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. 

On Chesterton's Fence and the Imperfect Vision of the Past

I have always had an uneasy relationship with political labels. I find that people who enjoy self-describing as having some kind of political belief (especially if they offer such a label unprompted) usually like the idea of themselves as belonging to a group, or movement, or something larger than themselves. In this view, they are tapping into the aspects of political beliefs that are less about a set of questions about the world that one decides on case by case, and more a kind of tribal affiliation. The people interested in such affiliations are usually, in my experience, quite uninteresting. But the Scylla of not wanting to embrace too much of a dumb label must be balanced against the Charybdis of claiming that one's beliefs are so unique, special and nuanced that it would be impossible to put any kind of a label on them. This, of course, is nearly always false, even if other people might pick a label that one finds unflattering. So to balance these aspects, I find myself sometimes persisting in using these labels just as a shorthand - a kind of crude summary of the main principle components of belief-space. 

Among these labels, it has been a long time since I would have described myself as a Conservative (the capital C version, of the explicit political movement). It is hard to have much stock in that in contemporary America (and, indeed, the reasons are exactly the same as R. L. Dabney identified 150 years ago, in his hilarious skewering of Northern Conservatives). But the difference between small-c conservatism, and reaction, is more nuanced. I lean more towards the latter, but the argument for the former is difficult to dismiss. 

The shorthand way I used to describe the difference between these groups was that a conservative primarily wants to keep things as they are. A reactionary, by contrast, actively wants to move backwards. This is usually said as a joke in polite company, for whom the idea of reversing progress is almost unthinkable. Whig history has become so ingrained that the very label of "progress" blurs the "good things are happening" version with "progressivism", the leftist political movement that communists used to use as a euphemism for themselves. 

Of course, Uncle Ted aside, not many people actually want to turn their back on literally everything about the modern world. Nearly always, what it actually means is identifying the problems of modernity that are actually creations of modern institutions and beliefs, mostly by having reference to a wider set of beliefs and ideas from times long past. Among Moldbug's most powerful intellectual ideas is to contemplate what people of the past might say if they could actually talk back to you. For instance, if a progressive who loves to smear the founding fathers as all being racist had to actually have a conversation with a resurrected George Washington, how do they think it would go? Bear in mind the first thing you'll have to do is define concretely what being "a racist" actually is, since he won't know. Then you'll have to convince him that there is a moral and practical imperative that he stop being racist, when he doesn't feel any moral valence in the term at all. Are you sure you can anticipate his rebuttals and refute them? This may be harder than you imagine - both the convincing of the hypothetical Washington, and even just modeling the hypothetical Washington. You need to read a lot about the person and think a lot, especially if you actually want a faithful version of the historical person, and not just a lazy strawman ( Moldbug did a great version of several figures here).

In this respect, the point of these hypotheticals is to embrace the observation of G. K. Chesterton (one of the great defenders of conservatism). Tradition, he said, is the democracy of the dead. And his idea of deference to their views was not just an ancestor worship notion. It was based on the idea that man's understanding of things is fallible, and existing structures may well be solutions to problems we don't understand: 

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

When we phrase it this way, however, we can see that the position of a conservative is an easier one to defend in this respect than that of a reactionary. In particular, Chesterton's Fence is an argument for preserving continuous, living institutions. That is, the fence that is still there, and we just don't want it recklessly torn down. The job of a reactionary, however, in some sense the opposite problem. The fence was torn down 10, or 30, or 60, or 150 years ago. There are now cattle wandering all over the road and getting run over. Some factions say that this is actually a good thing that they get run over, or that it's cruel to fence them in, or that fences never did much to stop the problem anyway. Meanwhile, all the people who built fences or knew how to maintain them died a hundred years ago, so it's hard to ask them how it actually worked. 

Which is to say, the reactionary runs into his own version of the George Washington dialogue problem above, where "what would George Washington think" is an easy exercise to state, and a hard one to implement with certainty. That is, the reactionary is trying to reconstruct something from the lessons of the past, but he has only an imperfect understanding of what that past actually was. Even if he gets power (something we're not in great danger of at present), he risks creating a version of the fence that doesn't solve his problems, because it wasn't in important respects the same as the fence that was created in the first place. 

The extent to which this is true depends, of course, on how good the sources are in question. But sources are only ever a tiny snapshot of life - the summation of "who was doing the writing, what they thought was important enough to write down, what parts survived to this day, and which parts you actually read among the many possible sources out there". Sometimes, this will probably be good enough - for understanding major wars, for instance. But other bits you have to work harder to imagine the range of outcomes. 

For instance, consider the question of relations between the sexes. What was the distribution of day-to-day life like for married couples in, say, New York in 1880? In London in 1620? In Rome in 350 A.D.? 

Whig history supplies a ready answer for this. Women existed under "the patriarchy". This was a set of norms that meant that men had enormous power within a marriage to physically assault their wives, to rape them, to make them bear as many children as the man wanted, to prevent them from working or from leaving the home, and to force them to do house work and hard physical labor. It is never quite said that this was the state of all women, but it is usually implied that this was the lot for most of them, for most of history. 

But if this is what modern feminists believe, what do the men's rights / manosphere types believe? Well, at the risk of simplifying the matter, a lot of them seem to agree on nearly all the claims above - they merely want to add at the end "...and that was awesome!!!"

The obvious problem is that very few of them actually made a study of history themselves. Without realizing it, they just took at face value the claims of feminists. Well, do these people strike you as good historians? The first clue that something might be amiss is when all times and places before 1960s America are lumped together as being "basically the same thing". Okay, it's all the patriarchy, fine. Were there any interesting or important variations in that patriarchy across history? Bueller? As Matt Damon said - do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter?

Reader, it is worth considering the possibility, even just as a hypothetical, that even if you restored everything that feminists describe as "the patriarchy", it might make less difference in practice than most people think. 

So we may need to investigate a bit ourselves, once we realize that we can't just trust this received wisdom. You can start with the legal status, obviously. For instance, here's Blackstone's Commentaries from 1770:

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law[l]: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of an union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her[m]: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself...

Okay, that sounds pretty tough. Bear in mind, though he doesn't say it explicitly, this single personhood meant, among other things, that this tended to preclude the possibility of marital rape. But even here, it's a little murky - Blackstone doesn't go into it in detail himself, and Wikipedia's description is:

Sir Matthew Hale's statement in History of the Pleas of the Crown did not cite a legal precedent for it, though it relied on earlier standards. In a case of Lord Audley's (1593–1631), for instance, Hale cite's the jurist Bracton (c. 1210 – c. 1268) support of this rule, said to have derived from laws of King Æthelstan (r. 927–939) where upon the law holds that even "were the party of no chaste life, but a whore, yet there may be ravishment: but it is a good plea to say she was his concubine".

But even in this seemingly straightforward question, when you actually look up Lord Audley's case, he in fact got executed for (among other things) rape of his wife! In this case, it was for restraining her while some other guy raped her.  (He also sodomized some men, which contributed to the execution too). But it certainly doesn't seem like "do whatever you want to your wife sexually, the law is cool with it" was actually an operating principle of the law in the way you might think. 

But surely he could just beat the hell out of her, no? Well, if you scroll further down Blackstone's commentaries, you find other things like this: 

The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction[h]. For, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children; for whom the master or parent is also liable in some cases to answer. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds[i]; and the husband was prohibited to use any violence to his wife, aliter quam ad virum, ex causa regiminis et castigationis uxoris suae, licite et rationabiliter pertinet[k]. The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife; allowing him, for some misdemesnors, flagellis et fustibus acriter verberare uxorem; for others, only modicam castigationem adhibere[l].-433- But, with us, in the politer reign of Charles the second, this power of correction began to be doubted[m]: and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband[n]; or, in return, a husband against his wife[o]. Yet the lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their antient privilege: and the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour[p].

What does this mean in practice? Great question. It seems almost certain that "moderate correction" as understood in 1770 is a lot more coercive than it would be interpreted as today. But still, what exactly could you do, at what points in time? It's not as simple as it might seem. 

Bear in mind that what you are describing is a question of power. And as I've said before, in some sense, all power is informal power. People face lots of constraints on their behavior, not just being thrown in prison. 

Let's take as given that Sir Matthew Hale is right, which seems likely, and if you decided to rape your wife, the law wouldn't care. Well, were there any other constraints? 

If the average man had the option to rape his wife whenever he felt like, how many times per week, month or year, do you think he'd actually be up for this? If your model of male sexual desire is that what is sought is "penis in vagina, plus orgasm", then the answer is probably quite a bit. But this is an absurdly reductionist model of male desire, as I've argued in the case of strip clubs (where people pay more money to not bang strippers than they would to bang hookers). The alternative view, even in the case of a monarch, is still best summarized by Joseph Heller. As I said previously:

"In his novel, God Knows, Joesph Heller describes the situation of an aging King David. He has his various courtesans, but can no longer get aroused by them. The only woman who still holds his sexual interest is his wife, Bathsheba. But Bathsheba no longer desires him - her only interest is to try to get David to make her own son, Solomon, the next king in place of his elder son, Adonijah, whom he had with another woman.

Heller describes very aptly the paradoxical situation of the absolute monarch who, due to the difficulty of male desire, cannot have what he really wants

Abishag showed him the door and petted my heaving chest until she felt my exasperation abate. Then she washed and dried herself, perfumed her wrists and armpits, and removed her robe to stand before me a moment in all her wonderful virginal nakedness before raising a leg gracefully to enter my bed on one of her biscuit-brown knees to lie down with me again. Naturally, it did no good. I got no heat then, either. I wanted my wife. I want my wife now. Bathsheba does not believe this and would not let it make a difference if she did.

“I don’t do things like that anymore,” Bathsheba responds firmly each time I ask, and, if out of sorts, adds, “I am sick of love.”

She lost her lust when she found her vocations. Her first was to be a queen. Too bad that we had no queens. The next was to be a queen mother, the first in our history, the widowed mother of a reigning sovereign. I refused to trade and I refused to grovel. I could order her into my bed with a single cursory command, of course, and she certainly would be here. But it would be begging, wouldn't it? I am David the king, and I must try not to beg. But God knows that, by one means or another, I am going to lie with her at least one more time before I give up the ghost and bring my fantastic story to an end.

Worldly absolute power does not, alas, extend to making other people actually want you on the terms that you would like."

At the risk of sounding ridiculous or insensitive, it is worth considering all the boring and practical ways that marital rape might not actually be that much fun for most men. There's social aspects like that she might complain to her friends and neighbours, which would embarrass you. Okay, let's assume you can stop this with the generous "physical discipline" exemptions you were also granted by the law. But what if she were just really sad and miserable all the time? What's the plan then - beat her some more until she's happy all the time? How's that going to work? What if, once you start raping her, she's just not very horny for you any more, which is probably what you really wanted in the first place? What if, once you start raping her, rape is now the only way you can bang her at all? Was this ... what you wanted?

And this is even while treating the women as mostly passive in this equation - having no options other than just being sad. What if there's a risk she might poison you (which definitely happened)? What if she's just well experienced at manipulating you into doing what she wants? 

To put all this in stark terms - what fraction of married men in, say, 1700, above age 40 or 50 or whatever, who had been married for some extended period of time, had vaguely unsatisfied sex lives where they didn't bang their wives as much as they wanted, or didn't bang very often, or just didn't bang at all, lax marital rape laws notwithstanding?

I genuinely don't know. I suspect it was higher than most people think, though probably lower than today, but that you should probably have quite wide confidence intervals over this question. What historical sources would we turn to to answer this question? It's tough. What man is likely to commit to paper words to the effect of "Wife still won't bang me, I'm still annoyed at this fact" given the costs of publishing at the time, not to mention the embarrassment involved in the admission?

Among the many things you could read, let me point you to just one snapshot to ponder - not for this question specifically, but the related question of daily marriage dynamics. This comes from one of Australia's great poets, Henry Lawson. It's from 1897. If you prefer song form to poems, Slim Dusty wrote an excellent song from it

Written Afterwards 

So the days of my tramping are over,
And the days of my riding are done
I’m about as content as a rover
Will ever be under the sun;
I write, after reading your letter
My pipe with old memories rife
And I feel in a mood that had better
Not meet the true eyes of the wife. 

You must never admit a suggestion
That old things are good to recall;
You must never consider the question:
‘Was I happier then, after all?’
You must banish the old hope and sorrow
That make the sad pleasures of life,
You must live for To-day and To-morrow
If you want to be just to the wife. 

I have changed since the first day I kissed her.
Which is due Heaven bless her! to her;
I’m respected and trusted I’m ‘Mister,’
Addressed by the children as ‘Sir.’
And I feel the respect without feigning
But you’d laugh the great laugh of your life
If you only saw me entertaining
An old lady friend of the wife. 

By-the-way, when you’re writing, remember
That you never went drinking with me,
And forget our last night of December,
Lest our sev’ral accounts disagree.
And, for my sake, old man, you had better
Avoid the old language of strife,
For the technical terms of your letter
May be misunderstood by the wife. 

Never hint of the girls appertaining
To the past (when you’re writing again),
For they take such a lot of explaining,
And you know how I hate to explain.
There are some things, we know to our sorrow,
That cut to the heart like a knife,
And your past is To-day and To-morrow
If you want to be true to the wife. 

I believe that the creed we were chums in
Was grand, but too abstract and bold,
And the knowledge of life only comes in
When you’re married and fathered and old.
And it’s well. You may travel as few men,
You may stick to a mistress for life;
But the world, as it is, born of woman
Must be seen through the eyes of the wife. 

No doubt you are dreaming as I did
And going the careless old pace,
While my future grows dull and decided,
And the world narrows down to the Place.
Let it be. If my ‘treason’s’ resented,
You may do worse, old man, in your life;
Let me dream, too, that I am contented

For the sake of a true little wife.

I find this poem wonderful, hilarious, and above all, utterly credible. It fits the observation I remember from Ben Folds that writing about a character can be a way of writing about oneself without it being lewd. At 130 years old, it still reads as quite fresh - the main things that give away its age are technological references - they ride horses, rather than drive cars, and they write letters, rather than phone or send emails.

But count the themes that you might not have expected from Australia in the 19th century. 

-The narrator had affairs with women when he was young and single

-These sounded less like "relationships" and more like "getting boozed with your friends and picking up women" 

Parenthetically, it's also worth wondering who these women were - they might have been prostitutes, but also might just be ordinary girls. Remember, there's an adding up constraint that makes the average number of sexual partners equal at all times. So "men having sex before marriage" has to map to either "regular non-prostitute women also having sex before marriage", "married women having affairs with single men" or "a lot more prostitutes, with these being the only option for single men". For reference here, some estimates are that a third of rural New England brides in the 1780s and 1790s were pregnant at the time of marriage, and even the low estimates at that time are around 10%.

-He is now married, and while overall grateful for this fact, finds it less exciting than single life in some respects, and feels himself somewhat whipped and constrained

-He endeavors to conceal all of the above from his wife, out of consideration for her feelings. 

The last part is especially worth pondering. He wants to protect her from finding out about his past dalliances because it will make her sad, and he loves her. This is described, over and over, as a constraint on what he can say and do. It doesn't carry any force of law, but it doesn't need to. Power is messy and complicated. Does he have the power to make his wife miserable? Well, sort of, in principle, but don't we all? He's probably not worried about being divorced, but it still doesn't seem like much fun. 

Now, I'm not saying that "this is just like modernity!", or that if we could see their day-to-day lives, we'd think them the same as ours (for one small snapshot, his children refer to him as "sir"). But this is obvious - the ways in which the past was totally different in sex relations are taken for granted. The ways in which they might be basically the same are much harder to see.

To take one final example that's a good test of patriarchal authority. Let's define the minimum set of conditions that we can all agree a patriarch would want. If you love your wife, and control her sexually, and can threaten her with violence for misbehaving, what is the minimum thing you probably want to prevent?

You would want to prevent her from flagrantly banging many other men against your wishes.

Surely this would go triply so if you were a man of wealth, strength and power. Surely, surely, this would apply if you were the most powerful man in Europe, and probably the world?

Like, say, Napoleon Bonaparte?

Read this amazing twitter thread. Some especially choice parts:

In 1796 Napoleon wrote:

“You do not write me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters afford him, and you do not write him six lines of even haphazard scribble.”

Joséphine had the GALL to come visit Napoleon with the man she was cheating on him with. And when Napoleon came for her, she was nowhere to be seen:

“I arrive at Milan, I rush into your apartment, I have left everything to see you, to press you in my arms…you were not there”

How much power did Napoleon Bonaparte have over Josephine? How much did the patriarchy help him here? Lest you think this is an isolated example, King George IV was not able to divorce his wife Queen Caroline despite the long rumors of her infidelity. Which is to say, at a bare minimum he was not able to prevent her acting in ways that generated persistent rumors of her being unfaithful to him, even though this annoyed him greatly, and he was the King! You can find similar rumors (though disputed) about Marcus Aurelius' wife. Obviously, this model doesn't apply to all men either, or even most men either (the model that "all wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity" as applied to several hundred years ago is surely a worse model than "zero wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity"). But these examples are telling you that the reality was considerably more complex than either of these.  

The narrow lesson here is that we don't actually know how much the things we call "the patriarchy" actually constrained day-to-day life for most married couples. It definitely would do some things, maybe even a lot (birthrates were certainly very different, but contraception was probably also a lot less reliable. Divorce rates were enormously different). But there are reasons to think it might matter less in many day-to-day aspects than most people (certainly most feminists) imagine. Even Augustus, with all his power, was unable to substantially reform Rome's sexual morality. 

But the broader lesson is worth pondering - power is often informal, and so the officially written down rules may not always affect things on the ground in the same way. Pushing on "laws" and "policies" may not solve as many things as we think it will. Laws are nearly always buttressed by social aspects whose actual application and level of enforcement in day to day life may be hard to know. If we implement our best idea of what things used to be like long ago, they may work in different ways than we think, or may not work at all. 

Or as the great Samuel Johnson put it:

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,
Our own felicity we make or find.

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.