After the French revolutionaries beheaded their king, they had another bright idea:
"Let's make the day 10 hours long"
This is NOT a joke. Left-wing "experts" actually changed the length of minutes, hours, and weeks in the name of science...
This is the story of that disaster:
1/ The French revolutionaries adopted a new calendar for three reasons:
- To eliminate religious consciousness from the French society
- To make time more “rational”
- To announce the birth of an egalitarian era
In their zeal they forgot an important factor: human nature
2/ This is a story of political arrogance
The revolutionaries overestimated the power of science. And underestimated the stickiness of religion
One hour = 100 minutes. One min = 100 seconds. New year shifted from 1st Jan to 22nd Sept..
A radical attempt to redefine time itself
3/ In France, from 1793 to 1805, one week had 10 days
The 7th day, traditionally a holiday - “holy day” - became a typical week day. An attempt at secularization
Every 10th day was made the rest day. John Adams called this change "superficially frivolous" and "coarsely vulgar"
4/ Sociologist Zerubavel notes that the 10-day week was meant to disrupt the “traditional, sacred seven-day cycle”
Purpose was to disorient people and make them lose track of “Sunday”
That is, the day for going to Church
And having a weekly sitdown with the divine
5/ The French Revolutionary Calendar was designed by the top experts of the day
The chief designer: CG Romme (Physics professor)
Mathematicians & astronomers chipped in
Tradition/old habits didn’t matter
The designers answered “solely to the principles of Reason and Science”
6/ Sociologist Zerubavel: “The Revolutionary Calendar was introduced in an age which advocated the total obliteration of the old order in the name of progress & modernity: the beginning of the new Republican Era marked the total discontinuity between past & present” Ring a bell?
7/ Every calendar has “critical dates” which are suffused with a symbolic importance
The Revolutionaries changed the first day of the year from January 1 to 22nd September - the day of the “foundation of the French Republic”
Society was to spin not around religion but politics
8/ Days which had a unique flavor due to their religious significance like “the saints' days, Sunday and the Church's religious holidays” were abolished. Each day became mathematically and symbolically alike. Differences were to be erased - whether among people or on the calendar
9/ By adopting calendrical rhythms alien to the rest of the world
The French created artificial barriers to communication, understanding, and ultimately trade
How would you fix delivery schedules with a country whose calendar is untranslatable into yours?
10/ Imagine you’re a French man in 1793...
The revolutionaries have not just beheaded the King and slaughtered their own
But have also made the week 10 days long
The day is now 10 hours, not 24
Your old clocks - and your old instincts - need to be thrown out
11/ By denouncing all authority as arbitrary, the revolutionary finally harms himself
On what grounds will HE govern once the king is gone?
In hindsight we can see the “boomerang effect” of the Calendar redesign
If the old dogmas were random
Why are the new ones any better?
12/ The people HATED the new Calendar
It made them work for 9 days straight instead of 6
Plus it was confusing
Special clocks were made to translate the Revolutionary calendar into the Gregorian calendar and back
People’s age-long habits were redesigned without their consent
13/ STALIN imposed a new calendar too
The week was cut to 5 days to eliminate the holiday of Sunday
Days were assigned colors, and workers were given colors
When it was your colored day, you took a day off
Families and friends had different colors and so they never hung out
14/ Here’s the French Revolutionary Calendar. Designed by the biggest scientific minds of the time. A failed dream...a symbolic warning. An attempt to restructure time by politics instead of the sacred. Reasonable, rational, and hence doomed. An emblem to the madness of equality
15/ Here’s the man who ended the tyranny of artificial time and took his country back to the Gregorian calendar
You can do almost anything with a phone - and that's Bad, Actually
Because you can do anything, you end up doing nothing
The best tools are constrained and specific. They do you a favor by limiting you...
Thread:
1/ On a typewriter you cannot stream movies, check stock prices, or play online chess. You can only write. On a camera you cannot tweet, google trivia, or order groceries. You can only click. These older tools gave you a tunnel vision that their advanced alternatives just cannot
2/ If the only tool you have is a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. If the only tool you have is a 7 inch flat screen, then all your problems look like pixel arrangement problems. That is Objectively False. Real problems demand more than tapping, clicking, coding
1/ One line from an 1883 philosophy book gets to the heart of the matter: "Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood" (Nietzsche). Writing comes not just from your brain but from your guts, balls, sinews, feelings, blood. AI has none of that
2/ Chesterton wrote in Heretics (1905) that if you want exciting art, you have to go to the ideologues. To the men who have actual convictions. Only a "doctrinaire" - someone with a doctrine, a POV, a set of values - can tell a story worth hearing. A data server has no doctrine
1/ Einstein fell seriously sick at 5. Bed-ridden. His father brought home a toy compass to entertain him. He was transfixed by the magnetic needle. It made him wonder—what were the "deeply hidden" forces controlling the needle...and the world? He spent his life chasing the answer
2/ The Wright brothers were gifted a toy helicopter when they were 7 and 11. They played with it until it broke, and then they built their own model. Years later they credited this toy for sparking off their life-long obsession with flight
Why do old buildings and weathered objects look so much more charming than the plastic creations of our time?
Because of a Japanese concept called Koko...
Thread:
1/ Charm is a hard thing to pin down - because it is not a thing but a spirit. The Japanese have thought about it for thousands of years. In the Zen philosophy of aesthetics, there is something called "Koko" - a certain weathered but attractive vibe that old objects develop
2/ Older things have history - which means they have stories, details, and finally, a MYSTERY, that a newly minted factory object simply cannot possess. Japanese art critic Yanagi Sōetsu put it well: "there is...a little something left unaccounted for"
• Never took a bath
• Never lost a fight
• Wrote one of Joe Rogan's all-time favorite books:
The Book of Five Rings (1645)
The book is 380 years old but its wisdom still holds up. A thread:
1/ Miyamoto Musashi was undefeated across 61 duels. An all-time record. He never married, never had children, and according to rumors, never combed his hair. He was a strange but profoundly wise man. Rogan says his book is "one of the most valuable things anyone has ever written"
2/ Have no favorite weapon. Musashi cautions fighters against over-reliance on one move or "special fondness for a particular weapon"
He writes: "Too much is the same as not enough"
Stay pragmatic, dont entertain "likes and dislikes," arm yourself with what you need for victory