The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History

https://www.deadcarl.com/p/the-kaiser-and-a-mediocre-man-theory

by baud147258 • 2 months ago

98 80 2 months ago

deadcarl.com

pickleballcourt• 2 months ago

Good read, interesting choice as there are a lot of such examples

bryanrasmussen2• 2 months ago

Probably greatness is most powerful if there are enough powerful mediocrities to work against.

curio_Pol_curio• 2 months ago

Bismarck? Or

his liberal father

Might be a stretch to imply that the Wilhelm II was a mediocre illiberal. HIM was (for a time) interested in protecting workers' rights. However great he was, Bismarck couldn't overpower a "mediocre" populist

https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/forging-an-empire-bismarcki...

bryanrasmussen2• 2 months ago

I was making a general point, not specifically about Bismarck.

Assume every side has great individuals in positions of power (great being here evidently in relation to ability), greatness is thus evenly balanced and not so important to the final outcome.

globalnode• 2 months ago

some interesting ideas but something feels off with the language used.

smitty1e2• 2 months ago

"as su," indicates a lack of editing.

jleyank• 2 months ago

LLM? Any verbose, struggling to focus article now looks generated rather than the work of somebody with better ideas than technique. Or they’re being paid by the word. I wonder whether there is a jargon problem with the word “great”…. These’s no way Trump or Cameron would be considered “great” but the world changed through their direct actions. One could argue that they just happen to be there when underlying forces interact and that the lone actor model of history is naive.

Many of us have written the “was Hitler inevitable” paper at uni and elsewhere. His particular phobias were extensive, but that time and place was ripe for such rule to appear.

matusp• 2 months ago

Of course mediocre and bad leaders make their mark on history. But Carlyle's Great Men theory is more about paradigm shifts that Great Men can will into existence, not just random noise they bring along. The problem with GM theory is that there is only a handful of examples to support it. Napoleon is one such example, and it was undoubtedly the inspiration why the theory was proposed in the first place. People were trying to come to terms with the fact that one leader can have such a dramatic impact on the entire world.

nixon_why696• 2 months ago

I think the wrinkle of "men (or maybe women) at a particular hingepoint had their personal foibles that shaped history" is valid. There were structural forces that led to WW2 but Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler et al being their particular personalities absolutely shaped how it unfolded.

irdc• 2 months ago

The same can also be said of e.g. the Cuban Missile Crisis.

ifwinterco• 2 months ago

From a UK perspective Churchill had a huge personal role in dragging the UK into the war against the initial public sentiment.

Not impossible if a few people at the top of the UK power structures had made different decisions then the UK could have stayed out of the war entirely, and the effect of that on the outcome would obviously have been drastic

Joker_vD3• 2 months ago

The historical setting at the moment of time matters a lot. Had the French Revolution not happened, he would've been yet another artillery lieutenant in the French army. In 1789 Jean Lannes was a dyer, Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr was a paineter, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan worked in a clothing store, Jean-Baptiste Bessières was a barber, Guillaume Marie Anne Brune was a typesetter, Jean-Baptiste Kléber was an architect... et cetera, et cetera. But it happened, and lot of people got an impossible before chance to discover their dormant military talents.

inglor_cz3• 2 months ago

The same is happening in Ukraine right now.

Prior to the war, Robert Brovdi (Magyar) was a local businessman on a periphery of Ukraine. Now he is a commander of probably the strongest drone force in the world.

sofixa• 2 months ago

Yes, but the point about Napoleon is that there was so much more about him than just military talents. The environment in which he flourished wasn't of his making, but he managed to grow in it and ended up impacting the whole world. Either directly by bringing the Napoleonic legal system to them with an army, or indirectly by inspiring or enabling nationalism, democratic ideas (power coming from the people, not deity), allowing the whole of Latin America to break free from the Spanish Empire by keeping the latter busy, etc etc.

Many people became successful militarily and even seized power afterwards during tumultuous times. Very few actually ended having such an impact worldwide.

And before any Brits come in with centuries old grudges, of course he did plenty of bad, most notably how he treated Haiti (which he at least acknowledged later in life).

bee_rider2• 2 months ago

What is a historical theory anyway? These things aren’t for making predictions. So it seems hard to judge them the same way we’d judge a scientific theory, based on their predictive ability (too easy to cheat, since all the experiments you can make using history are concluded already, other than current events, which are only a tiny slice of history and we don’t really know which ones will be deemed memorable by the record).

WJW• 2 months ago

This entire article tries to make a point that it's not just "great men" or "structural forces" alone being responsible for the course of history, but then completely misses the point again by labeling someone in power as mediocre and arguing that that mediocrity caused much of the events of the 20th century.

This once again causes oversimplifies history to a few people and some nebulous "structural forces", and provides an attractive but wrong model of how history developed. In software terms we would call this a "leaky abstraction", and this particular abstraction leaks so much it's barely useful at all.

The world is much too complex to be understood by examining less than at least a few hundred million people. That this is beyond the capability of humans is not the world's problem.

Simon_O_Rourke2• 2 months ago

You could fit in most senior directors, consultants and sales VPs into that bucket comfortably.

rbanffy6• 2 months ago

Organisations have evolved to deal with them. In fact, all the rules and procedures, checks and compliance procedures are there precisely to allow the organisation to survive despite its members.

xtiansimon• 2 months ago

What new concept evolves society the mental-immunity necessary to survive these radically destructive _ideas_? (Ie. corporations are people)

If revolution is the old answer to oppressive organizations together with its tragic loss of life, then… where’s our cure for cancer?

Esophagus4• 2 months ago

Ok, I’ll bite - why sales VPs?

Simon_O_Rourke2• 2 months ago

Mediocre sales leaders I've found treat pipeline stagnation as a motivation problem rather than fixing the underlying issues with training, lead qualification, or sales collateral. Previous company had a sales pipeline tanking, and the "brilliant" Sales VP thought bringing forward a sales off-site to get the best performing reps together to motivate them. Net result, pipeline tanks further, VP waits a few months and leaves, and the reps all get upset at missing their targets for a full quarter.

xg152• 2 months ago

If it was the social and political forces of the French Revolution that made Napoleon successful, the logical conclusion is that it would have made no difference to the course of history should he have, say, suffered a fatal stroke in 1801, a premise few would accept. It is clearly untrue when applied to specific cases. Not only who ends up in power, but the specific decisions they make are deeply consequential. Who would really contend that the 20th century would remain unchanged had Hitler been killed in WWI?

Isn't the idea more that the large-scale political forces are what allow those supposedly "great men" to become "great" in the first place? Yes, once Napoleon was in power, a lot of the details of history were dependent on his individual decisions - but the forces that led to the French Revolution were what gave him that power in the first place. An if he had actually died of a stroke, or if Hitler had been killed in WWI, then the specifics of history would have been different, but probably not the large-scale trajectory: Post-revolutionary France would still have been there and the deep divisions, senses of injustice and reactionary and capitalist influence in post-WWI Germany that gave rise to the Nazi movement would also still have been there. And chances are, other "great men" would have emerged and captured those forces.

As such, I see the relationship more like the one between lightning strikes and wildfires: Yes, a particular wildfire might have been caused by that particular lightning strike (or careless hiker or whatever), but the reason why that particular local event could spiral into a blaze that burns down acres and acres were the larger environmental conditions, i.e. hot weather, wind and dryness. And if firefighters could take a time machine and prevent that particular cause, then it's likely another random event would trigger a slightly different but still extremely similar wildfire - so not much would have been won.

CuriouslyC3• 2 months ago

Just so. People forget that at any time, the people around the "great men" could have decided not to listen to them, and done something else.

xenocratus• 2 months ago

Quite enlightening, I propose one of us writes a novel about it, about how Napoleon just precipitated what was already there, enabled of course by those around him. It should show the impact it had on everyone involved. Oh, and let's make it from a Russian perspective, showing a few intertwined families and the hardship the wars brings to them. Sounds like a great read! Oh, yeah, and make it like 1000 pages long.

nickhodge• 2 months ago

Reflect on this in the context of the US right now. Makuthink.

rbanffy6• 2 months ago

It was filed under “unintentional allegory”. Or intentional, it’s hard to say.

ahartmetz• 2 months ago

[...] where promotions were based on the favor of a man who did not have the character to set a consistent policy made for a state that was not a credible partner.
Germany’s interests were incomprehensible and thus there was no option other than to balance against this rogue state in the heart of Europe
There was a saying of the Kaiser in Vienna, that Wilhelm wished to be “the stag at every hunt, the bride at every wedding, and the corpse at every funeral.”

Indeed, indeed.

rbanffy6• 2 months ago

When you look at white noise from up close, you see dramatic changes, periods of calm, and what seems like patterns.

Only when you step back, you realise all that drama you read is mostly inconsequential. What will be the impact of Napoleon 1000 years from now? Of Columbus? If instead of Hitler Germany had Rohm? It’s all monkeys and typewriters all the way down. What matters are the structural forces, the natural resources, the geography, and so on. Chances are it’ll be all forgotten in a billion years.

Now, on a more serious note, did anyone else, at some point, started wondering whether the article was really about Wilhelm II?

_dain_• 2 months ago

We still speak today of Charlemagne, Muhammed, Caesar, Alexander.

Napoleon and Columbus have secured for themselves their seats in the pantheon of history and it will take longer than a thousand years for mankind to forget about them.

All these men built our world.

bsenftner• 2 months ago

Na, all it will take is a shift in perspective. As humanity becomes more and more Asian, those names will trigger a "who?"

CuriouslyC3• 2 months ago

People love to mythologize. The truth is usually much more mundane. Columbus in particular has a combination of Mr. Magoo quality and nastiness that is will lead history to forcefully forget him in short order.

9dev• 2 months ago

What are a thousand years other than a couple of generations? What does it matter from further away? We always forget about the past eventually. There are so many great civilisations we only have tiny shreds of knowledge about, and yet in their time, they also had great leaders and epic stories to tell. It’s all inconsequential once enough time has passed.

rbanffy6• 2 months ago

We talk about them because they are the ones who became famous. If they hadn’t existed we’d be talking about others that would most likely have done the same ish things with a couple decades of difference.

vintermann5• 2 months ago

This is missing the point. If any of these people hadn't lived, you would have someone else in your list of world-builders, names we don't know. And you, living in that world, might be convinced your world was much preferable to our world.

The question isn't who should sit in the pantheon of great men of history. The question is, should we have such a pantheon? Are we wiser for it? Better off?

Spooky23• 2 months ago

They both matter. All of the typewriters in the world doesn’t produce a play until you find the right monkey.

rbanffy6• 2 months ago

The right monkey is the one we are reading from. All other monkeys produced equally likely timelines.

kubb• 2 months ago

This point of view implies that the revered "great men" should be stripped of their wealth and power as much as possible. They're not necessary for history, so no need to disproportionally allocate resources to them.

credit_guy2• 2 months ago

so no need to disproportionally allocate resources to them.

Maybe I'm squinting too hard, but it seems to me you are talking about Musk here. We are not allocating any resources to him. He took some risks, started some ventures, some failed, but some succeeded spectacularly. He made lots of people wealthy in the process. I own a few shares of Tesla and they appreciated since I bought them. I did not become rich, but I did benefit from Musk's activities, and millions other people did. The society did not "allocate resources to Musk", and society did not "allocate resources" to J.P. Morgan or to Rockefeller or to Ford or to Bezos.

terribleperson2• 2 months ago

What is the stock market if not a way for society to allocate resources?

InfiniteRand• 2 months ago

One factor here is how systems become more or less prone to creating great or mediocre men. Inbreeding, isolation, over romanticism of emotions, all these are factors that can make a dangerous inconsistent person more likely to appear in the halls of power

Eddy_Viscosity25• 2 months ago

Reminds me a quote I heard recently about wealth inequality and how the very rich can do dumb things without consequences (to them anyway) and it was along the lines of 'we don't have a merit-based system, because our system does not need merit to function'.

hdhx8• 2 months ago

More useful less cynical frame is the Theory of Bounded Rationality which tell us everything has limits. Merit included.

Eddy_Viscosity25• 2 months ago

I mean, yes everything has limits. I think the point is that the limit for how much merit is required for our system to run is much much lower then people would intuitively expect. Which is why its surprising when we see very clearly incompetent people thriving at the same time other very clearly competent and talented people are struggling, and wondering how that could possibly happen.

Terr_• 2 months ago

The converse is true too: Inequality is emergent from the math, not from individual merit.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

krautburglar• 2 months ago

Any story that rests on the disaster that was Wilhelm II, but does not make a single reference to the “Eulenberg Affair” (i.e. elite closetgay club), is an utter waste of time.

The elites in the gayclub had many ties — personal and/or blood — to Britain, and pushed Wilhelm toward moderation in his foreign policy. Once the scandal hit the papers, gayclub dissolved, leaving (forcing, even) Wilhelm II entirely to the counsel of his generals.

By “forcing,” I mean the fellow elites in gayclub were widely known to hold pro-Britain sentiments, so Wilhelm was somewhat forced into a 180 to not go down with them in the court of public opinion.

In some small way, WWI was a “beard.”

Joker_vD3• 2 months ago

The synthesis position is what I call here the “mediocre man” theory of history. The idea of this mediocre man theory is that history is not just shaped by great men or by mass sociological forces that make individual irrelevant. Instead, while it is shaped by structural forces, it is also shaped by ordinary people who end in positions of extraordinary importance.

This synthesis has already been done as early as at least 1898, see G.V. Plekhanov, "On the Role of the Individual in History" [0].

[0] https://www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1898/xx/individua...

inglor_cz3• 2 months ago

When thinking about this from the perspective of rulers and war, Putin is the ultimate mediocre man of our times. He wanted to be the next Great Tsar - Expander of the Realm, forever mentioned in history textbook as the one who put the Russian World together again after Gorbachev let it collapse.

But career spooks like him and his inner silovik circe don't really understand war and, at the same time, don't trust the army enough to actually build it up to strength. And so he started something that he cannot finish.

vintermann5• 2 months ago

I agree he's mediocre, but I can think of a lot more mediocre men in our times. I think he's a lot more concerned with what's immediately ahead for himself personally, and less interested in what history will think of him than you believe.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 months ago

I am uncomfortable with describing folks as "great," or "mediocre." I feel that simplifies people too much. We're all ongoing epic sagas; even the most banal people in the world.

One example is incompetent people with extreme willpower. They can Make Shit Happen; even if it is not good stuff. I think we've all had bosses like that. Some folks will just jam beans into their noses[0], and, for whatever reason, they are in a position to impose this on others. Sometimes, the bad stuff is actually a trigger for growth. I doubt we'd have much of what we have now, if not for a couple of genocidal wars, last century.

Others can be insanely competent, but are never in a position to apply that competence to cause any meaningful change.

Also, never underestimate the power of personal insecurity. This can be a huge driver, and substitute for willpower. People spend millions, trying to salve personal insecurity, and, likely, many tyrants (and great leaders) have been driven by personal insecurity.

[0] https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/07/08/beans-and-nos...

grndn• 2 months ago

"Understandably, there has been much speculation as to [leader]’s mental fitness. It has been marked that [leader] possessed a perpetual immaturity. He had great difficulty in taking matters seriously, and tended to fixate on surface level details that caught his fancy to the neglect of the heart of the matter. He spoke without preparation or consideration, seemingly unaware of the consequences this brought about.

However, the influence of the [leader] on [country] politics made [country]’s isolation inevitable. A byzantine system where promotions were based on the favor of a man who did not have the character to set a consistent policy made for a state that was not a credible partner."

Danox• 2 months ago

He the Kaiser wanted to be Bismarck and failed spectacularly, just like the Czar of Russia, his cousin and his other cousin, the king of England three incompetent spoiled, entitled aristocrats, who had no clue their only real contribution thru failure was ushering in the era of a professional standing Army first popularize by Cromwell and Matthias Corvinus (who became king at 14) in earlier centuries where actual talent briefly became more important than being born into the aristocracy and therefore being allowed to command and run the military irregardless of your actual ability.

The last Russian Czar and his dad were spectacular in their failure, his dad losing to the Japanese in the far east, and the son losing everything World War I, his family and his crown basically a trifecta…

Hey, wait that sounds like modern America, where a would be dictator/king wants to run the military with his corrupt drunken henchman what could go wrong?

What happened to Hungary? Well the aristocracy disbanded, the professional military, and Hungary paid the price in the coming centuries. being conquered and partitioned many times, the Hungarian-aristocracy was more concerned about lording it over their estates than doing anything for the good of the country some things just never change.

deterministic• 2 months ago

IMHO science, technology, and economics has a much greater impact on history over the long term than any one individual.

An obvious example is the invention of the steam engine.

The Kaiser and a "Mediocre Man" Theory of History

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