The "Good Times Revolution"

I'll be blunt. I'm not a fan of revolution. I'm not excited by revolution. People who are excited by the prospect of revolution, are people I don't want anything to do with.

A Brief History of Revolutions

My girlfriend and I went to see a bunch of women's basketball in the Mexican league. The home team, the Astros Femenil were up by more than ten points in the last minute. And the opponents did the only thing you can do in that situation. Foul the astro's player in possession and send them to the free throw line.

So I got an opportunity to explain the 'Hack a Shaq' strategy. Shaq was pretty bad at free throws, so teams losing to Shaq's team be that Orlando Magic, LA Lakers, Miami Heat in the final minutes would foul Shaq because he was the player most likely to miss free throws. 

So if you are 10 points down, you need to score 5 2 point baskets or 3 3 point shots and another basket or a free throw. I think there's like 24 seconds on the shot clock, by the expiration of which you need to hit the basket, which more likely than not will result in possession switching teams. 

Anyway, you do Hack-A-Shaq not because it's likely to win you the game, it's just all you got. If you need a minimum of 4 unanswered successful offensive plays, and realistically 5 and there's only 2 minutes of game time. You can't let the team that's ahead run down the clock. So you foul them, send them to the free throw line, hope the miss, grab the rebound, your coach calls for a time out, you move the ball up the court hope your offensive play results in 2-3 points, and repeat.

It's hard to find a quick statistic on how effective Hack-a-Shaq is at turning games around. My sense is that it's a strategy of desperation. The best you can do, while still expecting to lose.

Revolutions happen less often than Hack-a-Shaq, Hack-a-Wilt, Hack-a-Wallace etc. but I'm reasonably confident, that revolutions are a more desperate strategy than Hack-a-Shaq.

The history of popular uprisings is fairly bleak. The major problem seems to me, that power to the people is highly effervescent. It lasts about as long as there's an identifiable government to topple. Then typically, through a popular lack of foresight, some absolute dickhole who did have foresight winds up being in charge.

Notable exceptions I believe are the American Revolution (The War of Independence), and the Haitian Revolution.

Investigate for yourself, arrive at your own conclusions. 

This brief history is just to say, revolutions are bad, but the answer I doubt, lies in convincing people they are bad. I don't know how one would even attempt such a feat, because anybody who is thinking about a revolution is going to think any campaign trying to dissuade them from revolution is fascist propaganda.

Methinks, that revolutions should be regarded as more of a late stage system that indicates the national or perhaps regional project fucked up.

As my father says 'you can win by too much and end up losing' a variation I believe on 'give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves.'

Something useful I learned from Andrew Doyle, was the concept of "Consent of the loser." Surprisingly the highest profile withdrawals of consent in contemporary times have come not from commie-pinko leftists high on Marx, but right wing conservative parties - notably Trump and the party that refuses to spank him, and perhaps imminently Brazil's Bolsanaro. Putin also I guess withdrew his consent, but he kind of withdrew his consent to run against living opponents.

But using this idea, we can consider popular uprisings as a withdrawal of consent. People refuse to accept the prevailing rule anymore and they revolt. 

Don't cry "victim blaming" on me. This probably meant you either, neglected the public domain (that is establishing that beliefs are constrained by reality, aka there are facts to be known) and people bought into a big lie. But more likely, historically at least, it means you pushed them too far. A significant number of people lost hope, got angry and said 'fuck it'.

And when the dust settles, you've learned your lesson...right before you got sodomised with a bayonet and died, and everything is worse.

I feel, and I am pulling this straight out of my arse, the historical mistake made by tyrants, and even dominant political parties faced with a revolution, is they try to suppress revolutionary sentiments, intuitions. Like passing sedition laws, beating up and arresting protestors, murdering journalists etc. 

I understand that intuition, just as I feel I understand the intuition to revolt. But both intuitions seem to feed each other like a death spiral.

What I feel is worth a crack, is that if people are talking about a revolution, maybe going 'we need to cool our jets, we need to lift our knees of these people's necks. We need to give people something to lose.'

Everything's Great, So No Revolutions Right?

Bringing me nicely to the actual subject of this post. Given I've come to regard Revolution as a kind of Stage IV symptom of mismanagement, we can extend this metaphor where the people are like individual cells, that given enough damage, enough trauma will turn cancerous.

It's time to abandon the metaphor of 'symptom'. Though ironically, this idea was prompted largely by the global pandemic.

The Good time revolution works like the traditional revolution in so far as it replaces something with something worse. Traditional Revolutions replace the house of Bourbon with Robespierre and the Terrors, the Czars with Lennon and Stalin. A rich guy with a military guy. And so on.

The Good time revolution works through atrophy. People in positions of power aren't stressed and aren't tested, and even in a free and fair democracy like Australia, with preferential voting to ensure the losers consent, leaders tend to get more indulgent and less competent over time. 

By "indulgent" in a culture like Australia, this means they get less exceptional, less inspiring, less articulate. They basically become regular Joes and Janes with no real or apparent qualifications to be a leader.

I wish phrenology were real to try and make this point, so I could do a photo comparison of Australian leaders who lead through troubled and tumultuous times vs leaders who sat back and enjoyed mining booms driven by a growing China.

Alas no, even with longer history in play, portraits don't tell us near as much as speeches. Simply that over time and with enough prosperity leaders stop sounding like 'We will fight them on the beaches...we will never give up! We will never surrender!' to 'our vision for 2010-2020 is stable macroeconomic growth driven by a growing export market.'

Waiting for the Barbarians

Krug is a lean man like most in his village, with tawny wiry muscles earned through eaking out a living cutting wood and selling it to homesteads and artisans. 

When the barbarian raiders come, Krug discovers something that sets him apart from the seemingly identical men of his village - courage. Where everyone else flees ahead of the raiders, Krug stays his ground, hefts his axe and swings it into the chest of the lead raiders horse, bringing horse and rider crashing to the ground. Krug is first to regain his feet and picks up a big rock and stoves in the head of the brigand leader with it.

The other hungry bandits suddenly lose their appetite for raiding and flee. Other men of the village seeing Krug's example suddenly find their own courage and give chase.

Krug is the toast of the village. Women look at him with a new light. People stop calling him Krug and start calling him by the honerific 'Champion'. Boys volunteer to learn woodcutting from him so they can build up their strength and courage and defend the village like Krug.

People bring Krug food, a bunch of villages decide to give Krug a chain of precious metals to wear around his neck as both reward and incentive to keep defending the village.

A bunch of people look to Krug, and think 'I want to be like Krug' other's look to Krug and think 'I want a shiny chain, extra food and admiration like Krug.'

The above, is my dialectic of history. 

1. Somebody does something valuable for their community.

2. The community recognizes their contribution.

3. Somebody else is motivated to imitate the recognition, not the contribution.

Because life is hard, there are more raids by barbarians in Krugs lifetime, which is considerably shortened when he is killed in one such raid. There, as other villagers despair, another younger man steps up to fill Krug's boots and defend the village. The chain is passed to him.

But after a few generations, the barbarians stop coming. The champion is an entrenched institution, and because of the halo effect, or maybe not, the village got in the habit of deferring to the champion on all kinds of matters, not just defence.

Champions start to retire having never seen a raiding party, and pass the chain onto their son. A few generations pass before the chain ends up around the neck of fat Ostal, who raises a levy to pay for more links to be added so the chain can fit over his chins. 

Villagers comment that Ostal looks like he struggles to stand up, let alone defend the village from Barbarians. His father was as aware as any when he retired that Ostal was less fit than himself in decrepitude, but he always dreamed of bestowing it on his son, and there hadn't been a barbarian attack in half a century.

Then there is. Ostal is the first to die, but having basically sold off or decommissioned all the villages defences to try and expand revenue generating farming plots, he ensures everyone else gets killed too.

 Why Not?

At some point in my late teens, I adopted a catch cry of 'Why not?' People offering me food or drink, I responded 'Why not?' People asked me to give them a hand washing dishes or moving furniture 'Why not?'

I said it in a light hearted way, but my father didn't like it. He said it invited people to think of reasons not to. I should just say 'Yes thanks' or 'no problem' instead.

The good-times revolution is fuelled, I propose, by this rhetorical 'Why not?' 

The earliest dynamic I'm familiar with as a younger brother, is demanding inclusion, turns, etc. Not out of a desire for responsibility, or because I thought I'd excel at the task, but for an illusory equity. That I was basically the same as a boy 2 years older than me.

It's not outside the realm of possibility. It's just the wrong motivation. Fortunately, this childhood manifestation was benign. There was nothing my brother did that I also wanted to do, that entailed any kind of responsibility. My brother imitated me in quitting cub scouts. I never followed up on whether I spared us both any abuse.

But 'Why not?' is the rhetorical question that dares someone, not to indulge us.

I feel it manifests in more consequential adult society as 'I want to CFO next.' 'I don't think so.' 'Why not?' 'Well it's a very complex and consequential job. I don't think you have enough experience to take on that responsibility...' 'This company made over a $100m in profit last year Dad. And nobody takes me seriously because I'm your son, so let me be CFO. Bob and Katherine can help me with the fine details. I just need some respect around here.'

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Again, in attempting to describe the phenomena of the good-times revolution, I think of children. 

Specifically, children sharing a video-game consol. A common behaviour readily observed in at least my family through the gaming generations, is one kid, typically older who is good at a particular video game, and another kid, typically younger who is not good but has unbridled enthusiasm.

This leads to a common exchange where the enthusiastic kid wants control of the game for as long as possible. But they are prone to getting stuck whenever the game gets challenging, difficult. They then ask the older kid to help. The older kid takes control, beats the hard bit and the younger kid tries to violently snatch back the controller, enthusiasm once again replacing frustration.

In democracies, we can see this type of scenario play out over economic boom-bust cycles. Basically an incumbent party rides through the good times winning re-election after re-election. Then there's a downturn, they get ousted and the opposition is brought into the worst economic conditions in living memory. They make a bunch of hard reforms, enacting policy that was not politically feasible (popular) before the downturn and get the economy moving again. 

Only to be ousted at the first opportunity to put the old party back in power.

Perhaps the best example in recent history being the Icelandic elections following the 2008-2011 financial crisis, a result of the global financial crisis. Up unto 2009 the Independence party had been in power for 18 years. Then the social democrats came in and TCOB creating one of the big economic recovery success stories of the GFC...to then be voted out in the 2013 elections for a coalition of the Independence party and Progressive party, both centre right. 

(When it comes to the GFC the US isn't a good example because well Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 thru 2006, which I feel indicates that H.W. Bush, Clinton and G.W. Bush pretty much had identical economic policy. Summarised crudely as 'if it looks like you are heading to recession, lower interest rates to cause a debt filled consumption binge' aka 'The Greenspan Put')

In this concept of no good deed goes unpunished, we can see a commonality in both the traditional, conventional revolution (rise up common man) and the good-times revolution (promote incredibly common men/rise up incompetent man). 

While searching for the mysterious public intellectuals that were generating far-left memes, back in 2015~2016 where it was really easy to identify where the ideas pushing back against the progressives were coming from (Sam Harris, the Weinsteins, Johnathan Haidt, Jordan Peterson) it was really hard to get where progressives were getting terms like 'microaggressions' and 'triggered' and shit like that from, so it was hard to understand what arguments supported the memes.

In my search, one of the first, and only, public intellectuals I found was Ta Nahesi Coates, who had just written and published 'We Were Eight Years In Power'. And there's little I suspect Coates and I would agree on, little he has persuaded me of, and in many ways as a public intellectual appears to be a casualty of a 'good-times' revolution himself, replaced by worse substitutes/grifters Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. 

Anyway, I find the central thesis of 'We Were Eight Years In Power' compelling at least as Coates explained it (I haven't read the book/essay) in so far as the anecdote that inspired the title. It was like, some reconstructionist politician bemoaning all the good they had achieved in their eight years in power only to be voted out for a party dedicated to undoing that good. Coates' take, that I and my experience are inclined to agree with is that - we often aren't afraid that our competition/opposition will fail and ruin things, but that they will succeed and do good things. That's why they are so threatening, it is the threat of obsolescence, redundancy. 

I find Coates' kind of judgey, so I don't think he ever would have put it as 'we' like 'we' are all prone to this anxiety. And I'd certainly concede, I tend to be more afraid of people fucking things up for everyone, than solving things instead of me. But one domain where I experience the described fear, is intrasexual competition, a fancy term for competing to be a particular woman's boyfriend. I do fear my competition might prove to be a keeper, for selfish reasons, because I fear dying alone.

But you know, I don't want to run an economy, or wage wars. I would much rather defer that duty to someone else, so I just want competence.

From Anti-fragile to Fragile

It's not clear cut, the "good-times" revolution. I think my dialectic of service-reward-narcissistic ambition can serve as a foundation, and also the ego-centric snatching back the video-game controls can be a foundation.

I think the good-times revolution, itself can be a foundation for a traditional revolution. If we go back to my village champion analogy, what we can see is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined as Anti-fragile behaviour, though it is friction. Apply stress to Krug he gets stronger, he unbreaks and becomes something more, more useful. 

Remove the stressors and the village champion gets fragile. Until we have Fat Olan a fragalista who fragilizes the whole village.

So the good-time revolution could be described as the journey over time from Anti-fragile to Fragile. There's another term that is probably a synonym for my 'good-times' revolution, and that is: cronyism.

The appointing of friends and family (nepotism) to plush jobs, regardless of qualifications.

Something easier to do in the good times. In fact, barring some code of chivalry and belief in martyrdom, there's really no incentive to do cronyism and nepotism in the bad times. It's likely to get your friends and family killed. 

Bad times is when society proves anti-fragile because you get rid of incompetent cowards and put in competent heroes, that's who you need to save your skin. 

There's a really interesting lecture about Why our generals were more successful in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq/Afghanistan and it might be the exception to the rule - if you don't have an hour to spare - it's that General's used to get fired by the military (Chief of Staff), but now they don't civilians fire them (the President, the Secretary of Defense). 

Many of the American generals who were given top commands during the war were either picked or recommended by Marshall, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jacob L. Devers, George S. Patton, Terry de la Mesa Allen Sr., Lloyd Fredendall, Lesley J. McNair, Mark Wayne Clark and Omar Bradley.[54]

But it might be, that in the military context, the old practice (old as in WWII old) is that when war broke out, you go and fire all the active generals that have fragilized during the good times and replace them with hungry competent generals.

Yeah, actually, upon reflection this is a kind of ideal outcome, or arresting of the road toward a more conventional revolution, a popular uprising.

Looking in the Mirror

People don't have much power. Revolutions are often enough, too often, a suicidal charge. In a country like Australia, most "revolutionaries" one can confidently characterize as delusional. The average Australian has so little to gain and so much to lose from a revolution. 

Imagine, how bad things have to get before people drop everything and shift career to soldier. Revolutionary soldier. Running up against a modern military replete with submarines and fighter jets.

The revolution in Australia/Canada/Sweden/France etc. is not coming anytime soon. House of Dragons season 6 would have to be soooooooo bad before the revolution comes.

But the probably delusional revolutionaries that have super jumped the gun. They are annoying. They do impose costs. And there is an intrinsic danger to resurrecting old bad ideas that have proven disasters in every attempted society wide application. 

I left a library last week where the coat-check employee warned me that the feminists were out protesting today so be careful. I passed the protest along the sidewalk and unexpectadly found myself inches away from a girl in a ski-mask and reflective goggles/glasses holding a hammer. I didn't feel intimidated because little mexicanas are not physically intimidating, but it probably would have been dangerous to grab the hammer off her because she was but one of a pack of idiots looking for a fight. (Plus one of Phil Zimbardo's findings in the Lucifer Effect, is that anonyminity across cultures helps individuals deindividuate and they become more violent, less responsible. I know people by and large hate and reject the Stanford Experiment, but I believe this finding to be sound as well as the overall plausibility that our environment effects our judgement.)

And even beyond wielding a hammer, egging is dangerous (as per Australia's egg-boy who got punched, and his later copycat who got charged when she tried and failed to crack an egg on ScoMo), hitting someone with a milkshake is dangerous, slapping Chris Rock is dangerous, stabbing Salman Rushdie is dangerous.

The world is full of individuals that are a danger to themselves and others because they have taken upon themselves the responsibility to change it.

But...

Listening to a lot of podcasts, a lot of critics of the culture wars and Wokeness, what I come across depressingly often are hosts and guests that literally do not concede, allude or express any contrintion over say the Jan. 6 insurrection. Are often so singularly fixated on the woke and their bad ideas that they come across as not seeing the obvious shortcomings of institutions like the modern Republican Party. It is unsurprising, because most people I feel are risk averse and that leads to a kind of tribal instinct, even when "braving" cancellation by criticising the woke.

Trump's administration, I mean it's not like it was a good time Trump presided over. Alas, look at the "good-time" revolution taking place on steroids. You start with Sean Spencer, Gen. John Kelly, Jeff Sessions etc. and with each revolution the administration just got worse - Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Bill Barr, Mick Mulvaney...

There was also a distinct defensible selection pressure applied to Trump appointees - they were not selected for competence, but rather the lack of integrity necessary to go along with Trump's presidential whims.

Beyond politics, which does have institutional constraints, checks and balances that help proof democracies against revolutions. 

People who support free markets and capitalism, are also likely to bash on the Woke and resurging socialist sympathies, need to look in the fucking mirror at how often cushy jobs that likely need not exist are given out as favors to friends and relatives. The curious phenomena of people who can get infuriated by someone receiving welfare payments of $800 a fortnight, but literally think nothing of their company paying $70,000 a year to that useless marketing manager who blew $150,000 budget on a failed ad-campaign.

This is why people want to revolt. It's the channelling of resources in times of abundance to the undeserving. 

Conclusion

Concede, reform. Don't quash, don't gaslight. I know it's hard, Aunty Isabelle is going to chew you out if you fire her useless son. Plus you've become accustomed to a certain lifestyle and you want more not less. In the long run we're all dead so why not kick the can up the road.

What do I hope to achieve? Just to make you consider, in your opposition to revolution, your own plausible part in the great undoing project of society. Cashing in, because you can. 

Because times are good.