274 - bloodletting 🩸🩸🩸
lessons from our fav Godfather capo, Clemenza
Hey there, !
Sorry to be the stereotypical movie guy, but here's a quote from The Godfather I was thinking about when I was re-watching it recently:
- Michael: How bad do you think it's gonna be?
- Clemenza: Pretty goddam bad. Probably all the other Families will line up against us. That's all right. These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one. You know, you gotta stop them at the beginning. Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they was just asking for trouble.
Following on from my piece 2 weeks ago, I've been thinking about this concept a bit - the 'letting of blood', so to speak.
If you haven't seen the movie, they're talking about a mafia war that's about to kick off. It's kept front of mind because it happens every 5 - 10 years - a cycle of violence and peace that they're accustomed to.
And I wondered, well, what do we keep at the front of our minds? What do we seem to forget?
There's so much stuff that people react to in the world. Everything you see with Trump, for example, or with Elon, or COVID, or planes crashing, or war, or fuckin' Nazi's making a comeback. Granted, all of these are very US-based but I think my point will still hold overall.
It's just interesting that these cycles occur, at all! You'd think people would learn from the lessons of history...but "History doesn't repeat, it rhymes", you know? I covered this in a previous piece ages ago...just noticing that there's some sort of societal forgetting we do; Trevor Noah just had a podcast on this called 'American Amnesia' recently that covered the concept that we all just...forget things (at a societal level, anyway).
We forget and lack appreciation for things we have, because we haven't experienced the pain that caused it to come about in the first place.
Well, okay, maybe not just pain, but also because we take things for granted. I remember when I was studying law, and we learned about 'conventions' - which are essentially gentleman's agreements or 'we just always did it that way - it's tradition!'. For example, the Governor-General very rarely uses their Royal Veto to shut down any legislation in Australia, but he/she can do that...it's just a convention that they don't. What happens if they use that veto? Who knows! But we'll know it'll be a Big Deal if it ever happens.
In my previous piece, I had asked "How could we train our societal working memories so that we can hold more information at once?", and I think that I have an initial answer: it's not just about writing down the events as they happen (i.e. history), but more importantly, it's about crafting the right stories as well.
Stories encode a wealth of information in an efficient package - there are so many forms...like movies, and tv shows, and books - but at the end of the day, a well told story gives you an easier way to remember that something happened.
Religion does this really well - parables and koans, for example, stick in memory easily and serve to illustrate and emphasise desired lessons. And then, in the discussions decades and centuries later, if there's ambiguity in the parable or koan (which there usually is!) there's not necessarily a right answer, but the pursuit of that truth can also serve the purpose of the story. Honestly, whoever wrote those things in the past were really great storytellers, and maybe it's something we should all be trying to get better at.
Of course, that means it's just another thing to add to the ever-expanding list, but you have to start somewhere!
To bring it back around to the quote at the beginning, I think the 'blood-letting' that we see right now is a good thing, just like Clemenza says.
If you don't like what you're seeing, then hopefully you're remembering that we need to do something about it, telling a story somewhere to the people around you that there's a problem that needs fixing, and watching and working to get it fixed. And when new systems are put in place to try and combat these things from happening again, hopefully, we can remember why we put these sorts of things in place. Don't let these situations build up again and again and then go 'omg how did this happen!?' - let out the pressure of it with the right systems earlier, and make sure we keep those systems going.
There are lots of rules that are written in blood - we just hope they don't dry too much and fade away.
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
📋Today's Question
Same as last week because I'm procrastinating a bit and wanna let y'all have another chance to vote! At the moment, the time heisters option seems to be most popular, which is gonna be fun but challenging :D
✔️Real Life Recommendations
-
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter...and Spring - 94% on RT, 3.5 stars for Vince - it's a very meditative movie about the human condition, following the 'seasons of life' of a monk and his apprentice. It's a very slow film where 'not a lot happens', but it's perfect for a meditative movie. Highly recommended still!
-
Lou Wall - Breaking the Fifth Wall - the Melbourne International Comedy Festival has started so get ready for some recommendations as I go through them! Lou Wall is doing a show at the Comedy Republic about lying and it's FANTASTIC. I hadn't watched much of their comedy before, but it is so tightly written and produced and performed I LOVED it. Very meme-based and highly millennial. Highly recommended!!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
-
How Scammers Launder Money and Get Away With It - a NYT article (un-paywalled) that dives into the mechanics behind money laundering in the modern day. They've got like...an Uber for money mules! Fascinating.
-
History has no lessons for you: A warning to policymakers - ugh okay alwyas finding articles contrary to my viewpoint AFTER I've written the piece. There's nuance to everything I guess.
-
Sun Tzu's Fighting Words - an interesting breakdown of how context matters in translation - was Sun Tzu saying that it's better not to fight? Or better not to fight in a pitched battle (and instead to do it before you even get to that battle)? Extracting lessons is such a hard pursuit.