blog post about history
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html
From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq's Full Story — Wait But Why
2014-09-12
Tim Urban
<div><div><p>If you’re not sure what <em>Odd Things in Odd Places</em> is and why I’m in Iraq by myself, <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/odd-things-odd-places-intro.html">here’s why</a>.</p>
<p>__________</p>
<p><strong>PDF: </strong>We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. You can buy it here:</p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-iraq"></a></p>
<p>Or see a preview <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/iraqs-full-story-preview.pdf">here</a>.</p>
<p>_______________</p>
<p>On the morning of Saturday, August 2nd, I got in a taxi in Erbil, the regional capital of Kurdish Iraq, and asked the driver to take me to the Khazir refugee camp.</p>
<p>This was a scary-ish thing to do.</p>
<p>The “scary” part is a result of the fact that the Khazir camp is outside of the borders of the somewhat autonomous Kurdish region, one of the only secure parts of the country.</p>
<p>The “ish” part comes from the fact that the Khazir camp, though outside of Kurdish borders, is still in an area currently controlled by the Peshmerga—the Kurdish army.</p>
<p>Iraq has been a scary place for a while now, for a number of reasons, but it’s currently <em>scary </em>in italics because of the terrorist group we’ve all gotten to know about in the past three months—ISIS.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Scary-Map1.png"></a></p>
<p>So, the cab driver, myself, and our two constricted assholes headed west towards Khazir.</p>
<p>After about 45 minutes, we crossed <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Iraq-Checkpoint.jpg">the checkpoint</a> that meant we were leaving the Kurdish region, and a few minutes later, right when my phone’s <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5041.png">blue dot</a> was starting to get <em>just</em> close enough to Mosul for my liking, I looked out the car’s right window and saw the camp:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5037.jpg"></a></p>
<p>We pulled in, spent a bunch of time convincing the camp officials and ourselves that I was a journalist, and eventually I was allowed in.</p>
<p>I didn’t have a plan, exactly, so I started walking through the long lines of tents, noting that the 118°F (48°C) temperature I had been suffering through all week must be almost lethal here, where the only escape was in a tent.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5053.jpg"></a></p>
<p>After a few minutes, I met a man named Kamil who spoke some English, and he invited me into his family’s tent. After talking with him a bit, I learned that it was actually a few families’ tent, and that there were 12 people living in it—five adults and seven children. There was electricity enough for a TV and a fan, and most of the mattresses were stacked on the side.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5049.jpg"></a></p>
<p>He told me that 12 people to a tent was common at the camp, and mentioned that his tent was actually about to move to 13, gesturing toward one of the women living there who was thoroughly pregnant.</p>
<p>Kamil was from Mosul, like everyone at the camp. Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city, only 30 miles west of the camp—and as of June 9th, an ISIS stronghold. After taking over, one of the first orders of business for ISIS was rounding up government workers for execution. Kamil, a police officer, was lucky to get out with his family before they got to him. When I asked him if he thought he’d return to Mosul at some point, he shook his head and said, “<em>Fuck</em> Mosul.”</p>
<p>As soon as he learned that I was going to be writing about my time in Iraq, he led me out of the tent to join him on a special Oh Okay Then I Want to Show You Exactly How Upsetting Everything Here Is So You Can Write About It and Tell Everyone Tour.</p>
<p>He walked me past the communal tap for drinking water, and said people used that water to clean themselves too, having not seen a shower since they arrived.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5097.jpg"></a></p>
<p>He showed me multiple babies that had been born at the camp.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5094.jpg"></a></p>
<p>We popped into a bunch of different tents, one whose fan had been stolen (remember that it’s 118°), and another that had 15 people living in it. He showed me where the shared toilets drain out into a system that flows openly through the camp. He told me that a lot of the families didn’t have enough food and that people were getting sick more and more often and remaining untreated. And these were all people who two months earlier were living their normal lives in their normal homes. Remember the time I complained about anything? That was dumb.</p>
<p>When Kamil introduced me to a man whose two brothers had been executed by ISIS, I assumed that had to be the tour’s horrifying grand finale, but he wasn’t done yet. He brought me into another tent where he introduced me to a woman living there, explaining to her that I was his new writer friend. Without missing a beat, she handed me these:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5060.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Whatever I was holding, it was something bad, and I didn’t want to ask what it was. I asked. He pointed across the tent to a little boy and explained that I was holding part of his <em>skull</em>.</p>
<p>The boy was an eight-year-old named Mohammad. Their family’s house had been bombed in the middle of the night during the first days of the ISIS takeover and subsequent Iraqi government airstrikes. I never learned why or if they were specifically targeted. But the end result was that this healthy little eight-year-old—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5084.jpg"></a></p>
<p>—was now this brain-damaged, partially deaf, blind in one eye eight-year-old with digestive difficulties:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_5088.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The goal of this post will be to understand <em>why </em>this sickening thing happened to this little boy—to <em>really </em>understand what’s going on in that country—better than you do now.</p>
<p>And if we really want to wrap our head around things, we have to start way, way back—in 570 AD.</p>
<p>_______________</p>
<p><b>Ingredient 1: An Ancient Schism</b></p>
<p>In 570, a long-named baby was born to a prominent family in Mecca, a city on the west coast of what is currently Saudi Arabia—Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim. Today he’s just known as Muhammad.<a href="#footnote-1-2349">1</a> <sup>← click this</sup></p>
<p>Muhammad never had a father—his father died six months before his birth—and his mother died when he was six years old.<a href="#footnote-2-2349">2</a> <sup>← again again</sup></p>
<p>After the death of his mother, Muhammad lived with his grandfather, and when <em>he</em> died two years later, Muhammad was transferred to his uncle, a merchant. With his uncle as his mentor, Muhammad became a merchant himself. Not too much is known about Muhammad’s young adult years, but one thing we’re pretty sure of is that he married a 40-year-old widow named Khadijah when he was 25 (he’d have multiple more wives later in his life). They would go on to have four daughters and two sons, only one of whom survived into full adulthood—his daughter Fatimah.</p>
<p>It wasn’t until Muhammad was 40 that his life started getting strange. He had gotten into the habit of going up to a mountain every year for a couple weeks to be alone, meditate, and pray. It was on one of these solo retreats in 610 AD that Muhammad was for the first time visited by the angel Gabriel.<a href="#footnote-3-2349">3</a> As the story goes, Gabriel recited messages to Muhammad that were directly from God, which Muhammad memorized. Over the years, Gabriel would continue to visit Muhammad with messages, Muhammad continued to commit them to memory, and later, he would recite the memories to his followers, who would then write them down, and that became the Quran.</p>
<p>Three years after the first visit from Gabriel, in 613, Muhammad began preaching the messages to the public, in his hometown of Mecca. This did not go well. At the time, Mecca was largely made up of polytheistic tribes who worshipped nature-related gods and goddesses, and one of Muhammad’s main messages was that there was one god and any idols to other gods should be destroyed, which was awkward for everybody. People started reacting violently to Muhammad’s growing influence, killing some of his followers, and they may have killed Muhammad too had he not belonged to a fancy family. But in 622, when Muhammad learned of an assassination plot against him, he and his followers decided to bail on Mecca and head to the nearby city of Medina. This journey is called the Hijra in Muslim tradition and it’s celebrated on the first day of the Muslim year.</p>
<p>Muhammad and his followers would spend the next eight years fighting off attempts to destroy them from Mecca and other places, and often being ruthless themselves with those who posed a threat to Islam or refused to convert. The thing a lot of people don’t know is that in addition to being a spiritual leader, Muhammad was, in essence, the general of an army of followers and a tremendously effective strategist in growing and holding on to his leadership position in the face of lots of hostile competition.</p>
<p>Things came to a head in 625 when the Meccans, who were increasingly losing prestige and support as Muhammad’s following continued to grow, launched an attack on Medina and defeated the Muslims. But five years later, Muhammad and a 10,000 man army marched into Mecca and conquered it for good. By the time Muhammad died in 632, Islam had spread through the whole Arabian Peninsula.</p>
<p><strong>The Muslim World Splits</strong></p>
<p>The new Muslim world enjoyed 20 years of internal unity until Muhammad died, and then that was the end of that, forever.</p>
<p>The problem is that Muhammad didn’t appoint a successor before he died, or if he did, he didn’t get the word out to everyone. And because he had no living sons, there was no obvious answer. Here’s what happened:</p>
<p>Group A thought that Muhammad wanted the elite members of the Muslim community to choose a fitting leader, or caliph, and whenever that caliph died, the elite would choose the next leader, and so on. And Group A decided a great first caliph to succeed Muhammad would be the father of one of Muhammad’s wives, Abu Bakr (we’ll call him Abu).</p>
<p>Group B disagreed. They thought Muhammad would have told them that only God can choose the successor to lead the Muslim world, and that could only happen by keeping things in the family. To them, all signs pointed to Muhammad’s cousin and the husband of his daughter Fatimah, Ali ibn Abi Talib (Ali). </p>
<p>Group A was bigger and it won.</p>
<p>So father-in-law Abu took over as Caliph, while son-in-law Ali watched from the sidelines and Group B seethed.</p>
<p>When Abu died of illness two years after taking over, another friend of Muhammad’s, Umar, took over, having been appointed by Abu before his death. Umar ruled for ten years before he was assassinated by the Persians he had just conquered. Abu had also appointed Umar’s successor, Uthman, who ruled for 12 years before <em>he </em>was assassinated. All the while, Group B is helpless and frustrated.</p>
<p>But then, the elite decided the next and fourth caliph should be Ali—Group B’s original guy—and for two seconds, everyone was happy.</p>
<p>Five years later, Ali was assassinated, and when his eldest son Hassan became the fifth caliph, he was quickly overpowered by an aggressive rebel force led by Muawiyah, who coerced Hassan out of power and became the sixth caliph—and Group A and Group B would never reconcile again. While Muawiyah was the first of a long dynasty of caliphs, Group B tells a different story. To them, the leaders are more special than merely elected caliphs—they’re divinely chosen <em>imams</em>, and the way they see it, after an annoying three-caliph delay, their first imam was finally in power when Ali got the job. His eldest son Hassan was their second imam, and when Muawiyah kicked him out, Group B threw their support behind Ali’s younger son, Husayn—their third imam.</p>
<p>Husayn, Group B’s third imam, ended up being beheaded by Yazid, Group A’s seventh caliph (Muawiyah’s successor), and so Group B moved onto Husayn’s son as their fourth imam, while Group A continued to ignore Group B and support their caliphs.</p>
<p>This was over 1300 years ago, and yet today’s Muslim world is still completely divided over it, and so much of today’s Middle East strife is centered around this ancient split.</p>
<p>Group A are Sunnis and Group B are Shias.</p>
<p>Today’s Sunni-Shia tensions are about a lot of things, but at their very core is what happened in the 7th century. Sunni Muslims believe in their line of caliphs, and don’t believe them to be chosen by God, and Shia Muslims reject the first three caliphs and instead believe in the line of divinely-chosen imams starting with Ali, revering in particular Ali<a href="#footnote-4-2349">4</a> and his son and the third imam, Husayn. Both sects agree that Muhammad is the final prophet, both follow the Five Pillars of Islam, and both view the Quran as the holy book—but Shia are less unquestionably accepting of the Quran in its entirety, because they believe certain parts were recounted by people other than the imams.</p>
<p>Here’s a chart to help clear up all of this confusion:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/caliphs-and-imams.png"></a></p>
<p>None of this stopped the early caliphs from conquering an insane amount of the world—by 750, just 140 years after Muhammad’s first revelation, the Muslim world had expanded its reach to a large portion of where it exists today.<a href="#footnote-5-2349">5</a><a href="#footnote-6-2349">6</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Early-Expansion-of-Islam1.png"></a></p>
<p>But as Islam swept the Earth, this early schism only deepened—it was here to stay.</p>
<p><strong>Ingredient 2: Straight Lines</strong></p>
<p>The land of Iraq has the coolest nickname of any land anywhere—The Cradle of Civilization—and for good reason. Ancient Iraqi history is as impressive as it gets. In particular, the fertile strip of Iraq in between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesopotamia#mediaviewer/File:N-Mesopotamia_and_Syria_english.svg">Mesopotamia</a> is often credited with the birth of writing (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#mediaviewer/File:Trilingual_inscription_of_Xerxes,_Van,_1973.JPG">cuneiform</a>), the invention of the wheel, some of the earliest sailboats, calendars, maps, schools, and the origin of the 60-minute hour and 60-second minute.<a href="#footnote-7-2349">7</a> 3,000 years later, when Alexander the Great conquered half the world, he chose that land to be his capital, selecting Babylon in particular for its treasures and its critical location between Europe and Asia. 1,000 years after that, the head of the great Abbasid Muslim dynasty built Baghdad on the same land to be the capital of the vast Muslim world, and for the next 500 years (until the Mongols stomped on it), Baghdad reigned as a world hub of learning and commerce and for a time, was the world’s largest city. There may be nowhere in the world with a history as rich as the land of Iraq.</p>
<p>The <em>nation</em> of Iraq, on the other hand, was created by two dicks with a pencil and ruler, and its history is mostly unpleasant.</p>
<p>By the beginning of the 20th century, the land of Iraq had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years.<a href="#footnote-8-2349">8</a> There were several ethnic and religious groups on the land, left mostly free to keep to themselves and separate from the others. But when Germany and Co. took on France, Britain, and Russia in World War I, the Ottoman Empire elected to be part of the “and Co.”, which left them ultimately on the losing side. Bye bye Ottoman Empire.</p>
<p>During the war, Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France got together with a pencil, a ruler, and a bottle of whiskey, and took to the map, carving the Ottoman Empire into nations and determining where their two nations and Russia would get to have spheres of influence after the war if they won.<a href="#footnote-9-2349">9</a>
</p><p>Regarding the whole “several ethnic and religious groups” thing and the natural boundaries of separation that had developed between them over centuries, George-Picot famously remarked, “Whatevs,” and with pencil in hand, Sykes is quoted as saying, “I should like to draw a line from the <em>e</em> in Acre to the last <em>k</em> in Kirkuk.”<a href="#footnote-10-2349">10</a> Here’s what they came up with:<a href="#footnote-11-2349">11</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Picot-Sykes-Agreement.png"></a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-25299553">BBC</a></p>
<p>The thing about creating borders using a map, pencil, and ruler, is that it’s a terrible way to create borders. If you look at organically-created borders around the world—those that were formed over time by the local populations, based usually on ethnic and religious divisions, and often demarcated by mountains, rivers, or other natural barriers—they’re squiggly and messy. What’s a clear and satisfying straight-line-on-a-map border for imperial powers trying to keep things clean and simple for themselves is a complete disaster on the ground across the world where the actual place is.</p>
<p>When borders are drawn this way, two bad things happen: 1) Single ethnic or religious groups are sliced apart into separate countries, and 2) Different and often unfriendly groups are shoved into a nation together and told to share resources, get along, and bond together over national pride for a just-made-up nation—which inevitably leads to one group taking power and oppressing the others, resulting in bloody rebellions, coups, and sectarian violence. This isn’t that complicated.<a href="#footnote-12-2349">12</a>
</p><p>But since it wasn’t really their problem, Sykes and George-Picot just went ahead with it, and over the next few years, precise new borders were drawn, giving birth to modern day Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait. Here was Iraq’s new situation:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/border-problem.png"></a></p>
<p>Can’t see why there’d be any issue here.</p>
<p><strong>A Tight Lid</strong></p>
<p>For any of you readers considering creating a new, tense nation of ethnic and religious groups who don’t like each other, I’ve been researching this shit all month and I have advice for you:</p>
<p>Your new nation is like a bubbling soup inside a pressure cooker and it’s gonna spew itself all over the kitchen unless you have one critical thing that can keep things in order: a tight lid.</p>
<p>The nation version of a tight lid can be either a strong western occupying power or an iron fist dictator with a scary military machine at his whim—without one of these, your nation will fall apart.<a href="#footnote-13-2349">13</a> Email me if you have any questions.<a href="#footnote-14-2349">14</a>
</p><p>The new nation of Iraq combined Ingredient 1 (Sunni and Shia Arabs living in the same area) with Ingredient 2 (a border that forces them into a nation together, along with a large group of Kurds) to create a tense pressure cooker.</p>
<p>Things were hot from the beginning, when the new Iraqis revolted against the British occupation in 1920. The British acted as a lid and crushed the revolt. After Iraq achieved independence and the British lid left, a series of military commanders took over the lid duties, stomping a number of revolts and killing each other in coups from time to time. In 1968, the Sunni Ba’ath Party took over, under the leadership of new president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and his ambitious vice president and general, Saddam Hussein.</p>
<p>By 1979, Saddam’s influence had grown to the point where he was kind of running the show, and finally he went to al-Bakr and was like, “You know what two cool things are? Murder and retirement. Ya know? I thought maybe you’d want one of those? And you could choose?” and al-Bakr stepped down, bringing Saddam Hussein, the tightest lid of them all, to power.</p>
<p>A lot of things sucked about the 24 year rule of Saddam. He started off in typical dictator fashion, calling together all the senior ranking members of government, and then reading out the names of those who were thought to be disloyal, 22 of whom were later taken out back and shot. He all but legalized “honor killings”—i.e. the tradition sometimes found in places run by Sharia Law whereby a man may kill a female relative if she dishonors her family, often without facing criminal charges. And he gave the world Uday Hussein.<a href="#footnote-15-2349">15</a>
</p><p>But Saddam’s worst crimes happened during the wars he started and their aftermath.</p>
<p>Worried that the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran would inspire rebellion in Iraq’s large Shia majority, Saddam launched into the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which killed over 100,000 Iraqis.<a href="#footnote-16-2349">16</a> Iraq’s Kurds, who have never wanted to be a part of Iraq, seized the opportunity in the chaos to try to form their own autonomous country, at times receiving support from the Iranians. The attempt failed, and toward the end of the war, Saddam embarked on the al-Anfal Campaign, a systematic genocide of the Kurdish north. One of the worst moments came in 1988, just as the war was winding down, when residents of the city Halabja were overcome by the smell of sweet apples after war planes flew by overhead, and then people and animals started dropping dead all over the city from gas poisoning. The gassing caused more deaths than 9/11. The entire al-Anfal campaign killed between 50,000 and 180,000 Kurds.</p>
<p>While we’re here, let’s pause for a second and talk about the Kurds.</p>
<div>
<p><strong>The Iraqi Kurdistan Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>This whole post was supposed to be about Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish region in northeastern Iraq. But when I decided to go another direction, Kurdistan got left out. As a consolation, Kurdistan is being featured in Wait But Why’s first ever blue “aside” box (if you don’t see a blue box, try clearing your cache). Here are some things about Kurdistan:</p>
<ul>
<li>Let’s start by clearing one thing up: The Kurds are an ethnic group, like the Arabs. Kurds are a number of religions, but most of them are Sunni Muslims. So when people talk about Iraq’s groups and they say “Sunni, Shia, and Kurds,” what they mean is “Arab Sunni, Arab Shia, and Kurdish Sunni.”</li>
<li>Kurds speak Kurdish, though many also speak Arabic as a second language.</li>
<li>Almost no ethnic group is a bigger victim of imperial ruler-pencil border drawing than the Kurds. Check out this map of the Kurdish population (in red) and how horribly it’s been cut apart by borders:</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Kurdistan-Cut-Apart.jpg"></a></p>
<ul>
<li>The end result of the artificial borders is that despite being the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East (after Arabs, Persians, and Turks), Kurds are now minority populations in four countries, making up roughly 20% of Turkey and Iraq, 15% of Syria, and 10% of Iran.<a href="#footnote-17-2349">17</a> Kurds are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without a state.</li>
<li>Iraqi Kurds were granted semi-autonomy in 1970, and today, Kurdistan has its own government, army (the Peshmerga), and (highly disputed) borders. But it also plays a role in the Iraq government and is part of Iraq. It’s confusing.</li>
<li>If Iraqi Kurdistan were its own nation, it would be about the size of Switzerland.</li>
<li>Kurdistan is on the liberal, moderate side of the Islamic world and is generally pro-West.</li>
<li>Kurdistan is normally totally safe to visit (right now might be an exception), and its tourism industry was on the rise—in the first half of 2014 alone, they received over one million tourists—but the industry has seen a sharp decline of late, for obvious reasons.</li>
</ul>
<p>Some notes from my visit:</p>
<ul>
<li>The people are outlandishly nice and sweet and friendly. One example: On no fewer than five occasions, I went up to a street stand or store to buy something small like a bottle of water, and the person working there would see I was a foreigner and ask me where I was from and how I liked Kurdistan. After we talked, I’d take my money out to buy the thing I came for, and they would adamantly refuse to accept it and tell me it was their gift, even after protests from me.</li>
<li>This wasn’t a surprise. Iraq is the 14th Muslim country I’ve been to,<a href="#footnote-18-2349">18</a> and I’ve gotten used to a very specific kind of Muslim hospitality and generosity in those countries that I haven’t experienced as consistently in other places.</li>
<li>There are a lot of <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_4967.jpg">serious-looking men</a> sipping on tiny glasses of tea, which I enjoyed.</li>
<li>They have <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_4973.jpg">cool candy</a>.</li>
<li>Erbil, the capital, is pretty modern—I would sometimes be in <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_4965.jpg">a fancy mall</a> or <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_4989.jpg">a German-run bar</a> and I’d have to remind myself, “I’m in <em>Iraq</em> right now.”</li>
<li>I talked to a lot of people there, and something that everyone <em>badly </em>wants is an independent Kurdistan. They’ve wanted this for a century, and it seems like it could really happen sometime not that far away.</li>
<li>The people I spoke to were generally pro-US, but they’re not thrilled with Obama. This is mainly because the US in general has not been supportive of Kurdish independence—I’ve read about why, and it seems to be a combination of a few geopolitical reasons, one of which is that an Iraq without the Kurdish part is much more likely to become a Shia-dominated Iranian ally and pawn.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>Anyway, back to Saddam, who barely had time to take a shit after the Iran-Iraq War before starting the Persian Gulf War by invading Kuwait for its delicious oil reserves. This, as I learned from my third grade teacher, did not go well for Saddam, and again, Iraq’s oppressed groups, the Shia and the Kurds, tried to take advantage of the situation by attempting to overthrow Saddam. Saddam responded by tightening the lid and crushing the uprisings, killing 80,000 – 230,000 people in the process.<a href="#footnote-19-2349">19</a>
</p><p>Saddam was a brutal ruler, but for the most part, under his iron fist, Iraq was a stable country. We all know what happens next.</p>
<p><strong>2003: Off Comes the Lid</strong></p>
<p>Say what you want about the Bush Administration and their decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam, but one thing is for sure: They were very, very wrong when they thought it would be a quick and easy war.</p>
<p>They knew they were removing a lid, but they seemed to think it was off a tupperware container of cookies, not a pressure cooker. And their plan to replace the wrought iron lid with a fresh sheet of democracy cellophane would have worked fine if it were a tupperware container of cookies. Just not if it were a pressure cooker.</p>
<p>So there’s the US, suddenly mired in hell and chaos for eight years, trying to fix a situation they weren’t prepared to fix, and which would ultimately be the Iraqi people’s problem, not theirs. Speaking of the Iraqi people, it’s time for another blue box.</p>
<div>
<p><strong>The Life in Baghdad Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>The people I got to know the best during my time in Kurdistan were three brothers from Baghdad who were visiting Kurdistan. They were born and raised in Baghdad, had lived there through the whole war, and spoke near-perfect English. I was ecstatic to find them, and spent two consecutive nights talking to them and asking them questions. Here are some things I learned:</p>
<ul>
<li>Living under Saddam was, unsurprisingly, horrible. You never dared say anything bad about Saddam or the government, even in private. You were careful who you crossed—if you insulted a kid in class who turned out to have parents in the Ba’ath party, your parents could end up in jail, or worse. “Voting” meant “vote for Saddam or die.” No one could travel. It sounds a lot like <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/20-things-i-learned-while-i-was-in.html">modern day North Korea</a>.</li>
<li>So it makes sense that they told me everyone was happy when the US invaded and ousted the Husseins. People mock the Bush Administration’s claim that they’d be greeted as liberators, but it seems that that was the case, at least for everyone these guys knew.</li>
<li>They continued to be happy about the war until about 2006, the peak of the violent civil war, when they said it had been unbearably scary to live there. These days, things are almost as terrible, and when I asked them if they wished that Saddam had never been overthrown, they couldn’t really answer. Two awful options. They don’t feel at all optimistic that things will improve in the future.</li>
<li>That said, outsiders imagine that living in Baghdad was a sea of constant death over the last ten years, while in fact, none of the three of them knew anyone who had died. It was a horrific decade to be there, but most people there have lived their lives unharmed.</li>
<li>Living in Baghdad, they hear a bomb go off almost every day—it’s gotten so common that when one goes off, people don’t even break in their conversation. They said the bombs are Sunni extremists bombing Shia people, or the other way around, and it’s a constant cycle of action and retaliation. Even though it’s unlikely that they’ll get caught in the line of fire, they never know if a bomb will strike where they are.</li>
<li>They’re required to carry around their ID card, which has a bunch of personal information on it, including the name of their religion and the name of their father and grandfather.</li>
<li>One thing that’s gotten more extreme since the Saddam era is a prevailing conservative ideology. Homosexuality is often punished by death by stoning, and police, they said, will turn their heads the other way when this happens. People have even been stoned to death for having <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/10/us-iraq-emo-killings-idUSBRE8290CY20120310">emo clothes or haircuts</a>. This wasn’t as bad during the Saddam era, they said, and is now a result of the empowerment of ultra-conservative Shia militia.</li>
<li>Oddly, given the above point, I noticed a lot of pairs of men holding hands or being cuddly together. Same story in Nigeria, where homosexuality is punishable by 14 years in prison. The reverse of American culture on both sides of things.</li>
<li>Here’s how dating works in Iraq: You meet a girl you like, you wait a bunch of years, and then you tell her you love her one day. She will evaluate and either decide to marry you or not. Once you’re married you can be alone together for the first time. Unslutty.</li>
<li>I asked about nightlife, and it sounds pretty grim. There are nightclubs, they said, but no one normal can enter them. You have to “know someone,” they said—and apparently, a lot of the people inside are bad men discussing violent plots.</li>
<li>For all the hardships in their lives, a lot of things are normal. They have smartphones, fast internet, cars, and they’re all in university or already graduated.</li>
<li>A lot of people they know have emigrated to Michigan, which apparently has a sizable Iraqi population. Random.</li>
<li>These three brothers, along with a few others, have started something called World Peace Day in Iraq with celebrations every September 21st. They were the first in the country to have the guts to do this (their celebrations are a target), but it’s caught on, and now the annual gatherings, which include people of many faiths and ethnicities, happen in five Iraqi cities and involve hundreds of people. Brave dudes.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>Anyway, as unfortunate as the bloody years of US occupation were for everyone involved, by being there, the US was acting as a lid of some kind. While the US was there, nothing <em>really </em>bad could happen. Then, in 2011, the US left.</p>
<p><strong>A Perfect Storm</strong></p>
<p>Instability is the fertile soil that bad, scary things grow out of, and when the US left, Iraq had a new prime minister, a new government, a new and unfamiliar constitution, and an amateur, recently-trained army—not a stable situation.</p>
<p>The power pendulum had also just swung for the first time in decades. Iraq’s population is 55% Arab Shia, 18% Arab Sunni, and 21% Kurd (with others making up 6%). And despite being the smallest group of the three, Iraq’s Arab Sunnis have been in power over the other groups for almost the country’s whole history. For any living Iraqis, a Sunni government and suppressed Shia majority is all they know. Suddenly, in 2006, Iraq had a new government, led by a hard-line Shia, Nouri al-Maliki. A logical observer of history would probably suggest that it would be a wise move for al-Maliki to be inclusive of Sunnis, regardless of the past, since, as noted above, the country was not in a stable situation. Al-Maliki did just the opposite, arresting Sunni leaders, discriminating against Sunni civilians, and targeting Sunnis disproportionately for torture and violence. All of this exacerbated the instability by making the government less unified and competent, creating rage in the Sunni populous,<a href="#footnote-20-2349">20</a> and weakening the loyalty of a military, part of which hates its own government. The anti-al-Maliki feelings are so strong that many normally-peaceful Sunnis <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/in-baghdad-middle-class-sunnis-say-they-prefer-militants-to-maliki/2014/07/11/fa0b66a7-1b09-409a-a5ed-ab580bc93a4a_story.html">find themselves</a> sympathizing or even supporting violent anti-government terrorists.</p>
<p>The power switch from Sunni to Shia has broader implications. If you look at the whole world of Islam, it’s clear that Sunni Islam is the vast majority (around 90%) and Shia Islam (around 10%) is just a small side branch:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Sunni-Shia-Uyan-Map.jpg"></a></p>
<p>But when you look at the heart of the Middle East more closely, you can see why things are so complicated.</p>
<p>Here’s what the Middle East looked like when Saddam was in power versus when al-Maliki took over:<a href="#footnote-21-2349">21</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Geopolitics-1.png"></a></p>
<p>Suddenly, Shias are in charge of countries all the way from Iran to the Mediterranean, creating a kind of Shia Axis. This is a great thing for the world’s largest Shia nation, Iran, and it scares the shit out of the region’s most powerful Sunni nation, Saudi Arabia. And what’s been happening is Saudi Arabia and Iran engaging in what is essentially a Cold War, vying for broader power, with conflicts like the Syrian Civil War and the current mess in Iraq serving as proxy wars that can tip the balance in the larger struggle. This is why Iran wants ISIS (a Sunni group) to disappear and why you keep hearing that the US and Iran might actually agree on something (though for different reasons). This is also why the Saudis have been rumored to have funded Sunni resistance movements in both Syria and Iraq, even possibly directing funds to groups like ISIS.<a href="#footnote-22-2349">22</a>
</p><p>Yet another factor playing into the trouble is the simultaneous instability of adjacent Iraq and Syria—this creates an unstable <em>border, </em>as well as a situation where the terrorist-fighting front is disjointed and without a shared national narrative to fight for. It also allows a terrorist group to hide in one country from trouble in the other.</p>
<p>Finally, western powers often provide a lid from afar when things erupt somewhere—but in this case, those powers have been gun shy since they <em>just </em>got out of a hideous war in the area and really <em>really </em>want to avoid getting involved. Up until Obama’s Mid-September speech, the US has done everything possible to avoid getting involved.</p>
<p>When you add this all together—an unstable and divided new government with an amateur, questionably-loyal army and an angry minority population who feels sympathy for anyone who will resist the government; the interests of a giant neighbor, Saudi Arabia, aligned with a government overthrow; a civil war next door; and a group of western powers who have been determined to stay out—you have the perfect storm for the fiercest of terrorist groups to emerge from the fringe and conquer.</p>
<p><strong>ISIS</strong></p>
<p>The beginnings of ISIS<a href="#footnote-23-2349">23</a>—a Sunni jihadist group—can be traced back to 1999, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist, started the group because he was pissed off about a lot of things. After Zarqawi swore allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004, this evolved into what became known as “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and was one of those shadowy insurgent groups you kept reading about the US fighting during the war. When insurgent activity died down after the US troop surge in 2007, ISIS seemed on the decline and disappeared from relevance for a bit.</p>
<div><p></p><p>Al-Baghdadi</p></div>
<p>In 2010, after ISIS’s second leader was assassinated, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—a former scholar of Islamic studies<a href="#footnote-24-2349">24</a> and a US war prisoner back in 2004<a href="#footnote-25-2349">25</a>—took over and got the group back on track. He replenished their partially-killed-off leadership with dozens of Saddam’s old Ba’athist military personnel, who brought key experience to the group. Then in 2011, when the Syrian Civil War broke out, ISIS joined in as a rebel force<a href="#footnote-26-2349">26</a>—which helped to train and battle-harden the group. ISIS’s behavior in Syria was so brutal and severe that they even started creeping out the other bad guy groups, including al-Qaeda, who finally had a tantrum in early 2014 and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/al-qaeda-disavows-any-ties-with-radical-islamist-isis-group-in-syria-iraq/2014/02/03/2c9afc3a-8cef-11e3-98ab-fe5228217bd1_story.html">cut all ties</a> with ISIS.</p>
<p>Up until early June 2014, only those who were carefully following the news knew about ISIS. But that’s when everything changed.</p>
<p>On June 5th, just hours after I purchased my non-refundable flight to Iraq, ISIS stormed into the country, taking control of the border, and started systematically conquering towns in the western part of the nation. And suddenly, everyone had heard of ISIS.</p>
<p>Two things were especially shocking about ISIS’s advance into Iraq. First, the horrifying, Genghis Khan-style way they conducted business—i.e. immediately round up and execute all men of authority, in this case anyone who was ever on the government payroll, and then execute anyone else who resisted their takeover.<a href="#footnote-27-2349">27</a> Second, the fact that in city after city ISIS attacked, the Iraqi military <em>would flee the scene</em>. This was partially because they were horrified of ISIS and partially because, as mentioned above, the Sunni members of the army weren’t that into fighting against a Sunni group to defend a government they hated. So western Iraq was folding quickly to ISIS, and by June 9th, they had captured Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city.</p>
<p>The area of Syria and Iraq they had conquered (and are still in control of) is the size of Belgium. Al-Qaeda never conquered anything—they just killed people. So how did ISIS do it? In addition to the perfect storm of factors discussed above, including far more tacit support from masses of civilians than al-Qaeda ever had, ISIS has three qualities that make them so effective:</p>
<p><strong>1) They’re brutal. </strong>No regard for human life is a helpful quality when trying to conquer a nation. <a href="https://www.es.amnesty.org/uploads/media/Iraq_ethnic_cleansing_final_formatted.pdf">This Amnesty International report</a> details real accounts of ISIS brutality so scary it doesn’t seem real. An example of an excerpt in the report:</p>
<p><em>A witness to one such mass killing in Solagh, a village south-east of Sinjar city, told Amnesty International that on the morning of 3 August, as he was trying to flee towards Mount Sinjar, he saw vehicles with IS fighters in them approaching, and managed to conceal himself. From his hiding place he saw them take some civilians from a house in the western outskirts of Solagh: </em></p>
<p><em>“A white Toyota pick-up stopped by the house of my neighbour, Salah Mrad Noura, who raised a white flag to indicate they were peaceful civilians. The pick-up had some 14 IS men on the back. They took out some 30 people from my neighbour’s house: men, women and children. They put the women and children, some 20 of them, on the back of another vehicle which had come, a large white Kia, and marched the men, about nine of them, to the nearby wadi [dry river bed]. There they made them kneel and shot them in the back. They were all killed; I watched from my hiding place for a long time and none of them moved. I know two of those killed: my neighbour Salah Mrad Noura, who was about 80 years old, and his son Kheiro, aged about 45 or 50.”</em></p>
<p>ISIS has officially been the deadliest terrorist group in history. In a tool that maps out the activity of the world’s most prominent terrorist groups, when you filter by “Most Victims,” ISIS comes up first, despite being around for less than a decade (their death count is more than double al-Qaeda’s lifetime total). The below screenshot of the tool shows terrorist groups ranked from most total killings (on the top left) to least (on the bottom right). Each mini-chart shows activity over time, with the red and yellow bars representing deaths and wounded, respectively:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Terrorism-Activity-Graphs.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>2) They’re sophisticated.</strong> ISIS functions like a well-run company—it knows how to recruit (ISIS forces are <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/islamic-state-50000-fighters-syria-2014819184258421392.html">supposedly</a> up to 50,000 in Syria and 30,000 in Iraq), it knows how to fundraise, and it’s incredibly organized. ISIS produces a thorough and professional annual report that details its killings and conquests in the same way a company would report on its revenue and gross margin. Here’s a chilling graphic from their <a href="http://azelin.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/al-binc481-magazine-1.pdf">2013 report</a> breaking down their various methods for the year’s 7,681 attacks:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/ISIS-report-2013_0.jpg"></a></p>
<p>They’re also pros at social media. Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadis at the Washington Institute, <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/69e70954-f639-11e3-a038-00144feabdc0.html?%E2%80%94ftcamp=crm/email/2014617/nbe/AsiaMorningHeadlines/product#axzz3A20GKJTZ">said that</a> when it comes to social media, ISIS is “probably more sophisticated than most US companies.”</p>
<p><strong>3) They’re incredibly rich. </strong><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/15/iraq-isis-arrest-jihadists-wealth-power">According to</a> Iraqi intelligence, ISIS has assets worth $2 billion, making it by far the richest terrorist group in the world. Most of this money was seized after the capture of Mosul, including hundreds of millions of US dollars from Mosul’s central bank. On top of that, they’ve taken oil fields and are reportedly making $3 million per day selling oil on the black market, with even more money coming in through donations, extortions, and ransom. ISIS has also gotten ahold of an upsetting amount of high-caliber, US-made weapons and tanks that were for the use of the Iraqi army but left behind when the army fled. They’ve even <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/world/middleeast/iraq.html?_r=0">gotten their hands on</a> nuclear material that they found at Mosul University.</p>
<p>On June 29th, ISIS just fully went for it and proclaimed itself a caliphate—i.e. a global Islamic state—and commanded all the world’s Muslims to obey Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the grand caliph. Those living in ISIS-captured cities are getting a taste of what life in the new caliphate is like:</p>
<ul>
<li>Women have about as many rights as a goldfish, barely allowed to leave the house and forbidden from showing their faces in public.</li>
<li>No smoking ever, and also no tampering with or disabling the smoke detector in the airplane lavatory.</li>
<li>If they’re not just rounded up and executed on the spot, Christians and other non-Muslims are forced to convert to Islam, pay a hefty non-Muslim tax, become a refugee, or die. The doors of Christian houses are marked with a ن, a symbol that signifies that they’re Christian. Nazi-esque.</li>
<li><a href="http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2014/07/25/Iraq-NGO-ISIS-likely-to-implement-FGM-fatwa.html">Some reports say</a> a fatwa (an Islamic law ruling by an authority) was issued declaring that all women between the ages of 11 and 46 would undergo genital mutilation, a tradition meant to suppress a woman’s sexual desire in order to discourage “immoral behavior.”<a href="#footnote-28-2349">28</a></li>
</ul>
<p>As for future goals, the short term goal is to establish an Islamic nation in the areas it currently controls, with some expansion of the boundaries. In the medium term, al-Baghdadi <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1uLIcCwsn0#t=1m7s">has declared that</a> “this blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes–Picot conspiracy”—i.e. until those pencil and ruler lines drawn after WWI are gone and all the nations are part of the new caliphate. In the long run, ISIS wants to expand its caliphate to the reaches of the first Muslim dynasty in 750 AD, and beyond:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/article-2674736-1F46221200000578-100_634x381.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Some people have argued that this map wasn’t made by ISIS, but rather by their supporters. Even if that’s so, al-Baghdadi’s ambitions certainly seem to match, and exceed, those on that map. In July, al-Baghdadi <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10939235/Rome-will-be-conquered-next-says-leader-of-Islamic-State.html">put out a message</a> to Muslims that assured them that ISIS “will conquer Rome and own the world.”</p>
<p>Over the past three months, as ISIS has marched through Iraq, 1.2 million Iraqis have become refugees. 700,000 of them are hiding under the protection of Kurdistan’s Peshmerga army. One of those 700,000 refugees is eight-year-old and now badly-damaged Mohammad, who was living a normal life in Mosul when ISIS attacked.</p>
<p>_______________</p>
<p>Five days after my visit to Khazir refugee camp, ISIS made an aggressive push forward into the scary-ish territory and captured the Khazir camp. The Peshmerga army retreated, instantly converting the area into scary-in-italics territory. That night, a black ISIS flag rose up over the camp where the Kurdish flag had been. Luckily, this happened after a few days of ISIS-Peshmerga fighting, and the refugees had time to run before ISIS arrived. But now, where do they go? People like Kamil, a police officer, cannot go back to Mosul—his name was on the government payroll, and he would be executed upon arrival. But without significant money, many refugees are not allowed into Kurdistan either. Some simply camped out on the road in the searing heat.</p>
<p>A few days later, with the help of US airstrikes, the Kurds recaptured the Khazir camp and a number of other areas ISIS had taken from them.</p>
<p>Since my visit, two new developments offer some hope that things could possibly turn around. The first is that the polarizing Nouri al-Maliki is no longer the Prime Minister. He has been forced out and replaced by another Shia leader, Haider al-Abadi. We’ll see if al-Abadi can cool off some of the Sunni rage al-Maliki’s administration ignited.</p>
<p>The second development happened on September 10th, when President Obama announced that the US would engage in a new campaign of airstrikes, both in Syria and Iraq, to try to defeat ISIS. Airstrikes are sure to slow ISIS down, but to take down and dismantle a group as shadowy, relentless, and fearless as ISIS, I doubt airstrikes will suffice. It’s going to be a lot harder than that.</p>
<p>_______________</p>
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<p><a href="https://gum.co/wbw-iraq"></a></p>
<p><strong>More where this came from:</strong></p>
<p>This post is one of five in a <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/odd-things-odd-places-intro.html">travel series</a> I wrote during the summer of 2014. The other four posts:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/russia-what-you-didnt-know.html"><strong>Russia: What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/07/japan-and-how-i-failed-to-figure-it-out.html"><strong>Japan, and How I Failed to Figure it Out</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/08/19-things-learned-nigeria.html"><strong>19 Things I Learned in Nigeria</strong></a></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/but-what-about-greenland.html"><strong>But What About Greenland?</strong></a></p>
<p>And <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/genie-question.html">the wrap-up video</a></strong>, where I asked people in all five countries what they’d wish for if they had a genie.</p>
<p>If you’re in a <em>really</em> crazy mood, here’s a post from the summer of 2013:<strong> </strong><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/20-things-i-learned-while-i-was-in.html">20 Things I learned in North Korea</a></strong></p>
<p><strong><br />
Sources</strong><br />
William Montgomery Watt – <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Muhammad_Prophet_and_Statesman.html?id=zLN2hNidLw4C">Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman<br />
</a>William Montgomery Watt – <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Muhammad_at_Mecca.html?id=ceUPAQAAIAAJ">Muhammad at Mecca<br />
</a>William Montgomery Watt – <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Muhammad_at_Medina.html?id=2ucPAQAAIAAJ">Muhammad at Medina<br />
</a>Majid Ali Khan – <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Muhammad_the_Final_Messenger.html?id=O90IGQAACAAJ">Muhammad, the Final Messenger<br />
</a>Bernard Lewis – <a href="http://books.google.com/books/about/Islam_in_History.html?id=RcGcb6PIky0C">Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East<br />
</a>Muhammad Husayn Haykal – <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Life-Muhammad-Husayn-Haykal/dp/0892591374">The Life of Muhammad<br />
</a>Richard C. Martin – <a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/Encyclopedia_of_Islam_and_the_Muslim_Wor.html?id=OVcUAQAAIAAJ">Encyclopedia of Islam &amp; the Muslim World<br />
</a>NPR – <a href="http://www.npr.org/2007/02/12/7280905/chronology-a-history-of-the-shia-sunni-split">Chronology of the Shiite-Sunni Split<br />
</a>Pew Research – <a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2011/01/27/the-future-of-the-global-muslim-population/">The Future of the Global Muslim Population<br />
</a>The Christian Science Monitor – <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1022/p09s02-coop.html">Cause of Iraq’s Chaos: Bad Borders<br />
</a>The Guardian – <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/firstworldwar">First world war: 15 legacies still with us today<br />
</a>CIA World Factbook – <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/iz.html">Iraq<br />
</a>The World Bank – <a href="http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI/">GINI Index<br />
</a>Time – <a href="http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,454453,00.html">The Sum of Two Evils<br />
</a><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mePsbrUjgNA">Sons of Saddam<br />
</a>Liam Anderson; Gareth Stansfield – <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=4JMHAI1C91gC&amp;pg=PA6">The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy, Or Division?<br />
</a>Al Jazeera – <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/islamic-state-50000-fighters-syria-2014819184258421392.html">Islamic State ‘has 50,000 fighters in Syria’<br />
</a>Wall Street Journal – <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/refugee-numbers-grow-as-civilians-flock-to-iraqi-camps-1402616063">Refugee Numbers Grow as Civilians Flock to Iraqi Camps<br />
</a>Periscopic.com – <a href="http://terror.periscopic.com/">A World of Terror<br />
</a>Amnesty International – <a href="https://www.es.amnesty.org/uploads/media/Iraq_ethnic_cleansing_final_formatted.pdf">Ethnic Cleansing on a Historic Scale: Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq<br />
</a>New York Times – <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/world/middleeast/iraq.html?_r=2">Sunni Extremists in Iraq Seize 3 Towns From Kurds and Threaten Major Dam</a></p>
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 From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story

 September 12, 2014 By Tim Urban


 If you’re not sure what Odd Things in Odd Places is and why I’m in Iraq by myself, here’s why.

 __________

 PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. You can buy it here:

 Or see a preview here.

 _______________

 On the morning of Saturday, August 2nd, I got in a taxi in Erbil, the regional capital of Kurdish Iraq, and asked the driver to take me to the Khazir refugee camp.

 This was a scary-ish thing to do.

 The “scary” part is a result of the fact that the Khazir camp is outside of the borders of the somewhat autonomous Kurdish region, one of the only secure parts of the country.

 The “ish” part comes from the fact that the Khazir camp, though outside of Kurdish borders, is still in an area currently controlled by the Peshmerga—the Kurdish army.

 Iraq has been a scary place for a while now, for a number of reasons, but it’s currently scary in italics because of the terrorist group we’ve all gotten to know about in the past three months—ISIS.

 So, the cab driver, myself, and our two constricted assholes headed west towards Khazir.

 After about 45 minutes, we crossed the checkpoint that meant we were leaving the Kurdish region, and a few minutes later, right when my phone’s blue dot was starting to get just close enough to Mosul for my liking, I looked out the car’s right window and saw the camp:

 We pulled in, spent a bunch of time convincing the camp officials and ourselves that I was a journalist, and eventually I was allowed in.

 I didn’t have a plan, exactly, so I started walking through the long lines of tents, noting that the 118°F (48°C) temperature I had been suffering through all week must be almost lethal here, where the only escape was in a tent.

 After a few minutes, I met a man named Kamil who spoke some English, and he invited me into his family’s tent. After talking with him a bit, I learned that it was actually a few families’ tent, and that there were 12 people living in it—five adults and seven children. There was electricity enough for a TV and a fan, and most of the mattresses were stacked on the side.

 He told me that 12 people to a tent was common at the camp, and mentioned that his tent was actually about to move to 13, gesturing toward one of the women living there who was thoroughly pregnant.

 Kamil was from Mosul, like everyone at the camp. Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city, only 30 miles west of the camp—and as of June 9th, an ISIS stronghold. After taking over, one of the first orders of business for ISIS was rounding up government workers for execution. Kamil, a police officer, was lucky to get out with his family before they got to him. When I asked him if he thought he’d return to Mosul at some point, he shook his head and said, “Fuck Mosul.”

 As soon as he learned that I was going to be writing about my time in Iraq, he led me out of the tent to join him on a special Oh Okay Then I Want to Show You Exactly How Upsetting Everything Here Is So You Can Write About It and Tell Everyone Tour.

 He walked me past the communal tap for drinking water, and said people used that water to clean themselves too, having not seen a shower since they arrived.

 He showed me multiple babies that had been born at the camp.

 We popped into a bunch of different tents, one whose fan had been stolen (remember that it’s 118°), and another that had 15 people living in it. He showed me where the shared toilets drain out into a system that flows openly through the camp. He told me that a lot of the families didn’t have enough food and that people were getting sick more and more often and remaining untreated. And these were all people who two months earlier were living their normal lives in their normal homes. Remember the time I complained about anything? That was dumb.

 When Kamil introduced me to a man whose two brothers had been executed by ISIS, I assumed that had to be the tour’s horrifying grand finale, but he wasn’t done yet. He brought me into another tent where he introduced me to a woman living there, explaining to her that I was his new writer friend. Without missing a beat, she handed me these:

 Whatever I was holding, it was something bad, and I didn’t want to ask what it was. I asked. He pointed across the tent to a little boy and explained that I was holding part of his skull.

 The boy was an eight-year-old named Mohammad. Their family’s house had been bombed in the middle of the night during the first days of the ISIS takeover and subsequent Iraqi government airstrikes. I never learned why or if they were specifically targeted. But the end result was that this healthy little eight-year-old—

 —was now this brain-damaged, partially deaf, blind in one eye eight-year-old with digestive difficulties:

 The goal of this post will be to understand why this sickening thing happened to this little boy—to really understand what’s going on in that country—better than you do now.

 And if we really want to wrap our head around things, we have to start way, way back—in 570 AD.

 _______________

 Ingredient 1: An Ancient Schism

 In 570, a long-named baby was born to a prominent family in Mecca, a city on the west coast of what is currently Saudi Arabia—Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim. Today he’s just known as Muhammad.1 ← click this

 Muhammad never had a father—his father died six months before his birth—and his mother died when he was six years old.2 ← again again

 After the death of his mother, Muhammad lived with his grandfather, and when he died two years later, Muhammad was transferred to his uncle, a merchant. With his uncle as his mentor, Muhammad became a merchant himself. Not too much is known about Muhammad’s young adult years, but one thing we’re pretty sure of is that he married a 40-year-old widow named Khadijah when he was 25 (he’d have multiple more wives later in his life). They would go on to have four daughters and two sons, only one of whom survived into full adulthood—his daughter Fatimah.

 It wasn’t until Muhammad was 40 that his life started getting strange. He had gotten into the habit of going up to a mountain every year for a couple weeks to be alone, meditate, and pray. It was on one of these solo retreats in 610 AD that Muhammad was for the first time visited by the angel Gabriel.3 As the story goes, Gabriel recited messages to Muhammad that were directly from God, which Muhammad memorized. Over the years, Gabriel would continue to visit Muhammad with messages, Muhammad continued to commit them to memory, and later, he would recite the memories to his followers, who would then write them down, and that became the Quran.

 Three years after the first visit from Gabriel, in 613, Muhammad began preaching the messages to the public, in his hometown of Mecca. This did not go well. At the time, Mecca was largely made up of polytheistic tribes who worshipped nature-related gods and goddesses, and one of Muhammad’s main messages was that there was one god and any idols to other gods should be destroyed, which was awkward for everybody. People started reacting violently to Muhammad’s growing influence, killing some of his followers, and they may have killed Muhammad too had he not belonged to a fancy family. But in 622, when Muhammad learned of an assassination plot against him, he and his followers decided to bail on Mecca and head to the nearby city of Medina. This journey is called the Hijra in Muslim tradition and it’s celebrated on the first day of the Muslim year.

 Muhammad and his followers would spend the next eight years fighting off attempts to destroy them from Mecca and other places, and often being ruthless themselves with those who posed a threat to Islam or refused to convert. The thing a lot of people don’t know is that in addition to being a spiritual leader, Muhammad was, in essence, the general of an army of followers and a tremendously effective strategist in growing and holding on to his leadership position in the face of lots of hostile competition.

 Things came to a head in 625 when the Meccans, who were increasingly losing prestige and support as Muhammad’s following continued to grow, launched an attack on Medina and defeated the Muslims. But five years later, Muhammad and a 10,000 man army marched into Mecca and conquered it for good. By the time Muhammad died in 632, Islam had spread through the whole Arabian Peninsula.

 The Muslim World Splits

 The new Muslim world enjoyed 20 years of internal unity until Muhammad died, and then that was the end of that, forever.

 The problem is that Muhammad didn’t appoint a successor before he died, or if he did, he didn’t get the word out to everyone. And because he had no living sons, there was no obvious answer. Here’s what happened:

 Group A thought that Muhammad wanted the elite members of the Muslim community to choose a fitting leader, or caliph, and whenever that caliph died, the elite would choose the next leader, and so on. And Group A decided a great first caliph to succeed Muhammad would be the father of one of Muhammad’s wives, Abu Bakr (we’ll call him Abu).

 Group B disagreed. They thought Muhammad would have told them that only God can choose the successor to lead the Muslim world, and that could only happen by keeping things in the family. To them, all signs pointed to Muhammad’s cousin and the husband of his daughter Fatimah, Ali ibn Abi Talib (Ali).

 Group A was bigger and it won.

 So father-in-law Abu took over as Caliph, while son-in-law Ali watched from the sidelines and Group B seethed.

 When Abu died of illness two years after taking over, another friend of Muhammad’s, Umar, took over, having been appointed by Abu before his death. Umar ruled for ten years before he was assassinated by the Persians he had just conquered. Abu had also appointed Umar’s successor, Uthman, who ruled for 12 years before he was assassinated. All the while, Group B is helpless and frustrated.

 But then, the elite decided the next and fourth caliph should be Ali—Group B’s original guy—and for two seconds, everyone was happy.

 Five years later, Ali was assassinated, and when his eldest son Hassan became the fifth caliph, he was quickly overpowered by an aggressive rebel force led by Muawiyah, who coerced Hassan out of power and became the sixth caliph—and Group A and Group B would never reconcile again. While Muawiyah was the first of a long dynasty of caliphs, Group B tells a different story. To them, the leaders are more special than merely elected caliphs—they’re divinely chosen imams, and the way they see it, after an annoying three-caliph delay, their first imam was finally in power when Ali got the job. His eldest son Hassan was their second imam, and when Muawiyah kicked him out, Group B threw their support behind Ali’s younger son, Husayn—their third imam.

 Husayn, Group B’s third imam, ended up being beheaded by Yazid, Group A’s seventh caliph (Muawiyah’s successor), and so Group B moved onto Husayn’s son as their fourth imam, while Group A continued to ignore Group B and support their caliphs.

 This was over 1300 years ago, and yet today’s Muslim world is still completely divided over it, and so much of today’s Middle East strife is centered around this ancient split.

 Group A are Sunnis and Group B are Shias.

 Today’s Sunni-Shia tensions are about a lot of things, but at their very core is what happened in the 7th century. Sunni Muslims believe in their line of caliphs, and don’t believe them to be chosen by God, and Shia Muslims reject the first three caliphs and instead believe in the line of divinely-chosen imams starting with Ali, revering in particular Ali4 and his son and the third imam, Husayn. Both sects agree that Muhammad is the final prophet, both follow the Five Pillars of Islam, and both view the Quran as the holy book—but Shia are less unquestionably accepting of the Quran in its entirety, because they believe certain parts were recounted by people other than the imams.

 Here’s a chart to help clear up all of this confusion:

 None of this stopped the early caliphs from conquering an insane amount of the world—by 750, just 140 years after Muhammad’s first revelation, the Muslim world had expanded its reach to a large portion of where it exists today.56

 But as Islam swept the Earth, this early schism only deepened—it was here to stay.

 Ingredient 2: Straight Lines

 The land of Iraq has the coolest nickname of any land anywhere—The Cradle of Civilization—and for good reason. Ancient Iraqi history is as impressive as it gets. In particular, the fertile strip of Iraq in between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers known as Mesopotamia is often credited with the birth of writing (cuneiform), the invention of the wheel, some of the earliest sailboats, calendars, maps, schools, and the origin of the 60-minute hour and 60-second minute.7 3,000 years later, when Alexander the Great conquered half the world, he chose that land to be his capital, selecting Babylon in particular for its treasures and its critical location between Europe and Asia. 1,000 years after that, the head of the great Abbasid Muslim dynasty built Baghdad on the same land to be the capital of the vast Muslim world, and for the next 500 years (until the Mongols stomped on it), Baghdad reigned as a world hub of learning and commerce and for a time, was the world’s largest city. There may be nowhere in the world with a history as rich as the land of Iraq.

 The nation of Iraq, on the other hand, was created by two dicks with a pencil and ruler, and its history is mostly unpleasant.

 By the beginning of the 20th century, the land of Iraq had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years.8 There were several ethnic and religious groups on the land, left mostly free to keep to themselves and separate from the others. But when Germany and Co. took on France, Britain, and Russia in World War I, the Ottoman Empire elected to be part of the “and Co.”, which left them ultimately on the losing side. Bye bye Ottoman Empire.

 During the war, Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France got together with a pencil, a ruler, and a bottle of whiskey, and took to the map, carving the Ottoman Empire into nations and determining where their two nations and Russia would get to have spheres of influence after the war if they won.9

 Regarding the whole “several ethnic and religious groups” thing and the natural boundaries of separation that had developed between them over centuries, George-Picot famously remarked, “Whatevs,” and with pencil in hand, Sykes is quoted as saying, “I should like to draw a line from the e in Acre to the last k in Kirkuk.”10 Here’s what they came up with:11

 BBC

 The thing about creating borders using a map, pencil, and ruler, is that it’s a terrible way to create borders. If you look at organically-created borders around the world—those that were formed over time by the local populations, based usually on ethnic and religious divisions, and often demarcated by mountains, rivers, or other natural barriers—they’re squiggly and messy. What’s a clear and satisfying straight-line-on-a-map border for imperial powers trying to keep things clean and simple for themselves is a complete disaster on the ground across the world where the actual place is.

 When borders are drawn this way, two bad things happen: 1) Single ethnic or religious groups are sliced apart into separate countries, and 2) Different and often unfriendly groups are shoved into a nation together and told to share resources, get along, and bond together over national pride for a just-made-up nation—which inevitably leads to one group taking power and oppressing the others, resulting in bloody rebellions, coups, and sectarian violence. This isn’t that complicated.12

 But since it wasn’t really their problem, Sykes and George-Picot just went ahead with it, and over the next few years, precise new borders were drawn, giving birth to modern day Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait. Here was Iraq’s new situation:

 Can’t see why there’d be any issue here.

 A Tight Lid

 For any of you readers considering creating a new, tense nation of ethnic and religious groups who don’t like each other, I’ve been researching this shit all month and I have advice for you:

 Your new nation is like a bubbling soup inside a pressure cooker and it’s gonna spew itself all over the kitchen unless you have one critical thing that can keep things in order: a tight lid.

 The nation version of a tight lid can be either a strong western occupying power or an iron fist dictator with a scary military machine at his whim—without one of these, your nation will fall apart.13 Email me if you have any questions.14

 The new nation of Iraq combined Ingredient 1 (Sunni and Shia Arabs living in the same area) with Ingredient 2 (a border that forces them into a nation together, along with a large group of Kurds) to create a tense pressure cooker.

 Things were hot from the beginning, when the new Iraqis revolted against the British occupation in 1920. The British acted as a lid and crushed the revolt. After Iraq achieved independence and the British lid left, a series of military commanders took over the lid duties, stomping a number of revolts and killing each other in coups from time to time. In 1968, the Sunni Ba’ath Party took over, under the leadership of new president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and his ambitious vice president and general, Saddam Hussein.

 By 1979, Saddam’s influence had grown to the point where he was kind of running the show, and finally he went to al-Bakr and was like, “You know what two cool things are? Murder and retirement. Ya know? I thought maybe you’d want one of those? And you could choose?” and al-Bakr stepped down, bringing Saddam Hussein, the tightest lid of them all, to power.

 A lot of things sucked about the 24 year rule of Saddam. He started off in typical dictator fashion, calling together all the senior ranking members of government, and then reading out the names of those who were thought to be disloyal, 22 of whom were later taken out back and shot. He all but legalized “honor killings”—i.e. the tradition sometimes found in places run by Sharia Law whereby a man may kill a female relative if she dishonors her family, often without facing criminal charges. And he gave the world Uday Hussein.15

 But Saddam’s worst crimes happened during the wars he started and their aftermath.

 Worried that the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran would inspire rebellion in Iraq’s large Shia majority, Saddam launched into the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which killed over 100,000 Iraqis.16 Iraq’s Kurds, who have never wanted to be a part of Iraq, seized the opportunity in the chaos to try to form their own autonomous country, at times receiving support from the Iranians. The attempt failed, and toward the end of the war, Saddam embarked on the al-Anfal Campaign, a systematic genocide of the Kurdish north. One of the worst moments came in 1988, just as the war was winding down, when residents of the city Halabja were overcome by the smell of sweet apples after war planes flew by overhead, and then people and animals started dropping dead all over the city from gas poisoning. The gassing caused more deaths than 9/11. The entire al-Anfal campaign killed between 50,000 and 180,000 Kurds.

 While we’re here, let’s pause for a second and talk about the Kurds.

 The Iraqi Kurdistan Blue Box

 This whole post was supposed to be about Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish region in northeastern Iraq. But when I decided to go another direction, Kurdistan got left out. As a consolation, Kurdistan is being featured in Wait But Why’s first ever blue “aside” box (if you don’t see a blue box, try clearing your cache). Here are some things about Kurdistan:

 * Let’s start by clearing one thing up: The Kurds are an ethnic group, like the Arabs. Kurds are a number of religions, but most of them are Sunni Muslims. So when people talk about Iraq’s groups and they say “Sunni, Shia, and Kurds,” what they mean is “Arab Sunni, Arab Shia, and Kurdish Sunni.”
 * Kurds speak Kurdish, though many also speak Arabic as a second language.
 * Almost no ethnic group is a bigger victim of imperial ruler-pencil border drawing than the Kurds. Check out this map of the Kurdish population (in red) and how horribly it’s been cut apart by borders:

 * The end result of the artificial borders is that despite being the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East (after Arabs, Persians, and Turks), Kurds are now minority populations in four countries, making up roughly 20% of Turkey and Iraq, 15% of Syria, and 10% of Iran.17 Kurds are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without a state.
 * Iraqi Kurds were granted semi-autonomy in 1970, and today, Kurdistan has its own government, army (the Peshmerga), and (highly disputed) borders. But it also plays a role in the Iraq government and is part of Iraq. It’s confusing.
 * If Iraqi Kurdistan were its own nation, it would be about the size of Switzerland.
 * Kurdistan is on the liberal, moderate side of the Islamic world and is generally pro-West.
 * Kurdistan is normally totally safe to visit (right now might be an exception), and its tourism industry was on the rise—in the first half of 2014 alone, they received over one million tourists—but the industry has seen a sharp decline of late, for obvious reasons.

 Some notes from my visit:

 * The people are outlandishly nice and sweet and friendly. One example: On no fewer than five occasions, I went up to a street stand or store to buy something small like a bottle of water, and the person working there would see I was a foreigner and ask me where I was from and how I liked Kurdistan. After we talked, I’d take my money out to buy the thing I came for, and they would adamantly refuse to accept it and tell me it was their gift, even after protests from me.
 * This wasn’t a surprise. Iraq is the 14th Muslim country I’ve been to,18 and I’ve gotten used to a very specific kind of Muslim hospitality and generosity in those countries that I haven’t experienced as consistently in other places.
 * There are a lot of serious-looking men sipping on tiny glasses of tea, which I enjoyed.
 * They have cool candy .
 * Erbil, the capital, is pretty modern—I would sometimes be in a fancy mall or a German-run bar and I’d have to remind myself, “I’m in Iraq right now.”
 * I talked to a lot of people there, and something that everyone badly wants is an independent Kurdistan. They’ve wanted this for a century, and it seems like it could really happen sometime not that far away.
 * The people I spoke to were generally pro-US, but they’re not thrilled with Obama. This is mainly because the US in general has not been supportive of Kurdish independence—I’ve read about why, and it seems to be a combination of a few geopolitical reasons, one of which is that an Iraq without the Kurdish part is much more likely to become a Shia-dominated Iranian ally and pawn.

 Anyway, back to Saddam, who barely had time to take a shit after the Iran-Iraq War before starting the Persian Gulf War by invading Kuwait for its delicious oil reserves. This, as I learned from my third grade teacher, did not go well for Saddam, and again, Iraq’s oppressed groups, the Shia and the Kurds, tried to take advantage of the situation by attempting to overthrow Saddam. Saddam responded by tightening the lid and crushing the uprisings, killing 80,000 – 230,000 people in the process.19

 Saddam was a brutal ruler, but for the most part, under his iron fist, Iraq was a stable country. We all know what happens next.

 2003: Off Comes the Lid

 Say what you want about the Bush Administration and their decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam, but one thing is for sure: They were very, very wrong when they thought it would be a quick and easy war.

 They knew they were removing a lid, but they seemed to think it was off a tupperware container of cookies, not a pressure cooker. And their plan to replace the wrought iron lid with a fresh sheet of democracy cellophane would have worked fine if it were a tupperware container of cookies. Just not if it were a pressure cooker.

 So there’s the US, suddenly mired in hell and chaos for eight years, trying to fix a situation they weren’t prepared to fix, and which would ultimately be the Iraqi people’s problem, not theirs. Speaking of the Iraqi people, it’s time for another blue box.

 The Life in Baghdad Blue Box

 The people I got to know the best during my time in Kurdistan were three brothers from Baghdad who were visiting Kurdistan. They were born and raised in Baghdad, had lived there through the whole war, and spoke near-perfect English. I was ecstatic to find them, and spent two consecutive nights talking to them and asking them questions. Here are some things I learned:

 * Living under Saddam was, unsurprisingly, horrible. You never dared say anything bad about Saddam or the government, even in private. You were careful who you crossed—if you insulted a kid in class who turned out to have parents in the Ba’ath party, your parents could end up in jail, or worse. “Voting” meant “vote for Saddam or die.” No one could travel. It sounds a lot like modern day North Korea .
 * So it makes sense that they told me everyone was happy when the US invaded and ousted the Husseins. People mock the Bush Administration’s claim that they’d be greeted as liberators, but it seems that that was the case, at least for everyone these guys knew.
 * They continued to be happy about the war until about 2006, the peak of the violent civil war, when they said it had been unbearably scary to live there. These days, things are almost as terrible, and when I asked them if they wished that Saddam had never been overthrown, they couldn’t really answer. Two awful options. They don’t feel at all optimistic that things will improve in the future.
 * That said, outsiders imagine that living in Baghdad was a sea of constant death over the last ten years, while in fact, none of the three of them knew anyone who had died. It was a horrific decade to be there, but most people there have lived their lives unharmed.
 * Living in Baghdad, they hear a bomb go off almost every day—it’s gotten so common that when one goes off, people don’t even break in their conversation. They said the bombs are Sunni extremists bombing Shia people, or the other way around, and it’s a constant cycle of action and retaliation. Even though it’s unlikely that they’ll get caught in the line of fire, they never know if a bomb will strike where they are.
 * They’re required to carry around their ID card, which has a bunch of personal information on it, including the name of their religion and the name of their father and grandfather.
 * One thing that’s gotten more extreme since the Saddam era is a prevailing conservative ideology. Homosexuality is often punished by death by stoning, and police, they said, will turn their heads the other way when this happens. People have even been stoned to death for having emo clothes or haircuts . This wasn’t as bad during the Saddam era, they said, and is now a result of the empowerment of ultra-conservative Shia militia.
 * Oddly, given the above point, I noticed a lot of pairs of men holding hands or being cuddly together. Same story in Nigeria, where homosexuality is punishable by 14 years in prison. The reverse of American culture on both sides of things.
 * Here’s how dating works in Iraq: You meet a girl you like, you wait a bunch of years, and then you tell her you love her one day. She will evaluate and either decide to marry you or not. Once you’re married you can be alone together for the first time. Unslutty.
 * I asked about nightlife, and it sounds pretty grim. There are nightclubs, they said, but no one normal can enter them. You have to “know someone,” they said—and apparently, a lot of the people inside are bad men discussing violent plots.
 * For all the hardships in their lives, a lot of things are normal. They have smartphones, fast internet, cars, and they’re all in university or already graduated.
 * A lot of people they know have emigrated to Michigan, which apparently has a sizable Iraqi population. Random.
 * These three brothers, along with a few others, have started something called World Peace Day in Iraq with celebrations every September 21st. They were the first in the country to have the guts to do this (their celebrations are a target), but it’s caught on, and now the annual gatherings, which include people of many faiths and ethnicities, happen in five Iraqi cities and involve hundreds of people. Brave dudes.

 Anyway, as unfortunate as the bloody years of US occupation were for everyone involved, by being there, the US was acting as a lid of some kind. While the US was there, nothing really bad could happen. Then, in 2011, the US left.

 A Perfect Storm

 Instability is the fertile soil that bad, scary things grow out of, and when the US left, Iraq had a new prime minister, a new government, a new and unfamiliar constitution, and an amateur, recently-trained army—not a stable situation.

 The power pendulum had also just swung for the first time in decades. Iraq’s population is 55% Arab Shia, 18% Arab Sunni, and 21% Kurd (with others making up 6%). And despite being the smallest group of the three, Iraq’s Arab Sunnis have been in power over the other groups for almost the country’s whole history. For any living Iraqis, a Sunni government and suppressed Shia majority is all they know. Suddenly, in 2006, Iraq had a new government, led by a hard-line Shia, Nouri al-Maliki. A logical observer of history would probably suggest that it would be a wise move for al-Maliki to be inclusive of Sunnis, regardless of the past, since, as noted above, the country was not in a stable situation. Al-Maliki did just the opposite, arresting Sunni leaders, discriminating against Sunni civilians, and targeting Sunnis disproportionately for torture and violence. All of this exacerbated the instability by making the government less unified and competent, creating rage in the Sunni populous,20 and weakening the loyalty of a military, part of which hates its own government. The anti-al-Maliki feelings are so strong that many normally-peaceful Sunnis find themselves sympathizing or even supporting violent anti-government terrorists.

 The power switch from Sunni to Shia has broader implications. If you look at the whole world of Islam, it’s clear that Sunni Islam is the vast majority (around 90%) and Shia Islam (around 10%) is just a small side branch:

 But when you look at the heart of the Middle East more closely, you can see why things are so complicated.

 Here’s what the Middle East looked like when Saddam was in power versus when al-Maliki took over:21

 Suddenly, Shias are in charge of countries all the way from Iran to the Mediterranean, creating a kind of Shia Axis. This is a great thing for the world’s largest Shia nation, Iran, and it scares the shit out of the region’s most powerful Sunni nation, Saudi Arabia. And what’s been happening is Saudi Arabia and Iran engaging in what is essentially a Cold War, vying for broader power, with conflicts like the Syrian Civil War and the current mess in Iraq serving as proxy wars that can tip the balance in the larger struggle. This is why Iran wants ISIS (a Sunni group) to disappear and why you keep hearing that the US and Iran might actually agree on something (though for different reasons). This is also why the Saudis have been rumored to have funded Sunni resistance movements in both Syria and Iraq, even possibly directing funds to groups like ISIS.22

 Yet another factor playing into the trouble is the simultaneous instability of adjacent Iraq and Syria—this creates an unstable border, as well as a situation where the terrorist-fighting front is disjointed and without a shared national narrative to fight for. It also allows a terrorist group to hide in one country from trouble in the other.

 Finally, western powers often provide a lid from afar when things erupt somewhere—but in this case, those powers have been gun shy since they just got out of a hideous war in the area and really really want to avoid getting involved. Up until Obama’s Mid-September speech, the US has done everything possible to avoid getting involved.

 When you add this all together—an unstable and divided new government with an amateur, questionably-loyal army and an angry minority population who feels sympathy for anyone who will resist the government; the interests of a giant neighbor, Saudi Arabia, aligned with a government overthrow; a civil war next door; and a group of western powers who have been determined to stay out—you have the perfect storm for the fiercest of terrorist groups to emerge from the fringe and conquer.

 ISIS

 The beginnings of ISIS23—a Sunni jihadist group—can be traced back to 1999, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist, started the group because he was pissed off about a lot of things. After Zarqawi swore allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004, this evolved into what became known as “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and was one of those shadowy insurgent groups you kept reading about the US fighting during the war. When insurgent activity died down after the US troop surge in 2007, ISIS seemed on the decline and disappeared from relevance for a bit.

 Al-Baghdadi

 In 2010, after ISIS’s second leader was assassinated, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—a former scholar of Islamic studies 24 and a US war prisoner back in 2004 25 —took over and got the group back on track. He replenished their partially-killed-off leadership with dozens of Saddam’s old Ba’athist military personnel, who brought key experience to the group. Then in 2011, when the Syrian Civil War broke out, ISIS joined in as a rebel force 26 —which helped to train and battle-harden the group. ISIS’s behavior in Syria was so brutal and severe that they even started creeping out the other bad guy groups, including al-Qaeda, who finally had a tantrum in early 2014 and cut all ties with ISIS .

 Up until early June 2014, only those who were carefully following the news knew about ISIS. But that’s when everything changed.

 On June 5th, just hours after I purchased my non-refundable flight to Iraq, ISIS stormed into the country, taking control of the border, and started systematically conquering towns in the western part of the nation. And suddenly, everyone had heard of ISIS.

 Two things were especially shocking about ISIS’s advance into Iraq. First, the horrifying, Genghis Khan-style way they conducted business—i.e. immediately round up and execute all men of authority, in this case anyone who was ever on the government payroll, and then execute anyone else who resisted their takeover.27 Second, the fact that in city after city ISIS attacked, the Iraqi military would flee the scene. This was partially because they were horrified of ISIS and partially because, as mentioned above, the Sunni members of the army weren’t that into fighting against a Sunni group to defend a government they hated. So western Iraq was folding quickly to ISIS, and by June 9th, they had captured Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city.

 The area of Syria and Iraq they had conquered (and are still in control of) is the size of Belgium. Al-Qaeda never conquered anything—they just killed people. So how did ISIS do it? In addition to the perfect storm of factors discussed above, including far more tacit support from masses of civilians than al-Qaeda ever had, ISIS has three qualities that make them so effective:

 1) They’re brutal. No regard for human life is a helpful quality when trying to conquer a nation. This Amnesty International report details real accounts of ISIS brutality so scary it doesn’t seem real. An example of an excerpt in the report:

 A witness to one such mass killing in Solagh, a village south-east of Sinjar city, told Amnesty International that on the morning of 3 August, as he was trying to flee towards Mount Sinjar, he saw vehicles with IS fighters in them approaching, and managed to conceal himself. From his hiding place he saw them take some civilians from a house in the western outskirts of Solagh:

 “A white Toyota pick-up stopped by the house of my neighbour, Salah Mrad Noura, who raised a white flag to indicate they were peaceful civilians. The pick-up had some 14 IS men on the back. They took out some 30 people from my neighbour’s house: men, women and children. They put the women and children, some 20 of them, on the back of another vehicle which had come, a large white Kia, and marched the men, about nine of them, to the nearby wadi [dry river bed]. There they made them kneel and shot them in the back. They were all killed; I watched from my hiding place for a long time and none of them moved. I know two of those killed: my neighbour Salah Mrad Noura, who was about 80 years old, and his son Kheiro, aged about 45 or 50.”

 ISIS has officially been the deadliest terrorist group in history. In a tool that maps out the activity of the world’s most prominent terrorist groups, when you filter by “Most Victims,” ISIS comes up first, despite being around for less than a decade (their death count is more than double al-Qaeda’s lifetime total). The below screenshot of the tool shows terrorist groups ranked from most total killings (on the top left) to least (on the bottom right). Each mini-chart shows activity over time, with the red and yellow bars representing deaths and wounded, respectively:

 2) They’re sophisticated. ISIS functions like a well-run company—it knows how to recruit (ISIS forces are supposedly up to 50,000 in Syria and 30,000 in Iraq), it knows how to fundraise, and it’s incredibly organized. ISIS produces a thorough and professional annual report that details its killings and conquests in the same way a company would report on its revenue and gross margin. Here’s a chilling graphic from their 2013 report breaking down their various methods for the year’s 7,681 attacks:

 They’re also pros at social media. Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadis at the Washington Institute, said that when it comes to social media, ISIS is “probably more sophisticated than most US companies.”

 3) They’re incredibly rich. According to Iraqi intelligence, ISIS has assets worth $2 billion, making it by far the richest terrorist group in the world. Most of this money was seized after the capture of Mosul, including hundreds of millions of US dollars from Mosul’s central bank. On top of that, they’ve taken oil fields and are reportedly making $3 million per day selling oil on the black market, with even more money coming in through donations, extortions, and ransom. ISIS has also gotten ahold of an upsetting amount of high-caliber, US-made weapons and tanks that were for the use of the Iraqi army but left behind when the army fled. They’ve even gotten their hands on nuclear material that they found at Mosul University.

 On June 29th, ISIS just fully went for it and proclaimed itself a caliphate—i.e. a global Islamic state—and commanded all the world’s Muslims to obey Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the grand caliph. Those living in ISIS-captured cities are getting a taste of what life in the new caliphate is like:

 * Women have about as many rights as a goldfish, barely allowed to leave the house and forbidden from showing their faces in public.
 * No smoking ever, and also no tampering with or disabling the smoke detector in the airplane lavatory.
 * If they’re not just rounded up and executed on the spot, Christians and other non-Muslims are forced to convert to Islam, pay a hefty non-Muslim tax, become a refugee, or die. The doors of Christian houses are marked with a ن, a symbol that signifies that they’re Christian. Nazi-esque.
 * Some reports say a fatwa (an Islamic law ruling by an authority) was issued declaring that all women between the ages of 11 and 46 would undergo genital mutilation, a tradition meant to suppress a woman’s sexual desire in order to discourage “immoral behavior.”28

 As for future goals, the short term goal is to establish an Islamic nation in the areas it currently controls, with some expansion of the boundaries. In the medium term, al-Baghdadi has declared that “this blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes–Picot conspiracy”—i.e. until those pencil and ruler lines drawn after WWI are gone and all the nations are part of the new caliphate. In the long run, ISIS wants to expand its caliphate to the reaches of the first Muslim dynasty in 750 AD, and beyond:

 Some people have argued that this map wasn’t made by ISIS, but rather by their supporters. Even if that’s so, al-Baghdadi’s ambitions certainly seem to match, and exceed, those on that map. In July, al-Baghdadi put out a message to Muslims that assured them that ISIS “will conquer Rome and own the world.”

 Over the past three months, as ISIS has marched through Iraq, 1.2 million Iraqis have become refugees. 700,000 of them are hiding under the protection of Kurdistan’s Peshmerga army. One of those 700,000 refugees is eight-year-old and now badly-damaged Mohammad, who was living a normal life in Mosul when ISIS attacked.

 _______________

 Five days after my visit to Khazir refugee camp, ISIS made an aggressive push forward into the scary-ish territory and captured the Khazir camp. The Peshmerga army retreated, instantly converting the area into scary-in-italics territory. That night, a black ISIS flag rose up over the camp where the Kurdish flag had been. Luckily, this happened after a few days of ISIS-Peshmerga fighting, and the refugees had time to run before ISIS arrived. But now, where do they go? People like Kamil, a police officer, cannot go back to Mosul—his name was on the government payroll, and he would be executed upon arrival. But without significant money, many refugees are not allowed into Kurdistan either. Some simply camped out on the road in the searing heat.

 A few days later, with the help of US airstrikes, the Kurds recaptured the Khazir camp and a number of other areas ISIS had taken from them.

 Since my visit, two new developments offer some hope that things could possibly turn around. The first is that the polarizing Nouri al-Maliki is no longer the Prime Minister. He has been forced out and replaced by another Shia leader, Haider al-Abadi. We’ll see if al-Abadi can cool off some of the Sunni rage al-Maliki’s administration ignited.

 The second development happened on September 10th, when President Obama announced that the US would engage in a new campaign of airstrikes, both in Syria and Iraq, to try to defeat ISIS. Airstrikes are sure to slow ISIS down, but to take down and dismantle a group as shadowy, relentless, and fearless as ISIS, I doubt airstrikes will suffice. It’s going to be a lot harder than that.

 _______________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having to check the site!

 If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 More where this came from:

 This post is one of five in a travel series I wrote during the summer of 2014. The other four posts:

 Russia: What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know

 Japan, and How I Failed to Figure it Out

 19 Things I Learned in Nigeria

 But What About Greenland?

 And the wrap-up video, where I asked people in all five countries what they’d wish for if they had a genie.

 If you’re in a really crazy mood, here’s a post from the summer of 2013: 20 Things I learned in North Korea


 Sources
 William Montgomery Watt – Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman
 William Montgomery Watt – Muhammad at Mecca
 William Montgomery Watt – Muhammad at Medina
 Majid Ali Khan – Muhammad, the Final Messenger
 Bernard Lewis – Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East
 Muhammad Husayn Haykal – The Life of Muhammad
 Richard C. Martin – Encyclopedia of Islam & the Muslim World
 NPR – Chronology of the Shiite-Sunni Split
 Pew Research – The Future of the Global Muslim Population
 The Christian Science Monitor – Cause of Iraq’s Chaos: Bad Borders
 The Guardian – First world war: 15 legacies still with us today
 CIA World Factbook – Iraq
 The World Bank – GINI Index
 Time – The Sum of Two Evils
 Sons of Saddam
 Liam Anderson; Gareth Stansfield – The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy, Or Division?
 Al Jazeera – Islamic State ‘has 50,000 fighters in Syria’
 Wall Street Journal – Refugee Numbers Grow as Civilians Flock to Iraqi Camps
 Periscopic.com – A World of Terror
 Amnesty International – Ethnic Cleansing on a Historic Scale: Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq
 New York Times – Sunni Extremists in Iraq Seize 3 Towns From Kurds and Threaten Major Dam

 1. Welcome to the new note system. When I research, I come across a ton of facts, most of which don’t make the cut for the post. These notes will give me a place to sprinkle in fun extras I learned about, and sometimes just to expound on a point in the post without breaking up the flow. And since the posts are long, those who don’t want to spend that long here can skip the notes, while those who want to dig in should check them out. Anyway, this note actually had a boring source-related purpose so let’s get to it: Any historical account from 1400 years ago will likely have hazy parts of the story or areas where historians disagree—and even more so when the story involves religion. My main source for this post are three books written by widely respected Islam scholar, William Montgomery Watt, with some additional information taken from the writings of Bernard Lewis, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Martin Lings, Majid Ali Khan, and Richard C. Martin—links to the sources at the bottom of the post.↩

 2. Sorry, I’m in the honeymoon phase with the new note system and wanted to come hang out here again. Let’s just quickly discuss how crazy it is that Muhammad’s parents never knew that their son was important. Like, his mother fell ill and before she died she thought, “I hope my little six-year-old makes something of his life” and she has no idea what happened. Imagine what she’d think if someone could have shown her the world in 2014, 1400 years in the future, and told her that 1.6 billion people revered her son. I know I make this point a lot about different people, and I’m going to continue to make it when I come across it because it’s crazy. Note, by the way, that you’re scrolling inside of a footnote. Cool right?↩

 3. Or, depending on what you believe, it was the first time he started making up stories of being visited by an angel.↩

 4. The word Shia derives from “Shiatu Ali” which means “followers of Ali.” While we’re here, I’m as confused as you are about Shia/Shi’a/Shiite—I read a bunch of things and it didn’t become clearer when to use which. I’m just gonna stick with Shia.↩

 5. You’ll notice Spain included in the 8th century Muslim world. It would stay that way for almost 800 years until the land would be reconquered by Christians in 1491, who would then spend the next 250 years systematically purging the land of its Islamic tradition. If you look hard, you can still find remnants of Islam in Spain—one example is the word “Ojala,” which means “I hope” or “Let’s hope,” but its actual definition is “May God will it” and is derived from “O Allah.”↩

 6. Speaking of where Islam exists today, here’s a cool “weighted” map that shows each country’s Muslim population.↩

 7. And if you’re into the Bible, both the site of the Garden of Eden and Ur, the hometown of Abraham, are within the borders of modern day Iraq↩

 8. Here’s a gif that shows the Ottoman Empire expansion timeline, if you’re interested.↩

 9. Here’s a map that shows what the Middle East looked like in 1914, right before WWI. As you can see, most of it was already under the influence of European imperial powers, with the waning Ottoman Empire as the exception—so that was what was left to be carved up by Sykes and George-Picot after the war.↩

 10. Surprisingly, one of those two quotes is actually real. Source: A Line in the Sand, James Barr, p.12↩

 11. Here’s a photo of the original map they drew on.↩

 12. Of course, the same principle is behind most of the African civil wars—remember the history chart in the Nigeria post? Another striking example is the creation of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border in 1893 by another aloof British guy—this line (called the Durand Line) sliced through the middle of the ethnic Pashtun population, creating a huge amount of ethnic strife and ultimately turning the Durand line into a Taliban hotbed. Over a century later, this is still causing massive trouble. Great map showing this here.↩

 13. A quintessential example of the Tight Lid Principle is Yugoslavia, a nation also formed in the wake of WWI, which consisted of modern day Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia. The tight lid in Yugoslavia’s case was dictator Josip Broz Tito. When Tito died in 1980, the repressed tensions all boiled to the surface, and the country broke up soon after, with a bunch of blood shed in the process.↩

 14. Don’t actually.↩

 15. Welcome to the Uday Hussein footnote! Today, in this footnote, we’ll make a bullet list about Uday, literally the worst person who has ever lived:

 + Uday was the older of Saddam’s two sons, and as such, expected to take over for his father one day
 + When Uday was young, Saddam would take him and his brother Qusay to watch prisoners be tortured or executed. Uday in particular relished the experience
 + Picture the obnoxious, mean, super-rich kid in high school, but now picture that he has the power to have his bodyguards beat you to a bloody pulp, or kill you, or kill you and your whole family, with the snap of his finger
 + In college, Uday would from time to time notice an exceptionally pretty girl, tell his bodyguards to bring her to his room, where he’d rape her and sometimes then have his bodyguards kill her
 + He would sometimes walk into a club and if he saw a really attractive girl dancing with a man, and it made him feel jealous, he’d have the man killed
 + He killed a man for refusing to let Uday dance with his wife
 + He would stand on his balcony with binoculars, and when he’d spot a pretty girl he’d have his men retrieve her for him. Once he did this with a man’s 12 and 14-year-old daughters, and the man had no choice but to accept or they’d all be killed
 + He was obsessed with torture and loved to experiment with different forms, including using an iron maiden he owned and putting someone alone in a room with his hungry pet tiger
 + He killed his father’s friend/bodyguard because Uday suspected that he was setting his father up with prostitutes
 + He once killed a man who didn’t salute him
 + Even Saddam was creeped out by how cruel and reckless Uday was, so much so that he appointed younger brother Qusay to be his successor instead of Uday
 + This made Uday incredibly jealous, and he would do things like hear about a girl Qusay slept with and have her brought to him to be raped and permanently branded with a U
 + To give him something to do, Saddam appointed Uday as the head of the Olympic committee. Uday would have athletes who performed poorly tortured, sometimes locking them in iron chests in the sun for three days
 + Uday was notorious throughout Iraq and universally loathed by everybody
 + Uday and Qusay were both killed in a fire fight with US troops in 2003
 + No one was sad

 I hope you enjoyed the Uday Hussein footnote! All of these nuggets were gathered from two sources: this documentary and this article.↩

 16. Some counts put the toll as high as 500,000↩

 17. Imagine if some powerful faraway country decided to draw new borders in Europe which cut France in three pieces, making the French population an oppressed minority group in Spain, Italy, and Germany with no country of their own. The Kurds’ situation is shitty.↩

 18. brag↩

 19. Many suggest that the George H.W. Bush Administration misled the Kurds and Shias to believe that the US was behind their uprisings and would protect them if necessary.↩

 20. This map comparison shows the religious makeup of Baghdad’s neighborhoods in 2005 vs 2007, illustrating just how tense the sectarian animosity has become since al-Maliki took over. Source.↩

 21. Lebanon’s Shia population represents the majority of Muslims in Lebanon, but not the majority of the population (there is a significant Christian population). Lebanon’s government is not totally Shia run either—they have a minority of seats in the Parliament—but again, they carry more power in government than do Lebanon’s Sunni population, and Hezbollah has a large amount of popular support and more power than their seat number would suggest.↩

 22. Saudi Arabia denies this.↩

 23. ISIS has a lot of names. First of all, ISIS doesn’t even stand for what people think it does (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), it stands for Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham refers to the Levant, the region that encompasses Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestine. So the second common name of the group, ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) is a synonym for the first. Before either of those was ISI (Islamic State of Iraq), and as of June, the group has renamed itself IS (Islamic State). Some leaders within Islam reject the name Islamic State and call it the less-glamorous QSIS (al-Qaeda Separatists in Iraq and Syria). I’m going to stick with ISIS.↩

 24. According to this pro-ISIS biography, which may or may not be accurate↩

 25. Supposedly, as al-Baghdadi was leaving the prison after his release, he said to one of the guards, “I’ll see you in New York.”↩

 26. This makes sense, since the Syrian government is Shia and the exact kind of entity ISIS wants to bring down↩

 27. ISIS has a habit of videotaping their executions and putting them online. Kind of a weird thing to link to here, so I won’t, but you can find these videos on liveleak.com if you want to give yourself nightmares.↩

 28. This practice has affected 125 million women worldwide, according to the WHO, most of them in Africa. Apparently 91% of Egyptian women undergo genital mutilation.↩

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 * 
If you’re not sure what Odd Things in Odd Places is and why I’m in Iraq by myself, here’s why.
__________
 PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. You can buy it here:
   
Or see a preview here.
_______________
On the morning of Saturday, August 2nd, I got in a taxi in Erbil, the regional capital of Kurdish Iraq, and asked the driver to take me to the Khazir refugee camp.
This was a scary-ish thing to do.
The “scary” part is a result of the fact that the Khazir camp is outside of the borders of the somewhat autonomous Kurdish region, one of the only secure parts of the country.
The “ish” part comes from the fact that the Khazir camp, though outside of Kurdish borders, is still in an area currently controlled by the Peshmerga—the Kurdish army.
Iraq has been a scary place for a while now, for a number of reasons, but it’s currently scary in italics because of the terrorist group we’ve all gotten to know about in the past three months—ISIS.
   
So, the cab driver, myself, and our two constricted assholes headed west towards Khazir.
After about 45 minutes, we crossed the checkpoint that meant we were leaving the Kurdish region, and a few minutes later, right when my phone’s blue dot was starting to get just close enough to Mosul for my liking, I looked out the car’s right window and saw the camp:
   
We pulled in, spent a bunch of time convincing the camp officials and ourselves that I was a journalist, and eventually I was allowed in.
I didn’t have a plan, exactly, so I started walking through the long lines of tents, noting that the 118°F (48°C) temperature I had been suffering through all week must be almost lethal here, where the only escape was in a tent.
   
After a few minutes, I met a man named Kamil who spoke some English, and he invited me into his family’s tent. After talking with him a bit, I learned that it was actually a few families’ tent, and that there were 12 people living in it—five adults and seven children. There was electricity enough for a TV and a fan, and most of the mattresses were stacked on the side.
   
He told me that 12 people to a tent was common at the camp, and mentioned that his tent was actually about to move to 13, gesturing toward one of the women living there who was thoroughly pregnant.
Kamil was from Mosul, like everyone at the camp. Mosul is Iraq’s second largest city, only 30 miles west of the camp—and as of June 9th, an ISIS stronghold. After taking over, one of the first orders of business for ISIS was rounding up government workers for execution. Kamil, a police officer, was lucky to get out with his family before they got to him. When I asked him if he thought he’d return to Mosul at some point, he shook his head and said, “Fuck Mosul.”
As soon as he learned that I was going to be writing about my time in Iraq, he led me out of the tent to join him on a special Oh Okay Then I Want to Show You Exactly How Upsetting Everything Here Is So You Can Write About It and Tell Everyone Tour.
He walked me past the communal tap for drinking water, and said people used that water to clean themselves too, having not seen a shower since they arrived.
   
He showed me multiple babies that had been born at the camp.
   
We popped into a bunch of different tents, one whose fan had been stolen (remember that it’s 118°), and another that had 15 people living in it. He showed me where the shared toilets drain out into a system that flows openly through the camp. He told me that a lot of the families didn’t have enough food and that people were getting sick more and more often and remaining untreated. And these were all people who two months earlier were living their normal lives in their normal homes. Remember the time I complained about anything? That was dumb.
When Kamil introduced me to a man whose two brothers had been executed by ISIS, I assumed that had to be the tour’s horrifying grand finale, but he wasn’t done yet. He brought me into another tent where he introduced me to a woman living there, explaining to her that I was his new writer friend. Without missing a beat, she handed me these:
   
Whatever I was holding, it was something bad, and I didn’t want to ask what it was. I asked. He pointed across the tent to a little boy and explained that I was holding part of his skull.
The boy was an eight-year-old named Mohammad. Their family’s house had been bombed in the middle of the night during the first days of the ISIS takeover and subsequent Iraqi government airstrikes. I never learned why or if they were specifically targeted. But the end result was that this healthy little eight-year-old—
   
—was now this brain-damaged, partially deaf, blind in one eye eight-year-old with digestive difficulties:
   
The goal of this post will be to understand why this sickening thing happened to this little boy—to really understand what’s going on in that country—better than you do now.
And if we really want to wrap our head around things, we have to start way, way back—in 570 AD.
_______________
 Ingredient 1: An Ancient Schism 
In 570, a long-named baby was born to a prominent family in Mecca, a city on the west coast of what is currently Saudi Arabia—Abū al-Qāsim Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim. Today he’s just known as Muhammad.1 ← click this 
Muhammad never had a father—his father died six months before his birth—and his mother died when he was six years old.2 ← again again 
After the death of his mother, Muhammad lived with his grandfather, and when he died two years later, Muhammad was transferred to his uncle, a merchant. With his uncle as his mentor, Muhammad became a merchant himself. Not too much is known about Muhammad’s young adult years, but one thing we’re pretty sure of is that he married a 40-year-old widow named Khadijah when he was 25 (he’d have multiple more wives later in his life). They would go on to have four daughters and two sons, only one of whom survived into full adulthood—his daughter Fatimah.
It wasn’t until Muhammad was 40 that his life started getting strange. He had gotten into the habit of going up to a mountain every year for a couple weeks to be alone, meditate, and pray. It was on one of these solo retreats in 610 AD that Muhammad was for the first time visited by the angel Gabriel.3 As the story goes, Gabriel recited messages to Muhammad that were directly from God, which Muhammad memorized. Over the years, Gabriel would continue to visit Muhammad with messages, Muhammad continued to commit them to memory, and later, he would recite the memories to his followers, who would then write them down, and that became the Quran.
Three years after the first visit from Gabriel, in 613, Muhammad began preaching the messages to the public, in his hometown of Mecca. This did not go well. At the time, Mecca was largely made up of polytheistic tribes who worshipped nature-related gods and goddesses, and one of Muhammad’s main messages was that there was one god and any idols to other gods should be destroyed, which was awkward for everybody. People started reacting violently to Muhammad’s growing influence, killing some of his followers, and they may have killed Muhammad too had he not belonged to a fancy family. But in 622, when Muhammad learned of an assassination plot against him, he and his followers decided to bail on Mecca and head to the nearby city of Medina. This journey is called the Hijra in Muslim tradition and it’s celebrated on the first day of the Muslim year.
Muhammad and his followers would spend the next eight years fighting off attempts to destroy them from Mecca and other places, and often being ruthless themselves with those who posed a threat to Islam or refused to convert. The thing a lot of people don’t know is that in addition to being a spiritual leader, Muhammad was, in essence, the general of an army of followers and a tremendously effective strategist in growing and holding on to his leadership position in the face of lots of hostile competition.
Things came to a head in 625 when the Meccans, who were increasingly losing prestige and support as Muhammad’s following continued to grow, launched an attack on Medina and defeated the Muslims. But five years later, Muhammad and a 10,000 man army marched into Mecca and conquered it for good. By the time Muhammad died in 632, Islam had spread through the whole Arabian Peninsula.
 The Muslim World Splits 
The new Muslim world enjoyed 20 years of internal unity until Muhammad died, and then that was the end of that, forever.
The problem is that Muhammad didn’t appoint a successor before he died, or if he did, he didn’t get the word out to everyone. And because he had no living sons, there was no obvious answer. Here’s what happened:
Group A thought that Muhammad wanted the elite members of the Muslim community to choose a fitting leader, or caliph, and whenever that caliph died, the elite would choose the next leader, and so on. And Group A decided a great first caliph to succeed Muhammad would be the father of one of Muhammad’s wives, Abu Bakr (we’ll call him Abu).
Group B disagreed. They thought Muhammad would have told them that only God can choose the successor to lead the Muslim world, and that could only happen by keeping things in the family. To them, all signs pointed to Muhammad’s cousin and the husband of his daughter Fatimah, Ali ibn Abi Talib (Ali). 
Group A was bigger and it won.
So father-in-law Abu took over as Caliph, while son-in-law Ali watched from the sidelines and Group B seethed.
When Abu died of illness two years after taking over, another friend of Muhammad’s, Umar, took over, having been appointed by Abu before his death. Umar ruled for ten years before he was assassinated by the Persians he had just conquered. Abu had also appointed Umar’s successor, Uthman, who ruled for 12 years before he was assassinated. All the while, Group B is helpless and frustrated.
But then, the elite decided the next and fourth caliph should be Ali—Group B’s original guy—and for two seconds, everyone was happy.
Five years later, Ali was assassinated, and when his eldest son Hassan became the fifth caliph, he was quickly overpowered by an aggressive rebel force led by Muawiyah, who coerced Hassan out of power and became the sixth caliph—and Group A and Group B would never reconcile again. While Muawiyah was the first of a long dynasty of caliphs, Group B tells a different story. To them, the leaders are more special than merely elected caliphs—they’re divinely chosen imams, and the way they see it, after an annoying three-caliph delay, their first imam was finally in power when Ali got the job. His eldest son Hassan was their second imam, and when Muawiyah kicked him out, Group B threw their support behind Ali’s younger son, Husayn—their third imam.
Husayn, Group B’s third imam, ended up being beheaded by Yazid, Group A’s seventh caliph (Muawiyah’s successor), and so Group B moved onto Husayn’s son as their fourth imam, while Group A continued to ignore Group B and support their caliphs.
This was over 1300 years ago, and yet today’s Muslim world is still completely divided over it, and so much of today’s Middle East strife is centered around this ancient split.
Group A are Sunnis and Group B are Shias.
Today’s Sunni-Shia tensions are about a lot of things, but at their very core is what happened in the 7th century. Sunni Muslims believe in their line of caliphs, and don’t believe them to be chosen by God, and Shia Muslims reject the first three caliphs and instead believe in the line of divinely-chosen imams starting with Ali, revering in particular Ali4 and his son and the third imam, Husayn. Both sects agree that Muhammad is the final prophet, both follow the Five Pillars of Islam, and both view the Quran as the holy book—but Shia are less unquestionably accepting of the Quran in its entirety, because they believe certain parts were recounted by people other than the imams.
Here’s a chart to help clear up all of this confusion:
   
None of this stopped the early caliphs from conquering an insane amount of the world—by 750, just 140 years after Muhammad’s first revelation, the Muslim world had expanded its reach to a large portion of where it exists today.5 6
    
But as Islam swept the Earth, this early schism only deepened—it was here to stay.
 Ingredient 2: Straight Lines 
The land of Iraq has the coolest nickname of any land anywhere—The Cradle of Civilization—and for good reason. Ancient Iraqi history is as impressive as it gets. In particular, the fertile strip of Iraq in between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers known as Mesopotamia is often credited with the birth of writing (cuneiform), the invention of the wheel, some of the earliest sailboats, calendars, maps, schools, and the origin of the 60-minute hour and 60-second minute.7 3,000 years later, when Alexander the Great conquered half the world, he chose that land to be his capital, selecting Babylon in particular for its treasures and its critical location between Europe and Asia. 1,000 years after that, the head of the great Abbasid Muslim dynasty built Baghdad on the same land to be the capital of the vast Muslim world, and for the next 500 years (until the Mongols stomped on it), Baghdad reigned as a world hub of learning and commerce and for a time, was the world’s largest city. There may be nowhere in the world with a history as rich as the land of Iraq.
The nation of Iraq, on the other hand, was created by two dicks with a pencil and ruler, and its history is mostly unpleasant.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the land of Iraq had been part of the Ottoman Empire for 400 years.8 There were several ethnic and religious groups on the land, left mostly free to keep to themselves and separate from the others. But when Germany and Co. took on France, Britain, and Russia in World War I, the Ottoman Empire elected to be part of the “and Co.”, which left them ultimately on the losing side. Bye bye Ottoman Empire.
During the war, Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France got together with a pencil, a ruler, and a bottle of whiskey, and took to the map, carving the Ottoman Empire into nations and determining where their two nations and Russia would get to have spheres of influence after the war if they won.9
 Regarding the whole “several ethnic and religious groups” thing and the natural boundaries of separation that had developed between them over centuries, George-Picot famously remarked, “Whatevs,” and with pencil in hand, Sykes is quoted as saying, “I should like to draw a line from the e in Acre to the last k in Kirkuk.”10 Here’s what they came up with:11
    
 BBC 
The thing about creating borders using a map, pencil, and ruler, is that it’s a terrible way to create borders. If you look at organically-created borders around the world—those that were formed over time by the local populations, based usually on ethnic and religious divisions, and often demarcated by mountains, rivers, or other natural barriers—they’re squiggly and messy. What’s a clear and satisfying straight-line-on-a-map border for imperial powers trying to keep things clean and simple for themselves is a complete disaster on the ground across the world where the actual place is.
When borders are drawn this way, two bad things happen: 1) Single ethnic or religious groups are sliced apart into separate countries, and 2) Different and often unfriendly groups are shoved into a nation together and told to share resources, get along, and bond together over national pride for a just-made-up nation—which inevitably leads to one group taking power and oppressing the others, resulting in bloody rebellions, coups, and sectarian violence. This isn’t that complicated.12
 But since it wasn’t really their problem, Sykes and George-Picot just went ahead with it, and over the next few years, precise new borders were drawn, giving birth to modern day Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Kuwait. Here was Iraq’s new situation:
   
Can’t see why there’d be any issue here.
 A Tight Lid 
For any of you readers considering creating a new, tense nation of ethnic and religious groups who don’t like each other, I’ve been researching this shit all month and I have advice for you:
Your new nation is like a bubbling soup inside a pressure cooker and it’s gonna spew itself all over the kitchen unless you have one critical thing that can keep things in order: a tight lid.
The nation version of a tight lid can be either a strong western occupying power or an iron fist dictator with a scary military machine at his whim—without one of these, your nation will fall apart.13 Email me if you have any questions.14
 The new nation of Iraq combined Ingredient 1 (Sunni and Shia Arabs living in the same area) with Ingredient 2 (a border that forces them into a nation together, along with a large group of Kurds) to create a tense pressure cooker.
Things were hot from the beginning, when the new Iraqis revolted against the British occupation in 1920. The British acted as a lid and crushed the revolt. After Iraq achieved independence and the British lid left, a series of military commanders took over the lid duties, stomping a number of revolts and killing each other in coups from time to time. In 1968, the Sunni Ba’ath Party took over, under the leadership of new president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and his ambitious vice president and general, Saddam Hussein.
By 1979, Saddam’s influence had grown to the point where he was kind of running the show, and finally he went to al-Bakr and was like, “You know what two cool things are? Murder and retirement. Ya know? I thought maybe you’d want one of those? And you could choose?” and al-Bakr stepped down, bringing Saddam Hussein, the tightest lid of them all, to power.
A lot of things sucked about the 24 year rule of Saddam. He started off in typical dictator fashion, calling together all the senior ranking members of government, and then reading out the names of those who were thought to be disloyal, 22 of whom were later taken out back and shot. He all but legalized “honor killings”—i.e. the tradition sometimes found in places run by Sharia Law whereby a man may kill a female relative if she dishonors her family, often without facing criminal charges. And he gave the world Uday Hussein.15
 But Saddam’s worst crimes happened during the wars he started and their aftermath.
Worried that the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran would inspire rebellion in Iraq’s large Shia majority, Saddam launched into the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which killed over 100,000 Iraqis.16 Iraq’s Kurds, who have never wanted to be a part of Iraq, seized the opportunity in the chaos to try to form their own autonomous country, at times receiving support from the Iranians. The attempt failed, and toward the end of the war, Saddam embarked on the al-Anfal Campaign, a systematic genocide of the Kurdish north. One of the worst moments came in 1988, just as the war was winding down, when residents of the city Halabja were overcome by the smell of sweet apples after war planes flew by overhead, and then people and animals started dropping dead all over the city from gas poisoning. The gassing caused more deaths than 9/11. The entire al-Anfal campaign killed between 50,000 and 180,000 Kurds.
While we’re here, let’s pause for a second and talk about the Kurds.
 The Iraqi Kurdistan Blue Box 
This whole post was supposed to be about Iraqi Kurdistan, the Kurdish region in northeastern Iraq. But when I decided to go another direction, Kurdistan got left out. As a consolation, Kurdistan is being featured in Wait But Why’s first ever blue “aside” box (if you don’t see a blue box, try clearing your cache). Here are some things about Kurdistan:
Let’s start by clearing one thing up: The Kurds are an ethnic group, like the Arabs. Kurds are a number of religions, but most of them are Sunni Muslims. So when people talk about Iraq’s groups and they say “Sunni, Shia, and Kurds,” what they mean is “Arab Sunni, Arab Shia, and Kurdish Sunni.”
Kurds speak Kurdish, though many also speak Arabic as a second language.
Almost no ethnic group is a bigger victim of imperial ruler-pencil border drawing than the Kurds. Check out this map of the Kurdish population (in red) and how horribly it’s been cut apart by borders:
   
The end result of the artificial borders is that despite being the fourth largest ethnic group in the Middle East (after Arabs, Persians, and Turks), Kurds are now minority populations in four countries, making up roughly 20% of Turkey and Iraq, 15% of Syria, and 10% of Iran.17 Kurds are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without a state.
Iraqi Kurds were granted semi-autonomy in 1970, and today, Kurdistan has its own government, army (the Peshmerga), and (highly disputed) borders. But it also plays a role in the Iraq government and is part of Iraq. It’s confusing.
If Iraqi Kurdistan were its own nation, it would be about the size of Switzerland.
Kurdistan is on the liberal, moderate side of the Islamic world and is generally pro-West.
Kurdistan is normally totally safe to visit (right now might be an exception), and its tourism industry was on the rise—in the first half of 2014 alone, they received over one million tourists—but the industry has seen a sharp decline of late, for obvious reasons.
Some notes from my visit:
The people are outlandishly nice and sweet and friendly. One example: On no fewer than five occasions, I went up to a street stand or store to buy something small like a bottle of water, and the person working there would see I was a foreigner and ask me where I was from and how I liked Kurdistan. After we talked, I’d take my money out to buy the thing I came for, and they would adamantly refuse to accept it and tell me it was their gift, even after protests from me.
This wasn’t a surprise. Iraq is the 14th Muslim country I’ve been to,18 and I’ve gotten used to a very specific kind of Muslim hospitality and generosity in those countries that I haven’t experienced as consistently in other places.
There are a lot of serious-looking men sipping on tiny glasses of tea, which I enjoyed.
They have cool candy.
Erbil, the capital, is pretty modern—I would sometimes be in a fancy mall or a German-run bar and I’d have to remind myself, “I’m in Iraq right now.”
I talked to a lot of people there, and something that everyone badly wants is an independent Kurdistan. They’ve wanted this for a century, and it seems like it could really happen sometime not that far away.
The people I spoke to were generally pro-US, but they’re not thrilled with Obama. This is mainly because the US in general has not been supportive of Kurdish independence—I’ve read about why, and it seems to be a combination of a few geopolitical reasons, one of which is that an Iraq without the Kurdish part is much more likely to become a Shia-dominated Iranian ally and pawn.
Anyway, back to Saddam, who barely had time to take a shit after the Iran-Iraq War before starting the Persian Gulf War by invading Kuwait for its delicious oil reserves. This, as I learned from my third grade teacher, did not go well for Saddam, and again, Iraq’s oppressed groups, the Shia and the Kurds, tried to take advantage of the situation by attempting to overthrow Saddam. Saddam responded by tightening the lid and crushing the uprisings, killing 80,000 – 230,000 people in the process.19
 Saddam was a brutal ruler, but for the most part, under his iron fist, Iraq was a stable country. We all know what happens next.
 2003: Off Comes the Lid 
Say what you want about the Bush Administration and their decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam, but one thing is for sure: They were very, very wrong when they thought it would be a quick and easy war.
They knew they were removing a lid, but they seemed to think it was off a tupperware container of cookies, not a pressure cooker. And their plan to replace the wrought iron lid with a fresh sheet of democracy cellophane would have worked fine if it were a tupperware container of cookies. Just not if it were a pressure cooker.
So there’s the US, suddenly mired in hell and chaos for eight years, trying to fix a situation they weren’t prepared to fix, and which would ultimately be the Iraqi people’s problem, not theirs. Speaking of the Iraqi people, it’s time for another blue box.
 The Life in Baghdad Blue Box 
The people I got to know the best during my time in Kurdistan were three brothers from Baghdad who were visiting Kurdistan. They were born and raised in Baghdad, had lived there through the whole war, and spoke near-perfect English. I was ecstatic to find them, and spent two consecutive nights talking to them and asking them questions. Here are some things I learned:
Living under Saddam was, unsurprisingly, horrible. You never dared say anything bad about Saddam or the government, even in private. You were careful who you crossed—if you insulted a kid in class who turned out to have parents in the Ba’ath party, your parents could end up in jail, or worse. “Voting” meant “vote for Saddam or die.” No one could travel. It sounds a lot like modern day North Korea.
So it makes sense that they told me everyone was happy when the US invaded and ousted the Husseins. People mock the Bush Administration’s claim that they’d be greeted as liberators, but it seems that that was the case, at least for everyone these guys knew.
They continued to be happy about the war until about 2006, the peak of the violent civil war, when they said it had been unbearably scary to live there. These days, things are almost as terrible, and when I asked them if they wished that Saddam had never been overthrown, they couldn’t really answer. Two awful options. They don’t feel at all optimistic that things will improve in the future.
That said, outsiders imagine that living in Baghdad was a sea of constant death over the last ten years, while in fact, none of the three of them knew anyone who had died. It was a horrific decade to be there, but most people there have lived their lives unharmed.
Living in Baghdad, they hear a bomb go off almost every day—it’s gotten so common that when one goes off, people don’t even break in their conversation. They said the bombs are Sunni extremists bombing Shia people, or the other way around, and it’s a constant cycle of action and retaliation. Even though it’s unlikely that they’ll get caught in the line of fire, they never know if a bomb will strike where they are.
They’re required to carry around their ID card, which has a bunch of personal information on it, including the name of their religion and the name of their father and grandfather.
One thing that’s gotten more extreme since the Saddam era is a prevailing conservative ideology. Homosexuality is often punished by death by stoning, and police, they said, will turn their heads the other way when this happens. People have even been stoned to death for having emo clothes or haircuts. This wasn’t as bad during the Saddam era, they said, and is now a result of the empowerment of ultra-conservative Shia militia.
Oddly, given the above point, I noticed a lot of pairs of men holding hands or being cuddly together. Same story in Nigeria, where homosexuality is punishable by 14 years in prison. The reverse of American culture on both sides of things.
Here’s how dating works in Iraq: You meet a girl you like, you wait a bunch of years, and then you tell her you love her one day. She will evaluate and either decide to marry you or not. Once you’re married you can be alone together for the first time. Unslutty.
I asked about nightlife, and it sounds pretty grim. There are nightclubs, they said, but no one normal can enter them. You have to “know someone,” they said—and apparently, a lot of the people inside are bad men discussing violent plots.
For all the hardships in their lives, a lot of things are normal. They have smartphones, fast internet, cars, and they’re all in university or already graduated.
A lot of people they know have emigrated to Michigan, which apparently has a sizable Iraqi population. Random.
These three brothers, along with a few others, have started something called World Peace Day in Iraq with celebrations every September 21st. They were the first in the country to have the guts to do this (their celebrations are a target), but it’s caught on, and now the annual gatherings, which include people of many faiths and ethnicities, happen in five Iraqi cities and involve hundreds of people. Brave dudes.
Anyway, as unfortunate as the bloody years of US occupation were for everyone involved, by being there, the US was acting as a lid of some kind. While the US was there, nothing really bad could happen. Then, in 2011, the US left.
 A Perfect Storm 
Instability is the fertile soil that bad, scary things grow out of, and when the US left, Iraq had a new prime minister, a new government, a new and unfamiliar constitution, and an amateur, recently-trained army—not a stable situation.
The power pendulum had also just swung for the first time in decades. Iraq’s population is 55% Arab Shia, 18% Arab Sunni, and 21% Kurd (with others making up 6%). And despite being the smallest group of the three, Iraq’s Arab Sunnis have been in power over the other groups for almost the country’s whole history. For any living Iraqis, a Sunni government and suppressed Shia majority is all they know. Suddenly, in 2006, Iraq had a new government, led by a hard-line Shia, Nouri al-Maliki. A logical observer of history would probably suggest that it would be a wise move for al-Maliki to be inclusive of Sunnis, regardless of the past, since, as noted above, the country was not in a stable situation. Al-Maliki did just the opposite, arresting Sunni leaders, discriminating against Sunni civilians, and targeting Sunnis disproportionately for torture and violence. All of this exacerbated the instability by making the government less unified and competent, creating rage in the Sunni populous,20 and weakening the loyalty of a military, part of which hates its own government. The anti-al-Maliki feelings are so strong that many normally-peaceful Sunnis find themselves sympathizing or even supporting violent anti-government terrorists.
The power switch from Sunni to Shia has broader implications. If you look at the whole world of Islam, it’s clear that Sunni Islam is the vast majority (around 90%) and Shia Islam (around 10%) is just a small side branch:
   
But when you look at the heart of the Middle East more closely, you can see why things are so complicated.
Here’s what the Middle East looked like when Saddam was in power versus when al-Maliki took over:21
    
Suddenly, Shias are in charge of countries all the way from Iran to the Mediterranean, creating a kind of Shia Axis. This is a great thing for the world’s largest Shia nation, Iran, and it scares the shit out of the region’s most powerful Sunni nation, Saudi Arabia. And what’s been happening is Saudi Arabia and Iran engaging in what is essentially a Cold War, vying for broader power, with conflicts like the Syrian Civil War and the current mess in Iraq serving as proxy wars that can tip the balance in the larger struggle. This is why Iran wants ISIS (a Sunni group) to disappear and why you keep hearing that the US and Iran might actually agree on something (though for different reasons). This is also why the Saudis have been rumored to have funded Sunni resistance movements in both Syria and Iraq, even possibly directing funds to groups like ISIS.22
 Yet another factor playing into the trouble is the simultaneous instability of adjacent Iraq and Syria—this creates an unstable border, as well as a situation where the terrorist-fighting front is disjointed and without a shared national narrative to fight for. It also allows a terrorist group to hide in one country from trouble in the other.
Finally, western powers often provide a lid from afar when things erupt somewhere—but in this case, those powers have been gun shy since they just got out of a hideous war in the area and really really want to avoid getting involved. Up until Obama’s Mid-September speech, the US has done everything possible to avoid getting involved.
When you add this all together—an unstable and divided new government with an amateur, questionably-loyal army and an angry minority population who feels sympathy for anyone who will resist the government; the interests of a giant neighbor, Saudi Arabia, aligned with a government overthrow; a civil war next door; and a group of western powers who have been determined to stay out—you have the perfect storm for the fiercest of terrorist groups to emerge from the fringe and conquer.
 ISIS 
The beginnings of ISIS23—a Sunni jihadist group—can be traced back to 1999, when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian jihadist, started the group because he was pissed off about a lot of things. After Zarqawi swore allegiance to al-Qaeda in 2004, this evolved into what became known as “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and was one of those shadowy insurgent groups you kept reading about the US fighting during the war. When insurgent activity died down after the US troop surge in 2007, ISIS seemed on the decline and disappeared from relevance for a bit.
   Al-Baghdadi 
In 2010, after ISIS’s second leader was assassinated, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—a former scholar of Islamic studies24 and a US war prisoner back in 200425—took over and got the group back on track. He replenished their partially-killed-off leadership with dozens of Saddam’s old Ba’athist military personnel, who brought key experience to the group. Then in 2011, when the Syrian Civil War broke out, ISIS joined in as a rebel force26—which helped to train and battle-harden the group. ISIS’s behavior in Syria was so brutal and severe that they even started creeping out the other bad guy groups, including al-Qaeda, who finally had a tantrum in early 2014 and cut all ties with ISIS.
Up until early June 2014, only those who were carefully following the news knew about ISIS. But that’s when everything changed.
On June 5th, just hours after I purchased my non-refundable flight to Iraq, ISIS stormed into the country, taking control of the border, and started systematically conquering towns in the western part of the nation. And suddenly, everyone had heard of ISIS.
Two things were especially shocking about ISIS’s advance into Iraq. First, the horrifying, Genghis Khan-style way they conducted business—i.e. immediately round up and execute all men of authority, in this case anyone who was ever on the government payroll, and then execute anyone else who resisted their takeover.27 Second, the fact that in city after city ISIS attacked, the Iraqi military would flee the scene. This was partially because they were horrified of ISIS and partially because, as mentioned above, the Sunni members of the army weren’t that into fighting against a Sunni group to defend a government they hated. So western Iraq was folding quickly to ISIS, and by June 9th, they had captured Mosul, Iraq’s second biggest city.
The area of Syria and Iraq they had conquered (and are still in control of) is the size of Belgium. Al-Qaeda never conquered anything—they just killed people. So how did ISIS do it? In addition to the perfect storm of factors discussed above, including far more tacit support from masses of civilians than al-Qaeda ever had, ISIS has three qualities that make them so effective:
 1) They’re brutal. No regard for human life is a helpful quality when trying to conquer a nation. This Amnesty International report details real accounts of ISIS brutality so scary it doesn’t seem real. An example of an excerpt in the report:
 A witness to one such mass killing in Solagh, a village south-east of Sinjar city, told Amnesty International that on the morning of 3 August, as he was trying to flee towards Mount Sinjar, he saw vehicles with IS fighters in them approaching, and managed to conceal himself. From his hiding place he saw them take some civilians from a house in the western outskirts of Solagh:  
 “A white Toyota pick-up stopped by the house of my neighbour, Salah Mrad Noura, who raised a white flag to indicate they were peaceful civilians. The pick-up had some 14 IS men on the back. They took out some 30 people from my neighbour’s house: men, women and children. They put the women and children, some 20 of them, on the back of another vehicle which had come, a large white Kia, and marched the men, about nine of them, to the nearby wadi [dry river bed]. There they made them kneel and shot them in the back. They were all killed; I watched from my hiding place for a long time and none of them moved. I know two of those killed: my neighbour Salah Mrad Noura, who was about 80 years old, and his son Kheiro, aged about 45 or 50.” 
ISIS has officially been the deadliest terrorist group in history. In a tool that maps out the activity of the world’s most prominent terrorist groups, when you filter by “Most Victims,” ISIS comes up first, despite being around for less than a decade (their death count is more than double al-Qaeda’s lifetime total). The below screenshot of the tool shows terrorist groups ranked from most total killings (on the top left) to least (on the bottom right). Each mini-chart shows activity over time, with the red and yellow bars representing deaths and wounded, respectively:
   
 2) They’re sophisticated. ISIS functions like a well-run company—it knows how to recruit (ISIS forces are supposedly up to 50,000 in Syria and 30,000 in Iraq), it knows how to fundraise, and it’s incredibly organized. ISIS produces a thorough and professional annual report that details its killings and conquests in the same way a company would report on its revenue and gross margin. Here’s a chilling graphic from their 2013 report breaking down their various methods for the year’s 7,681 attacks:
   
They’re also pros at social media. Aaron Zelin, an expert on jihadis at the Washington Institute, said that when it comes to social media, ISIS is “probably more sophisticated than most US companies.”
 3) They’re incredibly rich.  According to Iraqi intelligence, ISIS has assets worth $2 billion, making it by far the richest terrorist group in the world. Most of this money was seized after the capture of Mosul, including hundreds of millions of US dollars from Mosul’s central bank. On top of that, they’ve taken oil fields and are reportedly making $3 million per day selling oil on the black market, with even more money coming in through donations, extortions, and ransom. ISIS has also gotten ahold of an upsetting amount of high-caliber, US-made weapons and tanks that were for the use of the Iraqi army but left behind when the army fled. They’ve even gotten their hands on nuclear material that they found at Mosul University.
On June 29th, ISIS just fully went for it and proclaimed itself a caliphate—i.e. a global Islamic state—and commanded all the world’s Muslims to obey Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the grand caliph. Those living in ISIS-captured cities are getting a taste of what life in the new caliphate is like:
Women have about as many rights as a goldfish, barely allowed to leave the house and forbidden from showing their faces in public.
No smoking ever, and also no tampering with or disabling the smoke detector in the airplane lavatory.
If they’re not just rounded up and executed on the spot, Christians and other non-Muslims are forced to convert to Islam, pay a hefty non-Muslim tax, become a refugee, or die. The doors of Christian houses are marked with a ن, a symbol that signifies that they’re Christian. Nazi-esque.
 Some reports say a fatwa (an Islamic law ruling by an authority) was issued declaring that all women between the ages of 11 and 46 would undergo genital mutilation, a tradition meant to suppress a woman’s sexual desire in order to discourage “immoral behavior.”28 
As for future goals, the short term goal is to establish an Islamic nation in the areas it currently controls, with some expansion of the boundaries. In the medium term, al-Baghdadi has declared that “this blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes–Picot conspiracy”—i.e. until those pencil and ruler lines drawn after WWI are gone and all the nations are part of the new caliphate. In the long run, ISIS wants to expand its caliphate to the reaches of the first Muslim dynasty in 750 AD, and beyond:
   
Some people have argued that this map wasn’t made by ISIS, but rather by their supporters. Even if that’s so, al-Baghdadi’s ambitions certainly seem to match, and exceed, those on that map. In July, al-Baghdadi put out a message to Muslims that assured them that ISIS “will conquer Rome and own the world.”
Over the past three months, as ISIS has marched through Iraq, 1.2 million Iraqis have become refugees. 700,000 of them are hiding under the protection of Kurdistan’s Peshmerga army. One of those 700,000 refugees is eight-year-old and now badly-damaged Mohammad, who was living a normal life in Mosul when ISIS attacked.
_______________
Five days after my visit to Khazir refugee camp, ISIS made an aggressive push forward into the scary-ish territory and captured the Khazir camp. The Peshmerga army retreated, instantly converting the area into scary-in-italics territory. That night, a black ISIS flag rose up over the camp where the Kurdish flag had been. Luckily, this happened after a few days of ISIS-Peshmerga fighting, and the refugees had time to run before ISIS arrived. But now, where do they go? People like Kamil, a police officer, cannot go back to Mosul—his name was on the government payroll, and he would be executed upon arrival. But without significant money, many refugees are not allowed into Kurdistan either. Some simply camped out on the road in the searing heat.
A few days later, with the help of US airstrikes, the Kurds recaptured the Khazir camp and a number of other areas ISIS had taken from them.
Since my visit, two new developments offer some hope that things could possibly turn around. The first is that the polarizing Nouri al-Maliki is no longer the Prime Minister. He has been forced out and replaced by another Shia leader, Haider al-Abadi. We’ll see if al-Abadi can cool off some of the Sunni rage al-Maliki’s administration ignited.
The second development happened on September 10th, when President Obama announced that the US would engage in a new campaign of airstrikes, both in Syria and Iraq, to try to defeat ISIS. Airstrikes are sure to slow ISIS down, but to take down and dismantle a group as shadowy, relentless, and fearless as ISIS, I doubt airstrikes will suffice. It’s going to be a lot harder than that.
_______________
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 More where this came from: 
This post is one of five in a travel series I wrote during the summer of 2014. The other four posts:
  Russia: What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know  
  Japan, and How I Failed to Figure it Out  
  19 Things I Learned in Nigeria  
  But What About Greenland?  
And  the wrap-up video , where I asked people in all five countries what they’d wish for if they had a genie.
If you’re in a really crazy mood, here’s a post from the summer of 2013:   20 Things I learned in North Korea  
  
Sources 
William Montgomery Watt – Muhammad: Prophet and Statesman
William Montgomery Watt – Muhammad at Mecca
William Montgomery Watt – Muhammad at Medina
Majid Ali Khan – Muhammad, the Final Messenger
Bernard Lewis – Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East
Muhammad Husayn Haykal – The Life of Muhammad
Richard C. Martin – Encyclopedia of Islam &amp; the Muslim World
NPR – Chronology of the Shiite-Sunni Split
Pew Research – The Future of the Global Muslim Population
The Christian Science Monitor – Cause of Iraq’s Chaos: Bad Borders
The Guardian – First world war: 15 legacies still with us today
CIA World Factbook – Iraq
The World Bank – GINI Index
Time – The Sum of Two Evils
 Sons of Saddam
Liam Anderson; Gareth Stansfield – The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy, Or Division?
Al Jazeera – Islamic State ‘has 50,000 fighters in Syria’
Wall Street Journal – Refugee Numbers Grow as Civilians Flock to Iraqi Camps
Periscopic.com – A World of Terror
Amnesty International – Ethnic Cleansing on a Historic Scale: Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities in Northern Iraq
New York Times – Sunni Extremists in Iraq Seize 3 Towns From Kurds and Threaten Major Dam
From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq's Full Story — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html
https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/2013/10/
October 2013 – ALL MESOPOTAMIA
2013-10-20
None
<div><div>
<p>With Halloween upon us, I thought I’d write about Nebuchadnezzar II, the great king of Babylon, the one known for building one of the most elusive wonders of the ancient world.</p>
<p>Now, unless you’ve read up on this famous king, or are familiar with the bible, you’re probably wondering what Nebuchadnezzar has to do with Halloween, so I’ll get right down to it…</p>
<p>King Nebuchadnezzar was a werewolf!</p>
<div><p><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/db/William_Blake_-_Nebuchadnezzar_-_WGA02216.jpg/800px-William_Blake_-_Nebuchadnezzar_-_WGA02216.jpg"></a></p><p><strong>King Nebuchadnezzar at kind of a bad moment.</strong></p></div>
<p>Well, he <i>thought</i> he was, anyway. We think. It is believed that King Nebuchadnezzar II suffered from lycanthropy, what <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lycanthropy">Merriam-Webster</a> defines as “a delusion that one has become or has assumed the characteristics of a wolf.”</p>
<p>Conversely, Melissa Barrett writes in her article, <a href="http://melissabarrett.hubpages.com/hub/Real-Werewolves-Three-Cases-of-Lycanthropy">“Real Werewolves: Three Cases of Lycanthropy,”</a> that “…clinical lycanthropy is often offered as a secular explanation for the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar.”</p>
<p>In my research to put this post together, I found all kinds of sources referring to Nebuchadnezzar as the first–and I assume only–biblical werewolf. It is through the bible that we are introduced to this part of Nebuchadnezzar’s eventful life and reign as the king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, also known as the Chaldean Empire.</p>
<p>Putting secular explanations aside, Nebuchadnezzar was a proud and boastful king, who had the bricks used to build the walls of Babylon inscribed with the statement, “I am Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.” (Source)</p>
<h2></h2>
<p>Born around 634 BC, Nebuchadnezzar II was the son of <a href="http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/nmen/g/Nabopolassar.htm">Nabopolassar</a>, the liberator king of Babylonia after three centuries under Assyrian rule. King Nabopolassar left his son plenty to work with when he died around 605 BC, including political stability and wealth with which to expand and strengthen the empire he built, and Nebuchadnezzar’s ambition helped him build upon his father’s accomplishments.</p>
<p>Nebuchadnezzar began his journey to greatness by marrying Amytis, the daughter of the Median king Cyaxerxes, securing an alliance with his father’s allies against the Assyrians, the Medes. He then went on to defeat the Assyrians as well as the Egyptians, and became the first Babylonian king to rule Egypt. He also brought the regions of Palestine and Syria under his rule, and in turn controlled all trade routes stretching across Mesopotamia, from the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.</p>
<div><p><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/The_historical_city_of_Babylon.jpg"></a></p><p><strong>A panoramic view of the reconstructed city of Babylon. Note the thickness of the walls.</strong></p></div>
<p>Nebuchadnezzar II is also credited with building what the Greek historian Herodotus (484 BC-425 BC) felt should have been included in the list of <a href="http://www.ancient.eu.com/The_Seven_Wonders/">Seven Wonders</a>–the <a href="http://www.ancient.eu.com/Nebuchadnezzar_II/">walls of Babylon</a>, which were 56 miles long according to the<a href="http://www.ancient.eu.com/Nebuchadnezzar_II/"> Ancient History Encyclopedia</a> (<a href="http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/g/nebuchadnezzar.htm">another source says 10 miles</a>), and so thick that chariot races were performed on top of them, along with the most famous entrance, the <a href="http://www.ancient.eu.com/Ishtar_Gate/">Ishtar Gate</a>.</p>
<div><p><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Ishtar_Gate_at_Berlin_Museum.jpg/800px-Ishtar_Gate_at_Berlin_Museum.jpg"></a></p><p><strong>The original Ishtar Gate, which you can visit at the Berlin Museum. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ishtar_Gate_at_Berlin_Museum.jpg">Source</a>)</strong></p></div>
<p>Under Nebuchadnezzar’s rule, Babylon flourished as the center of art and literacy. Mathematics and craftsmanship also flourished then, along with religious tolerance and interest in other faiths and gods. Nebuchadnezzar built schools, and built and restored temples.</p>
<p>Nebuchadnezzar’s accomplishments are undeniably impressive, including being responsible for modern-day Judaism, and he might’ve been a hopeless romantic who built the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon to help his wife deal with her homesickness, for example, but the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament focuses on Nebuchadnezzar’s pride and narcissism (not to mention that pesky business of destroying the temple of Solomon and exiling the Jews), which brings us back to the Halloween aspect–to the werewolf.</p>
<div><p></p><p><strong>A performance of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco"><em>Nabucco</em></a>, Giuseppe Verdi’s most famous opera, about the biblical exile of the Jews to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, Nabucco in Italian. (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco">Source</a>)</strong></p></div>
<p>Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned in several parts of the Bible, but it is in the Book of Daniel that a nightmare and a curse equal something supernatural.</p>
<p>The author of the <a href="http://revdantheman.com/2009/07/13/a-werewolf-in-the-bible/">R</a><a href="http://revdantheman.com/2009/07/13/a-werewolf-in-the-bible/">evDanTheMan</a> blog writes in the post “A Werewolf in the Bible?”:</p>
<p>“Upon reading the Book of Daniel, we see that Nebuchadnezzar respected the God of Daniel[,] but he did not worship Him; he was a classic narcissist who believed in many gods[,] but who ultimately truly worshiped only the one [whose] image appeared every time he looked in a mirror.”</p>
<p>Well, pride and narcissism are never characteristics that bring good things to their bearers, especially in the Bible, so it is these flaws that bring on what is conjectured by some scholars to be lycanthropy.</p>
<p>According to the biblical account, Nebuchadnezzar’s troubles begin when he has a nightmare brought onto him by God as punishment for his pride and narcissism. The nightmare features a statue made of various materials; a head of gold, a chest of silver, a midriff of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron mixed with pottery (<a href="http://www.pbc.org/system/message_files/7826/4701.html">Source</a>).</p>
<div><p><a href="http://biblebookofdaniel.com/Limages/nebuchadnezzars_statue.jpg"></a></p><p><strong>The statue from Nebuchadnezar II’s nightmare with a head of gold, a chest of silver, midriff of bronze, legs of iron and feet of iron mixed with pottery. (<a href="http://biblebookofdaniel.com/Limages/nebuchadnezzars_statue.jpg">Source</a>)</strong></p></div>
<p>Nebuchadnezzar is troubled enough by this dream that he consults with magicians, sorcerers and conjurers for an interpretation, all to no avail. And this is perhaps where religious tolerance and interest in other faiths is most apparent in Nebuchadnezzar’s world, because he (eventually) asks the prophet Daniel to interpret his dream.</p>
<div><p><a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Daniel_Interpreting_Nebuchadnezzar%27s_Dream.jpg"></a></p><p><strong>Daniel interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. (<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Daniel_Interpreting_Nebuchadnezzar%27s_Dream.jpg">Source</a>)</strong></p></div>
<p>“You shall be driven from men,” Daniel tells the troubled king, “and your dwelling will be with the beasts of the field, and you will eat grass as oxen, and will be wet with the dew of heaven, and seven years will pass over you, till you know that the most High rules the kingdom of men, and gives it to whoever He will.”</p>
<p>I feel it important to mention at this point that lycanthropy is not exclusive to the form of a wolf. Harvey Rosenstock, M.D. and Kenneth R. Vincent, Ed.D., write in their article in <i>The American Journal of Psychiatry:</i> “The animals in the delusioned transformation include leopards, lions, elephants, crocodiles, sharks, buffalo, eagles, and serpents.”</p>
<p>And so, after refusing to repent, Nebuchadnezzar is struck by the curse of what is believed to be lycanthropy for the next seven years, and it was like there was a werewolf in Babylon.</p>
<p>“<em>The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’, and his nails like birds’.”</em></p>
<p>And after seven long years of living like a beast, Nebuchadnezzar finally repents and recognizes Daniel’s God, after which he returns to his former greatness.</p>
<h2></h2>
<p>Nebuchadnezzar II might’ve suffered from lycanthropy, he might’ve suffered from syphilis, we don’t know. Without archaeological evidence, we cannot be sure that he even suffered from anything other than a common cold here and there. We do know that Nebuchadnezzar II, who the historian Sir Henry Rawlinson labeled “the greatest monarch that Babylon, or perhaps the East generally, ever produced,” died an old man in 605 BC, in the city he made it his life’s mission to make one of the greatest the world would know. We might not have archaeological evidence of a werewolf in Babylon, or the legendary token of love he built for his wife, but we do have archaeological evidence of Nebuchadnezzar’s greatest achievement…Babylon.</p>
<p>Sources and further reading:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.ancient.eu.com/Nebuchadnezzar_II/">http://www.ancient.eu.com/Nebuchadnezzar_II/</a></p>
<p><a href="http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/g/nebuchadnezzar.htm">http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/g/nebuchadnezzar.htm</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.primitivism.com/lycanthropy.htm">http://www.primitivism.com/lycanthropy.htm</a></p>
<p><a href="http://revdantheman.com/2009/07/13/a-werewolf-in-the-bible/">http://revdantheman.com/2009/07/13/a-werewolf-in-the-bible/</a></p>
<p><a href="http://melissabarrett.hubpages.com/hub/Real-Werewolves-Three-Cases-of-Lycanthropy">http://melissabarrett.hubpages.com/hub/Real-Werewolves-Three-Cases-of-Lycanthropy</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.ancient.eu.com/The_Seven_Wonders/">http://www.ancient.eu.com/The_Seven_Wonders/</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.ancient.eu.com/Ishtar_Gate/">http://www.ancient.eu.com/Ishtar_Gate/</a></p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.pbc.org/system/message_files/7826/4701.html">http://www.pbc.org/system/message_files/7826/4701.html</a></p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabopolassar">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabopolassar</a></p>
<p><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=u1By9tEjh6AC&amp;pg=PA92&amp;lpg=PA92&amp;dq=nebuchadnezzar+lycanthropy&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=FaY3-Y2U5P&amp;sig=sT3D2M9jXpOPZ6UeKx6Gr-qvdvE&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=e8ZgUpihKZTCyAG6kIDYDQ&amp;ved=0CE4Q6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&amp;q=nebuchadnezzar%20lycanthropy&amp;f=false">http://books.google.com/books?id=u1By9tEjh6AC&amp;pg=PA92&amp;lpg=PA92&amp;dq=nebuchadnezzar+lycanthropy&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=FaY3-Y2U5P&amp;sig=sT3D2M9jXpOPZ6UeKx6Gr-qvdvE&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=e8ZgUpihKZTCyAG6kIDYDQ&amp;ved=0CE4Q6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&amp;q=nebuchadnezzar%20lycanthropy&amp;f=false</a></p>
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 Monthly Archives: October 2013

 Nebuchadnezzar II, a king with issues.

 20 Oct

 With Halloween upon us, I thought I’d write about Nebuchadnezzar II, the great king of Babylon, the one known for building one of the most elusive wonders of the ancient world.

 Now, unless you’ve read up on this famous king, or are familiar with the bible, you’re probably wondering what Nebuchadnezzar has to do with Halloween, so I’ll get right down to it…

 King Nebuchadnezzar was a werewolf!

 King Nebuchadnezzar at kind of a bad moment.

 Well, he thought he was, anyway. We think. It is believed that King Nebuchadnezzar II suffered from lycanthropy, what Merriam-Webster defines as “a delusion that one has become or has assumed the characteristics of a wolf.”

 Conversely, Melissa Barrett writes in her article, “Real Werewolves: Three Cases of Lycanthropy,” that “…clinical lycanthropy is often offered as a secular explanation for the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar.”

 In my research to put this post together, I found all kinds of sources referring to Nebuchadnezzar as the first–and I assume only–biblical werewolf. It is through the bible that we are introduced to this part of Nebuchadnezzar’s eventful life and reign as the king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, also known as the Chaldean Empire.

 Putting secular explanations aside, Nebuchadnezzar was a proud and boastful king, who had the bricks used to build the walls of Babylon inscribed with the statement, “I am Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.” (Source)

 Who’s he?

 Born around 634 BC, Nebuchadnezzar II was the son of Nabopolassar, the liberator king of Babylonia after three centuries under Assyrian rule. King Nabopolassar left his son plenty to work with when he died around 605 BC, including political stability and wealth with which to expand and strengthen the empire he built, and Nebuchadnezzar’s ambition helped him build upon his father’s accomplishments.

 Nebuchadnezzar began his journey to greatness by marrying Amytis, the daughter of the Median king Cyaxerxes, securing an alliance with his father’s allies against the Assyrians, the Medes. He then went on to defeat the Assyrians as well as the Egyptians, and became the first Babylonian king to rule Egypt. He also brought the regions of Palestine and Syria under his rule, and in turn controlled all trade routes stretching across Mesopotamia, from the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.

 A panoramic view of the reconstructed city of Babylon. Note the thickness of the walls.

 Nebuchadnezzar II is also credited with building what the Greek historian Herodotus (484 BC-425 BC) felt should have been included in the list of Seven Wonders–the walls of Babylon, which were 56 miles long according to the Ancient History Encyclopedia (another source says 10 miles), and so thick that chariot races were performed on top of them, along with the most famous entrance, the Ishtar Gate.

 The original Ishtar Gate, which you can visit at the Berlin Museum. (Source)

 Under Nebuchadnezzar’s rule, Babylon flourished as the center of art and literacy. Mathematics and craftsmanship also flourished then, along with religious tolerance and interest in other faiths and gods. Nebuchadnezzar built schools, and built and restored temples.

 Nebuchadnezzar’s accomplishments are undeniably impressive, including being responsible for modern-day Judaism, and he might’ve been a hopeless romantic who built the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon to help his wife deal with her homesickness, for example, but the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament focuses on Nebuchadnezzar’s pride and narcissism (not to mention that pesky business of destroying the temple of Solomon and exiling the Jews), which brings us back to the Halloween aspect–to the werewolf.

 A performance of Nabucco, Giuseppe Verdi’s most famous opera, about the biblical exile of the Jews to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, Nabucco in Italian. (Source)

 Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned in several parts of the Bible, but it is in the Book of Daniel that a nightmare and a curse equal something supernatural.

 The author of the RevDanTheMan blog writes in the post “A Werewolf in the Bible?”:

 “Upon reading the Book of Daniel, we see that Nebuchadnezzar respected the God of Daniel[,] but he did not worship Him; he was a classic narcissist who believed in many gods[,] but who ultimately truly worshiped only the one [whose] image appeared every time he looked in a mirror.”

 Well, pride and narcissism are never characteristics that bring good things to their bearers, especially in the Bible, so it is these flaws that bring on what is conjectured by some scholars to be lycanthropy.

 According to the biblical account, Nebuchadnezzar’s troubles begin when he has a nightmare brought onto him by God as punishment for his pride and narcissism. The nightmare features a statue made of various materials; a head of gold, a chest of silver, a midriff of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron mixed with pottery (Source).

 The statue from Nebuchadnezar II’s nightmare with a head of gold, a chest of silver, midriff of bronze, legs of iron and feet of iron mixed with pottery. (Source)

 Nebuchadnezzar is troubled enough by this dream that he consults with magicians, sorcerers and conjurers for an interpretation, all to no avail. And this is perhaps where religious tolerance and interest in other faiths is most apparent in Nebuchadnezzar’s world, because he (eventually) asks the prophet Daniel to interpret his dream.

 Daniel interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. (Source)

 “You shall be driven from men,” Daniel tells the troubled king, “and your dwelling will be with the beasts of the field, and you will eat grass as oxen, and will be wet with the dew of heaven, and seven years will pass over you, till you know that the most High rules the kingdom of men, and gives it to whoever He will.”

 I feel it important to mention at this point that lycanthropy is not exclusive to the form of a wolf. Harvey Rosenstock, M.D. and Kenneth R. Vincent, Ed.D., write in their article in The American Journal of Psychiatry: “The animals in the delusioned transformation include leopards, lions, elephants, crocodiles, sharks, buffalo, eagles, and serpents.”

 And so, after refusing to repent, Nebuchadnezzar is struck by the curse of what is believed to be lycanthropy for the next seven years, and it was like there was a werewolf in Babylon.

 “The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’, and his nails like birds’.”

 And after seven long years of living like a beast, Nebuchadnezzar finally repents and recognizes Daniel’s God, after which he returns to his former greatness.

 Nebuchadnezzar II’s Legacy

 Nebuchadnezzar II might’ve suffered from lycanthropy, he might’ve suffered from syphilis, we don’t know. Without archaeological evidence, we cannot be sure that he even suffered from anything other than a common cold here and there. We do know that Nebuchadnezzar II, who the historian Sir Henry Rawlinson labeled “the greatest monarch that Babylon, or perhaps the East generally, ever produced,” died an old man in 605 BC, in the city he made it his life’s mission to make one of the greatest the world would know. We might not have archaeological evidence of a werewolf in Babylon, or the legendary token of love he built for his wife, but we do have archaeological evidence of Nebuchadnezzar’s greatest achievement…Babylon.

 Sources and further reading:

 http://www.ancient.eu.com/Nebuchadnezzar_II/

 http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/g/nebuchadnezzar.htm

 http://www.primitivism.com/lycanthropy.htm

 http://revdantheman.com/2009/07/13/a-werewolf-in-the-bible/

 http://melissabarrett.hubpages.com/hub/Real-Werewolves-Three-Cases-of-Lycanthropy

 http://www.ancient.eu.com/The_Seven_Wonders/

 http://www.ancient.eu.com/Ishtar_Gate/

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco

 http://www.pbc.org/system/message_files/7826/4701.html

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabopolassar

 http://books.google.com/books?id=u1By9tEjh6AC&pg=PA92&lpg=PA92&dq=nebuchadnezzar+lycanthropy&source=bl&ots=FaY3-Y2U5P&sig=sT3D2M9jXpOPZ6UeKx6Gr-qvdvE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=e8ZgUpihKZTCyAG6kIDYDQ&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&q=nebuchadnezzar%20lycanthropy&f=false

 2 Comments

 Posted by ALL MESOPOTAMIA on October 20, 2013 in Babylon, Holidays, Kings

 Tags: Amytes, Ancient History, babylon, Chaldean, daniel, halloween, hanging gardens, herodotus, history, iraq, ishtar gate, king of babylon, lycanthropy, mesopotamia, Nabopolassar, nebuchadnezzar, neo-babylonian, seven wonders

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With Halloween upon us, I thought I’d write about Nebuchadnezzar II, the great king of Babylon, the one known for building one of the most elusive wonders of the ancient world.
Now, unless you’ve read up on this famous king, or are familiar with the bible, you’re probably wondering what Nebuchadnezzar has to do with Halloween, so I’ll get right down to it…
King Nebuchadnezzar was a werewolf!
      King Nebuchadnezzar at kind of a bad moment.  
Well, he thought he was, anyway. We think. It is believed that King Nebuchadnezzar II suffered from lycanthropy, what Merriam-Webster defines as “a delusion that one has become or has assumed the characteristics of a wolf.”
Conversely, Melissa Barrett writes in her article, “Real Werewolves: Three Cases of Lycanthropy,” that “…clinical lycanthropy is often offered as a secular explanation for the biblical story of King Nebuchadnezzar.”
In my research to put this post together, I found all kinds of sources referring to Nebuchadnezzar as the first–and I assume only–biblical werewolf. It is through the bible that we are introduced to this part of Nebuchadnezzar’s eventful life and reign as the king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, also known as the Chaldean Empire.
Putting secular explanations aside, Nebuchadnezzar was a proud and boastful king, who had the bricks used to build the walls of Babylon inscribed with the statement, “I am Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon.” (Source)
 
Born around 634 BC, Nebuchadnezzar II was the son of Nabopolassar, the liberator king of Babylonia after three centuries under Assyrian rule. King Nabopolassar left his son plenty to work with when he died around 605 BC, including political stability and wealth with which to expand and strengthen the empire he built, and Nebuchadnezzar’s ambition helped him build upon his father’s accomplishments.
Nebuchadnezzar began his journey to greatness by marrying Amytis, the daughter of the Median king Cyaxerxes, securing an alliance with his father’s allies against the Assyrians, the Medes. He then went on to defeat the Assyrians as well as the Egyptians, and became the first Babylonian king to rule Egypt. He also brought the regions of Palestine and Syria under his rule, and in turn controlled all trade routes stretching across Mesopotamia, from the Arabian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.
      A panoramic view of the reconstructed city of Babylon. Note the thickness of the walls.  
Nebuchadnezzar II is also credited with building what the Greek historian Herodotus (484 BC-425 BC) felt should have been included in the list of Seven Wonders–the walls of Babylon, which were 56 miles long according to the Ancient History Encyclopedia (another source says 10 miles), and so thick that chariot races were performed on top of them, along with the most famous entrance, the Ishtar Gate.
      The original Ishtar Gate, which you can visit at the Berlin Museum. (Source)  
Under Nebuchadnezzar’s rule, Babylon flourished as the center of art and literacy. Mathematics and craftsmanship also flourished then, along with religious tolerance and interest in other faiths and gods. Nebuchadnezzar built schools, and built and restored temples.
Nebuchadnezzar’s accomplishments are undeniably impressive, including being responsible for modern-day Judaism, and he might’ve been a hopeless romantic who built the legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon to help his wife deal with her homesickness, for example, but the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament focuses on Nebuchadnezzar’s pride and narcissism (not to mention that pesky business of destroying the temple of Solomon and exiling the Jews), which brings us back to the Halloween aspect–to the werewolf.
    A performance of  Nabucco , Giuseppe Verdi’s most famous opera, about the biblical exile of the Jews to Babylon by Nebuchadnezzar, Nabucco in Italian. (Source)  
Nebuchadnezzar is mentioned in several parts of the Bible, but it is in the Book of Daniel that a nightmare and a curse equal something supernatural.
The author of the R evDanTheMan blog writes in the post “A Werewolf in the Bible?”:
“Upon reading the Book of Daniel, we see that Nebuchadnezzar respected the God of Daniel[,] but he did not worship Him; he was a classic narcissist who believed in many gods[,] but who ultimately truly worshiped only the one [whose] image appeared every time he looked in a mirror.”
Well, pride and narcissism are never characteristics that bring good things to their bearers, especially in the Bible, so it is these flaws that bring on what is conjectured by some scholars to be lycanthropy.
According to the biblical account, Nebuchadnezzar’s troubles begin when he has a nightmare brought onto him by God as punishment for his pride and narcissism. The nightmare features a statue made of various materials; a head of gold, a chest of silver, a midriff of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of iron mixed with pottery (Source).
      The statue from Nebuchadnezar II’s nightmare with a head of gold, a chest of silver, midriff of bronze, legs of iron and feet of iron mixed with pottery. (Source)  
Nebuchadnezzar is troubled enough by this dream that he consults with magicians, sorcerers and conjurers for an interpretation, all to no avail. And this is perhaps where religious tolerance and interest in other faiths is most apparent in Nebuchadnezzar’s world, because he (eventually) asks the prophet Daniel to interpret his dream.
      Daniel interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. (Source)  
“You shall be driven from men,” Daniel tells the troubled king, “and your dwelling will be with the beasts of the field, and you will eat grass as oxen, and will be wet with the dew of heaven, and seven years will pass over you, till you know that the most High rules the kingdom of men, and gives it to whoever He will.”
I feel it important to mention at this point that lycanthropy is not exclusive to the form of a wolf. Harvey Rosenstock, M.D. and Kenneth R. Vincent, Ed.D., write in their article in The American Journal of Psychiatry: “The animals in the delusioned transformation include leopards, lions, elephants, crocodiles, sharks, buffalo, eagles, and serpents.”
And so, after refusing to repent, Nebuchadnezzar is struck by the curse of what is believed to be lycanthropy for the next seven years, and it was like there was a werewolf in Babylon.
“The same hour was the thing fulfilled upon Nebuchadnezzar: and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’, and his nails like birds’.” 
And after seven long years of living like a beast, Nebuchadnezzar finally repents and recognizes Daniel’s God, after which he returns to his former greatness.
 
Nebuchadnezzar II might’ve suffered from lycanthropy, he might’ve suffered from syphilis, we don’t know. Without archaeological evidence, we cannot be sure that he even suffered from anything other than a common cold here and there. We do know that Nebuchadnezzar II, who the historian Sir Henry Rawlinson labeled “the greatest monarch that Babylon, or perhaps the East generally, ever produced,” died an old man in 605 BC, in the city he made it his life’s mission to make one of the greatest the world would know. We might not have archaeological evidence of a werewolf in Babylon, or the legendary token of love he built for his wife, but we do have archaeological evidence of Nebuchadnezzar’s greatest achievement…Babylon.
Sources and further reading:
 http://www.ancient.eu.com/Nebuchadnezzar_II/ 
 http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/people/g/nebuchadnezzar.htm 
 http://www.primitivism.com/lycanthropy.htm 
 http://revdantheman.com/2009/07/13/a-werewolf-in-the-bible/ 
 http://melissabarrett.hubpages.com/hub/Real-Werewolves-Three-Cases-of-Lycanthropy 
 http://www.ancient.eu.com/The_Seven_Wonders/ 
 http://www.ancient.eu.com/Ishtar_Gate/ 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabucco 
 http://www.pbc.org/system/message_files/7826/4701.html 
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabopolassar 
 http://books.google.com/books?id=u1By9tEjh6AC&amp;pg=PA92&amp;lpg=PA92&amp;dq=nebuchadnezzar+lycanthropy&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=FaY3-Y2U5P&amp;sig=sT3D2M9jXpOPZ6UeKx6Gr-qvdvE&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=e8ZgUpihKZTCyAG6kIDYDQ&amp;ved=0CE4Q6AEwBDgK#v=onepage&amp;q=nebuchadnezzar%20lycanthropy&amp;f=false
October 2013 – ALL MESOPOTAMIA
https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/2013/10/
https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/2018/02/
February 2018 – ALL MESOPOTAMIA
2018-02-26
None
<div><div>
<p>Look at this bas-relief found at a palace in Nimrud…</p>
<p></p>
<p>…it depicts the humiliation of one man by another.</p>
<p>Some sources identify the prostrate figure as Hanunu, a king who ruled Gaza in the 8th Century BCE. Others simply identify him as a captured enemy.</p>
<p>Either way, the one thing everyone agrees on is that the foot placed upon his neck belongs to <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Tiglath_Pileser_III/">Tiglath-Pileser III</a> (745 – 727 BCE), an Assyrian king who laid the groundwork for modern imperialism and began a long line of Assyria’s greatest kings.</p>
<p><strong>Whooooooo Was He/Who-Who Who-Who?</strong></p>
<p>Tiglath-Pileser III is the first king we’re covering at All Mesopotamia that has been mentioned on the <a href="http://www.livius.org/sources/content/anet/564-566-the-assyrian-king-list/">Assyrian King List</a> (as well as the first Assyrian king to be mentioned in the bible). Though his reign is nowhere near being the first to occur within the traditional (and disputed) timeline of the <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Neo-Assyrian_Empire/">Neo-Assyrian Empire</a> (934 – 610 BCE or 912 – 612 BCE), some scholars believe this era began with Tiglath-Pileser III’s ascent to the throne in 745 BCE.</p>
<p>Being the third ruler in Assyria to carry the name Tiglath-Pileser—which is the Hebraic form of the Akkadian <em>Tukulti-apil-Ešarra</em>, which translates to “my trust/support is in the son of Esharra,” which refers to Ninurta, the god of war and hunting—you’d think he was related to at least one of the other two Tiglath-Pilesers. But he wasn’t. The first and second Tiglath-Pilesers ruled during what scholars have labeled the Middle-Assyrian period; one was during the 11<sup>th</sup> Century BCE, the other in the 10<sup>th</sup> Century BCE, respectively.</p>
<p>The gap grows wider and the direct relation is completely taken off the table when we remember that the third Tiglath-Pileser’s reign was in the 8<sup>th</sup> Century BCE.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, there is blood in this story.</p>
<div><p></p><p>Tiglath Pileser III shown in his chariot in this panel from his palace at Nimrud. (<a href="https://www.ancient.eu/image/2474/">Source</a>)</p></div>
<p>Of course, it’s not uncommon for unrelated kings to share a name, especially when the name is a nod to a deity (and truth be told, Tiglath-Pileser III never linked himself to his first two namesakes), but what makes TPIII’s choice so interesting is the inherent murkiness of his origins. (I will call him TPIII throughout the rest of this post.)</p>
<p>Though he presented himself as the son of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adad-nirari_III">Adad-nirari III (811 – 783 BCE)</a>, scholars question the truth of this relation, because there are three other guys between Adad-nirari III and TPIII on the Assyrian King List. Also, two of those guys are the actual sons of Adad-nirari III, with his grandson ruling in the gap between their reigns.</p>
<p>Oh, and another thing: in 1892, a stele was discovered that showed TPIII’s name imprinted <em>over</em> one of those three guys’ names. Add to that the scantiness of information about anyone mentioned here, including Adad-nirari III, and you’ve got yourself a fishy situation in some very murky (and bloody) waters.</p>
<p><strong>The Assyrian Shady</strong></p>
<p>So, how did such a shady character become one of the most powerful kings of Assyria?</p>
<p>Let’s start with the name Pulu.</p>
<p>Pulu (or Pul as he appears in the bible) was the governor of <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Kalhu/">Kalhu (Nimrud)</a>, the capital of a stagnant and waning Assyrian empire, one that was dealing with regional rulers with too much power, serving (or not) under ineffectual kings who were hardly maintaining what their long-gone predecessors had built.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Assyria’s army, known the ancient world over as the greatest, also began to lose its luster when in 754 BCE it met its match in the kingdom of <a href="http://www.britannica.com/place/Urartu">Urartu</a>‘s army…and lost.</p>
<p>This loss was a significant disaster for Assyria; it grew an already-existing fissure in the empire as its vassal states and allies began to undermine Assyria and look to Urartu as an alternative power to whom they would pledge allegiance. This shift in loyalties also affected Assyria’s coffers, which had been regularly filled with tributes from those very vassal states and allies now looking for other ways to “invest,” if you will. The ripple effect of this loss was long-lasting and reached as far as Babylonia in the south, where in 749 BCE forces were dispatched to protect Assyrian interests.</p>
<p>Needless to say, things just weren’t going well for Assyria during this time, and poor <a href="http://enacademic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/849062">Ashur-nirari V</a> (754 – 745 BCE) had not been king for long before he had to bear the brunt of a half century’s worth of failure and unrest. All this led to civil war, which broke out in 746 BCE and saw the royal family slaughtered, giving way to Tiglath-Pileser III, new king and <em>former governor of Kalhu</em>, aka<em> </em>Pulu.</p>
<p>Really, <a href="http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/machiavelli.html">Machiavelli</a> would’ve given Pulu a nod of approval for slaughtering his way to the top, and, more importantly, setting things up so that the same thing wouldn’t happen to him. Because as we will see, Pulu had <em>a lot</em> of work to do, and he wanted (and apparently <em>needed</em>) it done right.</p>
<p><b>First Things First</b></p>
<p>Since it takes one to know one, TPIII’s first order as king was to take power back from regional rulers.</p>
<p>He started by cutting up the larger, more rebellious provinces into little pieces. Over a period of seven years, TPIII had fashioned some 80 provinces through this technique. He then appointed <a href="http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sargon/essentials/governors/assyriangovernance/">eunuchs</a> to govern all those provinces.</p>
<div><p></p><p>“Two court officials – who are beardless and, therefore, possibly identifiable as eunuchs – are shown marching toward the king. The second figure motions to the line of men that stood behind him to come forward toward the king.” (<a href="https://oi.uchicago.edu/collections/highlights/highlights-collection-assyria">Source</a>)</p></div>
<p>Of course, appointing eunuchs would get another Machiavellian nod, as according to <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=lbmXsaTGNKUC&amp;pg=PA38&amp;lpg=PA38&amp;dq=karen+rhea+nemet-nejat+eunuchs+tiglath+pileser+iii&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=du0P2mJXqr&amp;sig=UUKmJowbWJkWSKOi61VkHaV72kU&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiuwPrw0PvYAhUG22MKHQl_CfsQ6AEIMDAB#v=onepage&amp;q=karen%20rhea%20nemet-nejat%20eunuchs%20tiglath%20pileser%20iii&amp;f=false">Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat</a> (and basic biology), eunuchs were a great way to maintain control over who occupies a position of power without the complication of heirs, much less a pedigree that mattered.</p>
<p><b>More, More, More</b></p>
<p>As I said before, TPIII is credited by some scholars with the founding of the <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Neo-Assyrian_Empire/">Neo-Assyrian Empire</a>, which some historians believe is the world’s first true empire (sorry, <a href="https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/part-i-sargon/">Sargon of Akkad</a>). It was a period during which Assyria grew to an area stretching from Asia Minor to Egypt by 671 BCE. This, despite being a geographically vulnerable nation.</p>
<div><p></p><p>The expansion and expanse of the Assyrian Empire–they even had Cyprus! (<a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Neo-Assyrian_Empire/">Source</a>)</p></div>
<p>It was really a “domino effect” that turned a nation with vulnerable geography into the world’s first superpower, one always on the offense rather than the defense. This effect is described well by Dattatreya Mandal in a <a href="https://www.realmofhistory.com/2016/02/24/10-fascinating-things-you-should-know-about-the-assyrian-army/">Realm of History</a> article titled, “<a href="https://www.realmofhistory.com/2016/02/24/10-fascinating-things-you-should-know-about-the-assyrian-army/">10 Fascinating Things You Should Know About The Ancient Assyrian State And Its Army</a>“:</p>
<p>“Simply put, this terrain rich in its plump grain-lands was open to plunder from most sides, with potential risks being posed by the nomadic tribes, hill folks and even proximate competing powers. This in turn affected a reactionary measure in the Assyrian society – that led to development of an effective and well organized military system that could cope with the constant state of aggression, conflicts and raids (much like the Romans).” (<a href="https://www.realmofhistory.com/2016/02/24/10-fascinating-things-you-should-know-about-the-assyrian-army/">Source</a>)</p>
<p>TPIII took over an army that had already perfected siege warfare and had genius battlefield tactics, and even featured the world’s first separate engineer corps. This <a href="https://www.historyonthenet.com/assyrian-empire-the-most-powerful-empire-in-the-world/">History On the Net article titled “Assyrian Empire: The Most Powerful Empire in the World,”</a> details that perfection:</p>
<p>“The Assyrians were the first army to contain a separate engineer corps. Assyrians moved mobile ladders and ramps right up against heavily fortified city walls. Sappers and miners dug underneath the walls. Massive siege engines became prized Assyrian armaments.” (<a href="https://www.historyonthenet.com/assyrian-empire-the-most-powerful-empire-in-the-world/">Source</a>)</p>
<p>This was also an army that had been incorporating the psychology of fear into its strategy. In an <a href="http://www.ancient.eu/Assyrian_Warfare/">Ancient History Encyclopedia</a><a href="http://www.ancient.eu/Assyrian_Warfare/"> entry</a>, the historian Simon Anglim is quoted on this combination of Assyrian war methods and its effect on warfare as we know it:</p>
<p>“By these methods of siege and horror, technology and terror, the Assyrians became the unrivaled masters of the Near East for five centuries. By the time of their fall, their expertise in siege technology had spread throughout the region.” (<a href="http://www.ancient.eu/Assyrian_Warfare/">Source</a>)</p>
<p>Nonetheless, this great army had just met its match and lost.</p>
<p>Knowing he would just be another ineffectual leader of a doomed empire if he didn’t think outside the box, TPIII created what all scholars indisputably credit him with: the world’s first truly professional army.</p>
<p><strong>You and What Ar–Never Mind</strong></p>
<div><p></p><p>Unstoppable. Not to mention incredible. (<a href="https://robfrancis2013.wordpress.com/assyrian-war-tactics/">Source</a>)</p></div>
<p>We have to acknowledge that TPIII’s predecessors accomplished a lot with what all armies were at the time: essentially part-time and made up of mostly farmers during their off-seasons, and mercenaries. As the Assyrian empire grew, however, so did its internal problems and need for a full-time force to protect its interests from within as well as without.</p>
<p>Being that he had more than a few <em>corrected</em> provinces to work with now, TPIII introduced a system that required each one of those provinces to designate a certain number of men to be professionally trained, full-time soldiers. In a <a href="https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_ancient_Professional_Armies_develop%3F">DailyHistory.org post titled, “How did ancient Professional Armies develop?”</a>, Mark Altaweel details this part of a multi-pronged approach to vamping up the Assyrian army:</p>
<p>“These army units began to have distinct ranks and be part of specialized units within the military,” Altaweel writes. “This included the chariotry, cavalry, and infantry units; specialized units also included naval units consisting of <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/phoenicia/">Phoenicians</a>. Other specialized soldiers include engineering units used for siege warfare.”</p>
<p>The overhaul extended further, all the way to command. “In addition, the army’s command structure became more sophisticated with developed ranks, similar to modern militaries,” Altaweel writes.</p>
<p>TPIII also made sure to reserve high ranks for pure Assyrians rather than those absorbed through conquest; cavalry, heavy infantry, and charioteers were all native Assyrians.</p>
<p>This overhaul, particularly locking in individuals with nothing on their schedule but soldiering year-round, translated into a gargantuan advantage over any other army in the world at the time, all of whom, Altaweel points out, still had a shortage of men during planting and harvest seasons. I can only imagine that to be attacked by the professional Assyrian army often entailed an imminent familiarity with the element of surprise for the attacked.</p>
<p>In the image above, you see a small part of what a siege carried out by the Assyrian army looked like; the skill of professionally-trained men with advanced weaponry, alongside technology. It was only through that multi-faceted approach to war and siege that TPIII was able to avenge Assyria’s defeat to the kingdom of Urartu and move on to destroying its difficult ally, the city of Arpad.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.britannica.com/place/Arpad-ancient-city-Syria">Arpad</a>‘s defeat was no easy feat–it took <em>three years</em> to bring that city down. This tidbit serves as a testament to the strength of Arpad, of course, but it also speaks to the otherworldly capabilities of TPIII’s relentless army.</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Assyrian_Warfare/">“Assyrian Warfare” entry for Ancient History Encyclopedia</a>, Joshua J. Mark puts into perspective what Arpad was up against during its three-year siege, and why its considerable strength was still not enough when facing TPIII’s new and improved army:</p>
<p>“Campaigns such as the long siege of Arpad could only have been carried out by a professional army such as the one Tiglath Pileser III had created and, as the historian [Peter] Dubovsky notes, this expansion of the Assyrian Empire could not have taken place without ‘the new organization of the army, improved logistics and weaponry’ and, in particular, the use of iron weapons instead of bronze.” (<a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Assyrian_Warfare/">Source</a>)</p>
<p>No other army had the resources the Assyrian war machine had: fast-made iron weapons and armor. Note, this could only happen by way of Assyria’s hegemony over iron ore-producing regions while everyone else’s weapons were still made of bronze. This is not including advanced engineering skills, unbeatable tactics and, of course, TPIII’s mind and ambition.</p>
<p>“Tiglath Pileser III’s brilliant successes in battle lay in his military strategies and his willingness to do whatever it required to succeed in his objectives,” Simon Anglim writes of TPIII’s recipe for success.</p>
<p><strong>Everybody’s Gonna Protect Their Feet</strong></p>
<div><p></p><p>Shoes really make or break an outfit, and the Assyrian army boot really tied the whole professional army thing together. (<a href="https://www.realmofhistory.com/2016/02/24/10-fascinating-things-you-should-know-about-the-assyrian-army/">Source</a>)</p></div>
<p>For an army to fight year round, it needs to be an all-weather and all-terrain one. This cannot happen without the proper footwear. Enter my favorite and the coolest of TPIII’s innovations and inventions: the army boot.</p>
<p>On the significance and features of the Assyrian army boot, Mark quotes the historian Paul Kriwaczek:</p>
<p>“…the Assyrian military invention that was arguably one of the most influential and long-lasting of all: the army boot. In this case the boots were knee-high leather footwear, thick-soled, hobnailed and with iron plates inserted to protect the shins, which made it possible for the first time to fight on any terrain however rough or wet, mountain or marsh, and in any season, winter or summer. This was the first all-weather, all-year army.” (<a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Assyrian_Warfare/">Source</a>)</p>
<p>Further, in his book, <em><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=y1ngxn_xTOIC&amp;pg=PA10&amp;lpg=PA10&amp;dq=assyrian+army+boot&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=KefV8I2fsP&amp;sig=O7WspIG2tuvONRtTdB6JUNEDzgk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiRpL2q1oXZAhUFLmMKHeo3A2sQ6AEIUDAJ#v=onepage&amp;q=assyrian%20army%20boot&amp;f=false">The Great Armies of Antiquity</a></em>, Richard A. Gabriel describes the specific ways in which the “<a href="https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/jackboot">jackboot</a>” was beneficial to its wearer:</p>
<p>“The high boot provided excellent ankle support for troops who fought regularly in rough terrain … The boot kept foot injuries to a minimum, especially in an army with large contingents of horses and other pack animals.” (<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=y1ngxn_xTOIC&amp;pg=PA10&amp;lpg=PA10&amp;dq=assyrian+army+boot&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=KefV8I2fsP&amp;sig=O7WspIG2tuvONRtTdB6JUNEDzgk&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwiRpL2q1oXZAhUFLmMKHeo3A2sQ6AEIUDAJ#v=onepage&amp;q=assyrian%20army%20boot&amp;f=false">Source</a>)</p>
<p>There’s not much else left to say about this accomplishment by TPIII, except it was such a great one, it wasn’t long before it became an everlasting staple of every military on earth…not to mention my personal favorite style of boot.</p>
<p><b>The Walls Come Down</b></p>
<p>With an area stretching as far as the Mediterranean, there was a lot of land full of people for TPIII to work with to make his empire not only bigger, but better.</p>
<p>Along with slaughter and slavery, the norms of war in antiquity, it was common practice and standard procedure in Assyria to deport defeated subjects, particularly if they had abilities and skills beneficial to the empire. This is a policy that TPIII is often credited with instituting, but it was actually first instituted by <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Adad_Nirari_I/">Adad-Nirari I</a> in the 14th Century BCE. Nonetheless, he did it on such a big scale, it became a part of his legacy.</p>
<dl>
<dt></dt>
<dd><a href="https://www.ancient.eu/image/2808/">People of Lachish Deported and Relocated. (Source)</a></dd>
</dl>
<p>Now, deportation did not have the same connotation it does today. Like I said, to be deported under Assyrian rule was really to be resettled by being sent to a province where the empire needed more settlers with practicable skills.</p>
<p>In the <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Tiglath_Pileser_III/">Ancient History Encyclopedia</a> <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Tiglath_Pileser_III/">Tiglath Pileser III entry</a>, Karen Radner describes such events:</p>
<p>“We must not imagine treks of destitute fugitives who were easy prey for famine and disease … the deportees were meant to travel as comfortably and safely as possible in order to reach their destination in good physical shape . . . the ultimate goal of the Assyrian resettlement policy was to create a homogeneous population with a shared culture and a common identity – that of ‘Assyrians’.” (<a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Tiglath_Pileser_III/">Source</a>)</p>
<p>To ensure deportations went smoothly and subjects arrived at their destinations in good physical shape, it took an organized effort that went well beyond just keeping these people moving toward their destination. Take this letter written by an official handling a deportation of Aramaeans ordered by TPIII:</p>
<blockquote><p>As for the Aramaeans about whom the king my lord has written to me: ‘Prepare them for their journey!’ I shall give them their food supplies, clothes, a waterskin, a pair of shoes and oil. I do not have my donkeys yet, but once they are available, I will dispatch my convoy. (<a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Tiglath_Pileser_III/">Source</a>)</p></blockquote>
<p>Even after the arrival of the deported subjects at their final destination, that official’s work of ensuring the welfare of his charges was still not done, as we see in another letter he wrote to TPIII:</p>
<blockquote><p>As for the Aramaeans about whom the king my lord has said: ‘They are to have wives!’ We found numerous suitable women but their fathers refuse to give them in marriage, claiming: ‘We will not consent unless they can pay the bride price.’ Let them be paid so that the Aramaeans can get married. (<a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Tiglath_Pileser_III/">Source</a>)</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course, destroying these peoples’ entire worlds and resettling them where they were to serve their conqueror’s needs does not a brownie point make, but considering the way war usually ended for the defeated in antiquity, well, it’s a little less horrible to be resettled and given a job and, apparently, a life partner.</p>
<p><b>Say it in Aramaic</b></p>
<p>Though Assyria had absorbed many different peoples through its expansion, there was one particular group Assyrians had done that a lot with: speakers of Aramaic.</p>
<p>Aramaic was a language spoken by those hailing from Aram, a group of city-states in what is modern-day Syria. They were a people Assyria had been picking fights with since the reign of the first Tiglath-Pileser in the 11th Century BCE. TPIII had resettled and assimilated so many Aramaeans as he expanded his empire, it was virtually overrun with them.</p>
<p>Perhaps to make things easier, what with so many people speaking it already, or perhaps because of the ease of Aramaic compared to Assyria’s Akkadian, TPIII eventually made Mesopotamian Eastern Aramaic the official language of the Assyrian Empire. One can only deduce that when the Romans made Latin their lingua franca centuries later, it was TPIII’s example they were following.</p>
<p><strong>He Did it His Way</strong></p>
<p>Tiglath-Pileser III’s reign lasted 17 years, filled with war, conquest, innovation and invention. He had even managed in that time to crown himself king of Babylonia in 729 BCE when a revolt broke out there after the death of its Assyrian ally king <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabonassar">Nabonassar (747 – 734 BCE)</a>.</p>
<p>Pretty much everything TPIII did was carried out in the same spirit as the one in the opening image of this post–a reinforcement of Assyria’s dominance and hold on the region. By the time he died in 727 BCE from natural causes, TPIII had built an invincible empire that would continue to flourish with a line of equally consequential and notable kings, including his son <a href="https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/part-i-sargon/">Sargon II (722 – 705 BCE)</a> and the last of the great kings of Assyria, his great-great grandson <a href="https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/?s=ashurbanipal">Ashurbanipal (668 – 627 BCE)</a>.</p>
<p>Mark sums up the legacy of the third Tiglath-Pileser best in his <a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Tiglath_Pileser_III/">Tiglath-Pileser III article</a>, and perhaps helps scholars’ argument along that the Neo-Assyrian era began with this mysterious yet determined man:</p>
<p>“Tiglath Pileser III’s achievements laid the foundation for the future of the Assyrian Empire, which has come to be recognized as the greatest political and military entity of its time and the model on which future empires would be based.” (<a href="https://www.ancient.eu/Tiglath_Pileser_III/">Source</a>)</p>
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 Monthly Archives: February 2018

 Tiglath-Pileser III

 26 Feb

 Look at this bas-relief found at a palace in Nimrud…

 …it depicts the humiliation of one man by another.

 Some sources identify the prostrate figure as Hanunu, a king who ruled Gaza in the 8th Century BCE. Others simply identify him as a captured enemy.

 Either way, the one thing everyone agrees on is that the foot placed upon his neck belongs to Tiglath-Pileser III (745 – 727 BCE), an Assyrian king who laid the groundwork for modern imperialism and began a long line of Assyria’s greatest kings.

 Whooooooo Was He/Who-Who Who-Who?

 Tiglath-Pileser III is the first king we’re covering at All Mesopotamia that has been mentioned on the Assyrian King List (as well as the first Assyrian king to be mentioned in the bible). Though his reign is nowhere near being the first to occur within the traditional (and disputed) timeline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (934 – 610 BCE or 912 – 612 BCE), some scholars believe this era began with Tiglath-Pileser III’s ascent to the throne in 745 BCE.

 Being the third ruler in Assyria to carry the name Tiglath-Pileser—which is the Hebraic form of the Akkadian Tukulti-apil-Ešarra, which translates to “my trust/support is in the son of Esharra,” which refers to Ninurta, the god of war and hunting—you’d think he was related to at least one of the other two Tiglath-Pilesers. But he wasn’t. The first and second Tiglath-Pilesers ruled during what scholars have labeled the Middle-Assyrian period; one was during the 11th Century BCE, the other in the 10th Century BCE, respectively.

 The gap grows wider and the direct relation is completely taken off the table when we remember that the third Tiglath-Pileser’s reign was in the 8th Century BCE.

 Nonetheless, there is blood in this story.

 Tiglath Pileser III shown in his chariot in this panel from his palace at Nimrud. (Source)

 Of course, it’s not uncommon for unrelated kings to share a name, especially when the name is a nod to a deity (and truth be told, Tiglath-Pileser III never linked himself to his first two namesakes), but what makes TPIII’s choice so interesting is the inherent murkiness of his origins. (I will call him TPIII throughout the rest of this post.)

 Though he presented himself as the son of Adad-nirari III (811 – 783 BCE), scholars question the truth of this relation, because there are three other guys between Adad-nirari III and TPIII on the Assyrian King List. Also, two of those guys are the actual sons of Adad-nirari III, with his grandson ruling in the gap between their reigns.

 Oh, and another thing: in 1892, a stele was discovered that showed TPIII’s name imprinted over one of those three guys’ names. Add to that the scantiness of information about anyone mentioned here, including Adad-nirari III, and you’ve got yourself a fishy situation in some very murky (and bloody) waters.

 The Assyrian Shady

 An alabaster bas-relief depicting the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser III. From the central palace, Nimrud (ancient Kalhu), Mesopotamia, northern Iraq. Neo-Assyrian era, circa 728 BCE. (The British Museum, London)

 So, how did such a shady character become one of the most powerful kings of Assyria?

 Let’s start with the name Pulu.

 Pulu (or Pul as he appears in the bible) was the governor of Kalhu (Nimrud), the capital of a stagnant and waning Assyrian empire, one that was dealing with regional rulers with too much power, serving (or not) under ineffectual kings who were hardly maintaining what their long-gone predecessors had built.

 Meanwhile, Assyria’s army, known the ancient world over as the greatest, also began to lose its luster when in 754 BCE it met its match in the kingdom of Urartu‘s army…and lost.

 This loss was a significant disaster for Assyria; it grew an already-existing fissure in the empire as its vassal states and allies began to undermine Assyria and look to Urartu as an alternative power to whom they would pledge allegiance. This shift in loyalties also affected Assyria’s coffers, which had been regularly filled with tributes from those very vassal states and allies now looking for other ways to “invest,” if you will. The ripple effect of this loss was long-lasting and reached as far as Babylonia in the south, where in 749 BCE forces were dispatched to protect Assyrian interests.

 Needless to say, things just weren’t going well for Assyria during this time, and poor Ashur-nirari V (754 – 745 BCE) had not been king for long before he had to bear the brunt of a half century’s worth of failure and unrest. All this led to civil war, which broke out in 746 BCE and saw the royal family slaughtered, giving way to Tiglath-Pileser III, new king and former governor of Kalhu, aka Pulu.

 Really, Machiavelli would’ve given Pulu a nod of approval for slaughtering his way to the top, and, more importantly, setting things up so that the same thing wouldn’t happen to him. Because as we will see, Pulu had a lot of work to do, and he wanted (and apparently needed) it done right.

 First Things First

 Since it takes one to know one, TPIII’s first order as king was to take power back from regional rulers.

 He started by cutting up the larger, more rebellious provinces into little pieces. Over a period of seven years, TPIII had fashioned some 80 provinces through this technique. He then appointed eunuchs to govern all those provinces.

 “Two court officials – who are beardless and, therefore, possibly identifiable as eunuchs – are shown marching toward the king. The second figure motions to the line of men that stood behind him to come forward toward the king.” (Source)

 Of course, appointing eunuchs would get another Machiavellian nod, as according to Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat (and basic biology), eunuchs were a great way to maintain control over who occupies a position of power without the complication of heirs, much less a pedigree that mattered.

 More, More, More

 As I said before, TPIII is credited by some scholars with the founding of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which some historians believe is the world’s first true empire (sorry, Sargon of Akkad). It was a period during which Assyria grew to an area stretching from Asia Minor to Egypt by 671 BCE. This, despite being a geographically vulnerable nation.

 The expansion and expanse of the Assyrian Empire–they even had Cyprus! (Source)

 It was really a “domino effect” that turned a nation with vulnerable geography into the world’s first superpower, one always on the offense rather than the defense. This effect is described well by Dattatreya Mandal in a Realm of History article titled, “10 Fascinating Things You Should Know About The Ancient Assyrian State And Its Army“:

 “Simply put, this terrain rich in its plump grain-lands was open to plunder from most sides, with potential risks being posed by the nomadic tribes, hill folks and even proximate competing powers. This in turn affected a reactionary measure in the Assyrian society – that led to development of an effective and well organized military system that could cope with the constant state of aggression, conflicts and raids (much like the Romans).” (Source)

 TPIII took over an army that had already perfected siege warfare and had genius battlefield tactics, and even featured the world’s first separate engineer corps. This History On the Net article titled “Assyrian Empire: The Most Powerful Empire in the World,” details that perfection:

 “The Assyrians were the first army to contain a separate engineer corps. Assyrians moved mobile ladders and ramps right up against heavily fortified city walls. Sappers and miners dug underneath the walls. Massive siege engines became prized Assyrian armaments.” (Source)

 This was also an army that had been incorporating the psychology of fear into its strategy. In an Ancient History Encyclopedia entry, the historian Simon Anglim is quoted on this combination of Assyrian war methods and its effect on warfare as we know it:

 “By these methods of siege and horror, technology and terror, the Assyrians became the unrivaled masters of the Near East for five centuries. By the time of their fall, their expertise in siege technology had spread throughout the region.” (Source)

 Nonetheless, this great army had just met its match and lost.

 Knowing he would just be another ineffectual leader of a doomed empire if he didn’t think outside the box, TPIII created what all scholars indisputably credit him with: the world’s first truly professional army.

 You and What Ar–Never Mind

 Unstoppable. Not to mention incredible. (Source)

 We have to acknowledge that TPIII’s predecessors accomplished a lot with what all armies were at the time: essentially part-time and made up of mostly farmers during their off-seasons, and mercenaries. As the Assyrian empire grew, however, so did its internal problems and need for a full-time force to protect its interests from within as well as without.

 Being that he had more than a few corrected provinces to work with now, TPIII introduced a system that required each one of those provinces to designate a certain number of men to be professionally trained, full-time soldiers. In a DailyHistory.org post titled, “How did ancient Professional Armies develop?”, Mark Altaweel details this part of a multi-pronged approach to vamping up the Assyrian army:

 “These army units began to have distinct ranks and be part of specialized units within the military,” Altaweel writes. “This included the chariotry, cavalry, and infantry units; specialized units also included naval units consisting of Phoenicians. Other specialized soldiers include engineering units used for siege warfare.”

 The overhaul extended further, all the way to command. “In addition, the army’s command structure became more sophisticated with developed ranks, similar to modern militaries,” Altaweel writes.

 TPIII also made sure to reserve high ranks for pure Assyrians rather than those absorbed through conquest; cavalry, heavy infantry, and charioteers were all native Assyrians.

 This overhaul, particularly locking in individuals with nothing on their schedule but soldiering year-round, translated into a gargantuan advantage over any other army in the world at the time, all of whom, Altaweel points out, still had a shortage of men during planting and harvest seasons. I can only imagine that to be attacked by the professional Assyrian army often entailed an imminent familiarity with the element of surprise for the attacked.

 Depiction of Tiglath-pileser III’s professional army fighting and besieging a city with a siege engine.

 In the image above, you see a small part of what a siege carried out by the Assyrian army looked like; the skill of professionally-trained men with advanced weaponry, alongside technology. It was only through that multi-faceted approach to war and siege that TPIII was able to avenge Assyria’s defeat to the kingdom of Urartu and move on to destroying its difficult ally, the city of Arpad.

 Arpad‘s defeat was no easy feat–it took three years to bring that city down. This tidbit serves as a testament to the strength of Arpad, of course, but it also speaks to the otherworldly capabilities of TPIII’s relentless army.

 In his “Assyrian Warfare” entry for Ancient History Encyclopedia, Joshua J. Mark puts into perspective what Arpad was up against during its three-year siege, and why its considerable strength was still not enough when facing TPIII’s new and improved army:

 “Campaigns such as the long siege of Arpad could only have been carried out by a professional army such as the one Tiglath Pileser III had created and, as the historian [Peter] Dubovsky notes, this expansion of the Assyrian Empire could not have taken place without ‘the new organization of the army, improved logistics and weaponry’ and, in particular, the use of iron weapons instead of bronze.” (Source)

 No other army had the resources the Assyrian war machine had: fast-made iron weapons and armor. Note, this could only happen by way of Assyria’s hegemony over iron ore-producing regions while everyone else’s weapons were still made of bronze. This is not including advanced engineering skills, unbeatable tactics and, of course, TPIII’s mind and ambition.

 “Tiglath Pileser III’s brilliant successes in battle lay in his military strategies and his willingness to do whatever it required to succeed in his objectives,” Simon Anglim writes of TPIII’s recipe for success.

 Everybody’s Gonna Protect Their Feet

 Shoes really make or break an outfit, and the Assyrian army boot really tied the whole professional army thing together. (Source)

 For an army to fight year round, it needs to be an all-weather and all-terrain one. This cannot happen without the proper footwear. Enter my favorite and the coolest of TPIII’s innovations and inventions: the army boot.

 On the significance and features of the Assyrian army boot, Mark quotes the historian Paul Kriwaczek:

 “…the Assyrian military invention that was arguably one of the most influential and long-lasting of all: the army boot. In this case the boots were knee-high leather footwear, thick-soled, hobnailed and with iron plates inserted to protect the shins, which made it possible for the first time to fight on any terrain however rough or wet, mountain or marsh, and in any season, winter or summer. This was the first all-weather, all-year army.” (Source)

 Further, in his book, The Great Armies of Antiquity, Richard A. Gabriel describes the specific ways in which the “jackboot” was beneficial to its wearer:

 “The high boot provided excellent ankle support for troops who fought regularly in rough terrain … The boot kept foot injuries to a minimum, especially in an army with large contingents of horses and other pack animals.” (Source)

 There’s not much else left to say about this accomplishment by TPIII, except it was such a great one, it wasn’t long before it became an everlasting staple of every military on earth…not to mention my personal favorite style of boot.

 The Walls Come Down

 With an area stretching as far as the Mediterranean, there was a lot of land full of people for TPIII to work with to make his empire not only bigger, but better.

 Along with slaughter and slavery, the norms of war in antiquity, it was common practice and standard procedure in Assyria to deport defeated subjects, particularly if they had abilities and skills beneficial to the empire. This is a policy that TPIII is often credited with instituting, but it was actually first instituted by Adad-Nirari I in the 14th Century BCE. Nonetheless, he did it on such a big scale, it became a part of his legacy.

 People of Lachish Deported and Relocated. (Source)

 Now, deportation did not have the same connotation it does today. Like I said, to be deported under Assyrian rule was really to be resettled by being sent to a province where the empire needed more settlers with practicable skills.

 In the Ancient History Encyclopedia Tiglath Pileser III entry, Karen Radner describes such events:

 “We must not imagine treks of destitute fugitives who were easy prey for famine and disease … the deportees were meant to travel as comfortably and safely as possible in order to reach their destination in good physical shape . . . the ultimate goal of the Assyrian resettlement policy was to create a homogeneous population with a shared culture and a common identity – that of ‘Assyrians’.” (Source)

 To ensure deportations went smoothly and subjects arrived at their destinations in good physical shape, it took an organized effort that went well beyond just keeping these people moving toward their destination. Take this letter written by an official handling a deportation of Aramaeans ordered by TPIII:

 As for the Aramaeans about whom the king my lord has written to me: ‘Prepare them for their journey!’ I shall give them their food supplies, clothes, a waterskin, a pair of shoes and oil. I do not have my donkeys yet, but once they are available, I will dispatch my convoy. (Source)

 Even after the arrival of the deported subjects at their final destination, that official’s work of ensuring the welfare of his charges was still not done, as we see in another letter he wrote to TPIII:

 As for the Aramaeans about whom the king my lord has said: ‘They are to have wives!’ We found numerous suitable women but their fathers refuse to give them in marriage, claiming: ‘We will not consent unless they can pay the bride price.’ Let them be paid so that the Aramaeans can get married. (Source)

 Of course, destroying these peoples’ entire worlds and resettling them where they were to serve their conqueror’s needs does not a brownie point make, but considering the way war usually ended for the defeated in antiquity, well, it’s a little less horrible to be resettled and given a job and, apparently, a life partner.

 Say it in Aramaic

 Though Assyria had absorbed many different peoples through its expansion, there was one particular group Assyrians had done that a lot with: speakers of Aramaic.

 Aramaic was a language spoken by those hailing from Aram, a group of city-states in what is modern-day Syria. They were a people Assyria had been picking fights with since the reign of the first Tiglath-Pileser in the 11th Century BCE. TPIII had resettled and assimilated so many Aramaeans as he expanded his empire, it was virtually overrun with them.

 Perhaps to make things easier, what with so many people speaking it already, or perhaps because of the ease of Aramaic compared to Assyria’s Akkadian, TPIII eventually made Mesopotamian Eastern Aramaic the official language of the Assyrian Empire. One can only deduce that when the Romans made Latin their lingua franca centuries later, it was TPIII’s example they were following.

 He Did it His Way

 Tiglath-Pileser III’s reign lasted 17 years, filled with war, conquest, innovation and invention. He had even managed in that time to crown himself king of Babylonia in 729 BCE when a revolt broke out there after the death of its Assyrian ally king Nabonassar (747 – 734 BCE).

 Pretty much everything TPIII did was carried out in the same spirit as the one in the opening image of this post–a reinforcement of Assyria’s dominance and hold on the region. By the time he died in 727 BCE from natural causes, TPIII had built an invincible empire that would continue to flourish with a line of equally consequential and notable kings, including his son Sargon II (722 – 705 BCE) and the last of the great kings of Assyria, his great-great grandson Ashurbanipal (668 – 627 BCE).

 Mark sums up the legacy of the third Tiglath-Pileser best in his Tiglath-Pileser III article, and perhaps helps scholars’ argument along that the Neo-Assyrian era began with this mysterious yet determined man:

 “Tiglath Pileser III’s achievements laid the foundation for the future of the Assyrian Empire, which has come to be recognized as the greatest political and military entity of its time and the model on which future empires would be based.” (Source)

 1 Comment

 Posted by ALL MESOPOTAMIA on February 26, 2018 in Assyrian, Kings

 Tags: ada-nirai III, adad-nirari I, altaweel, Ancient History, ancient history encyclopedia entry, aramaeans, aramic, army boots, arpad, ashur-niari V, ashurbanipal, assyria, assyrian army, assyrian empire, assyrian king list, assyrian military, babylonia, bas-relief, bible, bronze, city of arpad, dattatreya mandal, deportation, engineer corps, esharra, eunuchs, gaza, great armies of antiquity, Hanunu, hebraic, history, iraq, iron, jackboot, joshua j. marks, Kalhu, karen radner, Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat, logistics, mark altaweel, mesopotamia, michiavellie, middle-assyrian, neo-assyrian, nimrud, ninurta, paul kriwaczek, peter dubovsky, phoenicians, professional armies develop, pul, pulu, realm of history, resettle, richard g. gabriel, royal family slaughter, sargon II, siege, simon anglim, the most powerful empire, tiglath-pileser, tiglath-pileser III, tukulti-apil-esarra, urartu, weaponry

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Look at this bas-relief found at a palace in Nimrud…
 
…it depicts the humiliation of one man by another.
Some sources identify the prostrate figure as Hanunu, a king who ruled Gaza in the 8th Century BCE. Others simply identify him as a captured enemy.
Either way, the one thing everyone agrees on is that the foot placed upon his neck belongs to Tiglath-Pileser III (745 – 727 BCE), an Assyrian king who laid the groundwork for modern imperialism and began a long line of Assyria’s greatest kings.
 Whooooooo Was He/Who-Who Who-Who? 
Tiglath-Pileser III is the first king we’re covering at All Mesopotamia that has been mentioned on the Assyrian King List (as well as the first Assyrian king to be mentioned in the bible). Though his reign is nowhere near being the first to occur within the traditional (and disputed) timeline of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (934 – 610 BCE or 912 – 612 BCE), some scholars believe this era began with Tiglath-Pileser III’s ascent to the throne in 745 BCE.
Being the third ruler in Assyria to carry the name Tiglath-Pileser—which is the Hebraic form of the Akkadian Tukulti-apil-Ešarra, which translates to “my trust/support is in the son of Esharra,” which refers to Ninurta, the god of war and hunting—you’d think he was related to at least one of the other two Tiglath-Pilesers. But he wasn’t. The first and second Tiglath-Pilesers ruled during what scholars have labeled the Middle-Assyrian period; one was during the 11th Century BCE, the other in the 10th Century BCE, respectively.
The gap grows wider and the direct relation is completely taken off the table when we remember that the third Tiglath-Pileser’s reign was in the 8th Century BCE.
Nonetheless, there is blood in this story.
   Tiglath Pileser III shown in his chariot in this panel from his palace at Nimrud. (Source) 
Of course, it’s not uncommon for unrelated kings to share a name, especially when the name is a nod to a deity (and truth be told, Tiglath-Pileser III never linked himself to his first two namesakes), but what makes TPIII’s choice so interesting is the inherent murkiness of his origins. (I will call him TPIII throughout the rest of this post.)
Though he presented himself as the son of Adad-nirari III (811 – 783 BCE), scholars question the truth of this relation, because there are three other guys between Adad-nirari III and TPIII on the Assyrian King List. Also, two of those guys are the actual sons of Adad-nirari III, with his grandson ruling in the gap between their reigns.
Oh, and another thing: in 1892, a stele was discovered that showed TPIII’s name imprinted over one of those three guys’ names. Add to that the scantiness of information about anyone mentioned here, including Adad-nirari III, and you’ve got yourself a fishy situation in some very murky (and bloody) waters.
 The Assyrian Shady 
So, how did such a shady character become one of the most powerful kings of Assyria?
Let’s start with the name Pulu.
Pulu (or Pul as he appears in the bible) was the governor of Kalhu (Nimrud), the capital of a stagnant and waning Assyrian empire, one that was dealing with regional rulers with too much power, serving (or not) under ineffectual kings who were hardly maintaining what their long-gone predecessors had built.
Meanwhile, Assyria’s army, known the ancient world over as the greatest, also began to lose its luster when in 754 BCE it met its match in the kingdom of Urartu‘s army…and lost.
This loss was a significant disaster for Assyria; it grew an already-existing fissure in the empire as its vassal states and allies began to undermine Assyria and look to Urartu as an alternative power to whom they would pledge allegiance. This shift in loyalties also affected Assyria’s coffers, which had been regularly filled with tributes from those very vassal states and allies now looking for other ways to “invest,” if you will. The ripple effect of this loss was long-lasting and reached as far as Babylonia in the south, where in 749 BCE forces were dispatched to protect Assyrian interests.
Needless to say, things just weren’t going well for Assyria during this time, and poor Ashur-nirari V (754 – 745 BCE) had not been king for long before he had to bear the brunt of a half century’s worth of failure and unrest. All this led to civil war, which broke out in 746 BCE and saw the royal family slaughtered, giving way to Tiglath-Pileser III, new king and former governor of Kalhu, aka Pulu.
Really, Machiavelli would’ve given Pulu a nod of approval for slaughtering his way to the top, and, more importantly, setting things up so that the same thing wouldn’t happen to him. Because as we will see, Pulu had a lot of work to do, and he wanted (and apparently needed) it done right.
 First Things First 
Since it takes one to know one, TPIII’s first order as king was to take power back from regional rulers.
He started by cutting up the larger, more rebellious provinces into little pieces. Over a period of seven years, TPIII had fashioned some 80 provinces through this technique. He then appointed eunuchs to govern all those provinces.
   “Two court officials – who are beardless and, therefore, possibly identifiable as eunuchs – are shown marching toward the king. The second figure motions to the line of men that stood behind him to come forward toward the king.” (Source) 
Of course, appointing eunuchs would get another Machiavellian nod, as according to Karen Rhea Nemet-Nejat (and basic biology), eunuchs were a great way to maintain control over who occupies a position of power without the complication of heirs, much less a pedigree that mattered.
 More, More, More 
As I said before, TPIII is credited by some scholars with the founding of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, which some historians believe is the world’s first true empire (sorry, Sargon of Akkad). It was a period during which Assyria grew to an area stretching from Asia Minor to Egypt by 671 BCE. This, despite being a geographically vulnerable nation.
   The expansion and expanse of the Assyrian Empire–they even had Cyprus! (Source) 
It was really a “domino effect” that turned a nation with vulnerable geography into the world’s first superpower, one always on the offense rather than the defense. This effect is described well by Dattatreya Mandal in a Realm of History article titled, “10 Fascinating Things You Should Know About The Ancient Assyrian State And Its Army“:
“Simply put, this terrain rich in its plump grain-lands was open to plunder from most sides, with potential risks being posed by the nomadic tribes, hill folks and even proximate competing powers. This in turn affected a reactionary measure in the Assyrian society – that led to development of an effective and well organized military system that could cope with the constant state of aggression, conflicts and raids (much like the Romans).” (Source)
TPIII took over an army that had already perfected siege warfare and had genius battlefield tactics, and even featured the world’s first separate engineer corps. This History On the Net article titled “Assyrian Empire: The Most Powerful Empire in the World,” details that perfection:
“The Assyrians were the first army to contain a separate engineer corps. Assyrians moved mobile ladders and ramps right up against heavily fortified city walls. Sappers and miners dug underneath the walls. Massive siege engines became prized Assyrian armaments.” (Source)
This was also an army that had been incorporating the psychology of fear into its strategy. In an Ancient History Encyclopedia  entry, the historian Simon Anglim is quoted on this combination of Assyrian war methods and its effect on warfare as we know it:
“By these methods of siege and horror, technology and terror, the Assyrians became the unrivaled masters of the Near East for five centuries. By the time of their fall, their expertise in siege technology had spread throughout the region.” (Source)
Nonetheless, this great army had just met its match and lost.
Knowing he would just be another ineffectual leader of a doomed empire if he didn’t think outside the box, TPIII created what all scholars indisputably credit him with: the world’s first truly professional army.
 You and What Ar–Never Mind 
   Unstoppable. Not to mention incredible. (Source) 
We have to acknowledge that TPIII’s predecessors accomplished a lot with what all armies were at the time: essentially part-time and made up of mostly farmers during their off-seasons, and mercenaries. As the Assyrian empire grew, however, so did its internal problems and need for a full-time force to protect its interests from within as well as without.
Being that he had more than a few corrected provinces to work with now, TPIII introduced a system that required each one of those provinces to designate a certain number of men to be professionally trained, full-time soldiers. In a DailyHistory.org post titled, “How did ancient Professional Armies develop?”, Mark Altaweel details this part of a multi-pronged approach to vamping up the Assyrian army:
“These army units began to have distinct ranks and be part of specialized units within the military,” Altaweel writes. “This included the chariotry, cavalry, and infantry units; specialized units also included naval units consisting of Phoenicians. Other specialized soldiers include engineering units used for siege warfare.”
The overhaul extended further, all the way to command. “In addition, the army’s command structure became more sophisticated with developed ranks, similar to modern militaries,” Altaweel writes.
TPIII also made sure to reserve high ranks for pure Assyrians rather than those absorbed through conquest; cavalry, heavy infantry, and charioteers were all native Assyrians.
This overhaul, particularly locking in individuals with nothing on their schedule but soldiering year-round, translated into a gargantuan advantage over any other army in the world at the time, all of whom, Altaweel points out, still had a shortage of men during planting and harvest seasons. I can only imagine that to be attacked by the professional Assyrian army often entailed an imminent familiarity with the element of surprise for the attacked.
In the image above, you see a small part of what a siege carried out by the Assyrian army looked like; the skill of professionally-trained men with advanced weaponry, alongside technology. It was only through that multi-faceted approach to war and siege that TPIII was able to avenge Assyria’s defeat to the kingdom of Urartu and move on to destroying its difficult ally, the city of Arpad.
 Arpad‘s defeat was no easy feat–it took three years to bring that city down. This tidbit serves as a testament to the strength of Arpad, of course, but it also speaks to the otherworldly capabilities of TPIII’s relentless army.
In his “Assyrian Warfare” entry for Ancient History Encyclopedia, Joshua J. Mark puts into perspective what Arpad was up against during its three-year siege, and why its considerable strength was still not enough when facing TPIII’s new and improved army:
“Campaigns such as the long siege of Arpad could only have been carried out by a professional army such as the one Tiglath Pileser III had created and, as the historian [Peter] Dubovsky notes, this expansion of the Assyrian Empire could not have taken place without ‘the new organization of the army, improved logistics and weaponry’ and, in particular, the use of iron weapons instead of bronze.” (Source)
No other army had the resources the Assyrian war machine had: fast-made iron weapons and armor. Note, this could only happen by way of Assyria’s hegemony over iron ore-producing regions while everyone else’s weapons were still made of bronze. This is not including advanced engineering skills, unbeatable tactics and, of course, TPIII’s mind and ambition.
“Tiglath Pileser III’s brilliant successes in battle lay in his military strategies and his willingness to do whatever it required to succeed in his objectives,” Simon Anglim writes of TPIII’s recipe for success.
 Everybody’s Gonna Protect Their Feet 
   Shoes really make or break an outfit, and the Assyrian army boot really tied the whole professional army thing together. (Source) 
For an army to fight year round, it needs to be an all-weather and all-terrain one. This cannot happen without the proper footwear. Enter my favorite and the coolest of TPIII’s innovations and inventions: the army boot.
On the significance and features of the Assyrian army boot, Mark quotes the historian Paul Kriwaczek:
“…the Assyrian military invention that was arguably one of the most influential and long-lasting of all: the army boot. In this case the boots were knee-high leather footwear, thick-soled, hobnailed and with iron plates inserted to protect the shins, which made it possible for the first time to fight on any terrain however rough or wet, mountain or marsh, and in any season, winter or summer. This was the first all-weather, all-year army.” (Source)
Further, in his book,  The Great Armies of Antiquity , Richard A. Gabriel describes the specific ways in which the “jackboot” was beneficial to its wearer:
“The high boot provided excellent ankle support for troops who fought regularly in rough terrain … The boot kept foot injuries to a minimum, especially in an army with large contingents of horses and other pack animals.” (Source)
There’s not much else left to say about this accomplishment by TPIII, except it was such a great one, it wasn’t long before it became an everlasting staple of every military on earth…not to mention my personal favorite style of boot.
 The Walls Come Down 
With an area stretching as far as the Mediterranean, there was a lot of land full of people for TPIII to work with to make his empire not only bigger, but better.
Along with slaughter and slavery, the norms of war in antiquity, it was common practice and standard procedure in Assyria to deport defeated subjects, particularly if they had abilities and skills beneficial to the empire. This is a policy that TPIII is often credited with instituting, but it was actually first instituted by Adad-Nirari I in the 14th Century BCE. Nonetheless, he did it on such a big scale, it became a part of his legacy.
 
 People of Lachish Deported and Relocated. (Source) 
Now, deportation did not have the same connotation it does today. Like I said, to be deported under Assyrian rule was really to be resettled by being sent to a province where the empire needed more settlers with practicable skills.
In the Ancient History Encyclopedia Tiglath Pileser III entry, Karen Radner describes such events:
“We must not imagine treks of destitute fugitives who were easy prey for famine and disease … the deportees were meant to travel as comfortably and safely as possible in order to reach their destination in good physical shape . . . the ultimate goal of the Assyrian resettlement policy was to create a homogeneous population with a shared culture and a common identity – that of ‘Assyrians’.” (Source)
To ensure deportations went smoothly and subjects arrived at their destinations in good physical shape, it took an organized effort that went well beyond just keeping these people moving toward their destination. Take this letter written by an official handling a deportation of Aramaeans ordered by TPIII:
 As for the Aramaeans about whom the king my lord has written to me: ‘Prepare them for their journey!’ I shall give them their food supplies, clothes, a waterskin, a pair of shoes and oil. I do not have my donkeys yet, but once they are available, I will dispatch my convoy. (Source) 
Even after the arrival of the deported subjects at their final destination, that official’s work of ensuring the welfare of his charges was still not done, as we see in another letter he wrote to TPIII:
 As for the Aramaeans about whom the king my lord has said: ‘They are to have wives!’ We found numerous suitable women but their fathers refuse to give them in marriage, claiming: ‘We will not consent unless they can pay the bride price.’ Let them be paid so that the Aramaeans can get married. (Source) 
Of course, destroying these peoples’ entire worlds and resettling them where they were to serve their conqueror’s needs does not a brownie point make, but considering the way war usually ended for the defeated in antiquity, well, it’s a little less horrible to be resettled and given a job and, apparently, a life partner.
 Say it in Aramaic 
Though Assyria had absorbed many different peoples through its expansion, there was one particular group Assyrians had done that a lot with: speakers of Aramaic.
Aramaic was a language spoken by those hailing from Aram, a group of city-states in what is modern-day Syria. They were a people Assyria had been picking fights with since the reign of the first Tiglath-Pileser in the 11th Century BCE. TPIII had resettled and assimilated so many Aramaeans as he expanded his empire, it was virtually overrun with them.
Perhaps to make things easier, what with so many people speaking it already, or perhaps because of the ease of Aramaic compared to Assyria’s Akkadian, TPIII eventually made Mesopotamian Eastern Aramaic the official language of the Assyrian Empire. One can only deduce that when the Romans made Latin their lingua franca centuries later, it was TPIII’s example they were following.
 He Did it His Way 
Tiglath-Pileser III’s reign lasted 17 years, filled with war, conquest, innovation and invention. He had even managed in that time to crown himself king of Babylonia in 729 BCE when a revolt broke out there after the death of its Assyrian ally king Nabonassar (747 – 734 BCE).
Pretty much everything TPIII did was carried out in the same spirit as the one in the opening image of this post–a reinforcement of Assyria’s dominance and hold on the region. By the time he died in 727 BCE from natural causes, TPIII had built an invincible empire that would continue to flourish with a line of equally consequential and notable kings, including his son Sargon II (722 – 705 BCE) and the last of the great kings of Assyria, his great-great grandson Ashurbanipal (668 – 627 BCE).
Mark sums up the legacy of the third Tiglath-Pileser best in his Tiglath-Pileser III article, and perhaps helps scholars’ argument along that the Neo-Assyrian era began with this mysterious yet determined man:
“Tiglath Pileser III’s achievements laid the foundation for the future of the Assyrian Empire, which has come to be recognized as the greatest political and military entity of its time and the model on which future empires would be based.” (Source)
February 2018 – ALL MESOPOTAMIA
https://allmesopotamia.wordpress.com/2018/02/
https://rootsofprogress.org/why-ac-won
Why AC won the Electricity Wars
2019-03-09
None
<div><div>
 
 
 <p>I recently finished the book <a href="/books/empires-of-light"><em>Empires of Light</em></a>, by Jill Jonnes, about the “War of the Electric Currents”—AC vs DC—that took place as the electricity industry was getting established in the late 1800s. It is a common story in technology: two competing standards, with ardent proponents of each. But DC was doomed from the start—not for lack of backers, since it was favored by the world-renowned Thomas Edison, but by physics and economics.</p>
<hr />
<p>Let’s back up. Electricity, as a science and a technology, developed over the course of the late 1700s and 1800s. At first, the only known way to create an electric current was chemically, using batteries (invented in 1799 by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta; batteries are rated in “volts” named after him). Early batteries, though, were relatively weak, producing only a couple of volts; this could power new electrical communications, such as the telegraph, but it wasn’t a practical source of power for light or motors.</p>
<p>Electricity, however, is deeply intertwined with the force of magnetism. Each can induce the other: an electric current creates a magnetic field, and a magnetic field can create an electric current. The latter discovery (by Michael Faraday in 1831) led to the invention of the electric <em>generator</em>, which creates power by spinning a magnet near a coil of wire. A generator can be connected to a source of mechanical power, such as a steam engine, to convert kinetic energy into electrical.</p>
<p>By the late 1800s, electricity had become a mode of power to rival coal and oil. The applications, as with any form of energy, were mechanical power (in the form of the electric motor), heat, and especially light. Lighting was the “killer app” of the early electrical industry—the one application that was so valuable that it would drive the development of the technology and investment in infrastructure.</p>
<p>Early electric lights, however, left much to be desired. The original technology was the arc lamp, in which an electric arc was made to leap through the air between two carbon rods. This produced a very bright white light, harsh and glaring. It was workable for stadiums, theaters, and major commercial streets, but not for homes or offices.</p>
<figure>
 <a href="/img/light-bulb-patent.jpg">
 
 </a>
 <figcaption>
 Edison's patent on the light bulb, 1880
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
 <a href="/img/edison-light-bulb.jpg">
 
 </a>
 <figcaption>
 Edison light bulb
 
 
 
 <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/78162759@N06/13889854200">Filip Mishevski / Flickr</a>
 
 
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Thomas Edison saw the arc lamp, and grasped at once the potential for electric lighting to revolutionize daily life. But he had the vision to realize that the huge market opportunity was not in arc lighting, but in creating a less intense light source that could be used in any room. Already famous, and wealthy enough to run many experiments at his Menlo Park laboratory, Edison began a great R&amp;D effort to create a practical electric light bulb, which became his most legendary, career-defining invention.</p>
<p>Incandescent bulbs had been demonstrated before Edison, but they were not yet practical: they burned out far too quickly. Edison’s contribution was to make a lasting bulb with a healthy glow. One key discovery was the importance of creating a vacuum in the bulb. Another crucial element was the filament; Edison’s lab famously tested thousands of materials to find a filament that would burn for many hours. A practical bulb allowed electric light to replace home lighting of kerosene or natural gas.</p>
<p>Electric lights were cleaner than gas or kerosene lamps—and electric motors were <em>much</em> cleaner than any kind of combustion engine (just imagine using a home dishwasher, refrigerator or vacuum cleaner that burns oil or coal). But to get these benefits, inventors had to solve the problem of distribution. The first home lighting system was installed in the mansion of banker J. P. Morgan, and relied on a steam generator constructed in a small building on his property, outside the house, complete with a full-time attendant to operate it. (The attendant went off duty at 11 p.m., and if Morgan’s family was up late, the lights would turn off without warning, sending them groping for candles in the dark.) To get his light bulb in homes less wealthy than Morgan’s, Edison planned an entire system of central generators and a power distribution network.</p>
<p>But there was a problem. Energy was being lost in the transmission lines themselves. This happens inevitably whenever current flows across a resistance (and even the best power lines have some resistance). Because of this, Edison’s system was still limited to about a half-mile radius, making it suitable only for very dense urban areas, where there would be many lighting customers within that small circle. It was never going to be economical in other locations.</p>
<p>The strict distance limit also made it impossible to take advantage of natural power sources, such as waterfalls. For thousands of years, factories had made use of water power through mills. But because we have no way to efficiently transmit mechanical power over long distances, those mills had always been tightly geographically constrained: they had to be <em>on</em> the river. Electricity was holding out the promise of finally breaking those geographic constraints, enabling true long-distance power transmission—if only we could figure out the problem of power loss.</p>
<p>Fortunately, a solution took shape—literally, because the root of the solution is in the shape of the current.</p>
<hr />
<p>Let’s look again at how an electric generator works. The basic method is to spin a magnet near a coil of wire. The magnet is turned by mechanical power, such as a waterfall or steam turbine (in the latter case, the steam itself can come from any fuel source, from coal to gas to nuclear). The turning of the magnet creates a changing magnetic field, which, by fundamental laws of physics, creates an electrical field, which in turn causes electricity to move through a wire.</p>
<p>Because the magnet is turning in a circle, its magnetic field too is turning, and this creates, not a steady electric field, but an alternating one, which in turn creates an <em>alternating current</em> (AC). Instead of flowing in a constant direction, like water through a pipe, the electrons wiggle back and forth in the wire. (You might be surprised that this short-range wiggling enables long-range power transmission, but it does, because the wiggling motion propogates down the wire like a wave. Just as sound waves can reach your ears from miles away, even though no molecules of the air have actually traveled to you from the source, so electrical power can be drawn from the motion of electrons at the destination, even if no individual electrons have traveled all the way from the generator.)</p>
<p>At the time of the first generators, however, the only electric motors in existence required a <em>direct current</em> (DC) that traveled in a consistent direction. So, these generators converted AC into DC (using a more complicated generator design that involved brush contacts).</p>
<p>Both direct and alternating current could light up a light bulb just fine. And both could be generated easily enough (although the AC generator was more elegant, omitting the brush contacts). DC’s advantage in electric motors was leveled when the brilliant engineer Nikola Tesla invented an AC motor (it depended on “polyphase” AC, that is, multiple alternating currents where the alternations were out of phase with each other). The real, insurmountable difference was in <em>transmission</em>, because here AC could do something that DC could never do, something that would solve the problem of long-distance power lines and establish it as the electrical standard.</p>
<p>To understand this magic trick, we need to review a bit more of the physics of electromagnetism. Any electrical power line has a few basic physical attributes. The <em>current</em> is the rate at which electrical charge flows through the wire: literally, how many electrons per second are moving past a certain point. The <em>voltage</em> is a sort of electrical “pressure” applied to a wire: a greater voltage will produce a greater current. The <em>resistance</em> is analagous to friction that works against the current. When a current flows over a resistance, energy is lost, just as energy is lost to friction in a mechanical system. The amount of energy lost per second is proportional to the resistance, and to the square of the current. So to minimize energy loss, we must minimize both resistance and current.</p>
<p>To minimize resistance, you can use a low-resistance material such as silver or copper. Silver is slightly less resistive, but much more expensive, so copper is used in practice. You can make the wires thicker, because the resistance is inversely proportional to the cross-sectional area, but that uses more material, which is again more expensive. Thus resistance can only be lowered so much—and it gets worse with every mile, since it is proportional to the length of the wire.</p>
<p>The other way to minimize energy loss, then, is to reduce the current. But the wires still have to deliver power, and the power delivered is proportional to the current times the voltage. Therefore, to deliver a given amount of power with a low current, you need a high voltage.</p>
<p>But here we face another problem. A very high voltage is not suitable for domestic use. For typical daily use, you want electrical power available at about a hundred volts (the US standard today is a nominal 120V; Europe uses 220V). For long-distance power transmission, you want thousands of volts or more (modern lines use up to 765,000V!) If you brought that much power into the home, it would be far too much for a light bulb or electric motor, and it would present a danger of electrical shock or fire. But if you try to run power lines at only hundreds of volts, you lose too much energy to resistance.</p>
<p>How to solve this conundrum? Through an almost magical device called a transformer, which can convert low-voltage power to high-voltage and back. And it only works with alternating current.</p>
<figure>
 <a href="/img/transformer-diagram.png">
 
 </a>
 <figcaption>
 Diagram of an electrical transformer
 
 
 
 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Transformer3d_col3.svg">BillC / Wikimedia</a>
 
 
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
 <a href="/img/electrical-transformer.jpg">
 
 </a>
 <figcaption>
 Electrical transformer
 
 
 
 <a href="https://pixabay.com/photos/electricity-transformer-power-2820425">dimitrisvetsikas1969 / Pixabay</a>
 
 
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The seeming magic of the transformer is that the low-voltage and high-voltage wires don’t even touch. Instead, the power is transmitted via electromagnetic induction, that phenomenon discovered by Faraday in the 1830s. In a transformer, two coils of wire are wound around an iron core. As the current alternates in one coil, the iron becomes an alternating electromagnet. The alternating magnetic field then creates an alternating electric current in the other coil of wire. But if the number of turns in the two coils are different, then the voltage in the second coil will be different as well—higher or lower depending on whether the second coil has more or fewer turns than the first.</p>
<p>This works with AC because a <em>changing</em> magnetic field induces an electric field—but a <em>stationary</em> magnetic field does <em>not</em>, so it doesn’t work with DC. This is AC’s trump card, its decisive differentiator.</p>
<p>With AC, you can “step up” the current to a higher voltage for long-distance transmission, then step it down at the destination, such as a home, office or factory. The power travels long distances at high voltage and only short distances at low voltage, so very little energy is lost, but the desired voltage is still available to run lights and motors.</p>
<p>The advantage is analogous to shifting into the ideal gear when riding a bicycle. If you ride a bicycle in a low gear at a high speed on level ground, a lot of your energy just goes into moving your legs very fast, which is inefficient. By shifting into a higher gear, you can move your legs at a comfortable pace, while the wheels move much faster, thanks to the mechanical advantage created by the gears. The transformer is like a gear box for electricity.</p>
<p>George Westinghouse saw the value in the AC system and championed it. Edison, who had created a DC-based system, felt that high voltage was dangerous and argued against its use. The safety argument was compelling to many, but at the end of the day, a DC power grid was simply impractical—and Westinghouse’s sales figures proved it.</p>
<p>This was conclusively demonstrated by 1895, when the first hydroelectric power plant was built to harness the energy of the mighty Niagara Falls. An early plan for Niagara had called for a whole factory town to be built at the site, powered by water mills. But with electricity, the falls could deliver power to Buffalo, NY, located 26 miles away on the shores of Lake Erie.</p>
<figure>
 <a href="/img/niagara-power-plant.jpg">
 
 </a>
 <figcaption>
 Robert Moses Niagara Power Station, Lewiston, New York
 
 
 
 <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_moses_niagara_power_plant_01.jpg">Busfahrer / Wikimedia</a>
 
 
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>
<hr />
<p>There is a popular narrative today in which Edison is a bumbling fool who missed AC and who didn’t really invent the light bulb, and Nikola Tesla is the brilliant genius who invented AC and motors, predicted the cell phone, etc. This is unjust in two ways.</p>
<figure>
 <a href="/img/thomas-edison.jpg">
 
 </a>
 <figcaption>
 Thomas Edison
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>
<figure>
 <a href="/img/nikola-tesla.jpg">
 
 </a>
 <figcaption>
 Nikola Tesla
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>First, Edison was an inventive genius. He was wrong about AC, and in Jonnes’s telling, he seems to have been against it simply because it wasn’t his invention or his system. (He also participated in some dirty fighting against AC, such as a campaign to get AC, including Westinghouse-branded generators, instituted as a new form of execution for prisoners, in order to hurt Westinghouse by association with capital punishment.) But Edison was one of the few who saw early on the potential for incandescent lighting and the value of an electrical power grid, and he drove a huge investment in these technologies. And his lab did, for all practical purposes, invent the light bulb—certainly, no light bulb that existed before their experiments would have served.</p>
<figure>
 <a href="/img/george-westinghouse.jpg">
 
 </a>
 <figcaption>
 George Westinghouse
 
 </figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But even more importantly, the popular narrative takes no note of George Westinghouse. In Jonnes’s book, Westinghouse emerges as the true hero of the story. Tesla was a brilliant inventor who contributed some crucial innovations to AC power. But Westinghouse was the industrial visionary who made the power grid a reality. He got the financing, led the effort, made the sales, and deployed the system.</p>
<p>Moreover, he comes across as a man of honor and integrity. Here was his approach to publicity:</p>
<blockquote>
 <p>As the War of the Electric Currents grew uglier and fiercer, George Westinghouse decided in the fall of 1889 to hire a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter named Ernest H. Heinrichs to promote his companies and their achievements. On Heinrichs’s first day, Westinghouse came by to wish him success and explain his purpose. “All I want to see is that the papers print [things] accurately. The truth hurts nobody. …</p>
 <p>“As to the attacks made against me personally, of course they hurt, but my self respect and conscience do not allow me to fight with such weapons. Besides, I feel that my moral reputation and my business reputation are too well established to be hurt by such attacks. However, I am preparing an article for the North American Review in answer to Mr. Edison’s charges against the Alternating Current system, but beyond that I shall have nothing to give you for publication…. By letting the others do all the talking, we shall make more friends in the end than if we lower ourselves to the level of our assailants.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He displayed tremendous courage of his convictions:</p>
<blockquote>
 <p>As his old friend and biographer Henry Prout explained, Westinghouse was a great one for consulting others, “then he made up his own mind, and nothing milder than an earthquake could budge him. We have seen him sitting like a rock, serene, gentle, and unmoved when every member of the board of directors was against him. Whether he was determined or just obstinate depends upon your point of view.” Westinghouse had been right far too often when those he judged pusillanimous had been wrong. Why should he stop trusting his own formidable instincts?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Once, during a financial downturn, Westinghouse reorganized his company while retaining control:</p>
<blockquote>
 <p>Westinghouse’s lawyer, Paul D. Cravath, still marveled years later at this triumph of reorganization. Westinghouse, he said, “found it difficult to work with so-called financiers. What seemed to him to be their lack of vision and faith was always annoying to him…. In at least two great financial crises, when the financiers had given up the task as hopeless, Mr. Westinghouse, by his faith, by his untiring energy, and by the exercise of a power to influence men that I have never seen equaled, was able to weather the financial storm, raise enormous sums of money, and restore his enterprises to a sound financial position when his critics and most of his friends were certain that he was facing a crushing defeat.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Years later, during another downturn, Westinghouse had to reorganize his company under bankruptcy (known in that era as “receivership”). He was amazingly sanguine, saying to his publicist:</p>
<blockquote>
 <p>“Do not forget to make it very emphatic to them [the newspapers] that this receivership is not the end of the company…. [The] company is fundamentally as sound and solid as ever, and it will emerge out of this unfortunate situation a greater and more prosperous concern than ever.” The bankruptcy was a great shock to both insiders and outsiders, but with money so tight, Westinghouse saw no alternative. He treated it matter-of-factly. “‘I grant you this is not pleasant,’ he told one friend. ‘But it isn’t the biggest thing in the world. All large business has its ups and downs. The crisis through which we are passing is only part of our day’s work.’”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He did save the company, and although unfortunately he had to give up control, and ultimately was pushed out, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation exists to this day.</p>
<hr />
<p>The <a href="/the-newcomen-steam-engine">steam engine</a> inaugurated the age of industrial energy, by providing a means to <a href="/the-significance-of-the-steam-engine">transform heat energy into mechanical energy</a>. But electricity <em>completed</em> the energy revolution, by separating power generation from application. It allowed energy to be generated miles away, at a waterfall or a large, centralized fossil fuel–burning plant, and then to be used in homes and offices via clean electric lights and motors. It is indispensable to today’s standard of living. And we owe it to Westinghouse and AC.</p>
 
 
 
 
 
 <p><a href="/books/empires-of-light"><i>Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World</i></a></p>
 
 
 
 
 
 </div>||||I|||| The Roots of Progress

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 Why AC won the Electricity Wars

 by Jason Crawford · March 9, 2019 · 11 min read

 I recently finished the book Empires of Light, by Jill Jonnes, about the “War of the Electric Currents”—AC vs DC—that took place as the electricity industry was getting established in the late 1800s. It is a common story in technology: two competing standards, with ardent proponents of each. But DC was doomed from the start—not for lack of backers, since it was favored by the world-renowned Thomas Edison, but by physics and economics.

 Let’s back up. Electricity, as a science and a technology, developed over the course of the late 1700s and 1800s. At first, the only known way to create an electric current was chemically, using batteries (invented in 1799 by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta; batteries are rated in “volts” named after him). Early batteries, though, were relatively weak, producing only a couple of volts; this could power new electrical communications, such as the telegraph, but it wasn’t a practical source of power for light or motors.

 Electricity, however, is deeply intertwined with the force of magnetism. Each can induce the other: an electric current creates a magnetic field, and a magnetic field can create an electric current. The latter discovery (by Michael Faraday in 1831) led to the invention of the electric generator, which creates power by spinning a magnet near a coil of wire. A generator can be connected to a source of mechanical power, such as a steam engine, to convert kinetic energy into electrical.

 By the late 1800s, electricity had become a mode of power to rival coal and oil. The applications, as with any form of energy, were mechanical power (in the form of the electric motor), heat, and especially light. Lighting was the “killer app” of the early electrical industry—the one application that was so valuable that it would drive the development of the technology and investment in infrastructure.

 Early electric lights, however, left much to be desired. The original technology was the arc lamp, in which an electric arc was made to leap through the air between two carbon rods. This produced a very bright white light, harsh and glaring. It was workable for stadiums, theaters, and major commercial streets, but not for homes or offices.

 Edison's patent on the light bulb, 1880

 Edison light bulb Filip Mishevski / Flickr

 Thomas Edison saw the arc lamp, and grasped at once the potential for electric lighting to revolutionize daily life. But he had the vision to realize that the huge market opportunity was not in arc lighting, but in creating a less intense light source that could be used in any room. Already famous, and wealthy enough to run many experiments at his Menlo Park laboratory, Edison began a great R&D effort to create a practical electric light bulb, which became his most legendary, career-defining invention.

 Incandescent bulbs had been demonstrated before Edison, but they were not yet practical: they burned out far too quickly. Edison’s contribution was to make a lasting bulb with a healthy glow. One key discovery was the importance of creating a vacuum in the bulb. Another crucial element was the filament; Edison’s lab famously tested thousands of materials to find a filament that would burn for many hours. A practical bulb allowed electric light to replace home lighting of kerosene or natural gas.

 Electric lights were cleaner than gas or kerosene lamps—and electric motors were much cleaner than any kind of combustion engine (just imagine using a home dishwasher, refrigerator or vacuum cleaner that burns oil or coal). But to get these benefits, inventors had to solve the problem of distribution. The first home lighting system was installed in the mansion of banker J. P. Morgan, and relied on a steam generator constructed in a small building on his property, outside the house, complete with a full-time attendant to operate it. (The attendant went off duty at 11 p.m., and if Morgan’s family was up late, the lights would turn off without warning, sending them groping for candles in the dark.) To get his light bulb in homes less wealthy than Morgan’s, Edison planned an entire system of central generators and a power distribution network.

 But there was a problem. Energy was being lost in the transmission lines themselves. This happens inevitably whenever current flows across a resistance (and even the best power lines have some resistance). Because of this, Edison’s system was still limited to about a half-mile radius, making it suitable only for very dense urban areas, where there would be many lighting customers within that small circle. It was never going to be economical in other locations.

 The strict distance limit also made it impossible to take advantage of natural power sources, such as waterfalls. For thousands of years, factories had made use of water power through mills. But because we have no way to efficiently transmit mechanical power over long distances, those mills had always been tightly geographically constrained: they had to be on the river. Electricity was holding out the promise of finally breaking those geographic constraints, enabling true long-distance power transmission—if only we could figure out the problem of power loss.

 Fortunately, a solution took shape—literally, because the root of the solution is in the shape of the current.

 Let’s look again at how an electric generator works. The basic method is to spin a magnet near a coil of wire. The magnet is turned by mechanical power, such as a waterfall or steam turbine (in the latter case, the steam itself can come from any fuel source, from coal to gas to nuclear). The turning of the magnet creates a changing magnetic field, which, by fundamental laws of physics, creates an electrical field, which in turn causes electricity to move through a wire.

 Because the magnet is turning in a circle, its magnetic field too is turning, and this creates, not a steady electric field, but an alternating one, which in turn creates an alternating current (AC). Instead of flowing in a constant direction, like water through a pipe, the electrons wiggle back and forth in the wire. (You might be surprised that this short-range wiggling enables long-range power transmission, but it does, because the wiggling motion propogates down the wire like a wave. Just as sound waves can reach your ears from miles away, even though no molecules of the air have actually traveled to you from the source, so electrical power can be drawn from the motion of electrons at the destination, even if no individual electrons have traveled all the way from the generator.)

 At the time of the first generators, however, the only electric motors in existence required a direct current (DC) that traveled in a consistent direction. So, these generators converted AC into DC (using a more complicated generator design that involved brush contacts).

 Both direct and alternating current could light up a light bulb just fine. And both could be generated easily enough (although the AC generator was more elegant, omitting the brush contacts). DC’s advantage in electric motors was leveled when the brilliant engineer Nikola Tesla invented an AC motor (it depended on “polyphase” AC, that is, multiple alternating currents where the alternations were out of phase with each other). The real, insurmountable difference was in transmission, because here AC could do something that DC could never do, something that would solve the problem of long-distance power lines and establish it as the electrical standard.

 To understand this magic trick, we need to review a bit more of the physics of electromagnetism. Any electrical power line has a few basic physical attributes. The current is the rate at which electrical charge flows through the wire: literally, how many electrons per second are moving past a certain point. The voltage is a sort of electrical “pressure” applied to a wire: a greater voltage will produce a greater current. The resistance is analagous to friction that works against the current. When a current flows over a resistance, energy is lost, just as energy is lost to friction in a mechanical system. The amount of energy lost per second is proportional to the resistance, and to the square of the current. So to minimize energy loss, we must minimize both resistance and current.

 To minimize resistance, you can use a low-resistance material such as silver or copper. Silver is slightly less resistive, but much more expensive, so copper is used in practice. You can make the wires thicker, because the resistance is inversely proportional to the cross-sectional area, but that uses more material, which is again more expensive. Thus resistance can only be lowered so much—and it gets worse with every mile, since it is proportional to the length of the wire.

 The other way to minimize energy loss, then, is to reduce the current. But the wires still have to deliver power, and the power delivered is proportional to the current times the voltage. Therefore, to deliver a given amount of power with a low current, you need a high voltage.

 But here we face another problem. A very high voltage is not suitable for domestic use. For typical daily use, you want electrical power available at about a hundred volts (the US standard today is a nominal 120V; Europe uses 220V). For long-distance power transmission, you want thousands of volts or more (modern lines use up to 765,000V!) If you brought that much power into the home, it would be far too much for a light bulb or electric motor, and it would present a danger of electrical shock or fire. But if you try to run power lines at only hundreds of volts, you lose too much energy to resistance.

 How to solve this conundrum? Through an almost magical device called a transformer, which can convert low-voltage power to high-voltage and back. And it only works with alternating current.

 Diagram of an electrical transformer BillC / Wikimedia

 Electrical transformer dimitrisvetsikas1969 / Pixabay

 The seeming magic of the transformer is that the low-voltage and high-voltage wires don’t even touch. Instead, the power is transmitted via electromagnetic induction, that phenomenon discovered by Faraday in the 1830s. In a transformer, two coils of wire are wound around an iron core. As the current alternates in one coil, the iron becomes an alternating electromagnet. The alternating magnetic field then creates an alternating electric current in the other coil of wire. But if the number of turns in the two coils are different, then the voltage in the second coil will be different as well—higher or lower depending on whether the second coil has more or fewer turns than the first.

 This works with AC because a changing magnetic field induces an electric field—but a stationary magnetic field does not, so it doesn’t work with DC. This is AC’s trump card, its decisive differentiator.

 With AC, you can “step up” the current to a higher voltage for long-distance transmission, then step it down at the destination, such as a home, office or factory. The power travels long distances at high voltage and only short distances at low voltage, so very little energy is lost, but the desired voltage is still available to run lights and motors.

 The advantage is analogous to shifting into the ideal gear when riding a bicycle. If you ride a bicycle in a low gear at a high speed on level ground, a lot of your energy just goes into moving your legs very fast, which is inefficient. By shifting into a higher gear, you can move your legs at a comfortable pace, while the wheels move much faster, thanks to the mechanical advantage created by the gears. The transformer is like a gear box for electricity.

 George Westinghouse saw the value in the AC system and championed it. Edison, who had created a DC-based system, felt that high voltage was dangerous and argued against its use. The safety argument was compelling to many, but at the end of the day, a DC power grid was simply impractical—and Westinghouse’s sales figures proved it.

 This was conclusively demonstrated by 1895, when the first hydroelectric power plant was built to harness the energy of the mighty Niagara Falls. An early plan for Niagara had called for a whole factory town to be built at the site, powered by water mills. But with electricity, the falls could deliver power to Buffalo, NY, located 26 miles away on the shores of Lake Erie.

 Robert Moses Niagara Power Station, Lewiston, New York Busfahrer / Wikimedia

 There is a popular narrative today in which Edison is a bumbling fool who missed AC and who didn’t really invent the light bulb, and Nikola Tesla is the brilliant genius who invented AC and motors, predicted the cell phone, etc. This is unjust in two ways.

 Thomas Edison

 Nikola Tesla

 First, Edison was an inventive genius. He was wrong about AC, and in Jonnes’s telling, he seems to have been against it simply because it wasn’t his invention or his system. (He also participated in some dirty fighting against AC, such as a campaign to get AC, including Westinghouse-branded generators, instituted as a new form of execution for prisoners, in order to hurt Westinghouse by association with capital punishment.) But Edison was one of the few who saw early on the potential for incandescent lighting and the value of an electrical power grid, and he drove a huge investment in these technologies. And his lab did, for all practical purposes, invent the light bulb—certainly, no light bulb that existed before their experiments would have served.

 George Westinghouse

 But even more importantly, the popular narrative takes no note of George Westinghouse. In Jonnes’s book, Westinghouse emerges as the true hero of the story. Tesla was a brilliant inventor who contributed some crucial innovations to AC power. But Westinghouse was the industrial visionary who made the power grid a reality. He got the financing, led the effort, made the sales, and deployed the system.

 Moreover, he comes across as a man of honor and integrity. Here was his approach to publicity:

 As the War of the Electric Currents grew uglier and fiercer, George Westinghouse decided in the fall of 1889 to hire a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter named Ernest H. Heinrichs to promote his companies and their achievements. On Heinrichs’s first day, Westinghouse came by to wish him success and explain his purpose. “All I want to see is that the papers print [things] accurately. The truth hurts nobody. …

 “As to the attacks made against me personally, of course they hurt, but my self respect and conscience do not allow me to fight with such weapons. Besides, I feel that my moral reputation and my business reputation are too well established to be hurt by such attacks. However, I am preparing an article for the North American Review in answer to Mr. Edison’s charges against the Alternating Current system, but beyond that I shall have nothing to give you for publication…. By letting the others do all the talking, we shall make more friends in the end than if we lower ourselves to the level of our assailants.”

 He displayed tremendous courage of his convictions:

 As his old friend and biographer Henry Prout explained, Westinghouse was a great one for consulting others, “then he made up his own mind, and nothing milder than an earthquake could budge him. We have seen him sitting like a rock, serene, gentle, and unmoved when every member of the board of directors was against him. Whether he was determined or just obstinate depends upon your point of view.” Westinghouse had been right far too often when those he judged pusillanimous had been wrong. Why should he stop trusting his own formidable instincts?

 Once, during a financial downturn, Westinghouse reorganized his company while retaining control:

 Westinghouse’s lawyer, Paul D. Cravath, still marveled years later at this triumph of reorganization. Westinghouse, he said, “found it difficult to work with so-called financiers. What seemed to him to be their lack of vision and faith was always annoying to him…. In at least two great financial crises, when the financiers had given up the task as hopeless, Mr. Westinghouse, by his faith, by his untiring energy, and by the exercise of a power to influence men that I have never seen equaled, was able to weather the financial storm, raise enormous sums of money, and restore his enterprises to a sound financial position when his critics and most of his friends were certain that he was facing a crushing defeat.”

 Years later, during another downturn, Westinghouse had to reorganize his company under bankruptcy (known in that era as “receivership”). He was amazingly sanguine, saying to his publicist:

 “Do not forget to make it very emphatic to them [the newspapers] that this receivership is not the end of the company…. [The] company is fundamentally as sound and solid as ever, and it will emerge out of this unfortunate situation a greater and more prosperous concern than ever.” The bankruptcy was a great shock to both insiders and outsiders, but with money so tight, Westinghouse saw no alternative. He treated it matter-of-factly. “‘I grant you this is not pleasant,’ he told one friend. ‘But it isn’t the biggest thing in the world. All large business has its ups and downs. The crisis through which we are passing is only part of our day’s work.’”

 He did save the company, and although unfortunately he had to give up control, and ultimately was pushed out, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation exists to this day.

 The steam engine inaugurated the age of industrial energy, by providing a means to transform heat energy into mechanical energy. But electricity completed the energy revolution, by separating power generation from application. It allowed energy to be generated miles away, at a waterfall or a large, centralized fossil fuel–burning plant, and then to be used in homes and offices via clean electric lights and motors. It is indispensable to today’s standard of living. And we owe it to Westinghouse and AC.

 Relevant books

 Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World

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I recently finished the book  Empires of Light , by Jill Jonnes, about the “War of the Electric Currents”—AC vs DC—that took place as the electricity industry was getting established in the late 1800s. It is a common story in technology: two competing standards, with ardent proponents of each. But DC was doomed from the start—not for lack of backers, since it was favored by the world-renowned Thomas Edison, but by physics and economics.
Let’s back up. Electricity, as a science and a technology, developed over the course of the late 1700s and 1800s. At first, the only known way to create an electric current was chemically, using batteries (invented in 1799 by Italian physicist Alessandro Volta; batteries are rated in “volts” named after him). Early batteries, though, were relatively weak, producing only a couple of volts; this could power new electrical communications, such as the telegraph, but it wasn’t a practical source of power for light or motors.
Electricity, however, is deeply intertwined with the force of magnetism. Each can induce the other: an electric current creates a magnetic field, and a magnetic field can create an electric current. The latter discovery (by Michael Faraday in 1831) led to the invention of the electric generator, which creates power by spinning a magnet near a coil of wire. A generator can be connected to a source of mechanical power, such as a steam engine, to convert kinetic energy into electrical.
By the late 1800s, electricity had become a mode of power to rival coal and oil. The applications, as with any form of energy, were mechanical power (in the form of the electric motor), heat, and especially light. Lighting was the “killer app” of the early electrical industry—the one application that was so valuable that it would drive the development of the technology and investment in infrastructure.
Early electric lights, however, left much to be desired. The original technology was the arc lamp, in which an electric arc was made to leap through the air between two carbon rods. This produced a very bright white light, harsh and glaring. It was workable for stadiums, theaters, and major commercial streets, but not for homes or offices.
 
 
 
 
 Edison's patent on the light bulb, 1880
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Edison light bulb
 
 
 
 Filip Mishevski / Flickr
 
 
 
 
Thomas Edison saw the arc lamp, and grasped at once the potential for electric lighting to revolutionize daily life. But he had the vision to realize that the huge market opportunity was not in arc lighting, but in creating a less intense light source that could be used in any room. Already famous, and wealthy enough to run many experiments at his Menlo Park laboratory, Edison began a great R&amp;D effort to create a practical electric light bulb, which became his most legendary, career-defining invention.
Incandescent bulbs had been demonstrated before Edison, but they were not yet practical: they burned out far too quickly. Edison’s contribution was to make a lasting bulb with a healthy glow. One key discovery was the importance of creating a vacuum in the bulb. Another crucial element was the filament; Edison’s lab famously tested thousands of materials to find a filament that would burn for many hours. A practical bulb allowed electric light to replace home lighting of kerosene or natural gas.
Electric lights were cleaner than gas or kerosene lamps—and electric motors were much cleaner than any kind of combustion engine (just imagine using a home dishwasher, refrigerator or vacuum cleaner that burns oil or coal). But to get these benefits, inventors had to solve the problem of distribution. The first home lighting system was installed in the mansion of banker J. P. Morgan, and relied on a steam generator constructed in a small building on his property, outside the house, complete with a full-time attendant to operate it. (The attendant went off duty at 11 p.m., and if Morgan’s family was up late, the lights would turn off without warning, sending them groping for candles in the dark.) To get his light bulb in homes less wealthy than Morgan’s, Edison planned an entire system of central generators and a power distribution network.
But there was a problem. Energy was being lost in the transmission lines themselves. This happens inevitably whenever current flows across a resistance (and even the best power lines have some resistance). Because of this, Edison’s system was still limited to about a half-mile radius, making it suitable only for very dense urban areas, where there would be many lighting customers within that small circle. It was never going to be economical in other locations.
The strict distance limit also made it impossible to take advantage of natural power sources, such as waterfalls. For thousands of years, factories had made use of water power through mills. But because we have no way to efficiently transmit mechanical power over long distances, those mills had always been tightly geographically constrained: they had to be on the river. Electricity was holding out the promise of finally breaking those geographic constraints, enabling true long-distance power transmission—if only we could figure out the problem of power loss.
Fortunately, a solution took shape—literally, because the root of the solution is in the shape of the current.
Let’s look again at how an electric generator works. The basic method is to spin a magnet near a coil of wire. The magnet is turned by mechanical power, such as a waterfall or steam turbine (in the latter case, the steam itself can come from any fuel source, from coal to gas to nuclear). The turning of the magnet creates a changing magnetic field, which, by fundamental laws of physics, creates an electrical field, which in turn causes electricity to move through a wire.
Because the magnet is turning in a circle, its magnetic field too is turning, and this creates, not a steady electric field, but an alternating one, which in turn creates an alternating current (AC). Instead of flowing in a constant direction, like water through a pipe, the electrons wiggle back and forth in the wire. (You might be surprised that this short-range wiggling enables long-range power transmission, but it does, because the wiggling motion propogates down the wire like a wave. Just as sound waves can reach your ears from miles away, even though no molecules of the air have actually traveled to you from the source, so electrical power can be drawn from the motion of electrons at the destination, even if no individual electrons have traveled all the way from the generator.)
At the time of the first generators, however, the only electric motors in existence required a direct current (DC) that traveled in a consistent direction. So, these generators converted AC into DC (using a more complicated generator design that involved brush contacts).
Both direct and alternating current could light up a light bulb just fine. And both could be generated easily enough (although the AC generator was more elegant, omitting the brush contacts). DC’s advantage in electric motors was leveled when the brilliant engineer Nikola Tesla invented an AC motor (it depended on “polyphase” AC, that is, multiple alternating currents where the alternations were out of phase with each other). The real, insurmountable difference was in transmission, because here AC could do something that DC could never do, something that would solve the problem of long-distance power lines and establish it as the electrical standard.
To understand this magic trick, we need to review a bit more of the physics of electromagnetism. Any electrical power line has a few basic physical attributes. The current is the rate at which electrical charge flows through the wire: literally, how many electrons per second are moving past a certain point. The voltage is a sort of electrical “pressure” applied to a wire: a greater voltage will produce a greater current. The resistance is analagous to friction that works against the current. When a current flows over a resistance, energy is lost, just as energy is lost to friction in a mechanical system. The amount of energy lost per second is proportional to the resistance, and to the square of the current. So to minimize energy loss, we must minimize both resistance and current.
To minimize resistance, you can use a low-resistance material such as silver or copper. Silver is slightly less resistive, but much more expensive, so copper is used in practice. You can make the wires thicker, because the resistance is inversely proportional to the cross-sectional area, but that uses more material, which is again more expensive. Thus resistance can only be lowered so much—and it gets worse with every mile, since it is proportional to the length of the wire.
The other way to minimize energy loss, then, is to reduce the current. But the wires still have to deliver power, and the power delivered is proportional to the current times the voltage. Therefore, to deliver a given amount of power with a low current, you need a high voltage.
But here we face another problem. A very high voltage is not suitable for domestic use. For typical daily use, you want electrical power available at about a hundred volts (the US standard today is a nominal 120V; Europe uses 220V). For long-distance power transmission, you want thousands of volts or more (modern lines use up to 765,000V!) If you brought that much power into the home, it would be far too much for a light bulb or electric motor, and it would present a danger of electrical shock or fire. But if you try to run power lines at only hundreds of volts, you lose too much energy to resistance.
How to solve this conundrum? Through an almost magical device called a transformer, which can convert low-voltage power to high-voltage and back. And it only works with alternating current.
 
 
 
 
 Diagram of an electrical transformer
 
 
 
 BillC / Wikimedia
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Electrical transformer
 
 
 
 dimitrisvetsikas1969 / Pixabay
 
 
 
 
The seeming magic of the transformer is that the low-voltage and high-voltage wires don’t even touch. Instead, the power is transmitted via electromagnetic induction, that phenomenon discovered by Faraday in the 1830s. In a transformer, two coils of wire are wound around an iron core. As the current alternates in one coil, the iron becomes an alternating electromagnet. The alternating magnetic field then creates an alternating electric current in the other coil of wire. But if the number of turns in the two coils are different, then the voltage in the second coil will be different as well—higher or lower depending on whether the second coil has more or fewer turns than the first.
This works with AC because a changing magnetic field induces an electric field—but a stationary magnetic field does not, so it doesn’t work with DC. This is AC’s trump card, its decisive differentiator.
With AC, you can “step up” the current to a higher voltage for long-distance transmission, then step it down at the destination, such as a home, office or factory. The power travels long distances at high voltage and only short distances at low voltage, so very little energy is lost, but the desired voltage is still available to run lights and motors.
The advantage is analogous to shifting into the ideal gear when riding a bicycle. If you ride a bicycle in a low gear at a high speed on level ground, a lot of your energy just goes into moving your legs very fast, which is inefficient. By shifting into a higher gear, you can move your legs at a comfortable pace, while the wheels move much faster, thanks to the mechanical advantage created by the gears. The transformer is like a gear box for electricity.
George Westinghouse saw the value in the AC system and championed it. Edison, who had created a DC-based system, felt that high voltage was dangerous and argued against its use. The safety argument was compelling to many, but at the end of the day, a DC power grid was simply impractical—and Westinghouse’s sales figures proved it.
This was conclusively demonstrated by 1895, when the first hydroelectric power plant was built to harness the energy of the mighty Niagara Falls. An early plan for Niagara had called for a whole factory town to be built at the site, powered by water mills. But with electricity, the falls could deliver power to Buffalo, NY, located 26 miles away on the shores of Lake Erie.
 
 
 
 
 Robert Moses Niagara Power Station, Lewiston, New York
 
 
 
 Busfahrer / Wikimedia
 
 
 
 
There is a popular narrative today in which Edison is a bumbling fool who missed AC and who didn’t really invent the light bulb, and Nikola Tesla is the brilliant genius who invented AC and motors, predicted the cell phone, etc. This is unjust in two ways.
 
 
 
 
 Thomas Edison
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Nikola Tesla
 
 
First, Edison was an inventive genius. He was wrong about AC, and in Jonnes’s telling, he seems to have been against it simply because it wasn’t his invention or his system. (He also participated in some dirty fighting against AC, such as a campaign to get AC, including Westinghouse-branded generators, instituted as a new form of execution for prisoners, in order to hurt Westinghouse by association with capital punishment.) But Edison was one of the few who saw early on the potential for incandescent lighting and the value of an electrical power grid, and he drove a huge investment in these technologies. And his lab did, for all practical purposes, invent the light bulb—certainly, no light bulb that existed before their experiments would have served.
 
 
 
 
 George Westinghouse
 
 
But even more importantly, the popular narrative takes no note of George Westinghouse. In Jonnes’s book, Westinghouse emerges as the true hero of the story. Tesla was a brilliant inventor who contributed some crucial innovations to AC power. But Westinghouse was the industrial visionary who made the power grid a reality. He got the financing, led the effort, made the sales, and deployed the system.
Moreover, he comes across as a man of honor and integrity. Here was his approach to publicity:
 As the War of the Electric Currents grew uglier and fiercer, George Westinghouse decided in the fall of 1889 to hire a Pittsburgh newspaper reporter named Ernest H. Heinrichs to promote his companies and their achievements. On Heinrichs’s first day, Westinghouse came by to wish him success and explain his purpose. “All I want to see is that the papers print [things] accurately. The truth hurts nobody. …
 “As to the attacks made against me personally, of course they hurt, but my self respect and conscience do not allow me to fight with such weapons. Besides, I feel that my moral reputation and my business reputation are too well established to be hurt by such attacks. However, I am preparing an article for the North American Review in answer to Mr. Edison’s charges against the Alternating Current system, but beyond that I shall have nothing to give you for publication…. By letting the others do all the talking, we shall make more friends in the end than if we lower ourselves to the level of our assailants.”
He displayed tremendous courage of his convictions:
 As his old friend and biographer Henry Prout explained, Westinghouse was a great one for consulting others, “then he made up his own mind, and nothing milder than an earthquake could budge him. We have seen him sitting like a rock, serene, gentle, and unmoved when every member of the board of directors was against him. Whether he was determined or just obstinate depends upon your point of view.” Westinghouse had been right far too often when those he judged pusillanimous had been wrong. Why should he stop trusting his own formidable instincts?
Once, during a financial downturn, Westinghouse reorganized his company while retaining control:
 Westinghouse’s lawyer, Paul D. Cravath, still marveled years later at this triumph of reorganization. Westinghouse, he said, “found it difficult to work with so-called financiers. What seemed to him to be their lack of vision and faith was always annoying to him…. In at least two great financial crises, when the financiers had given up the task as hopeless, Mr. Westinghouse, by his faith, by his untiring energy, and by the exercise of a power to influence men that I have never seen equaled, was able to weather the financial storm, raise enormous sums of money, and restore his enterprises to a sound financial position when his critics and most of his friends were certain that he was facing a crushing defeat.”
Years later, during another downturn, Westinghouse had to reorganize his company under bankruptcy (known in that era as “receivership”). He was amazingly sanguine, saying to his publicist:
 “Do not forget to make it very emphatic to them [the newspapers] that this receivership is not the end of the company…. [The] company is fundamentally as sound and solid as ever, and it will emerge out of this unfortunate situation a greater and more prosperous concern than ever.” The bankruptcy was a great shock to both insiders and outsiders, but with money so tight, Westinghouse saw no alternative. He treated it matter-of-factly. “‘I grant you this is not pleasant,’ he told one friend. ‘But it isn’t the biggest thing in the world. All large business has its ups and downs. The crisis through which we are passing is only part of our day’s work.’”
He did save the company, and although unfortunately he had to give up control, and ultimately was pushed out, the Westinghouse Electric Corporation exists to this day.
The steam engine inaugurated the age of industrial energy, by providing a means to transform heat energy into mechanical energy. But electricity completed the energy revolution, by separating power generation from application. It allowed energy to be generated miles away, at a waterfall or a large, centralized fossil fuel–burning plant, and then to be used in homes and offices via clean electric lights and motors. It is indispensable to today’s standard of living. And we owe it to Westinghouse and AC.
 
 
 
 
 
   Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
Why AC won the Electricity Wars
https://rootsofprogress.org/why-ac-won
https://acoup.blog/2021/11/19/referenda-ad-senatum-november-19-2021-hidden-string-pullers-falling-empires-and-tactics-against-horse-archers/
Referenda ad Senatum: November 19, 2021: Hidden String-Pullers, Falling Empires and Tactics Against Horse Archers!
2021-11-19
Bret Devereaux
<div><div>
<p>Welcome! As we’ve done once before, this week I am going to take a chance to answer a number of shorter questions by my patrons over at Patreon who are at the <em>Patres et Matres Conscripti</em> tier, which entitles them to a seat in the <em>ACOUP</em> Senate (and for those of you who are in the <em>ACOUP</em> Senate, please note that over on Patreon there should be a poll up on the first longer question that ought to get its own dedicated post).</p>
<p>As before, I want to make clear that the responses to these questions aren’t necessarily as carefully researched or planned as a longer post; they reflect roughly what you’d get if you asked me the same question in office hours or after one of my classes. Of course I try to avoid errors or pontificating on topics about which I know little (I try to do both of those things all of the time), but these are still a bit less comprehensive than a full post.</p>
<p>And of course if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on <a href="https://www.patreon.com/user?u=20122096">Patreon</a>; as mentioned patrons who join the <em>Patres et Matres Conscripti</em> get to propose questions that I answer here. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (<a href="https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux">@BretDevereaux</a>) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings.</p>
<figure><figcaption><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Senate#/media/File:Cicer%C3%B3n_denuncia_a_Catilina,_por_Cesare_Maccari.jpg">Via Wikipedia</a>, Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari. This isn’t an accurate layout of the Roman curia Hostilia (the Senate house where the speech in question would have been delivered), which was rectangular in form and would have been a lot more cramped than this. Nevertheless, as it is probably the most famous depiction of the Roman Senate, it seemed a worthwhile title card.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Onward!</p>
<p><strong>Q: Leo Zhang asks, “What are other non-Mediterranean analogs for the collapse of the Roman Empire?”</strong></p>
<p>A: So how to answer this question depends a fair bit on how specific we are about ‘non-Mediterranean.’ The most obvious analog is the Mediterranean-adjacent <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse">Late Bronze Age Collapse</a> (LBAC) which occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East around 1100 BC. If anything, <strong>the LBAC was substantially <em>more</em> severe than the collapse of the Roman Empire</strong> in the West, though it shares a pattern in that areas that were on the periphery of the state system (Greece in the LBAC; the Roman West and especially Britain during the fall of Rome) were far more dramatically impacted than areas in the core. In the Roman case, of course, the Eastern half of the empire kept on after the collapse of the West with relatively limited disruption; during the LBAC, Egypt and the (Middle) Assyrian Empires weathered the collapse with substantial but not overwhelming disruption. By contrast, during the LBAC, many of the urban centers of Greece (to be clear, this is not classical Greece, but Greek urban centers some four centuries <em>before</em> Homer) were abandoned, architecture in stone almost entirely ceases (a shift back to wood), and technology of writing (in Linear B script) is lost, to be readopted (using the Phoenician script) three to four centuries later.</p>
<p>The causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are difficult to untangle. There’s some evidence for climatic disruption (possibly related to volcanic activity, but the dates don’t line up as clearly as we’d like) which would have negatively impacted agriculture. There seems to be pretty significant evidence that once things started going wrong, there was a domino-effect where state collapse in one region produced raiding and refugees that strained resources in the next, while disrupting the trade networks that states relied on for both revenue and military equipment. It’s also possible that the emergence of ironworking (and thus iron weapons, which were cheaper than bronze) may have had a role, though I have to admit I am quite skeptical of this last model.</p>
<p>If we want to get solidly outside of the Mediterranean, the collapse of the Han Dynasty (206BC-220 AD) into the Three Kingdoms era (220-280) has fairly strong parallels with how Roman power declined in the western parts of the empire, particularly in how the loss of power int he imperial center caused the steady fragmentation of the empire into much smaller competing states. The warfare and fragmentation of the period seem to have been <em>very</em> destructive, though as with all pre-modern collapses, most of the population decline must have been in the form of disease and famine (potentially taking place gradually in the form of increased infant mortality<a href="https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they-make-it-part-i-farmers/"> playing out through subsistence farming survival strategies</a>). If the census figures of the period are to be believed (there is, as I understand it, grounds for significant skepticism), by the time the Jin dynasty reestablished unified control of the country and could do a new census, the population of China had declined by almost 60% from its Han Dynasty peak over a period of just over a century. Its hard to compare that figure to the collapse of Rome because the evidence of the latter permits no firm estimate of population decline (though there probably was some) but my sense is that a decline of two-thirds of the population would be substantially worse than what we tend to think the decline was after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West.</p>
<p>And as an aside, “Was the Fall of Rome Bad and If So How Bad Was It?” is one of the long-response topics up for voting over on Patreon for members of the <em>ACOUP </em>Senate, if you want me to write something more on that and the historical arguments that swirl around that question.</p>
<p><strong>Q: Maxwell Goebl asks, “What tactics did the Romans use to defeat steppe peoples, Parthians or other people who used horse archers?”</strong></p>
<p>A: We have a few interesting bits of evidence for this, but at the outset it seems worth noting that we don’t hear of anything like dedicated anti-horse-archer tactics here (or indeed, in many places we might expect them). <a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-and-kiting/">As we’ve discussed</a>, unlike in video-games where horse archers can sit at long range with virtual impunity, actual horse archers have to get fairly close to their enemies, making them in turn vulnerable both to missile fire and to sudden charges by melee cavalry. Generally, the successful Roman responses to horse archers (and the Romans do beat horse archer armies fairly frequently) was to use their heavy infantry to provide an unassailable ‘base’ (protected by shields from arrow fire) for either missile troops, cavalry or artillery (torsion catapults) to engage the enemy cavalry. <em>Failure</em> tended to be the result of situations where the killing element (cavalry, missile troops, artillery) is put in situations where it cannot be supported by the infantry, or vice-versa.</p>
<p>An interesting source here is Arrian’s <em>Array against the Alans</em> (<a href="https://members.tripod.com/~S_van_Dorst/Ancient_Warfare/Rome/Sources/ektaxis.html">you can find a translation here</a>); the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alans">Alani </a>were an steppe nomadic people and Arrian presents a notional battle formation for fighting them, although there is no indication this formation was ever used in any particular battle. Arrian suggets a formation which places the heavy infantry in the front ranks, with javelin and archer troops directly behind them (he suggests finding a position where these troops can be on higher ground, for understandable reasons) with field artillery (torsion catapults, again) deployed on the flanks and to the rear. The cavalry is placed tightly on the flanks <em>behind</em> the infantry. The plan is to then let the enemy attack, the idea being the enemy cavalry wouldn’t be able to penetrate the infantry line, but would take missile fire from it and the artillery; if the enemy appeared to break <em>half</em> of the cavalry was to be released to pursue with the rest kept in reserve in case that was a feint. It’s not clear how much this matches actual Roman practice, but it isn’t an absurdly impractical battle plan.</p>
<p>Arrian’s positioning of his cavalry as purely an exploitation force seems to speak almost directly to the mistakes made at Carrhae (53BC) where (Marcus Licinius) Crassus’ army was defeated in part his son, Publius Licinius Crassus foolishly advanced with a fairly large part of the cavalry, was lured away from the main force and destroyed in detail (Plut. <em>Crass</em>. 25.1-3; Dio 40.21.2-3). It’s also striking just how few missile troops Crassus seems to have at Carrhae in the narratives of the battle we do have, compared to Arrian’s assumption of fairly ample missile troops (including friendly horse archers and field artillery). Disaster in Mark Antony’s own Parthian campaign (in 36 BC) also began with dividing the army, in this case splitting off the siege train from the main army. The Parthians destroyed the detached siege train which substantially hindered Antony’s later siege operations (Plut. <em>Antony</em> 38.3), though Antony is still able to win a field engagement by luring the Parthians close enough to his lines that his cavalry could dash out (almost exactly as Arrian imagines it), and ‘catch’ the Parthian cavalry in close combat near enough that the heavy infantry could follow up and support (Plut. <em>Antony</em> 39.3-5). Antony’s campaign subsequently falls apart, however, due to logistics issues.</p>
<p>The importance of infantry and missile troops working together is also apparent from <a href="https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1412879346885332996">our man, the one, the only, Publius Ventidius Bassus</a> (::airhorn sound::) and his defeat of a major Parthian army at the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mount_Gindarus"> Battle of Cyrrhestica</a> in 38 BC. Bassus’ army was positioned on the high ground and when the Parthians were lured into an attack, the Roman heavy infantry held and then forced the cavalry back down the slope, catching at least some of it in close combat in the confusion. Dio, who reports the battle, notes especially the impact of slingers who could effectively reach out and strike the Parthians at range (Dio, 49.20.2).</p>
<p>I will say that I find it striking that getting these sorts of tactics almost never work effectively in modern tactics games (like the <em>Total War</em> franchise), which is part of what made me write that <a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-and-kiting/">post on archery and ‘kiting’ back in 2019</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Q: Carabas asks, “How do you go about picking a given fictional battle and composing/researching a series like the ones you’ve done [Siege of Gondor, Helm’s Deep and the Loot Train Battle]?”</strong></p>
<p>The planning process for the “<a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/">Siege of Gondor</a>” series actually set the mold for a lot of how I set up and plan these longer series, since it was the first (and also, incidentally, remains the most popular). I’d initially thought to look at the Siege of Gondor itself because I knew there were going to be positive things I could say about it and I wanted to avoid just ending up with the blog as one more ‘historical nitpick society’ that was only ever negative. I had originally planned to just move through the battle in sequence and hadn’t thought a ton about the structure; it was in drafting the first post that I realized that there was an opportunity here to demonstrate some of the core concepts in military history in a systematic way.</p>
<p>And you can actually see in the process of writing that series in particular that I sort of ‘find’ the identity of the blog (I had always planned it as a history-and-pop-culture blog, of course, but if you look at the oldest posts in the first few weeks one would be forgiven for thinking the blog was going to be ‘historian complains about <em>Game of Thrones</em>‘ and mostly focused on arms, armor and tactics); it was the point where I realized I could actually use these long series (and the pop-culture reference point) to get into more sophisticated historical analysis (something beyond “that armor is comically wrong”) in an accessible and interesting way.</p>
<p>Now while I’d like to say I have a good, well-organized system for all of this, I really don’t. I keep a number of (poorly organized) lists of potential topics, but mostly I just sort of back-burner these ideas until they ripen. I don’t have any particular pipeline in part because I seem to always have more things to write than I have time to write them (my blog-writing ‘backlog’ has <em>nothing</em> on my research backlog where I have at least a decade’s worth of research projects sitting in ‘ideas’ folders just waiting for me to have the time to do them). Though it is hard to see because of the frequent delays between when a concept is ready to start drafting and when I <em>actually</em> start drafting, a lot of these topics emerge out of either earlier posts (<a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-part-i-the-ideal-city/">Lonely Cities</a> is a direct continuation, for instance, of my complaints about Peter Jackson’s <a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/05/24/collections-the-siege-of-gondor-part-iii-having-fun-storming-the-city/">‘Pelennor Steppe</a>‘) or out of what I am teaching. It is more often that I’m driven along by the historical concept I want to explain than by the pop-culture reference point, which is why I often find “can you discuss X fantasy novel/show/film?” requests difficult to get my head around if I don’t already have a sense of what the historical concept would be.</p>
<p>I generally keep topics restricted to those which aren’t going to require a lot of bespoke new research (just for time constraints, if nothing else), so once I’ve decided on a topic I can typically already look through my existing research notes or teaching notes to get the beginnings of a bibliography (and then blast my university library with book requests so I can go look up details). Ironically the <em>battle</em> post series required very minimal research time; most of the books I reference there I own and since pre-modern armies is what I do, I could often just speak from my own knowledge. When a topic is really foreign to me (the Dothraki series is a good example, both the Mongols and Native American Plains cultures are well outside of my specialty), I generally take the expedient of asking someone I know who does do that sort of history, typically with the question, “What should I read?” (asking for bibliography is a substantially smaller ‘ask’ than asking for a direct explanation of complex historiography). Many, <em>many</em> of my colleagues can likely report getting those emails, twitter DMs, Facebook messages, or hallway conversations.</p>
<p>There’s something of an irony here, because for my research writing I am very systematic in my approach, with lots of planning and outlining, but for <em>ACOUP</em> I am much more willing to just start writing on a topic and see where I end up (the entire outline for the Fortifications series lives on a single page of a 7×4 inch notepad).</p>
<p><strong>Q: Leo Zhang (two in one week!) asks, “Are there any historical analogs for something like Lodge of Sorceresses in the <em>Witcher</em> series who pull the strings of local monarchs from behind the scenes?”</strong></p>
<p>A: This particular trope, the trans-national cabal of educated knowledge-havers who manipulate secular rulers in pursuit of some hidden agenda (the Lodge, but also the Maesters of <em>A Song of Ice and Fire</em> seem to qualify, as do the Mages and Templars of the <em>DragonAge</em> setting) has always made me more than a bit uncomfortable, because there are historical analogs, but they have more to do with historical prejudices than actual historical power-structures.</p>
<p>The fairly obvious starting point for this trope seems to be the medieval Catholic Church which was a trans-national organization of educated people operating in a society with low literacy rates. In Western Europe, the Church really did have possession of a lot of the knowledge available to those societies and it did exist to a degree outside of the scope of secular power (though <em>to what degree</em> changes considerably depending on where and when you look). But treating the church as a single, more-or-less unified actor pursuing a single set of political goals resembles less the actual medieval Catholic Church and more early modern and modern anti-Catholic rhetoric (e.g. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#1960_presidential_election">fears as late as 1960 that a Catholic president would be ‘under the sway’ of the foreign interests of the Pope</a>, which were significant enough about them that Kennedy was asked about them and issued statements to assuage them that, “the Church does not speak for me.”).</p>
<p>The actual medieval clergy (especially its upper reaches) was more typically drawn from the same families which filled the ranks of the aristocracy; bishops and cardinals tended to be the brothers and cousins of dukes and kings. They also tended to have their seats in the regions they came from and very often were as loyal (and sometimes more so) to their local rulers than to the Holy See. Not for nothing did Henry IV, when he wrote to object to Pope Gregory VII’s reforms in 1075, write that he did so “with all of my Bishops.” Moreover, while in fantasy fiction the machinations of these literate cabals are seemingly unnoticed by the secular rulers, actual medieval kings were well aware of the influence of the Church and pushed back on it to secure what they saw as their own prerogatives (with mixed success). Where the church won these confrontations, its power was not in manipulation, <a href="https://acoup.blog/2019/06/04/new-acquisitions-how-it-wasnt-game-of-thrones-and-the-middle-ages-part-ii/">but in religious authority</a>; these people, after all, <em>believed their religion</em>, which invested the clergy with spiritual powers that mattered to folks.</p>
<p>Even <em>more</em> uncomfortable is the degree to which these fictional organizations seem to reflect <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitic_canard#World_domination">nonsense antisemitic canards</a> which claimed that there was some ‘vast Jewish conspiracy’ directing world events from the shadows. This in turn reflects a sort of prejudice frequently suffered by ‘<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middleman_minority">Middleman minorities</a>‘ in both historical and modern societies. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_Jew">Highly educated Jews show up fairly frequently in medieval and early modern European courts</a>, often (but not always) because of their role in finance (since Christians were not permitted to lend to other Christians at interest). The existing prejudice also made those same Jews vulnerable to being scapegoated – often by, and for the failures of, the same secular rulers who invited them in the first place – and persecuted.</p>
<p>Conspiracy theories of this sort, blaming problems on a cabal of highly placed ‘Papists’ or ‘the Jews’ have thus always been around (and frequently been distressingly popular), despite again – to be clear – being garbage nonsense. Absolutely the medieval Catholic church wielded massive institutional power, but it did so <em>openly</em> and the clergy were hardly a single united bloc with a single plan pulling the strings of the world towards a collective goal. Meanwhile, if it even needs say, there was not then and is not now any vast Jewish conspiracy. Persecuted minorities almost definitionally do not wield substantial institutional power; if they did, <em>they wouldn’t be persecuted</em>.</p>
<p>Humans are clearly drawn to these sorts of conspiracy theories, imagining power wielded from behind the scenes, but in <em>actual history</em>, <strong>most power is held by the obvious fellows who command armies and rule states and wield that power openly</strong>. Because the fact is, the ruler with access to lots of soldiers with weapons generally has no reason to let anyone pull their strings.</p>
<p><strong>And that’s that for this week’s deliberations</strong>! Next week, hopefully, we’ll continue our march through fortifications!</p>
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 Referenda ad Senatum: November 19, 2021: Hidden String-Pullers, Falling Empires and Tactics Against Horse Archers!

 Bret Devereaux R.A.S. November 19, 2021 13 Minutes

 Welcome! As we’ve done once before, this week I am going to take a chance to answer a number of shorter questions by my patrons over at Patreon who are at the Patres et Matres Conscripti tier, which entitles them to a seat in the ACOUP Senate (and for those of you who are in the ACOUP Senate, please note that over on Patreon there should be a poll up on the first longer question that ought to get its own dedicated post).

 As before, I want to make clear that the responses to these questions aren’t necessarily as carefully researched or planned as a longer post; they reflect roughly what you’d get if you asked me the same question in office hours or after one of my classes. Of course I try to avoid errors or pontificating on topics about which I know little (I try to do both of those things all of the time), but these are still a bit less comprehensive than a full post.

 And of course if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; as mentioned patrons who join the Patres et Matres Conscripti get to propose questions that I answer here. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings.

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 Via Wikipedia, Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari. This isn’t an accurate layout of the Roman curia Hostilia (the Senate house where the speech in question would have been delivered), which was rectangular in form and would have been a lot more cramped than this. Nevertheless, as it is probably the most famous depiction of the Roman Senate, it seemed a worthwhile title card.

 Onward!

 Q: Leo Zhang asks, “What are other non-Mediterranean analogs for the collapse of the Roman Empire?”

 A: So how to answer this question depends a fair bit on how specific we are about ‘non-Mediterranean.’ The most obvious analog is the Mediterranean-adjacent Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC) which occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East around 1100 BC. If anything, the LBAC was substantially more severe than the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, though it shares a pattern in that areas that were on the periphery of the state system (Greece in the LBAC; the Roman West and especially Britain during the fall of Rome) were far more dramatically impacted than areas in the core. In the Roman case, of course, the Eastern half of the empire kept on after the collapse of the West with relatively limited disruption; during the LBAC, Egypt and the (Middle) Assyrian Empires weathered the collapse with substantial but not overwhelming disruption. By contrast, during the LBAC, many of the urban centers of Greece (to be clear, this is not classical Greece, but Greek urban centers some four centuries before Homer) were abandoned, architecture in stone almost entirely ceases (a shift back to wood), and technology of writing (in Linear B script) is lost, to be readopted (using the Phoenician script) three to four centuries later.

 The causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are difficult to untangle. There’s some evidence for climatic disruption (possibly related to volcanic activity, but the dates don’t line up as clearly as we’d like) which would have negatively impacted agriculture. There seems to be pretty significant evidence that once things started going wrong, there was a domino-effect where state collapse in one region produced raiding and refugees that strained resources in the next, while disrupting the trade networks that states relied on for both revenue and military equipment. It’s also possible that the emergence of ironworking (and thus iron weapons, which were cheaper than bronze) may have had a role, though I have to admit I am quite skeptical of this last model.

 If we want to get solidly outside of the Mediterranean, the collapse of the Han Dynasty (206BC-220 AD) into the Three Kingdoms era (220-280) has fairly strong parallels with how Roman power declined in the western parts of the empire, particularly in how the loss of power int he imperial center caused the steady fragmentation of the empire into much smaller competing states. The warfare and fragmentation of the period seem to have been very destructive, though as with all pre-modern collapses, most of the population decline must have been in the form of disease and famine (potentially taking place gradually in the form of increased infant mortality playing out through subsistence farming survival strategies). If the census figures of the period are to be believed (there is, as I understand it, grounds for significant skepticism), by the time the Jin dynasty reestablished unified control of the country and could do a new census, the population of China had declined by almost 60% from its Han Dynasty peak over a period of just over a century. Its hard to compare that figure to the collapse of Rome because the evidence of the latter permits no firm estimate of population decline (though there probably was some) but my sense is that a decline of two-thirds of the population would be substantially worse than what we tend to think the decline was after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West.

 And as an aside, “Was the Fall of Rome Bad and If So How Bad Was It?” is one of the long-response topics up for voting over on Patreon for members of the ACOUP Senate, if you want me to write something more on that and the historical arguments that swirl around that question.

 Q: Maxwell Goebl asks, “What tactics did the Romans use to defeat steppe peoples, Parthians or other people who used horse archers?”

 A: We have a few interesting bits of evidence for this, but at the outset it seems worth noting that we don’t hear of anything like dedicated anti-horse-archer tactics here (or indeed, in many places we might expect them). As we’ve discussed, unlike in video-games where horse archers can sit at long range with virtual impunity, actual horse archers have to get fairly close to their enemies, making them in turn vulnerable both to missile fire and to sudden charges by melee cavalry. Generally, the successful Roman responses to horse archers (and the Romans do beat horse archer armies fairly frequently) was to use their heavy infantry to provide an unassailable ‘base’ (protected by shields from arrow fire) for either missile troops, cavalry or artillery (torsion catapults) to engage the enemy cavalry. Failure tended to be the result of situations where the killing element (cavalry, missile troops, artillery) is put in situations where it cannot be supported by the infantry, or vice-versa.

 An interesting source here is Arrian’s Array against the Alans (you can find a translation here); the Alani were an steppe nomadic people and Arrian presents a notional battle formation for fighting them, although there is no indication this formation was ever used in any particular battle. Arrian suggets a formation which places the heavy infantry in the front ranks, with javelin and archer troops directly behind them (he suggests finding a position where these troops can be on higher ground, for understandable reasons) with field artillery (torsion catapults, again) deployed on the flanks and to the rear. The cavalry is placed tightly on the flanks behind the infantry. The plan is to then let the enemy attack, the idea being the enemy cavalry wouldn’t be able to penetrate the infantry line, but would take missile fire from it and the artillery; if the enemy appeared to break half of the cavalry was to be released to pursue with the rest kept in reserve in case that was a feint. It’s not clear how much this matches actual Roman practice, but it isn’t an absurdly impractical battle plan.

 Arrian’s positioning of his cavalry as purely an exploitation force seems to speak almost directly to the mistakes made at Carrhae (53BC) where (Marcus Licinius) Crassus’ army was defeated in part his son, Publius Licinius Crassus foolishly advanced with a fairly large part of the cavalry, was lured away from the main force and destroyed in detail (Plut. Crass. 25.1-3; Dio 40.21.2-3). It’s also striking just how few missile troops Crassus seems to have at Carrhae in the narratives of the battle we do have, compared to Arrian’s assumption of fairly ample missile troops (including friendly horse archers and field artillery). Disaster in Mark Antony’s own Parthian campaign (in 36 BC) also began with dividing the army, in this case splitting off the siege train from the main army. The Parthians destroyed the detached siege train which substantially hindered Antony’s later siege operations (Plut. Antony 38.3), though Antony is still able to win a field engagement by luring the Parthians close enough to his lines that his cavalry could dash out (almost exactly as Arrian imagines it), and ‘catch’ the Parthian cavalry in close combat near enough that the heavy infantry could follow up and support (Plut. Antony 39.3-5). Antony’s campaign subsequently falls apart, however, due to logistics issues.

 The importance of infantry and missile troops working together is also apparent from our man, the one, the only, Publius Ventidius Bassus (::airhorn sound::) and his defeat of a major Parthian army at the Battle of Cyrrhestica in 38 BC. Bassus’ army was positioned on the high ground and when the Parthians were lured into an attack, the Roman heavy infantry held and then forced the cavalry back down the slope, catching at least some of it in close combat in the confusion. Dio, who reports the battle, notes especially the impact of slingers who could effectively reach out and strike the Parthians at range (Dio, 49.20.2).

 I will say that I find it striking that getting these sorts of tactics almost never work effectively in modern tactics games (like the Total War franchise), which is part of what made me write that post on archery and ‘kiting’ back in 2019.

 Q: Carabas asks, “How do you go about picking a given fictional battle and composing/researching a series like the ones you’ve done [Siege of Gondor, Helm’s Deep and the Loot Train Battle]?”

 The planning process for the “Siege of Gondor” series actually set the mold for a lot of how I set up and plan these longer series, since it was the first (and also, incidentally, remains the most popular). I’d initially thought to look at the Siege of Gondor itself because I knew there were going to be positive things I could say about it and I wanted to avoid just ending up with the blog as one more ‘historical nitpick society’ that was only ever negative. I had originally planned to just move through the battle in sequence and hadn’t thought a ton about the structure; it was in drafting the first post that I realized that there was an opportunity here to demonstrate some of the core concepts in military history in a systematic way.

 And you can actually see in the process of writing that series in particular that I sort of ‘find’ the identity of the blog (I had always planned it as a history-and-pop-culture blog, of course, but if you look at the oldest posts in the first few weeks one would be forgiven for thinking the blog was going to be ‘historian complains about Game of Thrones‘ and mostly focused on arms, armor and tactics); it was the point where I realized I could actually use these long series (and the pop-culture reference point) to get into more sophisticated historical analysis (something beyond “that armor is comically wrong”) in an accessible and interesting way.

 Now while I’d like to say I have a good, well-organized system for all of this, I really don’t. I keep a number of (poorly organized) lists of potential topics, but mostly I just sort of back-burner these ideas until they ripen. I don’t have any particular pipeline in part because I seem to always have more things to write than I have time to write them (my blog-writing ‘backlog’ has nothing on my research backlog where I have at least a decade’s worth of research projects sitting in ‘ideas’ folders just waiting for me to have the time to do them). Though it is hard to see because of the frequent delays between when a concept is ready to start drafting and when I actually start drafting, a lot of these topics emerge out of either earlier posts (Lonely Cities is a direct continuation, for instance, of my complaints about Peter Jackson’s ‘Pelennor Steppe‘) or out of what I am teaching. It is more often that I’m driven along by the historical concept I want to explain than by the pop-culture reference point, which is why I often find “can you discuss X fantasy novel/show/film?” requests difficult to get my head around if I don’t already have a sense of what the historical concept would be.

 I generally keep topics restricted to those which aren’t going to require a lot of bespoke new research (just for time constraints, if nothing else), so once I’ve decided on a topic I can typically already look through my existing research notes or teaching notes to get the beginnings of a bibliography (and then blast my university library with book requests so I can go look up details). Ironically the battle post series required very minimal research time; most of the books I reference there I own and since pre-modern armies is what I do, I could often just speak from my own knowledge. When a topic is really foreign to me (the Dothraki series is a good example, both the Mongols and Native American Plains cultures are well outside of my specialty), I generally take the expedient of asking someone I know who does do that sort of history, typically with the question, “What should I read?” (asking for bibliography is a substantially smaller ‘ask’ than asking for a direct explanation of complex historiography). Many, many of my colleagues can likely report getting those emails, twitter DMs, Facebook messages, or hallway conversations.

 There’s something of an irony here, because for my research writing I am very systematic in my approach, with lots of planning and outlining, but for ACOUP I am much more willing to just start writing on a topic and see where I end up (the entire outline for the Fortifications series lives on a single page of a 7×4 inch notepad).

 Q: Leo Zhang (two in one week!) asks, “Are there any historical analogs for something like Lodge of Sorceresses in the Witcher series who pull the strings of local monarchs from behind the scenes?”

 A: This particular trope, the trans-national cabal of educated knowledge-havers who manipulate secular rulers in pursuit of some hidden agenda (the Lodge, but also the Maesters of A Song of Ice and Fire seem to qualify, as do the Mages and Templars of the DragonAge setting) has always made me more than a bit uncomfortable, because there are historical analogs, but they have more to do with historical prejudices than actual historical power-structures.

 The fairly obvious starting point for this trope seems to be the medieval Catholic Church which was a trans-national organization of educated people operating in a society with low literacy rates. In Western Europe, the Church really did have possession of a lot of the knowledge available to those societies and it did exist to a degree outside of the scope of secular power (though to what degree changes considerably depending on where and when you look). But treating the church as a single, more-or-less unified actor pursuing a single set of political goals resembles less the actual medieval Catholic Church and more early modern and modern anti-Catholic rhetoric (e.g. fears as late as 1960 that a Catholic president would be ‘under the sway’ of the foreign interests of the Pope, which were significant enough about them that Kennedy was asked about them and issued statements to assuage them that, “the Church does not speak for me.”).

 The actual medieval clergy (especially its upper reaches) was more typically drawn from the same families which filled the ranks of the aristocracy; bishops and cardinals tended to be the brothers and cousins of dukes and kings. They also tended to have their seats in the regions they came from and very often were as loyal (and sometimes more so) to their local rulers than to the Holy See. Not for nothing did Henry IV, when he wrote to object to Pope Gregory VII’s reforms in 1075, write that he did so “with all of my Bishops.” Moreover, while in fantasy fiction the machinations of these literate cabals are seemingly unnoticed by the secular rulers, actual medieval kings were well aware of the influence of the Church and pushed back on it to secure what they saw as their own prerogatives (with mixed success). Where the church won these confrontations, its power was not in manipulation, but in religious authority; these people, after all, believed their religion, which invested the clergy with spiritual powers that mattered to folks.

 Even more uncomfortable is the degree to which these fictional organizations seem to reflect nonsense antisemitic canards which claimed that there was some ‘vast Jewish conspiracy’ directing world events from the shadows. This in turn reflects a sort of prejudice frequently suffered by ‘Middleman minorities‘ in both historical and modern societies. Highly educated Jews show up fairly frequently in medieval and early modern European courts, often (but not always) because of their role in finance (since Christians were not permitted to lend to other Christians at interest). The existing prejudice also made those same Jews vulnerable to being scapegoated – often by, and for the failures of, the same secular rulers who invited them in the first place – and persecuted.

 Conspiracy theories of this sort, blaming problems on a cabal of highly placed ‘Papists’ or ‘the Jews’ have thus always been around (and frequently been distressingly popular), despite again – to be clear – being garbage nonsense. Absolutely the medieval Catholic church wielded massive institutional power, but it did so openly and the clergy were hardly a single united bloc with a single plan pulling the strings of the world towards a collective goal. Meanwhile, if it even needs say, there was not then and is not now any vast Jewish conspiracy. Persecuted minorities almost definitionally do not wield substantial institutional power; if they did, they wouldn’t be persecuted.

 Humans are clearly drawn to these sorts of conspiracy theories, imagining power wielded from behind the scenes, but in actual history, most power is held by the obvious fellows who command armies and rule states and wield that power openly. Because the fact is, the ruler with access to lots of soldiers with weapons generally has no reason to let anyone pull their strings.

 And that’s that for this week’s deliberations! Next week, hopefully, we’ll continue our march through fortifications!

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 Published November 19, 2021

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 262 thoughts on “ Referenda ad Senatum: November 19, 2021: Hidden String-Pullers, Falling Empires and Tactics Against Horse Archers! ”

 1. glitterboy2098 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:14 am

 IIRC, isn’t some of the Arrian Array formations rather similar to how the later Byzantine forces deployed, per source like the Strategikon of Maurice?

 and iirc The Sassanian Persians used a similar “Spearmen in front, archer behind” formation in the 5th and 6th centuries,with the shield-and-spear Sparabara in rank and file ahead of archers in order to protect the archers from being overrun by enemy infantry or cavalry?

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 2. Wetcoaster (@Wetcoaster2) says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:53 am

 It seems to me that the bolt-throwing torsion siege engines the Romans had (scorpio, ballista) would have been even more effective for fighting horse archers,

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 1. Mary says:
 November 20, 2021 at 12:36 am

 Ah, serendipity.

 I was just reading this:
 https://rustyandco.com/comic/level-11-3/

 You may find a dispute in the comments amusing.

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 2. Pradana P.M. says:
 November 27, 2021 at 1:08 pm

 They kind of were, if we believe Arrian’s account of how Alexander the Great defeated the Scythians. Of course we also know that he probably had an agenda in writing up the action that way.

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 1. scifihughf says:
 November 28, 2021 at 4:10 am

 If Arrian had an agenda, it was to portray Alexander as a brilliant battlefield general. He would not achieve that by showing Alexander using tactics that his audience would know were dumb or didn’t work. So whether or not Alexander actually used artillery against the Scythians, people at the time thought it was good generalship.

 I’ve read the suggestion that ancient artillery had much more effect on horse archer morale than in inflicting casualties. For horse archers the dangerous part of combat is at closest approach to the enemy but they can usually relax once they’ve retreated back a couple of hundred metres before going in again. For the Scythians facing Alexander, that was no longer true as every so often an unlucky rider or horse got turned into a kebab.

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 3. Peter Thomson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:04 am

 Side note: I once checked the biographies of popes up to late medieval times. At least ten per cent were of humble origin. Smart peasant to pope was not a common road, but it wasn’t entirely a pipe-dream either.

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 1. Mary says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:23 am

 And lower clergy were probably proportional more, because the higher you went, the more the powerful cared.

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 4. pontifex maximus says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:23 am

 I find it curious that this Leo Zhang fellow thinks of the Lodge of Sorceresses first, as a fictional case of a power-behind-the-throne sort of organization. So shortly after the premiere of Villeneuve’s Dune, I’d rather expect Bene Gesserit to be the go-to example.

 Perhaps some of the courtly clicques in China could compare, but it still seems a stretch to me. Or some of the rather modern-day scholarship organizations such as the Rhodes Scholarship, but they’re not centralized and they don’t really seem to succeed much at their goals, at least on any level that would make them qualify for being an organized power-behind-the-throne. (Unless you are a conspiracy theorist, but in that case this discussion leads to nowhere anyway.)

 As for the maesters in ASoIaF, my guess would be that Martin needed a secular equivalent to the medieval Church. Because, you know, if they were religious folks you’d need to focus on their religion in writing and worldbuilding, and that’s all sorts of mess, and I can see the appeal of avoiding the issue. (Even though, as much as you say people in the past generally believed their religion, this doesn’t mean a high-ranking or learned clergyman just must be fervently religious. There’s plenty of opportunists, especially when intellectual career means either the clergy or nothing at all.) Also, this way the Northern and Ironborn lords can have a learned advisor without having to awkwardly explain why they keep around a clergyman of a religion they regard as an unwelcome foreign influence. (Even though, again, there’d be plenty of historical examples of just that, such as the high regard given to Muslim scholars in not-yet-Islamicized medieval West Africa.)

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 1. Dillon Saxe says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:43 am

 These Patreon questions are from the summer when Dune wasn’t out yet. (First thing I thought of was Illuminati conspiracy for that question.)

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 1. pontifex maximus says:
 November 19, 2021 at 7:00 am

 Well, seems like that one issue is settled, then. I figured the fella was just really into video games.

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 1. Richard H says:
 November 20, 2021 at 2:22 am

 There was also a Netflix series which gives you a fair amount of time inside the Lodge. All the royal families want one, because witches are walking artillery pieces, but also the witches definitely have an agenda of their own, as well as personal desires. (A lot of those desires seem to begin with “a will to power”, of course.)

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 1. pontifex maximus says:
 November 20, 2021 at 7:00 am

 Since this blog is about unmitigated pedantry, I’m gonna be that guy and point out the Netflix series didn’t quite get to the Lodge of Sorceresses yet. (The Lodge of Sorceresses is specifically a clandestine organization set up after the fall of the official magical authority, which is actually what we see in the first season of the show.)

 Perhaps he read the novels, but let’s be frank, the only ones who do it are those who have already read them before the first game came out, and those who are into video games to the point of buying tie-in materials.

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 2. Richard H says:
 November 20, 2021 at 10:39 am

 @pontifex maximus

 Thanks for clarifying! Having only seen the show, I didn’t know that it was a separate thing.

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 2. Peter Thomson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:54 am

 There are a few cases of underground movements that succeeded – and many more that failed. Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millenium documents the hidden millenarian cults of southern Germany that fuelled peasant rebellions every so often. Shia movements in Islam sometimes had this character. Of course, for real shadowy string-pullers, you need to go to ALEC or the Federalist Society.

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 1. George says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:51 am

 I think the idea of the illuminati or stonemasons is probably more influential on the modern NWO style conspiracy’s like the lodge than the blood libel.

 Funnily magic makes the idea of a scholarly circle of conspirators much more believable.

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 1. ECD says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:55 am

 On one level it does as it resolves the long distance communication problem (under most forms of magic), but it doesn’t generally solve the factionalism problem (or shouldn’t) and usually (with some exceptions like the Black Company where magic users are so overpowered they just do rule nations) doesn’t resolve the ‘why should the king do what you say instead of making you do what he says?’

 The usual excuse for this is either mind control (which, if available should be an expected tactic which people are prepared for) or cunning manipulation (which radically overestimates the success/influence of manipulators).

 More generally I’d say that the biggest problem with magic (in cases where it’s not incredibly rare) is the unwillingness to allow non-magic users to adapt to it, despite its prevalence and history.

 In a world with Disguise Self, everyone who knows anything will take some form of precaution against being framed or against someone pretending to be them to steal money/resources. Now, to be fair, this is really hard. Unlike most stuff, you can’t just pull from reality (though you can try, how do we solve security problems these days? Two-factor identification, passwords, biometric data). Usually the assumption seems to be that people only try to counter magic with magic rather than any sort of basic precautions which seems silly to me.

 Wow, went off on a tangent there…

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 1. George says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:59 am

 I believe the most influental form of magic would be divination, as it was itself highly influental in our own history but would be moreso if it actually worked.

 Factionalizm could be overcome if the people teaching magic all came from the same school, but even then there should be magical orders splitting off and grouping together common enough to break the masquerade.

 i.e. the stonemasons during the American civil war.

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 2. mindstalk0 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:08 pm

 Mundane countermeasures to magic is an interesting topic! Of course it depends massively on how powerful and flexible the magic is. But some specific ideas:

 magical disguise -> passwords (and more complex shared knowledge), physical tokens, dogs (if disguise doesn’t encompass smells.)

 invisibility -> lots of spaces that are noisy and/or make foot prints, like gravel or sand; doors with bell curtains; more dogs.

 magically persuasive voices -> councils that deliberate by writing; if spells have known duration limits, important decisions may require isolation + time delays so that someone can’t be ‘persuaded’ or ‘charmed’ into withdrawing all their money or signing over land. For less mundane countermeasures, important decisions requiring ‘detect charm’ beforehand.

 3e D&D passwall -> thin metal layer in walls

 D&D knock spell -> use of multiple locks, or locks + rope ties, locks + gate

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 3. David Boshko says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:08 pm

 The reason for this is that people REALLY want both:

 1. A shit-ton of magic.

 2. A world that looks like Medieval Europe.

 Since if a world with a shit-ton of magic would look nothing like Medieval Europe they instead fudge things by having the magic hiding under the bed or somesuch.

 In earlier some fantasy worlds you can get around a lot of this problem by having magic (especially powerful magic controlled by people) INCREDIBLY rare so people don’t have much in the way of countermeasures set up against it since they don’t expect it. Then just have the story center around those rare exceptions and the worldbuilding can make some degree of sense.

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 4. Roxana says:
 November 20, 2021 at 11:34 am

 Some versions of magical or psychic worlds do include routine counter measures.
 James Schmitz’s Confederacy of Vega has high powered psionics but also routine training for all levels of ability and commercial psi-tech to even the playing ground. Very gifted individuals can get around these or those with special tech but they are opposed by similarly gifted and equipped law enforcement.
 In Lord Darcy’s magical universe privacy and locking spells are highly developed and very difficult for even the best sorcerers to get around. Hence the need for detectives like his lordship.

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 5. joeinformatico says:
 November 21, 2021 at 6:20 pm

 I remember an old Dragon magazine that brainstormed mundane protections from D&D magic:
 – domed roofs on castle towers to defend against aerial assaults
 -dividing sections of the wall where defenders sit (e.g. a corridor of arrow slits for archers) into smaller sections with walls and doors so one area of effect spell doesn’t wipe out all the defenders
 -doors lined with airtight seals of fur and felt to prevent gaseous beings from sliding in

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 6. Arilou says:
 November 22, 2021 at 7:46 pm

 Classic D&D thing is to mix Gorgon’s blood in the mortar to prevent teleporation…

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 2. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:12 pm

 If magic were real, it would be just another tool to move the universe in a desired direction, and different people would desire to move it in different ways. Every country would have its own National Magic Security Agency, or more probably several rival ones all squabbling with each other. People would denounce international Big Magic companies for taking over from local Mom-and-Pop magicians. Universities would offer courses in Magic Science.

 And the effects of any magical conspiracy would be lost in the noise caused by all the other magical conspiracies.

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 1. mindstalk0 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:20 pm

 You’re making a lot of assumptions about magic: that it’s a neutral force which can be accessed by the right education.

 Magic can be mediated by or the action of spirits (which then have their own interests), or can have a moral/psychological effect (like the Force), can be linked to specific bloodlines, or “spiritual purity”, or mental states, can depend on virginity or on having never killed someone or on *having* killed someone, it can allow effects so horrible that every society tries to suppress it despite the other goods it can do…

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 2. ianargent says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:28 pm

 Harry Turtledove explores this in The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump. The Lord Darcy stories also explore this space

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 3. Michael Alan Hutson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 4:47 pm

 C.S. Lewis went into this both in essays such as “The Abolition of Man” and his novel “That Hideous Strength”. Lewis contrasts the Renaissance view of magic as a tool, a power to get what you want, with what Lewis terms “the older Art”, which consisted of establishing relationships with the arbitrators of a fundamentally supernatural universe.

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 4. Civile Bellum says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:30 pm

 I immediately thought of Shadowrun, a cyberpunk setting where magic has returned to the Earth and caused a great deal of trouble. This is basically exactly what happens!

 Because magic is a personal talent, it can’t be easily controlled by the megacorporations, but as with any skill it’s something they can hire – and they do. Magical security is at a premium, but there’s also a wide array of magic used for technical or medical functions. And corporations compete with governments to hire them, while at the opposite end of the spectrum there’s a wide array of criminal groups and terrorists who love throwing spells when they can.

 Mentioning *mindstalko*’s post, below, Shadowrun magic *can* involve all the things he mentions, but it isn’t inherently limited to any of them. In fact nobody in-setting has clearly figured out why some people have it and others don’t. It’s widely assumed to be genetic but nobody has actually sorted out how, if so.

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 5. Peter T says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:48 pm

 ‘Magic’ covers everything from having gods (or godlike beings) respond to requests to something close to technology. There are at least hundred – probably thousands – of different takes on it. I author my own version, but that’s no more or less plausible than any other.

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 6. Mary says:
 November 20, 2021 at 10:23 am

 Magic is unexplained casuality. This gives writers a free hand when explaining it.

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 7. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 20, 2021 at 12:05 pm

 “You’re making a lot of assumptions about magic: that it’s a neutral force which can be accessed by the right education.”

 From the viewpoint of someone without magic powers there is only one magic system: Find someone who can perform the magic you want done, and persuade them to do it for you. Doesn’t matter whether they are the Court Magician, the wise woman down the road, or International Business Magic.

 Although I will note that if magic is hereditary any King with any sense is going marry someone with it, and the world will quickly come to be ruled by Kings whose ancestors had sense. The magical and ruling classes will merge for the same reason the landholding and ruling classes did.

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 8. Mary says:
 November 20, 2021 at 10:28 pm

 Even then it matters whether the spell-slinger is a priest of the god of radiance and goodness, the warlock with a pact with the devil, or the wizard with a lot of eye of newt.

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 2. Finnish reader says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:52 am

 The Federalist Society is not really secret: it meets openly, invites attendance from interested students, and its political aims and funding sources are more or less clear for anyone who follows politics. It is quite well-known what are the steps and political positions you need to take if you want to join them and get a judicial appointment sponsored by them. They are quite as open in their power as the medieval Catholic Church. (Of course, you can disagree with their aims and say that those are mischaracterised, but all in all, they are a known factor to their friends and foes alike.)

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 1. Gomer says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:45 am

 Same goes for ALEC, which has conventions, brochures and proud “state chairs” who are sitting members of the legislature who proudly declare it’s their job to introduce and move ALEC’s model legislation.

 Attacks on “special interests” in American politics usually takes one of two forms, either an attack on the figure head of a popular and powerful movement so it doesn’t sound like you are attacking the large base of voters that support them: NRA, Planned Parenthood, etc.

 Or attacks by Democrats on Republicans who see Republicans as a party of movements, (it’s not – the Democrats are) which is amusingly paralleled when Republicans attack Democrats as believers in ideological conflict (they’re not – that’d be Republicans).

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 1. George says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:02 pm

 could you clarify party of movements/ideological conflict. The term seems obtuse.

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 2. Gomer says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:36 pm

 The Democratic Party is made up of a series of political movements, Labor Movement, Environmental Movement, African American Civil Rights Movements, etc. One of the movements is even an almalgimation of other movements, LGBTQA+ rights movement, or in Minnesota the DFL (Democratic Farm Labor Party). Some of these political movements are naturally allied, various “rights” movements, others are often conflicted Labor v Enviros. But each faction has its own independent interests and views and is sceptical when a leader arrives from another faction. Factions have even been forced out of the party. The Southern political faction dominated from the founding of the party by Jefferson through the 1930s and by the end of the 1960s they were gone. A political movement of movements.

 The Republicans, on the other hand, were founded to forward an ideological libertarian view for capital business and wage labor, know at the time as “Free Labor”. After winning the American Civil War they implemented their ideological vision, which ended slavery and ushered in robber baron capitalism. Over time through control by business elites they became the party of conservative resistance to social and economic change. In the words of William F. Buckley “to stand astride the train tracks of history yelling ‘STOP!'”. And where as intraparty squabbling among Democrats tends to be over whom drives the bus, Republicans tend to fight over who is most ‘conservative’ using policy only as symbol for how vigorously they’ll fight change or implement reaction. A political movement of ideological conflict.

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 3. Peter T says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:41 pm

 I was just being snarky. I agree that shadowy powers behind the throne are unlikely, then or now.

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 4. Erl137 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:36 pm

 @Peter T,

 But I think your point is very well taken. In fiction if you want to tell a story about a low-profile group with a substantial long-term impact, you could do a lot worse than modeling it off of well-known pressure groups, which have an open face and a full-court press lobbying engine, rather than on the (purely hypothetical and substantially implausible) notion of truly secret conspirators, whose actual aims are independent of their stated purposes.

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 3. Vampire Buddha says:
 November 19, 2021 at 4:08 pm

 Fire Emblem: Three Houses is interesting about this.

 Right at the start of the game, we are introduced to the Church of Seiros, the religion which holds great sway over the setting and has some pretty major internal issues. It’s basically Anime Catholicism with a whole lot of Buddhist imagery (and was founded by Fantasy Muhammad). Because it’s Fire Emblem, there’s also some stuff involving dragons that are close enough to immortal it makes no difference.

 For the first half of the game, we are led to believe that the Church is covertly manipulating the affairs of the countries in which it holds influence, and that ultimately we will turn against it and overthrow the ancient conspiracy. And then… that is exactly what doesn’t happen. While the Church has secrets, it’s mostly on the level, and even its more questionable acts were at least done with good intentions. It’s influential, sure, and has its own small-but-effective military force, but all its power is wielded completely openly.

 There is an evil group secretly manipulating events behind the scenes over centuries, but they are the Church’s enemies, and the plot of the game is about defeating *them*. And they are Fantasy Nazis.

 (There is a hidden route where you team up with the Flame Emperor and the Fantasy Nazis to destroy the Church and conquer the land. Some people think this route is default and is what the game is truly about. Don’t try speaking to these people unless you have a very, very high tolerance for frustration).

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 1. Verdant says:
 November 20, 2021 at 12:47 am

 Nice to see a mention of Fire Emblem: Three Houses here. Ever since I played it, I’ve felt that that game is, in part, a subversion/deconstruction of the old cliché JRPG “the church is evil and the final boss is a God-figure” plot, but it seems like a lot of people didn’t notice that it was.

 To tie it in more to the conspiracy topic, while the Fantasy Nazis in Three Houses are a bit underdeveloped, I found them chillingly true-to-life in their motivations, their mindset, and their actions; without going too deep into spoilers, they’re a group of genocidal, hate-filled racial supremacists who were motivated by their defeat in the distant past, and the related conspiracy theory that they believe in about the church, to create their own actual conspiracy in response. So, in Three Houses, the true evil conspiracy is actually the group spreading conspiracy theories about an evil, racially-distinct hidden elite. Which, IMO, is far more true to real life, and largely avoids the unfortunate implications that plotlines about evil, shadowy conspiracies usually have.

 (Spoilers ahead: in that hidden route you mention, supposedly the Flame Emperor turns on the Fantasy Nazis in the epilogue, but I don’t think it exactly makes it better. The implications of that route are still that the protagonist aided the Flame Emperor in finishing a genocide with the help of the people who originally carried it out, which IME defenders of the Flame Emperor and that route tend to, um, gloss over. Which is to say that I agree with your view both on what the game is about, and on that part of the fandom. I think the game does a subtle thing with that route where the Flame Emperor is convincing and charismatic and seems sympathetic, and it all plays out like a typical JRPG plotline — but then, when one plays the other routes and finds out certain things which aren’t revealed on the hidden route, the horrifying implications of that route become clear. I think it’s very well-done and an effective part of the general deconstruction the game is doing, but it may have been a little too subtle, given how much of the fandom unironically thinks that’s the best route. It’s probably influenced by the fact that it’s actually quite easy to get onto the hidden route, so I think it was the first one a lot of people played.)

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 1. Richard H says:
 November 22, 2021 at 1:31 pm

 One thing about the Slithers that I didn’t really think about until I was reading these comments, which is a subtle but I think important distinction, is that they really count as a “secret society” by a lot of these standards, either. (The Church doesn’t either, of course; Rhea wields its power quite nakedly.) Instead, they are, IMO, insurgents, whose operational capacity (leaving aside a few relics of the war they lost 1000 years ago) is limited to assassination and infiltration. If they actually operated openly, the Church would come down on them like a ton of bricks, which is more or less what happens each time they show their faces in the first half of the game. (Partly because, without spoiling too much, the top Church leaders personally remember the war from 1000 years ago.)

 As for “the right route”, it’s worth noting that, regardless of who wins the war, Rhea is not Archbishop at the end. The writers for the DLC also go out of their way to make the Church look worse with, among other things, a short list of inventions suppressed by order of the Archbishop herself that includes the movable type printing press. The game is not at all subtle about declaring that the Church and the older generation of the nobility work hand-in-glove to suppress anything that might be a threat to their power, and that therefore they are bad. (Meanwhile, all your students are somehow reformers, and even Lorenz, whose attitudes run towards “every man in his place and a place for every man,” apparently advocates for the benefit of the commoners. Maybe he’s trying to create a welfare state.)

 Personally, I did the Golden Deer route first, and by the end, I was ready to suggest that it might be for the best if Rhea died in Edelgard’s dungeon before we could take Enbarr. Admittedly, my own attitudes run towards the anti-theist. Given that caveat, it’s worth noting that Claude comes in and, with only the slightest of nudging by being pointed at relevant books by Tomas, concludes that the Church is a corrupt mess that went off the rails practically from its inception. As a result, I don’t think the game is at all subtle about who the bad people are.

 You’re entitled to your reading of the material, and I won’t tell you not to think Edelgard did terrible things out of proportion to what anyone deserved, but I think you’re wrong if you rate Edelgard anywhere lower than “Worst person you know has a point.”

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 1. Verdant says:
 November 23, 2021 at 6:23 am

 MAJOR FIRE EMBLEM: THREE HOUSES SPOILERS:

 ***

 The thing with Rhea is that she’s a genocide survivor. She’s deeply traumatized, and as I see it, all of her actions are motivated by that trauma. Everything she does, in my view, is based in a desire to protect the surviving Nabateans and makes sure the genocide never happens again, no matter what. Those goals (along with resurrecting her mother) are her first priority, and her manipulations of humanity are in service to them. Her actions aren’t right, and she shouldn’t be in the position that she’s in, but they’re very understandable when one looks at them from a Nabatean perspective.

 Edelgard, meanwhile, also suffered greatly at the hands of TWSITD, but she ends up placing the ultimate blame on the very people that TWSITD most hate, which is difficult to read as being anything but the product of their manipulations. I actually think there are a lot of parallels between Rhea and Edelgard, and it’s one of the ironies/tragedies of the game; they’re both charismatic, powerful, morally gray figures who seek power and try to change the world because they want to eliminate the source of their trauma and make sure it never happens again. Edelgard, though, ends up adopting the ideology of her abusers and helping them to carry out their agenda (even if she does plan to turn on them afterwards), which is why I ultimately find Rhea the more sympathetic of the two. Rhea, for me, is a tragic, flawed but sympathetic figure who should be removed from a position of power and given therapy. Edelgard, for me, is a tragic, flawed figure who was sympathetic up until the point where she decided to wage a war of aggression with TWSITD as her allies. It’s true Edelgard has a point about the church, but as you say, Claude ends up making the same point, and in his case it’s not influenced by the racism of TWSITD. Considering that the Crimson Flower route not only involves allying with TWSITD and helping them finish the genocide they started a long time ago, but doesn’t really accomplish anything positive that the other routes don’t also, I can’t see it as anything but the clearly “evil” route.

 I’d agree that the game isn’t subtle about who the bad people are, but I’d say that those people are TWSITD. The game definitely doesn’t hold the perspective that the church is right, but I think it sees it as having shades of gray and understandable motivations, and as being redeemable even if it needs to be greatly changed and/or stripped of the power it holds. TWSITD, though, are the ones ultimately responsible for basically everything bad that happens in the entire game. They are the source of trauma for both Rhea and Edelgard; by extension, they are ultimately the reason why the church is the way it is, why the Crest system exists in the first place, why Edelgard does what she does, and more. They don’t have any sympathetic motive for it, either; they’re genocidal racists with no shades of gray or redeeming qualities (which I feel is an appropriate portrayal, given what I think they’re an analogy for). To me they’re quite clearly meant to be the main and true antagonist of the game.

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 2. Richard H says:
 November 23, 2021 at 1:15 pm

 @Verdant (since we’ve now hit the reply column limit)

 I agree with you on a lot of this, and also your second post feels like a much more nuanced take than the first one.

 AND CONTINUING WITH THE SPOILERS!

 Claude is great, but I also think Claude gets an enormous PR boost from being in the position where he’s cleaning up from a mess Edelgard created. She does all his dirty work by smashing the things that need to be smashed, and then he gets to come in as a “liberator”. Edelgard even has the astonishing level of faith in destiny that she is willing to die a villain if that’s what it takes to achieve her goals. An early version of my last post had a glib comment about the bad guys being “everyone else”, because whoever the player sides with ends up behaving a lot better in that route than the other ones. The ideological conflict is pretty much always the same, but whoever ends up on the other side is a lot more desperate, and wild and crazy, than they are in their own routes.

 On the side of the Church, I admit Seiros had an impossible problem on her hands at the end of the war: Both sides had crest-empowered warriors. Furthermore, the war spanned decades; they would have had children, too. She couldn’t exactly proscribe crests, having one herself, and they were too widespread, besides. But then she basically made it so that the Divine Right of Kings flowed from crests, and that was a real mess. Nobody is ever told where the relics come from, either, and I can’t help wondering what would have happened if weapons with crest stones were instead declared to be abominations that must be destroyed. There’d be a lot fewer WMDs floating around 1000 years later, if that had been the case. (and also no game, but let’s ignore that)

 To be fair to the early Church of Seiros, they believed they had wiped out everyone who eventually became TWSITD. When Rhea figures out that isn’t the case, she clams up really dramatically about what’s going on. I do wonder what would have happened if she had told people, on learning that there were still Agartheans, that the ancient enemy had returned. Given the schism with the Western Church, it’s possible that would have made things worse, though.

 I guess, in general, I have real trouble being sympathetic to the Nabateans because I take the statement, “The progenitor god came from the Blue Sea Star,” literally. I think they’re literal aliens, and I can’t help wondering about the counterfactual where the dragons never came to Fodlan. No dragons means no magic blood means that the wing of Agarthean society that produced the Elites would not have been able to do that particular thing. I feel like Edelgard, much more than anyone else, wants to turn back the clock to before any of that happened. It’s probably not possible, even at sword-point, unfortunately.

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 2. SnowFire says:
 November 20, 2021 at 1:15 am

 So as not to derail this blog, I’ll just say that for those who didn’t play Three Houses – there’s some flame wars between elements of the fandom, but the above summary is not really correct. But it’d involve spoilers and such. The very short version is that all sides in 3H are fallible and have interesting flaws. Some parts of the fandom think that the smash-the-Church crew is totally right, Vampire Buddha & other parts think the Church is totally right, but I (and most fans) argue the author makes it quite clear that it’s just mixed grey morality on all sides.

 Also, rather than Fantasy Nazis, I’d more uncomfortably acknowledge the super-evil team as closer to the medieval conception of Jews- international conspiracy, evil sorcerers (except technology-flavored), some seemingly normal people might be crypto-Jews in hiding, they hate everyone for no reason, etc.

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 1. George says:
 November 20, 2021 at 8:37 am

 I mean the Nazi’s being secretly among us and trying to subvert the government with super tech is also a very prominent conspiracy theory in the modern age. Crypto-fascist is a word i’ve been hearing growing in popularity.

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 1. SnowFire says:
 November 20, 2021 at 11:12 am

 Maybe modern Nazis a bit, but classic Nazis wore their affiliation on their sleeve, and most modern ones are close enough IMO. While (especially in Spain) there was a whole paranoia thing about whether you were a proper old Christian or a “new” Christian (read: descended from Jews or Muslims), which fits the imposter plotline pretty well.

 (3H SPOILER WARNING)
 The other thing that makes me think more fevered medieval view of Jews – the Slitherers killed God a thousand years ago as part of some evil plan to gain ultimate power, their descendants agree with these crimes and want to continue them, they hate the Church, and they still want to kill God’s vessel. Lots of “The Jews killed Jesus” energy.

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 2. Verdant says:
 November 20, 2021 at 5:35 pm

 MAJOR FIRE EMBLEM: THREE HOUSES SPOILERS AHEAD:

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 On Those Who Slither In The Dark as a medieval Jewish stereotype; I can see how they can be read that way, but in the game, whenever they’re encountered, TWSITD come off way more “Nazi” than “Jewish stereotype” to me. Even if TWSITD have come to seem somewhat inhuman over time, they’re human supremacists; it’s made very clear that they hate the Nabateans because the Nabateans aren’t human, and they don’t present their ideology as being “Agarthans are superior and should rule”, but as “humans should rule and Nabateans have no right to exist.” To me, that feels like far more of a parallel with white supremacism; TWSTID are part of the race that the player is likely going to identify with, not a racial minority themselves. Combine that with the black uniforms, inhumane experiments, and genocide, and I think it’s pretty obvious what the historical parallel is meant to be.

 The “killing God” thing is probably the thing which most parallels antisemitic conspiracy theories on the surface, but again, looking at the details of it, it feels more far more Nazi than Jewish stereotype. Nemesis isn’t at all a sneaky, conspiring Judas figure; he’s a ruthless, conquering warrior. He’s all about strength and “warrior honor”. Furthermore, Sothis wasn’t a prophet who replaced the Agarthan concept of God; she was the first God figure of the Three Houses world, as far as we know. TWSITD aren’t portrayed as having a religion of their own, and their ideology seems to have a component of “religion is a tool of the elite that holds back human potential.” Putting all of this together, what it makes me think of is common misinterpretations of Nietzsche, specifically those favored by the Nazis. Nemesis killing the Goddess, IMO, isn’t a “Jews killed Jesus” story, it’s a “blond beast Übermensch free from the shackles of morality killing God” story. Once again, especially considering that the entire event is part of a campaign of racial genocide, it feels to me like a pretty clear Nazi analogy.

 I think that if there’s a group that’s meant to parallel Jews in Three Houses, it’s the Nabateans. That could be seen as having some questionable aspects itself, but it’s mostly a different set of issues in that case, and I don’t think that the Nabateans were intended to be an analogy for Jews to the same extent that TWSITD are for Nazis.

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 4. Alexander Brady says:
 December 9, 2021 at 12:01 am

 Even in China, the idea of a *secret* power behind the throne is pretty rare. I know of plenty of examples of regents that ruled in place of the emperor, but in all the examples I know of the regent in question was quite open about their seizure of power. Cixi is the archetypical example. I wouldn’t call it “behind the scenes” when the regent sits in the throne room, making decisions directly, and arrests the emperor when he gets uppity.

 There was a lot of concern over behind the scenes string pulling, but as far as I have read that can be explained as hysteria or rival politics. Wei Zhongxian, the eunuch advisor to the Chongzheng emperor (Ming dynasty), has gone down in history as corrupt and overreaching his station. However, there is no indication that the Chongzheng emperor disapproved of what he was doing or wanted to manage affairs directly. So even if we take historical slander at face value, he would be more of a Wormtongue, not a Bene Geserit.

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 5. baud says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:27 am

 > the successful Roman responses to horse archers was to use their heavy infantry to provide an unassailable ‘base’ for either missile troops, cavalry or artillery

 is artillery like catapults common on field battles in the classical antiquity? I though they would be restricted to sieges, considering the set up time

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 1. Opk3 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:41 am

 I mean, probably more like Scorpio/scorpions than catapults

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 2. Peter Thomson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:50 am

 Marsden’s works on classical torsion artillery instance a few occasions when dart-throwers were clearly present on the field. One was a third-century civil war fight, when two soldiers were decorated for disabling an enemy catapult that was doing damage to their side. The small ones would fit in a cart.

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 3. Paul says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:12 am

 Maybe not common but they had been used in the field as early Onomarchus when he defeat Phillip II.(c353 BC). Alexander used them sometimes in the field as well. Either a prepared position was needed or I suspect just the lighter dart/light shot ones that were not packed in pieces in general.

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 4. Bret Devereaux says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:58 am

 Rare in Greek contexts, but relatively common in Roman contexts from Caesar onward.

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 5. godfreyofboulogne says:
 November 22, 2021 at 9:41 am

 The Romans, following on from the Hellenistic Greeks, built artillery in all sizes, from massive siege engines, to static-defense mounts like that at Hatra, down to light, mobile field artillery. According to (IIRC) Vitruvius, these included the cart-mounted Carroballista and even the handheld “manuballista”, a sort of torsion-powered crossbow. There seems to have been no mechanical difference between the Scorpio and the large ballistae, except size; the scorpion was a light battlefield version.

 NB: To the Romans, a ballista was any two-armed engine that could fire darts, stones or iron or lead balls. The name descends from Greek petroboulos, “stonw-thrower” – so they didn’t just shoot big arrows!

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 6. Dark_Tigger says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:29 am

 May I ask why you are sceptic of the thesis that iron weapons had something to do with the bronze age collapse?
 Is it because we don’t have actual evidence of proliferation of iron weapons in that time, or is it because you do not think that iron weapons would have had an big impact on balance of power at that time?

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 1. Adam says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:31 am

 I’d be very interested in this too. It was my understanding that iron is enormously more common than the copper+tin combination used to make then-current bronze (As I understand it, arsenical bronze is older than “normal” bronze, but even to the ancients, they realized it was absurdly dangerous to try to make and didn’t bother all that much). To make bronze, you need acess to a huge geographical area to source both copper and tin. To make iron, not so much, so multiple smaller competing states were more viable.

 I admit to having done no research on the subject whatsoever, but it always seemed fairly sensible to me.

 Also, as a total aside, the Armeni tombs in Crete from the BAC are one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read about. Usually, when people talk about low average life expectancies in antiquity, it’s because of high levels of infant mortality. These tombs only had adult bodies, and there still were only a handful cadavers who made it to 30. I don’t know exactly what happened there, but it was *bad*.

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 1. lev says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:58 am

 The chronology doesn’t make sense is basically the beginning and end of it. LBAC starts to kick off, then iron working becomes more common, not the other way around. The longer version is that it was a hypothesis from when we had much less knowledge of the era. For example, when I was younger, I learned (from the age of empires manual) that the Hittites were a dominating military force due to their early mastery of iron. This is a very outdated hypothesis: our current knowledge shows that the Hittites were bronze users, and perhaps more striking were not really that exceptional at military affairs, having a fair number of successes but also quite a few failures (including obviously the destruction of their empire by an invasion from the north).

 Much more likely is that iron doesn’t have enough advantages over bronze to justify completely revamping a 2000 year running economy (if it ain’t broke…), up until the system implodes and bronze becomes unavailable: copper is common-ish, but tin is very difficult to source and the bronze age relied on complex international trade networks, when those failed (the origin of this failure is the crux of LBAC debates) the bronze production system fully breaks and iron goes from a novelty to a necessity.

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 1. Ynneadwraith says:
 February 3, 2022 at 6:13 am

 Interesting parallels between iron vs bronze in the bronze age med and copper vs stone in pre-conquest mesoamerica (from what I understand copper was known of, but primarily used for decoration rather than tool production).

 I wonder if there may have been similar breakdowns of previously functional tool complexes between the upper paleolithic and chalcolithic/bronze age in eurasia.

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 2. Lev says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:03 am

 The chronology doesn’t work is the basic problem. We have enough archeological evidence at this point that we can see that the LBAC kicking off precedes widespread iron work. Iron working was known prior to the collapse but was more at the novelty level than the mass production level.

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 1. Mary says:
 November 20, 2021 at 12:15 am

 Did LBAC produce the Iron Age?

 I doubt authorities could have done more than a marginal amount to suppress it, and its danger to the elite wasn’t obvious at first, but it created an obvious incentive for looking for cheaper weapons.

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 1. Dark_Tigger says:
 November 20, 2021 at 5:22 am

 I guess the argument is less, that the bronze age elit surpressed iron working, but rather they did not invest in it- If you are a smith why put time into developing better iron, when you can just work, at the kings bronze forge?
 After the LBAC you couldn’t get tin anymore, so you had to change to a different material anyway.

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 2. Mary says:
 November 20, 2021 at 5:53 pm

 I was thinking more of increased levels of conflict and so danger. Weapons are more attractive then, especially when there are fewer authorities to object.

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 3. Peter T says:
 November 22, 2021 at 6:48 pm

 Iron-working was slowly spreading before the LBAC. In some ways it’s a harder technology than bronze – you need higher temperatures, the ores are less distinctive and it’s a longer route from mining to metal. Elite attitudes don’t seem to have much to do with it – several took to iron use with enthusiasm (eg Assyrians and Chinese) with no perceptible cultural break.

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 4. Mary says:
 November 22, 2021 at 10:56 pm

 Exactly. Less elite attitudes and more lack of elite providing safety.

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 2. Finnish reader says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:09 am

 I think that the best example against the existence of cabals is provided by the cases of freemasons and carbonari.

 The carbonari were an actual cabal: they were a secret society forming a pro-Sardinian nationalist fifth column in pre-unification Italian states. During the revolutions of 1830, they did significant work to undermine the internal legitimacy and functioning of the enemies of Sardinia, including armed rebellions. They were struck down, and then regrouped under the banner of “Young Italy”. Though a secret society, their existence was well known, and after the unification, their remaining veterans were honoured openly.

 In the USA of the same period, freemasons were a bit similar clique. With weak central and local government, they did attract many educated and well-to-do members, who wielded considerable power. However, unless you go for conspiracy theories, we also know that they were not really able to affect anything particularly important. In the US Civil War, the movement broke down just like the rest of the USA, with freemasons fighting on both sides without regard to their masonry. If they were a cabal, they were ineffective, as they failed to prevent the Civil War.

 So, together, these organisations show the limits of secret societies. They may be able to have some effect, but they don’t change the political landscapes.

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 1. ECD says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:39 am

 I’m not seeing a massive difference between the carboneri and any other guerilla force?

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 1. Finnish reader says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:09 am

 There is perhaps the social difference: the carbonari were, very much, an urban middle class movement. So, they are socially very different from your typical 20th century rural guerillas of Maoist people’s war. In addition, the carbonari had a political organisation also at times when they didn’t conduct open military operations, which meant they were operating as an actual secret society. In any case, they are an example of an actual, honest-to-God cabal that tried to subvert the legal government both covertly and then overtly. And this government was the Imperial Austria with its semi-independent allies, usually remembered as a comically inefficient political entity. Still, the cabal was, ultimately, unsuccessful. It took the armed might of Both Sardinias to unify Italy.

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 1. Richard Gadsden says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:56 pm

 It took the armed might of Napoleon III’s France and then Bismarck’s Prussia to push the Austrians out of Italy; Sardinia’s armies defeated the “semi-independent Austrian allies” after the Austrians had been pushed out of supporting them, but not before.

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 2. ey81 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:19 pm

 Similarly, I’m not seeing a difference between the Freemasons and the Episcopal Church (or even the Society of Mayflower Descendants): in either case an organization of socially prominent, generally powerful people with no real common agenda, and probably insufficient power to implement it if they had it. Perhaps one should respond to conspiracy theories generally by remembering Oscar Wilde’s aphorism that the mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

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 2. mdap says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:30 pm

 An important reason for the decline of the Illuminati was that people just couldn’t keep quiet about being part of that cool club

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 3. Michael Alan Hutson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:39 am

 It’s just as likely that the adoption of iron as a substitute for bronze was a result, rather than a cause, of the LBAC. Early iron was inferior to well-made bronze but was at least cheaper and more available. The frequent references in the Old Testament to the use of iron AND bronze for example.

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 1. George says:
 November 20, 2021 at 8:40 am

 Or iron made weapons more available and bronze age states less stable?

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 2. asazernik says:
 November 23, 2021 at 8:16 am

 Iron wasn’t always cheaper – more important is that its cost was less dependent on the state of long-range trade networks.

 Bronze-working uses rare, expensive ores with relatively cheap, low-labor processes. Iron-working uses common, cheap ores combined with expensive capital investment and enormous amounts of labor and thermal energy. If you couldn’t get copper from Cyprus, it was either go back to stone or find some way to use these iron ores that were floating around everywhere but were an absolute pain to work with.

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 7. Christoffer says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:56 am

 The censuses of the ancient China were essentially tax registers of who was eligible for taxation and labour service (military and non-military), people belonging to the many tribute-paying southern tribes were not on the registers even in Han times.

 And well, tax evasion has always been a popular activity, meaning that people had every incentive to evade the census. So while the break-up of the Han empire no doubt caused a drop in population, it also caused a drop of capability (and will) in the successor states to carry out an accurate census. And those two factors can’t really be untangled by looking at census figures alone

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 8. George says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:37 am

 I Actually think that the proliferation of Iron weapons probably did have something to do with the bronze age collapse, since bronze relies on two relatively uncommon ores from far off areas being brought together it encouraged large trade networks. It could also be relatively easily regulated by centralized states, such as the mycenean palace states.

 Iron in contrast can be dug up most places, and once turned into weapons becomes far harder to moniter the production of. This encourages insurrection and infighting since force isn’t being monopolized by the state, and disrupts the predominance of the bronze based trade routes.

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 1. kozmo says:
 November 20, 2021 at 1:23 am

 My question about all the bronze vs iron debates is, then, why does classical Greece continue to use mainly bronze armor? And pretty much all the classical Mediterranean states until the Roman late republic/early imperial era. Bronze made a big comeback in the Archaic Greece age and beyond. Why didn’t classical Greece move on to iron for hoplite armies? All they used iron for was blades, spear points, arrowheads, that sort of thing.

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 1. George says:
 November 20, 2021 at 8:47 am

 Because bronze is easily cast into a variety of shapes, if bronze was so superior why wouldn’t high status swords have all been bronze?

 Also the core of my argument is that iron production harder to regulate leading to a more armed population and less stable social structure. Iron doesn’t need to be as good as bronze, it just needs to be good enough that it disrupts the state monopoly on metal weapons.

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 2. mindstalk0 says:
 November 20, 2021 at 9:24 am

 You can swap bronze for steel and get better swords and arrow heads, because steel holds an edge better. But people didn’t make iron breastplates for another 2000 years; across Eurasia, iron armor was made of little rings or little plates, linked together somehow. Greeks could turn steel into swords but not breastplates, so they stuck with bronze breastplates. Celts invented mail, at least for Europe, and Romans copied them.

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 3. alexpmc says:
 November 22, 2021 at 3:50 pm

 They didn’t use primarily bronze armor. They used primarily textile (linothorax) or wooden (aka a shield) armor. Bronze armor was primarily for the rich. I recall reading that’s it’s unclear if the bronze breastplates we recovered were thick enough to offer better protection than textile armor. But it seems like a primary utility of bronze breastplates was to look impressive.
 Regardless, it’s very difficult to turn iron into armor. Iron breastplates didn’t become commonplace until the late middle ages. Iron mail was invented by the Celts and adopted by the Romans around the time of the Punic wars, hundreds of years after the Classical Greek period.

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 1. ey81 says:
 November 24, 2021 at 9:21 pm

 I don’t know if Prof. Devereux reads this deep into the comments, but it he has the energy and inclination, an explication of the later (from Rome to the late middle ages) evolution of armor would be interesting. Why didn’t people make iron breastplates until centuries after they started making iron swords? It much have something to do with the metallurgical properties of iron, but I don’t really know. I don’t recall this issue being discussed in the earlier series on iron.

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 9. billymorph says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:57 am

 > Humans are clearly drawn to these sorts of conspiracy theories, imagining power wielded from behind the scenes…

 One of my favorite explanations for this stated–somewhat jokingly–that people prefer the thought that there’s a shadowy power controlling the world from behind the scenes because at least it means someone is actually in charge and it’s not all chaos.

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 1. pontifex maximus says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:18 am

 A more serious take on this explanation would be that a shadowy power means that all your problems have a personal cause and all will be good once it’s exposed and removed. You can’t do that to impersonal societal and economic forces.

 Now, there’s a line of thinking that assumes you can expose and remove the impersonal societal and economic forces that make your life miserable, but so far the attempts to do just that have had rather questionable outcomes.

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 1. Mary says:
 November 20, 2021 at 12:28 am

 And there’s the line of thought that says, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

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 2. Roxana says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:47 am

 I think you’re right on!

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 3. Borsukrates says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:11 am

 In similar vein, it’s quite ridiculous how spy movies portray intelligence operatives. Secret services are all SUPER competent. Real governments around the world are sloppy, lazy, and and unprepared, but somehow fiction secret agents are all amazing. At least competence porn in “The Martian” is plausible because they don’t pick random Joes to work at a space projects with literally astronomical budgets.

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 1. Roxana says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:07 pm

 I wish to God the CIA was even half as effective as movies and TV make them. And that goes for the fbi, NSA, and the rest of the alphabet agencies too.

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 1. Niall says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:05 pm

 Every time I see someone online talking about the CIA like they’re some omnipotent, omnipresent organization, I just point them to the absolute disaster that was the Bay of Pigs invasion.

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 1. Mary says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:59 pm

 Ah, that only APPEARED to be a disaster. Obviously their motive was something other than military victory.

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 2. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:50 pm

 I don’t really hope that: If they were then probably their enemies would also be as effective as in the movies and terrorists smuggling a nuke into some luckless metropolis would be an annual event.

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 1. Dillon Saxe says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:14 pm

 Highly effective secret spies also quite likely go the cabal/conspiracy theory route and really do take over places.

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 2. Roxana says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:38 pm

 Excellent point!

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 3. Michael Alan Hutson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:11 pm

 And megalomaniac billionaires trying to exterminate the human race would happen every decade or so…

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 2. Mary says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:43 pm

 Possibly it’s just that the competent ones make for better stories.

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 4. Ynneadwraith says:
 February 3, 2022 at 6:31 am

 I also think there’s a psychological element (although I would, being a psychology graduate). Being ‘in’ on a conspiracy theory feels good. It makes someone feel like they’re intelligent. Smarter than all the ‘sheeple’ who buy into the status quo. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that belief in conspiracy theories is heavily weighted towards those who haven’t had access to quality education, cutting them off from the prestige and self-worth afforded to people who are deemed by society as intelligent and thus worth listening to.

 There’s muddying factors around education’s ability to instil critical thinking skills, but (like everything enduring) I expect the causes are multi-factoral.

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 1. GJ says:
 February 3, 2022 at 1:21 pm

 I don’t think it’s a coincidence that belief in conspiracy theories is heavily weighted towards those who haven’t had access to quality education, cutting them off from the prestige and self-worth afforded to people who are deemed by society as intelligent and thus worth listening to.

 That’s because, if a theory is popular amongst educated people, we don’t call it a conspiracy theory.

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 1. Richard H says:
 February 3, 2022 at 4:52 pm

 I dunno; I know of at least one person who managed to get hired by a well-known tech company and vociferously argues (on an appropriate internal forum) for all manner of conspiracy theories including that the Apollo missions’ moon landings were faked.

 I assume he’s reasonably well-educated and even reasonably smart, but he has spent way too long stewing in some of these things.

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 1. GJ says:
 February 4, 2022 at 12:25 pm

 Yeah, but he’s just one person. Most educated people don’t believe that the moon landings were faked. A few do, but they’re very much in the minority.

 For an example of what I mean, consider the theory that Barak Obama is actually a Kenyan citizen and was therefore ineligible to be POTUS vs. the theory that the Russians hacked the 2016 election and Trump was/is a Kremlin asset vs. the theory that the Democrats rigged the 2020 election and Trump actually won. All three posit conspiracies to improperly interfere with who got to control the USA, but generally speaking, the first and third are much more likely to be described as “conspiracy theories” than the second.

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 10. thechaostician says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:59 am

 I think an important aspect of the Lodge of Sorceresses / Bene Gesserit trope is gender. Women are excluded from political leadership, so form their own organizations to wield power.

 Historical examples might be politically influential nunneries. Or maybe knitting circles of the wives of members of Congress. I would be interested to hear of any particular examples.

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 1. Borsukrates says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:41 am

 Now that you mention it, there were no female rulers or even major characters in Dune. But does it say anywhere in the book that women aren’t allowed to wield power?? Remember, the action starts somewhere around A.D. 10000.

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 1. Bullseye says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:27 am

 It’s been a long time since I read the book, but if it doesn’t say women can’t inherit, it’s because it doesn’t need to come out and say it.

 I saw the movie about a week ago, and it’s made clear that the Emperor’s daughters can’t inherit, but a son-in-law might. (Also, come to think of it, it’s odd that the Emperor only has two kids, given that sons of concubines can inherit.)

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 1. cptbutton says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:52 pm

 Without digging out the books, I think the Emperor Shaddam IV had four daughters and no sons, with the implication that his Bene Gesserit wife did that intentionally for [BG conspiratorial reasons]. Irulan becomes Paul’s wife in name only, and later a loyal regent for his orphaned children.

 In “Children of Dune” one of the other daughters is planning to assassinate the orphans with cyborg tigers to put her son on the throne.

 [Someone else referenced this briefly elsewhere in the thread.]

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:15 pm

 “In “Children of Dune” one of the other daughters is planning to assassinate the orphans with cyborg tigers to put her son on the throne.”

 Dune is a very serious work of speculative fiction.

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 2. Montefeltro says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:02 am

 I think the gender element is very important, though it’s interesting that (as Bret observes) the trope’s main historical forerunner seems to have been an organisation that was almost exclusively male: the Roman Catholic Church. Anxieties about manipulative women did exist in medieval Europe, but they tended to focus more on individuals (e.g. over-ambitious royal mistresses) than organised groups. I can think of two 16th-century ‘historical’ examples, but they’re both more fiction than fact (1) the witch craze, which in its more elaborate forms conjectured female-dominated cabals scheming to infiltrate and corrupt mainstream society (2) the ‘Flying Squad’ of aristocratic seductresses supposedly used by Catherine of Medici to influence court politics during the French Wars of Religion, who were largely the invention of hostile pamphlets seized upon by later generations of scandal-hungry historians.

 Both of these cases were heavily influenced by the Reformation backdrop, which reinforces my suspicions that the gender anxieties it unleashed were fairly key to laying the groundwork for the later version of the trope, as Protestant attempts to resurrect a kind of Old Testament patriarchy led to a blurring of boundaries between various demonised groups who didn’t follow the ‘right’ gender roles. Eunuch-like clergy, effeminate Jews, and disobedient women could all be imagined as different aspects of a Satanic conspiracy; hence, female rulers opposed to Reform began to be grouped together as a “monstrous regiment of women”, merging traditional fears of individual powerful women with stereotypes of the Church as a scheming transnational cabal. That’s a very rough generalisation though!

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 1. Tiercelet says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:40 am

 Just a quick note–“regiment” in that phrase (which comes from a particular pamphlet published by a Scottish Presbyterian reformer–https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Blast_of_the_Trumpet_Against_the_Monstruous_Regiment_of_Women) was an archaic usage meaning “rulership” or “government.”

 The phrase wasn’t claiming to identify a particular group involved in a conspiracy; it was saying “rule by women is monstrous.”

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 1. Joel Dillon says:
 November 22, 2021 at 3:48 pm

 Spell it ‘regime’ or even ‘regimen’ and it stops being archaic.

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 2. mindstalk0 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:17 pm

 I’m now reminded of the comic Strangers in Paradise, which went from wacky artist hijinks to (rot13 for major arc spoilers) N srznyr mnsvn tebhc hfvat qrrc pbire frqhpgerffrf gb zneel naq pbageby Frangbef

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 3. gbdub says:
 November 21, 2021 at 1:37 pm

 Magic users are not exclusively female in the Witcher series – the Lodge of Sorceresses was created as an intentionally female only secret cabal after the collapse of the traditional magic authority in what amounted to a brief but highly destructive civil war. It was actually the females excluding the males in that case.

 Although the series does contain the “powerful but oppressed minority” angle, as there is a strong prejudice and occasional pogroms against magic users, despite their unique powers being highly valued in certain contexts (every good court has a sorcerer as an advisor and weapon).

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 11. Montefeltro says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:08 am

 Another commenter mentions the Bene Gesserit as a classic example of the ‘secret cabal of knowledge-hoarding manipulators’ trope, which got me thinking about a related issue that’s puzzled me a bit lately; why, in several classics of late-20th-century sci fi, is it assumed that the future will be characterised by humanity’s guided evolution into a psychic race? The Bene Gesserit exemplify this, as do Asimov’s Second Foundation, plus various groups in 40k (including Tzeentch cults and the Emperor himself), and arguably the Jedi in Star Wars. From a 2021 perspective, ‘psychic powers’ seem more at home in a superstitious past than a spacefaring future, so it seems a little strange that many iconic fictional galaxies are dominated by the futuristic equivalent of spoon-bending fortune-tellers.

 Of course, the best explanation may simply be the obvious one, which is just that 40k and Lucas copied Herbert who copied Asimov, who needed to invent ‘mentalics’ in order to make psychohistory work (plus, 40k wanted space-wizards to match Warhammer Fantasy). Clearly, imitation of successful precedents is important. However, I wondered if anyone knows of a deeper context that explains why this particular idea was an attractive one to pick up and run with; was there a serious strain of scientific thought at the time which held that humans might be bred or trained (Men-Who-Stare-At-Goats style) to develop mind-control powers? Was it a product of the postwar drugs boom and related interest in consciousness-expanding experiences? Or is there something else I’ve missed?

 I note that the idea of a psychic humanity seems to have faded away from more recent sci fi, and where characters have magic-like powers it is usually explained as the result of them being augmented or replaced by computers (the Matrix etc), fitting in better with our contemporary anxieties about the direction of technology. Perhaps future generations will find our cyborgs and hyperintelligent AIs an anachronistic oddity too.

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 1. pontifex maximus says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:25 am

 “The strangest part of Turing’s paper is the few paragraphs on ESP. Perhaps it is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, though, if it is, this fact is poorly signposted by Turing. Perhaps, instead, Turing was influenced by the apparently scientifically respectable results of J. B. Rhine. At any rate, taking the text at face value, Turing seems to have thought that there was overwhelming empirical evidence for telepathy (and he was also prepared to take clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis seriously).”

 This is quoted from: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/

 As in, I can’t say anything about the origins of the idea, which is the question you asked, but I wanted to point out that very serious people seriously entertained the possibility. I can’t blame fantasy writers for running with the concept if the world of science was willing to give it consideration.

 My take, it took some time for science to figure out it didn’t work, and by that point it was too entrenched in fiction. Like, take genetic memory for a similar example. It’s long been known to be bull-crap, but fictional stories taking the concept seriously are written to this day.

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 2. Borsukrates says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:05 am

 Another thing to be aware about with Bene Gesserit is that Sci-Fi / Fantasy writers around 50’s were very prejudiced towards women. Another example is “Gather, Darkness!” a very nice action novel (proto Star Wars) which makes very sweeping statements about all women and power somewhere in the last third of the book. The same author also wrote “Conjure Wife”, about a man whose wife turns out to be a witch.

 I personally find it interesting that modern feminist-friendly political climate tolerates Bene Gesserit – is it because it appears empowering?

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 1. Greta Gill says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:05 pm

 Bene Gesserit have magical martial arts powers and the spermjacking motif is less pronounced than the magical fertility control motif. Simultaneously, Herbert doesn’t get around to putting women as central protagonists or antagonists until the 1980s and the back half of the Dune books. So it’s easy to read the Bene Gesserit subversively, especially since they hit a sweet spot between potent and unthreatening that I think is more appealing than, eg, Russ’s Whileaway to, say, cishet women.

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 1. Fazal Majid says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:45 pm

 Alia is in power during most of Children of Dune, and is shown as an unsympathetic tyrant.

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 1. Michael Alan Hutson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:54 pm

 Alia is a pre-born, and thus an Abomination by Bene Gesserit standards.

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 2. Greta Gill says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:48 pm

 And Herbert must explain this by recourse to having her be possessed by a man’s genetic echo. It’s not until the 1980s that he admitted women could be primary antagonists without having to have space magic explain why they were metaphysically men.

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 3. Michael Alan Hutson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 4:13 pm

 Not necessarily; it might just have been that the Baron was too eeevil a character not to quasi-resurrect.

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 3. Finnish reader says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:27 am

 The turn of 20th century was marked by the surge of new physical phenomena: we found radio waves, radioactivity, X rays, numerous new particles etc. Clinical psychology was founded as a science. Schliemann found Troy. Western colonisers met strange spiritual traditions of Islamic, Chinese and Indian cultures. It was completely reasonable to assume that the mythological and legendary feats attributed to heroes and saints might actually have a scientific basis, and that they could be rationally utilised and developed, just like we had built developed from water mills into hydropower plants, from strange magnetic stones into electrical motors and radio tranceivers and from purple of murex snails into chemical dyes.

 Thus, the early 20th century was filled with esoteric movements that claimed to be doing this. Usually, they were some sort of theosophists, but on the whole, their claims were not completely unbelievable for the contemporaries. Nonetheless, it just turned out to that the parapsychological phenomena were imaginary.

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 1. Major Obvious says:
 November 19, 2021 at 7:50 pm

 Westerners encountered Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and so on well before the turn of the 20th century. It is true that some of the mystical cults of the time like Theosophy were inspired by Buddhism and Hinduism.

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 1. Simon_Jester says:
 November 20, 2021 at 8:41 am

 It’s not that no Westerner met a Buddhist before 1900.

 It’s that there wasn’t enough cross-pollination of people and ideas for Buddhism to leave impressions in Western culture before 1900.

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 22, 2021 at 7:52 pm

 Eh…. Before 1800 you might have a point, but the 19th century actually has a pretty large interest in indian religion (both hinduism and buddhism)

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 2. Mary says:
 November 20, 2021 at 6:46 pm

 Often based on very poor information, possibly aggravated by cherry picking what they liked.

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 4. Mark Magagna says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:40 am

 There was a phase in science fiction for “psionics” as a thing. I think it paralleled the fad for “psychic” stuff in mass media in the 60s (crystals etc.) although it had earlier roots (mesmerism, theosophy).

 Much like UFOs, they seem to have become less popular (or at least less spoken of).

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 5. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:20 pm

 My understanding is that while it was obviously not JUST that, the fact that Campbell was a huge believer in ESP and the psychic human future meant that a lot of Golden Age SF included it basically because he liked that kind of stuff, and latter-day SF copied the Golden Age stuff, etc.

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 1. Richard H says:
 November 20, 2021 at 2:49 am

 Given how much Campbell shaped that era in other ways, I suspect this is the most direct explanation.

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 6. Daniel Berke says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:43 pm

 “The idea of psychic powers is cool” probably explains some of it (and it’s not like they’re completely gone today—psionic powers are an integral part of the popular XCOM series of games, for instance). Another way to think of it could be that it’s the ultimate refinement of humanity’s one attribute where we excel all other animals: our minds. Going from “my superior intellect allows me to harness nature and tame beasts with tools” to “my superior intellect lets me directly effect change in nature” is an enticing power fantasy and perhaps not too huge of a leap of logic when viewed from the right angle. Also as “Finnish reader” pointed out above, the 20th century had a lot of newly-discovered and poorly-understood scientific phenomena which might’ve allowed such concepts to seem plausible for a time, and the coolness factor let them continue in pop culture even after we’d consigned them to the same scientific bin as phlogiston and luminiferous aether.

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 7. AWJ says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:50 pm

 Don’t forget Newtypes in Gundam (the original TV series of which aired in 1979)

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 8. mindstalk0 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:26 pm

 As others have said, a _lot__ of people found it plausible, with supportive ‘experiments’ and CIA funding and “we only use 10% of our brains” such. But also Analog editor John Campbell was really into it.

 Also it seemed a ‘scientific’ way to put ‘magic’ into your SF. Sometimes very ‘scientific’, Asimov’s telepathy was supposed to be actual electromagnetism, and Julian May made up some ‘field’ terminology. Other times less so, just ‘psychic’ like Pern or Darkover or _More Than Human_ or Spock or…

 It possibly also helped writers in being more constrained; instead of having to figure out magic rules, you could just grab some mix of telepathy/telekinesis/teleportation and run.

 But, like, even if humans evolving powers isn’t likely, it probably felt more likely than people discovering that chanting the right spells works.

 I think it’s a lot rarer in new written SF, but took longer to die (if it even has) from TV SF: Babylon-5, Stargate, Roswell…

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 1. SnowFire says:
 November 20, 2021 at 1:23 am

 +1 to this post, right here. John Campbell was in many ways a terrible person by modern standards, but he was very influential in sci-fi circles in the 40s-60s and encouraged authors to stick Psionics & ESP in their stories and he’d make sure they got published. Campbell was very influential.

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 9. alexpmc says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:43 pm

 This reminds a bit of Watchmen, though it was made later.

 Even though there are explicitly no costumed heroes with superpowers other than Dr Manhattan, the crucial plot point hinges on the existence of psychics, the existence of which isn’t explored elsewhere in the story. MY hypothesis was just that Moore, being sort of a weird new-agey guy, just assumed psychics existed and no further explanation of that was necessary, just like he wouldn’t have to explain the workings of an internal combustion engine or firearm.

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:04 pm

 I mean yeah, Moore claims to be an actual wizard.

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 10. Dillon Saxe says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:26 pm

 Might be that thinking and mental stuff was one big area that people didn’t understand. Fire, light, machines, space travel, etc. were all being done by machines, physical laws, etc., but how minds work was an area you could plausibly add something like magic.

 I noticed this in computer games, where things like Starcraft and Alpha Centauri kept the psychic powers as something like magic while the rest was machines and more or less reality based things (if heavily exaggerated for coolness like starcraft.)

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 11. ey81 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 8:29 pm

 “humanity’s guided evolution into a psychic race”–You might also mention Ursula LeGuin’s Hainish cycle–written a bit later than some of the other examples–as being in this category.

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 12. Simon_Jester says:
 November 20, 2021 at 8:39 am

 >However, I wondered if anyone knows of
 >a deeper context that explains why this
 >particular idea was an attractive one to
 >pick up and run with; was there a serious
 >strain of scientific thought at the time
 >which held that humans might be bred
 >or trained… to develop mind-control
 >powers? Was it a product of the postwar
 >drugs boom and related interest in con-
 >sciousness-expanding experiences?
 >Or is there something else I’ve missed?

 Yes, yes, and maybe.

 In the mid-20th century, ‘parapsychology,’ the scientific study of human mental abilities that we today would call paranormal, was treated with a great deal more respect and dignity than it is today.

 The postwar drugs boom- not just the psychoactives, but the proliferation of medication that could tweak the body in various ways, and the corresponding rapid expansion in how much doctors really seemed to understand about the body, along with even the beginnings of a glimmer of scientific understanding of the mind, fueled a lot of speculative fiction about these particular kinds of transhumanism- transhuman capacity as a result of superior understanding of human potential.\

 There was also holdover from early 20th century and late 19th century notions about what evolution meant and the idea that humanity was evolving “towards” some superhuman state.

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 13. beleester says:
 November 23, 2021 at 9:50 am

 Parapsychology was taken seriously even outside of science fiction, as the CIA research indicates. I don’t know what made it take off in the 70’s, though. A side effect of regular psychology research? A spinoff of New Age spiritualism?

 I had an book as a kid, the Usborne Book of the Future, which predicted, alongside the usual stuff about space colonies and robots and radios that fit into a wristwatch, that research into ESP would lead to new advances in communications (telepathy), military (telekinesis and precognition), and medicine (aura healing). This was written in 1979, and they predicted it for the 22nd century, which at least shows a little bit of humility and recognizing that this is a very new field that might not pan out.

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 12. Tatane says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:11 am

 On the secret cabal of intelectuals, more than the catholic church as a whole, far too big to be secret, I would rather think of specifically the Jesuits ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Jesus ).

 Or more recently of the freemasonry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemasonry )

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 1. SnowFire says:
 November 20, 2021 at 2:40 am

 Yeah. The Jesuits really were an international group that had a pseudo-monopoly on a “power” equivalent to magic: education. This gave them lots of influence specifically among Spanish/Portuguese administrators and governors who had access to Jesuit education in the 1600-1770 era or so. You can see how this earned them some resentment: administrators educated at Jesuit colleges would overturn something stupid and evil the local colonists did, and earn their ire. They proved a useful scapegoat – the Spanish king was convinced by anti-Jesuit advisors that food riots in Madrid were somehow orchestrated by the Jesuits as part of a plot, ‘cuz they just like doing evil stuff to undermine the king, and were kicked out of both the Spanish & Portuguese empires. Very backroom deal manueverings & whispers kinda plot for a novel.

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 13. Draugdur says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:16 am

 Re. dealing with cavalry archers in video games: while Total War games being far from perfect (kudos from calling out the fairly mediocre portrayal of sieges in the fortification series, again!), I honestly don’t get the bashing here. The tactics you describe – infantry in front to soak up arrows, archers and/or artillery behind to do the killing, cavalry back in the flank to counterstrike at the right time – is THE tactic to deal with cav archers in any Total War game worth its salt. While chasing them down with cav is usually a suicide.

 And funnily enough, back in the day of Rome (I), I remember being asked the same question on twcenter forums and, after having done some testing, I concluded that the most efficient way to handle horse archers, taking especially cost-effectiveness into account, were…slingers

 Disclaimer: I do refer to older TW games, back when they were, well, GOOD. So maybe that’s the reason.

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 1. Paul Goodman says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:48 am

 Yeah that jumped out at me too. My experience is that those tactics work quite well against horse archers in Total War games, so I’m a bit confused at Bret saying otherwise.

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 2. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:24 pm

 I also seem to remember the han-chinese using very similar tactics for dealing with horse archers (polearm-infantry supported by crossbows in their case)

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 3. alexpmc says:
 November 19, 2021 at 4:09 pm

 Really, I thought the way to deal with horse archers in Total War games was to overcast Net of Amytok and then delete them with your Sisters of Averlorn doomstack, or charge them with dinosaur artillery.

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 4. sarachim1 says:
 November 20, 2021 at 2:34 am

 The criticism- which is laid out at length in the linked article- is that TW horse archers kite from maximum range. This works in TW because arrows are equally deadly at any range. In reality, arrows quickly lose kinetic energy to air resistance, so horse archers tend to gallop in, shoot, and gallop away. The mobility of the horses is useful because it enables you to get close, not keep away.

 The tactics that work against them might be vaguely similar (but then, a combined-arms approach with close-order infantry, missile infantry, and cavalry works against pretty much *everything* in the ancient world), but the battle looks totally different.

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 1. Draugdur says:
 November 22, 2021 at 4:17 am

 “The criticism- which is laid out at length in the linked article- is that TW horse archers kite from maximum range. This works in TW because arrows are equally deadly at any range.”

 I’m aware of that, thank you. My criticism is that none of these statements are actually correct (again, at least concerning the more historical TW games). Horse archers rarely kite from maximum range because their maximum range is in almost all cases lower than the range of foot archers. And arrows in TW are indeed not as deadly at any range. I admit that the discrepancy in lethality might not be as pronounced as it should be compared to real life, but it definitely exists.

 As for the battle looking totally different…well, it does look *somewhat* different because the caracole is difficult to properly simulate in the game’s engine. Although most cavalry archers do have the “Cantabrian circle” formation that comes close to it. But they definitely are similar.

 Again, the discrepancy may come from the fact that I draw my experiences from older (and, dare I say, better) TW games like Rome I and Medieval II, and heavily modded at that. I guess the reason why I’m writing this is so that the audience (and Bret) shouldn’t write off those games so fast and maybe rob themselves of some enjoyment. True, unmodded versions are an endless source of frustration for anyone who is at least a bit versed in history (and I have in fact endlessly ranted about a lot of things re. historicity on TWCenter back in the day :)), but with some quality mods, the historicity is actually much better than they’re given credit for.

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 1. sarachim1 says:
 November 22, 2021 at 1:08 pm

 My experience is also mainly older titles (plus Shogun 2, which is also fairly old at this point, I guess). My take on horse archers is mostly based on Rome I, which is my favorite and the one I’ve sunk the most hours into, and also the one where I’ve done the most horse archer spam (because there’s two factions, the Parthians and Scythians, built around using horse archers extensively.)

 So! In Rome I, missile units come with two ranges- standard (120) and long (170). The former is the range for all slinger units and most archers, foot or mounted. The latter is the range for a few elite archer units, including a horse archer unit for each faction mentioned above- Persian Cavalry and Scythian Noble Archers. So foot and horse archers generally have equal ranges, but horse archers have the additional advantage of being able to shoot while moving, which makes kiting possible (though finicky) even against equal-ranged foot archers. And if the opponent does the “melee in front, missile in back” approach described here, it’s also possible to kite the melee troops while staying just out of range of the missiles behind them.

 (I think it’s possible that one of your mods alters this to make horse archer ranges shorter, in the name of balance or historical accuracy. Or possibly that it works slightly differently in another title, like Medieval 2, and I’ve forgotten because Rome is the one that’s permanently seared into my brain.)

 It’s true that projectiles lose some accuracy over greater distances, but (in my experience, as someone who is not an expert but has spent an embarrassing amount of time with these games) that penalty is negligible compared to the advantages of greater range- more time to shoot, and safety from return fire. The ideal position for any missile unit is at the extreme limit of its range, because from there it does nearly-full damage while also being completely safe from anything but an equal- or greater-ranged unit. And shorter-ranged units get absolutely shredded by longer-range ones, because the former take a lot of damage while closing with the latter.

 In short, my experience of these games exactly matches Bret’s description, and I confess I’m rather surprised that someone else who also has extensive experience has such a different take. (Though, like I said, spending a huge amount of time on these games doesn’t necessarily make me good at them, and it’s entirely possible that you’re just more expert than me and have mastered stuff I’ve missed.)

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 1. Draugdur says:
 November 24, 2021 at 10:29 am

 Again, thanks for taking time for a detailed reply! It is indeed quite possible that the different experiences arise from referring to different games – I haven’t played Rome I in a while, and although I think I remember it differently, it may very well be my memory playing tricks on me. And thinking back, I now realize that in Rome I, I also played much more with mods than vanilla.

 My experience of the last years comes mostly from Med 2, with mods (also, Shogun 2, but horse archers don’t play a prominent role there anyway). Med 2 engine supports various ranges, and most good mods take advantage of this to really flesh out various levels of archers, all the way from peasants wielding fairly primitive hunting bows, to elite units using longbows or composite bows. Within this framework, the horse archers of roughly the same quality typically have shorter range than equivalent foot archers. Seeing that the horse archers also have a bigger hitbox, and typically less men in a unit (to simulate the presumably less populous steppe polities), foot archers will win almost always in a shoot-out. As you (and Bret) correctly point out, in this scenario their main strength is mobility, which allows them to get away from light cavalry, position themselves at the best possible point for shooting, and also sometimes just charge foot archers (I wonder how realistic this is? I guess a lightly armoured man would be vulnerable to a horse charge…)

 Also, in Med 2, if a unit is wearing any armour, ranged units (unless armour-piercing, but few archers are) will be dramatically less effective, especially in longer ranges. If the defending unit is well-armoured and with shields, shooting at max range and head-on is typically completely useless. I remember once playing a TW version of the battle of Hastings (I think it might’ve even been in the Rome I mod Chivalry!), where I opened with archer fire against Saxon shield wall at maximum range, and the results were…well, pretty much like in real life, 95% of my arrows harmlessly bouncing away.

 I guess the point I was trying to make was that, on this particular aspect, the TW games are at least able to be somewhat realistic (unlike, say, sieges, where they just cannot be salvaged and suck in any version). I concede the most TW games might not be realistic at all in unmodded versions though, it seems that I sometimes forget how much time I actually spent with modded games as compared to vanilla.

 Oh, and FWIW, I do also exclusively play against the AI and almost always on very hard, where the AI opponent seems to also get stats bonuses. Maybe that also makes a difference. In any case, with that setup, and with mods, maximum range is very much NOT where you want to be, except against completely unarmoured opponents.

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 5. Erl137 says:
 November 21, 2021 at 11:09 am

 I think Bret’s referring to his frustration at how many video games treat the “range” of ranged weapons as a “hard limit. Inside? Full damage. Outside? No damage.” This leads to emergent tactics not observed in history, and students familiar with these videogames have misconceptions they need to unlearn in his class. The whole topic is explored at much greater length at the post linked in that paragraph: https://acoup.blog/2019/07/04/collections-archery-distance-and-kiting/

 I am unfortunately not familiar enough with Total War to resolve the differences between your comment and that post, but I hope it at least demonstrates where he’s coming from.

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 1. Draugdur says:
 November 22, 2021 at 4:04 am

 Thank you, for your reply! I’m aware of that original post. In my opinion, it’s, to say it gracefully, not one of his finest works. There’s a comment in the comment thread to that post which explains in some more detail how TW actually works, but to sum it up, the range in (at least some of) those games is actually not a “hard” limit in the way he presents it. I’m no modder so I can’t say much on the actual mechanics, but from experience, range absolutely makes a difference in lethality in TW. And not just because of accuracy, mind – I’ve played a few mods where more “elite” archers have a very high accuracy where even at maximum range 75% or more or projectiles will hit (which may be another issue, but we’re not talking about that right now), but with very little lethality. Granted, the impact of range on power and lethality might not be as pronounced as it should be, but it absolutely is there.

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 1. Lekhaka says:
 December 8, 2021 at 5:42 pm

 As mentioned in other comments, this sounds like a difference due to actually playing different games, so it’s unfair to criticize Bret for describing something that’s different from your personal experience with modded M2TW. As someone who played RTW competitively in online tournaments, I would say Bret’s description is dead-on. Everybody kites from max range most of the time. Sure, getting closer might improve lethality a little, but the difference is so small that it is not worth the risk. Bret contrasting this to the difference in real life make the post one of many gems on this blog, and I rate it highly to anyone who generalizes historical tactics from RTW.

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 14. ianargent says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:28 am

 ” Crassus’ army was defeated in part his son…” seems to be missing a “because”

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 1. cptbutton says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:38 am

 “loss of power int he imperial center”
 “loss of power in the imperial center”

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 15. George says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:37 am

 I wonder if horse archers are a bit overrated, since most successful horse people use them in conjunction with heavier cavalry. The parthians and mongols both had an elite corp of heavily armoured lancers who would be the killing stroke in their battles.

 On the other hand, I wonder just how many ‘mongol’ warriors would actually be horse warriors. If they’re drawing soldiers from china and other tributaries you’d see those forms of fighting dilute the nomadic methods. For example the battle of mohi wasn’t won by a caracal or false retreat, but chinese artillery and gunpowder. So perhaps horse archery was no more deadly than infantry in most scenarios.

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 1. scifihughf says:
 November 19, 2021 at 7:08 pm

 The Mongols, like other nomads, certainly recruited Chinese, Persian, etc soldiers into their armies.

 But this was *after* they’d conquered those states, so the original Mongols by themselves could defeat powerful armies. Mongol armies were mostly horse archers according to sources, with one European observer (sorry don’t have exact details to hand) writing that only 1 in 10 had armour and weapons heavier than bow and sword.

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 1. Peter T says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:57 pm

 The Mongol secret was a novel organisation and unified command, rather than any new technology. In general, the nomad successes were balanced by long periods where they were under the thumbs of their sedentary neighbours.

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 2. George says:
 November 20, 2021 at 9:05 am

 Really? I’ve heard that mongol cavalry was around 40% shock cavalry. Also the wikipedia article on the mongol conquest of china suggests that there were large numbers of Han defectors throughout the invasion. Not to mention their Xia tributaries.

 There was probably a slow transition from a mostly nomad army to combined forces army as raiding turned to conquest.

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 1. Peter T says:
 November 20, 2021 at 6:58 pm

 Chinggis was very systematic. He broke the tribes that came under his rule apart, into standard formations officered by Mongols, ruthlessly eliminated their traditional leadership (which is why Chinggisid descent became a requirement for leadership afterwards – there was no competition). His campaigns were similarly systematic – raid, establish forward bases, move up, go for the leaders, incorporate nomads, go to next target. As they moved into China Han troops were recruited or impressed. I don’t know if this was planned, but it would not surprise if it were (the contemporary sources are not huge, and arcane).

 Nomad armies always had a percentage of medium cavalry, mostly the chiefs and their entourages. Keeping the heavier horses in condition was a challenge, hence nomad desire for grains – and sedentary emphasis on control of trade.

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 2. Arilou says:
 November 22, 2021 at 7:33 pm

 My understanding is that especially for steppe cavalry it’s not neccessarily either-or. Primarily horse archers might carry a lance and primarily armored shock cavalry might carry a bow.

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 16. Roxana says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:45 am

 Women and groups of women haver certainly exercised power through men down through the centuries but the idea of a centralized organization of anybody ruling from behind the scenes for centuries is nonsense. Women aren’t that lockstep, People aren’t that lockstep.

 I’ve been re-reading the Wheel of Time and while everybody talks of the shadowy power of the Aes Sedai, and the women themselves look back to a time when they ruled the rulers, what we see if a loosely confederated group of powerful women each of whom mostly does her own thing. And subdivisions, the Ajah, that compete against each other. In other words the power of the Aes Sedai is mostly myth.

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 1. Matt says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:39 am

 Wheel of Time spoilers below, beware:

 I very much like that the Aes Sedai, while in the general mold of the “trans-national secret society that secretly pulls the strings,” doesn’t do secretly (all powerful people in the series generally distrust the Aes Sedai and consider them to be manipulators—though Morgase Trakand is an exception since she actually trained at the Tower and has direct knowledge of how the AS operate) and their agenda is fairly well-understood (preserve stability, find male channelers and gentle them, and, for a *very* few (at first), find the Dragon Reborn). And the esoteric knowledge they possess is directly about things that only they can really deal with (the One Power, Shadowspawn, etc.). *And* that it turns out there’s a lot they don’t know (e.g. that channellers who aren’t bound by the Oath Rod are basically immortal) based on their own institutional prejudices and assumptions about How Things Work.

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 1. Adam says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:18 pm

 Minor pedantic correction. Channelers aren’t basically immortal. In fact, the lure of immortality is one of the big ones that the DO uses to attract the channelers who eventually became the Forsaken. The Oath rod, however, seems to roughly halve the extended lifespan of a channeler. 300 is more or less the oldest you can survive being bound by those oaths, and 600 is how old the oldest of other channelling traditions like the Aiel Wise Ones or the Kin seem to get.

 I do like some of the institutional prejudices and assumptions though, like how the ageless look is from extensive One Power usage and not a deliberate side effect of a rod meant to mark dangerous criminals in its original society.

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:28 pm

 I do think that for his (many) flaws one of Jordans real strength is his depictions of institutions, both that they are often factional but also how they influence their members thinking in various ways. (like the little bits about how the different versions of channelers all have different hierarchies and how that affects how they deal with others)

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 2. Dark_Tigger says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:38 pm

 Same is true for the Bene Gesserit, isn’t it?At least the whole ruleing class, is very well aware of them. There is even a certain amount of awareness of their greater goals as well. Everyone is also deeply suspicious of them.
 They are less a hidden rueling class behind the rulers and more an strange cult, that is accepted because they are useful for diplomacy. I think the comparison to the Jesuits fits best.

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 17. Borsukrates says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:58 am

 Okay, I have more examples of real groups who secretly manipulated rulers:

 1. The Order of Assassins (1090-1275). They did create their own state and built castles, but at the same time they projected great fear. They were famous for not running away after killing the high profile target, but often instead just laughing. They were happy that they earned their place in heaven. I think many terrorist organisations could qualify, especially in places where state power is weak.

 Modern groups:

 2. Scientology

 3. The finance world!!! I think it was Yannis Varoufakis who remarked that best, youngest and brightest no longer go to politics because that’s not where the real power is. The real power is in finance (remember the 2008 bank bailouts?). Or maybe David Graeber, I was watching their lectures around the same time.

 Speaking of Jews, a common meme in Poland is the quote: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” I’ve seen it attributed to Oscar Wilde. Wikipedia says it’s attributed to Voltaire but actually traced back to Kevin Alfred Strom, a (surprise!) neonazi, holocaust denier, white nationalist, white separatist. So if Israel has effective diplomacy and some clout in international organisations, it’s treated as a proof of Jewish conspiracy.

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 1. pontifex maximus says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:13 am

 “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

 Usually immediately rebuked with a comment along the lines of “we need to free ourselves from the tyranny of kids with cancer”, innit?

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 1. Borsukrates says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:44 am

 I’ve seen it on a meme picture, attributed to Oscar Wilde. Real source turns out to be Kevin Alfred Strom (born August 17, 1956), an American white nationalist, neo-Nazi, Holocaust denier,[1] white separatist, and associate editor of National Vanguard.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Alfred_Strom#%22True_Rulers%22_quotation

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 2. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:31 pm

 “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

 That does not show who rules over you, but it is a pretty good guide to who they care about. (Or wish to be seen to care about.) Of course, some of the people the rulers care about are themselves.

 Note that you can run the argument backwards: Throughout most of history you could denounce Jews with no trouble at all, so obviously they were neither ruling nor popular with the people who were ruling.

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 1. Dillon Saxe says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:30 pm

 It’s a guide, not a hard and fast rule. Seems the best way to sum things up. Speaks to something real, but can easily be misused.

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 1. George says:
 November 20, 2021 at 9:07 am

 Certainly applies to dictators i.e. winny the poo.

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 2. Simon_Jester says:
 November 20, 2021 at 9:10 am

 It doesn’t so much speak to reality as it speaks to “truthiness-” to the intuitive perception that a proposition is true, even though that proposition doesn’t stand up under serious analysis.

 Thinking about it, the vast majority of things in our culture that we’re “not allowed” to criticize (that is: can face serious consequences for outspokenly criticizing because they are widely popular either with the masses or the ruling elite)… Most of those are things that are just popular.

 Criticizing people’s mothers is a good way to start a fight, but that’s not because motherhood rules the world. Insulting kids with cancer will earn you tremendous disapproval, but not because there’s a secret conspiracy of seven year old leukemia patients running things.

 …

 “To learn who rules you, learn who you’re not allowed to criticize” isn’t an argument. It’s an excuse for why a group whose opinions are genuinely unpopular (e.g. neo-Nazis) isn’t getting influence in the legislature. Surely, it’s because the secret conspiracy they’re denouncing is [i]suppressing their power![/i]

 [rolls eyes]

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 1. George says:
 November 21, 2021 at 3:57 am

 Yes because when people get censured for criticizing a political figure it’s because their opinions are unpopular, and not a persecution of political enemies.

 Hell actual nazi’s made all media state-run so that no journalists could criticise them. Not that criticizing them was unpopular, hell freedom of speech allows you to criticise something that’s popular. Unless it gets censured off the net by people who take offense to it i.e. the FBI raiding journalists and leaking information to state favouring media sites to create propaganda.

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 2. Simon_Jester says:
 November 22, 2021 at 6:47 am

 The thing is, you’re trying to say that “P implies Q” means “Q implies P.”

 You note that ruling elites often ban criticism of themselves, notably citing an autocracy as your example. Which means you have proven “tyrannical ruling elites get their critics in trouble.”

 But the quote we’re discussing (which, let me remind you, originated with a 1993 essay by a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier) turns that right around. The quote’s obvious message is “if I get in trouble for criticizing something, it must mean the group I am criticizing is a secret ruling elite.”

 This is of course a great argument from the point of view of a neo-Nazi Holocaust denier. Because it means that when they get ostracized for being a Holocaust denier, it’s just more proof that there’s a secret Jewish conspiracy running everything and which “does not permit criticism” of the Jews.

 If I’m unpopular, it’s not because I’m perpetuating nonsense and insulting people who don’t deserve it and the public knows it. It’s because I’m onto something and the conspiracy is trying to shut me down!

 …

 Now, you can certainly point to specific examples of powerful elites who control the government targeting those whose opposition or criticism is a threat to the status quo (see Fred Hampton for reference).

 But you can’t generalize that into “everyone who is shut down, violently or otherwise, by the use of state power or not, is being shut down because they have ‘touched a nerve’ and offended the secret power that controls society.”

 Which is the thesis of the quote we are discussing. And it’s fairly clear, when you think about it, why conspiracy theorists thrive on this. Because it lets them reimagine any group that is unpopular for any reason as martyrs whose victimhood is proof of a conspiracy.

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 18. Borsukrates says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:48 am

 Sorry for double post, I thought it was another occurence! Can someone please delete this post and the sibling (in response to ‘pontifex maximus’)?

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 19. AlexT says:
 November 19, 2021 at 10:59 am

 Question re. legion vs horse archers: aren’t the thrown javelins enough to repel the horse archers? AIUI, the horsemen have to approach within a few dozen meters to have any significant lethality. At that point, they’re well inside javelin range, and they’re far less protected vs javelins than legionaries are vs arrows.

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 1. Adam says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:37 am

 At a total guess, ammo limiations are a big concern. A dedicated javelineer would only usually carry like 4-5 of them, and a heavy infantryman like the Romans usually had 2. A horse archer could carry dozens of arrows. So you’d have a couple of volleys and you might even do well in them, but then you’d have nothing left to continue the missile exchange with unless you can recover the thrown javelins, which seems difficult.

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 1. Michael Alan Hutson says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:56 am

 Which harkens back to comments about slingers: easy to carry large numbers of prepared shot or even just available stones.

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 2. AlexT says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:14 pm

 My objection to the ammunition disparity hypothesis is that there would be significantly more infantrymen than horsemen in a given formation (horses are big).

 On the other hand, thrown pila would probably be bent or broken (the soft deforming head), thus unrecoverable. I don’t think actually marching to recover thrown javelins would be a problem, IIRC even Crassus’ doomed men formed testudo and walked significant distances, 50m would be easy.

 On yet another hand, a legion going against horse archers would probably stock up on light javelins.

 Maybe the “shields in front, missile troops behind” formation actually has legionaries taking turns as missile throwers? I mean, archers and slingers are specialist troops, whereas a legion already has plenty of guys trained to throw javelins.

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 3. Borsukrates says:
 November 19, 2021 at 5:42 pm

 “Dedicated javelineers” would likely be poorly armored otherwise. Just because it says “horse archer” on the tin doesn’t mean they were unable to ride up to enemy formation and slice or spear some people – if they spotted a weakness.

 Javelins have relatively short range and are not that accurate. The range is not a big deal against charging light infantry, because they HAVE to get close to you. Horse archers can stop a few meters outside your range and pelt you with arrows(the closest safe range for them). And they had not just ordinary bows, but often composite bows which were made to retain good power and range in a small package (no room to shoot a longbow on horseback). Nomads had to be skilled with bows because they often hunted small game, such as hares or birds.

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 2. scifihughf says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:29 pm

 Basing on writings by Phil Barker, tabletop ancient/medieval wargame rule designer who also relies heavily on sources like Arrian.

 Javelins might repel horse archers once or twice, but unless you can inflict devastating casualties they’ll be back again … and again … and again.

 Individually, throwing a javelin (with full force) requires you to lower your shield and expose your body, not a great idea against skilled horse archers at short range.

 Most classical Greek/Roman era javelin infantry are the poorest of the city dwellers who can’t afford good armour and weapons and fight as skirmishers. The other classical and medieval javelin infantry come from hilly areas where rough ground means infantry can’t form up into solid blocks, so they also fight more in skirmish formations, a series of individual combats rather than line against line.

 But this means that on flat ground where horse archers operate, they are in open formation. As our host has written about previously,

 https://acoup.blog/2019/05/04/new-acquisitions-that-dothraki-charge/

 infantry against cavalry need to form a solid line that horses will shy away from. Horse archers can still charge when they see an opportunity, so will cut loose formation javelin infantry to pieces.

 The Roman infantry carry pila, which are designed to be thrown but they’re still big long spears. Against cavalry Phil Barker writes that they seem to have formed up in a closer formation and held their pila as conventional spears rather than throwing them. That’s what all the other infantry who could successfully stand off cavalry did.

 Even fire arm infantry in the 17th and 18th centuries couldn’t always repel cavalry charges by shooting alone, and still relied on close formation and long pointy things to keep the cavalry away.

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 1. mindstalk0 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:35 pm

 Must suck if you’re a fantasy infantry army facing a foe who has cavalry *and* fireballs. Close up and the fireballs get you, open up and the cavalry do.

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 1. scifihughf says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:15 pm

 Very similar to Napoleonic era battles. A lot of the British casualties at Waterloo came when the infantry had to form squares because the French cavalry were close enough to be a threat, but the cavalry didn’t charge and the squares made wonderful targets for the French artillery.

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 1. Dark_Tigger says:
 November 20, 2021 at 5:29 am

 There is a greate scene in Union of Salvation where Napoleon era (ok a little later) infantery is literally shot to bits by grape shot. I think it depicts the horror of that kind of event pretty acuratley.

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 2. ey81 says:
 November 24, 2021 at 10:05 pm

 “Must suck if you’re a fantasy infantry army facing a foe who has cavalry *and* fireballs.” Or if you’re the Lannisters, and your opponents can cut holes in your shield wall with dragonfire and then pour cavalry into the openings. Not to revisit old issues, but I thought Bret’s criticism of the tactics in the Gold Road battle was unfair: it seemed to me that Daenerys’s tactics were appropriate and probably would work for an actual pre-modern army that had dragons.

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 2. AlexT says:
 November 19, 2021 at 4:00 pm

 We’re discussing horse archers. The problem is *not* holding against the charge, it’s making them afraid to approach to effective arrow range.

 Quote: Most classical Greek/Roman era javelin infantry are the poorest of the city dwellers

 I’m talking about legionaries in the Parthian wars. The pros.

 Quote: Individually, throwing a javelin (with full force) requires you to lower your shield and expose your body, not a great idea against skilled horse archers at short range.

 Fortunately, they’re fighting in formation, not individually. First rank raise shields, second rank throw. Swap ranks, rinse, repeat. A formation 10-deep would have about 20 volleys, assuming they somehow didn’t think to bring extra spears.

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 1. scifihughf says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:34 pm

 I’ve now read the translation of Arrian provided by our host. (Not as long as I feared.)

 This is a Roman army fighting “Scythians” who are described as lightly armed with unprotected horses. Light cavalry, not cataphracts or proto-knights, almost certainly horse archers given the setting and being called Scythians who are not really considered noteworthy by classical authors for anything except horse archery.

 The first four ranks are to be legionaries, carrying spears. Assumed to be pilum, especially with mention of iron shanks.

 If the Scythians come close, the spearmen are instructed to hold their spears ready to thrust at the horses. The front three ranks lock shields and stand shoulder to shoulder.

 The fourth rank, and the lighter troops behind them, do throw javelins. The hope is that a tremendous weight of missiles will keep them from getting close.

 But there’s no mention of swapping ranks under fire, no mention of trying to retrieve javelins after use.

 So yes it seems the Romans did use javelins against horse archers. But like every other infantry army that successfully fought cavalry, the most important thing to do is present a solid line of spearpoints.

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 2. gbdub says:
 November 21, 2021 at 1:50 pm

 At some point, would all the thrown pila sticking out of the ground start to form an obstacle for the attacking cavalry?

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 3. Simon_Jester says:
 November 20, 2021 at 9:04 am

 As Adam notes, there’s the ammunition issue. Even if on any given stretch of frontage at any given moment, your infantry have as many total javelins as the opposing horsemen have arrows, the horsemen can have far more arrows total all over their force, while rotating out archer units to restock arrows and rest their arms between bursts of loosing a lot of arrows in a short time.

 As to the range issue, note that the horse archers’ effectiveness doesn’t have a hard cutoff, even against body armor. Their arrows aren’t as effective at 50 meters as at 25, and are far less effective at 75 than at 50… but in a pinch, they can stand off and pelt your formation with arrows from 50-75 meters, at which point javelins are largely ineffective. A lot of their arrows will miss or glance off of armor, but not all. And they can have far more arrows available, total, than you have javelins, because they may well have brought pack horses in addition to just being able to carry more in a quiver than you can in a bundle. So in a protracted battle that will tell eventually, even if not right away.

 …

 A further possible issue is that the horse archers often won’t be restricted to fighting you along a fixed frontage of your choosing unless you are doing very well with terrain selection. They can, for example, concentrate against one flank of your line and try to lap around it. Your battle plan needs a line item for “how do we stop several hundred enemy horse archers from all concentrating on the 100 guys at the extreme left end of our battle line?”

 If that’s a concern, then you really want to be able to project a “bubble” of firepower around your unit that’s large enough that horse archers can’t even get close to their optimum range without getting shot at a lot. As in, to get a bunch of their horse archers within 25-35 meters of your flanking infantry, they have to come within 75-100 meters of a whole lot of your slingers/archers/crossbowmen. Javelin units don’t really have the range to do something like that.

 If horse archers confront the infantry on your flanks and your army’s only ranged weapon is thrown javelins, then the specific javelin unit actually on the flank is pretty much on its own and cannot be directly supported by other friendly units.

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 1. Peter T says:
 November 20, 2021 at 7:06 pm

 That’s about right. At Arsuf Saracen horse-archers noted glumly that their arrows were ineffective at a distance against armoured infantry, while going closer exposed you and your horse to lethal crossbow fire. A Polish ruler preparing to defend against the Mongols instructed his vassals to bring infantry – “and let them have crossbows”.

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 1. Simon_Jester says:
 November 22, 2021 at 6:50 am

 Yes, and importantly, javelins don’t cut it in this role, not by themselves, because of the range disadvantage. Crossbows fired at horse archers can more or less match the horse archers’ own bows for effective range. Javelins alone cannot.

 Because even though in real life “effective range” exists on a sliding scale and weapons don’t immediately get full lethality the moment you cross an arbitrary line in the sand and get “close enough…”

 Well, a weapon that can plausibly put an arrow 100-150 meters away and penetrate armor at 50-75 meters is going to have a lot of advantages over a weapon that can plausibly put a spear 50-75 meters away and penetrate armor at 20-40 meters.

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 1. AlexT says:
 November 25, 2021 at 4:14 am

 Quote: a weapon that can plausibly put an arrow 100-150 meters away and penetrate armor at 50-75 meters is going to have a lot of advantages over a weapon that can plausibly put a spear 50-75 meters away and penetrate armor at 20-40 meters

 The thing is that the horse archers *do not have armor*, and javelins bleed far less energy with distance than arrows, so that if a javelin can hit, it can kill. Whereas the legionaries not only have armor, but it’s spaced armor (their shields) that render arrows far less dangerous.

 I think the legionaries would be lethal to horses, and to the riders for that matter, as far *or even further* than the horse archers are dangerous to them. And there are far more infantrymen than there are horse archers (because they are cheaper logistically and financially, and you can put more in the same space).

 The idea being, horse archers vs legionaries would look less like a turkey shoot (where archers shoot infantrymen with impunity) and more like a guerilla war. The horses have mobility and can strike where and when they wish, but engaging formed infantry head-on is a bad idea.

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 2. Simon_Jester says:
 November 25, 2021 at 7:33 pm

 It’s conceivable that javelins against horse archers do have equal or greater effective range than the horse archers’ arrows do against Roman legionnaires (or other heavily armored infantry).

 On the other hand, “a lot of advantages” includes a lot of options.

 The war of horse archers against heavy infantry is sort of like guerilla warfare, but also not. The horse archers, as noted, have much greater freedom of movement (not always true in true guerilla warfare). Unlike classical guerillas, the horse archers can keep up harassment fire with a lot more flexibility and consistency, even if from ranges at which arrows are vanishingly unlikely to penetrate shields and armor. And this harassment fire can have an effect against the heavy infantry- not necessarily from inflicting meaningful casualties, but from fatigue and from forcing the enemy to maintain tight shield wall formations that cannot move quickly in any direction.

 The infantry’s actual army is safe, but its camp or baggage may not be, and its pack animals may not be. Its auxiliary forces are vulnerable to being drawn out and cut up by the enemy. Access to water may be imperiled if the battle drags out long enough; men cannot stand out in the sun all day forming tortoises against long range harassment archery without something to drink.

 And so on, and so on.

 The heavy infantry force will necessarily struggle to damage the horse archers against their will, even if the horse archers remain close enough to be a clear and present threat. By contrast, a force supported with actual archers can keep the horse archers far enough away from its own lines that it has a bit more freedom of action; foot archers create a larger “exclusion zone” the horse archers cannot safely enter than javelin troops do.

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 3. scifihughf says:
 November 28, 2021 at 4:56 am

 Historically the western Roman armies based around legionaries were most successful against other infantry armies: hoplites, pikes, Celtic warbands. The pilum is the most well known heavy javelin used by ancient infantry thanks to Roman legionaries, but there were Greek peltasts with javelins and spear, and the tribes in Germany started using throwing axes and heavy javelins after being beaten up by Romans.

 As noted by Borsukrates, javelins are a really good weapon against other infantry who are trying to close with you. But they were never adopted on a large scale by infantry armies who often faced cavalry on more open ground.

 The Assyrian infantry, who definitely had to fight chariots and probably cavalry, was front ranks spears, rear ranks bows.

 https://acoup.blog/2019/10/11/collections-the-preposterous-tactics-of-the-loot-train-battle-game-of-thrones-s7e4/

 The Achaemenid Persians started with a similar mix of spears and bows when they established their empire in the middle east. The Byzantines, who had to fight horse archers in Hungary and the Middle East, converted their legionaries into mixed spears and bows. The Crusaders, as noted by Peter T at the battle of Arsuf, stopped knightly charges and relied on foot soldiers with spears front rank, crossbows behind. The Chinese, whether fighting nomads directly or other Chinese armies with nomad soldiers, used front ranks with spears or polearms, crossbows behind.

 All these armies were capable of using javelins, but they didn’t. I assume they knew what they were doing.

 This is NOT to say that javelins are useless. As per Arrian, if you’ve got javelins, you may as well throw them!

 And no, Roman legionaries are NOT helpless against horse archers. But they never fought them often, and didn’t have a great record when they did. Best known example is Carrhae, where a Roman army was destroyed by Parthian horse archers.

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 4. GJ says:
 November 28, 2021 at 10:59 am

 And no, Roman legionaries are NOT helpless against horse archers. But they never fought them often, and didn’t have a great record when they did. Best known example is Carrhae, where a Roman army was destroyed by Parthian horse archers.

 Carrhae’s the famous Roman-Parthian battle, but it was by no means the norm. The Romans captured Ctesiphon three times during the Parthian period (and twice more after the Sassanids took over), which isn’t the sort of outcome you’d expect if the Romans struggled to deal with Parthian horse archers.

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 5. Mary says:
 November 28, 2021 at 3:28 pm

 On the other hand, capturing it only one would be still more impressive.

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 6. scifihughf says:
 November 28, 2021 at 3:29 pm

 Javelin infantry vs horse archers is tactics, on the battlefield. Capturing the enemy capital is operational or strategic. As Pyrrhos of Epeiros or Hannibal of Carthage would testify, Romans are really good at winning the war despite losing the battles.

 Compare how long Ctesiphon stayed part of the Roman Empire to say Athens, Corinth, Tyre, Alexandria, Lyon, London.

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 7. GJ says:
 November 28, 2021 at 5:57 pm

 Javelin infantry vs horse archers is tactics, on the battlefield. Capturing the enemy capital is operational or strategic.

 But you don’t generally get a chance to capture the enemy’s capital if you can’t defeat them on the battlefield.

 As Pyrrhos of Epeiros or Hannibal of Carthage would testify, Romans are really good at winning the war despite losing the battles.

 But the Romans didn’t win their wars against the Parthians by grinding them down with superior manpower. Not only does that not fit with the surviving accounts of the wars, but most of the wars took place after the Roman army had become a force of long-service professionals fighting on distant frontiers, and therefore couldn’t rely on just raising army after army to win.

 Compare how long Ctesiphon stayed part of the Roman Empire to say Athens, Corinth, Tyre, Alexandria, Lyon, London.

 Well, firstly, the reason the Romans couldn’t hold on to Mesopotamia was because it was too far away from their centre of power, not because they were unable to deal with Parthian cavalry archers. And secondly, compare how long Ctesiphon stayed part of the Roman Empire to how long Rome stayed part of the Parthian.

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 20. Sergei says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:18 am

 Would the eunuchs who supposedly dominated the government during several Chinese dynasties be a closer analogy than that of the Catholic Church?

 As for the middleman minority: I have been part of several middlemen minorities over the course of my life- I move often- and it is a deeply strange social rung to cling to.

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 1. Roxana says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:12 pm

 And it’s hard to know how based on reality such supposed domination was since it’s a trope to blame ministers advisors or consorts for the failures of monarchs cross culturally.

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 1. Bullseye says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:17 pm

 I’ve read a theory that the eunuchs faithfully carried out the Emperor’s will, which didn’t always sit well with other elites who had other priorities. Of course criticizing eunuchs was much safer than criticizing the Emperor directly.

 This would explain why Emperors kept hiring eunuchs despite their bad reputation.

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 2. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:24 pm

 IIRC, the point of eunuchs was that since they could have no children, and generally came from unimportant families, they could have few loyalties which could conflict with their loyalty to the Emperor. Hence the trust in them shown by many Emperors. Hence the dislike of them by the intact bureaucrats.

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 1. Adam says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:00 pm

 Well, that and they couldn’t sire children, meaning they could be trusted with the wives and concubines of the emperor’s household. Otherwise, you could just have random people from outlying families with no competing loyalties.

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 2. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:06 pm

 Though i do note that it at times was fairly common for eunuchs to adopt. Cao Cao was descended from an eunuch, for instance.

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 1. Peter T says:
 November 21, 2021 at 3:04 am

 Well, in one sense…

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 21. Tiercelet says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:47 am

 In re: the Catholic Church, if anything it seems more like the secular rulers were conspiring to subvert the Church (by inserting their own loyalists in its upper echelons), rather than the other way around!

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 1. Fazal Majid says:
 November 19, 2021 at 12:52 pm

 Or outright getting their own tame Pope like Philip IV of France with the schism and papacy in Avignon.

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 2. Roxana says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:14 pm

 Church-State conflict was totally a thing, and more often than not the secular state won.

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 1. tomfulli says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:39 pm

 Would it be to much of a stretch to say the Catholic Church was a bit like the UN?

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 2. Finnish reader says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:39 pm

 The “secular state” should be understood here in the same sense as “secular priest”, I think: a state concerned with the daily matters of the world (as opposed to a “regular priest” who lives as a monk). The medieval states were completely religious in all their works. About every public event or gathering would include a religious element, and many monarchs who worked fervently against the pope were equally serious and honest in their conviction that they were actually better Christians. For example, reformation was not just about local princes opposing the Emperor. It was quite as much about the reformed princes being concerned about their own salvation.

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 1:53 pm

 This, even when kings opposed the Pope, or the Church, it was often because they believed they were better representatives of God, not out of some kind of ideological opposition to the notion thereof.

 The medieval state was fundamentally religious, and arguably the entire idea of a secular state comes out of the reformation (and not deliberately!) out of a need to reconcile different religious groups coexisting.

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 1. Roxana says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:14 pm

 That sounds possible. But most church-state conflicts were about power and jurisdiction not theology.

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 2. Tiercelet says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:10 pm

 Well, sure, but I think we also have to acknowledge the extent to which thinking you’re right about the politics will lead you to think you’re right about the theology, too. It’s a totally predictable cognitive bias: those who disagree with me are my enemies, and my enemies are wrong every time we disagree.

 Dr. Devereaux’ refrain that “people believe their own religion” has an important corollary: religious beliefs are part of a larger worldview and can be astonishingly flexible. Believing very sincerely is in no way incompatible with having those beliefs evolve to accommodate worldly concerns.

 Or, Upton Sinclair’s line that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it” isn’t just humorous understatement–it’s also an accurate psychological insight; it really is substantially harder to integrate an understanding that disagrees with the rest of your worldview and your interests.

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 3. Peter T says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:18 pm

 Roxana – true – but ‘power’ included religious power. Rulers were anointed – ie were formally included as religious figures, and were conceived as representatives of their people before God. There was also a tradition of rulers calling and participating in church councils, in the west as well as the east, and deposing popes who were out of line (often for flagrant misbehaviour, in the days when the papacy was the plaything of Roman aristocratic factions). One historian remarked that Charlemagne likely regarded the pope as his VP for church affairs, with himself firmly as CEO.

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 22. Natasha Özlem says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:24 pm

 For secret cabals, what about White Lotus during Yuan and Sufi lodges in Turan/Iran/Anatolia?
 The White Lotus Society was a secret Millenialist (ie doomsday cult) that ended up controlling many rural villages, monasteries and secretly city officials even before the Red Turban rebellion. They were a Mahayana Buddhist cult but heavily Manichaen syncretic and (due to pax Mongolica silk road) very Sufi influenced (the Matreiya Buddha advent was mixed with Shi’ia Mahdi). They trained Zhu Yuanzhang who lead an army in the Red Turban rebellion the White lotus instigated, and eventually overthrew them to found the Ming.

 The Hashishin/Assassins were a covert order who wielded considerable influence in Seljuks, Iran and crusades, through what we would today call terrorism. The Mongols hunted them down

 The Safavid order was a post Ilxanate Sufi lodge that claimed continuation from the assassins. They were masters of diplomacy that created vast webs of allegiance from clans, steppe warriors, Shah’s and even eeven marriages to Byzantine, Trapezuntine and Ottoman princesses. Though surrounded by Timurid princelings, the Aq and Qara Quyunlu, they were immune because through spiritual influence (like charismatic preachers in JW or mormons today) no army would fight them. Then when Ismail went a conquering age 12, warriors came from Ottoman turkey, Mauaranahr, Kwaresmia, Afghanistan and Syria to be his Qizilbash cavalry.

 Later when the Ottomans declared his proclamation of Mahdi as gulat (beyond the pale, the closest Islamic equivalent of heresy) and went to war, so many herdsmen left Ottoman Cappadocia to join Ismail (believing his claim to be Mahdi) that the province was depopulated. The Ottomans crushed him though, using fortified wagon pike and shot formations.

 My point is that secret cabals did exist. The fractured nature of political (and soldiery) power in post Seljuk (assassins) or post Ilxanate/Timur Iranmeant that loyalty to Sufi saints was a more reliable and powerful organisation, even though it would not be apparent on the map.

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 23. adamx says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:32 pm

 I think the trope of a shadow cabal is to some extent a reflection that often the titular ruler is not the actual ruler, and formal kingdoms with an absolute king are often oligarchic to some extent or other. I can speak most knowledgeably on Japan. In Japan the emperor has for most of history been only a symbolic ruler. Generally speaking a strong emperor lead to a destructive war, the wars leading to the establishment of the Kamakura and Ashikaga shogunates being prime examples (and arguably World War II).

 That’s not to say there weren’t periods where power was concentrated in one person, and definitely rulers often attempt to consolidate power in their person even in supposed democracies, a pattern seen in Venezuela and Russia recently. But I think hereditary rulers very often WERE having their strings pulled, simply because being born in power was no guarantee of being the type of person who could wield power effectively.

 The shadow cabal is rarely that shadowy, but powerful groups struggling with each other over control in supposed absolute monarchies is definitely a thing.

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 1. mindstalk0 says:
 November 19, 2021 at 2:45 pm

 Japan seems to have been particularly prone to indirection. At one point the most powerful man was a retired Hojo elder, who told the official Hojo head of house what to do, who was regent for an underage Fujiwara shogun, who was supposedly ruling Japan in the name of the Tennou/Emperor.

 Japan and modern China also seem to have a pattern of “I’ll retire from the official position with its boring duties but will still be making the real decisions.”

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:09 pm

 Nah, you missed a few steps, there was the Kamakura shogun (of the minamoto clan) and then a regent (of the Fujiwara clan) and then you had the retired/cloistered emperor, and THEN the reigning emperor.

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 2. Roxana says:
 November 19, 2021 at 9:50 pm

 It was a long lasting Japanese tradition and may be directly responsible for the survival of the imperial family as the most ancient royal dynasty in the world. The Emperor became the source of legitimacy if not the actual ruler.

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 3. GJ says:
 November 24, 2021 at 6:20 pm

 Japan and modern China also seem to have a pattern of “I’ll retire from the official position with its boring duties but will still be making the real decisions.”

 I’ve seen that attributed to the Confucian emphasis on filial piety. Disobeying your father would be impious, even if you’re (theoretically) the emperor/shogun/shogun’s regent/shogun’s regent’s regent, and he’s (theoretically) retired and living as a private citizen.

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 1. Michael Alan Hutson says:
 November 24, 2021 at 8:57 pm

 It certainly explains why people who fell out of power weren’t allowed to retire to their country estates.

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 24. Andrew Clough says:
 November 19, 2021 at 3:55 pm

 Thinking about secretive groups manipulating governments, it seems that the Black Hand (Црна рука) and League of Blood (血盟団) were pretty successful at helping start world wars by assassinating politicians.

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 19, 2021 at 6:11 pm

 That kind of secret societies are dime a dozen: but notably they don’t exactly tend to manipulate politics much, Al-Qaeda (to take another example) certainly had an impact on world politics, but they aren’t some kind of secret behind-the-thrones cabal.

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 25. DirkKS says:
 November 19, 2021 at 7:55 pm

 Surprised no one has mentioned the Dissolution of the Monasteries yet. Thumping triumph for the guy with the armies over the guys with the books.

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 26. GreatWyrmGold says:
 November 19, 2021 at 11:06 pm

 It is more often that I’m driven along by the historical concept I want to explain than by the pop-culture reference point, which is why I often find “can you discuss X fantasy novel/show/film?” requests difficult to get my head around if I don’t already have a sense of what the historical concept would be.

 …with Teaching Paradox (sorta) being the exception that proves the rule, since the concept being explored is pop cultural depictions of history rather than history itself.

 [I]n actual history, most power is held by the obvious fellows who command armies and rule states and wield that power openly.

 Plus, being known to have power is its own kind of power. This is a point I think a lot of people both understand and overlook. It’s easy to nod when people point out the perks of fame, how people try to get on your good side (or at least avoid offending you) without having to lift a finger, but equally easy to forget about this kind of universally handy soft power.

 By contrast, secrecy is really only useful for preventing other people from interfering with whatever secret things you’re doing, and that’s only useful for people without power (or at least with significantly less power than someone else). There are ways to contrive an extremely powerful society for which secrecy gives significant benefits, e.g. if it has access to extremely powerful supernatural abilities but limited manpower; however, this is obviously only applicable to certain kinds of fiction.

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 1. Dark_Tigger says:
 November 20, 2021 at 5:46 am

 “A man who must say “I am King” is no true king”
 – Tywin Lanister

 But early GoT is playing with this trope several times. It has sevreal shadowy cabals pulling strings from the background, like Littles Fingers organisation, or the Tagaryen loyalist group. There is even that scene were Little Finger threatens Cersei and she rebuffs him, by showing him that commanding armed men is were the real power lies.

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 1. Simon_Jester says:
 November 20, 2021 at 9:55 am

 Littlefinger’s “organization” is basically just his personal spy network and people he’s bribed. That’s not quite the same thing as a ‘cabal,’ it’s just one man who’s running a private intelligence service off the books thanks in large part to being free to embezzle funds in his capacity as a state official under King Robert.

 The Targaryen loyalists are a better example of a cabal, but notably they don’t actually do much to manipulate events on a continent-wide level. The extent of their plans is to keep the heirs secure over in Essos and keep their heads down in hopes that something will present an opportune moment to bring the heirs back in. They’re not actively controlling much of anything and they’re not a power bloc; the closest they come to directly influencing events is from taking advantage of the general collapse of factions that might oppose them.

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 1. Dark_Tigger says:
 November 20, 2021 at 11:23 am

 Little Finger obviously sees himself as a powerbroker. And the whole point is, that he is rebuffed, because his behind-the-courtain soft power, means nothing without boots on the ground.

 The loyalists have at least on agent in the small council. And at least in the books they activly working to destabelize Westeros, and are able to arange deals pretty half an continent over.

 But as I said, the books are playing with the trope, by making those organization pretty ineffectual at the end.

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 27. kozmo says:
 November 20, 2021 at 1:03 am

 Why the emphasis or importance placed on video games as a reflection of historical battle tactics? Why are video game designers or programmers looked on as some sort of savants? All they are concerned with is entertainment value, marketing, and PR. They are not serious students of history or the military. I keep being bemused by references in these blogs to videogame simulations of ancient military history. Disclaimer/contextual note: I once worked for TSR Hobbies and other game publishers as a game designer, long ago, pre-computer games as such. But we never considered ourselves arbiters of historical accuracy.

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 1. kozmo says:
 November 20, 2021 at 1:06 am

 PS: I could also add “movies or TV series dramas” to “videogames,” above.

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 1. KRG says:
 November 20, 2021 at 3:10 am

 It’s because pop culture gets a lot more exposure than actual historic investigation, so if games or tv shows etc are presenting inaccurate information a lot of people will only see that and will end up thinking it’s true.

 Look at the likes of Game of Thrones, which presents almost everyone in the middle ages as living in filth and that no one believed in their own religion, or games like Skyrim (and tons of others) which present archery as requiring almost no strength and armour as so heavy barely anyone can wear it.

 Those examples are completely wrong, but I’ve seen so many people assume they are correct because they don’t realise that the producers have either made a mistake or are just acting off previous tropes themselves. Or just don’t care.

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 1. GJ says:
 November 23, 2021 at 3:51 pm

 One thing I’ve noticed is how many people, even in historical discussions, use the GOT-style “House Tudor” (or whatever) rather than the more accurate “the House of Tudor”. A small example, maybe, but I think a significant indicator of how many people get their ideas about medieval history from watching Game of Thrones.

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 1. Bullseye says:
 November 23, 2021 at 3:56 pm

 Final Fantasy XIV, at least in the English version, is full of odd turns of phrase pillaged from Game of Thrones.

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 2. AlexT says:
 November 20, 2021 at 2:25 am

 >All they are concerned with is entertainment value, marketing, and PR.They are not serious students of history or the military.

 Game developer here. Some of us actually care about plausibility. Of course we’re in the entertainment business. But there exist a significant number of people who are entertained by games that are (as far as possible) immersive, realistic and historically/physically/psychologically accurate.

 I think our host is right to wish for less nonsense in games. It’s fun to walk a mile in another’s caligae.

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 3. Nate T says:
 January 31, 2022 at 1:39 pm

 This blog is a home for unmitigated pedentry.

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 28. EBA says:
 November 20, 2021 at 3:43 pm

 The vyzantines definitely spent a lot of focus on fighting enemy cavalry and especially using your own cavalry that you can see in the existing military manuals (Really good sources, Strategikon and tactica are great. Especially at seeing some evolution in Byzantine thought as the tactica is a reproduction with some changes reflecting modern enemies of the strategikon).

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 29. EBA says:
 November 20, 2021 at 4:14 pm

 On the other hand, climate change skepticism really is backed by a business conspiracy of very rich people funding think tanks, news agencies, and sketchy scientists to make climate change seem less scientifically secure. They take pains to hide exactly where all the money goes.

 But there is no such thing as a conspiracy so good that it can’t be figured out. it’s not hard to figure out the Koches and other energy sector businesses are funding climate change denialism. It is hard to find out exactly where all that money goes to. It requires digging. And that’s the heart of it. Make it too hard for the average person to figure out easily. Bury the links behind links until you have to go a dozen deep to find the source.

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 1. Bullseye says:
 November 20, 2021 at 4:30 pm

 > But there is no such thing as a conspiracy so good that it can’t be figured out.

 Well, not that we know of.

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 2. mindstalk0 says:
 November 20, 2021 at 10:02 pm

 Also tobacco company funding FUD regarding smoking and lung cancer; the sugar industry framing dietary fat for obesity; Russian and Chinese online disinformation campaigns; corporate ‘astroturf’; the CIA allegedly funding modern art and literature…

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 1. ey81 says:
 November 24, 2021 at 10:18 pm

 None of these things seems terrifically effective: middle-class suburban attachment to cars and detached houses seems more powerful than secret energy company think tank contributions, the tobacco companies have been in steady retreat for several decades, the power of Russian and Chinese propaganda has hardly rendered the American government more friendly to either of them, etc.

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 3. George says:
 November 21, 2021 at 3:46 am

 The most blatant conspiracy’s are the ones everyone knows but are gas-lit by the government, such as fraudulent votes or the people investigating hillary clinton ending up dead “comitting suicide”. Remember when fauci said there wasn’t an epidemic in china when corona virus just started?

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 30. Mateusz Konieczny says:
 November 20, 2021 at 4:45 pm

 Have they intended to achieve this?

 If not, then I would definitely not count it as success. If yes, then I would not credit it fully to them.

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 31. baud says:
 November 20, 2021 at 6:33 pm

 > with no real common agenda,

 That reminds me of an example where French freemason lodges had enough of a common agenda, with l’affaire des fiches, where lodges across the countries were providing information on religious and political orientation of officers to the minister of war, enabling him to discriminate against those with unwanted opinions

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 1. baud says:
 November 21, 2021 at 12:50 pm

 Sorry, it was supposed to be a reply to ey81’s post above. I guess I’ll avoid replying to comments on my mobile phone in the future.

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 32. Michael Newsham says:
 November 21, 2021 at 3:52 am

 “And as an aside, “Was the Fall of Rome Bad and If So How Bad Was It?” is one of the long-response topics up for voting over on Patreon for members of the ACOUP Senate, if you want me to write something more on that and the historical arguments that swirl around that question.”

 Yes please. While the “total disastrous collpse” narrative held from the Enlightenment to Modern Times seems to have been largely modified, there seems to be a counter model that appears to have gone too far the other way, treating the Declne and Fall as no big deal, just another phase. It sometimes goes as far as to suggest the term “Dark Ages” (itself problematic) was merely due to an absence of contemporary written documents because of a hitch in parchment production.
 This (regrettably but honestly) seems to be sourced to some, ahem, rightwingCatholicauthors (it doesn’t hurt if you say it fast) who, while accusing their opponents, sometimes rightly, of characterising the whole Middle Ages as a barbaric Dung Era, go to the other extreme and see it all as the High Middle Ages, full of happy peasants shepherded by learned clergy who were mostly concerned with admonishing the rulers for the sake of the lower classes.

 As to population collapses in China, is somebody suggesting that Stephen Pinker is not a reliable spource (sarcasm tag)?

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 22, 2021 at 7:43 pm

 There’s a bunch of things going on, partially it’s trying to highlight the different areas. (obvious one: hard to talk about a “collapse” in areas outside of the roman empire per se, though it certainly had consequences, but even so Britain and Italy faced very different situations) and the other thing is the question of “To what extent did the collapse of organized state functions actually make life worse for the average person?” and the third is the question of “To what extent are those the effects of the collapse vs. the causes?” (eg. population decline starts before the Empire collapses and continues afterwards, similar thing is happening with quite a few other trends)

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 2. GJ says:
 November 23, 2021 at 3:57 pm

 This (regrettably but honestly) seems to be sourced to some, ahem, rightwingCatholicauthors (it doesn’t hurt if you say it fast) who, while accusing their opponents, sometimes rightly, of characterising the whole Middle Ages as a barbaric Dung Era, go to the other extreme and see it all as the High Middle Ages, full of happy peasants shepherded by learned clergy who were mostly concerned with admonishing the rulers for the sake of the lower classes.

 I think it’s more because of academics’ need to say something novel in order to justify their research. The idea of the dark ages being awful was the dominant one until a few decades ago, so if you worked on the period and wanted to say something new, the obvious take was “Actually, the dark ages were good.” In a few decades’ time, I expect we’ll see a swing back to “No, the dark ages were really quite bad after all.”

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 33. EBA says:
 November 21, 2021 at 5:43 am

 Bows aren’t guns.

 They’re rather bad at actually KILLING a moderately armored man with a shield.

 They are good at getting that man to run after you, run away, or huddle up into one spot. And in two of those, that man is dead when you or the heavily armed lancer ride him down, and in the third he still can’t hurt you back. It’s about controlling the battlefield and making the enemy move how you want.

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 34. EBA says:
 November 21, 2021 at 6:32 am

 Also none of my replies end up actual replies and instead their own separate thing. XD I will never get technology

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 35. Thomas Gordanier says:
 November 21, 2021 at 12:00 pm

 Re: secretive cabals, I found an interesting read about (American) conspiracy theories. Lots of detail about particular ideas as they grew and change, with the general perspective of conspiracy theories as folktales.

 The United States of Conspiracy, by Jesse Walker

 https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_United_States_of_Paranoia/A7PtAwAAQBAJ?hl=en

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 36. Aldarion says:
 November 21, 2021 at 5:37 pm

 Disclaimer: I haven’t read any specialist literature on the Bronze Age Collapse. However, it seems to me that sometimes the preceding period of stability is exaggerated. Egypt had its two intermediate periods when the unified state broke down, around 2200 BC and 1700 BC. Both were worse for Egypt (in terms of state stability) than 1100 BC. Mesopotamia was only intermittently unified or even dominated by a singly polity: the Sargonid empire, Ur III, the Old Babylonian empire (Hammurabi), the Old and Middle Assyrian empires, then later the New Assyrian empire and the Chaldaean one… As far as I know, most surviving cuneiform texts date from either the Old Babylonian empire (before 1600 BC) or after about 800 BC. So the downfall of the Old Babylonian empire at the hands of the Hittites and Kassites would seem to have had more of an impact than anything around 1100 BC.

 For Greece, of course, the loss of writing and centralized bureaucracy is a big deal. However, for comparison, almost the entire Balkan Peninsula, with the exception of the immediate surroundings of Constantinople, Thessaloniki and to some degree Athens, Thebes and the fortress of Monembasia, lost writing between 612 AD and the 9th century AD.

 All of which is to say: I don’t quite understand why the “Bronze Age Collapse” gets so much press. The Egyptian Old Empire collapse and the downfall of Sargonid Akkad in the 3rd millennium BC and then of Babylon around 1600 BC, the end of the Indus Valley civilization, the end of the Han empire, then the drawn-out end of the Tang Dynasty, all seem to be more dramatic to me. Hardly anything can be as dramatic as the events of 750 AD, the first act of Tang downfall!

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 1. Mary says:
 November 21, 2021 at 11:11 pm

 Probably because that’s when the Iron Age began.

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 37. Droid says:
 November 22, 2021 at 8:47 pm

 Hey Bret, just wanted to tell you that Thunderbird and probably a few other email programs flag your [New Post] emails as phishing, probably because they include the whole post and thus the field to enter your e-mail address! I don’t know whether the field in the email would actually work at all, but it seems unnecessary given that you only receive the e-mail if you’re already subscribed.
 In light of this, do you think it would be worth changing the way the emails are generated to no longer include this field, probably making the phishing warning disappear?

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 38. asazernik says:
 November 23, 2021 at 8:21 am

 On the subject of the fantasy-writer’s problem of combining cool magic with a familiar mediev-esque social structure that would be absolutely disrupted by said magic:

 One method I’ve seen for dealing with this is magic systems that deeply constrain their wielders; for example, magic that can only be used by or with the permission of a legitimate holder of X noble title, often working as a tangible denotation to the reader of more fuzzy concepts like dynastic legitimacy or religious credentials.

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 1. Michael Alan Hutson says:
 November 23, 2021 at 12:10 pm

 “On the subject of the fantasy-writer’s problem of combining cool magic with a familiar mediev-esque social structure that would be absolutely disrupted by said magic:”

 Which makes me ask, in our actual medieval Europe where belief in the supernatural was ubiquitous (even if it didn’t actually exist), what did people do to ward off these supposed magical threats? AFAIK people used a combination of folk charms and holy church rituals.

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 1. Roxana says:
 November 23, 2021 at 3:32 pm

 Iron to ward off fairy folk, garlic for vampires, signs to avert the evil eye, hex marks to guard against witchcraft, charms and talismans beyond counting, and that’s just folk magic. The sign of the cross wards off evil, prayers can exorcise demons, blessings to protect women after childbirth, baptism to protect her newborn. It goes on and on.
 The common folk were very well defended against malific magic.

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 1. Ynneadwraith says:
 February 3, 2022 at 7:56 am

 Ah, see, so that’s why magic didn’t really have any observable effect. People were too well warded against it!

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 2. asazernik says:
 November 23, 2021 at 4:51 pm

 When it comes to “pro-social” sources of supernatural power, the solution was usually to follow social strictures very very punctiliously; see Dr. Devereaux’s primer on oaths in the ancient world for an example.

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 1. Mary says:
 November 23, 2021 at 7:01 pm

 I was thinking the specific “legitimate title holder” would be really fun.

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 1. asazernik says:
 November 23, 2021 at 8:54 pm

 (Assuming this is in re: another of my comments?)

 The typical literary trope there – see, again, Aragorn – is for a person’s use of supernatural power to serve as proof of either their legitimate claim, or of the prestige of the title, or both. The Return Of The King, as a trope, after all requires the audience and polity to be convinced both that this rando is the King and that it matters.

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 2. Mary says:
 November 23, 2021 at 3:39 pm

 Is that a “for example” or are you citing an actual work?

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 1. asazernik says:
 November 23, 2021 at 4:49 pm

 A Practical Guide to Evil is a fun one, in that certain classes of supernatural powers require their wielders to conform to certain cultural narratives.

 Re: using them as symbols and reinforcers of more fuzzy issues of legitimacy, that goes all the way back to The Lord of the Rings and the powers it attributes to the line of the Kings of Numenor. A particularly interesting example is “the hands of the king are the hands of a healer” – the attribution of physical healing powers to a legitimate king (not to a steward, note!) which were an actual thing believed in mid/late medieval northwestern Europe. There’s also a vague implication in modern Arthurian legend that the supernatural powers attributed to Arthur are tied deeply to his combination of dynastic legitimacy and vaguely-Christian moral certitude.

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 39. slator_hardin says:
 November 24, 2021 at 4:00 pm

 Just a nitpick: the fact that Jewish people were prominent in finance in the Middle Age is a bit of an anachronism, and the fact that the reason is that Christians did not lend at interest is a bit of a myth. The prohibition to lend at interest was never really enforced, not even by religious reprimand or social ostracism. Not only the idea that lending at interest was a sin never really gain traction outside theological debate, but a lot of theologians in fact disagreed!
 In fact, during the Middle Age, the main bankers and merchants are mainly Christians, with Jewish ranging from skilled craftsmen to skilled professionals. If a Jewish person was to be in a medieval court, it would be way more likely he was a physician or a juris doctor, not as a banker.
 Jewish communities become heavily involved in banking and trade only later, during the early modern period. Again, not because Christians could not do that or because Jewish were forbidden to own land, but because at this point Jewish community were heavily self selected, since for centuries impecunious or uneducated members had dropped out, and Jewish communities started having closer relationships with each other. THAT was the comparative advantage of Jewish people, being a community made up only by affluent and educated individuals, who by necessity developed an extensive network with affluent and educated communities spanning across the whole continent, that became crucial as Europe became more economic integrated in the XVII century. Christians could, and in fact did, enter in banking, they jut happened to not have the same comparative advantage.
 Source: The chosen few, by Botticini and Eckstein

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 1. Mary says:
 November 24, 2021 at 5:48 pm

 There were still Jewish moneylenders.

 And if a man dies owing a debt to the Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing of that debt; and if he leaves children under age, their needs shall be met in a manner in keeping with the holding of the deceased, and the debt shall be paid out of the residue, saving the service due to the lords.

 Yes, it does go on:

 Debts owing to other than Jews shall be dealt with likewise.

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 2. ey81 says:
 November 24, 2021 at 10:28 pm

 The Chosen Few is a controversial work, according to wikipedia. (I haven’t read it.) I wonder if Prof. Devereux cares to favor us with his views.

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 40. mindstalk0 says:
 November 26, 2021 at 12:47 am

 ‘The thing is that the horse archers *do not have armor*,’

 Are you talking about some specific archers who didn’t have armor? Because saying horse archers in general never hard armor seems to be false; wikipedia talks about various heavy horse archers in mail or lamellar, up to cataphract archers. Different tactics though, volleys more than skirmishing.

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 41. Twei says:
 December 20, 2021 at 9:44 pm

 As a Jew, I find the question of why hidden strings pullers are such a… trope to be a particularly poignant one, and I know this post is older but I’m just reading it now and I want to leave my Unmitigated Opinion on the subject because man I have some Thoughts:

 Conspiracy theories are fundamentally about control and about power and about understanding. When you feel out of control, when you feel powerless, and most of all when you don’t know who to blame, a conspiracy theory gives you someone to blame.

 Sometimes, that feeling of powerlessness is based on something real, even if it leads you to buy into horrible conspiracism. This study found that votes for the Nazi Party in early 1930s Germany were strongly correlated with rising local mortality rates. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350621001311 Sometimes, your feeling of powerlessness is based on existing bigotries, often as part of a dominant social, cultural, or economic position beginning to erode. The biggest single factor in the demographics of the January 6th insurrectionists in the US was coming from a county that had grown less white, ie more diverse: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/06/capitol-insurrection-arrests-cpost-analysis/ (also re-reported elsewhere if waPo gives you a paywall; here’s a couple that Google gave me: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/guest-commentary/os-op-leonard-pitts-capitol-mob-fear-20210412-i35skw2wu5gndan6vv7audcqj4-story.html https://www.minnpost.com/eric-black-ink/2021/04/a-look-at-demographics-of-the-jan-6-insurrectionists/ )

 But the thing is, sometimes someone, or more likely a group of someones, really can be said to be to blame for your powerlessness! And the resulting cultural products can be feel very much like conspiracy theory. Consider Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century, and one theme often used to portray it in political cartoons- an octopus, tentacles (or sometimes pipes!) reaching out to grasp the levers of ‘legitimate’ power and strangle freedom. You can see similar imagery used for all the usual bigoted canards: Catholicism (or “Romanism”), communism, Jews, whatever. But monopolies like Standard Oil really did wield an enormous amount of power at the time! The same visual language used for base bigotry can be used to attack very real centers of power. Or it can be both an attack on real power and a pretense for something else, even! American political cartoonists depicting Imperial Britain as an octopus were depicting a very real world power, but given America’s fondness for empire in its own right, one has to question the intent of these particular messages.

 So then, we have to make distinctions. Imagine plotting them out on a table, or grid.

 If a conspiracy theory is ostensibly about a group having some kind of secret power, we can divide the grid horizontally into three spaces. Let’s say on the left, we have groups that don’t have any kind of secret power. These are your Jews, your Catholics, your queers. On the right, we put groups that really do have power. Generally, this is your capitalism. The middle is reserved for groups that have some power, often serious powers, but not the kind that the conspiracy theory alleges. Think about alien abduction theories, Area 51 and the like, and other theories that allege a massive government coverup. The US government does not do this specifically. But MKULTRA? Very real. The CIA trafficking drugs and installing dictatorships? The CIA has even admitted to some of that! Shady shit was our government’s bread and butter during the Cold War. (Not that our government isn’t shady now, but we seem to have moved on to different forms of shadiness.) Or, for a more right-wing example, consider the general collection of rhetoric about the ‘liberal media’ or ‘woke media’ or whatnot. It’s hard to take seriously the idea that mainstream, corporate media is some bastion of progressivism. But they absolutely do select for certain views, push certain biases, privilege some stories over others, even if those decisions are far more friendly towards the right than the right would like to admit (Tom Cotton op-ed calling for deploying military units against BLM protestors in the New York Times, I’m looking at you). You can argue about whether it’s the result of capital I Ideology or simple economic pressure or both or whether there’s even a difference, but it’s certainly there; it’s just a much more mundane power than what the conspiracy theorists are generally imagining.

 Of course, our table has two axes. This brings us to the second distinction. Vertically, we’ll divide our table into two. On the top, we have groups who the conspiracy theorist thinks don’t deserve that power. On the bottom, groups who the conspiracy theorist thinks DO deserve that power.

 I can already hear you, imaginary reader, saying, with the distinct accent of a British person as imagined by an American person, “Well ‘ang on! Ain’t it the bloody point of a conspiracy theory that the supposed power is illegitimate, mate?!” And to which I say: thank you, imaginary reader, you’re absolutely correct. Conspiracy theories generally involve a secret villain, but never, as far as I can tell, a secret, powerful hero; they pit the everyman against the secretive establishment. (Except maybe for Qanon, which is a whole kettle of fish I can’t possibly wrangle with in this already bloated comment.) This bottom space, then, is a negative space that completes our chart by pointing out where the conspiracy theorist does not see conspiracy.

 Of particular interest here is the bottom right, where a group does have power but is not viewed as a ‘conspiracy.’ Going back to the octopus, you don’t see it used as a symbol of big business so much these days. In the prewar American political conscious, this kind of conspiracy-style rhetoric against big businesses and often capitalism as a whole was not uncommon. After Red Scares and half a century of Cold War propaganda, capital isn’t such an inviting target. Capitalism is freedom, after all! So the conspiratorial tone largely has to move on to other subjects, both old ones and new ones.

 This distinction explains a lot of how we got from the actual Catholic Church to the conspiracy theory canons. Even the earliest popes, who I’m led to understand were more like kings who happened to claim their legitimacy from religion, were never a secret cabal. People believed in their religion, so they believed in the legitimacy of the pope. The institution of the church could be opposed and fought with, but it was almost always viewed as at least partially legitimate. Fast forward 1400 years, give or take, and you have the upheaval of the Protestant Reformation. Suddenly, we move from the bottom to the top; the institution is no longer seen as legitimate. Now, you have room for conspiracy theories, though I imagine that it takes generations of people living in Protestant majority communities to other the Catholic Church enough that you get into the really heavy stuff.

 You can see this question of legitimacy unfolding in real time in the US today. The federal judiciary is a good example. For a long time, the mainstream liberal position has been to view the court as essentially apolitical, ‘just calling balls and strikes’. This is the position that the justices themselves try to portray, for understandable reasons. Being a politician taken to task for their position kinda sucks! Judges would much rather be understood as subject matter experts, as academics answering academic questions; that way, if you disagree, you’re just wrong about the subject, or more charitably having a different interpretation of the question, rather than objecting to some real decision that has material impacts on people’s lives. (This, incidentally, is probably some of the appeal of liberal, ‘apolitical’ technocracy to elected politicians. No one can accuse you of selling out your ideology if you claim not to have one, right?) The right, meanwhile, has understood the judiciary as a vital part of the conservative political project since at least the failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, if not earlier. There’s a whole ecosystem devoted to cultivating conservative legal talent, organizations funding conservative legal studies, entire fields of legal scholarship that just happen to usually guide the reader to conservative outcomes. With the installation of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barret to the Supreme Court, I think it’s fair to say that for the moment, the right has won. They may have continued to move right and froth with rage when the court isn’t quite conservative ENOUGH for them, but by any reasonable metric (IE, you’re not a political opinion writer for a major newspaper), the right has won. And yet, it’s taken two decades after Bush v. Gore, you know, that thing where the Supreme Court basically called the presidency for Bush along strictly ideological lines, for mainstream liberals to finally cotton onto the idea that maybe the Supreme Court is a fundamentally undemocratic institution (it is) and maybe we should do something about that (we should)? And even then, it’s largely coming from the left flank, which has been on that shit way longer than the mainstream Democratic Party and has only now been able to make the mainstream at least pretend to consider it. And those circles of either traditionally left wing or more recently radicalized left-liberals often talk about the Supreme Court as a conspiracy! Nine unelected politicians in robes, making shadowy decisions sometimes literally in the dead of night! It’s almost effortless to write about the Supreme Court in that tone. Weird clothing, weird habits, a small, secretive, selective group which nonetheless can carry immense power over the country and indeed the world. Really explains why so much of the justices’ public speaking (and much of John Roberts’ work as chief justice) is devoted to trying to defend that legitimacy.

 I could go on, but this post is long enough already!!!

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 42. Pingback: Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things – A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
 43. sthomson1971 says:
 March 22, 2022 at 8:48 am

 Thanks for that thread about Bassus — my only encounter with him before was his bit part in Antony and Cleopatra. He’s got quite a backstory!

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Welcome! As we’ve done once before, this week I am going to take a chance to answer a number of shorter questions by my patrons over at Patreon who are at the Patres et Matres Conscripti tier, which entitles them to a seat in the ACOUP Senate (and for those of you who are in the ACOUP Senate, please note that over on Patreon there should be a poll up on the first longer question that ought to get its own dedicated post).
As before, I want to make clear that the responses to these questions aren’t necessarily as carefully researched or planned as a longer post; they reflect roughly what you’d get if you asked me the same question in office hours or after one of my classes. Of course I try to avoid errors or pontificating on topics about which I know little (I try to do both of those things all of the time), but these are still a bit less comprehensive than a full post.
And of course if you like what you are reading here, please share it; if you really like it, you can support me on Patreon; as mentioned patrons who join the Patres et Matres Conscripti get to propose questions that I answer here. And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings.
  Via Wikipedia, Cicero Denounces Catiline, by Cesare Maccari. This isn’t an accurate layout of the Roman curia Hostilia (the Senate house where the speech in question would have been delivered), which was rectangular in form and would have been a lot more cramped than this. Nevertheless, as it is probably the most famous depiction of the Roman Senate, it seemed a worthwhile title card. 
Onward!
 Q: Leo Zhang asks, “What are other non-Mediterranean analogs for the collapse of the Roman Empire?” 
A: So how to answer this question depends a fair bit on how specific we are about ‘non-Mediterranean.’ The most obvious analog is the Mediterranean-adjacent Late Bronze Age Collapse (LBAC) which occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East around 1100 BC. If anything, the LBAC was substantially more severe than the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, though it shares a pattern in that areas that were on the periphery of the state system (Greece in the LBAC; the Roman West and especially Britain during the fall of Rome) were far more dramatically impacted than areas in the core. In the Roman case, of course, the Eastern half of the empire kept on after the collapse of the West with relatively limited disruption; during the LBAC, Egypt and the (Middle) Assyrian Empires weathered the collapse with substantial but not overwhelming disruption. By contrast, during the LBAC, many of the urban centers of Greece (to be clear, this is not classical Greece, but Greek urban centers some four centuries before Homer) were abandoned, architecture in stone almost entirely ceases (a shift back to wood), and technology of writing (in Linear B script) is lost, to be readopted (using the Phoenician script) three to four centuries later.
The causes of the Late Bronze Age Collapse are difficult to untangle. There’s some evidence for climatic disruption (possibly related to volcanic activity, but the dates don’t line up as clearly as we’d like) which would have negatively impacted agriculture. There seems to be pretty significant evidence that once things started going wrong, there was a domino-effect where state collapse in one region produced raiding and refugees that strained resources in the next, while disrupting the trade networks that states relied on for both revenue and military equipment. It’s also possible that the emergence of ironworking (and thus iron weapons, which were cheaper than bronze) may have had a role, though I have to admit I am quite skeptical of this last model.
If we want to get solidly outside of the Mediterranean, the collapse of the Han Dynasty (206BC-220 AD) into the Three Kingdoms era (220-280) has fairly strong parallels with how Roman power declined in the western parts of the empire, particularly in how the loss of power int he imperial center caused the steady fragmentation of the empire into much smaller competing states. The warfare and fragmentation of the period seem to have been very destructive, though as with all pre-modern collapses, most of the population decline must have been in the form of disease and famine (potentially taking place gradually in the form of increased infant mortality playing out through subsistence farming survival strategies). If the census figures of the period are to be believed (there is, as I understand it, grounds for significant skepticism), by the time the Jin dynasty reestablished unified control of the country and could do a new census, the population of China had declined by almost 60% from its Han Dynasty peak over a period of just over a century. Its hard to compare that figure to the collapse of Rome because the evidence of the latter permits no firm estimate of population decline (though there probably was some) but my sense is that a decline of two-thirds of the population would be substantially worse than what we tend to think the decline was after the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West.
And as an aside, “Was the Fall of Rome Bad and If So How Bad Was It?” is one of the long-response topics up for voting over on Patreon for members of the ACOUP Senate, if you want me to write something more on that and the historical arguments that swirl around that question.
 Q: Maxwell Goebl asks, “What tactics did the Romans use to defeat steppe peoples, Parthians or other people who used horse archers?” 
A: We have a few interesting bits of evidence for this, but at the outset it seems worth noting that we don’t hear of anything like dedicated anti-horse-archer tactics here (or indeed, in many places we might expect them). As we’ve discussed, unlike in video-games where horse archers can sit at long range with virtual impunity, actual horse archers have to get fairly close to their enemies, making them in turn vulnerable both to missile fire and to sudden charges by melee cavalry. Generally, the successful Roman responses to horse archers (and the Romans do beat horse archer armies fairly frequently) was to use their heavy infantry to provide an unassailable ‘base’ (protected by shields from arrow fire) for either missile troops, cavalry or artillery (torsion catapults) to engage the enemy cavalry. Failure tended to be the result of situations where the killing element (cavalry, missile troops, artillery) is put in situations where it cannot be supported by the infantry, or vice-versa.
An interesting source here is Arrian’s Array against the Alans (you can find a translation here); the Alani were an steppe nomadic people and Arrian presents a notional battle formation for fighting them, although there is no indication this formation was ever used in any particular battle. Arrian suggets a formation which places the heavy infantry in the front ranks, with javelin and archer troops directly behind them (he suggests finding a position where these troops can be on higher ground, for understandable reasons) with field artillery (torsion catapults, again) deployed on the flanks and to the rear. The cavalry is placed tightly on the flanks behind the infantry. The plan is to then let the enemy attack, the idea being the enemy cavalry wouldn’t be able to penetrate the infantry line, but would take missile fire from it and the artillery; if the enemy appeared to break half of the cavalry was to be released to pursue with the rest kept in reserve in case that was a feint. It’s not clear how much this matches actual Roman practice, but it isn’t an absurdly impractical battle plan.
Arrian’s positioning of his cavalry as purely an exploitation force seems to speak almost directly to the mistakes made at Carrhae (53BC) where (Marcus Licinius) Crassus’ army was defeated in part his son, Publius Licinius Crassus foolishly advanced with a fairly large part of the cavalry, was lured away from the main force and destroyed in detail (Plut. Crass. 25.1-3; Dio 40.21.2-3). It’s also striking just how few missile troops Crassus seems to have at Carrhae in the narratives of the battle we do have, compared to Arrian’s assumption of fairly ample missile troops (including friendly horse archers and field artillery). Disaster in Mark Antony’s own Parthian campaign (in 36 BC) also began with dividing the army, in this case splitting off the siege train from the main army. The Parthians destroyed the detached siege train which substantially hindered Antony’s later siege operations (Plut. Antony 38.3), though Antony is still able to win a field engagement by luring the Parthians close enough to his lines that his cavalry could dash out (almost exactly as Arrian imagines it), and ‘catch’ the Parthian cavalry in close combat near enough that the heavy infantry could follow up and support (Plut. Antony 39.3-5). Antony’s campaign subsequently falls apart, however, due to logistics issues.
The importance of infantry and missile troops working together is also apparent from our man, the one, the only, Publius Ventidius Bassus (::airhorn sound::) and his defeat of a major Parthian army at the Battle of Cyrrhestica in 38 BC. Bassus’ army was positioned on the high ground and when the Parthians were lured into an attack, the Roman heavy infantry held and then forced the cavalry back down the slope, catching at least some of it in close combat in the confusion. Dio, who reports the battle, notes especially the impact of slingers who could effectively reach out and strike the Parthians at range (Dio, 49.20.2).
I will say that I find it striking that getting these sorts of tactics almost never work effectively in modern tactics games (like the Total War franchise), which is part of what made me write that post on archery and ‘kiting’ back in 2019.
 Q: Carabas asks, “How do you go about picking a given fictional battle and composing/researching a series like the ones you’ve done [Siege of Gondor, Helm’s Deep and the Loot Train Battle]?” 
The planning process for the “Siege of Gondor” series actually set the mold for a lot of how I set up and plan these longer series, since it was the first (and also, incidentally, remains the most popular). I’d initially thought to look at the Siege of Gondor itself because I knew there were going to be positive things I could say about it and I wanted to avoid just ending up with the blog as one more ‘historical nitpick society’ that was only ever negative. I had originally planned to just move through the battle in sequence and hadn’t thought a ton about the structure; it was in drafting the first post that I realized that there was an opportunity here to demonstrate some of the core concepts in military history in a systematic way.
And you can actually see in the process of writing that series in particular that I sort of ‘find’ the identity of the blog (I had always planned it as a history-and-pop-culture blog, of course, but if you look at the oldest posts in the first few weeks one would be forgiven for thinking the blog was going to be ‘historian complains about Game of Thrones‘ and mostly focused on arms, armor and tactics); it was the point where I realized I could actually use these long series (and the pop-culture reference point) to get into more sophisticated historical analysis (something beyond “that armor is comically wrong”) in an accessible and interesting way.
Now while I’d like to say I have a good, well-organized system for all of this, I really don’t. I keep a number of (poorly organized) lists of potential topics, but mostly I just sort of back-burner these ideas until they ripen. I don’t have any particular pipeline in part because I seem to always have more things to write than I have time to write them (my blog-writing ‘backlog’ has nothing on my research backlog where I have at least a decade’s worth of research projects sitting in ‘ideas’ folders just waiting for me to have the time to do them). Though it is hard to see because of the frequent delays between when a concept is ready to start drafting and when I actually start drafting, a lot of these topics emerge out of either earlier posts (Lonely Cities is a direct continuation, for instance, of my complaints about Peter Jackson’s ‘Pelennor Steppe‘) or out of what I am teaching. It is more often that I’m driven along by the historical concept I want to explain than by the pop-culture reference point, which is why I often find “can you discuss X fantasy novel/show/film?” requests difficult to get my head around if I don’t already have a sense of what the historical concept would be.
I generally keep topics restricted to those which aren’t going to require a lot of bespoke new research (just for time constraints, if nothing else), so once I’ve decided on a topic I can typically already look through my existing research notes or teaching notes to get the beginnings of a bibliography (and then blast my university library with book requests so I can go look up details). Ironically the battle post series required very minimal research time; most of the books I reference there I own and since pre-modern armies is what I do, I could often just speak from my own knowledge. When a topic is really foreign to me (the Dothraki series is a good example, both the Mongols and Native American Plains cultures are well outside of my specialty), I generally take the expedient of asking someone I know who does do that sort of history, typically with the question, “What should I read?” (asking for bibliography is a substantially smaller ‘ask’ than asking for a direct explanation of complex historiography). Many, many of my colleagues can likely report getting those emails, twitter DMs, Facebook messages, or hallway conversations.
There’s something of an irony here, because for my research writing I am very systematic in my approach, with lots of planning and outlining, but for ACOUP I am much more willing to just start writing on a topic and see where I end up (the entire outline for the Fortifications series lives on a single page of a 7×4 inch notepad).
 Q: Leo Zhang (two in one week!) asks, “Are there any historical analogs for something like Lodge of Sorceresses in the Witcher series who pull the strings of local monarchs from behind the scenes?” 
A: This particular trope, the trans-national cabal of educated knowledge-havers who manipulate secular rulers in pursuit of some hidden agenda (the Lodge, but also the Maesters of A Song of Ice and Fire seem to qualify, as do the Mages and Templars of the DragonAge setting) has always made me more than a bit uncomfortable, because there are historical analogs, but they have more to do with historical prejudices than actual historical power-structures.
The fairly obvious starting point for this trope seems to be the medieval Catholic Church which was a trans-national organization of educated people operating in a society with low literacy rates. In Western Europe, the Church really did have possession of a lot of the knowledge available to those societies and it did exist to a degree outside of the scope of secular power (though to what degree changes considerably depending on where and when you look). But treating the church as a single, more-or-less unified actor pursuing a single set of political goals resembles less the actual medieval Catholic Church and more early modern and modern anti-Catholic rhetoric (e.g. fears as late as 1960 that a Catholic president would be ‘under the sway’ of the foreign interests of the Pope, which were significant enough about them that Kennedy was asked about them and issued statements to assuage them that, “the Church does not speak for me.”).
The actual medieval clergy (especially its upper reaches) was more typically drawn from the same families which filled the ranks of the aristocracy; bishops and cardinals tended to be the brothers and cousins of dukes and kings. They also tended to have their seats in the regions they came from and very often were as loyal (and sometimes more so) to their local rulers than to the Holy See. Not for nothing did Henry IV, when he wrote to object to Pope Gregory VII’s reforms in 1075, write that he did so “with all of my Bishops.” Moreover, while in fantasy fiction the machinations of these literate cabals are seemingly unnoticed by the secular rulers, actual medieval kings were well aware of the influence of the Church and pushed back on it to secure what they saw as their own prerogatives (with mixed success). Where the church won these confrontations, its power was not in manipulation, but in religious authority; these people, after all, believed their religion, which invested the clergy with spiritual powers that mattered to folks.
Even more uncomfortable is the degree to which these fictional organizations seem to reflect nonsense antisemitic canards which claimed that there was some ‘vast Jewish conspiracy’ directing world events from the shadows. This in turn reflects a sort of prejudice frequently suffered by ‘Middleman minorities‘ in both historical and modern societies. Highly educated Jews show up fairly frequently in medieval and early modern European courts, often (but not always) because of their role in finance (since Christians were not permitted to lend to other Christians at interest). The existing prejudice also made those same Jews vulnerable to being scapegoated – often by, and for the failures of, the same secular rulers who invited them in the first place – and persecuted.
Conspiracy theories of this sort, blaming problems on a cabal of highly placed ‘Papists’ or ‘the Jews’ have thus always been around (and frequently been distressingly popular), despite again – to be clear – being garbage nonsense. Absolutely the medieval Catholic church wielded massive institutional power, but it did so openly and the clergy were hardly a single united bloc with a single plan pulling the strings of the world towards a collective goal. Meanwhile, if it even needs say, there was not then and is not now any vast Jewish conspiracy. Persecuted minorities almost definitionally do not wield substantial institutional power; if they did, they wouldn’t be persecuted.
Humans are clearly drawn to these sorts of conspiracy theories, imagining power wielded from behind the scenes, but in actual history, most power is held by the obvious fellows who command armies and rule states and wield that power openly. Because the fact is, the ruler with access to lots of soldiers with weapons generally has no reason to let anyone pull their strings.
 And that’s that for this week’s deliberations! Next week, hopefully, we’ll continue our march through fortifications!
Referenda ad Senatum: November 19, 2021: Hidden String-Pullers, Falling Empires and Tactics Against Horse Archers!
https://acoup.blog/2021/11/19/referenda-ad-senatum-november-19-2021-hidden-string-pullers-falling-empires-and-tactics-against-horse-archers/
https://princiya.com/blog/dream-bucket-list/
My dream bucket list
2021-12-04
None
<div><div><p></p><div><p>Personal blog by <a href="https://princiya.com">Princiya Sequeira</a>.</p><p>I blog about my journey into a technical leadership role.</p><p>I am a skilled programmer with strong communication skills and 12+ years of experience building full-stack web &amp; mobile apps, implementing CI/CD solutions and supporting infrastructures, including 3+ years of experience leading technical teams at scale.</p><p><a href="https://princiya.com/blog/tags">See all blog categories</a></p></div></div><div><main><article><header><p>December 4, 2021 • ☕️ 1 min read</p></header><div><p>I do various things based on my mood. Sometimes I binge watch for hours, sometimes I am extremely productive. Offcourse I am talking about my free time.</p>
<ul>
<li>Get a PhD</li>
<li>Write a book</li>
</ul></div></article></main></div></div>||||I|||| P`s Blog

 Princiya




 Personal blog by Princiya Sequeira.

 I blog about my journey into a technical leadership role.

 I am a skilled programmer with strong communication skills and 12+ years of experience building full-stack web & mobile apps, implementing CI/CD solutions and supporting infrastructures, including 3+ years of experience leading technical teams at scale.

 See all blog categories
 twitter • github • rss




 My dream bucket list

 December 4, 2021 • ☕️ 1 min read


 dreamdraft
 This is a draft post and will be completed soon. The thoughts on this post are my raw brain dump. Read all completed posts here.

 I do various things based on my mood. Sometimes I binge watch for hours, sometimes I am extremely productive. Offcourse I am talking about my free time.

 * Get a PhD
 * Write a book
 * ← Thankful and grateful
 * How to learn →




 Personal blog by Princiya Sequeira.

 I blog about my journey into a technical leadership role.

 I am a skilled programmer with strong communication skills and 12+ years of experience building full-stack web & mobile apps, implementing CI/CD solutions and supporting infrastructures, including 3+ years of experience leading technical teams at scale.

 See all blog categories
 twitter • github • rss




Personal blog by Princiya Sequeira. I blog about my journey into a technical leadership role. I am a skilled programmer with strong communication skills and 12+ years of experience building full-stack web &amp; mobile apps, implementing CI/CD solutions and supporting infrastructures, including 3+ years of experience leading technical teams at scale.  See all blog categories        December 4, 2021 • ☕️ 1 min read   I do various things based on my mood. Sometimes I binge watch for hours, sometimes I am extremely productive. Offcourse I am talking about my free time.
Get a PhD
Write a book
My dream bucket list
https://princiya.com/blog/dream-bucket-list/
https://www.jefftk.com/
Jeff Kaufman
2023-02-06
None
<div><div>
<div>
 
<div>
 <div>
 <p>
With covid I've tried a lot of different n95 masks, and I like the <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Kimberly-Clark-Respirator-53358-NIOSH-Approved-Respirators/dp/B08NVDFB3R/">"pouch"-style
masks</a> best. By a lot! They're much easier to breathe through
then anything else I've tried, probably because they have so much
surface area. Because your mouth is in a large pocket, there's plenty
of room for talking, and even singing. And they also get a good seal
without being too squeezy on my face or head.
</p><p>
While I see more people wearing them over time, they are still
relatively unusual. I expect some of this is different masks, being a
good fit for people with different shaped heads and different
preferences, but I think the main problem is that they make you look
a bit like a duck:
</p>
</div>
 
 <p><a href="/p/duckbill-masks-are-great">more...</a>
 </p></div>
<div>
 <div>
 <p>
In general I'm a big advocate of child-proofing. The less they can
get hurt with or mess up, the more you can relax, let your guard down,
go longer without looking over to see how they're doing, and focus on
other things. On the other hand, some things (cords, trash cans) are
difficult or inconvenient to remove from otherwise pretty
child-proofed areas. With these we've had good success teaching
simple boundaries, even with young kids.
</p><p>
With all three kids one of the first rules we taught was "cords are
no". I would be very careful to teach a clear
and <a href="/p/predictable-parenting">consistent</a> boundary: just
having your hand near a cord, brushing a cord while you were clearly
going for something else, looking intently at cords, those were all
fine. It was only reaching out to grab one that got a firm "cords are
no" and separating them from the cord.
</p>
</div>
 
 <p><a href="/p/teaching-simple-boundaries">more...</a>
 </p></div>
<div>
 <div>
 <p>
I was looking at the specs for the <a href="https://www.kia.com/us/en/ev6/specs">Kia EV6</a> after someone
brought it up in a <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=34261671">discussion</a>:
</p>
<blockquote>
DC Fast Charge Time (10-80% @ 350 kW via Electric Vehicle Supply
Equipment) Level 3 Charger: Approx. 18 min.
</blockquote>
</div>
 
 <p><a href="/p/misleading-fast-charging-specs">more...</a>
 </p></div>
<div>
 <div>
 <p>
Whenever I post something publicly on Facebook mentioning hacking I
get a ton of spammy comments:
</p><p>
<a href="/fb-hack-comments-big.jpg"></a></p>
</div>
 
 <p><a href="/p/hacked-account-spam">more...</a>
 </p></div>
<div>
 <div>
 <p>
There was recently <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/contradancers/posts/10161487142454739/">some
discussion</a> on how many minutes callers typically run a contra
dance, with a lot of "well, it depends" answers. There's a place for
that, but I think it's also helpful to have some numbers. I went back
over the last ten evenings where I <a href="/p/record-your-playing">have
recordings</a>:
</p><p>
<a href="/average-contra-dance-lengths-by-evening-big.png"></a></p>
<p>
It looks like 8-9min is pretty common. How much variability is
there within an evening?
</p>
</div>
 
 <p><a href="/p/contra-dance-lengths">more...</a>
 </p></div>
<div>
 <div>
 <p>
Let's say you use a Google account as the root of your online
identity: Gmail, Fi, "Sign in with Google", Google's password manager,
etc. How much should you be worried that you'll suddenly find
yourself unable to get into everything? Should you do something else
instead?
</p><p>
To get a sense of how common lockouts are and how they happen I looked
through lockout reports on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/">Hacker News</a> by searching for
<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Google+blocked+account">[google
blocked account]</a> and <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&amp;page=0&amp;prefix=false&amp;query=Google%20%22locked%22%20out&amp;sort=byPopularity&amp;type=story">[google
locked out]</a>. I looked at top-level stories and the comments on
them for cases where people were entirely locked out of an account; I
didn't include cases where people lost access to only some Google
services (Payments, AdWords, etc) or where they did get back in on
their own. I did count cases where it took making a lot of noise on
HN or Twitter, though.
</p>
<p>
There are two reasons people seem to get locked out:
</p>
</div>
 
 <p><a href="/p/how-likely-is-losing-a-google-account">more...</a>
 </p></div>
<p><a href="/news">More Posts</a>
</p></div>
<div>
 <p><a href="pictures/heads/"></a></p>
 
 
 
</div>
 
 </div>||||I|||| * Jeff Kaufman
 * Posts
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 * Contact
 February 6th, 2023
 Duckbill Masks Are Great

 With covid I've tried a lot of different n95 masks, and I like the "pouch"-style masks best. By a lot! They're much easier to breathe through then anything else I've tried, probably because they have so much surface area. Because your mouth is in a large pocket, there's plenty of room for talking, and even singing. And they also get a good seal without being too squeezy on my face or head.

 While I see more people wearing them over time, they are still relatively unusual. I expect some of this is different masks, being a good fit for people with different shaped heads and different preferences, but I think the main problem is that they make you look a bit like a duck:

 more...
 February 5th, 2023
 Teaching Simple Boundaries

 In general I'm a big advocate of child-proofing. The less they can get hurt with or mess up, the more you can relax, let your guard down, go longer without looking over to see how they're doing, and focus on other things. On the other hand, some things (cords, trash cans) are difficult or inconvenient to remove from otherwise pretty child-proofed areas. With these we've had good success teaching simple boundaries, even with young kids.

 With all three kids one of the first rules we taught was "cords are no". I would be very careful to teach a clear and consistent boundary: just having your hand near a cord, brushing a cord while you were clearly going for something else, looking intently at cords, those were all fine. It was only reaching out to grab one that got a firm "cords are no" and separating them from the cord.

 more...
 February 4th, 2023
 Misleading Fast Charging Specs

 I was looking at the specs for the Kia EV6 after someone brought it up in a discussion:

 DC Fast Charge Time (10-80% @ 350 kW via Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) Level 3 Charger: Approx. 18 min.

 more...
 February 1st, 2023
 Hacked Account Spam

 Whenever I post something publicly on Facebook mentioning hacking I get a ton of spammy comments:

 more...
 January 31st, 2023
 Contra Dance Lengths

 There was recently some discussion on how many minutes callers typically run a contra dance, with a lot of "well, it depends" answers. There's a place for that, but I think it's also helpful to have some numbers. I went back over the last ten evenings where I have recordings:

 It looks like 8-9min is pretty common. How much variability is there within an evening?

 more...
 January 29th, 2023
 How Likely is Losing a Google Account?

 Let's say you use a Google account as the root of your online identity: Gmail, Fi, "Sign in with Google", Google's password manager, etc. How much should you be worried that you'll suddenly find yourself unable to get into everything? Should you do something else instead?

 To get a sense of how common lockouts are and how they happen I looked through lockout reports on Hacker News by searching for [google blocked account] and [google locked out]. I looked at top-level stories and the comments on them for cases where people were entirely locked out of an account; I didn't include cases where people lost access to only some Google services (Payments, AdWords, etc) or where they did get back in on their own. I did count cases where it took making a lot of noise on HN or Twitter, though.

 There are two reasons people seem to get locked out:

 more...
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With covid I've tried a lot of different n95 masks, and I like the "pouch"-style
masks best. By a lot! They're much easier to breathe through
then anything else I've tried, probably because they have so much
surface area. Because your mouth is in a large pocket, there's plenty
of room for talking, and even singing. And they also get a good seal
without being too squeezy on my face or head.
 
While I see more people wearing them over time, they are still
relatively unusual. I expect some of this is different masks, being a
good fit for people with different shaped heads and different
preferences, but I think the main problem is that they make you look
a bit like a duck:
 
  more...
  
 
 
In general I'm a big advocate of child-proofing. The less they can
get hurt with or mess up, the more you can relax, let your guard down,
go longer without looking over to see how they're doing, and focus on
other things. On the other hand, some things (cords, trash cans) are
difficult or inconvenient to remove from otherwise pretty
child-proofed areas. With these we've had good success teaching
simple boundaries, even with young kids.
 
With all three kids one of the first rules we taught was "cords are
no". I would be very careful to teach a clear
and consistent boundary: just
having your hand near a cord, brushing a cord while you were clearly
going for something else, looking intently at cords, those were all
fine. It was only reaching out to grab one that got a firm "cords are
no" and separating them from the cord.
 
  more...
  
 
 
I was looking at the specs for the Kia EV6 after someone
brought it up in a discussion:
DC Fast Charge Time (10-80% @ 350 kW via Electric Vehicle Supply
Equipment) Level 3 Charger: Approx. 18 min.
 
  more...
  
 
 
Whenever I post something publicly on Facebook mentioning hacking I
get a ton of spammy comments:
 
  
 
  more...
  
 
 
There was recently some
discussion on how many minutes callers typically run a contra
dance, with a lot of "well, it depends" answers. There's a place for
that, but I think it's also helpful to have some numbers. I went back
over the last ten evenings where I have
recordings:
 
  
It looks like 8-9min is pretty common. How much variability is
there within an evening?
 
  more...
  
 
 
Let's say you use a Google account as the root of your online
identity: Gmail, Fi, "Sign in with Google", Google's password manager,
etc. How much should you be worried that you'll suddenly find
yourself unable to get into everything? Should you do something else
instead?
 
To get a sense of how common lockouts are and how they happen I looked
through lockout reports on Hacker News by searching for
[google
blocked account] and [google
locked out]. I looked at top-level stories and the comments on
them for cases where people were entirely locked out of an account; I
didn't include cases where people lost access to only some Google
services (Payments, AdWords, etc) or where they did get back in on
their own. I did count cases where it took making a lot of noise on
HN or Twitter, though.
There are two reasons people seem to get locked out:
 
  more...
  
 More Posts
Jeff Kaufman
https://www.jefftk.com/
https://proseandpose.com/
Prose and Pose
2014-01-27
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Welcome! 
I’m Dee, short story writer and aspiring author. Find quick short stories when you need a literary hit. They’ll take you under three minutes to read.
Have a browse and let me know what you think.
Dee x
Prose and Pose
https://proseandpose.com/
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
Why Cryonics Makes Sense — Wait But Why
2016-03-25
Tim Urban
<div><div><div><p><em>We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. <a href="https://gum.co/cryonics">Buy it here.</a></em></p></div>
<p>You’re on an airplane when you hear a loud sound and things start violently shaking. A minute later, the captain comes on the speaker and says:</p>
<p><em>There’s been an explosion in the engine, and the plane is going to crash in 15 minutes. There’s no chance of survival. There is a potential way out—the plane happens to be transferring a shipment of parachutes, and anyone who would like to use one to escape the plane may do so. But I must warn you—the parachutes are experimental and completely untested, with no guarantee to work. We also have no idea what the terrain will be like down below. Please line up in the aisle if you’d like a parachute, and the flight attendants will give you one, show you how to use it and usher you to the emergency exit where you can jump. Those who choose not to take that option, please remain in your seat—this will be over soon, and you will feel no pain.</em></p>
<p>What would you do?</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>When Robert Ettinger was a kid in the 1930s, he read a lot of science fiction, and he assumed that with the world advancing the way it was, scientists would surely have a cure for aging at some point during his lifetime. He would live to see a world where sickness was a thing of the past and death was something people chose to do voluntarily, at a time of their choosing.<a href="#footnote-1-4836">1</a><a href="#footnote2-1-4836">1</a><sup>← New to WBW? Open these.</sup></p>
<p>But thirty years later, aging and involuntary death were still very much a thing, and Ettinger, by then a physics professor, realized that science might not solve these problems in time for him to reap the benefits. So he started thinking about how to hack the system.</p>
<p>If, rather than being buried or cremated after his death, he could instead be frozen in some way—then whenever the scientists <em>did </em>eventually get around to conquering mortality, they’d probably also have the tools and know-how to resuscitate him, and he could have the last laugh after all.</p>
<p>In 1962, he wrote about this concept in a book called <em><a href="http://www.cryonics.org/images/uploads/misc/Prospect_Book.pdf">The Prospects of Immortality</a></em>, and the cryonics movement was born.</p>
<p>The first person to give cryonics a try was James Bedford, a psychology professor who died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 73 and is doing his thing in a vat of liquid nitrogen in Arizona as you read this. Others slowly began to follow, and today, there are over 300 people hanging out in vats of liquid nitrogen.</p>
<p>Now let’s pause for a second. A year ago, I knew almost nothing about cryonics, and my impressions of it were something like this sentence:</p>
<p><em>Cryonics, or cryogenics, is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.</em></p>
<p>Then I started learning about it. It’s your fault—cryonics is one of the potential-future-post-topics people email me about most, and it’s something at least five readers have brought up in conversation when I’ve met them in person. And as I began to read about cryonics, I soon learned that a lot of the words in my italicized assumption sentence weren’t correct.</p>
<p>So let’s work our way through the sentence as we go over exactly what cryonics is and how it works. We’ll start with this part:</p>
<p><strong>Cryonics, or cryogenics, is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.</strong></p>
<p>It turns out that this is like saying, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRqnTODwvEA">Wingsuit flying</a>, or meteorology, is the sport of flying through the air using a wingsuit.” Meteorology is the study of what happens in the atmosphere, which includes how wind works, and wingsuit flying is a process that harnesses the wind—and you’d be an odd person if you thought they were the same thing.</p>
<p>Likewise, cryogenics is a branch of physics that studies the production and effects of very low temperatures, while cryonics is the practice of using very low temperatures to try to preserve a human being. Not the same thing.</p>
<p>Next, we have a string of three misleading words to talk about:</p>
<p><strong>Cryonics is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, <strong>and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.</strong></strong></p>
<p>We’ll address these three words by going through how cryonics works, starting at the beginning.</p>
<p>So you decide you want to be a cryonicist. Here are the steps:</p>
<p><strong>Step 1) Pick a company</strong></p>
<p>There are four major companies that provide cryonics services—<a href="http://www.alcor.org/">Alcor</a> in Arizona, <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/">Cryonics Institute</a> (CI) in Michigan, <a href="http://www.americancryonics.org/">American Cryonics Society</a> (ACS) in California, and <a href="http://www.kriorus.com/en">KrioRus</a> in Russia. KrioRus is the newest option and quickly up-and-coming, but the two big boys are Alcor and CI (ACS doesn’t have their own storage facilities—they store with CI).</p>
<p>From my perusing, it seems like Alcor is the slightly-more-legit and fancier of the two, while CI (which was started by Robert Ettinger, the guy who launched the movement) is more affordable and gives off more of a mom-and-pop vibe. Both are nonprofit, and each has about 150 people in storage. Alcor has a little over 1,000 “members” (i.e. people who will one day be in storage), and CI has around half that number.</p>
<p><strong>Step 2) </strong><strong>Become a member</strong></p>
<p>To become a cryonicist, you need to fill out some paperwork, sign some stuff and get it notarized, and pay for three things: an annual membership fee, a transport fee to get your body to the facility after you die, and a treatment/storage/revival fee.</p>
<p>Alcor’s <a href="http://www.alcor.org/BecomeMember/scheduleA.html">annual membership fee</a> is about $700, and their transport fee is bundled together with the treatment/storage/revival fee—together they cost $200,000. Alcor gives you the option of ditching your body and just freezing your brain (this is called “neuropreservation”), which brings the price down to $80,000.</p>
<p>CI’s <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/ci-landing/funding-for-cryostasis/">annual membership fee</a> is $120 (or a one-time fee of $1,250 for a lifetime membership) and the treatment, etc. costs $35,000 ($28,000 for lifetime members). This is so much cheaper than Alcor for two main reasons:</p>
<p>First, it doesn’t include the transport. If you live near the facility, you can save a lot of money. If not, you’ll need to go through their partner for a transport contract, which costs $95,000 ($88,000 for lifetime members).</p>
<p>Second, Alcor uses more than half of their large fee to fund what they call their <a href="http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/patientcaretrustfund.html">Patient Care Trust</a>. Back in the 70s, there were more cryonics companies, and some of them went bankrupt, which meant their frozen people stopped being frozen, which was a not ideal outcome. Alcor’s trust is a backup fund to make sure their “patients” won’t be affected by something like a company financial crisis.</p>
<p><strong>Step 3) Get a life insurance policy in the name of your new cryonics company</strong></p>
<p>Sounds shady, right? But it also makes sense. Both Alcor and CI are small companies on a pretty tight budget and neither can afford to offer a payment plan to be hopefully paid out by your estate or your relatives. On the patient end, unless you’re rich, cryonics fees are huge, and a life insurance policy guaranteed to pay your full cryonics fee forces you to save for this fee throughout your life. For young people, even sizable life insurance policies are pretty cheap—with CI, you could be totally covered for as little as $300/year ($120 annual membership, $180 life insurance policy to cover the main fee). Even for Alcor’s more expensive package, costs shouldn’t exceed $100/month.</p>
<p>Those fees aren’t nothing, but the whole life insurance thing, at least when it comes to younger people, pretty effectively ejects “rich” from our black and red sentence. If it costs the same as cable or a cigarette habit, you don’t need to be rich to pay for it.</p>
<p><strong>Step 4) Put on your bracelet and go on living your life</strong></p>
<p>Cryonics members are given <a href="http://alcor.org/BecomeMember/">a bracelet and a necklace</a>, etched with instructions and contact info, and encouraged to wear one at all times, so if you suddenly die, whoever finds you will know to notify the company.</p>
<p><strong>Step 5) Die</strong></p>
<p>Okay here’s where things get tricky. We think of the divide between life and death as a distinct boundary, and we believe that at any given point, a person is either definitively alive or definitively dead. But let’s examine that assumption for a second:</p>
<p>Let’s first talk about what it means when a person is “doomed” from a health standpoint. We can all agree that what constitutes someone being doomed depends on where, and when, they are. A three-year-old with advanced pneumonia in 1740 would probably have been doomed, while the same child with the same condition today might be fully treatable. The same story could be said of the fate of someone who falls badly ill in a remote village in Malawi compared with their fate if they were in London instead. “Doomed” depends on a number of factors.</p>
<p>That the same thing can be said of “dead” is at first pretty unintuitive. But Alcor’s CEO Max More puts it this way: “Fifty years ago if you were walking along the street and someone keeled over in front of you and stopped breathing you would have checked them out and said they were dead and disposed of them. Today we don’t do that, instead we do CPR and all kinds of things. People we thought were dead 50 years ago we now know were not.”<a href="#footnote2-2-4836">2</a>
</p><p>Today, dead means the heart has been stopped for 4-6 minutes, because that’s how long the brain can go without oxygen before brain death occurs. But Alcor, in its site’s <a href="http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm">Science FAQ</a>, explains that “the brain ‘dies’ after several minutes without oxygen not because it is immediately destroyed, but because of a cascade of processes that commit it to destruction in the hours that follow restoration of warm blood circulation. Restoring circulation with cool blood instead of warm blood, reopening blocked vessels with high pressure, avoiding excessive oxygenation, and blocking cell death with drugs can prevent this destruction.”<a href="#footnote2-3-4836">3</a> The site goes on to explain that “with new experimental treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can now be survived without brain injury. Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making today’s beliefs about when death occurs obsolete.”</p>
<p>In other words, what we think of as “dead” actually means “doomed, under the current circumstances.” Someone fifty years ago who suffered from cardiac arrest wasn’t dead, they were doomed to die because the medical technology at the time couldn’t save them. Today, that person wouldn’t be considered dead yet because they wouldn’t be doomed yet. Instead, someone today “dies” 4-6 minutes after cardiac arrest, because that happens to be how long someone can currently go before modern technology can no longer help them.</p>
<p>Cryonicists view death not as a singular <em>event</em>, but as a <em>process</em>—one that starts when the heart stops beating and ends later at a point called “the information-theoretic criterion for death”—let’s call it “info death”—when the brain has become so damaged that no amount of present <em>or future </em>technology could restore it to its original state or have any way to retrieve its information.</p>
<p>Here’s an interesting way to think about it: Imagine a patient arriving in an ambulance to Hospital A, a typical modern hospital. The patient’s heart stopped 15 minutes before the EMTs arrived and he is immediately pronounced dead at the hospital. What if, though, the doctors at Hospital A learned that Hospital B across the street had developed a radical new technology that could revive a patient anytime within <em>60</em> minutes after cardiac arrest with no long-term damage? What would the people at Hospital A do?</p>
<p>Of course, they would rush the patient across the street to Hospital B to save him. If Hospital B did save the patient, then by definition the patient wouldn’t actually have been dead in Hospital A, just <em>pronounced dead</em> because Hospital A viewed him as entirely and without exception <em>doomed</em>.</p>
<p>What cryonicists suggest is that in many cases where today a patient is pronounced dead, they’re not dead but rather doomed, and that there is a Hospital B that can save the day—but instead of being in a different <i>place</i>, it’s in a different <i>time</i>. It’s in the future.</p>
<p>That’s why cryonicists adamantly assert that cryonics does <em>not </em>deal with dead people—it deals with living people who simply need to be transferred to a future hospital to be saved. They believe that in many cases, today’s corpse is tomorrow’s patient (which is why they call their frozen clients “patients” instead of “corpses” or “remains”), and they view their work as essentially “extended emergency medicine.”<a href="#footnote2-4-4836">4</a>
</p><p>But it’s emergency medicine with an important caveat. Today’s technology has no way to revive a cryonically-suspended patient, so it isn’t considered a medical procedure by the law but rather a weird kind of coffin—i.e. if you cryopreserve someone who hasn’t yet been pronounced dead, it’s seen by the law as homicide. Even if the patient is terminally ill beyond any hope and adamantly doesn’t want to deteriorate further before being cryopreserved, it’s not an option—at least not under current laws (laws that some are <a href="http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/donaldson.html">trying to change</a>). This puts cryonicists in a tough bind—and it’s exactly where that differing definition of death comes in handy.</p>
<p>The law does not see death as a process. For a long time, legal death in the US was considered to occur when a person’s heartbeat and breathing stopped. As modern medical procedures like CPR and defibrillators started to allow those patients to be resuscitated, the law had to <a href="http://www.uniformlaws.org/ActSummary.aspx?title=Determination%20of%20Death%20Act">change the definition</a> of legal death to include “irreversible cessation of all functions of the brain.”<a href="#footnote2-5-4836">5</a> The old “heartbeat and breathing” definition of legal death is now called “clinical death,” a middle ground point where there’s an obligation to attempt resuscitation in most cases but where a patient can also have a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order in place (common with terminally ill patients).<a href="#footnote-2-4836">2</a> In DNR cases, a doctor or nurse will pronounce a clinically dead patient to be legally dead—even though a resuscitation effort could still revive them.</p>
<p>This is a critical fact for cryonics. Cryonics technicians have to wait until legal death to begin their work on a patient, but with the help of a patient’s DNR order, they can start the process right after the heart stops, well before any brain damage sets in.</p>
<p>So this is the window for cryonics:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Death-chart-2.png"></a></p>
<p>Which brings us back to our list, where we can now clarify what we really mean with Step 5:</p>
<p><strong>Step 5) Legally Die</strong></p>
<p>You legally dying is a key step along the way here, so don’t mess it up. You can do it the good way, the bad way, or the really bad way.</p>
<p><strong>The good way:</strong> Something predictable where you’re in a cliché deathbed situation, like cancer. This allows you to get yourself on a plane to either Scottsdale (Alcor) or Michigan (CI) and into one of the specifically designated hospice care facilities that the cryonics company regularly works with. This is important because cryonics is highly controversial within the mainstream medical community and often not well-regarded or well-understood. As a result, some hospitals and hospice care facilities are “cryonics friendly” and others are not (those that aren’t have been known to make it difficult for cryonics staff to do what they need to do or deny them the same privileges organ transplant specialists get in a hospital). Once you’re in hospice care, the cryonics company can put staff on standby around the clock, so that the second you legally die, they can be there to start the treatment.</p>
<p><strong>The bad way: </strong>Something sudden and unexpected, like a heart attack, where at best, someone is there and can contact the cryonics company as you’re rushed to the hospital so they can meet you there, or worse, where you’re dead for a few hours or even longer before anyone finds you. In these circumstances, the cryonics company will do the best they can. Your brain will be in worse shape than ideal when you go into cryopreservation, but again, who knows what future technology will be able to accomplish, and as long as you’re still somewhere in the “cryonics window” and still in the <em>process </em>of dying, not yet having reached info death, there remains hope.</p>
<p><strong>The really bad way: </strong>A violent accident or something where your brain ends up badly damaged. In the worst of these cases, there’s not much cryonics can do to help—like the Alcor member who died in the September 11th attacks.<a href="#footnote2-6-4836">6</a> Another bad ending would be dying in a foul-play situation that would lead the police to want to do an autopsy (Alcor <a href="http://www.alcor.org/BecomeMember/toprotectyourself.html">suggests</a> its members file a no-autopsy-for-religious-reasons form with the government). A woman who has signed up for cryonics did a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/knfcx/i_am_signed_up_for_cryonics_at_my_death_ama/">Reddit AMA</a>, and when one of the questions was about how signing up had changed her life, she answered, “The biggest change I’ve noticed is that I’m more careful. I drive slower and more cautiously/attentively, I pay more attention to what’s going on around me.” Because she doesn’t want to die the really bad way.</p>
<p><strong>Step 6) Cool off ASAP and get transferred to the cryonics facility</strong></p>
<p>After you’re declared legally dead, the cryonics team will, ideally, immediately get going. The first thing they do is two-fold—they put you in an ice water bath to bring down your temperature and slow your metabolism (so any damage taking place as a result of cardiac arrest takes longer to happen), and they start getting your heart and lungs working again so that the body remains in stable condition. They do this by administering CPS (like CPR but with an S for support instead of an R for resuscitation, because they’re not trying to resuscitate you) using a mechanical heart-lung resuscitator called a <a href="http://assets1.mytrainsite.com/501494/ems.png?r=1280">thumper</a>:<a href="#footnote2-7-4836">7</a>
</p><p><a href="https://www.michiganinstruments.com/trade-in-program"></a></p>
<p>Then they inject you with a number of different medicines to make sure you don’t get blood clots or start rotting.</p>
<p>Once that’s under control, they can do a more involved procedure that surgically accesses the major blood vessels in your thigh and hooks them up to this guy:<a href="#footnote2-8-4836">8</a>
</p><p><a href="http://www.alcor.org/Library/pdfs/atp.pdf"></a></p>
<p>That’s a heart-lung machine that takes care of circulation and oxygenation so they can stop the much cruder CPS. In addition to circulating your blood, the machine draws heat out of your body, cooling it to just above the freezing temperature of water, and replaces some of your blood with an organ preservation solution that supports life at super low temperatures (this is similar to how transplant surgeons keep organs alive when they have to transport them long distances).</p>
<p>If you have to be flown to the cryonics facility, they pack you in ice and put you on board what they hope is not your last ever flight.</p>
<p><strong>Step 7) Get vitrified</strong></p>
<p>Most people who know what cryonics is think it means getting frozen. It doesn’t. It means getting vitrified.</p>
<p>Glass is weird. It’s not a typical solid because as it cools from its liquid phase, it never crystallizes into an orderly structure. But, as I learned when a bunch of commenters yelled at me after I published this post, it’s not actually a liquid either, since <a href="http://www.cmog.org/article/does-glass-flow">it doesn’t flow</a>. So, it’s neither a typical solid nor a liquid—it’s an “amorphous solid,” sometimes compared to a <a href="http://www.cmog.org/article/does-glass-flow">giant molecule</a>. For our purposes, the key is that <em>like a liquid</em>, glass doesn’t crystallize—rather, as it cools the molecules just move slower and slower until they stop.</p>
<p>If you <em>froze</em> a human, all the liquid water in their body would eventually hit its freezing point and crystallize<em> </em>into a solid. That wouldn’t be good—first, water ice takes up about 9% more volume than water liquid, so it would expand and badly damage tissue, and second, the sharp ice crystals would slice through cell membranes and other tissue around it.</p>
<p>So to avoid that catastrophic liquid-to-solid state change, cryonics technicians do something cool—they perform surgery through the chest and hook the major arteries up to tubes which pump all the blood out of the body, replacing it with a “cryoprotectant solution,” otherwise known as medical grade anti-freeze. This does two important things: it replaces 60% of the water in the body’s cells, and it lowers the freezing point of what liquid is left. The result, when done perfectly, is that no freezing happens in the body. Instead, as they chill your body down and down over the next three hours, it hits -124ºC, a key point called the “glass transition temperature” when the body’s liquid stays amorphous but rises so high in viscosity that no molecule can budge. You’re officially an amorphous solid, like glass—i.e. you’re <em>vitrified.</em></p>
<p>With no molecule movement, all chemical activity in your body comes to a halt. Biological time is stopped. You’re on pause.</p>
<p>Since I’m sure you’re feeling skeptical, it’s helpful to note that vitrifying biological parts is nothing new. We’ve been successfully vitrifying and then rewarming human embryos, sperm, skin, bone, and other body parts for a while now. More recently, scientists <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/">vitrified a rabbit kidney</a>:<a href="#footnote2-9-4836">9</a>
</p><p><a href="http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html"></a></p>
<p>Then they rewarmed it and put it back in the rabbit. And it still worked.</p>
<p>And just in February of 2016, there was a cryonics breakthrough when for the first time, scientists vitrified a rabbit’s brain and showed that once rewarmed, it was in <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/332074-cryonics-rabbit-brain-regenerated/">near-perfect condition</a>, “with the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures intact … [It was] the first time a cryopreservation was provably able to protect everything associated with learning and memory.”<a href="#footnote2-10-4836">10</a>
</p><p>Once you’re vitrified, you need to keep being chilled, little by little, until after about two weeks, you’re down to -196ºC. Why? Because that’s the point at which nitrogen becomes a liquid, and you’re about to take a long-term liquid nitrogen bath.</p>
<p><strong>Step 8) Go into storage</strong></p>
<p>Or as Alcor euphemistically calls it, “long-term care.” The new vitrified you now goes into what is essentially a large upright thermos that’s about 10 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide.<a href="#footnote2-11-4836">11</a>
</p><p><a href="http://www.alcor.org/AtWork/index.html"></a></p>
<p>You meet your new neighbors—three other vitrified people, each in their respective quadrant of the thermos, along with five people traveling super lean, with no body, whose heads are stacked in the middle column.<a href="#footnote2-12-4836">12</a>
</p><p><a href="http://www.alcor.org/AtWork/index.html"></a></p>
<p>Or, if you’re in a heads-only thermos, you’ll be one of 45 brains sharing the space (the brain is what’s being stored, but they keep the brains in their heads because it’s riskier to remove a brain than to just keep it in there and use the head as a carrying case).</p>
<p>Oh, and you’re upside-down. This is because liquid nitrogen boils off gradually from the top of the container. Normally, it’s no problem—the staff tops it off about once a week. But if, in some worst-case scenario, a container was forced to be left for a long time, the head would be the last thing to be affected—upside-down patients means it would take six months before the nitrogen boiled off so far that the head would be exposed.</p>
<p>And when it comes to blackouts, cryonics patients are totally safe—there’s no electricity involved in their storage.</p>
<p>And this is where you’ll hang out. Maybe for 10 years. Maybe for 150 years. Maybe for 1,200 years. But the time doesn’t matter to you. You’re on pause.</p>
<p>Now’s a good time for us to take a step back and look at the big picture. If Point A is “I’ve decided I want to sign up for cryonics,” and Point B is “Oh cool it’s the year 2482 and here I am doing stuff,” there are four major Ifs that need to all go the right way to take you from A to B:</p>
<p><strong>1) If I legally die in a not really bad way and everything goes as planned with getting me into the thermos</strong></p>
<p>and</p>
<p><strong>2) If future humanity ever reaches a point where it has the technology to revive me to full health</strong></p>
<p>and</p>
<p><strong>3) If the cryonics company can manage to store me safely and uninterrupted until that point</strong></p>
<p>and</p>
<p><strong>4) If when that point comes, the outside world actually does take action to revive me</strong></p>
<p>—then I’ll be there in 2482 doing stuff.</p>
<p>The eight steps you’ve taken so far that start with choosing a cryonics company and end with you in the thermos only accomplish the first If, with all the other Ifs still standing in between you and the next step in your cryonics journey—revival.</p>
<p>To understand how we can reach that step, we need to understand the deal with all four Ifs.</p>
<p>We’ll start by talking about Ifs 1-3, which need to be discussed together, because they’re interdependent and they work together. To illustrate why, let’s lay them out in the same visual:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Three-Segments-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The three segments of this line relate to Ifs 1, 2, and 3. But the visual is a little misleading at first, because even though all three segments lie on the same line, they’re all representing different concepts:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>The blue segment</strong> (If 1) represents the quality of your initial preservation.</li>
<li><strong>The yellow segment</strong> (If 2) represents the capabilities of medical technology as time moves forward.</li>
<li><strong>The green segment</strong> (If 3) represents the amount of time still needed to bridge the gap between the blue and yellow segments before they can finally connect to each other. </li>
</ul>
<p>The idea is that the better you were preserved, the farther out to the right the blue segment extends, and as technology gets better and better, the yellow segment extends itself farther and farther left toward the blue segment. The green segment gets smaller and smaller as this happens, until eventually the green segment is no more and the blue and yellow segments connect—i.e. medical technology has reached the point where it can revive you.</p>
<p>A lot of the key details about cryonics are centered here, so let’s talk about each of these segments in more depth:</p>
<p><strong>The blue segment—the quality of your preservation (which relates to If 1)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Three-Segments-Blue.png"></a></p>
<p>The length of the blue segment corresponds to the <em>quality of preservation</em>. Or, put most simply, the fewer roadblocks there are between your vitrified state in the thermos and a fully restored and healthy you, the <em>longer</em> the blue segment is—because if everything that happens leading up to you being put in the thermos goes as well as possible, it goes a <em>longer way</em> towards getting you to Point B and means the yellow segment has to do less work on <em>its </em>end to be able to revive you.</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Three-Segments-comparison.png"></a></p>
<p>The major factor that determines the length of the blue segment is how closely the atomic structure of your vitrified brain resembles the original atomic structure of your brain when it was living and healthy.</p>
<p>Let’s note that I said “brain,” not “body,” because what we mostly care about here is the brain. Cryonicists, like many of us, believe that who <em>you</em> are comes down to your brain. If, in the future, your identical current brain lived on top of a synthetic body and your exact memories and personality were fully intact, cryonicists would be satisfied that you “survived.” That’s why some don’t even bother vitrifying their body.</p>
<p>The second thing to note is that scientists believe that short-term memory is contained in brain <i>activity</i>—in the <i>electricity </i>going through your brain—while your long-term memory, your personality, your knowledge, and everything else that makes you “you” is contained in the brain’s <i>structure</i>—i.e. the particular arrangement of atoms that make up your brain.<a href="#footnote2-13-4836">13</a>
</p><p>Any electrical activity in your brain before legal death will be lost during vitrification, so you’d be revived without the short-term memory of the end of your pre-vitrified life. But what vitrification <i>can </i>preserve is the structure of your brain, which conveniently, is all we care about.</p>
<p>This concept gives us a clearer understanding of the way cryonicists view death. To cryonicists, perfect health means the exact arrangement of atoms in your healthy brain being intact, and the process of dying means the deterioration of that arrangement due to phenomena like aging, injury, disease, and, eventually, effects caused by heart stoppage. Death, to them, means the point at which the original structure of your brain has become <em>so</em> disorganized that even the fanciest future science lab would have no way of figuring out what the original arrangement looked like—that’s the definition of info death.</p>
<p>The concept of info death makes sense when we compare the brain to a computer’s hard drive. Eliezer Yudkowsky explains how difficult it actually is to bring a computer hard drive to info death:<a href="#footnote2-14-4836">14</a>
</p><p><em>If you want to securely erase a hard drive, it’s not as easy as writing it over with zeroes. Sure, an “erased” hard drive like this won’t boot up your computer if you just plug it in again. But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between “this was a 0, overwritten by a 0” and “this was a 1, overwritten by a 0”.</em></p>
<p><em>There are programs advertised to “securely erase” hard drives using many overwrites of 0s, 1s, and random data. But if you want to keep the secret on your hard drive secure against all possible future technologies that might ever be developed, then cover it with thermite and set it on fire. It’s the only way to be sure.</em></p>
<p>He applies the same logic to the human brain to suggest that cryonics patients should one day be revivable:</p>
<p><em>Pumping someone full of cryoprotectant and gradually lowering their temperature until they can be stored in liquid nitrogen is not a secure way to erase a person.</em></p>
<p>In other words, it’s reasonable to assume that the fanciest future neuroscientists will become <i>so </i>good at reading a damaged vitrified brain for clues as to its original structure that a typical combo of aging, disease, heart stoppage, and vitrification likely won’t be able to “stump” them. And to cryonicists, if future scientists can examine your vitrified brain and figure out what it’s supposed to look like, you’re not dead—by definition.</p>
<p>The length of the blue segment—preservation quality—is affected by three things:</p>
<p><strong>1) How much damage happened before you legally died. </strong>How old were you when you died? How much had your brain deteriorated by that point? Did you suffer from a dementia-causing disease like Alzheimer’s and how much permanent damage did that disease do?<a href="#footnote-3-4836">3</a> Did the thing that killed you damage your brain (like brain cancer, or a head injury) or was your brain unharmed?</p>
<p><strong>2) How much damage happened between when you legally died and when the cryonics team started working on you. </strong>In the ideal situation, your heart stops and before any changes happen in your brain, you’re stabilized and put on ice. Often, this isn’t how things go, and every unattended minute that passes after legal death has a big impact on the brain and shortens the length of the blue segment. But cryonicists believe that true info death doesn’t happen for many hours, or even days, after legal death occurs, and that there’s often hope in cryopreserving even people who lay “dead” for a while before being found.</p>
<p><strong>3) How much damage happened during the vitrifying process. </strong>Vitrification itself—at least the way it is currently done—causes its own damage to the brain. Cryonics research focuses mostly on mitigating this factor, and it’s dramatically improved since the earliest days in the 1970s—the series of images at the bottom of <a href="http://alcor.org/AboutCryonics/index.html">this page</a> shows the progress that has been made.</p>
<p><strong>The yellow segment—the state of medical technological advancement as time moves forward (which relates to If 2)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Three-Segments-Yellow.png"></a></p>
<p>As medical technology becomes more and more advanced, the yellow segment grows—but while the blue segment extends to the right as it grows, the yellow segment extends to the <em>left</em>. The key point happens when technology eventually gets so good that the yellow segment meets the blue segment and you become officially revivable. </p>
<p>Some questions:</p>
<p><b><i>Will</i> If 2 happen? Will technology <em>ever</em> reach the point when it can revive you?</b></p>
<p>Assuming If 1 gets a check mark, cryonicists believe If 2 is likely to one day get a check mark too. Because there are only two ways to totally fail If 2:</p>
<p>1) For some reason, humans permanently stop working on medical technology advancements before you hit the If 2 key point.</p>
<p>2) Humans go extinct before hitting the If 2 key point.</p>
<p>Barring those two situations, If 2 should eventually cooperate. The theory is that with <i>enough</i> future technology, you’ll one day be revivable.</p>
<p><b><i>When</i> will If 2 happen? How long until I’m revived?</b></p>
<p>This part depends on how substantial the technological challenge of cryonic revival turns out to be and how quickly technology ends up moving forward—but it also depends upon how well If 1 went. As we just discussed, the better If 1 goes, the sooner If 2 happens.</p>
<p><b><i>How </i>will If 2 happen? What kind of future technology might be able to revive vitrified people?</b></p>
<p>Well, it depends on what we mean by revival. Cryonicists seem to have a Plan A and a Plan B.</p>
<p><b>Plan A: Restore the vitrified patient as a healthy human</b></p>
<p>Under Plan A, revival consists of restoring the structure of the vitrified brain to its original state—i.e. putting all the atoms where they belong. To do that, you need two things:</p>
<p>1) The info about where the atoms are supposed to go</p>
<p>2) A way to put the atoms where they’re supposed to go</p>
<p>The first thing is taken care of if today’s vitrifying procedures do their job, assuming future neuroscientists become really good at deciphering a brain’s original state from the information they can gather by examining the vitrified brain. </p>
<p>The second thing requires <em>molecular nanotechnology</em>. For a quick nanotech overview, I’ll steal part of a blue box from the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html">AI post</a>:</p>
<div>
<p><strong>Nanotechnology Blue Box</strong></p>
<p>Nanotechnology is our word for technology that deals with the manipulation of matter that’s between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or a millionth of a millimeter, and this 1-100 range encompasses viruses (100 nm across), DNA (10 nm wide), and things as small as large molecules like hemoglobin (5 nm) and medium molecules like glucose (1 nm). If/when we conquer nanotechnology, the next step will be the ability to manipulate individual atoms, which are only one order of magnitude smaller (~.1 nm).<a href="#footnote-4-4836">4</a>
</p><p>To understand the challenge of humans trying to manipulate matter in that range, let’s take the same thing on a larger scale. The International Space Station is 268 mi (431 km) above the Earth. If humans were giants so large their heads reached up to the ISS, they’d be about 250,000 times bigger than they are now. If you make the 1nm – 100nm nanotech range 250,000 times bigger, you get .25mm – 2.5cm. So nanotechnology is the equivalent of a human giant as tall as the ISS figuring out how to carefully build intricate objects using materials between the size of a grain of sand and an eyeball. To reach the next level—manipulating individual atoms—the giant would have to carefully position objects that are 1/40th of a millimeter—so small normal-size humans would need a microscope to see them.<a href="#footnote-5-4836">5</a>
</p><p>Nanotech was first discussed by Richard Feynman in a 1959 talk, when he explained: “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It would be, in principle, possible … for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down…. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance.” It’s as simple as that. If you can figure out how to move individual molecules or atoms around, you can make literally anything. Nanotechnology so advanced that it allows us to engineer at an atomic level is called molecular nanotechnology (MNT).</p>
<p>Humans haven’t yet conquered MNT, and scientists debate how long it’ll take humanity to get there. But when we do, we might look back on today’s technology as terribly primitive, like the picture scientist Ralph Merkle <a href="http://www.zyvex.com/nano/">paints</a>: “Today’s manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It’s like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can’t really snap them together the way you’d like.”</p>
</div>
<p>MNT will be a game-changer in an unimaginable number of arenas, one of which is in medicine. A brain synapse is just a particular configuration of atoms, so if we have the tools to move atoms around and put them where we want, then we can perfectly “repair” a damaged synapse. Cryonicists believe MNT is the key to the future revival and restoration of cryonics patients.</p>
<p>The first thought some people have when they think about revival is that the person would be revived as the old and dying person they were before being vitrified. But that’s not the plan. When we get to the point when we have technology so incredible that we can move atoms around well enough to revive someone, we should also have the technology to repair and rejuvenate them. For someone who was dying of cancer before going into the thermos, not only will their successful revival mean that cancer has likely been conquered long ago, but probably aging too. </p>
<p>Along the same lines, by that point we should also be able to either rejuvenate the patient’s vitrified body or simply make a new, perfectly-working body. Alcor’s Medical Response Director, Aaron Drake, explains: “We know we can regenerate a small organ, and grow a new heart. We know we can 3-dimensionally print cells and hearts. So at some point we would need to regenerate her entire body, or at least her organs, and put it all together. Then we’d need to transplant that brain into a new body.”<a href="#footnote2-15-4836">15</a></p>
<p><b>Plan B: Upload the person’s brain info into a virtual world</b></p>
<p>Plan B shares Plan A’s first requirement—the info about where the atoms are supposed to go—but not its need for physical assembly. Instead, Plan B relies on a hypothetical future technology called “whole brain emulation,” where an entire brain structure can be uploaded to a computer with such perfect accuracy that everything about the person is intact and alive in a virtual world.</p>
<p>Sounds super fun, right?</p>
<p>This is an option if physical revival is too difficult, or if it’s so far in the future that the physical world has actually gone out of style entirely. If humans can somehow pull off whole brain emulation, you could be revived to wake up in a magical virtual world, fully conscious and no longer confined to the limits and vulnerabilities of biology and the physical world. Please.</p>
<p>While both Plan A and B require immense technological hurdles, cryonicists stress that both options are theoretically possible.</p>
<p><strong>The green segment—the amount of time you need to stay safely in storage before technology is able to revive you (which relates to If 3)</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Three-Segments-Green-1.png"></a></p>
<p>The green segment’s job is simple: hold everything together until the yellow segment connects to the blue segment. </p>
<p>So what could mess up If 3? What could sabotage a vitrified person’s ability to remain bathed in liquid nitrogen as long as necessary? </p>
<p>A lot of things. Like:</p>
<p><b>The cryonics company screws up. </b>A human-error-caused catastrophe—e.g. a rupture in a thermos tank lets in heat, and all the liquid nitrogen evaporates before the staff realizes what happened.</p>
<p><b>The cryonics company goes bankrupt and doesn’t have the means, the will, or the organization to create a plan that will save the patients. </b>I mentioned that this happened a few times with some of the earlier companies. The major companies today claim to have secure backup plans in place in case of the worst case scenario, and this security blanket is the main purpose of Alcor’s sizable trust.</p>
<p><b>A natural disaster.</b> An earthquake, tornado, or something else smashes the building holding the thermoses to oblivion. Neither major US cryonics company is in a location highly prone to natural disasters—Alcor actually located itself in Scottsdale, AZ because it is the place in the US <a href="http://www.alcor.org/AboutAlcor/scottsdale.html">least at risk</a> of natural disasters. Even if a natural disaster were to strike, the patients might be fine—the thermoses are strong, they’re power-outage-proof with no electricity involved, and even if a thermos is ruptured, there’s the upside-down thing where patients’ heads will be the last body part affected.</p>
<p><b>A terrorist attack on a cryonics facility. </b>There are a lot of people in the world—especially in the world of religion—who hate the concept of cryonics.</p>
<p><b>War. </b>All bets are off in war.</p>
<p><b>The law prevents the cryonics company from doing its job. </b>This one almost happened recently. In 2004, Arizona legislators tried to pass a bill that would have put Alcor under the regulation of the State Funeral Board. This, if passed, would have likely ended up shutting Alcor down. It turned into a nasty debate, centered largely around religious issues, with the religious voice disapproving of Alcor’s line of work—but ultimately, Alcor prevailed. That said, in order to do business legally, Alcor has to accept bodies in the guise of “anatomical donations for research purposes,” a practice protected by the constitutional right to donate one’s body for research into cryopreservation. The law-related variable seems pretty stable currently, but if someone has a long green segment and requires 800 years of storage before their revival becomes possible, who the hell knows what will happen—what is currently Scottsdale, AZ might not even be part of the US by that point.</p>
<p><b>The cryonics company comes under ownership with different values and they decide to give up on the patients. </b>Or, more maliciously, a cryonics-hater makes a too-good-to-refuse offer to the owners of a cryonics company with the intention of shutting it down. All major cryonics companies claim that they’re run and always will be run by passionate cryonicists and this is not a possibility—but again, who knows.</p>
<p>The longer the green segment is and the longer it needs to hold out, the higher the chance of failing If 3. If patients can be revived 40 years from now, there’s a lot less that can go wrong than if revival doesn’t become possible for 2,500 years. </p>
<p>But the companies are doing their best to plan for the long run. On the question of how long until revival becomes possible, Alcor says, “Some think it will take centuries before patients can be revived, while others think the accelerating pace of technological change might so rapidly transform our world that decades would suffice. Alcor is planning for however long it might take.”<a href="#footnote2-16-4836">16</a></p>
<p>As time moves forward and both vitrification and revival technology improve, both the blue and yellow segments will tend to move inward, invading the green segment from both sides. The big picture might be best illustrated like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Cryonics-big-picture-4.png"></a></p>
<p>This is how the blue, green and yellow segments work in flow with each other. Cryonics companies often say cryonics will be a “last in, first out” thing, and this graph shows exactly why—</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Cryonics-big-picture-2-2.png"></a></p>
<p>The more time that passes before you need to be vitrified, the fancier the vitrification technology you’ll be treated with <em>and</em> the further along revival technology will be—and this smaller technology gap will mean a sooner revival date. And with less time to have to rely on a cryonics company to care for you, the less risk you’ll be taking. </p>
<p>It’s important to understand that the blue line on the graph applies to the <em>average</em> cryonics patient—someone who suffers from Alzheimers late in life will go into vitrification in worse shape than a typical person of their time, so their particular challenge will be greater than the blue line height that corresponds with the year of their death.</p>
<p>Of course, the simple, straight lines on the graph are portraying the general concept. The actual lines won’t be straight or predictable. One promising way this might be the case is that the accelerating rate of technological advancement<a href="#footnote-6-4836">6</a> might mean that the blue and yellow lines could improve at a faster rate over time and look like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Cryonics-big-picture-Exponential.png"></a></p>
<p>So that’s how the first three Ifs work. And that’s all great—but none of it matters if If 4 doesn’t pan out. Without If 4—i.e. “Will people actually revive me when the time comes?”—you’re still just a helpless, vitrified body, and if the external world doesn’t keep their side of the bargain once you become revivable, you’re out of luck—and you’ll never know it happened.</p>
<p>You’ll be a little like a farm animal. You might have rights in theory, but with no ability to defend your own rights, you’ll rely on other people to fight for those rights on your behalf.</p>
<p>As I’ve dug into this topic and talked to people about it, I’ve noticed that this concern seems to jump immediately to people’s minds as a reason cryonics is unlikely to work out.</p>
<p>They ask: “There will be enough problems on Earth to deal with—do you really think people are going to care about bringing dead people back to life?”</p>
<p>Cryonicists have answers to this question.</p>
<p>First, they point out that patients won’t be floating in tanks in a world that has forgotten them. Rather, as a patient, you’d likely have A) descendants or friends who will be highly aware of you and eager to see you reanimated, B) the larger cryonicist community, who will be as passionately interested in your fair treatment as PETA activists are in the fair treatment of animals, and C) the contractual obligation of your future care-takers—similar to how today you might be operated on by a surgeon who doesn’t know you, but who diligently cares for you anyway out of professional obligation.</p>
<p>Second, they argue that once the revival of cryonics patients becomes a reality, the public’s conception of what a cryonics patient is and what she deserves will dramatically shift:<a href="#footnote2-17-4836">17</a>
</p><p><i>Long before it ever becomes possible to contemplate revival of today’s patients, reversible suspended animation will be perfected as a mainstream medical technology. From that point forward, the whole tradition of caring for people who cannot immediately be fixed will be strongly reinforced in culture and law. By the time it becomes possible to revive patients preserved with the oldest and crudest technologies, revival from states of suspended animation will be something that has been done thousands, if not millions, of times before. The moral and cultural imperative for revival when possible will be as basic and strong as the obligation to render first aid and emergency medical care today.</i></p>
<p>If a cryonics patient might seem to have the rights of a farm animal today, cryonicists expect that to become an outdated and primitive-seeming viewpoint down the road. They believe cryonics patients will be looked upon more like today’s coma patients.</p>
<p>That sounds great, but of course, we have no idea how the future will play out or what the standing will be for the field of cryonics and its suspended patients. It does seem plausible, at least, that cryonics patients will end up with more and more rights in the future, not fewer and fewer. If that’s what happens, If 4 shouldn’t be much of a problem.</p>
<p>And if all four Ifs go your way, you’ll finally be able to move onto the next step—the one that will really blow your mind when it happens.</p>
<p><strong>Step 9) Be revived</strong></p>
<p>This will be quite the experience.</p>
<p>First, whether it happens 30 years or 2,000 years after you were last conscious, it’ll feel the same to you—probably a bit like a short nap. When you sleep, you feel the passage of time—when you wake up after an eight-hour night’s sleep, it doesn’t feel like you just went to bed a second ago, it feels like it’s been eight hours. But being on pause in your liquid nitrogen thermos is different. You won’t experience the passage of time, so it’ll feel like you were <em>just </em>awake in your previous life (the only reason it won’t feel totally instantaneous is that you’ll have lost your short term memories). You’ll probably be super disoriented, and someone will have to explain to you that A) you’re in the future, and B) the cryonics worked, and you’re no longer a person about to die—you’re healthy and rejuvenated and all set to start living again.</p>
<p>How <em>intense</em>.</p>
<p>As a very not-heaven-believing person, I’ve always thought about how <em>pleasantly shocked </em>I would be if I died and then woke up in some delightful afterlife. I’d look around, slowly realize what was happening, and then I’d be like, “Wait…<em>NO FUCKING WAY</em>.” Then I’d promptly plant myself at the gates and watch other atheists come in for the fun of seeing them go through the same shock.</p>
<p>I imagine being revived from cryonics will be kind of like that. Maybe a <em>few</em> notches less shocking, since you presumably did the cryonics thing because you thought there was a chance it would work—but still a pretty big <em>no fucking way </em>moment.</p>
<p>After the initial shock, you’ll have to figure out what kind of world you’ve woken up into. Some possibilities:</p>
<p><strong>It could suck<em>. </em></strong>You could wake up in a far future world that’s a lot worse than the one you previously lived in and a world in which you know zero people. Even worse, you could wake up in some really scary situation—who knows what kind of creepy shit might be going on in the future.</p>
<p><strong>It could be blah. </strong>You could wake up in a world that’s kind of meh. Like it’s not as future-y and cool as you thought it would be and you’re not immortal, just somewhat restored and still vulnerable, and you have to get a job and you don’t really have applicable skills for the times. Just kind of whatevs.</p>
<p><strong>It could be incredibly rad. </strong>Probably the most likely outcome, you could wake up and it could be very, very rad. The future-y stuff might be cool and fun beyond your comprehension. You might have previously been 84 and aching everywhere and forgetful, and suddenly you have the body of a perfectly fit 20-year-old, or maybe something even better, like a super-charged synthetic body that doesn’t feel pain or exhaustion and can’t get sick. Your old, forgetful brain could be repaired and full of vitality you haven’t experienced in 50 years. And best, you might be surrounded by friends and family who were also cryopreserved and are <em>unbelievably </em>excited to see you. It could be rad.</p>
<p>It could be even crazier if you wake up in a virtual world after having had your vitrified brain data uploaded to a computer. You wouldn’t feel like you were in a computer—you’d feel every bit as real as you did when you were a human, except now everything is amazing and magical and you can spend almost all your time fulfilling my lifelong dream of sliding down rainbows like this care bear.<a href="#footnote2-18-4836">18</a>
</p><p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/28395ff72b29fb268c0cfd4a43433490.jpg"></a></p>
<p>Your friends and family could be there with you, also virtually uploaded but still fully themselves with all of their old memories—all of you now eternal and indestructible, with no need for the physical world or its resources.</p>
<p>Who knows what kind of world you’d wake up in. But a couple things lead me to believe it would be a pretty good situation:</p>
<ul>
<li>A really terrible future world probably isn’t the type of world that would be concerned with protecting and reviving cryonics patients. In a world like that, you’d probably just never wake up.</li>
<li>Likewise, a future that can revive vitrified people is by definition pretty technologically amazing, so it’s hard to imagine waking up in a world that hasn’t solved all kinds of problems our current world suffers from.</li>
<li>The future tends to be better than the past. Humans have the tendency to predict dystopian futures, but at least so far, it’s been the other way around. Say what you want about the ills of today’s world, but it’s better to be a human today than it was 200 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.</li>
</ul>
<p>But because we have no idea what revival will be like, we have this next step:</p>
<p><strong>Step 10) Decide if you’re into it and want to stay</strong></p>
<p>Barring some hilariously bad scenario where you’re revived into a world of eternal virtual torture with no ability to end it—which really makes no sense—cryonics is a risk-free venture. It has an undo button—just kill yourself and it’s as if it never happened. If you’re not into it, your journey ends here. Otherwise, move on to the next step.</p>
<p><strong>Step 11) Enjoy shit</strong></p>
<p>We’ve kind of reached the end of me guiding you. You’re now just living again like you were before—hopefully in a much better situation—and what you do at this point is really your business. Just go do your thing and enjoy being in the future.</p>
<p><strong>Step 12) Die for real this time</strong></p>
<p>At some point, you’ll be over it. No one ever will ever ever want to live forever, a fact I realized at the end of my <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/11/1000000-grahams-number.html">Graham’s Number post</a>. When the time comes, I assume the fancy future will have some painless way to bow out—something that will cause total info death, where your data is truly unrecoverable. At that point, you’ll have lived the complete life you want to live, not a life cut short by the limitations of the medical technology of the time you happen to be born in. That’s really the way things should be.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>Now that we all know a lot more about cryonics, let’s bring back our sentence. This is where we were, and we were looking closely at the three words in the red:</p>
<p><strong>Cryonics is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.</strong></p>
<p>We can get rid of “rich,” because at least for younger people, cryonics can be paid for with a not-that-expensive life insurance plan.</p>
<p>We can get rid of “dead,” because cryonics doesn’t deal with dead people, it deals with people currently doomed to die given the technology they have current access to. For the same reason, we can also change the wording of “bring them back to life.”</p>
<p>And we can get rid of “freezing,” because cryonics doesn’t freeze people—it vitrifies them into an amorphous solid state.</p>
<p>While we’re here, let’s get rid of “morbid.” Is a vitrified human head floating in liquid nitrogen morbid? Yes. Is it more morbid than being eaten by worms and microbes underground or being burned to ashes? Definitely not. So not a fair word to use.</p>
<p>So that leaves us with a sentence more like this:</p>
<p><strong>Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.</strong></p>
<p>And then there’s the elephant in the room—this part of the sentence: <em>…and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.</em></p>
<p>I put that in there because when you’re examining something that involves A) a fringe community, B) the possible concept of immortality, and C) members paying large sums of money for services that they’re told might pan out 1,000 years from now—you have no choice but to put up your “Is this a Scientology-y thing?” antenna.</p>
<p>One way to let that antenna do its work is to read a bunch of stuff written by smart, credible people who think the whole thing is utter BS. If anything will disenchant you to the excitement of something as out there as cryonics, it’s experts telling you why it should be ignored.</p>
<p>So I did that. And as I read, I weighed what I read against the rebuttal from cryonicists, which I’d often find on Alcor’s highly comprehensive <a href="http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/">FAQ page</a>. Other resources for the cryonicist viewpoint are the thorough <a href="http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html">FAQ</a> of the Cryonics Institute’s ex-president, Ben Best, Alcor’s <a href="http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm">Science FAQ</a> and Alcor’s <a href="http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html">Myths page</a>.</p>
<p>The people who are super not into cryonics fall into a few general buckets:</p>
<p><strong>Skeptic Type 1: The scientist with a valid argument about why cryonics might not be possible</strong></p>
<p>The mainstream medical community is generally not on board with cryonics. No health insurance company will cover it, no government will subsidize it, no doctors will refer to it as a medical procedure.</p>
<p>Some skeptics make what seem to be valid points. Biochemist Ken Storey <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/23695785">says</a>, “We have many different organs and we know from research into preserving transplant organs that even if it were possible to successfully cryopreserve them, each would need to be cooled at a different rate and with a different mixture and concentration of cryoprotectants. Even if you only wanted to preserve the brain, it has dozens of different areas, which would need to be cryopreserved using different protocols.” Storey also points out just how tall an order it would be to “repair” someone damaged by vitrification, explaining that “a human cell has around 50,000 proteins and hundreds of millions of fat molecules that make up the membranes. Cryopreservation disrupts all of them.” (Alcor calls this statement <a href="http://www.alcor.org/notablequotes.html">patently false</a>.<a href="#footnote-7-4836">7</a>)</p>
<p>Others point to the towering challenge of either repairing a human brain or scanning one in order to upload it. Brazilian scientist Miguel Nicolelis <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/quest-upload-mind-into-digital-space-180954946/?no-ist">emphasizes</a> that the task of scanning a human brain would require, with today’s technology, “a million electron microscopes running in parallel for ten years.” Michael Hendricks, who studies the brains of roundworms, believes the challenge of reviving the qualities that make someone who they are is far too complex to achieve, <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541311/the-false-science-of-cryonics/">explaining</a> that “while it might be theoretically possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that certainly is not happening now. The technology to do so, let alone the ability to read this information back out of such a specimen, does not yet exist even in principle.”</p>
<p><strong>Cryonicist response: Totes</strong></p>
<p>Cryonicists don’t really disagree with these people (Storey’s quote notwithstanding). They readily admit that the challenges of reviving someone from cryopreservation are insurmountable using today’s technology. They simply point out that A) there’s no scientific evidence that cryonics <em>can’t </em>work, B) we shouldn’t underestimate what future technology will be able to do (imagine how mind-blowing <a href="http://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/">CRISPR</a> would be to someone in the year 1700 and think about what the equivalent would be for us), and C) there have been some promising developments—like the recent <a href="https://www.rt.com/news/332074-cryonics-rabbit-brain-regenerated/">well-preserved vitrified rabbit brain</a> news—that suggest there’s reason for optimism.</p>
<p>I’m yet to hear a cryonicist say, “Cryonics will work.” They just don’t feel that this is a case where a lack of proof amounts to a lack of credibility. Alcor’s Science FAQ <a href="http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm">addresses</a> this: “The burden of proof lies with those who make a claim that is inconsistent with existing well-established scientific theory. Cryonics is not inconsistent with well-established scientific theory … At no point does cryonics require that existing physical law be altered in any way.”</p>
<p>Cryonicists also don’t waste an opportunity to point out these quotes:</p>
<p>“There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the Moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the Earth’s gravity.” — Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, University of Chicago astronomer, 1932.</p>
<p>“All this writing about space travel is utter bilge.” — Sir Richard Woolley, Astronomer Royal of Britain, 1956</p>
<p>“To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon…. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Dr. Lee De Forest, famous engineer, 1957</p>
<p><strong>Skeptic Type 2: The scientist who argues that cryonics won’t work even though they know less about cryonics than you do right now having read this post</strong></p>
<p>This is a surprisingly large category of cryonics skeptics. It’s amazing, for example, how many people from the mainstream medical world argue that cryonics can’t work because when water freezes, it causes irreparable damage to human tissue.</p>
<p><strong>Cryonicist response: Agreed—that’s why we don’t freeze people. Please read about what cryonics is before saying more words out of your mouth.</strong></p>
<p>Among the cryonics skeptics who literally don’t get what modern cryonics consists of is celebrity physicist Michio Kaku, someone I normally like, but who in this clip is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-tcfWnZgCo">taken to town</a> by Alcor’s CEO for having no idea what he’s talking about.</p>
<p>Part of the reason most scientists don’t get cryonics has to do with its cross-disciplinary nature. Alcor explains:</p>
<p><em>Most experts in any single field will say that they know of no evidence that cryonics can work. That’s because cryonics is an interdisciplinary field based on <a href="http://www.alcor.org/AboutCryonics/index.html">three facts</a> from diverse unrelated sciences. Without all these facts, cryonics seems ridiculous. Unfortunately that makes the number of experts qualified to comment on cryonics very small. For example, very few scientists even know what vitrification is. Fewer still know that vitrification can preserve cell structure of <a href="http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html#myth2">whole organs</a> or <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&amp;db=pubmed&amp;dopt=Abstract&amp;list_uids=15247086">whole brains</a>. Even though this use of vitrification has been published, it is so uncommon outside of cryonics that only a handful of cryobiologists know it is possible.</em></p>
<p><strong>Skeptic Type 3: The cryo<em>gen</em>icist who doesn’t want the other cool kids to think he’s friends with cryonics, the weird outsider.</strong></p>
<p>There’s an amusing little one-way rivalry going on between cryogenicists (who, remember, deal with the science of the effects of cold temperatures in general) and cryonicists. Cryogenicists tend to view cryonics like an astronomer would view astrology—or at least, that’s what they say publicly out of caution. They seem to sometimes admit that there could be sound science behind cryonics, but they also know that cryonics lacks credibility with the wider science community and they don’t want to get roped into that reputation problem by association (they also have <a href="https://www.cryogenicsociety.org/cryonics/">very little sense of humor</a> about people confusing the words cryogenics and cryonics).</p>
<p><strong>Cryonicist response: Whatevs.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Skeptic Type 4: The person who believes that even if you can revive a vitrified person, it won’t really be <em>them</em>.</strong></p>
<p>This relates to a philosophical quandary I explored in the post <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html">What Makes You You?</a> Are “you” your body? Your brain? The data in your brain? Something less tangible like a soul? This all becomes highly relevant when we’re thinking about cryonics. It’s hard to read about cryonic revival, and especially the prospect of “waking up” in a virtual world you’ve been uploaded into, without asking, “But wait…will that still be <em>me</em>?”</p>
<p>This is a common objection to cryonics, but few people will argue with conviction that they <em>know </em>the answer to this question one way or the other.</p>
<p><strong>Cryonicist response: </strong><strong>Yeah, we’re not sure about that either. Fingers crossed though.</strong></p>
<p>Most cryonicists have a hunch that <em>you </em>can survive cryopreservation intact (cryonicist Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that “successful cryonics preserves anything about you that is preserved by going to sleep at night and waking up the next morning”) but they also admit that this is yet another variable they’re not sure about. You might even want to consider this a fifth “If” to add onto our list: If what seems to be a revived me is <em>actually</em> me…</p>
<p><strong>Skeptic Type 5: The person who, regardless of whether cryonics can work or not, thinks it’s a bad thing</strong></p>
<p>There are lots of these people. A handful of examples:</p>
<p><strong>Argument: </strong>Cryonics is icky.</p>
<p><strong>Typical cryonicist response: </strong>Yup, but less icky than decaying underground.</p>
<p><strong>Argument: </strong>Cryonics is creepy and unnatural.</p>
<p><strong>Typical cryonicist response:</strong> People said the same thing about the first organ transplants.</p>
<p><strong>Argument: </strong>Cryonics is trying to play God and cheat death.</p>
<p><strong>Typical cryonicist response: </strong>Is resuscitating someone whose heart has stopped playing God and cheating death? How about chemotherapy?</p>
<p><strong>Argument: </strong>Cryonics is a scam.</p>
<p><strong>Typical cryonicist response: </strong>The major cryonics companies are all nonprofits, the employees are paid modestly and the board members running the company (who are all signed up for cryonics themselves) aren’t paid at all. So who exactly is benefiting from this scam?</p>
<p><strong>Argument: </strong>“If you have enough money [for cryonics], then you have enough money to help somebody in need today.” — Bioethicist Kenneth Goodman<a href="#footnote2-19-4836">19</a>
</p><p><strong>Actual cryonicist response: </strong>“If you have enough money for health insurance (which costs a lot more than cryonics), then you have enough money to help somebody else in need today. In fact, if you have enough money for any discretionary expenditure (travel, sports, movies, beer), then you have enough money to help somebody in need today. Of all the ways people choose to spend substantial sums of money over a lifetime, singling out the health care choice of cryonics as selfish is completely arbitrary.”<a href="#footnote2-20-4836">20</a>
</p><p><strong>Argument: </strong>“Money invested to preserve human life in the deep freeze is money wasted, the sums involved being large enough to fulfill a punitive function as a self-imposed fine for gullibility and vanity.” — Biologist Jean Medawar<a href="#footnote2-21-4836">21</a>
</p><p><strong>Actual cryonicist response: </strong>“Nobody would ever imagine calling the first recipients of bone marrow transplants or artificial hearts “gullible and vain”. And what of dying children who are cryopreserved? Cryonics is an experiment, and people who choose this experiment are worthy of the same respect as other participants in high risk medical endeavors.”<a href="#footnote2-22-4836">22</a>
</p><p><strong>Argument: </strong>Cryonics will cause an overpopulation disaster.</p>
<p><strong>Actual cryonicist response: </strong>This is a common one I’ve heard in my discussions. Here’s what Alcor says: “What about antibiotics, vaccinations, statin drugs and the population pressures they bring? It’s silly to single out something as small and speculative as cryonics as a population issue. Life spans will continue increasing in developed parts of the world, cryonics or not, as they have done for the past century. Historically, as societies become more wealthy and long-lived, population takes care of itself. Couples have fewer children at later ages. This is happening in the world right now. The worst population problems are where people are poor and life spans short, not long.”<a href="#footnote2-23-4836">23</a>
</p><p><strong>Argument: </strong>But Ted Williams.</p>
<p>Let me explain. There are a handful of famous people signed up for cryonics, like Ray Kurzweil, nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler, and celebrities like Larry King, Britney Spears, Simon Cowell, and Paris Hilton.<a href="#footnote2-24-4836">24</a> But there are very few big names among the 300 or so who are already vitrified. One that is is baseball legend Ted Williams.</p>
<p>Williams is the first thing that comes to mind when a lot of people think about cryonics, an unfortunate fact that cryonicists wish would go away, because his story is <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ted-williams-frozen-in-two-pieces/">mired in scandal</a> (two of Williams’ children said cryonics is what he wanted while the other claimed he wanted to be cremated and the son was just cryopreserving him so he could later profit off of his DNA samples). The ugly story ended up, fairly or unfairly, as a stain on the cryonics industry in many people’s heads, partially because in the midst of it, Sports Illustrated published an <a href="http://www.si.com/vault/2003/08/18/348299/what-really-happened-to-ted-williams-a-year-after-the-jarring-news-that-the-splendid-splinter-was-being-frozen-in-a-cryonics-lab-new-details-including-a-decapitation-suggest-that-one-of-americas-greatest-heroes-may-never-rest-in">article</a> about the scandal with quotes from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Johnson_(author)">an ex-Alcor employee</a> accusing Alcor of mismanaging the Williams vitrification, among other things.</p>
<p><strong>Typical cryonicist response: </strong>Unfairly. It’s a stain unfairly. The accusations weren’t based in reality, and the employee recently <a href="http://www.alcor.org/press/response.html">admitted in court</a> that what he said may not have been true.</p>
<p><strong>Argument: </strong>Life is long enough. People aren’t supposed to live longer than we do now. Just enjoy what you’ve got.</p>
<p><strong>Typical cryonicist response: </strong>Thank you for your opinion. I disagree.</p>
<p>So how does my Scientology antenna feel after reading about 50 skeptic opinions?</p>
<p>Well, the skeptics definitely helped me appreciate the magnitude of the challenge at hand with cryonics. Science has a long way to go before cryonics can truly function as a pause button instead of a stop button—and we may never get there.</p>
<p>But it left me feeling every bit as confident that cryonics is a worthy pursuit and possibly a total game-changer. The fact that cryonic revival seems plausible, coupled with the fact that through most of history, the people of the time couldn’t have even imagined the magic that future technology would make real, makes me feel like the safer bet is on cryonics eventually <em>working</em>. If something important isn’t <em>impossible</em>, the future will probably figure out a way to make it happen, with enough time.</p>
<p>There’s also the “why the fuck not?” argument cryonicists make that’s very hard for skeptics to thwart.</p>
<p>Pro-cryonics scientist Ralph Merkle says it well:<a href="#footnote2-25-4836">25</a>
</p><p><em> The correct scientific answer to the question “Does cryonics work?” is: “The clinical trials are in progress. Come back in a century and we’ll give you an answer based on the outcome.” The relevant question for those of us who don’t expect to live that long is: “Would I rather be in the control group, or the experimental group?” We are forced by circumstances to answer that question without the benefit of knowing the results of the clinical trials.</em></p>
<p>The only way to shoot down a response that says, “We don’t know but we might as well try” is to say, “There is <em>definitely </em>no point in trying because it’s <em>impossible.</em>” And very few credible scientists would claim to have that conviction about things as mysterious as the workings of the brain and the possibilities of the far future.</p>
<p>The other thing that struck me as I learned about cryonics is that cryonicists aren’t usually “salesy” at all when they talk about cryonics. The impression I got from my research is that cryonicists tend to be well-educated, rational, realistic, and humble about what they know and don’t know. They readily admit the <a href="http://www.alcor.org/problems.html">problems and shortcomings</a> of the field<a href="#footnote-8-4836">8</a> and they’re careful to use measured, responsible language so as not to distort the nuances of the truth.<a href="#footnote-9-4836">9</a> And despite a general lack of support from the mainstream medical community, <a href="http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open-letter-on-cryonics/">plenty of reputable scientists</a> have become fervent cryonicists.</p>
<p>So, for now, cryonics has satisfied my Scientology antenna.</p>
<p>Which shortens our sentence to this:</p>
<p><strong>Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them.</strong></p>
<p>The final wording in the sentence that I’d like to challenge is:</p>
<p><strong>Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them.</strong></p>
<p>This is the part of the sentence that carries a twinge of eye-rolling contempt—something people often feel when they hear about someone with a desire to conquer mortality. Aside from the aversion we have to the prospect of a human body floating in a freezing tank, many of us feel a distaste towards the <em>motivation behind </em>cryonics. It seems <em>greedy</em> to want more than your one standard life.</p>
<p>I’m not one to typically feel contempt at something like this, but early in my research, even I found myself doing a little head shake when I read about billionaire Peter Thiel signing up for cryonics a while back.</p>
<p>But this post has forced me to take a big step back—back to where I can see death not as a moment but as a process, back to where I can see the human lifespan as a product of our times, not our biology, and back to where I see the concept of human health spread out along the spans of time and where I can imagine how future humans will see our current times of helplessness in the face of biological deterioration.</p>
<p>From way out here, it hits you that we’re living in a phase—a sad little window that an intelligent species inevitably passes through, when they’re advanced enough to understand their own mortality, but still too primitive to save themselves from it. We grapple with this by treating death like a tyrannical overlord we wouldn’t dare try to challenge, not even in our own private thoughts. We’ve been universally defeated and dominated by this overlord for as long as we’ve existed, and all we know how to do is bow down to it in full resignation of its power over us.<a href="#footnote-10-4836">10</a>
</p><p>Future humans who have one day overthrown the overlord will look at the phase we’re in and our resulting psychological condition with such clarity—they’ll be sad for us the way we’re sad for brainwashed members of an ancient cult who commit mass suicide because the master has instructed it.</p>
<p>Our will isn’t broken when it comes to <em>resisting </em>the overlord—that’s why we see it as honorable to fight cancer till the final minute, heroic to risk your own life for a good cause and make it out alive, and a terrible mistake to resign to the overlord prematurely and commit suicide.</p>
<p>But when it comes to <em>defeating </em>the overlord, our will has been squashed by a history that tells us that the overlord is indestructible.</p>
<p>And this explains the divide between how cryonicists feel about cryonics and how the rest of us view it. The divide is for two reasons:</p>
<p><strong>1)</strong> Cryonicists view death as a process and consider many people who are declared dead today to still be alive—and they view cryonics as an attempted transfer of a living patient to a future hospital that can save his life. In other words, they view cryonics merely as an attempt to <em>resist</em> the overlord, no different than the way we view someone being transferred to a hospital in a different location which has better treatment options for their condition. Most of us, by contrast, view death as a singular moment, so we see cryonics as an attempt to bring a dead person <em>back to life</em>—i.e. we see cryonics as an attempt to <em>defeat</em> the overlord. When cryonicists see us cheer on a billionaire who fights cancer and shake our heads at one who signs up for cryonics, when they see us praying for someone in a coma and rolling our eyes at someone being vitrified—they see us being highly irrational.</p>
<p><strong>2) </strong>Cryonicists view death not as an all-powerful overlord but as a puzzle to be solved. They see humans as an arrangement of atoms and see no reason that arrangement should have to inevitably deteriorate if our scientists can just get better at working with atoms. So for them, trying to defeat death altogether is an obvious, rational mission to undertake. But most of us view death as a fundamental fact of the universe—a mysterious and terrifying shadow that hovers over all living things and that only a naive fool would try to escape from—so instead of cheering on the people trying to solve the puzzle of death, we scoff at them and laugh at them, as if they’re too immature to come to peace with the inevitable.</p>
<p>Looking at this through a zoomed out lens was a big <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">Whoa Moment</a> epiphany for me. Suddenly, I saw the cryonicists’ of the world in the same light as those rare ancient people trying to understand how earthquakes work so they could be best prepared for the next one, and I realized that when I shook my head at Peter Thiel, I was being like one of the hordes of ancient people who worshipped the gods that had punished us with that earthquake and who wanted to burn those rare scientists at the stake for their blasphemous thinking.</p>
<p>I started this post thinking I’d simply write a “mini post” about this little community of cryonicists and what they were trying to do and ended it staring at another example of today’s self-proclaimed science-minded rationalists being tomorrow’s idol-worshippers.</p>
<p>I also saw my conception of end-of-life morality flip itself on its head. At the beginning of my research, my question was, “Is cryonics an okay thing to do?” By the end, the question was , “Is it okay to <em>not</em> sign up a dying child for cryonics, or will future people view that the way we see a parent refusing to allow life-saving medical treatment to their child for religious reasons?”</p>
<p>Cryonics has quickly come to seem not only like a good thing to try, but like <em>the right thing to do</em>.</p>
<p>That’s certainly how Alcor sees it. They say:</p>
<p><em>The moral argument for cryonics is that it’s wrong to discontinue care of an unconscious person when they can still be rescued. This is why people who fall unconscious are taken to hospital by ambulance, why they will be maintained for weeks in intensive care if necessary, and why they will still be cared for even if they don’t fully awaken after that. It is a moral imperative to care for unconscious people as long as there remains reasonable hope for recovery.</em></p>
<p>And once you’re looking through that lens, everything we consider normal starts to look crazy.</p>
<p>When <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html?_r=0">Kim Suozzi</a> found out she was dying of cancer at age 23, she signed up to be cryopreserved. She viewed it like trying a new experimental drug that might have a chance to save her when nothing else could—a no-brainer. But her father fiercely resisted the decision,<a href="#footnote-11-4836">11</a> Reddit users scorned her for it, and the story was unusual enough to warrant a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html">feature article</a> in the New York Times.</p>
<p>It’s as if Kim was part of a group of the world’s cancer-stricken 23-year-olds as they all walked toward a cliff to fall into the jaws of the overlord, and Kim saw a rope hanging from a higher cliff across the chasm and decided to jump for it because maybe, just maybe, it could pull her to safety. And the <em>Times</em> found that to be so bizarre, and so out there, that they wrote a piece on it. Huh?</p>
<p>From far away, it looks a lot like we’re all on a plane that’s going down, with our only shot at survival being to take a chance with an experimental parachute—and we’re all just staying in our seats.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p>I’ve decided to take a parachute and jump. I have an appointment set up for early April with a life insurance agent and Alcor member to get set up with a plan. I can boil the decision down to three reasons:</p>
<p><strong>1) I love life. </strong>Readers have picked up on my mild obsession with death, which might have something to do with the 55 times I’ve talked about it on this blog. But when they bring it up with me, they refer to it as my fear of death. Which isn’t quite how I feel. It’s more that I really like life. I like doing things and thinking things and I like my family and friends and want to keep hanging out with them if I can. I also really want to see what happens. I want to be there when we figure out the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">Fermi Paradox</a> and when we discover what dark matter is and when we terraform Mars and when AI takes all our jobs and then extincts all of us. I want to see what the 23rd century is like and see how cool the phones are by then. Being alive is a lot more interesting than being dead. And since I have all of eternity to be dead, it seems logical to stay not dead for at least a while when I have the chance.</p>
<p><strong>2) This chart. </strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Table.png"></a></p>
<p><strong>3) Hope. </strong>I’ve always been jealous of religious people, because on their deathbed, instead of thinking, “Shit,” they’re thinking, “Okay here’s the big moment—am I about to blink and wake up in heaven??” Much more fun. And much more exciting. Whether cryonics pans out or not, as I age, at least a little part of me can now be thinking, “I wonder what’s gonna happen when I die?” Atheists aren’t supposed to get to think that. Humans don’t need a huge amount of hope to feel hopeful—they just need something to cling onto. Just enough to be able to have the “So you’re sayin there’s a chance!” feeling.</p>
<p>Some of you will resonate with my decision—others will think it makes me silly, gullible, or selfish.</p>
<p>Either way, you should think about this and the fact that you currently have a plan, whether you realize it or not. Likely, that plan is to resign to death. To walk off the cliff instead of jumping for the lifeline. To stay planted in your seat as the plane goes down.</p>
<p>That’s not necessarily the wrong decision, depending on who you are, what you believe, and what you value. But if that’s your plan, it should be because you like that plan more than the alternative—not because you haven’t thought about it and are just doing what everyone else is doing. This is a matter of your one existence, and you have to take the fate of that existence into your own, independent-thinking hands.</p>
<p>And if you decide that you probably would rather grab a parachute than stay in your seat, try not to fall victim to a common trap:</p>
<p>Cryocrastination.</p>
<p>That’s a real term used in the cryonics world to describe the phenomenon of people—especially young people—saying, “Yeah duh I’m obviously doing cryonics when I die” and then not actually going through the actions to sign up and start paying money. It’s natural—what could possibly be easier to procrastinate on? That item on your list—”sign up for cryonics”—tends to never find itself at the <em>top </em>of the to-do list. But no matter what age you are, unexpected things can happen, and if you never got around to signing up when they do, you’re out of luck. If you take a big step back, procrastinating on this is <em>really </em>shortsighted. Just do what I did—book appointments so you’ll actually do it.</p>
<p>I hope you’ll do it the same way I’d hope you’d take a shot with an experimental drug if you were sick and it were the one chance you had. Because it’s worth a try. Because it just might work. Because why the fuck not. And because Dylan Thomas said it best:</p>
<p><em>Do not go gentle into that good night.<br />
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.</em></p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>If you want to learn more—</strong>the <a href="http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/">Alcor FAQ</a> and <a href="http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html">Ben Best’s FAQ</a> are great ways to start. Both the <a href="http://www.alcor.org/">Alcor</a> and <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/">Cryonics Institute</a> websites are full of information, and if you want to go a whole level deeper, dig into Alcor’s <a href="http://www.alcor.org/Library/index.html">library</a> (where you can also find <a href="http://www.alcor.org/Library/index.html#casereports">cryopreservation case reports</a>) or this collection of cryonics-related <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?orig_db=PubMed&amp;cmd=Search&amp;defaultField=Title%20Word&amp;term=cryonics">journal articles</a>. Many more sources are listed below.</p>
<p><strong>If you want to help or get involved—</strong>you can donate to <a href="http://www.alcor.org/donate/donate.html">Alcor</a> or <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/donate/">CI</a> or <a href="http://alcor.org/volunteer/">volunteer</a> to help at Alcor. Alcor lists some specific types of people they need help from at the bottom of <a href="http://www.alcor.org/problems.html">this page</a>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><a href="https://gum.co/cryonics"></a></p>
<p>If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the <strong><a href="#">Wait But Why email list</a></strong> and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.</p>
<p>If you’d like to support Wait But Why, <strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/waitbutwhy">here’s our Patreon</a></strong>.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>If you liked this post, you’ll want to read these:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/what-makes-you-you.html">What Makes You You?</a></strong> – A post that uses mind-bending thought experiments to dig into the weirdest, hardest cryonics question</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html">The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence</a> </strong>– Something that might be <em>way </em>better at helping us conquer mortality than cryonics (or the opposite and it’ll extinct us)</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-colonize-mars.html">How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars</a> </strong>– Like cryonics except instead of trying to extend a person’s life, it’s trying to extend the <em>species’</em> life</p>
<p>Or, for something less heavy, <strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/03/7-3-billion-people-one-building.html">this makes me feel not that scared</a></strong> about cryonics causing overpopulation.</p>
<p><strong>Sources</strong></p>
<p><a href="http://www.alcor.org/">Alcor’s website</a> is a great resource, especially their <a href="http://www.alcor.org/FAQs/">main FAQ</a>, their <a href="http://www.alcor.org/sciencefaq.htm">science FAQ</a>, and their <a href="http://www.alcor.org/Library/index.html">library</a>. They also have a substantial <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUh9FLcWu8k5k5W_ofWQMZA/videos?sort=p&amp;view=0&amp;flow=grid">YouTube page</a>. I got the idea for the plane going down / experimental parachutes metaphor from the video testimonial of Alcor member <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaZjBmmhK4Y">Andrew Popper</a> – thanks Andrew.</p>
<p>The other thing from this post that was inspired from outside work is the concept of death as an overlord, which is loosely based on the storyline of Nick Bostrom’s <em><a href="http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html">The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant</a></em>, where the role of death is played by a dragon. If you liked that part of the post, definitely read the fable.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/">Cryonics Institute</a> also has a lot of good information, especially the <a href="http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/CryoFAQ.html">FAQ</a> of Ben Best, their ex-president.</p>
<p>I feel bad having focused only on Alcor and CI in this post and ignoring the smaller but spirited <a href="http://www.kriorus.ru/en">KrioRus</a> outside of Moscow. Here’s a <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/d634e198-a435-11e5-873f-68411a84f346.html#axzz42ibEhPzp">good article</a> from FT Magazine (by Courtney Weaver) that focuses on them.</p>
<p>Here’s a collection of cryonics-related <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?orig_db=PubMed&amp;cmd=Search&amp;defaultField=Title%20Word&amp;term=cryonics">journal articles</a>. Here’s <a href="http://www.alcor.org/sciencerefs.html">another</a>.</p>
<p>Here are a handful of <a href="http://www.alcor.org/Library/index.html#casereports">cryopreservation case reports</a>.</p>
<p>Scientist and cryonicist Ralph Merkle nicely articulates a bunch of the stuff I talked about on <a href="http://www.merkle.com/cryo/">his website</a>. A lot of people compare the “why the fuck not?” argument for cryonics with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager">Pascal’s Wager</a>. Merkle doesn’t think it’s a great comparison – <a href="http://www.merkle.com/cryo/wager.html">here’s why</a>.</p>
<p>This is a pretty riveting <a href="http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/354/mistakes-were-made">This American Life</a> episode about cryonics. It focuses on the early days of the movement in the ’60s and ’70s, honing in on a <a href="http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/suspensionfailures.html">notorious cryonics disaster</a>. And here’s a <a href="http://www.stuffyoushouldknow.com/podcasts/cryonics-hi-frozen-body/">Stuff You Should Know</a> about cryonics.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.evidencebasedcryonics.org/scientists-open-letter-on-cryonics/">letter</a> by 60 scientists arguing that cryonics should be taken seriously in the science world.</p>
<p>Eliezer Yudkowsky finds a way of popping his head into like a third of the posts I write as I research. He has a bunch of interesting stuff to say about cryonics. Here’s <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/wq/you_only_live_twice/">one thing</a>. Here’s <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/1mc/normal_cryonics/">another</a>.</p>
<p>Two great recent articles about cryonics: One from Motherboard (by Brian Merchant) about <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-girl-who-would-live-forever">a dying two-year-old girl</a> whose parents made her the world’s youngest cryonics patient. And one from the NY Times (by Amy Harmon) that I referenced at the end of the post about a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryogenics.html?hp&amp;action=click&amp;pgtype=Homepage&amp;module=photo-spot-region&amp;region=top-news&amp;WT.nav=top-news&amp;_r=0">23-year-old</a> who signed up with Alcor before she died of a brain tumor.</p>
<p>An interesting <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/knfcx/i_am_signed_up_for_cryonics_at_my_death_ama/">Reddit AMA</a> with a cryonics member.</p>
<p>An article from Newsweek (by Anthony Cuthbertson) about the Feb 2016 <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/rabbit-brain-first-mammal-brain-return-successfully-cryopreservation-424913">rabbit-brain-vitrifying breakthrough</a>.</p>
<p>I only read excerpts of this, but here’s Robert Ettinger’s <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/images/uploads/misc/Prospect_Book.pdf">famous book</a> that launched the cryonics movement in the early ’60s.</p>
<p>An interesting New York Magazine article (by Kerry Howley) that explores the phenomenon of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/magazine/11cryonics-t.html">family conflict over cryonics</a>.</p>
<p>An Atlantic article (by Rose Eveleth) about <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/08/for-200000-this-lab-will-swap-your-bodys-blood-for-antifreeze/379074/">the cryonics process</a>. Alcor has <a href="http://www.alcor.org/procedures.html">a good page</a> on the procedure too. <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/ci-landing/guide-to-cryonics-procedures">So does CI</a>.</p>
<p>Meet Michael Hendricks, a smart scientist <a href="https://www.technologyreview.com/s/541311/the-false-science-of-cryonics/">who thinks cryonics is horse shit</a>. <a href="https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cold-reality-versus-the-wishful-thinking-of-cryonics/">Here’s another skeptic</a>. <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/quest-upload-mind-into-digital-space-180954946/?no-ist">And another</a>. Alcor refutes skeptics with <a href="http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html">this page</a> and <a href="http://www.alcor.org/notablequotes.html">this page</a>, and it admits problems with cryonics <a href="http://www.alcor.org/problems.html">here</a>.</p>
<p>Alcor’s <a href="http://www.alcor.org/BecomeMember/scheduleA.html">pricing</a>. And <a href="http://www.cryonics.org/membership/">CI’s</a>.</p>
<p>A video <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwNNdG4MZvc">nicely articulating the case for cryonics</a> by Alcor’s CEO Max More.</p>
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 Why Cryonics Makes Sense

 March 24, 2016 By Tim Urban


 We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here.

 You’re on an airplane when you hear a loud sound and things start violently shaking. A minute later, the captain comes on the speaker and says:

 There’s been an explosion in the engine, and the plane is going to crash in 15 minutes. There’s no chance of survival. There is a potential way out—the plane happens to be transferring a shipment of parachutes, and anyone who would like to use one to escape the plane may do so. But I must warn you—the parachutes are experimental and completely untested, with no guarantee to work. We also have no idea what the terrain will be like down below. Please line up in the aisle if you’d like a parachute, and the flight attendants will give you one, show you how to use it and usher you to the emergency exit where you can jump. Those who choose not to take that option, please remain in your seat—this will be over soon, and you will feel no pain.

 What would you do?

 ___________

 When Robert Ettinger was a kid in the 1930s, he read a lot of science fiction, and he assumed that with the world advancing the way it was, scientists would surely have a cure for aging at some point during his lifetime. He would live to see a world where sickness was a thing of the past and death was something people chose to do voluntarily, at a time of their choosing.11← New to WBW? Open these.

 But thirty years later, aging and involuntary death were still very much a thing, and Ettinger, by then a physics professor, realized that science might not solve these problems in time for him to reap the benefits. So he started thinking about how to hack the system.

 If, rather than being buried or cremated after his death, he could instead be frozen in some way—then whenever the scientists did eventually get around to conquering mortality, they’d probably also have the tools and know-how to resuscitate him, and he could have the last laugh after all.

 In 1962, he wrote about this concept in a book called The Prospects of Immortality, and the cryonics movement was born.

 The first person to give cryonics a try was James Bedford, a psychology professor who died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 73 and is doing his thing in a vat of liquid nitrogen in Arizona as you read this. Others slowly began to follow, and today, there are over 300 people hanging out in vats of liquid nitrogen.

 Now let’s pause for a second. A year ago, I knew almost nothing about cryonics, and my impressions of it were something like this sentence:

 Cryonics, or cryogenics, is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.

 Then I started learning about it. It’s your fault—cryonics is one of the potential-future-post-topics people email me about most, and it’s something at least five readers have brought up in conversation when I’ve met them in person. And as I began to read about cryonics, I soon learned that a lot of the words in my italicized assumption sentence weren’t correct.

 So let’s work our way through the sentence as we go over exactly what cryonics is and how it works. We’ll start with this part:

 Cryonics, or cryogenics, is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.

 It turns out that this is like saying, “Wingsuit flying, or meteorology, is the sport of flying through the air using a wingsuit.” Meteorology is the study of what happens in the atmosphere, which includes how wind works, and wingsuit flying is a process that harnesses the wind—and you’d be an odd person if you thought they were the same thing.

 Likewise, cryogenics is a branch of physics that studies the production and effects of very low temperatures, while cryonics is the practice of using very low temperatures to try to preserve a human being. Not the same thing.

 Next, we have a string of three misleading words to talk about:

 Cryonics is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.

 We’ll address these three words by going through how cryonics works, starting at the beginning.

 So you decide you want to be a cryonicist. Here are the steps:

 Step 1) Pick a company

 There are four major companies that provide cryonics services—Alcor in Arizona, Cryonics Institute (CI) in Michigan, American Cryonics Society (ACS) in California, and KrioRus in Russia. KrioRus is the newest option and quickly up-and-coming, but the two big boys are Alcor and CI (ACS doesn’t have their own storage facilities—they store with CI).

 From my perusing, it seems like Alcor is the slightly-more-legit and fancier of the two, while CI (which was started by Robert Ettinger, the guy who launched the movement) is more affordable and gives off more of a mom-and-pop vibe. Both are nonprofit, and each has about 150 people in storage. Alcor has a little over 1,000 “members” (i.e. people who will one day be in storage), and CI has around half that number.

 Step 2) Become a member

 To become a cryonicist, you need to fill out some paperwork, sign some stuff and get it notarized, and pay for three things: an annual membership fee, a transport fee to get your body to the facility after you die, and a treatment/storage/revival fee.

 Alcor’s annual membership fee is about $700, and their transport fee is bundled together with the treatment/storage/revival fee—together they cost $200,000. Alcor gives you the option of ditching your body and just freezing your brain (this is called “neuropreservation”), which brings the price down to $80,000.

 CI’s annual membership fee is $120 (or a one-time fee of $1,250 for a lifetime membership) and the treatment, etc. costs $35,000 ($28,000 for lifetime members). This is so much cheaper than Alcor for two main reasons:

 First, it doesn’t include the transport. If you live near the facility, you can save a lot of money. If not, you’ll need to go through their partner for a transport contract, which costs $95,000 ($88,000 for lifetime members).

 Second, Alcor uses more than half of their large fee to fund what they call their Patient Care Trust. Back in the 70s, there were more cryonics companies, and some of them went bankrupt, which meant their frozen people stopped being frozen, which was a not ideal outcome. Alcor’s trust is a backup fund to make sure their “patients” won’t be affected by something like a company financial crisis.

 Step 3) Get a life insurance policy in the name of your new cryonics company

 Sounds shady, right? But it also makes sense. Both Alcor and CI are small companies on a pretty tight budget and neither can afford to offer a payment plan to be hopefully paid out by your estate or your relatives. On the patient end, unless you’re rich, cryonics fees are huge, and a life insurance policy guaranteed to pay your full cryonics fee forces you to save for this fee throughout your life. For young people, even sizable life insurance policies are pretty cheap—with CI, you could be totally covered for as little as $300/year ($120 annual membership, $180 life insurance policy to cover the main fee). Even for Alcor’s more expensive package, costs shouldn’t exceed $100/month.

 Those fees aren’t nothing, but the whole life insurance thing, at least when it comes to younger people, pretty effectively ejects “rich” from our black and red sentence. If it costs the same as cable or a cigarette habit, you don’t need to be rich to pay for it.

 Step 4) Put on your bracelet and go on living your life

 Cryonics members are given a bracelet and a necklace, etched with instructions and contact info, and encouraged to wear one at all times, so if you suddenly die, whoever finds you will know to notify the company.

 Step 5) Die

 Okay here’s where things get tricky. We think of the divide between life and death as a distinct boundary, and we believe that at any given point, a person is either definitively alive or definitively dead. But let’s examine that assumption for a second:

 Let’s first talk about what it means when a person is “doomed” from a health standpoint. We can all agree that what constitutes someone being doomed depends on where, and when, they are. A three-year-old with advanced pneumonia in 1740 would probably have been doomed, while the same child with the same condition today might be fully treatable. The same story could be said of the fate of someone who falls badly ill in a remote village in Malawi compared with their fate if they were in London instead. “Doomed” depends on a number of factors.

 That the same thing can be said of “dead” is at first pretty unintuitive. But Alcor’s CEO Max More puts it this way: “Fifty years ago if you were walking along the street and someone keeled over in front of you and stopped breathing you would have checked them out and said they were dead and disposed of them. Today we don’t do that, instead we do CPR and all kinds of things. People we thought were dead 50 years ago we now know were not.”2

 Today, dead means the heart has been stopped for 4-6 minutes, because that’s how long the brain can go without oxygen before brain death occurs. But Alcor, in its site’s Science FAQ, explains that “the brain ‘dies’ after several minutes without oxygen not because it is immediately destroyed, but because of a cascade of processes that commit it to destruction in the hours that follow restoration of warm blood circulation. Restoring circulation with cool blood instead of warm blood, reopening blocked vessels with high pressure, avoiding excessive oxygenation, and blocking cell death with drugs can prevent this destruction.”3 The site goes on to explain that “with new experimental treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can now be survived without brain injury. Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making today’s beliefs about when death occurs obsolete.”

 In other words, what we think of as “dead” actually means “doomed, under the current circumstances.” Someone fifty years ago who suffered from cardiac arrest wasn’t dead, they were doomed to die because the medical technology at the time couldn’t save them. Today, that person wouldn’t be considered dead yet because they wouldn’t be doomed yet. Instead, someone today “dies” 4-6 minutes after cardiac arrest, because that happens to be how long someone can currently go before modern technology can no longer help them.

 Cryonicists view death not as a singular event, but as a process—one that starts when the heart stops beating and ends later at a point called “the information-theoretic criterion for death”—let’s call it “info death”—when the brain has become so damaged that no amount of present or future technology could restore it to its original state or have any way to retrieve its information.

 Here’s an interesting way to think about it: Imagine a patient arriving in an ambulance to Hospital A, a typical modern hospital. The patient’s heart stopped 15 minutes before the EMTs arrived and he is immediately pronounced dead at the hospital. What if, though, the doctors at Hospital A learned that Hospital B across the street had developed a radical new technology that could revive a patient anytime within 60 minutes after cardiac arrest with no long-term damage? What would the people at Hospital A do?

 Of course, they would rush the patient across the street to Hospital B to save him. If Hospital B did save the patient, then by definition the patient wouldn’t actually have been dead in Hospital A, just pronounced dead because Hospital A viewed him as entirely and without exception doomed.

 What cryonicists suggest is that in many cases where today a patient is pronounced dead, they’re not dead but rather doomed, and that there is a Hospital B that can save the day—but instead of being in a different place, it’s in a different time. It’s in the future.

 That’s why cryonicists adamantly assert that cryonics does not deal with dead people—it deals with living people who simply need to be transferred to a future hospital to be saved. They believe that in many cases, today’s corpse is tomorrow’s patient (which is why they call their frozen clients “patients” instead of “corpses” or “remains”), and they view their work as essentially “extended emergency medicine.”4

 But it’s emergency medicine with an important caveat. Today’s technology has no way to revive a cryonically-suspended patient, so it isn’t considered a medical procedure by the law but rather a weird kind of coffin—i.e. if you cryopreserve someone who hasn’t yet been pronounced dead, it’s seen by the law as homicide. Even if the patient is terminally ill beyond any hope and adamantly doesn’t want to deteriorate further before being cryopreserved, it’s not an option—at least not under current laws (laws that some are trying to change). This puts cryonicists in a tough bind—and it’s exactly where that differing definition of death comes in handy.

 The law does not see death as a process. For a long time, legal death in the US was considered to occur when a person’s heartbeat and breathing stopped. As modern medical procedures like CPR and defibrillators started to allow those patients to be resuscitated, the law had to change the definition of legal death to include “irreversible cessation of all functions of the brain.”5 The old “heartbeat and breathing” definition of legal death is now called “clinical death,” a middle ground point where there’s an obligation to attempt resuscitation in most cases but where a patient can also have a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order in place (common with terminally ill patients).2 In DNR cases, a doctor or nurse will pronounce a clinically dead patient to be legally dead—even though a resuscitation effort could still revive them.

 This is a critical fact for cryonics. Cryonics technicians have to wait until legal death to begin their work on a patient, but with the help of a patient’s DNR order, they can start the process right after the heart stops, well before any brain damage sets in.

 So this is the window for cryonics:

 Which brings us back to our list, where we can now clarify what we really mean with Step 5:

 Step 5) Legally Die

 You legally dying is a key step along the way here, so don’t mess it up. You can do it the good way, the bad way, or the really bad way.

 The good way: Something predictable where you’re in a cliché deathbed situation, like cancer. This allows you to get yourself on a plane to either Scottsdale (Alcor) or Michigan (CI) and into one of the specifically designated hospice care facilities that the cryonics company regularly works with. This is important because cryonics is highly controversial within the mainstream medical community and often not well-regarded or well-understood. As a result, some hospitals and hospice care facilities are “cryonics friendly” and others are not (those that aren’t have been known to make it difficult for cryonics staff to do what they need to do or deny them the same privileges organ transplant specialists get in a hospital). Once you’re in hospice care, the cryonics company can put staff on standby around the clock, so that the second you legally die, they can be there to start the treatment.

 The bad way: Something sudden and unexpected, like a heart attack, where at best, someone is there and can contact the cryonics company as you’re rushed to the hospital so they can meet you there, or worse, where you’re dead for a few hours or even longer before anyone finds you. In these circumstances, the cryonics company will do the best they can. Your brain will be in worse shape than ideal when you go into cryopreservation, but again, who knows what future technology will be able to accomplish, and as long as you’re still somewhere in the “cryonics window” and still in the process of dying, not yet having reached info death, there remains hope.

 The really bad way: A violent accident or something where your brain ends up badly damaged. In the worst of these cases, there’s not much cryonics can do to help—like the Alcor member who died in the September 11th attacks.6 Another bad ending would be dying in a foul-play situation that would lead the police to want to do an autopsy (Alcor suggests its members file a no-autopsy-for-religious-reasons form with the government). A woman who has signed up for cryonics did a Reddit AMA, and when one of the questions was about how signing up had changed her life, she answered, “The biggest change I’ve noticed is that I’m more careful. I drive slower and more cautiously/attentively, I pay more attention to what’s going on around me.” Because she doesn’t want to die the really bad way.

 Step 6) Cool off ASAP and get transferred to the cryonics facility

 After you’re declared legally dead, the cryonics team will, ideally, immediately get going. The first thing they do is two-fold—they put you in an ice water bath to bring down your temperature and slow your metabolism (so any damage taking place as a result of cardiac arrest takes longer to happen), and they start getting your heart and lungs working again so that the body remains in stable condition. They do this by administering CPS (like CPR but with an S for support instead of an R for resuscitation, because they’re not trying to resuscitate you) using a mechanical heart-lung resuscitator called a thumper:7

 Then they inject you with a number of different medicines to make sure you don’t get blood clots or start rotting.

 Once that’s under control, they can do a more involved procedure that surgically accesses the major blood vessels in your thigh and hooks them up to this guy:8

 That’s a heart-lung machine that takes care of circulation and oxygenation so they can stop the much cruder CPS. In addition to circulating your blood, the machine draws heat out of your body, cooling it to just above the freezing temperature of water, and replaces some of your blood with an organ preservation solution that supports life at super low temperatures (this is similar to how transplant surgeons keep organs alive when they have to transport them long distances).

 If you have to be flown to the cryonics facility, they pack you in ice and put you on board what they hope is not your last ever flight.

 Step 7) Get vitrified

 Most people who know what cryonics is think it means getting frozen. It doesn’t. It means getting vitrified.

 Glass is weird. It’s not a typical solid because as it cools from its liquid phase, it never crystallizes into an orderly structure. But, as I learned when a bunch of commenters yelled at me after I published this post, it’s not actually a liquid either, since it doesn’t flow. So, it’s neither a typical solid nor a liquid—it’s an “amorphous solid,” sometimes compared to a giant molecule. For our purposes, the key is that like a liquid, glass doesn’t crystallize—rather, as it cools the molecules just move slower and slower until they stop.

 If you froze a human, all the liquid water in their body would eventually hit its freezing point and crystallize into a solid. That wouldn’t be good—first, water ice takes up about 9% more volume than water liquid, so it would expand and badly damage tissue, and second, the sharp ice crystals would slice through cell membranes and other tissue around it.

 So to avoid that catastrophic liquid-to-solid state change, cryonics technicians do something cool—they perform surgery through the chest and hook the major arteries up to tubes which pump all the blood out of the body, replacing it with a “cryoprotectant solution,” otherwise known as medical grade anti-freeze. This does two important things: it replaces 60% of the water in the body’s cells, and it lowers the freezing point of what liquid is left. The result, when done perfectly, is that no freezing happens in the body. Instead, as they chill your body down and down over the next three hours, it hits -124ºC, a key point called the “glass transition temperature” when the body’s liquid stays amorphous but rises so high in viscosity that no molecule can budge. You’re officially an amorphous solid, like glass—i.e. you’re vitrified.

 With no molecule movement, all chemical activity in your body comes to a halt. Biological time is stopped. You’re on pause.

 Since I’m sure you’re feeling skeptical, it’s helpful to note that vitrifying biological parts is nothing new. We’ve been successfully vitrifying and then rewarming human embryos, sperm, skin, bone, and other body parts for a while now. More recently, scientists vitrified a rabbit kidney:9

 Then they rewarmed it and put it back in the rabbit. And it still worked.

 And just in February of 2016, there was a cryonics breakthrough when for the first time, scientists vitrified a rabbit’s brain and showed that once rewarmed, it was in near-perfect condition, “with the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures intact … [It was] the first time a cryopreservation was provably able to protect everything associated with learning and memory.”10

 Once you’re vitrified, you need to keep being chilled, little by little, until after about two weeks, you’re down to -196ºC. Why? Because that’s the point at which nitrogen becomes a liquid, and you’re about to take a long-term liquid nitrogen bath.

 Step 8) Go into storage

 Or as Alcor euphemistically calls it, “long-term care.” The new vitrified you now goes into what is essentially a large upright thermos that’s about 10 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide.11

 You meet your new neighbors—three other vitrified people, each in their respective quadrant of the thermos, along with five people traveling super lean, with no body, whose heads are stacked in the middle column.12

 Or, if you’re in a heads-only thermos, you’ll be one of 45 brains sharing the space (the brain is what’s being stored, but they keep the brains in their heads because it’s riskier to remove a brain than to just keep it in there and use the head as a carrying case).

 Oh, and you’re upside-down. This is because liquid nitrogen boils off gradually from the top of the container. Normally, it’s no problem—the staff tops it off about once a week. But if, in some worst-case scenario, a container was forced to be left for a long time, the head would be the last thing to be affected—upside-down patients means it would take six months before the nitrogen boiled off so far that the head would be exposed.

 And when it comes to blackouts, cryonics patients are totally safe—there’s no electricity involved in their storage.

 And this is where you’ll hang out. Maybe for 10 years. Maybe for 150 years. Maybe for 1,200 years. But the time doesn’t matter to you. You’re on pause.

 Now’s a good time for us to take a step back and look at the big picture. If Point A is “I’ve decided I want to sign up for cryonics,” and Point B is “Oh cool it’s the year 2482 and here I am doing stuff,” there are four major Ifs that need to all go the right way to take you from A to B:

 1) If I legally die in a not really bad way and everything goes as planned with getting me into the thermos

 and

 2) If future humanity ever reaches a point where it has the technology to revive me to full health

 and

 3) If the cryonics company can manage to store me safely and uninterrupted until that point

 and

 4) If when that point comes, the outside world actually does take action to revive me

 —then I’ll be there in 2482 doing stuff.

 The eight steps you’ve taken so far that start with choosing a cryonics company and end with you in the thermos only accomplish the first If, with all the other Ifs still standing in between you and the next step in your cryonics journey—revival.

 To understand how we can reach that step, we need to understand the deal with all four Ifs.

 We’ll start by talking about Ifs 1-3, which need to be discussed together, because they’re interdependent and they work together. To illustrate why, let’s lay them out in the same visual:

 The three segments of this line relate to Ifs 1, 2, and 3. But the visual is a little misleading at first, because even though all three segments lie on the same line, they’re all representing different concepts:

 * The blue segment (If 1) represents the quality of your initial preservation .
 * The yellow segment (If 2) represents the capabilities of medical technology as time moves forward .
 * The green segment (If 3) represents the amount of time still needed to bridge the gap between the blue and yellow segments before they can finally connect to each other.

 The idea is that the better you were preserved, the farther out to the right the blue segment extends, and as technology gets better and better, the yellow segment extends itself farther and farther left toward the blue segment. The green segment gets smaller and smaller as this happens, until eventually the green segment is no more and the blue and yellow segments connect—i.e. medical technology has reached the point where it can revive you.

 A lot of the key details about cryonics are centered here, so let’s talk about each of these segments in more depth:

 The blue segment—the quality of your preservation (which relates to If 1)

 The length of the blue segment corresponds to the quality of preservation. Or, put most simply, the fewer roadblocks there are between your vitrified state in the thermos and a fully restored and healthy you, the longer the blue segment is—because if everything that happens leading up to you being put in the thermos goes as well as possible, it goes a longer way towards getting you to Point B and means the yellow segment has to do less work on its end to be able to revive you.

 The major factor that determines the length of the blue segment is how closely the atomic structure of your vitrified brain resembles the original atomic structure of your brain when it was living and healthy.

 Let’s note that I said “brain,” not “body,” because what we mostly care about here is the brain. Cryonicists, like many of us, believe that who you are comes down to your brain. If, in the future, your identical current brain lived on top of a synthetic body and your exact memories and personality were fully intact, cryonicists would be satisfied that you “survived.” That’s why some don’t even bother vitrifying their body.

 The second thing to note is that scientists believe that short-term memory is contained in brain activity—in the electricity going through your brain—while your long-term memory, your personality, your knowledge, and everything else that makes you “you” is contained in the brain’s structure—i.e. the particular arrangement of atoms that make up your brain.13

 Any electrical activity in your brain before legal death will be lost during vitrification, so you’d be revived without the short-term memory of the end of your pre-vitrified life. But what vitrification can preserve is the structure of your brain, which conveniently, is all we care about.

 This concept gives us a clearer understanding of the way cryonicists view death. To cryonicists, perfect health means the exact arrangement of atoms in your healthy brain being intact, and the process of dying means the deterioration of that arrangement due to phenomena like aging, injury, disease, and, eventually, effects caused by heart stoppage. Death, to them, means the point at which the original structure of your brain has become so disorganized that even the fanciest future science lab would have no way of figuring out what the original arrangement looked like—that’s the definition of info death.

 The concept of info death makes sense when we compare the brain to a computer’s hard drive. Eliezer Yudkowsky explains how difficult it actually is to bring a computer hard drive to info death:14

 If you want to securely erase a hard drive, it’s not as easy as writing it over with zeroes. Sure, an “erased” hard drive like this won’t boot up your computer if you just plug it in again. But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between “this was a 0, overwritten by a 0” and “this was a 1, overwritten by a 0”.

 There are programs advertised to “securely erase” hard drives using many overwrites of 0s, 1s, and random data. But if you want to keep the secret on your hard drive secure against all possible future technologies that might ever be developed, then cover it with thermite and set it on fire. It’s the only way to be sure.

 He applies the same logic to the human brain to suggest that cryonics patients should one day be revivable:

 Pumping someone full of cryoprotectant and gradually lowering their temperature until they can be stored in liquid nitrogen is not a secure way to erase a person.

 In other words, it’s reasonable to assume that the fanciest future neuroscientists will become so good at reading a damaged vitrified brain for clues as to its original structure that a typical combo of aging, disease, heart stoppage, and vitrification likely won’t be able to “stump” them. And to cryonicists, if future scientists can examine your vitrified brain and figure out what it’s supposed to look like, you’re not dead—by definition.

 The length of the blue segment—preservation quality—is affected by three things:

 1) How much damage happened before you legally died. How old were you when you died? How much had your brain deteriorated by that point? Did you suffer from a dementia-causing disease like Alzheimer’s and how much permanent damage did that disease do?3 Did the thing that killed you damage your brain (like brain cancer, or a head injury) or was your brain unharmed?

 2) How much damage happened between when you legally died and when the cryonics team started working on you. In the ideal situation, your heart stops and before any changes happen in your brain, you’re stabilized and put on ice. Often, this isn’t how things go, and every unattended minute that passes after legal death has a big impact on the brain and shortens the length of the blue segment. But cryonicists believe that true info death doesn’t happen for many hours, or even days, after legal death occurs, and that there’s often hope in cryopreserving even people who lay “dead” for a while before being found.

 3) How much damage happened during the vitrifying process. Vitrification itself—at least the way it is currently done—causes its own damage to the brain. Cryonics research focuses mostly on mitigating this factor, and it’s dramatically improved since the earliest days in the 1970s—the series of images at the bottom of this page shows the progress that has been made.

 The yellow segment—the state of medical technological advancement as time moves forward (which relates to If 2)

 As medical technology becomes more and more advanced, the yellow segment grows—but while the blue segment extends to the right as it grows, the yellow segment extends to the left . The key point happens when technology eventually gets so good that the yellow segment meets the blue segment and you become officially revivable.

 Some questions:

 Will If 2 happen? Will technology ever reach the point when it can revive you?

 Assuming If 1 gets a check mark, cryonicists believe If 2 is likely to one day get a check mark too. Because there are only two ways to totally fail If 2:

 1) For some reason, humans permanently stop working on medical technology advancements before you hit the If 2 key point.

 2) Humans go extinct before hitting the If 2 key point.

 Barring those two situations, If 2 should eventually cooperate. The theory is that with enough future technology, you’ll one day be revivable.

 When will If 2 happen? How long until I’m revived?

 This part depends on how substantial the technological challenge of cryonic revival turns out to be and how quickly technology ends up moving forward—but it also depends upon how well If 1 went. As we just discussed, the better If 1 goes, the sooner If 2 happens.

 How will If 2 happen? What kind of future technology might be able to revive vitrified people?

 Well, it depends on what we mean by revival. Cryonicists seem to have a Plan A and a Plan B.

 Plan A: Restore the vitrified patient as a healthy human

 Under Plan A, revival consists of restoring the structure of the vitrified brain to its original state—i.e. putting all the atoms where they belong. To do that, you need two things:

 1) The info about where the atoms are supposed to go

 2) A way to put the atoms where they’re supposed to go

 The first thing is taken care of if today’s vitrifying procedures do their job, assuming future neuroscientists become really good at deciphering a brain’s original state from the information they can gather by examining the vitrified brain.

 The second thing requires molecular nanotechnology. For a quick nanotech overview, I’ll steal part of a blue box from the AI post:

 Nanotechnology Blue Box

 Nanotechnology is our word for technology that deals with the manipulation of matter that’s between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or a millionth of a millimeter, and this 1-100 range encompasses viruses (100 nm across), DNA (10 nm wide), and things as small as large molecules like hemoglobin (5 nm) and medium molecules like glucose (1 nm). If/when we conquer nanotechnology, the next step will be the ability to manipulate individual atoms, which are only one order of magnitude smaller (~.1 nm).4

 To understand the challenge of humans trying to manipulate matter in that range, let’s take the same thing on a larger scale. The International Space Station is 268 mi (431 km) above the Earth. If humans were giants so large their heads reached up to the ISS, they’d be about 250,000 times bigger than they are now. If you make the 1nm – 100nm nanotech range 250,000 times bigger, you get .25mm – 2.5cm. So nanotechnology is the equivalent of a human giant as tall as the ISS figuring out how to carefully build intricate objects using materials between the size of a grain of sand and an eyeball. To reach the next level—manipulating individual atoms—the giant would have to carefully position objects that are 1/40th of a millimeter—so small normal-size humans would need a microscope to see them.5

 Nanotech was first discussed by Richard Feynman in a 1959 talk, when he explained: “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It would be, in principle, possible … for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down…. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance.” It’s as simple as that. If you can figure out how to move individual molecules or atoms around, you can make literally anything. Nanotechnology so advanced that it allows us to engineer at an atomic level is called molecular nanotechnology (MNT).

 Humans haven’t yet conquered MNT, and scientists debate how long it’ll take humanity to get there. But when we do, we might look back on today’s technology as terribly primitive, like the picture scientist Ralph Merkle paints: “Today’s manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It’s like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can’t really snap them together the way you’d like.”

 MNT will be a game-changer in an unimaginable number of arenas, one of which is in medicine. A brain synapse is just a particular configuration of atoms, so if we have the tools to move atoms around and put them where we want, then we can perfectly “repair” a damaged synapse. Cryonicists believe MNT is the key to the future revival and restoration of cryonics patients.

 The first thought some people have when they think about revival is that the person would be revived as the old and dying person they were before being vitrified. But that’s not the plan. When we get to the point when we have technology so incredible that we can move atoms around well enough to revive someone, we should also have the technology to repair and rejuvenate them. For someone who was dying of cancer before going into the thermos, not only will their successful revival mean that cancer has likely been conquered long ago, but probably aging too.

 Along the same lines, by that point we should also be able to either rejuvenate the patient’s vitrified body or simply make a new, perfectly-working body. Alcor’s Medical Response Director, Aaron Drake, explains: “We know we can regenerate a small organ, and grow a new heart. We know we can 3-dimensionally print cells and hearts. So at some point we would need to regenerate her entire body, or at least her organs, and put it all together. Then we’d need to transplant that brain into a new body.” 15

 Plan B: Upload the person’s brain info into a virtual world

 Plan B shares Plan A’s first requirement—the info about where the atoms are supposed to go—but not its need for physical assembly. Instead, Plan B relies on a hypothetical future technology called “whole brain emulation,” where an entire brain structure can be uploaded to a computer with such perfect accuracy that everything about the person is intact and alive in a virtual world.

 Sounds super fun, right?

 This is an option if physical revival is too difficult, or if it’s so far in the future that the physical world has actually gone out of style entirely. If humans can somehow pull off whole brain emulation, you could be revived to wake up in a magical virtual world, fully conscious and no longer confined to the limits and vulnerabilities of biology and the physical world. Please.

 While both Plan A and B require immense technological hurdles, cryonicists stress that both options are theoretically possible.

 The green segment—the amount of time you need to stay safely in storage before technology is able to revive you (which relates to If 3)

 The green segment’s job is simple: hold everything together until the yellow segment connects to the blue segment.

 So what could mess up If 3? What could sabotage a vitrified person’s ability to remain bathed in liquid nitrogen as long as necessary?

 A lot of things. Like:

 The cryonics company screws up. A human-error-caused catastrophe—e.g. a rupture in a thermos tank lets in heat, and all the liquid nitrogen evaporates before the staff realizes what happened.

 The cryonics company goes bankrupt and doesn’t have the means, the will, or the organization to create a plan that will save the patients. I mentioned that this happened a few times with some of the earlier companies. The major companies today claim to have secure backup plans in place in case of the worst case scenario, and this security blanket is the main purpose of Alcor’s sizable trust.

 A natural disaster. An earthquake, tornado, or something else smashes the building holding the thermoses to oblivion. Neither major US cryonics company is in a location highly prone to natural disasters—Alcor actually located itself in Scottsdale, AZ because it is the place in the US least at risk of natural disasters. Even if a natural disaster were to strike, the patients might be fine—the thermoses are strong, they’re power-outage-proof with no electricity involved, and even if a thermos is ruptured, there’s the upside-down thing where patients’ heads will be the last body part affected.

 A terrorist attack on a cryonics facility. There are a lot of people in the world—especially in the world of religion—who hate the concept of cryonics.

 War. All bets are off in war.

 The law prevents the cryonics company from doing its job. This one almost happened recently. In 2004, Arizona legislators tried to pass a bill that would have put Alcor under the regulation of the State Funeral Board. This, if passed, would have likely ended up shutting Alcor down. It turned into a nasty debate, centered largely around religious issues, with the religious voice disapproving of Alcor’s line of work—but ultimately, Alcor prevailed. That said, in order to do business legally, Alcor has to accept bodies in the guise of “anatomical donations for research purposes,” a practice protected by the constitutional right to donate one’s body for research into cryopreservation. The law-related variable seems pretty stable currently, but if someone has a long green segment and requires 800 years of storage before their revival becomes possible, who the hell knows what will happen—what is currently Scottsdale, AZ might not even be part of the US by that point.

 The cryonics company comes under ownership with different values and they decide to give up on the patients. Or, more maliciously, a cryonics-hater makes a too-good-to-refuse offer to the owners of a cryonics company with the intention of shutting it down. All major cryonics companies claim that they’re run and always will be run by passionate cryonicists and this is not a possibility—but again, who knows.

 The longer the green segment is and the longer it needs to hold out, the higher the chance of failing If 3. If patients can be revived 40 years from now, there’s a lot less that can go wrong than if revival doesn’t become possible for 2,500 years.

 But the companies are doing their best to plan for the long run. On the question of how long until revival becomes possible, Alcor says, “Some think it will take centuries before patients can be revived, while others think the accelerating pace of technological change might so rapidly transform our world that decades would suffice. Alcor is planning for however long it might take.” 16

 As time moves forward and both vitrification and revival technology improve, both the blue and yellow segments will tend to move inward, invading the green segment from both sides. The big picture might be best illustrated like this:

 This is how the blue, green and yellow segments work in flow with each other. Cryonics companies often say cryonics will be a “last in, first out” thing, and this graph shows exactly why—

 The more time that passes before you need to be vitrified, the fancier the vitrification technology you’ll be treated with and the further along revival technology will be—and this smaller technology gap will mean a sooner revival date. And with less time to have to rely on a cryonics company to care for you, the less risk you’ll be taking.

 It’s important to understand that the blue line on the graph applies to the average cryonics patient—someone who suffers from Alzheimers late in life will go into vitrification in worse shape than a typical person of their time, so their particular challenge will be greater than the blue line height that corresponds with the year of their death.

 Of course, the simple, straight lines on the graph are portraying the general concept. The actual lines won’t be straight or predictable. One promising way this might be the case is that the accelerating rate of technological advancement 6 might mean that the blue and yellow lines could improve at a faster rate over time and look like this:

 So that’s how the first three Ifs work. And that’s all great—but none of it matters if If 4 doesn’t pan out. Without If 4—i.e. “Will people actually revive me when the time comes?”—you’re still just a helpless, vitrified body, and if the external world doesn’t keep their side of the bargain once you become revivable, you’re out of luck—and you’ll never know it happened.

 You’ll be a little like a farm animal. You might have rights in theory, but with no ability to defend your own rights, you’ll rely on other people to fight for those rights on your behalf.

 As I’ve dug into this topic and talked to people about it, I’ve noticed that this concern seems to jump immediately to people’s minds as a reason cryonics is unlikely to work out.

 They ask: “There will be enough problems on Earth to deal with—do you really think people are going to care about bringing dead people back to life?”

 Cryonicists have answers to this question.

 First, they point out that patients won’t be floating in tanks in a world that has forgotten them. Rather, as a patient, you’d likely have A) descendants or friends who will be highly aware of you and eager to see you reanimated, B) the larger cryonicist community, who will be as passionately interested in your fair treatment as PETA activists are in the fair treatment of animals, and C) the contractual obligation of your future care-takers—similar to how today you might be operated on by a surgeon who doesn’t know you, but who diligently cares for you anyway out of professional obligation.

 Second, they argue that once the revival of cryonics patients becomes a reality, the public’s conception of what a cryonics patient is and what she deserves will dramatically shift:17

 Long before it ever becomes possible to contemplate revival of today’s patients, reversible suspended animation will be perfected as a mainstream medical technology. From that point forward, the whole tradition of caring for people who cannot immediately be fixed will be strongly reinforced in culture and law. By the time it becomes possible to revive patients preserved with the oldest and crudest technologies, revival from states of suspended animation will be something that has been done thousands, if not millions, of times before. The moral and cultural imperative for revival when possible will be as basic and strong as the obligation to render first aid and emergency medical care today.

 If a cryonics patient might seem to have the rights of a farm animal today, cryonicists expect that to become an outdated and primitive-seeming viewpoint down the road. They believe cryonics patients will be looked upon more like today’s coma patients.

 That sounds great, but of course, we have no idea how the future will play out or what the standing will be for the field of cryonics and its suspended patients. It does seem plausible, at least, that cryonics patients will end up with more and more rights in the future, not fewer and fewer. If that’s what happens, If 4 shouldn’t be much of a problem.

 And if all four Ifs go your way, you’ll finally be able to move onto the next step—the one that will really blow your mind when it happens.

 Step 9) Be revived

 This will be quite the experience.

 First, whether it happens 30 years or 2,000 years after you were last conscious, it’ll feel the same to you—probably a bit like a short nap. When you sleep, you feel the passage of time—when you wake up after an eight-hour night’s sleep, it doesn’t feel like you just went to bed a second ago, it feels like it’s been eight hours. But being on pause in your liquid nitrogen thermos is different. You won’t experience the passage of time, so it’ll feel like you were just awake in your previous life (the only reason it won’t feel totally instantaneous is that you’ll have lost your short term memories). You’ll probably be super disoriented, and someone will have to explain to you that A) you’re in the future, and B) the cryonics worked, and you’re no longer a person about to die—you’re healthy and rejuvenated and all set to start living again.

 How intense.

 As a very not-heaven-believing person, I’ve always thought about how pleasantly shocked I would be if I died and then woke up in some delightful afterlife. I’d look around, slowly realize what was happening, and then I’d be like, “Wait…NO FUCKING WAY.” Then I’d promptly plant myself at the gates and watch other atheists come in for the fun of seeing them go through the same shock.

 I imagine being revived from cryonics will be kind of like that. Maybe a few notches less shocking, since you presumably did the cryonics thing because you thought there was a chance it would work—but still a pretty big no fucking way moment.

 After the initial shock, you’ll have to figure out what kind of world you’ve woken up into. Some possibilities:

 It could suck. You could wake up in a far future world that’s a lot worse than the one you previously lived in and a world in which you know zero people. Even worse, you could wake up in some really scary situation—who knows what kind of creepy shit might be going on in the future.

 It could be blah. You could wake up in a world that’s kind of meh. Like it’s not as future-y and cool as you thought it would be and you’re not immortal, just somewhat restored and still vulnerable, and you have to get a job and you don’t really have applicable skills for the times. Just kind of whatevs.

 It could be incredibly rad. Probably the most likely outcome, you could wake up and it could be very, very rad. The future-y stuff might be cool and fun beyond your comprehension. You might have previously been 84 and aching everywhere and forgetful, and suddenly you have the body of a perfectly fit 20-year-old, or maybe something even better, like a super-charged synthetic body that doesn’t feel pain or exhaustion and can’t get sick. Your old, forgetful brain could be repaired and full of vitality you haven’t experienced in 50 years. And best, you might be surrounded by friends and family who were also cryopreserved and are unbelievably excited to see you. It could be rad.

 It could be even crazier if you wake up in a virtual world after having had your vitrified brain data uploaded to a computer. You wouldn’t feel like you were in a computer—you’d feel every bit as real as you did when you were a human, except now everything is amazing and magical and you can spend almost all your time fulfilling my lifelong dream of sliding down rainbows like this care bear.18

 Your friends and family could be there with you, also virtually uploaded but still fully themselves with all of their old memories—all of you now eternal and indestructible, with no need for the physical world or its resources.

 Who knows what kind of world you’d wake up in. But a couple things lead me to believe it would be a pretty good situation:

 * A really terrible future world probably isn’t the type of world that would be concerned with protecting and reviving cryonics patients. In a world like that, you’d probably just never wake up.
 * Likewise, a future that can revive vitrified people is by definition pretty technologically amazing, so it’s hard to imagine waking up in a world that hasn’t solved all kinds of problems our current world suffers from.
 * The future tends to be better than the past. Humans have the tendency to predict dystopian futures, but at least so far, it’s been the other way around. Say what you want about the ills of today’s world, but it’s better to be a human today than it was 200 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.

 But because we have no idea what revival will be like, we have this next step:

 Step 10) Decide if you’re into it and want to stay

 Barring some hilariously bad scenario where you’re revived into a world of eternal virtual torture with no ability to end it—which really makes no sense—cryonics is a risk-free venture. It has an undo button—just kill yourself and it’s as if it never happened. If you’re not into it, your journey ends here. Otherwise, move on to the next step.

 Step 11) Enjoy shit

 We’ve kind of reached the end of me guiding you. You’re now just living again like you were before—hopefully in a much better situation—and what you do at this point is really your business. Just go do your thing and enjoy being in the future.

 Step 12) Die for real this time

 At some point, you’ll be over it. No one ever will ever ever want to live forever, a fact I realized at the end of my Graham’s Number post. When the time comes, I assume the fancy future will have some painless way to bow out—something that will cause total info death, where your data is truly unrecoverable. At that point, you’ll have lived the complete life you want to live, not a life cut short by the limitations of the medical technology of the time you happen to be born in. That’s really the way things should be.

 ___________

 Now that we all know a lot more about cryonics, let’s bring back our sentence. This is where we were, and we were looking closely at the three words in the red:

 Cryonics is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.

 We can get rid of “rich,” because at least for younger people, cryonics can be paid for with a not-that-expensive life insurance plan.

 We can get rid of “dead,” because cryonics doesn’t deal with dead people, it deals with people currently doomed to die given the technology they have current access to. For the same reason, we can also change the wording of “bring them back to life.”

 And we can get rid of “freezing,” because cryonics doesn’t freeze people—it vitrifies them into an amorphous solid state.

 While we’re here, let’s get rid of “morbid.” Is a vitrified human head floating in liquid nitrogen morbid? Yes. Is it more morbid than being eaten by worms and microbes underground or being burned to ashes? Definitely not. So not a fair word to use.

 So that leaves us with a sentence more like this:

 Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.

 And then there’s the elephant in the room—this part of the sentence: …and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.

 I put that in there because when you’re examining something that involves A) a fringe community, B) the possible concept of immortality, and C) members paying large sums of money for services that they’re told might pan out 1,000 years from now—you have no choice but to put up your “Is this a Scientology-y thing?” antenna.

 One way to let that antenna do its work is to read a bunch of stuff written by smart, credible people who think the whole thing is utter BS. If anything will disenchant you to the excitement of something as out there as cryonics, it’s experts telling you why it should be ignored.

 So I did that. And as I read, I weighed what I read against the rebuttal from cryonicists, which I’d often find on Alcor’s highly comprehensive FAQ page. Other resources for the cryonicist viewpoint are the thorough FAQ of the Cryonics Institute’s ex-president, Ben Best, Alcor’s Science FAQ and Alcor’s Myths page.

 The people who are super not into cryonics fall into a few general buckets:

 Skeptic Type 1: The scientist with a valid argument about why cryonics might not be possible

 The mainstream medical community is generally not on board with cryonics. No health insurance company will cover it, no government will subsidize it, no doctors will refer to it as a medical procedure.

 Some skeptics make what seem to be valid points. Biochemist Ken Storey says, “We have many different organs and we know from research into preserving transplant organs that even if it were possible to successfully cryopreserve them, each would need to be cooled at a different rate and with a different mixture and concentration of cryoprotectants. Even if you only wanted to preserve the brain, it has dozens of different areas, which would need to be cryopreserved using different protocols.” Storey also points out just how tall an order it would be to “repair” someone damaged by vitrification, explaining that “a human cell has around 50,000 proteins and hundreds of millions of fat molecules that make up the membranes. Cryopreservation disrupts all of them.” (Alcor calls this statement patently false.7)

 Others point to the towering challenge of either repairing a human brain or scanning one in order to upload it. Brazilian scientist Miguel Nicolelis emphasizes that the task of scanning a human brain would require, with today’s technology, “a million electron microscopes running in parallel for ten years.” Michael Hendricks, who studies the brains of roundworms, believes the challenge of reviving the qualities that make someone who they are is far too complex to achieve, explaining that “while it might be theoretically possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that certainly is not happening now. The technology to do so, let alone the ability to read this information back out of such a specimen, does not yet exist even in principle.”

 Cryonicist response: Totes

 Cryonicists don’t really disagree with these people (Storey’s quote notwithstanding). They readily admit that the challenges of reviving someone from cryopreservation are insurmountable using today’s technology. They simply point out that A) there’s no scientific evidence that cryonics can’t work, B) we shouldn’t underestimate what future technology will be able to do (imagine how mind-blowing CRISPR would be to someone in the year 1700 and think about what the equivalent would be for us), and C) there have been some promising developments—like the recent well-preserved vitrified rabbit brain news—that suggest there’s reason for optimism.

 I’m yet to hear a cryonicist say, “Cryonics will work.” They just don’t feel that this is a case where a lack of proof amounts to a lack of credibility. Alcor’s Science FAQ addresses this: “The burden of proof lies with those who make a claim that is inconsistent with existing well-established scientific theory. Cryonics is not inconsistent with well-established scientific theory … At no point does cryonics require that existing physical law be altered in any way.”

 Cryonicists also don’t waste an opportunity to point out these quotes:

 “There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the Moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the Earth’s gravity.” — Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, University of Chicago astronomer, 1932.

 “All this writing about space travel is utter bilge.” — Sir Richard Woolley, Astronomer Royal of Britain, 1956

 “To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon…. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Dr. Lee De Forest, famous engineer, 1957

 Skeptic Type 2: The scientist who argues that cryonics won’t work even though they know less about cryonics than you do right now having read this post

 This is a surprisingly large category of cryonics skeptics. It’s amazing, for example, how many people from the mainstream medical world argue that cryonics can’t work because when water freezes, it causes irreparable damage to human tissue.

 Cryonicist response: Agreed—that’s why we don’t freeze people. Please read about what cryonics is before saying more words out of your mouth.

 Among the cryonics skeptics who literally don’t get what modern cryonics consists of is celebrity physicist Michio Kaku, someone I normally like, but who in this clip is taken to town by Alcor’s CEO for having no idea what he’s talking about.

 Part of the reason most scientists don’t get cryonics has to do with its cross-disciplinary nature. Alcor explains:

 Most experts in any single field will say that they know of no evidence that cryonics can work. That’s because cryonics is an interdisciplinary field based on three facts from diverse unrelated sciences. Without all these facts, cryonics seems ridiculous. Unfortunately that makes the number of experts qualified to comment on cryonics very small. For example, very few scientists even know what vitrification is. Fewer still know that vitrification can preserve cell structure of whole organs or whole brains. Even though this use of vitrification has been published, it is so uncommon outside of cryonics that only a handful of cryobiologists know it is possible.

 Skeptic Type 3: The cryogenicist who doesn’t want the other cool kids to think he’s friends with cryonics, the weird outsider.

 There’s an amusing little one-way rivalry going on between cryogenicists (who, remember, deal with the science of the effects of cold temperatures in general) and cryonicists. Cryogenicists tend to view cryonics like an astronomer would view astrology—or at least, that’s what they say publicly out of caution. They seem to sometimes admit that there could be sound science behind cryonics, but they also know that cryonics lacks credibility with the wider science community and they don’t want to get roped into that reputation problem by association (they also have very little sense of humor about people confusing the words cryogenics and cryonics).

 Cryonicist response: Whatevs.

 Skeptic Type 4: The person who believes that even if you can revive a vitrified person, it won’t really be them.

 This relates to a philosophical quandary I explored in the post What Makes You You? Are “you” your body? Your brain? The data in your brain? Something less tangible like a soul? This all becomes highly relevant when we’re thinking about cryonics. It’s hard to read about cryonic revival, and especially the prospect of “waking up” in a virtual world you’ve been uploaded into, without asking, “But wait…will that still be me?”

 This is a common objection to cryonics, but few people will argue with conviction that they know the answer to this question one way or the other.

 Cryonicist response: Yeah, we’re not sure about that either. Fingers crossed though.

 Most cryonicists have a hunch that you can survive cryopreservation intact (cryonicist Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that “successful cryonics preserves anything about you that is preserved by going to sleep at night and waking up the next morning”) but they also admit that this is yet another variable they’re not sure about. You might even want to consider this a fifth “If” to add onto our list: If what seems to be a revived me is actually me…

 Skeptic Type 5: The person who, regardless of whether cryonics can work or not, thinks it’s a bad thing

 There are lots of these people. A handful of examples:

 Argument: Cryonics is icky.

 Typical cryonicist response: Yup, but less icky than decaying underground.

 Argument: Cryonics is creepy and unnatural.

 Typical cryonicist response: People said the same thing about the first organ transplants.

 Argument: Cryonics is trying to play God and cheat death.

 Typical cryonicist response: Is resuscitating someone whose heart has stopped playing God and cheating death? How about chemotherapy?

 Argument: Cryonics is a scam.

 Typical cryonicist response: The major cryonics companies are all nonprofits, the employees are paid modestly and the board members running the company (who are all signed up for cryonics themselves) aren’t paid at all. So who exactly is benefiting from this scam?

 Argument: “If you have enough money [for cryonics], then you have enough money to help somebody in need today.” — Bioethicist Kenneth Goodman19

 Actual cryonicist response: “If you have enough money for health insurance (which costs a lot more than cryonics), then you have enough money to help somebody else in need today. In fact, if you have enough money for any discretionary expenditure (travel, sports, movies, beer), then you have enough money to help somebody in need today. Of all the ways people choose to spend substantial sums of money over a lifetime, singling out the health care choice of cryonics as selfish is completely arbitrary.”20

 Argument: “Money invested to preserve human life in the deep freeze is money wasted, the sums involved being large enough to fulfill a punitive function as a self-imposed fine for gullibility and vanity.” — Biologist Jean Medawar21

 Actual cryonicist response: “Nobody would ever imagine calling the first recipients of bone marrow transplants or artificial hearts “gullible and vain”. And what of dying children who are cryopreserved? Cryonics is an experiment, and people who choose this experiment are worthy of the same respect as other participants in high risk medical endeavors.”22

 Argument: Cryonics will cause an overpopulation disaster.

 Actual cryonicist response: This is a common one I’ve heard in my discussions. Here’s what Alcor says: “What about antibiotics, vaccinations, statin drugs and the population pressures they bring? It’s silly to single out something as small and speculative as cryonics as a population issue. Life spans will continue increasing in developed parts of the world, cryonics or not, as they have done for the past century. Historically, as societies become more wealthy and long-lived, population takes care of itself. Couples have fewer children at later ages. This is happening in the world right now. The worst population problems are where people are poor and life spans short, not long.”23

 Argument: But Ted Williams.

 Let me explain. There are a handful of famous people signed up for cryonics, like Ray Kurzweil, nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler, and celebrities like Larry King, Britney Spears, Simon Cowell, and Paris Hilton.24 But there are very few big names among the 300 or so who are already vitrified. One that is is baseball legend Ted Williams.

 Williams is the first thing that comes to mind when a lot of people think about cryonics, an unfortunate fact that cryonicists wish would go away, because his story is mired in scandal (two of Williams’ children said cryonics is what he wanted while the other claimed he wanted to be cremated and the son was just cryopreserving him so he could later profit off of his DNA samples). The ugly story ended up, fairly or unfairly, as a stain on the cryonics industry in many people’s heads, partially because in the midst of it, Sports Illustrated published an article about the scandal with quotes from an ex-Alcor employee accusing Alcor of mismanaging the Williams vitrification, among other things.

 Typical cryonicist response: Unfairly. It’s a stain unfairly. The accusations weren’t based in reality, and the employee recently admitted in court that what he said may not have been true.

 Argument: Life is long enough. People aren’t supposed to live longer than we do now. Just enjoy what you’ve got.

 Typical cryonicist response: Thank you for your opinion. I disagree.

 So how does my Scientology antenna feel after reading about 50 skeptic opinions?

 Well, the skeptics definitely helped me appreciate the magnitude of the challenge at hand with cryonics. Science has a long way to go before cryonics can truly function as a pause button instead of a stop button—and we may never get there.

 But it left me feeling every bit as confident that cryonics is a worthy pursuit and possibly a total game-changer. The fact that cryonic revival seems plausible, coupled with the fact that through most of history, the people of the time couldn’t have even imagined the magic that future technology would make real, makes me feel like the safer bet is on cryonics eventually working. If something important isn’t impossible, the future will probably figure out a way to make it happen, with enough time.

 There’s also the “why the fuck not?” argument cryonicists make that’s very hard for skeptics to thwart.

 Pro-cryonics scientist Ralph Merkle says it well:25

 The correct scientific answer to the question “Does cryonics work?” is: “The clinical trials are in progress. Come back in a century and we’ll give you an answer based on the outcome.” The relevant question for those of us who don’t expect to live that long is: “Would I rather be in the control group, or the experimental group?” We are forced by circumstances to answer that question without the benefit of knowing the results of the clinical trials.

 The only way to shoot down a response that says, “We don’t know but we might as well try” is to say, “There is definitely no point in trying because it’s impossible.” And very few credible scientists would claim to have that conviction about things as mysterious as the workings of the brain and the possibilities of the far future.

 The other thing that struck me as I learned about cryonics is that cryonicists aren’t usually “salesy” at all when they talk about cryonics. The impression I got from my research is that cryonicists tend to be well-educated, rational, realistic, and humble about what they know and don’t know. They readily admit the problems and shortcomings of the field8 and they’re careful to use measured, responsible language so as not to distort the nuances of the truth.9 And despite a general lack of support from the mainstream medical community, plenty of reputable scientists have become fervent cryonicists.

 So, for now, cryonics has satisfied my Scientology antenna.

 Which shortens our sentence to this:

 Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them.

 The final wording in the sentence that I’d like to challenge is:

 Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death , in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them.

 This is the part of the sentence that carries a twinge of eye-rolling contempt—something people often feel when they hear about someone with a desire to conquer mortality. Aside from the aversion we have to the prospect of a human body floating in a freezing tank, many of us feel a distaste towards the motivation behind cryonics. It seems greedy to want more than your one standard life.

 I’m not one to typically feel contempt at something like this, but early in my research, even I found myself doing a little head shake when I read about billionaire Peter Thiel signing up for cryonics a while back.

 But this post has forced me to take a big step back—back to where I can see death not as a moment but as a process, back to where I can see the human lifespan as a product of our times, not our biology, and back to where I see the concept of human health spread out along the spans of time and where I can imagine how future humans will see our current times of helplessness in the face of biological deterioration.

 From way out here, it hits you that we’re living in a phase—a sad little window that an intelligent species inevitably passes through, when they’re advanced enough to understand their own mortality, but still too primitive to save themselves from it. We grapple with this by treating death like a tyrannical overlord we wouldn’t dare try to challenge, not even in our own private thoughts. We’ve been universally defeated and dominated by this overlord for as long as we’ve existed, and all we know how to do is bow down to it in full resignation of its power over us.10

 Future humans who have one day overthrown the overlord will look at the phase we’re in and our resulting psychological condition with such clarity—they’ll be sad for us the way we’re sad for brainwashed members of an ancient cult who commit mass suicide because the master has instructed it.

 Our will isn’t broken when it comes to resisting the overlord—that’s why we see it as honorable to fight cancer till the final minute, heroic to risk your own life for a good cause and make it out alive, and a terrible mistake to resign to the overlord prematurely and commit suicide.

 But when it comes to defeating the overlord, our will has been squashed by a history that tells us that the overlord is indestructible.

 And this explains the divide between how cryonicists feel about cryonics and how the rest of us view it. The divide is for two reasons:

 1) Cryonicists view death as a process and consider many people who are declared dead today to still be alive—and they view cryonics as an attempted transfer of a living patient to a future hospital that can save his life. In other words, they view cryonics merely as an attempt to resist the overlord , no different than the way we view someone being transferred to a hospital in a different location which has better treatment options for their condition. Most of us, by contrast, view death as a singular moment, so we see cryonics as an attempt to bring a dead person back to life—i.e. we see cryonics as an attempt to defeat the overlord . When cryonicists see us cheer on a billionaire who fights cancer and shake our heads at one who signs up for cryonics, when they see us praying for someone in a coma and rolling our eyes at someone being vitrified—they see us being highly irrational.

 2) Cryonicists view death not as an all-powerful overlord but as a puzzle to be solved. They see humans as an arrangement of atoms and see no reason that arrangement should have to inevitably deteriorate if our scientists can just get better at working with atoms. So for them, trying to defeat death altogether is an obvious, rational mission to undertake. But most of us view death as a fundamental fact of the universe—a mysterious and terrifying shadow that hovers over all living things and that only a naive fool would try to escape from—so instead of cheering on the people trying to solve the puzzle of death, we scoff at them and laugh at them, as if they’re too immature to come to peace with the inevitable.

 Looking at this through a zoomed out lens was a big Whoa Moment epiphany for me. Suddenly, I saw the cryonicists’ of the world in the same light as those rare ancient people trying to understand how earthquakes work so they could be best prepared for the next one, and I realized that when I shook my head at Peter Thiel, I was being like one of the hordes of ancient people who worshipped the gods that had punished us with that earthquake and who wanted to burn those rare scientists at the stake for their blasphemous thinking.

 I started this post thinking I’d simply write a “mini post” about this little community of cryonicists and what they were trying to do and ended it staring at another example of today’s self-proclaimed science-minded rationalists being tomorrow’s idol-worshippers.

 I also saw my conception of end-of-life morality flip itself on its head. At the beginning of my research, my question was, “Is cryonics an okay thing to do?” By the end, the question was , “Is it okay to not sign up a dying child for cryonics, or will future people view that the way we see a parent refusing to allow life-saving medical treatment to their child for religious reasons?”

 Cryonics has quickly come to seem not only like a good thing to try, but like the right thing to do.

 That’s certainly how Alcor sees it. They say:

 The moral argument for cryonics is that it’s wrong to discontinue care of an unconscious person when they can still be rescued. This is why people who fall unconscious are taken to hospital by ambulance, why they will be maintained for weeks in intensive care if necessary, and why they will still be cared for even if they don’t fully awaken after that. It is a moral imperative to care for unconscious people as long as there remains reasonable hope for recovery.

 And once you’re looking through that lens, everything we consider normal starts to look crazy.

 When Kim Suozzi found out she was dying of cancer at age 23, she signed up to be cryopreserved. She viewed it like trying a new experimental drug that might have a chance to save her when nothing else could—a no-brainer. But her father fiercely resisted the decision,11 Reddit users scorned her for it, and the story was unusual enough to warrant a feature article in the New York Times.

 It’s as if Kim was part of a group of the world’s cancer-stricken 23-year-olds as they all walked toward a cliff to fall into the jaws of the overlord, and Kim saw a rope hanging from a higher cliff across the chasm and decided to jump for it because maybe, just maybe, it could pull her to safety. And the Times found that to be so bizarre, and so out there, that they wrote a piece on it. Huh?

 From far away, it looks a lot like we’re all on a plane that’s going down, with our only shot at survival being to take a chance with an experimental parachute—and we’re all just staying in our seats.

 ___________

 I’ve decided to take a parachute and jump. I have an appointment set up for early April with a life insurance agent and Alcor member to get set up with a plan. I can boil the decision down to three reasons:

 1) I love life. Readers have picked up on my mild obsession with death, which might have something to do with the 55 times I’ve talked about it on this blog. But when they bring it up with me, they refer to it as my fear of death. Which isn’t quite how I feel. It’s more that I really like life. I like doing things and thinking things and I like my family and friends and want to keep hanging out with them if I can. I also really want to see what happens. I want to be there when we figure out the Fermi Paradox and when we discover what dark matter is and when we terraform Mars and when AI takes all our jobs and then extincts all of us. I want to see what the 23rd century is like and see how cool the phones are by then. Being alive is a lot more interesting than being dead. And since I have all of eternity to be dead, it seems logical to stay not dead for at least a while when I have the chance.

 2) This chart.

 3) Hope. I’ve always been jealous of religious people, because on their deathbed, instead of thinking, “Shit,” they’re thinking, “Okay here’s the big moment—am I about to blink and wake up in heaven??” Much more fun. And much more exciting. Whether cryonics pans out or not, as I age, at least a little part of me can now be thinking, “I wonder what’s gonna happen when I die?” Atheists aren’t supposed to get to think that. Humans don’t need a huge amount of hope to feel hopeful—they just need something to cling onto. Just enough to be able to have the “So you’re sayin there’s a chance!” feeling.

 Some of you will resonate with my decision—others will think it makes me silly, gullible, or selfish.

 Either way, you should think about this and the fact that you currently have a plan, whether you realize it or not. Likely, that plan is to resign to death. To walk off the cliff instead of jumping for the lifeline. To stay planted in your seat as the plane goes down.

 That’s not necessarily the wrong decision, depending on who you are, what you believe, and what you value. But if that’s your plan, it should be because you like that plan more than the alternative—not because you haven’t thought about it and are just doing what everyone else is doing. This is a matter of your one existence, and you have to take the fate of that existence into your own, independent-thinking hands.

 And if you decide that you probably would rather grab a parachute than stay in your seat, try not to fall victim to a common trap:

 Cryocrastination.

 That’s a real term used in the cryonics world to describe the phenomenon of people—especially young people—saying, “Yeah duh I’m obviously doing cryonics when I die” and then not actually going through the actions to sign up and start paying money. It’s natural—what could possibly be easier to procrastinate on? That item on your list—”sign up for cryonics”—tends to never find itself at the top of the to-do list. But no matter what age you are, unexpected things can happen, and if you never got around to signing up when they do, you’re out of luck. If you take a big step back, procrastinating on this is really shortsighted. Just do what I did—book appointments so you’ll actually do it.

 I hope you’ll do it the same way I’d hope you’d take a shot with an experimental drug if you were sick and it were the one chance you had. Because it’s worth a try. Because it just might work. Because why the fuck not. And because Dylan Thomas said it best:

 Do not go gentle into that good night.
 Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 ___________

 If you want to learn more—the Alcor FAQ and Ben Best’s FAQ are great ways to start. Both the Alcor and Cryonics Institute websites are full of information, and if you want to go a whole level deeper, dig into Alcor’s library (where you can also find cryopreservation case reports) or this collection of cryonics-related journal articles. Many more sources are listed below.

 If you want to help or get involved—you can donate to Alcor or CI or volunteer to help at Alcor. Alcor lists some specific types of people they need help from at the bottom of this page.

 ___________

 If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. It’s a very unannoying list, don’t worry.

 If you’d like to support Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

 ___________

 If you liked this post, you’ll want to read these:

 What Makes You You? – A post that uses mind-bending thought experiments to dig into the weirdest, hardest cryonics question

 The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence – Something that might be way better at helping us conquer mortality than cryonics (or the opposite and it’ll extinct us)

 How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars – Like cryonics except instead of trying to extend a person’s life, it’s trying to extend the species’ life

 Or, for something less heavy, this makes me feel not that scared about cryonics causing overpopulation.

 Sources

 Alcor’s website is a great resource, especially their main FAQ, their science FAQ, and their library. They also have a substantial YouTube page. I got the idea for the plane going down / experimental parachutes metaphor from the video testimonial of Alcor member Andrew Popper – thanks Andrew.

 The other thing from this post that was inspired from outside work is the concept of death as an overlord, which is loosely based on the storyline of Nick Bostrom’s The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, where the role of death is played by a dragon. If you liked that part of the post, definitely read the fable.

 The Cryonics Institute also has a lot of good information, especially the FAQ of Ben Best, their ex-president.

 I feel bad having focused only on Alcor and CI in this post and ignoring the smaller but spirited KrioRus outside of Moscow. Here’s a good article from FT Magazine (by Courtney Weaver) that focuses on them.

 Here’s a collection of cryonics-related journal articles. Here’s another.

 Here are a handful of cryopreservation case reports.

 Scientist and cryonicist Ralph Merkle nicely articulates a bunch of the stuff I talked about on his website. A lot of people compare the “why the fuck not?” argument for cryonics with Pascal’s Wager. Merkle doesn’t think it’s a great comparison – here’s why.

 This is a pretty riveting This American Life episode about cryonics. It focuses on the early days of the movement in the ’60s and ’70s, honing in on a notorious cryonics disaster. And here’s a Stuff You Should Know about cryonics.

 A letter by 60 scientists arguing that cryonics should be taken seriously in the science world.

 Eliezer Yudkowsky finds a way of popping his head into like a third of the posts I write as I research. He has a bunch of interesting stuff to say about cryonics. Here’s one thing. Here’s another.

 Two great recent articles about cryonics: One from Motherboard (by Brian Merchant) about a dying two-year-old girl whose parents made her the world’s youngest cryonics patient. And one from the NY Times (by Amy Harmon) that I referenced at the end of the post about a 23-year-old who signed up with Alcor before she died of a brain tumor.

 An interesting Reddit AMA with a cryonics member.

 An article from Newsweek (by Anthony Cuthbertson) about the Feb 2016 rabbit-brain-vitrifying breakthrough.

 I only read excerpts of this, but here’s Robert Ettinger’s famous book that launched the cryonics movement in the early ’60s.

 An interesting New York Magazine article (by Kerry Howley) that explores the phenomenon of family conflict over cryonics.

 An Atlantic article (by Rose Eveleth) about the cryonics process. Alcor has a good page on the procedure too. So does CI.

 Meet Michael Hendricks, a smart scientist who thinks cryonics is horse shit. Here’s another skeptic. And another. Alcor refutes skeptics with this page and this page, and it admits problems with cryonics here.

 Alcor’s pricing. And CI’s.

 A video nicely articulating the case for cryonics by Alcor’s CEO Max More.

 1. So here’s the deal with notes. The blue circles are the fun/interesting ones you should read. They’re for extra info or thoughts that I didn’t want to put in the main text because either it’s just tangential thoughts on something or because I want to say something a notch too weird to just be there in the normal text.↩

 2. An interesting stat I came across is that research shows that only about 5% of patients who require CPR outside the hospital and 15% who require it while in the hospital end up surviving. Which means that in practice, a DNR is unlikely to change most people’s fate very much.↩

 3. Scientist and cryonics enthusiast Ralph Merkle discusses the range of harm a disease like Alzheimer’s can cause on a person’s cryonics outlook: “Mild dementia caused by damage to neuronal mechanisms responsible for retrieval of the memory trace that left the memory trace itself relatively undamaged could be fully reversible by application of appropriate advanced technology. Severe dementia that destroyed the memory trace itself could not be reversed by any future technology. We cannot, at the present time, distinguish reliably between these two possibilities in most cases.”↩

 4. The next step would be much harder—manipulation of the subatomic particles in an atom’s nucleus, like protons and neutrons. Those are much smaller—a proton’s diameter is about 1.7 femtometers across, and a femtometer is a millionth of a nanometer.↩

 5. Technology that could manipulate individual protons is like a way bigger giant, whose height stretches from the sun to Saturn, working with 1mm grains of sand on Earth. For that giant, the Earth would be 1/50th of a millimeter—something he’d have to use a microscope to see—and he’d have to move individual grains of sand on the Earth with fine precision. Shows you just how small a proton is.↩

 6. Check out the opening section of my AI post for a longer discussion about this concept. ↩

 7. Alcor’s full statement about Storey’s claim: “Every single claim in this remarkable statement is false. As the illustration above shows, structural preservation of brain tissue in the presence of high concentrations of cryoprotectant is excellent. Furthermore, much of what is now known about Alzheimer’s and other brain diseases was learned by histochemical analysis of brains from neurological research banks that were frozen without any cryoprotectant at all. These brain banks would not exist if biomolecules could not be preserved by freezing, even hours after clinical death. It is no wonder that cryonics faces an uphill battle for scientific credibility when such grossly mistaken information is presented by respected cryobiologists on a national stage.”↩

 8. Like Alcor admitting on their website that “the lack of a clear outcome remains one of the biggest weaknesses in cryonics, since it encourages complacency and prevents accountability.”↩

 9. This quote, from Alcor’s FAQ, is the kind of thing I’m talking about: “It cannot be reliably known with present scientific knowledge how a given degree of preservation would translate to a given degree of memory retention after extensive repair, but sophisticated future recovery techniques using advanced technology might allow for memory recovery even after damage that today might make many think there was little room for hope.”↩

 10. This death-as-overlord analogy is loosely based on the storyline of Nick Bostrom’s awesome little story The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant, where the role of death is played by a dragon.↩

 11. In my research, I came across a lot of stories that involved family conflict surrounding cryonics. Often, one member of a couple (most often the husband) planned to sign up for it, and the spouse hated the idea, sometimes feeling abandoned. Seems pretty selfish to me, but I also get why it could be hurtful if you weren’t signing up and your spouse still wanted to.

 Sometimes these disagreements get so nasty that the cryonicist has to grant someone outside the family with power of attorney since they don’t trust that their family members will adhere to their wishes. In the case of Kim Suozzi, she gave power of attorney to her boyfriend, because her father was adamantly against the cryonics plan.↩

 1. Gray squares are boring objects and when you click on a gray square, you’ll end up bored. These are for sources and citations only.↩

 2. The Atlantic: For $200,000, This Lab Will Swap Your Body’s Blood for Antifreeze↩

 3. Alcor: Science FAQ↩

 4. BBC: Cryopreservation: ‘I Freeze People to Cheat Death”↩

 5. ULC: Determination of Death Act Summary↩

 6. http://future.wikia.com/wiki/Alcor_Life_Extension_Foundation↩

 7. Image: Michigan Instruments↩

 8. Image: Alcor↩

 9. Image: Alcor↩

 10. RT. Frozen rabbit brain brought back in ‘near perfect’ condition in cryonics breakthrough↩

 11. Image: Alcor↩

 12. Image: Alcor↩

 13. Mark Mayford, Steven A. Siegelbaum, and Eric R. Kandel: Synapses and Memory Storage.↩

 14. Less Wrong: You Only Live Twice↩

 15. Motherboard: The Girl Who Would Live Forever↩

 16. Alcor FAQ↩

 17. Alcor FAQ↩

 18. Image: Pinterest↩

 19. “Frozen in Time,” Miami Herald, Sept. 17, 2002.↩

 20. Alcor: Notable Quotes↩

 21. University of Calgary↩

 22. Alcor: Notable Quotes↩

 23. Alcor FAQ↩

 24. http://www.ocregister.com/articles/frozen-330223-king-cryonics.html↩

 25. Merkle.com↩

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We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here.   
You’re on an airplane when you hear a loud sound and things start violently shaking. A minute later, the captain comes on the speaker and says:
 There’s been an explosion in the engine, and the plane is going to crash in 15 minutes. There’s no chance of survival. There is a potential way out—the plane happens to be transferring a shipment of parachutes, and anyone who would like to use one to escape the plane may do so. But I must warn you—the parachutes are experimental and completely untested, with no guarantee to work. We also have no idea what the terrain will be like down below. Please line up in the aisle if you’d like a parachute, and the flight attendants will give you one, show you how to use it and usher you to the emergency exit where you can jump. Those who choose not to take that option, please remain in your seat—this will be over soon, and you will feel no pain. 
What would you do?
___________
When Robert Ettinger was a kid in the 1930s, he read a lot of science fiction, and he assumed that with the world advancing the way it was, scientists would surely have a cure for aging at some point during his lifetime. He would live to see a world where sickness was a thing of the past and death was something people chose to do voluntarily, at a time of their choosing.1 1 ← New to WBW? Open these. 
But thirty years later, aging and involuntary death were still very much a thing, and Ettinger, by then a physics professor, realized that science might not solve these problems in time for him to reap the benefits. So he started thinking about how to hack the system.
If, rather than being buried or cremated after his death, he could instead be frozen in some way—then whenever the scientists did eventually get around to conquering mortality, they’d probably also have the tools and know-how to resuscitate him, and he could have the last laugh after all.
In 1962, he wrote about this concept in a book called  The Prospects of Immortality , and the cryonics movement was born.
The first person to give cryonics a try was James Bedford, a psychology professor who died of cancer in 1967 at the age of 73 and is doing his thing in a vat of liquid nitrogen in Arizona as you read this. Others slowly began to follow, and today, there are over 300 people hanging out in vats of liquid nitrogen.
Now let’s pause for a second. A year ago, I knew almost nothing about cryonics, and my impressions of it were something like this sentence:
 Cryonics, or cryogenics, is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult. 
Then I started learning about it. It’s your fault—cryonics is one of the potential-future-post-topics people email me about most, and it’s something at least five readers have brought up in conversation when I’ve met them in person. And as I began to read about cryonics, I soon learned that a lot of the words in my italicized assumption sentence weren’t correct.
So let’s work our way through the sentence as we go over exactly what cryonics is and how it works. We’ll start with this part:
 Cryonics, or cryogenics, is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult. 
It turns out that this is like saying, “Wingsuit flying, or meteorology, is the sport of flying through the air using a wingsuit.” Meteorology is the study of what happens in the atmosphere, which includes how wind works, and wingsuit flying is a process that harnesses the wind—and you’d be an odd person if you thought they were the same thing.
Likewise, cryogenics is a branch of physics that studies the production and effects of very low temperatures, while cryonics is the practice of using very low temperatures to try to preserve a human being. Not the same thing.
Next, we have a string of three misleading words to talk about:
 Cryonics is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult.  
We’ll address these three words by going through how cryonics works, starting at the beginning.
So you decide you want to be a cryonicist. Here are the steps:
 Step 1) Pick a company 
There are four major companies that provide cryonics services—Alcor in Arizona, Cryonics Institute (CI) in Michigan, American Cryonics Society (ACS) in California, and KrioRus in Russia. KrioRus is the newest option and quickly up-and-coming, but the two big boys are Alcor and CI (ACS doesn’t have their own storage facilities—they store with CI).
From my perusing, it seems like Alcor is the slightly-more-legit and fancier of the two, while CI (which was started by Robert Ettinger, the guy who launched the movement) is more affordable and gives off more of a mom-and-pop vibe. Both are nonprofit, and each has about 150 people in storage. Alcor has a little over 1,000 “members” (i.e. people who will one day be in storage), and CI has around half that number.
 Step 2)  Become a member 
To become a cryonicist, you need to fill out some paperwork, sign some stuff and get it notarized, and pay for three things: an annual membership fee, a transport fee to get your body to the facility after you die, and a treatment/storage/revival fee.
Alcor’s annual membership fee is about $700, and their transport fee is bundled together with the treatment/storage/revival fee—together they cost $200,000. Alcor gives you the option of ditching your body and just freezing your brain (this is called “neuropreservation”), which brings the price down to $80,000.
CI’s annual membership fee is $120 (or a one-time fee of $1,250 for a lifetime membership) and the treatment, etc. costs $35,000 ($28,000 for lifetime members). This is so much cheaper than Alcor for two main reasons:
First, it doesn’t include the transport. If you live near the facility, you can save a lot of money. If not, you’ll need to go through their partner for a transport contract, which costs $95,000 ($88,000 for lifetime members).
Second, Alcor uses more than half of their large fee to fund what they call their Patient Care Trust. Back in the 70s, there were more cryonics companies, and some of them went bankrupt, which meant their frozen people stopped being frozen, which was a not ideal outcome. Alcor’s trust is a backup fund to make sure their “patients” won’t be affected by something like a company financial crisis.
 Step 3) Get a life insurance policy in the name of your new cryonics company 
Sounds shady, right? But it also makes sense. Both Alcor and CI are small companies on a pretty tight budget and neither can afford to offer a payment plan to be hopefully paid out by your estate or your relatives. On the patient end, unless you’re rich, cryonics fees are huge, and a life insurance policy guaranteed to pay your full cryonics fee forces you to save for this fee throughout your life. For young people, even sizable life insurance policies are pretty cheap—with CI, you could be totally covered for as little as $300/year ($120 annual membership, $180 life insurance policy to cover the main fee). Even for Alcor’s more expensive package, costs shouldn’t exceed $100/month.
Those fees aren’t nothing, but the whole life insurance thing, at least when it comes to younger people, pretty effectively ejects “rich” from our black and red sentence. If it costs the same as cable or a cigarette habit, you don’t need to be rich to pay for it.
 Step 4) Put on your bracelet and go on living your life 
Cryonics members are given a bracelet and a necklace, etched with instructions and contact info, and encouraged to wear one at all times, so if you suddenly die, whoever finds you will know to notify the company.
 Step 5) Die 
Okay here’s where things get tricky. We think of the divide between life and death as a distinct boundary, and we believe that at any given point, a person is either definitively alive or definitively dead. But let’s examine that assumption for a second:
Let’s first talk about what it means when a person is “doomed” from a health standpoint. We can all agree that what constitutes someone being doomed depends on where, and when, they are. A three-year-old with advanced pneumonia in 1740 would probably have been doomed, while the same child with the same condition today might be fully treatable. The same story could be said of the fate of someone who falls badly ill in a remote village in Malawi compared with their fate if they were in London instead. “Doomed” depends on a number of factors.
That the same thing can be said of “dead” is at first pretty unintuitive. But Alcor’s CEO Max More puts it this way: “Fifty years ago if you were walking along the street and someone keeled over in front of you and stopped breathing you would have checked them out and said they were dead and disposed of them. Today we don’t do that, instead we do CPR and all kinds of things. People we thought were dead 50 years ago we now know were not.”2
 Today, dead means the heart has been stopped for 4-6 minutes, because that’s how long the brain can go without oxygen before brain death occurs. But Alcor, in its site’s Science FAQ, explains that “the brain ‘dies’ after several minutes without oxygen not because it is immediately destroyed, but because of a cascade of processes that commit it to destruction in the hours that follow restoration of warm blood circulation. Restoring circulation with cool blood instead of warm blood, reopening blocked vessels with high pressure, avoiding excessive oxygenation, and blocking cell death with drugs can prevent this destruction.”3 The site goes on to explain that “with new experimental treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can now be survived without brain injury. Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making today’s beliefs about when death occurs obsolete.”
In other words, what we think of as “dead” actually means “doomed, under the current circumstances.” Someone fifty years ago who suffered from cardiac arrest wasn’t dead, they were doomed to die because the medical technology at the time couldn’t save them. Today, that person wouldn’t be considered dead yet because they wouldn’t be doomed yet. Instead, someone today “dies” 4-6 minutes after cardiac arrest, because that happens to be how long someone can currently go before modern technology can no longer help them.
Cryonicists view death not as a singular event, but as a process—one that starts when the heart stops beating and ends later at a point called “the information-theoretic criterion for death”—let’s call it “info death”—when the brain has become so damaged that no amount of present or future technology could restore it to its original state or have any way to retrieve its information.
Here’s an interesting way to think about it: Imagine a patient arriving in an ambulance to Hospital A, a typical modern hospital. The patient’s heart stopped 15 minutes before the EMTs arrived and he is immediately pronounced dead at the hospital. What if, though, the doctors at Hospital A learned that Hospital B across the street had developed a radical new technology that could revive a patient anytime within 60 minutes after cardiac arrest with no long-term damage? What would the people at Hospital A do?
Of course, they would rush the patient across the street to Hospital B to save him. If Hospital B did save the patient, then by definition the patient wouldn’t actually have been dead in Hospital A, just pronounced dead because Hospital A viewed him as entirely and without exception doomed.
What cryonicists suggest is that in many cases where today a patient is pronounced dead, they’re not dead but rather doomed, and that there is a Hospital B that can save the day—but instead of being in a different place, it’s in a different time. It’s in the future.
That’s why cryonicists adamantly assert that cryonics does not deal with dead people—it deals with living people who simply need to be transferred to a future hospital to be saved. They believe that in many cases, today’s corpse is tomorrow’s patient (which is why they call their frozen clients “patients” instead of “corpses” or “remains”), and they view their work as essentially “extended emergency medicine.”4
 But it’s emergency medicine with an important caveat. Today’s technology has no way to revive a cryonically-suspended patient, so it isn’t considered a medical procedure by the law but rather a weird kind of coffin—i.e. if you cryopreserve someone who hasn’t yet been pronounced dead, it’s seen by the law as homicide. Even if the patient is terminally ill beyond any hope and adamantly doesn’t want to deteriorate further before being cryopreserved, it’s not an option—at least not under current laws (laws that some are trying to change). This puts cryonicists in a tough bind—and it’s exactly where that differing definition of death comes in handy.
The law does not see death as a process. For a long time, legal death in the US was considered to occur when a person’s heartbeat and breathing stopped. As modern medical procedures like CPR and defibrillators started to allow those patients to be resuscitated, the law had to change the definition of legal death to include “irreversible cessation of all functions of the brain.”5 The old “heartbeat and breathing” definition of legal death is now called “clinical death,” a middle ground point where there’s an obligation to attempt resuscitation in most cases but where a patient can also have a Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) order in place (common with terminally ill patients).2 In DNR cases, a doctor or nurse will pronounce a clinically dead patient to be legally dead—even though a resuscitation effort could still revive them.
This is a critical fact for cryonics. Cryonics technicians have to wait until legal death to begin their work on a patient, but with the help of a patient’s DNR order, they can start the process right after the heart stops, well before any brain damage sets in.
So this is the window for cryonics:
   
Which brings us back to our list, where we can now clarify what we really mean with Step 5:
 Step 5) Legally Die 
You legally dying is a key step along the way here, so don’t mess it up. You can do it the good way, the bad way, or the really bad way.
 The good way: Something predictable where you’re in a cliché deathbed situation, like cancer. This allows you to get yourself on a plane to either Scottsdale (Alcor) or Michigan (CI) and into one of the specifically designated hospice care facilities that the cryonics company regularly works with. This is important because cryonics is highly controversial within the mainstream medical community and often not well-regarded or well-understood. As a result, some hospitals and hospice care facilities are “cryonics friendly” and others are not (those that aren’t have been known to make it difficult for cryonics staff to do what they need to do or deny them the same privileges organ transplant specialists get in a hospital). Once you’re in hospice care, the cryonics company can put staff on standby around the clock, so that the second you legally die, they can be there to start the treatment.
 The bad way: Something sudden and unexpected, like a heart attack, where at best, someone is there and can contact the cryonics company as you’re rushed to the hospital so they can meet you there, or worse, where you’re dead for a few hours or even longer before anyone finds you. In these circumstances, the cryonics company will do the best they can. Your brain will be in worse shape than ideal when you go into cryopreservation, but again, who knows what future technology will be able to accomplish, and as long as you’re still somewhere in the “cryonics window” and still in the process of dying, not yet having reached info death, there remains hope.
 The really bad way: A violent accident or something where your brain ends up badly damaged. In the worst of these cases, there’s not much cryonics can do to help—like the Alcor member who died in the September 11th attacks.6 Another bad ending would be dying in a foul-play situation that would lead the police to want to do an autopsy (Alcor suggests its members file a no-autopsy-for-religious-reasons form with the government). A woman who has signed up for cryonics did a Reddit AMA, and when one of the questions was about how signing up had changed her life, she answered, “The biggest change I’ve noticed is that I’m more careful. I drive slower and more cautiously/attentively, I pay more attention to what’s going on around me.” Because she doesn’t want to die the really bad way.
 Step 6) Cool off ASAP and get transferred to the cryonics facility 
After you’re declared legally dead, the cryonics team will, ideally, immediately get going. The first thing they do is two-fold—they put you in an ice water bath to bring down your temperature and slow your metabolism (so any damage taking place as a result of cardiac arrest takes longer to happen), and they start getting your heart and lungs working again so that the body remains in stable condition. They do this by administering CPS (like CPR but with an S for support instead of an R for resuscitation, because they’re not trying to resuscitate you) using a mechanical heart-lung resuscitator called a thumper:7
    
Then they inject you with a number of different medicines to make sure you don’t get blood clots or start rotting.
Once that’s under control, they can do a more involved procedure that surgically accesses the major blood vessels in your thigh and hooks them up to this guy:8
    
That’s a heart-lung machine that takes care of circulation and oxygenation so they can stop the much cruder CPS. In addition to circulating your blood, the machine draws heat out of your body, cooling it to just above the freezing temperature of water, and replaces some of your blood with an organ preservation solution that supports life at super low temperatures (this is similar to how transplant surgeons keep organs alive when they have to transport them long distances).
If you have to be flown to the cryonics facility, they pack you in ice and put you on board what they hope is not your last ever flight.
 Step 7) Get vitrified 
Most people who know what cryonics is think it means getting frozen. It doesn’t. It means getting vitrified.
Glass is weird. It’s not a typical solid because as it cools from its liquid phase, it never crystallizes into an orderly structure. But, as I learned when a bunch of commenters yelled at me after I published this post, it’s not actually a liquid either, since it doesn’t flow. So, it’s neither a typical solid nor a liquid—it’s an “amorphous solid,” sometimes compared to a giant molecule. For our purposes, the key is that like a liquid, glass doesn’t crystallize—rather, as it cools the molecules just move slower and slower until they stop.
If you froze a human, all the liquid water in their body would eventually hit its freezing point and crystallize into a solid. That wouldn’t be good—first, water ice takes up about 9% more volume than water liquid, so it would expand and badly damage tissue, and second, the sharp ice crystals would slice through cell membranes and other tissue around it.
So to avoid that catastrophic liquid-to-solid state change, cryonics technicians do something cool—they perform surgery through the chest and hook the major arteries up to tubes which pump all the blood out of the body, replacing it with a “cryoprotectant solution,” otherwise known as medical grade anti-freeze. This does two important things: it replaces 60% of the water in the body’s cells, and it lowers the freezing point of what liquid is left. The result, when done perfectly, is that no freezing happens in the body. Instead, as they chill your body down and down over the next three hours, it hits -124ºC, a key point called the “glass transition temperature” when the body’s liquid stays amorphous but rises so high in viscosity that no molecule can budge. You’re officially an amorphous solid, like glass—i.e. you’re vitrified. 
With no molecule movement, all chemical activity in your body comes to a halt. Biological time is stopped. You’re on pause.
Since I’m sure you’re feeling skeptical, it’s helpful to note that vitrifying biological parts is nothing new. We’ve been successfully vitrifying and then rewarming human embryos, sperm, skin, bone, and other body parts for a while now. More recently, scientists vitrified a rabbit kidney:9
    
Then they rewarmed it and put it back in the rabbit. And it still worked.
And just in February of 2016, there was a cryonics breakthrough when for the first time, scientists vitrified a rabbit’s brain and showed that once rewarmed, it was in near-perfect condition, “with the cell membranes, synapses, and intracellular structures intact … [It was] the first time a cryopreservation was provably able to protect everything associated with learning and memory.”10
 Once you’re vitrified, you need to keep being chilled, little by little, until after about two weeks, you’re down to -196ºC. Why? Because that’s the point at which nitrogen becomes a liquid, and you’re about to take a long-term liquid nitrogen bath.
 Step 8) Go into storage 
Or as Alcor euphemistically calls it, “long-term care.” The new vitrified you now goes into what is essentially a large upright thermos that’s about 10 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide.11
    
You meet your new neighbors—three other vitrified people, each in their respective quadrant of the thermos, along with five people traveling super lean, with no body, whose heads are stacked in the middle column.12
    
Or, if you’re in a heads-only thermos, you’ll be one of 45 brains sharing the space (the brain is what’s being stored, but they keep the brains in their heads because it’s riskier to remove a brain than to just keep it in there and use the head as a carrying case).
Oh, and you’re upside-down. This is because liquid nitrogen boils off gradually from the top of the container. Normally, it’s no problem—the staff tops it off about once a week. But if, in some worst-case scenario, a container was forced to be left for a long time, the head would be the last thing to be affected—upside-down patients means it would take six months before the nitrogen boiled off so far that the head would be exposed.
And when it comes to blackouts, cryonics patients are totally safe—there’s no electricity involved in their storage.
And this is where you’ll hang out. Maybe for 10 years. Maybe for 150 years. Maybe for 1,200 years. But the time doesn’t matter to you. You’re on pause.
Now’s a good time for us to take a step back and look at the big picture. If Point A is “I’ve decided I want to sign up for cryonics,” and Point B is “Oh cool it’s the year 2482 and here I am doing stuff,” there are four major Ifs that need to all go the right way to take you from A to B:
 1) If I legally die in a not really bad way and everything goes as planned with getting me into the thermos 
and
 2) If future humanity ever reaches a point where it has the technology to revive me to full health 
and
 3) If the cryonics company can manage to store me safely and uninterrupted until that point 
and
 4) If when that point comes, the outside world actually does take action to revive me 
—then I’ll be there in 2482 doing stuff.
The eight steps you’ve taken so far that start with choosing a cryonics company and end with you in the thermos only accomplish the first If, with all the other Ifs still standing in between you and the next step in your cryonics journey—revival.
To understand how we can reach that step, we need to understand the deal with all four Ifs.
We’ll start by talking about Ifs 1-3, which need to be discussed together, because they’re interdependent and they work together. To illustrate why, let’s lay them out in the same visual:
   
The three segments of this line relate to Ifs 1, 2, and 3. But the visual is a little misleading at first, because even though all three segments lie on the same line, they’re all representing different concepts:
 The blue segment (If 1) represents the quality of your initial preservation.
 The yellow segment (If 2) represents the capabilities of medical technology as time moves forward.
 The green segment (If 3) represents the amount of time still needed to bridge the gap between the blue and yellow segments before they can finally connect to each other. 
The idea is that the better you were preserved, the farther out to the right the blue segment extends, and as technology gets better and better, the yellow segment extends itself farther and farther left toward the blue segment. The green segment gets smaller and smaller as this happens, until eventually the green segment is no more and the blue and yellow segments connect—i.e. medical technology has reached the point where it can revive you.
A lot of the key details about cryonics are centered here, so let’s talk about each of these segments in more depth:
 The blue segment—the quality of your preservation (which relates to If 1) 
   
The length of the blue segment corresponds to the quality of preservation. Or, put most simply, the fewer roadblocks there are between your vitrified state in the thermos and a fully restored and healthy you, the longer the blue segment is—because if everything that happens leading up to you being put in the thermos goes as well as possible, it goes a longer way towards getting you to Point B and means the yellow segment has to do less work on its end to be able to revive you.
   
The major factor that determines the length of the blue segment is how closely the atomic structure of your vitrified brain resembles the original atomic structure of your brain when it was living and healthy.
Let’s note that I said “brain,” not “body,” because what we mostly care about here is the brain. Cryonicists, like many of us, believe that who you are comes down to your brain. If, in the future, your identical current brain lived on top of a synthetic body and your exact memories and personality were fully intact, cryonicists would be satisfied that you “survived.” That’s why some don’t even bother vitrifying their body.
The second thing to note is that scientists believe that short-term memory is contained in brain activity—in the electricity going through your brain—while your long-term memory, your personality, your knowledge, and everything else that makes you “you” is contained in the brain’s structure—i.e. the particular arrangement of atoms that make up your brain.13
 Any electrical activity in your brain before legal death will be lost during vitrification, so you’d be revived without the short-term memory of the end of your pre-vitrified life. But what vitrification can preserve is the structure of your brain, which conveniently, is all we care about.
This concept gives us a clearer understanding of the way cryonicists view death. To cryonicists, perfect health means the exact arrangement of atoms in your healthy brain being intact, and the process of dying means the deterioration of that arrangement due to phenomena like aging, injury, disease, and, eventually, effects caused by heart stoppage. Death, to them, means the point at which the original structure of your brain has become so disorganized that even the fanciest future science lab would have no way of figuring out what the original arrangement looked like—that’s the definition of info death.
The concept of info death makes sense when we compare the brain to a computer’s hard drive. Eliezer Yudkowsky explains how difficult it actually is to bring a computer hard drive to info death:14
  If you want to securely erase a hard drive, it’s not as easy as writing it over with zeroes. Sure, an “erased” hard drive like this won’t boot up your computer if you just plug it in again. But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between “this was a 0, overwritten by a 0” and “this was a 1, overwritten by a 0”. 
 There are programs advertised to “securely erase” hard drives using many overwrites of 0s, 1s, and random data. But if you want to keep the secret on your hard drive secure against all possible future technologies that might ever be developed, then cover it with thermite and set it on fire. It’s the only way to be sure. 
He applies the same logic to the human brain to suggest that cryonics patients should one day be revivable:
 Pumping someone full of cryoprotectant and gradually lowering their temperature until they can be stored in liquid nitrogen is not a secure way to erase a person. 
In other words, it’s reasonable to assume that the fanciest future neuroscientists will become so good at reading a damaged vitrified brain for clues as to its original structure that a typical combo of aging, disease, heart stoppage, and vitrification likely won’t be able to “stump” them. And to cryonicists, if future scientists can examine your vitrified brain and figure out what it’s supposed to look like, you’re not dead—by definition.
The length of the blue segment—preservation quality—is affected by three things:
 1) How much damage happened before you legally died. How old were you when you died? How much had your brain deteriorated by that point? Did you suffer from a dementia-causing disease like Alzheimer’s and how much permanent damage did that disease do?3 Did the thing that killed you damage your brain (like brain cancer, or a head injury) or was your brain unharmed?
 2) How much damage happened between when you legally died and when the cryonics team started working on you. In the ideal situation, your heart stops and before any changes happen in your brain, you’re stabilized and put on ice. Often, this isn’t how things go, and every unattended minute that passes after legal death has a big impact on the brain and shortens the length of the blue segment. But cryonicists believe that true info death doesn’t happen for many hours, or even days, after legal death occurs, and that there’s often hope in cryopreserving even people who lay “dead” for a while before being found.
 3) How much damage happened during the vitrifying process. Vitrification itself—at least the way it is currently done—causes its own damage to the brain. Cryonics research focuses mostly on mitigating this factor, and it’s dramatically improved since the earliest days in the 1970s—the series of images at the bottom of this page shows the progress that has been made.
 The yellow segment—the state of medical technological advancement as time moves forward (which relates to If 2) 
   
As medical technology becomes more and more advanced, the yellow segment grows—but while the blue segment extends to the right as it grows, the yellow segment extends to the left. The key point happens when technology eventually gets so good that the yellow segment meets the blue segment and you become officially revivable. 
Some questions:
  Will If 2 happen? Will technology ever reach the point when it can revive you? 
Assuming If 1 gets a check mark, cryonicists believe If 2 is likely to one day get a check mark too. Because there are only two ways to totally fail If 2:
1) For some reason, humans permanently stop working on medical technology advancements before you hit the If 2 key point.
2) Humans go extinct before hitting the If 2 key point.
Barring those two situations, If 2 should eventually cooperate. The theory is that with enough future technology, you’ll one day be revivable.
  When will If 2 happen? How long until I’m revived? 
This part depends on how substantial the technological challenge of cryonic revival turns out to be and how quickly technology ends up moving forward—but it also depends upon how well If 1 went. As we just discussed, the better If 1 goes, the sooner If 2 happens.
  How will If 2 happen? What kind of future technology might be able to revive vitrified people? 
Well, it depends on what we mean by revival. Cryonicists seem to have a Plan A and a Plan B.
 Plan A: Restore the vitrified patient as a healthy human 
Under Plan A, revival consists of restoring the structure of the vitrified brain to its original state—i.e. putting all the atoms where they belong. To do that, you need two things:
1) The info about where the atoms are supposed to go
2) A way to put the atoms where they’re supposed to go
The first thing is taken care of if today’s vitrifying procedures do their job, assuming future neuroscientists become really good at deciphering a brain’s original state from the information they can gather by examining the vitrified brain. 
The second thing requires molecular nanotechnology. For a quick nanotech overview, I’ll steal part of a blue box from the AI post:
 Nanotechnology Blue Box 
Nanotechnology is our word for technology that deals with the manipulation of matter that’s between 1 and 100 nanometers in size. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or a millionth of a millimeter, and this 1-100 range encompasses viruses (100 nm across), DNA (10 nm wide), and things as small as large molecules like hemoglobin (5 nm) and medium molecules like glucose (1 nm). If/when we conquer nanotechnology, the next step will be the ability to manipulate individual atoms, which are only one order of magnitude smaller (~.1 nm).4
 To understand the challenge of humans trying to manipulate matter in that range, let’s take the same thing on a larger scale. The International Space Station is 268 mi (431 km) above the Earth. If humans were giants so large their heads reached up to the ISS, they’d be about 250,000 times bigger than they are now. If you make the 1nm – 100nm nanotech range 250,000 times bigger, you get .25mm – 2.5cm. So nanotechnology is the equivalent of a human giant as tall as the ISS figuring out how to carefully build intricate objects using materials between the size of a grain of sand and an eyeball. To reach the next level—manipulating individual atoms—the giant would have to carefully position objects that are 1/40th of a millimeter—so small normal-size humans would need a microscope to see them.5
 Nanotech was first discussed by Richard Feynman in a 1959 talk, when he explained: “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom. It would be, in principle, possible … for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down…. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance.” It’s as simple as that. If you can figure out how to move individual molecules or atoms around, you can make literally anything. Nanotechnology so advanced that it allows us to engineer at an atomic level is called molecular nanotechnology (MNT).
Humans haven’t yet conquered MNT, and scientists debate how long it’ll take humanity to get there. But when we do, we might look back on today’s technology as terribly primitive, like the picture scientist Ralph Merkle paints: “Today’s manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling and even lithography move atoms in great thundering statistical herds. It’s like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can’t really snap them together the way you’d like.”
MNT will be a game-changer in an unimaginable number of arenas, one of which is in medicine. A brain synapse is just a particular configuration of atoms, so if we have the tools to move atoms around and put them where we want, then we can perfectly “repair” a damaged synapse. Cryonicists believe MNT is the key to the future revival and restoration of cryonics patients.
The first thought some people have when they think about revival is that the person would be revived as the old and dying person they were before being vitrified. But that’s not the plan. When we get to the point when we have technology so incredible that we can move atoms around well enough to revive someone, we should also have the technology to repair and rejuvenate them. For someone who was dying of cancer before going into the thermos, not only will their successful revival mean that cancer has likely been conquered long ago, but probably aging too. 
Along the same lines, by that point we should also be able to either rejuvenate the patient’s vitrified body or simply make a new, perfectly-working body. Alcor’s Medical Response Director, Aaron Drake, explains: “We know we can regenerate a small organ, and grow a new heart. We know we can 3-dimensionally print cells and hearts. So at some point we would need to regenerate her entire body, or at least her organs, and put it all together. Then we’d need to transplant that brain into a new body.”15 
 Plan B: Upload the person’s brain info into a virtual world 
Plan B shares Plan A’s first requirement—the info about where the atoms are supposed to go—but not its need for physical assembly. Instead, Plan B relies on a hypothetical future technology called “whole brain emulation,” where an entire brain structure can be uploaded to a computer with such perfect accuracy that everything about the person is intact and alive in a virtual world.
Sounds super fun, right?
This is an option if physical revival is too difficult, or if it’s so far in the future that the physical world has actually gone out of style entirely. If humans can somehow pull off whole brain emulation, you could be revived to wake up in a magical virtual world, fully conscious and no longer confined to the limits and vulnerabilities of biology and the physical world. Please.
While both Plan A and B require immense technological hurdles, cryonicists stress that both options are theoretically possible.
 The green segment—the amount of time you need to stay safely in storage before technology is able to revive you (which relates to If 3) 
   
The green segment’s job is simple: hold everything together until the yellow segment connects to the blue segment. 
So what could mess up If 3? What could sabotage a vitrified person’s ability to remain bathed in liquid nitrogen as long as necessary? 
A lot of things. Like:
 The cryonics company screws up. A human-error-caused catastrophe—e.g. a rupture in a thermos tank lets in heat, and all the liquid nitrogen evaporates before the staff realizes what happened.
 The cryonics company goes bankrupt and doesn’t have the means, the will, or the organization to create a plan that will save the patients. I mentioned that this happened a few times with some of the earlier companies. The major companies today claim to have secure backup plans in place in case of the worst case scenario, and this security blanket is the main purpose of Alcor’s sizable trust.
 A natural disaster. An earthquake, tornado, or something else smashes the building holding the thermoses to oblivion. Neither major US cryonics company is in a location highly prone to natural disasters—Alcor actually located itself in Scottsdale, AZ because it is the place in the US least at risk of natural disasters. Even if a natural disaster were to strike, the patients might be fine—the thermoses are strong, they’re power-outage-proof with no electricity involved, and even if a thermos is ruptured, there’s the upside-down thing where patients’ heads will be the last body part affected.
 A terrorist attack on a cryonics facility. There are a lot of people in the world—especially in the world of religion—who hate the concept of cryonics.
 War. All bets are off in war.
 The law prevents the cryonics company from doing its job. This one almost happened recently. In 2004, Arizona legislators tried to pass a bill that would have put Alcor under the regulation of the State Funeral Board. This, if passed, would have likely ended up shutting Alcor down. It turned into a nasty debate, centered largely around religious issues, with the religious voice disapproving of Alcor’s line of work—but ultimately, Alcor prevailed. That said, in order to do business legally, Alcor has to accept bodies in the guise of “anatomical donations for research purposes,” a practice protected by the constitutional right to donate one’s body for research into cryopreservation. The law-related variable seems pretty stable currently, but if someone has a long green segment and requires 800 years of storage before their revival becomes possible, who the hell knows what will happen—what is currently Scottsdale, AZ might not even be part of the US by that point.
 The cryonics company comes under ownership with different values and they decide to give up on the patients. Or, more maliciously, a cryonics-hater makes a too-good-to-refuse offer to the owners of a cryonics company with the intention of shutting it down. All major cryonics companies claim that they’re run and always will be run by passionate cryonicists and this is not a possibility—but again, who knows.
The longer the green segment is and the longer it needs to hold out, the higher the chance of failing If 3. If patients can be revived 40 years from now, there’s a lot less that can go wrong than if revival doesn’t become possible for 2,500 years. 
But the companies are doing their best to plan for the long run. On the question of how long until revival becomes possible, Alcor says, “Some think it will take centuries before patients can be revived, while others think the accelerating pace of technological change might so rapidly transform our world that decades would suffice. Alcor is planning for however long it might take.”16 
As time moves forward and both vitrification and revival technology improve, both the blue and yellow segments will tend to move inward, invading the green segment from both sides. The big picture might be best illustrated like this:
   
This is how the blue, green and yellow segments work in flow with each other. Cryonics companies often say cryonics will be a “last in, first out” thing, and this graph shows exactly why—
   
The more time that passes before you need to be vitrified, the fancier the vitrification technology you’ll be treated with and the further along revival technology will be—and this smaller technology gap will mean a sooner revival date. And with less time to have to rely on a cryonics company to care for you, the less risk you’ll be taking. 
It’s important to understand that the blue line on the graph applies to the average cryonics patient—someone who suffers from Alzheimers late in life will go into vitrification in worse shape than a typical person of their time, so their particular challenge will be greater than the blue line height that corresponds with the year of their death.
Of course, the simple, straight lines on the graph are portraying the general concept. The actual lines won’t be straight or predictable. One promising way this might be the case is that the accelerating rate of technological advancement6 might mean that the blue and yellow lines could improve at a faster rate over time and look like this:
   
So that’s how the first three Ifs work. And that’s all great—but none of it matters if If 4 doesn’t pan out. Without If 4—i.e. “Will people actually revive me when the time comes?”—you’re still just a helpless, vitrified body, and if the external world doesn’t keep their side of the bargain once you become revivable, you’re out of luck—and you’ll never know it happened.
You’ll be a little like a farm animal. You might have rights in theory, but with no ability to defend your own rights, you’ll rely on other people to fight for those rights on your behalf.
As I’ve dug into this topic and talked to people about it, I’ve noticed that this concern seems to jump immediately to people’s minds as a reason cryonics is unlikely to work out.
They ask: “There will be enough problems on Earth to deal with—do you really think people are going to care about bringing dead people back to life?”
Cryonicists have answers to this question.
First, they point out that patients won’t be floating in tanks in a world that has forgotten them. Rather, as a patient, you’d likely have A) descendants or friends who will be highly aware of you and eager to see you reanimated, B) the larger cryonicist community, who will be as passionately interested in your fair treatment as PETA activists are in the fair treatment of animals, and C) the contractual obligation of your future care-takers—similar to how today you might be operated on by a surgeon who doesn’t know you, but who diligently cares for you anyway out of professional obligation.
Second, they argue that once the revival of cryonics patients becomes a reality, the public’s conception of what a cryonics patient is and what she deserves will dramatically shift:17
  Long before it ever becomes possible to contemplate revival of today’s patients, reversible suspended animation will be perfected as a mainstream medical technology. From that point forward, the whole tradition of caring for people who cannot immediately be fixed will be strongly reinforced in culture and law. By the time it becomes possible to revive patients preserved with the oldest and crudest technologies, revival from states of suspended animation will be something that has been done thousands, if not millions, of times before. The moral and cultural imperative for revival when possible will be as basic and strong as the obligation to render first aid and emergency medical care today. 
If a cryonics patient might seem to have the rights of a farm animal today, cryonicists expect that to become an outdated and primitive-seeming viewpoint down the road. They believe cryonics patients will be looked upon more like today’s coma patients.
That sounds great, but of course, we have no idea how the future will play out or what the standing will be for the field of cryonics and its suspended patients. It does seem plausible, at least, that cryonics patients will end up with more and more rights in the future, not fewer and fewer. If that’s what happens, If 4 shouldn’t be much of a problem.
And if all four Ifs go your way, you’ll finally be able to move onto the next step—the one that will really blow your mind when it happens.
 Step 9) Be revived 
This will be quite the experience.
First, whether it happens 30 years or 2,000 years after you were last conscious, it’ll feel the same to you—probably a bit like a short nap. When you sleep, you feel the passage of time—when you wake up after an eight-hour night’s sleep, it doesn’t feel like you just went to bed a second ago, it feels like it’s been eight hours. But being on pause in your liquid nitrogen thermos is different. You won’t experience the passage of time, so it’ll feel like you were just awake in your previous life (the only reason it won’t feel totally instantaneous is that you’ll have lost your short term memories). You’ll probably be super disoriented, and someone will have to explain to you that A) you’re in the future, and B) the cryonics worked, and you’re no longer a person about to die—you’re healthy and rejuvenated and all set to start living again.
How intense.
As a very not-heaven-believing person, I’ve always thought about how pleasantly shocked I would be if I died and then woke up in some delightful afterlife. I’d look around, slowly realize what was happening, and then I’d be like, “Wait…NO FUCKING WAY.” Then I’d promptly plant myself at the gates and watch other atheists come in for the fun of seeing them go through the same shock.
I imagine being revived from cryonics will be kind of like that. Maybe a few notches less shocking, since you presumably did the cryonics thing because you thought there was a chance it would work—but still a pretty big no fucking way moment.
After the initial shock, you’ll have to figure out what kind of world you’ve woken up into. Some possibilities:
 It could suck.  You could wake up in a far future world that’s a lot worse than the one you previously lived in and a world in which you know zero people. Even worse, you could wake up in some really scary situation—who knows what kind of creepy shit might be going on in the future.
 It could be blah. You could wake up in a world that’s kind of meh. Like it’s not as future-y and cool as you thought it would be and you’re not immortal, just somewhat restored and still vulnerable, and you have to get a job and you don’t really have applicable skills for the times. Just kind of whatevs.
 It could be incredibly rad. Probably the most likely outcome, you could wake up and it could be very, very rad. The future-y stuff might be cool and fun beyond your comprehension. You might have previously been 84 and aching everywhere and forgetful, and suddenly you have the body of a perfectly fit 20-year-old, or maybe something even better, like a super-charged synthetic body that doesn’t feel pain or exhaustion and can’t get sick. Your old, forgetful brain could be repaired and full of vitality you haven’t experienced in 50 years. And best, you might be surrounded by friends and family who were also cryopreserved and are unbelievably excited to see you. It could be rad.
It could be even crazier if you wake up in a virtual world after having had your vitrified brain data uploaded to a computer. You wouldn’t feel like you were in a computer—you’d feel every bit as real as you did when you were a human, except now everything is amazing and magical and you can spend almost all your time fulfilling my lifelong dream of sliding down rainbows like this care bear.18
    
Your friends and family could be there with you, also virtually uploaded but still fully themselves with all of their old memories—all of you now eternal and indestructible, with no need for the physical world or its resources.
Who knows what kind of world you’d wake up in. But a couple things lead me to believe it would be a pretty good situation:
A really terrible future world probably isn’t the type of world that would be concerned with protecting and reviving cryonics patients. In a world like that, you’d probably just never wake up.
Likewise, a future that can revive vitrified people is by definition pretty technologically amazing, so it’s hard to imagine waking up in a world that hasn’t solved all kinds of problems our current world suffers from.
The future tends to be better than the past. Humans have the tendency to predict dystopian futures, but at least so far, it’s been the other way around. Say what you want about the ills of today’s world, but it’s better to be a human today than it was 200 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago.
But because we have no idea what revival will be like, we have this next step:
 Step 10) Decide if you’re into it and want to stay 
Barring some hilariously bad scenario where you’re revived into a world of eternal virtual torture with no ability to end it—which really makes no sense—cryonics is a risk-free venture. It has an undo button—just kill yourself and it’s as if it never happened. If you’re not into it, your journey ends here. Otherwise, move on to the next step.
 Step 11) Enjoy shit 
We’ve kind of reached the end of me guiding you. You’re now just living again like you were before—hopefully in a much better situation—and what you do at this point is really your business. Just go do your thing and enjoy being in the future.
 Step 12) Die for real this time 
At some point, you’ll be over it. No one ever will ever ever want to live forever, a fact I realized at the end of my Graham’s Number post. When the time comes, I assume the fancy future will have some painless way to bow out—something that will cause total info death, where your data is truly unrecoverable. At that point, you’ll have lived the complete life you want to live, not a life cut short by the limitations of the medical technology of the time you happen to be born in. That’s really the way things should be.
___________
Now that we all know a lot more about cryonics, let’s bring back our sentence. This is where we were, and we were looking closely at the three words in the red:
 Cryonics is the morbid process of freezing rich, dead people who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to bring them back to life, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult. 
We can get rid of “rich,” because at least for younger people, cryonics can be paid for with a not-that-expensive life insurance plan.
We can get rid of “dead,” because cryonics doesn’t deal with dead people, it deals with people currently doomed to die given the technology they have current access to. For the same reason, we can also change the wording of “bring them back to life.”
And we can get rid of “freezing,” because cryonics doesn’t freeze people—it vitrifies them into an amorphous solid state.
While we’re here, let’s get rid of “morbid.” Is a vitrified human head floating in liquid nitrogen morbid? Yes. Is it more morbid than being eaten by worms and microbes underground or being burned to ashes? Definitely not. So not a fair word to use.
So that leaves us with a sentence more like this:
 Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them, and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult. 
And then there’s the elephant in the room—this part of the sentence: …and the community of hard-core cryonics people might also be a Scientology-like cult. 
I put that in there because when you’re examining something that involves A) a fringe community, B) the possible concept of immortality, and C) members paying large sums of money for services that they’re told might pan out 1,000 years from now—you have no choice but to put up your “Is this a Scientology-y thing?” antenna.
One way to let that antenna do its work is to read a bunch of stuff written by smart, credible people who think the whole thing is utter BS. If anything will disenchant you to the excitement of something as out there as cryonics, it’s experts telling you why it should be ignored.
So I did that. And as I read, I weighed what I read against the rebuttal from cryonicists, which I’d often find on Alcor’s highly comprehensive FAQ page. Other resources for the cryonicist viewpoint are the thorough FAQ of the Cryonics Institute’s ex-president, Ben Best, Alcor’s Science FAQ and Alcor’s Myths page.
The people who are super not into cryonics fall into a few general buckets:
 Skeptic Type 1: The scientist with a valid argument about why cryonics might not be possible 
The mainstream medical community is generally not on board with cryonics. No health insurance company will cover it, no government will subsidize it, no doctors will refer to it as a medical procedure.
Some skeptics make what seem to be valid points. Biochemist Ken Storey says, “We have many different organs and we know from research into preserving transplant organs that even if it were possible to successfully cryopreserve them, each would need to be cooled at a different rate and with a different mixture and concentration of cryoprotectants. Even if you only wanted to preserve the brain, it has dozens of different areas, which would need to be cryopreserved using different protocols.” Storey also points out just how tall an order it would be to “repair” someone damaged by vitrification, explaining that “a human cell has around 50,000 proteins and hundreds of millions of fat molecules that make up the membranes. Cryopreservation disrupts all of them.” (Alcor calls this statement patently false.7)
Others point to the towering challenge of either repairing a human brain or scanning one in order to upload it. Brazilian scientist Miguel Nicolelis emphasizes that the task of scanning a human brain would require, with today’s technology, “a million electron microscopes running in parallel for ten years.” Michael Hendricks, who studies the brains of roundworms, believes the challenge of reviving the qualities that make someone who they are is far too complex to achieve, explaining that “while it might be theoretically possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that certainly is not happening now. The technology to do so, let alone the ability to read this information back out of such a specimen, does not yet exist even in principle.”
 Cryonicist response: Totes 
Cryonicists don’t really disagree with these people (Storey’s quote notwithstanding). They readily admit that the challenges of reviving someone from cryopreservation are insurmountable using today’s technology. They simply point out that A) there’s no scientific evidence that cryonics can’t work, B) we shouldn’t underestimate what future technology will be able to do (imagine how mind-blowing CRISPR would be to someone in the year 1700 and think about what the equivalent would be for us), and C) there have been some promising developments—like the recent well-preserved vitrified rabbit brain news—that suggest there’s reason for optimism.
I’m yet to hear a cryonicist say, “Cryonics will work.” They just don’t feel that this is a case where a lack of proof amounts to a lack of credibility. Alcor’s Science FAQ addresses this: “The burden of proof lies with those who make a claim that is inconsistent with existing well-established scientific theory. Cryonics is not inconsistent with well-established scientific theory … At no point does cryonics require that existing physical law be altered in any way.”
Cryonicists also don’t waste an opportunity to point out these quotes:
“There is no hope for the fanciful idea of reaching the Moon because of insurmountable barriers to escaping the Earth’s gravity.” — Dr. Forest Ray Moulton, University of Chicago astronomer, 1932.
“All this writing about space travel is utter bilge.” — Sir Richard Woolley, Astronomer Royal of Britain, 1956
“To place a man in a multi-stage rocket and project him into the controlling gravitational field of the moon…. I am bold enough to say that such a man-made voyage will never occur regardless of all future advances.” — Dr. Lee De Forest, famous engineer, 1957
 Skeptic Type 2: The scientist who argues that cryonics won’t work even though they know less about cryonics than you do right now having read this post 
This is a surprisingly large category of cryonics skeptics. It’s amazing, for example, how many people from the mainstream medical world argue that cryonics can’t work because when water freezes, it causes irreparable damage to human tissue.
 Cryonicist response: Agreed—that’s why we don’t freeze people. Please read about what cryonics is before saying more words out of your mouth. 
Among the cryonics skeptics who literally don’t get what modern cryonics consists of is celebrity physicist Michio Kaku, someone I normally like, but who in this clip is taken to town by Alcor’s CEO for having no idea what he’s talking about.
Part of the reason most scientists don’t get cryonics has to do with its cross-disciplinary nature. Alcor explains:
 Most experts in any single field will say that they know of no evidence that cryonics can work. That’s because cryonics is an interdisciplinary field based on three facts from diverse unrelated sciences. Without all these facts, cryonics seems ridiculous. Unfortunately that makes the number of experts qualified to comment on cryonics very small. For example, very few scientists even know what vitrification is. Fewer still know that vitrification can preserve cell structure of whole organs or whole brains. Even though this use of vitrification has been published, it is so uncommon outside of cryonics that only a handful of cryobiologists know it is possible. 
 Skeptic Type 3: The cryogenicist who doesn’t want the other cool kids to think he’s friends with cryonics, the weird outsider. 
There’s an amusing little one-way rivalry going on between cryogenicists (who, remember, deal with the science of the effects of cold temperatures in general) and cryonicists. Cryogenicists tend to view cryonics like an astronomer would view astrology—or at least, that’s what they say publicly out of caution. They seem to sometimes admit that there could be sound science behind cryonics, but they also know that cryonics lacks credibility with the wider science community and they don’t want to get roped into that reputation problem by association (they also have very little sense of humor about people confusing the words cryogenics and cryonics).
 Cryonicist response: Whatevs. 
 Skeptic Type 4: The person who believes that even if you can revive a vitrified person, it won’t really be them. 
This relates to a philosophical quandary I explored in the post What Makes You You? Are “you” your body? Your brain? The data in your brain? Something less tangible like a soul? This all becomes highly relevant when we’re thinking about cryonics. It’s hard to read about cryonic revival, and especially the prospect of “waking up” in a virtual world you’ve been uploaded into, without asking, “But wait…will that still be me?”
This is a common objection to cryonics, but few people will argue with conviction that they know the answer to this question one way or the other.
 Cryonicist response:  Yeah, we’re not sure about that either. Fingers crossed though. 
Most cryonicists have a hunch that you can survive cryopreservation intact (cryonicist Eliezer Yudkowsky argues that “successful cryonics preserves anything about you that is preserved by going to sleep at night and waking up the next morning”) but they also admit that this is yet another variable they’re not sure about. You might even want to consider this a fifth “If” to add onto our list: If what seems to be a revived me is actually me…
 Skeptic Type 5: The person who, regardless of whether cryonics can work or not, thinks it’s a bad thing 
There are lots of these people. A handful of examples:
 Argument: Cryonics is icky.
 Typical cryonicist response: Yup, but less icky than decaying underground.
 Argument: Cryonics is creepy and unnatural.
 Typical cryonicist response: People said the same thing about the first organ transplants.
 Argument: Cryonics is trying to play God and cheat death.
 Typical cryonicist response: Is resuscitating someone whose heart has stopped playing God and cheating death? How about chemotherapy?
 Argument: Cryonics is a scam.
 Typical cryonicist response: The major cryonics companies are all nonprofits, the employees are paid modestly and the board members running the company (who are all signed up for cryonics themselves) aren’t paid at all. So who exactly is benefiting from this scam?
 Argument: “If you have enough money [for cryonics], then you have enough money to help somebody in need today.” — Bioethicist Kenneth Goodman19
  Actual cryonicist response: “If you have enough money for health insurance (which costs a lot more than cryonics), then you have enough money to help somebody else in need today. In fact, if you have enough money for any discretionary expenditure (travel, sports, movies, beer), then you have enough money to help somebody in need today. Of all the ways people choose to spend substantial sums of money over a lifetime, singling out the health care choice of cryonics as selfish is completely arbitrary.”20
  Argument: “Money invested to preserve human life in the deep freeze is money wasted, the sums involved being large enough to fulfill a punitive function as a self-imposed fine for gullibility and vanity.” — Biologist Jean Medawar21
  Actual cryonicist response: “Nobody would ever imagine calling the first recipients of bone marrow transplants or artificial hearts “gullible and vain”. And what of dying children who are cryopreserved? Cryonics is an experiment, and people who choose this experiment are worthy of the same respect as other participants in high risk medical endeavors.”22
  Argument: Cryonics will cause an overpopulation disaster.
 Actual cryonicist response: This is a common one I’ve heard in my discussions. Here’s what Alcor says: “What about antibiotics, vaccinations, statin drugs and the population pressures they bring? It’s silly to single out something as small and speculative as cryonics as a population issue. Life spans will continue increasing in developed parts of the world, cryonics or not, as they have done for the past century. Historically, as societies become more wealthy and long-lived, population takes care of itself. Couples have fewer children at later ages. This is happening in the world right now. The worst population problems are where people are poor and life spans short, not long.”23
  Argument: But Ted Williams.
Let me explain. There are a handful of famous people signed up for cryonics, like Ray Kurzweil, nanotech pioneer Eric Drexler, and celebrities like Larry King, Britney Spears, Simon Cowell, and Paris Hilton.24 But there are very few big names among the 300 or so who are already vitrified. One that is is baseball legend Ted Williams.
Williams is the first thing that comes to mind when a lot of people think about cryonics, an unfortunate fact that cryonicists wish would go away, because his story is mired in scandal (two of Williams’ children said cryonics is what he wanted while the other claimed he wanted to be cremated and the son was just cryopreserving him so he could later profit off of his DNA samples). The ugly story ended up, fairly or unfairly, as a stain on the cryonics industry in many people’s heads, partially because in the midst of it, Sports Illustrated published an article about the scandal with quotes from an ex-Alcor employee accusing Alcor of mismanaging the Williams vitrification, among other things.
 Typical cryonicist response: Unfairly. It’s a stain unfairly. The accusations weren’t based in reality, and the employee recently admitted in court that what he said may not have been true.
 Argument: Life is long enough. People aren’t supposed to live longer than we do now. Just enjoy what you’ve got.
 Typical cryonicist response: Thank you for your opinion. I disagree.
So how does my Scientology antenna feel after reading about 50 skeptic opinions?
Well, the skeptics definitely helped me appreciate the magnitude of the challenge at hand with cryonics. Science has a long way to go before cryonics can truly function as a pause button instead of a stop button—and we may never get there.
But it left me feeling every bit as confident that cryonics is a worthy pursuit and possibly a total game-changer. The fact that cryonic revival seems plausible, coupled with the fact that through most of history, the people of the time couldn’t have even imagined the magic that future technology would make real, makes me feel like the safer bet is on cryonics eventually working. If something important isn’t impossible, the future will probably figure out a way to make it happen, with enough time.
There’s also the “why the fuck not?” argument cryonicists make that’s very hard for skeptics to thwart.
Pro-cryonics scientist Ralph Merkle says it well:25
   The correct scientific answer to the question “Does cryonics work?” is: “The clinical trials are in progress. Come back in a century and we’ll give you an answer based on the outcome.” The relevant question for those of us who don’t expect to live that long is: “Would I rather be in the control group, or the experimental group?” We are forced by circumstances to answer that question without the benefit of knowing the results of the clinical trials. 
The only way to shoot down a response that says, “We don’t know but we might as well try” is to say, “There is definitely no point in trying because it’s impossible.” And very few credible scientists would claim to have that conviction about things as mysterious as the workings of the brain and the possibilities of the far future.
The other thing that struck me as I learned about cryonics is that cryonicists aren’t usually “salesy” at all when they talk about cryonics. The impression I got from my research is that cryonicists tend to be well-educated, rational, realistic, and humble about what they know and don’t know. They readily admit the problems and shortcomings of the field8 and they’re careful to use measured, responsible language so as not to distort the nuances of the truth.9 And despite a general lack of support from the mainstream medical community, plenty of reputable scientists have become fervent cryonicists.
So, for now, cryonics has satisfied my Scientology antenna.
Which shortens our sentence to this:
 Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them. 
The final wording in the sentence that I’d like to challenge is:
 Cryonics is the process of pausing people in critical condition who can’t accept the concept of death, in the hopes that people from the future will be able to save them. 
This is the part of the sentence that carries a twinge of eye-rolling contempt—something people often feel when they hear about someone with a desire to conquer mortality. Aside from the aversion we have to the prospect of a human body floating in a freezing tank, many of us feel a distaste towards the motivation behind cryonics. It seems greedy to want more than your one standard life.
I’m not one to typically feel contempt at something like this, but early in my research, even I found myself doing a little head shake when I read about billionaire Peter Thiel signing up for cryonics a while back.
But this post has forced me to take a big step back—back to where I can see death not as a moment but as a process, back to where I can see the human lifespan as a product of our times, not our biology, and back to where I see the concept of human health spread out along the spans of time and where I can imagine how future humans will see our current times of helplessness in the face of biological deterioration.
From way out here, it hits you that we’re living in a phase—a sad little window that an intelligent species inevitably passes through, when they’re advanced enough to understand their own mortality, but still too primitive to save themselves from it. We grapple with this by treating death like a tyrannical overlord we wouldn’t dare try to challenge, not even in our own private thoughts. We’ve been universally defeated and dominated by this overlord for as long as we’ve existed, and all we know how to do is bow down to it in full resignation of its power over us.10
 Future humans who have one day overthrown the overlord will look at the phase we’re in and our resulting psychological condition with such clarity—they’ll be sad for us the way we’re sad for brainwashed members of an ancient cult who commit mass suicide because the master has instructed it.
Our will isn’t broken when it comes to resisting the overlord—that’s why we see it as honorable to fight cancer till the final minute, heroic to risk your own life for a good cause and make it out alive, and a terrible mistake to resign to the overlord prematurely and commit suicide.
But when it comes to defeating the overlord, our will has been squashed by a history that tells us that the overlord is indestructible.
And this explains the divide between how cryonicists feel about cryonics and how the rest of us view it. The divide is for two reasons:
 1) Cryonicists view death as a process and consider many people who are declared dead today to still be alive—and they view cryonics as an attempted transfer of a living patient to a future hospital that can save his life. In other words, they view cryonics merely as an attempt to resist the overlord, no different than the way we view someone being transferred to a hospital in a different location which has better treatment options for their condition. Most of us, by contrast, view death as a singular moment, so we see cryonics as an attempt to bring a dead person back to life—i.e. we see cryonics as an attempt to defeat the overlord. When cryonicists see us cheer on a billionaire who fights cancer and shake our heads at one who signs up for cryonics, when they see us praying for someone in a coma and rolling our eyes at someone being vitrified—they see us being highly irrational.
 2) Cryonicists view death not as an all-powerful overlord but as a puzzle to be solved. They see humans as an arrangement of atoms and see no reason that arrangement should have to inevitably deteriorate if our scientists can just get better at working with atoms. So for them, trying to defeat death altogether is an obvious, rational mission to undertake. But most of us view death as a fundamental fact of the universe—a mysterious and terrifying shadow that hovers over all living things and that only a naive fool would try to escape from—so instead of cheering on the people trying to solve the puzzle of death, we scoff at them and laugh at them, as if they’re too immature to come to peace with the inevitable.
Looking at this through a zoomed out lens was a big Whoa Moment epiphany for me. Suddenly, I saw the cryonicists’ of the world in the same light as those rare ancient people trying to understand how earthquakes work so they could be best prepared for the next one, and I realized that when I shook my head at Peter Thiel, I was being like one of the hordes of ancient people who worshipped the gods that had punished us with that earthquake and who wanted to burn those rare scientists at the stake for their blasphemous thinking.
I started this post thinking I’d simply write a “mini post” about this little community of cryonicists and what they were trying to do and ended it staring at another example of today’s self-proclaimed science-minded rationalists being tomorrow’s idol-worshippers.
I also saw my conception of end-of-life morality flip itself on its head. At the beginning of my research, my question was, “Is cryonics an okay thing to do?” By the end, the question was , “Is it okay to not sign up a dying child for cryonics, or will future people view that the way we see a parent refusing to allow life-saving medical treatment to their child for religious reasons?”
Cryonics has quickly come to seem not only like a good thing to try, but like the right thing to do.
That’s certainly how Alcor sees it. They say:
 The moral argument for cryonics is that it’s wrong to discontinue care of an unconscious person when they can still be rescued. This is why people who fall unconscious are taken to hospital by ambulance, why they will be maintained for weeks in intensive care if necessary, and why they will still be cared for even if they don’t fully awaken after that. It is a moral imperative to care for unconscious people as long as there remains reasonable hope for recovery. 
And once you’re looking through that lens, everything we consider normal starts to look crazy.
When Kim Suozzi found out she was dying of cancer at age 23, she signed up to be cryopreserved. She viewed it like trying a new experimental drug that might have a chance to save her when nothing else could—a no-brainer. But her father fiercely resisted the decision,11 Reddit users scorned her for it, and the story was unusual enough to warrant a feature article in the New York Times.
It’s as if Kim was part of a group of the world’s cancer-stricken 23-year-olds as they all walked toward a cliff to fall into the jaws of the overlord, and Kim saw a rope hanging from a higher cliff across the chasm and decided to jump for it because maybe, just maybe, it could pull her to safety. And the Times found that to be so bizarre, and so out there, that they wrote a piece on it. Huh?
From far away, it looks a lot like we’re all on a plane that’s going down, with our only shot at survival being to take a chance with an experimental parachute—and we’re all just staying in our seats.
___________
I’ve decided to take a parachute and jump. I have an appointment set up for early April with a life insurance agent and Alcor member to get set up with a plan. I can boil the decision down to three reasons:
 1) I love life. Readers have picked up on my mild obsession with death, which might have something to do with the 55 times I’ve talked about it on this blog. But when they bring it up with me, they refer to it as my fear of death. Which isn’t quite how I feel. It’s more that I really like life. I like doing things and thinking things and I like my family and friends and want to keep hanging out with them if I can. I also really want to see what happens. I want to be there when we figure out the Fermi Paradox and when we discover what dark matter is and when we terraform Mars and when AI takes all our jobs and then extincts all of us. I want to see what the 23rd century is like and see how cool the phones are by then. Being alive is a lot more interesting than being dead. And since I have all of eternity to be dead, it seems logical to stay not dead for at least a while when I have the chance.
 2) This chart.  
   
 3) Hope. I’ve always been jealous of religious people, because on their deathbed, instead of thinking, “Shit,” they’re thinking, “Okay here’s the big moment—am I about to blink and wake up in heaven??” Much more fun. And much more exciting. Whether cryonics pans out or not, as I age, at least a little part of me can now be thinking, “I wonder what’s gonna happen when I die?” Atheists aren’t supposed to get to think that. Humans don’t need a huge amount of hope to feel hopeful—they just need something to cling onto. Just enough to be able to have the “So you’re sayin there’s a chance!” feeling.
Some of you will resonate with my decision—others will think it makes me silly, gullible, or selfish.
Either way, you should think about this and the fact that you currently have a plan, whether you realize it or not. Likely, that plan is to resign to death. To walk off the cliff instead of jumping for the lifeline. To stay planted in your seat as the plane goes down.
That’s not necessarily the wrong decision, depending on who you are, what you believe, and what you value. But if that’s your plan, it should be because you like that plan more than the alternative—not because you haven’t thought about it and are just doing what everyone else is doing. This is a matter of your one existence, and you have to take the fate of that existence into your own, independent-thinking hands.
And if you decide that you probably would rather grab a parachute than stay in your seat, try not to fall victim to a common trap:
Cryocrastination.
That’s a real term used in the cryonics world to describe the phenomenon of people—especially young people—saying, “Yeah duh I’m obviously doing cryonics when I die” and then not actually going through the actions to sign up and start paying money. It’s natural—what could possibly be easier to procrastinate on? That item on your list—”sign up for cryonics”—tends to never find itself at the top of the to-do list. But no matter what age you are, unexpected things can happen, and if you never got around to signing up when they do, you’re out of luck. If you take a big step back, procrastinating on this is really shortsighted. Just do what I did—book appointments so you’ll actually do it.
I hope you’ll do it the same way I’d hope you’d take a shot with an experimental drug if you were sick and it were the one chance you had. Because it’s worth a try. Because it just might work. Because why the fuck not. And because Dylan Thomas said it best:
 Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 
___________
 If you want to learn more—the Alcor FAQ and Ben Best’s FAQ are great ways to start. Both the Alcor and Cryonics Institute websites are full of information, and if you want to go a whole level deeper, dig into Alcor’s library (where you can also find cryopreservation case reports) or this collection of cryonics-related journal articles. Many more sources are listed below.
 If you want to help or get involved—you can donate to Alcor or CI or volunteer to help at Alcor. Alcor lists some specific types of people they need help from at the bottom of this page.
___________
   
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If you’d like to support Wait But Why,  here’s our Patreon .
___________
 If you liked this post, you’ll want to read these: 
  What Makes You You?  – A post that uses mind-bending thought experiments to dig into the weirdest, hardest cryonics question
  The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence – Something that might be way better at helping us conquer mortality than cryonics (or the opposite and it’ll extinct us)
  How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars – Like cryonics except instead of trying to extend a person’s life, it’s trying to extend the species’ life
Or, for something less heavy,  this makes me feel not that scared  about cryonics causing overpopulation.
 Sources 
 Alcor’s website is a great resource, especially their main FAQ, their science FAQ, and their library. They also have a substantial YouTube page. I got the idea for the plane going down / experimental parachutes metaphor from the video testimonial of Alcor member Andrew Popper – thanks Andrew.
The other thing from this post that was inspired from outside work is the concept of death as an overlord, which is loosely based on the storyline of Nick Bostrom’s  The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant , where the role of death is played by a dragon. If you liked that part of the post, definitely read the fable.
The Cryonics Institute also has a lot of good information, especially the FAQ of Ben Best, their ex-president.
I feel bad having focused only on Alcor and CI in this post and ignoring the smaller but spirited KrioRus outside of Moscow. Here’s a good article from FT Magazine (by Courtney Weaver) that focuses on them.
Here’s a collection of cryonics-related journal articles. Here’s another.
Here are a handful of cryopreservation case reports.
Scientist and cryonicist Ralph Merkle nicely articulates a bunch of the stuff I talked about on his website. A lot of people compare the “why the fuck not?” argument for cryonics with Pascal’s Wager. Merkle doesn’t think it’s a great comparison – here’s why.
This is a pretty riveting This American Life episode about cryonics. It focuses on the early days of the movement in the ’60s and ’70s, honing in on a notorious cryonics disaster. And here’s a Stuff You Should Know about cryonics.
A letter by 60 scientists arguing that cryonics should be taken seriously in the science world.
Eliezer Yudkowsky finds a way of popping his head into like a third of the posts I write as I research. He has a bunch of interesting stuff to say about cryonics. Here’s one thing. Here’s another.
Two great recent articles about cryonics: One from Motherboard (by Brian Merchant) about a dying two-year-old girl whose parents made her the world’s youngest cryonics patient. And one from the NY Times (by Amy Harmon) that I referenced at the end of the post about a 23-year-old who signed up with Alcor before she died of a brain tumor.
An interesting Reddit AMA with a cryonics member.
An article from Newsweek (by Anthony Cuthbertson) about the Feb 2016 rabbit-brain-vitrifying breakthrough.
I only read excerpts of this, but here’s Robert Ettinger’s famous book that launched the cryonics movement in the early ’60s.
An interesting New York Magazine article (by Kerry Howley) that explores the phenomenon of family conflict over cryonics.
An Atlantic article (by Rose Eveleth) about the cryonics process. Alcor has a good page on the procedure too. So does CI.
Meet Michael Hendricks, a smart scientist who thinks cryonics is horse shit. Here’s another skeptic. And another. Alcor refutes skeptics with this page and this page, and it admits problems with cryonics here.
Alcor’s pricing. And CI’s.
A video nicely articulating the case for cryonics by Alcor’s CEO Max More.
Why Cryonics Makes Sense — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/cryonics.html
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/popular-posts-2014.html
Our Most Popular Posts of 2014 — Wait But Why
2014-12-31
Wait But Why
<div><article>
	<div><p><em>The gargantuan SpaceX post is coming soon. In the meantime, here’s our 2014 end-of-year post with the year’s most popular posts.</em></p>
<p>Every year, the last few days of December are full of every site aggressively reviewing the year for us. It’s time to reflect, whether you like it or not.</p>
<p>Well fuck it—we’re a website, and it’s time to join the coercive reflection party.</p>
<p>2014 was a fun year for us at Wait But Why—we explored a bunch of new kinds of topics, took our first crack at making a <a href="http://store.waitbutwhy.com/">store</a>, launched a new way for readers to interact with the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/table">Dinner Table</a>, and the summer travel <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/odd-things-odd-places-7-travel-posts.html">series</a> was definitely a thing that was a thing. On the personal side, my New Year’s resolution a year ago was “Next year, Tuesday means <em>Tuesday</em>” and then I proceeded to post on time between 0 and 2 times. Exciting year all around.</p>
<p>We posted a bunch of large and small things throughout the year on different parts of the site—but at the core were 35 big, long posts (you can find all of them in the <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/archive">Archive</a>). So which of them did best?</p>
<p><strong>Here are the ten most popular posts of 2014:</strong></p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html">The Fermi Paradox</a></strong> – Scientists estimate that there are over 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy—but we never see evidence of anyone. Here are 13 reasons why.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/04/everything-dont-know-tipping.html">Everything You Don’t Know About Tipping</a></strong> – Whenever you’re not sure what to tip someone, you risk ending up in the dreaded Ambiguous Tipping Situation. This post is here to help.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/02/pick-life-partner.html">How to Pick Your Life Partner</a></strong> – Given that the choice of life partner is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up getting it so wrong?</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-opinions-run-life.html">Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think</a></strong> – We all care way too much what other people think of us. Here’s why it makes no sense.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html">The Great Perils of Social Interaction</a></strong> – It’s a tough world out there.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/09/muhammad-isis-iraqs-full-story.html">From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story</a></strong> – If you’re not that clear on how Iraq, ISIS, or the conflicts within Islam came to be the way they are, this post will help.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html">Your Life in Weeks</a></strong> – Seeing all the weeks of your life in one chart is a weird experience.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/10-types-odd-friendships-youre-probably-part.html">10 Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of</a></strong> – When you’re young, you make friends kind of by accident. Then they stick. That’s why you’re now part of these 10 odd friendships.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/your-family-past-present-and-future.html">Your Family: Past, Present, and Future</a></strong> – The past, present, and future of your family tree are all more fascinating than you realize.</p>
<p><strong><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/10/religion-for-the-nonreligious.html">A Religion for the Nonreligious</a></strong> – A post that tied together a bunch of the ideas we’ve discussed on the site.</p>
<p>___________</p>
<p><strong>And here are 2013’s Top Ten:</strong></p>
<p><a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html">Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html">Why Procrastinators Procrastinate</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/putting-time-in-perspective.html">Putting Time in Perspective</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/07/7-ways-to-be-insufferable-on-facebook.html">7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html">How to Name a Baby</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/20-things-i-learned-while-i-was-in.html">20 Things I Learned in North Korea</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/10-types-of-30-year-old-single-guys.html">10 Types of Single 30-Year-Old Guys</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/08/creepy-kids-in-creepy-vintage-ads.html">Creepy Kids in Creepy Vintage Ads</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/11-awkward-things-about-email.html">11 Awkward Things About Email</a><br />
<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/11/life-is-picture-but-you-live-in-pixel.html">Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel</a></p>
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 Our Most Popular Posts of 2014

 December 31, 2014 By Wait But Why


 The gargantuan SpaceX post is coming soon. In the meantime, here’s our 2014 end-of-year post with the year’s most popular posts.

 Every year, the last few days of December are full of every site aggressively reviewing the year for us. It’s time to reflect, whether you like it or not.

 Well fuck it—we’re a website, and it’s time to join the coercive reflection party.

 2014 was a fun year for us at Wait But Why—we explored a bunch of new kinds of topics, took our first crack at making a store, launched a new way for readers to interact with the Dinner Table, and the summer travel series was definitely a thing that was a thing. On the personal side, my New Year’s resolution a year ago was “Next year, Tuesday means Tuesday” and then I proceeded to post on time between 0 and 2 times. Exciting year all around.

 We posted a bunch of large and small things throughout the year on different parts of the site—but at the core were 35 big, long posts (you can find all of them in the Archive). So which of them did best?

 Here are the ten most popular posts of 2014:

 The Fermi Paradox – Scientists estimate that there are over 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy—but we never see evidence of anyone. Here are 13 reasons why.

 Everything You Don’t Know About Tipping – Whenever you’re not sure what to tip someone, you risk ending up in the dreaded Ambiguous Tipping Situation. This post is here to help.

 How to Pick Your Life Partner – Given that the choice of life partner is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up getting it so wrong?

 Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think – We all care way too much what other people think of us. Here’s why it makes no sense.

 The Great Perils of Social Interaction – It’s a tough world out there.

 From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story – If you’re not that clear on how Iraq, ISIS, or the conflicts within Islam came to be the way they are, this post will help.

 Your Life in Weeks – Seeing all the weeks of your life in one chart is a weird experience.

 10 Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of – When you’re young, you make friends kind of by accident. Then they stick. That’s why you’re now part of these 10 odd friendships.

 Your Family: Past, Present, and Future – The past, present, and future of your family tree are all more fascinating than you realize.

 A Religion for the Nonreligious – A post that tied together a bunch of the ideas we’ve discussed on the site.

 ___________

 And here are 2013’s Top Ten:

 Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy
 Why Procrastinators Procrastinate
 Putting Time in Perspective
 7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook
 How to Name a Baby
 20 Things I Learned in North Korea
 10 Types of Single 30-Year-Old Guys
 Creepy Kids in Creepy Vintage Ads
 11 Awkward Things About Email
 Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel

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The gargantuan SpaceX post is coming soon. In the meantime, here’s our 2014 end-of-year post with the year’s most popular posts. 
Every year, the last few days of December are full of every site aggressively reviewing the year for us. It’s time to reflect, whether you like it or not.
Well fuck it—we’re a website, and it’s time to join the coercive reflection party.
2014 was a fun year for us at Wait But Why—we explored a bunch of new kinds of topics, took our first crack at making a store, launched a new way for readers to interact with the Dinner Table, and the summer travel series was definitely a thing that was a thing. On the personal side, my New Year’s resolution a year ago was “Next year, Tuesday means Tuesday” and then I proceeded to post on time between 0 and 2 times. Exciting year all around.
We posted a bunch of large and small things throughout the year on different parts of the site—but at the core were 35 big, long posts (you can find all of them in the Archive). So which of them did best?
 Here are the ten most popular posts of 2014: 
  The Fermi Paradox  – Scientists estimate that there are over 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy—but we never see evidence of anyone. Here are 13 reasons why.
  Everything You Don’t Know About Tipping  – Whenever you’re not sure what to tip someone, you risk ending up in the dreaded Ambiguous Tipping Situation. This post is here to help.
  How to Pick Your Life Partner  – Given that the choice of life partner is by far the most important thing in life to get right, how is it possible that so many good, smart, otherwise-logical people end up getting it so wrong?
  Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think  – We all care way too much what other people think of us. Here’s why it makes no sense.
  The Great Perils of Social Interaction  – It’s a tough world out there.
  From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s Full Story  – If you’re not that clear on how Iraq, ISIS, or the conflicts within Islam came to be the way they are, this post will help.
  Your Life in Weeks  – Seeing all the weeks of your life in one chart is a weird experience.
  10 Odd Friendships You’re Probably Part Of  – When you’re young, you make friends kind of by accident. Then they stick. That’s why you’re now part of these 10 odd friendships.
  Your Family: Past, Present, and Future  – The past, present, and future of your family tree are all more fascinating than you realize.
  A Religion for the Nonreligious  – A post that tied together a bunch of the ideas we’ve discussed on the site.
___________
 And here are 2013’s Top Ten: 
 Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy 
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate 
Putting Time in Perspective 
7 Ways to Be Insufferable on Facebook 
How to Name a Baby 
20 Things I Learned in North Korea 
10 Types of Single 30-Year-Old Guys 
Creepy Kids in Creepy Vintage Ads 
11 Awkward Things About Email 
Life is a Picture, But You Live in a Pixel
Our Most Popular Posts of 2014 — Wait But Why
https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/12/popular-posts-2014.html
https://acoup.blog/2021/11/26/fireside-friday-november-26-2021/
Fireside Friday: November 26, 2021
2021-11-26
Bret Devereaux
<div><div>
	
<p>Fireside this week! I had hoped to have the next part of the fortification series done by now (its coming along), but between the ends of semester crunch, a few unexpected time-sensitive projects and it being the week of Thanksgiving, that will have to wait.</p>
<figure><figcaption>Home Librarian Oliver helping me organize my books.</figcaption></figure>
<p>For this week’s <strong>musing</strong>, Thanksgiving seemed an appropriate time to look back at the last couple of years o on <em>ACOUP</em> and express how thankful I am for this platform and all of you reading it. I started this project back in May, 2019 as an outlet for some of my thoughts. Of course I didn’t know then that at the end of that first summer of <em>ACOUP</em> we’d be starting the last ‘normal’ semester for quite a while, or that we were heading into the last normal academic job market until…well, the academic job market is still not back to normal.<a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-1-10143"><sup>1</sup></a> Like many early career academics, I am currently what we call an ‘adjunct’ which is to say that I don’t have a permanent academic position (is a post on ‘what the heck do academic job titles mean?’ something worth writing?), but rather am stringing together short-term (single semester, single year) teaching jobs to stay ‘in the game’ while applying for more permanent positions. When COVID hit, academic hiring essentially froze solid and has only barely thawed so far; even lining up a normal teaching load was touch and go for a bit.</p>
<p>That of course meant there was suddenly a lot more uncertainty, both in getting enough semester-to-semester teaching to pay the bills and also to keep an active academic affiliation (the job market gets <em>even harder</em> if you have to do it as an ‘independent researcher’) and also in the long-term prospects of finding a permanent academic position (which remains an ongoing effort). Alongside that, in Spring 2020, of course, all teaching went remote and so I was stuck at home, lecturing into a laptop and a keyboard, isolated from students and colleagues both. The long, slow work of academic writing can be thankless and isolating even in the best of times, but COVID stole away some of the few positive feedback systems that do exist as our conferences went online and we all retreated from our offices to our hastily cobbled together home-zoom-offices.</p>
<p>Obviously this is not to say that I had the last two years particularly hard, compared to other folks. I didn’t end up unemployed, or in financial difficulties, or – most importantly – seriously ill. Many, many people have not been so fortunate. At the same time, even much smaller difficulties can be terribly demotivating and anxiety inducing.</p>
<p>In all of that, I cannot express how thankful I am that I had this space and all of you readers to help break that feeling of professional isolation and pointlessness. Having an outlet where I could see you all reading my writing, discussing it (both in the comments and off the site on social media) recommending it and so on always helped remind me that I wasn’t just shouting into the void, that the work I was producing had value and purpose. It provided a valuable backup supply of motivation to power through the setbacks and uncertainty. So thank you all for reading and thanks to my patrons especially for continuing to support this effort.</p>
<p>The world certainly seems a lot brighter this year than it did back in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down. We’re winding down the first semester taught in-person; I cannot tell you how glad I am to be teaching in person again and how much I missed it. In-person conferences are also slowly returning. And of course <em>ACOUP</em> continues to surprise me with its growing reach. If you will pardon my indulgence in some data: in 2020, <em>ACOUP</em> saw about 1.9m views<a href="#easy-footnote-bottom-2-10143"><sup>2</sup></a>; as I write this, <em>ACOUP</em> is at 2.5m views for 2021 with a month left to go. Academic hiring remains deeply uncertain, but thanks to your support, I have the resources to keep pushing at it and to keep writing, researching and teaching.</p>
<p>So thanks to you all and my good fortune (for the internet’s eyeball-economy is truly quite random) that brought you here.</p>
<p>On to <strong>Recommendations</strong>:</p>
<p>Over at<em> Sententiae Antiquae </em>– which, by the by, if you are even a little bit interested in Greek or Roman culture, <a href="https://sententiaeantiquae.com/">you should be reading <em>Sententiae Antiquae</em> </a>– I was struck by <a href="https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2021/10/01/the-swiss-army-spear/">this short post by Lawrence Benn on two fragments by the Greek poets Archilochus and Hybrias </a>both remarking on what they owed to their spears. With language that wouldn’t sound out of place in the verses of ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddad, I think the fragments underscore the central place that military participation had in how the Greeks understood the status of the free citizen landholder. Of course at the same time, they should also underscore how precarious that existence was, how wrapped up in regular violence. After all, the Greek hoplite himself was only ever one bad day – a lost battle, an encounter with bandits on the road – away from losing that spear and all of the other privileges it came with.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, I thought since I mentioned above how my current academic position is temporary, it might be a good time to draw attention to other contingent (another word for various kinds of fixed-term or adjunct positions) scholars working in the Classics. Over at the blog of the Society for Classical Studies, <a href="https://classicalstudies.org/blogs/contingent-faculty">they’ve been running a series of interviews with contingent faculty members in the Classics</a> (they’re up to six such interviews); check them out.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, over at Peopling the Past, <a href="https://peoplingthepast.com/2021/11/05/blog-post-39-rhea-classical-reviews/">they interviewed the folks over at <em>Rhea Classical Reviews</em></a> about their project, which is an open access review journal which reviews work by non-tenured scholars (pre-tenure, non-tenure, contingent, grad students, alt-ac, independent researchers, etc.), with reviews also written by non-tenured scholars. As tenure sadly continues to break down, I think efforts like <em>Rhea</em> are becoming more important in highlighting that, in fact, important scholarship is being done by scholars not necessarily on the tenure-track. That’s especially urgent because as more and more interesting intellectual output moves outside of the traditional academic status-hierarchy, it is more and more important for scholars at all levels to be able to think and read outside of that hierarchy and to recognize and appreciate the contributions of emerging and non-traditional scholars. You can check out <a href="https://www.rheaclassicalreviews.com/home"><em>Rhea</em> itself here</a>.</p>
<p>For this week’s <strong>book recommendation</strong>, since our fortifications series is about to move into the European Middle Ages, I am going to recommend Clifford Rogers, <em><a href="https://amzn.to/3p0LFF1">Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages</a></em> (2007). The book is pricey, to be sure (so perhaps see if your local library has a copy), but it is a really valuable work as a foundation for understanding medieval European warfare. The book is well organized, broken down into the various elements of a medieval army and the various tasks they might perform. Importantly, compared to the other oft-recommended (and also very useful) text, J.F. Verbruggen’s <em><a href="https://amzn.to/3CUKM5T">The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages</a></em> (1997), Rogers treats a much wider range of military activity (Verbruggen, in particular, is very focused on battles at the expense of both sieges and raiding warfare, which can give the wrong impression if one is not already aware that raids and sieges were much more common than battles for most of the Middle Ages). Rogers has explicit sections on private wars, raids, military extortion, and agricultural devastation, activities that didn’t necessarily result in large-scale battles but where nevertheless crucial in the warfare of the period.</p>
<p>The other great virtue of Rogers’ book for the relative beginner looking to get their feet firmly planted before moving on to reading about specific campaigns or delving into the specialist literature on particular aspects is that Rogers foregrounds the actual primary evidence through the book, with long quotations of accounts illustrating the principles he’s describing and frequent use of period artwork (particularly manuscript illustrations; one assumes the abundance of illustrations, even in black-and-white, is part of why the book is so darned expensive) to show how people at the time represented their forms of warfare. </p>
<ol><li>And by ‘normal’ I mean the ‘normal’ baseline post-2008 where every single year, had it occurred before 2008, would have been one of the worst years ever<a href="#easy-footnote-1-10143"></a></li><li>That is views as WordPress counts them, because I don’t have Google Analytics data back to the start of 2020. Generally Google Analytics is more thorough in ignoring bots and the like and so tends to produce view-counts about 10% or so lower than WordPress.<a href="#easy-footnote-2-10143"></a></li></ol>	</div>||||I|||| Skip to content

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 Fireside Friday: November 26, 2021

 Bret Devereaux Fireside November 26, 2021 6 Minutes

 Fireside this week! I had hoped to have the next part of the fortification series done by now (its coming along), but between the ends of semester crunch, a few unexpected time-sensitive projects and it being the week of Thanksgiving, that will have to wait.

 Home Librarian Oliver helping me organize my books.

 For this week’s musing, Thanksgiving seemed an appropriate time to look back at the last couple of years o on ACOUP and express how thankful I am for this platform and all of you reading it. I started this project back in May, 2019 as an outlet for some of my thoughts. Of course I didn’t know then that at the end of that first summer of ACOUP we’d be starting the last ‘normal’ semester for quite a while, or that we were heading into the last normal academic job market until…well, the academic job market is still not back to normal.1 Like many early career academics, I am currently what we call an ‘adjunct’ which is to say that I don’t have a permanent academic position (is a post on ‘what the heck do academic job titles mean?’ something worth writing?), but rather am stringing together short-term (single semester, single year) teaching jobs to stay ‘in the game’ while applying for more permanent positions. When COVID hit, academic hiring essentially froze solid and has only barely thawed so far; even lining up a normal teaching load was touch and go for a bit.

 That of course meant there was suddenly a lot more uncertainty, both in getting enough semester-to-semester teaching to pay the bills and also to keep an active academic affiliation (the job market gets even harder if you have to do it as an ‘independent researcher’) and also in the long-term prospects of finding a permanent academic position (which remains an ongoing effort). Alongside that, in Spring 2020, of course, all teaching went remote and so I was stuck at home, lecturing into a laptop and a keyboard, isolated from students and colleagues both. The long, slow work of academic writing can be thankless and isolating even in the best of times, but COVID stole away some of the few positive feedback systems that do exist as our conferences went online and we all retreated from our offices to our hastily cobbled together home-zoom-offices.

 Obviously this is not to say that I had the last two years particularly hard, compared to other folks. I didn’t end up unemployed, or in financial difficulties, or – most importantly – seriously ill. Many, many people have not been so fortunate. At the same time, even much smaller difficulties can be terribly demotivating and anxiety inducing.

 In all of that, I cannot express how thankful I am that I had this space and all of you readers to help break that feeling of professional isolation and pointlessness. Having an outlet where I could see you all reading my writing, discussing it (both in the comments and off the site on social media) recommending it and so on always helped remind me that I wasn’t just shouting into the void, that the work I was producing had value and purpose. It provided a valuable backup supply of motivation to power through the setbacks and uncertainty. So thank you all for reading and thanks to my patrons especially for continuing to support this effort.

 The world certainly seems a lot brighter this year than it did back in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down. We’re winding down the first semester taught in-person; I cannot tell you how glad I am to be teaching in person again and how much I missed it. In-person conferences are also slowly returning. And of course ACOUP continues to surprise me with its growing reach. If you will pardon my indulgence in some data: in 2020, ACOUP saw about 1.9m views2; as I write this, ACOUP is at 2.5m views for 2021 with a month left to go. Academic hiring remains deeply uncertain, but thanks to your support, I have the resources to keep pushing at it and to keep writing, researching and teaching.

 So thanks to you all and my good fortune (for the internet’s eyeball-economy is truly quite random) that brought you here.

 On to Recommendations:

 Over at Sententiae Antiquae – which, by the by, if you are even a little bit interested in Greek or Roman culture, you should be reading Sententiae Antiquae – I was struck by this short post by Lawrence Benn on two fragments by the Greek poets Archilochus and Hybrias both remarking on what they owed to their spears. With language that wouldn’t sound out of place in the verses of ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddad, I think the fragments underscore the central place that military participation had in how the Greeks understood the status of the free citizen landholder. Of course at the same time, they should also underscore how precarious that existence was, how wrapped up in regular violence. After all, the Greek hoplite himself was only ever one bad day – a lost battle, an encounter with bandits on the road – away from losing that spear and all of the other privileges it came with.

 Meanwhile, I thought since I mentioned above how my current academic position is temporary, it might be a good time to draw attention to other contingent (another word for various kinds of fixed-term or adjunct positions) scholars working in the Classics. Over at the blog of the Society for Classical Studies, they’ve been running a series of interviews with contingent faculty members in the Classics (they’re up to six such interviews); check them out.

 Meanwhile, over at Peopling the Past, they interviewed the folks over at Rhea Classical Reviews about their project, which is an open access review journal which reviews work by non-tenured scholars (pre-tenure, non-tenure, contingent, grad students, alt-ac, independent researchers, etc.), with reviews also written by non-tenured scholars. As tenure sadly continues to break down, I think efforts like Rhea are becoming more important in highlighting that, in fact, important scholarship is being done by scholars not necessarily on the tenure-track. That’s especially urgent because as more and more interesting intellectual output moves outside of the traditional academic status-hierarchy, it is more and more important for scholars at all levels to be able to think and read outside of that hierarchy and to recognize and appreciate the contributions of emerging and non-traditional scholars. You can check out Rhea itself here.

 For this week’s book recommendation, since our fortifications series is about to move into the European Middle Ages, I am going to recommend Clifford Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages (2007). The book is pricey, to be sure (so perhaps see if your local library has a copy), but it is a really valuable work as a foundation for understanding medieval European warfare. The book is well organized, broken down into the various elements of a medieval army and the various tasks they might perform. Importantly, compared to the other oft-recommended (and also very useful) text, J.F. Verbruggen’s The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages (1997), Rogers treats a much wider range of military activity (Verbruggen, in particular, is very focused on battles at the expense of both sieges and raiding warfare, which can give the wrong impression if one is not already aware that raids and sieges were much more common than battles for most of the Middle Ages). Rogers has explicit sections on private wars, raids, military extortion, and agricultural devastation, activities that didn’t necessarily result in large-scale battles but where nevertheless crucial in the warfare of the period.

 The other great virtue of Rogers’ book for the relative beginner looking to get their feet firmly planted before moving on to reading about specific campaigns or delving into the specialist literature on particular aspects is that Rogers foregrounds the actual primary evidence through the book, with long quotations of accounts illustrating the principles he’s describing and frequent use of period artwork (particularly manuscript illustrations; one assumes the abundance of illustrations, even in black-and-white, is part of why the book is so darned expensive) to show how people at the time represented their forms of warfare.

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 Published by Bret Devereaux

 View all posts by Bret Devereaux

 Published November 26, 2021

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 54 thoughts on “ Fireside Friday: November 26, 2021 ”

 1. kozmo says:
 November 26, 2021 at 1:27 am

 I have a number of these books on our shelves, too! And we have a black cat, but sadly, she is currently fading, just diagnosed with untreatable sarcoma. We don’t have very much longer with her.

 This is related to the recent series on the Spartans, who you were very hard on, esp. the rearing of children and the training of Spartan boys. I wonder if you’d be so rough on similar, more modern societies that cultivated a warrior ethos? I think in particular on the Zulus of the mid to late 19th century or the Plains Indians of a similar time period. The American Plains Indian tribes ran the original schools of hard knocks, when you read up on it. Would you also liken those boys to abused children or twisted “child soldiers” in the modern sense as you do the ancient Spartans?

 I’m always interested in your posts, even when I might want to argue a slightly contrary position or smile at modern cultural references working their way into the narratives. It’s not academic-ese, but it’s educational and informative!

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 1. Matthew says:
 November 26, 2021 at 1:47 am

 Did the plains Indians send out children to murder slaves? Sending them out to steal horses seems tame by comparison.

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 2. Horizon The Transient says:
 November 26, 2021 at 3:04 am

 While it’s generally not at all hard to argue that a randomly-selected historical child-rearing practice was abusive, because most of them were, I think it’s worth mentioning that the Spartan agoge wasn’t abusive in the abstract, but abusive in specific ways that traumatized and ossified its victims in similarly specific ways.

 Among other things, the Plains tribes and Zulu didn’t fight the same way the Spartans did, and so had wholly different martial virtues that didn’t center around the exceptionally-straightforward phalanx battle. Crows and Zulus had to be more martially flexible to suit their ways of warfare; if they produced bloody-minded, hammer-headed warriors, they wouldn’t do so in great quantities or for very long, because then their more martially-competent neighbors would stab them and take all their stuff.

 And then there’s the fact that, for the Plains tribes, there wasn’t really a distinct warrior class. Every able-bodied male was a warrior, it wasn’t a hierarchy thing like it was for the Spartans. I’m less well-read on Zulu social organization, but if you told me they were roughly as unspecialized as the Plains tribes, I wouldn’t have much trouble believing that.

 And *then,* if we take a step back and consider things more broadly, we can see that Plains tribes and the Zulu still produced art and stories and other important yet martially-useless things. They valued beautiful things and produced them, which the Spartan elites did not, because the Spartan elites were raised in the cult of the badass and honestly believed that anyone who worked for a living was little more than vermin. Whereas the peoples you cite… weren’t.

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 1. George says:
 November 26, 2021 at 4:23 am

 I’m actually wondering whether Bret’s analysis of the spartans was entirely accurate, it feels similar to how some people viewed horse nomads. As cultureless savages who viewed all non warriors as vermin.

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 1. Mary says:
 November 26, 2021 at 10:20 am

 A Spartan once held Cyrus in contempt because he gardened as a hobby.

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 2. Luke says:
 November 26, 2021 at 11:05 pm

 If you have any doubts, you can check the sources he cited.

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 3. Anonymouse says:
 November 27, 2021 at 11:58 pm

 What I wonder is if some of what is said about Spartan culture are actually embellishments from the Roman Tourist Trap period which made it look harder than it was.
 This was due to traditional Spartan culture having been abandoned by most actual residents, Cult of the Badass related reasons, and frankly because there was money to be made.

 There is a video by Invicta here -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u68_PsQF99E where he talks about Sparta during the Roman period. The example he goes with happens around 11:07 where he talks about an exercise called “The Whipping”, which commemorated Spartan youths beating Thracian barbarians.
 Originally 17 year old Agoge members would be armed with canes and defend the temple of Apollo against unarmed 16 year old Agoge members, who would steal cheese. The one who stole the most cheese would be the winner. Brutal yes, but maybe also fun. During the tourist trap days, youths would just get beaten and the one who remained conscious the longest was the winner.

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 1. Bullseye says:
 November 28, 2021 at 8:40 am

 The first version sounds like it would be more entertaining to watch than the second. Romans liked watching violence, sure, but gladiator fights were *fights*, not just one guy brutalizing another.

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 2. Roxana says:
 November 28, 2021 at 11:12 am

 The Spartan mirage dates back to the Spartans themselves but more particularly to the other Greeks who wrote about them and seem to have projected their own philosophical ideals onto them. Xenophon for example actually lived in Sparta but he also had a thesis to push. The state rearing of children was a particular buzzing bee in philosophical bonnets and I wonder just how much that influenced Xenophon and others. Xenophon projected a similar system onto the Persians of Cyrus’ time where it certainly did not exist.
 I don’t doubt the oppression of the helots or the ultimately self destructive rules of citizenship but I do wonder about the reality of the agoge.

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 2. pontifex maximus says:
 November 26, 2021 at 5:10 am

 I’d say the crux of the issue concerning Spartans is that the average Western male (in particular the average Western male in active military service) isn’t fawning over the Plains Indians or the Zulu.

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 1. Roxana says:
 November 26, 2021 at 10:34 am

 Both Zulu and Plains Indians have a definite mystique. The Spartans may be dominate at the moment because of the movies.

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 2. CatCube says:
 November 27, 2021 at 2:20 pm

 The primary attack helicopter in US Army service is named after the Apache tribe. It was a replacement for a stalled development program for an attack helicopter called the Cheyenne. A parallel development to the Apache, though with more utility duties, was the Kiowa. The upgrade to the Apache is called the Longbow. There’s a distinct theme here, is what I’m saying.

 There may be *more* mystique for the Spartans among servicemembers, but there amount of mystique for the Plains tribes isn’t “none.”

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 1. Arilou says:
 November 27, 2021 at 7:15 pm

 Yep, didnt one of the War Crimes committing units in Iraq/Afghanistan hand out custom tomahawks to their members? (and they used them too, including allegedly for scalping enemies)

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 2. Simon_Jester says:
 November 28, 2021 at 8:17 pm

 In US military culture, the Plains Indians are remembered as former (defeated) enemies. The US started naming attack helicopters after Native American tribes known for horse nomad warfare in the late 1960s. At that time, the wars in which the US Army fought and sought to destroy the Plains Indians were only just fading out of living memory; they were only slightly more remote from the Americans of that time than World War Two is from the present day.

 This doesn’t fully negate the points made about the Plains Indians having ‘mystique’ from the perspective of the US military, but it does provide an alternate source of that mystique. Militaries often romanticize a tough, exotic, and above all safely defeated enemy in one way or another. And some of the uses of references to Native Americans in US military language (e.g. “Injun country” for hostile territory) are institutional memories of a time when the US military was fighting a war of genocide against those same peoples.

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 3. Roxana says:
 November 26, 2021 at 10:32 am

 Frankly I’ve always found the Zulu system a little creepy.

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 4. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 26, 2021 at 1:41 pm

 “While it’s generally not at all hard to argue that a randomly-selected historical child-rearing practice was abusive, because most of them were”

 If your definition of abusive child raising includes most of the societies in which humans have raised children, I feel your definition of abusive may be a little broad.

 Having said that, I seem to recall that the Spartans ritually declared war on most or all of their own subjects every year. That always struck me as being a bad sign. It really does not sound normal at all.

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 1. Bret Devereaux says:
 November 26, 2021 at 2:10 pm

 Our sources – by which I mean other ancient Greek writers – are abundantly unanimous that Sparta was not a normal place. They merely differ as to if it was abnormal in negative or positive ways.

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 1. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 26, 2021 at 4:25 pm

 I feel that any government that routinely declares war on its own subjects is abnormal in at least one negative way. It’s bad enough to have to do it to some of them occasionally, let alone most of them every year…

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 2. George says:
 November 26, 2021 at 3:28 pm

 By the standards of modern society child rearing even in the 50’s would be considered abusive.
 Most cultures have at one point adhered to ‘spare the rod spoil the child’.

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 3. Finnish reader says:
 November 26, 2021 at 7:06 am

 I think that the classical book on the tipic would be Ferenc Molnar’s “The Paul Street Boys”. It describes, with intense sympathy, the life a group of school boys in Budapest. The ideas of nationalism and conscription give rise to a warrior ideal that is the main feature of the self-identity of the boys. This is, of course, about the Imperial Austria-Hungary, where militarism reached truly absurd levels, but the pathology is inherent in any system of universal conscription: when boys play war, they play with knowledge that they may be personally called to fight for real, and that later, even allowing for a permanent peace, they will train for a real war.

 In a system of universal conscription, like the one we have in Finland, you grow up knowing that after high school, you will serve, and for example, reaching the necessary level of physical condition is an important part of your life, and becoming a serviceman later is part of your identity. For example, when you attend the junior high school medical exam, you will be given a provisional service capability classification, and in physical education, you take the military PE tests regularly so as to know how well you can cope with the military service later.

 After service, you will hold a military rank for the rest of your life, and that rank has some impact on how your peers view you. And of course, you have a military position for some years or decades in the wartime mobilised force, and the nature of that position also affects your thinking and sense of personal dignity. Naturally, it is nothing as important as being a Hoplite was for a citizen of an Ancient Greek polis, but it does shape a culture in a not quite insignificant way.

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 1. DOS says:
 November 26, 2021 at 10:43 am

 You just brought up some memories. The US has a vestigial form of that; every male must sign up for Selected Service (emergency conscription/the draft) in order to have federal financial aid (all males are supposed to, but if one doesn’t, no school money). I cannot remember what brought it up (perhaps talking about our friend group) but conscription came up in a conversation with my wife (girlfriend then), and she was under the impression that we no longer have selective service. I told her: “Sure we do. I’m already in the pool. I had to for financial aid.” Her shocked face was endearing.

 I spent some time in a poorer country that practiced conscription of young men, and had some Swiss friends while there. A thought (perhaps melodramatic) went through my mind that if the US, for whatever cataclysmic reason, went to war with either nation and started conscription, I could end up fighting against friends.

 (Further clarification: one can get an exemption to the draft due to being a conscientious objector. Also, due to growing obesity in the US, some military leaders are worried about the shrinking pool of quality candidates in the event of a draft.)

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 1. Paul says:
 November 29, 2021 at 10:55 am

 Interesting. I was pretty proud even as the son of a liberal lefty family to go in and fill out my selective service paperwork. It seems like a bit of we are all in this together that we seem to be loosing now some 30+ years later.

 But on noticing that its tied to student aid… My son enjoyed telling his mates. Umm if you have not registered with selective service you are wasting your time staying for class on applying for federal student aid. He got same kind of reaction but we don’t have a draft.

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 2. Lien says:
 November 26, 2021 at 11:56 am

 Spoiler alert on the “Saint-Paul Street Boys” : it ends with not a very endearing situation to the poorest of them.
 As child reading it, I got enthralled by all the heroism and very well written drama, but it’s basically collective murder of the weakest that the book describes and indulges.

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 1. Finnish reader says:
 November 26, 2021 at 1:33 pm

 The finale of the book is, indeed, touching. The point is, in my opinion, not the mobbing. It is exactly the futility of the sacrifice that the little Nemecsek makes. After all, the whole quarrel and fighting over the playground is senseless: the empty lot is built over at the end of the book. The small boy, and all the boys on both sides the quarrel, fully buy into the militaristic spirit of the time, and feel compelled by their honour to do completely irrational things. Nemecsek leaves bed sick with pneumonia, fights and dies of his illness because of his loyalty to the warrior ideal, and all his friends.

 The book is not quite clear, in my mind, if this is admirable or horrible. In any case, it shows very well that you don’t need to go into exotic locales to find a population raised to a warrior ideal. Late 19th century Europe fits the picture.

 (Further clarification. In Finland, too, it is possible to be a conscientious objector, like in any democratic country. However, it carries a certain stigma. A good friend of mine decided to become a conscientious objector during the draft board, due to very serious moral concerns about the legitimacy of violence, and lost a lot of face in our high school due to it: “I am a conscientious objector, not a gay!” He started dating a girl steadily within a week to prove his heterosexuality.)

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 1. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 26, 2021 at 1:53 pm

 “The book is not quite clear, in my mind, if this is admirable or horrible.”

 Why can’t it be both? Loyalty may be a virtue, but it doesn’t follow that everything that stems from it is good.

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 2. Lien says:
 November 28, 2021 at 1:32 pm

 Well, I’ve not fully re-read it at adult age, and as a child I clearly also bought into the militaristic spirit of the book.
 So maybe you are right, the futility of the sacrifice is maybe the point of the book rather than its heroism…
 Since the book comes before the Brechtian way of putting out a book’s message, I’m not entirely convinced though.
 Also, the author seems to have been rabidly patriotic during WWI, from what I read on Wikipedia, so maybe the first-degree lecture I had as a child was not so far from the real meaning of the book ?

 But yes, your point about a militaristic ethos in recent european societies still holds. We’ve seen where it leads, though (and I believe that’s the point – now intentional – of Mother Courage and her Children).

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 4. Endymionologist says:
 November 28, 2021 at 8:28 pm

 I have at hand P. W. Singer’s Children At War (2006), which I read in its entirety when I first got it and haven’t been able to make myself fully reread since. Drawing parallels between the agoge and 21st-century treatment of child conscripts is no mere metaphor; our host is not simply grasping at a modern example to help explain something from the past, the Spartans engaged in deliberate abuse of children for exactly the reasons and often with exactly the same methods currently used in conflict zones all around the world to turn pre-teens into effective combatants. From Chapter 5, ‘Turning a Child into a Soldier’:
 “The killings are often carried out in a public manner, such that the home community knows that the child has killed, with the intent of closing off any return.”
 Sparta and other systems of child conscription are not simply a case of a ‘warrior ethos’ that got out of hand or an unforgiving wilderness survival program, these are deliberate redesigns of social structures around the perpetuation of massive parasitic murder-guilds. The emergence of fostering practices in some groups for infants born to present-day child conscripts even points to a plausible path whereby Spartan society could have naturally emerged from the simple reification of very successful bandit gang.

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 1. ad (@ad98832376) says:
 November 29, 2021 at 2:02 pm

 From Chapter 5, ‘Turning a Child into a Soldier’:
 “The killings are often carried out in a public manner, such that the home community knows that the child has killed, with the intent of closing off any return.”

 That seems a highly dubious analogy, given that the Spartans had no reason to use the agoge to split the children involved away from their home community. They WERE their children’s home community. If you want a parallel to the recruitment techniques of the Lords Resistance Army, you might be better off looking at the Janissaries.

 The Spartans were very much not into recruiting the children of other groups into the citizen body. Nor were most other city-states. I speculate this exclusiveness was precisely what made their empire so oppressive. Assimilation of the conquered was absolutely impossible, on any time scale.

 (Personally, the agoge always makes me think of those Jane Austen characters pulling strings to send their 12-year-old sons and brothers to the Sea and the Napoleonic Wars. Indeed, that is pretty much what happened to a couple of her own brothers.)

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 1. Endymionologist says:
 November 29, 2021 at 11:37 pm

 Again, it is *NOT* an analogy, dubious or otherwise. These are multiple institutions in different times and places using the same method–not simply forcing a child to kill, but forcing a child to *choose* to kill–so that the child will believe that they have crossed a line which cannot be uncrossed, and they can never have any human community going forward other than their unit. The larger passage the quote is taken from is not about severing ties between the child and their birth community, it is about *creating* a tie to the conscripting organization.
 That the Spartiates restricted their conscription pool to their own children is an interesting quirk, but it has no bearing on the question of whether the treatment of those children was abusive.
 I tried not to dwell on it because I find it horrific, but many present-day child conscripts do give birth; more sophisticated groups do place those infants with families and eventually return to conscript them as well. This system of being placed with a controlled family and then collected later is not ‘analogous’ to the Spartan system of child-rearing: because literally every task in the Spartan home was performed by an enslaved person, it is the same system.
 You’re frustratingly focused on the things discussed in chapter 4 of the book, “How Children Are Recruited into War”. You are indeed correct that Spartan recruitment techniques are different from, to pick one example, a Guatemalan government campaign to destroy native groups by abducting their children. But how is that relevant to kozmo’s questions about training programs?

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 2. Draugdur says:
 November 26, 2021 at 4:14 am

 Just to chip in to say, thank YOU for the amazing content, Bret!

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 1. kybernetikos says:
 November 26, 2021 at 4:34 am

 Yeah, the only other blog I read with similar anticipation is astralcodexten. He seems to have a good financial deal with substack (I don’t know the details, but it’s been alluded to). Has the pedant considered something similar?

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 3. ruknzdej says:
 November 26, 2021 at 5:20 am

 After reading your last spill about the conditions in academia, I was like, “yeah, I feel for ya man, know what you mean”. I’ve been through that too, I work in the academia as well. (Different discipline, different place, but still.) But then, I looked at your bio, read the post again, and then I added to myself, “well, except I ain’t a popular blogger like this guy [meaning you], and I sure am not as competent in my area as he is in his”. I dunno if this will cheer you up, mate, but keep up the good job.

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 4. Barry says:
 November 26, 2021 at 9:05 am

 Brett, thank you for giving us all the free goodies!

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 5. Mary says:
 November 26, 2021 at 10:15 am

 is a post on ‘what the heck do academic job titles mean?’ something worth writing?

 No. We couldn’t rely on it across space and time.

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 1. Henry Miller says:
 November 26, 2021 at 7:59 pm

 All the more reason to write it, preferably in a form that will survive. That way our future historians trying to make sense of our culture have something to compare with what they do. A lot of words have changed meanings over the years, which makes it hard to read historical sources (or even communicate across any distance in English) at times.

 One of the big problems with history is the sources we are most interested in today were often things so mundane nobody bothered to write them down because they were obvious. The Women’s works series Bret did is a perfect example: half the population was doing things that mostly were not recorded. (war and things the rich men did tends to be fairly well recorded, but the majority of things men did weren’t well recorded either – but still vastly better than what women did)

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 6. Roxana says:
 November 26, 2021 at 10:27 am

 Cat pictures always make me happy!

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 7. egoosu6591 says:
 November 26, 2021 at 11:19 am

 I’m a PhD student, and while I’m not on the job market quite yet, I definitely had the experience of teaching alone in my hastily-assembled home office. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts on academia and adjuncting. Best of luck to you in finding a home for your work, and on the job market!

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 8. gostsamo says:
 November 26, 2021 at 1:54 pm

 Many of your readers block google analytics as part of ad blocking. Consider a few dozen views across most of your posts from me.

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 9. S says:
 November 26, 2021 at 4:41 pm

 I am really glad your blog here continues to grow and generally work out. Working through your archive was very satisfying in 2020, and this year reading your new posts became a Friday fixture. Even got some friends interested despite the language barrier. Your posts are just very informative and entertaining at the same time. At least from the perspective of an amateur history enthusiasist in Germany, who says: Please keep at it!

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 10. 60guilders says:
 November 26, 2021 at 7:17 pm

 As a side note, after some reflection, when reading the article about whether or not to go into academia I was struck by some very uncomfortable parallels between Sparta and the agoge and graduate programs/academia.

 A. Nearly sadistic training programs
 B. Utter reliance on the goodwill of the people in charge of you in order to gain entry, and very few objective standards for either admission or dismissal
 C. A very limited overclass that seems bent on limiting itself even further, supported by scads of poorly-paid and mistreated peons
 D. An insistence on ideological conformity
 E. An utter unwillingness to accept that the world is changing, and that the practices of yesteryear will not serve now

 Of course, this comparison cannot be carried too far–entry to tenure-track, for example, does not require you to go out and kill an adjunct, and no one will go out and track down adjuncts who decide to leave academia–but the parallels are there.

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 11. ey81 says:
 November 27, 2021 at 8:19 am

 I’m not sure that academic titles can be explained without explaining the entire academic social system within which they are embedded. Relatedly, there are numerous titles for the various strata of “contingent” faculty, which vary somewhat from one institution to another.

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 12. Adam says:
 November 27, 2021 at 8:38 am

 Not directly related to anything in the thread, but there was a recent discovery of a 3rd-4th century mosiac in Roman Britain depicting a Trojan War scene. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/26/roman-britain-heritage-rutland-villa

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 1. Roxana says:
 November 28, 2021 at 11:00 am

 There’s no excuse for an image of miserable roman soldiers huddled in the rain. Archaeological remains make it quite clear that Britain was thoroughly romanized with all the amentities of roman civilization – except of course the sunny weather. Romano Britains sat out the rain in villas and passed the time with Cicero and Livy.

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 1. Bullseye says:
 November 28, 2021 at 11:16 am

 Being a soldier often means being outdoors when you’d rather not be. Some people in Roman civilization had fine houses and books, but not all of them. And even the rich had to go out in the rain if they were officers.

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 1. Roxana says:
 November 28, 2021 at 1:04 pm

 Well yes, but portraying all of Roman Britain at the same low level is a mistake.

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 13. asazernik says:
 November 28, 2021 at 9:26 am

 I would absolutely be interested in a quick blurb on the different forms of job titles for lecturers/professors/academics. I feel like there’s interesting history there, and attempts to outmaneuver the system from many different angles, that are quite opaque to someone seeing a snapshot of the system as it exists today.

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 1. ey81 says:
 November 28, 2021 at 3:21 pm

 Teaching assistants, lecturers, instructors, adjunct professors, visiting assistant professors, assistant professors, professors, visiting professors (probably more I left out): Bret probably understands more than if of these titles which, to my understanding, can mean different things at different institutions, or encompass very different situations at a single institution.

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 14. Sean M says:
 November 30, 2021 at 11:08 am

 Yes, that was central to the reinterpretation of ancient Sparta by a school based in the UK. They emphasize how many juicy stories about the Spartiates come from Plutarch around 100 CE, and that just because an ancient people said their social order had been established by a culture hero hundreds of years ago did not mean that was true. Without re-reading Dr. Devereaux’ post, I don’t think he fell into either of those errors.

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 15. itsabeast says:
 November 30, 2021 at 12:57 pm

 Is there a reason why 2008 was a turning point of badness in academia?

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 1. Bret Devereaux says:
 November 30, 2021 at 8:33 pm

 Start of the Great Recession. The more difficult, complex question is why academic hiring never recovered; I cover some of the problems that caused that here: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/why-state-universities-have-no-other-choice-but-to-reopen/615565/

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 1. itsabeast says:
 December 1, 2021 at 1:20 pm

 Thanks, and also for linking that article.

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 16. DeWitt says:
 November 30, 2021 at 2:37 pm

 Hello!

 I wanted a recommendation for a piece of literature, and didn’t know where else to ask. Because of that, I figured I might as well do so here.

 What book(s) would you recommend for someone who wants to learn about the migration period? Yes, I know that’s an extremely long amount of time. Yes, I know even the term migration period is a little dubious. Even so, I want to learn, and I’d like to have some resources to start out doing so.

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 1. Peter T says:
 December 1, 2021 at 4:26 am

 Peter Heather’s Empire and Barbarians (2010) is a very good start.

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 1. 60guilders says:
 December 1, 2021 at 1:48 pm

 Seconded. It’s quite comprehensive and very readable.

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 * Collections: On ChatGPT
 * Fireside Friday, February 10, 2023 (On Academic Freedom)
 * Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part III: That Númenórean Charge
 * Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part II: Falling Towers
 * Collections: The Nitpicks of Power, Part I: Exploding Forges
 * Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies

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 And by ‘normal’ I mean the ‘normal’ baseline post-2008 where every single year, had it occurred before 2008, would have been one of the worst years ever
 That is views as WordPress counts them, because I don’t have Google Analytics data back to the start of 2020. Generally Google Analytics is more thorough in ignoring bots and the like and so tends to produce view-counts about 10% or so lower than WordPress.
Fireside this week! I had hoped to have the next part of the fortification series done by now (its coming along), but between the ends of semester crunch, a few unexpected time-sensitive projects and it being the week of Thanksgiving, that will have to wait.
 Home Librarian Oliver helping me organize my books. 
For this week’s musing, Thanksgiving seemed an appropriate time to look back at the last couple of years o on ACOUP and express how thankful I am for this platform and all of you reading it. I started this project back in May, 2019 as an outlet for some of my thoughts. Of course I didn’t know then that at the end of that first summer of ACOUP we’d be starting the last ‘normal’ semester for quite a while, or that we were heading into the last normal academic job market until…well, the academic job market is still not back to normal. 1  Like many early career academics, I am currently what we call an ‘adjunct’ which is to say that I don’t have a permanent academic position (is a post on ‘what the heck do academic job titles mean?’ something worth writing?), but rather am stringing together short-term (single semester, single year) teaching jobs to stay ‘in the game’ while applying for more permanent positions. When COVID hit, academic hiring essentially froze solid and has only barely thawed so far; even lining up a normal teaching load was touch and go for a bit.
That of course meant there was suddenly a lot more uncertainty, both in getting enough semester-to-semester teaching to pay the bills and also to keep an active academic affiliation (the job market gets even harder if you have to do it as an ‘independent researcher’) and also in the long-term prospects of finding a permanent academic position (which remains an ongoing effort). Alongside that, in Spring 2020, of course, all teaching went remote and so I was stuck at home, lecturing into a laptop and a keyboard, isolated from students and colleagues both. The long, slow work of academic writing can be thankless and isolating even in the best of times, but COVID stole away some of the few positive feedback systems that do exist as our conferences went online and we all retreated from our offices to our hastily cobbled together home-zoom-offices.
Obviously this is not to say that I had the last two years particularly hard, compared to other folks. I didn’t end up unemployed, or in financial difficulties, or – most importantly – seriously ill. Many, many people have not been so fortunate. At the same time, even much smaller difficulties can be terribly demotivating and anxiety inducing.
In all of that, I cannot express how thankful I am that I had this space and all of you readers to help break that feeling of professional isolation and pointlessness. Having an outlet where I could see you all reading my writing, discussing it (both in the comments and off the site on social media) recommending it and so on always helped remind me that I wasn’t just shouting into the void, that the work I was producing had value and purpose. It provided a valuable backup supply of motivation to power through the setbacks and uncertainty. So thank you all for reading and thanks to my patrons especially for continuing to support this effort.
The world certainly seems a lot brighter this year than it did back in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down. We’re winding down the first semester taught in-person; I cannot tell you how glad I am to be teaching in person again and how much I missed it. In-person conferences are also slowly returning. And of course ACOUP continues to surprise me with its growing reach. If you will pardon my indulgence in some data: in 2020, ACOUP saw about 1.9m views 2 ; as I write this, ACOUP is at 2.5m views for 2021 with a month left to go. Academic hiring remains deeply uncertain, but thanks to your support, I have the resources to keep pushing at it and to keep writing, researching and teaching.
So thanks to you all and my good fortune (for the internet’s eyeball-economy is truly quite random) that brought you here.
On to Recommendations:
Over at Sententiae Antiquae – which, by the by, if you are even a little bit interested in Greek or Roman culture, you should be reading Sententiae Antiquae – I was struck by this short post by Lawrence Benn on two fragments by the Greek poets Archilochus and Hybrias both remarking on what they owed to their spears. With language that wouldn’t sound out of place in the verses of ‘Antarah Ibn Shaddad, I think the fragments underscore the central place that military participation had in how the Greeks understood the status of the free citizen landholder. Of course at the same time, they should also underscore how precarious that existence was, how wrapped up in regular violence. After all, the Greek hoplite himself was only ever one bad day – a lost battle, an encounter with bandits on the road – away from losing that spear and all of the other privileges it came with.
Meanwhile, I thought since I mentioned above how my current academic position is temporary, it might be a good time to draw attention to other contingent (another word for various kinds of fixed-term or adjunct positions) scholars working in the Classics. Over at the blog of the Society for Classical Studies, they’ve been running a series of interviews with contingent faculty members in the Classics (they’re up to six such interviews); check them out.
Meanwhile, over at Peopling the Past, they interviewed the folks over at Rhea Classical Reviews  about their project, which is an open access review journal which reviews work by non-tenured scholars (pre-tenure, non-tenure, contingent, grad students, alt-ac, independent researchers, etc.), with reviews also written by non-tenured scholars. As tenure sadly continues to break down, I think efforts like Rhea are becoming more important in highlighting that, in fact, important scholarship is being done by scholars not necessarily on the tenure-track. That’s especially urgent because as more and more interesting intellectual output moves outside of the traditional academic status-hierarchy, it is more and more important for scholars at all levels to be able to think and read outside of that hierarchy and to recognize and appreciate the contributions of emerging and non-traditional scholars. You can check out  Rhea itself here.
For this week’s book recommendation, since our fortifications series is about to move into the European Middle Ages, I am going to recommend Clifford Rogers,  Soldiers’ Lives Through History: The Middle Ages  (2007). The book is pricey, to be sure (so perhaps see if your local library has a copy), but it is a really valuable work as a foundation for understanding medieval European warfare. The book is well organized, broken down into the various elements of a medieval army and the various tasks they might perform. Importantly, compared to the other oft-recommended (and also very useful) text, J.F. Verbruggen’s  The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages  (1997), Rogers treats a much wider range of military activity (Verbruggen, in particular, is very focused on battles at the expense of both sieges and raiding warfare, which can give the wrong impression if one is not already aware that raids and sieges were much more common than battles for most of the Middle Ages). Rogers has explicit sections on private wars, raids, military extortion, and agricultural devastation, activities that didn’t necessarily result in large-scale battles but where nevertheless crucial in the warfare of the period.
The other great virtue of Rogers’ book for the relative beginner looking to get their feet firmly planted before moving on to reading about specific campaigns or delving into the specialist literature on particular aspects is that Rogers foregrounds the actual primary evidence through the book, with long quotations of accounts illustrating the principles he’s describing and frequent use of period artwork (particularly manuscript illustrations; one assumes the abundance of illustrations, even in black-and-white, is part of why the book is so darned expensive) to show how people at the time represented their forms of warfare. 
 And by ‘normal’ I mean the ‘normal’ baseline post-2008 where every single year, had it occurred before 2008, would have been one of the worst years ever   That is views as WordPress counts them, because I don’t have Google Analytics data back to the start of 2020. Generally Google Analytics is more thorough in ignoring bots and the like and so tends to produce view-counts about 10% or so lower than WordPress.
Fireside Friday: November 26, 2021
https://acoup.blog/2021/11/26/fireside-friday-november-26-2021/