John (Chris) Butler...has developed an innovative method of incorporating detailed flowcharts to help students mentally 'map' history

1. My pain hurts worse than your pain. We each view the world from inside our own skin and only truly feel the pain inflicted upon it. Of course, everyone else experiences the world in the same way from inside their own skins. History helps us look at both sides of a problem from a detached point of view where we can appreciate the pain on both sides equally. Keeping in mind that everyone in that historical situation was only feeling their own pain, we can see how things have turned out so badly so often. By the same token in our own personal lives, learning to empathize with others and feel their pain can go a long way toward resolving personal conflicts. On a larger scale, it could save the world.

2. The Rubber Band Effect: Everything is connected. Think of society as a bunch of marbles enclosed by a rubber band. Each marble represents one aspect of society (social structure, political structure, technology, the arts, etc.). If one marble starts moving, it puts stress on the rubber band, causing the other marbles to move in sync with the first marble. If that marble encounters resistance from other marbles, the rubber band keeps stretching as the marbles are more removed from one another. If the first marble doesn’t stop moving or the others don’t catch up, the stress on the rubber band eventually causes it to snap, signifying a revolution or systemic breakdown of society.

Along these lines, the old sci-fi TV series, Star Trek, had a principle known as the Prime Directive that recognized the Rubber Band Effect, dictating that a technologically superior civilization should never tamper with a less technologically advanced culture because of all the unforeseen knock-on effects down the road.

3. No one goes against the flow of history. "At least I am not so arrogant as to assume that the likes of us are able to make history. My task is to keep an eye on the currents of the latter and steer my ship in them as best I can."—Otto von Bismarck (1869)

History is the intersection of the infinite and infinitesimal.

Until the 19thcentury when more complete records and statistics started being kept, what is sometimes referred to as the Great Man school of history was how most people studied and interpreted the past. In other words, they saw history as being driven by a few great men (and much fewer women), such as Charlemagne, Caesar, and Alexander who did great deeds, all too often at the point of a sword.

This approach made sense to the extent that the few written records that were made, copied, and survived were about such people (who often commissioned such writing). Similarly, any artifacts that survived were generally rich treasures or works of art belonging to the great and powerful. 

On the other hand, day-to-day details of people’s lives, (e.g., clothes, toys, what they had for breakfast, used for toilet paper, etc.) were either irretrievably lost or buried waiting for someone in the future to find and appreciate them as historical artifacts as valuable as Charlemagne’s scepter or Caesar’s funeral mask.

Even when people, such as Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, started digging up ancient sites, it was typically in a desperate treasure hunt for gold that destroyed the more mundane artifacts that got in the way. For example, when the lease ran out for treasure hunters digging up Indian burial mounds near Spiro, Oklahoma, they dynamited what was left of the mounds since they couldn’t have what they contained.

Over the last fifty years or so scientists from various fields have uncovered a huge range of evidence from coins and inscriptions to ice cores tracking long-range climate patterns that has vastly expanded our view and understanding of how history works. The “great men” still matter, but like Bismarck’s pilot, they can only steer events in the direction of the flow of history.

4. History is often a process of old mentalities running up against new realities. While change has always been taking place, this is especially true since the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century. And every day it becomes truer than the day before. This especially became apparent in 1914 when we entered our “technological adolescence”, which, like human adolescents getting their drivers’ licenses, was a period of unprecedented power and limited sense of perspective. Just as teens are more likely to wreck the family car (hopefully not too seriously), the human race blundered into World War I using nineteenth century style human wave assaults with disastrous results against modern killing technology such as the machine gun and long-range artillery. Fortunately, World War I was a “fender bender” for civilization. Unfortunately, generals are often planning for the last war. Therefore, the French in particular planned for World War II to be another war of trenches and machine guns. Meanwhile, the Germans recognized that the rapidly advancing technology of tanks and airplanes would transform the next war. The result was the Blitzkrieg that overran much of Europe in 1939 and 1940. Think of that as a teen taking the family car out of town and onto a high-speed expressway. The resulting wreck was much worse, but we survived. Of course, World War II ended with an even more advanced and devastating technology, the atomic bomb (followed only seven years later by thermonuclear weapons) that has forced us to totally reassess how and if we fight another total war, given its likely catastrophic results.

5. The Butterfly Effect: History as the intersection of the infinitely great and infinitesimally small (or close to it). The significance of big events like the world wars or a comet hitting the earth hardly needs explanation. The importance of more apparently innocuous events, such as Kaiser Wilhelm’s breech birth in 1859, does bear discussion. Or just imagine the effects if an X chromosome were substituted for a Y chromosome and Julius Caesar became Julia Caesar.

6. Two things about human nature that never seem to change are greed and our capacity for self-delusion or “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” How else can we explain the ridiculous sums paid for tulips in the 1630s, dot.com stocks in the 1990s, and houses in the 2000s?

7. We are a social species prone to herd behavior. This is both good and bad news. It’s good because it’s been our collective will and efforts that have allowed us to survive as a species and societies. But it’s been bad when our collective will has been turned into a panicked stampede behavior and wrongly directed. Luckily, there are always individuals who dare to think differently and set us back on the right path. Even when, as all too often happens, they are forced to drink a cup of hemlock or get nailed to a cross, there will be others who are listening and willing to take up the standard.

8. Ideologues and the rest of us. There are certain people in history I call ideologues (e.g., Cromwell, Robespierre, Lenin, and Hitller) that are largely remembered as evil dictators and lumped together with history’s other truly evil dictators (e.g., Napoleon and Stalin). I draw the distinction between what drove these two types of men. Unlike the truly evil dictators, who were primarily driven by a hunger for power, ideologues seem to have been driven by an idea that assumed total importance in their lives to the exclusion of anything else, including people’s (and their own) basic human needs. For Robespierre that idea was his Republic of Virtue enforced with the Reign of Terror; for Lenin it was Marxism enforced with the Red Terror. Both these men used power ruthlessly to promote their agendas, but the fact that they lived fairly Spartan lives rather than exploiting power to pad their own nests indicates that personal power and wealth were not the driving factors. 

The fact that they also targeted people who were no real threat to their personal rule but were seen as a moral threat to their ideas (e.g., priests and prostitutes) also suggests their motives went beyond personal power. While it’s risky to speculate on the psychological makeup of such historical figures as Robespierre and Lenin, their behavior seemed more consistent with a one-track, almost autistic, obsession with a single idea and inability to empathize with the basic human needs that primarily concern most people. 

This isn’t to say such men are not dangerous. In fact, they can be more dangerous than your typical dictator, since they aren’t concerned with such things as own personal comfort or safety, and thus drive themselves and their countries to the point of self-destruction. This also isn’t to say that their ideas and the rule they inspire aren’t also evil. Hitler would probably be the most salient example of this last point.

9. Politics, like chess, is a game for control of the center of the board. If we divide people along the spectrum from extremely radical to extremely conservative, the vast majority of them will cluster in the center. Instead of being obsessed with some radical or conservative ideology, they’re mainly concerned with getting by on a day-to-day basis: being able to pay the rent, buy groceries, keep a job, educate their kids, etc. Therefore, while most people might characterize themselves as conservative, liberal, moderate, or whatever, they’re first concern is paying the bills. And it doesn’t matter so much whether their officials are conservative or liberal, as long as they keep things running smoothly. 

Therefore, the common wisdom is that people “vote their pocketbooks.” That is, they vote for whoever they think will be best at running the economy). Or as the Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping said: “It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.”

As a result, in the battle for public opinion, each side wants to paint the other as lunatics who will wreck the economy with their extremist policies. Whoever beats the other in that game typically wins public support.

10. Revolutions follow a somewhat similar and predictable long-range pattern that can take a century or more to resolve:

• Revolutions start when people have something and want more, not when people have nothing and want something. After all, people who have nothing don’t have it in their experience that they could have something. Only when they have something do they get it in their heads that they could do even better.

• Revolutions are long-term processes that are as evolutionary as they are revolutionary.

• Revolutions start out moderately and may not even be recognized as revolutions, which evade the attention of authorities until they have had time to grow and become truly revolutionary.

• Revolutions succeed against weak-willed regimes (e.g., Louis XVI of France and Tsar Nicholas II) that fail to react decisively until it is too late.

• Revolutions are like getting a new football coach or cleaning your room. Before things get better, they get  worse, leading to frustration from expectations that things would immediately improve.

• Revolutions become progressively more radical as things get worse, eventually leading to a crisis stage as conservative reactions from within and foreign intervention from without combine to make things even worse.

• Revolutions go from arbitrary power to arbitrary power. The initial arbitrary power is the weak-willed regime the revolution replaced. The second arbitrary power is much more hard-nosed and ruthless in pursuing and preserving its goals. Typically it is also highly ideological in nature (e.g., Oliver Cromwell, Robespierre, and Lenin). Oftentimes, this may go to a third arbitrary regime with a less ideological and more pragmatic and power-hungry leader who betrays the aspects of the revolution that stand in his way while keeping and using those ideals that he can manipulate while seeming to uphold them (e.g., Napoleon and Stalin).

• Revolutions, if successful, culminate with a “Napoleon III” phase (named after the French emperor who ruled France from 1851 to 1870) characterized by a combination of strict autocratic rule with market reforms that eventually lead to a moderate sustainable democracy a generation or so down the road. More specifically, an improving economy leads to a more broadly based middle class that can afford education for its children. And those children have a tendency to ask a lot of questions that, if not adequately addressed, lead to more substantial challenges to the authorities. recently, China and Russia have entered these phases and should be interesting to watch in the coming years. However, both countries’ long-term histories of autocratic rule have acted like vectors knocking their progress toward liberal democracy off course. Whether they will right their respective courses remains to be seen. History can be messy.

11. The fatal flaw of dictators is that they only listen to what they want to hear and that increasingly is bad advice. This is the result of a vicious cycle that starts with the dictator clawing his way to the top and convincing himself he is there because of his own genius. However true that may be, it also encourages him to feel superior to everyone else (since he is on top), the natural corollary to that being that anyone who disagrees with him must be wrong. Therefore, he gets rid of anyone with differing opinions and surrounds himself with sycophants and yes-men who only tell him what he wants to hear instead of what he needs to hear. That, in turn provides him with faulty information upon which he bases increasingly disastrous decisions. However, his inflated ego convinces him that those disasters are the result of inferior or traitorous subordinates, whom he purges and replaces with even more submissive yes-men, and so on. Classic examples include the invasions of Russia by Napoleon and Hitler, Stalin’s Five-Year Plans and collectivization of the agriculture, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

12. The Blame Game or “Not It”. In addition to starting riots against their enemies, the Fascists played a game I call “Not it”. Just like the children’s game of Tag where the last person to say “Not It” is “It”, so it goes in politics. A common political tactic is for one side to blame the other side for its own crimes and faults, because, whatever the truth of the matter, whoever gets blamed first is in a weakened position by right of having to defend itself. Even if it justly counter-blames the other side, it looks like it is only copying the other side, making it look unoriginal and guilty, since the other side first has already put it into people’s heads that the innocent side is guilty. Hitler and the Nazis would copy Mussolini in this and various other tactics.

13. We are basically prehistoric beings that are less and less biologically adapted for in a progressively technological environment and the primary thing we have to fear is fear (tactics). One of the most important examples is the amygdala, the primitive part of the brain that triggers a fear response to any unexpected sound or motion. This served us well for millions of years when a sudden noise or motion could signal a fatal attack by a predator. However, in this relatively orderly thing we call civilization, we are rarely ambushed by tigers in the shopping mall parking lot, while the biggest threat to our individual existence, moving automobiles, usually stay off sidewalks and stop for traffic lights.

Unfortunately, political leaders with nothing positive to contribute typically focus on negative things, and this often involves scare tactics to conjure up fears about imaginary threats or exaggerate minor ones, thus exploiting the amygdala’s fear response in inappropriate ways. The classic case of this is when Hitler and the Nazis stirred up hysterical fears about the Jews that led to the Holocaust. Not that this was the first time the Jews were made the scapegoats of real or imaginary problems people couldn’t understand. Medieval Christians also carried out purges and massacres, notably during the First Crusade and Black Death. And just to be fair to Christians, they were the victims of similar actions during the Roman Empire.

Our primary hope is another part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex, which helps us make more rational long-range decisions. Unfortunately, the pre-frontal cortex doesn’t evolve until around age 25, when the rate of drivers’ accidents goes down and, with it, insurance rates. Equally unfortunate is that by then many people’s behavior patterns and values have long since been set and are nearly impossible to change.

14. Soldiers’ riots. Normally, the culture of killing inherent in armies is restrained by military discipline to be used only against other armies. However, when the restraints of that discipline are relaxed, raw and uninhibited violence is unleashed, causing even normally civilized humans to engage in unspeakable acts.

• In 1099 that became Jerusalem’s story when Crusaders stormed its walls.
• In 1631 it became Magdeburg, Germany’s story as Christian troops stormed its walls to kill other Christians in the name of God.
• In 1937 it became Nanjing’s story when Japanese soldiers took the Chinese city of Nanjing and massacred an estimated 300,000 helpless civilians.
• In, 1968 it became the story of a small Vietnamese village named My Lai.

Rather than being extraordinary acts committed by extraordinarily cruel humans, these were extraordinarily cruel acts committed by normal humans in extraordinary circumstances. War does that to even the best of us.

15. Finding a middle path between aggression and appeasement (which encourages more aggression) to avoid a catastrophic war.This was the primary challenge facing diplomats during the Cold War (1945-91) when total war between the superpowers could have led to nuclear annihilation for us all. The answer was a one requiring a nuanced balance between being too provocative and too passive. This is as true for us as individuals as it is in diplomacy.

16. As Mark Twain said, History doesn’t repeat itself. It rhymes. While we can’t use historical events as exact predictors of what will happen, we can still use them to increase the odds of repeating catastrophic mistakes.