Today's Wisdom - Weimar, the Treadmill, and the Islamic Schism

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Today's wisdom explores:

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When war broke out in 1914, Germany abandoned the gold standard and chose to fund its war effort almost entirely by borrowing, gambling that a victorious Germany would repay the debt by annexing rich territory and squeezing reparations from the losers. Germany lost, and the bill turned against it. The Treaty of Versailles saddled the new Weimar Republic with colossal reparations payments to the Allies, on top of a mountain of existing war debt and an economy stripped of resources. Facing obligations it could not meet in gold or foreign currency, the government reached for the one tool it still controlled: the printing press. Rather than raise taxes on a resentful and exhausted population, it simply printed money to cover its deficits. What began as an emergency measure hardened into everyday policy.

The situation tipped into catastrophe in January 1923. France and Belgium, furious at Germany's failure to keep up reparations, sent troops to occupy the Ruhr. The German government called for passive resistance and the Ruhr's workers went on strike. The nation's most productive region stopped producing altogether, while the state kept paying the idle strikers with yet more freshly printed notes. Money poured out with nothing behind it, and at the peak the government had outsourced the printing to 133 companies running presses around the clock. The numbers became almost impossible to grasp. A US dollar, worth just over 4 marks before the war, cost 17,000 marks in January 1923 and around 4.2 trillion by November. Workers were paid twice a day and handed their wages to relatives to spend before they lost value.

Anyone who had saved money responsibly, above all the middle class and pensioners living on fixed incomes, watched a lifetime of savings evaporate. Those who held debts, land, or hard assets often emerged unscathed or even enriched. Farmers refused to sell food for currency that was worthless by nightfall, shortages spread, and food riots broke out as law and order frayed. In November 1923 it introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, backed by a mortgage on the nation's land and industry. One Rentenmark was exchanged for a trillion of the old ones and an exhausted public accepted the new money as confidence returned almost overnight. The economic wound healed, but the political one festered. Millions of ruined, embittered Germans had learned to distrust their fragile democracy, and in the chaos of that year a little-known agitator named Adolf Hitler made his first grab for power.

Almost everyone carries a quiet assumption that happiness is one purchase away. Once the pay rise comes through, once the new car sits in the drive, once the bigger house is bought, contentment will finally settle in for good. Psychologists have a name for why this rarely happens: the hedonic treadmill. The idea was coined by Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell in 1971, who observed that people habituate to almost any change in fortune, enjoying a brief spike of pleasure before drifting back to a stable personal baseline. The thrill of "more" becomes the new normal, and the new normal soon feels like nothing much at all. The dream car that thrilled you in week one becomes, within months, simply the thing you drive to work.

There is evidence for this in the form of a landmark 1978 study published under the title "Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?" Researchers interviewed three groups of people, namely 22 who had recently won large sums in the state lottery, with an average windfall of around $242,000, a matched group of 22 ordinary people as a control, and 29 who had been paralyzed in accidents. Each person rated how happy they were now, how happy they had been before the event, and how much pleasure they took from a list of humble everyday activities like eating breakfast, chatting with a friend, or watching television. The lottery winners were no happier in the present than the control group, and they rated life's small daily pleasures as noticeably less enjoyable. The paralyzed group, while less happy overall, actually took more pleasure from ordinary activities than the winners did.

What drives the treadmill is something researchers call the rising aspiration level, an idea the Stoics grasped two thousand years before psychology named it. Every gain you adapt to also lifts what you now expect, so the gap between what you have and what you want never actually closes. Seneca warned that a man who is not content with a little will never be content with a lot, and Epictetus taught that wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants. Later research has softened the bleakest version of the theory, since some blows like long-term unemployment and disability can leave lasting dents, and the happiness set point itself can gradually shift. What matters most is the practical wisdom. Because we adapt fastest to material things, which quickly fade into the background, spending on possessions delivers the poorest lasting return. The purchases that resist adaptation tend to be experiences, which we replay and fold into our sense of who we are, along with anything that deepens relationships or buys back free time. There is nothing wrong with wanting more, but a life spent entirely in pursuit of the next reward tends to overlook the one that has been sitting quietly in front of you all along.

The greatest division in Islam began over a single unresolved question of succession. When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632 CE, he had united much of Arabia under a new faith, yet he left no universally agreed instruction on who should lead the community after him. Two answers emerged, and the community split along the fault line between them. One group held that the leader should be chosen by consensus among the community's respected elders. They selected Muhammad's close friend and father-in-law, Abu Bakr, as the first caliph. The other group insisted that leadership belonged by right to Muhammad's own bloodline, specifically to his cousin and son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib. From the phrase shiat Ali, meaning "the party of Ali," comes the word Shia, while the majority took their name from the sunna, the traditions of the Prophet, becoming the Sunnis.

What began as a political disagreement hardened into a permanent schism through blood. Ali eventually did become the fourth caliph, but only after the two men who held the office before him had been assassinated, and Ali himself was murdered in 661 during the bitter power struggle that followed. The true breaking point, the wound that still defines Shia identity today, came in 680 at the Battle of Karbala in modern Iraq. There, Ali's son Husayn, the Prophet's own grandson, refused to pledge allegiance to the Umayyad ruler Yazid, whom he regarded as corrupt and illegitimate. Intercepted in the desert with a small band of around 72 followers and family members, Husayn and his companions were surrounded, cut off from water, and slaughtered. The killing of the Prophet's grandson sent a shockwave through the Muslim world that never fully faded, and for Shia Muslims Husayn became the supreme martyr.

Over the centuries the two branches developed into distinct traditions, though they share far more than divides them, agreeing on the core pillars of Islam, the oneness of God, and the Quran. The deepest theological difference flows from that original quarrel over leadership. Sunnis, who today make up roughly 85 to 90 percent of the world's Muslims, follow a tradition of religious authority based on scholarly consensus and the community. Shias, the minority concentrated in Iran, Iraq, and parts of the wider region, believe in the Imamate, holding that spiritual authority passed down through a line of divinely inspired Imams descended from Ali. Their differing sense of history shapes their whole religious temperament, with Sunni tradition emphasizing communal unity and legal continuity, while Shia devotion is colored by the memory of Karbala and the themes of sacrifice and suffering. It is worth remembering that for most of history the two have coexisted peacefully.

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The A Little Wiser Team