After his dismissal by the young Kaiser, Bismarck left two warnings. The famous one: "Jena came twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great; the crash will come twenty years after my departure if things go on like this" — "which came just about exactly in time" (Marshall notes the firing and WWI were separated by 26 years, treated as different eras of history though the same man did both). The more striking one: "Your Majesty, so long as you have this present officer corps, you can do as you please. But when this is no longer the case, it will be very different for you." Marshall's reading: Bismarck was trying to invoke "Get behind me, Satan!"-type thinking in Wilhelm II. By the late 1800s it was no longer fashionable to believe Satan poisoned your thinking, and it "would not fit decorum to tell the Kaiser that his own ideas, intuitions, and feelings were very dangerous." So Bismarck externalized the danger: "Be careful with this new round of officers whispering poison and blunt aggression into your ears. Do not put faith in them." But who chooses the officers? Wilhelm II. The criticism was really an attempt to make the Kaiser treat some of his own intuition and thinking as potentially dangerous — "putting that 'enemy soldiers' check and balance on Wilhelm II's thinking" — when saying it directly was impossible. --- *Source: [[Book Inventory/Progression|Progression]] (Sebastian Marshall, 2016) — Uncommon Virtues #5 — Counterintuition*