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Comment by gherkinnn | Hacker News Reader

I'm torn.

Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India. Same foot soldiers. Same cooks. But it was Alexander who got them there.

And yet we loose so much by glossing over the cooks and masons and smiths and horsemen. Stories lost. Lives lost. Knowledge lost. It's been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went in to D-Day are never talked about. It's all cliffs, Private Ryan, and Eisenhower. They put 150,000 men across the channel in a single day. And nobody seems to know about the how.

Original poem: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/bertolt-brecht-fragen-eines-l...

In Our Time on Persepolis, with a rather critical take on Alexander (the Great | of Macedon): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b4z075.

13 Minutes to the Moon, a BBC production about the moon landing. A good amount of detail about the invisible work that went in to the spectacular feat: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2

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> Had it not been for Alexander the Great, the Greeks would not have stomped all the way to India

How do you know that? Leadership and management are real jobs but there's often existing demand, goals and plans that these people are employed by those around them for. I'm willing to go out on a limb and wager that's the way it always is actually. Everyone's a product of their environment and their times, standing on the shoulder of giants, workers and peasants alike.

I don't. And you're right as in his exploits did not happen in a vacuum.

A pervasive theme is that time rumbles by and great men merely cling on and go with it at the right time. The Greeks were in the mood for a rampage and off they went. An Alexander born today won't start conquering foreign lands.

And yet, I can't shake the feeling that there must me something unique to Alexander and others.

Time passes, but not everybody massages it just enough to make a change.

There are some great recent counterexamples to this. Here are two: when Steve Jobs took the helm of Apple in the early 2000s, and Elon Musk with reusable rockets and rebooting space in general.

We seem wired to rally around leaders to get things done. Most people seem to wait around to be told what to do. This makes modern people very uncomfortable (for some very rational reasons) to the point that we engage in denialism about it.

In ancient tribal societies with group sizes close to Dunbar's number, this probably worked out much better than it does now. People had direct relationships with the leader and could see clearly what was happening, and if a leader lost favor they had to face people directly. Sometimes the results were brutal.

In modern society we have systems so large with so many layers of social and economic abstraction that it's very easy for leaders to abuse their power and to hide that abuse for a long time. It's also very easy for leaders to lose sight of the "ground truth" and/or for the people to lose sight of what the leader is doing. I'm sure sometimes leaders don't set out to abuse their power but kind of "back into it" for various reasons. It gets pretty dysfunctional but when you think about it it's kind of astounding that we are able to scale at all to societies this large given our species' background.

Edit:

I also wonder if there's an ego protecting mechanism at work. When Elon Musk says he's going to build a reusable rocket, we can get behind him and work for him... but if the effort fails we can blame the whole thing on him. If we succeed the leader gets the credit, which is the part we hate, but if we fail the leader also gets the blame.

But for the most part CEOs and presidents are replaced regularly with very little effect on the stability of very large and powerful organizations. A handful of debatable counterexamples don't change that it's the majority and the norm. Of course stability and efficiency are much more transparent than disruption.

You're right in that really effective innovative leaders are rare.

Still... I am not familiar with many examples of cases where the leader was removed and not replaced and things didn't fall apart.

I would like to see more experimentation in this area though. We don't experiment nearly enough with social structures.

Yeah that's beyond my claims though. I'm only saying that they're totally fungible and things getting done don't depend that much on a specific individual.

Mmm as far as experimentation, the closest I can think of on a large scale (besides anarchist groups which never had leaders) is that in Europe when a government can't be formed, they can operate without any official leadership even though there's a caretaker government (usually the previous one, who don't have a mandate anymore) but that's kind of formal. Big cooperatives usually elect leaders, so they still have them even though they're elected and can be recalled.

It was Alexander and his father Filippos whose untimely demise left Alexander with a formidable military machine. So it is people it is the environment it is timing, a good deal of luck on top of capability and perseverance.

People followed in their leadership and did their bit, every piece of the puzzle fell into place.

It's pretty obvious from recent well recorded history that leaders with the necessary skills, motivation and right time/place fitment to actually do world changing things are incredibly rare and when those kind of people do pop up we get world changing events that would have never otherwise happened or if they did would have happened with vastly different details and consequences.

The great man way of describing history leaves a lot to be desired but the "somebody else would have done it" crap is even worse. Remove key figures from history and then try to judge what would have happened had someone else filled their shoes and it becomes painfully obvious. Imagine 9/11 happened +/-20yr. How would the second half of the 1900s played out had Chaing Kai-shek gotten control of mainland china? Would we have gotten the napoleonic wars if Louis XVI kept the throne another 10yr? What would european history look like if church had waited another 200yr before cooking up the idea of the crusades? Imagine if the US hadn't elected an abolitionist sympathizer in 1860 but instead waited until 1872? How would recent European history look without Stalin? Etc. etc. Key details regarding when and the order in which events happen have a huge impact on history and the whims of individuals (like Alexander) massively influence these details.

I'm not here to defend the great man theory of history. I'm here to put the "it mostly would have happened about the same" theory of history in the dumpster where it belongs.

> but the "somebody else would have done it" crap is even worse

Except for that it is not so much the exception as it is the rule.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

I would say it's pretty obvious that the opposite is true: Almost all nation-states, corporations and militaries all march on perfectly fine regaardless of their leadership or management. You find only a few notable exceptions.

But someone leads. Look around you. Most leaders are really managers phoning it in.

But when the right person with the right resources at the right time is there, magic happens. All three legs of the stool have to be there.

Absolutely, in war it's not just about how many soldiers you have or what guns they carry.

You need a leader to inspire your troops. Otherwise they start thinking "what am I doing here I just want to survive and go home".

Propaganda (however it's delivered) and self-interest serve that role just fine.

Real Engineering did a great series on the logistics of D-day. https://youtu.be/sYXYG_F1EK0

We have shit tons of information about the fine grained details of WWII. You should look it up some time.

Never mind me, I’ve seen the Mulberry Harbour myself.

Doesn’t change the fact that it’s not part of the shared idea of that operation and over time will fall in to obscurity.

These are great links. I am not sure we are necessarily glossing over these details. The logistics of war/major construction/other big projects are actually heavily studied, and I'd dare say are interesting to the general public - see this book for example: The Virtues of War: A Novel of Alexander the Great. I'd call it history inspired fiction, but the author goes into a lot of detail about what it could have taken to motivate various peoples to join you for war, what goes into feeding said people etc.

I do agree that for some reason this information is more difficult to obtain - I want to blame popular movie directors who are obsessed with the lone genius trope, that however doesn't reflect reality well.

Interesting discussion/poem though - perhaps if we did a better job at reflecting the importance of all the moving pieces of the machine we'd have a better a priori idea of what it takes to create something big.

Edit: Here is something I watched recently about what it takes to feed 6000 miners somewhere in Mongolia - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-Vvw3Cy_Rw

> It’s been a mere 70 years and the logistics that went into D-day are never talked about.

False.

Loads of books have been written about the subject. Here is a video from a video series titled The Logistics of D-Day: https://youtu.be/zpFLLGkNm7I

We can apply this to the present day too.

Take a huge city like New York or Los Angeles or London or Tokyo. You think of investment bankers, celebrities and entertainment industry execs, or other hotshot professionals.

But underneath all that glamor are the waiters, the cooks, the janitors, the security guards, the sanitation workers, etc. etc. who are often overlooked. But the city would utterly fall apart without them.

I don't think that this is an 'exlusive or' situation; The emphasis in the poem is on the small man, who is not often treated as being as part of the big picture, but who has to pay the bills, in the final analysis.

You could add 'war is a racket' too

I knew the title, not its contents. Thanks.

From Wikipedia [0]:

> In the booklet's penultimate chapter, Butler recommended three steps to disrupt the war racket:

> 1. Making war unprofitable. Butler suggests that the means for war should be "conscripted" before those who would fight the war

> 2. Acts of war to be decided by those who fight it

> 3. Limitation of militaries to self-defense

Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matters.

Now it's just poor saps from the Appalachians. Unimportant people dying in unknown places. A small price to pay.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

1 - https://skepticalvet.com/

>Reminds me of a point Danny Sjursen made in his book Ghost Riders of Baghdad [1]. Paraphrasing (badly): Presidents, hawks, and other decision makers have no skin in the game. Their families are safe. They just rake in the dollars. In a conscript army, there is at least a chance that their sons too are sent to die. There might be an expectation that one has to have some experience before taken seriously in these matters.

Important people not having their children in the armed forces is a modern thing. There was a point in time when commanding armies in the field was an all but required resume checkbox for someone in line to inherit the throne and there was no shortage of war back then.

sharing the cost sounds like a better notion of democracy than sharing the votes

What egalitarian times those were.

That was my understanding too.

Though I don’t know when or why it changed. Was it mechanisation? Or the development of standing armies? Entrenched aristocracy?

The distinction between killing people and ordering people to kill people.

Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army was composed of many groups like Thessalians and Macedonians. Greeks were a small portion of it:

"The Greek cavalry was not considered as effective or versatile as the Thessalian and Macedonian cavalry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Macedonian_army

You are correct.

I hesitated using “Greeks”, but then stuck with the common parlance.

Stephen Ambrose actually wrote 2 books that detail the logistics of the invasion of Normandy. D-Day and Band of Brothers.

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