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Nov. 28, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

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2542 Unintended Consequences of Revolution and War! - A Conversation with Dan Carlin of Hardcore History

The unintended consequences of historical decisions which have shaped the modern world. Stefan Molyneux speaks with Dan Carlin from Hardcore History.

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	Hi, everybody.
	This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio.
	I hope you're doing very well.
	So people have asked me for a long time to go hardcore, and I have decided to take my own interpretation of that request and talk to Dan Carlin, the author and host extraordinaire of Hardcore History.
	Thank you so much, Dan, for taking the time today.
	Well, it's great to be back.
	How have you guys been doing?
	Oh, doing well.
	Doing well.
	I saw that you were on Joe Rogan, who has been just a completely wonderful guy to interact with, and I certainly enjoyed my time with him as well.
	So you've been on, I think, more than once, right?
	Oh, I think three times now, yeah.
	Isn't he awesome?
	I love how he just promotes all of our work and helps us all out.
	Yeah, well, of course, I like to think that I'm really helping Joe Rogan get his leg up in the media.
	Yes, I completely agree with you.
	He's had the FDR bump, which usually is just like a trap door opening up under other people's shows.
	But you'll see that, of course, after we finish this.
	But, well, so you do this show, Hardcore History, that I've just heard widely praised and, of course, which I enjoy as well.
	And I thought it would be fun to chat about...
	Unintended consequences of history.
	So there's this kind of thing that happens in history because things in the past kind of look inevitable.
	And yet, of course, things in the future are wide open.
	And when we look at history, we think it's sort of a series of decisions.
	And they seem to have, you know, they're in textbooks, there are maps, there's kind of inevitability about it.
	But I think quite often the result of decisions, both good and bad, made by individuals.
	And a lot of those decisions have unintended consequences.
	And so there's kind of An alternative history that is always worth looking at to shake us loose from the idea that there's inevitability in history.
	And so I thought it would be interesting to do a show about that.
	And in your travels through the realms of history, have you found particularly juicy examples of unintended consequences of historical decisions that you think are worth talking about?
	I think you could write a history book that purported to show that all of history was based around the ideas that had consequences that people didn't foresee or outcomes that were unexpected or decisions that were poor in hindsight to make.
	I think that's how common it is.
	And I think you could also make a case that perhaps it's the greatest threat that humanity faces in the future, too, when you talk about The ability to respond to challenges, which I think could be something you could say all of human history is about.
	How did people respond to challenges?
	And to make the wrong decision in crucial situations, I mean, I could see that as the epitaph for the human race someday, maybe.
	I mean, you know, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to imagine a disastrous decision in the Cold War precipitating a nuclear holocaust.
	I mean, that's how much of a knife edge I think history actually, you know, sits upon, and decision-making is the key, I think.
	I mean, like I said, I think you could write a whole history about how that's determined the entire course of events since the beginning of time.
	And this is something that frustrates me when I hear, you know, there's no such thing as history because, you know, the beginning of this conversation is already part of history.
	And so there's really no such thing.
	It's all the present.
	And what bothers me is I see history being made with the same mistakes over and over and over again.
	This is one of the things that drives you nuts about history is this sort of broken record circularity of it.
	Because people seem to make very confident assertions, people in power in particular.
	They make very confident assertions.
	You know, we're going to go bring democracy to Iraq.
	We're going to fix poverty in 10 years by putting the welfare state into place in the 1960s.
	You know, we're going to contain the Soviet empire.
	We're going to do all of these things.
	And there's no ambiguity about it.
	There's no like, well, unless this stuff happens, unless this crazy stuff happens, which we can't anticipate.
	It's always a very, well, here's what we're going to do.
	And it's going to be great.
	You know, we're going to have Obamacare.
	We're going to get everyone great health care for less money.
	You know, and there's confidence.
	And it's like when you study history and you realize how many unintended consequences spill out of entirely confident decisions.
	I wish people could learn more about that so they could say to anyone who makes these really confident assertions about what's going to happen when you go and invade another country or try and deal with complex social problems using the blunt force of the state.
	if they don't have any caveats, if they don't have any what-ifs or whatevers or if-mights kind of thing, Don't take them seriously.
	There's an old saying about war that all battle plans vanish when you meet the enemy.
	Because you make all these plans and then what you're doing is just responding.
	And so when people say we're going to do X and they don't include lots of, you know, well, here's what might happen, these bad things might happen and so on, I always really want people to understand that they're talking out of their ass and they should never be taken seriously.
	But it seems hard for people to get a sense of all of these ambiguities and unintended consequences of particularly major policy decisions.
	I think we have to be careful, too, to differentiate between what the public is fed in terms of a message versus how those same individuals who seem so confident when they're talking to the public, how they behave in private.
	I mean it's very possible that in a lot of cases those ambiguities are discussed in private, but in order to – if we want to take President Obama's excuse apparently for not explaining that yes, some people might lose their insurance and some people might not be able to go to their doctor when he said that the message would become confused.
	And easily seized upon by political opponents.
	So you want to sound confident to the voters when perhaps in private conversations while you're planning all this stuff, the downsides and the potential for things to go the way you didn't plan are perhaps openly discussed more.
	I think certainly though there are cases.
	The Iraq war that you brought up is a perfect example.
	Where it seems like even the internal discussions and debates were wildly optimistic and positive and dismissive of outcomes that were not conducive to what the people making the decisions wanted to see.
	I mean, the firing of General Anthony Zinni for saying a bunch of hard truths that turned out to be correct, that's a perfect example of I don't like your point of view, I don't like your decisions, and I don't like...
	I don't like the way you're seeing the potential for downsides.
	I think that that's maybe though different when you hear the public addressed with extreme confidence.
	I mean President Kennedy talked extremely confident when the Cuban Missile Crisis was happening.
	Hello?
	Yes, go ahead.
	Oh, I just heard a lot of noises.
	Okay.
	I think President Kennedy was talking very confidently to the public during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and we know darn well they were having these anguished debates about the downsides and the potential for miscalculation and operating through the fog of war.
	So maybe we get a different impression of how they're behaving than they would give us if we could see the internal deliberations via secret camera or something.
	Well, this is probably one reason why Obama's promise to publicize or publicly broadcast the Obamacare negotiations over C-SPAN was not carried through.
	This is all back to Plato, that bastard.
	Plato, of course, made the argument that the people – the noble lie.
	You should tell people very strong, powerful metaphors because they can't handle the complexity of the truth.
	But then, of course, that really doesn't work in a democracy, which is why Plato's ideal society was a dictatorship.
	Let me give – toss one – one sort of, I think, unintended consequence.
	We can certainly talk about arming and training the mujahideen in the 80s to take on the Soviet empire and learn how to destroy an empire by crippling it financially by having it invade a non-state agency or fight a non-state army.
	But what I found is particularly compelling is the – we mentioned the Cold War.
	The Cold War, of course, came about because of the Soviet empire and the NATO conflict.
	But going all the way further back, in the First World War, the allies and the Germans and their allies were fighting each other to a standstill.
	Like, neither of them could obtain a decisive victory, and certainly unconditional surrender would not have been possible.
	Germany, of course, itself was never invaded.
	And so they were fighting themselves to an exhaustion, and if they had finished the war without American intervention, it seems almost certain that they would have just basically said, let's go home, you know?
	Ten million dead.
	We basically changed the lines a couple of miles either way, back and forth.
	Let's all go home.
	And I think that would have been a very powerful anti-war message for Europe to have achieved, which is all this death and no decisive victory.
	Let's be a little more cautious next time.
	When America came in, of course, they brought massive amounts of troops and armaments and money and so on.
	And this allowed...
	The Western Front to really start to surge towards Germany.
	Germany, of course, freaks out and panics, doesn't want to fight the two-front war, and sends Lenin through Finland with lots of money and a couple of thousand nutty revolutionaries to go and start a revolution in Russia, which succeeded, you could argue, because of the German support.
	And so America coming into the war, in a sense, causes the domino effect of the creation of And so
	So these sort of examples where the American intervention in 1917 into the First World War had the unintended consequences of having a lot to do with, if not directly causing, the revolution in Russia and also creating the lopsided Treaty of Versailles, which created the backlash of Nazi Germany which created the backlash of Nazi Germany and so on.
	You just don't know what's going to happen when you commit these kinds of resources to these kinds of conflicts.
	I mean the 20th century would have been a wildly different and much more positive century without the First World War.
	But even with the First World War, without the intervention of the Americans into the First World War, I think it would have been hard to say that we would have either had communism or the Second World War.
	So these kinds of things are really, really hard to predict.
	So, I mean, you can certainly shoot that down if you want, or you can come up with other examples of these kinds of unintended consequences, but that's one that's always sort of troubled me.
	I always think more about the start of that war because you have, it seems to me, a couple of different kinds of conflicts that can precipitate a complete redrawing of the – if you think about the global political system as like a chessboard.
	Every now and then in history, something or someone comes along and simply swipes all the pieces off the board, throws the board up in the air, and you have to kind of start over.
	And sometimes, I think a lot of the time, those are single individuals.
	An Alexander the Great, a Nepal.
	Napoleon is very important in the story of the First World War because he's the previous time before the First World War when someone threw the chessboard up in the air and started over again, kind of.
	And I always think that when that happens, it's like an earthquake happens and it takes some of the pressure off of the system for a while.
	But after Napoleon, you had 100 years for that to build up again.
	And when the First World War breaks out, you see the other kinds of events that can upset the chessboard, not a single individual living out their glorious destiny like a Hitler.
	Instead, you see multiple nation states involved in a dynamic together where the nations that went to war in the First World War, I would think almost to a country, maybe the United States exempted, if they could have been shown what they would be like in 1919.
	the year after the war was over, I don't think any of those powers go to war.
	I think they would do anything to change what happened in 1914, whereas when it happened in 1914, most of the powers were pretty much okay with it.
	I mean, enthusiastic might be overdoing it, but certainly glad to have this showdown, excited about the potential, and then four years later, everybody is bloody and broken, and it's a disaster everywhere, really, but in the United States.
	Even victors like France and Great Britain I think it's interesting to look at that.
	at the decisions that were made at the start of these events and how interesting it is that everybody that was involved, with the exception of Woodrow Wilson and the U.S., probably would have taken it back if they could have.
	In terms of all those dominoes you talked about when the U.S. gets in the war falling the way that they did, well, that's the fun of alternative history.
	I mean, sure, it could have gone that way.
	We could have had maybe 12, 15, 20 different potential alternative outcomes where it could have gone one way or the other.
	Neil Ferguson, in his book, The Pity of War, basically the entire book is an alternative history argument to argue that everyone would have been better off if Britain had stayed aloof and not gone into the war.
	I I mean, he argues that I mean, think about what Britain would be today if they'd avoided that.
	I always like to think about the Germans and think of how different the whole 20th century and how different Germany is today if they don't find themselves on the losing end of two world wars.
	I mean, talk about an alternative reality right there.
	And if you could go back and tell the Kaiser and his military advisors and all those people, listen, if you go into this war, Germany's going to be here in the year 2020.
	I mean, that's the great alternative history of that era to me.
	And a lot of people had to screw up to make that possible.
	Yeah, and there is, I think, some conflict between the ancient warrior classes that were in charge of Europe and the sort of rising merchant classes that were generating the bulk of the wealth.
	And one of the great tragedies of the First World War, which of course there are almost an endless set, is the degree to which it destroyed wealth that had been built up.
	It's like you save up a bunch of gold and then some asshole on a horse comes and steals it all, right?
	And the growth of the free market and industrialization in the 19th century created massive amounts of wealth, at least relative to what had been before.
	And almost down to the dollar, the First World War just took all of that and set fire to it and destroyed almost a century of economic progress.
	And then what was left afterwards, as the old statement goes, war is the health of the state.
	The other thing that the patriotism and enthusiasm for a lot of the war that happened, not just in the upper classes, but in the lower classes too, the great adventure.
	It had been so long since Western Europe was at war that they had this idea that war was this adventure where you charge up a horse at a bad guy with a sword or something like that, some sort of toy soldier nonsense.
	And that turned out, of course, to be crushingly and bitterly false.
	And so the price of patriotism and enthusiasm for all of these things, The merchant classes were decimated and the ancient ruling classes of war really benefited in many ways because the growth of the power of the state was so intense in the First World War.
	And it certainly, as it usually does, it went smaller again after the state.
	But, I mean, before the First World War in America, the top income tax rate was 15%.
	And then during the war it went up to 90% and it never went back down anywhere below.
	I think it was 70% even in the 1920s.
	And so this – and of course the rise of central banking.
	As war became more absolute and as war became more expensive, you simply couldn't get away with it, right?
	The old way that war was limited was you just ran out of gold.
	You can't pay your troops and then the war is kind of done.
	But with central banking, fiat currency and all of that, you can start printing and making up your own money and debt and borrows and it all becomes this interchange of monopoly money.
	So the degree with which war expands the power of the state, crushes the wealth of the people and expands one of the most dangerous accessories of state power, which is fiat currency, has really reshaped what we understand of as the state and its role in society.
	And it seems like that is only continuing in a way in the 21st century.
	Well, I think part of the reason why is because those trends that the First World War was sort of a facet of.
	I mean, we have all these trends that begin to warp the international system that eventually become so destabilizing that it breaks out into something like the First World War.
	Those trends are still continuing to shake out.
	And so when you talk about the changes in the state, really there was a world that died when the First World War happened.
	And the changes, like you said, in for example, monarchy or the ability of old systems to adapt to – I mean we talked a second ago about how history is sort of the decision making that's done in response to challenges that people face.
	The First World War unleashed a whole bunch of challenges that we still haven't quite gotten our minds around as a human species.
	One of the challenges is whether or not The war-making power of major states has grown to a degree where it's not even a good idea to use it anymore.
	I mean, you know, Clausewitz famously said that, you know, war is a continuation of policy by other means.
	But if war-making becomes so deadly that you destroy any political gain that you could hope to achieve, you know, one of the things they said about the First World War is that Economically, they killed the golden goose of that era by fighting over a lot of things that were really more golden egg type questions.
	Excuse me.
	And so I think we are still as a human...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	I just want to make sure I understand the golden egg analogy because I want to make sure.
	Could you just break that out a little more?
	Sure.
	When the First World War broke out, that's considered to be one of the first true eras of globalization.
	Relatively instant communication via the telegraph, people reading newspapers all over the world, being able to order stuff from one place and have it delivered via the mail to you.
	I mean, there's a lot of very interesting similarities to the modern globalization pushes and what happened back then.
	There was a feeling that war was an integral part of anyone's political system.
	You know, in the Napoleonic era, the 1700s, 1600s, war is a facet of society.
	It's considered to be perfectly natural, a tool of the state and all those things.
	But if war gets to a point where it is so damaging and so out of control that it can destroy that intensely interconnected globalized system, then all of a sudden you're destroying the thing that's making you all the money that even makes modern warfare possible because of its expense.
	So you're destroying trade, not to mention workers, to such a degree that your tax base collapses?
	Well, and not just that.
	You're warping the political system money-wise, too.
	I mean, one of the things that a lot of economic historians will talk about, and it gets over my head pretty quickly, is how things like reparations after the war warps the international financial system and all those kind of things.
	I mean, it becomes...
	Something that once you tear apart this finely tuned machine that the 1914 world had evolved into, when you put it back together, it's going to have to be completely redesigned.
	I mean, like I said, we're still shaking out the things that were done to a previous international system by that war.
	Gold standards, all these things that were a part of the 19th century worlds and the great powers' conduct in them have never quite recovered since the debt and all of the reparations and everything financially that came out of that war.
	Well, I mean, as Churchill pointed out, reparations were entirely destructive to the domestic industry in England.
	We say, oh, we're going to go bring a million shoes from those bastard Germans back over to England.
	Well, what happens to the British shoe manufacturers?
	They collapse.
	Oh, we're going to grab all this gold from Germany and bring it over to England.
	Well, that just...
	I mean, there is no greater profit than trade.
	And the idea that you're going to do this Genghis Khan Old Testament eye for an eye, rip off the Germans and benefit the British is nonsense.
	That's not the way that wealth grows.
	I mean, that is the old style pillage and transfer.
	That basically comes from the Stone Age Viking mentality and that did not contribute anything other than disorder and destruction to the capacities of people to trade and generate wealth.
	So, yeah, economically, and this was well known by a lot of people at the time, economically, it was a complete disaster.
	But, of course, they had so many war widows.
	They had so many pensions.
	They had so many health care requirements for the troops that they just were grabbing like a man, a drowning man at a log.
	They just grabbed whatever resources they could get a hold of.
	They couldn't wait for trade to revitalize and for taxes to increase.
	They needed the money now because they were broke and they had massive obligations to a destroyed citizenry.
	So these kinds of decisions really undermined the re-knitting of trade that should have helped people avoid the Second World War.
	You know, as the old statement goes, when goods cease going across borders, soldiers will soon follow.
	This reparations and grabbing and punishment and pillaging and all that of the German economy and other economies on the losing side really prevented a lot of trade from reintegrating Europe back into a state that hopefully would have put a brake on any future conflicts.
	I mean, but this is what happens when you...
	If you destroy 10 million citizens, you kind of have to give people some vengeance.
	Otherwise, we basically say, well, okay, that was all for nothing.
	And so they say, well, we're going to go take stuff from those Germans, those bastards who started the war.
	And that had never happened before, where in Europe, a country had to accept full responsibility for starting the war, which of course wasn't true, but of course gives people that emotional satisfaction of vengeance with the problem that it generally goes on and creates another war.
	Well, and I think you destabilize the old systems, and it takes a long time for the ship to right itself.
	When you remove things like The Romanov dynasty and the Hohenzollern dynasty, and you break up these ancient states, you end up creating a vacuum, politically speaking, where it takes a while before people decide what's going to fill that gap.
	And it can't always be what the conqueror decides it's going to be.
	In Germany, for example, the government that they had to proclaim there was almost mandated by the peace deal.
	But that's not necessarily what the people there wanted, especially when they got angry enough to want something that they saw as more able to redeem whatever they felt that they lost in that previous war.
	I mean the reason you get Nazism in Germany, but almost communism maybe, I mean you could say that was perhaps a near-run alternative history there too.
	Part of the reason you get communism in what became the Soviet Union after Russia.
	I mean all those systems were left open to some newfangled approach once what had been in place for a long time was gone.
	So you take that stability from that old world out and it takes a long time before things reach a level of equalization again.
	A level of stability.
	If you look at the Middle East now, you could easily claim that that system was destabilized by the First World War and has not stopped tipping one way or the other since.
	We're still vibrating from what that war did to us.
	The political extremism that you saw in Europe to that period is tied directly to the economic situation, which is tied directly to the way that war ended.
	As I said, if you could have shown all these people who were the advisors to the Hohenzollern ruler, the Kaiser, that if you go into this war to improve Germany's world situation, there won't be a Kaiser, there won't be any Hohenzollern dynasty, and Germany will be fighting between extremists in ten years.
	None of those people go to war under any conditions.
	So to get back to your original premise, I find it fantastic that we find ourselves in a world that's probably been determined by bad human decision making.
	Well, and I think to your point that when you have an evolved structure where you have dynasties, and of course it was mostly a monarchy of one kind or another, certainly, and whether even in England where it wasn't a monarchy, you know, there was a monarchy, of course, but it was parliamentary power, which tend to be passed within a small section at the top of the British class system, you have people who were invested in the long-term health of the country, right?
	Right.
	If you, quote, own a country as a monarch and you're going to hand that country off to your kids, you don't want to screw it up too much.
	Democratic politicians with the four year rotation, they just grab everything they can because it's not a hereditary.
	I'm not sort of arguing that it's better.
	It's just an economic reality that you want to maintain the health.
	When you decapitate a monarchy, people are still used to being ruled.
	It's not like they suddenly wake up and say, hey, I would love a stateless society and we'd love to have complete freedom because they're used to being ruled.
	And what happens, again, I lean on Churchill for this kind of stuff.
	He had a great term for Hitler as an adventurer.
	He was a great adventurer.
	And what happened was when you decapitate the old systems, you open up a playing field for the charismatic demagogues that are always circling around looking for avenues to go in and grab power with.
	And so you get the Mussolinis, you get the Lenins, you get the Hitlers who come rushing in with their charisma, with their energy and unfortunately with their near bottomless capacity for evil.
	And it doesn't solve the problem to just rip off the old hierarchies.
	And it just, as you say, creates a power vacuum which tends to attract the worst, most manipulative, most sociopathic and yet most glib and powerfully spoken men that can rule a country.
	Which, boy, I mean, takes it in entirely unexpected directions, at least with the old aristocracy, with the old monarchy.
	You knew they were in it for the long haul, and that they had gotten used to power and had some understanding of its use, and there was a kind of stability that came from that, a kind of ballast stability.
	But when you ripped all of those heads of states off, I mean, who replaced them tend to be a lot more unpredictable, a lot more dangerous.
	And that, again, is one of these unexpected consequences.
	Same thing you could argue is happening in Iraq.
	Max, sorry, go ahead.
	I was going to say you see it in the French Revolution too, where once you get rid of those old systems, it takes a while for things to stabilize.
	And in that interim period, you could end up with something very radical indeed.
	And one could make a case, I think, that in human history we tend to lean that direction, that maybe extremism in one form or another is the default thing you can expect to happen in the near term after a long-lasting stable system is done away with.
	And so when we talk about I mean, the Tsar goes away.
	That's hundreds of years of Romanov history.
	The Kaiser goes away.
	Hundreds of years of Hohenzollern history and 45 years of unified German history.
	The Austro-Hungarian Empire is gone.
	The Ottomans.
	I mean, the number of people whose chess pieces are swept off the geopolitical chess board I'm not sure there are many times in history where you can name that many long-lasting, stabilizing forces that are done away with all at once.
	I guess that's why you call it a world war as opposed to something in a more regional sense.
	But when that happens, that helps explain the fantastically destabilized and weird periods of the 1920s and 1930s.
	Yeah, I would argue that the greatest prior European change was probably 13th and 14th century with the Black Death because, of course, it destroyed large numbers of the laboring classes and the ruling classes as well.
	But because there was such a shortage of labor, laborers could actually start to bid for some sort of freedom, some sort of independence, some sort of rights.
	And of course, it killed off a lot of theological classes as well, because priests would go to the bedsides and catch the disease and die.
	I think that was the last massive destabilization of European society.
	And again, I mean, out of that kind of hell can come some sort of positive stuff.
	But I think it had been a long time since Europe...
	been destabilized.
	I guess you had made the case, and I'd like to hear more about the case of Napoleon, again, another adventurer of the old school.
	Would you argue that that was the last time previous, you said 100 years prior to the 1914 opening of the First World War?
	If you could talk a little bit more about the effect that Napoleon had, I guess, the previous chessboard of the air, that'd be great.
	Well, to me, and I would say, by the way, that the previous big destabilizer before the First World War was the Napoleonic era, because I want to include the French Revolution in that.
	To me, Napoleon is the natural bookend to the French Revolution.
	The French Revolution was destabilizing for the reasons that your audience probably understands this very well, the whole question of how ideas can be destabilizing.
	The French Revolution...
	monarchies was almost like an intellectual contagion.
	That's a term I've used before.
	I mean, if you're the king of Prussia, you are as scared of the ideas of the French Revolution infecting your people as you are of Napoleon's soldiers later.
	And as a matter of fact, one of the reasons that these countries wanted to avoid having French troops stationed on their soil or occupying their soil was this idea that they would corrupt, you know, the peasantry of these other countries who are happily living under a monarchy with these radical ideas of liberty.
	So to me, the French Revolution is the period where Europe becomes destabilized by all these ideas which are transplanted Around Europe by Napoleon's conquest, because even though Napoleon is an emperor and it's an imperial system, the ideas of liberty that the French Revolution had spawned was still alive in all its soldiers, and Napoleon often used that sort of rhetoric and terminology and the ideas of liberty as one of the main structures that he argued things around.
	So these soldiers are spreading liberty in all of Europe, and many people have made the cases.
	That Europe's turbulent, in terms of political ideologies, 19th century is a direct result of that.
	The revolutions of 1848 and all those kinds of things are the beginnings of those germs spread by Napoleon's troops, taking root and beginning to spread themselves.
	And so, to me, that's the destabilizing thing.
	I mean you could argue that the Bolshevik bomb of 1917 is ignited by the French Revolution.
	And of course when Hitler was going to war with the communists of the Soviet Union, he said finally some of these French revolutionary questions are going to be settled once and for all.
	Well, I think that's a great point.
	I will challenge the use of the word liberty with regards to the essential ideas behind the French Revolution, because I would argue that the essential ideas behind the French Revolution were a form of totalitarianism, right?
	Wherein, if you compare the American Revolution to the French Revolution, it's literally night and day.
	I would argue that there was no...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I would just say, but I think you're taking it to the time of the terror, which is not the same as the time when the monarchy is overthrown.
	The French Revolution, to me, looks a heck of a lot like the original revolution in Russia, where it's a bunch of different groups that manage to combine everything from the 19th century idea of a liberal with what we would call today.
	I mean, some of these people are just poor and angry, and there's no ideology at all.
	It's a bunch of groups that manage to unite under the idea of the king's gotta go, and then you have the power struggle afterwards for, okay, what do we replace the king with?
	And you certainly saw that in the Russian Revolution, too, where Mensheviks and Bolsheviks and actual liberals and all these people fighting, and then someone emerges as king of the mountain.
	France during the terror, which is absolutely what you talked about, once you get there, you're into a leftist totalitarian sort of a system, but that's not how it started.
	That's one group finally gaining dominance over all the others that had to combine to overthrow the monarchy.
	And there's also a difference I would say between again what those people say to themselves in private and the way they we would call it today image themselves to the rest of the world.
	The French Revolution was definitely marketed as a liberty oriented advance and it was sold that way to a bunch of people who didn't have any liberty at all.
	A lot of our concept, I think, of what liberty is, is something that's much more modern than those people we're dealing with.
	It was a much more heady, unique, and to be honest, not fully formed idea back then.
	I don't think those people could have easily argued liberty with you because they didn't have as many examples and discussion about it to use as evidence.
	It's a much lower level of an understanding, but they knew that life sucked under the current regime and they wanted to change that.
	I certainly agree with you there.
	But I mean, if I think about the intellectual underpinnings of the American Revolution, obviously flawed though it was, you know, life, liberty, and originally it was property, life, liberty, and property, in other words, and the pursuit of happiness.
	Now, of course, they had to drop property from the ideological framework because of the slave owners in the South would not accept that property was foundational to the Constitution because then you can't own – property can't own property would be sort of against – so they had to drop property.
	But for the Americans, life was just be free of coercion.
	We'll protect your property.
	We'll enforce contracts and then go do what you will.
	But I always felt – found that the French ideology, whether it comes out of Catholicism or wherever or the egalitarianism involved in the idea of a soul that was all kind of equal in the eyes of God, it did not have that – we're going to stay out of your way and let you go do your thing and be happy.
	It was Smee, liberty, equality, fraternity.
	It was much more kind of claustrophobic, much more we have to have an outcome, an equality of outcome rather than an equality of opportunity.
	And I think whenever you take that kind of radical egalitarianism, it seems to provoke a lot of totalitarianism in its wake.
	So I'd sort of argue based upon where the revolutionaries were coming from in France, it almost kind of had to go that way.
	And the same thing, of course, occurred in Russia.
	I mean, obviously, the communists weren't fighting to protect private property, but quite the opposite, to abolish it or rather decentralize it in the hands of the state, which is what always happens.
	But I think those – it's not just, well, some group happened to win.
	I would argue it's really the ideology underlying the whole drive.
	There just didn't seem to be much of the Enlightenment individualism that was occurring in the French Revolution.
	Again, that's my reading of it.
	I'm certainly open to arguments of the contrary.
	Well, but the French Revolution differed from the American Revolution in that it's a class revolution.
	And the American Revolution wasn't a class revolution.
	There are people today on the left who will argue that it always was this middle or upper class severing of ties from Great Britain for financial reasons.
	I'm not going to go there.
	But the point is, is that the French Revolution is really, if you look at Europe's history, they would always have these, they had the peasants revolt.
	They had a lot of these kinds of things in France's past.
	But the American founders, with the possible exception of Thomas Jefferson, would refer to the demands of the French people in that revolution as leveling.
	That these are people who think that you need to take the classes and level them out.
	It's an anti-aristocratic, anti...
	See, the American Revolution was so non-class oriented that you had people like Hamilton who even wanted to find an American king afterwards to replace the British monarchy.
	These people were not upset with their station in life.
	Which in the French Revolution, and also to a great degree the revolution in Russia, those are class revolutions.
	Those are poor people saying this system is rigged against us.
	We've had it.
	We're suffering terribly, and it's not fair, so we're going to fix that.
	And that's where your state coercion comes in, because when you talk about fixing things like wealth inequality, there's always going to be some people that are going to have to have force used to do that, because I don't know about you, but I'm not giving up my stuff easily.
	Right.
	So that's how that happens.
	These are these are revolutions designed to fix class imbalances in systems where it's not perceived to be fair.
	These are not meritocracies.
	These are these are nations where the people who are benefiting are benefiting because they have a certain color blood.
	They're blue bloods.
	And the people that overthrew them thought, well, screw that.
	You know, we're not living in this unfair rigged system anymore.
	And as soon as we take over the state, we're going to fix the fact that we have nothing and you have all this stuff simply because of the family you were born into.
	So you have to make a distinction between the fact that the American Revolution really was not class-based at all, whereas something like the French Revolution was.
	And I think a lot of people, even people who don't like things like property seizure and whatnot...
	Could certainly understand the position that the poor found themselves in these societies, where they didn't have a chance to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and the whole system was perpetually rigged against them.
	So, I mean, I think we have to put ourselves in their shoes.
	In a meritocracy, we can argue about, hey, listen, everybody should have private property and their own stuff and whatnot, but in that system, the rulers and the bluebloods had private property, and they could take yours.
	The system was unfair from a totally different standpoint, and I would argue that at the time, a class rebalancing is exactly what those systems probably needed.
	Would I have cut a lot of people's heads off to do it?
	Of course not.
	Well, yes, Rachel.
	I think you touched on something very important there, which is that the American Revolution was not driven by a hatred of the rich, but rather a hatred of state power, which is one of the reasons why it allowed people to pursue happiness and tried to limit state power through the Constitution.
	Not successfully, tragically, but it tried.
	Whereas the mistake...
	If I can be so bold as to say, it comes down to one simple mistake.
	But the mistake in the French Revolution, which was to associate wealth and power with evil, you know, which, of course, almost everyone who was wealthy and powerful in the aristocratic and theocratic French state was evil.
	I mean, by sort of definitions of modern standards, at least, and certainly by the definitions of the people at the time, exploitive and so on.
	And they said, well, to have property is evil, so what we're going to do is get rid of property and then everything will be better.
	That is somewhat of a natural reaction to people who aren't well-versed in ideas, but it's really up to the intellectuals, I would argue, to talk people out of that stuff and say, no, the problem is not that they have money.
	It's not money, right?
	The problem is not money.
	The problem is theft.
	The problem is state power.
	And therefore, if we're going to solve that problem, we don't try and take away stuff from rich people and make everyone the same because that's going to promote more people We need to take away the privilege of those in power, which is the state's ability to control others, redistribute income, enforce arbitrary laws, and so on.
	If we take away that power, then whatever shakes out of that is going to be much more free and virtuous.
	But if we just say, well, anybody who's got money should be – it should be taken away from them, which is sort of the argument that the communists used in 1917.
	You know, you've got a big house.
	We're going to move 10 peasants in there.
	They sort of make that mistake.
	They're reacting in an emotional way and it's frustrating of course from the hindsight from the point of view of history that they weren't more intellectuals doing whatever they could to say the problem is not wealth.
	The problem is state power.
	Therefore, the solution is not to take away wealth but rather to reduce state power, let the chips fall where they may, which I would argue is more of the American solution.
	But it wasn't driven by rage of property, which, you know, the Proudhon's famous statement that property is theft did apply of course to the aristocracy and to the church, which were basically owning things through pretty wretched means.
	But it is always annoying that people didn't point that out more and, you know.
	Yeah, but again, I think you're expecting them to understand something that was not widely proven at the time.
	I mean, a perfect example is you can make those claims because you saw the French Revolution and you saw how it turned out.
	Those people didn't have that example to learn from, right?
	I mean, I think when you think about this, I've always said the problem with Marxism is that it's a classroom doctrine.
	And if you sit down with people with a blackboard and say, now, here's how the world should work, you can get people, most people, especially most poor people who feel like they don't stand a chance anyway, to go, yes, that makes total sense.
	It's a very different thing once you overlay those classroom blueprints on the human species.
	We don't tend to follow those blueprints very well, and we have so many random factors and variants person to person that those classroom theories fall apart in reality.
	But you have to see some examples of implementation in the past to learn your lesson.
	I would argue that we have plenty of lessons now to say, oh, here's what might happen if you go that route that people back then didn't have.
	And so I think from an intellectual standpoint, if you are a lower class person in France right before the revolution, you The idea of a revolution and redistributing wealth and all that stuff looks pretty darn good to you.
	And there's no French Revolution for the other poor person to say, wait a minute, if we do this, you're just going to empower another group of people who will start cutting heads off and send you off to war when you don't want to go.
	And that's not something those people would have easily understood.
	I think 20, 30, a generation later, I was going to say 20 or 30 years, but a generation later, a lot of those same people would be able to say to new revolutionaries, let me tell you what to be careful about.
	Let me tell you how this might go if we're not very prudent and wise.
	That's an example that hadn't existed in 1789, you know?
	Well, and of course, the peasants are starving, right?
	And food panic generally doesn't produce long-term rational solutions.
	The American revolutionaries weren't starving.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	No, I was going to say, you're absolutely right.
	If you're starving, none of this high-minded stuff means anything.
	If you're watching your kids die in front of you, none of this means anything.
	All right.
	Let me ask you the big challenging closing question.
	Big challenging closing question.
	And I say challenging simply because there's no way to be right or wrong in any fundamental way, but it's going to put you on a limb.
	All right.
	So, Dan, Western civilization, getting better or getting worse?
	What's the future?
	Come on, we study all this stuff to make predictions, right?
	No, I don't think there is a Western civilization anymore.
	I think those distinctions existed when the worlds east, west, north, all these places were more in their own little cocoons.
	I think a lot of what we would call Western civilization today has become the global civilization, influenced more and more by places like China and whatnot, but over...
	An overlay, you know, when we talk about things like human rights, I think that's the kind of thing that's catching on globally, even if there are powers like China who proclaim those to be Western rights.
	I think the global expectation of the conduct of nations, for example, is determined by the standards we used to say were Western civilization standards.
	So if you say, how's Western civilization working out?
	I would argue pretty well at the moment.
	The big test is always the same.
	Same test it was in the First World War, same test it was in the Second and in the Cold War.
	At a base level, can we keep from destroying ourselves?
	And I think – I go read Nick Bostrom, the physicist who writes the catastrophic stuff like how the world will end.
	And when you read this stuff, you start to realize exactly how important good decision-making – again, to bring your entire topic around at the beginning.
	How important good decision-making is to seeing that we don't somehow either destroy ourselves or destroy the planet's ability to support human life.
	And I think that the ideas that are guiding us into the 21st century are based in large part on a Western civilization-style model.
	So in that sense, it's probably, in my mind, evolved and transformed itself into something that hopefully will be able to meet the challenges that mankind are going to have, you know, thrown their way in this next hundred years.
	I like that.
	Deconstruct the question rather than answer my specifics, which is good.
	No, I think that's perfectly fair to redefine it that way, and I think that's a very good point.
	Well, Dan, thank you, of course, so much for your time.
	Hugely appreciate it.
	I hope we can chat again soon.
	For people who listen to my show, the three, four, some number, we just get them to do a lot of refreshes, how can they find your great stuff on the web?
	Oh, just go to my website, dancarlin.com.
	We're on iTunes as well, and generally any podcast service you subscribe to.
	We'll have us someplace.
	Just search for my name.
	And if it doesn't come up, let me know, and we'll change that.
	Well, thanks very much for your listeners.
	I run Free Domain Radio, which is the largest philosophy show on the web, at freedomainradio.com.
	And as I suggest to everyone, let's try and do a threesome with Joe.
	Thank you again so much for your time, and I hope you're back.
	Thank you for having me on.
	I really appreciate it.
	Thank you.

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