Historiography and Reality Distortion
Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern.
Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.
Karl Marx, Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach
I once listened to an eminent historian give a talk, at which they espoused the value of history for predicting the future.
At dinner, my teacher (who is wildly intelligent and accomplished) pushed back; surely it’s not that simple? The eminence held firm: men of action can benefit from listening to historians. Hedge funds should buy advice from historians.
After dinner, the eminence took my teacher to one side - and, Oxford PhD to Oxford PhD, made an admission. Of course you can’t use history to predict the future. But if you go around saying that, you won’t be able to sell your advice.
And that’s why my teacher was my teacher, and the eminence has made lots of money.
There are two types of Guy. Both Guys observe how the world works.
Guy 1 gets angry, and rejects reality: ridiculous! How can it possibly work like that!
Guy 2 quietly accepts reality, and adapts their behaviour to win.
Do you want to be Guy 1, or Guy 2?
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the Oxford history faculty has a theory of history, which is expounded broadly and with exceptions. It diminishes the significance of “great men”, and rejects individual agency. History is driven by impersonal factors, by environment and culture and geography. Discourses are what matter, not individual writers. Where individuals do enact change, they typically don’t intend the results of their actions.
There’s plenty of evidence for this theory, but one factor behind its success - an impersonal, discursive factor, if you will - is the structure of academia. In order for a professional, scientific analysis of the past to be scientific, to be a proper academic discipline, it has to go past both chance and individual actions as explanations. If you say that WW2 broke out because Hitler was smart and talented and evil, and he wanted to start a war, you’re a novelist. But if you argue that the Nazi party was a reaction to the Treaty of Versailles or the cultural excesses of the 1920s, or Central European demographic trends and the popularisation of amphetamines, then you’re a professional.
A more cynical explanation would be that history is written by the losers. If academics admitted that history is the story of great men and their decisions, then they’d have to think about why they haven’t themselves made history, why they toil in archives while others start wars. Perhaps if nobody’s super, everyone is. I’m not saying I believe in this this argument’s explanatory power, but it must be pretty galling to be a lowly monk copying out someone else’s hagiography.
Often I worry that I’m just in thrall to the last book I read. People used to criticise Boris Johnson for this - that he would predictably agree with the last person he spoke to, to the extent that people in Number 10 planned around being that last person. Aside from being aware of the bias, my only solution to the problem is note-taking and spaced repetition, as well as making the most of that thrall - so here goes. The last book I read was War and Peace, and Tolstoy has a lot to say about this theory of history.
Tolstoy’s general theory of history, set out in the first pages of Book III Part I and II (respectively), is that there’s a big, impersonal force guiding everything - that’s Fate, or Providence, or God. Events are certainly caused by the decisions of individuals, but they’re caused by so many individuals that you can’t single anybody out as being particularly important; furthermore, those individuals are not in any meaningful sense planning - they just react, or respond to their emotions. As far as history goes, there’s no free will.
We are forced to fall back on fatalism to explain the irrational events of history... the more we strive to account for such events in history rationally, the more irrational and incomprehensible do they become to us.
Man lives consciously for himself but unconsciously he serves as an instrument for the accomplishment of historical and social ends... the higher a man stands in the social scale, the more connexions he has with others and the more power he has over them, the more conspicuous is the predestination and inevitability of every act he commits.
'The hearts of kings are in the hand of God'
A king is the slave of history.
History, that is, the unconscious, universal, swarm-life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings for its own purposes.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book III, Part I, Chapter I
Providence compelled all these men, striving for the attainment of their own private ends, to combine for the accomplishment of a single stupendous result, of which no man (neither Napoleon, nor Alexander, still less any of those who did the actual fighting) had the slightest inkling.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, Book III, Part II, Chapter I
Tolstoy depicts both Napoleon and Tsar Alexander as great men. Undoubtedly, Napoleon is a military genius. And yet whenever Tolstoy displays his actual decision-making, it’s entirely thoughtless: Napoleon crosses the Niemen to invade Russia “unexpectedly, and contrary alike to strategic as well as diplomatic considerations”.
This is Tristram Shandy history - shaped by the accidental and the comic. Perhaps because Tolstoy is a novelist, and a Christian novelist at that, he can put forward an unscientific theory of history, one guided by Providence rather than discoverable and explicable laws.
Tolstoy’s historiography seems singularly useless to the man of action. Sure, we learn something about the human condition; but as Marx said, that’s just interpreting the world. You read a whole book on Napoleon, and there’s not even one handy tip on gaining power over the European continent. It’s a theory of history that casts doubt on the ability of any one man to consciously remake the world in his own image; even the greatest are merely agents of Providence.
Keith Rabois said on the Paradigm Shift podcast that great founders have a reality distortion ability.
Because it's so difficult, it's so heroic to create a company that transforms an industry or the world, if you don't have a spark that puts you in a rarefied world, the chance that you can rearrange the world around your desires rounds to zero, which means don't invest. So you need a non-zero probability that you can rearrange the world around your will. That's what we're looking for. Is there a non-zero probability that this person can rearrange the world around his or her will. And that normally means that there's a spark there that makes you say 'holy cow'... again, they're probably not that normal.
The venture world depends on this mindset. It needs founders who can rearrange the world around their will, because that’s the only way to generate the returns that sustain the ecosystem.
If you, an individual, want to change the world, then you might want a theory of history which says that individuals can change the world. You might want a theory of history that gives credit to individual decision-making.
But Tolstoy doesn’t provide that: his great men are driven by chance and Providence. Nor can you get much help from academic history. The great founder needs a different philosopher.
I don’t think you get this from Paul Graham and Marc Andreessen. These guys explain how to change the world, but they don’t quite explain why it’s possible to do so in the first place. You don’t get a justification for the metaphysical possibility of greatness. (citation needed? maybe I just haven’t read enough of their writing.)
You get this justification in the work of Machiavelli and Nietzsche. Their writing provides a world-historical justification for the existence of Rabois’s founders - which is probably why I bring both of them up so much.
Machiavelli’s Discorsi is full of great founders; individuals institute the foundations for future flourishing. Numa, Camillus, Brutus: as Machiavelli says in Book III Chapter I, “the actions of individual men made Rome great and produced many good results in that city.”
In Tolstoy, a king is the slave of history. But in the most controversial chapter (XXV) of Machiavelli’s most controversial book, Machiavelli argues that Fortune herself bends to the will of the Prince:
I certainly think it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortune is a woman, and if you want to control her, it is necessary to treat her roughly. And it is clear that she is more inclined to yield to men who are impetuous than those who are calculating. Since fortune is a woman, she is always well-disposed towards young men, because they are less cautious and more aggressive, and treat her more boldly.
One of the basic features of Nietzsche’s thought is that he denies the existence of Kantian values that are “out there”. “Thou shalt not kill” isn’t natural law, it’s human law. And so he lionises the ‘new philosophers’ - the people who create new values.
Horstmann describes these people in his introduction to Beyond Good and Evil:
To be the type of philosopher Nietzsche values is to follow hunches, to think at a 'presto' pace (§213), to embark on experiments both intellectual and existential (§205,210), to transform and to create values (§203,211), to put forward hypotheses that are risky: in short, to be interested in what he calls 'dangerous perhapses' (§2).
Nietzsche tells us more about them in §211:
But true philosophers are commanders and legislators: they say "That is how it should be!” They are the ones who first determine the "where to?" and "what for?" ... True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them. Their "knowing" is creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth is will to power. - Are there philosophers like this today? Have there ever been philosophers like this? Won't there have to be philosophers like this?
Keith Rabois would probably write these philosophers a check.
Nietzsche and Machiavelli allow us to theorise Rabois’s founders; but why should we pick their ideas over those of the academic establishment? People used to believe all sorts of crazy things about the world, and modern science has proven them wrong. Maybe Napoleon and Numa are statistical noise, products of their environment or even enacting the will of the gods.
The thing is, that’s not a very fucking helpful thing to believe if you want to change the world. And while theories of history have intellectual validity, they also have practical utility. And if you’ve already decided that you want to do something with your life, that you want to rearrange the world around your will, you are allowed to choose what you want to believe. And you are allowed to pick your philosophers on that basis.
It doesn’t matter if those selections are arbitrary - it doesn’t even matter if they’re self-serving, or even absurd. If you pick beliefs that help you achieve what you want to achieve, if you put in place the necessary mental technologies to do what you need to do, then that’s enough.
But the strange fact is that everything there is, or was, of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, or masterly assurance on earth, whether in thinking itself, or in ruling, or in speaking and persuading, in artistic just as in ethical practices, has only developed by virtue of the 'tyranny of such arbitrary laws.’
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §188
You know, novice, absurdity is all too necessary on this earth. The world rests on absurdity, and without it perhaps nothing would be accomplished.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Part II Book V Chapter 4 ‘Rebellion’ - Ivan