THE CHAOS THEORY

“Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its Empire and the West Lost the World” by Patrick J. Buchanan

I found this book when I was searching about the alternative history of World War II.

Previously, the widely-accepted narrative was pretty simple: Hitler triggered World War II after Nazi Germany launched a surprise attack on Poland 1 September 1939, which prompted a response from the Allied power (which consist of Britain, United States, Russia, China, and France). And when the Allied power won the war 6 years later, the good guys prevailed.

The common narrative will also say the moves by the Allies was necessary, to bring down Prussian militarism in Word War I that threatened to dominate Europe and the world, and to stop a fanatic Nazi dictator in 1939 who “would otherwise have conquered Europe and the world, enslaved mankind, massacred minorities on a mammoth scale, and brought on a new Dark Age. And thank God Britain did declare war. Were it not for Britain, we would all be speaking German now.”

But the recent events in world geopolitics 2023-2024 made me questioning this narrative. Were the good guys really won the war? After all, post World War II was the period of time when the biggest winner of the war, United States, became the dominant imperial power in the world, where everything from the UN, World Bank, IMF, WTO, were all created for the benefit of the US and allies, which they frequently abuse by “opening up markets” abroad while still imposing tariffs domestically. And guess who are the permanent members of the UN Security Council (with veto power), the supposedly “police of the world”? Exactly, Britain, United States, Russia, China, and France, all the Allied power.

The ongoing genocide by Israel is also an eye opener, where no sanction imposed on Israel, even though the ICJ has declared that their actions are war crimes and an intent of genocide, simply because the West is funding them and supplying them with the weapons. Is international law no longer applicable, even when Israel is starting to attack their neighboring sovereign countries? Of course it is still valid, but only when Iran and Lebanon retaliate, or If Russia (who has since the 1950s became the enemy of the West) is the one who is doing the war crimes.

So, why this book? The author, Patrick “Pat” Joseph Buchanan, was an assistant and special consultant to US Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. He was also a presidential candidate at one point in 1992. But perhaps he is more famous for being fired in 2012 from his job as a political commentator at the MSNBC network after he said minorities in the US will soon outnumber white Americans and that the country “is disintegrating, ethnically, culturally, morally, politically.” He is also labelled as a racist due to his open affiliation with white supremacist (allegedly, as claimed by Anti-Defamation League) and for blaming non-white immigrants (Hispanic in particular) for destroying white European heritage. Nasty human being, by the look of it. Some even said that if we want to understand Donald Trump politics today, we just need to see what Pat Buchanan did in the 1990s.

However, while his tone and intention look racist (at least through secondary sources), unlike Trump he did wrap this racist opinion based on solid data. And the data shows that in this rate of growth white Americans will indeed be a minority in the 2040s with Hispanic community taking over, that America’s white European heritage could be affected (with Latin culture could become the dominant force instead, which is nothing wrong, but I guess for a white racist American it would be a disaster).

Moreover, in 1999 he predicted that NATO expansion could cause Russia-Ukraine-US war, which is exactly what’s going on right now. And he also correctly predicted an immigration problem from Muslim refugees especially in Europe, although, again, he delivered the prediction in a borderline Islamophobic tone (at least from the way it was written on a report about him) and ignored the cause of the immigration: US atrocities in the Middle East.

So, why do I bother reading this kind of American-centric xenophobia? Because if we remove the bigotry, we’ll likely to find the harsh truths.

Pat Buchanan has also predicted that the sovereignty of the United States will be undermined by Israeli control, which turns out to be true and being revealed massively this year. Buchanan also criticized then-Vice President Biden in 2010 when he visited Israel, where Buchanan commented that Biden “was played for a fool” when Israel decided to build new settlement homes anyway in disputed area, something that didn’t change 14 years later when Biden keep supplying Netanyahu with billions of dollars of aid and weapons supplies in their genocide in Gaza (a place where Buchanan was vocal about lifting the siege there) despite Israel keep on doing what Biden administration warn them not to do.

Another Buchanan’s prediction can be traced back to 2005 when he said that Israel’s control over US foreign policy will drag the latter to the next war: the unnecessary war with Iran. Which is all too real today, where a lot of things that he predicted also came true today, down to the minor details such as his 1990 comment that the Congress is an “Israeli-occupied territory”; which got a backlash back then, but just look at the openly AIPAC-bribed Congress right now (not to mention Biden cabinet’s full of dual Israeli citizenship). In 2009 he also commented that the hundreds of Palestinians killed in the Gaza “concentration camp” will create a bunch of new Hamas fighters who want revenge on Israel; something that many in the West refuse to acknowledge and instead sticking to their tired old “Islamist jihadist” doctrine.

So, it got me thinking, is this guy really crazy, racist, and all that, or is he just being shunned by the status quo? And what else is Buchanan telling the blatant truth about but perhaps delivering it in a wrong way (or made it look wrong in the secondary sources)? Enter this book, where he shed a light into what really happened in World War I and World War II.

Buchanan made it very clear from the start that the focus of the book is not questioning whether Hitler and Nazi Germany is evil and whether the British were heroic (both are already established as such), but instead it is questioning whether the British’s statesmen were wise PRIOR to the wars and subsequently DURING the war after their failure to prevent a war have led to disastrous decision makings that made things gotten out of hand? As Buchanan explains, “[f]or their crimes, Hitler and his collaborators, today’s metaphors for absolute evil, received the ruthless justice they deserved. But we cannot ignore the costs of Churchill’s wars, or the question: Was it truly necessary that fifty million die to bring Hitler down? For World War II was the worst evil ever to befall Christians and Jews and may prove the mortal blow that brings down our common civilization. Was it “The Unnecessary War”?”

And this is his thesis, which cover World War I and World War II: “Had Britain not declared war on Germany in 1914, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and India would not have followed the Mother Country in. Nor would Britain’s ally Japan. Nor would Italy, which London lured in with secret bribes of territory from the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Nor would America have gone to war had Britain stayed out. Germany would have been victorious, perhaps in months. There would have been no Lenin, no Stalin, no Versailles, no Hitler, no Holocaust.” In other words, there would be no WORLD war.

World War II was also an unnecessary blunder by Winston Churchill that led to the rise of Soviet Iron Curtain (which would proceeded to kill much more people than the Nazis). Previously, Britain had a choice between 2 tyrants in Hitler’s Nazi (that control Central Europe) and Stalin’s Bolshevik (that control Eastern Europe), and they chose to be ally with Stalin and fight Hitler. Which was a strange decision, because as Buchanan remarks, “neither the Kaiser nor Hitler sought to destroy Britain or her empire. Both admired what Britain had built. Both sought an alliance with England. The Kaiser was the eldest grandson of Queen Victoria. Thus the crucial question: Were these two devastating wars Britain declared on Germany wars of necessity, or wars of choice?”

Britain did so by creating an alliance with Poland. As Buchanan elaborates, “[h]ad Britain not given a war guarantee to Poland in March 1939, then declared war on September 3, bringing in South Africa, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, and the United States, a German-Polish war might never have become a six-year world war in which fifty million would perish.” Which prompted Buchanan to question in other chapter, “[i]f Hitler’s ambitions were in the east, and he was prepared to respect Britain’s vital interests by leaving the Low Countries and France alone, was it wise to declare war on Germany—over a Poland that Britain could not save?”

Yes, a lot of what ifs. However, Buchanan is constructing his arguments using primary and secondary sources, which makes the narrative of the book iron clad with facts. Narrative that gives us the big picture of the geopolitical map before World War I, the behind the scene politicking in the interwar period, and the diplomatic and military strategies used during both World Wars. Which is all very gripping to read. Of course, I had to be careful in reading it, in differentiating between historical facts and his opinions. And I concur that it wasn’t always clear. But when it’s clear, it reveals a lot of new things.

Such as Churchill’s many sins: “Churchill was unafraid to break the rules of war. As he had been prepared to blockade Antwerp before the Germans invaded, so he brushed aside international law, mined the North Sea, and imposed upon Germany a starvation blockade that violated all previous norms of civilized warfare. In the war’s first week, Churchill had wanted to occupy Ameland, one of the Dutch Frisian Islands, though Holland was neutral. To Churchill, writes Martin Gilbert, “Dutch neutrality need be no obstacle.” Churchill urged a blockade of the Dardanelles while Turkey was still neutral.”

Moreover, Buchanan continues, “[i]n December 1914, he recommended that the Royal Navy seize the Danish island of Bornholm, though Denmark, too, was neutral. Yet it had been Berlin’s violation of Belgium’s neutrality that Churchill invoked as a moral outrage to convince Lloyd George to support war on Germany and that had brought the British people around to support war. When the Germans accommodated Britain’s war party by regarding the 1839 treaty as a “scrap of paper,” the relief of Grey and Churchill must have been immense. The declaration of war was their triumph. And when British divisions crossed the Channel, the troops were sent, as the secret war plans dictated, not to brave little Belgium but straight to France.”

The book also reveals the injustice imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, which put the war reparation cost of World War I on the Germans: “Men who believe in the rule of law believe in the sanctity of contract. But a contract in which one party is not allowed to be heard and is forced to sign at the point of a gun is invalid. Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles only when threatened that, should she refuse, the country would be invaded and her people further starved. Though Napoleon’s foreign minister Talleyrand had been invited to Vienna to negotiate the peace of Europe, no German had been invited to Paris. Francesco Nitti, the prime minister of Italy when Versailles was signed, in his book The Wreck of Europe, expressed his disgust at the injustice.”

As a result, the implementation of the Treaty wrecked havoc Germany’s economy, caused the lost of purchasing power due to hyperinflation, and the overall drop on quality of living, which paved way to the rise of a populist figure who wanted to get the demoralized Germany back to its glory days (and even took revenge to the perpetrators). As Buchanan remarks, “[a]t a London dinner party soon after Adolf Hitler had taken power in Berlin, one of the guests asked aloud, “By the way, where was Hitler born?” “At Versailles” was the instant reply of Lady Astor.” In fact, Hitler first caught the public attention by delivering again and again a speech that he titled “the Treaty of Versailles.”

Just look at Hitler’s speech that mentions Jews for the first time. As Buchanan describes, “[t]hree months after Kristallnacht, on the sixth anniversary of his assumption of power, January 29, 1939, Hitler, in a speech to the Reichstag, publicly threatened the Jews of Europe. America, Britain, and France, he charged, “were continually being stirred up to hatred of Germany and the German people by Jewish and non-Jewish agitators.” Hitler then issued his threat: In the course of my life I have often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it.… I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

But the Nazis didn’t prosecute Jews in 1939, also not in 1940. Instead, “[t]hey began after Hitler invaded Russia, June 22, 1941, when the Einsatzgruppen trailed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union exterminating Bolsheviks, commissars, and Jews. Writes Ian Kershaw, “[T]he German invasion of the Soviet Union triggered the rapid descent into full-scale genocide against the Jews.””

Hence, one of the big questions in the book, “[h]ad there been no war, would there have been a Holocaust at all? In The World Crisis, Churchill, the Dardanelles disaster in mind, wrote: “[T]he terrible Ifs accumulate.” If Britain had not issued the war guarantee [with Poland] and then declared war on Germany, Hitler might never have invaded France. Had he not, Mussolini would never have invaded France or Greece, or declared war on England. With no war in the west, all the Jews of Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Greece might have survived a German-Polish or Nazi-Soviet war, as the Jews of Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland survived.”

But why invade France, you might ask? Because Poland is at Germany’s eastern border, which is now backed by Britain, and Germany will be attacked by Britain from the west. Hence, the need for Germany to create a buffer at France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to prevent Britain to get close to Germany (and not, as the common misconception suggest, due to Hitler’s imperial ambitions).

And why invade Soviet? As Buchanan remarks, “[o]n January 8, 1941, Hitler clarified and expanded upon his reasoning for attacking Russia: Britain is sustained in this struggle by hopes placed in U.S.A. and Russia.… Britain’s aim for some time to come will be to set Russia’s strength in motion against us. If the U.S.A. and Russia should enter the war against Germany the situation would become very complicated. Hence any possibility for such a threat to develop must be eliminated at the very outset.” Buchanan then continues, “[i]n early June, Hitler spoke to General Fritz Halder, who wrote in a diary entry of June 14: Hitler “calculates ‘that the collapse of Russia will induce England to give up the struggle. The main enemy is still Britain.’””

Indeed, the key to trigger a WORLD war, it seems, is the alliances and their war pacts. Which is why the Britain-Poland pact was crucial in triggering World War II. As Buchanan elaborates, “[b]ut because Britain issued the guarantee to Poland and declared war on Germany, by June 1941 Hitler held hostage most of the Jews of Western Europe and the Balkans. By 1942, after invading Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic states, and Russia, he held hostage virtually the entire Jewish population of Europe.”

Is that what the Jews were for Hitler, hostages for leverage against the Bolsheviks?? But what’s the significance of the Jews for the Bolsheviks, that made Hitler think it’s important to hold them hostage? This line from chapter 14 shed a little light into this: “Though a philo-Semite and supporter of Zionism, Churchill’s views on the roots of Bolshevism seem not markedly different from those of Hitler. In the Illustrated Sunday Herald of February 8, 1920, after the failed Allied intervention in Russia, Churchill wrote that in the “creation of Bolshevism” the role of “atheistical Jews … probably outweighs all others.”

And here’s the dark truth, even with so many Jews were captured “neither the Allies nor the Soviets were focused on the potential fate of the hostages Hitler held. At Casablanca in 1943, Churchill and FDR declared their war aim was “unconditional surrender.” At Quebec in 1944, Churchill and FDR approved the Morgenthau Plan calling for the destruction of all German industry. Goebbels used the Morgenthau Plan to convince Germans that surrender meant no survival. Annihilation of their hostages was the price the Nazis exacted for their own annihilation.”

Did you capture that? The reason why the Nazis killed all of the Jewish [hostages] is because they’re not a useful leverage after all, because the allied powers didn’t really care about them. And then the Nazis proceeded to annihilate 6 million hostages in a tit-for-tat of the allies killing the Germans, all of which accounted as part of the death of 50 million civilians + 25 million military personnels in World War II. Of course the Nazis and Hitler are still evil for killing all of the Jews, but Britain, France, US, and Soviet are equally at fault for not giving maximum diplomatic and military efforts to save them.

There are so many more similar revelations in this book that I cannot possibly name them one by one, including one whole chapter about Hitler’s ambitions (including evidences that he never intended to invade western Europe), one whole chapter about Churchill’s track records, and the post-war events where the US took control over the world’s power. It is one of the clearest books that explains the background chaos behind World War I and II, with impressive details. It is as if Buchanan has read every single book about the World Wars, from the big picture by great scholars, to individual biographies, to even any letters and notes that he can find. It is one of those instances where I don’t have to like the author in order to appreciate his book.

It is a massive book about massive topics that is not necessarily providing us with anything new, but rather pointing us to the area of history that are publicly available but often ignored: It shows the diplomatic side of Hitler, the politician rather than only the warmongering dictator. It also shows that Churchill and the allied powers are also conducting many evil things when the war broke out, even provoking Hitler to conduct his own evil actions (which was then highlighted as arguably the most evil action anyone has ever done – more evil than Mobutu killing 20 million people in Congo, Mao killing 40-80 million of his people, the genocide of 56 million Native Americans, or indeed Stalin killing 20 million people – In other words, they showed the reaction but not the cause).

And it raised the ultimate question: were the two World Wars preventable? Yes, yes they were. Even the Holocaust was also preventable, because after Poland surrendered on 6 October 1939 Hitler made a peace offer to Britain and France, but it was turned down. Hitler also offered peace in July 1940 after he conquered France for buffer and before he attacked Britain, but again the offer was rejected by Churchill. And if you recall, these events were before any action taken against the Jews in 1941.

All of which make Churchill’s famous quotation a bit more sense: “history is written by the victors.” Because how come Hitler who killed 6 Jews is [rightly] labelled as evil, but Churchill who starved 4 million people in Bengal Famine, among his other atrocities in Europe, is labelled as a hero? In fact, not only Churchill is being celebrated as a war hero and the greatest Briton of all time, as the 20th century ended he was also rewarded the honor of “the man of the century.”

Meanwhile, as Buchanan remarks, “[a]sked how he could ally with Stalin, whose crimes he knew so well, Churchill answered “that he had only one single purpose—the destruction of Hitler—and his life was much simplified thereby. If Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least have made a favourable reference to the Devil. Yet in his Ahab-like pursuit of Hitler “at all cost,” did Churchill ever reckon the cost of a war to the death—for Britain, the empire, and Europe? For as the war went on for five years after Dunkirk, those costs—financial, strategic, moral—mounted astronomically.” And Britain’s mighty empire crumbled because of that. This, is the main argument of this book.

So perhaps that common saying is not true after all, that Germany is NOT always on the wrong side of history. They only lost the wars and thus being put as the scapegoat for ALL the damages, in the history written by the winners (mainly Britain and the US). Conversely, if we take a look at the history of warfares and coups and conflicts, we would easily see that Britain and the US are behind almost every single atrocities in modern history, either directly or indirectly. Including, arguably, opting out of peace negotiations and instead provoking Hitler into war.

With this in mind, it is like that Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch where a Nazi soldier just realised that what they’re doing is a war crime, and proceeded to ask his friend “Hans, are we the baddies?” Only this time it’s the other way around. This book is making us realized that there are no good guys, and that the allied powers are also as (if not more) guilty as the Nazis.

“A Grief Observed” by C. S. Lewis

How can a benevolent God cause you so much suffering and death? This was the question asked by a devout Christian C. S. Lewis when his beloved wife passed away, leaving him with so much grief.

Lewis married his wife Helen Joy Davidman (referred in the book as simply “H”) when he was already 60 and have long become a celebrated writer as well as the famous don of Oxford. Helen was an extraordinary woman, with intelligence and accomplishments that can match his level, which instantly sparked a connection between them since they first met. In fact, the story of how they met was incredible. Their marriage lasted only a decade long, however, after she sadly passed away due to bone cancer. And it ruined Lewis and prompted him to question why did God took her away after only a very brief period of happiness following a lifetime of being a bachellor?

But instead of abandoning his faith, he decided to write a book about this doubt and torment. This book. And the journey was profound.

We can see early on in the book that he is hurting, confused and feel the sense of lost: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid”, Lewis then continues, “I dread the moments when the house is empty.”

He also hate the way he was grieving, when he said “on the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it – that disgust me.”

He then went to a depression stage: “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? They say an unhappy man wants distractions—something to take him out of himself.”

And starting to question about God’s absence during his darkest period: “But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

And he was angry: “I’m not in danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is coming to believe such dreadful things about Him.”

He then became bitter: “To some I’m worse than an embarrassment. I am a death’s head. Whenever I meet a happily married pair I can feel them both thinking. ‘One or other of us must some day be as he is now.’”

And traumatized: “At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy—our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at once—like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash.”

But he then realized that “Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else.” And the fact that “The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”

But he still missing her some more, when he said “It is incredible how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone. How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night!” And when he said “I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the love-making, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.”

At some point in the book, he even began to question about his wife’s happiness in the afterlife: “‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why?”

But then, he started to see the light at the end of the tunnel: “Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously’. Apparently it’s like that. Your bid—for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity—will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high; until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.”

And he applied it to his own situation: “Why has no one told me these things? How easily I might have misjudged another man in the same situation? I might have said, ‘He’s got over it. He’s forgotten his wife,’ when the truth was, ‘He remembers her better because he has partly got over it.’”

And began to slowly heal: “You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can’t get the best out of it.”

And able to philosophize his experience: “I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought, feeling after feeling, action after action, had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an arrow to the string; then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead thought to H. I set out on one of them. But now there’s an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once; now so many culs de sac.”

And able to revisit his grief: “And then one or other dies. And we think of this as love cut short; like a dance stopped in mid career or a flower with its head unluckily snapped off—something truncated and therefore, lacking its due shape. I wonder. If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.”

He also started to see God from a different light: “Looking back, I see that only a very little time ago I was greatly concerned about my memory of H. and how false it might become. For some reason—the merciful good sense of God is the only one I can think of—I have stopped bothering about that. And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere. Meet is far too strong a word. I don’t mean anything remotely like an apparition or a voice. I don’t mean even any strikingly emotional experience at any particular moment. Rather, a sort of unobtrusive but massive sense that she is, just as much as ever, a fact to be taken into account.”

Despite still having some doubts for the future: “For this fate would seem to me the worst of all; to reach a state in which my years of love and marriage should appear in retrospect a charming episode—like a holiday—that had briefly interrupted my interminable life and returned me to normal, unchanged.”

And still can’t help for feeling the grief: “Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.”

Only this time is different. As Lewis remarks, “the greater the love, the greater the grief.”

In this, he has accepted the lost of his wife as a price to pay for loving her, a price very much worth paying. Because it is better to have loved and lost (however brief it was) than never experience them at all.

With this regards, Lewis realized that the key is not to avoid the inevitable suffering, but to embrace it as a part of the love you get to experience beforehand. A greater and better life that you can have if you have the courage to love (and bare the loss later on). And this, Lewis eventually realized, is what God intended for him all along.

“In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka

This is a story about a particular execution device in a penal colony located in an unnamed island. It is a brilliantly-written conversation between a visiting Traveler and the Officer of the colony, which describes the mechanism of the torture device in details.

The device was created by an Old Commander, whom the Officer is a devout follower. But after the Old Commander’s death the device had fallen out of favour by the new Commander due to its cruelty. Hence, the presence of the Traveler whose role was never explained but I suspect to be some kind of an overseas auditor or consultant, due to his nature that examines the device from a detached position.

It is a pretty simple short narrative, but like any other Kafka’s masterpieces the story has larger meanings behind it. It is analogous with the concept of a governmental “machine” that abuses its power and executes innocent citizens with impunity. It is also a conversation about morality, which is projected by the shock and disbelieve of the Traveler and his dilemma between paying respect to how things have always been done, no matter how wrong it is, or speaking up against it.

The Officer’s blind allegiance to the Old Commander is also telling, where the Officer can only sees the inherited device that his former boss created and the task-in-hand to operate it, without looking at the humanity of the victims. And at the end of the story it even revealed that he believes in a prophecy that the Old Commander could bizarrely rise from the dead, which is why the Officer is fighting for the device to be preserved for the Old Commander’s second coming.

All in all, the story explores the themes of injustice and the justification for brutal punishment, a familiar Kafkaesque environment. But the difference with this story is in this one the crime of the Condemned Man is clearly described, although a very minor one (a soldier must stand up for 12 hours in guarding a door and saluting the Commander but he fell asleep), which is not at all worthy of a torturous death.

It is yet another Kafka classic, which this time sees injustice from the vantage point of the executioner, who is conducting the whole atrocities by focusing only on glorifying the device and nothing else.

“Kafka on the Shore” by Haruki Murakami

How do you enthusiastically describe one of the weirdest stories ever written, but without spoiling any details?

You know a book is special when the mood of the book spilled over to your real life unconsciously. That’s how it felt for me during the 4 days I’m reading this book. It was as if I live in a dream state filled with omens, where nothing is concrete and time is none existent, where life is actually a metaphor.

This strange feeling is derived from the incredible story about a boy that gave himself the nickname Kafka, who ran away from home at the age of 15 and travelled to a faraway town of Takamatsu in the Shikoku island. No friends, no family, just himself in an unfamiliar place. The boy had no clue why he chose Takamatsu of all places, a small town miles away from his home in Tokyo. But as the story progresses, we will see that it was exactly where he is supposed to be.

It is a story filled with wonder and contemplation, with cluelessness and doubts, with sophisticated conversations about the meaning of life, of love and lost, of dealing with pain, and the existentialist question of who we are and what our purpose in life is.

These themes are portrayed through the strongest of characters in the book, a dumb simpleton, a crazy artist, a meticulous androgyny, a grieving soul, and more; all wrapped in a highly intriguing narrative with riddles that makes it hard to predict what will come next.

Two narratives, in fact, where from the beginning the book tells two separate stories intermittently between the chapters with one story in odd chapters and the other in even chapters: one is about a young boy looking ahead and the other is about an old man looking behind, both of whom will never meet with each other, but with a significant crossover of their stories in few chapters before they brilliantly went to their separate paths again.

Moreover, this book is also a projection of Murakami’s vast knowledge on literature. You see, for a 15 year-old Kafka is a stand up guy that can take care of himself, he’s pretty disciplined about his health and his fitness, but the number one thing that is most appealing about him is his love for reading books. In fact, the first thing he seeks when arriving at Takamatsu was the fabled private library, the Komura Memorial Library. And through his conversation with the highly knowledgeable librarian (that he eventually befriended) we get to learn about Murakami’s interpretation of the works of Natsume Soseki, the Tale of Genji, lessons from the Egyptian mythology, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and many more, including lessons from a trial of an ex Nazi officer, and of course the worldview of Franz Kafka that becomes the existentialist basis of this book.

Through all of this, the book shows the ability to dive deep into complicated topics without losing the easy-to-read narrative of the main story, where the breezy narrative is strong enough to withstand even several plot twists, which is a signature style of Murakami’s.

Hence, if this is a movie, this would probably be a Tim Burton movie, with all the out-of-the-world imaginations and symbolisms that don’t always make sense. It has everything, from a gripping beginning, to a sophisticated middle, and with bizarre twists at the last few chapters; all of which shows that “Kafka on the Shore” is one big modern-day Greek tragedy, as clearly explained by Oshima. It’s messy, it’s grotesque, it’s hella confusing at times with several things never explained, and with unexpected violence and taboo-breaking acts that will make your heart pound and your mind goes WTF?!

Brilliant, just brilliant!

“Transcending the Levels of Consciousness: The Stairway to Enlightenment” by David R. Hawkins, M.D., PhD

This book sits right at the border between spiritual mumbo jumbo and science. It is presented as a thesis of a serious research that dived deep into the science of consciousness, by a researcher who is a psychiatrist, a clinician, and then a self-proclaimed spiritual teacher even though he is openly an agnostic.

That’s right, it is one of those books where the author simultaneously talking about spirituality but berating religion that introduced the spirituality.

In this book Dr. Hawkins addresses the many different levels of consciousness, where he heavily uses a numbered scale that looks impressive at first, but then become questionable due to the fact that he never explained where he got the numbers from. This makes the numbers and figures highly subjective.

Here’s an example, using a scale of 1-1000 (with 1 as the lowest and 1000 as the highest level, while 200 marks the benchmark level for attaining consciousness): “The calibrated consciousness level of humans evolved slowly. At the time of the birth of the Buddha, the collective consciousness of all of mankind calibrated at 90. It then rose to 100 by the time of the birth of Jesus Christ and slowly evolved over the last two millennia to 190, where it stayed for many centuries, until the late 1980s. Then, at about the time of the Harmonic Convergence in the late 1980s, it suddenly jumped from 190 to 204-205, where it stayed until November 2003, when again, it suddenly jumped from 205 to its current level of 207. At the present time, approximately seventy-eight percent of all humanity calibrates below consciousness level 200, although that figure is only forty-nine percent in America. The significance is that the consciousness level of close to eighty percent of the world’s population is still below 200 and therefore dominated by primitive animal instincts, motivations, and behaviors (as reflected in the nightly news).”

So, first of all how can he quantify the COLLECTIVE consciousness of ALL mankind during the time of the Buddha? Then how can he measure the growth to 100 by the time of Jesus Christ as if it’s like a stock price movement that we can monitor on a screen, and to 204-205 in a very specific date November 2003 (that he never care to explain – spoiler alert: after further research, it was a Harmonic Concordance event in New York that he of course attended)? And what is the methodology behind his conclusion that the consciousness level of 80% of the world population is still below 200? He even presented a table with the level of consciousness of animals, again without explaining how he got the numbers from.

Which brings us to the next question, if Dr. Hawkins did not write this book using the scientific approach (with the sequence of: thesis, data gathering, findings or the interpretation of data, and then conclusion), and instead he jumps right to conclusion using the made up data that magically appears without explanation, why did he has to present his thesis as science? I suspect, to give credibility to his bland spiritual teachings.

Here’s more consciousness (or calibration) levels according to Dr. Hawkins, on a same scale of 1-1000: Bacteria 1, fish 20, reptiles 40, birds 105, wolves 190, deer 205 (is he telling us that the consciousness of 80% of world population is lower than a deer?), cats 240, family cat 245, cat’s purr 500 (no idea why), and a whole bunch of others. Meanwhile, Homo Sapiens 600,000 years ago was 80-85, the allegory of Adam and Eve calibrates at 70, Socrates’ statement calibrates at 700, megalomaniac leaders such as Hitler and Napoleon were in the 400s at first and then crashed, Yasser Arafat went from 440 to 65 because “peace would be the greatest threat possible” (sure, not biased at all), while he actually said skeptics have consciousness level below 200 (implying that we shouldn’t question his methods).

Moreover, according to Dr. Hawkins the consciousness level of Karl Marx is 130, Thomas Aquinas 460, Galileo 485, Aristotle 498, Newton 499, Marcus Aurelius 445, Shakespeare 465, Darwin 450, Einstein 449, Lao Tzu 610, Mahatma Gandhi in his 700s, Mother Teresa 710, the Buddha 1000 (of course), he even labelled the consciousness level of God, but at infinity level (I swear it’s like my kid assigning power levels to his imaginary play, with Gen-Z lingo of plus aura or minus aura). And Dr. Hawkins’s own teachings? From other sources outside this book, we can find that his books calibrate from 850-999.5 ranges! More than the level of Catholicism 510, the energy level of Christmas 535, Kabbalah 605, Ramayana 810, and far exceeded any other 20th century spiritual guru.

To be fair, there are some good psychological textbook contents in the book, especially when Dr. Hawkins refer to Freudian theories, while if we strip away the calibration levels of the various emotions from greed, fear, anger, all the way to love; his arguments actually make psychological sense. But when he does that, he uses unnecessarily big words to describe something simple. And then afterwards he often proceeded to write something factually absurd, such as his argument that a kamikaze pilot is suicidal in nature (yes the end goal is death, but it’s not performed by a depressed person but rather by a person with a sacrifice mission to destroy the enemy. More Patriotism, less “act of despair”).

He also criticizes “organized [Western] religion” quite often, but ironically using very weak examples to make his points, which shows the shallow depth of his understanding of religion (they all do, even Sam Harris, nay, especially Sam Harris). And not to mention his gross corruption of the sacred teachings of the [Eastern] Vedic spirituality, where he weirdly tried to blend his cliche interpretation of spirituality with his version of subjective science.

“Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld” by T. J. English

This is an incredibly violent history of jazz music and its tight relationship with the criminal underworld.

It is the story of a turbulent and harsh era in America, where according to the statistics by Tuskegee Institute between 1882 and 1912 there were 2329 instances of lynching of black people; horrors that created the tales of hardship that became the basis of the soul of jazz music.

As the author T. J. English wrote right at the beginning of the introduction, “[t]here is a reason that “Strange Fruit” still stands as the seminal jazz song. Written by Abel Meeropol in 1937 and sung so memorably by Billie Holiday two years later, it beckons from the great beyond, elliptical and haunting. The song is both a ballad and a primal scream, an aching tone poem that carries with it the deep, heart-wrenching emotionalism of the blues, as well as the lucid, steely observationalism of someone who has been a witness to history. In form and content, it is a brutal diagnosis of the human condition in B-flat minor. That this song speaks for jazz at the core of its being is no accident.”

This partly explains why jazz music has this sad vibe to it, and a relatively somber tone.

English then continues, ““Strange Fruit” finds its power in the perverse metaphoric imagery of “Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees . . .” Blood on the leaves, blood at the root. It is a song about lynching. And it is a song about America.”

It is in this kind of environment that the story of jazz began, in part 1 of the book, with Louis Armstrong as one of the main vantage points. It is when jazz musicians in New Orleans were given their first big breaks at venues owned by the mobsters, such as in whorehouses, clubs, honky-tonks, speakeasies, etc. That’s right, you cannot separate the history of jazz from the history of the mobsters, because their respective existance depend on each others.

As English elaborates, “[y]ou cannot understand America without knowing the history of jazz—or the mob. Taken together, they are part of the country’s origin story, symphonically intertwined, like an orchestral extravaganza by Ellington, with harmonic complexity, rich tonal shadings, dissonance, syncopation, and all the other elements that make a piece of music resonate in the imagination and remain timeless. Through the striving of numerous musicians, club owners, record label executives, and gangsters chronicled in this book, the contrapuntal groove between jazz and the underworld emerges as the heartbeat—and the backbeat—to the American Dream.”

Indeed, jazz is not a rigid music that is carefully created in conservatories or academies. But it is a freedom music with free-flowing improvs that mostly developed at night and became associated with vice – whorehouses, drinking, gambling, and artful carousing – which makes it the music of the people.

And this world fits both jazz musicians and mobsters, where during the age of segregation, mob-owned whorehouses and clubs became the safe space for all to mingle and interact, regardless of skin colour. As English remarks, “[t]he average Black musician had less to fear from an Italian mafioso inside a club than he did from the average white cracker out on the street. The early twentieth-century musician had less to fear from a gangster than he did from a policeman. For people in the jazz world, the bordello and the honky-tonk were a source of refuge from a society where, among other threats and indignities, lynching was an ongoing nightmare, and had been for generations.”

The book then elaborates on this in a massive scale; by telling the legends and stories of a cast of characters along the revolution of the music, through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War 2 era, all the way to the 1950s and 60s. First in Kansas City where jazz first branched out from New Orleans, then to Chicago and New York, before it spread everywhere to the likes of St. Louis, Pittsburg, Denver, all the way to the west coast in Southern California, and eventually Las Vegas, even to Cuba (which would gave birth to Latin Jazz).

The cast of characters are, on the musical side: Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Prima, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Sarah Vaughan, Tony Bennett, Harry Belafonte, to name a few; including Frank Sinatra as the primary vantage point in the story in part 2, and cameos from the likes of Stan Getz, Ella Fitzgerald, Quincy Jones, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, and Charles Mingus.

On the criminal underworld side: Al Capone, Legs Diamond, Owney Madden, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, Johnny D’Angelo, Mickey Cohen, the Gallo brothers, Vinnie the Chin, Tommy Eboli, and many, many more. The book also covers the stories of notorious club owners and talent managers, such as Jules Podell, Morris Levy, and Joe Glaser, all of whom walked the blurry line between legitimate capitalism of the upperworld and the criminal underworld.

However, the interracial tollerance in the New Orleans days did not last long. Especially in the 1950s and 60s when racism became more blatant and mob violence increasingly got more brutal. And along with the evolution of the music, came new waves of problems: While in the old days if people wanted to hear a musician sings they needed to go to the club where the singer performs, in the 50s and 60s this arrangement gradually changed with the invention of vinyl records and jukebox. And thus the mobsters also got increasingly involved in the nasty battle to control the records, the distribution channels, and even the jukeboxes. And this book shows how this was brutally executed.

The book ended with a bit of a sour note, where by the late 1960s and 1970s the popularity of jazz music started to dwindle. And as its profitability declined, the mob also slowly left the industry in seach of other fish to fry. And by the 1980s, during the major prosecutions for mobsters, there was no longer a relationship with the jazz world. And so jazz – the real jazz as we originally know it – was never the same again.

All in all, this is one of the most impressive histories of a music genre ever written, narrated in a clear and concise manner despite the complicated multi-decades affairs that mimick the complexity of jazz chords and improvs. If only every music genre have this kind of biography. I really enjoyed reading it so much, while listening to the old jazz tunes from every single one of those eras.

“Notes From the Underground” by Fyodor Dostoevsky

This is a book that many considered as the first existentialist novel. The book is written in a first-person account by an unnamed narrator, a very minor clerk in the Civil Service who hated his mediocre job and only works in order to eat, who then decided to retire early after a distant relative passed away and leave him 6000 Ruble in the will.

And thus the narrator begins to live a life of inactivity and contemplation, writing in this rants or musings about his life and general observations, often in a bitter, cynical, and sometimes witty tones. It is a writing, as the fictitious narrator claims, only intended for himself and not to be shared with anyone else.

Perhaps the beauty of this book is that it’s not narrated by a saint with moral high ground, but an isolating (hence, “underground”) loser full of intoxicating spite, who has a humiliating social encounter with old schoolmates, and a weird pursue towards a prostitute half his age whom he both attracted to and repelled by. I.e. a broken angry man with a lot of complications.

It is through this unique vantage point that we can see an honest criticism about society, the dilemma between hating everyone he meets and the bitterness of being an outcast, a dilemma between yearning for a sense of connection to the world and at the same time wanting for total detachment and free-will from society.

Indeed, the book is a brilliant criticism of contemporary philosophies on rationalism and free-will, where Dostoevsky actually wrote it in response to Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s novel “What Is to Be Done” that argued a utopian society can be constructed on natural laws of rational self-interest, that if such society is constructed humanity will no longer have the problem of evilness.

In this anti-thesis, Dostoevsky then argued that in asserting free-will people actually often act against self-interest, that people are willing to exercise free-will even if it goes against their best interest hence people will do things that aren’t aligned with those laws of nature (aka rebellion); which is demonstrated in part 2 of the book where the narrator gets into several conflicts. The narrator ultimately suggests that we can choose happiness (in the form of self-interest) or freedom (free-will) as our goal, but not both. This is why utopia never realised.

Funny how perspectives from 1864 can be so relatable even today in 2024, especially Part 1 of the book where Dostoevsky wrote down his core arguments, before illustrating it in the examples in part 2.

In a sheer coincidence I’m reading this book at the age of 41, just one year over the age of the narrator at 40, or 2 years younger than Dostoevsky when he wrote this book at 43. And I’m glad that I only begin to read it in my 40s because I’m at that age where I can really relate with his observations, just as I started to feel how unequal the world is and how there’s just so much bullshit going on; with my tolerance towards the cheaters, the liars, the backstabbers of the world is wearing thin; while still enjoying the connections with society as a whole.

“Nuking the Moon: And Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board” by Vince Houghton

This is a hilarious book about things that never happened. It is about those weird inventions that were almost created by America’s first intelligence agency (Office of Strategic Services (1942-1945)), its successor the CIA, as well as the bizarre operations ideas by the military, all during the fight against the Axis forces in World War 2 and the proceeding Cold War.

Yes, intelligence weapons. We’re talking about James Bond’s Q type of gadgets and military grade weaponries that have the invention of U-2 and SR-71 spy planes among the rare success stories (relative to the sheer amount of ideas), with “rare” as the key word here.

““Outcome history” is the traditional way of viewing historical events,” the author Vince Houghton remarks, “but it leaves much to be desired. It has severe limitations, primarily because its lessons are predicated on things that cannot be accurately quantified: fate, luck, misfortune, whatever you want to call it.”

Houghton then elaborates, “if the D-Day invasion of Normandy had failed because of a freak weather system, or a lucky shot from a German soldier that took out a key American leader on the beach (or any number of other misfortunate scenarios), would we think any less of Eisenhower’s plan? Using outcome-based history: yes. And therein lies the problem. Intent can be a very powerful tool for historians.”

Hence, the fresh approach of this book that uses not the outcome of history, not the alternate version of history, but the intent of what could have happened but never did. And the list of intent is long (like long, long). And reading it is like having a wild journey into the wacky and bizarre that will make us think “what the hell were they thinking?”

We’re talking about projects, missions, operations, and technology that they were seriously thinking about, but they’re either too risky, too expensive, too dangerous, way ahead of their time, or simply too dumb.

Inventions and operations such as: acoustic kitty, synthetic goat poop, cat suicide bomber, bat missiles, sun gun, giant inflatable balloon that looks like an omen in Shintoism, a chicken utilized as a thermoregulated weapon, an idea to create artificial tsunami, an operation involving digging a tunnel near the Soviet embassy, or covert air bases using not giant ships but floating icebergs.

It is also about the staggering 638 times the CIA tried (and failed) to assassinate Fidel Castro, plan to spike Hitler’s food with female hormones to make “his mustache fall out and his voice turn soprano”, a device they called Dyna-Soar (yeah I know, dinosaur), another one called the Ballistic Missile Boost Intercepts Project (or BaMBI), and many, many more, including the most bizarre idea of them all that becomes the title of the book, the plan to nuke the moon (with a contribution by Carl Sagan. Yes, THAT Carl Sagan).

And you know what the messed up part is? They’re all true stories!

Perhaps the most unsuspecting part of the book is where Houghton actually explains the science and technicality of the devices and operations, while also providing the full historical context for the intent of usage of the devices. Which makes this book not only highly amusing, but also very informative.

He is, after all, the historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, who earned a PhD in Diplomatic and Military History from the University of Maryland. And it shows in the quality of the book, a mix of expertise and madness that made me learn a lot and laugh a lot along the way. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book.

“Wahyu Yang Hilang Negeri Yang Guncang” by Ong Hok Ham

This is an excellent book on Indonesian history, broken down into 70 angles from 70 different articles that the author Ong Hok Ham wrote for Tempo magazine, in the span of 26 years from 1976 to 2002.

The articles consist of Ong’s signature blend of wide range of knowledge, skepticism, and wit, as well as his ability to make dull subjects into exciting stories that will make the reading experience truly enjoyable.

They tell the tales of sorcery for leaders, how some sultans are treated like a deity, the structures and customs of Javanese kingdoms, Jayabaya prophecies, the difference between agrarian kingdom and coastal kingdom, who are those “priayi” (or nobility class) really are, the complicated succession plans in different kingdoms (and the Dutch’s involvements), how the Dutch created the Chinese capitalist class in Hindia, on taxation, and a lot more in between, including the clearest ever explanation about the geopolitics of World War 1.

Moreover, although the 70 articles were stand-alone writings, the editor of the book has somehow brilliantly managed to organized them up into a connected flow under several major themes: 1. The concept and myth of power 2. Corruption and bureaucracy among those in power 3. Economy 4. Political changes and violence 5. Military and war 6. Indonesian nationalism 7. Other countries’ affairs 8. Social changes and other matters.

Overall, it is one of the most complete historical accounts of Indonesia, simply due to the format of article that allows Ong the freedom away from the usual structure of beginning-till-now narrative that most historical books are tied to. And instead, he was able to build a big picture view of Indonesia, from covering multiple topics and analyze them one by one.

“Influence” by Robert Cialdini

I first learned about this book from none other than Charlie Munger (it’s his favourite book), which prompted me to start listening to few podcast interviews with Dr. Robert Cialdini to get the sense of who he is and what this magnum opus of his is all about. Suffice to say that I was intrigued and instantly bought this book.

That was 7 years ago. Life flashes by, and I somehow “never had the time” to read this book, although I had time to read literally hundreds others. But I guess I wasn’t ready to read this book back then, no matter how much I wanted to. But my God it was worth the wait.

This is a very scientific book, which evolves around Dr. Cialdini’s profession as an experimental social psychologist specializing on the psychology of compliance. It serves to answer “which psychological principles influence the tendency to comply with a request.”

And in what I suspect interested Charlie Munger the most is that Dr. Cialdini broaden the scope of this “investigation” into the business world, where he interviewed and closely observed compliance professionals, in sales, advertising, public relations and even charity organization, to make his findings not just limited in the proximity of university testing but directly applicable in the market place.

And the result? “Although there are thousands of different tactics that compliance practitioners employ to produce yes,” Dr. Cialdini remarks, “the majority fall within six basic categories. Each of these categories is governed by a fundamental psychological principle that directs human behavior and, in so doing, gives the tactics their power.”

The 6 categories are: reciprocation, consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity (note: in the updated version of the book the principles are changed into 7: the original reciprocation, consistency, social proof, authority, scarcity; and he edited liking into unity and sympathy. But for this review I will stick with the original 6 because I read the earlier version of the book).

Dr. Cialdini then provides a lot of intriguing stories that highlight these 6 categories in real life action – from the inner workings of a religious cult, to the social approval of using pre-recorded laughter at a sit-com, how to rig a horse race bet using fake social validation, to the methods used to indoctrinate a prisoner of war, and many more – and explains them using psychological experiments (and not those cliche psychological anecdotes like the Marshmallow Test) with an equally incredible elaboration on the findings.

The result is a well-rounded in-depth analysis over these 6 categories that made my head hurts when reading this book (in a good way).

Here are some of the most important quotes from the book:

1. A well-known principle of human behavior says that when we ask someone to do us a favor we will be more successful if we provide a reason. People simply like to have reasons for what they do.
2. Retail clothiers are a good example. Suppose a man enters a fashionable men’s store and says that he wants to buy a three-piece suit and a sweater. If you were the salesperson, which would you show him first to make him likely to spend the most money? Clothing stores instruct their sales personnel to sell the costly item first. Common sense might suggest the reverse: If a man has just spent a lot of money to purchase a suit, he may be reluctant to spend very much more on the purchase of a sweater. But the clothiers know better. They behave in accordance with what the contrast principle would suggest: Sell the suit first, because when it comes time to look at sweaters, even expensive ones, their prices will not seem as high in comparison.
3. One thing I quickly noticed was that whenever Phil began showing a new set of customers potential buys, he would start with a couple of undesirable houses. I asked him about it, and he laughed. They were what he called “setup” properties. The company maintained a run-down house or two on its lists at inflated prices. These houses were not intended to be sold to customers but to be shown to them, so that the genuine properties in the company’s inventory would benefit from the comparison.
4. Automobile dealers use the contrast principle by waiting until the price for a new car has been negotiated before suggesting one option after another that might be added.
5. While small in scope, this study nicely shows the action of one of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us—the rule for reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.
6. Despite the enormous needs prevailing in Ethiopia, the money was being sent because Mexico had sent aid to Ethiopia in 1935, when it was invaded by Italy. So informed, I remained awed, but I was no longer puzzled. The need to reciprocate had transcended great cultural differences, long distances, acute famine, and immediate self-interest. Quite simply, a half century later, against all countervailing forces, obligation triumphed.
7. People we might ordinarily dislike—unsavory or unwelcome sales operators, disagreeable acquaintances, representatives of strange or unpopular organizations—can greatly increase the chance that we will do what they wish merely by providing us with a small favor prior to their requests.
8. Political analysts were amazed at Lyndon Johnson’s ability to get so many of his programs through Congress during his early administration. Even members of congress who were thought to be strongly opposed to the proposals were voting for them. Close examination by political scientists has found the cause to be not so much Johnson’s political savvy as the large score of favors he had been able to provide to other legislators during his many years of power in the House and Senate. As President, he was able to produce a truly remarkable amount of legislation in a short time by calling in those favors.
9. It is interesting that this same process may account for the problems Jimmy Carter had in getting his programs through Congress during his early administration, despite heavy Democratic majorities in both House and Senate. Carter came to the presidency from outside the Capitol Hill establishment. He campaigned on his outside-Washington identity, saying that he was indebted to no one there. Much of his legislative difficulty upon arriving may be traced to the fact that no one there was indebted to him.
10. The beauty of the free sample, however, is that it is also a gift and, as such, can engage the reciprocity rule.
11. A highly effective variation on this marketing procedure is illustrated in the case, cited by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders, of the Indiana supermarket operator who sold an astounding one thousand pounds of cheese in a few hours one day by putting out the cheese and inviting customers to cut off slivers for themselves as free samples.
12. The frightened captive with only a piece of bread in his hand then performed what may have been the most important act of his life. He gave his enemy some of the bread. So affected was the German by this gift that he could not complete his mission. He turned from his benefactor and recrossed the no-man’s-land empty-handed to face the wrath of his superiors.
13. There is another aspect of the rule, besides its power, that allows this phenomenon to occur. Another person can trigger a feeling of indebtedness by doing us an uninvited favor.
14. A person who violates the reciprocity rule by accepting without attempting to return the good acts of others is actively disliked by the social group.
15. Another consequence of the rule, however, is an obligation to make a concession to someone who has made a concession to us.
16. The percentage of successful door-to-door sales increases impressively when the sales operator is able to mention the name of a familiar person who “recommended” the sales visit.
17. If I want you to lend me five dollars, I can make it seem like a smaller request by first asking you to lend me ten dollars. One of the beauties of this tactic is that by first requesting ten dollars and then retreating to five dollars, I will have simultaneously engaged the force of the reciprocity rule and the contrast principle. Not only will my five-dollar request be viewed as a concession to be reciprocated, it will also look to you like a smaller request than if I had just asked for it straightaway.
18. A person who feels responsible for the terms of a contract will be more likely to live up to that contract.
19. It is essential to recognize that the requester who invokes the reciprocation rule (or any other weapon of influence) to gain our compliance is not the real opponent. Such a requester has chosen to become a jujitsu warrior who aligns himself with the sweeping power of reciprocation and then merely releases that power by providing a first favor or concession. The real opponent is the rule.
20. Perhaps we can avoid a confrontation with the rule by refusing to allow the requester to commission its force against us in the first place.
21. The rule says that favors are to be met with favors; it does not require that tricks be met with favors.
22. Psychologists have long understood the power of the consistency principle to direct human action. Prominent theorists such as Leon Festinger, Fritz Hieder, and Theodore Newcomb have viewed the desire for consistency as a central motivator of our behavior. But is this tendency to be consistent really strong enough to compel us to do what we ordinarily would not want to do? There is no question about it.
23. The drive to be (and look) consistent constitutes a highly potent weapon of social influence, often causing us to act in ways that are clearly contrary to our own best interests.
24. In these incidents, before taking his stroll, the accomplice would simply ask the subject to please “watch my things,” which each of them agreed to do. Now, propelled by the rule for consistency, nineteen of the twenty subjects became virtual vigilantes, running after and stopping the thief, demanding an explanation, and often restraining the thief physically or snatching the radio away.
25. But because it is so typically in our best interests to be consistent, we easily fall into the habit of being automatically so, even in situations where it is not the sensible way to be. When it occurs unthinkingly, consistency can be disastrous. Nonetheless, even blind consistency has its attractions.
26. First, like most other forms of automatic responding, it offers a shortcut through the density of modern life. Once we have made up our minds about an issue, stubborn consistency allows us a very appealing luxury: We really don’t have to think hard about the issue anymore. We don’t have to sift through the blizzard of information we encounter every day to identify relevant facts; we don’t have to expend the mental energy to weigh the pros and cons; we don’t have to make any further tough decisions.
27. The allure of such a luxury is not to be minimized. It allows us a convenient, relatively effortless, and efficient method for dealing with complex daily environments that make severe demands on our mental energies and capacities. It is not hard to understand, then, why automatic consistency is a difficult reaction to curb. It offers us a way to evade the rigors of continuing thought.
28. There is a second, more perverse attraction of mechanical consistency as well. Sometimes it is not the effort of hard, cognitive work that makes us shirk thoughtful activity, but the harsh consequences of that activity. Sometimes it is the cursedly clear and unwelcome set of answers provided by straight thinking that makes us mental slackers. There are certain disturbing things we simply would rather not realize.
29. If, as it appears, automatic consistency functions as a shield against thought, it should not be surprising that such consistency can also be exploited by those who would prefer that we not think too much in response to their requests for our compliance.
30. “No psychic powers; I just happen to know how several of the big toy companies jack up their January and February sales. They start prior to Christmas with attractive TV ads for certain special toys. The kids, naturally, want what they see and extract Christmas promises for these items from their parents. Now here’s where the genius of the companies’ plan comes in: They undersupply the stores with the toys they’ve gotten the parents to promise. Most parents find those things sold out and are forced to substitute other toys of equal value. The toy manufacturers, of course, make a point of supplying the stores with plenty of these substitutes. Then, after Christmas, the companies start running the ads again for the other, special toys. That juices up the kids to want those toys more than ever. They go running to their parents whining, ‘You promised, you promised,’ and the adults go trudging off to the store to live up dutifully to their words.”
31. For instance, prisoners were frequently asked to make statements so mildly anti-American or pro-Communist as to seem inconsequential (“The United States is not perfect.” “In a Communist country, unemployment is not a problem.”). But once these minor requests were complied with, the men found themselves pushed to submit to related yet more substantive requests. A man who had just agreed with his Chinese interrogator that the United States is not perfect might then be asked to indicate some of the ways in which he thought this was the case. Once he had so explained himself, he might be asked to make a list of these “problems with America” and to sign his name to it. Later he might be asked to read his list in a discussion group with other prisoners. “After all, it’s what you really believe, isn’t it?” Still later he might be asked to write an essay expanding on his list and discussing these problems in greater detail.
32. The tactic of starting with a little request in order to gain eventual compliance with related larger requests has a name: the foot-in-the-door technique.
33. What may occur is a change in the person’s feelings about getting involved or taking action. Once he has agreed to a request, his attitude may change, he may become, in his own eyes, the kind of person who does this sort of thing, who agrees to requests made by strangers, who takes action on things he believes in, who cooperates with good causes.
34. What the Freedman and Fraser findings tell us, then, is to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests. Such an agreement can not only increase our compliance with very similar, much larger requests, it can also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors that are only remotely connected to the little one we did earlier.
35. Notice that all of the foot-in-the-door experts seem to be excited about the same thing: You can use small commitments to manipulate a person’s self-image; you can use them to turn citizens into “public servants,” prospects into “customers,” prisoners into “collaborators.” And once you’ve got a man’s self-image where you want it, he should comply naturally with a whole range of your requests that are consistent with this view of himself.
36. A second advantage of a written testament is that it can be shown to other people. Of course, that means it can be used to persuade those people. It can persuade them to change their own attitudes in the direction of the statement. But more important for the purpose of commitment, it can persuade them that the author genuinely believes what was written.
37. People have a natural tendency to think that a statement reflects the true attitude of the person who made it. What is surprising is that they continue to think so even when they know that the person did not freely choose to make the statement.
38. Even though they had committed themselves under the most anonymous of circumstances, the act of writing down their first judgments caused them to resist the influence of contradictory new data and to remain consistent with the preliminary choices.
39. Now the harassments, the exertions, even the beatings of initiation rituals begin to make sense. The Thonga tribesman watching, with tears in his eyes, his ten-year-old son tremble through a night on the cold ground of the “yard of mysteries,” the college sophomore punctuating his Hell Night paddling of his fraternity “little brother” with bursts of nervous laughter—these are not acts of sadism. They are acts of group survival. They function, oddly enough, to spur future society members to find the group more attractive and worthwhile. As long as it is the case that people like and believe in what they have struggled to get, these groups will continue to arrange effortful and troublesome initiation rites. The loyalty and dedication of those who emerge will increase to a great degree the chances of group cohesiveness and survival.
40. Indeed, one study of fifty-four tribal cultures found that those with the most dramatic and stringent initiation ceremonies were those with the greatest group solidarity.
41. It appears that commitments are most effective in changing a person’s self-image and future behavior when they are active, public, and effortful.
42. Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act. Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it. The same is true of a strong threat; it may motivate immediate compliance, but it is unlikely to produce long-term commitment.
43. All this has important implications for rearing children. It suggests that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the things we want them truly to believe in. Such pressures will probably produce temporary compliance with our wishes. However, if we want more than just that, if we want the children to believe in the correctness of what they have done, if we want them to continue to perform the desired behavior when we are not present to apply those outside pressures, then we must somehow arrange for them to accept inner responsibility for the actions we want them to take.
44. No matter which variety of lowballing is used, the sequence is the same: An advantage is offered that induces a favorable purchase decision; then, sometime after the decision has been made but before the bargain is sealed, the original purchase advantage is deftly removed.
45. As a general guiding principle, more information is always better than less information.
46. The first sort of signal is easy to recognize. It occurs right in the pit of our stomachs when we realize we are trapped into complying with a request we know we don’t want to perform.
47. The reason this tactic worked so effectively is because once small commitments have been made (in this case, giving a kiss), people tend to add justifications to support the commitment and then are willing to commit themselves further.
48. The introduction of laugh tracks into their comic programming will increase the humorous and appreciative responses of an audience, even—and especially—when the material is of poor quality.
49. To discover why canned laughter is so effective, we first need to understand the nature of yet another potent weapon of influence: the principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct.
50. Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right thing to do. This feature of the principle of social proof is simultaneously its major strength and its major weakness.
51. Bartenders often “salt” their tip jars with a few dollar bills at the beginning of the evening to simulate tips left by prior customers and thereby to give the impression that tipping with folding money is proper barroom behavior. Church ushers sometimes salt collection baskets for the same reason and with the same positive effect on proceeds.
52. Advertisers love to inform us when a product is the “fastest-growing” or “largest-selling” because they don’t have to convince us directly that the product is good, they need only say that many others think so, which seems proof enough.
53. Sales and motivation consultant Cavett Robert captures the principle nicely in his advice to sales trainees: “Since 95 percent of the people are imitators and only 5 percent initiators, people are persuaded more by the actions of others than by any proof we can offer.”
54. The principle of social proof says so: The greater the number of people who find any idea correct, the more the idea will be correct.
55. In general, when we are unsure of ourselves, when the situation is unclear or ambiguous, when uncertainty reigns, we are most likely to look to and accept the actions of others as correct.
56. We will use the actions of others to decide on proper behavior for ourselves, especially when we view those others as similar to ourselves.
57. We most prefer to say yes to the requests of someone we know and like. What might be startling to note, however, is that this simple rule is used in hundreds of ways by total strangers to get us to comply with their requests.
58. By providing the hostess with a percentage of the take, the Tupperware Home Parties Corporation arranges for its customers to buy from and for a friend rather than an unknown salesperson. In this way, the attraction, the warmth, the security, and the obligation of friendship are brought to bear on the sales setting.
59. For twelve years straight, he won the title as the “number one car salesman”; he averaged more than five cars and trucks sold every day he worked; and he has been called the world’s “greatest car salesman” by the Guinness Book of World Records. For all his success, the formula he employed was surprisingly simple. It consisted of offering people just two things: a fair price and someone they liked to buy from. “And that’s it,” he claimed in an interview. “Finding the salesman they like, plus the price; put them both together, and you get a deal.”
60. One researcher who examined the sales records of insurance companies found that customers were more likely to buy insurance when the salesperson was like them in such areas as age, religion, politics, and cigarette-smoking habits.
61. Joe understands an important fact about human nature: We are phenomenal suckers for flattery. Although there are limits to our gullibility—especially when we can be sure that the flatterer is trying to manipulate us—we tend, as a rule, to believe praise and to like those who provide it, oftentimes when it is clearly false.
62. A fact that is as true today as it was in the time of ancient Persia, or, for that matter, in the time of Shakespeare, who captured the essence of it with one vivid line. “The nature of bad news,” he said, “infects the teller.”
63. There is a natural human tendency to dislike a person who brings us unpleasant information, even when that person did not cause the bad news. The simple association with it is enough to stimulate our dislike.
64. It is possible to attach this pleasant feeling, this positive attitude, to anything (political statements being only an example) that is closely associated with good food.
65. If it is true that, to make ourselves look good, we try to bask in the reflected glory of the successes we are even remotely associated with, a provocative implication emerges: We will be most likely to use this approach when we feel that we don’t look so good. Whenever our public image is damaged, we will experience an increased desire to restore that image by trumpeting our ties to successful others.
66. According to Milgram, the real culprit in the experiments was his subject’s inability to defy the wishes of the boss of the study—the lab-coated researcher who urged and, if need be, directed the subjects to perform their duties, despite the emotional and physical mayhem they were causing.
67. In half of the instances, the requester—a young man—was dressed in normal street clothes; the rest of the time, he was dressed in a security guard’s uniform. Regardless of the type of request, many more people obeyed the requester when he wore the guard costume.
68. The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.
69. whenever free choice is limited or threatened, the need to retain our freedoms makes us desire them (as well as the goods and services associated with them) significantly more than previously. So when increasing scarcity—or anything else—interferes with our prior access to some item, we will react against the interference by wanting and trying to possess the item more than before.

Subsequently, this book is now in my personal hall of fame for understanding human behaviour, alongside the likes of Thinking Fast and Slow (on decision making), Quiet (to understand about the introvert-extrovert spectrum), Never Split the Difference (on negotiating), Win Every Argument (on debating), Triggers (on, well, triggers), and of course all Robert Greene’s books (on power play, strategy, mastery, warfare, seduction, and human nature).

Special mention to that reader’s note from the parent of a college coed (chapter 1), whose daughter use the contrasting effect to make her bad grades seems pale in comparison to the made up disastrous story that she preceded before telling her college results, which involve fire, meeting an undesirable guy, and getting pregnant. Sharon may be failing chemistry, but she indeed get an A in psychology.