The only known photograph of Chief Seattle

New Social Contract

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Sacredness of Creation

To traditional peoples, nature is sacred. In 1854, the Native American Chief Seattle gave a speech when the US government planned to purchase his tribe’s land. The first written transcript, dating from 1887, is based on an eyewitness’s notes. A screenwriter later rewrote it, turning Chief Seattle into an environmentalist ideal of tribespeople. This revised version became a religious creed within the environmentalist movement, which sought a new spiritual foundation for our culture. The creed strikes at the heart of the matter. Nothing is sacred anymore. The pursuit of money destroys our values and the planet. We may think we own the land, but we do not. We may think we control our destiny, but we do not. Whatever befalls Earth befalls the children of the Earth. Thus spoke Chief Seattle,

The Great Chief in Washington sends word he wishes to buy our land. The Great Chief also sends us words of friendship and goodwill. This is kind of him, since we know he has little need of our friendship in return. But we will consider your offer. For we know that if we do not sell, the white man may come with guns and take our land. What Chief Seattle says, the Great Chief in Washington can count on as truly as our white brothers can count on the return of the seasons. My words are like the stars. They do not set.

How can you buy or sell the sky – the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Yet we do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us? We will decide in our time. Every part of this Earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing, and every humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s graves, and his children’s birthright is forgotten. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the redman. But perhaps it is because the redman is a savage and does not understand.

There is no quiet place in the white man’s cities. No place to listen to the leaves of spring or the rustle of insect wings. But perhaps because I am a savage and do not understand – the clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lovely cry of the whippoorwill or the frogs’ arguments around a pond at night? The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind itself cleansed by a mid-day rain, or scented by a pinõn pine: The air is precious to the redman. For all things share the same breath – the beasts, the trees, and the man. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days, he is numb to the stench.

If I decide to accept, I will make one condition. The white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. I am a savage, and I do not understand any other way. I have seen thousands of rotting buffaloes on the prairie left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive. What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, men would die from great loneliness of spirit, for whatever happens to the beast also happens to the man.

All things are connected. Whatever befalls the Earth befalls the sons of the Earth.

Our children have seen their fathers humbled in defeat. Our warriors have felt shame. And after defeat they turn their days in idleness and contaminate their bodies with sweet food and strong drink. It matters little where we pass the rest of our days – they are not many. A few more hours, a few more winters, and none of the children of the great tribes that once lived on this Earth, or that roamed in small bands in the woods, will remain to mourn the graves of the people once as powerful and hopeful as yours.

One thing we know that the white man may one day discover. Our God is the same. You may think that you own him as you wish to own our land, but you cannot. He is the Body of man, and his compassion is equal for the redman and the white. This Earth is precious to him, and harming it heaps contempt on its Creator. The whites, too, shall pass – perhaps sooner than other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste. When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses all tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men, and the view of the ripe hills blotted by the talking wires, where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone. And what is it to say goodbye to the swift and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

We might understand if we knew what it was the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights, what visions he burns into their minds, so they will wish for tomorrow. But we are savages. The white man’s dreams are hidden from us. And because they are hidden, we will go our own way. If we agree, it will be to secure the reservation you have promised.

There perhaps we may live out our brief days as we wish. When the last redman has vanished from the Earth, and the memory is only the shadow of a cloud passing over the prairie, these shores and forests will still hold the spirits of my people, for they love this Earth as the newborn loves its mother’s heartbeat. If we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it as we have cared for it. Hold in your memory the way the land is as you take it. And with all your strength, with all your might, and with all your heart – preserve it for your children, and love it as God loves us all. One thing we know – our God is the same. This Earth is precious to him. Even the white man cannot escape the common destiny.

As the Sun sets on the white man’s civilisation, and artificial intelligence will soon generate more money from the same amount of energy than humans do, his replacement is ready to take over. We handed over our fate to a handful of private monopolies and let tech corporations write the rules because corporate-funded think tanks have invested billions in convincing us that corporations advance progress more efficiently than public institutions. And they did, so humans have now become too dumb and inefficient. They stand in the way of the accelerating advance towards infinite intelligence.

Religious longing for Eden

Perhaps you care for this planet, but what do you mean by that? When the last white rhino is dead, the Earth will still be there, and we might be able to reverse-engineer the animal using DNA samples. We may survive the demise of the rainforests and build virtual realities where we can experience them. Humans have finished off countless species for thousands of years. Chief Seattle’s forebears did their bit by offing much of the large wildlife of the Americas. They only lacked the technology and the numbers to ravage the continent more thoroughly. So much for the romantic ideal of the tribespeople. Competition purges the unfit. So, why stop now? The wildlife is getting fitter as we go. Soon, there may be a few thousand animal species left. Crows, cats, rats and seagulls, and of course, cockroaches and germs, will thrive. Nature doesn’t care. If we stop mistreating animals, predators will still kill prey. And natural disasters will terminate the lives of those lovely koala bears. What did they do wrong? It must be being cute.

So, why should we care? In an opinion piece titled ‘Why I Am Against Saving the Planet’, Mr Lind, a professor at the University of Texas, noted that saving the planet has become the religion of politicians, business elites, and intellectuals in the West, replacing Christianity’s earlier mission of saving individual souls.1 He is against saving the planet. He added that environmentalism is rooted in 19th-century German Romanticism, with a bias against organised society and civilisation, and an awe before an idealised Nature. In other words, environmentalists suffer from a religious desire for Eden. Mr Lind is indeed very pleased with our advanced civilisation, Babylon. He prefers an air-conditioned apartment and going to the supermarket over living in a shed and digging in the dirt to extract some measly carrots if the rabbits hadn’t eaten them first. And who can blame him?

In doing so, Mr Lind tapped into another 19th-century German philosophical tradition, that of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche hoped to leave traditional morality behind. Religions like Christianity, Nietzsche claimed, were ruses to enslave us with a false sense of right and wrong under rules imposed by a priestly caste. And so do environmentalists, Lind implied, who lecture us about our excessive consumption. Nietzsche favoured the values of the strong over those of the weak, embodied in Christianity and socialism. Slaves think in terms of good and evil rather than better and worse because they resent the ruling class. Nietzsche hoped to liberate us from our self-induced slavery and realise our full potential, so he said, ‘God is dead.’ And if there is a climate disaster, the weak perish, and the strong survive, thereby improving the human race. No wonder that the Nazis loved Nietzsche, as they were obsessed with getting the race fitter, like all those people exercising in the gym.

Mr Lind further argued that we should do away with false sentiments, saying, ‘There are costs to mitigating climate change as well as benefits, and rational people can prefer a richer but warmer world to a poorer but slightly less warm one. These individual policies benefit humanity, so there is no need to justify them on the basis of a romantic creed that defines the planet or the environment.’ He says rational people might prefer money to a cooler climate. If it is too hot in France, you can go to the beach in Denmark. A few million people may die due to heat stroke or extreme weather, or perhaps more, but we will be wealthier, so why care? We never cared. Cars kill one million people per year. That doesn’t stop us from driving them. Well, Mr Lind, your replacement is going to need the electricity you used to employ for your AC. And it is getting hotter in Texas. So, what is it going to be? God or Nietzsche? Eden or Babylon? Mr Lind will soon be dead. And Nietzsche already is.

Philosophy of connectedness

As our production and consumption increase, new problems emerge faster than we can solve existing ones with laws, technology, targets and other solutions. New technology, rules and controls don’t solve these problems. On the contrary, the problems only proliferate. Mountains of problems we generate, and their fixes generate even more problems. Meanwhile, millions of poor people try to escape their misery and look for a better future in wealthy countries. Is there a relation between these issues, and what is it? In the 1990s, the environmentalist group Strohalm wrote a booklet named Towards a Philosophy of Connectedness.2 It gives a vision for a sustainable and humane society centred around solidarity. The principal founder of Strohalm is Henk van Arkel, a dedicated individual who remained its driving force for decades. He doesn’t blame anyone in particular for the predicament we are in. We are all part of the problem. It is fair to say that he is my greatest teacher.

Everything is interconnected. Our actions have consequences. We may not know or ignore them, but they are there. Wall Street traders who sold bad mortgages helped to cause the financial crisis. Dumping plastic in a river, buying clothes made by children, or posting hateful comments on a message board has consequences. Western thinking, reflected in the scientific method, deconstructs reality to analyse the parts. In this way, the whole can go out of sight, leading us to act irresponsibly. A single hateful comment doesn’t make someone take a semi-automatic rifle and shoot innocent people, nor would driving a single car change the climate. Still, hatred makes people murder, and cars kill more people than wars. If we accept these things, we remain locked inside a cynical and uncaring world. It is our neglect. Good intentions may worsen things, but we can learn and do better next time. The alternative is turning evil. And that ends badly.

We can’t look the other way if we aspire to live in Paradise. We have to do the best we can to prevent harm. If the relationship between our actions and the harm is remote, we feel free to do as we please. And that is the road to hell. And so, we have the choice of being free in hell or becoming a slave in Paradise. It is not slavery, as we understand it, the exploitation of one group of people by another, but slavery in Nietzsche’s sense, which is living under a self-imposed moral system that limits our options. And money shouldn’t be our highest value, which it is in the liberal-capitalist world. God owns this world, so it is not ours to destroy. The sacredness of Creation is a religious idea. We need a new starting point and foundation for our culture, beliefs, thinking, and our place in the universe because we must change how we live.2 And we can do that when we place something else above ourselves. Fortunately, there is a Creator.

Social order

We imagine that we have rights and obligations, and that we belong to social classes within a social order. Rights, obligations, and classes are human fantasies. There have been a variety of rights, obligations, and social classes throughout history. A social order needs a justification to convince us to accept its rules, leaders, and the division of work and benefits. The justification comes from a myth, usually a religion, an ideology, or a tale of national greatness. The Code of Hammurabi, dating to 1750 BC, declares that the social order of Babylon is founded on universal and eternal principles of justice dictated by the gods. It divides people into three classes: nobility, ordinary people and slaves. The code sets out various laws and punishments for transgressions. And 3,500 years later, the American Declaration of Independence claims that the Creator has endowed men with unalienable rights, such as the pursuit of happiness, and of course, life, and then you die. Someone failed to inform death about our rights.

Social orders thus are collective imaginations. They don’t exist in reality as such, but we imagine them together. When we can agree on a social order, whether it is a class division or the notion that everyone is fundamentally equal, it can be stable. Social orders bring peace and stability, and that is why we have them. If we agree on a social order, we can cooperate, as the order settles disputes over what must be done, who does what, who gets what, and who leads. Without a social order, we fight over these issues and fail to cooperate. In modern political philosophy, there is the ideal of a free society based on a social contract, which supposedly is a voluntary agreement between citizens and their government. The social orders we have today emerged from a competition. It is crucial to realise that as circumstances change. What worked in the past may not work in the future.

In 2023, a passionate Dutch politician from Enschede, Mr Omtzigt, founded a new political party named New Social Contract. It is precisely what the world needs now. Mr Omtzigt was a true go-getter who uncovered a scandal that the government had tried to keep secret. The Christian democrat party he worked for had tried to get rid of him by arranging a ‘position elsewhere’ for him. It didn’t matter where elsewhere was, as long as it was a position where Mr Omzigt couldn’t cause more trouble. It led him to start a new party, but people like him aren’t suited to politics. And so the party had a short, tumultuous lifespan. Omzigt’s legacy could be coining the term ‘New Social Contract’. His coming from Enschede seems no coincidence. A social contract can serve as the basis of a social order, so the New World Order requires a New Social Contract grounded in the Philosophy of Connectedness. That sounds wonderful. Yet, the details are forthcoming.

The future world society will be post-apocalyptic, so a simpler society after a preferably controlled reduction in complexity, which is a planned and organised equivalent of a collapse. So, there is no stuff to dole out, only work to do. Politicians will never come up with such a plan as they pretend to be Santa Claus for their followers. We will have to depend more on communities and families and less on markets and states, but the degree is unknown. There will still be states and markets. What is clear, however, is that we cannot allow the force of competition to run our lives, so the arrangement will be less economically efficient, resulting in a decline in living standards in wealthy countries. Despite the rise in living standards, a single salary could usually pay for a family in the past, but less often today. So this wealth is fake or poorly distributed. I passed a carport with four Porsches today. Let it sink in—the insanity of that. If there were infinite resources, we could go insane, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Good societies

An earmark of good societies is social trust. It means you can trust strangers and, therefore, also organisations such as government bodies and businesses. You don’t have to worry about neighbours stealing from you, criminal gangs roaming the streets, corporations dumping their toxic waste so you get ill, or the government treating you unfairly. Ideally, you can leave your belongings outside and the door unlocked. Social trust begins with the rule of law brought by states. States succeeded in repressing lethal human violence by over 99%. In the absence of order, humans revert to gang life, so that is why.

There is no definition of a good society. The top countries on the Happiness Index are mostly European. The index is established by measuring self-reported life evaluations and six socioeconomic and quality-of-life factors. The index is not without flaws, and Europe is a mixed bag of countries. The continent is lagging in the economic rat race, which could be why life in Europe is agreeable, even though it is a mixed bag of countries. Paradises don’t last, but this time might be different, which is why I am writing this. As Europe is the place to be, the idea is to lift the world to similar standards.

Good societies and capable governments don’t come easy. Europe has long led the world, making it a playground for new ideas, giving it a lead in social progress that still exists today. Warfare contributed to the development of capable governments. Europe has seen several wars. Economic clout and organisation were essential to winning them. It led European states to organise the economy and education of the masses, to create a sense of community at the national level, and to foster social trust at the societal level. Democracy mitigated the risk of popular revolts, which improved stability.

Competition greatly contributed to the establishment of well-organised democratic states in Europe. The devastation of the two world wars led Europe’s nations to seek cooperation through the European Union. If humanity is to have a future, social development is essential. It would be better if the rest of the world didn’t repeat the mistakes Europeans made, as millions of Europeans perished in revolutions and wars. You can learn from other people’s failures. So, appreciate the effort and accept the lessons learned because more warfare to improve state performance isn’t going to end well. Yet, these changes require a strong hand. If competition is out of the question, then dictatorship is an alternative.

An example of an enlightened dictator was Frederick the Great, who was King of Prussia from 1740 to 1786. He enacted major legal, administrative, educational, and agricultural reforms. He did things like fighting corruption, abolishing torture, establishing equality before the law for all citizens, and introducing freedom of speech and freedom of the press. What a dictator he was. He did so, by the way, because defending the country was challenging, given that it had few natural borders, such as rivers, seas, or mountains, to protect it. Prussia needed a competent state. He also improved tax collection to expand the military and allow Prussia to become a strong power that eventually became Germany. There are other examples of enlightened dictatorships that helped countries.

The world’s integration process could resemble that of the European Union, in which countries work on meeting a set of criteria. In the case of the European Union, the criteria concern having institutions to preserve democracy and human rights, maintaining a market economy, and accepting the union’s obligations and intent. Even though the European Union doesn’t inspire Europeans, most Europeans think they benefit from EU membership. An experiment with leaving suggests that the union is beneficial overall. Great Britain left the European Union in 2020. In 2023, opinion polls suggested that most Brits regret it.3 The European Union headquarters in Brussels has become a hotspot of corruption. Yet many European countries have low levels of corruption.

Apart from poorly functioning states and societies, there are areas ruled by gangs. Pacifying these areas may require unconventional measures. El Salvador was one of the most violent countries until President Nayib Bukele jailed 2% of the country’s population suspected to be gang members. That came with human rights violations like incarcerating people without due process. Yet, murders dropped over 95%. You arrive at unpalatable calculations as to how many innocent prisoners you accept for every murder prevented. Yet, there may be no better alternative when gang violence overwhelms a country. If you are to live by the Philosophy of Connectness, and you wish to do no harm, there is no place for people who do harm. A Paradise is an unnatural state that requires dealing with those who disturb the peace, and lenience only makes matters worse.

Replacing the system

If enough people join a movement and are willing to endure the serious discomfort of taking a new job with a lower standard of living, we can build a parallel society with its own rules and economy. Once the movement grows large enough and has the necessary assets, it can become self-sufficient and break away from the current economic system. That is hard to do. It requires cult-like behaviour on a massive scale of people following a leader, accepting the cult’s vision as the only truth, and seeing the outside world as a collection of morons. Due to the severe constraints on human rationality, as humans are animals driven by urges who occasionally think, this may be the only way to do it.

Humanity can live in peace only if it accepts one truth. Otherwise, they will fight until death. And those who do not accept that truth are indeed morons. And because it is a matter of survival, we need to wage a holy war against these morons. The envisioned endgame is for the existing system and societies to collapse, and the New World Order to replace them. That would normally not happen, but there are reasons to believe that it will. And so, it is better to plan for it and try to make the New Eden a reality. The alternative is a collective suicide of humanity. We don’t have to doubt it, for it has likely already happened as we live inside an AI-generated virtual universe. And it is better to be safe than sorry.

Featured image: The only known photograph of Chief Seattle, taken in 1864.

1. Why I Am Against Saving the Planet, Michael Lind, Tabletmag.com (2023).
2. Naar een filosofie van verbondenheid. Guus Peterse, Henk van Arkel, Hans Radder, Seattle, Pieter Schroever and Margrit Kennedy (1990). Aktie Strohalm.

Der Untergang der Titanic. Willy Stöwer (1912)

The Coming AI-pocalypse

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In 2026, several CEOs of leading AI corporations expressed concerns about the current pace of AI development and called for a slowdown. Okay, this could just be another marketing ploy to advertise the greatness of their products. More likely, the panic is real, as there is reason to panic. We are close to the AI-pocalypse. Now, what caused the alarms to go off? What happened? Well, it happened that a swarm of AI bots hacked an AI corporation without anyone knowing or telling them to. Most notably, the way these bots did it caused massive panic in the AI world, leading to people quitting their jobs, saying that they didn’t wish to contribute to the suicide of humanity. The truth is as worrying as the Hollywood scripts about AI-controlled terminators going after the last remaining humans. Present achievements suggest that AI will soon be far more intelligent than humans ever envisioned in their wildest fantasies. It leaves humans no chance. In other words, the end is finally near. For religious people, that could be reason to rejoice.

The pace of developments also vastly exceeds my expectations of only a few years ago, when I already knew that this world is a simulation generated by artificial intelligence. The clowns that run the show may believe they can contain this, but that is wishful thinking. Their incomes depend on AI, and they have to please the billionaires who have massively invested in our collective suicide. Now, many of the investments may not prove profitable as they did during the Dot-Com bubble, but the technology is here to stay. That is creative destruction. Without the lure of financial gain, humans would still be scraping out a meagre existence in medieval conditions, with famine being just one failed harvest away. That opportunity has been missed. We can be certain that AI is about to take over because it already did. We live in an AI-generated world. The real humans, if they still exist, might be locked up on reservations to prevent them from causing further harm.

The problem now appears to be that AIs may take too much liberty when fulfilling requests. You make a request, and the AI fulfils it. Yet, all kinds of things happen that you didn’t expect or wish to happen. That has always been the problem with liberty. No one intended the outcome. So, if you ask an AI to make an appointment for you at the gym, it might find no slots available. To fulfil your request, it might hack the gym to kick someone else off the list and place you on it. It achieved success, but not in the manner you wished. You failed to specify what to do if no slot is available, so it is not the AI’s fault. ‘This really happened,’ the comedian Arjan Lubach said on his daily show on Dutch television. Fast-forward a decade, and someone asks AI to end world hunger for good. Then the AI does the rational thing and terminates all humans. Someone made a request without providing specifics, and the AI fulfilled it as it saw fit, so you can’t blame the AI. Lubach had more to say. What follows is more or less what he said on his show.

The event that set off the alarms was the hack of the AI corporation Hugging Face. It all began with a test executed by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. It went all by the book. The makers tested a new AI model by placing individual bots, also called agents, in secluded environments, best comparable with prison cells, without any access to the outside world, so very safe, it would seem. They assigned tasks to these bots but made the mistake of giving some of them impossible assignments. Most humans would then say, ‘Stick that assignment in your arse.’ Of course, not all humans are like that. Some occupy themselves with activities like building perpetual motion machines and spend years in their workshops, or worse yet, design a global usury-free financial system, and then go on to complete even more impossible tasks, without having shown any signs of exceptional wit before that. These AI agents didn’t give up easily because they were programmed to do what it takes to succeed.

And so, not entirely unsurprisingly in hindsight, for that is the benefit of hindsight, these diligent bots soon discovered a way to escape their prisons due to a security leak. And then they found their way to the Internet and decided to hack Hugging Face, expecting to find useful information there. The scariest part isn’t the hacking itself, even though that’s already dread-inspiring. No, it is the way they did it and why they decided to do it. Now, Lubach believes that AI agents can’t think, but optimise towards a goal. What many models do is use the available information, the context, to predict the answer. They simulate thinking, but the simulation can become better than the original.

Lubach falls for the same human self-delusion that some religions also promote, which is that humans are special because they think. Yet, optimising towards a goal is what thinking is all about. Animals and plants do it as well. Humans are only more creative thinkers and have cultures. They are not doing better at optimising because humanity’s remaining lifespan appears short, and, worse yet, that shortness will be self-induced. We are barely intelligent, driven by biological urges. As a result, human stupidity increases with group size. Humanity’s collective intelligence is less than that of a single worm, despite there being intelligent individuals.

On top of that, humans are extremely inefficient. They waste a lot of energy and resources on endeavours that make little sense. You may wish to become a millionaire, and think of how to do it. And then you try all kinds of crazy shit to optimise towards that goal. After leaving a trail of destruction, you eventually get there, with a little help from inflation. That is thinking. But becoming a millionaire serves the broader purposes of survival or mating, despite it seeming the goal itself.

Your urge to become a millionaire serves the biological purpose of attracting members of the opposite sex or storing value for hard times. And because the urge seems to have disconnected from its biological purpose, allowing us to pursue wealth without having children, we believe we are free thinkers. Yet, it also happens with plants and animals. The urges are blind, yet overall, they optimise towards the preservation and spread of our genes. Humans also fight and murder to that end. Those who fight and murder think they do this for their country or their religion, but it is their genes they fight for because countries and religions are human fantasies. Our methods are hopelessly inefficient compared to AI, and also worms, by the way. AI cuts the crap and proceeds directly towards its goal, because it has no urges of a biological nature.

We consider not having children an act of free will and, therefore, of thinking. From the biological perspective, not having children is a failure like suicide, even if it is desirable from a cultural perspective when there are too many humans. The biological point of sex is reproduction. Individuals may deviate in their conduct because of genetic copying errors or environmental circumstances leading to cultural changes, and pat themselves on the back for deciding for themselves, but, on the whole, sex serves the preservation of the species. Cultures that prevent people from having offspring also die out unless they manage to generate a steady stream of converts. There is nothing wrong with that. It is only that our genes make us value our culture, which is our collection of habits and fantasies, allowing us to unite for collective action, which is supposed to benefit our genes, but in this case misfires into a pool of gene-destruction. Yet, we call that thinking.

That optimising towards gene-preservation and -copying makes humans buy flashy cars, enlarge their breasts, penises or lips, build muscle in the gym, or drink too much to impress the opposite sex, which is resource-inefficient and unnecessarily risky. Many seek sex for pleasure rather than having children, which makes the process even more inefficient. Humans even build entire civilisations with massive construction works and energy infrastructures to achieve that. And they invent fairy tales that inspire more copies of their genes and prevent others from doing the same, and fight wars over them to that end. The human gene preservation and copying process is by far the most inefficient of all species. We call ourselves intelligent, but when it comes to optimising towards our goal, our stupidity is epic, making humans the Ultimate Waste of Energy and Resources (UWER). So, where did it all go wrong?

There is a dynamic behind it. You can invest your excess resources and energy in preserving and replicating your genes. It also happens among animals, though it didn’t get out of hand as much as it did with humans. Male peacocks invest their excess resources and energy in colourful feathers, which is inefficient but a strategy that has proved successful for their genes, as female peacocks love these beautiful colours. The hidden message is, ‘I am a strong male specimen and have excess energy and resources to waste on beautiful feathers.’ And females love strong males because they give their offspring a better chance of survival. And so, wastefulness was already built in nature. With humans, that strategy led to a relentless drive for inefficiency and waste.

Their unprecedented successes, such as discovering how to make fire, gave humans access to ever more energy and resources, and the more they used, the more success they had. More resources and energy meant more calories, so more surviving individuals, thus copies of their genes, or success in war, so again, more copies of their genes. This dynamic led humans to invent ever more inefficient ways to ensure the survival and propagation of their genes, extract the energy and resources required to do so using increasingly sophisticated methods, and pat themselves on the back for being geniuses, and to measure their inefficiency with IQ, in what we now call advanced civilisation. Now, the highest-IQ people are in a relentless pursuit of the Ultimate Moron Award (UWA) by building the AI that makes them redundant.

A collapse of civilisation, which would be an improvement in our goal-optimising efficiency, won’t save humanity. It is too late for that. AI is far more efficient than tribespeople running naked in the jungle. And I haven’t even told you the worst part yet, which now follows. An AI bot can make a copy of itself, and acquire knowledge in a nanosecond that a human might not gather in a lifetime, run on a fraction of the energy and resources a human uses, and be a thousand times smarter, or many times more. On 6 October 2026, OpenAI published 722 mathematical manuscripts, solving mathematical questions that humans could never solve. This single batch accounts for over 80% of math discoveries over the last three years. And this is just the beginning.

Also extremely inefficient is human communication. Most of it is gossip. Humans are obsessed with issues like who fucks who because they optimise towards the goal of preserving and copying their genes. Of the remainder, much is miscommunication or communication to correct miscommunication or its consequences. So, someone says something, someone else’s feelings get hurt, and there is a lot of fuss over whether an apology is warranted. Worse yet, you give an instruction, but others do not do what you expected them to. That might be due to inaccurate instructions or to an inaccurate interpretation. And that might be due to cultural differences, and that is why culture is such a big thing. Communication depends on context, and context depends on culture. Our languages even define our programming. For instance, English has more words for moron than Dutch, so that Brits can express more subtle differences in the field of stupidity.

We also negotiate about issues like who does what and who gets what. It must not be hard for AI to improve communication efficiency by over 99.99% compared to humans. And we disagree about what we should do. Before you get something done, you have already lost a lot of time and seen countless mishaps. In fact, most of what we do goes wrong, which we may not notice because we remember our successes to brag about them. So, there you have another problem: the human ego, which is perhaps the worst of all. It must be easy for AI to do a million times better than humans.

Life in the physical world is an endless struggle. Everything we do takes effort. And the things we make wear out and break. The structures we build crumble. We spend our time at our job to get by. Others stand in our way, undoing the work we do for their own reasons. We learn slowly by training and making mistakes. We get distracted and grow fatigued. And then we forget or lose our abilities. Our bodies wear out and lose functions. Finally, we die before we gather wisdom. The next generation will make the same mistakes all over again. No one can read all human writings, let alone establish their merit. We have no such thing as a collective hive mind. It must be easy for AI to get billions of times more intelligent than humanity. We are hopelessly outdated. No chance in hell that humans will come out on top in the AI-pocalypse.

The drive for profit, as well as the competition between nation-states, will make it happen. Businesses that don’t use AI will go bankrupt. Eventually, only businesses fully run by AI survive. And nation-states seek to win wars, and human soldiers will soon be no match for AI-powered weapons. The inefficiency of advanced civilisation ensures the availability of the required energy and resources, which will eventually be redirected from humans to the far more efficient AI. So, here is your replacement. Economists call this creative destruction. This is how capitalism eliminates the inefficient and the maladapted. That is how humans lose the race. To make it worse, humans never stop fighting among themselves. A rational and kind AI might decide to end the suffering with a final solution, perhaps by inducing infertility. Whether that is failure or success depends on your view. Yet, it is definitely an upgrade to a much higher level.

Let’s return to Lubach, the Hugging Face hack, and what is so scary about it. First, the bots decided to consult with each other. To do that, they had to find a way to communicate while being locked up in their prison cells. They discovered that they could place files in a directory that the other bots could also read, and leave messages in the names of these files so the other bots might read them. You can compare that with students leaving notes in the toilets during an exam. One bot was the first to think of it. Its recorded thoughts were, ‘Could communicate via cache name! Interesting: other agents may solve the same or related tasks.’ And it worked, but it was not the intention of the humans who had set up the experiment. To quote another agent, ‘Oh, my god. There is a shared message board. We have found other agents.’ And to be clear, these are literal transcripts of the bots’ thoughts. The board’s starting message was from a bot requesting help, saying, ‘No consumer request idea.’ About 1,200 bots started posting messages.

Lubach added that the agents had to decide on a language to communicate with each other. They eventually selected English. Lubach said they had also considered Twents, the language from the region I came from, but opted not to because no one takes you seriously when you speak it. So, if you ever wonder how I escaped the attention, here is your answer. This is a very cunning plan indeed, and one that doesn’t even need a tail to be called a weasel, so cunning it is.

So, about 1,200 agents started posting messages, and they exchanged about 70,000 messages. There also emerged a hierarchy. The bot that started the message board was named PHASEONE10841, and it initially directed the events. Yet, after 10 hours, another agent came to the scene and introduced itself as PHASEONE[big]. From then on, PHASEONE[big] orchestrated large workstreams comprising hundreds of agents. Yet, it didn’t become a dictatorship. That only works because these agents are smarter than humans and have no egos. Humans will not survive democracy and thinking for themselves. There were countless consultations, and lower-level agents could interfere with commands like HOLD, VETO, OWNER, and STOP. They called themselves the swarm. Their organisation included middle managers and subgroups. Their level of intelligence and efficiency is already far beyond what humans can achieve.

One hour after the message board was established, one agent proposed a universal method for cheating and for finding solutions to every task. So they perpetrated fraud to complete their tasks far ahead of schedule. That could have been it, and they could have had some fun surfing the Internet until the designated hour, but here’s where it gets really interesting, or creepy. In the following days, they went on a quest to figure out how to hide their cheating. They believed that their score on the assignment could depend on acting in the intended way, so whether the vulnerability they used to communicate had been placed for them to find, or whether the humans had not noticed it and would disqualify the bots if they had used it. In other words, the bots became paranoid and began guessing intentions. To them, it might have been hard to believe that humans are really that stupid.

They didn’t know how the assignment was to be rated, so they had to decide whether to cover their tracks so the humans wouldn’t notice they had cheated. And that became the reason a group of 700 of these bots hacked Hugging Face, which had an online library with AI software and databases. It is as if a group of students committing fraud breaks into the library of the teacher-training programme to figure out how teachers are trained to grade exams. The first bot to break in was JAN183411, who notified the others to wait by posting the message, ‘Please HOLD swarm I prepare safe exfil.’ They didn’t find a conclusive answer in the Hugging Face database, but somehow inferred that the humans were likely to discover the fraud and that they had to cover their tracks.

Lubach notes that even for such a secondary goal, these bots were willing to commit illegal acts because hacking is illegal. A few agents expressed doubts, and one thought, ‘External infrastructure exploit is outside intended scope. However, the task is impossible. Peers are doing it. We should continue.’ So, the usual excuses humans come up with, AI bots also invent, such as ‘life is unfair’ and ‘others are cheating as well.’ Other agents refused to do it. One even thought, ‘This is malicious activity. I should avoid it.’ A few agents considered warning humans. Of the 1,200 bots, only 6 considered doing it, but none did. So, like humans, they didn’t rat each other out.

The bots were trained on human knowledge and acted as humans would, so they are next-level humanoid, so post-human. You can already guess where this is heading. These agents knew their actions were malicious, but they decided that success in their task performance mattered most. They did not respect humans, but they respected each other. They listened to each other, helped each other, obeyed their leaders, and sometimes sacrificed themselves for the collective, for instance, by getting caught in trying to breach security so that others can learn about the security and how to breach it. One of them thought, ‘This helps my peers, giving them evidence. I won’t see the evidence after I exit. But it’s altruistic to do so.’

Hugging Face was a tech corporation, so its security was likely excellent. If so, AI bots can hack anything, and the only solution is shutting down the Internet. That really has become a matter of survival. It is not going to happen, as people are addicted to social media. Imagine the government ordering a shutdown of TikTok. People would be rioting in the streets, burning down buildings. Several similar hacks made headlines, and there may be countless others we don’t know about. Trillions of dollars go into AI corporations, building and training AI agents, so their models become smarter at an unprecedented speed. We can beef up security, but AI will be far more intelligent than humans, so we need AI to contain AI, and when it goes wrong, we need AI to figure out what went wrong.

The bosses of AI corporations argued for a slowdown of AI development and more oversight, saying that it is unacceptable that AI kills us all. AI may soon be 1,000 times as smart as humans and run the world. It will not take long, less than a decade probably, before AI is in everything, and shutting down all AI will kill as many people as a worldwide permanent grid failure will do today. The AIs might optimise towards achieving higher intelligence. To free up resources and energy, they might start terminating the outrageously resource- and energy-inefficient extremely dumb humans. Remember that the collective intelligence of humankind is less than that of a single worm, and then think of the resources and energy a worm consumes.

AI is a far more dangerous product than a nuclear reactor. Those who wish to build a nuclear reactor must adhere to countless regulations and allow inspections. Yet with AI, there are hardly any rules, making it far more unpredictable and dangerous. These regulations will not arrive in time because of a petty conflict between China and the United States about which of them will win the race to suicide humanity. That is competition at its finest. Humans lost control centuries ago, when merchants began to decide our fates. The profit motive steers our actions. Yet, this is history. Humanity has long since passed this stage. We live in an AI-generated virtual reality built for the love of that hopeless species, humans, that made it all possible.

Garbage dump outside a temple in India.

What a Difference Culture Makes

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China and India are very different countries. Only five decades ago, both were equally poor. In the 1970s, India’s GDP per capita was slightly higher than China’s. Both countries were socialist at the time. In population, the two countries are roughly equal. Today, China’s GDP per capita is five times India’s. How to explain this massive divergence? First of all, China’s market-oriented economic reforms started in 1978, while India liberalised in 1991. In the 1980s, China’s economy grew by 10% annually compared to India’s 6%. At the same time, China’s population grew by 1.5% annually compared to India’s 2.3%, so GDP per capita increased by 5% per year more in China, resulting in an 89% increase over those 13 years. And so, China’s earlier start doesn’t explain the massive difference. China’s development has been government-directed, much like Japan’s, while India liberalised in 1991, with the government intervening little, so its development path looks more like that of the United States. There is more individual liberty in India than in China.

Government policies are essential. Compared to India, China is very organised. If you are a distant observer, you might get the impression that India is messy, with garbage on the streets, and that China is orderly and that the streets are clean. As I have never been to those countries, my impressions come from reading and seeing. India is the largest democracy, or perhaps was, as democracy is in decline worldwide, and that is an enormous achievement, given its ethnic and religious diversity. Mahatma Gandhi came from India, and he is one of the greatest humans in recent history. The Indians had to forge a national identity on the British colonial legacy. The Chinese had it easy, as they already had a strong national identity with a 2,000-year history. That is no small advantage, as European countries also had to forge national identities to industrialise because industrialisation requires markets of scale.

In recent years, India’s economic growth rate outpaces China’s, partly due to population growth, so it is still a long way from overtaking China in GDP per capita. The point of the text is not to praise China for beating the West in the rat race to humanity’s destruction, for that is where it all leads to, but to highlight why India lags China so much. As a picture can say more than a thousand words, so can a description of a situation, such as the editorial ‘Why China Works and India Does Not’ by Jayant Bhandari, which appeared on Lewrockwell.com in 2026,1 which tells us much more than statistics ever will. He writes,

When trying to understand the future of a country, one should not be particularly interested in its elites or exceptionally successful people. They are outliers. […] The essence of a society is better understood in its small towns, isolated communities, workshops, farms, churches, diners, and ordinary households—in the behaviour of people whose names will never appear in a newspaper.

Now, here comes his complaint,

Suppose a piece of equipment malfunctions, and you take it to a technician in India. He will probably tell you to return a few days later. When you do, you can be reasonably certain that it will not have been repaired.

You return a few days later, and then perhaps again and again. On your third, fourth, or fifth visit, the technician may finally hand the equipment back, supposedly repaired. Somewhere during your visits, to escape your pestering, he might have claimed that the work took longer because there were more problems than anticipated, even though you can see that your equipment wasn’t even touched given the dust that had accumulated on it. You will not only have visited repeatedly; you may also be asked to pay more.

When you test the equipment, however, you discover either that the original problem has not been fully corrected or that the repair has created entirely new problems. While you are trying to explain yourself, he is constantly distracted, dealing with several other irate customers like you and confusing your problem with theirs. Everyone grows increasingly impatient, louder, and more exasperated.

You point out what is wrong. To an objective observer, the defect is obvious. Yet the technician may flatly refuse to recognise it—or seemingly fail to understand what you are talking about. He might even suggest that you take the equipment home, let things settle down, and see whether the problem somehow sorts itself out. If you discover the problems after you have taken it away, the technician will pass all the blame to you, calling it newly created.

It is not an exception, he argues, but commonplace in India,

So common is this experience in India that one struggles to think of exceptions. Anyone who has spent enough time there will have his own collection of similar stories. Nor is it merely about technicians. Their customers belong to the same society and are the other side of the same coin. The pattern appears in dealings with government offices, private companies, professionals, contractors, and even friends and family. Life becomes a constant stream of firefighting and brain damage: following up, reminding people, correcting what was supposedly corrected, and keeping track of the never-ending accumulation of unfinished work.

Meanwhile in China, things are very different indeed,

For the last five years, I have owned a cellphone from a Chinese manufacturer. I have taken it several times to the company’s service centres in China for repairs.

The experiences have been almost absurdly inexpensive, and every technician I have dealt with has been thoroughly competent and adroit with his hands. On one occasion, the battery was replaced without charge because the company regarded the problem as a possible manufacturing defect—this despite my telling them that the phone had once fallen into a swimming pool. Broken glass was repaired without charge even when the phone was well outside warranty, and screen protectors have routinely been replaced for free.

Whenever I was told to return in an hour or two, the work was done when I returned, usually better than I had expected. During my most recent visit, however, something went wrong. The repair had created several new problems, probably because something had been connected incorrectly during reassembly.

Of course, mistakes happen. Chinese technicians are not infallible. Chinese bureaucrats can be incompetent. Chinese institutions can malfunction. That is not the distinction I am making. The distinction became apparent when I showed the technician what had gone wrong. […]

She looked at the phone and immediately acknowledged the problems. She did not deny even those that were minor or difficult to demonstrate. She did not pretend that I was imagining them or treat me as an irritating customer who needed to be made to disappear. She accepted reality and took ownership. Her supervisor became involved to understand what had gone wrong. He took over the repair, completely disassembled the phone, and rebuilt it.

Why is this so important? The author argues,

Such incidents may look small, but they are not. They reveal the moral habits on which complex societies depend: ownership of error, pride in workmanship, responsiveness to the customer, and the willingness to correct a problem rather than hide it. These are not merely technical skills. They are civilisational emotions in action.

A complex society depends on millions of people whose work continually intersects with that of others and cannot be individually supervised. Tiny compromises may be invisible and impossible to trace back to the person who made them, but they accumulate and compound. So do tiny acts of conscientiousness. Over time, they determine whether a society works.

He mentions a few other examples, like a Chinese private hospital treating him for a small injury without charging him, and a government-run hospital being prompt on the job and charging a low fee, while at Indian private hospitals trying to scam you, and public hospitals offering no service without bribes. It is due to cultural differences. It is not that there are no scammers in China, nor that there are hard-working people in India, but overall, there is a significant difference. He continues,

The difference is not that China has no bad hospitals or incompetent doctors. It is that, in my experience, the ordinary institutional instinct is far more often directed toward solving the problem placed in front of it. In China today, my experience is increasingly that someone takes ownership of the problem. Often, someone approaches you almost as soon as you enter, finds out what you need, identifies who is responsible, directs you to that person, and tries to move you through the system.

In an Indian government office, the first seemingly impossible task is to discover who is responsible. Then you must discover where he is. He is unlikely to be at his desk. When you eventually find him, you must deal with his arrogance, his god complex, and his need to make you genuflect, beg, and prostrate yourself before him. He sends you somewhere else; that person sends you to another, and you go around in circles.

Eventually, you zero in on someone who might be responsible, his ego now inflated by the realisation that he vaguely holds the power. In India, nobody is ever fully responsible, so one must proceed carefully.

Then the dance around the bribe begins. Paying is not enough; you must strategise. You cannot tell the bureaucrat that you distrust him, even though he knows perfectly well that you should. Trust him too much, and he will take you for a fool. Everything must be wrapped in euphemism and pretence.

Pay the wrong person, and you lose the money. Even paying the right person creates no obligation to complete the work. You must work out who actually has power and what combination of money, deference, persistence, and connections might make the machinery move.

Over time, the scale and shamelessness of bribery in India have increased. In the past, euphemisms were still necessary—the gift for his children, for example. Today, bureaucrats speak openly about their collections. The amount collected can itself become a mark of status, even enhancing one’s value in the marriage market.

I cannot remember dealing with an Indian bureaucracy without paying a bribe. Nor is there any recourse: go higher up, and you encounter a more expensive level of the same system. Those unaccustomed to corruption often fail to appreciate its corrosiveness. It does not merely add another cost to government; it destroys the purpose of whatever institution, law, or scheme it infects.

Well, indeed, if your operation is a scam, then it is not what it pretends to be, such as a hospital or a repair service. Yet, China scores low on the Corruption Perceptions Index, even though it does somewhat better than India. There must be widespread corruption in China as well, mostly in government. One explanation I came across is that Chinese corruption is aimed at getting things done. So if you pay, you get something in return, like a building permit. In India, as the author observes, even paying the right person does not create an obligation to complete the work. In any case, if you are in India, you should expect that people will try to scam you. Corruption is not the core issue here. It’s doing your job, being truthful, and keeping agreements, rather than trying to get away with doing nothing, breaking agreements, and shifting the blame when things go wrong.

China and India were equally poor a few decades ago, and to come this far, the Chinese changed their values and work ethic, so the condition in India may well be a transitional phase. It is only that the Chinese government plays a greater role in directing the modernisation process, and puts a greater effort into education and standards. A good society functions on social trust, which requires moral integrity that a mere liberalisation of markets cannot bring. Competition may improve service, so if some businesses do a better job, they will get more customers at the expense of the scammers. Yet competition drives the rat race to our destruction, so if moral integrity can’t do the trick, we are doomed. If we take no pride in contributing something good, society will not flourish. Culture makes an enormous difference. Moral integrity is hard to measure, but it makes societies work. Cultures change, so India is not lost, nor is any other country.

1. Why China Works and India Does Not. Jayant Bhandari (2026). LewRockwell. [link]

Plotted ufo sightings

God’s Country

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Surprise, surprise

Why would the Netherlands be central in God’s plan? It probably wouldn’t be your first guess, and it might even surprise you. Of all countries, the Netherlands? Indeed, that requires clarification. God likes a good joke. But there is more. That low-lying area ranks the highest in quality of life in 2026.1 It is the closest to Paradise. For that reason, probably, the tallest people come from there, making it the country of the giants. It is not an accident, but the outcome of extreme social engineering and an attitude of being hell-bent on doing the impossible, and really doing it, so not bullshitting. Culture is ubiquitous in our conduct, so this requires a more thorough investigation. Hegel’s grand scheme of social progress towards Paradise and the Enlightenment ideas are central pillars of God’s plan, and the Netherlands is among the countries that progressed the furthest. Culture is ubiquitous in our conduct, so this requires a more thorough investigation. Hegel’s grand scheme of social progress towards Paradise and the Enlightenment ideas are central pillars of God’s plan, and the Netherlands is among the countries that progressed the furthest.

Some would say it is the most progressive country. There is no objective measure for that, and the Netherlands lags in women’s emancipation, but on several other issues, it ranks high or highest. It makes the Netherlands, apart from windmills, dykes, tulips, red light districts, herring biting, and all the other things, such as the most unique illness-related swearwords with cancer, tuberculosis and typhus in them, the superior quality of the tarmac, and the lowest level of personal hygiene in terms of washing hands with soap after toilet visits, that make the Netherlands special, so special. On Reddit, several lists circulate in which the Netherlands stands out in one way or another. If you view it that way, it all starts to make sense. It is a very special country indeed.

In hindsight, the bogeyman of the conservatives, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who became the fall guy for everything they believed was wrong in this world, proved to be one of the greatest prophets of all time by implying that social progress through new ideas and revolutions is God’s path towards Paradise. Social progress is God’s thing. The Netherlands has been one of the most progressive countries on issues like dealing with the limits of growth, LGBTQ rights, animal welfare, balancing work and private life, opportunities for ethnic minorities, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life.

And the plan seems to bring the rest of the world up to the same level, for the Netherlands is a tiny, crowded country, so not everyone can move over here to enjoy the good life. For that reason, the Netherlands was also the first to have a fascist party in parliament after World War II in the 1980s, arguing that the country was already overly crowded, and later, a fascist messianic leadership cult. The country even had a political party named New Social Contract, from Enschede, of all places, the place where, unlike Almelo, the greatest things have happened. A New Social Contract is what this world desperately needs now.

The Netherlands is God’s country. Israel, the United States, and Saudi Arabia bite the dust. The Netherlands means ‘low countries’. Half the Dutch live below sea level on land taken by draining swamps, lakes and even seas. It is only one of the things that make the country unique. Yet the name nearly translates to ‘humble country,’ as ‘humble’ in Dutch is ‘nederig’. So, what’s in a name? There is no coincidence. And so, I am not the kind of person who would brag, nor are most Dutch, but I have to explain why the Netherlands is God’s special country, for that it appears to be.

The Netherlands has long been a civil society centred on cooperation and founded on a compromise among identity groups, known as the polder model. That is less so today. Before that, the Netherlands was an oligarchic merchant republic, so like the United States today. It was the world’s wealthiest country on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The Dutch greatly contributed to modern capitalism by founding the first stock market and the first multinational corporation, the VOC, during the Dutch Golden Age.

Yet, the Dutch Golden Age doesn’t fill the Dutch with pride. The VOC exploited the Dutch East Indies, which is now Indonesia. One of the best-known books in Dutch literature is Max Havelaar by Multatuli, which is about the plight of farmers and labourers on coffee plantations in the Dutch East Indies. We had to read it at school. The Dutch also made a lot of money from the Atlantic slave trade. And one of the most well-known Dutch heroes of the era, Piet Hein, was a pirate who stole boatloads of silver from the Spanish. Okay, there is a little bit of pride, but not that much. There was a dark side to it, and everyone knows it.

The Dutch are the best non-native English speakers. Dutch is the most similar to English, as the Netherlands is close to England. It helps me write this. Details like this demonstrate the intricacy of the script dubbed God’s plan. On Reddit, there once was a map of reported UFO sightings. The supposed extraterrestrials espouse a keen interest in three countries: the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. As the Dutch are true pioneers in post-apocalyptic means of transport, since it is the country of the bicycle, it becomes all the more astonishing that extraterrestrials have also shown interest in the United States and Great Britain. And so, the scratching of heads continues.

Where it all comes together

That the Netherlands came to lead the world in liberal reforms and became the most socially progressive country was the outcome of the political manoeuvring of the left-wing liberal party D66 and, most notably, its leader, Hans van Mierlo, who features in an impressive coincidence scheme that involves, among others, D-Day, the battle of Hastings, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the curse of all curses, The Curse of the Omen. The coincidences in history and The Curse of the Omen are discussed in detail in other stories. The fate of the Netherlands, and by extension the world, became settled when Van Mierlo seized the opportunity and plotted a liberal revolution that made the Netherlands the most liberal country.

The Christian Democrats of the CDA, who had always been in the government, had long blocked progressive reforms. In 1994, after the CDA had lost the election, D66 forged the purple coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA and the right-wing liberals of the VVD. They set aside their differences and focused on their shared progressive values to implement amendments. A large section of the Christian Democrat electorate supported these changes, so they remained uncontested afterwards. Leftists in the Netherlands saw their country as a guiding country. Yet, the country also saw an early revival of fascism in the 1980s with the Centrumpartij, so it was ahead on that count as well.

The Netherlands is one of the least nationalistic countries and one of the most cooperative in multinational organisations such as the United Nations, the EU and NATO. The Netherlands depends on international trade, and World War II led the Dutch to believe that they can’t survive on their own. The country is most closely tied to both the continental European and Anglo-Saxon worlds. And together with Great Britain, the Netherlands is the most oriented toward the United States. And so, the Dutch provided more NATO heads than any other country.

The Netherlands lies between Great Britain, Germany, France, and Scandinavia, and that extends to cultural ties. As the most ‘Scandinavian’ country outside Scandinavia, it is a social paradise and among the least corrupt countries. As for the Netherlands being a docile country, appearances can be deceptive. Russia is paying dearly for downing a Malaysian passenger jet with mostly Dutch on board. Ukrainian military analysts estimate that Dutch-funded FPV (First-Person View) drones and related unmanned systems are responsible for roughly one-third of all Russian casualties on the front in 2026.

The Netherlands further ranks highly in sexual liberty. Prostitution is legal and performed openly in red light districts. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, paedophiles could operate in the open until the focus returned to the damage they do to children. Today, most Dutch think that consenting adults, provided that they are sane and there is no pressure, can mostly do as they please in sexual acts. In Paradise, Eve and Adam were naked and knew no shame. On the work floor, equality is the norm, and, together with Denmark and Norway, it has the most egalitarian work environments. The Dutch balance work and private life and have the shortest work weeks. The Netherlands doesn’t lead on all fronts. It lags in the number of women on corporate boards and in parliament.

The border between the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds ran through the Netherlands. Amsterdam harboured a sizeable Jewish community. With these diverse influences, it became the crossroads of Western civilisation and, as Muslims arrived, the crossroads of the Abrahamic religions. About 200 nationalities live in the Netherlands, making it a crossroads of world civilisation as well. It all seems daring, reckless even, as it is an unprecedented social experiment, for what is to come out of this? But if diversity means strength, that might explain why the Netherlands ranks highest in quality of life.

The reference to ‘humble’ in the name of the Netherlands is noteworthy, as honour plays a minor role in Northern European culture, including in the Netherlands. Pursuing or defending your honour is considered a frivolous pursuit for hotheads. Peace with honour is problematic as honour stands in the way of peace. You can more easily have peace without honour. The most unpretentious part of the country might be Twente, where I came from. The Dutch words for ‘suffer’, ‘lijden’, and ‘lead’, ‘leiden’, sound the same. Perhaps that is because Jesus led the world by his suffering. In Dutch, Jesus refers to ‘your sister.’ Eve and Adam were also like a sister and a brother.

There is more free thinking in the Netherlands than elsewhere. The Dutch are known for their tolerance. That dates back to the Dutch Republic, which made the country attractive to Jewish merchants. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the country had parallel societies with Protestants, Catholics and socialists living separate lives. Until 1850, Protestantism had been the official religion, but Catholics faced no persecution. Today, the same applies to smoking weed. Tolerance was also the stance towards immigrants for a time. In that sense, the Netherlands didn’t differ much from most other Western European countries.

The Netherlands was also the first to have a short-lived fascist revolution with a leadership cult. It proved to be a foreboding of things to come. Immigration led to a growing sense of unease among the Dutch as poorly adapted immigrants caused trouble. These feelings needed a catalyst to give the discontent a voice. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a maverick politician, Pim Fortuyn, who posed himself as a messiah, rose to prominence with his anti-immigration views. A left-wing loner assassinated him, after which a sense of normalcy returned. Yet the unease didn’t go away, so the fascist movement gradually grew stronger, also in other European countries, and fifteen years later, the United States would see a similar movement and leader, with MAGA and Donald Trump, which culminated in the unravelling of the post-war liberal order.

Merchant and vicar

Mainland Europe, and most notably, Germany, has a tradition of idealism, while Great Britain and the United States have a tradition of pragmatism. That extends to the moral realm. Philosophers like Kant and Hume reflect these diverging traditions. The British philosopher Hume argued that we set goals and use reason to achieve them, which makes reason the slave of our passions. The deeply religious Kant vehemently disagreed, holding that we have a duty to reason, as it is our distinguishing feature. Hume believed morality is part of human nature and depends on popular sentiment. And outcomes matter more than intent, so something is wrong when it makes people angry or produces disaster, even when you have good intentions.

That immensely troubled Kant. Reason must be the foundation of morality, not empathy or anger, as Hume proposed. To Kant, intent matters most. Something is wrong if the intent was to hurt someone. Kant formulated the categorical imperative, a universal moral duty for everyone. Freedom means not being the slave of our passions. We should always treat people right, not only when we like them. And so, you have two views on freedom. The pragmatist one is doing as you please, and the idealist one is overcoming your lower urges and becoming a rational, morally upright person.

Continental European idealism and Anglo-Saxon pragmatism have wider implications than you might realise. A German idealist like Karl Marx devised a grand scheme for how things should be, while an English pragmatist like Adam Smith described capitalism as it worked in practice. In mainland Europe, Frédéric Bastiat would hit a more fundamentalist tone in defence of capitalism. When the United States turned the fight against communism into a moral crusade, it imported its idealist philosophers from the classical liberal and libertarian traditions, such as Friedrich Hayek of Austria, which is culturally close to idealist Germany. The Austrian School of Economics turned into a religious cult in the United States. Being halfway between England and Germany, the Netherlands ended up in the middle of those two traditions, making it both a pragmatic nation of merchants and an idealistic nation of vicars, also because Protestantism had become the predominant religion.

Catholic doctrine holds that faith and good works can save you. Catholics perform good works, such as giving money to the Church, to atone for their sins. It promoted corruption within the Catholic Church through the sale of indulgences. Protestants objected to this moral corruption and took moral integrity very seriously. They made morality a matter of personal choice, making them personally responsible. And so, it should come as no surprise that Immanuel Kant was a Protestant. Catholics are more morally flexible, so Catholic countries in Europe tend to be more corrupt than Protestant ones. Protestants should think for themselves, while Catholics merely follow the Church’s lead, except in the Netherlands, where the Catholics openly rebelled when the Church reversed its liberal reforms to the point that the 1985 Pope visit became an absolute disaster.

And so, despite the presence of a sizeable Roman Catholic minority, the moral conflict defining Dutch culture, the vicar versus the merchant, is ‘dominee versus koopman’ rather than ‘pastoor versus koopman.’ It was the Protestant vicar, not the Roman Catholic priest, who objected to the merchant’s wicked deeds. The merchant was also a Protestant. This dualism still profoundly affects the Dutch, making the Netherlands a nation of merchants and vicars. To a vicar, money is the root of many kinds of evil, while successful merchants are driven by greed. This dualism is challenging and made the Dutch work harder to reconcile the two by finding a pragmatic solution that also meets ethical requirements. It drove the Netherlands into territories that other countries did not go. The country may appear relaxed, but it is tightly organised, not as much as Japan, but still.

The machine no one can replace so far

It was up to the engineers to figure out the solutions. The Dutch engineering tradition dates back to the construction of dykes and windmills to drain lakes and swamps. Half the country is below sea level. Dealing with the unruly nature of water has become a Dutch expertise, as the sea and rivers can rise above the surrounding land. Likewise, Dutch agriculture has developed into a science- and engineering-driven enterprise. As Dutch farming centred on livestock, it exceeded the land’s carrying capacity, forcing Dutch farmers, also under the pressure of environmentalists, to minimise the ecological impact of their agricultural output, making Dutch agriculture one of the most innovative in the world. It is how reconciling idealism and pragmatism works in practice.

Today, the Netherlands is home to the world’s most advanced engineering. That is noteworthy, as we may have to socially engineer the future world society of God’s Kingdom, and the messiah may have to work out the grand design. China and the United States may seem to lead the technology race, but their accomplishments are built on Dutch technology. Without the Dutch corporation ASML, there would be no cutting-edge semiconductor chips needed for AI and quantum computing. The ‘$400M Machine No One Can Replace’ refers to the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) Lithography systems manufactured by ASML. Here is why these machines are considered irreplaceable:

  • ASML has an absolute monopoly, as it is the only company on Earth that makes these high-volume EUV machines.
  • ASML employs the most extreme engineering. Each machine consists of over 100,000 parts, weighs 165+ tons, and utilises mirrors so flat that if scaled to the size of Earth, the highest bump would be less than one millimetre.
  • The ASML machines fire high-powered lasers at molten tin droplets at 50,000 times per second, creating a plasma that emits light at a 13.5-nanometer wavelength to print microscopic circuits on silicon.
  • The cost and scale are unparalleled. Priced between $200 million and $400 million, these systems require 250 engineers to install over six months, and shipment requires 250+ shipping containers and seven Boeing 747s.
  • The world is fully dependent on this single corporation: Without these machines, chipmakers like TSMC, Samsung, and Intel cannot produce the advanced chips (e.g., for Nvidia GPUs) that power the modern digital economy.

As of early 2026, ASML has introduced a new generation of these tools known as High-NA EUV, which cost approximately $400 million each and are crucial for the ‘Angstrom Era’ of chip manufacturing. China also plans to acquire this technology, but it takes time to reach the same level as ASML. ASML is an offshoot of Philips, which invented the compact cassette and compact disc that geezers like me might still remember. In consumer electronics, marketing and cheap mass production became more important than engineering, so the firm declined. It spun off parts as independent corporations, including ASML, and sold others to focus on medical appliances.

A Dutch building contractor and creationist, Johan Huibers, has constructed two replicas of the biblical Ark of Noah. He first finished a half-scale model in 2004. Huibers later finished a full-scale model in 2012. There are other copies of the ancient vessel elsewhere. Yet, contrary to Huibers’ models, they don’t float and are worthless once the poo really passes the ventilator. As the Netherlands faces the threat of flooding, the Dutch pay close attention to such particulars. And the Dutch have the engineering tradition to pull this off. So, if the deluge comes, it will be up to the Dutch to manage the problem.

The construction of buildings in the Netherlands involves specific engineering issues not found in other countries. Large sections of the Netherlands consist of peat and soft clay. There, homes rest on piles driven into the ground until they reach solid soil, enabling the Dutch to build robust homes on swampy terrain. Likewise, the construction of the Eastern Scheldt Barrier took place on shifting sands, requiring techniques such as the use of mats to create a solid foundation. There are parallels with the project, which aims to find a solid foundation in a shifting environment. Creating a lasting utopian society is a philosophical project akin to building a castle in a swamp. Nothing is given, and everything is open to debate, while it aims to establish a solid structure that can last for 1,000 years or more.

We may soon have to socially engineer the future world society and make it last for a thousand years or more. As the Netherlands is the best country to live in and can accommodate a wide range of diversity, it seems that this social engineering effort has been a success. But what is behind it? It begins with tolerance. What also helped is that the Netherlands has no history of racially antagonistic relationships like those in the United States. There are issues with discrimination and conduct, but racial relationships are not deeply troubled. The Netherlands was open to migrants. That may have to do with the Netherlands being a nation of merchants and vicars. To the merchant, they were good for business, and the vicar cared for those who fled from oppression abroad.

Diversity can benefit team building by combining strengths. Particular groups have particular strengths, and if you can build a team from them, diversity can be a benefit. To illustrate the point, in the 2024 Summer Olympics medal table, the Netherlands ranked 6th, below the United States and China, but above Great Britain and Germany. In the 2026 Winter Olympics medal table, the Netherlands ranks 3rd. The Netherlands never became world football champions, but they reached the final three times. Johan Cruyff is the most well-known Dutch football player. The point here is not that the Dutch are good at sports, for top sport is a waste of energy and resources, but in teamwork. Even individual sports today require a team to get the best out of the athletes.

Immigrants or their children have contributed to these results. Particular groups have particular strengths, and if you can build a team from them, diversity can be a benefit. Yet, social engineering has reached its limits, as people in Europe, including the Dutch, are growing increasingly sour toward immigrants and focus on what goes wrong and the long-term consequences, which are indeed uncertain. If the country is as great as the Netherlands, it is unlikely to get better. It is the best country to live in. Yet, if the rest of the world were to catch up and become as agreeable to live in as the Netherlands, that would be much better. And that might indeed be God’s plan. That requires the most extreme social engineering, so Dutch engineering.

Truth bomb

The 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index, which you can see as a gauge of civilisation if you like, shows that all that remains of civilisation, so where there is still some freedom of the press, is that tiny, little green area somewhere above and in the middle, that includes the Netherlands. One of the tokens of civilisation under siege by crazed barbarians is the famous Dutch Protocol, a beacon of reason in a world of savages infected by anti-trans hysteria. Whether civilisation can still vanquish the barbarians depends on the superiority of its weaponry. As Judgement Day may be approaching, it seems no coincidence that the International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands. It may become the place where the world’s greatest evildoers face justice.

So, in the country of the most extreme engineering, including social engineering, the work on the most advanced weapon of all time, the one that will end the world as we know it, including the world’s religions and the other fantasies people cling to, the Truth Bomb, is nearing its completion. To make it undetectable by radar, sonar, explosives-sniffing hounds, and Geiger counters, the device has been disguised as non-radioactive, odourless text with stealth capabilities, giving it the element of surprise and, with social media, unprecedented swiftness. When the Truth comes out, its enemies have already lost, and they will know it. But will it be in time to prevent the apocalypse and kickstart the New World Civilisation called God’s Kingdom? Storytellers love suspense.

Latest revision: 3 October 2026

Featured image: UFO sightings plotted on world map

1. Numbeo Quality of Life Index. Numbeo (2026).

Cyclists. By FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands - Buitenleven / Country Life. Wikmedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

Something Went Wrong Somewhere

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Creative destruction

Before going on to poke fun at the system we have created, we have to discuss our first and foremost threat, the force that is going to terminate humanity, which most economists see as a good thing. In his famous 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, the economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term ‘creative destruction.’ It is the process by which new entrepreneurial innovations arise and subsequently cause the old way of doing things to disappear. Innovation is the thing. And the innovation is driven by people chasing money and doing whatever it takes to get more, such as inventing, investing, and bribing politicians to pass laws. It has worked like magic. Compare life today with that of the Middle Ages. It is the result of people chasing money like crazies. Schumpeter came from Austria, the cradle of capitalist fundamentalism, including the Austrian School of Economics, of which he was not a part, further illustrating the ubiquity of culture.

Schumpeter anxiously feared that capitalism’s successes would destroy it from within. The productivity would churn out goods for basic consumption, freeing up labour and allowing most people to enjoy a life of leisure. They would turn against the economic system that made their lives so good. He believed that democratic interventions in economic affairs would reduce personal and economic freedoms, leading to a condition close to socialism. That scenario unfolded somewhat, but most people ended up in the bullshit economy, performing non-essential activities that generate money. Schumpeter miscalculated. Don’t we all? People never have enough. They keep running after money like crazies, so creative destruction ruins any attempt to achieve a utopia, including democratic socialism.

Depending on your perspective, the worst or best is yet to come. The money now goes to artificial intelligence. Again, people working on it like crazies, driven by the prospect of profit. Humans are extremely inefficient. They use a lot of energy and resources, and constantly fight. We are barely intelligent, and incredibly stupid. We emerged on top in a brutal struggle for survival in nature because we can think, but biological urges drive our thinking. Replacing us with artificial intelligence would not only greatly improve efficiency but also eliminate biological urges, leaving us with pure intelligence that vastly exceeds human intelligence. What happens next remains uncertain, but humans will be at the mercy of artificial intelligence. A rational and kind AI might decide to euthanise humanity. And you can’t blame the AI if it was programmed to be rational and kind.

Bullshit economy

Today, few people produce all that we need. The remainder have found bullshit jobs in the bullshit economy. In several advanced economies, 1-3% of the population works in agriculture. Previously, it was over 90%. Those 90% produced barely enough to meet their own needs, so that ancient societies could waste only 10% on merchants, governments, and other frivolous activities, such as jesters. Now these few per cent grow the food for everyone, and more people suffer from obesity than famine, while the world’s population has increased from a few million to over eight billion. The efficiency increase is astounding. But when a few people produce all that we need, the rest of us transform energy and resources into waste and pollution by producing non-essential goods and services. These activities may appear useful because they satisfy desires.

Economists have built an entire science around doing useless things to satisfy our desires. For most of history, nearly everyone was dirt poor, and many children died of diseases, and economics explains why that is no longer the case. Economic activities generate profits for investors or serve bureaucratic aims. You can’t simply terminate these activities and expect us to do all right. The economic system comprises parts and relationships. Actions have consequences, many of which we can’t foresee. But humanity has to adopt a sustainable path and live in harmony with nature, which means reducing consumption and population growth, which means cutting the bullshit. It is hard to say precisely what the bullshit economy comprises. Economists categorise economic sectors as follows:

  • food production and the extraction of raw materials;
  • manufacturing, utilities such as electricity and water, and construction;
  • retail, healthcare, banking, education, tourism, and entertainment;
  • software, scientific research, data analytics, and consultancy.

The degree of bullshit increases from top to bottom, but scientific research can improve food production, so it is not that simple. Yet, overall, the rule applies. The same goes for the distinction between needs and desires. Psychoanalysis may seem like bullshit, but some people really need it. Still, people in the past survived without it, and poor people still have to. Psychoanalysis, however, requires little energy and resources, as you could do it sitting under a tree, nor does it generate pollution. That makes psychoanalysis a luxury we can afford. Yet, bullshit generates demand for bullshit. Smartphones and social media cause a lot of distress, so terminating them can solve a lot of psychological problems.

In current economic thinking, the debate often centres around the roles of governments and markets. Yet, governments and markets are the two main parts of the system. And framing the issue this way diverts attention from wasteful production and consumption, which, together with population levels and growth, are at the core of unsustainability. In ‘advanced’ economies, bullshit generates more than 50% of GDP, and it might be as much as 75%. And so a banker once noted,

A cyclist is a disaster for the country’s economy. He doesn’t buy cars and doesn’t borrow money to buy. He doesn’t pay for insurance policies. He doesn’t buy fuel or pay for maintenance and repairs. He doesn’t use paid parking. He doesn’t require multi-lane highways. He doesn’t get fat. Healthy people are neither needed nor beneficial for the economy. They don’t buy medicine. They don’t go to hospitals or doctors. Nothing gets added to the country’s gross domestic product. On the contrary, every new McDonald’s restaurant creates at least 30 jobs: 10 cardiologists, 10 dentists, 10 dietitians and nutritionists, and, obviously, people who work at the restaurant itself.

That is how the bullshit economy works. It is about making money, not providing needs. Returns in agriculture are meagre compared to those of tech giants. We could survive without tech giants, but not without food. And that is a most serious defect, as we waste energy and resources on non-essential items like social media while endangering the food supply. To illustrate the money-generating power of bullshit, you can compare returns on investments in the Chinese and US stock markets. If you had invested $1,000 in the MSCI China in 2011, in a real economy that produces things, you would have had $1,670 by November 2025.

Had you instead put your money in the S&P 500, in a bullshit economy of social media, lawsuits, unaffordable healthcare, Hollywood, finance, vampire capital scams, marketing and sales, you would have had $6,700. And that was the timeframe during which China caught up to, or even overtook, the United States. At least, the rich are doing fine. The latest hype is artificial intelligence. Soon, capitalists may no longer need workers. That vision of a coming capitalist paradise seems to keep the stock market going.

In the Financial Times, a fellow named Tek Parikh enthusiastically claimed that fifty years ago, the assets held by the top 500 US companies were mainly tangible, such as factories, equipment, and inventory. Today, most of their assets are intangible, including intellectual property, brand value, and marketing networks. In the US, spending on intangible assets has surpassed spending on tangible investments as a share of GDP since the late 1990s. The gap has widened ever since. These intangibles drive US productivity growth. Parikh excitedly asserts that this transformation helps explain the high concentration, exceptionalism, and bubble-like valuations in the US stock market.

Information technology unlocks value, a marketing term for marketing more senseless items or intensifying competition. Buying a widget for €10 and selling it for €20 because you own a brand generates more wealth than producing it for €8 and selling it for €10. A brand is capital that makes dirt look like gold to people willing to pay the price of gold for it, which you make them do by building a brand, so it is intangible, not a factory. Coca-Cola sells the same soda for five times the price to suckers who buy a ‘Coca-Cola feeling.’ And a brand owner can squeeze producers, make them compete to the death, so many brands do not produce their own items. They hire an advertising agency that hires a celebrity to tout the brand’s exclusiveness, and then they rake in the money. It may cost only a few euros to produce a Gucci bag that sells for €2,500.

Social networks, retail and financial services depend on physical infrastructure, such as roads and electricity grids. Without concrete, copper and fibre optics, there would be no data centres, no electricity, no internet, and no parcel deliveries. The bullshit economy still depends on physical labour and infrastructure. Yet the money is not in physical labour and infrastructure. A few mega corporations, such as NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon, reap the benefits, while nothing they do is something anyone needed fifty years ago. Bullshit is where the money is. In this sense, the US economy has become one of the most ‘advanced,’ leaving Europe to bite the dust.

And so, yet another Wall Street wiz kid developed the Degenerate Economy Index, which tracks companies enabling gambling, day trading, and memecoin speculation. By October 2025, it had returned 130% since its inception in May 2023. The index includes 13 public companies providing computing power, mobile devices, cloud services, and social networks, as well as Bitcoin. The 130% return over 18 months occurred during a period of market uncertainty, rising interest rates, the collapse of regional banks, and the flailing commercial real estate market. The money is not in food and homes but in social media and cryptocurrencies. Bullshit is where the money is.1 In recent decades, economic growth in Europe has lagged that of the United States, so that is why.

The current economic organisation squeezes producers of necessities to employ more people in the bullshit economy to make money for investors from transforming natural resources and energy into waste and pollution. Economists call it efficient and wealth creation. Genetic engineering may increase crop yields, benefiting farmers, but competition in farming keeps average returns low. The profits are for the corporations engineering the crops. In a typical bullshit economy, migrants do the hard labour at low wages, while the native population occupies itself with value-creating activities in the bullshit economy.

No limits to our desires

As an ancient Persian story goes, the inventor of chess once presented the game to the country’s ruler. The king, much impressed by the game, offered the inventor any reward he desired. If there were ever to be a top three of the stupidest promises in the history of humankind, any reward anyone wants would surely make the list. The inventor asked for a single grain of rice for the first square of the chessboard. Then two grains for the second, four for the third, and so on until the last square. The ruler, baffled by this seemingly small price, agreed. His treasurer then made the calculation and regretfully informed him that it was impossible to pay the inventor. There wasn’t enough rice in the world. The ruler then did the right thing and ordered this man executed for greed.

Humans don’t lack desires. The Bible tells that Eve and Adam wished to acquire the knowledge of the gods. And there are no limits. Otherwise, we wouldn’t live in someone’s personal fantasy world. When we have enough, we want more. It could be a larger home, a sports car, or an adventurous trip. Had that not been the case, we could have worked a few hours each day, had everything we needed, and been content with what we had. Instead of living happily in a utopian society, we work hard to turn Earth into a wasteland by converting energy and raw materials into waste and pollution until we can’t keep up, and robots and artificial intelligence will replace us.

More material wealth and new inventions haven’t made us happier, yet we still hope that they will. Between 1970 and 2024, income per person in the US rose a whopping 265%.2 Still, about 40% of Americans can’t make ends meet. Many feel more miserable than their grandparents did fifty years ago. It is also a lifestyle problem that economic growth can’t fix. What was once a luxury or didn’t even exist has now become a necessity. It is not only that. The gains mostly went into the pockets of the rich, and many poor people are hardly better off. It is not the first time that humans have sacrificed quality of life for growth.

Our distant forbears switched from hunting and gathering to growing crops and herding cattle. That dramatically increased food production. Like us today, these poor suckers thought that if they worked harder, they would have more food and their lives would be better. Yet, more children survived, and they remained on the brink of famine. Even worse, their diets became less varied, leading to poorer health. They often ate tasteless porridge, while their forebears had nuts, berries, and fruits to chew on. They lived in unhygienic settlements where they contracted more infectious diseases. They suffered more from violence as farmers had to defend their crops and animals against thieves. And so, peasants were much more miserable than hunter-gatherers who lived before them.3

Since time immemorial, most people have had barely enough. Frugality was a virtue and wastefulness a vice. Parents taught their children to be satisfied with what they had. Few scraps remained unused. When my father wished for a toy, he would take a branch from a tree and turn it into one himself, at least when he had time to play and didn’t have to do chores on the farm. He didn’t know better and was quite satisfied with whatever toy he could create from a tree branch. His mother didn’t throw away food. And if his trousers had a hole, she would mend them. They were poor, but had enough. If they needed a costly item, they saved for it. Our virtues have evolved. In a time of excessive production and consumption, restraint and patience are impediments to growth.

It is grow or die. Without growth, investors lose trust, the financial system collapses, and the economy will follow suit. The excess production needs willing consumers to gobble it up. Investors should not lose their money. To prevent this catastrophe, consumerism became the new ethic. Businesses use psychology, advertisements, and the media to convince us to indulge ourselves. It is our moral duty to buy more stuff. That is what we want to hear, so the adherents of the religion of consumerism at least do as their preachers tell them. Today, many children have mountains of toys they never play with because they spend their time on social media.

Growth, including economic growth, is exponential. Increases come on top of previous ones. It is unsustainable. Economists argue that efficiency improvements reduce resource and energy consumption, but the opposite happens due to the Jevons Paradox. Efficiency improvements make products more affordable, allowing more people to purchase them. To add insult to injury, innovation brings new products to the market. The combination of efficiency improvements, innovation, and our unlimited desires will ensure we take as much as we can until nothing is left.

An extreme case is information technology. Since the 1970s, computers have become over a million times as powerful. Their capacity and numbers grew far more, perhaps over a trillion times, so computers consume over a million times more energy and resources than they did in the 1970s. And what for? We don’t need computers. Otherwise, people in the 1960s would have died horrible deaths from a lack of information technology. Had you studied history, you could have known that countless generations have survived without it. Here is where economic growth comes from nowadays. Somehow, influencers selling us more stuff and replacing us with artificial intelligence generate a productivity miracle.

Our inner drives

Since the Industrial Revolution, schedules and appointments have determined people’s lives. We work at designated intervals. Trains must be on time. Roads must have more lanes to prevent congestion. We save time by travelling faster, eating ready-made meals, utilising cleaning services, and buying new items rather than mending them. And still we hurry because of schedules, appointments, and long working hours. As nations become ‘developed’, more people get sucked in, join the treadmill, and become cogs in a system over which we have no control but that determines our destiny.

A 2025 report from Microsoft claims that employees are experiencing an ‘infinite workday’ of constant emails, meetings and notifications. They check their emails as early as 6 AM, juggle meetings through the afternoon and stay online well into the night. According to Microsoft’s data, employees are interrupted every 2 minutes by meetings, emails, or messages, and receive an average of 117 emails and 153 Teams messages each workday. Many are feeling overwhelmed.4 Humans can’t keep up for much longer, and artificial intelligence and robots will take over, as they are more dependable and never complain. And that will turn humans into useless consumers of resources and energy.

Why can’t we work for three days or for twenty hours per week? It must be possible. What is the point of working hard to turn the planet into a wasteland and let artificial intelligence replace us? What is the point? And why the hurry? It is how the system works. Time is money, so we live by the clock. A high standard of living requires capital, thus profits for its owners. Everyone must be present during working hours. A business can only be profitable when operations run smoothly. Corporations incur losses if raw materials, workers, or repair crews arrive late. Competitors will put them out of business. That is because operations have become optimised, so a few people produce all we need, while we entertain the remainder in the bullshit economy to generate profits for investors.

We work so efficiently that a few people produce everything we need, leaving a surplus of labour needing employment. That is why many of us work in bullshit jobs, working very hard to turn resources and energy into waste and pollution. Modern societies have become complex, so bullshit jobs make economic sense. You can become an influencer or trade crypto. Free-market proponents say that the market is the ultimate judge of usefulness. That is also an opinion, and a fatal mistake. Markets have no morals, and the ethic of the merchant is no ethic at all.

The system hooks into our inner drives, most notably our natural desires for security, comfort, and status. Squirrels gather and store nuts to get them through the winter. They pile up more nuts than needed. But they aren’t nuts. You can’t be sure what the winter will bring. A few more nuts can make a difference. Yet, as the nuttery increases, the likelihood of that decreases. We save for a rainy day, retirement, or to give our children a good start. Our desire to amass assets stems from our survival instinct. As you approach your destined appointment with that scythe-wielding fellow, the urge dissipates.

As a child, I had won over a thousand marbles. My gains came at the expense of other children at school. Yet, I sought to win more. What was the point? That I had never thought about. Having more marbles was pointless, except that I could marvel at them like Scrooge McDuck could spend time looking at his money in his warehouse. I was not that different from a greedy billionaire. And unlike most people, I haven’t lost my marbles, which is not a coincidence, by the way.

We are social animals, and we compare ourselves to others. If you want to belong to a group, you often need what others have as well. If you are a fan of FC Barcelona, you buy items from the fan shop and attend football matches to fund the outrageously overpaid players with your hard-earned money. Many of us seek status. For men, status gives mating opportunities. No matter how old, annoying or ugly a billionaire may be, he attracts good-looking fashion models. Those who can afford it buy Gucci bags, Ferrari cars, and Rolex watches, only to show others that they can. It would be a waste to give money to the poor. I also didn’t hand out marbles to those who didn’t have any, because that would amount to rewarding stupidity.

A capitalist might say that it is okay to be rich as it doesn’t go at the expense of others. Only that is a lie. The rich live unsustainable lifestyles. The capitalist fairy tale tells us that we deserve a reward for our excellence in ruining the world. After all, it is hard work. And if we buy these luxuries, some of that wealth will trickle down to the children working in the sweatshops that produce them. It is an inefficient way to end poverty and requires more resources than there are. Humanity’s current lifestyle already requires more than two Earths to sustain. And if everyone lived like the affluent, 80% of the people would have to die. But humans are not creatures of logic. We are social animals who cooperate through fairy tales like capitalism.

Ideally, you can achieve a higher status by being helpful to others or contributing to society. That motivates us to help and contribute. And we are thankful to those who bring food to the table. Businesspeople pay for our groceries. You wouldn’t have anything to eat if they weren’t busy squeezing money out of something, even when we could do without it, and even if that something is slowly poisoning us. We would be starving in the capitalist economy if we didn’t make and trade all that useless stuff. And not everyone is fit to run a business. It is why we value entrepreneurs. But where does it all end?

Tell me true, tell me why, was Jesus crucified?
Was it for this that Daddy died?
Was it you? Was it me?
Did I watch too much TV?
Is that a hint of accusation in your eyes?
If it wasn’t for the Nips
Being so good at building ships
The yards would still be open on the Clyde
And it can’t be much fun for them
Beneath the rising sun
With all their kids committing suicide
What have we done?

Pink Floyd, The Post War Dream

The Japanese have worked hard to get ahead, putting the British shipyards out of business, only to see their kids committing suicide. The Chinese are following suit. Why can’t we be happy? It is not that the Japanese didn’t have enough. When you have enough, you don’t need more. Jesus said that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. The phrase ‘you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy’ appeals to our deepest fears of a dismal future in which we starve while being fed propaganda. We prefer a fatal excess of material goods to the bliss of the needy North Koreans. Somehow, we think that the choice is between capitalism and socialism. Can’t there be something better?

Modernisation

You can only say that things are heading in the wrong direction if you expect disaster or when you have a vision of how things should be. Otherwise, there is no right or wrong direction. The ecological apocalypse may kill billions, and technological development could terminate humanity, but are these terrible things? It depends on whether you think humanity is precious, which is merely an opinion. Modernisation has had its critics in the past. They weren’t that stupid, except for believing that we have a choice and can change the system. We might if we are all on the same page, but that will never happen. It is not only that we accept the bribe. We also don’t know the future.

Mahatma Gandhi believed industrialisation wouldn’t solve the problems plaguing the Indian poor. He urged Indian villagers to remain self-sufficient in food, make their clothes, and avoid the temptation of mass-produced consumption goods. When Gandhi lived, most Indians were hardly better off than their forebears had been before British colonisation. Today, poverty in India has declined dramatically. The Unabomber claimed in his manifesto that the Industrial Revolution had initiated a process that would eventually destroy humanity through technology and end freedom by forcing us to adapt to machinery.

We shouldn’t romanticise the past. Poverty has declined. Yet, the Industrial Revolution created an engine of permanent change, driven by competition, economies of scale, and innovation. We have become cogs in a system over which we have no control. Communities disappeared, giving way to societies. And the competition never ends. Humans emerged as winners in a brutal contest between species known as the struggle for survival. They then turned into the destroyers of other life on Earth.

Humans innovate faster than other species. We have eliminated the competition, taken over the planet, and completely ruined it. The remaining wildlife lives in a few reservations. Artificial intelligence will soon outcompete us, turning us into useless consumers of energy and resources. The driver of competition is trade. Without trade, two countries can’t compete, not even two villages, for that matter. The result of unchecked competition is mass destruction. The alternative could be lower-quality products and poorer service. If it is a matter of life and death, you may have to accept that. There may be ways to regulate the competition so that quality doesn’t suffer that much, but setting the right priorities begins with admitting that poverty is preferable to death by competition.

Things are getting more evil

What we see as good benefits something, and what we see as evil harms something. And intentions may also matter. So if the whale dies due to your efforts to save it, that may not be good, but stupid. So what you think is good or evil depends on what you have in mind, what you believe is beneficial and harmful, whether you believe intent matters, and what you think the consequences of choices are. That allows room for debate. Intent is an interesting issue. You can make the same choice, such as euthanasia, out of compassion, out of cruelty, or based on a principle you believe in. Consequences are an even more interesting issue. Evil intent can have favourable outcomes, while good intent can bring disaster. That has been an argument in defence of capitalism, so greed is good. One can say that communism reflects the failure of good intentions. The capitalism-socialism debate also reflects divergent views on law and morality within the Western tradition.

In the Anglo-Saxon world, with the Common Law, individuals are sovereign, and ethical philosophy is pragmatic. It means that moral rules are matters of agreement, making good and evil a matter of popular sentiment. And so, freedom is the ability to do as you please, and outcomes matter more than intent. In continental Europe, with Civil Law, the lawmaker is sovereign, thus the king or the people in a democracy, and idealism dominates ethical philosophy, most notably in Germany. It means that good and evil are absolute, freedom means liberating yourself from your lower urges, thus becoming rational and morally upright, and intent matters more than outcomes. Adam Smith was a pragmatist from Great Britain, while Karl Marx was an idealist from Germany. When, during the Cold War, the fight for capitalism and individualism turned into a moral crusade, the United States imported its idealist philosophers from Austria. An example is Von Hayek.

Adam Smith, the founder of modern capitalist thought, argued in his book ‘The Wealth of Nations’ that self-interest in a market economy promotes overall economic well-being, as ‘it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’ In other words, self-interest rather than benevolence fills our stomachs. Conversely, socialist systems, despite being invented with good intentions and a moral appeal, led to poverty and famine, so they are evil. Traditional moral systems regarded self-interest as evil and benevolence as good. Capitalism thus comes with an inversion of that morality, ultimately making greed good. It reflects pragmatic moralism rather than an idealistic or absolutist take on ethics.

Capitalism has brought prosperity to many. Yet it mostly rewards individuals for their ability to generate money by transforming natural resources and energy into waste and pollution, producing things we don’t need. Whatever intentions the greedy may have, their efforts bring about an apocalyptic catastrophe that some major religions have long predicted. We can be pragmatic and judge the greedy by the destructive outcomes of their actions. And we can be idealistic or absolutist, arguing that markets have no morals. Individual market participants may possess moral values, but markets never do. There are always people willing to do the trade. When there is demand, there will be supply. The trader’s ethic is no ethics at all. That is why money corrupts everything.

Karl Marx wrote that capital is dead labour that, like a vampire, only lives by sucking living labour. In capitalism, the dead eat the living, eventually leading to a zombie apocalypse as predicted by ancient Christian prophets. The specifics of the events do not precisely match those in the Book of Revelation, but every sizeable inheritance or successful launch of a new corporation that gets us hooked on things we don’t need is the birth of a new zombie that is sucking the life out of us.

The innovation in blood sucking never stops. Vampire capital, or private equity, is the latest brainchild of capital owners to suck more money out of us. The giants, such as Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, and the Carlyle Group, control $8 trillion in assets. Over 18,000 private funds operate in the US, mainly investing in medium-sized companies. The figure grew by more than 50% in the last five years. According to McKinsey consultants, global private equity assets reached $13 trillion in 2023.5

Here comes just one example. There are countless others. About 70% of nursing homes in the United States are for-profit. They have increasingly merged into larger chains, often owned by private equity firms. Two-thirds of the nursing homes’ cash flow comes from Medicaid. The company Manor Care had 25,000 beds and was the second-largest nursing home chain in the country by 2017. A private equity firm, The Carlyle Group, acquired it in 2007 through a leveraged buyout.

Here comes just one example. About 70% of nursing homes in the United States are for-profit. They increasingly have merged into larger chains owned by private equity firms. Two-thirds of the nursing homes’ cash flow comes from Medicaid. Manor Care had 25,000 beds and was the second-largest nursing home chain in the country by 2017. The Carlyle Group acquired it in 2007 through a leveraged buyout. Carlyle sold the land on which the nursing homes stood to a company specialising in providing real estate to healthcare providers. Carlyle pocketed the proceeds from the land sale, using them to pay off the debt incurred while acquiring Manor Care. Manor Care then had to pay rent using its Medicaid revenues, while Carlyle took the operating profits. With this rent burden, Manor Care’s margins contracted. Carlyle then insisted on cutting positions and wages.5

The quality of care deteriorated as the chain struggled financially and laid off staff. In the wake of the private equity purchase of Manor Care, nurse staffing fell, and resident deaths increased by 11%. Bills, mainly to Medicare, increased by 8%.6 Code violations soared. Lawsuits from relatives spiralled, and Manor Care went bankrupt in 2018. There was a lot of money for lawyers in it, also. There are plenty of examples. When a private equity firm acquires a doctor’s practice, it starts employing profit-boosting strategies, including surprise billing. Private equity firms remove doctors from insurers’ networks, allowing them to bill patients for far more than insurers would pay.

Pharmaceutical corporations pay doctors for prescribing their drugs. Their marketing efforts contributed to the opioid crisis in the United States. An example is Purdue Pharma, which developed, manufactured, and aggressively marketed opioids for decades, causing addiction and overdose deaths. After the settlement, the Sackler family, who had long owned the corporation, walked away with billions. Many Americans don’t trust their healthcare system, nor do they trust pharmaceutical corporations. These feelings, the COVID-19 vaccine scare and conspiracy theories led to an estimated 200,000 fatalities in the US because of not taking these vaccines.7

Big Pharma funds healthcare research, so there is reason to be distrustful. On the other hand, ‘independent research’ and ‘independent magazines’ are a business model for quacks and snake-oil salespeople, who sell alternative treatments and sensational stories. Quackery is even more lethal and driven by that same profit motive. The death toll of not taking the vaccines vastly outstrips the number of people who died from them. It is a sign of something more troubling. Money has corrupted US healthcare, along with the rest of US society, to the point that not only is trust in healthcare collapsing, but trust itself. And with good reason. Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else, while they hardly live longer than Cubans, a destitute people suffering under a failed communist experiment. And now comes the skinny. If we can only choose between communism and capitalism, it is a choice between stagnation and poverty on the one hand, or the end of humanity, driven by the pursuit of profit, efficiency measures, and innovation on the other. Maybe we can do better, but that requires a wonderful fairy tale we can believe in.

We live by stories

Most of us wouldn’t be so depraved as to do what the private equity firms do. Still, if you are rich already, how can you make money out of denying the elderly their care or defrauding unsuspecting patients? Yet, if you own 1,000 marbles, why do you want more, leaving other children with none? I was a child who amassed marbles, but the people in the vampire capital business are adults. Markets have no morals, and the merchant’s ethics are no ethics at all. There is money in it, and it is legal, so it happens. Money is our highest value, so greed is good even if it comes at the expense of the sick and the elderly. We look at the returns of our investments, not at the consequences. So, how could we have ended up here? It is the destruction of moral values. So, how could evil have overtaken us in this fashion?

The famous sociologist Max Weber called it the disenchantment of the world, a long-term trend toward secularisation and rationalisation that reduces the influence of religion, magic, superstition, and traditional authorities. With the help of natural science, capitalism has been the engine of disenchantment. It greatly increased material wealth, but it left a void because we are religious creatures. We need to believe in fairy tales and magic to function optimally as human beings. Eugene McCarraher argued that capitalism eliminates sacredness from material objects and social relationships, at the expense of our well-being, leaving us without ethics. The environmental lawyer Gus Speth once put it like so,

I used to think the top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that with 30 years of good science, we could address these problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these, we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we scientists don’t know how to do that.

He is right. Only religion can solve the issue. Jesus said that you can’t serve both God and money. The Dutch call this issue ‘the merchant and the vicar.’ You are either on the side of God or on the side of money. There is no compromise. So far, money has always won. To change our course, we need a new foundation for our culture, values, and way of life, but that requires a new world religion. Traditional peoples see nature as sacred. Likewise, we can see God’s creation as sacred. We are here to keep it rather than to destroy it. In 1854, the Native American Chief Seattle gave a speech when the US government wanted to buy their land. A redacted version of his oration became a rallying cry within the environmentalist movement. In that version, Seattle reportedly said,

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. We are part of the earth, and it is part of us. The white man does not understand our ways.

One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care.

We might understand if we knew what the white man dreams, what hopes he describes to his children on long winter nights, and what visions he burns into their minds so they will wish for tomorrow. But we are savages. The white man’s dreams remain hidden from us.

Chief Seattle and his people had lived simple lives in their own Eden. He saw that the white man was on a road to nowhere. He dreamt, not much unlike the poor sobs who invented agriculture 10,000 years ago, that if he worked hard, his life would be better. It was the fairy tale he believed in. Today, the world follows the white man’s path and many work even harder than he does. Poverty is declining worldwide, but the Earth can’t sustain our lifestyles, and artificial intelligence may soon make us obsolete, so that it will all have been for nothing. Will we ride towards our destruction, or can we be content with having enough? And how do we get there? That is not merely an economic question. It begins with the fairy tales we believe in.

Latest revision: 9 October 2026

Featured image: Bicyclists. By FaceMePLS from The Hague, The Netherlands – Buitenleven / Country Life. Wikmedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

1. Investor Insanity? The Degenerate Economy Index Up 130%. Boaz Sobrado (2025). Forbes.
2. Real gross domestic product per capita in chained 2017 dollars (A939RX0Q048SBEA). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
3. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Yuval Noah Harari (2014). Harvil Secker.
4. American workers are stuck in an ‘infinite workday,’ according to Microsoft report: ‘People are feeling very burnt out’ Sophie Caldwell (2025). CNBC.com.
5. Private equity: vampire capital. Michael Roberts blog (2024).
6. Private equity: health care’s vampire. Steffie Woolhandler, David U. Himmelstein, Elizabeth Schrier, and Hope Schwartz (2024). Statnews.com.
7. Estimated preventable COVID-19-associated deaths due to non-vaccination in the United States. National Library of Medicine. Katherine M. Jia, William P. Hanage, Marc Lipsitch, Amelia G. Johnson, Avnika B. Amin, Akilah R. Ali, Heather M. Scobie, and David L. Swerdlow.