Category Archives: Politics

Basin in the Meantime

3 January 2026 By in History, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Maybe there’s nothin’ happenin’ there
Or maybe there’s somethin’ in the air  — John Hiatt – Memphis in the Meantime

The operation in Caracas did not inaugurate a new doctrine so much as enforce an old one: The Monroe Doctrine or as the new moniker that is sweeping social media: The Don-roe Doctrine, The DDs. It demonstrated that, when the United States chooses to act in its near abroad, it can do so quickly, decisively, and without the prolonged escalation that once defined hemispheric interventions. The speed mattered less than the silence that followed.

What stretches south from the U.S. southern border is not a collection of isolated states so much as a single basin of changing fortunes. A shared space of currents and constraints where energy, food, money, people, and power circulate unevenly. In that basin, geography compresses time, stretching from long somnolence to sudden, decisive action in prestissimo. Decisions made in one port quickly reverberate into another; scarcity in one system bleeds into the next. When a major node fails, the effects do not remain local, they resonate in a loose, syncopated jazz time

The removal of Venezuela as a patron did not merely end Maduro’s dictatorship, it likely altered the flow of reality in the basin itself. What followed from adjacent confines and distant hegemons alike was not immediate confrontation but boilerplate as hesitancy or visa-versa. Borders were secured. Procedural condemnations were issued. The United Nations will hear of this! Behind the statements, positions were analyzed and reassessed. Cards were checked. No one raised. Everyone counted their chips. Everyone kept their cards, except Maduro, but no one pushed the pot.

In the meantime: the basin holds it breath, the alternatives have no luster, and time has taken on a velocity beyond the speed limits of the usual diplomatic stall. In the basin, survival at all costs no longer promotes stability of government nor docility of the populace. In the basin, the strength of will is now measured in meals, watts, and months: maybe. The Venezuela operation lasted 3 hours.

The absence of a Venezuelan military effective response was not the lack of detection of the opposing force or bribery of key personal to look the other way. It was the predictable outcome of a hollowed-out command structure confronted more attuned to loyalty rather than ability. Selective strikes against decision‑making nodes, combined with degraded communications and uncertainty about leadership status, collapsed the chain of authority before it could cohere into action. In a system likely conditioned to await orders from the top rather than exercise initiative, paralysis was the rational response. No one bucks the top…North Korea redux. A thirty‑minute operation leaves no room for deliberation; it ends before the system can decide what it is seeing. Maduro wasn’t answering his phone.

And the operation was not just the removal of a bad actor; it was also about who was watching.

The Iranian strike was never just a counter‑proliferation exercise. Reducing nuclear capability was the mechanism, not the message. The message was capability itself. It was designed to be seen not by Tehran, which already understood the risks, but by Moscow and Beijing. The flight profiles, the munitions used, the coordination, the timing, the public naming of the operation, all of it communicated U.S. reach, patience, and the ability to act unilaterally at scale without triggering uncontrolled escalation. It was deterrent by demonstration, not a declaration for further action.

The Venezuela operation carries the same scent, even if the target is less world‑ending. Different theater, different tools, same audience. There were other tells. In Moscow, state‑adjacent channels reverted to cultural filler, Swan Lake on shortwave. A gesture with a long memory. In Russian political language, it has historically marked moments of uncertainty at the top: authority suspended, clarity withheld, everyone instructed to wait. It was not a declaration, but it was not nothing either. Less foreknowledge than recognition. An acknowledgment that something irreversible was unfolding, inferred from U.S. posture rather than anything concrete.

That recognition itself would not have gone unnoticed. Intelligence services watch each other as closely as they watch targets, and awareness on one side becomes signal on the other. A brief pause, publicly attributed to weather or timing around the holidays, need not imply any hesitation. It can just as easily reflect confirmation: that inference had not translated into possible interference, that compromised channels would remain compromised, and that recognition would stay passive. In that sense, the music was not a warning, and the delay was not a feint. Both were acknowledgments that the hand had changed, and that no one intended to show their cards before the next move was made.

The unrest in Iran reads differently. Less recognition than diversion. When leverage is limited in one theater, pressure migrates to another. Iran’s internal volatility has long been a known fault line. One where agitation carries asymmetric cost. Disruption there absorbs Iranian authorities’ attention, resources, and narrative bandwidth, reducing the capacity for coordinated response elsewhere. Whether by design or exploitation, the effect is the same: consequences are diluted across theaters rather than concentrated at the point of action. Hezbollah and Hamas in the Caribbean remain isolated and neutered.

This does not require coordination to function. Systems under strain respond predictably to stress applied at their weakest seams. Iran’s unrest filled the information space with noise at precisely the moment clarity elsewhere would have been costly.

In Venezuela, the point wasn’t regime change as an ostentatious show of force or a shot across the bow. It was proof of access, intelligence dominance, and decision‑speed inside a space long assumed to be cluttered with foreign influence. The absence of a name matters. So does the brevity. So does the lack of follow‑on rhetoric, which, for Trump, is really saying something.

Regional reactions reflected this reality. The message, delivered without verbiage, was understood immediately. Except in Congress. Colombia’s troop movements were defensive and stabilizing, aimed at spillover rather than confrontation. Mexico and Colombia’s appeals to multilateral condemnation preserved diplomatic cover without altering facts on the ground. China and Russia issued ritualized objections. Entirely predictable, restrained, and notably unaccompanied by action. Iran’s rhetoric filled space where leverage was absent. Across the board, states assessed their stacks of chips and chose not to raise.

This collective hesitation revealed the deeper shift. The Caracas operation likely removed Venezuela as a structural patron and sanctuary, not just a regime. That removal matters less for ideology than for logistics. It collapses the external framework that allowed other systems: most notably Cuba, to remain in the game, even without chips.

Cuba’s predicament is not strategic; it is temporal and tactical. The island lacks indigenous energy beyond biomass, cannot sustain its grid without imported fuel, and faces chronic food insecurity dependent on foreign exchange. Its export of human capital: doctors, engineers, security personnel, once generated influence and cash, but those returns have diminished, and the population left behind is aging and shrinking. Tourism and remittances no longer provide reliable buffers. Scarcity does not need to become catastrophic to destabilize a system; it only needs to become unpredictable. Revolution is three meals away.

In this context, the familiar options narrow. Refusal to accept the obvious with re-engerized brutality can delay outcomes but the path ahead remains the same. Partial opening risks unleashing forces that cannot be re-contained. A managed transition preserves continuity but requires acknowledging mistakes and ultimately exhibiting weakness. Waiting for the irrational rescue likely recreates Ceausescu execution at the hands of an exhausted populace. Time is now a luxury. And there is no Che Guevara left to pretend this is about anything other than power.

The broader hemispheric picture reinforces this compression. Panama’s strategic assets favor quiet realignment rather than confrontation. Colombia’s incentives point toward containment. Mexico’s long‑standing safety valves, outward migration and remittance flows, have narrowed as borders tighten and returns increase. At the same time, cartel finances face pressure from heightened surveillance, financial enforcement, and disrupted logistics. When money tightens, patience evaporates. Ambiguity and neutrality become expensive.

The external powers, beyond the basin, face their own constraints. Russia’s tools in the hemisphere are limited to smoke signals, narrative, and opportunistic cyber and communication disruption; it cannot project sustained force near U.S. logistics without unacceptable risk. China’s leverage is financial and infrastructural: think Peru’s deepwater port, but money loses persuasive power when leaders weigh it against personal liability. Loans cannot guarantee immunity. Infrastructure cannot extract individuals from collapsing systems. A Berlin‑style airlift to sustain Cuba is implausible: geography, energy requirements, and visibility make sustained resupply untenable without escalation. A step that neither Beijing nor Moscow appear willing to risk.

What emerges instead is a less noisy contest. The real currency becomes safe passage for the unwanted and the management of transitions rather than bids for loyalty. Ports, telecom, finance, and migration policy, to and from the U.S., become the levers. Intelligence exploitation encourages action against cartels, rolling up networks of crime rather than staging battles.

In this environment, public speeches matter less than demonstrated capability. Respectful language toward leaders paired with relentless focus on non‑state threats: cartels, preserves diplomatic niceties while narrowing the options. The message is conveyed not through ultimatums but through persistence: neutrality becomes costly; alignment allows for tomorrows.

The western hemisphere has entered a meantime: not a moment of dramatic conquest, but a period where waiting is the most dangerous strategy. Outcomes will be shaped less by declarations than by which pressures are allowed to accumulate, and which are relieved. The Caracas operation did not end the game; it thinned the table and moved the stakes to the final table.

Freedom to Live—Telos to Thrive

23 December 2025 By in Philosophy, Politics, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Humans do not live by bread alone. Abundance may fill the stomach, but it doesn’t energize the soul. Somehow a life free of want and fear comes up lacking.

Adam, Eve and the Garden of Eden, the world’s first utopia, looked upon as a psychology experiment, failed. Failed in the sense that any utopia built only on abundance is already hollow. The question, then, is why? They were given food, water, sex beyond their basic needs. Their environment required no clothes. No predators threatened their existence. Labor and death were concepts not pondered. But in the end, it wasn’t enough. Why did it fail?

The answer, which will be explored further below, appears to revolve around the concept of purpose. A world; a utopia, that meets all needs but offers no purpose is not paradise but a gilded “behavioral sink.” A world without vocation, responsibility, sacrifice, striving, or narrative is a hollow reed: it stands, but it is filled with nothing. A world where nothing is required except obedience becomes unbearable stagnation. A world without purpose is not a meaningful, conscious life.

The Greeks called this deeper purpose to enliven the soul, telos. The purpose toward which life is directed. Without telos, abundance becomes a cage, a prison. With telos, even scarcity can be endured with dignity.

John Calhoun, ethologist, set out to study overpopulation but instead discovered something stranger: a behavioral sink: a kind of social and spiritual death. The colony did not collapse from too many mice, but from the breakdown of roles and meaning that eventually produced too few.

In his now famous “Universe 25” mouse utopia experiment, he showed that survival without purpose, at least for mice, collapses into withdrawal and extinction. Modern societies risk the same fate when they pursue utopia: abundance without struggle, surveillance as safety, and communal aid as the elimination of all negatives. The challenge is not simply to live, but to thrive; and thriving requires telos: a purpose.

John Calhoun’s experiment was designed to eliminate scarcity. Within a large enclosure, mice were given unlimited food and water, nesting material, and protection from predators. Eight mice were introduced, 4 male/female pairs, and the population grew rapidly, doubling every fifty-five days until it reached more than two thousand individuals (8 doublings): filling all available space. Yet despite this apparent freedom from want or fear, the colony eventually collapsed, seemingly due to extreme density and the breakdown of social roles. Fertility declined, social roles dissolved, abnormal behaviors proliferated, and reproduction ceased altogether. The colony died out, not because resources were lacking, but because abundance without freedom and meaning likely produced a breakdown. Calhoun coined the term “behavioral sink” to describe this collapse of social roles under conditions of density in a constrained space. The experiment suggested that abundance alone does not guarantee flourishing; without freedom, space, and above all, purpose, societies can unravel even in material plenty.

Subsequently psychologist Jonathan Freedman studied human responses to crowding and found that people did not exhibit the same collapse seen in Calhoun’s mice. Yet it is hard to look at modern societies and conclude that the behavioral sink: the collapse of social norms and the retreat from family formation, is entirely absent.

The Greeks would have recognized the deeper societal problem immediately. For them, the question was not simply how to survive, but how to live and prosper in accordance with telos: the end, the purpose, the fulfillment toward which life is directed. Aristotle described every being as having a natural telos: the acorn’s telos is to become an oak, the flute’s telos is to produce music, and the human telos is to live a life of virtue and flourishing, what he called eudaimonia.

Telos is purpose. For man it implies more than giving meaning to biological life. It suggests a dichotomy of mind versus consciousness: brain versus soul. Freedom from want and fear feeds the mind but provides nothing of sustenance for the soul.

Earlier societies understood this intuitively and built cultural codes to bind abundance to purpose. Chivalry, whether in its medieval form or its later incarnation as the English gentleman’s ethic, was precisely such a telos. It required the strong to protect the weak, but also required the weak to participate in the moral order. It paired mercy with discipline, generosity with boundaries, and honor with responsibility. Chivalry was not sentiment; it was a teleological architecture that kept abundance from becoming decadence.

The mice in Calhoun’s enclosure had food, water, and shelter, but no telos. Once density eroded their social roles, a slow downward spiral ensued. Humans in modern societies face the same paradox: welfare systems, surveillance, and engineered abundance can provide material plenty, but if they strip away telos: purpose, meaning, struggle, and virtue; all outcomes drift toward dystopia.

But if the soul is only in the domain of man, why did the mice without purpose also die? Mice perceive. They have instinct and social drives. They have memory and respond to stress. But they do not have a moral imagination or the capacity to choose meaning. A mouse in the experiment could not rebel against its environment by inventing a new one. The mice died because they reached the limits of space and mind. Social instincts, stress circuits, and behavioral roles all exploded and collapsed. They died because they were in a closed world and their minds could not adapt. They were trapped.

Eden failed not because humans are like mice. Man’s mind can adapt to a life of plenty, but the soul cannot adapt to tedium. Eden failed because man was built to struggle. Perfect conditions, total comfort, safety, and abundance lead to decline, not nirvana.

Eden and Universe 25 fail for different reasons. The mice died because they could not leave. Man was expelled from Eden because he reached for a transcendence and was not permitted. Humans were not allowed to question, seek, reach, or transcend their existence. Paradise needs struggle.

So why did an omniscient God create Eden? Probably because it was never meant to be a final state but a contrast state. A teaching moment. A world without fear, scarcity, or struggle in which the human soul could discover that comfort alone is not enough. In a paradise where every need was met, the only meaningful act was the one that revealed the nature of consciousness itself: the choice to reach beyond the enclosure. The serpent did not tempt Adam and Eve with pleasure but with becoming: “you will be like gods,” awakening a longing for agency, knowledge, and purpose that abundance could not satisfy. Their disobedience was not a failure of design but the moment in which the soul recognized that a static world cannot contain a teleological being. Eden exists in the story not as a utopia that failed, but as the stage on which freedom becomes visible and the human need for telos is revealed.This pattern is not confined to myth or laboratory. When purpose collapses, societies follow the same arc as Eden and Universe 25: abundance without telos gives way to stagnation, stagnation to withdrawal, and withdrawal to demographic decline. A people who cannot articulate why life is worth living will eventually cease to create life at all. The first sign of a civilization losing its telos is not revolution or war, but falling birthrates. The quiet demographic signature of a culture that no longer believes in its own future.

Across Europe, the United Kingdom, and increasingly the United States, fertility rates have fallen well below replacement. In Germany, Italy, and Spain, fertility hovers around 1.2 to 1.3 children per woman (2.1 is replacement level). In the UK it is around 1.5; in the U.S., about 1.6. This decline is not simply biological; it is sociological. Fertility is shaped by density, cost of living, cultural norms, and moral frameworks. Where communal support is strong: rural areas, religious communities, fertility often remains closer to or above replacement. In urban centers, where density and what might be called collective individualism dominate, fertility collapses. Declining birthrates are thus a symptom of lost telos. Families are not formed because the conditions for raising children feel untenable, and because the cultural narrative of purpose has weakened.

Chivalry once provided that narrative. It linked male strength to generational duty, female dignity to communal honor, and children to the continuity of the moral order. It gave family formation a story, not merely a biological function. When chivalry collapses, fertility collapses, not because people cannot reproduce, but because they no longer know why they should.

The paradox is sharpened when abortion policies are considered. In most of Europe and the UK, abortion is legal within the first trimester, framed as healthcare and autonomy. In the U.S., abortion remains contested but widely available in many states. Here lies the disconnect: abortion is framed as expanding individual autonomy: the freedom from unwanted obligation, while fertility decline reflects the collapse of collective freedom, the freedom to flourish and raise children. Societies expand freedom at the individual level while eroding it at the collective level. Autonomy is preserved, but telos is undermined.

To buttress declining populations, European countries and the UK have encouraged immigration. Migrants often come from regions with higher fertility rates, offsetting demographic decline and supporting aging workforces. Immigration is thus a pragmatic solution to population collapse: but it does not address the root causes: density, freedom, and telos. It is a patchwork repair, adding new blocks to a crumbling wall without restoring the foundation. The deeper paradox remains: abundance without purpose produces collapse, and immigration cannot substitute for the conditions that allow families to thrive, especially if society’s new members are supported without shared cost, shared culture, or shared telos.

Density alone does not dictate outcomes; it interacts with telos, governance, and cultural frames. Lagos, Nigeria, is one of the most densely populated and chaotic cities in the world, often described as bordering on ungovernable. Infrastructure is weak, governance is fragmented, and daily life is improvisational. Yet fertility remains high. The reason is that telos: family, lineage, and communal identity, remains intact. In Lagos, children are wealth, kinship and clan networks are survival, and religion provides meaning. Even in smothering density, purpose sustains resilience. The city may be chaotic, but it is alive.

By contrast, the homeless encampments of Los Angeles resemble Lagos in their improvisational density and lack of formal governance. Tents, makeshift shelters, and informal economies proliferate. Yet here fertility does not thrive. Rampant mental illness and drug use erode telos. The cornerstone of family, community, and purpose has collapsed. What remains is density without meaning, abundance without direction. Food programs, shelters, and aid exist, but they do not restore purpose. The result is stagnation and despair rather than resilience. Los Angeles encampments show that chaos without telos collapses into dysfunction.

Bangkok, Thailand, illustrates the opposite extreme. Governance is strong, infrastructure is orderly, and surveillance is extensive. Yet fertility has collapsed to ultra-low levels. Here, telos has been eroded not by chaos but by over-governance and modernization. Families shrink, marriage is delayed, and children are no longer seen as wealth or purpose. Bangkok epitomizes the behavioral sink in human form: density magnified by order but hollowed of telos.

These contrasts reveal the missing quadrant: a society that pairs order with telos. This was the promise of chivalry. Lagos has telos without order; Bangkok has order without telos; Los Angeles has neither. Chivalry represents the fourth possibility: order with purpose, structure with meaning, boundaries with dignity.

Together these cases sharpen the living paradox. Lagos thrives in chaos because telos survives. Los Angeles collapses in chaos because telos has dissolved. Bangkok collapses in order because telos has been eroded by governance. The lesson is clear: density is the stressor, but telos is the barrier to collapse. Where telos is strong, fertility can endure even in smothering conditions. Where telos is weak, density accelerates collapse. A utopia pursued through governance can become more dystopian than chaos if it erodes purpose. Man needs a purpose. Without it, abundance becomes nothing more than a cage: a prison with flowered curtains; with it, even hardship can be transformed into amber waves of plenty.

Urban America provides its own cautionary tale. Under Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, HUD launched massive urban renewal programs meant to eliminate “slums.” Entire neighborhoods once vibrant with shops, churches, and homes were razed. In their place rose brutalist public housing towers like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago. Instead of dispersing poverty, these projects concentrated it vertically, creating ghettos in the sky. The architectural order stripped away human scale, while the destruction of community fabric erased telos. Where once there were family networks, small businesses, and congregations, there was now isolation, surveillance, and stigma. The result was alienation, crime, and eventual demolition. HUD’s well‑intentioned utopia became a dystopia, echoing Calhoun’s mice: abundance of shelter without freedom or telos collapses into dysfunction.

Chivalry offers a counterpoint here as well. It was a social contract, not a bureaucratic one. It preserved dignity by pairing generosity with expectation, aid with responsibility, and protection with participation. Modern welfare systems sever the relationship and keep only the transfer. The result is dependency instead of resilience, abundance without telos.

Surveillance adds another layer to the modern enclosure. In Calhoun’s experiment, the enclosure walls were the hidden constraint. For humans, surveillance plays a similar role. In China, the social credit system tracks citizens through cameras, financial records, and online behavior, with scores affecting access to jobs, travel, and services. In Europe and the U.S., facial recognition, biometric ID, and behavioral profiling are increasingly common. Awareness of being watched erodes anonymity, adds stress, and modifies behavior. Surveillance is the human equivalent of the enclosure walls. It defines the boundaries of freedom, even in abundance.

The paradox is that surveillance is justified as safety, efficiency, or order, yet in practice it adds to the stress of density, accelerating the very breakdown it claims to manage. It is the human version of the behavioral sink: not scarcity, but suffocating constraint. And more deeply, surveillance erodes telos by reducing individuals to data points, stripping away the individual dignity of purpose.

Chivalry again stands as the opposite principle: internal discipline instead of external enforcement. A chivalric society requires fewer walls, fewer cameras, fewer bureaucratic constraints, because the code itself governs behavior. Surveillance grows where virtue shrinks.

The pursuit of utopia often plants the seeds of dystopia. Calhoun’s mice dramatize this paradox, and human societies repeat it in subtler ways. Utopia promises abundance and safety, but struggle, risk, and constraint are what give life meaning and resilience. Remove them, and individuals may feel aimless. The enclosure gave plenty, but the will to live wilted. The mice could not leave, explore, or repurpose their world.

For humans, welfare states or surveillance societies may provide abundance but limit autonomy. The invisible walls matter more than the food. Collective solutions often replace organic bonds with bureaucratic systems. Parenting, community, and moral frameworks weaken when the state or collective “fixes” everything. Individuals withdraw because the frame of telos collapses. Even in abundance, awareness of being watched adds psychological weight. For mice, the enclosure was the hidden constraint. For humans, cameras and social scoring systems are the modern equivalent.

The collective aims at population-level stability, but the individual seeks personal meaning, agency, and dignity. When collective solutions optimize for averages, individuals at the margins feel alienated. The bell curve of individuality is reduced to a spike. The revolt or collapse is not irrational; it is a signal that something is not working as intended. It shows that utopia defined by the collective may not align with the individual’s need for telos. The collective optimizes for stability, the individual thrives on agency, risk, and purpose. When those needs evaporate, revolt or withdrawal emerges.

Examples abound in modern policy. Guaranteed income experiments often show that recipients reduce work hours modestly. The reduction is not usually total withdrawal; it is often fewer hours, more time for caregiving, education, or leisure. But the symbolic effect matters: when income is guaranteed, the incentive to work as necessity weakens. The “beautiful ones” of Calhoun’s mice resonate here: abundance without struggle risks withdrawal.

Food stamps provide nutrition support to low-income households, but fraud and misuse exist, and some recipients may not be in dire need but qualify through loopholes or marginal thresholds. The program can attract dependency, with households remaining on benefits long-term rather than transitioning out. Help for the needy becomes normalized as entitlement, and the boundary between “in need” and “not in need” blurs, creating resentment and undermining trust in communal solutions.

The paradox is structural: help for the individual expands freedom‑from immediate crisis, but attracts broader participation, dilutes targeting, and sometimes erodes freedom‑to flourish. Programs designed as umbrellas risk becoming enclosed boxes; constraints that reshape behavior in unintended ways. And most importantly, they risk eroding telos by reducing life to consumption and dependency rather than purpose and flourishing.

Chivalry resolves this paradox by insisting that mercy must be paired with measure. The English gentleman was gallant toward women and the lower classes, but “hard as nails” when duty required it. This duality; compassion with boundaries, is precisely what modern systems lack. They know how to help, but not how to say no. Chivalry understood that saying no is sometimes the highest form of care, because it preserves dignity and agency. All good parents know this instinctively.

The lesson is not that communal aid is bad, but that design matters. If aid is too broad, it attracts those beyond need. If aid is too narrow, it misses the vulnerable. If aid removes all struggle, it risks eroding resilience. If aid balances support with responsibility, it can rebuild freedom‑to‑flourish. The paradox is that governments often attempt to engineer away all negatives, but the outcomes drift toward fragility rather than resilience. The mice in Universe 25 were given abundance: no hunger, no predators, no scarcity. Yet the absence of struggle did not produce flourishing; it produced an unremitting, total collapse.

Humans in modern welfare states face a similar paradox. Governments try to eliminate negatives: poverty, hunger, homelessness, drug use, through programs and interventions. Yet the outcomes are mixed: dependency, loss of initiative, bureaucratic surveillance, and sometimes deeper alienation. Erase all struggle, and resilience erodes. Limited means is not the enemy; it is the forge of adaptive capacity. Without struggle and purpose, societies grow brittle and collapse. Challenges often provide purpose. When all negatives are removed, individuals may feel rudderless and adrift.

To eliminate negatives, governments also expand monitoring: drug tests, social scores, biometric IDs. This adds stress, reproducing the under‑the‑microscope effect. Policies aimed at fixing one problem can create others. Housing programs may provide shelter, yet leave mental health and community breakdown untouched, creating dependency instead of resilience. Surveillance systems are justified as safety but erode privacy and increase stress in dense populations. The balance is razor‑thin. Too much intervention suffocates autonomy; too little starves collective flourishing. The missing element is telos. Without purpose, abundance becomes dystopia.

The pursuit of utopia, removing all negatives, often produces dystopian outcomes because it confuses abundance with flourishing. Flourishing requires freedom, struggle, and telos. Utopia removes struggle, but in doing so, removes meaning. The result is collapse: the behavioral sink in mice, fertility decline and alienation in humans. The challenge is to design programs that support resilience and meaning, rather than erasing all negatives.

A moral cycle often attributed to G. Michael Hopf: “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times,” encapsulates the utopia-to-dystopia paradox. Hopf’s cycle is not merely historical; it is teleological. Societies rise or fall according to the strength of their purpose.

Population decline is not linear, nor is it destiny. It is cyclical, shaped by density, freedom, and telos. When societies become too dense, when surveillance erodes autonomy, when communal bureaucracy substitutes for organic bonds, fertility and flourishing decline. Yet when density eases, when freedom is restored, when telos is rediscovered, populations rebound. History shows this rhythm: humanity has survived bottlenecks, plagues, wars, and famines, and each time rebounded when purpose was renewed.

The Greeks understood that man needs a telos, an end toward which life is directed. Without telos, abundance becomes a monkey cage; with telos, even scarcity can be endured with dignity. Calhoun’s mice remind us that survival is not about food and shelter alone. It is about freedom, meaning, and purpose.

Modern societies risk repeating the experiment when they pursue utopia as abundance or the absence of need without struggle, surveillance as safety, and communal aid as the elimination of all negatives. The paradox is that such utopian attempts often promote dystopian outcomes. The challenge is not to remove every negative, but to build an airy house on a foundation of resilience, dignity, and telos. Only then can abundance become flourishing, and only then can societies escape the behavioral sink.

Chivalry offers a final lesson: flourishing requires mercy, measure, and mettle. Mercy to lift the vulnerable. Measure to set boundaries that preserve dignity. Mettle to uphold the moral order even when it is difficult. Chivalry is not medieval nostalgia; it is a teleological architecture that binds abundance to virtue. Without such a code, abundance becomes a cage. With it, even hardship becomes a forge.

Chivalry once served as the mediating code between secular authority and sacred telos, binding worldly power to transcendent purpose. It stood in the space where kings governed and churches taught, ensuring that strength was disciplined by virtue and that mercy was bounded by responsibility. But in the modern age, this mediating role has eroded. Secular governments have expanded into moral territory, while many churches, entangled in state funding, NGO partnerships, and bureaucratic incentives, have softened their prophetic edge, echoing the language of administration rather than the guidance of the soul. When the sacred becomes an extension of the state, it can no longer offer counter‑telos; it becomes a chaplaincy to the administrative order. Money talks, and institutions drift toward the priorities of their patrons. The result is a vacuum where chivalry once stood: no moral architecture to restrain abundance, no internal compass to replace external surveillance, no code to bind freedom to responsibility.

Striving toward a vision of utopia is a failure to see that purpose, not perfection, sustains a society.

(Post‑script: Calhoun’s mice peaked at roughly 15–18 months and collapsed by about 48 months: an approximate 1/3 to 2/3 split between peak population and extinction. Universe 25 was the 25th iteration of his utopia experiments; earlier versions ended prematurely, but the behavioral patterns he observed: social breakdown under abundance and density, were consistent across his work. Scaled to humans: U.S. population is projected to crest around 2040–2080, suggesting the attempt at utopia began around Johnson’s Great Society, followed by a ~200‑year decline toward collapse (2240–2280). Strikingly, this peak falls within Isaac Newton’s own apocalyptic horizon, which he argued could not arrive before 2060. Abundance, demography, and prophecy all converge to remind us that abundance without telos has a half‑life, or at least a shelf‑life. Strangely, that also suggests that the timing of the apocalypse is of our own making: as a society the time to die is our choice.)

Hamlet Goes to Milwaukee—A Tragicomedy in Five Acts

28 October 2025 By in History, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Prolepsis’ Prologue:

The Chorus enters. A single spotlight. A single Damocles’ bullet hangs in the air like a haunted ghost spinning to history’s rhythms and trajectories.

CHORUS:

John Schrank shoots Theodore Roosevelt, 113 long and mostly forgotten years ago, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on a sharp and chilled Monday, coats pulled tight, 14 October 1912.

That’s the end, my friend, or so it seems. But tragedy demands context, and context demands sacramental passings. Let us reset and reconfigure the scene, with a sentimental barbershop quartet interlude of ‘Moonlight Bay’ drifting in the background and summon the ghosts of campaigns past and the raving refrains of the mad, all served with a bullet.

Act I: The Bull Rising

Before the Bull Moose and the bullet there was tradition and restraint. Before Roosevelt charged up the hill and across the plains, there was McKinley’s calm firmament.

William McKinley, 25th President of the United States, governed with a philosophy of calculated prosperity and protective nationalism, fittingly called the Ohio Napoleon, holding folksy court on America’s front porch. He was deliberate and firm but never rash, he was a Republican loyalist second, leader first, and a quiet expansionist, A Civil War veteran and devout Methodist, McKinley championed high tariffs, the gold standard, and industrial growth as the pillars of American strength.

His first term (1897–1901) unfolded as an economic recovery from Grover Cleveland’s faltering presidency and the Panic of 1893. It was marked by economic stabilization, the Spanish-American War, and the acquisition of overseas territories: Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii, all additions to America’s imperial structure.

His vice president, Garret Hobart died, of heart failure in 1899 at the age of 55. With no constitutional mechanism to fill the vacancy, the office remained vacant until McKinley’s re-election. It wasn’t until the ratification of the 25th Amendment in 1967 that a formal process was established to replace a vice president.

In 1900, Theodore Roosevelt, then Governor of New York and war hero of the San Juan Hill, was chosen as McKinley’s running mate. His nomination was largely a strategy of containment: an attempt to temper his reformist zeal beneath the inconsequential and ceremonial weight of the vice-presidency.

Act II: Bull Cometh

The Bull Moose was buried beneath ceremony, but symbols cannot contain momentum. The front porch would give way to the lists and charging steeds.

On September 6, 1901, President William McKinley stood beneath the vaulted glass of the Temple of Music at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, an American shrine to progress, electricity, and imperial optimism. There, in the charged glow of modernity, he was shot twice in the abdomen by Leon Czolgosz, a Polish American self-declared anarchist and bitter subject of the Panic of 1893 and its resultant mill closures, strikes and wage collapse, etched into his disillusioned psyche.

Czolgosz had been baptized in the radical writings of Emma Goldman, a Lithuanian emigree and firebrand of the American radical left. Goldman championed anarchism, women’s rights, and sexual liberation. She founded Mother Earth, a journal that became an infamous intellectual hearth for dissent and revolutionary analysis.

To Czolgosz, Mckinley was the embodiment of oppression: capitalism, imperialism, and state violence. His answer to these perceived provocations was violence. Concealing a revolver wrapped in a handkerchief, he fired at close range during a public reception, just as McKinley extended his hand in welcome.

Initially, doctors believed McKinley would recover. But gangrene developed around the damaged pancreas, and he died on 14th of September. His death was slow and tragic, a symbolic collapse of the front porch presidency.

Roosevelt, just 42, stepped up and became the youngest president in U.S. history (JFK was 43). With containment at an end, the Bull broke loose. And he mounted the stage with an agenda.

Act III: The Charge of the Bull

The Bull builds a protective legacy of words and stick, sweat and blood.

Roosevelt’s early presidency honored McKinley’s legacy: trust-busting, tariff moderation, and economic expansion. But he soon added his own signature: conservationism, progressive reform, and a bold, moralistic foreign policy.

He preserved 230 million acres of public land and established the U.S. Forest Service, 5 national parks, 18 national monuments, 150 national forests and a constellation wildlife refuges. Stewardship of the land became a sacred ideal that continues to present day.

In foreign affairs, Roosevelt extended the Monroe Doctrine with his Roosevelt Corollary (1904), asserting that the U.S. had the right to intervene in Latin America to prevent “chronic wrongdoing.” It was a doctrinal pivot from passive hemispheric defense against European imperialism to active imperial stewardship, cloaked in the language of civilization and order. America became the self-appointed policeman of the Western Hemisphere.

The corollary was a response to incidents like the 1902 Venezuelan debt crisis where European navies blockaded ports to force repayment. In Cuba, unrest was quelled with U.S. troops in 1906. Nicaragua, Haiti, and Honduras saw repeated interventions to protect U.S. interests and suppress revolutions. If Latin American failed to maintain order or financial solvency, the U.S. would intervene to stabilize rather than colonize.

The doctrine justified the U.S. dominance of the Panama Canal and set the precedent for Cold War interventions, neutralizing the American back yard while containing Soviet expansion in the east.

Act IV: Hamlet in Milwaukee

Heads of kings rest uneasy. Ghosts of injustice haunt. Princes fall prey.

After winning a full term in 1904, Roosevelt honored his promise not to seek reelection in 1908. But disillusioned with his successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt returned to politics in 1912, forming the Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party.

Enter stage left, John Schrank, a former barkeep plagued by visions and imagined slights. In the early morning hours of 15 September 1901, 6 days after McKinley was shot and 2 days before he died, the bar tender dreamt that the slain President rose from his casket and pointed to a shrouded figure in the corner: Roosevelt. “Avenge my death”, the ghost spoke. Schrank claimed to forget the dream for over a decade, until Roosevelt’s bid for a third term in 1912 reawakened the vision, which he now interpreted as a divine command.

Schrank believed Roosevelt’s third-term ambition was a betrayal of American tradition set forth in Washington’s Farewell Address. He hated Roosevelt and feared that he would win the election, seize dictatorial power, and betray the constitutional republic. In his delusional state, he believed Roosevelt was backed by foreign powers and was planning to take over the Panama Canal; an anachronistic fear, given total U.S. control of the canal since 1904. Schrank interpreted the ghost’s voice as God’s will: “Let no murderer occupy the presidential chair for a third term. Avenge my death.”

At his trial for the attempted assassination of Roosevelt, Schrank was remanded to a panel of experts to determine his mental competency. They deemed him insane, a “paranoid schizophrenic”, in the language of the time. He was committed to an asylum, where he remained until his death 31 years later.

Schrank’s madness parallels the haunted introspection of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Shakespeare’s longest and most psychologically complex tragedy that revolves around a ghost’s command: “Revenge my foul and most unnatural murder.” Hamlet, driven by the specter’s charge, spirals into feigned (and perhaps real) madness, wrestling with betrayal, duty, mortality, and metaphysical doubt. His uncle, the murderer, has married his mother; an Oedipal inversion within the world’s most enduring tragedy.

On 14 October 1912, as Roosevelt stood outside Milwaukee’s Gilpatrick Hotel, Schrank stepped forward and fired. The bullet pierced his steel glasses case and a folded 50-page tome of a speech, slowing its path. Bleeding, a bullet lodged in his chest, Roosevelt refused medical attention. He stepped onto the stage and spoke for 90 minutes, although it is said that due to his loss of blood, he shortened his speech out of necessity. Whether for himself or the audience is lost to history.

Unlike Hamlet, who dithers and soliloquizes his way toward a graveyard of corpses, Schrank shoots, hits, and leaves Roosevelt standing. Hamlet’s tragedy ends in death and metaphysical rupture. Schrank’s farce begins with the demands of a ghost and ends with a 90-minute speech. One prince takes his world with him into death. The other absorbs a bullet and keeps talking.

Act V: Ghosts and Republics

Ghosts and Republics are ephemeral. At the end of time; those fleeting moments, short and long; some, as Proust says, more and more seldom, are best treated with humor and grace.

In tragedy and near calamity, a man’s soul becomes visible. Some are seen darkly, others, bright, clear, unshaken and unafraid of new beginnings even if that beginning is death.

Roosevelt had already charged up San Juan Hill, bullets and fragments whistling past like invitations to a funeral ball. Each a death marker. So, when a solitary bullet from a madman struck him in Milwaukee, it was merely an inconvenience. He quipped: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

Sixty-eight years later, Reagan too survived a bullet to the chest. As he was wheeled into the emergency room at George Washington University Hospital, he said he’d “rather be in Philadelphia,” a throwback to his vaudeville days, a gag line used on fake tombstones: “Here lies Bob: he’d rather be in Philadelphia.” W.C. Fields once requested it as his epitaph. He’s buried in California. To the surgeons, Reagan added: “I hope you’re all Republicans.”

Where Roosevelt offered mettle, Reagan offered mirth. Both answered violence with theatrical defiance: natural-born and unshakable leaders, unbothered by the ghosts that tracked them.

They were not alone. Jackson, beat his would-be-assassin with a cane. Truman kept his appointments after gunfire at Blair house. Ford faced two attempts in seventeen days and kept walking. Bush stood unfazed after a grenade failed to detonate. They met their specters with grace, a joke, and a shrug.

The assassins and would-be assassins vanished into the diffusing whisps of history. The leaders of men left a republic haunted not by ghosts, but by a living memory: charged with the courage to endure and to imagine greatness.

Graphic: Assassination of President McKinley by Achille Beltrame, 1901. Public Domain.

Divine Right to Rule–Not

13 April 2025 By in History, Philosophy, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sir Robert Filmer, a mostly forgotten 17th century political theorist, claimed that kings ruled absolutely by divine right, a power he believed was first bestowed upon Adam.

In his First Treatise of Government, John Locke thoroughly shredded and debunked this theory of divine rights of monarchs to do as they pleased. Locke with extensive use of scripture and deductive reasoning demonstrated that ‘jus divinum’ or the divine right to rule led only to tyranny: one master and slavery for the rest, effectively undermining the natural rights of individuals and a just society.

Filmer, active during the late 16th to mid-17th century, argued that the government should resemble a family where the king acts as the divinely appointed patriarch. He erroneously based his theory on the Old Testament and God’s instructions to Adam and Noah. He used patriarchal authority as a metaphor to justify absolute monarchy, arguing that kings can govern without human interference or control. Filmer also despised democracies, viewing monarchies, as did Hobbes, as the only legitimate form of government. He saw democracies as incompatible with God’s will and the natural order.

Locke easily, although in a meticulous, verbose style, attacked and defeated Filmer’s thesis from multiple fronts. Locke starts by accepting a father’s authority over his children, but, in his view, this authority is also shared with the mother, and it certainly does not extend to grandchildren or kings. Locke also refutes Filmer’s assertion that God gave Adam absolute power not only over land and beast but also man. Locke states that God did not give Adam authority over man for if he had, it would mean that all below the king were ultimately slaves. Filmer further states that there should be one king, the rightful heir to Adam. Locke argues that there is no way to resolve who that heir is or how that could be determined. Locke finishes his argument by asserting that since the heir to Adam will be forever hidden, political authority should be based on consent and respect for natural rights, rather than divine inheritance: a logical precursor to his Second Treatise of Government, where Locke profoundly shaped modern political thought by advocating for consent-based governance.

Source: First Treatise of Government by John Locke, 1689. Graphic: John Locke by Godfrey Kneller 1697.  Public Domain.

Black Swans Part II

30 March 2025 By in Economics, History, History, Journalism, Philosophy, Philosophy, Politics Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Last week, we introduced Taleb’s definition of black swans; rare, unpredictable ‘unknown unknowns’ in military terms, with major impacts, exploring historical examples that reshaped society post-event. This week I’m going to introduce a fictional black swan and how to react to them but before that the unpredictable part of Taleb’s definition needs some modifications. True black swans by Taleb definition are not only rare but practically non-existent outside of natural disasters such as earthquakes. To discuss a black swan, I am going to change the definition a bit and say these events are unpredictable to most observers but predictable or at least imaginable to some. Taleb would likely call them grey swans. For instance, Sputnik was known to the Soviets, but an intelligence failure and complete surprise to the rest of the world. Nikola Tesla anticipated the iPhone 81 years ahead of time. 9/11 was known to the perpetrators and was an intelligence failure. Staging a significant part of your naval fleet in Pearl Harbor during a world war and forgetting to surveil the surrounding area is not a black swan, just incompetence.

With that tweak out of the way, we’ll explore in Part II where Taleb discusses strategies to mitigate a black (grey) swan’s major impacts with a fictional example. His strategies can be applied to pre-swan events as well as post-swan. Pre-swan planning in business is called contingency planning, risk management, or, you guessed it, black swan planning. They include prioritizing redundancy, flexibility, robustness, and simplicity, as well as preparing for extremes, fostering experimentation, and embracing antifragility.

Imagine a modern black swan: a relentless AI generated cyberattack cripples the Federal Reserve and banking system, wiping out reserves and assets. Industry and services collapse nationwide and globally as capital evaporates, straining essentials, with recovery decades away if ever. After the shock comes analysis and damage reports, then the rebuilding begins.

The Treasury, with no liquid assets, must renegotiate debt to preserve global trust. Defense capabilities are maintained at a sufficient level, hopefully hardened, to protect national security, while the State Department reimagines the world to effectively bolster domestic production and resource independence while keeping the wolves at bay.

Non-essential programs, from expansive infrastructure projects, research, federal education initiatives, all non-essential services are shelved, shifting priorities and remaining resources to maintaining core social and population safety nets like Social Security and Defense. Emergency measures kick in: targeted taxes on luxury goods and wealth are imposed to boost revenue and redirect resources. Tariffs encourage domestic production and independence.

Federal funding to states and localities is reduced to a trickle. States and municipalities must take ownership of essential public services such as education, water, roads, and public safety. The states are forced to retrench and innovate, turning federal scarcity into local progress.

Looking ahead, resilience becomes the first principle. Diversification takes center stage, with the creation of a sovereign wealth fund based on assets like gold, bitcoin, and commodities, bolstered by states that had stockpiled reserves such as rainy-day funds, ensuring financial stability. Local agriculture, leaner industries and a realigned electrical grid, freed from federal oversight, innovate under pressure, strengthening a recovery. Resilience becomes antifragility, the need to build stronger and better in the face of adversity. And finally, the government must revert to its Lockean and Jeffersonian roots, favoring liberty and growth over control, safety, and stagnation: anti-fragility.

Source: The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007. Graphic: The Black Swan hardback cover.

The Fable of the Turkey

29 March 2025 By in Politics Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Drum, a plump turkey, trusted his caring master, Strum, who fed him daily and cooed, “You’re the finest bird here.” Drum, a data geek, tracked his weight, 18 pounds on day 300, projecting 24 by day 400. On day 364, a Wednesday, he lost his head and some weight. By Thursday, day 365, Strumpf found him tasty, and his weight hit zero. Blind trust in trends can carve you up.

The Census Bureau’s 2023 Population Projections for the U.S. to 2100 play the same game. This “projection, not prediction” uses births (Total Fertility Rate, TFR, at 1.6), deaths, and net migration, spinning four population scenarios: Zero Immigration (333 million today drops to 226 million, down 32%), Low (down to 317 million), Main (up to 369 million), and High Immigration (435 million with 1–1.5 million newcomers yearly). Only immigration increases the population; births and deaths stay flat. It’s 78 years built on 2–3 years of data; no risks, no “what ifs,” no alternatives.

This is a house of cards sold as insight. Projections might hold up in the short term, but 78 years? Please. The Census Bureau, I assume, pitches this study for policy, budgets, districts, but it’s a narrative push: immigration or bust. Zero immigration craters us to 226 million; 1.5 million new bodies annually swells the population to 435 million. Yes, immigration boosts numbers, but why’s it the only solution? No probe into low births, no fixes beyond “import more bodies.” It’s not analysis, just bait for Congress and the public.

A growing or declining population has consequences. A 30% drop could tank GDP and programs such as Social Security. Or yield cheaper homes and a leaner U.S., like Japan (96 million by 2050, still thriving). Growth has costs too, more support for Social Security but more sprawl, maybe more crime, resource strains but the Census skips over those trade-offs. And a low TFR isn’t fate. The WWII generation raised four kids on $60,000 (adjusted) when homes were $12,700. Now we have $420,000 homes, $65,000 wages, and $10,000-per-kid childcare, maxing out affordable families at two. Inflation (2%+ since ‘71) and $36 trillion in debt, increasing by a trillion every 3 months, destroyed the dollar and concomitantly the Federal Reserve and government killed big families.

Increasing family size is a choice. Possible solutions to reverse the trend are tax credits at $5,000 per kid, or even an expanding credit for each additional child above 2, could lift TFR from 1.6 to 2.1 by 2035. That’s 700,000–1 million extra births annually within a decade, millions more Americans by 2050, no immigration spike needed. Cut housing costs by slashing senseless regs, open land to building, drop mortgage rates to 1%) and one income might work again. A declining family size is a choice, not a given.

The Census Bureau releases raw numbers, no “why,” no debate. Immigration’s one fix but not the only one. The government broke the system; it can unbreak it. Next time, Mr. Census Bureau, ask some questions, beyond just slinging spurious stats to support a preferred narrative.

Source: Census Bureau, The Black Swan, Fable of the Bees.  Graphic: Population Projections by the Census Bureau.

14th Amendment

22 March 2025 By in History, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The 14th Amendment, introduced during the Reconstruction era, was crafted to address legal and constitutional deficiencies exposed after the U.S. Civil War. Its first sentence; “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside“, has become a focal point for competing interpretations. Much like the Second Amendment, its wording has sparked legal and grammatical debates, particularly surrounding the clause “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The Second Amendment faced similar scrutiny for over 200 years, particularly its prefatory clause, “A well-regulated Militia.” This ambiguity was finally addressed in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), where the Supreme Court clarified that the historical record and documents like the Federalist Papers supported the right of private citizens to own firearms. The Court also ruled that the prefatory clause did not limit or expand the operative clause, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.“

Likewise, the 14th Amendment’s clause “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” remains unsettled, awaiting similar historical and grammatical scrutiny to solidify its interpretation. Initially aimed at protecting freed slaves and securing their citizenship, this provision has since invited broader interpretations in response to modern challenges like immigration.

The framers’ intent during Reconstruction was to ensure equality and citizenship for freed slaves and their descendants, shielding them from exclusionary laws. At the time, the inclusive principle of jus soli (birthright citizenship) aligned with the nation’s need to address the injustices of slavery and foster unity among the country’s existing population. However, changing migration patterns and modern cultural dynamics have shifted the debate. The ambiguity of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” now raises questions about its application, such as how jurisdiction applies to illegal immigrants or children of foreign diplomats, in a globalized world.

Legal precedents such as United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) affirmed that nearly all individuals born on U.S. soil are citizens, regardless of whether their parents’ immigration status is legal or illegal. While this aligns with the practical interpretation of jurisdiction, it has spurred debates about the fairness and implications of modern birthright citizenship practices.

Immigration today involves a broader spectrum of cultures and traditions than during earlier waves, when newcomers often shared cultural similarities with the existing population. Assimilation, once relatively seamless, now faces greater challenges. Nations like Britain and Germany have recently revised their jus soli policies to prioritize the preservation of societal norms. The unresolved question of how to address declining populations further complicates the debate; a debate with the citizens that has not occurred much less resolved.

While originally crafted to address the systemic exclusion of freed slaves, the 14th Amendment’s principle of birthright citizenship continues to evolve in its application.

Graphic: 14th Amendment Harper’s Weekly.

Locke and Citizenship

9 March 2025 By in Physiology, Politics Tags: , , , Leave a comment

John Locke, the intellectual and philosophical father of modern Western democracies, argues in his Second Treatise of Government that membership in a political society—and thus citizenship—is not automatically granted by birth on a country’s soil alone. Instead, it depends on the concept of consent, whether explicit or tacit, and the allegiance of the parents. Locke asserts that a child’s status is tied to the political community of the parents rather than merely the geographic location of their birth. Citizenship to Locke was not a right but a contract between the governed and the government. A summation of his reasoning follows:

  1. Voluntary Consent as the Basis of Citizenship: Locke begins with the premise that all individuals are born free and equal in a state of nature. Political society emerges only through the voluntary consent of individuals to join together. For Locke, citizenship is not an inherent trait but a contractual relationship. A child born on foreign soil to non-citizen parents has not entered this contract, nor have their parents done so on their behalf.
  • Parental Influence on Political Identity: Locke suggests that a child’s initial political identity derives from their parents. He describes the natural subjection of children to parental authority, implying that their political allegiance aligns with that of their parents until they reach an age where they can consent for themselves. If the parents are foreigners—not members of the political society where the child is born—they owe no allegiance to that country’s government, and thus neither does the child by extension.
  • Rejection of Jus Soli: Unlike later theories of jus soli (right of the soil), Locke does not consider birth on a territory sufficient for citizenship. He distinguishes between temporary presence and permanent allegiance. A foreigner residing in a country does not automatically become a member of its commonwealth unless they explicitly consent to its laws and government. A child born to such foreigners, being incapable of agreeing to these terms, does not acquire citizenship through birth alone.
  • Tacit Consent and Its Limits: Locke acknowledges that tacit consent—such as owning property or residing long-term in a country—can signal allegiance. However, a newborn child cannot provide consent, tacit or otherwise. If the parents are merely visitors or temporary residents, their presence does not imply a commitment to the political community, and thus the child does not gain citizenship by default.
  • An Illustrative Analogy: Locke reinforces his argument with an example: a child born to English parents in France does not become a French subject simply because of the location of birth. Instead, the child remains tied to the English commonwealth through the parents’ allegiance. This reflects Locke’s view that citizenship stems from political bonds, not just physical geography.

In summary, Locke’s arguments about citizenship, consent, and political society in his Second Treatise of Government are deeply rooted in his broader natural law framework. Natural law, for Locke, is a set of universal moral principles derived from reason and human nature, which govern individuals in the state of nature—before the establishment of organized political societies.

Locke contends that a child born on foreign soil to non-citizen parents is not a citizen of that country because citizenship requires consent and allegiance, which the child inherits from the parents’ status rather than the place of birth. Furthermore, a minor lacks the capacity to consent to the laws and allegiance of a foreign land. Locke’s reasoning underscores individual agency and the contractual nature of political membership, prioritizing these over a purely territorial basis for citizenship.

Source: Second Treaties of Government by John Locke, 1690. Graphic: John Locke by Godfrey Kneller 1697.  Public Domain.

The Legacy of John Locke

13 February 2025 By in History, Philosophy, Politics Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

The English Bill of Rights was signed into law on 13 February 1689, creating the constitutional monarchy that still exists today, albeit with the monarchy reduced to a figurehead status.

The coronation of William III and Mary II was conditional on their agreeing to the terms stipulated in the Bill of Rights, which included, among others, free speech for members of Parliament, the freedom to bear arms for self-defense, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, and the establishment of due process.

The Bill of Rights was primarily drafted by members of the English Parliament in response to the abuses of power by King James II, who was overthrown in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

John Locke’s “Second Treatise of Government” had a significant influence on the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Locke was a proponent of natural rights, the social contract, and the separation of powers, which were foundational to the development of constitutional government. His work emphasized that government should be based on the consent of the governed and that individuals have inherent rights to life, liberty, and property.

Source: JohnLocke.net. Graphic: John Locke, 1697, Public Domain.

The Mystic

12 February 2025 By in Movies, Philosophy, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny.  Grigori Rasputin, often referred to as the “Mad Monk,” was a peasant with a fondness for madeira, cheap steaks, and prostitutes. He seemingly cured the Tsar’s son, Alexei, returning him to health by a gift from God: the power of faith.

Rasputin, living by the Russian proverb “You can’t avoid that which is meant to happen,” accepted his fate and was welcomed by the Empress and her son into the royal household with open arms. However, he was later expelled from the royal household by the Tsar and his handlers for violating another Russian proverb: “Don’t bring your own rules into someone else’s monastery.”

Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, a 1996 HBO TV movie seen by almost no one, is Alan Rickman’s tour de force. It provides an exquisite emotional interpretation of religious fervor and mystical power. The film brings the myth of Rasputin into the realm of authenticity and historical plausibility.

The film recreates Rasputin’s madness amidst the early 20th-century events that predated and possibly presaged the madness of events set into motion by Lenin in 1917 (Rasputin was murdered towards the end of 1916). These events led to what Orwell succinctly summarized in “Animal Farm” when the new boss replaced the old boss: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.“

Genre: Biographical, Drama, Historical

Directed by: Uli Edel

Screenplay by: Peter Pruce

Music by: Brad Fiedel

Cast: Alan Rickman, Greta Scacchi, Ian McKellen, Freddie Finlay

Film Location: Budapest, Hungary and St. Petersburg, Russia

ElsBob: 7.0/10

IMDb: 6.9/10

Rotten Tomatoes Critics: -%

Rotten Tomatoes Popcornmeter: 79%

Metacritic Metascore: -%

Metacritic User Score: -/10

Theaters: 23 March 1996

Runtime: 135 minutes

Source: Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb. Graphic: Rasputin Movie Trailer, copyright HBO.