Author: nivtric

Kombuisflat in Lewenborg.

Under the Bridge

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In 1993, I moved to Groningen and rented a small apartment at Kraaienest in Lewenborg, a multicultural neighbourhood on the outskirts of town. The quarter featured a few large apartment blocks mixed with family homes. When I told others that I lived there, some of them felt sorry for me. The area had a questionable reputation, but that was grossly exaggerated, mainly by those who didn’t live there. I had lived there for four years and never felt unsafe. But if you look for ‘Kraaienest Groningen’ in a search engine, you will find that someone died there in 2014 as a result of a ‘violent incident.’

There was drug dealing going on in the area, or so I had heard. I wandered around quite often, but never noticed it, probably because I didn’t know where to go. For the most part, it was an ordinary neighbourhood. I only knew my next-door neighbours vaguely. You could raise your children there, and there were families with children, but if you had better options, you would go somewhere else.

A group of about thirty black males with dreadlocks often hung out near the shopping mall, in what the Dutch call a coffee shop, but which was, despite the name, a place to buy and smoke cannabis. At first glance, they seemed intimidating because there were so many, but as far as I could see, they did nothing more than hang around and smoke weed. If you passed by, they were friendly. ‘Live and let live,’ was the Dutch stance on cannabis, which was officially banned, but no enforcement of that ban was the official policy of ‘tolerance’ concerning the less harmful soft drugs.

As a teenager, I had imagined there would one day be a giant Rasta party in Nijverdal, likely because the river passing through Nijverdal is named Regge, which sounds like reggae. The party would be on the banks of the river, and the Rastafari from all over the world would come to Nijverdal. In hindsight, this is a coincidence worth noting. Rasta(fari) is an Abrahamic messianic religion like Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Rastafarians see Haile Selassie I, the former Emperor of Ethiopia, as a reincarnation of Jesus. Significant dates in the Rastafarian religion are 11 September (9/11 American notation), the Ethiopian New Year and 2 November (11/2 American notation), referring to emergency services numbers of the United States and the European Union. And there, they were hanging around in droves, near my home.

I had a job and, more importantly, a place of my own, so I wasn’t very particular about the place where I lived. Life had turned for the better. It was not marvellous, but then again, not as bad as it had been for a long time. And if your life turns from miserable to not-so-great, you can be content. I went out often alone, secretly hoping for the love that might come while dancing all night to rock music,

Sometimes I feel
Like I don’t have a partner
Sometimes I feel
Like my only friend
Is the city I live in
…
I don’t ever want to feel
Like I did that day

Red Hot Chili Peppers, Under The Bridge

The day was 13 October 1989 when I left the dormitory. The city was Groningen, where I lived alone and without a partner. I started collecting Garfield comics, about a cat well-known for its fatness and cynicism. Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, was an out-of-style country guy like me who had ended up in a city without a love life. Jon Arbuckle. That was the kind of guy I could relate to. And I didn’t even have a cat.

Women have become economically independent, and men, on average, crave women more, or perhaps sex, than women desire men, so more men than women end up involuntarily single. And women can be more picky because they don’t need a man to provide for them. Feminism solved a few problems but also created new ones. And men don’t talk about their problems, so women’s issues get the most attention.

Once, I met a lady in Groningen. She had travelled a lot and seen much of the world, whereas I hadn’t. She immediately concluded, and these were her exact words, ‘I hadn’t much to offer her.’ I was a provincial, and there was no point in getting to know me. Women often had long lists of requirements a man should meet. Men also have their wishes. They want hot supermodels, even if they’re not rich or good-looking.

Some of my friends never found a wife. They would have made good husbands, better than the jerks many women select. But they weren’t particularly adventurous or glamorous. Every market has winners and losers, as does the market for spouses. Once, in a pub, an Asian woman approached me out of the blue. She asked me if I was willing to die for her. My reply was frank, ‘No.’ I wasn’t that desperate. And so, she moved on. In hindsight, the incident was yet another noteworthy coincidence.

It turned me off. What was wrong with women? Did they think that men merely exist to please them? Of course, not all women were like that, but those still on the market often were so due to their excessive requirement lists. And women had only brought me misery with nothing good to show for it. Women weren’t worth the effort. Let’s face it. I was gradually giving up on them, and apathy was setting in.

A friend from my student years came over to Groningen. We went to a pub with a dance floor. A short but muscular man suddenly demanded that I leave. He seemed angry. In hindsight, I probably hit his face with my elbow while dancing as he was close behind me, but I was unaware of that and didn’t know there was a problem. I also didn’t recognise him as the pub’s bouncer, so I continued dancing. He then gave me a terrible beating and threw me out of the pub, severely injuring me so that I couldn’t work for two weeks. I filed a report with the police. I didn’t hear from them, so after a week, I called.

The police officer responsible for the case wasn’t in, so the police asked me to call again later. That happened a few times until, after a month, I managed to get hold of him. They weren’t going to do anything. It was a low-priority matter. And he began lecturing about police priorities. Justice was served nonetheless. About six months later, a local newspaper mentioned that the police had apprehended the guy for beating up an immigrant for no reason. It became treated as a case of racism, and at the time, racism had a high priority with the police.

Princess had moved to London in the United Kingdom and came to Groningen to visit me. She came by bus to the central station. I showed her Groningen, and we went out to the pubs. We also went by train to Amsterdam. On our way back, she expressed her disappointment that we hadn’t visited the world-famous red light district, which foreigners seem to want to see for some reason. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wanted to go there. Groningen also had such an area, and the lights there were as red, so Princess didn’t have to miss out on the action. When we walked down that particular street everyone in Groningen knew about, she said, ‘Look! That hooker is cursing me because I walk here with you!’ I didn’t notice it, but that is what Princess supposedly saw.

We also visited Nijverdal. I had hoped to surprise my mother, but she wasn’t at home. From there, we went to Enschede. I showed Princess the university campus. We also went to the German border close to Enschede at Glanerbrug. At the frontier, Princess attracted the attention of some locals in a pub. When Princess went to the toilet, one of them came after her and offered her money for sex. It was at least one hundred guilders, as Princess described his offer as a pile of banknotes with a one-hundred-guilder note on top. And the guy became pushy, even though not threatening. He offered to bring us to Enschede, or wherever we wanted to go, in his car several times. We had come to Enschede by train and, from there, by bus to Glanerbrug.

Princess didn’t see any problem with stepping into his car. She was sturdy enough to handle the guy, but I smelled trouble and insisted on taking the next bus out. She was genuinely surprised. On the bus back to Enschede, she asked me, ‘Why do you allow me to chat with guys in the pubs in Groningen but don’t allow him to bring us back?’ Princess seemed to think I was possessive. I said to her, ‘He is an asshole.’ Then she suddenly turned thankful for me being protective. And it dawned upon her that the whole situation wasn’t quite right. That showed the conditions of the ghetto where she had grown up. She later married a German guy. We later changed addresses and lost contact by 1997. Around 2013, she found me on LinkedIn and contacted me again. She worked for the US Army in Germany and was still married to him. They had a son together.

In 1994, I received an invitation to a singles party on a boat in Amsterdam. They had invited me because I had put in a personal advertisement the year before. On my way there on the train, I accidentally bumped into two guys from Almelo who were also going there. Nijverdal is close to Almelo, so we came from the same region, Twente. That created a bond and a mutual understanding. The guys from Almelo were discussing the disappointment they were about to get. One of them said, ‘The great thing about these events is the anticipation.’

After a decade of disappointments, there was hardly any anticipation on my part. And the previous five years had counted as twenty. When I moved to the university campus, I was twenty but immature, like a fifteen-year-old boy. Five years later, I had grown mature like a thirty-five-year-old. The intense memories still hung over me like a shadow. A clear division had emerged between life before and life after meeting A******* in the dormitory. These were two entirely different lives. When in Enschede, I sometimes returned to the campus to take a walk in the nearby forest and think about all that had happened.

Featured image: Kombuisflat in Lewenborg. H. de Vegt (2005). CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Before the Dawn of Reality

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It was March 2018. My wife, Ingrid, woke me up in the middle of the night. She said, ‘The bathroom door is locked, and our son Rob is sleeping in his bed.’ You could only lock the door from the inside, so that was strange. The lock requires force. It couldn’t close itself by accident. Ingrid feared a burglar might be hiding inside. I took a knife from the kitchen to unlock the door. Ingrid was standing behind me, holding a heavy object to smash into the head of the burglar. Only I never believed a burglar was hiding there. I had become too accustomed to God’s pranks to consider it might be something else. The unusual had become the new normal. Even the laws of physics had gone out the window a few times. And I was right. No burglar was hiding in the bathroom. Ingrid was baffled.

It was the last seriously peculiar incident in the Decade of Strangeness. The number of unusual events that have taken place is truly remarkable. Most occurred between 2008 and 2018. After that, strange events became rare. Ingrid and Rob also noticed the spooky incidents. Whenever something mysterious happened, we hummed the theme from Midsomer Murders, a British crime drama series. It radiated an atmosphere of mystery and eeriness, much like the theme of The Twilight Zone.

Candles had popped out from their stands, travelling eye-popping distances on several occasions, leaving Ingrid with the question, ‘Are there any ghosts out there doing this?’ And so, once Ingrid decided to test the supposed spooks dwelling in our house, by saying, ‘If you are here, pull this card from the refrigerator.’ A magnet attached the card to it. And then she waited. Nothing happened. However, the next day, the card was on the ground, at a noteworthy distance. Something had shaken the refrigerator. The toothpaste on top of it had also fallen. That is no proof of ghosts, but it is a remarkable coincidence.

If something happened that defies the laws of nature and we couldn’t think of a natural explanation, or was in other ways highly peculiar, thus a noteworthy coincidence, I just put up my Sneek accent, and said, ‘Het is gewoon behekst juh.’ It’s just haunted, man. In other words, nothing to worry about. Ingrid is not a logical thinker who understands science. Otherwise, she would have shared my logical conclusion that this world is not real. But if I said that, Ingrid rolled her eyes or became angry. And so, I made these jokes, or I would say, ‘There is more between heaven and Earth, Horatio.’ Ingrid wasn’t religious, so I couldn’t bring up God either, as another logical conclusion is that Someone created us.

Before the Autumn of 2008, I didn’t take notice. Something was slightly off, but I just accepted it without questioning my worldview. There had also been incidents suggesting A******* was interfering with my life from a distance, and some of them scared me, but there were too few to become suspicious. There was no reason to suspect a connection with the other incidents either. However, the events of the Autumn of 2008 made me take notice from then on. And there was no turning back. We live in a scripted reality, and God directs the script. Related remarkable coincidences are doubly strange. Something weird happens, and then something equally strange happens with a meaningful relation to the previous peculiar event. As the following example demonstrates, we usually don’t notice. As the Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff once said, ‘You only see it once you get it.’

At the office, our team, the Green Team, worked on twelve Java services. They all had names, which were acronyms like GAS, CIQR, CBBOX or OGWS. One was named KISS, and another was named CUS, which sounds like the Dutch word for kiss. On 27 January 2025, I completed a release for CUS, and the release number became 3.45.0, which I told the other team members. Someone else then said, ‘That is strange. I just released that same version 3.45.0 for KISS.’ Releasing two services with the same release number on the same day is remarkable already. But the names of the services made the coincidence truly astounding. I alerted the other team members and stressed the amount of planning that would have gone into making this happen if it were intentional. The others didn’t appreciate it as much. And I thought, ‘Welcome to the Matrix.’ Seconds later, another team, the Yellow Team, on the opposite side of the aisle, began discussing a matrix they had built inside one of their Java services, loudly enough for me to hear.

On 1 March 2006, my father had worked for forty years for his employer, Roelofs, a road constructor. His employer threw a party for that occasion, but an exceptional snowstorm blocked the roads. Several guests were unable to attend. People slept in their cars on roads blocked by snow. As far as I know, that didn’t even happen during the epic winter of 1979 when parked cars became covered in snow, but not while driving. But it was March by then, while we had a regular winter that year. In the Netherlands, the winters are mild. In hindsight, the roadblocks happening on the same day my father had a party, as he had worked forty years for a road construction company, is a noteworthy coincidence. Only, it didn’t suggest that anything out of the ordinary was afoot.

In 2006, Ingrid went to a psychic fair. A medium asked the audience, ‘Did someone drop a plate today?’ She had dropped a plate that morning. Then the medium continued, ‘I see trains and railroads.’ We live next to the railway station. She asked, ‘Does anyone recognise this?’ Ingrid remained silent. She didn’t want to go on stage. Then the medium said something Ingrid couldn’t relate to. After that, the medium said, ‘I see a sensitive boy who could benefit from swimming.’ Ingrid believed it referred to Rob. A year later, I started swimming to cope with repetitive strain injury, and have been doing so ever since.

In 2007, Ingrid’s mother had passed away during the night. In the morning, we didn’t know that yet. I woke up Rob because he had to go to school. After that, I closed the door of his room. A few minutes later, Rob couldn’t get out. The door lock malfunctioned. It was impossible to open it. I had to use an axe to free Rob. By then, it was too late for Rob to go to school as the school bus had already left. Then the phone rang. Rob’s grandmother had passed away. And so, Rob could come with us to see her lying body.

We then had to clean up Ingrid’s mother’s apartment. We brought most of her belongings to a second-hand shop. There was a lot of stuff, including a doll that had always been on her bed. A few months later, Ingrid returned to her mother’s apartment to fetch the mail of her late mother. A new tenant had moved in. That same doll, wearing the same clothes, sat on the bed in her mother’s bedroom again. A decade later, Ingrid returned, and the same woman still lived there, so Ingrid discussed the doll with her. And then the truth came out. It was not the same doll, but another one of the same type.

On 1 January 2008, an epic fog covered the Netherlands. It was the densest fog ever seen, enhanced by powder fumes from the fireworks. Car drivers couldn’t see the road before them. Pedestrians walked in front of cars to point the way. We were staying with my brother-in-law to celebrate the New Year. I didn’t dare drive back home, so we walked. At the end of 1988, I had walked through a dense fog, thinking it resembled the future’s visibility as I planned to look for a room in 1989. That was the year A******* crossed my path. That visibility of the future was similar in 2008, even though it didn’t cross my mind at the time, and A******* would again have something to do with it.

In January 2008, the lottery jackpots of the two major Dutch lotteries fell in my hometown of Sneek within two days.1 It is a small town, so it is not so likely to occur, but also not so unlikely that you would call it a miracle. But what was about to happen to me that year was a statistical miracle, probably less likely than winning the lottery jackpot twice.

In the summer of 2008, a good-looking woman sat by the side of the swimming pool. She was watching me. The following week, she was there again, watching me. It had been quite a while since a good-looking woman had shown interest in me. That gave me the good feeling of still being attractive, but I kept a distance. It went on for a few months. I wasn’t willing to cheat on Ingrid. And I had a family and a responsibility. It couldn’t go on, so one day, I walked out when she came in. She understood the hint and didn’t return. I then realised I would never become unfaithful to Ingrid. That was just weeks before I learned about my True Love, and also about my primary responsibility. Things were about to go wild.

She says, ‘Ooh, my storybook lover
You have underestimated my power, as you shortly will discover’

Paul Simon, She Moves On

Featured image: dense fog, somewhere in the Netherlands on 1 January 2008

1. Jackpot valt weer in geluksstad Sneek. Leeuwarder Courant (11 January 2008).

Doomsday Machine

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Forces of nature

How did we get where we are today? Nature’s driving forces are competition and cooperation. This perspective provides a great deal of insight into what happened. Plants and animals cooperate and compete for resources. Cooperation and competition are everywhere. Cooperation increases the available resources. Plants generate the oxygen animals need, while animals produce the carbon dioxide plants need. Still, the available resources are limited. There is only room for one tree on that spot. And so, there is a competition called the struggle for life, where the fittest survive.

Plants and animals are opportunistic, taking advantage of opportunities whenever possible, with the help of both competition and cooperation. Plants and animals have a blueprint, their genes. These genes have the urge to make copies of themselves. It is why we exist and the basis of our will to live and our sexual desires. And so, the biological purpose of plants and animals, including humans, is to spread their genes. That is indeed a most peculiar purpose. The copying of genes is prone to errors. And so changes occur, resulting in variation within species. It is why people vary in appearance and character.

Some changes make individual plants and animals better adapted to their environment, thereby increasing their chances of survival and reproduction, resulting in a rising number of individuals with these features. Environments allow for several species to coexist, most notably when they don’t compete for the same resources. It is why ants and monkeys can live in the same area. The balance in nature is always precarious, as changes in circumstances can favour different species. And so, introducing foreign species in places where they have no natural predators can lead to pests.

Like other social animals, humans operate in groups. Social animals benefit from group cooperation, which enhances their chances of survival. Within the group, competition can arise, resulting in rankings and struggles among members. Cooperating in groups also helps us to compete with other groups, usually in warfare. And groups can form coalitions to compete with coalitions of different groups. Stories enable humans to work together in groups of any size, which then further increases the competition between these groups.

Meet our closest relatives

Chimpanzees are our closest kin. Studying these apes provides us with insights into our nature. Chimpanzees live in small troops of a few dozen individuals. They form friendships, work with reliable group members, and avoid those who are unreliable. Chimpanzees have rules, may cheat on them, and can feel guilty when they do. Within the group, the members have ranks. When there is food available, the highest-status animals eat first. Ranks and rules regulate competition within the troop, reducing conflicts and enabling its members to collaborate more effectively.

Like human leaders, chimpanzee alpha males acquire their status by building coalitions and gaining support. Others show their submission to the alpha male. Like a government, the alpha male strives to maintain social harmony within his group. He takes sought-after pieces of food like a government collects taxes. Within a chimpanzee band, there are subgroups and coalitions. There are close friendships and more distant relationships. They unite as a single fighting force in the event of an external threat.

Coalition members in a chimpanzee band build and maintain close ties through intimate daily contact such as hugging and kissing, and doing each other favours. For the band to function effectively, its members must be aware of what others will do in critical situations. For that, they need to know each other through personal experiences. Unlike humans, chimpanzees have no language to share social information. That limits the size of the group in which chimpanzees can live and work together to about thirty individuals.

Chimpanzees also commit violence in groups. Like humans, they are among the species that commit genocide on their congeners. Humans and chimpanzees are not alone in this. Chickens are known to fight racial wars when they face a lack of food. Groups of chickens may start to kill those with different colours from themselves. And so, racism could be a natural behaviour caused by competition between genes.

The human advantage

Humans have become the dominant species on Earth. We can collaborate flexibly in large numbers. We have mastered fire, which enhances our power and allows us to eat foods we couldn’t otherwise. It allowed us to become the top predator. We use tools and clothing, allowing us to do things other animals can’t and live in inhospitable environments. Compared to other animals, humans employ a rich language. That enables us to express countless meanings and describe situations in precise terms.

We pass on social information, such as who is fit for a particular job. We get information about others in our group without needing personal experience. If someone cheats, you don’t need to learn it the hard way like chimpanzees must, but someone can tell you. That allows us to cooperate more effectively. Most human communication is social information or gossip. We need the group to survive, so we must understand what is happening within our group and the decisions our group needs to make.

Human politics is about cooperating and competing. We must agree on what we should do as a group and on how we divide the spoils of our cooperation. Within the group, we may compete to cooperate. Leadership contests benefit the group when the outcome is better leadership. That isn’t always the case, and infighting can weaken the group. We also cooperate to compete. We organise ourselves in groups to compete with other groups, such as defeating them in warfare.

Early humans lived in bands of up to 150 individuals. The number of individuals with whom we can closely collaborate is one of our natural limitations. We overcame the limit of our natural group size by cooperating based on shared imaginings, such as religions, laws, money, and nation-states. That competitive advantage over other species allowed us to take over this planet and become the ‘killer bug’ that has completely upended nature and has terminated more species than any other species.

Unlike other animals and plants, which adapt to their environment, we have altered our environment to suit us. We have created societies and civilisations and have become immensely powerful collectives to compete with other collectives. However, our civilisations also shield us from the forces of nature, turning us into weak individuals. We have become integrated into the system, and many of us won’t survive a collapse of civilisation. It is crucial to understand that competition drives this process.

We imagine corporations, laws, money, and nation-states. We believe a law exists, and that is why the law works. It is also why religion works. These shared imaginations allow us to cooperate on any scale for any purpose. We are programmable, with our brains serving as the hardware and our imaginations serving as the software. And we can change the software overnight. During the French Revolution, the French stopped believing in the divine right of kings overnight and began to envision the sovereignty of the people.

Organising to compete

The forces of competition and population density drove humans to organise. There is a competition between groups of humans. Just as there is a competition between species in nature, there is also a competition between human groups. Groups that succeeded in adapting to new circumstances survived those that did not. We are rule-following animals. Once we start to cooperate on a larger scale, we need political institutions that embody the rules of a community or society.

Humans design political institutions while genetic mutations emerge by chance. Still, competition determines which designs survive and become copied. In general, under the pressure of competition, which mainly was warfare, human organisation advanced from bands to tribes to feudalism to states. The experts deem this explanation simplistic and flawed. Still, overall, that trend towards more advanced organisation occurred.

Hunter-gatherers lived in family groups of a few dozen individuals. They had few violent conflicts, probably because they had no property, and population density was low. Hunter-gatherers could move on if a stronger band invaded their territory. Small groups were egalitarian. They often had no permanent leader or hierarchy and decided on their leaders based on group consensus.

The Agricultural Revolution changed that. Farming allows more people to survive. Farmers invest heavily in their cattle and crops, so agricultural societies need property rights and defence forces. Agriculture promoted the transition from bands to tribes. Population density increased, leading to more frequent violent conflicts among people. Tribes are much larger than bands and can muster more men for war, so tribes replaced bands.

Tribes were usually egalitarian, but a separate warrior caste often emerged. The most basic form of political organisation was the lord and his armed vassals, known as feudalism. The lord and his vassals exchange favours. The loyalty of the vassals is crucial, and politics is about these loyalties and betrayals. Tribalism centres around kinship, but also includes feudalist, personal relationships of mutual reciprocity and personal ties.

States yield more power than tribes because they force people to cooperate, while tribes work with voluntary arrangements. As population density increased and people lived closer to each other, the need to regulate conflicts also grew, so some states also provided justice services. Leaders, with their family and friends, led these states. They worked with personal, feudal relationships, thus making deals and returning favours. And so, the transition from tribes to feudalism to states is not a straightforward process.

The first modern, rationally organised states with professional bureaucracies based on merit rather than personal relationships and favours appeared in China. The reason was a centuries-long cut-throat competition of warfare on an unprecedented scale, with states having armies of up to 500,000 men, in the period now known as the Warring States Era. Fielding these armies required professional tax collection, with records of people and their possessions, as well as the provisioning of soldiers in the field.

Once the state of Qin emerged victorious by 200 BC, China became unified, and the competition between the states ended, and China’s modernisation ground to a halt. Even so, China adhered to modern bureaucratic principles and remained the most modern state for 2,000 years, enabling its rulers to govern a vast empire. States remained the most competitive organisational form until Europeans invented capitalism and corporations, which would cause a radical new dynamic of permanent change driven by competition.

Capitalism and corporations

China had a strong centralised state that prevented the merchants from becoming the dominant force in society. In the Middle Ages, Europe had no strong states, so capitalism could gradually emerge in Europe. The rise of merchants and later corporations brought a new economic dynamic and wealth. Corporations are legal entities serving a specific purpose. Invented in Roman times, they included the state, municipalities, political groups, and guilds of artisans or traders.

From the Middle Ages onward, Europeans introduced commercial corporations with shares and stock markets such as the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC). The advent of corporations triggered a new phase in the competitive cycle, further increasing efficiency by specialising in specific tasks. The Europeans combined their entrepreneurship with inquisitiveness, so eventually the profit motive began to drive innovations as well.

The new dynamic intensified competition and innovation, causing permanent economic growth and disruptive change, a process that economists call creative destruction. Capitalism increases available resources via cooperation or the division of labour, but competition is the driving force. As long as that remains so, competition rather than our desires determines what our future will look like.

Currently, China may have the most competitive socio-economic model, potentially outcompeting those of the West. But it will not end well for them either. Artificial intelligence may soon outcompete humans. It may become a ‘killer bug’ that ends humanity. We can’t keep up with artificial intelligence. The future doesn’t need us. We aren’t sufficiently efficient and innovative. Competition is our first and foremost problem. It is our doomsday machine. Competition, insofar as we allow it, should be at the service of cooperation rather than the opposite. If we don’t do that, we are doomed.

Featured image: Tower of Babel by The Tower of Babel (1569). Public Domain.

College Noetsele

Secondary School

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Nijverdal had a secondary school, Noetsele College. It was a Protestant comprehensive school with 1,500 pupils. It was near my friend Marc’s home. The building impressed me. It was huge and three storeys high. Okay, this was Nijverdal, not Tokyo, remember that. It was one of the most extensive buildings in Nijverdal. My primary school had only 200 pupils and one floor. My mother once told me we had passed by that building bicycling, and I said decisively, ‘I want to go to this school.’ It was close to home, and perhaps I feared she would send me to Pope Pius X College in Almelo, a similar Catholic school where many Roman Catholics sent their children. That was eighteen kilometres from home, which meant bicycling that distance twice a day for years, no matter the weather.

In contrast to the liberal, loose, and left-leaning primary school, this school was right-leaning, disciplined, and conservative. Conservative Protestants had a significant influence. Nearby Nijverdal was Rijssen, a conservative Protestant village without a comprehensive secondary school. People from Rijssen thus sent their children to Nijverdal. About Rijssen, people said there were twenty-two different churches because of the various types of Protestantism that disagreed on a particular matter. Television was a device of Satan for many of them, so they didn’t have one or hid it in a sealable closet so the neighbours and the preacher couldn’t see it.

When we visited my grandparents on Sundays, we saw them attending church, the black-stockinged Protestants. The women wore hats. They didn’t observe the traffic, so my father had to stop the car when they crossed the street. Someone later told me that if they died in an accident, they considered it God’s will. To these conservative Protestants, Roman Catholics like me weren’t real Christians but idol worshippers of the Virgin Mary. Our days at school started with a lecture from the Bible and ended with prayer. Nijverdal was predominantly Protestant, but there were also Roman Catholics.

I did fit in much better there, so my former classmates didn’t give me a hero’s welcome at the secondary school reunion. Marc was my classmate during the first year, so I still had a friend. In the second year, they reshuffled the groups, and I ended up in a different group with a great atmosphere. That group included a few classmates from primary school, but Marc was no longer in it. On Ascension Day, we went out bicycling. We started early, at six AM. It was a local tradition in Twente called dew kicking. A few classmates, including me, continue that tradition to this day. After that, no major reshuffling of the classes occurred. I had a good time and hardly went out alone during breaks.

Instead of Marc, Patrick P. became my mate. He sat beside me. I knew him from primary school. He was a lively character with a vivid imagination, albeit a bit over the top. He made drawings of our business accounting teacher, Mr B*****, in various Superman outfits and then prodded me during the lessons to attract attention, ‘Look… look… SuperB*****.’ He had a small studio in an attic above a garage, where he could be a disc jockey. Patrick hoped to become a celebrity one day, which indeed happened, as he was on television and radio several times, even though not as a disc jockey, but as a traffic expert.

It was not all calm and peaceful. For all those six years, my math teacher was Mr. B****. We initially had a problematic relationship. When Mr. B**** entered the classroom the first time, I said sarcastically to Marc, who sat beside me, ‘Is he our mathematics teacher?’ Mr. B**** had an insignificant stature and a remarkable face. He had heard it, and ordered me to his desk, noted my name, and promised to ‘polish the sharp edges of my personality.’ To his very personal taste, I was a bit too feisty, so from then on, Mr. Blaak frequently punished me for insignificant offences everyone else got away with.

Nearly every week, I had to stay an extra hour, which was more time than all my classmates combined. I worked hard and had good grades. Still, Mr. B**** tried to catch me for not doing my homework. He meticulously inspected my notebook a few times. It was pointless. I always did my homework, and did it all. At some point, after being punished again for something everyone else got away with, I couldn’t take it anymore, and went into tears. That was nearly two years later. Mr. B**** had gone too far, and he knew. He stopped punishing me, but I didn’t stop making jokes about him. Once, I let my notebook go around the class with a fill-in exercise, allowing my classmates to use their imagination on ‘Mr. B**** is a … because he … while he ….’ My classmates came up with over twenty suggestions, some of which were rancid.

Once they were sixteen, many youngsters went to a bar named Lucky in Rijssen. I didn’t go at first. I lived on the road to Rijssen, so those who came from Nijverdal to visit Lucky passed by my home. One Saturday evening, a few classmates rang the bell at nine PM. They wanted me to go with them. Being already in my pyjamas, I put on my clothes and went to a bar for the first time. Going to bars and discotheques became a habit. I could dance, chat with friends, and hope for love to come. The encounters in Lucky were sometimes a bit physical. Some girls pulled me over to get a kiss. Others pinched me in the butt when I passed by. If I looked back to see who did it, these girls were grinning and pointing at each other. It always happened in the same spots. You could count on it. One of my friends later told me he had the same experience.

I became a member of the School Council, which advised the school board on some matters of lesser importance. This council comprised board members, teachers, parents, and three pupils. It wasn’t a popular job, so after showing a slight interest, I found myself a member. There, I witnessed firsthand how bureaucrats keep themselves busy at work. The school had a Financial Commission, which had overstepped its bounds by entering the domain of the Cultural Council. I don’t remember what the Financial Commission did wrong, but it caused a fuss. The discussions then focused on whether that had been inappropriate, thus a transgression, or inelegant, and therefore merely a matter of taste. It dragged on for several meetings because the head of the Financial Commission was also a member of the School Council. A member of the Cultural Council accused the Financial Commission of appropriating too much power and acting like the famous authoritarian French king Louis XIV, thereby creating, and these were his exact words, a ‘L’etat c’est moi’ situation, referring to something Louis XIV supposedly had said to stress that only he made the decisions. Louis XIV claimed to have the divine right of kings, thus unlimited authority, because God had appointed him.

Featured image: College Noetsele by Historische Kring Hellendoorn-Nijverdal, from MijnStadMijnDorp, CC-BY 4.0

The Twilight That Could Be Dawn

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The sudden collapse of liberalism

In 2016, Trump supporters overran the GodlikeProductions.com message board. The atmosphere turned grim, much as it had fifteen years earlier, when Fortuyn supporters overran the Iex.nl message board. Since then, the new fascism has grown stronger. This time, I didn’t run away as I had missed out on something important. And given the job that may lie ahead, and me supposedly being Adolf Hitler reincarnate, not understanding fascism is no excuse. It is an exaggeration to say that Jews run the United States, but to say that they don’t is naive. And so, I kept visiting the message board and familiarised myself with the MAGA movement, like I previously did with Muslims. But I have never seen this level of bullshit. The first Trump administration was not a clean break with the past, as his cabinet included Republican establishment figures. They kept The Donald in check.

The second Trump administration was a different ballgame. Trump had surrounded himself with sycophants and went unhinged. Because there is no limit to Trump’s ego, and his being erratic and spiteful, it became a spectacle, so hilarious that even Monty Python couldn’t have made it up, with Trump naming building after building after himself, making his birthday a public holiday and countless similar self-aggrandising acts. And let’s not forget his self-enrichment and that of his family members by abusing his office, his mass-pardoning of criminals and his divisive Christmas messages. If Hunter Biden should be in prison, much of the Trump family must also be. I have seen lunatics on the left as extreme as MAGA, but they don’t run the United States. Knowing it is a script, I could laugh about it. Otherwise, I might have feared the worst. Others probably did, judging by the surging prices of gold and silver.

We have seen the collapse of liberalism. Things will not return to what they were before. The liberal world has ended, and forever. The liberal fairy tale has long been successful. Liberal states have been the strongest because of capitalism and science. Americans may think their nation is a Christian nation, but its constitution is liberal. Liberalism is as much a part of the Western heritage as Christianity. Science and capitalism thrived most in a liberal environment with freedom of expression and property rights. When the Nazis took over Germany, several Jewish German scientists fled to the United States, including a fellow named Einstein. They helped the United States develop the atomic bomb. And then Adolf Hitler made the error of attacking the Soviet Union. That is how liberalism won the day. When the Soviet Union collapsed, liberalism seemed to have won.

And so, complacency set in. High on delusion and lured by the prospect of profits for the businesses they represented, the neoconservatives, who were a breed of conservatives that had adopted Hegelian dialectic, much to the horror of true conservatives, believed that Western culture is so superior that after toppling the regime in Iraq, a liberal democracy would magically appear. Since then, China has revised its economic model and now outcompetes the West, while mass migration of non-Westerners has eroded the West’s liberal foundations. Most Muslims, Africans, and Eastern Europeans have little interest in LGBTQ rights or women’s rights, in the liberal sense that is. They have had no upbringing in a tradition of progress rooted in the Hegelian dialectic. Westerners can already notice that in inner cities. Liberalism is yet another fairy tale. It has just collapsed in front of us quite suddenly, even to my surprise, but liberals have yet to catch on. It seems that the time is drawing close. It may be the end of Hegel’s ride, so it will either be the collapse of Western civilisation or the completion of our journey to Paradise.

Peak Bullshit

MAGA could be Peak Bullshit, the era where nonsense can’t reach higher levels, as I surmised two decades earlier, after seeing misinformation spread on the Internet. In retrospect, it was a prophetic thought. After peak bullshit, things may collapse, and The Truth may come out. But why did the rise of MAGA nonetheless surprise me? Something similar had already happened in the Netherlands fifteen years earlier with the rise of the populist politician Pim Fortuyn. Only, the level of nonsense was much lower. For over two decades, I believed that the US dollar-based financial system would break down at some point, but when that collapse seemed to start, I had trouble believing it. I could be the messiah, but that is even more unbelievable.

And I am also biased. We all have a model of reality that gives sense to the world. We use it to explain things. Liberalism and fascism are both models of reality with merits and limitations. Christianity is high on bullshit as well, but there is an underlying truth, and Jesus had reasons to believe he was the Son of God. We all cling to our worldviews, but we deal with contradictions differently. Peak Bullshit came with the following symptoms:

  • Outright fabrications: many claims were simply bogus, so untrue. But they riled up people nonetheless. Anti-vaccine posts were usually of that nature.
  • Improper sourcing: a Twitter account claims something has happened, but there is no other evidence. You have to trust the gutter on that one.
  • Hyping incidents: if a black guy molests a white guy or rapes a white woman, the fascists claim it is evidence of white genocide.
  • Distorting the truth: if you get access to the same news from regular sources, you find that the reporting of the alt-right paints a caricature of reality.
  • Finally, there are definitely things that the traditional media do not report on, and are worth knowing. You can think of what preceded the war in Ukraine.

The left uses similar tactics. MAGA is just much better at it. The left hyped violent incidents committed by neo-Nazis. A most excellent example of nonsense from the left is Black Lives Matter, which made an issue out of the police violence against blacks. The incidents that inspired the movement were acts of police brutality with fatal consequences, and some of them might be murder. Racism may have played a role, but there is no proof. Compared to European police forces, American police make a high number of casualties, and not only blacks. And compared to Europeans, Americans accept a high level of lethal violence. You can get away with shooting a cleaning lady who tries to open the wrong door. In the Netherlands, that would be murder. And if you take violent crime levels into account, you get an entirely different picture. Blacks are three times as likely to be killed by the police, but eight times as likely to be a murder suspect.

So, relative to the number of murders they commit, the police killed fewer blacks. It would be fairer to say the opposite was true than what Black Lives Matter told us. And defund the police? Let violent gangs take over? Black Lives Matter was also high on bullshit. They used incidents to paint a caricature of reality. If you want to know why people went MAGA, here is one reason. I don’t doubt that there is widespread racism and that blacks are wronged. But is violent crime among blacks not a far greater problem than police brutality? And is it not that, whatever society does wrong, positive change begins with you? So, do you want to be good at sports, or do you want to become an engineer? Solving these issues requires a different approach than painting caricatures. And that is what MAGA is also about. But MAGA is the end of the line. You can’t go further down that road.

It was hard for me to grasp that people believe things that are easily disproved. But the proof is everywhere around me. And it happens to me as well. I found Black Lives Matter a noble cause until I found out about the violent crime levels among blacks that the liberal media didn’t mention. And there we arrive at the issue of conservatives distrusting the liberal mainstream press. Liberal media may not lie as much as fascist media, but they forget to mention crucial facts, which can be as bad. Often, more is afoot than you can prove, and some conspiracy theories point to these issues. They reflect gut feelings. Your gut feelings, however, are a survival mechanism, not a fact-finding instrument. If you suspect that someone is planning to murder you, waiting for proof can be fatal. So, shoot first and ask questions later. Yet, basing your actions on feelings while ignoring the facts is also dangerous. We live by stories that give meaning to the world. It is our nature to accept the errors and falsehoods in our worldviews.

Hence, dismissing the MAGA people as stupid or evil is a mistake. The Netherlands had once experienced a large-scale benefits fraud, with most culprits coming from a particular ethnic group. The United States also had one. Only, you can’t trust the reporting in the US because the issue is heavily politicised, while that was less so in the Netherlands. Giving in to popular sentiment created a greater disaster later on. The Netherlands is still dealing with the fallout from a fraud-prevention campaign gone wild, and paying reparations to people treated as fraudsters without proof. A conservative politician’s relentless efforts helped uncover the latter scandal. At the same time, the government tried everything to cover it up, including blacking out pages that it was required to hand over. Moral integrity mattered more to him than political gain. Such politicians are a rare breed, also in the Netherlands. Other politicians schemed to get rid of him by giving a ‘position elsewhere’ a note accidentally photographed by a journalist revealed. He came from the region I came from and lived at striking distance of my birthplace.

In a world ruled by money, fraud and corruption are everywhere, but if immigrants do it, we are more alarmed because ‘they’ are robbing ‘us’. It is only natural to feel this way. We are group animals. And so you have to be serious about fascism. Otherwise, things only get worse. The truth is often disagreeable. You hope that it isn’t so, unless you are a jerk. Those who abuse a system may feel no connection to the society they live in. They may have their reasons, but a society has its reasons to expel them. We can only address these issues if we are candid, and if needed, politically incorrect and as sharp as a knife, but that also means fairness and painting a truthful picture.

For the job that may await me, I needed answers. So, let’s start with a warning. It is the truth as I see it. I try to have a fair and balanced view, but above all, an insightful one. And it is my personal view, so definitely not neutral. But if I am the messiah, it might be the truth you should accept. The truth has many sides. Different views highlight different aspects of it. If you are a liberal, taking the perspective of a conservative opens up a different world with things you weren’t aware of, but are nonetheless true. The same is true if you are a conservative and adopt a liberal perspective. But I fear it is impossible to become good at it if you haven’t been both, and don’t consider your former views a folly.

That happened to me. I adopted the Hegelian dialectic to deal with the contradictions. There is an underlying truth. There are fundamental disagreements about direction, leading to an authority crisis and a moral crisis that divide societies. Think of it. An Antifa activist is as concerned about the future as a neo-Nazi. Authority and morality come from the stories we believe in. The United States has a moral corruption issue that gave rise to MAGA. Most Americans are normal people who have jobs, obey the law and pay taxes. They think what they do is right. Yet, Americans live in a tradition of pragmatism while Europe has a tradition of idealism, and that is a profound difference.

As Judgement Day seems to be approaching. The International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands, where I live. The Hegelian dialectic has progressed the furthest here on issues like dealing with the planetary boundaries, LGBTQ rights, animal rights, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life. That is no coincidence, either. The Netherlands has its own issues. There is a crisis of authority with rioters attacking police, firefighters, and ambulance crews with fireworks during the New Year’s celebrations. They are people who shit on authority. Some are immigrant youngsters, some are soccer hooligans, but most are neither. Liberalism is at the end of the line as well. If I sound judgmental, that is because I must, not because I like to. Try to view it as a problem description rather than a moral judgment. If it seems otherwise, remember that I am a systems engineer appointed to fix the biggest clusterfuck in the history of humankind.

For most ordinary people, the most brutal truth may be that if you work hard to get ahead, you may live at the expense of the planet, other people and future generations by taking more than you need. So, there you are: hard-working, obeying the law, paying taxes, raising your children properly, giving money to charities, perhaps even being faithful to your spouse, only to find out that your hard work and consumption ruin the planet. And that affects both liberals and conservatives. It is hard to stomach. But if we intend to march towards God’s Paradise, we must accept the whole truth and spare no one. Coming from a family of farmers, I am not afraid of shit. If necessary, I grab it with both hands. These are shitty issues, and you can’t fix them unless you get your hands dirty. Some of the most profound truths are hidden at the bottom of a manure pit.

Featured image: AI-generated

Latest revision: 5 January 2026