(highlight:: In his 1944 book Why Don’t We Learn From History?, BH Liddell Hart writes about why after every war people say, “That was so awful we will never do it again,” only to find themselves on the battlefield a few years later:

We learn from history that complete victory has never been completed by the result that the victors always anticipate—a good and lasting peace. For victory has always sown the seeds of a fresh war, because victory breeds among the vanquished a desire for vindication and vengeance and because victory raises fresh rivals.
Victory has always sown the seeds of a fresh war. That is such a strange concept, but it’s so obviously true. In his book Evil, Roy Baumeister writes:
The First World War had been so much more horrible than anything Europeans had remembered or even imagined that it produced a lasting and profound psychological impact. The winners concluded that there must be no more wars. The losers concluded that there had to be another war to set things right: So much sacrifice could not be allowed to be in vain.
It’s almost like the larger the victory, the higher the odds of a future war. World War I led to World War II, which led to the Cold War, which led to Russia invading Ukraine, and so on forever.)
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The former CEO of Slack recently explained a fascinating reason bloat seeps into successful companies. Managers vying for attention often rank themselves off a simple metric: How many employees report to them. The incentive, then, is to hire tons of people – even if they have little work to do – so a manager can say, “400 people report to me,” which signals their alleged value and importance. And you can only pull that off at a company with so much money and so much success that obnoxious budgets are approved
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(highlight:: In his 1944 book Why Don’t We Learn From History?, BH Liddell Hart writes about why after every war people say, “That was so awful we will never do it again,” only to find themselves on the battlefield a few years later:

We learn from history that complete victory has never been completed by the result that the victors always anticipate—a good and lasting peace. For victory has always sown the seeds of a fresh war, because victory breeds among the vanquished a desire for vindication and vengeance and because victory raises fresh rivals.
Victory has always sown the seeds of a fresh war. That is such a strange concept, but it’s so obviously true. In his book Evil, Roy Baumeister writes:
The First World War had been so much more horrible than anything Europeans had remembered or even imagined that it produced a lasting and profound psychological impact. The winners concluded that there must be no more wars. The losers concluded that there had to be another war to set things right: So much sacrifice could not be allowed to be in vain.
It’s almost like the larger the victory, the higher the odds of a future war. World War I led to World War II, which led to the Cold War, which led to Russia invading Ukraine, and so on forever.)
- View Highlight
-

The former CEO of Slack recently explained a fascinating reason bloat seeps into successful companies. Managers vying for attention often rank themselves off a simple metric: How many employees report to them. The incentive, then, is to hire tons of people – even if they have little work to do – so a manager can say, “400 people report to me,” which signals their alleged value and importance. And you can only pull that off at a company with so much money and so much success that obnoxious budgets are approved
- View Highlight
-