Why Don't We Learn From History by B.H. Liddell Hart - Introduction - w/Jesan Sorrells

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast, episode number 166. 6. We open our episode today with a quote. The money quote, as the boys in marketing used to quip back in the day, that defines the direction we will be headed in in the book that we are going to be talking about today. But it's not only the direction in the book that we're going

to be talking about today. Not only is it the direction of the themes around the book we are going to be talking about today, but it is also the direction. It also defines the direction of the next few episodes of the podcast that you are going to be hearing as we close out this next season or this last season of the show. By last, I don't mean final, I just mean the most recent.

Let's go to the money quote and I quote when one gets a close view of the influential people, their bad relations with each other, their conflicting ambitions, all the slander and the hatred, one must always bear in mind that it is certainly much worse on the other side among the French, English and Russians, or one might well be nervous. The race for power and personal positions seems to destroy men's characters. I believe that the only creature who can keep his honor is a man

living on his own estate. He has no need for intrigue and struggle, for it is no good. Intriguing for fine weather. Close quote the title of our book today asks a truly intriguing question, or poses a truly intriguing question that we guests and myself alike have struggled to answer definitively when using the platform of this show.

The point of this podcast, of course, is threefold. If you needed a reminder, number one, to build a platform to read and analyze books through the lens of leadership number two, to build relationships and connections with our audience and our guests in order to test and validate the power of human wisdom in these algorithmically driven times and three to build and maintain a launchpad for human solutions to the very human problems that continue to be double

us in our technologically sophisticated yet culturally barbaric age here in the West. The author of our book Today was a historian of World War I and World War II. He was a man who came from modest origins, and while, yes, he did indeed have an ego, he understood that

history is the tank. An object about which he knew quite a bit is the tank that overruns us all he personified in many ways the ideas of an older world, a more Greek philosophical world, a world driven not by corporate ambitions or by social media likes. A world driven not by financializing everything out to its furthest end. A world not driven by spectacle and a lack of shame. He was the last tie to an older aristocracy, a European aristocracy that all went to hell

in the fires of. Of World War I. Today, on this episode of the podcast, we will be introducing and discussing multiple themes from the book titled why Don't We Learn from History by B.H. liddell Hart. Leaders. To quote from our author today, and I quote in strategy, the longest way round is often the shortest way home. And so we open today with some of BH Liddell Hart's thoughts on why don't we learn from History. We open with his chapter that he begins this book with History and

truth. Now this book is a. Is public domain. You can go and get it anywhere. The copy that I get that I have was edited with an introduction by Gills Lauren and, and the book features. Well, the book is divided into. Into three parts. So history and truth, Government and freedom and war and peace. And in each area he writes or Liddell Hart documents in a few essays his thoughts on, well,

the various areas that he is. He is writing about. Think of it like a, like a, like a substack, right, but just put into a book form from the, from the 1970s. And so we open up in the volume that I have with the treatment of history and I quote directly from why Don't We Learn from History by B.H. liddell Hart. An increasing number of modern historians such as Veronica Wedgwood have shown that good history and good reading can be blended. And thus by displacing the mythologists,

they are bringing history back to the service of humanity. Even so, the academic suspicion of literary style still lingers. Such pendants may be well reminded of the proverb, hard writing makes easy reading, such hard writing makes for hard thinking. Far more effort is required to epitomize facts with clarity than to express them cloudily. Misstatements can be more easily spotted in sentences that are crystal clear than those that are cloudy. The writer has to be more

careful if he is not to be caught out than thus care in writing makes for care in treating the material of history to evaluate it correctly. The effort towards deeper psychological analysis is good so long as perspective is kept. It is equally good that the varnish should be scraped off so long as the true grain of the character is revealed. It is not so good except for selling success. When Victorian varnish is replaced by cheap staining colored to suit the taste for

scandal. Moreover, the study of personality is apt to be pressed so far that it throws the performance into the background. This certainly simplifies the task of the biographer. Who can dispense with the need for a knowledge of the field in which his subject found his life's work. Can we imagine a great statesman without statecraft, A great general without war, A great scientist without science, A great writer without literature that would look strangely nude and often

commonplace? A question often debated is whether history is a science or an art. The true answer would seem to be that history is a science and an art. The subject must be approached in a scientific spirit of inquiry. Facts must be treated with scientific care, for accuracy. But they cannot be interpreted without the aid of imagination and intuition. The sheer quantity of evidence is so overwhelming that selection is inevitable. Where there is selection, there is art. Exploration should be

objective, but selection is subjective. Its subjectiveness can and should be controlled by scientific method and objectiveness. Too many people go into history merely in search of texts for their sermons instead of facts for analysis. But after analysis comes art to bring out the meaning and to ensure it becomes known. It was the school of German historians headed by Reinke who in the last century started the fashion of trying to be purely scientific. That fashion

spread to our own schools of history. Any conclusions or generalizations were shunned and any well written books became suspect. What was the result? History became too dull to read and devoid of meaning. It became merely a subject for study, but by specialists. So the void was filled by new myths of exciting power but appalling consequences. The world has suffered and Germany worst of all for the sterilization of history that started in Germany. So what are we to make of Sir Basil

Henry Liddell Hart? Well, he was born October 31, 1895 at the close of what had been a very long 19th century. And he died January 29, 1970, close to the end of what was to prove to be an equally long 20th century. He was commonly known throughout most of his career, which a bit big chunk of it was spent in the service of the British military as Captain BH Lidell Hart. Not only was he a British soldier, he was also a military historian and a military

theorist. Lidell Hart was born in Paris and was the son of a Methodist minister. From these humble origins, Liddell Hart matriculated through school. And as a child

he was fascinated by the field of aviation. The budding field of aviation that had begun at Kitty with the Wright brothers successful plane flight at Kitty Hawk. When World War I began in August of 1914, Liddell Hart volunteered for the British army where he became an officer in the King's Own Yorkshire Light infantry in December. And he served with the regiment on the

Western Front. As a result of his participation at the Battle of the Somme, where The British lost 60,000 men, still the largest one battle loss of British soldiers in all of English history. He wrote a series of histories of major military figures after he mustered out of the British military in the mid to late 1920s. By the way, he wrote these histories by going around and actually talking to the people who were involved in World War I, who were involved in the

battles, who were involved in the maneuvers. And he didn't just limit himself to talking to folks in Europe who had been involved in the battles at various Verdun or at the Somme or even other places. He also

traversed the Atlantic and came over and talked to American officers and American soldiers who had been in the war. He advanced his ideas as a result of these kinds of conversations that the frontal assault was a strategy bound to fail at great cost in lives later on. Of course, this would be one of the titular lessons learned from the disasters of the Western Front in trench warfare and continuous frontal assault. By the way, Liddell Hart was.

Was injured in a poisonous gas attack during a frontal assault during World War I. Before he participated in the Battle of the Somme. Liddell Hart argued throughout his histories and throughout the the mid-20s and then well after World War I. He argued that the tremendous losses British suffered in the Great War, which is what World War I was called

before World War II came along. He argued that the tremendous losses Britain suffered were caused by its commanding officers not appreciating certain facts of history. And he spent the rest of his career trying to correct not only British generals, but to correct the military historical record. Not about what has his necessity, not necessarily about what happened during World War I. But he attempted to correct the.

The record on what could have been done better, what had been done badly and what could. What could be gleaned from such disasters so that future wars would be run differently. By the way, in the mid to late 1920s, Lidell Hart was an advisor to. To. To Chamberlain and he was an advisor to. To Churchill. And then later on after the war he became much more of a public historian in the British imagination and in the British. Among the British populace.

So this guy was the guy who stood next to the guy who made the decisions and impacted a lot of people both before World War II and after. So back to the book. Back to why Don't We Learn From History by B.H. liddell Hart? So we're going to pick up in the section labeled or titled not labeled, titled. War and Peace. Now this section is really interesting because you would think that he would start off with this section in the book, but instead he begins with history and truth. He moves into

government and freedom. A lot of interesting things to note in that section including, and you may want to pick this book up just for this little essay in here in Government and Freedom alone, the Psychology of Dictatorship, which has this great quote in it that I underlined. The effect of power on the mind of the man who possesses it, especially when he has gained it by successful aggression, tends to be remarkably similar in every age and in every country. Close quote.

Now, how aggression is defined, of course, differs from time to time. Your. Your definition of aggression and my definition of aggression in the pursuit of acquiring power will vary. Anyway, moving into the section on War and Peace. So it opens up with the. With an essay on the desire for power. And here Liddell Hart makes this. He opens with this point which I think is. Is important to

reference. Before we get to our main piece here that I want to read. He says this history shows that a main hindrance to real progress is the ever popular myth of the quote unquote great man. While greatness may perhaps be used in a comparative sense, if even then referring to. Referring more to particular quality qualities

than to the embodied some. The quote unquote great man is a clay idol whose pedestal has been built up by the natural human desire to look up to someone, but whose form has been carved by men who have not yet outgrown the desire to be regarded or to picture themselves as great men. Close quote. When I read that, I was immediately put in mind of the Percy Shelley poem Ozymandias. He goes into a discussion later on in this section on War and Peace,

where he tries to define real politic. And then he talks about in relation to realpolitik and the value of patriotism, but in contrast to, particularly in a diplomatic sense and in a policy sense, the value of decency, honesty and thought. He makes this point, which I want to read from directly underneath. The importance of keeping promises. And I quote, civilization is built on the practice of

keeping promises. It may not sound like a high attainment, but if trust in its observance be shaken, the whole structure cracks and sinks any constructive effort. And all human relations, personal, political and commercial, depend on being able to depend on promises. This truth has a reflection on the question of collective security among nations and on the lessons of history in regard to that subject in the years before the war. By the way, Pause. He's talking about

World War II here. Back to the book. The charge was

constantly broken that its supporters were courting the risk of war by their exaggerated respect for covenants. Although they may have been fools in disregarding the conditions necessary for the effective fulfillment of pledges, they at least showed themselves men of honor and in a long view of a more fundamental common sense than those who argued that we should give aggressors a free hand so long as they left us alone.

History has shown repeatedly that the hope of buying safety in this way is the greatest of delusions. So here's a question for you as a leader and we as we finally have said enough of set enough of a stage to be able to talk coherently about BH Ladell Hart's book why don't we learn from history and of course relate that to leadership? So here's a leadership question for you. Something to think about. Do we continue to live in America? Not globally, just in the United States of America? This

is the United States of America specific question. Do we or do we not live in a high trust society? That's actually a really good question. Because if you look around

at Substack and at Medium, if you look at Twitter and Blue sky, if you buy into the ideas that are fomented by folks like or not fomented, but that have been researched by folks like Jonathan Haidt and Steven Pinker and many others, you would think that we are at times of great political alienation and polarization, not just between individuals of different political stripes, but even now, individuals of different genders.

In the last election, the last presidential election in 2024, more men, particularly young men, drifted or directly voted for for the right leaning candidate for President of the United States than ever before. And more women voted for the left leaning presidential candidate for the President of the United States of America than ever before. Is this a sign of a decline in erosion in trust or is this a sign more of the sorting that naturally has occurred in America ever since our

founding? Here's another place where this question becomes interesting. If we are a low trust society, or if we are no longer a high trust society, then why do services such as Uber and Airbnb, why do those services work? Why do I agree to stay in a stranger's house in a strange city and I've never met that stranger before and I book their house through an app. Or why do I agree to get into a stranger's personal car without a taxicab medallion? That person does not

have the imprimatur of the state upon them. They are not licensed to be a taxicab driver and yet I have an app on my phone I ordered from them the their own car and they come and pick me up and I anticipate that they will take me safely whether I am a male or a female, it is or child, it doesn't really matter. I anticipate that they will take me safely to where it is I am supposed to go, drop me off and then in some cases come back and get me.

These services exist and they started on the Internet with paypal and and other services and of course auction sites like ebay really were the grandfathers of Uber and Airbnb. But these services are could only work in a high trust society.

If we were a low trust society, a society high in corruption, a society high in a lack of government actually working, if we were a society that was one where tribe mattered more than neighborhood or even state or community, none of these basic services would work. So how do we square that circle in our modern era with what is seemingly a decline in trust?

The decline in trust can be seen in the decline of marital commitments foundational to the building and maintaining of a society and culture since the advent of no fault divorce in California in the 1970s all the way through to our current era of intergender sniping and fault finding online and in social media. This has been marked not only through means of communication, but has also been noted by many professionals in various fields. And this perception of a decline in trust has filtered down

to the transactions and services that people provide each other. Not necessarily with the mediator of an app or phone, but with the services we provide where there is no mediator. And now I have to deal with you face to face. This has happened to me recently, by the way. One day on the show I will talk about my challenges in the summer of 2025 working with

the airlines. Trust me, customer service, which used to be the hallmark of a high trust society, or at least the hallmark of our high trust society. If my experience is any evidence, customer service is on the decline and has been for quite some time. This creates a paradox, right where we have more access than ever before to the means of getting a service or obtaining a product from another person we've never met and yet we have lower trust

in people. Actually behaving like sane human beings than ever before. And we seem more and more eager to outsource more and more of that sanity to screens into algorithms, to have mediators in our phones. And between us, we have no way, of course, to talk about this out loud. And you know,

we hide our concerns behind contracts and lawsuits, behind increasing regulations and ethical compliance schemes. And none of these things reflect a common shared sense of social solidarity. None of these tools really go to what Liddell Hart pointed out here, which is the fact that any constructive effort in all human relations, personal, political and commercial, depend on being able to depend on promises, leaders.

One of the things we have to do is we have to get back to promises and actually fulfilling those all the way down to the granular level. All right, back to the book. Back to why don't we learn from History by B H Liddell Hart? We pick up in Government and Freedom with the continuation of his conversation, which precedes the conversation that we just read from

around. Government and Freedom talks about authority, the men behind the scenes, the restraints of democracy and how power politics works in relation to history in a democracy. And then he, then he gets into the idea of what advisors look like and, and, well, he. He talks about self made despotic rulers in pattern of dictatorship. And I quote, we learn from history that self made despotic rulers fall follow a standard pattern

in gaining power. They exploit, consciously or unconsciously, a state of popular dissatisfaction with the existing regime or of hostility between different sections of people. They attack the existing regime violently and combine their appeal to discontent with unlimited promises which, if successful, they fulfill only to a limited extent. They claim that they want absolute power for only a short time, but quote, unquote, find subsequently that the time to relinquish it never comes. They excite

popular sympathy by presenting the picture of a conspiracy against them. And use this as a lever to gain a firmer hold at some crucial stage on gaining power. They soon begin to rid themselves of their chief helpers, discovering that those who brought about the new order have suddenly become traitors to it. They suppress criticism on one pretext or another. And punish anyone who mentions facts which, however true, are

unfavorable to their policy. They enlist religion on their side if possible, or if its leaders are not compliant, foster a new kind of religion subservient to their ends. They spend public money lavishly on material works of a striking kind. In compensation for the freedom of spirit and thought of which they have robbed the public. They manipulate the currency to make the economic position of the state appear better than it is in reality.

They ultimately make war on some other state as a means of diverting attention from internal conditions and allowing discontent to explode outward. They use the rallying cry of patriotism as a means of riveting the chains of their personal authority more firmly to the people.

They expand the superstructure of the state while undermining its foundations by breeding sycophants at the expense of self respecting collaborators, by appealing to the popular taste for the grandiose and sensational and instead of true values, and by fostering a romantic instead of a realistic view, thus ensuring the ultimate collapse under their successors, if not themselves, of what they have created.

This political confidence trick itself, a familiar string of tricks, has been repeated all down the ages, yet it rarely fails to take in a fresh generation. So I read that for a reason. In our current era, words we are struggling with words having meanings. Words, terms, phrases are thrown around in the general communication culture of the United States in the year of our Lord 2025, and have been for about the last 20 years.

And instead of being used to actually educate the public on history or entertain us with myth, instead words are used to run psychological operations on the culture and to propagandize and manipulate

listeners. In our current era, at least since the bad Orange man came down the escalator in 2015, words such as fascist, socialist, authoritarianism, and other lightning rod terms that have meaning in the context of a post World War II time that Liddell Hart was writing about, but that have zero meaning 80 years later, words such as these and other terms are used either to create an environment of political and social action, or they're used insidiously to suppress or socially

sanction political or social action. This is not good. As a

person who understands that words have meaning, as a person who reads books, it is the responsibility, at least I believe it is the responsibility of leaders and to examine the words that they are using and to hesitate to use words and to speak succinctly, yes, of course, but also to speak accurately.

And using such terms casually as fascist or socialist or authoritarianism or even, or even dictatorship, or the pejorative term which used to be the name of a man, and you know which man I'm talking about, utilizing these terms casually in terms of or in, in the space of Internet memes or tweets or messages or appeals to action, this indicates a laziness not only of thought, as George Orwell would say, but a laziness of consideration for the trust placed in each other by our fellow

man. It indicates a sense that we just believe society and culture will somehow miraculously just keep going, even if we behave like totally depraved fools with our language. This is what I mean by cultural barbarity, by the way. Technological sophistication and yet extreme cultural barbarity. It isn't just the abortions and the birth control, the pornography and the gender transitions that

are messing us up. It's primarily our inability to speak about these things clearly in order to weave back together the social fabric. Instead, we use these words, we use these inaccurate terms, or we use accurate terms inaccurately and lazily in order to tear the social fabric apart. Historians, educators and others have always leveraged words, terms and phrases in order to create and shape and change cultural myths. And they have done this in order to uplift a culture and to push

it to higher levels of confidence. Or they have done it insidiously and intentionally to suppress confidence and repress people's ability to either act in a crisis or to plan with calm. One of the things that technologists such as Peter Thiel and Sam Altman and others point out is that and it's equipped. But it's true. In our time, we were promised by the visionary builders of the post World War II era that we would have vacations to the moon and settlements on Mars by this

point in the 21st century. And instead all we got was 140 to 240 characters and DoorDash seems like a comedown, right? But you can't have innovative technology if you don't have innovative thought. And you can't have innovative thought if you possess lazy and degraded language. And you cannot have innovative actions and innovative objects with lazy integrated thinking that is expressed in lazy integrated language.

This is why on this show I am careful with the words that I pick, even the words that are pejorative words. I know that many of you may not agree with me. You're going to look for other places where the erosion is occurring. And don't get me wrong, there are plenty of other places where cultural erosion is occurring. And there are plenty of fingers to point at plenty of different folks for our current state of

cultural barbarity. But I believe fundamentally that when we throw around terms like Chiclets that we really don't understand, not only do we degrade the term itself and its power, but we also degrade the person using it, and we degrade our neighbor, and we degrade our ability to innovate past the problems that we have because we are reflecting a degraded ability to even think clearly and cohesively and cogently about the problems that we have.

This is a real problem for leaders. And so I encourage

leaders to understand that words have meanings despite our feelings about those words, and to be careful, clear and concise in what words we use to lead others. As we close out our show today, I have a few final thoughts and I'm going to start with maybe a basic observation here. First off, we are going to talk about why don't we learn from History with Tom Libby coming up on our next episode of this show. So I would encourage you to, to listen to that episode

and I anticipate we're going to have a great conversation. Tom always brings more to the table than I can in these, in these introductory solo episodes. But these introductory solo episodes are important as a way of anchoring my thoughts for you around the books that we cover on

this show. And we're going to continue this next next year starting in January 2026, we're going to probably go to covering about two to three books a month and with a couple of bonus episodes thrown in there, we're going to keep the mash up episodes that we've been doing this year. We've done two of them so far. We're going to keep

those maybe one every every four months. But we are going to keep this pattern of an introductory episode, then the main book with the guests and another director episode and then a second main book with the guest. And and while that will spread out the number of books that we will be covering in toto on this show, ultimately I think we'll be able to go deeper in each book that we cover. And why don't we Learn from History is a, it's a small book. It's only, only 126 pages so you

could get through it. It's a quick read. You can get through it in a, in a, in an afternoon probably. And it's probably better than watching whatever it is you may have in your Amazon prime and or Netflix queue or better than doom scrolling through Tick Tock or Instagram reels. Now to my point. Point. So I often think of in these times in which I live as I get older I think of or I wonder what my father would have said about times such as these. My father

was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He was born in the late 1940s in in northern Kentucky slash southern Ohio and and he was a man who was a hard working blue collar guy most of his life. He valued education. He valued the written word. He valued getting knowledge and understanding because that was the way out of the rural situation into which he was born. And the black rural underclass in the American south in the mid 20th century did not have it easy by any stretch of the imagination.

And so my father, who did towards the end of his life use the Internet for genealogical research purposes, he was fascinated by finding out more about where his relatives came from from and who they were and, and ultimately, I guess, why they came here. He was fascinated by history. He was also, as most baby boomer generation folks are, he was fascinated by the Internet. I am less fascinated by the Internet. I've been through four revolutions. They feel like four

wars. And I've said this before on this show with guests, but I've been through four revolutions. And most folks who were born in between 1960 and 1979 or 1965 and 1979, depending upon sort of where you, where you hit Gen X at. Most of us have been through four or some cases five revolutions. First it started with the Internet and dial up. Then we all went through the, the dot com

revolution. Then we went through social media and the rise of the promise of virtual reality and then cryptocurrencies, most notoriously blockchain and bitcoin powered by blockchain. And then we got to the promise of, and we are at the dawn of the cusp of the promise of algorithmic power delivered to us through the LLMs. But what does all this have to do with my father? What does this have to do with BH Liddell Hart? What does this have to do

with? Why don't we learn from history? Well, here's what this all has to do. I'm going to tie everything together for leaders here at the end.

The question for leaders, the question for my father. Question for me, the question for you. No matter what historical time in which we live, the question for us is why don't we learn from history? Why do we insist on believing that somehow we're better or smarter, more intelligent than those who came before us? Why do we confuse our technological prowess with actual hard earned wisdom? The 21st century is already shaping up to be a

time of technological wonder. I don't doubt that the next 50 years are going to deliver some of the most gee whiz, technological advancements ever imagined. And yet, and yet the human heart won't change, which means culture will continue to go through polarizations and splits, unitings and mergings, coming apart and moving togethers. If we are to avoid and by we, I mean us in the United States of America. But I also mean we as in humanity, and of course we

more generally in the West. If we are to avoid committing the same mistakes that our forefathers committed, only with greater levels of death, misery, loss, degradation and cultural stagnation than before, then we need to cling to the raft of history or we will find ourselves flung ashore and washed up on strange lands.

The farmer, the factory worker, the plumber and the PhD all need to put down their arrogance and their pride and their hubris, which our Internet searches have infected us with, and learn the hard lessons from history and then apply those hard lessons to fundamental problems that we have now. And understanding all the while that while technology may change, and while those wonders I do believe will occur, that's also not assured. While technology may change, human nature

fundamentally does not. We can do nothing or very little, little to change human nature. Human power can't do it. Mark Zuckerberg is still going to be greedy and Sam Altman is still going to have a lust for power. The bad orange man is still going to be bad and the lady who ran for president is still going to be power hungry. Those problems of power, of greed or desire for power, lust for power, avarice, greed, self deception, these problems can only be resolved by changing the human heart.

And the changes of the human heart are reflected in how we study history. I am going to advocate here, here at the end of this show today and for the remainder of our time for a more conservative reading of history. And I don't mean conservative as in politically conservative, although these days everything is political.

Am I right? A more conservative reading of history would look at history as a struggle not between the forces of progress and the forces of stagnation, but instead it would look at history as a struggle, an endless struggle, a as Superman might say, a never ending battle of men, and I mean women and men of humans to overcome themselves and to overcome their base instincts more often rather than less often. And to do so,

not to become great. I actually kind of agree with what BH Ladell Hart said there about great men. Not to become great, but merely to be better than those who came before them and better just meaning making all new mistakes with all different sins. A more conservative reading of history is what we require as a nation state. It's what we require as individuals. It's what we require in our educational systems. It's what we require in our TikTok videos. It's what we require

in our houses, around our dinner tables. It's what we require in the conversations we have with our kids. It's what we require in the conversations we have with ourselves after we put down our books and we reflect, sitting quietly on a park bench like Keanu Reeves in that meme, just eating lunch. It's also what we require in order to avoid the exegesis, the exegesis of war and conflict. Is it better to have fights on social media than it is to shoot your neighbor?

I don't know. Is it better to outsource your base

desires to objects and to animals that cannot reciprocate than to try to unite and connect with human beings that are flawed and angry and probably don't want to connect with you or are going to have their own problems? Maybe. Is it better to sever connections from people and families who disrespect you and deny whatever you may believe your core

identity is? Maybe. Maybe not. These are questions, among many, many others that history and literature can answer more definitively for us than any business book, politician, economic theory, or social theory of ordering people ever could. Why don't we study history? I don't really. But we're gonna find out, right? And. Well, that's it for me.