I'll pick a better title later

Lenin and Trotsky were smart…but apparently not smart enough to beat Stalin. Intellect often underestimates its enemies; one way to feel smart, huh?

Every ideology is a strategy operating on a system whose full state cannot be known and whose future cannot be perfectly predicted.

History is full of examples where:

• reforms created new problems,

• revolutions created new elites,

• safety measures created risk compensation,

• optimization in one dimension degraded another.

That is why many traditions converge on humility:

• Tao Te Ching emphasizes non-forcing.

• Friedrich Hayek emphasizes dispersed knowledge.

• Karl Popper favors piecemeal social engineering over grand redesigns.

• Nassim Nicholas Taleb emphasizes hidden fragility and unforeseen effects.

One concise formulation of your thought might be:

Knowledge of what is does not yield knowledge of what ought to be.

Knowledge of what ought to be does not yield knowledge of what will be.

Therefore every strategy should be held with less certainty than its advocate…