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.

From my Notion book template

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Alms for Oblivion is the final book in Peter Kemp’s war memoirs. It covers his time in the far east (Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia) slightly before and after the surrender of Japan. He spends much of his time trying to prop up the French and Dutch colonial empires, often using Japanese troops who had not yet been released from their army service.

Impressions

It was the best written of his books, it had to most geographical information of any of them. I did spend a lot of time pondering how much of his impressions of the local population were true vs a heavily biased British viewpoint. I was the most surprised by the lack of self reflection of how he went from law student to Lt Colonel in charge of a (sort of) country in a very short period of time. The post war colonial world was also very, very fractured, more so than I would have thought

How I Discovered It

I read the previous two books in the war trilogy

Who Should Read It?

Anyone who read the previous books

How the Book Changed Me

No changes – perhaps a further enforcement of the view that societies are very complicated things and the thought that disparate groups would unite in the face of a common threat is actually an attribute of very advanced societies.

Summary + Notes

For me it proved a first-class travel agency, sending me at His Majesty’s expense to countries that I could never otherwise have hoped to visit.

Juliet was a trim and self-possessed young woman with soft brown hair, faultless curves and inviting dark blue eyes. Most of her advice on the Far East proved inaccurate; she did, however, give me a few tips of more lasting value, and she was a sparkling, even bewitching companion and partner in pleasure.

A heavy rucksack, I told the training staff, was a white man’s burden that I was not prepared to tote; a small haversack such as had served me well in Albania and Poland was the most I would allow to aggravate my prickly heat; anything bulkier must be carried by mule, pony, bullock-cart or local labour—or abandoned. I never had cause to change this view.

I could only recall the bitter words of Colin Ellis’s epigram: ‘Science finds out ingenious ways to kill Strong men, and keep alive the weak and ill, That these asickly progeny may breed: Too poor to tax, too numerous to feed.’

In the excitement and fatigue of the last few days I had forgotten that this was indeed my thirtieth birthday, 19th August 1945.

The soil is poor and so, therefore, are the people, who supplement their income by breeding water buffalo, oxen and pigs for export to other parts of the country. But poverty has not brought discontent; most of the land is owned by the peasants who till it, and those twin vultures, the absentee landlord and the money-lender, cannot prey here as in India and in Lower Siam.

The Chinese, on the other hand, though not loved were tolerated; they owned all the hotels and eating houses and, together with the Indians, all the shops.

I received also a great deal of information that turned out to be false. The problem of sifting true from inaccurate reports was one that I was never able to solve the whole time I was on the frontier; I was at the mercy of my agents, who turned out as often as not to be double agents.

Another of his duties was to supervise the disarming of some eleven thousand Japanese and the shooting of their horses, which were in terrible condition, having been shamefully neglected by their masters. He was astonished, therefore, to see the Japanese soldiers in tears as they shot their horses, and then to watch them remove their caps and bow for two minutes before filling in the graves, which they covered with flowers.

Although the capital of the Laotian province of Cammon, Thakhek had a very large Annamese population, which in fact outnumbered the Laos; in the countryside, on the other hand, there were comparatively few Annamites, for they tended to congregate where there was some form of industry to give them employment. There was no love lost between the two races. The majority of Laos stood by the French, whereas the Annamites detested them and, having collaborated actively with the Japanese, were now organizing themselves into a Communist movement, with the declared intention of expelling the French from the whole of Indo-China; this movement was the Viet-minh. Now the Annamites, having obtained large supplies of arms from the Japanese, would, after the departure of the latter, control Thakhek. Tavernier’s troops were too weak and poorly armed to drive them out; indeed, they would be lucky to hold their own.

When the Japanese occupied French Indo-China in 1940 they did so with the acquiescence of the Vichy authorities who at that time ruled the colony; the French Colonial Army had orders not to resist. Until March 1945 the Japanese were content to use the country as a base, leaving the administration in the hands of the French, whose soldiers retained their arms.

The headman, who spoke pidgin French, procured us the men we needed; but it took time to assemble them, for hurry is a word unknown in the Laotian vocabulary.

During our talk the Annamese insisted on producing for our close inspection the very messy bodies of their dead—as Smiley commented, they must have been unattractive enough when alive.

A few days of rest, decent food and, above all, freedom from fear, worked amazing changes in their appearance, especially among the women. After observing the effects of a little make-up and a lot of ingenuity on one or two of the girls, I began to regret that present circumstances did not allow me to cash in on my position as their liberator and protector.

Although since the last century, when they had annexed Cambodia, the French had been the immediate object of Siamese fear and suspicion, always there had been the remoter but much more formidable menace of China.

The American attitude was summarized by the late Mr. Chester Wilmot, who wrote, ‘Roosevelt was determined that Indo-China should not go back to France.’ Mr. Graham Greene, who visited the country early in 1954, wrote of American intervention: In 1945, after the fall of Japan, they had done their best to eliminate French influence in Tongkin. M. Sainteny, the first post-war Commissioner in Hanoi, has told the sad, ignoble story in his recent book, Histoire d’une Paix Manqée—aeroplanes forbidden to take off with their French passengers from China, couriers who never arrived, help withheld at moments of crisis.

We were shortly to witness even worse. Like ourselves the French had been accustomed to thinking of the Americans not only as allies but as friends; it never occurred to any of us simple officers that the most powerful country in the free world would deliberately embark upon a policy of weakening her allies to the sole advantage of her most dangerous enemy. We have learnt a lot since, but in those days it all seemed very strange.

At the end of the month the Chinese arrived in strength. Almost their first action was to invite all the French officers to a dinner-party. At the Chinese headquarters in the Residency, where the tricolour was flying in their honour, Fabre and his companions were courteously shown into a room and immediately surrounded by Chinese soldiers with levelled tommy-guns. They were relieved of their arms, equipment, money and watches and ordered to quit the town instantly, on pain of arrest. After some argument Fabre himself was allowed to stay, together with his wireless set and operator; but he had to send the rest of his force ten miles away, for he had been ordered to avoid incidents with the Chinese.

Banks assured them that he was determined to put an end to what he called French aggression; also that Chinese troops would shortly arrive to disarm the French and take over the administration of the country pending the establishment of a ‘national and democratic government’ in Indo-China, free from the rule of France.

I reflected that if it were true, as we had heard, that the Viet-minh had Japanese deserters in their ranks, it was lucky for us that none of them was behind those guns.

Cox was a clever and experienced officer who had served with Force 136 in Burma; his gift for extracting the maximum amount of quiet fun out of life made him a delightful companion. Maynard was a young man of twenty-two whose ingenuity and enthusiasm more than compensated for any lack of maturity. Powling, a tall, quiet, very young soldier, most efficient at his job, unfortunately died the following January from virulent smallpox.

The girls were not prostitutes; they would take no money from us, but gave themselves over with uninhibited abandon to the pleasures of the night. Their attitude was not untypical, in my experience, of the Siamese outlook on sex which seemed to be compounded of equal parts of sensuality and humour.

Nothing so concentrates a man’s mind, observed Dr. Johnson, as the knowledge that he is going to be hanged.

My intention had been to apply at once for the demobilization to which I was now entitled. But while waiting in Bangkok I was offered and immediately accepted the command of a mission to the islands of Bali and Lombok in the Netherlands East Indies. There the Japanese garrisons had not yet surrendered, and the situation in both islands was obscure; SEAC therefore decided to send in a small advance party of British troops before committing the Dutch forces of occupation.

Tolerance and mercy are qualities seldom found in twentieth century revolutionaries.

whenever I have to give orders to clear out a nest of snipers that’s been harassing my men I seem to feel the hot, angry breath of Socialism on the back of my neck. So

I had never met Japanese in battle, the most I had had to do was keep out of their way. Now in my unearned hour of triumph I felt ashamed to watch this veteran sailor, who had spent his life in a service with a great fighting tradition, weeping openly over his humiliation at the hands of a jumped-up young lieutenant-colonel who had never even fought against

Lying between eight and nine degrees south of the Equator Bali naturally enjoys a warm climate and an even temperature throughout the year; there is in fact less than ten degrees variation between the warmest and coolest months. Sea winds preserve the island from the burning heat of other equatorial lands, but from November until April the north-west monsoons bring heavy rainfall and the discomforts of a high humidity; the pleasantest months are from June to September, when a cool, dry wind blows from Australia.

In their fear and hatred of the sea the Balinese are exceptional among island peoples. At Sanoer I saw men wading in the lagoon a few yards off shore with casting nets, or putting to sea in canoes with triangular sails and curiously carved and painted prows, to hunt the sea turtles that are a favourite delicacy at banquets; but most Balinese avoid even the coast and the beaches. In the words of Covarrubias ‘they are one of the rare island peoples in the world who turn their eyes not outward to the waters, but upward to the mountain tops.’

Every adult male Balinese, he says, was obliged to contribute a tax to his rajah in the form of work; if a man died without leaving a son old enough to take over this work, his widow and female children became the rajah’s property. Old women were employed in the palace, the middle-aged put to heavy manual labour; but the young girls—often before the age of puberty—were forced to become prostitutes and pay as much as nine-tenths of their earnings to the rajah. In Badung, the old principality of Den Pasar, Dr. Jacobs met several of these prostitutes under the age of puberty. Each rajah owned between two and three hundred of these unfortunate girls—a considerable source of income.

It is true that Hindu gods and practices are constantly in evidence, but their aspect and significance differ in Bali to such an extent from orthodox Hinduism that we find the primitive beliefs of a people who never lost contact with the soil rising supreme over the religious philosophy and practices of their masters. . . . Religion is to the Balinese both race and nationality.

Certain acts or conditions of individual members can make the whole community sebel, or unclean, and therefore vulnerable to evil forces. Such acts extend beyond the unpardonable crimes of suicide, bestiality, incest and the desecration of a temple, to quite innocent or unavoidable breaches of taboo; a menstruating woman, for instance, is sebel and must be secluded, and parents who have twins will render their village sebel. To such a people, in the words of Mr. Raymond Mortimer, ‘sin is not a disregard for conscience but a breaking, no matter how unintentional, of a taboo; and the resulting pollution can be removed only by ritual cleansings and sacrifice.’

There are four main castes, of which more than ninety per cent of Balinese belong to the lowest, the Sudras. The three noble castes are the Brahmanas, the priests; the Satrias, the princes, and the Wesias, the warrior caste. All three claim divine origin—from Brahma, the Creator—which is probably why the common people hold them in such respect. The Brahmanas are theoretically the highest, although the Satrias are inclined to contest their superiority; their influence is religious rather than political, but they serve as judges in the courts; their own laws forbid them to engage in commerce. Brahmana men carry the title Ida Bagus, and the women are styled Ida Ayu, both meaning ‘Eminent and Beautiful’. The two principal titles of the Satrias are Anak Agung, ‘Child of the Great’, and Tjokorde, Prince. Most of the nobility, however, belong to the Wesias and carry the title, Gusti; they have considerable political influence.12

There do not seem to be any ‘untouchables’, as in India, but certain professions are ‘unclean’ and will pollute a village if practised within its boundaries; among them are, strangely enough, pottery, indigo-dying and the manufacture of arak—a powerful, fiery spirit distilled from the juice of the sugar palm.

Only the laws of marriage are inflexible between the castes. A man may marry a woman of an equal or lower caste, but never may a woman marry a man of lower caste; even sexual intercourse between the two is forbidden, and in former times was punishable by the death of the guilty pair.

The most terrible of all punishments for a Balinese is expulsion from the village, when the offender is publicly declared ‘dead’ to the community; when the Dutch abolished the death penalty this became the capital punishment. ‘A man expelled from his village cannot be admitted into another community, so he becomes a total outcast—a punishment greater than physical death to the Balinese mind. It often happens that a man who has been publicly shamed kills himself.’

‘Childlike’ is the label attached in this hideous age to a people unresponsive to the language of the demagogue, the high-pressure salesman and the advertising hound; it is a label that bears no resemblance to the character of the Balinese, although they prefer their traditional way of life to that of the modern world, which, they would certainly agree with Pierre Louÿs, ‘succombe sous un envahissement de laideur.’ They have neither the ignorance nor the innocence of childhood, although they give an impression of its simplicity. They are, as I have said, the most skilful agriculturists in Asia, they are painters, craftsmen, poets, musicians and dancers; and their art has aroused the envy of a civilization to whose arrogance, ugliness and brutality they are largely indifferent.

The enthusiasm of the Balinese for this sport is as intense as that of the British for football or the Spanish for bulls; in ancient times, indeed, men would sometimes gamble away their whole fortunes in cockfights, even staking their wives and children. It was for this reason that the Dutch government intervened.

Moreover, unlike the Common Law of England, Balinese law does not hold a husband responsible for his wife’s debts.

Leaving the Buffs by the car Shaw and I approached the Pemudas; we put on the most nonchalant air we could muster, but for my part I know that my stomach felt full of butterflies and, as the Spaniards so prettily express it, my testicles were in my throat.

‘No, and I don’t suppose they care either. It must be all the same to these highlanders whether the Dutch, the Nips, the British or their own people are in power. Nobody seems to have bothered about them; they look as if they live pretty near the starvation level, and I’m sure they wouldn’t recognize a social conscience if they saw one.’

by the early symptoms of the tuberculosis which eighteen months later almost ended my life. Apart from the usual persistent cough, to which I paid no attention, I became noticeably neurotic, short tempered and snappy, with spells of overpowering lassitude that seemed to deprive me of all my energy and will. At the time I put everything down to war-weariness and alcohol.

Why they made no attempt to kill us all is something I can only attribute to Hubrecht’s personal popularity with the Balinese, and to the well-known Oriental affection for lunatics and children.

It occurred to me now that I was just two months short of my thirty-first birthday and for ten years I had been almost continuously at war; I wondered how I should make out in peace.

From my Notion template

The Book in 3 Sentences

1. The second of the Peter Kemp war books – it details the bulk of the Second World War for him. By odd twists of fate, he volunteers for the most dangerous jobs imaginable, but is first (mostly) constrained by weather – then by terrain , then by people. Functionally his job changes from commando, to would be guerilla leader to outside sales, where the penalty for failure to meet quota is perhaps death. The sales job was trying to organize Albanian guerilla groups into an effective fighting force, which did not happen.

Impressions

This seemed a lot like a diary that he filled supplemented with the benefit of hindsight, after action reports and historical perspective, which is not a bad thing, but the prioritization is odd – the march up the hill for the ambush that gets rained out gets the same number of pages and emphasis as getting chased by German patrols.

How I Discovered It

I read his first book – “Mind Were of Trouble”

Who Should Read It?

World War Two history buffs, people interested in the Balkans

How the Book Changed Me

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

• A reaffirmation on the importance of geography, weather and culture in history
• A reaffirmation that there are winners and losers in all things
• A reminder that the modern way of life, Britain in this time period would qualify, existed with other ways of life until quite recently in much more of the world than I would have thought. The existence of blood feuds being binding restraints on nationwide political movements was quite interesting. The primary political unit is not always the nation, or even the party, but also the family and extended family in a lot of the world.
• I am now wondering how much of history was written by the victors in Eastern Europe – the standard narrative does not seem to be quite complete.

Quotes

A strong Tory myself, I had served in the Carlist militia and the Spanish Foreign Legion, where my friends—Traditionalists, Conservatives and Liberal Monarchists—had no more sympathy than I for totalitarian regimes. But General Franco’s friendship with Hitler and Mussolini and his establishment of the Falange as the only political party in Spain had erased from most British minds all memory of the Communist threat he had defeated; even the Soviet-German Pact had not wholly revived it.

Poor Greta. She was a wonderful cook. But her naïve optimism did not save her from nearly six years in an internment camp.

I was all too conscious of my failure to set a proper example of indifference and courage. When the All Clear sounded I reflected sorrowfully that the last three years had left their mark upon my nerves.

He nursed a particular resentment against Hitler for what he regarded as an intolerable interruption of his private life. ‘Up to the age of thirty-five,’ he explained to me, ‘a man can work and drink and copulate; but at thirty-five he has to make up his mind which of the three he is going to give up. I had just passed my thirty-fifth birthday and made all my arrangements to give up work when that bloody Hun started the war.’

Easily the most junior of our party, I was delighted to find myself promoted overnight to the rank of Captain, which seemed to be the lowest rank on our Establishment.

This new organization, known as S.O.E., became responsible for all subversive activities in enemy-occupied territory. It received its directives through the Minister of Economic Warfare, and was staffed, surprisingly, by senior executives from several large banking and business houses, with a small but useful leavening of Regular Army officers, a few of whom had received Staff College training.

‘Save and deliver us, we humbly beseech Thee, from the hands of our enemies; abate their pride, assuage their malice, and confound their devices.’

took advantage of my leave to get married. Looking back from time’s distance I wonder how I could have been so foolish, complacent, and blind to my own character as to ask any girl, at my age and at such a time, to marry me; it is scarcely less remarkable, I suppose, that any girl who knew me well—and this one did—should have considered me a suitable husband. Our marriage lasted almost, but not quite, to the end of the European war.

In London, when we arrived after completing the course, my greeting from the staff officers of the Spanish section was not such as a hero might expect. Coldly the R.N.V.R. lieutenant said to me, ‘Perhaps you would care to read the concluding words of Major Edwards’s report on you?’ They ran simply: ‘Not once, nor twice, but three times have I seen this officer punctual.’

By religion a deeply sincere Roman Catholic, by tradition an English country gentleman, he combined the idealism of a Crusader with the severity of a professional soldier.

Thus, although we were also known as No. 62 Commando and were issued with green berets, March-Phillipps encouraged us to wear civilian clothes when off duty; this was in keeping with his conception of us as successors to the Elizabethan tradition of the gentleman-adventurer.

Reynolds was an Irishman, well known before the war as a sportsman, bon viveur, and playboy. On the outbreak of the Russo-Finnish war in 1939 he went to Finland as a volunteer in Major Kermit Roosevelt’s International Brigade; having exchanged the comfort and cuisine of Buck’s for the icy forests of Lapland and Karelia, he endured bitter hardship with that ill-fated band of idealists before making his way to Sweden after the collapse of Finnish resistance. There

leave, I was ordered by Brigadier Gubbins to take a party of our officers on the parachute course at Ring way. I had been sleeping badly, with terrible nightmares of those screaming sentries, and I was glad of an opportunity to take my mind off the recent raid.

For a few months the supporters of Tito and Mihailović had worked together, although with mutual suspicion, for they were fundamentally opposed in outlook and objectives. By the end of 1941 their hostility to each other had flared into open warfare, so that their efforts were wasted in internecine strife.

Although Mihailović still enjoyed the official support of the British Government, Tito was not without friends in S.O.E.: one staff officer, in fact, so far allowed his enthusiasm to exceed his discretion that he was subsequently tried and convicted under the Official Secrets Act for passing confidential information to the Soviet Embassy in London.

in 1936, he had been the secretary and inspiration of the Cambridge University Communists. I had innocently supposed that Communists were strictly excluded from S.O.E., for I myself had been required to sign a declaration that I belonged to no Communist or Fascist party before I was enrolled in the organization. However, among my acquaintances at Cambridge there were a number of young men who had joined the Party in a spirit of idealism, only to leave it after the Soviet-German pact of 1939; I assumed that Klugmann was one of them. But I was wrong: like his contemporary, Guy Burgess, he was one of the hard core and today he is a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

At this time the social structure in the north was tribal, resembling that of the Scottish highlands before the Forty-five; in the south a rich landowning aristocracy exploited a landless peasantry which since the beginning of Turkish rule had been allowed neither the security of wealth nor the dignity of freedom.

There are three religions in the country, generally confined within geographical limits: in the south the majority of the peasantry is Greek Orthodox, though the land-owning Beys are Moslem; the centre and plains are predominantly Moslem, while the north is divided between the Catholic mountaineers of Mirdita and Djukagjin, and the Moslems of Kossovo and the wild north-eastern frontier. But religious differences seemed to be of little importance in comparison with the rivalry of Gheg and Tosk and the age-long hatred of both for their Slav and Greek neighbours. At

the end of the Balkan Wars the Ambassadors’ Conference of 1913 recognized Albania as an independent State, delineating for it frontiers which were acceptable neither to the Albanians nor to their neighbours.

Two years later he was back in the mountains of Mati, where he carried on a guerrilla war against the Italians and their German successors until the end of 1944, when he was overrun and driven into exile by the Communists who now dominate his country. In

‘In practice, exclusive control of the movement was retained in the hands of a small committee, all of whom were Communists. This committee, besides directing policy, appointed the guerrilla commanders, the political commissars, and the regional organizers. The former were most often, and the two latter invariably, Communists; while, in accordance with the best conspiratorial traditions, all three were kept under observation by Party members who held no official position at all. By these methods, seconded by the salutary liquidation of those who disobeyed or disagreed, the Partisan movement presently achieved a degree of discipline and cohesion of which few observers believed Albanians to be capable.

gradually became apparent that the arms and money which S.O.E. was dropping so lavishly into Albania were being conserved by L.N.C. and Balli Kombëtar alike for use against each other.

These instructions, which seemed clear and logical to us in Cairo, were to prove quite unrealistic in the field.

he had volunteered for Albania, he informed us, in order to keep himself in practice for his next Himalayan attempt.

Reading this last sentence I was reminded that the Encyclopedia Britannica listed the word ‘intelligence’ under three headings: 1. Human; 2. Animal; 3. Military.

Unlike most of the Partisan leaders he already had some practical experience of serious warfare, for he had commanded a company of the International Brigades in Spain; unlike most of them, also, he spoke good English. A sour, taciturn man of ruthless ambition, outstanding courage, and sickening ferocity—he had personally cut the throats of seventy Italian prisoners after a recent engagement—he tried hard to conceal his dislike and distrust of the British, because he admired the soldierly qualities of McLean and Smiley and valued the help they gave him.

the whole L.N.C. movement—was in the hands of the Chief Political Commissar, Professor Enver Hoxha, an ex-schoolmaster from the Lycée at Korçë. He was a tall, flabby creature in his early thirties, with a sulky, podgy face and a soft woman’s voice. Like Mehmet Shehu he was a fanatical Communist, cruel, humourless, and deeply suspicious of the British. He spoke excellent French but no English. Although physically a coward he had absurd military pretentions, which led him two years later, when his forces had made him master of Albania, to arrogate to himself the rank of ‘Colonel-General’. It

No wonder the villagers are fed up! They must either take to the hills and lose their property, or stay and be massacred. Sometimes, to escape reprisals, they do warn the enemy of L.N.C. ambushes, and it’s hard to blame them.

If I had been entranced before I came to Albania by the romance and glamour of guerrilla warfare, this was a sobering reminder of its squalor and injustice.

Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu were not building up their military formations in order to fight Germans or Italians, but in order to gain control of Albania for themselves by force; they were not going to risk serious losses in operations which to them were only of secondary importance.

Now a Bektashi monastery stood on the slopes. The Bektashi sect, which was influential in Albania, seems to have originated during Turkish times among the Janissaries and contains elements of different religions absorbed into the Islamic faith. In particular, its adherents are not forbidden the use of strong drink.

In accordance with custom our arms were taken from us when we entered the house. This gesture signified that as long as we were under his roof our host was responsible with his life for our safety; if anyone were to kill us our host must start Hakmarjë—a blood feud—with him and would be dishonoured in the eyes of all his neighbours until he avenged our death with that of the murderer. The

It was not unusual for as many as twenty members of one family to be killed in the same vendetta in the course of two or three generations.1 More than once an Albanian has said to me: ‘I cannot go with you to that house; I have enemies.’

few months after his appointment to command the Italian Partisans in Albania he absconded to the mountains, accompanied by his Staff, with a considerable sum of money given him by the Allies to feed and equip his men.

As soon as he heard the news of the surrender, on 9th September, Seymour hurried to Arbonë, where he sent a message to General Dalmazzo in Tiranë requesting his co-operation and asking for a meeting; unfortunately the message was not delivered until the next day, when the Germans were already in occupation of the capital. However, Dalmazzo sent a staff car to Arbonë, which took Seymour, wearing an Italian army greatcoat over his uniform, through the German control posts to Army Headquarters, where he had a long discussion with Dalmazzo’s Chief of Intelligence. At the same time, in an adjoining room, Dalmazzo himself was in conference with senior German officers, arranging his own evacuation under German protection to Belgrade; not until Dalmazzo had left Albania did Seymour learn the truth.

Moreover, to many patriotic Albanians it was by no means clear that an Allied victory was in the best interests of their country; they feared—perhaps I should say fore-saw—that it would result not only in the loss of Kossovo but also in their own subjection to Communist rule.

The Germans played cleverly upon these feelings. Firstly they made very few demands on the civilian population, to whom they behaved with courtesy and consideration, and secondly they made much political capital out of the Kossovo question. It is a measure of their success that when they set up a puppet government in Tirana they were able to induce Albanians of high principles and distinction to serve in it. As time went on it became more and more obvious that we could offer the Albanians little inducement to take up arms compared with the advantages they could enjoy by remaining passive.

we British Liaison Officers were slow to understand their point of view; as a nation we have always tended to assume that those who do not whole-heartedly support us in our wars have some sinister motive for not wishing to see the world a better place. This attitude made us particularly unsympathetic towards the Balli Kombëtar, although the latter was a thoroughly patriotic organization. The Balli refrained from collaboration with the Germans against us; indeed, they gave us much covert help; but they did sit on the fence, hoping to establish themselves so firmly in the administration of the country that the victorious Allies would naturally call upon them to form a government. Indeed, they were naïvely convinced that the British and Americans would be glad to entrust the government to them, in preference to the Communist alternative of the L.N.C. The leaders of the L.N.C. had good reasons for continuing the struggle; but their interests, of course, were not Albania’s.

He did nothing to raise my spirits by pointing out how conspicuous I should appear in the town, for not only did I look like a foreigner but I even walked like one; to the vast entertainment of Seymour, Myslim, and Stiljan he insisted on giving me lessons in the ‘Albanian Walk’. He was not impressed with my progress.

I had come to Tiranë unarmed, believing that a gun was more likely to get me into trouble than out of it.

Cairo agreed to drop the money, but in small amounts, and to disperse it among the various British missions in the country, hoping thus to control its expenditure. The result was the same: most of the money was diverted to finance the Albanian Communist Party, who took exclusive credit for such relief work as was done.

but I was unable to shake off the feeling that they intended to keep one foot in the German camp in order to conserve their strength for the real struggle for power with the Partisans.

From his first days in Albania he suffered continuously from dysentry, but his spirit and determination drove him to endurance far beyond his strength.

At first sight Fiqri Dine reminded me of an evil, black, overgrown toad; his manner was reserved and barely friendly, his speech patronizing.

In Dibra, we subsequently heard, the Germans had received a similar ovation; disgusted with the behaviour of the Partisans and grateful to the power that had united them with their kin in Albania, the Dibrans had turned their backs on the Allied cause.

But it derived also from the perpetual insecurity of life in the mountains, especially on the frontiers; there were very few families whose houses had not been burnt at least once this century by Turks, Serbs, Greeks, Austrians, Germans, Italians, or fellow Albanians.

must have shocked the Germans’ own allies, for even in their blood-feuds the Albanians would respect the lives of women and children.

he looked very frail, sitting in a corner swathed in bandages, but his wounds were healing well under the usual local treatment, which was to plug the bullet-holes with goat’s cheese.

My principal task was to explore the chances of forming a resistance movement among Albanians in Kossovo. When I sounded him on the subject Hasan Beg warned me, as I had feared he would, that the majority of Kossovars preferred a German occupation to a Serb; the Axis Powers had at least united them with their fellow Albanians, whereas an Allied victory would, they feared, return them to Jugoslav rule. Therefore, although most believed that the Germans would eventually be beaten, few would risk their lives to help in the process without some combined declaration by the Allied governments, guaranteeing the Kossovars the right to decide their own future by plebiscite.

when I was awakened by the sound of three rifle shots in quick succession; grabbing their weapons Zenel and the others ran outside, to return in a few minutes with the comforting assurance that it was only a tribesman settling accounts with his blood-enemy.

‘Old man, it looks as though you’ve walked out of one spot of bother straight into another. There’s a blow-up expected here any day between the Partisans and the local chiefs.’

I did not mention the matter in front of Salimani because he had a feud with the Kryezius, dating from the 1920s when the eldest Kryeziu, Cena Beg, had invaded Krasniqi with a force of gendarmerie to hunt down his outlawed rival, Bairam Curi. I heard more of this tale later.

I ordered them to return to Deg at once, adding that the Kosmet could do what they liked about it. What they did, I soon discovered, was to send word to the Germans that I was in Gjakovë.

Soon we were prowling through the twisting, cobbled streets of the town like small boys playing Red Indians.

In the calm yet menacing grandeur of that mighty massif looming through the twilight I saw embodied all the splendour and savagery of the Balkans; all the harsh nobility and fierce endurance of the land shone in the opalescent beauty of those ice-bound, snow-wrapped cliffs.

was painfully reminded of the local name for these mountains—Prokletijë, or Accursed.

‘We have nothing against you English,’ he added. ‘Only we don’t want the Communists here; and so we collaborate with

those whom they considered to be our friends. In the eyes of the new rulers of Albania collaboration with the British was a far greater crime than collaboration with the Germans.

Of the Partisan leaders with whom I worked some have survived to enjoy power and privilege: others have been devoured by the monster they helped. to rear.

Albania, now the most abject of the Russian Satellites, was a totally unnecessary sacrifice to Soviet imperialism. It was British initiative, British arms and money that nurtured Albanian resistance in 1943; just as it was British policy in 1944 that surrendered to a hostile power our influence, our honour, and our friends.

but it was not the disappointment or the boredom that irritated us—not even the needling of the Partisans—so much as the knowledge that we were sitting idle in a backwater while great things were happening in the war outside. I thank heaven that I was never so unfortunate as to become a prisoner of war.

These supplies came from the Americans, but the Political Commissar used all his ingenuity to persuade his men and the peasants that they came from Russia. He went to the trouble of explaining that the initials, U.S. which were clearly stamped on the packages stood for ‘Unione Sovietica’; had not the planes been Italian? Then of course the labelling would be in Italian.

‘At least refrain from treachery to your officers in the field. Such conduct is unworthy of prostitutes let alone S.O.E. Staff Officers.’ He very rightly rejected my amendment, which would have read: ‘Such conduct is unworthy of prostitutes or even S.O.E. Staff Officers.’

Quayle had just come out of Albania from the Valona area, where his life had been an uninterrupted nightmare in which the Germans had played only the smallest part.

I suppose that eight months in the Balkans can be lethal to anyone’s sense of proportion.

He proposed to send me to Hungary to work with a non-Communist resistance group near Gyöngyös, north-east of Budapest. I should have to drop in the Tatra mountains in Slovakia, where the Slovak army was in revolt against the Germans, and cross the frontier to Hungary. It sounded an interesting assignment in a part of Europe that I had always wanted to visit.

In the years since the disruption of that curious manage a trois, the Anglo-American honeymoon with Russia, the various instances of Soviet treachery have faded from our memory, dulled either by the passage of time or by the frequency of repetition. The story of the Warsaw rising, however, provides a particularly odious example. In July the Red Army summer offensive across Poland was halted on the Vistula by the German Army Group Centre under Field-Marshal Model; on 1st August Russian forces under Marshal Rokossovsky—himself a Pole—were only five miles east of the capital. At this critical moment the Polish Home Army rose in revolt, joined by the entire civilian population of Warsaw.2 It may be that the rising was premature and that supply difficulties and heavy German reinforcements held up the Russians; perhaps the Poles were unduly sanguine if they forgot for the moment that it was the stab in the back from the Red Army in 1939 that brought about the final collapse of their resistance to the Germans, or if they expected Stalin to forget the great Polish victory on the Vistula in 1920 which drove the Red Army from their country. Nothing, however, can excuse the Russian failure to lift a finger in support of Bór-Komorowski; most infamous of all, the allied aircraft flying from Britain and Italy to drop supplies to the beleaguered Poles were refused permission to use the Russian airfields near the city. Knowing that the Armja Krajowa was opposed to Communism in Poland, Stalin was delighted to watch its destruction at the hands of the Germans; in the words of Dr. Isaac Deutscher, usually a sympathetic biographer, ‘he was moved by that unscrupulous rancour and insensible spite of which he had given so much proof during the great purges.’3 After a few weeks of lonely and heroic resistance, during which the Germans systematically reduced Warsaw to rubble, the remnant of the Polish garrison surrendered.

We were also handed, in an atmosphere of grim and silent sympathy, a small supply of ‘L tablets’, each containing enough cyanide to kill a man in half an hour if swallowed, in a few seconds if chewed; the idea was that we might find ourselves in circumstances where suicide would be preferable to capture. Fortunately or unfortunately we somehow mixed them up with our aspirin tablets and so decided to destroy our store of both.

We lived in a trullo, one of the beehive-shaped dwellings that are typical of the Apulian hill country. These quaint and cosy buildings, warm in winter and cool in summer, are said to date from pre-medieval times when taxation was levied on every house with a roof; their ingenious construction requires no mortar, the bricks supporting one another from foundations to ceiling, so that the roof could be quickly removed on the approach of the tax collector and as quickly replaced after his departure. From the terrace of our trullo on the hillside we looked eastward over silver-green olive groves to the lead-coloured waters of the Adriatic.

At first I thought my parachute must have been late in opening; but it turned out that the pilot, either through an error of judgment or in the excitement of finding himself so close to his native land, had dropped us all from a little over two hundred feet. If any of our parachutes had failed to open immediately there would have been a fatal accident.

It is well known, although it can bear repetition, that Poland alone among the countries occupied by Germany produced no Quisling.

As far as I know we were the first and only British officers to be dropped into the country.

Most savage of all were the German auxiliary troops belonging to the army of the renegade Russian General Vlasov. Vlasov was a Cossack who was captured at the beginning of the German offensive against Russia in 1941 when, according to some figures, eight hundred thousand Russian soldiers were taken prisoner. From these Vlasov recruited an army of Cossack, Ukrainian, Turkoman, Mongol, and other Asiatic troops, which the Germans employed chiefly on garrison and security duties in occupied countries. Knowing that they would receive no quarter if taken, these men fought to the last; such was their barbarity towards the civilian population that they were feared and detested throughout occupied Europe. In this part of Poland there were Ukrainian and Turkoman divisions on the river Pilica and Cossack patrols everywhere. The A.K. shot any of Vlasov’s men whom they captured, as they also shot all S.S. men; prisoners from the Wehrmacht were usually deprived of their arms and uniforms and then released.

We commented on the lack of interest that all of them, old and young, showed in the personalities of the exiled Polish Government in London—an indifference which we found everywhere in Poland. Mikolajczyk alone seemed to have a considerable following. It has often been remarked that governments in exile tend to lose touch with the people they claim to represent; they tend also to lose their respect.

with astonished admiration I saw that a detachment of our escort had emplaced itself behind a low bank and was firing on the tanks and the advancing infantry: some twenty-five Poles with rifles and one light machine-gun were taking on four tanks and at least a hundred well-armed Germans.

If there is any more disagreeable experience in warfare than that of running away under fire I hope I never meet it. There is none of the hot excitement of attack, but much more of the danger;

At that time, of course, the whole problem seemed academic and unreal; none of us could foretell the hideous future, none of us remembered Stalin’s pledge to Hitler in 1939 that Poland should never rise again; least of all could we suppose that those apostles of freedom, Britain and the United States, would underwrite by treaty such an odious conspiracy.

During the three days of our stay we became infested with the most prolific and ferocious crop of lice that I at least have ever encountered. For the Spanish, Albanian, and Montenegrin louse I had learnt to acquire a certain tolerance, even affection; but these creatures bit with an increasing and fanatical fury that excluded all hope of sleep and comfort.

As the evening progressed, the pace of the party quickened to a macabre and frenzied gaiety whose implications could no longer be concealed. However much these people hated the Germans—and there was not a man or woman in the room who had not lost at least one close relative fighting against them—they literally dreaded the Russians. Tonight they were saying good-bye to the world they had always known. The German occupation had brought unbelievable hardship and tragedy to their country and their class: Russian rule, they foresaw, meant extinction for both.

the Red Army’s method of living off the country during an advance was as devastating as their ‘scorched earth’ policy in retreat.

Such was the routine of our prison life. The N.K.V.D. had taken over the building from the Gestapo only two days earlier—with all fittings.