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Successful coping with either external or internal pressures requires selective change. That’s as true of nations as of individuals. The key word here is “selective.” It’s neither possible nor desirable for individuals or nations to change completely, and to discard everything of their former identities. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and don’t need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing.
The “crisis” is a sudden realization of, or a sudden acting on, pressures that have been building up for a long time.
Walden’s core message was: I should figure out what I really want in my life, and not be seduced by the vanity of recognition.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed a similar idea by his quip “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Winston Churchill’s corresponding quip was “Never let a good crisis go to waste!”
Ego strength includes being able to tolerate strong emotions, to keep focused under stress, to express yourself freely, to perceive reality accurately, and to make sound decisions.
Paasikivi concluded that Stalin’s driving motivation in his relationship with Finland was not ideological but strategic and geopolitical: i.e., the Soviet Union’s military problem of defending its second-largest city (Leningrad / St. Petersburg) against further possible attacks via Finland or via the Gulf of Finland, as had already happened in the past.
Experience also taught us that a small country purely and simply cannot afford to mix emotions—be they feelings of sympathy or antipathy—into its foreign policy solutions. A realistic foreign policy should be based on awareness of the essential factors in international politics, namely national interests and the power of relationships between states.”
This reframing of innovations as supposedly retained traditions—the phenomenon of “invented traditions” often invoked by innovators in other countries besides Japan—contributed to the success of Meiji leaders in carrying out drastic changes.
The changes affected most spheres of Japanese life: the arts, clothing, domestic politics, the economy, education, the emperor’s role, feudalism, foreign policy, government, hairstyles, ideology, law, the military, society, and technology.
Why did Japan from 1937 onwards blunder stepwise into such an unrealistic and ultimately unsuccessful military expansion, when Meiji Japan from 1868 onwards had carried out stepwise such a realistic and successful military expansion?
But one additional reason is especially relevant to this book: a difference between Meiji-Era Japan and the Japan of the 1930’s and 1940’s, in knowledge and capacity for honest self-appraisal on the part of Japanese leaders.
Meiji Japan is our case study that comes closest to the latter extreme of the unified vision.
Hence whereas the U.S. and Canada developed broad-based democratic governments from the very beginnings of their settlement by Europeans, in Chile a small oligarchy controlled most of the land, wealth, and politics. That concentration of political power has constituted a basic problem of Chilean history.
Rise of extreme inequality has the same effect.
They were similar only in sharing the fact that, to this day, it remains unclear why each of them acted as he did.
Partly, the answer involves Chile’s increasing polarization, violence, and breakdown of political compromise, culminating under Allende in the arming of the Chilean far left and in the “Yakarta viene” warnings of impending massacres by the far right.
This difference further illustrates a sad truth: that success is not guaranteed to well-intentioned decent people, nor necessarily denied to evil people.
Well-intentioned and decency confers righteousness but not success
Differing geographic constraints have meant that bad leadership results in much more painful consequences for Germany than for geographically less constrained countries.
“One should always try to see where God is striding through world history, and in what direction He is heading. Then, jump in and hold on to His coattails, to get swept along as far as one can go.”
the effects of good or bad leadership have been more obvious for Germany than for Britain or the U.S.
Repeating The same point made about China in Guns Germs and Steel
But I think that there is nevertheless a significance to those parallels: 21–23 years is approximately one human generation. The years 1848, 1918, and 1968 were decisive experiences for Germans who were young adults then, and who two decades later became their country’s leaders and finally found themselves in a position to try to complete (1871, 1990) or to reverse (1939) that decisive experience of their youth.
Brilliant!
the debt is held mainly by older Japanese people, who invested their money either directly (by buying government bonds) or indirectly (by receiving pensions from pension funds heavily invested in government bonds)—while those Japanese people ultimately paying the interest on the debt are mainly younger Japanese still working and paying taxes.
Japan’s debt in effect represents payments by younger Japanese to older Japanese, constituting an inter-generational conflict and a mortgage on Japan’s future. That mortgage is growing, because Japan’s young population is shrinking while its older population is growing
One could describe Japan as “anti-anti-whaling” rather than pro-whaling. Finally, awareness of Japan’s limited home resources has led it for the last 140 years to maintain, as the core of its national security and a keystone of its foreign policy, its claimed right of unrestricted access to the world’s natural resources.
The first, and also in my opinion the most ominous, of the fundamental problems now threatening American democracy is our accelerating deterioration of political compromise.
In short, as world human population and consumption rise, we can expect many, many more conflicts caused by international competition for limiting resources.
It turned out that economic growth rates were much more likely to change following a leader’s natural death than following random moments when a leader didn’t die. That suggests that, averaged over many cases, leadership does tend to affect economic growth.
It turned out that successful attempts were more likely than unsuccessful attempts to be followed by a change in national political institutions.
In both studies the effect of a leader’s death was stronger for deaths of autocratic leaders than for those of democratic leaders—and stronger for autocrats with no constraints on their power than for autocrats constrained by legislatures or by political parties.
That’s why it’s instructive to read biographies even of people whom we can never encounter, and thereby to broaden our database for understanding human behavior.
