Prosperous states (as well as those that are no longer prosperous but still think that they are) have an inherent tendency to overextend and overspend, resulting in an insidious buildup of debt that becomes ever more difficult to repay. These states then begin printing money to keep paying the bills, gradually destroying the value of their currency in the process. This tendency is a natural law of misgovernment, and although it may be curbed by individual leaders, over time it always prevails. The question isn’t whether or not a currency will be devalued or die, but how soon it will happen.

There is a belief in sailors’ lore that waves come in sets of nine, with the ninth being the biggest and deadliest. This is a bit how capital and debt cycles work. Dalio explains that the short-term boom and bust cycles we experience every few years are themselves a part of a larger capital and debt cycle, which lasts (very roughly) 75 years. Unlike the waves in sailors’ lore, however, what grows with every short-term cycle is not its magnitude but the country’s debt burden. The ship’s hull gets weaker and weaker with every wave, and, when another one inevitably arrives, it is unable to withstand the crash. The collapse always comes as a surprise because it happens once in a lifetime, so by the time it takes place, the last one has already been forgotten.

The timing of the ninth wave matters. The focus of Dalio’s book is a study of what he calls the “Big Cycle” that covers the rise and fall of every empire. This cycle interacts with and is influenced by three other cycles. One is the capital and debt cycle mentioned above. The other two are internal and external order and disorder cycles. These reflect the political situation within a country, and the political situation in the world at large. As the names suggest, these cycles revolve around states of order, unity and peace, and chaos, discord and war. The cycles follow their own timelines, but sometimes they align, and when they do, “the tectonic plates of history shift.” Depending on the stage in the cycles, this either results in a period of tremendous prosperity, or it results in collapse, revolution and a new world order.

As the world’s leading empire, the United States enjoys the “exorbitant privilege” of owning the world’s main reserve currency, the US dollar, which other countries use for international trade and as a store of value. Being the owner of a reserve currency is nice, but being the owner of a fiat reserve currency is a bit like having your own magic money tree. Unlike hard money (e.g. metal coins), or banknotes that are backed by hard money, the supply of fiat money can be increased indefinitely.1 You can print it. And because you can print it, you can print your debts away.2 Normally this wouldn’t work because it would cause hyperinflation (e.g. the Weimar Republic hyperinflation of 1921–1923, which I wrote about previously). The case of the United States differs in that, being the world’s main reserve currency and instrument of trade, countries can’t just dump the dollar tomorrow and go elsewhere. With no good alternative, they are forced to absorb the loss of value caused by the US printing machine. But they won’t keep absorbing it forever.

There are only four ways of reducing debt: spend less, raise taxes, print money, or just don’t pay it (i.e. restructure debt or default on it). The last option is saved for last, because once it’s used, no one will lend you money. The first two are very costly politically. No politician wants to be the one to cut government services or raise taxes. The cost to the public from printing money is the same as raising taxes, but, because it happens through inflation, the cause and effect relationship is obscured—i.e. it will be the businesses who will raise prices, and not the government who will raise taxes. Consequently, if the option to print money is available, governments will almost always take it.

Printing money doesn’t necessarily depreciate the currency. If an economy produces more value in tangible goods than the amount of money printed, then the currency will keep its worth, or even appreciate. Conversely, if the economy is unproductive, the added money supply will dilute the value of the currency. This is the crux of the issue. Once you print the money, you can spend it in two ways. You can spend it on things that increase productivity (e.g. infrastructure and education), or on things that don’t (e.g. welfare). The former increases a country’s output and strengthens its currency. The latter depreciates the currency, which simultaneously makes it a bad store of value, because the currency is now worth less, and discourages lenders, because the value they get in return shrinks. The point isn’t that you shouldn’t spend money on the latter, only that this cannot be done using unearned money without depreciating your currency.

On the other hand, money spent on things like infrastructure and education, even if it’s been printed, turns into real assets that will continue to generate returns, no matter what happens to the currency. The Singapore miracle, for example, was ignited by heavy investment in industrial infrastructure (i.e. whole industrial parks were built for companies to just move in). This attracted a flurry of overseas businesses to set up their production there, long before they even considered going to places like China. Moreover, Lee Kuan Yew was explicit about keeping the money supply in check. “I had decided in 1965, soon after independence, that Singapore should not have a central bank that could issue currency and create money. We were determined not to allow our currency to lose its value,” writes Lee Kuan Yew in From Third World to First. The Monetary Authority of Singapore would “have all the powers of a central bank except the authority to issue currency notes.” Today, on a per capita basis, Singapore is wealthier than the United States.

The problem, however, is that the policies that promote long term goals are not going to be very popular when they require short term sacrifices. “Reversing a decline is very difficult because it requires undoing so many things that have already been done,” writes Dalio. “For example, if one’s spending is greater than one’s earnings and one’s liabilities are greater than one’s assets, those circumstances can only be reversed by working harder or consuming less.” Once people are used to a certain standard of living, they’ll expect it to continue, even if the economy cannot sustain it, compelling the government to keep spending in order to maintain the illusion of prosperity that no longer exists. But the illusion can only be maintained for so long. Eventually, the “Unveracity is worn out,” as one author put it, and you are left desolate.3

The idea that the worth of a work of art depends on who created it may sound unreasonable or snobbish, but in this case it actually makes perfect sense, though maybe not in the way you might think. To understand Inman’s reaction to AI art it’s important first to define clearly what art actually is. This will help explain what, if anything, separates AI art from human art. The clearest definition I’ve come across is by Leo Tolstoy, who says that art is a human activity in which the artist, by means of words, pictures or sounds, transmits the feelings he or she has experienced to others, with the aim of uniting them in the same feelings.2

Now, you may disagree with Tolstoy’s definition, but it does point at a certain activity that can be clearly recognized as art, or at least a significant subset of it. This, I think, is precisely the activity that Inman is referring to when he speaks of art, and Tolstoy’s definition explains not only what makes AI art different from human art, but also why Inman finds it so empty.

To transmit a feeling, you must first be able to experience it. Assuming generative AI models aren’t sentient, the feeling that is transmitted cannot be that of the AI. If a feeling is being transmitted, then it is either that of the person writing the prompt, or that of the original artists whose work was used to train the model.

The former cannot be true because the person writing the prompt would have to fully express the feeling to the AI model before it could create a work to transmit it, but if the feeling could be fully expressed in a prompt then there would be no need to generate the art—the prompt alone would be enough, and would itself be art. Tolstoy actually mentions this in relation to summaries of works of art by noting that they can never adequately express the feelings they are talking about because those feelings cannot be expressed by anything less than full work. Art cannot be compressed.

This leaves us with the latter: the feelings of the artists the AI model was trained on. The AI model’s weights clearly reflect the choices of human artists, and it uses those choices when it generates its images. Can we go so far as to say that an AI model transmits human feelings? Because the diffusion process used by these models blurs the training data, what is being reproduced is that which is shared across a multitude of images: the superficial style and technique of the art, its “vibe” if you will, rather than its content. If a feeling is being transmitted, it is limited to this surface level style. The content, on the other hand, is dictated by the prompt, which, as we have seen above, is constrained by its brevity. But even the style does not really transmit human feelings directly, because while the output is guided by human decisions, it is not the work of any one artist. AI art erases human authorship.

A loose comparison can be made here to the advent of mechanical mass production in the 19th century, which was much criticized by prominent designers like William Morris for its effects on both craftsmen and their work. Craftsmen, who up to that point decorated their goods freely with their hands, were turned into the thoughtless cogs of the mechanized assembly line. Meanwhile, ornamental forms, which were difficult and time consuming to produce by hand, became cheap and easy when they could be cast or stamped by the new machines, and many designers abused this opportunity by plastering decorations all over their work. Mechanical mass production thus simultaneously took away the most creative and fulfilling part of craftsmen’s work and drove design towards an excess of ornament because it could now be cheaply made. Design movements of the early 20th century in turn revolted against this excess by stripping away all ornament from the surface of their work to leave only the simple, geometric forms beneath.3 What modern designers found objectionable wasn’t the ornament as such, but its thoughtlessness and excess—a consequence of new production methods. Even crude ornament, carved by hand, is valuable as an expression of the human spirit, but shoddy ornament that is mass produced is worthless.4

The problem with AI art isn’t that it’s bad, but that it’s authorless. It may evoke a feeling, but it doesn’t transmit a feeling, because there is nobody on the other end.5 When Inman discovers that an artwork was created by AI, he feels “deflated.” Even though moments ago he felt the emotions evoked by the illustration itself, the knowledge that a work is authorless strips from it the quality of human connection, the quality of being united with another human being in the feelings they’ve expressed. And it is this connection that is, ultimately, the whole point of art.6

America’s “biographer-in-chief,” Robert Caro, goes so far as to avoid computers, not because of AI, but because computers remove the friction that makes time for thought. He writes in longhand, before typing up his drafts on a typewriter. When he was young, his professor at Princeton told him that while his writing was good, he wasn’t going to achieve his potential unless he stopped “thinking with [his] fingers.” As Caro explains, the problem was that writing was just too easy for him:

No real thought, just writing—because writing was so easy. Certainly never thinking anything all the way through. And writing for a daily newspaper had been so easy, too. When I decided to write a book, and, beginning to realize the complexity of the subject, realized that a lot of thinking would be required—thinking things all the way through, in fact, or as much through as I was capable of—I determined to do something to slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through. That is why I resolved to write my first drafts in longhand, slowest of the various means of committing thoughts to paper, before I started doing later drafts on the typewriter; that is why, even now that typewriters have been replaced by computers, I still stick to my Smith-Corona Electra 210.1

Something similar applies to writing that aims to communicate a feeling. Unlike the writing that grapples with an idea, here you are grappling with an emotion, trying to find the words to transmit a spiritual state. Where the former is difficult when you don’t fully understand an idea, the latter is difficult when the emotion you’re trying to express isn’t sincere. This is where AI assistance is even more insidious, because it removes even the discomfort of having to lie. When, for example, some company’s PR manager writes a letter of apology to their customers for a mistake the company made, they no longer have to pretend to care. The large language model will do it for them.

The difficulty of writing is a bit like the cryptographic proof of work. The effort expended on the work demonstrates that some amount of intellectual or emotional labor was invested in the words. AI assistance diminishes that proof, if not altogether erasing it. This is why people have such an aversion to words they suspect were written with the help of AI. It’s a sign that the writer either doesn’t care enough about what they’re publishing to invest the time and effort to think it through or, even worse, that they are insincere.

The sorites paradox goes as follows: a grain of sand is not a heap, and adding just one more grain to it won’t turn it into one. But if, one by one, we add thousands of grains of sand, we will eventually get a heap of sand. So if adding one grain of sand doesn’t turn something that isn’t a heap into a heap, at which point do we get a heap?

In The Master and His Emissary, Iain McGilchrist puts forward the idea that the above paradox—as well as others like it—are the result of the brain’s left hemisphere’s particular way of viewing the world.1 One thing it does is divide everything in the world into parts, each of which is, in turn, composed of other parts. Another thing it does is set clear boundaries between things: something is either this or that, but not both. It tells things apart. Combined, the idea of the heap thus means something that is composed of individual grains of sand, and it must either be a heap, or not a heap. Hence the paradox—a product of a particular mode of seeing the world rather than an inherent problem of logic.

In contrast, the right hemisphere doesn’t divide things. Whereas “the left hemisphere tends to deal more with pieces of information in isolation,” writes McGilchrist, the right hemisphere deals “with the entity as a whole.” Take the famous example of the Gestalt effect below (Figure 1). At first, the image looks like some splattered blobs of black paint. But the moment the eye (or rather, the brain) connects a few of the spots, a pattern begins to rapidly reveal itself, and an image of a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground instantly comes together. The right hemisphere integrates a jumble of black spots into something meaningful. This cannot be done by examining each spot individually—the whole must be observed at once.

The reason why the brain is divided into two hemispheres is not to have a spare extra half should something happen to one of them, but to have multiple ways of viewing the world. Imagine an eagle gliding high up in the sky. Its eye is taking in everything at once as it observes the ground below. This is the domain of the right hemisphere, which watches the world as a whole. When the eagle spots its prey, however, it will focus all its attention on it, and will maintain this attention as it swoops down to catch it. This is the function of the left hemisphere, which allows the brain to separate individual objects from the world so that it can recognize them, focus on them and act on them. Both types of attention, one open and broad, the other narrow and precise, work together to expand our range of perception.

Attention, however, “is not just another ‘function’ alongside other cognitive functions,” writes McGilchrist. “The kind of attention we bring to bear on the world changes the nature of the world we attend to.” The differences in the two hemispheres give rise to two different worlds, two “fundamentally opposed realities.” Whereas the right hemisphere gives rise to “the live, complex, embodied world of individual, always unique beings, forever in flux, a net of interdependencies, forming and reforming wholes, a world with which we are deeply connected,” the left hemisphere is a “‘re-presented’ version of it, containing now static, separable, bounded, but essentially fragmented entities, grouped into classes, on which predictions can be based.” “These are not different ways of thinking about the world,” writes McGilchrist, “they are different ways of being in the world.”

McGilchrist’s grand theory is that the history of Western culture has been shaped by a kind of power struggle between the two hemispheres, that is, by one hemisphere asserting its own reality, its own way of “being in the world,” over the other. He suggests that the West has gone back and forth between periods when the two hemispheres were more or less balanced, such as the time of Classical Greece and the Renaissance, and when the left hemisphere was more dominant than the right, such as the time of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. There are no clear right-hemisphere dominant periods because the left tends to assert itself more than the right. One reason for this is that information flow from the left to the right hemisphere is slower than the other way round. Whereas the right hemisphere always shares information with the left, the left sometimes chooses to exclude the right. But an even bigger reason for left-hemisphere dominance is the special role it plays in the development of human civilization.2

The left hemisphere’s ability to separate things from the world allows it to turn them into mental constructs, into ideas. By abstracting things from the world, the left hemisphere can reason about them as individual entities. It can think about them, theorize about them and make conclusions about them. This is the foundation of language and logic, two of the most important pillars of civilization. The right hemisphere, by contrast, cannot even speak. This alone makes the left hemisphere feel a vast sense of superiority over the right. The right hemisphere has consequently been demoted in importance, dismissed as the “silent” or “minor” hemisphere (the left, naturally, becoming the “dominant” hemisphere) and reduced in popular understanding to the domain of emotions and art (which isn’t even half right, as emotions like anger are associated with the left hemisphere).

McGilchrist spends half the book contrasting the influences of the two hemispheres on Western culture, but here is one striking example that is to do with the way churches were arranged before and after the Reformation. They added pews. Before the Reformation, the congregation would stand together in one big mass—a living, flowing crowd of people. After the Reformation, the congregation was made to sit still in neat rows of benches—it was immobilized, made to listen to the voice coming from the raised pulpit above. If McGilchrist is right about the influence of the two hemispheres, then what we see here is the left hemisphere ordering the outside world by creating frameworks and boundaries to mold it in its own image. And, by externalizing itself, by manifesting its thought patterns in the world, the left hemisphere in turn reinforces those patterns in the minds of the people inhabiting that world.

McGilchrist suggests that today the West is dominated by the left hemisphere, and is only moving further leftwards. This imbalance not only costs us our full range of mental perception, it also makes us vulnerable to the left hemisphere’s peculiar pitfalls.

One problem with the left hemisphere is that it makes stuff up. Not only does it make stuff up, it does so rapidly and seemingly without realizing it. Similarly to how the right hemisphere is able to perceive the Gestalt effect between the things it sees, the left hemisphere can combine words to construct convincing logical explanations for things it doesn’t really know about, but which sound plausible (which is, incidentally, curiously similar to how large language models work).

There’s a famous experiment by Gazzaniga and LeDoux involving a split-brain patient. His bridge between the two hemispheres, the corpus callosum, had been cut in an attempt to cure epilepsy (it worked). As it turns out, people can still function with the two hemispheres split. The way our nerves are wired is that our left hand and eye are linked to the right hemisphere, and the right hand and eye to the left—that is, to their opposite side. When we look through the right eye or grab something with the right hand, we are typically relying on the left hemisphere, and vice versa. When the hemispheres are connected, our actions are coordinated—i.e. both hands do what the brain decides as a whole. In a split-brain patient, the unity between the two hemispheres no longer exists, so, for example, whatever the right eye sees is processed only by the left hemisphere.

This allowed the experimenters to project an image to either the patient’s left or right hemisphere independently. They then showed the patient a series of picture cards and asked him to point, with either hand, to a card connected to the image he had just seen (pointing is important because the right hemisphere cannot speak). So, for example, when a snow scene was shown to his right hemisphere, the patient pointed with his left hand to the card with a picture of a shovel. Because his left hemisphere saw nothing, his right hand pointed at a random card. This makes sense. The really curious thing happened when the experimenters showed him two different images at once, one to each hemisphere.

The right hemisphere was again shown a picture of snow, while the left hemisphere was shown a picture of a chicken claw. The patient’s left hand (governed by the right hemisphere) again pointed to the card with a shovel, while the right hand (governed by the left hemisphere) pointed to the card with a chicken. Asked why he chose the shovel, the patient, “without batting an eye,” explained that he saw a chicken, and he pointed to the shovel because “you need that to clean out the chicken shed.” His left hemisphere, which did not see the image of snow, nor chose the shovel, decided to make up a plausible answer on the spot. As McGilchrist puts it, the left hemisphere is like “the sort of person who, when asked for directions, prefers to make something up rather than admit to not knowing.”

Worse still, the left hemisphere “tends towards a slavish following of the internal logic of the situation, even if this is in contravention of everything experience tells us.” As long as a conclusion is logically sound, the left hemisphere is ready to accept it in isolation from everything it knows. In an experiment by Deglin and Kinsbourne, in which one of the hemispheres was temporarily suppressed using electro-convulsive therapy, subjects were asked to judge the following:

1. Major premise: all monkeys climb trees;

2. Minor premise: the porcupine is a monkey;

3. Implied conclusion: the porcupine climbs trees.3

When asked if the conclusion is true, the subject whose right hemisphere was suppressed replied that it is: “the porcupine climbs trees since it is a monkey.” Asked if the porcupine is a monkey, they replied that they don’t know, but they accept it because “that’s what is written on the card.” When the experiment was performed again with same person, but this time with their left hemisphere suppressed instead of the right, the results were reversed. The conclusion is false, said the subject—the porcupine doesn’t climb trees because “it’s not a monkey.” Asked if the conclusion makes sense from the stated premises, the person stood their ground, insisting that “the porcupine is not a monkey!” “For the right hemisphere,” writes McGilchrist, “truth is not mere coherence, but correspondence with something other than itself.”

“As soon as logic as a movement of thought—and not as a necessary control of thinking—is applied to an idea,” writes Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the “idea is transformed into a premise,” from which one can draw conclusions “in the manner of mere argumentation.” This is exactly what is happening in the experiment above. The left hemisphere shifts attention to the logical coherence of the argument—whether or not every part of it is consistent—and away from the original premise upon which it is built—whether or not it reflects something real in the first place. The very nature of truth shifts to logical coherence, which makes it possible to arrive at any conclusion so long as the argument is consistent. As one 20th century tyrant said in one of his speeches, the process of logic is “like a mighty tentacle,” which “seizes you on all sides as in a vise and from whose grip you are powerless to tear yourself away; you must either surrender or make up your mind to utter defeat.”4

“The madman,” wrote G. K. Chesterton, “is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”5 The madman can and will construct a wholly logical explanation for his own delusions, and will believe those delusions all the more because he has made them logical. Rather than using logic as “a necessary control of thinking,” the madman uses logic as a way to rationalize his his deluded perspective on the world, that is, he begins with a false premise and explains everything in relation to that premise. The result is that every argument he uses to support his delusion makes perfect sense, but he cannot see that they all stand on a false foundation because, being so obsessed with the details, he cannot step back and observe how it all fits—or rather, does not fit—into a greater whole.

If McGilchrist is right about hemisphere effects on culture and the shifts in their balance over time, then, besides its impact on science and art, a left-hemisphere dominated period is especially susceptible to ideological capture. The left hemisphere is ready to come up with explanations for things it has already decided to be the case, and to believe those explanations merely because they are logical. In such a world, truth becomes synonymous with logicality, and every argument, however deluded, can be made logical. That’s not to say that logic precedes irrational desire. It is, rather, like the case of Chesterton’s madman: one begins with base desires and then wraps them in logicality to produce an illusion of rationality.

But thinking spans beyond language and logic. As McGilchrist explains, thought can point at something real in the world without precisely defining it. The right hemisphere knows what a heap of sand is without counting the individual grains. Metaphor is the best example of this since the thing it conveys transcends the words used to convey it. If the whole of thought is reduced to language, the whole of thought can be reduced to logicality. To maintain its connection with reality, thought must be rooted in something beyond the words used to express it. It is said that Odin sacrificed one of his eyes to drink from the wellspring of Mímir—a source of wisdom—giving up material vision for the spiritual. In an ironic inversion, our left-brained world seems to be sacrificing one of its eyes not for wisdom, but for the narrow depthlessness of monocular sight.

As all action follows thought, Tolstoy wrote that “it is almost as important to know what not to think about as it is to know what to think about.” In a similar vein, Charlie Munger often recommended using inversion as a problem-solving technique. One of his favorite stories was that of a rustic who said: “I wish I knew where I was going to die, and then I’d never go there.”1 The point of the story is actually quite profound: when working on a problem or project, it may be easier to figure out what will prevent progress than what will aid it. And if you can identify actions that are sure to result in failure, you can avoid doing them.

Stripe Press recently released a beautiful edition of Poor Charlie’s Almanack, which is a collection of Charlie Munger’s wisdom, delivered in his speeches. The book is definitely worth reading (there is a free online version as well).

Munger covers many principles, so I won’t go over them all here. What I’d like to highlight is one idea that Munger returns to a few times, which is about how one can improve a civilization, or rather—since Munger really likes using inversion—how one can ruin a civilization:

Let’s say you have a desire to do public service. As a natural part of your planning, you think in reverse and ask, “What can I do to ruin our civilization?” That’s easy. If what you want to do is to ruin your civilization, just go to the legislature and pass laws that create systems wherein people can easily cheat. It will work perfectly.

Munger gives the example of a friend of his in the truck trailer market (controlling about 8% of the market at the time), who had to close his factories in California and Texas because of the crippling worker compensation costs. As Munger explains, gaming the system “has been raised to an art form,” which resulted in compensation costs taking up “double-digit percentages of payroll.” The business simply became unprofitable. His friend moved the factory to Utah, and the cost fell to 2% of payroll. “Are the Latinos who were peopling his plant in Texas intrinsically dishonest or bad compared to the Mormons?” asks Munger. “No. It’s just that the incentive structure that so rewards all this fraud is put in place by … ignorant legislatures [that] don’t take into account the second-order effects and the third-order effects in lying and cheating.”

The opposite of this is a system that prevents cheating. One of Munger’s favorite examples is the cash register. John Henry Patterson had a little store, which was unprofitable because his employees were constantly stealing from him. One day someone sold him a simple cash register. The stealing problem was solved at once and the store became profitable. Patterson was so impressed with the new tool that he closed his store and went into the cash register business, founding the National Cash Register company. “So great was the contribution of Patterson’s cash register to civilization, and so effectively did he improve the cash register and spread its use,” says Munger, “that in the end, he probably deserved the epitaph chosen for the Roman poet Horace: ‘I did not completely die.’”

The Stoic sage Epictetus has this story about how one time someone stole an iron lamp from his household shrine. The following day he decided to replace it with a cheaper one made of clay so as to not even encourage theft. “Look at it this way,” says Epictetus, “You have beautiful clothes and your neighbor does not. You have a window and want to give them an airing. The neighbor does not know what man’s good consists in, but imagines it means having beautiful clothes—the opinion you happen to share. It’s a foregone conclusion that he’s going to try and steal them … So don’t provoke them—don’t air your clothes at the window!”2

When ignorant legislatures pass laws and create state programs that are easy to game, they are airing the metaphorical clothes at the window—they are provoking unscrupulous people to act on their base instincts instead of blocking them, which is what the cash register does. The direct effects of these laws or programs may be beneficial, but without looking at the second and third-order effects, the total impact on your civilization cannot be judged. What’s worse, a business can move its factory from California to Utah, or abroad, but a state whose programs are being misused will continue to accumulate debts, taking on more loans and raising taxes to keep itself going.

Benjamín Labatut’s The MANIAC is a fictionalized biography of John von Neumann, the 20th century polymath considered by some to be the smartest man that ever lived. But the book’s deeper theme is that of the limits of human reason—how the human mind tried, and failed, to compress the workings of the universe into a system of logic, but still succeeded in harnessing its power, or rather, succeeded in unleashing its power, for it has begun a process that is beyond its control.1

Early in the book Labatut retells the story of the ancient Greek sage Hippasus. He was a follower of the Pythagorean school, one of whose doctrines was to keep hidden a terrible secret about the universe—a secret of such importance that to reveal it would be a to commit a crime punishable by death. Hippasus defied this commandment—he revealed the existence of the irrational—and for this he was drowned.2 “The harmony of nature was to be preserved above all things,” writes Labatut. “To acknowledge even the possibility of the irrational, to recognize disharmony, would place the fabric of existence at risk, since not just our reality, but every single aspect of the universe—whether physical, mental, or ethereal—depended on the unseen threads that bind all things together.”

At the dawn of the 20th century, Hippasus’ successors appeared to take their revenge, shattering our notions of comprehensible order. For two centuries, Newton’s laws of motion allowed us to calculate the movements and positions of the objects around by working out the effects of forces acting upon those objects. But it was discovered that when we look at objects that are extremely tiny, when we look at the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles, the Newtonian model breaks down. Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle showed that at quantum levels, we cannot accurately measure both the position and the momentum of a particle—the more we know about the one, the less we know about the other. Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation accepted this uncertainty as a fundamental attribute of the universe, and dealt with it by adopting a probabilistic model. The quantum world can remain a black box, but we can still manipulate it by predicting how it behaves. Einstein, who wanted to peer inside the black box, tried to push back against the idea of inherent uncertainty, remarking famously that “God does not play dice,” but the tide had already turned.

A blow that was perhaps even more terrible came from a young Austrian by the name of Kurt Gödel. For a long time mathematicians, including von Neumann, harbored the dream of encapsulating the whole of mathematics in a formal system of logic. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, put an end to that by proving the impossibility of building a system of logic that is both consistent and complete. A system free of contradictions would be incomplete because it would necessarily contain truths that it cannot prove, whereas a system that is complete would be even worse as it would contain contradictions. Like the uncertainty of quantum measurements, we could have one or the other, but not both. Human reason had made an unhappy discovery: it had uncovered its own limits.

Gödel’s discovery robbed von Neumann of what was about to become his life’s work. Deprived of a life purpose, he began searching for a new outlet for his extraordinary genius. And he found it by moving from theory to practice, from abstract to real life problems. “From Gödel onward,” says Labatut’s Eugene Wigner, “I was always afraid of him, because once he abandoned his juvenile faith in mathematics he became more practical and effective than before, but also more dangerous. He was, in a very real sense, set free.”3 Noting the change, Einstein said that von Neumann was turning into “a mathematical weapon.” And von Neumann was not alone. Many of the world’s brightest scientists would follow him, becoming more practical—and more dangerous. A little over a decade after Gödel’s paper, they would create the atomic bomb. “A dirty little secret that almost all of us share, but that hardly anyone speaks aloud,” says Labatut’s Wigner, “is that what drew us in, what made us fashion those weapons, was not the desire for power or wealth, fame, or glory, but the sheer thrill of the science involved. It was too much to resist.”4

Although von Neumann wasn’t part of the Manhattan Project, he visited as a consultant, helping design the explosive lenses in the implosion mechanism. But what von Neumann was really interested in was something even more powerful than the atomic bomb. When von Neumann was very young, his father, a successful banker, brought home a mechanical loom made by one of his clients to show to his kids.5 What was special about this particular loom was that it could be programmed to produce any textile using a series of cards with holes punched through them—a stream of binary instructions on how to make any pattern. Von Neumann was at once gripped by the machine, intuitively feeling immense potential in the technology. In a few decades, the same punched cards would be used to program computers.

Von Neumann did not invent these early machines, nor the punched card mechanism they took from the loom, but the architecture he helped develop became the foundation for how modern computers are built. In early 1950’s, von Neumann worked with the US Army on a powerful machine dubbed “the MANIAC” (Mathematical Analyzer Numerical Integrator and Automatic Computer).6 Its first purpose was to crunch numbers for the thermonuclear process. It ran non-stop for two months, processing over a million punched cards to give a single word answer, either a “YES” or a “NO.” It said “YES.” The following year, Ivy Mike, a bomb that was five hundred times more powerful than the ones dropped on Japan, exploded on an island in the South Pacific. The thermonuclear reaction worked.

But the way that the MANIAC, and indeed all computers, have been designed to work meant that they were, in a sense, limited by human reason. Limited not by raw processing power, in which they excelled, but rather by the code that governed that processing—code that was written by humans, and thus constrained by what a human mind could grasp. Like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, human code that tries to capture a problem within a system of logic will never be able to deal completely with every aspect of a complex system. A fully self-driving car, for example, cannot be built on a series of conditional instructions alone, simply because there are too many variables for it to handle, too many things that can go wrong. To handle a complex system, the machine must have a way of dealing with chaos, a way of intuiting a solution.

While he was working on the thermonuclear bomb, Stanisław Ulam came up with a clever way of dealing with problems for which precise calculations are unfeasible. Named after the casino in Monaco, the Monte Carlo method exploits the raw computational power of the machine to run a large number of simulations based on randomized inputs. The results are then analyzed statistically to find the most probable outcome. “Monte Carlo is a sort of weaponized randomness,” says Labatut’s Feynman, “a method to sift through overwhelming amounts of data in search of meaning, a way to make predictions and deal with uncertainty by modeling the many possible futures of complex situations and choose between the roads that branch out from ambiguous and unpredictable events. It’s unbelievably powerful and sort of humbling, or humiliating really, because it shows the limits of traditional calculation, of our rational and logical step-by-step thinking.”

Von Neumann worked with Ulam on Monte Carlo, but perhaps a more interesting collaboration was with a Norwegian-Italian mathematician by the name of Nils Aall Barricelli, whom he had given the use of the MANIAC for his project. Barricelli wanted to simulate the evolution of living organisms inside an artificial universe. These organisms were composed of strings of numbers, which, following the rules of the simulation, could mutate, die and procreate. Some creatures become predators. Others turned into parasites. The project didn’t get very far, and ended when von Neumann had some unknown disagreement with Barricelli and revoked his use of the MANIAC. Although Barricelli’s work is now largely forgotten, it was the first attempt at creating something resembling digital life.

Von Neumann died in 1957, his life cut short by a cancer suspected to have been caused by radiation exposure at Los Alamos. Decades later, the ideas he and his colleagues worked on would inspire a new generation of inventors to create a novel form of computation, a novel form of intelligence. It was not artificial organisms that would live, die and evolve, but connections between artificial neurons, and they would learn not by reasoning about the world, but by the sheer brute force of running enormous amounts of randomized simulations. The complicated conditional logic of human code is replaced by an invisible web of neural connections, capable of intuiting answers in a chaos of information. The breakthrough in artificial intelligence took place not when we kept trying to make the machine intelligent, but when we made it practical. And with that, the computational power of the machine has been untethered from the limits of human reason—it was, “in a very real sense, set free.”

Navigare necesse est, vivere non est necesse.
[To sail is necessary; to live is not.]
—Pompey Magnus (quoted by Plutarch)

What are we to make of the comically tragic statements made by the world’s leading AI entrepreneurs that, yes, while there’s a chance their work may result in human extinction (according to themselves1), they’re still going to go through with it, because if they don’t, then someone else surely will—that someone else being of a clearly dubious moral character and so unsuited for the task—though, of course, they’re all still going to do it regardless, and never mind the fact that this has nothing to do with the inherent risks of the work…?

The answer, according to one early 20th century German philosopher, is that they simply cannot stop.

In his 1931 book called Man and Technics (a kind of supplement to his more famous work, The Decline of the West) Oswald Spengler observes that Western inventors embody what he calls the Faustian spirit, which is defined by a deep need to solve big technical problems. Inventors and entrepreneurs driven by this spirit cannot stop, or even slow down, because what motivates them is not the consequences of their technical solutions (as they may often claim), but the thrill of discovering them. Even if a technology has foreseeably disastrous effects on society, the Faustian inventor, like an explorer with an insatiable hunger to see what lies just beyond the hill, feels compelled to carry out the work.2

The tactics of living

Spengler’s book revolves around the idea of “technics,” which he defines as the tactics of living. Unlike technology, the concept of technics is much broader. “Technics is not to be understood in terms of tools,” writes Spengler. “What matters is not how one fashions things, but the process of using them; not the weapon, but the battle.”3 In fact, Spengler’s technics aren’t limited to humans—they are ancient and extend into the life of all animals. Even without any tools, an animal uses tactics to catch its prey, or evade its predators. A lion outwitting a gazelle, for example. “Methods themselves are weapons.”

But animal technics are purely instinctive. What separates humans from animals is our ability to consciously create and develop technics. “Technics in man’s life is conscious, arbitrary, alterable, personal, inventive. It is learned and improved,” writes Spengler. “Man has become the creator of his tactics of living.”

Closely related to technics is Spengler’s categorization of human thought, which he splits into two kinds: the “thought of the hand” and the “thought of the eye.” The first of these is linked to the creation of tools, which is tied inseparably to the hand. “The unarmed hand is in itself useless,” writes Spengler. “It requires a weapon to become a weapon itself. As the implements took form from the shape of the hand, so also the hand from the shape of the tool.”4 The second kind, the “thought of the eye,” comes from the beast of prey’s forward set eyes which can focus on a target, thus giving rise to a world of perspective space and objects in space (in contrast to herbivore’s eyes, which are located on the sides of its head to give it broad, peripheral vision).

“The eye seeks out cause and effect; the hand works on the principle of means and end. The question of whether something is suitable or unsuitable—the criterion of the doer—has nothing to do with that of true and false, the values of the observer. And an aim is a fact, while a connection of cause and effect is a truth.” The two kinds of thought broadly divided human societies into spheres of action: statesmen, generals, merchants; and spheres of thought: priests, scholars, philosophers. More on the significance of this division in a moment.

The evolution of human technics is marked by two milestones: speech and organized enterprise. As Spengler views these as technics—i.e. the tactics of living—he sees their origin in action rather than contemplation. “The original object of speech is the carrying out of an act in accordance with intention, time, place, and means”—e.g. “Do this!,” “Ready?,” “Yes!,” and “Go ahead!” “Speech and enterprise,” writes Spengler, “stand in precisely the same relation to each other as the older pair hand and implement.” In other words, they developed simultaneously, serving the same purpose, and, just as the fabricated tool freed man from the limitations of the human body, organized enterprise freed man from the limitations of what an individual can achieve on his own.

But this evolution of technics came at great cost. The tremendous power gained through organized enterprise can only be attained by sacrificing freedom. The making and the using of the weapon are separated. The planning and the carrying out of the plans are turned into distinct roles. There arises a hierarchy: the few who direct and the many who execute—those who command, and those who obey. And in this bargain, not even the leaders get to keep their freedom. “This verbally managed enterprise involves an immense loss of freedom—the old freedom of the best of prey—for the leader and the led alike,” writes Spengler. “They both become intellectual, spiritual members of a higher unit, body and soul. This we call organization, the gathering of active life into definite forms … With collective doing the decisive step is taken from organic to organized existence.”

Vikings of the mind

Spengler’s analysis divides humankind into several “high cultures,” of which Western European culture—which he calls Faustian—is of especial interest with respect to its relationship to technics. As mentioned above, Spengler separates human thought into two kinds, that of the hand and that of the eye—i.e. action and contemplation. In the case of early Faustian culture, Spengler calls the social groupings that reflect these two kinds of thought the Vikings of the blood and the Vikings of the mind. The former were the warrior conquerors that migrated down from the Far North in the 8th–11th centuries, while the latter were the monks of 13th and 14th centuries that “forced their way deep into the world of technical-physical problems.”

What is particularly interesting about Faustian culture is that its Vikings of the mind, that is, its men of thought, have themselves strayed into the sphere of action. “[I]n the Faustian, and in the Faustian alone, every theory is also from the outset a working hypothesis,” writes Spengler. “A working hypothesis need not be ‘correct,’ it is only required to be practical. It aims, not at the embracing and unveiling the secrets of the world, but at making them serviceable to definite ends.” In the Faustian mind, the distinction between fact and truth disappears. As the Pragmatists would later put it: what’s true is what works.

Unlike, say, the Greeks, whose philosophers were content with the contemplation of abstract ideas—and indeed, who identified divinity with the contemplative eye of the eternal spectator—the Faustian thinker wanted more than to unravel the secrets of the world, he wanted to take part in the spectacle, wanted to “build a world oneself, to be oneself God.” The Faustian spirit desired “not merely to plunder [nature] of her materials, but to enslave and harness her very forces as to multiply his own strength.” And so, as the Vikings of the blood plundered the material world, conquering and looting their enemies, the Vikings of the mind discovered ways to seize and harness the invisible forces of nature. “The conception of booty of the beast of prey is thought out to its logical end. Not this or that bit of the world, as when Prometheus stole fire, but the world itself, complete with its secret of force, is dragged away as spoil to be built into our culture.”

The result of this union of thought and action in Faustian culture gives rise to an explosion of technical innovation—indeed, gives rise to an industrial revolution that changes the course of the world. We see a torrent of inventions, one after the other: the steam engine, mechanical mass production, trains, cars, planes, electricity, computers, robotics, AI…

Spengler, however, was a pessimist. He saw the Faustian journey not as an endless path of progress, but as a process with a beginning and an end. For Spengler, Faustian culture ends with its own self-destruction. This is, in part, due to the unsustainable use of the earth that results in “climatic changes … which imperil the land-economy of whole populations,” in part due to the West’s exporting technologies to developing countries, which, “owing to their low wages, will face us with a deadly competition.” If the West declines, Spengler believes that other cultures won’t stay on the same path of technological development because they do not share the same deep spiritual need to solve technical problems. The Faustian technologies will “one day lie shattered and forgotten—railways and steamships as good as the old Roman roads and the Chinese wall … The history of this technology is fast approaching its inevitable end. It will be eaten up from within, like all great forms of any culture.”

To be sure, one can certainly challenge Spengler’s prediction of the West’s downfall (said take place within the next two centuries, so there’s still plenty of time), or his view that only the Faustian spirit would pursue technics with the same zeal (and indeed his tacit assumption that, even in a globalized world, it won’t spread to other cultures), but, be as it may, Spengler does highlight something very important, which is that the Faustian mindset pursues the development of technics with little regard for their costs and consequences—a tendency that will only become more apparent and dangerous in the years ahead as the pace of technological innovation picks up.

Prisoners of progress

With the advent of the Intelligence Age, the Faustian inventor has achieved his greatest triumph: he has created a machine to solve technical problems for him. Man, who has freed himself from the limitations of his genus through a conscious invention of technics, and the limitations of the individual through organized enterprise, is now detaching technics itself from the limitations of his own mind. The machine, which has hitherto been used to harness nature’s forces for locomotion and mass production, and later to amplify the power of the brain (Steve Jobs’s notion of the computer as a “bicycle for the mind”), is now entering the domain of human thought.

As the industrialist “dragged away as spoil” the forces of nature, the AI entrepreneur, in order to build and grow his new machine, drags away the world of language, the world of thought, as spoil—precisely as spoil, for he seizes a world of intellectual and creative work without permission (the beast of prey needs no one’s permission). Like a colossal trawler, the AI machine casts its vast neural nets across the ocean of information, harvesting and dragging away the treasures of man’s mind. A trawler, moreover, that is forever hungry for “compute”—forever hungry for more power. As it consumes the world of knowledge and culture, it is simultaneously consuming the world’s resources to fuel its perpetual feast.

We are assured that this will result in unimaginable prosperity. But for whom? Mechanical mass production enabled a massive leap in output, but it came at the cost of individual freedom. The craftsmen of the pre-industrial era were moved to the factory floor, on which they became as cogs of a larger machine, “members of a higher unit, body and soul.” Their craft was carved up into a series of dreadfully monotonous tasks, while the profits went to the owners of the machines. The optimistic case for AI is that it will handle tedious and repetitive tasks, letting humans focus on the more creative jobs. But the reason people are doing the tedious tasks in the first place is because they are either limited by their skills or by the jobs market. Letting AI take these jobs might make a company more productive, but it is not at all apparent that it will also create an equivalent number of fulfilling jobs for those who would now find themselves redundant. And this is as much a problem for physical jobs as it is for knowledge work, for, as the new generation of AI robots enters mass production, those jobs will likewise be automated. Human workers will be liberated from the drudgery of menial labor, freed to pursue more fulfilling work. What that work will look like, however, is yet to be revealed.

But no matter, the Faustian inventor won’t be deterred by consequences. “In reality the passion of the inventor has nothing whatever to do with its consequences,” writes Spengler. “It is his personal motivation in life, his personal joy and sorrow. He wants to enjoy his triumph over difficult problems, and the wealth and fame that it brings him, for their own sake.” And in many cases, the “wealth and fame” pales in comparison with the triumph. To see a rocket land itself; to see a robot walk, jump and dance; to hear a computer speak with a human voice—that is the triumph the inventor works for, it is in those moments they feel the incredible sense of achievement, the satisfaction of conquering a problem, of seeing their hard work come to life. This is their life’s purpose, this is what gives their life meaning and joy.

In this lies both the grandeur and the tragedy of Faustian culture. Its spiritual pursuit of technics enabled its conquest of the world, but it also set in motion a race for technological supremacy which is no longer under its control. The power gained by technics drives its development at every scale of humanity: individuals compete with each other for prestige, companies compete with each other for profits, and states compete with each other for survival. Technological innovation is thus a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: if you don’t participate, you get left behind, and as long as one party keeps innovating, the rest must keep up.

We call this race “progress,” which frames it as something both positive and voluntary: humanity’s path of constant improvement and advancement. Moreover, by giving humanity an apparent purpose, the idea takes on a religious quality, which forbids all criticism of itself by making it a moral issue. It isn’t necessary to refute those who dare criticize “progress” when you can simply denounce them as Luddites who want to hold humanity back. The alternative—that the process may not be quite so positive or quite so voluntary—is unthinkable. Having lost control over the process, we fall back to what is wholly in our power: imagining the future. And it is certainly more agreeable to imagine a time of unprecedented prosperity than upheaval and unrest.

Why do societies fall? One answer may lie in the fact that survival is not the only aim driving individuals and societies. If these other aims take precedence, individuals and societies may begin acting in ways contrary to their survival. If they stay long enough on this path, they’ll achieve their own ruin.

In my last post I wrote on James Burnham’s Machiavellians, in particular about how division of power is the only guarantee of individual freedom. In the course of his narrative, Burnham touches on two important ideas related to survival, one at the level of individuals, the other at the level of societies. The first is Gaetano Mosca’s idea of the difference between the struggle for existence versus the struggle for pre-eminence. The second is Vilfredo Pareto’s idea of the utility of a community versus the utility for a community.

1

Mosca writes that “the struggle for existence has been confused with the struggle for pre-eminence.” His point is that besides survival, people compete with each other to rise to the top of the social hierarchy—i.e. to become the ruling class—and that this second struggle is not directly related to the first. To be sure, in situations with scarce resources, the rulers have the benefit of getting the first pick, but, short of a mass famine, this advantage doesn’t directly translate into survival. Indeed, Mosca points out that the opposite might even be true, for, generally speaking, “in civilized societies, far from being gradually eliminated by a process of natural selection so-called, the lower classes are more prolific than the higher, and even in the lower classes every individual in the long run gets a loaf of bread and a mate, though the bread be more or less dark and hard-earned and the mate more or less unattractive or undesirable.”

The winners in the struggle for pre-eminence, i.e. the ruling class, possess certain qualities and characteristics. Besides their capacity for hard work, ambition and ruthless pursuit of power, they have another attribute that makes them “highly esteemed and very influential in the society in which they live.”1 This attribute is their mastery of what Mosca calls a “social force”—which is any human activity that has, in the words of Burnham, “significant social and political influence.” Social forces include things like “war, religion, land, labor, money, education, science,” and technology. The importance of any one social force rises and falls in time, and so those who are masters of it are either elevated or demoted in the hierarchy, depending on what society currently values. One present-day example of this would be tech entrepreneurs, who have joined the elite through the meteoric rise of the power of technology.

Once they gain power, the elites tend to want to stay in power. “Special principles of selection,” writes Burnham, “different in different societies, affect the composition of the elite so that it no longer includes all those persons best fitted for social rule.” In other words, outside factors are not the only things that affect the selection of the elites—once in power, the elites themselves become the gatekeepers of who they allow to join their ranks. And competence is not necessarily at the top of their list of criteria. The obvious example of this is the aristocratic principle: the selection of the ruling class based on heredity. But there can also be ideological gatekeeping—to become the elite in the Soviet Union you had to be a member of the Party.2 Too much hereditary or ideological gatekeeping, and the elite will ossify and become incompetent, leading to decline, mismanagement, tension and even revolution (e.g. the regime of Louis XVI, or Nicholas II).

2

Utilitarians want to build a state that maximizes the happiness of its citizens, but, as Burnham writes, “to be the best, a government must be first of all possible.” In this regard Pareto makes a shrewd distinction between the utility of a community and the utility for a community. “By the utility of a community Pareto refers to what might be called the community’s survival value, its strength and power of resistance as against other communities. By the utility for a community Pareto means its internal welfare, the happiness and satisfaction of its members.” Pareto talks of competition with other communities when talking about the utility of a community, but I think the idea can be broadened to include factors that help a community survive in general. After all, countries don’t need an external enemy to collapse. The Soviet Union, for example, fell suddenly (and to many unexpectedly) under the accumulated weight of its failed economic system.

Burnham writes that “these two utilities … seldom coincide.” Take, for example, preparations for war. Money spent on the military is money not spent on infrastructure and welfare. Such spending does nothing to improve people’s daily lives. In the rare event of an outbreak of war, however, such preparations assume existential significance. Families having large numbers of children is another example. Partners who decide to forgo the costs and challenges of raising a large family get more time for themselves. But if everyone decides to have few or no children, we get an ageing population in which the ever growing welfare burden is pushed onto an ever shrinking number of young people. What we have in either case is a tradeoff between individual short-term interests and long-term societal goals.

Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore is a great example of making short-term sacrifices to achieve long-term prosperity. Besides investing in infrastructure, cleaning up the city and being strict on law and order, Lee Kuan Yew had to put a stop to endless union strikes. Singapore sits on a tiny island with no natural resources, so the only way that it was going to thrive was if multinational corporations chose to open factories there. And that was never going to happen if unions kept going on strike. At the start of the 1960s, shortly after Lee came into office, there were 153 strikes in the span of about a year. Nine years later, in 1969, owing to Lee’s forceful action, there were no strikes. Investments began pouring in. In time, so many companies came to Singapore that they began to compete with each other for staff, lifting salaries as a result. Today, Singapore has a higher per capita GDP than the US.

But a long-term strategy alone isn’t enough. The Soviet Union had a long-term strategy which, besides its many other problems, was economically unsustainable. Its forced collectivization of agriculture ruined the economy, killed millions by the famines it caused, and never proved sustainable.3 Not only do you need to think ahead, you also need to be right.

3

We thus have two factors that influence the health of a society:

1. Selection of the elites. Those who seek power compete with others for pre-eminence, and the mechanism that decides who rises to the top shapes not only the character of the ruling class, but, as a consequence, society as well. A mechanism that allows incompetence to rise or remain at the top, coupled with a mechanism that prevents competent people from rising, leads to mismanagement and growing tension.

2. Short-term individual interests versus long-term societal goals. The direction set by the ruling class decides the future of its society, or even whether it will have a future. Long-term societal goals may reduce the immediate happiness of a community, but they are necessary for the survival of the state, which is a prerequisite for everything else. “If a nation cannot survive,” writes Pareto, “it is rather pointless to argue in the abstract whether or not it is a ‘good society.’”

Plato famously observed that democracy is a stepping-stone to tyranny. His reasoning is not that it allows a wily populist to deceive the masses, but that it has a natural tendency to break down into anarchy, at which point the people begin clamoring for a strong leader to come and save them.4 Nobody wants a tyrant in a prosperous, well-run society. It is only when things break down that the question of leadership becomes paramount. The danger of societal decline isn’t just that a society declines, but that freedom is lost in the process.

Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division.

—Luke 12:51

The problem with modern democracies is that they’re not democracies. The good thing about modern democracies is that they’re not democracies. What most people consider to be democracy’s advantages are, for the most part, imaginary and nonexistent. Meanwhile, its real virtues are ignored.

The premise of James Burnham’s 1943 book, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, is that the idea of modern democracy is a myth, a “political formula” used to justify the rule of a tiny elite over the masses. The myth is useful for maintaining order, but its contents should not be confused for what actually enables a civilization to develop and thrive. The latter has nothing to do with the supposed notions of “self-government” or the “will of the people.” It depends, rather, on individual freedom, which is secured by curbing abuses of power by the ruling class. And these abuses of power can only be restrained through the division of the ruling class into opposing camps. “Only power restrains power.”1

Modern democracies have little in common with classical democracies. Classical democracies weren’t representative. Citizens didn’t elect a small minority to represent them in the legislative assembly—they themselves were the assembly. Athenian citizens, for example, would gather every month or so on a hill called the Pnyx to vote on important issues. Out of about 30,000–60,000 citizens, at least 6,000 had to attend to meet quorum. Though only a minority would attend, all could take part (women and slaves excepted). But perhaps what’s even more interesting is that public offices were doled out at random (like jury selection is today). A specially constructed device called the kleroterion was used to randomly pick tokens with citizens names to assign magistrates, councilors and other officials.

Modern democracy established universal suffrage at the cost of individual sovereignty. Direct democracy was changed to representative democracy. Because direct democracy is no longer possible for technical reasons—we no longer live in tiny city-states where the whole population can gather on a single hill—the solution is to elect a small number of people to represent the interests of the population as a whole.2 The problem is that sovereignty simply cannot be delegated. It cannot be delegated “because to be sovereign,” writes Burnham, “means to make one’s own decisions.” The fact that the representatives may be promoting their voters’ interests does nothing to negate their loss of sovereignty, for even a despot can (and always does) make that claim. As Rousseau famously put it in his comments on the British democracy, “the moment a people allows itself to be represented, it is no longer free: it no longer exists.”3

What we have instead is the product of what Robert Michels calls the iron law of oligarchy. The people do not and cannot govern themselves, they are always ruled by a tiny minority who “impose upon the rest of society a ‘legal order.’”4 It doesn’t matter how a society is officially structured—it may be democracy or tyranny, socialism or aristocracy—members of a small minority with an insatiable desire for power, whom Machiavelli calls the “ruler-type,” always rise to the top and organize some form of oligarchical rule. They then justify the form of their rule using what Gaetano Mosca calls a political formula: a myth that explains why they have a right to rule. The myth is of vital importance: it satisfies a subject’s need of “knowing that one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but on the basis of a moral principle.” In the 16th and 17th century, monarchy was justified using the idea of a “divine right of kings.”5 Today democracy is justified using the idea of self-government by means of the ballot box.

Though all governments are oligarchical in nature, some governments are better than others—if what is meant by better is their ability to raise and maintain what Mosca calls their level of civilization. “A civilization that has an active art, an active literature and commerce and science and industry, a strong army, and a progressive agriculture,” writes Burnham, “is higher than one that concentrates on only one or two of these, or one that is mediocre in most or all of them.” According to Mosca, the key to a thriving civilization is “juridical defense,” which means the prevalence of the rule of law over the whims of individuals, especially those in power. The rule of law makes a society free by protecting its citizens from the abuses of power by the elite. This freedom, in turn, allows art, science and industry to develop and thrive.

Democracy, understood as a system of government that makes this freedom possible, is not a political formula or a myth. What makes democracy different from other systems is the right of opposition. It permits the organization of opposing parties, along with a free press, which can oppose and criticize the ruling elite. A peaceful circulation of elites is then made possible by means of the ballot box. The ballot box is thus not a means of self-government, but a means of allowing the elites to take turns in power. Rather than overthrowing each other by force, the elites instead criticize one another and appeal to voters by making promises aimed at improving their lives. From time to time they even deliver on some of them. It is not the written constitution that makes freedom possible, but rather the very hunger for power of the people who want to rise to the top, which, if channelled into opposing camps, compels each camp to check and restrain the other’s abuses.

Burnham further suggests that the opposing camps don’t have to be equal, but they have to be active (I previously wrote about the effect of a single opposing voice in shattering conformity):

Only power restrains power. That restraining power is expressed in the existence and activity of oppositions. Oddly and fortunately, it is observable that the restraining influence of an opposition much exceeds its apparent strength. As anyone with experience in any organization knows, even a small opposition, provided it really exists and is active, can block to a remarkable degree the excesses of the leadership. But when all opposition is destroyed, there is no longer any limit to what power may do. A despotism, any kind of despotism, can be benevolent only by accident.6

This division depends on what Mosca calls the existence of independent social forces, which Burnham describes as human activities with “significant social and political influence,”—think religion, war, commerce, science, media, etc. The importance of every social force rises and falls in time, but during the time when it is important, those who are masters of it not only control the social force, but gain a measure of power over society as a whole. Thus, for example, if a time and place is religious, then the priests rule, if it is a time of war, then the generals, and so on. “A given ruling class rules over a given society precisely because it is able to control the major social forces that are active within that society.”

By allowing independent social forces to exist simultaneously, democracy creates a division of power. By struggling against one another, the powers restrain each other’s abuses, thereby establishing individual freedom (i.e. freedom from mistreatment by the ruling class). The greatest threat to that freedom is thus not so much the abuses of power by each of the camps—which will always happen and will always need to be checked—but rather the centralized control of independent social forces by the state (i.e. totalitarian control). If the state swallows up all the social forces, there will be no division of power, and, consequently, no freedom.7

When, sometime in AD 523, the Roman philosopher Anicius Boethius was imprisoned and sentenced to death (including a bout of gruesome torture), the question of the value of his learning was put to him in no uncertain terms. Having lost his considerable power and wealth, he found himself in the position of those so-called philosophers Epictetus was criticizing. As he sat in prison awaiting execution, he began writing, structuring his thoughts as a conversation between himself and Philosophy, who materializes in his room to help him confront his predicament. The result is the most widely read philosophical work of the Middle Ages: On the Consolation of Philosophy.

“This, then, is how you reward your followers,”2 Boethius complains bitterly to Philosophy. He followed her guidance by spoking the truth, only to find himself punished like a criminal, with suffering and death as his reward. And the real criminals? They are the ones doing the sentencing, the ones left to enjoy their plunder. How could this in any way be just, and how could he be expected to do anything other than despair at his unhappy fate?

Boethius’ Philosophy begins by explaining that the things he is distressed about losing are not only worthless, but never even belonged to him in the first place. She does this by painting a picture of Fortune and her wheel, the Rota Fortunae, upon which she keeps spinning human fates. On one side of the wheel are those moving up in life, on the other going down. Some get a lucky break and are propelled on their way to wealth, power and fame. Others suffer misfortunes and lose everything they’ve gained. The point is that Fortune is always spinning her wheel, and those who are enjoying prosperity now are certain to experience setbacks or even disasters in the future. “Change is her normal behavior, her true nature. In the very act of changing she has preserved her own particular kind of constancy towards you.” Building your happiness upon the things that don’t really belong to you but to Fortune, and which she is going to take away tomorrow, is a sure path to misery.

Moreover, getting more from Fortune isn’t even a good thing. For example, the wealthier you become, the more anxiety you will feel about losing it all. “How splendid, then, the blessing of mortal riches is! Once won, they never leave you carefree again,” mocks Philosophy. Power is no better, for not only does your position grow more dangerous the higher you rise, but the people who try to befriend you do so for their own selfish ends, ready to betray you the moment Fortune turns against you. Even kings have the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads—especially kings. “What sort of power is it, then, that strikes fear into those who possess it, confers no safety on you if you want it, and which cannot be avoided when you want to renounce it?” Fame, even if it is deserved, doesn’t last, and the pursuit of bodily pleasure, taken beyond moderation, results in illness and pain.

And yet, we cannot say that wealth, power, fame and pleasure are bad and undesirable. There is something about each of them that is clearly good. It is good to be self-sufficient, good to be strong, good to be honored and respected, and good to be joyful. Those who pursue these things are therefore not wholly wrong. The problem, explains Boethius’ Philosophy, lies in division. What people typically do is pursue one of these goods at the expense of the others. This makes them unhappy because they are always lacking something in their lives:

If a man pursues wealth by trying to avoid poverty, he is not working to get power; he prefers being unknown and unrecognized, and even denies himself many natural pleasures to avoid losing the money he has got. But certainly no sufficiency is achieved this way, since he is lacking in power and vexed by trouble; he is of no account because of his low esteem, and is buried in obscurity. And if a man pursues only power, he expends wealth, despises pleasures and honor without power, and holds glory of no account. But you can see how much this man also lacks; at any one time he lacks the necessaries of life and is consumed by worry, from which he cannot free himself, so he ceases to be what he most of all wants to be, that is, powerful. A similar argument can be applied to honor, glory, and pleasures, for, since any one of them is the same as the others, a man who pursues one of them to the exclusion of the others cannot even acquire the one he wants.

Boethius’ Philosophy explains that if you want to be happy, you must pursue all facets of happiness at once, or rather, you must pursue that which is the source of all the goods and therefore the source of perfect happiness. Because the unity of all the goods is the highest good the human mind can conceive, Boethius identifies it with God. To pursue God means to pursue perfect goodness, i.e. to pursue all the things that constitute the good life simultaneously: self-sufficiency, strength, honor, glory and joy. Put another way, the path to happiness is virtue.

Boethius essentially makes the same conclusion as the Stoics, although he arrives there via a different route. The Stoic argument is, briefly, as follows: there are things that are under our control (our impressions and will), and others outside our control (all externals). Focusing on things outside of our control makes us unhappy because even though we can influence them, we cannot guarantee their results. Even if you do everything right, events wholly outside of your power—wars, natural disasters, diseases—can prevent you from achieving your goals. So rather than focusing on outcomes, focus instead on how you deal with whatever Fortune throws your way, both good and bad. The Stoics don’t assign value to outside events—nothing external is good or bad, it’s all indifferent. What is good or bad is how you act. Do you give in to base instincts like fear, anger, impatience and greed, or do you behave courageously in the face of misfortune, and with self-restraint when things go your way? A good life is a virtuous life, not a fortunate one.

Boethius’ imprisonment is therefore not a misfortune at all but an occasion to show his virtue. “A wise man ought no more to take it ill when he clashes with fortune than a brave man ought to be upset by the sound of battle,” writes Boethius. “For both of them their very distress is an opportunity, for one to gain glory and the other to strengthen his wisdom.” In fact, there would be no such thing as virtue if there was no adversity to overcome. Moreover, we wouldn’t even know Boethius’ name today had his life been spared.

For Epictetus, this perspective meant ultimate freedom. Because everything that happens to you is an opportunity to build and display virtue—the four Stoic virtues being courage, temperance, justice and wisdom—nothing can stop you from living the good life, no matter how short or long it may be. Your actions always achieve their ends because the ends lie in the actions themselves, not in external goals. And, unlike the worldly goods of wealth, power and fame, nothing can take your goodness away from you.

Epictetus goes as far as to define a Stoic “simply as someone set on becoming a god rather than a man.” Boethius actually makes the same assertion, saying that the “reward of the good … a reward that can never be decreased, that no one’s power can diminish, and no one’s wickedness darken, is to become gods.” Boethius explains it in terms of possessing goodness and happiness, both of which he identifies with divinity. For Boethius, those who lead good lives are happier, and consequently more divine. “While only God is so by nature, as many as you like may become so by participation.”

But the reverse isn’t true—that is, evil men don’t become devils. Evil men forfeit their very existence, they cease being human. Boethius arrives at this conclusion by following his solution to the problem of evil. If an omnipotent God can do everything, then he can also do evil, but if he can do evil, how can he remain perfectly good? The answer is that Boethius’ omnipotent God cannot do evil. Why not? Because “evil is nothing.”

This is quite an assertion, but it’s not a new one. Writing over a hundred years earlier, Augustine explained it in his Confessions in terms of corruption. If we imagine a scale from something that is supremely good, which is therefore incorruptible, and wholly corrupted, which therefore has nothing left to corrupt, then corruption—that is, evil—is not a substance, but a deprivation of the good. Though not the same, this position is also not a radical departure from the Stoics, who don’t assign value judgements to the external world. Nothing in the world is good or bad, it just is. For the Stoics, the idea of good and evil applies solely to our actions (and even there, evil is seen more as a defect—a moral blindness). Because being imprisoned, stripped of his wealth and sentenced to death does not diminish Boethius’ goodness, it therefore does him no harm.

Boethius views people’s actions from the perspective of their relationship to God, which he identifies with supreme goodness—the “common goal of all things that exist.” From that perspective, bad actions are not really evil, they are futile, that is, they completely miss their mark. An evil man cannot harm others because he cannot take away their goodness, he can only harm himself by diminishing his own. “Evil is not so much an infliction as a deep set infection.”

Although Boethius does not use the following analogy, I think the concept of order and chaos also works to explain his interpretation of evil. If we imagine that everything is part of a divine order (“all that exists is in a state of unity and … goodness itself is unity”), then everything that detaches itself from this order disintegrates into chaos (“everything which turns away from goodness ceases to exist”). The material remains, but any higher forms composed of that material perish. By committing evil deeds, people harm themselves by disintegrating that which makes them human: their goodness. They don’t disappear, but they debase themselves to the level of animals:

You could say that someone who robs with violence and burns with greed is like a wolf. A wild and restless man who is for ever exercising his tongue in lawsuits could be compared to a dog yapping. A man whose habit is to lie hidden in an ambush and steal by trapping people would be likened to a fox. A man of quick temper has only to roar to gain the reputation of a lion-heart. The timid coward who is terrified when there is nothing to fear is thought to be like the hind. The man who is lazy, dull and stupid, lives an ass’s life. A man of whimsy and fickleness who is for ever changing his interests is just like a bird. And a man wallowing in foul and impure lusts is occupied by the filthy pleasures of a sow. So what happens is that when a man abandons goodness and ceases to be human, being unable to rise to a divine condition, he sinks to the level of being an animal.

Near the end of his Consolation, Boethius uses an image similar to the wheel of Fortune to illustrate the relationship between God’s plan (Providence) and its realization in the world (Fate). Imagine a series of revolving, concentric circles. As you move further away from the center, a point on a circle travels ever greater distances as it spins around. As you move closer to the center, the distances decrease. The point at the very axis doesn’t move at all—it is Providence.3 Thus, “whatever moves any distance from the primary intelligence becomes enmeshed in ever stronger chains of Fate, and everything is the freer from Fate the closer it seeks the center of things. And if it cleaves to the steadfast mind of God it is free from movement and so escapes the necessity imposed by Fate.”4

The human being is like vessel filled with a part of the divine, with goodness, which he can choose to increase by pursuing the good life, moving away from the maelstrom of fate towards the still point in the center—himself becoming divine “by participation”—or diminish by acting otherwise and “cease to be at all,” letting his body be whirled round by fate. On the one extreme, the vessel ultimately discards its shell and becomes its contents, on the other, it empties its contents and becomes its shell. Boethius chose the former and, despite the destruction of his vessel, his soul lived on in the form a thread woven into the fabric of civilization. His oppressors chose the latter and were erased from collective consciousness.

Only good people have a bad conscience. The reason for this is obvious: bad people do not repent of their evil deeds. What’s worse, bad people do not even think about their evil deeds. Because it is only by stopping to think that people detach themselves from their unconscious routines and judge their actions from the outside, so to speak, as spectators. Far from being a product of a “wicked heart,”1 most evil is a result of thoughtlessness.

This is the conclusion that Hannah Arendt makes in her remarkable meditation on the nature of thought itself entitled “Thinking,” the first volume of her final and sadly unfinished work, The Life of the Mind. This conclusion is preceded by an even more important insight, which is that our mental faculties, referred to as reason and intellect, don’t actually share the same aim. The intellect is “inspired by the quest for truth,” whereas reason is inspired “by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same.”

Whereas the activity of the intellect is knowing, the activity of reason is thinking. The first pursues cognition, the latter meaning. We can think of the two as the domains of the scientist and the philosopher. Each certainly makes use of both intellect and reason, but their work is skewed towards one or the other. The scientist focuses on the external world of appearances, using empirical evidence to gradually move his model of the world closer to reality, that is, closer to something that is consistently reproducible. He wants to know how the world works. The philosopher does the opposite. He withdraws from the world of appearances and turns his thought inward, into the world of ideas inside his head. He wants to make sense of what he knows.

The problem with inwardly directed thought is that, on its own, it can never uncover any new truths about the world. For that to happen its ideas must be tested in the real world. Moreover, it never ends. There is no point at which the thinking process can fulfill its purpose, because there is no purpose, or rather, because its purpose is the process itself. Even if thinking arrives at a conclusion, it will continue to question that conclusion, re-examining every premise upon which it rests. This is what gives thought a destructive quality. “There are no dangerous thoughts,” writes Arendt, “thinking itself is dangerous.” Being a never-ending process, it never stops undermining even the ideas of its own creation. Descartes’s famous “I think, therefore I am,” is shortened from the longer: “I doubt, therefore I am—or, what is the same—I think, therefore I am.” To think is to doubt.

From the perspective of the modern scientist, any purely contemplative philosophy disconnected from empirical evidence—i.e. metaphysics—is a kind of obsolete stage in the history of humankind’s intellectual growth—a stage that was once the spark of progress, but which, with the advent of the scientific process, has outgrown its usefulness. The 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, for example, referred to metaphysics as philosophy “under its most discredited name.”2 But such a view is the perspective of the intellect, which assumes that the main object of thought is truth, not meaning. In actual fact, the pursuit of truth was not always the primary goal of philosophy.

For the ancient Greeks, philosophy was quite literally a means of pursuing immortality. It was, as Arendt writes, a way for “mortal men to dwell in the neighborhood of immortal things and thus acquire or nourish in themselves ‘immortality in the fullest measure that human nature admits.’”3 The Greeks even had a word for it: athanatizein—immortalizing. It made sense: thought is intangible, indestructible. All material things decay, perish and die, but the world of immaterial ideas remains untouched. Hence, to spend time in thought is to spend time in the immortal domain of ideas, to become, as Cicero put it, a kind of “mortal god.” Moreover, by detaching themselves from the world of action, philosophers assumed the role of spectators—a pastime they shared with the gods.4

The Romans had a very different take. Under the Romans, philosophy became, as Arendt puts it, “something essentially practical.” Thinking, hitherto employed on idle speculation, is put into the service of what Epictetus calls “the art of living.” For the Stoics—of whom Epictetus is one of the greatest examples—philosophy is what helps us master our “impressions.” Simply put: we interact with the world through the impressions of our senses. The impressions are not the real world, they are a representation of the world within our consciousness. The grief of misfortune is not caused by misfortune itself, but by our negative impression of it. Consequently, we can overcome misfortune by changing how we view it and focusing our attention only on what is under our control (our will). Master your impressions, and you become invulnerable to the vicissitudes of fate.5

But perhaps the most interesting perspective is that of Socrates, “a thinker who was not a professional,” and who himself repeatedly said that he “did not teach anything, for the simple reason that he had nothing to teach.” Socrates was called many things. He was a gadfly. He was a midwife. He was an electric ray. Each epithet describes an aspect of Socrates’ relationship to thought.

He is a gadfly because “he knows how to sting the citizens who, without him, will ‘sleep on undisturbed for the rest of their lives’ unless somebody comes along to arouse them.” He is a midwife because, being himself sterile (“he teaches nothing and has nothing to teach”) “he knows how to deliver others of their thoughts,” to purge “people of their ‘opinions,’ … those unexamined pre-judgments that would prevent them from thinking.” And lastly, he is an electric ray because by remaining “steadfast in his own perplexities,” he “paralyzes anyone he comes into contact with,” including himself. “He does not claim to make men wise,” observes Arendt. “He only points out to them that they are not wise.” Socrates is not teaching people ideas, what he is doing is making them think.

The point of these examples isn’t that thought has some particular goal, but that it doesn’t have any one particular goal. It’s an inherent activity of a living mind. If thought is reduced to something purely instrumental, i.e. a tool in the pursuit of knowledge, then what we actually get is the death of thought, because an aim that can be satisfied implies the possibility of a result “that would make further thinking unnecessary.” In the sphere of politics this end result is dogma—a set of rules and values that makes it possible for people to live thoughtless lives.

Thoughtlessness is neither stupidity, which is the lack of intelligence, nor ignorance, which is the lack of knowledge. Thoughtlessness is the lack of thought. Thoughtless people are not fools. On the contrary, a person can be both highly intelligent and thoughtless. In fact, they are probably very successful, too, because what thoughtless people don’t do is waste any time contemplating the purpose of their lives and the meaning of their actions. They surrender that responsibility to others by going along with whatever society prescribes for them at any given time. Such people are often “the most respectable pillars of society,” and there’s nothing strange in that: their readiness to accept the dogma of the day without a second thought is precisely what makes them respectable. The charge of “corrupting the youth” for which Socrates was executed was not wholly wrong, for the greatest threat to dogma is living thought.

What’s interesting about those who unthinkingly follow a dogma is that they won’t defend it when another comes along—they’ll switch sides. “If somebody appears who, for whatever purposes, wishes to abolish the old ‘values’ or virtues, he will find that easy enough, provided he offers a new code,” writes Arendt. “The more firmly men hold to the old code, the more eager will they be to assimilate themselves to the new one.” Thus the Weimar Republic is turned into Nazi Germany, which in turn is followed by the extraordinary “reversal of the reversal,” back into liberal democracy, with its vehement denunciation of the ideology it was only yesterday eager to support. This is what Arendt meant when she said that most evil is a result of thoughtlessness. If people are incapable or unwilling to think for themselves, they will end up sleepwalking into evil. The trouble with those who are just following orders is that they really are just following orders.

In one of his letters, Flaubert made a comment on reading: “Do not read,” he wrote “as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.” And that’s really the whole point of thought, the whole point of Socrates’ “examined life,” for it is not the product of the examining that we are after—not some particular truth or perspective—but the process itself. Thought is not a means to an end, it is the end, because it is a part of life. “A life without thinking is quite possible,” writes Arendt, but such a life “fails to develop its own essence—it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive.”

“Weakness, laziness and stupidity are the only things that can be called vices. Everything else—in the absence of the aforementioned—is undoubtedly virtue. … If a person is strong (in spirit), active and smart (or capable)—then he is good, irrespective of any other ‘vices.’” Thus wrote Stalin in one of his margin notes.1 Echoing pragmatist philosophy, the tyrant asserts that the good is what works, not what one wishes it were.

This, in a nutshell, is the premise of Machiavelli’s The Prince, or rather, one side of it. The other side is that the things one wishes were good, that is, general notions of morality, are downright dangerous to a prince (the ruler of a state). A prince who tries to conform to a version of the world as it ought to be but not as it really is, to act morally, puts himself at a disadvantage by competing with others who won’t reciprocate. Consequently, the only way for a prince to deal with immoral actors is to respond in kind. This is why virtue is incompatible with statecraft. You can act virtuously in private, bearing the injuries done to you with dignity, but the injuries done to a prince will cost him his state. When others are trying to usurp you, “good deeds are your enemies.”2

The ideas in the The Prince can be read as a precursor of the prisoner’s dilemma. In a situation where rewards are skewed towards betrayal instead of cooperation, the short-term winning strategy for a selfish actor is to always betray. While cooperation lets everyone win, it only works when everyone cooperates, which is never the case in the real world. The prince may or may not betray others, but there are sure to be others who will betray the prince. Consequently, to stay in power he must do things that keep him in power, irrespective of whether or not they are deemed moral. A prince can be a good man, but he will soon cease being a prince.

Moreover, Machiavelli explains how actions that agree with conventional morality often result in outcomes that are disastrous both for the prince and for the state. By trying to do good, or to look good, a prince can ruin both himself and his country.

Take generosity. “There is nothing so self-defeating as generosity,” writes Machiavelli, for “in the act of practicing it, you lose the ability to do so, and you become either poor and despised or, seeking to escape poverty, rapacious and hated.” Instead of squandering his money for the sake of popularity or compassion, and thereby achieving the opposite of his goals, a prince should rather “not mind being called a miser.” In fact, by being thrifty, a prince “proves himself generous to all those from whom he takes nothing.” The only time a prince should give away money is when he has looted it from an enemy in war, as Caesar, Cyrus and Alexander had done, in which case he “should indulge his generosity to the full.”

Or take cruelty. Commenting on how Cesare Borgia restored order in Pistoia by violently suppressing a faction war, Machiavelli writes that “there was more compassion in Cesare than in the Florentine people, who, to escape being called cruel, allowed Pistoia to be devastated.” Machiavelli’s point is that misguided compassion sometimes results in more suffering. Napoleon, who had read The Prince, followed the advice by making “appropriately severe examples.”3 When a village called Binasco rebelled and attacked his troops during his invasion of Italy, Napoleon killed a hundred peasants and burned the village. “Remember Binasco,” he would later write, “it brought me tranquility in all of Italy, and spared shedding the blood of thousands.”

Or how about truthfulness. As Baltasar Gracián writes, “there’s nothing easier than deceiving a good person,” because “the person who never lies is more ready to believe.”4 Therefore, do not let your goodness “create opportunities for someone else to be bad.” Machiavelli paints the metaphor of the lion and the fox. A prince must possess both, the force of the lion to fight off wolves, and the cunning of the fox, to avoid traps. For a prince “there is no court of appeal,” he is judged only by results. Consequently, a prince should not “honor his word when it places him at a disadvantage and when the reasons for which he made his promise no longer exist.” “If all men were good, this precept would not be good,” Machiavelli writes, “but because men are wretched creatures who would not keep their word to you, you need not keep your word to them.”

What does a modern prince look like? A Machiavellian prince seems like a cunning, immoral tyrant skilled in laying traps for his enemies and evading theirs. But, as Machiavelli himself says, vicious actions can win “power but not glory.” To be a great prince, one must actually build a great state. Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore, has built a great state. In about three decades (from 1960 to 1990), Lee transformed a tiny third-world city-state into one of the most prosperous nations in Southeast Asia, with a higher per capita GDP than the US. In Lee we see a combination of pragmatic ruthlessness and constructive sympathy, the strength of will to do what’s necessary to succeed guided by a genuine desire to do what’s best for his people. And yes, Lee Kuan Yew had read The Prince (and even made his successor read it).

Machiavelli says that when a new prince seizes power, he should deliver all the injuries in a single blow. “He must inflict them once for all, and not have to renew them every day, and in that way he will be able to set men’s minds at rest and win them over to him when he confers benefits.” The withdrawal of the British from Singapore at the end of the 1960s was an existential crisis: not only were they providing military protection, but the military bases alone made up a fifth of the country’s GDP. And yet the crisis was also a rare opportunity for Lee to push through major labor union reforms that clamped down on strikes (strikes were banned outright for essential services). “Between July 1961 and September 1962, we had 153 strikes,” writes Lee Kuan Yew. “In 1969, for the first time since before the war, we had no strikes or work stoppages.”5 Though painful at first, these changes, together with investment in infrastructure and removal of red tape, made Singapore very attractive for overseas manufacturers, who flocked to the country and, in time, benefited the workers by creating jobs and growing the country’s wealth.

And this growing wealth was something that Lee Kuan Yew was loath to squander. Following Machiavelli’s dictum that it is better to be thought a miser than to go broke, Lee rejected a British style welfare state, which he called “a debilitating system” that “undermined self-reliance,” in favor of “the Confucian tradition,” in which “a man is responsible for his family—his parents, wife, and children.” He deemed the British National Health Service “a failure” founded on “idealistic but impractical” assumptions, whose only result is “ballooning costs.” Instead, Singapore went with a kind of personal savings fund that acts not only as a pension pot, but as a reservoir of money from which certain services, like healthcare and housing, are deducted. If you don’t have enough, you can ask your family for help. The result is a hybrid system where the state provides a basic safety net beyond which costs are covered by individuals and their relatives.

“By making an example or two,” writes Machiavelli, “he will prove more compassionate than those who, being too compassionate, allow disorders which lead to murder and rapine.” Singapore employs severe deterrents to discourage crime. Caning is used as punishment for all types of crimes, from murder and theft down to drug trafficking and vandalism. Littering is punished by heavy fines. Singapore also practices capital punishment—by hanging. The result is a clean city with one of the lowest crime rates in the world. In reply to critics who link crime to poverty rather than deterrent, Lee Kuan Yew explains that during Japanese occupation, the punishments were so severe that even in a state of utter destitution “there were no burglaries and people could leave their front doors unlocked, day or night. The deterrent was effective.”

Singapore is what one might call an “illiberal democracy”—a state in which free elections take place, but which is governed by a single party with practically no opposition. “[M]en must be either pampered or crushed,” writes Machiavelli, and “any injury a prince does a man should be of such a kind that there is no fear of revenge.” The one real threat to Lee’s reign came from the communist party, which he crushed by arresting its leaders under charges of foreign subversion. Lee’s own party, the People’s Action Party (PAP), would consequently dominate every election, sometimes winning all of the contested seats, like it did in 1972, 1976 and 1980. While the PAP was very proactive in organizing educational and recreational centers in local communities, it also had no qualms about employing questionable stratagems like promising housing upgrades to constituencies with highest PAP support.

“I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development,” Lee Kuan Yew explained, “I believe what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy.” Lee saw Western notions of how a democracy ought to function as a kind of distraction that gets in the way of progress and prosperity. Or, perhaps more accurately, he saw them as a consequence of prosperity rather than its cause. If you want freedom, you must first create the conditions for prosperity.

Lee’s views on democratic ideals are strikingly similar to Machiavelli’s views on conventional morality. Unlike the Renaissance prince, the modern politician does not care so much about morality, since today the very word “politician” carries a negative connotation. What he cares about is popularity, or, more accurately, public support, which he tries to win by promising to deliver policies that voters want. But this presents a similar problem to the modern politician as Machiavelli’s morality does to his Renaissance prince, namely: by making policies that directly address what people want, a politician deals with the world as the people wish it to be, not as it really is. Everyone wants something different, and short-term solutions are seldom the best. Thus misguided generosity turns into crippling debt and compassion into unchecked crime. By appealing to people’s emotions, the politician operates in a world of appearances at the cost of neglecting reality.

There is, however, a key difference between Machiavelli’s prince and the democratic statesman. Rewards for the democratic statesman are skewed towards appearances rather than reality. For the Renaissance prince, success and failure is the difference between life and death. In a wealthy democracy, failure is contained. A politician’s time in office is limited, and the nation’s growing troubles can be prolonged indefinitely through the magic of debt. Having climbed to the top of the hierarchy, a statesman has no need to fear disgrace,6 deprivation or death. Even if his term in office is disastrous, he can simply retire, letting someone else pretend to sort out the mess. As Lee Kuan Yew observed, “only a wealthy and solidly established nation like America can roll with such a system.”

In order to prove to himself that he “dares,” Raskolnikov kills the old pawnbroker woman. “I didn’t kill a person, I killed a principle… I didn’t kill in order to gain the means and power to become a benefactor of humanity. Nonsense! I simply killed; I killed for myself, for myself alone… I had to find out then, and find out quickly, am I a louse, like everyone else, or a man? Could I transgress or not? Would I have the courage to bend down and seize it or not? Am I a trembling wretch, or do I have the right?”

Turns out—a trembling wretch. Raskolnikov did not dare manifest his “independent desire” in full. He goes on to reveal his own crime, he childishly taunts Zamyotov and Porfiry, he throws webs on himself and gets hopelessly entangled in them. With contempt and self-loathing he goes to confess and give himself up, and sets off to the penal colony.

That Raskolnikov does not feel any remorse, and that it is not at all his pangs of conscience that force him to confess his crime has been shown superbly by Merzhkovsky. As I reread Crime and Punishment, I am perplexed: how could I have previously read the same thing and understood something else entirely, how could I see in the novel the worn-out “idea” that a crime awakens conscience in a human being and that pangs of conscience are a criminal’s highest punishment?

“‘I’m going to hand myself in. But I don’t know why I am going to hand myself in,’ said Raskolnikov. ‘Crime? What crime?’ he cried out in a sudden rage. ‘I’m not thinking about it, and I’m not thinking about wiping it away! Only now do I see the full absurdity of my cowardice, only now, after I have decided to go through with this unnecessary shame! I’m doing it simply because of my baseness and mediocrity!’”

And with a devil’s sneer he thinks: “I wonder, in the next fifteen–twenty years, is my soul really going to give in to such a point that I will meekly whimper before others, calling myself a wretch by any other name?… By what process can this be brought about? And why, why would one live after that?”

And now at the penal colony, “he harshly condemned himself, and his embittered conscience found no particularly terrible guilt in his past, except for a simple blunder… If only fate had sent him repentance—burning, heart-rending repentance, the agony of which would give one visions of the noose and the whirlpool. Oh, he would have welcomed it! Tears and agonies—that, after all, is also life. But he did not repent of his crime… He accepted one thing only to be his crime: that he could not bear it and confessed his guilt.”

What Raskolnikov experiences is not the pangs of conscience for having committed a terrible crime, but the awful realization that his force of will is no match for the magnitude of his desire—i.e. the realization that he is weak, that he is a coward, that he is “a trembling wretch”—the very object of his contempt. The result is not a burning repentance, but a burning self-loathing. The mismatch between his visions of grandeur and actual reality is the cause of his terrible anguish.

Anyone with any serious ambition is sure to run into a similar mismatch, when their desire stretches beyond their willpower and their abilities. The further their desire runs ahead, the greater their pain will be if reality fails to catch up. Raskolnikov compared himself to Napoleon, but discovered that he was not. A young entrepreneur has visions of creating the next Apple—but what will happen if he discovers that he’s not Steve Jobs?

Take Sahil Lavigna. In 2011, he launched the e-commerce platform Gumroad. An initial surge of interest filled his head with grand ideas of building a billion-dollar company. He left his job at Pinterest, raised capital and set out to build his “life’s work.” But the interest didn’t materialize into growth, or rather, not into the kind of growth he wanted. The result was neither an outright failure, nor a massive success: Gumroad turned out to be a small, steadily growing business. A modest success, however, did little to sate the founder’s big ambitions. Lavignia was tormented by the gap between where he was and where he expected to be. The gap was so great that, in his own words, he spent years thinking himself a failure. At one point he even wanted to shut the platform down, but felt terrible about abandoning the creators who depended on it. His way out was to subdue his ego by stopping “pretending to be some sort of product visionary” who was “trying to build a billion-dollar company,” and just focus “on making Gumroad better and better for … existing creators.”

Raskolinov’s “crime” is not the killing of the old pawnbroker woman, but the act of attaching his happiness to material outcomes that are outside of his control and his sense of self-worth to a fantastical notion of his abilities that he did nothing to earn. His punishment is not the penal colony, but the unbearable self-loathing he experiences when he realizes just how false his notions of himself are and that the money he stole is useless because it can do nothing to change that. The punishment is delivered not by his conscience, but by his ego.

In the 1950s, Solomon Asch performed a series of conformity experiments. Groups of participants were shown a sequence of cards, each with a line on it. They were asked to match the length of the line to one of three lines of different lengths shown on a reference card, labelled A, B and C, saying out loud which they thought was nearest in length. Only one of the participants in each group, however, was real—all the rest were actors. In the “critical trials” stage of the experiment, all of the actors intentionally picked the same obviously wrong length. The experiment was setup such that the real participant was always the last to answer. Asch wanted to see how many people would assert their own reason against the pressure to conform.

A third (35.7%) of real responses went along with a blatantly wrong consensus, with 74% of the participants giving at least one wrong answer. That many went along with the crowd despite their doubts is no surprise. What’s more interesting is what Asch did next. In a followup experiment, one nonconformist who would always say the right answer was introduced into the groups. The number of participants sticking with the majority fell to just 5%. A single dissenting voice was enough to inspire most people with the confidence to say what they really thought.

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt mentions an anecdote by Seneca about how the Roman senate once thought about getting slaves to all wear the same dress so that they could be easily distinguished from free citizens. The idea was rejected because “the slaves would now be able to recognize each other and become aware of their potential power.” Arendt points out that it wasn’t so much the number of slaves that was the issue but the fact that the dress would allow the slaves to appear in the public sphere as a distinct political entity.1

Like the anarchists in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, we live in a world of appearances. [Warning: spoilers ahead] When the hero of the story infiltrates the anarchists’ not-so-secret meeting, he thinks that he is an undercover detective among a group of criminals. What he doesn’t realize—what nobody else in the group realizes—is that they are all undercover detectives. But, because they cannot see beyond their false masks, they continue their charade. They deal with each other as anarchists because they assume everyone else is an anarchist. The reality of what other people believe differs from what we think they believe. Our perception is shaped by appearances, by what they say in public, but what they say in public is in turn influenced by what they think we and everyone else believes.

What the political censor cares about is not the spreading of some idea that is new to the public, but the speaking of an idea that the public already believes but is hesitant to talk about. It is difficult to convince people of something new, easy to clearly define for them what they already subconsciously believe. The point is to suppress the few dissenting voices that could make everyone else realize that they are not alone.

Anti-war demonstrators in Russia have been arrested for standing on the streets with empty signs. Blank sheets have also been used in protests in China, and in anti-monarchy demonstrations in the UK. What threatens the authorities is not so much the message, which is so obvious to everyone that words are not even necessary, but the very appearance of dissent. This is why censors seek to “deplatform” people rather than to redact ideas. When someone asserts a position, their stance becomes a part of their identity, even if their words are censored. It thus becomes more important for the censor to remove the messenger from a public platform than to erase his or her message, because their very presence gives others the permission to speak.2 Remove the source of dissent and people become like Chesterton’s fictional anarchists, separated from one another by the impenetrable wall of their public masks, each thinking himself alone in his dissenting views.

“Through all this ordeal his root horror had been isolation,” writes Chesterton, “and there are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.”

The portrait that Michael Lewis paints of Sam Bankman-Fried in Going Infinite is that of an ADHD genius on the spectrum in whom an extraordinary talent for rapidly estimating risk is marred by an extraordinary lack of organization. “[H]e would not show up for meetings, not shower for weeks, have a mess all around him with old food everywhere, and fall asleep at his desk,” recalled Tara Mac Aulay, who was part of the 2018 exodus. “He did zero management and thought that if people had any questions, they should just ask him. Then in one-on-ones with people, he’d play video games.” He would repeatedly cancel appointments, treating his schedule, as Lewis puts it, more as “a plan than a theory.” “You’re always going to be apologizing to different people, and you’ll do that every day,” explained his PR manager, who would begin thinking up excuses even as she was confirming his appointments.1

Not only was there no real management, there wasn’t even an org chart. “Sam didn’t like people to have job descriptions,” his psychiatrist revealed. “Everyone knew that he hated org charts.” When architects working on the new headquarters for FTX asked for a list of employees, an executive confessed that they didn’t have one. Even when Bankman-Fried’s companies were worth billions, there was no proper board of directors. “It’s unclear if we even have to have an actual board of directors,” he said, “but we get suspicious glances if we don’t have one, so we have something with three people on it.” Lewis notes that “he couldn’t recall the names of the other two people.” There was no chief financial officer either, because Bankman-Fried didn’t see any point in having one. “You think I don’t know how much money we have?” he asked. John J. Ray III, the man brought in to manage the liquidation of FTX and Alameda Research, wrote that never in his life has he seen “such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” Conversations with investors were awkward. “They wanted samples of what our internal controls are,” said one of the executives. “We didn’t have any.”

And yet… they did invest! At the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, 150 venture capital firms invested $2.3 billion in FTX for a 6 percent share while being denied a peek at the nonexistent controls or a seat on the nonexistent board. What could go wrong? Two years later, billions of customer deposits had gone missing from FTX. As it turned out, Alameda was using the money for their own investments. As it also turned out, those investments weren’t doing very well. In November 2022, FTX and Alameda filed for bankruptcy. For Caroline Ellison, then CEO of Alameda, and one of the few who chose to stay during the 2018 exodus, the collapse didn’t come as a surprise. In the final hours before bankruptcy, when the rival exchange Binance refused to bail them out, she wrote: “Feel weirdly good to get it over with. I’ve been dreading this for a long time so feels like a big weight off my shoulders.” A year later, Bankman-Fried was found guilty of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.

There’s been a lot of focus on Bankman-Fried’s guilt in this whole affair, but I have a different question. How is it that a myriad of seemingly savvy institutional investors poured billions of dollars into such a disorganized and mismanaged—or even unmanaged—enterprise? What convinced them that this was a good idea? Granted, the crypto market was exploding, but a market opportunity alone isn’t enough, you have to also believe that the people running the business are competent enough to succeed.

Bankman-Fried didn’t really hide his flaws. Instead, he dispelled doubt by presenting those flaws as quirks of a genius wholly focused on the pursuit of a higher altruistic mission.

“In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul,” Bankman-Fried confessed in a private memo. “This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others. But in the end there’s a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don’t feel happiness.” “Somehow my reward system never clicked,” he wrote in another note. He described his constant depression as “not out-of-control negative,” but as a “lack of positive.” There was a time when he didn’t even know how to smile. “There were some things I had to teach myself to do … Like making sure I smile when I’m supposed to smile. Smiling was the biggest thing that I weirdly couldn’t do.” But he did learn, and he became good at it. “It became easier. Like my muscles started to loosen up. And it made people like me more. It made me able to fit in better.”

Bankman-Fried “thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one. He thought of himself as a person who thought his way to action.” Raised in a home of academics, he knew of the existence of God, but “didn’t think anyone actually believed in” him. When he learned that, in fact, many people did, he concluded that “[m]ass delusions are a property of the world.” Art held no appeal for him, literary criticism was “subjectivity framed as objectivity.” Instead, he much preferred the concreteness of math. In a blog post he wrote during his time at MIT, he used statistics to prove that Shakespeare was overrated. “About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years,” he wrote. “By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.”

While at MIT, he met a group of people who were part of a movement called effective altruism. It was composed mostly of “young men with a background in math and science.” “The demographics of who this appeals to are the demographics of a physics PhD program,” said William MacAskill, one of the movement’s originators. “The levels of autism ten times the average. Lots of people on the spectrum.” Effective altruism didn’t waste time debating subjective notions like the meaning of life. It was all about optimizing numbers. The worth of a pursuit could be measured by its effectiveness, that is, by the number of lives saved. A doctor could save a certain number of lives in his lifetime, but an altruistic banker could sponsor many doctors, thereby multiplying the number of lives saved. Ergo, a banker could be a more effective altruist. Bankman-Fried found his philosophy.

It would be wrong to say that Bankman-Fried was a fake altruist. His interest and participation in effective altruism began at college, before he even knew what career he was going to pursue (he thought he might follow his parents into academia). He did, however, use his participation to his advantage, framing his aggressive speculation as part of a higher mission to save lives.

At school, Bankman-Fried disliked English because of its subjectivity, yet he still managed to get good grades. “I convinced the teachers that I was a good student, and thus I got good grades,” said Bankman-Fried. “It was self-fulfilling to a decent extent.” Years later, he would convince investors not only that he was a genius, but that he was an altruist as well. The point isn’t that an altruist is good at making money, but rather that he is good at not stealing your money. Just as the white coat of a doctor vests its wearer with authority, belonging to an altruistic movement vests one with a semblance of morality.

In an interview for Vox, immediately after the collapse of FTX, Bankman-Fried was frank about the way he portrayed himself. If he was going to try to make billions in a dubious market, it was better to position himself as an ambitious altruist than a greedy opportunist, so that even if he failed, it wouldn’t be so bad. To this end, he said “all the right shibboleths” to make people like him. It worked so well that when Michael Lewis first met him—about a year before the collapse—he immediately recommended him to a friend who was on the fence about investing in FTX. “Go for it!” Lewis told him. “Swap shares with Sam Bankman-Fried! Do whatever he wants to do!” And so they did.

The left claim that certain conservative leaders are trying to establish authoritarian regimes that will turn into dictatorships, while the right claim that the liberals are trying to expand state power to the point of turning our societies into totalitarian dystopias. The left imagine oppression coming from a backward model of traditional society, while the right imagine the threat coming from unrestrained state power. Both sides want freedom, perhaps a different kind of freedom, and each side is afraid of the other taking it away.

Hannah Arendt gave a compelling explanation for this phenomenon in her essay “What Is Authority?” (included in her 1961 book Between Past and Future). Arendt’s observation is perhaps even more relevant today than at the time it was written (emphasis mine):

Liberalism … measures a process of receding freedom, and conservatism measures a process of receding authority; both call the expected end-result totalitarianism and see totalitarian trends wherever either one or the other is present. No doubt, both can produce excellent documentation for their findings. Who would deny the serious threats to freedom from all sides of tyranny, at least since the end of the First World War? Who can deny, on the other hand, that disappearance of practically all traditionally established authorities has been one of the most spectacular characteristics of the modern world? It seems as though one has only to fix his glance on either of these two phenomena to justify a theory of progress or a theory of doom according to his own taste or, as the phrase goes, according to his own “scale of values.” If we look upon the conflicting statements of conservatives and liberals with impartial eyes, we can easily see that the truth is equally distributed between them and that we are in fact confronted with a simultaneous recession of both freedom and authority in the modern world.

As authority fades from the modern world (for reasons I’ll explain below), conservatives and liberals become locked into a never-ending tug of war. As conservatives try to re-establish authority by coercion, liberals pull in the opposite direction to dismantle the rules and limits the other side keeps putting in place. The process oscillates, with public opinion swinging now to one side, now to the other. But the result of this struggle is the destruction of the very things each side seeks to obtain, for as they pull back and forth, a little authority and a little freedom continues to be lost. This is because authority cannot be established by coercion, and freedom cannot exist without authority.

To understand why that is the case, we must first answer the question: what is authority?

There’s a story in Plutarch’s Lives about the Athenian general Themistocles sailing around the Greek islands squeezing money out of his confederates. When the people of Andros were hesitant to comply, he told them that he had with him two gods: Persuasion and Force.1 These are precisely the two things that authority does not rely on. “If authority is to be defined at all,” writes Arendt, “then, it must be in contradistinction to both coercion by force and persuasion through arguments.” Authority is a form of “obedience in which men retain their freedom.”

Authority relies neither on force nor persuasion, because the former eliminates free choice, while the latter does not work on everyone. The relationship between the one who uses violence to force someone to do something is that of a master and a slave. The relationship between the one who uses arguments to get someone to do something is that of equals. Authority, on the other hand, is the result of a hierarchy that is recognized by both, those in authority, and those who follow their directions. The people on the hierarchy are neither equals, nor slaves. By accepting the legitimacy of the hierarchy, you can accept the legitimacy of the directions without being coerced to do so.

Arendt’s understanding of authority is different to modern usage, especially when it is used in related terms like “authoritarian.” An authoritarian hierarchy differs from a tyranny in two important ways. The classical image of an authoritarian hierarchy is a pyramid. This is true for tyranny as well, except in the case of tyranny, the middle layers of the pyramid are removed, leaving the tyrant suspended above the rest. The second difference is that in the authoritarian pyramid, the source of authority is suspended above it. It is not part of the power hierarchy itself. For example, for Christians authority comes from God and the Bible. For US citizens, authority comes from the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. In every case, the source of authority is separate from the leaders at the very top of the power hierarchy. As long as they govern according to those established rules or ideals, the people whom they govern submit not to them directly, but to those higher rules or ideals. This is precisely what separates an authoritarian regime from a tyranny, in which it is the tyrant himself to whom his subjects are forced to submit.

The reason for the disappearance of authority has to do with a self-supporting structure that Arendt calls the Roman trinity: religion, tradition and authority. The three elements are linked like a roof held up by three pillars. Take one pillar away, and the rest collapse. For example, the authority of the kings of the Holy Roman Empire came from the Catholic Church, since it was the pope who crowned them. When Luther had challenged the authority of the Church, he inadvertently undermined the authority of the kings and monarchy itself as well.

Tradition is what transforms faith into religion. In the case of Christianity, it involves not only a belief in God, but the passing down of the Apostles’ “testimony of the life, of the birth, death, and resurrection, of Jesus of Nazareth.” In the process, the Apostles themselves became the “founding fathers” of the Church. By challenging tradition, political theorists like Hobbes simultaneously undermined religion, which they wanted to keep for the sake of authority.

The word authority comes from the Latin auctoritas, which in turn is derived from augere, which means “to augment.” As Arendt explains, “what those in authority constantly augment is the foundation.” The Romans, for example, built their authority not just on the founding myth of Rome, but on the cultural heritage of Greece, whose great thinkers and heroes they accepted as their authorities. “The Greek authors became authorities in the hands of the Romans, not of the Greeks.” The mythical founder of Rome, described in Virgil’s Aeneid, was not even from Italy, nor even Greece, but from the fallen city of Troy. As Aeneas fled the burning ruins of Troy, he took with him not only his old father Anchises, but statues of his household gods as well. Religion, tradition and authority were inseparable.

In his collection of Spartan sayings, Plutarch tells of the Spartan king Pausanias being asked why the ancient laws of his state cannot be changed. To this the king replied: “Because the laws ought to control men, not men the laws.” Political structures, up to the 20th century, were built on foundations, established in some great founding event, that could be augmented but not changed. But the structures can only remain as long as the people believe in the validity of the original foundations. The Catholic Church lost validity for those who no longer believed in the authority of the pope. Communism lost validity in the Soviet Union when its centrally planned economies failed (and then later fell apart when the regime could no longer rely on violence to preserve itself). As one man once said, when a foundation is washed away, the house above it collapses.

If Arendt’s thesis is right, then the current deepening divide between the left and the right in the West is caused by fundamental trends that cannot be resolved by simply trying to find a shared set of values. Shared values can promote unity, but they are useless without solid boundaries to contain conflicting interests. Without a higher source of authority to set the boundaries, each side tries to coerce the other into accepting the whole of its worldview, resulting in an ever growing feeling of enmity as it inevitably fails to do so. The paradox of authority is that the hierarchy and the boundaries it establishes are the very things that guarantee freedom rather than take it away, because the result of the absence of authority is not more freedom, but either anarchy, when the state can no longer enforce its own laws, or tyranny, when a strongman takes over.

The ancient city-state protected its citizens not only from hostile neighbors, but also from time. The Greek polis and the Roman res publica were “a guarantee against the futility of individual life, the space protected against this futility and reserved for the relative permanence, if not immortality, of mortals,” writes Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. “In other words, men’s life together in the form of the polis seemed to assure that the most futile of human activities, action and speech, and the least tangible and most ephemeral of man-made ‘products,’ the deeds and stories which are their outcome, would become imperishable.” The walls and laws of the city-state constituted “a kind of organized remembrance.”

“The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location,” continues Arendt, “it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” As Pericles told the Athenians, “Wherever you go, you will be a polis.” The problem with the city-state, however, was that its small size made it particularly vulnerable in war. Whole cities were razed to the ground, the vessels of their history and tradition shattered forever. Rome sought to avoid this fate by building a vast empire around its city, to guarantee survival through conquest. When its domination of the material world seemed certain, Rome became known as The Eternal City. But while the city did survive, the empire eventually crumbled.

The fall of the Roman Empire coincided with the rise Christianity. The new religion asserted the futility of trying to build anything lasting in the material world, in place of which it promised everlasting life in heaven through good deeds—of which only God is to know, as the ideal good deed is meant to be done in secret. Despite this professed lack of material ambition, the Christian Church had established an even more durable structure at the center of the collapsing empire by moving the ground of its metaphorical polis into the spiritual domain, from the Eternal City to the Kingdom of God. Wherever Christians went, they would be Christians. As Christianity spread throughout Europe, this space expanded to encompass what we now call Western civilization. Empires and kingdoms would rise and fall, the church itself would splinter, but the underlying civilization, held together by the shared thread of religion, would merely evolve.

This new refuge in the spiritual sphere did not remain secure forever. Not content with seizing material power, the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century extended the battle to the field of ideas by attempting to reshape the way people thought. “Some foreigners say our thought reform is brainwashing. I think that’s right, it is exactly brainwashing,” remarked Mao on his indoctrination program.1 Stalin’s most valued cadres were not his soldiers, generals, or even the secret police, but his writers. “There are various forms of production: artillery, locomotives, automobiles, trucks. You also produce ‘commodities,’ ‘works,’ ‘products,’” Stalin told a group of authors. “You are engineers of human souls,” he said, adding that “the production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”2

This assault on the mind was accomplished not only by means of terror, but by the destruction of intellectual tradition, of which the church naturally became one of the first victims. Not only did the totalitarian regime inculcate the people with its own ideals, but by severing the thread that linked the present to the past, it wrote its own version of history as well. Orwell grasped the full significance of this strategy, distilling it into the totalitarian slogan in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” Whereas tradition seeks to preserve, ideology seeks to rewrite. The problem for ideology, however, is that by undermining the foundation for remembrance, it likewise ensures its own destruction, for when a totalitarian regime inevitably falls, its own worldview is wholly erased by whatever replaces it. If the polis acted as a kind of organized remembrance, the ideologies of the 20th century result in a kind of organized oblivion.

“With the loss of tradition we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast realms of the past,” writes Arendt in Tradition and the Modern Age. “We are in danger of forgetting, and such an oblivion—quite apart from the contents that could be lost—would mean that, humanely speaking, we would deprive ourselves of one dimension, the dimension of depth in human existence.” Tradition is not the past, it is a means of structuring and keeping alive civilizational memory beyond a single human lifespan. It is like a thread that holds the beads of civilization—its beliefs, ideas and art—by preserving their context through time. Cut the thread, and one by one the beads slip off and become meaningless. The past will still exist, but it will exist as a mere set of facts and artifacts, interpreted backwards, not as your past, which it would be if you were a carrier of tradition.

Is the existence of this space for remembrance possible today? Two things stand in the way.

First is our tendency to look at the past through the lens of the present, rather than the present through the lens of the past. The unprecedented scientific advances of the last century make it easy feel intellectually superior to our ancestors, but even though we undoubtedly possess vastly more knowledge, can we really say the same about wisdom? In any case, it is not necessary to limit yourself to one perspective. Indeed, the only way to gain a clearer understanding of a time is to step outside of it, which means both, to look at the past from the vantage point of the present and to look at the present while immersed in the worldview of the past. As Nietzsche wrote: “There is only a seeing from a perspective, only a ‘knowing’ from a perspective, and the more emotions we express over a thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we train on the same thing, the more complete will be our ‘idea’ of that thing, our ‘objectivity.’”3

Second, the value of tradition itself is challenged by its being placed on a dichotomy between tradition and progress. In politics, this dichotomy is presented as the difference between the right, who are said to defend “traditional values,” and the left, who are said to promote “progress.” The pitting of tradition against progress frames it as a set of backward beliefs that get in the way of the improvement of society. Besides devaluing tradition, this perspective encourages people to tear down Chesterton’s fences—institutions or laws whose purpose is not immediately clear to a new generation of reformers—without thinking through why they might have been created in the first place.

For this space for remembrance to exist, we must both, understand the importance of tradition, and be part of a community that shares the same values. Shared values without tradition lack remembrance, tradition without shared values is superficial ceremony. The value of this space goes both ways: not only do you gain a “dimension of depth in human existence” by expanding your consciousness to include the thought patterns of the past, but some shard of your own existence—your actions and your ideas—can potentially be preserved in time. In Greek myths, the souls of the dead entering the underworld are ferried across the river Acheron. Tradition—in the broad sense of continuing the thread of historical, intellectual and artistic capital of civilization—is a kind of resurrection, in which we ferry dead souls back into our own consciousness. “The savior will be saved,” wrote the 19th century philosopher Vladimir Solovyov in his interpretation of an old fable. The way you treat history is the way history will end up treating you.

Liberal democracy is a luxury that only the wealthiest of nations can afford. Or so it is according to Lee Kuan Yew, the architect of modern Singapore.1 This view is not a criticism or dismissal of liberal democracy—it’s a reversal of cause and effect. It is not liberal democracy that makes for prosperous societies, but prosperous societies that can afford to sustain such a system.

In The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama famously asserted that liberal democracy is the final stage of the political evolution of every state. Every state, the theory goes, eventually becomes a capitalist liberal democracy, for the simple reason that they outcompete the rest (economically and technologically, and thus also militarily). But even if we accept that there is a general movement towards liberal democracy, it does not necessarily follow that liberal democracy results in prosperous societies, rather than vice versa. Over two decades after publishing the book, Fukuyama addressed the issue of certain countries “backsliding” into authoritarianism by blaming those countries’ “failure to provide the substance of what people want from government: personal security, shared economic growth and the basic public services.”2 It seems, in other words, that countries that are not prosperous and safe have trouble staying democratic.

In 1959, the year Lee Kuan Yew became president, Singapore was a Third World city state (in the economic sense), an entrepôt with no manufacturing or financial sector to speak of. In just three decades, Lee’s aggressive pursuit of growth produced a miraculous transformation, turning Singapore into one of the most prosperous states in the world. Around 2010, its GDP per capita overtook that of Britain—its former colonial masters. More incredibly, it is now higher than that of the US. And he did it with what may be called an illiberal democracy, in which elections take place, but one party controls virtually all the seats. Additionally, while Singapore is free economically, it has historically used severe measures to eliminate crime and corruption and to remake itself into a clean, green metropolis (for example, a fine for littering goes into thousands of dollars). Ray Dalio, the founder of the biggest hedge fund in the world, uses the concept of “believability” to decide whether someone’s ideas deserve especial attention. He defines believable people as “those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished the thing in question—who have a strong track record of at least three successes—and have great explanations of their approach when probed.”3 Lee Kuan Yew is a believable man. One may disagree with his views on democracy, but it would be foolish to ignore them.

So what are his views? When he visited Gorbachev in 1990—only a year before Soviet Union’s collapse—he observed that Gorbachev “had made a fatal mistake going for glasnost (openness) before perestroika (restructuring), that Deng Xiaoping had been wiser doing it the other way around.” At a forum in Tokyo the following year, in a comment on liberal democracy, Lee explained that “a people must have reached a high level of education and economic development, must have a sizable middle class, and life must no longer be a fight for basic survival, before that society could work such a democratic political system.” At a speech in the Philippines in 1992, Lee again challenged the value of democracy (emphasis mine): “I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development. I believe what a country needs to develop is discipline more than democracy.” Lee’s unorthodox view is that democracy, particularly liberal democracy, follows prosperity, which in turn is built on discipline.

While he is not alone in this view, Western think tanks, such as the Atlantic Council, assert that the relationship goes the other way round, with democratic freedom being essential for the creation of effective institutions, which in turn make for prosperous societies. And yet, their own “Freedom and Prosperity Index” shows that while there are countries that are not wholly free (defined as “mostly free”) and prosperous (Singapore and Israel), there is not a single country that is “mostly unprosperous” (or downright unprosperous) and free.4 One way to interpret this is to say that freedom is a guarantee of prosperity. But one could also turn it around and say that poverty is a guarantee of unfreedom—and it appears to be a more certain guarantee of unfreedom than unfreedom being a guarantee of poverty.

Freedom is a good that we pursue for its own sake, but, if Lee Kuan Yew is right, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that it will also make us prosperous. More important, if prosperity is a guarantee of freedom, then failing to deliver it may lead to a state “backsliding” into unfreedom. So what does make us prosperous? Well, at least in Singapore’s case, we don’t have to guess, because Lee Kuan Yew wrote a book about it. Published in 2000, From Third World to First is Lee Kuan Yew’s own account of the Singapore miracle.

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On the 9th of August, 1965, Singapore, a tiny Southeast Asian city-state that sits on an island smaller in area than New York City, with a then population of under 2 million, was kicked out of Malaysia. The reason it was in Malaysia in the first place goes back to only four years prior, when the president of Malaya, Tunku Abdul Rahman, known as “the Tunku,” proposed putting together the scattered pieces of former British territories in the region—Malaya, Singapore, Brunei, North Borneo, and Sarawak—into a larger federation called Malaysia. At the time, Singapore’s economy was so paltry that a fifth of its GDP was supported by British military bases alone. But the British were packing their bags and planning to leave by the end of the decade. Singapore’s leaders doubted that Singapore could survive alone, so they embraced the Tunku’s idea and joined the newly formed Malaysia in 1963 (Brunei gave it a pass). But it didn’t work out. Singapore began to have fundamental disagreements with policies dictated by Kuala Lumpur. Disagreements deteriorated into strife, which exploded in 1964, when Singapore’s ethnic Chinese majority (about 3/4 of the population) openly clashed with the Malay minority (around 1/7), resulting in hundreds of casualties, of which 36 were fatal. The Tunku, seeing no way to repair the rift, advised the Malaysian Parliament to expel Singapore from Malaysia, which it promptly did.

Singapore’s location at the tip of the Malay peninsula makes Malaysia its natural hinterland. When relations broke down, the dream of a common market with its larger neighbor also fell through. Worse still, Malaysia wanted to bypass Singapore entirely by using its own ports to deal directly with its trading partners. However, Singapore did have one invaluable asset. It was situated on one of the busiest sea lanes in the world. This meant that although geographically it was part of the Malay peninsula, logistically it could attach itself to other, potentially much larger economies. Socrates famously said that he was not an Athenian, or even a Greek, but a citizen of the world.5 Spurned by Malaysia, Singapore had to look for a new hinterland on the other side of the globe in America and Europe. In a sense, it would become a city state of the world.

In 1961, in his role as economic advisor, Albert Winsemius told Lee Kuan Yew that it would be a good idea to keep the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, the British colonial officer who founded modern Singapore. Winsemius explained that investors wanted to see what the new government was going to do with the symbols of its British heritage: would it break its ties, or embrace them? “I had not looked at it that way,” writes Lee Kuan Yew, “but was quite happy to leave this monument because he was the founder of modern Singapore. If Raffles had not come here in 1819 to establish a trading post, my great grandfather would not have migrated to Singapore.” Rather than viewing the statue as an insult, a constant reminder of the country’s time under foreign rule, Lee only saw the positives, made the statue his own, and focused on the future. This mindset would prove invaluable in the building of his state and establishing rapport with foreign leaders.6

The core of Lee’s strategy for growing Singapore focused on attracting foreign capital in the form of factories, which would provide jobs for Singaporeans and revenue for the state. To begin, he had to start local and small. “We encouraged our own businesspeople who set up small factories to manufacture vegetable oils, cosmetics, mosquito coils, hair cream, joss paper, and even mothballs! And we were able to attract Hong Kong and Taiwanese investors to build factories for toys, textiles and garments.” But mothballs weren’t going to take Singapore very far. What Lee really wanted were large multinational corporations (MNCs).

Like the statue of Raffles, Lee saw MNCs constructively. Viewed negatively, MNCs exploit labor in poorly developed countries by making their employees work long, arduous hours for paltry pay. Lee instead saw them as lucrative sources of jobs, technology and revenue. He understood that high wages could not be achieved overnight, that Singaporeans would have to work hard for many years to establish themselves in the world. The truth was that there was nothing particularly special about Singapore in the 1960s besides its port, certainly nothing to make MNCs move there. Lee had to offer them something very substantial if he was going to get them to set up shop on a tiny Southeast Asian island.

This something came in two forms. First, he created “a one-stop agency” called the Economic Development Board (EDB), whose purpose was to save investors from having to deal with multiple ministries. “This agency would sort out all an investor’s requirements whether relating to land, power, water, or environmental and work safety,” writes Lee. Instead of putting up barriers with red tape, the government was going to actively simplify the process of doing business. Second, the government invested heavily into infrastructure for future factories by building industrial estates. “Our largest infrastructure development was the Jurong industrial estate, which eventually covered 9,000 acres, with roads, sewers, drainage, power, gas, and water all laid out.”

Results were far from immediate. For its first few years, Jurong remained largely empty. In fact, the future of the project seemed so bleak that people called it “Goh’s Folly,” after Goh Keng Swee, who was finance minister at the time. “In 1961, we had issued only 12 pioneer certificates (During 1963–1965, our years in Malaysia, none were issued by the central government in Kuala Lumpur) … By the end of 1970, however, we had issued 390 pioneer certificates giving investors tax-free status for up to five years, extended to 10 years for those issued after 1975. Jurong was humming with activity.” In 1968, Texas Instruments flew to Singapore to consider it for their semiconductor factory. They began production within just 50 days of deciding to go with Singapore. More big names would follow, including National Semiconductor and Hewlett-Packard.

The Singaporean government went out of their way to attract and accommodate MNCs. For example, while Hewlett-Packard were picking a site for its factory, they leased two upper floors of a six-story building. Mr. Hewlett himself had flown in a visit. There wasn’t enough electricity in the building yet for the lift, but the EDB team came up with a solution. “Rather than have [Mr. Hewlett] walk up six flights of stairs,” recalls Lee Kuan Yew, “the EDB got a gigantic cable extended from a neighboring building, and on the day of the visit the elevator worked. Hewlett-Packard invested.” Presentation was everything. Part of the reason why Singapore now has remarkably clean and green streets is that Lee wanted to impress visiting CEOs. He made sure that the road from the airport to the hotels, and from the hotels to his office was clean and lined with neat shrubs and trees. “Without a word being said, they would know that Singaporeans were competent, disciplined, and reliable.”7

In effect, the government of Singapore acted like a business, one whose customers were not consumers, but multinational corporations. In fact, officers at the EDB acted as a sales team for Singapore, contacting and visiting corporate offices on a mission to get them to invest. Like all sales, this was a numbers game. “EDB officers would sometimes call on 40 to 50 companies before getting one to visit Singapore.” It was difficult to convince the CEOs to even consider Singapore as many of the them “did not even know where Singapore was.”

Meanwhile, Lee also focused on developing the infrastructure that connected Singapore to the world: its ports and airports. The now famous Changi airport, which ranks among the best airports in the world, began its life as one of four British Royal Air Force bases. When the British left in 1971, there remained the question of what to do with their vacant bases. It was suggested that they should be reclaimed for agricultural use, as this was what was usually done in such cases. Lee Kuan Yew had other ideas. He wanted to turn Singapore into an international hub, an “oasis” in Southeast Asia, and for this he needed to transform Changi into a major commercial airport. “For an airport of that size, the building period was usually 10 years. We completed Changi Airport in six. We demolished hundreds of buildings, exhumed thousands of graves, cleared swamps, and reclaimed land from the sea. When it opened in July 1981, it was Asia’s largest airport … The airport and the pleasant 20-minute drive into the city made an excellent introduction to Singapore, the best S$1.5 billion investment we ever made.”

All the investments poured into infrastructure, and all the promotional work done by the EDB paid off. When the British left in 1971, there was no rise in unemployment. “The American electronics companies had generated so many jobs that unemployment was no longer an issue.” In 1997, just over three decades after independence, Singapore “had nearly 200 American manufacturing companies with over S$19 billion worth of investments at book value.” These were complemented by investors from Japan and Europe. Singapore had found its new hinterland in the world’s richest countries. Unemployment fell from 14% in 1965, to 1.8% in 1997. Meanwhile, GDP per capita soared from around $500 in 1965 to over $26,000 in 1997. In 2022, it was over $82,800.8

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“If I have to choose one word to explain why Singapore succeeded, it is confidence,” writes Lee Kuan Yew. “This was what made foreign investors site their factories and refineries here.” When Jiang Zemin, the future leader of the Chinese Communist Party, visited Singapore in 1980, he questioned Ng Pock Too, an EDB director, about Singapore’s formula for success. “You have not told me everything,” he pressed. “What is the secret formula?” Ng pointed to Singapore in his copy of the Business Environment Risk Index, highlighting its 1A rating. “China was not even included in the rating. Singapore was safe and favored for investments because of safe political, economic, and other factors. There was no danger of confiscation. Our workers were industrious and productive, and there were minimal strikes. Our currency was convertible.” After thinking this over, Jiang told Ng that he has figured out his magic formula—it’s a “unique knowhow to sell confidence.” Under Zemin’s leadership, China’s GDP would grow 10% per year.

But if “confidence” is the reason for Singapore’s success, what was it built upon? Lee Kuan Yew said that what a country needs to develop is not democracy, but discipline—and that is precisely what he strove to instill and maintain. Large multinational corporations could feel confident knowing that their workers wouldn’t go on strike because Lee Kuan Yew defanged the labor unions and shifted the focus from wages to productivity. Moreover, Lee rejected the idea of a welfare state in favor of personal and familial responsibility, so there was little danger of creeping taxation. Lee’s benevolent authoritarianism, which emphasized order, industriousness and cohesion, would even spill into social life, materializing in, for example, his campaign against boys having long hair (because it promoted the hippy look—the antithesis of discipline). When one official remarked that the three things that Singapore does not tolerate are “hippies, long-haired boys, and critics of multinational corporations,” he wasn’t joking.9

From the end of the Second World War right up to the 1960s, Singapore suffered persistent union strikes, with 1962 seeing well over a hundred strikes. The unions were so active in those years in part because the British colonial government tried to undermine communist influence by showing workers how they could negotiate with their employers within a capitalist system. They taught people how to organize labor unions and go on strikes—something Lee Kuan Yew himself took part in and which he came to regret. The results, Lee explains, were terrible. “For example, triple pay on public holidays had led to cleansing workers deliberately allowing garbage to accumulate before public holidays to ensure that they would have to work on these holidays.”10 Another problem was worsening unemployment. Union pressure was forcing companies to become capital-intensive. Instead of simply giving in to union demands, companies looked for ways to replace capricious humans with compliant machines.

Higher pay was a worthy goal, but rather than trying to squeeze higher wages out of employers by force, Lee thought that it was better to raise employee efficiency and productivity in order to attract more companies to Singapore. If more businesses came to Singapore, wages would rise as a result of these companies’ competing with one another for the best employees. Lee took decisive measures to test his thesis. He rolled back policies such as triple pay on holidays and put restrictions on strikes. “We made it illegal for a trade union to take strike or industrial action without a secret ballot,” writes Lee. “This stopped the practice of voting by an open show of hands where dissenters were intimidated into acquiescence.” When an especially defiant unionist by the name of K. Suppiah organized a cleansing workers’ strike, the “police arrested and charged Suppiah and 14 other leaders” with organizing an illegal strike. “At the same time, the ministry of health declared that the strikers had sacked themselves; those who wished to be reemployed could apply the next day. This coordinated firmness panicked the strikers. Ninety percent of them applied for reemployment.” Following this incident, strikes in essential services were banned altogether.

“Between July 1961 and September 1962, we had 153 strikes, a record for Singapore,” writes Lee. “In 1969, for the first time since before the war, we had no strikes or work stoppages.” The reason he could implement such tough policies was in part due to the looming fear of British withdrawal. Not only did the British presence provide political stability at a volatile time, its military bases contributed to about a fifth of Singapore’s GDP in the 1960s. The existential threat of British withdrawal made Singaporeans more open to radical changes. Lee won the trust of many trade union leaders by meeting with them personally to explain why it would be unwise to “kill the goose whose golden eggs” they needed. “These changes in employment and industrial relations laws and practices brought tangible benefits. … [I]n 1969, 52 new factories were built, creating 17,000 new jobs. In 1970, new investments added 20,000 jobs. Incomes increased.” Indeed, incomes would continue to increase. Today, Singapore’s GDP per capita is higher than that of the US.

Lee took a similarly restrained stance on welfare. “Watching the ever-increasing costs of the welfare state in Britain and Sweden, we decided to avoid this debilitating system. We noted by the 1970s that when governments undertook primary responsibility for the basic duties of the head of a family, the drive in people weakened. Welfare undermined self-reliance.” Instead, Singapore would follow what he calls the “Confucian tradition,” whereby “a man is responsible for his family—his parents, wife, and children.”

In practice, welfare took the form of a personal savings fund (called the Central Provident Fund, or CPF), to which employers and employees contribute a percentage of an employee’s salary. The CPF is more than a pension fund, it is a kind of general reservoir that can be used to cover healthcare, education and housing costs. In contrast to the shared welfare pot approach in Western countries, the CPF emphasizes personal responsibility by shifting most of welfare costs to individual savings. So rather than your taxes going into paying for everyone else’s expenses, they are used to pay for your own. Perhaps the term “personal responsibility” isn’t the quite right. What actually matters is the family, as relatives can tap into their funds to help cover each other’s costs. So somewhat paradoxically, we have a Confucian collectivist society shifting the welfare burden onto individuals and families, while individualist Western societies are shifting it onto the collective.

Today, Singapore is one of the safest countries in the world. This was achieved by means of a severe deterrent. Caning is used as punishment for both serious crimes, such as kidnapping and robbery, and ones that are not so serious—at least to Western eyes—such as vandalism and drug abuse. Offenders are stripped naked and secured to a wooden trestle, with protective padding placed over their lower back organs to limit the damage. A rattan cane about 1.2 meters in length and no more than 12.7 mm in thickness is then used to administer the earned number of “strokes.” Asiatic barbarity? Not so. The practice was established by colonialists from the civilized world. “The British used to have whipping with a cat-o’-nine-tails or rattan in Singapore. After the war, they abolished whipping but retained caning (with rattan). We found caning more effective than long prison terms and imposed it for crimes related to drugs, arms trafficking, rape, illegal entry into Singapore, and vandalizing of public property.” In addition to caning, Singapore still practices the death penalty—by hanging—for serious crimes. In reply to those who might suggest other factors for low crime rates, Lee points to the time of Japanese occupation, explaining that “punishment then was so severe that even in 1944–1945, when people did not have enough to eat, there were no burglaries and people could leave their front doors unlocked, day or night. The deterrent was effective.”

Singapore’s streets today are remarkably clean and green, but it was a very different place in the early 1960s. Taxi drivers would spit out the windows of their cars, street hawkers would clog up the roads by setting up illegal food stalls, the Singapore River was so polluted that a blind man could tell that the bus he was on was approaching it from the stench alone. “One morning in November 1964 I looked across the Padang from my office window at City Hall to see several cows grazing on the Esplanade!” Lee introduced anti-spitting campaigns, moved street hawkers to specially constructed centers “with piped water, sewers, and garbage disposal,” and cowherds were given a deadline to move their cattle off the streets, “after which all stray animals would be taken to the slaughterhouses and the meat given to welfare homes. … Very quickly, all cattle and goats were back in the sheds.”

Cleaning up the Singapore River, however, was a monumental task. Many people questioned the very idea of doing it, saying that the Singapore River has “always been filthy; part of Singapore heritage!” A CEO of a ministry board joked that “It will be a lot cheaper for you to buy fish and put them in the river every week.” A new underground sewage system was constructed, 3,000 people from backyard and cottage industries were resettled, 5,000 street vendors moved into newly designed centers, pig rearing was phased out on 8,000 farms, and many fish ponds were closed. “Clean rivers made possible a different quality of life … We bought sand from Indonesia to lay a beach along the banks of the Kallang Basin where people sunbathe and water ski today. Waterside high-rise condominiums have taken over from unsightly small shipyards. For those who remember the Singapore River when it was a sewer, it is a dream to walk along the banks.”

It rains in Singapore almost every day. One might think that it would result in lush, green grass, but the opposite is actually the case. The rains wash away the topsoil, leaving few nutrients for the grass. Singapore’s grass is again the result of diligent effort. “To have grass green and lush, we had to apply fertilizers regularly, preferably compost, which would not be so easily washed away, and lime, because our soil was too acidic.” Very soon, the “grass became greener.” At first, sport fields were treated, and then gradually “the whole city greened up.” Even the industrial estates were greened, as factories “had to landscape their grounds and plant trees before they could commence operations.” The greening of Singapore was so successful that Singapore’s neighbors, Malaysia and Indonesia, were inspired to do the same. “Our neighbors have tried to out-green and out-bloom each other,” writes Lee. “Greening is the most cost-effective project I have launched.”

4

The simple explanation for Singapore’s growth thus has two parts. The first part involved pouring money into infrastructure to create industrial estates, eliminating bureaucracy and creating an economic board that not only helped companies rapidly set up shop, but would aggressively market Singapore to Western MNCs—particularly ones from America. The second part was to enforce discipline across all spheres of Singapore’s life, from eliminating union strikes to cleaning up its streets. These two things combined made Singapore attractive as a manufacturing base. It’s worth remembering that Singapore was a poor Third World country when Lee took over. Granted, its location on one of the busiest sea lanes in the world is a major asset, but Singaporeans still had to work hard to make the most of it. After all, its closest neighbors, who sit upon the same lane, did not experience the same rate of growth.

None of the steps Lee Kuan Yew took focused on building a democracy. If anything, he steered Singapore in the opposite direction, creating a kind of pseudo-democracy, which held elections but had only one viable party—the People’s Action Party (PAP). The one major threat, the communist Barisan Sosialis party, was effectively crushed as many of its leaders were arrested under the charge of foreign subversion. While he does not outright say it, you get a feeling that Lee is far from convinced in the value of opposition parties. In the 1970s, “people had full confidence in the PAP leadership and were not interested in having an opposition,” he writes. Keeping the communists out doesn’t appear to be the only reason for Lee’s distrust of opposition. He says that a decade later, in the mid-1980s, younger voters “wanted an opposition to check the PAP, to pressure the government for more concessions and to soften hard policies. It was bound to lead to less than adequate people getting elected, as indeed happened.”

Besides arresting the communists, the PAP set up a network of organizations to sway the public in their favor. Lee suggests that the simple method of walking around different areas to gauge support and decide where to focus your efforts is not effective. “I learned that while overall sentiment and mood do matter, the crucial factors are institutional and organizational networks to muster support.” The party set up the People’s Association, which provided various self-improvement classes in over a hundred centers, from literacy classes to courses on how to repair automobiles and television sets. The PAP also set up what Lee calls “semi-government institutions” called management committees and citizens’ consultative committees. These were funded by PAP to organize various recreational and educational activities, and manage local improvement projects. As these organizations “mobilized” community elders, they in turn would exert influence on the local voters to get them to vote for the PAP. But there were also more dubious tactics. For example, in 1991 the PAP decreed that “priority for upgrading of public housing in a constituency would be accord with the strength of voter support for the PAP in that constituency.”

The result was that the PAP won every single election since 1959. Some elections were won totally, as in the PAP won all the seats. In 1972, for example, all 57 out of 57 contested seats were taken by PAP with over 70% of the vote going the party’s way. The same was repeated in 1976 and 1980. In 1984 they finally lost 2 seats. Though the PAP continued to lose some seats over the years, it has retained its vast majority. In the 2020 election, it won 83 out of the 93 contested seats.

This reinterpretation of democracy, which dismisses the function of parliamentary opposition, combined with “nanny state” policies and their severe enforcement (for example, in 1992 Singapore banned all chewing gum after vandals stuck some on train sensor doors), has continued to provoke constant criticism and ridicule from the West. Singapore’s material success makes it impossible to criticize its leaders from a position of incompetence, so the attacks focus on the strictness of its rules. “To show their disapproval,” writes Lee, “the American press describes Singapore as ‘antiseptically clean.’ A Singapore that is efficient is called ‘soullessly efficient.’” A New York Times headline contrasted a “clean and mean” Singapore with a “filthy and free” Taiwan. Singapore’s greatest sin, however, is that it shows that material prosperity likely has less to do with liberal democracy, and a bit more to do with market economies and competent leadership.

Unfortunately, this also makes it difficult to imitate, because its success is not so much based on a set of policies, but on a leadership capable of identifying what problems to focus on and how to go about solving them in the context of their country’s capabilities. Copying Singapore’s policies on a superficial level won’t work. Sri Lanka, another former British colony, did just that and failed. “They announced that they would adopt the Singapore-style Area Licensing Scheme to reduce traffic entering the city, but it did not work,” writes Lee. “They started a housing program in 1982 based on ours, but there was no adequate financing. They set up a free trade zone only slightly smaller than the area of Singapore that might have taken off but for the Tamil Tigers whose terrorist tactics scared off investors.” Against Lee’s advice, they even launched an airline, taking away valuable resources from the things Sri Lanka really needed to improve: agriculture, housing, industrial promotion and development. “Faced with a five-fold expansion of capacity, negative cash flow, lack of trained staff, unreliable services, and insufficient passengers, it was bound to fail. And it did.”

That said, some attempts to copy Singapore were more successful. For example, Indonesia has an island called Batam 20 kilometers south of Singapore, about two-thirds its size. In 1976, Suharto asked Lee to help turn Batam into a second Singapore. Lee explained that in order to attract investors to Batam, Indonesia had to build out proper infrastructure on the island, to cut red tape, and “to allow 100 percent foreign equity ownership of investments in Batam.” Suharto hesitated and ended up only allowing full foreign equity ownership for purely export businesses for the first five years, after which Indonesia would take its share. This compromise made Batam less attractive. Suharto also did not understand that Lee could not simply order Singaporean companies to invest in Batam, that he had to create the right conditions for the companies to come on their own. Fortunately for Indonesia, manufacturing in Singapore was growing ever more expensive, motivating manufacturers to seek alternatives. Breakthrough came when the Singapore Technologies Industrial Corporation “formed a joint venture with an Indonesian group to develop a 500-hectare industrial park in Batam and actively promoted it among MNCs as well as [Singapore’s] own industrialists. It turned out a success. By November 1999, the park had generated US$1.5 billion investments, employing over 74,000 Indonesians.”

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“The rare strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it,” says the poet Syme in G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, arguing against an anarchist’s assertion that a well-functioning railway system is predictable and boring. “We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street, or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.”

When Singapore was kicked out of Malaysia in 1965, followed by the departure of the British a few years later, it would have been the gross, obvious thing for Singapore to stagnate or deteriorate. The remarkable, miraculous thing was for it to become a prosperous, First World state in just three decades. “We cannot afford to forget,” warns Lee Kuan Yew, “that public order, personal security, economic and social progress, and prosperity are not the natural order of things, that they depend on ceaseless effort and attention from an honest and effective government.” Lee’s critics attack his authoritarian excesses, but it is not at all a certainty that Singapore would have been freer had he focused less on growth and more on freedom. A poorer Singapore would have left the door open for communist takeover, which would have been the end of both the economy and individual freedoms.

Liberal democracy as we know it today is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the West did not grow rich under the freedoms it now enjoys. Even as late as the second half of the 19th century, democracy was not viewed as a panacea. For example, when Disraeli was pushing for fairer representation of the working classes in Britain in the 1860s, he mollified his critics by saying that of course “votes should be weighed not counted,” and moreover, that he was by no means trying to turn Britain into a democracy, which, he sincerely hoped “will never be the fate of this country to live under.”11 In most Western democracies, women couldn’t even vote until the 20th century, and before that, legibility to vote among the male population was often limited by property requirements. Liberal democracy is not the trunk of the tree of Western civilization, it is the fruit of a most prosperous time in its history.

It’s also worth noting that democracy is by no means synonymous with freedom. Democracy implies representation, but a tyranny of the majority can be just as tyrannical as a tyranny of one, and perhaps even more so because, as Tocqueville points out, whereas a despot may have physical control over you, “the majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy.”12 In other words, a tyrant doesn’t care about your opinions unless they undermine his authority, but the mob will get their pitchforks out to challenge every controversial opinion. Moreover, a tyrant can seize power through a democratic system just as well by an accident of birth. Democracy may act as a limiting mechanism to stop power being gathered in one place, but it is not enough to divide power to ensure freedom. Freedom requires that the government not only restrains itself from interfering in people’s lives, but that it also has enough power to protect its citizens against each other, against nature, and against other states. The freedoms afforded by a state that does not interfere in people’s lives are worthless if the state cannot also protect those freedoms from forces other than itself.

The idea that liberal democracy is supported and sustained by prosperity has implications for the West, because it suggests that a breakdown in the functioning of the state will threaten not only the wellbeing of its citizens, but their political freedom as well. A serious enough economic disaster can create the conditions for a radical transformation, plunging a country straight from a Weimar Republic into a Nazi Germany.

That democracy degenerates into tyranny is not a new idea. Writing around 375 BC about the origins of tyranny in the Republic, Plato observed that “an excessive desire for liberty at the expense of everything else is what undermines democracy and leads to the demand for tyranny.” He explains that the mind of the democratic character becomes so sensitive to any form of restraint that all authority becomes intolerable, so that eventually the “father and son … change places,” with the son “neither respecting nor fearing his parents, in order to assert what he calls his independence,” the “teacher fears and panders to his pupils, who in turn despise their teachers,” and the elders “try to avoid the reputation of being disagreeable or strict by aping the young.” Plato then suggests how the interaction between three groups (politicians, businessmen and the masses) can destabilize democracy. First, the politicians compete for favor with the masses by seeking to distribute the businessmen’s wealth (after taking their share). The businessmen in turn try to defend themselves, only to be accused of being “reactionaries and oligarchs.” “There follow impeachments and trials in which the two parties bring each other to court.” To resolve the struggle, a popular leader is put forward. Once in power, however, he uses violence against his opponents in fear of being dethroned. And, once blood has been spilled, the violence only intensifies, for, as the story goes, “the man who tastes a single piece of human flesh, mixed in with the rest of the sacrifice, is fated to become a wolf.”13

If Lee Kuan Yew is right and if our liberal democracy is indeed a luxury, then we should remember that it is a luxury that demands constant tribute in the form of discipline, that is, of making a constant effort to organize and manage the workings of the state according to what actually works—and not according to how we wish things worked—because when the payment stops, we may find ourselves possessed neither of prosperity, nor freedom.

It may be tempting to think that you could survive a totalitarian regime by complying with its demands. I’m afraid it won’t work. It won’t work because this course of action rests on a mistaken assumption that what totalitarianism wants is compliance. But totalitarianism doesn’t want you to comply. Totalitarianism wants to break down your will to the point where compliance is no longer necessary, because you no longer have the capacity to resist. Whereas your run-of-the-mill tyrant might want to coerce the people into supporting him—or at least into not actively trying to dethrone him—a totalitarian ruler wants to eliminate free thought altogether and transform the people into an unthinking machine.

Totalitarianism begins the process by dividing the people into us and them, comrades and enemies, allies and foes. This is done by means of ideology. An ideology is, in the words of Hannah Arendt, a kind of key to history. What she means by this is that ideology is a series of assumptions that explain the causes and direction of the process of history (and indeed the very assumption that history itself is a process that is going somewhere). For example, the communists explain history as a struggle between the working class and the capitalists. The Nazis explained it as a struggle between races. Once you accept the initial assumptions, everything else, every single event or process, can be explained through them, interpreted through them. An ideology thus acts as a kind of straight-jacket, restraining the thoughts of those who follow it by binding everything to a single cause and a single explanation. But for the naïve, it is a revelation. Their new “key” gives them an inflated sense of understanding, makes them think that they are possessed of deep insights into the hidden workings of the world—insights to which the uninitiated masses are blind.

Next, the party drives a wedge between the us and the them. Dostoevsky’s novel Demons was inspired by such a wedge. In 1869, a radical by the name of Sergey Nechayev incited his group of underground revolutionaries to murder one of their own comrades. Just like a gang initiation—which is exactly what it was—the loyalty of the members of his secret group was sealed by the spilling of blood. Those with only a tentative interest in an ideology can still change their minds and leave, but once they are coerced into committing a crime, parting ways no longer becomes an option. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented this on a grand scale. When, in 1927, the CCP began building its own armies and taking territory, the Party decreed that to get the peasants “to join the revolution, there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.” When the following year an army led by Zhu De was driven out of the territories it had taken (and razed), “thousands of civilians went with him.” They were “the families of the activists who had done the burning and killing,” and who thus “had nowhere else to go.”

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the citizens of Orwell’s fictional dystopia have to make their way daily to what is known as a “Two Minutes Hate” session. In these sessions, the participants are made to express their hate and fury by screaming and shouting at a film of their ideological enemy. Well, the CCP had their own “Two Minutes Hate” called dou di-zhou—“struggle against the landlords”—which lasted more than two minutes and involved real “enemies,” whose crime was not that they were necessarily landlords, but that they were better off than the rest. “Those designated as targets were made to stand facing a large crowd, and people were psyched up and organized to come forward and pour out their grievances against them … Village militants and thugs would then inflict physical abuse, which could range from making the victims kneel on broken tiles on their bare knees, to hanging them up by their wrists or feet, or to beating them, sometimes to death, often with farm implements.”

Similar sessions were also used to motivate new army recruits. When the CCP seized Manchuria, it began the process of transforming the defeated 200,000-strong army of the Manchukuo puppet regime into their own Red Army. After purging those who showed defiance, the rest of the soldiers were taken to “speak bitterness” rallies, where they were made to publicly vent their hate at the landlords and the rich who had mistreated them in the past. The rallies would get so intense that one soldier even passed out from his rage. “People who went through the process testify to its effectiveness,” writes Jung Chang, “even though they find this hard to believe when they reflect in a calmer state of mind.” On this point Orwell made an especially keen observation (emphasis mine): “The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretence was always unnecessary.”

Next comes the process of atomization—the process of breaking down relationships between people and isolating them. Here Mao managed to surpass both Stalin and Hitler. Whereas a Stalin would send people off to the Gulag, Mao turned his very institutions into a kind of Gulag. At the end of the Long March, Mao made the small provincial town of Yenan in Shaanxi province into his base of operations. A successful propaganda campaign led to an inflow of young, idealistic recruits. Once they were in Yenan, however, they were forbidden from leaving. Worse, they all had to undergo “screening” to prove they weren’t Nationalist spies, in which the recruits would take turns as interrogators and prisoners, torturing others and being tortured themselves. “Turning ordinary organizations into virtual prisons was a significant innovation of Mao’s … he converted people’s colleagues into their jailers, with former colleagues, prisoners and jailers living in the same premises. In this way, Mao not only drove a massive wedge between people working and living side by side, he greatly enlarged the number of people directly involved in repression.”

In Orwell’s fictional dystopia, the protagonist’s room is under constant surveillance, but, due to its unusual geometry, there is an alcove on the side with a little desk, which the camera of the telescreen cannot wholly see. Hiding himself in the alcove, the protagonist begins to write a kind of diary entry, trying to gather his shattered thoughts into something coherent. This process helps him think. Unfortunately, such luxury was impossible in Mao’s China due to something called “thought examinations,” which turned the process of writing to cultivate thought into the process of writing to destroy it. This particularly malign exercise involved the writing down of one’s every sin against the Party—not just the things you did, not just the things you’ve said, but the things you’ve thought. “Get everybody to write their thought examination,” decreed Mao, “and write three times, five times, again and again … Tell everyone to spill out every single thing they have ever harbored that is not so good for the Party.”

But your own sins were not enough—you were also expected to write down what other people said that was “not so good for the Party,” which the CCP called “small broadcasts.” The confessions were naturally reviewed so they could not be avoided, and, because the criteria of “not so good” was so vague, people wrote more to be on the safe side. “Through forcing people to report ‘small broadcasts,’ Mao succeeded to a very large extent in getting people to inform on each other,” writes Jung Chang. “He thus broke trust between people, and scared them off exchanging views not just at the time in Yenan, but in the future too. By suppressing ‘small broadcasts,’ he also plugged the only unofficial source of information, in a context where he completely controlled all other channels … Information starvation gradually induced brain death.”

The assault on free thought was relentless. “All forms of relaxation, like singing and dancing, were stopped.” Free time was filled up with exhausting “indoctrination meetings.” During the civil war, “Children were used as sentries, and formed into harassment squads, called ‘humiliation teams,’ to hound people into joining the army.” After the Nationalists were defeated, a “nationwide system of concierges called Order-Keeping Committees was established in every factory, village and street,” which “kept an eye on everybody, not just political suspects and petty criminals.” It became easier not only to keep quiet, but to stop thinking altogether.

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The term “political correctness” first appeared in the Soviet Union as a way to criticize and denounce anyone straying from the so-called “party line.” It was adopted by Mao as a tool to condemn whole groups of people, along with other similarly loose terms like kulaks (a Russian word meaning a rich peasant who owned land), “anti-Bolsheviks” (AB) and “counter-revolutionaries.” The words were nothing more than a way to mark political opponents as enemies, either to scare them into siding with you, or, if their support was impossible or unnecessary, to initiate a purge. Thus, for example, when in 1930 Mao stole the Red Army unit at Jiangxi, he crushed those who resisted the takeover by condemning and consequently purging the lot as enemies of the Party: “The entire Party [there] is under the leadership of kulaks … filled with AB … Without a thorough purge of the kulak leaders and of AB … there is no way the Party can be saved.” Or, when, at the end of the Long March, Mao approached the Red base ran by a man called Liu Chih-tan, he remarked that the leadership there “does not seem to be correct.” Party HQ initiated a purge, Chih-tan and his men were removed from command, and Mao took over.

Unfortunately, mute compliance was not enough to save you from being purged. The curious thing about totalitarian purges is that they are based on quotas. In this way, they can be thought of as a continuation of the methods of coercion listed above. The point is not just to eliminate actual enemies of the regime—though that is one of the goals—but to inflict psychological damage. In fact, actual spies were arrested in secret and “taken care of without a fuss,” meaning a “speedy, secret and noiseless execution.” The innocent, on the other hand, would be publicly denounced, tortured and killed to produce maximum terror. In 1955, Mao even included a purge quota as part of his “Five-Year Plan”: “We must arrest 1.5 million counter-revolutionaries in five years … I am all for more arrests … Our emphasis is: arrest in a big way, a giant way …” Two years later, talking about one province, Mao cheerfully announced that Hunan “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000, and killed 1,000. The other provinces did the same.”

Mao’s final triumph was the corruption and destruction of the education system and culture. In 1966, Mao started a decade-long terror campaign called the Cultural Revolution. The first phase turned students at schools and universities into political activists by forming them into paramilitary units known as the Red Guards. “These students were told to condemn their teachers and those in charge of education for poisoning their heads with ‘bourgeois ideas’—and for persecuting them with exams, which henceforth were abolished.” Many were eager to take part. This was their first chance to participate in politics in a country where every form of political action was forbidden. Being able to form groups and take public action allowed them to experience the thrill of real power. On 13 June 1966, Mao suspended schooling. “Violence broke out within days. On 18 June, scores of teachers and cadres at Peking University were dragged in front of crowds and manhandled, their faces blackened, and dunces’ hats put on their heads … Similar episodes happened all over China, producing a cascade of suicides.”

“Stuff ‘human feelings’!” said one Red Guard poster. “We will strike you to the ground and trample you!” said another. The most impressionable and most energetic group of people in the country were mobilized and incited to commit atrocities. The predictability of the results did not make them any less shocking. “On 5 August, in a Peking girls’ school packed with high officials’ children … the first known death by schoolchildren by torture took place. The headmistress, a fifty-year-old mother of four, was kicked and trampled by the girls, and boiling water was poured over her.” After further torture involving bricks, belts and wooden sticks studded with nails, she collapsed and died. The Red Guards were reported to the authorities. Instead of being arrested, they were encouraged to carry on.

Culture followed. “On 18 August, Mao stood next to Lin Biao on Tiananmen while Lin called on Red Guards throughout the country to ‘smash … old culture.’ The youngsters first went for objects like traditional shop signs and street names, which they attacked with hammers, and renamed.” The mob then swarmed onto the Peking Writers’ Association, where the they used belts to attack the country’s best known writers. Mao explicitly forbid the army and the police from trying to stop the violence, ordering that they must “absolutely not intervene.” Names and addresses of writers and artists were given to the Red Guards, who proceeded to ransack their homes, destroying books, paintings and musical instruments, and beating up their owners in the process.

Violence spread like wildfire across the whole of China. Thousands of monuments were destroyed, 4,922 in Peking alone. It was no longer just the intellectuals who had to worry about being raided, but the public at large. The terrorized population responded by doing the work of the censors themselves. “Fearing that the Red Guards might burst in and torture them if ‘culture’ was found in their possession, frightened citizens burned their own books or sold them as scrap paper, and destroyed their own art objects.”

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,” observed Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.” The biggest casualty of totalitarian terror is not the unprecedented amount of physical destruction, but the even greater amount of psychological devastation. By crippling and corrupting the minds and spirits of the people, it maims society on a civilizational level. Once their task was done, the violent Red Guards were no longer useful. In 1967, the army was called in to put an end to the chaos, and the Red Guards were mercilessly crushed. The youth who thought that they were burning down the relics of their oppressors did not realize until it was too late that they themselves were the fuel that was being burned.

An eternal, black night reigned over the land. Rotten fogs rose over the marshy earth and lingered in the air. People were born, grew up, loved and died in the damp darkness.

But at times, the breath of the wind would drive away the earth’s heavy vapors. When this happened, bright stars in the distant sky would gaze upon the people. There would be universal celebrations. The people, who had been sitting by themselves in their dark, coffin-like dwellings, would gather in the square and sing hymns to the sky. Fathers pointed out the stars to their children and taught them that the life and happiness of a human being consists in striving towards them. Young men and women greedily peered at the the sky and flew towards it with their souls, away from the darkness crushing the earth. The priests prayed to the stars. The poets sang their praises. The scientists studied the paths of the stars, their number and size, and they made a great discovery: it turned out that the stars are slowly but constantly approaching the earth. Ten thousand years ago—according to wholly reliable sources—it was difficult to make out a smile on a child’s face from one and half steps away. Now it was easily doable by anyone from a whole three steps. There wasn’t any doubt that in a few million years the sky will shine with bright lights, and the kingdom of eternally radiant light will come on earth. Everyone waited patiently for the blessed time and died hoping for it.

This was what people’s life was like for many years, quiet and calm, and it was kept warm by a meek faith in the distant stars.

One day the stars in the sky were burning especially brightly. The people crowded in the square and in mute reverence ascended in soul towards the eternal light.

Suddenly, a voice was heard from the crowd:

“Brothers! How light and wonderful it is up there in the heavenly plains! And down here it is so damp and dark! My soul languishes, it has no life and will in the eternal darkness. What good is it that in a million years the lives of our distant descendants will be illuminated by an everlasting light? It’s us, it’s us who need this light. We need it more than air and food, more than our mother and our beloved. Who knows, maybe there’s a path to the stars. Maybe we have the strength to tear them from the sky and hoist them here, among us, to the joy of the whole world. So let’s go look for the path, let’s find the light for life!”

The gathering was silent. In whispers, people asked each other:

“Who is that?”

“That’s Adeil, a reckless and rebellious youth.”

Again there was silence. And the old Tsur, the teacher of the clever ones, the light of science, bean to speak:

“Dear young man! All of us understand your yearning. Which one of us hasn’t experienced it? But it is impossible for a human being to tear a star from the sky. Deep chasms and abysses lie at land’s end. Beyond them lie sheer cliffs. And there is no way to get past them to the stars. So say experience and wisdom.”

And Adeil replied:

“It is not you, wise men, whom I am addressing. Your experience clouds your eyes, and your wisdom blinds you. I am appealing to you, young and brave of heart, to you who haven’t yet been crushed by the decrepit, old wisdom!”

And he waited for an answer.

Some said:

“We’d love to go. But we are light and joy in the eyes of our parents and we cannot make them sad.”

Others said:

“We’d love to go. But we have only just began building our homes, and we need to finish them.”

The third said:

“Hello Adeil! We are going with you!”

And many young men and women rose. And they went after Adeil. They went into the dark, menacing distance. And they were swallowed by darkness.

A long time had passed.

Of the departed there was no news. Mothers mourned their recklessly perished children, and life returned to normal. Again people were born, grew up, loved and died in the damp darkness, with the quiet hope that in thousands of centuries light will descend to earth.

But then one day, above land’s end, the sky was faintly illuminated by a flickering light. People crowded in the square and kept asking:

“What is that?”

The sky was growing lighter by the hour. Cyan rays slipped across the fogs, pierced the clouds and filled the heavenly plains with a broad light. The gloomy clouds curled up in fright, pushing one another, and fled into the distance. The triumphant rays spilled ever brighter over the sky. And a trembling of unprecedented joy rushed across the earth.

The old priest Satzoi was gazing fixedly into the distance. And he said pensively:

“Such light can only come from an eternal heavenly star.”

And Tsur, the teacher of the clever ones, the light of science, objected:

“But how could a star come down to earth? There is no path for us to the stars, and no path for the stars to us.”

But the sky kept growing lighter and lighter. And suddenly, a blindingly bright dot flashed over land’s end.

“A star! A star is coming!”

And, filled with a turbulent joy, the people rushed towards it.

Bright as day, its rays dispersed the rotten fogs before it. Torn, ruffled fogs darted about, clinging down to the earth. And the rays kept striking them, ripping them into shreds and driving them into the ground. The earth’s expanse was illuminated and cleansed. People saw how broad the expanse was, how much free space there was on earth and how many brothers were living all around them.

And, filled with a turbulent joy, they rushed towards the light.

Adeil was walking softly along the road, holding by a ray the star he had torn from the heavens. He was alone.

They asked him:

“Where are the others?”

He replied in a broken voice:

“All perished. They were paving the path to the heavens through chasms and abysses. And they died the death of the brave.”

The jubilant crowds surrounded the star-bearer. Girls showered him with flowers. Cries of rapture thundered:

“Glory to Adeil! Glory to the bringer of light!”

He entered the city and stopped in the square, and in his hand he held the shining star up high. And jubilation spread throughout the city.

Days passed.

The star continued shining brightly in Adeil’s raised hand. But for a while now there was no jubilation in the city. People walked around irate and gloomy, with downcast eyes, trying not to look at one another. Whenever they had to pass through the square, at the sight of Adeil a dark enmity would ignite in their eyes. There was no sound of song. No sound of prayer. In place of the rotten fogs driven away by the star, an invisible mist of black, sullen spite was thickening above the city. It was thickening, growing and becoming more intense. And its oppression made life impossible.

And then one day a screaming man ran into the square. His eyes were aflame, his face was distorted by an anger that was tearing his soul apart. In a frenzy of rage he cried out: “Down with the star! Down with the cursed star-bearer!… Brothers, are not all our souls screaming with my lips: down with the star, down with the light—it has deprived us of life and joy! We lived calmly in the darkness, we loved our nice dwellings, our quiet life. And look what happened now. The light has come—and there’s no joy in anything. Our houses are clusters of ugly, dirty masses. The leaves of trees are pale and slimy, like the skin on a frog’s belly. Take a look at the ground—it’s all covered in bloodied mud. Where did this blood come from? Who knows… but it sticks to your hands, its smell haunts us when we eat and sleep, it poisons and enfeebles our humble prayers to the stars. And there is nowhere to hide from this brazen, all-pervading light! It breaks into our houses, and we see that they’re all covered in dirt; the dirt has eaten into the walls, covered the windows and is growing in stinking piles in the corners. We cannot even kiss our beloved: the light of Adeil’s star has made them more repulsive than maggots; their eyes are pale, like woodlice, their soft bodies are musty and covered with stains. We can’t even look at each other anymore—it’s not a human being we see before us, but a mockery of a human being… Every day the relentless light illuminates our every secret step, our every hidden movement. It’s impossible to live! Down with the star-bearer, let the light perish!”

And others join in:

“Down with it! Long live the darkness! It’s only sorrow and damnation that brings the light of the stars to the people… Death to the star-bearer!”

And a menacing excitement took over the crowd. And it tried to intoxicate itself with a frenzied roar, to stifle the horror of its great blasphemy against the light. And it moved towards Adeil.

But the star shone deathly bright in the hand of the star-bearer, and the people could not approach him.

“Brothers, stop!” suddenly sounded the voice of the old priest Satzoi. “You are taking a heavy sin upon your souls by cursing the light. What do we pray to, what do we live by if not the light? But you too, my son,” he turned to Adeil, “you too have committed no lesser sin by bringing the star down to earth. True, the great Brahma said: “Blessed is the one who strives towards the stars.” But the people, bold in their wisdom, misunderstood the word of the World-Honored One. The students of his students have interpreted the true meaning of the All-Wise One’s enigmatic words: the human being should strive towards the stars only in thought, but on earth the darkness is as sacred as the light is in the heavens. And it is this truth that you have held in contempt by your exalted mind. Repent, my son, release the star, and let the former peace reign on earth!!”

Adeil sneered.

“And you think that if I release it, peace on earth hasn’t already perished forever?”

And with horror the people sensed that what Adeil said was true, that the former peace will never return.

Then the old Tsur came forward, the teacher of the clever ones, the light of science.

“You have acted recklessly, Adeil, and you yourself can now see the fruits of your recklessness. According to the laws of nature, life develops slowly. Slowly, too, do the distant stars draw nearer in life. With their gradual approach, life is also gradually reformed. But you didn’t want to wait. At your own peril you have torn a star from the heavens and with its bright light illuminated life. And what happened? Here it is all around us—dirty, pitiful and hideous. But didn’t we already know that this is what it’s like? Was this really the goal? It’s no great wisdom to tear a star from the heavens and illuminate the ugliness of the earth. No, take up the black, arduous work of transforming life. Then you will see just what it takes to cleanse it of the dirt that had been accumulating for centuries, whether a whole sea of radiant light would be enough to wash this dirt away. How much childish naïveté there is in this! How much misunderstanding of the conditions and laws of life! And so, instead of joy you have brought sorrow to the earth, instead of peace—war. And you could have been, and could still be useful to life: break the star, take but a shard of it—and this shard will illuminate life just enough to let you to work on it fruitfully and sensibly.”

And Adeil replied:

“You’re right Tsur! The star did not bring joy here, but sorrow, not peace, but war. I did not expect this when I climbed sheer cliffs towards the stars, when all around me my comrades were slipping and falling into the abyss… I thought that at least one of us would reach the goal and bring a star down to earth. And in its bright light a bright life would come to earth. But when I stood in the square, when I saw your lives in the light of the heavenly star, I realized that my dreams were foolish. I understood that you need the light only in an unattainable heavens, so that you could bow before it in the solemn minutes of your lives. But what you value most on earth is darkness, so that you can hide from each other and, most of all, so that you can be pleased with yourselves, with your dark, mold-eaten lives. But I have also felt, more than before, that it is impossible to live such a life. It cries out incessantly to the heavens with every drop of its bloody dirt, with every stain of its damp mold… However, I can put your mind at rest: my star does not have long left to shine. There, in the distant heavens, stars hang and shine on their own. But a star torn from the heavens and taken down to earth can only shine by feeding on the blood of its bearer. I feel my life flowing up my body towards the star and, like a candle, burning up in it. Very soon the whole of my life will be consumed. And it is impossible to pass the star to anyone else: it is extinguished together with the life of its bearer, and everyone must obtain this star anew. And it is you who I am addressing, the brave and honest of heart. Having discovered the light, you will not want to live in the darkness again. Set off on the long journey and bring new stars here. The path is long and arduous, but still it will be easier for you than for us, the first to perish on it. The paths have been laid, the ways have been marked. And you will return with the stars, and their light will never again run out on earth. Their inextinguishable light will make life as it is at present impossible. The marshes will dry up. The black fogs will disappear. The trees will turn bright green. And those who are now throwing themselves in a frenzy at the star, whether they want to or not, will take up the work of transforming life. After all, the reason they are angry is that they feel that the light makes it impossible for them to live as they do now. And life will become great and pure. And it will be beautiful in the radiant light of the stars being nourished by your blood. And when the starry sky finally descends and illuminates life, it will find a people worthy of its light. And then our blood will no longer be needed to nourish this eternal, everlasting light…”

Adeil’s voice broke off. The last drops of blood departed from his pale face. The star-bearer’s knees buckled and he fell. And the star fell with him. It fell, hissed in the bloody dirt, and died.

Black darkness rushed in from every side and closed over the extinguished star. Rejuvenated fogs rose from the ground and began swirling in the air. And through them shone the timid little lights of the distant, feeble and harmless stars in the distant sky.

Years passed.

As before, people were born, grew up, loved and died in the damp darkness. As before, life seemed peaceful and calm. But a deep anxiety and dissatisfaction undermined it in the darkness. People tried but could not forget that which the bright star had illuminated with its fleeting light.

The former quiet joys were poisoned. Deceit permeated everything. People would pray reverently to a distant star and begin to think: “Perhaps there will be another crazy one and he will bring a star here, to us?” And their tongue would waver, and the reverent prayer would be replaced by a cowardly trembling. A father would teach his son that human happiness consisted in the striving towards the stars. And suddenly a thought would flash: “But what if a striving for starlight would actually ignite in my son and, like Adeil, he would go after a star and bring it back to earth!” And the father would rush to explain to his son that while the light is, of course, good, it is crazy to try and bring it down to earth. There were such crazy ones, and they perished ingloriously, without making life any better.

This too was what the priests taught the people. This too was what the scientists continued to prove. But the sermons were said in vain. Now and then word spread that some young man or young woman left their native nest. Where to? Could they have followed the path marked by Adeil? And with horror the people could sense that if the light were to again illuminate the world, then, whether they wanted to or not, they would have to finally take up the monumental work, and there would be no way to avoid it.

With a vague apprehension, they peered into the black distance. And it seemed to them that above land’s end a trembling reflection of approaching stars was already beginning to flicker.