lamented: “You too, my child?” And so, Caesar died on the Ides of March. We see once again a mix of optimism and bravado on the part of Caesar – optimism, in thinking that long-term enemies would be reconciled with mercy and favor, combined with bravado in having himself named dictator for life – while not having adequate security around himself at all times. Caesar seems like he was unable to comprehend that the Roman Senate might avenge themselves on him and murder him – after all, he believed he was doing well in the Roman service, leading to a new era of peace and prosperity. By most accounts, he was indeed governing well – but once again, we see the mix of optimism and seeing things from his point of view and considering upside without considering downside and failing to take appropriate precautions. *** GUIDANCE There were many events that led to the disastrous Civil War, but there’s no doubt that had Piso – Caesar’s father in law – been able to send a diplomatic delegation to negotiate with Caesar, it all could have been avoided. In any large-scale faction, there are always people who are more stubborn and intractable than others. These people you need to be very wary of. In times of crisis, it’s common for the loudest voices to hold the most sway – you should be very wary of those who refuse to compromise because they believe they cannot lose . Likewise, people who consider only upside and not downside are very dangerous – Cato’s actions led to his own death, but also the downfall of most of his supporters, and ironically, the complete destruction of the old Roman Republic that he loved so dearly. On Caesar’s side, he somewhat foolishly believed that a policy of mercy and generosity would compensate for him seeming to master and dominate the Roman scene – the hatred of his enemies which started the Civil War was due to Caesar's preeminence and seeming dominance over the old Roman aristocracy, and Caesar never considered that that hatred would still simmer despite treating old enemy partisans in a friendly and merciful way. Caesar had at least three paths open to him to avoid assassination – he could have relentlessly exiled or prosecuted known enemies of his, he could have resigned his honors and withdrew into private life with dignity, or he could have been exceedingly careful with his security and kept a bodyguard amongst himself at all times. Any of these three would likely have prevented his assassination. But he did not do so because he was blinded, to some extent, by his own hope and optimism. He wanted to believe he lived in a world where “pity and generosity” would reconcile old foes, not recognizing that a lack of pity and generosity were not the problem. From the perspective of his enemies, the problem of Caesar was his preeminence and dominance – by continuing to extend both of those while leaving those enemies intact, his life was always at risk. He didn’t see this – apparently couldn’t see this – because of his optimism. If you spot this class of error in yourself, it seems it’s not corrected through any particular type of training, but more through careful thought and reasoning periodically. There is the way you want the world to be , but that is not necessarily the way the world is. This type of thing must be constantly thought about. Two very simple questions go a long way towards catching this error – “What if I’m wrong? What am I missing?” Shakespeare took a little poetic license when he made Caesar’s final words in the play, “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar.” And while Julius Caesar likely didn’t say that exactly, the spirit and sentiment is certainly correct. “How can this be happening? Mercy and generosity is not enough? Then fall, Caesar.” Bravado is certainly a Danger Flag to be watched carefully; and perhaps optimism too. Again – “What if I’m wrong? What am I missing?” Danger Flags #7: Structural Problems Danger Flags #7: Structural Problems RELAPSED HERETICS “Jacques de Molay and three other senior Templars remained in prison, awaiting the Pope’s decision. In late December 1313, [Pope] Clement finally set up a council to determine the fate of the four men. […] All were old men: de Molay was at least 70 […] They were led out to a platform in front of Notre-Dame, where the sentences were read out. As all four men stood guilty of heresy, they were condemned to ‘harsh and perpetual imprisonment’. [Two senior Templars] accepted the sentence, and were led away to die miserably in jail. “At this moment, perhaps dreading the thought of being reimprisoned (he had spent the last four years in solitary confinement), Jacques de Molay began shouting that he and his Order were innocent of all crimes, and he publicly retracted his confession. This astounded the cardinals and doctors, and they suddenly did not know what to do. After seven years of captivity, during which time he had consistently failed to defend his Order, Jacques de Molay’s finest hour was suddenly at hand. He adamantly refused to confess his guilt. Geoffroi de Charney rallied to his Master, and likewise insisted on the Order’s innocence. The two men were taken back to their cells while news of the unexpected turn of events were rushed to [King of France] Philip. The King now had a legal and ecclesiastical emergency on his hands. He summoned the lay members of his council and the matter was resolved. As the two Templars were insisting upon their innocence, they were guilty of being relapsed heretics, and there was only one punishment for that – death by fire.” -- Sean Martin, “ The Knights Templar: The History and Myths of the Legendary Military Order ” *** FEROCIOUS DISCIPLINE AND CHARISMA The Knights Templar remain one of the strangest and most interesting organizations across all of history. From 1095 to 1099, the First Crusade was called by Pope Urban II to reconquer Jerusalem and the region of “Outremer” – roughly, the western coast of the Middle East – from the Muslims who had driven back and conquered the region from previous Christian inhabitants some 400 years before. Europe was widely fractured at this point, but was almost completely Christianized. The Northern Europeans, Germans, and Balkans had almost entirely gone over to Christianity with just a few holdouts, and Christian forces had finally started to have some successes in the Reconquista against the Muslims in modern Spain and Portugal. Lacking pagans to fight, the newly-Christian Kings and Lords kept fighting amongst themselves, until Urban II called for the Crusade, perhaps primarily as a way to unify the infighting Christians against a common enemy. It was something of a surprise to all parties when the First Crusade actually succeeded – it was a ragtag mess, barely an army, but then, Islam was at a relatively low period in its military history, with a number of its caliphates and kingdoms breaking apart under their own weight. These things tend to oscillate across history. The Knights Templar were formed as “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon,” one of many Christian knightly orders formed in the aftermath of the First Crusade with a particularly rare mix of fierce discipline, austerity, and charismatic leadership. The initial knights were indeed “Poor Fellow-Soldiers,” only a little more than a dozen knights formed the order to police the roads and guard pilgrims traveling to the Christian holy sites in Outremer. Around 1119, the Frenchman Hugues de Payens became Magister Militum Templi – Grandmaster of the Knights Templar. De Payens was incredibly charismatic, and from 1120 to 1136, he took trips across all of Western Europe, telling the stories of pilgrims to the Holy Land and the perils they faced from raiders and bandits, and how the Knights Templar lived in complete austerity while devoting themselves to fighting for Christendom. Rarely do leaders mix austerity, piety, discipline, and charisma – but this is what Hugues de Payens evidently did; he and the Knights Templar became wildly popular in Western Europe, and the ranks of the Templars swelled into the thousands, and they were granted revenues, churches, and lands from many monarchs across Western Europe. *** CODES OF AUSTERITY The Templars adopted a “ Latin Rule ” of 72 points that all members of the order were required to follow. The people that framed this “constitution” drew from a mix of monastic orders, humanistic past Church leaders like Augustine, and – at least on this amateur historian’s reading of it – seem to have drawn a lot of inspiration from the contemplative and martial practices of Islam. The rules are rather remarkable to read in modern context, especially if you also have some background in the precepts and codes of modern military special forces – many of them are remarkably similar. Take, for instance, the rules on dress – “17. We command that all the brothers' habits should always be of one colour, that is white or black or brown. And we grant to all knight brothers in winter and in summer if possible, white cloaks; and no-one who does not belong to the aforementioned Knights of Christ is allowed to have a white cloak, so that those who have abandoned the life of darkness will recognise each other as being reconciled to their creator by the sign of the white habits: which signifies purity and complete chastity. Chastity is certitude of heart and healthiness of body. For if any brother does not take the vow of chastity he cannot come to eternal rest nor see God, by the promise of the apostle who said: Pacem sectamini cum omnibus et castimoniam sine qua nemo Deum videbit. That is to say: 'Strive to bring peace to all, keep chaste, without which no-one can see God. “18. But these robes should be without any finery and without any show of pride. And so we ordain that no brother will have a piece of fur on his clothes, nor anything else which belongs to the usages of the body, not even a blanket unless it is of lamb's wool or sheep's wool. We command all to have the same, so that each can dress and undress, and put on and take off his boots easily. And the Draper or the one who is in his place should studiously reflect and take care to have the reward of God in all the above-mentioned things, so that the eyes of the envious and evil-tongued cannot observe that the robes are too long or too short; but he should distribute them so that they fit those who must wear them, according to the size of each one.” You can see how the Knights Templar would become so successful, then – their rules mandated highly functional and not-adorned clothing, the type that would very much turn off “show horses” and really only appeal to “work horse” type people; flashier nobles and lords would have little interest in this. Likewise, at least semi-intentionally, the Templars were concerned with optics and say so right in their descriptions – “…so that the eyes of the envious and evil-tongued cannot observe…” – they were concerned with external appearances, appearing pious to all who observed them. Finally, they imbued their code and principles into everything – their dress, their weapons, their usage of horses, their ranks, and so on. The colors and styles they chose represented certain spiritual and martial values, and thus, even the littlest things they would do would be constant reminders of it. They banned a variety of frivolous things – “22. We prohibit pointed shoes and shoe-laces and forbid any brother to wear them; nor do we permit them to those who serve the house for a fixed term; rather we forbid them to have shoes with points or laces under any circumstances. For it is manifest and well known that these abominable things belong to pagans. Nor should they wear their hair or their habits too long. For those who serve the sovereign creator must of necessity be born within and without through the promise of God himself who said: Estote mundi quia ego mundus sum. That is to say: 'Be born as I am born.” They ate in complete silence – “23. In the palace, or what should rather be called the refectory, they should eat together. But if you are in need of anything because you are not accustomed to the signs used by other men of religion, quietly and privately you should ask for what you need at table, with all humility and submission. For the apostle said: Manduca panem tuum cum silentio. That is to say: 'Eat your bread in silence.' And the psalmist: Posui ori meo custodiam. That is to say: 'I held my tongue.' That is, 'I thought my tongue would fail me.' That is, 'I held my tongue so that I should speak no ill.” They prayed multiple times per day, and after the end-of-day’s prayers, no talking was permitted – “31. When the brothers come out of compline they have no permission to speak openly except in an emergency. But let each go to his bed quietly and in silence, and if he needs to speak to his squire, he should say what he has to say softly and quietly. But if by chance, as they come out of compline, the knighthood or the house has a serious problem which must be solved before morning, we intend that the Master or a party of elder brothers who govern the Order under the Master, may speak appropriately. And for this reason we command that it should be done in such a manner.” Showing a keen sense of optics and appearances, the rules were to be held as closely as possible when doing fundraising and civil missions back in Europe – “37. Brothers who are sent throughout divers countries of the world should endeavour to keep the commandments of the Rule according to their ability and live without reproach with regard to meat and wine, etc. so that they may receive a good report from outsiders and not sully by deed or word the precepts of the Order, and so that they may set an example of good works and wisdom; above all so that those with whom they associate and those in whose inns they lodge may be bestowed with honour. And if possible, the house where they sleep and take lodging should not be without light at night, so that shadowy enemies may not lead them to wickedness, which God forbids them.” *** THE FIRST BANK OF CHRISTENDOM Wikipedia: Knights Templar: Rise – “Although the primary mission of the order was military, relatively few members were combatants. The others acted in support positions to assist the knights and to manage the financial infrastructure. The Templar Order, though its members were sworn to individual poverty, was given control of wealth beyond direct donations. A nobleman who was interested in participating in the Crusades might place all his assets under Templar management while he was away. Accumulating wealth in this manner throughout Christendom and the Outremer, the order in 1150 began generating letters of credit for pilgrims journeying to the Holy Land: pilgrims deposited their valuables with a local Templar preceptory before embarking, received a document indicating the value of their deposit, then used that document upon arrival in the Holy Land to retrieve their funds in an amount of treasure of equal value. This innovative arrangement was an early form of banking and may have been the first formal system to support the use of cheques; it improved the safety of pilgrims by making them less attractive targets for thieves, and also contributed to the Templar coffers. “Based on this mix of donations and business dealing, the Templars established financial networks across the whole of Christendom. They acquired large tracts of land, both in Europe and the Middle East; they bought and managed farms and vineyards; they built massive stone cathedrals and castles; they were involved in manufacturing, import and export; they had their own fleet of ships; and at one point they even owned the entire island of Cyprus. The Order of the Knights Templar arguably qualifies as the world's first multinational corporation.” Nothing succeeds like success, eh? You can see similarities in the martial and spiritual codes of the Templars to modern elite military units like U.S. Navy SEAL Teams and U.S. Army’s Delta Force. Life was strenuous, hard, and unadorned. As such, their reputation grew for discipline and ferocity. That, combined with charismatic leadership, led the Templars to grow in prominence and renown rapidly throughout Europe. The first Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Hugues de Payans, died in 1136 in Jerusalem. Three years later, Pope Innocent II made a Papal Bull – something similar to a modern executive order – giving the Knights Templar formal extraordinary rights and privileges. This Bull, “ Omne Datum Optimum ,” made the Knights Templar exempt from all taxes and tithes across Europe and Outremer. Within 10 years, two more Bulls followed – Milites Templi and Militia Dei – granting an extraordinary range of privileges to the Templars. Most importantly, they were given free passage through all of Christendom without needing permission from local kings or magistrates, and they were allowed to collect their own taxes and offerings through Christendom. This laid the groundwork for them becoming “arguably the world's first multinational corporation” – given that they were exempted from import and export taxes, and their members could move freely without permission throughout Europe, they were thus able to set up fortresses and churches that did banking-type operations across Europe and Outremer. Pairing with these large privileges were the strict codes of discipline and the heavily armed nature of the order: in a time of raiding and banditry, transiting gold and money was a dangerous things. The Templars eventually came to own ports and fleets, and many heavily guarded fortresses. Eventually, nobles could deposit their money with one branch of the Knights Templar, and receive a letter of credit to withdraw it at another Templar branch. *** DANGER FLAGS #7: STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS In under 50 years, the Knights Templar went from being formed with a dozen poor knights, to being one of the most powerful organizations in the world. They held with position for another 150 years, and then – seemingly very abruptly – they were thrashed apart, their leaders burned at the stake in France, and the Order was dissolved. This is the second-to-last chapter of Danger Flags, and differs slightly from the first six. Our premise, again: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it. The rest of the series on Danger Flags has looked at a mix of character and attributes that tend to predict bad future behavior. This chapter, we’ll look at that too, but additionally at structural problems that can predict vulnerability to such a cataclysmic downfall. *** STRUCTURAL PROBLEM #1: IF YOU OWE THE BANK… There’s a famous American quote: “If you owe the bank $100 dollars, that's your problem; if you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.” It’s disputed who said it, but it’s worth carefully thinking through. Over their first 200 years, the Templars had became closely intertwined with the King of France’s finance – eventually, a number of the key treasury posts in France came to be staffed by Templars, and they had a close working relationship. Over time, the French Crown’s debt to the Templars grew and kept growing. The Middle Eastern Crusades, in particular, always cost far more in gold and supplies than they reclaimed in resources and tax revenues. Reconquering and garrisoning cities like Jerusalem and Tiberias would often cost in the neighborhood of 10x more than the annual tax yields and resources from those cities; every Crusade, thus, brought European monarchs deeper into debt. During the Seventh Crusade in 1249, King Louis IX of France was captured in the field by the Mamluk Sultan Qutuz. Louis was ransomed for 400,000 livres – whereas the annual Crown revenues in France were only 1,250,000 livres. Reflect on that for a moment: one-third of France's annual revenues went to paying a single ransom . You can see how the Crusades would rapidly lead to heavy expenses. The French Crown kept adding debts to the Knights Templar; it was only two generations later that the French King Philip IV had them arrested and destroyed – historians frequently note the debts as one of the key reasons motivating the action. *** STRUCTURAL PROBLEM #2: ROLLBACK FROM THE MISSION The Knights Templar had been granted immense authority in large part because no monarch or emperor was strong enough to coordinate the fight in Outremer alone; the Templars, as a multinational organization exempt from local rules, could much better coordinate weapons, supplies, and money across the Crusades from the many disparate kingdoms and principalities of Europe. They both lost prestige and lost their core mission when Islamic forces began rolling back the Crusades in the late 1100’s under Saladin. The Egyptian Mamluks and Khwarezmi Turks were also both formidable, and by 1244, Jerusalem was captured by the Turks. By 1303, the Mamluks conquered the last Templar base in the Middle East. There were calls for a new Crusade at this time, but the raison d’etre of the Knights Templar had faded greatly. They were no longer successfully operating the fortresses and forward operating bases of Christendom, leaving them with their wealthy possessions and banking operations in Europe, but without the overseas bases and infrastructure that had led to them being granted immense privileges and rights in the first place. *** STRUCTURAL PROBLEM #3: TRADITION AND SINGLE POINTS OF FAILURE The Papal Bulls under Innocent II had made the Templars answerable only the Pope himself: this broadly meant immunity from taxes, tithes, regulations, and accountability to local kings and princes. When the Crusades were on the ascent and things seemed going well, this might have slightly chafed some lords, but the Templars were extremely popular. By the first decade of the 1300’s, this popularity – and the general feelings towards Crusading and Outremer in general – had faded immensely, and hostility towards the Templars rose in the process. At this time, the Templars were clearly in their weakest position since their founding – but since so long had elapsed since then, the leaders seemed to have taken for granted their status. They looked backwards at tradition and did not see how vulnerable they were. The Knights Templar were still, on paper, only accountable to the Pope – but Pope Clement V was a native Frenchman and cousins with King Philip IV. When Philip IV decided to act against the Templars, he did so with a Pope who was largely favorable to his cause. The Templar leadership perhaps could have been aware of this dynamic, but having held their positions for so long in living memory, they seemed to be largely unaware and surprised when the danger rose against them. *** THE END OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR Wikipedia: Knights Templar: Arrests, Charges, and Dissolution – “At dawn on Friday, 13 October 1307 (a date sometimes linked with the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition) King Philip IV ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The arrest warrant started with the phrase: "Dieu n'est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume" ["God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom"]. ” The Templars did not defend themselves well – from this amateur historian’s point of view, they seemed confused by what happened. Torture was very much legal in France, and Templars were tortured to produce all manner of confessions. The Templar Treasurer, when recanting his confession later, said: “Under such torture, I would have confessed to killing God.” Nevertheless, Philip IV moved decisively – Templars who recanted their confessions were burned alive shortly afterwards, eventually culminating in the execution of the Order’s final leaders via burning by fire, and their possessions were divided between other knightly orders and various monarchs of the countries that had Templar bases. *** DANGER FLAG REGARDING MONEY USAGE Following the normal format of Danger Flags, we must flag bad usage of money as a danger flag – people who “never had enough money” are prone to bribery, corruption, and crime. You should be exceedingly careful around anyone who has a pattern of bad usage of money, who is in constant debt, and so on. Throughout history, this predicts a wide range of bad behavior. For your part, if you have money problems, it can be worth spending a few years – and it might take years – to reduce your expenses to less than your incomes and clear your debt. Debt can lead to a lot of awful situations. *** GUIDANCE REGARDING STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS But that’s nothing new – it’s been known across the ages that people who handle money poorly are prone to do bad things. More interestingly and importantly, you should be aware of structural problems that presage potential problems. The Knights Templar had a few: *Many powerful people were indebted to them, and thus had a reason to benefit from their persecution. *Their raison d’etre of being the forward-operating base and elite troops during the Crusades had faded when Outremer was conquered by the Kurds, Mamluks, and Turks. *They had a single point of failure that they had became blind to as a result of tradition – they didn’t consider that such a thing could happen. In any of these instances – when a powerful person would benefit from the downfall of an individual or organization, when an organization’s mission becomes obsolete or greatly lessens in importance, and when there’s a single point of failure that hasn’t been adequately noticed and prepared – all of these lead towards being more fragile and in a riskier position. You can see these patterns repeat throughout history – Philip IV also persecuted and expelled the Jews from France for similar reasons he liquidated the Knights Templar. In modern times, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait largely to cancel the debts he’d made to the Kuwaitis while fighting the Iran/Iraq War. There are similar structural problems beyond the scope of this piece regarding envy and authority – you can look backwards at assassinations within royal and imperial families, even Augustus Caesar’s own children, for example. In modern times, when two cofounders of a company both believe they should be CEO, that’s a similar structural problem that presages problems if things start going poorly. In all these instances, just becoming aware of the problems goes a long ways – Sergey Brin and Larry Page were probably very wise to hire Eric Schmidt to be the CEO of Google, and to the best of my knowledge, there was no breach between them and no falling-out as is so common among very talented founders of fast-growing companies. Structural problems can be mitigated over time, but first and foremost comes awareness of them. The biggest danger is in blindness to them – people often fail to realize the sources of their authority and power when they’ve traditionally held those roles for long periods of time; thus, they can become blind to rising risks and potential downsides. So yes, do danger flag people with poor money usage – but also become aware of structural problems and structural risks that might make an adversary act against yourself or your organization. Danger Flags #8: Being And Doing Danger Flags #8: Being And Doing 'GATE “And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I could say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.” -- Richard Nixon, Annual Convention of Associated Press Managing Editors Association, 17 November 1973 *** A WARRIOR CREED “In times of war or uncertainty there is a special breed of warrior ready to answer our Nation’s call. A common man with uncommon desire to succeed. Forged by adversity, he stands alongside America’s finest special operations forces to serve his country, the American people, and protect their way of life. I am that man. My Trident is a symbol of honor and heritage. Bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before, it embodies the trust of those I have sworn to protect. By wearing the Trident I accept the responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life. It is a privilege that I must earn every day. My loyalty to Country and Team is beyond reproach. I humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans always ready to defend those who are unable to defend themselves. I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my actions. I voluntarily accept the inherent hazards of my profession, placing the welfare and security of others before my own. I serve with honor on and off the battlefield. The ability to control my emotions and my actions, regardless of circumstance, sets me apart from other men. Uncompromising integrity is my standard. My character and honor are steadfast. My word is my bond. We expect to lead and be led. In the absence of orders I will take charge, lead my teammates and accomplish the mission. I lead by example in all situations. I will never quit. I persevere and thrive on adversity. My Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down, I will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission. I am never out of the fight. We demand discipline. We expect innovation. The lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me – my technical skill, tactical proficiency, and attention to detail. My training is never complete. We train for war and fight to win. I stand ready to bring the full spectrum of combat power to bear in order to achieve my mission and the goals established by my country. The execution of my duties will be swift and violent when required yet guided by the very principles that I serve to defend. Brave men have fought and died building the proud tradition and feared reputation that I am bound to uphold. In the worst of conditions, the legacy of my teammates steadies my resolve and silently guides my every deed. I will not fail.” -- The United States Navy SEAL Code *** DANGER FLAGS, FINALE: BEING AND DOING My purpose in my writings – at The Strategic Review and in books like Pragma – has always been, and continues to be, for everyone reading to have their mind expanded, to do better, to live better. This series has been our darkest exploration yet – we opened with Niccolo Machiavelli being tortured in the wake of an assassination attempt in Florence, and then followed the tragikomedya of the Soviet Security Chiefs working their way downwards under Stalin’s direction. From there, we explored what Western interrogators were looking for and at during the Cold War and visited in with Nietzsche’s reflections on the origins of hatred and the schisms between the different branches of the aristocracy. We saw Scipio Africanus see neglect in the Carthaginian camps and fortifications, leading to the famous night fire raid that contributed so very much to the triumph of Rome in the Punic Wars – and to the destruction of Carthage as a civilization. One century later, we saw the foolish bravado of Julius Caesar’s opponents that led to him crossing the Rubicon and starting the Civil Wars, and Caesar’s own bravado that led to his assassination on the Ides of March. We finally investigated the rise and fall of the Knights Templar – rising to a position as arguably the world’s first multinational corporation, until falling under the avarice and malice of a deeply indebted French King, who had the Templars arrested, tortured, and burned to death. Yes, this series has undoubtedly been our darkest yet – but how else to get across and burn the lessons of history in our minds? There are many bad things that can’t be anticipated at our current levels of science and technology – earthquakes, typhoons, outbreaks of particularly virulent diseases – but when it comes to human nature, we really should be able to spot a lot of bad things that happen before they do, and take appropriate countermeasures against them. Danger Flags. I call them “Danger Flags” – not a flag as in a banner flying in the air, but “flagging” something noteworthy for further review and scrutiny. The concept is simple, but frequently neglected: before a person does something bad, there’s often predictable signs that they were going to do it. You want to be able to notice and flag common warning signs and then take countermeasures against them, or avoid entirely a person who comes with immense danger about them. This final chapter, we’re looking at an entire class of danger flags – those related to being . *** “WHAT HAVE I DONE? WHAT HAS HAPPENED?” “It was after dinner that night when Nixon summoned Henry Kissinger to the Residence of the White House and sat with his Secretary of State in the Lincoln Sitting Room. Though the two leaders had worked tirelessly together on foreign policy during Nixon’s administration, they didn’t necessarily like each other. Nixon was often jealous of Kissinger’s popularity and dismissive of his personality. Kissinger thought the President was bitterly mean at times, and unnecessarily paranoid about Kissinger’s loyalty. They worked well together, but more often than not, they downplayed the other’s role in crafting the administration’s foreign policy when speaking to others. Nixon didn’t trust Kissinger and Kissinger was often angered by Nixon’s irrational behavior, especially in the past few days as the Secretary of State believed the President’s problems had paralyzed the country’s foreign affairs. “On this night, however, Nixon and Kissinger simply talked. They discussed their accomplishments, their failures, their philosophies and disagreements, and Nixon urged the diplomat to stay on as Secretary of State and provide Gerald Ford with the same service he had provided Nixon. Sitting there in the smallest room of the White House, Nixon asked Kissinger about how he would be remembered. Although he had made mistakes, he felt that he had accomplished great things for his country. Nixon was worried that his legacy would be Watergate and resignation, but he desperately wanted to be thought of as a President who achieved peace. Kissinger insisted that Nixon would get the credit he deserved. “President Nixon started crying. At first, it was a teary-eyed hope that his resignation wouldn’t overshadow his long career, but soon, it broke down into sobbing as the President lamented the failures and the disgrace he had brought to his country. Nixon — a man who never wore his Quaker religion on his sleeve — turned to Kissinger and asked him if he would pray with him. Despite being Jewish, Kissinger felt he had no choice but to kneel with the President as Nixon prayed for peace — both for his country and for himself. “ After finishing his prayer, Nixon remained in a kneeling position while silently weeping, tears streaming down the large jowls often caricatured by political cartoonists. Kissinger looked over and saw the President lean down, burying his face in the Lincoln Sitting Room’s carpet and slamming his fist against the ground crying, “What have I done? What has happened?”. Nixon and Kissinger both disliked physical affection and Nixon in particular hated being touched, but Kissinger didn’t know any other way to console his weary, broken boss. Softly patting Nixon’s back at first, Kissinger embraced Nixon in a hug and held the President of the United States until he calmed down and the tears stopped flowing. Kissinger helped Nixon up to his feet and the men shared another drink, talking openly about what role Nixon could have in the future as a former President.” -- Anthony Bergen, " The Final Hours of Richard Nixon’s Presidency ", emphasis added “What have I done? What has happened?” – these two cried-out questions, from that carpet on the White House, might best make understood what ended the Nixon Presidency so ignominiously. *** BY ANY OTHER NAME “What's in a name? that which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet” -- Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet This next statement might sound trivial, but I contend it’s important to understanding this whole mess of a thing – Nixon genuinely believed he was not “a crook.” And again, this might seem trivial, but – What’s a crook? I think we would a call someone a “crook” who “does crooked and criminal things” – or something like that. But the universe doesn’t have any substance of crookness – there’s no element on the Periodic Table called crookium; as far as I know, there’s no composites of elements that become hydrocrookide; no, the word “crook” is just a label. Nixon thought he wasn’t that ; whatever a crook was, it wasn’t him . Can you not see how this is a potential problem? *** BEING AS A DANGER FLAG From time to time, I point out the verb “to be” – variants “is”, “was”, “are”, “were”, “am” – as something to watch closely in your thinking. I didn’t come up with that myself; a lot of scholars recommend “ E-Prime ” – using English without the word “is” and variants of it – “E-Prime (short for English-Prime, sometimes denoted É or E ′ ) is a version of the English language that excludes all forms of the verb to be, including all conjugations, contractions and archaic forms. “Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing. For example, the sentence "the film was good" could not be expressed under the rules of E-Prime, and the speaker might instead say "I liked the film", "the film made me laugh", or "the film has value". The E-Prime versions communicate the writer's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact. “Kellogg and Bourland describe misuse of the verb to be as creating a "deity mode of speech", allowing "even the most ignorant to transform their opinions magically into god-like pronouncements on the nature of things." ” Very often, “I am” and “they are” and “it is” type thinking leads to making a person feel exempt from their actions. If you’re “not a crook” regardless of your actions, then – paradoxically – all the crooked dealings in the world might not change that for you. I contend that very many “I am X” beliefs are danger flags and ought to be carefully noted when seen in another person. The most dangerous occur when people believe themselves honest, just, good – you know, “not crooked” – and thus fail to reflect regularly on their actions. *** A FORK IN THE ROAD ““Tiger, one day you will come to a fork in the road,” he said. “And you’re going to have to make a decision about which direction you want to go.” He raised his hand and pointed. “If you go that way you can be somebody. You will have to make compromises and you will have to turn your back on your friends. But you will be a member of the club and you will get promoted and you will get good assignments.” Then Boyd raised his other hand and pointed another direction. “Or you can go that way and you can do something – something for your country and for your Air Force and for yourself. If you decide you want to do something, you may not get promoted and you may not get the good assignments and you certainly will not be a favorite of your superiors. But you won’t have to compromise yourself. You will be true to your friends and to yourself. And your work might make a difference.” He paused and stared into the officer’s eyes and heart. “To be somebody or to do something. In life there is often a roll call. That’s when you will have to make a decision. To be or to do. Which way will you go?” -- Colonel John Boyd, U.S. Air Force; compiled by Robert Coram This is a slightly less dangerous variant than the above, but the same theme holds – John Boyd’s famous “To Be Or To Do” speech is now taught across much of the U.S. military. It looks at people who want to “be somebody” – hold offices, get promoted, get awards and decorations – rather than do what needs to be done. *** AN ABILITY TO EVOLVE ONE’S THINKING, OR NOT “I finally realized today why politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions. [...] “I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan. “Which topics engage people's identity depends on the people, not the topic. For example, a discussion about a battle that included citizens of one or more of the countries involved would probably degenerate into a political argument. But a discussion today about a battle that took place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't. No one would know what side to be on. So it's not politics that's the source of the trouble, but identity. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, what they really mean is that it has started to be driven mostly by people's identities. “ Because the point at which this happens depends on the people rather than the topic, it's a mistake to conclude that because a question tends to provoke religious wars, it must have no answer. For example, the question of the relative merits of programming languages often degenerates into a religious war, because so many programmers identify as X programmers or Y programmers. This sometimes leads people to conclude the question must be unanswerable—that all languages are equally good. Obviously that's false: anything else people make can be well or badly designed; why should this be uniquely impossible for programming languages? And indeed, you can have a fruitful discussion about the relative merits of programming languages, so long as you exclude people who respond from identity. [...] “The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible. “Most people reading this will already be fairly tolerant. But there is a step beyond thinking of yourself as x but tolerating y: not even to consider yourself an x. The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.” -- Paul Graham, “ Keep Your Identity Small ” So if you think of yourself as a “Ruby programmer” and hold that dearly to you – if it’s something you are – you become less able to evaluate the tradeoffs and downsides of that programming language, and to potentially switch to another language when appropriate. Going a step further, I’ve noticed that a lot of times people who identify themselves as “creative” run into more writer’s block and desperate failings in the creative domain, people who think of themselves as “smart” melt down more often when they come to a problem at the threshold of their skill and intellectual ability, and so on. The worst of these aspects are often the people who think they’re “not a crook” – this can surely lead one into problems and mean less self-scrutiny and self-awareness – but most such being seems to hinder people’s ability to change their minds, see things clearly, and understand both themselves and the world. *** BUT WHAT SHALL WE BE? In this whole series on Danger Flags, we’ve looked at some common cases to be noticed – flagged – and either avoided or carefully managed. This one is a relatively easy one to spot and fix in oneself – you stop taking pride in what you are ; and start taking pride in what you do . It’s not difficult to see how being proud that “I am creative” might lead to producing less art than “I write a three-act play every quarter, four per year”, no? And yet, it’s very human and natural and normal to want to identify with things, to be things. When I first sat and mulled over this, it was confusing and difficult. Clearly, if you can handle it, scrubbing most “being” out of your thinking and what you’re proud of can make you more honest, reliable, effective; can lead to acting better in a variety of ways. But this almost certainly will never go mainstream, can’t go mainstream; being is going to be around for the foreseeable future, downsides and all. And to that end, I think the “Navy SEAL Code” offers great lessons and alternatives to the sort of “mindless being” that leads Nixon to say he isn’t a crook, despite paying off the “White House Plumbers” to keep silent about the burglary. Look at how it begins – “In times of war or uncertainty there is a special breed of warrior ready to answer our Nation’s call. A common man with uncommon desire to succeed. Forged by adversity, he stands alongside America’s finest special operations forces to serve his country, the American people, and protect their way of life. I am that man. My Trident is a symbol of honor and heritage. Bestowed upon me by the heroes that have gone before, it embodies the trust of those I have sworn to protect. By wearing the Trident I accept the responsibility of my chosen profession and way of life. It is a privilege that I must earn every day. ” Interestingly, it notes the SEAL is a “common man” – not a special man, not an ultra-talented ultra-warrior by birth, not possessing otherworldly powers, no, a common man with uncommon desire to succeed. It then emphasizes “forged by adversity” – that’s where it comes from, from actually going through adversity, from doing . It says “I am that man” – being – but immediately tempers it with, “It is a privilege that I must earn every day.” Earn. Work. Do. “We expect to lead and be led. In the absence of orders I will take charge, lead my teammates and accomplish the mission. I lead by example in all situations. I will never quit. I persevere and thrive on adversity. My Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down, I will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission. I am never out of the fight. We demand discipline. We expect innovation. The lives of my teammates and the success of our mission depend on me – my technical skill, tactical proficiency, and attention to detail. My training is never complete.” Really, the whole thing is remarkable. It’s worth re-reading in full and thinking through, and then perhaps spending some time studying the very difficult selection process that the would-be Navy SEAL must endure and persist through, and the ongoing training they do. And it’s not all lofty – emphasizing the need for technical skill, tactical, proficiency, and attention to detail. “My training is never complete.” Apparently, you can’t just “be” a Navy SEAL. It’s something you must earn every single day. *** FAREWELL, DANGER FLAGS We’ve looked at a mix of attributes you should notice immediately and carefully flag in others – liking without respect, internal strife, hatred, neglect, bravado, avarice, and a lot of other big and small things. The people you choose to have in your life are one of the most important things for how your life will run. And while we could spend another few years just investigating other types of danger flags, for now we are concluded – though I must recommend you continue to study and think on who should be in your life. And just as importantly, who are you becoming? How are you training? Any attribute we dislike in others, we must work ten times as hard to scrub out of ourselves. This might be the difference between triumph and defeat on the grandest of stages, it might be life or death, or it might just be whether life runs more smoothly and tranquilly, and whether we’re able to get the best out of ourselves across these few decades we have on this planet. "I brought myself down. I gave them a sword and they stuck it in. And they twisted it with relish. And, I guess, if I'd been in their position, I'd have done the same thing." Yeah, Richard Nixon said that. Do things; don’t be things. Thank you for joining me on Danger Flags . LIMIT BREAKS LIMIT BREAKS Limit Breaks #1: Time Limit Breaks #1: Time CHAPTER 1: "THE DAILY MIRACLE" ““Yes, he’s one of those men that don’t know how to manage. Good situation. Regular income. Quite enough for luxuries as well as needs. Not really extravagant. And yet the fellow’s always in difficulties. Somehow he gets nothing out of his money. Excellent flat—half empty! Always looks as if he’d had the brokers in. New suit—old hat! Magnificent necktie—baggy trousers! Asks you to dinner: cut glass—bad mutton, or Turkish coffee—cracked cup! He can’t understand it. Explanation simply is that he fritters his income away. Wish I had the half of it! I’d show him—” So we have most of us criticised, at one time or another, in our superior way. We are nearly all chancellors of the exchequer: it is the pride of the moment. Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum, and these articles provoke a correspondence whose violence proves the interest they excite. Recently, in a daily organ, a battle raged round the question whether a woman can exist nicely in the country on L85 a year. I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time you can obtain money—usually. But though you have the wealth of a cloak-room attendant at the Carlton Hotel, you cannot buy yourself a minute more time than I have, or the cat by the fire has. Philosophers have explained space. They have not explained time. It is the inexplicable raw material of everything. With it, all is possible; without it, nothing. The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it. You wake up in the morning, and lo! your purse is magically filled with twenty-four hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours. It is the most precious of possessions. A highly singular commodity, showered upon you in a manner as singular as the commodity itself! For remark! No one can take it from you. It is unstealable. And no one receives either more or less than you receive. Talk about an ideal democracy! In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect. Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say:—”This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you. I said the affair was a miracle. Is it not? You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that. Strange that the newspapers, so enterprising and up-to-date as they are, are not full of “How to live on a given income of time,” instead of “How to live on a given income of money”! Money is far commoner than time. When one reflects, one perceives that money is just about the commonest thing there is. It encumbers the earth in gross heaps. If one can’t contrive to live on a certain income of money, one earns a little more—or steals it, or advertises for it. One doesn’t necessarily muddle one’s life because one can’t quite manage on a thousand pounds a year; one braces the muscles and makes it guineas, and balances the budget. But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely. The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted. Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.” Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? Which of us is quite sure that his fine suit is not surmounted by a shameful hat, or that in attending to the crockery he has forgotten the quality of the food? Which of us is not saying to himself—which of us has not been saying to himself all his life: “I shall alter that when I have a little more time”? We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.” -- Arnold Bennett, “ How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day ”, 1910 *** LIMIT BREAKS #1: TIME Danger Flags was on the darker end of the spectrum of what we tend to cover – whereas those concepts are important for understanding and navigating the world, I’m pleased that we’re going back to the well of practical productivity. Simple, straightforward, and effective doing better and living better . Most of us will aim to have a “better life” and work towards it – the definition of “better” will vary from person to person, but almost all of us will work towards our conception of it. As we look to improve and do more things, we run into various limits to doing more. It’s often tedious for a writer to go to the dictionary with a case they’re about to make, but I think it makes sense here. The Apple Dictionary’s definition of “limit” – limit | ˈ limit| noun 1 a point or level beyond which something does not or may not extend or pass: the limits of presidential power | the 10-minute limit on speeches | there was no limit to his imagination. • (often limits) the terminal point or boundary of an area or movement: the city limits | the upper limit of the tidal reaches. • the furthest extent of one's physical or mental endurance: Mary Ann tried everyone's patience to the limit | other horses were reaching their limit. 2 a restriction on the size or amount of something permissible or possible: an age limit | a weight limit. • a speed limit: a 30 mph limit. • (in card games) an agreed maximum stake or bet. • (also legal limit) the maximum concentration of alcohol in the blood that the law allows in the driver of a motor vehicle: the risk of drinkers inadvertently going over the limit. 3 Mathematics a point or value that a sequence, function, or sum of a series can be made to approach progressively, until it is as close to the point or value as desired. verb (limits, limiting, limited) [with object] set or serve as a limit to: try to limit the amount you drink | class sizes are limited to a maximum of 10 | (as adjective limiting) : a limiting factor. Yes, there’s some useful fodder there: *a point or level which something does not or may not extend or pass *the furthest extent of one’s physical or mental endurance *a restriction or amount of something permissible or possible *the math definition (which we come to specifically in a future chapter) *the verb, “try to limit the amount you drink” What are the limits facing us on making a terrific life? How do we break through those limits? This is the crux of this series. *** PROFOUND AND NEGLECTED TRUTH Arnold Bennett’s “How To Live on 24 Hours Per Day” was a formative book for me to read. It’s short – that’s the whole first chapter above – and the concept is rather simple on the surface. “I have seen an essay, “How to live on eight shillings a week.” But I have never seen an essay, “How to live on twenty-four hours a day.” Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. […] You have to live on this twenty-four hours of daily time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect, and the evolution of your immortal soul. Its right use, its most effective use, is a matter of the highest urgency and of the most thrilling actuality. All depends on that. Your happiness—the elusive prize that you are all clutching for, my friends!—depends on that. […] Which of us lives on twenty-four hours a day? And when I say “lives,” I do not mean exists, nor “muddles through.” Which of us is free from that uneasy feeling that the “great spending departments” of his daily life are not managed as they ought to be? […] We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.” The simplest truths are often neglected. I read Bennett’s short book some 100 years after it was published, and it struck me right away. Yes, indeed – we shall never have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. What should we do with it? *** BACKDROP: THE PAX BRITANNICA Arnold Bennett was born in 1867, wrote How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day in 1910, and died in 1931. He was one of the last of the Victorian British – meaning, he lived during the age of Queen Victoria. Victoria herself was born in 1819 – four years after the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte by the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian General Blucher. Victoria became Queen of Great Britain and Ireland in in 1837. She had already started to retreat from public life when Bennett was born in 1867, three decades into her reign. These dates and people might seem irrelevant at first – why bother recounting them? But I think it matters quite a lot: the current day-and-age, I believe, has more in common with the era that Bennett was born into than any other period of history. After the fact, it came to be called the “Pax Britannica” – the “British Peace” – when Great Britain had clear and overwhelming superiority militarily, politically, and economically across the whole world. The situation, I think, is similar to the United States after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The word political scientists use to describe a country with unrivaled superiority is “hegemony” – certain things typically happen during periods of hegemony like that which Rome held after the defeat of Carthage, that which the Mongols held during the Pax Mongolica after conquering almost the entirety of the East, that which Great Britain held after Napoleon lit Europe on fire before being finally defeated, and the position America held after the fall of the Soviet Union. War and strife tends to consume a lot of human energy, and certain forms of art and technology do not grow as well in times of war and strife than in times where there is a clear hegemon. Much like our own, the Victorian Age had an extremely rapid growth of civilian technologies, communications, evolution of jobs and the nature of work, and interconnectedness and trade across the planet. It would not be an exaggeration to say that nearly every aspect of human life was transformed for people in the British Empire. Bennett was one of the last of the Victorians, and you can see in his writings a mix of practicality and hopeful marching towards progress that comes from someone who had never faced existential threat and crisis. He was one of the last of the Victorians, living in an age of extremely rapid transformation, and his thinking can and should inform our own. *** CHAPTER 2: “THE DESIRE TO EXCEED ONE’S PROGRAMME” Bennett concluded Chapter 1, “We never shall have any more time. We have, and we have always had, all the time there is. It is the realisation of this profound and neglected truth (which, by the way, I have not discovered) that has led me to the minute practical examination of daily time-expenditure.” ” He begins Chapter 2, ““But,” someone may remark, with the English disregard of everything except the point, “what is he driving at with his twenty-four hours a day? I have no difficulty in living on twenty-four hours a day. I do all that I want to do, and still find time to go in for newspaper competitions. Surely it is a simple affair, knowing that one has only twenty-four hours a day, to content one’s self with twenty-four hours a day!” To you, my dear sir, I present my excuses and apologies. You are precisely the man that I have been wishing to meet for about forty years. Will you kindly send me your name and address, and state your charge for telling me how you do it? Instead of me talking to you, you ought to be talking to me. Please come forward. That you exist, I am convinced, and that I have not yet encountered you is my loss. Meanwhile, until you appear, I will continue to chat with my companions in distress—that innumerable band of souls who are haunted, more or less painfully, by the feeling that the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that they have not yet been able to get their lives into proper working order. If we analyse that feeling, we shall perceive it to be, primarily, one of uneasiness, of expectation, of looking forward, of aspiration. It is a source of constant discomfort, for it behaves like a skeleton at the feast of all our enjoyments. We go to the theatre and laugh; but between the acts it raises a skinny finger at us. We rush violently for the last train, and while we are cooling a long age on the platform waiting for the last train, it promenades its bones up and down by our side and inquires: “O man, what hast thou done with thy youth? What art thou doing with thine age?” You may urge that this feeling of continuous looking forward, of aspiration, is part of life itself, and inseparable from life itself. True! But there are degrees. A man may desire to go to Mecca. His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook’s, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves Brixton. It is something to have left Brixton. Most of us have not left Brixton. We have not even taken a cab to Ludgate Circus and inquired from Cook’s the price of a conducted tour. And our excuse to ourselves is that there are only twenty-four hours in the day. If we further analyse our vague, uneasy aspiration, we shall, I think, see that it springs from a fixed idea that we ought to do something in addition to those things which we are loyally and morally obliged to do. We are obliged, by various codes written and unwritten, to maintain ourselves and our families (if any) in health and comfort, to pay our debts, to save, to increase our prosperity by increasing our efficiency. A task sufficiently difficult! A task which very few of us achieve! A task often beyond our skill! Yet, if we succeed in it, as we sometimes do, we are not satisfied; the skeleton is still with us.” *** CHAPTER 3: “PRECAUTIONS BEFORE BEGINNING” “Now that I have succeeded (if succeeded I have) in persuading you to admit to yourself that you are constantly haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with your own arrangement of your daily life; and that the primal cause of that inconvenient dissatisfaction is the feeling that you are every day leaving undone something which you would like to do, and which, indeed, you are always hoping to do when you have “more time”; and now that I have drawn your attention to the glaring, dazzling truth that you never will have “more time,” since you already have all the time there is—you expect me to let you into some wonderful secret by which you may at any rate approach the ideal of a perfect arrangement of the day, and by which, therefore, that haunting, unpleasant, daily disappointment of things left undone will be got rid of! I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to find it, nor do I expect that anyone else will ever find it. It is undiscovered. When you first began to gather my drift, perhaps there was a resurrection of hope in your breast. Perhaps you said to yourself, “This man will show me an easy, unfatiguing way of doing what I have so long in vain wished to do.” Alas, no! The fact is that there is no easy way, no royal road. The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony, and the worst of it is that you never quite get there after all. The most important preliminary to the task of arranging one’s life so that one may live fully and comfortably within one’s daily budget of twenty-four hours is the calm realisation of the extreme difficulty of the task, of the sacrifices and the endless effort which it demands. I cannot too strongly insist on this. If you imagine that you will be able to achieve your ideal by ingeniously planning out a time-table with a pen on a piece of paper, you had better give up hope at once. If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin. Lie down again and resume the uneasy doze which you call your existence. It is very sad, is it not, very depressing and sombre? And yet I think it is rather fine, too, this necessity for the tense bracing of the will before anything worth doing can be done. I rather like it myself. I feel it to be the chief thing that differentiates me from the cat by the fire. “Well,” you say, “assume that I am braced for the battle. Assume that I have carefully weighed and comprehended your ponderous remarks; how do I begin?” Dear sir, you simply begin. There is no magic method of beginning. If a man standing on the edge of a swimming-bath and wanting to jump into the cold water should ask you, “How do I begin to jump?” you would merely reply, “Just jump. Take hold of your nerves, and jump.” As I have previously said, the chief beauty about the constant supply of time is that you cannot waste it in advance. The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career. Which fact is very gratifying and reassuring. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose. Therefore no object is served in waiting till next week, or even until to-morrow. You may fancy that the water will be warmer next week. It won’t. It will be colder.” *** THE NATURE OF TIME You can see why Bennett is so beloved – he’s got a wonderful sense of urging you forwards, combined with sympathy for the difficulty of the task at hand. He’s also extremely quotable – “A man may desire to go to Mecca. His conscience tells him that he ought to go to Mecca. He fares forth, either by the aid of Cook’s, or unassisted; he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he gets to Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the coast of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrate. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who, desiring to reach Mecca, and harried by the desire to reach Mecca, never leaves Brixton. ” “Never leaves Brixton” – indeed. Anyone trying to do anything significant, sooner or later, realizes that time is one of the chief ingredients. It’s obviously very important, but like anything else that is always there, we often don’t notice it – and perhaps, fail to think about it as much as we should. What is time? I don’t want to get too philosophical; a lot of people have tackled the question throughout the ages. But a few things are worth noting about time. The first is that the Earth is spinning on its axis and is also orbiting around the Sun. One full spin of the Earth on its axis is a “day” – the world around us is dark when we are facing away from the Sun (nighttime), and it is bright when we are facing the Sun (daytime). That is a day. A year – as we currently measure it – is one pass full orbit of the Earth around the Sun. That is a year. The division of the day into 24 hours is largely arbitrary – there have been other divisions of the day into different units, and they work just as well if not better. I’m particularly a fan of “ beat time ” which divides the day into 1000 units, and gets rid of timezones altogether while standardizing the world on “beats,” but that’s largely beyond the scope of this chapter. It’s just worth remembering than while a day is “real” – it’s a full set of movement that heat and sunshine wax and wane through – an “hour” is a made-up measurement. There are other potential measurements. The week – seven days – is also somewhat arbitrary. At different times, people used different measurements for the passing of days. Most of this was standardized during the Roman Republic, early Roman Empire, and Christian Roman Empire, and it largely stuck because it was good enough; when the West industrialized first, these units of measurement were largely adopted across the world. The human species – us – obviously, we evolved on Planet Earth. Thus, gradually our sleep/wake cycles and circadian rhythms came into some sort of harmony with the light and dark cycles of the world spinning. Every day, you need to consume some basic materials – macronutrients, water, oxygen, etc – to stay alive. You do this throughout the days as the world spins around, and in the process your body ages. Gradually, through aging, your body loses the ability to replace damaged and decayed cells, and you die. That might sound stark, but it’s just the facts of the matter. Even as the world spins on its axis, and orbits the Sun, similar movement is happening in your body. You heal and restore lost cells as you consume nutrients and raw materials, though your ability to heal and recover slows down over time, and then that’s the end of the game. We might say, then, that time is a few things – but most importantly, it’s the human perception and measurement of movement large and small. *** TIME AS THE FIRST, LAST, AND FUNDAMENTAL LIMIT Bennett says that space has been explained, but time has not – I’m not sure either of those are true . Human bodies are constantly moving, in large and small ways. Blood is being pumped through your body, you breathe in air and process the oxygen, and then exhale; in short durations, you can heal and recover from most of your body wearing out; in the long run, you wear out and that’s it. You can divide the movements of the Earth spinning and orbiting around the Sun into whatever measurements you want to – we use seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, etc – but the Earth spinning and orbiting is just a fact. Movement is happening on large scales and small scales. Most of what you’ll want to do on Planet Earth requires a mix of small and medium-sized movements from you; you do those movements and actions in time , as the Earth and Sun do their thing. In current technology, and for the foreseeable future, there’s no getting around that. This isn’t good or bad; it just is. “Genius is never rewarded by even an extra hour a day. And there is no punishment. Waste your infinitely precious commodity as much as you will, and the supply will never be withheld from you. No mysterious power will say:—”This man is a fool, if not a knave. He does not deserve time; he shall be cut off at the meter.” It is more certain than consols, and payment of income is not affected by Sundays. Moreover, you cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste to-morrow; it is kept for you. You cannot waste the next hour; it is kept for you. ” In other words, the Earth keeps spinning. You can do whatever you want right now – smartly or foolishly – and the Earth will spin just the same tomorrow. Until the day you die, you’ll wake up and the day will pass just the same. And again, for the foreseeable future, this will remain true. Anything you want to do requires movement, and you’ll do that as everything else is moving. The totality of what you’ll do in life is the set of movements you make, just as everything else is moving. *** SIMPLE GUIDANCE WITH SOME OUTSIZED IMPACT This series will gradually get more intense – we’ll do some very practical math; we’ll discuss the very difficult challenge of modifying one’s of behavior. I wanted to start this first chapter easily enough before we get into the harder parts. Some simple guidance, then – 1. Recognize time as movement. 2. Recognize the “supply of time” is fixed. 3. Cease bad language and thinking patterns from otherwise. Next chapter, we’ll stay with Bennett and drill deep into how to reclaim lost hours so we can use them more profitably. For this chapter, I want to leave you with a very simple piece of guidance: Stop saying you don’t have enough time to do things. As Bennett says, genius is not rewarded with even one extra hour per week, and the biggest knave in the world does not have hours taken from him. We can use measurement units – hours, days, weeks, etc – to help us understand time as it passes. But time, as we understand it, is just the Earth spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun. It’s movement. The question becomes, what movements you’ll make in a given week. I genuinely believe that saying “I don’t have enough time” is a crippling thing, mentally and verbally. It’s easy to do and very common in our culture, but the Earth spins and orbits at the same speed for you as it does for everyone else. Your needs in terms of sleep, your levels of health and energy – these vary, and we’ll talk about that coming forward. I’d like to suggest you think and meditate on the concept of time as movement . The Earth is spinning on its axis and orbiting the Sun. Everything is moving. Meanwhile, you get to make your movements, large and small, during these time periods. It’s fine to say you “won’t get to something” this week, you have other priorities, you’ll be doing something else. But saying you “don’t have time” – as small of a thing as this might seem – I contend that’s disempowering, limiting, and makes a person less effective. We’ll drill deeper into the mechanics of this over the next few chapters, but for now, stop saying you don’t have enough time. You have exactly as much time as everyone else. Limit Breaks #2: 168 Limit Breaks #2: 168 168 How many hours are in a day? 24. Everyone knows that. How many hours are in a week? This, most people don’t know this number off the top of their head. It’s critically important – life-changing, maybe, even – to know. I do not exaggerate when I say this. 168. 24 hours per day x 7 days per week = 168 hours per week. There are a whole lot of immensely practical implications of this number, knowing it firmly, respecting it – and navigating it to the best of your ability. We dive into a few of them in this chapter. *** CHAPTER 5: “TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL” “You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours a day instead of twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents alone know how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one’s self in one’s self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already “put by” about three-quarters of an hour for use. Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six o’clock. I am aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour and a half) in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is given to eating. But I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your newspapers then. I meet you again as you emerge from your office. You are pale and tired. At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to understand that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the mighty suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud, particularly in winter. You don’t eat immediately on your arrival home. But in about an hour or so you feel as if you could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano…. By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day’s work. Six hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office—gone like a dream, gone like magic, unaccountably gone! That is a fair sample case. But you say: “It’s all very well for you to talk. A man is tired. A man must see his friends. He can’t always be on the stretch.” Just so. But when you arrange to go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the suburbs; you spare no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to town in another train; you keep yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not five; you take her home; you take yourself home. You don’t spend three-quarters of an hour in “thinking about” going to bed. You go. Friends and fatigue have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely long (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that time when you were persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and slaved two hours every other night for three months? Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy—the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day? What I suggest is that at six o’clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-five hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., “Time to be thinking about going to bed.” The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living. But remember, at the start, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, “Sorry I can’t see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club,” you must say, “…but I have to work.” This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.” -- Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day , 1910 *** 168 AS A MAGIC NUMBER The dividing of the day into 24 “hours” is somewhat arbitrary, as is the dividing of 7 days into a “week” – you could divide them differently. If I have enough spare time in a decade or two, I’ll probably try to advocate for and popularize the world getting on some form of metric time, like beat time. But nearly everyone uses 24 hours and 7 days; our schedules and clocks and computers and organizations are built around this, so we’ll stick with it. Changing the measurement and units wouldn’t change the underlying fact of the world spinning, anyways – the measurements are less important than the movement. So, as long as this is the convention, we’ll use it. It’s good enough. There are 24 hours in a day. There are 7 days in a week. That means there are 168 hours in a week. There is really no getting around this – everything you want to do in your life will have to fit into these hours and days. So, what do we do about it? *** TWO WAYS TO LOOK AT TIME: MEASUREMENT AND PUZZLE Bennett’s whole idea, his marvelous idea, is that we should learn to budget and spend our hours like we’d budget and spend money. Everything you need and want to do in a given day must fit into the 24 hours of the day, and everything you want to do in a given week must fit in the 168 hours of that week. There’s a major difference between money and time, though: money will sit in your wallet or bank account until you are ready to spend it, whereas time passes on its own moment-by-moment. You cannot bank time; you are always spending it; it is always being spent. I’d like to suggest two ways to look at time, then – the first way is as a measurement . When we talk about having 168 hours per week, we’re talking about a particular measurement of time. You can – literally – measure where your time is going, and make adjustments for the current week and upcoming weeks. Behaviorally, though, time acts more like a puzzle – I don’t mean that as “mysterious.” I mean, almost literally like a jigsaw puzzle where you have to fit the pieces together well. *** THE PUZZLE OF THE WEEK You can see the language is dated, but nonetheless I love this passage – “There is no place in my daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one’s self in one’s self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already “put by” about three-quarters of an hour for use.” There are a lot of ways to visualize time – the calendar app on your computer is a fine one. You can literally block out where you are going and where you have to be on the calendar, and observe where the empty blocks are, and fill them in. Many people do exactly this, attempting to allocate onto their calendar exactly what they’d like to do, and leaving very little blank time. “Calendar painting,” I think that’s what it’s called. But step back from that for a moment – Bennett is pointing out that if you’re commuting by train, you can choose what you’ll do in that time. He says that reading newspapers during a 45-minute commute on public transit is a bad use of 40 minutes. It’s lavish and wasteful. If you instead prepared to do something more taxing than reading the newspaper – such as studying a particular topic you wanted to become more knowledgeable in – you could use the time in commuting more profitably than if you hadn’t set that aside. This is part of the puzzle-fitting of time – figuring out when, throughout your week, you can do more valuable things. *** ALLOCATION AND TIME AS A MEASUREMENT Now, here is why I think the number “168” is critically valuable, and here’s an exercise I strongly recommend you do. I do this a few times a year, and every time I do, it’s very insightful. Actually sit down and calculate where your hours go each week, roughly. Rough is fine – estimates are fine. I average nine hours of sleep per night; after much trial and error, that’s where I function best (unfortunately – I envy the people who can be at full cognitive ability on less sleep). So, 7 days x 9 hours of sleep per night = 63 hours per week sleeping Again, there are 168 hours every week. 168 hours - 63 hours sleeping = 105 hours remaining in the week. (If you slept 8 hours per night, it would be 56 hours per week, and you would have 112 waking hours remaining.) If you have to be at a set place for a job, you can calculate that. Five days per week from 9AM to 5PM is 40 hours. Thus, if I was at a 40-hour-per-week job and slept nine hours per night, I’d have: 168 hours - 63 hours sleeping - 40 hours at the office = 65 other hours How long do you spend eating? If it’s three hours per day, that’s 21 hours per week. There would be 44 hours left. How long do your chores take? Showering, dressing, laundry, shopping, etc? 10 hours per week? Then there’s 34 hours left. *** I RECOMMEND YOU ACTUALLY DO THIS Here are a few big categories to look at – *Hours slept *Chores *Time in the office *Commuting *Time eating To figure out how many hours per week any daily activity takes, multiply by 7 if you do it every day (sleeping), or multiply by five if you only do it on the weekdays. So if you commute one hour each way to the office, that’s two hours per day. If you do it on weekdays (five days per week), that’s 10 hours. Every time I do this exercise, I almost always notice two things – 1. There are quite a lot of hours, dozens of hours, unaccounted for. Where are they going? What am I doing with them? 2. “Little stupid activities” that don’t add much to life – shopping, commuting, etc – are actually eating away at a lot of life and hours. Both of these insights are very valuable for improving how you deploy your 168 hours each week. *** BASIC SUGGESTION: FILLING DEAD TIME We will walk through some basic, intermediate, and advanced suggestions. You can come at the challenge of living better on your weekly hours from either the measurement perspective or the puzzle-fitting perspective; in the end, all your life resolves to actions and movements you’ll make, but you can start from either viewpoint. First and foremost, you want to take time that’s “mostly bad and wasted” and make it slightly better. Smartphones have done a lot in this regard – you can use Audible for audiobooks (or get a library card and Overdrive to get audiobooks for free), as well as using Amazon’s Kindle app on your phone to read books (there’s many free ones that are out of print, as well as almost all major new releases coming out on Kindle). Finally, you can use an app like Pocket to load up reading of longer essays and articles; I know a number of readers forward each issue of The Strategic Review to Pocket, and then read them at their convenience. Whenever I’m in an airport, I’m often dumbfounded to see people doing nothing while waiting in line for security screening, and for customs and immigration when flying internationally. It’s very easy to set it up so you can listen to a book, or read books and essays while in line and waiting for things. This can easily turn 3-5 hours per week of “standing around waiting” into reading and learning. Bennett notes that people wasted their time away on trains reading newspapers in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, because they hadn’t prepared and queued up something better to do with their time. It’s even easier to remedy this fault these days. This is the lowest-hanging fruit – find ways to bring useful things with you, that would otherwise be unpleasant waiting-around time. *** BASIC SUGGESTION: REDUCTION OF TIME ON INSIGNIFICANT THINGS In Bennett’s Sixth Chapter, “Remember Human Nature,” he notes – “To “clear” even seven hours and a half from the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. ” This insight must be noted. To do more of something you want to do, you need to replace some activity you were already doing. This maybe sounds very obvious, but I usually see people neglect it. If you want to write for an hour each day, that means doing one hour less each day of something else you were already doing. “One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it” – indeed. Now, here’s why I recommended you actually sit down and estimate how much time you spend on each major activity in your life: to re-allocate time to some new activity, you need to find where the time was actually going in the past. The best candidates for doing this are, perhaps counterintuitively, not procrastination and waste – but rather, unpleasant routine activities with no payoffs to them. Commuting is the largest one. I can’t say enough bad things about commuting. Commuting is the worst thing in the world. Unless you’re doing it by foot or by bicycle, one of the largest quality-of-life improvements is reducing the amount of time you spend commuting. People think “oh, it’s only 30 minutes each way; it’s only an hour a day” – but when you actually sit and write out where your 168 hours each week are going, you realize it’s very significant. If you’ve got some core job or duties in the world that are consuming 40+ hours per week, and you sleep 8 hours per night (56 hours per week), then that’s already 96 hours. Chores and eating are typically taking 10-20 hours per week or more; let’s call it 10 (but it’s probably more for you if you measure it). So, just sleep+work+chores+eating is already 106 hours. That means you only have 62 hours left each week. If you’re commuting 10 hours per week, that’s 16% of the remainder of your life. And what do you get for commuting? Lower rents? Often, people spend on commuting more than they save on lower rents, when they actually measure it. I won’t go on too long on the topic – it risks crossing over into ranting – but commuting is a dreadfully bad use of time and just about every major study on the topic has shown commuting makes people less happy. Reducing your commuting to a distance you can do by foot or bicycle should be a goal for anyone who wants to do a lot in the world. If it takes 3-5 years to get in a position where you can, fine, but by all means reduce commuting. I’m able to write 200,000 words per year in the time most people spend commuting – what could you do with an extra 520 hours per year? A lot, a whole lot. Cooking and eating is a great joy for many people – if that’s you, by all means keep doing it. For many of the rest of us, it’s just something we do to stay alive. I’d encourage you to measure how much time you spend cooking and eating – it’s probably a lot more than you think – and work to reduce it. My friend Taylor Pearson typically cooks once per week – making a mix of grilled chicken, stew, baked sweet potatoes, etc – and then he can heat them up and eat quickly when he feels like it. Figuring out healthy food deliveries, making purchases like roasted chickens and figuring out foods like stirring boiling water into oats for oatmeal, etc – this is valuable. You can eat healthy without spending a lot of time on it. It takes practice and research, but is possible. Again, 3 hours per day on cooking and eating is 21 hours per week – if you get it down to 10-14 hours or less, you get those hours to spend doing things more meaningful to you. You can and also should experiment with eating once or twice per day – it suits some people more than others, but eliminating an entire meal goes a long ways. *** INTERMEDIATE SUGGESTION: ANATHEMATIZE STATISTICALLY DOMINATED ACTIVITES Quitting things is hard. You should probably quit some things, but it’s hard to do. A lot of people raised in Western countries, especially America, have a sort of Puritanical streak to them – thus, when they try to quit things, they start by trying to quit the stuff they enjoy the most, or the stuff they feel like will be hardest to quit. This seems to be a losing strategy to me. I don’t mean on a spiritual level, but on a very practical one. Quitting things is hard. Quitting the hardest thing to quit is even harder. If you’re looking to redeploy some of your 168 hours per week, then, and you want to quit some stuff, I’d recommend you always start by quitting stuff that’s easier to quit . Let’s compare it to eating junk food – if your favorite food is pizza, quitting pizza will be likely be the hardest food for you to quit. You might seem to successfully quit pizza for a few months, but then, after a very stressful day, you go on a pizza binge. After that, you’re back eating pizza with a vengeance – perhaps eating more pizza than you ever did before the (failed) quitting attempt. I recommend you do something that’s also hard, but much easier: quit stuff that you don’t enjoy very much or get very much out of. In 2016, last year, I quit four types of food, presumably forever: cookies, pastries, candy, and chips. It was very easy. I quit them all a couple months apart. I had one final one of each of them, took a photograph of my last time eating it, and then said – never again. But it was very easy, and I’ve had almost no cravings. The reason it was easy is because I actually don’t like any of those four foods at all. If I wanted to eat cookies, for instance, it was because my body wanted some mix of simple carbohydrates, sugar, a pleasant taste, fats, or I was bored or some such. But I never enjoyed cookies all that much. What I did – and this takes more effort than it sounds like – is I sat and thought really carefully. I asked myself, “If I’m in a situation where I’m hungry, craving carbohydrates, craving fats, wanting something sweet, or just bored, are cookies the best way to get that food/carbs/sugar/fat/sweetness/anti-boredom?” My answer was: no. I’d rather, 10 times out of 10, eat ice cream. So it was actually very easy to resolve to quit those lesser pleasures, they were dominated in a statistical sense by eating ice cream. If I’m at a party and someone offers a cookie, I say no. If, on reflection, I’d really like something sweet/carb-ish/anti-boredom/whatever, it doesn’t take very long to duck out to a convenience store and have an ice cream. I placed zero restrictions on the amount of ice cream I eat. But if you look at the studies on eating, you find that people will tend to over-eat much more when there’s a large variety of food options, and less so when there’s only a single food option. I mean, how much ice cream can a person really eat? Eating a ton of ice cream is gross. Whereas it’s easy to eat a little bit of cookies, a little bit of candy, have a little bit of ice cream, then maybe another cookie, etc, etc – it’s much harder to do that with just eating ice cream forever. Now, this takes more work to do than it sounds. To anathematize – basically, “kill off forever” – a behavior, you have to really understand what conditions you do that behavior under, and find a replacement behavior that fills all those needs. It’s easy to see that you could streamline all carb/fat mixes of foods into eating only ice cream, and thereby limit the random junk food you eat. It’s what I did, and around a year later, it’s humming along in the background of my life easily enough. The trick is, though, to really be honest and introspective about what payoffs the behavior is serving. Applying this time, if you typically procrastinate by browsing Facebook, reading a book might or might not be an adequate replacement behavior. I think if I’d tried to channel all my junk-food eating into vegetables, I’d have probably failed. In terms of anathematizing procrastinating behaviors, you’d start with ones you like less on all levels , but which meet the same needs, as whatever you’re doing. So if you surf a semi-learning website like Quora aggressively, you might be able to replace that with a great curated feed of blogs on a particular topic that’s relevant to you. This might sound like a small thing, but it’s actually pretty big if you can add it to your toolbox – by reducing and streamlining all “junk behaviors” in a particular class (online procrastination, for instance) into a single one, there’s only so much of it you can do before you get bored and go back to work or whatever it is you wanted to be doing. Second, and more importantly, it gives you greater skill at quitting-in-general. The ability to quit things, and fight off dumb impulses towards doing the activity you quit, is a skill. It can be trained. Success helps a lot with developing new skills, and it keeps morale up. You can try quitting things that aren’t very important to you and streamline those into (very slightly) better behaviors, and you become more skilled at self-regulation and quitting. It gradually frees up hours of the week to redeploy. *** INTERMEDIATE SUGGESTION: SEQUENCING Bennett: “What I suggest is that at six o’clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours.” This is also harder to sound than it sounds at first. When you start taking the puzzle of your 168 hours per week seriously, you eventually get to the point where getting another 5-10 hours per week of good work is quite a challenge. At that point, sequencing becomes very important. I’ll go a step further than Bennett – one of the largest gains for me was shifting my morning around. Like most people, I used to: 1. Wake 2. Shower 3. Do morning routines 4. Have breakfast 5. Start working I changed it to: 1. Wake 2. Work, immediately, until a little tired 3. Have breakfast 4. Work some more 5. Do morning routines 6. Shower 7. Work some more This must have been worth between 5 and 20 hours per week of work. At some point, fatigue becomes the limit on work, and the mind needs time to compile between types of hard work. It takes time and practice and study – it’s harder than it sounds – but you can sequence your day in a way that it’s possible to get a lot more done. Merely working 30-60 minutes before your shower makes the shower a recharging and mind-compiling activity, as opposed to routine. It also feels more like a reward, more “earned,” when done that way – it’s more enjoyable to shower after completing an hour of solid work upon waking. Breakfast tastes better after work is done, too. If you really study the pattern of your life, you’ll probably find 5-10 major sequencing changes you can make, that add up collectively to dozens (no exaggeration) of excellent hours each week. Some people are useless before their morning coffee. I used to be. I bought caffeine pills equivalent to a cup of coffee, and take one immediately upon waking. Bennett lists a number of these within How to Live on 24 Hours – stupid little elements of sequencing that make a major difference. The world has obviously changed a lot since 1910, but the general practice is still sound. Things like batching phonecalls to all happen on a specific day of the week or within certain hours, carving out time for naps in the middle of the day, and going to bed earlier and waking earlier. All of these are known to work, but take some effort and practice to put into effect. *** ADVANCED SUGGESTION, MAYBE I think the suggestions above – estimating where your 168 hours are currently going, filling dead time, reducing time on insignificant things, quitting less-enjoyed procrastination in favor of something clearly better, and sequencing your day more carefully – are very much good enough to get started. It wouldn’t surprise me if the average person could 5x to 10x their output on what’s most important to them from those changes alone. This doesn’t need to be made harder than it is. With that said, I know we do have some hardcore readers who have already taken the most basic of steps. For them, I’ll finally note something that’s expensive and inconvenient and not-worth-it for most people, but if you’ve already squeezed most of the juice out of the easy and intermediate suggestions, you could try tracking your time down to the five minute block. It takes about 30 minutes per day, and a couple hours to review once per week, to do that. I do it. It’s useful and I’ve learned a lot from it, but I only started doing it after around five years after looking to get basic patterns in place. If you’ve already got the fundamentals mastered – and seriously, if you haven’t, it’s really not worth it – but if you’ve got the fundamentals mastered, the first step to doing it would be just to write down the start and stop time of activities, and broadly classify them. I’ve got some categories like “Logistics” (planning, basically), meetings, measurement and analysis, high-technical work, routine work, etc. Not too many categories. 5-10 is more than enough, maybe too much. The first step would just be to track all of that for a few weeks. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by how long things take – some things you think are difficult actually don’t take very long, and some things you think are trivial are actually taking a lot of time. If you wanted to go really hardcore after doing that successfully for a couple months, you could then set up a spreadsheet and classify your time into something like “Excellent”, “Okay”, “Bad”, and “Leisure” (I classify “good leisure” as its own thing, and distractions and procrastination as “Bad”). At the end of it, you can output numbers like these for a week – Excellent 1660 total minutes 258.57 minutes per day Okay 2340 total minutes 354.29 minutes per day Bad 565 total minutes 80.71 minutes per day Leisure 1775 total minutes 253.57 minutes per day Ratio: E as % of Work 42.19% Ratio: E as % of Day 27.3% Ratio: E+L as % of Day 54.07% Ratio: E+O+L as % of Day 91.48% That was an unusually good week – the first week of 2017 for me. Of course, divide by 60 to get hours. 1660 total minutes = 27.7 hours spent on excellent work. I’m pretty strict in what I classify as “Excellent” time – it’s almost always large-scale design, innovation, and so on. “Okay” is by no means bad – a perfect week for me would never be more than 70% Excellent and 30% Okay on work ratios, and that would be unusual. There’s always some meetings and email and paperwork and taxes and such, at least for how my life is set up. The chief value in doing this is not for eliminating bad time, but ensuring you’re not being excessively busy and neglecting to do really excellent work. That’s where a lot of people get into trouble – being busy with calls and meetings and email, but not doing really needle-moving hugely-important things. *** PATCHWORK IMPROVEMENTS AND ONGOING GAINS Again, I can’t emphasize strongly enough that I don’t recommend setting up a complicated spreadsheet thing to start. People tend to look for a “single solution” on the most important areas in life, but almost none of life works like that. If you decided today that you wanted to live precisely as excellently as you can (by your own definition), it would be 5-10 years of nonstop tweaking and improvements as a way of life towards getting towards there. For most people, that’s not even necessary anyways – I’m aiming to do Elon Musk-esque things in the world, that’s part of it, but I also get a genuine kick out of doing this. If you don’t enjoy this sort of thing immensely, it’s still worth doing the basics once or twice a year as a quick overview and making some small improvements, but by no means necessary to approach fanatically. And on that note, I’ll leave you with some final cautionary points that Bennett made and that I’ll echo – “Let us now see where we stand. So far we have marked for saving out of the waste of days, half an hour at least on six mornings a week, and one hour and a half on three evenings a week. Total, seven hours and a half a week. I propose to be content with that seven hours and a half for the present. “What?” you cry. “You pretend to show us how to live, and you only deal with seven hours and a half out of a hundred and sixty-eight! Are you going to perform a miracle with your seven hours and a half?” Well, not to mince the matter, I am—if you will kindly let me! That is to say, I am going to ask you to attempt an experience which, while perfectly natural and explicable, has all the air of a miracle. My contention is that the full use of those seven-and-a-half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal occupations. You practise physical exercises for a mere ten minutes morning and evening, and yet you are not astonished when your physical health and strength are beneficially affected every hour of the day, and your whole physical outlook changed. Why should you be astonished that an average of over an hour a day given to the mind should permanently and completely enliven the whole activity of the mind? More time might assuredly be given to the cultivation of one’s self. And in proportion as the time was longer the results would be greater. But I prefer to begin with what looks like a trifling effort. It is not really a trifling effort, as those will discover who have yet to essay it. To “clear” even seven hours and a half from the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have spent one’s time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits. And habits are the very dickens to change! Further, any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live your old life, you are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition, will be necessary. And it is because I know the difficulty, it is because I know the almost disastrous effect of failure in such an enterprise, that I earnestly advise a very humble beginning. You must safeguard your self-respect. Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one’s self-respect. Hence I iterate and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously. When you have conscientiously given seven hours and a half a week to the cultivation of your vitality for three months—then you may begin to sing louder and tell yourself what wondrous things you are capable of doing.” Nothing succeeds like success, eh? If you’re just starting with this sort of thing, aiming to get an average of 1-2 hours a day of excellent work is already a pretty hard challenge – my default recommendation for someone starting out is to get 90-120 minutes of excellent work in during the morning, and build the rest of your life around that. That gives a lot of flexibility in where to start. It could be waking a little earlier and sequencing your morning a little smarter to get some good gains. Bennett recommends aiming for 7.5 hours per week to start; I recommend aiming for between 9 and 11 excellent hours each week reliably as a starting place. You’ll find that’s plenty hard enough, and if it’s easy after a couple months, by all means keep improving and ratcheting the difficulty. But all the while, little lessons and skills and habits and patterns you pick up, those stay with you. They make the rest of your life easier, probably forever, and they increment and add up. There’s no “single secret” – it’s a patchwork of improvements and gains, as you push up against this fundamental limit and fit your movement and action in as the Earth spins around and orbits the Sun and does its thing. It’s satisfying – incredibly satisfying – and I do recommend you give it a think through. A good starting place, if you haven’t already done so, is sitting down and doing a rough estimate of where your 168 hours per week are going. Limit Breaks #3: Actions Per Minute Limit Breaks #3: Actions Per Minute IN THE HOT SEAT “Now it was my turn. I was sitting in a leather armchair in one of the rooms of the Shooting House. The place was furnished like a living room with sofas and chairs, coffee and end tables, mirrors, pictures, and bookcases. There were even books on the shelves. The lighting was dim. Manikins and paper targets were positioned around the room. Some held guns and some were empty-handed. They were terrorists and I was their hostage. There was an armed manikin crouched behind me with one hand on my neck and the other on my shoulder, pointing a pistol at the door. Another terrorist stood on my other side, pointing a submachine gun at my head. Within the next ten minutes, the door be blown in and four of my classmates would assault the room using the close-quarter battle techniques we had learned. Within three seconds of the explosion, they had to kill the terrorists, gain positive control of the room — and rescue me. Bullets would rain throughout the room and someone would be firing live rounds within inches of my head. If they misses a single terrorist or hit me by mistake, the team would fail the training. I sincerely wanted them to pass the exam.” -- Eric Haney, Inside Delta Force *** 30,000 ACTIONS PER HOUR “How many things do you think you can do in an hour? How many problems can you locate, think through, come up with a solution to, and then actually solve in this short time? Stop and think about this, and get into your head a figure that you think is reasonable. What if I told you the answer was 30,000. Would you think that was ridiculous? I certainly would. We live life with a mindset determined by our experiences and our surroundings, and hence each one of us has our own understanding of what is and isn’t reasonable. Clearly 30,000 logic-related decisions and actions in an hour is an absurd expectation – one that no one would take seriously. This was my outlook, just like all other beginners, when they first play a game called StarCraft.” -- Ivan Mazour, “ The APM Principle – what StarCraft teaches us about real life success ” *** LIMIT BREAKS #3: ACTIONS PER MINUTE One of the strangest realizations I had – and it wasn’t original to me, many people have discovered and rediscovered this – is that most of the largest innovations in a field come from outside of the field. It makes sense, of course. After a profession, industry, or skillset becomes firmly established, people tend to observe what the leaders in that field are doing and copy what’s worked in the past. If you take this idea to its logical conclusion, you get all sorts of strange counterintuitive realizations: biggest of all, it suggests that actively studying other fields might be one of the faster ways to make innovations in your own. This isn’t a new idea – Steve Jobs famously studied calligraphy at Reed College out of personal interest, and was the first to bring really aesthetic font choices to personal computing. There’s many examples of people who entered a field with a background in something like engineering, took a rigorous and analytical approach, and greatly innovated in their new field. I’d like to go one step further, though: the largest overlooked gains in a field are likely to come from other fields that seem either (1) totally irrelevant, or (2) are completely lacking in mainstream prestige. I’ve studied a lot of fields. A few years ago, I recognized three that have nearly universal application, but which other people might not realize as having such: finance, warfare, and athletics. All three of those have multiple sides competing within them, so you can see how competition forces each side to improve. Success is relatively easy to observe and measure in each of them: you can see financial returns easily on a graph, you can view the results of battles and wars, you can see the final scores and winning histories of individual athletes and sports teams. Thus, I’m always interested in how top financiers and investors think and analyze, how top military units and soldiers train and innovative, and how top sports teams and athletes are coached, practice, and train. Recently, I’ve added a fourth field to the list of “almost definitely worth studying”: competitive video games. You could even argue that competitive video games function like athletics – lately, tournaments have been growing in popularity in what’s called “eSports” – taking a cue from athletics. Most people won’t consider video gaming a sport, and that’s fine; the definitions aren’t as important. But certainly, at the highest levels, games involve muscle memory, reflexes, strategy and tactics, and training. This chapter, we’re looking at both high-level competitive video games, and modern counterterrorism, to be able to identify and hone in on a key mental model – actions per minute – that we can train into our own lives. *** PROFESSIONAL STARCRAFT “The Koreans have 12 professional StarCraft teams with top players making fat six-figure salaries. Even the average pro gamer makes more than the average Korean. “Not only do Korean pro gamers rake in the dough, but also national attention. 120,000 people gathered live in a stadium to watch a 2005 StarCraft championship--over 40K more than attended the Super Bowl that year. “And if you had any doubt that Korea as a nation takes this seriously, note that the Korean Air Force actually started their own gaming team so that top players wouldn't have to stop playing when the joined the military for their compulsory two-year service. “If you're wondering if it's like this anywhere else, well, no. Almost half of all copies of StarCraft (4.5 million out of 9.5 million) were sold in South Korea. Note they have one sixth the population of the U.S. […] “They're measuring their speed in "actions-per-minute," the number of times in one minute they can move a unit or do something else in the game. In that video, one gamer talks about how at the top levels you need about 300 actions-per-minute. That's five actions per second. “My enthusiastic StarCraft-playing friends estimate themselves at about 30 actions-per-minute. Me, I can do about two, but if you count erratically zooming all over the map trying to find the ramp to your base as an action, maybe three. “They get up to that speed by first being born with a Rain Man-like perfect storm of genetics and then training for a minimum of 10 hours a day, six days a week. Teams actually live together in barrack-like quarters...” -- 5 Insane True Things about Starcraft: The Professional Sport *** FROM TOTAL WAR TO SPECIAL FORCES World War I, World War II, and the Korean War had been “total war” – tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of combatants taking the battlefield against each other. In that environment, the individual precision of an individual soldier was far less important than figuring out how to coordinate thousands of people moving and attacking together, along with the logistics and support to coordinate mass-scale battles. With the Allied victory in World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons, the era of total war had almost passed. During the stalemate in the Korean War, the Soviet Union had been able to develop nuclear weapons of their own, which was largely the end of total war for this chapter of history. Going into the 1960s, poorly equipped guerillas would be wiped out in a large scale battle against modern artillery and aircraft. Therefore, the world saw a rise in insurgent warfare, terrorism, and hostage-taking taking as a way for small groups to put military pressure and the threat of violence against larger and more well-equipped countries. *** DELTA FORCE TRAINING Delta Force was formed in 1977 and modeled on the British Special Air Service (SAS), a top commando unit. The SAS had been one of the most effective units in counterterrorist and anti-guerilla operations in the aftermath of the Korean War era. When American Army Special Forces officer Charlie Beckwith served with the SAS as an exchange officer, including on combat duty in British Malaya, he saw the need for an American-equivalent organization that could handle similar missions. Those missions called for unique and intense amounts of precision and coordination, levels of marksmanship, self-control, and small unit coordination among operatives. Delta Force rose to become the premier counterterrorism unit in the U.S. Army to meet those challenges – the challenge of what to do in the event of terrorist operations like what happened at the Munich Olympics, or in response to the rapidly-increasing amount of airline hijackings happening in the era. After going through an intense selection process that weeded out 90% of the candidates applying, the soldiers of Delta Force repeatedly honed their marksmanship in the “Shooting House” they built. Pay attention to the progression of how they worked on their skills; it is illuminating. In all cases, “targets” are either paper shooting range type targets, or human-sized shaped manikins. From Inside Delta Force – “We started in the Shooting House as we had on the range: first walking through without weapons, then with, but dry-firing. Next walking through live-firing with one target, then adding targets. We increased our speed until we could move at a full run. It was exciting. Standing outside the door to a room in ready position, muscles tensing, wound up like a coiled spring, guns going off in the other rooms. Bill, Mike, Allen, or Bob holding the handle to the door, counting down with voice and fingers — "Three...two…one — Execute! Execute! Execute!” You blast inside and immediately make a turn left or right. Sometimes a target is right in your face — right inside the doorway. You have to shoot on the move; shoot and keep moving at full speed and keep shooting until all targets are taken out. Then you assess the room for other dangers, other threats. Your heart is still pounding from the burst of energy, but your mind has to remain calm and detached. It’s like when you have to observe yourself and the scene from outside your body — from a spot on the ceiling where you can take it all in with a fish-eye lens. Soon it feels good; it feels fluid. You start to clear the room with a style that feels automatic. If a target is in your sector, you shoot it without even looking to see the hits — because you know where the shots went before they were fired. Your pistol or submachine gun follows your eyes while your mind ranges ahead. You can feel the gun moving in your hands, sense and count the shots as they’re fired, but you never really hear the sounds of the shots going off. Somewhere about that time, we added hostage targets to the equation. Then our instructors switched to cartoon targets that sometimes held weapons and sometimes didn’t. That caused a little hesitation and embarrassment at first, but soon it made no difference at all. We either shot for the weapons held by the targets or at targets identified as “bad” (whether they held weapons or not) just as the instructor flung open the door and we hurled ourselves inside to do battle. Then we started working in pairs. Two men in at a time, the first man in taking the heavy side, the second man going to the other side of the room. That added a whole new dimension and feel to the exercise. Hearing and feeling the fire from a partner, knowing the angles of fire were shifting and changing and that a “friendly” was in the room. The angles and elevations of your shots took on added importance. You didn’t want to hit your mate — or he, you — but sometimes the rounds you fired would miss him by inches and his pass just as closely by you. Next we added teammate-down drills: how to pick up a partner’s side of the room if he was shot and incapacitated or his weapons malfunctioned. We shifted from room to room and partner to partner, and each scenario was different from the one before. […] When we could function well as two-man teams we formed into four-man teams. We shifted around the Shooting House between rooms and team members. An instructor was in charge of each room, and we rotated from station to station. Every room presented a new problem and a different situation to overcome.” *** PRECISION TACTICAL SHOOTING The type of training the Delta Force soldiers were undergoing is typically called “tactical shooting” or “tactical marksmanship” – as distinguished from target shooting, where you stand in one place on a shooting range and shoot at targets down range. I’m not a particularly good shot and don’t stay in practice, but I learned basic target shooting in the Boy Scouts as a teenager, and also had the opportunity to learn the basics of tactical shooting – the same thing the Delta Force operatives were learning to a much higher level – where you and a partner are moving and shooting in coordination. It’s a lot more dangerous. A lot more can go wrong. Obviously, an error can lead to a grievous injury or fatality. And the whole thing can be quite confusing: firearms are loud , the recoil from firearms is painful in one’s hand whenever a gun goes off, spent shell-casings are automatically ejected from modern guns and roll around on the floor, and that’s before getting into a bunch of edge cases of what to do if your gun gets jammed. Given that the stakes are so high in this discipline, it forms a uniquely valuable place to study the mechanics and form of human thinking and human action. I universally recommend everyone and anyone learn the basics of marksmanship at some point in their life; I’ve introduced a number of men and women to basic shooting. Even in countries where firearms are highly controlled, there’s usually gun ranges you can pay to shoot for an afternoon that are surprisingly affordable. But even if you never try marksmanship (though again, I recommend it), even if not, the basic mental models of how elite soldiers and law-enforcement officers learn to navigate these difficult and inherently chaotic situations to safely do them at high-speed can be a highly instructive mental model. *** STEADY AND PERSISTENT PRACTICE Starcraft – even professional-level Starcraft where tens of thousands of dollars are at stake in a given competition – is inherently lower-stakes than something as intense as counterterrorism. But, surprisingly – or perhaps unsurprisingly – the aspects of training, competency, and mastery in Starcraft looks strikingly similar to elite-level tactical marksmanship. A famous overview video of Starcraft actions-per-minute, linked by both Ivan and the article on professional Starcraft play – Korean Gamers: APM Demonstration “Interviewer: What is APM? Player: APM stands for Actions Per Minute. It is an average rate of how quick your fingers move. To win a championship, it should be at least over 200’s and in the lower 300’s. Interviewer: Why is APM important? Player: It is a rate that shows how quick you can draw your picture in the game with a keyboard and a mouse. Interviewer: What do you do to increase your APM? Player: I have tried this and that, putting my wrists on sandbags and so forth... Steady and persistence practice seems to be the only way.” *** ACTIONS PER MINUTE AS A GENERALIZED MENTAL MODEL We are in the midst of our series on Limit Breaks – we are looking to figure out what the limits that are holding us back from higher performance and more thriving, and systematically navigate and break through them. All of your life happens throughout time , and this chapter, we’re looking at the smallest units of time. Actions Per Minute. If you complete more per minute than other people, you can do more things than other people. That sounds obvious, but most of life is not very high-stakes. In a counterterrorism operation, being 10 seconds faster might be the difference between a bad guy getting off a shot to kill one of your teammates or a hostage. In those cases, being able to make two precise and accurate shots in a three-second window might be the difference between life and death. It makes sense, then, for counterterrorism soldiers to train to be able to take an action that’s naturally clumsy and awkward – shooting a firearm is not an intuitive or natural behavior – and train to be able to do it finely, precisely, accurately, and quickly. Lower-stakes than counterterrorism is competition – traditional athletics or video games – where an American football quarterback being able to “read the defense faster” and throw the ball where the defense isn’t can lose or win the game. The same applies to competitive gaming; getting to the enemy’s base in Starcraft when he isn’t ready wins you the match. But why do we care in our own lives, if we’re doing things like answering email, getting our taxes done, working on project proposals and descriptions, and getting routine work done? Well, when we realize that we all only have 168 hours each week, being able to do more per minute means being able to do more in life. To take something trivial, if you have 20 emails you need to answer, if that takes 5 minutes (one email answered every 15 seconds), then you have more time to spend doing what you want than if it takes 20 minutes (one email answered every 60 seconds). The person who answers 4 emails of the same type in a minute has 4x the “Actions Per Minute” as the person who answers 1 per minute. This seems small if we’re talking about 20 emails, but what if you have 100 emails to answer? The difference between 25 minutes in your email and 100 minutes in your email is a pretty big deal; it’s the difference between a quick chore and the activity consuming a significant part of the day. In everything you do, if it completes faster, you have more time to deploy on whatever is most meaningful to you – in competitive and fast-moving and high-stakes environment, this is essential. But even in lower-stakes environments, it means more time to do what matters most to you. Training towards a higher APM in the regular activities of your life means more achievement but also, paradoxically, more meaningful things done and lower stress in the process. The last point is counterintuitive – lower stress by going faster? Let’s explore. *** SPEED AS A BYPRODUCT OF DOING THINGS CORRECTLY “Inside Delta Force” is an excellent book, but it’s not a how-to guide. It’s a memoir; you have to extract the mental models for yourself from it. If you want an excellent how-to guide from a veteran elite solider, you can’t do much better than Richard Machowicz’s “ Unleash the Warrior Within .” A veteran Navy SEAL who served as Naval Special Warfare Scout/Sniper Instructor, Machowicz emphasizes that speed comes only after a progression of mastery. Machowicz – “How you practice determines the quality of your performance in deploying a weapon. Perfect performances can’t exist without perfect practice. The Training Pyramid is a systematic method that allows the progression of learning to occur naturally. This provides a way to acquire more weapons (i.e., skills) you don’t already possess. My experiences in training for close-quarter battle honed my thinking about training in general, and introduced me to the ideas behind the Training Pyramid. Close-quarter battle essentially means clearing and securing rooms from terrorists who have taken hostages. In other words, we get rid of the bad guys. This is the most volatile situation imaginable: You have merely a fraction of a second to determine who are the “tangos” (terrorists) and who are the hostages. Not only that, it’s highly possible to shoot one of your own people, because a full- fledged battle will be raging in a space that might be the size of a bedroom. Bullets travel through plasterboard and wood, and if the room is made from concrete or steel there is the danger of ricochet. It’s not uncommon for explosives to go off before and during your entrance. How do we prepare to face this absolute chaos? Reduce the entire process down into distinct increments, second by second. Then, after everyone knows exactly where he is supposed to be, what he is supposed to do, and how he is supposed to move, all the pieces are slowly and gradually put back together . It is a dangerous piece of choreography. People have been shot and killed just in the training. ” Machowicz describes a “Training Pyramid” that goes: Correct Fundamentals Concentration Consistency Accuracy Speed You don’t start by looking for speed and just start moving frantically when untrained; that’s not what elite soldiers are doing, and it’s not what elite competitors in their field are doing. Machowicz compares speed and mastery of anything to typing – “The process of learning to type—or not learning to type!—is exactly what I’m talking about. First you have to familiarize yourself with the keyboard, exactly where all the letters, numbers, and symbols are placed. Then you have to learn how to position your hands so that you can strike the basic keys you need to learn first. These are examples of the correct fundamentals. Next you have to concentrate to be able to physically move your fingers over the keyboard in a way that will produce legible words. To concentrate fully in the beginning, you need to fully, slowly focus on the fundamentals you were given. You repeat those concentrated movements over and over again to be able to be consistent, hitting the keys you want to hit, get- ting the same correct results over and over again. Assuming that you have applied the correct fundamentals, concentration, and consistency, you will find that you are over time able to make fewer and fewer typos and look at the keyboard less and less. Now you are developing accuracy. Finally, as your typing gets more accurate until it feels like second nature, your speed will gradually and naturally increase. Over time you will find you are able to type as fast as you talk! But if something breaks down in the process—you don’t learn correct fundamentals, or you don’t concentrate on what you learn, or you don’t have the patience to practice often enough to develop consistency—you’ll end up like me. A rotten typist.” Speed comes as a byproduct of mastery, starting with the fundamentals. Then, practicing fully concentrating and removing distractions, then consistently outputting the right action, then consistently and accurately outputting the right action, and then – and only then – speed. *** TAKING A FUNDAMENTAL SKILL, MASTERING, AND FORGETTING IT If you look at guides of high-level Starcraft online, they follow similar principles. For instance – “The following techniques can be looked upon as the basic requirements to achieve Master-level rank. It’s important to understand that Master League is only the beginning of high level play. As such, these requirements may appear to be overwhelming, but as Spanishiwa once said: “The way to get really good is to incorporate one thing at a time and focus on it until it becomes second nature, then add the next thing.” (paraphrased) Therefore, picking skill-level-appropriate actions to focus on and integrate into your play and mastering them is the way to eventually acquire all of these mechanics.” The author then makes a simple point that generalizes to everything – “Always use a dedicated hotkey for scouting. Mine was ~ (tilde). I bind this to early scouter drone, then to the first overlord closest to my opponent’s base to fly in around 40 supply or 7 minutes. […] Whatever the hotkey, use that and ONLY that hotkey for scouting and ONLY for scouting. Why? Because in this way, scouting will become second nature and will never have to be remembered again. ” This might seem small or trivial, but is actually the root of Actions Per Minute. Scouting – moving around to reveal the edges of the map and the opponents – is one of the core things that needs to be done in Starcraft. Here, the expert is recommending you (1) always use a single dedicated key on the keyboard for scouting, (2) use that key only, and (3) practice until it “becomes second nature.” Then, you never have to remember or think about it again. *** TRAINING IN THE FUNDAMENTALS Starcraft guides written by master-level players have many similarities, that largely hold across domains. Here’s another one – “You should be able to go through your macro cycles fairly quickly, somewhere around 2 seconds will suffice. If it takes longer than 2 seconds you are too slow. I can do them in 1 second. You want to aiming to slim down that number because macro is such a core part of the game that if you do slim it down imagine the amount of time you can use for micro and other things. Its also very important turn down your key press delay in your control panel keyboard settings. “ The way I was able to learn to hit these keys as quickly as I can was to go into notepad and just ferociously spam these. As well as keys that were hard to hit for me. Do my macro cycle over and over until it was smooth and quick. Until you get to a point where you don't even think about doing your cycles. You need to get to a point where you build a sort of cycle in your macro rotation. Here's an example of my thought process while macroing.” Interestingly, this player recommends practicing and improving, not by playing the game, but by repeatedly and accurately typing the keystrokes into a basic text editor until it’s second nature. He recommends practicing the common “macro” keystrokes, as well as any keys that are hard to hit due to lack of typing skill or unusual hand motions. *** MAPPING THE FUNDAMENTALS Everyday life differs in a major way from known domains – you need to map the fundamentals for yourself. The fundamentals of playing Starcraft are now known at a high level. The fundamentals of clearing a room of terrorists, even, is now known at a high level – after decades of refinement by elite military units. It’s likely that aspects of your work have not been mapped to such a high degree. That means, in order to implement these principles, you need to sit and think, “What would be the perfect way to do this?” A period of self-study is required to make this work well. You look at what outputs you’re creating, the key things that go into creating those outputs, and then you search for the most efficient and effective way of doing them – followed by practicing them until they’re second nature and forgotten. In this way, you diagnose and map “big actions” into smaller pieces, and practice the smaller pieces until they’re second nature. *** A FEW EXAMPLES This can seem like a lot of work. It is a lot of work. It’s worth it. If there’s an activity you do regularly, spending 1-3 hours studying and mapping it might make you 10%, 20%, or even as much as 90% faster – forever. It’s worth remembering, first, that every standardization and mapping of a domain started with experimentation. In any area you’ve learned to a high level, someone did the work of standardizing the field. In Inside Delta Force , the author described the immense amounts of experimentation they did to find the perfect way to do everything. Eventually, an eight-person team clearing a room would work in four pairs of two men – the first pair would break into the room and take the “strong side” of the room (either the larger side or the one with more hostiles), followed by the next pair immediately taking the other side. There was then a couple-second delay before the third pair took the strong side, and fourth pair the weak side. They spent a lot of time experimenting, at chalkboards drawing and re-drawing rooms, and looking for what the “best” way to do it was, in order to establish that as doctrine and then practice it until it was second nature. Everyone’s work differs a little bit, but here are three examples from my own life. 1. Typing: given that so much of what you do involves the keyboard, training typing speed up is very valuable. I already quoted Machowicz on the theory of it; I also practiced using typing games like Z-Type until I could type fast. It’s a little bit boring training one’s typing speed up, but more than pays for itself across life. 2. Complex writing: getting into a more advanced domain, writing long essays used to take me 20+ hours; I cut that time roughly in half by hard-separating brainstorming, outlining, writing, and editing. I did a modified version of Bob Pozen’s guidelines in Extreme Productivity – his chapter on writing is excellent and works very well. When I moved from being an “inspiration writer” to a writer who had mastered the mechanics and fundamentals of writing, I was a lot slower for my next 30-60 of writing, but then I moved at double the speed forever. This came, again, from breaking down writing into discrete stages – Brainstorm, Outline, Write, Edit – and practicing each of them individually. As I developed my own mechanical style, I also looked to identify problems where a piece wasn’t coming together well, naming these: “Lack of thesis”, “Transition problems”, etc. I then developed specific techniques on how to get through those problems as quickly as possible, and practiced those as well. 3. Processing photos and videos: doing activities like the GiveGetWin Tour tend to produce a lot of photos and video worth sharing. The first year we did it, we just took photos and video, and afterwards we had a big pile of unprocessed photos and video that was a massive hassle to go through. In subsequent years, we pre-decided (1) exactly the file system in Dropbox everyone would upload photos and videos to, (2) exactly where we’d look to upload photos and videos online, and (3) most importantly, we’d go through a cycle of doing this after every Tour date. The first time, we had a huge backlog of photos and videos and not knowing what to do with them. After developing protocols, it was 15-30 minutes after a single event to upload all of them to the write place, delete and free up memory on all our cameras and phones and videocameras, and get everything online. What had been a slow and unwieldy process became a standard part of debriefing an event. These are small, maybe almost trivial things, but if neglected, it takes way too long to get anything done. By diagnosing and mapping out how work should go in advance, and practicing that, you eventually get a lot of “free speed” – and things become easier and less stressful as the actions become automatic. *** THE FINAL TRIAL Haney -- “Now that I was here, I realized it was harder to be the shooter than the hostage. To be on the assault team required great confidence in your abilities. To be the hostage required faith in your comrades. It was easier to think of being shot than of shooting a mate. As the minutes ticked by so slowly, I thought about the long, hard path we’d taken to this point. We had spent untold hours on the range, and in the Shooting House, and had fired hundreds of thousands of rounds to get here, to this room, to this chair. I heard an explosion down the hall, then the immediate stutter of pistols and submachine guns in another room. The firing was over in just a few seconds. I hope that went well. I glanced down at my watch. The assault should be any time now. I hope these guys pass their test, I most sincerely do. The door exploded with a flash and a clap, and a shock wave hit me like a punch in the face. I could see the team hurling themselves into the room, see the splashes of fire from the muzzles of their guns, and feel the slap of overpressure as bullets flew by my face. But I can’t honestly say I heard any one distinct sound or that my brain registered any one distant image. It happened so fast, so suddenly, that even though I was expecting it, it was so completely overpowering that my system was unable to respond until it was all over. The ferocity of the attack stunned me. It was like being struck by lightning – a pure and elemental force. J.T. was the team leader. As he gave commands to his team to conduct the search, I unfroze enough in my chjair to check the terrorist over my shoulder. The manikin’s head was lying on the floor a few feet away, with one hole just under the right cheek and another slightly in front of his ear. The terrorist on my side had a pair of holes at the base of his throat. The rest of the manikins and cartoon targets around the room had at least two hits in the kill zone; some had four where the three and for men had added their shots to an already hit target. When the team finished their room search, J.T. gave me a toothy grin from under his lush mustache. “You okay, Bubba?” he asked as he looked me over from head to toe. “Yeah J.T., I’m fine” […] It all came off without a hitch. Everyone had multiple turns as a hostage, and as an assaulter with a live hostage in the room. Nobody was hurt and no targets were missed. And the confidence that life-or-death final examination gave us – in ourselves as much as in our mates – stuck with us for life.” *** FINAL GUIDELINES To increase your Actions Per Minute, 0. If it’s a brand new field or a unique part of your workflow, diagnose and map out the best way actions can go. This takes a while. If it’s an established field or workflow, search out some best practices on how to do it. 1. Break your actions into the fundamentals and practice how to do the fundamentals correctly. 2. Aim for full concentration and consistency first, before worrying about how good the output is. When you slow down and start doing any action correctly from a blueprint, quality can suffer a little bit at first, but that’s okay. 3. Aim to increase accuracy and quality while following the correct fundamentals. 4. The speed comes from there – with practice and more repetitions, you get faster. You also can start addressing edge cases and make things more complex at this stage. 5. If desired, you can also start measuring how long things take, and perhaps evaluating the quality of how good things came out. Marksmanship gives pretty clear feedback on if you hit the target or not, but in other fields, you might need to develop your own way to evaluate quality. We’ll talk more next chapter about how to standardize and automate activities; we’ll go deeper into that. For now, start thinking on how to increase your Actions Per Minute. Given that time is the fundamental limit of life, being able to complete things faster gives you more time to do whatever you like – whether that be more work, more leisure, or something else, getting things done faster makes a lot more possible. And finally, do remember when you’re going faster in the correct way, it should be easier and more enjoyable and less stressful. Speed isn’t franticness – it’s mastery. Limit Breaks #4: Automation Limit Breaks #4: Automation WHERE'S ELI WITH THE GUNS? “The first figure of note to attempt the goal of interchangeable parts was Eli Whitney. Having seen his attempt to market his cotton gin end in disaster, Whitney turned in 1797 to the idea of gun manufacture. At the time, Congress anticipated an attack from Napoleon. Playing on this fear, Whitney was able to initiate the practice of government contracts for arms dealers -- a custom that continues to this day. “The contract was astoundingly generous. Going into effect on June 21, 1798, it called for Whitney to produce 10,000 muskets, the first 4,000 of which would be delivered in a year and a half. For each musket delivered, he would receive $13.40, for a grand total of $134,000, with advances along the way if necessary. What made this handsome sum all the more astonishing was the fact that Whitney had almost no knowledge of gunmaking in a time when the best armories were unable to produce more than 5,000 guns a year. “Whitney set up a factory in East Haven, Connecticut and drove his workers hard, but come his first deadline on September 30, 1799, he had no muskets to show for himself. Indeed, he hadn't even equipped his armory. Thinking quickly, he wrote a letter to Secretary of State Oliver Wolcott, announcing a "new principle" in manufacturing. This principle, he claimed, would revolutionize that arms industry even as it improved the quality of the goods. “"One of my primary objects," he wrote, "is to form tools so the tools themselves shall fashion the work and give to every part its just proportion -- which when once accomplished, will give expedition, uniformity, and exactness to the whole." Intrigued, Wolcott granted an extension, on the condition that Whitney demonstrate his results. “In January of 1801, before an audience that included President John Adams and Whitney's old friend, President-elect Thomas Jefferson, Whitney personally showed how he could fit 10 different locks into the same musket using nothing but an ordinary screwdriver. He then did one better and took 100 different locks apart, scrambled their pieces and put them back together "by taking the first pieces which come to hand." His audience was amazed.” -- “ Eastman and Mass Production ”, PBS.org *** FICTION AND REALITY The American novelist Tom Clancy once wryly noted, “The difference between reality and fiction? Fiction has to make sense.” We’re going to be talking about automation this chapter. It’s very useful stuff. It’s also supremely complicated to tell the tale of it. Where to even begin? The whole thing is almost hilarious in its mess of how it came about. Well, let’s start in media res – in the middle of the action. I’m generally proud to be an American, and I think if you look at the historical record, for all of America’s flaws, American leadership has mostly acted in a well-intentioned and good faith way on the international scene. A notable exception is how the early Americans treated the French after the French Revolution. The French and Spanish monarchies supported the 13 Colonies in the American War of Independence, largely to hurt their rival power, the British Empire. This included the French King giving loans to the Americans to finance the war, to be paid back over time. When the French Revolution followed the American Revolution, the American leaders did something perhaps a bit underhanded: when the new French Republican government wanted to collect on the French loans to the Americans, the Americans hemmed and hawed a little bit, and said: “Well, gee, you know, the French King loaned us the money from the French Crown , and you killed the King and dissolved the Crown, and so, umm, there’s no one for us to pay our loans back to, and they’re nullified.” The French didn’t take well to this, and America and France were on the brink of war at the end of the 1790’s. In fact, there was an undeclared “Quasi-War” when American and French naval ships harassed and attacked each other. Worrying that perhaps the French might declare a full war against America, Congress authorized the manufacture and purchase of weapons to fight the war. One of those commissions went to Eli Whitney, who invented the famous cotton gin to clean cotton by mechanical means. He’d never made weapons before, but he got the commission on the strength of his reputation. Unfortunately, he missed his first deadline to deliver the muskets. When American government officials called angrily on him – “Hey, Eli, where’s the guns?” – he replied that he had something marvelously better than the old way of making weapons to show them. *** REALITY AND FICTION It’s hard to do justice to just how much Whitney’s demonstration would have shocked those in attendance. Let’s try – “Until [Whitney’s demonstration], all firearms were made by highly skilled artisans who made the entire weapon, crafting each part from scratch and filing and fitting them by hand. Each part, and by extension each musket, was one of a kind—the trigger made for one gun wouldn’t work on any other because it fit only that musket. Broken muskets could only be repaired by expert craftsmen. If the weapon broke in the middle of a military campaign, you were out of luck. Armorers capable of such skill were scarce, and new ones took forever to train, which was why the U.S. arsenals were having such a hard time making muskets.” -- “ Changing the World Twice: The Story of Eli Whitney ” Before Eli Whitney, high-precision gunsmiths were required to keep weapons functioning, and every musket required precision custom work to build, repair, and maintain. Everything was custom. “A “stand of arms” was the flintlock-era term for a musket and its accessories (ramrod and bayonet). The accessories had traditionally been hand-fitted to the gun, too: as strange as it sounds to a modern soldier, if you and the fellow in the next rank inadvertently swapped bayonets, you might both be left unable to fix them.” -- “ Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts ” Congress had ordered 10,000 regular muskets from Whitney, but when he fell behind on his delivery schedule, he decided to buy some time for himself by showing he could make a far better weapon that required far less from gunsmiths and armorers to both manufacture and to keep working. The general historical consensus now is that Whitney faked much of the demonstration – his factories weren’t good enough to make weapons truly interchangeable, so he cheated a little bit by bringing a few different batches of prototype interchangeable-part guns with him to the demonstration. Nevertheless, Whitney wasn’t caught – and it didn’t matter anyways. The idea of having all guns made to the same standard, where parts can be rapidly replaced and swapped out between them, absolutely captivated the attention of the Americans in attendance. Right away, they saw the applications to warfare – and perhaps, to all of industry. *** THE BIRTH OF THE AMERICAN SYSTEM “The American system of manufacturing was a set of manufacturing methods that evolved in the 19th century. The two notable features were the extensive use of interchangeable parts and mechanization for production, which resulted in more efficient use of labor compared to hand methods. […] In the 1850s, the "American system" was contrasted to the British factory system which had evolved over the previous century. Within a few decades, manufacturing technology had evolved further, and the ideas behind the "American" system were in use worldwide. Therefore, in manufacturing today, which is global in the scope of its methods, there is no longer any such distinction. “The American system involved semi-skilled labor using machine tools and jigs to make standardized, identical, interchangeable parts, manufactured to a tolerance, which could be assembled with a minimum of time and skill , requiring little to no fitting. “Since the parts are interchangeable, it was also possible to separate manufacture from assembly, and assembly could be carried out by semi-skilled labor on an assembly line—an example of the division of labor.” -- Wikipedia: American System of Manufacturing The United States always had a low population relative to its natural resources, and so labor was often scarce. Soon after seeing Whitney’s demonstration, there was an explosion of activity to create interchangeable systems in making all types of consumer goods, industrial goods, and parts. It spread internationally quickly and was adopted by just about every country. Eventually, interchangeable parts in weapons hit its zenith under the Soviet Russian weaponmaker Mikhail Kalashnikov, whereas the Japanese took the concepts the furthest in a lot of complex consumer products like cars and televisions. Even though Whitney’s demonstration had a bit of deceptiveness to it, it captured the imagination of the early Americans, who ran it out to its conclusions and quickly led to America being one of the highest-output industrial countries in the world. But this raises an interesting question – how come it didn’t happen sooner? There’s records that Carthaginian warships from 2000 years ago used interchangeable parts, and likewise, the system had been re-invented by Venice in the Venetian Arsenal from the 1100’s to the 1500’s with great success in making ships, artillery, and firearms. But how come it didn’t diffuse widely and “stick” until the 1800’s? Why didn’t this innovation – which could be clearly understood in ancient times – become widespread earlier? This is an important question, not just from a historical perspective, but also regarding implementing these principles in your own life. Remember the question – we’ll come back to it, after we analyze the benefits of adopting these principles. *** LIMIT BREAKS #4: AUTOMATION Automation is a fancy buzzword these days, but the principles behind it are remarkably simple and sound. As we try to do more things in life, we run up against fundamental limits. Chief among them is that there are only 24 hours in a day and 168 hours in a week. That’s the final limit, in the end – everything must be navigated through time. You can increase how many actions you can do per minute by training and practice, and that goes a long way towards being able to do more. But regardless of how good you get at quickly doing things, that too hits limits – after a certain point, you just can’t get any faster at a particular type of cognitive or mechanical action. And, just as importantly, you get tired. None of us works every waking minute at peak effectiveness. (I’ve tried. It’s probably not possible.) Automation greatly helps us do more, by decreasing the number of things we need to do to produce an outcome. Putting dirty clothing in a washing machine is more automated than washing the clothing by hand. Regardless of how well you deploy your time and how quickly you can work per minute, the person loading and unloading a washing machine is always going to be faster than someone washing the same amount of clothing by hand. That’s an obvious example – it might seem trivial, even – but it’s the root of what we’re driving at here. By reducing the number of steps that require manual intervention, one of the chief limits to higher performance can be broken through. *** THE AUTOMATION SPECTRUM Most people, I contend, do not understand what automation is . More importantly, they do not know how to automate things. In the common (incorrect) understanding, something is either automated or it is not. After a lot of work in this area over the last few years, I don’t believe that’s true. Rather, I think it’s a spectrum. Kai Zau and I work a lot on automation – in commercial work, in nonprofit work, for education, and in a variety of personal and life projects too. Here are the primary four stages along the automation spectrum, as we see them – Bespoke -> BRP -> ERP -> Automated Something Bespoke is completely custom. When you hear about a “fine bespoke suit,” that’s a fully custom-made suit. This is a type of work that is not automated at all – every single time you do it, you’re doing it from scratch. You can become more skilled at doing it faster, but you’re starting from the beginning every single time. From there, things go into Barely Repeatable Processes (BRP), and from there to an Easily Repeatable Process . These terms came from Sigurd Rinde , a terrific, little-known thinker who has done some excellent work on the topic. A Barely Repeatable Process uses common ways of doing things, but still requires a high level of skill and judgment to execute. An auditor from an accounting firm doing due diligence on a complicated business merger follows some checklists and processes, but there is still immense amounts of human judgment and training needed in advance to be able to run that process. An Easily Repeatable Process is one which doesn’t require much skill, education, or advanced training to complete; you can be trained in how to run that process, or even figure it out from just instructions, without coming in with expert levels of knowledge. Most fast food franchises, like McDonalds, are run on collections of ERPs. There’s an exact way to take orders, enter them into the cash register, give a receipt with an order number on it, cook the food, and serve the food in exact containers, exactly the same way in a bag or on a tray, in an exactly the same pickup place every single time. Finally, there’s “full automation” – when a human doesn’t need to interact with a system any more to produce the outcomes. If you saved a regular order of supplies from Amazon.com and logged in to order them from time to time, that’d be an Easily Repeatable Process. If you scheduled the deliveries automatically every two weeks without further intervention, it would be nearly fully automated. *** DRIVING THINGS DOWN THE AUTOMATION SPECTRUM Most people think of things as either “automated” or “not automated,” but again, I believe that’s an incorrect way to think about it. Rather, in any complicated work, there will be dozens of small individual processes that go into it. By driving things from Bespoke -> BRP -> ERP -> Automated, they get “more automated” each step of the way. If you wanted to build a cabin and had to go scout which trees to chop down for lumber, chop down the trees, and treat the wood yourself, followed by drawing your own architectural plans from scratch, and then building the cabin to those specs, it would be fully bespoke. If you bought a manual on how to build cabins and adopted those designs, it would move the planning aspect from Bespoke to a Barely Repeatable Process. If you bought the treated wood at Home Depot, it would drive the lumber procurement from Bespoke to an Easily Repeatable Process. If you’re a party planner and you plan every party from scratch, then every party is Bespoke (fully custom). If you have a simple checklist you make sure to include each time, it becomes a Barely Repeatable Process – you still need the skill and judgment to be able to implement the checklist, but you’re not starting from scratch. If you have detailed checklists and templates that you use each time, a book of suppliers and venues, and standard orders that can be filled out in a spreadsheet, those become Easily Repeatable Processes. If you use a technology like Eventbright for RSVPs and for automatic reminders to go out about the party, that aspect becomes fully automated. Not all work is fully automatable – or rather, the “fullest automation possible” in a given domain will vary; some things are more conducive to automation than others. Brain surgery might include some easily repeatable processes, but will always require technical training to do, and has fully custom aspects as well. On the other hand, simple blood and urine tests for first screenings can get pretty close to easily repeatable processes and nearly fully automated. *** THE ADVANTAGES OF AUTOMATION The advantages of automation are rather clear – it reduces the amount of labor time needed to produce a result, and it reduces the amount of skill and judgment needed to run a process. Human judgment, skill, and technical ability are serious limits to getting more done. By driving things down the spectrum of automation, those limits can be surpassed. It becomes cheaper, easier, and faster to do things. *** WHY AUTOMATION DOESN’T HAPPEN So why doesn’t automation happen? There’s strong evidence that Carthage was using interchangeable parts in shipbuilding as early as over 2000 years ago. Periodically, a particular civilization will get on an automation kick like Venice did in the Middle Ages, and their output will soar. But this “soft technology” came and went across history, and only stuck fairly recently. Why? I think the answer is important, because it will also shed light on your own life. And here is my answer – the first step, going from fully bespoke to standardized towards a barely repeatable process , is very expensive and time-consuming. If you’re a skilled woodcutter and a skilled carpenter in a world without any formal processes around either of those, it will always be faster to go build another cabin than to sit and think about a universally standardized design for wood and cabins that work across a wide variety of situations. “ Eli Whitney and Interchangeable Parts ” – “Whitney’s guns still had a lot of hand work in them. In general, parts that could be turned and screw slots on early Whitney muskets show machine tool work, and flat and irregular parts show hand filing. His key innovation may have been organizing the work by type of work rather than by type of gun part. Workers seem to have been specialized, also: if you were a filer, you were likely to be a filer of lock plates, or of triggers, rather than a generalist. And these filers were paid, apparently, piecework rates.” Whitney held out the promise out of interchangeable parts in weaponmaking, but he never fully reached that standard in his own life. It was only his heirs that were able to actually actualize Whitney’s vision, decades after he started to work on it. Decades! “In 1825… 195 separate operations in musket production were listed in a report about Springfield Armory, and were identified as performed by hand or by waterpower. The number of operations per part ranged from three for the sear to 24 for the barrel. Among them were, for instance, five for the trigger: forging by hand, trimming by water, filing by hand, polishing by water, and hardening by hand. At the Whitney Armory, as we currently understand the site, if a trigger went through the same sequence, it would be forged in the east bank forge shop, then taken to the west bank machine and filing shop for trimming, filing and polishing, and returned to the east bank for hardening before finally joining other parts of the “mounting” in the stocking shop on the west bank. Each of the other 29 musket parts mentioned in the list would follow its own sequence of journeys back and forth across the Mill River for shaping, cutting, and heat treating. ” A skilled gunsmith could “work by feel” – using their intuition and experience – to make a gun. Contrast that against those early modern armories which had over 195 different operations that all had to be studied, understood, standardized, setting required quality levels (“tolerances” they’re called in engineering), managing all the work so it adds up, and perfecting the process. The gains to this type of standardization and automation are immense; take for instance Whitney’s earlier intervention of the cotton gin – “Using Whitney’s cotton gin, in one day a laborer could clean as much as 10 pounds of upland cotton, which before would have taken 10 days to clean by hand. If a larger gin powered by water or a horse was used, a laborer could clean as much cotton in one day as would have taken more than seven weeks to clean by hand. […] Between 1785, the year that steam power was introduced to the textile industry, and the early 1860s, the price of cotton cloth fell by more than 99%. That’s the equivalent of a price of Tommy Hilfiger jeans falling from $5,000 to $50. ” But again, this required changes in how cotton was harvested, how it was cleaned, how it was woven into thread, standard designs of clothing, how the cotton was dyed, how it was sewn, and how it was shipped. The standardization and automation of all those processes would take an immense amount of time, study, thinking, and design to standardize. In any given short window of time, it’s almost always faster to produce one more unit in the current way of doing things than it is to study and experiment with a system to mass produce more of it easier and more efficiently. That’s why it rarely happens. *** GUIDANCE, I: MAKE TIME AND SPACE FOR AUTOMATION IN YOUR LIFE Obviously, we won’t be able to cover the entirety of automation in a single chapter… I’ve read dozens of books on the topic and related to the topic, and frankly, I still feel like a beginner much of the time. Automation might be worth its own series at The Strategic Review at some point in the future, but the first piece of guidance I have for you is to recognize its advantages and to make time and space for it in your life. Driving things down the automation spectrum means things take less time to do and complete more efficiently, can be done on less energy and when less smart, and means quality will be more consistent over time. The biggest reason people don’t do automation is because they’re too busy, or at least, they don’t make time for it. The first piece of guidance I have for you, then – Move beyond just doing work, into studying your work and how to make it better and easier over time. That’s an easy sentence to write, an easy sentence to read, but it’s something the majority of people aren’t doing. My good friend Kai Zau has had a very successful life, has achieved a lot in a very short period of time, but to my eyes, it looks like he works “less hard” in some respects than a lot of other people I know who are less successful. He still works very hard, but rarely seems stressed or overwhelmed, and doesn’t put a “heroic effort” into work very often – and yet, he’s constantly succeeding. One of the biggest reasons is that Kai hates doing the same type of work twice without stopping to improve things after the first run of it. Any time we do a project together and are going to do a similar version again, he insists on studying everything that went right and wrong, and making decisions for how to do it better on the next version. Not “perfect” – just “better.” He has an acronym, RUNI Work – “Recurring Urgent Non-Important” Work, that’s his most hated type of work. Whenever he spots RUNI Work, he looks to design and improve things so that the RUNI Work gets designed and automated away. Surprising, this doesn’t take very long to do. If a project takes 10 weeks to start and complete, it might only take 1-2 weeks of study and design improvements in order to make the next time take only 6-8 weeks to complete. It’s “net free” to do, but most people rush from fighting one fire to fighting another fire, and thus, their work never gets easier. The specific techniques and strategies of automation can easily be learned, but the tactical points are worthless without adopting this principle – Move beyond just doing work, into studying your work and how to make it better and easier over time. *** GUIDANCE, II: STANDARDIZE In order to automate anything, you need to standardize the outputs (the results, what you want to happen) and you need to standardize the inputs (the work you’ll be doing). To standardize outputs, you need to sit down and brainstorm what levels of quality and performance you want out of your work/outcomes. This means clearing a few hours from your calendar, and sitting down writing out every outcome that could happen and picking which mix of outcomes are most profitable and desirable. You should standardize outputs, to some extent, before looking to standardize inputs. In other words, start with what quality levels and output you want. From there, you can work to pick the tools and work processes that are most reliable and inexpensive to get to that level of performance. But again, you’ll need to clear time out to really sit and think and compare mixes of work, to determine what levels of quality (outputs) you want, which will determine your inputs. The Russian AK-class rifles are generally seen as being less accurate than American M-class rifles, but they use less precise parts and are thus less expensive to make and easier to maintain. If you’re making a precision sniper rifle, that calls for higher quality parts and workmanship than if you’re making loose infantry assault rifles. There’s often no “single right answer” of what level of quality you should standardize to; it depends on your strategy and which tradeoffs you want. But sitting down and thinking, and standardizing on any spec is better than not doing it, if the work will happen repeatedly going forwards. *** GUIDANCE, III: OPERATIONALIZE AUTOMATION INTO YOUR LIFE Once you’ve decided to make time and space for automation, and started standardizing outputs and inputs, then you merely need to install regular review periods to “chip away at it.” Automation isn’t a single gigantic binary thing that must be done or not done; rather, it comes from constantly making things a little more standard, reducing the work a little bit, making re-usable standard parts that can be used over and over again, designing a system to produce less RUNI work and less inefficiencies and broken parts. This happens over time. To get the benefits of automation, you want to always be doing it a little bit – this means building it into your operations , building it into how you do things. The most fanatic example of this is probably Toyota. When a single error is detected on their automobile production lines, any worker who sees it is expected to pull an alarm that shuts down the entire assembly line until the problem is fixed and identified so that it never happens again. That’s obviously very hardcore. Each shutdown costs hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost performance. And yet, they do it every single time, and are thus forced to improve rapidly. On the other end of the spectrum, you might simply look at how to reduce time required and increase automation every 2-3 months. That's probably enough to capture the easiest gains periodically. If your life is very project-based, an easy way to operationalize automation into your life is to always schedule a week after any major project completes to study what went right and what went wrong, to standardize what went right so it happens every single time, and to design new ways of doing things so the negative and most expensive aspects can be made easier going forwards. Just putting a single extra week on the calendar after any major project goes a long ways towards getting great automation done. *** A FEW SIMPLE EXAMPLE CANDIDATES FOR AUTOMATION Everyone’s work is a little different, but there’s some universal and common things we all do. Email: *If you get two very different types of email, such as urgent work email and nonurgent email, you can divide them between two different email addresses and develop different processes for answering them. *If you get a regular type of email, you can write template replies that can be copy/pasted every time it comes up. *You can save templates to Textexpander on the Mac or the Windows equivalent to make them easier to copy/paste. *You can reduce incoming email by doing things like writing a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), making announcements and details more clear, and avoiding problems upstream. Communications: *Creating a standard template agenda for a meeting goes a long way towards saving 10-20 minutes each meeting “getting on the same page.” *You can move many ad hoc “got a minute?” type meetings to a chat app like Slack. *You can get a Slack bot to ask questions as prompts daily for people. Kai designed a Slack bot for us that asks, every day at 8AM, “1. Progress to celebrate? 2. Today's top priority? 3. Anything blocking / needing coordination? 4. How's our tempo / trajectory? How could we improve? ” Multimedia: *Creating standard folders for photos and videos on Dropbox, pre-shared with the right people, goes a long towards keeping these usable. *You can experiment with tools that make it easier to rapidly edit and polish up photos and videos before posting them to different sites. *You can develop simple checklists of where photos and videos are posted, and do this every single time. Miguel Hernandez of Grumo Media does excellent work on this. Personal Finance: *Getting two separate credit cards for business expenses and non-business expenses goes a long way towards keeping your taxes organized. *There’s a lot of ways to get all credit card and expense data to export from a bank’s website to be easily imported into accounting software. It takes a few hours to set up, but then makes things happen faster going forwards. *You can set automatic transfers to savings accounts and retirement accounts to come in when your paycheck lands, automatically. *You can use something like mint.com or ones of its competitors to get all your aggregate spending in a single place for review, if you use multiple cards. *For squaring up on joint expenses, you can’t beat splitwise.com – very easy to enter shared expenses on it, and to square up with a person you split expenses with later. Food: *It takes a while to set up, but eating 80% of your meals from a standardized meal plan goes a long way towards making healthy food choices automatic. *Going further on that point, if you’re looking for a certain body composition (losing weight or gaining weight), you can look to standardize all your meals to the same amount of calories – 500 calories, 600 calories, 800 calories, or whatever. For instance, two cups of oatmeal with one scoop of protein powder is 420 calories, 3 eggs on a salad with two small cans of tuna is 460 calories, and one Mealsquare is 500 calories – thus, if you eat 4 meals of those type in a day, you’ll be around 1700-2000 calories. A double-chicken Chipotle bowl with brown rice, beans, cheese, and no sour cream or guacamole is 835 calories; that can swap in for two meals. Again, this takes a little while to set up – probably 5-6 hours to calculate out different meals – but then makes eating to precise targets very easy and fast. *Pre-cooking a week’s worth of food every Sunday goes a long ways. *Setting up standard delivery orders of food from your grocery store, Amazon.com in the USA, KateandKimi.com in Shanghai, etc, goes a long way towards having the same food arrive each week. *** SLOWLY AGGREGATING GAINS Perhaps this stuff can seem boring – heck, maybe it is boring. But the upside of it is, if you regularly reduce the amount of time and thinking needed to produce outcomes, gradually your days get easier and you have more time to do whatever you want. There are, of course, many more ways to automate work that are specific to what you’re doing. With writing TSR, I have a format I follow of macro-outlining a series, defining what research I need, and then doing research rapidly while saving articles and information to an app called “Pocket” which automatically syncs to my iPhone and computer desktop. I estimate that setting this up took only 2-3 hours, and it saves me 30 minutes or so per issue. That was 3 hours once , to save 26 hours per year . If you regularly make choices like that, and build the mindset of automation into your life, works gets easier and more reliable over time. You spend an hour or two, here and there, to buy back 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes per week. As you do this, it gets easier to get things done in less time and have more bandwidth available to do bigger and better things, easier and more smoothly, over time. Is it boring? A little bit, maybe. But perhaps, far less boring than constantly being bogged down and firefighting while overwhelmed with trivial details. Limit Breaks #5: WIP And Decay Rate Limit Breaks #5: WIP And Decay Rate TOYOTA TAKES OVER AN ALREADY WORLD-CLASS PLANT FOR A MONTH “The Toyota Supplier Support Center agreed to take one product line in this world-class plan and use the methods of [the Toyota Production System] to transform it. At the end of this nine project, the production line was barely recognizable compared with its original world-class state and had attained a level of leanness the plant could not have thought possible. This production lined leapfrogged the rest of the plant on all key performance measures, including: *46% reduction in lead-time to produce the product (from 12 to 6.5 hours) *83% reduction in work-in-process inventory (from 9 to 1.5 hours) *91% reduction in finished-goods inventory (from 30,500 to 2,890 units) *50% reduction in overtime (from 10 hours to 5 hours/person-week) *83% improvement in productivity (from 2.4 to 4.5 pieces/labor hour) […] When I lecture companies on the Toyota Way, I describe this case and ask, “What does this tell you?” The answer is always the same: There is always room for continuous improvement. “But were these small, incremental improvements?” I ask. No. These were radical improvements. If you look at the original state of the production line at the beginning of the project, it is clear from the results that the company was in fact far from being world-class[…] The implications are clear and disturbing: this lean plant was not even close to being lean based on Toyota’s standards, despite being recognized as a lean facility. […] Visitors were coming to the plant convinced they were seeing world-class manufacturing, suggesting they did not have a clue what world-class manufacturing is.” -- Jeffrey Liker, The Toyota Way *** LIMIT BREAKS #5: WIP AND DECAY RATE This chapter, we’re going to borrow a term from manufacturing: WIP. WIP stands for “Work in Process” or “Work in Progress.” When a car company makes a car, they make a lot of the parts separately – the engine, the transmission, the frame, the body, the tires, the windshield, and so on. Until this is all assembled and ready to be sold to the customer, it’s WIP – work in process. After the product is fully assembled and before it’s sold, it becomes “inventory.” Now here’s something you might not expect – larger amounts of WIP and larger amounts of inventory predict a company being less profitable and more likely to fail. If you’ve read up on the topic a little bit, maybe that’s not so surprising. It’s 2017, after all, and this became commonly accepted wisdom around 30 years ago. Before that, though, it was very surprising. For a while, Toyota had a higher market capitalization – the total value of the company’s stock on the stock market – than every other car company in the world combined . Just to be clear, so you know what that means: for a while, Toyota was worth more as a company that Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, BMW, Mercedes, Rolls Royce, Peugot, Ferrarri, and every other car company combined . Combined. One reason is because Toyota’s engineers and executive understood, counterintuitively, that inventory and WIP were both very dangerous and potentially very bad things, and worked constantly to lower the amount of them without compromising their performance. Most of us will never be involved in manufacturing, but we’ll borrow the mental model of WIP and inventory from manufacturing, and talk about how work always has both carrying costs and a decay rate associated with it. *** INVENTORY AS AN ASSET, INVENTORY AS A LIABILITY In traditional accounting, inventory is an asset – it’s a valuable thing. You put it on your balance sheet as an asset. As such, before the lean manufacturing revolution pioneered by Toyota, American automakers would typically run their factories at full production ability. This would convert raw materials into inventory of finished cars. Here’s the thing: while that’s correct in accounting terms, often the American car companies would make more cars than consumers would buy before the end of the year. They put those cars into storage and warehouses. This involved “carrying costs” – you needed to pay rent for the storage space at the warehouse, you needed to pay security to make sure the place didn’t get broken into, and you needed to transport cars to the warehouse once they were built, and from the warehouse when they were bought. Additionally, many of the car companies carried debt to finance their production. If the raw materials and labor costs to build a finished car cost $20,000 and the car sat in the warehouse for a year, they had $20,000 tied up in that car. If they’d borrowed money at a 5% interest rate, they paid an additional $1000 in interest costs to leave the car stored there. Thus, while inventory is technically an asset, it has liabilities associated with it. Storing cars in a warehouse costs you money. But wait, it gets worse. *** NOBODY BUYS AND FORD DUMPS CARS AT DISCOUNT Every year, most car companies put a new version of each of their models out. So if it’s 2017 right now, the 2017 Ford Camry is for sale. Maybe Ford is selling it for $25,000 and expecting to make a $5,000 profit. But once it turns 2018, who wants to pay full price for last year’s model? Nobody. So any remaining unsold cars start getting discounted more heavily at the end of 2017. Once the year rolls over, Ford might be selling for only $21,000… and if they still have unsold cars, they might have to sell at a loss – for $19,000 or $18,000, just to get rid of the thing, get it out of the warehouse, and get their cash back to pay off the interest on the debt to finance making the thing. Ford – and indeed, most car companies worldwide before Toyota changed things – routinely built more cars than they could sell, and when they had too many cars at the end of the year, deeply discounted them and took a loss on them. You can see how this gets brutal fast – if it cost Ford $20,000 to make the car, $1000 in interest charges to finance holding the inventory, $500 in storage and transportation and security costs, and then they sell it at a loss for $19,000, they lost a total of $2,500 on that car. And this used to routinely happen, all the time, to most major car companies. It was seen as a largely unavoidable part of doing business. *** TOYOTA AND “JUST IN TIME” “The Toyota Production System borrowed many of its ideas from the U.S. One very important idea was the concept of the pull system, which was inspired by American supermarkets. In any well-run supermarket, individual items are replenished as each item begins to run low on the shelf. “ That is, material replenishment is initiated by consumption. Applied to a shop floor, it means that Step 1 in a process shouldn’t make (replenish) its parts until the next process after it (Step 2) uses up its original supply of parts from Step 1 (that is down to a small amount of safety stock). In TPS, when Step 2 is down to a small amount of safety stock, this triggers a signal to Step 1 asking it for more parts. “This is similar to what happens when you fill the gas tank in your car. As in Step 2, your car signals a need for more fuel when the gauge tells you that the fuel is low. Then you go to the gas station, Step 1, to refill. It would be foolish to fill your gas tank when you’re not low on gas, but the equivalent of this overproduction happens all the time in [manufacturing] mass production. At Toyota, every step of every manufacturing process has the equivalent of a gas gauge built in (called kanban), to signal to the previous step when its parts need to be replenished. This creates pull which continues cascading backwards to the beginning of the manufacturing cycle. In contrast, most businesses use processes that are filled with waste, because work in Step 1 is performed in large batches before it is needed by Step 2. This work in process must be storage and tracked and maintained until needed by Step 2, a waste of many resources. Without this pull system, just-in-time manufacturing would never have evolved.” -- Jeffrey Liker, The Toyota Way This seems like a subtle thing, maybe, and can be hard to get your mind around. Basically, Toyota wouldn’t build components until they were needed for the final product . That is, they wouldn’t make a bunch of windshields just because the glassmaking station was empty. They’d wait until they had a batch of cars that needed windshields, and then make the windshields for that batch alone. This meant you didn’t have a lot of finished glass sitting around that you had to store and had to make sure nobody knocked over and broke. It lowered the amount of storage and security needed, space needed, and cash needed to finance it. Likewise, the parts that went into windshields – raw glass and rubber and treating chemicals – they wouldn’t buy those, either, until they were out of those and a new batch of windshields needed to be made. This is a subtle point, but with big implications. After a couple decades of doing things this way, Toyota could sell cars at a profit for cheaper than American car manufacturers could make a car at all . Once that happens, the game is over and you have won. Indeed, without repeated bailouts and protectionist legislation from foreign governments, Toyota would likely have put almost every foreign car manufacturer out of business many times over. *** AND DECAY RATE Decay rate is my own term, that I typically apply to knowledge work. But we can first understand it in a manufacturing setting. Let’s say your factory makes as many windshields as it can, even if there’s no cars to be assembled with those windshields. Then, the end of the year rolls around, and suddenly, the next year’s model uses a different shape and design of windshield. At this point, you have a backlog of windshields that can’t and won’t be used. You might be able to sell them for spare parts to car dealerships and mechanics, but again, that’s a complicated logistical hassle. You might need to scrap the windshields entirely, meaning all the cost that went into making them is wasted. Likewise, if a humid hot spell hits the warehouse, maybe the windshields warp a little bit and become useless scrap. Or heck, maybe they just get lost in the storage process. That, too, was not an uncommon thing in manufacturing. All unfinished work is always decaying. It’s not always possible to know the exact decay rate, but any unfinished work-in-process hanging around is always in danger of decaying, breaking, or becoming obsolete. *** APPLYING CARRYING COSTS AND DECAY RATE TO KNOWLEDGE WORK Obviously, most of us will never be involved in industrial mass production. However, the general mental models from manufacturing can be profitably applied to our own lives and work. All “partially completed work” has some similar attributes to work in process. All “completed but not shipped and harvested work” has some similar attributes to inventory. And again, all knowledge work that you aren’t fully complete and done with has both carrying costs and decay rates for you, which are expensive and making your life worse. *** MENTAL BANDWIDTH AS A LIMITED RESOURCE The first and most obvious cost with unfinished work is that you can’t completely forget about it yet. All of us have limited bandwidth – the amount of things we can think about, coherently, without getting overwhelmed. For the vast majority of people, any unfinished projects or work will randomly recur in one’s thinking. “Should I start doing my taxes yet? Hmm…” – this is unprofitable. Broadly speaking, every time you think about something without making progress on it, you’re paying a cost. It’s draining a little bit of your cognition and taking your mind away from where else it could be spent profitably. This is okay to do, even correct to do it, if you’re intentionally letting some work sit and “marinate” and thinking about it in the background. That’s not what we’re talking about. Rather, we’re talking about work where you know what the next step is to getting it complete, that you’re sure you’re going to complete, but where you haven’t completed it. Any thinking about that work without doing it is mentally expensive. Obviously, we’ll have readers with a wide variety of different life circumstances. If you’re under the “overwhelm threshold,” you probably can’t imagine just how expensive it is to have work hanging around uncompleted. For people over the overwhelm threshold, it’s very expensive. Incredibly expensive. Actually, paradoxically, people that are constantly over the overwhelm threshold also probably don’t realize how expensive it is… life runs a lot better when nothing is on fire, and you can pick the most profitable work to do on any given day, or just take the day off and take leisure if you’re tired, or indulge in the best idea you have. You can only keep so many things in your life without losing track of them. Anything that’s started-but-not-finished, that you’re sure you want to finish, you’re incurring some mental cost from. *** DECAY RATE IN KNOWLEDGE WORK Most complex technical work requires “loading the problemspace” in one’s mind, in order to be able to complete it. Depending on the task, this might be as little as a few seconds, or as much as 15-30 minutes. For very big projects, it might be 2-4 hours of going back through and studying all the relevant materials. As a general rule with my writing at TSR, for every working day I spread writing a particular essays across, that adds around an extra hour of time to complete the piece . This shocked me when I saw the numbers on it, and I checked and re-checked them repeatedly. It doesn’t seem like I take much longer when the writing is spread across multiple days, because it certainly doesn’t take me 60 minutes to re-read my notes and research materials before I start writing. But, as with any kind of complex work, things happen the fastest in “flow state” – when time just disappears, and everything just gets done. I reckon this is where the increased costs come from – whenever I spread a piece across multiple days, I have to re-read what I’ve already written to get a consistent tone across the piece and re-check research materials to make sure I’ve got the right names and dates – this might take 15-30 minutes total – but then, I have to go through the “warming up” period where the writing is a struggle for a while before breaking through. Most aggravatingly (and stupidly), there were times in the past where I’d gotten a piece 90% finished and it would only have taken 20-40 more minutes to finish it, but then stopped for the day. Often, it would then take 2-3 hours for me to write a solid conclusion. Of course, this is very aggravating when it happens – an obvious example of the mental decay rate in action. Things get worse when multiple people are involved – every extra week a project drags on means more coordination meetings, “getting on the same page” again, and so on. And, of course, my writing is not prone to being changed by outside demands. If you were an attorney who had a brief for a case almost complete, but then the client changes the direction, it might mean going back to square one. If you had a complete brief already done, perhaps those change requests never would have come in at all – negating the chance that past work goes obsolete. (At least most attorneys bill hourly. The rest of us don’t have the luxury of charging for our obsolete work.) *** GUIDANCE: A MACRO MENTAL SHIFT My first and foremost piece of guidance is a mental shift that I recommend you make – seeing all work-in-process and “unsold inventory” in your life as dangerous and potentially harmful. We’ll run out some tactical implications in a moment, but the mindset shift is the most important. Whenever there’s work you’ve committed to do, and haven’t finished, you’re in a somewhat dangerous position. Now, we don’t need to exaggerate this or get histrionic about it – it’s probably not going to be the end of the world if things drag on longer than they need to, and you end up taking more costs as a result. But with that said, if you can reduce the amount of time you have incomplete WIP in your life, you’ll succeed faster, succeed more, be more calm, and have less work go to waste. It can seem like a small thing at the margin, but it adds up. For a small personal example, we recently started advertising the Ultraworking Pentathlon using Google Adwords. Customers love the Pentathlon and we think it’ll be profitable to advertise. Kai and I designed the landing pages, chose keywords, and set up all the tech and created an Adwords account. That took about three days. Then – and this is fully on me – when it was 90% complete, I let it sit for about five days. This is not the end of the world, of course. The first version of the project got out the door in 8 days instead of 3 days. But… for the next five days, even though I had higher priorities (getting Machina out the door and turning around some admin and paperwork I needed to do), getting the Adwords live stayed in the back of my mind. I thought about it at least a couple times each day without making progress on it, taxing bandwidth ever-so-slightly. Meanwhile, we started getting initial data and results five days later than we otherwise would have. Again, this isn’t the end of the world – but there’s many opportunities each year to make this type of error. If I make a five-days-later error 20 times per year, we’re 100 days behind a more ideal schedule on market feedback. Sure, it’s only five days – but every new customer we get might refer someone or repeat purchase, and that’s delayed five days. Take 20 such delays, and you can see how a company that reliably turns around projects in 3-4 days will outperform a company that takes 8 days. While 5 days seems like a small number, over many decisions it adds up. The person that lets the project sit uncompleted has a higher chance of abandoning it, requires more time to “re-load the problemspace” mentally to do the work, the work takes longer, and the results come later. You pay the carrying costs and decay rate. Again, not the end of the world. But the first step, overwhelmingly, is making the macro mental shift – All work-in-process and “unsold inventory” in your life might be dangerous and potentially harmful. *** SEQUENTIALIZING PROJECTS The second piece of guidance I have for you might sound trivial and obvious for people already doing it, and it might seem impossibly hard for people who are very far away from it – Aim for sequential projects instead of parallel projects, whenever possible. Sequential means doing them in a sequence: Project 1 completes, so then you start Project 2. You don’t start Project 2 when Project 1 is 50% complete, or even 90% complete. You get Project 1 done and completely out of your life before starting the next one. As an example, if you were a student that had four final papers for your classes, and they were all due in 20 days, you’d be much better off spending 3-5 days to get one of them completely done and submitted before starting on the second one. If you do the math, under most circumstances that’ll be the cheapest and sanest way. It also means less risk – if you break your ankle or get seriously ill with 3 days left in the semester, only one final project is at risk, instead of all 4 of them if you did them all in parallel. There are already many people operating this way, and the advice might seem trivial to them. Those people tend to be very successful. I first heard this advice from my friend, the terrific CEO Zach Obront, who built his startup BookInABox to over $6 million in annual revenue within three years of starting. He runs hard, fast, and sequential on his projects as much as possible. For other people, it seems impossible – there’s already 15 things going on, and they’re all on fire. Yikes. In that case, you might recognize that perfection here isn’t required – and indeed, almost all of us will have blended parallel projects from time to time – but you’ll still benefit from often saying, “Which of these can I get done and completed forever?” and then prioritizing those, to lower the number of things in process and free up mental bandwidth as a result. Finally, you might do well to install a weekly review where you select and schedule your projects, and almost never agree to projects mid-week. I did this and it changed my life. Whenever I have a new opportunity, unless it’s obviously massively better than whatever else I’d be doing, I tell the person I’ll take a couple days to think about it, and I overview all of my already active projects at the same time, looking at what’s going to be delayed and how much as a result. Starting new projects before you’ve finished your last ones is a recipe for higher carrying costs and a higher decay rate, which are of course expensive. A project has to be really good to make it worth blending and parallelizing with other already-good things in process. *** “TEFLON” AS TACTICAL AND OPERATIONAL GUIDANCE Finally, I’d like to give you one word that’s been incredibly profitable for me – Teflon. Teflon is what they coat pans with to make them “non-stick” – things don’t stick to Teflon. Most of the tactical improvements you can make to your work habits in this area come from being more “Teflon-like.” For instance, there’s the famous “OHIO” rule – “Only Handle It Once” – meaning, train yourself to not touch a piece of work until you’re ready to complete it. For email, playing Baydin’s “ Email Game ” will only show you a single email at a time. Use it and refuse to skip any email until your answer it or process it, and you’ll only look at a particular email once. Whenever my inbox gets above 20 or so, I use Email Game to process it. If you do a type of work that always takes multiple sessions to complete, it can be useful to break the work into separate steps that can be completed in a single session, and to aim not to start on the work until you can at least get the next complete step. This was revolutionary for me with writing – I separate out brainstorming, outlining, research, editing, and writing, all of which can be handled as separate steps. I know I can work to get a complete outline in 30-60 minutes, and on a busy day, I can schedule just outlining and know it’ll get complete under an hour. Probably the hardest part of Teflon-ness is undergoing the mental and emotional training to always push through if you’re a little tired but work is nearing complete. I like to call that “Terminator Mode,” after Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg character in the movies of that name. Whenever The Terminator was near a target, it would go into, well, “Terminator Mode” and relentlessly go after the target. If work is far from complete, I don’t stress and work at whatever pace, and comfortably break off for the day if my concentration is scattered and I’m not working well any more. But around 85% complete or so, I try to flip into “Terminator Mode” and really relentlessly stay with it until it’s complete. This can be harder than it sounds, and it takes training and practice to build into your life. But whenever you catch yourself saying, “Well, this is almost done, but I’m getting a little tired/hungry/whatever…” – stop! Terminator Mode! Teflon! I actually debrief every single day “Was I net-Teflon?” as a Yes/No question. It meant not letting any work hang around that could’ve been completed. For such a small thing, it’s really almost miraculous in its effects. *** IN CONCLUSION All work-in-process has some carrying costs associated with it, and some decay rate. As long as something you’re committing to doing is incomplete, you’re paying at least some small cost each day. The first thing you ought to do is recognize that , and make the mindset shift that it’s good to be Teflon . As much as possible, work to sequentialize your projects, not doing the next one until the current one is complete. If you’re over the overwhelm threshold and have multiple projects open that you’re genuinely going to complete, consider prioritizing whichever one can finish to reduce the mental carrying costs and decay rate in your life. Then, work both tactically and operationally to train good work habits around Teflon-ness into your life. The time from starting a packet of work to that packet completing is one of the chief predictors of success, because it means less stress, less cost, greater efficiency, greater flexibility, and more calm and control in the process. Limit Breaks #6: Theory Of Constraints Limit Breaks #6: Theory Of Constraints SCIENCE “The Goal is about science and education. I believe that these two words have been abused to the extent that their original meanings have been lost in a fog of too much respect and mystery. Science for me, and for the vast majority of respectable scientists, is not about the secrets of nature or even about truths. Science is simply the method we use to try and postulate a minimum set of assumptions that can explain, through a straightforward logical derivation, the existence of many phenomena of nature. “The Law of Conservation of Energy of physics is not truth. It is just an assumption that is valid in explaining a tremendous amount of natural phenomena. Such an assumption can never be proven since an infinite number of phenomena that can be explained by it does not prove its universal application. On the other hand, it can be disapproved by just a single phenomenon that cannot be explained by the assumption. This disproving does not detract from the validity of the assumption. It just highlights the need or even existence of another assumption that is more valid. This is the case with the assumption of the conservative of energy which was replaced by Einstein’s more global — more valid — postulation of the conservation of energy and mass. Einstein’s assumption is not true to the same extent the previous one was not “true”. “Somehow we have restricted the connotation of science to a very selective, limited assemblage of natural phenomena. We refer to science when we deal with physics, chemistry or biology. We should also realize that there are many more phenomena of nature that do not fall into these categories , for instance those phenomena we see in organizations, particularly those in industrial organizations. If these phenomena are not phenomena of nature, what are they? Do we want to place what we see in organizations to the arena of fiction rather than into reality? “This book is an attempt to show that we can postulate a very small number of assumptions and utilize them to explain a very large spectrum of industrial phenomena. You the reader can judge whether or not the logic of the book’s derivation from its assumptions to the phenomena we see daily in our plants is so flawless that you call it common sense. Incidentally, common sense is not so common and is the highest praise we give to a chain of logical conclusions. If you do, you basically have taken science from the ivory tower of academia and put it where it belongs, within the reach of every one of us and made it applicable to what we see around us. “What I have attempted to show with this book is that no exceptional brain power is needed to construct a new science or to expand on an existing one. What is needed is just the courage to face inconsistencies and to avoid running away from them just because “that’s the way it was always done”. ” -- Eliyahu Goldratt, Introduction to “ The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement ”, emphasis added *** A GENERAL FACTOR OF CORRECTNESS? As soon as I saw that question – “ Is there a general factor of correctness? ” – my eyes lit up – “… is there a General Factor of Correctness? “Remember, IQ is supposed to come from a General Factor Of Intelligence. If you make people take a lot of different tests of a lot of different types, people who do well on one type will do well on other types more often than chance. You can do this with other things too, like make a General Factor Of Social Development. If you’re really cool, you can even correlate the General Factor of Intelligence and the General Factor of Social Development together. “A General Factor Of Correctness would mean that if you asked people’s opinions on a bunch of controversial questions, like “Would increasing the minimum wage to $15 worsen unemployment?” or “Which interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct?” or “are artificial sweeteners safe?” and then somehow discovered the answers to these questions, people who did well on one such question would do well on other types more often than chance. “This is a surprisingly deep and controversial issue, but one with potentially big payoffs. Suppose you want to know whose economic theories are right, but you don’t want to take the time to learn economics. Consider some position that was once considered fringe and bizarre, but now known to be likely true – for example, pre-Clovis settlement of the New World. Find the economists who believed in pre-Clovis settlement of the New World back when doing so was unpopular. Those economists have demonstrated a proven track record of being able to winnow out correct ideas amidst a sea of uncertainty. Invest in whatever company they tell you to invest in and make a killing. “I’m sort of joking, but also sort of serious – shouldn’t something like this work? If there’s such a thing as reasoning ability, people who are good at sifting through a mess of competing claims about pre-Columbian anthropology and turning up the truth should be able to apply that same skill to sifting through a mess of competing claims about economic data. Right?” If you’ve been a reader of mine for a while, you can probably guess my answer: Yes. Yes, of course there’s a general factor of correctness. I had been looking for a phrase along those lines for a while. Certain authors across history seem to have it. As you get deeper into history and science, you start to get a sense for it. But I never had a word for it. I was calling it something like “general truthfulness” or “universal truthfulness” or something along those lines, but I never had a phrasing that I was quite comfortable with. A “general factor of correctness” – yes, that’ll do. You start to get a sense for it, the more you read. “Generally-correct” writing, when I see it, has a sort of reasoning quality to it. You can see this in the writing of excellent researchers, historians, and scientists – they spent a lot of time laying out the circumstances that cause them to investigate something, they look at from all angles, and they follow things to their conclusions – and are surprised by them. If you’re never surprised by your investigation into something, that should be a huge red flag. After all, if every conclusion you find after investigating something turns up what you already expected to find, wouldn’t that be odd ? If you look at the writings of a “generally correct” author – someone like Richard Feynman or Paul Graham – you find them stumbling onto counterintuitive things, and outlining their reasoning throughout. Pick any Paul Graham essay – one like his 2009 piece “ Relentlessly Resourceful ” – and you can see him walk around the topic some, think it through, find the conclusions, reason through them some more, test the ideas, caveat them, and eventually come to conclusions. Or take any given chapter from Feynman’s memoir, “ Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman ” – and you start to see a pattern. Something happens, you reason through it, you follow the reasoning to its conclusion, and you refine from there. When you read the writings of Miyamoto Musashi from Sengoku Japan, or Xenophon’s account of fighting in the Persian Civil War, you get a sense of correctness from it – or, perhaps they err at times, but they err honestly. There is a general search for truth, observation, and surprise in their writings. You read Musashi’s Book of Five Rings or Xenophon’s Anabasis , and you realize these are people honestly and wide-rangingly searching for the true nature of things. This brings us to Eli Goldratt. *** LIMIT BREAKS #6: THEORY OF CONSTRAINTS “... and most importantly, I wanted to show that we can all be outstanding scientists. The secret of being a good scientist, I believe, lies not in our brain power. We have enough. We simply need to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see. The key ingredient is to have the courage to face inconsistencies between what we see and deduce and the way things are done. This challenging of our basic assumptions is essential to breakthroughs.” The Goal by Goldratt is one of my favorite books. I sat down to skim it to write this chapter, and I wound up reading the whole book again – for the sixth time. I’ve recommended it to almost everyone I know in any type of industry or entrepreneurship, and it always gets universal acclaim. In this chapter, we’ll look at one of his core ideas – the Theory of Constraints – but we’ll spend even more time looking at why this generally correct idea isn’t applied more often. “The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom "a chain is no stronger than its weakest link." This means that processes, organizations, etc., are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them or at least adversely affect the outcome.” -- Wikipedia: Theory of Constraints The basic idea of the Theory of Constraints is a rather simple one: you identify what is the current “bottleneck” or “constraint” to achieving the goal you’ve set out for yourself, and you go to work immediately and directly on that. Non-obviously – and Goldratt lays this out well in the book – working on non-bottlenecks produces at best marginal gains, rather than huge gains. That’s true and we’ll cover it, but it’s not the hard part of understanding and implementing TOC in your own life. The hard part is thinking . *** THE THEORY OF CONSTRAINTS, SIMPLE VERSION Imagine, for a moment, a company that only does one thing: turns raw iron ore into a strong steel alloy, selling finished steel ingots. This might involve five steps – 1. Purchase raw iron ore from supplier. 2. Heat the raw ore and filter it to remove impurities. 3. The alloy process to the raw iron into a stronger type of steel. 4. Packaging the final alloy into a shippable form. 5. Selling the finished alloy to a customer. The simple idea of the Theory of Constraints is that, at any given time, one of those five steps is the “constraint” – the weakest part of the process. If you can’t find enough raw iron to buy, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of the purification and alloy process is. If you the heating and filtering process is limited in your factory, it doesn’t matter how good the rest of the processes are. And so on. Finally, if there’s not enough demand – if you don’t have enough customers wanting to buy the finished product – then it doesn’t matter how good you are at making this steel alloy, until you can find more sales. In other words, if you have an infinite supply – you can buy as much raw iron as you want – and if you have more demand at profitable prices than you’re currently serving, meaning you’ll make more sales and profit if you make more steel – then whichever is the slowest or lowest-capacity process in Steps #2, #3, and #4 is what’s holding you back from selling more steel and being more profitable. *** THE EASY PART IS EASY; THE HARD PART… The easy part of the Theory of Constraints is rather easy. You walk around and observe what’s the slowest or weakest part of a process. You improve that process. If there’s a line out the door of customers that want to buy hamburgers from you, and you can’t make enough hamburgers, you look at why: are we running out of hamburger patties? Can the grill only hold six burgers at a time? Does it take too long to cook the burgers? Are we running out of buns? Is the cashier taking too long to take people’s orders, and they’re getting aggravated and leaving? The Theory of Constraints says something that’s correct, but counterintuitive – improving the area that’s not the current bottleneck won’t give you much gains. It’s kind of obvious – if the biggest thing holding you back from making more sales is that only six hamburger patties can be on the grill at a time, and the cooking process is already as fast as it can be, then pretty much the only way to make more burgers would be to get more grill space. Anything else you did – taking customer orders a little faster, putting the burger on the bun a little faster, etc – any of these might be small improvements, but wouldn’t lead to a huge improvement the way that getting more stove space would. The easy part of the Theory of Constraints is easy – you study to see where your bottlenecks are, and then you do some mix of increase capacity, re-design how the resource is needed, increase efficiency, etc, until that place isn’t the bottleneck any more. It’s very simple on the surface, yes, but why is it hard to do in practice? *** PROBLEM #1: INGRAINED ASSUMPTIONS The Theory of Constraints is a simple way to evaluate the performance of a system, identify what’s holding back higher performance, and set about to improving performance. It’s terrific. But often, the biggest bottleneck or constraint to higher performance will be held in place by some ingrained assumption, a “sacred cow” that’s hanging around. When Goldratt was looking to popularize his work in operations during the early 1980’s, he got a lot of pushback from executives using outdated accounting methods. Eventually Goldratt declared, “Cost Accounting is productivity's public enemy number one." “When cost accounting was developed in the 1890s, labor was the largest fraction of product cost and could be considered a variable cost. Workers often did not know how many hours they would work in a week when they reported on Monday morning because time-keeping systems were rudimentary. Cost accountants, therefore, concentrated on how efficiently managers used labor since it was their most important variable resource. Now however, workers who come to work on Monday morning almost always work 40 hours or more; their cost is fixed rather than variable. However, today, many managers are still evaluated on their labor efficiencies, and many "downsizing," "rightsizing," and other labor reduction campaigns are based on them. “Goldratt argues that, under current conditions, labor efficiencies lead to decisions that harm rather than help organizations. Throughput Accounting, therefore, removes standard cost accounting's reliance on efficiencies in general, and labor efficiency in particular, from management practice. Many cost and financial accountants agree with Goldratt's critique, but they have not agreed on a replacement of their own and there is enormous inertia in the installed base of people trained to work with existing practices. ” -- Wikipedia: Throughput Accounting: History We don’t need to get into all the details behind the history of it, but cost accounting made a lot of sense in the 1890s when it was developed. It worked pretty well. Similarly to how Isaac Newton’s laws of motion worked pretty well for astronomy, but weren't the final definitive version of physics. By the 1980s, the conditions that had made cost accounting very useful had largely changed. The biggest thing is that most labor costs were no longer “per piece” but were for a fixed amount of hours per week. As such, assigning the per-hour labor cost of each laborer to each piece of work they did… well, it was a creaky system. It would sometimes output very odd and incorrect things, where a factory would turn down a profitable contract and keep a laborer idle and doing nothing instead, because the cost accounting numbers (incorrectly) showed a particular job would be unprofitable. Traditional cost accounting methods would also stop a manager from assigning more labor to the bottleneck station in production – to save ten or twenty dollars, the manager might be giving up hundreds or thousands or dollars of revenue. Absurdities like those. We all have ingrained assumptions, but obviously, they can be hard to realize. For instance, there’s a lot of graphic designers who believe they “can’t code” – even though a designer with basic coding skills might make double or triple the income on an hourly basis, a lot of people just assume they can’t do it. Or maybe they’re not even assuming they “can’t” – they’re just not thinking about it. You might improve every aspect of a graphic design process, but the final constraint on higher profitability from that profession might just be where the supply and demand rates are for that field. Subtly shifting one’s focus, skillset, or market might be the necessary if you wanted to be more profitable. “But we’ve always worked in this field, in this way” – yes, that’s precisely the problem many people have, without even realizing they have it. *** PROBLEM #2: SEARCHING FOR BASIC PROCEDURES AGAINST OUR NATURE This quote from Goldratt stood out to me – “This is not going to be easy. We all are action-oriented and searching for basic procedures is almost against our nature…” We explored automation last chapter – and we noted that it’s always faster to do another individual action than it is to standardize a way of doing things. The Theory of Constraints is a very effective way to identify the point of greatest leverage in a system – the point which, if you improve it, will make everything much more effective. But it requires slowing down from “doing things” and getting into a detailed mode of study. You need to take observations and make hypotheses of where things are slowing down, and how they could be improved. Sometimes, it’s not obvious how to best make improvements, and you might need to brainstorm dozens of ways and try the most promising potential methods out to see if they work. This is unnatural. Time and space must be created to study how things are already working, identify what’s holding them back from working better, and brainstorm and test potential improvements to elevate performance. *** PROBLEM #3: LACK OF A GOAL, OR A BAD GOAL Goldratt’s book is titled The Goal. It takes a bunch of concepts from operations management that are normally boring to most people, and turns it into a novel where a manager of a failing manufacturing plant has only a short time to turn it around or the plant will be closed. Interestingly, the first problem that the protagonist of the novel runs into is not knowing the goal of his plant should be . There’s a bunch of competing and conflicting mandates from headquarters, “cut costs” and “increase efficiencies” being the two biggest ones, and yet, the plant keeps losing money no matter how many costs are cut. The protagonist takes a while to get to what the goal ought to be (spoiler: profit), and it becomes very clear and obvious and straightforward to him once that happens – but many other senior managers stay in a zombie-like commitment to little tactical pieces that are bad goals. For instance, “market share” is a common goal for businesses. But Apple has only around 15% of the market share of smartphones... and yet Apple makes 91% of all profits in smartphones . Whoa. Bad goals come with hidden assumptions baked in – for instance, you say “our goal is to get market share” but the hidden assumption is that that will lead to profit, whereas that’s not always universally true. On the other end of the spectrum, often people struggle because they don’t have any goal at all. For health and fitness, for instance, it’s relatively easy to do a Theory of Constraints type analysis on what’s holding you back from higher performance in any particular sport, or to any particular concrete benchmark. This is why people training for a marathon, triathlon, or who are part of a competitive sports team tend to get so much more consistent gains out of their training – given that they’re training towards a specific goal, it becomes easy to optimize their training. In the absence of a goal, it’s very easy to mess around with a “little of this and a little of that.” *** GUIDANCE The Theory of Constraints is simple, but there’s a lot of technical details that can make life easier, help you account for things like statistical fluctuations, and help to visualize and improve systems. It’s worth learning deeper on, and I can’t recommend Goldratt’s The Goal highly enough. It’s a masterpiece – and everyone I know who has read it, loved it. With that said, the basic idea of the Theory of Constraints is simple – whatever the current constraint is to higher performance, go to work on that for the biggest gains. The three biggest reasons you might not do it – ingrained assumptions, the unnaturalness of searching for procedures instead of “just doing things”, and the lack of a goal or a poorly-chosen goal. I think all of these can be addressed in a single way – through doing regular reviews. Every single week, I do a very simple form of a weekly review where I ask myself three questions, 1. What’s really going on? 2. So what do I do about it? 3. What matters; what doesn’t? If things are going marvelously and this week is the same as last week, those questions can be breezed through in about 15 seconds. But if something is going wrong, they can be a good prompt to journal and think through things. In this way, you start gradually creating a record of what’s going right and wrong – when you look back on a string of weekly reviews, you can see if any of the same problems are re-occurring frequently, and then go to work on those. At the end of every month, I look over all my weekly reviews, and compile them into a monthly review that’s rather similar. From there, I pick a personal goal and theme for the next month. In this way, you don’t need to have the totality of “meaning of life” 100% figured out to set goals – setting one and tuning for it for just 30 days can go a long ways towards improving performance in a particular area. Periodically, it makes sense to take a week off to just inventory everything that’s going on , and study all the weak points and constraints to what you’re doing . I like to do this on long train journeys – on Amtrak in the United States, going from San Francisco to Chicago by train is a marvelous few days to journal, write, think, and examine things. But wherever you do it, you ought to do it periodically – examining everything that’s going on, clarifying that your goals are relevant and appropriate, looking to surface hidden assumptions, and then looking for the constraints to greater performance – in order to break through on them. Limit Breaks #7: Combined Arms Limit Breaks #7: Combined Arms WEATHERING THE FRENCH ASSAULTS Wikipedia: Duke of Wellington: Waterloo Campaign – “The French cavalry attacked the British infantry squares many times, each at heavy cost to the French but with few British casualties. [French General] Ney himself was displaced from his horse four times. Eventually it became obvious, even to Ney, that cavalry alone were achieving little. Belatedly, he organised a combined-arms attack, using Bachelu's division and Tissot's regiment of Foy's division from Reille's II Corps plus those French cavalry that remained in a fit state to fight. This assault was directed along much the same route as the previous heavy cavalry attacks. Meanwhile, at approximately the same time as Ney's combined-arms assault on the centre-right of Wellesley's line, Napoleon ordered Ney to capture La Haye Sainte at whatever the cost. Ney accomplished this with what was left of D'Erlon's corps soon after 18:00. Ney then moved horse artillery up towards Wellesley's centre and began to destroy the infantry squares at short-range with canister. This all but destroyed the 27th (Inniskilling) Regiment, and the 30th and 73rd Regiments suffered such heavy losses that they had to combine to form a viable square. Wellesley's centre was now on the verge of collapse and wide open to an attack from the French. Luckily for Wellesley, Pirch I's and Zieten's corps of the Prussian Army were now at hand. Zieten's corps permitted the two fresh cavalry brigades of Vivian and Vandeleur on Wellesley's extreme left to be moved and posted behind the depleted centre. Pirch I Corps then proceeded to support Bülow and together they regained possession of Plancenoit, and once more the Charleroi road was swept by Prussian round shot. The value of this reinforcement at this particular moment can hardly be overestimated.” *** HELD LINES AND BROKEN LINES We will discuss Combined Arms momentarily, but first some context is in order. It’s necessary for understanding the Napoleonic battlefield, but also useful for building your understanding of the world at large. One of the strangest realizations about large-scale combat that most military historians know, and that most civilians do not know, is that the vast majority of casualties and fatalities on a battlefield do not happen during the most fierce fighting. Instead, most casualties happen when ranks break and one side retreats. This has been described thoroughly in Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman’s books On Killing and On Combat , which look at the psychology of a human on the battlefield – the stresses and pressures people face under combat, and how they act. In general, when intact military formations are facing each other in battle, the casualties are very low. Something like 75% to 95% of the casualties of a battle would typically only happen after one side “broke ranks” and either began to flee or started acting in a confused and disorganized way. This is why you’ll see a battle where one side took 4,000 casualties and the other side took 40,000 casualties – both sides might have had casualties in the low thousands until the ranks broke, and then in the pursuit and aftermath, the fleeing side would be ridden down and destroyed by the winning side’s cavalry. This explains why Napoleon Bonaparte marched only 73,000 French troops against 118,000 Allied troops at the Battle of Waterloo. On a quick glance, he was outnumbered – but Napoleon’s intent was to march against the British to break their ranks and destroy them before their German (Prussian) allies could join the battle. Napoleon’s hope was to turn the British into disarray and drive them off the battlefield before the Germans arrived, and then fight the Germans could join the battle. When you read, “[The Duke of Wellington, Arthur] Wellesley's centre was now on the verge of collapse and wide open to an attack from the French ” – this means that Napoleon had almost caused the British troops to break their formations and start to act in a disorganized and retreating way, which would mean the battle was lost. Napoleon had marched rapidly on an army that outnumbered him, but which was divided between two different camps, looking to wipe out the British camp before facing the Germans. It almost worked. *** A BRUTAL GAME OF ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS On the Napoleonic-era battlefield, the three primary types of military units were cavalry, infantry, and artillery. Artillery was expensive, slow-moving, and rare – artillery troops were the most complicated to train, and required a mix of different skills and roles to operate: engineers, technicians, transport, and soldiers skilled in mathematics and calculus to be able to aim and deploy the artillery. Artillery devastated infantry that was formed up a tight group, but undefended artillery could easily be ridden down by fast-moving cavalry on horseback and destroyed. Cavalry likewise was very effective at facing infantry that was disorganized and spread out, but horses were unwilling and unable to ride into a tightly formed group – a “square” is what the main anti-cavalry formation was called. This lead to a brutal game of tradeoffs – tightly-formed-up infantry would defeat cavalry, artillery would destroy tightly-formed-up infantry, and cavalry would destroy undefended artillery. “The French cavalry attacked the British infantry squares many times, each at heavy cost to the French but with few British casualties. [French General] Ney himself was displaced from his horse four times. Eventually it became obvious, even to Ney, that cavalry alone were achieving little. Belatedly, he organised a combined-arms attack… Ney then moved horse artillery up towards Wellesley's centre and began to destroy the infantry squares at short-range with canister.” Those paragraphs we opened with, which seem technical and mystifying without the historical context, begin to make sense. General Ney had started by (foolishly) attacking infantry in formation with cavalry, and the cavalry took heavy losses. Seeing this, he brought up his artillery to fire upon the formed-up British infantry, and the infantry started taking heavy losses and was on the verge of breaking – which is when Ney would send his cavalry and infantry back in to finish the British off. *** LIMIT BREAKS #7: COMBINED ARMS We are in the midst of our series on Limit Breaks – identifying and surpassing the limits to greater performance and thriving. Napoleon Bonaparte’s name is, to this day, synonymous with military genius. With less resources than his opponents, and often outnumbered, he won stunning and incredible victories on the battlefield. There’s many reasons for his success, but one of the largest was he understood how technology had changed in the late 1700’s, and he used Combined Arms better than his adversaries. It was only after many decades of fighting that the best of his adversaries also learned these methods well, most famously Arthur Wellsley, the Duke of Wellington, who would lead the final defeat of Napoleon on the battlefield at Waterloo. While the era of Napoleonic Warfare is long past, the general doctrines and principles of Combined Arms are employed to this day in modern militaries, and the general mental models of Combined Arms can be incredibly useful in one’s life. *** THE TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGES AT THE ADVENT OF THE NAPLEONIC ERA Wikipedia: Napoleonic weaponry and warfare – “The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars revolutionized military strategy. The impact of this period was still to be felt in the American Civil War and the early phases of World War I. With the advent of cheap small arms and the rise of the drafted citizen soldier, army sizes increased rapidly to become mass forces. This necessitated dividing the army first into divisions and later into corps. Along with divisions came divisional artillery; light-weight, mobile cannons with great range and firepower. […] “While not the originator of the methods he used, Napoleon very effectively combined the relatively superior maneuver and battle stages into one event. Before this, General Officers had considered this approach to battle as separate events. However, Napoleon used the maneuver to battle to dictate how and where the battle would progress. The Battle of Austerlitz was a perfect example of this maneuver. Napoleon withdrew from a strong position to draw his opponent forward and tempt him into a flank attack, weakening his center. This allowed the French army to split the allied army and gain victory. […] One of the major components in Napoleon's arsenal of weaponry was his artillery. With the development and improvement of combat weapons throughout the Seven Years' War prior to Napoleon, artillery had expanded to almost every European country, including France with 12-lb, and 8-lb cannons. "The Gribeauval guns, developed between 1765 and 1774, were 12-, 8-, 6- and 4-pounders with 6- and 8-inch howitzers." This style of gun was the artillery of choice for Napoleon, considering they were lighter by one third than the cannons of any other country. For example, the barrel of the British 12-pounder weighed 3,150 pounds, and the gun with carriage and limber about 6,500 pounds. The Gribeauval 12-lb barrels weighed 2,174 pounds and the gun with carriage and limber 4,367 pounds. Since Napoleon insisted on speed and mobility in conducting his maneuvers, this lighter cannon provided the flexibility he desired. Along with the artillery, the army had vast quantities of mortars, furnace bombs, grape and canister shots, all of which provided substantial support fire.” This is, unfortunately, somewhat technical stuff. It can be hard to get at what’s important and what’s not. But let’s try to untangle it. “With the advent of cheap small arms and the rise of the drafted citizen soldier, army sizes increased rapidly to become mass forces” – prior to the rise of cheaply mass-produced small arms weapons (rifles and handguns), it was very expensive and time-consuming to train soldiers; to be a soldier was a highly specialized role. In particular, early gunpowder was not much better than archery – but a master archer might take 3-5 years to train, whereas a conscript with modern gunpowder light arms could be trained in a few weeks to a few months. This meant that many more people would take the battlefield, and battles grew much larger than before. The French military innovator Gribeauval brought the manufacturing technologies of standardization and replaceable parts to artillery – a little before Napoleon’s time, he standardized the French armory on just a few types of standard heavy canons, howitzers, and mortars. The heavy artillery got lighter and smaller… not to a huge degree, but just enough that it was more mobile. Suddenly, smaller teams of horses and men could pull artillery up a hill quickly. Whereas canon had been used for a long time in defending castle walls and in slow sieges, during Napoleon’s time it was possible to move artillery around the battlefield reasonably quickly, and use it to breach opponents’ lines and central positions. *** THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMBINED ARMS DOCTRINES That’s the technological background. So what? The Napoleonic era is over, and the majority of us will never serve in the military or as soldiers in any sort of way. Why should we care? Well, I contend that the general mental models and practices of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington can be studied and learned from, in order to make us more effective in our own professions and non-military affairs. Resources are always limited, and to achieve things in the world, we have to deploy our resources well. Napoleon, and later Wellington, were among the best in history in seeing how the technological, social, and economic landscapes had changed – and how to use limited reasons much more effectively. Combined Arms was a large piece of this puzzle. Notably, I think Combined Arms requires the four basic steps that can be learned and applied outside of the military context – 1. Experimentation, theorizing, tradeoffs 2. Codification, doctrine, training 3. Building of repertoire 4. Leverage, deploying strength on opportunity/weakness *** POINT #1: EXPERIMENTATION Outside of our basic human instincts, everything we do has to be learned. We often forget this. When you observe any modern institution – a hospital, a railroad, a military base – it seems to be running well. It seems like “things are the way are.” We often forget that these institutions were once completely unknown, and they had to be discovered through experimentation and built from scratch. This is most true in an era with new and changing technologies; that is, an era like the one we now live in. In May 1779, at the age of 20 years old, Napoleon entered into the French military academy at Brienne-le-Chateau; upon graduation, he trained for a year at the elite French Ecole Militaire academy in Paris. The French seem to have grasped the significance of artillery sooner than most other European military traditions, and one of the largest debates at the military academies was on whether artillery should be dispersed or concentrated . Meaning, if you have 10,000 soldiers broken into 10 groups of 1,000 soldiers, and you have 60 artillery guns, would it be better to assign 6 pieces of artillery to each group, or would you be better placing all 60 pieces of artillery with a single group with immense firepower? A common view, before Napoleon, was that dispersed artillery was the way. Each group could use some artillery to weaken and soften their opposition before combat. It was only through a mix of experimentation that the better could be found. Eventually, Napoleon settled on concentrating artillery heavily in a few small groups, and using those heavily-armed groups to cause breakthroughs in the opponent’s lines. But again – as logical as this sounds, now , it was not obvious before experimentation and trying different ways of doing things. Each method had tradeoffs, and you had to develop strategies and maneuvers that would take advantage of the way you chose. *** POINT #2: CODIFICATION, DOCTRINE, AND TRAINING One of the largest impediments to Combined Arms is that every different type of military service has its own terms of language and its own subtly different way of doing things. Cavalry officers would have a very different culture than artillery officers, and would use different language, different standards of timing, different tactics and preferred ways of doing things. In Limit Breaks #4: Automation , we already discussed the need to be standardize in order to be able to automate procedures. In military terms, they needed to codify doctrine – Napoleon needed his different branches of military service to work together, and to train and standardize his way of doing things. From “ The Success of Napoleon ” – “Napoleon essentially borrowed the divisional formation […] He stressed the need for greater mobility and advocated the use of divisional formations. It was through the use of divisional formations that Napoleon revolutionized strategy. Armies would now be composed of detachable parts that could engage the enemy alone until the rest of the army came up in support, which consisted of both infantry and artillery […] As a result of implementing divisional formations, generalship was made more complicated and staff work became more important, as well as the need for highly detailed maps that would need to show terrain features and road networks. […] Even though Napoleon had implemented the use of divisional formations, armies during this time period would drastically increase in size due to conscription. These conscription based armed forces in France would number over a half a million men. In order to effectively command these large numbers of troops, Napoleon would implement permanent army corps within the French army. This organizational unit became essential for administration and command and controlling these large numbers of troops. The corps formation would be utilized similarly as the division, which it would be a combined arms organization composed of infantry, artillery and cavalry.” Napoleon codified the different mix of tactics and strategy that his commanders and soldiers would operate within, created new types of permanent army structures, and found and promoted excellent officers to lead these new types of military units, trained in the new methods of war. *** POINT #3: BUILDING OF REPERTOIRE From the Apple dictionary – repertoire noun • a stock of plays, dances, or pieces that a company or a performer knows or is prepared to perform. • the whole body of items that are regularly performed: the mainstream concert repertoire. • a stock of skills or types of behavior that a person habitually uses: his repertoire of threats, stares, and denigratory gestures. The concept of repertoire is one that’s endlessly fascinated me – it’s a set of common moves and maneuvers that you can competently do. Early in his military career, Napoleon faced weak opposition, and thus his errors – and he made plenty of errors early – did not lead to fatal consequences. Instead, these unpunished errors taught him new ways of doing things. “Napoleon would once again borrow these ideas from one of his teachers. Pierre de Bourcet, a chief of staff of the royal armies in both the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, as well as the director of the school for staff officers at Grenoble. He taught that an enemy could be misled by moves of various units which appeared to be disconnected, but which were actually part of a unified plan. The overall aim of this strategy was to compel the enemy to divide their forces and then to attack them while separated before it could be reinforced. It was through this philosophy that would form the basis of Napoleonic strategy. Napoleon would later refine this strategy by accident at the Battle of Marengo in 1800, where the battle was won for Napoleon by the opportune appearance of a division that had failed to concentrate prior to battle. Thereafter, Napoleon would often hold reserves back until the enemy forces were worn out, which was when he would send in his reserves.” -- “The Success of Napleon”, emphasis added There is a large difference between knowing something in theory, and being able to do it consistently. By being constantly at war, the French Napoleonic armies became battle-hardened and able to quickly execute complicated maneuvers. If not for the dual disasters of the overreaching coup in Spain and invasion of Russia, the French armies might have remained nearly invulnerable against their opposition. Napoleon’s repertoire, and his troops’ repertoire, was developed through combat. By being constantly at war, they mastered how to apply the codified doctrines of combined arms and how to best deploy the new technologies of the day. Most historians credit the invasion of Russia with bringing Napoleon’s downfall, but Napoleon himself pointed to the long-term guerilla war in Spain as his biggest problem. This is true – aside from tying down his best troops, it did something else: it gave a theater of the battle for the British to fight the lesser commanders trained in the Napoleonic style of war for years. The Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, also made many large mistakes in his first campaigns against the French in Spain and Portugal – but Napoleon was not there himself to rout and destroy the British; Wellington was facing lesser French commanders. During the war in Spain, Wellington’s troops learned and built their repertoire and learned how to face down French artillery, cavalry charges, and battlefield maneuvers designed to surround and destroy them. Note well – facing lesser opposition and easier challenges at the beginning of their military careers led both Napoleon and Wellington build repertoire that they would later build their successes upon. *** POINT #4: STRENGTH ON WEAKNESS/OPPORTUNITY Finally, the doctrine of Combined Arms comes together by deploying your relative strengths against an adversary’s weakness. (In non-conflict situations, this is deploying your strength against the best opportunities.) For most of his career until the blunderous invasion of Russia, when Napoleon outnumbered adversaries he would look to surround them; when he was outnumbered, he would pick a weak spot in their line and drive very hard at it. Early in the Napoleonic Wars, it was always surprising and confusing when an outnumbered Napoleon would take the offensive and drive hard at an army that outnumbered him – by doing so, and deploying most of his artillery at a weak point, he would cause a breakthrough and cause the enemy’s battle formations to disintegrate, followed by rapidly having his cavalry and infantry pursue the disintegrated and fleeing adversary. This is often described as taking a maneuver warfare approach, as opposed to an attrition warfare approach. Attrition warfare might be likened to two boxers who are just punchers, slugging it out and trading blows until one of them falls over. Maneuver warfare is dancing around the ring, deflecting heavy blows, and looking for an opportunity to land a devastating attack when the opponent is caught on the wrong foot. This is critical for breaking through limits – if you sit and “slug it out” with an adversary or a poor opportunity, it drains resources and is very expensive. By looking for the weakest spot – or the easiest opportunity – your resources can be utilized to much greater extent. Before Russia, at least, Napoleon recognized that he didn’t have to defeat the entire enemy army in full combat – he needed to find one critical spot and break it apart, and then the enemy would disintegrate. *** PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS Any time that technology is changing very quickly, there are many opportunities. We live in just such an era. I contend the basic understanding of Combined Arms can be applied to one’s personal life, career, and projects – 1. Experimentation, theorizing, tradeoffs 2. Codification, doctrine, training 3. Building of repertoire 4. Leverage, deploying strength on opportunity/weakness The first step is probably the hardest, or rather, the one that’s hardest to define and explain well. By definition, there are no formulas here; as soon as there are formulas, they get codified, trained, developed into repertoire, and deployed – at which point in time, they aren’t major unknown opportunities any more. It’s worth remembering that 1997 was only 20 years ago. This is before the dot-com mania and dot-com crash, and much has happened since then. There’s dozens if not hundreds of small and large technologies that have emerged and refined over the past 20 years – broadband internet, wireless internet (WiFi), smartphones, App Stores, syncing technologies like Dropbox, better databases like Firebase and RestDB, coding frameworks like Ruby on Rails, easily-deployed web software packages like Wordpress. Streaming audio and video, social media, search engines and pay-per-click advertising, marketing and sales automation software, customer-relationship management software like Salesforce, online banking, reliable GPS in smartphones, high-quality maps like Google Maps, user-generated review sites like Yelp and Goodreads, more elegant project management and communications software like Basecamp, Trello, and Slack… the list goes on and on. Any single one of these technologies might be something a career or company is built upon. It might be something brand new like a new type of media company built around podcasting and streaming video, or it might be a better form of distributed team built around Slack, Skype, and Trello. This is without even looking forwards at emerging technologies like wearable devices, augmented reality and better virtual reality, cheaper and more innovative uses of genetics for medical prediction, blockchain and cryptocurrencies… … a lot of things are happening. It’s hard to say which of them will be important; some of them may be more hype than substance, but there’s no doubt that many of them will change the fundamental ways we do things. We live in an era where experimentation for the sake of experimentation will pay huge gains. If you’re not a technologist at all in 2017, why aren’t you? This is one of the eras in which technology is changing and evolving faster than ever before, and from it will come many opportunities. Building a curiosity and experimentation around emerging technologies is very valuable. To be less fancy about it, “playing around with new tech” is very valuable right now. But a lot of people play around with tech, and do not get much gains from it – once you discover something that seems to work very well and is very promising, you’ll want to then start codifying and standardizing how you and your colleagues use it going forwards, and training it into doctrine. From there, taking on a set of small projects using new technologies and methods is the way to develop repertoire – so that you can quickly and consistently deploy new methods for getting large gains. The strongest repertoire is one that combines the use of new technologies and new ways of doing things in a way that’s stronger than any individual pieces. Once that all that starts coming together, it then makes sense to look for the areas where you’ll get the largest gains from your new advantages with the least effort and lowest costs. This is placing strength on opportunity. *** CONCLUDING I won’t make remarks about hubris and Napoleon’s overreaching and arrogance – I would simply point you back at the old series Vantages , now in Machina , about Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s inability to stop overreaching and consolidate his gains; his disastrous invasions of Korea and China, and the Toyotomi dynasty being overthrown as a result. We have covered why people act foolishly and cannot stop; it is beyond this piece. Read the Vantages series for that perspective. But it is worth noting that, though Wellington did not have perhaps quite as much innovative genius as Napoleon, he was still able to master Combined Arms through experimentation, codification, developing repertoire, and then placing strength on weakness at that critical Battle of Waterloo. You don’t have to be the first in a field to develop a repertoire in that field – simply identifying the technological trends that are developing, experimenting to find the highest yield and best methods, codifying it, building it into repertoire, and then placing your strengths against relative weaknesses and opportunities – this is ever and always a way to greatly outperform limited resources that are at hand, and to break through various limits to more performance and more achievement. Limit Breaks #8: Overwhelming Force Limit Breaks #8: Overwhelming Force EISENHOWER'S TWO LETTERS On the evening of 5th June 1944, Eisenhower sends his public Order of the Day to the troops about to embark on the largest amphibious invasion in history – “SUPREME HEADQUARTERS ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened. He will fight savagely. But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man-to-man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our Home Fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to Victory! I have full confidence in your courage and devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory! Good luck! And let us beseech the blessing of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking. (Signed, 'Dwight D. Eisenhower')” Privately, Eisenhower wrote a very different letter , to be released in the event the worst came to happen – "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that Bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone." *** UNKNOWNS History has many lessons to teach us, but we often fail to learn them. I personally believe that history is taught poorly in schools. There’s a certain unfortunate inevitability written into the history books. “Here is what happened. Then here is what happened next. And here’s what happened after that.” When you read more deeply into history, into the memoirs and private papers of past leaders and innovators, you realize just how much uncertainty they dealt with. Those great ancestors of ours wrestled with the same types of questions we wrestle with. They did not know in advance what the outcomes of their actions would be. The Allied Invasion of Normandy began on 6 June 1944. 160,000 Allied troops landed on the first day, and over 2 million Allied troops landed by the end of August. Eight months later, Adolf Hitler committed suicide while Berlin was in flames, and the war in Europe was over. But they couldn't know that in advance. *** NIGHT DREAMS OF AMPHIBIOUS TERRORS The decision to invade Western Europe at Normandy was made in May 1943 at the Trident Conference between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Dwight Eisenhower was shortly afterwards promoted to Supreme Commander of Allied Forces. All three of these men knew what the stakes were – Normandy would be the largest amphibious invasion in history. The last major such invasion? The British Gallipoli Campaign, 28 years previous, during World War I. It was the largest single military disaster in British history, where Allied Forces got pinned down on the beach lines at Galipolli and took 302,000 casualties while failing to break through to Istanbul. The men of the Trident Conference knew that campaign well – Prime Minister Churchill had been First Lord of the Admirality, and much of the blame for the disaster had fallen on his shoulders. You can see why, then, Eisenhower wrote his encouraging letter of the day to the Allied soldiers – and why he privately wrote the letter taking responsibility for the disaster, in the event the worst came to pass. *** LIMIT BREAKS #8: OVERWHELMING FORCE In almost all of life, the most expensive and disastrous thing is to barely fail. This is true for anything as small as failing a university course or failing to get a job when you were in the final round of interviews, to something as large as a major legal reform or invasion in total war. Whenever you undertake a campaign or project, you invest time and mental energy in them. Most of us are effected to some degree by morale and momentum, and failure at a major promising initiative is demoralizing; we can often build immediately on successes, but are forced to regroup and rethink all of our assumptions when we fail. And when we fail, how much did we fail by? Were all of our premises faulty? Should we have not tried that campaign at all? Or, did we miss by a little bit? Would more effort have gotten the job done? These bitter recriminations and downgoings can be avoided by taking the approach of a military metaphor – overwhelming force. We always want to pay attention to economy in action, but noting that the cost of failure is so incredibly damaging, it can often make sense to do every single possible thing to gain an overwhelming chance of success in any critical campaign. *** ALLIED INVASION PREPARATIONS, 1943-1944 The codename for the Normandy Invasion was Operation Overlord . It can be very insightful to read about – the Allied Forces brought every single possible advantage to the Normandy battlefront. Starting in 1943, Allied Air Forces started targeting German aircraft factories, air fields, and transportation logistics like rail networks. They scattered other air raids and bombings against unrelated targets to make it not obvious where a future invasion might come, but slowly they whittled away the ability of the German Luftwaffe Air Force and the resupply network of France. Allied air and sea reconnaissance mapped the entire French coastline – they already knew the spots they wanted to land, but again, they wanted to preserve the element of surprise. As such, they mapped all of the coastline, even areas they knew were irrelevant to the invasion. Allied engineers set to making custom new technologies specifically for the problems of landing a huge force at the Normandy beaches – most impressively, the designed a series of artificial harbors that could be rapidly assembled on landing, meaning they didn’t need to capture an established port to land troops and equipment. They spared no expense or brainpower in making custom equipment specifically for landing and driving the German defenders back from the beaches. The series of modified tanks are particularly impressive – “A series of specialised tanks, nicknamed Hobart's Funnies, were created to deal with conditions expected during the Normandy campaign. Developed under the supervision of Major-General Percy Hobart, these were specially modified M4 Sherman and Churchill tanks. Examples include the Sherman Crab tank (equipped with a mine flail), the Churchill Crocodile (a flame-throwing tank), and the Armoured Ramp Carrier, which other tanks could use as a bridge to scale sea-walls or overcome other obstacles. In some areas, the beaches consisted of a soft clay that could not support the weight of tanks. The "bobbin" tank would overcome this problem by deploying a roll of matting over the soft surface. The material was then left in place to create a route for more conventional tanks. The Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineers (AVREs) were modified for many tasks, including laying bridges and firing large charges into pillboxes.” Every possible advantage was stacked up. The Allies conspicuously assigned one of their most famous commanders, General George Patten, to a fictitious invasion group – “A fictitious First U.S. Army Group was created, supposedly located in Kent and Sussex under the command of Lieutenant General George S. Patton. The Allies constructed dummy tanks, trucks, and landing craft, and positioned them near the coast. Several military units, including II Canadian Corps and 2nd Canadian Division, were moved into the area to bolster the illusion that a large force was gathering in the area. As well as the broadcast of fake radio traffic, genuine radio messages from 21st Army Group were first routed to Kent via landline and then broadcast, to give the Germans the impression that most of the Allied troops were stationed there. Patton was stationed in England until 6 July, thus continuing to deceive the Germans into believing a second attack would take place at Calais.” “Dummy tanks” in particular are both genius and amusing in retrospect – they made tanks out of cardboard, wood, and inflatable canvas similar to a balloon. There historical photos of a group of 4-5 soldiers carrying what looks like a full-scale American tank in the air with ease are particularly amusing: the thing looks real; the feat looks impossible. The British had captured and turned senior Nazi spies, and had them broadcast false counterintelligence back to headquarters, again aiming to mislead the Germans as the location of the attack. *** BARELY UNDERCOMMITTING In the disaster at Gallipoli, one generation before the Normandy Invasion, Allied troops landed 30,000 soldiers with another 40,000 in reserve. It’s harder to find reliable numbers on the Ottoman defenders, but it looks that there were around 35,000 Ottoman defenders immediately at Gallipoli around the time of the invasion, with perhaps another 30,000 who were battle-ready and able to reach Gallipoli within a few weeks, and perhaps another 100,000 a month or two away. The First World War Allies would be outnumbered if their initial invasion didn’t capture Istanbul – the thinking was that the element of surprise, superior equipment, and better training of the Allies would allow them to prevail in the battle and secure a rapid victory, which might lead to the complete collapse of the Ottoman military government. Indeed, the Allied invasion of Gallipoli almost succeeded – “As at Anzac, the Ottoman defenders were too few to defeat the landing but inflicted many casualties and contained the attack close to the shore. By the morning of 25 April 1915, out of ammunition and left with nothing but bayonets to meet the attackers on the slopes leading up from the beach to the heights of Chunuk Bair, the 57th Infantry Regiment received orders from Kemal, commanding the 19th Division: "I do not order you to fight, I order you to die. In the time which passes until we die, other troops and commanders can come forward and take our places". Every man of the regiment was either killed in action or wounded.” But the Turks held. Barely. *** BARELY FAILING How much did the Allied invasion in 1915 fall short by? Very, very little. In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte had written, “All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.” Eventually, the Gallipoli invasion swelled to 489,000 ground troops on the Allied side against 315,500 Ottoman defenders. Fearing the loss of such a major engagement would demoralize and dishearten Allied prestige, the British and French high commands kept pouring more soldiers into Gallipoli – and repeatedly barely failed to break through and capture Istanbul. If the original Gallipoli invasion had been 100,000 and even slightly better coordinated, they very likely would have broken through; contemporary observers thought the Ottoman government was on the verge of collapse. But by barely failing , they took immense and horrifying losses for no gain. *** APPLYING THE LESSONS OF NORMANDY AND GALLIPOLI TO OUR THINKING Obviously, the stakes of our own lives are not so great as the millions of soldiers and civilians mobilized in the World Wars. But while the Allied Supreme Command preparing for the Normandy Invasion painstakingly sought every single advantage possible, the Gallipoli planners were rife with overconfidence. A famous leaflet was given to soldiers preparing for the Gallipoli invasion – “Turkish soldiers as a rule manifest their desire to surrender by holding their rifle butt upward and by waving clothes or rags of any colour. An actual white flag should be regarded with the utmost suspicion as a Turkish soldier is unlikely to possess anything of that colour.” Overconfidence is often fatal, and humans are naturally overconfident. *** THE COSTS OF DOING THINGS The British and French planners of the Gallipoli invasion calculated that they had significant strength to break through to Istanbul. They were almost correct, and fell short by a very small amount. This is a natural human behavior, though. We’re all susceptible to it. Almost everyone underestimates the amount of time and resources that successful campaigns and projects take to complete. The programmer and startup founder Matthew Jewkes is an expert at estimating how long software projects take to complete, and he explained it to me like this – When you’re doing a software project (and indeed, many sort of projects), it’s like rolling a ten-sided die. If the die comes up 1-9, it only takes 1 unit of time to complete that task. If the die comes up 10, it takes 10 units of time. Jewkes described this as an “L-shaped curve” – almost all of the curve is cheap and easy to complete, but the single “ugly case” takes 10 times as long as the more common simple cases. And very often, you can’t know in advance which parts of the project will be the more difficult – or fail outright. *** SETBACKS AT NORMANDY Many Allied technologies and maneuvers failed at Normandy. A new technology, a Pipe-Line Under The Ocean, was designed by engineers to supply fuel to France. But the pipeline had technical difficulties, and only became operational months after the invasion. Of the new tanks invented, a floating-on-the-water tank model, the Duplex-Drive tank, turned out not to work in combat conditions and many sunk. When Allied paratroopers were dropped behind enemy lines, only 10% landed in their designed landing zones, with 90% of paratroopers landing in random places that were not desirable to land. Notably, the Allies failed to capture almost all of their Day One objectives for the Normandy landings and were behind their timetables going into the battle. And yet they still won. *** OVERWHELMING FORCE By the middle of July, the Nazis had moved 380,000 defenders to defend against the Normandy Invasion. By the middle of July, the Allies had landed 1,452,000 troops to dislodge and beat back the Germans. By the end of August, the Nazis had moved over 1 million defenders to fight the invasion. By the end of August, the Allies had moved over 2 million troops to break through. With numbers like that, a lot of things can go wrong – and one can still win. *** A FEW PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS Underestimation and overconfidence are natural human deficiencies. In almost all of human affairs, there are infinitely more things that can go wrong than can go much better than expected. This can be dealt with by refusing to be overconfident, under-resourced, and over-extended. To that end, there’s a few things you can do – The first is to single-task as many of your projects and campaigns as possible, and to have excess time in case things can go wrong. It can be helpful to have secondary objectives lined up, in case things go as planned, but which are not sought until after core points are completed. In terms of single-tasking projects, I recently made a little spreadsheet that shows the day I started any project with a field for which day the project completed. The spreadsheet then automatically calculated how many days passed from the project starting to the project completing. I then mark down how many days I actually worked on the project in the interim. So if a project started on 1 April and ended on 4 April, then four days passed. I manually mark how many days I work on it. Let’s say I worked on that project on 1 April, 2 April, and 4 April. That means I worked 3 days out of the 4 days the project was open. I then divide the number of days worked by the number of days passed. In this case, it would be 75%. The ideal, for me, is to have projects complete in as few of days as possible, to have as few projects overlapping at the same time as possible, and to have the number of days worked on a project that it was open as close to 100% as possible. [For spreadsheet geeks, it looks like this: Column A: ProjectName Column B: DaysWorkedOn (manually increased by 1 each day I worked on it) Column C: StartDate Column D: EndDate Column E: DaysElapsed (=D2-C2+1) Column F: DaysWorkPercent (=B2/E2) This outputs results like: UWP3 Service/Automation 2 1-Apr 2-Apr 2 100% ] I didn’t make this out of a love of spreadsheets or data, but because projects dragging on too long without progressing wastes days and time, and leads to risk. I try to budget multiple free days each week in case anything takes longer than expected, and by ensuring projects are closing as fast as possible and with as much emphasis on an open project as possible – and then use this spreadsheet to make sure things aren’t getting stale, things are moving, and I’m not getting overconfident and dipping into my excess budget time. Regardless – you don’t need a spreadsheet. Limit the number of active projects, ensure they’re moving regularly and on pace to complete, and have extra time that you never “count on” in your estimates. Since most projects will complete on time if you do this, the bonus time can be used to get ahead of schedule – or for leisure, or whatever you like. When doing things that involve a lot of unknowns, I’ve seen many successful project managers multiply by four how long they expect the project to take. This might seem excessive, but the people I know who do it tend to be more successful than those who don’t. *** CONCLUDING You should learn to truly hate and fear “failing by a little bit” – and organize your affairs accordingly. If you barely fail to reach an objective, you expended all the effort and morale to run a nearly full project, but you get none of the gains. In our own affairs, this can be a small thing. At medium scale, this can bankrupt organizations and destroy otherwise worthy efforts. At large scale, it can lead to unmitigated disasters like the Gallipoli Invasion. With hindsight , we can say that the Normandy Invasion would likely have succeeded if it was 40% smaller – probably . But does it matter? The objective was to liberate Western Europe from the Nazis, and the campaign succeeded. If you’re choosing projects and campaigns that are meaningful and important enough, then it’s imperative to give yourself enough extra time, space, and resources to ensure the campaign is successful. And then – neglect no advantages. What type of good people can you bring in? What’s truly essential that can be prioritized over what’s secondary? What technology and other resources can you create or acquire to lead to success? What other factors matter, and how can you gain advantages there? “All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.” If what you’re doing is important enough, neglect nothing . Take every advantage. Bring more resources than you need, to ensure things succeed even in the face of things going wrong. Humble thyself to fight overconfidence and bring overwhelming force to your campaigns – ensure success, collect the relevant achievements, and then gear up for the next rounds of campaigns and projects in life. Limit Breaks #9: Hidden Logic Limit Breaks #9: Hidden Logic ADVANTAGE “Back before I discovered Magic: The Gathering, my game of choice was chess. During my lunch period, me and the other chess players at my school would gather in the student lounge and play speed games, and often we'd also play after school. A large part of the fun of playing chess at that level is the trash talking, and one of our favorite topics was advantage. If you could put it in front of the word advantage, we claimed it. As in any game, there was also the advantage itself, but we were normally arguing over who had that one. The most popular type of advantage was of course material advantage, which is the equivalent of Magic's card advantage, but consider these other important claims: Space advantage. Development advantage, and its generalization time advantage, which is not to be confused with the very important clock advantage. Pawn structure advantage. Open file advantage. King safety advantage. Center advantage. There were many more, but you get the idea. When my old best friend Adam Hulse and I moved from chess to Magic, we didn't debate advantage much anymore. I don't think we even knew the term card advantage, even though for us it should have been a natural thing to talk about and we knew about its implications even if we didn't give it a name. In my section of the Magic community, early players knew card advantage well, almost as well as we do now, but didn't understand concepts like tempo or the mana curve. We also didn't forget to keep asking who was winning the game, but understood without having to say anything that this was much harder to work out in Magic than in a deterministic complete information game like chess. […] Also, remember the following rule that I didn't put into the right words until after I [almost finished writing a treatise on the subject]. It sounds obvious, but people forget it and Justin Gary had to tell me that I had forgotten the correct words to put it in: Rule of Reflection: Everything in Magic has value equal to the amount it increases your chance to win the game. If it doesn't make you more likely to win the game, it has no value. If it does, it has value equal to the probability it will make the difference. Once you hear it that's an easy thing to say, but a difficult thing to properly apply. Here begins the quest… for Advantage…” -- Zvi Mowshowitz, “ Advantage: The Grand Unified Theory ” *** MTG BACKGROUND Magic: The Gathering became the most prominent Collectible Card Game, the blockbuster of its field. Launching in 1993, it was a new type of game that the world hadn’t seen before. Still going very strong 24 years later, MTG has over 16,000 printed cards that are eligible for players to play in a given game. It’s not surprising that the game was created by a mathematician – Richard Garfield, its creator, had studied computer mathematics as an undergraduate, worked for the very innovative Bell Labs in the 1980’s, and went back to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate studies and received a PhD in combinatorial mathematics in 1993, the same year that Magic: The Gathering was launched to the public and became a rousing success. In case you’re unfamiliar with how the game works, Magic: The Gathering is rather simple on the surface: it’s a game where you assemble a deck of 60 cards and play against another player who chooses 60 cards. Each of you begins with 20 life, and draw 7 cards into your initial hand, and then take turns playing. If either of you hits 0 life or runs out of cards to draw, you lose. The simplest version of the game goes like this – each of the 7 cards you draw does different things. The first card you play is almost always a land, because you can play one land for free each turn. One land produces one “mana,” which you can spend on casting spells. Every spell has a cost in mana, and then some spells will summon a “permanent” card (a creature, artifact, or long-term enchantment) and sometimes they’ll do something immediately (damage the opponent, allow you to draw more cards, force the opponent to draw cards, destroy one of his permanents, things like that). The goal is to win – typically by reducing your opponent’s life to zero (the most common way), occasionally by forcing them to run out of cards to draw, and (very rarely) some other eccentric means of winning. Maybe this will sound like an overreach on my part, but I think Magic: The Gathering is actually one of the most interesting things ever invented in the United States – and yes, I’m aware that Americans have invented a whole lot of interesting things. *** WHY STUDY GAMES? In the past, I’ve pointed to three fields that are almost universally worthy of study for general mental models – athletics, finance, and warfare. All three of those fields have multiple sides competing within them, so you can see how competition forces each side to improve. Success is relatively easy to observe and measure in each of them: you can see financial returns easily on a graph, you can view the results of battles and wars, you can see the final scores and winning histories of individual athletes and sports teams. I’ve recently started to include competitive games as a potentially fourth category – it fits all the criteria. Games offer something else, too – they’re a complete system . Whereas reality is infinitely vast, games offer a set of clean and clear rules to be played by. In business, there’s almost an infinite number of things you can do, and you can do them in a nearly infinite number of variations. The same goes for individual careers, or artistic choices. But games, at any given time, offer a somewhat limited set of moves. A complex game might have millions of permeations, but that’s still considerably less than infinity, eh? By honing in on skilled high-level game play, and studying it, we can identify rules and patterns that work and lead to winning. Those patterns – deduced from study of something complete with a fixed ruleset – can then be re-applied profitably to the infinite complexity of life. *** WHY STUDY MTG? Lots of games are interesting – Chess and Go are consistently ranked as the two of the most enduring, complex, and interesting games. But Magic: The Gathering offers a couple unique advantages over Chess and Go. As Mowshowitz wrote, “We also didn't forget to keep asking who was winning the game, but understood without having to say anything that this was much harder to work out in Magic than in a deterministic complete information game like chess. ” In Magic, you’re up against another player who is trying to defeat you. You do not know all of the cards in his deck or in his hand. You’re playing with incomplete information all the time. Additionally, part of the genius of Garfield’s game design is that new cards are released regularly, which reshape the playing field and what other players are including in their decks, and how they combine to defeat what has been played most commonly recently. This is referred to as the “meta-game” – there’s no single “best deck”; the best deck in competitive tournament play is the one that wins most often against collectively all of the other decks being commonly played. You have to both anticipate and adapt to what others are doing in the meta-game in order to win on a sustained basis. In Chess, there’s perfect information – you can see all of your pieces and all of your opponent’s pieces. An outside observer can see the board and know everything that all of the players know about the board. In Magic, the imperfect information – meaning, the cards in hand and deck are hidden – makes for a very interesting game that has some things in common with life. You don’t know what others are thinking and what they’re going to do to respond to you. You’ll often get choices in Magic to do a little damage to the opponent immediately, or save your damage-dealing in case they get a powerful creature out you need to kill. Sometimes you’ll hold a counterspell – which cancels what the opponent casts – and you need to pick the right spot to use it. If the opponent plays something “pretty good but not amazing,” do you counter it to slow them down or do you hold on to your counter in case they attempt something bigger later? This leads to a lot of opportunities to train your perception, your pattern recognition, and your moment-by-moment decisionmaking. You need to learn to control your emotions, to make decisions quickly but not rashly, and to process and make dozens of choices throughout the game. *** LIMIT BREAKS #9: HIDDEN LOGIC In any game, in any industry, in any aspect of life you want to thrive, it’s key to identify what matters and what does not. I think Mowshowitz said it well when he said – “Everything in Magic has value equal to the amount it increases your chance to win the game.” But often, it’s not clear what wins the game – especially in more complex areas of life like career, one’s network, and all sorts of infinite choices and decisions we could make. Often, the very most sophisticated and successful in a field are employing “hidden logic” – they’re seeing derived variables that are not explicitly written down, managing their affairs, and making decisions by them. If you can identify the hidden logic of situations, the key variables that lead to winning and losing, you’ll thrive to a much higher degree than people who are ignorant of the beautiful hidden and logic that underlies so much of human affairs. *** MOWSHOWITZ’S EXPLORATION Zvi Mowshowitz’s Grand Unified Theory of Advantage series is worth reading if you’ve got any background in Magic; it probably doesn’t make sense to read if you haven’t played the game (it’s rather technical), but if you have, it’s a gold mine. In it, he explores and points out the flaws in various types of advantage theories in Magic. He starts by analyzing different types of “card advantage” – for instance, if I play a single card that forces you to discard three cards randomly, I gained an advantage of two cards on you. (I played one card from my hand, which is now spent and gone. You discarded three cards, which are now dead and gone. 3-1 = advantage gained of 2.) Given that everything you do in Magic requires cards to get going, gaining more “card advantage” on the other player should help you win, no? If they no cards in their hand or on the board, they can’t do anything. But Zvi notes, it’s no use being “up five cards” if you then hit zero life and die… so he looks at things like tempo and speed – if you’re slowly gaining card advantage on me, but I’m quickly killing you, the game is mine. Now, here is where I’d like to stop and note – “card advantage” is nowhere in the rules of Magic; neither is tempo or speed. All of these are derived variables, strategic ways of thinking about the game that you’re not mandated to think. You can think about the game however you want – or even play it without thinking strategically at all. But nowhere in the rules does it say anything about card advantage or tempo. There’s rules about putting down land, and casting permanent spells and temporary spells, and starting with life totals of 20 and dying when you hit a life total of 0. The interactions in between hitting zero life or zero cards are all derived, strategic thinking. *** LIFE: OVERRATED Since many readers here will have never played Magic , I’ll stop with the technical stuff – it’s gone about as far as it can go – aside from making one last point from Zvi that is extremely counterintuitive and not how people normally think about the game. From “ Advantage Theory: Putting It All Together ”, emphasis added – “Life is the resource whose importance varies most in the game. Cards can be irrelevant, but more often than not they are critical and most of the rest of the time the battle can be viewed as some form of virtual or effective card war. Tempo can be irrelevant, but that is almost always because neither side has any, while mana is the same case in reverse: It becomes meaningless when both sides have too much. Like mana, life points have a critical point: The big difference is between Not Enough Life, Enough Life and Lots 'o Life. When both players have more than enough life points life often becomes all but irrelevant until something changes that. One and four life points are very different numbers, but it can be much harder to tell the difference between twenty and twenty-five. It is also common for one player's life total to be moot or almost moot. This is all true because life doesn't do anything at all until that moment that it does everything. As long as you're alive your life total has no direct impact on the game. When a player starts getting close to death it has a dramatic effect on the game and so does paying life to get something in exchange, but the primary reason to pay attention to life is that when a player drops to zero life points he is dead and nothing else matters. Being dead does not have any effect on tempo or card advantage (in any form) or anything else. It wins you the game. Nothing more, nothing less. This system allows Magic to grant players an early advantage and not automatically shut the player who falls behind out of the game.” Sounds logical, right? Yet, I contend this is extremely counterintuitive. Your life total in Magic does not matter until hits zero, or is at risk of hitting zero. This is, again, extremely counterintuitive – and it actually applies to any game that has binary win/loss conditions with life totals. The naive understanding of most people who first play the game – mine, too – is that the player who has more life than the other is “winning.” That’s not necessarily true. In Magic, there’s a lot of ways to get defenses up such that the opponent cannot damage you any more. If you get enough defenses up that it’s not possible for the opponent to do any damage for the rest of the game , then it doesn’t matter if you had 20 life, 10 life, or 1 life when you finally got all those defenses up. Life, in Magic, is a binary variable – once it hits zero, you lose. Until it hits zero, it only effects you insofar as you’re worried about taking damage that’ll take you to zero life. There’s many cards that do exactly 3 damage – lightning bolt, for instance. If you’re facing an opponent carrying only 3-damage cards, then your life total matters in increments of 1+3. If you have 4 life then you can can absorb one lightning bolt and survive, 7 life means you can take two bolts, 10 life means three bolts… and so on. Thus, dropping from 4 life to 3 life might mean losing on the next turn if your opponent can cast lightning bolt on you, but dropping from 6 life to 4 life might not make a difference. This, again, is counterintuitive – if your opponent is racing to damage you, and you’re ignoring the damage while racing to get complete defenses up so they can’t damage you, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the brink of death when those full defenses come up – you’ve survived, and presumably they’re now at your mercy. Okay, this is a slightly eccentric point, no? Let’s look at another example of Hidden Logic in sports, and then we'll generalize it to everyday life. *** RUN EXPECTANCY VS WIN EXPECTANCY IN BASEBALL The American sport of baseball is an interesting one – there’s no “clock”; the game doesn’t end by time passing. Instead, the game is measured by “innings” – basically, it’s one “turn” of play – and each inning, your team gets 3 “outs” before the inning ends. There’s nine innings; so, each team gets 27 outs total before the game ends. To score in baseball, you need to get one of your team – a batter – around four bases that they can advance through. If a player gets around all four bases, you score one “run” – basically, a point. Whoever has the most runs at the end of the game, wins. To get around the bases, you need to hit a ball that the defense controls with a wooden bat. Now, the game is interesting because you can try to hit the ball as hard as you can, or you can try to hit the ball just a little bit in order to move a player already on one of the bases forwards. A common situation in baseball is where the first player up hits the ball hard, and gets to second base – halfway to scoring. Early in the game, you should keep playing normally – by having everyone on your team swing as hard as they can, some of the will make a bad play and get out, whereas others will hit the ball hard and get to first base, second base, or hit a home run (hitting the ball all the way out of the field of play, scoring everyone on a base and the person who hit it). Again, early in the game, you don’t do anything differently if the first player hits a double and gets to second base. But as soon as it’s the 9th inning, everything changes. The 9th is the last inning, so if you’re losing at the end of the 9th, the game is over and you lose. So if you’re losing 4-3 in the 9th and final inning, and your first guy gets to second base, you probably want to have your next player hit a “sacrifice” where they make an out on person to get the guy to third base. Then, even a weakly hit ball on the next play scores the player, ties the game, and you can survive to keep playing extra innings. In baseball, this is a difference between two hidden variables – run expectancy and win expectancy . Briefly, every situation in baseball has a certain “run expectancy” associated with it – how many runs you’ll be expected to score in that situation. There’s a whole lot of statisticians that calculate this sort of thing and are intrigued with it. (I self-taught myself statistics from baseball, incidentally.) When you’ve got a player on second base and no outs, you’ll (mathematically, on average) score 1.228 runs . If you sacrifice bunt the man over to third base, you’ll score on average 0.980 runs. That is, by trading one out to move the player forward one base, you’ll decrease your average amount scored by 1.228 - 0.980 = .248 runs. Early in the game, before the final outcome looks close to settling, you’re better off just maximizing runs – you don’t know how many the other team will score, so your best bet is maximizing the amount you score. But if the game is about to end in the 9th inning, average runs don’t matter – you lose if you don’t score one more. By sacrificing the guy over to third base, you increase the chances of at least one run scoring at the expense of the average. You can then map the “chances of winning” with each situation – win expectancy – and calculate whether it’s worth playing to tie the game or playing for a higher average runs for a chance to win at the expense of losing immediately. Hidden logic. But okay, let’s step outside of math and games and apply this to life. *** NEGOTIATIONS AND WIN CONDITIONS When I lead a negotiation, the first thing I’ll do with my side is define our “win conditions” into three categories – Need Want Nice-to-have Negotiations are complicated, and there’s often a mix of things you absolutely need to have happen to make a deal good, things you very strongly want to have happen to make it a good deal, and a variety of little nice-to-haves that aren’t as important. My rules go like this – Need: you get every single item here or you walk away. Place items into this category very sparingly, and never budge an inch or indicate any flexibility on them. By definition, you need these and will walk and if they’re not met. Want: these are what you’re negotiating over. Almost everything important goes here. If there’s any way to make a deal happen, at all, without a condition, it goes here. Niceties: you make a list of all the little bonus things, and handle them last. My definition of a good negotiation is one where you get all of your needs (obviously, or you’d walk) and most of your wants. The nice-to-haves are good to keep in mind but less important. One of the most common mistakes I see people make in negotiations is to not define their win conditions well – they define a lot of things as “must-haves” but then they trade them away. They don’t know what their bottom line or walkaway point is, and they often crumble in the heat of things. Commonly, people in negotiations place too many things in the “Need” bucket – if there’s any way to get the deal done without a condition being met, it’s a “Want.” And again, I consider a successful negotiation one in which you’re getting almost all of your Wants. Now, there’s no explicit rule that you need to set win conditions in a negotiation – it’s entirely hidden logic; something for you to analyze, detect, and strategize through on your side. And yet, knowing the hidden and underlying logic of a negotiation lets you make very simple lists of objectives to navigate through to ensure you get the best possible deal. *** THRESHOLD OF INTRODUCTIONS Finally, let’s turn to something that’s incredibly abstract and intangible – the kind of thing most people don’t apply logic to and never think about. Will someone introduce you to someone else they know? Introductions are one of the most powerful ways to meet people. If you’re introduced by someone a person trusts and admires, you’re on very solid ground to start getting to know them. I realized, some years ago, that there’s three thresholds you can be at when asking a person for an introduction – 1. They won’t introduce you for any reason. 2. They’ll only introduce you for a very relevant and specific reason. 3. They’ll introduce you to just about anyone you ask them to. At threshold #1, you’re untrusted, or have bad manners, or wouldn’t represent the introducer well. At threshold #2, you’re alright – if you’re looking for an accountant and they know an accountant, they’ll introduce you for that reason. The magic is at threshold #3 – if someone trusts you to an incredible degree, knows you’ll always represent them well in any situation, and knows you’re universally a worthwhile person for anyone they know to get to know as well, then they’ll be willing to make many introductions for you to anyone they meet. Using this very simple (and hidden) logic, you can evaluate where you’re at with anyone you know. The magic, again, is getting to threshold #3, where a person trusts you enough to introduce you to anyone they know. I met Jesse Sussman last year at GiveGetWin Summer Camp II at UChicago, where he was a standout performer. Since then, he’s raised over $10,000 for charity at GiveGetWin, and been an incredibly enjoyable person to work with, carrying forth brilliant insights along with a rare humility for his talent level, and just genuinely being an upbeat, hardworking, great guy to know and be around. I’ll introduce him to basically anyone at this point if he asks. In your own life, once you have even just three to five well-connected people who feel the same way about you, you’re basically set – from there, you can start to get to know just about anyone you’d want to know for your projects, career, and life. Again, this is a hidden logic behind introductions – you can quickly ask yourself if someone would introduce you to people they know, and under what circumstances. It’s easy to test, too – you just ask to be introduced. There’s of course little confounding factors – maybe the person you asked to be introduced to is busy, or the person you asked for an introduction doesn’t know they as well as you thought they did – but in general, I’ve found these three simple thresholds to be a very easy way to understand getting to know people and assessing where you’re at. From there, it’s easy enough to analyze what you need to do differently if you’re below that third magical threshold – manners? Credibility? Attitude? Building a few deeper relationships instead of more shallower ones? It lends itself well to analysis and improvement. *** CONCLUSION You should ever and always ask, “What matters here?” In any situation that’s competitive, you should ask, “What really leads to winning and losing?” In non-competitive aspects of life, you should ask, “Where am I now, and where do I want to be?” Often, we run on vague feelings and intuitions, but never use analysis, logic, and strategy to clarify what really leads to outcomes. Thus, effort is diffused and results are erratic. You can learn about discerning underlying logic by reading memoirs of people who were successful, and technical manuals by experts in their field. In different types of business, repeat purchase rate, churn/attrition rate, or referral rate might be a key piece of hidden logic to optimize your business around. In competitive endeavors, you want to put a cohesive strategy around which (often hidden) variables are going to lead to success. This rabbit hole, I fear it runs deep and that even these now we have barely scratched the surface, but burn this into your mind – Always ask, “What matters here? What leads to winning and losing?” Discern those variables – they’re often not explicitly stated, but when you unearth the hidden logic of situations, it’s beautiful to behold. Limit Breaks #10: Cutting Limit Breaks #10: Cutting THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI “What is the way of the samurai?” Those Japanese warriors of old would answer this question in one word – “Death.” We begin by looking at two of the foremost writers of the samurai and bushido traditions – Miyamoto Musashi, one of the greatest swordsmen of the high-point era of Japanese swordsmanship, and Yamamoto Tsunetomo, whose Hagakure is one of the definitive works on bushido. “It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways. Even if a man has no natural ability he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the Way. Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.” -- Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings , 1645 “The Way of the Samurai is found in death. When it comes to either/or, there is only the quick choice of death. It is not particularly difficult. Be determined and advance. To say that dying without reaching one’s aim is to die a dog’s death is the frivolous way of sophisticates. When pressed with the choice of life or death, it is not necessary to gain one’s aim. “We all want to live. And in large part we make our logic according to what we like. But not having attained our aim and continuing to live is cowardice. This is a thin dangerous line. To die without gaming one’s aim is a dog’s death and fanaticism. But there is no shame in this. This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai. If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo, The Hagakure , 1709-1716 So – we are on interesting ground. Do note the sentence I bolded – “a thin dangerous line” – but we see broad agreement on choosing death and not life as the way of the samurai. Carrying on… “The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him. You must thoroughly research this.” -- Musashi “People think that they can clear up profound matters if they consider them deeply, but they exercise perverse thoughts and come to no good because they do their reflecting with only self-interest at the center. “It is difficult for a fool’s habits to change to selflessness. In confronting a matter, however, if at first you leave it alone, fix the four vows in your heart, exclude self-interest, and make an effort, you will not go far from your mark. “Because we do most things relying only on our own sagacity we become self-interested and turn our backs on reason, and things do not turn out well. As seen by other people this is sordid, weak, narrow and inefficient. When one is not capable of true intelligence, it is good to consult with someone of good sense. An advisor will fulfill the Way when he makes a decision by selfless and frank intelligence because he is not personally involved.” -- Tsunetomo “Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men. Next, in order to beat more skillful men, train according to this book, not allowing your heart to be swayed along a side-track. Even if you kill an enemy, if it is not based on what you have learned it is not the true Way.” -- Musashi “Calculating people are contemptible. The reason for this is that calculation deals with loss and gain, and the loss and gain mind never stops. Death is considered loss and life is considered gain. Thus, death is something that such a person does not care for, and he is contemptible.” -- Tsunetomo … and then we seem to see a mix of contradictions – there is a view towards hyper-action and not thinking , but also strong advice to train constantly , use strategy , and consult with people who are wise … and then, Yamamoto Tsunetomo seems to walk it all back and say “Calculating people are contemptible.” Hmm. This is, at least, interesting. *** THE LEAST USEFUL INFORMATION YOU CAN TRACK Well, let’s step back from the samurai code for a moment, set aside those epic life-and-death struggles with the sword and bow, and check in on one of the greatest investors of the 20th century. “With survival at stake, it’s the rare professional who has the guts to traffic in an unknown La Quinta. In fact, between the chance of making an unusually large profit on an unknown company and the assurance of losing only a small amount on an established company, the normal mutual-fund manager, pension-fund manager, or corporate-portfolio manager would jump at the latter. Success is one thing, but it’s more important not to look bad if you fail. There’s an unwritten rule on Wall Street: “You’ll never lose your job losing your client’s money in IBM.” “If IBM goes bad and you bought it, the clients and the bosses will ask: “What’s wrong with that damn IBM lately?” But if La Quinta Motor Inns goes bad, they’ll ask: “What’s wrong with you?” That’s why security-conscious portfolio managers don’t buy La Quinta Motor Inns when two analysts cover the stock and it sells for $3 a share. They don’t buy Wal-Mart when the stock sells for $4, and it’s a dinky store in a dinky little town in Arkansas, but soon to expand. They buy Wal-Mart when there’s an outlet in every large population center in America, fifty analysts follow the company, and the chairman of Wal-Mart is featured in People magazine as the eccentric billionaire who drives a pickup truck to work. By then the stock sells for $40.” -- Peter Lynch, One Up on Wall Street , 1990 *** LIMIT BREAKS, FINALE: CUTTING You might think, on first blush, that there is very little relationship between the samurai – who eschewed money and commerce nearly entirely in a caste-based society ruled by fierce warriors – and a twentieth century mutual fund manager in Boston, who got his original start at Fidelity Investments when he caddied for a Fidelity boss on the golf course. And that would be reasonable. But perhaps mistaken. Peter Lynch became one of the most successful investors of all time. He returned 29.2% annual financial returns at the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977-1990, which is really an unheard-of track record. If you invested your money with Lynch, he doubled it every 2.5 years. Consistently. For 23 years. His fund started as small and obscure with $14 million under management – a modest amount for a mutual fund – and he ended with $14 billion under management, growing his own net worth north of $300 million in the process. And you know, there’s obvious differences between an investor like Lynch and a samurai like Musashi – it’s almost so obvious we don’t need to say it – but I dare say, they have far more similarities than differences in the way they think than not. We close our investigation of Limit Breaks with the questions we started with – What are the limits facing us on making a terrific life? How do we break through those limits? So welcome to our finale on Limit Breaks , the tenth chapter of this series: Cutting. *** CUTTING Let’s repeat Musashi’s quote again – “ The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him. You must thoroughly research this.” We need not be obscure or dance around the point: all of the preparations, and work, and understanding we’ve built in this series, will be worth nothing if not applied towards what actually matters. *** BEFORE YOU THINK ABOUT BUYING STOCKS Lynch – “Before you think about buying stocks, you ought to have made some basic decisions about the market, about how much you trust corporate America, about whether you need to invest in stocks and what you expect to get out of them, about whether you are a short-or long-term investor, and about how you will react to sudden, unexpected, and severe drops in price. It’s best to define your objectives and clarify your attitudes (do I really think stocks are riskier than bonds?) beforehand, because if you are undecided and lack conviction, then you are a potential market victim, who abandons all hope and reason at the worst moment and sells out at a loss. It is personal preparation, as much as knowledge and research, that distinguishes the successful stockpicker from the chronic loser. Ultimately it is not the stock market nor even the companies themselves that determine an investor’s fate. It is the investor.” Tsunetomo – “If by setting one’s heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.” It you told me that the average modern American investor had nothing in common with the average Tokugawa-era samurai, I would agree with you. But again, I contend that the most successful samurai and that the most successful investors are very much cut of the same cloth. You see in the best investors – Lynch, Munger, Dalio, etc – a strong philosophical streak , a genuine curiosity and investigation into how the whole works. But first and before that, they study themselves . Half-measures on the battlefield are fatal to the warrior; half-measures in investing lead to nearly guaranteed losses. Lynch: “It is personal preparation, as much as knowledge and research, that distinguishes the successful stockpicker from the chronic loser.” Musashi: “Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling.” *** INVESTING AS CUTTING Lynch, from chapter “Earnings, Earnings, Earnings” – “Let’s say you noticed Sensormatic, the company that invented the clever tag and buzzer system for foiling shoplifters, and whose stock rose from $2 to $42 as the business expanded between 1979 and 1983. Your broker tells you it’s a small company and a fast grower. Or perhaps you’ve reviewed your portfolio and you’ve found two stalwarts and three cyclicals. What possible assurance do you have that Sensormatic, or any of the stocks you own already, will go up in price? And if you’re buying, how much should you pay? “ What you’re asking here is what makes a company valuable, and why it will be more valuable tomorrow than it is today. There are many theories, but to me, it always comes down to earnings and assets. Especially earnings. Sometimes it takes years for the stock price to catch up to a company’s value, and the down periods last so long that investors begin to doubt that will ever happen. But value always wins out—or at least in enough cases that it’s worthwhile to believe it. “Analyzing a company’s stock on the basis of earnings and assets is no different from analyzing a local laundromat, drugstore, or apartment building that you might want to buy. Although it’s easy to forget sometimes, a share of stock is not a lottery ticket. It’s part ownership of a business.” That, in a nutshell, is cutting for Lynch. He looks for businesses that can be invested in cheaply who have good earnings but are unpopular, or have a great product and the potential for good growth in earnings. One Up On Wall Street is a great read – my second favorite book on finance, and highly recommended for just getting smarted in general, even if you never plan to invest in stocks at all. What cutting is for Lynch is buying a business (1) with a good product, and (2) good or growing earnings, at (3) a good price. And that’s it. He ignores nearly everything else. Here’s him slagging on the late-90’s dot-com boom – “Owing to the lack of earnings in dot.com land, most dot.coms can’t be rated using the standard price/earnings yardstick. In other words, there’s no “e” in the all-important “p/e” ratio. Without a “p/e” ratio to track, investors focus on the one bit of data that shows up everywhere: the stock price! To my mind, the stock price is the least useful information you can track, and it’s the most widely tracked. When One Up was written in 1989, a lone ticker tape ran across the bottom of the Financial News Network. Today you can find a ticker tape on a variety of channels, while others display little boxes that showcase the Dow, the S&P 500, and so forth. Channel surfers can’t avoid knowing where the market closed. On the popular Internet portals, you can click on your customized portfolio and get the latest gyrations for every holding. Or you can get stock prices on 800 lines, pagers, and voice mail. “To me, this barrage of price tags sends the wrong message. If my favorite Internet company sells for $30 a share, and yours sells for $10, then people who focus on price would say that mine is the superior company. This is a dangerous delusion. What Mr. Market pays for a stock today or next week doesn’t tell you which company has the best chance to succeed two to three years down the information superhighway. If you can follow only one bit of data, follow the earnings —assuming the company in question has earnings. As you’ll see in this text, I subscribe to the crusty notion that sooner or later earnings make or break an investment in equities. What the stock price does today, tomorrow, or next week is only a distraction. ” *** CUTTING AS CUTTING The final testament of Miyamoto Musashi is my favorite short document of all time. His Dokkodo – “the Way of Walking Alone” – is just 21 sentences, of immense wisdom. It begins, 1. Accept everything just the way it is. 2. Do not seek pleasure for its own sake. 3. Do not, under any circumstances, depend on a partial feeling. And his forth precept is my favorite quote of all time – 4. Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world. The old man who wrote that final testament on his deathbed traveled a long way to get there – Musashi was undefeated in 60 duels, most of them to the death. In an era filled with master warriors and intense battlefields. He developed a radical style for the day of using two swords at the same time, but he wasn’t married to any style. “The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means.” In Musashi’s most famous duel with Sasaki Kojiro, his opponent was armed with one of the largest Japanese swords – a nodachi , which is about 50% longer and around double the heaviness of a katana. Instead of facing Kojiro with his normal weaponry, Musashi carved a wooden sword out of the oar of a boat, a weapon slightly longer but much lighter than Kojiro’s greatsword – and he cracked his head open with it in the opening movements of the duel. We might call Musashi a radical pragmatist – form, ceremony, weaponry, flourish – none of this meant anything to him; winning meant everything to him. In everything he did, it was about cutting the enemy. *** CUTTING AS THE LIMIT BREAK There are 10,000 things we might all do – if not infinite. Just a few of those things are the most important to your life. Cutting. What determines success where you’re at? This, of course, varies tremendously. Apple’s renaissance over the last 15 years was about an obsession with perfection and aesthetics. Walmart’s rise was in radically low costs, incredibly fast inventory turnover, and the best logistics. Toyota’s comes from relentlessly eliminating waste, down to the smallest details of a workman having to bend over to pick up a wrench. (They see any human movement to rearrange one’s tools or materials as waste, and constantly redesign their factories to eliminate all wasteful movements.) The architect Frank Lloyd Wright was unreliable, but often enough he created a brilliant synthesis between structure and environment that people put up with his unreliability. Pixar’s success in movies and Blizzard’s success in video games comes from a radical perfectionism, never putting out a single bad product in multi-decade runs. The mathematician Paul Erdos worked on as many mathematical problems, with as many contributors as possible, concurrently – and sacrificed everything in his life that wasn’t related to mathematics. The physicist Richard Feynman was the opposite – he constantly cultivated socializing, curiosity, and many of his breakthroughs came from playing around with random inputs and little puzzles in physics. And of course, Lynch focused relentlessly on companies with a good product, good earnings, and at a good price. What’s cutting for you? What makes the difference that, if you do it extraordinarily well and focus on that, means winning every battle? You don’t have a run as the highest returning mutual fund manager for 23 years in a row by accident. You don’t go undefeated in 60 duels-to-the-death by accident. Those who succeed, figure out what cutting is, and cut the enemy. What’s cutting? *** ON COURAGE AND PRECOMMITMENT, OR: CUTTING IS HARD “When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. And if you have not done your inquiring beforehand, there is most often shame.” -- Tsunetomo "Prior to World War II it had always been assumed that the average soldier would kill in combat simply because his country and his leaders had told him to do so and because it was essential to defend his own life and the lives of his friends. When the point came that he didn't kill, it was assumed that he panicked and ran. “[General S.L.A. Marshall's studies] were consistently the same: only 15 to 20 percent of the American riflemen in combat during World War II would fire at the enemy. Those who would not fire did not run and hide (in many cases they were willing to risk great danger to rescue comrades, get ammunition, or run messages), but they simply would not fire their weapons at the enemy, even when faced with repeated waves of banzai charges.” -- Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, On Killing , 1996 Grossman’s book, On Killing , is one of those that changed the way I saw all of humanity – permanently. It’s a trope in modern slasher/horror movies that anyone pushed far enough could become a killer. You see that in the dreadful torture-franchise Saw , where random people are made to kill each other in order to survive by some insane diabolical criminal. But it’s wrong. Most people aren’t killers. Of course, that’s a good thing. But I’ve recommended On Killing to dozens of people, and talked about it some with the few people that read it. (It’s not always an easy read.) The samurai era of Japan feels like a very long time ago; it’s not alive the way current days affairs and tragedies are alive. All of the combatants are dead and gone; their descendants only have a foggy familiarity at best with their ancestors. But there is no doubt, when Musashi cracked Sasaki Kojiri in the head, a man of flesh and blood fell to the ground with his skull fractured into pieces and embedded in his brain; the lights then went off for him, forever. Anything he wished to do in his life, that wasn’t done, now never would be. And of course, the majority of readers flinch at that paragraph – I flinched while writing it. I hesitate to generalize too far, but I think that many of us have the same resistance to cutting as a metaphor as we would to cutting an enemy , or firing a rifle in combat at a charging Imperial Japanese infantryman. I think it’s telling, a little bit telling, that we often describe people who are very effective at business as killers . You see someone that closes lots of business deals and you say, “Yeah, he’s a killer.” It’s very easy to intellectually say, “Oh, yes, cutting . Yes, pick the most important thing and drive at that. ” But it’s actually hard to do. In that way, then, you see some of the seeming contradiction between Musashi and Tsunetomo writing about strategy and preparation, and then fully disregarding one’s life when entering combat. Tsunetomo – “ When the time comes, there is no moment for reasoning. And if you have not done your inquiring beforehand, there is most often shame.” *** AND SOCIETAL APPEARANCES, OR: LOOKING GOOD VS BEING RIGHT Tsunetomo – “Calculating people are contemptible. The reason for this is that calculation deals with loss and gain, and the loss and gain mind never stops. Death is considered loss and life is considered gain. Thus, death is something that such a person does not care for, and he is contemptible.” Lynch – “With every spectacular stock I’ve managed to ferret out, the virtues seemed so obvious that if 100 professionals had been free to add it to their portfolios, I’m convinced that 99 would have done so. But for reasons I’m about to describe, they couldn’t. There are simply too many obstacles between them and the tenbaggers. “Under the current system, a stock isn’t truly attractive until a number of large institutions have recognized its suitability and an equal number of respected Wall Street analysts (the researchers who track the various industries and companies) have put it on the recommended list. With so many people waiting for others to make the first move, it’s amazing that anything gets bought.” And to wrap up, one of the last lessons that’s very explicit from Lynch, and hiding in plain sight in the samurai writings, is how attempting to appear good rather than be right is at least detrimental, if not fatal. I’ll just recommend reading Lynch’s book, but he lists many reasons why institutional investors are unable to make good investments – not least among them, the point that “You’ll never lose your job losing your client’s money in IBM.” There’s a variety of societal reasons why we can’t be on the forefront of doing what we need to do to flourish. Some of them are good, but most of them frankly aren’t. Actually, the next paragraph of Tsunetomo’s is worthwhile to look at as well – “Calculating people are contemptible. The reason for this is that calculation deals with loss and pain, and the loss and gain mind never stops. Death is considered loss and life is considered gain. Thus, death is something that such a person does not care for, and he is contemptible. “ Furthermore, scholars and their like are men who with wit and speech hide their own true cowardice and greed. People often misjudge this.” Now, this is not Tsunetomo being anti-intellectual – he has immense regard for Confucious and genuine sages – but rather, he is chastising the same people that Lynch would, three centuries later. Most investors want to justify their own errors to keep this jobs, rather than take smart risks. They’d rather look good than be right . This is probably as natural an even more natural fear in humans – being different and especially being ostracized for being different – than even violence is. Lynch’s methods weren’t exactly rocket science – he looked for good products at good companies, at a good price. But this meant investing in upstart companies no one had heard of, where he’d look like an idiot if they failed – instead of merely guaranteeing small failure by buying overpriced mainstream stocks. But the vast majority of people are unable to accept being potentially ostracized, and are thus unable to drive on what matters . To cut. *** CONCLUDING LIMIT BREAKS On the surface, this might seem philosophical – maybe it is somewhat philosophical. But I dare say, everyone who thrives to a very high degree in any domain is to some extent a philosopher. Mastery anywhere is, to some extent, mastery everywhere. You can organize your days, your weeks, your minutes, your projects, your business and personal ops, you can apply methodologies like the Theory of Constraints and principles like Combined Arms and Overwhelming Force – but it will do you almost no good if you don’t drive on what matters. “It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways. Even if a man has no natural ability he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the Way. Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.” To conclude, then – 1. You must identify what really matters to drive at it. 2. You must study yourself to understand your weak points, particularly where your conviction will waver. 3. You must “set your heart” to your work every morning and every evening. 4. You must constantly train in your field towards mastery. 5. When it actually comes down to it, you must cut the enemy – whatever cutting is in your field. Not worrying about looking good – or even staying alive . Perhaps we can understand a little more, then, what Musashi means when he says “the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death.” And now, as we end Limit Breaks, one final note from Musashi – “Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men.” LINGUA FRANCA LINGUA FRANCA Lingua Franca #1: Condescension Lingua Franca #1: Condescension WE'VE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA “On the sixth day of Hate Week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of massed planes, the booming of guns—after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war-criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings, they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces—at just this moment it had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Eurasia was an ally. “There was, of course, no admission that any change had taken place. Merely it became known, with extreme suddenness and everywhere at once, that Eastasia and not Eurasia was the enemy. Winston was taking part in a demonstration in one of the central London squares at the moment when it happened. It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed. “The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax. But at the moment he had other things to preoccupy him. It was during the moment of disorder while the posters were being torn down that a man whose face he did not see had tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuse me, I think you’ve dropped your briefcase.’ He took the brief-case abstractedly, without speaking. He knew that it would be days before he had an opportunity to look inside it. The instant that the demonstration was over he went straight to the Ministry of Truth, though the time was now nearly twenty-three hours. The entire staff of the Ministry had done likewise. The orders already issuing from the telescreen, recalling them to their posts, were hardly necessary. “Oceania was at war with Eastasia: Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.” *** ORWELL IN COMBAT George Orwell was certainly one hell of a man. He became one of the fiercest critics of Stalin and the USSR – Animal Farm and 1984 (quoted above) laid bare the consequences of the criminalization of thought, the shifting standards, the nature of power. But it’s worth remembering – and oft-neglected – that he actually took part as a guerilla fighter on the socialist side in the Spanish Civil War. There is where his breach with Soviet Russia came about. Here is Orwell in his own words, from the preface to Animal Farm – “Up to 1930 I did not on the whole look upon myself as a Socialist. In fact I had as yet no clearly defined political views. I became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society. “In 1936 I got married. In almost the same week the civil war broke out in Spain. My wife and I both wanted to go to Spain and fight for the Spanish Government. We were ready in six months, as soon as I had finished the book I was writing. In Spain I spent almost six months on the Aragón front until, at Huesca, a Fascist sniper shot me through the throat. “In the early stages of the war foreigners were on the whole unaware of the inner struggles between the various political parties supporting the Government. Through a series of accidents I joined not the International Brigade like the majority of foreigners, but the POUM militia – i.e. the Spanish Trotskyists. “So in the middle of 1937, when the Communists gained control (or partial control) of the Spanish Government and began to hunt down the Trotskyists, we both found ourselves amongst the victims. We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive, and not even to have been arrested once. Many of our friends were shot, and others spent a long time in prison or simply disappeared. “These man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them. In Spain as well as in Russia the nature of the accusations (namely, conspiracy with the Fascists) was the same and as far as Spain was concerned I had every reason to believe that the accusations were false. To experience all this was a valuable object lesson: it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries.” *** OUR SERIES ON THE LINGUA FRANCA Language – words – are one of the chief tools of thought and communications. There’s other ways to think besides in language – in pictures, in emotions, perhaps in a deep understanding numbers that transcends language – but language is the most common and paramount across society. For all of history, but especially accelerating since the start of the Industrial Era, language has been a battleground – perhaps the battleground – for the long-term shaping of how people think, communicate, and – eventually – act. It happens so slowly that we don’t realize it’s happening, but one of the hardest lessons in life to learn is to a proper skepticism of words themselves . Laozi understood this in Ancient China; Wittgenstein did incredibly fine work in this in the modern West; it’s really of the paramount importance – but it seems obscure and vague. I daresay that the vast majority of people never learn this critical lesson, and their life suffers tremendously for it. Language and words are literally tools to think and communicate. But most people do not realize their limitations, and do not realize they are missing some very badly needed tools , and that they have broken and rusted tools in their toolbox. To not understand the limitation of words – and the current words you have in your toolbox, and the words you have in common with the people you speak and communicate with – well, this would be like a carpenter going through life without a single hammer, instead trying to hammer nails into place with a rusty tin can. The work would be slow and tedious – and in fact, some jobs couldn’t be done at all. Such is the problem with today’s language. *** LINGUA FRANCA #1: CONDESCENSION A writer shouldn’t, very often, ask their readers for sympathy. For me to say, “Dear reader, please be sympathetic – I’ve crossed into treacherous ground here. It is difficult. Bear with me.” That… that’s not appropriate to do very often. A fine rebuttal would be, “Marshall, you chose this subject area. Why are you asking for sympathy?” But I’ve always seen my writing at The Strategic Review and in my books as more of a dialogue than a soapbox for preaching . I try, and hopefully sometimes succeed, to imagine the chains of thought and logic that might arise in your mind when you read what I write, and try to carry forth in a way that’s illuminative and useful. This series… this series is going to be a difficult one. The challenge is this: there’s not much insight to be had in analyzing words that have long-since died in common usage like “schismatic” or “piety” – there might be some insight, as a historical matter, but frankly not much of it. We need to analyze words that are living, that are breathing, that are coming into our thoughts and out of our mouths with some regularity. But, oh! This is a very personal thing. If I take a word that you feel particularly strong about – for or against – it risks bringing about a whole chain of emotional turmoil and turbulence that’s really besides the point. I have friends and colleagues ranging across the political spectrum, from the left to the right. Friends and colleagues who are good people, who I enjoy being around, who range from basically being sincere Communists to basically being devout Christians. As such, even though the etymology and history of words like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” could throw the hidden nature of language into plain sight, it also risks being read as me having an axe to grind. I have no axe. I have very few public political positions – with the work that I do, across a wide range of countries and sectors, I don’t have the luxury of grinding axes in idle talk. If I say something incredibly stupid, I alienate some good people. Worse yet, if I say something intelligent, true, and fiercely disliked – well, there are even worse consequences for that. And yet, I think this topic is very important – it’s one of the most important topics that people don’t realize is important , which is why I intend to battle through it, and search diligently for good examples, and hopefully aid you in better thinking and thriving as a result. Our first such word – Condescension. *** A SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA Let’s take a long look at Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes . If you’re not familiar with the series, you really ought to read it, sooner or later – it makes you much smarter, forever. In order to really understand what happened to the word condescension – and the corresponding mental concept – we need to fill in some of the lines. This story is the first one about Holmes after the narrator and his long-time companion, Dr. Watson, has moved out of their Baker Street apartments. In it, a mysterious visitor arrives. I’ve taken the liberty of a long excerpt here, both because Holmes says some very insightful things, but also to paint the picture of how people would understood condescension in 1892, when the piece was written – “I could not help laughing at the ease with which he explained his process of deduction. “When I hear you give your reasons,” I [Dr. Watson] remarked, “the thing always appears to me to be so ridiculously simple that I could easily do it myself, though at each successive instance of your reasoning I am baffled until you explain your process. And yet I believe that my eyes are as good as yours.” “Quite so,” he [Sherlock Holmes] answered, lighting a cigarette, and throwing himself down into an armchair. “You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.” “Frequently.” “How often?” “Well, some hundreds of times.” “Then how many are there?” “How many? I don’t know.” “Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed. By-the-way, since you are interested in these little problems, and since you are good enough to chronicle one or two of my trifling experiences, you may be interested in this.” He threw over a sheet of thick, pink-tinted note-paper which had been lying open upon the table. “It came by the last post,” said he. “Read it aloud.” The note was undated, and without either signature or address. “There will call upon you tonight, at a quarter to eight o’clock,” it said, “a gentleman who desires to consult you upon a matter of the very deepest moment. Your recent services to one of the royal houses of Europe have shown that you are one who may safely be trusted with matters which are of an importance which can hardly be exaggerated. This account of you we have from all quarters received. Be in your chamber then at that hour, and do not take it amiss if your visitor wear a mask.” “This is indeed a mystery,” I remarked. “What do you imagine that it means?” “I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. But the note itself. What do you deduce from it?” I carefully examined the writing, and the paper upon which it was written. “The man who wrote it was presumably well to do,” I remarked, endeavouring to imitate my companion’s processes. “Such paper could not be bought under half a crown a packet. It is peculiarly strong and stiff.” “Peculiar—that is the very word,” said Holmes. “It is not an English paper at all. Hold it up to the light.” I did so, and saw a large “E” with a small “g,”a “P,” and a large “G” with a small “t” woven into the texture of the paper. “What do you make of that?” asked Holmes. “The name of the maker, no doubt; or his monogram, rather.” “Not at all. The ‘G’ with the small ‘t’ stands for ‘Gesellschaft,’ which is the German for ‘Company.’ It is a customary contraction like our ‘Co.’ ‘P,’ of course, stands for ‘Papier.’ Now for the ‘Eg.’ Let us glance at our Continental Gazetteer.” He took down a heavy brown volume from his shelves. “Eglow, Eglonitz—here we are, Egria. It is in a German-speaking country—in Bohemia, not far from Carlsbad. ‘Remarkable as being the scene of the death of Wallenstein, and for its numerous glass-factories and paper-mills.’ Ha, ha, my boy, what do you make of that?” His eyes sparkled, and he sent up a great blue triumphant cloud from his cigarette. “The paper was made in Bohemia,” I said. “Precisely. And the man who wrote the note is a German. Do you note the peculiar construction of the sentence—‘This account of you we have from all quarters received.’ A Frenchman or Russian could not have written that. It is the German who is so uncourteous to his verbs. It only remains, therefore, to discover what is wanted by this German who writes upon Bohemian paper and prefers wearing a mask to showing his face. And here he comes, if I am not mistaken, to resolve all our doubts.” As he spoke there was the sharp sound of horses’ hoofs and grating wheels against the curb, followed by a sharp pull at the bell. Holmes whistled. “A pair, by the sound,” said he. “Yes,” he continued, glancing out of the window. “A nice little brougham and a pair of beauties. A hundred and fifty guineas apiece. There’s money in this case, Watson, if there is nothing else.” “I think that I had better go, Holmes.” “Not a bit, Doctor. Stay where you are. I am lost without my Boswell. And this promises to be interesting. It would be a pity to miss it.” “But your client—” “Never mind him. I may want your help, and so may he. Here he comes. Sit down in that armchair, Doctor, and give us your best attention.” A slow and heavy step, which had been heard upon the stairs and in the passage, paused immediately outside the door. Then there was a loud and authoritative tap. “Come in!” said Holmes. A man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet six inches in height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules. His dress was rich with a richness which would, in England, be looked upon as akin to bad taste. Heavy bands of astrakhan were slashed across the sleeves and fronts of his double- breasted coat, while the deep blue cloak which was thrown over his shoulders was lined with flame-coloured silk and secured at the neck with a brooch which consisted of a single flaming beryl. Boots which extended halfway up his calves, and which were trimmed at the tops with rich brown fur, completed the impression of barbaric opulence which was suggested by his whole appearance. He carried a broad-brimmed hat in his hand, while he wore across the upper part of his face, extending down past the cheekbones, a black vizard mask, which he had apparently adjusted that very moment, for his hand was still raised to it as he entered. From the lower part of the face he appeared to be a man of strong character, with a thick, hanging lip, and a long, straight chin suggestive of resolution pushed to the length of obstinacy. “You had my note?” he asked with a deep harsh voice and a strongly marked German accent. “I told you that I would call.” He looked from one to the other of us, as if uncertain which to address. “Pray take a seat,” said Holmes. “This is my friend and colleague, Dr. Watson, who is occasionally good enough to help me in my cases. Whom have I the honour to address?” “You may address me as the Count Von Kramm, a Bohemian nobleman. I understand that this gentleman, your friend, is a man of honour and discretion, whom I may trust with a matter of the most extreme importance. If not, I should much prefer to communicate with you alone.” I rose to go, but Holmes caught me by the wrist and pushed me back into my chair. “It is both, or none,” said he. “You may say before this gentleman anything which you may say to me.” The Count shrugged his broad shoulders. “Then I must begin,” said he, “by binding you both to absolute secrecy for two years; at the end of that time the matter will be of no importance. At present it is not too much to say that it is of such weight it may have an influence upon European history.” “I promise,” said Holmes. “And I.” “You will excuse this mask,” continued our strange visitor. “The august person who employs me wishes his agent to be unknown to you, and I may confess at once that the title by which I have just called myself is not exactly my own.” “I was aware of it,” said Holmes dryly. “The circumstances are of great delicacy, and every precaution has to be taken to quench what might grow to be an immense scandal and seriously compromise one of the reigning families of Europe. To speak plainly, the matter implicates the great House of Ormstein, hereditary kings of Bohemia.” “I was also aware of that,” murmured Holmes, settling himself down in his armchair and closing his eyes. Our visitor glanced with some apparent surprise at the languid, lounging figure of the man who had been no doubt depicted to him as the most incisive reasoner and most energetic agent in Europe. Holmes slowly reopened his eyes and looked impatiently at his gigantic client. “If your Majesty would condescend to state your case,” he remarked, “I should be better able to advise you.” The man sprang from his chair and paced up and down the room in uncontrollable agitation. Then, with a gesture of desperation, he tore the mask from his face and hurled it upon the ground. “You are right,” he cried; “I am the King. Why should I attempt to conceal it?” “Why, indeed?” murmured Holmes. “Your Majesty had not spoken before I was aware that I was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia.”” *** CONDESCENSION IN 1892 We might mark 1892 as nearly the exact midpoint in the evolution of the word condescension . Sherlock Holmes is a revelation – he’s a fictional character, of course, but he often feels very much alive. Conan Doyle, the author, he was a medical doctor himself. The science and medicine in all the books about Holmes are up to the current day’s standard, including Watson regularly nagging Holmes not to do too much cocaine. (Really.) So what do we make of this? – “If your Majesty would condescend to state your case,” he remarked, “I should be better able to advise you.” The old meaning of the word condescension is mostly there, but we can see the sprinklings of the change coming about. Holmes is asking the King to condescend to his level , and again, it’s mostly sincere – it’s mostly not irony. Look at how the King is described – A man entered who could hardly have been less than six feet six inches in height, with the chest and limbs of a Hercules. His dress was rich with a richness which would, in England, be looked upon as akin to bad taste. … From the lower part of the face he appeared to be a man of strong character, with a thick, hanging lip, and a long, straight chin suggestive of resolution pushed to the length of obstinacy. It’s a strange mix of respectful and disrespectful. The king is of gargantuan height with limbs like Hercules, a man of strong character… and yet he’s dressed in a richness that would be looked upon as akin to bad taste in England, his expression suggesting resolution pushed to the length of obstinacy. “If your Majesty would condescend to state your case,” he remarked, “I should be better able to advise you.” What to make this? *** CONDESCENSION IN 2017 The Apple dictionary will do just fine for this – condescend verb show feelings of superiority; be patronizing: take care not to condescend to your reader. do something in a haughty way, as though it is below one's dignity or level of importance: we'll be waiting for twenty minutes before she condescends to appear. condescending adjective having or showing a feeling of patronizing superiority: she thought the teachers were arrogant and condescending | a condescending smile. Yes, those definitions are telling – “haughty” and “arrogant and condescending”… this is the modern understanding of the word. But when Sherlock Holmes clearly wasn’t asking masked King to be haughty or arrogant when he said, “If your Majesty would condescend to state your case,” he remarked, “I should be better able to advise you.” Just the opposite, no? Isn’t this is a puzzle? *** “A KINDHEARTED DESCENT FROM RANK” The original meaning of the phrase “condescend” could probably be called something like “a kindhearted descent from rank.” If a King went and worked in the fields to see how the peasants truly lived, he was condescending to do so. In a nice, kindhearted way. A military colonel or general who walked amongst the trenches and took fire from the enemy was condescending when he did so – in the old meaning of the word. He was “going down a level in the hierarchy of duties” – or some such – when he didn’t have to , which was seen as a kindhearted and empathetic thing. In olden stories, you might hear about a monarch or vizier “condescending” to stay at a little local inn, or to eat at the table of a local farmer. This was condescension – in the old meaning of the word. It was entirely a good thing, in those days. *** THE TURNING OF CONDESCENSION You can see the midpoint of condescension in Conan Doyle’s writing. Perhaps more telling than all the explicit language is what’s unstated . The King of Bohemia, a very powerful man, is wearing a mask to consult with an amateur detective and scientist (Holmes), and is friend who is a discharged army medic (Watson). In 1892, rank was still an accepted concept – it was only the World Wars that largely destroyed the concept of rank. But even in 1892, these amateur scientists, industrialists, and businessmen were starting to see that the monarchies needed them more than they needed the monarchies. *** DAMNATIO MEMORIAE In ancient Roman times, defeated public enemies would sometimes have “ damnatio memoriae ” applied to them – damning their memory . This meant being entirely erased from official Roman history . Any statues of someone so damned would be torn down; if they were an emperor, all their coins would be re-minted; no one was allowed to talk about them any more. The Soviets, obviously, did the same thing with Trotsky and a whole lot of others. Orwell wrote in the preface to Animal Farm – “At the death of John Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World – first-hand account of the early days of the Russian Revolution – the copyright of the book passed into the hands of the British Communist Party, to whom I believe Reed had bequeathed it. Some years later the British Communists, having destroyed the original edition of the book as completely as they could, issued a garbled version from which they had eliminated mentions of Trotsky and also omitted the introduction written by Lenin. If a radical intelligentsia had still existed in Britain, this act of forgery would have been exposed and denounced in every literary paper in the country. As it was there was little or no protest. To many English intellectuals it seemed quite a natural thing to do. And this tolerance or plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for Russia happens to be fashionable at this moment. Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.” This same type of action – erasing words from the shared vocabulary and toolbox of mankind – is constantly and ever employed. I believe that this is precisely what happened to the old meaning of the word condescend. *** WHITHER RANK? HOW DOES ONE GOODHEARTEDLY DEPART FROM IT? We explored Rank as a concept back during the Dubious Battle series, now part of the Machina compilation. As previously said, rank originates with commissioned duties . If an individual dispatches their duties well, their office might become formalized into official rank , and the better that subsequent officeholders of that rank do, the more prestigious it becomes. Clearly, rank still exists. A tenured professor in a university is higher in formal rank than an adjunct professor, who is higher in formal rank than a graduate student. It’s normally the job of a graduate student to grade simple papers in a 101-type class. If a professor – who is under no obligation to do so – grades some papers to “remember what it’s like” and just to be friendly to one of the graduate students, then what is the word to describe it? There is an old word for it – Condescend. “The physics professor condescended to grade some 101-level papers.” What is the current word for it? If someone is of higher formal rank, and does duties that are not expected out of their rank merely from goodwill, what is the word for that? There is no word for it. There is no way to describe, in modern English, “departing from one’s duties [and rank], to do lower duties, out of a sense of goodwill.” This word has been destroyed; the original meaning is now the opposite. Condescension used to be a nice thing; now it’s a bad thing. “How dare you presume to be higher-ranked than someone.” And yet, rank exists. We’re not responsible for all sets of duties. There are duties that do not belong to us if we’ve advanced to higher levels of more difficult commissions. And yet, we can “go down” and do some of those duties. But there is no way to say that. Attempting to “go down” and “be kindhearted” is seen as a bad thing , an arrogant thing , a haughty thing . Condescension has flipped its meaning. The old form of condescension can not be said alone, and indeed – without words for it, it is hard to even think the concept. *** TACIT AGREEMENT THAT “IT WOULDN’T DO” Orwell – “Any fairminded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war [World War II] official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian “co-ordination” that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the Government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news – things which on their own merits would get the big headlines – being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do” to mention that particular fact.” Orwell’s masterpieces, 1984 and Animal Farm, showed how governments and cultures would erase the past. They would make you think you’re crazy, because all the official sources would list something different from what you remembered happening. And in public conversation, no one would contradict the official narrative – the penalties for doing so ranged from social censure at least, to imprisonment and execution at most. But I dare say Orwell, for all his mastery, didn’t go far enough. Distorting historical facts is one thing; coming across a single unburied uncensored copy of Ten Days that Shook the World might well start one’s mind spinning, when compared against the censored and distorted version. This hamfisted type of censorship was certainly a danger before the internet, but becomes less dangerous every passing day. No, I think the real danger now is making concepts impossible to think about by deleting or changing the meaning of words themselves. In the current mainstream view of the world, traditional goodly condescension is impossible – and yet, it was , and still exists – at least, the old meaning of the word still maps to reality in many instances. Monarchies have been in constant decline, of course, but rank in the form of commissioned duties ever is and ever will be, as long as there's stuff that needs to be done and someone who needs to be responsible for seeing it gets done. *** THE FIRST LESSON FROM LINGUA FRANCA We’re exploring the nature of language and thinking – and the word condescension really isn’t the point. It’s just a single word, and in the grand scheme of things, not particularly important. The particular word, again, is not the point. Rather, our first lesson is that words can flip valence from good to bad, and the old meaning of the word can be destroyed. There is no substitute word for condescension – for the vast majority of people in 2017, the concept does not exist . And yet, there are people who, for no reason other than a general sense of goodwill, depart from whatever their lofty station might be, and those people are often well-loved and well-appreciated. But condescension? Don’t you dare condescend to me. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia. Lingua Franca #2: Heroes Lingua Franca #2: Heroes "HERE IS THE PEOPLE'S HEROINE" Most of the traces of the young Iosif Djugashvili were now gone – the fashionable and chic dress, the wind-swept hair, the smoldering good looks. The old photos make clear why he could be such a charmer, so well-loved among his friends and revelers. The man he’d later become, you’d see no traces in those early photographs – he was charming, dashing, brash, full of confidence. You can understand why he made such an excellent bank-robber, extortionist, and agitator – but all that is gone, long buried and censored, scant few traces remaining for historians many decades later to attempt to dig up and piece together. No, by January 1942 that Iosif Djugashvili is no more; the hair is now slicked-back tightly upon his skull. He wears a simple and drab military uniform with no decorations on it. There’s moments of levity at banquets – he would still turn on the charm at something like the Moscow Conference with Churchill and American representative Harriman present, laughing a little, striking one of his grandest bargains – no separate piece for the Axis criminals. Unconditional surrender only. But most of the time, Joseph Stalin looks much harder than he did as a younger and more care-free man. The Nazi Invasion, Operation Barbarossa, had failed two months earlier at the very doorstep of Moscow. Now, in late January of 1942, Iosif is musing on war strategy. The Nazis dug into the defensive after the Russian counterattack in the Battle of Moscow in early December, but they would surely resume their aggressive campaign when the winter thawed. How to navigate the war strategy…? Stalin was likely smoking a cigarette and working at his desk when he came across the article in the newspaper Pravda. Oh, this is something… Stalin read the final account of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya – an 18 year old Russian woman who volunteered for partisan guerilla warfare against the German invaders. She’d snuck into the village of Petrischevo where German cavalry where based, and set fire to a number of buildings before being caught. She was defiant from the gallows; she makes a speech of resistance – "Hey, comrades! Why are you looking so sad? Be brave, fight, beat the Germans, burn, trample them! I'm not afraid to die, comrades. It is happiness to die for one's people! You hang me now, but I'm not alone. There are two hundred million of us. You can't hang us all. They will avenge me." And her last words – "Farewell, comrades! Fight, do not be afraid! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!" Some weeks later, Stalin reads this account in Pravda and finds himself nodding. Yes, this is something… Stalin stands up from his desk, smiles, says, "Here is the people's heroine.” *** LINGUA FRANCA #2: HEROES Our exploration of the Lingua Franca continues with a concept that’s been important across the ages – heroism. It used to mean something very different than it does now. It likely will take it’s olden meaning once again, some day not too far into the future. Until then, we’d be wise to get our thinking in order on this important topic. So now we explore – what’s a hero? *** HEROES OF THE SOVIET UNION For her partisan warfare and brave stance in the face of death, Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya became the first woman decorated with the Hero of the Soviet Union award during World War II. This was one of two major “Hero” decorations in the Soviet Union – Hero of Socialist Labor and Hero of the Soviet Union . The Hero of Socialist Labor award was the newer of the two, being created in 1938. Its first recipient? Joseph Stalin. From looking at Zoya and Stalin, we can see two types of publicly-honored heroes that, seemingly, all societies tend to honor across history – the martyr and the confessor . *** THE TWO TYPES OF SAINTS “Sainthood” exists as a concept in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and most of hierarchical branches of Christianity. (It’s missing from some Protestant denominations, and present in others.) The original criteria for sainthood was martyrdom – dying for the faith specifically. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, had she been a Christian instead of a Soviet partisan, would have perfectly met the criteria for Christian sainthood. "Farewell, comrades! Fight, do not be afraid! Stalin is with us! Stalin will come!" This looks eerily similar to how many of the early Christians died under Nero’s persecutions – the torture, the humiliations, the final invocation that Christ is coming and thus, stay strong brethren! – except in her case, it was Stalin and comrades, not Christ and fellow Christians. Death is always and ever lurking somewhere in the back of one's mind for most humans. Even when we don’t think of death itself, certain things terrify us – tapping in to some primordial self defense mechanisms, a self-preservation instinct we inherited from our times as apes… or perhaps even earlier. Fear is part of our existence, and fear of death is one of the strongest of the fears. In all societies, across all times, people who died bravely were put forth as examples and stories of them were shared among the survivors of their people. This was true when Pericles gave his famous funeral oration in Athens; this was true when Lincoln spoke of the consecrated ground at Gettysburg; this was true when Soviet partisans were hung by Nazis on that frigid winter battlefield. It was and is always true. In the early centuries of Christianity, martyrdom was the criteria for sainthood, but eventually, Christianity became the Roman state religion and the persecution of Christians largely ceased. As martyrdom became less common, a new type of saints came to the fore in being canonized – confessors of the faith. This designation was for people who lived entirely a manifestation of Christian life – or as the official Roman rites called it, a life “Heroic in Virtue.” There are some official and relatively discrete criteria for Christians to be called “heroic in virtue” – their life needed to seem to follow the tenets of Christianity nearly completely, and interestingly, with a certain effortlessness to it. It was not enough to be pious – you had to be joyfully pious . From my (admittedly limited) understanding of this doctrine, it was a belief that Confessors of the Faith were granted some sort of grace by God Himself; they lived as an example to those living; God sent them to show light to the world, or some such. And thus, gradually, there became more officially recognized saints who were confessors , who lived in heroic virtue , than those who were martyrs . *** PATTERNS OF CELEBRATION OF PEOPLE’S LIVES As humans, one of the chief ways we figure out how to live is by observing those around us. Strongest of those examples are those our culture celebrates as heroes . And indeed, across all ages and cultures, people who die bravely in defense of their civilization or ideology seem to be celebrated to some extent as martyrs, and those who seem to live effortlessly along the lines of a very inspirational life are celebrated too – there is less of a universal word for those, but confessor-type heroes are celebrated across the ages. This makes sense, and seemingly happens across all human civilizations. Similar rites and celebrations and words come to describe them – the word “hero” seems to emerge across all languages, sooner or later, and it typically encompasses these two types of heroes. *** THE GREATEST OF GREAT HEROES A third and final type of Universal Hero ought to mentioned before proceeding – the truly Great Hero . We’ll turn to one of the foremost works on heroism, one of my favorite books, for reference. Tomas Carlyle’s 1840 “ On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History ” is one of the finest works ever written; if you can handle and work your way through the Victorian English, it pays off with all sorts of gems and insights. Carlyle advanced two critical ideas in On Heroes , both of which I believe to be correct. 1. Everyone has a “religion” in the most general sense of the word – not necessarily their formal religion or what they claim to believe, but how they relate to what matters and their place in the universe . This is one of the chief facts of people and determines much of the course of their lives. 2. “Religion” is mapped out, discerned, and founded by Heroes , who illuminate and bring forth how a people should live. *** RELIGIO AS THE CHIEF FACT I tend to use the Latin word “religio” to denote a person’s orientation towards the universe , and to distinguish it from organized religion. Everyone has a religio – at two extremes, a belief that nothing matters and nothing is true is religio just as much as a Buddhist who believes in working towards nirvana to break the reincarnation cycle. Carlyle, emphasis added – “ It is well said, in every sense, that a man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man’s, or a nation of men’s. By religion I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion ; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the Un- seen World or No-World; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? “Was it Heathenism,—plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;—doubt as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of this question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual in them that determined the outward and actual;—their religion, as I say, was the great fact about them. ” *** AND WHERE DOES RELIGIO COME FROM? … HEROES Carlyle goes on to walk through some of Norse mythology – noting they still believed in the Norse Gods, Odin and Thor and what not, as little as 800 years prior to his writing On Heroes during the early days of the Industrial Revolution. He reflects on how the Norse mythology gave rise to notions of what to do and why life matters … and then reflects on where such views came from. His answer – “Well, it is strange enough this old Norse view of Nature; different enough from what we believe of Nature. Whence it specially came, one would not like to be compelled to say very minutely! One thing we may say: It came from the thoughts of Norse men;—from the thought, above all, of the first Norse man who had an original power of thinking. The First Norse “man of genius,” as we should call him! Innumerable men had passed by, across this Universe, with a dumb vague wonder, such as the very animals may feel; or with a painful, fruitlessly inquiring wonder, such as men only feel;—till the great Thinker came, the original man, the Seer; whose shaped spoken Thought awakes the slumbering capability of all into Thought. It is ever the way with the Thinker, the spiritual Hero. What he says, all men were not far from saying, were longing to say. The Thoughts of all start up, as from painful enchanted sleep, round his Thought; answering to it, Yes, even so ! Joyful to men as the dawning of day from night;—is it not, indeed, the awakening for them from no-being into being, from death into life? We still honor such a man; call him Poet, Genius, and so forth: but to these wild men he was a very magician, a worker of miraculous unexpected blessing for them; a Prophet, a God!—Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows , in man after man, generation after generation,—till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther; but must give place to another. “For the Norse people, the Man now named Odin, and Chief Norse God, we fancy, was such a man. A Teacher, and Captain of soul and of body; a Hero, of worth immeasurable; admiration for whom, transcending the known bounds, became adoration. Has he not the power of articulate Thinking; and many other powers, as yet miraculous? So, with boundless gratitude, would the rude Norse heart feel. Has he not solved for them the sphinx-enigma of this Universe; given assurance to them of their own destiny there? By him they know now what they have to do here, what to look for hereafter. Existence has become articulate, melodious by him; he first has made Life alive!—We may call this Odin, the origin of Norse Mythology: Odin, or whatever name the First Norse Thinker bore while he was a man among men. His view of the Universe once promulgated, a like view starts into being in all minds; grows, keeps ever growing, while it continues credible there. In all minds it lay written, but invisibly, as in sympathetic ink; at his word it starts into visibility in all. Nay, in every epoch of the world, the great event, parent of all others, is it not the arrival of a Thinker in the world! ” *** ON HEROES Heavy stuff! Oh my, this is heavy stuff. But I think it is – true . Often denigrated under the name “Great Man Theory,” Carlyle articulates how societies come to form their views of the world and what matters. He answers that all men wonder and suffer, in a vague unspeakable way, until some Thinker – a Hero – comes forth and codifies what matters, and what does not. Carlyle names a number of such Heroes – Odin, mentioned above; the Prophet Muhammad of Islam; Napoleon Bonaparte and Oliver Cromwell… a number of literary greats and poets; religious reformers… Indeed, this explanation rings true – Confucius still lives on, deeply embedded in East Asian society. His life is seen as an example of how to live, especially in Chinese society, and he’s adored and revered to this today. Carlyle uses the word “worshipped,” but the word worship, alas, has also changed meanings in the 170-some years since he wrote On Heroes . Being a Hero , of course, does not make you good . Under Carlyle’s definition, Marx and Lenin were certainly Heroes ; Attila the Hun, Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan, and yes, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin qualify as Heroes, alongside Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Mohandas Gandhi, and innumerable others. To say Hero in the Carlylean sense is not to say good – it is just a fact. It is someone who organized the thinking and religio of their people for a time. The Young Turks that led the Ottoman Empire down into destruction were Heroes , just as much as Mustafa Kemal who fought to preserve the independence and modernize the new Turkish Republic. To be a Hero has nothing at all to do with being good ; it has to do with organizing an uncertain and confused pattern of life into a systematic way of thinking for a large number of people. You can be a hero and terribly wicked – like, say, Pol Pot – or you can be a Hero and be terrifically good, like, say, Aristotle. Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan were both Heroes to large numbers of Americans, under this definition, however you might personally feel about either of them. So too were Sun-Yat Sen, Mao Zedong, and Deng Xiaoping – again, however you might feel about any of those three. To be a Hero is to organize confusion into a system of thought about what matters, for a large number of people. *** HEROES AND POWER Humans are ever and always attracted to power, for a variety of obvious and non-obvious reasons. I need not explain that, do I? Humans are attracted to power. The majority of humans, the majority of the time. This is a straightforward and true statement, can we not agree on that? (Good.) There has been a trend over the last 50 years or so to equate “hero” and “good.” “Teachers are the real heroes” – statements like those. Prior to this past half-century, heroes would typically show at least some aspect of the three we’ve explored – 1. The Great Hero – Confucius, Augustus Caesar, Mohammad, Charlemagne, Benjamin Franklin, Marx, Lenin, Mao – someone who organized a large-scale system of thought for their people and led them to new patterns of meaning – religio – across their lives. 2. The Martyr – someone who dies bravely in defense of their society and culture. 3. The Confessor – someone who embodies all the precepts of their society, seemingly effortlessly, manifesting virtue and seeming to light the way for others. The very devout and pious son in the view of a Confucian, the samurai lord who arranged his affairs perfectly and lived in harmony in his domain, the Christian who founds a monastic order, the revolutionary socialist who strives constantly to add more dignity to labor and build the state. We can see these emanating from the same place – first, in the foundation of a system of thinking and meaning; second and third, in dying bravely or living faithfully in advancing that way of thinking. The word “heroic” might be appended to lesser versions of these actions – so that a policeman or soldier who goes far beyond the call of duty into mortal danger, but who does not die or suffer for it, is called heroic. It is like a “smaller version” of living one’s life constantly like that – a smaller version of the Confessor-type hero, heroic as applied to a single moment ; that makes sense, of course. People who clarify a system of thought – Mencius following from Confucius – might also be called Heroes; as would people who go through prolonged suffering to bring their cause to the forefront (like the original Bolsheviks, to a socialist, who often lived in immense poverty and dedication for a long time before the USSR was founded). (Incidentally, many of them would later be executed by Stalin before being rehabilitated and considered martyrs by Khrushchev and Gorbachev – but that’s besides the point.) To be a Hero, of course, was powerful – because you were shaping, to greater or lesser extent, what people believed mattered and how they lived. You were forming a society and culture, or advancing and defending a society and culture that already existed. *** THE DEBASEMENT OF THE HEROIC CURRENCY But this brings us to the current day. “ “The miners are not ‘heroes,’ as they have been called around the world for surviving underground for over two months,” Néstor Jorquera, president of the Chilean mineworkers union, CONFEMIN, told the Inter Press Service. “They are victims.” Many in the international labor movement have complained that news accounts have ignored the poor treatment of workers by the mining company, which initially refused to pay their wages after the miners were trapped underground on Aug. 5.” “The miners are heroes.” “Teachers are the real heroes.” Where does this come from? Under some sort of tortured logic, of course, you could say that anyone doing anything worthwhile is a hero – but what then, are actual heroes to be called? Carlyle said it like this – “Society everywhere is some representation, not insupportably inaccurate, of a graduated Worship of Heroes—reverence and obedience done to men really great and wise. Not insupportably inaccurate, I say! They are all as bank-notes, these social dignitaries, all representing gold;—and several of them, alas, always are forged notes. We can do with some forged false notes; with a good many even; but not with all, or the most of them forged! No: there have to come revolutions then; cries of Democracy, Liberty and Equality, and I know not what:— the notes being all false, and no gold to be had for them, people take to crying in their despair that there is no gold, that there never was any! “Gold,” Hero-worship, is nevertheless, as it was always and everywhere, and cannot cease till man himself ceases. ” I find the above excerpt fascinating – almost hilarious. Carlyle is advancing one of the most grand and lofty theories of all time – as to the origin of why humans think certain things matter – and he answers that it comes from Heroes who organize thought and meaning , and that society follows from reverence and emulation of those heroes. And then – hilariously – he compares it to bank notes. And he remarks that that some notes are forged. Carlyle was an odd writer – he mixed the lyrical and poetic hyper-romanticism of the earlier age, with the fierce mercantile, scientific, and logical thinking of the Industrial Revolution. (Incidentally, Nietzsche did too, as did Marx at times. Nowadays the hyper-romantic streams of thinking have largely died out in their purest forms, so we have very little writing that’s both logically grounded while simultaneously truly sweeping and awe-inspiring.) Carlyle takes both refuge in an idea, and shudders in horror at the same time – when the ideas that are advanced as Heroic stand on shaky ground but are persuasive, the can only circulate like forged bank-notes for a time… before the entire currency collapses. We can say thus, that Hitler was a Hero for a time to the Germans – but Nazism collapsed and was extinguished due to the falseness of the ideology he advanced. Aristotle and Confucius have lived for thousands of years and will likely live thousands more, but Hitler was a brief run of a couple ugly decades before he committed suicide in the subterranean Fuhrerbunker as Berlin burned above him. When Carlyle was writing in 1840, of course, the French Revolution was seen as an unmitigated disaster – the Terror, Napoleon’s usurpation of the Republic, and then his self-proclaied monarchy; then his usurpation of the Spanish Crown followed by the brutal guerilla uprising there, the doomed invasion of Moscow and all the suffering there, before eventual and final defeat at Waterloo. Carlyle’s prediction was that debasing the heroic currency – intending to praise and celebrate and live patterns of living that are not in harmony with nature would eventually lead to downfall and destruction. I believe that he is correct – and World War I and World War II were the forces that swept so many bankrupt philosophies off the world stage and into the ash heap of history. But – what of our current era? *** HEROES AND VICTIMS We are exploring the language of the day – last chapter, we explored the word “condescension” – which flipped meanings from good thing to very bad thing , and the original concept was effectively deleted from common thinking. Rank still exists. Duties still exist. Duties that are beneath your station that you are not responsible for… those still exist. You can still do those duties out of a sense of goodwill and camaraderie. But condescension… condescension has had damnatio proclaimed on it; the concept does not exist any more. There is no way to talk about this thing; it might as well not exist. Heroism has gone similarly – if everything is “heroic,” then what’s actual heroism? The reasons it happened, I believe, are far different. “Heroism” got equated with “powerful” – which is both true and false. Yes, the Heroic is always a source of power and moves people along through life. But being named heroic does not grant that sort of power; it’s only when a worldview and system of thought is in harmony with both nature and its era that it becomes powerful. It might not be an exaggeration to say that True Heroism is everything … and yet, the word “hero” without actual heroism doesn’t mean particularly anything. We probably live in an era that glorifies naked power as much as any other era ever has. Which might even be acceptable, but we also live in an era that pays too much attention to labels – words – and not enough to substance . When the Chilean miners were trapped underground for over two months, they were steadfast, they endured, they survived – they were a lot of things. But were they heroes? Their own union rep, Señor Jorquera, does not think so – “ The miners are not ‘heroes,’ as they have been called around the world for surviving underground for over two months. They are victims.” *** THE SECOND LESSON FROM LINGUA FRANCA Words are incredibly useful as a tool of thought, but they mean nothing when they map to nothing. The word “hero” – for reasons we’ve explored – has come to be mapped to “person I like” or “person I want to praise or reassure for some reason.” The word hero , thus, has came to mean – very little. It’s just a worthless compliment you can give someone. Yes – worthless . It doesn’t mean what it meant when Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya was executed by the Nazis; it doesn’t mean what it meant when Benjamin Franklin was lovingly called “The First American” for advancing principles that the new nation would be based upon. In this case, the word has been debased – it’s mostly just another synonym for “good,” highly diluted in its meaning. Worst of all abuses of this word, I contend, is calling someone a “hero” who has just suffered through something. Suffering steadfastly can be admirable, to be sure, but in olden days, it was only those who suffered to advance their civilization that were called heroes – and even then, sparingly. Once again, the word does not matter – actually, in this case, the word might matter some… you ought to think on what’s really a hero . I’ve laid out my logic and sources, but you ought to give it some thought of your own. But, in another sense, no, the word does not matter – rather, what matters is the concept of a word losing its meaning by merely becoming a synonym for “nice thing” and thus losing its significance. The trend towards calling anyone a hero who suffers a little bit, not even necessarily bravely, not for their civilization but just in their own private lives … is this not a debasement of the word “hero” – a word that was once the most grand of words, denoting the most grand things of a civilization, and which now means… nothing? It’s too bad we don’t have an actual word for people who suffer – so that they can be worthy of our compassion, and celebrated for enduring, and comforted after their struggle. Attributing “hero” to them, as if the word is a magical talisman that will make them powerful, that’s just silly… but it’s too bad we don’t have an appropriate word for this other thing that’s worthy of our sympathy. Oh wait, we do have a word for it? What is it? “The miners are not ‘heroes,’ as they have been called around the world for surviving underground for over two months. They are victims .” Oh. Well, ain’t that something. Monarchs who think they’re clever mix brass in with their gold coins and think no one will notice. It’s a good trick… for a short time. A very short time. Think through your words a little, eh? We need to brandish up our mental treasuries to continue to think soundly, clearly and lucidly. Lingua Franca #3: Revolutionary Lingua Franca #3: Revolutionary NOT CONSTRUCTION, BUT DESTRUCTION; NOT REFORM, BUT REVOLUTION! “The Roosevelt administration was worried by Long's growing popularity and on 4 March 1935, General Hugh S. Johnson in a radio speech denounced Long and Coughlin as this "great Louisiana demagogue and this political padre", going on to accuse the duo of speaking "with nothing of learning, knowledge nor experience to lead us through a labyrinth that has perplexed the minds of men since the beginning of time... These two men are raging up and down this land preaching not construction, but destruction-not reform, but revolution! "” -- Wikipedia: Huey Long *** LINGUA FRANCA #3: REVOLUTION Well, the general pattern of our investigation is clear enough – we find some important word, investigate what concepts it maps to, and use it to clarify our general thinking from its class of words. On the way, we hopefully learn a little history and get smarter in general. So, no need to bury the lede here – revolutionary used to be a very disreputable word. Revolutionary things were bad things. General Hugh Johnson – one of Franklin Roosevelt’s braintrust, and thus not in any way an ultra-conservative type like Metternich – condemned Huey Long for “preaching not construction, but destruction-not reform, but revolution ! ” I mean, isn’t that odd to our modern ears? Equating “destruction” and “revolution” – when Apple advertises a revolutionary new iPhone, they’re obviously not equating themselves with Huey Long. What’s going on here? “Revolutionary” went from a negative valence to a positive one – it’s now time to explore valence in this chapter – and the word has flipped in its implications and feeling about it. What happened? How did this happen? And as our words have shuffled around, are we smarter, stupider, neither, or both as a result? *** YAY/BOO THEORY “I am a normative utilitarian and a descriptive emotivist: I believe utilitarianism is the correct way to resolve moral problems, but that the normal mental algorithms for resolving moral problems use emotivism. “ Emotivism, aka the yay/boo theory, is the belief that moral statements, however official they may sound, are merely personal opinions of preference or dislike. Thus, "feeding the hungry is a moral duty" corresponds to "yay for feeding the hungry!" and "murdering kittens is wrong" corresponds to "boo for kitten murderers!" “ Emotivism is a very nice theory of what people actually mean when they make moral statements. Billions of people around the world, even the non-religious, happily make moral statements every day without having any idea what they reduce to or feeling like they ought to reduce to anything. “ Emotivism also does a remarkably good job capturing the common meanings of the words "good" and "bad". An average person may have beliefs like "pizza is good, but seafood is bad", "Israel is good, but Palestine is bad", "the book was good, but the movie was bad", "atheism is good, theism is bad", "evolution is good, creationism is bad", and "dogs are good, but cats are bad". Some of these seem to be moral beliefs, others seem to be factual beliefs, and others seem to be personal preferences. But we are happy using the word "good" for all of them, and it doesn't feel like we're using the same word in several different ways, the way it does when we use "right" to mean both "correct" and "opposite of left". It feels like they're all just the same thing. The moral theory that captures that feeling is emotivism. Yay pizza, books, Israelis, atheists, dogs, and evolution! Boo seafood, Palestinians, movies, theists, creationism, and cats! “Remember, evolution is a crazy tinker who recycles everything. So it would not be surprising to find that our morality is a quick hack on the same machinery that runs our decisions about which food to eat or which pet to adopt.” -- Yvain on LessWrong, The Trouble With “Good” *** VALENCE AND YAY/BOO “ Valence, as used in psychology, especially in discussing emotions, means the intrinsic attractiveness/"good"-ness (positive valence) or averseness/"bad"-ness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation. The term is also used to characterize and categorize specific emotions. For example, the emotions popularly referred to as "negative", such as anger and fear, have "negative valence". Joy has "positive valence". Positively valenced emotions are evoked by positively valenced events, objects, or situations. The term is also used to describe the hedonic tone of feelings, affect, certain behaviors (for example, approach and avoidance), goal attainment or nonattainment, and conformity with or violation of norms.” -- Wikipedia: Valence (psychology) Well, those are two useful tools to add the toolbox. We’ve got emotivism , which says that most ethical and value judgments are basically just saying “yay” or “boo” to things. And we’ve got valence , which looks at what the “emotional charge” of a particular word, person, concept, or outcome is. So, to put General Johnson’s statement in context, “destruction” and “revolutionary” used to have the same valence, which was bad (boo). From my reading, actually, in the past people often felt about the word “revolutionary” more-or-less as strongly as people feel about the word “hatred” today. Which is to say, pretty darn unfavorably. *** WEBSTER’S 1828 DICTIONARY Ah, yes, it would be useful to dig into this resource now. It doesn’t actually capture the full concept behind a word, but it can be very useful at times to compare a modern dictionary to the 1828 Webster’s. As it’s from 1828, it’s obviously out of copyright, and some wonderful soul put it up online at http://webstersdictionary1828.com/ – it can be useful to compare to today’s Merriam-Webster dictionary at https://www.merriam-webster.com – and perhaps most telling are the examples chosen to illustrate words. 1828 : Revolutionary REVOLU'TIONARY, adjective 1. Pertaining to a revolution in government; as a revolutionary war; revolutionary crimes or disasters. 2. Tending to produce a revolution; as revolutionary measures. 2017 : Definition of revolutionary 1 a : of, relating to, or constituting a revolution • revolutionary war b : tending to or promoting revolution c : constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change • a revolutionary new product 2 capitalized : of or relating to the American Revolution or to the period in which it occurred Yeah, that’s interesting. 190 years ago, “revolutionary crimes or disasters” was the primary example of the word. That’s been scratched in the modern day, and we’ve got “constituting or bringing about a major or fundamental change” as a new definition and “a revolutionary new product” as the dominant example. How very strange and mysterious! How did this happen? *** ROUNDHEADS AND CAVALIERS The terrific thing about history is that there’s a whole lot of it . Similar patterns occur and re-occur and recur, ever and over again, settling into natural equilibriums in human affairs. Way back in Uncommon Virtues #7: Loyalty , we explored some of the fatefully poor decisionmaking during the English Civil war (1642-1651) that led to King Charles I allowing a loyal supporter of his, the Earl of Strafford, to be executed by his enemies. Charles I was executed not long after. We need not analyze all those machinations and poor decisionmaking here – we tap into the English Civil War again for just one thing: insults . Or, specifically, one type of insult – the pejorative. To tap into our two new tools of this chapter, valence and emotivism, a pejorative is a single word or short phrase that expresses a strong negative valanece , a very strong “booooo!!!” in a single short pithy phrase. During the English Civil War, both sides hit the other with pejoratives. The Royalists got labeled “Cavaliers” by the Parliamentarians, and the Royalists fired back by labeling the Parliamentarians “Roundheads.” Of course, you’ve probably never heard the term “Roundhead” before, and the term “Cavalier” is a fashionable and flashy type term that’s still used. (In fact, the National Basketball Association’s Cleveland Cavaliers won the NBA championship last year.) How odd – two pejoratives, meant to insult and show scorn, and one of them fades from history while the other flips valence to a positive term. Strange! Let’s explore. *** CAVALIER AS A PEJORATIVE Wikipedia: Cavalier: Etymology – “Cavalier derives from the same Latin root as the French word chevalier (as well as the Spanish word caballero), the Vulgar Latin word caballarius, meaning "horseman". Shakespeare used the word cavaleros to describe an overbearing swashbuckler or swaggering gallant in Henry IV, Part 2, in which Shallow says "I'll drink to Master Bardolph, and to all the cavaleros about London". ” And, “ It first appears as a term of reproach and contempt , applied to the followers of King Charles I in June 1642: 1642 (June 10) Propositions of Parlt. in Clarendon v. (1702) I. 504 Several sorts of malignant Men, who were about the King; some whereof, under the name of Cavaliers, without having respect to the Laws of the Land, or any fear either of God or Man, were ready to commit all manner of Outrage and Violence . 1642 Petition Lords & Com. 17 June in Rushw. Coll. III. (1721) I. 631 That your Majesty..would please to dismiss your extraordinary Guards, and the Cavaliers and others of that Quality, who seem to have little Interest or Affection to the publick Good, their Language and Behaviour speaking nothing but Division and War. ” So – a cavalier was a swashbuckler, a swaggering braggart, someone who cared not for laws of God or Man, ready to commit all manner of violences and outrages – hmm, this sounds familiar. *** REAPPROPRIATING CAVALIER AS A TITLE OF HONOUR And then – “[King] Charles, in the Answer to the Petition 13 June 1642 speaks of Cavaliers as a "word by what mistake soever it seemes much in disfavour". It was soon reappropriated (as a title of honour) by the king's party , who in return applied Roundhead to their opponents, and at the Restoration the court party preserved the name, which survived till the rise of the term Tory . ” Whoa! That is fascinating . “Cavalier” as the predecessor royalist term to Tory . My goodness, this is almost unbelievable. I knew well enough how I’d write this piece before I started, and it still shocks to me as I go deeper into the research. How the heck did that happen? *** ROUNDHEAD DOESN’T FLIP VALENCE, THOUGH First, Roundhead – “Roundhead was the name given to the supporters of the Parliament of England during the English Civil War. Also known as Parliamentarians, they fought against Charles I of England and his supporters, the Cavaliers or Royalists, who claimed rule by absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings. The goal of the Roundhead party was to give the Parliament supreme control over executive administration. ” And, more importantly – “Some Puritans, but by no means all, wore their hair closely cropped round the head or flat and there was thus an obvious contrast between them and the men of courtly fashion, who wore long ringlets. “ During the war and for a time afterwards, Roundhead was a term of derision—in the [Parliamentarian anti-Royalist] New Model Army it was a punishable offence to call a fellow soldier a Roundhead. This contrasted with the term "Cavalier" to describe supporters of the Royalist cause. Cavalier also started out as a pejorative term—the first proponents used it to compare members of the Royalist party with Spanish Caballeros who had abused Dutch Protestants during the reign of Elizabeth I—but unlike Roundhead, Cavalier was embraced by those who were the target of the epithet and used by them to describe themselves. ” *** THE THIRD SET OF LESSONS FROM LINGUA FRANCA This brings us to our third set of lessons from Lingua Franca . We have three new tools – the understanding of emotivism (yay/boo theory), the concept of valence (negative or positive associations with a word), and the pejorative (a short word or phrase that encompasses a lot of negative valence). Now, we can come to a big lesson – It’s easier to flip the valence of an emotionally-charged term than it is to take a neutral term to a strong positive or strong negative valence. And specifically – Given that pejoratives start as emotionally negatively charged, they can often be reappropriated into strong positive terms and titles of honor. *** PATRIOTS, REBELS, AND REVOLUTIONARIES Incidentally, “revolutionary” is not at all new in this regard. “Patriot” started as a pejorative, which was reappropriated during the American War of Independence as a positive term. (Incidentally, there is a major professional sports team in the American National Football League called the Patriots, and a number of college teams as well.) “Rebel” started as a pejorative, which was reappropriated to a large extent by the Confederates during the American Civil war with the “Rebel Yell.” (Incidentally, there are also a number of college sports teams named the Rebels.) So too with “revolutionary” – what started as a negative term got reappropriated during the various revolutionary wars for a limited time… though its usage often sunk back into disrepute between successful revolutions before finally setting on its current-day valence when the Soviets pushed heavily to reappropriate it as a title of honor in both Russia and everywhere that socialist revolutions were fomented. *** WHY DO SOME PEJORATIVES GET REAPPROPRIATED, AND OTHERS NOT? Sometimes pejoratives get reappropriated, and other times they remain pejoratives until fading into disuse. From my readings of history, it tends to be the side with more of a sense of humor that can reappropriate terms successfully. Typically, this has been the left side of the political spectrum – but not always. The Cavaliers, of course, were to the right of the Roundheads. In the case of the Roundheads, a lot of their military superiority was based on stronger cohesion, self-sacrifice, and a Puritan sense of ethics and duty. They cut their hair short, shunned individualism, and worked to build a fierce and almost Roman-like Army for their times. Indeed, Cromwell’s New Model Army was one of the finest armies that appeared in its era. But this fanatical Puritanism and social conservatism didn’t leave much room for the breezy sense of humor that lets one reappropriate an insult and start calling oneself the insult repeatedly until it becomes a badge of honor. Incidentally and mostly lost to modern history, the Confederates seemed to mostly have more of a sense of humor than the Unionists – in fact, there were all sorts of strange and cavalier-like characters in the Confederate Camp. There were confederate briefings in the nude, occasionally a Confederate General would launch an armed cavalry raid while riding nude on horseback , and there was a certain gallows humor seemingly ever-present in the Confederate Camp. Meanwhile, to be sure, there was some joking around in the Union Camp – Lincoln defending Grant’s drinking by saying “let me know what whisky he’s drinking, I’ll send a barrel to my other generals” – but by and large, the Union was the more humorless side. Many of the conscripts on the Union side didn’t want to be in the battle, and so stricter military discipline needed to be enforced. Likewise during the American Revolution, the Patriots had less to lose than the Tories – and were less reliant on prestige, seeming “proper,” and the like – and more able to embrace pejoratives thrown their way like “Patriot” and the song “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” So too with the Communist revolutionaries – who had so little to lose. They could joke and have a laugh over things that the more Christian and more “serious” Westerners could not afford to do as easily. In general, then, a sense of humor can help one side take a linguistic advantage in struggles by reappropriating hostile terms as badges of honor. And to be clear, of course, this doesn’t mean good or bad ; the more humorless might be the correct or incorrect one in a conflict – while the Union was more humorless than the Confederacy, the Western Allies in World War II certainly had a better sense of humor than the Nazis and thus could call themselves “G.I. Joes” with a laugh, whereas the Germans – reliant on solemnity and absolute discipline – had no such luxuries. So it’s not “good” or bad” to have more humor automatically; rather, it’s just a historical fact that a side of a conflict with a greater sense of humor can more easily reappropriate pejoratives thrown their way. *** WELL, THAT’S NICE. NO DOWNSIDES, RIGHT? Actually, unfortunately, there are a few downsides. Once again with Lingua Franca , we are not so concerned with the particular word – “revolutionary” was a pejorative, and it became a badge of honor, eventually being generalized as a nice term for anything new. But – Was there any downsides to being cavalier ? (Yes.) Are there any downsides to patriotism ? (Yes.) Is there any downside to rebellion? (Yes.) Is there any downside to revolution? (Yes.) The danger with this “changing the valence of words” thing is that you can lose the underlying valence-neutral conceptual meaning of the word. “These two men are raging up and down this land preaching not construction, but destruction-not reform, but revolution! " We learn, re-learn, and fail to learn repeatedly that revolutions usually go poorly. I say that merely in a historical and statistical sense. “This session of the Reichstag takes place on a date which is full of significance for the German people. Four years have passed since the beginning of that great internal revolution which in the meantime has been giving a new aspect to German life. ” -- Calvin College’s German Propaganda Archive: Adolf Hitler’s 30 January 1937 speech, on the fourth anniversary of the Nazi takeover of power We tend not to refer to Nazism as a revolution – but the Nazis certainly conceived of themselves as leading a revolution. When former pejoratives are reappropriated to a strong positive valence and a badge of honor, often the original meaning of the word is destroyed and dead space in thinking and language is created where that concept existed. As such, we tend to only invoke successful and prosperous and sane revolutions as “revolutionary” – but revolutionary, of course, just means “as relating to revolution” in its original meaning. That might be an American Revolution, which went well, or a Nazi Revolution, which went very poorly indeed – but given that we think “revolutionary = good” due to valence alone , we become blind to the fact that most political revolutions are bloody affairs that lead to a broken and failed states as a result. Most people don’t think in logic primarily, don’t disentangle the meanings of words and clarify their own thinking. Emotions tend to dominate our thinking and views towards certain things. So you get a self-referential chain where “revolutionary = good” and thus, only the (relatively rare) successful and prosperous revolutions are classed as “revolutionary” – this leaves us a little blind and stupid to the fact that most “revolutionary” things go very badly indeed – historically and statistically speaking. *** CONCLUDING To conclude, we have a few useful concepts for thinking of the word. *Emotivism, or “yay/boo” theory. *Valence, or whether a word or concept is “positive” or “negative” in the general feeling towards it. *Pejoratives, which we can identify as single words or short phrases with a strong negative valence, a strong “boo!” in a single word. We’ve also discerned that pejoratives can be reappropriated by a side with a strong sense of humor into a badge of honor , flipping the term from a strong negative valence to a strong positive valence. And lastly, we take note that the there might be some conceptual thinking ability that has been lost as a result – where a cavalier, patriot, rebel, or revolutionary becomes just a “good thing” – and thinking stops as a result. All of these are useful tools to understand and navigate the world – and serve as banners of caution to keep thinking . Words are powerful, but dangerous when they map poorly to the world. Constantly clarify one’s thinking, analyze one’s words, and look for the gaps in meaning that need to be re-filled as occasions call for it. Thinking is hard – very hard – but of course, immensely profitable and critical to living a thriving life. Lingua Franca #4: Fascism Lingua Franca #4: Fascism OF ALL THE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS “Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’ “One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from ‘pure democracy’ to ‘pure diabolism’. In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define Fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology. “It is not easy, for instance, to fit Germany and Japan into the same framework, and it is even harder with some of the small states which are describable as Fascist. It is usually assumed, for instance, that Fascism is inherently warlike, that it thrives in an atmosphere of war hysteria and can only solve its economic problems by means of war preparation or foreign conquests. But clearly this is not true of, say, Portugal or the various South American dictatorships. Or again, antisemitism is supposed to be one of the distinguishing marks of Fascism; but some Fascist movements are not antisemitic. Learned controversies, reverberating for years on end in American magazines, have not even been able to determine whether or not Fascism is a form of capitalism. But still, when we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini's Italy, we know broadly what we mean. It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning. For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years.” -- George Orwell, “ What is Fascism? ”, 1944 *** LINGUA FRANCA #4: FASCISM Our general guidelines for the Lingua Franca series are clear enough: we explore the current-day usage of a word, trying to disentangle the meaning of the word, and use the specific example to identify the more general pattern. We use this understanding to clarify our thinking of how words map to concepts – or fail to map to concepts. In the process, ideally we become clearer and more lucid thinkers and reasoners. Fascism presents some unique challenges, but none of them insurmountable. Notably, looking at the tools we explored last chapter in Lingua Franca #3: Revolutionary , we can it’s one of the most negative valence words in the English language. It’s a little strange in that it’s both a pejorative – a single-word insult expressing strong negative valence – and it maps to a specific set of political ideologies that have shown themselves to be rather dangerous. In this chapter, we’ll look at the historical etymology of fascism from Roman times – it came, no kidding, from the image of an axe wrapped in a bundle of sticks – and how that evolved into a specific and highly destructive political ideology in the 1900’s, before becoming a rather broadly applied pejorative in the years following World War II. Finally, we’ll look at what is and is appropriate to be designated as actual fascism as separate from the general pejorative; in the process, perhaps, we can become clearer thinkers – able to identify genuine danger as separate from mere signaling of dislike. *** THE ROMAN FASCES Wikipedia: Fasces – “Fasces is a bound bundle of wooden rods, sometimes including an axe with its blade emerging. The fasces had its origin in the Etruscan civilization, and was passed on to ancient Rome, where it symbolized a magistrate's power and jurisdiction. The image has survived in the modern world as a representation of magisterial or collective power. […] “While the swastika – also a symbol with a long previous history – was deeply stigmatized by its association with Nazi Germany, the Fasces did not undergo a similar process because of association with Italian Fascism; its use remains acceptable in various legitimate contexts.” The fasces was a symbol of the coercive power of government wrapped in popular support – long before modern 20th century political fascism, it was considered a symbol of both unity and humility. The theory went that a single branch of a tree is easily broken – even an axe handle. But if you bundled a bunch of sticks and lashed them together, the bundle could not be broken. Likewise, the fasces showed that even individual power could be surmounted – the power of an individual, lone axe (representing violence and the coercive power of the state) was only safe if wrapped in unity within the collective power of the state’s citizens. There’s an immense amount of images of fasces in countries that became democratic before 20th century political fascism reared its ugly head – it was on the American Mercury Dime until 1945, a fasces without the axe head is in the Oval Office, the official seal of the United States Senate has a fasces on it, a fasces decorates both the United States Supreme Court and is on the seal of the United States Tax Court. The fasces, likewise, appears on official government emblems in Spain, France, various parts of Scandinavia, Belgium, and a variety of Latin American countries. Long before Mussolini, the fasces was a symbol of unity – and to a large extent, humility. *** ITALIAN ORIGINS OF MODERN FASCISM The term “fascism” in English came from the Italian “fascisimo” – a term largely attributed to Benito Mussolini. It blended democracy, socialism, and nationalism for a period of 7-10 years, three of which were with Mussolini as legitimately elected Prime Minister. Wikipedia: Benito Mussolini – “In 1912 Mussolini was the leading member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Prior to 1914, he was a keen supporter of the Socialist International, starting the series of meetings in Switzerland that organised the communist revolutions and insurrections that swept through Europe from 1917. Mussolini was expelled from the PSI for withdrawing his support for the party's stance on neutrality in World War I. He served in the Royal Italian Army during the war until he was wounded and discharged in 1917. Mussolini denounced the PSI, his views now centering on nationalism instead of socialism, and later founded the fascist movement.” Wikipedia: Fascism: Etymology – “The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio meaning a bundle of rods, ultimately from the Latin word fasces. This was the name given to political organizations in Italy known as fasci, groups similar to guilds or syndicates. According to Mussolini's own account, the Fascist Revolutionary Party (Partito Fascista Rivoluzionario or PFR) was founded in Italy in 1915. In 1919, Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan, which became the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) two years later.” *** THE OPPORTUNIST: HITLER Germany was in an odd position in 1919 – the government and military were in ruins, but the physical landscape in Germany itself was actually not so bleak or desolate. All of the heavy fighting and heaviest damage in the West had been on French and Belgian soil – a part of the reason the French insisted on such large war reparations. You probably know some of Hitler’s early story – from Austria, something of a loser, homeless, a bohemian artist with no special talent at art. Then, during the World War in 1914, Hitler joins a German regiment. Apparently he served bravely – which, actually, doesn’t surprise me. Every time in history there’s a major war, there’s a few people who were a total mess on the outside, who just seem to thrive under the more rigid structure of military discipline. Hitler was, apparently, one of them. Hitler was convalescing in the hospital – he’d been caught in a mustard gas attack – when the news of the German surrender came in, shocking many of the front-line soldiers who thought the war was going much better than it was for the Germans. Wikipedia – ““Hitler later wrote, "When I was confined to bed, the idea came to me that I would liberate Germany, that I would make it great. I knew immediately that it would be realized." However, it is unlikely that he committed himself to a career in politics at that point in time. ” That’s my assessment as well – this is almost certainly later propaganda. Hitler would have been 29 years old at the time, and had just been through the only period of his life where he was successful – from youth to age 25, he’d had a bad life. Army service had seemed to suit him, and now there would be no army – Germany was defeated. Which brings us to a fact that’s much less well-known than it ought to be – Hitler’s first job out of the army, in 1919, was as an intelligence agent sent to spy on radical socialist groups like the German Workers’ Party. Of course, much to the world’s detriment, he would wind up being recruited – “going native,” I think is what it’s called colloquially by spy services. He was sent to spy on fanatics – he wound up being converted to the fanatics’ party. *** THE OPPORTUNIST: MUSSOLINI Mussolini followed a path different on the surface, but very similar in some of its undercurrents – he was a prominent member of the Socialist International, and the general principle during World War I was pacifism and staying aloof from the war. (Indeed, the Bolshevik slogan that carried the day during the Russian Revolution was “Peace, bread, and land” – and I do actually believe the majority of Russian Revolutionaries were mostly genuinely sincere in their anti-war stances.) The socialist movement in Italy was broadly against the war, and Mussolini began on that footing before changing his mind – “Mussolini initially held official support for the party's decision and, in an August 1914 article, Mussolini wrote "Down with the War. We remain neutral." He saw the war as an opportunity, both for his own ambitions as well as those of socialists and Italians. He was influenced by anti-Austrian Italian nationalist sentiments, believing that the war offered Italians in Austria-Hungary the chance to liberate themselves from rule of the Habsburgs. He eventually decided to declare support for the war by appealing to the need for socialists to overthrow the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary who he claimed had consistently repressed socialism.” Of course, if you’ve forgotten – the Italians were on the Allied side in World War I; that is, they were fighting the Germans and Austrians; Hitler and Mussolini were on opposite sides during World War I. For advocating for war against the party line, Mussolini was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party: “As Mussolini's support for the intervention solidified, he came into conflict with socialists who opposed the war. He attacked the opponents of the war and claimed that those proletarians who supported pacifism were out of step with the proletarians who had joined the rising interventionist vanguard that was preparing Italy for a revolutionary war. He began to criticize the Italian Socialist Party and socialism itself for having failed to recognize the national problems that had led to the outbreak of the war. He was expelled from the party for his support of intervention.” From there, you can see Mussolini making his way over, gradually, to what would become fascism – “After being ousted by the Italian Socialist Party for his support of Italian intervention, Mussolini made a radical transformation, ending his support for class conflict and joining in support of revolutionary nationalism transcending class lines.” But of course, he was still very much in the socialist camp – at least, his funding came from socialist sources. Gradually, he began a program that looks like to me – a modern amateur historian – as making somewhat vague statements as to his intentions, and allowing whoever was listening to interpret them as they felt like. To socialists, he was a socialist. To a nationalist, he was a nationalist. To a conservative, he was a conservative. Even, to a large extent, to liberals he attempted to appear a liberal. *** ORWELL: WHAT’S A FASCIST? The question of “What is fascism?” is still relevant in 2017; it’s still a major failure case in politics that people are rightfully worried about. But it’s notoriously hard to pin down what a fascist is . From Orwell’s essay in 1944 – “… when we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini's Italy, we know broadly what we mean. It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning. For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term ‘Fascist’. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. I have seen the words ‘Fascist in sympathy’, or ‘of Fascist tendency’, or just plain ‘Fascist’, applied in all seriousness to the following bodies of people: “Conservatives: All Conservatives, appeasers or anti-appeasers, are held to be subjectively pro-Fascist. […] “Socialists: Defenders of old-style capitalism (example, Sir Ernest Benn) maintain that Socialism and Fascism are the same thing. […] “Communists: A considerable school of thought […] refuses to recognize a difference between the Nazi and Soviet régimes, and holds that all Fascists and Communists are aiming at approximately the same thing and are even to some extent the same people. […] “Trotskyists: Communists charge the Trotskyists proper, i.e. Trotsky's own organization, with being a crypto-Fascist organization in Nazi pay. [Editor’s note: this allegation was false.] […] “Catholics: Outside its own ranks, the Catholic Church is almost universally regarded as pro-Fascist, both objectively and subjectively; “War resisters: Pacifists and others who are anti-war are frequently accused not only of making things easier for the Axis, but of becoming tinged with pro-Fascist feeling. “Supporters of the war: War resisters usually base their case on the claim that British imperialism is worse than Nazism, and tend to apply the term ‘Fascist’ to anyone who wishes for a military victory. […] “Nationalists: Nationalism is universally regarded as inherently Fascist, but this is held only to apply to such national movements as the speaker happens to disapprove of. Arab nationalism, Polish nationalism, Finnish nationalism, the Indian Congress Party, the Muslim League, Zionism, and the I.R.A. are all described as Fascist but not by the same people.” *** SO, WHY IS EVERYONE A FASCIST IN THEIR RIVALS’ EYES? As we mentioned during Lingua Franca #1: Condescension , Orwell was as committed of an antifascist as anyone you could meet – he actually fought with the Trotskyist socialists in Spain against Spanish fascism, and was wounded by a fascist sniper in combat. Some years later, during the closing moments of World War II, he notes that anyone and everyone gets called a fascist by their enemies – everyone from war resistors to supporters of the war, people in the appeasement camp and the anti-appeasement camp, and everyone in between. We can see a few reasons why this might be true – First, the word fascist became a pejorative , a sign of strong dislike, a word very negative in valence, a way to say “booooo” to any movement you disliked and disapproved of. Second, fascism became anti-prestigious , and there is a general human tendency to like to associate with high prestige and dislike being associated with low prestige. Fascism had militant and aggressive qualities, and lost , which is most surely a dreadful combination that guarantees hatred and scorn. Third, what is fascism was rather vague… clearly enough there was Italian fascism and German fascism, and clearly enough they had some things in common, but they also had many differences between them. It was unclear what were the essential elements that would lead to all the bad points of fascism, and what were just random elements in a particular fascist regime. As such, the word could largely be applied to anyone. *** OPPORTUNISM, RESENTMENT, DEMOS, AND FASCISM There are many elements that commonly are conceived as being essential parts of fascism – nationalism, racial supremacy, revanchism (the desire to regain lost territory), aggressive militarism, a strange sort of “societally unified class warfare,” anti-clericalism, anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, anti-liberalism, authoritarianism, romanticism, mass propaganda, anti-cosmopolitanism, and a fear of “decadence” – however decadence might be defined. From that list, you can observe right away that almost no group fits none of those descriptions. If you think anti-clericalism and class warfare along racial lines are the defining features of fascism, you could apply it to Russian Communism. If you think anti-Semitism and anti-liberalism are the defining features of fascism, you could apply it to the Catholic Church. If you thought authoritarianism of any sort was the defining feature, you could apply it to any dictatorship. If you thought any sort of militarism was the defining feature of fascism, you could apply it to any country that goes to war or any party that advocates war at any time. As far as I can tell, there are three features that always appear in fascism. They might not be the defining features – which can be debated, and is in fact debated constantly to this day – but there are three that I see always present. 1. Resentment: Fascism has, at its core, a sense of hatred in it. It needs to point at people ruining society – who this is varies depending on which fascist society you’re talking about – but fascism needs enemies, and it born out of a specific type of resentment and hatred. 2. Opportunism: I see no evidence of any of the fascist leaders of the twentieth century taking a long philosophical view of fascism, but rather adopting positions opportunistically. Hitler taking a job as an intelligence agent after the war, only to see a radical party gaining power and joining it. Mussolini being willing to appear as all things to all people, and only forming his own party after being kicked out of the Italian Socialist Party. Francisco Franco, in Spain, taking up the fascist position from a previous conservative and monarchist perspective to curry favor and receive arms and funding from Germany and Italy. And a final, third point that might be the most controversial – the origin in mass politics along the lines of democracy. *** FASCISM AND DEMOS It’s rather important to note that both Mussolini and Hitler were more-or-less legitimately democratically elected, before amending the constitutions of their country to ban other political parties, passing states of emergency to grant extraordinary powers, and otherwise transforming into dictatorships. But again – they were elected. Both Mussolini and Hitler advocated for democracy until elected, and then and only then did they suspend democracy – and largely with the approval of their constituencies, having laid the ground with mass propaganda to pave the way for those actions. The Italian Fascist Manifesto of 1919 – “The Manifesto was presented on 6 June 1919 in the Fascist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia. The Manifesto supported the creation of universal suffrage for both men and women (the latter being realized only partly in late 1925, with all opposition parties banned or disbanded); proportional representation on a regional basis; government representation through a corporatist system of "National Councils" of experts, selected from professionals and tradespeople, elected to represent and hold legislative power over their respective areas, including labour, industry, transportation, public health, communications, etc.; and the abolition of the Italian Senate. The Manifesto supported the creation of an eight-hour work day for all workers, a minimum wage, worker representation in industrial management, equal confidence in labour unions as in industrial executives and public servants, reorganization of the transportation sector, revision of the draft law on invalidity insurance, reduction of the retirement age from 65 to 55, a strong progressive tax on capital, confiscation of the property of religious institutions and abolishment of bishoprics, and revision of military contracts to allow the government to seize 85% of their profits. It also called for the creation of a short-service national militia to serve defensive duties, nationalization of the armaments industry, and a foreign policy designed to be peaceful but also competitive. ” You see, thus, early fascist positions advocating for democracy – democracy is only dispensed with once the fascist party takes undisputed power. *** OUR FOURTH LESSON FROM LINGUA FRANCA Our fourth lesson from Lingua Franca is that when there is a word that has strong negative connotations to it, but with ambiguous meaning , people will strive to harness that word and apply it to their rivals. Fascism is still relevant in 2017, because it is a failure case of democracy. The majority of the most destructive fascist movements started as democratic parties, praised democracy, and only abandoned democracy when it suited their purposes. But due to the ambiguous and opportunistic nature of political fascism, you could attempt to apply the label to almost any group that shared some of its characteristics. Orwell, emphasis added – “It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else. “Yet underneath all this mess there does lie a kind of buried meaning. To begin with, it is clear that there are very great differences, some of them easy to point out and not easy to explain away, between the régimes called Fascist and those called democratic. Secondly, if ‘Fascist’ means ‘in sympathy with Hitler’, some of the accusations I have listed above are obviously very much more justified than others. Thirdly, even the people who recklessly fling the word ‘Fascist’ in every direction attach at any rate an emotional significance to it. By ‘Fascism’ they mean, roughly speaking, something cruel, unscrupulous, arrogant, obscurantist, anti-liberal and anti-working-class. Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come. “But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword. ” *** CONCLUSION: THINKING AND PERSUASION Honestly, this chapter could have been longer and more thorough, but researching and investigating the beginning of large-scale political crimes gets tiresome; we’ll visit next with much more pleasant figures, Laozi and Wittgenstein. And yet, it is an important topic. Orwell noted that, “Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come. ” A much-abused word, indeed. And he advises – “All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.” ” But we should make a final note – in Lingua Franca , we are speaking from the perspective of what Orwell calls circumspection ; we are trying to think better. “Fascist” is still a viable pejorative. It’s an insult and a rebuke that, when it sticks, stigmatizes various forms of mass politics, resentment, rallies, nationalism, militarism, and so forth. As such, from a persuasive angle, it will remain a battleground for the foreseeable future – and perhaps it should ; we should ever and always look to think clearly , but – sadly – this is often different from adopting certain language when trying to persuade . Once again, I’ll state that the word fascism is less important than the general concept – when there is a “bad thing that arises from not fully known causality,” various groups will try to pin that “bad thing” on their rivals – whether their rivals be pacifists or militarists, the devoutly religious or atheists, whether they be revolutionary or conservative, or anywhere in between. On a historical level, it’s worth sooner-or-later researching the rise of Hitler and Mussolini to power; particularly Mussolini, who had a longer and more winding political career, and who is much less known than Hitler across the Western world outside of Italy. But over and above that, you should distinguish to yourself cleanly the difference between attempting to persuade – that is, assign a lot of bad causality to a rival group – and when you are attempting to think clearly. Fascism remains a failure case that could happen again, and working against that is indeed working for society – but what is fascism? Simple definitions help in propaganda and persuasion, but clear circumspection and thinking is what makes you a better thinker. Not just for this one word, but all words – whenever there is anything good or bad with a mix of causality driving it, the more persuasive route is to assign it very simply to one word, and claim it for oneself if it is prestigious and positive, or ascribe it to a rival if it is unprestigious and negative. Well, such is the way of persuasion, and has been for a long time – but in one’s private learnings and studies, it would do well to think clearly and delineate all the causes of things. “It’s complicated” has never been very persuasive in public, but can at times be a source of wisdom in private. Lingua Franca #5: Truth Lingua Franca #5: Truth TRACTATUS PREFACE “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it—or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book. Its object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure. “The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the method of formulating these problems rests on the misunderstanding of the logic of our language. Its whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. ” -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, the opening of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus *** LINGUA FRANCA #5: TRUTH Well, here is an important topic – and a challenging one. Truth . Most people don’t think too much about what’s true – we kind of sort of think what we know is true, and we either know things or don’t know things, and we go about life like that. It causes us a lot of harm, and just a little bit of thinking on this topic – this word truth in particular, and the general concept of truth – this can be very profitable. It can make us into better thinkers, more effective doers, and lead us to more thriving lives. But the topic presents some serious challenges for me, the author. Well, some of the chapter was obvious enough – right away, when I was sure I’d write on Truth , I knew I’d reference a few sources – we’d get at Wittgenstein and the Tractatus , we’d look at Laozai’s Taoteching , and we’d look at Tetlock’s method of forecasting and calibration. All of these are some very useful tools for thought, and they make a person into a stronger and clearer thinker. But for the rest of Lingua Franca , we’d contrasted how a word is used in common usage, and the concepts underlying it. So I was left with a hard question – who would take the opposite side of this exploration? Who or what would we pick on for a very loose and sloppy definition of truth? Malcolm Gladwell? I opened up Outliers and leafed through it again. It would work. But arraying Gladwell against Wittgenstein, Laozi, and Tetlock seems downright unfair; something like bringing a gatling gun to a knife fight. Would we pick some religious leader who made some silly denouncements of science and logic, perhaps a Pope that was against Galileo or Spinoza or some such? That would work, and feels more fair in the grand scheme of things, but it wouldn’t be particularly relevant . The example wouldn’t resonate . Nobody reading this believes the Earth is the center of the universe with a religious zeal. Thomas Jefferson? That’d be both relevant and a fair fight – what would Wittgenstein say about the Declaration of Independence? Right away, it starts with, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” – and any semi-diligent student of Wittgenstein can tell you what Ludwig would have said about Jefferson. But again , it would miss the mark. The Declaration of Independence was intended to largely be a declaration of revolutionary war – it wasn’t aimed at truth the way Wittgenstein aimed at truth; it was aimed at mobilization of the population for war. And the document got its job done. So at the end of the day, perhaps there’s no enemies of truth to be arrayed against in battle lines – and we’ll just have to be content with a little practical scholarship to sharpen our own mental tools somewhat, arraying our efforts against our own sloppy thinking – and surely, if we can take aim at our sloppy thinking, that should be enough. *** LAOZI: THE SAGE’S AWARENESS OF CONTRASTS Obviously the records from the 6th century BC are a little spotty; we don’t know if there was a single “Laozi” that wrote the Taoteching in two days, as is told in the historical fable, or if it was the work of multiple scholars over many generations before finally coming to its final form in the 3rd century AD. Nevertheless, Laozi drives at very similar points that Wittgenstein would drive at, some 2,500 years later at Cambridge. Both scholars were aware that words were often faulty and the cause of a lot of problems . Our first lesson for this chapter, then – Often, when we think we’re describing an object, we’re actually describing ourselves. Now, this is not at all a mystical statement or a religious statement; it will become very clear what it means in a moment. Laozi and Wittgenstein both wrote in a very terse style and it takes diligent and slow study of their works to get at what they’re trying to say. I tried to read the Taoteching a few times, and failed each time, until eventually I found a hyper-modern casual translation, a side-by-side set of eight literal translations, and a long commentary on the work and read them all together. To really “get it,” you need to flip back and forth between multiple translations and interpret. The Chinese language has undergone at least three major sets of changes since Laozi wrote, so even modern Chinese scholars have a hard time translating Laozi into modern Chinese – let alone English, a very different language. But if you’re willing to work at it, there’s some lessons that come through clear as day. Wing-tsit Chan’s translation of the Taoteching , Chapter 2 – “When the people of the world all know beauty as beauty, there arises the recognition of ugliness. When they all know the good as good, there arises the recognition of evil. Therefore: Being and non-being produce each other; Difficult and easy complete each other; Long and short contrast each other; High and low distinguish each other; Front and back follow each other.” What Laozi is saying is that many judgments automatically create the contrast of them . When we describe some work as “difficult,” we’re automatically creating a concept of work that’s “easy.” Laozi doesn’t say to refrain from such judgments, but rather to be aware that you’re making them – “When such comparisons are made by a sage, that is a person who is in harmony with the Tao, that person is aware of making a judgement, and that judgements are relative to the person who makes them, and to the situation in which they are made, as much as they are relative to that which is judged.” -- Stan Rosenthal, The Tao Te Ching: An Introduction To put it into a very simple example, a Norwegian might describe a man as “short” whereas a Japanese person might describe the same person as “tall” – you can measure the height of a person in centimeters, and that’s the same everywhere, but “tall” or “short” says something about you the speaker rather than about the person you’re describing. Likewise, when you describe a person as “good” or “evil” – you’re saying more about yourself than you are about the person. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it – but that you should be aware of doing it. It might be true that a man’s height is measured 170 centimeters – but that doesn’t make him tall or short ; those judgments say much more about you than about the man. Likewise, saying “math is hard” doesn’t say anything about the math – and everything about how you relate to and judge the math. *** WITTGENSTEIN I didn’t understand Wittgenstein very well for a long time – and there’s still a lot of it that I don’t the formal technical training to understand – but reading Wittgenstein’s war diaries were a revelation for me. The Tractatus was written for a very knowledgeable audience – we quoted him above by saying the work would be a success if a single person understood the book and read it with pleasure – and the work was very terse. It doesn’t explain or define a lot of its technical terms; it assumes you know them already and moves forwards. But his war journals are something else. They’re certainly an inspiration on how to live – we discussed this back in Uncommon Virtues #9: The Great and the Sublime , marveling over how incredible it was that he was writing one of the most important works of philosophy while serving in incredibly dangerous situations in World War I. But more than that, they trace his thinking. He writes out his frustrations, sketches out ideas, looks for an angle to attack the problem. They clarify his later and more terse work very well. From John Preston’s Wittgenstein Chronology – “Tuesday 29th September, 1914: In his diary, LW mentions that this morning a corporal who is sick with dysentery was brought to the hospital, and that there are now many cases. He notes that he himself did some (philosophical) work, but without success: ‘I’m still not clear and have no overview. I see details, without knowing how they [something – one word illegible here] are likely to fit into a whole’. In an entry whose text is incomplete and heavily scratched over, he then records that ‘every problem is the main problem’. He urges himself not to be fainthearted, but to take courage. In the evening, he records, he worked, not without success (GT1, S.31). The notebook entry corresponding to this not unsuccessful work begins by declaring that ‘The general concept of the proposition carries with it a quite general concept of the co-ordination of proposition and situation: The solution to all my questions must be extremely simple’. He then has the insight arising from the Paris law court scenario he had recently read about (in August): the idea of propositions as models (Potter 2009, pp.226-7; Monk, p.118; Sterrett, pp.xvii, xx, 16, 212). In a proposition it is as if a world is put together experimentally. This, he thinks, must straight away yield the nature of truth. [Editor’s note from SM: the Paris law court was trying to figure out liability in an automobile accident, and couldn’t understand it from verbal arguments, so they asked for the accident to be re-created with small model cars to show it happened. This caused something of a breakthrough in Wittgenstein’s thinking.] He then considers hieroglyphic writing, in which ‘each word is a representation of what it stands for’, as well as the fact that pictures of situations can be right or wrong. He sketches two people, A and B, swordfighting, and explains how this sketch might assert ‘A is fencing with B’ by virtue of one stick-figure representing A and the other representing B. In this picture-writing form, the proposition can be true or false, and its sense is independent of its truth or falsehood. LW declares that ‘It must be possible to demonstrate everything essential by considering this case’. While we cannot be certain that all situations can be pictured, nevertheless we can be certain that all logical properties of situations can be portrayed in a two-dimensional script. He finishes by noting that ‘This is still very much on the surface, but we are on good ground’ (NB, p.7).” I find that entry and summation of Wittgenstein’s diary incredibly informative – he often writes in technical language and explores very precise things around an “object”, attributes of an object like “color”, and so on in the Tractatus. It can be somewhat confusing for a layman. But that journal entry makes the point well – when language was hieroglyphics like in Ancient Egypt, there might be a drawing of a shepherd with ten sheep on a wall. You can sense what the drawing is trying to say – “there is a shepherd with ten sheep” – and it is independent of whether there actually are ten sheep with the shepherd. That is, you can make statements in language which make sense , but which are not true . If a statement makes sense, it also corresponds to reality – and may be true or false . *** AND THAT’S IT I’ve heard Wittgenstein sometimes being described as “throwing a hand-grenade into traditional philosophy” – and that might not be a bad metaphor. Wittgenstein summarizes the Tractatus as, “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. ” He’s arguing that all things that can be said – “the shepherd has ten sheep” – can be said clearly, whether as an actual picture in hieroglyphics, or in modern alphabets which attempt to use words to paint a picture in one’s mind. But for anything that can’t be said clearly – hope, love, justice, and so on – we must be silent. That is, we can’t speak truthfully about them. They’re critically important – Wittgenstein believes they’re critically important – but it’s impossible to paint a picture of them and see if that picture corresponds with reality. I remember as soon as I “got” this argument, much murky and cloudy thinking of mine disappeared into clear thought. “Oh. We can’t say anything about that truthfully .” He might be wrong – I don’t entirely believe it, obviously, as any student of Wittgenstein could tell from my word choices. But for Wittgenstein, truth is very clear and easy to express in pictures and words, and everything that cannot be clearly expressed clearly in pictures and words is not strictly true. With that, he resigned from philosophy and left Cambridge University. *** PROBABILITY Of course, Wittgenstein came back to philosophy later, rebuking even his original work – but that’s beyond the scope of this chapter. Rather, I’d like to look at one final aspect of truth that’s in Wittgenstein’s work but often neglected in discussions about him – probability. From the Tractatus, section 4 – “Tautology leaves to reality the whole infinite logical space; contradiction fills the whole logical space and leaves no point to reality. Neither of them, therefore, can in any way determine reality. “The truth of tautology is certain, of propositions possible, of contradiction impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have an indication of that gradation which we need in the theory of probability.) ” Wittgenstein and Laozi both build on tautologies, which are things are definitionally true . Something like, “Everything that is, is.” In fact, I translate the concept of “Tao” as roughly “the totality of the universe” – when Laozi says that “Tao is everything,” he’s making a (I believe) a tautological statement. When Laozi says “Tao is simple and complex,” he means that reality isn’t complicated or clever – it’s all just happening – but when we try to understand it, we often get led astray by our words and concepts, by unclear thinking. To get smarter – remove unclear thinking. Delete ambiguous concepts that aren’t true nor false from one’s thinking. That’s one of Laozi’s core messages, and one of Wittgenstein’s. And yet, what of things that might be true? What if we’re unsure exactly how many sheep the shepherd has in his flock? One final tool will help us immensely. *** CALIBRATION A final thinker to address is Professor Philip Tetlock – his work is critically important, and I suspect he’ll later be recognized as one of the greatest minds of this era. For over 30 years, he’s done something that’s very simple on the surface, but had never happened in history beforehand – he asked a large variety of people to make very concrete predictions of the world. The questions were all in binary format, and all were dated. Questions like, “Will North Korea detonate a nuclear device by the end of the year?” and “In the next year, will any country withdraw from the Eurozone?” The people who participated in Tetlock’s experiments answered with their best guess – yes or no – but also added how confident they were in their predictions. If you had no idea at all, and guessed randomly, you’d say you were 50% confident in your answer. But if you looked at the current state of North Korean science, the North Korean military program, and its foreign policy, you could probably do better than guess randomly. You would take in all the facts, study the problem, and come up with your best prediction while also assigning your confidence to it. You might say, then, “I think there’s a 90% chance North Korea won’t detonate a nuclear device by the end of the year.” While that might sound like a very specific point, Tetlock asked thousands of these questions – and many of them have very practical implications. If a new program of vaccinations was being administered in a country, you could predict whether the rate of new births would go up or go down within two years. If one’s children were less likely to die of infant mortality, does that mean parents would have more children or less children? You could analyze any pattern of policies for what you suspect the long range cause-and-effect might be. If sanctions were placed on a country like Russia, will that increase or decrease the leading political party’s support in the next election? Again, the value isn’t solely in the prediction – not at all – but with the accompanying confidence level in the forecast. Tetlock, from his excellent book Superforecasting – “We cannot rerun history so we cannot judge one probabilistic forecast — but everything changes when we have many probabilistic forecasts. If a meteorologist says there is a 70% chance of rain tomorrow, that forecast cannot be judged, but if she predicts the weather tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, for months, her forecasts can be tabulated and her track record determined. If her forecasting is perfect, rain happens 70% of the time when she says there is a 70% chance of rain, 30% of the time when she says there is a 30% chance of rain, and so on. This is called calibration. It can be plotted on a simple chart. “If the meteorologist’s curve is far above the line, she is under confident — so things she says are 20% likely actually happen 50% of the time. If her curve is under the line, she is overconfident — so things she says are 80% likely only happen 50% of the time." One of the single greatest strengths I’ve gotten personally is to start assigning confidence levels to the facts I believe to be true. “Nothing can move faster than the speed of light” – yes, with 98% confidence. But this all seems so eccentric … who cares? Well, “The venture capitalist who said they’re interested and asked us for due diligence documents will invest in our next fundraising round within 3 months” – yes or no? What confidence? “I’ll be given a job offer within two weeks at the company I did two rounds of interviews already” – yes or no? What confidence? You can assign confidence levels to all the basic facts you believe, as well as predictions made about the future. This can be on issues as polarizing as global warming – “The Earth is getting warmer every year” – yes or no? What confidence? “Over 90% of the Earth’s warming is human-caused from Co2 gases, and if Co2 production stopped, the Earth would get warmer at 10% or less of the current pace” – yes or no? What confidence? Or it can be applied to the most simple issues, like how you think gravity and chemistry work. As a personal convention, I typically assign only 99% confidence max to understandings even as fundamentally established as those, to leave myself open to changing my mind. In theory, a single 100% confidence item being proven wrong would set your calibration to infinitely incorrect – but that’s a technical point; you could read Tetlock if you wanted the nuance of how a 99% confidence level is double the confidence level of 98%, though it sounds counterintuitive at first. (And 100% is infinitely higher than 99%.) It’s obvious how you gain analytical power and thinking ability by assigning confidence levels to one’s future predictions – am I going to be offered the job? Are we going to get the contract? Will the VC invest in us? – but I also believe that assigning confidence levels to your understanding of facts leads to a much more correct understanding of how sure you are of truth , and which of your beliefs need more research and synthesis to increase your confidence . It’s an eccentric concept – not many people know it – but incredibly powerful. Everyone I know who thinks in probabilities and confidence levels makes broadly better decisions than those who do not, across the board. *** CONCLUDING I’ve not tried to get at what truth is in this chapter, but I’ve hopefully given you a few tools to sharpen your understanding of truth . Notably, Often, when we think we’re describing an object, we’re actually describing ourselves. Though height is measurable and can be true, “tall” and “short” say more about you than about a person you’re describing. This becomes very valuable when you start to re-think things like, “Is this work hard ?” It’s interesting to consider the argument that what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent. I don’t believe it – and yet, it gives us a power to dismiss all sorts of so-called “deep questions” that cannot be true in the basic sense of the word true . But what if we want to speak of the benefits or downsides of a new policy? Shouldn’t we do something about global warming? In those cases, “We need to do something about global warming” cannot be said to be true or false, but we can make predictions about what will happen, and assign confidence levels to them . The more our confidence levels match what actually happens, the better we are predicting things – which has obvious, immense practical value when applied to basic questions about one’s life. (If I get a Masters degree, I’ll be able to get a job paying at least 40% higher than I have right now in two years. Yes or no? What confidence?) You can also assign a confidence level to your understanding of basic facts and concepts. This final point is perhaps the hardest to synthesize – it’s a very highly unusual and uncommon way of thinking – but when you ask yourself, “How sure am I that that’s true ?” – and then you put a percentage on it, you can work towards gaining a greater mastery of the world. Lingua Franca #6: Pathos Lingua Franca #6: Pathos ALMOST ANY SUBJECT PRESENTED TO US “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. Every other art can instruct or persuade about its own particular subject-matter; for instance, medicine about what is healthy and unhealthy, geometry about the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic about numbers, and the same is true of the other arts and sciences. But rhetoric we look upon as the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us…” -- Aristotle, Rhetoric *** LINGUA FRANCA #6: PATHOS For around 2200 years – from roughly 400 BC to 1800 AD – general education was the domain of the very wealthy. There were many scattered exceptions, and there was a variety of technical training available to people of crafts and professions, but for most of human history, most humans have been illiterate, innumerate, and had very little training in critical thinking, the sciences, history, or philosophy. Now, to really get one’s mind around how it used to be, you have to try to imagine the patterns of people’s lives in those days and ages. The primary sources of generational wealth in ancient days were land and natural resources, and there were constant lawsuits, debates, and conflicts over who controlled what lands, who was infringing on another person’s lands, who would be governor and overseer of newly incorporated lands into an empire, who would collect taxes and tributes and customs duties, and so forth. Likewise, in many ancient societies, the primary goal of the many wealthier people was to rise to political prominence – to become leaders of a city or state, of the local religion or cult, and to otherwise influence fellow aristocrats and landowners and priests. As such, for those 2200 years, rhetoric was one of the chief topics of education; almost all general education curriculum had materials on how to think, prepare arguments, and be well-spoken and persuasive. This was essential to success in aristocratic life. Around the Industrial Revolution, this began to change rapidly. Suddenly, crafts and factories and the development of new goods and more production became a greater source of wealth than cultivation of land, along with banking and trading which supported this. The Prussian Education System , from the most militant German state, became the model of general education for most of the Western world – it emphasized a lot of the general elements of thinking, calculating, math, literacy, and so forth – but it emphatically did not teach rhetoric; it aimed at cultivating loyalty to the state and that strange sort of militant Prussian internal harmony. Rhetoric was not part of the curriculum. If you received a general education in a regular school of a Western country, you probably learned in the Prussian model – without realizing it. Things like homework and assignments were designed to train a class of workers on how to discharge their duties well, not to question and analyze and persuade about how things were being done. Indeed, before the opening of this piece, did you even know Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric? “Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. ” The “available means of persuasion” – what is that ? Have you ever even heard of such a thing? And yet, it’s very important – and with all the upheavals in technology and media right now, perhaps more important than it’s been for many decades, if not centuries. In this chapter, we’ll explore the nature of rhetoric , and the descent of one type of persuasive speech – pathos , the type that’s least well-understood by us in the modern age. *** THE ABSTRACT AND THE CONCRETE Socrates died in 399 BC from hemlock poison. Aristotle was born in 384 BC, 15 years later. Which is to say, born early enough to hear firsthand accounts of the conditions that led to Socrates’s trial and death, but with around three decades between the proceedings and Aristotle hearing a recounting of them. Plato, born 429 BC, was 30 years old at Socrates’s trial and lived, remarkably, another 51 years after Socrates’s death. Plato’s longevity explains both why he was able to write so many works, and why his early works differ so much from the latter. Plato’s early works are grounded in Socrates’s actual dialogues with people, whereas his later works, like The Republic, are generally thought to employ Socrates in a fictional role, saying things he never said to advance Plato’s ideas. Aristotle studied under Plato in Athens, but I think those of us in modern times can be easily misled when we hear that Aristotle studied at Plato’s “school” or that Aristotle founded a “school.” The topics the Ancient Greeks were diving into were very fresh, new, and alive – there was, as far as I can tell, far less of a set curriculum of instruction than what we think of when we think of a modern university. These were discussion groups; groups of enquiry. It’s likely that whoever led a school would organize specific topics of discussion and study on certain days, and also would just have free-form discussions to explore the world, share observations, and debate. If you want to put it into modern context, I think it was far more akin to pure experimental research like DARPA or Bell Labs than it was to a set university curriculum. The great thinkers of the age would work out ideas alone, take observations, and do experiments, and then come together in the group to share those. Occasional, there’d be very specific instruction in geometry or poetry or whatever, but there wasn’t a curriculum to be studied in order to receive a degree or a professional license of any sort. We’ll cover the nature of philosophy more next chapter – what it means now, and what it used to mean – but from this background, you can understand how Plato and Aristotle could wind up with such different conclusions about the world. Some 19 centuries after Plato and Aristotle, the Italian master painter Raphael would paint the very famous School of Athens with Plato and Aristotle at the center of it – Plato pointing up into the air, to show his grounding in abstract ideas, and Aristotle pointing to the ground to show his grounding in empirical study of the world. Plato was one of the most terrific poets of all-time, to be sure. His language is beautiful. For my money, just in this amateur’s opinion, Plato is wildly overrated beyond that – I think his contemporary Xenophon surpasses him in many ways, and Aristotle surpasses him in every way. (Actually, that’s not just my opinion – great thinkers and doers throughout history have tended to favor Xenophon over Plato: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Niccolo Machiavelli, and many others held Xenophon in the highest esteem, and Plato not so much. Both Xenophon and Aristotle tend to be regarded much more highly than Plato in any given sane era.) But we’re not speaking of Xenophon this chapter – I’ll simply say you should read Anabasis which is one of the greatest memoirs of all-time about the Greek mercenaries during the Persian Civil War, and The Education of Cyrus about how character is developed, and how nations and empires are formed. No, we’re talking about Aristotle here – and his grounding in the empirical. In addition to work on what’s now understood to be philosophy – metaphysics, logic, and such – he also did a tremendous amount of study of the world, both the natural sciences, as well as how men communicate and how communities are formed. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is a difficult read; it takes patience and hard work, but there’s many gems in it. Aristotle brings the same rigor to the subject that he would in studying marine biology and many of the natural sciences – making observations of what actually happens in dialogue and persuasion, the conditions they happen under, and synthesizing specifics into general rules of thumb. *** THE SOPHIST AND THE RHETORITICIAN There was one area where Plato and Aristotle were in firm agreement – that sophists were not-so-great. From Aristotle’s Rhetoric – “What makes a man a 'sophist' is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. In rhetoric, however, the term 'rhetorician' may describe either the speaker's knowledge of the art, or his moral purpose.” There’s already a gem in here along the lines of our exploration of Lingua Franca. The modern definition of sophist, from the Apple dictionary – sophist | ˈ säf ə st| noun • a paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece, associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and specious reasoning. • a person who reasons with clever but fallacious arguments. We’ll discuss this more next chapter, but “philosophy” came from the words “Philo [love] Sophia [wisdom]” – a philosopher was a “lover of wisdom.” This was contrasted against a Sophist, which came from the same root word Sophia – but it meant, simply, “the wise.” A philosopher, then, was someone who was searched for wisdom, and a sophist was someone who portrayed themselves as wise – usually for pay. We could say that the ancient philosopher was more like a scientist who was trying to figure out how things actually were, and the ancient sophist was more like an amoral trial attorney who might suspect his client is guilty of a crime, and yet wants to mislead the jury so that the guilty man is acquitted. That’s the second definition of sophist – “a person who reasons with clever but fallacious arguments.” The sophist was less interested in the truth, and more interested in persuading – regardless of the nature of the underlying truth. Yet, note! The word “rhetoric,” even now 2400 years after Aristotle, still is tainted with the association of sophistry. Aristotle – “What makes a man a 'sophist' is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. In rhetoric, however, the term 'rhetorician' may describe either the speaker's knowledge of the art, or his moral purpose.” This is already a useful lesson for Lingua Franca – when someone says, “that’s just rhetoric” they mean that it’s sophistry . And yet, these two mappings onto one word is unfortunate – because everything persuasive is rhetoric . Rhetoric doesn’t have to misleading; indeed, Aristotle notes that rhetoric is just a technical skill. Similar to engineering, you can use rhetoric to build great things or terrible things. But these two meanings are mapped onto the word rhetoric, and the word suffers for it. When people hear the word “rhetoric” they tend to think of dishonesty, sophistry. Aristotle notes that – it was true even in his day so many centuries ago. You could call someone a “rhetorician” in a pejorative sense, if you thought they didn’t care about the truth and only wanted to be persuasive. But again , all persuasive speech is rhetoric . In a technical sense, it’s value-neutral. You can use rhetoric to advance the truth – Aristotle notes it’s easier to advance the truth than falsehoods with rhetoric – or you can use it to try to obscure the truth. So there’s already a lesson there – when a particular word is both technical and moral, often the moral definition of it dominates one’s thinking and discussion. That’s unfortunate – because rhetoric is incredibly valuable to at least be aware of , and to understand , and to be able to navigate skillfully. *** THE THREE MODES OF PERSUASIVE SPEECH Aristotle – “Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.” It might not be obvious on a quick skim, but there’s actually an immense amount of lessons in that single paragraph. Aristotle notes three types of persuasive speech, and he elaborates on them much further in Rhetoric . The first is emphasizing your character and the nature of you, yourself, as a speaker on the topic. This includes things like being fundamentally honest, decent, pro-social, and so forth, as well as being credible in the area that’s being spoken about. A successful medical doctor can emphasize their long studies and their history of success in medicine to be taken more seriously when speaking about health and medical interventions. This is Aristotle’s first type of persuasion. Next is “putting the audience in a certain frame of mind” – primarily emotionally. This is appealing to the audience’s emotions and prejudices, in order that they receive what you’re saying more favorably. This would be like a doctor who is about to advise someone to quit smoking saying, “Think of your children. Wouldn’t it be terrible if you died of cancer and they were all alone in the world?” This is the most important and least understood part of rhetoric, and we’ll cover it much more in a moment. Finally, there’s “proof” – or, generally speaking, just logically laying out facts and evidence, cause-and-effect. In the doctor’s case, it might be referring to the science behind a particular health intervention, all the studies on the topic, the patterns they’ve observed in treating patients in the past, and so on. *** ETHOS, LOGOS, AND PATHOS Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion are now typically called Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. The first two are clear enough – we can see the root words in them right away. “Ethos” of course is the root word of ethical . This refers more to character-based ethos than to ethical codes in the modern sense, but we can see the word and are familiar with it right away. “Logos” is familiar to us as well – logical . That makes sense. But when Pathos is defined in modern terms, it’s typically defined as “an emotional appeal.” But, wait – I don’t see the word “emotion” being derived from the word “pathos” – isn’t that sort of odd? Ethos, ethical. Logos, logical. Pathos… emotional? What’s going on here? *** A PATHETIC APPEAL The Greek word “pathos” does have a modern equivalent – pathetic. Ethos was an ethical appeal – to show that you’ve got excellent character and trustworthiness on the subject you were weighing in on. Logos was a logical appeal – to outline the facts, evidence, and cause-and-effect of your case. Pathos was a pathetic appeal – designed to invoke feelings of pity and prejudice. The English word “passion” also descends from the Greek pathos – but again, in the vein of Lingua Franca , the word passion has flipped its valence as well. When the Christian tradition speaks of the “Passion of Christ” – Jesus being tortured and executed by the Romans – they weren’t using the word “passion” in the sense of “I’m really passionate about social media.” Passion too used to be a strong negative word. Being in the grips of passion would be a bad thing. Romeo and Juliet both committing suicide over star-crossed love would be passionate , in the old sense of the word. Being in “the grips of passion” meant being unable to think clearly, being reduced to the state of being an animal, unable to use one’s logic, reason, ethics, and morality. It was decidedly not a good thing, in the old sense of the word. *** PATHOS, PATHOS, PATHOS Both Ethos and Logos are not hard to understand. In modern English, to employ Pathos , emphasize your credibility and good character. In modern English, to employ Logos , emphasize the facts, evidence, and cause-and-effect relationships. Pathos … pathos is something else. Aristotle: “… persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions. Our judgements when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile. It is towards producing these effects, as we maintain, that present-day writers on rhetoric direct the whole of their efforts.” We can see, then, why rhetoric can so easily be treated as a bad thing . Even in Aristotle’s day, the sophist-type rhetorician would be focused almost entirely on getting the audience into a receptive and pleased mindset, or into a hostile and pained mindset, appropriate to what judgments they want made. This, of course, is completely independent from credibility and character (Ethos), as well as all the facts, evidence, and logic! Aristotle obviously thinks very poorly of this type of persuasion being the primary focus, but here is where the genius of Aristotle shines. He mentions that the best courts and constitutions forbid anything except laying out the facts of a case, thus attempting to have judges make their assessments solely on Logos. But Aristotle didn’t stop there and moralize – he spent around half of Rhetoric analyzing every type of common persuasive emotion, who tends to feel it, and under what conditions they feel it – “The Emotions are all those feelings that so change men as to affect their judgements, and that are also attended by pain or pleasure. Such are anger, pity, fear and the like, with their opposites. We must arrange what we have to say about each of them under three heads. Take, for instance, the emotion of anger: here we must discover (1) what the state of mind of angry people is, (2) who the people are with whom they usually get angry, and (3) on what grounds they get angry with them. It is not enough to know one or even two of these points; unless we know all three, we shall be unable to arouse anger in any one. ” This is the genius of Aristotle. He goes through many types of emotions – Pathos – and the conditions under which they emerge. He makes fine-grained distinctions as to when and how these things happen. EX – “There are three kinds of slighting-contempt, spite, and insolence. (1) Contempt is one kind of slighting: you feel contempt for what you consider unimportant, and it is just such things that you slight. (2) Spite is another kind; it is a thwarting another man's wishes, not to get something yourself but to prevent his getting it. The slight arises just from the fact that you do not aim at something for yourself: clearly you do not think that he can do you harm, for then you would be afraid of him instead of slighting him, nor yet that he can do you any good worth mentioning, for then you would be anxious to make friends with him. (3) Insolence is also a form of slighting, since it consists in doing and saying things that cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to yourself, or because anything has happened to yourself, but simply for the pleasure involved. (Retaliation is not 'insolence', but vengeance.) The cause of the pleasure thus enjoyed by the insolent man is that he thinks himself greatly superior to others when ill-treating them. That is why youths and rich men are insolent; they think themselves superior when they show insolence. ” You read this, and you get smarter. Aristotle’s Rhetoric is a difficult read – it’s not pleasant easy “beach reading” – but it makes you smarter. Aristotle goes on in this vein for a long time, and also analyzes the emotions common to youth, people in the prime of their life, and in old age. It’s all very insightful. Another single example should illustrate – “We will next consider Emulation, showing in what follows its causes and objects, and the state of mind in which it is felt. Emulation is pain caused by seeing the presence, in persons whose nature is like our own, of good things that are highly valued and are possible for ourselves to acquire; but it is felt not because others have these goods, but because we have not got them ourselves. It is therefore a good feeling felt by good persons, whereas envy is a bad feeling felt by bad persons. Emulation makes us take steps to secure the good things in question, envy makes us take steps to stop our neighbour having them. Emulation must therefore tend to be felt by persons who believe themselves to deserve certain good things that they have not got, it being understood that no one aspires to things which appear impossible. It is accordingly felt by the young and by persons of lofty disposition. Also by those who possess such good things as are deserved by men held in honour-these are wealth, abundance of friends, public office, and the like; on the assumption that they ought to be good men, they are emulous to gain such goods because they ought, in their belief, to belong to men whose state of mind is good.” What a veritable gold-mine of insight! There’s probably dozens of lessons that could be illustrated here – we could note, for instance, that we have no commonly used modern word for “Emulation” – which is a mix of admiration, desire, worthiness, and striving. Aristotle notes that it’s only felt by people who feel like they have a chance to get whatever they want to emulate; people don’t feel this towards things that seem impossible to them. Aristotle contrasts it against envy – where you wish the person you were envious of didn’t have the thing in question. Actually, in modern English, “envy” might be more similar to Aristotle’s “emulation”; whereas we’d probably say “jealousy” for what Aristotle calls envy. This is the genius of Aristotle – he doesn’t particularly like the sophists of Athens running around preaching and teaching Pathos as the primary means of persuasion, but he nonetheless investigates exactly how it’s done, with guidelines on how to do and to counteract it. To flip envy/jealousy to admiration/emulation, then, would include showing that the person in question deserves the things they have, and – more importantly – emphasizing that the listener could also reach those levels. There’s so many gems here – Aristotle’s Rhetoric is hard work to read, but it makes you smarter. *** ELEMENTS OF RHETORIC: A MODERN EXAMPLE I try as much as possible to use no modern political examples to illustrate these works, because again, I aim for principles that are timeless, and don’t want to get bogged down in – well, the passions of the day. But rhetoric is always designed to come alive in its age – citing even Franklin Delano Roosevelt, from less than 100 years ago, wouldn’t make the example come alive, so we’ll turn towards the recent day and age for an example. We can see that the recent American Presidential election was absolutely dominated by ethos and pathos , with very little logos involved. This has been the trend in American politics for quite some time, but it just hit its high-water mark. We’ll take the example of the American Republican Presidential Debate to illustrate some aspects of rhetoric. Do kindly please refrain from sending me mail about the recent election; I’m not interested in discussing it, I merely wanted one real-life example that people can understand and learn from. I’m interested in the analysis more than the current day’s passions. With that said, at the Republican debate, you can see all this on fully display – Moderator Megyn Kelly: “Mr. Trump. One of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don't use a politician's filter. However, that is not without its downsides – in particular, when it comes to women. You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs,' 'dogs,' 'slobs' and 'disgusting animals’ –“ This is a challenge to Trump’s ethos ; it’s suggesting he has bad character. He interrupts immediately with a joke – Candidate Donald Trump: “Only Rosie O’Donnel.” (A sometimes adversary of his in the past, who might be described as heavyset.) The audience laughs and cheers raucously. (Aristotle noted in Rhetoric that “those who reply with humorous levity when we are speaking seriously […] indicates contempt.” ) In the face of a pretty strong allegation, Trump responds with contemptuous humor – indicating a sense of superiority, which, incidentally, is actually sometimes an effective technique at preserving ethos . (That’s not to say it’s morally right or wrong, just that it’s effective – indeed, he won the GOP nomination and then the Presidency.) Kelly: “No it wasn’t. Your Twitter account –“ Trump (to the audience, who are still laughing): “Thank you.” Kelly: “For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnel.” Trump (contemptuously): “I’m sure it was.” Kelly (continuing): “Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women's looks. You once told a contestant on 'Celebrity Apprentice' it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?” We can see here the word “temperament” as almost an exact stand-in for ethos . It’s, broadly speaking, an attack on Trump’s character. You can also see pathos mixed in – ending the question with “the war on women.” That’s not to say there’s no factual material in the question and the selection – but it’s dominated by ethos and pathos. Trump’s response: “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. (Audience cheers.) Trump: “I’ve been challenged by so many people, and I don’t frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn’t have time either. This country is in big trouble. We don’t win any more. We lose to China. We lose to Mexico, both in trade and at the border. We lose to everybody. And frankly what I say, and oftentimes it’s fun, it’s kidding, we have a good time – what I say is what I say. And honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, but I could probably not be, based on the way you’ve treated me, but I wouldn’t do that. (Audience mixes cheering and jeering.) Trump: “We need strength. We need energy. We need quickness. We need brain in this country to turn it around. That I can tell you – right now.” Again, you can see that the answer is around 90% pathos, with the rest of it ethos. Logos is not on display here; this isn’t a reasoned and measured analysis of evidence; not at all. Of course, “big trouble… don’t win any more… we lose… we lose… we need strength…” – this is pure pathos . And of course, “I’ve been challenged by so many people” points at ethos – character. Trump then flags the whole thing as personal, and implies Kelly has a bad character in response to her question. “Honestly Megyn, if you don’t like it, I’m sorry. I’ve been very nice to you, but I could probably not be, based on the way you’ve treated me…” There is very little logos here, if any. Indeed, on the GOP side of the election, the candidate that spoke most often about “pure policy” (logos) was Jeb Bush, who did very poorly despite raising the most fundraising and being seen as the frontrunner for the nomination before the election cycle started. When you start to study the elements of rhetoric, you can actually see how speakers are employing it and using it in real time. The whole exchange by Kelly and Trump – it was a famous one and a large part of the news cycle during the election – was dominated by ethos and pathos. *** LESSONS To wrap up, there’s many profitable lessons in the vein of Lingua Franca here. First, I’d do well to say again that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is worth reading. It’s hard reading, but profitable. Next, we can note the case where the word “rhetoric” gets mixed-up with its most common and abused form – the pathetic appeal only. In modern English, we might say that it’s “trying to be manipulative towards the listener’s emotions.” But – we can take a cue form Aristotle here. Rhetoric is simultaneously a value-neutral technical field, and a description of a specific type of morality and intentions in practice. The latter – we could call it sophistry – can have many negative effects. But most people throw the baby out with the bathwater – yes, much of rhetoric is disreputable, and it’s easy to see why it has a bad reputation. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be studied by honest and forthright people – just the opposite, in fact. Rhetoric is . It happens. It’s happening all the time. It’s worthy of study. Next, we might note that the word “Pathos” has been covered-up a little bit in modern language; it’s now called an “emotional appeal” instead of a “pathetic appeal.” The reason is obvious enough – the word pathetic drifted from a slightly negative valence to a strong negative valence over time. But indeed, I think you can see how a great many of what are called “emotional appeals” do indeed trend towards the pathetic – “war on women”, “this country is in big trouble and doesn’t win any more” – these are not uplifting and cheerful emotions; the root of them is fear and despair, which seem to have always been more motivating and animating to an audience than mere cheerfulness and optimism. We can draw a final lesson about rhetoric and pathos , then, in the vein of our Lingua Franca series. Because the concept of rhetoric is associated with sophistry and pathos, many good people neglect to study it – feel it’s disreputable and not worth learning. But if you neglect to study rhetoric, you cede the ground of arguments to those people who do know it and have mastered it. Rhetoric can be employed for disreputable ends, it’s true, but that’s not the only thing it can do – ever and always, people are persuaded by a mix of the character and background of a speaker, the emotions the speaker instills, and – lastly and sadly often leastly – by the facts, evidence, logic, and cause-and-effect. Aristotle said it like this – “The use of persuasive speech is to lead to decisions. (When we know a thing, and have decided about it, there is no further use in speaking about it.) This is so even if one is addressing a single person and urging him to do or not to do something, as when we scold a man for his conduct or try to change his views: the single person is as much your 'judge' as if he were one of many; we may say, without qualification, that any one is your judge whom you have to persuade.” Indeed, all persuasive speech is rhetoric – how could it be otherwise? The topic is not just well-worthy of study – it’s absolutely crucial to gain an understanding of, to navigate modern life. Lingua Franca #7: Philosophy Lingua Franca #7: Philosophy INTERESTINGLY ENOUGH “Early studiers of cults were surprised to discover that when cults receive a major shock – a prophecy fails to come true, a moral flaw of the founder is revealed – they often come back stronger than before, with increased belief and fanaticism. The Jehovah’s Witnesses placed Armageddon in 1975, based on Biblical calculations; 1975 has come and passed. The Unarian cult, still going strong today, survived the nonappearance of an intergalactic spacefleet on September 27, 1975. (The Wikipedia article on Unarianism mentions a failed prophecy in 2001, but makes no mention of earlier failure in 1975, interestingly enough.) "Why would a group belief become stronger after encountering crushing counterevidence?” -- Eliezer Yudkowsky, “ Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs ” *** LINGUA FRANCA #7: PHILOSOPHY I have some bad news and some good news for you. The bad news: “philosophy” as it’s commonly understood is in a death spiral, having suffered from very clear and obvious evaporative cooling effects over the last 150 years. Philosophy – one of the most important fields of inquiry for human thriving – has lost the historical grounding that made it so useful and powerful in the West over its first 2,250 years. Worse news: most people have failed to realize this. The word “philosophy” has a certain prestige and respectability to it, even now at one of its lowest water-mark periods in history. The word “philosophy” has very little in common with actual philosophy after largely becoming divorced from the traditions that served it so well for 23 centuries in the West. I don’t want to exaggerate the point, but I think this is one the worst things that’s happened over the last 1.5 centuries that’s not commonly realized. Philosophy – actual philosophy – can be a great source of guidance on how to live, show insight into the nature of the world and the people who live in it, and can really be genuinely uplifting and lead to thriving. Mainstream philosophy being in such a sorry state is a very bad thing for humanity. I think this is a somewhat serious matter, and well-worth some of our attention and thought. The good news, though, is that actual philosophy is alive and well – if mainstream philosophy were a government, we might say it’s been taken over by a mix of hostile agents and incompetent bureaucrats – but both governance and philosophy are ever and always a thing, and we humans are remarkably adaptable at routing around chaos and corruption to continue thriving. So, without further ado – what happened to philosophy? And how do we get it back? *** NATURAL PHILOSOPHY… MODERN SHAPE… Wikipedia: Natural Philosophy – “ From the ancient world, starting with Aristotle, to the 19th century, the term "natural philosophy" was the common term used to describe the practice of studying nature. It was in the 19th century that the concept of "science" received its modern shape with new titles emerging such as "biology" and "biologist", "physics" and "physicist" among other technical fields and titles; institutions and communities were founded, and unprecedented applications to and interactions with other aspects of society and culture occurred. Isaac Newton's book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), whose title translates to "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy", reflects the then-current use of the words "natural philosophy", akin to "systematic study of nature". Even in the 19th century, a treatise by Lord Kelvin and Peter Guthrie Tait, which helped define much of modern physics, was titled Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867).” Read the bolded part again. For the first 2,250 some years of Western philosophy, science was a core component of philosophy. There was no separation and no cloistering away of studying thinking, governments, ethics, and morals from the natural world, astronomy, biology, and physics. Then this remark – “It was in the 19th century that the concept of “science” received its modern shape…” Doesn’t that seem vaguely sinister ? “Modern shape”? What is this? Are you concerned yet? Perhaps you’ve already grasped what we’re driving at – or perhaps the vast significance of this hasn’t quite clicked yet. Let’s go deeper. *** PHILO SOPHIA Philosophy comes from the Greek words “philo” (love) and “Sophia” (wisdom) – philosophy simply meant “love of wisdom.” The Ancient Greeks had another similar-but-hated word – “sophist” – meaning just, “the wise” – these were people that didn’t love wisdom, but loved appearing to be wise and persuasive. They would use illogical arguments, make persuasive and prejudiced appeals, and wanted to be held in high regard without actually working to understand the world. A “love of wisdom” – the original meaning of philosophy – was a mental orientation towards the world, not a formal field of study. If you loved wisdom, you could look for it anywhere. Why are some horses faster than others? How come one army destroyed another army? How do turtles lay and hatch eggs? Why do some buildings stand for a long time, and others fall over? There was no separation between what’s now called “philosophy” and what’s now called “science” – all of it was fertile ground for exploring and developing wisdom. Wikipedia: Science – “From classical antiquity [~2400 years ago] through the 19th century, science as a type of knowledge was more closed linked to philosophy than it is now, and in the Western world the term “natural philosophy” once encompassed fields of study that are today associated with science, such as astronomy, medicine, and physics.” *** THE ABILITY TO BE WRONG A classical philosopher wasn’t primarily interested in raw, theoretical, and untestable ideas – the classical philosopher was interested in gaining useful knowledge and wisdom. As such, you often see the most excellent philosophers of ages past being involved in difficult disciplines where you can very much be wrong. Socrates, of course, was a soldier in the Peloponnesian War. He was noted as a distinguished and brave soldier, in fact. (You didn’t know? No one told you? It seems like an important detail to leave out…) Xenophon, too, was a soldier; Thucydides, one of the fathers of modern history, was a military general; Wittgenstein, one of the few good philosophers of the modern era, likewise served with distinction in dangerous roles in World War I. Note well – Any craft or profession where your views can be shown to be mistaken is a fertile ground for cultivating wisdom. If you had theorized about military command and the nature of soldiering and military discipline, and you were wrong , then the enemy would show you that you were wrong. Science – what we now call science – has the same function. It’s not surprising, too, that so many good philosophers were also scientists, making observations and testing assumptions about the natural world. *** EVAPORATIVE COOLING Wikipedia: Science – “Over the course of the 19th century, the word “science” became increasingly associated with the scientific method itself as a disciplined way to study the natural world. It was during this time that scientific disciplines such as biology, chemistry, and physics reached their modern shapes. That same time period also included the origin of the terms “scientist” and “scientific community”, the founding of scientific institutions, and the increasing significance of their interactions with society and other aspects of culture.” So, right when natural philosophy is hitting its greatest strides, leading to the greatest output of scientific knowledge of all time… it becomes divorced from philosophy. So much the worse for philosophy, no? “In Festinger’s classic, When Prophecy Fails”, one of the cult members walked out the door immediately after the flying saucer failed to land. Who gets fed up and leaves first? An average cult member? Or a relatively more skeptical member, who previously might have been acting as a voice of moderation, a brake on the more fanatic members?” In his piece on Evaporative Cooling, Yudkowsky uses a science metaphor for what often happens to communities. When things go wrong like failed prophesies and scandals, it’s the highest-energy, brightest, most skeptical and savvy people who leave first. What’s left behind are the dull, the slow, the fanatic, the unthinking. I contend that when “natural philosophy” became “science,” it had a massive evaporative cooling effect on the field of philosophy as a whole. You can see that scientists still do excellent philosophy in the old sense of the word – Richard Feynman’s memoir “ Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman ” is certainly excellent philosophy; Richard Hamming’s “ You and Your Research ” is a must-read for more practical wisdom and guidance. But who reads these works today? Scientists! These men didn’t consider themselves philosophers – as far as I’m aware – but they were clearly doing philosophy in the old meaning of the word. They loved wisdom. They searched for it. They looked to discuss it and share it with other people. Meanwhile, they were making innovations and progress in physics, mathematics, computer science, industrial research, and so on – because, of course, that makes perfect sense. Sharpening one’s mind as to the nature of reality makes you a better thinker across the board. The ability to fail and be wrong at making a computer work, or making a fission reaction happen, or predicting the movement of atomic particles – these thoughts taught humility, constant work, diligence, curiosity, experimentation… all things that are also well-worthwhile for the study of human nature and for searching out patterns of how to live. *** SUSPECTING NONSENSE “If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students. Till one knows better, it’s hard to distinguish something that’s hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like a mathematical proof that’s hard to understand because the ideas it represents are hard to understand. To someone that hasn’t learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope. This is what lured me in as a high school student. The singularity is even more singular in having its own defense built in. When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they’re nonsense generally keep quiet. There’s no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can’t distinguish them from placebos. And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy’s claims. It’s supposed to be about ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise. Because philosophy’s flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating.” -- Paul Graham, " How to Do Philosophy " “When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they’re nonsense generally keep quiet” – is this not a near-perfect description of evaporative cooling? *** RECLAIMING PHILOSOPHY We’ll conclude with some more bad news, and then some very good news. Graham continued – “The singularity I’ve seen is not going away. There’s a market for writing that sounds impressive and can’t be disproven. There will always be both supply and demand. So if one group abandons this territory, there will always be others ready to occupy it.” So, these scraps of left-behind philosophy will be here to stay in some form or fashion. We can’t get rid of it… but it’s also not necessary to get rid of it. Turning to better news, even in mainstream philosophy, there are still sane and sound branches doing good work, like logic (which is basically math) and philosophy of mind (which is rapidly becoming neuroscience but which hasn’t yet evaporatively cooled out of philosophy). It wouldn’t take very many people reclaiming the word philosophy as a love of wisdom to begin to turn things around. Genuinely good philosophy is happening all over the place – though it’s rarely people in fields that don’t fight back at all . Indeed, you see computer programming and financiers doing some of the best philosophy now – Paul Graham, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Ray Dalio, Charlie Munger, Nassim Taleb. When the computer scientist get something wrong, their code doesn’t work. When the financier gets something wrong, they lose a lot of money. Excellent philosophers still come of the military – John Boyd and Hyman Rickover to name two recent Americans – and they come out of industrial engineering, like Eli Goldratt. That these people are currently not classified as philosophers is simply an error – let the people doing uselessness in the towers call themselves “theoretical screwaroundists” or whatever other more palatable name they might come up with for themselves; genuine philosophy is alive and well, even as the word points to decayed and failing institutions. *** AND DOING PHILOSOPHY In Lingua Franca , we’ve been exploring the nature of how change meanings or map to unclear topics – and using them to clarify our thinking and become more effective. By all means, immediately reclaim philosophy as a love of wisdom – the imposters in so-called philosophy can’t be overthrown too soon. But over and above that, reclaiming a word is useful, yes – but over and above that, reclaim the concept of philosophy for yourself. Paul Graham wrote on doing philosophy, “I propose we try again, but that we use that heretofore despised criterion, applicability, as a guide to keep us from wondering off into a swamp of abstractions. […] The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward.” And more importantly, Graham notes that anyone can do philosophy by searching out truths that are both general and useful . That’s not the only way to reclaim philosophy, but it’s certainly a good place to start. Read Hamming. Read Feynman . Read Graham . And most importantly, renounce the idea that the current works of “philosophy” are philosophy – the love of wisdom. Cultivate the love of wisdom in yourself, and search far and wide for it. Look to work hard in areas where you can be wrong. Look for fields that fight back. Study and love the world, and cultivate and share the wisdom you gain. Philosophy is dead – long live philosophy. Lingua Franca #8: Ethics and Morals Lingua Franca #8: Ethics and Morals ASSIGNMENT: JAPAN “The Japanese were the most alien enemy the United States had ever fought in an all-out struggle. In no other war with a major foe had it been necessary to take into account such exceedingly different habits of acting and thinking. […] Conventions of war which Western nations had come to accept as facts of human nature obviously did not exist for the Japanese. It made the war in the Pacific more than a series of landing on island beaches, more than an unsurpassed problem of logistics. It made it a major problem in the nature of the enemy. We had to understand their behavior in order to cope with it.” -- from the introduction of Ruth Benedict’s “ The Chrysanthemum and the Sword ”, 1947 *** SOURCES OF PRINCIPLES “Ethics are external standards that are provided by institutions, groups, or culture to which an individual belongs. For example, lawyers, policemen, and doctors all have to follow an ethical code laid down by their profession, regardless of their own feelings or preferences. Ethics can also be considered a social system or a framework for acceptable behavior. “Morals are also influenced by culture or society, but they are personal principles created and upheld by individuals themselves.” -- Diffen: Ethics vs. Morals *** LINGUA FRANCA #8: ETHICS AND MORALS A puzzle. How to go about getting at the difference between ethics and morals ? I think it’s important – it might be important – but it seems like hair-splitting. Certainly, ethics and morality overlap very often. Certainly, the words “ethical” and “moral” have subtly shifted meanings over the last 200 years… in both valence and common parlance. Tracing their roots and the shifts of these words would be easy enough. But what to do with it? How to illuminate it? It will be easy enough to show the difference in how lawyers think about “legal ethics” – which is straightforward and easy enough to understand – and “legal morality” – a phrase I’ve never once heard spoken and which seems almost an oxymoron… but how does this apply to that sizeable majority of us who are not lawyers? And then a single word sprung to mind. Banzai! Oh. That’s how we’ll do it. *** THE CHRYSANTHEMUM AND THE SWORD During the Pacific Theater of World War II, the American Office of War Information – a precursor to the modern Central Intelligence Agency – commissioned an in-depth study of Japanese culture and traditions, to understand how and why Imperial Japanese soldiers and the population of the Empire Japan would think, feel, and act under a variety of different circumstances. American cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict was unable to visit the Empire of Japan – the countries were engaged in total war – and so she made an extensive study of Japanese newspapers, books, essays, and war documents, alongside doing extensive interviews with Japanese expatriates and foreigners who had lived abroad in Japan. The totality of Japanese thinking and actions were really a puzzle to the Western Allies; their whole framework of beliefs and living differed very greatly from the American and Western traditions in large and small ways. Benedict was attempting to figure this out and make pragmatic recommendations on how the war could be ended, and what would lead to a stable peace. Thus, Benedict studied deeply and tried to puzzle through Japanese culture and traditions – “The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways. They are terribly concerned about what other people will think of their behavior, and they are also overcome by guilt when other people know nothing of their misstep. Their soldiers are disciplined to the hilt but are also insubordinate.” The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is one of those books that everyone has heard of, but no one has actually read. I was familiar with a broad outline of the book’s themes, but I figured it would be terse and boring reading. Boy, was I wrong about that. The book is absolutely fascinating – tracing how Japan’s feudal origins and the emphasis on hierarchy and public social decorum greatly differed from the American views of liberty and individualism. *** FIGHTING TO THE DEATH “Japanese seamen [Imperial Japanese navy sailors] were warned that in case they were torpedoed and the order given to abandon ship, they should man the lifeboats with the utmost decorum or ‘the world will laugh at you. The Americans will take movies of you and show them in New York.’ It mattered what account they gave of themselves to the world. And their concern with this point was a concern deeply imbedded in Japanese culture.” Benedict found a number of very strange things – strange from the American perspective – about Japanese culture. One of the most interesting was that the Japanese military officials had an official policy of no surrender ever which was typically followed through – in Western armies, when a battle was hopeless, forces would tend to surrender and still believe themselves honorable soldiers – “In the armies of Occidental nations [i.e., American, English, French, etc] it is almost a truism that troops cannot stand the death of one-fourth to one-third of their strength without giving up; surrenders run about 4:1.” So, if 40,000 Western soldiers were surrounded and the battle was hopeless, after around 10,000 soldiers were killed-in-action, the other 30,000 soldiers would surrender. The Japanese ratios were entirely flipped, and sometimes to an extreme extent – Benedict noted that in Hollandia, there was 1 surrender for every 5 soldiers killed… in North Burma, there was only 1 Japanese surrender for every 120 Japanese soldiers killed. Thus, if there had been 40,000 Japanese soldiers in a hopeless position, you’d see over 39,700 fight to the death in a hopeless fight, with only around 300 soldiers surrendering. This was, of course, seemingly insane to the Western forces. *** BUT THEN BEING A MODEL PRISONER Amazingly though, those who had been captured because they were unconscious, or those few who had surrendered, became model prisoners with almost no resistance – “The shame of surrender was burned deeply into the consciousness of the Japanese. They accepted as a matter of course a behavior which was alien to our conventions of warfare. And ours was as alien to them. They spoke with shocked disparagement of American prisoners of war who asked to have their names reported to their government so that their families would know they were alive. The rank and file, at least, were quite unprepared for the surrender of American troops at Bataan for they had assumed they would fight it out the Japanese way. And they could not accept the fact that Americans had no shame in being prisoners of war. “The most melodramatic difference in behavior between Western soldiers and the Japanese was undoubtedly the cooperation the latter gave the Allied forces as prisoners of war. They knew no rules of life which applied in this new situation; they were dishonored and their life as Japanese was ended . Only in the last months of the war did more than a handful imagine any return to their homeland, no matter how the war ended. Some men asked to be killed, ‘but if your customs do not permit this, I will be a model prisoner.’ They were better than model prisoners. Old Army hands and long-time extreme nationalists located ammunition dumps, carefully explained the disposition of Japanese forces, wrote our propaganda and flew with our bombing pilots to guide them to military targets. It was as if they had turned over a new page; what was written on the new page was the opposite of what was written on the old, but they spoke the lines with the same faithfulness. […] “ Americans had not expected this right-about-face from prisoners of war. It was not according to our code. But the Japanese behaved as if, having put everything they had into one line of conduct and failed at it, they naturally took up a different line. Was it a way of acting which we could on in post-war days or was it behavior peculiar to soldiers who had been individually captured? Like the other peculiarities of Japanese behavior which obtruded themselves upon us during the war, it raised questions about the whole way of life to which they were conditions, the way their institutions functioned and the habits of thought and action they learned.” (Emphasis added.) *** APPEARANCES OF RULES Benedict’s book was published to general audiences in 1947, after the war had been won. Nevertheless, even now 70 years later, many of the points of Japanese conduct remain strange to us – “ Americans tell, too, of how rigorously [Japanese] sentries required that the prisoners should cover up evasions of rules; the great crime was to evade openly. In camps where prisoners worked off-bounds on roads or installations during the day the that no food be brought back with them from the countryside was sometimes a dead letter – if the fruit and vegetables were covered up. If they could be seen, it was a flagrant offense which meant the Americans had flaunted the sentry’s authority. Open challenging of authority was terribly punished even if were mere ‘answering back.’” In other words, Japanese sentries didn’t particularly care to investigate closely if American prisoners were breaking rules – so long as they didn’t do it openly. But the slightly disrespect or talking back to a Japanese sentry would be punishable by the harshest measures. Appearance of respect for the rules and the hierarchy is what mattered; breaking rules without overtly threatening the hierarchy or insinuating disrespect was condoned. *** SHAME CULTURES AND GUILT CULTURES Wikipedia – “In cultural anthropology, a shame society is a society in which the primary device for gaining control over children and maintaining social order is a the inculcation of shame and the complementary threat of ostracism. A shame society is contrasted with a guilt society, in which control is maintained by creating and continually enforcing the feeling of guilt (and the expectation of punishment now or in the afterlife) for certain condemned behaviors…” The Chrysanthemum and the Sword popularized the difference between societies that aim to inculcate shame and guilt as primary means of establishing control and discouraging prohibited behaviors. Japanese society was a shame society – built on following rules and understanding oneself as part of the larger whole, which would be devastatingly to be ostracized and broken away-from. American society ran primarily on guilt – an inner feeling of right and wrong, as opposed to decorum as part of a group. Guilt is an individual emotion, felt internally, judged and arbited by the individual. Contrarily, shame exists in a social context – it is applied by other members of a group to an individual who is out of line with the group’s ethics. And there’s that word – ethics . The idea of guilt and shame cultures is interesting enough, and any Westerner who lives in Asia for a while eventually comes across the concepts as they learn how to navigate that world. But, if you don’t wind up living in a culture that differs from you in terms of guilt vs shame, who cares? Isn’t it only mildly interesting at best, and probably irrelevant? I think – not. I think the concept is very important to understand and to clarify in one’s own thinking. *** LINGUA FRANCA: THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY AND ETHICS The words “ethical” and “moral,” I think, are very important words. You should clarify which standards you live under, and gradually sort out contradictions and dissonance in your own thinking around these concepts. As with all of our exploration of the Lingua Franca , we look at the words and the meanings they correspond to. Both “Ethics” and Morals” have actually flipped once from their original meanings. The word “ethic” comes from the Greek “ethos,” meaning character. The word “moral” comes from the Latin “mos”, meaning custom. That’s strange enough – the words flipped meanings from ancient times. Originally, “ethics” were who you were , and “morals” were following the customs of the day. But the meaning flipped once before coming into modern English. Fair enough. Interestingly, I think the meanings are starting to flip once again over the last 50 or so years. *** FROM MORAL TO ETHICAL The contrast between “ Ethics vs. Morals ” at Diffen is a good starting point on understanding the modern meaning of ethics and morals – It notes that ethics are rules of conduct recognized by a particular group or profession, that it comes from an external social system, and that we do them “because society says it is the right thing to do.” Morals, on the other hand, are a personal compass of right or wrong, that come from individual and internal feelings, and that we do “because we believe in something being right or wrong.” In other words, ethics corresponds to shame and external sanction , and morals correspond to one’s inner beliefs about right and wrong. This was the most recent understanding of ethics and morality in the modern West. *** UNDERSTANDING ETHICS AND MORALS This can seem somewhat abstract – and anyways, who cares? But to throw the distinction into clarity, you can think of professional ethics , like a lawyer’s ethics. Lawyers have attorney/client privilege and always are supposed to provide the most vigorous defense of their clients in a criminal case. These are lawyer’s ethics. This doesn’t mean that a lawyer’s defense of a client is moral – that’s up for the individual to decide. If a lawyer really deeply believes that their client is guilty of a heinous crime and might repeat it if they get off at trial, it might or might not be immoral for the lawyer to defend that client – it’s the lawyer’s personal, moral decision. But it’s certainly ethical-in-a-legal-ethics-sense to provide a vigorous defense to that client. Ethics aren’t good or bad in a moral sense – they just are . There were certainly samurai ethics in feudal Japan, rules of conduct that samurai lived under. One such ethic was to kill anyone of a lower class who disrespected you in public. An individual could believe this was immoral – most people in the modern world do believe that’s immoral – but it was ethical-in-a-samurai-ethics-sense. There’s many such examples. The Ancient Spartans had an expression, “with your shield or on it” – meaning, never lose your weapons or armor. It was ethical for a Spartan warrior to die in combat, and ethical for them to gain victory in combat, but it was unethical for them to retreat without their equipment. Ethics always related to conduct under societal or professional guidelines. And again, ethics aren’t good or bad in a moral sense – they just are. I personally believe it’s immoral for a criminal defense attorney to defend a client they believe is guilty of a heinous crime who is likely to repeat offend – but it’s not against lawyer’s ethics. Lawyer’s ethics are just a set of professional codes and rules laid down by organizations like the American Bar Association, and various traditions of American and English Common Law. *** WHEN AN ETHICAL SYSTEM BREAKS DOWN When you read Ruth Benedict on the conduct of Japanese prisoners-of-war again, it starts to make sense – “The most melodramatic difference in behavior between Western soldiers and the Japanese was undoubtedly the cooperation the latter gave the Allied forces as prisoners of war. They knew no rules of life which applied in this new situation; they were dishonored and their life as Japanese was ended. Only in the last months of the war did more than a handful imagine any return to their homeland, no matter how the war ended. Some men asked to be killed, ‘but if your customs do not permit this, I will be a model prisoner.’ They were better than model prisoners. Old Army hands and long-time extreme nationalists located ammunition dumps, carefully explained the disposition of Japanese forces, wrote our propaganda and flew with our bombing pilots to guide them to military targets. It was as if they had turned over a new page; what was written on the new page was the opposite of what was written on the old, but they spoke the lines with the same faithfulness. […] Americans had not expected this right-about-face from prisoners of war. It was not according to our code. But the Japanese behaved as if, having put everything they had into one line of conduct and failed at it, they naturally took up a different line.” Japanese society inculcated and ran on strict ethical rules. These were enforced by shame and ostracism if broken. But once the ethical rules they knew were entirely broken and the maximum shame and ostracism was reached, many of these soldiers did not have a moral framework to fall back on in regards to resistance, or what their moral duties should be. They fell in line with a new ethical and hierarchical framework, accepting that they were largely dead to Japanese society, and falling in with the ethics and hierarchy of their American captors. This is ever and always the danger with ethics – the person who runs entirely on ethics alone is at a loss for what to do in a radically different situation, once their old framework and system of ethics has broken down. *** THE RECENT TRANSITION FROM MORALS TO “ETHICS” But why is this relevant? The word “morality” has been under siege almost nonstop since the mid-1800’s; Nietzsche famously savaged almost all of Western morality in books like Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals . Nietzsche wasn’t the only one, of course; merely the most famous. Around 50 years ago – let’s say, roughly, 1967 – both Nietzschian and Marxist critiques of morality became very prominent in the Western world. The word morality – not the concept, but the word – transitioned from a positive valence to a negative valence. Morality came to be associated with Christian morality alone , and Christian morality has been on the constant wane in Western society over the last 50 years. That might be a good thing, or might be a bad thing, but it left a certain void in our thinking. Surely, in the West we still believe people should understand right and wrong, and we still look to instruct children in right and wrong, and developing a strong moral conscience. With the word morality in disrepute, another word was needed. And what word happens to be most similar? Ethical. Think for a moment, if it’s still near the year 2017, of how silly it would be in public discourse to say, “That company is acting immorally.” People just don’t talk that way. But we do say, constantly, “that company is acting unethically.” The problem is – and I do believe it’s a problem – is that it’s trying to get two distinct concepts out of a single word. We still have the concept of “legal ethics,” “soldier’s ethics,” “medical ethics,” “police ethics,” and so on – the professional codes of conduct in those fields. But when we critique a person or organization for “acting unethically,” we’re really saying they’re acting immorally – as judged by our inner sense, and which we believe they should feel from their inner sense too. *** CLARIFYING ONE’S THINKING, ETHICS, AND MORALS The ethical and moral often come into conflict – it’s a common theme in movies. Often, a “good cop” needs to break their professional ethics in order to do the moral thing. The Dirty Harry movies, the Lethal Weapon movies, all sorts of cop movies look at this dichotomy. The shortest way to understand this – There’s a concept of an internal sense of right and wrong . The word for that in modern English, up until 50 years ago or so, was morality. There’s also a concept of an external set of rules of right and wrong. The word for that in modern English, up until very recently, was ethics. When we criticize a company that’s broken no laws or conventions of its industry for behavior we still feel is wrong , we’re making a moral critique of them. I think it’s very important to clarify your own thoughts on this matter – often the word “unethical” or “ethical” is used to designate the concept of morality, because the word morality has fallen into disrepute. I don’t know if the word “moral” can or should be re-claimed, but I do know it’s unstable to invoke the word “ethical” to mean both “systems of rules” and “internal sense of right and wrong” – it leads to confused thinking, and in my opinion, doing the wrong thing in many situations. The Imperial Japanese Army committed many atrocities when the people under their rule seemed to be defying their ethics ; likewise, if you believe captured soldiers shouldn’t assist the enemy, Imperial Japanese soldiers were often adrift and lost morally when their ethical system no longer held. It’s dangerous to run on ethics and shame alone – and perhaps even more dangerous to have a confused understanding of right and wrong. For your own thinking, do sit down at some point and ask yourself why you do things. Ethics – because the external rules say it’s right and wrong. Morals – because you think it’s right and wrong. You can throw the word “morality” over the side of the boat if you don’t like it – “principles” might be an adequate substitute if you think the word “morality” is too tarnished. And yet, though often used in a confused and interchangeable way in modern language, there’s a gigantic difference between doing things because you’ve been told it’s the way they must be done (ethics), and out of a fear of shame and ostracism (ethics), and because you believe something is genuinely right or wrong (morals). Throw the word “morality” over the side of the boat if you like – that’s fine. But the concept of right and wrong, for internal or external reasons is a distinction you absolutely must make in your own mind, and one that will serve you well in any chaotic, fast-changing, or unusual situations. Lingua Franca #9: Perfectionism Lingua Franca #9: Perfectionism ELITE EDUCATION IS NOT ALLOWABLE IN OUR SOCIETY “ What? The final aim of science should be to give man as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other – that whoever wants to learn to ‘jubilate up to the heavens’ must also be prepared for ‘grief unto death’? And that may well be the way things are! […] Even today you still have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, in short, lack of pain – and socialists and politicians of all parties fundamentally have no right to promise any more than that – or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of a bounty of refined pleasures and joys that hitherto have seldom been tasted. Should you decide on the former, i.e. if you want to decrease and diminish people’s susceptibility to pain, you also have to decrease and diminish their capacity for joy. With science one can actually promote either of these goals! So far it may still be better known for its power to deprive man of his joys and make him colder, more statue-like, more stoic. But it might yet be found to be the great giver of pain! – And then its counterforce might at the same time be found: its immense capacity for letting new galaxies of joy flare up!” -- Nietzsche, The Gay Science “The ideological conflict that made Kolmogorov’s proposed reforms impossible was real. His plan called for dividing high-school students into groups depending on their interest and abilities in mathematics, allowing the most talented and motivated to get farther faster. The entire Soviet system of secondary education was based on the concept of uniformity: everyone was to be taught the same thing at the same time, using the same textbooks. But the Soviet Union still craved international prestige – in fact, that need became more and more pronounced as the technological rivalries of the second half of the century heated up. Just as the world of adult mathematics to cultivate a certain number of geniuses to showcase at international conferences, so a small world of talented children had to be allowed to exist in a sort of greenhouse setting, if only for the country to field competitors at international math and physics Olympiads. And just as it was in the world of adult mathematicians, in the world of student mathematicians, the space for comfortable existence was too small to accommodate all whose talents warranted inclusion; to get in, a Jewish child had to be twice as good as a non-Jewish child and four times as good as the child of an apparatchik. “Possibly because there were so few schools, they were all fairly similar, shaped in the Kolmogorov mould of increased emphasis not only on math and physics but also on music, poetry, and hiking – in no small part because Kolmogorov’s students influenced most of these schools directly. They were all subject to heightened scrutiny: Kolmogorov’s boarding school was visited frequently by ideological inspectors, who became especially vigilant following the denunciation of his curriculum reform. School supporters were often called upon to defend it before the authorities, who claimed that “elite education is not allowable in our society” ; Moscow’s School 2 was apparently the object of many denunciations – written by concerned parents and outraged Soviet-issue teachers – that eventually had its cofounders fired; and School 239 lost some of its most popular teachers to KGB pressure while its principal was reprimanded for admitting too many Jewish children…” -- Masha Gessen, “ Perfect Rigour: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century ” *** LINGUA FRANCA, FINALE: PERFECTIONISM Lingua Franca has been one of the most difficult series for me to write – and I hope, perhaps, one of the most profitable for readers. We began with a simple idea: language – words – are one of the chief tools of thought and communication. And over the last 150 years, language has been a key battleground for shaping how people think, communicate, and – eventually – act. Words shift meaning, new words are invented, old words are re-appropriated or forgotten – and with them, our ability to think clearly on certain topics increases or diminishes. These changes happen so slowly that we often don’t realize it’s happening, but one of the hardest lessons in life to learn is to a proper skepticism of words themselves . Language and words are literally tools to think and communicate. But most people do not realize their limitations, and do not realize they are missing some very badly needed tools , and that they have broken and rusted tools in their toolbox. This is what we set out to address in Lingua Franca. In Condescension , we began by noting that it’s very hard to think a concept we don’t have words for. After the word condescension shifted meanings, the ability to even think the original concept was largely destroyed. In Heroes , we looked at how words are only valuable when they map to useful concepts – and how the concept underlying a word can be diluted over time until the word is essentially meaningless. In Revolutionary , we look at the concepts of emotivism – yay/boo theory – and valence , the positive or negative emotion associated with a word. We looked at pejoratives , strongly negative valence words – and how they can occasionally be reappropriated as a badge of honor by a side that has a greater sense of humor. In Fascism , we looked at how words that map to ambiguous concept are often battlegrounds for propaganda and persuasion, which is why everyone ranging from a war-hawk nationalist to a pacifistic internationalist is often called a fascist by their enemies. In Truth , we noted that often the judgments we make about the external world say more about ourselves than about the world we think we’re describing. Some things can be said clearly, and some things can hardly be said at all. We then looked at using probability, confidence levels, and calibration to make more clear and correct statements. In Pathos , we looked at rhetoric and the three “modes of persuasion” – ethos, logos, and pathos. We noted that ethos and logos are still familiar words (ethical, logical)… but the word “pathos” now maps to “emotional” instead of its original root – pathetic. We looked at how emotional appeals are greatly on the rise in public discourse at the expense of logos and ethos. In Philosophy , we looked at evaporative cooling – how natural philosophy became science, leaving the current state of mainstream “philosophy” in very bad shape. We differentiated between the modern mainstream “field of philosophy” over the last 150 years and its historical background as a love of wisdom , and we noted that it’s still possible to do philosophy – real philosophy – even though the word has lost much of what it used to mean. In Ethics and Morals , we noted that the word “morality” fell into disrepute, but there is still a very large difference between believing something is right or wrong because of one’s internal judgment, or because of the external rules of a society or profession. We noted how the word “ethical” has became somewhat confused recently in that it now is used to describe both internal senses of right and wrong and external senses of right and wrong – the old word “morality” became tarnished, but the new usage of “ethical” is prone to very muddy and unclear thinking. We wrap the series now. It’s my sincere hope that this series has helped you clarify your own thinking – if the series has been effective at all, you now have some tools to diagnose and understand your own language, and language as other people use it. Ideally, you can now think a little more clearly and communicate more clearly. Most importantly, I hope you’ve been able to recognize that there are important concepts that we have no good words for. By definition, these are the hardest things to think about – since most of our thinking and communicate is done in words. Now, we’ll wrap up with a final word that needs much clarification – perfectionism . It has two meanings, one of which you’ve likely never heard before – moral perfectionism , as contrasted against the psychological concept. Of course, the mainstream understanding is that perfectionism is bad. Is it? Let’s find out. *** PERFECTIONISM – MAINSTREAM PERSPECTIVE Psychology Today: Perfectionism – “For perfectionists, life is an endless report card on accomplishments or looks. It’s a fast and enduring track to unhappiness, and perfectionism is often accompanied by depression and eating disorders. What makes perfectionism so toxic is that while those in its grip desire success, they are most focused on avoiding failure, so theirs is a negative orientation.” Wikipedia: Perfectionism (Psychology) – “Perfectionism, in psychology, is a personality trait characterized by a person’s striving for flawlessness and setting high performance standards, accompanied by critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others’ evaluations. […] Perfectionists strain compulsively and unceasingly toward unobtainable goals, and measure their self-worth by productivity and accomplishment. Pressuring oneself to achieve unrealistic goals inevitably sets the person up for disappointment. Perfectionists tend to be harsh critics of themselves when they fail to meet their standards. ” I think we’d do well to note the specific words used in these descriptions – “endless report card”, “fast and enduring track to unhappiness”, “toxic”, “more focused on avoiding failure”, “negative orientation”, “strain compulsively”, “unobtainable goals”, “unrealistic goals”, etc. Of course, whatever this thing they’re describing is – it sounds dreadful. Who would want anything to do with such a thing? *** MORAL PERFECTIONISM And yet, what is this ? Wikipedia: Perfectionism (Philosophy) – “In ethics and value theory, perfectionism is the persistence of will in obtaining the optimal quality of spiritual, mental, physical, and material being. […] Perfectionism, as a moral theory, has a long history and has been addressed by influential philosophers. Aristotle stated his conception of the good life (eudaimonia). […] The philosopher Stanley Cavell develops the idea of moral perfectionism as the idea that there is an unattained but attainable self that one ought to strive to reach. Moral perfectionists believe that the ancient questions such as "Am I living as I am supposed to?" make all the difference in the world and they describe the commitment we ought to have in ways that seem, but are not, impossibly demanding. We do so because it is only in the keeping such an "impossible" view in mind that one can strive for one's "unattained but attainable self." ” So we see right away a difference – moral perfectionism, which is much older than modern psychology or psychiatry, was concerned with reaching the “unattained but attainable self” – which, you might note, is exactly opposite of the mainstream psychological definition. This is curious, is it not? What’s going on here? *** DISTINGUISHING “That Russia produced some of the twentieth century’s greatest mathematicians is, plainly, a miracle. Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything. It promoted argument; it studied patterns in a country that controlled its citizens by forcing them to inhabit a shifting, unpredictable reality; it placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand, making the mathematical conversion a code that was indecipherable to an outsider; and worst of all, mathematics laid claim to singular and knowable truths when the regime had staked its legitimacy on its own singular truth. All of this is what made mathematics and mathematicians suspect. Explaining what makes mathematics as important and as beautiful as mathematicians know it to be, the Russian algebraist Mikhail Tsfasman said, “Mathematics is uniquely suited to teaching one to distinguish right from wrong, the proven from the unproven, the probable from the improbable. It also teaches us to distinguish that which is probably and probably true from that which, while apparently probable, is an obvious lie. This is a part of mathematical culture that [Russian] society at large so sorely lacks.”” In Perfect Rigor , Masha Gessen tells the story of how Russian Jewish mathematician Grigori Perelman solved one of math’s greatest unsolved problems – the Poincare Conjecture – and then decided to turn down the $1 million USD prize associated with solving it, out of dislike of the commercialization of mathematics. The story is fascinating on a lot of levels. You learn about thinking and temperament, and about education, mentorship, and competition. Those lessons were to be expected from the book. Less expected – and perhaps even more profitable – was how the book shined a light on the education and political system of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s anti-elitism, anti-Semitism, and at times, anti-sanity... these are not the main thrust of Gessen’s book at all – it’s all just background information. Which makes it all the more fascinating – “There would be inspectors criticizing me for not working with the average kids,“ Ryzhik recalled in 2008, when he had been a practicing schoolteacher for nearly half a century. “And I would say, The issue is not working with the average kids; the issue is working with the gifted kids – and that’s really hard, because, for one thing, they are all different. Another is, if you teach them in a way that’s not interesting for them, they can tolerate it for a day or two and then they get bored and start wondering what they are doing at this school. And that can’t happen. You have to make their eyes light up, and I can’t explain to you how you do that.” The book outlines some genuinely heroic contributions to education and mathematics by teachers who looked to carve out hidden enclaves of excellence and rigor from within the Soviet system. *** FROM THE PHILOSOPHICAL TO THE POLITICAL Gessen – “By the time I met Ryzhik, he was seventy, teaching again – at a new elite physics-and-math school – playing chess in the afternoons, and given to looking back kindly on his life, which had been lived largely in the shadow of the Soviet compromise. He had been denied entry to Leningrad University because he was Jewish. “They did not even manage to find a problem I couldn’t solve: I sat for three hours after the exam was over, I solved them all, and still they failed me. I was just a boy. I went home and cried. He graduated from Herzen, the second-tier college, and was later cut from its faculty because there were too many Jews. He never managed to defend his doctoral dissertation, which was based on the geometry textbook he coauthored and was criticized for violating every rule of Soviet teaching methodology.” With just a little bit of thinking, we can see why moral perfectionism would be seen as hostile to the Soviet Union – people’s political sentiments and preferences often flow directly from their morality and philosophy. Indeed, take this (unintentionally) hilarious entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on “ Perfectionism in Moral and Political Philosophy ” – “2.2 Elitism and Inequality “Perfectionist ethics has often been associated with elitist doctrines. Whether it takes a consequentialist or deontological structure, perfectionism is compatible with assigning different weights to the perfection of different human beings. And a number of important perfectionist writers have maintained that the perfection that matters the most is the perfection of those who are capable of achieving the most. This “superman” version of perfectionism, a view famously associated with Nietzsche, gives absolute weight to the excellence achievable by certain great men, such as Socrates or Goethe and zero weight to the rest of humanity (Nietzsche 1873/1876; Griffin 1986, 60–61). “The superman version of perfectionism is an extreme view. It holds that some human lives count for much and many human lives count for nothing. This view should not be confused with a different and less extreme view, one that can be termed the prioritarian version of perfectionism. This view holds that we should value the perfection of each and every human being, but in aggregating human perfection we should count the greater perfections more, by some multiplier, than the lesser perfections.” I say it’s unintentionally hilarious, because it’s often funny when someone attempts and fails to describe a viewpoint they clearly hate and oppose – the author of that SEP entry clearly very much dislikes moral perfectionism. He actually doesn’t even talk about moral perfectionism very much at all – spending almost no time talking about it, and then around 75% of the piece outlining the various counterarguments against it. (Tellingly, the word "greatness" only shows up once in the entry – and not in a favorable way. And what defines moral perfectionism better than the striving for greatness ?) Yet, much of that entry is correct – moral perfectionism does tend to be at least indifferent, if not outright opposed, to egalitarianism. It de facto increases inequality, because the highest heights of accomplishment tend not to be reached by most people. And thus, the teachers under the Soviet system who sought to help their students reach the highest levels of mathematics were automatically suspect – and often persecuted. It’s no surprise to me, either, that anti-Semitism raged in Soviet academia. Jewish culture has always had strong lines of moral perfectionism running through it – “a light unto all nations,” chosenness, the Biblical Covenant, etc. Science benefits immensely from moral and philosophical perfectionism – a relentless effort to do better and achieve the utmost that we’re capable of. People of Jewish descent have won 22.4% of all Nobel prizes , while being less than 0.2% of world population – is any surprise that a culture with such deep lines of moral perfectionism would account for so much of the world's advance in the sciences? And thus we can see one large reason why the Soviet commissars would’ve felt threatened – and respond by stamping “J” in every passport of someone of Jewish descent, refuse to take more than two Jews per year into the best mathematics program at the top university, and purge many of the best Soviet Jewish scientists and mathematicians from their top programs. The idea of a sub-culture achieving high degrees of perfection in a given field, and excelling above and beyond the rest of society, generated a nearly-unending stream of hatred and persecution. *** FOR COMMON NATURES… Nietzsche – “ For common natures all noble, magnanimous feelings appear to be inexpedient and therefore initially incredible: they give a wink when they hear of such things and seem to want to say, ‘Surely there must be some advantage involved; one cannot see through every wall’ – they are suspicious of the noble person, as if were furtively seeking his advantage. If they became all too clearly convinced of the absence of selfish intentions and gains, they view the noble person as a kind of fool: they despise him in his pleasure and laugh at the sparkle in his eye. ‘How could one enjoy being at a disadvantage? How could one want with open eyes to be disadvantaged? Some disease of reason must be linked to the noble affection’ – thus they think and look disparagingly, the way they disparage the pleasure that a madman derives from his fixed idea. What distinguishes the common nature is that it unflinchingly keeps sight of its advantage, and that this thought of purpose and advantage is even stronger than its strongest drives; not to allow these drives to lead it astray to perform inexpeditious acts – that is its wisdom and self-esteem.” Nietzsche was a moral perfectionist – probably the most hardcore of moral perfectionists of all-time, with Aristotle coming in second. (And of course, Nietzsche and Aristotle continue to be very profitable reading for people wishing greater self-mastery and perfection.) The remarks above are fascinating – I think they’re true. The first reaction to someone of a noble and magnanimous character is skepticism and suspicion – what advantage is secretly being had here? Why would Perelman turn down a million dollars to focus on the purity of mathematics? He must be playing some larger game…! But if eventually convinced that, no, Perelman is in fact sincere – then “they despise him in his pleasure and laugh the sparkle in his eye.” Nobility of character is dismissed as a disease; the common person keeping their eyes fixed solely on (short-term) advantages. *** THE WEAPONIZATION OF PSYCHOLOGY Wikipedia: Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union – “There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. It was called "psychopathological mechanisms" of dissent. During the leadership of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, psychiatry was used to disable and remove from society political opponents ("dissidents") who openly expressed beliefs that contradicted the official dogma. The term "philosophical intoxication", for instance, was widely applied to the mental disorders diagnosed when people disagreed with the country's Communist leaders and, by referring to the writings of the Founding Fathers of Marxism–Leninism—Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin—made them the target of criticism. [… ] The "anti-Soviet" political behavior of some individuals — being outspoken in their opposition to the authorities, demonstrating for reform, and writing critical books — were defined simultaneously as criminal acts (e.g., a violation of Articles 70 or 190-1), symptoms of mental illness (e.g., "delusion of reformism"), and susceptible to a ready-made diagnosis (e.g., "sluggish schizophrenia").[8] Within the boundaries of the diagnostic category, the symptoms of pessimism, poor social adaptation and conflict with authorities were themselves sufficient for a formal diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia.” In the USSR, the authorities worked together with sympathetic “psychologists” to create diagnoses that could be applied to people who disagreed with them and their political ideologies. It’s now admitted, broadly across the political spectrum in former USSR and the West, that there were significant abuses in this regard. The reason to do so would be obvious – it was advantageous for propping up their political system. It had an air of authority to it. It was an easy way to discourage and suppress moral and political beliefs that the Soviet rules disliked and wished to suppress. Now, a question for you – do you think the psychologists of the West are above such a thing? *** MORAL PERFECTIONISM AND PSYCHOLOGICAL “PERFECTIONISM” Moral perfectionism has been around a lot longer than the psychological buzzword “perfectionism” – and for my money, will be around a lot longer after the psychological concept has passed into the ash heap of history. Almost by definition, perfectionism is not something that most people will seek. “What? The final aim of science should be to give man as much pleasure and as little displeasure as possible? But what if pleasure and displeasure are so intertwined that whoever wants as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other – that whoever wants to learn to ‘jubilate up to the heavens’ must also be prepared for ‘grief unto death’? And that may well be the way things are!” I believe that is – true. But the mainstream definition of the word “perfectionism” crowds out the older, more important concept. The mainstream definition of perfectionism has all kinds of anti-perfectionist stuff wound up and tied into it – things like being excessively concerned about appearances and what other people think, being paralyzed against taking action, excessive vanity, even eating disorders! And yet, if you read actual perfectionist writers – Aristotle and Nietzsche and Benjamin Franklin certainly qualify, Richard Hamming’s “ You and Your Research ” certainly qualifies – you get the sense, not of paralysis, but of nearly unlimited joy in striving, constantly embracing and analyzing errors for improvements to be made, and overcoming the worst parts of one’s nature to thrive more, do more, be better. But the mainstream definition of “perfectionism” is anything but genuine perfectionism. The definition is almost exactly backwards – what’s called “perfectionism” in psychology is very clearly an immature form of anti-perfectionism in practice. *** CLARIFYING ONE’S WORDS AND THINKING This series is one of the most abstract that we’ve engaged in – but there are certainly immense practical implications to be made, and gains to be had. One of the most pernicious and damaging things is when a word that maps to a good concept – perfectionism – is instead pathologized, simplified incorrectly to a small part of the puzzle, and then the simplification is highlighted as a bad thing. How many young people are instructed to “not be a perfectionist” in the West? When really, they would benefit more from being encouraged to worry less about appearances and more about achieving – i.e., actual perfectionism . In fairness to the modern psychological concept of “perfectionism,” it does get one thing right – perfectionism involves a lot of pain. This is true. The pain, of course, is not the point . Transcending and overcoming it to do great things is the point. But the psychologists – both the Westerners and their Soviet colleagues – mistake one side effect of a life of striving for the whole of the thing, and neglect the only cure – overcoming . Which is, in fact, the point. So think for a little bit on this word “perfectionism” – both the ancient moral perfectionism and the bastardized modern psychological variants of the word – but then, think deeper of its implications. I personally think it’s a tragedy that one of our greatest concepts – the concept of overcoming , of fighting to be the very best possible , of doing the most you possibly can , turned into a buzzword-type pathology. From there, you’ll want to think widely and broadly in this area – what other useful concepts have had their corresponding words bastardized and pathologized? I think of a few dozen such words immediately, but I’ve gone as far as I’m willing to write. You should do some more reflection on the topic – to clarify your own thinking across the board. *** AND FINALLY If I might slip a last little bit of philosophy into this series on language, it would do well to think on Nietzsche’s proposition – “Even today you still have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, in short, lack of pain … or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of a bounty of refined pleasures and joys that hitherto have seldom been tasted. Should you decide on the former, i.e. if you want to decrease and diminish people’s susceptibility to pain, you also have to decrease and diminish their capacity for joy. With science one can actually promote either of these goals! So far it may still be better known for its power to deprive man of his joys and make him colder, more statue-like, more stoic. But it might yet be found to be the great giver of pain! ” Is he correct? Is he mistaken? He might even be mistaken – but I suspect he’s on to something there. So, do think through your words and language and thinking – I hope this series has provided more tools to do so – but then, perhaps think a little bit on the goal of life. Is it as little pain as possible? I think not. A last thought. One of the students of the elite mathematics boarding school said this, about being cloistered away from mainstream Soviet ideology – “What could be more beneficial at sixteen or seventeen than not having to lie?” Not all language is corrupted – most words, thankfully, map reasonably faithfully to the concepts they are meant to represent. A cow is a cow, milk is milk, and so on. But where language is corrupted, you’re being implicitly asked to lie all the time – and this is something we have to learn to do as we mature into adults, in order to navigate society. But all lies exact their price on thinking – and communicating – and morale – and action – and, life. Analyzing one’s words and concepts allows us to cut away the falsehoods most deeply embedded in our thinking – so we can run, and perhaps even fly. It’s a painful path at times, but ever and always, I think, worth it for those brave enough to pay the price. Galaxies of joy – indeed. For joining me on Lingua Franca – thank you. Stay In Touch 1. I’d love your feedback. Write me at editor@thestrategicreview.net Reviews are also always appreciated. 2. Like Pragma ? Get one essay of this caliber per week, for free, every Thursday. All essays here originally were published in The Strategic Review , a free weekly newsletter – http://www.thestrategicreview.net/ It’s 100% free to sign up. A new essay comes out once per week, on Thursday. By delivering only via email (not publishing on the general internet), we’re able to cover more controversial and intense topics, in a more intimate manner. I’d love for you to sign up. Again, it’s 100% free – http://www.thestrategicreview.net/ And have you pointed your deepest-thinking friends to TSR yet? Please do. They’ll thank you. 3. Final Passing Thought “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas? ” – Joseph Stalin The history books are written in blood — it almost breaks the mind to ponder the sheer amount of raw strife our ancestors navigated to create us , such that we can now live and breathe and think and thrive … Should we learn from them? Should we exceed them? Should we arm ourselves — or accept the consequences of being disarmed? It’s worth musing over, eh? My highest regards, always — and for now, aideu , – Marshall