Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is

the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode

number 166. 6.

We open our episode today with a quote.

The money quote, as the boys in marketing used to

quip back in the day, that defines the direction

we will be headed in in the book that we are going to be talking

about today. But it's not only the direction in the book that we're going

to be talking about today. Not only is it the

direction of the themes around the book we are going to be talking about today,

but it is also the direction. It also defines the direction of the next

few episodes of the podcast that you are going to be

hearing as we close out this next

season or this last season of the show.

By last, I don't mean final, I just mean the most recent.

Let's go to the money quote and I quote when one

gets a close view of the influential people, their

bad relations with each other, their conflicting ambitions, all the

slander and the hatred, one must always bear in

mind that it is certainly much worse on the other side among the

French, English and Russians, or one might well be

nervous. The race for power and personal

positions seems to destroy men's characters.

I believe that the only creature who can keep his honor is a man

living on his own estate. He has no need for

intrigue and struggle, for it is no good. Intriguing

for fine weather. Close

quote the title

of our book today asks a truly intriguing question,

or poses a truly intriguing question that we guests and

myself alike have struggled to answer definitively when using the

platform of this show.

The point of this podcast, of course, is threefold. If you needed a reminder,

number one, to build a platform to read and analyze books through the lens of

leadership number two, to build relationships and connections with our

audience and our guests in order to test and validate the power of

human wisdom in these algorithmically driven times

and three to build and maintain a launchpad for human

solutions to the very human problems that continue to be double

us in our technologically sophisticated yet

culturally barbaric age here in the West.

The author of our book Today was a

historian of World War I and World War

II. He was a man who came

from modest origins, and while, yes, he did

indeed have an ego, he understood that

history is the tank. An

object about which he knew quite a bit is the tank that overruns

us all he

personified in many ways the ideas

of an older world, a more Greek

philosophical world, a world driven

not by corporate ambitions or by social

media likes. A world driven not by financializing

everything out to its furthest end. A world

not driven by spectacle and a lack of

shame. He was the last tie

to an older aristocracy, a European

aristocracy that all went to hell

in the fires of. Of World War I.

Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will be introducing and

discussing multiple themes from the book

titled why Don't We Learn from History

by B.H. liddell Hart.

Leaders. To quote from our author today, and I quote

in strategy, the longest way round is

often the shortest way home.

And so we open today with some of

BH Liddell Hart's thoughts on why don't

we learn from History. We open with

his chapter that he begins this book with History and

truth. Now this book is a.

Is public domain. You can go and get it anywhere.

The copy that I get that I have was edited with an

introduction by Gills Lauren

and, and the book features. Well, the book is divided into.

Into three parts. So history and truth, Government and

freedom and war and peace. And in each area

he writes or Liddell Hart documents in

a few essays his thoughts on, well,

the various areas that he is. He is writing about. Think of it

like a, like a, like a substack, right, but

just put into a book form from the, from the

1970s. And so we open up

in the volume that I have with the treatment of

history and I quote directly from

why Don't We Learn from History by B.H.

liddell Hart. An increasing number of modern historians

such as Veronica Wedgwood have shown that good history and good reading

can be blended. And thus by displacing the mythologists,

they are bringing history back to the service of humanity. Even

so, the academic suspicion of literary style

still lingers. Such pendants

may be well reminded of the proverb, hard writing makes easy reading,

such hard writing makes for hard thinking.

Far more effort is required to epitomize facts with clarity than

to express them cloudily. Misstatements can be more easily

spotted in sentences that are crystal clear than those that are

cloudy. The writer has to be more

careful if he is not to be caught out than thus care in writing

makes for care in treating the material of history to

evaluate it correctly. The effort

towards deeper psychological analysis is good so long as

perspective is kept. It is equally good that the varnish should be scraped off

so long as the true grain of the character is revealed. It is not

so good except for selling success. When Victorian varnish is

replaced by cheap staining colored to suit the taste for

scandal. Moreover, the study of personality is apt

to be pressed so far that it throws the performance into the background.

This certainly simplifies the task of the biographer. Who can dispense with the need

for a knowledge of the field in which his subject found his

life's work. Can we imagine a great statesman without statecraft, A

great general without war, A great scientist without science, A great writer without

literature that would look strangely nude and often

commonplace? A question often

debated is whether history is a science or an art.

The true answer would seem to be that history is a science

and an art. The subject must be approached in a

scientific spirit of inquiry. Facts must be treated with scientific care, for accuracy.

But they cannot be interpreted without the aid of imagination and

intuition. The sheer quantity of evidence is so

overwhelming that selection is inevitable. Where there is selection,

there is art. Exploration should be

objective, but selection is subjective. Its subjectiveness can and

should be controlled by scientific method and objectiveness. Too many people go

into history merely in search of texts for their sermons instead

of facts for analysis. But after analysis

comes art to bring out the meaning and to ensure it

becomes known. It was the school

of German historians headed by Reinke who in the last century

started the fashion of trying to be purely scientific. That fashion

spread to our own schools of history. Any conclusions or

generalizations were shunned and any well written books became

suspect. What was the result? History became too

dull to read and devoid of meaning. It became merely

a subject for study, but by specialists.

So the void was filled by new myths of exciting

power but appalling consequences.

The world has suffered and Germany worst of all for

the sterilization of history that started

in Germany. So what are we

to make of Sir Basil

Henry Liddell Hart? Well, he was

born October 31, 1895

at the close of what had been a very long 19th

century. And he died January 29,

1970, close to the end of what was to

prove to be an equally long 20th century.

He was commonly known throughout most of his

career, which a bit big chunk of it was spent in the service

of the British military as Captain BH

Lidell Hart. Not only was he a British

soldier, he was also a military historian and a military

theorist. Lidell Hart was

born in Paris and was the son of a Methodist

minister. From these humble origins,

Liddell Hart matriculated through school. And as a child

he was fascinated by the field of aviation.

The budding field of aviation that had begun at

Kitty with the Wright brothers successful plane flight at

Kitty Hawk. When World War I began

in August of 1914, Liddell

Hart volunteered for the British army where he became

an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light infantry

in December. And he served with the regiment on the

Western Front. As a result of

his participation at the Battle of the Somme, where The British lost

60,000 men, still

the largest one battle loss of British

soldiers in all of English history.

He wrote a series of

histories of major military figures after he

mustered out of the British military in the mid

to late 1920s. By the way, he wrote these histories

by going around and actually talking to the people who were

involved in World War I, who were involved in the

battles, who were involved in the maneuvers. And he didn't just

limit himself to talking to folks in Europe who had been

involved in the battles at various Verdun or at the

Somme or even other places. He also

traversed the Atlantic and came over and talked to

American officers and American soldiers

who had been in the war. He

advanced his ideas as a result of these kinds of

conversations that the frontal assault was a

strategy bound to fail at great cost in lives

later on. Of course, this would be one of the titular

lessons learned from the disasters of the Western Front in

trench warfare and continuous frontal

assault. By the way, Liddell Hart was.

Was injured in a poisonous gas attack during a

frontal assault during World War I. Before he

participated in the Battle of the Somme.

Liddell Hart argued throughout his

histories and throughout the the mid-20s

and then well after World War I. He argued that the tremendous losses

British suffered in the Great War, which is what World War I was called

before World War II came along. He argued that the tremendous losses Britain

suffered were caused by its commanding officers not

appreciating certain facts of

history. And he spent the rest of his career

trying to correct not only British

generals, but to correct the military historical record.

Not about what has his necessity, not necessarily about what happened

during World War I. But he attempted to correct the.

The record on what could have been done better,

what had been done badly and what could.

What could be gleaned from such

disasters so that future wars would be run

differently. By the way, in the mid

to late 1920s, Lidell Hart

was an advisor to. To. To

Chamberlain and he was an advisor to. To Churchill.

And then later on after the war he became

much more of a public historian in the British imagination

and in the British. Among the British populace.

So this guy was the guy who stood

next to the guy who made the decisions and impacted a lot of

people both before World War

II and after.

So back to the book. Back to why Don't We

Learn From History by B.H. liddell Hart? So we're going to pick

up in the section

labeled or titled not labeled, titled. War

and Peace. Now this section is really interesting because you would think that he would

start off with this section in the book, but

instead he begins with history and truth. He moves into

government and freedom. A lot of interesting things to note in

that section including, and you may want to pick this book up

just for this little essay in here in Government and Freedom

alone, the Psychology of Dictatorship,

which has this great quote in it that I underlined. The effect of power on

the mind of the man who possesses it, especially when he has

gained it by successful aggression, tends to be remarkably similar

in every age and in every country. Close quote.

Now, how aggression is defined, of course, differs from time to

time. Your. Your definition

of aggression and my definition of aggression in the pursuit of

acquiring power will vary.

Anyway, moving into the section on War and Peace. So it opens up

with the. With an essay on the desire for

power. And here Liddell Hart makes

this. He opens with this point which I think is. Is important to

reference. Before we get to our main piece here that I want to read. He

says this history shows that a main hindrance to real progress

is the ever popular myth of the quote unquote great man.

While greatness may perhaps be used in a comparative sense, if

even then referring to. Referring more to particular quality qualities

than to the embodied some. The quote unquote great man is a

clay idol whose pedestal has been built up by the natural human desire

to look up to someone, but whose form has been carved by

men who have not yet outgrown the desire to be regarded

or to picture themselves as great men. Close

quote. When I read that, I was immediately put

in mind of the Percy Shelley

poem Ozymandias. He goes

into a discussion later on in this section on War and Peace,

where he tries to define real politic. And then

he talks about in relation to realpolitik and

the value of patriotism,

but in contrast to, particularly in a

diplomatic sense and in a policy sense, the value of decency,

honesty and thought. He makes this point, which I

want to read from directly underneath. The

importance of keeping promises.

And I quote, civilization is built on the practice of

keeping promises. It may not sound like a high attainment,

but if trust in its observance be shaken, the whole

structure cracks and sinks any

constructive effort. And all human relations, personal, political and

commercial, depend on being able to depend on promises.

This truth has a reflection on the question of collective security among

nations and on the lessons of history in regard to that subject in the

years before the war. By the way, Pause. He's talking about

World War II here. Back to the book. The charge was

constantly broken that its supporters were courting the risk of war by their exaggerated

respect for covenants. Although they may have been fools

in disregarding the conditions necessary for the effective fulfillment of pledges,

they at least showed themselves men of honor and in a long view of

a more fundamental common sense than those who argued that we should give aggressors

a free hand so long as they left us alone.

History has shown repeatedly that the hope of

buying safety in this way is the

greatest of delusions.

So here's a question for you as a leader and we

as we finally have said enough of

set enough of a stage to be able to talk coherently

about BH Ladell Hart's book why don't we learn from history

and of course relate that to leadership? So

here's a leadership question for you. Something to think about.

Do we continue to live in America?

Not globally, just in the United States of America? This

is the United States of America specific question. Do we

or do we not live in a high trust society?

That's actually a really good question. Because if you look around

at Substack and at Medium, if you look at

Twitter and Blue sky, if you buy

into the ideas that are fomented by folks like

or not fomented, but that have been researched by folks like Jonathan Haidt

and Steven Pinker and many others,

you would think that we are at times of great

political alienation and

polarization, not just between

individuals of different political stripes, but even now,

individuals of different genders.

In the last election, the last presidential election in 2024,

more men, particularly young men, drifted

or directly voted for for the

right leaning candidate for President of the

United States than ever before. And more

women voted for the left leaning presidential candidate

for the President of the United States of America than ever before.

Is this a sign of a decline in erosion in trust or is this a

sign more of the sorting that

naturally has occurred in America ever since our

founding? Here's another place where

this question becomes interesting. If we are a low trust

society, or if we are no longer a high trust society, then

why do services such as Uber

and Airbnb, why do those services work?

Why do I agree to stay in a stranger's house in a

strange city and I've never met that stranger before

and I book their house through an app. Or

why do I agree to get into a stranger's personal car

without a taxicab medallion? That person does not

have the imprimatur of the state upon them. They

are not licensed to be a taxicab driver and

yet I have an app on my phone I

ordered from them the their own car

and they come and pick me up and I anticipate that they will take

me safely whether I am a male or a female, it is or

child, it doesn't really matter. I anticipate that they will take me safely

to where it is I am supposed to go, drop me off and then in

some cases come back and get me.

These services exist and they started on the Internet with paypal

and and other services and of course auction sites

like ebay really were the grandfathers

of Uber and Airbnb. But these services

are could only work in a high trust society.

If we were a low trust society, a society high in corruption,

a society high in a lack of government actually

working, if we were a society that

was one where tribe mattered more

than neighborhood or even state or

community, none of these basic services would work.

So how do we square that circle in our modern era with

what is seemingly a decline in trust?

The decline in trust can be seen in the decline of marital

commitments foundational to the building and maintaining of a society and

culture since the advent of no fault divorce in California in the

1970s all the way through to our current

era of intergender sniping and fault finding

online and in social media.

This has been marked not only through means of communication, but has also

been noted by many professionals in various fields. And this

perception of a decline in trust has filtered down

to the transactions and services that people provide each other. Not

necessarily with the mediator of an app or phone, but

with the services we provide where there is no

mediator. And now I have to deal with you face to face.

This has happened to me recently, by the way. One day on the show

I will talk about my

challenges in the summer of 2025 working with

the airlines. Trust me, customer

service, which used to be the hallmark of a high trust society,

or at least the hallmark of our high trust society.

If my experience is any evidence, customer service

is on the decline and has been for quite some time.

This creates a paradox, right where we have more access than

ever before to the means of getting a service or obtaining a product

from another person we've never met and yet we have lower trust

in people. Actually behaving like sane human beings than

ever before. And we seem more and more eager to outsource

more and more of that sanity to screens into algorithms,

to have mediators in our phones. And

between us, we have no way,

of course, to talk about this out loud. And you know,

we hide our concerns behind contracts and lawsuits,

behind increasing regulations and ethical compliance schemes.

And none of these things reflect a common

shared sense of social solidarity. None of these

tools really go to what

Liddell Hart pointed out here, which

is the fact that any constructive

effort in all human relations, personal, political and commercial,

depend on being able to depend on

promises, leaders.

One of the things we have to do is we have to get back to

promises and actually fulfilling those

all the way down to the granular

level.

All right, back to the book. Back to why don't we learn from History

by B H Liddell Hart? We pick up in

Government and Freedom with the

continuation of his conversation, which

precedes the conversation that we just read from

around. Government and Freedom talks about authority,

the men behind the scenes, the restraints of democracy and how power

politics works in relation to history in a

democracy. And then he, then he

gets into the idea of what advisors

look like and, and, well, he.

He talks about self made despotic rulers

in pattern of dictatorship. And I

quote, we learn from history that self made

despotic rulers fall follow a standard pattern

in gaining power. They exploit, consciously or unconsciously, a

state of popular dissatisfaction with the existing regime or of hostility

between different sections of people. They attack the existing

regime violently and combine their appeal to discontent with unlimited

promises which, if successful, they fulfill only to a limited

extent. They claim that they want absolute power for only a short

time, but quote, unquote, find subsequently that the time to

relinquish it never comes. They excite

popular sympathy by presenting the picture of a conspiracy against them. And

use this as a lever to gain a firmer hold at some crucial stage

on gaining power. They soon begin to rid themselves of their chief helpers,

discovering that those who brought about the new order have suddenly become

traitors to it. They suppress criticism on one pretext or

another. And punish anyone who mentions facts which, however true, are

unfavorable to their policy. They enlist

religion on their side if possible, or if its leaders are not compliant, foster a

new kind of religion subservient to their ends.

They spend public money lavishly on material works of a striking kind.

In compensation for the freedom of spirit and thought of which they have robbed the

public. They manipulate the currency to make the economic

position of the state appear better than it is in reality.

They ultimately make war on some other state as a means of diverting attention from

internal conditions and allowing discontent to explode outward.

They use the rallying cry of patriotism as a means of riveting

the chains of their personal authority more firmly to the people.

They expand the superstructure of the state while undermining its foundations by breeding

sycophants at the expense of self respecting collaborators,

by appealing to the popular taste for the grandiose and sensational and

instead of true values, and by fostering a romantic instead of a realistic

view, thus ensuring the ultimate collapse under their

successors, if not themselves, of what they have created.

This political confidence trick itself, a familiar string of

tricks, has been repeated all down the ages,

yet it rarely fails to take in

a fresh generation.

So I read that for a reason.

In our current era, words

we are struggling with words having meanings.

Words, terms, phrases are thrown around in the general

communication culture of the United States in the year of our Lord

2025, and have been for about the last 20 years.

And instead of being used to actually educate the public on

history or entertain us with myth, instead words

are used to run psychological operations on the

culture and to propagandize and manipulate

listeners. In our current

era, at least since the bad Orange

man came down the escalator in 2015,

words such as fascist, socialist,

authoritarianism, and other lightning

rod terms that have meaning in the context of a

post World War II time that Liddell Hart was

writing about, but that have zero meaning 80 years later, words

such as these and other terms are used either to create an

environment of political and social action, or

they're used insidiously to suppress or socially

sanction political or social action.

This is not good. As a

person who understands that words have meaning, as a person who reads books,

it is the responsibility, at least I believe it is the responsibility of leaders and

to examine the words that they are using and

to hesitate to use words and to speak

succinctly, yes, of course, but also to speak accurately.

And using such terms casually

as fascist or socialist or

authoritarianism or even, or even

dictatorship, or the pejorative term which used to be the

name of a man, and you know which man I'm talking

about, utilizing these terms

casually in terms of or in, in the space of

Internet memes or tweets or messages or

appeals to action, this indicates

a laziness not only of thought, as George Orwell would say,

but a laziness of consideration

for the trust placed in each other by our fellow

man. It indicates a sense that we just believe

society and culture will somehow miraculously just keep going,

even if we behave like totally depraved

fools with our language.

This is what I mean by cultural barbarity, by the way.

Technological sophistication and yet extreme

cultural barbarity. It isn't just

the abortions and the birth control, the

pornography and the

gender transitions that

are messing us up. It's

primarily our inability to speak

about these things clearly in

order to weave back together the social fabric.

Instead, we use these words, we use these inaccurate terms,

or we use accurate terms inaccurately and lazily

in order to tear the social fabric apart.

Historians, educators and others have always leveraged words,

terms and phrases in order to create and shape and change

cultural myths. And they have done this in

order to uplift a culture and to push

it to higher levels of confidence. Or they have done it

insidiously and intentionally to

suppress confidence and repress people's ability

to either act in a crisis or to

plan with calm. One of the things

that technologists such as Peter Thiel

and Sam Altman and others point out is that

and it's equipped. But it's true. In our time,

we were promised by the visionary builders

of the post World War II era that we would have

vacations to the moon and settlements on Mars by this

point in the 21st century. And instead all we

got was 140 to 240 characters

and DoorDash seems like a

comedown, right? But you can't have

innovative technology if you don't have

innovative thought. And you can't have innovative thought

if you possess lazy and degraded language.

And you cannot have innovative actions and

innovative objects with lazy integrated thinking

that is expressed in lazy integrated language.

This is why on this show I am careful with the words that I pick,

even the words that are pejorative words.

I know that many of you may not agree with me. You're going to look

for other places where

the erosion is occurring. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of other

places where cultural erosion is occurring. And there are

plenty of fingers to point at plenty of different folks for our current state of

cultural barbarity. But I

believe fundamentally that when we throw

around terms like Chiclets

that we really don't understand, not only do we

degrade the term itself and its power,

but we also degrade the person using it, and we degrade our neighbor,

and we degrade our ability to innovate past

the problems that we have because we are reflecting

a degraded ability to even think clearly

and cohesively and cogently about

the problems that we have.

This is a real problem for leaders. And so I encourage

leaders to understand that words have meanings

despite our feelings about those words, and to

be careful, clear and concise in what words

we use to lead others.

As we close out our show today, I have a few final

thoughts and I'm going to start with maybe a basic observation here.

First off, we are going to talk about why don't we learn from History

with Tom Libby coming up on our next episode of this show. So

I would encourage you to, to listen to that episode

and I anticipate we're going to have a great conversation. Tom always brings

more to the table than I can in these, in these introductory solo

episodes. But these introductory solo episodes are important as a way

of anchoring my

thoughts for you around the books that we cover on

this show. And we're going to continue this next next year

starting in January 2026, we're going to probably go to

covering about two to three books a month and with a couple of

bonus episodes thrown in there, we're going to keep the mash up episodes that we've

been doing this year. We've done two of them so far. We're going to keep

those maybe one every every four months. But we

are going to keep this pattern of an introductory episode, then the main book with

the guests and another director episode and then a second main book with the guest.

And and while that will spread out the number of books that we will be

covering in toto on this show,

ultimately I think we'll be able to go deeper in each book that we

cover. And why don't we Learn from History is

a, it's a small book. It's only, only 126 pages so you

could get through it. It's a quick read. You can get through it in a,

in a, in an afternoon probably. And it's probably

better than watching whatever it is you may have in

your Amazon prime and or Netflix queue

or better than doom scrolling through Tick Tock or Instagram reels.

Now to my point. Point. So

I often think of in these times in which I live as I get

older I think of or I wonder

what my father would have said about times

such as these. My father

was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He was

born in the late 1940s

in in northern Kentucky slash southern

Ohio and and

he was a man who was a hard working blue collar guy most of his

life. He valued education. He valued the written

word. He valued

getting knowledge and understanding because that was the way out of the

rural situation into which he was born.

And the black rural underclass in the American

south in the mid 20th century did not

have it easy by any stretch of the imagination.

And so my father, who did towards the end of

his life use the Internet for

genealogical research purposes, he was fascinated by finding

out more about where his relatives came from from

and who they were and, and ultimately, I guess, why they

came here. He was fascinated by history. He was

also, as most baby boomer generation folks are,

he was fascinated by the Internet.

I am less fascinated by the Internet.

I've been through four revolutions. They feel like four

wars. And I've said this before on this show with guests, but I've been

through four revolutions. And most folks who were born in between

1960 and

1979 or 1965 and

1979, depending upon sort of where you, where you hit Gen X at.

Most of us have been through four or some cases five

revolutions. First it started with the Internet

and dial up. Then we all went through the, the dot com

revolution. Then we went through social media and

the rise of the promise of virtual reality and

then cryptocurrencies, most notoriously

blockchain and bitcoin powered by

blockchain. And then we got to the promise of,

and we are at the dawn of the cusp of the promise of

algorithmic power delivered to us through the

LLMs. But what does all this have to do with my father? What

does this have to do with BH Liddell Hart? What does this have to do

with? Why don't we learn from history? Well, here's what this all

has to do. I'm going to tie everything together for leaders here at the end.

The question for leaders, the question for my father. Question for me, the question for

you. No matter what historical time in which we live, the question for

us is why don't we learn from history? Why do we

insist on believing that somehow

we're better or smarter, more

intelligent than those who came before us? Why

do we confuse our technological prowess

with actual hard earned wisdom? The

21st century is already shaping up to be a

time of technological wonder. I don't doubt that

the next 50 years are going to deliver some of the most

gee whiz, technological advancements

ever imagined. And yet,

and yet the human heart won't change, which means

culture will continue to go through polarizations and

splits, unitings and mergings,

coming apart and moving togethers.

If we are to avoid and by we, I mean us in the United States

of America. But I also mean we as in humanity, and of course we

more generally in the West. If we are to avoid committing the same mistakes

that our forefathers committed, only with greater levels of death,

misery, loss, degradation and cultural

stagnation than before, then we need to cling to the raft of history

or we will find ourselves flung ashore

and washed up on strange lands.

The farmer, the factory worker, the plumber and the PhD

all need to put down their arrogance and their pride

and their hubris, which our

Internet searches have infected us with, and learn the hard

lessons from history and then apply those hard

lessons to fundamental problems that we have now.

And understanding all the while that while technology may change,

and while those wonders I do believe will occur, that's also not

assured. While technology may change, human nature

fundamentally does not. We

can do nothing or very little, little to change human

nature. Human power can't do it.

Mark Zuckerberg is still going to be greedy and Sam

Altman is still going to have a lust for power.

The bad orange man is still going to be bad

and the lady who ran for president is still

going to be power hungry. Those

problems of power, of greed

or desire for power, lust for power, avarice, greed,

self deception, these problems

can only be resolved by changing the human heart.

And the changes of the human heart are reflected in how

we study history.

I am going to advocate here, here at the end of this show today

and for the remainder of our time for a more

conservative reading of history. And I don't mean conservative

as in politically conservative, although these days everything is political.

Am I right? A more conservative reading of history

would look at history as a struggle not between the forces of

progress and the forces of stagnation, but instead it

would look at history as a struggle, an endless struggle, a

as Superman might say, a never ending battle of men,

and I mean women and men of humans to overcome

themselves and to overcome their base instincts

more often rather than less often. And to do so,

not to become great. I actually kind of agree with what

BH Ladell Hart said there about great men.

Not to become great, but merely to be

better than those who came before

them and better just meaning

making all new mistakes with all different sins.

A more conservative reading of history is what we require as a nation state.

It's what we require as individuals. It's what we require in our educational

systems. It's what we require in our TikTok videos. It's what we require

in our houses, around our dinner tables. It's what we require in the conversations we

have with our kids. It's what we require in the conversations we have with

ourselves after we put down our books and we

reflect, sitting quietly on a park bench like

Keanu Reeves in that meme, just eating lunch.

It's also what we require in order to avoid the exegesis,

the exegesis of war and

conflict. Is it

better to have fights on social media than it is to shoot your neighbor?

I don't know. Is it better to outsource your base

desires to objects and to animals that cannot reciprocate

than to try to unite and connect with human beings

that are flawed and angry and probably don't want to connect with you

or are going to have their own problems? Maybe.

Is it better to sever connections from people and families

who disrespect you and deny whatever you may believe your core

identity is? Maybe. Maybe

not. These are questions, among many,

many others that history and literature

can answer more definitively for us

than any business book, politician, economic

theory, or social theory of ordering people ever could.

Why don't we study history? I don't

really. But

we're gonna find out, right?

And. Well,

that's it for me.