Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is
the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode
number 166. 6.
We open our episode today with a quote.
The money quote, as the boys in marketing used to
quip back in the day, that defines the direction
we will be headed in in the book that we are going to be talking
about today. But it's not only the direction in the book that we're going
to be talking about today. Not only is it the
direction of the themes around the book we are going to be talking about today,
but it is also the direction. It also defines the direction of the next
few episodes of the podcast that you are going to be
hearing as we close out this next
season or this last season of the show.
By last, I don't mean final, I just mean the most recent.
Let's go to the money quote and I quote when one
gets a close view of the influential people, their
bad relations with each other, their conflicting ambitions, all the
slander and the hatred, one must always bear in
mind that it is certainly much worse on the other side among the
French, English and Russians, or one might well be
nervous. The race for power and personal
positions seems to destroy men's characters.
I believe that the only creature who can keep his honor is a man
living on his own estate. He has no need for
intrigue and struggle, for it is no good. Intriguing
for fine weather. Close
quote the title
of our book today asks a truly intriguing question,
or poses a truly intriguing question that we guests and
myself alike have struggled to answer definitively when using the
platform of this show.
The point of this podcast, of course, is threefold. If you needed a reminder,
number one, to build a platform to read and analyze books through the lens of
leadership number two, to build relationships and connections with our
audience and our guests in order to test and validate the power of
human wisdom in these algorithmically driven times
and three to build and maintain a launchpad for human
solutions to the very human problems that continue to be double
us in our technologically sophisticated yet
culturally barbaric age here in the West.
The author of our book Today was a
historian of World War I and World War
II. He was a man who came
from modest origins, and while, yes, he did
indeed have an ego, he understood that
history is the tank. An
object about which he knew quite a bit is the tank that overruns
us all he
personified in many ways the ideas
of an older world, a more Greek
philosophical world, a world driven
not by corporate ambitions or by social
media likes. A world driven not by financializing
everything out to its furthest end. A world
not driven by spectacle and a lack of
shame. He was the last tie
to an older aristocracy, a European
aristocracy that all went to hell
in the fires of. Of World War I.
Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will be introducing and
discussing multiple themes from the book
titled why Don't We Learn from History
by B.H. liddell Hart.
Leaders. To quote from our author today, and I quote
in strategy, the longest way round is
often the shortest way home.
And so we open today with some of
BH Liddell Hart's thoughts on why don't
we learn from History. We open with
his chapter that he begins this book with History and
truth. Now this book is a.
Is public domain. You can go and get it anywhere.
The copy that I get that I have was edited with an
introduction by Gills Lauren
and, and the book features. Well, the book is divided into.
Into three parts. So history and truth, Government and
freedom and war and peace. And in each area
he writes or Liddell Hart documents in
a few essays his thoughts on, well,
the various areas that he is. He is writing about. Think of it
like a, like a, like a substack, right, but
just put into a book form from the, from the
1970s. And so we open up
in the volume that I have with the treatment of
history and I quote directly from
why Don't We Learn from History by B.H.
liddell Hart. An increasing number of modern historians
such as Veronica Wedgwood have shown that good history and good reading
can be blended. And thus by displacing the mythologists,
they are bringing history back to the service of humanity. Even
so, the academic suspicion of literary style
still lingers. Such pendants
may be well reminded of the proverb, hard writing makes easy reading,
such hard writing makes for hard thinking.
Far more effort is required to epitomize facts with clarity than
to express them cloudily. Misstatements can be more easily
spotted in sentences that are crystal clear than those that are
cloudy. The writer has to be more
careful if he is not to be caught out than thus care in writing
makes for care in treating the material of history to
evaluate it correctly. The effort
towards deeper psychological analysis is good so long as
perspective is kept. It is equally good that the varnish should be scraped off
so long as the true grain of the character is revealed. It is not
so good except for selling success. When Victorian varnish is
replaced by cheap staining colored to suit the taste for
scandal. Moreover, the study of personality is apt
to be pressed so far that it throws the performance into the background.
This certainly simplifies the task of the biographer. Who can dispense with the need
for a knowledge of the field in which his subject found his
life's work. Can we imagine a great statesman without statecraft, A
great general without war, A great scientist without science, A great writer without
literature that would look strangely nude and often
commonplace? A question often
debated is whether history is a science or an art.
The true answer would seem to be that history is a science
and an art. The subject must be approached in a
scientific spirit of inquiry. Facts must be treated with scientific care, for accuracy.
But they cannot be interpreted without the aid of imagination and
intuition. The sheer quantity of evidence is so
overwhelming that selection is inevitable. Where there is selection,
there is art. Exploration should be
objective, but selection is subjective. Its subjectiveness can and
should be controlled by scientific method and objectiveness. Too many people go
into history merely in search of texts for their sermons instead
of facts for analysis. But after analysis
comes art to bring out the meaning and to ensure it
becomes known. It was the school
of German historians headed by Reinke who in the last century
started the fashion of trying to be purely scientific. That fashion
spread to our own schools of history. Any conclusions or
generalizations were shunned and any well written books became
suspect. What was the result? History became too
dull to read and devoid of meaning. It became merely
a subject for study, but by specialists.
So the void was filled by new myths of exciting
power but appalling consequences.
The world has suffered and Germany worst of all for
the sterilization of history that started
in Germany. So what are we
to make of Sir Basil
Henry Liddell Hart? Well, he was
born October 31, 1895
at the close of what had been a very long 19th
century. And he died January 29,
1970, close to the end of what was to
prove to be an equally long 20th century.
He was commonly known throughout most of his
career, which a bit big chunk of it was spent in the service
of the British military as Captain BH
Lidell Hart. Not only was he a British
soldier, he was also a military historian and a military
theorist. Lidell Hart was
born in Paris and was the son of a Methodist
minister. From these humble origins,
Liddell Hart matriculated through school. And as a child
he was fascinated by the field of aviation.
The budding field of aviation that had begun at
Kitty with the Wright brothers successful plane flight at
Kitty Hawk. When World War I began
in August of 1914, Liddell
Hart volunteered for the British army where he became
an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light infantry
in December. And he served with the regiment on the
Western Front. As a result of
his participation at the Battle of the Somme, where The British lost
60,000 men, still
the largest one battle loss of British
soldiers in all of English history.
He wrote a series of
histories of major military figures after he
mustered out of the British military in the mid
to late 1920s. By the way, he wrote these histories
by going around and actually talking to the people who were
involved in World War I, who were involved in the
battles, who were involved in the maneuvers. And he didn't just
limit himself to talking to folks in Europe who had been
involved in the battles at various Verdun or at the
Somme or even other places. He also
traversed the Atlantic and came over and talked to
American officers and American soldiers
who had been in the war. He
advanced his ideas as a result of these kinds of
conversations that the frontal assault was a
strategy bound to fail at great cost in lives
later on. Of course, this would be one of the titular
lessons learned from the disasters of the Western Front in
trench warfare and continuous frontal
assault. By the way, Liddell Hart was.
Was injured in a poisonous gas attack during a
frontal assault during World War I. Before he
participated in the Battle of the Somme.
Liddell Hart argued throughout his
histories and throughout the the mid-20s
and then well after World War I. He argued that the tremendous losses
British suffered in the Great War, which is what World War I was called
before World War II came along. He argued that the tremendous losses Britain
suffered were caused by its commanding officers not
appreciating certain facts of
history. And he spent the rest of his career
trying to correct not only British
generals, but to correct the military historical record.
Not about what has his necessity, not necessarily about what happened
during World War I. But he attempted to correct the.
The record on what could have been done better,
what had been done badly and what could.
What could be gleaned from such
disasters so that future wars would be run
differently. By the way, in the mid
to late 1920s, Lidell Hart
was an advisor to. To. To
Chamberlain and he was an advisor to. To Churchill.
And then later on after the war he became
much more of a public historian in the British imagination
and in the British. Among the British populace.
So this guy was the guy who stood
next to the guy who made the decisions and impacted a lot of
people both before World War
II and after.
So back to the book. Back to why Don't We
Learn From History by B.H. liddell Hart? So we're going to pick
up in the section
labeled or titled not labeled, titled. War
and Peace. Now this section is really interesting because you would think that he would
start off with this section in the book, but
instead he begins with history and truth. He moves into
government and freedom. A lot of interesting things to note in
that section including, and you may want to pick this book up
just for this little essay in here in Government and Freedom
alone, the Psychology of Dictatorship,
which has this great quote in it that I underlined. The effect of power on
the mind of the man who possesses it, especially when he has
gained it by successful aggression, tends to be remarkably similar
in every age and in every country. Close quote.
Now, how aggression is defined, of course, differs from time to
time. Your. Your definition
of aggression and my definition of aggression in the pursuit of
acquiring power will vary.
Anyway, moving into the section on War and Peace. So it opens up
with the. With an essay on the desire for
power. And here Liddell Hart makes
this. He opens with this point which I think is. Is important to
reference. Before we get to our main piece here that I want to read. He
says this history shows that a main hindrance to real progress
is the ever popular myth of the quote unquote great man.
While greatness may perhaps be used in a comparative sense, if
even then referring to. Referring more to particular quality qualities
than to the embodied some. The quote unquote great man is a
clay idol whose pedestal has been built up by the natural human desire
to look up to someone, but whose form has been carved by
men who have not yet outgrown the desire to be regarded
or to picture themselves as great men. Close
quote. When I read that, I was immediately put
in mind of the Percy Shelley
poem Ozymandias. He goes
into a discussion later on in this section on War and Peace,
where he tries to define real politic. And then
he talks about in relation to realpolitik and
the value of patriotism,
but in contrast to, particularly in a
diplomatic sense and in a policy sense, the value of decency,
honesty and thought. He makes this point, which I
want to read from directly underneath. The
importance of keeping promises.
And I quote, civilization is built on the practice of
keeping promises. It may not sound like a high attainment,
but if trust in its observance be shaken, the whole
structure cracks and sinks any
constructive effort. And all human relations, personal, political and
commercial, depend on being able to depend on promises.
This truth has a reflection on the question of collective security among
nations and on the lessons of history in regard to that subject in the
years before the war. By the way, Pause. He's talking about
World War II here. Back to the book. The charge was
constantly broken that its supporters were courting the risk of war by their exaggerated
respect for covenants. Although they may have been fools
in disregarding the conditions necessary for the effective fulfillment of pledges,
they at least showed themselves men of honor and in a long view of
a more fundamental common sense than those who argued that we should give aggressors
a free hand so long as they left us alone.
History has shown repeatedly that the hope of
buying safety in this way is the
greatest of delusions.
So here's a question for you as a leader and we
as we finally have said enough of
set enough of a stage to be able to talk coherently
about BH Ladell Hart's book why don't we learn from history
and of course relate that to leadership? So
here's a leadership question for you. Something to think about.
Do we continue to live in America?
Not globally, just in the United States of America? This
is the United States of America specific question. Do we
or do we not live in a high trust society?
That's actually a really good question. Because if you look around
at Substack and at Medium, if you look at
Twitter and Blue sky, if you buy
into the ideas that are fomented by folks like
or not fomented, but that have been researched by folks like Jonathan Haidt
and Steven Pinker and many others,
you would think that we are at times of great
political alienation and
polarization, not just between
individuals of different political stripes, but even now,
individuals of different genders.
In the last election, the last presidential election in 2024,
more men, particularly young men, drifted
or directly voted for for the
right leaning candidate for President of the
United States than ever before. And more
women voted for the left leaning presidential candidate
for the President of the United States of America than ever before.
Is this a sign of a decline in erosion in trust or is this a
sign more of the sorting that
naturally has occurred in America ever since our
founding? Here's another place where
this question becomes interesting. If we are a low trust
society, or if we are no longer a high trust society, then
why do services such as Uber
and Airbnb, why do those services work?
Why do I agree to stay in a stranger's house in a
strange city and I've never met that stranger before
and I book their house through an app. Or
why do I agree to get into a stranger's personal car
without a taxicab medallion? That person does not
have the imprimatur of the state upon them. They
are not licensed to be a taxicab driver and
yet I have an app on my phone I
ordered from them the their own car
and they come and pick me up and I anticipate that they will take
me safely whether I am a male or a female, it is or
child, it doesn't really matter. I anticipate that they will take me safely
to where it is I am supposed to go, drop me off and then in
some cases come back and get me.
These services exist and they started on the Internet with paypal
and and other services and of course auction sites
like ebay really were the grandfathers
of Uber and Airbnb. But these services
are could only work in a high trust society.
If we were a low trust society, a society high in corruption,
a society high in a lack of government actually
working, if we were a society that
was one where tribe mattered more
than neighborhood or even state or
community, none of these basic services would work.
So how do we square that circle in our modern era with
what is seemingly a decline in trust?
The decline in trust can be seen in the decline of marital
commitments foundational to the building and maintaining of a society and
culture since the advent of no fault divorce in California in the
1970s all the way through to our current
era of intergender sniping and fault finding
online and in social media.
This has been marked not only through means of communication, but has also
been noted by many professionals in various fields. And this
perception of a decline in trust has filtered down
to the transactions and services that people provide each other. Not
necessarily with the mediator of an app or phone, but
with the services we provide where there is no
mediator. And now I have to deal with you face to face.
This has happened to me recently, by the way. One day on the show
I will talk about my
challenges in the summer of 2025 working with
the airlines. Trust me, customer
service, which used to be the hallmark of a high trust society,
or at least the hallmark of our high trust society.
If my experience is any evidence, customer service
is on the decline and has been for quite some time.
This creates a paradox, right where we have more access than
ever before to the means of getting a service or obtaining a product
from another person we've never met and yet we have lower trust
in people. Actually behaving like sane human beings than
ever before. And we seem more and more eager to outsource
more and more of that sanity to screens into algorithms,
to have mediators in our phones. And
between us, we have no way,
of course, to talk about this out loud. And you know,
we hide our concerns behind contracts and lawsuits,
behind increasing regulations and ethical compliance schemes.
And none of these things reflect a common
shared sense of social solidarity. None of these
tools really go to what
Liddell Hart pointed out here, which
is the fact that any constructive
effort in all human relations, personal, political and commercial,
depend on being able to depend on
promises, leaders.
One of the things we have to do is we have to get back to
promises and actually fulfilling those
all the way down to the granular
level.
All right, back to the book. Back to why don't we learn from History
by B H Liddell Hart? We pick up in
Government and Freedom with the
continuation of his conversation, which
precedes the conversation that we just read from
around. Government and Freedom talks about authority,
the men behind the scenes, the restraints of democracy and how power
politics works in relation to history in a
democracy. And then he, then he
gets into the idea of what advisors
look like and, and, well, he.
He talks about self made despotic rulers
in pattern of dictatorship. And I
quote, we learn from history that self made
despotic rulers fall follow a standard pattern
in gaining power. They exploit, consciously or unconsciously, a
state of popular dissatisfaction with the existing regime or of hostility
between different sections of people. They attack the existing
regime violently and combine their appeal to discontent with unlimited
promises which, if successful, they fulfill only to a limited
extent. They claim that they want absolute power for only a short
time, but quote, unquote, find subsequently that the time to
relinquish it never comes. They excite
popular sympathy by presenting the picture of a conspiracy against them. And
use this as a lever to gain a firmer hold at some crucial stage
on gaining power. They soon begin to rid themselves of their chief helpers,
discovering that those who brought about the new order have suddenly become
traitors to it. They suppress criticism on one pretext or
another. And punish anyone who mentions facts which, however true, are
unfavorable to their policy. They enlist
religion on their side if possible, or if its leaders are not compliant, foster a
new kind of religion subservient to their ends.
They spend public money lavishly on material works of a striking kind.
In compensation for the freedom of spirit and thought of which they have robbed the
public. They manipulate the currency to make the economic
position of the state appear better than it is in reality.
They ultimately make war on some other state as a means of diverting attention from
internal conditions and allowing discontent to explode outward.
They use the rallying cry of patriotism as a means of riveting
the chains of their personal authority more firmly to the people.
They expand the superstructure of the state while undermining its foundations by breeding
sycophants at the expense of self respecting collaborators,
by appealing to the popular taste for the grandiose and sensational and
instead of true values, and by fostering a romantic instead of a realistic
view, thus ensuring the ultimate collapse under their
successors, if not themselves, of what they have created.
This political confidence trick itself, a familiar string of
tricks, has been repeated all down the ages,
yet it rarely fails to take in
a fresh generation.
So I read that for a reason.
In our current era, words
we are struggling with words having meanings.
Words, terms, phrases are thrown around in the general
communication culture of the United States in the year of our Lord
2025, and have been for about the last 20 years.
And instead of being used to actually educate the public on
history or entertain us with myth, instead words
are used to run psychological operations on the
culture and to propagandize and manipulate
listeners. In our current
era, at least since the bad Orange
man came down the escalator in 2015,
words such as fascist, socialist,
authoritarianism, and other lightning
rod terms that have meaning in the context of a
post World War II time that Liddell Hart was
writing about, but that have zero meaning 80 years later, words
such as these and other terms are used either to create an
environment of political and social action, or
they're used insidiously to suppress or socially
sanction political or social action.
This is not good. As a
person who understands that words have meaning, as a person who reads books,
it is the responsibility, at least I believe it is the responsibility of leaders and
to examine the words that they are using and
to hesitate to use words and to speak
succinctly, yes, of course, but also to speak accurately.
And using such terms casually
as fascist or socialist or
authoritarianism or even, or even
dictatorship, or the pejorative term which used to be the
name of a man, and you know which man I'm talking
about, utilizing these terms
casually in terms of or in, in the space of
Internet memes or tweets or messages or
appeals to action, this indicates
a laziness not only of thought, as George Orwell would say,
but a laziness of consideration
for the trust placed in each other by our fellow
man. It indicates a sense that we just believe
society and culture will somehow miraculously just keep going,
even if we behave like totally depraved
fools with our language.
This is what I mean by cultural barbarity, by the way.
Technological sophistication and yet extreme
cultural barbarity. It isn't just
the abortions and the birth control, the
pornography and the
gender transitions that
are messing us up. It's
primarily our inability to speak
about these things clearly in
order to weave back together the social fabric.
Instead, we use these words, we use these inaccurate terms,
or we use accurate terms inaccurately and lazily
in order to tear the social fabric apart.
Historians, educators and others have always leveraged words,
terms and phrases in order to create and shape and change
cultural myths. And they have done this in
order to uplift a culture and to push
it to higher levels of confidence. Or they have done it
insidiously and intentionally to
suppress confidence and repress people's ability
to either act in a crisis or to
plan with calm. One of the things
that technologists such as Peter Thiel
and Sam Altman and others point out is that
and it's equipped. But it's true. In our time,
we were promised by the visionary builders
of the post World War II era that we would have
vacations to the moon and settlements on Mars by this
point in the 21st century. And instead all we
got was 140 to 240 characters
and DoorDash seems like a
comedown, right? But you can't have
innovative technology if you don't have
innovative thought. And you can't have innovative thought
if you possess lazy and degraded language.
And you cannot have innovative actions and
innovative objects with lazy integrated thinking
that is expressed in lazy integrated language.
This is why on this show I am careful with the words that I pick,
even the words that are pejorative words.
I know that many of you may not agree with me. You're going to look
for other places where
the erosion is occurring. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of other
places where cultural erosion is occurring. And there are
plenty of fingers to point at plenty of different folks for our current state of
cultural barbarity. But I
believe fundamentally that when we throw
around terms like Chiclets
that we really don't understand, not only do we
degrade the term itself and its power,
but we also degrade the person using it, and we degrade our neighbor,
and we degrade our ability to innovate past
the problems that we have because we are reflecting
a degraded ability to even think clearly
and cohesively and cogently about
the problems that we have.
This is a real problem for leaders. And so I encourage
leaders to understand that words have meanings
despite our feelings about those words, and to
be careful, clear and concise in what words
we use to lead others.
As we close out our show today, I have a few final
thoughts and I'm going to start with maybe a basic observation here.
First off, we are going to talk about why don't we learn from History
with Tom Libby coming up on our next episode of this show. So
I would encourage you to, to listen to that episode
and I anticipate we're going to have a great conversation. Tom always brings
more to the table than I can in these, in these introductory solo
episodes. But these introductory solo episodes are important as a way
of anchoring my
thoughts for you around the books that we cover on
this show. And we're going to continue this next next year
starting in January 2026, we're going to probably go to
covering about two to three books a month and with a couple of
bonus episodes thrown in there, we're going to keep the mash up episodes that we've
been doing this year. We've done two of them so far. We're going to keep
those maybe one every every four months. But we
are going to keep this pattern of an introductory episode, then the main book with
the guests and another director episode and then a second main book with the guest.
And and while that will spread out the number of books that we will be
covering in toto on this show,
ultimately I think we'll be able to go deeper in each book that we
cover. And why don't we Learn from History is
a, it's a small book. It's only, only 126 pages so you
could get through it. It's a quick read. You can get through it in a,
in a, in an afternoon probably. And it's probably
better than watching whatever it is you may have in
your Amazon prime and or Netflix queue
or better than doom scrolling through Tick Tock or Instagram reels.
Now to my point. Point. So
I often think of in these times in which I live as I get
older I think of or I wonder
what my father would have said about times
such as these. My father
was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He was
born in the late 1940s
in in northern Kentucky slash southern
Ohio and and
he was a man who was a hard working blue collar guy most of his
life. He valued education. He valued the written
word. He valued
getting knowledge and understanding because that was the way out of the
rural situation into which he was born.
And the black rural underclass in the American
south in the mid 20th century did not
have it easy by any stretch of the imagination.
And so my father, who did towards the end of
his life use the Internet for
genealogical research purposes, he was fascinated by finding
out more about where his relatives came from from
and who they were and, and ultimately, I guess, why they
came here. He was fascinated by history. He was
also, as most baby boomer generation folks are,
he was fascinated by the Internet.
I am less fascinated by the Internet.
I've been through four revolutions. They feel like four
wars. And I've said this before on this show with guests, but I've been
through four revolutions. And most folks who were born in between
1960 and
1979 or 1965 and
1979, depending upon sort of where you, where you hit Gen X at.
Most of us have been through four or some cases five
revolutions. First it started with the Internet
and dial up. Then we all went through the, the dot com
revolution. Then we went through social media and
the rise of the promise of virtual reality and
then cryptocurrencies, most notoriously
blockchain and bitcoin powered by
blockchain. And then we got to the promise of,
and we are at the dawn of the cusp of the promise of
algorithmic power delivered to us through the
LLMs. But what does all this have to do with my father? What
does this have to do with BH Liddell Hart? What does this have to do
with? Why don't we learn from history? Well, here's what this all
has to do. I'm going to tie everything together for leaders here at the end.
The question for leaders, the question for my father. Question for me, the question for
you. No matter what historical time in which we live, the question for
us is why don't we learn from history? Why do we
insist on believing that somehow
we're better or smarter, more
intelligent than those who came before us? Why
do we confuse our technological prowess
with actual hard earned wisdom? The
21st century is already shaping up to be a
time of technological wonder. I don't doubt that
the next 50 years are going to deliver some of the most
gee whiz, technological advancements
ever imagined. And yet,
and yet the human heart won't change, which means
culture will continue to go through polarizations and
splits, unitings and mergings,
coming apart and moving togethers.
If we are to avoid and by we, I mean us in the United States
of America. But I also mean we as in humanity, and of course we
more generally in the West. If we are to avoid committing the same mistakes
that our forefathers committed, only with greater levels of death,
misery, loss, degradation and cultural
stagnation than before, then we need to cling to the raft of history
or we will find ourselves flung ashore
and washed up on strange lands.
The farmer, the factory worker, the plumber and the PhD
all need to put down their arrogance and their pride
and their hubris, which our
Internet searches have infected us with, and learn the hard
lessons from history and then apply those hard
lessons to fundamental problems that we have now.
And understanding all the while that while technology may change,
and while those wonders I do believe will occur, that's also not
assured. While technology may change, human nature
fundamentally does not. We
can do nothing or very little, little to change human
nature. Human power can't do it.
Mark Zuckerberg is still going to be greedy and Sam
Altman is still going to have a lust for power.
The bad orange man is still going to be bad
and the lady who ran for president is still
going to be power hungry. Those
problems of power, of greed
or desire for power, lust for power, avarice, greed,
self deception, these problems
can only be resolved by changing the human heart.
And the changes of the human heart are reflected in how
we study history.
I am going to advocate here, here at the end of this show today
and for the remainder of our time for a more
conservative reading of history. And I don't mean conservative
as in politically conservative, although these days everything is political.
Am I right? A more conservative reading of history
would look at history as a struggle not between the forces of
progress and the forces of stagnation, but instead it
would look at history as a struggle, an endless struggle, a
as Superman might say, a never ending battle of men,
and I mean women and men of humans to overcome
themselves and to overcome their base instincts
more often rather than less often. And to do so,
not to become great. I actually kind of agree with what
BH Ladell Hart said there about great men.
Not to become great, but merely to be
better than those who came before
them and better just meaning
making all new mistakes with all different sins.
A more conservative reading of history is what we require as a nation state.
It's what we require as individuals. It's what we require in our educational
systems. It's what we require in our TikTok videos. It's what we require
in our houses, around our dinner tables. It's what we require in the conversations we
have with our kids. It's what we require in the conversations we have with
ourselves after we put down our books and we
reflect, sitting quietly on a park bench like
Keanu Reeves in that meme, just eating lunch.
It's also what we require in order to avoid the exegesis,
the exegesis of war and
conflict. Is it
better to have fights on social media than it is to shoot your neighbor?
I don't know. Is it better to outsource your base
desires to objects and to animals that cannot reciprocate
than to try to unite and connect with human beings
that are flawed and angry and probably don't want to connect with you
or are going to have their own problems? Maybe.
Is it better to sever connections from people and families
who disrespect you and deny whatever you may believe your core
identity is? Maybe. Maybe
not. These are questions, among many,
many others that history and literature
can answer more definitively for us
than any business book, politician, economic
theory, or social theory of ordering people ever could.
Why don't we study history? I don't
really. But
we're gonna find out, right?
And. Well,
that's it for me.