Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lionhearted | Hacker News Reader

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A very nice comment, insightful and inspirational, just one point -

> What that means is that actions you take that affect other people in turn affect you; helping someone else will come back to help you, and screwing someone else will come back to bite you in the ass. [...] ^And, yes, I'll say it... Government.

I like the sentiment of your comment and 100% agree about doing good deeds on an individual and business level. Unfortunately, the point about doing nice things doesn't always scale to a governmental level.

History backs this up quite clearly - when you capitulate even a little bit to demands due to unrest, you almost always get more unrest within 5 years. It's how the British Empire lost the 13 Colonies.

See, legitimate grievances do have to be addressed, but unfortunately addressing them in response to protest creates hugely empowered people fundamentally hostile to the government that capitulated. These people's power stems from their ability to extract concessions under rebellion or threat of rebellion, so, humans being what they are, they'll inevitably rebel or threaten to rebel after a short honeymoon period.

The solution is pretty clear in the history books - crack down brutally on the leadership, wait a suitably short amount of them, and then and only then redress grievances. That way, the people who are actually suffering have their needs fulfilled, but you don't have a class of organizers feeding and fueling further unrest and riots.

That particular policy has worked consistently throughout history. Crack down, then redress grievances and help the people. There's notable examples it working effectively across all eras and continents. Redressing and hoping that rioters are satisfied and don't continue without the crackdown doesn't work. Neither does cracking down without fixing problems.

This doesn't make the position ethical, moral, aesthetic, or what should be done. But it does seem to be the best way to fix problems without setting off a cascading cycle of violence and revolution.

I agree more or less with everything you're saying. I didn't mean to lump government in with business except in that the US government has gained a monolithic corporation's obsession with "quarterly profits" (the deficit) over investment in the future, and it's driving us into the ground just as surely.

Like you, I see the government as a special case, which needs to follow different rules. Ideally, everyone would understand that our fortunes are all tied together and just be nice to each other. Unfortunately, short-sighted individuals will always (or have in the past, anyway) see that as an opportunity to sell out tomorrow for a dollar today, so someone needs to be forcing people to cooperate or the whole thing comes tumbling down.

The only question, which is still open as of this writing, is how you keep an organization which is by definition empowered to break its own rules on a short enough leash that it can't hang itself.

Can you elaborate more on the circumstances in which it happened?

If you want a number of examples, contrast how the British treated the American complaints and dissent against them, vs. how Washington and the American leadership treated dissent and rebellion among their ranks.

The Americans executed a number of people who rebelled against the Continental Congress / Washington's Command, whereas the British were lenient. A very thorough treatment of this can be found in Chernow's "Washington - A Life" which is a very thorough biography/history.

You could also look at the Sengoku Era of Japanese history for many examples, you could compare Napoleonic France with the Neapolis Revolts in the same era. You could look at how Rome treated its protectorates and dependencies, as well as Britain (most of the time, America being a strange exception).

Abraham Lincoln's treatment of the Confederacy would be another example. Crush them, then bring them back into the fold.

Or compare the Pacific Theater of WWII vs. the Vietnam War from America's perspective... Japan was better-armed, better-trained, with superior forces than the Vietnamese, and the Americans were worse-equipped and more hastily trained at that point. The Japanese were easily equivalent guerrilla fighters to the Vietnamese. Yet America went total war and crushed the Empire of Japan (then rebuilt Japan intelligently - crushing without rebuilding creates a potential Nazi-Germany-after-Versailles situation)... whereas the American leadership tried some "moral leadership" insanity in Vietnam instead of total war.

Again, I'm not advocating any of these things. This is meant to be more descriptive than prescriptive, but maybe I'm being sloppy with language. But treating Hanoi in the 1960's the way they treated Tokyo in the 1940's would have seems like it would have likely secured a demilitarized and protected South Vietnam from the Northern Forces.

Maybe they couldn't have totally destroyed the communist forces and taken the North, but they absolutely could have fenced off the South and stopped the Khmer Rouge genocides from ever happening (they started the same year America withdrew - this isn't a coincidence). Millions of lives would have been better, more like South Korea than North Korea.

The examples in history of this abound. Leniency and concessions provoke more unrest. Crackdowns without redress eventually lead to the dam bursting. Doing both together tends to resolve the situation most often.

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