This is about a book that a librarian recommended to me. It is Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time by Carroll Quigley.
This book was made in 1966.
It was OK. It is pretty big. It took me about a month to read it, and I fell asleep a couple times.
Some things I learned from it was if you want to get consent from someone you can do so by paying them, by force and by persuasion.
“. . . there are three basic ways to win obedience: by force, by buying consent with wealth, and by persuasion.” [p. 33]
Another thing I learned was that the purpose of war was to change the minds of people, both the winner and the loser. You can also speed things up. Like if something would take 1000 years normally, with war it can happen in 200 years.
“The war brought nothing really new into the world; rather it sped up processes of change which had been going on for a considerable period and would have continued anyway, with the result that changes which would have taken place over a period of thirty or even fifty years in peacetime were brought about in five years during the war. Also, the changes were much greater in objective facts and in the organization of society than they were in men’s ideas of these facts or organization. It was as if the changes were too rapid for men’s minds to accept them, or, what is more likely, that men, seeing the great changes which were occurring on all sides, recognized them, but assumed that they were merely temporary wartime aberrations, and that, when peace came, they would pass away and everyone could go back to the slow, pleasant world of 1913.” [p. 256]
“Any war performs two rather contradictory services for the social context in which it occurs. On the one hand, it changes the minds of men, especially the defeated, about the factual power relationship between the combatants. And, on the other hand, it alters the factual situation itself, so that changes which in peacetime might have occurred over decades are brought about in a few years.” [p. 831]
Some other stuff I learned is that if you want to get money you could just marry into it. Some families are really wealthy. More wealthy than that Warren Buffett dude on the Forbes list. So if one of these wealthy families has a hot daughter you could marry her, divorce her and then take half of it.
“The economic power represented by these figures is almost beyond imagination to grasp, and was increased by the active role which these financial titans took in politics. Morgan and Rockefeller together frequently dominated the national Republican Party, while Morgan occasionally had extensive influence in the national Democratic party (three of the Morgan partners were usually Democrats). These two were also powerful on the state level, especially Morgan in New York and Rockefeller in Ohio. Mellon was a power in Pennsylvania and du Pont was obviously a political power in Delaware.” [p. 532]
“The greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendants of Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743-1812) of Frankfort, whose male descendants, for at least two generations, generally married first cousins or even nieces. Rothschild’s five sons, established at branches in Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris, as well as Frankfort, cooperated together in ways which other international banking dynasties copied but rarely excelled.” [p. 51]
That’s all I can remember.
Daniel Kemp
