When a crowd reaches sufficient size, it begins to operate according to its own laws. No longer a collection of individuals, each with their own thoughts, dreams, and reasons, it becomes a discrete entity, greater and more powerful than the sum of its multitudes.
Like a stormfront slowly churning and growing miles off-shore, people, when gathered in crowds, are governed by natural laws but wholly unpredictable, subject to the whims and chances of fate. Will the storm fall harmlessly over the ocean, or will it continue to grow, gathering more molecules of water into itself as it slowly roils the sea beneath until it at last reaches the shore to unleash death and destruction?
Studying the collective behavior of individuals in large groups has been my life’s work, and I am quite good at it. We have a term for this type of study, populometrics, though it won’t be invented until you who are reading this have been dead for centuries.
Consider how, to those who came before you, the chaotic interplay of particles leading to the formation of complex weather patterns was shrouded in mystery. Now, the prediction of weather, once a power capable of being wielded only by sorcerers or charlatans, has become so routine, so expected, that you feel entitled to curse its failure should you become inconvenienced by a mistaken forecast. The power of prediction your society has reached in this regard is imperfect, certainly, and it becomes more so the further ahead it is called to chart, but it is within your grasp.
The ability of populometricists, such as myself, to predict the actions of populations and nations is at a similar level of accuracy. It is possible, and our projections are often right, but it is imperfect and liable to faulty predictions and mistaken forecasts. This is especially true if you introduce a confounding factor: say, other travelers through time who are working to oppose your ends.
I don’t know why I am bothering to pen this missive.
I suppose old age causes us all to pause and reflect, to look back at our life and what we have done with it and wonder whether any of it mattered, whether we made a difference, whether we used our time wisely or if the paths not chosen would have led to a better life. It is certain that almost no one will read this, and those who do will be unable to either believe or understand what I am saying, but I find myself plowing ahead regardless, heedless of the folly.
Like Sisyphus, standing shoulders slumped at the bottom of the hill, facing, yet again, the old nemesis, that massive rock speckled with mud and towering above me, I stretch my aching muscles, massage my trembling calves, lower my shoulder, and begin once again to push.
I have walked through centuries and across oceans of time. I have witnessed, caused, or failed to stop, many events now famous in your history books and many more of which you remain ignorant, but upon which the fate of nations and empires turned.
I sat in the shadows of an open-air market in Antioch and watched the death throes of a merchant who would have raised the flag of rebellion. A rebellion that would unite the Roman empire under the banner of Christendom 100 years before the reign of Constantine, and would cause untold suffering and a Dark Age that would span 1,000 years. And when the news of his passing was delivered to his family and they mourned him, I watched that too.
I nudged a harried rabbit into the trap of a starving hunter who would, in old age, join a monastery and preserve the last copy of a fading manuscript. A manuscript that would later find its way into the hands of a new breed of scholars who questioned everything and were eager to understand the world and man’s place in it. I waylaid envoys bearing messages of import, I slipped poison into or out of countless cups, I was, in hundreds of ways and multitudes of places, the nail, for want of which, a kingdom was lost.
There were a thousand such actions, some big and some small, in which I tried to influence this world for the better.
With the distance of time, and the dispassion of old age, I think I can safely say that I failed more often than I succeeded. There were a few successes, to be sure, the machinations to place Ashoka on the throne were some of my more inspired, and the felling of Huey Long which I orchestrated forestalled his run for presidency in 1936 and the brutal civil war that would leave the Axis free reign over Europe and beyond. But I can remember far more times when I had to sit quietly by and watch our well-laid plans fall apart and the world slip into ignorance and terror once more.
I was there with Savonarola in his cell, on that long, cold, night as we watched the workers shrouded in moonlight erect the pyre for his execution. I could not understand where we stepped wrong, what defect in his character that we missed in our endless research and calculations. When he first began preaching to the poor, when he reminded the people of Florence of the true teachings of their Jesus and urged them to seize with their own hands his promise of equality and justice for all of Christ’s children, I thought we had succeeded beyond our wildest hopes.
But then, as always, the righteous sense of purpose, the drive that lives within us all to make a world better than the one we were given, became twisted and poisoned once the levers of power were seized. Once the purity of the cause met the grubby reality of governance, the cracks appeared and the ugly, selfish, features of human nature came again to the fore.
When they first began marching in the streets, his followers sang of fellowship and mercy, but once in control, those same beliefs became contorted by dogmatism and unflinching zealousness. When the bonfires began, and books, instruments of learning, and secular works of art were consigned to the flames along with the vanities of the rich, I knew we had failed again.
I was there too, in the streets of Paris, standing shoulder to shoulder with its citizens, breathing in the smell of sweat and mutton and gunpowder, watching the people cheer, baying for blood as the guillotine fell again and again.
I had stood with the people in 1789, and, with a well-timed pistol shot, precipitated the charge against the bulwarks of the Bastille, that symbol of unreasoned totalitarianism that stood like a dark totem in a city that was ready for a new world. I watched in dismay as the sense of fellowship I had felt on that day, as the belief, newly formed in the crucibles of revolution, that we need not accept the world as it is, but can make one better through will and reason, slowly curdled and soured in the face of conspiracy and infighting.
As the streets of Paris ran red with blood, the people cast aside their faith in reason, and searched about for a strongman who might protect them from themselves.
I have seen hundreds of such failures. I have stood in the torchlight of Masada and watched the last few besieged rebels hold swords with trembling hands as they steeled themselves to take their own lives, a last act of defiance against an empire that had ground them down.
In 1921 I fled from the war machine of the Bolsheviks under the cover of darkness, feeling the acrid burn of smoke in my lungs as I pulled on the oars of a small rowboat and watched the city of Kronstadt smolder. The sailors and citizens of that city had survived a World War and overthrown a King only to learn, too late, that regimes which rise to power under banners of freedom and equality can commit acts more horrible than the most bloodthirsty tyrant in the name of those causes.
For every failure, for every rebellion that ended in bloodshed, we could not figure out how we erred, where our calculations went awry. Now that I finally have, I fear I may be too late.
Predicting the behavior of peoples requires exquisite data collection and computation powers that are beyond the imagination of this time. And it is still prone to mistakes, to errors.
We finally came to understand that there was another power in our time. One that was hidden, and was working against us. Its agents had been stalking us through time and plotting their own course for history’s final destination. But this knowledge came too late, when the trap had already been sprung.
Our most recent failing, will I believe, be our last. My team is dead, and I can see no path to correct that which went wrong. The failure that I will tell you about has not happened yet, but it will. I cannot stop it; I will not be there.
Already, I know, they are searching for me and will soon find me. I was chased to this last bolthole in time like a desperate rat and here I must stay, cornered and waiting to be found.
All I can do now is play my last cards, and shout my warning into the void. I no longer have the tools to calculate what it would take to change what will happen, but I know before I begin that it is a lost cause. The agents of the enemy will be scouring the internet for warnings, I must lay my breadcrumbs carefully, in the most unlikeliest of places, hoping against hope that they will not be picked up by the animals of the wild, but will find their way into the hands of some citizen of this time who will recognize them for what they are: a warning of a future that must be stopped.
It was January 6, 2025, and we were monitoring a mob that had descended on the Capitol.
On this day, and in this place, it at first seemed like our calculations had been correct, that the crowd would disperse peacefully without major incident. That its members would return to their cars and airports and train stations in small groups, the proud banners and flags hanging limply in the fading sun, their lurid colors and cocky obscenities looking faintly ridiculous dispersed amongst the corporate chains and unimpressed urbanites.
Afterward, in their hotel rooms, the participants would post pictures and mock their enemies, would regale each other with tales of the minor skirmishes and shouting matches that had swirled around the edges of the charged crowd. But then they would return home. And this creaky, ailing democracy would continue to stagger on, bloody, but unbowed.
But that is not what happened.
Instead, some unpredictable alchemy of events, a car that backfired and caused the crowd to surge, a shove, that caused a ripple, that led to a flood, transformed a disorganized mass into a horde storming the Capitol, baying for blood.
They came over the barricades and entered the halls of power as if in a dream, as if they themselves could not believe this was happening. Their ranks were made up of insurance salesmen, and realtors, and plumbing technicians. They were good neighbors, they paid their bills on time and they coached the local little league. They lived comfortable lives, but could not escape a nagging feeling that something had gone wrong. That they were no longer afforded the respect they were due, and that someone, somewhere, was laughing at them.
They had grown up on simple stories of heroes and villains, and yearned so passionately to be the champion at the center of the story that they swallowed whole the fervid concoction of lies and conspiracies allowing them to play the part. They were soldiers in a righteous cause; they did not need to feel inferior to those who earned the accolades of intellectual achievement, who scaled the highest ranks of society, they alone could see that those marks of distinction were fraudulent and unearned. They could do their own research and see through the lies that kept everyone else trapped in a life empty of heroism and excitement.
I was there in 1914, as the grocery clerks, and retail assistants, and farmers marched in ranks together. With flowers raining down on their shoulders and patriotic songs following them, they marched into battle. They traded a life of safety and security for a lie spun out of glory and heroism.
On January 6, 2025, like those who marched into the trenches to die in the mud, I will again watch in horror as a people step willingly toward destruction in service of a lie. When the guns begin firing on that day, they will not cease for a long, long, time.