whispery......................

 

This is a story walking us in several directions.  Whoever said time was a straight line?  We now find ourself right back at the beginning, in the very woods the terrible deal was struck.  A message is caught and manipulated between king and queen, warrior and mother.  Fake news flying around the psyche.  When we are out of touch with truth, we can stew on such wretched and fictitious messages.  Often in a fairy tale when a witch or sorcerer wants to infect you, they get you alone and start whispering such distortions in your ear, delighted to paralyze your immediate relationships.  The mythologist Marie-Louise von Franz called this 'cold evil' as opposed to 'hot evil'.  Hot evil is all giants and swinging clubs, heads on spikes, villages massacred, very visible.  Cold evil is something else again.  Very interior, very subtle, very whispery, very hidden.  This is a good example.  It has a hallucinatory, paranoid essence.  Gossipy.

-Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole:  Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

The more things change..................

 

      There is a tendency, as strong now as at any former time, to suppose that an oligarchy is admirable if it consists of 'good' men.  The government of the Roman Empire was 'bad' until Constantine, and then it became 'good'.  In the Book of Kings, there were those who did right in the sight of the Lord, and those who did evil.  In English history as taught to children, there are 'good' kings and 'bad' kings.  An oligarchy of Jews is 'bad', but one of Nazis is 'good'.  The oligarchy of Tsarist aristocrats was 'bad', but that of the Communist Party is 'good'.

     This attitude is unworthy of grown-up people.  A child is 'good' when it obeys orders, and 'naughty' when it does not.  When it grows up and becomes a political leader, it retains the ideas of the nursery, and defines the 'good' as those who obey its orders and the 'bad' as those who defy it.  Consequently our own political party consists of 'good' men, and the opposite party consists of 'bad' men.  'Good' government is government by our group, 'bad' government that by the other group.  The Montagues are 'good', the Capulets 'bad', or vice versa.

      Such a point of view, if taken seriously, makes social life impossible.

-Bertrand Russell, The Taming of Power, circa 1938, from The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell

how long is an era...................?

 

     An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era.  As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era.  In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it.  The writers of today know this.  If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked.  If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture at the University of Uppsala

Some things never change............

 

Guizot would become both a major historian and formidable statesman; he was also, like Royer-Collard, a significant presence in the young Tocqueville's life.  One of his first initiatives as Secrétaire général was to order what we would nowadays call a public opinion survey, pioneering a new role for local administrators.  The Bourbons had been in exile, and thus out of power, for so many years that they had to rediscover France.  In September 1814, Guizot instructed all prefects to inquire about the "hearts and minds of the masses, their general opinions, and general mentality and assumptions of each profession and each rank, and how they shaped public affairs in the département, especially regarding those opinions that are resistant to the authorities."  Guizot would eventually think of "governance of the public mind" as "the great challenge of modern society.

-Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis De Tocqueville

Almost seventy years ago.................

 

To create today is to create dangerously.   Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing.  Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art.  The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible.

-Albert Camus, from this 1957 lecture

the interplay.......................

 

     History was a favorite genre for the rest of Swift's life.  What mainly interested him was the interplay of personalities, with their complicated motives, covert betrayals, and heavily masked truth.  He would undoubtedly have agreed with Voltaire's conclusion to his massive Essai sur les moeurs: "Since nature has placed self-interest, pride, and all the passions in the human heart, it is not surprising that we have viewed, over a span of ten centuries, an almost continuous succession of crimes and disasters."

-Leo Damrosch, Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World

Incentives matter.............

 

Unsustainable things can last longer than you anticipate.  Incentives can keep crazy, unsustainable trends going longer than seems reasonable because there are social and financial reasons preventing people from accepting reality for as long as they can.

-Morgan Housel, Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Certainly feels like it....................

 

.......................if you pay more attention to the news instead of the history books.

image via

Uh-oh...................

 

All of the good forms of government are good only if the rulers are virtuous.

-Leighton and Lopez, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change

The more things change...............

 

     As he prepared to leave for England in November 1764. Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter.  It included paternal exhortations to be "dutiful and tender towards your good mama" and typical Franklin advice, such as "to acquire those useful accomplishments arithmetic and bookkeeping."  But it also contained a more serious note.  "I have many enemies," he said.  "Your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound and afflict me.  It is therefore the more necessary for you to be extremely circumspect in all your behavior that not advantage may be given to their malevolence."

-Walter Isaacson,  Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

the more things change.........................

 

The invention of paper was decried by Socrates for degrading the faculty of memory . . .

-Scott H. Young, Get Better at Anything: 12 Maxims for Mastery

Ed. Note:  Wondering if Socrates really thought that way, the Intertunnel was consulted: one answer found here.

"money power".........................

 

This idea was at the core of Van Buren's worldview.  It would never change.  Collusion between government and private interests, he believed, would always enrich the few at the expense of the many.

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

man, this sounds familiar...............

 

     Williams also got the politicians.  The Junto consistently elected Federalists to local seats—often by playing dirty.  One corrupt practice of the era was called "making votes."  Since many people couldn't meet the state's stringent property requirements, Federalist attorneys created fake deeds that voters presented to poll inspectors. "In this cursed crooked world," Williams wrote Ebenezer Foote, "if our institutions are worth preserving, we must preserve them by use of such means as alone can sustain them."

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

unflagging diligence...............

 

     Making votes was one example of how corruption evolved—one could even say became democratized—in post-Revolutionary New York.  Given that land was no longer the sole path to wealth, politics became another pipeline.  Elites funded newspapers that promoted their interests.  They bribed legislators in exchange for votes on banks, turnpikes, and chartered corporations.  Van Buren saw this "implied alliance" between monied interests and the state as a means of restoring colonial-era oligarchy under a different guise.  Columbia's "money power" was, he believed, the essence of Federalism, whose raison d'etre was to "combat the democratic spirit of the country . . . an object which it has pursued with unflagging diligence."

-James M. Bradley,  Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

Ah, history..............................

 

      The notion of a legitimate, loyal opposition had yet to take root.  Schooled in the Revolution, each camp had a warrior's mentality.  They argued that their rival's success jeopardized the nation's existence.  They deemed the opposition not only wrongheaded but sinister, corrupt, even treasonous.  Republicans accused Federalists of advocating a British-like monarchy.  Federalists countered that Republicans sympathized with the French Revolution's violent radicalism.  As strong as these passions were, even the most doctrinaire partisans thought the newfound party mania was temporary.  They believed that the new constitutional order of separation of powers would stabilize government and cool men's fervency.

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

The more things change..........................

 

.......................the more they stay the same:

Still, he preferred the nomination of Seward, whom he viewed as a real Republican, to the nomination of Bates or Bell, the elderly conservatives whose names were often mentioned that Spring.  "I have lost patience with what I hear of hunting of the fossils," Chase wrote to a friend.  "It will do for paleontologists but not for Republicans."

-Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival.  The setting is the campaign for the Republican presidential candidate in 1860.

As well as how weird the present is.............

 

Read a lot of history so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be.

-Kevin Kelly

The more things change.....................

      Because of the high wartime inflation—the cost of imports was six times higher than usual—Henry found it difficult to fill the civilian jobs at the arsenals despite offering exorbitant wages of $30 a month along with a suit of clothes and another suit every year along with the normal army rations.  He wrote Washington that he would add an allotment of half a pint of rum per day to sweeten the deal.  

-Mark Puls,  Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution

Inadvertently.................ah, history

 Deprived of French help, on December 28, 1783, the Turks officially acknowledged the loss of the Crimea.  Exclaimed on observer, "The Russian state has spread out like ancient Rome."  Indeed, Catherine's swollen dominions now stood larger that the entire Roman Empire at its height.

     But there was a price to be paid for this brash expansion.  For one thing, Catherine's actions had inadvertently opened the wounds of religious wars that would one day cross borders and carry over into a new age.  For another, the Crimea remained a boiling stew of biases, prejudices, and fierce hatreds.  In the years that followed, while annexation was one thing, actually extending Russian control over the region remained an exasperating business.  Russian forays into the area known as the Caucasus were especially riddled with troubles—in 1785 a rebellion broke out among a deadly mix of Chechens, Avars, and other tribes.  Descending down from the mountains, a shadowy leader wrapped in a green cloak and espousing a mystical version of Islam proclaimed a Ghazavat, or holy war, against the Russians.  With dauntless flair and lightning strikes, this self-anointed "Sheik Mansur" led a coalition of mountain tribesmen that harassed and tormented the Russians with guerrilla warfare, laying the seeds for a conflict that still sputters today.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

a never-ending chain............

      If you've relied on data and logic alone to make sense of the economy, you'd have been confused for a hundred years straight.

     Economist Per Bylund once noted: "The concept of economic value is easy: whatever someone wants has value, regardless of the reason (if any)."

     Not utility, not profits—just whether people want it or not, for any reason.  So much of what happens in the economy is rooted in emotions, which can, at times, be nearly impossible to make sense of. . . .

     The danger, one you see often in investing, is when people become too McNamara-like—so obsessed with data and so confident in their models that they leave no room for error or surprise.  No room for things to be crazy, dumb, unexplainable, and to remain that way for a long time.  Always asking, "Why is this happening?" and expecting there to be a rational answer.  Or worse, always mistaking what happened for what you think should have happened.

     The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.

-Morgan Housel, as excerpted from Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes