History isn’t the study of the past; it is the study of change. History teaches us what remains the same, what changes, and how things change.

What this crude analysis misses is that human power is never the outcome of individual initiative. Power always stems from cooperation between large numbers of humans.

Its defining feature is connection rather than representation,

happens in the universe, but knowing that E = mc² usually doesn’t resolve political disagreements or inspire people to make sacrifices for a common cause. Instead, what holds human networks together tends to be fictional stories, especially stories about intersubjective things like gods, money, and nations.

large-scale societies cannot exist without some mythology, but that doesn’t mean all mythologies are equal. To guard against errors and excesses, some mythologies have acknowledged their own fallible origin and included a self-correcting mechanism allowing humans to question and change the mythology. That’s the model of the U.S. Constitution, for e

But what exactly does “intrinsic goodness” mean? The most famous attempt to define an intrinsically good rule was made by Immanuel Kant, a contemporary of Clausewitz and Napoleon. Kant argued that an intrinsically good rule is any rule that I would like to make universal. According to this view, a person about to murder someone should stop and go t

This idea, sometimes called the counterspeech doctrine, is associated with the U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis, who wrote in Whitney v. California (1927) that the remedy to false speech is more speech and that in the long term free discussion is bound to expose falsehoods and fallacies.

Sherman Eager, an officer in the Lost Battalion, who decades after the war brought his children to see Cher Ami at the Smithsonian and told them, “You all owe your lives to that pigeon.” Whatever the facts may be, the story of the self-sacrificing winged savior proved irresistible.[8]

A fourth democratic principle is that surveillance systems must always leave room for both change and rest. In human history, oppression can take the form of either denying humans the ability to change or denying them the opportunity to rest. For example, the Hindu caste system was based on myths