What You Do Is Who You Are by Ben Horowitz EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Ben Horowitz
- Language: English
- Genre: Business Teams
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Culture and Revolution: The Story
of Toussaint Louverture
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Blood of a slave, heart of a king.
—Nas
After I sold my company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 and helped
with the transition, I had nothing to do. As an entrepreneur, I had trained
myself to think in contrarian ways. The secret to finding a breakthrough
idea, as Peter Thiel says, is that you have to believe something that nobody
else does. So I started thinking about ideas that everyone believes. The first
that came to mind was “Slavery was so incredibly horrible that it’s almost
unimaginable that it existed at such scale.” What was the contrarian point of
view?
What if it were more shocking that slavery ever ended? As absurd as that
sounded, once I dug into the matter, I felt like I might be onto something.
Slavery had been around since the beginning of recorded history. It was
endorsed by all the major religions; long and detailed sections of the Bible
and the Koran are dedicated to it. In the 1600s, more than half of the
world’s population was enslaved. How did it ever end? The stamping out of
slavery is one of humanity’s great stories. And the best story within that
story is the Haitian Revolution.
In our long history, there has been only one successful slave revolution
that led to an independent state. There were surely uprisings by the slaves
of the Han Dynasty and the Christian slaves of the Ottoman Empire, and
there are numerous accounts of rebellions by some of the ten million
Africans held in bondage during the slave trade that thrived from the
fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. But only one revolt succeeded.
Certainly, strong motivation fueled every attempt—there is no more
inspiring cause than freedom. So why only one victory?
Slavery chokes the development of culture by dehumanizing its subjects,
and broken cultures don’t win wars. As a slave, none of your work accrues
to you. You have no reason to care about doing things thoughtfully and
systematically when you and your family members can be sold or killed at
any moment. To keep you from learning about other ways of life,
communicating with other slaves, or knowing what your masters are up to,
you are forbidden to learn to read and have no ready tools for accumulating
and storing knowledge. You can be raped, whipped, or dismembered at your
captor’s pleasure. This constellation of atrocities leads to a culture with low
levels of education and trust and a short-term focus on survival—none of
which help in building a cohesive fighting force.
So how did one man, born a slave, reprogram slave culture? How did
Toussaint Louverture build an army of slaves in Saint-Domingue (the
prerevolutionary name of Haiti) into a fighting force so fearsome it defeated
Spain, Britain, and France—the greatest military forces in Europe? How did
this slave army inflict more casualties on Napoleon than he would suffer at
Waterloo?
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