Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:

We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: Henri de Catt

[mildred_of_midgard]

2) Me too! Your icon stands. :)

And Fritz, however enlightened a monarch he was, was at his core a despot who needed to control people. And Voltaire was the ultimate uncontrollable person of his age.

Agreed. That's why, when you shared the quote about Fritz liking EC because she was so docile, I thought about replying, "And for once this isn't misogyny, it's legit control freak Fritz's criterion for the people he wants around him."

(Though this strikes me like asking an abused wife "so why did you only run away twice, never mind the beatings afterwards got worse?")

Right? The explanations aren't mutually exclusive, though: if you're stuck in a situation--I know I keep harping on rationalization, but it's something traumatized people do. (Also non-traumatized people. There's just so much neuroscientific evidence that a lot of our thought processes start in the limbic system, and then on top of that we build a superstructure of rational thought, whose whole purpose is to back up our emotions.)

Anyway, if Gundling was thinking about leaving but couldn't bring himself to try it again, he might very well come up with reasons why it was worth staying, in spite of everything. When at base, the real reason might just be plain old fear.