Victory has always sown the seeds of a fresh war. 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. We learn from history that complete victory has never been completed by the result that the victors always anticipate-a good and lasting peace. 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: The act of getting big is enough to make you smaller without being pushed by anyone or anything.Ī lot of mistakes in life come when you think risk is something caused by external forces, when in fact the weight of your own success is enough to pull you down without any outside help. As anyone who’s built a sandcastle knows, there comes a point when the whole thing comes crashing down on its own accord, crushed by the weight of its own vertical greed.Įverything is cyclical, and the thing that’s easy to miss about cyclicality is that it doesn’t require any outside force to push it in the other direction. The amazing thing is that the slide wasn’t caused by a glacier gnawing at the mountain, which is usually what keeps mountain height in check. Today, after the slide shaved a third of a mile off its top, it’s merely big. Annapurna IV used to be one of the top-five tallest mountains in the world. Massive may be an understatement: the slide moved enough earth to bury Manhattan as high as the Empire State Building. French geologists recently discovered that a Himalayan mountain suffered a massive landslide 800 years ago.
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