Why do civilizations turn against their own greatness, and what happens when they do?

In this episode of Context with Brad Harris, we trace the psychology of civilizational decline, from the Great Wall of China and the Apollo program to the Department of Justice's 2026 lawsuit against UCLA Medical School, asking why modern Western culture increasingly treats excellence as a moral threat.

Drawing on Alain de Botton's book Status Anxiety and Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, we explore how status anxiety breeds resentment, how resentment disguises itself as compassion, and how institutions captured by this cycle begin to reward narrative over competence, with consequences that can be lethal.

This episode builds on my previous episodes Which Humanity Survives and Layers of Meaning in Human History to ask: do we still have the civilizational courage to revere greatness?

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Once survival is secured, a different question emerges: what is life for?

In this episode of Context, we trace three enduring sources of human purpose—endurance, exploration, and understanding—through three excellent books: The Wager, Undaunted Courage, and A Short History of Nearly Everything. From shipwrecked sailors struggling to preserve dignity, to Lewis and Clark crossing an unmapped continent, to scientists devoting their entire lives to understanding how the universe works, we'll consider how human beings have sought more than mere comfort.

The result is a long-view reflection on what intelligence is for. And why, in the age of artificial intelligence, remembering these layers of meaning may matter more than ever.

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Human history is not a smooth story of progress. It is a story of bottlenecks—moments when pressure narrows the field, and when only certain ways of living can carry themselves forward.

In this episode of Context, we explore the idea that AI is creating the next great bottleneck in human evolution.

Drawing on evolutionary biology, deep prehistory, the Black Death, World War I, and modern digital culture, we consider how bottlenecks reshape not just populations, but meaning itself, filtering which values, commitments, and forms of responsibility can survive across generations.

The question before us is not whether humanity survives the age of AI, but which version of humanity does.

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In this episode of Context, we explore the historical, philosophical, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, drawing on examples from world history, literature, and modern AI research.

We examine pivotal moments in the history of technology—from Ming China's abandonment of oceanic exploration 600 years ago to the Cold War's embrace of nuclear power 60 years ago—to frame the long-term liabilities of technological progress.

This episode culminates in a simple but haunting idea: the greatest risk of artificial intelligence may not be the violent destruction of humanity, but its painless euthanasia. Not a civilization wiped out by its inventions, but one that trades the ordeal of being human for the ease of being entertained into extinction.

History's rule is progress. But progress for its own sake has never been humanity's purpose. Purpose has to be chosen by every generation. If AI can make everything infinitely easy, it may also make everything infinitely meaningless.

This episode asks whether we are willing to keep choosing struggle, curiosity, and wonder—or whether we're prepared to outsource meaning itself, and quietly accept The Great Silence that follows.

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Can fractured societies pull themselves back from the brink?

Is America doomed to slide into another civil war? Or, are we already engaged in a kind of Cold Civil War?

In this episode of Context, we examine three powerful case studies of recovery:

• England emerging from the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century
• West Germany rising from the rubble of 1945
• America clawing its way out of the malaise of the 1970s

Each story reveals how societies that seemed broken beyond repair found ways to discipline elites, renew their principles, and restore confidence in themselves and in the future.

As America faces mounting political violence and cultural fatigue, these examples remind us that collapse is not destiny. Renewal has always required sacrifice, leadership, and moral courage, but history proves it is possible.

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My thoughts on the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and what his martyrdom reveals about truth versus lies, good versus evil, and the West's spiritual fight for its life.

For fifty years, we've been told that nature is fragile — a porcelain Eden, easily shattered by the slightest human pressure. But history tells a different story. From the fall of Rome to the Black Death, from Chernobyl to Detroit, every time people retreat, the wilderness rushes back with astonishing speed.

In this episode, we examine the reality that civilization is fragile while life on Earth is ferociously tenacious. Drawing on historians like Bryan Ward-Perkins and William Cronon, and ecologists like C.S. Holling, we discover how fast forests and animals can reclaim human spaces, and why the modern myth of a delicate planet misses the deeper truth.

Nature is not fragile. Civilization is.

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History is full of phantom worlds—alternative technological paradigms that could have made everything turn out radically differently. Airships instead of airplanes. Rail instead of cars. Direct current instead of alternating current. Telegraphs instead of telephones. Each path once seemed inevitable, until another won out and reshaped civilization.

In this episode of Context, we explore these turning points and what they reveal about our own moment, when autonomous vehicles and immersive virtual reality are racing forward in parallel. Will the future be built on radical mobility, or radical simulation? Or both?

Most of all, we ask: what kind of lives do we want our grandchildren to live, and how will the choices we make now determine the answer?

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Modern life runs on hidden engine rooms—vast, intricate systems most of us never see. The Haber-Bosch process, which turns air into fertilizer, is one of them. It feeds billions, yet almost no one outside of science or industry could explain how it works or why it matters.

In this episode, we explore Haber-Bosch not just as a technological marvel, but as a parable for our dependence on complex systems most of us barely understand. From the fight over bird droppings in the 19th century to the industrial alchemy of fixing nitrogen, we trace how human ingenuity transformed the limits of nature, and how that transformation fostered both abundance and fragility.

This is a story about the machinery that sustains us, and the risks we run when we forget it's there.

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The modern world is defined by acceleration. But what if the most stable—and perhaps most human—version of ourselves existed long before civilization?

In this episode, we explore the world of the Cro-Magnon: anatomically modern humans who thrived in Ice Age Europe. For hundreds of generations, their way of life remained remarkably unchanged. What was it like to live in near-perfect evolutionary harmony with the environment?

Civilization ultimately emerged as a hedge against danger, especially for those with children to protect. But in exchange for safety and surplus, we surrendered something more elemental and spiritually sustaining.

This is the story of that trade-off—and of what we lost in the bargain. This is the story of a time before history began, when we were most human.

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