The Prometheus Dispatch

The Open Society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper

The Virtue Premium

Daniel Hatke — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:16:49 GMT

In late 2023, Jacinda Ardern stood before a packed forum at the Harvard Kennedy School. She had resigned as New Zealand’s prime minister in January of that year, citing exhaustion, and was now collecting fellowships and global speaking engagements. Fortune had named her the world’s greatest leader. Time put her in its 100 most influential. Harvard had awarded her an honorary doctorate of laws.

Two years later, New Zealand holds twenty-one days of diesel reserves and is spending over a billion dollars to build an import terminal for the very fossil fuels Ardern’s government banned. Wholesale electricity prices have more than doubled. A record 131,000 people left the country in a single year, nearly forty percent of them under thirty.

The applause was real. So is the bill.

I’ve been watching this pattern across western democracies, and something keeps surfacing: a specific kind of policy failure that follows a specific kind of political success. Leaders signal a destination. The signal earns praise. Practical objections get coded as moral failure. And then the bill arrives, years later, in a currency the signalers no longer have to pay.

It’s happening everywhere. Left and right. Large economies and small. The content varies. The mechanism doesn’t.

New Zealand: twenty-one days of diesel

In 2018, Ardern’s government banned new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. The framing was climate leadership: New Zealand would lead the world into a post-fossil future. The Zero Carbon Act followed in 2019. A “wellbeing budget” prioritized sustainability metrics over GDP growth. The international press was rapturous.

Gas production fell roughly thirty percent in six years. The Marsden Point refinery, the country’s only fuel-processing facility, closed in March 2022, making New Zealand one hundred percent dependent on imported refined fuel. Nearly half its petrol now comes from South Korean refineries and a third from Singapore, both reliant on Middle Eastern crude transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

In 2020, the same year Ardern’s government declared a climate emergency, New Zealand imported over a million tonnes of Indonesian coal. The dirtiest fuel. Because domestic gas was declining and renewables couldn’t fill the gap. The signal said one thing. The grid and human well-being required another.

The knowledge needed to balance a power grid, secure supply chains, and manage energy transitions doesn’t sit in a parliament building. It’s dispersed across engineers, traders, geologists, real world practitioners. It can’t be legislated into existence. When a government signals away its domestic production before alternatives exist, the need gets displaced to somewhere harder to see and harder to control.

What happens to a country’s sovereignty when it holds three weeks of fuel?

Germany: the grid that went brown

Angela Merkel’s nuclear phase-out might be the purest case study of signaling-as-policy in the twenty-first century.

In 2010, Merkel’s center-right government extended the lifetimes of Germany’s seventeen nuclear reactors. Then Fukushima happened. Nine thousand kilometers away in Japan. The earthquake spooked the Baden-Württemberg state election, and Merkel reversed course entirely, shutting down eight reactors immediately and scheduling the rest for closure by 2022.

Seventy-one percent of Germans believed the reversal was tactical, not principled. It probably was. A center-right chancellor executed the Green Party’s signature policy because the electoral math demanded it.

Germany shut down its last reactor in April 2023. On the morning after, coal provided thirty percent of the country’s electricity. The signal was green. The grid was brown, dirty, and producing more carbon than ever.

The nuclear phase-out made Germany dependent on Russian gas. That dependency constrained its response when Russia invaded Ukraine: Berlin hesitated on sanctions, delayed weapons deliveries, and spent months arguing over an embargo that Poland and the Baltics demanded on day one. One signaling decision in 2011 narrowed Germany’s options in 2022, which damaged its credibility in 2023, which weakened the European security architecture that German industry depends on. The bill doesn’t arrive once. It compounds.

The direct costs alone: industrial electricity prices twenty-five percent above the EU average. BASF, Germany’s chemical flagship, investing nearly nine billion euros in a new plant in China while closing production lines at its historic Ludwigshafen site. Volkswagen cutting fifty thousand German jobs. Manufacturing lost 120,000 positions in 2024 alone. GDP contracted in both 2023 and 2024: the longest stretch of economic stagnation in seven decades.

Germany’s current energy minister, Katherina Reiche, in March 2026: “The phase-out of nuclear power was a huge mistake. A huge mistake.”

What do you tell the factory worker in Ludwigshafen whose job moved to China so that a politician could win a state election?

The United Kingdom: the sovereignty signal

Brexit was sold as a return to self-determination. “Take back control” was the phrase, and it worked because it named something real: a democratic deficit, a feeling that decisions were made elsewhere, by people who didn’t have to live with consequences.

But “take back control” was a signal, not a plan. The campaign bus drove around the country promising £350 million a week for the NHS, a figure the UK Statistics Authority called “a clear misuse of official statistics” during the campaign itself. Raising the objection got you coded as an elite remainer who didn’t respect the will of the people. The harder questions (supply chains, customs infrastructure, the Irish border, labor market dependence on EU workers) met the same reception.

Eric Hoffer wrote in 1951 that a rising mass movement holds a following “not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of individual existence.” Brexit offered that refuge to a post-industrial England that no longer knew what it was for. The doctrine came later: years of negotiations, multiple prime ministers, a Northern Ireland protocol nobody likes, and a bill that arrives in increments too small to make headlines but too large to ignore. UK goods trade with the EU fell by roughly twenty percent in real terms between 2019 and 2024. Business investment flatlined for six years after the referendum. The Centre for European Reform estimates a cumulative GDP shortfall of five percent relative to comparable economies. Bloomberg Economics puts the cost at roughly a hundred billion pounds a year in output the country simply doesn’t produce anymore. No single quarter looks catastrophic. The sum is.

The signal was sovereignty. The country took back control and spent six years discovering how much it couldn’t control alone.

Is there a version of patriotism that includes reading the fine print?

The historicist’s bill

Something connects these cases. It goes deeper than bad policy.

Karl Popper wrote The Open Society and Its Enemies in exile during World War II, watching the most educated civilization in Europe destroy itself. His target was historicism: the belief that history moves toward a knowable destination. Once you believe you know where history is heading, three things follow. Opposition becomes irrational (you’re fighting the tide). Present costs become acceptable (the destination justifies them). And coercion becomes a moral obligation, because you’re helping people arrive where they were going anyway.

The destination doesn’t have to be forward. Popper wrote about progressive historicism, but the mechanism runs in any direction. A restored golden age is still a destination. “Take back control” and “Make America Great Again” are as destination-certain as “the right side of history.” Each declares where things must end up and treats practical objections as betrayal of the vision. The direction is the costume. The certainty is the mechanism.

This sounds like an old problem, confined to Marxists and fascists who are safely dead. It is alive in ordinary Tuesday politics. “The right side of history.” “The arc of the moral universe.” “The clean energy future.” “Take back control.” Each phrase contains the same assumption: we know the destination, and anyone raising practical objections is naive at best, morally deficient at worst.

This is why the practical warnings get ignored. They aren’t heard as engineering concerns. They’re heard as character flaws. You can’t raise energy security without being coded as a climate denier. You can’t raise trade logistics without being coded as anti-sovereignty. You can’t raise integration capacity without being coded as racist. The historicist frame converts every practical question into a character test.

And so the bill keeps compounding.

The United States: the America First signal

Trump’s tariff program was historicism in its right-wing costume: a vision of national destiny that treated trade as a battleground and manufacturing return as inevitable, if only someone with sufficient will would force it.

The signal was “America First.” The assumption: levy enough tariffs and factories will come home, trade deficits will shrink, American workers will prosper. There’s a persistent belief that complex systems bend to executive authority, that trade-offs are problems of will rather than features of a dispersed and interdependent global order. The practical objections (tariffs function as consumer taxes, supply chains don’t reroute by decree, retaliation damages export sectors) were dismissed as globalist hand-wringing.

Soybean exports to China collapsed seventy-five percent in a single year. American farmers required twenty-eight billion dollars in emergency bailouts. The overall trade deficit grew by forty percent as imports rerouted through other countries. Manufacturing entered contraction before COVID arrived to take the blame. The second term doubled down: “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025 imposed duties on nearly all imports, and markets shed trillions in value within a week. Allied nations, treated as adversaries in trade negotiations, became less cooperative on defense and diplomacy. The signal said strength. The bill was paid by soybean farmers in Iowa and consumers in every state.

What does “America First” mean when America’s allies stop answering the phone?

---

Germany (again): the moral signal

In August 2015, Angela Merkel said “Wir schaffen das” and opened Germany’s borders. More than 1.2 million asylum applications followed in two years.

The signal was moral leadership: Germany, given its history, would demonstrate that a wealthy democracy could absorb the displaced. The practical questions (housing capacity, language training, labor market integration, the pace at which communities can absorb change) were coded as moral failure. Raising them meant you lacked compassion. I remember this coding well. I felt the pull of it: the sense that asking “how many?” was somehow the wrong question, that the only legitimate question was “how do we help?”

“How many?” was a real question. Germany now faces a housing shortage of 700,000 units. The AfD, which managed 4.7% in its first election in 2013, took 20.8% in the 2025 federal election and became the country’s second-largest party. Merkel’s own party, under Friedrich Merz, has reversed her immigration policies, breaking the political “firewall” she herself insisted on.

The strain of bearing an open society is real, and Popper never pretended otherwise. When people’s communities change faster than they can process, when their concerns are dismissed as bigotry, they don’t become more tolerant. They find someone who will listen. Often, that someone is worse than the problem they named.

When you make the practical question unspeakable, who benefits from the silence?

Australia: the signal cycle

Australia has been through three cycles of energy signaling in fifteen years. Labor signals climate ambition. The Coalition signals affordability and energy independence. Labor returns and signals again. Each government defines its energy policy against its predecessor’s signal rather than toward a coherent strategy.

The result is investment paralysis. Who builds a power plant when the policy environment reverses every election cycle? Who commits capital to a twenty-year project in a country that can’t hold a policy for four? Australia missed its window for nuclear, which remains banned by federal law. Its grid lurches between renewable targets and emergency coal extensions. It exports massive volumes of LNG while domestic gas prices climb.

The signal, whichever direction it points at any given moment, is always confident. The grid, which doesn’t care about confidence, is increasingly fragile.

The country with antibodies

Poland crossed one trillion dollars in GDP in 2025, entering the world’s twenty largest economies. In 1990, it was thirty-eighth, behind Pakistan and Algeria. Since joining the EU in 2004, its economy has grown at an average of 3.8% per year against the EU average of 1.8%. It was the only EU country to avoid recession during the 2008 financial crisis. GDP per capita has risen from roughly half the EU average to over eighty percent in two decades.

The numbers are striking. But the numbers aren’t the interesting part.

In 2015, Poland opened an LNG terminal at Świnoujście, years before Russian gas dependence was a crisis. In October 2022, the Baltic Pipe from Norway came online, timed to coincide with the expiration of Poland’s Russian gas contract. When Russia cut off gas supplies in April 2022, Poland’s storage was over seventy-five percent full and its alternatives were already built. The country spends 4.7% of GDP on defense: more than any NATO member, including the United States. It is building Westinghouse nuclear reactors, with the first now projected for 2036.

It absorbed nearly a million Ukrainian refugees with a seventy-eight percent employment rate, the highest in the OECD. Practical integration infrastructure, built quietly before it was needed, did the work that grand moral declarations could not.

President Lech Kaczyński warned in 2008 that “today it is Georgia, tomorrow it may be Ukraine, then the Baltic States, and later, perhaps, Poland.” Defense Minister Radek Sikorski compared Nord Stream to “a new Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.” Western leaders dismissed them. Poland built the LNG terminal anyway.

Poland is not a clean case. Under PiS, it ran its own signaling operation on cultural issues: attacks on judicial independence, “LGBT-free zone” declarations, media pressure campaigns. Poland paid a virtue premium there too, in EU funding freezes and institutional credibility. But on the questions that determine whether a country can feed and heat itself, Poland built before it announced.

Why? Because Poland spent forty-four years inside the ultimate historicist experiment. Marxism was historicism turned into daily life: history has a direction, the Party knows it, resistance is irrational, present suffering is justified by the destination. Poles know, in their bones, what happens when the signal becomes the policy. The country has scar tissue where Western democracies have theory.

Popper called this piecemeal social engineering: small, testable reforms rather than utopian redesign. Fix what’s broken. Test the fix. Adjust. The work is unglamorous and doesn’t earn keynote invitations. It builds LNG terminals before you need them.

I wrote earlier that the skills that win elections have nothing to do with governing. This is that mechanism scaled up. The signal that earns magazine covers and honorary degrees is rarely the signal that prepares a country for what’s coming.

The virtue premium is what you pay when you optimize for applause instead of resilience. It compounds quietly. The leader who earned the praise is gone by the time the bill arrives. And the bill always arrives: in fuel reserves measured in days, in factories relocated to other continents, in young people leaving for countries that still have functioning grids and economies.

I feel this pull in myself. The desire to be on the right side of wherever history is going. It feels like wisdom. It feels like moral clarity. But Popper’s warning keeps surfacing: once you believe you know the destination, everyone who raises a practical objection becomes an obstacle. The distance between “I know where this is going” and “get out of my way” is shorter than any of us would like to admit.

Pragmatism has blind spots of its own: it can mistake caution for wisdom and lose the capacity to mobilize when mobilization genuinely matters. But the failures in this essay share a common feature, and it isn’t pragmatism. It’s that leadership optimized for the destination and forgot to check whether the road could hold.

Everything a modern society does to feed, heat, and heal its people sits on top of energy.

The applause fades. The grid either holds or it doesn’t.

Sources and Inspiration

The Road to Serfdom - F.A. Hayek

Monuments to Tolerated Error

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:47:49 GMT

In November 2024, California voters approved Proposition 36, increasing criminal penalties for theft and drug offenses. The measure passed with 70% support. It reversed much of Proposition 47, which California voters had approved ten years earlier with 60% support.

No committee deliberated. No amendments were offered. No one sat in a room and said, “What if we toughened some penalties but not others? What about the drug treatment provisions: can we keep those while addressing the theft problem?” The question was binary. Yes or no. The voters spoke. The nuance didn’t.

This is how we govern now. Through the clean binary of the referendum. Thumbs up. Thumbs down. I picture Commodus.

The legislature is too slow, too captured, too compromised. So we go around it. We take the question directly to the people.

It feels like more democracy, maybe. It is less republic.

The founders were specific about the distinction.

Madison, in Federalist 10, designed the republic explicitly to resist what he called the “violence of faction”: the tendency of passionate majorities to steamroll minorities and mistake collective feeling for collective wisdom. His solution was to refine popular will. Pass it “through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.”

Madison worried about both directions. Minority factions could capture the machinery of government and obstruct from within (the filibuster, the committee bottleneck, the organized interest that blocks what most people want). We see this everywhere now: small, disciplined groups wielding procedural tools to veto what majorities support. The frustration with this obstruction is bubbling up, and it’s one reason people reach for the referendum. If the legislature won’t act, go around it.

But Madison understood something we keep forgetting: opinion and judgment are different things. Opinion is what I think right now, based on what I know, colored by what I feel. Judgment is what emerges when opinion meets counter-argument, competing evidence, and the discipline of having to govern the consequences. The answer to minority obstruction is to fix the deliberative process, not to abandon it.

The representative doesn’t just carry the people’s opinion to the capitol. The representative deliberates. Sits in committee with the opposition. Hears what the other district needs. Amends the proposal. Finds the version that addresses the problem without creating three new ones. The deliberation is the point. It’s where raw opinion gets refined into judgment through the friction of competing perspectives.

Burke made this even sharper. Speaking to his constituents in Bristol in 1774, he told them something no modern politician would dare: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

The representative who becomes a weathervane, who polls before every vote, who treats constituents’ preferences as binding instructions: this person has kept the office but abandoned the function.

The binary everywhere

Social media is a constant referendum. Every issue becomes a poll. Every position a signal. The algorithm rewards the stark binary, not the careful “it depends.” Twitter threads don’t have an amendment process. Instagram polls don’t allow counter-proposals. The format demands thumbs up or thumbs down, and we’ve internalized the format so deeply that we expect governance to work the same way.

When I look at my stats for these essays, that too is a referendum. I learn where people are willing to put their time. This essay likely won’t do well.

The revolt against institutional authority happens through tools of negation. The public can swarm, humiliate, and vote out. It cannot amend, deliberate, or build. Polling is negation dressed as participation. The information revolution gave everyone a voice, but the voice can only say yes or no. The kind of voice that says “what if we tried this instead” requires a room, a process, and time. We have less patience for all three.

Then the ballot initiatives. California has put hundreds on the ballot since establishing its initiative process in 1911. Each one reduces complex policy to a binary question. Do you want lower drug penalties? Yes or no. Do you want higher minimum wage? Yes or no. Do you want the gig economy regulated? Yes or no. Each question has a clean answer. But the clean answer has consequences the question doesn’t capture: trade-offs that only emerge in deliberation, second-order effects that nobody votes on because nobody is asked.

Prop 13 capped property taxes in 1978 and reshaped California governance for fifty years. Its consequences (funding crises in schools and local government, distorted housing markets, a shift of power from localities to Sacramento, creating a moat around certain families and not others) were not on the ballot. The question was: do you want lower property taxes? The answer was yes. The implications were a different question entirely, intense inequality, generational conflicts, and more. Nobody voted on those.

On the left, progressive ballot initiatives bypass legislatures to encode specific social visions directly into law. On the right, populist movements demand that representatives stop deliberating and start obeying. Both treat the representative as obstacle rather than tool. Both want the frictionless efficiency of direct will. The MAGA movement’s contempt for Republican moderates who “don’t fight” and the progressive left’s contempt for Democratic incrementalists who “don’t deliver” share the same structural complaint: stop deliberating and do what we want.

Same mechanism. Different content.

The school we’re closing

Tocqueville spent two years studying America and concluded that voluntary associations and local self-governance were the republic’s load-bearing walls. Citizens who join a school board, sit on a jury, negotiate with neighbors about the zoning variance: these people are practicing deliberation. They’re learning that their perspective is partial. That the other side has reasons. That the workable solution usually lives in the friction between competing interests. The township was the school of citizenship.

Take away the deliberative step, and you take away the school.

The farmer knows the land. The nurse knows the ward. The shopkeeper knows the block. A ballot initiative asks California voters to decide the fate of the state’s water policy, but the knowledge needed to make that decision well is distributed across thousands of farmers, engineers, ecologists, and municipal planners. None of it fits into a yes or no. It can only enter the system through a process where people speak, listen, amend, and compromise. Hayek called this the knowledge problem: the knowledge necessary for wise governance doesn’t live in any single person or faction. It emerges through the friction of deliberation.

Representative institutions exist because the process of debate and amendment generates insight that no poll, no referendum, no prediction market can access. Polling counts existing opinions. Deliberation produces new understanding.

Plebiscitary culture collapses a distinction the republic was built to maintain: the difference between a difference of opinion and a difference of principle. When every issue is a referendum, every disagreement becomes existential. There’s no space for “I see your reasoning but I think the trade-offs point differently.” There’s only yes or no. For or against. The capacity to treat disagreement as workable rather than threatening requires a process designed for that purpose. Referendums are designed for something else.

A society that only knows what it’s against finds plebiscitary culture suited to its needs. You can vote NO without offering an alternative. Negation scaled to governance.

I’m not arguing against citizen engagement. The founders built the republic on it. Washington and Franklin didn’t want a system designed for passive subjects. They designed one for active citizens who govern themselves through participation.

The question is what kind of participation.

Participation that submits to the discipline of deliberation (jury service, local governance, elected representation where the representative actually deliberates) builds the muscle of self-governance. It teaches us to hold our opinion alongside competing opinions and find the workable ground between them. This is hard. It’s slow. It produces outcomes that fully satisfy no one. It is also the only known process that converts raw popular will into governance that doesn’t consume itself.

Participation that bypasses deliberation (the poll, the referendum, the social media pile-on, the demand that representatives become mirrors rather than filters) feels more direct. More democratic. More responsive. But it replaces the process that generates judgment with the process that merely counts opinion. And opinion without deliberation is what Madison feared most: faction unchecked by the friction that forces it to reckon with what it doesn’t know.

The drift is real. We’re all doing it. We treat polls as mandates. We expect representatives to “fight” rather than deliberate. We reduce complex questions to binaries and call the result the voice of the people. I do it too. I catch myself wanting the clean answer, the decisive action, the leader who just does something. The patience required for deliberation feels like weakness. It isn’t. But it feels that way, and feelings are what plebiscitary culture runs on.

Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville

Back to California. In 2014, sixty percent of voters said yes to lower penalties. In 2024, seventy percent of voters said yes to higher ones. The same electorate, the same mechanism, opposite conclusions, ten years apart. No one sat in a room between those two votes and asked what changed. No one amended. No one deliberated. The people spoke twice, and the two answers canceled each other out.

Jefferson understood this better than we give him credit for.

He was the most democratic of the founders. The one who pushed hardest against Federalist caution, who trusted the people most. And in his First Inaugural, having won the most bitter election the young republic had ever seen, he said something that plebiscitary culture makes almost impossible:

“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We are all republicans: We are all federalists.”

Our disagreements about how to govern are not disagreements about whether to govern ourselves. The republic can contain differences of opinion because it has a process for working through them. That process is deliberation.

And then the less-remembered line: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union, or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated, where reason is left free to combat it.”

Monuments to the safety of tolerated error. The republic’s confidence in itself: we can afford to let wrong ideas stand because we have a process for testing them. Reason, given time and friction and the discipline of deliberation, will do its work.

Plebiscitary culture offers no such patience. It demands instant verdict. It builds guillotines of instant consensus where Jefferson would build monuments to tolerated error.

The people should govern. That was never the question. The question is whether we’re still willing to govern through the slow, maddening, indispensable process that converts what we think into something wiser than any of us thought alone.

The republic was designed to refine opinion into judgment. We are converting it back.

Sources and Inspiration

A Conflict of Visions - Thomas Sowell

Ex Conatu, Libertas

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 15:30:22 GMT

Thomas Jefferson crossed out a word and changed the meaning of freedom for two and a half centuries.

George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted weeks before Jefferson sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, listed the inherent rights: life, liberty, property, happiness, and safety. Jefferson kept life. He kept liberty. He dropped property. In its place, he elevated three words that have been misread ever since: the pursuit of happiness.

I believe I know what he meant.

Jefferson was, by his own private confession, an Epicurean. In an 1819 letter to his friend William Short, he said it plainly: “I too am an Epicurean.” He enclosed a syllabus of Epicurean doctrine, stripped to its bones:

Happiness the aim of life.
Virtue the foundation of happiness.
Utility the test of virtue.

Read those three lines slowly. Happiness is the aim. But you cannot reach it without virtue. And virtue is measured by its usefulness: its effects on the world, its contribution to others, its capacity to produce something that matters. Jefferson’s happiness was a framework for effectiveness. For producing. For participating.

He told his daughter Martha the same thing in plain language, writing from a canal boat in southern France in 1787: “A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe for felicity. The idle are the only wretched.”

The idle are the only wretched. Struggle, challenge, effort: those were the mechanisms of happiness in Jefferson’s architecture. Passivity and disengagement were its enemies.

His remaining purpose in life, he told Martha, was seeing his daughters “developing daily those principles of virtue and goodness which will make you valuable to others and happy in yourselves.” Valuable to others AND happy in yourselves. The two weren’t separate categories. Usefulness to others was the mechanism of personal happiness.

The enemy of happiness in Jefferson’s framework is not suffering. It’s what he called “the most dangerous poison of life”:

Ennui.

Passivity.

Disengagement.

Doomscrolling.

The withdrawal from useful activity that rots character from the inside.

We’ve turned his word into something he wouldn’t recognize. Happiness has become a feeling to be optimized, a mood to be managed, an arrival to be reached and defended against disturbance. We track it on apps now. Jefferson meant something closer to effective engagement with reality through virtue: being productive, being useful, developing character through activity, and through all of that, arriving at flourishing. The pursuit was the point. The happiness was in the pursuing.

The drive beneath the Declaration

There is a deeper current running beneath Jefferson’s framework, one he never named.

A century before the Declaration, Spinoza had a word for it: conatus. The fundamental drive of every being to persist in and expand its own existence. Not survival, exactly. Something more stubborn than that. A plant turning toward light isn’t deciding to grow. It just grows. Conatus is that: the core motion of a living thing, pressing outward against whatever constrains it.

And freedom, in Spinoza’s architecture, is the achieved state of acting from your own nature rather than being shoved around by external forces.

Freedom earned through understanding and effort. Never granted. Never inherited without renewal.

Ex Conatu, Libertas. From striving, freedom.

Where did Jefferson’s version come from? He may never have read Spinoza directly. The influence was atmospheric: Spinoza’s ideas passed through the radical Enlightenment and entered the intellectual air that Jefferson breathed without tracing it back. But the convergence is striking. Jefferson’s substitution of “the pursuit of happiness” for “property” shifted freedom from static possession toward active striving. His conviction that the moral sense must be exercised and cultivated, his vision of the yeoman farmer realizing capacity through self-directed labor: all of it resonates with conatus more than with Locke’s framework of natural rights.

Both men arrived at the same insight from different directions. Striving constitutes freedom. Passivity negates it.

What you can’t put in a constitution

But Jefferson made a choice that I think contains the deepest wisdom in the whole architecture.

He kept all of this privately.

His public philosophy remained Lockean: natural rights, consent of the governed, limited government as a shield against tyranny. He built institutions on Locke because institutions require bright lines. A republic must answer questions like: Where does your freedom end and mine begin? What constrains the sovereign? What rights can’t be taken away? Conatus offers no answers to these questions. It is concerned with a being’s relation to its own nature, not with the architecture of competing wills.

Some truths constrain power, bound authority, draw lines between people. A republic runs on these. A courtroom runs on these. They have to be enforceable, or they’re decoration.

Other truths shape character. They orient a person toward the world, cultivate something in them that no legal code can reach. A family runs on these. A mentor runs on these. They work precisely because no one is forced to follow them.

You cannot legislate striving. Try, and you get either authoritarianism (the state defining what counts as proper effort) or emptiness (a principle so abstract it constrains nothing). You cannot put conatus in a constitution. But you can build a household around it. You may, at its largest scale, create a culture of it.

A family doesn’t operate on enumerated rights. It operates on shared identity, obligation, modeling. The goal is character formation. And within that context, the claim that freedom is earned through effort, that passivity negates it, that the idle are the only wretched: these lose none of their force for being unlegislatable.

Jefferson understood this. He held one philosophy for the republic and another for himself and his household. He was right to keep them separate.

As a family creed, Ex Conatu, Libertas locates freedom in agency rather than entitlement. It tells children they are free because they pursue freedom through their own striving, choosing it each day. Not a gift. An ongoing achievement, something that can atrophy through neglect the way a muscle does.

It carries a useful severity. The person who ceases to strive has ceased to be free, regardless of how comfortable the couch is. This is a demanding standard. Deliberately. Jefferson told his daughter the idle are the only wretched. He didn’t soften it.

And it inoculates against what I think is the quiet disease of our particular moment: the slow substitution of ease for agency, of consumption for creation. I watch it in myself. The drift toward optimization, toward managing life rather than living it. The creed functions as a standing challenge. Remain an active author of your own life. Provide value. The capacity for self-governance starts in the smallest republic: the family.

This is why I named the publication what I named it. Prometheus saw humans shivering in the dark. He didn’t petition Zeus. He didn’t wait for permission. He stole fire, brought it down, and accepted the eagle as the price. That’s conatus in its mythic form: the drive to act on what you know, to bring light even when the cost is visible from the start. The creed and the myth are the same argument. Striving constitutes freedom. The fire has to be carried. And the carrying is the point.

I chose these words knowing they can’t be made into law.

A creed that could be legislated would have already lost its meaning. Compelled striving is compliance. Only freely chosen effort constitutes what Spinoza meant, what Jefferson practiced, what I want my children to understand about what it means to be free.

Some truths belong to the household. They enrich the individual and shape the family, and they fall apart the moment you try to enforce them on strangers with no shared context. Jefferson knew this. He built bright lines for the republic and kept his Epicurean notebooks for himself.

Ex Conatu, Libertas. From striving, freedom. The philosopher’s private conviction. The patriarch’s standing challenge.

A mind always employed is always happy. The idle are the only wretched. I believe this. I want my children to believe it too. Not because I told them. Because they felt it: the moment you realize your own capacity, the weight you can carry, the thing you built that wasn’t there before. That feeling is the freedom. Once you’ve had it, comfort stops being enough.

That’s the creed’s final demand. Even its acceptance must be earned.

Sources and Inspiration

Ethics - Baruch Spinoza

The Paralysis of the Over-Aware

Daniel Hatke — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:47:14 GMT

I can see it happening in real time now.

My inner workings can be insufferable, but let me paint a while.

Someone at dinner says something about the news, and before they’ve finished the sentence I’ve already catalogued it: preference falsification (they’re performing a belief for the table), shadow projection (the outrage says more about their anxieties than the story), entertainment epistemology (they encountered the event as spectacle, not information). I can name every mechanism operating in the room. The tribal signaling. The quiet conformity. The way certainty substitutes for thinking.

I name all of it. And then I take another bite of penne alla vodka and say nothing.

This is supposed to be the payoff. You read the books. You internalize the frameworks. You learn to see the escape mechanisms that Erich Fromm mapped in 1941: how people flee freedom through authoritarianism, through destructiveness, through what he called automaton conformity, where you adopt the beliefs and desires your culture hands you and stop noticing you’ve done it. You learn to see the way people publicly conform while privately disagreeing, performing beliefs so long they forget the original belief existed. You learn to see all of it.

And then you discover that seeing all of it changes almost nothing.

The connoisseur of dysfunction

Fromm described three escape routes from the burden of freedom. Two are dramatic: submission to authority, destruction of what threatens you. The third is quiet. Automaton conformity. You adopt the personality offered by cultural patterns. You become “exactly as all others are and as they expect you to be.” The self disappears into consensus.

There’s a version of this Fromm didn’t describe, probably because it barely existed in 1941. Call it the fourth escape: the informed spectator. You don’t submit to authority. You don’t destroy. You don’t conform. You observe. You develop such a fine-grained understanding of how everyone else is fleeing freedom that you never notice you’re doing it too.

The observation becomes the escape.

I recognize this because I live in it. I can write essays about escape mechanisms and still catch myself fleeing. I can name automaton conformity and still adopt positions because my intellectual tribe holds them, discovering later that the position was borrowed rather than earned. The awareness is something. The awareness is also, by itself, insufficient.

This isn’t confined to one end of the spectrum. The educated progressive who can deconstruct every power structure but hasn’t built or maintained a single institution or business. The constitutional originalist who can recite the Federalist Papers but hasn’t attended a school board meeting in a decade. The libertarian who has read every word Hayek wrote and never organized so much as a neighborhood party. The mechanism is the same: understanding substitutes for participation. The sophistication of the analysis becomes the excuse for the absence of the action.

A tennis coach named Timothy Gallwey once described the mind as split: Self 1, the verbal critic that analyzes your grip and replays your last mistake, and Self 2, the body that already knows how to hit the ball if Self 1 would get out of the way. The over-aware are all Self 1. The diagnostic lens has become its own form of interference.

When the most aware people opt out

This would be a private problem if it stayed private.

Hannah Arendt spent years studying what happens when people fail to think. Her account of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem produced an observation that still unsettles: the catastrophic evil of the Holocaust was administered not by monsters but by ordinary people who never stopped to consider what they were doing. Eichmann coordinated deportation logistics. He organized transport schedules, attended planning conferences, issued operational directives. He was not a passive clerk. He was an active administrator of genocide who simply never stopped to consider what his efficiency was serving. The banality of evil, Arendt called it: thoughtlessness as complicity.

The over-aware represent the mirror failure. We think constantly. We think about the mechanisms, the systems, the psychological structures, the historical patterns. We scroll the news on our phone, a false sense of participation. Of knowing. And we don’t act. Or, perhaps we make a post or send a text regarding our outrage. Meanwhile, the gap left by aware people who opt out gets filled by people with fewer reservations. Some of them are building real things. Some of them are building badly, and the people best equipped to notice are sitting at dinner cataloguing mechanisms over pasta.

Arendt understood something about action that the over-aware tend to miss: action is a beginning. It arrives when you choose to begin. The thinking was never going to finish. Every birth, she wrote, is the appearance of something new in the world. Every act of genuine agency is a kind of natality: something that could not have been predicted from what came before. You don’t finish diagnosing and then start building. You build, and the building teaches you what the diagnosis couldn’t.

Phronesis only comes from doing

Aristotle drew a distinction here. There are two kinds of knowledge. Episteme is theoretical understanding: knowing that something is true and why. Phronesis is practical wisdom: knowing what to do in a particular situation, right now, with these people, under these conditions. Episteme comes from study. Phronesis comes from action.

The catch: phronesis cannot be taught. It develops only through practice. You don’t become practically wise by reading about practical wisdom. You become practically wise by doing things, getting some of them wrong, and developing the judgment that only arrives through skin in the game. Aristotle’s word for this settled disposition was hexis: knowledge that lives in your hands and your habits, not in your theories.

The over-aware have episteme to spare. They understand the mechanisms. They can trace the genealogy of every institutional failure. What they lack is hexis, the settled capacity that comes from having tried, failed, adjusted, and tried again. The only way to build it is to begin. And beginning is exactly what the over-aware have been deferring.

The anxiety is the threshold

Rollo May, a psychologist who spent his career studying people who can’t begin, saw this pattern from the therapist’s chair. Patients in postwar America came to him with everything the century promised: security, comfort, opportunity. They weren’t sick in any obvious way. They were empty. May called it “the loss of the center.” People adrift in comfort, living what he called blind momentum: going through the motions without genuine choice, their days blurring together, their opinions borrowed from their environment.

The over-aware have their own version of blind momentum. They go through the motions of analysis rather than the motions of conformity, but the “going through the motions” part is identical. The diagnosis replaces the living. The framework substitutes for the choosing.

May’s prescription: “The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.” The over-aware think they’ve escaped conformity because they can see through it. But their inaction is its own conformity: the conformity of the critic class, the audience that watches and never performs. They’ve traded the conformity of borrowed beliefs for the conformity of borrowed analysis. The form changed. The surrender didn’t.

And the anxiety they feel? May would say stop treating it as a problem. Anxiety is the price of becoming. We feel it because we stand at the threshold of something we haven’t been before. The person who feels no anxiety has stopped growing.

This is the part the over-aware get backwards. They feel their anxiety and conclude they need more theory, more reading, more understanding before they can act. One more book. One more framework. One more meditation, or Xanax. One more essay that names the mechanism with sufficient precision. May would say the anxiety is the signal that the threshold is right there. The anxiety isn’t blocking the door. The anxiety is the door. Walk through it. The doing is what resolves it, because the anxiety was never a thinking problem. It is the permanent companion of freedom. You act alongside it or you don’t act at all.

And the reward for walking through? May argued it is not grim endurance. It is joy. Watch a child learning to walk. She tries, falls, gets up, tries again. Falls again. Keeps going. When she finally takes those steps, she laughs. Not because anything external has changed. Because she’s using her powers. “Joy is the affect which comes when we use our powers.”

The over-aware have been denying themselves this. They’ve been watching the child instead of walking. They have studied the biomechanics of the first step, mapped the neural pathways, read three papers on infant motor development, and written a thoughtful critique of how society undervalues the courage it takes to fall. They have done everything except stand up.

Joy is waiting on the other side of the anxiety they keep trying to resolve with more analysis. It cannot be reached from the armchair.

What it looks like when the aware act

Iris Murdoch, a philosopher who thought more carefully about attention than almost anyone in the twentieth century, argued that the moral life is not primarily about dramatic choices. It’s about the quality of one’s vision between choices. How you see the world in ordinary moments: with clarity or distortion, with generosity or suspicion, with attention to what’s actually there or attention only to your own categories. She called the ego “fat” and “relentless,” always inserting itself between the person and the real.

The over-aware have a particular form of ego: the ego of the diagnostician. The one that sees mechanisms rather than people. Categories rather than situations. The essay rather than the dinner.

Murdoch’s remedy was attention redirected: stop looking at your own reflection in the glass and look through the glass at what’s actually there. The person in front of you at dinner isn’t a bundle of mechanisms. They’re a person. The community you live in isn’t a case study in associational collapse. It’s a place where you could show up.

Every source I’ve cited in this publication was written by someone who acted. And the action came in flavors as different as the people themselves.

Michel de Montaigne, the man who invented the essay form, retreated to a tower on his family estate in the Dordogne and wrote. That was his action. Not policy. Not activism. Writing with radical honesty about his own contradictions, his fears, his digestion, his cowardice, his confusion. His famous question, “Que sais-je?” (what do I know?) was not a counsel of paralysis. It was a practice. By admitting he didn’t know, he freed himself to investigate. By investigating, he discovered. By discovering, he changed. The curiosity was the engine. Montaigne’s action was turning the diagnostic lens on himself and publishing what he found, warts and all. He could have studied the human condition from a safe distance. Instead he made himself the specimen. That cost him something. It cost him the comfort of being the observer.

Hannah Arendt covered a trial in Jerusalem and told the truth about what she saw. She reported that Eichmann was not a monster but a bureaucrat, and that some Jewish leaders had cooperated with the Nazi regime. The truth cost her Gershom Scholem, one of her oldest and closest friends, who broke with her permanently. It cost her Kurt Blumenfeld, her mentor, who rejected her and died without reconciling. It cost her years of public attack from communities she had belonged to her entire adult life. Her action was judgment exercised in public, with consequences she accepted and could not have fully predicted. She could have stayed in the audience.

She chose the stage.

Fromm practiced psychoanalysis: one patient at a time, in a room, trying to help a specific person face their specific escape mechanisms. Eric Hoffer worked the San Francisco docks for more than twenty years and wrote philosophy in his spare time. Benjamin Franklin built a lending library, a fire company, a postal system, a university, a nation. He didn’t theorize about civic association. He built civic associations.

These actions share a common structure, and it isn’t scale. Montaigne in his tower and Franklin in his city were doing the same thing at different volumes: beginning something, with skin in the game, where they could be wrong. Montaigne could be wrong about himself. Franklin could be wrong about the nation. Arendt could be wrong about Eichmann (many thought she was). The action required what the analysis didn’t: exposure to consequences.

Aristotle would recognize every one of these as phronesis in formation. You cannot think your way into acting. You can only act your way into a different relationship with thinking. The hexis, the settled practical wisdom, develops through contact with the real. Montaigne’s essays got better because he kept writing them. Franklin’s institutions got better because he kept testing them. Arendt’s judgment got sharper because she kept exercising it in public, under fire.

Back to the dinner table

The over-aware already have confronted the hardest part: they see clearly (at least, they think they do). What they haven’t done is pick the form their action takes. For some it will be writing. For some, building. For some, showing up to a local board meeting and staying past the first hour. For some, the hardest action of all: saying what they actually think at the dinner table instead of cataloguing what everyone else thinks.

Someone brings up the latest outrage. The mechanisms are visible, as always. The preference falsification, the shadow projection, the borrowed certainty. I can see all of it.

This time I put down the fork.

I say something. Not the full diagnostic, not the framework, not the essay. Something smaller and more honest: that I’m not sure the outrage matches what actually happened, and that I’ve noticed we all seem to agree on things at this table that I’m not sure we’d agree on privately. It’s clumsy. It lands wrong. So I move to curiosity. I ask whether anyone else at the table has noticed the gap between what we say here and what we might say privately. Whether any of us are actually sure, or just performing certainty because the silence would be worse.

The awareness doesn’t save the moment. That’s the thing May tried to tell us. The anxiety doesn’t resolve before you act. It resolves, if it resolves at all, somewhere on the other side. The doing is graceless. The phronesis isn’t there yet. It won’t be there until I’ve done this enough times to develop the hexis, the settled habit of speaking honestly in rooms where honesty isn’t the norm.

But the penne alla vodka tastes different when you’re not hiding behind the observation. The vodka sauce has blossomed, or maybe it’s the adrenaline. There is something on the other side of the analysis: the small, startled recognition that you are using your powers. That you are, for the first time in a while, actually in the room.

May called it joy. I’d call it something quieter than that, in this context. Relief, maybe. The relief of no longer performing the role of the person who sees everything and does nothing.

The civic square is emptier than it should be. The people most capable of seeing what’s needed are the same ones sitting in the audience, cataloguing the performance.

The show doesn’t need more critics.

Sources and Inspiration

Man’s Search for Himself - Rollo May

The Inner Game of Tennis - Timothy Gallwey

Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

Eichmann in Jerusalem - Hannah Arendt

The Sovereignty of Good - Iris Murdoch

Essays - Michel de Montaigne

The Tab

Daniel Hatke — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:36:09 GMT

Louis C.K. had a bit about watching a man on a plane lose his mind the moment the in-flight Wi-Fi went out. The guy had been connected for just minutes. Before that, the technology didn’t exist on planes. And now he was furious, as if something had been taken from him. Louis’s line was something like: “How quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago.”

That’s the speed of it. The provision appears, becomes normal, becomes atmosphere, and then its absence becomes an outrage. Minutes. That’s all it takes for a miracle to become a minimum expectation.

I think about this every time something breaks that I didn’t know was working. The cell signal I notice only when it drops. The package tracking I check twelve times and then curse when it’s late. The flight itself, the metal tube hurtling six miles above the earth, which I ignore entirely, so I can be angry about the Wi-Fi or running out of snacks for my kid only 20% into the flight time. The provision is so seamless that it becomes invisible. And invisible provision does something dangerous to the person receiving it: it erases the awareness that anyone is providing at all.

For seventy-five years, the United States has been providing the Wi-Fi. Across the global commons: shipping lanes, energy corridors, dollar-denominated trade, the financial plumbing that makes international commerce function. The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet wasn’t a favor anyone asked for, at least not out loud. It was infrastructure. Background. The way shipping in the mideast lanes works.

The Strait of Hormuz was open the way water comes from a tap. You don’t think about the municipal system that delivers it until the pipe breaks.

Now the pipe has broken. And the sober objection needs to be stated right here: the United States broke it. In February 2026, joint U.S.-Israeli strikes hit Iran, killing its Supreme Leader. Iran retaliated by closing the Strait. Commercial traffic dropped 95% within weeks. Oil prices surged past $110 a barrel, up more than 60% in a month. And then Donald Trump told European and British leaders, in effect, to go handle it themselves. He posted on Truth Social: “Go get your own oil.” He told the UK to “build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT.”

Two versions of this story circulate, and both are correct. One says Trump started the fire and is now demanding that everyone else put it out. The other says the fire revealed that Europe has no fire department. If Europe had the capability to secure Hormuz independently, the question of who lit the match would be tactical (an argument about strategy). The question is existential because they can’t. Macron said forcibly opening the Strait was “unrealistic.” These are nations that ran down their hard-power capabilities for decades, secure in the assumption that American ships would always appear over the horizon.

The fire caught a house with no extinguisher, no alarm system, and no evacuation plan. Who struck the match matters. That the house had no sprinklers matters more.

Forgot, or Never Learned

The question worth sitting with is why the sprinklers were never installed.

Freedom is psychologically expensive. It demands you tolerate uncertainty, bear responsibility, build capacity you may never need. This is true for individuals. It is also true for nations. When someone else carries the weight of your security, you don’t just benefit from the arrangement. You stop perceiving the weight as weight. You mistake the absence of burden for the natural order of things. The guarantee becomes atmosphere. You breathe it without thinking.

And here’s what makes it worse: the better the guarantor, the deeper the sleep. A malevolent protector creates awareness. You feel the boot. You know you’re dependent because the dependency chafes every day. If Iran were providing Europe’s security, no European would mistake the arrangement for freedom. The coercion would be visible, and so would the chains. But a benevolent protector, a competent one, a generous one, produces something more dangerous than resentment. It produces oblivion. The provision is so reliable, so seamless, that it vanishes into the background of reality. You don’t notice the weight being carried because the carrier never complains and never drops it. Until they do.

This isn’t an argument that the United States should have been worse at the job. It’s an observation that doing the job well, for long enough, without asking anything in return, produces the same incapacity as coercion. Just without the awareness.

Erich Fromm identified this mechanism in 1941, watching Europe burn from American exile. His question wasn’t how dictators seize power. It was why populations hand it over. His answer: freedom creates anxiety. The burden of self-provision, of standing alone, of making choices no one else can validate, produces a discomfort that most people will do almost anything to escape. When someone else is providing, the anxiety never surfaces. The dependent party doesn’t feel dependent. They feel normal.

Alexis de Tocqueville saw the endpoint two centuries before Fromm named the mechanism. He described a power that “does not tyrannize, but compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” Tocqueville was writing about soft despotism, the paternalistic state that infantilizes through comfort rather than coercion. But the mechanism works the same way with a paternalistic ally. Provide for every need long enough, and the recipient loses the capacity to provide for themselves. Not because they’re shortsighted. Because the muscle was never asked to flex.

Forgot implies institutional memory that can be recovered. Never learned means building from scratch under crisis conditions. The postwar European political class largely inherited the American guarantee at birth. They didn’t choose dependency. They were born into a world where someone else was already paying the tab. The anxiety Fromm described never had to surface. The safety net was always there. Childhood was the only condition they knew, and childhood feels like freedom until someone asks you to feed yourself.

The Outrage Is the Tell

Eric Hoffer spent his life on the docks of San Francisco, watching who joined movements and why. His uncomfortable conclusion: the content of the doctrine is almost irrelevant. What matters is what the movement offers the convert. Someone to blame. Something to be. The costume differs left and right; the function is identical.

Hoffer’s insight applies here in a way he might not have anticipated. The dependent party doesn’t just accept the dependency silently. They convert it into moral superiority. Europe didn’t merely free-ride on American naval power. It disdained that power while sheltering under it. Green posturing, anti-militarist rhetoric, multilateral virtue-signaling: all delivered from the safety of someone else’s security guarantee. The disdain is the tell. It functions the way Hoffer’s true believer relates to the society that sustains them: needing it, resenting it, performing the resentment as proof of moral purity.

And it’s happening inside America too.

On the left: the anti-capitalist organizer coordinating via iPhone, posting on a venture-backed platform, collecting speaking fees at universities whose endowments are invested in the markets they denounce. Noam Chomsky built his career at MIT, one of the Pentagon’s largest research partners, arguing that the military-industrial complex was America’s defining sin. I’m not saying the critique is wrong. I’m saying the critique was funded by the thing it critiqued, and nobody talked about that part. That silence suggests something closer to a power calculus than an honest reckoning.

On the right: seven or eight of the ten most federally dependent states (depending on the year measured) vote Republican. Three-quarters of FEMA disaster relief goes to red states. Cliven Bundy denied federal authority while ranching on federal land at a 93% discount to private market rates. He could not ranch without the system he rejected. The Ayn Rand Institute, devoted to laissez-faire capitalism, accepted $713,000 in forgivable government loans during Covid. They wrote a blog post explaining why it was fine.

(I’m aware I’m listing these with the detachment of someone who thinks he’s above the pattern. I’m not. I’ll get there.)

Neither side sees it. And this is the part I want to deliver: what’s operating here is self-deception. Hypocrisy would require knowing you’re doing it. The Bundy rancher genuinely does not experience himself as a federal beneficiary. The anti-military academic genuinely does not experience herself as sheltered by military power. The European diplomat genuinely does not experience his green-energy sermon as delivered from the deck of someone else’s diesel-powered destroyer, projecting power against adversaries who would willingly take or destroy the freedom he’s exercising to give the sermon in the first place.

Jean-Paul Sartre called this mauvaise foi. Bad faith. You deceive yourself about your own situation so completely that the deception disappears into the furniture of your worldview. You don’t see it because seeing it would require dismantling the story you tell about who you are.

It disturbs one’s identity.

The Fish Doesn’t Know It’s in Water

The tab at Hormuz is the visible line item. The bill underneath is larger.

The dependency isn’t just military. It’s the entire operating system. Dollar-denominated trade. Treasury recycling. Shipping insurance. Correspondent banking. The clearing mechanisms and compliance layers through which value moves across borders. The architecture that turns a handshake in Dubai into a settled transaction in Frankfurt. All of it runs on American infrastructure. The U.S. didn’t just protect the shipping lanes. It built the lanes. And the ports. And the currency everyone uses when they arrive.

F.A. Hayek called the underlying principle the knowledge problem: the information required to coordinate a complex system is so dispersed, so embedded in local circumstances and tacit practice, that no one can perceive it as a whole, let alone replicate it. Hayek was writing about economies and central planning. But the insight scales. The global operating system that American power underwrites is so distributed that most participants can’t see it as a product of anyone’s effort. It’s just how trade works. How shipping works. How money works.

Until it doesn’t. Iran has established a toll on Larak Island. The IRGC screens every vessel: IMO number, cargo manifest, destination, crew list, ownership details. All submitted to intermediaries linked to the Revolutionary Guard. Two million dollars per transit, payable in yuan or cryptocurrency. Some Chinese-linked vessels have been turned back even after paying. The distributed order that Hayek described (too complex and embedded in local practice for anyone to administer) is being replaced by somebody vetting paperwork in a harbor office on an island most people couldn’t find on a map. It is already failing. But the damage to the old system doesn’t require the new one to succeed.

Deutsche Bank strategist Mallika Sachdeva warned this could be “the catalyst for erosion in petrodollar dominance and the beginnings of the petroyuan.” Speculative, maybe. Except that sanctioned Iranian and Russian oil already accounts for roughly thirteen million barrels per day (about fourteen percent of global supply), and most of it has traded outside dollar rails for years. The alternative infrastructure already exists. Hormuz is testing whether a crisis can force it to scale.

The water is draining. And the fish are starting to notice what air feels like.

David McCullough spent decades reconstructing the American founding. The through-line of his work is contingency: nothing about the arrangement was inevitable. The fog over the East River that allowed Washington’s army to escape Brooklyn. The crossing of the Delaware that kept the war alive. Every institution, every alliance, every guarantee was a contingent choice that could have gone differently. The postwar generation inherited a world of American guarantees and treated them the way fish treat water. Not a gift. Not a decision someone made. Just the medium of existence.

In July 1969, Richard Nixon held an informal press briefing in Guam and told Asian allies they would need to provide their own ground forces. Australia heard the message and began rebuilding its defense posture around self-reliance. But the word “began” is doing a lot of work. The first articulated self-reliance policy didn’t appear until the 1976 Defence White Paper, seven years after Nixon’s announcement. The full doctrine wasn’t codified until the 1987 white paper. Eighteen years. Every Australian defence white paper since has debated the same unresolved question: how much weight for the alliance versus how much for self-reliance. Forty years on, they’re still calibrating. It worked because Australia had latent capacity, strong institutions, and nearly two decades of peace in which to build. The withdrawal was calibrated, not chaotic. The umbrella was pulled back slowly enough for the person underneath to find their own roof. That timeline matters for what follows.

When the U.S. left the Philippines in 1992, there was no calibration and no time. In February 1995, just over two years later, a Filipino navy patrol found a newly built octagonal structure on stilts flying a Chinese flag on a submerged reef, two hundred and forty kilometers off the island of Palawan. A Filipino fisherman had reported being taken captive by Chinese soldiers. Beijing said the structure was a shelter for its fishermen. It was equipped with a satellite dish linked to the Chinese mainland. Today Mischief Reef is a fully fledged Chinese military outpost: a three-thousand-meter airfield, radar arrays, and probable surface-to-air missile installations built on land reclaimed from the sea. The fisherman’s shelter became a forward operating base. By 1998, the Philippines signed the Visiting Forces Agreement to get American forces back. The dependent party didn’t build. The vacuum filled. And then the dependent party asked the provider to return.

And then there’s China. More than 40% of China’s oil imports transit the Strait of Hormuz. Belt and Road stretches across three continents. Artificial islands bristle with radar and runways in the South China Sea. This is a nation that has spent two decades signaling that it is ready to be a superpower.

Hormuz is the exam. And so far, China’s answer has been a toll booth on Larak Island: collect fees in yuan, wave ships through selectively, let the IRGC do the muscle work. A toll booth without a road crew. Even Chinese-linked vessels (the ships of the one major power paying in the preferred currency) have been turned back at the chokepoint. Someone has to dredge the mines, enforce the rules of engagement, absorb the casualties, manage the diplomatic overhead of being the power everyone resents. The US has done this for seventy-five years. China has watched. Watching and doing are different things, and the difference is measured in blood, treasure, and the willingness to be hated for showing up. The tab comes due for aspiring superpowers too.

Europe sits somewhere between these outcomes, and nobody knows which way it tips. France deployed ten warships to the Eastern Mediterranean and Red Sea, including the nuclear-powered Charles de Gaulle carrier group, retasked from operations near Sweden after an Iranian drone struck RAF Akrotiri on March 1. That means France chose the Middle East over the Baltic. Half the French surface fleet, deployed to a crisis zone, other commitments left exposed. France is preparing escort missions for merchant ships through Hormuz and has dedicated frigates to the EU’s Operation Aspides.

France can do this because France resisted. In 1966, de Gaulle withdrew from NATO’s integrated military command to preserve French strategic autonomy. Against explicit American opposition. France kept independent nuclear capability and a blue-water navy when every incentive pointed toward letting Washington carry the weight. That tradition exists because one leader said no while the architecture of dependency was being built around him. Everyone else said yes. France is the only European nation that chose to keep a navy capable of projecting power at this scale.

The UK convened forty nations to discuss collectively reopening the Strait. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper chaired the meeting: representatives from France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the UAE, Bahrain, Australia, and more than thirty others. Forty foreign ministers in a room, trying to build the fire department that should have existed decades ago. The next stage: military planners meeting to discuss mine-clearing operations and a reassurance force for commercial shipping. Not just diplomacy. Operational planning. The fire department is being designed in the middle of the fire.

The United States didn’t attend. Trump said it wasn’t America’s responsibility. The man who lit the match declined the invitation to discuss the fire. Whatever strategic logic you credit him with — and I’ve tried to be fair about the argument that the fire revealed a house with no sprinklers — refusing to show up when your allies are trying to respond is a stain on the strategy. You can argue that Europe needs to stand on its own. You can even argue that a crisis was the only thing that would force it. But you cannot start the crisis, demand others handle it, and then not show up when they try. That isn’t tough love. It’s abandonment dressed as doctrine.

The ReArm Europe plan envisions eight hundred billion euros in new defense investment. The number deserves scrutiny. Six hundred and fifty billion comes from suspended EU budget rules: permission for member states to reallocate spending they already have. Not new funding. The remaining hundred and fifty billion is a loan instrument called SAFE. And the plan was announced in March 2025, a full year before the Hormuz crisis. The reckoning was already underway before Trump lit the match. What Hormuz did was expose the gap between the plan’s timeline and reality. ReArm Europe targets four years. If Australia needed eighteen years after the Nixon Doctrine to fully articulate its self-reliance posture (with latent capacity, strong institutions, and no active crisis), four years is ambition dressed as strategy. The crisis operates on a timeline of weeks.

The honest position is that the dependency was real, the reckoning was overdue, and the outcome is genuinely unresolved. The person who lit the match and the person who never bought a fire extinguisher both have something to answer for. Assigning blame for the fire doesn’t rebuild the house.

But the honest position has a layer beneath it that makes both parties more uncomfortable than either wants to be.

Who Kept the Lights Off

The dependency was designed. Fromm’s anxiety mechanism explains part of it, but only part. For decades, American strategists understood something simpler: a Europe that depends on Washington for security is a Europe that follows Washington’s lead. When West Germany began military cooperation with France in the early 1960s, Kennedy threatened to pull every American soldier off the continent. An independent European defense posture would end what the United States called its “preponderant position” in the alliance. That was the real threat. Washington wanted the dependency. It kept the lights off on purpose.

This doesn’t excuse the dependency. Europe had agency and chose comfort. (Choosing comfort is still choosing.) But it reframes the outrage. When American voices now demand that Europe stand on its own, they are demanding something that American policy actively discouraged for sixty years. The house has no sprinklers partly because the fire department told them sprinklers weren’t necessary.

And yet. The world of 1985 no longer exists. The strategic calculus that made European dependency useful to Washington (containing the Soviet Union, maintaining NATO coherence, preventing the emergence of a rival European power center) dissolved with the Berlin Wall and hasn’t applied since. What served American interests during the Cold War is counterproductive in 2026. A Europe that can’t secure its own shipping lanes is a strategic liability. The architecture of dependency was designed for a world that vanished thirty-five years ago. The design is obsolete. The dependency it produced is not.

Both truths coexist. Neither cancels the other. And neither makes the reckoning optional.

There is a second force making the reckoning harder, and it doesn’t originate in any capital that claims to be an ally.

The realist argument has been losing ground for years: that Europe must build hard-power capacity, that dependency is dangerous, that the liberal order requires actual defense. All true.

Since at least 2014, Russian information operations have framed NATO as an instrument of American imperialism rather than a defensive alliance. The messaging is tailored for every audience. To the European far-left, Russia fights Western imperialism and colonial overreach. To the far-right, it offers nationalist sovereignty against Brussels technocrats. Different costumes, same function. Hoffer would recognize the structure instantly. The content of the doctrine is irrelevant. What matters is what it offers the convert: a reason to do nothing and feel righteous about it. A hundred and fifty suspected hybrid incidents linked to Russia were documented across the EU in 2025 alone. AI-generated content is making the next round cheaper by the day.

China’s approach is quieter but the structure is the same. Belt and Road builds ports and railways. It also builds a story: American-led order is declining, alternatives exist, “multipolarity” means freedom from Western dominance. (Whether it means submission to a different kind goes unmentioned.) Chinese strategists talk about winning the “three warfares” (public opinion, psychological pressure, legal positioning) long before any shooting starts. The goal is erosion. Convince enough people that American leadership is optional and the architecture starts to crumble whether anyone replaces it or not. The Larak Island toll booth is the physical version of this. The narrative is the psychological version.

The audience most susceptible is the population Fromm described: people exhausted by complexity, suspicious of institutions, hungry for someone to explain why the world feels broken. The anti-imperialist narrative, the anti-change narrative, the reflexive suspicion of any argument that says we need to build or defend or maintain anything at all. It offers what every escape mechanism offers: relief from the burden of seeing clearly. I’ve watched it work in my own feed. Someone shares a carefully sourced argument about European defense capacity waning and the first reply is something about imperialism or some other western shame. The conversation dies there. It was designed to die there. The platforms reward the reply because outrage travels faster than analysis, and the realist argument ends up sounding like warmongering to people who have never had to think about where their security comes from.

This is the same mechanism, running through one more channel. The provision was invisible. The dependency was invisible. And now the information environment designed to keep people from seeing the dependency is itself invisible — the most seamless provision of all.

I said I’d get to myself. Here.

Where in my own life have I mistaken someone else’s effort for the natural order of things? Where have I converted my dependence into a story about my own independence? I’d rather not answer that. Which is probably the answer. But an honest answer for most of us is somewhere in our relationship with our parents.

Me included. It is all too easy to look around in your teens and see others who have more, whether material or experience. The will to compare is intense. You’re actively trying to figure out not only who you are, but where you stand. In that fog of hormones and half-formed frontal lobes, you can misunderstand the nature of the water you swim in. Once you begin signing your own leases, taking your own risks, and being the backstop to others your whole perspective shifts. Moving to New York City meant my backstop was gone. Luckily, I had some stellar friends who helped elevate me. When they left, I did the same for others.

The Wi-Fi on the plane, the shipping lane at Hormuz, the invisible labor in every family where one person absorbs the cost while everyone else discusses fairness: the mechanism is the same at every scale. And the first sign that the reckoning has arrived is always the same. Not self-reflection. Not gratitude. Outrage. Because the provision was load-bearing, and acknowledging it means acknowledging what we can’t do alone, and what it actually costs to try.

The Wi-Fi has become atmosphere. We just never asked who was paying for it.

Sources and Inspiration

Democracy in America - Alexis de Tocqueville

The Road to Serfdom - F.A. Hayek

1776 - David McCullough

The Signaler-in-Chief

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:12:15 GMT

A man walks into the Four Seasons in a ragged flannel shirt. Another walks into a Best Western wearing a Rolex. We might call the first humble and the second flashy, but that misses what’s actually happening. Both are signaling. The flannel says “I’m so wealthy I don’t need to dress the part.” The Rolex says “I’m successful even if my surroundings don’t reflect it.” Neither is more authentic than the other. Both are performances calibrated to an audience.

I don’t think this is a problem. Humans signal. We always have. The question is whether we know we’re doing it. Some of us are aware of our performances and make peace with them. Some deny they’re performing at all, which is cause for introspection. Some genuinely don’t care how they’re perceived and just wear what’s comfortable (though this is rarer than we like to think).

But there’s a fourth category that’s become dominant in public life: people who have become so skilled at signaling that they’ve lost the capacity to do anything else. People whose entire competence lies in reading the room and delivering what the room wants to hear.

We’ve started electing these people. And then we wonder why they can’t govern.

Keir Starmer won a landslide in July 2024. By December, his approval rating had collapsed to 18% favorable, 72% unfavorable. That’s roughly where Boris Johnson sat on his resignation day. A historic victory evaporated in months.

What happened?

Watch the mechanism. In 2020, Starmer needed left-wing Labour members to win the party leadership. So he published ten pledges: abolish tuition fees, nationalize rail and utilities, defend free movement with the EU, raise taxes on the top 5%, end the “cruel” two-child benefit cap. He positioned himself as Jeremy Corbyn’s natural heir, promising to “maintain our radical values.”

He won the leadership.

Then he needed media support and centrist votes to win the general election. So he abandoned every pledge. Tuition fees rose. Nationalization plans were attacked as “Corbyn-style” overreach. Free movement was ruled out; he started using “take back control,” the Brexit slogan he’d spent years opposing. The two-child cap remained; he suspended seven Labour MPs who voted against it.

Two audiences. Two sets of signals. Zero continuity of substance.

The Gaza example shows the pattern even more starkly. In October 2023, Starmer said Israel had the “right” to cut off water and electricity to Gaza. He called a ceasefire something that would “embolden” Hamas. When 56 Labour MPs defied him to vote for a ceasefire, he sacked ten frontbenchers rather than shift position. Then, once the political winds changed, he shifted. By February 2024, he was demanding the “fighting must stop now.” He adopted the position he’d punished others for holding, and acted as though it had been his view all along.

His skill is reading the room. That skill got him the job. But governing requires a different skill: making decisions that disappoint people, absorbing unpopularity for necessary choices, holding a position even when the room turns against you. Starmer has cycled through four directors of communications in nineteen months. The tool that works for acquiring power breaks when you try to use it for wielding power.

Same mechanism, different costume

The pattern isn’t confined to the British left.

In 2016, JD Vance called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler.” He wrote that Trump’s promises were “the needle in America’s collective vein,” that Trump was “cultural heroin.” He called him “reprehensible” for his rhetoric on immigrants and Muslims. He described himself as “a Never Trump guy” and reportedly voted for Evan McMullin rather than cast a ballot for Trump.

By 2022, Vance was running for Senate in Ohio. He deleted the critical tweets. He apologized publicly: “I regret being wrong about the guy.” He became, in the words of reporters covering him, “one of Trump’s fiercest defenders.” In 2024, Trump selected him as his running mate.

Vance’s explanation for the reversal is that he “bought into media lies” about Trump. This requires believing that he was completely deceived about a man’s character in 2016, then completely correct by 2022, with the timing of his enlightenment perfectly matching his political ambitions. The simpler explanation: the room changed, and Vance adjusted his signal accordingly. I don’t know what Vance actually believes. I’m not sure he does either.

The content differs entirely from Starmer. One is British Labour, courting progressives then abandoning them. One is American right-wing, opposing Trump then embracing him. But the mechanism is identical. Both men read their respective rooms with precision. Both delivered whatever signals would advance them with whichever audience they needed at that moment. Both are fluent in the language of conviction without the inconvenience of actual convictions.

Vance hasn’t been tested by governance yet — Starmer has. The results aren’t encouraging.

We might want to blame the politicians. But Starmer and Vance didn’t emerge from nowhere. They were selected. Someone selected them.

We did.

But the selection isn’t just bad judgment. It’s structural. Neil Postman observed that the medium shapes what kind of person can succeed within it. Print culture could reward the deliberator: someone who builds an argument across paragraphs, tolerates complexity, changes minds through sustained reasoning. Performance media cannot. The camera demands presence, timing, the compression of everything into moments. A politician who pauses to think looks weak. One who says “it’s complicated” looks evasive. The medium eliminates the deliberator from the pool, because deliberation on camera is indistinguishable from hesitation.

What the system produces instead is what Daniel Boorstin called the human pseudo-event: a figure whose public image exists for media consumption, skilled primarily at appearing skilled. The celebrity replacing the hero. Starmer’s ten pledges weren’t convictions communicated through media. They were performances calibrated to the medium carrying them. So was Vance’s reversal.

The genuine article (someone who knows what they think, says it clearly, holds the position even when costly) is at a disadvantage in this system. They’ll say the wrong thing. They’ll refuse to pivot when the room shifts. They’ll accumulate enemies by standing for something specific.

The signalers, meanwhile, glide upward. They read every room correctly. They never alienate anyone permanently because they never commit to anything permanently. They seem like leaders right up until the moment leadership is required.

We vote the way they campaign

But the problem runs deeper than who gets elected. What Timur Kuran called preference falsification (saying what we think we’re supposed to believe until we forget what we actually believed) doesn’t stop at conversation. We don’t just tell pollsters what sounds good while believing something different. We do it at the ballot box. We cast votes that make us feel like good people rather than votes that reflect our judgment. We signal with our votes the same way Starmer signals with his pledges.

Think about how often political opinions are expressed not as reasoning but as identity markers. “I could never vote for X” functions less as policy analysis and more as tribal declaration: I am the kind of person who would never do that. The vote becomes a performance of virtue rather than an expression of preference. And once voting becomes signaling, the system dutifully produces candidates who are excellent at receiving signals and reflecting them back.

There are exceptions. Bari Weiss resigned from the New York Times and absorbed years of professional and social cost for expressing heterodox views. J.K. Rowling has spent half a decade as a target for voicing positions on gender that, polls suggest, most people privately share but few will publicly defend. Bill Maher has been telling the same jokes for thirty years and watched himself migrate from liberal provocateur to something the left now codes as conservative, without changing many positions. That all three names register as “right-coded” says more about the drift than about them. These are people who broke from the feedback loop, who stopped falsifying their preferences and accepted the consequences.

Most of us won’t do this. I understand why. The cost is real. I feel the pull myself: the temptation to express the acceptable view, to vote the way that won’t require explanation at dinner parties, to signal membership in the right tribe rather than voice the judgment forming in my own mind. Signaling is comfortable. Conviction is expensive.

And the corruption runs in both directions. Falsified preferences produce signalers. Those signalers reinforce which preferences it’s safe to express. Starmer’s pledge reversals taught Labour members what convictions actually cost. Vance’s reversal taught Republican aspirants what loyalty requires. Each cycle narrows the range of expressible belief, which narrows the range of viable candidates, which narrows further still.

What would happen if we voted the way we actually believe? Not the view that makes us feel virtuous. Not the tribal declaration. The judgment we’d express if no one were watching.

If we keep selecting signalers (and we keep selecting them because we vote as signalers ourselves) we’ll keep getting governments that perform rather than govern. The feedback loop is tight: we falsify our preferences, the system reads our falsified preferences, and it produces leaders optimized for the false signal rather than the true one.

Every signal we send, the system receives. It is listening very carefully.

Sources and Inspiration

The Image - Daniel Boorstin

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Neil Postman

Private Truths, Public Lies - Timur Kuran

A Conflict of Visions - Thomas Sowell

Into the Forge of Both Sides-ism

Daniel Hatke — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:24:44 GMT

Both sides have radicalized. Both sides are extreme. Both sides are the problem.

This is the responsible position, the one you take when you want to sound thoughtful without getting into a fight. I held it for years. It felt fair, measured, the kind of thing a serious person says at dinner without anyone needing to push back. You critique the right’s populism and the left’s institutional capture in the same breath, everybody nods, nobody feels accused or attacked, necessarily.

The data doesn’t cooperate. But the more interesting question turned out to be why the comfortable frame made it so hard to see.

I’ve rewritten this eight times, attempting to thread this needle.

Timur Kuran is an economist who noticed something strange about revolutions: they seem to come from nowhere. The Soviet system looked stable, then collapsed. The Shah seemed secure, then fell in weeks. His explanation was preference falsification. People misrepresent their private beliefs under social pressure, publicly affirming what they privately doubt. When everyone falsifies, no one knows what anyone actually believes. Public opinion becomes a hall of mirrors.

Kuran’s deeper discovery was what happens over time. If you spend long enough publicly affirming positions you privately question, you start to forget you ever questioned them. The performance overwrites the private belief. Preference falsification doesn’t just hide what people think. Given enough time, it destroys what people think.

I bring this up before the data, before the politics, because the “both sides” frame is itself a species of preference falsification. We say “both sides are the problem” not because we’ve examined the evidence and found symmetry, but because symmetric blame is socially safe. It doesn’t require choosing. It doesn’t invite accusation. And we’ve been performing it so long that many of us have forgotten there was ever a question to examine.

When you look past the frame, the picture isn’t symmetric.

In 2017, Pew Research published a study tracking ten core political values from 1994 to 2017. The median Democrat shifted substantially leftward, with the sharpest acceleration after 2011. The median Republican shifted rightward, but less dramatically and more gradually. The partisan gap more than doubled.

A 2026 study from Cambridge, published in Royal Society Open Science, put a finer point on it. Analyzing American National Election Studies data from 1988 to 2024, they found the left became 31.5 percent more socially liberal. The right moved 2.8 percent more conservative. On actual policy positions across three and a half decades, one side’s center of gravity shifted dramatically. The other barely budged.

These aren’t polls about one hot-button issue. These are composite measures across the full range of policy positions: immigration, race, criminal justice, the role of government, social values.

But notice what I just did. I presented a scoreboard. And the temptation, mine included, is to read it as vindication: see, they started it. That impulse is the frame talking. The numbers matter as evidence that the “both sides” story is hiding a causal chain. They don’t matter as a final score. The mechanism underneath is what we need to see.

The engine underneath

Two visions of human nature sit beneath every political argument. Thomas Sowell mapped them in A Conflict of Visions: the constrained vision sees people as fixed and flawed, so you design systems that work despite our limits. The unconstrained vision sees people as perfectible, so you get the right arrangement and solve problems the old systems only managed.

You don’t need the labels to see which one found institutional fuel after 2008. Universities, professional credentialing, media, corporate HR: they provided the infrastructure for one vision to accelerate while the other held roughly in place. Each new norm made the previous position look retrograde, which pushed the next norm further, which made the thing that was progressive five years ago look conservative now.

But beneath the institutional machinery, something deeper was at work. Karl Popper, writing in wartime exile while watching the most educated civilization in Europe devour itself, identified what he considered the most dangerous idea in Western political thought: historicism. The belief that history moves toward a knowable destination. Once you believe you know where history is going, three things follow. Opposition becomes irrational. Present costs become acceptable. And coercion becomes a moral obligation. You’re not forcing anyone. You’re helping them arrive where they were going anyway.

“The right side of history” is the tell. It sounds like moral clarity. It functions as prophecy. And prophets don’t need consent.

Popper’s insight explains why the left’s shift was institutional rather than merely ideological. Historicism changes what institutions do. If progress has a direction, then institutions that advance that direction are doing their job, and institutions that resist it are failing. The credentialing bodies, the editorial boards, the HR departments didn’t conspire. They each, independently, aligned with what felt like the direction of history. The result was a ratchet: each turn generated pressure for the next, because standing still now meant standing on the wrong side of something inevitable.

The most striking version happened on race. Zach Goldberg, analyzing ANES data, documented something counterintuitive: between 2012 and 2020, white liberals shifted so far leftward on racial attitude measures that on several survey questions they scored more “liberal” than Black and Hispanic respondents. The people most affected by racial discrimination shifted their attitudes moderately. The people most removed from it shifted dramatically.

That inversion is hard to explain as awakening. You’d expect genuine awakening to start closest to the experience and radiate outward. This started in seminar rooms, editorial meetings, social media and propagated out.

Immigration tells the same story from a policy angle. In 2006, twenty-six Senate Democrats voted for the Secure Fence Act, including Obama and Schumer. Border security was a bipartisan position. By 2018, enforcement was cruelty. People who didn’t change their mind on immigration found the categories changing around them.

Eric Hoffer’s observation about mass movements illuminates why these shifts felt so total. The doctrine matters less than what the movement provides psychologically: belonging, identity, purpose, someone to blame. If you’re twenty-eight in a major city with a degree that isn’t producing the life you expected, a movement that offers a moral framework, a community of the righteous, and a clear enemy answers questions that career and income are failing to answer. The psychological pull and the institutional enforcement arrived together. One side’s shift had both engine and fuel. The other side’s shift hadn’t happened yet.

This doesn’t mean racism isn’t real or that border enforcement is simple. It means the fuel for these particular shifts included more than new information about race or immigration. And when the advocates move further than the people they’re advocating for, it’s worth asking who the movement is serving.

What happened next

Then the right shifted. Differently.

The Cambridge researchers who documented the 2.8 percent policy shift offered an interpretation: the right’s recent energy reflects “outgroup animosity for a perceived ‘woke’ left,” as one of the study’s authors put it, more than firm belief in extreme policy positions. The right developed new tolerances for the previously unacceptable. It didn’t develop new ideas of its own.

By 2025, only 30 percent of Republicans strongly disapproved of January 6th, down from 51 percent in 2021. By 2023, 63 percent still believed the 2020 election was stolen. Between 2022 and 2024, the share who say “health of democracy” is a critical issue fell from 51 to 32 percent. On immigration, the share who say undocumented immigrants should not be allowed to stay legally jumped from 42 to 66 percent between 2020 and 2024.

Moderate Republicans fell below 20 percent for the first time in Gallup’s tracking: 18 percent in 2024, down from the low 30s at the turn of the century. But this looks less like existing conservatives radicalizing than like moderates leaving the party. The coalition didn’t move right. It shed everyone who wasn’t already there.

I need to say something directly here, because the structure of this essay could be read as softening the right’s pathology: reactive does not mean less dangerous. Election denial is real. Institutional nihilism is dangerous. The personality cult is dangerous. A car crash caused by one driver drifting into the other lane is still a car crash. The passengers in both vehicles are equally injured. The right’s norm erosion (anti-democratic proceduralism, January 6th, the delegitimization of institutions themselves) is its own crisis, and its consequences are playing out right now.

But the right’s shift didn’t materialize from nothing. The data shows a delay, not a parallel: the left shifted through roughly 2020, and the right’s hardening accelerated after. The left’s shift was programmatic: build through institutions, capture credentialing, make the new norms load-bearing. The right’s shift was reactive: tear it down, burn it out, replace deliberation with grievance. Same psychological mechanism, the demand for certainty in the face of exhaustion, wearing different clothes.

Popper would recognize both. The historicist plans the future against the will of the open process: once you know the destination, correction becomes coercion. The authoritarian offers relief from the chaos the planning created: the exhaustion of uncertainty produces a demand for someone who will just decide. Both are enemies of the open society. But one is cause and the other is consequence, and flattening the sequence into “both sides” makes both problems harder to fix.

Why we can’t say this

Here is where Kuran’s insight becomes structural.

The Cato Institute and YouGov found in 2020 that 62 percent of Americans say the political climate prevents them from sharing their views. Self-censorship was highest among Republicans (77 percent) and independents (59 percent), but a majority of Democrats (52 percent) reported it too. More than half of Democrats don’t feel free to say what they think.

The More in Common project, in their Hidden Tribes study, identified what they called the “Exhausted Majority”: roughly two-thirds of Americans caught between the politically active wings. Progressive Activists (about 8 percent of the population) and Devoted Conservatives (about 6 percent) drive the discourse. The other 86 percent watches.

This is preference falsification at scale. And the “both sides” frame is its signature product. We default to symmetric blame because naming the sequence carries social cost. Say the left shifted first and further, and from the left you’re a right-wing apologist. Say the right’s response is genuinely dangerous, and from the right you are some type of traitor. Symmetric blame is the position that avoids both accusations.

Kuran showed that revolutions surprise everyone because the gap between public expression and private belief was invisible until it collapsed. The “both sides” frame works the same way. It feels like analysis or fairness. It functions as camouflage. Underneath it, a large majority privately suspects the symmetry story is wrong, but publicly performs it because the cost of saying so is too high.

And the deepest damage operates exactly the way Kuran predicted. Perform the frame long enough and the original question disappears. You can no longer access the observation because it’s been buried under years of diplomatic equivalence. The frame doesn’t just hide the asymmetry. It erodes your capacity to see it. Knowledge corruption, Kuran called it: falsification so prolonged that the private belief itself degrades.

In the mid-1990s, journalists at major outlets roughly matched the general population on many political attitude measures. By the 2020s, that match was gone. Newsroom surveys show dramatic leftward clustering, particularly on social and cultural issues. This isn’t conspiracy. It’s Kuran’s mechanism operating inside institutions: when everyone in the room shares the same assumptions, those assumptions stop being assumptions. They become “how things obviously are.” The person who disagrees doesn’t get silenced. They just feel increasingly off, and eventually they leave or stop talking, and the room gets more uniform, and the frame survives because the room producing it no longer contains the perspective that would challenge it.

I notice something about myself as I write this. I keep reaching for balance. Every time I name the asymmetry, the instinct fires to immediately offset it with a matching critique of the other side. The pull toward symmetric blame is strong precisely because asymmetric diagnosis invites the very social cost I described three paragraphs ago. I am performing the preference falsification I’m writing about. The frame has its hooks in me too.

You don’t fix institutional capture by asking voters to calm down. You don’t fix reactive nihilism by asking institutions to loosen up. You fix each by naming each, which requires tolerating the discomfort of saying something that will be misread by someone on every side.

The 86 percent caught between the active wings, the ones performing compliance or calling themselves independent because the alternatives require pretending: they are the open society trying to hold. And the first step in holding is refusing the frame that makes the problem invisible: seeing the sequence clearly enough to diagnose each pathology for what it is, instead of flattening both into a symmetry that comforts everyone and helps no one.

Accurate diagnosis is not partisanship. Misdiagnosis for the sake of balance is.

Sources and Inspiration

Private Truths, Public Lies - Timur Kuran

The Open Society and Its Enemies - Karl Popper

The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli

Black Coffee

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 16:39:44 GMT

You’re in a coffee shop. The barista asks what you’d like.

You know what you don’t want. Definitely not a black coffee.

But what do you want? There are some nice options here.

You hesitate. She moves on.

Three orders later she circles back. Have you decided?

Not yet. But not black coffee.

She nods. The line is growing. She comes back a third time. You’re still not sure what you want, but you are absolutely certain about what you don’t.

She goes.

Returns with a black coffee.

You are more likely to get what you fixate on.

The ordering of our lives, our institutions, our civilizations: the tendency to build an identity entirely out of opposition, as though knowing what you refuse is the same as knowing what you want. The harder you fixate on what you don’t want, the more likely you are to receive it. When your identity is built on rejection, you hand the initiative to everyone who knows what they’re actually building toward.

They know what they want. You only know what you don’t.

Right now, this is operating at the largest scale there is.

The Costume and the Body

For seventy years, negation defined the international order. Not the 1930s. Not another war that swallowed the world. The architecture that emerged from 1945 (the United Nations, Bretton Woods, NATO, the web of treaties and trade frameworks) was built to prevent a specific nightmare from recurring. And for decades, it worked. Partly because the nightmare was still close enough to touch. Partly because American power made the negation enforceable.

But an order that only knows what it opposes can’t regenerate itself. It can’t adapt to conditions its founders never imagined, can’t inspire the commitment its maintenance requires. The original nightmare fades from living memory, and the will to maintain the architecture fades with it.

Machiavelli watched the same pattern five centuries ago. Writing from exile in 1513, he warned against designing politics for the world you wish existed: “Many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth.” Leaders who govern for the ideal get destroyed by reality. The rules-based international order became its own imagined republic. It appeared to constrain all states equally, to operate on shared principles rather than power. The effectual truth was different. The rules were the rules America wrote. Enforced when convenient. Bent when not. The order rested on American hegemony wearing the costume of multilateral consensus.

This is how order works. Someone builds it, and the architecture reflects the builder’s interests. The problem was that we insisted the costume was the body. And when the gap between appearance and reality widened far enough, others noticed.

And now we deal with the collective guilt. Another poison entirely. The recognition that we helped break the order doesn’t clarify what to build next. It just makes us hesitate. Guilt fixates on what went wrong. The black coffee again: we know what we regret but not what we want.

They noticed because we showed them.

Iraq, 2003: the rules said one thing, America did another. Withdrawal from treaties under multiple administrations. The dollar weaponized through sanctions and SWIFT exclusions, teaching every watching nation that the global financial system was an American instrument, not a neutral one. When the UN spent credibility on politically charged actions while structural paralysis went unaddressed, hair fractures deepened into crevasses.

We taught the world that the rules were a costume. The lesson landed.

China took notes. Patient and strategic, already sketching alternatives. Russia cataloged weaknesses, looking for pressure points. They drew different conclusions, but both arrived at the same observation: the gap between how the order appeared and how it actually operated was the only thing you needed to understand. Institutions serve those who operate them. Stated purposes diverge from actual behavior as reliably as water flows downhill. Watch what the powerful do, not what they say. Then build accordingly.

Now we’re alarmed. China asserts territorial claims boldly. Russia invaded a sovereign European nation. The rules that were supposed to prevent this seem powerless to stop it. And we look at the chaos and say the rules-based order is under attack, yet lack the will to go enforce them.

I think that’s half right. The order is fracturing. But we helped fracture it. We modeled the behavior we now condemn, called it something else, and are surprised that others learned the real lesson rather than the stated one. Americans across the political spectrum contributed. On the right, unilateralism was celebrated as strength. The left championed institutional idealism while quietly tolerating the selective enforcement that kept the system running. Both widened the gap between appearance and reality that others eventually walked through.

What Walked Through

China and Russia are playing different games on the same board.

China is a rising power seeking to redesign the architecture. Belt and Road, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, BRICS expansion: patient construction of parallel structures that don’t require American permission to function. China knows what it wants. It can name a positive vision (Sino-centric regional order, economic interdependence on Chinese terms, technological leadership) even if we find that vision threatening. Specificity of vision is strategic advantage. China has it.

Russia is playing a different game entirely. Its economy is smaller than Italy’s. Its demographic trajectory is dire. Disorder is the only environment where a declining power punches above its weight, so Russia sows it: information campaigns, election interference, frozen conflicts, and the invasion of Ukraine as a bet that the rules had decayed enough to survive the consequences. Russia wants only to ensure that no stable order constrains it.

Graham Allison called this structural tension between rising and established powers the Thucydides Trap: historically, 12 of 16 such transitions ended in war. Compelling warning. But the trap may not spring as it has before. Nuclear deterrence changes the calculus. Economic interdependence makes total decoupling suicidal for all parties. And the transition is multipolar, not bipolar: India, the Gulf states, ASEAN nations, the EU are all making independent calculations. The old first-world, second-world, third-world paradigm is long past. We now have entire blocs willing to make decisions based less on international ties.

The danger takes different forms: economic warfare, proxy conflicts, institutional capture, information operations, and the constant risk of miscalculation when there are no agreed rules for the transition. The old pattern was rising power challenges established power, war decides. The new pattern may be protracted competition between systems, none dominant enough to impose order, all too entangled to fully separate. Managed tension on a civilizational scale. And managed tension requires a kind of strategic clarity that nobody has shown yet.

Florence, 1513. Italy fragmented into competing city-states of varying strength. No overarching authority capable of keeping peace. France and Spain exploiting every internal division, playing Italian states against each other for strategic advantage. And within each city-state, factions so consumed by domestic rivalry that they preferred inviting the foreign power to compromising with their neighbor. Florence fell partly because its internal divisions made external exploitation inevitable. Each faction called in the foreigner rather than making peace with the faction next door.

I keep coming back to this. The scale is different. The weapons are different. But the world now is that same Italy. Competing powers exercising influence more directly. Alliances shifting. And the old lesson holding: those with inner division should expect foreign adversaries to exploit it.

This is the truth Americans across the partisan divide need to hear. Every domestic battle that weakens institutional coherence is a strategic gift to Beijing and Moscow. Internal fracture invites external exploitation, and it always has. Florence’s factions weren’t stupid. They were consumed. Each believed the domestic enemy was more dangerous than the foreign one. Each was wrong, and the city paid for generations.

The mechanism doesn’t care about your politics. It cares about your fracture.

Machiavelli warned that the innovator has enemies everywhere: “those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new.” Building anything durable as things fragment requires what he called virtú: the capacity to see the situation clearly and act before the flood. Fortuna governs half our affairs. Virtú, the other half, is ours if we’ve cultivated the capacity to respond. The levees go up when the weather is fair. Not when the river is already over the banks.

The Barista Is Waiting

So what gets built?

Not a universal system. The architecture that includes actors who benefit from its dysfunction is structurally unstable: too many people inside the house with matches. The imagined republic of universal governance, where every nation agrees to the same rules and plays by them honestly, belongs to a world that never quite existed and certainly won’t return.

Think of the US and Saudi Arabia. Nobody pretends the values align. The relationship serves mutual interests (energy security, regional counterbalance to Iran, arms markets) and both parties know exactly what they’re getting. That honesty is its own kind of durability: more stable than chartered solidarity that nobody believes. An alliance of convenience dressed in the language of shared conviction is just another lie. Call the tier what it is.

The effectual truth of alliance is smaller than we pretend. Coalitions where geopolitics and values converge, tested by behavior rather than declared by charter. Shared interests verified by action. Multiple competing systems worldwide is the logical endpoint. Messier than what we had (or imagined we had). More honest. And built for the world that exists rather than the one we keep projecting onto it.

This is the prescription, updated: see clearly, then build durably. We’re in that window now. What gets built in the coming decade will set the shape of what follows. I don’t think anyone has a clean vision of what this looks like yet. But the people showing up with blueprints, even rough ones, have an advantage over those still mourning the old building. The strategic prerequisite everyone keeps skipping: you cannot build toward something you can’t name.

The same pattern operates at every scale. Nations that can’t say what they’re building toward get the black coffee. So do people.

We define ourselves by what we oppose.

I’m not that kind of person. I would never live like that. I don’t think what they think, don’t want what they want.

The identity feels solid because the opposition feels real. But opposition is a costume with nothing underneath (and we’ve seen where costumes lead). Take away the thing you’re against and there’s nothing there. No vision. No answer to the simplest question anyone can ask: what do you want?

Freedom is expensive. It demands that we tolerate uncertainty, bear responsibility for our choices, generate conviction from somewhere inside rather than borrowing it from the crowd’s negation. Many of us flee that burden into the comfortable work of defining what we’re not. We order by exclusion. And we’re surprised when the cup arrives filled with everything we were trying to avoid.

The barista isn’t going to ask again. Neither is the world. The order is fragmenting. New architectures are being built by people who know exactly what they want, whether we share their vision or not. The rest of us, nations and individuals watching this transition unfold, have the same task ahead. Name something worth building toward. Something specific. Something that demands more of us than opposition.

I think we can. But it starts with knowing what we want. What we’re willing to build, and bear, and carry into the cave.

Be specific. The barista is waiting.

Sources and Inspiration

The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom - James Burnham

Scott Barry Kaufman on specificity of vision

The Life That's Waiting

Daniel Hatke — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 18:41:04 GMT

I keep a mental list of the lives I almost chose. The corporate track that would have paid better and felt less. The city I stayed in three years too long because leaving would have required admitting the move was a mistake. The version of myself that said yes to everything reasonable and no to everything that scared me.

That version looked fine from the outside. Good job. Good apartment. The right opinions at dinner parties. A life that checked every box on a form I didn’t remember filling out.

I wonder sometimes how many people are living inside a life like that right now. Not broken. Not unhappy, exactly. Just not quite theirs.

I get it. The chosen life is hard. I ruminate on how much better my other paths might have been, especially right now, while what I’m authoring is hard.

Joseph Campbell had a word for it: the wasteland.

Not poverty. Not war. Not the dramatic suffering we’d recognize as crisis. The wasteland is a full life that feels empty. People going through motions inside institutions that run on procedures nobody remembers the purpose of. A civilization that has everything except the sense that any of it matters. Sound familiar?

He spent decades studying the mythology of every culture he could find, and he kept discovering the same story. Someone leaves the ordinary world. They cross into the unknown. They face something that threatens to destroy them. And they come back carrying something the community needs. The details change (a Sumerian king, a Navajo twin, a carpenter’s son) but the architecture is identical. As if the species encoded its own operating instructions in narrative form and then forgot how to read them.

The journey is not optional. You either make it consciously or it makes you unconsciously. The alternative is the wasteland: the life that runs on autopilot, the self that was planned by someone who wasn’t you.

“Follow your bliss” has been diluted into self-help wallpaper. Do what makes you happy. Chase your passion. But bliss is not pleasure. It’s the signal that you’re on your authentic path, and that path involves sacrifice, descent, suffering. The life that’s waiting for you might be harder than the life you planned. It almost certainly will be.

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

So why do we stay?

Because the wasteland is comfortable. That’s the part most people skip. The wrong life has amenities. It has predictability, social approval, a clear measurement of whether you’re doing well. The right life, your life, offers none of that. It offers anxiety. It offers the terrifying possibility that you’ll succeed and have to become someone you don’t recognize yet.

Fromm understood this mechanism. Freedom creates anxiety. When no authority tells you who to be, you have to decide. And deciding is hard enough when the choices are small. When the choice is “which life am I going to live?” most people find a way to not decide at all. They adopt the life that was offered, the path that was obvious, the identity that their environment assembled for them. Not deliberately. Just by never quite choosing otherwise.

Wilson saw the same thing from the cybernetic side. Most people are running programs they didn’t write. The Thinker installs a belief (”I’m the kind of person who does X”), and the Prover builds the evidence. The belief becomes a reality tunnel: a perceptual world organized to confirm itself. You don’t experience the life you chose. You experience the life your programming produces. And the program was written by parents, culture, convenience, fear.

Fear!

The wasteland, seen this way, is a program running without a programmer. A life on autopilot where the autopilot was installed by someone else.

“Follow your bliss” is a metaprogramming instruction. Recognize that you’re running a program. Recognize that you can rewrite it. Then find the signal, the bliss, that tells you which program is actually yours.

Finding the signal is the hardest part. We’ve forgotten how to listen for it.

The great trackers of the South African bush can follow a leopard through dense cover by reading signs most people would step over. A bent blade of grass. A scuff in the dust. Birdsong that stopped three seconds too early. They don’t force the trail. They follow it. And the quality of attention this requires is exactly what bliss demands: patient, embodied, non-judgmental, open to what’s actually there rather than what you expected to find.

Your bliss is your track. The signs are there if you have the patience to read them. But the modern world trains the opposite of this patience: quick answers, clear metrics, algorithmic certainty. The wasteland is efficient. The track is slow, intermittent, full of stretches where you lose it entirely. You have to tolerate not knowing where it leads. You have to trust that the trail is there even when you can’t see it.

May called this tolerance the courage to be. The anxiety you feel at the threshold between the planned life and your life is the price of becoming. “One does not become fully human painlessly.” The person who feels no anxiety at the threshold hasn’t found peace. They’ve decided not to cross.

I want to be careful here. I don’t believe anyone can tell you what your bliss is, where your track leads, or when to cross the threshold. The mythology itself is suspicious of prescribers. “If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”

What I believe is simpler and harder: most of us have an inkling. A signal that keeps returning despite our efforts to ignore it. The thing we’d do if no one were watching, the work that doesn’t feel like work, the question that won’t leave us alone. We know. We’ve known for a while. But the life we planned is easier to explain.

I recognize this in myself. The pull toward the thing that measures well, the life that makes sense on paper, the path where I know what success looks like. That pull is real, and I don’t think it makes me weak. It makes me human. The wasteland isn’t where broken people go. It’s where people go by default. The choosing, tracking, pathfinding, and bushwhacking is hard.

But the hero’s story has a final act: the journey is not complete until the return. Whatever is found in the crossing must be brought back. Self-knowledge hoarded is self-knowledge wasted. Authorship of your own life is preparation for the harder task: being useful to others in a way that only you can be. The wasteland doesn’t just cost you. It costs everyone who would have been served by the life you didn’t live.

The life that’s waiting is not the one you planned. It may be harder, stranger, less legible. But it’s the one that’s yours. And the species has been encoding this instruction for thousands of years, in every mythology, in every hero who crosses the threshold.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

I’m working on it.

Sources and Inspiration

Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion - Joseph Campbell

Prometheus Rising - Robert Anton Wilson

Man’s Search for Himself - Rollo May

The Cathedral of the Wild - Boyd Varty

The Daily Conquest

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:37:38 GMT

“He only earns his freedom and existence who daily conquers them anew.”

Goethe put these words in the mouth of Faust at the end of his life, the final wisdom of a man who had tried everything: knowledge, pleasure, power, love. What he learned was that freedom is not a possession. You don’t achieve it and then have it. You earn it each day or you lose it.

This sounds like motivational rhetoric until you watch yourself lose it. Not through some crisis or conquest. You just stop choosing. The days blur together. You do what you did yesterday because that’s what you did yesterday. Your opinions are the opinions of your environment. Your life is the life that happened to you while you weren’t paying attention.

Rollo May called this “blind momentum.” The opposite of choosing one’s self. The path of least resistance that feels like normalcy but is actually a slow evacuation.

Freedom is psychologically expensive. This is Fromm’s insight, the one he arrived at watching Europe burn in 1941: modern people are free in ways their ancestors couldn’t have imagined, and many of them are miserable because of it.

The medieval peasant had no choices. He was born into a role, a place, a meaning. He didn’t have to figure out who he was or what his life was for. The world told him. We broke those bonds. We declared that every person could choose their own path, their own beliefs, their own identity. We called it liberation.

It was. It also created a new kind of burden. When no one tells you who to be, you have to decide. When no authority dictates what to believe, you have to think. When your life has no predetermined meaning, you have to make one. This requires tolerating uncertainty, bearing responsibility, and maintaining a self without external scaffolding.

Many people find this unbearable. Because it’s genuinely hard.

So they escape. Fromm identified three routes: submit to an authority who will tell you what to think (authoritarianism), destroy what threatens your fragile self (destructiveness), or become indistinguishable from your environment (automaton conformity).

The third is the quietest and most common. You adopt the personality offered by cultural patterns. You think what you’re supposed to think, want what you’re supposed to want. It doesn’t feel like surrender because it feels like common sense. Of course I believe what everyone around me believes. These positions are obviously correct.

The self that would exercise freedom has been replaced by something that looks like a self but isn’t choosing anything.

Rollo May saw the same thing from a therapist’s chair. His patients weren’t suffering from dramatic pathologies. They were suffering from emptiness. From the sense that their lives weren’t quite their own. From what he called “the loss of the center.”

His prescription was strange-sounding but precise: you have to choose yourself.

Not once. Each day.

“The basic step in achieving inward freedom is ‘choosing one’s self,’” he wrote. “This strange-sounding phrase of Kierkegaard’s means to affirm one’s responsibility for one’s self and one’s existence. It is the attitude which is opposite to blind momentum or routine existence; it is an attitude of aliveness and decisiveness; it means that one recognizes that he exists in his particular spot in the universe, and he accepts the responsibility for this existence.”

This is not self-help advice about morning routines or positive thinking. It’s an existential claim about what it means to be free. Freedom is not a state you achieve and then coast on. It’s a practice. You either do it today or you don’t. And if you don’t do it enough days in a row, you start to forget that you could.

Here’s the part that surprised me when I first read May: he says the reward for this daily work is joy.

Not happiness. Joy.

He distinguishes them carefully. Happiness is circumstantial, dependent on things going your way. Joy is something else: “the affect which comes when we use our powers.”

Watch a child learning to walk. She tries, falls, gets up, tries again. Falls again. Keeps going. And when she finally takes those steps, she laughs, she beams. Not because anything external has changed. Because she’s using her powers. Because she’s becoming what she is capable of becoming.

“This is nothing in comparison,” May writes, “to the quiet joy when the adolescent can use his newly emerged power for the first time to gain a friend, or the adult’s joy when he can love, plan and create.”

Joy is the signal that you’re doing it. That you’re not in blind momentum but in active becoming. That the self exercising freedom is actually present.

This reframes the whole project. The daily conquest isn’t grim duty. It’s the path to the deepest satisfaction a human being can experience. The people who escape into routine, who let the phrases think for them and the crowd choose for them, aren’t just losing their freedom. They’re losing access to joy.

You can see this playing out in language.

Orwell noticed it in 1946: when people stop choosing their words, the words start choosing for them. “Ready-made phrases,” he wrote, “will construct your sentences for you, even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent, and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.”

That last part is the key. The ready-made phrase doesn’t just save effort. It hides you from yourself. You can speak fluently in the dialect of your tribe without ever confronting what you actually believe. The phrases do the work. You’re technically talking, but no one is home.

This is automaton conformity applied to speech. And speech shapes thought. Sloppy language, Orwell argued, makes sloppy thinking easier. The two corrupt each other in a feedback loop.

But he also believed the process was reversible. That’s the hopeful part. If you choose your words carefully, if you ask “what am I actually trying to say?” instead of letting the familiar phrases rush in, you’re doing a small version of the daily conquest. You’re being present where you could be absent. You’re choosing where you could be coasting.

Clear language is evidence of a self that showed up.

This has political implications. May made them explicit:

“We simply propose that our social and economic ideal be that society which gives the maximum opportunity for each person in it to realize himself, to develop and use his potentialities and to labor as a human being of dignity giving to and receiving from his fellow men.”

The good society is the one that makes the daily conquest possible. That gives people the space and the tools to choose themselves. Not freedom from constraint only, but freedom to become.

Collectivism, whether fascist or communist, fails not because it’s the wrong tribe but because it forecloses this possibility. It tells you who you are. It chooses for you. The relief it offers is real (Fromm understood this), but the price is the self that would have done the choosing.

We oppose these systems not out of tribal loyalty to our own side but because we believe something about what human beings are for. We believe they’re for becoming. For using their powers. For the quiet joy that comes when the adult can love, plan, and create.

This is what we’re trying to build. This is what we’re trying to protect.

I notice that I haven’t done this well today.

I woke up and checked my phone before I was fully conscious. I read opinions I already agreed with. I felt the small satisfaction of having the right views without the effort of arriving at them. By the time I sat down to write, I was already in blind momentum, already coasting on yesterday’s choices.

The daily conquest is not something I’ve achieved. It’s something I fail at regularly and try to resume. The trying is the point. Goethe didn’t say “he only earns his freedom who conquers once.” He said daily. Each day. Anew.

There’s something strange in that word: anew. It suggests that yesterday’s conquest doesn’t carry over. That you can’t bank it. That freedom is less like a possession you accumulate and more like a fire you have to keep feeding or it goes out.

Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to lose. We expect that once we’ve figured things out, we can relax. We can coast on our previous clarity. But clarity fades. Choices calcify into habits. The self that was present yesterday can be absent today without anyone noticing, least of all you.

The only remedy is to begin again.

May saw patients in the 1950s who were materially comfortable and spiritually empty. They had achieved the external markers of success and felt nothing. They came to therapy not with dramatic symptoms but with a vague sense that something was missing, that their lives were not quite their own.

Seventy years later, I don’t think the problem has gotten smaller.

We have more freedom than any humans in history. More choices, more information, more paths available. And yet the blind momentum is everywhere. The tribal dialects, the ready-made opinions, the lives that happen by default. The escape routes are more numerous and more comfortable than ever.

But so is the possibility of joy. That hasn’t changed. The child still laughs when she learns to walk. The adult still feels the quiet satisfaction of using her powers well. The self that shows up, that chooses, that conquers anew, still has access to what May called “the profoundest joy to which the human being is heir.”

It’s available today. It was available yesterday, and I missed some of it. It will be available tomorrow.

Did you choose joy, today? There is still time.

Sources and Inspiration

Man’s Search for Himself - Rollo May

The Collapse of Global Liberalism - Philip Pilkington

The Helping Impulse

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 16:47:38 GMT

A young man in 1955 could look at a factory, a trade, a profession and see a ladder. Apprentice, journeyman, master. Entry-level, mid-career, senior. The rungs were visible. The requirements were known. You might not make it to the top, but you knew what “the top” meant and what it would take to get there.

A young person in 2025 confronts something else. The ladder has been replaced by a cloud. There are no rungs, only “opportunities.” No clear sequence, only “networking.” No defined mastery, only “personal branding.” The official story is that this is better: more freedom, more flexibility, less arbitrary gatekeeping.

The unofficial story is that the gates are still there. They’re just invisible now. And the people who can see them are the ones whose families taught them where to look.

We did this on purpose. We did it to help.

The economist Philip Pilkington argues that liberalism contains a fatal flaw, but not the one its critics usually name. The flaw isn’t that liberalism is too weak or too permissive or insufficiently rooted in tradition. The flaw is that liberalism, when it goes hard, destroys the very structures it requires to function.

Pilkington defines liberalism as the Enlightenment impulse to level and rationalize. Its target has always been hierarchy: the king over the commoner, the priest over the congregation, the guild master over the apprentice. Wherever liberalism sees hierarchy, it asks: is this justified? Can this be defended rationally? And when the answer is no (or not entirely), the hierarchy becomes a target for dismantling.

This impulse is not malicious. It genuinely tries to help. The liberal reformer sees barriers and wants to remove them. Sees gatekeepers and wants to open the gates. Sees people constrained by structures they didn’t choose and wants to set them free.

The problem is what gets destroyed in the process.

Hierarchies don’t only encode privilege. They also encode information: what’s valued here, what path leads up, what competence is rewarded, where you stand, what you need to do next. When you dismantle a hierarchy because it’s “arbitrary,” you don’t just remove privilege. You remove the map.

And the people who needed the map most are the ones left stranded.

Pilkington’s argument is that liberalism parasitically required pre-liberal structures to function. The stable liberal order of the twentieth century worked because it built on foundations it didn’t create: religion that provided meaning, families that transmitted values, guilds and associations that structured advancement, local communities that enforced norms. These were hierarchical, often irrational by Enlightenment standards, frequently unfair. They were also load-bearing.

As liberalism progressed and began to liquidate these structures (because they were hierarchical, because they couldn’t be rationally justified, because they constrained individual choice), it sawed off the branch it was sitting on.

This is different from saying liberalism was attacked from outside. The crisis is endogenous. The ideology generated its own dissolution.

Consider what the old structures actually provided:

Legibility: You could locate yourself within a system. The rules might be arbitrary, but they were knowable. The young person entering a trade understood what apprenticeship meant, what the stages were, what mastery looked like. The path might be narrow, but it was a path.

Scaffolding for aspiration: The ladder existed, which meant climbing was possible. You might resent the rungs above you, but you could see them. Aspiration had a shape. It wasn’t just “be successful” or “find your passion.” It was: learn this, then this, then you’ll be ready for that.

Meaning beyond the self: The structures embedded people in something larger: a trade with a history, a faith with a tradition, a community with obligations. This constrained, certainly. It also located. You weren’t just an individual choosing in a vacuum. You were part of something that preceded you and would outlast you.

When liberalism removes these structures because they’re irrational or unfair, it doesn’t create a flat plain of equal opportunity. It creates a desert. And in the desert, those who already possess informal navigational tools (cultural capital, family networks, elite education, the implicit knowledge of how things actually work) thrive. Those without such tools wander.

The reformer walks away believing they’ve helped. They’ve removed obstacles. They’ve leveled a playing field.

What they’ve actually done is make the game illegible to anyone who wasn’t already winning it.

This is what makes the helping impulse pernicious rather than merely mistaken. It’s self-sealing.

The reformer can’t see the damage because the damage is invisible to them. They have the credentials, the network, the cultural fluency. They navigate the new terrain easily. When they look around, they see openness and flexibility, the absence of arbitrary barriers.

What they don’t see: the young person from outside the network who follows the official rules (get the degree, apply to jobs, work hard) and discovers the official rules are fiction. The real rules are unwritten, and you had to already know them to know they existed.

The reformer concludes the system is working. The person stranded in it concludes the system is rigged. Both are correct from where they stand.

You can trace this across every domain.

Education: The old system was elitist, exclusionary, narrow. True. So we expanded access, diversified requirements, questioned standards. Now credential inflation means the degree that once signaled competence signals nothing. The students who needed clear standards most are adrift in a system that won’t tell them what excellence looks like, because defining excellence is hierarchical.

Work: The old career ladder was rigid, patriarchal, limiting. True. So we celebrated flexibility, gig economy, portfolio careers. Now the path from entry to security has dissolved. Those who can navigate ambiguity (those with family money, connections, cultural fluency) thrive. Everyone else churns through precarity while being told they’re free.

Family and community: The old structures were constraining, heteronormative, oppressive in various ways. True. So we celebrated choice, autonomy, the dissolution of unchosen obligation. Now people are freer than ever and lonelier than ever. The structures that once provided meaning, even when they constrained, have been replaced by nothing. People shop for meaning the way they shop for products, and find it equally disposable.

Religion: The old frameworks were dogmatic, exclusionary, irrational. True. So we celebrated secularism, personal spirituality, the marketplace of beliefs. Now the frameworks that once located people in something larger have given way to self-help and content consumption. The transcendent has been replaced by the therapeutic.

In each case: a genuine problem with the old structure. A genuine impulse to help. A reform that removes the structure. An outcome that harms those who most needed the structure’s legibility.

Fromm understood what happens next. Freedom, he argued, isn’t just a gift. It’s a burden. The weight of choosing who to be, what to value, how to live creates anxiety that many cannot bear. But Fromm also recognized that functional freedom requires scaffolding: relationships, communities, values, structures that give the choosing self somewhere to stand.

Hard liberalism attacks the scaffolding as arbitrary. It sees only the constraint, not the support. It imagines the ideal as the autonomous individual choosing freely in an open field.

But the open field is a desert. Without scaffolding, the choosing self has nothing to push against, nothing to climb, no way to know if it’s getting anywhere. The result isn’t freedom. It’s paralysis, or drift, or the flight to any structure that will provide what liberalism removed.

This is where the Fourth Turning framework meets Pilkington’s diagnosis. Strauss and Howe treat the crisis as exogenous: history moves in cycles, and periodically the old order gets disrupted by forces that reset institutions. Pilkington says the disruption is endogenous: liberalism generates its own crisis by destroying the structures it required.

Both are probably true. The cyclical pattern holds. But this particular turning may be different because the crisis is a crisis of illegibility itself. The fracture isn’t between regions or nations or clearly defined factions. It’s between those who can navigate the unmarked terrain and those who can’t. Between those for whom the system works invisibly and those for whom it doesn’t work at all.

The demand that emerges from illegibility is predictable: structure. Any structure. The strongman offers hierarchy without the tacit knowledge that made old hierarchies functional. He offers legibility without wisdom. A map that leads nowhere, but at least it’s a map.

What would reconstruction require?

I don’t know. But I suspect it begins with understanding what we destroyed and why we destroyed it.

The helping impulse was sincere. That’s what makes this hard. You’re not fighting villains. You’re fighting your own best intentions. The reformers who dismantled the old structures weren’t trying to create a desert. They were trying to remove walls. They couldn’t see that the walls were also holding up a roof.

Rebuilding legibility without recreating the worst of what was dismantled: this is the task. Can you create structures that provide maps without encoding arbitrary privilege? Scaffolding that supports without constraining? Hierarchy that serves function without becoming exploitation?

Maybe. But it requires first admitting that the project of pure liberation has failed. Not because liberation is bad, but because liberation without structure isn’t liberation. Humans still need maps of the territory.

The young person in 2025, staring at the cloud where the ladder used to be, knows this already. They feel it even if they can’t name it. The system was supposed to set them free. Instead it set them adrift.

We did this to help. That’s the part that’s hard to face.

Sources and Inspiration

The Fourth Turning Is Here - Neil Howe

The Interference Problem

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 17:12:53 GMT

You’ve seen it on a golf course, or at a driving range, or in one of those simulator bays that smell like beer and false hope. The waggle. The practice swing. The careful positioning of feet, the micro-adjustments of grip, the ritualized settling-in that precedes every shot. Then the internal monologue starts: Keep your head down. Slow backswing. Don’t sway. Hips first. Follow through.

The instructions pile up and the body tightens against itself. By the time the club makes contact, the golfer is muscling through a motion that should be fluid, fighting his own limbs like they’re adversaries. The ball shanks into the rough. The club gets a look of betrayal, as if it were the problem.

The thing is, the body already knows how to swing. It’s been shown a thousand times. The motion of a golf swing isn’t fundamentally different from skipping a stone or swinging an axe: weight transfer, rotation, release. The knowledge is there. What’s also there, louder, is the voice narrating what the body already knows how to do.

This is the interference problem. We block the capacity we already have.

Timothy Gallwey spent decades working with athletes and executives on what he called the Inner Game. His insight: performance improves more by quieting interference than by adding technique. There are two selves at work in any skilled action. Self 1 is the teller, the instructor, the judge: the voice that narrates what you should be doing and critiques how you’re doing it. Self 2 is the doer: the body-mind that actually performs the action, drawing on years of accumulated learning and natural coordination.

Self 1 distrusts Self 2. And that distrust creates exactly the failure it fears.

Watch a child learn to walk. No one lectures her on biomechanics. She falls, she adjusts, she falls differently, she adjusts again. Her body is gathering information through experience and making corrections below the level of conscious instruction. This is how we learned almost everything that matters: language, social cues, balance, coordination. The learning happened when the conscious mind stepped aside.

Then we grew up and decided that the conscious mind should supervise everything. That nothing could be trusted to operate without explicit instruction. That the way to get better at something was to think harder about it.

I feel this in my own work. There’s a state where writing flows: one idea connects to the next, the words arrive close to right, I’m discovering what I think as I put it down. And there’s another state, much more common, where I’m watching myself write. Judging each sentence as it appears. Comparing it to some imagined standard. The watching creates a stiffness that shows up on the page.

The paradox is that I know more about writing now than I did ten years ago. I’ve read more, practiced more, thought more carefully about what works and why. But all that additional knowledge can become interference if it shows up at the wrong time. Craft knowledge belongs in preparation and revision, not the moment of generation.

This is an argument about timing, not against knowledge or technique. There’s a time to study the mechanics of a tennis serve and a time to forget them and trust your arm. The problem is that most of us have collapsed these into one continuous stream of self-instruction that never stops.

We’ve become Self 1 dominant cultures. Every domain has been colonized by explicit knowledge, conscious instruction, verbal framing. We turn intuition into frameworks. We turn practice into theory. We turn doing into knowing-about-doing. And then we wonder why performance feels so effortful, why even things we’re good at become occasions for exhausting self-monitoring.

The interference shows up in places beyond individual performance.

Watch what happens in organizations when every decision requires explicit justification, when every intuition has to be translated into the language of metrics and documented rationales. The people who are good at their jobs often know things they can’t fully articulate. They’ve developed pattern recognition through years of experience. They can sense when something is off before they can explain why. But if the only legitimate form of knowledge is the kind that can be stated explicitly and defended verbally, all that tacit understanding gets overruled by whatever sounds most convincing in a meeting.

This is Self 1 at institutional scale. The demand that everything be made explicit, legible, defensible. The result is decisions made by the part of the system that can talk rather than the part that actually knows.

Or watch what happens when people try to improve themselves through pure conscious effort. They identify the flaw. They commit to doing better. They monitor their behavior for signs of the flaw. And the monitoring itself keeps the flaw alive, keeps their attention fixed on exactly what they’re trying to move past. The conscious mind cannot solve problems it created by being too present in the first place.

Gallwey’s approach was counterintuitive. Instead of giving more instructions, he gave fewer. Instead of correcting flaws directly, he directed attention elsewhere. A player with a bad backhand might be asked to notice where the ball crossed the net, or to say “bounce” when it hit the court and “hit” when it met the racket. The conscious mind gets occupied with an observation task, and the body is freed to make its own adjustments.

The results were often immediate. The body was finally allowed to use what it already knew.

This is the subtractive approach to excellence. Removing what interferes with capacity already there. The athlete who performs effortlessly in practice but tightens under pressure has added something: the weight of self-consciousness, the watching, the judge. Remove the addition and the performance returns.

I think about this when I watch people struggle with things they should be good at. The presentation they’ve given a hundred times that suddenly feels impossible because the stakes are higher. The conversation with someone they care about that goes wrong precisely because they’re trying so hard to make it go right. The creative work that dries up the moment someone is watching, or paying, or expecting something specific.

These aren’t failures of capacity. They’re failures of trust. The inner judge has decided that the inner performer cannot be relied upon, that conscious supervision is necessary, that we have to think our way through what we used to just do. And the supervision creates exactly the stumbling it was meant to prevent.

The interference problem reaches beyond tennis or writing or giving presentations. It’s about the relationship we’ve developed with our own competence. Somewhere along the way we stopped trusting that we knew things. We decided that nothing counted unless it was explicit, monitored, managed. We made consciousness into a foreman rather than an occasional consultant.

I have no technique for fixing this, which feels appropriate given the subject matter. Techniques are what Self 1 wants: something to add, some new instruction to layer on top of all the others.

But I notice what works for me. When the internal narrator quiets, usually by accident, there’s something underneath that knows what to do. The accumulated years of practice, all the failures that taught something, the pattern recognition that happens below the level of words. It was there all along. It was just being talked over.

The question is what we’d have to stop doing to let our capacity through. Most of us have more than we’re accessing.

What’s in the way?

What will you remove?

How should you direct your attention, such that your inherent skills and knowledge take you to where you wish to go?

Sources and Inspiration

The Inner Game of Tennis - Timothy Gallwey

Widening Warfare

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:15:37 GMT

The culture war is now being fought in beer aisles, school libraries, weather agencies, medical journals, fast food drive-throughs, and morning talk shows. It started somewhere smaller. Nobody can remember where. But it keeps widening, absorbing new territory the way a wildfire jumps roads: the conditions are right, the fuel is everywhere, and nobody has an interest in putting it out.

Think about what a decade of this has actually produced. The right didn’t reverse progressive cultural change. The left didn’t neutralize populist backlash. Both sides are more entrenched than they were in 2016, more exhausted, more certain the other side is not just wrong but malevolent. The territory hasn’t shifted. The armies are just smaller and more tired.

Sun Tzu observed twenty-five centuries ago that there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. The insight has outlasted every empire since because the mechanism never changes. Prolonged campaigns drain the state that wages them. Not just the treasury: the morale, the cohesion, the institutional capacity, the willingness of citizens to cooperate on anything. The cost of a war that never ends always exceeds what either side was fighting for.

I’ve felt the pull. The urgency of engagement. The sense that stepping back means complicity. That feeling is the trap. The conviction that fighting is always courage and disengagement is always cowardice is, strategically speaking, how you guarantee your own defeat.

The left’s contribution to widening warfare is the expansion of what counts as political terrain.

Start with the workplace. Diversity, equity, and inclusion as a concept is defensible. As a bureaucratic apparatus of compelled statement, it became something else. The DEI loyalty oath (sign this commitment, attend this training, produce this public affirmation) turned a legitimate organizational goal into a political litmus test. Not because inclusion is wrong but because compelled speech always backfires. It doesn’t produce allies. It produces resentment, falsified compliance, and a new front in the war.

Then the battlefield widened further. “Silence is violence” eliminated neutral ground entirely. When non-participation becomes complicity, you’ve conscripted every citizen into a war they may not have chosen. The person who wants to sell insurance, coach Little League, and go home to their family is now a combatant whether they like it or not. Their silence has been redefined as a position. This is strategically catastrophic. You’ve maximized your enemies and guaranteed that the war encompasses all available territory.

The pattern kept expanding. Publishing houses policing backlists. Scientific journals appending social justice disclaimers to research papers. A Shakespearean theater company issuing land acknowledgments before Hamlet. Each expansion felt righteous from inside the movement. Each opened a new front. Each consumed resources (institutional goodwill, public trust, organizational energy) that could never be recovered.

This is siege warfare, the most expensive strategy in Sun Tzu’s hierarchy. His preferred order: disrupt the enemy’s plans first, then their alliances, then engage their forces. Siege cities only as a last resort, because sieges consume the attacker as much as the defender. The progressive project chose to siege every institution simultaneously: universities, corporations, newsrooms, nonprofits, medical associations, entertainment, sports. The cost has been extraordinary. The gains have been fragile.

And the expansion serves a psychological function beyond politics. The fight provides moral clarity: I know which side I’m on. I know who the enemy is. I know what justice requires. Resolution would reintroduce ambiguity. If the war ends, I have to sit with harder questions: who am I when I’m not fighting for something? The burden of freedom doesn’t go away just because your cause is righteous. It just hides behind the righteousness.

The underlying values are genuine. The mode of pursuit has become the problem.

The right’s contribution is the permanent emergency.

Every fundraising email is the last stand. Every news cycle is an existential threat. Every election is the final battle for the soul of America. The rhetoric of crisis has been so relentless for so long that it has produced numbness: a population that has heard “this is it” so many times that when a genuine crisis arrives, the alarm system is broken.

Conservative media built a business model on outrage supply chains. The cycle works like this: identify an offense (a transgender athlete, a campus protest, a corporate pride campaign), amplify it across platforms for 72 hours, extract maximum engagement, then discard it and move to the next one. By Friday, nobody remembers Monday’s apocalypse. The effect is a citizenry habituated to performing emergency. The resources consumed (attention, institutional trust, the capacity for sustained focus) are real. The strategic output is zero.

Then there is “fight” as governing metaphor. When the dominant language is combat (fight, war, battle, take back, last stand), compromise becomes surrender and moderation becomes treason. Trump’s “fight fight fight” wasn’t metaphor; it was instruction. The rhetoric locked both leaders and followers into escalation. Disengagement became structurally impossible because it would mean admitting the fight was never as existential as advertised.

And the provocation wing: the faction whose explicit goal is triggering emotional reactions from the other side. Owning the libs. The performative cruelty of policies designed not to solve problems but to generate outrage. When the goal shifts from winning to provoking, you’ve abandoned strategy for spectacle. You’ve guaranteed counter-escalation without advancing any objective. This is what it looks like to attack from anger rather than advantage.

Same mechanism as the left, different costume.

The fight provides belonging and purpose. I know what I’m against: the elites, the woke, the establishment. That clarity is addictive. Peace would mean sitting with the harder question both sides are avoiding: what am I actually for? What would I build if I stopped fighting long enough to draw blueprints? The black coffee problem applies here too: when identity is defined by opposition, you get whatever your enemy isn’t, which is rarely what you need.

Both sides are draining the same treasury. Both have structural incentives to prolong rather than resolve. Both are choosing the strategy Sun Tzu warned against above all others.

So why does the war keep widening instead of resolving?

Follow the power, not the ideology. The professional class that lives between the combatants has every incentive to keep the war going and no incentive to end it.

Cable news. Fox and MSNBC are not opposing armies. They are arms dealers supplying both sides. Outrage is the product. Resolution would collapse the business model. Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow need each other the way Coke needs Pepsi: the competition is the business. Neither wants you to disengage.

Political fundraising. Open your inbox. “Democracy is at stake: donate $25 before midnight.” “They’re coming for your freedom: rush $50 now.” Every email is an emergency. The crisis never resolves because next quarter’s fundraising depends on a fresh one. The stated goal is winning. The operational goal is fighting, because winning would end the revenue stream.

Social media platforms. The engagement algorithms don’t care about truth, justice, or the American way. They optimize for conflict because conflict holds attention, and attention is the product. This isn’t conspiracy. It’s architecture. The information environment selects for prolongation the way a river selects for the path of least resistance. You are downstream.

Most people, on both sides, look at this and want to fix the platforms. Regulate the algorithms. Break up the companies. Some of this may be needed. But it won’t hold. Before algorithms, talk radio did this. Before talk radio, cable news. Before cable, yellow journalism and penny presses. The mechanism within us that craves the clarity of combat, that mistakes outrage for engagement and engagement for meaning, is older than any technology. Shut down one delivery system and another will find the same vulnerability. The terrain changes. The susceptibility doesn’t.

The durable answer is inoculation. The capacity to see the mechanism for what it is, to feel the pull and name it, to recognize the surge of righteous combat as a signal to pause rather than engage. This is Sun Tzu’s oldest counsel applied inward: know yourself. Know what in you can be exploited. Then it can’t be.

Pundits, influencers, commentators: their relevance is a function of the war’s continuation. The podcaster with a million followers built that audience on outrage. The columnist who pivoted to political commentary tripled their readership during the Trump years. The last thing any of them want, on either side, is for you to look away.

The stated motivations diverge from the actual behavior. The professional political class says it wants to win. Watch what it does. It wants to fight. Winning would be an extinction event for the industry that has grown up around the conflict.

And this matters now more than it did a decade ago. The generational cycle suggests the decisive period of this era hits by the early 2030s. That crisis (whatever form it takes) will demand exactly what prolonged culture war destroys: institutional coherence, social trust, the capacity for collective action, the willingness to cooperate with people you disagree with. Every year of widening warfare degrades those capacities further. We are burning our strategic reserves on a war that produces nothing, heading into a season that will demand everything.

The damage is cumulative. A decade of culture war hasn’t just failed to resolve anything. It has actively degraded our capacity to resolve anything in the future.

I don’t exempt myself from any of this. I’ve doomscrolled. I’ve argued with strangers. I’ve felt the righteous surge that comes with a perfectly crafted rebuttal to someone who is wrong on the internet, even if I never posted it. That surge is what Sun Tzu was talking about when he said never to act from anger. It feels like courage. It’s usually just adrenaline.

Here is what I think, stated plainly.

The culture war in its current form is a strategic trap. Both sides are inside it. The way out is not to care less about the issues but to refuse the terms of engagement. The widening is the mechanism of destruction: every new front opened is another resource consumed, another institution degraded, another relationship sacrificed on the altar of being right.

Choose your battles. This is Sun Tzu’s most basic counsel, and the one we’ve most thoroughly ignored. Not every hill is worth dying on. Not every outrage requires a response. Not every disagreement is existential. The person who fights everywhere fights nowhere effectively.

Withdraw from the fronts that don’t matter. Invest the reclaimed resources: attention, energy, good faith, the willingness to see your neighbor as something other than an enemy. Invest them in building. Families, communities, local institutions, your own inner capacity to bear complexity without retreating into tribe. The work of construction is slower, quieter, and less satisfying than the dopamine of combat. It is also the only work that has ever produced anything durable.

The general who knows when to fight and when not to fight will win. The general who fights everything, everywhere, all the time, will exhaust the state he swore to defend.

We are that state.

Sources and Inspiration

The Art of War - Sun Tzu

The Fourth Turning Is Here - Neil Howe

Bad Philosophy

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:52:31 GMT

Yuval Noah Harari on meaning:

“Human life has absolutely no meaning. Humans are the outcome of blind evolutionary processes that operate without goal or purpose... any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion.”

On human rights:

“There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings.”

On free will:

“Humans are now hackable animals. The idea that humans have this soul or spirit and they have free will, that’s over.”

On progress:

“We thought we were saving time; instead we revved up the treadmill of life to ten times its former speed.” The Agricultural Revolution? “History’s biggest fraud.” We didn’t domesticate wheat. “It domesticated us.”

On our cosmic significance:

“If planet Earth were to blow up tomorrow morning, the universe would probably keep going about its business as usual. Human subjectivity would not be missed.”

On the future:

“Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new ‘useless class.’” Homo sapiens will likely “disappear in a century or two.”

These are not marginal observations. These are the central claims of one of the most widely read thinkers of the past decade. Tens of millions of copies sold. Translated into dozens of languages. Assigned in universities, discussed in boardrooms, cited by world leaders.

And something about them closes doors.

I must admit, I was a Harari disciple upon my first reading. It spoke to me in ways that I can only assume was a shared experience by many others. However, after reading David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch has a concept he calls “bad philosophy.” Not philosophy that’s merely false (Aristotle was wrong about physics, but his philosophy opened inquiry). Bad philosophy is something more corrosive: ideas that actively prevent the growth of knowledge. Frameworks that make problems seem unsolvable by design. Conclusions that foreclose rather than open.

After absorbing Deutsch’s framework, Harari’s work reads differently. The quotes above aren’t just provocations. They’re door-closers. “You’re hackable” isn’t an invitation to investigate consciousness. It’s a terminus. “Meaning is delusion” doesn’t open inquiry into what makes life worth living. It shuts it down.

Bad philosophy doesn’t give wrong answers. It prevents better questions.

But here’s what puzzled me: Harari meditates two hours a day. He’s done months of silent Vipassana retreat. When Buddhist masters say “no self,” they’re pointing toward liberation. When they say form is emptiness, they’re opening a gate. Harari uses similar language and arrives somewhere else entirely. Same starting territory, radically different destination.

What happened?

Harari and Sam Harris are often grouped together because both speak favorably about meditation and draw from Buddhist traditions. The similarity is superficial. Their relationships to Buddhism differ in orientation, depth, and philosophical ambition.

I’ve listened to the two of them speak with each other for hours. Unfortunately, current events nearly always take the show rather than the two of them sparring on Buddhism and meditation. Sam, if you’re reading, let’s do it. I’d love to hear you wander around with Harari on the topic.

Harari’s connection is primarily disciplinary and experiential. He practices Vipassana in a traditional, intensive form. He treats meditation as a tool for epistemic hygiene: a way to observe mental phenomena directly and reduce self-deception. Buddhism, for him, is not a truth-claim about reality but a technology for seeing how minds generate suffering, narratives, and illusions. This perspective underwrites his historical work. His skepticism toward stories, identities, and humanist myths is consistent with Buddhist insights about impermanence and non-self. But he does not argue for those insights philosophically. He treats them as observations revealed through practice.

Harris’s connection is philosophical and normative. He engages Buddhism selectively, abstracting key insights (especially non-duality and the illusion of self) and then argues for their truth using analytic philosophy, neuroscience, and introspection. Meditation, for Harris, is not merely a practice but evidence in a broader claim: that certain Buddhist insights are objectively true descriptions of consciousness and can be integrated into a rational, secular worldview. He rejects much of traditional Buddhism while preserving what he sees as its core metaphysical insight.

The contrast can be stated cleanly. Harari uses Buddhist practice to undermine confidence in meaning-making systems. Harris uses Buddhist insight to establish a positive account of mind and well-being. Harari is descriptive and deflationary. Harris is prescriptive and reconstructive.

Harari treats Buddhism as a method that dissolves illusions. Harris treats it as a source of truths worth defending.

This matters because it reveals what Harari took from the contemplative tradition and what he left behind.

The Buddhist insight that “self is constructed” is not meant to terminate in despair. It opens into something. The dissolution of the grasping ego reveals interconnection, compassion, presence. The emptiness points toward śūnyatā: the ground from which meaning arises fresh, unburdened by clinging.

When a Buddhist master says “no self,” the next movement is toward all beings. The deconstruction is preparatory, not final. You dissolve the illusion of separateness and discover you were never alone.

Harari took the deconstructive move and stopped. He accessed the insight that narratives are constructed, selves are assembled, meaning is not given by the universe. True enough, in a sense. But then he stayed in the rubble.

His conclusions follow: if meaning is constructed, it’s “just a delusion.” If selves are assembled, humans are “hackable animals.” If stories are fictions, we can be reprogrammed by whoever writes better code.

This is left-hemisphere Buddhism: analysis that stops before integration, taking-apart that never returns.

The psychiatrist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that the brain’s hemispheres don’t do different things so much as attend to the world in fundamentally different ways. The left hemisphere narrows, focuses, grasps. It excels at analysis, categorization, taking things apart. The right hemisphere opens, contextualizes, integrates. It holds the whole, the meaning, the way parts fit together.

Both modes are necessary. The pathology is when one dominates without the other’s correction. McGilchrist’s central image: the right hemisphere is the master, the left its emissary. The emissary goes out, gathers information, executes tasks. The master retains the broader view, the sense of purpose. Problems arise when the emissary forgets its role and begins to believe it is sufficient unto itself.

Harari’s Buddhism is the emissary without the master. He can dissolve the illusion of self but cannot complete the movement into what that dissolution opens. He visited the master’s house, took notes on the emptiness, and returned to report there was nothing there.

But the emptiness was the doorway, not the destination.

Why does this sell?

Erich Fromm understood. Freedom is a burden. The weight of choosing, of being responsible for your own meaning, of facing a universe that doesn’t hand you significance on a platter: this is difficult.

Harari offers relief. You don’t have to figure out what your life is for. It’s not for anything. Meaning is a delusion, so stop grasping. The algorithms will sort it out.

This is an escape mechanism dressed as sophistication. “I’m too intellectually honest for meaning.” But the exhausted reach for certainty, and nihilism is a form of certainty. It closes the question. You can stop searching.

The true believer, Eric Hoffer observed, doesn’t primarily seek truth. He seeks relief from the burden of selfhood. Harari’s readers aren’t necessarily true believers in the cult sense. But the appeal has the same structure: here is permission to stop struggling with the hard questions. The universe is meaningless. Your intuitions about significance are just evolutionary residue. Relax into hackability.

The alternative is harder. It requires holding the insight that meaning is not given while still constructing meaning worth living for. It requires dissolving the grasping ego without collapsing into passivity. It requires the return.

There’s a reflexivity problem in Harari’s position that he never addresses.

The insight that dissolves meaning should dissolve the speaker’s authority too. If narratives are fictions, Harari’s narrative is fiction. If humans are hackable, his predictions are outputs of a hacked system. If “any meaning that people inscribe to their lives is just a delusion,” then the meaning Harari inscribes to his project of enlightening millions is also delusion.

But he doesn’t write that way. He writes with the confidence of someone who has seen through the illusions and now reports from outside them. The deconstruction is applied to everyone except the one doing the deconstructing.

This is the tell. A genuine “no self” position would dissolve the narrator along with everything else. What remains is humility, or silence, or compassion.

Harari retains the authority of the one who knows while denying that knowing is possible. He stands outside the system he’s describing, which is precisely what his system says can’t be done.

What’s actually at stake?

David Deutsch offers a counter: problems are soluble. The future is not determined. Humans are not algorithms because humans generate explanations that change everything. The growth of knowledge is unbounded. We are not hackable because we can always conjecture something new, criticize what exists, and create what didn’t exist before.

This is not naive optimism. Deutsch is clear-eyed about how things can go wrong. But his framework opens doors. “We don’t yet know” is an invitation to inquiry. “You’re hackable” is a full stop.

Jung offers another counter. Human consciousness doesn’t seem to operate in isolation. The same symbols, the same myths, the same archetypal patterns appear in cultures that never touched each other. Calculus emerged simultaneously from Newton and Leibniz. Natural selection from Darwin and Wallace. Jung called this the collective unconscious: something shared beneath individual minds that shapes what we dream, what we create, what we discover.

Harari would likely dismiss this as pattern-matching on randomness, or convergent evolution of cognitive modules. But notice what that dismissal does. It takes a phenomenon that feels meaningful (the sense of participating in something larger than the individual self) and declares it epiphenomenal. The left hemisphere can’t grasp it, so it must be illusion.

This is the emissary’s confidence again. What it can’t measure, it dismisses. What it can’t analyze, it denies.

The Buddhist return offers the deepest counter. Emptiness isn’t the destination. It’s the clearing that allows compassion and meaning to arise without grasping. You dissolve the fixed self and discover something larger. The insight is preparatory to engagement, not withdrawal.

Harari foreclosed all three.

I don’t think Harari is malicious. I think he’s incomplete.

He accessed something real through practice. The constructed nature of experience. The way minds generate narratives. The absence of meaning written into the fabric of the universe. These are insights, and they can shatter comfortable illusions.

But shattering is not the end. What matters is what you do with the pieces.

Harris tries to rebuild: a secular ethics, a science of well-being, a meaning grounded in the facts of consciousness. You can argue with his reconstruction, but he’s attempting the return.

Harari stays in the rubble and describes it. Worse, he predicts that the rubble is all there will ever be. The stories are fictions. The selves are hackable. The useless class awaits. This is what you see when you stop halfway.

Bad philosophy doesn’t just give wrong answers. It prevents better questions. It forecloses the inquiry that would reveal its incompleteness. Harari’s millions of readers don’t just absorb false claims. They absorb a frame that makes certain thoughts harder to think.

What would it mean to hold the same insights Harari accessed and complete the movement he abandoned?

The self is constructed. We can construct selves capable of bearing freedom.

Meaning is not given. And we can create meaning worth living for.

Narratives are fictions. Some fictions are more true than others.

The door Harari closed was never locked. It just requires walking through.

Now go.

Sources and Inspiration

The Beginning of Infinity - David Deutsch

The Master and His Emissary - Iain McGilchrist

Man and His Symbols - Carl Jung

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

Excellence Without Obligation

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:36:20 GMT

We’ve gotten very good at optimizing our own lives. Meal prep, morning routines, productivity systems, wellness trackers, curated experiences. We talk about “investing in ourselves” and “self-care” and “personal growth” with the earnestness of people performing something important. And maybe it is important. But somewhere in all this careful tending to the self, something else fell away.

I notice it in the language we use. We optimize. We curate. We invest. These are words for managing portfolios, not for becoming someone. They frame life as a series of resource allocation decisions, each one made to maximize return to the self. The grammar itself has shifted. We used to speak of becoming; now we speak of acquiring. Character gave way to capability. Who you are gave way to what you have.

And I feel the pull of this myself. The appeal of keeping life manageable, controlled, aligned with my preferences. It’s seductive precisely because it’s rational. Every individual choice makes sense. The logic compounds. Why take on obligations you can avoid? Why bind yourself to commitments that might not serve your interests?

The answer, I think, has something to do with what we’ve actually lost in all this optimization. Not time or money or options. Something harder to name. Call it the thing that excellence actually requires.

Jim Murphy trains elite athletes. His book Inner Excellence makes a distinction that sounds simple but isn’t: excellence is not the same as performance. You can perform well through talent, through preparation, through favorable circumstances. But excellence is something else. It emerges from presence, from purpose, from the integration of who you are with what you’re doing. It requires that you become someone capable of the work, not just someone who can execute the motions.

Excellence is built through addition. You achieve it by building the capacity to meet friction and hold together. The athlete who can perform under pressure has cultivated something that the athlete who crumbles has not. That cultivation happened through difficulty, through it, because of it.

Murphy’s athletes don’t optimize for comfort. They train for the moments when comfort disappears and only character remains. The free throw with the game on the line. The final set when your body is screaming to quit. Excellence shows up precisely where optimization would have told you to avoid.

There’s something important here about what we’ve been calling self-improvement. The optimization version promises a better life through better management: smoother systems, less friction, more alignment between your preferences and your circumstances. The person at the end remains unchanged, just with better circumstances.

Real excellence changes you. It leaves deposits. The difficulty you chose to meet (and the failures you absorbed along the way) become part of who you are. This is why people who have done hard things carry themselves differently than people who have merely arranged comfortable lives. The former have been built. The latter have been curated.

Emerson saw the same distinction a century and a half before Murphy, though he came at it from a different angle.

Self-Reliance is the most misread essay in the American canon. The title alone has been drafted into service for every kind of individualism: libertarian, therapeutic, entrepreneurial. Trust yourself. Don’t let others define you. Be authentic. The essay gets quoted at graduation ceremonies and painted on Instagram tiles, always in service of the same message: be yourself, trust your instincts, don’t conform to others’ expectations. What gets lost in this reading is where all that self-trust is supposed to lead: to the capacity to bear obligation.

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” Yes. But why? Not so you can optimize your life into perfect comfort. Not so you can avoid the obligations that come from caring about something beyond yourself. Emerson’s self-trust is a demand, not a permission slip. “Always do what you are afraid to do.” It’s the capacity to hold your own judgment against social pressure so that you have something genuine to contribute. The whole essay is about becoming strong enough to bear the weight of actually standing for something.

“Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.” This is the core claim. The pressure to conform isn’t incidental to social life; it’s built into it. Everyone around you is gently pulling you toward imitation, toward adopting their views and habits because it’s easier than forming your own. Most people comply. They become what Emerson calls “a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater.”

Self-reliance is the refusal to make that trade. But notice what it requires. Not isolation. Not the careful removal of obligation. It requires strength. The capacity to stand in the room where everyone disagrees with you and not waver, not because you’re stubborn, but because you’ve done the work to know your own mind.

This kind of self-reliance creates obligation. You become capable of genuine contribution precisely because you’ve held onto your own judgment. You can give the world something it doesn’t already have because you’ve formed something real inside yourself. The self-reliant person owes more because they have something real to offer.

The optimization culture we’ve built has co-opted this language while gutting its meaning.

We talk about self-improvement, but we mean life management. We talk about personal growth, but we mean preference satisfaction. We talk about excellence, but we mean performance metrics. The words remain; the substance has drained out.

Here’s what the substance actually requires: difficulty you don’t avoid. Commitment you can’t exit when it gets hard. The discovery that you’re capable of more than you knew, which only happens when circumstances demand more than you planned.

The optimized life is organized to prevent this discovery. Every friction point gets smoothed. Every exit gets preserved. Every commitment comes with conditions that let you walk away when the terms no longer serve you. The result is a life that might be comfortable and might even be successful in conventional terms, but cannot produce excellence because excellence requires exactly what optimization eliminates.

I don’t mean this as judgment on individual choices. People have reasons for their decisions, circumstances I can’t see from the outside. And the pull toward optimization is strong precisely because it’s rational. Every specific choice makes sense.

But notice what happens when this becomes the default. When an entire culture organizes itself around minimizing binding commitment and maximizing optionality. When the language of excellence gets attached to what is actually very sophisticated comfort-seeking. When we raise people to believe that self-reliance means independence from everyone, when it actually means becoming strong enough to be genuinely needed.

I think about this when I read surveys showing Gen Z’s return to religion, their craving for in-real-life experiences, their suspicion of the optimization culture they inherited. They’re noticing something that the rest of us have learned to rationalize.

They watch people who’ve perfected the art of taking without acknowledging the taking. People who’ve arranged their lives to maximize optionality while performing the language of excellence. People who talk about self-reliance but mean self-service. And they can smell that something is wrong with this, even if they don’t have the language to name it.

Real excellence creates obligation because real excellence changes you, and changed people owe something to what changed them. The athlete owes something to the sport, the coach, the competitors who pushed them. The scholar owes something to the tradition, the teachers, the students who will come after. The citizen owes something to the institutions that made citizenship possible.

Emerson knew this. Murphy knows this. The people who have actually done hard things know this, which is why they speak differently than the people who have merely arranged comfortable lives.

Excellence isn’t optimization. Self-reliance isn’t self-service. And whatever we’ve been building with all this careful life-curation, it isn’t producing people capable of bearing the weight that freedom requires.

I suspect Murphy is right, that excellence emerges from meeting difficulty rather than avoiding it. I suspect Emerson is right, that self-reliance means becoming strong enough to bear binding commitment, not clever enough to escape it. I suspect the foundation we’re standing on was built by people who understood that excellence created debt, and that we’ve been spending down that inheritance while calling it self-improvement.

The people coming up can see something that the rest of us have rationalized away. They haven’t bought all the way in yet, and that gives them distance.

What would you tell yourself ten years from now, if you kept optimizing? What would be missing?

Sources and Inspiration

Inner Excellence - Jim Murphy

Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Where is This Fourth Turning?

Daniel Hatke — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 17:26:15 GMT

Your neighbor believes things you find incomprehensible. You believe things they find dangerous. You’re both drawing from sources the other considers propaganda, from experts the other considers compromised, from institutions the other considers captured.

Democracies can handle disagreement. This is something else. This is fracture.

It’s global. Brexit Britain. Bolsonaro’s Brazil. Polarized America. Rising nationalist movements across Europe. The pattern repeats everywhere: institutional trust collapses, truth bubbles harden, shared ground vanishes. We’ve moved beyond arguing about what policies best serve common goals. We’re arguing about what happened yesterday. What occurred, not merely what it means. The disputes are factual before they’re interpretive.

When shared reality dissolves, shared institutions follow. And when shared institutions dissolve, you get what historians call a turning.

History moves in cycles. The rhythm isn’t mechanical, but it’s recognizable. Neil Howe mapped approximately eighty-year patterns in Anglo-American history: four phases repeating like seasons. High, Awakening, Unraveling, Crisis. Each full cycle produces fundamental reordering. Each crisis phase (the Fourth Turning) breaks the old order and forges something new.

The American pattern: the Revolution, the Civil War, the Depression and World War II. Each arrived roughly eighty years after the last. Each felt, to those inside it, like the end of everything familiar. Each produced institutions that structured the next cycle.

But here’s what matters: the crisis event never was the turning. The turning was the legitimacy collapse that preceded it. By the time shots were fired at Lexington, colonial trust in British governance had already shattered. By the time Fort Sumter fell, the union had already fractured in practice. The visible crisis resolved what had already broken. The turning was underway years before anyone recognized it.

That’s what we’re watching now. The preconditions. The legitimacy collapse that makes crisis inevitable.

Howe thought the current turning would climax by the early 2030s. Whether his timeline holds, I don’t know. Frameworks illuminate; they don’t predict. But the pattern recognition matters: we are inside something, not observing it from outside. And that changes what’s demanded of us.

The visible breakdown is epistemological. We cannot agree on what’s true.

Martin Gurri diagnosed the mechanism. The digital revolution shattered elite monopoly on information. For most of human history, what counted as news, as fact, as legitimate knowledge was filtered through institutions: newspapers, universities, governments, credentialed experts. The public received truth from above.

That broke. Catastrophically, and faster than anyone anticipated. Suddenly everyone could publish, broadcast, investigate, accuse. The failures and hypocrisies that institutions once hid became visible. And they were extensive.

The public revolted. But (and this is Gurri’s crucial insight) the revolt defined itself by negation. The public knew what it was against: elites, experts, the establishment, the system. It did not know what it was for. Institutions were delegitimized but not replaced. The result is a vacuum where shared truth used to be.

Neil Postman saw it coming from a different angle. The medium shapes the message. Television turned news into entertainment, politics into performance, discourse into spectacle. Social media completed what television began. The platforms select for engagement, and engagement means emotion: outrage, fear, tribal solidarity. What spreads isn’t what’s true. What spreads is what activates.

We cannot think clearly because the forms through which we communicate no longer support clear thinking.

And beneath the surface, preference falsification (Timur Kuran’s term) compounds the distortion. People misrepresent their beliefs under social pressure. What you see in public opinion isn’t what people actually think. It’s what they’re willing to say given the social costs of dissent. The result is a hall of mirrors. Preference falsification explains why reform seems impossible until sudden rupture, why regimes that look stable collapse overnight, why societies can shift faster than anyone predicted.

That’s turning dynamics. Pressure building invisibly. Then release.

But distrust alone doesn’t explain what’s happening. Societies have weathered distrust before. What makes distrust metastasize into turning conditions is what lies underneath it: a pervasive vacancy. Call it malaise. Call it alienation. Call it the slow withdrawal of investment in anything beyond the self.

People who feel ownership push back, reform, engage. They defend institutions because those institutions feel like theirs to defend. People who feel like passengers (or worse, victims of the system they’re nominally part of) don’t defend anything. They watch the house burn. Sometimes they cheer.

Fromm understood this. Freedom isn’t just a gift. It’s a burden. The weight of self-determination, of choosing who to be and what to value, creates anxiety that many cannot bear. When that weight isn’t matched with meaning, with stake, with genuine investment, people drift. They go through motions without ownership. They become what they’re supposed to be without ever choosing it. Fromm called this “automaton conformity.” It looks like participation. It’s actually absence.

The escaped slave and the comfortable drifter have opposite problems but arrive at the same vulnerability: neither feels the institutions are theirs to maintain.

Hoffer saw what fills the vacuum. The frustrated individual (his term) is someone with no stake in the present order. Weak selfhood. No internal source of meaning. This person is raw material for mass movements. The movement’s doctrine is almost irrelevant; what matters is what the movement offers: identity, belonging, purpose. Someone to blame. Something to be. The costume differs left and right; the psychological function is identical.

Victimhood becomes identity because victimhood provides meaning when nothing else does. The movement says: you’re not failing, you’re oppressed. You’re not lost, you’re fighting. You’re not empty, you’re righteous.

Emerson saw the foundation that’s missing. Self-reliance. The capacity to trust yourself, generate meaning internally, choose values rather than inherit them. When that foundation fails (and Emerson thought society conspired against it), people adopt tribal positions. They define themselves by opposition. They know who they’re against because they don’t know who they are.

The connection between distrust and malaise is this: distrust metastasizes because no one feels invested enough to repair trust. You don’t fix a house you’re renting. You don’t defend institutions you feel alienated from. The epistemological collapse and the psychological vacancy feed each other. We can’t share truth because we don’t share stake. We don’t share stake because we can’t see ourselves in common institutions. The spiral tightens.

Previous turnings ended. Crisis gave way to new order. What made that possible?

The turning ends when a new order emerges that enough people accept as legitimate. That requires both destruction and reconstruction, and reconstruction is the harder part.

The founders built durable institutions through compromise, argument, practical wisdom. They disagreed violently about almost everything: federal power versus states’ rights, agrarian versus commercial economies, slavery (the wound they couldn’t close). The Constitution wasn’t consensus. It was negotiated truce that held because enough people decided to make it hold.

But they had something the current moment lacks: investment. Stake. The founders weren’t passengers. They were building something they believed they owned. Many risked execution for treason. They had, as the phrase goes, skin in the game.

McCullough’s account of 1776 shows how close it came to failing. Washington’s army nearly dissolved from cold, hunger, and despair. The Revolution survived because enough people decided, in specific moments of doubt, to continue. Ellis documents the personal feuds and near-fractures that could have broken the early republic. The institutions held because individuals chose to make them hold, often against their own interests and grievances.

What happens when no one makes that choice? When everyone’s a passenger? When the malaise runs deep enough that the house burning feels like someone else’s problem?

That’s the untested variable of this turning. Previous crisis phases had clearer battle lines. External enemies. Geographic fractures. This one is diffuse. The dissolution isn’t between North and South. It’s between realities layered on the same geography. And the malaise means even those who see the fracture may not feel enough ownership to repair it.

The turning will resolve. History doesn’t pause. Some new order will emerge: more authoritarian or more free, more centralized or more distributed, more coherent or more fragmented. The question is what kind.

And that depends on what we bring into it.

The publication you’re reading exists because of this conviction: preparation matters more than prediction. Understanding why people flee freedom. Recognizing manipulation, tribal epistemology, the forces that tear societies apart. Knowing the history well enough to maintain the inheritance. Building the inner strength to bear liberty when liberty is hard.

Strong people make strong institutions. Weak people make weak institutions (or strongmen who exploit weakness). The chain from individual to civilization doesn’t skip links.

I’m not telling you to do anything. I’m describing what the pattern suggests: the quality of what emerges from a turning depends on the quality of the people inside it. Their capacity for self-determination. Their willingness to hold stake in something beyond their own tribe. Their ability to tolerate disagreement without demanding the other side’s destruction.

Whether enough people can move from passenger to owner (from malaise to investment, from victimhood to agency) is the open question. The Fourth Turning will answer it. We’re the ones who have to live inside the answer.

Return to where we started. Your neighbor in a different reality. The sources you don’t share. The facts you can’t agree on.

The fracture won’t heal because one side wins and the other submits. It heals (if it heals at all) when enough people decide shared institutions are worth maintaining despite disagreement. That requires something the current moment doesn’t provide: stake. Ownership. The belief that this thing is mine to maintain, even when I’m furious at what my countrymen believe.

I don’t know if we can rebuild that. I don’t know if the malaise has run too deep, the distrust too far. I know only that the turning is here, and what emerges depends on what we do inside it.

Sources and Inspiration

The Fourth Turning Is Here - Neil Howe