SEPTEMBER 2, 2026.
Season 4, Episode 9.
7:00 PM PACIFIC TIME.
There is a peculiar moment in any relationship built around dependence when the weaker party stops asking whether the stronger party will behave differently and begins asking a more consequential question: How do we make their behaviour less important?
That moment may now be arriving across several systems at once.
Canada is reorganizing parts of its economic relationship with the United States. Energy producers are searching for routes that reduce dependence on vulnerable chokepoints. Businesses are reconsidering suppliers. Consumers are changing purchasing habits. Governments are building alternative alliances. Central banks are confronting an energy shock that can travel from missiles in the Middle East to household borrowing costs thousands of kilometres away.
At the same time, another form of disruption is unfolding much closer to the individual. Artificial intelligence is dramatically expanding access to information while arriving inside an economy already competing aggressively for human attention. We can retrieve more knowledge than ever before while potentially becoming less capable of concentrating on any of it for very long.
These developments appear unrelated until we examine the mechanism underneath them. They are all stories about dependency, attention, adaptation and autonomy.
A powerful country can impose costs on another country. A military can threaten a shipping route. A government can impose tariffs. A platform can design an environment that keeps millions of people scrolling. An artificial-intelligence system can place extraordinary analytical capability in somebody’s hands. None of these forces determines the outcome by itself because human beings and institutions respond.
Every disruption creates incentives to adapt. Countries find another supplier, pipeline, customer, alliance or shipping route. People can also adapt by developing better information habits, protecting attention, questioning inherited desires and learning to use technology deliberately rather than allowing technology to determine the rhythm of consciousness.
Power can compel, but used repeatedly, power can also teach. Sometimes what it teaches the world is how to need the source of that power less.
You are listening to Incorrigible Myths, an independent public-interest publication built around current affairs, human behaviour and pattern recognition through long-form analysis.
Incorrigible Myths steps outside the daily headline cycle to examine recurring forces underneath political events, including power, status, incentives, institutions, narrative, psychology, emotional regulation, economic consequence and human behaviour. Politics provides many of the case studies, but the larger purpose is to understand how people and systems behave when pressure rises.
Incorrigible Myths is published in Canada as independent public-interest commentary and analysis, and the views expressed here are my own, grounded wherever possible in documents, credible reporting, public data and research that readers can examine for themselves.
Canada’s democratic framework includes the freedoms recognized by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression protected by Section 2(b). Those freedoms carry an intellectual responsibility alongside their legal protection: disagreement should remain possible, evidence should remain examinable and conclusions should remain revisable.
Nothing here requires agreement. It requires examination.
Aristotle gives us a useful starting discipline. Do not stop at what something appears to be. Examine its causes, its purpose, the conditions surrounding it and the consequences that follow. Political claims may describe an intention, but the measurable effects of a decision often tell us more about the system in which that decision operates. Serious inquiry therefore requires separating assertion from demonstration and asking whether the explanation being offered actually accounts for what we can observe.
Epictetus gives us another tool. Human beings are constantly confronted with impressions: things we see, hear, fear, desire and immediately interpret. The difficult intellectual work begins before we accept those impressions as reality. Political slogans, press conferences, threats, patriotic mythology, algorithmic feeds, social-media performances and declarations of strength all arrive first as impressions competing for judgment.
The analytical task running through this investigation is deceptively simple: How do we distinguish the impression placed before us from the reality underneath it?
If you are listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, the written version of this investigation is available on Incorrigible Myths, where the research, source documents, screenshots, charts and hyperlinks referenced throughout this episode can be examined directly.
1. Disruption Is No Longer Somewhere Else:
On September 2, Reuters reported another escalation in the US-Iran conflict. Brent crude settled at $95.63 per barrel, while West Texas Intermediate reached $91.01. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz remained severely disrupted. Preliminary tracking data showed only four commodity vessels transiting the waterway on Tuesday, compared with a ten-day average of roughly thirteen.
The Strait carried close to one-fifth of global oil shipments before the conflict. When movement through a passage that important becomes unreliable, the consequences do not remain geographically confined to the Persian Gulf. Energy enters almost everything. It moves trucks, ships and aircraft, heats buildings, powers industrial production and influences the cost of manufacturing and transportation. Natural gas feeds electricity systems and industrial processes. Diesel moves freight and agricultural machinery. Raise the cost of energy long enough and the shock begins migrating through supply chains.
Reuters reported something especially revealing on September 2. Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had used rare ship-to-ship transfers of liquefied natural gas outside the Strait of Hormuz to keep cargo moving toward countries including India and Japan. Asian spot LNG prices had risen to $23.20 per million British thermal units, more than twice their pre-conflict level.
The world did not simply stop moving because an important maritime route became dangerous. Companies adapted, ships transferred cargo differently and alternative arrangements emerged. Costs increased, but commerce searched for another path. That is disruption in its most instructive form: a system is disturbed, and the system begins reorganizing around the disturbance.
The same mechanism is beginning to appear much closer to home.
2. War Can Reach Your Mortgage Without Crossing Your Border:
Canadians do not need to see a missile to experience the economic consequences of one.
On September 2, the Bank of Canada held its policy interest rate at 2.25 percent, but Governor Tiff Macklem warned that multiple rate increases could become necessary if inflation remained elevated. Reuters reported inflation at 3%, with higher oil prices associated with the Iran conflict contributing to the pressure.
The transmission mechanism deserves attention because geopolitical reporting often stops too early. A military confrontation pushes oil prices higher. More expensive energy raises transportation and production costs. Businesses absorb some of those costs and pass others to consumers. Persistent price pressure complicates the work of central banks. Interest-rate expectations change, bond yields move, mortgages renew at different rates, business financing becomes more expensive and governments pay more to borrow.
By September 2, Reuters was also describing a global bond selloff as rising energy prices revived inflation fears. US 10-year Treasury yields were approaching 5 percent, while central banks across several major economies were confronting renewed pressure to keep monetary policy restrictive.
That is how the phrase global risk becomes tangible. Eventually it becomes somebody’s grocery bill, mortgage renewal, freight invoice, hiring decision or postponed investment.
The humanitarian dimension arrives through precisely that pathway. Inflation does not distribute pain evenly. A household with substantial savings absorbs a higher fuel bill differently from a family already deciding which expenses can wait.
A multinational corporation can hedge energy exposure differently from a small manufacturer. Wealth creates shock absorbers, and disruption reveals who has them.
3. Canada Is Not Powerless, but Power Requires Precision:
Discussion of the Canada-US relationship often begins with one undeniable fact: the United States is much larger.
It has the world’s deepest capital markets, enormous productive capacity, globally dominant technology companies, extraordinary military power and a domestic population roughly nine times Canada’s. None of that establishes that Canada is powerless.
Power between countries is rarely binary. Dependence can run in both directions while remaining highly unequal.
The US Energy Information Administration reported in July that Canada remained the primary source of US crude-oil imports in 2025, supplying an average of approximately 3.9 million barrels per day. The value of US energy imports from Canada reached approximately $111 billion that year, compared with about $26 billion in US energy exports to Canada.
Canada also occupies strategically important positions in electricity, fertilizer, aluminum, critical minerals, autos, railways, pipelines and continental transportation. Then there is geography.
The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway system extends approximately 3,700 kilometres from the Atlantic into the continental interior. Transport Canada says the system supports more than 241,000 Canadian and US jobs and approximately $46.8 billion in economic activity across the two countries. The St. Lawrence Seaway between Montreal and Lake Erie contains fifteen locks. Thirteen are operated on the Canadian side and two by the United States.
None of this means Canada can simply switch off American prosperity. Nor does US dependence on Canadian commodities erase Canada’s far greater exposure to the American market. The relationship is best understood as interdependent, but asymmetrical.
That distinction protects us from two equally poor stories. One says Canada holds all the cards. It does not. The other says Canada holds none. That does not survive serious examination either.
Strategic analysis begins when we stop counting slogans and start identifying where actual leverage sits, how quickly it can be exercised, what exercising it would cost and how the other party could respond.
4. The Strange Mathematics of Coercion:
Coercion works best when the target believes resistance will cost more than compliance. That calculation changes once the target begins building alternatives.
Reuters reported on August 28 that the breakdown in Canada-US trade negotiations had increased pressure to plan another oil pipeline to Canada’s west coast. Trans Mountain CEO Mark Maki described greater Pacific access as increasingly important for allowing Canadian producers to reach Asian customers.
The mechanism is straightforward. If one customer buys almost everything you produce, that customer possesses leverage even without issuing a threat. If you develop several credible customers, the original customer may remain the largest and most valuable, but its ability to dictate terms declines.
Infrastructure changes political relationships because infrastructure changes available choices. A pipeline does not need to predict a presidential post. A port does not need to determine whether a threat is theatrical. A trade agreement with another market does not depend on confidence that Washington will become more predictable next year. Each creates another option, and options reduce vulnerability.
Diversification therefore should not automatically be interpreted as anti-Americanism. For a country, it resembles portfolio management. You do not necessarily abandon your largest asset because it has become volatile. You reduce the probability that one asset can determine your survival.
There is an irony buried inside coercive power. If economic pressure is intended to increase another country’s dependence, but the experience of pressure convinces that country to invest in alternatives, the tactic may produce concessions today while weakening its own effectiveness tomorrow. That is the difference between a tactical victory and a strategic advantage.
5. The Staples Trap:
Independent Canadian writer Markham Hislop recently offered a useful historical framework for understanding the stakes in his Thoughtful Journalism analysis, “Why Trump Launched His Tariff War.”
Hislop describes the emerging US approach as a form of neo-mercantilism, drawing on analysis from Professor Andrew Nurse of Mount Allison University and Professor Drew Fagan of the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Their argument is that Washington has incentives to concentrate advanced manufacturing, investment and high-value production inside the United States while maintaining privileged access to Canadian energy, minerals and other resources.
That should be treated as analysis rather than established US motive. Yet it points toward an old Canadian problem that deserves examination regardless of motive.
Canada has spent centuries trying to move beyond the staples trap. Fish, fur, timber, grain, minerals, oil and natural gas have generated extraordinary wealth, but extracting something from the ground and shipping it elsewhere allows other economies to capture substantial value through refining, advanced manufacturing, technological development and commercialization.
Hislop distinguishes three useful economic linkages. Backward linkages arise when domestic companies supply the machinery, steel, engineering and other inputs needed to extract resources. Forward linkages emerge when the resource becomes the input for higher-value production. Technology linkages occur when expertise developed in one industry becomes useful somewhere else.
Those distinctions change how diversification should be understood. Finding another international customer for the same barrel of crude reduces customer concentration and can strengthen resilience. Transforming Canadian resources into higher-value products before they leave the country changes Canada’s position in the value chain itself.
Hislop points to work involving oil-sands bitumen and advanced materials such as carbon fibre as an illustration. Whether any particular technology succeeds commercially remains an empirical question, but the strategic principle deserves attention: Canada’s answer to excessive dependence cannot simply be finding more countries willing to buy Canadian raw materials.
Otherwise Canada may diversify its customers without diversifying its economic role.
6. The Auto Industry Shows How Interdependence Really Works:
The North American automobile industry demonstrates why simple nationalist narratives fail so quickly.
Reuters reported on August 31 that proposed 50 percent US tariffs on Canadian vehicle imports could severely affect Toyota and Honda, which manufacture more than three-quarters of the vehicles produced in Canada. Canadian-built vehicles also represent significant portions of those companies’ US sales.
Cars do not respect political storytelling. Parts cross borders repeatedly, components are manufactured in different jurisdictions and assembly plants depend on synchronized logistics. Suppliers depend on assemblers, while trucking companies depend on the entire network. Workers in Ontario can therefore be connected economically to consumers in Ohio, engineers in Michigan and executives in Japan.
A tariff imposed on Canada does not necessarily produce a neat transfer of pain from one country to another. Costs move through the network. Canadian workers can pay through lost hours or employment. American consumers can pay through higher prices. Japanese automakers can absorb margin pressure. Investment can move, suppliers can disappear and production decisions can change. Sometimes several consequences arrive together.
The language of punishment can therefore obscure economic reality. Integrated economies are systems wired together over generations. One country may possess a larger switchboard, but pulling a cable still requires knowing what else is attached to it.
7. Then Consumers Enter the War:
Governments impose tariffs, but people form habits.
Canadian boycotts of American products began as a visible form of retaliation against US trade pressure. Alcohol became one of the clearest symbols. Provinces removed American products from shelves while consumers increasingly discussed buying Canadian.
The deeper question concerns what happens afterward. A consumer who purchases a Canadian whisky because the American bottle is unavailable may discover that they prefer it. A grocery shopper who begins checking labels for political reasons may continue doing so after the immediate political reason disappears. A company forced to locate another supplier may discover that its new supplier is competitive.
Temporary disruption can create durable substitution.
Reuters’ September 2 reporting suggests that the behavioural shift extends beyond liquor. Canadians are changing supply chains, travel patterns, purchasing decisions and even symbolic relationships with the United States. Businesses described efforts to replace American suppliers, while Canadian travel to the United States has declined.
None of those examples alone proves economic decoupling. Together they reveal something more psychologically interesting: political conflict can reorganize ordinary behaviour long before formal economic structures disappear.
Trust is particularly vulnerable because policy and memory operate on different clocks. A tariff can be removed by executive action, but a consumer habit does not automatically reverse with it. A contract can be renegotiated, while the experience that made somebody distrust the contract remains.
8. The Relationship Can Survive After Trust Changes:
The Canada-US relationship is far too integrated to describe casually as decoupling.
Energy grids remain connected. Pipelines cross the border. Autos are manufactured through continental supply chains. Railways move freight through both countries. Millions of families, businesses and communities maintain personal and commercial relationships across the border.
Yet economic integration and political trust are different assets. Countries can remain deeply interconnected while simultaneously trying to reduce the consequences of that interconnection.
Reuters reported on September 2 that Canadians are pulling away from the United States across areas ranging from supply chains to travel and consumer behaviour. The shift is occurring against a background of worsening trade conflict and repeated political threats.
If that process continues, a future US administration could inherit a peculiar relationship. The pipelines may still exist, factories may still trade parts and electricity may still cross the border, while Canadian businesses possess more suppliers, Canadian energy producers have more customers, Canadian governments maintain deeper European relationships, consumers have different habits and research institutions compete within a broader international network.
Physical integration can survive while psychological dependence declines. That is considerably harder to reverse.
9. External Pressure Can Manufacture the Identity It Was Supposed to Weaken:
Human beings behave differently when they perceive an outside threat. Groups do too.
Threat can intensify internal disagreement, but it can also increase cohesion by creating a shared external reference point. People who disagree about taxes, immigration, healthcare or provincial politics may suddenly discover that they agree about something more basic: who gets to make decisions for their country.
This does not erase Canada’s divisions. Quebec sovereignty has a long history. Alberta alienation is real. Regional economic interests differ sharply. Indigenous nations possess political and legal relationships that cannot be collapsed into a simple nationalism. Canada remains a complicated federation.
Yet Reuters reported on August 22 that US tariffs had reduced Quebec’s appetite for rapid separation from Canada. On September 1, Mark Carney’s Liberals won three special elections in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec while the prime minister was calling for national unity during the trade confrontation.
Those facts do not prove that Donald Trump has unified Canada. They do demonstrate why claims that external pressure will automatically fracture the country deserve skepticism.
Independent writer Dean Blundell captured the irony with a line worth preserving as commentary: “Trump threatening to swallow Canada did more for Canadian unity than a hundred years of Heritage Minutes.”
The humour works because the behavioural mechanism underneath it is serious. Repeatedly telling a population that its sovereignty is conditional may not make that population more submissive. It can remind people that sovereignty exists.
10. Strength and the Performance of Strength:
Political systems often reward visible dominance. Rallies reward threats, social platforms reward conflict and television rewards confrontation. Supporters may interpret escalation as evidence that a leader is fighting for them.
Those rewards can blur the distinction between the performance of strength and the production of strategic advantage.
A threat can feel powerful immediately because somebody else must respond, yet the nature of that response determines whether actual leverage has increased. Suppose a tariff causes a company to relocate production into the United States. That may represent a measurable American gain. Suppose the same tariff persuades an allied country to build alternative export infrastructure, deepen relationships with Europe, develop domestic manufacturing capacity and permanently reduce purchases from American suppliers. The long-term balance becomes considerably more complicated.
Psychology can help explain why leaders and institutions may nevertheless favour immediate visible rewards. Behaviour that produces applause, compliance, media attention or temporary concessions receives reinforcement. If downstream costs arrive months or years later, the political system can reward the decision long before the strategic system presents its invoice.
Research on threatened egotism by Roy Baumeister, Brad Bushman and others has challenged the simplistic assumption that aggression necessarily emerges from low self-esteem. Under some conditions, aggression can follow threats to a highly valued or inflated self-image. That does not diagnose a political leader. I use this framework as an interpretive lens rather than a clinical diagnosis of any public figure.
The behavioural question is more useful: what happens when changing course threatens an image of dominance while escalation produces immediate psychological and political rewards? The problem extends beyond personality because institutions, media ecosystems and political parties can reinforce the same incentives. Once the surrounding environment repeatedly rewards escalation, restraint begins carrying its own cost.
11. The Tariff Is Also a Financial Ecosystem:
Another layer deserves careful investigation.
Independent writer Dean Blundell recently drew attention to reporting concerning tariff-refund claims and Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial firm formerly led by US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and subsequently run by his sons.
The underlying mechanism deserves attention regardless of the personalities involved.
After the US Supreme Court rejected tariffs imposed under emergency economic powers, Reuters reported in February that companies could be entitled to refunds from a pool estimated at approximately $175 billion. The process is legally complicated, potentially lengthy and particularly difficult for smaller businesses.
That uncertainty created a market. Some businesses have chosen to sell their rights to potential tariff refunds to investors rather than wait years for the government and courts to resolve the claims. Tariffs therefore became financial assets.
Once hundreds of billions of dollars can move through tariff payments, exemptions, lawsuits, refund rights and secondary markets, trade policy is no longer merely a negotiation between governments. It creates private winners and losers whose financial incentives can differ sharply from those of workers, consumers or governments.
Blundell raises more specific allegations concerning Lutnick’s former firm and his family’s financial interests. Those allegations should not be converted into findings without primary evidence establishing them. Congressional scrutiny, corporate records and official disclosures are appropriate places to examine those questions.
The broader investigative principle survives independently of any allegation: Who benefits financially when a policy is imposed, prolonged, challenged, overturned or refunded?
That is not cynicism. It is accounting.
12. IMPUNITY Was Never Only About Breaking Rules:
The previous Incorrigible Myths investigation, IMPUNITY, examined what happens when accountability appears to depend on who you are. DISRUPTION extends that question into systems.
Impunity does not necessarily mean consequences disappear. Consequences can be delayed, redirected, negotiated, absorbed by institutions or transferred to people who did not make the original decision.
If escalation repeatedly produces attention, concessions, loyalty or delayed accountability, escalation becomes easier to choose again. If institutions absorb much of the cost, the decision-maker experiences less of it personally. If supporters reward the spectacle while companies, workers and households absorb the downstream damage, the feedback loop becomes distorted.
Accountability, understood properly, is not merely punishment. Accountability is feedback. Healthy systems allow decisions and their consequences to remain visible enough that institutions can learn from mistakes. Unhealthy systems can separate the reward from the cost so effectively that the person making the decision receives one while somebody else receives the other.
A worker may lose hours, a manufacturer may lose a supplier, a family may renew a mortgage at a higher rate, a farmer may pay more for inputs, a country may build another pipeline and an ally may sign another trade agreement. None of those consequences necessarily appears on the same screen as the political decision that helped create them.
Pattern recognition reconnects the screens.
13. The Strait of Hormuz Is Teaching the Same Lesson:
Return to the Persian Gulf. The actors are different, the history is different and the stakes are different, but the mechanism is familiar.
The Strait of Hormuz has historically offered enormous strategic leverage because so much of the world’s energy must pass through a narrow geographic corridor. Disrupt the corridor and everybody notices.
Yet every prolonged disruption simultaneously increases the economic value of alternatives. Different pipelines become more attractive. Storage becomes more valuable. Alternative suppliers gain market share. Governments subsidize substitutes. Shipping companies experiment with different operating methods. Energy efficiency becomes more valuable. Technologies that previously appeared expensive begin competing against a newly expensive status quo.
The ship-to-ship LNG transfers Reuters documented on September 2 offer a small illustration of adaptation already occurring. The Strait remains enormously important, but disruption creates an incentive to reduce how much any single chokepoint can determine.
That is the paradox of leverage. The more aggressively a dependency is exploited, the more valuable independence becomes to the party being pressured.
14. Markets Can Normalize Extraordinary Conditions:
There is another danger hidden inside prolonged disruption. Human beings adapt psychologically as well as economically.
Reuters’ Morning Bid observed in late August that the Iran war had reached six months despite originally being described by Trump as something expected to last four or five weeks. Financial markets had shown remarkable resilience despite prolonged obstruction of the Strait of Hormuz, an outcome that once might have been treated as catastrophic.
Resilience is valuable. Normalization is more complicated.
A market that learns to function during war has not demonstrated that war is harmless. Participants have adapted expectations and repriced the environment. People do something similar. Repeated exposure changes the threshold for surprise. The first threat can dominate attention. The tenth competes with everything else in the feed. The first tariff seems extraordinary. Eventually another tariff becomes another percentage. Institutional behaviour that once appeared shocking can slowly enter the background of ordinary life.
Epictetus becomes useful here because the problem begins with the impressions arriving before judgment. When extraordinary events appear repeatedly, the mind can begin processing them as ordinary simply because they are familiar. Familiarity does not make an event harmless, and repetition does not make an interpretation accurate.
A society can therefore experience profound structural disruption while individual days continue feeling surprisingly normal.
That brings us to another system experiencing its own form of disruption: the human attention system itself.
15. The Next Chokepoint May Be Human Attention:
Artificial intelligence is frequently described as an intelligence revolution, and there are good reasons for the excitement. Modern AI can help people search enormous bodies of information, compare arguments, translate languages, summarize documents, generate hypotheses, analyze data, write software and explore subjects that previously required far more time or specialized access.
Yet there is a conceptual mistake hiding inside some of the optimism:
AI does not automatically amplify judgment, wisdom, curiosity, emotional regulation or conscious understanding. It can assist those capacities. It can guide investigation and dramatically reduce the friction involved in acquiring information. But the person using the system still has to decide what to ask, which evidence deserves confidence, when an answer is inadequate, what contradictions deserve examination and whether the conclusion makes sense.
Human intelligence is not simply information retrieval. It also depends on attention, memory, judgment, context, curiosity, self-awareness, tolerance for uncertainty and the capacity to remain with a difficult question long enough for understanding to emerge.
AI is therefore arriving at an unusual moment in human history. Our tools for obtaining information are becoming extraordinarily powerful at precisely the same time that much of the digital economy competes aggressively for the attention required to understand that information.
That tension deserves far more scrutiny.
16. The Attention Economy Has Different Incentives Than Your Mind:
Silicon Valley does not need a secret meeting in which executives decide to make humanity distracted. The economic incentives are enough to deserve examination.
Many large digital platforms make money when people remain engaged. Longer sessions create additional opportunities to serve advertisements, gather behavioural signals, recommend content and keep users inside an ecosystem. The exact business models differ among companies, but attention has enormous commercial value.
The human nervous system is not neutral inside that contest. Novelty and social information attract us. Threat and anger can hold us. Status comparison can hold us. Uncertainty encourages us to check again. Digital products can place all of those stimuli into an effectively endless stream.
The result is paradoxical. Someone may consume information for hours while having very little uninterrupted time in which to think about any particular piece of information. A person can know what happened everywhere and understand very little about why any of it happened, encounter hundreds of opinions while rarely constructing one carefully, and remain continuously stimulated while becoming cognitively exhausted.
Doomscrolling sits inside this environment. The term is casual, but the underlying behaviour is serious: repeated consumption of negative or emotionally activating information even when the activity itself leaves the person feeling worse.
It would be too strong to claim that every platform deliberately seeks psychological dysregulation. Evidence does not justify that blanket statement. A more defensible observation is uncomfortable enough: commercial incentives can reward systems that successfully capture and retain attention, even when the resulting pattern is not necessarily aligned with the user’s long-term well-being, concentration or understanding.
The platform can optimize engagement. The human being still has to protect the mind.
17. When More Information Produces Less Understanding:
The distinction between information and understanding becomes essential in an AI age.
Imagine two people with access to the same extraordinarily capable AI system. One approaches it with curiosity and discipline. They ask questions, challenge answers, request sources, compare competing explanations, notice uncertainty, return to primary documents and use the technology to explore beyond their existing beliefs. For that person, AI can dramatically increase intellectual reach.
Another person uses the same technology primarily to eliminate cognitive friction. Every difficult question receives an immediate answer, every long document becomes a summary, every argument is outsourced and every moment of uncertainty is removed before curiosity has time to develop.
The technology is identical. The relationship with it is not.
If artificial intelligence becomes a replacement for thinking rather than an instrument for thinking, cognitive convenience may begin masquerading as intellectual development. A calculator expands mathematical capability without automatically teaching mathematics. GPS expands navigational capability without necessarily improving someone’s internal sense of direction.
We should not assume that because humanity has built more intelligent tools, every person using those tools automatically becomes more intelligent.
18. The Algorithm Can Supply Desires Too:
Attention has another dimension beyond concentration. It influences desire.
Human beings have always compared themselves with others. Communities have always produced status hierarchies, fashions, expectations and social scripts. Social media did not invent imitation. It industrialized exposure to it.
Someone can spend years pursuing a destination they never consciously selected: the house, the car, the wedding, the title, the body, the lifestyle, the audience. Eventually a deeper question can disappear beneath the accumulation of goals: Do I actually want this?
That is not an argument against ambition or material success. There is nothing inherently shallow about wanting a beautiful home, financial security, travel or a celebration with people you love. The problem begins when comparison replaces examination.
When we are continuously shown what other people appear to desire, it becomes harder to distinguish aspiration from imitation.
Epictetus would recognize the problem immediately. An impression has entered the mind. The mistake begins when we accept it without examination. The algorithm has simply become very good at supplying impressions.
19. AI Can Amplify Intelligence, but It Can Also Amplify the Existing Pattern:
The most interesting possibility is not that artificial intelligence will make humanity stupid. It is that AI may magnify differences in how people use attention.
* A disciplined mind gains a remarkable research assistant.
* A curious student gains access to explanations that once required expensive tutors or specialized libraries.
* A scientist gains another analytical instrument.
* A writer can interrogate ideas from several directions.
* A citizen can compare legislation, speeches, economic data and historical precedent faster than previous generations could have imagined.
Those possibilities are extraordinary.
Yet a fragmented attention system can use the same technology to generate endless novelty, reassurance, entertainment and shortcuts. AI does not automatically raise the level of the mind using it. It can amplify the way that mind already engages with information.
The emerging intellectual divide may therefore not simply separate those who have AI from those who do not. It may increasingly separate people who can direct their attention from people whose attention is continuously directed for them.
That is a profound form of inequality because attention sits upstream of almost everything else we call intelligence. You cannot examine evidence you never remain with long enough to understand. You cannot recognize a contradiction if another stimulus replaces the first claim before working memory has finished processing it. You cannot ask what you genuinely want if every empty moment is immediately filled with somebody else’s life.
The technology may accelerate. The increasingly scarce resource could become the mind capable of using it deliberately.
20. Distraction is Also a Political Environment:
This connects directly to an earlier Incorrigible Myths investigation, DISTRACTION.
Politics increasingly competes inside the same attention architecture as entertainment, advertising, influencers, sports, celebrity scandal and personal communication. The incentives favour speed and emotional intensity. Nuance is slower than outrage. Context occupies more space than accusation. Probability is less satisfying than certainty. Corrections travel through a cognitive environment already crowded with the next crisis.
None of this means ordinary citizens are unintelligent. The informational burden itself has become extraordinary.
People are managing jobs, bills, children, relationships, health, uncertainty and ordinary exhaustion while being exposed to a volume of political and geopolitical information that previous generations never encountered continuously.
Under those conditions, attention becomes a democratic resource. A population that struggles to sustain attention long enough to evaluate evidence becomes more vulnerable to manipulation through repetition, emotional framing and identity. This does not require sophisticated mind control. Volume can be sufficient. The louder environment can crowd out the more difficult thought.
Artificial intelligence adds another dimension because it makes the production of persuasive text, images, audio and video increasingly inexpensive. Our capacity to produce information is accelerating much faster than the biological capacity available to consume it.
That asymmetry may become one of the defining disruptions of the AI era.
21. Humanitarian Risk Begins Where Abstraction Ends:
Geopolitics often speaks in units too large for the human nervous system: millions of barrels, billions of dollars, basis points, tariff percentages, shipping volumes and GDP. Technology discussion has developed its own abstractions, including parameters, compute, model performance, automation, productivity and artificial general intelligence.
Those measurements are useful. People experience something else.
They experience whether their employer is hiring, whether rent increased, whether gasoline costs more, whether the grocery budget lasts until Friday, whether a factory still has orders, whether automation changes their job, whether they can concentrate after two hours online, whether their child can distinguish an advertisement from information, whether their ambitions belong to them and whether they still possess enough silence to hear themselves think.
That is why humanitarian risk belongs inside geopolitical and technological analysis rather than beside it.
A factory closure does not resemble an explosion, but its consequences can travel through a community for years. Inflation does not wear a uniform, but it can erode security across millions of households. Attention fragmentation leaves no crater, yet it can influence learning, decision-making, relationships and democratic participation.
Systems eventually reach people. That is where their consequences become real.
22. Canada’s Opportunity is Larger Than Surviving Trump:
There is a temptation in moments like this to turn Canadian resilience into nationalism. That would miss the larger opportunity.
Canada does not need to prove that it can defeat the United States. Geography alone makes the proposition absurd. The United States will remain Canada’s most important economic relationship for the foreseeable future.
The more interesting project is building a Canada whose prosperity cannot be threatened so easily by changes in a single foreign capital.
That requires more than retaliation. It requires infrastructure, ports, energy corridors, electricity transmission, critical-mineral processing, advanced manufacturing, defence capacity, trade agreements, domestic productivity and capital capable of financing Canadian companies through their growth stages.
It also requires intellectual infrastructure: research institutions, universities, artificial intelligence, scientific talent, media literacy and education capable of teaching people not simply how to retrieve answers, but how to examine them.
A technologically sophisticated country whose population cannot concentrate or distinguish evidence from performance would possess extraordinary tools without necessarily possessing the judgment to use them well.
The same principle applies to natural resources.
Canada has oil and gas, uranium, potash, hydroelectricity, critical minerals, freshwater and access to the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic. Those are advantages, but they become power only when institutions know what to do with them.
Information works the same way. Having access to knowledge is not identical to knowing how to think.
23. The United States Still Has Extraordinary Strength:
None of this analysis works if it becomes Canadian wish fulfilment.
The United States remains an economic and technological colossus. Its productive capacity is enormous. Its capital markets remain unrivalled. Its universities and research ecosystem remain extraordinarily influential. Its technology companies shape global infrastructure. Its military reach remains unmatched. Its energy production is formidable. Its domestic consumer market gives Washington leverage Canada cannot replicate.
The US economy has also continued showing resilience. Reuters reported on September 2 that US factory orders rose 0.9 percent in July, beating expectations, while investment related to artificial intelligence continued supporting demand.
Reality therefore refuses both propaganda scripts. America is not collapsing because Canada is diversifying, and Canada is not helpless because America is larger.
A great power can remain extraordinarily powerful while simultaneously using that power in ways that encourage allies to hedge against it. A technology sector can create extraordinary human capability while simultaneously operating business models that compete for the attention required to use those capabilities wisely.
Both contradictions can exist at once.
24. Reliability is Becoming an Economic and Cognitive Asset:
For decades, discussions of national power emphasized familiar ingredients: GDP, population, military capacity, resources, technology and geography. Another variable is becoming harder to ignore: reliability.
Businesses invest partly according to expectations about tomorrow. Governments sign agreements because they expect those agreements to survive. Supply chains become efficient because companies believe borders will remain predictable enough to justify specialization.
That premium often appears through behaviour rather than an explicit invoice. It can take the form of a second supplier, another pipeline, larger inventory, a different market, a European partnership or a contingency plan that previously seemed unnecessary.
Something similar happens cognitively. People require reliable ways of determining what deserves attention. When every notification claims urgency, urgency loses meaning. When every political event is described as unprecedented, the word eventually carries little information. When synthetic content becomes abundant, provenance becomes more valuable. When information becomes effectively infinite, trusted methods for filtering information become strategic assets.
The age of abundance creates scarcity elsewhere. Cheap information makes judgment more valuable. Infinite content makes attention more valuable. Artificial intelligence makes discernment more valuable.
Disruption changes what becomes scarce.
25. DISRUPTION is the Warning:
The most consequential developments of September 2026 are not isolated headlines.
The Iran conflict is disrupting energy, and energy is feeding inflation pressure. Inflation is complicating monetary policy. Trade conflict is reorganizing supply chains. Political threats are affecting trust. Lost trust is changing consumer behaviour. Changing behaviour encourages diversification, and diversification alters leverage.
Meanwhile, the information environment is disrupting attention. Fragmented attention affects judgment. AI is increasing the speed and volume at which information can be created and analyzed. That creates extraordinary opportunity, but it also increases the premium on the human ability to decide what deserves thought.
No single mastermind designed this sequence. Complex systems rarely work that way. Decisions create incentives, incentives create responses, responses create new environments and those environments influence the next decision.
That is why studying human behaviour belongs beside economics, technology and geopolitics. People adapt. Companies adapt. Markets adapt. Countries adapt. Minds adapt too.
The strategic error begins whenever the actor applying pressure assumes everybody else will remain still.
26. What Would Force Us to Reconsider?:
Aristotle’s method brings us back to a discipline that political identity and technological enthusiasm can both make uncomfortable: explanations should survive contact with observable reality.
If you believe Canada is powerless without the United States, what measurable diversification would force you to revise that conclusion? If you believe Canada can easily replace the American market, what evidence about integrated supply chains, export concentration and employment would make you reconsider? If you believe tariffs automatically strengthen the country imposing them, what evidence of domestic costs, supplier substitution or lost market share would challenge that belief?
The same discipline belongs in our examination of power. If every demonstration of force represents strength, what downstream consequences would persuade us that some demonstrations of strength can reduce future leverage?
It belongs equally in our examination of technology. If artificial intelligence will automatically make humanity more intelligent, what evidence about attention, dependency, learning and cognitive outsourcing would require us to qualify that expectation? Conversely, if AI will inevitably make people less intelligent, what evidence of improved learning, research capability, scientific productivity and expanded access to expertise would require revision?
The point is not permanent skepticism. It is disciplined judgment.
Epictetus understood something about that problem long before algorithms existed. Impressions arrive continuously. Fear presents one interpretation, status another, anger another and desire another. The responsible mind does not have to reject every impression, but it should avoid surrendering judgment before examination has begun.
Modern information systems have magnified the number of impressions arriving every hour. Political identity can attach itself to them. Consumer identity can attach itself to them. Technological optimism can attach itself to them. Once an impression becomes part of who we believe ourselves to be, contradictory evidence can start feeling less like information and more like attack.
A functioning democracy requires the ability to examine the impression again.
It also requires something institutions sometimes resist: the ability to admit that a decision failed and correct it without treating correction as humiliation.
That is accountability at its most useful.
Not revenge.
Feedback.
27. Rebuilding Begins With Feedback:
The immediate risks are visible. Energy remains vulnerable to escalation around the Strait of Hormuz. Higher oil and LNG prices can feed inflation. Persistent inflation can push borrowing costs higher. Trade conflict can damage industries on both sides of the Canada-US border. Companies may relocate, workers may lose jobs and governments may spend heavily cushioning the consequences.
The longer-term transformation is less obvious. Countries are learning where dependencies sit. Companies are learning which suppliers can disappear. Allies are learning which agreements require insurance. Consumers are learning that purchasing decisions can become geopolitical. Individuals are entering an era in which artificial intelligence can place extraordinary cognitive leverage in their hands while the surrounding information environment competes continuously for the attention required to use it.
Some adaptations will fail. Some will be expensive. Some will merely replace one dependency with another. Others may permanently reshape trade, energy, technology, alliances and even the relationship human beings have with information.
That is why DISRUPTION deserves attention before the disruption feels complete. By the time a new system looks normal, the decisions that produced it may already be years behind us.
The constructive answer is not permanent outrage. It is rebuilding systems capable of learning.
* Accountability belongs inside that process because institutions that cannot receive feedback cannot reliably correct themselves.
* Courts need enough independence to tell governments when legal authority has been exceeded.
* Journalism needs enough institutional strength to investigate power without access becoming the price of silence.
* Markets need enough transparency for private incentives surrounding public policy to be examined.
Allies need relationships stable enough that cooperation does not depend on permanent political obedience. Citizens need enough intellectual space to change their minds without being humiliated for having once believed something different.
Political identity should not become a prison sentence.
A person who voted for a leader should remain free to reconsider that leader. A conservative should be able to criticize a conservative government without surrendering conservatism. A liberal should be able to recognize a liberal government’s failure without treating the admission as betrayal. Canadians should be able to acknowledge American strength without surrendering Canadian sovereignty, just as Americans should be able to question the treatment of an ally without abandoning their country.
Democratic systems become stronger when changing one’s mind remains socially possible.
The same principle applies to artificial intelligence. The useful relationship with technology is neither worship nor panic. Use it. Learn from it. Build with it. Allow it to expand what you can investigate, but do not confuse the intelligence of the tool with the consciousness of the person holding it.
Artificial intelligence may become one of the greatest intellectual force multipliers humanity has ever created. Whether it expands human understanding will still depend partly on something remarkably old: our ability to pay attention, question ourselves, resist imitation, examine evidence and consciously decide what deserves a place inside our minds.
I was born in India, spent several years living in the United States, and now write from Canada as an Independent Writer and Geopolitical Analyst. That background does not provide a superior vantage point. It simply affects what I notice. When relationships among countries change, I tend to examine both the strategic forces above and the ordinary human consequences underneath.
A healthier relationship is one in which cooperation remains valuable because both sides continue choosing it, not because one side believes the other has nowhere else to go.
The same principle runs through the other systems examined here.
Power that depends entirely on another country’s inability to leave is fragile. Institutions that protect decision-makers from meaningful feedback become vulnerable to repeating their mistakes. A business model built around capturing human attention deserves scrutiny when attention itself becomes a scarce cognitive resource. An intelligent tool used without judgment does not automatically produce an intelligent outcome.
Rebuilding therefore begins before the bridge, factory, institution or relationship has visibly collapsed. It begins when feedback is still possible.
Aristotle’s discipline survives technological change because causes still have to be examined rather than merely asserted. Epictetus survives it because impressions still have to pass through judgment before they deserve belief.
The deeper warning inside DISRUPTION is that the world is building exits from old dependencies while simultaneously constructing new ones. The disruption ahead is not only about pipelines, tariffs, wars or artificial intelligence. It is about what retains agency when the systems surrounding us become more powerful.
Countries will have to answer that question. Institutions will have to answer it. Political leaders will have to answer it. Journalists, courts, businesses and citizens will have to answer it.
And increasingly, each of us will too.
This investigation represents my own interpretation and commentary, grounded wherever possible in publicly available reporting, government documents, economic data, academic research and other sources that readers can examine independently. References to psychology and human behaviour are educational and interpretive frameworks rather than clinical diagnoses of Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick or any other public figure. Where evidence establishes events but does not establish motive, motive should remain an open question. The discussion of artificial intelligence and attention likewise distinguishes established characteristics of attention-based digital business models from broader interpretations about their social and cognitive consequences.
Independent Writer, Geopolitical Analyst
Whistleblower | Incorrigible Myths™ 🇨🇦Vancouver, Canada
“This is not the time to know less. It is the time to understand more.”
Get full access to Incorrigible Myths at incorrigiblemyths.substack.com/subscribe
