Sublime

The price was never paid by the war’s leaders. As a U.S. Army officer in Iraq wrote in 2007, “A private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” The cost for Americans fell on the bodies and minds of young men and women from small towns and inner cities. It was unusual to meet anyone in uniform in Iraq who

There are three basic kinds of failure: failure to learn, failure to anticipate, and failure to adapt.

For Clausewitz, then, rationality means alignment. Pursuing tactical or strategic victories that are misaligned with political goals is irrational. The problem is that the bureaucratic nature of armies makes them highly susceptible to such irrationality. As discussed in chapter 3, by dividing reality into separate drawers, bureaucracy encourages th

Reflecting on the Myanmar tragedy, Pwint Htun wrote to me in July 2023, “I naively used to believe that social media could elevate human consciousness and spread the perspective of common humanity through interconnected pre-frontal cortexes in billions of human beings. What I realize is that the social media companies are not incentivized to interc

Instead of testing men and institutions, we must examine the structures through which they work and explore how those structures stand up to the stresses they encounter.

From this point on, the core dynamics of the Subject Story were largely set: protection, division, subjugation, conquest, patronage, duty; in a word, paternalism. We can recognise them from the Roman Empire to the British to the rise of Hitler, right through to the looming resurgence of the Subject Story in the form of the strongman leaders of the