Okay, so I have a ridiculously long and detailed set of thoughts about this escape plan and its ineffectiveness, and why it may have been the best plan he was capable of. The obvious differences I've run through in another comment: he was only 18, he was living in a state where his father had absolute power, he didn't have an army at his disposal, etc.
But the core of my reservations about the "cry for attention" is that there is a tendency among humans to attribute purpose to everything they see. Though the term "teleological fallacy" is usually reserved for creationism/evolution debates, I would like to see the term used more broadly, because this fallacy is so widespread in human thinking that it crops up everywhere.
In particular, there is a tendency among people to think that if someone is doing something self-defeating, they must be getting something out of it, they must have some reason, it must be by design. The fact that the outside observer can see that that there are really obvious and apparently easy ways to improve their situation means they must be doing it on purpose.
In the psychodynamics school of thought, this is called "secondary gain." Major example: depressed people must be getting something out of their depression. Attention, not having to work, etc. This is among the most pernicious and methodologically unsound concepts out there in psychology. Depressed people, by and large, don't know how to not be depressed! Even in the cases where they can articulate better ideas in words, they're in too much emotional overload to be able to get the right neurons to fire in the right order.
Society is guilty of this too: troubled teens are "rebellious" and "defiant", not struggling with problems that are too big for them to handle. (I saw someone summarize this beautifully as "We treat teenagers like they *are* problems, not like they *have* problems.")
So I am immediately suspicious when someone breaks out the "bad idea" -> "cry for attention" assumption. Depressed people and troubled teens may well also be crying out for attention. But it isn't necessarily driving their self-defeating behavior.
There are very good reasons to believe that this was the best plan Fritz could have come up with at the time, that he genuinely believed it would succeed, and that it was only with hindsight that an older Fritz, like we ourselves, could look back and say, "Who on earth thought that plan was a good idea?"
One is that he'd been intermittently trying to run away for almost a year, and apparently had not yet set off his father's rage (details are sparse, but the very fact that details are sparse means it wasn't a huge deal on the scale of the final, catastrophic attempt). So either these were escalating attempts to get attention, or he was genuinely trying to get away and failing because it was a difficult problem relative to his resources and skill set of the time.
There's also evidence that his escape attempts correlated with the bleakness of his fluctuating marital prospects. He and Wilhelmine clearly saw their marital future as an escape, literal and metaphorical, from Dad. (In the end, both ended up marrying less desired partners as part of a bargain whereby FW agreed to treat 20-something Fritz a little better.) So, if there was no light at the end of the tunnel called marriage, that was when he decided to look for another escape.
Another reason is that Fritz does not strike me as one of those neglected children/teens who will do anything to get a reaction out of indifferent parents, even if it means getting punished. (Neglected children are one of the few cases where I accept that people are, very consciously in most cases, acting out to get attention.) He was getting abundant positive attention from his mother and older sister for doing things he enjoyed. He craved his father's approval, yes, but he was getting so much punishment and was under the royal paternal microscope so much that it's hard to believe he wanted more attention. At best, a halfhearted escape attempt may have been a game of chicken where Fritz thought, "If I show him I'm serious and I won't take this, maybe it'll force his hand even without me going all the way to England." But I kind of think he thought that after it failed (and before the consequences turned catastrophic), not before.
Another reason is that, as part of the plot around the final escape attempt, he sent a note to one of the conspirators (Katte?) right as he set off on the road trip with his father where he planned to make his escape, and the note read, roughly, "We've accounted for everything, this is our best laid plan, no way is it going to gang agley."
This note reads amazingly similarly to me to what Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his diary in Antarctica as he and the last of his surviving men lay freezing and starving to death. "We accounted for everything. We just got unlucky, and we have to accept that." Meanwhile, you need more than two hands to enumerate the mistakes he made that his contemporary and rival Amundsen avoided, which allowed Amundsen to beat Scott to the Pole by several weeks and bring all his men home safely, as opposed to every single one dying.
But Frederick the Great was smarter than that!
Not necessarily. One, abuse victims are notoriously bad at escaping from their abusers. In many cases, this is because most of the resources in their brain are being commandeered by the amygdala, which screams really simple things like, "Run away! Fight! PANIC!", as opposed to the more elaborate plans that calmer and more sophisticated parts of the brain can come up with if left alone.
Two, there is a real case to be made that Friedrich has historically been mistaken for a tactical genius, when really what was going on was that he had great talents at various aspects of war that weren't battlefield tactics. It is very easy to look at the number of battles someone won and attribute that to their personal tactical acumen.
Now, I personally haven't scrutinized this claim that he won most of his battles through means other than the famed and possibly overrated oblique order. But my impression is that it does seem to be based on more thorough examination of the documentary evidence than the usual approach I see of drawing a diagram of the battle field, describing the movements of the troops, and concluding that the winner's tactics were superior. The last time I personally scrutinized Friedrich's tactics, 1) it was using sources that employed the latter approach, and 2) I was 15-16.
BUT. Evidence for underestimating his opponents, scapegoating his officers and troops, and general lack of self-awareness is so incontrovertible that it's acknowledged even by his diehard fans, and this behavior would seem to be consistent with the lack of self-awareness that went into "this is the best plan ever, it's going to work great, we have nothing to worry abou--OH SHIT."
It's clear that he underestimated his father's reaction when he was caught and started talking and giving out names. It's just as clear that he spent the rest of his life underestimating person after person, and army after army.
One of his biographers says on the one hand that the escape plan was so "hamfisted" that it's very plausible he meant to be caught, and then, many chapters later, argues that adult Friedrich was completely overrated as a tactician and strategist, and does this without ever noticing the possibility for consistency between the eighteen-year-old runaway and the fifty-year-old general.
So...I would say that it's obvious he didn't see getting caught as the catastrophic outcome it turned out to be. So he may not have taken the precautions he would have had he anticipated his father's reaction. And having been caught, he reacted the same way he reacted to every major power in Europe at one time or another, and often at the same time: piss everyone off with the non-stop snarking, even when not in his or his country's best interests.
But was he not making a serious attempt to get away? Was it a subconscious, half-conscious, or conscious cry for attention? There are definitely other possibilities, imo.
Actually it's escaping at least metaphorically in Schiller and Verdi too, of course -- you probably remember that in that clip Carlo says he wants to escape from the court and be sent to Flanders.
Yep! And this is the part where I was going to talk about the political aspects of the escape attempt (it wasn't all just running away from abusive Dad, which is part of the reason Dad overreacted so much), but then Selenak kindly went and did it for me, yay.
In short, I'll just say that his dawning discovery of the involvement of foreign powers was what pushed FW over from "God, my fucking son again," into paranoid insistence that *technically* Fritz, Katte, and Keith were *deserters* and *technically* that's the death penalty and *technically* it's important to always go by the letter of the law and maximum penalty because high-sounding ideals like *justice*, even when you on a different occasion allow your most favorite son to talk you into sparing some less important deserter.
no subject
Okay, so I have a ridiculously long and detailed set of thoughts about this escape plan and its ineffectiveness, and why it may have been the best plan he was capable of. The obvious differences I've run through in another comment: he was only 18, he was living in a state where his father had absolute power, he didn't have an army at his disposal, etc.
But the core of my reservations about the "cry for attention" is that there is a tendency among humans to attribute purpose to everything they see. Though the term "teleological fallacy" is usually reserved for creationism/evolution debates, I would like to see the term used more broadly, because this fallacy is so widespread in human thinking that it crops up everywhere.
In particular, there is a tendency among people to think that if someone is doing something self-defeating, they must be getting something out of it, they must have some reason, it must be by design. The fact that the outside observer can see that that there are really obvious and apparently easy ways to improve their situation means they must be doing it on purpose.
In the psychodynamics school of thought, this is called "secondary gain." Major example: depressed people must be getting something out of their depression. Attention, not having to work, etc. This is among the most pernicious and methodologically unsound concepts out there in psychology. Depressed people, by and large, don't know how to not be depressed! Even in the cases where they can articulate better ideas in words, they're in too much emotional overload to be able to get the right neurons to fire in the right order.
Society is guilty of this too: troubled teens are "rebellious" and "defiant", not struggling with problems that are too big for them to handle. (I saw someone summarize this beautifully as "We treat teenagers like they *are* problems, not like they *have* problems.")
So I am immediately suspicious when someone breaks out the "bad idea" -> "cry for attention" assumption. Depressed people and troubled teens may well also be crying out for attention. But it isn't necessarily driving their self-defeating behavior.
There are very good reasons to believe that this was the best plan Fritz could have come up with at the time, that he genuinely believed it would succeed, and that it was only with hindsight that an older Fritz, like we ourselves, could look back and say, "Who on earth thought that plan was a good idea?"
One is that he'd been intermittently trying to run away for almost a year, and apparently had not yet set off his father's rage (details are sparse, but the very fact that details are sparse means it wasn't a huge deal on the scale of the final, catastrophic attempt). So either these were escalating attempts to get attention, or he was genuinely trying to get away and failing because it was a difficult problem relative to his resources and skill set of the time.
There's also evidence that his escape attempts correlated with the bleakness of his fluctuating marital prospects. He and Wilhelmine clearly saw their marital future as an escape, literal and metaphorical, from Dad. (In the end, both ended up marrying less desired partners as part of a bargain whereby FW agreed to treat 20-something Fritz a little better.) So, if there was no light at the end of the tunnel called marriage, that was when he decided to look for another escape.
Another reason is that Fritz does not strike me as one of those neglected children/teens who will do anything to get a reaction out of indifferent parents, even if it means getting punished. (Neglected children are one of the few cases where I accept that people are, very consciously in most cases, acting out to get attention.) He was getting abundant positive attention from his mother and older sister for doing things he enjoyed. He craved his father's approval, yes, but he was getting so much punishment and was under the royal paternal microscope so much that it's hard to believe he wanted more attention. At best, a halfhearted escape attempt may have been a game of chicken where Fritz thought, "If I show him I'm serious and I won't take this, maybe it'll force his hand even without me going all the way to England." But I kind of think he thought that after it failed (and before the consequences turned catastrophic), not before.
Another reason is that, as part of the plot around the final escape attempt, he sent a note to one of the conspirators (Katte?) right as he set off on the road trip with his father where he planned to make his escape, and the note read, roughly, "We've accounted for everything, this is our best laid plan, no way is it going to gang agley."
This note reads amazingly similarly to me to what Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his diary in Antarctica as he and the last of his surviving men lay freezing and starving to death. "We accounted for everything. We just got unlucky, and we have to accept that." Meanwhile, you need more than two hands to enumerate the mistakes he made that his contemporary and rival Amundsen avoided, which allowed Amundsen to beat Scott to the Pole by several weeks and bring all his men home safely, as opposed to every single one dying.
But Frederick the Great was smarter than that!
Not necessarily. One, abuse victims are notoriously bad at escaping from their abusers. In many cases, this is because most of the resources in their brain are being commandeered by the amygdala, which screams really simple things like, "Run away! Fight! PANIC!", as opposed to the more elaborate plans that calmer and more sophisticated parts of the brain can come up with if left alone.
Two, there is a real case to be made that Friedrich has historically been mistaken for a tactical genius, when really what was going on was that he had great talents at various aspects of war that weren't battlefield tactics. It is very easy to look at the number of battles someone won and attribute that to their personal tactical acumen.
Now, I personally haven't scrutinized this claim that he won most of his battles through means other than the famed and possibly overrated oblique order. But my impression is that it does seem to be based on more thorough examination of the documentary evidence than the usual approach I see of drawing a diagram of the battle field, describing the movements of the troops, and concluding that the winner's tactics were superior. The last time I personally scrutinized Friedrich's tactics, 1) it was using sources that employed the latter approach, and 2) I was 15-16.
BUT. Evidence for underestimating his opponents, scapegoating his officers and troops, and general lack of self-awareness is so incontrovertible that it's acknowledged even by his diehard fans, and this behavior would seem to be consistent with the lack of self-awareness that went into "this is the best plan ever, it's going to work great, we have nothing to worry abou--OH SHIT."
It's clear that he underestimated his father's reaction when he was caught and started talking and giving out names. It's just as clear that he spent the rest of his life underestimating person after person, and army after army.
One of his biographers says on the one hand that the escape plan was so "hamfisted" that it's very plausible he meant to be caught, and then, many chapters later, argues that adult Friedrich was completely overrated as a tactician and strategist, and does this without ever noticing the possibility for consistency between the eighteen-year-old runaway and the fifty-year-old general.
So...I would say that it's obvious he didn't see getting caught as the catastrophic outcome it turned out to be. So he may not have taken the precautions he would have had he anticipated his father's reaction. And having been caught, he reacted the same way he reacted to every major power in Europe at one time or another, and often at the same time: piss everyone off with the non-stop snarking, even when not in his or his country's best interests.
But was he not making a serious attempt to get away? Was it a subconscious, half-conscious, or conscious cry for attention? There are definitely other possibilities, imo.
Actually it's escaping at least metaphorically in Schiller and Verdi too, of course -- you probably remember that in that clip Carlo says he wants to escape from the court and be sent to Flanders.
Yep! And this is the part where I was going to talk about the political aspects of the escape attempt (it wasn't all just running away from abusive Dad, which is part of the reason Dad overreacted so much), but then Selenak kindly went and did it for me, yay.
In short, I'll just say that his dawning discovery of the involvement of foreign powers was what pushed FW over from "God, my fucking son again," into paranoid insistence that *technically* Fritz, Katte, and Keith were *deserters* and *technically* that's the death penalty and *technically* it's important to always go by the letter of the law and maximum penalty because high-sounding ideals like *justice*, even when you on a different occasion allow your most favorite son to talk you into sparing some less important deserter.
Me: *imagines the state of your inbox today* haha