Channeling Napoleon and Chou En-Lai, by Charles Hugh Smith

We make predictions about things with absolute confidence but about which we know very little. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Where things will stand in three years in unknown. A little humility might serve us well, for it is indeed too soon to tell about a great many things.

Recent events call two quotes to mind, one from Napoleon Bonaparte and one from Chou En-Lai.

Napoleon: “Do you know what amazes me more than anything else? The impotence of force to organize anything.”

Chou En-Lai: “It’s too soon to tell.”

The current backdrop is one of simplistic declarations presented as certainties because these are rewarded by the algorithms. Remarkably, few of those confidently declaring their implicit expertise ever acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge and the limits of the Ultra-Processed “facts” presented by the various interests seeking to control the context, narrative and agenda.

I reckon it fair to say that Napoleon was well-placed to survey the limits of force. That he is reputed to have observed “There are only two powers in the world: the spirit and the sword. In the long run, the sword will always be conquered by the spirit” makes sense in the context of the limits of the sword and other manifestations of force.

The phrase in the long run brings us to Chou En-Lai’s “It’s too soon to tell.” Chou En-Lai (Zhou Enlai) was the People’s Republic of China’s first foreign minister and Premier, the statesman / diplomat who guided foreign policy while surviving Mao’s tumultuous purges.

In the usual telling, while meeting with American officials during President Nixon’s February, 1972 visit to China, Zhou was asked (in some tellings by Henry Kissinger, in others by Nixon) what he thought of the French Revolution, which occurred some 180 years earlier in 1789-1793.

Zhou’s reply–“It’s too soon to tell”–is presented as evidence of China’s long game perspective that reflects China’s long history and sagacious avoidance of rash judgments.

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