The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam
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Read between November 11 - November 16, 2020
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A PHENOMENON noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
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Why in recent times have British trade unions in a lunatic spectacle seemed periodically bent on dragging their country toward paralysis, apparently under the impression that they are separate from the whole? Why does American business insist on “growth” when it is demonstrably using up the three basics of life on our planet—land, water and unpolluted air?
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Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens’ attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II’s of England via the Armada, Germany’s twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan’s bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity.
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is whatever conduces to the welfare or advantage of the body being governed; folly is a policy that in these terms is counter-productive.
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To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age.
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Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.
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Misgovernment by a single sovereign or tyrant is too frequent and too individual to be worth a generalized inquiry.
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(The Trojan Horse, to be examined shortly, is an exception to the time requirement, and Rehoboam to the group requirement, but each is such a classic example and occurs so early in the known history of government as to illustrate how deeply the phenomenon of folly is ingrained.)
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The working class as represented by Communist governments functions no more rationally or effectively in power than the middle class, as has been notably demonstrated in recent history. Mao Tse-tung may be admired for many things, but the Great Leap Forward, with a steel plant in every backyard, and the Cultural Revolution were exercises in unwisdom that greatly damaged China’s progress and stability, not to mention the Chairman’s reputation.
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If the majority of Russians are materially better off than before, the cost in cruelty and tyranny has been no less and probably greater than under the czars.
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The revolutionary regimes of Jacobins and Directorate could muster the strength to exterminate internal foes and defeat foreign enemies, but they could not manage their own following sufficiently to maintain domestic order, install a competent administration or collect taxes. The new order was rescued only by Bonaparte’s military campaigns, which brought the spoils of foreign wars to fill the treasury, and subsequently by his competence as an executive.
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The reason for concern is that folly in government has more impact on more people than individual follies, and therefore governments have a greater duty to act according to reason.
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Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.
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It is epitomized in a historian’s statement about Philip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns: “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.”
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A classic case in action was Plan 17, the French war plan of 1914, conceived in a mood of total dedication to the offensive. It concentrated everything on a French advance to the Rhine, allowing the French left to remain virtually unguarded, a strategy that could only be justified by the fixed belief that the Germans could not deploy enough manpow...
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Evidence to the contrary which began seeping through to the French General Staff in 1913 had to be, and was, resolutely ignored in order that no concern about a possible German invasion on the west should be allowed to divert strength from a direct French offensive eastward to the Rhine. When war came, the Germans could and did use reserves in the front line and did come the long way around on the west with results that determined a protracted war and its fearful consequences for our century.
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Wooden-headedness is also the refusal to benefit from experience, a characteristic in which medieval rulers of the 14th century were supreme.
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No matter how often a campaign that depended on living off a hostile country ran into want and even starvation, as in the English invasions of France in the Hundred Years’ War, campaigns for which this fate was inevitable were regularly undertaken.
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Count Axel Oxenstierna, Chancellor of Sweden during the turmoil of the Thirty Years’ War under the hyperactive Gustavus Adolphus, and actual ruler of the country under his daughter, Christina, had ample experience on which to base his dying conclusion, “Know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed.”
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Rehoboam, King of Israel, son of King Solomon, succeeded his father at the age of 41 in approximately 930 B.C., about a century before Homer composed the national epic of his people. Without loss of time, the new King committed the act of folly that was to divide his nation and lose forever its ten northern tribes, collectively called Israel.
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Acknowledged King without question by the two southern tribes of Judah and Benjamin, Rehoboam, clearly aware of unrest in Israel, traveled at once to Shechem, center of the north, to obtain the people’s allegiance. He was met instead by a delegation of Israel’s representatives who demanded that he lighten the heavy yoke of labor put upon them by his father and said that if he did so they would serve him as loyal subjects.
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Rehoboam asked the delegation to depart and return after three days for his reply. Meanwhile he consulted with the old men of his father’s council, who advised him to accede to the people’s demand, and told him that if he would act graciously and “speak good words to them they will be thy servants forever.” With the first sensation of sovereignty heating his blood, Rehoboam found this advice too tame and turned to the “young men that were grown up with him.” They knew his disposition and, like counselors of any time who wish to consolidate their position in the “Oval Office,” gave advice they ...more
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They composed for him the famous words that could be any despot’s slogan: “And thus shalt thou say to them: ‘Whereas my father laid upon you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. Whereas my father chastised you with whips, I shall chastise you with scorpions.’
Dan Seitz
Badass but utterly stupid.
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That his subjects might not be prepared to accept this reply meekly seems not to have occurred to Rehoboam beforehand. Not without reason he earned in Hebrew history the designation “ample in folly.” Instantly—so instantly as to suggest that they had previously decided upon their course of action in case of a negative reply—the men of Israel announced their secession from the House of David with the battle cry “To thy tents, O Israel! See to thine own house, David!”
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Calling upon the very man who represented the hated yoke, Adoram, the commander or overseer of the forced labor tribute, he ordered him, apparently without providing supporting forces, to establish his authority. The people stoned Adoram to death, upon which the rash and foolish King speedily summoned his chariot and fled to Jerusalem, where he summoned all the warriors of Judah and Benjamin for war to reunite the nation.
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The protracted struggle weakened both states, encouraged the vassal lands conquered by David east of the Jordan—Moab, Edom, Ammon and others—to regain their independence and opened the way to invasion by Egypt. King Shishak “with a large army” captured fortified border posts and approached Jerusalem, which Rehoboam saved from conquest only by paying tribute to the enemy in the form of golden treasure from the Temple and royal palace.
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The twelve tribes were never reunited. Torn by their conflict, the two states could not maintain the proud empire established by David and Solomon, which had extended from northern Syria to the borders of Egypt with dominion over the international caravan routes and access to foreign trade through the Red Sea.
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After two hundred years of separate existence, the ten tribes of Israel were conquered by the Assyrians in 722 B.C. and, in accordance with Assyrian policy toward conquered peoples, were driven from their land and forcibly dispersed, to vanish into one of the great unknowns and perennial speculations of history.
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The alternative course that Rehoboam might have taken, advised by the elders and so lightly rejected, exacted a long revenge that has left its mark for 2800 years.
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Aztec armies conducted annual campaigns to capture slave labor and victims for sacrifice from neighboring tribes, and food supplies, of which they were always short, and to bring new areas into subjection or punish revolts. In the early years of his reign, Montezuma led such campaigns in person, greatly extending his boundaries.
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Informed by the local inhabitants, who hated the Aztec overlords, of the riches and power of the capital, Cortés with the larger part of his force boldly set out to conquer the great city of the interior. Though reckless and daring, he was not foolhardy and made alliances along the way with tribes hostile to the Aztecs, especially with Tlaxcala, their chief rival.
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Uncertain and apprehensive, he did the worst thing he could have done in the circumstances: he sent splendid gifts that displayed his wealth, and letters urging the visitors to turn back that indicated his weakness. Borne by a hundred slaves, the gifts of jewels, textiles, gorgeous featherwork and two huge plates of gold and silver “as large as cart wheels” excited the Spaniards’ greed, while the letters forbidding further approach to his capital and almost pleading with them to return to their homeland and couched in soft language designed to provoke neither gods nor ambassadors were not very ...more
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Through an excess of mysticism or superstition, he had apparently convinced himself that the Spaniards were indeed the party of Quetzalcoatl come to register the break-up of his empire and, believing himself doomed, made no effort to avert his fate.
Dan Seitz
There are...other takes.
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When, in a spasm of regret or at someone’s persuasion, Montezuma ordered an ambush of the garrison that Cortés had left behind at Vera Cruz, his men killed two Spaniards and sent the head of one of them to the capital as evidence. Asking no parley or explanation, Cortés instantly put the Emperor in chains and forced him to yield the perpetrators whom he burned alive at the palace gates, not forgetting to exact an immense punitive tribute in gold and jewels.
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Having lost authority, Montezuma could neither take command nor suppress the people’s anger. On Cortés’ return, the Aztecs, under the Emperor’s brother, rebelled. The Spaniards, who never had more than thirteen muskets among them, fought back with sword, pike and crossbow, and torches to set fire to houses. Hard-pressed, though they had the advantage of steel, they brought out Montezuma to call for a halt in the fighting, but on his appearance his people stoned him as a coward and traitor.
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The Spaniards evacuated the city during the night with a loss of a third of their force and their loot.
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With the aid of the Tlaxcalans, he organized a siege, cut off the city’s supply of fresh water and food and gradually penetrated it, shoveling the rubble of destroyed buildings into the lake as he advanced.
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Follies need not have negative consequences for all parties concerned. The Reformation, brought on by the folly of the Renaissance Papacy, would not generally be declared a misfortune by Protestants. Americans on the whole would not consider their independence, provoked by the folly of the English, to be regrettable. Whether the Moorish conquest of Spain, which endured over the greater part of the country for three hundred years and over lesser parts for eight hundred, was positive or negative in its results may be arguable, depending on the position of the viewer, but that it was brought on ...more
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Through the unrestrained self-interest normal for sovereigns of the time, they created only hostility and in the end became its victims. Hostility was sharpened by animosity in religion, the local inhabitants being Catholics of the Roman rite while the Visigoths belonged to the Arian sect. Further contention arose over the method of selecting the sovereign. The native nobility tried to maintain the customary elective principle, while the kings, afflicted by dynastic longings, were determined to make and keep the process hereditary.
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Meanwhile, through the stronger organization and more active intolerance of the Roman Church and its bishops in Spain, Catholic influence was gaining, and in the late 6th century, it succeeded in converting two heirs to the throne. The first was put to death by his father, but the second, called Recared, reigned, at last a ruler conscious of the need for unity.
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He was the first of the Goths to recognize that for a ruler opposed by two inimical groups, it is folly to continue antagonizing both at once.
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Several of his successors, too, made efforts to placate former adversaries, recalling the banished and restoring property, but divisions and cross-currents were too strong for them and they had lost influence to the Church, in which they had created their own Wooden Horse.
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Confirmed in power, the Catholic episcopate lunged into secular government, proclaiming its laws, arrogating its powers, holding decisive Councils, legitimizing favored usurpers and fatefully promoting a relentless campaign of discrimination and punitive rules against anyone “not a Christian”—namely the Jews.
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During this century, the Moslems, animated by a new religion, exploded in a wild career of conquest that extended from Persia to Egypt and, by the year 700, reached Morocco across the narrow straits from Spain. Their ships raided the Spanish coast and though beaten back, the new power on the opposite shore offered to every disaffected group under the Goths the ever-tempting prospect of foreign aid against the internal foe.
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the invited power stays and takes over control.
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A once tolerated minority who had arrived with the Romans and prospered as merchants, they were now shunned, persecuted, subjected to forced conversion, deprived of rights, property, occupation, even of children forcibly taken from them and given to Christian slave owners. Threatened with extinction, they made contact with and provided intelligence to the Moors through their co-religionists in North Africa. For them anything would be better than Christian rule.
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In 710, a conspiracy of nobles refused to acknowledge as King the son of the last sovereign, defeated and deposed him and elected to the throne one of their own number, Duke Rodrigo, throwing the country into dispute and confusion. The ousted King and his adherents crossed the straits and, on the theory that the Moors would obligingly regain their throne for them, invited their assistance.
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Rodrigo’s army offered ineffective resistance and the Moors won control with a force of 12,000. Capturing city after city, they took the capital, established surrogates—in one case handing a city over to the Jews—and moved on. Within seven years their conquest of the peninsula was complete.
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Since disorder is the least tolerable of social conditions, government began to take shape in the Middle Ages and afterward as a recognized function with recognized principles, methods, agencies, parliaments, bureaucracies.
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This is not to say that crowned heads and ministries are incapable of governing wisely and well. Periodically the exception appears in strong and effective, occasionally even benign, rulership, even more occasionally wise. Like folly, these appearances exhibit no correlation with time and place.
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