Drunk History? America Could Avoid Repeating Excesses of Covid, BLM by Heeding Lesson From Ancient Persia

The ancient Persians stress-tested decisions about important issues, Herodotus said, by debating them twice — once while drunk and once while sober. Conclusions held only if they withstood scrutiny by both the uninhibited and the focused mind. Risk-taking and passion went up against careful calculation and consideration of consequences.The modern-day Iranian regime appears to deploy a version of this ancient practice. Tehran lives to fight another day, toggling between public fits of revolutionary rhetoric and symbolic strikes that suggest being drunk on the ideological elixir that Middle East scholar Michael Doran calls the “theory of victory,” and the kinds of stone-cold sober moves that Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ray Takeyh points out are products of Iranian institutional resilience. One can debate whether America is inebriated or clear-minded when prosecuting its war against the mullahs, but there is little to suggest that the wisdom of the old Persian decision-making frame has been deployed in our country over the last decade when it comes to the most important matters of our time.The public just read Dr. Anthony Fauci’s diary and learned just how drunk on power our public health officials were during the Covid era. Both policy and public messaging were shaped by partisan interests, and by the overflowing cups of adoration the epidemiologist imbibed — served up by celebrities like Julia Roberts and media personalities like Jake Tapper. Vaccines were promoted, schools closed, and businesses destroyed because sober voices within the medical community, not drunk on fame, were censored rather than consulted.The antiracism era in America produced a rash of bad ideas — defunding the police, open borders, and a new definition of “equity” — that would never have stood up to the sober analysis of serious people who hadn’t drunk the spiked Kool-Aid. Those people were canceled, leaving no one at the party to push back against the impaired thinking of the crowd that argued for re-segregation on campuses, sanctuary cities, and kneeling before black Americans on the sidewalk — and little meaningful improvement in the lives of millions.Pure sobriety, however, doesn’t necessarily produce the best results either. The Democrat and Republican political establishments probably could have used a shot or two at their conventions to rouse them out of the stale thinking and lack of energy that opened the door for the radical left and the DSA to throw a rager on one side of the aisle and MAGA to stage a vast tailgate on the other. Americans left the parties that were dry, choosing the risks of drunken excess over sober stagnation. Now we have Mayor Zohran Mamdani at New York City, Tucker Carlson online, and a potential AOC Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. Someone pass the tequila.Ancient Persians (and today’s) remind us that both the unrestrained, expansive perspective of the human mind drunk on possibility and idealism, and the detail-oriented, conservative perspective of a brain unaltered by fantastical thinking, are needed to solve complex problems. Wars, public health threats, social challenges, and policy-making are best confronted by debates that integrate ideas unleashed by both inebriation and sobriety.The biggest challenge now is the rise of artificial general intelligence and potential superintelligence. The consequences of unchecked acceleration on the one hand or paralysis by way of excessive caution on the other could be devastating. Let’s hope we don’t allow our recent American track record of public debate guide our approach to this critical issue. The most future-facing matter of our time is probably best faced using the ancient Persian approach.

Drunk History? America Could Avoid Repeating Excesses of Covid, BLM by Heeding Lesson From Ancient Persia

Drunk History? America Could Avoid Repeating Excesses of Covid, BLM by Heeding Lesson From Ancient Persia

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