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.
