On April 27, King Charles III and Queen Camilla visited Donald Trump at the White House. Coverage of Trump’s welcome varied dramatically.

According to Fox News:

At The Atlantic, Jonathan Chait had a very different interpretation:

Fox News and The Atlantic described the same event, and the same speech. But each selected different elements, emphasized different meanings, and presented a different reality to its audience. This ambiguity has been a hallmark of Trump coverage since his first run for the Oval Office. The difference is not in what happened, but in what is seen.

You may think one of these accounts is an accurate description of Trump’s speech, while the other is propaganda written to mislead the gullible. But it is more likely that both writers described the speech as they experienced it—and filtered that experience through their outlet’s editorial framework.

This reflects a broader shift in modern media consumption. Periodical publishers saw a 40.5% drop in revenue between 2002 and 2020. Televised news channels lost around 25% of their viewers between 2016 and 2022. Many readers now come to these outlets through social media recommendations and Google searches.

Hard-pressed publishers have strong incentives to give their audience what it wants—and social media audiences tend to favor clear, emotionally resonant material that reinforces their preconceptions. Each outlet emphasizes different elements and draws different conclusions. They produce narratives that feel consistent to their audiences, even when they diverge sharply from one another.

In the 20th century, news came from a few sources. You learned about the world from your local newspaper, your favorite magazines, your radio and later your television. Each of these sources reached out to a diverse audience and aimed for the widest possible appeal. What resulted was a baseline narrative for what was happening in your community and in the world.

We no longer have that baseline. Instead, information is filtered into personalized streams catering to our individual preferences. We create our own narrative, and with it our own reality.

We have many more sources of information at our fingertips than 20th century viewers. But our options are not unlimited. Each social media outlet has a Terms of Service policy that sets its boundaries. They also have algorithms that will restrict the visibility of posters who violate written or unwritten rules.

Most of these rule sets are designed not to punish wrongdoing but to ensure maximum engagement. Your feed is carefully calibrated to deliver content that inspires clicks, likes, comments, and shares. If your posts consistently attract eyeballs and activity, your audience is likely to grow. If they do not, your reach may quietly decline.

While they play a vital role in your social media experience, the algorithms are proprietary. Nobody—outside of a small group of developers—knows how posts are judged and feeds are built. A sharp drop in reach may mean you said something offensive. Or perhaps the latest update has deprioritized one or more of your favorite topics or formats.

For many users, social media serves as their primary news source. But not all sources are equally reliable. Administrators try to steer users away from fake news. But determining what qualifies as “fake news” is not always straightforward. Consensus weighs heavily in most systems, as does reputation. But that means the correct response gets less traction than hundreds that are incorrect in the same way. Or an incorrect response from a “trusted source.” And the systems that weigh and rank sources are as impenetrable to the average user as those that determine their reach.

This ambiguity gives rise to conspiracy thinking. When people can’t understand how something works, they try to explain it. Users start viewing the systems not as imperfect but as actively malevolent. Fact-checkers are dismissed as propagandists whose real job is not to find the truth but to hide it. The platform becomes a tool by which hidden masters manipulate their unwitting subjects.

You might expect this mindset to drive users away from these platforms. In most cases, it does the opposite. Their feeds continue to deliver content that captures their attention. And because the underlying systems remain invisible, users often experience these ideas as their own conclusions rather than as the product of a curated environment. They may distrust the system, but they continue to communicate within it—and, in doing so, internalize the information it provides.

Mechanically curated feeds provide you what their equations determine that you want. As you continue scrolling, you come to believe that the information on your feed is what you want. You follow those who share your curated interests and argue with those who don’t. Your convictions deepen. You come to believe not only that you arrived at your views independently, but that they are the only correct ones.

Social media not only shapes your online experience. It transforms the way you interpret your offline relationships. The world feels more polarized, divided between Good People and Bad People. Those who question your worldview sit firmly in the latter category. These conflicts regularly break up families and friendships.

On August 11, 2017, Jennifer Wright at Harper’s Bazaar advised readers “If You Are Married to a Trump Supporter, Divorce Them.” As she explained:

A Wakefield Research study taken that same year revealed that 11% of Americans, and 22% of Millennials, had ended relationships over political strife. Furthermore, 22% of Americans and 35% of Millennials knew someone whose marriage or relationship had been negatively impacted specifically due to President Trump's election.

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Dopamine helps fuel our sense of pleasure and excitement, as well as our craving for continued stimuli. Cocaine and methamphetamine act on the dopamine system. So do sexual stimulation and anger. These same reward pathways also help determine the stories you read, the images you share, and the ads you click.

The more dopamine content generates, the more widely it travels. Anger-inducing posts travel particularly fast and far. The anger may be aimed at a target; it may be aimed at the poster. Whatever the motivation, it registers as engagement. Scornful comments rank just as highly as praise. Both keep the viewer glued to the screen and increase retention time. The longer viewers keep scrolling, the more ads they view and the greater the company’s revenue.

Advertisers once joked that 80% of their budget was wasted, but they didn’t know which 80%. Today’s advertisers can access reams of data on their dashboards. They can sort by demographics, geographic location, and other variables to figure out which combination of positive and negative reinforcement is most likely to convert to a sale, lead, or subscription.

You’ve seen the “chumbox” ads at the bottom of many web pages:

• Cure your impotence issues with this ONE WEIRD TRICK

• Famous gut doctor begs you to THROW AWAY THIS VEGETABLE

• Take a look at this celebrity’s REPULSIVE home

• 25 of the MOST INAPPROPRIATE dresses on the red carpet

You probably roll your eyes at these ads. But you’ve also likely clicked on at least a few. Chumboxes have been appearing at the bottom of pages across the web for over a decade now. You’ll find chumboxes on TMZ, Fox News, and other high-traffic sites. In 2025 Taboola, one of the largest chumbox providers, reported earnings of $1.912 billion with $569.5 million in gross profit.

Easy access to metrics hasn’t just shaped advertising. News editors now have detailed insight into which stories spread and which fall flat. They know which topics get eyeballs and which risk driving viewers away. This shapes their decisions as to what gets coverage and how it is covered. They may not use chumbox-level clickbait headlines. But they rely on A/B testing to determine which headlines attract the most viewer interest.

News shapes its readers, and readers shape the news. Information has become less universal and more carefully targeted. We no longer argue about reality—we scream at each other across voids.

And as our realities diverge, so do our myths.

When people live in different realities, they no longer simply disagree. They begin to organize against each other. The Other becomes a vessel of corruption, a Jungian shadow made flesh. Because we inhabit many realities, we find many potential scapegoats. Political identities receive the lion’s share of attention. But these splits can mask cultural and generational differences that are equally important.

The rules of shared reality are simple; we must agree on certain facts and how to interpret them. In the age of mass media, there was enough common ground to allow for diversity and debate. But when you’re on a tiny island of reality surrounded by hostiles, there is much greater pressure for group consensus. Different interpretations are no longer fodder for discussion; they are signs of betrayal.

We have always held reality together through mythology. Today we identify “myth” with falsehood and old wives’ tales. But that’s only because our myth of Science has told us that we can only depend on that which can be weighed, measured, and quantified. Myths are shared narratives that explain the world, create meaning, and encourage group cohesion.

Some of you are screaming right now that science is not a myth. As a method of inquiry, it is not. It is a tool that relies on observation, experimentation, and verification. But most people don’t practice science, they trust it. For them science functions as a shared framework for understanding the world.

That framework offers explanations, creates meaning, and fosters a degree of social cohesion. We accept its conclusions because we trust—or trusted—the system that produces them. In recent years that authority has weakened as competing narratives and alternative frameworks have gained traction.

Myths depend on heroes and villains. Cultural divides are often based on which side a mythological figure occupies. The internet has turned Donald Trump into a hero to some and a villain to others. That mythic split reflects and reinforces equally deep chasms between political groups.

Is Trump a hero or a villain? A dozen people might look at one story or one meme and come up with a dozen interpretations. Our answer depends on our political identity. We create our own Donald Trump based on the narratives we favor and the stories our feed presents to us.

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So where do we go from here?

There is no return to shared mass media and a single narrative. We cannot fix our predicament by adding more moderation, nor will the issues be solved by removing it. The problem is not temporary; it is structural.

Enforced consensus from above leads to the rise of underground narratives distributed privately. The Soviet “Samizdat” movement offers a good historical example. It also produces growing distrust in the system and, ultimately, backlash against the enforcers.

Total unmoderated freedom leads to noise drowning out the signal. Usenet discovered this the hard way. Ultimately users seek out walled gardens—spaces where conversations aren’t buried in abusive, illegal content. Both extremes recreate the same problem in different forms.

We find ourselves in a world of competing narratives, algorithmic mediation, and fragmented information. Our problems are not going away. We must find ways to navigate them. Nobody is coming to rescue us from our thought bubbles. We must save ourselves.

We can start by questioning our own conclusions. Instead of taking our ideas for granted, we can ask ourselves why we think and feel as we do. At first this may seem like a waste of time. Your ideas are perfectly clear and logical; only an idiot or a person acting in bad faith would question them. But if you are willing to walk through that door in good faith, you will be able to truly claim the ideas which survive your scrutiny as your own.

By stepping outside of our initial reaction and weighing the information from a more neutral position, we can spot factual errors and misinterpretations. We can seek out material from political opponents and try to understand how they arrived at their conclusions. When you do this, you’ll find lots of drek on every side. But you will also find wisdom in unexpected places.

Universal agreement is not an option. It never was. We’ve been arguing about politics since Athenians held meetings in the polis. What we can hope for is partial shared ground. That starts with a willingness to engage with opponents and tolerate civil disagreement. You may not create shared beliefs, but you can build a common frame from which you can debate and discuss them.

Recognizing a myth does not destroy it. It lets you understand it in its proper perspective. We live by narratives. Understanding those narratives, and their limitations, allows us to use their structures without becoming lost in their labyrinths.

The alternative? Escalating fragmentation. Increased polarization. Continued dehumanization. Inevitable conflict.

We can have scapegoats, or we can have opponents we respect and whom we argue with fondly—and sometimes not so fondly. We can have discrete groups, or we can have battling mobs. The choice, and the responsibility, lies solely with us.

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Vietnamese children run from a village that has just been bombed by South Vietnamese forces. At the center of the image is a young girl, naked, her body seared by napalm. You’ve seen the photo—“The Terror of War,” more commonly known as “Napalm Girl.” It remains an enduring emblem of the Vietnam conflict.

In 2016, a Norwegian journalist was temporarily suspended from Facebook for posting that image as part of a collection of historic wartime photographs. More than a week after removing the post, Facebook issued a public apology. Vice President Justin Osofsky explained:

Most would agree that a “no photos of naked children” rule belongs in any social media company’s Terms of Service. It’s as close to a universal standard as you will find online. Facebook followed that guideline—and got it wrong.

As Tarleton Gillespie argues in Custodians of the Internet:

Huỳnh Công Út (known professionally as Nick Ut), took the photo on June 8, 1972 after an accidental strike on the village of Trảng Bàng. At first, the AP photo bureau rejected the photo because it showed full frontal nudity. Only after extended—and heated—discussions was the image greenlighted by New York photo editor Hal Buell.

In the age of mainstream media, editors had the final say as to what got published. Television producers decided what would or would not get aired. They might question the boundaries in cases like “The Terror of War.” But they knew those boundaries were there, and for the most part they stayed within them.

The advent of the Internet promised something special: a world without gatekeepers. Anybody with access to a computer and a modem could evade censors and political tyrants and share their thoughts anonymously. Usenet would be a place where free speech reigned supreme, a virtual world where nobody could decide what you read, what you saw, or what you said.

The problems appeared almost immediately.

Some attacks were political. In one case, a group of Turkish nationalists began posting long screeds about the origins of the Armenian genocide. The word “Turkey” triggered an immediate response—which made for some very interesting Thanksgiving discussions.

Another infamous crosspost, “alt.fuck.the.skull.of.jesus,” propagated across thousands of groups. “Killfiles,” user-built filters designed to block unwanted content, struggled to keep up with endless title changes from offended Usenetizens and trolls.

And then there were shock links—most notoriously Goatse.cx—posted across countless groups to provoke and disgust unsuspecting readers. Alongside them came endless “Make Money Fast” schemes.

It soon became clear that a system without gatekeepers did not produce open and elevated discourse. Instead it produced noise, abuse, and constant attempts to game the system. Users began building their own filters. Communities imposed their own rules. Moderation, formal and informal, re-emerged almost immediately.

Ultimately the chaos of Usenet gave way to walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit. But as those new startups became increasingly popular, governments began turning a nervous eye to their potential for social engineering.

The early and mid-2000s saw a wave of “Colour Revolutions.” Protesters in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and other countries used the Internet alongside email and SMS to coordinate protests, mobilize observers, and counter state-controlled media. Western NGOs provided training in election monitoring, communications strategy, and digital literacy.

The Colour Revolutions succeeded in driving out a few autocratic leaders, though holding onto new democracies has proven more challenging. But they also taught leaders around the world that people could use the Internet not only for sharing cat pictures but also for organizing large-scale political actions.

The Arab Spring of 2010-2012 further showed how social media could be used to coordinate and organize revolutions. These uprisings were primarily fueled by long-standing social, political, and ethnic grievances. But Arab leaders insisted that these protests were staged uprisings led by Western intelligence agencies.

In a 2011 New York Times article, Stephen McInerney of Project on Middle East Democracy clarified his NGO’s role in the Arab Spring:

The Internet was a tool that helped protesters put their grievances into action, not the spark that ignited them. But distinguishing between the two can be difficult. Even if you acknowledge that the NGOs did not directly foment revolution, there’s no denying that they helped organize it. And if small groups with limited funding can organize protests in the Arab world and in former Soviet states, they can also organize them against your government.

To make matters even more pressing, internet organizing has a low entry barrier. You don’t need large groups with significant funding. A small cadre with smartphones can set up an operation; a single computer-savvy revolutionary can spread the message through anonymizers and botnets. These techniques not only increase the likelihood of unrest; they multiply the number of actors who might help organize it.

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies work with limited datasets. They put together fragments of information to create a narrative that explains their opponents’ present behavior and helps predict future actions. But ultimately those explanations are like interpreting a Rorschach blot. Some see a sheep; some see a cloud; some see an island. And when they’re facing a threat to their power, they’re likely to look at those fragments and see danger.

In the 2016 presidential election, the American political establishment was shocked by a political outsider’s victory. Donald Trump used Twitter as a base to rally his troops and promote his causes; Hillary Clinton largely let her staff handle social media as part of the wider campaign. Many political insiders were unwilling to admit flaws in their platform or their candidate. Like the Arab and ex-Soviet leaders who faced political unrest, they blamed their defeat on outside forces.

From 2017 onward, we saw the rise of “fact checkers” who point out “misinformation.” Organizations like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org sorted out the journalistic wheat from the “fake news” chaff. Snopes partnered with Facebook in 2017 to detect and flag bogus data.

Many came to respect these fact checkers as arbiters of truth in a disinfo-clogged landscape. Others came to see them as propaganda outlets. For them, the fact-checker’s condemnation was proof it was true. And when fact-checkers got a detail or two wrong, that was further proof of an ongoing coverup.

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We also saw a greater focus on “hate speech” and various “phobias” against different minority groups. Hostile groups looking to destabilize a country often use ethnic tensions as leverage. For people who feared an American Arab Spring, our longstanding racial tensions were a spark that could easily be fanned into a fire.

Many social media users jumped into the war against racism, fascism, etc. They scanned their feeds in search of questionable content, then sent it along to their circles for mass-reporting. Outlets that tolerated controversial opinions frequently found themselves debanked, DDoSed, or disconnected.

The push against racism and hate speech led to a countercultural upsurge. What Usenet called trolls re-emerged as shitposters. They shared images of Jewish caricatures being stuffed in ovens, Black caricatures being lynched, and liberal “soyboy” caricatures tearfully watching their girlfriends have sex with other men. They pushed tirelessly against the terms of service, and kept multiple accounts in cold storage so they could pop back up soon after they got banned.

Ongoing conflict created an outrage loop. The shitposters made the anti-racists hop up and down as entertainment. But their provocative memes also reinforced the idea that there was an enormous underground organization of White Supremacists. This led to increasing calls for moderation, and a growing demand for tasteless and offensive material. Social media thrives on engagement and conflict, and each side provided that to the other.

As 2016 saw complaints of Russian interference, 2020 brought claims of a Democratic coup. Questions about Biden’s election, valid or otherwise, were dismissed as the “Big Lie”; restrictions on COVID-19 “denialism” shut down honest questions and doubts from medical professionals. All this only reinforced the idea that the federal government was illegitimate. By 2024, anti-government feelings were strong enough to bring Trump back for a second term.

Editors, producers, and institutional filters were visible, slow, and, to a degree, accountable. You might not be able to change or question their decisions, but you knew where the buck stopped. But as the information flow became a torrent, these old gatekeepers became unable to keep up with an ever-increasing number of users.

Today, most moderation is handled not by people but by systems. Proprietary algorithms determine what phrases and images violate terms of service; engagement metrics and recommendation engines shape what does and does not appear in your feed. They decide what gets seen, what spreads, and what disappears.

It’s no longer necessary to ban or remove controversial ideas. They can be buried, deprioritized, and throttled. They can still be found, but only with a greater or lesser degree of work. And with an ever-flowing scroll of content rolling across the screen, only a few will make that effort.

Many social media users today believe that they have been “shadowbanned” for their political or social stances. These complaints can be found across the political spectrum, from Leftist activists like Jennifer Bloomer to Right-leaning commentators like Dan Bongino.

Some wear their alleged shadowban as a badge of honor: their material is so honest and forthright that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg don’t want you to see it. Most of these people are not being throttled. But the suspicion persists because, like Calvin’s Elect, the shadowbanned can neither confirm nor refute their status.

There are websites which claim to test your account to see if it is or is not being shadowbanned or restricted. These sites often come up with conflicting diagnoses. And since individual posts and comments can be deprioritized while the account stays at its current status, it’s hard to tell how far any given statement will spread. Social media no longer needs to use the hard power of cancellation to shape discourse. The user stays, but their words are kept on a short leash.

This is not to say that these algorithms are part of a sinister plot to control the discourse. As we saw in the opening sections, moderation is both necessary and difficult. It’s also worth noting that Reddit, a community moderated by volunteers, has a worse reputation for censorship, suspension, and arbitrary bans than algorithm-moderated sites like X and Facebook.

Algorithms may restrict the spread of controversial ideas, but the medium promotes controversy in general. Controversial content gets more engagement and more visibility. Feuding groups each promote their opponents even as they mock and insult them. Sites which are geared to a specific political slant (leftists on BlueSky, right-wingers on Truth Social and Gab) find it hard to retain long-term viewers. Endless affirmation doesn’t hold the same attraction as constant conflict.

Successful sites must simultaneously amplify controversy while at the same time constraining illegal, dangerous, or disruptive content. This is much harder than it sounds. To hearken back to our first example, pictures of naked children are generally considered illegal, unless they are historically significant. And “Dangerous” and “disruptive” are loaded words. In his oft-cited essay, “Repressive Tolerance,” Herbert Marcuse complained of:

Platforms are asked to distinguish between legitimate expression and dangerous, disruptive speech—but those distinctions are rarely clear, and rarely agreed upon. While both Marcuse and his critics might be comfortable silencing “the party of hate,” they would have disagree on which party they were talking about.

Moderation by algorithm is a work in progress. In time, we will come to an acceptable if controversial balance between oversight and freedom. Social media continues to provide a voice to minority communities and marginalized groups. It also welcomes people who just came to argue. All these groups will engage with each other as they once did in the town square. And they will help to decide, with their likes and with their presence, the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

The algorithm will shape their beliefs, but those beliefs will also shape the algorithm. Its code will be modified to suit new controversies and social shifts. There will be arguments and disagreements, as there are with every change. But ultimately we will recognize that we have met the gatekeeper, and he is us.

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Jimmy Carter was not a stupid man; he trained as a nuclear engineer and brought a methodical, detail-oriented mind to the presidency. He was not a wicked man; even political opponents remembered the former Georgia governor as a man of decency, compassion, and honor. He was not a cynical man; his early struggles with Washington’s pork-barrel culture reflected a genuine discomfort with the transactional side of politics.

But he was not the man Americans wanted during a crisis.

On July 15, 1979, with the country mired in inflation, energy shortages, and a growing sense of drift, Jimmy Carter addressed the nation. In what would later be called the “malaise” speech, he offered not reassurance but a moral and economic diagnosis.

Carter’s speech was a sober, introspective message. It asked Americans to reflect, to take responsibility, to confront uncomfortable truths.

It was also a political disaster.

Carter’s rough road got considerably bumpier a few months later with the November 4 storming of the Iranian Embassy, followed by the December 1979 Soviet attack on Afghanistan. As interesting times continued, his approval ratings plummeted. Many Democrats worried about the upcoming election. Others still felt sure their man would win. After all, the Republicans were running a man who was most famous for starring in B-movies alongside a chimpanzee.

That’s not to say that Ronald Reagan was unqualified. From 1967-75, he was governor of California. In 1976, he nearly won a primary challenge against incumbent president Gerald Ford. But even in the famously open-minded 1970s, many Americans questioned whether an actor had what it takes to be President. Even more were concerned about Reagan’s 1949 divorce from Jane Wyman.

In the 1980 Presidential Debate, Carter appeared tense and ruffled. His opponent came across as a kindly grandfather. In response to an attack from his opponent, Reagan simply shook his head and said in a genial tone “there you go again.” For many, that was the moment that Reagan clinched the election. Carter spoke frankly about America’s lack of confidence. Reagan offered reassurance.

Twenty years earlier, Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow cost him a televised debate against John F. Kennedy. 1980 saw the rise of another telegenic President, one who used his acting skills to soothe a benighted nation. Many saw him as an empty suit or a mannequin mouthing lines. Economists still debate the wisdom of his stimulus package and subsequent deficit spending. But for many Americans, Reagan was the man who made America feel like the bright shining city on a hill.

After Kennedy, we had a series of untelegenic Presidents. Lyndon B. Johnson frequently came across as overbearing and blustering on camera. Nixon’s body language was often read as evasive and untrustworthy, earning him the nickname “Tricky Dick.” And Gerald Ford, a former football player, was seen as a clumsy buffoon thanks in no small part to Chevy Chase’s Saturday Night Live portrayals of “Operation Stumblebum.”

Reagan had spent decades before the camera. He was relaxed during public performance and knew how to move and speak before audiences. He understood timing, framing, and emotional tone.

Television favors clarity over complexity and confidence over ambiguity. It rewards emotional impact more than technical detail, and presence more than depth. An analytical, introspective leader like Carter struggled with TV appearances. Television fit Reagan like a comfortable pair of slippers. He didn’t need to be the most informed candidate, because he was the most watchable one.

Radio was better suited to sustained, difficult argument. Winston Churchill rallied a nation on the verge of war with a broadcast that promised “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” The medium allowed listeners to sit with complexity and absorb the material over time. Television worked differently. Reagan simplified problems, reassured voters, and left them feeling less anxious than they had before.

Carter might have fared better in the age of radio. Before a camera, he was no match for a trained actor. He brought substantive, policy-driven arguments to the debate. Reagan’s quip was neither informative nor substantive; it was emotionally disarming. But that single, well-delivered line outweighed Carter’s detailed concerns.

Reagan was widely dismissed at the beginning of his run. He was an actor, an intellectual lightweight, not a serious candidate. But all those weaknesses turned out to be strengths in televised politics. A skilled, optimistic communicator with a clear, well-enunciated message was exactly what post-Vietnam America was looking for. Reagan didn’t just win an election. He demonstrated what success looked like in the age of television.

By 2015, the dominant medium had changed yet again. Television was still powerful, but it was centralized and limited. Cable expanded the number of channels and introduced 24-hour news. But the basic relationship remained the same: you watched, and someone else decided what was worth seeing.

With the rise of the iPhone and similar devices, that relationship broke down. Social media became a primary source of information. Instead of choosing between channels, users scrolled through endless feeds in search of content. With phone cameras, you could skip traditional media and watch events unfold in real time. And instead of writing a letter to the editor or calling a station to complain, you could respond, and have your response amplified, instantly.

Television rewarded the most watchable candidate. Social media rewards the most unavoidable one. Provocation draws more attention than reassurance. Speed outruns polish, and conflict travels farther than consensus. A coherent narrative matters less than a viral moment.

It was in this environment that Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race.

Like Ronald Reagan before him, Trump was widely dismissed. He was best known for barking “You’re fired” on The Apprentice and for clotheslining Vince McMahon at a Wrestlemania event. And unlike Reagan, he had no political background. He looked like an attention-seeker running a publicity stunt, not a serious candidate.

Under the old rules, that would have been disqualifying.

But by 2016, those rules no longer applied.

Trump used Twitter to bring his message directly to the public. He had a natural instinct for attention-grabbing, provocative comments. He wrote short, punchy messages and was constantly sharing his opinion with fans and foes alike. He was as optimized for Twitter as Reagan was for television.

Reagan came to power by being genial and soothing. Few would use those words to describe Donald Trump. But social media doesn’t reward genial and soothing; it favors outrage and controversy. Negative coverage didn’t hurt Trump—it galvanized his followers and further spread his message. Reagan reassured voters; Trump activated them.

Carter and Reagan were mediated by networks. Trump spoke directly to his audience. There were no editors, no filters, and no delay between them. His critics called him brash and undisciplined. His supporters read the same messages and saw authenticity. And those who loved him and those who hated him worked together to ensure that no corner of social media could avoid him.

Trump did not break the system. He revealed what it had become—a system where attention is power, and power follows visibility. Those who were still working within the rules and guidelines of mainstream media dismissed him, then tried desperately but unsuccessfully to contain him. Experience, endorsements, and institutional support were no longer enough to win a presidential election. The new technology favored visibility, engagement, and narrative dominance.

The medium had changed and, once again, it chose the man best suited to it.

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We’ve built a system that selects leaders based on their ability to command attention. But leadership involves a very different set of skills. Negotiation and compromise are essential for political success. They are also, more often than not, the kiss of death on social media.

So can serious leaders still win?

Yes, perhaps. But it is much harder than it once was, and it will require adaptation. Serious leaders must now master the art of simplifying without oversimplifying. They must learn how to communicate constantly, and how to live before an audience of fans and hecklers.

That doesn’t mean that quiet coalition-building will go away, or that long-form explanations will become obsolete. They will take place where they always have, in backrooms and at seminars where decision-makers shape policy amidst their peers. But they will not be a pathway to leadership. Politicians who cannot hold attention will be quickly forgotten by their voters.

The problem is not that serious leaders can’t win. It is that before they can govern like adults, they must master the art of campaigning like performers.

Campaigns run on an attention economy. They thrive on speed, provocation, and emotional engagement. They are fueled by easily-remembered slogans and on clear, firm statements. Governance is rooted in institutional reality. It requires patience, compromise, complexity, and long-term thinking. The traits that win elections can actively undermine the traits needed to govern.

Outrage can win you votes, but it makes compromise more difficult once you are elected. Simple slogans can rally a crowd, but they are of limited use when dealing with complex situations. Amidst constant messaging, there’s little time for deliberation.

The printing press, radio, television, social media—each reshaped messaging and perception, and each led to widespread political changes. Our current systems reward outrage, conflict, and emotional spikes. This has resulted in louder candidates, deeper divisions, and increasingly fast information cycles. We worry about polarization. Perhaps we should be more concerned with leadership that has become more optimized for visibility than effectiveness.

Is this the end? It may seem that way. Peasants caught up in the Thirty Years’ War might well have cursed Gutenberg for setting the world afire. The Nazis used cheap Volksempfängern (People’s Radios) to spread their message. And yet, over time, these media have remained important and we have remained committed to our winding and oft-delayed quest for justice and freedom.

The medium will continue to change. So will we, and so will the leaders who rise within it. The challenge is not to escape the medium, but to use it without being consumed by it, to translate complexity into clarity without surrendering to simplicity. Those who can do that will still find an audience.

From radio to television to social media, each shift has reshaped not only how leaders speak, but which leaders can succeed. We do not choose them in a vacuum. The medium we live in helps choose them for us.

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In 1989 Kimberlé Crenshaw published “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex.” Her paper examined how Black women could be marginalized in ways that were not captured by legal frameworks treating race and sex as separate categories. It also coined a new phrase: Intersectionality.

What began as a legal framework for analyzing inequality would, over time, take on a broader cultural role—shaping not only how people understood society, but how they understood themselves.

More than two decades later, Dr. Crenshaw offered a broader definition in a 2015 Washington Post article:

Crenshaw’s 1989 article was a dense, citation-packed academic paper. At the time, the concepts she was developing circulated largely within legal scholarship and a relatively small academic audience. Racism was widely recognized as a social issue, and people had strong views on the subject. But the analytical frameworks Crenshaw employed had not yet spread far beyond those circles.

A few years after Crenshaw’s article, Bill Maher began hosting Politically Incorrect. From 1993 to 1996, Maher and guests shared their thoughts on Comedy Central; in 1997 the show was picked up by ABC. While the show skewered sacred cows of all political affiliations, it leaned center-left/libertarian. Its critique of “political correctness” tended to focus less on racism or inequality than on perceived constraints on speech and expression.

By 2015, when Dr. Crenshaw released her Washington Post essay, that had begun to change. Discussions of intersectionality were appearing in mainstream media, and events like the 2017 Women’s March sparked broader debates about diversity within feminism. But though Crenshaw’s ideas were now widely read, they were often simplified, reinterpreted, and misunderstood by adherents and critics alike.

In 2017, many of the legal barriers against women’s equality had been dismantled. Women could open bank accounts and pursue careers that were barred to earlier generations. The issues that remained were more diffuse and harder to observe. Glass ceilings are not nearly so visible as barred doors, even if they are no less real.

As intersectionality became more widely known, it shifted from an analytic tool to a framework used to interpret personal experiences. Crenshaw originally saw it as a way to inform legal and political action. For a new generation, it became a framework for creating meaning.

In this form, intersectionality provided a language through which individuals could describe and present their identities for themselves and to others. Gender, sexual orientation, and disability became not only axes of oppression but markers of identity. In 1969, Carol Hanisch argued that “The Personal is Political.” By the late 2010s, the political was becoming increasingly personal.

As intersectionality moved from analysis to interpretation, it laid the groundwork for political movements organized around identities that functioned as options for self-definition. Gender and sexuality were once treated as ways of describing roles and behavior. Today, they are more often understood as self-defined markers through which individuals express and define themselves and their lived experience.

In medieval Christianity, salvation was mediated through visible and repeatable practices. Sacraments, confession, and penance provided structure and reassurance. With the Reformation, the emphasis shifted to faith and grace—states that cannot be directly observed or conclusively verified. The result was a new kind of inward search for signs of assurance that could never be fully settled.

The modern language of identity similarly resists external verification, depending instead on self-recognition and affirmation from others. This opens space for self-expression, but can also produce a more diffuse uncertainty as individuals seek confirmation of something that cannot be directly demonstrated.

The quest for selfhood leads to increasingly specific and granular identities. As the number of recognized identities grows, so do the possible combinations. Let’s take a look at the Asexual Spectrum, as viewed by a Tumblr user who identifies herself as:

The Human Rights Campaign defines asexuality as “a complete or partial lack of sexual attraction or lack of interest in sexual activity with others.” The LGBTQAI+ Wiki defines aromantic as “people who do not experience romantic attraction, or experience little-to-no romantic attraction.” A non-SAM aro is “simply and only aromantic, and does not identify with any asexual or allosexual identity.”

At first glance, Maika’s identification as both “aroace” (aromantic asexual) and “non-SAM aro” might appear contradictory. But as the Wiki explains, individuals may reject the split attraction model for a variety of reasons: they may find it difficult to distinguish between different forms of attraction, consider one aspect of their identity more salient than others, or simply find certain labels unnecessary or unhelpful.

What appears as inconsistency to outsiders is, from within, an attempt to navigate and articulate a complex internal experience. These terms allow individuals to describe themselves with greater precision while still leaving room for interpretation. Maika encourages readers to provide further information on aspec experiences, offering to tag new concepts as necessary.

The same process that produces increasingly individualized identities also fosters new forms of community. Individuals who adopt these labels form affinity groups organized around shared experiences. Because most use multiple terms to describe themselves, these groups frequently overlap. What results is a network of partially intersecting communities rather than clearly bounded categories. And one thing that binds these groups is a shared sense of marginalization and misunderstanding.

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In another Tumblr post, Maika describes this sense of tension:

Many do indeed dismiss these groups as “attention seeking children.” But are these posts rooted in attention-seeking behavior? Or are they cries of deep alienation from people who feel disconnected from a hostile mainstream world?

These posts, and the mockery they attract, help to bring the community together. A shared sense of alienation becomes a shared sense of persecution. Criticism and sarcasm further reinforce their feelings that the greater community despises them. Partially intersecting communities begin to sense an ever-present threat, and respond with a very similar set of political beliefs.

So are those fears justified, or is the greatest danger these identities face obsolescence in the face of the next dominant cultural framework?

Earlier societies assigned identities at birth through family, religion, class, and community. Today those signifiers are much less prevalent. We are increasingly called on to define ourselves. One of the ways we do that is by creating our own communities where we can define ourselves with the help of like-minded others.

Self-defined identities may disappear from view like the Pet Rock. They may be emblems of an era the way disco and encounter groups defined the 1970s. Or they may continue to grow and thrive as young people define themselves in a digital world. Whatever happens, the underlying current that spawned these identities will remain: the human need to understand ourselves and to be understood by others.

Today identity is no longer simply inherited. Instead, it is constructed and socially mediated. How might it continue to be formed, stabilized, and contested?

Some terms will fall out of fashion. In the 19th century homosexuals were called “Uranians” and “Sapphists.” By the 20th century they had become “pansies,” “dykes,” and “friends of Dorothy.” The slur “queer” has been repurposed today to represent sexuality that differs from the “cishet” norm. And just 25 years ago the word “cishet” would have been greeted with a blank stare.

Other terms will survive. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary now lists “Asexual” as an identity beneath “asexual plants” and “asexual reproduction.” Some will be saved for posterity by movies or by a popular influencer or celebrity who “comes out.” While there is currently some controversy and pushback, we are likely to see continuing recognition of transgender identities in the future.

The anxiety that underlies many of these identities will not fade. But it may be redirected elsewhere as individuals look for new signifiers. Others will find new ways to express their feelings, or find that their chosen labels no longer apply to the person they have become. And still others will have to decide what their identity means in a world that now accepts it as a given.

In the modern world, we are not only given the option to choose our own identity—we are forced to do so. These new identities are part of an ongoing quest that led mid-20th century Americans on quests to “find themselves” and left Sartre exclaiming that we are “condemned to be free.” Our descendants may not find meaning in labels, belonging in online communities, or recognition in gender flags. But they will still be searching for meaning, recognition, and belonging.

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Ahnaf and Malcom answer questions from the audience in a 3-hour marathon session. Feeling pessimistic about the ongoing Iran War? Spend some time listening to this episode and your nagging doubts will be replaced by cosmic horror. Turn in, tune on, embrace the collapse, and don’t forget to like and subscribe!

When Erica Jong published Fear of Flying, it wasn’t simply provocative—it was emblematic of a profound cultural shift. Effortless, unencumbered sexual connection had only recently entered public consciousness as an ideal.

Fifty years later, Jong’s bestselling novel seems almost innocent. She, like many other 1970s thinkers, hoped that sexual freedom would culminate in a spontaneous unity. We would become one with the other and with ourselves as bodies and souls flowed together without friction.

Today, the cultural imagination is far more accustomed to casual sexual encounters. We’ve thrown off the stigma around “bad girls” and accepted homosexuality and many other once-taboo practices as normal expressions of human sexuality. The zipless fuck may remain out of reach, but there’s no denying the Sexual Revolution’s impact on our relationship with eroticism and sexuality.

The world Erica Jong described was shaped in large part by Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, who argued that sexual repression lay at the root of both personal and social disorder. By eliminating what Reich called “hang-ups,” they believed we could create a less neurotic, more peaceful world.

For many, the Sexual Revolution was a license for indulgence. For Marcuse and Reich, it was a necessary step in the transformation of both the individual and the society. The Sexual Revolution challenged traditional religious and familial authority, questioned inherited moral frameworks, and rejected the idea that restraint is inherently virtuous.

What it sought was not merely a shift in behavior, but a profound change in underlying assumptions. The Sexual Revolution did not simply alter how people acted on desire—it changed the way we understand it.

The American Revolution turned the colonial world upside down. Two centuries later, we remember that bloody war through familiar images—tricorn hats, Betsy Ross flags, and stories of George Washington chopping down cherry trees. The Revolution remains foundational, but its disruptive force has been softened by distance and myth.

The Sexual Revolution achieved something similar. Its most radical claims have been absorbed into everyday assumptions. Abstinence was once treated as a virtue, continence as an exercise of willpower, and pleasure-seeking as a mark of weak character. We now tend to assume that repression is harmful, that sexual expression is integral to identity, and that sexual fulfillment is something close to a human right.

Those ideas were still hotly debated in the 1970s; in the 80s, many saw the AIDS epidemic as proof they were dangerously wrong. Today they have largely become ambient. As it triumphed, the Sexual Revolution grew less visible. What was once radical has now become the norm.

But if these ideas feel natural today, what ideas did they replace? What alternative models of desire existed? To understand the present, let’s take a look at the past—and at the tension between liberation and discipline.

Marcuse believed that repression was not a necessity; it was imposed to ensure productivity and progress through ongoing toil. For him, Prometheus—the god who steals fire at the cost of eternal suffering—represents our ceaseless struggle for mastery over ourselves and others through reason and domination.

In Eros and Civilization, he turns instead to Orpheus and Narcissus as the gods of the new culture, describing them as:

Ioan Petru Culianu describes a very different historical system—one in which repression is not an obstacle to desire, but one of its most powerful instruments. In Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, he explores courtly love as a “vocation of suffering.”

Here, desire is not fulfilled but cultivated; not resolved, but intensified through delay, distance, and denial.

So long as the love between Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere remains chaste, both are elevated. Lancelot’s restraint defines his nobility and his longing gives his actions meaning. Guinevere develops an emotional connection she cannot find in her relationship with a distant and duty-bound Arthur.

Reich and Marcuse believed sexual consummation leads to fulfillment and integration. For Lancelot and Guinevere, it leads to disaster. What was once noble love becomes tawdry infidelity. Their affair leads to Camelot’s dissolution and downfall. Guinevere ends her days in a nunnery, her unrequited love replaced by joyless sorrow and regret. Lancelot withdraws from the world as a hermit, wasting away in grief and fasting until he dies.

They are destroyed not by repression itself, but by its collapse. So long as desire is held in tension, it elevates; once resolved, it begins to corrode. What Marcuse treats as the cure for repression, the courtly tradition reveals as a potential source of ruin.

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Ioan Petru Culianu sees courtly love as a system that assumes hierarchy and makes it meaningful. It does not abolish power, but rather refines and channels it. The courtly lover’s devotion, restraint, and willingness to suffer are sublimated. They encourage inward loyalty while directing energy outward toward battle and defense of the realm.

For Wilhelm Reich, that is exactly the problem. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich presents repression not only as a personal burden but also as a political danger. Extending Freudian psychology, he argues that rigid family structures and repressive sexual mores serve as a bridge to authoritarianism. Courtly love can serve an authoritarian ruler as easily as a just one; it does not distinguish between them.

Reich contends that repression becomes internalized, shaping what he calls the individual’s “character structure.” Sexually constrained individuals come to fear spontaneity and seek order, discipline, and authority. The traits that late medieval Europe considered virtues are recast by Reich as the foundations of authoritarianism.

Both perspectives capture something real. Repression can distort and control—but it can also structure and intensify. The difference between Reich and Culianu lies not only in how they understand desire, but in how they understand authority. Where Reich sees repression as the seed of domination, Culianu reveals it as a tool that can give both desire and authority their form.

The story of Tristan and Isolde highlights these tensions from another angle. Lancelot and Guinevere sustain their love through restraint; Tristan and Isolde are bound by a love potion. Their passion cannot be sublimated and resists structure from the start. King Mark, in many versions, is not a tyrant but a weak ruler who can command neither loyalty nor love.

In such a setting, the passions engendered by courtly love do not stabilize authority—they immediately expose its fragility. Desire escapes its bounds, loyalty collapses, and ruin comes for both the lovers and the kingdom they inhabit.

We should also note that Culianu was a sharp critic of totalitarian systems across the political spectrum. While his 1991 murder remains unresolved, many have speculated that his outspoken views played a role in the shooting. His analysis of courtly love is not a defense of hierarchy, but a description of how desire can be used to sustain it.

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What should be done with human desire?

Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich believed it should be fulfilled, so that we might achieve unity and reconciliation. The troubadours and courtiers thought it should be restrained, so that it might give rise to elevation and meaning. The story of Tristan and Isolde offers a darker warning: left unconstrained, desire can lead to fragmentation and ruin.

The Sexual Revolution adopted the models of Marcuse and Reich. Freeing the world from prudery was a step toward ridding it of tyranny. Sexual liberation fought its war with one-night stands and built its fortresses in bathhouses and swing clubs. It achieved many of its goals, but it has not yet achieved the unity and reconciliation its early theorists envisioned.

The revolutionary model, combined with transgressionist thinkers like Sade and Foucault, introduced a structural tension. For transgressionists—and revolutionaries in general—norms and boundaries exist to be challenged and interrogated. This leaves the heirs of sexual liberation with a difficult question: which limits should be preserved, and on what grounds?

The logic of continual expansion, and new technologies, can make these boundaries harder to articulate. In practice, views that involve harm—particularly toward children or animals—are overwhelmingly rejected across society, including within LGBTQ+ communities.

Yet at the margins, especially in online spaces, fringe groups and arguments continue to appear. These positions are often framed in the language of liberation or identity. While they are broadly condemned, their existence exposes a deeper difficulty: a framework grounded primarily in the critique of norms must still argue why certain norms should be non-negotiable.

Desire cannot be fully repressed, but neither can it be fully liberated; it must be shaped. Even today we still seek form, distance, and tension in our desires.

In When Harry Met Sally (1989), the long-sustained tension between friendship and desire cannot survive consummation in its original form. Yet rather than ending in ruin, the relationship reorganizes itself. Fulfillment does not simply dissolve desire, but transforms it.

Mad Men (2007-2015) explores the unfulfilled relationship between Don Draper and Peggy Olson. Olson idolizes Draper, who recognizes her talent and elevates her from her secretarial role into a copywriting job. As the series progresses, however, the hierarchy between them begins to erode as she challenges him both morally and professionally.

Their relationship is never consummated, but neither does it remain static. In the modern world, the courtly structure persists only in altered form—no longer anchored in fixed roles, but continually renegotiated.

Ultimately, the quest for untrammeled desire may have led the Sexual Liberation movement into the issue Tristan and Isolde highlights. When desire escapes its bounds, it becomes uncontrolled and ultimately corrosive. We have reshaped the boundaries of acceptable behavior. We are still struggling with where we should draw our new ones.

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We describe our homeless encampments as “tent cities.” Tent cities are temporary. They’re a problem that will be resolved with the next election or the next economic recovery. If they become too inconvenient, they can be taken down by court order and police action.

In Brazil they call these impromptu encampments “favelas.” In other countries, they are called “slums,” “shanty towns,” or “informal settlements.” These are long-standing multigenerational communities that are shaped by generations of endemic poverty and income inequity. Their residents see them as permanent homes and are prepared to fight and die for what they consider their land. Their governments let them stay because they lack the resources and manpower to clear them out by gunfire.

If American living standards recover, our tent cities will fade away like our Hoovervilles once did. If they do not, we will see an increasing number of tent cities—and we will take for granted that those tent cities are just another neighborhood, albeit one most nonresidents avoid.

Those neighborhoods will be poor and dirty. Their residents will suffer from hunger, disease, and want. They will support themselves by charity, day labor, and crime. The wealthy will concern themselves more with “how can we get rid of them?” than “how can we better their lot?”

But those American favelas will also be cauldrons from which new myths emerge. Those myths will help residents make sense of instability, hardship, and chaos. And in time, they will become an integral part of post-American culture.

So what will those myths look like?

Let’s turn our attention to another falling empire.

In 383, Magnus Maximus, commander of the British Army, was proclaimed Caesar of the West by his troops. Maximus earned his purple the old-fashioned way—he assassinated the previous Caesar, Gratian.

Few soldiers looked forward to being posted in Britannia; it was seen as a swampy wasteland surrounded by hostiles, criminals, and bandits. The island was, however, a good place for an ambitious commander to rise in the ranks—Constantine I was also proclaimed emperor there. But, like Constantine, Maximus claimed the purple and then left Britannia immediately.

The Western Empire in 306 had enough soldiers to leave the island well-defended after Constantine departed. The Empire of 383 did not. Maximus took many of his troops with him when he moved to his new headquarters in Trier. His soldiers no longer needed to worry about British weather or British bandits. The people of Britannia were not so fortunate.

The reign of Maximus was cut short—as was his head—in 388. But few, if any, of his troops were reposted to Britannia. Those soldiers left behind remained at their posts for a time. But as the Empire lost its hold on the island, they either left or settled down and married into the general population.

There was another reason Western emperors were reluctant to reinforce Britannia. The province had a long reputation as a breeding ground for imperial usurpers. Several commanders stationed there had already claimed the purple; Maximus was only the most recent among them. Sending troops to the island carried a political risk: today’s reinforcement could become tomorrow’s rival.

In 410 the Emperor Honorius purportedly received a letter from his British subjects. They complained that Britannia was besieged by Saxons from the East, Picts from the North, and Hibernians from the West. But Honorius replied to their pleas with a firm denial. The Empire had no soldiers to spare, he told them. Going forward, Britannia could handle its own defense matters.

There are no extant copies of this “Rescript of Honorius,” and there is controversy as to whether or not there ever was an official request to Rome. But we know that Rome’s hold on the West was crumbling, and Britannia had always been on the imperial fringe.

We also have limited firsthand accounts from St. Patrick, a Romano-British Christian enslaved by Hibernian pirates. Patrick escaped his captivity, then returned to Ireland and worked tirelessly to spread Christianity. His years in bondage had introduced him to many Irish customs and legends; he incorporated those into his preaching and helped lay the groundwork for what later became known as Celtic Christianity.

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Over a century after Patrick, St. Gildas described post-Roman Britain in his De Excidio Britanniae (On The Ruin of Britain). While Gildas’ Latin is notoriously bad and his discussion frequently punctuated by lengthy rambling, he provides a colorful portrait of life in post-Roman Britain.

Gildas tells us that the tide finally turned for Britannia under the leadership of a warlord named Ambrosius Aurelianus:

After many pitched battles, Ambrosius finally triumphed over his foes at the Battle of Badon (Badon Hill). Gildas tells us this battle took place “forty-four years and one month after the landing of the Saxons, and also the time of my own nativity.”

The Venerable Bede (c. 673-735) tells us that the Saxons first landed, at the invitation of Vortigern, in 449. That would put the date of the Battle of Badon, and Gildas’ birthdate, in 491. The Annals Cambriae, compiled in the 10th century, provide different dates and names.

At a Chedworth dig, archaeologists have uncovered a large villa that dates to Roman British times. Carbon-14 dating suggests several rooms, and at least one elaborate mosaic floor, were built between 424 and 544.

Former National Trust archaeologist Martin Papworth notes that the mid-range date for the mosaic’s construction would be AD 475-495. While this is several generations after the fall of Rome, it would place the mosaic’s construction within the lifetime of Ambrosius.

The precise location of Badon remains controversial. One of the most intriguing candidates is Badbury Hill in Dorsetshire. At Badbury Hill’s summit stand the ruins of an Iron Age fort; that fort is surrounded by concentric walls called the Badbury Rings.

To the north and east of the Badbury Rings we find early medieval Anglo-Saxon pagan burials. To the west are the graves of Christian Britons. This shows that the area marked a border between the contending forces, and one which was contested for some time. And a 2004 archaeological dig revealed charcoal dated to 480-520, suggesting it may have been occupied at the time of the Badon Hill battle.

Many Bretons (including St. Gildas) moved to Brittany, where there were still sizable communities who spoke mutually intelligible (with practice) Celtic dialects. Their descendents still speak Brezhoneg today.

Wandering Breton minstrels spread their stories and songs throughout Europe. Arthur and his doughty warriors squared off against gods and heroes from pre-Christian legends with assistance from a mad Welsh prophet whose name was rendered by English tongues as Merlin. As these tales spread, other artists wove Provençal and Occitan tales into the cycle. Today King Arthur and his crew continue to inspire entertainers and philosophers alike.

The Battle of Badon Hill provided only temporary respite. The Bretons remained subjects to foreign leaders, and remain so to this day. Brittany is now part of France, just as Wales is part of Britain. In both cases, local languages and cultures were discouraged for generations—excluded from schools, stigmatized in public life, and treated as obstacles to national unity.

The heart of the Arthurian legend lies in what Portuguese speakers call saudade. It is a longing for a beautiful past that may never have existed as we remember it. Those memories are idealized but that does not make them less true. They are myths of what might have been, reshaped into models for what could be. If we never reach them—if we never find the Grail—we are still better for the quest.

So what would a post-American Arthur look like?

A powerful state weakens. As it loses its ability to project power, it loses access to critical trade routes. Its institutions crumble; with them goes the expertise required to maintain our infrastructure and interpret our records.

All that remains are stories.

We frequently hear stories about AI’s enormous energy and resource demands. The internet’s broader infrastructure is less power-hungry, but no less dependent on scarce materials and shared formats. Many video memes and cartoons from the early 21st century can no longer be viewed because Adobe discontinued the Flash platform on which they ran.

Very little of the data we depend on today will survive into the coming centuries. It has always been this way. Music was an essential part of Roman life, but it was not annotated and today we can only imagine the soundtrack of imperial life. Many Victorian bestsellers are now read only by specialists; many Greek and Roman philosophers are known only through quotations preserved by their opponents.

Without the strictures of recorded fact, figures are transformed into legends. Presidents, generals, cultural icons, and tech figures take on new forms. Their names will persist even as their context fades. Our descendants may tell stories of Doctor Salk who cured polio and saved the nation from COVID and AIDS. They may believe Ben Franklin used lightning strikes to power the first computer. What remains is not a biography, but a composite.

Out of those stories comes a story not of a man as he lived, but a man as he is needed. This hero will fight enemies, restore order in a time of chaos, and defend the people. He and his followers will become the center of a story rooted in the hopes of those who tell it. Our descendants will remember their triumphs and mourn their defeat.

Our vision of Arthur is rooted in Breton oral tradition, French courtly romance, pre-Christian myths, and many other sources. A post-American Arthur will be drawn from films, memes, propaganda, and folklore. He may be counseled by the shaggy-haired wizard Einstein, who teaches him how to create a weapon of great terror. He may be a descendent of Washington, the First King.

The ruins of our cities will serve as anchors. Later scholars may argue about whether King Washington held court in Columbia District or amidst the towers of New York. They will argue about whether we ever landed on the moon and suggest our satellite networks were mere terrestrial radio stations described by peasants.

The details from their past will be reshaped into cautionary tales and hero legends. They will sing of cities that blazed with light and scare children with tales of the goblin Stalin. Events that have not yet happened will become the defining myths of ethnicities that do not yet exist. Memories will become stories; stories will become traditions; traditions will become truth.

Our reality will be colored by saudade. Our descendants will long for a time that never was, and envision their ancestors as they never were. We will become icons of a Golden Age, remembered both for our triumphs and our fall.

Many Americans see the Kennedy administration as the zenith of postwar American confidence. In the early 1960s, the United States stood at the center of a global order it had helped create. Its economy was strong, its cultural influence unmatched, and its technological goals were quite literally reaching for the moon. Things were not so bright and unified as we imagine, of course. But they rarely are.

Kennedy’s 1963 assassination marked an end to that sense of unlimited possibility. After his death clarity gave way to uncertainty. We could no longer pretend we were united in hope, no longer tell ourselves we were in a golden age.

Americans of that time felt these doubts more keenly than we do now. They looked back on their martyred President as the end of an era, and named his administration after a then-popular Broadway musical.

They called it Camelot.

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The Honest Sorcerer, Nova Scotia Tony, and Arnav Jindal team up with Ahnaf & Kenaz for a rousing discussion about the ongoing Iran war and the economic nuclear bomb which Iran has dropped by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Tune in, turn on, embrace the DOOM, and don’t forget to like and subscribe.

The response has polarized along familiar lines. Some knew all along the SPLC was stirring up unrest so they could report on it. Others are equally certain the indictment is lawfare against a prominent civil rights organization. Few voices, on any side, have called for restraint while the facts are sorted out.

Many critics have long claimed the SPLC is a dangerous organization that shapes social narratives by bullying and blackmail. For them, this indictment is concrete proof that it manipulates the public by simultaneously fighting and funding racism.

Longtime SPLC supporters point to decades of criticism from conservative politicians and news outlets—and abuse from self-identified racists—as proof that the government is using its power to silence or bankrupt a longtime enemy.

The narratives are clear. The facts are not. Here’s what we know so far.

On April 21, 2026, the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts, including wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment (money laundering).

According to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche:

The SPLC has strongly denied the allegations. Interim President and CEO Bryan Fair said in a written statement:

One element of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s defense is that funds were directed toward paid informants, not toward supporting extremist activity. In that context, a line from Fair’s statement stands out:

“Living in the shadow” alludes to the overt and frequently lethal racial violence we saw during and immediately after the Civil Rights era. But it also implies distance. This is not to say that racism, or the threat of violent extremism, has disappeared. But it has shifted significantly in scale and in context.

In 1981 Alabama Klan members beat and lynched a 19-year-old Black man, Michael Donald. In 1987 SPLC lawyers helped his mother, Beulah Mae Donald, win a $7 million civil judgment against the United Klans of America. The verdict bankrupted the organization. Later the SPLC organized similar lawsuits against White Aryan Resistance and the Aryan Nations.

The lawsuits dismantled groups that were already becoming marginalized. In 1987 the Ku Klux Klan had little of the political power it held in the 1920s or even in the 1960s. Two of Michael Donald’s attackers received lengthy prison sentences in a criminal trial; another was sent to the electric chair.

This kind of overt, organized racial violence is much less common today than it once was. But the legacy of that period remains central to the SPLC’s identity and rhetoric. That legacy, and the ways in which it has been reinterpreted, helps explain the sharply divided perceptions of the modern Southern Poverty Law Center.

By the late 20th century, overt and organized racial violence had declined significantly. Some took this as a sign that racism was finally a thing of the past. That was an error, but an understandable one. Racism still existed, but it had become less visible and less dramatic.

We’re all familiar with the old images: fire hoses, police dogs, mob violence, cross-burnings. They are direct, arresting, and morally unambiguous. Redlining, glass ceilings, housing discrimination, and sentencing disparities are less immediately visible. The work—and the targets of SPLC attention—became more ambiguous and harder to capture in simple narratives.

It’s easy to spot racists wearing white hoods or swastika armbands. Racism in the 21st century is more diffuse and more open to interpretation. That creates more room for disagreement—and error—about who or what qualifies as racist. This helps explain why conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation came to see the SPLC not as a watchdog but as a “left-wing smear factory.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Map” organizes groups into 21 categories. One glaring issue is that the map provides each organization’s location and classification, but gives no explanation of the criteria used to designate it as a hate group. Here are randomly chosen examples taken from a few categories.

Anti-Immigrant

One group listed as “anti-immigrant” is Americans for Legal Immigration PAC (ALIPAC). Based on its public materials, ALIPAC advocates positions that are common among restrictionist voters: support for immigration-critical candidates, emphasis on crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, and opposition to open-border policies.

Many readers will strongly disagree with these positions. But disagreement alone does not establish that a group encourages or condones violence.

Conspiracy Propagandists

These are definitely controversial ideas. Some might even call them kooky ideas. But this is not a Controversial Map or a Kooky Map: it’s a Hate Map. Let’s take a look at one listed group of “Conspiracy Propagandists,” the John Birch Society.

The JBS was founded in 1958 by Robert G. Welch, a man who suspected that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a secret Communist agent. Today it seeks “Less government, more responsibility, and—with God’s help—a better world.”

There’s no obvious hate to be found on a quick perusal of their website. And the only thing I learned from Google was that the John Birch Society is “listed by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group.”

Male Supremacy

My home state of New Jersey has only one Male Supremacy listing, Broadstone Media. As its owner, Donovan Sharpe, describes himself on his YouTube channel:

Donovan Sharpe® is the creator of Womanese and hosts a podcast about relationships for Men and women... Donovan supports unapologetic masculinity and supports the personal development of Men in all areas including dating, finance, and fitness.

I’m happily married and have been out of the dating scene for a while, so I can’t comment on the efficacy of Mr. Sharpe’s “Daily Dating Wisdom.” I did not, however, see any videos on how to subjugate women, trans men, and nonbinary people.

Landing on these lists can cause reputational damage, job loss, even de-banking. That kind of power comes with responsibility. And yet the reasons behind its hate map listings remain opaque. This sets the SPLC up for disagreement—and distrust.

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The SPLC’s critics generally see this indictment as decisive action against an NGO that has abused its power for years. Its supporters see it as lawfare. As with the critics, many of their concerns are rooted in history.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program targeted and infiltrated organizations like the Black Panthers and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After 9/11 federal agents visited many mosques in an effort to find threats. In 2011, FBI informants showed up at several Occupy Wall Street camps.

Conservative politicians and commentators have long criticized the SPLC. Many of those same commentators are now cheering the indictment. For supporters, this further cements concerns that this action is not a neutral enforcement—it is payback.

Others are concerned about precedent. A government institution with the power to compel, prosecute, and punish has acted on the grounds that the SPLC is misleading, manipulative, and politically harmful. That ambiguous standard may be applied broadly, and differently, by future administrations.

The indictment may also have indirect consequences. Organizations that have been listed or criticized by the Southern Poverty Law Center may be more inclined to pursue legal action. Some cases may be dismissed; others might result in large payouts. The SPLC has substantial funding, but it also has many opponents. In the past, they used these litigation tactics against groups like the Aryan Nations. They may now find themselves facing similar legal pressures.

Perhaps the greatest issue is institutional credibility. Discovery is likely to bring internal communications and practices into the public record. This will certainly reveal things the SPLC would rather keep private. Those disclosures will be amplified across partisan media and social platforms.

They will shape how the organization is perceived by supporters and critics alike. Corporate and individual donors may reassess their association. Journalists may become more cautious about relying on SPLC claims. That damage may not go away even if the case is resolved in their favor. Loss of reputation is a significant problem for an organization that presents itself as a source of moral certainty.

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Two very different narratives have formed around this indictment. Both narratives are grounded in genuine concerns. Each has extended those concerns into a broader conclusion—often supported more by preconceptions and prejudices than data. The facts of the case remain incomplete, but many have already rendered their verdict.

The question is not simply who is right in United States of America vs Southern Poverty Law Center. It is whether the standards being applied are clear, consistent, and resilient enough to withstand changes in political power and public perception.

Those questions are harder to answer.

They are also more important.

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Today “problematic” is often used as shorthand for “morally unacceptable.” It is a boundary that signals what you must not question and what you should not say. But this colloquial usage is nearly the inverse of its original meaning.

If we look back to the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary , we find a very different set of meanings for “problematic”:

A problematic statement in 1933 did not close discussion—it demanded it. It raised thorny questions. It recognized ambiguity and accepted uncertainty. It pointed to issues that could not be ignored and factors that could not be safely silenced.

Consider Gone With the Wind, often described as “deeply problematic.” This is true in the modern sense of the word. Many find Mitchell’s portrayal of happy slaves on a bucolic plantation to be deeply offensive caricatures.

Our understanding of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is no less complicated. Today “Uncle Tom” is used as a grievous insult. But Harriet Beecher Stowe was a committed abolitionist who created the character to evoke sympathy and moral outrage among her readers. Stowe’s Uncle Tom was a morally strong, dignified image of Christian virtue by the standards of 1852.

By the early twentieth century, Black activists used “Uncle Tom” to describe other Black Americans they saw as complicit in White oppression. If a work created in good faith, with the explicit goal of ending slavery, can later be understood so differently, it raises an uncomfortable question. Sixty years from today, how will our own moral certainties and good intentions be understood?

Today we can see the stereotypes and oversimplifications that shaped their work. We have a much harder time spotting our own. Stowe drew on the testimony of escaped slaves. Mitchell used stories passed down through her family. Our vision of the Civil War relies on movies, inherited assumptions, and contemporary politics more than the historical record.

An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that slavery was an unjust, oppressive, and evil system. But in making that judgment, we often flatten the history that surrounds it. The Civil War becomes a morality play, and the Confederacy its cast of villains.

Let’s be clear: the system was indeed monstrous. But the people who sustained it did not experience it that way. Nor did they see themselves that way. Some agonized over slavery. Some justified it by imagining themselves as humane masters who cared for those they enslaved. Many were church-going people who took morality seriously—within the framework they inherited.

Yet they allowed that system to continue.

Does that make them monsters? It is comforting to think so. Declaring someone a monster functions resolves the issue. It removes the need to engage further. But it also removes the need to understand.

And without that understanding, we are left with a simpler story than history can support—and a more dangerous one than we might like to admit. If injustice requires monsters, then we can be confident it belongs to the past. And we can be certain that we would have risen above it.

But what if it can be sustained by ordinary people? By people who believe themselves decent, who act with kindness in their own circles, who never question the system that surrounds them.

Then the question becomes harder. Then we must go beyond condemning what they tolerated in the past. We must ask ourselves what we tolerate in the present.

So how do people ignore atrocities? They don’t. They justify them.

Psychologist Albert Bandura noted that people do not simply tolerate harmful practices; they reframe them as morally necessary, even as honorable. This reframing allows them to preserve their sense of self-worth as they participate in oppressive systems.

Many slaveholders justified slavery as a civilizing influence. In their view, Africans lived in savagery and want. Slavery, they believed, introduced them to Christianity, gave them purpose, and ensured their material well-being. They convinced themselves the slaves were better off in bondage than in freedom.

Others fancied themselves as kindly masters. They made sure their Negroes were well-fed and properly clothed. They made sure the overseers treated them fairly, and never used the whip unless it was absolutely necessary. They reassured themselves that none of their slaves had run away in generations.

In an 1814 letter, Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend:

What followed was a reframing of “this moral and political depravity.” Jefferson noted that English peasants were as oppressed as American slaves—and there were more peasants in England than slaves in America. He shifts the frame of judgment from the nature of slavery itself to a comparison of relative suffering. Today we call this redirection of blame “whataboutism.”

From a twenty-first-century vantage point, it is easy to see through Jefferson’s argument. It is much more difficult to recognize the same patterns in our own thinking. The fact that we have a word like “whataboutism” suggests that these forms of justification remain persistent habits of mind.

Justification alleviates the consciences of those who support a system. But it does nothing to protect victims. Stalin probably caused more deaths than Hitler; Mao Zedong almost certainly did. But nobody who died in a concentration camp thought “at least Hitler’s not Stalin or Mao.” Nor did any American slave ever say “I sure am glad I’m not an English peasant.”

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Harriet Beecher Stowe created Uncle Tom in the image of the abolitionist’s ideal Negro—one shaped more by her moral expectations than by enslaved lives. Only later did we discover that Black people had very different ideals.

Today we recognize “internalized racism.” We seek out Black voices to educate us, just as abolitionists invited escaped slaves to speak at their meetings. We work to eradicate racism like abolitionists fought to eradicate a political and moral atrocity.

But are we any closer to understanding each other?

Good intentions do not eliminate misunderstanding. They can also shape it.

Moral movements attract the deeply committed. They also draw those seeking social clout. Like today’s antiracists, abolitionism had its share of members who wanted to be seen on the popular side of a defining issue. Today we call this “virtue signaling.” But the behavior is not new. And those who repeat slogans frequently often wind up believing them.

But the world as it is and the world reduced to slogans are very different. A movement’s vision of its cause—and of the people it wants to help—is emotionally loaded and simplified. That simplification is inevitable. Movements run on moral clarity, not ambiguity.

What gives a movement its power can also limit its understanding. Reducing a group to heroes can be as misleading as reducing them to villains. Stowe understood the system was evil. She then decided that its victims must be good. And so she recast them in her image of the “good Negro.” That pattern has not faded.

On March 19, 2007, David Ehrenstein wrote a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed about Barack Obama entitled “The Magic Negro Returns.”

The language is provocative. The underlying idea is not. The individual becomes a symbol. He is no longer seen as he is, but as he is needed.

In “Eating the Other,” bell hooks talks about how People of Color can become a fetish in both the sexual and magical sense. They not only represent the Other; they are seen as a source of primitive power and innocence in the tradition of Rousseau’s Noble Savage. As hooks describes it:

The form changes. The pattern does not. The Other is no longer feared or dominated. He is idealized, desired, and asked to provide what the self feels it lacks.

We do not just misunderstand each other. We assign each other roles.

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I was born a year after the Civil Rights Act passed. The people who remember colored water fountains and whites only luncheonettes are now in their late sixties or older. Within a few decades, segregation will pass out of living memory. It will no longer be remembered. It will be taught.

When that happens, it will change—not in its facts, but in its meaning.

The Civil Rights struggle was the last battle of the Civil War. The period since then has been a second Reconstruction. As the first Reconstruction’s close left many issues unresolved, so will this one. I will not be there, but many of my readers will.

That process of resolution will not be simple. You will face difficult questions and few easy answers. They will be problematic in the original sense—uncertain, contested, open to interpretation. Many ideas we now call “problematic” will lose the force they carry today. They will pass into history, to be reconsidered rather than condemned.

Other generations will inherit your past, as we did. But they will not inherit it unchanged. They will reinterpret history to understand their present. They will learn of the fires that tore through Atlanta and Gettysburg and Birmingham.

They will see only ashes.

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There was plenty of fear to go around in Cold War America. My middle school had a fallout shelter. We watched 8mm films warning us to “Duck” (under our desks) and “Cover” (our ears) if the Russians ever nuked our town of 4,000. In high school I read A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Martian Chronicles. In college we saw The Day After and WarGames, along with older standbys like Fail-Safe and Godzilla.

All of these encounters inspired fear. Nuclear war was a very real possibility at the time. But when the book ended and the credits rolled, I went out to the playground, the library, or the keg. The fear was contained. The story moved toward resolution. Comedies, tragedies, and adventure films all ended with some form of closure. It might not be happy, but it was unquestionably an ending.

Today, fear has become background noise. Our phones and laptops give us constant exposure to distraction and stimulation. Our social media feeds are filled with frightened people predicting horrible endings. We see bloody catastrophes minutes after they happen. We learn of tragedies and losses to the sound of a notification chime.

We used to experience fear in stories. Now we experience it in fragments.

Traditional storytelling builds tension, resolves it, and leaves meaning behind. From Sophocles to Stephen Spielberg, we have relied on structures that produce a sense of coherence, clarity, and a resolution—the completion of an experience over time.

In tragedies like Oedipus Rex or operas like Peter Grimes, the protagonist is brought to a bitter end. Romantic films typically end with the lovers united, often with the promise of a life together. However it arrives, the ending provides closure.

One of the defining features of modern art is its challenge of established conventions. Surrealism challenges bourgeois notions of reality and logic. Serialist musicians like Arnold Schoenberg and Karlheinz Stockhausen sought freedom from what Schoenberg called “the tyranny of tonality.” Bebop jazz musicians used melodies and chord progressions as a jumping-off point for intricate group improvisation.

But these artists weren’t looking to destroy structure so much as test its limits. They wanted to discover how far they could move beyond established boundaries and what they might find on the fringes. Their divergences strengthened the work and their journeys remained within a format that creates tension, led to climax, and resolved in the end.

In the “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades” aria, Grimes is a half step off key. Benjamin Britten uses dissonance to highlight how Grimes is set apart from the other villagers. Modern films increasingly feature antiheroes—charismatic, complex figures who blur the line between hero and villain. They may use new techniques and challenge old ideas, but they remain grounded on traditional foundations.

Today, a different form dominates our attention. It does not build toward a climax or move toward an ending. It does not explain, edify, or entertain. It asks only to be watched.

Clips, reels, and fragments now fill our screens. They begin in the middle of something, deliver a moment of intensity, and end without conclusion. A confrontation, a joke, a shock. A burst of outrage or satisfaction. Then another video arrives. There is no expectation that these moments will add up to a unified whole. They do not resolve; they are simply replaced.

These clips may be drawn from films, television, or TikTok. You may see the same segment several times, each time with different titles: NEVER HUMILIATE A SPECIAL FORCES MAN; GREEN BERET TEACHES BAD GUY A LESSON; MESSING WITH THIS MAN WAS A MISTAKE.

Many fragments lack even that tenuous connection to reality. They are AI-generated morality tales designed to provoke emotion. A celebrity humiliates a bully. A prisoner refuses freedom after a lifetime behind bars. There is no resolution, only a burst of feeling.

The responses become part of the cycle. Some reply with “CERTIFIED AI BULLSHIT” and similar memes, but the reaction itself becomes engagement. The feed does not distinguish between belief and disbelief. It registers only attention.

One response to a fabricated video captured the mindset perfectly:

The remark was meant as a defense, but it reveals something deeper. I no longer recall the fragment. It might have been a firefighter rescuing a puppy, a bully slapped down by a smaller man, or a racist police officer humiliated by a Black FBI agent. The content is as irrelevant as its veracity. It felt right. In the world of short-form video, truth is secondary to reaction.

Their structure is closer to pornography than to traditional film: a sequence of heightened moments, stripped of context, designed for immediate response rather than sustained engagement. The viewer is not asked to follow a story, only to react to a moment.

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Classic drama provides what Aristotle called catharsis, a purging of pent-up emotions. We pity the protagonist’s sufferings. We tremble as we realize their sufferings could be ours. And we resolve our feelings as the players resolve the story. Resolution gives us emotional processing, distance, and closure.

Video clips give us fear in pieces. There is no beginning and no end. The action begins and ends in media res. We experience the emotional payload in fragments. There is no completion, no ornamentation, and no magnitude. On a video feed fear does not unfold; it recurs.

Violence, outrage, and catastrophe draw attention. Attention draws eyeballs. You find yourself watching fistfights, injustice, and rage bait. The algorithm picks up on your viewing habits and soon your video feed is an endless scroll of scenes that raise your blood pressure and adrenaline levels.

You never receive a sense of closure. All you get is a constant supply of images, shorn of context and scale. You internalize that violence and begin to feel like you are under constant threat. Your brain may know that these images are not real, but your reactions have already decided they ought to be.

As Marshall McLuhan observed, “the medium is the message.” The form of a medium shapes not only what we see, but how we experience it. Short-form video does not simply deliver content in smaller pieces. It restructures experience itself—isolating moments, removing context, and replacing resolution with repetition.

So what happens to a world exposed to constant unstructured stimulus?

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A 2023 study on cognitive overload and anxiety found that cognitive overload can lead to feelings of worry, tension, apprehension, and frustration. Extended exposure to rapid, fragmented stimuli can overwhelm our capacity for attention and processing. This not only increases anxiety: it also makes individuals more likely to avoid effortful analysis in favor of simpler inputs with a lower cognitive demand.

We see this dynamic in online discourse. Dense, long-form content and nuanced analysis require attention, memory, and interpretation. Under cognitive strain many begin building their worldview from memes and short, simple, easily-processed narratives.

This is not limited to any one platform or political perspective. Cognitive overload does not concern itself with voting records or preferred social media hangouts. Fatigued minds seek out compressed narratives that can be grasped at a glance. They do not require analysis; they supply it. And that analysis is often reduced to simple signals of threat, outrage, and vindication.

This does not mean our situation is hopeless and that Western Civilization is doomed to death by TikTok. Nor are short-form reels the only drain on our attention. What we are facing is a disruptive technology that changes the way we engage with reality. Clips have not caused our free-floating anxiety any more than Gutenberg caused the Reformation. But as with the printing press, we’re still struggling to grasp the full implications of our latest invention.

So what happens next?

To learn more about the future, let’s take a look at the past.

Many clips come from longer films. The first motion pictures were clips. They didn’t tell stories, they presented spectacles: a train arriving at a station; workers leaving a factory; dancing girls; saloon brawls. Like today’s clips, they did not require structure or resolution. The experience of the new technology was enough.

As the medium developed, filmmakers began shaping these images into narratives. Like stage plays and novels, movies were built on scenes and driven by tension and resolution. Moving pictures evolved from a novelty to a new art form.

From running horses on a penny Kinetoscope viewer to Technicolor films in grand cinemas, movies were occasional experiences. They were viewed in dedicated spaces at scheduled times. The spectacle grew more impressive, but it always functioned within set boundaries.

Today the fragments do not end. They follow us from screen to screen, promising us stimulus whenever we crave distraction. What was once a novelty has become ever-present.

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W2XCW, America’s first television station, began broadcasting in 1927 from General Electric’s Schenectady facility. A television cost $75—roughly two months’ wages for an average worker. For that investment, viewers could watch blurry images on a three-inch screen. The station had few viewers and served primarily as a demonstration of GE’s cutting-edge capabilities

As more TV stations came online in the 1930s, wealthy enthusiasts in urban areas took advantage of the new technology. Television remained a novelty and a status symbol rather than a mainstream media outlet. Most Americans still turned to radio for news and entertainment.

After the war, that began to change. Amidst the postwar economic boom, many people found themselves with disposable income. Luxuries that once would have been unthinkable were now achievable with a bit of thrift and savings.

In 1950 only 9 percent of American homes had televisions; by 1954 that number had risen to 55 percent; in 1960 televisions could be found in 9 out of 10 American homes. What was once an expensive novelty had become a fixture. Families gathered around their sets for news and entertainment. The nation watched as Kennedy debated Nixon; it mourned when it learned that Kennedy had been shot.

Many critics worried about television’s rise. They complained that the “idiot box” led to passive consumption and the decline of reading. On May 9, 1961, FCC Chairman Newton Minow told the National Association of Broadcasters:

Minow’s criticism was not entirely unfounded. Television often favored formulaic scripts, recycled plots, and easy consumption. For every Twilight Zone or Leave it to Beaver there were clunkers like My Mother the Car and Tom Corbett—Space Cadet.

But those who blamed television for a nation’s ills missed many other contributing factors. Television certainly reshaped America. But so did postwar prosperity, interstate highways, mass production, and the rise of advertising. American social tensions appeared on television in shows like M*A*S*H* and All in the Family. But they were representations of existing issues, not their cause.

For all its flaws, television still told stories—and stories, however simple, still ended. Variety shows might seem shapeless, but every skit had a definitive ending and every musical number a conclusion. And as with movies, TV shows aired at set times on specific stations. That is no longer the case.

So what will become of clip culture?

Television created new opportunities for creative professionals. It also gave rise to a great deal of bad programming. The same could be said of movies. For every good film, there are dozens of bad ones and hundreds of soon-to-be-forgotten mediocrities. We believe in cinematic or televised “Golden Ages” only because we have forgotten the dross.

Every clip depends on an original source. Today making and distributing high-quality long-form content is easier—and cheaper—than ever. But the platforms reward immediacy, repetition, and engagement, not completion and depth. This will not kill long-form content any more than television killed cinema. But it does mean that, now as then, media will change and adapt as they engage with each other.

Today advertisers use search engine optimization to find keywords that will rank on search queries. Tomorrow’s filmmakers may take a similar approach, designing scenes to function as “clipbait”—moments that can be extracted, shared, and circulated across platforms. Instead of resisting this fragmentation, they may work with it, using clips as entry points that lead viewers back to the full work.

We may also find that clip culture reshapes society’s expectations for coherence and resolution. Long-form content may become a niche offering and a social market of prestige. Entertainment will be seen in terms of immediate reward and the tension/resolution cycle may seem as outmoded as barbershop quartets.

That being said, there is still a market for barbershop quartets—and just about every other kind of entertainment you can imagine. The Internet has given the world access to all sorts of obscure information. What changes is not their existence, but their meaning.

The original beatniks listened to bebop jazz. They adopted sunglasses, berets, goatees, and other fashion accessories popular in the jazz scene. They also dabbled in some of the jazz scene’s more visible vices, notably marijuana and heroin. To beatniks, this signaled sophistication and rebellion. For critics, they proved the scene was filled with drug-addled poseurs making noise and calling it art.

A generation later, hippies followed a similar path and received an equally hostile reaction. Rock musicians were mocked with the same anger and often with the same cliches. Like bebop, rock often sounded chaotic to outsiders and was dismissed as self-indulgent nonsense.

But while this was happening, jazz was changing its place in the social order. Jazz musicians who had once been seen as dangerous and marginal were welcomed into the American musical canon. Today, jazz is favored by the sophisticated and by those who want to be seen as sophisticated. It has taken its place among opera and classical music as “important art.”

Rock has not yet made that transition. Today hip-hop has taken the place of cultural dominance held by jazz in the 1940s and 1950s and by rock from the 1960s through the 1990s. Rock is just one of many other musical genres. Young people are as likely to choose EDM or lo-fi—genres which focus more on creating atmosphere and mood than on traditional song structures.

Long-form video content may not be going the way of the dinosaur, but it is already changing in form. Three-hour movies may become serialized, with stories unfolding over shorter installments. Viewers will choose between binge-watching or viewing each episode as an individual event.

We once encountered fear within stories that gave it form and meaning. Today, we encounter it in fragments that resist both. The forms remain. What changes is how we understand them—and how we process experience itself.

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Ahnaf joins Nova Scotia Tony, Najjii, and our good friend Cleveland Blakemore for a talk about what’s going on in Iran. The Strait of Hormuz remains blocked and American negotiators keep making threats they can’t follow through on. How does this end? Well, we all know it ends … with DOOM. Tune in, turn on, embrace the collapse, and don’t forget to like and subscribe!

Before we can ask whether a free society can create meaning, we need to be clear about what we mean by “freedom.”

The word has become a slogan and a signal of allegiance. It can mean “the right to do whatever I want” and “the things you shouldn’t stop me from doing.” It gets tossed around with the same certainty—and imprecision—as words like “fascism” or “tyranny.”

If freedom can mean anything, it ultimately means nothing. If we cannot define it, we cannot evaluate it. We can’t say if we have it, if we are losing it, or what it requires from us.

Let’s start by defining “free society.” For our purposes:

But while many think of freedom as an unqualified good, it comes with its own problems. Freedom expands choice, but it also dissolves structure. Roles that were once inherited must now be chosen. Beliefs that were once assumed must now be justified. Meaning, once given from outside, must now be built from within. That shift does not eliminate the need for purpose or belonging. It intensifies it.

If no structure defines identity, then identity must be constructed and maintained. The question is no longer “What is my place?” but “What should my place be?” That question is not optional, and it is not easily answered. It is here—between expanded freedom and diminished structure—that the central tension of a free society emerges.

It is tempting to imagine that we could restore the structures that once provided meaning—clear roles, shared beliefs, inherited identities. But the gates of Neverwhen are closed to us. As Martin Heidegger observed, we are “thrown” into the world. We do not choose the time in which we live, the culture we inherit, or the conditions that shape our lives.

Here we are—and from here we must begin.

The structures that once defined identity and purpose have changed. Many have weakened, and some have disappeared altogether. In place of the authorities that once assigned meaning, we have been given the freedom—and duty—to find or construct our own meaning. For good or ill, this is our being and our time.

We cannot return to a world in which meaning was imposed. We can only decide what we will build in a world where it is not.

As Jean-Paul Sartre said, we are “condemned to be free.” We cannot retreat into roles we did not choose or beliefs we did not examine. Even refusing to choose is itself a choice.

Freedom does not relieve us of responsibility. It ensures that we cannot escape it.

There is an old line from the cult television series The Prisoner: “Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison to oneself.”

The show follows #6, a man who insists, again and again, “I am not a number. I am a free man.” He resists the Village that seeks to define him, to categorize him, to reduce him to something manageable.

And when he finally confronts #1, the authority behind it, he finds his own face.

The pressures that produce systems of control do not arise from nowhere. They arise from our human needs—our desire for certainty, for order, for relief from the burden of choosing.

We can attempt to escape our surroundings, just as #6 tries to escape the Village. We can reject institutions, question authority, and walk away from imposed identities. But we cannot escape ourselves. The same need for clarity that drives us to resist control can also drive us to recreate it.

The story makes this explicit in its final moments. When #6 returns home and opens his door, he finds #1 emblazoned upon it.

He has found his answers—and discovered they are a prison of his own making.

Individual freedom solves the problem of imposed meaning. But it leaves us with the problem of shared meaning. We are free to define ourselves, but the pronouns “we” and “our” imply a social order.

Maintaining a society requires coordination, trust, and a shared set of assumptions. But a society of individuals living for themselves soon fragments into misunderstanding and conflict. Shared lives require shared meaning.

Our internal needs lead us to create external structures.

The individual longing for clarity begins to shape the group. Social enforcement and orthodoxy establish the tribe—and define our place within it. In time, some members rise to become formal or informal Strongmen. Others settle into place within the hierarchy.

Their purpose—their meaning—is shared with them by their fellows. They have neither the burden nor the blessing of self-creation. Most will never realize what they have lost.

The question is not whether a free society will have shared meaning. It is how that meaning will be created—and who will control it.

We can chase freedom through personal experience and the language of “self-discovery” and “self-exploration.” Or we can surrender that “freedom” to a Strongman—individual or collective—who promises to relieve us of the burden of questions and the prison of answers. Both paths promise relief. In practice, they lead to the same result.

Centering freedom entirely in the self tends toward alienation and nihilism. Outsourcing it to others leads us back to the same place. We must find a way to build meaning that can be shared without being imposed. We must do without a final arbiter, a permanent resolution, a stable identity that removes the burden of choosing.

This demands tolerance for ambiguity and a willingness to live alongside views we find incomplete, mistaken, or even offensive. The Strongman offers clarity and ease: a defined enemy, a settled purpose. Freedom provides us with none of these. This path is harder to sustain, less emotionally satisfying, and far more demanding. But it is the only path that does not end in the quiet surrender of self-creation.

So how does a free society create shared meaning?

Imperfectly and impermanently.

With sustained effort—and a measure of luck—it may do so just well enough to endure.

A free society requires restraint as well as rights. It depends on the understanding that freedom does not mean you will always get your own way. The ability to debate respectfully—and to separate disagreement from moral condemnation—is vital for any society that hopes to remain free. This will be difficult, demanding, and occasionally infuriating. The alternative is escalating dispute, tribalization, and eventual fragmentation.

Social norms must tolerate dissent, with a presumption of good faith even—especially—when dealing with challenging topics. An open society rests on community expectations and informal rules of engagement. Freedom must be internalized by the people and protected by the law. Tensions over the balance between the two are inevitable.

A society with separation of powers and competing authorities will constantly face slow decision-making and frequent gridlock. Those systems are frustrating by design. Delayed action and shared authority lead to ongoing disagreement. But they keep it from becoming domination.

Consolidated power can move much more quickly. It can silence disagreement and enforce orthodoxy. But those advantages come at a cost. Power that acts without resistance will eventually act without limit.

A free culture survives through shared habits, not shared conclusions. It accepts that there are no final answers and is comfortable with ongoing argument. It must value the ability to live with disagreement more than the desire to eliminate it.

The Strongman temptation never disappears. Impatience leads a society to seek fast, easy resolutions. Authority reassures in difficult moments, and traditional customs of openness and acceptance can feel dated as conditions change.

Open societies often close during times of crisis. Fear drives the demand for targets; confusion feeds the desire for clarity. Tolerance for instability and dissent becomes harder to sustain under pressure. During times of privation and collapse, many choose bread over freedom. A free culture can survive only as long as enough people are willing to do the harder thing.

Freedom is not a permanent achievement. It is a decision, made again and again, by people who are willing to accept the cost.

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When I was young, my mother told me about a deceased uncle I never met. Loud noises gave him wartime flashbacks. A backfiring car or a plane flying low could send him diving behind the couch, aiming an imaginary rifle.

She didn’t talk about her uncle much. She hadn’t known him well, and he died when she was still a girl. Though she never said so outright, I later realized he spent much of his postwar life in mental hospitals. In the 1930s and 40s, that carried a stigma. It was easier to keep things calm and quiet—for his sake and for everybody else’s.

I always assumed her uncle was a veteran of World War II. That was the war I associated with trauma. To a child in the early 1970s, World War I looked like Snoopy flying his Sopwith Camel against the Red Baron.

Only later did I realize my great-uncle was almost certainly a badly damaged veteran of the First World War. The images I inherited quietly reshaped the story I thought I was hearing—and recast his trauma in a war he was too broken to fight.

I was fourteen before I saw a serious World War I film—a television version of All Quiet on the Western Front, starring Richard Thomas, whom I knew as John-Boy Walton. It was a good film, in hindsight, but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me. By 1979 I had seen lots of movies with antiwar messages.

The Vietnam War had left many Americans feeling deeply ambivalent about combat. I saw The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now in the Montrose Theatre. I remember the bayonet scar my father got in Korea—but not as clearly as I remember watching M*A*S*H. The country was battle-weary and more interested in war’s horror than its heroism.

World War II was the exception. We were still divided about Vietnam, but everyone agreed on the Second World War: a triumph of good (us) over evil (Germany and Japan). There were no My Lai Massacres in that story, no trenches, no wars in countries we didn’t recognize for reasons we couldn’t explain. World War II vets were the “Greatest Generation,” warriors who had secured a better life for their children.

The Dirty Dozen was a television favorite. It told the story of a group of American convicts who earned redemption by blowing up a gathering of the Reich’s top commanders. Some died nobly in battle; others survived and were recognized as heroes. It was classic myth, complete with an all-star cast. Even the lowest American criminal, it suggested, was made of sterner stuff than the Nazis.

Our reception for NBC was spotty and Montrose didn’t have cable, so I missed Holocaust on its first run. But our library had The Diary of Anne Frank. On the playground I heard lurid tales of Nazi medical experiments; our CBS reception was better, so I also saw Vanessa Redgrave’s Auschwitz movie Playing for Time.

All of it reinforced my belief that Nazis were bad people who did bad things.

I also learned that Nazism was a thing of the past. In the Cold War era villains spoke with a Russian accent. Rocky Balboa squared off against Ivan Drago in Rocky IV; Rosa Klebb took on James Bond in From Russia with Love; twenty years later Bond foiled General Orlov’s plot to start a nuclear war in Octopussy. Even cartoons followed the pattern: The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show gave us Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale.

Nazis were a historical anomaly. The Soviet threat was very much alive, while the Third Reich had been decisively defeated. Even 1978’s The Boys from Brazil had to resort to ninety-five cloned Hitlers to make Nazism feel like a contemporary threat.

The Holocaust remains the moral core of World War II memory. But Nazis are no longer a dim, distant stain on history. Today, Nazism is often invoked as a looming danger, and political opponents are regularly labeled as “literally Hitler.”

We now have strong diplomatic ties with Germany, while our relationship with Russia remains tense. Yet there is no cultural fixation on Stalinism, and little of the pervasive fear of Russian saboteurs and spies that characterized the Cold War. Nazism has become a cultural bugbear, while more immediate geopolitical concerns do not generate the same kind of diffuse anxiety.

One issue is ambiguity. During the Cold War, Soviet espionage was a genuine threat and fears of nuclear annihilation were not unfounded. But nuclear war never came, and our fears of infiltration led us to embarrassing excesses like the Red Scare and the McCarthy hearings.

There is no Joe McCarthy in our cultural memory of World War II. The Japanese American internment camps are widely acknowledged as a grave injustice, but they are treated as an exception rather than the defining image of the war. The Cold War invites self-critique; the Second World War offers moral certainty.

The Holocaust gives us a clear image of evil: monstrous men committing monstrous acts. That clarity is part of its power. It is also part of its danger.

On April 11, 1961, an Israeli court charged Adolf Eichmann with:

• four counts of Crimes Against the Jewish People

• eight counts of Crimes Against Humanity

• one count of War Crimes

• two counts of Membership in Criminal Organizations.

To each of these charges, he pleaded “not guilty in the sense of the indictment.” Hannah Arendt describes his later attempts to explain himself:

Eichmann saw himself as a functionary. He obeyed orders, followed procedures, and advanced his career—and believed this absolved him of responsibility. For Arendt the horror lay not in his demonic wickedness, but in his terrifying normality.

Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann disrupted the comforting image of the Nazi as a monster. But a similar need for clarity shaped the way many people thought about the victims. In 1961, being a Holocaust survivor could carry a burden of shame. David Ben-Gurion is quoted by Hannah Arendt as complaining that “the Jews had degenerated until they went to their death like sheep.”

This kind of reaction is not uncommon in the aftermath of catastrophe, when survivors and observers alike search for explanations that restore a sense of agency. Even Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for all his knowledge of oppression, struggled with survivor guilt and later lamented that he had not resisted his captors more forcefully.

Reducing victims to cowards and perpetrators to villains serves a similar psychological function. Both provide a sense of meaning and closure. To say that a man loaded bodies into ovens because he was weak, or designed those ovens because he was evil, is to feel that you have grasped the atrocity. And these explanations carry a further comfort: they let us believe that we are fundamentally different.

One function of the Eichmann trial was to restore a sense of power and purpose—to replace the image of the Jewish victim with that of the Jewish avenger. It offered the possibility that, by bringing a perpetrator to justice, something of that lost agency could be recovered. It also reminded Jews in the Diaspora that what had happened once might happen again.

Arendt warned that such an emphasis risked sustaining an older mentality of separation, at odds with the realities of modern statehood. In the postwar world, she believed Israel would have to exist as “a nation among nations, a state among states.” The danger was not memory itself, but the possibility that it might distort the present.

What followed suggests that her concerns were not misplaced.

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By 2026, the Holocaust has nearly passed out of living memory. Those who entered the camps as children are now in their late eighties and nineties. In response, institutions and communities sought to preserve both the historical record and the moral lessons associated with it through memorials, museums, and educational programs.

But as memory was preserved, it was also simplified. The Holocaust shifted from a historical event to a lens through which other events were understood. “Nazi” became a shorthand and ultimately a general-purpose insult. And as that analogy expanded beyond its original context, the meaning those museums and memorials sought to preserve grew increasingly diluted.

Today, one no longer has to sport swastikas, advocate genocide, or goose-step to be labeled a Nazi. In online discourse, even heated disagreement can make you literally “Literally Hitler.”

In 1990, American attorney Mike Godwin observed that every online discussion that goes on long enough will eventually produce comparisons to Nazis or Adolf Hitler. He hoped that by naming the tendency, he might discourage it. His observation came to be known as “Godwin’s Law.”

Writing in 2016, Godwin reflected on the phenomenon:

The memorials and educational programs hoped to create a shared moral structure that would discourage both genocide and anti-Semitism. But not all audiences experience that education the same way.

For those with a personal or inherited connection to the Holocaust, it can reinforce a sense of historical vulnerability and a need to defend their community. Others see the Holocaust primarily as a universal moral lesson about the dangers of hatred and genocide. That education has helped produce a radical split over views of the ongoing Palestine conflict.

Before we go any further: this is not a “Jew vs Gentile” split. Many of Zionism’s most vocal critics are Jewish. Many of Israel’s strongest supporters come from outside the Jewish community. Simplifying complex issues to “us versus them” may provide the illusion of certainty, but it rarely leads to understanding.

The lines here are drawn not between fixed groups, but between different ways of interpreting the past. Those without a personal connection to the Holocaust encounter it largely through contemporary imagery. Like early medieval painters dressing first-century Christians in the garb of their time, or children seeing World War I through Peanuts cartoons, we envision the past through our own experiences.

Images from the ongoing Israel–Palestine conflict—starving children, armed soldiers, devastated neighborhoods—are often interpreted through the moral framework of genocide. For those with a more direct or inherited connection to the Holocaust, such comparisons can feel less like moral reasoning and more like a distortion of history, or even a continuation of the hostility that memory was meant to guard against.

Which interpretation is correct? Both reflect real concerns, but neither is complete. There are those who invoke the language of genocide in bad faith, and others who use it to express genuine moral alarm at civilian suffering. In polarized environments, attempts at nuance often satisfy no one. The result is a cycle of mutual misunderstanding, in which the same images reinforce opposing conclusions and deepen distrust.

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Within the next fifteen years, the last living Holocaust eyewitnesses will pass away. Their stories will be remembered through secondhand accounts, recorded testimony, and inherited fragments of memory. Old films and historical texts will become the primary frame of reference. What was once an open wound will fade into a scar.

Seventy years after the Civil War ended, Margaret Mitchell used her family stories as material for Gone with the Wind. Her book, and later the movie, transformed a horrific conflict into a sweeping epic about a lost Antebellum culture. They also helped popularize a vision of happy, loyal slaves living peaceful lives on bucolic plantations.

Today we recognize that Gone with the Wind reflects deeply problematic ideas about slavery and race relations. It is less clear what future generations will see when they look back at our own representations of the Holocaust. Like Mitchell, we work from testimony, images, and inherited narratives. But we shape that material through our own assumptions and needs.

The question is not whether our representations will be judged incomplete or flawed. It is what we currently fail to see.

A generation taught that the Holocaust must be treated with solemnity and reverence has, in many cases, responded with “oven memes” and Holocaust jokes. This shock humor is often read as anti-Semitism and hate speech. It may also be understood as testing the boundaries of what can be said.

These younger audiences encountered the Holocaust through cultural rather than living memory. Confronted with efforts to enforce seriousness, some respond with “sick” humor that derives its power from the very gravity it undermines. Their memes are not unlike the long hair and “hippie” garb of the 1960s counterculture. Where one generation rejected convention through appearance, another tests it through language.

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Hannah Arendt rejected easy ideas of monstrosity and depravity. Those oversimplifications ignored a deeper, more disturbing truth: evil was not ontological, it was procedural.

Much of modern discourse has moved away from Arendt’s insight, returning to a more familiar image of the Nazi as a monster whose actions require no further explanation. Atrocity has been reduced to cliché and ultimately to memes.

Today we often use “myth” as a synonym for fraud, for lie, for old wives’ tale. But myth is the survival of memory. It can preserve wisdom and become a cultural framework. But it can also obscure reality.

We are not outside that process, we are a part of it. We reshape the stories we inherit and pass them on to the future. But we miss things we cannot see, just like those who came before us and those who will follow in our footsteps.

The danger is not that we will forget what happened. It is that we will come to believe we understand it completely.

Before he was the Führer, Hitler was just another radical agitator in the Vienna streets. Stalin began as an obscure seminarian on the Russian Empire’s margins. Neither was unique. Europe had no shortage of political extremists, nor Russia of revolutionaries.

What distinguished them was not their ideas or their ambition. It was the apparatus that formed around them. Both rose to power with the help of loyal supporters. But they consolidated power through an expanding network of officials, clerks, and enforcers who simply did their jobs. Their authority rested on compliance at every level below.

The strongman is a symbol and a focal point. The apparatus is the mechanism that puts his ideology into practice. Hitler spoke of the Jewish problem. Eichmann and his underlings provided the solution. We frequently hear that Stalin murdered tens of millions. But those victims died at the hands of apparatchiks, guards, and bureaucrats who redistributed grain, guarded prisoners, and rubber-stamped sentences.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent eight years in Soviet prisons and labor camps, followed by years of internal exile. In 1974, he was expelled from the Soviet Union and sent to West Germany. Not until 1994 would he be allowed to return to his homeland.

The Gulag Archipelago, written between 1958 and 1967 and smuggled out of Soviet Estonia, became a worldwide bestseller. It remains one of the most powerful records of life in Stalinist Russia—and of the mechanisms that made such a system not only possible, but sustainable.

The Fall of the Faithful

Nikolai Bukharin feared exclusion more than death. To be cast out of the Party was to lose not only status, but identity itself. Stalin understood this and used it with precision. The system did not rely on force alone. It relied on the need to belong.

Bukharin was not an opponent of the regime—he was one of its architects. A longtime Party loyalist, he helped develop the doctrine of “socialism in one country,” which distinguished Stalin’s vision from Trotsky’s call for permanent revolution. He was, in every sense, an insider.

It was precisely that position that led to his arrest on February 27, 1937.

As Stalin ignored his former friend’s anguished letters, Bukharin wrote a “Letter to the Future Central Committee” from his cell. He swore his loyalty to the Party and affirmed his support for everything it had done.

For months, Bukharin resisted his interrogators’ efforts to force a confession. When he finally broke, he soon withdrew it. But threats against his family succeeded where sleep deprivation and torture had failed. At his trial, he ended his statement with:

From prison Bukharin sent one last plea to Stalin: “Why do you need me to die?” Stalin did not respond and on March 15, 1938 Nikolai Bukharin was executed.

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The Folly of Resistance

By the early 1930s, Soviet doctrine had begun to dismiss concepts such as guilt and innocence as “rightist opportunism.” The accused were not convicted of crimes; they were subjected to administrative penalties that could include exile, confiscation of property, and decades of imprisonment.

A peasant who taught his children about Orthodoxy could receive a ten-year sentence under Article 58-10 for “counterrevolutionary propaganda.” A satirical comment in a private letter led to Solzhenitsyn’s own arrest under the same provision.

There was not only no clear moment to resist. There was no clear basis for a defense. Detainees rarely knew what they were being charged with, and even if they had, it would have made little difference. What mattered was not whether one had violated a known rule, but whether one could be placed within a category.

While most people had little access to the laws and statutes that governed them, they quickly learned that association could be dangerous. In Stalinist Russia, anyone could be condemned for arbitrary reasons. Once arrested, they were often forced to name others who participated in the imaginary conspiracy.

Under Article 58-12, “failure to report anti-Soviet activity” was itself a crime. Turning in a neighbor or friend might protect you—until that same person named you in return. Everyone you knew—friend, family, neighbor—was a potential witness, informant, or suspect.

The Stalinist system did not need to monitor every conversation. It conditioned people to monitor themselves. Speech became calculated, cautious, and conditional. Because there were no clear boundaries on safe speech, what was permissible today might be forbidden tomorrow. Comrades learned to avoid not only dangerous speech, but anything that might later be interpreted as dangerous.

Relations with suspect persons were fraught with peril. Prisoners were frequently served with divorce papers while in custody. Children changed their last names to avoid suspicion. Traditional ties of blood and community weakened as the Party rose to take their place.

The safest position was not loyalty. It was isolation.

The Interrogator and the Lie

Many Soviet citizens believed fervently in Stalin and saw the mass arrests as a justified, if harsh, response to a real threat. Those who did not generally stayed quiet or were quickly silenced. In such an environment, there was little public outcry as the purges continued.

The interrogators did not rely on rumor or propaganda. They knew that many of the confessions they recorded were false. In many cases, they had helped construct those lies and then forced the accused to repeat them. Yet most remained active participants in the system for years or decades.

It is easy to dismiss them as sadists or monsters—aberrations from the norm. But in 1957, Solzhenitsyn discovered that his closest friend from the war, Ovsyannikov, had joined the Organs of state security—the very offices responsible for interrogations. His explanation was simple:

Ovsyannikov is not a fanatic or a sadist. He admits that there are aspects of his work he dislikes. But he continues. He does not justify the system. He does not defend its outcomes. He simply narrows his field of vision until those questions no longer demand an answer.

“I no longer think about the future” is not an expression of ignorance. It is a decision to avoid what he already knows. The past cannot be examined, the future cannot be imagined, and the present is reduced to the task at hand. What remains is not belief, but function. The Organs do not require belief—only the willingness to look away.

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Internal and External Enemies

For Marx and his intellectual descendants, communism represented the final stage of an inevitable historical process. Capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions, the working class would rise, and the dictatorship of the proletariat would give way to a classless, moneyless society.

The Soviet Union had achieved a Marxist-Leninist revolution, yet the population continued to struggle with hunger and poverty. For many, life under the Party was more constrained than it had been under the Tsar. This presented a problem. If history guaranteed success, failure required an explanation.

Stalin’s answer was straightforward: the system was sound, but it was under attack. International capitalism—and its collaborators within the Soviet Union—were undermining progress.

Under Article 58-7, so-called “wreckers” could be prosecuted for “undermining state industry.” Trofim Lysenko’s agricultural policies contributed to widespread famine, yet starving farmers were accused of poisoning the fields. Power failures could result in engineers being shot under Article 58-14, “counterrevolutionary sabotage.”

Show trials did not make life easier for the people, but they made suffering intelligible. They shifted blame away from Stalin and onto enemies who sought to undermine the system. And because the Party controlled the means of mass communication, there were few narratives capable of challenging the official account.

Executions and incarcerations served a second purpose. They reinforced the cost of dissent. Patriotism tends to intensify in times of perceived crisis, and every “spy” or “traitor” carried out of an apartment building served as a warning. To be named an enemy of the people was to place not only oneself, but one’s family, at risk.

These enemies were not simply discovered. They were produced. The system required them to make sense of its own contradictions. Once identified, they had to confess, implicate others, and confirm the narrative. The interrogations and trials that followed were not attempts to uncover truth, but to construct it.

If the system depends on ordinary people, it also requires a figure to represent it. Stalin became the face of Soviet Communism, just as Solzhenitsyn became the face of Soviet tyranny. But Stalin did not sign the papers that led to Solzhenitsyn’s arrest. Neither did he read the letters that sealed Solzhenitsyn’s fate. Those actions were carried out by long-forgotten men acting in Stalin’s name.

The strongman functions much like a corporate logo. If you see the familiar Golden Arches, you immediately think of McDonald’s. But placing a similar sign above a restaurant does not make it McDonald’s. The brand depends on a supply chain, standardized processes, and a network of managers, trainers, and employees who ensure that the product is consistent from one location to the next.

Images of Stalin served as shorthand for the systems he represented. Stalin possessed real power, but that power was exercised through an extensive apparatus of officials, functionaries, and enforcers. His greatest importance was not as an individual but as a symbol.

The strongman gives the system a face; the system gives the strongman power. Remove the figure, and the apparatus remains. Remove the apparatus, and the figure becomes irrelevant. These systems do not depend on extraordinary individuals. They depend on ordinary ones—on people very much like us.

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Gutenberg’s press was revolutionary and, at first, commercially precarious. Literacy was rare in 15th-century Europe. And while a Gutenberg Bible cost far less than a handwritten one, it still required roughly three years of a clerk’s wages. Gutenberg died with little of the wealth his invention would later generate. Fust, the more successful businessman, moved to Paris and died wealthy.

One of Gutenberg’s few reliable sources of income was the printing of indulgences. These official Church documents promised a reduction in the temporal punishment for sin. Those who wanted a shorter stay in Purgatory—or who worried about the fate of deceased relatives—could purchase indulgences for themselves or others.

These indulgences were the subject of Luther’s 95 Theses. In October 1517, Luther’s critique was less about indulgences in principle than about the false assurance they offered. He worried they promised redemption without genuine repentance or inward transformation.

Early printed works were largely in Latin, the language of educated elites. Luther originally released his Theses in Latin for Church scholars. But within a few months, German translations appeared throughout the region. What had begun as a debate between monks and priests became a matter of public controversy.

As Luther’s support increased, the Church grew increasingly concerned. In 1520, Pope Leo X issued a papal bull condemning Luther and threatening him with excommunication if he did not recant. He did not.

By January 1521, the excommunication was final. The conflict had moved beyond theology to a question of authority. Three months later, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V summoned Luther to the Diet of Worms and ordered him to recant.

Luther appeared as commanded—but stood firm, grounding his position not in Church authority, but in Scripture and conscience:

According to later accounts, he concluded, “Here I stand, I can do no other. May God help me. Amen.” The heretic monk was now an outlaw.

But many German princes had long resented the authority of both Rome and the Emperor. One of them, Frederick the Wise, arranged for Luther’s escape from Worms and concealed him in Wartburg Castle. There, under the name Junker Jörg (“Jörg the Knight”), Luther began translating the New Testament from Greek into German—bringing Scripture directly into the language of the laity.

Luther’s rise unfolded within a broader climate of extended instability. The Western Schism (1378-1417) fractured the authority of the papacy for nearly four decades. Efforts to restore unity culminated in the execution of two prominent reformers, Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague. This in turn sparked fifteen years of Hussite Wars in Bohemia and surrounding regions.

The fall of Constantinople in 1453 further heightened fears across eastern and central Europe. In the next decades the Ottomans conquered the Balkans, the Black Sea, and Crimea, even seizing the southern Italian port of Otranto in 1481. Institutions and ideas that had undergirded European culture for centuries no longer appeared secure—or sufficient to meet emerging threats.

Even after the wars ended, Hussite beliefs remained widespread among the Bohemian and Moravian population. Large segments of the laity continued to identify with reformist ideas. The Church’s authority persisted, but its claim to theological uniformity had already begun to erode.

A dissatisfied public increasingly turned to pamphlets for answers they could no longer find in established institutions. Belief was no longer shaped exclusively through clergy and tradition. It was open to personal engagement, interpretation, and dispute. For many self-education and self-examination were both a right and a responsibility.

Social and economic changes reinforced this shift. Growing urban populations created mercantile and artisan classes that did not fit neatly into traditional hierarchies. Political, religious, and social authorities were no longer fixed and uncontested. And the cracks that divided the European landscape now threatened the firmament of Heaven.

“Hellmouth” images and sculptures reminded medieval Catholics that salvation was not guaranteed. But the Church also provided sinners with a pathway out of damnation. Prayer, sacraments, and good works offered a means of avoiding Hell. It was terrifying, but it was also manageable.

Along with indulgences, Martin Luther challenged the idea that salvation could be secured through sacraments and works alone. Salvation came down to sola fide—faith alone. But faith is not always steady. Doubt, despair, and uncertainty remain. How could one know whether that faith was sufficient?

John Calvin offered a stark answer: one could not. For Calvin, salvation rests not on faith or works, but on the judgment of an inscrutable God. From the beginning of time, each soul was predestined to grace or damnation—and the elect are few, while the damned are many.

The early modern era marks a shift in both Catholic and Protestant reform movements. Medieval Christianity emphasized right practice, visible conformity, and participation in shared forms. After the Reformation, attention shifted to sincerity, self-examination, and inward belief.

It was no longer enough to attend church and recite the proper prayers. One had to consider sincerity, test one’s faith, and confront sins that might not even be fully acknowledged. The focus turned inward. Judgment extended beyond outward behavior to thought and intention.

Once the interior life becomes morally decisive, it also becomes politically significant. When salvation depends not merely on outward behavior but on inward belief, sincerity, and conviction, authority can no longer limit itself to regulating actions alone. It must concern itself with what individuals think, intend, and truly believe.

But the interior life is opaque; it cannot be directly observed or measured. What follows is a growing emphasis on signs. Professions of belief, denunciations of error, and visible acts of conformity become the means by which inner states are inferred and judged.

These signs, however, can be performed. The result is an increasing concern not just with obedience but with authenticity. The boundary between moral scrutiny and political control begins to blur—and ultimately to disappear. One of the earliest, most striking examples of this dynamic emerged in 1534 Münster.

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Many who read Martin Luther’s pamphlets and essays became Lutherans. Others treated his ideas not as conclusions, but as starting points. A few extended his critique of authority beyond anything Luther himself was willing to accept.

The Anabaptists drew on both earlier reform traditions and more recent Protestant developments. From the Hussites they inherited a suspicion of established authority and a willingness to form alternative religious communities. From Luther they adopted an emphasis on Scripture and the primacy of individual faith. They pushed both further, insisting that belief be conscious, voluntary, and genuine.

Yet these shared premises led to very different outcomes. Some Anabaptist groups responded by withdrawing from the world, forming disciplined, pacifist communities that rejected political authority altogether. Others took a more radical path, seeking to establish a purified society on earth. The Anabaptists of Münster belonged to this second group.

In 1534, the city of Münster became the center of one of the Reformation’s most radical experiments. Anabaptist preachers, fueled by apocalyptic expectation and widespread dissatisfaction with existing authorities, gained influence among segments of the urban population and within the city’s political structure.

Within this fractured environment, Anabaptist leaders and their supporters took control of the city government. What followed was not simply reform, but transformation. Münster was recast as a “New Jerusalem,” a community that sought to embody divine order on earth. Belief had become political, and politics had become a matter of belief.

The Münster leaders did not come from the traditional clerical or noble elite. Jan Matthys, the leading figure in the movement, was a Dutch baker. His authority was rooted in his charisma and perceived spiritual insight. By interpreting unfolding events as signs of divine intervention, he framed the crisis as part of a larger, sacred struggle. His leadership felt both authentic and urgent.

But his reliance on visions would prove to be his downfall. On Easter Sunday 1534, Matthys led a small group out of the city, convinced that divine revelation would secure victory against the besieging forces. The besieging forces did not cooperate, and the group was quickly overwhelmed and killed. Interior conviction proved incapable of defeating external weapons.

Matthys’ failed prophecy might have discredited the movement. But his successor, John of Leiden, reinterpreted his death as part of a larger divine plan. In a city under siege and increasingly isolated from the outside world, there were few remaining structures capable of challenging such claims.

The former tailor positioned himself not merely as a political leader, but as a divinely sanctioned ruler, eventually declaring Münster the “New Jerusalem” and himself its king. Religious conformity was enforced through rebaptism, expulsion, and execution. Property was redistributed, social life regulated, and even marriage brought under collective control.

These measures were not simply expressions of power, but responses to a deeper problem: belief could not be directly observed. It had to be demonstrated, enforced, and made visible. In a system built on interior conviction, uncertainty was intolerable—and control expanded to eliminate it.

Münster remained under siege for more than a year as surrounding Catholic and Protestant forces closed in. Food grew scarce, internal discipline tightened, and the gap between the leaders’ promises and the city’s reality became harder to ignore. In June 1535, the besieging forces finally breached the city’s defenses. The “New Jerusalem” fell not to divine intervention, but to sustained military pressure from the outside world it had tried to replace.

The aftermath was swift and brutal. John of Leiden and other leaders were captured, tortured, and executed. Their bodies were placed in iron cages and suspended from the tower of St. Lambert’s Church, where the cages still hang today. The message was unmistakable: the established order had reasserted itself.

Despite its failure, the Münster rebellion remains important for what it revealed. A movement fueled by interior conviction had, under pressure, produced a system of visible enforcement and absolute authority. The system lacked the surveillance capacity and bureaucratic structure of modern regimes, but the Münster Anabaptists displayed many of the underlying dynamics we associate with modern totalitarianism.

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Attempts to isolate a single, decisive cause for totalitarianism oversimplify a far more complex reality. Certain factors may be more influential in particular movements, and similar outcomes may emerge under different conditions. What matters is not any individual cause, but the convergence of pressures that make people hungry for certainty no matter the cost.

Declarations of belief, denunciations of error, and displays of visible conformity can establish a community. But signs reveal actions, not thoughts. Individuals may conform outwardly while believing otherwise. Enemies may present themselves as allies. What cannot be known must ultimately be inferred— and enforced.

Once belief must be inferred, communities rely on signals. What begin as affirmations of belonging gradually harden into requirements. As the demand for certainty increases, the space for ambiguity narrows, and informal pressures give way to more structured forms of enforcement. It is then that a defining feature of totalitarian systems emerges; the social and the moral become subsumed by the institutional.

Totalitarianism thrives on and generates suspicion. But suspicions about the interior life cannot be resolved. Denunciations and scapegoats can help establish boundaries and keep the populace in line. But they can never achieve certainty. The line between moral judgment and political control disappears. Differences of alignment become more than simple evidence of disloyalty. They are emblems of internal corruption.

In a totalitarian state, individuals not only regulate themselves in anticipation of judgment. They monitor others. Many envision the totalitarian state as a strongman who holds his people in bondage. But the system sustains its oppression with the active participation of the people—many, often most of whom do not feel oppressed.

As certainty remains out of reach, the pressure to resolve that uncertainty reshapes social life. What cannot be settled through knowledge is managed through structure, expectation, and control. Participation in that structure becomes both a sign of belonging and a means of enforcement.

The result is not simply a system imposed from above, but one that emerges from within—a pattern in which individuals, seeking clarity and security, sustain the very forces that constrain them. And a desire for certainty is met by a system that cannot tolerate doubt.

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The Spectacle

Published in 1967, Society of the Spectacle has aged better than many of its Marxist contemporaries. Scroll through any social media feed and Debord’s central insight becomes immediately recognizable: modern life is mediated through systems of representation that reshape our understanding of reality. What once read as theory now reads more like a description of everyday life.

But that is no longer the whole story. Debord wrote in the age of television, when the Spectacle appeared primarily as something the individual experienced passively. The viewer watched, absorbed, and internalized a mediated version of reality.

In the age of the Internet, that relationship has shifted. Users can comment in real time, upload their own content, and shape the narratives they consume. The spectator has become a participant in its production. They no longer simply observe the Spectacle. They help construct and sustain it.

Debord’s Spectacle shaped how people understood the world. The Spectacle of social media shapes how they understand themselves. Meaning is no longer just mediated; it is turned inward and made into identity.

In the mid- to late twentieth century, individuals sought to “find themselves.” Today identity is less often discovered than constructed. Individuals assemble labels, affiliations, diagnoses, and interests into a constantly curated and reinforced self. This self is not fixed. It is performed, revised, and displayed in real time.

When identity is performed in public, it must be continuously reinforced through visible signals. While often dismissed as “performative outrage,” these expressions are not necessarily insincere. They are how individuals define themselves within a structure that rewards signs of alignment.

Once identity is expressed publicly, it becomes subject to social reinforcement and correction. As Erich Fromm observed, the fear of disapproval and the need for approval are among the most powerful forces shaping moral judgment. What appears to be conviction is often inseparable from the social rewards and punishments that sustain it.

In this environment, online communities feel unified internally. They provide members with a shared language, shared norms, and a shared moral framework. But that clarity of identity comes with an equally binding clarity of opposition. You learn who belongs by contrasting them with those who do not.

Ultimately, these communities provide an illusion of belonging through exclusion. They are no longer defined by distance, but by shared belief. They operate within a virtual geography that tells you where you stand and what you must do to remain within the group. The camaraderie they offer is grounded in the separation that defines them.

The Spectacle has not overcome separation. It has reorganized it. Social media is driven by visibility and engagement. Distinction is rewarded. The clearer the divide between Us and Them, the easier it becomes to recognize and reinforce one’s own position. Extreme statements attract more attention than moderation.

Over time, these positions harden. Differences that were once ignored become flashpoints. The Spectacle makes separation more visible and more legible. These distinctions become central to how communities and individuals understand themselves and others.

The Spectacle does not simply provide the appearance of community. It also provides the appearance of purpose. Individuals are given roles to perform, norms to enforce, and causes to defend. This produces a sense of moral clarity and engagement, but it remains contained within its own logic.

What feels like action is often a form of participation. It produces recognition and affirmation rather than material change. Participants experience an intense sense of purpose, but that purpose rarely extends beyond the boundaries of the Spectacle. It feels like reality, but operates as something else entirely—what Jean Baudrillard would later describe as a simulacrum.

The Simulacrum

Debord argued that our experience of the real world had become filtered through the Spectacle. Reality still existed, but it was increasingly mediated by the images and narratives presented through television, newspapers, and film. Baudrillard pushed this insight into more unsettling territory.

Writing decades before the rise of the internet, he argued that modern systems no longer represent reality. They replace it. What emerges is not a distorted version of the real, but a self-contained collection of signs that can be endlessly recombined and reinterpreted.

Meaning is no longer anchored to lived experience. It is generated internally through the interaction of symbols, categories, and narratives. What matters is not whether something corresponds to reality, but whether it is recognizable and legible within the system itself.

Within the simulacrum, identity is assembled, performed, and validated internally through labels and signals. Its foundations lie in virtual spaces rather than lived experience or external reality. Participants come to understand themselves through the responses of other constructed selves.

The Collective Strongman is not a person, a leader, or an institution. He is a distribution of signals that produces authority. Approval is expressed through praise, and disapproval through callouts. There is no central source, no founding principle, and no external legitimacy. The Collective Strongman is the group—and the group is the Collective Strongman.

The community exists less as a unified group than as shared signals, language, performance, and enemies. Its guidelines and political stances function not only to express beliefs, but to distinguish members from non-members. The outrage feels real, but it remains largely self-contained. What matters is not what is done, but how it appears.

Baudrillard notes that systems often sustain themselves by invoking their own negation. The threat of collapse, oppression, or catastrophe keeps members active and engaged. It also provides meaning: to be targeted suggests that one’s beliefs matter, that one poses a threat to opposing forces. This can be deeply compelling to individuals who feel marginal or unheard.

From outside the system, those fears may look exaggerated or implausible. But that makes them an especially effective sorting mechanism, separating believers from outsiders. Those who deny the danger are not merely mistaken. They may be seen as complicit in it, or indifferent to its consequences. To express doubt is to risk marking oneself as an outsider. It becomes easier to remain silent, and over time, to internalize the prevailing beliefs.

Baudrillard argues that Debord’s Spectacle has begun to dissolve. The Spectacle depends on a distinction between the medium and the audience, between what is shown and who is watched. But the medium is no longer identifiable as something separate from the social world. It becomes diffuse, embedded, and inseparable from everyday interaction.

This marks a shift from observation to participation. Individuals are no longer merely spectators of a mediated reality. They become its medium. The system no longer stands apart from them. It operates through them.

Drawing on Marshall McLuhan, Baudrillard further suggests that the distinction between medium and message has collapsed entirely. The medium and the real have fused. What remains is not a channel through which meaning passes, but a closed loop in which meaning circulates.

There is no external point from which it can be challenged or corrected. Criticism, dissent, and reform all take place within the same structure that produces the conditions they seek to oppose. The system absorbs them, incorporates them, and continues. What appears as opposition functions as reinforcement—and as a target.

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The Scapegoat

René Girard observed that belief is often shaped less by independent reasoning than by mimesis, or imitation. Individuals adopt the views of those around them, especially when reinforced by trusted peers. Over time, these shared beliefs become self-reinforcing.

This dynamic becomes especially potent when combined with fear. A vague or impersonal threat is difficult to grasp. A visible enemy is not. The identification of that enemy provides both an explanation and a target. It transforms uncertainty into conflict, and conflict into meaning.

You might think that manifests as fear of the Other, but that’s not always the case. According to Girard, “persecutors are never obsessed by difference but rather by its unutterable contrary, the lack of difference.” Through mimesis, individuals begin to mirror one another. Cultural and behavioral distinctions blur, along with the boundaries that define identity.

This loss of distinction produces anxiety. Fear restores it. By drawing a sharp line between Us and Them, communities reestablish a sense of order. When combined with external stress—a bad harvest, a plague, a crime—this process can escalate. Those who were once neighbors become scapegoats, threats that must be eliminated to restore stability.

It’s tempting to write these incidents off as relics of a darker, more ignorant time. But Girard doesn’t let us off that easily. He reminds us that the witch hunters and pogrom leaders were convinced their targets were guilty. And he notes that each of us believes that our opponents have superstitions while we have justified enmities.

Such beliefs sustain themselves not only through shared conviction, but through the inability to recognize one’s own participation in them. We assume ourselves too rational to fall for such patterns. Yet when a narrative is sufficiently compelling—or the stakes feel sufficiently high—it becomes easier to accept than to question.

René Girard traces this pattern back to some of the earliest myths. In the story of Oedipus, a plague afflicts the city, and the search for its cause leads to the revelation of hidden crimes—parricide and incest. Once the truth is exposed, punishment follows, and with it the restoration of order.

To its original audience, this progression was not merely dramatic. It was logical. Catastrophe demanded explanation, and explanation demanded guilt. Guilt, in turn, demanded punishment. Only through the identification and expulsion of the guilty could the community hope to restore balance.

What is striking in the present moment is not simply the persistence of these patterns, but their intensity. Accusations of hidden evil and extreme wrongdoing circulate with increasing frequency and confidence. They are repeated, refined, and amplified until they take on the weight of established truth.

At first glance, many of these claims appear too implausible to take seriously. But their implausibility is part of what gives them force. They are not merely explanations. They are markers of belief.

The extremity of the accusation draws a clear boundary between those who belong and those who do not. It resists moderation, because moderation weakens distinction. What begins as rumor or speculation can, through repetition and reinforcement, come to feel not only plausible but inevitable.

The belief does not spread because it is true. It spreads because it is shared. And once belief and identity are stabilized, they no longer require reinforcement from above. They are simply lived from within.

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The Panopticon

Dungeons traditionally kept convicts locked away in darkness. Cells segregated prisoners from guards and from each other. Jeremy Bentham proposed something different: constant visibility. In his panopticon, guards had a constant, clear view of every prisoner.

Michel Foucault describes how the panopticon serves to induce “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” Its effects are continuous even when observation is not. Individuals regulate their behavior because they may be seen.

Social media participants who violate moral norms may find themselves “doxed.” Their identities may be exposed, their words circulated beyond their original context, and their misdeeds brought to the attention of employers, acquaintances, and the virtual mob. The online pillory serves to set boundaries. Discourse is shaped in advance by the awareness that anything said may be seen, recorded, and judged.

This structure no longer requires a central observer. It operates independently of any single authority. Participants become both subject and enforcer, caught up in a system of visibility and judgment that they themselves sustain.

Foucault notes that the subject “assumes responsibility for the constraints of power… he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” The individual no longer simply responds to authority. He carries it within himself. The enforcement of norms becomes automatic. Power persists not through force, but through the anticipation of judgment.

The Spectacle no longer stands apart from its audience. The simulacrum no longer requires a reference point. The enforcement of norms no longer depends on a central authority. Visibility produces behavior. Behavior reinforces norms. Norms shape identity. Identity, in turn, sustains the system that produced it.

Authority is no longer concentrated in a single figure, but distributed across the network itself. The Collective Strongman emerges from this process—not as a person, but as a pattern. He has no voice, yet speaks through millions. He has no will, yet enforces conformity. He is not imposed from above, but generated from within.

The structures we inhabit today do not simply constrain us. They are sustained by us. We participate in them, reinforce them, and carry them with us. Power no longer needs to be imposed. It persists because it has been internalized and distributed among those it governs—until it no longer appears as power at all.

The Spectacle mediates reality. The simulacrum replaces it. The scapegoat stabilizes belief, and the panopticon internalizes control.

Power is no longer imposed from above, nor embodied in a single figure. It is distributed, enacted, and sustained through participation.

The Strongman has not disappeared. He has been collectivized.

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Some critics warned about these “hidden persuaders.” A few even recognized them as capitalism’s version of Soviet propaganda. But for most people, the forces shaping collective meaning were distant, opaque, and controlled by a small group of experts.

Today’s persuasion industry has been decentralized. Professional journalists are now overshadowed by “Influencers” whose credentials are their camera and charisma. Accounts like Occupy Democrats and Libs of TikTok attract millions of followers who repost their content and adopt their language.

No matter where you land on the political spectrum, you’re sure to find accounts that tell you what to think, how to vote, and whom to hate. That last one is especially popular. The social media political sphere thrives on morality plays, complete with cartoonish villains driven solely by malice.

Political power no longer requires a degree or even an election. All you need is a smartphone. Where people once looked to a strongman to give their lives meaning, they can now choose from a menu of ideologies—each promising clarity, identity, and direction.

But are they choosing these ideologies, or being herded into them?

And if they are being herded, who—or what—is doing the herding?

One of the defining promises of modern life is freedom. From an early age, we’re told that we can be whatever we want to be and do whatever we want to do. We’re no longer constrained by family, class, religion, geography, or other factors that once defined our lives and set our limits.

We have plenty of possibilities. But we lack direction.

And many people find themselves wondering, “Who am I, and what should I do?”

“NPC” memes feature gray, identical faces repeating popular narratives. They portray opponents as brainwashed puppets who simply parrot the slogans they are given.

But they also serve another purpose. They reassure the person sharing it that they are different. They think for themselves. They’re not easily manipulated like those people.

You’ll find NPC memes across the political spectrum. Whether the NPCs wear MAGA hats or COVID masks, the message remains the same: we are independent, you are brainwashed. The meme is new. The existential angst is not.

Erich Fromm recognized this pattern in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom. Writing about the pressures of modern society, he argued that the desire for security and belonging can lead individuals to surrender their sense of self.

We are now tasked with defining our own lives. Conformity provides ready-made belief. It feels like alignment, not control. We no longer carry the burden of finding ourselves. And we no longer fear being alone.

But if identity can be shaped this easily, where does that identity come from?

The Redistribution of Meaning

Once we got meaning from our families, pastors, and peers.

The first two have seen better days. Multigenerational households are increasingly rare, and family estrangement is much more common. “Spiritual but not religious” has become shorthand for “I have no use for organized faith.”

Churches sit empty, but virtual chat rooms are busier than ever. We have not abandoned the search for meaning—we have outsourced it. Today, we rely largely on our online peers. But those peers are often scattered across cities, countries, and time zones. We spend more time talking to strangers online than speaking with the people who live next door.

The Internet democratized propaganda. Everyone has a voice, and persuasion has become participatory. You can promote, attack, and defend your ideas before an international audience.

But many of your ideas came from somebody else. They arrive at your feed through reposts, paraphrases, and misquotes. You see them repeated by people you trust, and they begin to feel familiar. After enough repetition, the idea no longer feels borrowed. It feels like your own.

Before you choose your online friends, algorithms choose what you read. They structure your feed based on your posting history and engagement. They show you content that they think you like.

And, over time, it becomes the content you do like.

Many believe that social media algorithms promote certain political causes and suppress others. Lacking direct access to those algorithms, those allegations can neither be verified nor refuted.

But we do know that social media companies, like all corporations, are built to maximize profit. The longer you stay on a site, the more ads you view and the more likely you are to subscribe. Platforms reward engagement, and the content that generates the most engagement is the kind of material that pisses people off.

This creates powerful social and financial incentives for influencers to produce inflammatory content—and to respond to it in kind. Nuanced views of complex questions rarely travel as far, or as profitably, as loud, simplified denunciations.

Over time, this reshapes behavior. Rudeness becomes normal. Hostility becomes expected. Divides grow wider. Calls for cooperation and courtesy don’t get deplatformed or demonetized. They’re simply ignored. The system doesn’t silence moderation, it makes it irrelevant.

Anger is even easier to internalize than slogans. Ragebait gets projected onto entire groups. Individual misdeeds become evidence of collective guilt. And it feels like righteous outrage against an implacable, irredeemable enemy.

When this emotional tone becomes the default, debate and dialogue begin to collapse. Slogans are safer than questions, and disagreement becomes disloyalty. Insufficient anger invites suspicion; tooth-grinding outrage becomes proof of virtue.

Performative beliefs get likes, shares, and praise. Pavlov trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Social media conditions outrage, certainty, and conformity through the same kind of feedback loop. We learn what to say and how to say it. And all the while, we’re convinced that we speak in our own voice.

The group also enforces norms through negative reinforcement. After you’ve seen members expelled for unacceptable ideas—or been called out for crossing a line—you learn where the boundaries lie. Those boundaries influence how you engage within the group—and outside it.

The lines that mark your territory also shape your thought and your voice. You adopt group language, anticipate reactions, and censor statements that might get you in trouble. And when radical positions are rewarded while nuanced statements are punished, you can expect the group’s positions to become increasingly extreme.

There is no single person who fuels this change. The group becomes a collective strongman, dispensing meaning and claiming authority over its members. There is no one to punish, no one to blame, and after a few purges, no one left to dissent.

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The Emergence of Collective Strongmen

For over 200 years we have sorted our political systems into “Right” and “Left,” Conservative and Liberal. Today we are moving toward what Carl Schmitt described as the fundamental political distinction: friend and enemy.

This shift does not require a dictator. All it needs is a system that generates the right combination of cohesion and pressure.

The internet puts libraries at our fingertips and connects us with people around the world. It breaks down borders and gives dissenters a voice and a network. But even as it expands understanding, it intensifies division. Many now use that connection to demand stronger boundaries and stricter conformity.

Perceived threats drive greater cohesion. Social media amplifies conflict and rewards the language of threat. It reduces arguments to morality plays and turns identity into declarations of belief. It produces the conditions under which strongmen flourish—and an environment in which groups, not just individuals, can become tyrants.

These groups are not shooting their opponents or overthrowing governments. But they create an atmosphere that serves a strongman’s purposes. They normalize ostracism, collective blame, and hatred. Those conditioned to accept this behavior online will have little hesitation carrying those attitudes into the streets.

When loyalty is prioritized over truth and the collective is weaponized against individual dissent, the conditions for strongman rule are already in place. A strongman does not require centralized authority or visible enforcement. Decentralized suppression of dissent and social pressure can be just as effective—and much harder to resist.

Defeating the Collective Strongman

The collective strongman is not confined to any ideology, community, or platform. These dynamics can occur in any group. And, in every case, its most ardent members will sincerely deny that it exists.

It happens to all of us. We tie our identity to the causes we oppose. We demonize the other for trivial misdeeds and stay silent at greater sins from our own side. We use the Internet as an emotional dumping ground, saying to anonymous accounts what we would never repeat in public.

We all feed the collective strongman. And he feeds on us.

The collective strongman offers clarity in a confusing world. He provides belonging and identity. Joining brings moral certainty, emotional satisfaction, and camaraderie. Before long, the doubts fade and the slogans sound like common sense. They become so familiar that you can hardly imagine they came from somewhere else. Participation doesn’t feel like complicity when everyone is doing it.

But sooner or later, those boundaries that once felt comfortable start closing in. You notice there’s no nuance, no dialogue, no independent thought. Every day the list of acceptable beliefs gets shorter and the list of forbidden topics grows longer. And you begin to realize you’re wearing someone else’s personality.

When that moment arrives, you have a choice. You can swallow your doubts and keep living a lie, hoping it will feel like truth again. Or you can walk away.

The choice is not between left and right, or good and evil.

It is between reacting and thinking.

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What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness… has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)

Few places have been more welcoming to the Collective Strongman than Tumblr. Strident denunciations and ardent declarations of faith are constant. “Do Not Interact” lists serve as walls between good and evil. It’s a space where some go to find affirmation and others come to mock it.

But what if we took a different path? What if we looked at Tumblr’s Collective Strongmen not with adulation or ridicule, but with empathy? What if we sought neither to believe or to scorn but simply to understand?

Let’s take a look at one recent Tumblr exchange.

According to the Otherkin Wiki:

It would be easy to dismiss arguments about whether a “police dog identity” is racist. But it is more productive to ask what purpose those identities serve.

To be alterhuman is to define oneself as fundamentally different from those around you. These identities emerge alongside a persistent feeling of separation, of not fully fitting into the surrounding world. The label not only describes that alienation; it gives it meaning.

Alterhuman spaces bring together individuals who share similar feelings of difference and isolation. Loneliness and confusion become something that can be understood and shared. Alienation becomes identity, and identity becomes community.

So what else can we learn about Wolfy? From his pinned post we discover:

Wolfy begins by listing their pronouns, followed by their age. They also identify as a “contherian,” which is:

But before they arrive at that identity, Wolfy describes themself through a list of conditions—autism, physical disability, chronic illness, and mental illness. Similar lists of diagnoses appear frequently on Tumblr. Critics often dismiss them as malingering, hypochondria, or attention-seeking.

As I have not seen Wolfy’s medical records, I cannot comment on their health. But I can note that these issues appear to be a cornerstone of their identity. Only after describing them do they tell us they are an artist and author.

Once again, the question is not simply whether these claims are true or false—it is what purpose they serve. Are these lists simply diagnoses, or do they also function as explanations that help the list makers understand why they feel set apart in the world?

That distinction might matter less than we think.

What matters more is what happens when these ideas are brought into a shared space.

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At first glance, there’s no obvious connection between identity politics and alterhuman spaces. You might expect communities centered on niche identities, creative works, or shared interests to focus on their own internal concerns.

Yet Tumblr has become widely associated with highly visible and intensely moralized discourse—often to the point of ridicule. Arguments that appear trivial or opaque to outsiders can carry real weight within these communities. So how did a microblogging site become Ground Zero for an audience of Collective Strongmen?

Part of the answer lies in its audience. Tumblr’s audience skews young: 70% of its users are under 35, and nearly 40% are under 24 years of age. These years are often defined by social sorting and the search for belonging. It’s not surprising to see a strong focus on questions of identity and morality, along with a tendency to see these issues in black and white.

Tumblr’s structure encourages rapid interaction, public expression, and constant feedback. Disagreements are visible, responses are immediate, and social standing is shaped in real time. Under these conditions, discussions become intense, and conflicts quickly take on broader moral significance.

Those who prefer quieter environments often migrate elsewhere, leaving behind communities that are more engaged—and more reactive. And when that happens, members tend to adopt increasingly strident stances through social osmosis.

When Tumblr users see posters called out for problematic posts, they learn which topics to avoid. When those call-outs receive likes and reblogs, they learn how to gain approval. In Man For Himself, Erich Fromm noted that “the fear of disapproval and the need for approval seem to be the most powerful and almost exclusive motivation for ethical judgment.”

Did Wolfy challenge “racist” police dog identities out of genuine concern? Or to gain status among his peers? Those motivations are not mutually exclusive. Humans have a knack for both self-sacrifice and self-justification—often at the same time. The line between conviction and performance can be very hard to draw.

Shostakovich, Stalin, and Call-Outs

In 1936, Joseph Stalin attended a performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. The opera had been widely praised since its premiere two years earlier. Stalin, alas, was not a fan. Shortly after he attended a performance, Pravda denounced the opera as a “muddle instead of music.”

In the Soviet system, such criticism was not merely aesthetic. It was dangerous. Shostakovich recognized his peril and responded accordingly. Withdrawing his more experimental Fourth Symphony, he composed a new, more conservative piece. His 1937 Fifth Symphony premiered as “a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism.” It received an ovation that lasted over thirty minutes.

Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk was banned from Soviet stages for decades. In 1962 Shostakovich was allowed to stage an edited version. The uncensored opera would not be staged in Russia until 2000, 64 years after the Pravda review and nine years after the Soviet Union’s fall. But Shostakovich survived, and so did his career.

Apologies and adaptation do not always work when dealing with a Strongman—individual or collective—but open defiance almost never does. The system rewards those who demonstrate alignment and punishes those who resist it.

We see a similar, if less fraught, pattern in Wolfy’s comments section. Cosmicstrays, a 23-year-old self-described “earthborn theriomythic dog-wolf -> space dog -> human(ized) -> weredog-wolf,” calls them out for racial insensitivity.

Cosmicstrays issues the callout. Wolfy responds with an apology that affirms the underlying norms. Both emerge stronger within the system. The accuser reinforces their role as an enforcer of acceptable behavior. The accused demonstrates submission, adaptability, and moral alignment.

Wolfy’s response proves him to be an artist who responds to justified criticism. Had Wolfy chosen to defend themself, the outcome likely would have been different. Defiance risks exclusion. Compliance restores standing.

In exchanges like these, the boundaries of the community are clarified and reinforced. What is acceptable becomes clearer. What is not becomes more dangerous to express. The walls are strengthened—not by force, but by participation.

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The Future of the Collective Strongmen

These dynamics are not just found on Tumblr. Similar patterns of accusations, affirmations, and moral enforcement appear across social media, from the largest groups to the smallest niche communities. What was once subcultural behavior has become a general social pattern.

Tumblr has well over 100 million users, most in the Gen Z and Millennial age brackets. Wolfy is not old enough to drink legally, but he’s old enough to vote. His political instincts are already being shaped by the environment he inhabits—and he is far from alone.

At some point, smart politicians will recognize the value of engaging those instincts. The question is not whether these dynamics will influence politics, but who will learn to shape them.

Those who do will speak the Collective Strongman’s language and signal their membership in that group. As they gain trust and status, they will reshape its narratives to support their purposes. They will not reimpose meaning; they will redirect it. They will not declare themselves leaders; they will simply suggest who the group should follow.

Political leaders will come to recognize Collective Strongmen as powerful amplifiers. They function not only as a means of spreading ideas, but as enforcers of the boundaries that define acceptable belief. Those who fall outside those boundaries are not merely opposed—they are excluded.

But the relationship is not one-sided. As leaders shape the group’s narrative, the group, in turn, shapes the leader’s agenda. What begins as influence becomes adaptation. The leader and the group will define together what is said and what cannot be spoken.

Large democracies require coalition-building. Politicians have frequently used vague messaging to appeal to the greatest number and to offend the fewest. They’ve left it up to each voter to decide what their slogans mean.

But Collective Strongmen demand clarity, direction, and moral certainty. They don’t want to interpret the message; they want to be given a role. And so we have seen vague political slogans take on very specific, yet often contradictory meanings.

Donald Trump, the first presidential candidate to make social media a campaign pillar, did this with “Make America Great Again.” To many of Trump’s supporters this meant a return to postwar America and the Reagan boom years. To many detractors, this meant rolling back the Civil Rights era.

Neither interpretation was likely, or even possible. But each group found its reading emotionally plausible. And each group began displaying Collective Strongman behavior.

For the MAGA community, criticism of Trump signaled insufficient faith. For his opponents, any insufficiently critical comment about Trump marked you as a closet MAGA fan. Each side chose moral certainty over ambiguity, and simplicity over complexity.

Over the following decade, this dynamic hardened into something more rigid. Disagreement became a sign of bad faith. Compromise became betrayal. The space for negotiation narrowed, and with it, the ability to act.

What has followed is increasing political paralysis. Each side has grown more certain of its own righteousness and more convinced of the other’s danger. Debate has given way to argument and its outcomes have become increasingly predictable—and futile.

As Hannah Arendt observed, such conditions do not simply produce apathy. They can produce a longing for clarity, order, and resolution. When the system no longer seems capable of acting, the appeal of someone who can act—decisively, unambiguously—becomes difficult to ignore.

Exhaustion and Convergence

Constant outrage is exhausting. It demands increasing energy and ever more strident condemnations. In time, fatigue sets in. People begin to realize that each side is screaming at the other, but nothing is actually being accomplished.

The slogans that once provided meaning begin to lose their force. What once felt urgent begins to feel repetitive. The same arguments return, again and again, with little to show for them.

Some double down. Many others drift into apathy. And in that space between anger and exhaustion, something different takes hold.

Loneliness.

When shared meaning breaks down, individuals begin to feel increasingly isolated. They lose their sense of connection to the communities that once gave them identity. The endless arguments, shifting meanings, and constant moral demands begin to feel intolerable. They look for something they can’t find amidst the shouting—clarity.

When that moment comes, these lonely people begin to look for something, or someone, who will give them meaning. They are no longer interested in arguing. They simply want the arguments to end. And when someone promises to end them, they are ready to listen.

Through manipulation or exhaustion, the Collective Strongman may ultimately be co-opted by individuals. Whether through a politician who learns to harness the system or through disillusioned members seeking something more decisive, the result is not resolution, but a shift toward authority.

The Strongman does not create those conditions. He simply steps into them. Where once the Strongman created systems, the system now creates Strongmen. And in a world where loneliness becomes ordinary, the promise of meaning—no matter its source—becomes difficult to refuse.

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Archdruid of DOOM John Michael Greer joins Ahnaf and Kenaz for a rousing conversation about our favorite topic—collapse! We tell you what’s happening with Iran, why drones are the wave of the present, and why aircraft carriers and high-tech wunderwaffens are joining heavy cavalry in history’s dustbin. Tune in, turn on, embrace the DOOM, and don’t forget to like and subscribe.