patrick.net

Reality says

July 1789: Duke of Orleans paid for a mob to attack and occupy lightly guarded Bastille ordinance depot;

It's idiotic to think a revolution could be started by paying a crowd. This is not like renting a crowd to protest for women health issue is SF. People attacking the Bastille were attacking a monarchy that stood for 800yrs and could easily kill them.

The revolution started because different players in France had totally different ideas. Some of the nobility still lived by feudalism. The King was totally out of touch with the country (and even with the basis of its own power). His court was throwing lavish parties while many people didn't have enough to eat. The King was seen as impotent and unable to control his Austrian wife - let alone France. At the same time the bourgeoisie was rising, more affluent, more educated, striving on commerce where Aristocrats owned the land. Philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire were pushing the values of the enlightenment. Abroad the American revolution made tangible the possibility of escaping monarchy.
This was an explosive mix.

The revolution started in June 1789, before the Bastille. The deputies of the tiers etat came with a list of demands for the general states but the King prevented the meeting. The deputies of the "tiers etat", together with some deputies of the clergy and nobility met in "Jeu de Paume" instead, and swore not to disband until they had crafted a constitution (aiming for a constitutional monarchy).



Reality says

1794: Cult of Supreme Being (personality cult of Robespirre), execution of Danton (former close ally of Robespirre.) which so alarmed all deputies that they arrested and executed Robespirre. mass execution burning itself out;

The revolution never led to a stable regime. It was a vortex of chaos that charismatic men like Robespierre briefly influenced before being themselves consumed by it. Robespierre had no reason to kill Danton, except in this situation, Danton could kill him first, so Robespierre had to act first, but to no avail. It was the rule of paranoia and fear on all sides.

It's absurd to say that there was a cult of personality in the sense you see in North Korea. There was never even a stable regime in which such propaganda could take place.


Reality says

Commerce, market and the division of labor they produce can pack a huge number of people into a small space like the Venetian Republic for 1100 years (eventually ended by Napoleon's invasion) . . . whereas collectivism and academic ideological rigidity (most revolutionaries were intellectuals) even with the best of intentions like "Bill of Rights of Men" written in the 2nd month of the French Revolution would lead to mass genocide as "solution" to the "over-population" problem created by the lack of creativity and growing expectations of a copy-happy population (i.e. a society where advancement was through education, not the market). Robespirre himself was a law student, and president of student body welcoming the King when Louise XVI inspected Paris University, which was the largest and most prestigious university in the world.

This paragraph is incoherent.
- The revolution was bloody but certainly not a genocide.
- the point of the killing was fear not population control
- the cause of the killing was not the ideology, but the descent into chaos.
- The French revolution was never built against religion. Religion was still unchanged at the end of it, except in its role in the government.
- "academic ideological rigidity" is an expression that doesn't make sense: science is the opposite of dogma and ideology. It is subject to constant change. Some philosophers like Voltaire and Marx produce ideology. The question is: is this ideology based on defending human freedom and rights, or is it based on imposing some organization. Voltaire the former, Marx the later.

- development: commerce etc... can lead to feeding wider population, which is exactly the problem we started the thread with. i.e the human species escape its ecological niche and is an "outbreak" in biological terms.

Overall your conception of propaganda "cult of personality" is simplistic. There is a lot more that goes on in tribal/dogmatic propaganda.

Your instinct is for bottom up organization. I get that. But you fail to recognize when top-down organization is needed. Capitalism is made of many companies emerging from individuals bottom up, however each company is itself a top-down organization, or at least include some top-down parts. There is no such thing as a purely self-organizing company or society for that matter.
I find your beliefs themselves are VERY ideological and rigid.

Heraclitusstudent says

It's idiotic to think a revolution could be started by paying a crowd. This is not like renting a crowd to protest for women health issue is SF. People attacking the Bastille were attacking a monarchy that stood for 800yrs and could easily kill them.

Both the crowd attacking the Bastille and "The Women's March" on Versaille 3 months later were actually rent-a-crowds, paid for by the Duke of Orleans wanting to take the crown from Louise XVI. The monarchy was so "scary" that the few guards guarding the Bastille didn't use the canons they already had at the fort against the mob attacking them, quite unlike Napoleon six years later who had to move canons from a different location to be used against the mob. Most of the killed and injured during "The Women's March" were the king's guards, killed and injured by the mob invading the king's private country residence.

Heraclitusstudent says

The King was totally out of touch with the country (and even with the basis of its own power). His court was throwing lavish parties while many people didn't have enough to eat. The King was seen as impotent and unable to control his Austrian wife - let alone France.

According to the journalists bought and paid for by the Duke of Orleans. While there are always people throwing lavish parties while some other people didn't have enough to eat (even in our current time), Louise XVI led a much less excessive court life than his two immediate predecessors. I hope you do realize, the mere fact that the journalists were able to publish all sorts of fake stories that made the king and his queen look bad proves that Louise XVI was not in fact a despotic king. It was precisely his tolerance and laxity that did him in (combined with the political ambitions of the Duke of Orleans and the young intellectuals looking for social advancement while not having any marketable skills).

Heraclitusstudent says

The deputies of the "tiers etat", together with some deputies of the clergy and nobility met in "Jeu de Paume" instead, and swore not to disband until they had crafted a constitution (aiming for a constitutional monarchy).

The grouping was led by the Duke of Orleans.

Heraclitusstudent says

The revolution never led to a stable regime. It was a vortex of chaos that charismatic men like Robespierre briefly influenced before being themselves consumed by it. Robespierre had no reason to kill Danton, except in this situation, Danton could kill him first, so Robespierre had to act first, but to no avail. It was the rule of paranoia and fear on all sides.

As can be expected in those revolutions by the similarly trained good-for-nothing intellectuals: each can easily replace another; no one has special marketable skills. Each was paid for by the same financiers to create chaos and kill each other . . . so that the local real estate price will collapse and can be bought up cheap decades later by outside investors.

Heraclitusstudent says

The French revolution was never built against religion.

The Catholic church became a target of predation simply because the revolution had to pay its supporters and soldiers. Most revolutions turn against existing religious institutions for the same reason.

Heraclitusstudent says

- "academic ideological rigidity" is an expression that doesn't make sense: science is the opposite of dogma and ideology. It is subject to constant change. Some philosophers like Voltaire and Marx produce ideology. The question is: is this ideology based on defending human freedom and rights, or is it based on imposing some organization. Voltaire the former, Marx the later.

Which one do you think has more appeal to a revolutionary mob? What do academic intellectuals involved in revolutionary politics know about science? The answer is usually next to nothing!

Heraclitusstudent says

- development: commerce etc... can lead to feeding wider population, which is exactly the problem we started the thread with. i.e the human species escape its ecological niche and is an "outbreak" in biological terms.

Human division of labor create niche for individuals that are far removed from the natural ecology. Almost nothing you have touched today was "natural resource," but all products of someone else' labor. It's silly to talk about overpopulation running out resources when all the resources you need are produced by someone else! The only "shortage" in human society is the result of unmet expectations; that is due to either raising people's expectations too high or lack of commerce creating the material wealth through exchange between dissimilar market participants. Academic education produces both drivers of "shortage" in abundance.

Heraclitusstudent says

Your instinct is for bottom up organization. I get that. But you fail to recognize when top-down organization is needed. Capitalism is made of many companies emerging from individuals bottom up, however each company is itself a top-down organization, or at least include some top-down parts. There is no such thing as a purely self-organizing company or society for that matter.
I find your beliefs themselves are VERY ideological and rigid.

Do you not realize individual workers can quit the company and seek employment elsewhere at any time? It's nothing like a nation-state or even a slave plantation. The so-called "top-down" organization in a company is voluntary association; i.e. still a bottom-up organization. The owner of the company simply owns the passive capital stock of the company (therefore at a disadvantage and have to be protected by property rights), not the individuals. That is very different from a top-down nation-state (where membership is mandatory), which inevitably comes down to slavery of one shade or another, centralization of power and all the leaders killing each other to grab that power, with the worst scum eventually floating to the top!

Reality says

take the crown from Louise XVI

If you want to discuss this part of history, you could at least get the name of the king right: Louis.
Louise is a female name.

Reality says

Do you not realize individual workers can quit the company and seek employment elsewhere at any time? It's nothing like a nation-state or even a slave plantation. The so-called "top-down" organization in a company is voluntary association; i.e. still a bottom-up organization. The owner of the company simply owns the passive capital stock of the company (therefore at a disadvantage and have to be protected by property rights), not the individuals. That is very different from a top-down nation-state (where membership is mandatory), which inevitably comes down to slavery of one shade or another, centralization of power and all the leaders killing each other to grab that power, with the worst scum eventually floating to the top!

There is only 2 ways to organize: bottom-up self-organization (like happens in evolution, there is no central control and order 'emerges' from the interaction of the parts), or top-down design (intelligent design, i.e. 1 central designer controls or at least influences the parts). It's not different, whether you are talking of companies or nations, or even design of species.

Human beings have lived in tribes and evolved a cognitive bias to obey their leaders, because it is critical for the survival of tribes. This is this bias that is hijacked in personality cults, whether in states (Stalin), or politics (Trump), or religion (Jesus). But without strong leadership armies cannot function, companies drift into irrelevance, the Hebrews would never have reached the promised land, and Shackleton's men would have died in Antarctica. Leadership is the central control, the coordination, that is vital in all these situation.

This doesn't mean we don't need self-organization. We absolutely do. No one at the top of a nation controls every details of the economy and people's lives. Better let people on the ground deal with complexity on individual situations.

However saying this doesn't negate either the role of leadership. Top-down leadership is still vital. The key is to be able to tell when one is better than the other.
Claiming top-down is always a bad idea is absurd.

There is a huge difference between Leadership vs. Top-down Coercion. Even among the examples you gave, neither Shackleton nor Jesus exercised Top-down Coercion; they carried out their leadership through inspiration, inspiring their followers into voluntary action. Stalin of course took the coercive state secret police approach. If we have to venture into contemporary politics, Trump is closer to the former approach whereas his political opponents are closer to the latter . . . which is the reason why his political opponents are losing badly world-wide.

"Intelligent Design" would only work if the designer is Omniscient and Omnipotent (i.e. God). Obviously no human being has that kind of qualification. Evolution from the bottom up is the only way real progress can be sustainably carried out in human society. In the relatively backwards societies, such as France (compared to England in late 18th century), Germany and Russia (compared to western Europe in the 19th and early 20th century) and China (compared to Europe and America in the 20th century), the local elite's access to textbooks translated from the advanced economies/societies in other parts of the world may give them a (false) sense of God-like knowledge superiority over their countrymen, just like parents over kids in childhood, teachers/professors over students. The copying may indeed goose the local formerly backwards economy very quickly as the "design" had already been carried out in a different country. Those carrying out the copying may think they are doing "Intelligent Design" . . . however, the implementation is almost always very flawed: the rapid progress creates unrealistic expectations about the natural speed of progress that can be sustained when there is nothing to copy. For example, Japanese economy has been stuck for 3 decades after the copying phase was over; Karl Marx mistakenly thought linear progress (hence "progressivism") was the nature of human society instead of cyclicity, and his followers not understanding that "end state" is literally death: life/living is a process, nothing pleasant about jumping to the "end state" / death. Massive bloodshed awaited French, German, Russian and Chinese when what could be done with copying was coming to an end and there was no native creativity to sustain the unnaturally rapid economic advancement that the local population had grown accustomed to in a few short decades of copying. That is a recurring theme in human history.

Company leadership is about individual responsibility: the owner of the private property has to exercise his intimate knowledge of his capital or the workers would choose to work for someone else. At no time is the owner of the factory allowed to coerce his workers.

The military context is affected by the N-Squared Law, so co-ordination and timely application of as much available force as possible on the enemy is of critical importance. People who are not familiar with military operations may think top-down structure makes military efficient . . . that actually is not the case. The first thing you'd learn in a staff college for training officers is how to inspire local individual initiative. One of the primary reasons why American/British, German and Israeli army units are much more effective than comparable units in their opponents is the emphasis on local initiative and decision making. That is fundamental to Bewegungskrieg. An army accustomed to following orders top-down is one that gets liquidated like the Soviet post-Stalin purge army at the opening phases of Barbarosa and the Egyptian 3rd army getting rounded up at Sinai by a smaller opponent.