Many years ago my father began to compile a list of sayings that he believed would serve as good guideposts for his sons as they moved through life. I will not get into all of them, but one such saying was “when the dictator starts wearing capes, he is soon to fall.” This was an allusion to General Augusto Pinochet, who my father was on personally good terms with when our family lived in Chile, but also figures such Idi Amin, Shah Reza Pahlavi and Muammar Gaddafi. It was a play on the “emperor has no clothes” line, updated for the then- modern circumstances.
Since then I and people close to me have added to the list, including lines about sexual repression and absurd hats; thrones, large tables and relative power; ATVs, jet skis, dune buggies, drift cars and IQs; and and assorted lesser metaphors for syndromes common to both the the powerful and the powerless. In any event my brothers never quite had the same enthusiasm as I did for this list, perhaps because as the oldest I got to witness the list develop more fully before “el Viejo” passed away.
I have always kept the memory of his list and as mentioned have added a few of my own over the years. Not so much as a “rules to live by” anthology but more as a reminder mostly to myself of certain immutable truths. Here is another one:
“When the small head’s logic overrides the big head’s caution, then temporary pleasure will turn into long term pain.”
Although the personal dimension of this is obvious even to those who have not experienced it directly, the professional value of the adage is invaluable in service of defensive as well as an offensive intelligence-gathering purposes. That is, ensnarement schemes like honey traps are designed to turn that long term pain into targeted espionage gain if the target is not aware of the manipulation.
Nvidia’s Jensen Huang just found that out the hard (!) way.