Honestly, it makes my head spin a little to think about. Like, wow. Oh my goodness. That was close.
Napoleon famously said, “All great events hang by a hair. The man of ability takes advantage of everything and neglects nothing that can give him a chance of success; whilst the less able man sometimes loses everything by neglecting a single one of those chances.”
This is the stuff we’ll consider in Temporal Control, both looking for pragmatic guidance and smarter mental models for seeing and processing the world.
Here are a few rapid lessons from World War I you can apply to your own life, to help not make errors in crises.
These lessons don’t look at what people could have done 10 or 20 years earlier (different types of militaries, technology, infrastructure, diplomatic policies, etc) but instead just basic stuff that can and should have been done at any time, as well as better decisions in the moment.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination –
*If the Archduke had waited for soldiers to arrive, it would not have happened. Lesson: Do not act too hastily in a risky situation where there is no advantage to speed.
*If Governor Potiorek had insisted the Archduke wait for soldiers to arrive instead of encouraging the bravado, it would not have happened. Lesson: Arrogance can be fatal.
*If they’d had a better security protocol in place for emergencies, it might not have happened. Why were they even arguing over where to go once events unfolded? It should have been decided in advance. Lesson: Have contingency plans.
*If they’d had better security at all, it might not have happened. Lesson: Take defensive measures with foresight.
*IF SOMEONE HAD JUST TOLD THE DRIVER THE ROUTE WAS CHANGED, IT WOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. Lesson: Don’t neglect obvious trivial details, especially during a crisis.
… if any of those take place, perhaps World War I doesn’t start.
Britain and Ottoman entrance into World War I –
*With a less inflammatory entrance into the war by the Germans (cavalier “scrap of paper” remark), perhaps British public opinion is not so inflamed. Lesson: Use tact and be conciliatory when there’s no good reason to offend someone.
*The British very likely could have gotten the Turks to join them against the Central Powers had they treated them well, and just asked outright which side of the war they want to join instead of starting by telling them the ships are confiscated. (There was a strong pro-British camp in Istanbul before that event.) Lesson: Don’t presume hostility and create enemies unnecessarily.
*The British nevertheless still could have kept more diplomatic options open by being more conciliatory, promising to pay the Ottomans back the money with interest, potentially guaranteeing them against aggression from Greece as long as they stayed neutral/friendly (the main reason they wanted the ships)... or at the very least, not insulting the Turkish officers and diplomats so brazenly. Just a few minutes of courtesy might have delayed Ottoman entry into the war, helping Russia and allowing Russia to commit more resources to fighting Germany. Lesson: Think through your options before acting rashly.
(With hindsight, you might think “it’s not a big deal” that the Ottoman Empire became an enemy power to the Allies. But consider, if Turkey joins the Allies, the war ends a lot faster, Russia probably does not collapse and go Soviet, and — if you look closely — there were at least two moments on the Western Front where the Central Powers almost won. If France had BARELY fallen, it would have looked mighty stupid getting the Ottomans into the war on the German side.)
Lessons from Gallipoli –
*If Churchill had been better-prepared for Sackville Carden’s resignation, they might have broken thorugh the Dardanelles on the first day of naval expeditions. Lesson: Have succession/transition plans in place for key roles in your life.
*Once Carden resigned, Churchill should have ensured Vice-Admiral de Robeck knew the plan and triple-confirmed it, since it was counterintuitive. Lesson: Don’t assume people understand the plan.
*De Robeck withdrawing on the verge of victory was disastrous. Lesson: Ensure your people know their relative priorities and context (a few ships sunk to save at least hundreds of thousands of lives, and maybe millions if the war ended earlier, would have been a good trade. De Robeck didn’t see the bigger picture and context.)
*Significant problems in the chain of command, and too much improvisation lead to the wrong mix of over-conservatism in the moment while getting committed and over-investing in the failed endeavor. Lesson: Ensure you and your people focus and are on the same page with critical priorities.
*Underinvestment into the first Dardanelles amphibious invasion meant barely losing. Lesson: The worst result is taking 99% of the cost and getting none of the gains; do not “barely underinvest.”
*They played it halfway and didn’t evacuate or advance when they took casualties on the initial landing, thus being in the worst of all possible worlds. Lesson: Never play it halfway in anything that matters.
*The British then doubled down and reinforced failure repeatedly, building up their reinforcements and commitment at a slower rate than Ottoman defenses were improving... even while the campaign was likely already lost. Lesson: Don’t do that.
Temporal Control #2: Unit of Account
AN INFINITELY EXPANDABLE WAY OF STRUCTURING VALUE…
“Humans have found many ways to bring order to the phenomenological flow of existence, and money is one of the most important. Money is strictly a human invention in that it is itself a metaphor; it stands for something else. It allows humans to structure life in incredibly complex ways that were not available to them before the invention of money. The metaphorical quality gives it a focal role in the organization of meaning in life. Money represents an infinitely expandable way of structuring value and social relationships – personal, political, and religious as well as commercial and economic.”
-- Jack Weatherford's 1998 “History of Money”
***
THE THREE MONEY THINGS
Find yourself an economist and ask, “Economist, what is money?”
The economist will then clear his or her throat, adjust his or her spectacles, and say,
“What is money? It is three things –
1.A store of value,
2.A medium of exchange, and,
3.A unit of account.”
Following this juicy tidbit of wisdom passed along, the economist may well then clear his or her throat a second time and smile knowingly, as if to say: dismal science? Indeed, no; truly, we are at the epoch of history. But, of course, he or she will not verbalize such bravado aloud; it goes contrary to the whole notion of being an economist these days.
The first concept of money is simple enough – as a store of value.
My last book before Machina was Progression. It is still selling nicely. It’s being sold for U.S. dollars. Those U.S. dollars will then sit in the bank without problems.
If, instead, I’d traded each copy of Progression for a half-gallon bottle of milk, well, I’d have now have many half-gallons of milk that were about to go bad in my refrigerator.
Never mind that it would be massively inconvenient to get all those bottles of milk shipped to Tallinn, Estonia where I’m spending the early summer with Kai.
In the past, lots of things have been used as money. Tobacco was a common one; in Virginia, before the American Revolution, taxes were often paid in tobacco.
The issue, again, is that tobacco still had to be re-sold reasonably quickly before it went bad. Gold doesn’t go bad. Gold, thus, make a better store of value than tobacco. (Both are better stores than bottles of milk.)
Well, that’s easy enough to understand. Store of value. “Sorry, we won’t trade you copies of this book in exchange for bottles of milk, because we can’t drink it fast enough. We’ll take gold – or dollars – though, because we stack them in a pile and leave them there until we know what to do with them.”
“Money as a store of value
” – easy enough to understand!
Money as a medium of exchange, well that sounds fancy at first, but is not so hard to understand.
American economist Paul Samuelson said this about barter –
“Unless a hungry tailor happens to find an undraped farmer, who has both food and a desire for a pair of pants, neither can make a trade.”
In other words, without a single useful type of money that everyone wants, the tailor who wants food needs to go around searching for an undraped farmer with a surplus of food. This is, obviously, dreadfully inefficient.
(The fancy economist term for this is “a double-coincidence of wants.”)
“Money as a medium of exchange” – the tailor and farmer can transact in gold or dollars – easy enough to understand!
But we are most interested in the third thing that money is, a unit of account.
Now, what pray tell, is going on here?
***
GYGES: ASSASSIN, THEN KING
In 716 BC – or, almost exactly 2,700 years ago – Gyges kills King Candaules of Lydia, marries the assassinated monarch’s wife, and proclaims himself King.
The new King Gyges now promptly makes his way to Delphi, to bribe the Oracle there with gold and treasure, to confirm him as rightful ruler; the Oracle duly makes the confirmation.
If the name rings familiar to you, it’s likely from Plato. The “Ring of Gyges” is from that Gyges, the one who killed Candaules and took the dead Candaulus’s wife and kingdom as his own.
There is some dispute as to Gyges’s rank and background pre-assassination/ascension – Plato allegorically names him a shepherd who discovers a magical ring, another tale has him as the head of Candaules’s security forces; another source names him a diplomat; perhaps one of these is true, or perhaps none of them have it right.
Regardless, Gyges settles in and apparently governs quite well. The Kingdom of Lydia continues to get richer and richer.
The geography is well-suited for it – Lydia overlapped with Western Anatolia, one of the key trade routes (and battlegrounds) of all of history. In modern times, Western Anatolia is Turkish; 2700 years ago, it was Lydian.
The Lydian capital, Sardis, was nearly exactly due-South from modern Istanbul, and nearly exactly due-East from modern Izmir. If you drew a line on a map straight down from Istanbul, and another line straight east from Izmir, they’d meet around where Sardis was.
The players in the region, those days, were the disunited and quarreling Greeks and Thracians to the West, and a mix of disunited chieftainates to the East: of them, the Medeans and Persians were notable, but not all that notable yet. They will be soon, but are not yet.
The Phrygians reside within Lydia’s sphere of influence, and are most likely vassals of Lydia; or perhaps they are right on the outskirts of Lydian power. Regardless, the two kingdoms each nice relations.
The most famous Phrygian you’ve no doubt heard of, King Midas (that King Midas), but Midas will play no part in the coming story. Simply note – the Kingdom that the Greeks would tell the “golden touch” fable about was most likely a vassal to Lydia; that’s how rich and powerful Lydia was.
***
AS RICH AS CROESUS
One of Gyges’s grandchildren, probably King Alyattes, struck the first modern coins in Lydia. The kingdom was already flourishing with its importance along the trade routes and good natural resources, but under Alyattes and his son Croesus, Lydia rapidly became the richest kingdom in the world.
Despite few people these days remembering Lydia’s existence, “as rich as Croesus” is still an expression in a half-dozen languages across the world, including English.
It’s hard to overstate just how big of a deal standardized coined money was in only a few words, but let’s try.
Here’s Jack Weatherford’s “History of Money” again –
“The emergence of the money system and its sibling, the public market, imposed a new kind of mental discipline upon human beings. Long before people needed to become literate, the market had made it necessary for them to be able to count and use numbers. People were forced to equate things that had never before been equated. It is often difficult for us to think back to the pre-monetary era, since we are so accustomed to thinking in terms of groups, sets, and categories of things.”
Indeed, it was a really, really big deal.
King Alyattes got a lot of things right: the coins had standardized weight and bore the seal of the royal mint – making them easier to trade with, and harder to counterfeit.
He got the denominations correct. Weatherford –
“The genius of the Lydian kings can be seen in their recognition of the need for very small and easily transported ingots worth no more than a few days' labor or a small part of a farmer's harvest. By making these small ingots in a standardized size and weight, and by stamping on them an emblem that verified their worth to even the illiterate, the kings of Lydia exponentially expanded the possibilities of commercial enterprise.”
– thus avoiding the double-coincidence of needs problem; the tailor no longer needed to find a farmer with excess food and no pants. And, predictably with hindsight, this leads to the first retail selling in history –
“The variety and abundance of commercial goods quickly led to another innovation: the retail market. Rather than leaving buyers to seek out the home of someone who might have oil or jewelry to sell, the kings of Sardis set up an innovative new system in which anyone, even a stranger, with something to sell could come to a central market. Numerous small shops lined the market, and each merchant specialized in particular goods. One sold meat, and another offered grain.”
The final result of this will be an incredible spiral that leads to a standard unit of account for a whole lot of things (not everything, but a whole more than the first 200,000 years of human existence).
Here’s a last big excerpt from Weatherford… it might seem kind of mundane, but given that almost all of modern society is built on these principles, I’d recommend you read it for comprehension (I also recommend reading the entire book, which is both terrifically informative and very readable) –
“Money made possible the organization of society on a scale much greater and far more complex than either kinship or force could have achieved. Kinship-based communities tend to be quite small: bands of sixty to a hundred people tied through kinship and marriage to similar neighboring bands. The power of tributary systems and the state to organize humans proved far greater than mere kinship. A tributary system could easily include millions of people divided into provinces and classes and administered by a bureaucracy with a well-established system of keeping records. The use of money does not require the face-to-face interaction and the intense relationships of a kinship-based system. Nor does it require such extensive administrative, police, and military systems. Money became the social nexus connecting humans in many more social relationships, no matter how distant or how transitory, than had previously been possible. Money connected humans in a more extensive and more efficient way than any other known medium. It created more social ties, but in making them faster and more transitory, it weakened the traditional ties based on kinship and political power.
“Money also became the medium for the expression of more values, making a great leap forward when its use was expanded from the realm of articles and commodities to something as abstract as work. A man or woman might be paid for cleaning out the stables, for a day's work at the spinning wheel, for help in chopping timber or in feeding the animals, or for a sexual act. Work and human labor itself became a commodity with a value that could be fixed in money according to its importance, the amount of skill or strength it required, and the time it took. As money became the standard value for work, it was also becoming the standard of value for time itself.”
You can see, there, the cycle and spiral that made the Lydian Kings – Croesus the final of them – so very rich.
Coined money let you trade with outsiders without a cl
ose relationship. Instead of needing to form bonds of trust and reciprocity over months and years, you could just pay a few coins to have someone help you muck out your stable. If you had a surplus of crops from this year’s harvest, you could sell them for coins, and use the coins in a future year if needed.
Suddenly, the barrier to work is lower – you no longer need close kingship networks of trust and reciprocity.
The barrier to trade is lower – for the same reasons, and now there's a one-size-fits-all thing to trade in the deal (coins) – and people start doing more “work” for coins, thus leading to an upward spiral of more buildings, more trade, more crafts, more investment, more cultivation, and so on.
Before, a farmer would be very happy to grow enough crops to feed his immediate family. Maybe a little extra to trade to the blacksmith or toolmaker. But it didn’t make sense to try to grow as many crops as possible, because there was nothing you could trade it for easily that you wanted, once you’d covered the basics.
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