Without Data, You're Just Another Person with an Opinion

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Most of us have experienced it.

Someone speaks with great confidence. The room becomes quiet. Heads begin to nod. The conclusion sounds convincing. Yet, after the meeting, you may wonder: What was the evidence?

The famous quote, often attributed to the American statistician and management thinker W. Edwards Deming, captures this perfectly:

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion."

Although Deming said this in the context of business and quality management, the idea is much older. It reaches back to the philosophers of ancient Greece, who argued that claims should be supported by reason rather than authority. It also echoes the spirit of the scientific revolution, when observation gradually replaced tradition as the foundation of knowledge.

For most of history, however, people often accepted statements because they came from kings, priests, nobles, or respected elders. Their position gave weight to their words. The question "How do you know?" was not always welcomed.

The modern world has largely turned this upside down. Scientists, historians, archaeologists, and judges all work from the same basic principle: conclusions should follow from evidence. A strong opinion is not enough. Even widely accepted ideas must be open to challenge when new evidence appears.

This way of thinking is not limited to laboratories or universities. It shapes everyday life as well. Whether discussing history, restoring a medieval church, managing a local association, or planning a journey, better decisions usually begin with the same simple question:

"What do the facts tell us?"

That question does not guarantee agreement. People can interpret the same evidence differently. But it shifts the discussion away from personalities and towards understanding.

Perhaps that is why Deming's words have remained so memorable. They remind us that confidence is not the same as knowledge, and that good conversations begin not with certainty, but with curiosity.

In the end, culture is more than monuments and traditions. It is also the way societies learn, question, and search for truth. Every time we ask for evidence before accepting a conclusion, we continue a tradition that has shaped the best of European thought for more than two thousand years.

How Democracies Begin to Fail

What Ernst Fraenkel, Max Weber and Aziz Huq Can Teach Us About the Rule of Law

An impossible conversation across time. This AI-generated image imagines three scholars who never met. From left to right: Aziz Huq (born 1976), Ernst Fraenkel (1898–1975), and Max Weber (1864–1920). Together, their ideas offer a powerful way of understanding how the relationship between law and political power can gradually erode the rule of law.

A Lawyer in Berlin

How does a democracy begin to fail?

Most people imagine dramatic moments: soldiers in the streets, elections abolished or a constitution suspended. History is usually much quieter. Democracies often begin to change while their institutions continue to look reassuringly familiar. Courts still hear cases, governments still pass laws and elections still take place. The challenge is not recognising the end of a democracy. It is recognising the beginning of constitutional change while everyday life still appears perfectly normal.

That question led American constitutional scholar Aziz Huq to an almost forgotten book written in 1941 by a Berlin lawyer named Ernst Fraenkel. Huq was not searching for historical parallels. He was looking for a better way of understanding how constitutional systems evolve, and he found it in the observations of a man who had watched one democracy slowly transform from inside its own legal system.

Fraenkel practised law during the final years of the Weimar Republic and the first years of Nazi rule. Unlike politicians or journalists, he observed events from courtrooms rather than parliament. His days were filled with contracts, labour disputes and administrative decisions. It was an ordinary legal career in extraordinary times.

What puzzled him was not the speed of political change but the persistence of normality. Berlin still looked like a functioning modern city. Businesses signed contracts, civil courts settled disputes and much of daily life continued much as before. Yet inside the legal system he began to notice a pattern that was almost invisible from the outside.

Commercial law remained predictable, but cases involving political opponents, trade unions and, increasingly, Jewish citizens followed a different logic. Administrative authorities acquired greater freedom, while legal safeguards quietly became less reliable. No single judgement explained what was happening. Only after watching countless ordinary cases did Fraenkel realise that Germany had not abandoned the rule of law. It had divided it.

He called this the Dual State. One part of government, the Normative State, continued to function according to established legal rules. Alongside it grew the Prerogative State, where political necessity increasingly outweighed legal principle. The institutions remained, but they no longer served everyone in the same way.

Fraenkel's insight remains striking because it challenges our instinctive picture of democratic collapse. Constitutional systems do not always fail because laws disappear. Sometimes they fail because the relationship between law and political power quietly changes while the institutions themselves remain standing.

A Forgotten Book Returns

Fraenkel escaped Germany in 1938 and published The Dual State three years later in the United States. The timing could hardly have been worse. The world wanted broad explanations of fascism and totalitarianism, while Fraenkel offered something more precise: an account of how constitutional government changes from within. His book earned the respect of specialists but never reached a wider audience.

For almost eighty years it remained largely forgotten.

Then Aziz Huq picked it up again.

What fascinated Huq was not Germany in the 1930s but Fraenkel's way of thinking. Imagine a debate about immigration. Most people immediately argue about whether a policy is fair or effective. Huq asks a different question: what is happening to the relationship between law and power? Has the executive gained greater discretion? Can courts still exercise meaningful oversight? Are legal safeguards applied equally, or are exceptions gradually becoming normal?

Those questions extend far beyond immigration. They can also be asked about emergency powers, universities, the legal profession or the relationship between national and regional government. The issue is not whether every development is alarming. It is whether constitutional institutions continue to perform the role for which they were created.

At this point another German thinker quietly joins the conversation. Long before Fraenkel, Max Weber argued that modern states depend upon impersonal institutions. Judges serve the law, civil servants serve the office and governments derive legitimacy from rules that apply equally to everyone. When personal loyalty gradually becomes more important than institutional restraint, the character of the state itself begins to change. Modern political scientists describe this as neo-patrimonialism.

Fraenkel and Weber illuminate different stages of the same journey. Fraenkel helps us recognise when the rule of law begins to fragment. Weber shows where that journey may eventually lead if institutions increasingly serve people instead of principles. Huq brings their ideas together, not to predict the future, but to sharpen our observation of the present.

Learning to See

That distinction is what makes The Dual State remarkable. It is not a handbook for recognising dictatorships, nor an invitation to compare every constitutional dispute with Germany in the 1930s. It is a reminder that democratic change is often gradual and that legal institutions deserve attention long before they visibly weaken.

Some books become classics because they perfectly explain their own age. Others spend decades on library shelves before a later generation discovers that they contain questions it suddenly needs. Fraenkel's book belongs to that second category. Written to understand one constitutional crisis, it eventually became a guide to observing constitutional change more carefully.

History rarely provides ready-made answers. At its best, it offers something more valuable: new ways of seeing. Ernst Fraenkel taught us to notice when the rule of law begins to divide into different realities. Max Weber reminded us why strong institutions depend on impersonal rules rather than personal power. Aziz Huq showed that these ideas still help us ask better questions about constitutional democracy today.

Perhaps that is why forgotten books matter. They do not survive because they predict the future. They survive because, many years later, they quietly teach us to look at the present with fresh eyes.

Further Reading

• Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship

• Aziz Z. Huq, How the Rule of Law Changes

• Max Weber, Economy and Society

• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

• Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die

Why Plato Still Feels Uncomfortably Modern

Plato with Athens in the background. Image created with AI.

More than 2,400 years ago, in the streets of ancient Athens, a philosopher began asking questions that still echo across Europe today.

Why do democracies become unstable?
Why do crowds sometimes choose leaders who damage the society they lead?
And what happens when emotion, propaganda and short-term thinking become more powerful than wisdom?

The philosopher was Plato, and his answer became one of the most influential books in European history: The Republic.

Plato did not write during a golden age of calm and stability. Athens was deeply divided. Wars had exhausted the city. Political factions fought each other constantly. Public debate was often loud, emotional and manipulative. The democracy that Athenians were proud of had also condemned Plato’s teacher, Socrates, to death.

To Plato, this was not simply a political mistake. It was evidence that a society without wisdom could become dangerous — even when it called itself democratic.

His solution was radical. He imagined an “ideal state” ruled not by wealthy elites, military strongmen or popular politicians, but by philosopher-kings: leaders trained to seek truth, justice and self-control rather than personal power.

Today, the idea sounds both fascinating and unsettling.

Plato believed that most societies fail because people are too easily distracted by wealth, ambition, fear and desire. He divided society into three groups: rulers, defenders and producers. Justice, he argued, existed when each group fulfilled its role in harmony. Education was central to this system. A good society could only exist if citizens were shaped by good education, moral discipline and a shared sense of responsibility.

Some of Plato’s ideas now feel deeply uncomfortable. He wanted strict control over culture and education. He distrusted democracy. His ideal society left little room for individual freedom. Critics later accused him of imagining a rigid and even authoritarian state.

And yet, many of his questions feel strangely modern.

Across Europe today, people worry about political polarisation, misinformation, populism and the growing distrust of institutions. Social media often rewards outrage more than wisdom. Public debate can feel increasingly emotional and fragmented. At the same time, many societies place enormous faith in experts, technocrats and even artificial intelligence to manage complex problems.

In a way, the old Platonic question has quietly returned:

Can a democracy survive if knowledge and wisdom lose authority?

One of the most famous parts of The Republic is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Prisoners sit inside a cave watching shadows projected onto a wall, believing those shadows are reality itself. Only when one prisoner escapes does he discover the larger world outside.

For centuries, Europeans have returned to this image whenever societies seemed trapped by illusion, propaganda or collective fear. In the age of algorithms, viral misinformation and AI-generated realities, Plato’s cave suddenly feels less like ancient philosophy and more like a mirror.

Perhaps Plato’s real importance today is not that he offered the perfect political system. He did not. Even he later admitted that his ideal state was probably impossible.

What remains powerful is the warning beneath it:

A society cannot remain free and stable if truth, education and moral responsibility no longer matter.

Further Reading

• The Republic — Plato

• The Open Society and Its Enemies — Karl Popper

• A History of Western Political Thought — J. S. McClelland

Europe Looking for Direction in a Changing World

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For centuries, Europe stood at the center of global power. Even after two world wars, the continent remained closely tied to American power and to a global economy shaped largely on Western terms. Globalization, free trade and technological progress seemed to confirm the idea that the future would gradually become more interconnected — and, in many ways, more Western.

That confidence is evaporating.

Europe now watches a world in which power is shifting rapidly toward Asia, while the rivalry between China and the United States grows more intense. China has moved from being the factory floor of globalization to becoming a technological and industrial power with its own long-term ambitions. The United States remains dominant in finance, software, military power and digital platforms, but increasingly acts according to its own strategic interests, even when those interests are not aligned with Europe’s.

The uncomfortable reality for Europe is that it depends heavily on both.

European industries rely on China for batteries, rare earths, solar panels and industrial supply chains. At the same time, Europe depends on American software, cloud infrastructure, digital platforms and military protection. What once looked like healthy interdependence increasingly feels like vulnerability.

Part of Europe’s problem is internal. While China invested aggressively in infrastructure, industrial ecosystems and strategic technologies, Europe focused heavily on regulation, market rules and financial stability. While American firms built globally dominant digital platforms, Europe often struggled to turn innovation into companies capable of scaling internationally.

The contrast is becoming painfully visible. German carmakers, long symbols of European industrial strength, now face fierce competition from Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers. Europe helped shape the modern environmental transition, yet much of the battery production and critical mineral processing behind that transition now lies elsewhere. In digital life, most Europeans depend daily on American operating systems, cloud services and online platforms.

This does not mean Europe is weak or irrelevant. The European economy remains one of the largest in the world, with advanced industries, strong universities and highly skilled populations. But Europe often appears fragmented in a world where scale matters more and more. Chinese companies benefit from enormous domestic markets and state coordination. American firms operate inside a unified financial and technological system. Europe still works through layers of national interests, regulations and political compromises.

The war in Ukraine accelerated Europe’s awakening. Cheap Russian gas disappeared almost overnight, supply chains proved fragile, and dependence itself became a geopolitical risk. As a result, Europe has started rediscovering industrial policy, investing more heavily in defense, energy infrastructure, semiconductors and AI.

At the same time, Europe risks misunderstanding China if it sees only threat and competition. China’s rise also reflects something the West long underestimated: the importance of long-term planning, infrastructure investment and industrial coordination. Entire Chinese cities have been transformed around advanced transport systems, AI integration, manufacturing and logistics at a scale difficult to imagine in much of Europe.

China, of course, has its own vulnerabilities — debt, demographic decline, overcapacity and political centralization among them. But the larger reality remains: the global balance of power is changing.

The world that shaped Europe’s prosperity after the Cold War is disappearing. Economic globalization is becoming geopolitical. Technology is becoming strategic. Supply chains are becoming instruments of power.

The United States still speaks like a superpower determined to preserve its dominance. China increasingly acts like a civilization-state convinced its historical moment has returned. Europe, meanwhile, is searching for direction in a world it no longer shapes as confidently as it once did.

Ecology Can't Be Everything? Well, It Is Everything.

William Ophuls and the Limits of Human Ambition

William Ophuls (1934–2025), political theorist and ecological thinker, known for exploring the limits of growth and the challenges of sustaining complex societies.

A Warning from the Age of Growth

In 1972, the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, warning that endless economic expansion on a finite planet was impossible. Most people dismissed the idea. Yet one political scientist took it very seriously. His name was William (Patrick) Ophuls.

More than fifty years later, Ophuls remains one of the most thought-provoking voices in environmental politics. While many writers focused on pollution, climate change, or resource depletion, he asked a different question: what happens to politics when a civilisation reaches ecological limits?

His answer was simple but unsettling. Modern societies were built during an extraordinary period of abundance. Cheap energy, abundant resources, and continuous economic growth allowed democracies, welfare systems, and consumer economies to flourish. The danger, Ophuls argued, is that we have come to assume this abundance is permanent.

He often compared modern civilisation to an heir living off an inheritance. For a while everything looks prosperous, but the heir is quietly spending the capital rather than living from the interest. Fossil fuels, fertile soils, forests, fisheries, and biodiversity are forms of natural wealth accumulated over immense periods of time. Industrial civilisation has treated them as though they were inexhaustible.

This is why Ophuls famously replied to critics who claimed ecology could not explain everything:

“Ecology can't be everything? Well, it is everything.”

For him, ecology is not one issue among many. It is the foundation upon which all human societies ultimately depend.

Success Becomes a Trap

Unlike many environmental thinkers, Ophuls does not believe civilisation is threatened because it failed. He believes it is threatened because it succeeded.

Human beings became remarkably good at extracting resources, producing wealth, and expanding their influence over nature. Yet every success brought new dependencies. Larger populations required more energy. Greater prosperity demanded more resources. More complex societies became harder to maintain.

In this respect, Ophuls shares common ground with William Catton, author of Overshoot. Both argued that growth can become a trap. A civilisation expands beyond what its environment can sustainably support, and the very achievements that made it successful become sources of vulnerability.

History offers many examples. Societies rise, grow wealthy, become more complex, and eventually discover that the costs of maintaining that complexity exceed the benefits. Ophuls believed modern industrial civilisation is unlikely to be exempt from this pattern.

Politics in an Age of Limits

What makes Ophuls distinctive is his focus on politics. His concern was not merely that ecological limits exist, but that modern political systems are poorly equipped to deal with them.

Democracies work best in times of expansion. Politicians win support by promising prosperity and growth. Difficult conversations about limits, restraint, or sacrifice are far less popular. As long as the economic pie keeps growing, compromises are relatively easy. When growth slows, politics becomes a struggle over who bears the costs.

This argument remains controversial. Critics point out that democracies have repeatedly adapted to major challenges and that technological innovation has often solved problems once considered insurmountable. Ophuls never denied that technology can solve particular problems. He simply doubted that technology could remove the underlying reality that humanity lives within ecological boundaries.

For him, the challenge is not primarily technical. It is cultural and political.

Hubris and the Future

At the heart of Ophuls' work lies an ancient Greek concept: hubris, the overconfidence that blinds people to reality. In Greek tragedy, heroes often fall because success convinces them that ordinary limits no longer apply.

Ophuls believed modern civilisation suffers from a similar illusion. Technological achievements have encouraged the belief that humanity can overcome any obstacle. Yet ecological limits are not opinions. They are realities.

Whether one agrees with Ophuls or not, he asks questions that are becoming harder to ignore. Can a civilisation built on growth adapt to a world of limits? Can democratic societies make difficult long-term choices before crises force them to act?

His answers are not comforting. But they are worth considering. More than fifty years after he first raised these concerns, the debate he helped start remains far from over.

Further Reading

• The Limits to Growth (1972) — Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jørgen Randers and William Behrens III.

• Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) — William Ophuls.

• Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail (2012) — William Ophuls.

• Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980) — William R. Catton Jr.

• The End of Growth (2011) — Richard Heinberg.

• Silent Spring (1962) — Rachel Carson.

The Parable of the Tribes

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In 1984, Andrew Bard Schmookler published a remarkable book called The Parable of the Tribes. It explores a simple but important question: if most people prefer peace, why has so much of human history been shaped by war, conquest, and competition?

Schmookler begins with a thought experiment. Imagine several tribes living near one another. If all choose peace, they can coexist peacefully. But what happens if just one tribe decides to expand its territory and dominate its neighbours?

The other tribes face a difficult choice. They can be conquered, flee, submit, or prepare to defend themselves. Yet successful defence often requires them to become more organised, more militarised, and more focused on power. In trying to resist the aggressor, they begin to resemble it.

This is the central insight of the book. Power does not spread because everyone wants it. It spreads because those who refuse to compete with powerful rivals are often overwhelmed by those who do.

For Schmookler, this is more than an explanation for war. It is a theory of history. He argues that once societies began competing with one another, a process of selection took hold. Societies that became better at organising power were more likely to survive, expand, and leave their mark on the future. Over centuries, this helped shape kingdoms, empires, armies, bureaucracies, and many of the institutions we associate with civilisation.

Viewed in this way, history is not simply a story of ambitious rulers and military victories. It is also a story of systems. Even communities that preferred a peaceful path could find themselves drawn into the struggle because their neighbours were playing by different rules.

Schmookler does not argue that human beings are naturally violent. Rather, he suggests that the circumstances in which societies find themselves can be as important as their intentions. A society may choose peace, but it cannot choose peace on behalf of its neighbours.

The book remains controversial. Critics point out that human history has been shaped not only by competition but also by trade, cooperation, religion, migration, and cultural exchange. Others question whether early hunter-gatherer societies were as peaceful and egalitarian as Schmookler suggests. Civilisation, they argue, cannot be explained by the pursuit of power alone.

Yet even those who disagree with some of his conclusions often acknowledge the strength of the question he raises. What happens when a single society chooses expansion in a world where its neighbours would rather live in peace? Schmookler's answer is that the consequences spread far beyond the original aggressor, shaping the entire system around it.

More than forty years after its publication, The Parable of the Tribes remains a fascinating lens through which to view the past. Whether one accepts its conclusions or not, it encourages us to look beyond individual leaders and battles and to ask a deeper question: how much of human history has been shaped not by what people wanted, but by the situations they could not avoid?

After Gaza: Europe’s Uncomfortable Moral Dilemma

Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza is not simply a book about the war in Gaza. Nor is it a traditional political history of Israel and Palestine. It is a broader reflection on violence, memory, colonialism, and the moral authority of the modern West.

What makes the book unusual is its point of view. Pankaj Mishra writes not as a European or an American, but as an Indian intellectual shaped by the history of colonialism and by the experience of living outside the Western world. That perspective matters. The book is, in many ways, an attempt to describe how the events in Gaza are seen across large parts of Asia, Africa and the Middle East — regions where European history is remembered not only through the Holocaust and democracy, but also through empire, racial hierarchy and colonial violence.

For Mishra, Gaza has become a moment in which these different historical memories collide.

In Europe, the Holocaust remains the central moral reference point of modern history. The promise of “never again” shaped Europe’s postwar identity and strongly influenced its relationship with Israel. But Mishra argues that many people outside the West increasingly see a contradiction between Europe’s universal language of human rights and its reactions to Palestinian suffering.

Whether one agrees with him or not, this is the uncomfortable core of the book.

Mishra moves through a wide landscape of ideas and history: anti-Semitism, Zionism, European imperialism, postcolonial thought, nationalism, and the long shadow of twentieth-century violence. He does not deny Jewish suffering or the horrors of the Holocaust. But he questions whether Europe’s historical guilt has, at times, made open discussion about Israel and Palestine more difficult.

That argument places European readers in a difficult position.

Can Europeans defend both Israel’s security and universal human rights without appearing selective? Can criticism of Israeli policy remain separate from anti-Semitism? And how should Europe respond when much of the non-Western world increasingly interprets Gaza through the language of colonialism and inequality rather than through Europe’s postwar moral framework?

The book does not offer easy answers. In fact, part of its power lies in its refusal to comfort the reader. Mishra deliberately challenges assumptions that many Europeans have long taken for granted about morality, historical responsibility and the role of the West in the world.

Critics of the book argue that Mishra oversimplifies Israeli fears and reduces a highly complex conflict to a colonial narrative. Admirers see the book as an important attempt to explain why Western reactions to Gaza have damaged the credibility of Europe and the United States in many parts of the world.

Both reactions reveal something important: The World After Gaza is not mainly a book about diplomacy or military strategy. It is a book about legitimacy — about who has the moral authority to speak in the name of humanity, justice and universal values.

For European readers, that may be the most unsettling aspect of all.

The book quietly raises a larger question: what happens if the rest of the world no longer sees Europe as the moral centre of global politics, but as one historical power among many — carrying both the achievements and the burdens of its past?

Mishra does not celebrate that shift, nor does he fully explain where it may lead. But he argues that Gaza has accelerated it.

That makes The World After Gaza an uncomfortable but important book: not because it tells Europeans what to think, but because it forces them to see themselves through the eyes of others.

Further reading

• The Age of Anger — Pankaj Mishra

• From the Ruins of Empire — Pankaj Mishra

• Orientalism — Edward Said

• Enemies and Neighbours — Ian Black

Overshoot: Rereading William Catton in 2026

William R. Catton Jr. (1926–2015), whose was one of the first exploring the ecological limits of human expansion in his book Overshoot (1980).

Few books become more relevant with age. Most are products of their time, shaped by the concerns and assumptions of the era in which they were written. William Catton's Overshoot, first published in 1980, seems to have followed a different path. For decades it remained largely unknown outside environmental circles. Today, however, it reads less like a historical document and more like a guide to some of the questions that increasingly dominate public debate.

Catton was a sociologist, but he approached society with the eyes of an ecologist. While most discussions about the future focused on economics, politics, or technology, he asked a simpler question: what happens when a species grows beyond the long-term capacity of its environment? Ecologists had long applied this idea to deer, fish, insects, or bacteria. Catton argued that humans should not assume they are exempt.

More than forty years later, the question feels surprisingly contemporary.

An Age of Abundance

The key to Catton's argument was energy. For most of human history, people lived on the annual income provided by nature: crops, forests, animal power, wind, and water. The amount of energy available each year was limited by what the Earth could produce during that year.

The industrial age changed that.

Coal, oil, and natural gas gave humanity access to enormous stores of energy accumulated over millions of years. Catton described these resources as a kind of inheritance: wealth stored by nature long before humans arrived. Combined with technological innovation, they transformed agriculture, transportation, industry, and medicine. Populations expanded. Cities grew. Standards of living rose. Economic growth became so familiar that many people came to regard it as the normal state of affairs.

The scale of this transformation is difficult to overstate. A modern farmer using machinery and synthetic fertilizers can produce food for hundreds of people. Goods can be transported across continents within days. Vast cities can exist in deserts because fossil fuels allow water to be pumped, treated, and distributed. Industrial civilization became possible because humanity gained access to a temporary windfall of concentrated energy.

The problem, Catton argued, was not the windfall itself. The problem was what happened next.

Living on Inheritance

Imagine a family that spends its savings as if it were income.

At first, everything appears to be going well. The house improves, the meals become richer, and life feels more prosperous every year. Looking around, it seems obvious that the family has discovered a successful formula.

Only later does an uncomfortable reality emerge. The money being spent is not income. It is capital. Once it is gone, it is gone.

Catton believed industrial civilization had made a similar mistake.

The graph accompanying this article illustrates the idea. The upper dashed line represents what Catton called phantom carrying capacity: a temporary increase in the Earth's ability to support human populations and consumption, created by fossil fuels, technology, and the exploitation of accumulated natural wealth.

The lower line represents long-term carrying capacity: what the Earth can support indefinitely without drawing down its natural capital.

For a time, the two seem almost indistinguishable. The temporary abundance provided by fossil fuels makes extraordinary growth possible. Humanity expands into a space that appears sustainable because the underlying resources are still plentiful.

But appearances can be deceiving.

Catton's overshoot model: fossil fuels and other forms of natural capital temporarily expand carrying capacity, enabling rapid growth. But as that inheritance is consumed, both prosperity and the Earth's ability to support it come under pressure.

The Overshoot Phase

The red curve in the graph represents human demand on ecosystems.

As long as demand remains below carrying capacity, growth can continue without fundamentally damaging the resource base. Problems arise when demand exceeds what the Earth can renew and absorb.

This is the point Catton called overshoot.

Most environmental debates focus on individual symptoms: climate change, biodiversity loss, groundwater depletion, soil erosion, declining fisheries, or pollution. Catton encouraged readers to see these not as separate crises but as different expressions of the same underlying process.

During overshoot, society begins drawing down natural capital.

Forests are harvested faster than they regrow. Aquifers are depleted faster than they refill. Fertile soils erode. Fisheries decline. Fossil fuels are burned. The inheritance is converted into current prosperity.

For a while, this may even accelerate growth. The easiest and richest resources are usually exploited first. Living standards rise. Economic indicators improve. Success reinforces the belief that growth can continue indefinitely.

Yet the apparent prosperity contains a hidden contradiction. The more completely society succeeds in converting natural capital into economic activity, the more it reduces the foundations on which future prosperity depends.

The shaded area beneath the peak of the curve represents this drawdown of natural capital.

It is the heart of Catton's argument.

When the Limits Move

One of the most interesting features of the graph is that neither carrying-capacity line remains fixed.

The temporary carrying capacity created by fossil fuels and technology eventually begins to decline. The richest resources are depleted first. Remaining reserves become harder and more expensive to extract. More energy and effort are required simply to maintain existing systems.

But the lower line also changes.

For much of the growth phase, the Earth's long-term carrying capacity remains relatively stable. Then, as overshoot continues, it begins to decline as well. Degraded soils produce less food. Damaged ecosystems become less resilient. Biodiversity shrinks. Freshwater resources become more difficult to access.

The result is a troubling feedback loop. Humanity is not only exhausting a temporary bonus; it may also be reducing the productive capacity that would remain after the bonus is gone.

This distinction is crucial. Overshoot does not merely consume resources. It can alter the conditions under which future generations must live.

In ecological terms, the carrying capacity itself becomes a moving target.

Adjustment

No species can indefinitely consume resources faster than they are renewed.

Eventually reality reasserts itself.

Catton referred to this stage as adjustment. He was cautious about predicting exactly how it would occur. Different societies may respond in different ways. Technological innovation can delay certain limits. Cultural adaptation can reduce pressure on resources. Demographic change may alter patterns of demand.

Yet none of these possibilities eliminate the underlying ecological principle.

If demand exceeds carrying capacity long enough, some form of correction becomes unavoidable.

The shape of that correction is impossible to know in advance. History offers examples ranging from gradual decline to sudden collapse. Catton's concern was not to predict a specific future but to highlight a pattern that had appeared repeatedly in both human and natural systems.

Growth beyond limits eventually encounters consequences.

Income and Capital

What makes Overshoot such a remarkable book is that it shifts the discussion away from politics and ideology and toward a more fundamental question.

Are we living from income, or are we living from capital?

The distinction sounds technical, but it reaches into almost every contemporary debate. Climate change, biodiversity loss, declining fisheries, groundwater depletion, soil degradation, and resource scarcity can all be viewed through this lens.

A society living from income relies on flows that can be renewed year after year. A society living from capital consumes stocks that accumulated over long periods of time.

Catton's warning was not that humanity would inevitably collapse. It was that industrial civilization had become so accustomed to living from accumulated capital that many people no longer recognized the difference.

The graph is therefore not a prophecy. It is a reminder.

Temporary abundance can be mistaken for permanent wealth. Growth can disguise depletion. Prosperity can conceal dependence on resources that are quietly disappearing beneath the surface.

More than four decades after its publication, Overshoot remains compelling because it invites readers to look beyond immediate events and ask a deeper question: not how much wealth we are creating today, but what we are spending in order to create it.

That question may be even more relevant now than it was in 1980.

Further Reading

• William R. Catton Jr., Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (1980)

• William R. Catton Jr., Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse (2009)

Yanis Varoufakis on America and the New Global Shift

Based on: “America Is Heading Towards Collapse!” (YouTube)

Yanis Varoufakis is a Greek economist, author, and former finance minister of Greece, known internationally for his outspoken criticism of austerity policies, global financial inequality, and the concentration of power within modern capitalism. Since the eurozone crisis, he has become one of Europe’s most recognizable public intellectuals on economics, democracy, and the future of the global order. (Image created with AI.)

In a recent interview, Greek economist and former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis argued that the world may be witnessing the gradual weakening of American global dominance.

His central claim is simple: by relying increasingly on sanctions, military pressure, and financial control through the dollar system, the United States is encouraging other countries to build alternatives.

The World Begins Looking Beyond the Dollar

Varoufakis points to a major turning point after the freezing of Russian state assets following the invasion of Ukraine. Many governments suddenly realized that access to their own reserves could become politically conditional.

According to him, countries across Asia, the Gulf, and Africa are now quietly diversifying away from the dollar. China’s digital payment systems and the emerging BRICS Pay network are, in his view, the first foundations of a parallel global financial system.

He does not believe the dollar will collapse soon. In fact, China itself still depends heavily on dollar stability. But he argues that the long-term shift has already started.

A Tale of Two Economies

One of Varoufakis’ most striking observations is the growing disconnect between financial markets and everyday life.

While ordinary people struggle with rising costs for food, housing, and energy, stock markets and AI companies continue booming. In his analysis, modern capitalism increasingly rewards financial speculation while much of the middle and working class loses purchasing power.

He describes Western democracies less as true democracies and more as oligarchic systems dominated by wealthy interests. Whether one agrees or not, the frustration he describes is increasingly visible across Europe and America.

Europe’s Uneasy Position

Varoufakis is especially critical of Europe.

He argues that after the 2008 financial crisis, European leaders combined austerity for citizens with large-scale support for banks and financial markets. The result, he says, was a weakened industrial base and growing dependence on the United States.

Recent years have exposed some uncomfortable truths. Europe remains vulnerable to energy shocks, dependent on American military protection, and economically squeezed between the United States and a rapidly rising China.

Meanwhile, China continues expanding its strength in electric vehicles, batteries, solar energy, and digital infrastructure.

The Return of a Multipolar World

For three decades after the Cold War, much of the world operated under the assumption that American economic and geopolitical leadership was permanent. Varoufakis believes that assumption is now fading.

Countries are increasingly trying to reduce their dependence on a single global center of power. Some are diversifying trade routes. Others are investing in alternative payment systems, energy partnerships, or regional alliances. The rise of BRICS reflects this wider search for balance and autonomy.

At the same time, the West faces growing internal strains: rising inequality, political polarization, industrial decline, and declining trust in institutions. For many citizens, the promises of globalization no longer feel convincing.

Varoufakis does not predict an immediate collapse of the United States. Rather, he describes the beginning of a long transition toward a more fragmented and competitive world order — one in which economic power, technological innovation, and political influence are distributed across several competing centers rather than concentrated in Washington alone.

History offers many examples of such transitions. Great powers rarely disappear overnight. More often, influence slowly erodes while new systems emerge alongside the old.

Varoufakis believes we may already be living through one of those moments.

Further Reading

• Technofeudalism — Yanis Varoufakis (2023)

• The Global Minotaur — Yanis Varoufakis (2011)

• The World for Sale — Javier Blas & Jack Farchy (2021)

Marion Koopmans Before Parliament on COVID-19

Why Do So Many Virologists Favour Spillover?

Marion Koopmans, Dutch virologist and member of the WHO team that investigated the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan. (Image created with AI)

When Marion Koopmans appeared before the Dutch parliamentary inquiry into COVID-19, the committee questioned one of the most influential scientific advisers of the pandemic. Much of the hearing focused on the chaotic first weeks of 2020, the uncertainty surrounding a new virus, and the challenge of advising governments when critical information was still missing. Listening to her testimony, one is reminded how little was known at the time and how many decisions had to be made before the facts were fully understood.

The discussion eventually turned to the origins of COVID-19. Koopmans repeated a position she has held for years: that a natural spillover from animals to humans remains the most likely explanation, even if certainty remains elusive. She also observed that within the scientific community that studies emerging infectious diseases, a large majority of researchers continue to regard COVID-19 as one of many examples of a virus crossing from animals into humans. At the same time, she suggested that the tendency to treat spillover and laboratory leak as equally plausible explanations emerged largely outside that scientific community.

The committee largely moved on.

Yet that brief exchange should have opened an entirely new line of questioning.

If most virologists continue to favour spillover, while many politicians, intelligence agencies and members of the public remain unconvinced, then understanding that difference becomes important. Why do these groups look at the same uncertainty and arrive at different conclusions? What assumptions guide their thinking? What evidence do they weigh differently?

Instead, the discussion quickly returned to more familiar ground.

That feels like a missed opportunity.

After all, Marion Koopmans was not invited merely because she had read the relevant reports. Parliament could have read those reports itself. She was invited because she possesses something much more valuable: decades of experience inside the international virology community. She knows how that community thinks about emerging diseases. She understands how it assesses risk. She has spent years participating in debates about dangerous pathogens, laboratory safety and pandemic preparedness.

Those are precisely the subjects that Parliament seemed least interested in exploring.

From a virologist's perspective, spillover is hardly an unusual explanation. SARS, MERS, avian influenza and Ebola all crossed from animals into humans. Researchers such as Koopmans have spent much of their professional lives studying precisely these kinds of events. When a new virus emerges, many naturally begin by looking for the next example in a familiar pattern.

Yet COVID-19 emerged under circumstances that many people regard as anything but ordinary.

The outbreak began in Wuhan, a city that had become one of the world's leading centres for coronavirus research. Scientists there were studying bat coronaviruses, collecting virus samples and investigating how such viruses might evolve and infect humans. Questions about laboratory safety had occasionally surfaced before the pandemic. None of these facts prove that COVID-19 originated in a laboratory. But they help explain why the laboratory-leak hypothesis has remained alive long after the pandemic itself.

This is where the hearing begins to raise eyebrows.

One might expect a parliamentary committee to ask how the international virology community viewed those circumstances. How did researchers assess the risks associated with coronavirus research before 2020? How much confidence did they place in laboratory safety systems? Were laboratory accidents regarded as realistic possibilities or as highly unlikely events? How did scientists think about gain-of-function research and other controversial forms of pathogen research?

Most importantly, why did so many virologists continue to place greater weight on spillover than on a laboratory accident?

Those questions were barely explored.

That matters because expertise and independence are not the same thing. After financial crises, societies seek explanations from bankers. After military failures, they question generals. After industrial accidents, they rely on engineers. In every case, insiders possess knowledge that outsiders lack. Yet insiders are also shaped by the assumptions, experiences and culture of their own profession.

The same may be true in virology.

Scientists who have spent decades studying dangerous pathogens understand better than anyone why such research is conducted. They know what has been learned and what future threats it may help prevent. At the same time, if a pandemic were ever linked to the type of research they consider important, the consequences would extend far beyond a single laboratory. Questions would inevitably be asked about research priorities, funding, oversight and scientific culture across the entire field.

That does not mean their conclusions are wrong.

It does mean that their assumptions deserve scrutiny.

Indeed, the more expert the witness, the more important that scrutiny becomes. The purpose of a parliamentary inquiry is not simply to establish what experts think. It is to understand how they arrived at those conclusions and what assumptions underpin them.

That was the opportunity Parliament had before it.

The hearing revealed a great deal about what Marion Koopmans thinks about the origins of COVID-19. It revealed much less about why the wider virology community thinks the way it does.

Six years after the pandemic began, the debate over spillover and laboratory leak remains unresolved. The hearing was never likely to settle it.

But it could have shed light on a different question: how one of the world's leading communities of virus researchers assesses risk, uncertainty and evidence.

Marion Koopmans was one of the few people capable of helping Parliament explore that question.

The committee never really asked her to.

Written after evaluating the public hearing of Marion Koopmans before the Dutch Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on COVID-19, 29 May 2026.

Why Europe’s Past Still Shapes Its Future

Michael Neiberg, historian who studies how Europe’s past continues to shape its present. (Image created with AI.)

Europe often presents itself as a continent focused on the future: open borders, shared institutions, economic cooperation, and democracy replacing centuries of conflict. Yet many of today’s political tensions — from the war in Ukraine to debates about migration and nationalism — are deeply rooted in Europe’s past.

That is the central argument of Michael Neiberg, an American historian at the United States Army War College and one of the leading experts on modern European history. In a recent lecture, Neiberg argued that Europe’s current crises only make sense when viewed through the long historical forces that shaped the continent.

His message is simple but powerful: history does not disappear. It remains visible in borders, political culture, economics, and even voting patterns.

Europe Was Built on the Collapse of Empires

Before the World War I, Europe looked very different from today. Much of the continent was ruled not by nation-states, but by vast empires such as the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian, and German Empires. These were multi-ethnic worlds where different peoples lived under the same imperial structures.

Then, between 1914 and 1918, all four collapsed.

After the war, European leaders tried to rebuild the continent around the idea of national self-determination: each people should ideally have its own state. But reality was far messier. Populations were mixed together, borders rarely matched identities, and millions suddenly became minorities inside newly created countries.

Neiberg argues that many of Europe’s current divisions still follow these older fault lines. Election maps in places like Poland, Romania, and Germany continue to reflect borders drawn generations ago. Even decades after the end of the Cold War, the old divide between East and West Germany remains visible in politics and economics.

History, in other words, leaves very long shadows.

The Optimism After the Cold War

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Europeans believed that history had entered a new phase. Liberal democracy and free markets appeared to have won decisively. Economic integration would make future wars unlikely.

Trade became the new foundation of European thinking.

Germany in particular believed that economic cooperation could transform former rivals into reliable partners. Russian gas would tie Russia to Europe. Trade with China would encourage stability and openness. Military confrontation increasingly seemed like something belonging to the twentieth century.

For a while, this vision appeared successful.

But Neiberg argues that Europe misunderstood its own history. Economic ties alone did not erase geopolitical ambitions or historical grievances. Russia did not become the predictable partner many hoped for. Instead, the invasion of Ukraine shattered much of Europe’s post-Cold War optimism.

The result is a Europe suddenly forced to rethink assumptions that had guided it for decades.

A Continent Rediscovering Hard Power

The war in Ukraine has pushed Europe back into questions many believed had been solved: territorial security, military power, and the possibility of large-scale war on the continent.

Countries such as Poland and the Baltic states warned for years that Russia remained a threat. Their historical experience under Soviet domination shaped a very different understanding of security from that of Western Europe.

Now much of Europe is moving in their direction.

Germany, long reluctant to think of itself as a military power, is rebuilding its armed forces and increasing defense spending. The idea that economic interdependence alone guarantees peace no longer feels convincing.

At the same time, Europeans increasingly wonder how permanent American support will remain. Photographs of European leaders discussing security without the United States — and American officials discussing Europe with Russia without Europeans present — have created unease across the continent.

Once again, history shapes perception. Europe remembers periods when American engagement weakened, and many now fear a return to a more distant and transactional relationship.

Migration and the Legacy of Empire

Neiberg also points to migration as another example of history’s persistence.

Many migrants arriving in Europe come from regions once ruled by European empires in Africa and the Middle East. In countries such as France, these historical connections still influence debates about responsibility, identity, and belonging.

Europe faces a contradiction: many economies need migrant labor, yet large parts of the population remain uneasy about rapid demographic and cultural change.

These debates are not only about economics or borders. They are also about the unfinished legacy of empire.

History Does Not Repeat — But It Persists

Neiberg is careful not to argue that Europe is doomed to repeat the past. History is not destiny. But ignoring history can lead to dangerous illusions.

One of the clearest examples, he argues, was the belief that post-Cold War Europe had moved beyond traditional power politics altogether. The assumption that trade alone would create stability now appears far less certain than it did twenty years ago.

For Neiberg, the challenge is not to become trapped in history, but to understand how deeply it continues to shape the present.

Europe may look modern and post-national on the surface. Yet underneath, the continent still carries the structures, memories, and tensions created by empires, wars, borders, and ideological struggles stretching back more than a century.

The past has not disappeared. Europe is still negotiating with it every day.

Further reading

• Michael Neiberg — Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I

• Michael Neiberg — When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance

• Timothy Snyder — The Road to Unfreedom

• Mary Sarotte — Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate

AI and the Coming Quantum Revolution

Image created with AI.

For years, quantum computing has sounded like something from science fiction: strange machines using the bizarre laws of quantum physics to solve problems beyond the reach of ordinary computers. Most experts believed practical quantum computers were still decades away.

Now, that assumption is beginning to wobble.

A recent scientific breakthrough suggests that the arrival of powerful quantum computers may come much sooner than expected. Even more striking: artificial intelligence played a major role in making the breakthrough possible.

For most people, quantum computing is hard to imagine. Ordinary computers work with bits that are either a 0 or a 1. Quantum computers use “qubits,” which behave according to the strange rules of quantum physics. In theory, this allows them to process certain kinds of calculations enormously faster than today’s machines.

The problem has always been stability. Quantum systems are fragile. Tiny disturbances can create errors, and researchers long believed that millions of qubits would be needed before truly powerful quantum computers became practical.

The new research changes that picture. Scientists found a method that dramatically reduces the number of qubits needed for error correction. In simple terms: the mountain of problems to solve suddenly became much smaller.

And AI helped them to do it.

Researchers used advanced AI systems to test enormous numbers of possible solutions. The AI combined existing mathematical ideas in unexpected ways and discovered new approaches that human researchers had overlooked. Some scientists involved admitted that without AI, they might simply have given up.

This is one reason the breakthrough has caused such concern in cybersecurity circles.

Much of modern digital security depends on mathematical problems that are extremely difficult for ordinary computers to solve. That is what protects online banking, encrypted messaging, passwords, military secrets, and large parts of the global financial system.

A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could potentially crack many of these protections far faster than current machines. Experts sometimes refer to the moment this becomes possible as “Q-Day.”

Nobody knows exactly when that day will arrive. Some researchers still believe it is many years away. Others now think it could come much sooner than governments and companies expected.

The fear is not only about the future. Intelligence agencies and criminal groups may already be collecting encrypted data today in the hope that future quantum computers will later be able to unlock it.

The story also points to something larger than quantum computing itself.

For decades, scientific progress was often limited by human time and human imagination. AI is beginning to change that. It is no longer just writing essays or generating images. Increasingly, it is helping researchers solve difficult problems in mathematics, chemistry, physics, and medicine.

That raises uncomfortable questions.

Human societies usually adapt slowly. Laws, education systems, political institutions, and public understanding often lag behind technological change. Yet AI may now be accelerating discovery in ways that compress decades of progress into just a few years.

The world has seen moments like this before. The Industrial Revolution transformed economies faster than societies could adapt. Nuclear physics changed global politics almost overnight after the Second World War. The internet reshaped communication and power structures within a single generation.

Quantum computing, combined with AI, may become another such turning point.

And as with earlier technological revolutions, the real challenge may not be building the machines themselves. It may be preparing society for what follows.

Europe’s Moment? Anne Applebaum’s Warning from Vienna

Anne Applebaum’s speech at Vienna’s Judenplatz, 14 May 2026 — YouTube video available online

Anne Applebaum — Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, journalist, and author known for her work on authoritarianism, the Soviet Union, and the future of democracy in Europe. Born in the United States and long based in Poland, Applebaum has become one of the leading voices warning about the return of nationalism, propaganda, and imperial politics in the 21st century. (Image created with AI.)

Standing beside Vienna’s Holocaust memorial on 14 May 2026, historian and journalist Anne Applebaum delivered a speech that felt less like an academic lecture and more like a warning to Europe.

Her message was simple but urgent: the peaceful and democratic Europe built after 1945 can no longer be taken for granted.

Applebaum reminded the audience that the European Union and the wider postwar order were created deliberately after the destruction of the Second World War. Europe’s institutions were designed not only to create prosperity, but to prevent the return of dictatorship, nationalism, and imperial conquest.

But many of the political ideas Europeans once believed had disappeared are returning. Applebaum spoke about contempt for democracy, ethnic nationalism, propaganda, and the search for scapegoats — ideas that Europe itself once produced.

The war in Ukraine stood at the center of the speech. Applebaum argued that Russia’s invasion is not merely a border conflict, but an attack on the postwar European idea that nations have the right to exist independently and that borders cannot simply be changed by force.

Perhaps most striking was her warning that Europe can no longer assume the United States will always defend the democratic order it helped build after 1945. Parts of the contemporary American political movement, she argued, increasingly see Europe less as a partner and more as a battleground in a wider ideological struggle.

Yet the speech was not entirely pessimistic. Applebaum insisted that Europe still possesses enormous strengths: stable institutions, rule of law, scientific knowledge, culture, and democratic traditions. The real question is whether Europeans themselves still believe in those strengths.

One line captured the evening perfectly. European civilization, she said, is not just “a backdrop for Instagram influencers.” Europe’s true inheritance also includes free speech, judicial independence, religious tolerance, and accountable government.

That may be the real challenge facing Europe in 2026: deciding whether its future will be shaped by fear and fragmentation, or by the democratic ideals it once rebuilt from the ruins of war.

The Manosphere and the Ancient Fear of Being Rejected

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Evolutionary Success for Men Meant Being Desired

For most of human history, male reproductive success was highly uneven. Some men fathered many children, while others left no descendants at all. From an evolutionary perspective, this meant that status, attractiveness, reputation, and social competence carried enormous importance for men. Evolutionary success was not simply about survival. It was also about being desired.

Because women invest far more biologically in reproduction — through pregnancy, childbirth, and childcare — they historically evolved stronger incentives to be selective in choosing partners. This principle, explored by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, shaped sexual selection across much of the animal kingdom, including humans.

The peacock’s extravagant tail exists because peahens choose. The male performs because the female selects.

Seen from this perspective, much male behaviour throughout history begins to look different. Strength, courage, humour, intelligence, artistic talent, ambition, and wealth were not only tools for survival or dominance. They were also signals designed to attract attention and increase the chances of being chosen.

This gives the modern manosphere an interesting psychological dimension. Beneath the rhetoric of “alpha males,” dominance hierarchies, and “sexual market value” lies something far older and more vulnerable: the fear of not being desired.

That fear is ancient.

Human Evolution Rewarded More Than Dominance

But human evolution was never only about aggression or brute strength. Humans became successful because they evolved into intensely social and cultural creatures.

Long before modern civilisation, successful men were often not simply the strongest fighters. They were also skilled communicators, storytellers, musicians, reliable allies, humorous companions, and respected members of a group. Human attraction evolved within communities, not only through physical competition.

This is where the work of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller becomes especially relevant. In The Mating Mind, Miller argues that many uniquely human traits — humour, creativity, language, music, intelligence, and artistic expression — may partly have evolved through sexual selection. Humans impressed one another not only through physical power, but through displays of culture and mind.

In that sense, civilisation itself may partly be the result of people trying to attract one another.

This makes the manosphere strangely reductive. Despite constantly invoking evolution, much of it reduces human value to muscles, money, dominance, and manipulation. Relationships become markets. Women become ranking systems. Men become products competing for status.

Yet human history suggests something far richer. Women did not simply select for aggression. They also selected for empathy, trustworthiness, humour, emotional intelligence, and the ability to cooperate within a community.

The tragedy of the manosphere may therefore be that, while speaking constantly about evolution, it often ignores some of evolution’s most important outcomes: culture, cooperation, and emotional connection.

Algorithms and the Modern Crisis of Male Status

Modern technology has intensified these ancient anxieties in ways our ancestors would barely recognise. Human psychology evolved in small communities where status was local and personal. Today, social media and dating apps expose millions of men to constant comparison with global elites of beauty, wealth, and charisma.

Attraction becomes quantified through likes, followers, visibility, and matches.

Under such conditions, insecurity easily mutates into resentment. This may explain why so much manosphere content feels simultaneously aggressive and fragile. The performance of dominance often masks a profound fear of exclusion and rejection.

The louder the claims of control become, the more visible the insecurity beneath them sometimes appears.

The manosphere is therefore not simply a story about masculinity. It is also a story about what happens when ancient evolutionary anxieties collide with modern algorithmic culture. Human beings evolved to seek recognition, intimacy, and belonging inside relatively small social groups — not inside global digital arenas of permanent comparison.

The fear of being rejected may be ancient.

But so too is the human need for connection.

Further Reading

• The Mating Mind — Geoffrey Miller (2000)

• The Evolution of Desire — David Buss (1994)

• Natural Selection and Social Theory — Robert Trivers (2002)

• Behave — Robert Sapolsky (2017)

• Sex at Dawn — Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá (2010)

• The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins (1976)

The Return of Imperial Thinking

Jiang Xueqin (Image created with AI.)

For much of the 1990s and early 2000s, many people in Europe believed that history was slowly moving toward a more connected and stable world. Global trade expanded, borders became easier to cross, and wars between major powers seemed increasingly unlikely. Today, that confidence has largely disappeared.

Wars have returned to Europe and the Middle East. Energy security has become a strategic concern again. Artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape economies and political systems. And around the world, people increasingly speak the language of empires, spheres of influence, trade routes, and military power.

It is in this atmosphere that geopolitical commentator and educator Jiang Xueqin has found a large online audience. In a long and controversial interview, Jiang presents a sweeping interpretation of today’s global tensions. He argues that the United States, Russia, China, Iran, and Israel are all pursuing competing imperial visions, and that the world may already be entering a new era of global conflict.

Whether one agrees with his conclusions or not, the popularity of such arguments tells us something important about our time.

What makes Jiang’s worldview striking is not only its dramatic predictions, but also how deeply it echoes older ways of thinking about history and power. His analysis resembles the geopolitical theories that dominated much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — a world in which great powers compete for control over strategic regions, trade routes, energy supplies, and military chokepoints.

In his telling, geography once again becomes destiny. Mountain ranges, ports, oil routes, naval corridors, and railways shape the future of nations. He describes the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, and the Black Sea not merely as locations on a map, but as pressure points in a global struggle for dominance.

This language would have sounded familiar to strategists during the age of the British Empire, the Cold War, or even the era of the Roman Empire. Civilizations rise and decline; powers seek control over resources; rivals form alliances to resist dominant empires.

Europeans know these patterns well because Europe’s own history was shaped by them for centuries.

Yet the appeal of such grand geopolitical narratives goes beyond strategy. They offer something emotionally powerful in uncertain times: a sense that chaos can still be explained. When inflation rises, wars spread, institutions weaken, and technological change accelerates, people naturally search for larger frameworks that make events feel understandable.

This is not new. During the oil crises of the 1970s, many people also feared the collapse of the global order. During the Cold War, millions believed nuclear conflict between superpowers was inevitable. In the 1930s, economic instability and political polarization produced competing visions of global destiny that reshaped entire societies.

What is different today is the combination of old geopolitical fears with entirely new technologies. Artificial intelligence, digital surveillance, and data-driven governance appear repeatedly in Jiang’s predictions about the future. He imagines a world where states increasingly monitor behaviour through digital systems and AI-driven analysis.

Again, whether these predictions are realistic or exaggerated is almost beside the point. The deeper issue is that many people increasingly feel that they are losing control over the systems shaping their lives.

At the same time, there are important blind spots in this kind of worldview.

The interview focuses overwhelmingly on military power, empires, strategic trade routes, and state rivalry. But some of the greatest forces shaping the twenty-first century barely appear at all.

Climate change is perhaps the most obvious omission. Rising temperatures, droughts, migration pressures, water scarcity, and food insecurity may ultimately transform societies more profoundly than military conflict. Demographic ageing, especially in Europe and East Asia, is another major challenge largely absent from this type of geopolitical thinking.

Even technology itself may reshape the world in ways that go far beyond military competition. Artificial intelligence could alter labour markets, education, healthcare, and social structures just as dramatically as it changes warfare.

History rarely follows a single grand plan. Empires rise and fall, but societies are also shaped by culture, economics, technology, religion, climate, and ordinary human adaptation.

Still, the growing popularity of voices like Jiang reveals something important about the mood of our era. After decades in which globalization seemed unstoppable, many people once again see the world through the lens of competing civilizations and declining empires.

For Europeans especially, this should feel strangely familiar.

Europe’s history is filled with periods when people believed they were living through the end of one order and the birth of another. Sometimes they were right.

Can the World Contain the Andes Hantavirus Outbreak? — An Update

Image created with AI.

What makes the current discussion around the Andes hantavirus so unsettling is not just its lethality, but the combination of several characteristics that together create a potentially dangerous epidemiological picture.

Health authorities now acknowledge that the Andes strain can spread from person to person. Even more troubling are growing indications that infected individuals may already be contagious before they themselves realize they are ill. Combined with reports that the incubation period may in some cases last up to six weeks, this creates a uniquely dangerous situation.

An infected person may unknowingly expose family members, colleagues, fellow travellers, healthcare workers, or others sharing the same spaces before recognizing the significance of their symptoms. By the time severe symptoms emerge and the infection is finally recognized, chains of transmission may already have spread beyond the original source, potentially crossing cities and borders in a world defined by constant human movement.

And then there is the fatality rate. Severe Andes hantavirus infections have been associated with mortality estimates approaching 38%. Even allowing for uncertainty in the numbers, that is an extraordinarily high figure compared to most modern respiratory outbreaks.

Taken separately, each of these factors would already concern epidemiologists. Combined — human-to-human transmission, possible pre-symptomatic spread, a long incubation period, and high lethality — they describe exactly the kind of outbreak epidemiologists fear most.

The central question is no longer whether the Andes hantavirus deserves serious attention. The real question is whether modern societies, after years of political fatigue, economic pressure, and declining trust in public institutions, still possess the collective will, discipline, and coordination required to stop a dangerous outbreak before it spreads beyond control.

Further reading

• European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)

• U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

• RIVM – Hantavirus updates

• Other article(s) on this topic on culture-lovers.eu

How Worried Should We Be About the Hantavirus?

Image created with AI.

Three people are dead. Several others became seriously ill within days. Doctors in different countries are now tracing passengers who shared dining rooms, lecture halls and cabins aboard a cruise ship crossing the South Atlantic.

Even so, the official tone around the current outbreak of the Hantavirus has remained surprisingly calm. Health authorities continue to say that this is “not another COVID,” and that the risk to the wider public is low. That may eventually prove true. But some scientists are becoming uncomfortable with how strongly that reassuring message is being pushed while important questions still remain unanswered.

The real issue is not whether people should panic. They should not. The more important question is whether the public is hearing the full scientific story, including the uncertainties.

What Is the Hantavirus?

The Hantavirus is normally spread from rodents to humans through contaminated dust, urine or droppings. In most cases, the virus does not spread from one person to another. The current outbreak, however, involves the Andes strain of the Hantavirus, a rare version found in South America that is known to be capable of limited human-to-human transmission.

What worries scientists is not just the virus itself, but the combination of characteristics it appears to have. The Andes strain can cause very severe illness and has a relatively high fatality rate. At the same time, the virus may have a long incubation period and may sometimes spread between people in enclosed spaces.

Modern epidemiologists increasingly look at these combinations of factors rather than at one number alone. A recent study from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine argues that the danger of an outbreak depends on how severity, transmissibility and incubation time work together.

A virus does not need to spread as easily as measles to become a serious problem. If infected people can travel internationally for days or even weeks before realizing they are ill, controlling an outbreak becomes much harder.

Why the Cruise Ship Outbreak Matters

Cruise ships are almost perfect environments for studying outbreaks. Large numbers of people share air, dining rooms and social spaces while constantly moving between countries.

According to WHO and ECDC reports, several people aboard the MV Hondius quickly developed severe respiratory symptoms, pneumonia and shock. Three people died.

The current outbreak appears to have a fatality rate close to 38%, although the number of confirmed cases is still small. Earlier outbreaks in South America showed similar numbers.

Those figures are striking. COVID-19 was far less deadly for the average patient. What made COVID so destructive was not mainly its fatality rate, but the fact that it spread very efficiently before people became seriously ill.

Right now, there is no evidence that the Hantavirus spreads anywhere near as easily as COVID-19. But some researchers fear that we may not yet fully understand how the Andes strain behaves in crowded indoor environments.

The Debate About Transmission

Official WHO and ECDC guidance says that person-to-person transmission of the Andes strain mainly happens after close and prolonged contact, especially between household members or caregivers.

Harvard scientist Joseph Allen has publicly questioned that interpretation. After reviewing earlier scientific studies and speaking directly with a doctor aboard the ship, Allen argued that some infections may have happened without what most people would describe as “close contact.” In interviews, he described reports of infected passengers who had simply shared indoor spaces such as dining rooms or lecture halls.

Allen is not saying that the Hantavirus is about to become a global pandemic. His argument is more limited, but still important. He believes that official communication may sound more certain than the science really is.

That debate will sound familiar to many people after COVID. Governments often try to avoid panic by reassuring the public. But if the message becomes too reassuring too early, many people stop paying attention exactly when careful attention is still needed.

The Problem of the Long Incubation Period

Another reason scientists are watching this outbreak closely is the incubation period. Research on the Andes strain suggests that symptoms can appear anywhere from 7 to 39 days after exposure, with a median of around 18 days.

That creates a long period of uncertainty. Passengers may board flights, stay in hotels and return home long before they realize they are infected. WHO has warned that additional cases may still appear because the incubation period can extend to six weeks.

Long incubation periods do not automatically create pandemics. But they do make outbreaks harder to trace and control in a world where international travel is constant.

Is There a Treatment?

At the moment, there is no proven antiviral treatment for the Hantavirus. Doctors mainly rely on supportive intensive care, including oxygen therapy, ventilation and, in severe cases, ECMO. Patients can deteriorate very quickly once serious respiratory symptoms begin.

That alone is enough reason for doctors and epidemiologists to take even relatively small outbreaks seriously.

So, How Worried Should We Be?

At this stage, there is still no evidence that the Hantavirus poses a COVID-scale threat to the world. But there is also enough uncertainty that simple reassurance may not tell the whole story.

The outbreak aboard the MV Hondius is a reminder that outbreaks are shaped not only by biology, but also by how uncertainty is communicated. The real debate is not about panic versus calm. It is about whether modern societies are able to handle nuance: a virus can simultaneously be unlikely to become a global catastrophe and still deserve serious scientific concern.

Why Anthropic’s Mythos Has Silicon Valley Worried

Image created with AI.

For years, discussions about artificial intelligence focused on familiar themes: chatbots writing emails, AI creating images, or computers helping students with homework. Most people saw AI as a useful tool — impressive perhaps, but still limited.

That changed when Anthropic announced a new AI model called Mythos.

The company claims Mythos became so good at discovering weaknesses in computer systems that it decided not to release the model publicly.

At first glance, this may sound like a technical problem affecting only programmers. But the reason Silicon Valley is suddenly nervous is much broader. Modern society runs on software. Hospitals, banks, ports, trains, electricity networks, water systems, airports, supermarkets, and communication systems all depend on millions of lines of code quietly working in the background every day.

Most people never think about that invisible infrastructure — until it fails.

Mythos reportedly discovered hidden weaknesses in important software systems that human experts had failed to notice for years, sometimes even decades. One example involved FFmpeg, a video-processing system used throughout the internet. According to reports, Mythos found a flaw after millions of earlier security scans had missed it.

The fear is simple: if AI becomes extraordinarily good at finding weaknesses, then criminals, hostile governments, or terrorist groups could eventually use similar systems to attack the digital foundations of society.

Why This Feels Different

Cybersecurity experts have worried about hackers for decades. But Mythos appears to represent something new in both speed and scale.

Human experts work slowly. A skilled cybersecurity researcher might spend weeks studying one piece of software looking for a vulnerability. AI systems like Mythos can potentially examine enormous amounts of software continuously, day and night, at a speed humans cannot match.

Some researchers involved with the project described the experience as unsettling. One engineer reportedly said the model found more vulnerabilities in a few weeks than he had discovered during the rest of his career combined.

That matters because much of the world’s digital infrastructure is old, fragmented, and poorly protected. Critical systems are often built on layers of software written over many decades by different people and companies. Even experts describe parts of this infrastructure as fragile. One cybersecurity specialist bluntly summarized the situation by saying many essential systems are effectively “held together with sticky tape.”

In practice, that could mean AI systems eventually becoming capable of exposing weaknesses in power grids, shipping systems, financial networks, or communication infrastructure faster than humans can repair them.

This is why Anthropic decided not to fully release Mythos and instead launched Project Glasswing together with major technology companies. The idea is to strengthen critical systems before more advanced AI models become widely available.

More Than a Technology Story

Some critics argue that Anthropic also benefits from the publicity surrounding Mythos. Declaring a model “too dangerous to release” naturally attracts attention and investment. Others point out that AI systems have already been helping cybersecurity researchers for years, meaning Mythos may be an important step forward rather than an immediate catastrophe.

But even if some of the language is exaggerated, the broader concern remains real. The Mythos story reveals how dependent modern civilization has become on software that very few people truly understand.

It also raises political questions. If only a handful of companies possess AI systems considered too powerful for public release, who controls those systems? Governments? Corporations? Military alliances? And how transparent will those decisions be?

For Europe, the issue is especially uncomfortable. Europe largely missed the rise of the dominant internet companies and now risks depending on American AI infrastructure as well. The Mythos debate may therefore force European governments to think more seriously about digital independence, regulation, and technological sovereignty.

Perhaps the fears surrounding Mythos will eventually prove overstated. Silicon Valley has always had a tendency toward dramatic predictions. Yet many people inside the AI industry now openly speak as if society is approaching a historic turning point.

The real fear is not simply that AI will become smarter. It is that AI may evolve faster than governments, laws, and ordinary citizens can keep up with — while becoming deeply connected to nearly every system modern life depends on.

The End of the Future?

Ivan Krastev on a World Without a Story

Ivan Krastev, Bulgarian political scientist and leading voice on Europe’s changing place in the world. (Image created with AI.)

We like to think history moves with a certain direction. Crises come and go, but the overall path remains visible. Ivan Krastev suggests that this sense of direction is now breaking down. What we are experiencing is not just instability, but the end of the framework that made the modern world understandable.

He calls it the end of the “long 20th century.” What is fading is not simply a period in time, but the belief that politics is driven by competing visions of the future.

For much of the last century, that belief held everything together. Capitalism and communism were not just systems—they were promises about tomorrow. Both sides assumed history would ultimately vindicate them. That confidence allowed for patience, even restraint.

Today, the future no longer feels like a promise. It feels like a source of anxiety. Climate change, demographic shifts, and technological disruption have turned tomorrow into something uncertain, even threatening. As a result, political ideas have lost much of their energy. The labels remain, but they no longer mobilize people in the same way.

This shift is especially visible in the United States. Krastev sees recent developments there as something closer to a revolution—fast-moving, reactive, and lacking a clear direction. What matters is not where it is going, but how quickly it moves.

More importantly, the American self-image is changing. For decades, power was linked to values and a sense of mission. Now, that connection is weakening. Power is increasingly seen as something that does not need justification beyond itself.

At the same time, the internal debate has shifted. Earlier criticism often came from those who believed the country had failed to live up to its ideals. Today, those ideals themselves are questioned. That marks a deeper loss: not just political consensus, but belief in a shared purpose.

Krastev draws a striking parallel with the late Soviet Union, where systems collapsed not because they were suddenly attacked, but because belief in them quietly disappeared.

This loss of confidence is not limited to one country. It affects the global order as well. As the United States becomes less predictable, the world does not simply divide into two camps. Instead, it becomes more fluid.

China’s rise, for instance, is increasingly seen as part of a rebalancing rather than a direct threat. At the same time, international politics is becoming less institutional and more personal. Relationships between leaders and informal deals matter more than formal structures.

This creates opportunities for countries that are neither superpowers nor small states. They can navigate between larger actors, adjusting their position as circumstances change.

For Europe, this is a difficult environment. It faces pressure from multiple directions—economic, military, and political—while the old certainties, especially about its relationship with the United States, are weakening. Yet Europe has not fully redefined its role. There is still an assumption that the future will resemble the present, only slightly worse.

Krastev doubts that this is realistic.

What makes the current moment so disorienting is the absence of a clear story. The 20th century, despite its conflicts, offered competing visions of where the world was heading. Today, that sense of direction is missing. Events unfold quickly, but without a shared narrative.

Looking back, major turning points often seem inevitable. At the time, they rarely feel that way. The collapse of the Soviet Union surprised almost everyone. Only later did it begin to look predictable.

We may be in a similar moment now. Not a sudden collapse, but a gradual shift in which the assumptions that once shaped political life are quietly losing their hold.

If so, the challenge is not just to respond to events, but to recognize that the deeper transformation is still unfolding.

Further reading

• Ivan Krastev – After Europe

• Ivan Krastev & Stephen Holmes – The Light That Failed

• Ivan Krastev – Is It Tomorrow Yet?

• Francis Fukuyama – The End of History and the Last Man

When Prices Rise and Routes Close: The Return of the Misery Index

Image created with AI.

There is something almost disarmingly simple about the idea. Take two things people feel every day—how fast prices are rising, and how hard it is to find work—and add them together. The result is what economists came to call the misery index, a rough measure of how strained everyday life feels.

The concept is usually linked to Arthur Okun, who in the 1960s tried to capture, in one number, the pressure ordinary households experience. Inflation erodes purchasing power; unemployment undermines security. Add the two, and you get a snapshot—imperfect, but intuitive—of economic discomfort.

Europe in the 1970s: When Energy Shock Became Social Change

Although the misery index was born in the United States, its logic applied just as much to Europe in the 1970s. The turning point was the Oliecrisis van 1973, when geopolitical tensions abruptly restricted oil supply and sent prices soaring.

What followed was stagflation: rising prices, slowing growth, and growing unemployment.

In southern Europe, the effects were especially intense. Italy struggled with inflation and instability. Spain, emerging from the rule of Francisco Franco, faced economic hardship alongside political transformation. Greece, after the fall of military rule, confronted both economic fragility and institutional rebuilding.

The crisis reshaped not only economies, but societies.

Today: Shock, Uncertainty—and a Structural Transformation

Today’s pressures are again rooted in disruption, but the mechanism is broader.

The instability around the Strait of Hormuz—linked to the war between United States and Iran—has exposed how vulnerable global energy flows remain. As in the 1970s, higher energy costs ripple through transport, food, and industry.

But the deeper effect lies in uncertainty.

When companies cannot reliably predict costs, supply chains, or geopolitical risks, they hesitate. Investment slows. Expansion plans are postponed. Hiring becomes cautious.

And this is where a second, quieter transformation intersects with the story.

At the same time, the rapid growth of the AI sector is beginning to reshape entire industries. Automation and AI-driven processes promise efficiency and new forms of productivity—but they also create friction in labour markets. Jobs are redefined, some disappear, others require new skills that are unevenly distributed.

This matters for the misery index in a subtle but important way:

• inflation may be driven by external shocks

• unemployment may increasingly be shaped by structural change

The result is a more complex dynamic than in the 1970s. Economic strain is no longer just cyclical—it is also transitional.

The Return of Unemployment—But in a New Form

Unemployment does not rise overnight after a shock. It follows.

As uncertainty persists:

• companies delay hiring

• investment weakens

• sectors under pressure begin to shed jobs

But unlike the past, this process now overlaps with technological change.

Some jobs may not return—not because demand disappears, but because they are replaced or transformed. At the same time, new roles emerge, often requiring different skills or located in different regions.

This creates a paradox:

• labour shortages in some sectors

• rising unemployment or insecurity in others

From the perspective of the misery index, this is crucial. The “unemployment” component becomes less uniform, more fragmented—and potentially more persistent.

Southern Europe—and Increasingly the Rest—on the Fault Line

Countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain remain more exposed to rising costs and structural weaknesses. Higher youth unemployment and lower income buffers amplify the impact of both economic shocks and technological change.

But the divide between north and south is no longer as clear-cut as it once was.

The combination of geopolitical instability and AI-driven transformation affects all of Europe:

• industrial regions face restructuring

• service sectors undergo automation

• regional inequalities may deepen

The result is not a single crisis, but overlapping pressures.

What Comes Next: A Slow-Burning Adjustment

If instability in global energy routes continues, and technological change accelerates, Europe may face a prolonged period of adjustment rather than a sharp crisis.

First comes the price shock.
Then comes the employment shift.
Overlaying both is structural transformation.

This is not a replay of the 1970s—but it rhymes with it.

A Simple Index in a Complex Age

The misery index remains a powerful idea because it captures something fundamental: how economic conditions are experienced.

But today, it needs to be read differently.

Inflation still matters.
Unemployment still matters.
But beneath both lies a deeper layer of change—uncertainty and transformation.

The real question is no longer just how high the index will rise, but how societies adapt to what lies behind it.

And that is where today’s story diverges from the past: not just in the shocks we face, but in the scale of change unfolding at the same time.