Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

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!”

While the break-up of a close relationship can be devastating at any age, the break-up of one’s first close relationship is especially devastating. At the time of later break-ups, no matter how painful, one recalls having gone through and gotten over similar pain before.

For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, “The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious education that I had retained. There is Auschwitz, therefore God cannot exist. I haven’t found a solution to that dilemma.”

Against Soviet tanks attacking the Mannerheim Line, the Finns compensated for their deficiencies in anti-tank guns by inventing so-called “Molotov cocktails,” which were bottles filled with an explosive mixture of gasoline and other chemicals, sufficient to cripple a Soviet tank.

The result was that the Soviets no longer had any motivation to take over Finland, because Finland was so much more valuable to the Soviet Union independent and allied with the West than it would have been if conquered or reduced to a communist satellite.

The result of that excellent educational system and those high investments in research and development is that, within half-a-century, Finland went from being a poor country to being one of the richest in the world.

Finland illustrates flexibility born of necessity (factor #10). In response to Soviet fears and sensitivities, Finland did things unthinkable in any other democracy: it put on trial and imprisoned its own wartime leaders according to a retroactive law; its parliament adopted an emergency decree to postpone a scheduled presidential election; a leading presidential candidate was induced to withdraw his candidacy; and its press self-censored statements likely to offend the Soviet Union. Other democracies would consider those actions as disgraceful. In Finland those actions instead reflected flexibility: sacrificing sacred democratic principles to the extent required to retain political independence, the principle held most sacred. Quoting again from Zaloga’s biography of Mannerheim, Finns have excelled at negotiating “the least awful of several very bad options.”

The mission announced its purpose as being “to select from the various institutions prevailing among enlightened nations such as are best suited to our present condition.”

For example, American ideals have included democracy, equality, freedom, liberty, and opportunity, as captured in phrases such as “rags to riches,” “melting pot,” “land of liberty,” “land of equal opportunity,” and “land of unlimited possibilities.”

While averaging only slightly more than 100 miles wide from west to east, it’s nearly 3,000 miles long from north to south: almost as long as the U.S. is wide.

That gives Chile’s armed forces a financial basis far in excess of the money needed to defend Chile against any credible foreign threat—especially considering that Chile’s last (and only its second) war ended over a century ago in 1883, that Chile’s borders are protected by ocean and desert and high mountains, and that Chile’s neighbors (Argentina, Bolivia, Peru) are not dangerous. Instead, the only likely use of Chile’s armed forces is against the Chilean people themselves.

Such heartfelt apologies by government leaders for government cruelties have been vanishingly rare in modern history; the closest parallel is German chancellor Willy Brandt’s equally heartfelt apology at the Warsaw Ghetto to the victims of Germany’s former Nazi government (see Chapter 6 for details).

The exhibit made no mention of what followed the deaths of the generals: the murder of about half-a-million other Indonesians at the instigation of the Indonesian armed forces.

The Javanese language has the additional disadvantage of being hierarchy-conscious,

Corruption pervaded all aspects of Indonesian life. For instance, while I was working in Indonesia for the international environmental organization World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an Indonesian friend also working for WWF pointed out to me an Indonesian WWF office director and whispered that his nickname was “Mr. Corruption”—because he was not just normally corrupt, but exceptionally corrupt; a boat that overseas WWF donors had bought for that particular WWF office had ended up as a private boat of Mr. Corruption. As another example of non-governmental corruption, my work in Indonesia routinely required me to fly with heavy luggage that incurred excess baggage charges. I became accustomed to the fact that, whenever I checked in at the counter of an Indonesian domestic airport, the airline check-in employees came out to me from behind the counter and demanded the excess baggage charges in cash for their own pockets, not for the airline.

One cannot defend one’s actions by saying that one was obeying those laws. There is no law that can justify a crime against humanity. Everybody must have his own sense of right and wrong and must obey it, independently of what a state government says. Anyone who takes part in what Bauer called a murder machine, such as the Auschwitz extermination apparatus, thereby becomes guilty of a crime. In addition, it became clear that many of the defendants whom he put on trial, and who gave as an excuse that they did what they did because they were forced to do it, were acting not out of compulsion but out of their own convictions.

In front of the Polish crowds, Brandt spontaneously fell down on his knees, acknowledged the millions of victims of the Nazis, and asked for forgiveness for Hitler’s dictatorship and World War Two (Plate 6.5).

The act barred the immigration of prostitutes, the insane, people suffering from loathsome diseases, and criminals (despite Australia’s origin as a dumping ground for criminals). The act also provided that no blacks or Asians would be admitted, and that Australians should be “one people, and remain one people without the admixture of other races.”

Hence 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 (see below).

One might object that the marriage rate is also falling in most other developed countries without causing the catastrophic drop in the birth rate that Japan is experiencing, because so many births are to unwed mothers: 40% of all births in the U.S., 50% in France, and 66% in Iceland.

Without democracy, citizens are more likely to feel frustrated, and to conclude correctly that their only option is to resort to violence, and even to try to overthrow the government. Knowledge that peaceful outlets for expression exist reduces the risk of civil violence.

While those money outlays are legal in the U.S., they achieve results similar to those achieved illegally by corruption. That is, legislators or officials adopt policies or actions harmful to the public good, but beneficial to the donor of the money, and sometimes beneficial to the legislators or officials as well.

For example, children of wealthy American parents are 10 times more likely to complete college than are children of poor parents. As Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill wrote, “Pick your parents carefully!”

That illustrates why geo-engineering would first require “atmospheric testing”—an impossibility, because we would have to ruin the Earth experimentally 10 times before we could hope to figure out how to make geo-engineering produce just the desired good effects on the 11th try.

There will surely be more terrorist attacks against the U.S. and Europe, and probably against Japan and Australia as well, in the future—as long as that factorial difference of 32 in consumption rates persists.

Yet we promise developing countries that, if they will only adopt good policies, like honest government and free-market economies, they too can become like the First World today. That promise is utterly impossible, a cruel hoax. We are already having difficulty supporting a First World lifestyle even now, when only 1 billion people out of the world’s 7.5 billion people enjoy it.

Germany’s reaction might have been dominated by self-pity and a sense of victimization for the millions of Germans killed during the war (including all those killed by Allied bombing of German cities that would have been considered a war crime if the Allies hadn’t won the war); for the million German women raped in the Soviet advance from the east; and for the loss of large German territories after the war.

Skepticism about science is increasingly widespread in the U.S., and that’s a very bad portent, because science is basically just the accurate description and understanding of the real world.