Revolutions have the habit of replacing one set of tyrants with a new set of tyrants. Sure things have gotten more democratic over the past 2000 years. Life was harder under Julius Caesar than it is under George W. Bush, although Caesar was an intelligent statesman and Bush is a buffoon. But perhaps history is traveling in some Hegelian progression toward a certain end state, that being either perfection or ultimate destruction. I’d pick the latter...

I’m a firm believer in the “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” view of revolutions. Were the Bolsheviks a great improvement over Tsar Nicholas? How did Robespierre’s Reign of Terror and then Napoleon’s “enlightened” dictatorship stack up to Louis and Marie’s rule? Radical change sounds fun, so does public execution and guillotines, but the end result is chaos.

Revolutions are rarely “by the people, for the people”. They are instigated and engineered by a small minority who are seeking their own self-interested goals, mainly power. Even if this minority engineers the revolution with the intentions of spreading freedom and equality for all, the new rulers soon become corrupted by their power and sucked into the same system that corrupted the previous rulers.

You cannot defeat the system.

The system will always defeat you.

Thinking that you can defeat the system is using defeatist logic .

You will fail.

What did I learn from majoring in political science? Just say no when it comes to politics. Your life will be more pleasant. Political change is an illusion. You will only find peace with the outer world by discovering inner peace. In other words, acceptance.

That’s my defeatist lesson for the day.