Random quote
Clogs – “floppies,” slippers – are made so that one can slip them on one’s feet without using the hands. They are monuments to the hatred of bending over.

Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) 

Humean causation

One of the most important contributions of David Hume (1711-1776) to philosophy is his view on causation. In several respects it is controversial and much has been said about it. Despite all criticisms it contains some essential elements of the idea of causation that you find back in almost any discussion about it, if not that they are present in the background. Therefore it’s worth giving here Hume’s view. I’ll base myself mainly on his essay “Of the Idea of Necessary Connexion”. (first published in 1748) A deeper explanation can be found in his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748).
However, let me start with the lemma on Hume in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In section 2.2 it says that “Hume takes there to be three components to our idea of causation: first, spatial contiguity, second, priority in time of cause before effect, and most importantly, the necessary connection between cause and effect.” However, this summary of Hume’s idea of causation omits what is, to my mind, Hume’s most important and also most essential aspect of causation: That “all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions”, and that consequently the idea of causation, so of cause and effect, exists only in the mind: We don’t know anything about what happens in reality: “[W]e are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other. The impulse of one billiard-ball is attended with motion in the second. … [T]he power or force, which actuates the whole machine, is entirely concealed from us…” We can never know anything about the power that connects a cause and an effect. If we think that there is such a connection, it’s only based on our experience of how one event constantly follows another, but we cannot know what a cause and effect “binds … together and makes them inseparable.” We don’t understand the connection but we only see a conjunction of objects.
Until now we discussed only connections between individual events. In fact, experiencing a connection between individual cases is not enough to speak of a causal connection, how certain and accurate this connection may seem to us. We can only suppose a causal relationship to be present if it always exists, i.e. if “one particular species of event has always, in all instances, been conjoined with another.” There must be a constant conjunction of two events. However, even then, not much changes, “except only, that after a repetition of similar instances, the mind is carried by habit, upon the appearance of one event, to expect its usual attendant, and to believe, that it will exist.” Also a constant conjunction is nothing but a feeling, an experience, a “customary transition of the imagination from one object to its usual attendant”, and it “is the sentiment or impression, from which we form the idea of power or necessary connexion. Nothing farther is in the case.” In short (my words), a causal connection exists only in the mind and says nothing about what really happens. It makes foretelling the existence of one from the appearance of the other easy, indeed. However, “[w]hen we say … that one object is connected with another, we mean only, that they have acquired a connexion in our thought, and give rise to this inference, by which they become proofs of each other’s existence.”
Therefore, so Hume, “we may define a cause to be an object, followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second. Or in other words, where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed. The appearance of a cause always conveys the mind, by a customary transition, to the idea of the effect. Of this also we have experience. We may, therefore, suitably to this experience, form another definition of cause; and call it, an object followed by another, and whose appearance always conveys the thought to that other.” However, we have no idea what such a connection involves.
In his Enquiry concerning Human Understanding Hume mentions contiguity in time and space as a requirement for a connection of ideas. This should exclude the idea of remote causation. This gives us the three elements of causation as contiguity, priority in time of cause before effect, and necessary connection. However, so Hume, “[e]very idea is copied from some preceding impression or sentiment; and where we cannot find any impression, we may be certain that there is no idea.” When the vase falls to the ground just at the moment that the crow caws, it is only in our mind that the latter causes the former (or the other way round).

Random quote
A young tree, which over-tops and destroys its parent, stands in all the same relations with Nero, when he murdered Agrippina; and if morality consisted merely in relations, would, no doubt, be equally criminal.

David Hume (1711-1776)

Football fallacies

Football is not only a game. Football is life. I think that everybody will agree. Maybe in the past football was only a game, but in present-day society it is not simply a game anymore, but it is fully lived experience like, say, work, study, or marriage. However, isn’t every game lived experience, even if it is of minor importance for you and society? Can we separate games from life, as if they don’t belong to it? Can we compartmentalize life into “real life” and games? Of course not. In fact, every game is life in a sense.
Being life football is also vulnerable to its fallacies and dilemmas. Here are some of them.

- The sunk cost fallacy. People commit it when they feel bound to what they did in the past instead of rationally evaluating what is better to do in the future, just in case it would be rational to break with the past, as I explained in a former blog. They don’t want to give up a bad investment because then they must admit that they have made a mistake. This fallacy is typically observed in sports, so AI tells me: “It describes the tendency of teams – coaches, managers, and owners – to keep starting underperforming players or retaining struggling coaches because of the massive resources (high transfer fees, large salaries, or draft capital) already invested in them.” It's also an example of an irrational choice. Irrational? It sometimes happens that a player gets a revival after some time, indeed, but generally it’s better not to wait for it. Be rational and evaluate a player on current merit and look for someone who plays better.
- The Reep Fallacy, named after Charles Reep by Bill Gerrard. Reep was the pioneer of soccer analytics, using statistical analysis to support the effectiveness of football. Reep found that a majority of goals are scored from sequences of three passes or fewer. However, what Reep didn’t see is that most passing sequences in a match are under five passes. Therefore, “it is no surprise that most goals are scored from passing sequences with fewer than five passes,” so Gerrard (see here). Reep counted only successful outcomes of the passes and didn’t count the unsuccessful outcomes. Analysis by others showed that the relationship between the length of passing sequences and goals scored is flawed.
- The football leadership dilemma, mentioned by Martin Mulyadi and Jeff Coker. From a business point of view, football clubs need financial sustainability. However, from a sporting point of view they need to win. The dilemma is that business-first decisions can undermine the core sporting ambition.
- The football brand dilemma is analysed by Matthew Guschwan in an article with the same title. Football teams are bound to particular places such as Manchester or Madrid. However, marketing efforts to attract international fans can shift the club’s focus. So, for commercial reasons the boards of football clubs may want to relate the club to well-known international brands, which give the club status and money. This may cause clubs to alienate their local supporters, since decisions regarding pricing or scheduling often prioritize global TV audiences over match-going local supporters.

With the exception of the first one, these are a few fallacies and dilemmas specific to sports, especially to football. However, human as footballers, football managers, and football analysts are they commit also common human fallacies like Appeal to Authority, Appeal to Ridicule, Cherry Picking, Circular Reasoning, etc. You find some here, applied to football.
To end this blog, I want to quote yet a few football fallacies from a blog promoting the book The Ugly Game by Martin Calladine:
- The lying table effect: the unshakable belief in a sacked manager that he did the right things despite the outcome.
- The great player effect: falsely assuming that because someone was a great player, they are more likely to be right about something. (But don’t we think so about many “great” persons?)
- The one cap wonder fallacy: the willingness of managers, fans and pundits to generalise from a few games.
- The League Cup fallacy: the belief that something you experienced yourself is representative of the true picture.

Enjoy the FIFA World Cup matches, but don’t fall in the logical traps of the commentators, analysts, managers, and players! 

La Boétie on becoming free

Source of the stamp

Random quote
Be resolved not to serve any more, and you will be free. Tyrants are great only because we are on our knee.

Étienne de La Boétie (1530-1563)

Football fraternizes, doesn’t it?

Currently, the football world championship for the FIFA World Cup is taking place. In view of the contradictions between the nations, sometimes exploding into war, it is a good thing for sport fraternizes, they say. So, at Christmas 1914 at the frontline of the First World soldiers stopped fighting spontaneously and observed an unofficial truce. German and British soldiers left the trenches and started talking with each other and exchanged small presents like food and cigarettes. At several places even football matches were organized. The army command was upset, for sport fraternizes, isn’t it? The war had to go on! So, trying to approach the enemy was forbidden, and as we now know, this war would last till November 1918. Today several monuments remember this unusual event, like the one in Mesen in Belgium at the top of this blog, unveiled in 2015.
Later, football played again a role in the First World War, but now it was used by the British army as a means to motivate the soldiers and to maintain morale. So, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, captain Wilfred Nevill distributed four footballs among the four companies of his battalion. “Nevill and his fellow officers”, the Wikipedia tells us, “were concerned about how their men would behave when finally called on to go over the top. To provide his soldiers with a reassuringly familiar symbol, Nevill bought the footballs while on leave in London...” On one football was printed “The Great European Cup-Tie Final. East Surreys v Bavarians. Kick off at zero." (“Zero” is the time that the attack would start) Another ball had the text “NO REFEREE”, which was Nevill’s way of telling the men they needn’t treat the Germans too gently. (According to other sources there were only two balls) (ibid.) The company that would be the first to kick the ball into a German trench would win a prize. However, no ball reached the German trenches, and Nevill was killed in action, the same day.
It seems that this wasn’t the first time in this war that a football was used for motivating soldiers. “As early as 1915, a battalion … near Loos appears to have taken a ball at the foot in the attack full of bravado… [Also] “in the attack on Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917, the Royal Canadian Regiment kicks a ball to the top of the ridge through the grenade funnels of the no man's land. This ball can … be admired in a museum in Canada”, another website tells us. “The war poet and captain Siegfried Sassoon read football news to his men to keep them calm for fighting on the Western Front,” so AI (I couldn’t check it, but it seems likely). However, Sassoon was quite sarcastic about the relationship between war and football, as we see in his poem “Does It Matter?”:

Does it matter?—losing your legs?...
For people will always be kind,
And you need not show that you mind
When the others come in after football
To gobble their muffins and eggs.
…

Anyway, football was no longer fraternizing. Football had become war, long before the Dutch football coach Rinus Michels had famously said these words, albeit in a somewhat different context. (see here)

The relation between football and war was very close in the First World War but doesn’t end with it. In the Second World War football was mainly used for keeping the soldiers fit and for recreation, but this also happened during the First World War. A try of the Germans to use football as a propaganda instrument to promote their own popularity in the Soviet Union failed (see here for the details). What’s worse is that sometimes a football conflict has led to war, like the Football War between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969. Riots after a match between the national teams made the existing tensions between the countries explode. The army of El Salvador invaded Honduras and a war of 100 hours followed. Football violence also played a part in the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The impact of football on war can be negative, as we have seen, but it can be positive as well, as we have also seen. Sport fraternizes and basically football is not an exception. It brings people together and in this way it can shape relations and mutual understanding. Therefore it is unfortunate that a top referee from Somalia has been denied access to the US; that players and staff of the Iranian team are not allowed to spend the night in the USA; or that ticket prices for the matches are often extraordinary high. Just because of the possible positive effects of football the arrival of participants and spectators should be promoted and not stopped for fear of alleged dangers or for commercial reasons. Mutual understanding must be given a chance, whenever possible. Rules must give way to this.

Sources not mentioned in the text
- Een voetbal kerstverhaal
- Facts About Football In The Second World War
- Gielt Algra, “Voetbal is oorlog - Oorlog is voetbal”
- Wilfred Nevill en de Grote Europacup Finale (zondag 25 juni 1916)

Random quote
If either a single person or an oligarchy or a democracy has a soul eager after pleasures and desires—wanting to be filled with them, yet retaining none of them, and perpetually afflicted with an endless and insatiable disorder; and this evil spirit, having first trampled the laws under foot, becomes the master either of a state or of an individual,—then … salvation is hopeless.

An Athenian, in Plato, Laws, Book 4, 714a

Plato’s noble lie

Plato and Pinocchio

Are politicians allowed to lie to convince the people of what they see as a good thing for everybody? That is something I was wondering, as so many politicians proclaim untruths, falsehoods or lies – or how you want to call them – during the current wars to defend them (and not only then). Plato already discussed the problem in his Republic (Πολιτεία, Politeia) 2500 years ago, for example:

Socrates is discussing the ideal state with Glaukon and Adeimantos and raises the question of how to convince the people to help establish this state and to support it. In order to do so, he suggests telling them a “noble lie”:
“How, then,” said I [=Socrates], “might we contrive one of those opportune falsehoods of which we were just now speaking, so as by one noble lie to persuade if possible the rulers themselves, but failing that the rest of the city?”
“What kind of a lie do you mean?” said he. “Nothing unprecedented,” said I, “but a sort of Phoenician tale, something that has happened ere now in many parts of the world, as the poets aver and have induced men to believe, but that has not happened and perhaps would not be likely to happen in our day and demanding no little persuasion to make it believable.”
“You act like one who shrinks from telling his thought,” he said. “You will think that I have right good reason for shrinking when I have told,” I said.
Say on,” said he, “and don't be afraid.”
“Very well, I will. And yet I hardly know how to find the audacity or the words to speak and undertake to persuade first the rulers themselves and the soldiers and then the rest of the city, that in good sooth all our training and educating of them were things that they imagined and that happened to them as it were in a dream; but that in reality at that time they were down within the earth being moulded and fostered themselves while their weapons and the rest of their equipment were being fashioned. And when they were quite finished the earth as being their mother delivered them, and now as if their land were their mother and their nurse they ought to take thought for her and defend her against any attack and regard the other citizens as their brothers and children of the self-same earth.”
“It is not for nothing,” he said, “that you were so bashful about coming out with your lie.”
“It was quite natural that I should be.”
[Then Socrates further elaborates on the “noble lie” and at the end he says:]
Do you see any way of getting them to believe this tale?”
No, not these themselves,” he said, “but I do, their sons and successors and the rest of mankind who come after.”
“Well,” said I, “even that would have a good effect making them more inclined to care for the state and one another. For I think I apprehend your meaning. And this shall fall out as tradition guides.” (Book I, 414b-415d)

Plato uses explicitly the words “lie” (pseudos) and “to lie” (pseudein) in this context. Therefore, I have replaced the word “fiction” by “lie” in the second paragraph of the translation above. Another thing is that, when reading this passage, a modern reader may think that Socrates’s story is not very convincing. Isn’t it? Note how many fantasy stories go around in circles of complot thinkers that are really believed, like about evil people who eat little children for their satanic rites! For Socrates the lie presented here was a serious story that could be used to convince people, although it might be difficult, as the end of the quoted passage shows.
So Socrates, or in fact Plato, suggests here that politicians are allowed to lie if it is for a good cause, in order to convince others to support them. The so-called “noble lie”. It’s no wonder that this view led to many and often strong reactions through the ages.
For me, Plato’s “noble lie” sounds quite Machiavellian, albeit a moderate Machiavellianism. But who decides whether a lie is “noble”? Don’t most of us think that their aims are noble, or not bad, anyway? Or at least they present their aims that way? Machiavelli openly allowed the ruler to deceive the people and his opponents if it was useful to keep him in power. That’s not what Plato says here. A noble lie is not meant to deceive but as a means to convince people in a cause that is good for all and not only for the ruler. Doesn’t Plato tell here that also the rulers must be convinced by the noble lie? Anyway, maybe it was because of the Machiavellianism that Montaigne saw around him that he strictly rejected lying: “In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word. If we did but discover the horror and gravity of it, we should pursue it with fire and sword, and more justly than other crimes.” And also: “I have this vice in so great horror, that I am not sure I could prevail with my conscience to secure myself from the most manifest and extreme danger by an impudent and solemn lie.” (in “Of Liars”, Essays, Book I-9) Montaigne would even keep his word after having been taken captive by a robber and then released against the promise to pay a ransom later, after his release. Nevertheless, Montaigne admits that rulers and others in power are allowed to use lies in the right circumstances. (see Of Profit and Honesty, Essays, Book III-1) Thus in fact Montaigne allowed the noble lie.
One of the fiercest critics of Plato’s noble lie was Karl R. Popper. In his The Open Society and his Enemies Vol. I. Plato, Popper stated that allowing the noble lie paves the way for fascism and Nazism and other totalitarian ideologies. And it is true that rulers and ideologists of authoritarian if not totalitarian states often make use of lies, falsehoods and falsifications as well in order to justify and support their power and position. Kant stated that lying is always morally wrong, without exception, which implicitly also rejects the noble lie. But what if in the Second World War you had a person in hiding in your home, and a Nazi patrol knocked at your door, asking whether you had hiders in your house. Should you say then “Yes, I have”?
The question whether a noble lie is allowed is not simply a matter of yes or no. Although I agree with Montaigne that lies are reprehensible, it’s more that noble lies should be rejected than that they must or have to be rejected. Anyway, I am going a step further than Montaigne and think that it is allowed to lie against a robber and not keep your promises to him. But ideologies based on a false representation of things are reprehensible, anyway. Popper was right but not for the reason given (see Bert van den Berg et al., ch. 1). A government can be in situations that it would undermine the state and bring many people in danger if it would openly tell the truth. Undoubtedly, there can be good reasons for “white lies” or “noble lies”, but the basic rule must be not to accept a lie, even when presented as noble. Exceptions must be exceptions. And whenever what a political leader says is a lie that then is exposed as a lie, we must not accept it because it is a political leader who says so, as too often happens. For a lie it is and a lie needs a strong justification to be acceptable.

Random quote
Conquest is as far from setting up any government, as demolishing an house is from building a new one in the place. Indeed, it often makes way for a new frame of a commonwealth, by destroying the former; but, without the consent of the people, can never erect a new one.

John Locke (1632-1704)

The way you travel is the way you see

Sunset seen from a moving train

You go from A to B, say from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Bordeaux in the southwest of France. You might think that this is just a matter of going from Amsterdam to Bordeaux and that’s it. But matters are not that simple, for you’ll have many experiences during the journey and they depend on how you go. It’s a different context, but in his “Walking in the City” Michel de Certeau describes how the world looks like – or rather looked like – when we are lifted to the summit of the World Trade Centre that once, before it was destroyed on the 9th of September 2001, dominated the New York skyline. Look down: How different the world from above is from what we see when we are walking down there in the streets of the city. We also have such differences in experience when we are travelling from Amsterdam to Bordeaux and use different means of transport: The aeroplane, the High-Speed Train (HST) or a car. You could even go by bike, as some Dutchmen do. However, I’ll ignore it, since it is of a different order. Cycling such a distance is not simply a matter of going from A(msterdam) to B(ordeaux), but it is being on holiday, and that is not what I want to discuss here. Here I want to talk about different experiences of simply passing from A to B.
Going by plane, train or car are three different ways of travelling or passing, to use a general term, and they include three different ways of seeing the world you are passing, and so three ways of experiencing and discovering it. From an aeroplane you have a bird’s eye view of the world on the ground. This world resembles a map on the internet. However, what you see is real and not represented symbolically like on an internet map. Nevertheless, your experience is map-like, for just like when reading a map on the internet, you see the world but it doesn’t feel that you are in it. The world is passing fast under you, and within two hours you arrive at your destination.
How different are your experiences when you go by train or car. In a train or car you are not passing above a world that is map-like, but you are passing in this world itself. You feel the world as it is and you can distinguish small details. On the other hand, when travelling by train or car, you miss the overview you have from an aeroplane. However, there are differences between the world as seen from the High-Speed Train and the world as seen from a car. The HST brings you along a fixed route that leads through cities like Brussels and Paris. Moreover, there is no direct rail connection between Amsterdam and Bordeaux, and in Paris you have a transfer (not by train) from one railway station to another. Maybe you must also change trains in Brussels, but that’s in the same station. When travelling by car, by contrast, there may be preferred routes, but they are not fixed. You choose your route according to your own wishes: following motorways or secondary ways, during the whole trip or during a part of the trip; avoiding cities or not avoiding them; making one or more detours and intermediate stops; etc. You can pass or visit the intermediate places as you like. When taking the HST, you can interrupt and adapt your journey only where the train stops anyway, while in Paris you must even leave the train and the railway station (Gard du Nord) and mingle with city life somehow, before continuing your travel from Gare Montparnasse. It is true that this stopover in Paris gives you some freedom, for you make the transfer on your own account. By taxi, metro, walking, as you prefer.
Depending on your mode of transport, you experience the world from the air or on the ground. But the experiences on the ground are different for HST travellers and for car travellers, and not only because the HST follows a fixed route, while for the car traveller the route is free. From your perspective, a HST is a cage moving through the landscapes and the cities it passes though it is an efficient, fast, and comfortable cage. You are locked up for almost the whole passage, and you see the landscapes and cities passing through a window, which is a bit like a TV screen. Travelling by train is waiting till you arrive at your destination, meanwhile watching a film that passes by outside the cage. In a car, you are also watching the world passing by through a screen and the world around also looks like a film. Especially on a motorway this is so. But a car is much smaller than a train and the contact with the surrounding world feels much more direct and in fact it is. If you are the driver, this is especially so, for you must adapt yourself (=the car) continuously to the surrounding world, made up of other car drivers, the surface of the road, traffic jams, benches, etc. You can open a window and feel fresh air coming in and you can smell the air outside. You can stop somewhere and walk in the landscape instead of passing through it. In a car you are closer to the landscape than in an HST, and in a car and in an HST you are closer to the landscape than in an aeroplane.
Etc. Even if you don’t agree with the details of my analysis, one thing will be clear: Travelling in an aeroplane, in a HST or in a car are different experiences. Each mode of transport for passing gives another view on the surrounding world and consequently each one is a different way to discover the world. When you pass through places you know, you can see what is changing there, for no place remains the same for a long time. When passing through unknown places, passing is discovering, anyway. What you discover then depends on how you pass, as the example of the trip from Amsterdam to Bordeaux illustrates. The way you pass is the way you see.

Random quote
‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

David Hume (1711-1776) 

John Locke on democracy

Dutch government buildings in The Hague. At hte left the office of the Prime Minister (the "Little Tower").
 Behind the office buildings of the ministries,  the roof and towers of the parliament are just visible.

In these days of increasing polarization and the rise of autocracy, it should be good to read John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government”. The English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) is one of the intellectual fathers of western democracy and an important advocate of toleration (which he defended especially in his “A Letter Concerning Toleration”). The Second Treatise was first published in 1689 (though anonymously), but Locke had written it already in the years 1680-81.

Unlike Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), who thought that “A man is a wolf to another man” and that people were continuously making war with each other, according to Locke people are basically peaceful and inclined to consensus and to cooperate with others and to help them. We can say that peace and cooperation are the basic concepts for describing the natural state of society. In this original natural state – which is a hypothetical idea for Locke; not a (pre)historical fact – everybody is equal to everybody and free to do what they please, “though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. … [T]here cannot be supposed any … subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our’s.” (Sect. 6.) However, if everybody is “absolute lord of his own person and possessions, equal to the greatest, and subject to no body”, there is a problem, for if everybody is his own king “as much as he, every man his equal, … the enjoyment of the property he has in this state is very unsafe, very unsecure. … [This makes people] willing to join in society with others, who are already united, or have a mind to unite, for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties and … property.” (Sect. 123.) In other words, people choose a government and a king or other ruler. The power of this ruler is not absolute. Far from that. Rulers derive their authority only from the consent of the governed. No government is legitimate if it doesn’t have this consent and is controlled either directly by the people, which means by the consent of the majority, or, more often, by representatives chosen by them. If it doesn’t, it “subverts the end of government”. (Sect. 140)
The idea that a government must be based on people’s consent – or paraphrasing the American (but Lockean) statement “no taxation without representation” by “no laws without representation” – has an important consequence: It is allowed to overthrow any government that rules without this consent. When consent is lacking, the people have the right to impeach and remove the ruler. When a ruler fails or exceeds the powers he received from the people, the latter have a right of resistance. “When any one, or more, shall take upon them to make laws, whom the people have not appointed so to do, they make laws without authority, which the people are not therefore bound to obey; by which means they come again to be out of subjection, and may constitute to themselves a new legislative, as they think best, being in full liberty to resist the force of those, who without authority would impose any thing upon them.” (Sect. 212; cf. Sect. 219) “Whensoever therefore the legislative [=ruler] shall transgress this fundamental rule of society; and either by ambition, fear, folly or corruption, endeavour to grasp themselves, or put into the hands of any other, an absolute power over the lives, liberties, and estates of the people; by this breach of trust they forfeit the power the people had put into their hands for quite contrary ends, and it devolves to the people, who have a right to resume their original liberty, and, by the establishment of a new legislative, (such as they shall think fit) provide for their own safety and security…” And it is not only when a ruler directly damages the lives, property etc. of the governed that he can be removed, but he “acts also contrary to his trust, when he either employs the force, treasure, and offices of the society, to corrupt the representatives, and gain them to his purposes; or openly pre-engages the electors, and prescribes to their choice, such, whom he has, by solicitations, threats, promises, or otherwise, won to his designs; and employs them to bring in such, who have promised before-hand what to vote, and what to enact. Thus to regulate candidates and electors, and new-model the ways of election, what is it but to cut up the government by the roots, and poison the very fountain of public security?” (Sect. 222.)

In short
- People basically live in peace together and are inclined to cooperate.
- In order to regulate interhuman cooperation and to solve frictions between people we need a ruler.
- Therefore, people voluntarily give up their executive power and place it into the hands of a civic community, where, however, the majority holds supreme power.
- The community delegates this power to a government and ruler to enact and enforce laws for the public good. Government and ruler are controlled by the people or their representatives.
- When a ruler or government abuses its power, tramples on the people's rights, or governs without popular consent, the government becomes illegitimate.
- When a government has become illegitimate, the people have a right if not an obligation to resist and to remove it and to replace it with a new government.

Alas, there is a big gap between dream and reality, also in politics.

Random quote
Great robbers punish little ones, to keep them in their obedience; but the great ones are rewarded with laurels and triumphs, because they are too big for the weak hands of justice in this world, and have the power in their own possession, which should punish offenders.

John Locke (1632-1704)

The story of the troglodyte

The cave dweller: Portrait of a man as a prehistoric being. Collage by G.F. Potter, 1899.
 Gelatin silver print and ink; photographed by me in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Sometimes, I discuss thought experiments in my blog, but to my surprise, I have never treated Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, although it is one of the most important philosophical thought experiments. I have mentioned it only shortly here and there. So let me make up for the negligence now.
Plato treats the allegory in his Republic (Πολιτεία, Politeia, 514a–520a, Book VII). Here is a summary:

A group of people is imprisoned in a cave, already since childhood. Behind their backs a fire is burning and between the fire and the prisoners people are continuously passing by. The heads of the prisoners have been fixed, so that they cannot see what is happening behind them but only what is right in front of them: The shadows of the passers-by on the wall of the cave. Even more, each prisoner sees only their little part of the wall with the moving shadows. Therefore the prisoners know only what these people look like and what they do and what further is going on in the world behind them in an indirect way and they know it only insofar as it casts shadows on their parts of the wall.
Then one of the prisoners is released and he goes to the real world. First his eyes are blinded by the light, but gradually he succeeds in seeing directly and with his own eyes what is happening there. However, when he returns to the cave and tells the prisoners what he has seen, no one believes him. They say that the light has ruined his eyes and that it has no sense to leave the cave, and that they’ll try to kill everybody who wants to release them and to lead them out of the cave.

Over the years this allegory has gotten many interpretations, including one by Plato and/or Socrates themselves. It’s not my intention to summarize them here or to comment on them. Instead, I’ll give it an interpretation in line with my recent blogs, and apply it to the world of social media in order to show its modern relevancy.
The allegory of the cave gives us a deep psychological insight: Human beings are trapped in their own images and they refuse to accept any fact or argument that seems to conflict with them. They are fed lifelong or at least during the time that a world view is formed with the same kinds of images so often and in such a compelling way that these images have become real for them in the deepest sense. For everybody in the cave the shadows on their little part of the wall have become their images of the world as it is. Once someone, even if it is one of their own group – let alone if it were someone from the outside – criticizes these world views, the cave dweller, or troglodyte as we may call them better, rejects the criticisms; or alternatively tries to integrate them in their existing world views by saying that it’s actually what they are already thinking; or picks from the criticism only what fits what they are already thinking; or they blame the critic; etc. In psychology, such adaptation processes are known as cognitive dissonance reduction, confirmation bias, shooting the messenger, etc. We can also say that troglodytes live in their own self-maintained bubbles. One step further is that the shadows do not represent the world as it is, but that they are manipulated by people in the “real” world. Then we can see the shadows as algorithms, actually in a negative sense insofar as they are used to hide the “real” world for the troglodytes and are used in the interest of manipulators.
This brings me to the world of today and the caves that we find here, and even more that are created here. Of course, I don’t want to say that in earlier days people didn’t live in their mental caves. Even the fact that Plato or Socrates came with the allegory of the cave 2500 years ago would make such an idea ridiculous. Or, for instance, think of Galileo (1564-1642) or Spinoza (1632-1677) who escaped from the cave of religion and got into trouble by doing so. Moreover, I don’t want to be a culture pessimist. However, in the present digital world it seems that we are increasingly pushed into the caves of social media and that an escape from one such a cave is only possible at the cost of being trapped into another digital cave, because the world has become so digitalized that it would break down if the digital network that spans the globe were seriously disrupted. It’s a network that makes nobody survive any longer without having a smartphone or at least a simple mobile in their pocket or bag. It is in this world that social media – the most striking digital phenomenon – create their caves into which they try to lure their users. Whether it is Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or another social medium, it’s known that everybody gets there only a selective part of the information there is to get about a theme, sometimes on request, but always partly and often wholly manipulated by the algorithms of the social medium you are using. Social media information is usually selective, manipulated information. If you are left, you get leftist information, if you are right you get rightist information, and it is difficult to break the pattern and become informed about the other side, even if you try. Just as in Plato’s allegory, you see your own private shadows and you cannot see the shadows that other troglodytes see – only those of your neighbours at most – for your head is fixed. Isn’t it as if we are back in prehistory when humans also lived in caves, but with the difference that in this digital age we have become troglodytes in a metaphorically sense?

Random quote
Where there is no law, there is no freedom: for liberty is, to be free from restraint and violence from others; which cannot be, where there is no law: but freedom is not, as we are told, a liberty for every man to do what he lists: (for who could be free, when every other man’s humour might domineer over him?) but a liberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his person, actions, possessions, and his whole property, within the allowance of those laws under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary will of another, but freely follow his own.
                                                                                 John Locke (1632-1704)

Famous in the Middle Ages

Somewhere in his book Erasmus de Reiziger (Erasmus The Traveller), John Tholen writes: “Celebrities are often bombarded today by their fans, who hope to get a glimpse of their idol, or even receive a touch or signature.” (p. 175) Making a relaxed walk in the street is often difficult for them, for they are easily recognized, and soon they are surrounded by a crowd of fans, or people are gazing at them. Is it a surprise that they are recognized? For if you are a well-known personality, today everybody will have seen your face on social media, on television, in the cinema, in newspapers, etc. Even more, many celebrities stimulate that their face is published in the media, and they have their own social media channels that they use to become famous, for it’s a way to earn money and also more than that.
For us, being such a celebrity is a normal phenomenon; and we think that it’s a modern phenomenon. Before the invention of photography or otherwise of the cinema it did not happen, we think. Of course, before that there were also famous people, but being recognized when walking in the street in another town where you had never been before? Impossible, unless you were maybe a king, even if you were incognito. Impossible? It was what sometimes happened to Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466-1536) in later life when his fame was growing. And when he stayed somewhere there were always people who tried to get a glimpse of him, if not to get in touch with him, simply because he was a famous man.
Erasmus tells us about it in his letters. So, once on a journey along the Rhine his boat moored in Boppard, in Germany, for a customs inspection. During the stop, Erasmus was walking along the bank of the river when suddenly someone recognized him and told this to the customs officer. The latter shouted for joy and took Erasmus to his house and showed him his books written by Erasmus. Moreover, he let him bring two jugs of whine. Next, as a mark of honour, the rector of a nunnery in Boppard accompanied Erasmus till he arrived in Koblenz. When reading this, I wondered how it was possible that someone recognized Erasmus. Without a doubt, his portrait circulated, for instance with his books, but did it resemble Erasmus enough to recognize him when you saw him by chance for the first time in his life?
Once he had become famous, Erasmus often received presents when he arrived somewhere and he was invited by local authorities; or it happened that unknown persons wanted to meet him. For example, when Erasmus arrived in Sélestat, a town in the Alsace in France, some prominent persons there sent him three barrels of wine, and the next day they invited him for lunch. That he was invited for lunch or dinner is something that Erasmus mentions many times in his letters. It also often happened that his stay was paid by prominent persons in the town where he arrived.
For safety reasons, Erasmus seldom travelled alone and once during a journey from Basel in Switzerland to Besançon in France, a priest in his company recognized him and rode ahead to tell the people in Besançon that Erasmus was coming. Erasmus wanted to stop him, for, so Erasmus, “I know all too well the annoying crowds of people who come to greet.” But the man had already gone. In Besançon, Erasmus was invited for dinner by local authorities and his stay there was arranged for him. The next day, two men he hardly knew were waiting for him “in order to greet him”. A magistrate sent him a large amount of wine and oats (for his horse?), planned a banquet in honour of him, and even offered him a prebend of 100 crowns a year (which Erasmus refused). A few days later, when Erasmus wanted to return to Basel, again a few people – this time he didn’t know them – came to greet him in the morning and several prominent people accompanied him till a few miles outside the town.
What did Erasmus think of all this? Of course, he often enjoyed it. It made life a lot easier for him, and he was not averse to being known and often stimulated it himself, like a modern celebrity. Nevertheless, more and more it happened that Erasmus tried to avoid such tributes, and in a letter in 1525 he writes: “As the situation stands, I cannot go anywhere without the rumour stirring up a lot of people, and I cannot leave anywhere without a crowd gathering. I find nothing more unpleasant than that.”
I have given here only a few examples of what it was for Erasmus to be famous, and I treated only his case. Nevertheless, I think that it is not too bold to say that celebrities are of all times, but only the scale of what it means to be a celebrity has changed.

Source
John Tholen, Erasmus de Reiziger. The quotations are from the letters in this book.

Random quote
Fame and youth all at the same time are too much for a mortal.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

The AI mould

You listen to a lecture and want to take notes. It is better to do this with paper and pen than with a notebook (laptop): You’ll remember better what the speaker said. It’s an example of how tools influence the way you think. But this is for an instrument that helps register the stuff you want to think about. But how about AI that is a tool that itself thinks? AI is used in many ways, but as a writer, first of all I am interested in how it affects your thinking in case you use it for writing texts, so when you use AI for replacing some of your thinking activities. How does this affect you?
I got the idea for this blog when reading an article in the Dutch daily Trouw titled (translated) “Does AI change the way we write?” (quoted as Trouw), which I mainly used for this blog. However, I did also an internet search and the first article I found, one by Raquel Loga, is worrying, indeed. Actually, the other search results were not very different. A recent study by Gerlich, so Loga, “found a negative correlation between frequent AI usage and critical-thinking abilities, suggesting that individuals who rely heavily on automated tools may struggle with independent reasoning”, especially because they prefer quick AI-generated solutions above deep, reflective thinking. The effect is greater among young people than among older people – which was to be expected, I think – and less among higher educated people than under the lower educated. Moreover, excessively using AI reduced critical thinking, in the sense that “increased trust in AI-generated content led to reduced independent verification of information, raising concerns about declining skepticism.” Plus that the AI information was often one-sided, since it “often filters content based on prior interactions, reinforcing existing biases and limiting exposure to diverse perspectives.” Moderate AI usage did not affect critical thinking, so Loga summarizes Gerlich’s study.
Back to the article in Trouw. In the past, your writing started with ordering your thoughts and the relevant literature you had found in your mind guided by a research question. Now your writing starts with asking relevant questions to AI and you must recognize if what AI says is what you are looking for. This recognizing looks like creation, so computer scientist Zhivar Sourati, “but in reality it is the AI model that has subtly reshaped the frame of your idea”, and gradually you are internalizing AI’s manner of “thinking”. A consequence is that it makes your brain lazy: Writing with the help of AI generates less brain activity than writing without it, so Sourati. Moreover, people using AI for writing a text remember less what they wrote and they have a decreased feeling of ownership of the text. If you use AI as a tool for understanding difficult texts, the effect is the same, so Renske Brouwer of the Utrecht University: Knowledge of the text and reading comprehension are superficial. Also your vocabulary changes, so data scientist Dmitry Kobak. You tend to use increasingly words used by AI; words that were often rare before the introduction of AI. AI written texts also get increasingly similar and tend to lack creativity. This is not only a matter of words, as a study by Sourati’s team shows. Even when the writer starts with a creative idea and wants to develop it in a creative way, AI casts it in the same common mould. It is because every writer using AI uses the same sources. “Texts are going to miss the variation of different minds that really approach a problem from different angles”, so Sourati. And he continues saying that the power of groups always has been the variety in experiences, background and knowledge of the participants when solving problems. This advantage of diversity will disappear if all writers draw from the same well. Moreover the diversity offered by AI as yet will diminish even more if more people are going to use AI and if then their AI generated texts will be used to train AI. A related problem is that AI tends to use the language patterns of highly educated western people. “When millions of people pass their texts through the same models, they are pushed towards a single expressive standard”, Sourati says. It looks like a new kind of colonization of the world by the West, I would add.
Using AI when writing texts is not only negative, as this blog suggests. For instance, Deborah Ko stresses that speed and execution grow when writing a text, and so it saves time for creative thinking. It gives confidence that you can write, too. Or, when used in a smart way, it just can stimulate. Nevertheless, as linguist Peter-Arno Coppen says in Trouw, “Language not only helps to express your thoughts, but also to shape them. If students do everything with AI, how should they learn to think?”

Source
Andrei Stiru, “Verandert AI de manier waarop we schrijven?”, in Trouw, zaterdag 25 april 2026, “De Verdieping”, pp. 14-15.

Random quote
The so-called good society accepts all kinds of merits, except intellectual ones; these, in fact, are contraband.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

On responsibility

The cast receiving the applause after the Dutch premiere of Mieczysław
 Weinberg’s opera The Passenger,  17 April 2026 in Amsterdam

You admire the leader of your country, a charismatic person, and you want to support him as much as you can. You vote for him or his party in elections, but actually you want to do more. Happily, you work for the government. Even more, you hold a high position there, so your contribution counts. Moreover, you know that your leader takes the right decisions, so you are happy that you can help execute them. Then you get a task and you absolutely find you cannot do that. It will backfire on what you do or will backfire on what your leader intends, but okay, it’s your leader’s responsibility, or so you think. But what will you do if it’s against your moral values? If you see that by what you do you’ll hurt other people a lot and bring a lot of misery to them? What would I do?
I had to think of it when I went to the Dutch premiere of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera The Passenger recently. The main theme of the opera was the question of responsibility and guilt when you are part of a system that doesn’t only oppress people, but kills, no destroys them. The opera was about a guard of the concentration camp of Auschwitz and one of her victims. Auschwitz was an extreme and exceptional case. People often think it belongs to the past. However, in view of what is happening in the world today, I am afraid that it was not so exceptional as many people tend to think. Apart from that, aren’t extreme cases often a strengthened reflection of what happens in daily life in a less extreme way? Don’t they point to perfidious characteristics of life that are less extreme and often tolerated in daily life? They make us aware of what often remains unnoticed. Let me clarify, guided by the article by Alette Smeulders in the programme booklet of the opera.
People want to belong and to become part of a group. Sometimes they join a group without really knowing the direction it is taking, though. A charismatic leader, large and enthusiastic crowds, joining an elite corps: It can feel right and often there seems to be no reason to stay aside. You think that this group will bring you where you want to go. And aren’t you part of the future by joining? Some don’t care if such a group uses violent means, or that it sometimes does. Others would not choose them, and certainly not extreme violence, oppression, and genocide but accept it when the leader does, for they want to support him and his movement that gives them hope, and they are prepared to fight for it, even if it is at the expense of others. Being a member of an elite corps means adhering to certain rules, standards and values. In extreme cases it involves strict obedience, conformity and loyalty, if not an oath to the leader. And why not? You have chosen the group voluntarily and you are prepared to dedicate your whole person to it, and not shirk from the ‘dirty work’. Maybe, you can refuse tasks you don’t like and finally leave the group, but the pressure to stay is immense and you don’t want to let the others down. And what if you would leave the group? You are afraid of the void you would feel. Of course, you’ll feel uncomfortable when you do something you don’t like for the first time, but gradually you’ll get used to it; acting against your gut will become routine, and soon it doesn’t feel any longer like that.
This description is based on Auschwitz, but as Smeulders says, such things happen everywhere: “Perpetrators subordinate themselves to a leader, a group or an ideology. They are aiming to create a better world and think that the end justifies the means. They try to repress anything that raises doubts: they do their utmost to assuage their consciences and maintain the notion that they are the good ones and the others embody evil. That lets them create their own reality and cast themselves as the heroes in their own narrative. The moment any empathy arises, it is suppressed and superseded by tunnel vision. They have a mission, a task that must be accomplished.”
However, and that’s important, although what perpetrators of extremist acts do is extremist, indeed, the perpetrators are seldom extremists as such. As such they are people like you and I; they are normal people who have become extremist; or in the words of Smeulders: “Time and time again, it becomes clear that the perpetrators who did terrible things were not born as perpetrators. Other than the occasional sadist or psychopath, it is frightening just how normal they were. They were ordinary people who got swept along and suddenly found themselves in extreme situations that they felt they could no longer escape from. It is possible to break loose, but it comes at a price: you have to disengage from the group, perhaps at the risk of your own life, and face up to where you went wrong.”
This brings me where I want to go in this blog. Extremist situations are extremist, indeed, but in a sense they are a continuation of daily practice. They are daily practice pushed to the extreme by all kinds of factors that I cannot discuss here now. Extreme behaviour is the end point of normal behaviour on a sliding scale. It’s not that there is good behaviour and there is bad behaviour and that’s it. There is a lot in between. This makes it so difficult. In daily life there is pressure from others and there are practical restrictions of what is possible (socially and physically). So we must choose, and choices can be disadvantageous to others. Sometimes we cannot help, but often we can but still see no reason to adapt our choices. It can be (but need not be) a first step to the extreme. We must realize that, but we seldom do and seldom take the time to consider. But as an agent, and so as a perpetrator, you have a choice. Choices are not always easy, but choices they are. And aren’t you responsible for your own choices?

Source
Alette Smeulders, “On perpetrators and perpetration”, in the programme booklet of Mieczysław Weinberg’s opera The Passenger.

Random quote
If the enemy be rich, [the Romans] are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace.

Words spoken in AD 83 or 84 by the Caledonian chieftain Calgacus according to the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 117)

Moving the goalposts

Suppose, you are the president of a mighty democratic country. You see that in a country with a very repressive regime on the other side of the world, the people rise in revolt and want to topple their regime. The revolt fails and the regime kills many of the rebels. You think: “My country is mighty and I can help them. If I kill their president, the people will rise again and now they’ll succeed and the country will become democratic.” So, you tell the whole world “I’ll bring a regime change over there.” And on your orders your secret service kills the president, but the people have become afraid and don’t have the courage to rise again and the new president chosen by the repressive regime is even harder in his actions against the opposition than his predecessor.
Now, you, the president of that mighty country, have a problem: In fact, the repressive regime hasn’t changed, except that the president has been replaced. The country is still as repressive as before and the country hasn’t become democratic, which was your goal by killing its president. However, if you would admit this, you, the mighty president, will have lost your face, so you tell the world: “Because of my action, a regime change has taken place in that country over there, for it has a new president.”

The case just described is an example of the fallacy “Moving the goal posts” (or MG, for short). Originally, the goal of the president of the mighty country was to make the country with the repressive regime democratic by killing its president. However, the anticipated scenario did not work. Therefore, now he told the world that his goal had always been to have the repressive president removed. He gave his goal “regime change” a new interpretation, of course, without admitting that he did. And such a thing is what we do when we move the goal posts. Wikipedia says it this way: “Moving the goal posts (or shifting the goal posts) … means to change the rule or criterion (‘goal’) of a process or competition while it is still in progress, in such a way that the new goal offers one side an advantage or disadvantage”. The advantage for the mighty president was that he saved his face (or so he thought). MG is a trick that is often used by this mighty president, but not only by this president but by many other politicians as well, mighty or not mighty, in both democratic and repressive countries. It’s a means for saving face and concealing mistakes.

Typically the “Moving the goal posts” fallacy is committed if:
1) Person A requests Person B to meet a certain goal (evidential or otherwise)
2) Person B fulfils the goal as stipulated above in step 1
3) Instead of admitting that Person B has met the goals or has discharged the conditions of the contract, Person A stipulates even further goals.
The name of the fallacy derives from football – if the goalposts for one team are moved farther away or closer, this can provide a (dis)advantage to the opposing team.
(from Source)

The example I started with is a special instance of MG in the sense that 1) the fallacy is (intentionally) applied to yourself: The mighty president has changed his own goal (as publicly declared) and 2) he has changed it because it has not been achieved. And that’s what politicians often do, for example, to save face. But in many cases it is so that someone sets a goal for another person, and after the latter has achieved it the former says: That was not what I said what you had to do; my order/request etc was… You can also say then that the rules, criteria or expectations have changed, after they had been set and after the action (or whatever is done to achieve them) has already started. It’s like changing the rules during the game.
The main characteristics of the MG fallacy are this altering of criteria, rules and expectations and persistent shifting; and often both together. For example in debates, a case of MG is challenging someone to prove a point, and when they do, rejecting it and demanding more proof; or instead of accepting the prove, ignoring it and shifting the argument to a new, broader, or irrelevant point. And that’s where you often find this fallacy: In debates, and – what is most visible to everybody – especially in political debates. But you find MG also in politics in general (cf. the case I started with) and in addition at the workplace, for example, when a manager sets a performance task and then changes it. Also the tactics of bullying behaviour include moving the goalposts: Setting objectives which subtly change in ways that cannot be reached. In workplace bullying, MG is a much-used tactic. (Wikipedia) Of course, MG is also a common phenomenon in everyday life. MG is typically used in bad faith to avoid admitting defeat or disadvantage. One solution seems to be setting clear rules and making clear agreements in advance (see Source, p. 187). But isn’t that just begging the question, especially if people who set the rules and must apply them act in bad faith, as so often happens?

Source
- Tuomas W. Manninen, “Moving the Goalposts”, in Bad Arguments, pp. 185-188.

Random quote
Of what use is knowledge to him who has lost his head?

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Public and Private

When someone holds an office, it often happens that she or he doesn’t see the office only as a function they hold but as a part of their whole personal life. For them it is a function that penetrates everything they do, in public as an office holder and in private life as well. Or even, they see the function as a personal fief, like a mediaeval lord who manages his personal estate. (see also my blog “Three ways to perform an office”) In his essay “Of managing one’s will” (Essays, Book III, 10) Montaigne tells us that it was not his style. There is nothing against performing an office with full dedication. Sometimes it is necessary to do so with your whole personality, he says. However, generally it is better to keep office and private life separate, as Montaigne did himself when he was mayor of Bordeaux. It is not only better for yourself, but if you cannot distance yourself from your office, it can even be harmful to the performance of your duties: “[The] sharpness and violence of [private] desires more hinder than they advance the execution of what we undertake; they fill us with impatience against slow or contrary events, and with heat and suspicion against those with whom we have to do. We never carry on that thing well by which we are prepossessed and led: ‘Impulse manages all things ill’, [as Statius says].” Someone who approaches his office rationally is more at ease and more open to new chances and opportunities and can better take the reins than the one who lets himself be swayed by emotions and passions: “In him who is intoxicated with this violent and tyrannical intention, we discover, of necessity, much imprudence and injustice; the impetuosity of his desire carries him away; these are rash motions, and, if fortune do not very much assist, of very little fruit. … Avarice has no greater impediment than itself; the more bent and vigorous it is, the less it rakes together.” Instead, so Montaigne explains to us, it is better to take things as they are and to adopt a philosophical attitude, and not to expect miracles, but to wait till a new opportunity arises.
Moderate and controlled behaviour finally brings more. And isn’t it so that “most of our business is farce”? That the whole world is a play in which we just play our part? Indeed, so Montaigne, but “as a borrowed personage. We must not make real essence of a mask and outward appearance; nor of a strange person, our own; we don’t know how to tell the skin and the shirt apart.” So the office holder (the shirt) and you as a private person (the skin) are two different beings. But how many office holders don’t see the difference and “cannot … distinguish the salutations made to themselves from those made to their commission, their train, or their mule”, as Montaigne puts it. When you greet Montaigne, the mayor of Bordeaux, it doesn’t need to imply that you greet Montaigne, the writer of the Essays, at the same time. However, many office holders “swell and puff up their souls, and their natural way of speaking, according to the height of their [offices]”, to paraphrase Montaigne. And it is such office holders who see criticizing the holder of the office as criticizing the person who holds the office. They burst into anger when this happens. But, so Montaigne, they who “extend their anger and hatred beyond the dispute in question, as most men do, show that they spring from some other occasion and private cause. … The reason is that they are not concerned in the common cause, because it is wounding to the state and general interest; but [they] are only nettled by reason of their particular concern. This is why they are so especially animated, and to a degree so far beyond justice and public reason…” The public serves the private, and they are considered the same.
Look around what’s happening in this world. Again Montaigne holds up a mirror to us.

Note
Here and there I have adapted the translation of Montaigne’s text.

Random quote
Impulses serve all things badly.

Publius Papinius Statius (ca 40-96)

Queueing

Although humans are animals, some kinds of behaviour are typical of humans and we don’t find them in other animals. It’s not surprising. If every kind of human behaviour were also found in other animals, what then would make humans human? (and similarly, what would make a certain animal that animal?) Okay, it could be the combination of behavioural characteristics, but I doubt whether it’s only this that makes humans human. For example, you are walking in the street and you lose your handkerchief. Then you hear someone behind you calling: “Sir, you have lost something”. Can you imagine that an animal would do something like that? Or have you ever seen a queue of animals waiting their turn? Indeed, sometimes animals are waiting for each other; for example, the great tits and blue tits that eat from the string with peanuts in my garden do. But in the animal world the general rule is “the strongest first”, while in the human world waiting rules are more subtle. Let me have a look at them.
Queueing or lining up can take place in many ways. In my blog “Cultural misunderstanding” I explained that queueing is not necessarily physical. It can also be mental, while it still is queueing: the waiting people simply watch when it is their turn without physically standing behind each other. Another alternative for queueing is giving numbered tickets to people as soon as they enter the waiting space, so that there is no need for people to stand behind each other to know who’s next. In this blog I’ll pay attention only to physical waiting lines and take it for granted that my explanation also applies to other kinds of waiting.
I think that the phenomenon of queueing is so common that it doesn’t need further clarification. Following David Fagundes, four rules for proper queuing are essential:
1) Form a line
2) No cutting
3) First come, first served
4) Wait your turn.
The first rule says that you must stand directly behind the last person who arrived. It is the basic form of queueing. More important is the second rule. It says that it is not allowed to cut the waiting line. You must wait till it is your turn to be served. If you don’t, you are at least frowned upon, or people make remarks about it, maybe they try to stop you, and in the extreme case it can lead to a fight. In other words, everybody in the queue claims the right to be served in the order of their spot in the queue (rule three), and cutting the line is seen as violating this rule. Nonetheless, sometimes rule three is ignored, while this is not seen as a case of line cutting. It can happen that a service person picks you from the line to treat your case before you have arrived first; disabled persons and pregnant women may be allowed to go to the top of the line; people whose case can be handled “within a minute” may ask to be served first; and the like. This is not seen as cutting the line if the other waiting people (or often the next to be served only) and/or the service person consent. Rule four says that you’ll forfeit your place in the line when you leave it. Also to this rule there are exceptions, for example, if you need to go to the toilet or, in a supermarket, if you are waiting to check out and you forgot to take something. Then you ask the person behind you in the queue for permission, which is usually automatically given with an affirmative look.
This briefly about what queueing involves. I’ll ignore the sanctions for not applying the queueing norms (see Fagundes), but such sanctions illustrate that from a sociological point of view queues can be seen as a kind of mini-society or mini-system with their own rules or “laws” in which those waiting are connected by the goal of waiting for the same service or whatever it is that they are waiting for. As in a “real” system or society, violations of the rules or laws may be sanctioned. However, a queue is a very loose society or system. You don’t belong to it anymore as soon as you have left it, and probably you’ll never recall anymore that you were lining up there, or it must be for a special reason. Why should you? Moreover, you must have committed a crime to be held responsible for your behaviour in the queue once you have left it. If someone cuts the line without consent, for instance, it can be very annoying at the moment it happens, and sometimes it leads to comments, reactions and exceptionally even to a row, but in the end it’s indecent behaviour and not a crime. Laws specifying line protocol and imposing penalties for cutting in are exceptional (Wikipedia describes such a case). Anyway, usually queueing people wait orderly and basically they stick to the rules. Queueing seems to be a phenomenon that exists in all cultures, though this doesn’t mean that in all cultures always and everywhere people line up when two or more people are waiting for the same. It depends on the situation. And not in all situations and everywhere people queue physically, and other queuing systems exist as well, as said.
I think that queueing is typically human, although probably it is not an innate but a cultural achievement. Sometimes, like in the animal world, power can give you priority in a waiting line. Authorities often can pass the line and go first, although, this is also a cultural phenomenon. In the Netherlands it is not so that a burgomaster or cabinet minister simply can go first, because he or she is a burgomaster or cabinet minister. There must be a special reason for that (like security measures). In other countries power counts.
Why do people queue in the absence of formal rules or laws? Several investigators have tried to answer this question (see Fagundes pp. 1191 ff). I think there is one main background reason: Human societies are so complicated, compared to animal societies, and waiting together with others is such a common phenomenon that situations of waiting easily would escalate and lead to serious disagreements if not fighting, if no cultural norms would have developed that regulate how to wait. An obvious norm is queuing.

Random quote
Meaning and sense are not ‘things’ that you can find somewhere. They are made by people.

Pieter Hoexum (1968-)

How to prepare a defeat

French monument for the victory in the First Battle of the Marne (5-12 September 1914) in the First World War. This victory stopped the German invasion and no longer allowed a quick German victory in the war against France.

When Germany invaded Belgium and France in August 1914, it thought that its soldiers would celebrate next Christmas at home, for the war would not last longer. However, the soldiers celebrated Christmas in the trenches, sometimes together with enemy soldiers. This war – the First World War – would last more than four years, and it ruined the German Empire. Also in later wars, it often happened that, before they started fighting, the initiators underestimated the length as well as the possible impact on themselves and their own country, with negative consequences if not outright defeat as the result. Think of the Vietnam War and the wars in Afghanistan. It seems that these mistakes are again made in the wars presently going on in the world. Who would dare to say that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a success, although on paper Russia should have been able to defeat Ukraine easily? Apparently more is needed to beat a seemingly weak enemy than a stronger army. Again and again we see that, as Monica Duffy Toft says: “Wars are rarely lost first on the battlefield. They are lost in leaders’ minds –when leaders misread what they and their adversaries can do, when their confidence substitutes for comprehension, and when the last war is mistaken for the next one.” But which false decisions if not mistakes can leaders make when they go to war? To gain insight into this, I googled the sentence “how to lose a war”. Below you find a compilation of what I found plus a few factors of my own based on the most recent political developments.

Key factors why a war is lost include:
- Failure of a strategy and lack of clear objectives. Initiating a war without a clear, realistic and achievable goal.
- Strategic miscalculation and overconfidence. Underestimating the opponent and its capability to defend itself and to counterattack. Relying on faulty intelligence or ignoring intelligence. Overestimating one’s own strengths and capabilities. Ignoring the advice of military and political experts and relying too much on the advice of those who are basically on your side. Ignoring dissident opinions. Ignoring warnings of experts of the unintended consequences of your actions, for example for the international markets and economy.
- Prolonged conflict and overreach. Engaging in long, drawn-out struggles that drain military and economic resources and the morale of your own population. Ignoring or underestimating the opposition against the war in your own country.
- Ignoring your allies. Not informing them about your plans, even if you don’t suppose them to participate. Asking them afterwards to correct your mistakes (which they may refuse because “it is not their war”). Not trying to get support from international institutions that might legitimize your actions, or otherwise not informing them about your intentions.
- Attempting to implement “democracy promotion” without local support. Trying to bring a regime change while the local population is mainly on your side but doesn’t have the means or organization to implement such a change and/or doesn’t know what to do for that.
- Alienating the local population and others on your side in or from the enemy country, even if they initially supported you. For example by destroying the infrastructure of the country and its economic capabilities, especially if this destruction will have negative long-term consequences.
- Misunderstanding local dynamics. Failing to appreciate the cultural, historical, and political landscape of the combat zone.
- Too hesitant, too limited use of means to achieve the war objectives. Inconstancy, changeability and capriciousness in the employment of your military and political and economic means.
- Underestimating the enemy’s will to resist.

In short, an initiated war is often lost by underestimating the complexity of the intervention and the enemy’s response. Especially, great powers hold the believe that their abilities will outweigh local complexities. The American senator J. William Fulbright (1905-1995) called it “the arrogance of war”. But even if a war has been well prepared, there still is what Carl von Clausewitz called the “fog of war”: The extreme uncertainty in situational awareness, intelligence, and communication experienced during military operations; the confusion regarding enemy capabilities and intentions. In the fog of war much goes wrong. It often makes a war unpredictable. And even if you have won on the battlefield, it may have made your country so much weaker that we call it a Cadmean victory.

Sources
- When I googled the sentence “how to lose a war”, first I got an AI made compilation of the most important factors that answered my question. However, such an AI survey is dynamic: The next time you google your question, you’ll get a somewhat or completely different reply. In my text I used what I found on 21 March 2026, about 11:00 p.m. This dynamic also made that I cannot refer to the sources this AI survey is based on.
- Amin Saikal, How to Lose a War. The Story of America’s Intervention in Afghanistan.
- Monica Duffy Toft, “How to lose a war”.