Fear and Loathing in Sparta

 

 

Just Some Rich Asshole Image by

Dejan Krivokapic from Pixabay

 

 

 

 

I wanted to do a companion piece to my review of The Bronze Lie because the book gave me a lot to think about but I felt it distracted from discussing Cole's work. Like I said in the review, part of Cole's objective was to break down the myth of Sparta to cut down on how modern day fascist movements use them around the world. This is an interesting political question because to me it says a lot about how the fears that were the heart of Spartan society lay at the heart of our own.

We have to be careful writing about Sparta because, as Cole mentions, we have no first hand account of what the Spartans thought of themselves. There are no Spartan historians, philosophers, poets -the most acclaimed Spartan poet was probably an Athenian - playwrights, basically, every avenue humans have used to express themselves over the entirety of our existent, Sparta leaves us nothing. Everything we know about Sparta comes from other people telling us about them, which means we're getting depictions from people who were contemporaries (Herodotus, Thuycidides, Xenophon) or people writing much, much later (Plutarch). All of these authors have their own agenda's in their depictions of the Spartans, so we have to phase everything we know about them through a filter of "What does this author get from depicting them in this way" and apply it to what we know about human behavior.

What's interesting is that this fuzziness makes the Spartans the most convenient historical analogue we have on hand. The lack of messy, contradictory details means we can project onto them whatever traits we find most desirable. Whatever we're afraid our own culture doesn't have, we can say the Spartans did, because who is around to argue otherwise? Cole rightly calls out the anxiety at the root of this behavior, ascribing to ancient civilizations what we are most of lacking in our own. Still, projections only work if there's something solid behind them which, in my opinion, that something is the fear.

If you're wondering what the Spartans were so afraid of, that's easy enough to answer: it was their slaves. As I pointed out in my review, the helots - Sparta's slave class - made up 90% of Sparta's population. And if that number makes  you question how such a small Spartan minority maintained control over such a massive slave population the answer is simple: murder. Lots and lots of state sanctioned murder. How it would work is that the ephors - a five-member executive council that partly governed Sparta - would declare war on the helots, allowing any Spartan citizen to kill helots at any time without fear of legal or religious sanction. Just to repeat that so there's no misunderstanding, every year, the Spartan government declared war on its own slave class so its citizens could murder said slaves at will with no repercussions.

Another method of control the Spartans employed was the krypteia, the final part of the Spartan agoge where the boys would go out in the fields, hiding during the day, then fan out at night, killing whatever helots they found or ones they had spied on and thought could cause the most trouble. 

Keep in mind, this is usually the fate of helot men. For the helot women, they got to live with the constant wondering if their family members would come home at night, and, of course, rape. We know the scale of this because the Spartans had an entire social class of the offspring of Spartan men and helot women. Called either the nothoi (it translates to 'bastards') or mothax, the men were sometimes sponsored into the agoge by wealthy Spartan families and fought with their masters in the hoplite phalanxes alongside their masters. But again, I feel the need to repeat this because the sheer scale of this problem almost boggles the mind so, one more, with feeling: Spartan men raped their women slaves so much they created a distinct social class as a result.

This then, is Spartan life. A life of leisure built on top of an unrelenting campaign of murder, rape, and terror. But like I said, these campaigns are built to make the helots more afraid of the Spartans than the Spartans were of their slaves. The Spartans lived in constant fear of their helots turning on them, to the point that the first thing the Spartan did after a devastating earthquake in 464 BC was to mobilize the army to quell a helot rebellion. This turned out to be a prescient move, because revolt the helots did.

We tend to limit our understanding of slavery to the concept of one human being owning another, then leave it at that. We don't think about all the cultural justifications that get built up to justify the practice. This usually means our thinking tends to drift into thinking of slaves as accepting of their condition or at the very least attuned to their station. Things get much messier if you consider that slaves apparent complacency was bought by the constant threat (and practice) of murder they lived under.

I feel that I cannot emphasize enough that the Spartans engaged in these barbaric practices because they were utterly terrified of their slaves revolting against them. They would have been keen to avoid any sign of weakness lest they give their slaves the idea that they could be over thrown. This then serves as a good example as to why the brutality of slave societies exists, it reflects the terror the masters live in the shadow of two simple facts: 1. there are far more slaves around then there are masters, and 2. should the slaves recognize this, you can't kill them all.

Slavery is the easy thing to beat the Spartans up about, though. We shouldn't forget that the other thing we should scorn them for is that they, as a culture, seemed dedicated to learning nothing. The bulk of Spartan military history runs from the first Messenian War which started in 743 BC to the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, a period of just under 400 years. Throughout that time, which Cole documents repeatedly, the Spartans are beset by the same tactical and strategic errors, seemingly never implementing any of the lessons their defeats should have taught them. So think that through, almost 400 years of constant fighting and the Spartan army shows no signs of adaptation, improvement, or flexibility over the centuries. There are some individual moments, like one battle where the Spartan general does a valiant job trying to break into the fort his army is seizing. That he doesn't succeed is because the defenders have more options to make their defense last than he has to attack, but, this is the one notable exception and we never see a repeat of this behavior. 

What should we make then, of a society so committed to ignorance that it would rather lose the same battles in the same way over and over again than adapt to its circumstances? On a side note, this is yet another reason why we should discard the idea that the agoge was a military academy - if you don't train your soldiers in the tactics of the battles they're going to be fighting, your goal isn't to train soldiers. If we wanted to emulate the Spartans than Cole's project wouldn't exist, mainly because it involved actual work but also because the bedrock on which the project rests is questioning what we've been taught and testing it against the evidence to see if the story holds up.

The last thing I want to touch on is that what Spartan society shows us is the danger of a society under elite capture. Practically every bit of work done in Sparta - the farming, weaving, smithing, weapon making, every bit of it was done to support the idle Spartiates who remember, literally did no work at all. This funneling of every possible resource into the minority concentration of Spartan hands left Spartan society hollowed out - it had no commerce, no trade, nothing to economically support itself. So when Sparta's power over their slaves broke, there was nothing for them to fall back on save their own image. To be fair, they've successfully sold that image for over a thousand years to every Western culture that's followed them. Still, I think that if all you have to trade in a society is a mirage of its heavily  disputed glory, it's safe to call that society a failure on multiple levels.

Cole has a lot of compassion for the Spartans, a feeling I do not share. The worst thing, in my opinion, about every slaver is that they have but one life to give in return for the thousands they destroy. No matter the personal struggles and triumphs of the individual Spartans, that their lives depended on the misery of literally hundreds of thousands of people makes those personal problems irrelevant in my eyes. On top of all that, the vampiric relationship the Spartiates had with the rest of society left the society powerless to adapt long-term to any of its problems which left Sparta as little more than antiquity's version of Branson, Missouri.

Cole is right though that we should avoid casting the Spartans as monsters. History isn't a morality play for later generations to sift through for heroes and villains to venerate or scorn as we see fit. Everything the Spartans struggled with are things we struggle with now, with much of the same dynamics at play. You can't tell me there are so many industries going on strike because workers are getting fair treatment from their employers. Or that the shortages we're experiencing because of the monopoly consolidation in the shipping industry has made our societies more resistant to systemic shocks.

The problems of oppression and exploitation aren't unique to Sparta. These problems exist in every political, economic, and social system we've ever invented. We need to recognize that the Spartans are all too human, that their failures are our own, failures that we've repeated for thousands of years before and since. Most importantly, we need to recognize the Spartans as human because if nothing else, we need to recognize ourselves in their actions so that, if nothing else, we can resolve to do better than those assholes ever did. 

The Bronze Lie Review

 

Aside from the Romans, there is no ancient culture more lionized than the Greek city of Sparta. The Spartans enjoy the almost unassailable cultural image of badass, ultimate warriors, men who carved themselves out of the brutality of the world into invincible armies who steamrolled all who stood before them. Even when they lose, like the near legendary battle of Thermopylae, they win because they die heroically defending freedom from evil, tyrannical dictators. It's such an intrinsic part of Western culture that French historian Francois Ollier coined the term "The Spartan Mirage" to describe the near rapturous acclaim the ancient civilization enjoyed then and now.

Which makes Myke Cole's book The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy so incredibly refreshing. Cole looks to achieve two things with his work, present an unbiased overview of Spartan military performance, then use the result of that analysis to punch as many holes as he can in the fetishized myth of who the Spartans were. And, for the most part, Cole is successful in this, walking his readers through every battle the Spartans participated in, from the Archaic era when Sparta is enslaving their neighbors, to the final desperate attempts at relevance before settling into their fate as a tourist trap for the ancient Romans. 

As Cole points out, the Spartans legacy rests on their reputation for being a society of professional soldiers who abhorred wealth, lived in a firmly egalitarian society, and defended their fellow man from tyrants both foreign and domestic. Cole abolishes each of these pillars as he goes, showing us a Sparta that often had to be dragged into fighting, who installed oligarchs and tyrants whenever they had the chance to, who won the Peloponnesian Wars on the back of Persian gold. Also, for a people who hated wealth more than anything, the amount of Spartan generals and kings who flee the city after taking bribes from their enemies becomes something of a running joke as the book continues.

The book is incredibly easy and accessible to read. Part of this comes from Cole's experience as a veteran and his personal testimonies from participating in reenactments using the same gear the hoplites themselves used.  His ability to guide the reader through the momentum of a battle, breakdown the tactical and strategic goals of not only the Spartans but the people they fought against gives the reader a clear sense of cause-and-effect out of the chaotic mess of human decisions on the battlefield. Cole's most helpful tool in this is his self-coined Law of Competence, which holds that everyone involved in these battles knew what they were doing, which allows us to discard anything in the ancient sources that depends on the people involved being complete morons. There's a tendency to take ancient sources at their word, completely at face value. We forget that people have always been people, every writer has an agenda and crafts their work to fulfill it. So it's nice to see Cole call bullshit when necessary and present what he is always clear is his own best, and personal, interpretation of the battle and the participants motives.

All throughout, Cole is constantly checking the presentation of the Spartans against their actions, calling them out and giving praise as the situation requires. Which makes the one exception to this stand out all the more. Part of the Spartan myth is that they were raised to be the ultimate warriors through the agoge - basically the school system for Spartan citizens. Cole largely goes along with the interpretation of the agoge as a early military academy except, his own analysis should lead him to question this. The boys in the agoge were separated from their families at the age of seven, were intentionally under fed and sleep deprived, and then encouraged to steal food to make up for the shortfall in their rations. Cole says that the idea of this is supposedly to make the Spartans learn to be stealthy and be fleet of foot around their enemies and that the regular beatings and trauma of going through the program would engender a shared sense of hardship which would solidify unit cohesiveness when battle came. Except, as Cole has regular reason to say, the Spartans almost never scout their enemies or the battlefield ahead of time, and their famed sense of cohesion is much more "touch and go" then everyone has been led to believe.

So if the agoge is a training academy, it abysmally fails to impart the lessons of stealth or unit cohesion and should be rightly brought low for doing so. More than likely though, the agoge was never meant to be a military academy, but a tool to beat adherence to Sparta's social structure into the younger generation. The shared sense of trauma may not have created military cohesion, but it probably did ensure the arch conservative streak that Sparta was famous for continued, even has Sparta itself faded into irrelevance.

Overall, what we see unfold in Cole's pages is a Sparta that did have an advantage in the straight ahead phalanx to phalanx battle that was standard in Greece at the time, but Cole is always insistent pointing out that this advantage came from the Spartans being the tiny aristocratic minority that sat at the top of a pyramid of slavery and oppression. That the Spartans trained at all is what separated them from the other Greek polis' totally amateur armies, but it wasn't regimented training run by the government, it was just aristocratic dandies filling up their free-time. What we also see is that this is also the only area Sparta had any advantage or really even competence in. As mentioned, Sparta almost never engaged in scouting or reconnaissance work before their battles, they are absolutely god-awful at sieges -seriously, the amount of times the Spartans are stopped dead in their tracks by their enemy moving behind a wall is hysterical. 

What especially helps is that Cole doesn't treat this like the Spartans are a sports team. While he does helpfully keep a running tally of their wins, losses, and draws, Cole understands that the numbers aren't the story. Thermopylae for example is one of the most decisive defeats in world history, yet it's the Spartans most celebrated battle. The story is that the Spartans knew the battle was hopeless but went any way, sacrificing themselves to save Greece from the tides of the Persian horde. None of that is true, as Cole lays out. Why send for reinforcements, for example, if the point is to die anyway? The battle of Thermopylae was meant to be the holding point, the best place they could use to neutralize the Persians massive numerical advantage. The Greeks amassed an army of 7,00 men to do this, then got flattened like pancakes in three days. Turning the battle into an intentionally doomed crusade was a propaganda story invented on the fly to keep the Greek morale from collapsing.

And yet, not all defeats are created equal. In a different context, like the Battle of Leuctra which saw the Sacred Band of Thebes completely annihilate the Spartan military and permanently crippled Sparta to the point where their power essentially disintegrated. What Cole does is put each battle in the context of the war the Spartans were fighting along with how they fit into the broader mythology we crafted for them over the millennia.

The picture that emerges of Sparta is a society of aristocrats who were terrified of the slaves who made up 90% of their society. Which, is fair, considering the multiple slave uprisings Sparta would then have to spend years putting down. Over and over, we see Sparta sending out token participation forces, sometimes even only they've been threatened by their allies, offering up one excuse after the other. Cole argues, persuasively, that what lay behind Sparta's refusal to innovate is that they had to constantly keep their defenses turned inward, lest their slaves finally get a chance to make good on their desire to "eat their masters raw." Furthermore, because Sparta was so stingy with who was a citizen, the number of full citizen Spartans continued to dwindle, making the Spartans hold on power more tenuous, more fragile, to the point where they couldn't afford to take any chances with new endeavors because they couldn't risk losing any of their dwindling numbers.

In the end, the effect of all this is that we see the Spartans as just another society. They have their own goals, their own flaws, they have every thing we have, just in a different flavor. Cole says at one point that all he's shown us is people, not evil people but, I have to take a small issue with that. I don't believe you can be part of society that depends on so much slavery and exploitation without being a little evil because of it. But then, what society hasn't been based off the exploitation of the many for the benefit of the few? That the Spartans were so excessive about this just makes them different by degrees, not kind. Never mind the fact that we can only have these philosophical discussions when we know the details, when we see different cultures and societies not as some strange alien invention, but as an extension of ourselves. Thanks to Cole's work, I believe we can finally move our discussions of the Spartans out of the hazy mirage of godhood we've cloaked them in into the solid, messy world of humanity where they belong.

It's About More Than Being Nice

 I realize that I have the tendency to get too worked up about things. I know it's not sensible for me to get mad at articles like these which compare the fall of the Roman Republic to the United States, especially when they're three years old. But the ideas presented here aren't limited to this article alone, so it's worth spending some time examining why they fall short and why we shouldn't be so eager to map the past completely unto our present, no matter how tempting it looks.

Part of why we should be careful about people telling us how well we mirror the past is that the story is never really about the past, it's always, with no exceptions, about the  problems of our present. So it is with this article from the Smithsonian, which tells us, in all its studied breathlessness, that what doomed the Roman Republic was the instability brought about from violent rhetoric and the disruption of political norms. The article quotes from historian Edward Watts then new book, who says that Rome teaches "its modern descendants the incredible dangers that come along with condoning political obstruction and courting political violence... Roman history could not more clearly show that, when citizens look away as their leaders engage in these corrosive behaviors, their republic is in mortal danger.” 

We'll come back to this idea of how the idea of a passive Roman citizenry is, but we need to sidetrack a little bit to call out the dangers of projecting our own image backward. The article quotes a 2005 book written by historian Cullen Murphy, who takes a more direct approach in comparing Rome and the United States. His argument is that Rome, after defeating Carthage in the Second Punic War, was in the same situation we found ourselves in after the end of World War II. Murphy says that we, like the Romans, found ourselves with "the world on our shoulders; and the implications of that responsibility have skewed things in every part of our society and economy, and put our old political (and other) structures under enormous strain." This wildly conflates the self-dealing fairy tales we've told ourselves in the post-war era with what the Romans got up to once they were the unrivaled power of their time. When Rome looked out at the world, they saw an opportunity for riches and wealth beyond anything they'd ever dreamed of, so they took it. 

It's hard to put into words the scale of plundering the Romans did, but suffice to say when they showed up to your neck of the woods, they were leaving with everything valuable they could find. Gold, silver, fancy furniture, and, most especially, people. The Romans saw the world as their spoils and wasted no time taking whatever they could from who ever they wanted.

What's worse is that the article engages in some of the sloppiest history work I've ever seen. The author, Jason Daley, calls out how Rome's hegemony led to social upheavals like the introduction of secret ballots - which Daley argues led to politicians developing political brands to appeal to the masses - and Rome's move away from civilian conscription armies loyal to Rome to semi-private ones who were dependent on their generals for their pay. These conditions, Daley says, led to a political situation where "whipping up the resentments of the lower classes and threatening political enemies with semi-private armies became the norm."

 Where the sloppy history work comes in is that Daley argues that these trends converged with the political career of Tiberius Gracchus in 134 B.C.The issue here is that the professionalization of Rome's armies, when the land owning requirement to be in the army was dropped, wouldn't happen until Gaius Marius became Counsel in 104 B.C., almost thirty years after Tiberius Gracchus died. Daley is right, sort of, that the flashpoint around Tiberius' actions as Tribune of the Plebs was the land reform bill, but Daley leaves out so much context that it's almost impossible to understand why it was such a big deal in the first place.

To start us off, we need a better understanding of how Roman society, specifically its armies, functioned. Rather than having a professional, standing army under the direct management of the state, the Roman army was drawn from levies of land owning citizens (they would also take conscripts from the other ethnic Italian communities, which Rome had, for the most part, already conquered). Each citizen would be responsible for providing their own weapons and armor, while the state would provide the food and other logistical support. Military service was required for Romans looking to get elected to the Senate or hold any sort of public office which, to the Romans, was incredibly important in their families prestige. This method of warfare worked really well when Rome fought traditional seasonal campaigns, but started to fall apart in the wake of the three Punic Wars.

The big reason why was there was no leave in the Roman army. Meaning, once you got called off to war, you stayed at war, no matter how long it took to finish. Men who left on campaign would leave their farms in the hands of their wives and children which works well enough if you're gone for a few months. But when these wars started lasting for years at a time, it wasn't uncommon for these farms to fall fallow, forcing the families to sell it off to other, richer families. Once all the wars were over, the soldiers who fought them came back to find their families destitute and homeless, their homes part of massive private estates called latifundium.

You may take this moment to ask yourself why couldn't these men couldn't just work their old land under its new owners and the answer to that is well, slaves. The rich who bought up all these failing farms staffed them with the slaves the soldiers brought back with them from their campaigns. So it's in this Rome, filled with conquering heroes with no roofs above their head, that Tiberius Gracchus introduces his land reform bill.

Officially known as the Lex Sempronia Agraria, Tiberius' land reform bill would parcel out land owned by the Roman state to the homeless and the poor so they could be self-sufficient. This bill sought to solve two problems, the first, obviously, was reducing the amount of homeless citizens. It's generally not a good idea to leave men who have spent years fighting for the state with nothing to do but get angry about all the things they no longer have because of the years they spent fighting. The second was that reducing the amount of land-owning citizens directly impacts Rome's ability to create an army. If the only eligible people to fight are landowners and you allow the amount of landowners to significantly decrease, then what you're doing is drastically reducing your martial capacity which, for a Republic suddenly needing to control exponentially more territory than it did before, is a recipe for disaster.

But the Senate did not like Tiberius' plan. Roman politics worked on elaborate client systems, run largely on personal reputations, family ties, and favors. If Tiberius' bill went through, he would have thousands of supporters dependent on his patronage who could be relied on to back his political agenda. Obviously, this could not be allowed. So the Senate did everything it could to stop him. Daley makes a big deal over Tiberius not asking for the Senate's permission to introduce his bill but the thing is, he didn't have to. As Tribune of the Plebs, he could introduce legislation in either the Senate or the Plebeian Assembly whenever he wanted to. It's true the Tribunes usually gave the Senate the heads up, but, given the open hostility to his bill in the Senate, Tiberius did the smart thing and just introduced it on his own terms.

Which brings us to the incident with Marcus Octavius. Octavius was the other Tribune of the Plebs, who the Senate paid to ensure that Tiberius' bill could not pass. So even though Tiberius had the votes, Octavius vetoed the bill. The most common story about what happened next is that Tiberius called for a vote to remove Octavius from office. When people voted to do so, he simply vetoed them as was is power as Tribune. When he wouldn't yield, Tiberius had Octavius physically removed from the Assembly, so the land reform bill could be introduced and passed 1without interference. Now, Tribune's in ancient Rome were sacrosanct, it was literally against the law to touch them. Tiberius went too far when he did this and his supporters got cold feet, so he resorted to basically shutting down the city by refusing to participate in any of his official duties until his bill was passed by the Assembly and the Senate.

Even then, this isn't what got him killed. When the Senate passed the bill, they gave the bare minimum of funds to the commission that was to split up the land so it couldn't function. What ended being the end of Tiberius was the death of King Attalus, ruler of the Greek kingdom of Pergamum. Attalus died without any heirs, so he left the entirety of his fortune, and the kingdom itself, to Rome. Seizing the opportunity to fund his commission, Tiberius claimed control of the money on the grounds that he was the representative of the people it was left to. Naturally, this pissed the Senate off something awful, since foreign affairs were exclusively their domain. In frustration, the Senate began spreading rumors around that Tiberius was out to make himself king. The tension around these rumors built to such a pitch that they are what ultimately led to Tiberius, along with 300 of his supporters,  getting beaten to death in public by his political opponents.

Yet, you would never know those were the stakes just by reading Daley's article. He sweeps every bit of this under the rug, reducing it to "Tiberius went outside political procedures, which is just the worst thing he could do, then some other stuff happened and then he died."

To top off this ridiculous argument, Daley returns again to Watts, who he quotes with the following: "People who are politically engaged are not killing each other and they’re not threatening to kill each other. When they disagree with each other they use political means that were created by the republic for dealing with political conflict." The absurdity of this statement is almost mind-boggling. To classify the Roman citizens who beat an elected official to death at the behest of the political institution in Rome as not politically engaged is the kind of tap dancing routine you don't see outside of Fred Astaire movies. The whole point of all this violence was, and would remain, so the Senate could protect its privilege and powers in the wake of ever increasing demands from the citizenry below that they, too, be included in the benefits of Rome's burgeoning empire.

Harsh language didn't kill the Roman Republic. If anything, the zero-sum nature of Roman politics mixed with powerful interests refusal to compromise on anything that would infringe on their position led to a situation where the only possible way to enforce anything was through violence. The breaking of political norms are superficial, polite things to be upset about but, in Rome and currently, they are merely symptoms of much greater, much more threatening fractures in the political system. If you want to avoid the really bad stuff, like the civil wars that would plague Rome for close to 50 years, you have to deal with the underlying power imbalances that drive political systems to become so irrevocably broken.

There's a reason Daley leaves out all this context. Without it, he can reshape the complicated political situation of the late Roman Republic, which then allows him to recast the political stakes into whatever he wants them to be. This ultimately allows him to focus on the most meaningless aspect of the end of the Roman republic, that people stopped caring about the rules. No where does he stop to consider that there are bigger problems in society than whether politicians play nice with each other. Flouting norms without consequence is important because it tells you that people believe they are no longer obligated to follow them. The thing is though, and I can't stress this enough, the reasons why people don't feel that obligation are more important than the rules themselves. Trying to game out whether Tiberius is more responsible than the Senate for fracturing political norms misses the point that both of them felt they had the power to do so. 

Like I said, I know I get too worked about things. Especially bad takes on history and what they tell us about the present. At the same time, how we view the past, and what went wrong in it, can't help but shape how we view what the problems of our world even are. If the best we can do is say that we should all be nice to each other and let everyone speak, we're doomed. If we can't learn enough about the past to question the important things in our society like who has power, what are they using it for, and how are they keeping it, then we'll just be stuck in these useless cycles until the world collapses around us while we're all standing around looking stupid with or mouths hanging open, wondering how any of this could have ever happened.

 

The Empty Promise of Bitcoin

News that Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin sent the virtual currency to an all-time high of $48,000 (it's since climbed to $52,000). This has sparked, again, discussion/enthusiasm about bitcoin's future as a viable currency or further widespread adoption. So this as good a time as any to point out that bitcoin will never be anything its faithful hope it will be. 

What is bitcoin

To understand why bitcoin will never work, we'll need to understand what it is. 

Bitcoin is a virtual cryptocurrency generated by its user base solving harder and harder cryptography equations. Its design and function was laid out in a 2008 white paper by someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto. 

The purpose of bitcoin was to create a currency that didn't have any state or central bank behind it. Only its users could create the currency and only they could ensure the coins validity. The idea behind this is to prevent the central authority from debasing the currency through inflation or issuing debt to print money. 

To protect against fraud, the system relies on something called a blockchain to record and verify payments. The blockchain is a public ledger filled with every transaction of every bitcoin, allowing its users to theoretically go back and track the entire history of the bitcoin they're being paid with. 

Because there's no central authority backing the validity of bitcoins, the users themselves have to perform these checks for each transaction. To do this, users are assigned a digital wallet they then create a password for. To buy something, the buyer submits a bitcoin- or whatever percentage of the coin they're using- from their wallet, then the coin is assigned a hash, which is like a digital signature. From there, another user, or network of users if they want to authenticate multiple transactions, verify the hash isn't being used for multiple purchases, does all the math, with the end result being the transaction is added to the blockchain, and life goes on. 

It's a ridiculously labor and energy intensive process, with Bitcoin mining using more electricity than Ireland.

Who Needs Trust?

If you wanted a simple reason why bitcoin is doomed to fail, it's that there's no trust in the system. 

The white paper closes celebrating that it laid out the best case for creating a currency that operates without trust. Bitcoin's barkers point to the blockchain as the ultimate solution to this problem- you don't need trust in a system of relentless verification. 

This sounds like a huge, game changing feature- except all it does is make everything more complicated for no benefit whatsoever. 

Imagine going to the grocery store and having to wait in line as the teller calls up every individual customer's bank to verify their account information, their available balance, only hanging up once they confirmed the transfer from your account to the store's was complete. 

Then imagine them doing this all over again once the next person in line stepped up. Then multiply this process for every single transaction at every store in every city of the country. Think about all the things you buy in a day and try, just try, to imagine all the time you'd lose if you not only had to go through this process every single time but also wait for everyone around you to go through it, too.

What people miss the most about money is that it is a social tool. The whole point of it is to facilitate moving resources from one place to another which, at some point, you're going to need trust to move the process along. 

You can see this process in the evolution of paper currencies. During the reign of Kublai Khan, the Yuan imperial government would send out papers marked with the amount of coins they owed to the merchants they bought supplies from. The promise was the merchants could come to the capitol and exchange the paper for coins whenever they wanted. Since trading the papers was as good as trading coin, eventually those pieces of paper became a form of currency in their own right. 

Something similar happened in Europe, too. Between the 14th and 18th centuries, these things called bills of exchange were used to facilitate trade among the different European countries. How they would work is a bank in Italy would issue a letter to one of their depositors so they could exchange it at another bank in Spain, where they could take the letter and exchange it for cash. 

Merchants could also use their bills as payment if they didn't have cash on hand. They would sign the document over, then the new owner could take it to the bank to get paid. Hell, people could even sell the bills themselves if they wanted to get some quick cash in their pockets.  

In London, banks would issue their own paper currencies to their depositors as a representation of the gold they had in their account. Eventually depositors asked for banknotes of smaller denominations so they could use for more everyday purchases. If anyone wanted coins instead of paper, all anyone had to do was just take the note to the bank who issued it and redeem it. And that was it- just trade a piece of paper for gold, no questions asked. 

The point is that for money to work, you need people to trust that what you're giving them is worth what you say it is. You need people to believe that when you hand them a piece of paper that says it is worth x amount of value, they can take that paper anywhere to trade on its stated value. 

Because bitcoin cuts out that trust, it's essentially crippled. It can't process payments at any rate that's sustainable- it can handle 3-4 transactions per second, compared to the 1,667 Visa manages- which leads to embarrassing situations like a cryptocurrency conference refusing to accept bitcoin payments because they take too long to process. 

Money is a vehicle for social cohesion and trust, bitcoin buries its users in isolation and suspicion. You can't have anything like FDIC insurance under bitcoin so if you lose the password to your wallet or someone steals your coins, you can't be reimbursed. Any coins that you got in recompense would have to come at the expense of someone else. Bitcoin at its peak is a zero-sum game, which, yeah, see how long that lasts. Or, see what happens when inevitable economic shock comes and whatever value people have is gone forever. 

Removing the social aspect of money from bitcoin's design has created a currency that demands total faith from its users but offers no protections to them when things go wrong. No matter the myriad other reasons, this choice will forever doom bitcoin from achieving anything its believers hope it will 

The Myriad Other Reasons

Bitcoin is hardcoded to have a limit of available coins. Once 21 million coins have been minted, the system stops producing them. There a few problems that arise from this, the biggest being that bitcoin is suicidally deflationary. 

Put simply, deflation happens when the value of your goods is higher than the value of your currency. So if you have $1 billion worth of goods to sell, but only $100 million in currency to buy those goods with, you've got deflation. The easiest way of solving this problem- just print more money- is unavailable because the currency is tied to a finite resource like gold. 

Since printing money isn't an option, the only thing to do is wait for prices to fall until they're in line with the available money supply. This process can take years as people have to absorb the losses they take while they're cutting prices and wages to match what people have in buying power. 

Why this is relevant to bitcoin is that it is nowhere near big enough to support a national, let alone global, economy. At $48,000, the total value of every possible bitcoin would come in at just over $900 billion dollars. That sounds impressive until you realize that the GDP- the measure of the goods and services produced in the economy- of the United States is $21 trillion. The crunch from the value of goods falling to match the value of bitcoin would trigger a depression so severe in length and scale the only viable way to end it would be to ditch the currency entirely, just like when countries abandoned the gold standard to escape the Great Depression.

The second, albeit not as catastrophic, problem is that one of the incentives for people to use so many resources to verify payments and add them to the blockchain is that they get a bitcoin as a reward. The groups who do this also charge transaction fees, but the coin is obviously the main draw here. 

As you can probably see, if no more coins are being minted, than the only incentive these groups will have to expend all those resources is more costly transaction fees. Plus, the more transactions lined up to get verified, the more difficult the equations get, which means more power, which makes it more expensive to solve, meaning for every single transaction you're not only using up bitcoins to pay for goods but also you're paying more and more for the time and energy needed just for the privilege of buying something. 

Aside from the electricity waste, there's literally nothing bitcoin does better than anything it intends to replace. Because your bitcoin wallet is tied directly to your I.P. address, cash is better for anonymous, untraceable payments which is why there's a concerted effort to reduce the amount of available cash going on right now. The efforts have failed miserably so far but the goal is clear: governments want the ability to track every purchase its citizens make and a blockchain is the perfect tool for that project. 

It barely even holds up an investment tool. Bitcoin's real value is the same as any other commodity: you get to exchange it for dollars. That's why it's not a big deal that some companies allow bitcoin payments, all they're doing is accepting to go through a longer, more complicated process to exchange your assets into real money. All the excitement around bitcoin is based on its dollar value. 

Sure it's on a bit of a tear now but we've been down this road before, too. The price will climb, media attention will draw new users excited to get in on the game but then the reality that you can't do much of anything with your new toy sets in and then the price can drop 20-30% in a single day. 

That's obviously not a very stable investment situation, which means more people cash out at a loss, the more the price drops because people lose confidence in bitcoin's value. Eventually, the price stabilizes again because the user base self-selects for true believers who keep insisting bitcoin is worth something which, slowly but surely, drives the price back up until the cycle repeats. 

Ironically, all these failures are why bitcoin won't be going anywhere any time soon. As an object of faith, the more bitcoin fails, the stronger people will cling to their belief. All bitcoin has is the faith of its users which means as long as they have that faith, this wannabe currency isn't going anywhere. 

Is There Any Way To Make It Work?

No. 

Bitcoin is explicitly designed to be harder to use the more people try to use it. The whole point of its payment system is that it grinds to a halt the moment transaction volume picks up. 

You can't change anything about bitcoin to make it more workable because bitcoin, at its core, is an ideological argument. Changing how bitcoin works means admitting the ideology that created it was wrong. Which no one will admit, because ideas aren't products, they don't get recalled if they're defective. 

Nothing Fails Like Success

In 218 BCE, Hannibal Barca marched his army in Spain over the Alps into Italy, launching what's now known as the Second Punic War into full gear. For the next two years, he would humiliate one Roman army after another which culminated with the Battle of Cannae in 216 BCE.

If you've ever watched any show covering battles of the ancient world on the History Channel or YouTube, you've probably heard of this battle. It's famous for Hannibal's Carthaginian army pulling off a double envelopment- basically, Hannibal's army was able to completely surround the Roman army. Out of 86,000 troops, only 15,000 made it out unscathed with almost 50,000 dead and the rest captured by the Carthaginians. 

To this day, military historians lose their shit and marvel at the tactical brilliance of this battle, one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on any Roman army, and use it as the jumping off point for alternate histories where Carthage, not Rome, becomes the sole power of the Mediterranean world.

Also, Cannae is why Hannibal loses the war.

Up until this point, Hannibal's strategy revolved around luring the Romans into battle so he could crush them with clever tactics. The Romans, arrogant honor junkies that they were, obliged him without fail. Its only after Cannae that the Romans decide that a man named Fabius Maximus may have been on to something when he said "How 'bout we don't walk into obvious traps that get us slaughtered?" Following his lead, the Roman army avoids any direct contact with Hannibal's forces. For ten years. Ten long, long years with no major battles. 

This was fatal to Hannibal's war effort. The whole point of his strategy was to show the other Italian cities that Rome wasn't as strong as they thought, that if they joined up with Hannibal, they'd be much better of then sticking with their pompous, condescending neighbors. Once the Romans stopped rushing out to die at his feet however, Hannibal had a major problem. 

See, his crossing of the Alps severely weakened his army. He didn't have the numbers or the supplies to lay siege to Rome, which meant he also didn't have the show of strength necessary to convince the Italians to throw in with him unconditionally. All the cities he turned flipped back to the Romans once Hannibal was out of sight which meant he spent years going all over Italy taking back cities he'd already won, then lost, back to his side. 

As any gamer knows, backtracking is a soul crushing endeavor that, ultimately, accomplishes nothing. With no momentum to his side, it was only a matter of time before the war slipped through Hannibal's fingers which, it did when the man who became known as Scipio Africanus beat Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BCE.

Skipping ahead a few centuries, let's meet Diocletian. In 284 CE, Diocletian was proclaimed emperor by the troops under his command after the last two self-proclaimed emperors died in battle. Now, at the time, the Roman world is going through the Crisis of the Third Century which, as you can probably tell from the name, is a great time to be alive. Civil wars, invasions, plagues, whatever flavor of catastrophe you prefer, you'll find it on offer in the 200's CE.

Being a rather industrious fellow, Diocletian decides to solve the problems that have beset his home and put right what has obviously gone wrong in the world. And then, he does. He defeats all his military rivals foreign and domestic. Once that's settled, he carves the empire into smaller districts to ensure any ambitious generals can't proclaim themselves emperor with a sizeable army at their backs like they've been doing for the last 50 years. Diocletian then divides the empire into four distinct districts ruled over by himself, his co-Emperor and two junior emperors who all pursue Diocletian's vision of unity and stability with aplomb. 

With the empire in good standing, Diocletian retired to his vegetable garden in 305 BCE. Less then twenty years later, the system of succession Diocletian so painstakingly crafted will be just as dead he is. 

When Diocletian retired, he forced his co-Emperor Maximian to step down with him. Overall, it was the smart play- Maximian served as a glorified general elevated to serve the imperial will of Diocletian wherever Diocletian couldn't be physically present. As the next five years would show, Maximian didn't have a political bone in his body, so the idea of leaving him in charge of the Empire was an invitation to disaster.

Sidebar: The cliff notes of Maximian's life from 305-310 are as follows: He helps his son Maxentius rebel in 306 after he's left out of the new tetrarchy, Maximian then betrays  Maxentius to take the reigns of power for himself. When that fails, he runs East to his son-in-law Constantine, declares himself Emperor, gets forced out of the declaration by Constantine, tries to seize power from Constantine, fails, then is forced to commit suicide to end the world suffering his foolishness any longer.

So, while leaving Maximian in charge was unacceptable, this only bred a deeper problem that Diocletian seemed incapable of understanding. When Diocletian created the tetrarchy, it was clear that while they were all relatively equal in their authority, Diocletian was more equal than all of them. Removing himself and Maximian created a power vacuum that his chosen successors would spend the next twenty years seeking to fill.

Eventually, Constantine would come out on top then establish Constantinople as the new heart of the empire, which would continue on for another 1200 years. But to Diocletian, the idea that the empire fell back under the rule of one central authority represented nothing but the failure of his life's work. 

It's hard to be too judgemental, though. Because of his reforms, the empire would survive as a unified whole until the Western half fell in 410 CE. His organization of the empire into smaller dioceses would lay the foundation the Catholic Church would use as it spread after the Roman world fell into chaos. His monetary policy would, in part, pave the way for Roman currency to regain its value which made it easier to keep soldiers in line since they were being paid in worthwhile currency again.

When your entire adult life consists of pulling off one miracle after another,  it's easy to think that the rest will just take care of itself. Everything else has worked, so why not that?

But like with Hannibal some 400ish years earlier, Diocletian didn't take into account how his success would change the world he lived in. Having four emperors during a time of crisis is fine- it means all of them have lots of problems to solve all at once all the time. But once the crises passes, all they've got to look at is each other. Who would be happy with a sliver of ultimate power when you could easily have it all?

That's the irony of the whole thing- the tetrarchy was created to stave off the civil wars that plagued the Roman world for fifty years but once the problems of the empire were handled, civil war between the tetrarchs was the only possible outcome.

To bring this closer to home, we go to 1971. Eugene Sydnor, then president of the Chamber of Commerce, commissioned a memo from his friend Lewis Powell. Powell was a corporate lawyer who worked for Philip Morris and was two months away from his nomination, and eventual appointment to, the Supreme Court. 

The result, known as either The Powell Memo or The Powell Manifesto, advocated for corporations to take a more proactive role in protecting their political interests. He suggested that the Chamber of Commerce should hire scholars to make the intellectual case for unregulated capitalism, monitor text books and TV news for unfavorable content, and to use their donations to colleges to influence those institutions to hire faculty more receptive to corporate interests. 

It's hard to overstate the consequences of this memo. All of Powell's suggestions were put in place, which led to the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, among others. Combined with the creation of Fox News and conservative radio, the conservative political agenda veered hard to the right.With the addition of the evangelical right, these principles took on a millennial, religious aspect, with a dash of apocalypse if they weren't pursued.

This didn't go unnoticed across the aisle. Spurred by the humiliating defeat of George McGovern, a new wing of the Democratic party began to form with the goal of moving the party away from its socially conscience, liberal image. The election of Bill Clinton solidified the control of the Third Way Democrats which they still enjoy to this day. 

The failure of all this realignment should be obvious. With Republicans actively hostile to social welfare programs and Democrats afraid of them, when crisis strikes it leaves millions of people in the lurch. So that's why you find both parties sitting on their hands as millions of people risk losing their homes, their health insurance, or just straight up starving as the pandemic rages unopposed. 

How these failures will change us is still up in the air. But you can't have the government abandon its citizens to cruelties of their fate without repercussions. Given how far the idea that enterprise is the only real freedom we have, I don't have high hopes. You can't bind yourself to your neighbor and demand better for everyone in a country that sees solidarity as a communist plot. 

We're told that failure is more instructive than success because it forces us to confront our shortcomings. In this way, failure leads to success as we improve, evolving our methods until we find the combination we need to get what we want. 

But we're never really taught that the inverse is true, too. We never get taught that we have to adapt to the world our success creates. Instead we're taught to expect that the world will stop to bask in our glories, that one success will endlessly breed further triumphs.  

That complacency is a trap. It inevitably leads us to disaster and yet, we've never bothered to learn to avoid it. If we come out of this calamity in one piece, we should probably start.