Show 72 - Mania for Subjugation II

Dan Carlin: One of the things that I find terrifying about life is how fortune can just turn on a dime. [...] And this bolt from the blue aspect of our existence is operating on every level, right? Your individual level, something can happen in your life. We are soft, squishy beings, and it doesn't take much for us to get hurt. I mean, so things happen all the time, right? Illnesses, things strike a bolt from the blue in your personal life. But this works on the giant super macro scale, too. Something happens and all of our worlds are thrown in a completely different direction as quickly as a billiard ball caroms off another billiard ball and changes its trajectory entirely. I mean, if you're old enough to have consciously lived through something like the 9-11 attacks, you know what that's like. That's wake up in one world, go to bed that night in a completely different world and know it. And Pearl Harbor was that way too, just to take a couple of American things, but this is so common, every people on the planet can name historical bolts from the blue that had that same sort of an effect in their world. It's not uncommon at all, right? In your personal life, all the way up to global affairs. And in a lot of cases, we should remember a bolt from the blue that impacts global affairs can still be a bolt from the blue at ground zero on an individual level too. I mean, to just go back to the 9-11 attacks. We're all affected by the 9-11 attacks the minute it happens, right? Your sense of stability is upset. You don't know what's going to happen next. We're all a bit traumatized. But the families of people who died in the 9-11 attacks, well, they get all of that we get, and then they get the impact on ground zero in their family where they've suffered a bolt from the blue where the ripples of pain will continue to emanate in their individual world for a generation two or three, right?

Dan Carlin: For 20-year-old Alexander III, right, the future Alexander the Great as we will know him, it's very possible watching his dad get stabbed to death publicly in front of a crowd of, for the most part, important people, to watch that from a few feet away, well, that has the potential to be both those things, doesn't it? Because obviously, you take out the most important person in the history of that region, if we're talking about sort of the great man theory of history, or the just in the geopolitical kings conquest, you know, politics, realpolitik and all that sort of stuff, you're taking out the most important figure, potentially in the history of the region. If not, one of the top ones, certainly the most important during this time period, you take out this guy, you changed the whole world. I mean, you tried to find other people in history where it would have been this big. Well, what about Hitler in 1940? Not to compare the two in a moral sense, but I mean, you take out Adolf Hitler in 1940 or 1939, and you can't even fantasize on how things are different. And you could say the same thing about someone like, Franklin Roosevelt or Churchill too. And no question, had those two died of a heart attack or something at the start of the Second World War, a bazillion things change in major ways. But those systems of diffused power and sorts of internal rules of succession and all that would have fared much better, right? The US is just going to plug a different president into the White House. And it's going to be different, but in a lot of ways it's not. You take Hitler from the leadership position of Germany right at the start of the Second World War, and you can't even imagine what happens. And the situation in Macedonia when Philip II is murdered is much more similar to that. It has to do with the fact that so much power is wrapped up in one person, right? And the system itself isn't really set up for what happens without that person. They've created this intricate web that really relies on them being the spider in the middle of it for it to all work. And you take the spider out and then what do you have? So that is a 9-11 moment, right? The minute it happens, everybody watching it knows that everything has changed. They don't know how it's changed. And I get this sense after Philip's murder that everyone's walking around the way we were walking around for the next week after the 9-11 attacks. We all had like little swirls in our eyes and we just couldn't believe or absorb what had happened. And it was like everyone was experiencing this at the same time.