“Never let yourself be persuaded that any one Great Man, any one leader, is necessary to the salvation of America. When America consists of one leader and 158 million followers, it will no longer be America.”
--Dwight D. Eisenhower
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
In Secular Cycles (2009), the Russian historian Sergey Nefedov and I have examined in detail eight such waves of instability, brought on by the loss of cooperation: the civil wars of the late Roman Republic and the collapse of Roman Empire, the Hundred Years War and the War of the Roses in medieval England and France, the French War of Religion, the English Civil War, the Time of Troubles in Russia, and the Russian Revolution and Civil War that ended the Romanov dynasty. In each case, we found that unraveling cooperation was a lead indicator of social collapse.
So self-betrayal —this act of violating my own sensibilities toward another person—causes me to see that person or persons differently, and not only them but myself and the world also. When I ignore a sense to apologize to my son, for example, I might start telling myself that he’s really the one who needs to apologize, or that he’s a pain in the backside, or that if I apologize, he’ll just take it as license to do what he wants.
