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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

My big ask is, was it always this stupid? Like, all these huge historical events and figures, did it all go down as stupidly and clownishly as the modern USA? Was there an early 20th century fascist Europe equivalent to a man named Big Balls being beat up by children and a fascist police action being triggered as a result? Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings? Was George III as publicly and flagrantly fellated by the court as Trump is by the media still allowed into the White House?

I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history so it makes me try to see other historical eras in a similar light - how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?

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> was it always this stupid?

Excellent question. There are two easily readable sources I know of covering historical events of the sort you're asking about. The first is Barbara W. Tuchman's The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam, where the entire premise is that stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along. The second is Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in which Hannah Arendt details just how dull and unimaginative Eichmann was. She writes, "it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown", and suggests that Eichmann was not especially different from anyone he worked for, right up to the top.

History doesn't seem clownish because of the way it is recorded and taught. Even Arendt's writing is cool and formal compared to the histrionics we see on social media and many news outlets.

> Was there a Napeolonic era equivalent to a media figure known for making light of school shootings, getting killed in a school shooting, a second after again making light of school shootings?

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and subsequent events leading to the start of the First World War, were filled with errors and stupidity, so much that history mostly lumps them all under the term "July Crisis", and rarely goes into detail. If you're familiar with the Abilene paradox, you have a framework for how the Great War started as the result of collective actions by soldiers, diplomats, and national leaders.

> stupid people did stupid things and then doubled down on stupidity as they went along.

You might like this review of the movie Civil War. Very well thought out review.

Alex Garland's CIVIL WAR has a clear and simple meaning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWBzZJxhQtY

That contrasts well with how most of the media present events as somehow well thought out and considered. Many stories somehow manage to make even the most unhinged, word salad rants into thoughtful position statements, followed up with a bland bit of "other side" objection.

What an excellent video essay, thanks for sharing. On the second watch, after removing the expectation of an alternative history, Civil War hit me really hard that a future civil war would be absurd and horrific.

Surely there was a lot of stupidity in Nazi Germany and hence the appalling results, but I think that during the second half of the 20th century most actors in western history were much less stupid than now, although maybe I'm just being naive.

To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Behind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.

That's a good podcast that gets across that most of the Nazis really were just dense thugs.

One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power. Weimer Germany was run by the social democrats. These people were basically 'center left.' They ended up in control after the 1919 revolution that got rid of the Kaiser, and ruled via coalition government with other centrist and center-right parties as junior members.

In general people's complaints were 1) land reform because especially in Prussia most of the land was still owned by massive landowners (Junkers) and most peasants were tenant farmers and 2) better working conditions in industry for the working poor 3) some way to get out of the economic crisis that was bad even before the depression in Germany.

The social democrats failed to deliver any of this. And mostly they spend their entire time in power battling with the Communists. This included hiring freekorps, which were paramility groups that roamed the German countryside after the war and eventually turned into brownshirts, to work with the police to attack communists. There was already a ton of state sponsored terror in the 1920s directed almost entirely at the left.

Support for the social democrats and other center parties collapsed and in the 1932 election, the nazis and communists were the big winners almost entirely at the expense of the social democrats. The center parties decided that working with the communists was absolutely beyond the pale and thought that the nazis would be more easy to manipulate, so they decided to work with Hitler and made him chancellor. Once the nazis had their foot in the door, as it were, and given that they had contempt for democracy and the rule of law, they used every dirty trick they could after that to consolidate power.

> One thing that it doesn't really cover is the rest of German society and how those thugs managed to get power.

Just to clarify for other folks, there are many episodes re: Nazis, but it also covers everything from Khmer Rouge to more modern coverage that's truly the more banal kind of evil, covering the worst and most destructive grifters. So while it's definitely kinda preoccupied with fascism, there's another through-line with dis/misinformation, etc etc.

I do agree with your basic criticism though, fair to say the general show format for dictators is 1st part bio which is frequently unremarkable, then the 2nd part is appalling crimes. How society was complicit/tolerant enough to allow the decline to happen is usually sidelined. On the other hand though, it's kind of always the same and pretty simple. To the extent it's not simply hidden or covered up, it works like this. After things are definitely very shitty, whatever misguided optimism folks can muster is usually all about "harming the out-group will help somehow!". (It doesn't.)

But the astute dictator (or their advisors) can rely on and exploit that kind of tribalism. Common sense, static value-systems, or any sensitivity to blatantly hypocritical statements/behaviour etc just are not things that the common person can really hang on to once they are angry/impoverished/aggrieved/hungry

To know the answers to all of these questions, you should really check out the Bbehind the Bastards podcast because that is the whole premise. Covering the lead-up to horrible situations and the inevitable slide in fascism. It's insanely detailed about covering many, many stupid fascist bastards and a few smart ones.

Details vary but from time-to-time, yes, things do go this wildly off the rails.

You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example; tens of millions dead over something as transient as birthright rulership. Others that come to mind are much of the reign of Henry VIII (everyone knew he was dangerously paranoid, nobody with the potential to do so mounted an overthrow of his power, and his son was shaping up to be worse and England was narrowly spared his reign by the luck of his own bad health). Then there's the French overthrow of a monarchy to replace it with a bloody civil war that liquidated, among others, most of the people who overthrew the monarchy (and replaced it with an empire).

Power consolidation begets perverse effects.

>>You could argue that the entirety of Europe declaring war on itself over the death of one royal (and not even a reigning monarch; an heir-apparent) is such an example

I mean that was just an excuse, in hindsight it's completely obvious that Europe was gearing up for war for years prior to the event. Just like now it seems completely possible that we might end up in a war or even civil war in some countries over a (seemingly) minor event - it's just going to be a spark that sets off the powder keg.

You could also just go with the details of that assassination, which are Baby’s Day Out levels of comic blundering.

This rings poignant now that I finally got around to reading The Three-Body Problem. It starts off depicting struggle sessions during the cultural revolution in China in the 60s, in which they're beating a physicist to death for teaching relativity because Einstein gave imperialists the bomb. It's so stupid, that if it was fiction, I wouldn't find it realistic that people would be this stupid.

To be clear, the book is fiction, but struggle sessions and beating physicists to death is not.

Do you have a citation for an actual physicist being beaten to death because of their views on physics or was the book exaggerating for the sake of the plot and promoted widely in the west because it promoted anticommunism?

For what it’s worth I like the show just not that part.

What didn't you like about that part, just the depiction of violence while everyone watched and did nothing?

I'll preface with, I am a communist so I have no anti communist tendencies.

But, that is what struggle sessions were like, and their most frequent locations were in classrooms, and their most frequent targets were teachers and professors. And they'd often drag in random peasants to watch. I remember one quote that was like, feeling bad for these peasants who have no idea wtf is going on or why they're watching some professor get beat half to death.

The CPC's reasons for the struggle sessions were cynically open-eyed: they wanted people to participate so that people were involved and culpable with the state violence against "counter revolutionaries."

This is why the PRC's communist revolution was flawed from the start and doomed to slide into deep authoritarianism, which holds out as a historical fact now.

Btw for what it's worth the book really isn't all that anti communist, or anti CPC at least. Criticism of the cultural revolution is allowed in the PRC now, or the author never would have been allowed to publish.

I knew that there were kids running around acting like gang members, but I was skeptical of the part where the professor was attacked solely for his scientific beliefs and not some kind of social or political belief or action.

> how can I reinterpret the past such that it also experienced a bunch of clownish nonsense?

The thing is, you don't know what happened in the past - you weren't there. What you have is a lot of stories and films that bring that to life for you.

Personally, I'm pretty sure nothing in the implementation has changed, but that the goals being sought have changed, as has the technology and therefore the implementation.

Well, I at least know that teenagers were considered adults, not children, in the past and were expected to be responsible. Maybe that change is a big part of the problem.

Apparently (can't be bothered to fact check this) the nazis liked having parades in the dark because it was easier to propagate the idea of the nazi ubermensch when you couldn't see that the dedicated members of the nazi party were generally on the uglier side of average. As you'd expect of dissatisfied radicals, really. Probably same reason there's a stereotype of right-wing people on social media having a profile picture of themselves in a car with sunglasses on.

Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.

> Anyway, as stupid as this is, Americans are generally literate, with access to unadulterated messages from the other side of the world. Imagine how stupid things were when 95% were illiterate and all information passed through a giant game of telephone before it arrived to you.

I agree, but the other side of this is that we're open to manipulation coming from anyone around the world, and sometimes that game of telephone can act as an effective bullshit filter.

>I feel like I can't possibly live in the stupidest era in world history.

Your statistical intuition is sound, and while there are many historical sources describing very stupid events (VSE) dating as far back as recorded history, it is difficult to appreciate the outer bounds of the stupidity range because what has been written is a small fraction of the history that people have lived for at least 100,000 years.

So while I feel we are living in the stupidest era in history (the SEIH), I must conclude that we don't.

I think the speed at which the impact of stupidity can spread in current times is unrivaled throughout history, though.

I think what's more important, is that you have a device that will broadcast you a personalized feed of whatever the most engaging stupidity in the world is, at that very moment, 24/7. The magnitude of this passive exposure is far greater than even the rate of spread.

I generally agree, but if we assume that the amount of history scales proportional to the number of humans, then it's not so clear cut, as there's never been more humans alive than now. In other words, there's just more history to be dumb in, nowadays, than before.

Every generation gets the stupidest politics the world has ever seen... So far.

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