Missive #388

Despite sickness in the final years of his life, Dos Passos presses on for adventure. He and his wife journey to Easter Island, where they explore the history behind the famous statues—called maois.

This was Dos Passos’s last published book, he died the same year that it was published. It was also not so much written by him as a compilation of seamen journals by those explorers that landed at the island starting with Cook. He only wrote a couple of chapters about his visit. It does provide some good island history so is worth a read.“When I was a small boy,” Dos Passos says, “some kind person took me to the British Museum. There I saw a statue, a huge, rough, dark-gray statue with [a] long, sad, dark-gray face. The statue stared back out of deep, sunken eyes. What was it trying to say? To this day I can remember the feeling it gave me of savage, brooding melancholy.” — Book promo @ goodreads.com

Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, the Easter Island story wouldn’t have seemed so cogent to an American. We were still hopefully committed to the building of a civilization. It never occurred to us that we were breeding a generation of wreckers. Great blocks of steel and glass skyscrapers full of the whir of typewriters and people pushing papers back and forth across desks probably wouldn’t have seemed any more important to an Easter Islander than their weird statues seem to us, but we see them as part of a complicated social structure which assures food, clothing and shelter and an incredible number of amenities to many millions of people. Today, again without any massive impulse from the outside, counterparts have appeared in our society of the wreckers who had themselves a time pulling down the silly old statues on Easter Island. “None of it is any good, let’s make an end of it.”
Probably it didn’t occur to the Easter Island revolutionists anymore than it does to our college radicals that their own food and shelter depended on the social order they were pulling down. Undoubtedly agitators told them that if they overthrew the statues the oppression of the Longears would fall with them. Justice and plenty would reign. Nobody would have to work any more. The result was a hundred years of arson and famine and murder and the near extinction of a talented and effective community.

Machiavelli knew what President Trump was going to be faced with. I think Trump has learned his lesson and also knows; will will see.

Here we have to bear in mind that nothing is harder to organize, more likely to fail, or more dangerous to see through, than the introduction of a new system of government.

The person bringing in the changes will make enemies of everyone who was doing well under the old system, while the people who stand to gain from the new arrangements will not offer wholehearted support, partly because they are afraid of their opponents, who still have the laws on their side, and partly because people are naturally skeptical: no one really believes in change until they’ve had solid experience of it.

So as soon as the opponents of the new system see a chance, they’ll go on the offensive with the determination of an embattled faction, while its supporters will offer only half-hearted resistance, something that will put the new ruler’s position at risk too. — Chapter Six of The Prince @ Advice For Leaders by Charles Hugh Smith