2 Comments
User's avatar
⭠ Return to thread
Jan's avatar

I noticed that advisors for Protect Democracy includes Professor Timothy Snyder, an Eastern European Historian. Snyder has been warning about the threats to our democratic republic since 2016. Have you ever heard of “On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century”?

Expand full comment
Craig Butcher's avatar

It's on my reading list. He points out how much farther along we are than even the pessimists here generally realize.

In human affairs as well as in physics and chemistry there are event horizons and tipping points, where one realm of equilibria is stable within a range of perturbations of inputs and feedbacks, but breaks out into another realm quite suddenly, very often apparently without warning, when the right combination of inputs occurs. Call it a phase transition. Often the processes are not perspicuous and the transition comes as a seeming surprise. Sometimes the causes truly are hidden variables, but in retrospect it usually falls out that they were "hidden" only in the sense that observers went to great lengths to not see them.

I think one of these "hidden" variables has been right in our faces for the past half century or so -- unprecedented advances in the technologies of communication and information processing, employed in the twin services of venality and criminality, have birthed a technology of mendacity before which we poor primates are defenseless. I look forward to seeing whether and/or how Snyder addresses this.

By the way, if you are looking for a book that will really make you feel great about humanity (not!) try "Bloodlands" -- Snyder's history of Eastern Europe as it experienced Hitler and Stalin and their respective systems. Before you read it, though, have your spouse or partner lock up the cyanide pills until you've finished the book at least a week or more and you've had a chance to look at a beautiful sunset or two.

Expand full comment