The Fourth Wall of Psychology

The fourth wall of psychology, which you break at your peril, is the assumption that the "you" of today is the same as the "you" of yesterday and tomorrow. This underpins all planning and deferred gratification, without which you won't weight, let alone defer to, future selves.

It is also the basis for past memories being happy - it is still "you" that did those pleasant things, which gives a form of comfort (as opposed to "I" want that, and can't have it, which is also true, but a much more miserable way to reflect on your past).

Once, years ago, I broke this fourth wall by accident. It was during one such happy time that I knew I wasn't likely to be able to repeat. For some reason, out of the blue, the thought occurred to me "Sucks for you, future Shylock, that you won’t get to do this, and I do!”

As soon as this thought passed, it felt like I had accidentally opened a door to a strange and dark portal, through which lay a basilisk of second-guessing, unhappiness and intrusive thoughts. I was determined not to ponder it too long, and not to encourage this thought to persist. I didn’t think I would actually start making impulsive decisions based on a philosophical conviction that amounted to “lol, discount rates should be infinity”. But the various versions of me were, up to that point, always linked by a strong sense of mudita, or sympathetic joy. If the me of the past experienced something, happy days. If the me of the future gets to experience it, happy days. A world where this base psychic cooperation doesn’t exist seemed like a world of madness and deformity.

You might think that nobody could possibly operate this way. But there are good reasons to suspect that other people’s internal psychic states can be radically, wildly different from your own, and you might not know it. We know that people have enormously different abilities to form mental images, with one end being eidetic imaging where mental imagery pictures are completely crystal clear and photographic, and the other being aphantasia where they are completely absent. While this fact could have been known any time in human history, as the tech needed for it involves the complicated process of “asking people some basic but unusual questions”, as far as we can tell it wasn’t discovered until Francis Galton figured it out in 1880.

We know that people also vary in whether they have an internal monologue, a voice in their head talking to them consciously like a conversation. I have seem numbers on this for the population placed at 30-50%, from lazy googling of the subject. Like before, both the people with it, and the people without it, can’t quite believe that the other group exists, until this is pointed out.

And even here, if you believe the context described in Julian Jaynes’ “Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”, it is not always obvious that this monologue, if it exists, was conceived the same way. That is, if you have one, you probably think that the voice is “you”. Jaynes argued that in the Bronze Age, people thought that the voice was the gods, commanding them to do things. Which is to say, you probably never wondered whether the voice is really you, and just assumed, like all this stuff, that your assumptions on the matter were universal. But they probably aren’t.

I wonder whether people who are impulsive and sufficiently low IQ actually lack this instinct of psychic unity across time, or have a very underdeveloped sense of it. I imagine they also just don't think about it much. But it is one possible answer to what "very high time preference" might mean as an underlying foundation.

At a minimum, a sufficiently high time preference becomes had to distinguish from the outside from failing to incorporate futures selves as the same as present self. If I were to guess, I suspect that this basilisk, rather like Roko’s Basilisk, only applies to a certain kind of abstract thinker. Which is to say, most people with low time preference think that the two selves are the same instinctively. Most people who have high time preference just don’t think about the matter at all. Not many people would be interested enough to wonder, and philosophically inclined enough to seriously get concerned. But the question of what exactly it is that makes “you” you is quite thorny. Indeed, one simple answer to Roko’s Basilisk is the view that an atomically identical version of you is actually better thought of as a twin, and not you. In that case, if a future superintelligent AI tortures my twin, yeah that sucks for him, but that’s life sometimes. Ironically, this means that there’s no value in torturing said twin, because it’s not going to affect me today. Just take the one box, bro.

Incidentally, there’s a revealed preference test for whether you really believe that an atomically identical you is really you. Suppose someone had a cloning machine. They had cloned you against your will, and were threatening to make an exact copy on Mars. You can press a button, and transfer half your net wealth to a bank account controllable only by that person. Do you press it? What if they make another copy? And another?

Like so many things, when you ask people to actually pay for their beliefs, you might be surprised by how many people take the practical, basilisk-proof answer.

But if the atomically identical version isn’t you, why is the much less similar version from 20 years ago, or from 20 years in the future? It is surprisingly hard to say.

Good, consistent decision-making turns out to be supported by a giant Newcomb’s Box rock, overhanging a cliff. Take the second box, and it vanishes.

I hope I haven’t seeded anything too bad here.

And with that, I strongly encourage you to go back to the usual movie. It is an occasional humorous incongruity when movies break the fourth wall. But it is nearly always better when the fourth wall is respected, without which, the whole concept of the movie quickly breaks down.

On Avoiding Being the Boiled Frog

It is hard to know when to exit something that was once good, and might still be good, but isn’t really right now.

There have been two fantastically-timed exits in my lifetime. The first was Satoshi Nakamoto, who left before Bitcoin was big, but once it seemed to be on a sufficient path to success, in his mind. The second was Jerry Seinfeld, ending his show when it was still funny, turning down a ton of money to keep the show going when it might have still been funny a little longer, or might have started to slide into irrelevance. Of the two, Satoshi is always a singular example in so many respects, and hard to apply. But Seinfeld is the one we can hope to aspire to. In principle, lots of people ought to be able to identify when some cherished project of theirs is no longer quite what it was, and finish it early. But in practice, it is very, very hard. More people end up going for the John Howard exit (running for PM again and again, until at last you lose your own seat in Parliament and have to get carried out in a box), or the Michael Jordan exit (retire, regret it, start playing again, retire again, regret it again, come back a third time and eventually dwindle into embarrassing irrelevance). This is especially so when the admission of decline and choice to exit involves a blow to one’s ego or self-image. Very few people have the self-awareness to be honest assessors of this.

If we narrow this matter to the domain of the political, there is a related question to ponder. In the French revolution, once it got rolling, who was the person or group of people you most wanted to be, if you could?

The answer is the Emigres. The best choice you could have picked is to not be there, if you had the resources. Doing this was easy at the start, and increasingly hard as the revolution began to devour more and more of its children.

Part of the problem, I think, is that in situations of social decline, people end up being the frog getting boiled. Things get worse, and some minor previous compromise gets breached, and then some escalation happens, and then some counter escalation, but then things cool off for a bit, and maybe it’s not so bad.

And then before you know it, you’re in the middle of Sulla’s proscriptions, or The Terror, or other equivalent disasters. And then it’s too late.

The best method I have found to stop yourself being thus boiled is that you need to identify trigger points ahead of time that will tell you when things have crossed an acceptable threshold. You can’t just hope to identify it from gut feel at the time, because your gut will probably be like everyone else’s gut, and only really get twisted and panicked once things have already become catastrophic.

One example of this I remember distinctly was the start of the Russia/Ukraine war. When war first broke out, I was overseas, and seriously wondering whether I should return back to America or not. In particular, when uncertainty and tension was at maximum height a few days in, the question I kept pondering was “what is the chance that this turns into a nuclear exchange within, say, two weeks?”

Bear in mind that various estimates of the unconditional base rate of nuclear war are maybe 1% per year. This time was surely higher than that. But how high? And how do you estimate the conditional odds at each day, and decide when the risk is too high, that it’s worth gambling your job to GTFO?

If you wait for the nuclear alert SMS to come, it’s too late. You’re just going to die getting nuked in a traffic jam.

The trigger point I decided on was if America declared a no-fly-zone over Ukraine. The only way this would work is for America to start shooting Russian planes, bombing Russian anti-aircraft batteries, etc. Not through Ukranian proxies, but directly on its own account. This would involve US aircraft being shot down as well, and there are a lot of ways that this could escalate pretty badly and pretty quickly.

But here’s the thing. If, in our hypothetical timeline when the US announced a no-fly-zone in the first week of the war, you booked the first direct flight out of the US to, say, anywhere in Central or South America with a plan to get an AirBnB and figure out the rest later, I am pretty sure you would have been able to do it, no problem. Not many people would have seen it as an immediate trigger that it’s time to GTFO. Which is fortunate, because if they all had, the flights would all be booked, the roads would be jammed, and the plan wouldn’t work.

Which is to say, a general property of most successful bugout plans is that they have to be triggered before most people realize it’s time to bug out. In other words, they need to be done when the outcome is still uncertain, and it might actually all amount to nothing. And they need to be done at the point that the median person will think that you are weird and paranoid.

Thankfully with Russia, this never happened. Enough people with enough sense decided to limit escalations to moderate things that were unlikely to immediately turn into total war. The calculation above then became a curious intellectual exercise, but one people can’t even do honestly, because hindsight bias is too strong for them to form honest assessments of what they thought at the time. I took my scheduled flight back to the US, but I did monitor the news very carefully for the next two months, until the risk seemed to have reduced.

Parenthetically, we actually ended up with a sort-of-no-fly-zone over Ukraine anyway, both for Russian and Ukranian planes, though we got here for very different reasons – it’s that fighter aircraft seem to be basically expensive and vulnerable targets that everyone leaves at home rather than getting them blown up, and they just uses drones instead.

With political escalations, rather than military ones, the good news is that you typically have more time to decide. In both the French and Russian revolutions, there were actually two revolutions in each case. In the early one, the old order got toppled, but things seemed like they might have settled down to a new, peaceful constitutional order. In the second, the killing and chaos really started to begin in earnest. But the gap between them was roughly 3 years for the French revolution, and 8 months for the Russian. If you had figured out which way the wind was blowing after the first one, you actually had a good amount of time to get your affairs in order and leave. It’s hard to think of political crises that went from “not much” to “mass murder” in a matter of days. The Saint Bartholemew’s Day Massacre is one, but there aren’t a ton.

More broadly, America, to me, has quite strong “Late Roman Republic” energy about it. If you place Trump on the Roman timeline, to me he doesn’t look like Caesar. He looks more like the Gracchi brothers – using populist tactics to disrupt an elite that hated them and the populists, and winding up getting killed over it. They didn’t directly succeed, but they showed a path that others would take to its logical conclusions – Marius, then Sulla, then Julius Caesar, then Augustus.

But if you think that we might be somewhere on a timeline that won’t be the same as this, but might have some echoes, where are we exactly, and how do you decide what your trigger point is?

A number of years ago, I forget when, but I think it was maybe 2018 or so, I came up with an answer. I told myself that if Donald Trump ever got sent to prison, that this was a decent possible trigger point for when it might be time to leave America. I told myself this, because at the time, there was no suggestion of criminal wrongdoing, even the impeachment had gone nowhere, the media was still on the “it will never happen” phase of the idea, before they seamlessly move as always to “it’s happening, and it’s a good thing that it is”. But Blog.jim was already on this train, and it seemed like a good out of sample test. I wanted to tell myself that, from the vantage of 2018 – not just the vantage of the median normie in 2018, but from my vantage in 2018, as an interested and skeptical-bordering-on-cynical observer of the political process, the idea of sending political opponents to prison on trumped up charges (pardon the pun) was considered a shocking and dramatic development, a massive flagrant breach of the status quo political compromise that keeps democracy civil, and a large escalation that had a decent chance of triggering some counter escalation, but probably more escalation to come. I wanted to tell myself this, because I forecast that if I didn't, there was a real chance I would forget it when the time came. 

Well, dear reader, here we are. Trump has now been convicted on charges for which the main substance of the actions was reported on as a minor humorous news item back in 2018. As Mr Dylan asked - how does it feel?

Even with the trigger, you still second guess yourself. It will probably get overturned on appeal. Maybe he will escape ever being in prison. Even if he doesn’t, plenty of countries routinely send political opponents to prison and survive as polities (Lula in Brazil was president, then was in jail, then got his conviction overturned, and now is president again). Maybe it’s not so bad. I mean, yes, it’s bad. But is it “uproot your life” bad?

And yet – whose perspective should you trust more? The current you, who has lots of additional nuanced knowledge of facts on the ground, but who might have a tendency to spin themselves comforting lies? Or the you from 2018, who could see that if outlandish counterfactuals came to pass, this was very big news, no matter what people said at the time?

I do not know. But I think the case for trusting the 2018 me is considerably stronger than you might think.

A key note here is that all of the above is significantly related to being a foreign-born ex-pat. If you are an American whose ancestors have lived here for hundreds of years, it is a much more thorny question, and the moral and aesthetic arguments for staying to fight it out, whatever comes, because this place is yours, are quite decent.

But if the place is not yours, why exactly do you still want to be here?

There is one other technique that I’ve found helps, from a different point of view. One of the reasons the frog gets boiled is inertia and the status quo bias. People default to doing nothing, and they need a particular impetus to act. This burden is generally quite high, and especially high when acting goes against social consensus. This arises both for reasons of psychology, but also the practicalities of life’s circumstances. You see what you are giving up, and it is large and a pain in the ass. You do not see what might happen in the future, either the realities of a new life, but also what would happen if you stay.

Seinfeld is still funny! They are still offering you fat checks to keep going! Are you really going to turn down the money? How many people ever turn down the money?

So one way around this psychological status quo bias is to mentally reverse the presumption of the status quo, and see how the problem looks then.

Which is to say – suppose you didn’t live in America already. Suppose you were living in some relatively safe other country. If someone offered you a chance to move to America, right now, would you take it? Even for somewhat more money than you currently make?

No. Hell no. Are you crazy? Look at the place! Be honest – is there anyone who is actually optimistic about America right now? Inside or outside America, the answer is the same. The idea that America’s best days are behind her is probably the single most bipartisan poll question going around these days.

Would the answer change if they offered you a 50% pay raise.

Maaaybe. But you’d still be pretty wary. I suspect for a lot of people, the answer is still “no thanks.

But even if your answer is just “probably not”, then status quo bias aside, it is probably worth taking a 33% pay cut to leave.

I say all this, dear reader, but do not be fooled. I am working through my thoughts on this page, trying to convince myself as much as you that the logic is sound, because it is confronting logic indeed. In some ways, this is a therapy post. I resolved to avoid writing therapy posts as much as possible, because they tend to have the highest likelihood of me later realizing I said things that were dumb or cringe to try to make myself feel better.

This isn’t quite that.

But the stakes are high, and this is very bad news. Not because you have to love Trump. But because this is a major erosion of one of the key pillars that keeps political disagreement in the US civil and nonviolent.

I do not think this will stop here. The Democrats cheering this are contemptible fools, heaping logs on a bonfire that has a significant chance of consuming their own house.

It is too early to tell if the porridge is really going to hit the propellor, and if so whether this happens in six months, 5 years, or 30 years. It may not happen at all

But one thing seems very likely. If it does hit the propellor, a whole lot of people are going to find themselves learning the hard way Paul Fussell’s wonderful description of the three mindsets that soldiers gradually go through in wartime

    1. It can’t happen to me.

    2. It could happen to me, so I need to be more careful

    3. It is going to happen to me, and only my not being here will prevent it.

You are strongly advised to figure this out before everyone else does.

Letters to My Great Grandchildren, Part 1: Obesity and Bewilderment

Let me begin with the obvious. I do not actually expect you to actually read these. The dead, as Kipling observed, are only borne in mind for a little, little span. Digital preservation being what it is right now, I don't even really expect it to survive. And even if you do somehow read it, it is hard to know what will strike you as interesting about my time. Assuredly, the things that I find noteworthy about modernity may have nothing to do with what interests you. A lot of your questions will probably relate to things like "what was life like without [indispensable invention X]?". Alas, I cannot tell you - it seems pretty normal to me! One throws this note in a bottle into the digital sea - the modern version of the same impulse that made men once paint on cave walls.

One thing I can tell you, however. In certain respects, the early 21st century is a bewildering time to be alive. And this is especially so in a respect that I imagine will strike you as especially jarring when you look at photos from this time. Namely, why is everybody so enormously fat and unhealthy-looking? 

The immediate question you are probably wondering is how we didn't figure this out. Didn't they look around and notice there was a huge problem? How could you possibly fail to spot the obvious answer of [cause Y]? 

To take the obvious first - we definitely noticed. Human nature did not change so much that the obese failed to observe that they were obese. Nor did they fail to observe the health and lifestyle costs. Indeed, in the sexual marketplace, the fewer people who are thin and in shape, the higher the payoffs to those traits, making the perception even more acute. 

It is glaringly obvious that, at least in this respect, something has gone very wrong with modernity in the last 60 years or so. Obesity, testosterone, sperm counts, the list is long. But time series changes are incredibly difficult things to parse out. The problem is that dozens, if not hundreds, of things are changing all at once. The curse of knowledge is always a tough one to circumvent. When you know something, it will always seem like it ought to be obvious to people who don't know that thing. But it isn't. It turns out it is more difficult than you think to credibly put yourself in the shoes of someone who doesn't know, in this case, why everyone got so fat.

To begin with one aspect that makes the problem hard. Across different categories, there is a large difference in regulation about what can occur, and how much data collection and notification goes into it. To take one example, which may or may not be relevant to obesity (which is the most glaring and acute of the modern problems). There are a lot of requirements about labeling the ingredients in food. But there are almost none about labeling the chemicals used the packaging that the food comes in. There is some attention paid to the composition of trace chemicals in the water people drink, but it depends a lot on which chemical. There is little attention paid to the amount and type of radiation people are exposed to. Lack of regulation and lack of interest is strongly correlated with lack of data to test hypotheses well. The hardest of which is not "does this increase weight in controlled settings", but "does this quantitatively explain the world around us?" 

Are any of the examples above actually *important*? That, future reader, is the aspect I most want to discuss. The problem is not the lack of plausible theories, or possible contributing causes, or partial remedies. The problem is the complete surplus of them, and the difficulty of sifting between them. Smart, motivated, curious people live in a world of leaping from one lead to the next. They have a scarce budget of time and attention and effort, but great confusion as to where to allocate it to solve a problem that seems all pervasive. The obvious candidates are things associated with modernity, broadly defined. But which ones? Do you need to be reducing the amount of carbs you eat? Do you need to cut back on seed oils? Less salt? Do you need to limit the hours in a day when you eat? Or perhaps the problem is chemical in nature. Do we need to work to reduce our exposure to  polyfluoroalkyl substances? BPA? Microplastics? Lithium? Antibiotics? Glyphosate? Blue light? 5G radiation?

Or is the problem even thornier - that we were simply evolved for a world of calorie scarcity, and our hardwired instincts are now pathological in a world of permanent calorie excess, moths circling a flame of our own making, consisting of hamburgers and doritos? Because, as Eliezer Yudkowsky put it, we can do what we want, but we cannot want what we want? It is striking that the unusual period in history when we consume too many calories is the same period, and same places, that our houses now routinely accumulate junk possessions which occupy much time and effort getting rid of. Both problems would seem bizarre to people a hundred years ago. 

I have no doubt this list will seem comical and insane by the time you read it. But this is the point. To live in 2024, and spend any time pondering not just obesity, but the various other maladies that seem to afflicted us more than in the past, is to have a complicated and uneasy relationship with the modern world. There are many things that are probably in the category that the distribution of effect sizes starts at zero, and includes small negatives and considerable negatives. That is to say, not many people seem to think you should be *increasing* your consumption of microplastics. But is it a small problem, or a large one, or actually not really a big deal? That's the difficulty. You can try to play it safe, as it were. But the precautionary principle breaks down very fast when the space of possible things to avoid is sufficiently large. And many of them carry tradeoffs that only become obvious in hindsight, because some of the things are so prevalent. You might be worried about contaminants in your water, perhaps. So you buy a cheap water filter, except now all your water runs through a plastic container made of whatever as-bad-or-worse BPA substitute they're using these days. You take supplements to try to improve your health. But you buy the easy to swallow ones without thinking about it, and end up consuming a lot of whatever is included in the dubious term "gel caps". One ends up being pushed towards rejecting more and more of the modern world, where the end point is rejecting it wholesale, like the Unabomber, or the Amish, or Boko Haram. We don't want this, of course. We still want to be able to write our essays on the internet. 

You can guess at the outlines, of course. It has to be pervasive, hard to avoid entirely. Every area of every country seems to have gotten fatter. It has to be associated with modernity, probably the 1960s/70s onwards, but also increasing over that time. In the cross section, who is affected more seems to be largely genetic, from the twin studies. But since genes haven't changed much in 70 years, this means either genes are a big determinant of response to a time series change, or genes determine willpower, and the ability to use effort to overcome the force pushing you in the same direction. It doesn't seem to be from cross-sectional environmental exposure. Which is weird, since a large time series change sounds a lot like environment. 

You're probably thinking to yourself, that's it? Well, not exactly. There is lots more specific evidence, but this is much more murky and open to interpretation. If you want to know how to control obesity, you've got a larger set of options, with their own limited success. But, for instance, it seems very unlikely that the rise of obesity in the 1980s came from people abandoning their previous one-meal-a-day keto diet, even if you think that might be a decent remedy for the underlying cause. If people stick to it. The distinction between "this would work, if people actually do it", and "this is a thing that the average person could credibly do" is also surprising blurry in the way matters are discussed. 

The other aspect, which you might not guess, is what the response is to this confusion. You would probably guess at there being a frank acknowledgement of the lack of understanding. But there's not. There appears to be some strange aspect where in the face of intractible problems, people would rather believe vehemently in some theory or other, and that it just hasn't been tried hard enough. People would rather hear a wrong theory, vigorously and persuasively espoused, than to frankly admit that all their theories aren't working, and they're largely out of ideas until big pharma invents the right drug. There is a need for action, even partial or unsatisfactory or pointless or symbolic or improbable-to-be-successful action. And once this has occurred, cognitive dissonance takes care of a lot of the rest, changing beliefs to match the actions already taken. 

People believe passionately in their particular theory of weight loss and weight gain. Their passion is strangely out of all proportion with the actual level of confidence that you could attach to intent to treat estimates. That is, if you think the problem is seed oils, is this the same as making a concrete prediction that everyone who cuts seed oils from their diet by, say, 90%, and makes no other changes, will obtain and maintain a healthy BMI? I mean, it would probably help, at least a little. But that's not the same thing. Notably, they believe this much more passionately than for things where knowledge is straightforward. Nobody is passionate about vitamin C being a cure for scurvy. Hell, nobody is even especially passionate about whether Ozempic tends to produce weight loss, because it does. This is just boring, ordinary knowledge. But why everyone got fat in the first place? The honest assessment, that we just don't really know, is the one you are perhaps least likely to hear. 

So here we are. In these strange times, to admit to this plight, is to have some sympathy for the Carthaginians. Nature abhors a causality vacuum. It is more comforting to sacrifice some children to the gods to try to bring rain, than it is to sit there powerless, day after day, not doing anything, not able to even really know what you should be doing. 

For now, Ozempic has been a small light at the end of the tunnel. Once better drugs get invented, and it perhaps gets fully solved, it might eventually just be a subject of later academic or historical interest as to what it was all about in the first place, rather like what caused the decline of the Roman empire. In the shorter term, if we do find out the answer, the people so strongly clinging to this or that theory of diet will forget that they ever did so. Cognitive dissonance is strange like that.

In other words, your likely bewilderment looking at photos and videos of us is matched only by our own bewilderment in looking at ourselves. It is a strange time, but alas, we have no other. 

Anyway, I hope to write some more of these soon. Life is busy, not least from looking after your grandparent and great uncle or aunt. 

With all my love, 

[Shylock] 

Bolivar and South American "Limited Success"

I continue to work my way through the Mike Duncan "Revolutions" podcast series. I recently got through his series on Simon Bolivar and the revolutions in the Spanish Americas. 

These are excellent, and I highly recommend them. In this post, I'm perhaps going to be a bit harsh on Duncan, but don't let this deter you. Duncan is an excellent storyteller, and exceptional at condensing the disparate strands into an easy-to-follow story that has an amazing amount of useful information per unit time. He has a basic liberal bias, but this is fairly easy to subtract. 

One of the ideals I got out of Moldbug (and also in Ernst Junger's Eumeswil) is that you should aspire to understand the present as a historian living in on Mars in 300 years time would understand our present situation. That is to say, everybody is dead and gone, the nations and causes evoke no immediately strong emotions. You just want to understand what happened and why, and what it teaches you about how the world works. 

It is hard to do this with much of modern history. Ancient history has this a lot more, of course - the Greeks are utterly alien, for instance. As John Dolan put it, when describing the Iliad - the Greeks enjoyed cruelty. They found cruelty hilarious. And if you don't understand this about them, you'll never get the story. But if the only way you can get the appropriate distance is to travel so far back in time and setting, it's hard to know how much any of it actually maps clearly to the present. This is why the ideal is so elusive - disinterested knowledge of something that the year and place of your birth forces you to take a very active interest in. 

For an Anglo reader, Spanish American independence is well worth studying, because it's almost as close to the Martian ideal as you're going to get in the modern world. It's not your war. Neither the monarch, the colonial power nor the colony are in any sense "your" monarch or "your" country. There is an odd tension people sometimes get from being weaned too much on moronic Manichean versions of history, where one somewhat feels the need to "pick a side" in the story, rather like a foreigner moving to America and deciding on a random NFL team to support (I know several people who did this, incidentally). And while this instinct of picking sides in history not generally useful, I think it is useful to consider the question of who acted wisely, who acted foolishly, who could have achieved a better outcome if they had acted differently, and if you were a random elite civilian at the time, who would you have chosen to support. 

Guiding you in this, of course, are your general abstract principles - in my case, things like support for central authority and skepticism of proponents of radical leftist change. But how much should that commend Ferdinand VII to you specifically? It's not totally clear. I think anyone with monarchist leanings will probably lean towards supporting the monarchy before things go to hell. But what about afterwards? As I said about the French revolution, at some point the fastest and best path back to strong central authority for France was not restoring the House of Bourbon, but rather ... elevating Napoleon. 

When evaluating the wars of Spanish American independence, it's hard not to judge things in part by the character of Simon Bolivar. He really is a singular figure in terms of his sheer force of will. He famously swore an oath on Mons Sacer, the location of the Secession of the Plebs in ancient Rome, to liberate his country of Venezuela or die trying. He was not joking. He managed to remain stalwart even in the face of repeated setbacks and failed attempts. It is a little bit unclear how to count the number of times he was exiled after failed attempts at independence, but it is at least three. 

-After he had played a large part in the military victories leading to the First Republic of Venezuela, when it collapsed after the earthquake of 1812 (not just due to that, obviously, but it doesn't help when people interpret it as God's divine wrath for declaring independence), he had to flee to Curacao, and later to Cartagena in New Granada (modern Colombia). 

-He got exiled a second time after the Second Republic of Venezuela was crushed by the Royalists, and the forces he led were massively defeated. He fled to Jamaica, narrowly avoided an assassination attempt there, and moved to Haiti

-From Haiti, he led a failed attempt to re-invade Venezuela in 1815, but was defeated again in particularly embarrassing fashion, and had to return to Haiti again in exile a third time. 

-And at the end of his life, he was about to be exiled to Europe, but managed to die before this happened. 

Suffice to say, when I reflect on his situation in 1816, after three failed attempts at this thing called independence, it's fair to say that most people might be a mite discouraged. But not Bolivar. It is impressive how much you can accomplish as an organized and brave member of the elite with an absolutely single-minded focus, and a willingness to die in the attempt. 

A lot of this is Bolivar himself, though, and perhaps not something that's easy to emulate. In one of those great admissions against interest, as the lawyers say, his sometime-ally-and-sometime-opponent Francisco de Paula Santander put it this way:

His force of personality is such that on countless occasions when I have been filled with hatred and revenge, the mere sight of him, the instant he speaks, I am disarmed, and I come away filled with nothing so much as admiration.

Bear in mind that the narrator here is no wilting flower - he was the hero of the Battle of Boyaca and later president of Gran Colombia. It's sort of like how everybody smart was blown away at how smart Von Neumann was. 

Bolivar was so magnetic in his personality that, in Duncan's retelling, his personal insistence was the driving force behind the creation of Gran Colombia, a country that was a union of modern Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and parts of other countries too. It seemed like nobody else was much interested in the idea of a grand centralized republic. Everyone else saw independence mostly as an opportunity for the circulation of (local) elites, where some group gets to become the leaders of a smaller new country, rather than being subordinated in a larger one. It's a testament to his sheer force of will that he conjured this country into existence for 12 years, despite most other elites having a very lukewarm attitude to it. But eventually he encountered a problem that he couldn't brute force through will alone.  

As a general, his track record was somewhat hit and miss, and it's not obvious from casual empiricism what his actual wins above replacement would be. He liked reckless and bold assaults, and sometimes these worked extremely well (like the Magdalena campaign) and sometimes they worked poorly, like in his assault on Ocumare de la Costa in 1816, which wikipedia, not usually one for hyperbole in these matters, describes as "a debacle". 

I think Duncan reads him correctly in the following sense. He is an impressive guy, with huge balls, a broad and far reaching vision, and an absolute willingness to sacrifice everything to achieve it. He left a very large mark forever on his country. Duncan's description at the end of the series, which we'll return to, is this:

More than any other single man (Bolivar) represents the entire process of South American independence, and without question he is now mostly remembered as a romantic hero of an adventurous age, the details of the man himself little remembered or even needed. And in this way too he is like Washington, mythologized to the point of abstraction. But I hope as we've slogged our way along with him now over the past 27 episodes, across mountains, in grasslands and through deserts and through freezing cold, in the city, in the country, through victory and defeat, aiming for glory, getting it, losing it, and then winning it again, that we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times, trying to take the world he inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of. 

He was indeed. But this much is also true of Hitler, and Stalin, and Pol Pot, and Lee Kuan Yew, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon, and George Washington. It marks him for "greatness" in the sense of enormity, and overall impact on history. But it leaves open the other version of "greatness", of actually doing good. By their fruits shall ye know them. When you are the leader of a country, you no longer get to claim that you meant well. You no longer get to claim that you tried your best, and were mistaken. And you definitely don't get to claim that the fact that you felt you were doing the right thing is an excuse for unforeseen consequences. History's judgment is severe, and rightly so. When millions of lives and whole nations are on the line, you have to be right, and you have to succeed. You also deserve to be judged against reasonable counterfactuals. What else would have happened, absent your choices? 

Let's start with the counterfactual. The obvious counterfactual to independence is ... not independence. That is, the continuation of the Spanish rule in the Americas. Like with the Haitian revolution, the Spanish American revolutions are very hard to imagine without Napoleon overthrowing the Spanish monarchy. Also as in the Haitian revolution, a lot of the early revolutionaries establish local juntas in their cities as a way of supposedly declaring their support for Ferdinand VII, against the French monarchy of Joseph I (Napoleon's brother), whom Napoleon imposed on Spain in 1808. This makes it all very deniable, means almost everybody local will be minded to agree with some parts of what you're pushing early on, and also means that it's not clear whether allegiance to Ferdinand himself requires allegiance to the various governments claiming to rule Spain in opposition to Joseph I, such as the Supreme Central Junta or the Cortes of Cadiz. 

In terms of its relation to the martian ideal, Duncan's re-telling of Roman history was excellent, because it's very easy to have intellectual distance. Duncan's re-telling of the American revolution was mostly lame, because he can't (or doesn't want to) liberate himself from the standard propaganda. In the  American Revolution, the complaints of the patriots were ridiculous, but Duncan had to repeat them anyway. He never seriously addressed the rebuttal of those complaints by the Loyalists. As Moldbug pointed out, the strongest of these is Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence. I don't know anybody that has read that document and come away with the impression that the complaints of the Revolution were anything other than a complete joke. 

In the US revolution, Duncan knows the actual complaints against the previous colonial order and leans into them as best he can to try and make the case. Whereas in Spain, it seems much more of a required formality to address briefly - it's not his background, there's nothing in there that makes for an interesting story, and he doesn't have a great deal of energy for it. There are the usual problems of enforced monopolies on trade with the mother country, and pro forma stuff about stuffy elites from Europe running the show to the chagrin of local elites. Notably, there aren't the long list of complaints about the evils and abuses of slavery that accompanied his descriptions of the causes of the Haitian revolution. It is left as an exercise for the reader to infer whether this was because a) Spanish slavery in the 18th century was much more humane than French slavery in the 18th century, or b) because, ex-post, the slaves played a pretty minor role in the Spanish American revolutions, and almost none of the action seems to easily fit a narrative of slaves as the central protagonists taking revenge on their cruel former masters.  

So there were some problems with Spanish America, but they seem pretty trivial. Even more so than Haiti, it seems that despite the occasional uprising beforehand, it's very hard to imagine anything getting off the ground without the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy. 

You can say, fine, once it got overthrown though, it's probably not possible to put things back the way they way. And this has quite a lot of truth to it. But Ferdinand VII was restored in 1813, and made a concerted attempt to re-assert Spanish control. It's not hard to imagine that it could have all been restored, even if it's hard to imagine it all continuing along uninterrupted the whole time without it coming from a counterfactual that has nothing to do with Bolivar or Spanish America at all, and everything to do with Napoleon. If the monarchy were restored, it's also easy to imagine gradual and peaceful paths to devolution of power that look more like Canada or Australia, not that this had to happen necessarily. The more important question, though, is would this restoration of the Spanish monarchy have been a good thing? 

The most astonishing fact about Bolivar is to look at the system he wanted to impose in his vision of Gran Colombia. He wanted a grand unified country, ruling over large tracts of Spanish America. The whole continent would be divided into perhaps four large countries. He wanted a strong central government, rather than a federal system that devolved power to the local regions. He wanted a strong executive, rather than dominance by an elected body like Congress. And remember, mind you, that he wanted this system so much that he tried to impose this vision against the expressed wishes of most other local elites.

What system is this describing?

It's describing the God damn Spanish monarchy! In every major respect, other than the birthplace and ruling location of the man at the top of the pyramid (and some of his local elite advisors), he is describing the system they previously had. Sure, there is a new lifelong president to capture the rents at the top, and a different process for choosing that person (once! he wanted lifelong appointments) but how much difference does this make? If you personally get to be the monarch, sure it makes a big difference to you. But Bolivar does a better than average job of indicating that he actually didn't aspire to be a peacetime president for life (though plenty of contemporaries doubted these protestations). Sure, even so, let's assume he got the top job. What's in it for everyone else? Who cares if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice?

Bolivar's ridiculous conceit, for which everyone paid very heavily, was that he could smash all the existing institutions and their history and force of inertia, and somehow expect that he could approximately impose the same conditions back up again, except with the Peninsulares, the Spaniards of Spanish birth, replaced by the Criollo, the Spaniards of America birth. But it doesn't work that way. Once the political VIX spikes up, it stays high for a very long time. All of the people you've been leading in this coalition to overthrow the existing order have very different ideas about what they're hoping to get out of the new regime. It's very far from obvious that they'll be contented to be put back into essentially the same circumstances with a new guy in charge. 

This is the first damning indictment on Bolivar. 

But this is the realm of hypotheticals - the what could have been. Let us at least stick to the factual, rather than counterfactual. What was?

I'm going to start here with Bolivar's own assessments at the end of his life, because he made two, a few months apart. On his death bed, he has this to say:

"Colombians you have witnessed my efforts launch liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have labored selflessly sacrificing my fortune and my peace of mind. When it became clear that you doubted my motives I resigned my command. My enemies have toyed with your confidence, destroyed what I hold sacred my reputation and my love of Liberty.  They have made me their victim and hounded me to my grave. I forgive them. As I depart your midst my love for you impels me to make known my last wishes. I aspire to no other glory than the consolidation of Colombia. If my death can heal and fortify the Union I go to my tomb in peace." 

Hmm, it seems to be hinting at some bad stuff going on, but there's definitely an optimistic veneer that warms the heart of anyone raised on stories of the American revolution. What else did he say though, in his letter to Juan Jose Flores, at that time President of Ecuador (Troy McLure: Hi, I'm Ecuador! You may remember me from such recent polities as the collapsed Republic of Gran Colombia).

1. America is ungovernable.

2. He who serves revolution plows the sea. 

3. All one can do in America is to leave it. 

4. The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos after which it will pass into the hands of  an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color. 

5. Once we have been devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one, not even the Europeans, will want a subjugate us. 

Or, as he put it elsewhere around the same time:

"There is no such thing as good faith in America. Treaties are worth little more than the paper they are printed on America. Constitutions are pamphlets, elections an excuse for war. Liberty has dissolved into anarchy, and for me life has become a torment."

Why would he give such a grim assessment?

Because the country had been through over 20 years of butchery, chaos and civil war! Duncan has a habit of throwing in one-off lines that are incredibly jarring but then never referring back to them in hours and hours of narrative. One of them (from memory) was that the process of independence killed roughly half the population (I think of Venezuela). That seems like a fact worth emphasizing more! I ran out of energy to track down exactly which line in which of the 27 episodes it was that he claimed this, or what specific region or time he has in mind, or what source. I am lazy. But the flip side here is that this is a fact that ought to be repeated every 30 minutes. "And then, the Second Republic of Venezuela was inaugurated, and by this time historians estimate the cumulated death toll of this experiment to be XXX".  Wikipedia is telling me the death toll is 600,000 for the wars of Spanish American independence, and while this applies to more than just Venezuela, it's a pretty reasonable number compared with the estimated population of Venezuela of 710,000 in 1810, with Colombia contributing maybe another 500,000, plus the other regions. So the "half" is looking dicey unless quite limited in geography. But can we agree that this cost of 600,000 corpses and decades of chaos is worse than the deadweight loss imposed by a trade monopoly and the other grab bag of abuses?

Nor was Bolivar merely an unwitting or accidental contributor to this. His hilariously named "Admirable campaign" where he led armies from New Granada against Royalist-held Venezuela involved him famously declaring a war to the death, where any Spanish-born civilian that didn't support his side was liable to be killed. This contributed mightily to the atmosphere of butchery and brutality that surrounded these campaigns. To take another reading of the atmosphere of these conflicts, consider the "Legions of Hell", the mixed-race Pardo army led by Jose Tomas Boves. Wikipedia charmingly describes their exploits thus:

Most striking to his contemporaries, however, was that he allowed his llanero soldiers to engage in a class and race war against the landed and urban classes of Venezuela, fulfilling the latter's fear, since 1810, that the revolution could devolve into another Haitian Revolution. ... Boves's army became feared for its liberal use of pillage and summary executions, which became notorious even in this period when such actions were common on both sides of the conflict.

But don't forget, the Spanish imposed trade monopolies!

And it's worth emphasizing that none of this was even what got Bolivar depressed at the end of his life. Rather, it's that once all these costs had been paid, and independence actually established, all these political projects kept collapsing into further wars, first against the remaining Royalist forces to drive them out over years and years, but then it quickly devolved into coups and wars between different generals, and wars between the newly independent countries in the region. 

It rather follows the immortal words of Brad Pitt in Se7en:

You're right. It's all fucked up. It's a fucking mess. We should all go live in a fucking log cabin.

But Duncan can't quite see it this way. He almost can. He can narrate the individual events just fine. But the sheer scale of the horror is something you need to keep reminding yourself of - that all these glorious civil wars of butchery between previously amicable groups of civilians are in fact monstrous and probably avoidable evils. Instead, the unironic use of the word "liberation" throughout the narrative, and the also unironic use of the word "treason" to describe the actions of generals who rebelled against Bolivar's rule, shows that Duncan just can't help identifying with the revolutionaries. He loves the idea of plucky natives throwing off the brutal yoke of colonial despotism, and so he can't bring himself to ever say cleanly what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion - that all of what we call "the struggle for independence" was in fact an atrocious disaster from start to finish, a horrible decades-long calamity besetting the region, whose disastrous consequences were, if not entirely predictable, then at least highly probable. This straightforward assessment is to be found nowhere in the Duncan description, and you in fact need to work quite hard as a critical listener to piece together this obvious summary.

I may have some instinctive support for the Royalist side, though I try to not let this sway my read of the story too much. But I don't know if Duncan makes the same attempt, or if he's just not very successful, or if his spin is just more jarring because it fits the modern hysterical and religious love of democracy and anti-colonialism, neither of which I share. His narrative has a strong sense that the revolutionaries are in some sense "our guys", even if they're not really our guys in any meaningful way and the only overlap is an unreciprocated sense of ideological overlap. It's rather akin to the way that Israeli conservatives are "our guys" for American conservatives - their victories don't actually get you anything concrete, but somehow you like them anyway and take vicarious enjoyment in their victories.

Bolivar, despite having a number of admirable character traits, comes across as someone so conceited with himself and his vision that he never seemed to notice that the carnage all around him was directly attributable to the schemes he was trying to implement. But it is always thus. A narcissist can feel shame, but never guilt. 

How do you reconcile these aspects of Bolivar's legacy? His force of personality, his revolutionary success, and his total failure to bring about his political vision, other than the narrowest definition of independence? One answer is just that it is easier to break things in war than to build them up. It is easier to tip over the apple cart of the existing order than it is built a nation. Credit where credit is due - it is not actually that easy to tip over the apple cart either, and Bolivar pulled off something that very few men would have been able to achieve. But more importantly, if one is actually a martian and if one actually doesn't care about any of the players involved or the causes involved, the immediate lesson is similar to the one from the French revolution - as your first order concern, all you want is to not have everything go off the rails. You do not want to be around for a revolution. 

Instead, the Duncan reading is that this is a noble endeavor that somehow worked out badly. It is not "I am a bad person". It is not even the narcissist's defensive cop-out when cornered- "I am not a bad person, but I somehow did a bad thing." No, it's even more risible - "I am a good person, and I actually did a good thing, notwithstanding that it led to very bad outcomes". The goodness, in other words, is measured only in the nobility of my convictions, and the warm, airy adjectives that get attached to the whole affair. At one point, he charitably assesses it thus:

Everything in South America always seems to be defined by those words - limited success.

Duncan is no fool though, and he's funny and perceptive in describing the outcomes. He just can't see the connection to the rest of the story. I find his summing up at the end great and revealing:

Now there is simply no way to account in any meaningful way for the subsequent 200 years of South American history. But Bolivar's final depressed vision of the future proved prophetic. 'The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color.' And that seems to about cover it. Ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians ensured that the nations Bolivar liberated never really enjoyed stability or unity of purpose. And the same was true across South America as for both the remainder of the 19th century and most of the 20th century, South America was racked by constant strife. Foreign wars and civil wars, annexations and counter-annexations, revolts, invasions, insurrections, repression, bankruptcy, and then let's do it all over again. In a macro way South America mirrors the course of Haiti, with its government and economy unstable, and at the mercy of European and North American merchants bankers and politicians who saw South America as a resource to be exploited not co-equal partners in the project of Western Civilization. 

If this is "limited success", I would hate to see what failure looked like.

In other words, Duncan can summarize the problems very pithily. But for him, these are problems that occur in spite of the revolution, not because of the revolution. No, they are the result of other forces - "ambitious warlords" and "treacherous politicians" and "European and North American merchant bankers and politicians". The latter being especially hilarious, because they play the most trivial of parts in this story up to now. Instead, they just sound like a cliche designed to appeal to what John Dolan called the liberal version of American exceptionalism - that America is uniquely responsible for all the evils in the world. It never seems to occur to Duncan that if this stuff happens for 200 years, maybe Bolivar himself was setting up the conditions of chaos and disorder into which it was extremely likely would step such a string of ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians and European and American merchant bankers. Maybe, indeed, we should actively fault the man who was instrumental in creating these conditions. 

In the end, Duncan ends up having the same assessment of anti-colonialism that, ironically, one of Joseph Conrad's characters in Heart of Darkness says about colonialism - that the idea alone redeems it.

At a certain point, however, when all your predictions keep being wrong, and those of all your critics keep being right, maybe your idea was just fundamentally mistaken. This is certainly true for anti-colonialism in the modern era. For the colonialists at the time, their perspectives are, if not lost to history, then certainly lost from the easy-to-find sources. There would be a great and tragic story to be written from the perspective Spanish Royalists, correctly assessing the nightmare that was coming, and watching their chances slowly slip away. But for the most part those men don't have names or stories - they are just the masses of "Spanish forces", where by the end even their leaders aren't considered important enough to describe in any detail.   

And after narrating such a dismal and grotesque tale, Duncan's final description of Bolivar is a great summary of so many of the intellectual pathologies of our time. 

I hope that... we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times, trying to take the world he inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of. Even if that project in the end only met with those fateful words, "limited success", he had done the one thing he had set out to do. He had liberated his country.  

He sure had.

Reader, you should pray, to whatever Gods you believe in, that nobody liberates yours. 

Why You Don't Hear About the Haitian Revolution

Let me ask you a question that has both nothing and everything to do with Haiti.

How many people do you think died in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2003?

The most commonly cited guess of excess deaths (mostly from disease and malnutrition) is 5.4 million. Obviously there's some standard errors on that number, and other people put it at 860,000, but it's fair to say that the answer is a shit ton.

How much media coverage did you hear about that war? Either now, or at the time?

Would you say that the answer here is approximately zero?

Weird, no? What exactly is going on here?

The standard leftist narrative always used to be that the media doesn't care about black deaths. This seems, uh, shall we say, not exactly operative in the age of George Floyd, where they care about them a great deal, and sometimes seem to care about little else. But fine, this is Sub-Saharan Africans. Maybe people just don't care about black deaths there. 

But in 2012, the internet got briefly and strangely exercised about Joseph Kony, trying to get him arrested for war crimes in Uganda. It's not necessarily weird that they should care about war crimes, mind you, but by the time they cared, the crimes themselves were mostly over a decade in the past. And the press definitely got extremely concerned over the genocide in Darfur, which started around the time that the Congo War was wrapping up.

Evidently there is some capacity for caring about gruesome mass deaths in Africa. So what happened in this case?

Well, to understand it, let's start with Wikipedia's list of belligerents. 

Huh?

Let me give you the summary. It's a complete, absolute mess. It's notable that the wikipedia entry doesn't even attempt to give you a summary of what the war was about. Not only are there a ton of different nations and militias, but most of them are pretty unsympathetic characters. Seriously, read the wikipedia article and try to make sense of it. 

The overall attitude seems to just end up being the line at the end of Burn After Reading

Simple narratives get re-told, and complicated narratives do not. 

You can say people are being lazy, but that's not it. The whole war just seems to be an anti-meme. (So is the English Civil War, at least to me, although not to the same extent). No sooner do you read one bit than it's slipping through your mind like a sieve. The reality is that people just can't retain everything they read. If you remember it, it's because you remember a compressed version of events, especially one that has the important parts to update your mental models of the world. These events also tend to be remembered more easily when they fit the pattern of familiar narrative structures, stories and plotlines that are satisfying to our sense of how drama should proceed. Modernity, being addicted to fairytales and Manichaeism, likes simple stories between good and evil, and where good triumphs in the end. (If it can't have that, it sells ridiculous versions like Kony 2012 where everything that happened in Uganda is just a prologue for the real hero of the story, you, the viewer, to get justice done by posting links to social media to spread awareness). 

But if you can't have a happy ending, the closest narrative that people want to fit mass murder into is the Holocaust. Reduced to its barest symbolic components, a large group of innocent and helpless civilians gets genocided for no military reason by a group who personifies evil. It's very hard to hammer the war into this narrative, because it just seems to be everyone killing everyone else, deaths from disease and malnutrition don't have the same grisly industrial horror as mass executions, and there's no simple descriptions of who exactly was getting killed, or who was doing the killing, other than that everyone was black. So what then?

Modern readers (ha! Let's say "viewers", to be more honest) dislike simple stories between evil and evil. They have no clue whatsoever about what to do with a 20 sided war where you suspect everyone is pretty nasty, and it's hard to even make sense of what they're fighting over.

The Haitian Revolution has a fair amount of this problem. Not as much as the DRC, but a decent amount. You can condense it into a single sentence that would be very popular today. That sentence would be:

A black slave colony rose up in revolt and secured its independence....

Sounds great! As long as you ask exactly zero additional questions, this is a heart-warming tale made for modernity. But it's such a great story, we have to hear more. 

...and immediately genocided all the white French civilians on the island. 

Hmm, that doesn't sit nearly as well. Are the slaves now the bad guys? Did the women and children civilians deserve to be genocided? Avante Garde lefist activists are probably willing to flirt with this line these days, but it still sits pretty uneasily with people. But we'll soldier on regardless. 

The slave armies had fought off the French, but honestly only a small fraction as much as Yellow Fever fought the French...

This part definitely isn't fitting the glorious military victory aspect. It's hard to piece together the exact numbers from the Leclerc expedition to retake Haiti, but it seems like at least 2/3 of the French deaths were from Yellow Fever, and maybe much more. One rather suspects that without this, it would have been a pretty short war to reimpose slavery. 

Honestly, this is one of the maddest aspects of the whole French project there. The French kept turning up at this place that just killed them horribly in a short period of time. It's like nature's way of saying "go somewhere else". But they wouldn't do it. 

Power had also been greatly consolidated after the Slave leaders, principally black leader Toussaint Louverture, defeated and massacred the supporters of colored leader André Rigaud, ...

And at last, no matter how much we try to gloss over it, by about 4 sentences into any possible history of the Haitian revolution, you have to talk about the role of the free coloreds, or the mulattos. The Haitian Revolution was, even in racial terms, a three-sided war, not a two-sided war. Those who had one white parent and one black or mulatto parent, and were thus part black in racial terms, formed a very distinct social group. Their existence is a total repudiation of all of modern, US-centric theories of race. For starters, they didn't see themselves, nor were they seen by others, as straightforwardly "black". They sure weren't white either, but that's not quite the same thing. The US operates on something that's not quite the one-drop rule, but heading in that direction. There are no anguished articles written about whether Barack Obama should be considered black or not. Whereas in Haiti in 1794, there would be no question - he would be a mulatto. (In Kenya, where his father was born, he'd probably be white).

And not only do these guys not think of themselves as black, for most of the history of the revolution, they stubbornly refuse to play the part that modernity would want, of showing solidarity with the blacks. Far from it. In fact, many of the mulattos were very strong defenders of slavery. A number of them had wealthy French fathers and had been educated in France (like Alexandre Pétion, who was 1/4 black and later a president of Haiti). In fact, they were often richer than a lot of the poor whites who worked in town jobs and clerical roles (the "small whites", as opposed to the large plantation owners, the "big whites"). Many of the mulattos owned slaves themselves, and were not at all interested in abolishing slavery. What they were interested in, however, was abolishing explicitly racial distinctions, especially for free coloreds themselves, that would see them face legal impediments to citizenship. 

This leads to some hilarious scenes like when Robespierre is arguing before the Revolutionary government that we need to abolish slavery based on the fundamental rights of man, and then he's followed up by mulatto activist Julien Raimond arguing that France needed to recognize the rights of free coloreds as a way of helping shore up support for the important institution of slavery. 

The coloreds were also willing to do things like arm slaves in revolt against the big whites with promises of freedom, only to later renege on those promises in part because they didn't actually want to set too many precedents of slaves getting freed en masse.

They are a peg that stubbornly refuses to be hammered into either of the "black" or "white" holes that modernity wants. 

Not that the early black slave revolt leaders were much better, mind you. Jean-François Papillon, when attempting to negotiate with the French for an end to one of the early slave uprisings, was willing to trade the slaves in his army back into slavery as long as the terms included freedom for him and the other officers. 

If you go back to the very beginnings of the independence movement, it's actually something like a six sided conflict. In addition to slaves and free coloreds (some of whom were fully black in racial terms, but who had been granted freedom), you had different groups of whites. The big whites in Haiti, the rich plantation owners, were big supporters of independence, chafing against trade restrictions imposed by France, and fancying that they could get a better deal running the country themselves. As Mike Duncan notes, they look and act a lot like the liberal nobles in the French revolution, who also ended up getting eaten by the forces they unleashed. This is a lesson that keeps coming up. The small whites were more driven by the importance of racial distinctions, which were their main source of potential status over the free coloreds. But on top of that, you had the Royal authorities in the colony, who often played one off against the other in order to keep their authority. In the early days of the Haitian revolution, this often meant allying most strongly with the free coloreds, who they saw as the most reliable supporters of monarchy. Finally, you've got the revolutionaries back in France, where developments of political events back in Europe ended up determining a lot of the course of events in Haiti. It's only very late in the story that it sounds like the Haitians being the primary drivers of events. And despite the fact that some of the revolutionaries were often big pushers of abolishing slavery, after the French revolution you also had various slave armies originally claiming to be fighting on behalf of the deposed King! This is without even getting into the role of the Spanish, or the English, or the Americans. 

Like I said - we're not at Congo War levels of confusion, but this is a story that resists simple morality tale narratives, especially if you want these to fit in with contemporary American racial preoccupations. 

But there is one final large and embarrassing reason why you don't hear much about the Haitian revolution. 

If you want this to be a morality tale, you have to end it in 1804. Because the other question you absolutely can't ask is "So what happened after that?", because the answer is that it's a horrible depressing dysfunctional mess for the next 220 years. And this destroys so much of the mythical allure of it all. Half the people who "ended slavery" didn't even mean by that term that you were free to walk off your plantation and do some different kind of work in some other locale. Oh no, you were now part of the Louverture Labor Code, which basically reinstituted slavery in all but name, but with slightly nicer conditions and different colored owners. The plantation system only really came to an end when the country was so completely destroyed that there was no infrastructure left to sustain a plantation. Unsurprisingly, this did not lead to large welfare improvements for the Haitian in the street. And so the whig history progressive has to spend the rest of the time spinning excuses for why none of this is the Haitians' fault, because the French demanded a large debt indemnity, and the Americans lost interest in trade, and then there were all these coups that nobody could have foreseen, and then the US invaded in the early 20th century, and then there was Papa Doc Duvalier who was a complete monster, and recently they had this earthquake...

It's a mess. It's a total mess. If there is anything much optimistic to discuss in the two-odd centuries after independence, it sure doesn't come up in the Mike Duncan brief history. 

I used to actually use this as a trolling example to leftists. Suppose you have a former colony. It finally gets its independence, and it's got problems. Mostly, we attribute those problems to the legacy of colonialism. But this presumably can't last indefinitely. If the place is still a basket case in a 1000 years time, it's probably not the fault of the British. So what's the Statute of Limitations here? What's the maximum length of time you'd need before you'd be willing to say "you know, this probably isn't due to colonialism?"

They will usually start thinking of Africa. They'll estimate how long it's been, then like Sandra Day O'Conner with affirmative action, grant themselves extra breathing room to make sure they're not proven wrong any time soon. "100 years" is a common answer. Maybe 150. 

Well, Haiti (which is almost never the example they have in mind, because nobody hears about Haiti) has been independent for 220. This is quite awkward. 

And what's the latest situation?

Curtis Yarvin was hilarious and scathing in a recent substack:

As a monarchist, I can tell you that Haiti could probably use Emperor Jacques back, genocide or no genocide, since it currently has no elected officials and is under the de facto control of a gang leader known as “Barbecue”—whose Wikipedia page notes:

Chérizier has denied that his nickname “Babekyou” (or “Barbecue”) came from accusations of his setting people on fire. Instead, he says it was from his mother's having been a fried chicken street vendor.

¿Porque no los dos? 

And so, this leads to a nagging alternative worry. What if the problem isn't actually just that the Haitian revolution resists summary? What if the problem is that the one sentence summary that captures the full thrust of events doesn't fit the progressive world view at all? What if the shortest summary of all the events is actually

A nation of slaves rose up in revolt, and after a messy and nasty war, genocided the whites and led to misery and poverty essentially forever.

I do not assert that this summary is true, by the way. Even aside from the general problem that summarizing any revolution in a single sentence is a fraught exercise guaranteed to miss a lot of important detail, a great deal hinges upon how exactly you define "led to". It was certainly chronologically antecedent to it. Whether it was causal is always a much thornier issue, as with everything in history. This is without even getting into what a full range of counterfactuals would be, because there are surely options other than "Haitian revolution" and "Haitian slavery continues forever". 

But even to state such a potential summary is deeply disturbing to modern sensibilities, because reading it simplistically it makes it sound like Haitian slavery was thus a good thing. Nobody, as far as I know, is eager to reinstitute slavery. And while there are serious scholarly works arguing that American tobacco and cotton slavery had material conditions close to that of a free laborer, and likely better than a Welsh coal miner at the same time, I have never heard anyone assert the same thing about French Caribbean sugar slavery. It was hell on earth, where you got worked to death over a short number of years under absolutely brutal conditions. Nobody wants to bring it back. And when I say "nobody", I mean "levels of support seem to be minimal even among people who routinely espouse positions far outside the Overton window". 

Yet the chronological sequence is there, and undeniable. They had a successful slave revolt. They genocided the whites. It has been a complete mess ever since. What you wish to make of those facts is up to you, and there are many other facts you could choose to add to those above, but there are not many good news stories to tell out of it.

And so the glorious one sentence successful slave uprising ultimately gets ignored in favor of fictional slave uprisings that never happened. Which is a shame. Because the Haitian Revolution is a fascinating story if you have an attention span longer than a summary of three sentences. 

The French Revolution and the Inertia of Government

If I had to summarize in a sentence the biggest common thread between both the English Civil War and the French Revolution, it’s how much all governments are governments of inertia. For good or bad, any government whose institutions and norms have been around for a long time is a pretty stable equilibrium. The biggest problem that its enemies have is simply convincing a critical mass of people that it might actually be possible to achieve major reforms, if not complete replacement. People tend to be unimaginative on alternative institutional arrangements. This applies doubly so towards changes that don’t map to obvious and mentally accessible historical templates. Something like Curtis Yarvin’s sovereign corporations, or Robin Hanson’s futarchy, are notable because of how rare they are. Even when they get proposed, they have a very futuristic feel – which is to say, one can imagine them somehow, somewhere, far in the future. Imagining a clear path from here to there is much more difficult.

The obvious consequence of this, which is everywhere on display around you, is that dysfunctional or substandard government can persist a very long time. This holds true even if lots of people would prefer a change, or sometimes even if lots of elites would prefer some kind of change. But for forecasting the future in the conditional sense (where the stakes are probably highest), the flip side is actually almost as important. Once the revolution has gotten going, the new institutional arrangements have none of the old inertia benefit. Which is to say, revolutions look a lot like the golden rule of affairs – there’s never just one.

And this isn’t just the case in France, either. Russia had the February Revolution (we’ll have constitutional government under Prince Georgy Lvov) and the October Revolution (get ready for misery - horrible communist misery). America, after its war of independence, had the Congress of the Confederation, a period so dysfunctional that it tends to get left out of American history altogether, before it had the Constitution and the Federalists. In the English Civil War, it only took 9 years of Cromwell’s dictatorship after the execution of Charles I in 1649 for everyone to decide that they weren’t much interested in extending this after Cromwell’s death, and so King Charles II was installed in 1660.

And so it is in France. Actually, France takes this to a new level, because the chaos eventually gets so continual and extreme that you stop counting in terms of discrete events. You may think you’re just establishing a constitutional monarchy under the constitution of 1791. But since that’s just some document that a bunch of guys came up with a year ago, why should anyone pay it any particular heed? So next thing you know, King Louis is being executed and you need a new constitution of 1793, since it’s awkward to have the last constitutional document refer to a guy who’s dead. Except that never really actually gets implemented, so then you need the constitution of 1795, which lasts about three months until another coup, and eventually you get the constitution of 1799…

Constitutions are useful markers here not because they’re sacred, inviolable documents. Quite the contrary – often they’re barely even implemented. But they represent the fervent desire to establish some kind of precedent that will bind everyone else. The alternative, which the French revolution has a lot of, is the endless shifting of power, horse trading and back stabbing that happens when there’s no formal structure and lines of authority to decide who is really in charge. New constitutions are thus somewhat useful markers of when the reality of power has gotten so disconnected from the previous piece of paper that the current mob feel the need to justify the difference.

Parenthetically, this reveals the brilliance of the current constitutional order in the US. If the option is available, you are much better off referring to the same piece of paper and saying that you’re totally still the legitimate heirs of 1789. A shockingly large number of rubes will fail to notice that the modern government bears almost no resemblance in any of its practical arrangements to the government of 1789, so maybe, just maybe, you’re not actually governed by the piece of paper after all, and the government can very easily change with the paper staying the same.

All of which to say, if politics had the equivalent of a VIX index of implied future volatility, it is going to be high for quite some time after a revolution. Most of the participants at the Festival of the Federation in 1790, must have assumed that all the unpleasantness was over. A year after the storming of the Bastille, here was the King, and Lafayette, and Talleyrand, and Marie Antoinette, and everyone else saying what a great outcome it all was and how chuffed they were with France’s glorious new future. Instead, it was actually a great time to be selling your French property and getting out of dodge while nobody was yet trying to restrict you from doing so. Out of the celebrants, Lafayette had fled the country and wound up in an Austrian prison in 1792, Louis and Marie Antoinette were both executed in 1793, and through good luck and good management, Talleyrand skipped town for a few years, slightly ahead of a warrant for his arrest.

And this brief list highlights the overwhelming general trend here in both personnel and causes – there is an alarmingly high turnover of both. It is striking how many figures grace the stages early in the story, only to just disappear later on. Take Jacques Necker, Louis’ on and off again Finance Minister over whom so much of the pre-revolutionary controversy centered, but who eventually just gets politely shuffled off stage in 1791 to exile. Or consider the Parlement, whose conflicts with Louis XVI formed such a large part of the initial series of conflicts, but which had already sunk into irrelevance such that by the time it was abolished in 1790, you barely even noticed. The sacred rights of nobles to have a say in legislation was not a concern of long duration. Maybe that’s something worth thinking about before you kick off your list of complaints to the king. Are you on net a beneficiary of the current institutional arrangements, relative to the space of possible things that might come about if everyone starts to believe that institutional arrangements are much more malleable than they seem?

My favorite example of this is that Jacques-Louis David, who was basically Albert Speer with a small side of Goebbels, started doing his masterpiece painting, “The Tennis Court Oath”. Unfortunately, too many of the figures present got purged or executed before it could be finished, and he decided that it would be more prudent to just scrap the whole thing.

The grim upside in this monstrous affair is that once the initial round of executions is done, and most of the sympathetic reactionary figures are dead or exiled, it turns into a black comedy where each round of people gets killed for being insufficiently revolutionary. The Girondins, the “moderate” revolutionaries who supported the King’s removal, but argued only that he shouldn’t be put to death, were led to the guillotine still singing La Marseillaise. You’d need to have a heart of stone to not laugh at this, these nitwits determined to not be hit with the clue stick on the way out. Maybe, just maybe, something in our original worldview wasn’t quite right. It’s like the original version of so many modern memes:




“Jacobins are the real reactionaries!”

“So much for the tolerant left!’


The longer it goes on, the more you have to work to find the “comedy” amongst the “grim”. The most memorable summary of just how far all this changed within a few years, and how much of a shock it would have seemed, comes from Moldbug, quoting Hippolyte Taine, translating La Harpe. La Harpe was actually one of those pro-revolutionary artists who did get hit with the clue stick, becoming both reactionary and Christian by the end. In his fictionalized dialogue from the salons of 1788, he places himself as one of the incredulous guests laughing as Cazotte (who ended up guillotined himself for monarchist sympathies) prophesies the path of the French revolution. Even without knowing the full biographies of all the characters, the sentiment is quite jarring.

It seems to me, La Harpe says, as if it were but yesterday, and yet it is at the beginning of the year 1788. We were dining with one of our fellow members of the Academy, a grand seignior and a man of intelligence. The company was numerous and of every profession, courtiers, advocates, men of letters and academicians, all had feasted luxuriously according to custom. At the dessert the wines of Malvoisie and of Constance contributed to the social gaiety a sort of freedom not always kept within decorous limits. At that time society had reached the point at which everything may be expressed that excites laughter. Champfort had read to us his impious and libertine stories, and great ladies had listened to these without recourse to their fans.

Hence a deluge of witticisms against religion, one quoting a tirade from ‘La Pucelle,’ another bringing forward certain philosophical stanzas by Diderot… and with unbounded applause… The conversation becomes more serious; admiration is expressed at the revolution accomplished by Voltaire, and all agree in its being the first title to his fame. ‘He gave the tone to his century, finding readers in the antechambers as well as in the drawing-room.’ One of the guests narrates, bursting with laughter, what a hairdresser said to him while powdering his hair: ‘You see, sir, although I am a miserable scrub, I have no more religion than any one else.’

They conclude that the Revolution will soon be consummated, that superstition and fanaticism must wholly give way to philosophy, and they thus calculate the probabilities of the epoch and those of the future society which will see the reign of reason. The most aged lament not being able to flatter themselves that they will see it; the young rejoice in a reasonable prospect of seeing it, and especially do they congratulate the Academy on having paved the way for the great work, and on having been the headquarters, the center, the inspirer of freedom of thought.

One of the guests had taken no part in this gay conversation; a person named Cazotte, an amiable and original man, but, unfortunately, infatuated with the delusions of the visionary. In the most serious tone he begins: ‘Gentlemen,’ says he, ‘be content; you will witness this great revolution that you so much desire. You know that I am something of a prophet, and I repeat it, you will witness it… Do you know the result of this revolution, for all of you, so long as you remain here?’

‘Ah!’ exclaims Condorcet with his shrewd, simple air and smile, ‘let us see, a philosopher is not sorry to encounter a prophet.’

‘You, Monsieur de Condorcet, will expire stretched on the floor of a dungeon; you will die of the poison you take to escape the executioner, of the poison which the felicity of that era will compel you always to carry about your person!’

At first, great astonishment, and then came an outburst of laughter. ‘What has all this in common with philosophy and the reign of reason?’

‘Precisely what I have just remarked to you; in the name of philosophy, of humanity, of freedom, under the reign of reason, you will thus reach your end; and, evidently, the reign of reason will arrive, for there will be temples of reason, and, in those days, in all France, the temples will be those alone of reason… You, Monsieur de Champfort, you will sever your veins with twenty-two strokes of a razor and yet you will not die for months afterwards. You, Monsieur Vicq-d’Azir, you will not open your own veins but you will have them opened six times in one day, in the agonies of gout, so as to be more certain of success, and you will die that night. You, Monsieur de Nicolai, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur Bailly, on the scaffold; you, Monsieur de Malesherbes, on the scaffold; … you, Monsieur Roucher, also on the scaffold.’

‘But then we shall have been overcome by Turks or Tartars?’

‘By no means; you will be governed, as I have already told you, solely by philosophy and reason. Those who are to treat you in this manner will all be philosophers, will all, at every moment, have on their lips the phrases you have uttered within the hour, will repeat your maxims, will quote, like yourselves, the stanzas of Diderot and of “La Pucelle.” ’

‘And when will all this happen?’

‘Six years will not pass before what I tell you will be accomplished.’

‘Well, these are miracles,’ exclaims La Harpe, ‘and you leave me out?’

‘You will be no less a miracle, for you will then be a Christian.’

‘Ah,’ interposes Champfort, ‘I breathe again; if we are to die only when La Harpe becomes a Christian we are immortals.’

‘As to that, we women,’ says the Duchesse de Gramont, ‘are extremely fortunate in being of no consequence in revolutions. It is understood that we are not to blame, and our sex.’

‘Your sex, ladies, will not protect you this time… You will be treated precisely as men, with no difference whatever… You, Madame la Duchesse, will be led to the scaffold, you and many ladies besides yourself in a cart with your hands tied behind your back.’

‘Ah, in that event, I hope to have at least a carriage covered with black.’

‘No, Madame, greater ladies than yourself will go, like yourself in a cart and with their hands tied like yours.’

‘Greater ladies! What! Princesses of the blood!’

‘Still greater ladies than those…’

They began to think the jest carried too far. Madame de Gramont, to dispel the gloom, did not insist on a reply to her last exclamation, contenting herself by saying in the lightest tone, ‘And they will not even leave one a confessor!’

‘No, Madame, neither you nor any other person will be allowed a confessor; the last of the condemned that will have one, as an act of grace, will be…’ He stopped a moment.

‘Tell me, now, who is the fortunate mortal enjoying this prerogative?’

‘It is the last that will remain to him, and it will be the King of France.’ ”

Indeed, when one reads the path of all this, the contemporary French attitude towards the whole thing seems ghastly, glib, and frivolous. To view this as a noble story of the people shrugging off the shackles of a despotic king and implementing freedom and democracy requires zooming out to such a large distance and squinting at what details are still evident that you’re left with a narrative to be told to a small child, and not a very inquisitive child at that.

Zoom in any more on the narrative, and it quickly seems monstrous – François Joseph Westermann apparently writing to the Committee of Public Safety after ordering no quarter given on fleeing Vendée rebels

There is no more Vendée, Republican citizens. It died beneath our free sword, with its women and its children. I have just buried it in the swamps and the woods of Savenay. Following the orders that you gave to me, I crushed the children beneath the horses' hooves, massacred the women who, those at least, will bear no more brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach myself with. I have exterminated them all.

This was somewhat hyperbole, but it was much less hyperbole when, months after any of these rebels still posed any military threat, Louis Marie Turreau lead his troops through the Vendée and exterminated everyone they came across, around 20% of the population, 20-40,000 all told.

Or Jean-Baptiste Carrier gleefully drowning 4000 people at Nantes, women, children, nuns, priests, in his “Republican Baptisms” (on top of the 2000 odd executed in a quarry, such as by blasting them all with a cannon).

The Committee of Public Safety during the Terror executed tens of thousands of people being suspected of being insufficiently revolutionary, old men, women and children included. When put this way, it all tends to just turn into a blur, where you might imagine that somehow this is just them being the equivalent of a Duterte or a Bukele, executing the equivalent of drug dealers and gangs. But no, focus in a little on the mechanism by which this came about, and it really is horrifying. The Law of 22 Prairial was the reform by which the messy process of accusation, trial, and deliberation was massively sped up. Defendants were no longer allowed to call witnesses, nor were they allowed to have lawyers – that is to say, they weren’t really allowed to defend themselves anymore. The line between “accusation” and “conviction” become very thin indeed. The list of crimes was expanded to include new offenses like “seeking to inspire disagreement”, “slandering patriotism”, and “spreading false news”. Only two verdicts were allowed – acquittal, or death. And, finally, citizens were required to denounce these crimes – failure to denounce is also a crime, which, like all crimes, is now punishable by death.

It's basically all the crazy untrustworthiness of the Soviet Union, where everyone denounces everyone else, but with the grim discipline of the NKVD replaced with Haitian anarchy.

And lest you think that this was all some accident, Robespierre had laid out his vision in a speech on the Republic of Virtue, that this was in fact the aim – terror is an emanation of virtue, and without it, virtue will be weak.

If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.

Mike Duncan (from whose Revolutions podcast a lot of this history is taken) does a great job of summarizing the atmosphere shortly before Robespierre met his end:

“The authorities had already had to move the guillotine of the Place de la revolution, to a spot east of the city, where the Place Bastille is now, and then move it further east again after residents complained of the blood and the stench. Executions were no longer a glorious public celebration, they had become a grim and mechanical daily routine that just wasn’t much fun anymore. No one was enthusiastic when Cecil Renault and her entire family – mother, father, sisters, brothers, were led off en masse to be killed for their role in this alleged plot to kill Robespierre. And it was really to no one’s great rejoicing when on July 17th, a herd of old pious Carmelite nuns were led off for the crime of living together communally. When a child pick pocket was led up to the scaffold, the sympathetic onlookers started shouting ‘No more children!’.”

As they say – you executed the King, for this?

The one minor note of optimism here is the – well, not even schadenfreude, more like thankful justice, that many of the worst characters here got eaten by the same forces they eagerly unleashed. Westermann was guillotined for being aligned with Danton. Carrier was recalled after even Robespierre found his activities too much, and then executed after the Thermidorian reaction. Robespierre himself was undone by the Thermidorian reaction, after threatening too many people with being involved in a conspiracy that they decided to get him before he could get them. He tried to organize an insurrection, but that failed. He tried to shoot himself with a pistol, but only succeeded in blowing off half his jaw. He lived in agony for another day before being guillotined himself. It’s grisly, but couldn’t happen to a nicer bloke.

The other terrible indictment of the project is that the French also want to idolize the man who shortly afterwards did more to undo all the principles of the revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte. And even then, 19th century French history is a complete mess until at least after the Paris Commune in 1871. Seriously, there’s a reason that most people don’t know much about France between the fall of Napoleon and it entering World War 1. It’s a total shitshow.

But aside from viewing it as a kind of grotesque cautionary tale that runs counter to the prevailing narrative, I think there is quite a lot to learn by putting oneself in the shoes of a potential reactionary at different points in the story. What exactly should you have been hoping for, anyway? At least before the ending of the story is known, it’s harder than you’d think. One sees a strange tension between supporting monarchical principles, and supporting monarchical tradition. When the king is still in power, there is not much of a contradiction here. But once the King is executed, are you specifically interested in restoring the legitimate heir of the Bourbon dynasty? What if he's 7 years old? What if, once he’s dead at age ten, it’s not straightforward whose claim you should support? Or are you just interested in solving the Carlyle problem of finding the most able man, and giving him absolute power? Because it’s pretty clear that by a certain point in the story, that man was Napoleon. The question of when exactly you would recognize him as such is not nearly as obvious as you might imagine. It is a funny exercise imagining the leaders of the French Directory, feeling like they’re on top of their game and in charge of France. But when a historian tells the story of that time period, for much of their reign, the actual tale being told is “what was Napoleon doing at this time?”

When you look into it, a curious regularity is that many of the great authoritarian leaders came to power supporting the governments they later overthrew. Julius Caesar lead the populares against the traditional aristocratic privilege of the Roman Senate. But did this matter once he’d assumed power? Did it stop his rule from being further right than what came before – monarchy, instead of oligarchy? Not one bit. Same thing with Napoleon. It’s well known that he was willing to use “a whiff of grapeshot” to defeat the mob, which sounds pretty based. But it was a Royalist mob, attacking the revolutionary government! Those who just wanted competent authority invested in the ablest man would have been much better off supporting the man shooting at them, though it was very hard for them to know that at the time. Even in modern times, Augusto Pinochet led the crackdown on anti-Allende protests in 1972!

All of which is to say, that it’s not nearly as obvious as you might think where exactly the next competent authoritarian might come from. It is a mistake to place too much weight in the man’s politics before he seizes power. Those destined to rule seem to instinctively know that the first thing to do is actually acquire the power to rule, by whatever means necessary, otherwise all your grand visions amount to very little. Of course, this adds a pretty big risk component once political opposition is swept away. As Moldbug is fond of pointing out, the Democratic Party platform of 1932 is almost the exact opposite of what FDR actually implemented once he took control of the US government. It can cut both ways.

And this tension between supporting the man and supporting the institution can even be extended back to the period when monarchs were in power. King Louis XVI was, in many ways, contemptibly weak, and not up to the task of dealing with the moderate problems he faced. But J.F. Bosher makes a great case, over and over, of all the alternatives Louis XVI had in front of him, whether shaking down the debt holders and effectively defaulting, or sending in troops to arrest the members of the National Convention at the Tennis Court Oath, or a bunch of other options. How much did he deserve your support?

Well, he was a hell of a lot better than what came immediately afterwards. Because even with his weakness, the inertia of governing structures kept things sane.

This isn’t the only view, though. Thomas Carlyle took the opposite position in Latter-Day Pamphlets, when assessing the various revolutions of 1848. You would think that, being a supporter of monarchy, he would be straightforwardly appalled at all these events that overthrew the monarchies of Europe, and offer a strong support of the deposed monarchs. But hating democracy misses the broader point, that nature abhors a weak and fake king:

[W]e had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous, amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos. Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare to dogs and the profane:—Enter, all the world, see what kind of Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons, stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go, as if exclaiming, "We are poor histrios, we sure enough;—did you want heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings conscious that they are but Play-actors.
…

These rulers were not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages, while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings, play-acting as at Drury Lane;—and what were the people withal that took them for real?

It is probably the hugest disclosure of falsity in human things that was ever at one time made. These reverend Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors, then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels they preached to them were not an account of man's real position in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,—a falsity of falsities, which at last ceases to stick together. Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were dupes,—a kind of inverse cheats, too, or they would not have believed in them so long. A universal Bankruptcy of Imposture; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody will change its word into an act any farther…

Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it, to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were sadder than any sorrow,—like the vision of immortality, unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that Imposture has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then,—known it must and shall be,—is hateful, unendurable to God and man. Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the world. Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable one.

Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here,—for who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease.

One shudders to think what Carlyle would make of the Republican Party in 2023.

But what Carlyle has in thundering and principled rhetoric, he doesn’t obviously have in terms of practical strategy. Because outside of the specific sham-monarch question, one of the other practical lessons of the ups and downs of the French revolution seems to be the opposite – holding institutions is useful, even (or especially) institutions that have been illegally purged of one’s enemies. Institutions do two things. First, they are opportunities for co-ordination and concentration of power. Second, they are public-facing sources of legitimacy, a kind of vaguely agreed upon sense that these guys are in charge. Often, it doesn’t even matter what the institution’s exact mandate even was. The National Convention was voted in in 1792 to draft a new constitution. But just being the convention meant that it operated as a de facto parliament with general powers, which it then delegated most of to the Committee of Public Safety, which then basically became a dictatorship by committee. None of these aspects, you will note, have anything to do with drawing up a constitution. But it didn’t matter.

Even expelling members doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. Once the Girondins got purged (admittedly, at the hands of a massive stirred up mob), the rest of the National Convention proceeded just fine. Same thing when the members of the Paris Commune were also expelled later on (this time, for being too leftist). The even more striking version, to briefly switch revolutions, was the Rump Parliament in the English Civil War. You might think that shamelessly expelling 180 of the 470 members of a legislative body for disagreeing with you might seriously weaken its legitimacy, but this is probably because you’ve lived under democratic lies too long. A better question is “whatcha gonna do about it?”. Because if you don’t have an answer to that question, then you’ve gotten weaker, not stronger.

It is possible to organize from out of power, of course. Mostly this seems to involve building parallel institutions to subvert the existing regime. Georges Danton was a great example. If you don’t know his story, read through the section on “Revolution” and try to work out at what point he actually held a major position in an important public office – it’s surprisingly late. He did most of his early work in the Jacobin club, which operated as a kind of shadow government for the left. He was involved in the local government of the Paris Commune, but most importantly helped organize the mobs that stormed the palace in the insurrection of August the 10th, which precipitated the King’s removal and eventual execution. In other words, you don’t have to be in the current legislative body (in this case, the Legislative Assembly) if you can just gin up a massive mob to overthrow the monarch presiding over said assembly. His first real post then came when he was appointed minister of justice, but this was mostly just a reflection of the informal organizing role he already had. Once you can stir up the mobs to carry out the September Massacres, executing all sorts of royalists and suspected Royalists, and effectively get away with it, it won’t be long until you’re finally voted into the National Convention (the new legislative body created after you totally crushed the old one), and ultimately in the big leagues of the Committee of Public Safety. Of course, his whole career looks a lot more like Vladimir Lenin than it does like Carlyle. Say what you will about the tenets of Bolshevik Communism, but they understood how power works. They may not have understood anything else, but they understood that. Danton was acting like a government in waiting long before he held real office, including directing a mob substantially at his command. One man’s mob is another man’s national guard.

What you definitely don’t want to do is what the outgoing Constituent Assembly did in 1791, when setting up the Legislative Assembly, and decree that none of the members in the current body should be eligible to sit in the new body. Great job! Now everyone who set up the new system won’t be serving in it, and the ones that do will have pretty damn ambivalent feelings about the constitutional structures you love so much. Giving up power, walking out of institutions without a plan of what to do next, boycotting elections – these are all symbolism without a concrete plan, and counterproductive symbolism at that.

Indeed, what’s most useful about all this is not so much studying what happened, but thinking about possible counterfactuals to what might have happened, and what they reveal about the general laws of politics and human behavior. The resemblance of the later French revolutionaries to straight-up communism is quite palpable. Especially Babouef, who explicitly wanted to abolish private property (“Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others."). And his idea of this was defending Robespierre and the other executed leaders of the Terror. Babouef, humorously, wrote under the pen name Gracchus, which is funny given the role of the rabble-rousing Graccchi brothers in kicking off a process in the Roman Republic that eventually led to … the Caesars. Babouef, who never actually made it to power, is just one more end point of each group deciding they could rile up a coalition of lower ranks who were out of power to overthrow the people at the top. The Parlement organized against the King, then the National Assembly organized against both the Parlement and the King by harnessing the power of the bourgeois citizens, then Danton organized the Sans Culottes into a mob that overthrew the power of the others, until the trend to that point stopped when Thermidor prevented things going further leftward. Religious reforms started out as being making the wealth and role of priests more equal, then it moved to abolishing tithes, then it moved to seizing Church property, then in moved to requiring priests to swear an oath of fealty to the Republic over the Church, then it moved to just abolishing the Church altogether and replacing it with a Cult of Reason.

The point is that there is a logic to these progressions. They in fact represent taking the established principles (which blog.jim described as “knocking over the apple cart in order to get the apples”) further each time. Thankfully, it’s not like this process always gets taken to its horrible logical conclusion. Existing elites can sometimes realize that enough is enough, and reverse the current trend to try to cement more right wing changes (Thermidor, the Federalists, the Restoration of Charles II). But there’s also no reason this process has to stop on its own. And to see it taken to its fully logical end point, you get Zhang Xianzhong, who Wikipedia politely refers to as “leading a peasant revolt” that led to “massacres in Sichuan that depopulated the region”. Translation: everyone got killed. Everyone. Like Robespierre’s homage to terror, this doesn’t seem to be an accident. His most famous contribution to literature is his Seven Kill Stele:

Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

Like they used to say about Zimbabwe – it can always get worse.

I think the clearest application to the present, if you are a nobody and not an aspiring Georges Danton, is “Be extremely wary of the first revolution.”

By way of an example, in June 2020, during the height of the George Floyd mayhem, there had been a bunch of protests during the week, leading up to a big organized event on the Saturday night. There were thousands of protestors banging on barricades outside the White House. As it turns out, the security services managed to keep them under control, just. But what if it hadn’t gone that way? What if the mob had broken through the barricade, and the security services had started shooting them? Or what if they’d failed to shoot, and the white house got overrun and burned to the ground? What if Trump got chased out of office as part of a color revolution, or tracked down by a mob?

None of these things happened, of course. Which either means we got lucky, or that the protests were in fact controlled (since the left already holds the levers of power). But what would the French Revolution perspective be on these events? Are you really sure that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi will really stay in charge of a fully unleashed mob that got out of hand? You’d be a bold man to bet that way. Events have an alarming way of taking on a life of their own. You can call up a mob to the front of the White House, but your ability to control it in the heat of the moment may be less than you think. 

For my part, I had a modest position in VIX call options over that weekend. Nothing came of it, of course. Like every bad trade, when it fails, you can always call it a hedge.

I can tell you this, though. If the White House had actually gotten burned to the ground, or Trump got color revolutioned out of power that week, I would have begun planning my life around it being time to leave America.

The good news is that, historically, you actually have a decent amount of time to do this. Things don’t tend to go completely bananas in the next day, week, month, or often even year.

But after the first revolution, you are much better off being an Émigré, waiting to see whether the next big change is a reaction from the right, or further leftward. High political volatility is great if you’re a young, clever, ambitious man looking to quickly advance up the ranks. It is a disaster for everyone else though.