From my notion template – the money quote from the entire book is

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. A very, very detailed account of the Western Hemisphere in the American revolutionary period. What stood out was the detailed accounting of the disease and environmental, both political and natural, factors and a very good accounting of what the world was like at that point. It was a worthy successor to American Colonies

How I Discovered It

The other Alan Taylor books.

Who Should Read It?

Anyone who enjoys world and American history

How the Book Changed Me

How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

• The top things were the concept of wars as a line item, possible then, not so much now, and a very good look at who the players of the revolution were at the time, their incentives, histories and so forth. America was a much more muddled place then than it is now.
• Also – another reminder that Machiavelli basically nailed it with his division of a country being divided into the the people, the aristocracy, and the monarch. That was very much in play in this time period.

Highlights

Only by the especially destructive standards of other revolutions was the American more restrained. During the Revolutionary War, Americans killed one another over politics and massacred Indians, who returned the bloody favors. Patriots also kept one-fifth of Americans enslaved, and thousands of those slaves escaped to help the British oppose the revolution. After the war, 60,000 dispossessed Loyalists became refugees. The dislocated proportion of the American population exceeded that of the French in their revolution. The American revolutionary turmoil also inflicted an economic decline that lasted for fifteen years in a crisis unmatched until the Great Depression of the 1930s. During the revolution, Americans suffered more upheaval than any other American generation, save that which experienced the Civil War of 1861 to 1865.

the revolution began, rather than culminated, a long, slow, and incomplete process of creating an American identity and nation.

In 1775, Benjamin Franklin recalled, “I never had heard in any Conversation from any Person drunk or sober, the least Expression of a Wish for a Separation, or Hint that such a Thing would be advantageous to America.”

By writing of the American Revolution as pitting “Americans” against the British, historians prematurely find a cohesive, national identity. If we equate Patriots with Americans, we recycle the canard that anyone who opposed the revolution was an alien at heart. We also read American nationalism backwards, obscuring the divisions and uncertainties of the revolutionary era. This book refers to the supporters of independence as Patriots and to the opponents as Loyalists, but many more people wavered in the middle, and all were Americans.

Unable to restrain settlers, American leaders needed to help them. By leading, rather than slowing, the process of Indian dispossession, the federal government could gain influence in the West. Jefferson

But the American Revolution generated many conflicting meanings, and some Americans kept alive an alternative, broader vision of revolution that might lead to a “new birth of freedom” in a later generation.

As the imperial wars became global, the “King-in-Parliament” needed cooperation from colonial governments. In a key compromise, the Crown accepted assemblies elected by property-holders as responsible for setting taxes and appropriations within each colony. Most

Rather than thinking of themselves as a distinct new people in America, colonists proudly claimed the status of Britons who lived west of the Atlantic.

As the protector of his subjects and their rights, this king warranted allegiance. Colonists idealized the king as their champion against their Catholic enemies, the French and Spanish, for politics and religion were entangled in colonial culture. By comparison, colonists felt little fondness for Parliament, where they had no representatives. Proud of their British liberty, the colonists looked south and north to see their supposed inferiors in the more authoritarian Spanish and French empires.

Rival empires measured their strength by the range and number of their Indian allies.

Unable to suppress them, the colonial government sought to contain the maroons by paying them bounties for returning more recently escaped slaves.

To the north on the Atlantic coast of the continent, South Carolina (founded in 1670), North Carolina (1712), and Georgia (1733) also produced commodities for export. Too far

In 1701, feeling cheated by the Carolina traders, some Santee natives tried to take their deerskins directly to England by crossing the Atlantic in dugout canoes. Of course, they underestimated the distance and powerful ocean swells, which swamped their open canoes. They were rescued by passing sailors but then promptly sold into slavery: it did not pay to cross Carolinians, whom, a pious visitor insisted, “walk[ed] the straight path to hell.”19

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Chesapeake colonists imported thousands of enslaved Africans, who comprised 40 percent of the region’s population by 1750.20

In 1713, the British took Acadia from the French and renamed the colony Nova Scotia.

prospering farms attracted immigrants and promoted a higher birth rate and longer life expectancy than in the sickly West Indies to the south, or the colder, northern outposts of the British Empire. As a result, in 1750 four-fifths of British Americans lived in the thirteen colonies of the temperate latitudes on the continent. Those colonies had 1.5 million people compared to a mere 60,000 in French Canada and 10,000 in Louisiana.

After 1700, British America imported 1,500,000 slaves: more than four times the number of white immigrants. The massive escalation of the slave trade produced an unprecedented, transatlantic displacement of people. A brutal business, the slave trade killed a tenth of the enslaved, primarily from disease, during transit across the Atlantic from West Africa. The survivors then suffered the shock of enslavement in a strange and distant land. Separated from friends and kin, they were ordered about in a new language and brutally punished if they balked, resisted, or tried to escape. New masters put the enslaved to work on colonial farms and plantations raising crops for export. Arriving with many distinct languages and ethnic identities, they gradually created new cultures as African Americans.

Three-quarters of the newly enslaved landed in the West Indies, where the sugar plantations were especially profitable but lethal.

Although the West Indies imported more slaves, by 1775 the British mainland colonies had more living slaves, because of their healthier conditions. In continental British America, a fifth of the people were enslaved, with the largest numbers in the Carolina and Chesapeake colonies. Slavery proved less profitable in New England and the middle colonies, where farmers could not raise the more lucrative southern crops: rice, tobacco, indigo, and sugar. The enslaved comprised only 2 percent of the population in New England and 8 percent in the middle colonies, but slavery was legal in every colony, and only Quakers questioned the enslavement of Africans.28

By 1775, Spanish America had more free than enslaved blacks because the Catholic Church promoted manumission in wills, and imperial policy allowed slaves to purchase freedom by hiring out for wages.

Georgia, early settlers bristled when their paternalistic colonial government initially banned slavery as a security threat. The dissidents prevailed under the revealing slogan of “Liberty and Property without restrictions,” for they insisted that white men became fully free by owning blacks. The British offered just one of several formulas for freedom and race in the Americas.

Nothing in the colonies could compare to the teeming metropolis of London, the largest city in Europe and home to 750,000 people.

Thanks to the swelling volume of trade, the colonial economy grew faster than did Britain’s. From just 4 percent of England’s gross domestic product in 1700, the colonial economy blossomed to 40 percent by 1770, assuming greater importance to the empire.

Only the poorest and most rustic people wore homespun; everyone else donned clothing made from imported textiles.

In the mainland colonies, the genteel comprised about one in every twenty free people; the rest were common.

Per the law of coverture, a British colonial woman passed by marriage from legal dependence on her father to reliance on a husband, losing her last name and gaining no civil rights.

A colonial woman usually married in her late teens or early twenties and bore seven to ten children.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Britons insisted that their constitution preserved the liberties of subjects better than in any other realm on earth. Unlike the later American Federal Constitution, the British constitution was not a written document but, instead, a consensus understanding of political institutions and legal precedents.

Conventional thinking insisted that Britain enjoyed a “mixed constitution,” which balanced the three elements of any civilized society: the one (a monarch), the few (aristocrats), and the many (common people).

Common rioters called themselves “regulators,” for they sought to regulate the law rather than destroy it.72

Washington surrendered on July 4, unaware that the date would later assume a happier meaning for him. Fortunately for Washington, the French wanted to prevent a full-scale war, so they disarmed the Virginians and sent them home.

Resistance crumbled, and the victors tortured and executed more than 100 rebels, decorating crossroads with impaled heads as intimidating examples to other slaves. Given a terrible scare, Jamaican planters clung more closely to the empire, petitioning for more redcoats to garrison the colony.

Britons gloated over their global triumphs, but the French exited the war with a leaner and more effective empire, while Britain took on vast debts and expensive new responsibilities. The leading French negotiator, the Duc de Choiseul, boasted that he had burdened the British with future woes.

Within a dozen years of the peace of 1763, a global conflict would erupt from a surprising source: a rebellion by thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic Seaboard of North America. A Briton later recognized that his empire’s triumph in the Seven Years War had borne bitter fruit: “What did Britain gain by the most glorious and successful war on which she ever engaged? A height of Glory which excited the Envy of the surrounding nations and . . . an extent of empire we were equally unable to maintain, defend or govern.” Because of that triumph, the empire would reap a revolution in British America.

Victory had not come cheap, for the conflict nearly doubled the British national debt from a prewar £74 million to a postwar £133 million. During the mid-1760s, servicing that debt consumed £5 million of the empire’s annual budget of £8 million. The government also needed £360,000 annually to sustain 10,000 troops to garrison the conquests in North America.

During the war, British officers and officials had discovered just how prosperous the colonists had become. Yet on a per capita basis, the colonists paid only 1 shilling in tax directly to the empire compared to 26 shillings per capita paid in England.

British hubris was on a collision course with inflated American expectations of a partnership in the empire. Colonists considered themselves “free-born Englishmen” of tried and true loyalty to their king. As British subjects in America, colonial leaders expected the same rights as their counterparts in the mother country. They balked at the label “American” as implying cultural degradation by association with Indians and enslaved Africans.

If denied equality with Britons, colonists feared that they sat on the slippery slope to dependence, dispossession, and even (they claimed) enslavement.

the eighteenth century, the population grew faster in British America than in the mother country. Thanks to abundant land, early marriages, and healthy conditions, the number of colonists doubled every twenty-five years. In 1751, Benjamin Franklin calculated that, within a century, “the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side of the Water.”

Britons began to think of the colonists as aliens—as Americans—far sooner than did colonists like Franklin who dreamed of a shared empire of equals.

Between 1760 and 1775, 30,000 English, 40,000 Scots, and 55,000 northern Irish (a total of 125,000) moved to British America. During the same period, 12,000 Germans and 85,000 enslaved Africans joined them, raising the total to 222,000. On average, 15,000 immigrants arrived annually, a tripling of the prewar rate.

In February 1764, 500 armed Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia to intimidate the leaders of Pennsylvania into adopting harsher measures against Indians. On the outskirts of the city, the vigilantes agreed to return home when promised a redress of their grievances. The colony allocated more money for frontier defense and offered bounties for Indian scalps: $134 for a man, $130 for a woman, and $50 for a child. The bounties promoted indiscriminate Indian hunting, for the scalp of a peaceable native told no tales, paid as well, and cost fewer pains to take.

But colonists longed to crush and dispossess native peoples, if only the British would get out of the way.

The proclamation shocked colonists who, after helping to conquer Canada, had expected the British to help them dispossess the Indians in the West.

To further discourage speculative hoarding of wild lands, the Crown required an annual “quit-rent” of 6 pence per acre, which a productive plantation could better afford than could idle lands.

The rest of Florida remained native country largely settled by Seminoles: Creek Indians who had moved south and developed a new identity during the preceding generation.

The warm climate, long growing season, and supposed fertility allured well-connected Britons, including the colony’s governor, General James Grant, and Lord Adam Gordon, who noted that promotional literature had “sett us all Florida mad.”

In 1768, he settled them seventy-five miles south of St. Augustine at a place ominously known as Mosquito Inlet. Changing the name to New Smyrna failed to fool the millions of biting insects who bled the newcomers.

Shocked by harsh conditions and brutal overseers, the servants rebelled and fled, but Governor Grant’s troops captured and returned them. Grant sentenced three to die but pardoned one who agreed to execute the other two. Within seven years of arrival, three-quarters of the immigrants died from a combination of disease, heat prostration, and brutal treatment.

In a single decade, New York’s population more than doubled, from 80,000 in 1761 to 168,000 in 1771.

North Carolina’s population increased sixfold between 1750 and 1775, while Georgia’s grew by a factor of fourteen.

Husband fled north to Pennsylvania, where he adopted the fitting alias of “Tuscape Death.”

Tall, strong, bold, and profane, Ethan Allen led the Green Mountain Boys. Allen denounced the “great state and magnificence” of New York’s “junto of land thieves,” who sought to exploit hardworking settlers by demanding premium prices for frontier land. He insisted that justice favored possession “sealed and confirmed with the Sweat and Toil of the Farmer.” Confronting “Yorkers,” Allen declared “that his name was Ethan Allen, Captain of that Mob, and his authority was his arms, pointing to his gun, that he and his companions were a Lawless Mob, their Law being Mob Law.” After burning a Yorker’s farm, Allen told him: “God Damn your Governour, Laws, King, Council, and Assembly.” Try as he might, Tryon could never catch and hang the Green Mountain Boys, as he had done to the North Carolina regulators. Allen would outlast the governor and lead Vermont to independence during the coming revolution.

Britons considered Indians blessed with perfect freedom or cursed with virtual anarchy.

Unlike most settlers, who insisted on hard and harsh boundaries between the races, Indians believed that they could convert white captives because natives regarded identities as cultural and fluid rather than biological and fixed.

In 1773, the Virginia Gazette insisted, “Not even a second Chinese wall, unless guarded by a million soldiers, could prevent the settlement of the Lands on the Ohio.”

Unable to restrain settlers, British officers hoped that Indians would take bloody revenge on intruders and murderers. In 1765, John Stuart assured Creeks, “We will set up Marks and if any white People settle beyond them we shall never enquire how they came to be Killed.”

To avert war, Hillsborough directed Virginia’s governor to void all surveys and reject all applications for land in the contested zone. Hills- borough also compelled Johnson to reconvene the Haudenosaunee during the summer of 1770 to renounce the cession west of the Great Kanawha, thereby depriving Virginian speculators of 10 million acres in what is now Kentucky. The frustrated Virginians included Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, who resented the empire’s restrictions on their western ambitions. Their anger grew as squatters began to occupy lands denied to speculators. They also feared competition from an immense rival speculation launched in England by Benjamin Franklin.

In London, Franklin recruited wealthy aristocrats and bankers with political clout by promising them fabulous profits from selling fertile lands to settlers. The British partners included Thomas and Richard Walpole, the wealthy and powerful nephews of a late prime minister. The American investors included Franklin’s son, William, who was the royal governor of New Jersey, Sir William Johnson and his leading deputy, George Croghan, and the wealthy Philadelphia merchants Samuel and Thomas Wharton.

General Gage declared, “I wish most sincerely that there was neither Settler nor Soldier in any part of the Indian country.” Instead, the military withdrawal accelerated settlement. By 1774, 50,000 settlers lived beyond the old Proclamation Line, but Gage washed his British hands of the bloodshed that they would provoke: “Let them feel the Consequences, [for] we shall be out of the Scrape.”

a speculator hoped to preempt prime locations from the competition. But overlapping claims soon rendered the Ohio Valley a lawyer’s paradise and a farmer’s lament.

They were led by Richard Henderson, a backcountry judge notorious for greed. Offended by his treatment of squatters and debtors, regulators had burned his house, barn, and stables in 1770. One former debtor, Daniel Boone, proved more forgiving, entering a partnership with Henderson in 1774. A veteran hunter, Boone knew the best routes over the mountains to the finest lands in Kentucky. Folklore casts Boone as a nature-loving refugee from settled civilization; in fact, he helped land speculators fill the forest with farmers.

Most of the settlers were young men of little property and less reputation. Henderson described them as “a set of scoundrels who scarcely believe in God or fear a devil.”

By 1775, the British Empire had lost all credibility and influence in the Ohio Valley. Imperial authority shrank into a few, small forts scattered along the Great Lakes to the north. When

In June 1774, Parliament endorsed Carleton’s proposals by passing the Quebec Act, which broke with the British constitutional tradition that had excluded Catholics from government. Unlike the Irish, Canadian Catholics could own land and serve on the governing council.

While encouraging common buyers, the new policy also promised greater revenue for the Crown: a doubly damning prospect for colonial gentlemen who speculated in lands and sought to keep the empire weak within the colonies.

that his predecessor had taken the wrong side in the colonial land disputes. Replacing Tryon as North Carolina’s governor, Josiah Martin initially agreed that the regulators had gotten their just desserts, but a tour of the backcountry changed his mind. Writing to Hillsborough, Martin explained, “My progress through this Country, My Lord, hath opened my eyes exceedingly.” He concluded that the farmers had “been provoked by insolence and cruel advantages taken of the people’s ignorance by mercenary tricking Attornies, Clerks and other little Officers.” When “the wretched people,” turned to regulation, crafty speculators and county officials used “artful misrepresentations” to deploy the government against common folk.

Turning the tables, Martin sought to build popular support for the empire by mollifying backcountry farmers. In effect, he played the populist card against the leading men who had supported Tryon. Martin pardoned regulators, sacked extortionate officials, and demanded restitution from embezzling sheriffs. A delighted regulator concluded that, because Martin had “given us every satisfaction,” the county cabals “hate [him] as bad as we hated Tryon.” Throughout British America, regulators wishfully believed that a just king favored them against local elites. Martin gave substance to that legend of the protecting king. During the coming revolution, most North Carolina regulators would either support the empire or at least avoid helping the Patriots. On the other hand, North Carolina’s leading Patriots had supported Tryon’s suppression of the regulation.

In April 1766, hundreds of regulators marched on New York City, seeking to free their jailed leader, Samuel Monroe. They turned back when blocked by the city’s militia commanded by merchants and lawyers who also had led the seaport protests against British taxes. A British officer wryly noted that “Sons of Liberty” were “great opposers to these rioters. They are of opinion that no one is entitled to riot but themselves.”

Cherishing the king rather than Parliament, colonial leaders imagined the empire as a federated body of legislatures united only by a shared monarch. A royal governor noted that colonists claimed to live in “perfect States, not otherwise dependent upon Great Britain than by having the same King.” They even petitioned the king to reclaim the power to veto Parliament’s laws: a power that had lapsed during the preceding half century.

To justify resistance, colonists cited political writings by British critics of Parliament. During the 1720s, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon published eloquent essays, known as Cato’s Letters, in a London newspaper. Suspicious of all power as selfish and malevolent, Trenchard and Gordon insisted that government officials chronically imperiled liberty: “Power is like fire; it warms, scorches, or destroys according as it is watched, provoked, or increased.” By accumulating power, corrupt officials became rich by impoverishing people with heavy taxes. To preserve property and the liberty that it sustained, people needed closely to watch and strictly to limit power. Rather than blame the king, the critics accused his ministers of distorting the will of a benevolent monarch, who sustained the world’s freest constitution. Trenchard and Gordon declared, “We have a constitution that abhors absolute power; we have a king that does not desire it; and we are a people that will never suffer it.”

They insisted that farmers made the best citizens because they sustained “virtue,” which meant the sacrifice of private interests to benefit the community. Such virtue abounded where people were relatively equal in owning productive farmland (or artisans’ shops). The ideal society maximized the number of modest property holders but denied political rights to anyone without independence: women, children, servants, slaves, and wage laborers. Virtue’s corrosive opposite was corruption, the use of money and luxury to render people dependent on others.

Patriots detected a malevolent plot by British leaders to “enslave” the colonists by imposing new taxes and regulations. Boston’s town meeting insisted that “a deep-laid and desperate plan of imperial despotism has been laid, and partly executed, for the extinction of all civil liberty.” That rhetoric struck Britons as so irrational that it must cover a colonial conspiracy by reckless demagogues out to destroy the empire by seeking American independence. Neither plot existed save in the powerful imaginations of political opponents who distrusted one another. A rare moderate on imperial issues, Benjamin Franklin, lamented, “To be apprehensive of chimerical dangers, to be alarmed at trifles, to suspect plots and deep designs where none exist, to regard as mortal enemies those who are really our nearest and best friends, and to be very abusive, are all symptoms of this distemper.”

The Royal Navy added patrols along the North American coast to search merchant ships for smuggled goods. Entitled to a share of what they confiscated, naval officers were highly motivated to seize suspected ships.

To minimize pushback from the colonists, Grenville set their stamp tax at a relatively low level: only two-thirds of what Britons paid. He also stipulated that the money would remain in the colonies to fund the military, and he appointed leading colonists to the lucrative positions selling stamps. Surely, he reasoned, colonists would pay the new tax with no more than the grumbling that had met the Sugar Act.16 Instead, the stamp tax horrified the colonists, who were suffering from a postwar depression in trade. At war’s end, the empire’s military expenditures dried up in the mainland colonies as the British removed troops, sailors, and their subsidies. Meanwhile, demobilized soldiers and sailors poured into the seaports, depressing wages paid for labor. Facing ruin for want of customers, merchants sued their many debtor-customers, who stood to lose their shops and farms for want of specie. Hard-pressed colonists bristled at paying another new imperial tax, no matter how small.

“The rights of parts and individuals must be given up when the safety of the whole shall depend on it . . . in return for the protection received against foreign enemies.” Patriots, however, refused to sacrifice any rights for the benefit of the whole empire.

Hutchinson’s greatest foe was Samuel Adams, the son of a Boston brewer. Unlike the wealthy and restrained Hutchinson, Adams possessed only moderate means but a fierce focus on his political goals. In contrast to his dapper and slender rival, Adams was stocky and shabbily dressed. “I glory in being what the world calls a poor Man,” Adams wrote. Secretive, patient, and cautious, he cultivated popularity as the basis for power. Instead of putting on airs, Adams carefully learned the names and views of shipwrights and other artisans. A leader in Boston’s town meeting, Adams secured appointment as a local tax collector, where he became more popular by neglecting to collect from his neediest supporters. A political rival characterized Adams as “by no means remarkable for brilliant abilities” but “equal to most men in popular intrigue, and the management of a faction. He eats little, drinks little, sleeps little, thinks much, and is most decisive and indefatigable in pursuit of his objects.” Adams aptly described his political strategy as to “keep the attention of his fellow citizens awake to their grievances; and not suffer them to be at rest, till the causes of their just complaints are removed.”

Rather than denounce all of the rich as a predatory class, Patriots encouraged laboring people to focus their animus more narrowly on a few gentlemen who seemed especially menacing because of their imperial connections. Those connections became a liability as people blamed their economic woes on Parliament’s new taxes.

Far from seeking seats in the distant Parliament, colonists simply argued that only their own assemblies could tax them. Pennsylvania’s assemblymen asserted that colonists were “entitled to all the Liberties, Rights and Privileges of his Majesty’s Subjects in Great-Britain,” and it was “the inherent Birth-right . . . of every British Subject, to be taxed only by his own Consent, or that of his legal Representatives.” In Virginia, a fiery young assemblyman, Patrick Henry, declared “that the General Assembly of this Colony have the only and sole exclusive Right and Power to lay Taxes and Impositions upon the Inhabitants of this Colony.”

Loyal to the king, colonists wanted him to intervene and overrule Parliament.

British leaders had expected little resistance from the diverse mainland colonies with their deep suspicions of one another. But the Stamp Act touched a raw nerve, their aversion to taxes imposed by Parliament, so the crisis generated unprecedented intercolonial communication and cooperation.

Despite the Declaratory Act, colonists exulted in news of the repeal and felt renewed pride in an empire apparently ruled by a benevolent king.

The Stamp Act Crisis taught the colonists how to frustrate British measures by combining protest resolutions by elite writers with violent intimidation by common mobs and economic boycotts by everyone. The three forms of resistance worked together. Boycotts required a common front, which intimidation and ostracism helped to produce. In turn, published arguments by leading Patriots vindicated the boycotters and bully boys as defending colonial liberty against a plot by British tyrants.41

Boston’s leading Patriots organized a club known as “the Sons of Liberty.” By early 1766, similar groups had appeared as far south as Georgia. The leaders were respectable tradesmen and merchants, but most had achieved wealth rather than inherited it, and they often worked beside common journeymen and apprentices in their shops or on their wharves.

Familiarity with common men helped to mobilize hundreds of laborers and sailors for mass meetings, parades, and protests. Sons of Liberty proudly declared that their meetings drew “all ranks and condition,” which was a radical development in a political culture where genteel leaders had long excluded the “rabble” from gatherings by the “respectable.”

But their actions tended to discredit the colonial regime as impotent to keep order. The Sons of Liberty increasingly had to fill a vacuum of authority that they helped to create.

A new consensus denied that colonists should pay any tax, external as well as internal, if levied by Parliament.

Washington noted that many a gentleman feared that “an alteration in the System of my living, will create suspicions of a decay in my fortune, & such a thought the world must not harbour.”

The Sons of Liberty sought to shame, isolate, and ruin as “enemies to their country” anyone who violated the boycott.

British officials marveled at the power of extra-legal committees and mobs to compel colonists to forsake their beloved consumer goods.

In the name of liberty, Patriots suppressed free speech, broke into private mail, and terrorized their critics. In Boston in October 1769, a defiant conservative printer, John Mein, revealed that some Sons of Liberty, including John Hancock, covertly imported goods while exploiting the boycott to drive smaller competitors out of business. Mein’s revelations threatened to discredit the boycott, so a mob of a thousand men chased him through the streets, yelling, “Kill him; kill him.” Mein escaped and sailed away for England. In his absence, Hancock bought up debts owed by Mein and used them to seize control of, and shut down, his offending newspaper. Patriots believed only in the liberty of their press.55

Boston mobs continued to menace redcoats, bully importers of British goods, and tar and feather customs informers.

On the night of March 5, 1770, about fifty men and boys gathered to harass seven soldiers guarding the custom house on Boston’s main street by hurling snowballs, chunks of ice, sticks, and rocks while yelling “Kill them.” The captain in charge tried to restrain his men, but they feared for their lives. One fired and the rest followed suit, hitting eleven colonists, five of whom died. Flocking to the scene, hundreds of angry colonists threatened to kill the captain and his men, so Hutchinson ordered them away to Castle William.58 Patriot propagandists turned the tragedy into “the Boston Massacre.” Three-quarters of the town’s inhabitants attended the mass funeral of the victims.

The troops also pulled down a nearby “liberty pole”: a tall post erected as a rallying point for Patriots. When the Sons gathered to counterattack, a massive brawl erupted. Getting the worst of it, soldiers retreated to their fort. While singing “God Save the King,” the Sons of Liberty erected a massive new pole: eighty feet tall, cased in protective iron bands, and topped by a weather-vane inscribed with the word “Liberty.”

Balking at the expense of sending more troops to coerce the colonists, in April 1770, Parliament repealed the Townshend Duties, save for a duty on tea meant to maintain Parliament’s right to tax colonists.

The tax on tea yielded scant revenue because most colonists consumed cheaper tea smuggled in from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia).

But the Tea Act angered colonial merchants, who stood to lose their profitable business in smuggled tea. They denounced the act as a plot to seduce Americans to sell their liberty for the tea of a British monopoly. This line of attack revived opposition to any tea tax, no matter how small.

In Philadelphia, a Patriot newspaper denounced the chests of tea as “filled with poverty, oppression, slavery, and every other hated disease.” Patriots threatened to turn any colonial collaborators over to “The Committee for Tarring and Feathering,” which persuaded most merchants to reject the company’s tea.

Reversing Patriot rhetoric, Lord Buckinghamshire argued that the issue had become whether the British “were to be free, or slaves to our colonies.”

By crushing resistance in Boston, British leaders sought to save their empire. If deprived of its American colonies, the empire would, they feared, collapse, exposing Britain to domination by the French and Spanish.

Washington insisted that the British meant to “make us as tame & abject Slaves as the Blacks we Rule over with such arbitrary Sway.”

During the 1760s, the colonists imported 365,000 slaves: more than in any preceding ten-year period.

Most of the enslaved lived in the southern, plantation colonies, accounting for 90 percent of the population in the West Indies, 60 percent in South Carolina, and 40 percent in Virginia. But slavery was legal throughout the colonies, including the northern seaports. In Boston in 1761, 1,000 of the city’s 15,000 people were enslaved and only 18 black residents were free. In the mainland colonies as a whole, the enslaved comprised a fifth of the population.

In a particularly obtuse performance, Richard Henry Lee, a wealthy Patriot in Virginia, had his slaves parade around a county courthouse, carrying banners which denounced Parliament’s taxes as “chains of slavery.”

The English writer Samuel Johnson was appalled that colonists likened Parliament’s small new taxes to slavery: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

Defying efforts to exclude them, blacks joined seaport mobs that attacked officials in the name of liberty. An escaped slave of mixed African and Indian ancestry, Crispus Attucks, died in “the Boston Massacre.”

The legend of a liberating king reflected news of a recent antislavery ruling by England’s highest court in the celebrated case of Somerset v. Stewart. A former customs officer in Boston, Charles Stewart, had brought a slave, James Somerset, to England in 1769. When Stewart subsequently tried to send Somerset away to Jamaica, the slave sued for his freedom with the support of an abolitionist attorney who argued that the enslaved became free when brought to England. In 1772, the chief justice, Lord Mansfield, ruled that slavery had no just basis in “natural law” or in English common law, so it required “positive law,” a statute passed by Parliament, to legitimate the system in England: “It’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.” For want of such a statute, Mansfield ruled that Stewart could not force Somerset to leave the mother country for renewed slavery in a colony. Although technically narrow, Mansfield’s ruling became broadly interpreted as upholding the legal maxim that any slave became free upon setting foot in England, deemed the great land of liberty.

In 1774, most colonists still hoped to stay in the empire while compelling Parliament to rescind the Coercive Acts.

Rural Patriots saw their own grim potential future in the British exploitation of Irish peasants, who lacked political rights, suffered from heavy taxes, and paid rising rents to absentee landlords.

Refusing commissions issued by Gage as governor, rural militia officers answered to local committees and prepared for armed resistance by stockpiling munitions and drilling their young men as “minutemen,” who could rally at a moment’s notice.

But Patriots had hardened their stance against Parliament. In addition to the old insistence that Parliament could not tax colonists, they added that Parliament had no power to legislate for the colonies in any way, not even to regulate trade. Regarding the king as their sole link to the empire, the Patriots would still accept royal governors but would heed no British legislature as superior to any of their own.

For true governance, they wanted only a shared king and their colonial legislatures.

Linked to provincial congresses in each colony and ultimately to Congress, the committees provided new political structures, which initiated a revolution beyond what the delegates had anticipated.

Becoming de facto local governments, the committees took over collecting taxes and managing the militia. Many committees even enforced price controls, inspected merchants’ books, and shunned violators until they publicly confessed and mended their ways.

Acting in the name of liberty, the committees suppressed speech by their critics. The Philadelphia Committee insisted that “no person has the right to the protection of a community or society he wishes to destroy . . . by speeches and writings” which “aid and assist our enemies.” Patriots broke open mail to read letters from suspected critics of Congress. A merchant begged his correspondents to censor their words because “the temper of the people is such that misconstructions are put on the most innocent expressions” by “those who call themselves the Assertors of American Freedom.”

Critics feared that the social upheaval would culminate in a violent anarchy destructive to all property and social order. In New York, Reverend Samuel Seabury concluded, “If we must be enslaved, let it be by a KING at least, and not by a parcel of upstart, lawless committee-men. If I must be devoured, let me be devoured by the jaws of a lion and not gnawed to death by rats and vermin.”

Which is better—to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away? —MATHER BYLES, a Loyalist, 17741

To defeat the British, Patriot gentlemen needed to maximize their popular support, so they promised enhanced respect and opportunities for common men. The Patriot movement created many new leadership roles as committeemen, provincial legislators, and militia officers, which common men often filled.

Merit rather than connections would reap wealth and leadership. But like the paternalism favored by Loyalists, Patriots described an elusive ideal that they often compromised in practice. Interests and connections persisted in the new order, as in the old empire, but in a more egalitarian guise. Those contradictions disgusted some common people, who preferred the elitism of leading Loyalists as more honest and transparent.

The British population of 11 million greatly outnumbered the 2.5 million mainland colonists, and a fifth of the latter were slaves more apt to support the British than help the Patriots. The free colonists were also bitterly divided, for a fifth remained loyal to the empire.

By seeking a commander from Virginia, John and Samuel Adams hoped to consolidate southern support for the siege of Boston. As the largest, most populous, and most powerful colony, Virginia was critical to the Patriot coalition.

Tall, strong, and erect, he looked the masculine part of a commander. Reserved and dignified, he was popular with the other delegates, who preferred to hear the sound of their own voices. “He possessed the Gift of Silence,” recalled John Adams, who did not.

Because rifles were slower to load and quicker to jam, most soldiers, American as well as British, fought as infantry with smoothbore muskets. Only by firing in massed volleys could troops compensate for the relative inaccuracy of their muskets. To achieve group cohesion and a rapid pace of fire required months of drilling, which did not sit well with Americans.

Britain retained the loyalty of half of their empire in America, for fourteen colonies rejected the rebellion embraced by thirteen. While the Patriot cause prospered in the thickly settled mainland colonies, it withered along the northern and southern margins, where Anglophones were few and needed British military aid. East and West Florida, for example, were sparsely settled, depended on British subsidies, and relied on redcoats for protection against Indians and the Spanish in nearby Louisiana. Both colonies also lacked newspapers and active legislatures (West Florida’s assembly did not meet for six years after 1772) to agitate the public.

The empire could pressure West Indian assemblies by threatening to withdraw troops, while it had to send redcoats to cow the mainland colonists.

Southern mainland planters also sustained slavery, but they felt more threatened than protected by the British Empire. They also felt more secure in resisting the naval power of the empire because of the vast hinterland of their continental setting. Where whites were less than a tenth of the West Indian population, they accounted for 60 percent of the people in the southern mainland colonies. North American planters could rally thousands of common whites as militiamen to watch slaves and resist British rule. West Indians, however, could neither resist the redcoats (and Royal Navy) nor do without their protection.

Dunmore’s threat to free and arm the enslaved began as a bluff, meant to spook Virginians into passivity, for he did not wish to ruin the plantation economy of a colony that the British hoped to recover. But the Patriot coup in Williamsburg called that bluff, forcing Dunmore to convert his bluster into black soldiers. He also recognized the military potential of the many runaway slaves who sought haven on his warships during the summer and fall.

Rather than recognize that runaways indicted the slave system, Virginians concocted their own wishful legend: that Britons lured away slaves to resell them in the West Indies, where they would suffer far more than in Virginia. If the British were frauds instead of liberators, the enslaved should cling to their masters as protectors rather than flee from them as exploiters. Masters assembled their slaves to warn of their West Indian peril and invite their renewed commitment to servitude in Virginia.

In the South, the enslaved sought a greater revolution, for they meant to “Alter the World” and regarded Britons, rather than Patriots, as the better champions of true liberty. Although the British performance as liberators lagged far behind the wishful hopes of the enslaved, they could find no better ally.

The catastrophe in Canada had cost 5,000 Patriot soldiers, either dead or captured. A British officer mocked the Patriots for offering “a resistance . . . as flimsy & absurd as were their Motives for taking up Arms against their Sovereign.”

Many moderate Patriots as well as Loyalists still revered the mixed constitution of Britain and cherished the commercial benefits of the empire. In April 1776, Franklin observed, “The Novelty of the Thing deters some, the Doubt of Success others, [and] the vain Hope of Reconciliation, many.” But he also noted “a rapid Increase of the formerly small Party who were for an independent Government.”

That shift in opinion owed much to an unlikely man, Thomas Paine. Hard-drinking, self-educated, cranky, and restless, Paine had accomplished little during the previous thirty-seven years of his checkered life. The son of a poor artisan, Paine had lost his job as an excise tax collector in England in 1774, the same year that his marriage crumbled and creditors auctioned his paltry household goods to pay his debts. At rock bottom, Paine sought a new start by migrating to the colonies. Arriving in Philadelphia in November 1774, he embraced the Patriot cause and became the chief writer and editor of the Pennsylvania Magazine. His forceful prose impressed Dr. Benjamin Rush, a leading Patriot who recruited Paine to publish a political pamphlet against reconciliation.66 On January 10, 1776 in Philadelphia, Paine published Common Sense, which became the most powerful pamphlet in American history. The first edition of 1,000 copies sold out within two weeks. By June, reprints raised the total to 150,000 copies: a phenomenal impact for a public of only 2.5 million people, a fifth of them slaves. Many more colonists read excerpts from Common Sense in their local newspapers or heard it read aloud in taverns and streets. Except for the Bible, no written work had ever been so widely read and discussed in British America.

For Paine, style was also substance, for he sought to constitute a new readership: a broad and engaged public for a republican revolution. He insisted that common people should no longer defer to gentlemen in politics. Aptly titled, Common Sense spoke to and for common people.

Paine pushed for immediate independence, a union of thirteen states, and republican governments for those states. All three goals broke dramatically with past experience and received wisdom. No colonies in the Americas had yet revolted from their mother empire; past bickering by the colonies augured poorly for a union; and almost all former republics in Europe had been small, contentious, and short-lived. In a daring stroke, Paine argued that Americans could triumph by combining all three gambles: on independence, union, and republic. Seeking one alone would certainly fail, but the combination would prove invincible. If united in a righteous cause, he insisted, Americans could crush the corrupt mercenaries of a royal tyrant.

He elevated the Patriot struggle in utopian and universal terms. By winning republican self-government, Americans could create an ideal society of peace, prosperity, and equal rights. That conspicuous success would, in turn, inspire common people throughout the world to seek freedom either through revolution at home or by migrating to America, “an asylum for mankind.” Paine concluded, “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. . . . The birth-day of a new world is at hand.”

Americans now take this soaring rhetoric for granted, but it was new and radical for colonists who had long felt self-conscious about their parochial and provincial status.

Loyalists retorted in their own pamphlets, principally James Chalmers’s Plain Truth, which defended the mixed constitution as “the pride and envy of mankind.” But Loyalist writers struggled to reach readers because Patriots seized and burned most of the opposition’s pamphlets.

Adams delighted in the “high tone and the flights of Oratory with which [the Declaration] abounded.” He later added, “The Declaration of Independence I always considered as a Theatrical Show.” Congress forwarded printed copies to state officials with directions to proclaim and circulate. At 1,337 words, it fit on one long, printed page—a broadside—which proved convenient for posting on the doors of public buildings and the walls of taverns. Newspapers reprinted the Declaration, magistrates proclaimed it at county courthouses, and clergymen announced it from their pulpits. Washington had his officers read the Declaration to their assembled troops.

In New York City on July 9, Patriots toppled the great equestrian statue of George III and melted its lead to make 40,000 bullets to shoot at redcoats. In that blow for liberty, the Patriots employed slaves to tear down the statue.

By declaring independence, Congress gave the conflict greater clarity and raised its stakes. No longer were Patriots absurdly fighting in the king’s name against his Parliament. Instead, they defended an American union of republican states. A Delaware man observed, “I could hardly own the King and fight against him at the same time, but now these matters are cleared up. Heart and hand shall move together.”

More than 700 people signed a “declaration of dependence” affirming their loyalty to the empire. In a proclamation, Howe promised to restore the “free enjoyment of their Liberty and Properties upon the true Principles of the Constitution.”

At least 5,000 men accepted British pardons. The defectors included Richard Stockton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Washington grimly understood that the people “will cease to depend upon or support a force, from which no protection is given to them.”

The Patriots suffered no dead and only three wounded to take 948 prisoners in Washington’s first significant battlefield victory of the war.

But Washington understood better than Howe that victory hinged on who could endure a long, hard, and bitter struggle.

abilities. The British writer Horace Walpole described Burgoyne as a “vain, very ambitious man with a half-understanding which was worse than none.”

While Howe won the showy battles, Washington was winning a war of attrition as the British lost men whom they could ill afford to replace. His friend General Nathanael Greene, noted: “We cannot conquer the British force at once, but they cannot conquer us at all. The limits of the British government in America are their out-sentinels,” for they lacked enough committed Loyalists to hold the ground that Howe passed over.

An adept political infighter, Washington built a powerful “interest” among officers and in Congress. Underestimating Washington was a fool’s errand.

Two thousand men, nearly a fifth of the army, perished that winter from a debilitating combination of filth, exposure, malnutrition, and disease.

Admiring Washington’s persistent soldiers, Steuben marveled that no European army would have held together under such suffering.

The Patriot diplomats in Paris included Benjamin Franklin, a famed scientist and talented writer, who made the most of his international celebrity. During the early 1770s in London, Franklin had taken pains to appear wealthy and genteel, but in Paris he shrewdly cultivated a new persona as the plain and honest American of simple but dignified clothes and manners. He deftly appealed to the French fashion for romanticizing America as a land of purer simpletons, early versions of Jerry Lewis. Taken with Franklin, the French mass-produced his image on engravings, medallions, busts, and statuettes.

Shocked by France’s alliance with the Patriots, Lord North sought reconciliation with the Patriots in early 1778. Responding to North’s urgent lobbying, Parliament reluctantly rescinded the Coercive Acts of 1774 and promised to exempt colonists from parliamentary taxation forever (save for duties to regulate trade). In return, Patriots would have to demobilize their army, abandon the French alliance, and restore colonial governments with royal governors.

If offered in 1774, the concessions would have resolved the American crisis short of war. By 1778, however, Patriots would accept no dependence, however limited, on the empire. Clinging to independence and the French alliance, Congress refused to meet with the Carlisle commissioners.

Morris’s threats seemed credible thanks to a real terrorist, a young Scot named James Aitken but commonly known as “John the Painter” because John was his alias and he worked as a house painter. Aitken had spent two years in British America, initially as an indentured servant in Virginia, but he had returned to England in the spring of 1775 just as the war began. Short, slim, hard-drinking, and prickly, he wanted revenge against the many English who mocked his poverty and stutter. He hoped to return to a hero’s welcome in America after burning Royal Navy dockyards in Britain. In 1776, he visited Paris to pitch his plan to Silas Deane, who provided some encouragement and money. In late 1776 and early 1777, Aitkin set fires that damaged the Portsmouth dockyard and the city of Bristol, which spread public terror via the newspapers through England. Arrested in January, he was tried, convicted, and executed in March at the age of twenty-four. Hoisted in an iron gibbet, his rotting body hung for years as a warning to others at the entrance to Portsmouth Harbor on the Channel coast.

The entry of the French and Spanish (and later the Dutch) escalated the conflict into a world war. Facing attacks on colonies and shipping around the globe, the British no longer could concentrate troops and warships in North America to suppress the rebellion. Instead, they had to divert military resources to defend Gibraltar and Minorca, the West Indian sugar colonies, the slaving entrepot at Senegal, and the East India Company’s holdings in India.

A more dreaded draft consigned men to the Continental Army for three or more years. Draftees received a notice: “This is to inform you [that you] are this evening drafted as one of the Continental men to go to General Washington’s headquarters, and you must go or find an able bodied man in your Room, or pay a fine of twenty pounds in law[ful] money in twenty-four hours.” A prosperous conscript paid the fine or hired a substitute, but poor men had no choice but to serve or run away.

A French officer noted that Continental regiments “were composed entirely of vagabonds and paupers; no enticement or trick could force solid citizens to enlist as regulars.”55 Apprentices, transients, beggars, drunks, slaves, and indentured immigrants abounded among the new recruits, as communities thrust military duty on marginal men. A Continental officer described most of his recruits as “only Food for Worms . . . hungry, lean faced Villains.”

For want of gold and silver, Congress and the states printed millions of paper dollars, which rapidly depreciated toward worthlessness. A pound of beef cost 4 cents in 1777 but $1.69 three years later.

Soldiers also could band together to go on strike, which officers called “mutiny.” During mutinies, enlisted men refused to do duty until satisfied for their grievances, or they could march away as regiments bound for home. Rare in the early, active years of the northern war, mutinies became more common between 1779 and 1781. Soldiers usually mutinied during the winter or spring: the hungriest seasons of their service. Rather than embroiling the entire army, mutinies were sporadic and involved regiments from the same state. Not yet thinking of themselves as Americans, soldiers lacked bonds and trust across state lines. Officers relied on the animosities and prejudices between states to suppress mutinies. During the spring of 1780, when Connecticut regiments went on strike, Pennsylvania troops forced them to submit.

The post-1776 Continental Army belied the myth of heroic citizen-soldiers putting down the plow to pick up their muskets and win the war. In fact, a small regular army of poor men sustained the Patriot cause by enduring years of hard duty and public neglect.

Women even collected urine in chamber pots to help produce saltpeter, an essential but scarce component for making gunpowder.

Feeding Arnold’s resentments, Peggy urged him to seek greater justice and rewards with the British. She helped him open a covert correspondence with Major John André, who had been her friend during the British occupation of Philadelphia and later became General Clinton’s spymaster. Through intermediaries, Arnold, André, and Clinton reached a deal in August 1780, when Arnold obtained a new command: of West Point, the pivotal fortification in the Patriot defenses on the Hudson River north of New York City. In return for betraying the garrison and embracing Loyalism, Arnold would receive a whopping £20,000 payment, a lifetime pension of £500 annually, and a commission and command as a major general in the British service. Clinton hoped that such a high-profile defection would discredit Congress and initiate a cascading series of conversions that would doom the revolution. With Arnold’s help, Clinton predicted that “the Rebellion would end suddenly in a Crash.”

Delivering himself but not his post, Arnold received a cut-rate price from the British: £6,000 instead of £20,000. Still, he made more money from his service than did any other American general during the war.

Left behind by her fleeing husband, Peggy gave a masterful, wailing performance of utter shock and raving depression, which fooled Washington and his gallant officers, who pronounced her innocent of everything but great beauty. She left West Point for her father’s home in Philadelphia but later slipped away to join her husband in New York.87

Clinton had hoped that Arnold’s betrayal would discredit the Patriot cause and promote mass defections. Instead, the Patriots spun Arnold’s betrayal as the consummate, but selfish and isolated, act of treason.

Revolutions breed civil wars: triangular struggles in which two sides compete for civilian support. British leaders wishfully believed that most colonists were Loyalists temporarily cowed by a minority of brazen and bullying rebels. “I may safely assert,” General Howe reported, “that the insurgents are very few, in comparison with the whole of the people.” Although committed Patriots were a minority outside of New England in 1775, Howe confused the colonial majority, which preferred to remain neutral, with committed Loyalists, who, in fact, were a minority even smaller than the Patriots.

John Adams famously calculated that, at the start of the revolution, “We were about one third Tories, one third timid and one third true Blue.” Adams overestimated the Loyalist proportion, which probably peaked early at a fifth of the population or about half the proportion of Patriots. He also undercounted the wavering, who comprised about two-fifths of the people.

Patriots demanded far more from common people than Parliament ever had.

we suggest that individuals made quick and definitive decisions based on political principles. Some did, but many more committed slowly, reluctantly, and provisionally. In one North Carolina county, the vaguely divided militiamen decided to cast their united lot based on the result of a fistfight between a Loyalist and a Patriot.

In the most common pattern, Loyalists belonged to local minorities who feared living in a republican society where a distrusted majority could dominate them. Unpopular and harassed by their neighbors, the Scots in North Carolina and Virginia rallied to the king as their protector. Anglicans and Quakers dreaded falling under the sway of their more numerous Congregationalist and Presbyterian rivals, who were early and staunch Patriots.

During the period 1774 to 1776, Patriots seized control of almost all the printing presses and militia units. As in other revolutions, a committed and organized minority led the way, demanded that others follow, and punished those who balked. In a hard fight against a powerful empire, Patriots refused to tolerate doubters and critics in their midst.

After partially scalping Brown, they carted him through the streets for public ridicule. By abusing and shaming Loyalists as despised outsiders, rituals of intimidation helped draw wavering neighbors into the Patriot ranks.

Thanks to superior communication and coordination across counties and colonies, Patriots could bring overwhelming force to bear on pockets of disaffection.

Meanwhile, farms and families suffered from the incarceration of a father or son. When released, a Loyalist often returned home to find it looted and burned and his family scattered. Some courts had Loyalists branded on the face or cut off their ears so that Patriots could recognize enemies in their midst.

A Patriot officer confessed, “Any Army, even a friendly one, if any can be called so, are a dreadful Scourge to any People—you cannot conceive what Devastation and Distress mark their Steps.” General Greene considered it “impossible to carry on a war without oppressing the inhabitants.”

And Patriots were masterful at turning enemy brutalities into vivid stories to demonize the British. Possessing less skilled polemicists and fewer printing presses, Loyalists faltered in the competition to convert atrocities into compelling propaganda.

For hanging Loyalists after quick, mock trials, Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia turned his name into a verb.

While the invaders drew upon runaways for recruits, Patriots would have to reserve men to guard their slaves, reducing the troops available to resist invasion. With the threat of blacks and Indians, the British hoped to intimidate southern Patriot leaders into quick submission. John Stuart, the British Indian agent, had noted, “Nothing can be more alarming” to southern whites “than the Idea of an Attack from Indians and Negroes.”

In late 1778, General Clinton began the southern invasion by sending 3,000 troops in ships from New York to Georgia. The weakest and most vulnerable of Patriot states, Georgia had a long frontier with native peoples, and the small free population of about 18,000 feared their 15,000 slaves.

By the end of the war, blacks comprised a tenth of the Continental Army, serving at a rate double that of their proportion in the northern population.

wealth.” Despite his private qualms about the plan, Washington similarly assured John, “I must confess that I am not at all astonished at the failure of your Plans. That Spirit of Freedom, which at the commencement of this contest would have gladly sacrificed everything to the attainment of its object, has long since subsided and every selfish Passion has taken its place.” The long, hard war had amplified Americans’ vices at the expense of their virtue.

His men were hungry and unnerved by the summer heat, leading Gates to lament, “Our Army is like a dead whale upon the Sea Shore—a monstrous Carcass without Life or Motion.”

Where British atrocities stiffened Patriots’ resistance, their cruelties spooked the Loyalists, a difference which predicted who would ultimately win the partisan war in the backcountry. A Patriot exulted, “The tories, who after the defeat of Genl. Gates had a full range, are chased from their homes, hunted thro’ the woods and shot with as much indifference as you would a buck.”

Despite the setback on his western flank, Cornwallis pressed deep into North Carolina in pursuit of the Continentals under a new commander: Nathanael Greene. A self-educated and genial former blacksmith from Rhode Island, Greene had a surprising self-confidence that impressed his men and superiors, especially Washington, who became his great patron. No general in the war, not even Washington, could do more with less than Greene, a talent which served the Patriots very well indeed in the embattled South.

The raiders captured munitions and seven state legislators, including Daniel Boone, who represented Virginia’s county in Kentucky.

Plain folk bristled when wealthy planters exempted themselves, their sons, and overseers from militia duty so that they could stay home to guard the enslaved. A common farmer complained, “The Rich wanted the Poor to fight for them, to defend their property, whilst they refused to fight for themselves.”

Desperate for fodder and food, both armies stole from civilians, ruining hundreds of farms and impoverishing thousands of people. On both sides, officers reasoned that any resources left behind would only fall to the enemy. But the worst looting and killing derived from the vicious competition of irregular partisans. Rarely paid, they sought compensation in plunder, which discouraged morality and restraint. They assassinated foes, executed prisoners, and looted and burned the homes of civilians caught in the middle. A Patriot partisan recalled victory in a skirmish where “Not one [Loyalist was] taken prisoner—for that occurred but seldom, the rifle usually saved us that trouble.” Both sides applied to whites the cruelties previously practiced in frontier war against Indians.

At night, both sides attacked houses to kill helpless, sleeping foes in their beds or to haul them out for brutal floggings that could become fatal. Hundreds of desperate families became “Outlyers,” abandoning their homes to live in hovels secreted in forests or swamps. A North Carolinian reported, “Fear of being called into the militia has driven many to hide in the woods, [and] as they have nothing on which to live they resort to highway robbery.” Bandit gangs added to the chaos by preying upon everyone.

Initially so promising, the British bid to conquer the South withered as they alienated most of the white people, including many formerly inclined to Loyalism. The superiority of Patriot partisans also swayed the wavering majority. Cornwallis complained, “Colonel [Francis] Marion had so wrought on the minds of the people, partly by the terror of his threats and cruelty of his punishments, and partly by the promise of plunder, that there was scarcely an inhabitant between the Santee and Pedee [rivers], that was not in arms against us.” Marion’s mood was not improved when Loyalists captured and executed his son.

Patriot raiders burned fifteen more towns in March 1781. Burning out Indians proved wildly popular with southern settlers, who rallied to the Patriots and despised the British. Cherokees

served the Patriot cause better as enemies than they could have as allies.

This violent redistribution of the enslaved disrupted their families and communities—dividing relatives and friends forever. By flirting with Indians, bandits, and runaways, the British unwittingly alienated most white southerners, who defended private property and white supremacy by rallying to the Patriots.

Although unreliable when thrust into combat with regulars, Patriot militiamen were plenty good at suppressing their Loyalist counterparts.

Despite some showy, early victories, the British forces were big enough to spread chaos but far too small to restore peace.

The Patriot cause merged a frontier hunger for Indian land with a dread of British power. Colonists feared confinement within a boundary patrolled by savage warriors allied to a domineering empire.

In the east, where Indians lived in poverty and small enclaves enveloped by settlements, Patriots demanded their armed support. Bowing to that pressure, southern New England’s Indians sent men to fight and die for the Patriot cause. Indeed, a greater proportion of enclave natives served in Patriot forces than did their white neighbors. Similarly situated in the Carolinas, Catawbas fought beside, and caught slaves for, the Patriots. By serving as allies, eastern natives sought Patriot protection for their enclaves. Instead, they suffered especially heavy casualties, which emboldened white neighbors to grab more native land.

No matter how little the British did to help Indian raids, they bore the blame so skillfully cast by Patriot writers.

Renowned as fertile, Kentucky attracted hundreds of settlers in 1775–1776, just as revolution disrupted the empire.

Exploiting Henderson’s unpopularity, Virginia’s Patriot governor, Patrick Henry, organized Kentucky into counties, appointed magistrates and militia officers, and promised generous land grants at bargain prices.

The Spanish had to proceed carefully because of their weakness in Louisiana. Sprawled along the entire western side of the Mississippi River, the colony stretched across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains to include about 828,000 square miles. But Spain had only 500 soldiers and 30,000 colonists: about an eighth of the native numbers within that vast expanse.

Most of the colonists lived in two modest clusters on Louisiana’s eastern margin in the Mississippi Valley. The main cluster occupied the lower river around the capital and seaport at New Orleans. In upper Louisiana, a secondary set of settlements emerged at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers (in the future state of Missouri) with St. Louis as the primary town. Most of the colonists were Francophones who had lingered after the colony’s transfer from French to Spanish rule in 1763. Enslaved Africans comprised the second-largest group. The Spanish-speaking minority consisted primarily of newcomers from the Canary Islands, who settled along the river below New Orleans.

His armed force included more than 400 free blacks, whom the Spanish more readily employed as soldiers than did either Britons or Patriots.

With the conquest of West Florida, Spain dominated the entire Gulf of Mexico.

During the 1770s, Spanish officials tripled their sales tax and applied it, for the first time, to coca, which Peruvian natives depended on to cope with the cold and thin air of their mountainous region.

Although well educated as a Jesuit, José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera claimed descent from the Incan royal line and adopted the regal name of Tupac Amaru.

cracked in 1769 under the strain of fighting elusive Indians on the northern frontier. One night, Gálvez burst from his tent to announce a plan to “destroy the Indians in three days simply by bringing 600 monkeys from Guatemala, dressing them like soldiers, and sending them against” the natives. He then assumed, in succession, the identities of Moctezuma, the king of Sweden, St. Joseph, and finally God. But none of them could defeat the Indians. The viceroy decided that Gálvez needed to rest and recuperate. Two years later, he sailed back to Spain and won promotion to Secretary of the Indies, the cabinet post responsible for American policy. Madness in America was no bar to power in Spain.

Faster and nimbler than bison, mounted men armed with bows could maneuver and attack with deadly skill. By killing more bison, the Great Plains natives became better fed, clothed, and housed. Enriched by meaty protein, they raised the tallest children on the continent, taller even than the relatively well-fed people of the United States. The alluring combination of horses and bison drew more native nations to relocate onto the Great Plains. Coming from either the Rocky Mountains to the west or the Mississippi Valley to the east, the newcomers included Osages, Comanches, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Blackfeet, and the especially numerous peoples known to others as the Sioux and to themselves as Lakotas or Dakotas.

Moving southeastward out of the Rocky Mountains, Comanches drove out, killed, or captured their predecessors on the southern plains, primarily peoples known to outsiders as Apaches. Determined to keep their enemies weak, Comanches blocked efforts by French gun traders to push through to deal with desperate Apaches. By 1800, Comanches had grown in number to 20,000—twice as many as all other native peoples on the southern plains and more than the Hispanics of Texas and New Mexico.

Smallpox was deadlier for natives than for Euro-Americans, and people in the close quarters of an earth-lodge village suffered greater losses than did the nomads of dispersed and transient encampments. Often an epidemic affected everyone in a village, so that victims had no one to care for them.

By scalping their diseased foes, victors unwittingly carried away the virus to afflict their own friends and kin. The epidemic probably halved the native population of the Great Plains between 1779 and 1783.75

A commanding admiral tried to coordinate his vessels by means of signal flags from his “flagship,” but the signals often produced confusion during battle

He obtained a commission from Congress in 1776 and raided the Scottish port of Whitehaven in April 1778.

The French and British valued their West Indian colonies more than anything on the North American continent. Sugar cane raised by slave labor enriched planters and the merchants who transported sugar and rum to Europe. Taxes on slave imports and sugar exports generated greater revenue for the rival empires than any other colonial trade.

For the rest of the conflict, the empire sent more reinforcements to the Caribbean than to North America.

The 15 percent annual loss of troops to disease in the West Indies exceeded the 6 percent of those serving in New York or the 1 percent in Canada.

The French and Spanish could sustain larger forces in the Caribbean in part because they more readily enlisted and armed free blacks. These empires also had more free blacks to recruit because the Catholic church and their laws encouraged manumissions.

More pragmatic in tincturing their racism, the Spanish and French recognized that an armed and intermediary caste of free blacks tended to secure, rather than imperil, the slave system.

Cornwallis also crippled British prospects by accepting surrender terms that denied his Loyalist troops the protection of prisoner-of-war status. Unlike the redcoats, Loyalists taken at Yorktown risked harsh punishment, even execution, as deserters and traitors by the Patriots. News of Cornwallis’s indifference shocked and demoralized Loyalists elsewhere.

Giddy with relief, the British public erupted in celebration at the news, particularly the capture of de Grasse and his massive flagship, which multiplied the impression made by the victory. Jamaica’s merchants, planters, and legislators funded an octagonal stone temple to house a neoclassical statue of the heroic Rodney. Medals, ballads, poems, pottery, and prints celebrated him as the greatest of British admirals. “Rodney Forever” became the hit song that summer in London.

Instead of the looter who helped to lose America, Rodney became the hero who saved the more important colonies in the West Indies. The Crown promoted him to the aristocracy as a baronet and awarded a lifetime, annual pension of £2,000. His former critics in Parliament joined in extolling the admiral. Lacking such acclaim, Sir Henry Clinton (rather than Rodney) bore the blame for the debacle at Yorktown because empires need scapegoats as well as heroes.

During the 1760s and 1770s, India grew in importance to the empire as a prime source of commerce and revenue. While native princes controlled the interior, the British held four colonies on the coast: Bombay on the west and Bihar, Bengal (including the overall capital of Calcutta), and Madras on the eastern shore. The empire entrusted their management to the East India Company, which appointed an overall governor-general. Unlike in North America, British settlers were few and redundant in distant and crowded India, so several hundred officials and soldiers relied on thousands of native collaborators to run the colonies. Based in seaports, the East India Company projected power into the interior through military alliances with some princes at the expense of others in a divide-and-conquer strategy. Claiming paternalistic motives, officials insisted that British rule in India protected the Hindu majority from brutal Muslim princes and rapacious French interlopers.

Weak and dependent on French aid, Congress dutifully instructed its diplomats “to undertake nothing in the negotiations for peace or truce” without informing French leaders to secure their “concurrence, and ultimately to govern yourselves by their advice and opinion.” To further restrain Adams, Congress added Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, Henry Laurens, and Thomas Jefferson to the peace commission (but Jefferson declined to go).

By keeping the British in Canada, Vergennes also hoped to perpetuate their frictions with the Americans, who would then have to cling to their alliance with France. “But you will agree, Monsieur,” Vergennes assured a French diplomat, “that this way of thinking ought to be an impenetrable secret from the Americans. It would be a crime that they would never pardon.” But Vergennes would soon find that Americans were his superiors at deception.

In theory, Ireland was an independent kingdom, but its monarch was the British king, and his ministers controlled civil, military, and judicial appointments. Thousands of occupying redcoats dominated the Irish and served as a reserve for deployment overseas in an emergency. Although Catholics comprised three-quarters of the people, they were denied political and property rights. Most were poor laborers and peasants who rented small farms and cottages from Anglican landlords. Presbyterian dissenters prevailed in Ulster (in northern Ireland), and they also resented domination by the Anglican elite based in Dublin. Anglicans owned 90 percent of the land and held almost all government offices, military commissions, and seats in the Irish Parliament, which had less autonomy than a colonial assembly.

Of course, Adams resented the restraining instructions from Congress: “Those Chains I will never wear.” Wearied by Adams’s insistent fears, Franklin characterized him as “always an honest Man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his Senses.”

In late October, Adams and Jay decided to deal directly with the British without consulting Vergennes. To their surprise, Franklin accepted that negotiating strategy. By pursuing distinct and secret negotiations with the British, the commissioners sought the best possible deal, but they did so in defiance of their instructions from Congress.

The war also doubled France’s national debt, creating a fiscal crisis that compelled the king to summon the long-suspended Estates-General, the French parliament. In 1789, that parliament initiated a revolution that destroyed the French monarchy and sucked Europe into a massive new war, which proved especially disastrous for the Spanish.

Likening the empire to an edifice, Lord Macartney declared that without America “the building not only looks much better but is a great deal stronger.”

West Indian planters denounced new imperial restrictions on the slave trade and slavery as attacks on the rights of property. Many regretted that they had not joined the revolution by their fellow slaveholders in North America. But the islanders had lacked that option given their dependence on the British market for their sugar and on the Royal Navy for protection. They were stuck when the empire abolished the slave trade in 1807 and emancipated the slaves during the 1830s.

In one late skirmish, John Laurens died in a reckless charge into a Loyalist ambush outside Charles Town. The Patriot champion of black enlistment and emancipation was shot by runaway slaves in the British service.

Militia victories culminated in many executions, and the heads of dead maroons decorated poles erected outside county courthouses in Georgia and South Carolina.

At the end of the war, Virginia had 236,000 slaves, up from the 210,000 at the start.

Thousands of former slaves sought havens within the British Empire, initially in Nova Scotia and later in West Africa.

Hamilton urged Washington to lead the army’s demand for the nationalist program, but the general balked, lest he “open the flood Gates of Civil discord” that would “deluge our rising Empire in Blood.” Washington preferred to wait and trust the states eventually to do right by soldiers and officers.

If Congress ever did make good on the certificates, most payments would benefit the speculators who bought them from desperate soldiers in 1783.15

But civilians filled the hall and gallery of the statehouse to watch Washington resign. He aptly described his performance as theatrical: “Nothing now remains, but for the actors of this mighty Scene to preserve a perfect unvarying consistency of character through the very last act; to close the Dramma with applause, and retire from the Military Theatre.” An impressed congressman praised the “solemn and affecting spectacle.” Washington projected a dignified and selfless devotion to the republican cause: a precious rarity among his squabbling countrymen. John Adams later described Washington’s performance as “Shakespearean” and praised his “Excellence in Dramatic Exhibitions.”

He got support from London’s abolitionists, led by Granville Sharp, who organized the Sierra Leone Company to found a West African colony as a haven for free blacks. The abolitionists funded Peters to recruit black colonists with assurances of generous land grants and political equality. The company leaders promised, “No distinction is to be made, between them & the Whites.”

Alluringly named Freetown, the colonial capital had, by 1796, four hundred homes on a grid of nine streets. The black colonists relied upon an emotional, evangelical faith that distinguished them from their white neighbors, who were often transported criminals. A governor noted, “While the white inhabitants are roaring with strong drink at one end [of Freetown], the Nova Scotians are roaring out hymns at the other.”

That ground proved slippery. When Burke discharged a former Loyalist and accused horse thief for lack of evidence, a furious mob rushed in, seized the suspect, and hanged him in front of the courthouse door. This postwar violence troubled some elite Patriots as a threat to social order. Nathanael Greene denounced the “intolerance to persecute men for opinions which, but twenty years before, had been the universal belief of every class of society.”

Eight thousand refugees went to Britain, which one called “The Isle of Liberty and Peace.” But most of them struggled with drenching rain, bitter poverty, a high cost of living, cultural disorientation, and British prejudices against Americans as cunning cheats.

About a third of the Maritime Loyalists drifted back to the United States during the late 1780s or early 1790s, after the hatreds of the civil war had cooled.

Location: 4,996 The revolution led to virtually free land for settlers in British Canada while rendering land more expensive in the United States. Burdened by immense public debts incurred to wage the war, federal and state governments sold vast tracts of frontier land to speculators, who could immediately pay large sums in cash.

Parliament also funded the salaries for the colony’s executive and judicial officers, which ensured the Crown’s control over its servants. This arrangement reflected another British lesson drawn from the thirteen rebelling colonies: that elected assemblies had used their power over salaries to sway Crown officials. In the Canadas after the war, the British government paid those salaries to prolong colonial dependence on the empire.

Thanks to this British largesse, the Canadian colonists paid lower taxes than did Americans in the republican states. In 1794, Upper Canada’s landholders paid only 5 shillings in tax for every £100 in assessed property: a rate of one-quarter of one percent and a fifth of the tax rate in New York. An ironic consequence of the revolution was that the Patriot “winners” had to bear higher postwar taxes to finance their war debts.

Lord Thurlow explained that the British “have given them more civil liberty, without political liberty.” In sum, the British worked to deny the colonists both the civil motives and the political means for agitation.

Under the Articles, the states conceded only a few, limited powers to Congress: to wage war, conduct diplomacy, and arbitrate disputes between them. To satisfy small states, each delegation cast a single vote, so little Rhode Island’s vote matched that of vast Virginia. On the major issues of war and peace, only a supermajority of nine states (out of thirteen) could commit the confederacy. The Articles required ratification by all thirteen states to become operative, and any future amendment also required unanimity, which discouraged any change.

Thomas Jefferson drafted the first “Northwest Ordinance,” which Congress provisionally adopted in April 1784. It subdivided the federal domain into ten territories and stipulated that, once any one had 20,000 free citizens, they could convene a convention to draft a republican constitution and send a delegate to Congress. When the settler population reached the threshold of the smallest original state, Rhode Island, the territory could join the union as an equal partner in its powers and share in the national debt. While holding out future statehood, the ordinance bought time for the federal government to sell land within the territories.

To help the Ohio Company attract respectable settlers from New England, the new ordinance outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory. To reconcile southern congressmen, the ordinance also mandated a fugitive slave law, requiring territorial settlers to return runaways from the slave states. The ordinance also implicitly kept open more southern territories to slavery. The combination of a partial restriction on slavery’s expansion with a fugitive slave law set a precedent deemed fundamental to preserving the union.

Regarding Congress as hapless and hopeless, settlers fought their own war against Indians in the Ohio Valley. In 1786, Benjamin Logan and George Rogers Clark led Kentucky militiamen in massive raids that destroyed seven Shawnee villages, although their chiefs had cooperated with federal treaty councils. One of them, Molunthy, received an American flag, which he flew over his village as a source of protection. Instead, Kentuckians seized the chief and smashed his skull with a tomahawk. After blowing his body to pieces with gunpowder, they burned his village and its crops. While smashing Shawnees, the raids also discredited the federal government that had promised to protect them.

The growing settlements also alarmed their imperial neighbors: the British to the north in Canada and the Spanish to the southwest in Louisiana. From just 12,000 in 1783, Kentucky’s population exploded to 73,000 in 1790. In

Another Spanish governor regarded the settlers as “distinguished from savages only in their color, language, and the superiority of their depraved cunning and untrustworthiness.”

In effect, the Spanish tried to build a settler fire wall to keep away more hostile settlers from the American orbit. During the 1780s and early 1790s, about 20,000 Americans moved to Louisiana. Some newcomers, including Daniel Boone, settled near St. Louis, but most developed farms and plantations around Natchez, on the east bank of the lower Mississippi. “May God keep us Spanish,” wrote one grateful settler.

McGillivray warned against gambling that Americans could become good Spanish subjects. He insisted that “filling up your country with those accursed republicans is like placing a common thief as a guard on your door and giving him the key.”

In 1784, Robert Morris resigned as superintendent of finance for want of any money to superintend.

Franklin agreed, “Our States are on the point of separation, only to meet hereafter for the purpose of cutting one another’s throats.”

During the revolution, however, they faced growing pressure from common voters, who often favored ambitious men of newly gained wealth. In 1786, the French minister to the United States reported, “Although there are no nobles in America, there is a class of men denominated ‘gentlemen,’ who by reason of their wealth, their talents, their education, their families, or the offices they hold, aspire to a preeminence which the people refuse to grant them.” Gentlemen cast their new rivals as ignorant, vulgar, and greedy men aspiring to more than their due. Robert Morris complained that republican politics favored “vulgar Souls whose narrow Optics can see but the little Circle of selfish Concerns.” This sounded obtuse coming from a man who had gotten rich by manipulating government contracts, subsidies, and land grants.

Common folk also bore the greatest sacrifices and hardships of the war. As the conflict dragged on, they resented their increasing burdens from taxes and militia service. They blamed leaders for waging a rich man’s war by making it a poor man’s fight.

By disrupting traditional networks of trade and political influence, the war created opportunities for daring and ambitious men to wheel and deal their way to new wealth and greater influence. They profited from military contracts and speculation in the confiscated estates of exiled Loyalists.

But Clinton repeatedly won reelection, governing the state for nearly twenty years by consolidating his popularity as the farmer’s champion. Common voters appreciated that Clinton celebrated their way of life instead of displaying the traditional elitism within his grasp.

Alexander Hamilton rose in the approved fashion to win acceptance into the New York elite. Although born poor and illegitimate in the West Indies, Hamilton secured a wealthy patron, college education, high-status wife (Schuyler’s daughter), and the mores and manners of his new peers. Brilliant, short, elegant, and handsome, Hamilton wore a self-assurance that belied his origins. After serving as an officer in the army, he became a lawyer and politician who championed the interests of wealthy merchants and great landlords, obscuring his early poverty. Gentility as well as wealth jointly qualified the proper leader.

To defend liberty, Patriots dispersed power among many legislators and rendered them collectively superior to the governor. Most governors lost their powers to appoint officials and veto laws. No state constitution allowed a governor to prorogue a legislature.

While granting sovereignty to “the people,” the state constitutions insisted that only men with property could vote or hold office. As in the colonial era, a voter had to own enough real estate to support his family, which meant having either a farm or a shop. Because small farms and workshops abounded, about two-thirds of white men qualified to vote. Patriot leaders insisted that only propertied men possessed the “independence” from a landlord or employer required to make judicious political decisions.

The new constitution broadened the electorate to include any man who had resided for at least a year in the state and had paid any tax. Where only two-thirds of men could vote under the colonial property requirement, 90 percent qualified as a result of the new taxpayer standard.

Distrusting human nature, they regarded inaction (or “gridlock” as we would put it today), as preferable to the hyperactive legislation of popular government.

It was folly, he insisted, to deprive the wealthy of all institutional power, for then they would subvert the government—as they were busy doing in Pennsylvania. If concentrated instead in a senate, elite power would become more conspicuous, inviting scrutiny and restraint from the lower house and common voters.

In a stroke of political genius, conservatives packaged a separation of powers as the essence of true republicanism. In New Hampshire, a conservative insisted that the different branches of a properly complex government should, by watching one another, “become centinels in behalf of the people to guard against every possible usurpation.”

The long, hard war had devastated the American economy. Roaming armies and frontier raiders uprooted thousands of people by destroying their farms, plantations, and towns. At least 25,000 Americans died in military service, usually of disease. As a percentage of the population, the mortality exceeded every American conflict but the Civil War of the 1860s. British

Economic historians find a 30 percent decline in national income between 1774 and 1790: a decline which they characterize as “America’s greatest income slump ever,” and an “economic disaster.”

To reduce inflation, radical Patriots favored strict price controls, the confiscation and sale of Loyalist property, and tender laws that punished anyone who refused to take paper money in payment. Radicals blamed inflation on rich merchants who allegedly hoarded scarce commodities and sold them only when paid premium prices. The growing wealth of merchants like Robert Morris bred angry resentment among poor men, who blamed “greedy Muckworms.”

Women often took the lead in riots, gathering to break open merchants’ warehouses to seize sugar, coffee, and flour. Rioters left behind paper money at the price they deemed just. According to Abigail Adams, in July 1777 in Boston, a hundred women “assembled with a cart and trucks” to break open the warehouse of “an eminent, wealthy, stingy Merchant (who is a Batchelor).” They beat him until he gave up his keys. While they carted away his coffee, “a large concourse of Men stood [by as] amazed, silent Spectators.”

In early October, renewed disturbances led thirty armed conservatives, including Robert Morris and James Wilson, to hole up in Wilson’s mansion, which became known as “Fort Wilson.” Radicals and conservatives exchanged gunfire, killing men on both sides. Just as common militiamen broke down the front door, a genteel militia unit, the City Light Horse, arrived to save the mansion and its defenders. The authorities dared not prosecute anyone on either side for the violence. The Fort Wilson riot deepened conservative hatred for the Pennsylvania constitutional regime, which apparently tolerated economic regulation by mobs.

To fund those payments, most states levied taxes at unprecedented rates. In 1786, for example, taxes in Massachusetts were at least four times higher than before the war. The taxes were regressive, with the poor land of common farmers paying at a higher rate than the vast tracts held by land speculators. Many states relied on poll taxes levied at the same rate on every man, poor and rich. Recalling the prewar protests over small British taxes, some rural people complained, “Our Grievances Ware Less Real and more Ideal then they are Now.”

The postwar recession multiplied lawsuits for debts, and court judgments also demanded payment in hard money. If a debtor failed to pay, sheriffs seized his livestock and land for auctions, where property sold for a fraction of its appraised value. If a farmer hid his livestock, a creditor could cast him in jail as a hostage for the debt. A gloomy debtor insisted that New England had become “a country, which holds out nothing but poverty and prisons.” Farmers dreaded losing title to their farms to become the dependent tenants of aristocratic landlords.

The legislature, however, badly represented rural interests because towns had to pay the costs of their representatives, so fifty-two poor towns economized by declining to send any. Naturally, the representatives of wealthier towns saw no reason to heed their petitions.

Across the country, conservatives overreacted to Shays’s Rebellion, which they improbably described as a leveling movement meant to abolish all debts and confiscate great property to benefit the poor. Henry Knox assured Washington, “Their creed is that the property of the United States has been protected from confiscation . . . by the joint exertion of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all.”

Some states offered more limited measures to delay or reduce taxes or allow payments of debts or taxes in farm produce rather than in scarce cash.

Although no state, save Pennsylvania, was particularly democratic, conservatives did not like to compromise when their property was at stake. They regarded state constitutions as pretty on paper but failures in practice, for too many alleged demagogues won legislative seats by pandering for popularity. Dr. Benjamin Rush detected a new pathology in American minds, a disease he named “Anarchia” and described as “the excess of the passion for liberty . . . which could not be removed by reason, nor restrained by government.” By 1787, conservatives concluded that the revolution had gone too far.

As he saw it, the problem was that too many people could use state governments to shut their purses to him while they reached into his pocket.

The eldest son of the wealthiest man in a Virginia county, Madison inherited hundreds of acres, scores of slaves, and the leisure time to read widely. Attending the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), Madison studied moral philosophy and graduated in 1772. Returning to Virginia, he became active in his county’s Committee of Safety and the colony’s Provincial Congress. Scholarly, sickly, astute, and shy, he worked best in a library or on a committee rather than on the stump in an election. Joining Congress in 1779, he grew frustrated with regional rivalries and the weak confederacy.

Madison defied conventional thinking, which insisted that a republic could only work on a small scale, no larger than a state, so that the legislators could know their constituents and feel the local consequences of their laws. The diverse climates, landscapes, ethnicities, and classes in the vast United States seemed to defy unification in one superrepublic. Past republics had worked best on the relatively intimate scale of a city, a province, or a canton, which enjoyed relative homogeneity. Madison retorted that no American state enjoyed homogeneity and harmony, least of all the smallest one, Rhode Island.

In the New York delegation, Clinton assigned two clients to keep a close eye on the third member, Hamilton.

Through self-discipline and hard service, he became known as the consummate republican leader of virtue, dignity, and honor. Sensitive to his public audience, Washington weighed every word, gesture, and decision with painstaking care. His vaunted reputation gave him great political leverage, but he dreaded losing his impeccable aura with any public controversy.

The fifty-five delegates were mature, wealthy, and well-educated gentlemen from prestigious families. Aside from two Catholics, all were Protestants, and 70 percent belonged to the relatively elitist Episcopal Church. None adhered to the more plebeian evangelical churches. At a time when few men (and no women) had access to higher education, twenty-nine of the delegates held college degrees. Professionally, they were a mix of lawyers, merchants, great planters, and landlords. Twenty-five owned slaves. Aside from the wealthy Pennsylvania merchants, the richest delegates came from Virginia and South Carolina, where they possessed vast plantations worked by scores of the enslaved. Most had federal experience as congressmen (forty-two) or Continental officers (thirty). No delegate embodied the perspective of the American majority: the hinterland farmers of modest means.

To discourage snoopers, delegates kept the hall’s windows and doors shut through the heat and humidity of a Philadelphia summer. By excluding public feedback, they sought frank discussions. Madison later insisted, “No Constitution would ever have been adopted by the convention if the debates had been public.”

A Connecticut delegate declared that Hamilton’s plan “had been praised by everybody” but “supported by none.” The delegates could not afford to embrace a controversial British-style mixed constitution. Citing an ancient precedent, Pierce Butler of South Carolina concluded, “We must follow the example of Solon who gave the Athenians not the best Government he could devise but the best they would receive.”

The heated debates over representation exposed a second, even more dangerous fault line between northern and southern states. Slaves comprised less than 4 percent of the northern population compared to 40 percent in the South. Determined

Some northern delegates argued that only free citizens should count in allocating seats in the House of Representatives. Gouverneur Morris denounced the inequity that the inhabitant of Georgia and South Carolina who goes to the Coast of Africa, and in defiance of the most sacred laws of humanity, tears away his fellow creatures from their dearest connections and damns them to the most cruel bondage, shall have more votes in a government instituted for the protection of the rights of mankind, than the citizen of Pennsylvania or New Jersey who views with a laudable horror so nefarious a practice.

In August, another heated debate erupted over continuing the import slave trade. On this issue, southern delegates divided. Seeking to expand their operations, planters in the Lower South demanded continued imports from Africa. The Upper South’s leaders, however, believed that they had a surplus and could profit by sales to the Lower South. Banning import competition would enhance those profits, but principle also played a role with some delegates, particularly Madison, who insisted that importing more slaves would “dishonor” the nation.

Saving the union and promoting profits ultimately mattered more than any moral principles against bondage for others. Thanks to this compromise, the Lower South would import another 200,000 Africans as slaves during the next twenty years.

Delegates longed to believe that slavery eventually would wither without Americans having to make difficult sacrifices.

They cleverly claimed the popular name of “Federalists,” which previously had meant a supporter of strong states and a weak confederation. Better still, the newly minted “Federalists” cast their critics as mere contrarians called “Anti-Federalists,” whom they characterized as cunning demagogues bent on cheating their creditors. Winning that propaganda battle, the Federalists created labels that stuck with the press and historians ever since.

Anti-Federalists pointed out that the constitution created a national government with greater power than Britain had ever exercised over the colonists.

An American national identity emerged later, slowly, painfully, and partially. It would follow from that constitution rather than lie behind its creation.

Only in Rhode Island did Anti-Federalists have the wit to call the Federalists’ bluff by holding a more direct appeal to the people: a referendum, where Rhode Islanders voted against the constitution by ten to one.

In the national campaign, Federalists enjoyed better networks for sharing information and political strategy. As congressmen, Philadelphia delegates, or Continental officers, many had worked with one another across state lines. A Connecticut Anti-Federalist lamented that the Federalists “have got almost all the best Writers (as well as speakers) on their side.” A New York Anti-Federalist noted, “The great easily form associations,” but “the poor and middling class form them with difficulty.”

Cities hosted most of the nation’s newspapers, and their editors usually agreed with their advertisers and subscribers, who were overwhelmingly Federalists. Eighty of the nation’s ninety-two newspapers tilted toward the Federalists, favoring their essays, particularly the celebrated series, The Federalist, written by Hamilton (51 essays), Madison (29), and Jay (5). Because postmasters doubled as merchants or printers, most supported Federalism, so Anti-Federalist letters and pamphlets often got lost or delayed in the mail. Thanks to distortions by press and post, readers could gain the misleading impression that the Federal Constitution was wildly popular elsewhere. Northerners read that Patrick Henry had endorsed the constitution when, in fact, he was leading the opposition in Virginia.

In the spring, two more states ratified overwhelmingly: Maryland in April and South Carolina in May. In both states, the apparent inevitability of national ratification had deflated opposition.

On June 21, New Hampshire narrowly provided that ninth state, but it was a minor prize compared to two major holdouts: New York and Virginia. A union without them would be painfully incomplete and likely to falter. Both favored Anti-Federalism, for their voters preferred to live in strong states within a weak union. Both states also had especially able, clever, and committed Anti-Federalist leaders: New York’s Governor George Clinton and Virginia’s Patrick Henry, whom Jefferson considered “the greatest orator that ever lived.” Considering his political clout invincible, Jefferson once observed to Madison, “What we have to do I think is devoutly pray for his death.” Clinton feared losing the state’s robust revenues from taxing imports, for his popularity derived from minimizing internal taxes. Henry dreaded that northerners would dominate a powerful nation and could threaten southern slavery.

stronger union would benefit Virginia, he argued, more than any other state. After three weeks of debate, Madison’s dogged optimism trumped Henry’s gloomy eloquence.

As the new administration’s prime mover, Alexander Hamilton cultivated “a principle of strength and stability in the organization of our government, and vigor in its operations.”

The great American nightmare was that foreign powers would exploit the internal divisions of a tenuous union.

Washington dreaded the new office as inevitably contentious and potentially fatal to his cherished reputation. He felt like “a culprit who is going to the place of his execution,” as he exchanged “a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties.” Washington ensured the Constitution’s early survival by administering the new government with careful deliberation, good judgment, and public dignity. John Adams later recalled Washington as “the best actor of Presidency We have ever had.”

Washington went along with the quasi-regal style, acting with cold formality while wearing a dignified, dark suit accessorized with a ceremonial sword. He rode in a richly decorated coach drawn by six white horses and attended by four servants in orange-and-white livery. During public appearances, officials called him “Your Excellency,” and bands sometimes played “God Save the King.”

Rather than alarm southern leaders, Madison also avoided a philosophical preface on human equality featured in the bills of rights adopted by most states. Consequently, no one called Madison’s slate of amendments “the Bill of Rights” until the 1860s.

Madison’s amendments did give North Carolinians enough political cover to enter the union in November 1789. Rhode Islanders remained stubbornly independent until Congress put economic screws to the little republic by barring its trade with the United States in May 1790. At the end of that month a special state convention narrowly voted to rejoin the United States, which once again had thirteen states. The union added a fourteenth state with Vermont’s admission a year later.

Madison’s amendments protected only the free, leaving untouched the slavery suffered by a fifth of the American people. In February 1790, Pennsylvania Quakers and other antislavery activists submitted two petitions to Congress. The petitioners included an aged and dying Benjamin Franklin, who had owned slaves but had developed new scruples.

Overriding state legislatures and courts, the federal law authorized masters or their agents to pursue and seize alleged runaways in another state. Entrusting adjudication to any magistrate, the law denied trial by jury or the protections of habeas corpus to the accused runaways. Tacitly permitting kidnappings, so long as the victims were black, the law empowered southern agents who profited by hunting down and seizing supposed runaways in northern states.

Brash and energetic, he meddled in every department, including foreign affairs, to Jefferson’s disgust. Attentive to details and the big picture, Hamilton designed both policy and the bureaucracy to implement it. By deploying patronage, he built support in Congress and the states. A critic grumbled, “Mr. Hamilton is all powerful and fails in nothing which he attempts.”

Locating the temporary capital in Philadelphia created a problem for slaveholders, who by state law could keep a slave in Pennsylvania for no more than six months. Washington brought a few household slaves to Philadelphia but shuttled them back to Mount Vernon every few months to keep them from claiming freedom. “I wish to have it accomplished,” he explained, “under [some] pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.”

During the fall of 1791, Arthur St. Clair led 1,400 federal soldiers deep into Indian country. Before dawn on November 4, about 1,000 warriors surprised the sleeping troops in their poorly guarded camp. Quickly overwhelmed, they broke and fled, suffering 630 dead in the greatest single victory won by Indians over Americans during their long history of conflict. The victors stuffed the mouths of the enemy dead with soil to mock their fatal lust for Indian land.

By 1800, half a million Americans lived west of the Appalachian Mountains, three times as many as in 1790. The newcomers spilled over the western border into Louisiana, where Spanish officials reluctantly welcomed them for want of any way to stop them.

Federalists regarded the regulation as a rebellion that threatened the new constitutional order. They insisted that “busy and restless sons of anarchy” were bringing “us back to those scenes of humiliation and distress from which the new Constitution has so wonderfully extricated us.”

Standing down, the regulators stayed home rather than confront overwhelming force. Federal troops arrested twenty supposed rebels, whom they hauled back to Philadelphia for trial. They included Herman Husband, an aged religious mystic and a refugee from the bloody suppression of the regulation in North Carolina in 1772. After a year in a frigid jail, Husband was released, but he died of pneumonia on his journey home.

The American Revolution had helped to provoke the French Revolution by generating a massive war debt that the crown could not finance and by setting a republican precedent for replacing that monarchy.

Initially, almost all Americans welcomed the revolutionary creation of a sister republic by their wartime allies. Americans hoped that republicanism would become a moral contagion that could liberate the entire world from kings and aristocrats. Americans celebrated French victories, sang their revolutionary songs, waved the tricolored revolutionary flag, wore tricolored cockades on their hats, and even donned red French liberty caps. In Boston, an angry audience rioted and demolished a theater after concluding that a play had mocked a French character.

As the French and British escalated their naval warfare, both powers pressured the United States for assistance. The British counted on America’s dependence on British imports and its vulnerability to the superior might of the Royal Navy. The French expected American gratitude for their help in defeating the British during the War of the American Revolution. The Washington administration opted for neutrality because the deeply indebted and politically divided United States could ill afford a new conflict. In April 1793, Washington issued a proclamation of neutrality, barring Americans from assisting the French as privateers or filibusterers.

By continuing to celebrate the French Revolution, Republicans terrified Federalists, who dreaded that their rivals meant to copy the bloody French Jacobins. Cultivating a xenophobic American patriotism, Federalists disdained foreign revolutions as perversions. They cast the Republicans as traitors in league with “foreign disorganizers.” Federalists claimed that only the United States could sustain a stable republic—and only so long as they kept European ideas and conspirators away. “Holding

British repression accelerated Irish migration to the United States, where most of the newcomers voted for Republicans as the enemies of their enemies, the British. Disgusted Federalists denounced the newcomers as “United Irishmen, Free Masons, and the most God-provoking Democrats on this side of Hell.” Adopting a nativist position, Federalists derided most immigrants as too ignorant, poor, violent, and brutish to become citizens. A Federalist journalist declared that “every United Irishman ought to be hunted from the country, as much as a wolf or a tyger.” A Federalist congressman insisted, “The time is now come when it will be proper to declare that nothing but birth shall entitle a man to citizenship in this country.”

Federalists also blamed the French Revolution for instigating a massive and bloody slave revolt in the Caribbean. The greatest slave revolt in the Americas erupted on the evening of August 22, 1791, later known as the “Night of Fire.” On the northern plain of the French West Indian colony of Saint-Domingue, enslaved Africans began to kill overseers and masters and torched the buildings and cane fields of a thousand plantations. The revolt caused an international sensation because Saint-Domingue was the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean, for its 465,000 slaves produced richer crops of coffee and sugarcane than in the entire British West Indies. About the size of Maryland, Saint-Domingue occupied the western third of the island of Hispaniola, with the Spanish holding the eastern two-thirds as their colony of Santo Domingo. Because of brutal work conditions and tropical diseases, slave deaths exceeded births in the colony, so the planters imported thousands to replace the corpses. As a consequence, most of the enslaved in Saint-Domingue were Africans by birth.

The French sought to rally thousands of black men to defend the French West Indies while promoting slave revolts in the British West Indies.

Rejecting the racial radicalism of the French Revolution, Napoleon resolved to restore French control and plantation slavery in Saint-Domingue.

Their new country, named “Haiti,” became the second new nation, after the United States, to win sovereignty in the Americas.

To fend off that storm, Jefferson favored emancipating and deporting Virginia’s slaves over the course of two generations. But his fellow southerners rejected his plan as too expensive and economically debilitating.

A few fearful slaves sought to save themselves by revealing the plot to their masters, who alerted militia officers. Called into service, militiamen patrolled the roads and arrested suspects.79 The trials commenced on September 11, and executions began the next day.

Jefferson also tried to pay down the national debt that Hamilton had designed for perpetuity. During their twelve years in power, the Federalists had increased that debt from $76 million to $83 million; during his eight years as president, Jefferson reduced it to $57 million.

In 1811, the United States spent only $1 per capita, a mere twenty-fifth of the public expenditures in Great Britain. A French traveler reported that Jefferson’s administration was “neither seen [n]or felt.”

Hamilton noted that “the courage and obstinate resistance made by black inhabitants” had destroyed the invaders and induced Napoleon to cut his losses in America by selling Louisiana to the United States at a bargain price in 1803. Three years earlier, Napoleon had extorted that vast colony from the Spanish king.

Jefferson feared becoming entrapped by Marshall’s quick mind and rigorous logic. The new president assured another judge, “So great is his sophistry [that] you must never give him an affirmative answer, or you will be forced to grant his conclusions. Why, if he were to ask me whether it were daylight or not, I’d reply, ‘Sir, I don’t know, I can’t tell.’”

Jefferson held the presidency for eight years, while Marshall served as Chief Justice for thirty-four years thanks to a life tenure provided by the Federal Constitution. Marshall participated in more than a thousand decisions, writing over half of them. Thanks to that prodigious output during a critical generation in the consolidation of the federal union, Marshall had an impact at least comparable to Jefferson’s. The president complained that Federalists had “retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold.

By 1819, Jefferson and his Republican successor, James Madison, had appointed most of the Supreme Court justices, but the justices had come around to Marshall’s Federalist philosophy, to Jefferson’s dismay.

But any political victory is temporary. Like a kaleidoscope, we continue in every generation to make new combinations of clashing principles derived from the enduring importance and incompleteness of our revolution. The revolution remains embedded as selective memory in every contemporary debate.

Strained by revolution and migration, old hierarchies had to be reinvented in a new republic. Although excluded from formal politics, poorer colonists and women could protest violently as urban mobs and rural regulators.

Once limited to the governing elite, gentility spread to the middle class. Prosperous tradesmen, shopkeepers, and farmers read more, adopted better manners, and wore nicer clothes. Teacups and saucers, carpets, clocks, and looking glasses proliferated in their homes as they entertained more visitors. Watching closely, they measured one another for signs of refinement or vulgarity. A dread of scorn compelled attention to every detail of appearance and performance.

Numerous in the Northeast and Middle Atlantic, the outposts of middle-class gentility were scarce in the West and scarcest of all in the South, where most rural folk preserved a plain style of life.

In 1786, Jefferson pitched a secular and public system of education for Virginia. He reasoned that “the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more that the thousandth part of what will be paid to [the] kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.” But most citizens preferred to keep their taxes low, so Virginia’s legislators rejected Jefferson’s plan.

Comprehensive, public school systems did not emerge beyond New England until the 1820s and 1830s and only in the other northern states.

The colonies had supported only nine colleges, which each year collectively graduated fewer than 200 students, most of them from the genteel elite. After the war, reformers sought to expand colleges and recruit more middle-class students. By 1815, the United States sustained thirty-three colleges, but that growth barely kept up with the exploding population. Many rustics still distrusted colleges as training grounds for potential aristocrats.

The early republic promoted more self-education than public education as many people exploited the greater availability of print. Thanks to rudimentary education at home, about three-quarters of free American adults were literate: one of the highest rates in the world.

The 69 post offices of 1788 mushroomed to 903 in 1800, when the postal system carried nearly 2 million copies of newspapers to far-flung readers, giving the United States the largest and widest circulation in the world.

Foreign visitors marveled at the number and influence of American newspapers, which became pivotal to republican politics, for shrewd editors could make or break candidates. The French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville noted “Only a newspaper can put the same thought at the same time before a thousand readers.” But many moralists worried that newspapers put the wrong thoughts in too many minds, spreading slander rather than insights. In 1807, Jefferson concluded, “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. . . . The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them.” A free press might threaten, rather than bolster, the fragile new republic.

By seeking European approval, Americans kept their art derivative and prolonged their cultural dependency.

Before 1820, American publishers preferred to pirate books and articles from Britain rather than publish American writers. English texts were more fashionable and less expensive for publishers who, by law, had to pay royalties to American authors but not to foreign writers. Susanna Rowson’s novel Charlotte Temple (1791) sold very well, but she reaped few profits because American printers pirated it from the London edition. Because of that unintended consequence of copyright law, no American novelist could live by her or his work until the 1820s.

If government can answer for individuals at the day of judgement, let me be controlled by it in religious matters; otherwise, let men be free.”

In 1789, a Methodist preacher described “the true disciple of Christ” as “meek in heart, thirsting after holiness, crucified with Christ, and dead to the world.”

While prioritizing spirituality, evangelicals did not withdraw from the world, for they expected believers to work hard and honestly—and then support church and charity. Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, exhorted, “Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.”

Conservatives argued that a republic could not survive without the virtuous and moral citizens promoted by state-mandated financial support for religion. In 1784, Richard Henry Lee defended a religious establishment in Virginia: “The experience of all times shows Religion to be the guardian of morals—and he must be a very inattentive observer in our Country, who does not see that avarice is accomplishing the destruction of religion, for want of a legal obligation to contribute something to its support.”

From 1784 to 1786, Madison deftly outmaneuvered the state’s governor, Patrick Henry, who wanted a mandatory tithe paid by all taxpayers to support incorporated churches. In the key move, Madison persuaded Presbyterians that they would lose out to Anglicans under Henry’s proposal. Madison boasted to Jefferson, “The mutual hatred of these sects has been much inflamed. . . . I am far from being sorry for it.” Sectarian rivalry helped Madison make the case for dissolving the church-state alliance.

Virginia’s example proved slowly contagious. None of the new states created after the revolution provided for a church establishment, and those of the old states gradually toppled: New York in 1777; Virginia in 1786; South Carolina in 1790; Maryland in 1810; Connecticut in 1818; New Hampshire in 1819; and Massachusetts in 1833.34

They promoted an emotional, physical style of worship that often provoked convulsions, known as “the jerks,” in listeners absorbed in spiritual ecstasy. This visceral worship appealed to settlers coping with the hardships of frontier life and skeptical of college learning.

To curry favor with France during the revolution, the states had repealed colonial laws barring Catholics from voting and holding office. Catholics made the most of their new legal equality to compete for souls through persuasion.

Protestant theology shifted with the more egalitarian times. During the colonial era, almost all Protestant churches clung to Calvinist doctrines, which emphasized inherent human depravity and utter dependence on divine grace for salvation. The postwar competition for believers led most denominations instead to emphasize individual free will in seeking and gaining salvation. Instead of dwelling on God the all-powerful father, preachers emphasized the mix of the human and divine in Jesus. Under the pressure of competition, most mainstream churches—Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Lutheran—adopted the new emphasis on outreach, free will, and your own personal Jesus. They founded missionary organizations to compete for believers in the West, where the nation’s future emerged through expansion.

Visitors from Europe marveled that America’s many denominations and lack of a church establishment led to a broader and more intense interest in Christianity. A higher proportion of Americans attended church and adhered to religious values than in any other country of Christendom. Most American households owned a Bible—in stark contrast to Europe.

After 1800, most Americans regarded republicanism and Protestantism as mutually reinforcing, for both preached individual choice and encouraged voluntary association.

By shattering religious establishments, he had sought the triumph of secular thinking. Instead, disestablishment created space for an increasingly evangelical public culture.

In only one state, New Jersey, did some women gain the right to vote. In 1776, the state constitution neglected to specify citizenship as male, instead defining voters as “all free inhabitants” who met property and residence requirements—which qualified widows and spinsters (but not married women). Some eligible women exploited that oversight to vote during the 1780s, which led the New Jersey legislature explicitly to accept the practice in a 1790 election law that referred to a voter as “he or she.” During the 1790s, most widows preferred Federalist candidates rather than Republicans, who favored expanding rights for common white men while limiting those of women.

Republicanism opened all forms of social inequality and domination to criticism in the name of individual rights. More young people had sex before marriage in defiance of their parents. Growing steadily during the eighteenth century, premarital pregnancy peaked during the revolutionary generation at a third of brides. Throwing up their hands, magistrates stopped the traditional prosecutions of young people for fornication. Instead, new mothers sued presumed fathers for support if they had not married yet.

Most states also made it easier for women to seek divorces if abandoned or brutalized by their husbands. More couples simply and cheaply “self-divorced” as one bolted from the other to seek happiness outside of marriage. In one of many elopement notices published by jilted men, a Virginian advertised, “Whereas, my wife Annie Dixon has revolted from my bed, and refuses copulation . . . I will not pay any of the debts she contracts.”

Aside from Quakers, who rejected slavery as a sin, almost all colonists had regarded human bondage as natural and immutable. In the traditional society of British America, slavery was but the lowest rung in a social hierarchy of dependency, below white indentured servants, tenant farmers, women and children, and wage laborers.

John Jay headed New York’s antislavery society, but he continued to buy slaves and freed them only once he felt fully compensated by years of their hard labor. Although George Mason criticized slavery, he clung to his own slaves and, with consummate insensitivity, named one of them “Liberty.”

Jefferson agreed that southerners were “zealous for their own liberties, but trampling on those of others.” Whites especially cherished their own freedom because they denied it to the enslaved.

Most northern states gradually emancipated their slaves through laws designed to soften the blow for masters. In 1780, Pennsylvania’s legislature declared slavery “disgraceful to any people, and more especially to those who have been contending in the great cause of liberty themselves.” But the law freed no slaves then alive, only those born after the law and only once they turned twenty-eight years old. No slave, if properly registered by a master, could become free until 1808. A slave born a day before the act remained enslaved for life. Pennsylvania still had some elderly slaves until 1847, when the state finally and fully abolished the system.

The laws sought primarily (and very gradually) to free northern states of slavery, rather than to ensure freedom for the enslaved. Lawmakers meant to save taxpayers from having to compensate masters for their lost property. Instead, young slaves would pay for their eventual freedom by working without compensation into their mid-twenties. Economic historians calculate that this young labor recouped to masters 95 percent of the slaves’ market value.

Northern legislators acted more from a distaste for slavery than from empathy for the enslaved. Legal loopholes often enabled masters to sell slaves to southern buyers before freedom claimed them.

In the northern states, gradual emancipation laws increased the free black population from fewer than 1,000 in 1775 to nearly 50,000 in 1810. But the northern states still had 27,000 slaves that year because the gradual process of emancipation remained incomplete. The freed tended to gravitate from the countryside into the cities, where they found greater comfort and safety in numbers. By 1810, nearly a third of New York State’s blacks lived in New York City, and two-fifths of black Pennsylvanians resided in Philadelphia. By providing growing numbers for runaways to hide in, black neighborhoods pressured northern masters to sell early freedom to their remaining slaves. In the greatest boon of freedom, by 1820 most northern black couples could live together and keep their children.

Northern racism intensified as the free black population grew. Tocqueville noted, “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists.”

Slaves could join their masters in genteel parlors and public conveyances, but free blacks faced exclusion. Even the antislavery societies of New York and Pennsylvania barred blacks from joining.

The manumitters included Washington, who freed his slaves in a last will and testament. Most manumitters, however, were Quakers or evangelicals with religious scruples.

The postrevolutionary manumissions modestly increased the free black population in Virginia from 2,000 in 1782 (1 percent of all black people) to 20,000 (7 percent) in 1810. Maryland’s free black population grew from 4 percent of blacks in 1755 to 20 percent in 1810.97

Jefferson and Madison challenged Virginia’s colonial laws of “entail and primogeniture,” which had enabled a great landowner to bind his heirs never to subdivide or alienate any part of a plantation (including its slaves). Aristocratic in design, entail and primogeniture preserved great estates through the generations at the expense of all the children save the first-born son. Reformers denounced the colonial inheritance laws as the tyranny of a past generation overriding the rights of the living to buy and sell land and slaves as they wished.

Minor crop during the colonial era, cotton became profitable and widespread in the Lower South after the invention in 1793 of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin: a machine to separate valuable fibers from their husks.

South Carolina’s cotton exports soared from 9,840 pounds in 1790 to 6,425,000 pounds just ten years later. By 1810, exports surged to 50 million pounds, and planters scrambled to buy more slaves from Chesapeake traders.

In barns and secluded spots, they whipped backs and inflicted “cat-hauling”: dragging a cat by the tail along the bare back of a trussed-up victim.

From 700,000 in 1790, the number of enslaved doubled to 1.5 million in 1820. As foreign imports faded after 1807, natural increase accounted for most of the population growth. Between 1790 and 1860, slave traders and migrants herded over a million slaves south and west from the Chesapeake to expand southern society to the Mississippi and beyond.

Postrevolutionary America was the first society premised on individualism (for and by the free). Only in the United States did most men think of themselves as lone actors making free choices that determined success or failure.

In sum, the revolution generated clashing contagions, of slavery and liberty, and pitted them against one another.

Constitutional crises flared in every generation as one region or another threatened secession until those threats became real and bloody in 1860–1861.

From my notion template

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. An in-depth look at how cell phones and social media are changing the younger generations. It’s helpfully packaged with remediation strategies.

Impressions

On the whole it was good – it was quite repetitive, and Haidt’s substack had ruined several points before the book actually came out

How I Discovered It

I’ve read Haidt’s other books.

Who Should Read It?

Parents of children under 18

How the Book Changed Me

My immediate actions were to cut down on Marleigh’s already very rationed phone time – also it reaffirmed and extended my current belief that a proper relationship with technology is both symbiotic and adversarial. It also clarified my notions of anomie and one’s relationship with modern society as it is, not as it should be.

Summary + Notes

By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.

While the reward-seeking parts of the brain mature earlier, the frontal cortex—essential for self-control, delay of gratification, and resistance to temptation—is not up to full capacity until the mid-20s, and preteens are at a particularly vulnerable point in development.

Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and—as I will show—unsuitable for children and adolescents.

They spent far less time playing with, talking to, touching, or even making eye contact with their friends and families, thereby reducing their participation in embodied social behaviors that are essential for successful human development.

So even while parents worked to eliminate risk and freedom in the real world, they generally, and often unknowingly, granted full independence in the virtual world, in part because most found it difficult to understand what was going on there, let alone know what to restrict or how to restrict it.

My central claim in this book is that these two trends—overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world—are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.

A few notes about terminology. When I talk about the “real world,” I am referring to relationships and social interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for millions of years: They are embodied, meaning that we use our bodies to communicate, we are conscious of the bodies of others, and we respond to the bodies of others both consciously and unconsciously. They are synchronous, which means they are happening at the same time, with subtle cues about timing and turn taking. They involve primarily one-to-one or one-to-several communication, with only one interaction happening at a given moment. They take place within communities that have a high bar for entry and exit, so people are strongly motivated to invest in relationships and repair rifts when they happen. In contrast, when I talk about the “virtual world,” I am referring to relationships and interactions characterized by four features that have been typical for just a few decades: They are disembodied, meaning that no body is needed, just language. Partners could be (and already are) artificial intelligences (AIs). They are heavily asynchronous, happening via text-based posts and comments. (A video call is different; it is synchronous.) They involve a substantial number of one-to-many communications, broadcasting to a potentially vast audience. Multiple interactions can be happening in parallel. They take place within communities that have a low bar for entry and exit, so people can block others or just quit when they are not pleased. Communities tend to be short-lived, and relationships are often disposable.

No smartphones before high school. Parents should delay children’s entry into round-the-clock internet access by giving only basic phones (phones with limited apps and no internet browser) before ninth grade (roughly age 14). No social media before 16. Let kids get through the most vulnerable period of brain development before connecting them to a firehose of social comparison and algorithmically chosen influencers. Phone-free schools. In all schools from elementary through high school, students should store their phones, smartwatches, and any other personal devices that can send or receive texts in phone lockers or locked pouches during the school day. That is the only way to free up their attention for each other and for their teachers. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence. That’s the way children naturally develop social skills, overcome anxiety, and become self-governing young adults.

Adults in Gen X and prior generations have not experienced much of a rise in clinical depression or anxiety disorders since 2010,[21] but many of us have become more frazzled, scattered, and exhausted by our new technologies and their incessant interruptions and distractions.

For most of the parents I talk to, their stories don’t center on any diagnosed mental illness. Instead, there is an underlying worry that something unnatural is going on, and that their children are missing something—really, almost everything—as their online hours accumulate.

We found important clues to this mystery by digging into more data on adolescent mental health.[5] The first clue is that the rise is concentrated in disorders related to anxiety and depression, which are classed together in the psychiatric category known as internalizing disorders. These are disorders in which a person feels strong distress and experiences the symptoms inwardly. The person with an internalizing disorder feels emotions such as anxiety, fear, sadness, and hopelessness. They ruminate. They often withdraw from social engagement.

In contrast, externalizing disorders are those in which a person feels distress and turns the symptoms and responses outward, aimed at other people. These conditions include conduct disorder, difficulty with anger management, and tendencies toward violence and excessive risk-taking. Across ages, cultures, and countries, girls and women suffer higher rates of internalizing disorders, while boys and men suffer from higher rates of externalizing disorders.[6] That said, both sexes suffer from both, and both sexes have been experiencing more internalizing disorders and fewer externalizing disorders since the early 2010s.[7]

Anxiety is related to fear, but is not the same thing. The diagnostic manual of psychiatry (DSM-5-TR) defines fear as “the emotional response to real or perceived imminent threat, whereas anxiety is anticipation of future threat.”[12] Both can be healthy responses to reality, but when excessive, they can become disorders.

Cognitively, it often becomes difficult to think clearly, pulling people into states of unproductive rumination and provoking cognitive distortions that are the focus of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), such as catastrophizing, overgeneralizing, and black-and-white thinking. For those with anxiety disorders, these distorted thinking patterns often elicit uncomfortable physical symptoms, which then induce feelings of fear and worry, which then trigger more anxious thinking, perpetuating a vicious cycle.

So whatever happened in the early 2010s, it hit preteen and young teen girls harder than any other group. This is a major clue. Acts of intentional self-harm in figure 1.4 include both nonfatal suicide attempts, which indicate very high levels of distress and hopelessness, and NSSI, such as cutting. The latter are better understood as coping behaviors that some people (especially girls and young women) use to manage debilitating anxiety and depression.

Millennial teens, who grew up playing in that first wave, were slightly happier, on average, than Gen X had been when they were teens. The second wave was the rapid increase in the paired technologies of social media and the smartphone, which reached a majority of homes by 2012 or 2013. That is when girls’ mental health began to collapse, and when boys’ mental health changed in a more diffuse set of ways.

Smartphones are very different. They connect you to the internet 24/7, they can run millions of apps, and they quickly became the home of social media platforms, which can ping you continually throughout the day, urging you to check out what everyone is saying and doing. This kind of connectivity offers few of the benefits of talking directly with friends. In fact, for many young people, it’s poisonous.

People don’t get depressed when they face threats collectively; they get depressed when they feel isolated, lonely, or useless. As I’ll show in later chapters, this is what the Great Rewiring did to Gen Z.

college students, activism, and flourishing.[43] Yet more recent studies of young activists, including climate activists, find the opposite: Those who are politically active nowadays usually have worse mental health.[44] Threats and risks have always haunted the future, but the ways that young people are responding, with activism carried out mostly in the virtual world, seem to be affecting them very differently compared to previous generations, whose activism was carried out mostly in the real world.

Intriguingly, a child’s brain is already 90% of its full size by around age 5.

Children can only learn how to not get hurt in situations where it is possible to get hurt, such as wrestling with a friend, having a pretend sword fight, or negotiating with another child to enjoy a seesaw when a failed negotiation can lead to pain in one’s posterior, as well as embarrassment. When parents, teachers, and coaches get involved, it becomes less free, less playful, and less beneficial. Adults usually can’t stop themselves from directing and protecting.

but information doesn’t do much to shape a developing brain. Play does. This relates to a key CBT insight: Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development. It is in unsupervised, child-led play where children best learn to tolerate bruises, handle their emotions, read other children’s emotions, take turns, resolve conflicts, and play fair. Children are intrinsically motivated to acquire these skills because they want to be included in the playgroup and keep the fun going.

Even if the content on these sites could somehow be filtered effectively to remove obviously harmful material, the addictive design of these platforms reduces the time available for face-to-face play in the real world. The reduction is so severe that we might refer to smartphones and tablets in the hands of children as experience blockers.

The two that are most relevant for our discussion of social media are conformist bias and prestige bias.

In a real-life social setting, it takes a while—often weeks—to get a good sense for what the most common behaviors are, because you need to observe multiple groups in multiple settings. But on a social media platform, a child can scroll through a thousand data points in one hour (at three seconds per post), each one accompanied by numerical evidence (likes) and comments that show whether the post was a success or a failure. Social media platforms are therefore the most efficient conformity engines ever invented. They can shape an adolescent’s mental models of acceptable behavior in a matter of hours,

But humans have an alternative ranking system based on prestige, which is willingly conferred by people to those they see as having achieved excellence in a valued domain of activity, such as hunting or storytelling back in ancient times.

Language learning is the clearest case. Children can learn multiple languages easily, but this ability drops off sharply during the first few years of puberty.[32] When a family moves to a new country, the kids who are 12 or younger will quickly become native speakers with no accent, while those who are 14 or older will probably be asked, for the rest of their lives, “Where are you from?”

For girls, the worst years for using social media were 11 to 13; for boys, it was 14 to 15.

By building physical, psychological, and social competence, it gives kids confidence that they can face new situations, which is an inoculation against anxiety.

I’ll refer to BIS as defend mode. For people with chronic anxiety, defend mode is chronically activated.

thrilling experiences have anti-phobic effects.

Sandseter and Kennair analyzed the kinds of risks that children seek out when adults give them some freedom, and they found six: heights (such as climbing trees or playground structures), high speed (such as swinging, or going down fast slides), dangerous tools (such as hammers and drills), dangerous elements (such as experimenting with fire), rough-and-tumble play (such as wrestling), and disappearing (hiding, wandering away, potentially getting lost or separated). These are the major types of thrills that children need. They’ll get them for themselves unless adults stop them—which we did in the 1990s. Note that video games offer none of these risks, even though games such as Fortnite show avatars doing all of them.

Our goal in designing the places children play, she says, should be to “keep them as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible.”

Children were getting less time to play, but they suddenly got more time with their time-starved parents?

The Australian psychologist Nick Haslam originated the term “concept creep,” [48] which refers to the expansion of psychological concepts in recent decades in two directions: downward (to apply to smaller or more trivial cases) and outward (to encompass new and conceptually unrelated phenomena). You can see concept creep in action by observing the expansion of terms like “addiction,” “trauma,” “abuse,” and “safety.” For most of the 20th century, the word “safety” referred almost exclusively to physical safety. It was only in the late 1980s that the term “emotional safety” began to show up at more than trace levels in Google’s Ngram viewer. From 1985 to 2010, at the start of the Great Rewiring, the term’s frequency rose rapidly and steadily, a 600% increase.

Mammal babies therefore have a long period of dependence and vulnerability during which they must achieve two goals: (1) develop competence in the skills needed for adulthood, and (2) don’t get eaten. The best way to avoid getting eaten is generally to stick close to Mom. But as mammals mature, their experience-expectant brains need to wire up by practicing skills such as running, fighting, and befriending. This is why young mammals are so motivated to move away from Mom to play, including risky play. The psychological system that manages these competing needs is called the attachment system.

As I noted in chapter 2, the human brain reaches 90% of its adult size by age 5, and it has far more neurons and synapses at that moment than it will have in its adult form.

If a child goes through puberty doing a lot of archery, or painting, or video games, or social media, those activities will cause lasting structural changes in the brain, especially if they are rewarding. This is how cultural experience changes the brain, producing a young adult who feels American instead of Japanese, or who is habitually in discover mode as opposed to defend mode.

In fact, smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.

Are screen-based experiences less valuable than real-life flesh-and-blood experiences? When we’re talking about children whose brains evolved to expect certain kinds of experiences at certain ages, yes. A resounding yes. Communicating by text supplemented by emojis is not going to develop the parts of the brain that are “expecting” to get tuned up during conversations supplemented by facial expressions, changing vocal tones, direct eye contact, and body language. We can’t expect children and adolescents to develop adult-level real-world social skills when their social interactions are largely happening in the virtual world.

In the real world, it often matters how old you are. But as life moved online, it mattered less and less. The

A country that is large, secular, and diverse by race, religion, and politics may not be able to construct shared rites of passage that are full of moral guidance, like the Apache sunrise ceremony. Yet despite our differences, we all want our children to become socially competent and mentally healthy adults who are able to manage their own affairs, earn a living, and form stable romantic bonds. If we can agree on that much, then might we be able to agree on norms that lay out some of the steps on that path?

“Daddy, can you take the iPad away from me? I’m trying to take my eyes off it but I can’t.” My daughter was in the grip of a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule administered by the game designers, which is the most powerful way to take control of an animal’s behavior short of implanting electrodes in its brain.

In this chapter, I describe the four foundational harms of the new phone-based childhood that damage boys and girls of all ages: social deprivation, sleep deprivation, attention fragmentation, and addiction.

By the early 2010s, our phones had transformed from Swiss Army knives, which we pulled out when we needed a tool, to platforms upon which companies competed to see who could hold on to eyeballs the longest.

First and foremost, in 2009, Facebook introduced the “like” button and Twitter introduced the “retweet” button. Both of these innovations were then widely copied by other platforms, making viral content dissemination possible. These innovations quantified the success of every post and incentivized users to craft each post for maximum spread, which sometimes meant making more extreme statements or expressing more anger and disgust.[8] At the same time, Facebook began using algorithmically curated news feeds, which motivated other platforms to join the race and curate content that would most successfully hook users.

By the early 2010s, social “networking” systems that had been structured (for the most part) to connect people turned into social media “platforms” redesigned (for the most part) in such a way that they encouraged one-to-many public performances in search of validation, not just from friends but from strangers.

Children and adolescents, who were increasingly kept at home and isolated by the national mania for overprotection, found it ever easier to turn to their growing collection of internet-enabled devices, and those devices offered ever more attractive and varied rewards. The play-based childhood was over; the phone-based childhood had begun.

Putting it all together, the Great Rewiring and the dawn of the phone-based childhood seem to have added two to three hours of additional screen-based activity, on average, to a child’s day, compared with life before the smartphone.

These numbers vary somewhat by social class (more use in lower-income families than in high-income families), race (more use in Black and Latino families than in white and Asian families[13]), and sexual minority status (more use among LGBTQ youth; see more detail in this endnote

In 2020, we began telling everyone to avoid proximity to any person outside their “bubble,” but members of Gen Z began socially distancing themselves as soon as they got their first smartphones.

The Great Rewiring devastated the social lives of Gen Z by connecting them to everyone in the world and disconnecting them from the people around them.

Teens need more sleep than adults—at least nine hours a night for preteens and eight hours a night for teens.

It makes intuitive sense. A study by Jean Twenge and colleagues of a large U.K. data set found that “heavy use of screen media was associated with shorter sleep duration, longer sleep latency, and more mid-sleep awakenings.”[37] The sleep disturbances were greatest for those who were on social media or who were surfing the internet in bed.

In other words, when your sleep is truncated or disturbed, you’re more likely to become depressed and develop behavioral problems. The effects were larger for girls.

In short, children and adolescents need a lot of sleep to promote healthy brain development and good attention and mood the next day. When screens are allowed in bedrooms, however, many children will use them late into the night—especially if they have a small screen that can be used under the blanket. The screen-related decline of sleep is likely a contributor to the tidal wave of adolescent mental illness that swept across many countries in the early 2010s.

When you add it all up, the average number of notifications on young people’s phones from the top social and communication apps amounts to 192 alerts per day, according to one study.[42] The average teen, who now gets only seven hours of sleep per night, therefore gets about 11 notifications per waking hour, or one every five minutes.

Thanks to the tech industry and its voracious competition for the limited resource of adolescent attention, many members of Gen Z are now living in Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopia.

They found that performance was best when phones were left in the other room, and worst when phones were visible, with pocketed phones in between.

Figure 5.3. The Hooked model. From Nir Eyal’s 2014 book, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. In the book, Eyal warned about the ethical implications of misusing the model in a section titled “The Morality of Manipulation.”

The loop starts with an external trigger, such as a notification that someone commented on one of her posts. That’s step 1, the off-ramp inviting her to leave the path she was on. It appears on her phone and automatically triggers a desire to perform an action (step 2) that had previously been rewarded: touching the notification to bring up the Instagram app. The action then leads to a pleasurable event, but only sometimes, and this is step 3: a variable reward. Maybe she’ll find some expression of praise or friendship, maybe not. This is a key discovery of behaviorist psychology: It’s best not to reward a behavior every time the animal does what you want. If you reward an animal on a variable-ratio schedule (such as one time out of every 10 times, on average, but sometimes fewer, sometimes more), you create the strongest and most persistent behavior.

What the Hooked model adds for humans, which was not applicable for those working with rats, was the fourth step: investment. Humans can be offered ways to put a bit of themselves into the app so that it matters more to them. The girl has already filled out her profile, posted many photos of herself, and linked herself to all of her friends plus hundreds of other Instagram users.

At this point, after investment, the trigger for the next round of behavior may become internal. The girl no longer needs a push notification to call her over to Instagram. As she is rereading a difficult passage in her textbook, the thought pops up in her mind: “I wonder if anyone has liked the photo I posted 20 minutes ago?”

We know that Facebook intentionally hooked teens using behaviorist techniques thanks to the Facebook Files—the trove of internal documents and screenshots of presentations brought out by the whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021. In one chilling section, a trio of Facebook employees give a presentation titled “The Power of Identities: Why Teens and Young Adults Choose Instagram.” The stated objective is “to support Facebook Inc.–wide product strategy for engaging younger users.” A section titled “Teen Fundamentals” delves into neuroscience, showing the gradual maturation of the brain during puberty, with the frontal cortex not mature until after age 20.

Unfortunately, when an addicted person’s brain adapts by counteracting the effect of the drug, the brain then enters a state of deficit when the user is not taking the drug. If dopamine release is pleasurable, dopamine deficit is unpleasant. Ordinary life becomes boring and even painful without the drug. Nothing feels good anymore, except the drug. The addicted person is in a state of withdrawal, which will go away only if she can stay off the drug long enough for her brain to return to its default state (usually a few weeks).

Lembke says that “the universal symptoms of withdrawal from any addictive substance are anxiety, irritability, insomnia, and dysphoria.”[57] Dysphoria is the opposite of euphoria; it refers to a generalized feeling of discomfort or unease. This is basically what many teens say they feel—and what parents and clinicians observe—when kids who are heavy users of social media or video games are separated from their phones and game consoles involuntarily. Symptoms of sadness, anxiety, and irritability are listed as the signs of withdrawal for those diagnosed with internet gaming disorder.

Most obviously, those who are addicted to screen-based activities have more trouble falling asleep, both because of the direct competition with sleep and because of the high dose of blue light delivered to the retina from just inches away, which tells the brain: It’s morning time! Stop making melatonin!

Certainly, these digital platforms offer fun and entertainment, as television did for previous generations. They also confer some unique benefits for specific groups such as sexual minority youth and those with autism—where some virtual communities can help soften the pain of social exclusion in the real world.

However, unlike the extensive evidence of harm found in correlational, longitudinal, and experimental studies, there is very little evidence showing benefits to adolescent mental health from long-term or heavy social media use.[66] There was no wave of mental health and happiness breaking out around the world in 2013, as young people embraced Instagram. Teens are certainly right when they say that social media gives them a connection with their friends, but as we’ve seen in their reports of increasing loneliness and isolation, that connection does not seem to be as good as what it replaced.

A second reason why I am skeptical of claims about the benefits of social media for adolescents is that these claims often confuse social media with the larger internet. During the COVID shutdowns I often heard people say, “Thank goodness for social media! How would young people have connected without it?” To which I respond: Yes, let’s imagine a world in which the only way that children and adolescents could connect was by telephone, text, Skype, Zoom, FaceTime, and email, or by going over to each other’s homes and talking or playing outside. And let’s imagine a world in which the only way they could find information was by using Google, Bing, Wikipedia, YouTube,[67] and the rest of the internet, including blogs, news sites, and the websites of the many nonprofit organizations devoted to their specific interests.

A third reason for skepticism is that the same demographic groups that are widely said to benefit most from social media are also the most likely to have bad experiences on these platforms. The 2023 Common Sense Media survey found that LGBTQ adolescents were more likely than their non-LGBTQ peers to believe that their lives would be better without each platform they use.[69] This same report found that LGBTQ girls were more than twice as likely as non-LGBTQ girls to encounter harmful content related to suicide and eating disorders. Regarding race, a 2022 Pew report found that Black teens were about twice as likely as Hispanic or white teens to say they think their race or ethnicity made them a target of online abuse.[70] And teens from low-income households ($30,000 or less) were twice as likely as teens from higher-income families ($75,000 or higher) to report physical threats online (16% versus 8%).

We need to develop a more nuanced mental map of the digital landscape. Social media is not synonymous with the internet, smartphones are not equivalent to desktop computers or laptops, PacMan is not World of Warcraft, and the 2006 version of Facebook is not the 2024 version of TikTok.

Time with friends dropped further because of COVID restrictions, but Gen Z was already socially distanced before COVID restrictions were put in place.

Around 2013, psychiatric wards in the United States and other Anglo countries began to fill disproportionately with girls.

There is a clear, consistent, and sizable link[7] between heavy social media use and mental illness for girls,[8] but that relationship gets buried or minimized in studies and literature reviews that look at all digital activities for all teens.

Taken as a whole, the dozens of experiments that Jean Twenge, Zach Rausch, and I have collected[15] confirm and extend the patterns found in the correlational studies: Social media use is a cause of anxiety, depression, and other ailments, not just a correlate.

This meant that they made eye contact less frequently, laughed together less, and lost practice making conversation. Social media therefore harmed the social lives even of students who stayed away from it.

These group-level effects may be much larger than the individual-level effects, and they are likely to suppress the true size of the individual-level effects.[18] If an experimenter assigns some adolescents to abstain from social media for a month while all of their friends are still on it, then the abstainers are going to be more socially isolated for that month. Yet even still, in several studies, getting off social media improves their mental health. So just imagine how much bigger the effect would be if all of the students in 20 middle schools could be randomly assigned to give up social media for a year, or (more realistically) to put their phones in a phone locker each morning, while 20 other middle schools served as the control group. These are the kinds of experiments we most need in order to examine group-level effects.

Agency arises from striving to individuate and expand the self and involves qualities such as efficiency, competence, and assertiveness. Communion arises from striving to integrate the self in a larger social unit through caring for others and involves qualities such as benevolence, cooperativeness, and empathy.

The two motives are woven together in changing patterns across the life course, and that weaving is particularly important for adolescents who are developing their identities. Part of defining the self comes from successfully integrating into groups; part of being attractive to groups is demonstrating one’s value as an individual with unique skills.[30] Researchers have long found that boys and men are more focused on agency strivings while girls and women are more focused on communion strivings.

It was bad enough when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, when girls were exposed to airbrushed and later photoshopped models. But those were adult strangers; they were not a girl’s competition. So what happened when most girls in a school got Instagram and Snapchat accounts and started posting carefully edited highlight reels of their lives and using filters and editing apps to improve their virtual beauty and online brand? Many girls’ sociometers plunged, because most were now below what appeared to them to be the average. All around the developed world, an anxiety alarm went off in girls’ minds, at approximately the same time.

These tuning apps gave girls the ability to present themselves with perfect skin, fuller lips, bigger eyes, and a narrower waist (in addition to showcasing the most “perfect” parts of their lives).[38] Snapchat offered similar features through its filters, first released in 2015, many of which gave users full lips, petite noses, and doe eyes at the touch of a button.

Girls are especially vulnerable to harm from constant social comparison because they suffer from higher rates of one kind of perfectionism: socially prescribed perfectionism, where a person feels that they must live up to very high expectations prescribed by others, or by society at large.[39] (There’s no gender difference on self-oriented perfectionism, where you torture yourself for failure to live up to your own very high standards.) Socially prescribed perfectionism is closely related to anxiety; people who suffer from anxiety are more prone to it. Being a perfectionist also increases your anxiety because you fear the shame of public failure from everything you do. And, as you’d expect by this point in the story, socially prescribed perfectionism began rising, across the Anglosphere nations, in the early 2010s.

Striving to excel can be healthy when it motivates girls to master skills that will be useful in later life. But social media algorithms home in on (and amplify) girls’ desires to be beautiful in socially prescribed ways, which include being thin. Instagram and TikTok send them images of very thin women if they show any interest in weight loss, or beauty, or even just healthy eating. Researchers for the Center for Countering Digital Hate created a dozen fake accounts on TikTok, registered to 13-year-old girls, and found that TikTok’s algorithm served them tens of thousands of weight-loss videos within a few weeks of joining the platform.

The researchers also noted that “social comparison is worse” on Instagram than on rival apps. Snapchat’s filters “keep the focus on the face,” whereas Instagram “focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle.”

Boys are also more interested in watching stories and movies about sports, fighting, war, and violence, all of which appeal to agency interests and motivations. Traditionally, boys have negotiated who is high and who is low in social status based in part on who could dominate whom if it came to a fight, or who can hurl an insult at whom without fear of violent reprisal. But because girls have stronger communion motives, the way to really hurt another girl is to hit her in her relationships.

Researchers have found that when you look at “indirect aggression” (which includes damaging other people’s relationships or reputations), girls are higher than boys—but only in late childhood and adolescence.

Studies confirm that as adolescents moved their social lives online, the nature of bullying began to change. One systematic review of studies from 1998 to 2017 found a decrease in face-to-face bullying among boys but an increase among girls, especially among younger adolescent girls.

They found that happiness tends to occur in clusters. This was not just because happy people seek each other out. Rather, when one person became happier, it increased the odds that their existing friends would become happier too. Amazingly, it also had an influence on their friends’ friends, and sometimes even on their friends’ friends’ friends. Happiness is contagious; it spreads through social networks.

The second twist was that depression spread only from women. When a woman became depressed, it increased the odds of depression in her close friends (male and female) by 142%. When a man became depressed, it had no measurable effect on his friends.

But on social media, the way to gain followers and likes is to be more extreme, so those who present with more extreme symptoms are likely to rise fastest, making them the models that everyone else locks onto for social learning. This process is sometimes known as audience capture—a process in which people get trained by their audiences to become more extreme versions of whatever it is the audience wants to see.[59] And if one finds oneself in a network in which most others have adopted some behavior, then the other social learning process kicks in too: conformity bias.

The recent growth in diagnoses of gender dysphoria may also be related in part to social media trends. Gender dysphoria refers to the psychological distress a person experiences when their gender identity doesn’t align with their biological sex. People with such mismatches have long existed in societies around the world. According to the most recent diagnostic manual of psychiatry,[68] estimates of the prevalence of gender dysphoria in American society used to indicate rates below one in a thousand, with rates for natal males (meaning those who were biological males at birth) being several times higher than for natal females. But those estimates were based on the numbers of people who sought gender reassignment surgery as adults, which was surely a vast underestimate of the underlying population. Within the past decade, the number of individuals who are being referred to clinics for gender dysphoria has been growing rapidly, especially among natal females in Gen Z.[69] In fact, among Gen Z teens, the sex ratio has reversed, with natal females now showing higher rates than natal males.

Sexual predation and rampant sexualization mean that girls and young women must be warier, online, than most boys and young men. They are forced to spend more of their virtual lives in defend mode, which may be part of the reason that their anxiety levels went up more sharply in the early 2010s.

The clinical psychologist Lisa Damour says that regarding friendship for girls, “quality trumps quantity.” The happiest girls “aren’t the ones who have the most friendships but the ones who have strong, supportive friendships, even if that means having a single terrific friend.”[82] (She notes that this is true for boys as well.)

When teens as a whole cut back on hanging out and doing things together in the real world, their culture changed. Their communion needs were left unsatisfied—even for those few teens who were not on social media.

Two major categories of motivations are agency (the desire to stand out and have an effect on the world) and communion (the desire to connect and develop a sense of belonging). Boys and girls both want each of these, but there is a gender difference that emerges early in children’s play: Boys choose more agency activities; girls choose more communion activities. Social media appeals to the desire for communion, but it often ends up frustrating

The net effect of this push-pull is that boys have increasingly disconnected from the real world and invested their time and talents in the virtual world instead. Some boys will find career success there, because their mastery of that world can lead to lucrative jobs in the tech industry or as influencers. But for many, though it can be an escape from an increasingly inhospitable world, growing up in the virtual world makes them less likely to develop into men with the social skills and competencies to achieve success in the real world.

They calm their anxieties by staying inside, but the longer they stay in, the less competent they become in the outside world, fueling their anxiety about the outside world. They are trapped.

world with too much supervision and not enough risk is bad for all children, but it seems to be having a larger impact on boys.

But around 2010, something unprecedented started happening: Both sexes shifted rapidly toward the pattern traditionally associated with females. There has been a notable increase in agreement with items related to internalizing disorders (such as “I feel that I can’t do anything right”) for both sexes, with a sharper rise among girls as you can see in figure 7.2. At the same time, agreement with items related to externalizing disorders (such as “how often have you damaged school property on purpose?”) plummeted for both sexes, more sharply for boys. By 2017, boys’ responses looked like those from girls in the 1990s.

By 2015, many boys found themselves exposed to a level of stimulation and attention extraction that had been unimaginable just 15 years earlier.

In previous decades, the main way for heterosexual boys[33] to get a look at naked girls was through what we’d now consider very low-quality pornography—printed magazines that could not be sold to minors. As puberty progressed and the sex drive increased, it motivated boys to do things that were frightening and awkward, such as trying to talk to a girl, or asking a girl to dance at events organized by adults.

When we look at daily users or users for whom porn has become an addiction that interferes with daily functioning, the male-female ratios are generally more than five or 10 to one,

Porn separates the evolved lure (sexual pleasure) from its real-world reward (a sexual relationship), potentially making boys who are heavy users turn into men who are less able to find sex, love, intimacy, and marriage in the real world.

Prevalence estimates vary,[58] but one 2016 study found that 1 or 2% of adult gamers qualify as having gaming addiction, 7% are problematic gamers, 4% are engaged gamers, and 87% are casual gamers.

As Peter Gray and other play researchers point out, one of the most beneficial parts of free play is that kids must act as legislators (who jointly make up the rules) and as judges and juries (who jointly decide what to do when rules appear to be violated). In most multiplayer video games, all of that is done by the platform. Unlike free play in the real world, most video games give no practice in the skills of self-governance.

Video games also deliver far less of the anti-phobic benefits of risky play. Video games are disembodied. They are thrilling in their own way, but they can’t activate the kind of physical fear, thrill, and pounding heart that riding a roller coaster, or playing full-court basketball, or using hammers to smash things at an adventure playground can give. Jumping out of planes, having knife fights, and getting brutally murdered are just things that happen dozens of times each day for boys playing Fortnite or Call of Duty. They do not teach boys how to judge and manage risks for themselves in the real world.

Boys thrive when they have a stable group of reliable friends, and they create their strongest and most durable friendships from being on the same team or in a stable pack, facing risks or rival teams. Virtual packs create weaker bonds, although today’s increasingly lonely boys cling to them and value them because that’s all they have. That’s where their friends are, as Chris told me.

Drawing on data that was just becoming available as governments began to keep statistics, he noted that in Europe the general rule was that the more tightly people are bound into a community that has the moral authority to restrain their desires, the less likely they are to kill themselves.

The phone-based life produces spiritual degradation, not just in adolescents, but in all of us.

But there’s another vertical dimension, shown as the z axis coming out of the page. I called it the divinity axis because so many cultures wrote explicitly that virtuous actions bring one upward, closer to God, while base, selfish, or disgusting actions bring one downward, away from God and sometimes toward an anti-divinity such as the Devil. Whether or not God exists, people simply do perceive some people, places, actions, and objects to be sacred, pure, and elevating; other people, places, actions, and objects are disgusting, impure, and degrading (meaning, literally, “brought down a step”).

Conversely, witnessing people behaving in petty, nasty ways, or doing physically disgusting things, triggers revulsion. We feel pulled “down” in some way. We close off and turn away. Such actions are incompatible with our elevated nature. This is how I’m using the word “spiritual.” It means that one endeavors to live more of one’s life well above zero on the z axis. Christians ask, “What would Jesus do?” Secular people can think of their own moral exemplar. (I should point out that I am an atheist, but I find that I sometimes need words and concepts from religion to understand the experience of life as a human being. This is one of those times.)

In the rest of this chapter, I’ll draw on wisdom from ancient traditions and modern psychology to try to make sense of how the phone-based life affects people spiritually by blocking or counteracting six spiritual practices: shared sacredness; embodiment; stillness, silence, and focus; self-transcendence; being slow to anger, quick to forgive; and finding awe in nature.

This is one of the founding insights of sociology: Strong communities don’t just magically appear whenever people congregate and communicate. The strongest and most satisfying communities come into being when something lifts people out of the lower level so that they have powerful collective experiences. They all enter the realm of the sacred together, at the same time. When they return to the profane level, where they need to be most of the time to address the necessities of life, they have greater trust and affection for each other as a result of their time together in the sacred realm. They are also happier and have lower rates of suicide.

People who live only in networks, rather than communities, are less likely to thrive.

Living in a world of structureless anomie makes adolescents more vulnerable to online recruitment into radical political movements that offer moral clarity and a moral community, thereby pulling them further away from their in-person communities.

DeSteno notes that synchronous movement during religious rituals is not only very common; it is also an experimentally validated technique for enhancing feelings of communion, similarity, and trust, which means it makes a group of disparate individuals feel as though they have merged into one.

Sports are not exactly spiritual, but playing them depends on some of spirituality’s key ingredients for bonding people together, like coordinated and collective physical movement and group celebrations. Research consistently shows that teens who play team sports are happier than those who don’t.

One of the fundamental teachings of the Buddha is that we can train our minds.

This is why many religions have monasteries and monks. Those seeking spiritual growth are well served by separating themselves from the noise and complexity of human interactions, with their incessant words and profane concerns. When people practice silence in the company of equally silent companions, they promote quiet reflection and inner work, which confers mental health benefits. Focusing your attention and meditating have been found to reduce depression and anxiety.

You stand on the platform and post content to influence how others perceive you. It is almost perfectly designed to crank up the DMN to maximum and pin it there. That’s not healthy for any of us, and it’s even worse for adolescents.

Social media is a fountain of bedevilments. It trains people to think in ways that are exactly contrary to the world’s wisdom traditions: Think about yourself first; be materialistic, judgmental, boastful, and petty; seek glory as quantified by likes and followers. Many users may believe that the implicit carrots and sticks built into platforms like Instagram don’t affect them, but it’s hard not to be affected unconsciously. Unfortunately, most young people become heavy users of social media during the sensitive period for cultural learning, which runs from roughly age 9 to 15.

The Tao Te Ching lists “ideas of right and wrong” as a bedevilment. In my 35 years of studying moral psychology, I have come to see this as one of humanity’s greatest problems: We are too quick to anger and too slow to forgive.

But I believe his point was that the mind, left to its own devices, evaluates everything immediately, which shapes what we think next, making it harder for us to find the truth. This insight is the foundation of the first principle of moral psychology, which I laid out in The Righteous Mind: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second. In other words, we have an immediate gut feeling about an event, and then we make up a story after the fact to justify our rapid judgment—often a story that paints us in a good light.

From a spiritual perspective, social media is a disease of the mind. Spiritual practices and virtues, such as forgiveness, grace, and love, are a cure.

In 2003, Dacher Keltner and I published a review paper on the emotion of awe in which we argued that awe is triggered by two simultaneous perceptions: first, that what you are looking at is vast in some way, and, second, that you can’t fit it into your existing mental structures.[30] That combination seems to trigger a feeling in people of being small in a profoundly pleasurable—although sometimes also fearful—way. Awe opens us to changing our beliefs, allegiances, and behaviors.

The great evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson said that humans are “biophilic,” by which he meant that humans have “the urge to affiliate with other forms of life.”

Yet one of the hallmarks of the Great Rewiring is that children and adolescents now spend far less time outside, and when they are outside, they are often looking at or thinking about their phones. If they encounter something beautiful, such as sunlight reflected on water, or cherry blossoms wafting on gentle spring breezes, their first instinct is to take a photograph or video, perhaps to post somewhere. Few are open to losing themselves in the moment as Yi-Mei did.

As for our children, if we want awe and natural beauty to play a larger role in their lives, we need to make deliberate efforts to bring them or send them to beautiful natural areas. Without phones. The

Soon before his death in 1662, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote a paragraph often paraphrased as “there is a God-shaped hole in every human heart.”

It matters what we expose ourselves to. On this the ancients universally agree. Here is Buddha: “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts.”[37] And here is Marcus Aurelius: “The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.”[38] In a phone-based life, we are exposed to an extraordinary amount of content, much of it chosen by algorithms and pushed to us via notifications that interrupt whatever we were doing. It’s too much, and a lot of it pulls us downward on the divinity dimension. If we want to spend most of our lives above zero on that dimension, we need to take back control of our inputs. We need to take back control of our lives.

Awe in nature may be especially valuable for Gen Z because it counteracts the anxiety and self-consciousness caused by a phone-based childhood.

called back when a safety issue was discovered. After the Titanic sank in 1912, its two sister ships were pulled out of service and modified to make them safer. When new consumer products are found to be dangerous, especially for children, we recall them and keep them off the market until the manufacturer corrects the design.

Parents face collective action problems around childhood independence too. It was easy to send kids out to play back when everyone was doing it, but in a neighborhood where nobody does that, it’s hard to be the first one. Parents who let their children walk or play unchaperoned in a public place face the risk that a misguided neighbor will call the police, who may refer the case to Child Protective Services, who’d then investigate them for “neglect” of their children. Each parent decides that it’s best to do what every other parent is doing: Keep kids supervised, always, even if that stunts the development of all children.

If Instagram were to make a real effort to block or expel underage users, it would lose those users to TikTok and other platforms. Younger users are particularly valuable because the habits they form early often stick with them for life, so companies need younger users to ensure robust future usage of their products.

What is the right age of internet adulthood? Note that we are not talking about the age at which children can browse the web or watch videos on YouTube or TikTok. We’re talking only about the age at which a minor can enter into a contract with a company to use the company’s products. We’re talking about the age at which a child can open an account on YouTube or TikTok and begin uploading her own videos and getting her own highly customized feed, while giving her data to the company to use and sell as it says it will do in its terms of service.

We expect liquor stores to enforce age limits. We should expect the same from tech companies.

Parents should have a way of marking their child’s phones, tablets, and laptops as devices belonging to a minor. That mark, which could be written either into the hardware or the software, would act like a sign that tells companies with age restrictions, “This person is underage; do not admit without parental consent.”

Governments at all levels, from local to federal, could support this transition by allocating funds to pay the small cost of buying phone lockers or lockable pouches for any school that wants to keep phones out of students’ pockets and hands during the school day.

Yet in some U.S. states, such as Connecticut, the law said a child should never be left alone in public before the age of 12, meaning that 11-year-olds needed babysitters. Indeed, a Connecticut mom was arrested for letting her 11-year-old wait in the car while she ran into the store.

Tech companies can be a major part of the solution by developing better age verification features, and by adding features that allow parents to designate their children’s phones and computers as ones that should not be served by sites with minimum ages until they are old enough. Such a feature would help to dissolve multiple collective action problems for parents, kids, and platforms.

Voss says that when he walks into a school without a phone ban, “It’s kind of like the zombie apocalypse, and you have all these kids in the hallways not talking to each other. It’s just a very different vibe.”

In other words, the phone ban ameliorates three of the four foundational harms of the phone-based childhood: attention fragmentation, social deprivation, and addiction. It reduces social comparison and the pull into the virtual world. It generates communion and community.

(Some parents object that they need to be able to reach their children immediately in case of an emergency, such as a school shooting. As a parent I understand this desire. But a school in which most students are calling or texting their parents during an emergency is likely to be less safe than a school in which only the adults have phones and the students are listening to the adults and paying attention to their surroundings.[6]

The value of phone-free and even screen-free education can be seen in the choices that many tech executives make about the schools to which they send their own children, such as the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, where all digital devices—phones, laptops, tablets—are prohibited. This is in stark contrast with many public schools that are advancing 1:1 technology programs, trying to give every child their own device.[9] Waldorf is probably right.

The “digital divide” is no longer that poor kids and racial minorities have less access to the internet, as was feared in the early 2000s; it is now that they have less protection from

“It seems small. But in the moment, when I saw her get on the bus and it drove away, I felt really important to her, important to someone.” That’s what was so new to her. At last, instead of feeling needy, she was needed.

We should all be aghast that the average American elementary school student gets only 27 minutes of recess a day.[19] In maximum-security federal prisons in the United States, inmates are guaranteed two hours of outdoor time per day. When

The key thing to understand about “loose parts” playgrounds is that kids have control over their environment. They have agency. Playgrounds with fixed structures can hold kids’ attention only so long. But loose parts keep kids’ attention for hours, allowing them to build not only forts and castles but also focus, compromise, teamwork, and creativity.

Kids will take on responsibility for their safety when they are actually responsible for their safety, rather than relying on the adult guardians hovering over them.

The Let Grow Project is another activity that seems to reduce anxiety. It is a homework assignment that asks children to “do something they have never done before, on their own,” after reaching agreement with their parents as to what that is. Doing projects increases children’s sense of competence while also increasing parents’ willingness to trust their children and grant them more autonomy.

New parents lost access to local wisdom and began to rely more on experts.

After school is for free play. Try not to fill up most afternoons with adult-supervised “enrichment” activities. Find ways that your children can just hang out with other children such as joining a Play Club (see chapter 11), or going to each other’s homes after school. Friday is a particularly good day for free play because children can then make plans to meet up over the weekend. Think of it as “Free Play Friday.”

The cure for such parental anxiety is exposure. Experience the anxiety a few times, taking conscious note that your worst fears did not occur, and you learn that your child is more capable than you had thought. Each time, the anxiety gets weaker. After five days of our son walking to school, we stopped watching his blue dot. We got more comfortable with his ability to navigate the city, and soon its subway system.

Delay the opening of social media accounts until 16. Let your children get well into puberty, past the most vulnerable early years, before letting them plug into powerful socializing agents like TikTok or Instagram. This

Encourage more and better off-base excursions with friends. Let your teen hang out at a “third place” (not home or school) like the Y, the mall, the park, a pizzeria—basically, a place where they can be with their friends, away from adult supervision. Otherwise, the only place they can socialize freely is online.

Rely more on your teen at home. Teens can cook, clean, run errands on a bicycle or public transit, and, once they turn 16, run errands using a car. Relying on your teen is not just a tool to instill work ethic. It’s also a way to ward off the growing feeling among Gen Z teens that their lives are useless.

Encourage your teen to find a part-time job.

Find ways for them to nurture and lead. Any job that requires guiding or caring for younger children is ideal, such as a babysitter, camp counselor, or assistant coach. Even as they need mentors themselves, they can serve as a mentor to younger kids. Helping younger kids seems to turn on an empathy switch and a leadership gene.

Take a gap year after high school. Many young people go directly to college without any sense of what else is out there.

Risking a serious injury for no good reason is dumb. But some risk is part of any hero’s journey, and there’s plenty of risk in not taking the journey too.

Their parents got smartphones too. Those smartphones gave parents a new superpower that they did not have in the era of flip phones: the ability to track their children’s movements at every moment.

Whether we think of the phone as “the world’s longest umbilical cord” or as an “invisible fence,” childhood autonomy plummeted when kids started carrying them.

I didn’t set out to write this book. In late 2021, I began writing a book on how social media was damaging American democracy. My plan was to begin with a chapter on the impact of social media on Gen Z, showing how it disrupted their social lives and caused a surge of mental illness. The rest of the book would analyze how social media disrupted society more broadly. I’d show how it fragmented public discourse, Congress, journalism, universities, and other foundational democratic institutions. But when I finished writing that first chapter—which became chapter 1 of this book—I realized that the adolescent mental health story was so much bigger than I had thought. It wasn’t just an American story, it was a story playing out across many Western nations.

Until someone finds a chemical that was released in the early 2010s into the drinking water or food supply of North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, a chemical that affects adolescent girls most, and that has little effect on the mental health of people over 30, the Great Rewiring is the leading theory.

In part 4, I offered dozens of suggestions, but the four foundational reforms are: No smartphones before high school No social media before 16 Phone-free schools Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence

If a community enacts all four, they are likely to see substantial improvements in child and adolescent mental health within two years.

You shouldn’t have to compete for your students’ attention with the entire internet.

Growing up in the virtual world promotes anxiety, anomie, and loneliness. The Great Rewiring of Childhood, from play-based to phone-based, has been a catastrophic failure. It’s time to end the experiment. Let’s bring our children home.

From my notion book template

What It’s About

Part philosophical ramble, part science fiction, all world building – Eumeswil is a book of fiction posing as the diary/notes/ruminations of a full time history grad student and part time bartender to the tyrant (the term tyrant is used descriptively, not pejoratively) of a city state somewhere in North Africa in the far, far future. This weird position to both history in the past (via education) and history in the making (the tyrant does most of his business with his underlings at the bar) spawns weird ruminations and insights into the relationship between the individual, state, and society.

Junger also creates one of his signature concepts, namely “The Anarch” – defined as “The Anarch is to the anarchist what the monarch is to the monarchist.”. A more useful definition would be something like “An Anarch is someone who is unaffected inwardly by government and society, even if outwardly affected”. If that sounds like a stoic “sage”, i.e. one who has mastered stoicism, then you’re pretty close. The main difference between the sage and the anarch would be that the sage concerns himself with serenity, emotional control and happiness whereas the anarch resists all influence. Hey, Germans!

How I Discovered It

Amazon was kind enough to suggest it to me as “Something you might like”

Thoughts

Reading this book time me quite a long time – I found myself reading and then rereading whole pages just to make sure I was understanding things correctly. The Kindle highlight word for a definition feature was extremely helpful on this book.

As I write this I’m struck by the utter absence of any Old and New Testament influences in the book. Biblical influence, in one way or the other seeps into any sort of moral lesson or redemptions arcs (that’s what we’re used to, and there is no other way to do moral lessons or redemption arcs, the bible as literature and all that.) There was none of that in Eumeswil. Instead there were lots of lessons from Greek and Roman mythology, and a smattering of Norse. Classical Roman and Greek leaders were raised to near mythological levels as well. The most prominent example was the narrator’s discovery of letters from his dad attempting to pressure his mom to have an abortion and the mythological story of Zeus, Rhea and Kronos.

A thought I had was the Junger is a classically educated writer who was educated on other classics.

This book was yet another example of “fully formed observer looks out at the world” genre I’m so fond of.

What I Didn’t Like About It

The biggest negative about the book was that pretty much nothing happens – Eumeswil is 99% world building, 1% plot. Other massive negatives are what I can only presume are unavoidable translation problems and a mind boggling use of archaic terms (which is odd for a sort of sci fi novel written in the 1970s). I’m normally a fan of such things, but this was a lot, even for me.

Who Would Like It?

I liked it, but I’m not sure I can think of anyone else that would. It appealed to my sense of rationalism, fondness for magical realism in fiction, dystopias, works by people born before 1920, and legions of baroque historical references.

Related Books

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man by Albert Jay Nock

Highlights

But if an utterance begins with a lie, so that it has to be propped up by more and more lies, then eventually the structure collapses. Hence my suspicion that Creation itself began with a fraud. Had it been a simple mistake, then paradise could be restored through evolution. But the Old Man concealed the Tree of Life.

The Condor sets great store by visual acuteness: seldom does a candidate who wears glasses stand a chance with him.

So one can comfortably let time pass—time itself provides enjoyment. Therein, presumably, lies the secret of tobacco—indeed, of any lighter drug.

The Condor feels that the presence of women, whether young or old, would only promote intrigue. Still, it is hard to reconcile the rich diet and leisurely life-style with asceticism.

When we look back, our eyes alight on graves and ruins, on a field of rubble. We are then inveigled by a mirage of time: while believing that we are advancing and progressing, we are actually moving toward that past. Soon we will belong to it: time passes over us. And this sorrow overshadows the historian.

Among the animals, he says, the bees have rediscovered this kinship. Their mating with the flowers is neither a forward nor a backward step in evolution, it is a kind of supernova, a flashing of cosmogonic eros in a favorable conjunction. Even the boldest thinking has not yet hit on that, he says; the only things that are real are those that cannot be invented.

The goal was the copper flasks in which King Solomon had jailed rebellious demons. Now and again, the fishermen who cast their nets in the El-Karkar Sea would haul up one of these flasks in their catches. They were closed with the seal of Solomon; when they were opened, the demon spurted forth as smoke that darkened the sky.

This emir, the conqueror of Northwest Africa, may be regarded as their prototype. His Western features are unmistakable; of course, we must bear in mind that the distinctions between races and regions vanish on the peaks. Just as people resemble one another ethically, indeed become almost identical, when approaching perfection, so too spiritually. The distance from the world and from the object increases; curiosity grows and with it the desire to get closer to the ultimate secrets, even amid great danger. This is an Aristotelian trait. One that makes use of arithmetic.

Evil becomes all the more dreadful the longer it is deprived of air.

The loss of perfection can be felt only if perfection exists.

As the word is weighed by the poet, so, too, must the deed be weighed by the historian—beyond good and evil, beyond any conceivable ethics.

I contented myself, as I have mentioned, with shaking my head; it is better, especially among men, for emotions to be guessed rather than verbalized.

Yellow highlight | Location: 553 These are the suspicions with which two sorts of faculty members operate here: they are either crooks disguised as professors or professors posing as crooks in order to gain popularity. They try to outdo one another in the race for infamy,

Basically, it is beauty that he serves. Power and riches should be its thralls.

To be sure, extremely importunate persecutorial types thrive in our putrid lagoon. “Each student is a viper nursed in the bosom,” Vigo once said to me in a gloomy moment when speaking about Barbassoro, who, granted, belongs more to the species of purebred rats.

He has an instinct for conformity and for irresistible platitudes, which he stylizes in a highbrow manner. He can also reinterpret them, depending on which way the wind is blowing.

No salvation comes from exhumed gods; we must penetrate deeper into substance.

A man who knows his craft is appreciated anywhere and anytime. This is also one of the means of survival for the aristocrat, whose diplomatic instinct is almost irreplaceable.

They cut their finest figure in their obituaries. As survivors, they soon become unpleasant again.

Distinctions must be drawn here: love is anarchic, marriage is not. The warrior is anarchic, the soldier is not. Manslaughter is anarchic, murder is not. Christ is anarchic, Saint Paul is not. Since, of course, the anarchic is normal, it is also present in Saint Paul, and sometimes it erupts mightily from him. Those are not antitheses but degrees. The history of the world is moved by anarchy. In sum: the free human being is anarchic, the anarchist is not.

The anarch can lead a lonesome existence; the anarchist is sociable and must get together with peers.

The positive counterpart of the anarchist is the anarch. The latter is not the adversary of the monarch but his antipode, untouched by him, though also dangerous. He is not the opponent of the monarch, but his pendant. After all, the monarch wants to rule many, nay, all people; the anarch, only himself.

According to Thales, the rarest thing he encountered in his travels was an old tyrant.

My mother died young, during my early school years. I regarded the loss as a second birth, an expulsion into a brighter, colder foreign land—this time consciously.

My mother had been the world for me; she gradually became a person.

When I could no longer be thought away, he tackled me physically. I do not wish to go into detail. In any case, while floating in the amniotic fluid, I was menaced with dangerous adventures, like Sindbad the Sailor. He tried to get at me with poisons and sharp instruments and also with the help of an accomplice on the medical faculty. But my mother stuck by me, and that was my good fortune.

The ancients depicted time as Cronus, who eats his own children. As a Titan, the father devours his engendered son; as a god, he sacrifices him. As a king, he squanders him in the wars that he instigates. Bios and myth, history and theology offer any number of examples. The dead return not to the father, but to the mother.

When he swaggers, I sometimes feel like reminding him of the map room and the tricks he harassed my mother with. She sheltered me from him in her cavern just as Rhea shielded her Zeus against the gluttonous Cronus.

There are truths that we must hush if we are to live together; but you cannot knock over the chessboard.

The person who teaches us how to think makes us lords over men and facts.

Bruno, too, considers the situation in Eumeswil favorable: the historical substance is used up. Nothing is taken seriously now except for the gross pleasures and also the demands of everyday life. The body social resembles a pilgrim who, exhausted by his wanderings, settles down to rest. Now images can come in. These ideas also had a practical meaning for my work.

Florence was enough for a Machiavelli.

Once, people got fed up with pure dynamics, and so technology declined in the larger areas. This was matched on the other side by its plutonian concentration in the hands of a small, now autonomous personnel.

Although an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered.

In the animal kingdom, there are parasites that clandestinely hollow out a caterpillar. Eventually, a mere wasp emerges instead of a butterfly. And that is what those people do with their heritage, and with language in particular, as counterfeiters; that is why I prefer the Casbah, even from behind my counter.

I am curious by nature; this is indispensable for the historian. A man is a born historian or else he is boring.

I consider it poor historical form to make fun of ancestral mistakes without respecting the eros that was linked to them. We are no less in bondage to the Zeitgeist; folly is handed down, we merely don a new cap.

I therefore would not resent my genitor for merely believing in a fallacy; no one can help that. What disturbs me is not error but triteness, the rehashing of bromides that once moved the world as grand utterances. Errors can shake the political world to its very core; yet they are like diseases: in a crisis, they can accomplish a great deal, and even effect a cure—as hearts are tested in a fever. An acute illness: that is the waterfall with new energies. A chronic illness: sickliness, morass. Such is Eumeswil: we are wasting away—of course, only for lack of ideas; otherwise, infamy has been worthwhile.

Thus, it is the language of a man who knows what he wants and who transfers this wanting to others: Dico: “I speak”; dicto: “I speak firmly, dictate.” The t concentrates.

The Domo said, “Whatever a man does in bed or even in a stable is his own business; we do not interfere. Bien manger, bien boire, bien foutre—by giving our blessing to all that, we relieve the police and the courts of an enormous workload. This way, aside from lunatics and gross criminals, we only have to deal with do-gooders, who are more dangerous.

Tyranny must value a sound administration of justice in private matters. This, in turn, increases its political authority. The latter rests on equality, to which tyranny sacrifices freedom. Tyranny is intent on overall leveling, which makes it akin to rule by the people. Both structures produce similar forms. They share a distaste for elites that nurture their own language and recognize themselves in it; poets are even hated.

The idea of the Eternal Return is that of a fish that wants to jump out of the frying pan. It falls on the stove plate.

As I have already said, I have nothing against authority, nor do I believe in it. Rather, I need authority, for I have a conception of greatness. That is why, although not without skepticism here too, I associate with the top rank.

We play on slanting chessboards. If some day his pontiffs—and I do not doubt it—topple the Condor, then Eumeswil will once again celebrate liberazione—the transition, that is, from visible to anonymous power. For a long time now, soldiers and demagogues have been spelling one another.

How, then, shall I classify the Condor? Among the tyrants—though not to be doubted, it says little. According to linguistic usage, tyrants find a more fertile soil in the West and despots in the East. Both are unbounded, but the tyrant follows certain rules, the despot his cravings. That is why tyranny is bequeathed more easily, though at most to a grandchild. The bodyguard is likewise more reliable, as is one’s own son. Despite profound disagreements, Lycophron, the son of Periander, rebels against his father only in spirit but not in deed.

Such is the role of the anarch, who remains free of all commitments yet can turn in any direction.

Gullibility is the norm; it is the credit on which states live: without it, even their most modest survival would be impossible.

Tiberius is remarkable for his character; the sheer fact that he, virtually as a private citizen, could hold on to the reins for such a long time verges on witchcraft.

was reckless enough to broach this topic at the family table, only to reap an answer worthy of my genitor: namely, that the invention of the phonograph has rendered such speculations null and void. The inventor was, I believe, an especially disagreeable American, a disciple of Franklin’s named Edison.

Action is more easily emulated than character; this is borne out by the bromidic reiterations in world history.

The special trait making me an anarch is that I live in a world which I “ultimately” do not take seriously. This increases my freedom; I serve as a temporary volunteer.

The world civil war changed values. National wars are fought between fathers, civil wars between brothers. It has always been better to fall under the father’s hand than into the brother’s; it is easier being an enemy of another nation than another class.

For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket.

Now, I am not putting down fear. It is a foundation of physicality, indeed of physics. If the ground wobbles or if the house so much as threatens to collapse, one looks for the door. This, too, creates a selection—say, of those people who did not fall into the trap. In this respect, Odysseus is one of our greatest models—the whiffer par excellence. Fear is primary: the instinctive whiffing of danger. It is joined by caution, then canniness and also cunning. Odysseus’ caution is so extraordinary because he also has courage and curiosity. He is the harbinger of Western man’s intellect, boldness, and inquiring mind.

“Dear friend, where have you been? We haven’t seen you in ages.” “I’ve been living.”

Man is a rational being who does not like sacrificing his safety to theories. Placards come and go, but the wall they are pasted on endures. Theories and systems pass over us in the same way.

Incidentally, I notice that our professors, trying to show off to their students, rant and rail against the state and against law and order, while expecting that same state to punctually pay their salaries, pensions, and family allowances, so that they value at least this kind of law and order. Make a fist with the left hand and open the right hand receptively—that is how one gets through life. This was easier under the tribunes; it is also one reason for my dear brother’s nostalgia for their splendor. Yet he himself helped to saw off their branch.

The political trend is always to be observed, partly as a spectacle, partly for one’s own safety. The liberal is dissatisfied with every regime; the anarch passes through their sequence—as inoffensively as possible—like a suite of rooms. This is the recipe for anyone who cares more about the substance of the world than its shadow—the philosopher, the artist, the believer.

The last time must have been after the Second World War—that is, after the final triumph of the technician over the warrior.

There is simply nothing new in the cosmos; otherwise the universe would not deserve its name.

The difference will be obvious when I go to my forest shack while my Lebanese joins the partisans. I will then not only hold on to my essential freedom, but also gain its full and visible enjoyment. The Lebanese, by contrast, will shift only within society; he will become dependent on a different group, which will get an even tighter hold on him.

The partisan operates on the margins; he serves the great powers, which arm him with weapons and slogans. Soon after the victory, he becomes a nuisance. Should he decide to maintain the role of idealist, he is made to see reason.

As I have said, I have nothing to do with the partisans. I wish to defy society not in order to improve it, but to keep it at bay no matter what.

As for the do-gooders, I am familiar with the horrors that were perpetrated in the name of humanity, Christianity, progress. I have studied them. I do not know whether I am correctly quoting a Gallic thinker: “Man is neither an animal nor an angel; but he becomes a devil when he tries to be an angel.”

The partisan wants to change the law, the criminal break it; the anarch wants neither. He is not for or against the law. While not acknowledging the law, he does try to recognize it like the laws of nature, and he adjusts accordingly.

The difference is that the forest fleer has been expelled from society, while the anarch has expelled society from himself. He is and remains his own master in all circumstances.

Incidentally, most revolutionaries suffer from not having become professors. The Domo knows this, too: once, at the night bar, I heard him telling the Condor: “We’ll make him a professor—that should take him off our backs.”

I began with the respect that the anarch shows toward the rules. Respectare as an intensive of respicere means: “to look back, think over, take into account.” These are traffic laws. The anarchist resembles a pedestrian who refuses to acknowledge them and is promptly run down. Even a passport check is disastrous for him. “I never saw a cheerful end,” as far back as I can look into history. In contrast, I would assume that men who were blessed with happiness—Sulla, for example—were anarchs in disguise.

Cadmo, to enlighten me, often takes me along to his “Storm Companions.” I am not really welcome there—perhaps they even regard me as an agent of the Domo, who, by the by, knows about their meetings but considers them irrelevant, indeed almost useful. “A barking dog never bites.”

The true historian is more of an artist, especially a tragedian, than a man of science.

Let me repeat that I prefer the history of cultures to the history of states. That is where humanity begins and ends. Accordingly, I value the history of royal courts and even back courts over that of politics and parties. History is made by people and at most regulated by laws; that is why it is so inexhaustible with surprises.

intellectual rank was no longer to be identified by a mastery of language. The result is a banal chitchat defective in both its heights and its depths.

Similarly, when elites have grown rare or shrunk down to a few individuals, the clear, unadulterated word convinces the uneducated man—indeed, precisely him, the non-miseducated man. He senses—and this puts his mind at ease—that the ruler still observes rules despite his power. Caesar non supra grammaticos. A solace in periods of decline.

large-scale demagogue, who turned up when the planet Pluto was discovered, dabbled in painting just as Nero did in singing. He persecuted painters whose works he did not like. He dabbled in other areas, too—for instance, as a strategist who doomed many people, but was technically perfect; as a chauffeur in all directions, who eventually had himself cremated with the help of gasoline. His outlines melt into insignificance; the torrent of numbers wipes them out. The pickings are slim for both the historian and the anarch. Red monotony, even in the atrocities.

The anarch thinks more primitively; he refuses to give up any of his happiness. “Make thyself happy” is his basic law. It is his response to the “Know thyself” at the temple of Apollo in Delphi. These two maxims complement each other; we must know our happiness and our measure.

At times, I suspect the Condor of hoping to turn Eumeswil into a small-scale Florence; he would then have his Machiavelli in the Domo.

Transcendence is the side track of reason. The world is more miraculous than as depicted by sciences and religions. Only art has any inkling of it.

One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians (“God is goodness”) castrate the Good Lord. This is a Saturnian trait.

will content myself with his maxim: “Primal image is image and mirror image.” His actual strategem was to reduce the platonic idea to phenomenon, thereby reanimating matter, which had been emasculated by abstract thinking. A miracle, he said, could not be expected from above or from the future—say, from a world spirit ascending from level to level; despite its variable elements, he said, a miracle always remains the same, in every blade of grass, in every pebble.

A little generosity is worth more than a lot of administration. The tribunes were redistributors; they raised the prices of bread for the poor in order to make them happy with their ideas—say, by building extravagant universities whose jobless graduates became a burden to the state (hence once again to the poor) and never touched another hammer. The pauper, so long as he does not think parasitically, wishes to see as little government as possible, no matter what pretexts the state may use. He does not want to be schooled, vaccinated, or conscripted; all these things have senselessly increased the numbers of the poor, and with them, poverty.

I stand before the mirror and view Emanuelo: clothing, physical appearance, smile, and movements must be casual and pleasant. It is important—we can learn this from women—to look the way others picture us in their wishes.

Like many young men with time on their hands, he occupied his mind with the “perfect crime”—about which he also had a theory.

I have noticed that a cat will turn up her nose at a piece of meat if I hand it to her, but she will devour it with gusto if she has “stolen” it. The meat is the same, but the difference lies in the predator’s delight in recognizing itself.

Opposition is collaboration; this was something from which Dalin, without realizing it, could not stay free. Basically, he damaged order less than he confirmed it. The emergence of the anarchic nihilist is like a goad that convinces society of its unity.

In Eumeswil, abortion is one of the actions that are punishable but not prosecuted. They include, among other things, gambling, smoking opium,

A demonological literature à la The Witches’ Hammer still exists, but underground. Whenever it has an effect, whenever it turns virulent, one can assume other causes—above all, a cosmic angst in search of objects.

“The hunter has companions, but tillage brought slavery, killing became murder. Freedom ended; the game was driven away. In Cain a descendant of the primal hunter was resurrected, his avenger, perhaps. Genesis supplies only a rumor about all this. It hints at Yahweh’s bad conscience regarding the slayer.”

Otherwise the Inuits were thoroughly corrupted by dealing with the whalers, who, next to the sandalwood skippers, were notoriously the worst villains ever to plow the seas. From them, they had learned how to smoke, drink, and gamble. They gambled away their dogs, boats, weapons, and also their wives; a woman might change hands five times in a single night. *

But this did not seem to be Attila’s point. His guiding thought in that discussion (which, as we recall, concerned abortion) was, more or less: It is reprehensible to delegate a misdeed. The hunter takes his son to the mother’s grave and kills him. He does not assign the task to anyone else—not his brother, not the shaman; he carries it out himself.

My father hounded me when my life was frailest. This may be our most exquisite time. My mother concealed me from him in her womb, like Rhea hiding Zeus in the grotto of Ida to shield him from the clutches of a voracious Cronus. Those are monstrous images; they make me shudder—conversations between matter and time. They lie as erratic boulders, uninterpreted, beneath the surveyed land.

Such are the standards in Eumeswil, a fellah society that periodically suffers moral harassment from demagogues until generals come and insert an artificial spine.

And revolutions lose their charm if they become permanent fixtures. Tyrannicide, the killing of the tyrannus absque titulo, presumes the existence of underdogs of quality.

The Casbah has a rule that an execution must be done by hand and that blood must flow. Criminals are decapitated, politicals shot. The public viewing is guaranteed, but limited.

Above all, I believe, Salvatore owed his life to the Domo’s secret sympathy with criminals. I notice that his head begins swaying almost benevolently whenever the conversation turns to major felonies. This happens less with fraud and property offenses than with armed robbery and violence, which have stirred the imagination since time immemorial. In spreading terror, the forces they unleash confirm the ruler and his justice. Such observations could support theories that power per se is evil.

“Most offenses can be taken care of quickly and painfully with a flogging. Who would not prefer that to a longer incarceration? Everyone is unanimous on this issue—the culprit, the judge, the opinio publica. Certain offenses simply cry for a flogging. It clears the air. While the deterrent effect may be arguable for capital punishment, it is beyond all question for corporal punishment. Besides, the latter makes reparation possible—compensation makes more sense for pain than for false imprisonment.”

The rulers change, the prisons abide; they are even overcrowded with each new regime.

Protection against aerial landings was assured by permanently revolving projectiles, which had come down to our era along with other remnants of the age of high technology.

The selection of inmates for the individual islands has led to sociological experiments. But, whatever the mixture of deportees, the initial “anything goes” situation soon developed into an authoritarian system.

The original and semi-mythical Brutus killed the last Roman king, his historical descendant killed the first caesar—both with their own hands. One commenced and one concluded the five-hundred-year history of the republic.

But when something that was already boring in the editorials read at breakfast is passed off as elite wisdom, then you feel annoyed.

The anarch is no individualist either. He wishes to present himself neither as a Great Man nor as a Free Spirit. His own measure is enough for him; freedom is not his goal; it is his property. He does not come on as a foe or reformer: one can get along with him nicely in shacks or in palaces. Life is too short and too beautiful to sacrifice it for ideas, although contamination is not always avoidable. But hats off to the martyrs.

The Domo has a sharp eye for anything concerning greetings and clothing, and rightly so, for therein lies the start of insubordination. If a man is not reprimanded for leaving his top button open, he will soon walk in naked.

At first blush, the anarch seems identical with the anarchist in that both assume that man is good. The difference is that the anarchist believes it while the anarch concedes it. Thus, for the anarch it is a hypothesis, for the anarchist an axiom. A hypothesis must be confirmed in each individual case; an axiom is unshakable. It is followed by personal disappointments. Hence, the history of anarchism is a series of schisms. Ultimately, the individual remains alone, a despairing outcast.

So much for the transmission of texts and their combination. The Tower of Babel was dismantled brick by brick, quantified, and rebuilt. A question-and-answer game leads to the upper stories, the chambers, the details of its appointments. This suffices for the historian who practices history as a science.

A conversation with someone who introduces himself as a realist usually comes to a vexatious end. He has a limited notion of the thing, just as the idealist does of the Idea or the egoist of the self. Freedom is labeled. This also holds for the anarchist’s relationship to anarchy.

In a town where thirty anarchists get together, they herald the smell of fires and corpses. These are preceded by obscene words. If thirty anarchists live there without knowing one another, then little or nothing happens; the atmosphere improves.

As in everyone, as in all of us, the anarch is also concealed in the anarchist—the latter resembling an archer whose arrow has missed the bull’s-eye.

Above all, the anarch must not think progressively. That is the anarchist’s mistake; he thereby lets go of the reins.

Merlino, one of the disillusioned, hit the nail on the head: “Anarchism is an experiment.”

Taking part in civil but not national wars is consistent with anarchist logic.

This revolution is bizarre in that throughout the European countries where it took place, it achieved the exact opposite of its goals, thereby damming up the world torrent for nearly a hundred years. The reasons have been examined from different vantage points. In medicine, such a process is known as maladie de relais: a disease providing new impulses—in this case, say, Bismarck and Napoleon III.

The anarch can face the monarch unabashedly; he feels like an equal even among kings. This basic mood affects the ruler; he senses the candid look. This produces a mutual benevolence favorable to conversation.

Spain is one of the great strongholds of reactionism, just as England is a bulwark of liberalism, Sicily of tyranny, Silesia of mysticism, and so forth. “Blood and soil”—this inspired muttonheads, who amused blockheads.

State capitalism is even more dangerous than private capitalism because it is directly tied to political power. Only the individual can succeed in escaping it, but not the group.

The most obvious things are invisible because they are concealed in human beings; nothing is harder to evince than what is self-evident. Once it is uncovered or rediscovered, it develops explosive strength. Saint Anthony recognized the power of the solitary man, Saint Francis that of the poor man, Stirner that of the only man. “At bottom,” everyone is solitary, poor, and “only” in the world.

This recalls a certain philosopher’s judgment of solipsism: “An invincible stronghold defended by a madman.”

Now just what are the cardinal points or the axioms of Stirner’s system, if one cares to call it that? There are only two, but they suffice for thorough reflection: 1. That is not My business. 2. Nothing is more important than I.

It is especially difficult to tell the essential from that which is similar to and indeed seems identical with it. This also applies to the anarch’s relation to the anarchist. The latter resembles the man who has heard the alarm but charges off in the wrong direction.

The milk of human kindness has gone sour; no Cato will make it fresh again. Besides, any present time is grim; that is why better times are sought partly in the past, partly in the future.

It makes no difference to me whether Eumeswil is ruled by tyrants or demagogues. Any man who swears allegiance to a political change is a fool, a facchino for services that are not his business. The most rudimentary step toward freedom is to free oneself from all that. Basically each person senses it, and yet he keeps voting.

Two steps, or rather leaps, could get me out of the city in which evolution has run its course.

a human being is revealed more in his lies than in his banal truth—his measure is his wishful thinking.

Sometimes the warrior caste is disempowered by the demos or by the senate and it then migrates to remote territories. That is how the motherland gets rid of its agitated minds, aristocrats, and reactionaries; in those areas, as in nature reserves, they can wage old-fashioned wars against nomads and mountain tribes. Adventures in service. On the other hand, they can turn dangerous when they, like Caesar, create their Gaul or, like an Iberian general named Franco, return with their legionnaires during a crisis.

“The heir to the Last Man is not the primitive, but the zombie.”

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. This book is a bizarre travel memoir mostly concerning the Mexican American War. The author gets kicked out Boston at a young age and rambles the country more or less witnessing war crimes and fighting cavalry fights. It serves as a dramatic lesson in how the world has changed if nothing else.

Summary + Notes

Now while I was ready to forgive the sinner for his insult to me, I felt it was my Christian duty to punish him for his blasphemy.

Thus I lost confidence in woman’s love, and faith in religion, and went forth shunned as if I was another Cain.

She was sorry I was a Yankee, but when I assured her that I had never made a wooden Nutmeg or peddled a wooden Clock in my life she thought better of me. She

made an objection to having his Sable majesty ride inside, but I was verdant to Southern customs. A young Virginian, the master of the Negro, got into a rage and swore, “that the boy was worth twelve hundred dollars, and doggone his buttons if he would allow him to catch his death a cold for all the cursed Yankees that ever wore Store Clothes.”

the frightened inmates thought the whole house was on fire. I cried out that the fire was in the roof and seeing a row of Fire Buckets hanging in the Hall, I threw them down, rushed with two to the well, filled them, and run up the Stairs, asking one of the teachers to see they were all filled and brought up.

We formed a plan to elope to the North, and without waiting for the tie to be severed that bound her to Laboyce we would marry and be happy for life!

Our company, the Alton Guards, elected our own officers, as did all the other volunteers.

The Company was composed of the floating population of a Mississippi River town, wild reckless fellows, excellent material for soldiers, but requiring strict discipline to curb their lawless spirits.

The Rangers were the Scouts of our Army and a more reckless, devil-may-care looking set, it would be impossible to find this side of the Infernal Regions. Some

Take them altogether, with their uncouth costumes, bearded faces, lean and brawny forms, fierce wild eyes and swaggering manners, they were fit representatives of the outlaws which made up the population of the Lone Star State.

The warm body was carried out, sawdust was sprinkled over the bloodstained floor, Glanton carefully wiped his knife on the leather sleeve of his jacket, and matters in the Bexar Exchange resumed their usual course.

We went for each other, and he very foolishly run onto the point of my “Arkansas toothpick” and was badly cut for his want of judgement. I was seized by the guard, old Spanish irons were placed on me, and I was thrust into the “Callaboose,” a room about twenty feet square, inhabited by a very select society of Indians, Texans, Horsethieves, Murderers and the vilest characters of the lawless frontier.

This family placed me under the greatest obligations by their extreme kindness.

But I resisted and triumphed and the honor of the house of Ritter suffered not at my hands.

strolling under the shade of the sheltering woods. Katherine lay reclining in my arms, her arms pressed around me as of old, and I—well, my nature is too volcanic to play the Joseph too often!

Here I have listened to thrilling stories of Napoleon’s campaigns, related by an old cavalryman of fifty years’ service who had served in Italy, Egypt and in the Russian campaign, and at the age of seventy was still a vigorous soldier in the United States service.

On seeing us the “Rackensackers” broke ranks, and surrounded us yelling and whooping like Indians. Their officers had no control over them, and only our bold front saved our defenseless prisoners from being massacred by these brave chivalric sons of the South. Finding they could not butcher our charge, they went off at a jump to find other victims. Woe to the cripples and sick women who fell in their way, for their cruelty was only exceeded by their insubordination.

No man of any spirit and ambition would join the “Doughboys” and go afoot, when he could ride a fine horse and wear spurs like a gentleman.

No one was punished for this outrage; General Wool, in a general order, reprimanded the Arkansas Cavalry, but nothing more was done. The direct cause of the massacre was the barbarous murder of a young man belonging to the Arkansas Regiment. But this murder was undoubtedly committed in retaliation for the outrages committed on the women of the Agua Nueva ranch by the volunteers on Christmas day.

Most of them were wild reckless young fellows, with the most inflated ideas of their own personal prowess and a firm belief that their own State could whip the world and Mexico in particular. This independence of character, and self-confidence was fatal to their efficiency as soldiers. Many of them were duelists and desperados of the frontier, quite famous in their own locality as fighting men, to whom the wholesome restraints of discipline seemed tyranny in its worst form. The battles of the Alamo, San Jacinto and Mier, with the exploits of their demigods Crockett, Travis, and Bowie, caused them to religiously believe that a dozen Southern gentlemen armed with the Kentucky rifle and that southern institution, the Bowie Knife, could travel all over Mexico.

They took no care of their arms—not one Carbine in fifty would go off—and most of their Sabres were rusted in their scabbards. This shameful state of affairs seemed to have no remedy; the War was a southern democratic one, and ex-Governor Yell of the great and sovereign State of Arkansas, and ex-Senator Marshall, of the immaculate and still greater State of Kentucky, were men of too much importance to take advice, much less orders, from a little Yankee general like Wool. “We come here to fight sir!

Sergeant Gorman was reduced to the ranks for seeing a Ghost.

Under the cliffs at the pass the Surgeon and his assistants were busy preparing amputating tables.

The air was so clear we could see every movement: The Infantry knelt down, the Cavalry lowered their lances and uncovered, and their colors drooped as the benedictions were bestowed. This ceremony offered a striking contrast to conditions in our lines; there was not a Chaplain in our army!

I heard General Taylor say, “Steady boys! Steady for the honor of Old Mississippi!”

The Mexicans had a heavy battery of three guns, manned by Irish deserters from our army. These desperadoes were organized as a battalion known as the Battalia San Patricio, or Legion of Saint Patrick; the commander was the notorious Reilly, who ranked as a Colonel in the Mexican Army.

The gallant Colonels, not having time to settle their debate, decided to act independently, so when the enemy was within five hundred yards, Marshall gave the order to “Fire!” and Colonel Yell cried out, “Hold! Don’t fire until they are nearer!” The consequence was, some fired, others did not, but all turned and fled excepting Colonel Yell and a few officers of both regiments. Colonel Yell was killed—pierced by lance thrusts in the mouth and breast—and Marshall was senior beyond all dispute! Captain Porter of Arkansas and Adjutant Vaughan of Kentucky were also slain. Our column gave a wild Hurrah and charged the foe in the flank, taking them by surprise, and at a disadvantage.

On examining his body it was discovered that the shot which broke his thigh bone was fired by his own men (there being Buckshot in it). This was considered accidental, but believed otherwise, as battles often decide private grievances, as well as those of nations.

I halted at a spring and found my good steed apparently as fresh and as lively as when we set out. I raised up his head and gave him a drink of the whiskey (he was a regular old soldier), took some myself, let him drink at the spring, in which I bathed my head, and then tightening the saddle girth I was off again.

The guerillars, if possible, were guilty of worse acts than the Rangers, and the conflict was no longer war but murder, and a disgrace to any nation calling itself Christian. Our officers became disgusted with the many revolting acts committed by volunteers and Rangers, and no reports were ever made of these cruel raids.

This “Yankee” regiment was essentially an Irish one, the best material in the world to make infantry of, but requiring great efficiency on the part of the officers to enforce discipline. Unfortunately,

Visions of prize money flitted through our brains when a dignified little yellow-faced man, dressed in a suit of Nankeen, cut English fashion, came from the cuartel and stuck a pole surmounted by the Union Jack of England in one of the piles and, in the most pompous manner, informed our officers the silver was the property of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, and that the United States Government would be held to a strict accountability if it was molested! How potent is the power of Great Britain! Here thousands of miles away from all apparent power of that nation a miserable little cockney, with only the insignia of his country’s greatness, defies and threatens three hundred of Uncle Sam’s roughest riders. I believe that one of the Silver Pigs was sequestered by a graceless artillery officer, who not having the fear of Her Majesty’s displeasure, hid one in one of his guns, and thus it was brought to camp.

was already far gone in love; wild schemes flittered through my brain to adopt her as a sister, but alas!—man proposes and God disposes—platonic attachment between a wild Dragoon not yet out of his teens, and a young, passionate daughter of Mexico was an impossibility.

They were tried by a Court Martial, fifty sentenced to be hanged, the rest to dig the graves of their executed comrades, and “to receive two hundred lashes on the bare back, the letter D to be branded on the cheek with a red hot iron, to wear an iron yoke weighing eight pounds with three prongs, each one foot in length, around the neck, to be confined to hard labor, in charge of the guard during the time the army should remain in Mexico, and then to have their heads shaved and be drummed out of camp.”

During the war many of the females of the country had proved firm friends of “Los Gringos,” and we were often indebted to them for valuable information regarding the movements of the enemy, their own countrymen. Our fair female friends showed the utmost contempt for the weak dissolute “greasers,” and were public in their outspoken admiration of the stalwart frames, fair skins, blue eyes, and the kind and courteous demeanor of Los Barbarianos del Norte. This feeling was not confined to the lower classes; the señoritas ricas and the “doñas puros Castillanas” of the towns shared it with the poblanas and margaritas of the villages.

As might be supposed, this did not increase the love of the hombres for us, or render the position of the “Yankedos” now that their protectors were leaving the country, a pleasant one. They suffered fearful outrages from the returned Mexican soldiery and the ladrones of the country—they were violated, ears cut off, branded with the letters “U.S.” and in some cases impaled by the cowardly “greasers,” who thus wreaked their vengeance on defenseless women.

Through her influence I obtained the position of wagon master, at sixty-five dollars per month and two rations—a much better arrangement than the $7 a month I had been receiving as a Dragoon.

The bearer of this, Miss Ellen Ramsey, is desirous of going to California, and I have recommended you to her as a suitable party for her to contract a ‘Scotch marriage’ with, to enable her to do so. She will explain all. Yours, &c, Hugh Elmsdale.” This extraordinary epistle was written by a friend of mine, a clerk in the commissary Dept.

At Santa Cruz de Rosales, about 60 miles from Chihuahua, I sketched a monument built to commemorate a victory over the Comanches, who terrorize the country.

Colonel Washington, Majors Graham and Rucker gave the fair bride a chaste salute and the happy couple departed, hand in hand, to the bridegroom’s home, i.e., his tent.

Glanton had made two raids in the Indian country, with but small profit, and had met with considerable loss. There was in camp drying thirty-seven of those disgusting articles of trade, Apache scalps, cut with the right ear on, to prevent fraud, as some Indians have two circles to their hair.

Holden’s lecture no doubt was very learned, but hardly true, for one statement he made was “that millions of years had witnessed the operation producing the result around us,” which Glanton with recollections of the Bible teaching his young mind had undergone said “was a d——d lie.”

The Great Canyon of the Colorado at last!

I am satisfied that we were the first white men who ever saw the Great Canyon from this point. What is very singular in regard to it is that the cut is not through mountains, but through a level plain, with mountains rising above it from three to twelve thousand feet.

Their fields are irrigated by a system of canals from the Gila, the women doing the work of the fields while the men take care of the children and do the weaving.

From my notion template

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Hanania examines the legal underpinnings of what we now call “Wokeness” and is kind enough to define what he means by the term. Then he goes into an extreme amount of detail explaining his theories. TLDR – there is a lot of money and power in wokeness due to the the way exact way the civil rights laws are written (light on text, heavy on bureaucracy) – it is NOT postmodernism. Al;so – Hanania is book form is much less Hanania than his twitter feed, or substack.

How I Discovered It

Hanania’s substack.

Who Should Read It?

Right wingers who care about being correct about our confusing modern times

How the Book Changed Me

The single biggest thing I took from the book was that what we call Modern Wokeness is not the end result of post modernism, endless fashion, etc, etc, but it is the result of how civil rights laws are written and have been interpreted. It’s the Jones Act of political movements.

Quotes and Highlights

For so many public intellectuals and politicians to be anti-woke but indifferent to civil rights law struck me as similar to worrying about global warming but not bothering to know anything about energy policy. Of course, something changed in the mid-2010s.

Opponents of wokeness sometimes say that “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But the federal judiciary does.

Yet on issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation, the country has consistently moved left, toward institutions emphasizing classification based on identity, a results-based approach to seeking out equality between groups, and the stamping out of dissent from liberal orthodoxy.

For the purposes of this book, we can say that wokeness has three central pillars. The belief that disparities equal discrimination: Practically any disparity that appears to favor men over women, or whites over non-whites, is caused by some combination of past and present discrimination. Disparities that favor women over men or non-whites over whites are either ignored or celebrated. This includes not only material outcomes like differences in income or representation in high-status professions but “disparities in thought,” or stereotypes about different groups.

Speech restrictions: In the interest of overcoming such problematic disparities, speech needs to be restricted, particularly speech that suggests that they are caused by factors other than discrimination or that stereotypes are true. Human resources (HR) bureaucracy: In the interest of overcoming disparities and regulating speech, a full-time bureaucracy is needed to enforce correct thought and action.

If a person believes that discrimination is the primary cause of disparities but not that there should be speech restrictions to enforce that idea, we generally just call them a liberal instead of woke.

Title IX, which as a matter of statutory text simply banned discrimination in government-funded educational institutions and programs, has been used to micromanage the sex lives of college students.

Government got into the business of social engineering, while outsourcing much of the enforcement of its mandates and regulations to the private sector.

Wokeness resembles civil rights law more than it does Protestantism or the writings of any postmodern philosopher, and we can look at the historical and legal record to understand the motivations of those who made that law.

particular problem for the idea that wokeness came from the university is the fact that identity politics had to originally be forced upon much of higher education by Washington, with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare originally coercing schools like Columbia and UC Berkeley to adopt quota-based faculty hiring during the early 1970s.9 The government mandates came first, and the ideology later.

Long before wokeness was a cultural phenomenon, it was law.

Enforcement is not carried out by the state itself, but mostly outsourced to trial lawyers and the human resources industry, at the expense of private institutions, which end up absorbing much of the cost of and backlash to political correctness.

The members of Congress who voted for the Civil Rights Act believed that they were dismantling a caste system in the South that was sustained by intentional and conscious private and state-backed discrimination. They did not see the bill as a way to remake American society, redistribute wealth, or destroy capitalism.

Once again, there was more intellectual honesty on both the right and the left than there was in the center.

While “diversity” is certainly an idea, it is not one that can claim any kind of intellectual depth or historical pedigree. It was basically the creation of one judge acting out of either political timidity or intellectual laziness.

The fact that feminist and LGBT dogma contradict each other is a problem for logicians and political philosophers but not for the law or the psychology of true believers.

All of the contradictions noted above can be explained by understanding wokeness as the name we give to a collection of beliefs that one must hold for legal and psychosocial reasons, without any mechanism to ensure logical consistency built into the system. We do not look for logical consistency in an act of Congress that we know was the product of logrolling, compromise, and debate between various factions. The creation of a cultural phenomenon is even more complicated than a piece of federal legislation, and how it is lived and experienced is even less likely to have a close relationship with any philosophical text.

Like an act of Congress, wokeness can similarly be seen as a “logrolled” set of cultural beliefs.

This means that the whole project of seeking a grand philosophical explanation for wokeness relies on a conceptual mistake, likely rooted in the need of intellectuals to exaggerate their importance.

defined wokeness in terms of three pillars—disparities equal discrimination, speech controls, and HR bureaucracy—these beliefs and practices should be seen less as a philosophical doctrine with its own impeccable inner logic than as a political program that has emerged from a combination of factors such as interest group lobbying, mass emotional sentiment, and bureaucrats seeking to increase their power.

Why, despite a war on terror that led to the victimization of Muslims both at home and abroad, do we see so little organized political activity among Muslim Americans relative to politicians and activists who identify with artificial categories like Hispanics and AAPI? The wokeness-as-law perspective can help one understand all of this and much else.

The entire concept of merit—whether measured through standardized tests or other forms of academic achievement—is treated with suspicion, as schools close down gifted programs and more universities drop SAT requirements, putting increasing emphasis on subjective measures like extracurriculars that have even worse class and political biases than the practices being eliminated.

The public health profession was discredited among wide swaths of the population when much of the community recommended lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic but made an exception for protests against racism.

Despite the fact that a similar rise in homicide did not occur in other nations that were also suffering from the pandemic, the media sought to place the blame on disruptions related to Covid-19 instead of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The state is so intertwined with the rest of life that it makes little sense to treat culture and politics as separate forces in a modern society.

We see hints of what may come in the rise of corporations, like Coinbase, Substack, and Basecamp, that are explicitly disavowing political activism, even in the absence of any changes in civil rights law.

This is the story of civil rights law. It is likely that few, if any, members of Congress at the time would have believed that the bill signed by President Johnson would ultimately force police departments to lower their physical fitness standards to accommodate women, much less make employers subscribe to theories about the malleability and subjectivity of gender that had yet to be invented.

but ultimately text on paper passed by two large and divided legislative bodies has proved no match for the machinations of permanently placed bureaucrats and judges.

What changed in the mid-twentieth century? It would be surprising if the rise of television did not play a role, as it both nationalized politics and provided footage that increased sympathy for the plight of black southerners. In 1950, only 9 percent of American homes had a television. This number rose to 65 percent in 1955, and 87 percent in 1960.

The year after the CRA was passed, President Johnson signed EO 11246, which, as amended throughout the years, has become the basis of the modern affirmative action in contracting regime.

It created what would come to be called the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), located within the Labor Department. In 1967, Johnson added “sex” to its prohibited categories, and Obama included “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” in 2014. While

Today, about a quarter of the American workforce is employed by a government contractor.

Affirmative action is required for every employer with fifty employees that does at least $50,000 worth of business a year with the federal government, and every subcontractor with at least $10,000 in business.

Race and sex are to be determined by self-identification, with the employer prohibited from overruling an individual’s selection, although visual classification is acceptable under certain conditions.20

From the contractor’s perspective, all they can know for certain is that they must go through the motions, and that hiring and promoting more minorities and women will be less likely to get them in trouble.

Each business must be aware of the racial dynamics in its own community, forcing the private sector into the dishonest project of creating identity-obsessed institutions that simultaneously champion equal treatment.

At various points throughout the debate over the Civil Rights Act, critics of the bill expressed concern that it might do x. In response, supporters of the bill would say, “no, it won’t do x,” and the two sides would agree to a compromise that involved entering a clause into the bill in effect saying that “x is prohibited.” Usually within a decade, the EEOC and the federal courts would do x anyway.

If this sounds like a judge making up the law to fit his own political preference, that is because that is exactly what it is. At the very least, Justice Blackmun should be credited for his candor.

which showed an acknowledgment “that constant change is the order of our day and that the seemingly reasonable practices of the present can easily become the injustices of the morrow.”

We have therefore moved from bans on explicit discrimination to practically any behavior or speech potentially offensive to women.

Explicit quotas are preferable to the current system in that they could potentially place limits on discrimination, leave more room for merit, and provide clarity on what is and isn’t allowed. They would also be simpler to administer, lead to less bureaucracy, and not require ideological litmus tests in the form of “diversity statements,” which increasingly are required in university hiring. What we have instead is a system where civil rights law serves as the skeleton key of the left.

As of 2019, among those twenty-five and older, 40 percent of whites had a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 52 percent of Asians, 26 percent of blacks, and 19 percent of Hispanics. Clearly any employer that requires a BA or postgraduate degree could be accused of engaging in a practice that has a disparate impact on the latter two groups under the four-fifths rule. Unlike with cognitive tests, though, employers have seldom, if ever, gotten in trouble for requiring college degrees, even when the kind of credential necessary to be hired or promoted has no connection to the profession in question.

If it seems that our culture has built an elaborate ranking system of races, genders, and “traumas,” it is because our legal system did it first.

When most people think about what types of people are affiliated with universities, they usually think of professors and students. That impression is dated, as higher education has been taken over by professional managers who neither teach nor do research. Yale currently has about as many administrators and managers as it does students.1 Many new employees have job titles that did not exist only a few decades before. As of 2020, Ohio State University employed 132 administrators with “diversity” or “equity” in their job titles at the cost of $13.4 million.

None of this would matter all that much if civil rights law wasn’t also self-financing, the second reason for the existence of a robust human resources industry.

Finally, there is the “best practices” doctrine, through which an institution can defend itself by showing that it is behaving in accordance with industry norms. Employers must pay attention not only to what judges and bureaucrats think but to the things that other corporations are doing to address discrimination. This creates an arms race, which helps explain why practices that once seemed absurd can become common.

The results show the creation of an entire industry. In 1968, only 1 in 558 American workers were employed in human resources. By 2021, that number had risen to 1 in 102, including 1 in 184 men and 1 in 68 women. In his 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, James Burnham argued that the world was witnessing a shift from a system where capitalists comprised the ruling class to one in which they were being replaced by a managerial elite that controlled the means of production.

But vagueness wrapped in jargon is the great trick of civil rights law.

That would be an arbitrary standard, but adding more words has the effect of only making the rule look more exact and precise, while in effect doing no such thing.

A traditionally “strong” state can issue mandates that are clear, do not undergo transformations over time through judicial and bureaucratic procedures, are enforced through one part of the national government, and are of uncontested legitimacy. The government of France is held up as an example of a strong state, one that has been able to create a quota for hiring handicapped employees and has laws regarding employment that are stable and enforced exclusively through the Ministry of Labor. In contrast, the American state is “weak.” It does not mandate quotas; in fact, it explicitly bans them. Instead, government contractors have “goals” and “timetables” they set themselves, and all large employers must be on the lookout for “disparate impact” in a world where everything has a disparate impact. Enforcement is also highly decentralized. In the private sector, an employer may face negative consequences through a lawsuit filed by a private party, an investigation through the EEOC, or, if they have a federal contract, via the Department of Labor or the agency that the firm is directly dealing with. Firms may also face pressures at the state or local level. Public institutions such as schools similarly can face individual lawsuits or investigations and threats that funding from Washington will be cut

Due to Christiansburg, however, we now have an asymmetry in which plaintiffs have a right to recover attorney’s fees if they win, but defendants must swallow the costs of defending themselves even when courts have determined they have done nothing wrong.

Under the Obama administration, it was normal practice for the Justice Department to reach settlements with corporations that required them to pay money to left-wing activist groups, therefore providing funding to the administration’s political allies without having to go through Congress.21 Civil rights law implements a relatively small tax on corporations that has a massive effect in terms of creating an entire industry of lawyers, activists, and human resources professionals.

In 2020, there were about 1.5 million businesses in the US with at least fifteen or more employees, the threshold to be covered under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and the ADA.

Civil rights law, through its vagueness, works in a similar way. Each corporation has an incentive to seem “less discriminatory” than others, which in effect means adopting fads out of academia or the HR industry and having to engage in ever more blatant forms of reverse discrimination.

“Woke capital,” which often refers to corporations taking left-wing stances on identity-related issues, is a natural response to a system that rewards this kind of virtue signaling.

Data from the Department of Education shows that while the number of K–12 teachers in the US increased by 8 percent from 2000 to 2017, the number of administrators increased by 75 percent.

The federal relations director of the Association of American Universities once put forward what he called “administrative clone theory,” in which every new form of federal spending comes with a new federal office to administer the money, and then “clones” of the department are created at each university.

In the 1950s, the field of human resources barely existed. Over the next decades, it would grow into a massive community, today comprising around 1 percent of the workforce.

The government decides which categories are relevant to public life, and which are not.

As it turned out, it was easier to create a race than it was to disestablish one.

Americans are usually asked to choose a “race” and an “ethnicity,” with Hispanic or Latino being the only kind of “ethnicity” officially recognized.

In the next year, the SBA would reject Iranians and Arabs for inclusion, and conclude that the category of “Asian” stopped at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border for the purposes of government classification in this area.38 Although it doesn’t appear to have been given much thought, further up north, Central Asians were and remain considered whites for the purposes of government classification, with the status of Uzbeks being the subject of a 2008 SBA hearing that was settled by the petitioner being declared disadvantaged on nonracial grounds.

The EEOC originally denied Poles official minority designation on the grounds that there was no room left on their form, and including them might lead to demands for similar treatment of “Italians, Yugoslavs, Greeks, etc.”42 More extensive efforts were made on behalf of American Jews. Reports from the Truman administration on civil rights gave them substantially more attention than European ethnics, and the Eisenhower administration listed Jews as one group that could be voluntarily reported on by employers in the “other minorities” category.

The idea that the Civil Rights Act would ban employment discrimination based on sex started out as an attempt by a southern segregationist to kill the bill.

Moreover, much of the increase in LGBT identity appears to be among those who engage in only heterosexual behavior, indicating that we are arguably witnessing more of a social contagion of identity than a situation where greater tolerance has allowed more individuals to live as their authentic selves. Again, as with changes in gender relations, it is difficult to prove a causal effect of government policy, though it would be surprising if it had none. Nonetheless, with regard to gender and sexual identity issues, we see the same story of social engineering evident in the way we think about and classify individuals according to race.

Businesses find themselves having to adopt policies that are less tolerant of flirtation and other forms of organic, healthy interactions between men and women, meaning that government has in effect legalized all sexual behavior that goes on behind closed doors, while also carving out an exception for when two individuals work together—in which case it has problematized every step in the process to get to that point.

How could one area of law have such disastrous downstream effects in so many different areas of life? By way of analogy, this question can be answered by noting that one might be skeptical of a claim that there is a medicine that cures a large number of ailments, while being more ready to believe that there is a poison with a large number of negative health effects. Like the human body, society is an extremely complex system, which means that there are many more potentially harmful interventions than there are beneficial ones.

The difficulty created by civil rights law is so well known that it is referred to as the “validity-diversity trade-off”: the better a metric is for predicting job performance, the larger its disparate impact.

At the risk of oversimplification, we may divide American governance into four eras. From the Founding to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, there was the era of elite rule. Then came the spoils system, which was ended, albeit imperfectly, with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 and the formation of the Civil Service Commission. The era of meritocratic hiring lasted just under a century. Since 1978, when the Civil Service Commission was abolished, if not earlier, we have been living in the racial spoils era, where government maintains impersonal standards but seeks to distribute jobs across various official categories.

Interestingly, one way to potentially get around the problem is through explicit quotas. In the first decades of the EEOC’s war on testing, employers had begun to “race-norm” exams, which simply meant giving extra points to individual blacks and Hispanics by only comparing their scores to those of the same ethnic group. With that method, instead of eliminating standards, one can at least find the most qualified people from each race. The EEOC was in favor of this practice as a means to achieve equal representation, at one point actually prosecuting a Tennessee company for not giving extra points to black applicants.

personnel need to meet certain physical standards. Unfortunately for the left, almost any non-negligible physical fitness standard that men have to achieve is going to exclude practically all women.

In the workplace, however, the practical impact of civil rights law can be to create an environment in which only the left-wing position is permitted, and any employer who thinks otherwise is opening himself up to legal liability.

Human relations are complex, so much so that, according to the social brain hypothesis, the reason we have such high levels of cognitive ability in the first place is because intelligence is necessary to navigate and manage our social relations.

Capitalism does not guarantee optimal societal outcomes—such a thing is too much to hope for. But it aggregates information in a way like no other process on earth, and produces a result that, if not perfect, continuously builds on previous improvements and makes people’s lives better.

This is why the standardization of the American workplace that resulted from civil rights law has likely had such disastrous effects on productivity. A series of practices, such as structured interviews, the deemphasizing of tests, and HR departments managing social relations did not emerge necessarily because they reflected the best ways to run a business. Rather, they emerged as a compromise between market pressures that reward productivity and aggregate human preferences, on the one hand, and arbitrary government fiats aimed at achieving demographic parity while hiding what they are doing, on the other.

Civil rights law is killing experimentation at work, with implications for the rest of life. As a matter of simple logic, more diversity within institutions will lead to less diversity between them.

If individuals desire a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace free of anything that might cause offense, the market will create such spaces.

In other words, major American institutions are required to declare within the same sentence both that they do not discriminate and that they practice affirmative action.

Some have argued that Trumpian lies play a social role in binding the right—that by expressing belief in falsehoods that are clearly absurd, followers of the former president show their loyalty to him.56 They have failed to notice that the same can be said regarding lies couched in legalese or academic jargon. Trumpian lies at least make clear the rules of the game and delineate the sides. They at the very least do not insult anyone’s intelligence through obfuscation.

Civil rights law declares some practices related to sex and race unacceptable and others mandatory, restricting personal freedom and harming economic efficiency. It prevents creative destruction in the economic and social realms and taste-based discrimination, while making life more difficult for certain “unofficial minorities,” including the neuro-atypical, the socially inept, the highly religious, and the hypermasculine.

The economist Robin Hanson asks us to imagine political debate as a tug-of-war, with each side pulling on one side of the rope. If one wants to have an unusually high level of influence, the best strategy is to pull the rope sideways—that is, take a position not clearly aligned with either side of the political spectrum.1

For a Reaganite or libertarian, using government power to roll back the excesses of civil rights law is no more philosophically problematic than reducing environmental regulations or lowering taxes. Doing so is not only something libertarians shouldn’t feel uncomfortable about, it is something they should actively support.

Sometimes when different factions of the elite agree on a policy approach, they can exclude alternative viewpoints that might resonate with the masses. This was easier to do before the fragmentation of the media landscape. In the 1960s, national politics was covered on television by three major news stations.

The fact that the increase in crime was overwhelmingly concentrated precisely where Great Society legislation aimed to help—that is, in the inner cities—helped further discredit the liberal project, as did the rise of race riots in those same communities.

Nixon in particular adopted the language of conservatives, but he was a centrist on domestic policy whose primary interest was in foreign affairs.15 As he focused most intently on geopolitical issues surrounding Vietnam, China, and the Cold War, at home Nixon gave moderate staffers a dominant policy role while letting conservatives handle speechwriting and PR.

In the Philadelphia Plan, government construction contractors were first held to a “goals-and-timetables requirement” to hire more minorities, with Nixon having personally lobbied members of Congress on behalf of the policy in December 1969 as a way to pit civil rights organizations and labor unions against one another and split the Democratic coalition.

And while partisan polarization now prevents Republicans from working with Democrats to expand civil rights law, education polarization ensures that they find it difficult to move policy in their preferred direction.

Republicans after taking the House in 1994 found that abolishing affirmative action split their own caucus while uniting Democrats, tilting the playing field in favor of the latter despite there being majority support for the conservative position in the country as a whole.

In few areas is the mainstream press less trustworthy than on issues of identity, as can be seen in recent years in various supposed hate crimes that journalists have championed being exposed as hoaxes, and the narratives about police shootings that they credulously reported on that turned out to unravel over the course of time.

This story teaches us something important about policymaking. There can be a practice that 100 percent of people think should be banned, but it can remain legal if no one thinks about the issue or brings it to the attention of the public.

While the left still outnumbers the right in number of committed lawyers, nonprofits, and activists on its side, conservatives have built enough of a critical mass to be effective and are now well represented in the judiciary, with Republican presidents having appointed most federal judges as of 2022.

know that there is a practical way to fight back. Civil rights law, like other legal areas, is something of a battle of attrition between bureaucrats and lawyers. Progress depends not only on getting judges and bureaucrats to see things in the way one prefers, but also on galvanizing enough members of what is sometimes called “the managerial class” within and outside of government to build upon legal victories and blunt the impact of defeats.

The rise of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing, in which Wall Street firms acting as corporate shareholders push for diversity in hiring and promotions as well as other left-wing causes, represents an acute threat to American ideals based in the private sector, and may make a purely libertarian approach to fighting wokeness unrealistic.

Instead of more sweeping bills, a Republican-controlled Congress could nibble around the edges of civil rights law, passing legislation that attracts little public attention but may have major effects on the incentive structures faced by bureaucrats, lawyers, and potential plaintiffs and defendants in court cases. Topics like federal jurisdiction, whether a plaintiff can get attorney’s fees and how much, and the burden of proof in different kinds of actions arouse little in the way of mass sentiment; nevertheless, as seen in the rise of certain kinds of lawsuits in the aftermath of the CRA of 1991, they can have a profound impact on how the law is practiced and its societal effects.

Moreover, if there are measures to enforce an anti-wokeness policy agenda through the courts, they should be pursued. The 2021 Florida bill creating a cause of action against schools that teach critical race theory is a good example of this.30 It even includes attorney’s fees for parents who successfully file suits, mimicking federal civil rights law.

Unlike the federal government, a state exercises direct control over its higher education system, and there is little reason not to go to war with the diversity bureaucracy, with the ultimate aim of getting universities out of the business of social engineering or taking a side in the culture war.

Asking what should be done to fight wokeness while in power is somewhat like asking where to get water from the ocean. Opportunities abound.

The right hates wokeness, but its failures have resulted from seeing the phenomenon as simply a cultural trend or class marker rather than as a left-wing mode of bureaucratic governance.

This conclusion has two purposes. First, it is to show that wokeness is not as strong as it looks. Analogies to religious faith—which carry with them the implicit argument that the phenomenon may last for thousands of years—rest on a weak foundation.

Populations changing their national loyalties is more common than the adoption of new religious faiths; it has been noted that when Russia moved into eastern Ukraine in early 2022 it found much less support among the local population than it had only eight years before.

Wokeness thus has no history of surviving without state support. In fact, even with state support, and with practically unlimited rhetorical backing from elite institutions, it still struggles to win hearts and minds. Wokeness remains mostly a political loser for the left, which is why it obfuscates on issues like critical race theory and the fact that civil rights law in its current form all but requires speech restrictions and racial quotas. Wokeness does not appear to be able to motivate its adherents to make the extreme kinds of sacrifices that are the hallmarks of true religious faith. It can’t even convince liberals to keep their kids in inner-city public schools.

France provides a counterexample to the American model of the management of race and gender issues. Its laws generally ban the state from collecting data on the race, religion, and ethnicity of individuals.7 This means that, much to the chagrin of some American liberals, France cannot have disparate impact standards, state-enforced affirmative action, or even programs targeted at a group with a particular ancestry. It is perhaps not a coincidence that in a country that bans the kind of data collection necessary to enforce woke policies, we see much more resistance to wokeness as a cultural force among the political elite.

Thus if we see homosexuality becoming more acceptable in most or all countries, is this a natural consequence of modernity, or just a sign that Hollywood and the State Department are everywhere? Nonetheless,

Wokeness can be understood as a series of recurring moral panics backed up by state power.

This demonstrates that there is not always a strong correlation between how much energy surrounds a public policy debate and how important it ends up being.

As it turns out, moral panics only become a permanent part of life when they are backed up by state power and lead to the creation of new laws and bureaucracies.

Few people think too deeply about the connection between law and popular culture—music, art, and TV shows. Yet even in the freest societies, law shapes culture, which means that it cannot help but drive popular entertainment.

This is why many of the most critically acclaimed TV shows of recent years have been set in either the distant past, fantasy universes, or the criminal underworld, where there is less pressure for politically correct stories that obviate natural differences between men and women and insert unrealistic levels of ethnic diversity that distract from the ability to find inspiration in a work.

In the relationship between culture and law, the arrow of causation does not flow in one direction.

To even ask which causal arrow has greater weight is likely asking too much of social scientists. At the same time, historical research, by looking at the order of events, can make the case that many of the ideas fundamental to wokeness were part of law before they were part of American culture. In other words, there is a striking resemblance between assumptions of civil rights laws that go back to the 1970s and cultural ideas and forces that have come to ascendance much more recently.

Among its many other goals, this book argues against our tendency to mistake salience for importance. Wokeness inspires passions on both sides. While debates over hot-button issues are often dismissed as insignificant by those who have an aesthetic or ideological commitment to the idea that politics should mostly be about economic issues, Americans, just like other people, have made clear that they care deeply about what kind of culture they live in. Yet for half a century now the culture war has been an asymmetric fight, with one side able to inspire a critical mass of bureaucrats and activists who do their work far from public attention, and the other doing little more than encouraging and reflecting mass discontent without much impact.

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. The Prince is a wonderful improvisation on the use of power across time and space (at the time anyway). The translation is very conversational and modern, which I liked quite a bit. Some parts were rather dated, but by no means all.

Impressions

The book was much less cynical and much more descriptive than I would have thought.

How I Discovered It

Book club

Who Should Read It?

People interested in the classics, or anyone who really appreciates a good translation.

Summary + Notes

The Prince was written by a forty-four-year-old diplomat facing ruin.

For most of the fifteenth century there had been five major players in the peninsula: the Kingdom of Naples, the Papal States, Florence, Venice and Milan.

However, if the situation was rarely static, it is also true that there were few major changes. As soon as one power achieved some significant military victory, the others immediately formed an alliance against it to halt its progress. Florence, in particular, owed its continuing independence largely to the fact that if Venice, Milan or Rome tried to take it, the other two would at once intervene to prevent this happening.

Girolamo Savonarola ruled Florence from 1494 to 1498, during which time the city passed from being one of the centres of Renaissance Humanism to a book-burning, fundamentalist theocracy.

Had Machiavelli insisted on deploring this unhappy state of affairs, had he dwelt on other criteria for judging a leader, aside from his mere ability to stay in power and build a strong state, had he told us with appropriate piety that power was hardly worth having if you had to sell your soul to get it, he could have headed off a great deal of criticism while still delivering the same information. But aside from one or two token regrets that the world is not a nicer place, Machiavelli does not do this. It wasn’t his project. Rather he takes it for granted that we already know that life, particularly political life, is routinely, and sometimes unspeakably, cruel, and that once established in a position of power a ruler may have no choice but to kill or be killed.

In short, Machiavelli’s attention has shifted from a methodical analysis of different political systems to a gripping and personally engaged account of the psychology of the leader who has placed himself beyond the constrictions of Christian ethics and lives in a delirium of pure power.

For a diplomat like Machiavelli, who had spent his life among the powerful but never really held the knife by the handle, a state employee so scrupulously honest that when investigated for embezzlement he ended up being reimbursed monies that were due to him, it was all too easy to fall into a state of envy and almost longing when contemplating the awesome Borgia who had no qualms about taking anything that came his way and never dreamed of being honest to anyone.

The Prince was largely responsible for Henry VIII’s decision to take the English Church away from Rome.

It was in so far as Machiavelli allowed these dangerous implications to surface in his writing that he both unmasked, and himself became identified with, what we might call the unacceptable face of Renaissance Humanism.

there is also an undercurrent of excitement at the thought that it might be possible to take life entirely into one’s hands, manipulate people and circumstances at will and generally pursue one’s selfish goals without a thought for moral codes or eternal damnation: in this sense the Machiavellian villain looks ahead to the worst of modern individualism.

Cromwell frequently governed without parliament or elections for fear the people might not see things God’s way.

Members of court, Napoleon ordered, shortly after usurping power, must attend soirées with their wives, to appear respectable and avoid gossip. ‘The death of conversation’, Talleyrand opined. Certainly, when a leader has to rely on appearing respectable to claim legitimacy, he is on thin ice indeed.

As Rousseau saw it, the whole of The Prince was itself a Machiavellian ruse: the author had only pretended to give lessons to kings whereas in fact his real aim was to teach people to be free by showing them that royal power was no more than subterfuge.

Machiavelli after all declared himself a republican and a libertarian.

Others took a more traditional view: Bertrand Russell described The Prince as ‘a handbook for gangsters’,

one reaction that Machiavelli never seems to provoke is indifference.

The English have Prince Charles. And the thing about Prince Charles is that he is not King Charles and probably never will be.

Machiavelli’s word ‘prince’ does not mean ‘the son of the king’, and even less ‘an attractive young suitor’. Machiavelli’s ‘principe’ refers generically to men of power, men who rule a state. The prince is the first, or principal, man.

For Machiavelli ‘virtù’ was any quality of character that enabled you to take political power or to hold on to it; in short, a winning trait. It could be courage in battle, or strength of personality, or political cunning, or it might even be the kind of ruthless cruelty that lets your subjects know you mean business.

A ruler who inherits power has less reason or need to upset his subjects than a new one and as a result is better loved.

this for the simple reason that you can’t give them as much as they expected. And you can’t get tough with them either, since you still need them; because however strong your armies, you’ll always need local support to occupy a new territory.

Even where there is some difference in language, the customs of these territories are similar and people can get along with each other. So a ruler who has taken territories in these circumstances must have two priorities: first, to eliminate the family of the previous rulers; second, to leave all laws and taxes as they were. In this way the acquired territory and the king’s original possessions will soon form a single entity.

So, if you go and live in the new territory you’ve taken, you’re very unlikely to lose it.

In this regard it’s worth noting that in general you must either pamper people or destroy them; harm them just a little and they’ll hit back; harm them seriously and they won’t be able to. So if you’re going to do people harm, make sure you needn’t worry about their reaction.

Seen in advance, trouble is easily dealt with; wait until it’s on top of you and your reaction will come too late, the malaise is already irreversible.

Remember what the doctors tell us about tuberculosis: in its early stages it’s easy to cure and hard to diagnose, but if you don’t spot it and treat it, as time goes by it gets easy to diagnose and hard to cure. So it is with affairs of state. See trouble in advance (but you have to be shrewd) and you can clear it up quickly. Miss it, and by the time it’s big enough for everyone to see it will be too late to do anything about it.

Time hurries everything on and can just as easily make things worse as better.

The desire to conquer more territory really is a very natural, ordinary thing and whenever men have the resources to do so they’ll always be praised, or at least not blamed. But when they don’t have the resources, yet carry on regardless, then they’re at fault and deserve what blame they get.

So Louis made five mistakes: he eliminated the weaker states; he enhanced the power of one of Italy’s stronger states; he brought in an extremely powerful foreign king; he didn’t go to live in the territory he’d acquired and he didn’t establish colonies there.

you must never fail to respond to trouble just to avoid war, because in the end you won’t avoid it, you’ll just be putting it off to your enemy’s advantage.

and when the cardinal told me that the Italians knew nothing about war, I told him that the French knew nothing about politics, because if they did they wouldn’t be letting the pope grow so powerful.

From which we can infer a general rule that always holds, or almost always: that to help another ruler to grow powerful is to prepare your own ruin; because it takes flair or military strength to build up a new power, and both will seem threatening to the person who has benefited from them.

To explain this situation let’s start by remembering that all monarchies on record have been governed in one of two ways: either by a king and the servants he appoints as ministers to run his kingdom; or by a king and a number of barons, who are not appointed by the king but hold their positions thanks to hereditary privilege. These barons have their own lands and their own subjects who recognize the barons as their masters and are naturally loyal to them. Where a state is governed by a king and his ministers the king is more powerful since he is the only person in the state whom people recognize as superior. When they obey someone else it is only because he is a minister or official and they have no special loyalty to him.

Looking at these two kinds of states, it’s clear that Turkey is hard to conquer but once conquered very easy to hold. France on the other hand will be somewhat easier to conquer but very hard to hold.

you’ll lose the territory you took as soon as your enemies get an opportunity to rebel.

Note:Similar to Afghanistan

It wasn’t a question of the abilities of each particular conqueror, but of the different kinds of state they had invaded.

When the states you invade have been accustomed to governing themselves without a monarch and living in freedom under their own laws, then there are three ways of holding on to them: the first is to reduce them to rubble; the second is to go and live there yourself; the third is to let them go on living under their own laws, make them pay you a tax and install a government of just a few local people to keep the state as a whole friendly. Since this government has been set up by the invading ruler, its members know they can’t survive without his support and will do everything they can to defend his authority.

If you conquer a city accustomed to self-government and opt not to destroy it you can expect it to destroy you.

And though we can hardly say much about Moses, since he merely carried out God’s orders, all the same we have to admire him for the grace that made him worthy of God’s attention.

Analysing their lives and achievements, we notice that the only part luck played was in giving them an initial opportunity: they were granted the raw material and had the chance to mould it into whatever shape they wanted. Without this opportunity their talent would have gone unused, and without their talent the opportunity would have gone begging.

Here we have to bear in mind that nothing is harder to organize, more likely to fail, or more dangerous to see through, than the introduction of a new system of government. The

no one really believes in change until they’ve had solid experience of it.

It’s easy to convince people of something, but hard to keep them convinced. So when they stop believing in you, you must be in a position to force them to believe.

Anyone who thinks that an important man will forget past grievances just because he’s received some new promotion must think again. Borgia miscalculated in this election, and the mistake was fatal.

Looking at Agathocles’ life and achievements, you won’t find much that can be attributed to luck.

On the other hand, we can hardly describe killing fellow citizens, betraying friends and living without loyalty, mercy or creed as signs of talent. Methods like that may bring you power, but not glory.

Cruelty well used (if we can ever speak well of something bad) is short-lived and decisive, no more than is necessary to secure your position and then stop; you don’t go on being cruel but use the power it has given you to deliver maximum benefits to your subjects. Cruelty is badly used when you’re not drastic enough at the beginning but grow increasingly cruel later on, rather than easing off. A leader who takes the first approach has a chance, like Agathocles, of improving his position with his subjects and with God too; go the other way and you have no chance at all.

So get the violence over with as soon as possible; that way there’ll be less time for people to taste its bitterness and they’ll be less hostile. Favours, on the other hand, should be given out slowly, one by one, so that they can be properly savoured.

In every city one finds these two conflicting political positions: there are the common people who are eager not to be ordered around and oppressed by the noble families, and there are the nobles who are eager to oppress the common people and order them around. These opposing impulses will lead to one of three different situations: a monarchy, a republic, or anarchy. A

A king who comes to power with the help of the rich nobles will have more trouble keeping it than the king who gets there with the support of the people, because he will be surrounded by men who consider themselves his equals, and that will make it hard for him to give them orders or to manage affairs as he wants. But a man coming to power with the support of the common people holds it alone and has no one, or hardly anyone, around him who’s unwilling to obey. What’s more, you can’t in good faith give the nobles what they want without doing harm to others; but you can with the people. Because the people’s aspirations are more honourable than those of the nobles: the nobles want to oppress the people, while the people want to be free from oppression. What’s more, a king can never be safe if the common people are hostile to him, because there are so many of them; but he can protect himself against the nobles, since there are not so many.

A man who becomes king with the support of the people, then, must keep those people on his side. This is easy enough since all they want is to be free from oppression. But the man who becomes king against the will of the majority and with the support of the wealthy nobles must make it an absolute priority to win over the affection of the common people.

what’s more, to keep people well fed without draining the public purse, they stock materials for a year’s worth of work in whatever trades are the lifeblood of the city and whatever jobs the common folk earn their keep with.

Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous. If you are counting on mercenaries to defend your state you will never be stable or secure, because mercenaries are ambitious, undisciplined, disloyal and they quarrel among themselves. Courageous with friends and cowardly with enemies, they have no fear of God and keep no promises. With mercenaries the only way to delay disaster is to delay the battle; in peacetime they plunder you and in wartime they let the enemy plunder you.

they’re happy to be your soldiers while you’re not at war, but when war comes, they run for it, or just disappear.

And a republic with a citizen army is less likely to fall victim to a coup than a republic paying for mercenary armies.

Rome and Sparta stood for many centuries armed and free. The Swiss are extremely well armed and completely free.

fight his neighbours, the emperor of Constantinople brought 10,000 Turks into Greece and when the war was over they wouldn’t leave, which was how the infidels began to get control of Greece.

To summarize, the big danger with mercenaries is their indecision, with auxiliaries their determination.

having your own army means having a force made up of subjects, or citizens, or men dependent on you. All other forces are mercenaries or auxiliaries.

A ruler, then, must have no other aim or consideration, nor seek to develop any other vocation outside war, the organization of the army and military discipline.

if you always want to play the good man in a world where most people are not good, you’ll end up badly. Hence, if a ruler wants to survive, he’ll have to learn to stop being good, at least when the occasion demands.

With time, when people see that his penny-pinching means he doesn’t need to raise taxes and can defend the country against attack and embark on campaigns without putting a burden on his people, he’ll increasingly be seen as generous – generous to those he takes nothing from, which is to say almost everybody, and mean to those who get nothing from him, which is to say very few. In our own times the only leaders we’ve seen doing great things were all reckoned mean. The others were failures.

Note:Republicans

A ruler in power and a man seeking power are two different things. For the ruler already in power generosity is dangerous; for the man seeking power it is essential. Caesar

Spending other people’s money doesn’t lower your standing – it raises it. It’s only spending your own money that puts you at risk.

if you have to choose, it’s much safer to be feared than loved.

Men are less worried about letting down someone who has made himself loved than someone who makes himself feared. Love binds when someone recognizes he should be grateful to you, but, since men are a sad lot, gratitude is forgotten the moment it’s inconvenient. Fear means fear of punishment, and that’s something people never forget.

And a ruler won’t be hated if he keeps his hands off his subjects’ property and their women.

Above all, he mustn’t seize other people’s property. A man will sooner forget the death of his father than the loss of his inheritance.

The positive qualities without the cruelty wouldn’t have produced the same effect. Historians are just not thinking when they praise him for this achievement and then condemn him for the cruelty that made it possible.

Since a ruler has to be able to act the beast, he should take on the traits of the fox and the lion; the lion can’t defend itself against snares and the fox can’t defend itself from wolves. So you have to play the fox to see the snares and the lion to scare off the wolves. A ruler who just plays the lion and forgets the fox doesn’t know what he’s doing. Hence a sensible leader cannot and must not keep his word if by doing so he puts himself at risk, and if the reasons that made him give his word in the first place are no longer valid.

There is nothing more important than appearing to be religious. In general people judge more by appearances than first-hand experience, because everyone gets to see you but hardly anyone deals with you directly. Everyone sees what you seem to be, few have experience of who you really are, and those few won’t have the courage to stand up to majority opinion underwritten by the authority of state.

You’ll be held in contempt, on the other hand, if you’re seen as changeable, superficial, effeminate, fearful or indecisive. So a ruler must avoid those qualities like so many stumbling blocks and act in such a way that everything he does gives an impression of greatness, spirit, seriousness and strength; when presiding over disputes between citizens he should insist that his decision is final and make sure no one imagines they can trick or outwit him.

In fact, one of the most powerful preventive measures against conspiracies is simply not being hated by a majority of the people. People planning a conspiracy must believe that killing the ruler will be popular; when they realize that, on the contrary, it would be unpopular they lose heart, because conspiracies are always beset with endless difficulties. Experience

My conclusion, then, is that so long as he has the people on his side a ruler needn’t worry about conspiracies, but when they are against him and hate him he’ll have to watch everyone’s every move.

This prompts the following reflection: that a ruler must get others to carry out policies that will provoke protest, keeping those that inspire gratitude to himself. In conclusion, let me repeat that a ruler should respect the nobles but must make sure he is not hated by the people.

No one new to power has ever disarmed his subjects; on the contrary, finding them disarmed new rulers have always armed them. When you’re the one giving people arms, those arms become yours; men who were potentially hostile become loyal, while those already loyal become your supporters rather than just your subjects. It’s true you can’t arm everyone, but in favouring some you can feel safer about the others too.

Looking carefully at the reasons for this and drawing on the examples available from ancient and modern history, we find that it is much easier to win over those who were content with the previous government, and hence your enemies, than the men who were not content and so made an alliance with you and helped you take the country.

A ruler will also be respected when he is a genuine friend and a genuine enemy, that is, when he declares himself unambiguously for one side and against the other. This policy will always bring better results than neutrality.

For example, if you have two powerful neighbours who go to war, you may or may not have reason to fear the winner afterwards. Either way it will always be better to take sides and fight hard. If you do have cause to fear but stay neutral, you’ll still be gobbled up by the winner to the amusement and satisfaction of the loser; you’ll have no excuses, no defence and nowhere to hide. Because a winner doesn’t want half-hearted friends who don’t help him in a crisis; and the loser will have nothing to do with you since you didn’t choose to fight alongside him and share his fate.

A ruler must also show that he admires achievement in others, giving work to men of ability and rewarding people who excel in this or that craft. What’s more, he should reassure his subjects that they can go calmly about their business as merchants or farmers, or whatever other trade they practise, without worrying that if they increase their wealth they’ll be in danger of having it taken away from them, or that if they start up a business they’ll be punitively taxed.

Note:Supply side Machiavelli

In responding to these advisers, as a group or separately, he should make it clear that the more openly they speak, the more welcome their advice will be. After which, he shouldn’t take advice from anyone else, but get on with whatever has been decided and be firm in his decisions.

So a ruler must always take advice, but only when he wants it, not when others want to give it to him. In fact he should discourage people from giving him advice unasked.

I realize that many people have believed and still do believe that the world is run by God and by fortune and that however shrewd men may be they can’t do anything about it and have no way of protecting themselves.

My opinion on the matter is this: it’s better to be impulsive than cautious; fortune is female and if you want to stay on top of her you have to slap and thrust. You’ll see she’s more likely to yield that way than to men who go about her coldly. And being a woman she likes her men young, because they’re not so cagey, they’re wilder and more daring when they master her.

Justice is definitely on our side because ‘war is just when there’s no alternative and arms are sacred when they are your only hope.’ The

God doesn’t like doing everything himself, he doesn’t want to deprive us of our free will and our share of glory.

It’s true that the Swiss and Spanish infantries are thought to be formidable, but both have weak points that would allow a third force not only to face them but to feel confident of beating them. The Spanish can’t stand up to cavalry and the Swiss are in trouble when they run into infantry as determined as themselves.

ACUTO, GIOVANNI Italianization of John Hawkwood (1320-94). Having served in the English army in France, in 1360 Hawkwood joined mercenary soldiers in Burgundy and later commanded the so-called White Company fighting for different states and factions in Italy. Constantly playing off his employers against their enemies, he built up considerable wealth. From 1390 on he commanded Florentine armies in their war against the Viscontis of Milan.

Illegitimate son of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, later Pope Alexander VI, Cesare Borgia was made Bishop of Pamplona at fifteen and a cardinal at eighteen.

Cesare then became the first person in history to resign his position as cardinal, upon which Louis made him Duke of Valentinois, hence the nickname, Duke Valentino.

COMMODUS Lucius Aurelius Commodus Antoninus (161–193), Roman emperor (180–93). The son of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus rejected his father’s stoic asceticism, giving himself over to pleasure and amusement while allowing a series of favourites to run the empire. Boastful about his physique, he regularly took part in naked gladiatorial combat. Eventually a conspiracy against him led to his being strangled by the wrestler Narcissus.

FORLÌ, COUNTESS OF Caterina Sforza (1463–1509), an illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan. She married Girolamo Riario, officially the nephew but possibly the son of Pope Sixtus IV. Riario was Count of Forlì and after his murder in 1488 Caterina took control of the town until it was captured by Cesare Borgia in 1500. She is famous for having refused to hand over the citadel of Forlì to rebels despite their threatening to kill her children, whom they held hostage. Exposing her genitals from the castle walls, she told them she was perfectly capable of producing more children.

Despite impressive victories he was forced to return home when the Romans attacked Carthage, and was defeated at the Battle of Zama (201 BC) by Scipio Africanus.

Eventually, to avoid falling into Roman hands, he killed himself by poisoning.

He died of natural causes and was immediately deified.

Note:Worth noting cause of death

While his domestic reforms enjoyed a certain amount of success, his foreign policies were confused and ineffective and led to the loss of Switzerland, which became an independent confederation in 1499.

his preaching appeared to be vindicated and he became head of the Florentine government, leading the city as a theocracy from 1494 to 1498 and encouraging people to burn anything profane (books, paintings) on his so-called Bonfire of the Vanities.

THESEUS Legendary Greek hero, son of Aegeus, King of Athens. He slew the Minotaur in the Cretan labyrinth and was the first lover of the adolescent Helen of Troy. He united the region of Attica under the administration of Athens.

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. A somewhat padded but useful book about what to record and how to record any bit of information you come across in your life. It started out as a course but was distilled down into several guiding principles and put into book form. I found it worth reading if you plan to actually put the lessons of the book into action. It could have been shorter without missing anything of value but such is the nature of the beast.

How I Discovered It

From the Thomas Frank Youtube/Nebula Channels

Who Should Read It?

People who intend to be more organized

How the Book Changed Me

How my life / behaviour / thoughts / ideas have changed as a result of reading the book.

• A better notion setup
• More focused note taking
• Better overall information organization.
• A focus on the reusable “intermediate packets” – which is a valuable concept

Summary + Notes

We spend countless hours reading, listening to, and watching other people’s opinions about what we should do, how we should think, and how we should live, but make comparatively little effort applying that knowledge and making it our own. So much of the time we are “information hoarders,” stockpiling endless amounts of well-intentioned content that only ends up increasing our anxiety.

To be able to make use of information we value, we need a way to package it up and send it through time to our future self.

The Building a Second Brain system will teach you how to: Find anything you’ve learned, touched, or thought about in the past within seconds. Organize your knowledge and use it to move your projects and goals forward more consistently. Save your best thinking so you don’t have to do it again. Connect ideas and notice patterns across different areas of your life so you know how to live better. Adopt a reliable system that helps you share your work more confidently and with more ease. Turn work “off” and relax, knowing you have a trusted system keeping track of all the details. Spend less time looking for things, and more time doing the best, most creative work you are capable of. When

I became the project manager of my own condition, taking detailed notes on everything my doctors told me, trying out every suggestion they made, and generating questions to review during my next appointment. With

Research from Microsoft shows that the average US employee spends 76 hours per year looking for misplaced notes, items, or files.

This digital commonplace book is what I call a Second Brain. Think of it as the combination of a study notebook, a personal journal, and a sketchbook for new ideas. It is a multipurpose tool that can adapt to your changing needs over time.

You’re allowed to reference your notes at any time, provided you took them in the first place.

For modern, professional notetaking, a note is a “knowledge building block”—a discrete unit of information interpreted through your unique perspective and stored outside your head.

Their stories convey a pervasive feeling of discontent and dissatisfaction—the experience of facing an endless onslaught of demands on their time, their innate curiosity and imagination withering away under the suffocating weight of obligation.

There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us: Making our ideas concrete. Revealing new associations between ideas. Incubating our ideas over time. Sharpening our unique perspectives.

Before we do anything with our ideas, we have to “off-load” them from our minds and put them into concrete form. Only when we declutter our brain of complex ideas can we think clearly and start to work with those ideas effectively.

In its most practical form, creativity is about connecting ideas together, especially ideas that don’t seem to be connected.

Having a Second Brain where lots of ideas can be permanently saved for the long term turns the passage of time into your friend, instead of your enemy.

American journalist, author, and filmmaker Sebastian Junger once wrote on the subject of “writer’s block”: “It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about that topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, [but rather] that I don’t have the ammunition.”

The second way that people use their Second Brain is to connect ideas together. Their Second Brain evolves from being primarily a memory tool to becoming a thinking tool. A piece of advice from a mentor comes in handy as they encounter a similar situation on a different team.

To guide you in the process of creating your own Second Brain, I’ve developed a simple, intuitive four-part method called “CODE”—Capture; Organize; Distill; Express. These are the steps not only to build your Second Brain in the first place, but also to work with it going forward.

The solution is to keep only what resonates in a trusted place that you control, and to leave the rest aside.

The best way to organize your notes is to organize for action, according to the active projects you are working on right now. Consider new information in terms of its utility, asking, “How is this going to help me move forward one of my current projects?”

Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this as useful as possible for my future self?” That question will lead you to annotate the words and phrases that explain why you saved a note, what you were thinking, and what exactly caught your attention. Your notes will be useless if you can’t decipher them in the future, or if they’re so long that you don’t even try. Think of yourself not just as a taker of notes, but as a giver of notes—you are giving your future self the gift of knowledge that is easy to find and understand.

Information is always in flux, and it is always a work in progress. Since nothing is ever truly final, there is no need to wait to get started.

Information is food for the brain. It’s no accident that we call new ideas “food for thought.”

A knowledge asset is anything that can be used in the future to solve a problem, save time, illuminate a concept, or learn from past experience.

Knowledge assets can come from either the external world or your inner thoughts. External knowledge could include: Highlights: Insightful passages from books or articles you read. Quotes: Memorable passages from podcasts or audiobooks you listen to. Bookmarks and favorites: Links to interesting content you find on the web or favorited social media posts. Voice memos: Clips recorded on your mobile device as “notes to self.” Meeting notes: Notes you take about what was discussed during meetings or phone calls. Images: Photos or other images that you find inspiring or interesting. Takeaways: Lessons from courses, conferences, or presentations you’ve attended.

If you try to save every piece of material you come across, you run the risk of inundating your future self with tons of irrelevant information. At that point, your Second Brain will be no better than scrolling through social media.

The renowned information theorist Claude Shannon, whose discoveries paved the way for modern technology, had a simple definition for “information”: that which surprises you.7 If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? Surprise is an excellent barometer for information that doesn’t fit neatly into our existing understanding, which means it has the potential to change how we think.

If what you’re capturing doesn’t change your mind, then what’s the point?

but if you take away one thing from this chapter, it should be to keep what resonates.

First, you are much more likely to remember information you’ve written down in your own words. Known as the “Generation Effect,”10 researchers have found that when people actively generate a series of words, such as by speaking or writing, more parts of their brain are activated when compared to simply reading the same words. Writing things down is a way of “rehearsing” those ideas, like practicing a dance routine or shooting hoops, which makes them far more likely to stick.

I eventually named this organizing system PARA,I which stands for the four main categories of information in our lives: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. These four categories are universal, encompassing any kind of information, from any source, in any format, for any purpose.

PARA can handle it all, regardless of your profession or field, for one reason: it organizes information based on how actionable it is, not what kind of information it is. The project becomes the main unit of organization for your digital files.

There’s another way. I will show you how to take the notes you’ve captured and save them according to a practical use case. By taking that small extra step of putting a note into a folder (or tagging itIII) for a specific project, such as a psychology paper you’re writing or a presentation you’re preparing, you’ll encounter that idea right at the moment it’s most relevant. Not a moment before, and not a moment after.

With the PARA system, every piece of information you want to save can be placed into one of just four categories: Projects: Short-term efforts in your work or life that you’re working on now. Areas: Long-term responsibilities you want to manage over time. Resources: Topics or interests that may be useful in the future. Archives: Inactive items from the other three categories.

Projects have a couple of features that make them an ideal way to organize modern work. First, they have a beginning and an end; they take place during a specific period of time and then they finish. Second, they have a specific, clear outcome that needs to happen in order for them to be checked off as complete, such as “finalize,” “green-light,” “launch,” or “publish.”

Each of these is an example of an area of responsibility, and together they make up the second main category of PARA. All these areas, both personal and professional, require certain information to be handled effectively, but they’re not the same as projects.

The third category of information that we want to keep is resources. This is basically a catchall for anything that doesn’t belong to a project or an area and could include any topic you’re interested in gathering information about.

Any note or file that isn’t relevant or actionable for a current project or area can be placed into resources for future reference.

Finally, we have our archives. This includes any item from the previous three categories that is no longer active.

The archives are an important part of PARA because they allow you to place a folder in “cold storage” so that it doesn’t clutter your workspace, while safekeeping it forever just in case you need it.

Projects are most actionable because you’re working on them right now and with a concrete deadline in mind. Areas have a longer time horizon and are less immediately actionable. Resources may become actionable depending on the situation. Archives remain inactive unless they are needed.

This order gives us a convenient checklist for deciding where to put a note, starting at the top of the list and moving down: In which project will this be most useful? If none: In which area will this be most useful? If none: Which resource does this belong to? If none: Place in archives. In other words, you are always trying to place a note or file not only where it will be useful, but where it will be useful the soonest. By placing a note in a project folder, you ensure you’ll see it next time you work on that project. By placing it in an area folder, you’ll come across it next time you’re thinking about that area of your work or life. By placing it in a resource folder, you’ll notice it only if and when you decide to dive into that topic and do some reading or research. By placing it in archives, you never need to see it again unless you want

started. The goal of organizing our knowledge is to move our goals forward, not get a PhD in notetaking. Knowledge is best applied through execution, which means whatever doesn’t help you make progress on your projects is probably detracting from them.

There is a parallel between PARA and how kitchens are organized. Everything in a kitchen is designed and organized to support an outcome—preparing a meal as efficiently as possible. The archives are like the freezer—items are in cold storage until they are needed, which could be far into the future. Resources are like the pantry—available for use in any meal you make, but neatly tucked away out of sight in the meantime. Areas are like the fridge—items that you plan on using relatively soon, and that you want to check on more frequently. Projects are like the pots and pans cooking on the stove—the items you are actively preparing right now. Each kind of food is organized according to how accessible it needs to be for you to make the meals you want to eat. Imagine

PARA isn’t a filing system; it’s a production system. It’s no use trying to find the “perfect place” where a note or file belongs. There isn’t one. The whole system is constantly shifting and changing in sync with your constantly changing life.

Any piece of information (whether a text document, an image, a note, or an entire folder) can and should flow between categories.

They had repeatedly postponed their creative ambitions to some far-off, mythical time when somehow everything would be perfectly in order. Once we set that aside and just focused on what they actually wanted to do right now, they suddenly gained a tremendous sense of clarity and motivation.

You could also create folders for your areas and resources, but I recommend starting only with projects to avoid creating lots of empty containers. You can always add others later when you have something to put inside them. Although you can and should use PARA across all the platforms where you store information—the three most common ones besides a notetaking app are the documents folder on your computer, cloud storage drives like Dropbox, and online collaboration suites like Google Docs—I recommend starting with just your notes app for now.

Each time you finish a project, move its folder wholesale to the archives, and each time you start a new project, look through your archives to see if any past project might have assets you can reuse.

don’t worry about reorganizing or “cleaning up” any existing notes. You can’t afford to spend a lot of time on old content that you’re not sure you’re ever going to need. Start with a clean slate by putting your existing notes in the archives for safekeeping. If you ever need them, they’ll show up in searches and remain just as you left them.

They require a bit more refinement to turn them into truly valuable knowledge assets, like a chemist distilling only the purest compound. This is why we separate capturing and organizing from the subsequent steps: you need to be able to store something quickly and save any future refinement for later.

Your job as a notetaker is to preserve the notes you’re taking on the things you discover in such a way that they can survive the journey into the future.

Discoverability is an idea from information science that refers to “the degree to which a piece of content or information can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system.”

Progressive Summarization is not a method for remembering as much as possible—it is a method for forgetting as much as possible. As you distill your ideas, they naturally improve, because when you drop the merely good parts, the great parts can shine more brightly.

A helpful rule of thumb is that each layer of highlighting should include no more than 10–20 percent of the previous layer.

When the opportunity arrives to do our best work, it’s not the time to start reading books and doing research. You need that research to already be done.

Our time and attention are scarce, and it’s time we treated the things we invest in—reports, deliverables, plans, pieces of writing, graphics, slides—as knowledge assets that can be reused instead of reproducing them from scratch. Reusing Intermediate Packets of work frees up our attention for higher-order, more creative thinking.

Fourth, and best of all, eventually you’ll have so many IPs at your disposal that you can execute entire projects just by assembling previously created IPs. This

While you can sit down to purposefully create an IP, it is far more powerful to simply notice the IPs that you have already produced and then to take an extra moment to save them in your Second Brain.

Ask yourself: How could you acquire or assemble each of these components, instead of having to make them yourself?

Note:This is a key insight . design for future discoverability and use

Our creativity thrives on examples. When we have a template to fill in, our ideas are channeled into useful forms instead of splattered around haphazardly. There are best practices and plentiful models for almost anything you might want to make.

Those four retrieval methods are: Search Browsing Tags Serendipity

Search should be the first retrieval method you turn to. It is most useful when you already know more or less what you’re looking for, when you don’t have notes saved in a preexisting folder, or when you’re looking for text,

If you’ve followed the PARA system outlined in Chapter 5 to organize your notes, you already have a series of dedicated folders for each of your active projects, areas of responsibility, resources, and archives.

You will begin to see yourself as the curator of the collective thinking of your network, rather than the sole originator of ideas.

This is a turning point in the life of any creative professional—when you begin to think of “your work” as something separate from yourself.

Translated to English, it means “We only know what we make.”

One of my favorite rules of thumb is to “Only start projects that are already 80 percent done.” That might seem like a paradox, but committing to finish projects only when I’ve already done most of the work to capture, organize, and distill the relevant material means I never run the risk of starting something I can’t finish.

My father planned for creativity. He strategized his creativity. When it was time to make progress on a painting, he gave it his full focus, but that wasn’t the only time he exercised his imagination. Much of the rest of the time he was collecting, sifting through, reflecting on, and recombining raw material from his daily life so that when it came time to create, he had more than enough raw material to work with.

What I learned from my father is that by the time you sit down to make progress on something, all the work to gather and organize the source material needs to already be done. We can’t expect ourselves to instantly come up with brilliant ideas on demand. I learned that innovation and problem-solving depend on a routine that systematically brings interesting ideas to the surface of our awareness.

One of the most important patterns that underlies the creative process is called “divergence and convergence.”

The first two steps of CODE, Capture and Organize, make up divergence. They are about gathering seeds of imagination carried on the wind and storing them in a secure place. This is where you research, explore, and add ideas. The final two steps, Distill and Express, are about convergence. They help us shut the door to new ideas and begin constructing something new out of the knowledge building blocks we’ve assembled.

Your Second Brain is a powerful ally in overcoming the universal challenge of creative work—sitting down to make progress and having no idea where to start.

When you distinguish between the two modes of divergence and convergence, you can decide each time you begin to work which mode you want to be in, which gives you the answers to the questions above. In divergence mode, you want to open up your horizons and explore every possible option. Open the windows and doors, click every link, jump from one source to another, and let your curiosity be your guide for what to do next. If you decide to enter convergence mode, do the opposite: close the door, put on noise-canceling headphones, ignore every new input, and ferociously chase the sweet reward of completion. Trust that you have enough ideas and enough sources, and it’s time to turn inward and sprint toward your goal.

I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

An Archipelago of Ideas separates the two activities your brain has the most difficulty performing at the same time: choosing ideas (known as selection) and arranging them into a logical flow (known as sequencing).

The goal of an archipelago is that instead of sitting down to a blank page or screen and stressing out about where to begin, you start with a series of small stepping-stones to guide your efforts. First you select the points and ideas you want to include in your outline, and then in a separate step, you rearrange and sequence them into an order that flows logically. This makes both of those steps far more efficient, less taxing, and less vulnerable to interruption. Instead of starting with scarcity, start with abundance—the abundance of interesting insights you’ve collected in your Second Brain.

How do you create a Hemingway Bridge? Instead of burning through every last ounce of energy at the end of a work session, reserve the last few minutes to write down some of the following kinds of things in your digital notes: Write down ideas for next steps: At the end of a work session, write down what you think the next steps could be for the next one. Write down the current status: This could include your current biggest challenge, most important open question, or future roadblocks you expect. Write down any details you have in mind that are likely to be forgotten once you step away: Such as details about the characters in your story, the pitfalls of the event you’re planning, or the subtle considerations of the product you’re designing. Write out your intention for the next work session: Set an intention for what you plan on tackling next, the problem you intend to solve, or a certain milestone you want to reach.

Note:Make this a notion thing

Knowing that nothing I write or create truly gets lost—only saved for later use—gives me the confidence to aggressively cut my creative works down to size without fearing that I’ve wasted effort or that I’ll lose the results of my thinking forever.

Set a timer for a fixed period of time, such as fifteen or twenty minutes, and in one sitting see if you can complete a first pass on your project using only the notes you’ve gathered in front of you. No searching online, no browsing social media, and no opening multiple browser tabs that you swear you’re going to get to eventually. Only work with what you already have.

The three habits most important to your Second Brain include: Project Checklists: Ensure you start and finish your projects in a consistent way, making use of past work. Weekly and Monthly Reviews: Periodically review your work and life and decide if you want to change anything. Noticing Habits: Notice small opportunities to edit, highlight, or move notes to make them more discoverable for your future self.

The practice of conducting a “Weekly Review” was pioneered by executive coach and author David Allen in his influential book Getting Things Done.III He described a Weekly Review as a regular check-in, performed once a week, in which you intentionally reset and review your work and life.

The truth is, any system that must be perfect to be reliable is deeply flawed. A perfect system you don’t use because it’s too complicated and error prone isn’t a perfect system—it’s a fragile system that will fall apart as soon as you turn your attention elsewhere.

orchestrating and managing the process of turning information into results.

We can try to describe how we do these things, but our explanations always fall far short. That’s because we are relying on tacit knowledge, which is impossible to describe in exact detail. We possess that knowledge, but it resides in our subconscious and muscle memory where language cannot reach.

you can always fall back on the four steps of CODE: Keep what resonates (Capture) Save for actionability (Organize) Find the essence (Distill) Show your work (Express)

Thank you to Venkatesh Rao for serving as my introduction to the online world of ideas.