An Autodiact's Bible, #14

Reclaiming Your Mind, Part 2, Chapter 3b

This is the fourteenth installment of the serial of my forthcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. As with other installments, part of it is behind the paywall. Become one of my supporters to get the whole thing.

Catch up on earlier installments here:
#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13

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Last time we started a deep-dive into first-principles reasoning. Now, let’s continue on with an exercise in reasoning from cause-to-consequence…

Chapter 3:
The Nitty Gritty (continued)

Continuing the section “More on First Principles”:

Imagine you’re a primitive child in a river valley. You’re curious, and observant, and you have only your own experience to guide you. You notice that when you pour water out on the ground, it flows downhill. As the slopes of the ground converge, so do the rivulets of water.

You live in a river valley. Your people trade with other peoples who live along the river on either side. That trade means you don’t have to manufacture everything you use.

But that river you’re on flows one way, so that must mean that the direction the river is going is down.

Suddenly, you realize: the world has a bottom, and it’s filled with water. Somehow, somewhere, all the water you could ever imagine is in the same place, and it connects to all the other rivers flowing down hill. Which means you could build a boat and go find other peoples who make other things and trade with them.

But then you realize something worse:

The water is rising. It would have to be, unless it was draining out somehow. You can’t afford to stay here—you have to go find out what’s going on, in case your people need to learn to build floating houses.

As a small child, starting with nothing, you can deduce the existence of the ocean and the necessity of the hydrological cycle and the potential for ecological apocalypse by simply watching the water move in the dirt on the bank of a river.

Now, let’s do a little walk through two examples of some first-principles reasoning going on all around us. Buckle up, this is gonna be bumpy:

Example 1: Foundational Geopolitics¹

Let’s start with the end of our tale of the river-valley child, but import one more first principle that most children don’t understand:

Power tends to corrupt.

No, that’s too fuzzy. Let’s make it specific: “Disproportionate power tends to turn community-dependent creatures into community-exploiting creatures.”

Okay, keep that in mind, and let’s keep the reasoning chain going.

Trade networks form along rivers for the reasons the child in our last illustration deduced: you can use a river like a road. Even in the age of automobiles, a river is a better road than an Interstate, because even if you don’t count the cost of building and maintaining the Interstate, it still costs 12-17x more to move a given amount of weight over flat ground than it does to move it over water. Friction is that much of an obstacle.

What happens if you trade with someone enough?

Well, you’ll learn their language, or they’ll learn yours, or you’ll build a new one—after all, you have to have a basis on which to build trust, communicate, negotiate, maintain relationships, and reconcile accounts.

Intermarriage helps cement trust. If your daughter marries my son, we both have a vested interest in seeing their children (our grandchildren) succeed in life.

So, we can deduce that trade networks create common languages, common cultures,² and even genetic consanguinity. These turn neighboring tribes into a single people—even a single nation.

A nation is like a bigger river-valley tribe, which in turn is like a bigger single village. Since you've seen how the larger follows some of the same rules as the smaller, you will suspect that as this new nation grows more prosperous, it will eventually need resources that are held by other people who do not share their heritage or lineage.

It's pretty easy to trade with people who share your culture, your language, your family, or your locality. People who don't share those things? Trading with them can take a lot of work, and sometimes they don't want to sell. You realize there will come a time when, for one reason or another, some people will be easier to conquer than they are to trade with. In other words...

Disproportionate power tends to turn community-dependent creatures into community-exploiting creatures.

When you act on that logic, you cease to be a nation and you become an empire.

What if everyone else who can does the same thing? If enough tribes build enough trade networks to build enough nations to conquer enough colonies that they fill the world and start running into one another?

Well, if that happens, you’d get some kind of world war.

In our universe, we called that war “World War I.”

Example 2: Global Order Geopolitics

HISTORY, OF COURSE, is not quite so forgiving as to be vulnerable to naked first-principles thinking. Contingency intervenes. In our own history there were several wars that might have settled things the way World War I tried to (most notably the Thirty Years War), but, for various reasons, could not and did not.

Nonetheless, this kind of reasoning gives you a solid trendline from which to correct even in highly contingent fields like history—it can even help you anticipate what might happen should contingency intervene.

This kind of thinking is characteristic of Golden Age science fiction stories, one of which (Solution Unsastisfactory by Robert A. Heinlein) predicted the outcome of World War II and the subsequent world order with an eerie degree of prescience. Another pair (1984 by George Orwell and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley) each predicted some of the more disturbing features of the world we live in today, and in ways that should make all of us feel pretty foolish as having walked exactly into the traps they sketched out.

But, of course, the fact that history is so contingent is one of the reasons that we resist suggestions that there may be things about human nature that push us mightily in particular directions. We take emotional and intellectual refuge in the caves of contingency, as it were, and ignore the fact that the continent those caves rest on is shifting whether we like it or not. We don't like feeling as if we don't have free will (but I'll stop here, since free will is a huge can of worms I don't have time to delve into in this book).

Our hypothetical tribal child would have no way to predict that World War I's resolution might be a failure, let alone that it might be sabotaged by a Utopian fabulist with a doctorate in history and delusions of grandeur (Woodrow Wilson) who was determined to see his vision of racial supremacy adopted throughout the world, and who, because of that very personal motivation, would coerce all parties at the Versailles peace conference into a treaty that made a second world war inevitable.

However, the story gets more interesting, and, as Heinlein and Orwell and Huxley and many others who wrote in the era immediately surrounding World War II demonstrated, first principles can still work even in an era filled with crazy-looking contingencies.

Let's see how we could have done with our thought experiment in an age of unpredictability. And, since our river-valley child would have found this world impossible to comprehend, let's switch characters now, to an Englishman in the 1920s who is familiar with all the above, and also knows about the Treaty of Versailles and predicts (as many did at the time) that it didn’t settle anything important, and that there would be a second war in about twenty years, which would end civilization as we know it.

World War II did end civilization as we knew it. It ended all the major empires by the simple expedient of exhausting all their fleets and armies, to the point where they would prove unable to maintain their empires. It produced a generation of leaders that decided they didn’t want to go through it all again. You, as our character from the 1920s, would predict this turn of mind (since people in your own time were already saying that wars must be made to end, because modern wars were too destructive).

You would also be able to comfortably predict (based on the past five centuries of European history) that Russia would emerge relatively unscathed and be in a position to steamroll the weakened victors and secure its stated ambitions for world domination. This ambition pre-dates the 1920s, and is premised on geopolitical theory dating to the late 19th century:

Any power that controls Moscow and Berlin has the sea ports and resources and farmland to rule the globe.

That means that the post-war powers will only have one choice if they want to resist Russian hegemony:

Since none of them have the strength to oppose Russia alone, they must band together.

But would that be enough, with all the great empires in ruins? Probably not. So, what would happen?

Now, let’s play it forward. The second war IS decisive, and you get a generation that, at the end of that second war, decided that they didn’t want to go through it all again. Your 1920s persona would predict this (since people at Versailles who decried the treaty did not want to go through another World War), and would also be able to comfortably predict (based on the history of the continent) that Soviet Russia might be left standing at the end of World War II. Further, you’d anticipate that if it was left standing, would be powerful enough that it could probably mop up the weakened victors and secure its stated ambitions for world domination.

Well, at the end of World War I the Americans came rolling in, and even though they screwed things up royally, they did actually end the war. They obviously have an interest in keeping Europe from burning itself down a few times every century. They've even talked publicly about their determination to prevent anyone from controlling both Russia and Germany at the same time. And, since they're all the way over across the Atlantic, there's a pretty good chance that they'd survive the war when nobody else did. So, you make a guess:

America will survive and still have a navy, and they'll have a strong opinion on whether or not Russia should be allowed to conquer Europe.

You also know that the Americans pretty much hate running an empire, because all of their attempts to do so have been both disastrous and unpopular, and besides, they don't really need one. You can be pretty confident that they won't just take over Germany themselves. So what's left?

Well, honestly, you have no way to guess, because what came next was an innovation; literally. It was a new thing which the world had never seen before. It surprised everyone. Here, contingency presents a bar over which first principles cannot easily leap. The biggest nation in the alliance, the only one to survive the war with a navy intact, said to the others:

“Let’s never fight each other again. Let’s team up against this one bad guy. And since you guys live closer to him than we do, we’ll pay you to do it for us. You can use our markets to build back up your wealth, and we’ll use your countries as a buffer zone against our common enemy, and, if we’re lucky, we’ll keep our enemy from growing and they’ll collapse, so we’ll never have to fight another world war again.”

And they did it knowing it was a fool's errand and could never work in the long run (as anyone familiar with Russian or European history would pretty much assume from the get-go).

Now, we can pick up from first principles again. Nobody in their right mind would turn down a deal like that. It’s like getting free health care for life at somebody else’s expense. But we also know that the mission was (in the opinion of any reasonable person) doomed to fail.

If you undertake a doomed mission because it holds your only chance at survival, what don't you do?

Exactly.

So, we can safely reason that the Americans, in this scenario, would also not bother to plan for the future. They'd put everything they could, on every level, into holding the line. We'd expect that everyone who came of age in the next generation would know they were doomed to fail, even the leaders, so why wouldn't they spend all the wealth from the ensuing economic boom buying creature comforts or plotting end-of-the-world escape scenarios for themselves as individuals?

Thus, first principles tells us that the two worst things that could happen would be:

1. The Americans lose the Cold War, or

2. The Americans win the Cold War.