Why You Acting So Hitlerish, Mang? (Be Caesar, Not Hitler) (Patreon)

You are a general. Your tasks are your worthy opponents. Divide and conquer them. Don’t bunch them up. Don’t do one while doing the other. Don’t tack one on along the way. Choose one. Fight one. Win. Then move on. Having angular features and the most superior Aryan blood in the universe won’t help you if your strategy is scheisse.

Reality doesn’t care about your ancestry. Reality treats everybody equally all the time, no exceptions. Society obviously doesn’t, but society is ultimately subject to reality, too. So if you must bend those knees, bend them at something worth bending to.

It is possible to beat two opponents at once — multiplexing is real — but one opponent should always be the focus and whatever else you get for free is like a bonus, not something you’re actually counting on, working on, focusing on, aiming at or even thinking about. Just a freebie.

Of course, upon returning from a successful (possibly genocidal...it’s in a bit of a moral grey area, and by “grey area” I mean a lot of Celts got murdered and enslaved) Caesar neglected to divide and conquer his [Roman] opponents, allowing them to amass and gang up on him. 

[Roman politics at the time was just a mess, so it’s hard to make bold statements, or even boil it down to a single lesson, but Julius made himself an easy target by visibly concentrating all that power in himself. He was smooth on the battlefield but clunky in the Senate chamber. 

What he needed to do was build alliances, not become an autocrat. If he had shared power with his allies and eschewed public honors, his opponents would have had no center to hit (again, essentially dividing and conquering his enemies by depriving them of any clear targets). To his credit, Caesar attempted to "share" power by opening the Senate to new kinds of folks ("provincials and professionals" -- Gauls, doctors, soldiers and such), but those attempts may have just been, and were certainly perceived as, a cynical ploy to add more "yes men" to the mix.

Just sayin’. The metaphor breaks down a bit if you overthink it, but there’s still something valuable there lol. 

And, for the record, I don’t think my pithy suggestions would have saved the Roman Republic: that knot was tied pretty tight. Politics is a profoundly stupid, futile game and the less time we all spend thinking, talking and/or worrying about it, the better. Ancient history can teach us that. Regular people like us waste precious time, air and brain cycles getting fired up about what's essentially a side-show. Which politician wins or loses literally will not change your life*; we act like it will; we think it will; they tell us it will; it won't.

To be intellectually fair: once a generation, it might. But never in the way, by the way, or for the reasons you're thinking. My point is: we're not governed by lawmakers, we're governed by socioeconomic forces, and the sooner we learn to work on and with those forces, to harness them, and stop wasting our time on the loud and empty distraction that is politics, the better. A bunch of mouthy tosspots in a room with ugly upholstery ain't runnin' your life. 

When an adult watches cartoons all day, we call them a deadbeat/pothead/TV critic. When an adult watches politics all day, we call them "well-informed"; this is the lie. And this is the truth: your happiness and success in life will be inversely proportional to how much you concern yourself with politics. Just ask Jon Stewart: few men in this world have done more to raise public consciousness, and benefited less. With his wry humor and winning smile, he lifted the spirits of a nation and the world every weekday for a decade and a half -- but the mere act of following all that political news all the time literally made him sick. In his own words: "Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing...I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don’t get turd lung disease." [Jon Stewart: why I quit The Daily Show | Media | The Guardian]]

Really, you want to be neither Caesar nor Hitler. But you definitely want to be more like Caesar than like Hitler. That sounds like a statement that goes without saying, but it’s not, for the simple reason that all of us tend to act a bit Hitlerish by starting multi-front, offensive “wars”. We get greedy, but hide our greed even from ourselves by couching it in diligence.

Overworking and overloading yourself is not diligence. It’s actually a sign of laziness and cowardice: overloading happens because we lack the courage to say “no” and the intellectual diligence to find the few things worth saying “yes” to. Elimination is your friend, but you’ve got to let her in for the friendship to work.