What Bismarck taught in Dominic Cummings

Otto von bismarck concerned Dominic Cummings. If you spend time reading her blogYou will have noted the 1890 Punch cartoon Drop the pilot. The pilot in question is a thick collar, Bismarck, descendant of the Prussian state ship, looking at the germs by a Kaiser Freshage Wilhelm II. This image adorns its pinWritten in December 2023, which serves as a final authors on his obsession.

The article in question is an introduction to a much longer work, a chronology of 393 pages of Bismarcks' career until 1867. This chronology is a feat of the most impressive scholarship, 20 years old doing. He came to my mind, while reading it with Otto Pflanzes with three volumes biography From Bismarck in hand, in accordance with the instructions of the authors that Cummings could have a stronger understanding of everything related to Bismarck than any professional historian currently active in Great Britain. There could still be a handful of German embanded heads who could give him a race for his money.

The obsession with cummings for the Germanys, the first chancellor, began as a teenager and shaped his thought when he was trying to pilot our own state vessel through the stormy time of Brexit and Covid. I recently read some of the media comments on 2019 that I ignored at the time and it is incredible how many hacks thought I was trying to use [von Neumanns] Game theory, he complain. I was not. I made the ideas of the way Bismarck treated the Prussian constitutional crisis. The parliamentarians in 1862 refusing to comply with governments wish to increase military spending, and the Kaiser supposedly on the verge of resignation, Bismarck watched them, broke out and finally succeeded. There were indeed traces of blood and iron in Cummings and Boris Johnsons resolved to parliamentary extension during his first days at Downing Street.

That the media are false All is an axiom of cummings thought. He considered it necessary to draw his bismarck-chronology in part because the media of the 19th century were not better and have deceived many historians. His inner knowledge of political life distress him of the reliability of official stories. He has learned to recognize that things that people say about politics are rarely the case; And so it follows that things that people say about history are rarely the case either. The chronology of Bismarck is thus isolating these few things on the career of Bismarcks that we can know more or less with certainty, and around which we can then try to build more robust stories and theories.

It is, in itself, a lesson to learn: the brutal disconnection between official stories and this Really arrived. Nowhere is clearer than in the spectacle of conspiracy theories (Russian disinformation, Cambridge Analytica) solidification In official stories in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum: the media are unable to analyze the intersection of policy and technology and actively sayinforms the public. The official history, moreover, tends to flatter decision -makers, giving them an agency and a control; And one thing that Bismarck can teach us, because Cummings is stress, is the importance of stupid luck. Bismarck, he noteswas only appointed in the first place due to a collapse in the royal circles on which he had no real control. And if the goal of an assassin prefers, Ferdinand Cohen-Aveugle, had been It was only slightly different in May 1866, the German states would certainly have evolved in a different way, not from the First World War, no Hitler.

But if Bismarck had been entirely At the mercy of fortune, what would be the goal to encourage budding leaders, as Cummings did in his Essay on Odyssis educationTo take into account his example? An aspect of the genius of bismarcks cummings does not fear this word is that it has exploited the random of the world to its advantage. He was a brilliant practitioner of what the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (another cummings favorite) called Cheng / Chi operations pretended to eliminate the enemy. We hear a lot about the big strategy in international affairs, but the example of Bismarcks suggests that the best way for countries to ruthlessly pursue their interests is not to choose a strategy at all. It may not be a coincidence that Cummings had these reflections during the first phases of the first Trump administration, nor that it feels in the middle of the current Trumps chaos certain large reform opportunities.

Cummings is always impatient to emphasize that his admiration for Bismarck is not of a moral genre; Indeed, it often said That the world would be better today if Bismarck had never existed. However, given the extent of his enthusiasm and his vanity, it is natural to wonder if he sees something himself in Bismarck. The historian Katja Hoyer Thinks and even retraces vague points of parallel between Bismarcks' career in government and cummings, although even in a rather hostile article, it is too polite to emphasize that it is difficult to imagine that the Chancellor in iron obtains overflowed In The Halls of Power by Carrie Symonds (Bismarck excelled in the gel of the wife of Kaisers, Victoria, out of the Prussian court). Hoyer claims that Bismarck Never wrote a detailed response to each rumor that his enemies spread over him in the press, but I can't find it too difficult to imagine. Robert Lucius von Ballhausen said in 1875 that Bismarck disabled thoughts of revenge and reprisals for real or imagined that he suffered; And who knows how they could have manifested if Bismarck had been familiar with substitution.

“An aspect of the genius of Bismarcks is that it has exploited the randomness of the world to its advantage.”

Some of the political behavior of cummings have a bismarckian flavor. He is proudly cynical and not a supporter, and, like Bismarck, partial in the secret meeting: Bismarck with the flamboyant socialist leader, Ferdinand Lassalle; Cummings with everyone from Jeremy Corbyns communications team In 2019 at, he recently performed, Nigel Farage. Despite his occasional diatribes on social networks, Cummings seems to me less in disorder of a man than Bismarck, who was constantly in tears and threatening to commit suicide; Angling and high emotions should not be underestimated as a blunt instruments in its diabolical toolbox.

Beyond all this, I am not so sure that Cummings imagines as a bismarck of the last days. The subtitle of his chronology is a case study of unrecognized simplicity of high performance, and cummings, which hawk Books such as Superforecasting And Scout state of mind To anyone who listens, strives to be an expert recognition of things not recognized. Cummings Bismarck, at least when seen from the outside, is more a phenomenon than a human of flesh and blood; It is, in fact, a super-intelligence.

Cummings used this metaphor several times, and it means It's seriously. Watching Bismarck playing politics is like watching the best computers play chess; They don't only play better That the rest of us, but so differently that it is really a different game. Elsewhere, cummings writing that the question that Bismarck obliges us to reflect on a relevant question for the debates on AI today is how much efficiency Linked with the dangerous. Cummings Chronology persists on the bourgeois nipples which met Bismarck on his elevation to the Chancelle in 1862 by those who recognized neither her efficiency nor its dangerous; He draws for us an intellectually hollow World order completely not prepared for what was going to hit him, unable to see him for what he was. And those who did Recognize Bismarcks shine Albrecht von Roon, for example, who summoned him to be chancellor with his famous telegram, The risk of delay Make it other fatal error, of assuming that he would align with their interests rather than pursuing his; They recognized its effectiveness but not its dangerous. Bismarck was not predicted or understood by teachers and experts; The ODD MAVERICK warns that you make a fatal error, I beg you to reconsider but is rejected by the experts. Cummings is clearly not Bismarck in this story: Hes the Maverick.

SIR Christopher Clark, professor of Regius of history in Cambridge, wrote that Cummings resembles these Germans who, as Max Weber observed in 1917, admired [Bismarck] Not for the greatness of his subtle and sovereign spirit, but exclusively for the element of violence and cunning in his state activity, real or imaginary brutality in his methods. Perhaps there is a blind power competition in progress; Some of the Cummings hikes certainly give this impression. However, Bismarck, for Cummings, is not only a character snatched from the past so that the clever leaders imitate, but a phenomenon that clever leaders will have to learn to recognize: something that transcends artificial intelligence that leaders will have to see even when elite opinion or official history does not do so. On this recognition, the future of humanity may well depend; However, with enough Bismarcian initiative, these threats could even present opportunities. Some of the cummings Published reflections On the AI, composed when he was a little known servant of Michael Gove in the Department of Education, closed, a lot in this vein, with one of the most celebrated bismarcks good words. Technical changes such as genetic engineering and machine intelligence bring a revolution. It would be better to undertake it only to undergo it.