Much of life is an illusion. We perceive things to be a certain way because our limited perspective doesn’t provide full context.
Freedom is one of them. A person feels free only insofar as they feel capable of doing something without permission or external constraints. But like everything else, context can create an illusion.
Imagine two children growing up in the same household. One goes to bed early and rises early. The other is a night owl. The former won’t feel restricted by a strict curfew by their parents. The latter will feel controlled. But both are equally constrained.
Too many people think they’re free when they’re actually on a leash, however long or short. The illusion is maintained only as long as they remain within its length, or their master chooses not to pull on it. The illusion of freedom often makes one blind to the leash as it shortens.
There’s no better way to tell someone didn’t learn their lesson after a conflict than when they choose to focus on the real or perceived wrongdoings of the winner rather than how they won.
Julius Caesar. Alexander the Great. Charlemagne. Martin Luther. Oliver Cromwell. George Washington. The boys at the Alamo. Abraham Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt. Winston Churchill. Ho Chi Minh. The Taliban. Bashar al-Assad. Vladimir Putin.
Fill in whatever person or group comes to mind that has amassed a fanbase of haters who think there’s nothing to learn from these people and the only emotion to have toward them is contempt.
At a micro-level and in a more conventional context, it could be a soccer, football, or baseball team.
Or, say, a hockey team. For years the Soviets crushed everyone at the Olympics. Herb Brooks studied their strategy to figure out how to beat them, then trained his team accordingly.
That’s how you win. The Soviets were the best, and Brooks realized his boys had to be even better at the game. He didn’t just wallow in self-pity and talk forever about how they’re wicked communists.
Instead, he trained his boys so they put the best goaltender in the world on the bench.
Rocky Balboa gives a great speech to his son in the 2008 film about the difference between winners and losers.
Too often I see the losers (or their descendants) of a conflict fixate on the moral underpinnings or cause, typically by highlighting the failings and crimes of the enemy or their leader. They are blamed for every real and perceived problem going on.
They may be right or wrong, but right doesn’t make might. If it did, then how come the “bad guys” won and continue to win? Virtue matters, but it won’t win fights. Shrewdness, cunningness, brilliance, wit, pragmatism and adaptability make victory possible.
When you lose in a conflict, you don’t wallow in self-pity or focus forever on how bad the other person or group was. You figure out why they won from a practical perspective, and incorporate that into your strategy if you’re still in search of victory.
But perhaps that might require a level of self-awareness that, if it existed before, might have prevented the conflict in a lot of cases.
Authentic virtue is a difficult thing to determine, because many people do the right thing for the “wrong reasons.” They do the right thing because it’s easy to do, the safe thing to do. It’s easy to adhere to a religion or a ideology when it gains you acceptance and a sense of belonging.
Doing the right thing because you’re scared of the risks or loss of something important by doing the wrong thing doesn’t make you virtuous. But, it makes it hard for others to know for sure why you do the things you do, and vice versa.
Putting aside severe or grievous crimes, a man who does the wrong thing out of genuine courage is more virtuous than the man who does the right thing out of cowardice. That doesn’t mean what the coward does is detrimental to the collective good, nor is the brave man’s act beneficial. The issue is one of inner conscience, of true self. Both desire to do the same thing, but one at least is willing to risk loss to get it.
This matters because circumstances change, and a man’s cravenness can be exposed as much as a man’s bravery. When the man is a leader or someone with great power and responsibility, the consequences can be enormous.
This is why the mundane, riskless life produces insincere and disingenuous selves. For a man to truly know another, for him to know his own self, they must endure trials, crisis, and conflicts. He must face loss and perhaps even lose things that matter to him. Those hardships are a refining fire that consume falsities and pretenses so he cannot deceive others or himself.
A lot of people who talk about investing don’t seem to get this. They view it on ideological grounds. Cryptocurrency boys spar it out on social media with gold bugs.
Belief in their chosen investment borders on fanaticism, and when their beloved commodity crashes in value, they rationalize how it’s just a hiccup.
The check can’t be in the mail forever.
Cardinal Richelieu allegedly said treason is merely a matter of dates. The same could be said for effective investing.
If you bought a home and invested in the stock market in 1980, right now you’re making out like a bandit. But if you bought gold at the same time, you’re still waiting to recover the money put in – not the same for someone who bought it in 2003.
The reverse is true for someone who bought a home in 2007 and was forced to sell it in 2009.
If you got into Bitcoin in 2013 and held onto it until now, you’ve made a digital fortune up there with buying a San Francisco home in 1950; but the same can’t be said for someone who bought Bitcoin in March 2021. The same with the GameStop stock roller coaster ride.
When you think about it, this same delusion is found in military theory. Everyone keeps thinking the next war will be determined in a single battle using specific, singularly-focused “bulletproof” strategy. Then it drags on for four years as the bodies stack up.
Der Untergang der Titanic by Willy Stöwer, in the public domain.
There’s a time to fight for something, and then there’s a time to acknowledge the painful truth; it’s mortally wounded.
Just as people can’t recognize the difference between an opening skirmish and the final assault during a conflict, they can’t tell when an organization or institution is showing signs of initial illness or a fatal condition.
Most have an “iceberg” moment. Before it hit the iceberg, the Titanic was afloat and discussions about what to do could account for the ship remaining so. But once it hit the iceberg, it was over. It was going to sink no matter what. Discussions about why, and who was to blame, was irrelevant for anyone on board. The focus was on how to get on a lifeboat or survive without one.
A lot of organizations die because the captains ignore the iceberg and only begin to talk of how to save the ship when it’s tipping downward. The smart sailor doesn’t entertain those arguments; he gets on a lifeboat and finds another ship – ideally with a captain who won’t make the same mistake.
To continue with the analogy, the first (First Class) passengers to accept the boat was sinking survived. Third Class passengers got locked below decks, sentenced to go down with a ship whose fate they had no control over.
In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won,
Sun Tzu
During the Battle of Hattin a Crusader army foolishly marched through the desert outside Jerusalem and found themselves out of water. Saladin harassed them from afar with arrows and light skirmishers, but refused to commit the full weight of his troops into an all-out fight. By their own actions the Crusaders had already doomed themselves, and he knew all he had to do was wear them down until they were too weak to pose a significant threat.
Eventually that moment came, and the Saracens stormed the Crusader’s main defenses with few casualties. The survivors were either butchered or sold into slavery.
The takeaway is that an enemy often weakens you before he commits to an attack. Depending on the situation and context, it takes hours, days, weeks, years or even decades. But the day finally comes when he decides he is ready for a full-on assault.
A lot of people today see the assault happening in front of their very eyes, but think it’s the opening skirmish.
Most fights occur over something other than what triggered it. They’re pretexts. World War I started when a Serbian shot the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne. But the war wasn’t fought over him. A bitter church feud over whether to have pews or chairs in the sanctuary is really a struggle over something else more important but nobody wants to openly discuss.
Famous historical figures often defined history by imposing their will on it. Other times, they merely instigated something that was always beyond their control. Populist movements are always feared because they exist with or without a leader and are harder to defeat than one driven by a few individuals.
People too often confuse the catalyst with the fuel. If you want to avoid a fire, you get rid of the fuel. Catalysts will always come and go. Lighting strikes don’t cause megafires; it’s the fuel loads and overly-dense forestland.
To keep with the analogy, we ignore the fuel because to acknowledge it requires asking where it came from and how it got there. So we let it build up until it bursts into flame, then blame whoever started it as wholly responsible.
I suspect one major cause of the modern psychosis plaguing the West is self-deceit. People lie to themselves, and not about small things. They internalize beliefs that are contradicted every waking hour of the day within countless interactions. It’s like professing the sky to be yellow and water to be on fire. To continue to believe it, you must constantly block those things out of your mind.
The people in charge of things, those in power, pretend to be helpless victims as they lash out at the powerless who are deemed to be covertly controlling everything. Those who are among “the haves” insist they’re one of the “have nots” as they hoard and consolidate even more.
The cowardly and pathetic pretend to be brave and heroic for proclaiming beliefs that involve no risk. They are praised by people who pretend to support out of sincere belief, not complacency or fear of consequences.
All this takes a toll.
Self-deceit is a horrendous vice, but seldom discussed.
“You’re not a wartime consigliere, Tom.” – Michael Corleone
You don’t have a gardener fight your wars, and you don’t have a warrior plant your garden.
Too often today we expect the wrong people to do a job, so it never gets done, or it’s done poorly.
The problem is we assume that someone in a leadership position possesses certain qualities that work well when the group is not in danger. They keep the peace. But peacemakers don’t fight wars.
Some men are suited best to lead during certain times, and when it is over they step down. Some are best suited to preserve and maintain what is; others are good at restoring.
Then there are those are good at destruction.
There is a chronic inability today to differentiate them.
The decay and demise of many institutions come as a surprise to people because they assumed, incorrectly, that those in charge were the kind of men who would hold the line. They weren’t. And the type of men they expect to fix things won’t, because that’s not who they are and never was.
If things get fixed, it will be done by men who do so in spite of intense opposition from the very people they seek to help. If it happens at all.
You can tell someone what you want done, or how you want it done. Many were raised to do the former. Following rules was emphasized over whether or not the goal was achieved. In fact, there was an implicit belief that following the rules mattered more than whether it achieved anything or not. Following the rules was really meant to validate an institution or person.
But too many rules, procedures, methods, and processes don’t have a meaningful lifespan. The only way to navigate the world today is by focusing on the objective and crafting your path accordingly, on what actually works. If you’re trying to summit a mountain and the “official” path is blocked or impassable, you either turn around and quit or you blaze your own trail to the top. Few go on a hike with staying on the official trail as the first and foremost goal.
In 2019 I hiked Eightmile Mountain, which has no trail of any kind. I simply hiked where it was passable. It wasn’t my fondest hikes, and perhaps I could have picked a better approach, but in the end I reached the summit.
