Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avgcorrection | Hacker News Reader

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> Such books are celebrations of individualism. Their primary effect is to promote an individualist perspective on the world.

Can we please stop reading history and stories as things that people in the past slavishly believed to the letter like unthinking machines? Of course stories about leaders glorify them. That’s just the victors writing history. Of course leaders and their sycophants mostly bragged and embellished.

Did people have a reason to believe those things in their heart, though? What does “divine right” matter to a serf?[1]

Of course we all know that we just don’t automatically believe everything about some person just because his bank account is large enough, or he is a high authority in the military, or the so-called democratic process chose him to be a representative of something. But somehow we tend to speak of the Middle Ages like, oh that’s when everyone believed in Divine Right (or whatever) and no one was the slightest bit sarcastic about it. (But then what were all those armies and fortresses about? If everyone toed the line...)

It’s like cynicism was only invented in 1970 or something.

And the answer to the question has got nothing to do with leaders per se. It’s just that political liberalism reigns supreme, which is incredibly individualistic. (The dominant political philosophy is very relevant to the conception of leadership.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7qT-C-0ajI&pp=ygUUbW9udHkgc...

> What does “divine right” matter to a serf?

Good point!

This essay doesn't explore enough how "leaders" hold on to power through the use of violence/coercion. The targets of this violence certainly didn't believe in the "divine right" of the person threatening their existence.

> "That was why regicide (the murder of a king) was considered, well into the early modern era, the worst crime one could possibly commit – it was against the ruler and against God."

If I was a king, and I knew that people hated me because I was killing them, I would probably make a decree that murdering the king is the worst crime! If a society is authoritarian (king == sole decision maker) then we can't look at the "laws" as anything but the product of the self-interest of that authoritarian ruler. "Was considered...the worst crime" by whom? Surely the average normal person (e.g. not in the ruling class) would still consider the murder of a loved one as a worse crime than the murder of a king?

> "It is hard to escape this view of leaders and leadership. It is all around us. We still tend to teach, study and celebrate ‘Great Men’. All over the world, people are in search of larger-than-life figures who can lead them past crises and catastrophes, and into a bright future."

The question, I think, is: Who is the "we" that the author refers to in this essay? The writing moves slickly from "we who teach, study and celebrate 'Great Men'" to "people all over the world". Is it "we" the population that benefits from the decisions made by the ruler? It certainly isn't "we" the people the ruler wants to get rid of!

> Can we please stop reading history and stories as things that people in the past slavishly believed to the letter like unthinking machines?

Medievalists don't do that. There are a lot of common wrong-headed beliefs that stem from "The Enlightenment," a time when some really smart people discovered that they were suddenly enlightened, thus causing the equally sudden endarkenment of the ones who lived before them in "The Dark Ages."

> Can we please stop reading history and stories as things that people in the past slavishly believed to the letter like unthinking machines? Of course stories about leaders glorify them.

People back them did not had so many information. All negative information about the king or leader was (self) censored.

Look at cult Steve Jobs had in his lifetime, he was far from perfect, but nobody cared. Or some political leaders, despite all the corruption, drugs...

You don’t need to have so many information in order to think for yourself. You can choose to believe it or not.

I could make a manifesto about being the greatest person to have ever lived. People are not going to believe it just because there doesn’t exist a counter-manifesto about me.

Thinking for yourself required knowledge and actual study, not just something people can do on a moment's notice.

For example, thinking about the movie 300(2006) required some knowledge of how aristocratic Sparta actually works. It's basically a fascist movie glorifying the brutality of Spartan warriors with no question on its actual efficacy as a fighting force(unremarkable). I recommend this essay on why Sparta sucks.[1]

1. https://aeon.co/essays/who-are-the-leaders-in-our-heads-and-...

> Thinking for yourself required knowledge and actual study, not just something people can do on a moment's notice.

What do you think happens when people work the land? When people cook, plant, tend animals, build their own tools to make more tools with, do handcrafts? They experiment and learn. They pass along knowledge.

I recommend picking up an Eric Sloane book if you're interested in that. He wrote a lot about not the middle ages in Europe, but how people lived in the pre-electrified rural US.

https://ericsloane.com

Thinking for yourself requires just existing. That goes for anyone who is not being indoctrinated into a cult.

Thinking for yourself requires just existing. That goes for anyone who is not being indoctrinated into a cult.

The mistake is thinking that you can just "think for yourself" without possessing knowledge.

I think people who avoid scams, cults, and pseudoscience largely does it through general knowledge and heuristics, not by thinking hard.

> The mistake is thinking that you can just "think for yourself" without possessing knowledge.

This is clearly a mistake since EVERYONE THINKS FOR THEMSELVES WITHOUT BEING SPOON-FED IT.

A person needs to be socialized enough to develop language. As long as you’re more human-sociable than a chimpanzee-raised jungle child, that base is covered. You don’t need much more beyond that in order to “think”.

> I think people who avoid scams, cults, and pseudoscience largely does it through general knowledge and heuristics, not by thinking hard.

Everyone has built-in heuristics. Why do you think “rationalists” complain about “cognitive biases” so much? We need heuristics to survive. Something which we did prior to Prussian-inspired schooling.

We live in an era defined by information and science. It may seem natural for us to adopt a skeptical stance and question long-standing myths, as we've been encouraged to do so—it's ingrained in our education system and our culture. That certainly wasn't the norm in the medieval times when people lived a restrained rural life without access to education and under totalitarian regimes.

Half-correct in a completely incorrect way. Who’s more indoctrinated: someone who lives off the land and has all the free-mind time in the world since he does manual work all day? Or someone who went through over a decade of Prussian-inspired conformity/workplace training (schooling)? And gets information-saturated from all free angles throughout the day?[1]

Of course you won’t be convinced either way so there is no point pursuing this.

[1] The mind is not like a vessel that you fill up with knowledge and facts.

Half-correct in a completely incorrect way. Who’s more indoctrinated: someone who lives off the land and has all the free-mind time in the world since he does manual work all day? Or someone who went through over a decade of Prussian-inspired conformity/workplace training (schooling)? And gets information-saturated from all free angles throughout the day?

It's inaccurate to think of Prussian school as a system of conformity. Rather that's the opposite intention.[1]

1. http://hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model

I skimmed your little heterodoxy. I don’t see how that applies to my argument. I guess the “Prussian” model was quite anarchic and freeing? I’m not some Khan Academy, tech-optimistic, gadgets-will-solve everything type that your article seems to be arguing against.

'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink...

I think the contrary is more likely to be true: that people from that era had a vivid inner life and curiosity about the universe. They talked about things with each other. It's hard to censor thoughts, or discussions between people. A good book about this is The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, focusing on the trial of a single peasant in the 16th century.

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