The Julius Ruechel Podcast

My guest this week is Dr. Matthew Wielicki, a geochemist and Earth Sciences professor whom you might already know from his insightful posts on X. He runs a popular Substack at irrationalfear.substack.com where he challenges mainstream climate narratives by actually looking at… the published science. He also has a book called Irrational Fear: Climate Change coming out soon.

I’ve invited him on the show to discuss the latest media focus — the alleged impending collapse of the Atlantic Ocean currents, commonly known as the AMOC (short for “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation”) and which include currents like the Gulf Stream, which act like a giant conveyor belt to vent heat from the Atlantic into the Arctic.

According to the mainstream narrative, there are growing signs that continued global warming could weaken the AMOC, with media often pointing to increasing meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet as a trigger. They say that stalling these currents would plunge northern Europe into a bone chilling 5–15°C (9–27°F) temperature drop. Media outlets like The Guardian, Science Daily, Phys.org, and YouTube videos with millions of views all warn of a ‘critical Atlantic current collapse’ within decades.

As evidence that we’re teetering on the edge, many point to the historic example of the Younger Dryas — a 1,200-year cold snap 12,900 years ago, with temperatures similarly plunging between 5–15°C. It was likely triggered by the collapse of Glacial Lake Agassiz, which dumped a colossal 21,000 cubic kilometers of meltwater from the Laurentide Ice Sheet into the Atlantic, thus fundamentally disrupting the AMOC.

And it happened again around 8,200 years ago during the awkwardly named 8.2-kiloyear event, when another 100,000 cubic kilometers of meltwater from Glacial Lake Agassiz disrupted the AMOC, causing a somewhat milder 160-year cold snap of 1–3°C globally and 3–6°C in parts of Europe.

I reached out to Dr. Wielicki to unpack this doomsday scenario to see what the science actually says (hint, it’s quite different from the media’s narrative) and to bring in some geological context to show how the truth is far more fascinating than the hype.

Our full interview is free for everyone, but I’ve also included a bonus question at the end, for paid subscribers only, building on another of Dr. Wielicki’s articles called Is It Really Our CO2?, in which he unpacks some recently published peer-reviewed research that significantly muddies the waters when it comes to the simple story of fossil fuels carrying most of the blame for rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

When it comes to the climate sciences, no matter where you look, the actual data looks nothing like what the popular narratives would have us believe. In our interview, Dr. Wielicki even discusses his first hand experiences as an academic with the distorted incentives that have rotted out the climate sciences.

I hope you enjoy our discussion!

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The Canadian economy is now officially shrinking, foreign capital flight has become a full-blown crisis, and Canadians themselves are voting to leave this country in record numbers with their money and with their feet. And it’s all 100% self-inflicted.

Premier Danielle Smith recently pointed out, “this onslaught of anti-energy, anti-agriculture, and anti-resource development policies has scared away global investments to the tune of half a trillion dollars, driving those investments and jobs out of Canada to much more attractive climates in the United States, Asia, and the Middle East.”

Martin Belanger (@Martyupnorth_2 on X) is the retired former Senior VP of Pieridae Energy. The company spent more than a decade trying to build an LNG export terminal in Nova Scotia to export North American gas to Europe, Asia, and South America. It would have been Canada’s first LNG terminal on the East Coast — there’s only one other LNG terminal today, but it’s in British Columbia, so not idea for accessing Europe’s gas-hungry markets.

Yet, in 2023, after spending many tens of millions of dollars on front-end engineering, the company walked away from the project without ever managing to get a single shovel in the ground despite having secured construction permits and even a 20-year contract with a German utility company worth $35 billion dollars (with loans backed by the German government).

The Canadian government blamed the collapse of the project on a lack of demand for Canadian gas (obviously untrue considering the contract the company had secured). Mainstream media cynically blamed it on the weak finances of the company — but a half-truth is a whole lie… when the government keeps moving the goal posts to endlessly stretch out and undermine the permitting and financing processes, even the most robust cash reserves are eventually exhausted and investors begin heading for the exits to find more attractive jurisdictions to invest their money.

Mr. Belanger is no longer bound by a confidentiality agreement. I sat down with him to understand how Canada strangled what should have been one of the most promising new oil and gas projects in Canada. It’s one example among many, but what was done to Pieridae Energy represents a pattern that is systematically crippling our country, from coast to coast to coast.

I felt it was extremely important to get his story on record so that investors, policymakers, and citizens themselves understand the gritty details of what is broken in our country and, by consequence, the steps that MUST be taken if Canada is ever to get back on a sustainable path. Fixing this (and reversing the investment outflows) is going to take far more than just ousting an ideologically hostile political regime — the regulatory and bureaucratic framework that has grown up underneath that regime, both federally AND provincially, is going to take extremely deep reforms to fix.

Understanding the grainy details of what went wrong is the first step towards fixing the problem.

I hope you enjoy this latest special edition of the Julius Ruechel Podcast, available here on Substack as well as on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else where you listen to podcasts.

Thanks for listening! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, or upgrade to a paid subscription to support my work. I am 100% reader-supported by people like you!

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A recent decision by the BC Supreme Court has just set a shocking precedent by extending Aboriginal land claims beyond Crown lands to also include privately owned lands. The judgement also explicitly states that Aboriginal title is a prior and senior right to land that supersedes fee simple land titles, thus throwing the door wide open for your land title to mean nothing!

This move is the consequence of the United Nations Declaration of Indigenous Rights slowly being written into Canadian law — by its wording, every single law in BC must be updated in consultation with indigenous groups. What is emerging is an 4th tier of government, accountable only to its First Nations members, but with the authority to shape every single decision in our province, including undermining your privately-owned land ownership.

With 147 countries adopting UNDRIP legislation at the UN General Assembly, what’s happening in BC is the merely the thin edge of the wedge.

I asked lawyer and MLA for the BC riding of Vancouver-Quilchena, and co-founder of the new OneBC party, Dallas Brodie, to come on my podcast to explain the dangerous precedents that have been set by this landmark ruling and to discuss the broader multi-million-dollar reconciliation industry underpinning it. While many people support reconciliation with good intentions, these good intentions are far removed from the reality of how this is playing out. We urgently need to confront the complex issues at stake to find an alternate path forward.

You can follow Dallas Brodie (@Dallas_Brodie) and her colleague Tara Armstrong (@TaraArmstrongBC) on X. Both are sitting members of the BC Legislature and co-founders of the new OneBC party — they are currently gathering signatures for a petition (https://1bc.ca/petitions/defend-property-rights) to force the government to fight this ruling all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

I hope you enjoy this special edition of the Julius Ruechel Podcast, available here on Substack as well as on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else where you listen to podcasts.

Thanks for listening! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, or upgrade to a paid subscription to support my work. I am 100% reader-supported by people like you!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

Scapegoats, however wicked they may be, are also the perfect distraction by which to avoid facing our own problems. Sometimes a simple comparison between two “things” forces us to re-evaluate our assumptions about how the world works and, by extension, confront the hard realities staring back at us when we hold a mirror up to ourselves.

Kenya, in the developing world, just completed a major infrastructure megaproject — a 27 km elevated toll highway called the Nairobi Expressway, funded in part by China, and designed to give the East African economy a major boost by removing a major barrier to trade in the region. By comparison, Canada, in the developed world, similarly also recently completed a major infrastructure megaproject — the government-owned Trans Mountain Pipeline to bring oil from Alberta to the port in Vancouver, thus also removing a major hurdle for Canada to access world markets.

On the one hand, the upcoming comparison between these two projects reveals the scale of the rot and corruption that has infested the West. On the other hand, what emerges from the details reveals why Western nations are losing standing in the rest of the world… with alarming geopolitical implications for the future. It has become extremely fashionable to blame China for corrupt and predatory business practices designed to undermine the West — and not without good reason (I have discussed some of these issues in regards to America’s tariff war with China in a previous article here). But as usual, pointing fingers provides a useful excuse to avoid confronting our own even more significant self-inflicted problems, of which there are many and which are at risk of being ignored amidst all the finger pointing. Beneath the headlines, it’s not so easy to distinguish between friend and foe.

If all this sounds a bit vague and wishy-washy, don’t worry, all will become clear in a moment.

We shall begin this story with Kenya’s Nairobi Expressway. If you’ve ever gotten trapped in a Nairobi traffic jam prior to this project being built, you’ll know that Nairobi’s traffic problems make congestion in places like Toronto, Vancouver, New York, or Los Angeles look like child’s play by comparison. It had become an extreme barrier to trade in the entire East African region since, by virtue of geography, almost all trade between Kenya’s provinces and all trade from the coast to the surrounding East African countries flows through Nairobi. It is the hub at the center of the proverbial wheel.

In the early 2000s, Kenya spent somewhere between 5 and 10 years trying to secure funding from Western lenders and institutions in both the private and public sphere, including the World Bank, the IMF, and various Western governments in order to pursue a number of major infrastructure projects designed to resolve these kinds of economic bottlenecks. The Nairobi Expressway was one of them, a major railway expansion project called the Standard Gauge Railway to link Nairobi to the port of Mombasa was another (with further expansions coming to extend the rail lines to Uganda, South Sudan, the DRC, Rwanda, Burundi, and Ethiopia), the upcoming highway improvement linking Nairobi to the port of Mombasa is another, and so on. But all of these efforts to secure funding from the West failed over and over again.

Why?

The “moral” West had extremely strict and paternalistic conditions attached to loans and grants, which demanded governance reforms in exchange for money, imposed strict anti-corruption measures, required extensive environmental and social impact assessments and exhaustive feasibility studies, demanded competitive bidding processes, had lengthy approval and disbursement timelines, and so on. I think you can begin to see the irony of where this is going considering that Canada is the other half of this comparative story, but I don’t want to get ahead of the story…

In the end, after a lost decade of courting Western funding, nothing got done. The approval process stagnated, strangled by Western bureaucracy and “do-goodism”, and Kenya finally got frustrated and adopted a new “Look East” policy that emphasized closer ties to countries in Asia, particularly China and India, in order to get these long-overdue projects built. That Eastern realignment paid off handsomely — China’s Belt and Road Initiative was more than happy to step into the void...

Under this new Eastern realignment, the Nairobi Expressway and the Standard Gauge Railway Project were rapidly and successfully funded by private-public partnerships with the state-owned China Road and Bridge Corporation. In the case of the Expressway, China secured its loans with a 27-year guarantee of toll revenues, a 25% equity stake in the toll road, brought in some of its own contractors to do the work, and bypassed the governance and environmental conditions imposed by rival Western lenders.

Construction of the 3-year project, completed in July of 2022, only took one month longer than anticipated (a 2.78% overrun). However, the US$599-million project was also over budget by 47% (in USD terms), partially due to spikes in construction materials during the Covid era, partially due to the depreciation of the Kenyan Shilling against the US dollar (which increased the cost of dollar-denominated payments), and partially because land compensation costs to reimburse landowners along the route exceeded budgeted amounts. And yes, there were plenty of accusations of corruption scandals that haunted the project along the way, including accusations of elite capture of the project by the ruling family and allegations of fraud during the land compensation payments. And yet, somehow, things got built and the East African economy could finally move beyond this bottleneck in the system.

But now we get to the Canadian part of this story.

The Trans Mountain Pipeline was originally owned by Kinder Morgan. According to 2012 projections when Kinder Morgan announced plans to start the project, it was expected to cost Can$5.4 billion. The regulatory process was expected to take 2 to 3 years, followed by a 3-year construction process, with completion expected by 2019.

By 2017, Kinder Morgan’s projected cost has risen to Can$7.4 billion due to additional regulatory and environmental requirements and legal challenges. And construction had still not begun. By then, investors, especially in the oil and gas sector, were fleeing Trudeau’s Canada en masse. In 2018, with construction still not started, Kinder Morgan got fed up, decided to exit Canada altogether, and sold the project to the Canadian government for $4.5 billion after no private buyers emerged to take on the project. The government of Canada, under Trudeau, was forced to buy it as a project of “national interest” since Canada had pretty much chased off all investors and shuttered all other alternative pipeline projects by that point.

And then the real fun began. The project was finally completed in 2024, 5 years later than Kinder Morgan’s original projected completion date and 33% over the government’s own revised construction timeline set out in 2018 when it purchased the orphaned project.

But the cost overruns are truly monumental on a scale that would make even the most corrupt governments in the developing world blush.

Final cost? By the time the first drop of oil got pumped through the pipeline, taxpayers were on the hook for a colossal Can$34 billion!?! That’s 529% over Kinder Morgan’s original budget of $5.4 billion! Contractors, environmental consultants, bureaucrats, lawyers, and pretty much anyone who found a way to work on the project made small fortunes.

The stories from people who worked on the pipeline are eye-popping. A few anecdotes from people I’ve spoken with suffice to provide a flavor of the clown show that this government-run project turned into.

When puddles had to be moved to make way for construction, the water from these puddles had to be purified to drinking wa…

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

How do you de-program a mind that has succumbed to ideology, mass hysteria, or propaganda?

And how do you fix an entire society once the “cult” goes mainstream?

~ ~ ~

Before we turn to the unpleasant business of population-scale deprogramming, I want to begin with a revealing story about a repulsive yet pitiable old man that I briefly stumbled across many years ago who had so firmly fused his identity to a radical ideology during his formative years that, even decades after his peers had all moved on, he spent the rest of his unhappy and isolated life trapped inside that ideology to shield himself from the psychological void of having to sever his identity from those beliefs.

~ ~ ~

Fresh out of high school in the early 1990s, I spent several months apprenticing on a cattle ranch in Namibia. On one occasion, my host invited me to join him on a drive to another distant Namibian farm to deliver a piece of machinery. It was a beautiful drive and a chance to see more of Namibia’s stark and harsh Kalahari beauty.

By that time, SWAPO’s guerilla war against the South African government was over, Namibia had gained independence from South Africa (in 1990), and South Africa’s withdrawal marked the end of apartheid in Namibia. A cautiously hopeful and reconciliatory mood had replaced the fear and repression of the previous era.

And yet, in marked contrast with everywhere else that I travelled across Namibia, driving onto that distant Namibian farm was like stepping into another world.

We arrived at nightfall. Driving into the dusty farm compound, we were surrounded by razor-wire fences, stern armed guards, and a snarling mass of rottweilers. And it was all lit up by massive flood lights mounted all along the tops of the fence posts. This Namibian farmer lived in perpetual fear.

While that heavily fortified compound might be normal today in the dangerous failing state of South Africa, the contrast with the rest of the society I encountered in Namibia in the early 1990s was so stark that I made some brief comment about it to my host as we drove in. He acknowledged that this old farmer was “a little off in the head”. And then, before jumping out of the truck to sort out the machinery, he wryly remarked, “things are even more strange inside his house — he still has a giant WWII-era Nazi flag hanging on his wall.”

… wait, what!?! 👀 And why are you even doing business with a guy like that?!?

On our drive back to the home ranch, my host went on to tell the full story of this old Namibian farmer and the circumstances that had shaped his broken mind, which I have fleshed out below with a little extra context from that era. As always, history and psychology are deeply intertwined. There is nothing random about why minds are captured by ideology or succumb to propaganda or hysteria — history creates the circumstances; human nature does the rest.

~ ~ ~

As World War I broke out, South Africa (then still a part of the British Empire), invaded and seized the neighboring German colony of Namibia (then called German South West Africa). In truth, it wasn’t much of a fight — the Kaiser had more pressing wartime concerns to attend to than a distant colony that perpetually cost his empire more money than it generated. German settlers were summarily interned in an abandoned military fort near Pietermaritzburg until the end of the war to keep them from making any trouble.

After WWI ended, the League of Nations gave South Africa a mandate to continue to administer Namibia, effectively turning the former German colony into a de facto fifth province of British South Africa.

Its German-descendant population was NOT happy about its new circumstances and resisted cultural assimilation, feeling that their Germanness was threatened, although that resistance never grew beyond cultural resistance — it never escallated to become an organized resistance movement. German-language schools and organizations sprouted everywhere to try to preserve their German cultural identity as a kind of counter-reaction against the encroachment of British and Boer culture. But beyond that, the German settlers seamlessly integrated into South Africa’s political system and even participated in both local administration and the South African parliament, though they continued to yearn for some kind of German-led political control or even to return their beloved South West Africa back to Germany. This is the cultural backdrop in which our old German-descendant Namibian farmer grew up.

When World War II broke out in September of 1939, the Union of South Africa (as it was then called, as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire), initially deliberated whether to stay neutral given the divided loyalties of its society. But then, only a few days into the war, it too decided to declare war on Germany and once again began rounding up citizens of German descent (mostly the men), which were reclassified as “enemy aliens” — especially in the former German colony of Namibia (South West Africa). Around 5,000 German men (out of a total population of around 33,000 to 40,000 Germans) were interned.

What happened next inside these internment camps is crucial to understanding this old Namibian farmer’s story. For context, most other allied Western countries behaved similarly. The United States, for example, rounded up 120,000 Japanese Americans and 11,000 German Americans and placed them in internment camps for the duration of WWII (just in case, even if they displayed no signs of divided loyalties and were fully assimilated into American society). Likewise, the UK interned around 30,000 “enemy aliens”. Australia interned around 7,000.

Even Canada interned around 24,000 “enemy aliens” in 24 separate camps spread out across the country, with a particular focus on Japanese Canadians, German Canadians, Italian Canadians, Ukrainian Canadians, and, rather bizarrely, 2,284 Jewish refugees who arrived by boat from Germany, Austria, and Italy to escape persecution (and worse) — these refugees were also classified as “enemy aliens” and were treated with the same suspicion as all the other internees because they originated in countries with which Canada now found itself at war.

In Canada’s case, the Canadian government finally apologized to Japanese Canadian internees, reinstated their citizenship, and offered them financial compensation to the tune of $21,000 each… in 1988…, one month after Ronald Reagan did the same for Japanese American internees. In neither country was this gesture extended to inlude Germans, Italians, and others who were also interned during the war.

Conditions inside these internment camps, from South Africa to Canada and beyond, were far from ideal. One of Canada’s biggest internment camps was right here in Vernon, British Columbia, not far from my home today. The national director of Canada’s internment program described Vernon as being “the most difficult of camps”, with harsh and unsanitary conditions, severe overcrowding (one building designed for around 80 people housed more than 500), forced labour (in construction, agriculture, roadwork, etc.,), and with severe punishments meted out to internees, including solitary confinement. It all amounted to a harsh, indefinite, and extralegal prison sentence, but without trial, without a legal process, and without individual charges.

Affected families designated as “enemy aliens” by the bureaucratic machine had their homes, farms, businesses, and property seized, and faced financial ruin and stigmatization. Families were typically separated, with men sent to different camps than the women and children. Some families were never successfully reunited. South Africa was actually one of the few British territories that allowed women and children of interned men to remain free instead of shuffling them off to separate family camps.

Nor was WWII internment unprecedented. For example, during WWI, Canada interned around 8,579 “enemy aliens” (primarily German Canadians, Ukrainian Canadians, and other immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Bulgarian empires.) The WWI-era Monashee Mountain internment camp (which was located just an hour and a half from where I live today) was opportunistically used by the Canadian government as a forced labor camp to build a much needed road over the rugged Monashee Pass (Highway 6), with appalling conditions for the inmates (see image below).

Many affected families struggled for a long time to reconcile their Canadian identity against the persecution, injustice, and stigmatization that they faced during those years — the Vancouver Sun even went as far as to encourage German-born residents to change their names to disguise their German heritage.

My point in explaining all this context is that the experiences that our Namibian farmer went through inside those camps undoubtedly felt unfair, but they were also not unique, and yet he came out permanently radicalized even as most other internees did not. In fact, South Africa’s camps were unusually lenient compared to internment camps in other Allied countries and yet, paradoxically, they were also unusual for the extreme radicalization that happened inside those internment camps, as will become apparent in a moment. In many ways, what happened inside those South African internment camps is a real-life version of the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, except in this case it was the inmates themselves that were self-administering much of life inside the camps, and driving both the abuse and the radicalization inside this perverse echo chamber, even as the authorities did little to stop it. But I’m getting ahead of the story.

A 2024 research paper describes the prelude that led to internment in South Africa. In the lead-up to WWII, many Germans living in South Africa and Namibia:

“enthusiastically greeted Hitler’s rise to power as the beginning of a new dawn for their mother country after a humiliating defeat in the First World War. […] While there was a broad consensus amongst them that Hitler was inducting Germany’s rebirth, the haughty claim of a younger generation that the Nazi movement was the sole representative of German interests in southern Africa clashed with older conservative traditions. Monarchist nostalgia was still prevalent in sections of the German community. The modest numbers of card-carrying members of the Nazi party in the Union of South Africa reflected the integration of Germans into socio-economic networks dominated by white English-speakers, which mitigated against noisy declarations of support for Hitler. [my emphasis]” (Dedering, T., 2024)

In other words, while support for Germany was high in South Africa’s German community, the entire German population was also not a uniform and frothing mass of rabid Nazi fanatics either. Nonetheless, support for both Germany and the Nazi movement was greatest in South West Africa, whose German-speaking population was unhappy to have been stripped of its own government after WWI and was grating under British South African rule and the pressure this placed on the continuity of their German culture.

South Africa’s fear that these Germans might become a fifth column to sabotage and destabilize South Africa during the war were thus not entirely unfounded — even Hitler’s foreign branch was known to have been working behind the scenes in the region. However, it’s also worth noting that pro-German sentiments were separate from the much larger and more actively pro-Nazi Afrikaner nationalist movement that was also rising in South Africa at that time (the Afrikaner Ossewabrandwag organization is estimated to have had around 350,000 members at its peak in 1941, out of a total white population of only 2,073,000 !). There certainly was some overlap between German and pro-Nazi Afrikaner views and political membership (especially among the younger German population), much to the concern of South Africa’s British government, but reality was nonetheless nuanced — something to bear in mind as we see what happened next inside these internment camps. However, in the heated atmosphere on the eve of WWII, rumors of German conspiracies were spreading like wildfire.

When the war broke out, tensions between pro-German and anti-German factions of South African society boiled over as anti-German riots broke out in Johannesburg. Crowds hurled tear gas at Johannesburg’s German Club and German shops were attacked across the city. Within weeks, the internment camps were filling up with German men rounded up from across South Africa.

Early estimates that around 1,000 German “enemy aliens” would need to be interned quickly spiralled to 4,000 — by war’s end, a total of 6,636 civilians had been interned in six different camps across South Africa. Nor were German “enemy aliens” the only ones interned – pro-Nazi Afrikaners, anti-Nazi Communists, political dissidents, trade unionists, and anti-war pacifists also found their way into these internment camps. The Afrikaner nationalist movement accused the South African government of using internment as a deliberate ploy to lock up its political opponents — the few thousand Afrikaners who got locked up even included future South African prime minister John Vorster for his involvement with the pro-Nazi Ossewabrandwag organization.

In that heated atmosphere, even some Englishmen who were suspected of harboring German sympathies found their way into the camps. One Englishman was indicted on evidence that he “spoke German fluently”, “conducted himself like a German, whatever that meant”, and that “his diet consisted mainly of potatoes and pork”. Both justifiable fears and hysterical rumors of “Hun intrigue” all began to blur together.

It's worth noting that South Africa did not have the balls to lock up the bulk of the much larger pro-Nazi Afrikaner nationalist movement, despite the fact that they were demonstrably more actively pro-Nazi than South Africa’s Germany community. By focusing only on Afrikaner leaders, the South African government sent a clear message but avoided sparking a much bigger backlash from the Afrikaner community, which solidly outnumbered the rest of the combined white South African community (based on the 1936 Census, Afrikaners represented approximately 58% of the white South African population, compared to Germans which came in at less than 1%).

British South Africa was walking on eggshells because the Afrikaner community vividly remembered the horrors and deaths inflicted on their family members in the concentration camps run by the British during the Boer Wars only 40 years earlier (thus in living memory), which had been deliberately used by the British to break the will of the Boer resistance. South Africa’s lenience and careful attention to ensuring good conditions inside the WWII camps undoubtedly was shaped by that history and the fear of triggering a wholescale uprising among the Afrikaner community. The tiny, less organized, and less radicalized German community was much easier to control (and much easier to use to set an example), but in doing so South Africa also fueled a sense among the German community that they were being unfairly singled out.

Conditions in South Africa’s camps seem to have been remarkably good — and extraordinarily lenient — compared to internment camps elsewhere in Allied countries. Reports highlight abundant food, access to books, and there’s even mention of some camps including tennis courts and in one case even a three-hole golf course to help internees pass the time.

Furthermore, unusually, much of life inside the camps was self-administrated by the internees themselves. And in the latter half of the war, many of the less hardened internees were released back into South African society, albeit with some restrictions, rather than holding them all until the end of the war as happened in other countries. In fact, in the famous story of the two German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, who fled into the Namib Desert to hide in the labyrinth of canyons along the Kuiseb River for two years to avoid internment, when they finally turned themselves in order to seek medical treatment for Hermann Korn, who had become desperately ill, they were given a small fine (paid by friends), released, and then hired by the government to conduct groundwater exploration even as the war raged on. Their hideout in the Canyon is now a famous Namibian tourist attraction.

But reports on conditions inside South Africa’s internment camps emphasize that rounding up and segregating radicals from society and lumping them all together inside these camps, and then giving them free rein to administer themselves, created an echo chamber that only fueled both their zeal and their sense of being oppressed, even as camp administrators allowed Nazi symbols and camp-level Nazi events and organizations to flourish inside the camps — inside some camps, “the picture of the Führer and the swastika decorated every room” and it was common for inmates in the camps to greet companions by “bellowing ‘Heil Hitler’”, though it’s not clear how many did so out of conviction versus doing so to avoid intimidation from their fellow inmates.*

As Tilman Dedering reported in his 2024 research paper, one internee at the Andalusia camp in South Africa stated that on arrival the commandant welcomed him by saying:

They are all Nazis in this Camp. If you happen not to be a Nazi yourself you will have to behave like one. If you don’t, I cannot guarantee your personal safety once you are inside the camp. Yes, you will have to give the Nazi salute. If you wish to express any views about the war they will have to be the German views, even if your views as a South African should differ.

South Africa confined both pro-Nazi and anti-Nazi inmates in the same camps, which led to significant violence and persecution against the anti-Nazi minority at the hands of an increasingly sadistic self-radicalizing pro-Nazi majority. Dissenters faced intense pressure to conform and join in with Nazi ideology.

And then Jewish refugees fleeing Europe also began to show up in South Africa. Once again, much like the approach taken by Canada, South Africa merely categorized them by point of origin, ignoring the reason for their flight from Europe, and locked them up inside the same camps. Predictably, pro-Nazi internees unleashed Hell against these unfortunate souls. Yet, camp administrators turned a blind eye to the violence being dished out by the pro-Nazi factions against both Jewish and anti-Nazi internees. Reading about it, I’m left with the impression of something not entirely unlike the story told by The Lord of the Flies, or, for that matter, the campus of a modern university.

In effect, South Africa took a population that already viewed themselves as oppressed and whose circumstances already predisposed many to view Germany’s Nazi movement as an escape from their own local troubles, and then separated off the most ideological members of that society and locked them up together, in isolation, inside an echo chamber, and nursing grievances of unfair persecution, while giving them relatively free rein inside those camps and plenty of victims upon which to vent their extreme views. Talk about pouring gasoline on an ideological fire.

This is literally the opposite of what it takes to de-fuse a cult and deradicalize a population.

Canada’s internees also included pro-German and anti-German internees and Jewish refugees, but at least Canada had the good sense to house pro-Nazi internees separately from everyone else… and subject them to re-education and de-Nazification programs rather than giving them free rein inside the camps as happened in South Africa. South Africa’s approach inadvertently created a self-radicalizing echo chamber inside those internment camps, which undoubtedly played a significant role in shaping and hardening the mind of our old Namibian farmer during his most formative young adult years. Consequently, his identity had become fused not only to those beliefs, but also to the sense of victimhood that fueled those beliefs. Like wokeism today on both the left and the right, Nazism was, at its core, fueled by victimhood culture. In his youth, our old Namibian farmer had swallowed the bait, hook, line, and sinker. And now he was trapped by those beliefs.

Ironically, once those beliefs had taken root, only being exposed to British news reporting of the war during those long years inside the camps — media that belonged to the very same side that now held him in captivity — only reinforced the impression that all the details of Germany’s crimes playing out in the news were merely British propaganda designed to discredit “his side.”

After the war when the internees were released back into society, he couldn’t move on from his radical beliefs because he’d built a psychological identity for himself based on those beliefs into which he’d poured all his own grievances. Reconciling the disconnect between what he’d come to believe about Hitler’s utopian promises and the hellish reality of how things played out under national socialism inside Germany were simply a bridge too far.

My host pointed out that this old farmer completely denied all of Nazi Germany’s crimes — he was a full-fledged Holocaust denier — to acknowledge these things would have collapsed his entire identity and the foundation upon which he’d built both his world view and his view of himself.

Instead, he retreated into the echo chamber inside his head — bitter, resentful, fearful, and fiercely in denial of anything that conflicted with both his sense of victimhood and the utopian belief system upon which he’d constructed his identity. Other than the usual interactions that take place within a farming community — equipment sales, machinery repairs, harvest sales, and fighting bushfires alongside his neighbors, he didn’t mix much with the broader community. He could have rejoined the human race at any time — the door to the rest of his community remained open — the decision to continue to isolate himself and retreat into resentment and fear was his alone. And yet, to choose otherwise would have triggered a wholescale identity crisis — that was a psychological bridge too far.

My host explained that most people in the farming community viewed him with a mixture of pity and curiosity as time left his broken mind ever further behind. As the old saying goes, “you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.”

What percentage of former internees continued to harbor similar radical beliefs is hard to say but it is clear that most moved on (or disguised those beliefs in order to adapt to post-WWII realities) — either way, our unapologetic and beleaguered old Namibian farmer was clearly the exception to the rule.

Understanding his psychological journey and why his mind remained trapped in ideological victimhood is perhaps the easier question to understand. The more difficult question is why he was the exception, not the rule.

Before I dive into the remainder of this essay, in which I explore the psychological surrender that must happen in order to cause a radicalized population to turn its back on its former ideology, I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!

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Studies of extremist groups, cults, terror organizations, and the Nazi Party’s fanatic supporters in Germany (beyond mere voters), suggest that no more than 10 to 15% of people become what Eric Hoffer called “true believers” — they make the most noise, but they never make up more than a tiny percentage of overall society. In his 1951 book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (Amazon affiliate link), Hoffer suggested that this radical commitment to the cause is driven by personal frustrations, a sense of alienation, or a desire for purpose and belonging. Most true believers will take those beliefs with them to the grave once those beliefs have fused themselves to their sense of identity. Once in, they simply cannot find their way back out — nor do they want to.

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There is a legal concept in international law known as odious debt, also sometimes referred to as illegitimate debt. It states that debts incurred by a despotic regime are not considered enforceable or binding on the citizens of a country or on its successor state once that despotic regime is deposed.

The core idea behind this legal concept is that if a regime borrows money for personal gain or against the interests of its people, and if creditors knew this at the time (or should have known), then this debt is not binding, and the lenders go home empty-handed. In other words, lenders need to do more than just gauge the solvency of a nation before issuing debt or issuing loans based solely on whether a regime is capable of squeezing the necessary taxes out of its population to service those debts — this legal concept is meant to raise the bar by threatening consequences against international creditors who knowingly underwrite exploitative, predatory, or despotic governments that do not act in the best interests of their citizens. That overhanging threat against international creditors is meant to strengthen society’s immune system against repressive or irresponsible government.

Of course, if that threat actually had teeth, there would be very few countries left today still capable of accessing the bond markets out of fear of this legal concept being applied, in full or in part, since it’s crystal clear by now that corruption, wilful incompetence, and grift have completely overwhelmed even the most Western of Western nations, and that citizens have little recourse to hold their leaders accountable as the “new crook” that’s voted in merely picks up where the “old crook” left off. And yet, bond investors keep these regimes solvent nonetheless, year after year, and decade after decade.

“Thieves of private property pass their lives in chains; thieves of public property in riches and luxury.”

― Cato the Elder

In reality, to invoke the legal concept of odious debt, long-suffering citizens would first have to depose the despotic regime. Then they would have to make their case in a sympathetic international court — an almost impossible task, though not without precedent as you will see momentarily. And, rather cynically, the geopolitical context surrounding the claim (i.e. which other countries will be affected by this debt forgiveness and what geopolitical agendas will be served (or violated) by that debt forgiveness) is actually far more influential on whether that claim sticks than the sins committed by the despotic nation itself. Contrary to popular belief, international law is neither impartial nor blind, but is wholly shaped by the priorities, biases, and agendas of those with the power to enforce it.

Furthermore, the world’s financial institutions would fight tooth and nail against any declaration of odious debt because if countries learn to walk away from their debts every time a new administration figures out how to blame the problems it inherits on a previous corrupt administration, the world’s bond markets would immediately seize up as investors find somewhere safer to park their money, with apocalyptic near-term consequences for our debt-fueled interconnected global economy.

Indeed, no matter how deserving a nation’s claims may be, in order to successfully enforce this claim of odious debt against international creditors, claimant nations may need an army strong enough to fend off a foreign army if creditor nations decide to send their armies to collect — which is historically what used to happen anytime any country tried to walk away from its debts, even when those debts had been thrust upon them by illegitimate means. Once again, this scenario is also not without precedent, as you will also see momentarily.

Even at the individual scale, debt is a form of bondage. But on an international scale, with entire nations funding their activities with foreign loans, the collections’ agency is another nation’s army. International justice is not and can never be blind because everyone in the court is also a participant in that international financial system and thus has their own axe to grind (and their own vulnerabilities to protect) as they weigh one another’s claims.

This reality raises uncomfortable questions about the wisdom of funding a nation with foreign debts, as has become the norm in our modern era. As long as a nation relies only on its own citizens to fund its government, a despotic regime can be starved out of existence simply by refusing to buy bonds and pay taxes — not easy, but also not impossible because ultimately even goon squads need to be paid.

But international lending breaks that cycle of accountability by breathing fresh life into despotic regimes. And once those debts are issued, a nation can continue to be held in debt bondage for generations, long after the despotic regime that incurred those debts has collapsed or been overthrown because the threat of invasion or financial collapse continues to hang over the people if they do not continue to toil in service of those foreign debts.

A classic example is Haiti, whose slave population won its freedom from France in 1791 by violent revolution. But in 1825, France sent its gunboats to Haiti and threatened to invade unless Haiti agreed to pay reparations for the loss of France’s property, including the loss of its slaves. In Haiti’s case, unlike the examples provided later in this essay, the concept of “odious debt” never kicked in to relieve Haiti of its debts to France. In late 19th and early 20th century Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, and elsewhere, the U.S. was happy to invoke the principle of odious debt (or some earlier version of it) in order to strategically leave European creditors empty-handed. Debt forgiveness was a strategic play to encourage European to remove their fingers out of America’s sphere of influence. But in Haiti’s case things played out a little differently… with the U.S. playing the role of enforcer of those odious debts rather than stepping into the role of the benevolent saviour to relieve Haiti of those odious debts, quite in contrast to what the U.S. did in Mexico, Cuba, Costa Rica, etc. Geopolitical context is everything.

It took 122 years (!) for Haiti to crawl out from underneath that odious debt to France (from 1825 to 1947). Haiti even had to take fresh loans from French banks to service that indemnity, thus relying on new debt to service that old debt (as a point of clarification, technically Haiti finished paying out reparations to France by 1888, but the colossal loans that Haiti had to take out from French banks to pay out those reparations to the French government took until 1947 to pay off).

By 1900, 80% of Haiti’s budget was being consumed to service these debts (with much of the remainder pilfered by the despotic regimes that rose and fell in quick succession across this entire time period). In a sane (and fair) world, those odious debts should have been wiped off the slate even as Haiti should simultaneously also have been barred from receiving any fresh loans considering the disastrous track records of the brutal and corrupt regimes that followed in quick succession one after the other, usually by violent revolution. That combination of forgiveness of odious debt and no more new loans to corrupt existing regimes would have created the incentives for a new fiscally responsible and less despotic system of government to emerge in Haiti. But it didn’t — instead Haiti was trapped in a cycle of debt slavery, with one despot after another maintaining business as usual on the back of foreign loans.

After the end of the U.S. Civil war in 1867, the U.S. (through its Wall Street connections) took over the Haitian financial system when U.S. banks bought the Haitian national bank and the U.S. army seized Haiti’s gold reserves for safekeeping. By this move, America became Haiti’s primary creditor. By restructuring and consolidating Haiti’s debts, the U.S. effectively took control of Haiti’s financial obligations even as it redirected Haiti’s ongoing debt service payments to the benefit of American financial institutions, particularly the National City Bank (predecessor to today’s Citibank).

In doing so, the U.S. successfully wrestled Haiti out of European control and into its own orbit of control. You only have to glance at a world map to understand why Haiti (sitting right beside Cuba and just south of America’s southeastern seaboard), is a core American concern. That map view makes it amply clear why America sought to expel European powers out of its sphere of influence, including from Haiti, as demanded by its Monroe Doctrine, established in 1823 by President James Monroe. That doctrine declared that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to further European colonization or intervention; it has been a core guiding U.S. foreign policy imperative ever since.

But with Haiti’s debt payments now funneling through U.S. banks rather than going directly into foreign hands, debt forgiveness was off the table. So much so that in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson invaded and occupied Haiti for 19 years. The invasion was excused as necessary in order to restore order in a rapidly deteriorating political situation because an angry mob had just lynched the latest Haitian president. But the occupation was also clearly a move to prevent Haiti from defaulting on U.S. loans and to protect U.S. investments. And behind the scenes, the move was clearly a strategy to exclude other European powers from establishing any further strongholds on the island. By 1915, with WWI already underway, Germans had long since figured out how to get around Haiti’s foreign land ownership restrictions by intermarrying with Haitians — by 1915, Germans had gained control over approximately 80% of Haiti’s international commerce and had become the principal financiers of the island’s competing political factions.

During the next 19 years of occupation, the U.S. ruled Haiti as a brutal and violent military regime under a constant state of martial law, with at least 5,500 Haitians dying in forced labour camps and a guerilla war raging throughout. The Germans were also placed in internment camps for the remainder of WWI, and then summarily expelled from the island without compensation. This was American turf now, and Americans were not about to let its investments and loans go unserviced. As Major General Smedley D. Butler documented in his 1935 book, War Is a Racket (Amazon affiliate link) similar versions of this story, under various guises, unfolded across Latin America and elsewhere as America extended its reach and opened up new markets for the benefit of Wall Street.

“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”

The whole episode and the ruinous effect it had on Haiti’s soil and ecosystem is described in detail as one of the case studies featured in my book, Plunderers of the Earth (Amazon affiliate link). Keep Haiti’s example in mind as we get to other examples in this essay in which the U.S. intervened in a benevolent fashion to relieve countries of their odious debts — in those cases, the cancelation of debt was part of the strategy to also draw these nations into the American orbit, but the context was different and so America’s moral compass pointed in the opposite direction. The selective application of the principle of odious debt underscores that international justice is anything but impartial. However much we would like it to be otherwise, Lady Justice does not wear a blindfold.

The law is only as strong as the sword behind it. Beneath the supposed empathetic liberal veneer of the “rules-based order”, the actual arbiter of international law is still the power struggle between national interests. Anyone who has watched the International Criminal Courts in action knows how little that court has to do with justice and how much it has to do with theater conducted in service of national interests.

Both Roman and medieval traditions always depicted Lady Justice without a blindfold to symbolize that wisdom and discernment requires clear vision, but both systems also implicitly and even sometimes explicitly acknowledged the partiality or politicized nature of justice. The blindfold only began appearing later, starting in the late 1400s, to reflect Renaissance and Enlightenment idealism about impartiality. But the gulf between ideals and reality are wide indeed. Especially in the international arena, the sword and the scales are real, but the blindfold is mostly an illusion, with the idealism selectively applied as cover to pursue hard and timeless geopolitical aims.

A brief walk through a few chapters in history reveal some eye-opening examples of when this legal concept of odious debt was successfully argued and when it was obvious but failed to stick nonetheless — that story arc provides a sober peek behind the curtain into the cold, hard calculations of geopolitics, but also exposes the hidden dangers of acting on this moral principle and why, despite its clear moral message and its place in international law, even the most clear-cut cases of national debt restructuring always stop short of formally invoking the principle of odious debt.

Before I dive into the remainder of this essay — into various historic examples of how debt relief was deviously weaponized to pursue geopolitical aims, the dangerous forces that would be unleashed if a universal standard were ever to be written into international law to identify odious debts, and the curious history of how the Royal Bank of Canada bit off more than it could chew when it decided to underwrite a repressive and illegitimate banana republic in Latin America — I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!

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Example # 1: The Strategic Cancellation of Mexico’s Debts in 1867

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Buddhists described the inner voice in our heads as the mind monkey or heart-mind monkey (named that way because of its tendency to jump from one thing to another, similar to how a monkey jumps from tree to tree, and its tendency to hyper-fixate on whatever catches its attention). That metaphor isn't exactly complementary of our inner voice and speaks to the restless, scattered, chaotic, undisciplined, and hard-to-control nature of our mind.

And yet, according to psychology studies, this inner voice or inner dialogue is nonetheless credited with helping guide our decisions, work through various scenarios in order to decide a course of action, help us break complex problems into smaller manageable steps, hold us accountable to our moral compass, facilitate self-reflection, experience greater empathy for others, construct a “narrative self”, encourage self-motivation, and turn abstract feelings into concrete words and actions.

Western pop culture latched on to this romanticised idea of the inner voice long ago, with endless appeals to “trust your inner voice”, “discover your inner voice”, “your inner voice knows best”, and “quiet the noise to hear your inner voice”, all of which reflect not only the idea that this inner voice is essential to a fulfilling human experience but also that there is some kind of innate, authentic truth or wisdom buried within every individual, which has been obscured by external influences like societal pressures, expectations, and noise, and which can be accessed if only you just spend enough time (and money) on self-help (or life coaches, or surrounding yourself with enough inspirational quotes, or watching enough back-episodes of the Oprah Winfrey show) to peel back the layers that are blocking this innate voice of wisdom. Even Homer Simpson’s annoyance with himself (“D’oh!”) whenever he ignores his much wiser inner voice was a staple feature of the successful long-running The Simpsons cartoon series.

And yet, according to various news sources (like Scientific American and Psychology Today), allegedly somewhere between 50 to 70% of people don’t have (or infrequently have) the experience of thinking happening as a structured active voice that we hear inside our heads. Allegedly.

The studies referenced by these news articles also go on to tell us about all the alleged behavioral consequences of lacking that inner speech — and the list is long: poorer working memory, difficulty making decisions, impaired self-reflection, less empathy, challenges with emotional regulation, reduced moral reasoning, less impulse control, difficulty articulating thoughts, more easily feeling overwhelmed, and so on. By this reading, it would seem that our humanity hinges upon this voice inside our own heads — this ability to hold an active inner dialogue within ourselves — and that we are somehow lesser, diminished, or defective without it.

Unsurprisingly, social media has been quick to latch on to this narrative to leverage clicks as it becomes yet another divisive excuse to “other” or “dehumanize” by implying that those who lack this inner dialogue are effectively “programmable characters” (also known as NPCs or non-player characters in video game jargon). Ironically, this explanation for moral or intellectual shortcomings closely mirrors the woke perspective of the world, which also likes to blame our differences on factors that we’re born with that are outside of the control of individuals (like skin color, social class, culture, etc.). Once again, individual responsibility, individual merit, individual hard work, and individual choices can be explained away by some intrinsic invisible metric, not unlike the way cranium measurements were once used to try to differentiate between “higher” and “lower” forms of humans.

One sensationalist social media account went as far as to describe the divide between those with versus those without an inner voice as “almost like a split between narrative beings and reactive shells” and stated that if you take away the ability to “hold a conversation with yourself”, “what’s left is not a philosopher… it’s a refined animal in a human body. Sorry 75%.” Somehow, between Reddit and social media, now the alleged defective population has risen to 75%, though I’ve yet to come across a shred of evidence for this newly augmented number in any of the psychology literature that I’ve been wading through for this essay. The same social media post then went on to provocatively ask, “But what if most of the world is sleepwalking, not because they’re unwilling… but because they’re literally unequipped to narrate their own story? If that's true, everything we know about agency, ethics, and consciousness needs to be rewritten.”

Heady stuff! — certainly the kinds of questions that drive clicks, sell news headlines, and deserve lots and lots of your tax dollars to fund lots and lots more studies, right?

Yet these simplistic claims quickly fall apart with just a very light scratch beneath the headlines. What emerges instead is a fascinating (and much more complex) story about how we think, structure our thoughts, and navigate the world around us.

~ ~ ~

Even when news stories correctly report the findings of psychology studies, as a matter of principle these studies should always be taken with a big grain of salt. As we know from the “replication crisis” that is rotting out scientific research, academia has become so degraded and so prone to bias and sloppy work and sensationalism that 50 to 70% of all published research studies are simply junk science because the studies fail to find the same results if the studies are repeated.

And the field of psychology is among the worst offenders, with only around 36% of research studies being reproduceable (!!!), partly because of small sample sizes, partly because of "flexible" statistical methods, and partly because of the publication bias that favors researchers that publish "novel" results (in other words, sensational headlines are great for research careers even if they frequently come at the expense of the truth). The field of psychology has long been considered to be at the epicenter of the replication crisis that has infected academia.

The only fields that come out even worse than psychology are biomedicine, sociology, and education research. Replication rates in biomedicine research (i.e. cancer research) are as low as 11%, partly because of the complexity of the biological systems being studied, partly because of selective reporting, partly because of poorly constructed studies, and partly because of commercial pressures due to funding conflicts of interest.

Replication rates in sociology are even lower at less than 10% for reasons similar to those that plague psychology — small sample sizes, non-representative selection criteria for choosing test subjects, and highly subjective testing metrics.

And education research may be the worst offender of all, where virtually zero published studies are reproducible, partly because of a reliance on observational data, partly because of the diverse range of educational environments, and partly because education researchers (unlike scholars in many other disciplines) are not in the habit of checking each other's work.

But in the case of the claims about our inner voice, the popular psychological research paper that’s commonly used to justify the news headlines (Hurlburt et al., 2016) isn't even being properly quoted by the mainstream news (surprise, surprise). If they were reporting honestly, the eye-popping headlines would immediately lose their dramatic flair.

As it turns out, because self-reporting our inner experiences is so subjective and unreliable, the researchers studying our inner voice decided to use a more objective measure by using a timer set at regular intervals and, when it went off, subjects were asked to report what was going on in their minds (i.e. at that moment, were they engaged in an active inner dialogue or not?). A more honest headline that reads that "50 to 70% of the time we are not engaged in active inner dialogue" would not have been quite as newsworthy. In other words, the results are more reflective of how much time we spend engaged in inner dialogue, not whether we have that inner voice at all.

A more plausible research finding that was reported on more honestly by Science Daily found that although up to half of test subjects spent very little time engaged in internal dialogue, only about 5 to 10% of people actually experienced NO inner voice at all. That is a notable difference.

One of the most famous people who doesn’t have a word-based internal dialogue is, of course, Dr. Temple Grandin. An autist herself, most people will recognize her from her autism research and her illuminating books. However, if you’re from a farming background (like I am) your first exposure to her work probably comes from her research into cow psychology and livestock handling systems. As she describes in her book, Thinking in Pictures, while most people engage in conscious thought via words that play in our heads, her conscious thinking comes in the form of pictures that play inside her imagination almost like a movie.

If there's a rule to live by in science, it’s that it doesn't matter how much evidence you accumulate to support a pet theory, it only takes a single data point that doesn't fit the pattern to blow that theory to shreds. If anyone defies all the nasty stereotypes about the lack of agency, ethics, self-reflection, and consciousness that are floating around on social media about those who don't have an active inner voice continually narrating words inside their heads, it's Dr. Temple Grandin. Anyone in doubt about the rich inner world of someone who thinks in pictures instead of words should read one or two of her books!

And so, Dr. Temple Grandin's example will serve as the first stepping stone to deconstruct these stereotypes and open the window into the diverse ways in which we actually process information inside of our heads.

Our active inner dialogue is only one of many "thinking tools" and (as I will argue) a thinking process that often gets in the way of the others. In keeping with the Buddhist view of the inner voice as a mind monkey, it is also the thinking process that is most likely to lead us astray. Furthermore, as you will soon see as this essay unfolds, thinking in pictures isn't even the only alternative to thinking with words — it’s merely the tip of a much larger iceberg. And for most of us, we use some combination of them all even if one style often dominates over the others from one moment to the next.

~ ~ ~

Thanks to Dr. Grandin’s research into animal psychology and low-stress handling facilities, over 35% of all cattle on North American farms today are handled in corrals that use her curved chutes and humane stockyard designs. And over half of all cattle slaughtered in North America are slaughtered in facilities designed by Dr. Grandin. As she described in her book, Thinking in Pictures, her “superpower” is that she is able to allow her visual imagination to walk though a corral system to see how various shapes, shadows, and design features trigger the animals' fight-or-flight responses. Coupled with her strong sense of empathy for animals, she is able to imagine how cattle perceive the world, effectively giving her the ability to “see” the world through a cow’s eyes in order to recognize what subtle things trigger their fight-or-flight response and, by consequence, how to design handling systems that sync well with how cattle experience the world and thus minimize their stress and anxiety.

Dr. Grandin is perhaps unique in that she almost exclusively thinks in pictures rather than words, but visual non-verbal thinking is actually quite common in engineers, architects, astronomers, geologists, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, designers, and other careers that work primarily with tactile things in the real world and learn to play with those objects in their minds. For most, the switch between visual and verbal thinking happens on an as-need basis, and that visual thinking can be either consciously directed or allowed to roam free, just as happens with the inner voice in our heads.

Speaking from my own experience, whether I’m planning out a new shed, renovating a house, or working on a woodworking project, that switch to non-verbal thinking when the words go completely quiet in my head (a relief!), frees me to think in shapes, pictures, and mind puzzles. That, for me, is when I’m truly “in the zone” when I’m most productive and in tune with accomplishing my goals.

And it doesn’t just happen with tactile practical things. Even planning out an article doesn’t happen with words, but rather with whole chunks of ideas – entire concepts that come and go all at once and that can be played with in a somewhat similar way to how geometric shapes can be played with inside the mind when designing a woodworking project. It’s only when it comes time to find the words to communicate those ideas to others (or to find words to express those ideas on paper) that the slow tedious inner voice can be heard again — and that, for me, is the point when I come out of “the zone”, the flow is interrupted, and things begin to feel like hard work again. Quite frankly, even though I am rarely without an inner voice, that inner voice is kind of a pain in the butt because it’s slow, cumbersome, inefficient, and constantly getting in the way of effective thinking.

That, for me, is the first clue that Western psychology has things exactly backwards in its idea of the inner voice as our primary problem-solving tool through which to experience the world. At most, I view that active narrating voice as nothing more than one mental tool among many by which to process information and solve problems. And I often view it as the least efficient of those tools even though I’m plagued by it a good deal of the time, most likely due to the acquired habit of being “in my head” far too often.

~ ~ ~

The mental tools we use the most are the ones that get most developed. Almost like a muscle, the way we think even literally begins to reshape the actual physical structure of our brains.

One of the most interesting stories about Albert Einstein is what happened to his brain after he died. After his death, someone at Princeton University secretly removed, stored, and dissected Einstein’s brain (possibly without Einstein’s permission) in order to get some insights into the source of his genius.

Before I dive into the remainder of this essay — into the results of Einstein’s brain autopsy, the wide range of ways in which we think, and the way my own brain seems to work — I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!

If you are not already a paid subscriber, I’d like to ask for your support in the form of a paid subscription to my Substack. These kinds of essays require a colossal amount of time, effort, and research to produce. My freedom to explore ideas and think out-of-the-box comes from the fact that I am 100% reader-supported by people like you.

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The defining legacy of Trump’s first term is that, within the first couple of weeks after it ended, President Biden’s executive pen erased virtually every mark Trump had left on America’s system. The US rejoined the Paris Climate agreement. Construction of the border wall was stopped (and construction materials were auctioned off for pennies on the dollar). The doors were once again thrown wide open to even more uncontrolled illegal migration. And existing oil and gas development permits were rescinded or suspended.

Even the Keystone XL Pipeline permit, which was mandated into existence by Trump in 2017 as an executive order during the first days of his presidency to put a stop to a decade of ideological bureaucratic obstructionism, was revoked by Biden in the first days of his presidency in 2021, also by executive order. The company building the pipeline (TC Energy) launched a $15 billion lawsuit against the U.S. government to try to recover its investments (construction was already well underway!), but a trade tribunal tossed out their claim in 2024, cynically ruling that since the permit had been issued under NAFTA rules but NAFTA no longer existed since it had been replaced by the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, the company was not entitled to compensation. The province of Alberta also has a $1.3 billion lawsuit running against the U.S. government to try to recover its share of investments into the Keystone XL project — that lawsuit is still ongoing.

There’s no shortage of examples of how Trump 1.0’s legacy was erased as soon as he left office. Not only did Trump not leave a mark but, with the stroke of the executive pen, contracts, permits, negotiations, and investments conducted in good faith under his watch subsequently became financial and legal liabilities for companies and even for foreign governments as soon as a different set of hands gained authority over the executive pen.

That’s the trouble with ‘rule by executive order’ — it’s arbitrary, temporary, unaccountable, dictatorial, and frequently vengeful. And the ideologically-captured courts are happy to play along, thus legitimizing this arbitrary power into law. What’s lawful versus what’s right increasingly no longer overlap.

When the Founding Fathers drafted their Constitution, presidential authority to issue executive orders wasn’t explicitly defined, and their use was originally very limited, mostly for administrative or minor procedural matters – in those days, the young federal government had a limited scope, and the separation of powers was strictly interpreted. Law-making at the federal level was the responsibility of Congress — full stop. And most of the laws that directly affected citizens’ lives were made at the state level (by state legislatures) — again, full stop. Presidential authority was little more than a thin and rarely-felt overlay to tie that republic together, with the president’s primary responsibilities limited to defense and international diplomacy, to ensure that laws were properly enforced, and to create a check on Congress’s legislative power.

Not anymore.

One precedent after another has gradually expanded the power of the executive branch to the point where, today, an executive order increasingly resembles a royal decree that is routinely used to bypass Congress, even as Congress willfully abdicates is lawmaking responsibilities to both the judicial and executive branches.

Don’t let the legalese deceive you — “rule of law” has given way to “rule by law” as judicial decisions, bureaucratic decrees, and executive governance are increasingly reinterpreted and enforced not by principle but rather primarily based on the priorities of whichever party is in control of that institution. Even the idea of an impartial judiciary has long-since given way to a politicized judiciary that’s frequently engaged in social-engineering. Americans may have given King George III a proverbial bloody nose during their Revolutionary War, but today King George III must be laughing in his grave as America (regardless of which party is in charge) evolves to become exactly what they fought to liberate themselves from in 1776.

If you want to know where this evolving system leads, you only have to look north to Canada to the arbitrary and almost absolute authority that is exercised by our Prime Minister, Privy Council, and the myriad of unaccountable bureaucracies that rule over us. Canada never managed to cast off King George III’s shadow — it is baked right into our constitution even if the prime minister has replaced the king as the de-facto governing head of our constitutional monarchy.

As we’ve seen time and time again, our “constitution” means whatever our prime minister and our bureaucracies want it to mean on any given day as our ‘constitutional monarchy’ evolves to become a ‘bureaucratic tyranny’ in all but name. Our recently elected prime minister, Mark Carney, has even rolled out a new plan to build “one Canadian economy, not thirteen” — it’s the ultimate symbol of the collapse of provincial sovereignty and local decision-making. The relentless centralization and expansion of arbitrary federal powers on either side of our border continues unabated — Canada leads the way, but the US is not far behind.

Trump didn’t create this arbitrary and abusive system in America. However, he also did nothing to dismantle that arbitrary centralized authority or to reverse America’s evolution away from a decentralized republic towards quasi-imperial rule. Instead, like every president before him, he used that power to rule America according to his vision of what is best for the country, thus continuing the well-established tradition of stretching the power of the executive pen just a little bit further with each new administration to bypass the tedious and time-consuming process of lawmaking via Congress, just as Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, and so many others did before him.

And Biden continued that centuries-long tradition when he followed Trump into office… and the precedents he set through his use of the executive pen only expanded that arbitrary power still further.

The main political struggle today is no longer about the separation of powers that once gave the republic its vitality, or about imposing limits on government authority, or about restoring state sovereignty — it’s all about which party gets to be in charge of that vast centralized authority and what new schemes can be dreamt up to reshape America through government meddling. Each side predictably cries foul when their opponents use that power while cheerfully unleashing that same power to the maximum extent as soon as they get their fingers on the throne — neither decentralization nor the dismantling of excess government authority is on the menu.

On so many other levels, Trump 1.0 was equally disappointing not because his administration represented a break with the past (as Democrats and mainstream media would have us believe), but because, other than the mean tweets, it was a continuation of many of the structural issues of the past. Sure, Trump 1.0 changed the curtains and the music, but beneath the fluff all the core elements that are undermining the decentralized, liberty-focused Idea of America remained in place.

Out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt continued to grow unchecked under Trump 1.0 (even before Covid) despite his fierce criticisms of both of those things before he assumed office. And his lockdowns, mask mandates, and Operation Warp Speed were textbook cases of authoritarian diktats — the perfect illustrations of the philosophical shift that has taken place in America over the past two centuries as government evolved from ‘protector of rights’ to ‘meddling shepherd in charge of engineering outcomes’. Through these actions, Trump proved once again why central planning always ends in a disaster regardless of whether the intentions are good or bad. Biden’s Covid policies were even more authoritarian and heavy-handed than Trump’s as his vision of government intervention went still further but, in reality, both presidents are merely separated by degrees, not by philosophical principle.

Trump 1.0 also supported (and even expanded) the military build up in the Ukraine and the tone-deaf stance taken by NATO as it threatened to expand onto Russia’s doorstep, thus giving the lie to his claim that if he had won the 2020 election, the Ukraine War would never have happened (on the contrary, his policies towards the Ukraine contributed in equal measure towards provoking Russia’s Special Military Operation). Perhaps the start date of the war would have been different, but that’s not the same as defusing tensions — the nuanced understanding of what it takes to co-exist with other Great Powers was missing.

And, despite criticizing Obama’s use of drone strikes abroad (a.k.a. targeted assassinations without due judicial process) as reckless, strategically flawed, lacking in transparency, lacking in judicial process, prone to civilian casualties, and ripe with moral problems, after Trump assumed office he nevertheless increased the use of those same drone strikes and expanded America’s counterterrorism footprint in other countries. Even his use of tariffs to reshape the economy to his liking was merely an expansion of Obama’s use of tariffs, and indeed Biden kept most of Trump 1.0’s protectionist “friend-shoring” tariffs in place when he assumed office. Trump 1.0 wasn’t the course-correction that many of his supporters had hoped for when they voted him into office with a mandate to drain the Swamp.

Trump 1.0 also never managed to get American troops out of Afghanistan despite his criticism of the long war as America’s mission morphed from destroying al-Qaeda into a failed attempt to impose Western-style centralized liberal democracy. He even briefly hired neo-con John Bolton (!) as his National Security Advisor and brought in Mike Pompeo as his CIA director — in both cases signalling an overt continuity of the Washington Swamp he had allegedly come to drain. Nor did he pardon either Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, nor did he dismantle (or meaningfully reform) the overbearing national security apparatus that they had exposed.

The system Trump 1.0 left behind was arguably just as bloated, unreformed, and out-of-control as when he assumed office, with the Deep State still aggressively managing American and world affairs behind the scenes. Despite all the noise and the smoke, the nuts and bolts of the system remained unchanged. After Trump 1.0 left office, his imprint on the system faded almost immediately – erased by a few executive orders. Colonel Douglas McGregor recently said something to the effect that ‘Trump 1.0 set out to master the Washington Swamp, but in the end the Washington Swamp mastered Trump.’

But perhaps Trump 2.0 would be different…

The experiences of wrestling against America’s entrenched political establishment and tussling with the embedded Deep State during his first term, followed by the predatory lawfare unleashed against him by a vengeful regime throughout the entire four years after the 2020 election, seemed to produce a kind of “awakening” to make him aware of the scale and scope of the systemic rot that had infected the system and the degree to which the agencies had fed him bad information in his first term. If the political forces, agencies, and bureaucrats could so easily circumnavigate and trample even an elected president and multi-billionaire, what recourse does the average citizen have? It’s not just that the laws are bad, it’s that the very structure of the system is rotten, compromised to its very core, and ripe for abuse. If you want to drain the Swamp, your reforms have to be a lot more ambitious than merely rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic to suit your priorities.

Early signs suggested that Trump 2.0 would indeed be different, not just based on his rhetoric but by the fact that he seemed to surround himself with a very different cadre of people (Kennedy, Tulsi, Vivek, Elon, etc), all of them more libertarian minded (to varying degrees) and all of which were vocal critics of the Swamp. Perhaps Trump 2.0 would finally go where Trump 1.0 had dared not tread?

Alas, it was not to be.

We’re almost 5 months in and it’s becoming quite clear that even if you get some policies you like (and yes, there have been quite a few of those), overall Trump 2.0 isn’t shaping up to be any more of a structural reformer than Trump 1.0 was. Trump’s vision for America is no stand-in for Ron Paul or the Founding Fathers — not even close. As he himself has indicated through his admiration of President William McKinley, Trump is styling himself in the tradition of the early Progressive Era presidents (1890s–1920s), which are traditionally listed as William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson — all of which embraced the vision of using government as a sledgehammer to impose their will upon the nation. Woodrow Wilson perhaps best summed up the Progressive philosophy in his 1887 book, The Study of Administration:

“no one can doubt that in some way it [the federal government] must make itself master of masterful corporations. ... The idea of the state and the consequent ideal of its duty are undergoing noteworthy change; ... Seeing every day new things which the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly how it ought to do them.”

Ever since, presidents have not lacked for seeing new things that the state ought to do.

Sure, some (but only some) of Trump 2.0’s policies are very different from Biden’s — but has centralized power been dismantled? Even on issues where there have been desirable changes in policy, what’s to prevent things from reverting the moment he leaves office as the executive pen rears its ugly head to, once again, sweep it all away? What has Trump done, structurally, that cannot be undone by the next president in the first days of assuming office? Without dismantling the federal government’s authority to insert itself into everything, life inside America will continue to revolve around presidential whims.

And despite some positive changes on some levels, on so many other levels there hasn’t been a change of direction at all. As I will demonstrate in the second half of this essay below, the lack of a coherent vision of the future is on plain display as Trump is, once again, being mastered by the Washington Swamp or (equally damaging) as Trump’s lack of clear vision, lack of clear follow-through, lack of political support even within his own party, and his poor communication skills leaves America (and the world) floundering on the same path as before.

Trump 2.0 MUST succeed, otherwise America and the Western world face a very bleak future as Western Civilization slides ever deeper into centrally planned global socialism. “Winning” isn’t about getting the policies you want. “Winning” (a.k.a. draining the Swamp and keeping it drained even after you leave office) requires dismantling centralized power to make sure that no-one, good or bad, ever has this much centralized control over the country ever again.

As President Gerald Ford once said (though he was not the first to say it), “A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have.” Even if you get the policies you want today, it’s not a mystery what happens to America if the Democrats ever get their hands back on those immense levers of power. And it may be irrelevant whether they do or not if Republican hands are equally eager use that power to impose their alternate Progressive vision of America. Either way, the central planner’s sledgehammer is controlled by whoever has the president’s ear and you’re only ever one election away from losing everything based on the stroke of a pen.

And so, over the coming paragraphs, I want to take a bird’s eye view of Trump 2.0 to understand what is evolving out of his 2nd term – the growing risks, the unaddressed problems, the dangerous precedents that are being set, the minefields that are building up everywhere, the structural reforms that simply aren’t being undertaken, and the philosophical void that unites it all.

As it stands today, the legacy of Trump’s 2nd term risks being as fleeting as his first. America’s evolution towards a quasi-imperial system remains unchecked and all the dominoes continue to be put in place for Western Civilization as a whole to devolve into a Chinese-style global authoritarian surveillance state.

The seeds sown by Trump 2.0 will be bitter indeed if they are allowed to bear fruit. “Winning” requires something more…

Debt & Deficits

The recent dust-up between Elon Musk and President Trump is perhaps a good place to start as Elon lost his patience with Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which increases the debt ceiling by another 5 trillion dollars even as the deficit increases to $2.5 trillion. Spending cuts are backloaded to 2029, which would stick the next president with the fiscal drag. This isn’t what Elon signed up for.

Ron Paul summarized it best:

“Decade after decade, the Republicans disappoint. They can control all levers of government and they still disappoint.

The election last November was supposed to put an end to that.

Republicans (with massive public support at their backs) were finally going to lessen the major burdens that Americans are forced to shoulder (spending, deficits, and debt).

But then came the Big Beautiful Bill, and once again, Republicans disappoint.

All three of the burdens will continue to rise.

Elon Musk, who was very instrumental in the election, finally had enough. He joined Thomas Massie & Rand Paul in saying we need a SLIM Beautiful Bill.”

Trump’s current direction does not put America back onto a sustainable fiscal path with a small federal government footprint. Quite the opposite — the longer that these unsolved financial risks continue to accumulate, the more certain it becomes that America will either face a massive future bond crisis or engage in massive dollar devaluation and inflationary money printing to inflate away its financial liabilities (which would also ultimately lead to a bond crisis). The longer you delay this, the bigger that the reckoning will be when it finally comes. As I explained in a previous article, the bond market is already getting nervous — decades of fiscal irresponsibility and accumulating debt are beginning to catch up to America.

Furthermore, an authoritarian state needs money. You cannot dismantle a bloated authoritarian state if you don’t deprive it of the cash to fund its activities. You can’t drain the Swamp if you don’t take away the food-source that the Swamp feeds on. Trump’s decision to continue to fund Big Government has grave implications for America’s future — despite all the noise, in the end there’s no philosophical shift in the size, scope, or reach of the federal government, merely a continuation of the century-long war over who gets to control the levers of this massive centrally-planned apparatus.

In other words, business as usual.

Instead of cutting government down to size and reviving the free market in America, Trump is growing the federal footprint by taking out an additional mortgage. If now is not the time to cut the federal monstrosity back down to size, then when?

DOGE

There are two issues with DOGE…

After initially advertising that more than $2 trillion in waste could be cut from the government, that number has been dropping ever since. As I write this, GOP leaders finally have a bill on the floor of the House of Representatives to codify a package of cuts worth… wait for it… $9.4 billion. That’s 0.47% of the initial advertised cuts. Not 47%. Not 4.7%. Only 0.47% — less than half of 1 percent!?!. Perhaps there will be more bills forthcoming… but seriously?!?

Clearly, a lot of people have become dependent on “waste” and Congress doesn’t want to risk upsetting any of them. That waste may do nothing for America and makes taxpayers poorer, but cutting it is a major political risk because every voter, lobbyist, and regime supporter who has grown financially dependent on that waste is not going to take kindly to being cut off from the trough. Best not to shake the tree too hard.

But there’s an even bigger philosophical question at stake.

Do you even want an efficient government when that government is trending towards ever greater centralized control? This comes down to the philosophical question I alluded to when I brought up the Progressive Era presidents earlier in this article — do you want a big efficient centralized government that organizes, orchestrates, and manages everything, or do you want a small, lean, minimalist federal government, while everything else happens at the state and local levels and in the private free market, as the Founding Fathers intended.

In his book, Skin in the Game, author Nassim Nicholas Taleb framed this philosophical conundrum as follows:

“I am, at the Fed level, a libertarian;

at the state level, a republican;

at the local level, a democrat;

and at the family and friends’ level, a socialist.

If that saying doesn’t convince you of the fatuousness of left vs. right labels, nothing will.”

The best way to cut “waste” is not to make bureaucracies more efficient. The best way to cut waste is to eliminate the bureaucracies altogether and push the authority to regulate things back down to the state level where the Founding Fathers initially placed it. With 50+ states all doing their own regulation, competition would emerge, and a price would be paid by states that over-regulate and overtax their citizens. But as long as America continues to evolve to become a centralized jackboot, the last thing you need is for that jackboot to become more efficient at controlling you because eventually the machinery of government will be in the hands of someone who views your way of life as a target.

DOGE should have been about cutting agencies altogether, not trimming spending and waste that can grow back as soon as the current mood subsides.

Even the mythical Greek hero, Hercules, in his fight against the Hydra, had to learn that in order to defeat the multiplying heads of the multi-headed serpent, it wasn’t enough to cut off the heads, it also required cauterizing the stumps with fire after each beheading to prevent them from growing back.

Bureaucracy

This brings us to the next point. Elon Musk pointed out that the U.S. has 428 federal agencies, and that they are growing at a rate of two per year as the government just keeps finding “new things that the state ought to do”.

He suggested that the number should be cut to 99 agencies, though in my opinion that’s still far too many if you want to resurrect the philosophical vitality of a decentralized republic. Most of this stuff should be happening at the state level, not at a single federal level.

Imagine if Texas, South Dakota, and California all kept their own climate records instead of it all being concentrated in the hands of the single federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – if one of fifty state-level agencies starts “adjusting” their numbers to fit a preferred narrative, but others don’t, transparency begins to emerge, and cheaters are easier to expose. But as it stands now, whistleblowers are simply ignored as the rot soaks ever deeper into the fabric of these all-encompassing institutions.

But here’s what is happening instead:

Before I dive into the remainder of this essay — into the details of where Trump has fallen short both on the domestic front and on the world stage, from the Ukraine to Israel and beyond, and the dangerous world that is emerging as a result of these shortcomings — I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!

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Culture is an evolutionary process that follows many of the same patterns as biological evolution. And all too often, the path to cultural extinction is also evolutionary.

In biology, an invasive species is defined as “a non-native organism that, when introduced to a new ecosystem, proliferates rapidly, disrupts local biodiversity, and causes ecological or economic harm by outcompeting or preying on native species.”

What’s left out of that definition, of course, is a reflection on why the native species is so easily displaced. Or, to put it another way, why is the invader so easily able to dislodge a native species from its natural habitat in the first place? And how can that vulnerability be plugged?

A case in point drawn from the animal kingdom is the American beaver, which is perfectly at home in its native North American habitat. But after they escaped from fur farms in Europe (or were intentionally released, like in Finland and Russia), they rapidly spread across Europe and began to displace the European beaver.

American beavers are more aggressive and adaptable, and thus they quickly dominated the prime riverine habitats and food sources. Compounding this is the fact that the American beaver has a higher reproductive rate. Furthermore, European and American beavers are genetically incompatible because they have different chromosome counts (40 in American beavers, 48 in European beavers) — this rules out any possibility of some kind of hybrid mix emerging from these two rival species.

Evolution is often a zero-sum game – when two incompatible species compete for the same territory, one must eventually lose and go extinct. Without some kind of outside intervention to remove the invasive species and re-introduce the native species, the European beaver is doomed to be displaced within a few generations. Unless, of course, it evolves some new trait to “adapt” to the invader’s presence to either beat it back or find some uneasy truce. At the moment, its inevitable demise is being forestalled by eliciting sympathy from humans. But if humans lose interest in protecting it, the European beaver is ultimately destined to join the Dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, and the Wild Auroch as historical anecdotes in the fossil record.

But this isn’t an article about beavers. Nor is it about ethnicity, the color of skin, or the genes flowing in our veins.

It is about the evolution culture – about the ideas in our heads and the society that emerges from those shared ideas – about what happens when rival cultures with incompatible philosophical and moral beliefs collide, and what makes some cultures especially vulnerable to ruination and extinction.

~ ~ ~

Before jumping ahead to our own era, I’d like to begin with a stark example from another time and place in which one culture effectively committed suicide by evolving seemingly beneficial moral traits that dramatically improved the lives of all its members — for a while — only to discover that these cultural adaptations left them utterly defenseless against a hostile rival that didn’t play by the same pacifist rules.

The first Polynesian ancestors of the Māori arrived in New Zealand sometime between 1320 and 1350 AD. In the early years, they were mostly focused on survival and adaptation to their new island home, rather than organized warfare.

But, in time, that changed.

Overhunting caused New Zealand’s large flightless moa birds to go extinct within the first 100 years of Māori settlement, thus depriving the Māori of one of their major food sources. By 1445, the moa was extinct.

With the moa gone, this significantly increased competition for fish, shellfish, and cultivatable land. Meanwhile, the Māori population continued to increase even as large-scale deforestation from agriculture and hunting continued to reduce available land. This, in turn, fueled a massive competition for land and resources between rival clans. This competition began to reshape the culture itself.

And so, a warlike culture began to emerge. Their culture began to emphasize traits like mana (prestige/authority), which could be gained through bravery in conflict, and utu (reciprocity or balance), which demanded retribution for wrongs. By the time European explorers, traders, and missionaries began regularly visiting the islands in the late 18th and early 19th century, inter-tribal warfare among the Māori was deeply entrenched in their culture, and Māori culture had even evolved ritualistic cannibalism practices in which defeated enemies were consumed in order to absorb their mana.

When European traders introduced muskets to the island in the early 1800s, intertribal conflict spiraled as rival tribes leveraged the killing power of the musket to full effect. This period is known as the Musket Wars (1806 – 1845), with as many as 3,000 battles and raids fought between rival Māori clans resulting in 20,000 to 40,000 deaths (in a population of only around 80,000), with rival tribes taking many tens of thousands of slaves as captives from these wars.

Then, in 1845, the initial wave of European traders was followed by a formal British effort to conquer New Zealand (known as the Land Wars or the Māori Wars). But with the Māori well versed in guerrilla warfare, ambushes, and hit-and-run tactics, the next three decades were no less violent than the last.

Early on, the British Empire suffered heavy casualties and almost lost to the Māori. By the 1860s, 4,000 Māori warriors were facing off against 18,000 British troops who were well supported by artillery, cavalry, and local militia. Yet even then, the British faced a difficult uphill struggle. The Māori were tough customers to conquer – their warlike culture may have made life pretty perilous for the average Māori trying to build a life for their family, but that warlike culture also ensured that nothing less than the full weight of the British Empire could conquer this tiny, sparsely populated island.

But not all ancestral Māori followed this cultural evolution towards a militant warrior culture.

Around 1500 AD (approximately 150 to 200 years after the first Polynesians arrived in New Zealand), a group of ancestral Māori from New Zealand crossed the open Pacific to reach the Chatham Islands, located about 800 km to the east of New Zealand. They became known as the Moriori. With a climate too cold for agriculture, theirs became a hunter-gatherer and fishing culture.

The first few generations on the Chatham Islands followed a similar cultural arc as the Māori back in New Zealand, with prolific intertribal warfare and bloodshed erupting between the three rival groups that dominated the Chatham Islands. But then, a prominent 16th century Moriori chief by the name of Nunuku-whenua established a new set of laws that essentially turned the Chatham Islands population into committed pacifists. Nunuku’s Law forbade both murder and the eating of human flesh. According to Wikipedia, he proclaimed: "Never again let there be war as there has been this day. Do not kill." And he secured the lasting peace with an accompanying curse: "May your bowels rot the day you disobey".

Cut off from the New Zealand mainland, Moriori culture was able to develop in isolation. And, for over 300 years, Nunuku’s peace remained intact. As long as all the rival groups on the Chatham Islands bought into this new pacifist turn in their culture, they were free to enjoy their new long peace without risk of ending up as the main course on someone else’s menu.

But obviously, despite the long peace reigning on the Chatham Islands, not everyone in the rest of the world shared those noble pacifist values. And eventually, the rest of the world caught up to the Chatham Islands. At that point, the bitter price for 300 years of pacifism had to be paid.

In 1835, two Māori tribes comprised of approximately 900 people (men, women, and children) that had been displaced by the Musket Wars back in New Zealand found their way to the Chatham Islands on European trading ships. These newcomers immediately began to walk about the Chatham Islands in a way that made it clear that they were laying claim to the land and intended to stay. The Moriori withdrew to debate about what to do about it but decided to maintain their long-entrenched policy of non-aggression.

And then the Māori attacked. A Moriori survivor reported that the Māori began slaughtering them like sheep, indiscriminately killing the fleeing Moriori wherever they could find them and hunting them down in the bush wherever they tried to hide. The few survivors were all, without exception, forced into slavery to the Māori.

In 1863, after the British won their own war against the Māori and gained full control over both New Zealand and the Chatham Islands, they forced the Māori to free their Moriori slaves, which they did reluctantly and only under great pressure from the British. By then, less than 10% of the Moriori population remained.

Testifying in a European-led court in the 1870s, a Māori chief commented: "We took possession ... in accordance with our custom, and we caught all the people. Not one escaped. Some ran away from us, these we killed; and others also we killed – but what of that? It was in accordance with our custom. I am not aware of any of our people being killed by them."

During 300 years of cultural isolation, the Chatham Islands’ culture of pacifism paid handsome dividends to maintain peace and prosperity at home – it’s nice to not have to live in fear of having your skull bashed in or to be sold off into slavery. And yet, in the end, that pacifism effectively led to cultural suicide as soon as that isolation was broken and the pacifist Chatham Islanders encountered an aggressive rival warrior culture that did not share those same pacifist principles and values.

Insulated from aggression for so many long centuries, when faced with an enemy that did not share their respect for human life and their commitment to peaceful negotiation, they simply could not step outside of their evolved moral code to do whatever was necessary to defend themselves against an enemy that did not view the world through the same moral lens.

~ ~ ~

Since the Second World War, Western society has effectively followed the Chatham Islanders down an accelerating path towards pacifism, appeasement, and cultural suicide. Professor of evolutionary psychology Gad Saad, in his upcoming book, coined the term — suicidal empathy — which perfectly describes how our enemies (both foreign and domestic) are exploiting the West’s culture of empathy, tolerance, and our habit of ‘self-criticism as a path to self-improvement’. By learning how to “hack” our moral code for their own self-serving benefit, our enemies are successfully dismantling all the core classical liberal principles of Western Civilization. And, trapped by our own morality, we are letting it happen.

Within the confines of our culture, all these traits were once our greatest strengths – they helped us create a more peaceful, fair, meritocratic, and compassionate society in which fewer and fewer people had to live in fear of starving on the streets or having their skulls bashed in while they sleep. But that only worked as long as all those within our borders shared those same baseline moral values… and understood their limits. Because morality stripped of nuance and context and stretched to its radical extremes isn’t morality at all. When moral values become moral absolutes, they cease to be useful guides with which to navigate a complex world and instead become chains by which our enemies can subvert us.

Peace, tolerance, and empathy at all costs is madness. An absolute moral code that is blind to evolving circumstances is a recipe for cultural suicide. If we allow ourselves to extend our moral code even to those who have no love for our culture and who seek to either parasitize our culture or overthrow it altogether, then we have only ourselves to blame for what happens next as we are colonized or conquered by our enemies, both domestic and foreign.

Those who do not share our cultural values are not deserving of our empathy, tolerance, or protection if we must compromise our culture to accommodate them, and their criticisms of our culture must not be given consideration. A culture will not survive for long if it loses its ability to draw a line around what is allowed inside versus what must be kept out. To maintain peace and liberty at home, a culture must be able and willing to confront its enemies, both physically and philosophically, and do so without reservation.

Who is to blame for the slaughter and enslavement that happened on the Chatham Islands? The Māori, operating within the framework of their culture that they brought with them to the Chatham Islands? Or the Moriori for refusing to adapt their moral code to expel a dangerous rival who did not share their culture and was unwilling to adopt their values upon landing on their shores. Graveyards are full of people who were “morally in the right to the bitter end” – perhaps that makes them better fertilizer for daisies, but it’s cultural suicide, nonetheless.

Our desire to behave as moral and good people within the evolving norms of our own culture, irrespective of context, has become our Achilles Heel. Tolerating the intolerant is not a virtue. Empathy for victimhood culture is neither honorable nor wise. Mercy for the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.* Weaponized self-criticism is not a path to self-improvement. Compassion for the tears of our enemies is a self-inflicted wound. Peace at all costs is a recipe for subjugation. A ceasefire regardless of terms is not a better alternative to war – without terms for a lasting peace, war is preferrable despite its bitter cost because violence committed in self-defence is not immoral.

Before I dive into the remainder of this essay — into the forces driving our culture to evolve crippling levels of tolerance, empathy, compassion, self-criticism, and pacifism — I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!

If you are not already a paid subscriber, I’d like to ask for your support in the form of a paid subscription to my Substack. These kinds of essays require a colossal amount of time, effort, and research to produce. My freedom to explore ideas and think out-of-the-box comes from the fact that I am 100% reader-supported by people like you.

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Regardless of whether leadership is elected, appointed, inherited, or seized by a coup, all political power ultimately depends on entangled threads of patronage that grow up underneath that political power, fueled by mutual obligation and self-interest. And as it grows, it begins to warp the minds of all those who get caught up in its net.

During the Roman Era, their entire political system revolved around elaborate patronage networks in which political support was openly exchanged for preferential access to resources, benefits, or favors. They didn’t even try to hide it — the Roman patron-client relationship was a formal and visible social structure that influenced elections, judicial decisions, and economic outcomes.

It was so deeply embedded in society and so openly practiced that Romans had a well-established daily morning ritual, called the salutatio, in which clients visited their patrons every morning to greet them and request favors. Power was easily measurable simply by watching who showed up on someone else’s door — it was a brutal, efficient, and a refreshingly honest way of practicing corruption. Until the 2nd century BC, even voting was done out in the open for all to see (no secret ballots) to allow patrons to verify whether their “investments” into their clients were paying off at the ballot box.

The feudal system that emerged in Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire evolved from this Roman system, with liege lords, vassals, and serfs bound together via mutual oaths and formal hereditary legal obligations. Indeed, various waves of increasingly formal legislation passed during the late Western Roman Empire (under Diocletian, Constantine the Great, Theodosius, Valentinian, and Justinian) imposed successively greater restrictions on mobility, began binding tenant farmers (coloni) to their land, and made their legal status hereditary. These increasingly restrictive laws were all passed in response to labor shortages and the need to maintain tax revenues and food supplies as Rome shifted away from a slave-based economy to a tenant farm economy — these late-Roman legal reforms later evolved as the legal precedent for feudal serfdom in medieval Europe after the Western Roman Empire collapsed.

Whereas the Roman patronage system was based mostly on customs and traditions, the feudal manor system left less to chance — they formalized their patronage system with clear laws. They also expanded it to include church tithes, which were absent in Roman law, thereby formally embedding the Church in the State’s political patronage system. Financial dependency and political loyalty are inextricably linked — the leash may be invisible, but that doesn’t make its effect any less powerful on the mind.

And, much like what’s happening under wokeism today, while those within the feudal patronage system were in constant competition with one another for prestige, power, and privilege, they nonetheless were highly cooperative in banding together to put down any peasant revolt that emerged to try to overthrow the system as a whole — the famous German Peasants’ War in the 16th century (the largest and deadliest social revolt in Europe prior to the French Revolution) was notable for how the legions of local lords, which had essentially been at war with one another for nearly a millennia, managed to put aside their differences long enough to protect the patronage system as a whole by brutally suppressing the poorly armed peasants who demanded an end to serfdom, slaughtering hundreds of thousands.

However, the collaboration required to suppress this German Peasants’ War exposed the fragility of the decentralized feudal structure and bolstered the authority of local princes at the expense of lesser lords and knights — in time this shift concentrated ever more power in the hands of regional rulers and eventually led to the rise of powerful centrally-controlled monarchies. The patronage system not only adapts to changing political circumstances but even drives those political changes as the patronage system re-orders itself to adapt to new challenges that emerge to threaten the patronage system. As one form of the patronage system proved less useful, another emerged to replace it. It would seem that the leash created by participation in the patronage system cuts in both directions.

As power was concentrated in the hands of centralized monarchy, the character of the patronage system evolved once again to become less formal and more flexible, involving payments, pensions, and gifts in exchange for political and military support. And as monarchy continued to evolve to gain ever more power concentrated at the very top of the political hierarchy, this ushed in the Age of Absolutism, in which monarchs held absolute power, unconstrained by other institutions like legislatures or the Church. The patronage system evolved right along with it.

This led to the absurd picture of life at the court of France’s Sun King (Louis XIV) during the second half of the 17th and first decades of the 18th centuries, which I described in my book, Plunderers of the Earth (Amazon Affiliate Link):

On any given day there were anywhere between 3,000 and 10,000 nobles of greater and lesser status living in the guest rooms at the Palace of Versailles, all vying for influence with the king. Since virtually everything depended on the whims of their king, practically the whole of French nobility permanently resided at the Palace of Versailles, out of necessity, in order earn (and maintain) the favor of their king.

It was a never-ending game of jockeying played out in the courts, luxurious gardens, and between the sheets of Versailles’ more than 2,300 rooms, where even a trip home to visit your estate could spell catastrophe if, in your absence, someone else managed to catch the king’s eye and convince him to transfer your titles, privileges, or estates to someone more deserving.

In refusing to grant favours asked for by some noble, Louis XIV habitually remarked, "We never see him", meaning that the hopeful claimant did not spend enough time playing the game at the Palace of Versailles. It's a snapshot of life in a golden birdcage, where the pomp, prestige, and never-ending theatrics are a thin veneer disguising lives trapped in a golden cage.

If you visit Berlin today, you can tour Sanssouci Palace, the opulent former summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia — on the tour they describe how the morning salutation had once again been resurrected (similar yet different from the Roman salutatio). Every morning, half the court lined up to visit the king’s bed chambers to greet him upon waking up, with a formal hierarchy established as to who could stand where (proximity was directly related to political connectedness in the power hierarchy) and in what order they could greet the king. Obviously, a never-ending game of intrigue was played among the courtiers as they jostled for position.

Even the job of the person managing the king’s chamber pot and wiping his bottom was a highly sought out and socially respected position, open only to those belonging to the aristocratic landowner class, as the position offered great influence and opportunities for promotion because it placed him closest to the king’s ear. And yes, in case you’re wondering, all this happened in front of the audience of privileged courtiers who attended the morning salutation — it was all part of the ritual of the court 😳 — which shows just how absurd and illogical things can get in order to cater to that all-important patronage network. If you think what’s happening in society today is because society has lost its mind, think again — you’re not viewing these phenomena through the lens of the patronage network.

In England, this highly sought-out position in charge of the king’s chamber pot became formally known as the Groom of the Stool — through the Groom of the Stool’s intimate conversations wi…

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