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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32249 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.

Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.

The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.

Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.

The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.

Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews.

That's what they want you to think. But there's a some amount of evidence Christianity is just disguised Imperial Cult that went a bit astray. Of course we as a civilization and especially academia cannot possibly acknowledge the truth of it, that'd be unthinkable.

See:

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-gospel-of-mark-antony-2-parallel

So, Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans, although they kind of fumbled it at the end by not managing to deprecate the old testament entirely.

Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans

Yeah, sure, that really works out, given the support of the Hasmodeans by the Romans. They invented a new religion to convert the Jews. Instead of, you know, stomping all over them as per usual practice when conquering a new province.

Excuse me while I stoop down to pick up my eyeballs, they fell out of their sockets after rolling too hard.

I was really hoping he wasn’t channeling Joseph Atwill’s thesis. It’s a historical conclusion that’s ‘very’ far reaching and implausible.

I’m not impressed by these sorts of coincidences. If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

A hero character who loves the poor isn’t that uncommon, in fact Buddha fits this fairly well too. Buddha is a prince who essentially renounced his throne to become a religious aesetic. He had disciples, was a traveling preacher, and so on. So you can put this “character” onto both Jesus and Buddha and if memory serves Krishna as well.

As to the specific events, they only fit if you take very vague descriptions of the events themselves. Jesus was Baptized in the Jordan, he wasn’t crossing as a conqueror. Jesus didn’t just say “don’t be scared,” he calmed the storm. The Sanhedrin had mostly theological disputes with Jesus, and not that he was looking to establish a kingdom or something.

The other part is that Jesus is very interested (mostly in Mathew, though he teaches the Law in other places) in Judaism itself. The Shema quote (this is the most important credal statement in Judaism— Hear Oh Israel, the Lord year God, the Lord is One), concerns over Jewish temple sacrifices, and the Jewish Sabbath are things that just don’t fit. Roman’s were polytheistic and their sacrifices were not identical to Jewish sacrifices, and Romans don’t keep any sort of Sabbath. It simply doesn’t make sense to insert Jewish ideas into the mouth of a character invented to absorb the imperial cult.

My God, we're overlooking the most obvious piece of evidence literally staring us in the face!

JC!

JC - Julius Caesar/Jesus Christ.

They told us what they were doing right from the start!

If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

Try it.

Someone already did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coincidences_urban_legend

Here you go.

Did you never hear of folktale classification? This is breaking down story elements into what we'd now call tropes which are commonly shared by different stories from different places. It's how Jung gets his notion of the Collective Unconscious and the Archetypes:

A quantitative study, published by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani in 2016, tried to evaluate the time of emergence for the "Tales of Magic" (ATU 300–ATU 749), based on a phylogenetic model. They found four of them to belong to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stratum of magic tales:

ATU 328 The Boy Steals Ogre's Treasure (= Jack and the Beanstalk and Thirteen)

ATU 330 The Smith and the Devil (KHM 81a)

ATU 402 The Animal Bride (= The Three Feathers, KHM 63 and The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat, KHM 106)

ATU 554 The Grateful Animals (= The White Snake, KHM 17 and The Queen Bee, KHM 62)

There's an entire cottage industry from the 19th century of dismissing Christianity as just another Middle Eastern mystery cult (the dying and resurrected saviour motif from Osiris to Dionysius), as well as the valiant attempts of Frazer and others to reduce all mythology ultimately to the Solar Myth and fertilty myths. Comparative religion is the field for "hey DAE the resemblances between X and Y?"

Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis at the fane of Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.

...Girard's "grievances" against The Golden Bough were numerous, particularly concerning Frazer's assertion that Christianity was merely a perpetuation of primitive myth-ritualism and that the New Testament Gospels were "just further myths of the death and resurrection of the king who embodies the god of vegetation."

We also get 19th ethnographers trying to classify 'primitive' beliefs according to that sort of schema, and the euhemerists culminating in the philogist Max Müller and his famous phrase that "mythology is a disease of language":

He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is "a disease of language". By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view, "gods" began as words constructed to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the word "Dyaus", which he understood to imply "shining" or "radiance". This leads to the terms "deva", "deus", "theos" as generic terms for a god, and to the names "Zeus" and "Jupiter" (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking was later explored similarly by Nietzsche.

That article is the lowest form of conspirational thinking.

Caesar went north into Gallia; Jesus went north into Galilee.

Caesar went to SPAin to cleanse it of pompeian forces; Jesus went to a SPA to cleanse his feet.

This is the equivalent of "American historians in the 19th century noticed they had no Great Military Leader for the Revolution, so they copied the Duke of Wellington and instead called him George Washington".

WASH-ING-TON, WELL-ING-TON, I mean they're practically the same name! And you WASH with water that you get from a WELL. Could they have made it any clearer?

There are so many plums to pluck out of it, like the following:

It may also be notable that the dove was a symbol of Venus, and plays a prominent role in Christian symbolism.

Sparrows were also symbols of Venus, more so than doves. And didn't Jesus say something about sparrows?

29 Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. 30 But even the hairs of your head are all numbered. 31 Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows.

Caesar had an infamous love affair with Cleopatra, widely regarded by Romans as a whorish seductress; Jesus had an affair with the prostitute Mary Magdalene.

Our boy is clearly not up on scholarship which denies that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute, how un-feminist of him! 😁

He also contradicts his own point, where he says something, adds a quote to demonstrate it, and doesn't see that the quote doesn't say what he just said:

His funeral, however, was rather interesting. Mark Antony had a wax effigy of Caesar created, in the pose in which Caesar had been found dead, wounds and all, which for the purposes of display was affixed to a cross together with his bloody robes. The effigy was raised in front of the crowd so that the plebs could see for themselves what had been done to their champion. Antony was a showman that way. From Appian (amusingly, at the link, it says the translation was done by none other than John Carter):

When the crowd were in this state, and near to violence, someone raised above the bier a wax effigy of Caesar - the body itself, lying on its back on the bier, not being visible. The effigy was turned in every direction, by a mechanical device, and twenty-three wounds could be seen, savagely inflicted on every part of the body and on the face. This sight seemed so pitiful to the people that they could bear it no longer. Howling and lamenting, they surrounded the senate-house, where Caesar had been killed, and burnt it down, and hurried about hunting for the murderers, who had slipped away some time previously.

There's nothing there about bloody robes or the effigy being affixed to a cross (certainly not, the cross was a shameful method of execution for slaves and the worst criminals, you're not going to put your murdered hero on a cross) but "a mechanical device" used to raise it up because it couldn't be seen as it lay on the bier.

He covers himself by saying it was a tropaeum and then illustrates it by a really dumb picture (famously balding and vain about it Caesar with long hair in the wax effigy?) which is a repurposed version of a crucifix:

The mechanical device in question was a tropaeum, a cruciform device on which things were hung for display. Caesar was known for showing off his various war trophies on tropaea, and often placed the device on his coinage, to the degree that tropaea became symbolically associated with him

Wikipedia has a handy article on this, and depictions of historical tropaions. While they might (and I emphasise might) have hung Caesar's bloody garments on such, they wouldn't have done the same with an effigy. Because tropaions were trophies, indicating the conquest and vanquishing of an enemy. Putting up the clothing, much less the funeral effigy, would have been annoucing "Caesar has been beaten by his victorious enemies". It would be like using images of George Floyd for BLM marches depicting him sitting on the toilet: not the associations you want to invoke in the outraged onlookers.

"But wouldn't Caesar's bloody garments be like the photos of Floyd with Chauvin kneeling on him? Wouldn't that show the same 'he was murdered unjustly' imagery to get the mob up in arms?" Perhaps, but the associations of trophies is probably too strong - it would be showing 'Caesar was killed rightly as a just punishment and is a loser', which is not what Antony wanted.

Anyway, see for yourself: compare John Carter's alleged "Reconstruction of Caesar’s wax effigy, hanging on a tropaeum, as it would have appeared at his funeral" with what genuine ancient Roman depictions of tropaeum look like, and judge for yourself. That's not even getting into the history of depictions of the crucifixion, which would have come much later.

(God damn it, anyone with a cursory knowledge of history and five feckin' minutes on Google can do the work, this is why I rant and rave about historical illiteracy).

EDIT: We have Suetonius' account, where he says that the robe was hung on a pillar:

When the funeral was announced, a pyre was erected in the Campus Martius near the tomb of Julia1, and on the rostra a gilded shrine was placed, made after the model of the temple of Venus Genetrix; within was a couch of ivory with coverlets of purple and gold, and at its head a pillar hung with the robe in which he was slain.

There's the account by Appian, which John Carter quotes for the wax effigy, which again tells us about the bloody robe, this time it is Mark Antony who puts in on a pole and waves it about:

Then, swept very easily on to passionate emotion, he stripped the clothes from Caesar's body, raised them on a pole and waved them about, rent as they were by the stabs and befouled with the dictator's blood.

Appian then goes on to the part about the wax effigy and the mechanical device, but as I said, I'm not convinced this was a tropaeum or anything that looked like a body on a cross.

First of all, historical examples are old enoigh to be from eras where the scientific method was rare, knowledge was limited to a few people, and I wouldn't expect anyone to predict the future well regardless of whether more modern people could.

Second, even your modern examples are chosen because they were the ones that turned out unpredictable. But that doesn't mean that the typical prediction would be incorrect.

There's also the question of who counts as making the prediction when people have different levels of knowledge. Some people did predict the fall of the Soviets, even if the man in the street didn't.

To me this invokes the phrase of human actions if not human designs. There are so many different variables whereby action X leads to Y, or Z, or A, , or BBB.

Not to side track your conversation but this is why a centralized system will always fail over the long run. What you need are numerous bets; not one bet. Because no matter how educated the position the key to understanding is knowing that we don’t know anything.

I disagree with the thesis. It might be hard at the moment to predict with precision when an empire will rise or fall, but the things that create strong civilizations are pretty well known.

A commitment to meritocracy, a strong work ethic, and (especially post-industrial revolution) a commitment to education are key cultural traits to develop. If you look at any of the countries that became powerful, you’ll find these things happening. The Germans lead Europe through having a highly educated population willing to work hard and actively promoted high achievers. They had electrified cities because they created a large crop of good engineers in their universities.

The second trait is entrepreneurial spirit. The ideal of a person having an idea, building it, and selling it. People adopting new technologies and using them to solve problems and do interesting things. And a state that mostly stays out of the way letting technology grow and develop. Americans, especially, excelled at this. If there was anything people wanted or needed, someone would invent it and sell it. And of course people were quick to adopt and adapt these gadgets to get things done.

A third would be self-confidence. Rising civilizations believe in themselves and their ideas. They are right and thus have the ambition to try to make a mark on the world. The Spanish never questioned their natural right to the New World. Britain didn’t wring her hands over whether or not it was right to conquer all their territories or to rule them as she saw fit. Britain of yesteryear saw absolutely nothing wrong with imposing her language, her ways, and her economic policies on the majority of the globe. China, in our era does much the same.

I agree, but there are other elements which civilizations don't even recognize as key because they tended to always exist previously so there were few to no variations to use as data. For instance, above replacement fertility or an unchanging climate.

Even assuming that everything you say is true, it does not allow us to accurately predict whether or not country X will become an empire, for several reasons:

  1. Those things might be necessary for becoming an empire, but are they sufficient, alone on in combination? It seems clear that they are not. An obvious additional necessary element is demographics, for example. And of course, all sorts of external factors, such as the status of rivals.
  2. We don't know what level of meritocracy, or work ethic, or self-confidence, etc, is necessary.
  3. Even if we knew what level of each is necessary, we cannot accurately measure them.

Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.

They'd almost certainly be neither surprised nor happy about this, because the assumption would be that a nuclear war had taken place. People seem to have completely forgotten the grip that threat had on the culture around that time.

Recently someone asked about that time when I translated Vasily "Vatoadmin" Topolev's overview of 20-year intervals in the 20th century, here it is:

Writing about current events is tough, so let's do some minor league historiosophy.

Many people may know that Andrei Amalrik wrote the book "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" in 1969. He was only seven years wrong, it turns out. But Hélène Carrère d'Ancoss, in 1979, wrote a book called "The Fractured Empire," in which she was wrong by just one year – she was expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Amalrik died in a car crash in 1980, but Hélène (incidentally, born Zarubashvili of Russian-Georgian aristocratic émigrés) is still alive and even became secretary of the French Academy of Sciences.

Far fewer people know what the forecast itself was. Amalrik believed that the USSR would collapse as a result of war with China. In reality, the USSR collapsed after six years of consistently improving relations with China. Carrère d'Ancoss expected a mass Islamist uprising in Central Asia (as in Iran). In reality, the Central Asian republics were the last to leave the Union, after not only the Baltics, Ukraine, and Transcaucasia, but even after the RSFSR and the BSSR – that is, when there was no Union at all. But who remembers that now?

Paul Samuelson is considered one of the most illustrious economists of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize and wrote his famous textbook, which was used for decades by students all over the planet in their economics 101 course. Samuelson believed that by 1990 the USSR would overtake the United States in gross domestic product. Then he shifted his forecast a bit: by 2000.

In 1987, Yale historian Paul Kennedy (no, not a relative of the president) published his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (translated into Russian a couple of years ago). The book brought Kennedy worldwide fame – he described the change of the dominant powers over the course of 500 years. Except that the first cover of the book had a picture (https://pictures.abebooks.com/isbn/9780517051009-us.jpg): the Briton John Bull coming down from the top of the globe, the American Uncle Smith standing on the top, but a bespectacled Japanese sneaking up behind him. Kennedy believed that American domination of the world would be succeeded by the Japanese domination (he did not actually say it that explicitly, but it was easy to notice). In the real world, a few years after the book was published, Japan was hit by a severe economic crisis – some offices in downtown Tokyo became 100 (yes one hundred) times cheaper, and the nineties were labeled "the lost decade (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades)" by the Japanese themselves.

Everyone knows that the brilliant Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a brilliant book called The Grand Chessboard. Only no one has read it. But I have. The main idea of the book is that the power that controls pipelines in Central Asia will dominate in the 21st century. Brilliant. Who even remembers these pipes now, even against the backdrop of the global energy crisis.

In July 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm II promised soldiers that they would be back from the front before the first autumn leaves touched the ground. And the Kaiser was not alone. That the outcome of the war would be decided in the first months was the opinion of wise generals in all the general staffs of Europe. The French, based on the Franco-Prussian experience (you know that bit, the fight between two democracies?) believed that the outcome of the war would be decided in the first month – and have had a hundred thousand men felled in the Ardennes in a narrow area over four days, throwing them in pointless attacks on the German machine guns. The Russians threw two newly mobilized corps, in which half of the soldiers remained in sandals, on Königsberg – and the East Prussian disaster happened. The Austrians, too, threw their dressy – the prettiest uniforms in the world! – toy-like regiments to the Carpathians, where they were ground to dust in a few months by the harsh Siberian, Cossack, Grenadier, Guard and other select regiments of the Russian army.

In this light, let me remind you of an old idea of mine. We will scroll through the twentieth century, 20 years at a time.

So, let's start on January 1, 1900. What does the world look like?

World politics is defined in three capitals – London, Berlin, St. Petersburg.

The British, after the Boer War, are the world's pariahs. They have very bad relations with literally all other great powers. At the 1900 World's Fair in Paris, they even banned the British delegation. India is once again preparing for a Russian invasion.

France is sandwiched between the British and the Germans. The former can easily take her colonies, the latter can defeat her in a one-on-one war. The most militarized country in Europe. When railroad workers go on strike, the government simply declares them mobilized and sends those who refuse to work to be court-martialed – no other country in the world has thought of such a thing.

Germany is the European leader. The world's most advanced science – soon Germans will be raking in handfuls of Nobel prizes. The best universities in the world are not Harvard or Oxford, but Göttingen and Heidelberg. A mighty army. The world's second largest navy – thirty years ago there was none at all. Berlin is called the "Electroburg"; it's the most progressive and cleanest city in the world, kind of like Singapore today.

Russia has tremendous industrial growth, the highest in the world. The St. Petersburg Stock Exchange will reach a peak this year to which it will never return, not even by 1914, after the Stolypin reform. There are plans to build a huge fleet by 1920, with only battleships counting 50. Korea, Manchuria, and Persia are gradually turning into Russian colonies.

China, recently defeated in a war with Japan, seems determined to modernize along Japanese lines. Although right now the country is in an extremely deplorable state, China is genuinely feared. Both in Russia [ru link reddit'd], and in America [for good measure], and everywhere else. Kaiser Wilhelm paints a picture [] in which the Archangel Michael calls upon all the nations of Europe to go to holy war against the Asian hordes. Somewhere near China lies Japan, which has yet to receive much attention. The King of England and the Tsar of Russia call the Japanese macaques in their correspondence.

The U.S. is already very rich, but it is almost invisible in world politics. The American army is ranked by the German General Staff on a level with the Portuguese army. The American navy has only five small battleships. Unexpectedly, the Americans went to war with the other "weaklings," the Spaniards, and although they won, they ended up with an endless guerrilla war in the Philippines. All in all, simmering somewhere on the periphery.

Scroll to 1920.

There is no such thing as a Chinese empire. The Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires are similarly non-existent. In place of the Russian Empire there is a giant bloody stain. Germany, cut off from all sides, is steadily teetering on the brink of Communist revolution. All of Europe, down to Poland and Romania, is now dominated by France. The British Empire is even larger than it was in 1900. The U.S. has become a great military power. Wall Street, swollen during the war, turned from a peripheral financial center into a competitor to the City of London. Japan began to build its empire, suddenly becoming one of the world's great powers.

Fast forward to 1940.

The U.S. is still trying to get out of the Great Depression. France as a state simply does not exist, unless you count the mysterious entity centered in the resort town of Vichy. Russia, torn apart by civil war, was replaced by the giant Soviet Union. Germany, recently humiliated and defeated, has now conquered almost all of Europe. The British, recent triumphators, are preparing for a German landing and hiding from German bombs. Japan has already conquered a good half of China and is not going to stop.

Another turn of the knob and we go to 1960.

The U.S. has experienced a decade and a half of frenzied economic growth. The country is bursting with exuberance. U.S. military bases are spread across the globe. The Soviet Union, which many had already given up on in 1942, has recovered, has rid itself of the worst features of totalitarianism, is preparing to send a man into space, and is competing equally with the United States in the most sophisticated fields of technology – lasers, atomic, space, aviation. Germany and Japan are now almost the most peaceful countries in the world, especially since both are de facto occupied by U.S. and Soviet troops. Italy, until very recently one of the poorest countries in Europe, which has also suffered terribly after two years of warfare on its territory, is showing the highest growth rate in Europe and will soon overtake even Britain. Fewer and fewer territories remain of the British Empire, which was supposedly victorious in World War II, and those too will soon be independent. France is a great power again. Germany is experiencing its economic miracle. The Shah of Iran is determined to use petrodollars to turn his country into the most developed and enlightened in the Middle East.

And we are already in 1980.

When railroad workers go on strike, the government simply declares them mobilized and sends those who refuse to work to be court-martialed – no other country in the world has thought of such a thing.

I know I'm going off on a tangent here, but I recently read a Chesterton essay in a book of collected essays published in 1909, and he mentioned a French strike. I wondered if he was talking about the 1900 strike, so I looked up what strikes happened in France around that date. Well, they had a bunch of 'em from 1900 onwards, but I imagine the particular strike he was talking about was this one (to fit in with writing an essay that was published at the time and then a couple of years later in an anthology):

On May 1, 1906, the Confédération Générate du Travail (CGT), the national organization of French revolutionary syndicalism, demanded that the French government reduce the legal work day for industrial workers to eight hours. The CGT would back this request with force, and it called upon all workers to strike by May 2. The response was overwhelming; work-stoppage was widespread, and it appeared that government and industry would have to yield. By May 2, over 200,000 workers had walked off the job. The number of establishments affected was impressive. 295 strikes which called specifically for a work-day reduction involved 12,585 firms, a high figure compared to previous years. (Strikes for a ten-, nine-, or eight-hour work day were a part of the CGT's eight hour day movement.) For instance, only 14% of the strikes in 1904 and 16% in 1905 aimed primarily at a work-day reduction compared to 64% in 1906. Also, in 1905, there were only a total of 830 strikes affecting 177,666 workers and 5,302 establishments, while in 1904, 271,097 workers participated in 1,026 strikes involving 17,250 establishments. By comparison, the total number of firms struck in 1906 was 19,637 and involved 438,466 workers in 1,309 strikes. The Ministry of Labor conceded that the increased number had resulted from the CGT's eight-hour day movement.

We do have this image of the French perpetually going on (violent) strikes, and it made me smile to think they've been doing it so regularly for so long. Maybe Chesterton's conclusion here is indeed apt:

As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty and Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like so many such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and silent line of horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and prosaic enough, but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their helmets; and their helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans. I had seen them by twos and threes often enough before. I had seen plenty of them in pictures toiling through the snows of Friedland or roaring round the squares at Waterloo. But now they came file after file, like an invasion, and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that lit up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie into which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet and cry out, "The French soldiers!" There were the little men with the brown faces that had so often ridden through the capitals of Europe as coolly as they now rode through their own. And when I looked across the square I saw that the two other corners were choked with blue and red; held by little groups of infantry. The city was garrisoned as against a revolution.

Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker. He said he was not going to "Chomer." I said, "Qu'est-ce que c'est que le chome?" He said, "Ils ne veulent pas travailler." I said, "Ni moi non plus," and he thought I was a class-conscious collectivist proletarian. The whole thing was curious, and the true moral of it one not easy for us, as a nation, to grasp, because our own faults are so deeply and dangerously in the other direction. To me, as an Englishman (personally steeped in the English optimism and the English dislike of severity), the whole thing seemed a fuss about nothing. It looked like turning out one of the best armies in Europe against ordinary people walking about the street. The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less harmlessly. But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not) as docile as the English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled, so to speak, through the whole noisy night. This people has a natural faculty for feeling itself on the eve of something—of the Bartholomew or the Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment. It is this sense of crisis that makes France eternally young. It is perpetually pulling down and building up, as it pulled down the prison and put up the column in the Place de La Bastille. France has always been at the point of dissolution. She has found the only method of immortality. She dies daily.

But Hélène Carrère d'Ancoss, in 1979, wrote a book called "The Fractured Empire," in which she was wrong by just one year – she was expecting the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990.

Whatever was good in her book she copied from Emmanuel Todd.

Very curious, but very frequent, is the attitude of some economists: after a little discussion of principle, they adopt the statistics provided by these soviet authorities who also prohibit the access of the three quarters of their territory to tourists, academics and western journalists.

Typical illustration of the elementary inconsistency of the model proposed by the communists to describe the soviet social system: if the U.S.S.R. had, as they claim, a stable social system, she would not be afraid of open its borders and allow free movement of people, almost sixty years after the revolution. We can, we must deduce from the closing of borders that soviet society is considered fragile by its leaders. If it is fragile, there are internal tensions fundamentals.

So how do we inform ourselves? The figures that describe the economic relations between communist and western countries - exports, imports - are verifiable. Those numbers must therefore be privileged for the analysis of communist economic systems. External exchanges can provide extremely valuable information about the inner workings of an economy.

Soviet statistics are sad and false, not totally hopeless. There are holes in the abundant production of the official statistics of the Soviet Union. Characteristic example: demography. The eras of purges, which should result in demographic terms, by an increase in the mortality rate age and a decline in the birth rate, appear clearly, in hollow one might say, as an absence of statistics. Collectivization, a period of civil war, of deportation tations and famines led to a disappearance of the complete information on death and birth statistics. Between 1924 and 1930, the birth rate hovered around 38-40 per thousand. From 1931 to 1935, the services of statistics did not provide this simple demographic index. Statistical holes, especially when they follow at a time of relative abundance in numbers, mark Stalinism. In China, the great leap forward was quickly followed by a big leap backwards from the previous abundance of statistics that alert us to the extent of "errors” of the Chinese Communist Party.

The age pyramid keeps encrusted, for decades, the mark of the "errors” of Stalinism, Maoism or any other totalitarian variety, who treat human society as a field to be cleared and left fallow, a blank page, like a game of massacre. We realized, a little late, that there was a shortage of 30 to 60 million inhabitants in the U.S.S.R. We notice, in 1975, that China is short of about 150 million.

America has been in stagflation for years. Society is afflicted by the depression and the Vietnam syndrome, with the main movie of the generation being The Taxi Driver and such. Britain is even worse off than the United States. The USSR continues to expand its sphere of influence and pump up its military might, taking advantage of the rain of petrodollars. The vast majority of Sovietologists do not expect the collapse of the Soviet state in the coming decades. China is in ruins after the Cultural Revolution. Japan seems to many to be the next world economic leader. Germany is called the "sick man of Europe."

Here comes the year 2000.

The USSR does not exist. China is developing at an incredible rate. The Japanese call the 90's the "lost decade", their economy has stopped growing. The U.S. has attained a dominance unprecedented in history – in economics, finance, technology, military power, and politics. Once again, London has become one of the world's two major financial centers.

Every time we turn the knob twenty years ahead, we find ourselves in an entirely new world that no one could have predicted beforehand. Yes, some features could be guessed, but not the picture as a whole. And haven't yet written anything about all sorts of third- or fourth-rate countries.

Today's observers expect to see in ten or twenty years a world that will be basically the same as it is today, but with one change. Russia will fall apart, or the United States will be torn apart by civil war, or China will have its own Great Depression and overthrow the Communist Party. But imagine a world in which there would be none of the constituent parts we are accustomed to today – not the United States, not the European Union, not China, not Russia, not Ukraine, not (insert country name of preference) in their current form. Some will become more powerful, and some will disappear altogether – temporarily or permanently. Judging by the news, the likelihood of such a world is getting higher by the day.

... and then 20 years later things are exactly the same, except for Covid, which is a blip on history. The Japanese economy is still bad, the USSR still doesn't exist, China is still developing, the US is still dominant.

The last two decades have been unremarkable indeed.

That said, my feeling is that we put too much emphasis on stories and not enough on statistics.

Would anyone in 1900 be surprised that America became a great power? They shouldn't have. The combination of population growth and natural resources made greatness a given.

The years from 2000–present are a time of consolidation for China. Every year, their economy grows at twice the rate of the West, and they still have hundreds of millions of rural peasants. Already their economy is quite a bit larger than the US (PPP) and still grows much faster.

The pressure builds beneath the surface and then erupts. History look only at the eruption, not the things that made it inevitable.

Yeah, I think unless you were alive at the time (and old enough to be aware of what was going on), you don't get how the Fall of the Berlin Wall was something astonishing. Overnight, the system had just gone up in smoke! What everyone had come to accept as "This stalemate between the US and the USSR is going to go on forever" was now just not happening anymore. The West had (seemingly) won.

That's just one of the many reasons why I've cooled so much on doomerist predictions, including "within five/ten/twenty years AI will be eating us alive!"

We can't even foretell what is going to happen next year with any certainty. Did anyone expect the pandemic? Did anyone expect it to go on for as long as it did? Before the 2008 crash the economists in my country were by and large assuring everyone the good times would continue to roll forever. Things were different now. We were never going to go back to the old days.

One aspect of doomerism is hard to knock back though. Climate change. Because it's not up to what people and nations do, anymore, barring some sudden and miraculous changes. The polycrisis era that climate change will bring is coming almost no matter what we do, isn't it?

Not at all. Climate change is eminently solvable, unlike AI alignment. Furthermore, its effects over the next 100 years will be quite small. Pity the poor animals who will be made extinct, but humans will adapt.

When are the eminent solutions going to appear?

Most Republicans don't believe climate change is a problem at all, your optimism is incoherent

The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict

And yet for much of human history it was very easy to predict - functionally zero for the vast majority of people. A Roman from 100 AD might be surprised that the brightest minds of 1600 were in misty Brittania or burned-over Germania, but he wouldn't be surprised at the way the vast majority of European people ate, lived, and farmed up 'til the Columbian exchange. The Mongols would have been instantly cognizable to anyone who saw the Hunnic incursions (or the Scythians, Pechenegs, Avars, Bolghars, Magyars or any other number of mounted steppe confederacies crashing into Europe from the east). Medieval black death? Meet the plague of Justinian. Most of the major political developments in pre-modern Europe had classical counterparts (if they weren't directly aping classical models - the Catholic church's parish system is a carryover from Roman secular organization), and the technology levels waffled around, with changes here and there but few true revolutions in material conditions.

Things have only really started going crazy in the last few hundred years, and yet even then people keep being eerily prescient about major technological and social developments (or maybe there was just something in the Star Trek writers' room's water).

The appearance of sameness across the years from 100 A.D. to 1600 are largely just a lack of detailed historical knowledge rather than anything meaningful.

As one random example: the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights. The invention of barrels, of particular metals, and fasteners, and construction methods. The Viking longship, that enables continuous travel from Iceland all the way to Byzantium in the 800's. The invention of double-entry accounting in the 1200's, etc etc. That's not even getting into social developments.

My historical knowledge isn't perfect, but there were massive advancements in things you don't even think about if you don't know the details. The deeper you look in the past, the more you start to realize the pace of change wasn't that different. This is especially true when you compare the change for the average person then to the change for the average person now. Sure computing was a big-deal of an invention but it took like what, 60 years before there was any meaningful impact to the average worker? Even longer, if you take into account the coworkers I've had who seem to have had no trouble retaining their positions despite being computer-illiterate.

Note that I'm not saying that the contemporary era isn't predictable, just that it's not really all that different from the speed of development in the past, with maybe a few exceptions. (Though frankly, I think even something as large as the Industrial Revolution is easily paralleled by the Agricultural Revolution.)

As one random example: the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights.

Quibbling here, but the saddle was invented before the stirrup in Central Asia at the latest sometime in the first millenium BC (with Assyrians known to use saddle-like things), while stirrups were invented later (2nd c. BC toe stirrup in India vs 2-4th c. AD foot stirrup in China). Both were invented in the classical period.

I guess that proves your point?

the invention of the (practical, iron) stirrup and (more advanced) saddle doesn't seem too significant to us because we don't care about horses, but it ushered in an era of political dominance by feudal lords and their knights.

The stirrup and saddle were important, yes, but the idea that the rich rode horses while the poor fought on foot is at least as old as Alexander's companion cavalry (who had neither stirrups nor advanced saddles). Similarly, political organization revolving around personal relationships between kings and subordinate networks of landholders who also owed military service doesn't arise with medieval "feudalism" (which itself isn't a unitary concept, because e.g. the French, English, and Polish models are so radically different) but was much, much older - the huscarl/fyrd system is similar, not reliant on mounted troops, and has antecedents back to classical Germanic tribes. Heck, even classical greco-roman hoplite/legionary systems are similar (though the Roman system diverged with the consolidation of agricultural land and then the marian reforms).

Developments in every day life did occur, and are interesting. But let's not lose the forest for the trees - it wasn't until first the Columbian exchange, and then the modern era, that there were true civilization-rocking material sea-changes.

Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews.

The fact that there was quite persecution of Christians in the roman empire obviously showed that Romans were worried about the potency of said religion.

Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers.

Twenty Thousand Legues under the sea was 1870, from earth to the moon was written in 1865 (Jules Verne just rules), Ada Lovelace was dead for 20 years and the idea that we will have bombs that make even bigger bang was not far fetched.

But try and explain to someone in 1969 that 70 years later we won't be having any presence outside of the LEO.

Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers.

Yes, that one was a poor example. The person of 1870 would have rolled their eyes and gone "Oh you mean all those things the novelists are writing about right now?"

1870 was the year Verne published his follow-up to "From the Earth to the Moon", entitled Around the Moon. Stop me and say if any of this is sounding familiar from the moon missions of the 20th century:

Four days later, the crew of a US Navy vessel, Susquehanna, spots a bright meteor fall from the sky into the sea. This turns out to be the returning projectile. A rescue operation is assembled, intending to raise the capsule from a depth of 6096m (20,000 ft), using diving bells and steam-powered grappling claws. After several days of fruitless searches, all hope is lost and the rescue party heads home. On the way back, a lookout spots a strange shining buoy. Only then do the rescuers realize that the hollow aluminium projectile had positive buoyancy and thus must have surfaced after impact. The 'buoy' turns out to be the projectile and three men inside are found to be alive and well. They are treated to lavish homecoming celebrations as the first people to leave Earth.

The fact that there was quite persecution of Christians in the roman empire obviously showed that Romans were worried about the potency of said religion.

The persecution of the Christians does seem to have been somewhat overstated by Christian authors, whose writing comes down to us with a bit of an agenda.

There was only ever really one concerted push to stamp out Christianity and that was under Diocletian. Before this point the persecution of Christians was largely sporadic and localised. Even when Diocletian actually tried to eradicate Christianity, enforcement was spotty and largely depended on the feelings of local officials.

To reduce the opinions of a vast number of people, living across several centuries, down to a sentence. The Romans did not feel threatened by Christianity, they found Christianity to be weird, alien and therefore unsettling.

The fact that there was quite persecution of Christians in the roman empire obviously showed that Romans were worried about the potency of said religion.

I don't think it does by itself? persecutes is one of the most common relationships between groups, historically, so its presence doesn't tell us much.

No subjugation is most common. Persecution is a lot rarer because of its low ROI

Predicting the future is vital to civilization itself. Capitalists must predict the future to know what products to develop. NVIDIA's sudden providence wasn't an accident - Jensen Huang was working towards GPU-based AI development for about 20 years before it became apparent that this was a big deal.

Predicting the future over the very long term is very difficult. I don't know how anyone could predict where the best scientists will come from in 3530, or even what form they'll take. A soup of high energy plasma perhaps, or something more arcane? Even so, the Romans might well have predicted that Latin-speakers would make the discoveries and they wouldn't be wrong - Principia Mathematica was written in Latin. Yet that would have little meaning.

However, we can make predictions in the medium-term, when the world still functions roughly as we understand it. You can look at a country like China and say 'wow this country has high potential for growth, its population is Very Large and has a long history of civilization, plus there's plenty of coal... If they get richer and better organized...' That's a fact-based observation, which only needs a little analysis to become a conditional prediction.

Significant non-obvious predictions can be made and gotten right. Imagine if the US had been a little more thoughtful about what Chinese growth would do to their superpower standing back in 1989 or 1990, after Tiananmen square. Or at the latest in 1996, after the 3rd Straits Crisis (what clearer sign could they ask for about the fundamental attitude of the Party). Suppose they'd tried to predict what Chinese leaders would do, given that the US had made it perfectly clear that they planned to undermine the rule of the Party via economic liberalization and the free flow of ideas... Would they not try to cut off foreign political ideas but keep the wealth? Grow stronger and then seek to challenge US hegemony in Asia, like any world power seeking to control their own region against an ideological enemy?

Or take NATO expansion in Eastern Europe. A fair few said it would lead to disaster, George Kennan for instance (who is not the biggest Russophile in the world) in 1997:

[P]erhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

Lo and behold, we got nationalistic, anti-Western tendencies in Russian opinion, a Cold War and unfriendly Russian foreign policy. Medium-term predictions aren't easy but they can regularly be made and done right, it all depends on the competence of those who make predictions. There was a whole chorus of people who predicted the Iraq War would be a disaster and they were right too.

One might counter with the 'Japan is the greatest challenge to US in the Pacific' camp in the 1980s but these people were very very stupid. Japan obviously didn't have the energy or materials (or even the food security) to challenge the US, or the population size, or the military-industrial base, or the nationalistic foundation in internal ideology... This isn't hindsight but things that could easily be observed at the time. Even if Japanese economic growth continued at 1980s rates it couldn't challenge the US without taking a huge chunk of South East Asia. And Japan couldn't take a huge chunk of South East Asia unless it challenges the US.

Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

Note that it assumes that letting Russia to recolonize Ukraine, Baltics, Poland would give a superior results.

The problem with Russia is that after conquering Poland it would start demanding demilitarization of Germany and talk about legitimate security interests.

The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

He was right that it would turn Russia against the West; he was wrong that it would be "the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era". He was expecting a new Cold War that might possibly escalate into WW3, while the US has barely been affected by the current war. Kennan, having spent most of his career with Russia as a peer of the US, could not conceive how much Russia would degenerate and how little of a threat it would pose.

If Russia's nuclear arsenal isn't a threat, what is?

The US has very much been affected by this war (Europe far more so). Aside from inflation, stocks of munitions have been greatly depleted. It turns out that GDP is not sufficient for producing artillery shells, Stingers or Javelins in sufficient numbers to supply a medium-high intensity war. Factories and machine tools are what the US needed, what they're scrambling to put together.

Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing the US digging out dregs from fifty years ago - Hawk missiles were pretty good in 1970 but are somewhat desultory now: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4944652

Nor would the US MIC be outperformed by Russia in shell production: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/long-war-in-ukraine-highlights-need-for-u-s-army-to-modernize-ammo-production

“So we’re doing five times less than they do and trying to keep it up. But if we don’t start the production lines, if you don’t warm it up, it is going to be a huge problem,” Ustinova said.

Furthermore, a new Cold War that might escalate into WW3 is precisely what we have. That's the China-US conflict in the Pacific. Pushing Russia towards China was possibly the biggest and most braindead mistake the US has made.

expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.

This conflates two things:

  1. A prediction of how NATO expansion will affect Russian behavior; and
  2. A statement that said Russian response means that NATO expansion would be bad policy.

We actually don't know whether or not policy makers disagreed with #1. They might well have agreed with #1, but not with #2. And we do not know whether #2 is true, and cannot say whether it is, unless we assess the benefits of expansion, including the avoidance of the effects of a failure to expand, none of which you mention. Finally, re #2, as Zhou Enlai probably didn't say, it is too soon to tell. (Heck, if Russia's current policy re Ukrainian grain exports causes food inflation and results in Biden losing the election, most people here will consider NATO expansion a very good thing indeed).

You make a very good point about how it is often possible to successfully predict in the medium term, but generally impossible to predict in the long term.

Many of your hypotheticals about how the future could have been successfully predicted are probably examples where emotion overruled cold logical analysis. Kennan's insights seem obvious in retrospect, but he was not listened to. I guess that maybe the ideological urge to expand the Western system and/or the "we're on a roll now" urge to keep expanding NATO's hard power overruled such considerations.

It is possible that we overestimate how often such accurate predictions were actually made in the past and how easy it is to make accurate predictions because in hindsight, we give extra attention to the people who were proved right.

True, hindsight bias is a pain.

The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict it.

I think your closing paragraph really hits the nail on the head.

There's a bunch more that I'd like to say as a reply to/expansion upon this idea but it's going to take a bit to organize and put into words. In the interim, One of the things I began to appreciate as I got older is how often exercising control and effecting real change in your life requires a willingness to acknowledge and soberly assess things you can and can't control, which is simultaneously a lot more and a lot less than you'd think.

One of the things I began to appreciate as I got older is how often exercising control and effecting real change in your life requires a willingness to acknowledge and soberly assess things you can and can't control, which is simultaneously a lot more and a lot less than you'd think.

That's an interesting idea. I'd like to hear more about it.

If in 1814 you told a Russian soldier marching through the streets of Paris, or a French Senator signing the Acte de déchéance de l'Empereur, that 150 years hence half of Europe would be governed from Moscow, they might have find it quite conceivable. The history of the Russian Empire for decades prior had been one of constant expansion, and now they had defeated the most powerful empire in Europe. If in 1990 you told a white South African that 30 years of black rule would lead quickly to the abandonment of Mandela's professed principles, and their replacement by anarchy, national deterioration, and the codification of discrimination against non-black citizens, this too would have been quite conceivable - he had plenty of examples on the continent to consider.

These appeals to nuance and caution tend very often to be recipes for paralysis and the suspension of critical thinking, usually with the aim of avoiding drawing conclusions about the future that the appellant finds unsavory. Yes, certain radical events are impossible to predict. But it's futile to assume that some radical event is bound to happen that will make all future extrapolations suspect. Very often you can make reasonable predictions of what's going to happen in the future because you have decades or centuries of data regarding geopolitical conditions and human behavior to draw from, and I think those predictions are usually true. Obviously it gets shakier the further out into the future you go (I will never make any claims about what America is going to look like 200 years hence), but political arguments for a paltry few years or a couple of decades are perfectly fine.

Surely we can see the difference between the predictions of leaders who say "if you give me $1M for 10% of the company, we will build new which fills and that will 100x" and "fascism will inevitably fall to liberalism for structural reasons"? OP is criticizing the latter, not the former.

You can argue "uber will succeed because it's better than taxis and because we can beat regulators" isn't true, but one could be convinced of that. Whereas "liberalism is the endpoint of all modern societies, no matter the historical contingency" ... there are a lot more ways that can go wrong.

And taking the particular case of startups - despite all being led by "visionary leaders", most startups fail! Everyone in the area is aware of that! Yet investment continues not because everyone involved is delusional and sheds the prison of rationality for the nobility of unconsidered self-sacrifice, but because computers and the internet enable successful startups to scale, meaning the big wins win very big, more than compensating for the losses on average. There aren't such visionary leaders in the restaurant space.

that recognition doesn't excuse you from having to do it anyway

But accurate predictions usually look like 'probably this and this if this, or maybe that if this, and this could all be wrong if that and that', not 'MY GLORIOUS PEOPLE WILL INEVITABLY TRIUMPH AND ASCEND TO THE HEAVENS'. Visionary leaders may have to lie about their confidence in success in public rhetoric, but in the process of success they take actions that demonstrate reasonable appraisals of the risk of failure. Your startup's idea is amazing, until you're pivoting and it wasn't so great (but the new one is great!)

I find these debates to be mainly definitional. "Difficulty predicting" is not the same as looking at trends and extrapolating outwards.

Knowing specifically that it would be South Carolina that would be the first to announce secession from the United States is inherently predictable: Based on pure odds, there were only N states at the time which practiced slavery to the extent that they were embroiled in the conflict over ownership of other human beings and whether the central government had the right to enforce such a dramatic societal change. But, with further information about the state senators and leading up politics- which states were the ones that were the loudest and most informed in the senatorial debates provides enough information to make a prediction.

When would it happen, and how would it happen, including some of the broad strategies the south would employ would likely have been predictable to a person who followed the newspaper.

What's difficult is the "by this date, X will happen", and only fools enter into specifics. You simply have to have the foresight to ask the question. Therefore, I don't find your argument compelling. By reframing the argument, we miss the cases where someone comes close enough that they may as well have been correct.

Communism was a motivating ideology that led toward revolution in general. Therefore, assuming an existing powerful monarchy would fall to communism, and after 200 years of monarchism's powers continually being peeled back in Europe seems simple enough. It's not difficult to imagine someone somewhere, predicting the Tzars falling to communism, were they properly informed, given the preconditions: They know about communism, recent history (the prior 100 years at least), and can look outward at what societies are unhappy with their existing setups.

Good post. This kind of humility is a hallmark of classical liberal thinking. Such thinking has of course gone out of vogue lately.

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