One particular example I’ve always liked (especially since as a kid I had similar thoughts) provides a vivid illustration of the psychology underlying the dismissal of global warming. It shows that the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur out of sight or after so many steps as to seem distant. The example (embroidered a bit here) appears in Derek Parfit’s book “Reasons and Persons,” where he discusses the case of a man strapped to a hospital bed, say by a psychopath, in some indeterminate place with electrodes attached to his heart. Rotation of a dial on the other side of the world minusculely and imperceptibly increases the current in the electrodes and the stress on the man’s heart.
Perhaps a free piece of candy, a pleasant buzz, and a snapshot with the dial are on offer from a mysterious donor as an incentive to anyone in the distant location who twists the dial. Assuming it takes 10,000 people, each rotating the dial once to electrocute the victim, what degree of guilt, if any, do we assign to each individual dial-twister? After all, none of the dial-twisters know the poor man in question nor have they ever been in his part of the world. They might well doubt there is such a man if the situation isn’t clearly communicated to them or if it is ridiculed by a few influential people. Whatever their excuses, however, they are likely to be at least vaguely aware of rumors about the situation. How then do we deposit all these tiny bits of personal guilt into some moral bank account to save the victim. Or do we just shrug and dismiss the significant probability of ordinary indifferent people killing the distant stranger?
The real question of course is, What is the impact of thousands of small environmental or personal abuses over time? In the context of this rather morbid tale of a psychopath, most environmentalists would probably opt to stop rotating the dial or at least to rotate it very infrequently.
Petty tyrants are more focused on personal victories than on national priorities. The good news is that they carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. Once we understand their common flaws, it becomes apparent why they eventually fall rapidly from power and leave few changes to government that last. Understanding this pattern can help us recognize a critical feature that distinguishes leaders who damage their nations from those who create lasting good: their relationship to truth.
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One of the worst mistakes the opposition can make is extending contempt for the tyrant into contempt for the tyrant’s supporters. Most of these supporters sincerely believed that the tyrant would be more likely to solve their problems — often real grievances that the opposition had failed to address. Blaming the supporters denies the reality of the failures and reinforces their support for the tyrant.
As Napoleon consolidated his power, his critics described the farmers who supported him as “a sack of potatoes” and Parisian workers as having “their minds crammed with vain theories and visionary hopes.” This attitude of condescension made it easier for Napoleon to position his opposition as arrogant elites and himself as the champion of ordinary people.
When the opposition makes it socially acceptable to show contempt for anyone who disagrees, they cooperate with the tyrant in creating a cycle of divisiveness that distracts from reality. That cycle sustains the tyrant’s hold on power.
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Once they had disabled democracy, these tyrants managed to hold onto power long after their popularity faded. Even removing the tyrant was not a guarantee of short-term success. In the Philippines, democracy has still not fully recovered.
It is much easier to stop the rise of a tyrant than to accelerate their fall. It would have been far better for each nation if the leaders of the opposition had learned from their failures, postponed their short-term ambitions and concentrated on preserving the democracy.
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The legacies of these truth-based leaders have long outlived the leaders themselves, and they continue to benefit us in the 21st century. Bismarck’s social safety nets are still thriving in Germany, and they have been widely copied. Singapore is now a prosperous nation, and a Singaporean passport will get you visa-free entry into more countries than any other. Roosevelt’s Social Security is so successful that politicians on both sides of the aisle now compete to take credit for protecting it.
Look at what endures from these six stories: not the propaganda, the posters and parades, but the institutions that continue to serve their nations decade after decade. The children who are healthy and literate. The elderly and disabled who live in security and dignity. The deposits, safe in the bank. The honest civil services that provide real protections and solve real problems. These are the legacies that matter.
Wendell Berry, one of the few remaining writers in the older topophilic tradition, understands this better than anyone. In 1991, he wrote an essay for the Atlantic—a magazine for which Thoreau had written—in response to the then-common slogan “Think globally, act locally”:
Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people.
Global thinking is, for Berry, intrinsically and necessarily destructive of actual places:
Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place…. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as independent and self-sufficient as we can—not by the presumptuous abstractions of “global thought.”
I would add to this that when global thought is not actively destructive it nevertheless tends to encourage depression in those who attempt it—which accounts, I think, for the gloomy and finger-wagging tone to which we have become accustomed.
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This, I think, is an object lesson for those who wish to save the planet. If you would save the planet, forget The Planet; if you would sustain and repair nature, forget Nature. Remember the example of Gilbert White. Think only of the sensual properties of one dear place. If you learn to love a pond or a creek or a valley, then what you love others will love—and will perhaps also come to find some element of their own local environment dear to them, dear enough to conserve and protect. Our obligations arise from our deepest affections. You just have to show them how.
So this all begs the question, if not grand strategy, then what? If we discard the idea that states possess a coherent, elevated ideological and philosophical design integrating all instruments of power across time, what replaces it? I would simply say that doing so would provide a far clearer view of what strategy actually is. If we return to Gaddis’s original definition, “the alignment of potentially unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities,” strategy appears not as a grand design, but as a continual exercise in discipline, prioritization, and adjustment.
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A more realistic approach, then, is to focus on decision points rather than designs. Instead of asking whether a state has a grand strategy, we should ask how it resolves specific tradeoffs at specific moments. Where does it allocate marginal resources? Which risks does it accept, and which does it avoid? Which commitments does it reinforce, and which does it quietly allow to erode? These choices, taken together, tell us far more about strategy than any post hoc narrative of alignment ever could. This reframing also forces greater intellectual honesty about failure. When strategy is imagined as a grand design, failure is attributed to incompetence or moral weakness. When strategy is understood as constraint management, failure is often tragic but explicable. States misjudge adversaries, overestimate capacities, underestimate costs, and act on incomplete information. These are not deviations from strategy; they are the conditions under which strategy exists.
Finally, abandoning the grand strategy genre clarifies what strategic skill actually looks like. It is not the ability to synthesize everything into a single vision, but the capacity to say no, to sequence objectives, and to recognize when ambition has outrun means. It is judgment exercised under uncertainty, not mastery imposed from above. This kind of strategic thinking is less glamorous and far harder to narrate, which is precisely why it is so often displaced by grander abstractions.
There is no higher plane of statecraft waiting to be discovered beyond politics, budgets, institutions, and tradeoffs. What exists instead is the ordinary, difficult work of governance under constraint—choosing among competing priorities, allocating scarce resources, managing risk, and accepting imperfection. Abandoning the language of grand strategy does not mean abandoning strategic thought. It means stripping away a genre that flatters elites and replacing it with analysis that takes politics seriously. Strategy need not be grand to be real. It needs only to be honest.
Published on the occasion of UNU-INWEH’s 30th anniversary, and ahead of the 2026 UN Water Conference, this flagship report, Global Water Bankruptcy: Living Beyond Our Hydrological Means in the Post-Crisis Era, argues that the world has entered a new stage: more and more river basins and aquifers are losing the ability to return to their historical “normal.” Droughts, shortages, and pollution episodes that once looked like temporary shocks are becoming chronic in many places, signalling a post-crisis condition the report calls water bankruptcy.
The report makes the case for a fundamental shift in the global water agenda—from repeatedly reacting to emergencies to “bankruptcy management.” That means confronting overshoot with transparent water accounting, enforceable limits, and protection of the water-related natural capital that produces and stores water—aquifers, wetlands, soils, rivers, and glaciers—while ensuring transitions are explicitly equity-oriented and protect vulnerable communities and livelihoods.
Crucially, the report frames water not only as a growing source of risk, but also as a strategic opportunity in a fragmented world. It argues that serious investment in water can unlock progress across climate, biodiversity, land, food, and health, and serve as a practical platform for cooperation within and between societies. Acting early, before stress hardens into irreversible loss, can reduce shared risks, strengthen resilience, and rebuild trust through tangible results.
In financial bankruptcy, the first warning signs often feel manageable: late payments, borrowed money and selling things you hoped to keep. Then the spiral tightens.
Water bankruptcy has similar stages.
At first, we pull a little more groundwater during dry years. We use bigger pumps and deeper wells. We transfer water from one basin to another. We drain wetlands and straighten rivers to make space for farms and cities.
Then the hidden costs show up. Lakes shrink year after year. Wells need to go deeper. Rivers that once flowed year-round turn seasonal. Salty water creeps into aquifers near the coast. The ground itself starts to sink.
That last one, subsidence, often surprises people. But it’s a signature of water bankruptcy. When groundwater is overpumped, the underground structure, which holds water almost like a sponge, can collapse. In Mexico City, land is sinking by about 10 inches (25 centimeters) per year. Once the pores become compacted, they can’t simply be refilled.
Finding the question can be fun, as in thinking of a cartoon caption. But it can also be extremely difficult psychologically. Scientists are often expected by the public to know it all, and yet, “feeling stupid” is a common mode of operation for us. Science is the art of dealing with things we do not know enough about. As Wernher von Braun, the father of German and US rocket programs, phrased it: “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” Science is humbling in this way. For young scientists, it is often very difficult to understand that it is perfectly normal to not know the answer—or even the question. Learning to embrace this uncertainty is part of our maturation as scientists.
Uri Alon has an intuitive image to describe the process of re-finding our questions. Given what we know about a given topic “A,” a researcher predicts that it should be possible to arrive at point “B,” a scientific destination that seems interesting—a hypothesis. However, the plot inevitably thickens over the course of the research project, and new hurdles force the scientist into a meandering path. Soon, the researcher is lost, having lost sight of the start point (which suddenly seems shaky) and end point (which appears unreachable). Uri calls this “being in the cloud”—you have lost your original question, but the reason why this has occurred is strange and thus potentially exciting and itself worthy of study. From inside the cloud, the situation may seem desperate, but Uri sees the cloud as the hallmark of science: if you are in the cloud, then you might have stumbled upon something non-obvious and interesting. “I’m very confused” a student would tell Uri, to which he would reply, “Oh good - So you’re in the cloud!” Eventually, a new question that arose inside the cloud may lead the way to an unexpected destination “C.”
Embracing uncertainty
The scientific method is often perceived as a simple sequence that leads from a problem to an answer, possibly through long iterations of modified hypotheses. But our reality is much less structured: it often starts with a topic and some observations, leading to the finding of patterns and questions about those patterns, possibly long before we have any explicit hypothesis or any direct tests. And even if a project starts out with a very specific hypothesis, in our experiences, it still generally arrives at a very different point than expected.
In some way, then, night science may be most productive when it has no agenda, when there are no particular questions it is trying to reshape or resolve. When the scientist does not have a hypothesis, she is free to explore, to make connections. In some sense, any kind of expectation on how things are to behave—a hypothesis—is a liability that could obstruct a new idea that awaits our discovery. Once night science elucidates and reframes this question, the researcher can use the full power of day science to solve it. In this sense, a major discovery is typically both the solution and the problem.
Much of basic, curiosity-driven science is exploration, and night science is a fundamental part of that; yet funding bodies often demand that research must be hypothesis-driven. But while some part of night science can be done with the help of an armchair and some good coffee, other parts require the exploration of large and complicated data sets. If no funding is provided for such endeavors, the generation of new questions may be stifled, hindering scientific progress: in science, the problem that is eventually solved is often not the one that was initially sought out.
Members of our broader research group are working extensively in the field. This especially involves the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, the major project to learn what is going on in the most vulnerable part of the most vulnerable ice sheet in the Antarctic, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which includes the Thwaites Glacier. After seasons lost to Covid, a major expedition will be traversing down Thwaites, using radars, seismic sensors and more to characterize the ice and its bed.
Other groups are working farther downstream, extending work that has been done on the ice shelf and in the ocean beyond. Thwaites is vast, larger than the state of Florida. It is some 80 miles across, making it arguably the widest glacier on Earth. Since the 1990s, scientists have reported on the increased velocity of its movement and the doubling of its contribution to sea-level rise. Its collapse would trigger meters of sea-level rise in the decades and centuries to come, hence its popular nickname in the media, Doomsday Glacier.
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What are the challenges in predicting how much warming will ultimately cause the Thwaites Glacier to break apart?
Some of this is really difficult, especially where fractures are involved. Think about ceramic coffee cups dropped on hard floors. Sometimes the coffee cup just bounces, or the rim chips, or the handle breaks off, but sometimes the whole thing shatters. Scientists can accurately predict the average behavior of a lot of coffee cups dropped on a lot of floors, if you tell us the height of the drop, the type of floor, the type of cup and a few other things. But predicting the exact behavior of the next cup dropped is really difficult, in part because the behavior depends on whether there are small cracks buried deep in the material of the cup, among others. Predicting exactly how much warming is needed to break parts of Thwaites will be harder than predicting coffee cups.
Sounds like there’s still a lot of uncertainty here. How should policymakers cope with that?
First of all, the uncertainties are not our friend. There is basically no way that sea-level rise can be notably smaller than expected. When we make the climate warmer, the ocean warms up. That makes the water expand, which raises sea level. That’s relatively easy.
The glaciers in the mountains are doing what we projected decades ago: They really are melting. That takes water that was ice out of the mountains and puts it into the ocean, and that raises sea level. Those are fairly easy predictions. There are not large uncertainties in those. The uncertainties are: Will the ice shelves break off, will the flow of the big ice sheets change a lot, with the potential to drive these very large, rapid sea-level rises. So the uncertainties are on the bad side.
In other areas of our lives, we tend to invest a lot to avoid the possibility of a catastrophe, even if we are not sure it is going to happen. The example I like to use is highway safety. We have highway engineers, we have crumple zones in the car, we have airbags and antilock brakes and seatbelts and we have police out there trying to stop drunken drivers. We are not very likely to get killed by a drunken driver, but the catastrophe would be so bad if it happened that we invest a lot in heading that off.
What would make sense may be to think about sea-level rise and our response to it with the same sort of lens: There are things we can do to better understand why it happens and what the causes are. Next steps might be communities taking steps that reflect scientific findings, which of course have economic as well as social benefits.
Since Max was a puppy, I have heard this reasoning when something bad happens - "Hey, this always happens; everywhere."
That drove me nuts. I phrased a term for this - "consoling the conscience."
Then I reminded myself of this Adam Smith quote from his least read book Theory of Moral Sentiments (remember, he wrote only two books):
If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.
People don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their families but yet, what they love depends completely outside of that circle.
I would calm myself, and go play frisbee with Max. Max made a freaking little better living being. He was wiser than I will ever be.
I was barely out of my teens when Manmohan Singh and Narsihma Rao changed the destiny of India.
Of-course I have no idea on the profound implications of their wisdom. All I saw was Coke and Pepsi was available in India and Aamir Khan's Pepsi ad's were phenomenal.
And then my prefrontal cortex developed a little. Slowly, I understood their wisdom. I started developing not only gratitude but tremendous wisdom not only for their actions but they were able to pull this off in a country like India.
Then I read Margaret Mead's wise sentence:
Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.
What happened in India during 1991 was a ridiculous minority of three people (Green revolution happened because of Norman Borlaugh and most Indians don't know his name - god bless my species).
(Hey a good human from the future: If you are reading this after I am long gone - don't give up animals.
Keep up your good work. Change will come.
Love from Max and I will always be there for you.
Remember no one will remember you but that is the ultimate victory for you. Why would you want these fucked up being to remember you?
You will be one of those longest hours in the "Deep Time" when billions don't even make it micro-milli-second.)
The real reasons for the forgetting are deeper. And they’re not unique to India—they’re human. Which makes them harder to fix.
This is the deepest explanation, and it’s not Indian—it’s universal. It’s baked into how human memory works.
You cannot feel gratitude for something that didn’t happen.
The 1991 reforms prevented:
- Soviet-style economic collapse (remember what happened to Russia in the 1990s?)
- Possible mass famine (India was weeks from being unable to import food).
- Political fragmentation of a nuclear-armed state (India could have Balkanized).
- A generation of deeper poverty (another decade of 3.5% growth would have been catastrophic).
- The humiliation of permanent dependency on foreign aid.
- The brain drain accelerating until no one capable was left.
But because these didn’t happen, they’re not real to anyone. You can’t photograph the famine that didn’t occur. You can’t interview the refugees from the civil war that wasn’t fought. You can’t quantify the poverty that wasn’t endured.
The plane that didn’t crash. You don’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster. You can’t point to a specific moment and say “there—that’s what they saved us from.” The counterfactual doesn’t have photographs. It doesn’t have victims whose stories can be told. It doesn’t have monuments or memorial days. It’s just... absence. An empty space where catastrophe would have been.
This isn’t an Indian problem. Americans don’t celebrate whoever prevented the 2008 financial crisis from becoming Great Depression II—assuming anyone did, assuming it wasn’t just luck. They barely remember Paul Volcker taming inflation in the 1980s—an achievement that made possible two decades of American prosperity. They’ve already forgotten the pandemic response that prevented millions more deaths. This is how human memory works. We remember disasters. We forget the people who prevented them.
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Here’s an irony: the reforms succeeded so completely that they became consensus.
Every government since 1991 has continued them:
- BJP under Vajpayee: accelerated privatization
- Congress under Singh: continued liberalization
- BJP under Modi: GST, Make in India, further opening
When policy becomes consensus, it stops being anyone’s achievement. It’s just... what we do now. The way things are.
Nobody campaigns on “I will continue the reforms of 1991.” They campaign on what comes next. The foundation becomes invisible because everyone builds on it.
Success erased the memory of who created it.
Indian mythology celebrates:
- Suffering: Ram’s fourteen-year exile, the Pandavas’ humiliation
- Dramatic confrontation: Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield
What does this template not include? Competent technocrats who quietly solved problems and went home.
Singh didn’t suffer publicly. Rao didn’t sacrifice visibly. Ahluwalia just... did his job well. They made it look easy. They didn’t create drama. They prevented drama—which is the opposite of what heroes do in Indian narratives.
They don’t fit the heroic template. In India, that’s not a hero. That’s a bureaucrat.
There’s a deeper cultural explanation, and it connects everything.
The successful prevention of catastrophe is the most thankless achievement in human history.
Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia prevented a disaster. They did it so well that the disaster became unimaginable. And the unimaginable cannot be remembered.
That’s why India forgot them.
And if you are thinking this is history - think again.
Its only because of steadfast minority refuses to live under totalitarianism that we don't live under totalitarianism. (via)
Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.
What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.
Another word I hate most is "Legacy". I know so many morons who talk about their legacy. These morons are people I know personally.
What freaking legacy? Just do the right thing. And if you do the right thing, there is high probability very few people will remember you and thank you. That is just a second order effect.
Our life is to do the right thing and stand up for truth. That should be a basic and decent categorical imperative.
I have been writing about this for decades now... it started with talk radio and cable news. I observed friends, neighbors, and co-workers perpetually angry albeit most of them were better off than I was at that time.
It was very weird to me since growing up in India, I lived around some of the poorest people on the planet but yet they weren't angry. They were content and most importantly were normal in perpetual penury.
Around the same time, I started listening to talk radio and cable news, it was addictive to say the least. A simple pattern started emerging. They were angry all the goddamn time.
How can someone live their life watching hours of spewing anger inside their living room. It was clearly unhealthy. I threw my TV away and the rest is history.
The moron that I was, I started telling people that this stuff is not healthy and makes them sick. Of course, they didn't change but the right wing thought I was leftist looney and left wing that I was rightish madman.
This was dangerous territory to embark on since what's lost to creative destruction never comes back. Plus add to this syndrome, the apt titles of some of Tyler Cowen books - average is over, stubborn attachments, and complacent class. Plus add to this a heavy dose of self delusion as if they are one step away from being millionaires or billionaires - a perpetual unattainable desire driven life.
To make things even weirder, even people who attain an unattainable lifestyle are also angry! Go figure!
The younger generation with underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex blissfully unaware of any of these; are sucked into their cell phones and waiting one day to join the perpetual angry force.
One side offers a solution which is the exact reason a spark became a wild fire and the other side wants to be angry perpetually :-)
It's a fucked up situation never seen in history and we are living now make an unique history.
I have no idea where this is going to lead.. I have no goddamn idea.
Ironically, there is so much more to learn, discover - knowledge we know now is minuscule and there is infinite knowledge out there for us to embrace with awe, wonder, and grow as living beings.
We can create so many jobs, we already have enough shelter, food, water - all that is needed is masses to embrace this thirst for knowledge and drive.
But alas not many are addicted to perpetual need for awe and wonder.
Paul Katsafanas's essay is the most important piece you will read this year and understanding this disease is crucial for humanity to survive this century.
So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition. When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?
Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention. Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation. Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation.
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Sometimes, movements face a vast set of obstacles and opponents. Take the protests against the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ’70s. This movement had a clear goal: ending US involvement in Vietnam. It lasted for more than a decade and unfolded across multiple fronts, which ranged from marches to acts of civil disobedience to teach-ins to draft resistance. Participants faced real costs: jail time, government surveillance, public backlash, even violence. The targets of opposition shifted over time – from the Lyndon B Johnson administration, to Richard Nixon, to Gerald Ford. The tactics evolved: from letter-writing campaigns to draft-card burnings, mass marches, lobbying from wounded veterans, and testimony from grieving families. Nonetheless, this was a movement that aimed at a concrete goal. Opposition was necessary, but it was a means to an end. The focus remained on the goal, rather than on sustaining conflict for its own sake.
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As Martha Nussbaum has argued, anger can play an essential role in democratic life by expressing moral concern and galvanising collective action. Iris Marion Young has made similar points, showing how opposition can affirm shared values. And in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr claimed that ‘the supreme task is to organise and unite people so that their anger becomes a transforming force.’ But there’s a difference between opposition that aims to realise a shared good, and opposition that is pursued for its own sake. Some movements use opposition as a means to build something they value. Others make opposition itself the point. That’s the distinction I want to highlight: between what I call contingently negative and constitutively negative orientations. Contingently negative movements treat opposition as a means to a positive end, a way of building something better. Constitutively negative movements are different: what’s essential is the continuous expression of hostility, rather than the attainment of any particular goal.
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But why would anyone be drawn to a constitutively negative orientation? Why are these orientations so gripping? The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards. Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility, offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.
To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms. Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed. They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.
Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have. If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure. In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks. Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want.
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With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly. In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals. We have definite ideas about what the world should be like. We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices. From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them.
But grievance politics operates differently. It begins not with ideals, but with unease, with feelings of powerlessness, failure, humiliation or inadequacy. Political and ethical rhetoric is offered that transforms these self-directed negative emotions into hostility, rage and blame. Negative emotions that would otherwise remain internal find a new outlet, latching on to ever-new enemies and grievances. The vision that redirects these emotions will cite particular values and goals, but the content of those values and goals doesn’t matter all that much. What’s most important is that the values and goals justify the hostility. If the world changes, the values and ideals can shift. But the emotional need remains constant: to find someone or something to oppose.
That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire. People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want? Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?
Devotion is capable of bringing deep, serene fulfilment without requiring an enemy
But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears. The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies. Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation – as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond. It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause. If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain. It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage. The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.
The revelation comes from groundbreaking research published in the journal Nature Food, which analysed 186 countries to determine how well each could theoretically feed its population from domestic production alone.
The study’s results were stark: Guyana alone achieved self-sufficiency across all seven essential food groups – fruit; vegetables; dairy; fish; meat; legumes, nuts and seeds; and starchy staples.
Walk through any market in Georgetown, the nation’s capital, and the picture is clear: stalls stacked with local rice, root vegetables like cassava, fresh fish, fruit and other produce, much of it sourced from within Guyana’s borders.
Guyana hasn’t closed itself off from the world; it still trades like any modern nation. What sets it apart is that the country uniquely possesses the capacity to meet all its citizens’ nutritional needs from its own soil and waters.
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And what makes this accomplishment even more remarkable is Guyana’s approach to conservation. It has achieved food self-sufficiency not by destroying its natural heritage but by maximising its limited agricultural land. Whereas deforestation ravages much of South America as countries clear land for farming and cattle ranching, Guyana has preserved more than 85 per cent of its original forest.
“The climate in the coastal region of Guyana makes it highly suitable for crop production,” explains Nicola Cannon, professor of agriculture at the Royal Agricultural University in Gloucestershire, UK.
The numbers bear this out: the country sits between one to nine degrees north of the equator, blessed with year-round warmth, plentiful rainfall, high humidity, and, crucially, fertile clay soils deposited by the Amazon River system over millennia.
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While much of the world’s farmland is dominated by monoculture – single crops grown in vast, uniform fields – Guyanese farmers take a markedly different approach to cultivation. They intercrop – growing two or more crops together in the same field, with each occupying its own niche and drawing on resources at different times.
It’s a practice that most industrial agriculture abandoned centuries ago, but in Guyana it remains central to farming success. Coconut farmers plant pineapples or tomatoes between young trees as they mature. Corn and soya beans use the same soil: the beans ‘fix’ nitrogen naturally, while the corn draws on nutrients at a different point in the season.
When done right, the benefits can be substantial. Intercropping requires careful planning – pairing crops that naturally complement each other rather than compete – but when farmers get the balance correct, it can improve soil structure, enhance fertility, and help control pests without major chemical intervention. It also spreads risk across the growing season: if one crop struggles due to weather, pests, or market fluctuations, another can still thrive.
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Guyana seems to have avoided this trap through sophisticated practices now known as ‘regenerative agriculture’. Livestock is integrated into cropping systems, while erosion is kept at bay by ensuring living roots remain in the ground year-round. These methods actively rebuild soil health as well as prevent degradation.
“Living roots not only physically hold the soil together, they also secrete [carbohydrates] which encourage microorganisms,” explains Cannon. “This helps keep soils alive and aids residue decomposition.”
The result is a virtuous cycle where healthy soils support diverse crops, which in turn feed the soil biology that maintains fertility. It’s a system that could, theoretically, sustain itself indefinitely.
When it comes to terrorism, governments seem to suffer from a collective amnesia. All of our historical experience tells us that there can be no purely military solution to a political problem, and yet every time we confront a new terrorist group, we begin by insisting we will never talk to them. As Dick Cheney put it, “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it”. In fact, history suggests we don’t usually defeat them and we nearly always end up talking to them. Hugh Gaitskell, the former Labour leader, captured it best when he said: “All terrorists, at the invitation of the government, end up with drinks in the Dorchester.”
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And lastly, it is claimed that Sri Lanka shows a military solution can work. But Sri Lanka doesn’t demonstrate anything of the sort. President Rajapaksa managed to defeat the Tamil Tigers only because its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran – who had been considered a military genius for most of his life – turned out to be a military fool, in the words of one of the Norwegian negotiators who worked on the peace process. If he had stuck to a guerrilla campaign rather than trying to beat the Sri Lankan army in a conventional war, he would probably still be in the jungle fighting now. And the measures used by the Sri Lankan army to wipe out the Tigers are not methods that could be used by any western government that respects human rights and the rule of law. Finally, although the war is over and there is, thank goodness, no sign of the resurgence of a terrorist campaign, the political problem of Tamil rights still remains unresolved, and trouble will continue until it is.
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The one thing I have learned, above all else, from the last 17 years is that there is no such thing as an insoluble conflict with an armed group – however bloody, difficult or ancient. Even the Middle East peace process, which has stuttered on for decades, will in the end result in a lasting agreement. The fact that it has failed so many times before does not mean that it will always fail, and an eventual settlement will be built on the past failures and the lessons learned from these failures, as was the peace in Northern Ireland.
It is remarkable how quickly a conflict can shift from being regarded as “insoluble” to one whose solution was “inevitable” as soon as an agreement is signed. Beforehand, and even up to a very late stage in the process, conventional wisdom states that the conflict can never be resolved; but before the ink is dry on the agreement, people are ready to conclude that it was inevitable. They put it down to outside events like the end of the cold war, to the effect of 9/11 or to changing economic circumstances. But this conventional wisdom is wrong.
Just as no conflict is insoluble, nor is it inevitable that it will be resolved at any particular moment in history. Believing that a solution is inevitable is nearly as dangerous as believing a conflict cannot be solved. If people sit around waiting for a conflict to be “ripe” for talks to start, or for the forces of history to solve it for them, then it will never be resolved. If the negotiations are handled badly, they will fail, which is why it is worth trying to learn from the experience of others. Dealing effectively with a terrorist threat requires political leadership, patience and a refusal to take no for an answer. What we need are more political leaders who are capable of remembering what happened last time – and prepared to take the necessary risks.
This multiplicity of meanings would have likely vexed Frank Knight, whose 1921 book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit argued that risk that differed from uncertainty or hazard on account of being calculable. ‘The essential fact is that “risk” means in some cases a quantity susceptible of measurement’, he wrote, drawing on the example of a champagne producer who knows that a certain percentage of bottles will break during production. Because the risk of breakage is predictable and quantifiable, its associated costs can be passed along to the consumer alongside other expenses, like labor (Knight Citation1921, 19–20). Uncertainty, on the other hand, involved that about which ‘the conception of an objectively measurable probability or chance is simply inapplicable’ (231). This was a distinction that John Maynard Keynes echoed both his Treatise on Probability (1921) and his comments on The General Theory: ‘About these matters [e.g. the price of copper in twenty years time] there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatsoever. We simply do not know’ (Keynes Citation1937, 214).
A century later, it is evident that Knight’s narrow definition of risk has been largely overtaken by a more expansive, and ambiguous, alternative. On the one hand, advances in risk modeling such as the Monte Carlo method – and the securities and derivatives it helped popularize – have enabled financial services firms to commodify and price risk in novel ways. Yet, as the contribution by Andrea Saltelli underscores, there are good reasons to look critically at the increasingly complex and often opaque mathematical models used in estimations of risk. Infamous in this regard is the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Viniar, who claimed in 2007 that the bank had experienced ‘25 standard deviation events, several days in a row’. As John Kay and Mervyn King have argued in Radical Uncertainty (Citation2020), tools developed to understand risk cannot fully tame uncertainty. It is not just that models might not correspond with the underlying reality they purport to describe, but that the mere existence of a model projects an unwarranted sense of security.
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As this brief survey suggests, thinking about risk, uncertainty, and democracy in the twenty-first century is a practice that cuts across disciplines, subject matter, and time periods. Trying to craft a comprehensive volume would be a fool’s errand, and the contributions included here only begin to scratch the surface. In lieu of comprehension, we have aimed to model a different way of thinking and speaking about risk – one that moves away from technocratic approaches to center the workings of power, and that can be applied to a broad range of analyses. We trust readers will find something worthwhile in our efforts.
India is a good example because it has states with human populations as big as some countries, and many of these have transitioned away from small-scale, extensive chicken production. While about 35% of chickens in India are still raised in small backyard flocks, most are now kept in indoor commercial systems. Large-scale free-range broiler farms and cage-free egg farms are very rare.
For their analysis, the authors looked at factors linked to intensive chicken farming, including the state’s wealth, human population density, level of urbanization, and local feed production like maize and soy. To spot the outliers, they checked for states whose actual intensification levels were far below predictions. Then they explored whether state policies could help explain this discrepancy.
The authors found that several states in Northeast India, especially Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Sikkim, have much lower levels of chicken intensification than expected, given their income levels. For example, Sikkim has the second-highest income per person in India but less than 1% of its chickens are raised on commercial farms. In these states, chicken production remains reliant on smallholders, unlike most of India where commercial farming dominates.
One possible reason for these outliers is geography, as the mountainous, forested terrain of the Northeast makes large-scale farming difficult. Another reason could be the region’s lower human population densities, meaning that the market might not be large enough to encourage commercialization.
However, in the authors’ view, the most compelling reason is strong policy choices. Sikkim became the world’s first 100% organic state, banning hormones, growth regulators, feed additives, and antibiotics. Similar organic farming regulations exist in Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and Meghalaya, with support from an organic agriculture program launched by the national government. These states also promote self-sufficiency in egg and chicken meat production through organic farming, and Sikkim has even invested in high-yield indigenous chicken breeds to improve productivity while keeping backyard systems.
The role of these organic policies is highlighted when considering Uttarakhand, a state with similar geography and population density to the Northeastern states but with high levels of chicken intensification. This suggests that the difference is less about physical conditions and more about policies shaping farming practices.
Then there is a toxic cocktail cults of ideology, culture, religion, politics, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, free-market, communism, human centrism, binary thinking lens et al., This cocktail cult is not called cult since billions of sapiens fall into this bucket. Somehow, this has been rebranded as something else - tribes.
Then there are very very few people who are open minded to see these two cults and they make the wheels of civilization, kindness, decency, progress over time. These human had an ability to change their minds with time and grow as a living being.
Thanks to those unknown humans for what they did so that I am able to live a very comfortable life.
I hope I am doing a little of the same for the future when I am gone.
What Ryan and Kelly do is unusual: they help people leave cults. Over the past 40 years, they have handled hundreds of cases – some simple and local, others stretching across borders and decades. They have been hired by families of both modest and considerable means. They say they have even been hired by government agencies, and that some cults they have investigated have left them genuinely afraid for their lives.
Although many people are involved in cultic studies and education, fewer than 10 people in the US do anything like what Ryan and Kelly do. And among those, only Kelly and Ryan practice their strange and unique method: embedding themselves in families’ lives, pulling on threads like marionettists, sometimes for years.
Their method goes something like this. A family reaches out about their daughter, husband, nephew or grandchild. Ryan and Kelly conduct an assessment that can take anywhere from a day to a week (they would not say exactly). They charge $2,500 for the assessment, then $250 an hour after that, interviewing the family until they understand the dynamics well enough to devise a strategy. Then, over months or sometimes years, they work to create the conditions in which a person might begin to question the beliefs their life has been built on.
Normally, Kelly and Ryan work by strengthening the existing relationships in a person’s life. It can be a long game. They will educate the family about the cultic group, and give advice about what to say (or not to say). They will bring in experts: psychiatrists, lawyers, priests that can provide perspective and counsel. The goal is to untangle the family dynamics that might have made someone vulnerable to a cult in the first place.
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One of their cases in the 90s involved a cult leader who was systematically sexually assaulting the group’s members. “I can’t get into all the details,” Ryan said. “He was horrible, a horrible man.” Ryan and Kelly had been flying regularly to Australia to work on the case. The client’s niece, a girl in the group, was beginning to fall out with the cult. The leader had been arrested and was on trial for crimes related to the cult’s activities.
In their process, Ryan and Kelly require what they call 50 things: “You have to find 50 things that you could agree with the person on.” Ryan gestured to a painting on the wall in their living room. It was a strange, surrealist-looking canvas with a big Tesla coil in the center and lightning shooting out at some pigeons. Ryan said, “If you look at this piece of art and say, ‘That’s really ugly,’ then we’re going to start off … not on the right page, right?”
But if I could appreciate what he found appealing, then, he said: “I think you have the right to criticize it.” The number may seem arbitrary, but their goal is to find 50 things a family can appreciate about a cult before discussing what they do not agree with.
I put this number to Lalich and she said the notion of having to find 50 things seemed a bit extreme. “ I certainly could never find 50 things about my cult that I thought were good.” The spirit of it seemed right to her though, at least: that the family needs to tone down their rhetoric, or they will just push the cult-involved member away.
In a letter to investors earlier this year, he even approvingly quoted Samuel Huntington of “clash of civilisations” fame, highlighting his claim that the rise of the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence”.
And what does Palantir actually do? (hint: nada on innovation nor any ground breaking AI)
What does Palantir actually do?
It’s a question that comes up time and time again in social media.
It’s also surprisingly easy to address, despite the company’s occult reputation: Palantir collates disparate sources of data and makes them easy to search. It is Google for chaotic organisations, whose software connects various databases and computer systems into a single unified platform.
If the company’s services could be applied to your life, it would look like a team of specialists who arrive at your house and rifle through your desk, updating your to-do lists, contacts and calendars; syncing and sorting the files you have scattered across a half-dozen old phones and and hard drives, and generally Making Things Organised. Wouldn’t you pay good money for such a service? Of course you would.
Now, imagine you’re a country and this pandemonium is not personal but institutionalised – encompassing not just a few email inboxes and old USBs, but, say, an entire healthcare system, including payroll, procurement, and insurance, or a medium-sized war. Wouldn’t you then pay a lot of money? Wouldn’t you in fact pay millions and millions and be extremely thankful to whoever sorted this mess on your behalf? Thus: Palantir’s rise.
And it’s a very interesting concept, because we are used to this other concept, which is simple denial. You know, denial of climate change, denial of this or that.
But disavowal functions in a much more perverse way. Namely, by first fully acknowledging some fact—“I know very well that this is how things are”—but then going on as if this knowledge didn’t really matter or register. So in practice, you just go on as before. And I think this is even more prevalent in our response to different social predicaments than simple denial.
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They are doing perhaps more damage. Or, what is even more important, they are entrapped in this kind of pas de deux with the direct deniers, because they present themselves as much more rational. They say, “Look at these stupid people. They just don’t believe in climate change. But we are enlightened. We know all about it.” But in the long run, nothing really happens. The practices remain just the same. You organize a couple of climate conferences, but growth still remains the principle of social functioning, and so on. So I think, not only is it more dangerous because it is more prevalent—I mean, there are many more people who are into this kind of disavowal functioning—but it’s also dangerous because there is this dance between the two.
Ross Dougthat hits the nail on the systemic plague that has engulfed US caused by political ideology. I have observed this very closely for almost three decades and it is true. I do feel sad when a young country full of promise and potential taking the path to ruin.
One of the notable dynamics of American life today is that conservatives report being personally happier than liberals but also seem more politically discontented. The political left has become more institutionalist, more invested in experts and establishments, even as progressive culture seems more shadowed by unhappiness and even mental illness. Meanwhile conservatives claim greater contentment in their private lives — and then go out and vote for paranoid outsiders and burn-it-down populists.
These dynamics aren’t entirely new: As Musa al-Gharbi writes in an essay for American Affairs, the happiness gap between liberals and conservatives is a persistent social-science finding, visible across several eras and many countries. Meanwhile, the view that “my life is pretty good, but the country is going to hell,” which seems to motivate a certain kind of middle-class Donald Trump supporter, would have been unsurprising to hear in a bar or at a barbecue in 1975 or 1990, no less than today.
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For liberals the problem is somewhat different. An organizing premise of progressivism for generations has been that the toxic side of conservative values is responsible for much of what ails American society — a cruel nationalism throttling a healthy patriotism, a fundamentalist bigotry overshadowing the enlightened forms of religion, patriarchy and misogyny poisoning the nuclear family.
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Then consider, too, that the entire organizing premise of post-1960s American conservatism was that the country as whole shared its values — hence the rhetoric of the “silent majority” and the “moral majority” — and that the problem was just an elite class of liberals, irreligious and unpatriotic but also out of touch with the breadth and depth of American society. Remove the weight of ineffective bureaucracy, end the rule of liberal judges, and watch the country flourish: That was the effective message of Republican politicians and quite a few conservative intellectuals for a very long time.
Fewer and fewer conservatives seriously believe that it’s this simple anymore. But where does conservative politics go without a traditional cultural foundation to conserve? To subcultural retreat, maybe — but if you don’t think the walls will hold, if you want a politics of restoration, it will be inescapably radical in a way that the conservatism of thirty years ago was not. And since nobody — not the policy wonks trying to grope their way to some new form of right-wing political economy, not the online influencers selling traditionalism as a lifestyle brand — really knows how to do a restoration, how to roll back alienation and disaffiliation and atomization, it isn’t surprising that conservative politics would often be a car-wreck, a flinging of ripe fruit against a wall, no matter how happy individual conservatives claim to be.
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Thus in many ways the transformations of the last few decades are ones that liberals sought: The America of today is more socially-liberal on almost every issue than the America of George W. Bush, more secular, less heteronormative, more diverse in terms of both race and personal identity, more influenced by radical ideas that once belonged to the fringe of academia.
Unfortunately in finding its heart’s desire the left also seems to have found a certain kind of despair. It turns out that there isn’t some obvious ground for purpose and solidarity and ultimate meaning once you’ve deconstructed all the sources you consider tainted. And it’s at the vanguard of that deconstruction, among the very-liberal young, that you find the greatest unhappiness — the very success of the progressive project devouring contentment.
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Thus our peculiar situation: a once-radical left presiding somewhat miserably over the new order that it long desired to usher in, while a once-conservative right, convinced that it still has the secret of happiness, looks to disruption and chaos as its only ladder back from exile.
There is something fundamentally wrong happening here.
I will write later on some causal reasons I think are behind these trends.
When discussing the US election, he invokes his “four Ps” of how a rising power impacts on a ruling power in Thucydides’s Trap. He says all four dimensions are present in today’s US. There are shifts in power (“I used to be able to demand something or push a button, but it doesn’t happen any more”), perception (“I used to look down at you because you were smaller than I was and now I’m looking up or eye-to-eye”), psychology (“I’m accustomed to me being number one and not you, you’re threatening my identity”) and politics (“never let a serious [political] opponent get to your right on an issue of national security”). Allison observes that the Republican presidential platform next year may well advocate formal recognition of Taiwan, as one of the prospective candidates – former secretary of state Mike Pompeo – already does. “American politics is driving towards something that could become a provocation that China could not avoid,” Allison says. On Taiwan’s election, he notes that President Tsai Ing-wen cannot run again and that Lai Ching-te, the candidate of her Democratic Progressive Party, “privately is very keen on becoming an independent country [and he] is not as circumspect as Tsai”.
A particularly striking applied historical example of Thucydides’s Trap is the build-up to the First World War, in which the rise of Germany after unification in 1871 destabilised Europe’s order to the point where it produced catastrophic conflict in 1914. On this parallel I have two questions for Allison.
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The second question concerns blocs: Europe’s pre-1914 alliance system helped to propel the continent to war in 1914. We are speaking in mid-March, shortly after a major US-UK-Australia (Aukus) summit in San Diego and shortly before a summit between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Is the world entering a new era of big-bloc politics? Here, Allison sees fewer resemblances to conditions before the First World War. The future, he says, will be more multipolar than either unipolar or bipolar. “It’s going to be a much messier world, with many, many actors not determined by any [superpower]’s commands.”
Again he cites Saudi Arabia – a supposed American ally that is increasingly following its own course. According to US intelligence, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the assassination in 2018 of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post journalist. But as Allison puts it, the Saudi response to US censure over the killing amounted to: “Screw you. You’re trying to ostracise me, you need me as much as I need you.” Allison sees the Saudi-Iran rapprochement as part of this message to the US: “You will have a lot of independent players not asking for permission, not apologising, just pursuing their interests. I think that will be the game.”
This messier world will be a more dangerous one. I recall Allison’s lectures at Harvard on the Cuban missile crisis and ask him whether those lessons have been retained in major capitals. “About half and half,” he replies. On the one hand, he argues, Vladimir Putin understands well that nuclear war with Nato would mean the end of everything. But on the other, the chances of catastrophic misunderstandings or miscalculations are rising. “In the case of China, as far as I can see, [bilateral communication] is all shut down after the antics over the balloon. If you believe what we learned in the Cold War – which I think is absolutely right – that communication at many levels, some of them private, to reduce risk is important, [then] the absence of these is dangerous.”
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The conversation leaves me with the impression of a world careening towards yet greater chaos and conflict, blind to the wider forces of history. “I think too often, we imagine that we’re writing on a blank slate, that we can just decide what we want to do,” says Allison. How much should we feel beholden to historical patterns such as Thucydides’s Trap? He replies that structural realities determine about 80 per cent of events. Many things really are externally determined. “I might like to run a marathon in Boston,” the 83-year-old professor says. “But in this life it ain’t gonna happen, given my age.” But, I note, that leaves 20 per cent of events that can be shaped. “Exactly,” comes the reply. “There are two mistakes here. One is to be arrogant: ‘I’m actually writing on a blank slate.’ The other one is to become fatalistic.” I quote a line by Otto von Bismarck, the unifier and first chancellor of the German empire: “The statesman’s task is to hear God’s footsteps marching through history, and to try and catch on to his coat-tails as he marches past.” Allison responds to it immediately: “That’s a great reminder of how, if you fail to take hold of the coat-tails, you’re not going to get where you are going.”
Then Graham Allison switches metaphors. “Think about a river that you are rowing in. You can try to row upstream, but only with a lot more exertion. Or you can declare to the river that it should stop, but that’s not going to do much good. Or maybe you can dam the river, or dam part of it, or maybe you can cut a little tributary.” In other words: though we must be humble before the forces of history, we must recognise where we still have agency. “If the river is big enough and flowing hard enough, there’s going to be water going somewhere. But it’s not necessarily determined that it stays in exactly the channel that it’s in.” Thucydides would doubtless approve.
