The Julius Ruechel Podcast

My guest this week is Dr. Matthew Wielicki, a geochemist and Earth Sciences professor whom you might already know from his insightful posts on X. He runs a popular Substack at irrationalfear.substack.com where he challenges mainstream climate narratives by actually looking at… the published science. He also has a book called Irrational Fear: Climate Change coming out soon.I’ve invited him on the show to discuss the latest media focus — the alleged impending collapse of the Atlantic Ocean currents, commonly known as the AMOC (short for “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”) and which include currents like the Gulf Stream, which act like a giant conveyor belt to vent heat from the Atlantic into the Arctic. According to the mainstream narrative, there are growing signs that continued global warming could weaken the AMOC, with media often pointing to increasing meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet as a trigger. They say that stalling these currents would plunge northern Europe into a bone chilling 5–15°C (9–27°F) temperature drop. Media outlets like The Guardian, Science Daily, Phys.org, and YouTube videos with millions of views all warn of a ‘critical Atlantic current collapse’ within decades. As evidence that we’re teetering on the edge, many point to the historic example of the Younger Dryas — a 1,200-year cold snap 12,900 years ago, with temperatures similarly plunging between 5–15°C. It was likely triggered by the collapse of Glacial Lake Agassiz, which dumped a colossal 21,000 cubic kilometers of meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet into the Atlantic, thus fundamentally disrupting the AMOC.And it happened again around 8,200 years ago during the awkwardly named 8.2-kiloyear event, when another 100,000 cubic kilometers of meltwater from Glacial Lake Agassiz disrupted the AMOC, causing a somewhat milder 160-year cold snap of 1–3°C globally and 3–6°C in parts of Europe.I reached out to Dr. Wielicki to unpack this doomsday scenario to see what the science actually says (hint, it’s quite different from the media’s narrative) and to bring in some geological context to show how the truth is far more fascinating than the hype.Our full interview is free for everyone, but I’ve also included a bonus question at the end, for paid subscribers only, building on another of Dr. Wielicki’s articles called Is It Really Our CO2?, in which he unpacks some recently published peer-reviewed research that significantly muddies the waters when it comes to the simple story of fossil fuels carrying most of the blame for rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. When it comes to the climate sciences, no matter where you look, the actual data looks nothing like what the popular narratives would have us believe. In our interview, Dr. Wielicki even discusses his first hand experiences as an academic with the distorted incentives that have rotted out the climate sciences.I hope you enjoy our discussion!Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss upcoming essays and podcast episodes!If you are not already a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to my Substack. These essays require a colossal amount of time, effort, and research to produce. I am 100% reader-supported by people like you. This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

The Canadian economy is now officially shrinking, foreign capital flight has become a full-blown crisis, and Canadians themselves are voting to leave this country in record numbers with their money and with their feet. And it’s all 100% self-inflicted.Premier Danielle Smith recently pointed out, “this onslaught of anti-energy, anti-agriculture, and anti-resource development policies has scared away global investments to the tune of half a trillion dollars, driving those investments and jobs out of Canada to much more attractive climates in the United States, Asia, and the Middle East.” Martin Belanger (@Martyupnorth_2 on X) is the retired former Senior VP of Pieridae Energy. The company spent more than a decade trying to build an LNG export terminal in Nova Scotia to export North American gas to Europe, Asia, and South America. It would have been Canada’s first LNG terminal on the East Coast — there’s only one other LNG terminal today, but it’s in British Columbia, so not idea for accessing Europe’s gas-hungry markets.Yet, in 2023, after spending many tens of millions of dollars on front-end engineering, the company walked away from the project without ever managing to get a single shovel in the ground despite having secured construction permits and even a 20-year contract with a German utility company worth $35 billion dollars (with loans backed by the German government).The Canadian government blamed the collapse of the project on a lack of demand for Canadian gas (obviously untrue considering the contract the company had secured). Mainstream media cynically blamed it on the weak finances of the company — but a half-truth is a whole lie… when the government keeps moving the goal posts to endlessly stretch out and undermine the permitting and financing processes, even the most robust cash reserves are eventually exhausted and investors begin heading for the exits to find more attractive jurisdictions to invest their money.Mr. Belanger is no longer bound by a confidentiality agreement. I sat down with him to understand how Canada strangled what should have been one of the most promising new oil and gas projects in Canada. It’s one example among many, but what was done to Pieridae Energy represents a pattern that is systematically crippling our country, from coast to coast to coast.I felt it was extremely important to get his story on record so that investors, policymakers, and citizens themselves understand the gritty details of what is broken in our country and, by consequence, the steps that MUST be taken if Canada is ever to get back on a sustainable path. Fixing this (and reversing the investment outflows) is going to take far more than just ousting an ideologically hostile political regime — the regulatory and bureaucratic framework that has grown up underneath that regime, both federally AND provincially, is going to take extremely deep reforms to fix.Understanding the grainy details of what went wrong is the first step towards fixing the problem.I hope you enjoy this latest special edition of the Julius Ruechel Podcast, available here on Substack as well as on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else where you listen to podcasts.Thanks for listening! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, or upgrade to a paid subscription to support my work. I am 100% reader-supported by people like you! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

A recent decision by the BC Supreme Court has just set a shocking precedent by extending Aboriginal land claims beyond Crown lands to also include privately owned lands. The judgement also explicitly states that Aboriginal title is a prior and senior right to land that supersedes fee simple land titles, thus throwing the door wide open for your land title to mean nothing! This move is the consequence of the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Rights slowly being written into Canadian law — by its wording, every single law in BC must be updated in consultation with indigenous groups. What is emerging is an 4th tier of government, accountable only to its First Nations members, but with the authority to shape every single decision in our province, including undermining your privately-owned land ownership. With 147 countries adopting UNDRIP legislation at the UN General Assembly, what’s happening in BC is the merely the thin edge of the wedge.I asked lawyer and MLA for the BC riding of Vancouver-Quilchena, and co-founder of the new OneBC party, Dallas Brodie, to come on my podcast to explain the dangerous precedents that have been set by this landmark ruling and to discuss the broader multi-million-dollar reconciliation industry underpinning it. While many people support reconciliation with good intentions, these good intentions are far removed from the reality of how this is playing out. We urgently need to confront the complex issues at stake to find an alternate path forward.You can follow Dallas Brodie (@Dallas_Brodie) and her colleague Tara Armstrong (@TaraArmstrongBC) on X. Both are sitting members of the BC Legislature and co-founders of the new OneBC party — they are currently gathering signatures for a petition (https://1bc.ca/petitions/defend-property-rights) to force the government to fight this ruling all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. I hope you enjoy this special edition of the Julius Ruechel Podcast, available here on Substack as well as on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else where you listen to podcasts.Thanks for listening! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, or upgrade to a paid subscription to support my work. I am 100% reader-supported by people like you! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

Scapegoats, however wicked they may be, are also the perfect distraction by which to avoid facing our own problems. Sometimes a simple comparison between two “things” forces us to re-evaluate our assumptions about how the world works and, by extension, confront the hard realities staring back at us when we hold a mirror up to ourselves.Kenya, in the developing world, just completed a major infrastructure megaproject — a 27 km elevated toll highway called the Nairobi Expressway, funded in part by China, and designed to give the East African economy a major boost by removing a major barrier to trade in the region. By comparison, Canada, in the developed world, similarly also recently completed a major infrastructure megaproject — the government-owned Trans Mountain Pipeline to bring oil from Alberta to the port in Vancouver, thus also removing a major hurdle for Canada to access world markets.On the one hand, the upcoming comparison between these two projects reveals the scale of the rot and corruption that has infested the West. On the other hand, what emerges from the details reveals why Western nations are losing standing in the rest of the world… with alarming geopolitical implications for the future. It has become extremely fashionable to blame China for corrupt and predatory business practices designed to undermine the West — and not without good reason (I have discussed some of these issues in regards to America’s tariff war with China in a previous article here). But as usual, pointing fingers provides a useful excuse to avoid confronting our own even more significant self-inflicted problems, of which there are many and which are at risk of being ignored amidst all the finger pointing. Beneath the headlines, it’s not so easy to distinguish between friend and foe.If all this sounds a bit vague and wishy-washy, don’t worry, all will become clear in a moment.We shall begin this story with Kenya’s Nairobi Expressway. If you’ve ever gotten trapped in a Nairobi traffic jam prior to this project being built, you’ll know that Nairobi’s traffic problems make congestion in places like Toronto, Vancouver, New York, or Los Angeles look like child’s play by comparison. It had become an extreme barrier to trade in the entire East African region since, by virtue of geography, almost all trade between Kenya’s provinces and all trade from the coast to the surrounding East African countries flows through Nairobi. It is the hub at the center of the proverbial wheel.In the early 2000s, Kenya spent somewhere between 5 and 10 years trying to secure funding from Western lenders and institutions in both the private and public sphere, including the World Bank, the IMF, and various Western governments in order to pursue a number of major infrastructure projects designed to resolve these kinds of economic bottlenecks. The Nairobi Expressway was one of them, a major railway expansion project called the Standard Gauge Railway to link Nairobi to the port of Mombasa was another (with further expansions coming to extend the rail lines to Uganda, South Sudan, the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Ethiopia), the upcoming highway improvement linking Nairobi to the port of Mombasa is another, and so on. But all of these efforts to secure funding from the West failed over and over again.Why?The “moral” West had extremely strict and paternalistic conditions attached to loans and grants, which demanded governance reforms in exchange for money, imposed strict anti-corruption measures, required extensive environmental and social impact assessments and exhaustive feasibility studies, demanded competitive bidding processes, had lengthy approval and disbursement timelines, and so on. I think you can begin to see the irony of where this is going considering that Canada is the other half of this comparative story, but I don’t want to get ahead of the story…In the end, after a lost decade of courting Western funding, nothing got done. The approval process stagnated, strangled by Western bureaucracy and “do-goodism”, and Kenya finally got frustrated and adopted a new “Look East” policy that emphasized closer ties to countries in Asia, particularly China and India, in order to get these long-overdue projects built. That Eastern realignment paid off handsomely — China’s Belt and Road Initiative was more than happy to step into the void...Under this new Eastern realignment, the Nairobi Expressway and the Standard Gauge Railway Project were rapidly and successfully funded by private-public partnerships with the state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation. In the case of the Expressway, China secured its loans with a 27-year guarantee of toll revenues, a 25% equity stake in the toll road, brought in some of its own contractors to do the work, and bypassed the governance and environmental conditions imposed by rival Western lenders.Construction of the 3-year project, completed in July of 2022, only took one month longer than anticipated (a 2.78% overrun). However, the US$599-million project was also over budget by 47% (in USD terms), partially due to spikes in construction materials during the Covid era, partially due to the depreciation of the Kenyan Shilling against the US dollar (which increased the cost of dollar-denominated payments), and partially because land compensation costs to reimburse landowners along the route exceeded budgeted amounts. And yes, there were plenty of accusations of corruption scandals that haunted the project along the way, including accusations of elite capture of the project by the ruling family and allegations of fraud during the land compensation payments. And yet, somehow, things got built and the East African economy could finally move beyond this bottleneck in the system.But now we get to the Canadian part of this story.The Trans Mountain Pipeline was originally owned by Kinder Morgan. According to 2012 projections when Kinder Morgan announced plans to start the project, it was expected to cost Can$5.4 billion. The regulatory process was expected to take 2 to 3 years, followed by a 3-year construction process, with completion expected by 2019.By 2017, Kinder Morgan’s projected cost has risen to Can$7.4 billion due to additional regulatory and environmental requirements and legal challenges. And construction had still not begun. By then, investors, especially in the oil and gas sector, were fleeing Trudeau’s Canada en masse. In 2018, with construction still not started, Kinder Morgan got fed up, decided to exit Canada altogether, and sold the project to the Canadian government for $4.5 billion after no private buyers emerged to take on the project. The government of Canada, under Trudeau, was forced to buy it as a project of “national interest” since Canada had pretty much chased off all investors and shuttered all other alternative pipeline projects by that point.And then the real fun began. The project was finally completed in 2024, 5 years later than Kinder Morgan’s original projected completion date and 33% over the government’s own revised construction timeline set out in 2018 when it purchased the orphaned project.But the cost overruns are truly monumental on a scale that would make even the most corrupt governments in the developing world blush.Final cost? By the time the first drop of oil got pumped through the pipeline, taxpayers were on the hook for a colossal Can$34 billion!?! That’s 529% over Kinder Morgan’s original budget of $5.4 billion! Contractors, environmental consultants, bureaucrats, lawyers, and pretty much anyone who found a way to work on the project made small fortunes.The stories from people who worked on the pipeline are eye-popping. A few anecdotes from people I’ve spoken with suffice to provide a flavor of the clown show that this government-run project turned into.When puddles had to be moved to make way for construction, the water from these puddles had to be purified to drinking water standards before being pumped into a puddle on the other side of the road. Ant hills had to be meticulously relocated while all construction was put on pause. One environmental inspection shut down work on site because “foreign vegetation materials” had been found on a right-of-way and had to be painstakingly collected and removed from the ground. And what was that offending “foreign vegetative matter”? Sunflower shells thrown on the ground by work crews. And on and on it goes.A similar story of the nonsensicalness of it all comes from the government-run Site C hydro dam project in northern BC — indigenous groups paid protestors to protest continuously at the site during construction on their behalf, as is the norm on these kinds of projects these days. One such paid protestor decided to get a second job to increase his take-home pay. And, since the Site C project was hiring, he got a job onsite. So, after completing his protesting shift, he would store his protest gear in his truck and cheerfully head off to work on the dam.But back to the Trans Mountain Pipeline. The government has plans to sell the pipeline now that it’s completed, but toll disputes and the exorbitant construction costs make it highly unlikely that the Canadian government will be able to recover the full costs. While nothing is finalized as of this writing, several First Nations groups are actively working towards an ownership stake, with loan guarantees provided by… the Canadian government (i.e. taxpayers).~ ~ ~As Wikipedia so aptly describes, in political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself *. The Western institutional system has become this kind of self-licking ice cream cone. It’s not naked corruption like in many developing countries, although there seems to be a growing amount of that too these days, but the scale of the problem has become so vast that it’s become every bit as crippling as the notorious levels of corruption and grift that plague so many develo

How do you de-program a mind that has succumbed to ideology, mass hysteria, or propaganda?And how do you fix an entire society once the “cult” goes mainstream?~ ~ ~Before we turn to the unpleasant business of population-scale deprogramming, I want to begin with a revealing story about a repulsive yet pitiable old man that I briefly stumbled across many years ago who had so firmly fused his identity to a radical ideology during his formative years that, even decades after his peers had all moved on, he spent the rest of his unhappy and isolated life trapped inside that ideology to shield himself from the psychological void of having to sever his identity from those beliefs.~ ~ ~Fresh out of high school in the early 1990s, I spent several months apprenticing on a cattle ranch in Namibia. On one occasion, my host invited me to join him on a drive to another distant Namibian farm to deliver a piece of machinery. It was a beautiful drive and a chance to see more of Namibia’s stark and harsh Kalahari beauty.By that time, SWAPO’s guerilla war against the South African government was over, Namibia had gained independence from South Africa (in 1990), and South Africa’s withdrawal marked the end of apartheid in Namibia. A cautiously hopeful and reconciliatory mood had replaced the fear and repression of the previous era.And yet, in marked contrast with everywhere else that I travelled across Namibia, driving onto that distant Namibian farm was like stepping into another world.We arrived at nightfall. Driving into the dusty farm compound, we were surrounded by razor-wire fences, stern armed guards, and a snarling mass of rottweilers. And it was all lit up by massive flood lights mounted all along the tops of the fence posts. This Namibian farmer lived in perpetual fear.While that heavily fortified compound might be normal today in the dangerous failing state of South Africa, the contrast with the rest of the society I encountered in Namibia in the early 1990s was so stark that I made some brief comment about it to my host as we drove in. He acknowledged that this old farmer was “a little off in the head”. And then, before jumping out of the truck to sort out the machinery, he wryly remarked, “things are even more strange inside his house — he still has a giant WWII-era Nazi flag hanging on his wall.”… wait, what!?! 👀 And why are you even doing business with a guy like that?!?On our drive back to the home ranch, my host went on to tell the full story of this old Namibian farmer and the circumstances that had shaped his broken mind, which I have fleshed out below with a little extra context from that era. As always, history and psychology are deeply intertwined. There is nothing random about why minds are captured by ideology or succumb to propaganda or hysteria — history creates the circumstances; human nature does the rest.~ ~ ~As World War I broke out, South Africa (then still a part of the British Empire), invaded and seized the neighboring German colony of Namibia (then called German South West Africa). In truth, it wasn’t much of a fight — the Kaiser had more pressing wartime concerns to attend to than a distant colony that perpetually cost his empire more money than it generated. German settlers were summarily interned in an abandoned military fort near Pietermaritzburg until the end of the war to keep them from making any trouble.After WWI ended, the League of Nations gave South Africa a mandate to continue to administer Namibia, effectively turning the former German colony into a de facto fifth province of British South Africa.Its German-descendant population was NOT happy about its new circumstances and resisted cultural assimilation, feeling that their Germanness was threatened, although that resistance never grew beyond cultural resistance — it never escallated to become an organized resistance movement. German-language schools and organizations sprouted everywhere to try to preserve their German cultural identity as a kind of counter-reaction against the encroachment of British and Boer culture. But beyond that, the German settlers seamlessly integrated into South Africa’s political system and even participated in both local administration and the South African parliament, though they continued to yearn for some kind of German-led political control or even to return their beloved South West Africa back to Germany. This is the cultural backdrop in which our old German-descendant Namibian farmer grew up.When World War II broke out in September of 1939, the Union of South Africa (as it was then called, as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire), initially deliberated whether to stay neutral given the divided loyalties of its society. But then, only a few days into the war, it too decided to declare war on Germany and once again began rounding up citizens of German descent (mostly the men), which were reclassified as “enemy aliens” — especially in the former German colony of Namibia (South West Africa). Around 5,000 German men (out of a total population of around 33,000 to 40,000 Germans) were interned.What happened next inside these internment camps is crucial to understanding this old Namibian farmer’s story. For context, most other allied Western countries behaved similarly. The United States, for example, rounded up 120,000 Japanese Americans and 11,000 German Americans and placed them in internment camps for the duration of WWII (just in case, even if they displayed no signs of divided loyalties and were fully assimilated into American society). Likewise, the UK interned around 30,000 “enemy aliens”. Australia interned around 7,000.Even Canada interned around 24,000 “enemy aliens” in 24 separate camps spread out across the country, with a particular focus on Japanese Canadians, German Canadians, Italian Canadians, Ukrainian Canadians, and, rather bizarrely, 2,284 Jewish refugees who arrived by boat from Germany, Austria, and Italy to escape persecution (and worse) — these refugees were also classified as “enemy aliens” and were treated with the same suspicion as all the other internees because they originated in countries with which Canada now found itself at war.In Canada’s case, the Canadian government finally apologized to Japanese Canadian internees, reinstated their citizenship, and offered them financial compensation to the tune of $21,000 each… in 1988…, one month after Ronald Reagan did the same for Japanese American internees. In neither country was this gesture extended to inlude Germans, Italians, and others who were also interned during the war.Conditions inside these internment camps, from South Africa to Canada and beyond, were far from ideal. One of Canada’s biggest internment camps was right here in Vernon, British Columbia, not far from my home today. The national director of Canada’s internment program described Vernon as being “the most difficult of camps”, with harsh and unsanitary conditions, severe overcrowding (one building designed for around 80 people housed more than 500), forced labour (in construction, agriculture, roadwork, etc.,), and with severe punishments meted out to internees, including solitary confinement. It all amounted to a harsh, indefinite, and extralegal prison sentence, but without trial, without a legal process, and without individual charges. Affected families designated as “enemy aliens” by the bureaucratic machine had their homes, farms, businesses, and property seized, and faced financial ruin and stigmatization. Families were typically separated, with men sent to different camps than the women and children. Some families were never successfully reunited. South Africa was actually one of the few British territories that allowed women and children of interned men to remain free instead of shuffling them off to separate family camps.Nor was WWII internment unprecedented. For example, during WWI, Canada interned around 8,579 “enemy aliens” (primarily German Canadians, Ukrainian Canadians, and other immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Bulgarian empires.) The WWI-era Monashee Mountain internment camp (which was located just an hour and a half from where I live today) was opportunistically used by the Canadian government as a forced labor camp to build a much needed road over the rugged Monashee Pass (Highway 6), with appalling conditions for the inmates (see image below). Many affected families struggled for a long time to reconcile their Canadian identity against the persecution, injustice, and stigmatization that they faced during those years — the Vancouver Sun even went as far as to encourage German-born residents to change their names to disguise their German heritage.My point in explaining all this context is that the experiences that our Namibian farmer went through inside those camps undoubtedly felt unfair, but they were also not unique, and yet he came out permanently radicalized even as most other internees did not. In fact, South Africa’s camps were unusually lenient compared to internment camps in other Allied countries and yet, paradoxically, they were also unusual for the extreme radicalization that happened inside those internment camps, as will become apparent in a moment. In many ways, what happened inside those South African internment camps is a real-life version of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, except in this case it was the inmates themselves that were self-administering much of life inside the camps, and driving both the abuse and the radicalization inside this perverse echo chamber, even as the authorities did little to stop it. But I’m getting ahead of the story. A 2024 research paper describes the prelude that led to internment in South Africa. In the lead-up to WWII, many Germans living in South Africa and Namibia:“enthusiastically greeted Hitler’s rise to power as the beginning of a new dawn for their mother country after a humiliating defeat in the First World War. […] While there was a broad conse

There is a legal concept in international law known as odious debt, also sometimes referred to as illegitimate debt. It states that debts incurred by a despotic regime are not considered enforceable or binding on the citizens of a country or on its successor state once that despotic regime is deposed. The core idea behind this legal concept is that if a regime borrows money for personal gain or against the interests of its people, and if creditors knew this at the time (or should have known), then this debt is not binding, and the lenders go home empty-handed. In other words, lenders need to do more than just gauge the solvency of a nation before issuing debt or issuing loans based solely on whether a regime is capable of squeezing the necessary taxes out of its population to service those debts — this legal concept is meant to raise the bar by threatening consequences against international creditors who knowingly underwrite exploitative, predatory, or despotic governments that do not act in the best interests of their citizens. That overhanging threat against international creditors is meant to strengthen society’s immune system against repressive or irresponsible government. Of course, if that threat actually had teeth, there would be very few countries left today still capable of accessing the bond markets out of fear of this legal concept being applied, in full or in part, since it’s crystal clear by now that corruption, wilful incompetence, and grift have completely overwhelmed even the most Western of Western nations, and that citizens have little recourse to hold their leaders accountable as the “new crook” that’s voted in merely picks up where the “old crook” left off. And yet, bond investors keep these regimes solvent nonetheless, year after year, and decade after decade.“Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains; thieves of public property in riches and luxury.”― Cato the ElderIn reality, to invoke the legal concept of odious debt, long-suffering citizens would first have to depose the despotic regime. Then they would have to make their case in a sympathetic international court — an almost impossible task, though not without precedent as you will see momentarily. And, rather cynically, the geopolitical context surrounding the claim (i.e. which other countries will be affected by this debt forgiveness and what geopolitical agendas will be served (or violated) by that debt forgiveness) is actually far more influential on whether that claim sticks than the sins committed by the despotic nation itself. Contrary to popular belief, international law is neither impartial nor blind, but is wholly shaped by the priorities, biases, and agendas of those with the power to enforce it.Furthermore, the world’s financial institutions would fight tooth and nail against any declaration of odious debt because if countries learn to walk away from their debts every time a new administration figures out how to blame the problems it inherits on a previous corrupt administration, the world’s bond markets would immediately seize up as investors find somewhere safer to park their money, with apocalyptic near-term consequences for our debt-fueled interconnected global economy. Indeed, no matter how deserving a nation’s claims may be, in order to successfully enforce this claim of odious debt against international creditors, claimant nations may need an army strong enough to fend off a foreign army if creditor nations decide to send their armies to collect — which is historically what used to happen anytime any country tried to walk away from its debts, even when those debts had been thrust upon them by illegitimate means. Once again, this scenario is also not without precedent, as you will also see momentarily. Even at the individual scale, debt is a form of bondage. But on an international scale, with entire nations funding their activities with foreign loans, the collections’ agency is another nation’s army. International justice is not and can never be blind because everyone in the court is also a participant in that international financial system and thus has their own axe to grind (and their own vulnerabilities to protect) as they weigh one another’s claims. This reality raises uncomfortable questions about the wisdom of funding a nation with foreign debts, as has become the norm in our modern era. As long as a nation relies only on its own citizens to fund its government, a despotic regime can be starved out of existence simply by refusing to buy bonds and pay taxes — not easy, but also not impossible because ultimately even goon squads need to be paid. But international lending breaks that cycle of accountability by breathing fresh life into despotic regimes. And once those debts are issued, a nation can continue to be held in debt bondage for generations, long after the despotic regime that incurred those debts has collapsed or been overthrown because the threat of invasion or financial collapse continues to hang over the people if they do not continue to toil in service of those foreign debts.A classic example is Haiti, whose slave population won its freedom from France in 1791 by violent revolution. But in 1825, France sent its gunboats to Haiti and threatened to invade unless Haiti agreed to pay reparations for the loss of France’s property, including the loss of its slaves. In Haiti’s case, unlike the examples provided later in this essay, the concept of “odious debt” never kicked in to relieve Haiti of its debts to France. In late 19th and early 20th century Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, and elsewhere, the U.S. was happy to invoke the principle of odious debt (or some earlier version of it) in order to strategically leave European creditors empty-handed. Debt forgiveness was a strategic play to encourage European to remove their fingers out of America’s sphere of influence. But in Haiti’s case things played out a little differently… with the U.S. playing the role of enforcer of those odious debts rather than stepping into the role of the benevolent saviour to relieve Haiti of those odious debts, quite in contrast to what the U.S. did in Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, etc. Geopolitical context is everything.It took 122 years (!) for Haiti to crawl out from underneath that odious debt to France (from 1825 to 1947). Haiti even had to take fresh loans from French banks to service that indemnity, thus relying on new debt to service that old debt (as a point of clarification, technically Haiti finished paying out reparations to France by 1888, but the colossal loans that Haiti had to take out from French banks to pay out those reparations to the French government took until 1947 to pay off). By 1900, 80% of Haiti’s budget was being consumed to service these debts (with much of the remainder pilfered by the despotic regimes that rose and fell in quick succession across this entire time period). In a sane (and fair) world, those odious debts should have been wiped off the slate even as Haiti should simultaneously also have been barred from receiving any fresh loans considering the disastrous track records of the brutal and corrupt regimes that followed in quick succession one after the other, usually by violent revolution. That combination of forgiveness of odious debt and no more new loans to corrupt existing regimes would have created the incentives for a new fiscally responsible and less despotic system of government to emerge in Haiti. But it didn’t — instead Haiti was trapped in a cycle of debt slavery, with one despot after another maintaining business as usual on the back of foreign loans.After the end of the U.S. Civil war in 1867, the U.S. (through its Wall Street connections) took over the Haitian financial system when U.S. banks bought the Haitian national bank and the U.S. army seized Haiti’s gold reserves for safekeeping. By this move, America became Haiti’s primary creditor. By restructuring and consolidating Haiti’s debts, the U.S. effectively took control of Haiti’s financial obligations even as it redirected Haiti’s ongoing debt service payments to the benefit of American financial institutions, particularly the National City Bank (predecessor to today’s Citibank). In doing so, the U.S. successfully wrestled Haiti out of European control and into its own orbit of control. You only have to glance at a world map to understand why Haiti (sitting right beside Cuba and just south of America’s southeastern seaboard), is a core American concern. That map view makes it amply clear why America sought to expel European powers out of its sphere of influence, including from Haiti, as demanded by its Monroe Doctrine, established in 1823 by President James Monroe. That doctrine declared that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to further European colonization or intervention; it has been a core guiding U.S. foreign policy imperative ever since. But with Haiti’s debt payments now funneling through U.S. banks rather than going directly into foreign hands, debt forgiveness was off the table. So much so that in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson invaded and occupied Haiti for 19 years. The invasion was excused as necessary in order to restore order in a rapidly deteriorating political situation because an angry mob had just lynched the latest Haitian president. But the occupation was also clearly a move to prevent Haiti from defaulting on U.S. loans and to protect U.S. investments. And behind the scenes, the move was clearly a strategy to exclude other European powers from establishing any further strongholds on the island. By 1915, with WWI already underway, Germans had long since figured out how to get around Haiti’s foreign land ownership restrictions by intermarrying with Haitians — by 1915, Germans had gained control over approximately 80% of Haiti’s international commerce and had become the principal financiers of the island’s competing political factions. During the next 19 years of occupation, the U.S. ruled Hai

Buddhists described the inner voice in our heads as the mind monkey or heart-mind monkey (named that way because of its tendency to jump from one thing to another, similar to how a monkey jumps from tree to tree, and its tendency to hyper-fixate on whatever catches its attention). That metaphor isn't exactly complementary of our inner voice and speaks to the restless, scattered, chaotic, undisciplined, and hard-to-control nature of our mind.And yet, according to psychology studies, this inner voice or inner dialogue is nonetheless credited with helping guide our decisions, work through various scenarios in order to decide a course of action, help us break complex problems into smaller manageable steps, hold us accountable to our moral compass, facilitate self-reflection, experience greater empathy for others, construct a “narrative self”, encourage self-motivation, and turn abstract feelings into concrete words and actions.Western pop culture latched on to this romanticised idea of the inner voice long ago, with endless appeals to “trust your inner voice”, “discover your inner voice”, “your inner voice knows best”, and “quiet the noise to hear your inner voice”, all of which reflect not only the idea that this inner voice is essential to a fulfilling human experience but also that there is some kind of innate, authentic truth or wisdom buried within every individual, which has been obscured by external influences like societal pressures, expectations, and noise, and which can be accessed if only you just spend enough time (and money) on self-help (or life coaches, or surrounding yourself with enough inspirational quotes, or watching enough back-episodes of the Oprah Winfrey show) to peel back the layers that are blocking this innate voice of wisdom. Even Homer Simpson’s annoyance with himself (“D’oh!”) whenever he ignores his much wiser inner voice was a staple feature of the successful long-running The Simpsons cartoon series.And yet, according to various news sources (like Scientific American and Psychology Today), allegedly somewhere between 50 to 70% of people don’t have (or infrequently have) the experience of thinking happening as a structured active voice that we hear inside our heads. Allegedly.The studies referenced by these news articles also go on to tell us about all the alleged behavioral consequences of lacking that inner speech — and the list is long: poorer working memory, difficulty making decisions, impaired self-reflection, less empathy, challenges with emotional regulation, reduced moral reasoning, less impulse control, difficulty articulating thoughts, more easily feeling overwhelmed, and so on. By this reading, it would seem that our humanity hinges upon this voice inside our own heads — this ability to hold an active inner dialogue within ourselves — and that we are somehow lesser, diminished, or defective without it.Unsurprisingly, social media has been quick to latch on to this narrative to leverage clicks as it becomes yet another divisive excuse to “other” or “dehumanize” by implying that those who lack this inner dialogue are effectively “programmable characters” (also known as NPCs or non-player characters in video game jargon). Ironically, this explanation for moral or intellectual shortcomings closely mirrors the woke perspective of the world, which also likes to blame our differences on factors that we’re born with that are outside of the control of individuals (like skin color, social class, culture, etc.). Once again, individual responsibility, individual merit, individual hard work, and individual choices can be explained away by some intrinsic invisible metric, not unlike the way cranium measurements were once used to try to differentiate between “higher” and “lower” forms of humans.One sensationalist social media account went as far as to describe the divide between those with versus those without an inner voice as “almost like a split between narrative beings and reactive shells” and stated that if you take away the ability to “hold a conversation with yourself”, “what’s left is not a philosopher… it’s a refined animal in a human body. Sorry 75%.” Somehow, between Reddit and social media, now the alleged defective population has risen to 75%, though I’ve yet to come across a shred of evidence for this newly augmented number in any of the psychology literature that I’ve been wading through for this essay. The same social media post then went on to provocatively ask, “But what if most of the world is sleepwalking, not because they’re unwilling… but because they’re literally unequipped to narrate their own story? If that's true, everything we know about agency, ethics, and consciousness needs to be rewritten.”Heady stuff! — certainly the kinds of questions that drive clicks, sell news headlines, and deserve lots and lots of your tax dollars to fund lots and lots more studies, right?Yet these simplistic claims quickly fall apart with just a very light scratch beneath the headlines. What emerges instead is a fascinating (and much more complex) story about how we think, structure our thoughts, and navigate the world around us.~ ~ ~Even when news stories correctly report the findings of psychology studies, as a matter of principle these studies should always be taken with a big grain of salt. As we know from the “replication crisis” that is rotting out scientific research, academia has become so degraded and so prone to bias and sloppy work and sensationalism that 50 to 70% of all published research studies are simply junk science because the studies fail to find the same results if the studies are repeated.And the field of psychology is among the worst offenders, with only around 36% of research studies being reproduceable (!!!), partly because of small sample sizes, partly because of "flexible" statistical methods, and partly because of the publication bias that favors researchers that publish "novel" results (in other words, sensational headlines are great for research careers even if they frequently come at the expense of the truth). The field of psychology has long been considered to be at the epicenter of the replication crisis that has infected academia.The only fields that come out even worse than psychology are biomedicine, sociology, and education research. Replication rates in biomedicine research (i.e. cancer research) are as low as 11%, partly because of the complexity of the biological systems being studied, partly because of selective reporting, partly because of poorly constructed studies, and partly because of commercial pressures due to funding conflicts of interest.Replication rates in sociology are even lower at less than 10% for reasons similar to those that plague psychology — small sample sizes, non-representative selection criteria for choosing test subjects, and highly subjective testing metrics.And education research may be the worst offender of all, where virtually zero published studies are reproducible, partly because of a reliance on observational data, partly because of the diverse range of educational environments, and partly because education researchers (unlike scholars in many other disciplines) are not in the habit of checking each other's work.But in the case of the claims about our inner voice, the popular psychological research paper that’s commonly used to justify the news headlines (Hurlburt et al., 2016) isn't even being properly quoted by the mainstream news (surprise, surprise). If they were reporting honestly, the eye-popping headlines would immediately lose their dramatic flair.As it turns out, because self-reporting our inner experiences is so subjective and unreliable, the researchers studying our inner voice decided to use a more objective measure by using a timer set at regular intervals and, when it went off, subjects were asked to report what was going on in their minds (i.e. at that moment, were they engaged in an active inner dialogue or not?). A more honest headline that reads that "50 to 70% of the time we are not engaged in active inner dialogue" would not have been quite as newsworthy. In other words, the results are more reflective of how much time we spend engaged in inner dialogue, not whether we have that inner voice at all.A more plausible research finding that was reported on more honestly by Science Daily found that although up to half of test subjects spent very little time engaged in internal dialogue, only about 5 to 10% of people actually experienced NO inner voice at all. That is a notable difference.One of the most famous people who doesn’t have a word-based internal dialogue is, of course, Dr. Temple Grandin. An autist herself, most people will recognize her from her autism research and her illuminating books. However, if you’re from a farming background (like I am) your first exposure to her work probably comes from her research into cow psychology and livestock handling systems. As she describes in her book, Thinking in Pictures, while most people engage in conscious thought via words that play in our heads, her conscious thinking comes in the form of pictures that play inside her imagination almost like a movie.If there's a rule to live by in science, it’s that it doesn't matter how much evidence you accumulate to support a pet theory, it only takes a single data point that doesn't fit the pattern to blow that theory to shreds. If anyone defies all the nasty stereotypes about the lack of agency, ethics, self-reflection, and consciousness that are floating around on social media about those who don't have an active inner voice continually narrating words inside their heads, it's Dr. Temple Grandin. Anyone in doubt about the rich inner world of someone who thinks in pictures instead of words should read one or two of her books!And so, Dr. Temple Grandin's example will serve as the first stepping stone to deconstruct these stereotypes and open the window into the diverse ways in which we actually process inf

The defining legacy of Trump’s first term is that, within the first couple of weeks after it ended, President Biden’s executive pen erased virtually every mark Trump had left on America’s system. The US rejoined the Paris Climate agreement. Construction of the border wall was stopped (and construction materials were auctioned off for pennies on the dollar). The doors were once again thrown wide open to even more uncontrolled illegal migration. And existing oil and gas development permits were rescinded or suspended.Even the Keystone XL Pipeline permit, which was mandated into existence by Trump in 2017 as an executive order during the first days of his presidency to put a stop to a decade of ideological bureaucratic obstructionism, was revoked by Biden in the first days of his presidency in 2021, also by executive order. The company building the pipeline (TC Energy) launched a $15 billion lawsuit against the U.S. government to try to recover its investments (construction was already well underway!), but a trade tribunal tossed out their claim in 2024, cynically ruling that since the permit had been issued under NAFTA rules but NAFTA no longer existed since it had been replaced by the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, the company was not entitled to compensation. The province of Alberta also has a $1.3 billion lawsuit running against the U.S. government to try to recover its share of investments into the Keystone XL project — that lawsuit is still ongoing.There’s no shortage of examples of how Trump 1.0’s legacy was erased as soon as he left office. Not only did Trump not leave a mark but, with the stroke of the executive pen, contracts, permits, negotiations, and investments conducted in good faith under his watch subsequently became financial and legal liabilities for companies and even for foreign governments as soon as a different set of hands gained authority over the executive pen.That’s the trouble with ‘rule by executive order’ — it’s arbitrary, temporary, unaccountable, dictatorial, and frequently vengeful. And the ideologically-captured courts are happy to play along, thus legitimizing this arbitrary power into law. What’s lawful versus what’s right increasingly no longer overlap.When the Founding Fathers drafted their Constitution, presidential authority to issue executive orders wasn’t explicitly defined, and their use was originally very limited, mostly for administrative or minor procedural matters – in those days, the young federal government had a limited scope, and the separation of powers was strictly interpreted. Law-making at the federal level was the responsibility of Congress — full stop. And most of the laws that directly affected citizens’ lives were made at the state level (by state legislatures) — again, full stop. Presidential authority was little more than a thin and rarely-felt overlay to tie that republic together, with the president’s primary responsibilities limited to defense and international diplomacy, to ensure that laws were properly enforced, and to create a check on Congress’s legislative power.Not anymore.One precedent after another has gradually expanded the power of the executive branch to the point where, today, an executive order increasingly resembles a royal decree that is routinely used to bypass Congress, even as Congress willfully abdicates is lawmaking responsibilities to both the judicial and executive branches.Don’t let the legalese deceive you — “rule of law” has given way to “rule by law” as judicial decisions, bureaucratic decrees, and executive governance are increasingly reinterpreted and enforced not by principle but rather primarily based on the priorities of whichever party is in control of that institution. Even the idea of an impartial judiciary has long-since given way to a politicized judiciary that’s frequently engaged in social-engineering. Americans may have given King George III a proverbial bloody nose during their Revolutionary War, but today King George III must be laughing in his grave as America (regardless of which party is in charge) evolves to become exactly what they fought to liberate themselves from in 1776.If you want to know where this evolving system leads, you only have to look north to Canada to the arbitrary and almost absolute authority that is exercised by our Prime Minister, Privy Council, and the myriad of unaccountable bureaucracies that rule over us. Canada never managed to cast off King George III’s shadow — it is baked right into our constitution even if the prime minister has replaced the king as the de-facto governing head of our constitutional monarchy.As we’ve seen time and time again, our “constitution” means whatever our prime minister and our bureaucracies want it to mean on any given day as our ‘constitutional monarchy’ evolves to become a ‘bureaucratic tyranny’ in all but name. Our recently elected prime minister, Mark Carney, has even rolled out a new plan to build “one Canadian economy, not thirteen” — it’s the ultimate symbol of the collapse of provincial sovereignty and local decision-making. The relentless centralization and expansion of arbitrary federal powers on either side of our border continues unabated — Canada leads the way, but the US is not far behind.Trump didn’t create this arbitrary and abusive system in America. However, he also did nothing to dismantle that arbitrary centralized authority or to reverse America’s evolution away from a decentralized republic towards quasi-imperial rule. Instead, like every president before him, he used that power to rule America according to his vision of what is best for the country, thus continuing the well-established tradition of stretching the power of the executive pen just a little bit further with each new administration to bypass the tedious and time-consuming process of lawmaking via Congress, just as Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, and so many others did before him.And Biden continued that centuries-long tradition when he followed Trump into office… and the precedents he set through his use of the executive pen only expanded that arbitrary power still further.The main political struggle today is no longer about the separation of powers that once gave the republic its vitality, or about imposing limits on government authority, or about restoring state sovereignty — it’s all about which party gets to be in charge of that vast centralized authority and what new schemes can be dreamt up to reshape America through government meddling. Each side predictably cries foul when their opponents use that power while cheerfully unleashing that same power to the maximum extent as soon as they get their fingers on the throne — neither decentralization nor the dismantling of excess government authority is on the menu.On so many other levels, Trump 1.0 was equally disappointing not because his administration represented a break with the past (as Democrats and mainstream media would have us believe), but because, other than the mean tweets, it was a continuation of many of the structural issues of the past. Sure, Trump 1.0 changed the curtains and the music, but beneath the fluff all the core elements that are undermining the decentralized, liberty-focused Idea of America remained in place.Out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt continued to grow unchecked under Trump 1.0 (even before Covid) despite his fierce criticisms of both of those things before he assumed office. And his lockdowns, mask mandates, and Operation Warp Speed were textbook cases of authoritarian diktats — the perfect illustrations of the philosophical shift that has taken place in America over the past two centuries as government evolved from ‘protector of rights’ to ‘meddling shepherd in charge of engineering outcomes’. Through these actions, Trump proved once again why central planning always ends in a disaster regardless of whether the intentions are good or bad. Biden’s Covid policies were even more authoritarian and heavy-handed than Trump’s as his vision of government intervention went still further but, in reality, both presidents are merely separated by degrees, not by philosophical principle. Trump 1.0 also supported (and even expanded) the military build up in the Ukraine and the tone-deaf stance taken by NATO as it threatened to expand onto Russia’s doorstep, thus giving the lie to his claim that if he had won the 2020 election, the Ukraine War would never have happened (on the contrary, his policies towards the Ukraine contributed in equal measure towards provoking Russia’s Special Military Operation). Perhaps the start date of the war would have been different, but that’s not the same as defusing tensions — the nuanced understanding of what it takes to co-exist with other Great Powers was missing.And, despite criticizing Obama’s use of drone strikes abroad (a.k.a. targeted assassinations without due judicial process) as reckless, strategically flawed, lacking in transparency, lacking in judicial process, prone to civilian casualties, and ripe with moral problems, after Trump assumed office he nevertheless increased the use of those same drone strikes and expanded America’s counterterrorism footprint in other countries. Even his use of tariffs to reshape the economy to his liking was merely an expansion of Obama’s use of tariffs, and indeed Biden kept most of Trump 1.0’s protectionist “friend-shoring” tariffs in place when he assumed office. Trump 1.0 wasn’t the course-correction that many of his supporters had hoped for when they voted him into office with a mandate to drain the Swamp.Trump 1.0 also never managed to get American troops out of Afghanistan despite his criticism of the long war as America’s mission morphed from destroying al-Qaeda into a failed attempt to impose Western-style centralized liberal democracy. He even briefly hired neo-con John Bolton (!) as his National Security Advisor and brought in Mike Pompeo as his CIA director — in both cases signalling

Culture is an evolutionary process that follows many of the same patterns as biological evolution. And all too often, the path to cultural extinction is also evolutionary.In biology, an invasive species is defined as “a non-native organism that, when introduced to a new ecosystem, proliferates rapidly, disrupts local biodiversity, and causes ecological or economic harm by outcompeting or preying on native species.”What’s left out of that definition, of course, is a reflection on why the native species is so easily displaced. Or, to put it another way, why is the invader so easily able to dislodge a native species from its natural habitat in the first place? And how can that vulnerability be plugged?A case in point drawn from the animal kingdom is the American beaver, which is perfectly at home in its native North American habitat. But after they escaped from fur farms in Europe (or were intentionally released, like in Finland and Russia), they rapidly spread across Europe and began to displace the European beaver.American beavers are more aggressive and adaptable, and thus they quickly dominated the prime riverine habitats and food sources. Compounding this is the fact that the American beaver has a higher reproductive rate. Furthermore, European and American beavers are genetically incompatible because they have different chromosome counts (40 in American beavers, 48 in European beavers) — this rules out any possibility of some kind of hybrid mix emerging from these two rival species.Evolution is often a zero-sum game – when two incompatible species compete for the same territory, one must eventually lose and go extinct. Without some kind of outside intervention to remove the invasive species and re-introduce the native species, the European beaver is doomed to be displaced within a few generations. Unless, of course, it evolves some new trait to “adapt” to the invader’s presence to either beat it back or find some uneasy truce. At the moment, its inevitable demise is being forestalled by eliciting sympathy from humans. But if humans lose interest in protecting it, the European beaver is ultimately destined to join the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, and the Wild Auroch as historical anecdotes in the fossil record.But this isn’t an article about beavers. Nor is it about ethnicity, the color of skin, or the genes flowing in our veins.It is about the evolution culture – about the ideas in our heads and the society that emerges from those shared ideas – about what happens when rival cultures with incompatible philosophical and moral beliefs collide, and what makes some cultures especially vulnerable to ruination and extinction.~ ~ ~Before jumping ahead to our own era, I’d like to begin with a stark example from another time and place in which one culture effectively committed suicide by evolving seemingly beneficial moral traits that dramatically improved the lives of all its members — for a while — only to discover that these cultural adaptations left them utterly defenseless against a hostile rival that didn’t play by the same pacifist rules.The first Polynesian ancestors of the Māori arrived in New Zealand sometime between 1320 and 1350 AD. In the early years, they were mostly focused on survival and adaptation to their new island home, rather than organized warfare.But, in time, that changed.Overhunting caused New Zealand’s large flightless moa birds to go extinct within the first 100 years of Māori settlement, thus depriving the Māori of one of their major food sources. By 1445, the moa was extinct.With the moa gone, this significantly increased competition for fish, shellfish, and cultivatable land. Meanwhile, the Māori population continued to increase even as large-scale deforestation from agriculture and hunting continued to reduce available land. This, in turn, fueled a massive competition for land and resources between rival clans. This competition began to reshape the culture itself.And so, a warlike culture began to emerge. Their culture began to emphasize traits like mana (prestige/authority), which could be gained through bravery in conflict, and utu (reciprocity or balance), which demanded retribution for wrongs. By the time European explorers, traders, and missionaries began regularly visiting the islands in the late 18th and early 19th century, inter-tribal warfare among the Māori was deeply entrenched in their culture, and Māori culture had even evolved ritualistic cannibalism practices in which defeated enemies were consumed in order to absorb their mana.When European traders introduced muskets to the island in the early 1800s, intertribal conflict spiraled as rival tribes leveraged the killing power of the musket to full effect. This period is known as the Musket Wars (1806 – 1845), with as many as 3,000 battles and raids fought between rival Māori clans resulting in 20,000 to 40,000 deaths (in a population of only around 80,000), with rival tribes taking many tens of thousands of slaves as captives from these wars.Then, in 1845, the initial wave of European traders was followed by a formal British effort to conquer New Zealand (known as the Land Wars or the Māori Wars). But with the Māori well versed in guerrilla warfare, ambushes, and hit-and-run tactics, the next three decades were no less violent than the last.Early on, the British Empire suffered heavy casualties and almost lost to the Māori. By the 1860s, 4,000 Māori warriors were facing off against 18,000 British troops who were well supported by artillery, cavalry, and local militia. Yet even then, the British faced a difficult uphill struggle. The Māori were tough customers to conquer – their warlike culture may have made life pretty perilous for the average Māori trying to build a life for their family, but that warlike culture also ensured that nothing less than the full weight of the British Empire could conquer this tiny, sparsely populated island.But not all ancestral Māori followed this cultural evolution towards a militant warrior culture.Around 1500 AD (approximately 150 to 200 years after the first Polynesians arrived in New Zealand), a group of ancestral Māori from New Zealand crossed the open Pacific to reach the Chatham Islands, located about 800 km to the east of New Zealand. They became known as the Moriori. With a climate too cold for agriculture, theirs became a hunter-gatherer and fishing culture.The first few generations on the Chatham Islands followed a similar cultural arc as the Māori back in New Zealand, with prolific intertribal warfare and bloodshed erupting between the three rival groups that dominated the Chatham Islands. But then, a prominent 16th century Moriori chief by the name of Nunuku-whenua established a new set of laws that essentially turned the Chatham Islands population into committed pacifists. Nunuku’s Law forbade both murder and the eating of human flesh. According to Wikipedia, he proclaimed: "Never again let there be war as there has been this day. Do not kill." And he secured the lasting peace with an accompanying curse: "May your bowels rot the day you disobey".Cut off from the New Zealand mainland, Moriori culture was able to develop in isolation. And, for over 300 years, Nunuku’s peace remained intact. As long as all the rival groups on the Chatham Islands bought into this new pacifist turn in their culture, they were free to enjoy their new long peace without risk of ending up as the main course on someone else’s menu.But obviously, despite the long peace reigning on the Chatham Islands, not everyone in the rest of the world shared those noble pacifist values. And eventually, the rest of the world caught up to the Chatham Islands. At that point, the bitter price for 300 years of pacifism had to be paid.In 1835, two Māori tribes comprised of approximately 900 people (men, women, and children) that had been displaced by the Musket Wars back in New Zealand found their way to the Chatham Islands on European trading ships. These newcomers immediately began to walk about the Chatham Islands in a way that made it clear that they were laying claim to the land and intended to stay. The Moriori withdrew to debate about what to do about it but decided to maintain their long-entrenched policy of non-aggression.And then the Māori attacked. A Moriori survivor reported that the Māori began slaughtering them like sheep, indiscriminately killing the fleeing Moriori wherever they could find them and hunting them down in the bush wherever they tried to hide. The few survivors were all, without exception, forced into slavery to the Māori.In 1863, after the British won their own war against the Māori and gained full control over both New Zealand and the Chatham Islands, they forced the Māori to free their Moriori slaves, which they did reluctantly and only under great pressure from the British. By then, less than 10% of the Moriori population remained.Testifying in a European-led court in the 1870s, a Māori chief commented: "We took possession ... in accordance with our custom, and we caught all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these we killed; and others also we killed – but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom. I am not aware of any of our people being killed by them."During 300 years of cultural isolation, the Chatham Islands’ culture of pacifism paid handsome dividends to maintain peace and prosperity at home – it’s nice to not have to live in fear of having your skull bashed in or to be sold off into slavery. And yet, in the end, that pacifism effectively led to cultural suicide as soon as that isolation was broken and the pacifist Chatham Islanders encountered an aggressive rival warrior culture that did not share those same pacifist principles and values.Insulated from aggression for so many long centuries, when faced with an enemy that did not share their respect for human life and their commitment to peaceful negotiation, they simply could not step outside of their evo

Regardless of whether leadership is elected, appointed, inherited, or seized by a coup, all political power ultimately depends on entangled threads of patronage that grow up underneath that political power, fueled by mutual obligation and self-interest. And as it grows, it begins to warp the minds of all those who get caught up in its net. During the Roman Era, their entire political system revolved around elaborate patronage networks in which political support was openly exchanged for preferential access to resources, benefits, or favors. They didn’t even try to hide it — the Roman patron-client relationship was a formal and visible social structure that influenced elections, judicial decisions, and economic outcomes. It was so deeply embedded in society and so openly practiced that Romans had a well-established daily morning ritual, called the salutatio, in which clients visited their patrons every morning to greet them and request favors. Power was easily measurable simply by watching who showed up on someone else’s door — it was a brutal, efficient, and a refreshingly honest way of practicing corruption. Until the 2nd century BC, even voting was done out in the open for all to see (no secret ballots) to allow patrons to verify whether their “investments” into their clients were paying off at the ballot box.The feudal system that emerged in Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire evolved from this Roman system, with liege lords, vassals, and serfs bound together via mutual oaths and formal hereditary legal obligations. Indeed, various waves of increasingly formal legislation passed during the late Western Roman Empire (under Diocletian, Constantine the Great, Theodosius, Valentinian, and Justinian) imposed successively greater restrictions on mobility, began binding tenant farmers (coloni) to their land, and made their legal status hereditary. These increasingly restrictive laws were all passed in response to labor shortages and the need to maintain tax revenues and food supplies as Rome shifted away from a slave-based economy to a tenant farm economy — these late-Roman legal reforms later evolved as the legal precedent for feudal serfdom in medieval Europe after the Western Roman Empire collapsed.Whereas the Roman patronage system was based mostly on customs and traditions, the feudal manor system left less to chance — they formalized their patronage system with clear laws. They also expanded it to include church tithes, which were absent in Roman law, thereby formally embedding the Church in the State’s political patronage system. Financial dependency and political loyalty are inextricably linked — the leash may be invisible, but that doesn’t make its effect any less powerful on the mind.And, much like what’s happening under wokeism today, while those within the feudal patronage system were in constant competition with one another for prestige, power, and privilege, they nonetheless were highly cooperative in banding together to put down any peasant revolt that emerged to try to overthrow the system as a whole — the famous German Peasants’ War in the 16th century (the largest and deadliest social revolt in Europe prior to the French Revolution) was notable for how the legions of local lords, which had essentially been at war with one another for nearly a millennia, managed to put aside their differences long enough to protect the patronage system as a whole by brutally suppressing the poorly armed peasants who demanded an end to serfdom, slaughtering hundreds of thousands.However, the collaboration required to suppress this German Peasants’ War exposed the fragility of the decentralized feudal structure and bolstered the authority of local princes at the expense of lesser lords and knights — in time this shift concentrated ever more power in the hands of regional rulers and eventually led to the rise of powerful centrally-controlled monarchies. The patronage system not only adapts to changing political circumstances but even drives those political changes as the patronage system re-orders itself to adapt to new challenges that emerge to threaten the patronage system. As one form of the patronage system proved less useful, another emerged to replace it. It would seem that the leash created by participation in the patronage system cuts in both directions.As power was concentrated in the hands of centralized monarchy, the character of the patronage system evolved once again to become less formal and more flexible, involving payments, pensions, and gifts in exchange for political and military support. And as monarchy continued to evolve to gain ever more power concentrated at the very top of the political hierarchy, this ushed in the Age of Absolutism, in which monarchs held absolute power, unconstrained by other institutions like legislatures or the Church. The patronage system evolved right along with it.This led to the absurd picture of life at the court of France’s Sun King (Louis XIV) during the second half of the 17th and first decades of the 18th centuries, which I described in my book, Plunderers of the Earth (Amazon Affiliate Link):On any given day there were anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 nobles of greater and lesser status living in the guest rooms at the Palace of Versailles, all vying for influence with the king. Since virtually everything depended on the whims of their king, practically the whole of French nobility permanently resided at the Palace of Versailles, out of necessity, in order earn (and maintain) the favor of their king. It was a never-ending game of jockeying played out in the courts, luxurious gardens, and between the sheets of Versailles’ more than 2,300 rooms, where even a trip home to visit your estate could spell catastrophe if, in your absence, someone else managed to catch the king’s eye and convince him to transfer your titles, privileges, or estates to someone more deserving. In refusing to grant favours asked for by some noble, Louis XIV habitually remarked, "We never see him", meaning that the hopeful claimant did not spend enough time playing the game at the Palace of Versailles. It's a snapshot of life in a golden birdcage, where the pomp, prestige, and never-ending theatrics are a thin veneer disguising lives trapped in a golden cage.If you visit Berlin today, you can tour Sanssouci Palace, the opulent former summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia — on the tour they describe how the morning salutation had once again been resurrected (similar yet different from the Roman salutatio). Every morning, half the court lined up to visit the king’s bed chambers to greet him upon waking up, with a formal hierarchy established as to who could stand where (proximity was directly related to political connectedness in the power hierarchy) and in what order they could greet the king. Obviously, a never-ending game of intrigue was played among the courtiers as they jostled for position. Even the job of the person managing the king’s chamber pot and wiping his bottom was a highly sought out and socially respected position, open only to those belonging to the aristocratic landowner class, as the position offered great influence and opportunities for promotion because it placed him closest to the king’s ear. And yes, in case you’re wondering, all this happened in front of the audience of privileged courtiers who attended the morning salutation — it was all part of the ritual of the court 😳 — which shows just how absurd and illogical things can get in order to cater to that all-important patronage network. If you think what’s happening in society today is because society has lost its mind, think again — you’re not viewing these phenomena through the lens of the patronage network.In England, this highly sought-out position in charge of the king’s chamber pot became formally known as the Groom of the Stool — through the Groom of the Stool’s intimate conversations with the king and the access to secrets and influence that this placed in his hand, this position led to him becoming one of the most feared, respected, and powerful figures within the court. As Wikipedia points out, by the time of Henry VII, the Groom of the Stool had evolved into a powerful official involved in setting national fiscal policy under the “chamber system”. Talk about multi-tasking!With the emergence of liberal democracy, which was supposed to dismantle this hierarchical hereditary system and replace it with purely democratic decision-making, meritocratic institutional promotions, and transparent government contracts, the patronage system evolved new informal ways of adapting to this new environment, with loyal supporters somehow always gaining preferential access to positions in ministries, agencies, or advisory roles, and with politicians learning how to appeal directly to voters, implicitly or explicitly, in a quid-pro-quo system that exchanges favors for votes — known as clientelistic democracy. The checks and balances we thought we’d placed on democracy in order to keep it small and honest never stood a chance.This is why rotten, corrupt, tyrannical, or dysfunctional democratic systems, from Zimbabwe to Canada and beyond, are impossible to dislodge — once a coalition of loyal supporters is built, that patronage system, enabled by nudges, winks, and back-room negotiations, and lubricated by generous showerings of tax dollars and regulatory privileges, ensures that financial self-interest maintains a core, regime-friendly, loyal support base inside the institutions and at the polls, irrespective of how destructive that regime is to the greater whole of the country. I vividly remember, at the very beginning of Covid, as the federal government began rolling out mask mandates and business closures, it also granted all federal employees a massive raise and pay bonus. Compliance and loyalty are bought, quid-pro-quo.Voters aren’t stupid, they’re self-interested — they vote to preserve th

As the post-national multi-cultural social-engineering experiment of the past 80 years reaches its ugly but inevitable chaotic conclusion and the world begins to take stock on how to rebuild the cultural fabric of our nations before things spiral into full-blown race wars and civil unrest (or worse), the urgent question arises: what does it take to glue a fractured nation back together and rebuild a cohesive “national identity”? How do you get a fractured society that has lost its common cultural core (and has turned hostile to all the values and principles upon which these nations once stood) to set aside their divisions and rally together again around a new common vision of the future and a renewed sense of shared identity? ~ ~ ~According to the Oxford dictionary, the dry clinical definition of a “nation” is a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory. There’s so much that’s been left unsaid in that simplistic definition. Why, for example, did America succeed in becoming a singular nation in the minds of its people despite the fact that, in defiance of that Oxford dictionary definition and in contrast with what defined the sense of nationhood back on the European continent (where ancestry, culture, and language defined everything), America’s sense of nationhood did not emerge from a single dominant religion, language, culture, or ancestral heritage, and has always included a huge multi-ethnic foreign-born population thanks to the never-ending waves of new immigrants washing up on its shores. And yet, a single patriotic nation emerged despite the wildly different cultural traditions of its constituent parts, which varied not just from colony to colony and town to town, but even from one house to the next.Even the common language link that we take for granted today wasn’t nearly as clear at the time of America’s founding. A significant proportion of its early population only used English as their lingua franca out on the street but spoke a different language inside their homes. Ancestry estimates based on surnames in the 1790 census suggests that those of German and Dutch heritage comprised a full 29% of the population (!), and even those who spoke English were anything but cohesive — that same census shows that another 16% was comprised of Scottish, Irish, or Welch ancestry (all English speakers but hardly the best of friends with Englishmen back on the British Isles). By the 1910 census, only around 25% of immigrants coming to America were still coming from one of the English-speaking countries. The rest were Germans, Italians, Jewish, Polish, Swedish, French, and Norwegians as the next most populous immigrant groups — there are a total of 27 other languages besides English listed as the first languages of immigrants on the 1910 census! You don’t have to scratch very deep below the surface to find the cultural patchwork of what makes up the “typical’ American.No nation in history has ever been forged from raw ingredients with such a colossal diversity in ancestry, history, culture, language, or religion. Another notable example which highlights the unlikelihood that America would ever have succeeded in forging itself into a single patriotic nation is that, during the colonial era before America’s War of Independence, both Virgina and Massachusetts were so hostile to Catholics that they prohibited Catholics from settling and even from setting foot inside their colonies — a 1647 law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony imposed banishment on Catholic priests for the first offense of entering the colony and death if they came back a second time! Meanwhile, the colony of Maryland was founded specifically to serve as a haven for Catholics fleeing persecution in Britain after the English Reformation. These states could not have been more ideologically different. And yet, instead of launching religious wars against each other in keeping with the long-established European tradition, they instead did the unthinkable by voluntarily joining the same Republic and signing on to the same Constitution! Likewise, the tensions between the Quakers and their Puritan neighbors during the colonial era are legendary. Yet once again, all willingly signed on to that same Constitution!Perhaps the only thing that all these raw ingredients had in common with each other is that they all had very little in common but wanted the freedom to keep it that way.Partly because of the experience of fighting the Revolutionary War and partly because of the experience of having to look to one another to create a strong enough republic after that war to defend their newly won freedom from being extinguished by Britain during the peace that followed, these diverse peoples were willing to bind themselves together as a singular patriotic nation. But there was one key difference between the glue that bound America together versus that has been used to glue all other countries together before or since — rather than sharing a single culture, America was founded on the idea of Liberty. By all accounts, these diverse states should never have been able to become “one people”. And yet, in both heart and mind, and not just in a legal sense, they defied the Oxford dictionary to become one large American family — frequently quarrelsome, full of warts and wrinkles, unbelievably diverse in all the ways that matter, yet one patriotic family nonetheless. The American “tribe” truly is unlike any other (or, at least it was, but I’m getting ahead of the story).The American Constitution was the physical embodiment of that unwritten social contract to preserve one another’s liberty — that’s why, to this day, the American Pledge of Allegiance to acquire citizenship and the oaths taken by judges and politicians upon taking office are not pledged to any king, country, or government, only to their Constitution — it is the blueprint that was meant to safeguard their own and each other’s liberty.Lots of other nations have inspirational-sounding constitutions (some even more eloquently written than America’s), and many of them were modelled upon some version of America’s Constitution. Yet many of those living under these other constitutions are nonetheless NOT a singular people despite having spent centuries confined together in one country. A parchment does not make a people.The legal architecture to bind them together as a country is there, but the patriotic instinct to bind those people to one another is missing. Their constitutions failed to inspire — the words may be the same but those words have not lit the same spark in the hearts and minds of their people. And those other countries struggle to assimilate newcomers, whereas America does not.Instead, these countries are plagued by long-simmering internal political dysfunction, secession movements, civil wars, and borders that are permanently in flux. As Belgian politician and cultural critic Jules Destrée famously wrote in 1912, “in Belgium there are only Walloons and Flemish people, but no Belgians.” And he wrote that long before the waves of recent mass migration and before the post-WWII European experiment with post-national multiculturalism had begun! Culturally, there are two nations trapped within Belgium’s borders. And the dysfunction still hasn’t been resolved more than a century later — from 2018 until 2020, Belgium had NO government for a mindboggling 652 days because it was unable to form a government against the backdrop of these simmering tensions between the French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish. And in 2024, Belgium went through another 7 month gap without a government as intense post-election negotiations resulted in yet another stalemate.The divisions between these two cultural tribes are so entrenched that unsuccessful independence movements have also been simmering on both the Flemish and Walloonian sides for more than a century, with no resolution in sight. It would seem that, more than a century after Jules Destrée’s pithy observation, there are still no Belgians in Belgium. Nation-building is hard.As we will soon see as this essay unfolds, America became a singular patriotic nation precisely because it was not composed of a single or even of similar cultures. It became a patriotic nation precisely because of what it took to inspire diverse peoples to voluntarily unite under a single Constitution in spite of all their differences — it is perhaps the only nation-building effort that has ever been able to achieve such a feat. Other countries have tried but ultimately failed to overcome their historical, cultural, religious, and linguistic divisions. Newcomers simply create even more internal tribes. Even if things settle down for a while, sectarianism and factionalism ultimately keep breaking through because these top-down efforts at nation-building were never propelled by a bottom-up unifying desire for liberty. But as liberty is throttled in America by the centralization of powers, legislative strangulation, and bureaucratic bloat, even America is gradually succumbing to internal factionalism and struggling to assimilate some of its newcomers — more on that in a moment.This is one of the core lessons of this essay: if you put pressure on people from the top, they resist that pressure by taking refuge in tribal divisions. But the reverse happens if government offers liberty as the prize — immense tribal divisions can be overcome to create a single sense of nationhood in order to preserve that liberty — but only if that liberty requires everyone to look to one another to keep them free from big meddlesome government. Once liberty is replaced by a managerial state, tribalism thrives, and the national identity begins to fray.America’s unique foundational focus on Liberty achieved the impossible by inspiring thirteen dissimilar and frequently quarrelling founding colonies to willingly bind themselves together as a r

“I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” — Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America.~ ~ ~Before I turn to Alberta and the East-West divide that is threatening to tear Canada apart, I want to begin with a brief story from another time and place to bring some of the complex ideas contained in this essay into focus.In 1864, three years into the bitter U.S. Civil War, as that war was turning increasingly barbaric, Abraham Lincoln allowed Colonel James Jaquess and another colleague to secretly slip across enemy lines to travel to Richmond, Virginia, to meet with Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America, in an unofficial effort to negotiate for peace. The full exchange, originally published in the September 1864 issue of the Atlantic (Vol. 14, No. 83 — also available on Project Guttenberg), is extremely eye-opening — I recommend reading the full exchange, but will reproduce the key points below: Early in the conversation, Colonel Jaquess asks Davis:“Our people want peace,—your people do, and your Congress has recently said that you do. We have come to ask how it can be brought about.”“In a very simple way,” replies Davis. “Withdraw your armies from our territory, and peace will come of itself. We do not seek to subjugate you. We are not waging an offensive war, except so far as it is offensive-defensive,—that is, so far as we are forced to invade you to prevent your invading us. Let us alone, and peace will come at once.”“But we cannot let you alone so long as you repudiate the Union. That is the one thing the Northern people will not surrender.”“I know. You would deny to us what you exact for yourselves,—the right of self-government.”As the conversation evolves it becomes clear that to Colonel Jaquess, it is perfectly moral, just, and natural for the minority, even a distinct geographic minority, to willingly subordinate itself to the democratic outcomes of majority rule. When you’re part of the numerical majority, this view is as natural as the sun rising in the East.In this context, an exasperated Davis delivers one of his most famous quotes as he touches upon a theme that ultimately underpins virtually every separatist movement and civil war in history, that the South’s minority was not willing to allow itself to be further subjugated to the will of the North’s numerical majority:“I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves; and so the war came.”In Davis’s view, the idea that culturally and economically distinct sovereign states should subordinate themselves to the will of the numerical majority of the United States as a collective whole was a repudiation of the principles upon which the Republic was founded, which viewed each state as a sovereign entity, free to govern their own affairs within their own state borders, united only as a Republic as a means of securing their borders against foreign aggression and to regulate interstate commerce, NOT so that other states could override the local sovereignty of individual states via the national ballot box. In short, Davis and his Southern peers viewed the American Republic as a collection of united yet sovereign states, each with their own distinct peoples. Whereas Colonel Jaquess, Abraham Lincoln, and their Northern peers had come to view the United States as a single united entity, one people united as a single nation.Colonel Jaquess tries to impress upon Davis that the Union far outnumbered the Confederacy (4.5 to 1) and that within the Union exists the “unanimous determination to crush the Rebellion and save the Union at every sacrifice.” However, Colonel Jaquess points out to Davis that if the rebel Confederate government could be dismantled via an immediate cessation of hostilities and the Southern states returned to the Union, now, before the growing barbarism of the war caused such resentment that all of the Southern leaders would assuredly be hanged if the South loses the war, then peace and harmony could be restored and the North would even willingly welcome the South back into the Union, forgive the bloodshed, and help the South rebuild the destruction caused by the war.Davis turns him down.“There are some things worse than hanging or extermination. We reckon giving up the right of self-government one of those things.”“By self-government you mean disunion,—Southern Independence?”“Yes.”“And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest.”“No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.”Colonel Jaquess turned the conversation to whether the conflict can be settled by letting the combined people of the United States (Union and Confederacy together) decide the contentious questions that led to the fracture of the Union by putting those questions to a nation-wide referendum, such that the South commits itself to accepting the wishes of the democratic majority, whichever way these questions are decided. To which Davis replies:“That the majority shall decide it, you mean. We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority, and this would subject us to it again.”“But the majority must rule finally, either with bullets or ballots.”“I am not so sure of that. Neither current events nor history shows that the majority rules, or ever did rule. The contrary, I think, is true.”Colonel Jaquess is dismayed.“But, seriously, Sir, you let the majority rule in a single State; why not let it rule in the whole country?”“Because the States are independent and sovereign. The country is not. It is only a confederation of States; or rather it was: it is now two confederations.”“Then we are not a people,—we are only a political partnership?”“That is all.”Davis concludes the meeting with Colonel Jaquess and his colleague, stating that:“I am glad to have met you, both. I once loved the old flag as well as you do; I would have died for it; but now it is to me only the emblem of oppression.”“I hope the day may never come, Mr. Davis, when I say that,” said the Colonel.After they left President Davis, Colonel Jaquess’ colleague was asked about the outcome of that meeting, to which he replied:“Nothing but war,—war to the knife.”The philosophical divide could not be bridged. The North could not compromise on a fractured Union that would result in the continental power of the United States to splinter into independent parts. To them, the republic created by the “united states in America” had become a single indivisible nation inhabited by a single indivisible people — a single nation called the United States OF America. By contrast, the South could not compromise on subordinating itself to the majority rule of the greater whole at the expense of losing the state sovereignty that allowed each state to pursue its own destiny within its own borders according to its own local culture and local economic needs, as the Republic’s Founding Fathers had originally intended. And so, the bid for peace failed and the war ground onwards into its final brutal year. As Davis makes clear during this extraordinary historical exchange, the moral and economic issue of slavery was merely the trigger — underneath it all was the bigger question of state sovereignty and self-governance, and the choice between a decentralized republic versus a singular all-encompassing nation.Abraham Lincoln later complained that Jefferson Davis’s only terms of peace were the independence of the South — the dissolution of the Union. And Navy Secretary Gideon Wells later wrote in his diary about Colonel Jaquess’ attempt to reach out to Davis, stating that: “Colonel Jaquess is another specimen of inconsiderate and unwise, meddlesome interference. The President assented to his measure and gave him a card, or passport, to go beyond our lines. There is no doubt that the Colonel was sincere, but he found himself unequal to the task he had undertaken. Instead of persuading Jeff Davis to change his course, Davis succeeded in persuading poor Jaquess that the true course to be pursued was to let Davis & Co. do as they please. The result was that Jaquess and his friend Gilmore who went to Richmond to shear, came back shorn.”~ ~ ~It may surprise some readers to see me start this essay about Alberta’s struggle to assert its sovereignty within Canada with a story about the leader of the Confederate South from the U.S. Civil War era. This is a different era with different issues at stake, and most view Canada as a completely different and morally upright country that prides itself on its politeness and on its cultural and economic diversity as it avoids the raw, snarling, uncompromising politics of our American neighbors. Besides, the dividing line is East vs West, not North vs South. Surely, our divisions can be overcome with civility, grace, and appeals to unity within our larger Canadian family?Yet once again, beneath it all, we see a country rupturing along a fault line defined by two incompatible moral world views, as incompatible as oil and water, a divided economy that reflects that moral divide, and the age old question — are we one indivisible people in one indivisible nation, or does the provincial sovereignty that’s so clearly defined in our Canadian Constitution still mean something? What is the purpose of Canada, and who is it meant to serve? In short, this rupture isn’t merely a difference of opinion; it represents an existential philosophical rift. And that makes it very difficult for either si

Dotting the walls of the red sandstone canyons all across the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States (where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet), high up on the vertical cliffs, you can see the ancient ruins of countless cliff dwellings and granaries, big and small, perched on seemingly impossible narrow ledges, sometimes hundreds of feet up off the valley floor where the slip of a single footstep means certain death. No sane individual that loves their children would voluntarily choose to raise a family in a place like that. And yet, for more than a century, the refugees of a failing civilization did just that. And then they mysteriously disappeared from the region altogether, leaving behind a devastated ecosystem that even today, more than 700 years after their passing, still hasn’t recovered. Their story is a lesson to us all — and not for any of the reasons that you typically hear on the six o’clock news. For centuries, the Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloan culture of the Southwest divided their time between the adobe pueblos and agricultural fields that they built among the pinyon pine and juniper woodlands up on top of the cooler mesas and growing crops and building pueblos alongside reliable water sources down on the hot canyon floors. But then, in the 12th and 13th centuries, all across the region, something big changed to cause these ancient people to start moving into these precarious stone hovels perched on the edge of certain death, half-way up between the canyon bottoms and the rim of the mesas above. What made them abandon their earlier customs to adopt such a perilous new way of life?The simplistic but only partially true explanation is that the climate changed. Two brutal multi-decadal megadroughts in the 12th and 13th centuries triggered a collapse of the cultures and traditional ways of life across the entire region — the geographic extent of these two droughts is shown in yellow (12th century) and red (13th century) in the chart below. As the droughts took their toll, the entire previously relatively peaceful region was plunged into decades-long conflict, war, and extreme violence (there’s even archaeological evidence for torture, cannibalism (both ritual cannibalism and cannibalism motivated by starvation), and vicious attacks that destroyed entire villages), all of which led people to seek refuge in increasingly inaccessible places to stay out of reach of their hungry enemies.Mesa Verde in the Colorado portion of the Four Corners region is arguably the most famous cliff dwelling on the North American continent. After living primarily on top of the mesas for over 600 years, sometime in second half of the 12th century during a period of intense social and environmental instability, the Ancestral Puebloans turned Mesa Verde into a massive city. At its peak, Mesa Verde was home to many thousands of people. And yet, after nearly a century of intense occupation, by 1285 Mesa Verde was completely abandoned. The Ancestral Puebloans migrated out of the region altogether — their scattered modern-day descendants are the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, Tewa and other Pueblo peoples.The second most famous Ancestral Puebloan archaeological site in the region (and arguably the most impressive example of ancient architecture north of the Mexican border) is Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico portion of the Four Corners region (shown in the image below). It is the largest ancient architectural complex ever built on the North American continent north of the Mexican border prior to the 19th century. By its sheer size alone, it was clearly once the core of a very large civilization. Some of its massive buildings were more than 5 stories tall and contained up to 800 rooms!This extraordinary site at the bottom of Chaco Canyon served as the major cultural center for all Ancestral Puebloans across this vast region for more than 600 years! It was the central hub of a sphere of influence that spanned across more than 90,000 square miles (and area larger than Ireland!) and even included a huge network of roads, some more than 30 ft wide, linking together the other Great Houses across the region (more than 150 of them have been found so far), all of which are connected back to Chaco Canyon by these roads. And yet, Chaco Canyon was abandoned during the first of these two megadroughts, in the second half of the 12th century, before Mesa Verde was built and just as the mass shift to cliff dwellings in the region took place.At its peak, Chaco Canyon’s vast building projects were supported by huge rock quarries where they harvested their sandstone blocks. They also hauled massive timbers to the site from as far as 110 km away — archaeologists estimate that more than 200,000 large timbers were transported to the site between 850 and 1200 AD using only human power (no small feat in both manpower and organizational planning considering that this is at a time before either the wheel or horses were introduced to the continent). And the astronomical alignments reflected in their building architecture captured lunar and solar cycles that would have required generations of meticulous observations. And yet, the crippling 50-year megadrought that began in 1130 led them to abandon their canyon altogether. By 1150, more than a century before Mesa Verde was abandoned, Chaco Canyon was already an empty ruin— the central node of Ancestral Puebloan civilization collapsed during the first of those two megadroughts.The abandonment of Chaco Canyon was accompanied by significant changes in religious beliefs and religious practices all across the Southwest. However, what emerged was not replacement by a new religion or a new culture but rather a fracturing of a large, centralized religion into less formal and more local clan-based rituals as the unifying religious authority collapsed. The large circular kivas (a.k.a. ceremonial rooms), like the enormous kiva shown at Chaco Canyon in the image above, were replaced by much smaller, less formal kivas scattered across the region. Even the rock art in the region evolved to show new motifs and evolving spiritual concerns, even as burial practices became much simpler.In sum, we get a picture of a collapsing complex civilization that fractured into desperate and increasingly hostile rival clans, which reverted to a much simpler way of life. And where once all these people were united as a single, stable, relatively peaceful, and cooperative culture capable of building vast architectural projects and hauling timbers across the entire region, now they lived in fear of one another even as the ecosystem that once sustained them began to collapse all around them. If you’ve followed the late Andrew Cross’ Desert Drifter channel on YouTube, which explored many of these ancient archaeological sites across the Southwest, you’ll know just how extreme the living conditions were in some of these ancient cliff dwellings that were built during that tumultuous period. These ancient people were clearly pushed to the very brink of survival and lived in terror of other clans in the region — these abandoned cliff dwellings truly capture a snapshot in time during the last stage of civilizational collapse before the region was abandoned altogether.Complicating it all is that Athabascan tribes (ancestors of the Navajo, Apache, etc) also migrated into this region from the north, though most archaeological evidence suggests that the bulk of this southward migration of newcomers only reached the Southwest in the 1300s and 1400s (some archaeologists place the date as late as 1450 AD) long after both Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were abandoned and after the Ancestral Puebloan population in the region had already collapsed and most had fled. So, the violence that drove the Ancestral Puebloans into their cliff dwellings was “home-grown” — the consequence of the internal chaos unleashed by a collapsing previously-centralized civilization — and is not readily blamed on the arrival of outside tribes.But while the mega-droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries undoubtedly served as the trigger for destabilizing Ancient Puebloan culture, once you dig deeper into the geological and archaeological research (as we are about to do), you quickly discover that there is much, much more to this story. The victims of this climate disaster were also simultaneously the chief architects of the disaster that destroyed their civilization — their impact on their local ecosystem turned what otherwise would have been just another dry period within the never-ending cyclical climate patterns of the region into an existential crisis that destroyed not only their civilization but also permanently degraded an ecosystem that was previously perfectly adapted to weather these kinds of megadroughts into the dry, fragile, brittle ecosystem that persists in the region even today.As shocking as it may be to anyone who has toured the extraordinary wilderness of Utah’s canyonlands, although geology created these canyons, everything else about this brittle landscape was created over centuries by the mismanagement of ancient human hands.The lessons from that long-forgotten story — about the evolution of civilization, about soil and deforestation, and about the complex forces that shape our climate and either keep our ecosystems healthy or destroy them — are all still very relevant to our own era. As Charles Lyell (the “father of geology” and close friend of Charles Darwin) famously said, “the past is the key to the future.” ~ ~ ~If you visit any of the parks in the Four Corners region today (and I hope you do — they are an unforgettable experience!) — like Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Mesa Verde National Park, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Hovenweep National Monument, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and so on — you’ll be familiar with the pervasive signs (almost as numerous as the tourists

This is the audio version of my recent Deep Dive, The Dangerous End of the Post-WWII Monetary Order, which was unfortunately delayed because of some technical difficulties that I have now resolved.In other news, I’m just wrapping this week’s upcoming essay and podcast — a Deep Dive that I’m particularly proud of that relies heavily on both my farming and geology backgrounds, and my long-time passion for archaeology — which will be in your inbox shortly.Enjoy!Cheers,Julius This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

This short post about Trump’s long game in Canada began as a reply to a post on X by Carl Benjamin, from the United Kingdom, where he criticized Trump’s “beligerance towards Canada” and the cold face Trump has shown “towards the right-wing cause in every other country,” which is helping to push voters into the arms of the very same Liberal Party that has caused so much destruction to Canada over the past 10 years.As you can probably guess, I see this a bit differently… as a strategic chess move in Trump’s long game to defeat the Globalist ideology. But before I unpack this, I’ll let you read Carl’s post because it mirrors what a lot of conservative voters are saying here in Canada.Hi Carl, Canadian weighing in here. When you say Trump has hurt the Right (Poilievre) in Canada, I believe you are misreading what the establishment Right represents here — there is a lot more to this story.To begin with, there's very little functional difference anymore between left and right in Canada's establishment parties — to compare it with your UK politics, was Rishi Sunak really all that different than Kier Starmer? That’s about as little daylight as can be found between the Canadian Conservatives and the Canadian Liberals here today. In effect, these two parties are merely the liberal and conservative wings of the Globalist revolution that is sweeping around the world.Globalist ideology has become a threat not just to America but all throughout Western Civilization, and Trump is pivoting to confront this threat in a kind of anti-globalist counter-revolution. He may have won the election in America, but he can’t permanently root out the threat of this globalist ideology inside America as long as that same revolutionary globalist ideology thrives on America’s northern doorstep, just as it must be purged from Europe in order to eliminate the threat of the Europeans undermining America to bring the globalist Democrats back into power.Like communism, globalism (a.k.a. militant liberal progressivism) doesn’t respect borders… it’s on an ideological mission and it’s growing fast, and you don’t win against such an ideology through appeasement. Trump’s election win was merely one battle in a much larger war and that broader war has not yet been won — in fact, I would argue that Trump’s election was just the opening battle in a much larger global war that must be waged both inside and outside America.But establishment right-wing parties everywhere in both Europe and Canada don’t share Trump’s vision and indeed are every bit as hostile towards Trump's anti-globalist vision of the future as the Left is, possibly more so to judge by Poilievre's rabid anti-Trump rhetoric. On everything from mass migration to Ukraine warmongering to free trade to freedom of speech to climate change, these globalist Conservatives in Canada and in Europe are just mirror images of their leftist peers — the flavor differs slightly but the substance is the same. They all lead to the same destination; you just arrive in globalist Hell at different speeds. Look at the damage done by Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson in the UK, by Mark Rutte in the Netherlands, by Angela Merkel in Germany, or by the establishment US Republicans (Rinos) like Bush, Cheney, McCain, Romney, etc. — to claim that the globalist right (like Canada's Conservatives) are less of a threat or that they would make better allies for Trump’s anti-globalist counter-revolution is wrong. But many conservative voters can't see it as they cheer for their team — they are desperately voting for the lesser evil out of fear of another destructive Liberal term.It’s telling that Poilievre’s slam-dunk bid to become the next Prime Minister evaporated overnight the moment that the Liberals replaced Justin Trudeau — what Poilievre offered to Canada wasn’t an inspiring vision; he was merely the “other guy” to the “current guy” — as soon as the Liberals replaced the “current guy” with a “new guy”, Poilievre’s entire election appeal evaporated overnight.Consider that in 2015, the Conservatives lost to Justin Trudeau with 32% of the vote. In 2019, they lost again with 34% of the vote. In 2021, they lost again with 34% of the vote. And now they’re polling somewhere between 34-39% of the vote depending on which poll you trust, despite 10 years of devastating Liberal rule. Does that sound like a party with an alternate vision for Canada’s future?It’s also telling that Mark Carney is essentially stealing most of Pierre Poilievre's platform, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how Canada's supposed "right-wing" has evolved to become just another globalist party, just like everywhere in the E.U. The Conservatives have moved so far to the left to chase globalist voters that the Conservatives are arguably to the left of what the Liberal Party was in 2010. If a Conservative party’s platform can be adopted by the globalist Left simply by taking half a step to the right — without ruffling feathers among their own globalist voters — then the Conservatives haven’t been defending conservative principles or providing conservative solutions — they’re merely offering a slightly more conservative flavor of the globalist revolution. There is no chance that the Liberals would steal Maxime Bernier’s conservative platform if he was their chief rival in the polls — liberal voters would have a conniption.Poilievre's vision of the future has ZERO overlap with Trump's vision — nor does Poilievre have anything in common with the likes of Argentina's Javier Milei, El Salvador's Nayib Bukele, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the UK's Nigel Farage, Germany's AfD Party, or Hungary's Victor Orban — the other emerging anti-globalist allies in the war against the globalist Axis of Evil.I don't think Trump has hurt any right-wing party that is truly anti-globalist — Canada's PPC, Germany's AfD, UK's Reform, Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party in Brazil, Hungary's Fidesz, etc. Their voters are anti-globalist and not in the least bit bothered by Trump — quite the opposite, actually.So if, as you say, Trump is damaging right wing parties, it's only the globalist right-wing that is being hurt — the ones still defending the defunct post-WWII era that has morphed into globalism. These establishment right-wingers urgently need to be purged in the same way that the likes of George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, and other establishment neo-con pigs needed to be purged from the Republican Party to make way for the rise of the anti-globalist MAGA movement in America.To take on America in 2016, Trump had to begin by winning a civil war inside his own Republican Party. But that civil war inside the conservative establishment hasn’t happened yet in most other countries — it still needs to be fought.The globalist Conservatives, like Poilievre, are every bit as much the enemies of freedom as the globalist Liberals — possibly more so because they give their electorate a false hope and stand in the way of rising anti-globalist voices.It might genuinely be easier for Trump to pressure the Liberals and turn Canada anti-globalist if Carney’s Liberals win than if Poilievre comes to power.If Carney wins and Trump goes after Carney, right wing voters in Canada are more likely to rally around Trump as their defense against Carney’s globalist authoritarianism. Whereas if Poilievre wins, conservative voters would be likely to rally behind "their guy" and against Trump as Trump ramps up pressure against a hostile Poilievre-led globalist Canada, which would leave Trump with few voices of support inside Canada.If Trump wants allies in other countries and if he wants to prevent Canada from becoming a hostile problem on his northern doorstep, he has to destroy the globalist false-friends of conservative voters in those countries — like globalist Poilievre — just as Trump had to win a civil war inside his own Republican Party in 2016 in order to clear the way for MAGA to inherit the conservative banner inside America. For Trump to win the long game on the global chessboard and dismantle the globalist threat, the only way to build a coalition of global Allies for Trump's global counter-revolution against the rising Axis of Globalist Powers is to destroy establishment globalist Conservative parties in order to bring conservative voters into the anti-globalist fold. Establishment Conservatives stand in the way of a united Right pivoting to defeat the Globalist world order.In a long war against a rising hostile ideology, the battles must be fought in the right order if you want to win the bigger war. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, or upgrade to a paid subscription to support my work. I am 100% reader-supported by people like you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

(If you’re reading this in your email browser, I recommend clicking on the title to switch to reading on the Substack platform (https://juliusruechel.substack.com) because most email programs truncate larger image-rich Substack posts.)This is Part Three of my Deep Dive into the psychological unravelling of Western Civilization. In Part One — Why Western Civilization Lost Its Mind — I explored the psychological origins of our unravelling into dysfunction and chaos as all the civilizing forces that keep our feral human nature in check begin to break down. In Part Two — Brain Games — I explored the many strange ways in which our brains work which, when overlaid on the current political, institutional, and social crises, explains many of the bizarre behaviours that are boiling out of society.And in this third and final part of the essay — A People Unfit for Democracy — I will explore the social cycles that have haunted humanity since the dawn of time as different forms of government rise, grow stale, and get replaced by the next stage — and the implications for our own era as our corrupted democracies teeter on the brink of exhaustion.~ ~ ~Crossing the Rubicon into DictatorshipMany of the ancient Greek thinkers described a natural cyclical progression through various forms of government as each stage succumbs to corruption and instability driven by human flaws and societal decay. Plato described a social cycle distinguished by five types of government, each of which follow the other in turn. In his view, the starting point in the cycle is an aristocratic form of government — usually some kind of philosopher-king who rules justly based on his wisdom, honor, and integrity. But as future generations of an inferior nature inherit the throne, this degenerates into timocracy — a state in which power is no longer earned due to the wisdom of the philosopher-king or due to the noble virtues of an aristocratic class; instead power is derived entirely from the inherited wealth and property owned by the aristocratic class, without any regard for social or civic responsibility.As wealth continues to accumulate and gets concentrated in ever fewer hands, this gives way to the next stage in the cycle — oligarchy — in which a frugal and self-interested coalition of extremely wealthy individuals rule over society. In time, as the growing gap between rich and poor fuels ever more bitter tensions between the social classes, the majority eventually forcibly overthrows the wealthy ruling minority, leading to democracy in which “the people” elect their own leaders. But as the lower classes become more numerous and leadership competitions devolve into populism and spectacle, mob rule becomes ever more common until some clever demagogue leverages the mob’s fear of a return to oligarchy by establishing a tyranny, in which tyrants enslave the population and “eliminate” anyone who poses a threat to their power. This leaves society in the hands of the worst members of society, and with no discipline to create civility and order. Society devolves into chaos, and war is frequently used as a tool to consolidate the tyrant’s grip over society. In Plato’s view, the tyranny that emerges from an exhausted democracy is the most unjust form of government.As layers upon layers of laws emerge to legitimize the tyranny and plunder, the system becomes perfectly insulated against any democratic effort by the people to cast off the tyranny by reforming the predatory democratic system using the tools of democracy. But eventually, the tyranny is forcibly overthrown by some emergent new philosopher-king who breaks all the “democratic” rules and thus dislodges the tyranny, and so the cycle begins anew.Many other ancient Greek writers proposed different variants on this theme. For example, Polybius proposed three basic forms — democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy — each of which devolves into its degenerate mirror image — mob rule, oligarchy, and tyranny — before giving way to the next stage in the cycle.As a side note: in Part One of this essay I began by discussing why I disagree with Mattias Desmet’s book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, in which he laid out four psychological conditions that must emerge in a population to explain why society allegedly becomes vulnerable to mass hysteria and becomes willing to embrace totalitarianism (which he views as a distinct form of dictatorial authoritarian rule).In Desmet’s view, there is a psychological distinction in the minds of the masses, which separates “regular” dictatorship from totalitarian dictatorship, with the former being more utilitarian and the latter more ideological as it seeks to control everything right down to your thoughts. In my view, while those differences may be useful for describing differences between authoritarian regimes, I believe those academic descriptors are not particularly useful in understanding why society is suddenly plunged into one type of tyranny or another.Totalitarianism isn’t a new or unique form of tyranny — modern technologies and modern contexts certainly give each regime their own flavor and unique new tools with which to control their populations, but the collective tyranny of the Spartan State in ancient Greece between 900-192 BC, the totalitarian rule of Qin Shi Huang (China’s first emperor) between 221-210 BC, the ideological and militant Fatimid Caliphate from 909 to 1171 AD, or the cult-like ideological rule under Akhenaten’s Egypt from 1353-1336 BC all fit the mold of extremely ideological leadership, society-wide thought control, society-wide ideological fervor, the crushing of rival beliefs and the extermination of rival believers, and intense policing of the private sphere.Tyranny comes in many forms because it has to mold itself to the society in which it operates. The flavor of the tyranny that emerges will reflect the stage of Plato’s social cycle as society evolves through different types of government and will necessarily reflect the culture and historical context of each era. An ideological society (like revolutionary Russia, which was fixated on the Bolshevik/Marxist class struggle; or Hitler’s Germany, which was fixated on social engineering to escape Weimar Germany’s failed interwar experiment with liberal democracy, or the theocratic authoritarianism of the Ancien Régime in early Quebec, which was obsessed with Catholic purity and colonial control) will each produce an ideological form of tyranny that demands total control over the private sphere. By contrast, a militaristic society intent on suppressing rival political powers and focused primarily on plundering state coffers (like Pinochet’s Chile, founded by military coup, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, founded on the idea of Arab nationalism) will produce a more utilitarian form of tyranny, less fixated on utopian ideals but no less brutal. The context of the era provides the flavor to the regime — a society obsessed with ideological ideas will produce ideological regimes, whereas societies that emerge during eras of brute power politics will produce more utilitarian regimes. It’s also worth noting that new regimes often ride a wave of ideology into power, which they then dial back once their grip on power is secure — harnessing ideological zeal is a useful battering ram with which to topple the old guard, but once power is seized, governing demands stability over zeal. Even Chairman Mao only fanned the flames of ideology whenever he felt his power being threatened by whipping up the easily-incited mob as a weapon to purge threats, but then let things simmer down whenever he felt secure — a fact that further undermines the idea that totalitarianism is a product of pre-existing psychological pressures in society, while underscoring the ease with which a regime can inflame or dial back ideological fervor, on demand, simply by hacking our easily hackable human nature. Watching the ease with which a dose of fear about the Covid virus, Russia, or Trump can ignite mob-like behaviours in our own society reveals how easily any tyrannical regime can start a fire as long as it is in control of the airwaves that tell an obedient population what to think and feel.I think Plato, Polybius, and their peers provide a far more logical explanation for the chaos and tyranny that emerge during unravelling eras. There is a natural degeneration to every form of government as each form becomes intolerable, unworkable, unreformable, and tyrannical — the social, economic, and cultural context of each era provides the flavour, but the cycle holds nonetheless. And at every stage, society’s leaders tap into our human nature to whip up the crusades, intimidate their enemies, and purge their rivals. Our irrational, tribal, hive-minded, and superstitious nature does the rest. A mob is to a politician as an army is to a general — a tool to be commanded if you know how to push the right buttons.Rome provides a great example of this natural cyclical progression through Plato and Polybius’ different forms of government and the inevitable chaos and tyranny that erupts at the turning points. Rome was founded in 753 BC by philosopher-kings. But over the course of next 250 years of monarchical rule, their Roman kingdom degenerated into tyranny until, in time, they were violently overthrown by the combined efforts of the aristocracy — and so the Republic was born. But after 500 years of senators “tweaking” their republic to serve only themselves as all the founding principles of their Republic were eroded away, the only realistic way to dislodge their greedy hands from the levers of power was to empower some “champion of the people” who could cut through the layers upon layers of laws by which they had legalized their plunder and insulated themselves from the will of the people. And so, in 49 BC, Julius Caesar (who had built a charismatic larger-than-life persona around himself as a kind of populist showman with heavy use of symbolism and

(If you’re reading this in your email browser, I recommend clicking on the title to switch to reading on the Substack platform (https://juliusruechel.substack.com) because most email programs truncate larger image-rich Substack posts.)This is Part Two of my Deep Dive into the psychological unravelling of Western Civilization. In Part One — Why Western Civilization Lost Its Mind — I explored the psychological pressures that are pushing society into dysfunction and chaos as all the civilizing forces that keep our feral human nature in check begin to break down. In this second part of the essay — Brain Games — I will explore the many strange ways in which our brains work, which, when overlaid on the emergent political, institutional, and social crises that are enveloping civilization, explain many of the bizarre behaviours that are boiling out of society.For example, will see how toxic ideas boiling out of our broken institutions can spread like wildfire through our hive-minded society, much like a faulty “software update” can spread through a network of interconnected computers. We’ll also explore our instinctive tribal nature and the implications of the Asch Conformity Experiment, which revealed how easily we succumb to group think. We’ll also examine how the supposed hyper-individualism of the post-WWII era actually fueled an era of hyper-tribalism thanks to a phenomenon known as the “zeal of the convert”. And we’ll learn about the bizarre loyalty tests that monkeys impose on each other to test one another’s tribal loyalties. We’ll also explore the strange analogy of the Rider and the Elephant (metaphors for emotional vs rational thinking), as well as the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram Obedience Experiment, the primate studies that revealed the tyrannical rule that happens when a coalition of betas is able to overthrow an alpha, and discover how small intolerant minorities can impose a kind of dictatorial rule over tolerant majorities.In the upcoming third and final part of this essay — A People Unfit for Democracy — I will explore the social cycles that have haunted humanity since the dawn of time as different forms of government rise, grow stale, and get replaced by the next stage — and the implications for our own era as our corrupted democracies teeter on the brink of exhaustion (make sure you subscribe to my Substack so you don’t miss it!)~ ~ ~1. How Faulty Software Updates Get Uploaded to the Hive MindEveryone thinks they know how to make a pencil until they’re asked how they would mine and refine the graphite to make the lead, how to build the chainsaw used to cut down the tree to make the wood, how to build the lathe to mill that wood into the shape of a pencil, how to mine and refine the steel required to build the lathe that mills the wood, how to make the machines that are required for mining and refining the raw iron ore required to make that steel, and so on. (If you’ve never read the famous story of I, Pencil, I encourage you to read it here.)What’s true about pencils is true about virtually all of civilization, including most of the thoughts and beliefs we carry with us. We each have a tiny area of direct experience and expertise, but beyond that we merely function because we tap into the knowledge and wisdom of a greater whole as we rely on the expertise of others to carry us through life. We are not fully autonomous individuals; we are wholly dependent on being plugged into a much larger functional herd.And the more complex society gets, the more dependent we become upon the expertise of others. No other animal species collaborates so fully with other non-related members of its own species. In effect, we each are merely cogs in a much larger unit — civilization happens when all those separate parts come together.In order to navigate this complex society, every individual quite literally builds a seemingly coherent mental map of the world by adopting/outsourcing information, technology, and skills from others. What choice do we have — it’s the only way to navigate the vast complexity of human society. Without that outsourced second-hand knowledge, skills, and technology, we’re reduced to an atomized collection of individuals scrambling to live hand-to-mouth. Individually, our mental map of our world may be wholly incomplete, deeply flawed, and full of irrational beliefs, but as long as we continue to successfully perform our little part within our larger functional society, civilization blooms nonetheless. As long as the information and technology circulating in society is grounded in some version of reality, flawed individuals with limited information can collaborate to create a functioning whole.I know that plate tectonics and viruses and the vacuum of space are real. And yet, I’ve never seen the continents move, seen a virus with my own naked eye, or experienced the cold emptiness of outer space. I rely on the knowledge, calculations, and experiences of others. But as long as those ideas pass through a functioning institutional process that serves as a kind of gauntlet to separate the good from the bad, I can thrive nonetheless based on my own incomplete and outsourced mental map of how the world works.The same is true of our understanding of philosophy, history, morality, and so on, which are all essentially ideas imported into our minds from others — mostly through memorization — and then we build our own lives and choices on top of that imported knowledge base. But what happens when the ideas boiling out of our institutions and being shared within our peer groups become compromised by corruption, self-interest, or ideology? And what if something as simple yet fundamental as freedom of speech has been suppressed for political purposes, which makes it all that much harder to course-correct?Garbage in, garbage out. If the processes I trust to deliver accurate information begin to spew nonsense, then I will build a coherent map of the world based on that nonsense and not know the difference. And I will begin to act upon those nonsensical beliefs.That’s when the glue that enables a cohesive collaboration between flawed individuals begins to come apart. Planes start falling out of the sky. The lights begin to flicker. And what counts as “moral” and “true” unravels into chaos.In the late stage of the civilizational cycle, which I discussed in Part One of this essay, when all the institutions and core assumptions are corrupted, politicized, or obsolete, increasingly bizarre beliefs begin to boil out across the whole of society — even as all the institutional processes that normally filter information become too corrupted and too politicized to purge those falsehoods before they become embedded in the minds of greater society. These erroneous beliefs are then compounded as other individuals, politicians, activists, and corporations upload those faulty ideas, incorporate them into their “operating system”, and even learn to weaponize them against others for their own benefit.And so, that’s how we get from a philosophy of “sticks and stones may break my bones” to a new era in which we censor factual information to protect “permanent victims” from “emotional trauma”, backed by an entire rotten academic community churning out rotten research that cherry-picks evidence to make eloquent arguments in support of that idea. Like a software update gone wrong, as the institutions start spewing nonsense, those faulty updates spread like a mind virus throughout society as society attempts to behave in a way that is consistent with those faulty uploaded beliefs. The main difference between a society steeped in superstition and a society steeped in evidence-based thinking is not the people themselves — most are exactly the same faulty, superstitious, irrational human beings — for the most part, the only difference is the guardrails of the institutions that filter and spread knowledge.Humans may not be logical, and they may be very bad at long-term second-order thinking, but they are extremely creative, adaptive, and opportunistic. So, if inventing another gender, or wrapping themselves in victimhood, or catering to dominant political narratives leads to power or resources, most will not hesitate to do it. And many will not even realize there’s anything wrong with their thinking because none of their previous beliefs were acquired due to anything other than mimicry either. Such is the illogical nature of our human species. In 2011, researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute conducted a study into how ideas spread. They discovered that “when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society.” In other words, once an idea (good or bad) reaches 10% penetration of the population, that’s the tipping point when that idea goes mainstream. A few quotes from the linked article tell a damning tale:“When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority.”“Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame.”“[As] true believers began to converse with those who held the traditional belief system, the tides gradually and then very abruptly began to shift.”"In general, people do not like to have an unpopular opinion and are always seeking to try locally to come to consensus.”It reveals that most people essentially outsource their thinking by observing and mimicking the ideas that are most forcefully defended by those around them, even as they are firmly convinced that they adopt those ideas after a rational weighing of the facts. The power of the Hive Mind is very, very real.It’s a reality about our human nature that’s easily weaponized by bad actors because it means that a very vocal and well-funded campaign inside a small popula

(If you’re reading this in your email browser, I recommend clicking on the title to switch to reading on my Substack (https://juliusruechel.substack.com) because most email programs truncate larger image-rich Substack posts.)“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” ― Charles MacKay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)As society continues to unravel into chaos and dysfunction, it has become amply clear that we are surrounded by a horde of people upon whom evidence and rational debate has no effect. A lot of ink has been spilled to explain what has gone wrong in society to make people so prone to falling for all the lies and groupthink, why they’ve become so resistant to new evidence, and why their moral compass has been discarded. As many people have commented, “society has gone insane”, people have been infected by a “mind virus” or, as one friend likes to say, “people are not even human anymore.” In other words, what has happened to break people’s minds?In Part One of this Deep Dive into the unravelling of Western Civilization, I’m going to tease apart the psychological origins of our decline as all the civilizing forces that once kept our feral human nature in check are now breaking down. In Part Two — Brain Games — I will explore the strange ways in which our brains work, which, when overlaid on the emergent political, institutional, and social crises, explains many of the bizarre behaviours that are boiling out of society.And in Part Three — A People Unfit for Democracy — I will explore the social cycles that have haunted humanity since the dawn of time as different forms of government rise, grow stale, and get replaced by the next stage in the cycle — and the implications for our own era as our corrupted democracies teeter on the brink of exhaustion.~ ~ ~One of the most compelling explanations offered during the Covid era came from Belgian professor of clinical psychology, Mattias Desmet. In his book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, he laid out four psychological conditions to explain why society — allegedly — becomes vulnerable to mass hysteria and willing to surrender its freedoms to some cause, leader, or government: 1) a lack of societal bonding (i.e. loneliness, lack of community), 2) a sense that lives have no meaning or purpose (i.e. sleeping walking through dead-end jobs), 3) free floating anxiety (i.e. a persistent sense of foreboding about the future not tied directly to any specific situation or object, recognizable in modern society by skyrocketing levels of depression and an unprecedented mental health crisis), 4) and chronically high levels of frustration and aggression in everyday life.By this tidy explanation, societal conditions created a perfect storm of psychological pressures to break people’s minds and turn once-functional human beings into a rabid easily controllable mob.It’s easy to find evidence that seems to support that theory — financial stress, the rise of corporatism, over-taxation and over-regulation, cultural erosion, mass migration, post-nationalism, nonstop fearmongering propaganda about everything from viruses to climate change to the Bad Orange Man, the caustic influence of feminism, the seductive lure of socialism, the breakdown of the family structure, the decline of religion, poor quality education, overcrowding in cities, and so on and so forth. However, science doesn’t progress by finding evidence for a compelling theory, but rather by putting that theory to the test by searching for evidence to try to disprove it. It doesn’t matter how much evidence you accumulate to support an idea, it only takes a single piece of counterevidence to blow that theory apart.Desmet’s explanation rests on the unspoken assumption that rational, logical, evidence-based functioning minds have been broken by current societal conditions. And yet, merely writing that last sentence injects the first whisper of doubt because anyone who has ever observed any member of our human species in its natural habitat is keenly aware that humans are a permanent bundle of irrational emotions, inconsistent thought processes, vicious tribalism, and mob behaviours. Our flawed human nature is perhaps the only thing you can count on to remain unchanged throughout history.History is one long never-ending stream of moral panics, mob psychology, groupthink, social contagion, mass hysteria, popular delusions, superstitions, tribal hatreds, and the attraction to ideological crusades and strongmen. Even the so-called “golden eras” when society was stable and strongly rooted in its culture were no less prone to these impulses as some madness could erupt spontaneously, seemingly out of nowhere, and at any moment. From the Salem witch trials, to the tulip mania during the Dutch Golden Age (17th century Holland), to modern stock market bubbles, to the “Satanic day care panic” of the 1980s, the “Tickle Me Elmo” craze in the late 90s, to lynch mobs, to pogroms, and even to ridiculous fashion trends, the examples of moral panics, mob psychology, and wholly irrational societal obsessions are endless. It’s who we are as a species.So, the idea that societal conditions broke people’s minds falls flat when we face up to the fact that people’s minds are, even at the best of times, anything but sane, logical, and rooted in evidence-based thinking. There has always been an irrational, vindictive, and ignorant mob — if anything, the only real and much simpler question is ‘why did the irrational mob become focused on the current set of destructive ideas instead of something else?’ Even the scientific community, which supposedly dedicates its life to evidence-based research and evidence-based debate, has proven time and time again that it is no less prone to succumbing to endless mad and destructive fallacies that spread like wildfire throughout the scientific community (and beyond) even when the evidence should have changed minds long ago, like the Martian Canals theory that persisted into the 20th century long after better quality telescopes had been invented, miasma theory, eugenics, Lamarckism, the recently-debunked 60-year panic about dietary cholesterol causing heart disease, the now-discredited 19th-century climate theory that the “rain follows the plow” (which I wrote about in my book, Plunderers of the Earth), or the ongoing climate hysteria of today. Tenured academia — the supposed bastion of rational thought — is also ironically where the ideas and support for most authoritarian social engineering projects usually originate. And once these ideas take root, they are shockingly resistant to evidence and logic. The tribalism that erupts inside the scientific community as the “consensus” closes ranks against dissident voices is also no less feral in its consequences — a particularly famous example is what happened to Professor Ignaz Semmelweis in the late 19th century, in the era before germ theory, when he noticed that doctors were killing women during childbirth by not washing their hands in between dissecting corpses and delivering babies. He proposed the controversial idea that doctors should wash their hands after conducting autopsies and before going to the delivery room, for which he was viciously vilified, ostracised, and ultimately committed to a mental asylum against his will by his own colleagues, where he was beaten up by the guards and died from a gangrenous wound that resulted from the beating.*It would seem that much of our thought processes — even at the best of times, even among those whose entire careers are dedicated to evidence-based thinking, and even in social classes that don’t fit any of Desmet’s criteria — are no less governed by emotions, ego, tribal allegiances, self-interest, prejudice, and peer pressure, rather than by rational evidence-based thought as we would like to believe. It doesn’t take any of Desmet’s four criteria to turn supposedly reasonable, rational, logical men into feral mobs willing to follow their leaders over a cliff. Civilization is not the natural state of human affairs. It is the product of a slow, difficult, tedious cultural and institutional evolution, which tempers our raw emotions and keeps our destructive human nature at bay. And so, as we try to understand what has gone wrong in society, we have cause-and-effect reversed — civilization is not breaking down because we’ve lost our minds; it’s the opposite — as the civilizing forces that restrain our feral natural instincts are corrupted and fall away, we are being revealed for who we really are — feral, mean, vicious, superstitious, emotional, self-serving, and tribal — and the more that the guardrails of our civilization erode away, the easier it is for our ugly nature to be unleashed, by accident and/or by intentional design.Look outside of modern Western society — the belief that we are normally creatures rooted in restraint, logic, rationality, and evidence-based thinking in the absence of Desmet’s psychological criteria is equally betrayed by overwhelming evidence of our never-ending superstition, raw tribalism, impulsiveness, and feral emotions, despite the fact that these societies also don’t feature any of the usual scapegoats that are blamed for the unravelling of the West (financial stress, corporatism, feminism, taxation, mass migration, family breakdown, loss of religion, overcrowding, etc.). Civilization places institutional and cultural guardrails upon our thoughts and actions — and when those guardrails break down, we revert to the mean. We don’t need psychological pressures to turn ourselves into feral beasts. It’s actually the other way round — we need civilizing psychological pressures to prevent us from turning into feral beasts. Any society that turns its back on the principles upon which its civilization was built will rapidly unravel into some version of the L

Welcome to the Julius Ruechel Podcast. Quite a few of you have asked whether I could release a podcast version of my essays. So, here’s the first of hopefully many…Podcast Episode #1 is the audio version of my latest essay: The Strong Do What They Can and the Weak Suffer What They Must: A Deep Dive into the End of Post-WWII Moral Internationalism and a … This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

The story of the famous Melian Dialogue was originally written over 2,500 years ago by ancient Greek historian Thucydides. I have included both the text and audio version in this Substack (and removed the paywall) for easier sharing because of how important the lessons from this ancient historic text are even today.What follows is meant to serve as both a stand-alone episode and as a supplemental to my recent essay/podcast called: "The Strong Do What They Can and the Weak Suffer What They Must — A Deep Dive into the End of Post-WWII Moral Internationalism and a Revival of the 2,500-Year-Old Melian Dialogue.”For a little bit of context before we dive in, the Melian Dialogue was one short chapter in Thucydides’ multi-volume historical account of the History of the Peloponnesian War, in which he meticulously documented the entire 27-year-long war between Athens and Sparta. He himself served as an Athenian general during that war. The chapter on the Melian Dialogue describes the dramatized negotiations between Athens and the rulers of the small island city-state of Melos, in the Aegean Sea, on the eve of Athens fateful siege of the city as Melos tried in vain to negotiate for its independence, offering its loyal friendship to Athens as an alternative to being conquered.Even today, the Melian Dialogue is still taught in universities and military colleges all around the world as a case study in political realism and because of the profound and complex philosophical questions that are captured by this short story. As our current world transitions from the heady idealism of the now-defunct post-WWII era into a harsher multi-polar world where national interests once again trump all other considerations, the Melian Dialogue is required reading to understand what is to come.Some truths are as valid today as they were 2,500 years ago. I promise the short story of the Melian Dialogue is well worth your time.I have combined the text of several earlier translations and updated them into modernized English to create an easy-to-read standalone story. My version draws from three translations: Benjamin Jowett’s 1881 translation (available on the Internet Archive), Richard Crawley’s 1914 translation (available for free on Project Gutenberg), and Rex Warner’s 1916 translation (available on both the Internet Archive and on Amazon (Amazon affiliate link)). Links to all three are provided in the text version of this essay. If you want to take a deeper dive into Thucydides works, I recommend reading the Rex Warner edition as the easiest to read of the three versions.The Melian Dialogue by Thucydides, from his History of the Peloponnesian War (Book 5, Chapter 17)Sixteenth Year of the War—The Melian Conference—and the Fate of MelosIn the summer of 416 BC, the Athenians also launched an expedition against the island of Melos. The Melians are a colony from Sparta. They had refused to join the Athenian empire like the other islanders, and at first had remained neutral without helping either side; but afterwards, when the Athenians had brought force to bear on them by laying waste to their land, they had become open enemies of Athens.Now the Athenian generals encamped in Melian territory and, before doing any harm to the land, first of all sent representatives to negotiate. The Melians refused to give them a public hearing, but instead asked them to state the object of their mission in a closed-door session open only to the island’s magistrates and governing council, to which the Athenian envoys replied:ATHENIANS: Since we are not allowed to speak directly to the people, no doubt in case the mass of the people should hear once and for all and without interruption an argument from us which is both persuasive and incontrovertible, and should so be led astray — for we are perfectly aware that this is why you have only granted us a private audience — why don’t you select few who sit here take an even more cautious approach? Let us have no set speeches at all, but let us proceed one statement at a time, to which you may reply at once with your disapproval and criticisms to settle that which you do not like, before proceeding further. Do you like this proposal?To which the Council of the Melians responded:MELIANS: The quiet interchange of explanations is a reasonable thing, and we do not object to that. But your military preparations are too far advanced to agree with what you say, as we see you have come to be judges in your own cause, and that at the end of the negotiation, if the justice of our cause wins the argument and we therefore refuse to yield, we may expect war; and if we are convinced by your arguments, slavery.To which the Athenians replied:ATHENIANS: If you have met with us to speculate about the future, or for any other purpose other than to look the facts in the face and on the basis of these facts to consider how you can save your city from destruction, then we can end this conversation now; otherwise, we are ready to proceed with our negotiation.The Melians responded:MELIANS: It is natural and understandable for people in our position to explore all kinds of arguments and different points of view. But we admit that this conference has met to consider the question of the preservation and security of our country; and therefore let the argument proceed in the manner which you propose.And so, the Athenians began:ATHENIANS: Well then, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences—either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Persians, or are now attacking you because of some wrong that you have inflicted on us—we will not make long speeches like that, which you would not believe; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that, although you are a colony of Sparta, you have not taken part in their military expeditions or that you have never done us any harm. Instead we recommend that you should try to get what it is possible for you to get, taking into consideration what we both really think; since you know as well as we do that, when these matters are discussed by practical people, that the question of justice arises only between parties equal in strength. Outside of that, the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak must accept what they have to accept.To which the Melians replied:MELIANS: Then in our view (since you force us to leave matters of justice aside and to confine ourselves only to self-interest) – it is at any rate useful that you should not destroy a principle that is to the general good of all men – namely, that in the case of all who fall into danger there should be such a thing as fair play and just dealing, and that such people should even be allowed to use and to profit from arguments that are not strictly valid if they can get away with it. And this is a principle which is as much in your interest as in ours, since your own defeat would also be followed by the most terrible punishments to set an example for the rest of the world.The Athenians shot back:ATHENIANS. The end of our empire, if end it should, does not frighten us: we are not so much frightened of being conquered by a power which rules over others, as Sparta does (not that we are concerned with Sparta for now), as of what would happen if our own subjects may some day rise up and overthrow their former masters. This, however, is a risk that we are content to take. We will now proceed to show you that we have come here in the interest of our empire, and that we shall say what we are now going to say for the preservation of your country; we do not want any trouble in bringing you into our empire, and we want you to be spared for the good both of yourselves and of ourselves. MELIANS: And how could it turn out as good for us to serve you, as for you to rule us?ATHENIANS: Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we would gain by not destroying you.MELIANS: So you would not agree to our being neutral friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side?ATHENIANS: No, because it is not so much your hostility that can hurt us; it is rather the case that, if we were on friendly terms with you, our subjects would regard that as a sign of our weakness, whereas your hatred is evidence of our power.MELIANS: Is that your idea of fair play? – that no distinction should be made between people who are quite unconnected with you and people who are mostly your own colonists or else rebels that you have conquered?ATHENIANS: As far as right and wrong are concerned, subjects think that there is no difference between the two, that those who still preserve their independence do so because they are strong, and that if we fail to attack them it is because we are afraid. By conquering you we shall not only increase the size but the security of our empire. We rule the sea and you are islanders, and weaker islanders than the others; it is therefore particularly important that you should not escape.MELIANS: But do you think there is no security for you in what we proposed? For here again, since you will not let us mention justice, but tell us to give in to your interests, we, too, must tell you what our interests are and, if yours and ours happen to coincide, we must try to persuade you of the fact. Is it not certain that you will make enemies of all states who are at present neutral when they see what is happening here, and naturally conclude that in course of time you will attack them too? Doesn’t your action strengthen the enemies you have already?, and force others to become your enemies even against their intentions and inclinations?ATHENIANS: As a matter of fact we are not so much frightened of states on the continent. They have their liberty, and this means that it will be a long time before they begin to take precautions against us. We are more concerned about islanders like yourselves, who are still unsubdued, or subjects who have already become embittered by