Hamilton: the Musical and the Folly of Chessmasters

Not that long ago I watched "Hamilton: the musical". While it’s a fictional depiction of historical events, I feel like anyone who wants to learn from Hamilton’s example should also learn from his mistakes, which the musical seemed to depict rather genuinely.

Hamilton grew up with a fundamental distrust of the rest of humanity due to gruesome and hellish poverty. He knew deep down in his bones that if he didn't do the work and make the changes he wanted himself, those changes simply wouldn't happen because no one else could be expected to take responsibility for those changes.

That kind of distrust is terrible in political leaders because then they won't trust other people enough to delegate to them when they need to. They'll try to do everything themselves because they know they can do it better than anyone else.

But one man’s thoughts and effort alone is never enough to sustain a civilization and make it thrive. Just because you can do most of the work better than anyone else doesn’t mean you should.

If you do everyone’s thinking for them it doesn’t matter if you’re better at thinking because then no one else has the chance to learn. And sometimes it’s better to have many people doing good poorly than to have just one person doing good really really well.

Hamilton should never have pursued a career in government. His thoughts and ideas had already had a profound impact on the zeitgeist of a new nation, and he would’ve had thousands of people who’d try to follow in his footsteps, if he’d only taught and encouraged them.

He could have taught his wisdom to the next generation and let them take the lead, instead of trying to do so much of the work himself. Ironically he would have realized this if he’d had better political and interpersonal skills.

This is the same reason why I will probably never trust myself with command of others. Growing up in isolation and captivity, without a community to rely on, in a civilization that ignorantly neglected and betrayed me again and again, has left something fundamentally broken inside me.

While it’s made me stronger and more independent of heart and mind, it’s also made me particularly unsuitable for governance. I don’t trust other people enough to know how to delegate to them enough on that scale. I would be so scared of messing up that I’d be indecisive at best, a control freak at worst.

So I give suggestions, but not orders.

If someone doesn't want to do what I ask of them, I can just ask someone else, or change what I'm asking for.

I dare not lead directly, but instead inspire and empower others to lead for me.

I provide the tools, I explain the situation and how I see things, I describe the problems I care about.

But I try to avoid making other people's decisions for them. Because if they were to delegate their decision-making to me on any kind of scale, I would likely disappoint them by trying too hard to minimize my mistakes and end up making different mistakes than the ones I would typically notice.

The folly of chess-masters like Hamilton is that their grand plans sorely lack redundancy. If they better understood the hearts and minds of others and saw them as fellow players rather than merely pieces on the gameboard, they would see that every "piece" they move is actually an ally who had to be persuaded to move.

If that ally wasn’t there, they would simply have needed to persuade someone else to be there. That means that manipulation and dishonesty are never necessary for the truly skilled political organizers.

And if you constantly fight all the time you’re not making as much of a difference as you could if you got your opposition on your side.

Chessmasters like Hamilton don’t understand this. They treat negotiation and politics like it’s war by other means, rather than as the building of mutually beneficial relationships and the recruitment of help for working on important collaborative projects.

That makes their plans fragile.