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Humanity has survived for aeons, is able to inhabit any environment, take control of its own evolution. Humanity also keeps producing utter a-holes hellbent on greed, malice, and wiping out large chunks of humanity. It’s almost a testimony to the fact we’ve survived our own weird stupidity in enabling people like that. Like we somehow outlive our own dumbassery. Go, humanity.
While contemplating the a-holes in the world for reasons that I’m sure are entirely obvious, I thought of something. Maybe our problem is that we’re fighting the last a-hole.
I got this idea from watching Vladimir Putin (an a-hole) get his aging, paranoid backside handed to him by the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians aren’t fighting the last war – they’re fighting war in a new way. Putin may have been pretty good at bribery and propaganda up to a point, but when he decided to shovel his military meat shield towards the Ukraine, the Ukraine took the support they got from freer nations and rethought war.
Putin may have been a modern a-hole to some extent, with his troll farms and the like, but militarily he was old school. However, having seen Kremlin talking points penetrate various Influencers, political parties, etc. Putin was thinking ahead. Just not far enough, though judging by the people I saw discounting or lauding the murderous bastard, he got pretty far.
So as I often hear talk of how people lose by “fighting the last war” (as the US seems to be in danger of doing in Iran), I think we loose by figuring the next tyrant or dictator or genocidal maniac will be like the last one.
That might seem like a good bet because tyrants are incredibly predictable to a point. I’m amused that author Timothy Snyder could write On Tyranny, his quick guide to resisting tyranny, so concisely. However dictators and tyrants are in many cases the same, but smart ones are updated.
You aren’t going to get the next Hitler, because people did Hitler and that didn’t work. You will get someone like him, someone possibly inspired by him, but they won’t be the same because people learned about him. Apparently not enough to judge by the state of politics in some countries, but at least enough that “hey, someone’s doing a Hitler” alerts some resistance.
(Meanwhile, you can see a lot of media who don’t want to acknowledge dictators desperately wanting to discount it, but that’s for another rant.)
For people who are pro-freedom and pro-human dignity we have to act like an immune system. We don’t just learn from the last dictator but need to identify “similar infections” and rally to stop them. We need to be ears open for when history rhymes because it never repeats. We need to be ready to predict the next a-hole.
Of course what we really need to do is focus on freedom and functional, healthy, responsive societies a-holes can’t twist, turn, and exploit. But that too is for another essay, perhaps.
We need to keep an eye out for a-holes, updated or not. We’re the immune system, and maybe that gives us space to build a freer world that’s harder for a-holes.
Steven Savage