“Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not ‘every man for himself.’ And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.” – A Fish Called Wanda
Four Norse gods, one Roman god, and two astrological bodies walk into a bar. Everyone knew Wilder was going to make another week joke.
Farther back than written record exists, people have been fighting each other in an organized fashion. Though there are indications of earlier Egyptian battles, probably the first written records of tactics come from an inscribed stone thought to depict a Sumerian victory around 2500 B.C. Again, perspective – the time of Christ is closer to us than Christ was to this battle. Another way to say it? Almost as old as your mom.
The tactic as shown on the stone would have been familiar to a Greek or a Roman or a Viking: it’s a shield wall. The idea is that soldiers working together would provide each other mutual protection through their overlapping shields. In the case of the Greeks, the shield wall (or phalanx) was manned by citizen-soldiers called “hoplites.” The Greeks had a lot of stories, though. The half-human, half-horse who was a doctor? They called him the Centaur for Disease Control.
Each hoplite protected himself and the man on his right. Much of the most effective fighting was done by the guys in the second row, who were also protected by the shields of the front row. The shield wall was generally employed by both sides during ancient conflicts. As a superior technology, the choice was simple – adopt or learn to speak a new language, if you were lucky.
Protons are underrated. They’re always so positive.
Photo CC BY-SA 3.0, Sting, viaWikimedia
Combat was simple. The opposing shield walls would meet and, as near as we can understand, a big sumo match between porcupines was the result. The worst thing that could happen to a shield wall is breaking. If a shield wall broke, the only real option for the side that broke was to flee. For just that reason, the Greeks put the most inexperienced soldiers in the front and center of the shield wall. That gave them psychological comfort of being surrounded by experienced fighters, plus they couldn’t get scared and run off. They were stuck there in the middle of the fight.
The shield wall is one example that I could think of where the responsibilities of the individual to the group were vitally important. Individual thought in a Greek phalanx is more than discouraged – it’s fatal. That’s why the put the rookies in the middle. The choices in the middle of a Greek phalanx are two: fight as a unit and maybe win or be individuals and certainly die.
Philip also asked if he should come to Sparta as a friend or a foe. The Spartan response? “Neither.”
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the tension between responsibility and individuality as I get older. When I was younger after I read Ayn Rand I was a ready-to-move-to-Galt’s-Gulch Libertarian. My thoughts were rather simple: I’d do as I please, not harm anyone, and the world would let me be.
Heck, I even went to a meeting of the largest Libertarian group in the state I was living in. When I saw it was just six guys in a booth at Taco Bell® (I’m not kidding) I decided to skip the meeting. Libertarians are horrible at organizing. Everybody wants to do their own thing, which makes for lousy coordination. It shouldn’t have surprised me that there were only six of them, and that they met at a single booth at a Taco Bell™. Also, since then I’ve come to the realization that the world will never let us be so we don’t have the option of going to Galt’s Gulch.
I still love the idea of individual freedom. And even when I was young, I realized that individual freedoms came with individual responsibility. You make a mistake? You’re held accountable for it. But there’s a component that’s missing that complements the first two:
Responsibility to the group.
Do Transformers® get car insurance or health insurance? Neither, they are illegal aliens.
Does that constrain your individual freedom? Certainly. But it’s reality. If you’re on a football team, working at a business, part of a family, or even in a tribe of Libertarians living in Galt’s Gulch, your individual freedom is limited to an extent that you have responsibilities to the group.
Just as the Greek hoplite was responsible for his own life, he was also responsible for the lives of those around him. Each individual hoplite was responsible for the success of the group.
As I get older, I realize that responsibility does exist for each of us. It’s not the same immediate life or death imperative of a hoplite, but it’s serious nevertheless.
If Joe wins the election, at least Hunter can get a job closer to home.
In one sense, the State (mainly the Federal government, but also small-s state governments) has done it’s best to remove that individual responsibility to society – it’s now nothing more than a series of payments to the State – taxes here and taxes there and you can go about your life without worrying about your responsibility to the state.
Poor people? That’s easy. The State will pay for them. The break between individual charity is gone, but I’ve written about that before (Charity, The Terminator, and Flat Tires). But it goes much further with similar stories in education, medical care, and retirement care. There are a million ways that the State has replaced the responsibility of the individual to that group.
One impact of that has been the recent riots. Reparations? Make the State pay. Burnt out buildings? Make the State Pay. Chose to get a degree and rack up enormous debt? Make the State pay. Unhappy with your life? Capitalism has failed. The State should fix this.
During the Soviet Revolution, they didn’t get every goal, but the did aim for the Tsars.
In the minds of Leftists, every solution requires more State power. That’s been at the root of every issue we’ve seen in 2020. Beyond the riots, COVID-19 has provided another outlet for the religious fervor of the Left.
- Vaccines? Should be mandatory once one shows up.
- Masks? Previous: Now: Required.
- Trump’s response? Previous: He doesn’t have authority. Now: Every death is on his head.
- Voting? Protests? Just fine.
The cause of this is that there is a natural desire to want to have responsibility that the State has severed. In its place, there are still chances to do that – be a Little League® coach. Volunteer at the food bank. Volunteer your time down at the local shooting club to teach people how to protect the man to their right.
That’s what a responsible hoplite would do, after all.
Wonderful history lesson, John!
The only group literally standing shoulder to shoulder behind shields these days are the police. They are opposing groups with far more fluid tactics. You can win late night street battles behind a wall of shields. You will lose the war the next morning if that’s all you’ve got to fight modern opponents. Here’s the result when hired blue hoplites standing shoulder to shoulder behind shields can’t permanently dispatch their opponents:
https://twitter.com/tadgermania/status/1291717913980747776
That’s an older video from early June, now those are all covered with graffiti.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/nyc-artists-display-blm-street-art-boarded-up-storefronts-200621104811500.html
Gotta come up with different tactics or we lose.
I’ve been reading another interesting history lesson about Homer, Hagel and Marx over on Burning Platform. Today they dropped the final Part 3 and finally cut to the chase – all 11K words of it, but definitely worth a read.
https://twitter.com/tadgermania/status/1291717913980747776
Bottom line, standing behind shields made of stacks of freshly printed cash isn’t any better than standing behind shields of plexiglass. It’s a different kind of war we’re fighting.
Ack! Wrong link above for Burning Platform, here is the correct one as run at ZH…
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/evolution-fiat-money-part-3-where-all-going-spoiler-alert-nowhere-good
Perhaps not historically accurate but I always remember the scene in Last Of The Mohicans when the Indians ambush the British. The Brits stand and fire as a unit, which is great in an open field, but when you opponents can hide behind trees it meant that once you fire a volley, it takes too long to reload. Or when the Germans adapted after World War I and instead of charging headlong at the Maginot Line, they just went around it.
It is. And it’s not one any of us can fight alone.
Our responsibility extends beyond today. We also have a responsibility to those who come after us. If we live as radical individuals, then all that matters is that I minimize discomfort and maximize pleasure for me and me alone. The simplest thing I could do to achieve this is to keep my mouth shut, my head down and go along with the program. The reason I don’t do this is that I have children and hopefully my children will also have children and as such I have a responsibility to them as well. The balance is finding a place somewhere where our individual rights are cherished while we still recognize our collective responsibility to others.
Perfectly said.
And your recent posts were great, but blogger wouldn’t let me comment. I’ll try again tomorrow.
I need to get a different comment system.
It worked tonight. I’m blaming my computer on this one?
https://www.facebook.com/168457099980357/posts/1596233553869364/
We had a class in our library on that…
I love it!!!!
Off topic but deemed worthy of sharing:
I had a joke about Covid-1984, but there’s a 94.12 % chance you won’t get it….
Maybe if we start telling Millennials that the brain is a free app, they will begin using it….
And for GOD’s sake, if you don’t want to have to live the life of a Hoplite warrior….GET OUT & STAY OUT OF BIG CITIES !!
Agreed . . . on all points, but we should convince the Leftists that Svalbard is nice this time of year.
I waited and waited for the Hopilite joke…. and it never came😟!
Seriously, my first post and I have been looking forward to your newsletters since they started. Thanks for providing your insight laced with juicy bits of humor!
But you *did* get Centaurs for Disease Control . . .
The uncomfortable bit of deus ex machina hand-waving that ruined “Atlas Shrugged” for me is that Galt’s Gulch ran on free energy (electricity out of the air, and I don’t recall where they got their food from). It was a New York apartment building for the chattering class, relocated into an ecosystem just as barren. I don’t think there’s any place in the world left where a human being can just dig in and live off the fat of the land. If somebody else isn’t already there, the land isn’t as fat as it looks.
I once heard “the difference between Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings, is that while both are popular with young men, one is a fantasy that leaves them intellectually impaired for years, and the other has orcs.
Depends on the land, but it’s fatter than it looks. You have to know how to use it. The problem is the age-old one for settlers: barbarian raiders.
Yup. But unrealistic I can overlook. 70 page speeches? Not so much.
I’ve been thinking quite a lot about the tension between responsibility and individuality as I get older.
There is no tension between responsibility and individuality, as they do not trade off against each other. This is as false as the idea that liberty and security trade off.
Once you convince a human being that some other thing is more important than him, you’ve attached puppet strings. Every group who wants power attempts to do this. All say you’ve “got” to sacrifice your own individual success in order to save X which is more important than you. Calling a libertarian “selfish” is a compliment, it means he is mentally healthy and living his life according to his values, rather than someone else’s.
Responsibility to the group.
There is no responsibility to the group. There is responsibility to yourself, in the form of keeping promises you’ve made to the group. Let us remind ourselves that a group of humans has no brain, does not think or make decisions, and without a brain to contain a personality the group has no agenda or empathy or loyalty. Stop caring about the group, a nonliving piece of bookkeeping, and start caring about the individual humans that comprise it. Groups are not, by political handwaving, always more important than the individual humans who comprise them.
‘Free energy in Atlas Shrugged’
There is a 200 year reserve of coal in North America at present rates. The Thorium in that coal has 10X as much energy as the coal, when ‘burned’ in the appropriate type of nuclear reactor, a type first pioneered by the US in the 1950’s. That means there is 2,000 years of energy available while we figure out how to fuse the hydrogen in the oceans.
Sure, but then we get to the calculation of the net energy supplied after you have tallied up the energy to extract it.
Extraction costs of Thorium from coal are nonzero, but legislatures wouldn’t have bothered to ban that power generating approach if it wasn’t attractive.
I think we differ on terms, not on meaning. Absolutely, individuals matter. But the civilization that individuals (and liberty!) can flourish in matters, too.
Big thorium fan here.
WAR is obsolete in the borderless globalist consumerist serf utopia. There will be no talk of phalanxes or shields up.
Weapons will be turned in and melted down to make statues of esteemed party members such as comrade kommissar DeBlasio even if they are still among the living.
All comrades of the collective will be equalized in a hive with a cargo cult drop off each month from Mommygov.
Your comrade’s havel must be empty with no signs of capitalist pig private property ownership.
Here you will sing hymns of praise to globalist pimps while basking in the warm light of teevee.
Forward to the glorious Zimbabwe/Venezuela/Cuba hybrid utopia. Yes we can!
Okay, LOVE the name.
And, yup, that’s the alternative.
Being told you have a huge duty big enough to require structuring your life around, but which you did not carefully and thoughtfully agree to as a sober adult, is Communism. If the duty is portrayed as a debt, it’s called debt slavery, only one step up from chattel slavery. Americans are debt slaves. Hamilton led the charge to make them so, but none of the founding lawyers are innocent.
Humans have the political instincts of great apes, which is where Communism comes from. Once a person is convinced to be a Communist, everything inside of that moral event horizon is warped. If someone claims to be liberating the Communist victim from taxation without representation, would the victim /really/ not snitch on the liberator to the police? Snitching is an unforced action, and the victim perfectly free to not do it; he suffers no consequences if he keeps a secret no one else is aware he knows. But the Communist victim is truly convinced that, despite the politicans who are rascals, there is a core of truth at the center of Communism.
Debt: Agreed – it’s one generation enslaving the next. But it will be paid – by the borrower, or, more likely day by day, by the lender.
And unthinking private enterprise can take on that mantle – that’s in Wednesday’s post.
Debt: Agreed – it’s one generation enslaving the next. But it will be paid – by the borrower, or, more likely day by day, by the lender.
And unthinking private enterprise can take on that mantle – that’s in Wednesday’s post.
Did you hear the one about the confederation of Roman numeral universities? They call it the IV League.
Did you hear the one about the confederation of Roman numeral dermatologists? They call it the hIVy league.
Thank you for the education about shield walls.
Ha! Great stuff!
Where were you when I was finishing this post???
Shield walls have always fascinated me – their final use probably was in Britain around ~1000 or so. A great technology, destroyed by another – cavalry.