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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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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!

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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!

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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 with the king and the access to secrets and influence that this placed in his hand, this position led to him becoming one of the most feared, respected, and powerful figures within the court. As Wikipedia points out, by the time of Henry VII, the Groom of the Stool had evolved into a powerful official involved in setting national fiscal policy under the “chamber system”. Talk about multi-tasking!

With the emergence of liberal democracy, which was supposed to dismantle this hierarchical hereditary system and replace it with purely democratic decision-making, meritocratic institutional promotions, and transparent government contracts, the patronage system evolved new informal ways of adapting to this new environment, with loyal supporters somehow always gaining preferential access to positions in ministries, agencies, or advisory roles, and with politicians learning how to appeal directly to voters, implicitly or explicitly, in a quid-pro-quo system that exchanges favors for votes — known as clientelistic democracy. The checks and balances we thought we’d placed on democracy in order to keep it small and honest never stood a chance.

This is why rotten, corrupt, tyrannical, or dysfunctional democratic systems, from Zimbabwe to Canada and beyond, are impossible to dislodge — once a coalition of loyal supporters is built, that patronage system, enabled by nudges, winks, and back-room negotiations, and lubricated by generous showerings of tax dollars and regulatory privileges, ensures that financial self-interest maintains a core, regime-friendly, loyal support base inside the institutions and at the polls, irrespective of how destructive that regime is to the greater whole of the country. I vividly remember, at the very beginning of Covid, as the federal government began rolling out mask mandates and business closures, it also granted all federal employees a massive raise and pay bonus. Compliance and loyalty are bought, quid-pro-quo.

Voters aren’t stupid, they’re self-interested — they vote to preserve the patronage network upon which they have come to depend. In socialist Canada, where more than 1 in 4 employed Canadians works for one of the levels of government and where 44% of every dollar that is spent in the country is spent directly by the government (rising to 64% if you include indirect spending triggered by subsidies, regulatory privileges, or coercive regulations), it’s not hard to see why the broken system is nonetheless as stable as a rock no matter how illogical it all looks from the outside. Once someone becomes dependent in some way upon a politically-managed system, it’s very hard to let go and vote against your own self interest. And so, stability is bought and paid for — peasant revolts at the polls and in the streets stand no chance against such a firmly-rooted, self-defensive patronage system.

The feudal system, despite its obvious abuses and innovation-stifling characteristics, lasted between 700 and 1,000 years (depending on which country you look at) because the web of people in whose hands power was distributed were sufficiently motivated to fight to preserve it no matter the price paid by everyone else. All democracy has done today is re-order who gets to participate in the patronage networks underpinning political and institutional power — but once a stable coalition of dependent and loyal supporters emerges, it is no less resistant to change as long as the practice of voting at the ballot box is maintained.

Nor is all the self-interest financial — power, prestige, and even emotional ties all play a role in building out a cohesive and loyal network of supporters. It’s impossible to understand the longevity of the Liberal regime, begun under Justin Trudeau and now continuing under Mark Carney, without understanding the patronage network underpinning their support at the polls — if logic, integrity, policy outcomes, fiscal accountability, or anything resembling the “greater good” were what made Canadian democracy work, the country would long since have devolved into open revolt.

No-one rules alone. Every government position, every judicial appointment, every government contract, every legal cartel (like Canada’s telecom, egg, chicken, and dairy cartels), every welfare program, every regulatory privilege, and every policy that leads to coerced spending (like electric vehicle mandates, vaccine requirements, and building codes) all add up to create a large loyal support base, based on self-interest, which defends the existing power structure against rivals and reformers who threaten to upset or embarrass the status quo.

At least the slimy Roman patron-client relationship came by its corruption honestly, whereas we have to find ways to pretend to ourselves that our self-interest isn’t playing a role in warping our choices. That’s the thing about the patronage network — it may pay handsome dividends in terms of money and opportunities, but the price paid is the loss of our independent minds — it’s to wake up one day to realize that your body, mind, and soul are now being bent in servitude to an invisible leash. Sure, you could walk away from it all in a heartbeat and no-one would stop you, but would you want to? What price are you willing to pay to own your own mind?

Most of the political wars going on today between liberal and conservative political parties is a battle over which party will control the patronage network that underpins the regime as a whole — parties that promise to dismantle power, shrink government, and unleash the free market tend to make little or no progress at the polls (with Ron Paul being the perfect example), because even though most people agree with those three priorities in theory, in practice they find ways to rationalize voting to preserve their self-interest, whether it is to protect their industry, avoid the downsizing of jobs, preserve regulatory privileges or legal cartel systems, secure government contracts, defend welfare benefits, or open the door to new government-enabled opportunities. Once you become dependent upon a system in some way, it becomes virtually impossible to vote to dismantle the ground upon which you are standing. That’s the difference between a true free market system, in which you have no control over the competition, versus a politically managed market system in which whispers, nudges, and political pressure can change who wins and who loses.

That’s the thing about the modern patronage system — many portions are informal, with many people not recognizing how their own self-interest is clouding their ability to see their own participation in that influence network as they go to the polls — the golden birdcage is still there, just more subtle than the one that existed during Louis XIV’s era. As economist Milton Friedman once said, “since the 1930s the technique of buying votes with the voters’ own money has been expanded to an extent undreamed of by earlier politicians.”

An honest politician is useful to no-one. No-one who participates in the patronage system can build a life based on unreliable privileges — if a politician’s position changes as new data or evidence emerges, then life within the patronage network becomes highly uncertain. The patronage network instinctually protects itself — and it wants stability and loyalty at all costs.

As Simon Cameron, former U.S. Senator and U.S. Secretary of War (under Abraham Lincoln), once said, “an honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.”

The only solution is to minimize the size and reach of the political system as a whole — irrespective of whether it is a democracy, a monarchy, a feudal system, or some kind of dictatorship. The less government you have to contend with, the less incentives there are to be sucked into participating in the soul-sucking patronage system, and the greater the chance that you can build a prosperous life with your own two hands, without the winks, nudges, back-room deals, and destructive voting habits that buy privilege and opportunity inside the patronage system.

After all, despite all the pomp and prestige found within the golden birdcage, not even the king truly owns his own mind as he too is forever held hostage to playing his part in the patronage system lest his clients rise up to depose him in favor of a more amenable patron. Inside the patronage network, everyone is simultaneously both master and slave.

In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, renowned author of Lord of the Rings, Tolkien wrote to his son that “my political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. […] The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.”

In the letter he goes on to say that “Give me a king whose chief interest in life is stamps, railways, or race-horses; and who has the power to sack his Vizier if he does not like the cut of his trousers.” Yet he acknowledges that this hands-off system only works as long as the world basically trundles along in an inefficient way, without someone emerging who tries to play Alexander the Great and without the factories and power-stations that have completely changed the nature of the problems facing an industrializing world.

Indeed, his seminal work, The Lord of the Rings, revolved around a quest to destroy the “One Ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them” (an allusion to the patronage networks that underpin political power). This master ring, representing the central authority of all-consuming power, must be cast back into the Fires of Morder by a humble hobbit, Frodo, who joins the adventure to destroy the ring with no personal aspirations of power of his own. This task to destroy the ring falls to the smallest, meekest, and most humble member of society — a hobbit — whose only ambition is dreaming of tending his garden. Anyone more ambitious who touches that ring, even with the intent of destroying it, will succumb to the temptation of using it (even for good) and thus be corrupted by its power.

But in the end, even the humble hobbit Frodo cannot let it go, and it is the greed of Gollum, the ring’s former owner who is torn between his lust for the Ring and his desire to be free of it, who snatches the ring out of Frodo’s hands but is then destroyed himself as he falls into the Fires of Mordor with the ring clutched in his hands.

Tellingly, in Tolkien’s epic story, all those who lay their hands on the ring of power, including all those who held the lesser rings of power that are subordinate to the power of the One Ring — the three elven kings, the seven dwarf lords, and the nine mortal men — are forever changed by their contact with power, reduced in some fashion to hollow versions of their former selves, bearing the weight of the world upon their shoulders. The nine mortal men were most affected of all — they were reduced to mere ring wraiths, immortal yet ghost-like wraiths bound forever to mindlessly serve as the corrupted servants of the One Ring — the perfect analogy for those who allow themselves to be captured by the patronage network. Even Frodo is left hollowed out by the experience, with a frailty and weariness afterwards that he is unable to overcome, and he is never fully able to reintegrate back into Shire life, eventually departing Middle Earth with the elves.

Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,One for the Dark Lord on his dark throneIn the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind themIn the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.

— J.R.R Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

And so, I move on to the main purpose of this essay, to another fairy tale, this time an older one from Germany called The Rat King Birlibi, which perhaps better than any other, describes this unholy patronage system that grows up around any political system and the warping effect that it has on the mind. But first, a little context…

Prior to the 18th and 19th centuries, the German-speaking regions of Europe were absolutely brimming with fables and fairy tales, with every little valley and obscure corner of these lands having their own versions or, indeed, their own unique stories. Basically, every valley was its own Shire, except with serfdom.

But as industrialization advanced and especially as these German-speaking regions began to get bound together under larger more centralized political structures in the early 19th century, these local fairy tales began to disappear. These political changes were triggered in no small part in reaction to Napoleon marching his armies across the continent to conquer all of Europe, which accelerated the urgency to unify these German-speaking semi-sovereign micro-states into ever larger political unions and to industrialize their military systems in order to withstand the onslaught of large, aggressive, conquering industrialized armies.

While today we complain of the flattening effect of globalization on national cultures, that flattening was already well underway in the 19th century, during the emergence of large politically centralized nation states, which effectively flattened the local cultures that had thrived in the patchwork of decentralized feudal micro-states that had dominated central Europe for the past thousand years. Even in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, the pastoral simplicity of the Shire, under threat of the encroaching forces of industrialization and tyrannical centralized power, speaks to this theme.

A number of writers and publishers emerged to try to collect as many of these local folk stories as possible before they disappeared under the flattening influence of industrialization and 19th-century liberal nation-building. The most famous collectors and editors of these German fables, legends, and folk tales were the Brothers Grimm (Jacob and Wilhelm) who amalgamated more than 200 stories, collected from across the German-speaking realm.

Nor were they the only ones. A distant cousin of mine, a man by the name of Johann Karl August Musäus (1735 - 1787) made his fame and fortune by also collecting German folk stories, the most famous being the well-known legend of a capricious shape-shifting mountain spirit called Rübezahl (known as Krakonoš to the Czechs and Liczyrzepa to the Polish), collected from the historically German-speaking Giant Mountains region in Silesia, which straddles the border between modern Poland and the modern Czech Republic.

Within this heightened enthusiasm for fairy tales, which was coursing through Europe at that time, a second category of fairy tales arose — literary fairy tales written by single authors, which weren’t necessarily political but often used the fairy tale format to make social or political commentary. Authors like Hans Christian Anderson (1805 - 1875) from Denmark fit into that mold.

And so do the works of a German writer and political activist by the name of Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860). It is through him that we have the story of the Rat King Birlibi, which aligns with the style of popular folk tales of that era, like those collected by the Brothers Grimm, with their moral critiques, animal characters, and grotesque imagery. However, Arndt’s stories are more polished and intentionally structured to speak to a politically aware audience — The Rat King Birlibi is a direct attack on the feudal patronage networks that sustained serfdom in Germany, which he had made his life’s mission to abolish.

A few details about Arndt’s life and complex character, and the broader context in which he published this story, really helps the story come to life. When the French Revolution broke out in neighboring France, he was initially a supporter of its ideas, especially its focus on abolishing serfdom and its desire to bring liberal democracy to France. But when the revolution devolved into the gruesome guillotine-obsessed Reign of Terror under the Jacobins, he dissociated himself and then became viscerally anti-French when Jacobin rule was immediately followed by Napoleon’s dictatorship, which unleashed Napoleon’s conquering armies onto Europe. Through his advocacy for an end to serfdom in Germany and his desire to bring democratic governance to the German people, Arndt evolved an extreme dislike of anyone who wasn’t German — particularly the Polish, Slavs, Wends (a Slavic people from north-eastern Germany), Jews, and especially the French.

Arndt, through his writing and his activism, is considered one of the driving forces that created a German national identity, and thus is considered one of the founders of German nationalism in the 19th-century understanding of that word, which emerged in response to the Napoleonic Wars and which sought to unite all German-speaking regions as a single democratically controlled nation. Nearly a century after his death, his anti-French rhetoric was recycled by Germany during both the First and Second World Wars.

Arndt was the son of an emancipated serf. Early in his life he published a scathing history of serfdom in Pomerania (the German-speaking region on the Baltic Coast where he grew up, which was then still controlled by Sweden). The picture he painted in his book was such a convincing condemnation of serfdom that it prompted King Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden to abolish serfdom only three years after the book was published.

By then, most of Germany had fallen under Napoleonic rule. Arndt took refuge in Sweden and taught at a university there while championing the cause of German independence as he called for Germans to rise up and overthrow French rule in Germany. I find it ironic to discover the degree to which the later militant German nationalism of the 20th century owes its beginnings to a reactionary response to the Napoleonic conquest of German lands — the emergence of a national identity borne out of a shared sense of suffering under serfdom and under Napoleonic rule grew up over top of the highly local identities of earlier generations. As is so often the case, the emergence of a national identity owed its roots to an experience of common suffering at the hands of a common enemy.

Arndt snuck, incognito, back into Napoleonic-controlled Germany for a while to continue his activism and then traveled to St. Petersburg to help organize the final military struggle to dislodge France from German soil. Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 and exiled to the island of Elba; then, after a 10-month exile, he escaped Elba, reclaimed the throne for 110 days, and was defeated again (this time permanently) at the battle of Waterloo in 1815 by an invading Allied army from Austria, Prussia, Russia, Spain, the UK, Portugal, Sweden, Sardinia, and the few remaining independent German States (this time he was exiled to the remote island of Saint Helena, where he died 6 years later at the age of 51). In the peace that followed Napoleon’s defeat, Arndt returned to Germany to teach at the University of Bonn.

Following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored feudal monarchies to power in all the territories that had been conquered by Napoleon, and outside of France, serfdom continued on as before. Arndt immediately began to ruffle German feathers with his criticisms of the German monarchical system, his demands for freedom of the press, and his demands for political reform to dismantle feudal privileges, promote equality under the law, and replace feudal absolutism with constitutional governance that would allow greater political participation and accountability.

Alarmed by the nationalist sentiment that was rising up across German-speaking lands to challenge centralized monarchical rule and fearful of losing control over an increasingly agitated population, Prussian authorities arrested Arndt as a revolutionary agitator during their 1819 crackdown against liberal and nationalist movements, confiscated his papers, and banned him from working in his professorship, though he was allowed to keep his professor’s stipend.

During this next 20-year period, he turned to writing folk tales, often full of moral quandaries and often with a subversive political commentary buried in the subtext. The Rat King Birlibi stands among his best — it’s the perfect analogy for criticizing the feudal patronage networks still thriving in Germany at that time, though it’s no less relevant to any other patronage system, including those that support our modern increasingly undemocratic liberal democracies.

In 1840 (at the age of 69), his professorship was reinstated and in 1841 he was chosen to serve as the rector of the university. By 1848, growing public anger against the feudal monarchical system boiled over all across Europe, triggering a series of violent revolutions demanding democracy and an end to feudal serfdom. These revolutions broke out spontaneously in over 50 countries, with tens of thousands killed before they were suppressed — they are collectively known as the Revolutions of 1848 or the “Spring of Nations”). [ As a side note, the anti-government protests, uprisings, and armed rebellions that broke out across the Arab world in 2010, known as the “Arab Spring”, were named after the “Spring of Nations” of 1848.]

In the aftermath of the Spring of Nations of 1848, reform finally came to Germany. Feudalism was finally abolished and Germany finally got its first freely elected parliament, the National Assembly in Frankfurt, which was created for the purpose of drafting a constitution for a unified German nation-state composed of the former German-speaking remnants of the hundreds of semi-autonomous micro-states of the feudal era, previously known as the Holy Roman Empire before Napoleon’s conquering armies rolled across Europe. The seeds of the vision Arndt had fought for his entire life had finally come to fruition. At the age of 78, Arndt served as one of the 379 elected deputies in the new National Assembly in Frankfurt. He continued to write and lecture until his death at the age of 90 in 1860.

If only that had been the end of the seeds that he planted, we would probably all know his name today. Unfortunately, the seeds of ethno-nationalism that were also planted by Arndt and his fellow German nationalists during the 19th century in their quest to free the German people from serfdom, feudal monarchy, and Napoleonic French rule did not die with him. Instead, the collective sense of victimhood that emerged during that era continued to fester until it found its final gruesome outlet under Hitler’s national socialist regime in the 1930s and 40s. Hitler ended Germany’s experiment with liberal democracy and ushered in a new era not altogether different from Napoleonic-style totalitarian dictatorship in order to forcibly impose his ethno-nationalism and national socialism onto Germany and beyond. As we are finding out once again in our own woke era, cultivating a victimhood mind frame is an especially dangerous mind virus that justifies the unjustifiable, especially when it manages to latch on to political power — but that is a story for another day.

Arndt’s story about the Rat King Birlibi is wholly focused as a critique of the feudal patronage network and the flattening effect it has on the human soul — thankfully, this witty story is not tainted by any ethno-nationalist themes and so has stood the test of time.

In folklore, a rat king symbolizes society decay and corrupt tyrannical rule, and especially those who live well on the back of others. According to Wikipedia, even Martin Luther, one of the key figures of the Protestant Revolution that kicked off in the 16th century, used the metaphor of the rat king to criticize the corrupt medieval Church, finishing up a long critique with the statement: “finally, there is the Pope, the king of rats right at the top” — the rat king reference (Rattenkönig in German) was specifically designed as a barb to criticize the medieval pope’s attitude of “sponging” off people. He also referred to the cardinals as “that rabble of rats”, monasteries as “rats’ nests”, and the Anabaptist theocracy that established itself in the Germany city of Münster in 1534 as a “rats’ kingdom”.

But there’s a double meaning that makes a rat king a particularly useful analogy for criticizing any patronage system…

Medieval Europe had a rat problem. Unlike brown rats, with their shorter, stiffer tails, black rats (the species that was primarily responsible for spreading the Black Plague) have long, slim tails that can occasionally get entangled and knotted together when they live in cramped and densely populated conditions, especially as their entwined tails get matted together by sticky sap, feces, blood, or gum. Furthermore, their tails have a grasping reflex that helps them climb, which makes the problem worse.

Once their tails become knotted together, the knot doesn’t come undone, especially as the rats pull the knots tighter in their struggle, which causes bones to break in their tails. The rats become bound together, like a wagon wheel, with the knotted tails acting like wagon spokes — a grisly fate if ever there was one. Bound together, they are known as a rat king.

X-ray images of the broken bones in the rats’ tails have revealed calluses at the fractures, which demonstrate that these rat kings can survive like this for an extended period of time, suggesting that they were able to lead a successful collaborative existence. The rat king truly is the perfect metaphor for the ultimate co-dependent patronage network.

The largest-known rat king was found in Altenburg, in Thuringia, Germany, in 1828, and consisted of 32 rats — it is preserved in the museum in Altenburg and is shown in image below. In 2021, a live rat king was found in Estonia consisting of 13 rats — they all look quite healthy and well-fed in the video.

As a quick side note to debunk a false understanding about rat kings that has been circulating since Jordan Peterson related a theory about rat kings on a podcast with Theo Von, which you may have seen as it spread across the internet like wildfire at the time — his story suggests that if villagers put rats in a pit, eventually only one — the rat king — would survive by eating all the others. If this were to be repeated several times, that rat would develop a taste for eating rats and could then be released back into the wild where it would hunt down and cannibalize other rats, thus ridding the village of rats.

Unfortunately, even with the help of Grok to widen my search, I was unable to find any references to substantiate this claim — nor am I the first to have looked and come up empty-handed. It’s nothing more than an urban myth, without a factual basis. However, James Bond fans pointed out that this story mirrors an extremely similar speech given by a James Bond villain in the movie Skyfall. Oops.

So, to clarify, the feudal symbolism of rat kings has nothing to do with Peterson’s theory of learned cannibalism and everything to do with collaborative patronage networks that sustain the entrenched power of a corrupt regime.

And so, without further ado, what follows below is my translation of Arndt’s original German tale of the Rat King Birlibi.

The Rat King Birlibi

by Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860)

translation by Julius Ruechel

I want to tell the story of the Rat King Birlibi, a story that Balzer Tievs from village of Preseke often told me, along with many other stories.

Balzer was a farmhand who worked on my father's farm when I was eight or nine years old. He was a man of mischievous ideas who knew many stories and fairy tales. The story of the Rat King Birlibi goes like this:

In the Stralsund village of Altenkamp, ​​which lies on the beach between Garz and Putbus, there once lived a rich farmer named Hans Burwitz. He was a tidy, clever man who succeeded in everything he attempted and who had the most well-stocked farm in the entire village. He had sixteen cows, forty sheep, eight horses, and two foals in his stables and paddocks, their coats as smooth as eels, and so well-bred that his foals were always sold for eight to ten gold coins each at the Berger horse market. He also had six handsome children — both sons and daughters — and he was so well off that people used to call him the Rich Farmer of Altenkamp.

But this man lost all his fortune because of his nighttime wanderings in the forest.

Hans Burwitz was also a skilled hunter; he had a particularly good nose for hunting foxes and martens, and therefore often spent nights in the forest where he set his traps and waited for his catch.

There, inside the forest, he saw and heard many things in the darkness and twilight and moonlight that he was reluctant to speak about, as many strange and peculiar things happen in the forest at night. It was from him that people learned the story of the Rat King Birlibi.

In his childhood, Hans Burwitz had often heard stories about a Rat King who wore a golden crown on his head and ruled over all weasels, hamsters, rats, mice, and other such skittish and scurrying creatures. This Rat King was a mighty forest king. But Hans had never wanted to believe it. For many a year he had wandered through the forest, hunting foxes and martens and setting traps for birds, but had neither seen nor heard the slightest trace of the Rat King.

However, the Rat King must have been operating in another region, for he has many castles in all the lands beneath the mountains and moves to a different castle almost every year, where he amuses himself with his courtiers and ladies-in-waiting. Indeed, he lives like a very distinguished lord, and neither the Great Mogul nor King of France could have had better days.

And don't think that this Rat King and his friends ever let nuts, wheat grains, or milk touch their lips — no indeed — sugar and marzipan are their daily food, and sweet wine is their drink, and they live better than King Solomon and the Assyrian General Holofernes.

Now, Hans Burwitz went into the forest again one night after midnight, on the lookout for foxes. From a distance, he heard a cacophony of shrill, discordant noises, and above it all, a clear voice kept ringing out: Birlibi! Birlibi! Birlibi! This reminded him of the tale of the Rat King Birlibi, which he had often heard, and he thought to himself, “I’ll go see what’s going on!”, for he was a bold man, unafraid even in the pitch-black night.

He was already about to head toward the sound when he recalled the proverb: “Stay away from where you have no business, and you’ll keep your nose.” But the calls of Birlibi continued to echo in his ears as long as he was in the forest. The next night, and the third night, it was the same. Yet he remained undaunted and said, “Let the devil and his rabble carry on their wild antics as they please! They can’t harm someone who doesn’t meddle with them.”

If only Hans had stuck to that resolve! But on the fourth night, his curiosity overpowered him, and he truly fell into the wicked snare.

It was Walpurgis Night, and his wife had begged him not to go into the forest on that wild night reserved for unholy things, for it was not safe, and all the sorcerers and weather-witches were about, capable of doing him harm, for on this night, when the entire infernal host was unleashed, many a Christian soul had come to grief.

But he laughed at her, calling it womanly fear, and went his usual way into the forest after the others had gone to bed. But that’s when King Birlibi’s draw became too powerful to resist.

At first, that night in the forest was much like the previous ones: there was a distant tumult and clamor, with the cries of ‘Birlibi’ ringing out clearly amidst it all. The whistling, whirring, and rustling above his head in the treetops didn’t trouble Burwitz much, for he didn’t believe in witchcraft at all. He said they were only night spirits that frightened people because they were unknown, mere illusions and trickeries of the darkness that could do no harm to someone who didn’t believe in them.

But when midnight struck and the bell tolled twelve, a wholly different sound of ‘Birlibi’ emerged from the forest, making Hans’s hair stand on end and tingle, and he wanted to run away. But they were too swift for him, and soon he was caught up in the midst of the king’s entourage, unable to escape.

For when the clock struck twelve, the entire forest suddenly resounded as if filled with drums, kettledrums, flutes, and trumpets, and it became bright within the forest, as though it was illuminated by thousands of lamps and candles. It was, in fact, the grand high festival of the Rat King, and all his subjects, followers, men, and vassals had been summoned to celebrate it.

All the trees seemed to rustle, all the bushes to whistle, and all the rocks and stones to leap and dance, so that Hans became terribly afraid. But when he tried to flee, so many animals blocked his path that he could not get through and had to resign himself to staying where he was. There were foxes, martens, polecats, weasels, dormice, marmots, hamsters, rats, and mice in such countless numbers that it seemed they had been gathered from the entire world for this festival. They ran, jumped, hopped, and danced wildly amongst each other, as if crazed; they all stood on their hind legs, carrying green boughs of arbutus in their front paws, and they shouted and roared and howled and shrieked and whistled, each in their own way.

In short, the whole thieving rabble of the night was assembled, creating a hideous clamor, clanging, and tumult all mixed together. In the air, it was just as wild as on the ground; owls, crows, screech-owls, eagle-owls, bats, and dung beetles flew chaotically about, proclaiming the joy of this great day with their shrill, screeching throats and their buzzing, whirring wings.

As Hans stood frightened and bewildered amidst the tumult, commotion, and clamor, not knowing which way to turn, behold, a brighter light suddenly flared up, and thousands of voices sang together in a terrifyingly ghastly solemnity that echoed through the forest, making Hans’s heart tremble in his chest:

Open up! Open up! Open the gates! And come here from all places!You are all invited at once;The king is marching through his kingdom.

I am the great Rat King.Come to me if you lack anything!My house is made of gold and silver,I measure money by the bushel.

And so it continued in solemn and slow song, punctuated by piercing, shrill voices shrieking Birlibi! Birlibi! in a repulsive tone, with the entire throng echoing Birlibi! so that it resounded through the forest. And it was the Rat King himself who came forth in procession.

He was monstrously large, like a bullock, seated in a golden chariot with a golden crown on his head and a golden scepter in his hand. Beside him sat his Queen, also wearing a golden crown, so fat that she gleamed. They had their long, bald tails entwined behind them, playfully intertwining them, for they were in a very merry mood.

These tails were the most repulsive sight of all; but the King and Queen were ghastly enough themselves. The chariot in which they rode was pulled by six gaunt wolves, baring their teeth, and two lanky cats stood as footmen at the rear, holding blazing torches and meowing horribly. Yet the Rat King and Queen showed no fear of them; they seemed to be mighty lords and rulers over all. Twelve swift drummers marched ahead of the chariot, beating their drums. These were hares, who must beat the drums to inspire courage in others, for they themselves have none.

Hans had already been frightened enough; but now, seeing the Rat King and the Rat Queen, along with the wolves, cats, and hares all together like this, his skin crawled over his entire body, and his usually brave heart nearly faltered, and he said to himself, “The devil himself can stay here longer, where everything goes so against nature! I’ve read and heard of wonders, to be sure, but they always had some natural order to them. But this is a motley devil’s game and a pack of fiends. If only I could get out of here!”

Hans made one last attempt to push his way out, but the procession surged relentlessly through the forest, and Hans was swept along with it. They continued until they reached the outermost edge of the forest. There, out in an open field, stood hundreds of wagons laden with bacon, meat, grain, nuts, and other foodstuffs.

Each wagon was driven by a farmer with his horses, and the farmers carried sacks of grain, bacon, hams, sausages, and whatever else they had loaded, down into the forest. When they saw Hans Burwitz standing there, they called out to him, “Come! Help carry!”

Bewildered, Hans went over and helped unload and carry with them, so confused that he scarcely knew what he was doing. In the twilight, it seemed to him that he recognized familiar faces among the farmers, including the village headman from Krakvitz and the blacksmith from Casnevitz. But he gave no sign of recognition, and they acted as if they were strangers.

The truth about the farmers was this: they had pledged themselves to the service of the Rat King and his followers, and on Walpurgis Night, when the Rat King’s great festival took place, they were obliged to transport the plunder that the Rat King’s subjects had pilfered and stolen from all corners of the world into the forest.

Hans, entirely innocent, had stumbled into this and didn’t know how. As soon as the sacks and other goods were carried into the forest, the wild thieving rabble pounced on them, and with cries of Grips! Graps! and Rips! Raps!, they each grabbed what they could and dragged it away, faster than the eye could follow, until less and less remained.

The King, however, still stood there in his grand and splendid chariot, with some still dancing, roaring, and clamoring around him. Once all the wagons were unloaded, about a hundred large rats appeared, pouring gold from sacks onto the field and the path, singing as they did:

Hands here! Hats here!Who wants more? Who wants more?Merry! Merry! Today is going to be great,Merry! Hands and hats full!

The farmers fell upon the scattered gold like ravenous crows, scrambling and clawing, pushing and shoving, each grabbing as much of the ill-begotten plunder as they could seize, and Hans was not idle either, eagerly snatching his share.

As they were busily at work, like pigeons tossed peas, behold, the morning cock crowed, signaling the moment when the heathen and infernal realm holds no more power on Earth—and in an instant, everything vanished as if it had been merely a dream. Hans stood all alone at the forest’s edge. Dawn broke, and he went home with a heavy heart.

But his pockets were heavy too, filled with beautiful gold, which he did not spill. His wife had grown terribly anxious that he was returning home so late, and she was alarmed to see him so pale and distraught, asking him all sorts of questions. But, as was his habit, he brushed her off with jests and didn’t breathe a single word about what he had seen and heard.

Hans counted his gold (it was a tidy heap of ducats), stored it in his chest, and for the first few months after this adventure, he did not venture into the forest.

A secret dread kept him away. But, as is human nature, he gradually forgot the Walpurgis Night and its eerie, ghastly tumult, and he resumed his fox and marten hunts under the moonlight and starlight as before. He neither saw nor heard anything more of the Rat King and his Birlibi, and eventually thought of it only rarely.

But as spring approached, everything changed. At times, around midnight, he heard the Birlibi calls ringing out across the forest again, so vividly that the faintest hairs on his head stood on end. Though he would hurriedly flee the forest, he harbored secret thoughts of Walpurgis Night. And because what people think of by day often comes back to haunt them in their dreams at night, playing and shimmering and tricking, so too did the Rat King and his nocturnal illusions appear in Hans’ dreams.

Hans often dreamt that the Rat King stood at his door, knocking, and when he opened it, he saw the Rat King in the flesh, just as he had appeared in the chariot, but now made entirely of pure gold and not as hideous as he had seemed before. The Rat King sang to him in the sweetest voice, one you wouldn’t believe could come from a rat’s throat, reciting the following verse:

I am the great Rat King.Come to me if you lack anything!My house is made of gold and silver,I measure money by the bushel.

And then he came close and whispered in Hans’ ear, “You’ll come back for Walpurgis Night, Hans Burwitz, and help carry sacks and fill your pockets with ducats, won’t you?” Though Hans, upon waking from such dreams, felt both joy at the thought of the gold and a lingering dread, he would say, “Just you wait, Prince Birlibi, I won’t come to your festival!”

But it went with him as it had with so many others, and the old proverb was to prove true for Hans Burwitz as well: Once the devil has you by a thread, he’ll soon lead you by a rope.

Sure enough, as Walpurgis Night drew nearer, Hans’s desire to join in grew stronger. Yet he firmly resolved not to give in to the evil this time and went to bed with his wife on Walpurgis Eve, determined to stay put.

But he couldn’t sleep; the wagons with their sacks, the farmers, and the great rats pouring gold from sacks onto the ground kept haunting his thoughts. Unable to bear it any longer, he had to get out of bed, slip away from his wife, and run into the dark forest. And there, that second night, he experienced it all again just as he had the first time. He had brought a small sack for the gold and gathered far more than he had the previous year.

Now it seemed to him that he had enough gold, and he swore a solemn oath that he would never again give in to temptation or set foot in the forest. And he kept that oath, overcoming himself so that he did not return to the forest or take part in another Walpurgis Night, no matter how often he dreamed of Birlibi and the golden Rat King.

He did not let these temptations take root in his heart but drove them out with fervent prayer, wearying out these devilish urges until they finally left him alone.

Many years passed, and Hans was known as a very wealthy man. With his ducats, he had bought villages and estates and had become a lord. There were whispers among the people that his wealth was not honestly gained, but no one could prove it. Yet, in the end, the proof came.

The Rat King lay in wait for the poor man, over whom he had already gained some power. He was enraged that Hans had completely stopped attending his grand festivals on Walpurgis Night. And when Hans, in a moment of sinful longing, thought once more of gathering gold and forgot his evening prayer, even uttering some unchristian curses over a trifle, the Rat King and his minions were able to break through.

Hans then learned the true nature of King Birlibi’s golden game. From that time on, Hans had neither luck nor fortune in his affairs. No matter how much he toiled, he could achieve nothing; instead, things went from bad to worse, day by day.

His worst enemies were the mice that devoured his grain in his fields and barns, the weasels, rats, and martens that slaughtered his chickens, ducks, and pigeons, and the foxes and wolves that took his lambs, sheep, foals, and calves. In short, the vermin wreaked such havoc that within a few years, Hans lost his estates and farms, his horses and cattle, his sheep and calves, until he could no longer call even a single hen his own.

He was forced to leave his home and lands as a poor man, with a stick in his hand, alongside his wife and children, and sustain himself in his old age as a day laborer.

And so, Hans often recounted the story of how he had gained his wealth and risen from a peasant to a nobleman, and he thanked God for sending rats and mice as his redeemers, making him poor again.

“Otherwise,” the poor man said, “I might not have made it to heaven, and the devil would have kept his hold over me, and I would have had to dance to the Rat King’s tune forever in the hereafter.”

He also shared that gold, gained in such a strange and secretive way, carried no blessing. Despite all his treasures, he had never felt as content in his heart as he did later in his deepest poverty. Indeed, he was a more wretched man when he rode about as a nobleman with a team of six horses than afterward, when he was often glad to have just salt and potatoes in the evening.

And that brings us to the end of this essay. If you enjoyed it, please share it widely to help me grow my audience, and please consider signing up for a paid subscription of my Substack to support my work. I rely 100% on the support of readers like you.

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As the post-national multi-cultural social-engineering experiment of the past 80 years reaches its ugly but inevitable chaotic conclusion and the world begins to take stock on how to rebuild the cultural fabric of our nations before things spiral into full-blown race wars and civil unrest (or worse), the urgent question arises: what does it take to glue a fractured nation back together and rebuild a cohesive “national identity”?

How do you get a fractured society that has lost its common cultural core (and has turned hostile to all the values and principles upon which these nations once stood) to set aside their divisions and rally together again around a new common vision of the future and a renewed sense of shared identity?

~ ~ ~

According to the Oxford dictionary, the dry clinical definition of a “nation” is a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.

There’s so much that’s been left unsaid in that simplistic definition.

Why, for example, did America succeed in becoming a singular nation in the minds of its people despite the fact that, in defiance of that Oxford dictionary definition and in contrast with what defined the sense of nationhood back on the European continent (where ancestry, culture, and language defined everything), America’s sense of nationhood did not emerge from a single dominant religion, language, culture, or ancestral heritage, and has always included a huge multi-ethnic foreign-born population thanks to the never-ending waves of new immigrants washing up on its shores. And yet, a single patriotic nation emerged despite the wildly different cultural traditions of its constituent parts, which varied not just from colony to colony and town to town, but even from one house to the next.

Even the common language link that we take for granted today wasn’t nearly as clear at the time of America’s founding. A significant proportion of its early population only used English as their lingua franca out on the street but spoke a different language inside their homes. Ancestry estimates based on surnames in the 1790 census suggests that those of German and Dutch heritage comprised a full 29% of the population (!), and even those who spoke English were anything but cohesive — that same census shows that another 16% was comprised of Scottish, Irish, or Welch ancestry (all English speakers but hardly the best of friends with Englishmen back on the British Isles).

By the 1910 census, only around 25% of immigrants coming to America were still coming from one of the English-speaking countries. The rest were Germans, Italians, Jewish, Polish, Swedish, French, and Norwegians as the next most populous immigrant groups — there are a total of 27 other languages besides English listed as the first languages of immigrants on the 1910 census! You don’t have to scratch very deep below the surface to find the cultural patchwork of what makes up the “typical’ American.

No nation in history has ever been forged from raw ingredients with such a colossal diversity in ancestry, history, culture, language, or religion.

Another notable example which highlights the unlikelihood that America would ever have succeeded in forging itself into a single patriotic nation is that, during the colonial era before America’s War of Independence, both Virgina and Massachusetts were so hostile to Catholics that they prohibited Catholics from settling and even from setting foot inside their colonies — a 1647 law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony imposed banishment on Catholic priests for the first offense of entering the colony and death if they came back a second time! Meanwhile, the colony of Maryland was founded specifically to serve as a haven for Catholics fleeing persecution in Britain after the English Reformation. These states could not have been more ideologically different. And yet, instead of launching religious wars against each other in keeping with the long-established European tradition, they instead did the unthinkable by voluntarily joining the same Republic and signing on to the same Constitution!

Likewise, the tensions between the Quakers and their Puritan neighbors during the colonial era are legendary. Yet once again, all willingly signed on to that same Constitution!

Perhaps the only thing that all these raw ingredients had in common with each other is that they all had very little in common but wanted the freedom to keep it that way.

Partly because of the experience of fighting the Revolutionary War and partly because of the experience of having to look to one another to create a strong enough republic after that war to defend their newly won freedom from being extinguished by Britain during the peace that followed, these diverse peoples were willing to bind themselves together as a singular patriotic nation.

But there was one key difference between the glue that bound America together versus that has been used to glue all other countries together before or since — rather than sharing a single culture, America was founded on the idea of Liberty. By all accounts, these diverse states should never have been able to become “one people”. And yet, in both heart and mind, and not just in a legal sense, they defied the Oxford dictionary to become one large American family — frequently quarrelsome, full of warts and wrinkles, unbelievably diverse in all the ways that matter, yet one patriotic family nonetheless. The American “tribe” truly is unlike any other (or, at least it was, but I’m getting ahead of the story).

The American Constitution was the physical embodiment of that unwritten social contract to preserve one another’s liberty — that’s why, to this day, the American Pledge of Allegiance to acquire citizenship and the oaths taken by judges and politicians upon taking office are not pledged to any king, country, or government, only to their Constitution — it is the blueprint that was meant to safeguard their own and each other’s liberty.

Lots of other nations have inspirational-sounding constitutions (some even more eloquently written than America’s), and many of them were modelled upon some version of America’s Constitution. Yet many of those living under these other constitutions are nonetheless NOT a singular people despite having spent centuries confined together in one country. A parchment does not make a people.

The legal architecture to bind them together as a country is there, but the patriotic instinct to bind those people to one another is missing. Their constitutions failed to inspire — the words may be the same but those words have not lit the same spark in the hearts and minds of their people. And those other countries struggle to assimilate newcomers, whereas America does not.

Instead, these countries are plagued by long-simmering internal political dysfunction, secession movements, civil wars, and borders that are permanently in flux. As Belgian politician and cultural critic Jules Destrée famously wrote in 1912, “in Belgium there are only Walloons and Flemish people, but no Belgians.” And he wrote that long before the waves of recent mass migration and before the post-WWII European experiment with post-national multiculturalism had begun!

Culturally, there are two nations trapped within Belgium’s borders. And the dysfunction still hasn’t been resolved more than a century later — from 2018 until 2020, Belgium had NO government for a mindboggling 652 days because it was unable to form a government against the backdrop of these simmering tensions between the French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish. And in 2024, Belgium went through another 7 month gap without a government as intense post-election negotiations resulted in yet another stalemate.

The divisions between these two cultural tribes are so entrenched that unsuccessful independence movements have also been simmering on both the Flemish and Walloonian sides for more than a century, with no resolution in sight. It would seem that, more than a century after Jules Destrée’s pithy observation, there are still no Belgians in Belgium. Nation-building is hard.

As we will soon see as this essay unfolds, America became a singular patriotic nation precisely because it was not composed of a single or even of similar cultures. It became a patriotic nation precisely because of what it took to inspire diverse peoples to voluntarily unite under a single Constitution in spite of all their differences — it is perhaps the only nation-building effort that has ever been able to achieve such a feat.

Other countries have tried but ultimately failed to overcome their historical, cultural, religious, and linguistic divisions. Newcomers simply create even more internal tribes. Even if things settle down for a while, sectarianism and factionalism ultimately keep breaking through because these top-down efforts at nation-building were never propelled by a bottom-up unifying desire for liberty.

But as liberty is throttled in America by the centralization of powers, legislative strangulation, and bureaucratic bloat, even America is gradually succumbing to internal factionalism and struggling to assimilate some of its newcomers — more on that in a moment.

This is one of the core lessons of this essay: if you put pressure on people from the top, they resist that pressure by taking refuge in tribal divisions. But the reverse happens if government offers liberty as the prize — immense tribal divisions can be overcome to create a single sense of nationhood in order to preserve that liberty — but only if that liberty requires everyone to look to one another to keep them free from big meddlesome government. Once liberty is replaced by a managerial state, tribalism thrives, and the national identity begins to fray.

America’s unique foundational focus on Liberty achieved the impossible by inspiring thirteen dissimilar and frequently quarrelling founding colonies to willingly bind themselves together as a republic. It also served as a magnet for many additional states, each with their own unique character, to nonetheless willingly apply to join that Republic at a later date (like Vermont, Tennessee, Ohio, Alabama, Oregon, etc.). And even after some territories were later added by annexation or conquest (like Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona), unlike other conquered territories elsewhere in the world that have spent centuries wallowing in resentment against their new masters, these new American states not only accepted their fate without further conflict but these newly annexed citizens even fully bought into the American national identity and rapidly became “American” in every sense. Even for those who had to be conquered first in order to bring them into the fold, the American Dream is irresistibly addictive because it is founded on the idea of liberty.

Contrast this with the Belgian experience — there is no Belgian Dream, only a Walloonian Dream and a Flemish Dream.

Or consider Quebec, which dreams of independence from Canadian Confederation — Quebec has remained an unhappy participant in the Canadian system ever since it was conquered by the British in 1763 — to them, the Canadian flag is not a symbol of liberty but rather a symbol of oppression despite the fact that French Canadians did, in the early decades after conquest, transfer their patriotic loyalty to the British Crown, only to lose that patriotic sentiment as soon as the British began their efforts to try to transform them into Englishmen. In the War of 1812, French Canadians voluntarily enlisted and fought valiantly alongside the British to fend of an American invasion, much to the surprise of the invading Americans who had convinced themselves that the French Canadians would greet them as liberators. Yet by 1837, Lower Canada (modern Quebec) was rioting in the streets in armed rebellion in protest of their English masters.

Everything about the American experience defies all the dictionary definitions of what it means to create and sustain a nation. Even after America’s Union was tested and temporarily split in two during the bitter and bloody U.S. Civil War (triggered by the growing centralization and expansion of federal powers which caused the southern states to feel like the Republic was betraying its commitment to preserve the liberty for each state to govern its own internal affairs), America nonetheless was able to come back together as one cohesive nation after the Civil War without the multi-decadal simmering violence that so often follows failed attempts at secession in so many other countries.

The South today is no less patriotic to the American flag than the North — by some measures even more so if you consider that the former states that were part of the Confederacy during the Civil War provide nearly as many recruits for today’s US military compared to former Union states despite the fact that these former Confederate states have less than half of the population of those former Union states. America has a unique ability to inspire, absorb, and assimilate people in defiance of all the criteria laid out in that Oxford dictionary definition.

In other words, the concept of “nation” is much more than the legal or geographic notion of a “country”. It is a shared bond towards one another as a people — a sense of bottom-up patriotism that emerges spontaneously from the hearts and minds of its people. It is the largest “family” that we identify with — our national tribe. And it is a two-way unwritten social contract; we identify with that tribe but the tribe equally has to accept us as one of its members.

Beyond nation, the next division up is at the species level — homo sapiens versus all the other animals — which inspires no loyalty or sense of kinship at all. That’s the United Nations vision for all of humanity, which seeks to coerce everyone into viewing themselves as belonging to a single tribe — the “Brotherhood of Man”. This abstract philosophical idea is promoted by academics and idealistic liberal politicians, but it simply doesn’t exist as a practical reality out on the street. The idea that we are all united as a singular “Brotherhood of Man” does not lead to patriotic feelings.

As the Covid experience proved, even when all of mankind comes under simultaneous attack from an enemy outside of our species, we don’t join as one — we retreat back into our tribal identities even as many seize that opportunity to exploit the “crisis” for power and money at the expense of their fellow humans. We are not, nor were we ever, nor will we ever be “all in this together.”

There is no universal kinship that can unite us all under a single umbrella. We are tribal by nature and no amount of top-down social engineering can refashion our sense of “tribe” to encompass our entire species. Why not? Because the bigger the political system gets, the more rules we impose to keep order, and the more resources that accumulate in the hands of the government, the more that natural divisions will begin to emerge as various factions begin to compete for preferential access to land, resources, redistributive taxes, regulatory privileges, and to make sure that even the well-intended one-size-fits-all legislation is tweaked to fit their unique circumstances and not someone else’s. Our tribe is comprised of those with whom we have something in common, whereas the sense of the “other” emerges in our minds to identify the other tribes that our tribe is forced to compete with based on geography, culture, history, language, religion, ideology, etc, etc.

And now, even our national identities are unravelling because we have lost pride in our common culture, forgotten our history, turned our backs on the shared principles that once united our countries, flooded our countries with millions of migrants, degrading our national sovereignty through countless international treaties, encouraged multi-culturalism as a policy, and not only removed the obligation to assimilate but even actively encouraged newcomers not to assimilate. In sum, we have quite a mess on our hands.

~ ~ ~

National Geographic provides an alternate definition of “nation”:

“A nation is a territory where its people are led by the same government. The word ‘nation’ can also refer to a group of people who share a history, traditions, culture and, often, language—even if the group does not have a country of its own.” [my emphasis]

The first half of that definition is rooted in the post-nationalism of our era as it deliberately confuses the difference between a nation and a country. A passport is not to be confused with patriotic feeling. America is a nation. Belgium is only country.

But the second half of National Geographic’s definition speaks to the more traditional path to nationhood — the ability of culture, history, tradition, and language to forge a familial bond within an in-group to the exclusion of other out-groups, and to maintain that unshakable bond across the span of time.

For example, the Basques are a nation — a distinct people — spread across two countries who have not had a country of their own for at least 3,000 years. Entire civilizations have come and gone, yet the Basques are still there, unfazed, unassimilated, and distinct. Genetically, linguistically, and culturally, the Basque nation reaches back in an unbroken line for at least 10,000 years!

By contrast, Spain (one of the two host countries in which the Basque nation is located) is a country, for a long time it was a kingdom, and for a while it even became an Empire, but despite all the efforts of the center to bring the periphery into the fold, it has never truly been a nation in a unified cultural sense because it is composed of many distinct smaller nations like the Basques and Catalonians who don’t actually want to be there — their allegiance is to their tribe, not to the larger artificial Spanish country or empire in which they are confined at the present time.

Spain is held together by the raw might of its institutional powers and the loyalty of the patronage network that Madrid has bought itself through the power of taxation and legislation, in contrast with the cultural, linguistic, and ancestral glue that has held the Basques together for millennia even without a government of their own to impose that bond by force. But the Basques will undoubtedly still be there long after Spain ceases to exist, just as they have outlived the Romans, the Visigoths, the Franks, the Umayyad Caliphate and Al-Andalus, the Kingdom of Navarre, the Kingdom of Aragon and Castile, and the Spanish Monarchy, all of which preceded the rise of the modern centralized Spanish state in their turns.

At best, Spain has merely achieved partial nation status, with some citizens (especially those belonging to groups that dominate national politics) buying into the artificial Spanish national identity, even as many peripheral “tribes” fail to share that enthusiasm for a national “family” that preys upon their resources and undermines their local autonomy— on the contrary, these rebellious hold-outs are alienated still further by federal efforts to impose that national identity onto its dissenting citizens by coercion and by force. Coercion has a way of heightening rather than healing national divisions.

Nationhood can only emerge if there is a bottom-up appetite for it. Top-down efforts at nation-building fail miserably as they drive a giant emotional wedge between a country and its dissidents. A country is a legal and geographic concept whereas nationhood isn’t about logic or law; it is deeply rooted in (and emerges from) our emotions — from our sense of belonging to and being respected by a larger family or tribe.

France was once a nation in addition to being both a country and an empire, with its people embracing their king as their nation’s “Great Father”. Even the indigenous tribes in New France came to refer to France’s kings by that moniker. Theirs was not a nation founded on liberty in the American sense, but on the sense that, in some way, all of the king’s subjects were the king’s children and he would, in some way, attempt to fairly adjudicate between them and look out for them as a kind of shepherd. The king was the gold-giver, law-maker, and shepherd at the heart of the vast patronage network from which France drew its support.

And after the inept monarchy was guillotined in the late 18th century after having lost its legitimacy in the eyes of too many of its subjects, that authority to act as the nation’s shepherd was transferred in turn to elected councils, dictators, legislatures and the presidency, but the core idea of a French nation centered around a powerful central shepherd remained at the core of the French national identity. And, whenever that shepherd is seen to fall short, the nation rises up to stage another revolution (three big ones so far since 1789, plus a bunch more near-revolutions).

But the French Empire has long since faded away, and the nation that remains is fast becoming just another country composed of fracturing people whose common bond is rapidly eroding away under the relentless assault on French culture by post-national social engineering — they are fast becoming a legal union of strangers as they cease to be a national family. It’s the same story in Britain, in Germany, in Sweden, and so many other places besides, which all thought they could tinker with their people’s sense of “tribe” by either transferring that patriotic national sentiment to a new multi-cultural identity or onto a new artificially-contrived pan-European identity, or both. Since the glue holding France together was a common cultural bond (rather than the American concept of individual and local liberty), as that cultural bond is eroded away by multi-cultural social engineering, the glue holding the nation together begins to dissolve. In America, the patriotic nation dissolves as liberty is eroded. In Europe, the patriotic nation dissolves as mono-cultural unity is diluted.

Like America, Canada did not truly emerge from a shared common culture, ancestry, history, language, or religion, but nor was it founded on American-style liberty, even if many of its immigrants did come to these shores in search of liberty, and found it in some measure compared to the suffocating nations that they left behind in the old country.

Canada emerged as a colonial remnant of the British Empire, cobbled together as a country by the ham-fisted historic center in order to exercise control over its peripheral geographic parts. But mostly, it was created to prevent the rest of British North America from being annexed by the expanding reach of that rebellious nation created by America’s thirteen rebel colonies. Canada takes pride in its “diversity” and the fact that it is not and never has been an American “melting pot”. And yet, unlike America, it can’t quite seem to get authentic bottom-up buy-in from all of its constituent parts, like Quebec and most of its indigenous nations, who by historic accident find themselves living inside that country. Their bodies belong to Canada, but their hearts and minds do not.

And then, after the Second World War, Canada threw itself upon the idea of post-national multiculturalism with an enthusiasm that is unparalleled by any other Western nation — it even ditched its earlier flag (the Red Ensign), which included symbols of its British and French heritage, to adopted a new generic flag in 1965 (the Maple Leaf) and made multi-culturalism its official policy in 1971 under Pierre Elliott Trudeau. By the time his son Justin Trudeau came to power, Trudeau Jr. proudly announced that Canada could be the world’s “first post-national state […] There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” — what better place for a post-national social-engineering experiment than a huge nation with immense geographic and cultural differences and rapid immigration, where even its most recent territorial acquisition (Newfoundland in 1949) only joined Confederation with great reluctance.

By contrast, Quebec, much like the Basques in Spain, is undeniably a distinct nation unto itself with a distinct history, culture, language, and religious heritage, which finds itself legally and geographically trapped within that larger artificially-concocted Canadian jurisdiction through no fault of their own.

Throughout most of its history since it was conquered by the British in 1763, Quebec has been on the blunt end of a relentless 250-year social engineering experiment to try to assimilate the French Canadian identity, erase the French language, dilute the French population via mass migration, and suppress French culture in order to forcibly assimilate the French Canadian identity into the larger British and then later the larger Canadian national family. And yet, with each poke and prod, the wedge between them only gets driven even deeper. Yves-Francois Blanchet, Quebec separatist and leader of Canada’s federal Bloc Quebecois political party, recently stated this in the most blunt terms when he said, “we are, whether we like it or not, part of an artificial country with very little meaning, called Canada. […] this nation [referring to Canada] is not mine. I don’t feel any more at ease in the Canadian Parliament than [Alberta Premier Danielle] Smith would feel at ease in the National Assembly of Quebec.”

When an outraged media called him out on dubbing Canada as an “artificial country”, he doubled down:

“Mr. Trudeau himself […] said that Canada is a post-national nation. It’s a non-nation, a country which denies its own identity and, ironically, with a central government which wants to control the jurisdictions of every province, slowly but surely, and with major parties who use mainly immigration as a tool to have a more fragile [I think he means easily exploitable] working force.

Within that presently, there’s a strong nation identifying itself as a nation, and a proud one [Quebec]. If everybody in this present country was to do like us [he means assert their provincial sovereignty], the dynamics of politics would be quite different in Ottawa. It has been pulled together through history with the hope of making Quebecers into Canadians just like any other Canadians. And it failed. So maybe this country is a bit artificial.”

Meanwhile, the growing separatist sentiment in Alberta is also driving that province to also sever its emotional ties towards Canada as it too evolves towards becoming a proto-nation in its own right. But casting off the yoke of an oppressive distant government that undermines local decision-making at every turn is not enough to automatically give Albertans a cohesive national cultural identity — something more must happen in the hearts and minds of Albertans to glue them together as an Albertan nation.

When Mr. Blanchet was recently asked if he has any tips for Alberta to help them in their quest, he pointed out that a nation “requires a culture of their own, and I am not certain that oil and gas qualify to define a culture.” Work still needs to be done to evolve a common vision and a unifying “patriotic” emotional bond that doesn’t include Ottawa, as either parent or villain, to help them define that identity. A culture that depends on a common enemy to sustain its relevance in the hearts and minds of its people is also artificial, even if the underlying grievances are real. Nationhood requires not just a definition of what you are not, but also a clear sense of the glue that binds you together as a tribe.

Meanwhile, Germans spent most of their history without a singular country to call their own — during the Middle Ages, German-speakers were divided into countless separate suffocating feudal micro-states despite their shared culture, language, folklore, and ancestral bonds. Indeed, uniting all these people under a single democratic umbrella became an obsession for German-speaking people as they yearned to create a political force capable of resisting and replacing feudal tyranny.

German speakers in Europe spent the late 18th and early 19th century clamouring to catch up with other European nations, like France and England, which were already far ahead in their quest to be united as a single culture within their own self-governing nation. This drive to dismantle empires in order to give distinct nations their own countries was the defining obsession of 19th century liberal movements throughout Europe — while American liberty was defined as freedom from government, the 19th century concept of liberty in Europe was focused on the struggle for cultural or ethnic groups (referred to as “nations”) to achieve self-governance — a subtle yet important difference. As surprising as it is for many people today, nationalism (and all the intolerance and discrimination that often accompanies ethno-states) emerged from 19th century liberalism as the reactionary antidote to imperial tyranny.

To return the favor of advice to Mr. Blanchet based on the bitter lessons drawn from German nationalism, Quebec should also take heed in that their own quest for independence is also struggling to gain support from all of its citizens who don’t share a Quebecois heritage because, like a European ethno-state, the evolution of Quebec’s culture rests firmly in the hands of the centralized provincial government in Quebec City.

Unlike the decentralized republic created by America’s Founding Fathers, Quebec’s centrally controlled system is quite oppressive towards many of its outlying regions and towards all the other subcultures that don’t come from a Quebecois heritage — the indigenous peoples, the English, Irish, Scottish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Portuguese, Eastern Europeans, Africans, Caribbeans, Asians, and Middle Easterners who were settled in Quebec by Canada in order to dilute the French Canadian grip over the province, yet who came in good faith and are now citizens like everyone else, and in some cases with cultural roots in the province that also extend back up to 260 years.

The central authority exercised by Quebec City is undoubtedly a necessary adaptation in order to keep Ottawa’s heavy hand at bay as long as Quebec remains a part of Canada. But if, after independence, liberty for some comes at the expense of eroding the liberty of others, that won’t glue Quebec together as a cohesive whole.

If Quebec wants to bring ALL its hearts and minds on board for a successful independence bid to get out from Ottawa’s thumb, while simultaneously preserving the cultural identity of its Quebecois heritage, it should consider refashioning itself as a French-speaking mirror of the early United States by pre-drafting a constitution modelled on the one created by America’s Founding Fathers (before it was corrupted by too much centralization) in order to transform Quebec into a decentralized, bottom-up French-speaking Republic immediately following independence, with almost all decision-making authority devolved from Quebec City to new regional governments upon achieving independence.

That, and probably only that, is what it would take to bring Quebec’s diverse population under a single patriotic and harmonious umbrella to achieve a successful separatist referendum. Don’t be another ham-fisted version of Ottawa — be the opposite. Be a French version of the American Republic to bring everyone on board. Liberty is contagious and inspires patriotism. Bloated central authority and ethno-nationalism does not.

~ ~ ~

But let’s turn back to the unique lessons offered by the German national experience… Once united as a single German Empire in 1866, Germany struggled to keep it together, not only because the nationalism went to their heads and extinguished individual liberty within their new ethno-nation, but also because its militant ethos led to two world wars that tore their country apart, twice, only a few decades after it was formed. Ironically, when Germans were finally reunited once again in 1990 (this time by peaceful reunification) after yet another 45-year outside-imposed partition, they flipped to the opposite cultural extreme as they completely abandoned any sense of national cultural self-preservation — undoubtedly in no small part out of shame and guilt for Germany’s crimes committed during the fever of national socialism.

Instead they launched themselves whole-heartedly into the newest pan-European neo-liberal social-engineering project (the European Union), this time to create a technocratic post-national empire that seeks though politics, through monetary policy, through mass migration, through institutional domination, and through cultural indoctrination, to erase, dilute, and undermine both the national sovereignty and the cultural identity that their 19th century ancestors had fought so hard to achieve — Germany is turning into yet another “multi-culti” country that’s at risk of becoming little more than a postal code without a cultural identity, like so many other liberal democracies in the West.

Germany isn’t the only one — they are reflective of a much broader trend that emerged since the Second World War as the West embarked on a giant collective experiment to try to stamp out the feverish ethno-nationalism that had turned Europe and Asia into a giant bloody horror show in the 1930s and 40s. The idea they latched onto as the solution to 19th century European liberalism (a.k.a. nationalism) was 20th century liberalism (a.k.a. multi-cultural internationalism). If everyone is from somewhere else, mixed together as rainbow nations with only the country name printed on the cover of our passports to differentiate us, and a detached scientifically-informed technocratic regime to watch over us, then perhaps our tribal human nature would be tamed once and for all, and a “Brotherhood of Man” would emerge at long last to let our shared human kinship shine through in all its theoretical glory.

It’s the great switcheroo — where once nations existed as distinct peoples even if they did not have their own countries because they were subordinate to the rules of centrally-controlled multi-ethnic empires, now countries exist but no longer with their own distinct peoples as the nations that once inhabited them are scattered far and wide. The pendulum has swung to the other extreme.

Sushi on Mondays, Italian pasta on Tuesdays, kebabs on Wednesdays, taco Thursdays, chicken masala on Fridays, schnitzel and burgers on Saturdays, bangers and mash on Sundays, and a big festive “Happy Holidays” to everyone every few weeks as each quaint cultural heritage is celebrated in turn. Stripped of the vice of tribalism, and with ethnic culture reduced to food, music, and tourist attractions, humanity is allegedly finally free to live out our individual human potential to the fullest. Peace. Harmony. And the human solidarity to bring everyone together as one big harmonious international family. Kumbaya.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way. Not even close. And the harder that their top-down thumb is pressed down on the people to achieve by force what migration and propaganda failed to achieve on their own, the more angry, divisive and hostile the pushback becomes.

~ ~ ~

As I discussed in greater detail in my recent 3-part essay about The Psychological Unravelling of the West, as national identity was stripped away by the post-national, multicultural experiment, what emerged was raw tribalism on steroids. The rainbow-colored woke movement is tribal and intolerant to the extreme, with countless sub-tribes both collaborating and competing for all the power, resources, and regulatory privileges that are concentrated in the hands of our increasingly powerful and increasingly centralized governments. And the more that the government tries to mold society, the greater the incentive for everyone to leverage their micro-tribal identities to opportunistically turn that social engineering to their own advantage, even if it comes at the expense of someone else.

Through this emergent woke tribal lens, every individual has been reduced to their ethnicity, religious affiliation, and skin color — it defines everything. And since they’re all mixed together and living under one governing authority instead of living separately by geography and region (as tribes once did when they were confined to larger multi-ethnic empires, each with their own provincial governor), these tribes are now locked in perpetual war over who gets to control those powerful centralized levers of government, including in America, which turned its back on decentralized, limited government to also increasingly turn itself into a vast bureaucratic managerial state.

As tribalism resurges, the Individual is wholly reduced to his tribal markers. Under this pressure, the entire Judeo-Christian architecture of Western civilization (in the legal, educational, and cultural sense), from which emerged concepts like meritocracy, individual rights, individual worth, equality before the law, property rights, and so much more, is now in full-scale collapse, under attack from all sides by all these tribal factions that are leaping into the void once filled by a cohesive national cultures. If all members of the tribe are essentially cut from the same cloth, meritocracy can thrive as competition happens at the individual level. But when society is composed of a thousand warring tribes, individual meritocracy gets pushed aside by that tribal power struggle that consumes everything. The incentives created by this fractured tribal competition for power and resources create a self-reinforcing belief system that’s hostile to building a cohesive national culture.

Compounding this toxic witches’ brew are outside forces, including state actors, that also smell opportunities to leverage this cultural implosion and take advantage of the rise of identity politics to pursue their own agendas within the West itself. For example, China’s hostile infiltration into Western political systems (especially in Canada) is well documented.

Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood and its sponsors (like Qatar) are also having an increasingly potent influence on university campuses throughout the West, on mosques located inside the West, on activist movements on Western streets, and even on the political decisions made by Western governments — it’s an ironic and self-inflicted oversight considering that the Muslim Brotherhood is banned and even classified as a terrorist group in multiple Middle Eastern countries, including by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, because of its radical interpretations of Islam, its hostility to both Western values and Arab nationalism, it’s overt resistance to assimilation into local and national cultures as it seeks to colonize any country or culture in which it gains a toehold, and its relentless efforts to turn radical Islam into a political force capable of challenging and even overthrowing long-established local political structures. And yet, within Western nations, it’s an influential organization whose networks are allowed to operate with impunity.

Money, voting blocks, political influence, and social pressure from these imported foreign actors are also re-shaping the evolution of our nation’s culture, laws, and social fabric, and are contributing to the chaos, anger, and unresolvable tensions that are consuming our Western nations. Against the backdrop of post-WWII multi-cultural internationalism that seeks to stamp out all remnants of the discredited European ethno-state, the concept of cultural assimilation between host and immigrant has been wholly inverted as the guilt-manipulated old stock of Western nations increasingly defers to the cultural sensitivities, values, and idiosyncrasies of the newcomers. The host is being assimilated by the guests.

Before I dive into the remainder of this essay — into the challenges and solutions to rebuilding the glue to heal our fractured nations — 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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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

“I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” — Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America.

~ ~ ~

Before I turn to Alberta and the East-West divide that is threatening to tear Canada apart, I want to begin with a brief story from another time and place to bring some of the complex ideas contained in this essay into focus.

In 1864, three years into the bitter U.S. Civil War, as that war was turning increasingly barbaric, Abraham Lincoln allowed Colonel James Jaquess and another colleague to secretly slip across enemy lines to travel to Richmond, Virginia, to meet with Jefferson Davis, the first and only President of the Confederate States of America, in an unofficial effort to negotiate for peace. The full exchange, originally published in the September 1864 issue of the Atlantic (Vol. 14, No. 83 — also available on Project Guttenberg), is extremely eye-opening — I recommend reading the full exchange, but will reproduce the key points below:

Early in the conversation, Colonel Jaquess asks Davis:

“Our people want peace,—your people do, and your Congress has recently said that you do. We have come to ask how it can be brought about.”

“In a very simple way,” replies Davis. “Withdraw your armies from our territory, and peace will come of itself. We do not seek to subjugate you. We are not waging an offensive war, except so far as it is offensive-defensive,—that is, so far as we are forced to invade you to prevent your invading us. Let us alone, and peace will come at once.”

“But we cannot let you alone so long as you repudiate the Union. That is the one thing the Northern people will not surrender.”

“I know. You would deny to us what you exact for yourselves,—the right of self-government.”

As the conversation evolves it becomes clear that to Colonel Jaquess, it is perfectly moral, just, and natural for the minority, even a distinct geographic minority, to willingly subordinate itself to the democratic outcomes of majority rule. When you’re part of the numerical majority, this view is as natural as the sun rising in the East.

In this context, an exasperated Davis delivers one of his most famous quotes as he touches upon a theme that ultimately underpins virtually every separatist movement and civil war in history, that the South’s minority was not willing to allow itself to be further subjugated to the will of the North’s numerical majority:

“I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves; and so the war came.”

In Davis’s view, the idea that culturally and economically distinct sovereign states should subordinate themselves to the will of the numerical majority of the United States as a collective whole was a repudiation of the principles upon which the Republic was founded, which viewed each state as a sovereign entity, free to govern their own affairs within their own state borders, united only as a Republic as a means of securing their borders against foreign aggression and to regulate interstate commerce, NOT so that other states could override the local sovereignty of individual states via the national ballot box.

In short, Davis and his Southern peers viewed the American Republic as a collection of united yet sovereign states, each with their own distinct peoples. Whereas Colonel Jaquess, Abraham Lincoln, and their Northern peers had come to view the United States as a single united entity, one people united as a single nation.

Colonel Jaquess tries to impress upon Davis that the Union far outnumbered the Confederacy (4.5 to 1) and that within the Union exists the “unanimous determination to crush the Rebellion and save the Union at every sacrifice.” However, Colonel Jaquess points out to Davis that if the rebel Confederate government could be dismantled via an immediate cessation of hostilities and the Southern states returned to the Union, now, before the growing barbarism of the war caused such resentment that all of the Southern leaders would assuredly be hanged if the South loses the war, then peace and harmony could be restored and the North would even willingly welcome the South back into the Union, forgive the bloodshed, and help the South rebuild the destruction caused by the war.

Davis turns him down.

“There are some things worse than hanging or extermination. We reckon giving up the right of self-government one of those things.”

“By self-government you mean disunion,—Southern Independence?”

“Yes.”

“And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest.”

“No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, however this war may end, make them two nations.”

Colonel Jaquess turned the conversation to whether the conflict can be settled by letting the combined people of the United States (Union and Confederacy together) decide the contentious questions that led to the fracture of the Union by putting those questions to a nation-wide referendum, such that the South commits itself to accepting the wishes of the democratic majority, whichever way these questions are decided. To which Davis replies:

“That the majority shall decide it, you mean. We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority, and this would subject us to it again.”

“But the majority must rule finally, either with bullets or ballots.”

“I am not so sure of that. Neither current events nor history shows that the majority rules, or ever did rule. The contrary, I think, is true.”

Colonel Jaquess is dismayed.

“But, seriously, Sir, you let the majority rule in a single State; why not let it rule in the whole country?”

“Because the States are independent and sovereign. The country is not. It is only a confederation of States; or rather it was: it is now two confederations.”

“Then we are not a people,—we are only a political partnership?”

“That is all.”

Davis concludes the meeting with Colonel Jaquess and his colleague, stating that:

“I am glad to have met you, both. I once loved the old flag as well as you do; I would have died for it; but now it is to me only the emblem of oppression.”

“I hope the day may never come, Mr. Davis, when I say that,” said the Colonel.

After they left President Davis, Colonel Jaquess’ colleague was asked about the outcome of that meeting, to which he replied:

“Nothing but war,—war to the knife.”

The philosophical divide could not be bridged. The North could not compromise on a fractured Union that would result in the continental power of the United States to splinter into independent parts. To them, the republic created by the “united states in America” had become a single indivisible nation inhabited by a single indivisible people — a single nation called the United States OF America.

By contrast, the South could not compromise on subordinating itself to the majority rule of the greater whole at the expense of losing the state sovereignty that allowed each state to pursue its own destiny within its own borders according to its own local culture and local economic needs, as the Republic’s Founding Fathers had originally intended. And so, the bid for peace failed and the war ground onwards into its final brutal year.

As Davis makes clear during this extraordinary historical exchange, the moral and economic issue of slavery was merely the trigger — underneath it all was the bigger question of state sovereignty and self-governance, and the choice between a decentralized republic versus a singular all-encompassing nation.

Abraham Lincoln later complained that Jefferson Davis’s only terms of peace were the independence of the South — the dissolution of the Union. And Navy Secretary Gideon Wells later wrote in his diary about Colonel Jaquess’ attempt to reach out to Davis, stating that:

“Colonel Jaquess is another specimen of inconsiderate and unwise, meddlesome interference. The President assented to his measure and gave him a card, or passport, to go beyond our lines. There is no doubt that the Colonel was sincere, but he found himself unequal to the task he had undertaken. Instead of persuading Jeff Davis to change his course, Davis succeeded in persuading poor Jaquess that the true course to be pursued was to let Davis & Co. do as they please. The result was that Jaquess and his friend Gilmore who went to Richmond to shear, came back shorn.”

~ ~ ~

It may surprise some readers to see me start this essay about Alberta’s struggle to assert its sovereignty within Canada with a story about the leader of the Confederate South from the U.S. Civil War era. This is a different era with different issues at stake, and most view Canada as a completely different and morally upright country that prides itself on its politeness and on its cultural and economic diversity as it avoids the raw, snarling, uncompromising politics of our American neighbors. Besides, the dividing line is East vs West, not North vs South. Surely, our divisions can be overcome with civility, grace, and appeals to unity within our larger Canadian family?

Yet once again, beneath it all, we see a country rupturing along a fault line defined by two incompatible moral world views, as incompatible as oil and water, a divided economy that reflects that moral divide, and the age old question — are we one indivisible people in one indivisible nation, or does the provincial sovereignty that’s so clearly defined in our Canadian Constitution still mean something?

What is the purpose of Canada, and who is it meant to serve? In short, this rupture isn’t merely a difference of opinion; it represents an existential philosophical rift. And that makes it very difficult for either side to back down.

The Eastern side of this Canadian fault line is dominated by a world view that is partially ideological, but mostly it is driven by self-serving self-interest and the appetite for control. Theirs is the view that emerged long before Canadian Confederation itself as Upper Canada (Ontario) set about establishing political control over British North America after the American War of Independence.

These founders of our Canadian nation sought to bind together what remained of Britian’s colonies after America’s independence to create a single nation designed to serve the needs of the Laurentian heartland of that emergent Canadian nation, while doing their best to shield Canada from dangerous democratic ideas about representative government that had seduced America to embrace republican democracy. 😱 In effect, Canada was never a bottom-up Union between free and equal provinces, but rather a top-down nation-building exercise by the center to exercise control over the extremities.

Within the parliamentary democracy that emerged, “some are clearly more equal than others” (as George Orwell might say) in the nation’s decision-making process. And provincial sovereignty, while written into the constitution, tends to get steamrolled whenever it emerges as an obstacle to Ottawa’s centrally planned agenda — the tools by which the provinces can defend their sovereignty against central overreach are lacking, by design. The Senate, the House of Commons, judicial appointments, the Privy Council, the powers vested in the Prime Minister, and so much more were all crafted to allow the Laurentian East to impose their will onto the lesser regions — in effect, Canada remains a kind of colonial project of the periphery by the elites of the heartland.

Complicating it all is the fact after 158 years of this parasitic relationship, a vast patronage network has evolved in the East (and throughout the country as a whole), which depends on maintaining that strong, centralized federal control — this patronage network uses its numerical advantage to leverage majority rule as the key strategy to impose its interests upon the rest of Canada and, when necessary, to steamroll regional or provincial sovereignty if it conflicts with their interests.

Any effort to change that oppressive constitutional status quo, which would give greater autonomy to sovereign provinces, represents an existential threat to their parasitic way of life. The moral question of oil and gas may be the trigger of the current rift, just as the moral question of slavery was the trigger in the run-up to the U.S. Civil War, but beneath it all is a broader question about how to balance provincial sovereignty against the political will of the national majority.

On the Western side of the divide are people driven by existential concerns about their ability to safeguard their local economies, their freedom, their way of life, and their prosperity after more than a decade of sustained and unrelenting economic attacks by Ottawa. And this isn’t the first time. Indeed, this fault line has been a major thorn in the West’s side from the very first day of Canadian Confederation, 158 years ago. This is merely the latest chapter in that troubled history as the Laurentian East steamrolls western provincial sovereignty to impose its globalist anti-oil-and-gas world view onto the West.

That philosophical and moral divide is now boiling over as the aftermath of the 2025 election opens an extremely dangerous new chapter in Canada’s evolution, with ramifications not just for Canada but for the whole of Western Civilization. The ideological battle between local sovereignty and centrally-controlled global socialism is coming to a head out on the Canadian prairie.

~ ~ ~

Separatist movements rarely end successfully. Most are frustrated, strangled, or crushed by the dominant power in various devious ways prior to achieving their objectives. Jefferson Davis is one of the lucky losers of history — he was spared the noose and was left in peace to write his memoires in his old age and in the comfort of his own home. All too often, separatist leaders end up suffering terribly along the way as repayment for their efforts.

One current example comes from the leader of the modern-day independence movement in the Catalonia region of Spain, who now lives in exile in Belgium — more on that specific example later). And an example from Canadian history is Louis Riel who led the Red River Rebellion in 1869-1870 in what has become Manitoba today, and then North-West Rebellion in 1885 in what later became Saskatchewan. Even though Louis Riel was fighting to address broader regional grievances, defend his people’s land rights, and achieve meaningful political representation for his people within the Canadian Parliament, but was not seeking full independence from Canada, Louis Riel was still ultimately sent to the gallows after tensions spiralled out of hand.

A smaller number of separatist movements achieve a greater degree of regional sovereignty — a limited victory — their leaders tend to fare better even as these movements as a whole fall short of their goal of full independence (i.e. Scotland, Greenland, Wales, Quebec, Basque Country, etc.). With the exception of independence movements in post-Soviet and post-Warsaw-Pact nations, not a single independence movement in any Western nation has achieved full independence since the end of the Second World War. Later on in this essay I’ll be looking at some of the tools that Canada uses to frustrate efforts to pursue separation, pioneered during Quebec’s struggle for independence.

A significant number of independence movements devolve into full scale civil war somewhere along the way — the American War of Independence, the U.S. Civil War, the complex Rhodesian Bush War that erupted following Prime Minister Ian Smith’s Universal Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1965 (a story I’ve written about in my essay The Great Unravelling, Why Democracy Failed and How to Fix it (Amazon Affiliate Link), the Irish War of Independence, the Sudanese Civil War, the Yugoslav Wars, the Eritrean War of Independence, the Sri Lankan Civil War, the Chechen Wars, the Donbas War in Eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2022, and so on. Croatia’s bid for independence from Yugoslavia involved heavy fighting. Bosnia and Herzegovina devolved into full-scale ethnic cleansing and genocide as tensions came to a head.

On very rare occasions, full independence is achieved with minimal bloodshed, like in Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Slovenia (minimal fighting), mostly because of strong internal cohesiveness and intense pressure from outside nations to keep a lid on violence.

Still others get trapped somewhere in between, like Taiwan, Kosovo, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and Transnistria, which are de-facto independent but have been unable to rally sufficient international support to achieve full UN recognition as independent countries, reflecting the unresolved international issues that could still lead these countries into full-scale war at some later date.

And even when independence is achieved, internal divisions and conflicts about what to do with that independence all to often erupt into civil war after independence as different factions compete over what comes next and which faction gets to control the newly liberated throne, with examples ranging from Nigeria after independence from the UK, South Sudan after independence from Sudan, Rwanda after independence from Belgium, Mozambique after independence from Portugal, and so on.

In short, what Alberta faces is not for the faint of heart and is a lot more complicated that simply conducting a successful separatist referendum. The mother country rarely lets her children leave peacefully. And the children need to come to a unified agreement about what independence means once they achieve independence from their parent.

And so, it’s time for a Deep Dive into the storm that’s brewing in the West.

~ ~ ~

On May 5th, Premier Danielle Smith addressed her province and laid out a set of political demands in order to fix the broken relationship between Alberta and the federal government in Ottawa. What’s different about this demand and the many fruitless attempts that have come before is that, for the first time, the possibility of national divorce is now openly and firmly out on the table, with a clear ultimatum set for a referendum (in 2026) and a clear path that citizens must follow to gather the necessary signatures for a citizen-led petition to put that fateful question to the Albertan people.

I’ve included a link to her full 19-minute speech below (on YouTube) and encourage you to watch it before we dive deeper in this essay. The comments for her video are turned off on YouTube, but she also posted her video address on X (Twitter) where the comments section is already filling up very, very fast.

It summarizes the issues fueling the conflict in our current era as provincial sovereignty collides with national majority rule, and allows you to hear her lay out Alberta’s demands of Ottawa in her own words, all of which provides context for the deeper dive that follows in this essay as it becomes clear why, despite how reasonable Alberta’s demands are, those demands will be virtually impossible for Ottawa to fulfill. This is the beginning, not the end, of a fractious divide that is threatening to cleave Canada in two.

To briefly summarize her video address, Premier Smith discussed a lost decade during which Ottawa has engaged in sustained economic attacks against Alberta’s economy by systematically weaponizing malicious regulation and using a host of other devious strategies to block pipelines, cancel oil and gas projects, ban the tanker ships that are required to get oil to international markets, and made the approvals process for new projects so onerous and expensive that they have effectively throttled investment in the region, especially in the oil and gas industry but in many other industries as well.

Furthermore, Ottawa has cynically placed a cap on oil and gas industry emissions and hammered the industry with crippling carbon taxes. They’ve even imposed net-zero mandates on the power grid, which makes the power grid in the province increasingly unreliable and even dangerous. And so far the courts have not put a stop to any of it despite the fact that Ottawa is clearly in violation of Alberta’s provincial sovereignty, as defined by our constitution.

As Premier Smith points 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.”

The prairie provinces are Canada’s economic engine. Yet after a decade of ideological Liberal rule, Canada is now dead last in economic growth among industrialized nations.

Premier Smith laid out Alberta’s four unconditional demands to end this assault and restore Alberta’s constitutionally guaranteed provincial sovereignty:

* a guaranteed corridor and port access to tidewater off the Pacific, Arctic, and Atlantic coasts for the export of oil, gas, critical minerals, and other resources, in amounts supported by the free market, rather than by the diktats and whims of Ottawa. (in other words, free access to world markets and no sneaky ways of imposing production caps by Ottawa — we’ll talk about the implications of her demand to access the Atlantic coast shortly)

* the federal government must end all federal interference in the development of provincial resources by repealing the No New Pipelines Law (bill C-69), the oil tanker ban, the net-zero electricity regulations, the oil and gas emissions cap, the net-zero vehicle mandate, and any federal law or regulation that proports to regulate industrial carbon emissions, plastics, or the commercial free speech of energy companies (this final point is in reference to an attempt in 2024 by Parliament to pass legislation that would criminalize speaking well of fossil fuels!).

* the federal government must refrain from imposing export taxes or restrictions on the export of Alberta resources without the consent of the government of Alberta. As she says, “Frankly, all provinces should be given that same respect for their resources.”

* and finally, the federal government must provide to Alberta the same per capita federal transfers and equalization payments as is received by the other three largest provinces, Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia. (In effect, this is an end to the massively abused system of Equalization Payments, retaining the system only as a way to help the smallest and weakest provinces and territories while putting a stop to Quebec and Ontario using it to plunder the West).

As she said, if these points are agreed to, this would eliminate the doubts that many Albertans feel about the future of Alberta as a part of Canada. If passed, Alberta could continue on as a sovereign province under a de-fanged Canadian federal umbrella.

She’s not the first to demand some version of these things, but this time there’s an ultimatum looming over her words that provides real consequences if Ottawa resorts to its usual strategy of simply ignoring anything it doesn’t like or steamrolling over Alberta as it has over the past decade. This time national divorce is on the table.

Premier Smith explained that she is putting together a number of judicial, academic, and economic advisors to create a new “Alberta Next” panel to discuss Alberta’s future in Canada, and explore the steps Alberta can take to protect itself against the current or future hostile policies of the federal government. Some of the more popular ideas from that panel will be put to a provincial referendum in 2026 (the ultimate form of direct democracy). These new ideas would build on reforms that are already underway like the effort to create a provincial police force to end Alberta’s contract with the federally-run RCMP, thus mimicking the system that Quebec has as it too seeks to exert its own provincial sovereignty.

But there’s more. It’s what comes next that actually matters.

She emphasized that her government will not take steps for a government-led initiative to put a vote for separation on the referendum ballot. However, and this is the important part, “if there is a successful citizen-led referendum petition that is able to gather the requisite number of signatures requesting such a question to be put on a referendum, our government will respect the democratic process and include that question on the provincial 2026 referendum ballot as well.” Translation: if there is to be separation, it will come in the form of a citizen-led national divorce.

This comes on the back of a new Albertan law announced only a week earlier, reducing the number of signatures required for a citizen-led petition to trigger a constitutional referendum (i.e. for a separatist referendum). This new law reduces the threshold to trigger a referendum to only 177,000 signatures, down from the previously required 600,000.

The message is clear.

Nonetheless, she laid out reasons why she feels that Alberta still has plenty of tools to fend off Ottawa’s attacks and why she feels that a joint and prosperous united Canada that honors its Constitutional limits is still the best way forward, and that she will do everything in her power to negotiate a fair deal for Alberta.

In other words, she is not a separatist, something she emphasized repeatedly. This is a wise move at this stage of the game. It’s extremely dangerous for a separatist movement to coalesce around any individual leader.

A case in point… in 2017, after a request made by the Spanish government, Spain’s Constitutional Court declared an impending referendum on Catalonia’s self-determination to be in breach of the Spanish Constitution. The fed-up Catalonian leaders went ahead with the referendum anyway in spite of a police crackdown. The National Police Corps and the Guardia Civil intervened to prevent voting even as local Catalonian police allowed voting to continue. Turnout was thus abysmally low, at only 43%, due to so many polling stations being closed and the violence that erupted on that fateful day between civilians and police. Yet of the votes that were cast, 92% voted in favor of Catalonia becoming its own republic.

The Supreme Court intervened once again. Local police were investigated for disobedience and one Catalan mayor even investigated for sedition. After the Catalan government declared its intention to act upon the results of the referendum anyway and unilaterally declare independence from Spain, the Spanish government responded by summarily dismissing the entire Catalan government and imposing direct rule by the Spanish federal government.

The President of the government of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, fled to Belgium to avoid arrest, but in 2018 German police arrested him nonetheless and he faced extradition back to Spain. Long story short, after lots of back and forth and plenty of legal drama, the European Court of Justice finally intervened in 2022 to restore his parliamentary immunity. In 2024, he briefly returned to Spain from his exile in Belgium, gave a speech advocating for Catalonia’s right to self-determination, and then was forced to free into the crowd as a large-scale police operation began in order to try to arrest him. One local police officer was arrested on suspicion of helping Puigdemont escape, and Puigdemont is now back to living in exile in Belgium to escape the wrath of the Spanish government.

Although I have no idea what her true beliefs are, Premier Danielle Smith’s stance is wise at this stage of the game — by distancing herself from the separatist movement and by making it clear that if it happens it must happen as a citizen-led initiative, via petitions and a direct-democracy referendum, it helps insulate Premier Smith and her government from legal shenanigans if/when Ottawa starts playing nasty. It also avoids the mistake of allowing individual political personalities to define the movement. This reduces the risk that individual personalities become the target for a government- and media-led smear campaign that could tarnish the whole movement — instead the onus is put on Ottawa to do what it takes to convince the Albertan people that Canada is still a nation worth being part of.

Furthermore, it also establishes a clear precedent for what happens AFTER a successful referendum — it sets the precedent that an independent Alberta would emerge as a bottom-up republic, with government “by the people, for the people” rather than repeating the mistake of becoming a smaller top-down elite-led dictatorship with Edmonton rather than Ottawa holding the whip.

If separatism makes it onto the referendum ballot, it’s because Ottawa failed to earn back the support of the Albertan people, and the people themselves pushed for independence. Meanwhile, Premier Smith remains neutral, tasked with carrying out the people’s will whichever way the cards fall, establishing herself as the servant not the master of her people.

However, she also went out of her way to emphasize that those who are considering a national divorce are loyal Albertans too, NOT traitors, and that if a citizen-led separatist referendum is successful, she will accept the judgement of her fellow Albertans even if they choose to vote for a national divorce. Thus, those working on the petitions have nothing to fear from Premier Smith’s government.

Her demands are clear. And she now has a citizen-led ace in her back pocket if Ottawa doesn’t dance to her tune. The gauntlet has been thrown down.

But this is where things begin to get difficult. Even if Ottawa wanted to give Premier Smith everything she asked for, saying yes to her demands is virtually impossible and risks tearing the country apart from the other end.

Before I dive into the second half of this essay — into Ottawa’s impossible choices as it faces up to Alberta’s demands, the challenges and dangers that lie ahead if a separatist referendum is successful, and the devious tools at Ottawa’s disposal to block Alberta’s exit — I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!

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Ottawa, Trapped Between a Rock and a Hard Place

At first glance, Premier Smith’s demands seem quite reasonable, perfectly in line with our Constitution, with our constitutional concept of provincial sovereignty, and with the ethos of Western liberal democracy itself. And yet, her demands are virtually impossible for Ottawa to fulfill, even if Ottawa wanted to.

What Premier Smith has laid out is, functionally, the end of the federally-led climate crusade in Canada. The federal government can respect provincial autonomy. Or it can impose its climate crusade onto dissenting provinces by authoritarian diktat. But not both.

This presents a major problem for a Liberal government whose entire support base across the rest of the nation has been built on that fictitious climate narrative — after all, Mark Carney was the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action. Turning his back on that narrative now would spark a revolt among his support base.

Furthermore, the climate narrative is one of the main load-bearing myths of our era to justify the global socialist movement and the accelerating centralization of power in the hands of federal and international institutions as they continue to eat away at local and regional autonomy. Without the climate crusade, power begins to flow the other way.

If Alberta gets its way, its provincial sovereignty would overrule these climate-justified power grabs and the concentration of power at the federal and international level would begin to unravel. Respecting provincial sovereignty effectively renders Canada’s international climate agreements and internationally-agreed climate targets null and void. And no federal leader could ever sign another one without Alberta’s approval.

If Carney backs off in order to respect Alberta’s provincial sovereignty, he betrays the expectations of a very large number of people. But if Carney rides roughshod over Alberta’s demands to cater to his base and sustain the power-hungry globalist climate crusade, he triggers a separatist referendum in Alberta. Check mate.

Alberta’s four demands strike at the very heart of the climate belief system. It transfers power back to local jurisdictions. It restores provincial and national sovereignty. It kills the ESG initiatives and carbon taxes that are central to the WEF-led vision that is being imposed upon the world. And once granted to Alberta, her demands would ripple outward through the rest of the Canadian provinces, and beyond — why would any corporation remain headquartered in Toronto if it can exempt itself from all that baloney simply by relocating to Alberta? Whatever Alberta gets will immediately be demanded by the other provinces too. And so, provincial sovereignty is the grenade that unravels the entire climate crusade in Canada.

Ideology aside, there are a lot of people, corporations, institutions, and governments at all levels in Canada that are financially and politically dependent upon keeping that Green narrative alive. It’s their gravy train. They’re going to be putting a lot of pressure on Ottawa not to give an inch. That leaves Mark Carney to choose between putting the authoritarian squeeze on Alberta to satisfy his base or risk the wrath of the support base that put him in power.

Even his own newly acquired power as Prime Minister is at risk — he still relies on the eco-radical and radically socialist NDP party to maintain his grip on Parliament because he failed to win an outright majority in the recent election. That leaves him with very little room to manoeuver without triggering an election that could strip him of power. Yet if he begins to squeeze Alberta, separation looms. So, he’s in a bit of pickle.

Equalization is equally problematic for Ottawa. Quebec is a major net beneficiary of equalization payments. Take that away and the case for Quebec separation becomes much easier to sell to Quebec’s electorate. And so, without equalization to grease the wheels, Ottawa would simply appease one separatist movement while fueling the other.

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Dotting the walls of the red sandstone canyons all across the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States (where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet), high up on the vertical cliffs, you can see the ancient ruins of countless cliff dwellings and granaries, big and small, perched on seemingly impossible narrow ledges, sometimes hundreds of feet up off the valley floor where the slip of a single footstep means certain death. No sane individual that loves their children would voluntarily choose to raise a family in a place like that.

And yet, for more than a century, the refugees of a failing civilization did just that.

And then they mysteriously disappeared from the region altogether, leaving behind a devastated ecosystem that even today, more than 700 years after their passing, still hasn’t recovered.

Their story is a lesson to us all — and not for any of the reasons that you typically hear on the six o’clock news.

For centuries, the Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloan culture of the Southwest divided their time between the adobe pueblos and agricultural fields that they built among the pinyon pine and juniper woodlands up on top of the cooler mesas and growing crops and building pueblos alongside reliable water sources down on the hot canyon floors. But then, in the 12th and 13th centuries, all across the region, something big changed to cause these ancient people to start moving into these precarious stone hovels perched on the edge of certain death, half-way up between the canyon bottoms and the rim of the mesas above.

What made them abandon their earlier customs to adopt such a perilous new way of life?

The simplistic but only partially true explanation is that the climate changed. Two brutal multi-decadal megadroughts in the 12th and 13th centuries triggered a collapse of the cultures and traditional ways of life across the entire region — the geographic extent of these two droughts is shown in yellow (12th century) and red (13th century) in the chart below.

As the droughts took their toll, the entire previously relatively peaceful region was plunged into decades-long conflict, war, and extreme violence (there’s even archaeological evidence for torture, cannibalism (both ritual cannibalism and cannibalism motivated by starvation), and vicious attacks that destroyed entire villages), all of which led people to seek refuge in increasingly inaccessible places to stay out of reach of their hungry enemies.

Mesa Verde in the Colorado portion of the Four Corners region is arguably the most famous cliff dwelling on the North American continent. After living primarily on top of the mesas for over 600 years, sometime in second half of the 12th century during a period of intense social and environmental instability, the Ancestral Puebloans turned Mesa Verde into a massive city. At its peak, Mesa Verde was home to many thousands of people. And yet, after nearly a century of intense occupation, by 1285 Mesa Verde was completely abandoned. The Ancestral Puebloans migrated out of the region altogether — their scattered modern-day descendants are the Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, Tewa and other Pueblo peoples.

The second most famous Ancestral Puebloan archaeological site in the region (and arguably the most impressive example of ancient architecture north of the Mexican border) is Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico portion of the Four Corners region (shown in the image below). It is the largest ancient architectural complex ever built on the North American continent north of the Mexican border prior to the 19th century. By its sheer size alone, it was clearly once the core of a very large civilization. Some of its massive buildings were more than 5 stories tall and contained up to 800 rooms!

This extraordinary site at the bottom of Chaco Canyon served as the major cultural center for all Ancestral Puebloans across this vast region for more than 600 years! It was the central hub of a sphere of influence that spanned across more than 90,000 square miles (and area larger than Ireland!) and even included a huge network of roads, some more than 30 ft wide, linking together the other Great Houses across the region (more than 150 of them have been found so far), all of which are connected back to Chaco Canyon by these roads. And yet, Chaco Canyon was abandoned during the first of these two megadroughts, in the second half of the 12th century, before Mesa Verde was built and just as the mass shift to cliff dwellings in the region took place.

At its peak, Chaco Canyon’s vast building projects were supported by huge rock quarries where they harvested their sandstone blocks. They also hauled massive timbers to the site from as far as 110 km away — archaeologists estimate that more than 200,000 large timbers were transported to the site between 850 and 1200 AD using only human power (no small feat in both manpower and organizational planning considering that this is at a time before either the wheel or horses were introduced to the continent).

And the astronomical alignments reflected in their building architecture captured lunar and solar cycles that would have required generations of meticulous observations. And yet, the crippling 50-year megadrought that began in 1130 led them to abandon their canyon altogether. By 1150, more than a century before Mesa Verde was abandoned, Chaco Canyon was already an empty ruin— the central node of Ancestral Puebloan civilization collapsed during the first of those two megadroughts.

The abandonment of Chaco Canyon was accompanied by significant changes in religious beliefs and religious practices all across the Southwest. However, what emerged was not replacement by a new religion or a new culture but rather a fracturing of a large, centralized religion into less formal and more local clan-based rituals as the unifying religious authority collapsed. The large circular kivas (a.k.a. ceremonial rooms), like the enormous kiva shown at Chaco Canyon in the image above, were replaced by much smaller, less formal kivas scattered across the region. Even the rock art in the region evolved to show new motifs and evolving spiritual concerns, even as burial practices became much simpler.

In sum, we get a picture of a collapsing complex civilization that fractured into desperate and increasingly hostile rival clans, which reverted to a much simpler way of life. And where once all these people were united as a single, stable, relatively peaceful, and cooperative culture capable of building vast architectural projects and hauling timbers across the entire region, now they lived in fear of one another even as the ecosystem that once sustained them began to collapse all around them.

If you’ve followed the late Andrew Cross’ Desert Drifter channel on YouTube, which explored many of these ancient archaeological sites across the Southwest, you’ll know just how extreme the living conditions were in some of these ancient cliff dwellings that were built during that tumultuous period. These ancient people were clearly pushed to the very brink of survival and lived in terror of other clans in the region — these abandoned cliff dwellings truly capture a snapshot in time during the last stage of civilizational collapse before the region was abandoned altogether.

Complicating it all is that Athabascan tribes (ancestors of the Navajo, Apache, etc) also migrated into this region from the north, though most archaeological evidence suggests that the bulk of this southward migration of newcomers only reached the Southwest in the 1300s and 1400s (some archaeologists place the date as late as 1450 AD) long after both Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde were abandoned and after the Ancestral Puebloan population in the region had already collapsed and most had fled. So, the violence that drove the Ancestral Puebloans into their cliff dwellings was “home-grown” — the consequence of the internal chaos unleashed by a collapsing previously-centralized civilization — and is not readily blamed on the arrival of outside tribes.

But while the mega-droughts of the 12th and 13th centuries undoubtedly served as the trigger for destabilizing Ancient Puebloan culture, once you dig deeper into the geological and archaeological research (as we are about to do), you quickly discover that there is much, much more to this story.

The victims of this climate disaster were also simultaneously the chief architects of the disaster that destroyed their civilization — their impact on their local ecosystem turned what otherwise would have been just another dry period within the never-ending cyclical climate patterns of the region into an existential crisis that destroyed not only their civilization but also permanently degraded an ecosystem that was previously perfectly adapted to weather these kinds of megadroughts into the dry, fragile, brittle ecosystem that persists in the region even today.

As shocking as it may be to anyone who has toured the extraordinary wilderness of Utah’s canyonlands, although geology created these canyons, everything else about this brittle landscape was created over centuries by the mismanagement of ancient human hands.

The lessons from that long-forgotten story — about the evolution of civilization, about soil and deforestation, and about the complex forces that shape our climate and either keep our ecosystems healthy or destroy them — are all still very relevant to our own era. As Charles Lyell (the “father of geology” and close friend of Charles Darwin) famously said, “the past is the key to the future.”

~ ~ ~

If you visit any of the parks in the Four Corners region today (and I hope you do — they are an unforgettable experience!) — like Arches National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Mesa Verde National Park, Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, Hovenweep National Monument, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Chaco Culture National Historical Park, and so on — you’ll be familiar with the pervasive signs (almost as numerous as the tourists themselves) warning visitors not to step off the beaten trail onto the delicate cryptobiotic soils.

These signs are referring to the thin crust of bacteria and fungi that bind the fragile desert soil together in between the sparse tufts of grass that still manage to grow in this desert environment. In the absence of a continuous protective grass sod, this cryptobiotic crust is all that prevents wind and rain from eroding what little remains of the soil in the region.

Most people mistakenly think this is the normal soil of this desert region. And yet, in reality, this cryptobiotic crust is the soil’s last line of defense in a collapsing ecosystem because the soil itself has never recovered from the ecological collapse that accompanied the civilizational collapse of the Ancestral Puebloans — those two stories are inextricably connected.

Today, you’ll see an occasional deer, antelope, desert bighorn, or jackrabbit when you visit the area. The dry cryptobiotic soils in the area simply don’t grow enough vegetation anymore to support large wildlife populations.

And yet, before the Ancestral Puebloans built their civilization, they once did.

Vast herds of pronghorn antelope and desert bighorn sheep once roamed these canyons and mesas. Andrew Cross cites an article by The New York Times in one of his videos which contains the graph below showing how deer populations in the Four Corners region collapsed between 600 and 800 AD.

This interval (600 - 800 AD) when game populations collapsed coincides with the time when the earlier semi-nomadic ancestors of the Ancestral Puebloans went through a significant cultural and architectural shift during which they transitioned from pit houses to more permanent above-ground adobe and stone structures (pueblos) and adopted a much more agriculture-dependent lifestyle based on growing corn, beans, squash and turkeys, all of which led to a substantial population increase. While hunting continued to play an important role in providing protein for the Ancient Puebloans, from that time forward their diet was heavily and increasingly dependent on their crops and their corn-fed domesticated turkeys.

Indeed, those turkeys became one of the core pillars of Ancestral Puebloan civilization. Anthropological archaeological studies describe how:

“ […] practically every pueblo had its turkey pen and that in the cliff dwellings the pen was located in the rear of the cave…Several of the early Spanish accounts mention turkeys in pens, but none of which I am aware speaks of them as running loose. Most of the pueblos were so situated that I doubt if even a Pueblo would have indulged in the labor of getting the turkeys up and down daily.”

A turkey permanently kept in confinement means that 100% of its food must be grown and stored by its owners. That requires a lot of corn! Farming clearly went from supplementing the diets of their earlier hunter-gatherer ancestors to becoming THE core activity at the heart of Ancestral Puebloan society.

As history.com reports, by the time of Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde:

“As much as 90 percent of the Southwestern Pueblo diet consisted of calories consumed from agricultural products, with wild fruits, greens, nuts and small game making up the balance. Because large game was scarce in some areas, textiles and corn were traded with the Plains people for bison meat. [my emphasis]”

Those wild empty canyons that we see today were, quite literally, once the heart of a vast agricultural civilization that relied almost exclusively upon farming for survival because the population had long since exceeded the capacity to feed itself from dwindling wild game in the region.

And as that agricultural civilization began to unravel into chaos, violence, and theft, and as their crops began to fail, those cliff dwellings became the solution, borne out of desperation, as those ancient farmers sought refuge on the inaccessible cliffs to protect themselves, their precious harvests, and their invaluable turkeys.

As a side note, turkeys were domesticated twice in North America in two separate locations — in Mexico around 800 BC by the Aztecs and in the Four Corners region around 200 B.C. by the Anasazi (Ancestral Puebloans). All turkeys today are descendent from the Aztec turkeys because the Anasazi turkeys went extinct not long after the Spanish arrived in the Americas.

However, DNA from Anasazi turkeys has helped unlock one of the mysteries of the Ancestral Puebloans — specifically, where did they go after they abandoned Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, and all the other settlements in the Four Corners region?

The oral histories preserved by modern Puebloan tribes, which today mostly live in northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico (far to the south of the Four Corners area), suggest that the Ancestral Puebloans may have migrated to the northern Rio Grande region of northwestern New Mexico (near modern-day Santa Fe) after they left the Four Corners area. But because many native tribes refuse to give permission for scientists to analyse the DNA of ancient remains, that oral history has not yet been confirmed by DNA evidence, and it is not proven whether the Ancestral Puebloans are indeed the ancestors of these modern Puebloan tribes. However, as Science Magazine reported in 2017, a group of scientists turned to studying the DNA of turkeys instead as a proxy for mapping out the migration of Ancestral Puebloans after they fled the Four Corners region.

Sure enough, before 1280, the DNA of turkey bones found in the Rio Grande area of New Mexico were purely of the Aztec variety. But after 1280, there’s a massive influx of Anasazi turkey DNA, suggesting a large influx of new people to the area who brought their turkeys with them and joined the smaller population already living in the Rio Grande region. And so, we have the first tantalizing hard evidence to support the oral histories and anthropological research which suggested that the face shapes of the modern Tewa Pueblo population of the Rio Grande area are very similar to the face shapes of the skeletal remains of Ancestral Puebloans.

But let’s get back to the main story.

Those two droughts that destroyed the Ancestral Puebloan civilization, they must have been off the charts — unlike anything seen before or since, right?

Nope.

A study of growth rings of bristlecone pines in the region revealed a much longer megadrought in the second century AD, in the midst of an already uncharacteristically dry century, which then tipped into a full-scale megadrought lasting an unthinkable 50 years. And yet, this second-century megadrought did not lead to a wholescale ecosystem collapse, it did not lead to a permanent change in the vegetation, it did not cause local wildlife populations to collapse, and did not trigger a mass exodus of people from the region.

Megadroughts are perfectly normal in this part of the world. Before the Ancestral Puebloans set up their agricultural and timber-dependent civilization in the region, the natural ecosystem of the Southwest was perfectly adapted to weather these cyclical droughts.

Indeed, the graph below (from my book Plunderers of the Earth), originally from a study published in Geophysical Research Letters, shows a 2,500-year history of alternating wet and drought cycles in New Mexico. Megadroughts lasting 50 to 100 years are the norm in this part of the world. The two droughts that destabilized the Ancestral Puebloan culture at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde don’t even stand out — the 2nd century megadrought was much worse (and longer). Indeed, professor of geomorphology David R. Montgomery points out that these two devastating megadroughts in the 12th and 13th century actually fall within the range of normal climate variability for the past six thousand years! (more on Professor Montgomery’s work in a moment).

Even the modern droughts of the 21st century, which the media and climate hysterics like to broadcast as “apocalyptic”, are extremely modest by comparison with what a normal dry period in the cycle looks like over the past 2,500 years. We have been fortunate that the 21st century has been extremely mild compared to the norm — a point we should bear in mind as we consider our own impact on our local ecosystems in our own era, which have left our backyards extremely vulnerable for when (not if) the next truly dry cycle begins.

And so, when considering what happened to the Ancestral Puebloans in the 12th and 13th century, although the megadroughts were clearly the trigger, they were not the underlying cause of the civilizational and ecological collapse that followed. The key difference between these megadroughts and those that came earlier is the impact that this large populous agricultural civilization had on the land and vegetation in the centuries leading up to those two megadroughts. They made the ecosystem brittle. And then the drought came and everything collapsed.

~ ~ ~

In his eye-opening book Dust: The Erosion of Civilization (Amazon Affiliate link), professor of geomorphology David R. Montgomery describes how, despite all these earlier megadroughts, pollen preserved in the sediments show there was no change in the vegetation for thousands of years. Until the Ancestral Puebloans built their agricultural civilization. But then, everything changed.

Pollen data in the sediments and plant remains found in packrat middens in caves in the area show that once the Ancestral Puebloan culture became established, there was a dramatic and rapid change in the local vegetation as the pinyon-juniper woodlands were cut down for fuel and as ponderosa pines were harvested to provide the timbers for their massive building projects.

What today is a mix of desert scrub and grass was once woodland. If you look closely when you visit the area, you can still spot ancient stumps left behind by the Ancestral Puebloans in what is nothing but a sea of scrub and cryptobiotic soil today.

But why didn’t the woodlands grow back after the Ancestral Puebloans left the region?

Before I dive into how the Ancestral Puebloans irreversibly degraded their ecosystem to create the perfect storm when the megadroughts finally began and why their devastating impact on their local canyonlands ecosystem has been so permanent — I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!

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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit juliusruechel.substack.com

This is the audio version of my recent Deep Dive, The Dangerous End of the Post-WWII Monetary Order, which was unfortunately delayed because of some technical difficulties that I have now resolved.

In other news, I’m just wrapping this week’s upcoming essay and podcast — a Deep Dive that I’m particularly proud of that relies heavily on both my farming and geology backgrounds, and my long-time passion for archaeology — which will be in your inbox shortly.

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Julius