TimothyThe television series “Versailles” kicks-off with the young king rapt in a dream. His younger brother is clutching their dying mother’s hand. Rhetorically, she asks if the dreamer is scared. She tells him as the younger breaks into tears that terrible things happen to kings. And then, she lets go history. She looks ahead to his times and perhaps beyond and reminds him of his destiny before concluding her monologue thus:
“And now, you dream of paradise,
But you must build it for yourself,
And let the world know,
Louis the Great has arrived.”
Thunder wakes him. “I had a vision” he tells his aid, “a dream about a palace. Bring my architect here in Versailles.” And from that morning, Louis XIV relentlessly pursued his dream. A luxurious palace rose in backyards of his father’s former hunting lodge. Power moved from Paris to this small and remote village of Versailles.
As he set forth in 1661 to his uncertain future, his kingdom, France, was bankrupt. Numerous plotted against him. How was he going to see his dream through? In the words of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, to tell it all or “to understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” meaning that it would take us several life times to truly know how Louis the Great did indeed become great.
Briefly we could say the following. He centralised power. He vigilantly collected taxes. He waged wars for the loot and for glory. He initiated and sealed trade deals cordially and otherwise. Here was a twenty-something young man trenching foundations for a new France and underwriting his glory for posterity.
In the second episode of the second season of this dramatisation of his reign, his aid whispers to him as the nobles stroll into the new palace to take-up residence: “Congratulations sire, your dream of Versailles is made flesh”. We too, some 350 years later, know all this to be true.
I obviously make no commission for this teaser on Versailles. But if I were to, I would replay the scene in which Louis XIV let go history like his mother did in his vision. In the scene, he has just been briefed of a foiled coup. All have been asked to leave the briefing room save his aid and the king’s brother. The king is breaking emotionally but collects himself and begins to talk.
He talks as any of us would of our backyards in our formative years — the paths we walked perhaps to school, the trees we climbed for fun or to pluck some fruit for a snack. He recites how, in those woods — the woods he knew so well, so intimately — the deer have for hundreds of years followed the same paths though, “once in a while”, one of them turns and takes its own path.
Should he be in the herd, be just another king in the tradition of kings or must he not be that once-in-a-while deer that take its own path? There is comfort in adhering to long-held traditions but it yields little progress. It nurtures defensiveness and reactionaries. It is in new paths with uncertainties that societies change their fortunes for better or for worse.
As I was writing this article, President Mnangagwa tweeted from the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Cape Town: “History is firmly in the past. We have to look to the future . . .” Interestingly, some fifteen years ago, the founder of the WEF Professor Klaus Schwab wrote the preface to a book titled “Resilience to risk: business success in turbulent times” authored by Sean Cleary and Thierry Malleret. The book is not so much on typical risks organisations face in their day-to-day operations (e.g. credit risk, exchange rate risk and so on) but on complex risks which present significant society-wide impact.
Examples of such include climate change-related catastrophes, pandemics, geopolitical security and so on. It discusses such risks after a lucid account of how as a civilisation we have, over centuries, tried to measure and manage uncertainties we face in our quests for progress.
Given limited data and information on such complex risks, (hence difficulties in qualifying them using standard planning and forecasting models), the discussion in “Resilience to Risk” is strategic than operational. It is a discussion that forces readers to wean themselves off existing knowledges when sketching and envisioning their future.
As Professor Schwab writes in the preface to the book, “the future cannot be predicted, but surely we can — and must — think about the forces that will shape it”. Such forces are not in the eloquence with which we articulate our histories but in overcoming our fixation on such histories.
As Austrian Economist Ludwig von Mises wrote back in 1949, “what distinguishes the successful promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinions about the future . . . In his action, he is directed by opinion about the future which deviates from those held by the crowd.”
Maybe this is the only lesson we need to carry over from history: that we leave it behind if we are to trench foundations of prosperity for posterity as the twenty-three-year-old set out to do in the France of 1661.
Bongani Ndlovu