Burke's Law
" An 18th-century Irish conservative foretold the new Cold War " Edmund Burke was not, by temperament, a pessimist. When he watched the French Revolution tear down every institution, tradition, and accumulated arrangement of French civilization in the name of abstract Reason, he did not cheer along with the intellectuals. He wrote a very long, very irritated letter which became Reflections on the Revolution in France, explaining exactly why he believed this was going to end badly. It ended badly. What infuriated him about the French Revolution was not the general public’s desire to improve things. It was the catastrophic confidence that you could tear everything down first and then build utopia from the rubble. On nothing more than pure philosophical reasoning. The Jacobins—the tech broligarchs of 18th-century France—were people who had read a great deal of Rousseau, developed strong opinions about abstract rights, and decided the most efficient path to a just...
