Couple thousand years?

For when they could have started personal development projects or for when they actually did all this?

The war began almost two thousand years ago and ended about fourteen hundred years ago. Probably the best time for the personal development would've been before that.

I still don't have like, a book's worth of context on the local stuff, so I probably shouldn't keep making unenlightened Hitler comparisons.

I certainly don't mind?

I think Hitler decided to round up and murder twelve million people of ethnic backgrounds he did not care for because this was in fact his goal and he would not have been in a position to tell in advance that a personal development project ought reasonably aim away from that.

- well I don't think that...the people who did this... were making exactly the same mistake as that. Because that sounds like a pretty easy mistake to avoid making.

You'd think. I don't wanna say people commit genocide all the time on Earth, it's still, like, noteworthy, but we do have to have a name for it.

- do you want the whole story? I'm not the best person to tell it but I can, if that's easier than - trying to build a lot of bridges between concepts that don't quite line up.

If there's a better person to tell it I don't wanna make you go through it all the umpteenth time.

I don't mind. I don't mind thinking about it - I need to -

Valinor had three tribes of Elves, each ruled by a King. The Kings were the men who'd first visited Valinor and then returned to persuade people to join them there, and they built Elven civilization in Valinor and resolved disputes and - I don't actually know when the concept was introduced that kingship should be inherited, but it was introduced by the Valar. They know bits and pieces of the divine plan, but not only do they not know very much of it - it sometimes seems like they know specifically inconvenient bits of it.  Elves sometimes have the capacity for prophecy ourselves, and it works self-protectively; you don't see things that'd inspire you to change them. But the way the Valar's foreknowledge shapes things is beyond that. If they'd said that kings chose their successors from other tribes, so that the peoples did not become too separated, we'd have done that, or if they'd said that the people - elect the kings like you do it -

The King of the Noldor was my great-grandfather. His eldest son was my grandfather. My great-grandmother died giving birth to my grandfather. It's said that this is because he was an unusually gifted child, and took too much out of her. It's said that he carried the Marring of the world into Valinor. It's said that she foresaw his future and it killed her.  People say lots of things. And on this in particular - the first evil in all of Valinor - the more convenient narrative was shifting all the time. 

My great-grandfather remarried. He had other sons, they didn't get along. My grandfather ran away as a child, married very very young, they reconciled only tentatively and much later.

- I'm sorry, this must all seem terribly irrelevant.

It did occur to me to wonder how the definition of relevance expands by the time you're thousands of years old but it's not like I have another appointment.

It's important because it's where they made mistakes. My great-grandfather favored his firstborn. Everyone did, he was a genius. The best in the world at - I wanted to tell you 'everything he put his mind to' but only because then it'd be less obvious - he was the best in the world at linguistics. He invented writing. He learned the language of the gods, which no one else has succeeded at. He added tens of thousands of words to Quenya and there was a debate over every single one of them. He was the best in the world at engineering. He invented metalworking techniques, he invented magic artifact compression techniques.

He was brilliant, he was ambitious, he understood things clearly, he worked constantly - that might have been one of the errors. Most Elves sleep at least every other day and spend some of their time resting and singing and interacting with other people. It's important, lack of sleep causes people to have a harder time separating their own internal experiences from their model of the world and improves pattern recognition at some cost to spotting patterns that aren't there. And if you go too long without interacting with other people then it's easy to find the things in your head more compelling and more important than they are, it's easy to get worse at the skills involved in interacting with people and then the barriers to doing it go up and the pattern is self-reinforcing. 

People didn't know all of these things back then but they knew some of them and just gave him a pass on everything because he was the brilliant tormented tragic gifted crown prince. That was - he was making all these gorgeous things they enjoyed, while there was obviously something wrong with him, so that was the narrative that sat most comfortably for a long time. 

Humans can't sleep that little. Every other day would be unsustainable even with, like, drugs, I think. - you probably knew that.

If you want to imagine how concerning an Elf who sleeps less often than every two nights is I think the right reference for a human would be - someone who rarely sleeps for more than three or four hours? 

Okay.

He shakes his head distractedly. Anyway. The King never clarified the succession. This was because, while my grandfather was his favorite and everyone's favorite, he was clearly not temperamentally suited to be King. No one said so, of course. They had not succeeded in cultivating an atmosphere where you could. I don't think they were trying, because -- there are so many people who have opinions about you, when you rule, and hearing all of them all of the time if they're unfiltered is very upsetting, since cruel things cut deeper than compliments, and so there's an instinct to not have to hear upsetting things about the time. And that's all it takes. You just have to clearly not particularly want to hear upsetting things and there they are, all gone.

My grandfather was not suited to be king but nobody talked about it. The King was hardly going to name someone else his heir. It'd destroy their relationship, and also it'd feel absurd and insulting, to try to give someone else the right to rule my grandfather. And then my uncle Maitimo was born. My uncle Maitimo was as intelligent as my father but socially gifted, too, and he picked up on all of this at a very early age and helpfully positioned himself as the person obviously qualified to actually take over when the King retired, and so it shaped up that the plan -- which no one spoke of, as it'd involve acknowledging things they weren't acknowledging -- was for my grandfather to become King and then pass it down after a symbolically appropriate but certainly not long, stretch of time to his firstborn, who was more than worthy of it. 

This was a fine plan in some ways but some of how it worked depended on how it wasn't explicit, and that created a lot of space for people to believe they were acting on the King's will, later. 

If I die or am incapacitated or if the people close to me doubt my judgment or wellness, there's a group of five people here, three Elves and two Dwarves, who are to make decisions in Eregion in consultation with Cirdan, our neighbor. If it's an emergency then they each have absolute authority in different domains, with my advisor Nismal in charge. Everyone knows this, little children know it. There are probably problems with this way of doing things, too, just no one's discovered them yet.

I can't instantly come up with a problem with it assuming it's worked this long and all the people in question live forever.

He nods fervently.

There's an evil god. Or, well, there's a god whose domain is causing as much suffering and destruction and death and horror as he can, and so everyone calls him the evil god, and I don't feel like they're being very unreasonable. When free he spends most of his energy building and running enormous, elaborate torture prisons for hundreds of thousands of people. If you torture Elves for long enough you get very different-looking creatures, called orcs, and if you do it the right way they're in constant pain without you doing anything and you don't have to torture them. He made orcs and now there are millions of them. His name is Morgoth, in the language spoken here. He was in prison when this whole story started.

I assume you're about to describe a jailbreak.

No, they paroled him.

I assume I do not particularly need to observe that this was one of the mistakes in this story.

Seemed a safe bet.

They didn't - we didn't - he'd been in prison a very long time. He said he regretted it deeply. They thought they could contain him on parole. It didn't seem right, back then, to have an infinite sentence for a crime, no matter how horrendous. It seemed like maybe no matter how bad things had been we ought to be capable of making them better, of welcoming the people who did them back into society. 

That's not how it works. Some people need to be gone from the universe forever and it's not even particularly because they deserve it, though in this case it was. But - a mistake made for good reasons, unlike most of them. Most of the time we were just being conflict-avoidant or overconfident or carried away with our own cleverness. Here we were trying to be good. 

She nods.

He was let out on parole. He ran around doing errands and earnestly complimenting people, nothing we knew to find suspicious. 

There was another thing that had gone wrong at the same time. 

My grandfather -- and my uncle -- shared a fondness for being so extraordinarily clever that no one else could ever follow what was clever about their plans except for the astonishing success rate. They did it because they got tired of explanations, I think. They were brilliant, and things were obvious to them that it took weeks to spell out to everyone else, so instead you just said - trust me - and you were right, every time, and eventually people just learned to trust you. 

Instead you should explain every step of your logic on anything important, even when your internal experience is that everyone is being a dull idiot who doesn't get it and is trying not to get it just to spite you and has clearly not devoted even three of their brain cells to actually listening to the very clear explanation you have just given them. Because - it's not just about getting what you want on one occasion, it's about, in general, whether the people around you will notice mistakes when you actually make them, and they can't, if you've repeatedly trained them to believe that literally everything you do is the next inscrutable move in a brilliant game that'll come to a satisfying conclusion in front of them in a few minutes or a few years.