You Don't Get To Know

This is a transcript. Recording above. Many on the left (and certain factions of the right) have been freaking out over Trump’s latest Genocidal Madman post. He says: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. WHO KNOWS. We will find out tonight. One of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran.” EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here: So there was speculation about whether Trump was going to nuke Tehran, or deploy the space lasers, or demonic UFO zero-point-energy anti-gravity wonder weapons. And of course, nothing happened, because nothing ever happens. But many are still Deeply Concerned about the President’s Rhetoric. The evening after he posted this on Truth Social, it looks like the Iranians, mediated by Pakistan, came to the table and at least in principle agreed to a two-week ceasefire. That will depend on whether or not Bibi wants a ceasefire. We will see how it goes, but the Plan Trusters are saying, “See, Trump was crazy like a fox. He freaked you out, he freaked them out, and that is why everybody came back to the table.” So, during Operation Giant Lance in 1969, President Nixon sent nuclear-armed B-52s to press Soviet airspace for three days. During this time, Kissinger is on the phone with the Kremlin nonstop, warning them that Nixon was drunk and dangerously unstable and his finger was on the button. In the same year, the North Koreans shot down a spy plane and killed 31 American crewmen — a story you probably did not hear about in history class, and that is part of the point I am going to make here. The story is: Nixon is loaded. He is furious. He orders a tactical nuclear strike on the North Koreans. But apparently he is incapacitated enough that Kissinger is able to step in, countermand the order, and let Nixon sleep it off. In the morning, he thinks better of it. There are also accounts that Nixon was basically drunk throughout the entire 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was a three-week period. Some of these stories should probably be understood as damnatio memoriae, a retrospective discrediting of Nixon by his enemies. But it seems to be true that, number one, Nixon really did drink a lot, and number two, he deliberately cultivated his enemies’ belief that he was a volatile and irrational actor. Now, what was different back then is that this whole drama took place with Nixon on the Red Phone, one-on-one with the Kremlin, and the public either never heard about it or heard about it years later. Whereas Trump is playing Drunk Nixon live on the timeline. But in both cases, the strategy only works if the Russians, or the North Koreans, or the Iranians — who study American leaders much more carefully than the median American voter — have good reason to believe in this irrationality. There is no way for the American leader to wink at the voters, or even at his staff, to say, “I am running dread game, everything is going to be okay.” And not only that, but you cannot just deploy this tactic when you need it. Nixon needed to be a guy who drank a lot for this tactic to work. Trump does not drink, but he is definitely mercurial, and in addition to that being a true fact about him, he has also cultivated that as an image. So if you got got by the most recent Genocidal Madman tweet, that is not, in principle, an absurd thing to believe. He is definitely volatile when it is smart to be volatile, but he is also just volatile all the time. I cannot be sure that is what he was doing, or what was going through his head, or whether that was a smart thing to do, or even whether it is a good idea in general. We know various leaders have done it — but, given our information environment, even looking back, it is hard to say a whole lot. For instance, in the 2017 Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man, my button is bigger” thing: we, the public, still do not know — may never know — the exact contours of North Korea’s nuclear program. We have some basic information about what they were doing, the big visible tests, but we do not actually know how they felt about what Trump said, or even really what they did about it. It does seem like they went back to launching test rockets. And even looking back as far as the late sixties and early seventies, it is pretty tough to prove the counterfactual in some of these nuclear standoff situations. We still do not know exactly what the escalation calculus was on either side in 1969 or 1973.We do not really know what Nixon’s real goals were. We do not know actually how drunk he was. Some facts are better corroborated across people with different axes to grind, and maybe that is useful. But that is the point: you just don’t get to know. When this latest thing popped off on February 28th, everybody rushed onto Twitter with the Takes: whether this was righteous or wicked, whether it was prudent or foolish — all of this predicated on: * our respective stockpiles and output of munitions * the escalation ladder * the penetrability of Iran’s underground sites * how resilient their leadership bench was to a decapitation strike * where the KC-135s were * whether the transponders were turned on or off * what we know about Iranian sleeper cells And of course, it was all b******t. Nobody knew anything. If you were closely monitoring the situation, you were anti-informed — the information you received was worse than useless. And it was just bizarre to see so many Based and Redpilled guys talk about this war as if the public ought to know or could know, ought to be consulted or even could be consulted in theory about it. We are all talking about whether or not it is a good idea, and it is like — we do not even know what “it” is. They do not tell us what they plan to do. They do not tell us what their objectives are. They do not tell us whether they think it is likely to succeed, and what justification they have for that belief. They do not tell us what they think we could gain. They do not tell us what they think we could lose. They do not tell us what we might lose if we do not do anything. And that is the top-level strategic summary stuff. They are definitely not going to tell you where the submarines are and where the B-52s are, and how many JDAMs we have got and how many Shaheds they have got, and what about the radars. All that stuff is classified to the gills for the obvious reason that you cannot let the enemy know your mind. You may or may not have a good plan, but if you have a good plan, the very act of consulting the public about it makes it unworkable. None of this is to argue that any of this was prudent or morally justified — just that all of the information that you or I would use to make that kind of assessment is not available. And that is fine. A lot of this is entertainment. If you like your unplugged controller, you can keep your unplugged controller. But it got me thinking about how media-managed mass democracy seems to be changing. The last war we officially declared — which is, not coincidentally, the last major war we were able to conclusively win — was World War II. I am going to suggest two reasons why that is the case: why World War II was the last major war, and why, to the extent that subsequent military interventions have been successful, they were successful. First reason is information control, and the second reason is information tempo. In the 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, the Roosevelt administration had either captured or, to some extent, invented the modern apparatus of narrative control through mass media. The public was not consulted about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They had no time to theoriz… This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe