Under the Bridge

22 Aug 202515 Apr 2026 nivtricLeave a comment

In 1993, I moved to Groningen and rented a small apartment in Kraaienest, Lewenborg, a multicultural neighbourhood on the outskirts of town. Bus line 3 brought you there from the central station, which featured a statue of a horse named ‘Peerd from Ome Loeks’ and was opposite a colourful construct named Groninger Museum, designed by a famous architect. Also making up the local skyline were office buildings of the national telecom provider KPN. As for the central station, I was there often, as the train was my way of getting somewhere else. There, I once witnessed a dove challenging a bus by not flying or walking away as the bus was about to run over it. I saw and heard the dove get flattened with a juicy plash. Doves are pretty dumb, my father explained. Their nests consist of a few loose twigs that can barely hold the eggs. A little bit of wind, and the eggs or chicks fall on the ground. Despite all that, there are plenty of doves.

The Lewenborg quarter featured apartment blocks mixed with family homes. When telling my colleagues at work that I lived there, they felt sorry for me. ‘You live in Lewenborg. Oh… poor thing.’ It was not particularly upscale, indeed. Lewenborg had a questionable reputation, but that was grossly exaggerated. Those who didn’t live there didn’t know what life was like there. I had lived there for four years and never felt unsafe. Yet, if you look for ‘Kraaienest Groningen’ in a search engine, you may find that someone died there in 2014 as a result of a violent incident of a rather particular nature. There was drug dealing going on in the area, or so I had heard. I often wandered around, but never noticed it, probably because I didn’t know where to go. Likely, it was inside a home, and not on the street.

It was an ordinary neighbourhood. There were families with children, but if you had better options, you might go somewhere else. There was a shopping mall nearby, and in the first years I had to hurry to get my groceries in time, as the shops closed at 6 PM. I only knew my next-door neighbours vaguely. Next to me lived an elderly couple who had retired and sold their home. They had a German Shepherd dog that could make a lot of noise and did so regularly. I visited them a few times. On the other side lived a good-looking lady my age, but she showed no interest in me. She soon had a fancy man, or may already have had him. He must have seen my name tag, because at some point he accosted me, asking about my father, his employer, and his job.

And so, I told him that my father was a board member at a road construction company called Roelofs. It turned out that his father was also a board member of Roelofs and held a higher rank than my father, which he was rather keen to point out to me. That is also why my last name had attracted his attention. In hindsight, it was a noteworthy coincidence as Roelofs didn’t have that many board members. As the bedrooms were adjacent, I once overheard the couple having steamy sex. After some time, she moved out to live with him, but not much later, she returned to the Kraaienest and took another apartment. The neighbour who lived opposite me seemed to want to befriend me first. She had been ensnared in an American multi-tier marketing scheme selling ‘environmentally friendly’ cleaning products to enrich those at the top of the pyramid. She viewed me as a sales prospect. After hearing out her sales presentation, I bought something out of politeness.

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. I suspect their hanging around contributed to the neighbourhood’s bad reputation because there wasn’t much else going on. 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 soft drugs. For those who think that hard drugs might be for sale there, too. I have never seen anything suggesting it or overheard anyone saying it. And I didn’t go inside to check out.

As a teenager, I had imagined there would one day be a giant Rastafari 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. Rastafari 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), which correspond to emergency services numbers in the United States and the European Union. And there, they were hanging around in droves, near my home.

Life had turned for the better. I had a job and, more importantly, a place of my own. It was not marvellous, but not as bad as it had been. And if your life turns from miserable to not-so-great, you can be content. Your well-being greatly depends on things exceeding expectations, making me appreciate Garfield’s ‘If you don’t succeed, lower your standards’ quote. I went out often alone, hoping for the love that might come while dancing all night to rock music. Yet, the past still cast a dark shadow over the present,

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

That 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. Garfield is a cat well-known for its fatness and cynicism. Garfield’s owner, Jon Arbuckle, could make cynical remarks about Garfield’s figure or laziness, which Garfield would then counter with even more cynical remarks on Arbuckle’s conduct or success in life. 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 anymore. This problem didn’t exist in the past because men were the providers and women had fewer rights. Feminism solved a few problems but also created new ones, and this problem might have remained under the radar. 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. I agreed. There was no point in getting to know her. Her attitude was like,

I’ve known a few guys who thought they were pretty smart
But you’ve got being right down to an art
You think you’re a genius, you drive me up the wall
You’re a regular original, a know-it-all

Oh-oh, you think you’re special
Oh-oh, you think you’re something else
Okay, so you’re a rocket scientist

That don’t impress me much

…

Okay, so what do you think, you’re Elvis or something?
Whatever
That don’t impress me

Shania Twain, That don’t impress me much

And who do you think you are? Can you stop time? You can’t even handle the English language correctly. ‘That don’t impress me much.’ Women 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, but they are more likely to compromise on their demands. Yet, with men and women being like that, hookers have a lot of business. Prostitution is the oldest profession for good reason. I never considered visiting a prostitute. It would have been a disappointment anyhow, or so I figured.

Some of my friends never found a wife. They would have made good husbands, much better than the jerks many women select. My friends 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 and prompt: ‘No.’ I wasn’t that desperate. And so, she moved on. In hindsight, the incident was yet another noteworthy coincidence. What was wrong with women? Did they think that men merely exist to please them? Not all women were like that, but those still on the market often were. And women had only brought me misery with nothing good to show for it. Women weren’t worth the effort, so apathy was setting in. Not that I entirely gave up trying.

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, since he was close behind me, but I was unaware of it and didn’t realise 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 on another day. 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.

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 near 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 drive us to Enschede or wherever we wanted to go 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 reached out to 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.

Latest revision: 9 April 2026

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

Before the Dawn of Reality

25 Jul 202518 Apr 2026 nivtricLeave a comment

It was March 2018 when my wife, Ingrid, woke me up in the middle of the night, saying, ‘Wake up. The bathroom door is locked, and our son Rob is sleeping in his bed.’ You could only lock the door from the inside. The lock requires force. It couldn’t close itself by accident. How can that be? Ingrid feared that 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, the so-called Bobby beater, a pounder from a pharmacy, to smash into the head of the burglar. She originally had kept it to use it on a Romanian guy named Bobby in case he caused trouble, hence the name. Only, I never believed that a burglar was hiding inside. I had become too accustomed to God’s pranks to consider that it might be something else. The unusual had become normal. Even the laws of physics had gone out the window a few times. Indeed, no burglar was hiding in the bathroom. Ingrid was baffled.

It was the last seriously peculiar incident ending the Decade of Strangeness. Remarkable coincidences continued to occur from time to time, but the laws of nature remained intact, so that was at least something. The number of unusual events that have taken place is truly remarkable. Most occurred between 2008 and 2018. Ingrid and Rob also noticed the spooky incidents. When something mysterious happened, we hummed the theme from Midsomer Murders, a British crime detective series. It radiated an atmosphere of mystery and eeriness, much like the theme music 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?’ Once, Ingrid decided to test the supposed spooks dwelling in our house by saying, ‘If you are here, pull this card from the refrigerator.’ The card had been there for a long time. A magnet attached it to the fridge. And then she waited, but nothing happened. Yet the next day, the card lay on the ground, a notable distance away from its original location. Something seemed to have shaken the refrigerator. The toothpaste on top of it had also fallen. It is not proof of ghosts, but it is a remarkable coincidence.

When an event defied the laws of nature, or something happened that was in other ways spooky, I put up my Sneek accent, saying, ‘Het is gewoon behekst juh.’ It’s just haunted, man. In other words, nothing to worry about. Or, I would say to God, thereby slightly modifying the words of Mr Paas from the Checkers Club Nijverdal, ‘Ie pakt mie toch wel.’ You’re going to get me anyway. Ingrid isn’t that into logic and science. Otherwise, she might have shared my conclusion that this world is fake. When I raised the issue, she would roll her eyes or become angry. Making these jokes would avoid that. You could always have fun with her. Or I would say, ‘There is more between heaven and Earth, Horatio.’ She would agree. She had seen plenty of evidence.

Already before the Autumn of 2008, something was slightly off. I accepted it without questioning. There had been incidents suggesting A* was interfering with my life from a distance, but there were too few to become suspicious. There was no reason to suspect a connection with the other incidents either. There was no obvious link. The events of the Autumn of 2008 made me take notice. From then on, there was no turning back. Since then, I knew we live in a scripted reality. And once you know, you cannot unknow. That is the problem with knowledge. Related remarkable coincidences are doubly strange. Something weird happens, and then something equally strange happens with a meaningful relation to the previous peculiar event. The world-famous Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff, who was also a proficient philosopher, once said, ‘You only see it once you get it.’ As the following example demonstrates, we usually don’t notice.

At the office, our team, the Green Team, worked on twelve Java services. They all had names that 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. I informed the other team members. Then Patrick, who was one of our team members, 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. The names of the services made the coincidence truly astounding, alerting the other team members and underscoring how much planning would have gone into making this happen if it were intentional. The others didn’t appreciate it as much. They didn’t get it because they didn’t see it. 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. Two years later, GAS was the first service to pass the release-10 mark, and after I released the first 10.0.0 version on 24 February 2026, I discovered that I had done so at exactly 10:00 AM.

So, unusual events already transpired before 2008. 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. Some people, not guests, have slept in their cars on roads blocked by snow. It was in the news. As far as I know, that didn’t even happen during the epic winter of 1979, when parked cars were covered in snow. But it was March by then, and it had been a regular winter that year. In the Netherlands, the winters are mild. In hindsight, the roadblocks that occurred on the same day my father had a party, after he had worked for 40 years at a road construction company, are 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 our son, 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. The 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. The funeral was in the Catholic church of Sneek. The outside of the church was not impressive, but I saw its interior for the first time. It was the most appealing church interior, somehow perfectly aligned with my taste. I had seen other churches and cathedrals. At the time, it didn’t seem as if anyone had designed it with my taste in mind, or, conversely, that my taste was made to admire this particular church interior.

We then cleaned up Ingrid’s mother’s apartment. Most of her belongings went 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 her late mother’s mail. 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, pointing 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 mirrored my view of the future as I planned to look for a room in 1989. That was the year A******* crossed my path. My vision of the future was similar in 2008, even though it didn’t cross my mind at the time, and A******* would be involved once again.

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 jolly feeling of still being attractive. Yet, I kept a distance. It went on for a few months. I wasn’t willing to cheat on Ingrid. Apart from that, 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 realised that I would never become unfaithful to Ingrid. It was just weeks before that idea went out of the window. As for my family and responsibility, they both extended beyond my wildest imagination. 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

Latest revision: 10 February 2026

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

3 Jul 202521 Oct 2025 nivtricLeave a comment

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.

Secondary School

4 Jun 202530 Jul 2025 nivtricLeave a comment

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

14 May 20253 Jun 2026 nivtricLeave a comment

The sudden collapse of liberalism

In 2016, Trump supporters took over the GodlikeProductions.com message board. The mood turned grim, much as it had fifteen years earlier, when Fortuyn fans flooded the IEX message board. This time, I stayed as I had missed something important. Given my possible future job, not understanding fascism was no excuse, so I familiarised myself with the MAGA crowd, as I had done with the Moroccan minority in the Netherlands. Hanging out with people helps you to understand them. And it served as a reality check. God’s plan for the New World Order seems to turn the world into one multicultural society. So what stands in the way? Hanging out with the Moroccan minority had given me an impression. And the former Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende gave an answer: norms and values. Still, having an answer is not the same as solving a problem, and that is also because the answer fell short. Liberalism centres on freedom, enforces only a minimal set of norms and values, and we disagree on what they should be.

There is racism inside the MAGA movement, but that is not why fascism is seeing a revival. People worry about migration causing crime. The issue is not new. In the United States, Jewish, Irish, and Italian gangs brought with them gang violence, partly because they had few opportunities, but it is also a cultural issue. The mafia is a typically Italian phenomenon. These groups eventually integrated, but it took time and effort, including going after mobsters. Shared values and norms, and their enforcement, are the principal requirements for a good society. Our myths, so our religions and ideologies, also fail us, causing confusion and strife. And there is no authority everyone respects. Finally, Western culture itself is suicidal, and it is the problem that led to all the other problems that need fixing. The pursuit of money ruins its moral foundation, destroys the planet and promotes a rat race that is about to terminate humanity.

Turning the world into a single agreeable society will require unorthodox methods of an unimaginable kind. Yet that seems to be what the Kingdom of God is about. And even though it seems impossible, if God wants it to happen, it will. I can only try to figure out what it might look like and how we can get there. Whatever may be required, the alternative is probably worse. If you look at it as a Hegelian dialectic, the old liberal order is the thesis, the revival of fascism is the antithesis, and a brutal truth exercise can bring a synthesis, which might form the basis of the global social contract. It only requires widespread agreement and following through. That will never come from the interplay of social and political forces, so it needs to be an act of God. GodlikeProductions.com had the annoying feature of banning you for no apparent reason, only to let you back in after some time. It also made me use Reddit, where you can hang out with other groups, like a fly on the wall.

The first Trump presidency was not a clean break with the past, as his cabinet featured several Republican establishment figures. They kept The Donald in check. The second Trump administration became a different ballgame. Trump went unhinged after he had surrounded himself with sycophants. His erratic and spiteful caprices became a spectacle so hilarious that even Monty Python couldn’t have made it up, with Trump naming buildings after himself, declaring his birthday a public holiday, and numerous other self-aggrandising acts. It was sometimes hard to see a plan behind his actions, prompting his followers to praise his brilliance for keeping his plans secret and taking his opponents off guard, which he often did. His economic policies included raising tariffs on Swiss imports because he didn’t like how the Swiss leader spoke to him. Then there were his brazen lies, his self-enrichment and that of his family members by abusing his office, eclipsing all previous corruption by US presidents, his pardoning of criminals, and his divisive Christmas message.

Also noteworthy were Trump’s war threats against Denmark, for, among other reasons, not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, which he blamed on Norway. Then he went to war with Iran while negotiations were still ongoing for enriching uranium after he had torpedoed the previous nuclear agreement with Iran because Bibi Netanyahu told him it was a bad deal for Israel. As Europe did little to help him in his war efforts in Iran, Trump revived his idea of leaving NATO, while leaving the rest of the world to pay for the disaster that war caused. Meanwhile, Mr Trump was already eying an attack on Cuba. As a Swedish newspaper put it, ‘This is the problem with having a giant baby in charge of the free world.’ As a Swedish newspaper put it, ‘This is the problem with having a giant baby in charge of the free world.’ Also, on the GodlikeProductions.com message board, I was cautious about expressing my opinions.

No doubt that the second Trump administration will go down in history as the greatest joke in the history of government. Yet, there are real issues behind the rise of fascism, and because fascism has already failed before communism, capitalism and liberalism did, it seems that humanity has failed. Many believe that God sent Donald Trump. They are right. God likes a good joke. The name Trump means trumpeteer, which is noteworthy as the loud noise of trumpets would herald the end times. Trump defiled Jesus’ legacy more than most other blasphemers did. He sold his followers $3 made-in-China Trump Bibles for $60. After the Pope criticised Trump for threatening to wipe out an entire civilisation by bombing Iran into oblivion, Trump lashed out at the Pope and then posted on social media an image portraying himself as Christ healing the sick. Also, on the GodlikeProductions.com message board, I was cautious about expressing my opinions.

By 1 January 2025, it was already clear that the second Trump administration would be different from the first. Trump had ousted those who might rein him in, so his erratic conduct could destabilise the world. The world adapted, but with no one to check the orange madman, things could spiral out of control. The Trump government may seem like a clown show, like the fascist parties in the Netherlands, but their success comes from the failure of the liberal order. In Hegel’s scheme, this can lead to progress if the contradiction is resolved. My preparations were not yet complete, but seemed good enough had the time come, and close to the finish line, the moment when additional preparation would make little sense. I figured it would be around 1 April 2027. I further surmised that the job would start before Trump’s second term ended. My new deadline became 1 January 2029. I promised myself to stop by then if nothing had come out of it.

Things will not return to what they were before. Fascism is on the rise in Europe as well. The liberal world order has ended. The dark side of it is a dramatic rise in savagery and nuttery, such as online hatred of women, LGBTQ people, and ethnic minorities, death threats, false accusations against public officials, ranging from being part of a paedophile network or planning genocide with vaccines, and violent riots near asylum seeker centres to protect Western civilisation from savages. It is a normal and natural development when order collapses. Humans are not an agreeable species. They are the worst the planet has ever seen. That is what a messiah has to deal with. On the bright side, he can tell every paranoid soul on Earth that whatever has happened and whatever will happen was God’s plan. And who is to question God?

Liberal states have long had an edge because of capitalism and science. When the Soviet Union collapsed, liberalism seemed to have won. Yet, it is better to say that our consumption addiction has won. The communists had given up on their project because they had promised their workers more stuff, while everyone knew that workers in capitalist countries had more stuff. The modern consumer is not much unlike a drug addict busy committing suicide by overdosing, wanting his dealer to bring on more. He has no survival skills and is hooked on a system he can’t survive without. The merchants of death, selling us that merchandise, are like drug dealers selling opioids. Liberalism was yet another fairy tale. It has just collapsed in front of us, but liberals have yet to catch on.

We are at a turning point in history. A pillar of Western civilisation, social progress, is falling apart. That is due not only to migration but also to ecological destruction, resource depletion, the replacement of humans by artificial intelligence, and the threat of World War III. What is the point of it all if the nukes are soon flying? Civilisation is just a thin veneer to keep the beast within us in check. Liberalism was an attempt to achieve a good society through a social contract, giving all groups in society a suitable place based on the idea of a fundamental equality of all individuals. That is only possible if we all share the same values and adhere to the same norms, which includes the amount of freedom we allow. It begins with the myths we believe in. They give our lives meaning, and our values and norms come from them. We are at the end of Hegel’s ride. We may either see the end of civilisation or the completion of our journey to Paradise.

Mediocre vision

Humanity’s lack of collective intelligence sets the bar for a world leader rather low. Someone with mediocre vision will already do better, provided this individual has unlimited authority like a messiah. That is the point of having a messiah. If you happen to be that person, you must do what you think is best, regardless of what others think, because God appointed you, and what needs to be done requires trampling on the rights people believe they have. Politicians are like Santa Claus. They hand out presents to their followers. Others pay for them. That also applies to the limited-government people who wish for businesses and the wealthy to thrive at the expense of others. Their production and consumption are unsustainable. You must avoid errors, as your mistakes can have dire consequences. If that fails, you have to depend on God to make things turn out all right, if needed by some miraculous course of events. And so, I needed answers.

What I write is the truth as I see it. I may have to revise my views, but the truth I present to you might be the truth that can save you. It is no accident that I live in the Netherlands, 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. The Netherlands was also the first to have a fascist party in parliament, and later, a fascist messianic leadership cult like MAGA. And so, the Netherlands was ahead in that sense as well.

The Dutch culture of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries formed me, just as first-century Jewish culture shaped Jesus. The Netherlands is an agreeable place to live in, a paradise, maybe. Yet, social progress has reached the end of the line. We face fundamental disagreements about the direction we should take, leading to an authority crisis and a moral crisis, also in the Netherlands. As Judgement Day could be approaching, it seems not a coincidence that the International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands.

If the world is to become one society, it will be multicultural, but that is an intermediary phase, as cultures will gradually give way to folklore. People from different cultures may live separately, like the Dutch did in the pillared society, until the differences between the identity groups have become irrelevant. Cultural differences are the last remaining obstacle to the unification of humankind. The issue can be fixed, but it takes time and may require pressure. To illustrate the point, the Danes descend from the raping and pillaging Vikings. Now, we don’t need to wait for hundreds of years. We should picture what the future requires of us all and define what is acceptable conduct. Then, we must deal with those who don’t fit in. Can they be re-educated?

That is not going to work in a liberal environment because it requires sharing beliefs, so there is less room for deviant opinions. You can’t question the messiah’s leadership, even if he is wrong. God knows better. As a liberal-minded person, I know that it will be hard on liberals. Multicultural societies work best when the state is more powerful than the tribes living within it, and when everyone believes the same myths and shares a sense of common destiny. The problem is not only with people from premodern cultures who have trouble integrating into modern societies, but also the suicidal nature of modern culture, which is ‘creatively destroying’ itself in the pursuit of money. Only a brutal truth exercise that spares no one can save us now. I know first-hand that it can be excruciating. These are shitty issues, and you can’t fix them without getting your hands dirty. Coming from a family of farmers, I am not afraid of shit.

Make America Go Apeshit

A 2013 poll indicated 26% of Americans believed that Obama is the Antichrist or might be.¹ Most of these people later voted for Trump. For a liberal-minded person like me, that is hard to believe, as Obama seems like a kind man. No woman has accused him of sexual misconduct, nor did his name pop up in the Epstein files. Racism plays a role here, but it is not the entire story by any means. The introduction of public healthcare insurance has infuriated conservatives. Some believe that public healthcare is a Satanic communist scheme because communists oppose religion. Barack Obama once gave the following Easter message, ‘Michelle and I wish you a joyful holiday filled with the enduring power of faith and hope.’ And Donald Trump, ‘Open the fucking strait you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell. Praise be to Allah.’ How people came to think that Obama is an evil genius, and a Muslim, while the Allah-praising Donald Trump is the best choice for Christians, is a mystery for those who don’t understand American conservative culture.

The hatred of progressive presidents has a long history. John F. Kennedy faced the John Birch Society’s Wanted for Treason campaign. The John Birch Society had found that Kennedy was a communist and that communists had infiltrated the highest ranks of the US government, and were conspiring to create a totalitarian one-world government. The supposed proof for that was the US administration’s attempt to prevent the spread of John Birch Society propaganda, which seemed like dangerous extremism to government bureaucrats, but violated the freedom of speech. To American conservatives, the expansion of government or international cooperation like the United Nations smells like communism. These are collectivist organisations. And communists oppose and repress religion, so it is Satan’s work as well, in their view at least. That goes a long way in explaining these sentiments. And there may be racism involved, as Kennedy had proposed the Civil Rights Bill to end racial segregation shortly before his assassination.

If he had them, Kennedy did an excellent job of hiding his communist sympathies. After, like a true puppet of the Military Industrial Complex, having grilled his opponent, Eisenhower, during the election campaign for neglecting America’s defences, making Eisenhower warn of the influence of the Military Industrial Complex at his farewell speech, he risked World War III with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Those geniuses at the John Birch Society saw through all that and found Eisenhower to be an even more dangerous radical leftist lunatic extremist. While conspiracy theorists, with their eyeballs glued to their computer screens, were busy analysing every move by every secret society and imagining countless others, the John Birch Society has taken over the United States, with a little help from Russia’s secret services, by making people believe these conspiracy theories. If that was the plot to destroy America, it has succeeded marvellously.

America has been destroyed. By now, large groups of liberals and conservatives hate each other’s guts. To illustrate the point, on 31 December 2025, someone reposted a RealDonaldTrump social media post on Reddit headlined ‘Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!’ It featured a photograph of a dead bird, not a bald eagle, near a windmill in Israel, so not the United States. I reacted jokingly, ‘At least, Donald Trump was real.’ These were unmistakably his words, and he posted them under the name RealDonaldTrump. That was the gist of the joke. The post wasn’t offensive, or at least by any reasonable standard, yet it became one of the most downvoted I’ve ever written on Reddit. Praising or bashing Trump may draw ire, but this? It is impossible to say whether Trump haters or Trump lovers did it, but there is something seriously wrong with those who found it offensive. On a MAGA-related message board, you find instances of blacks misbehaving. On a BLM-related message board, you find examples of whites harassing blacks, and quite often, it is clear that there was no good reason for it.

Conspiracy thinking is more widespread in the United States than in the Netherlands. Acquaintances of mine who regularly visited the United States and spoke with Americans have confirmed it. And I could see it for myself on message boards. Conspiracy theories often relate to the facts, but if you investigate them, much would be unproven, inaccurate or wrong. Conspiracy theorists don’t adhere to strict logic. Pizzagate may be a fabrication, but they claim the Epstein files prove it. Humans are political animals who scheme and plot, in secret if they can. If you call conspiracy theories hunches, they make more sense. We don’t know what’s going on, so getting the direction right is already a success. Yet, the conspiracy theorists aren’t paranoid enough. There is a script. These secret dealings, as well as conspiracy theories, seem part of the ultimate psyop: God’s scheme to undermine trust in US society to make America go crazy and ready for the messiah. It made me think that MAGA stands for ‘Make America Go Apeshit’.

Culture: selling versus convincing

America has a tradition of moral pragmatism, in contrast to Europe’s idealism. You convince Europeans, but sell to Americans. The difference is not just in the wording. It reflects a cultural divide. I have heard Brits use the phrase, but in a negative sense, meaning getting scammed. It is more common in the United States, where it has a more neutral meaning of becoming convinced. The United States is a nation of salespeople. If an American likes your argument, he buys it as if it were a product. It is a different idea of truth, and a corrupt one. It sheds some light on why religion and climate change denial are more widespread in the United States than in Western Europe. It is part of the American success story. Money is power, and bullshit sells, as we are religious beings who need myths to believe in. A bit of corruption greases the wheels of industry, but the graft has gotten out of hand because once you allow it, it will grow like cancer. The United States is not the most corrupt country by far. Yet, compared to North-West Europe, it is corrupt.

You may not buy the science of climate change because you don’t like taking public transport or eating less meat. And so, you buy into climate change denial. That makes you morally corrupt, but no problem, you can buy the story that Jesus died for your sins, and believing that will get you into heaven. That Jesus died for our sins is pretty unbelievable, and if you had been honest and truthful, you would have questioned your faith, which Western Europeans do more than Americans. A large swath of Americans now genuinely believe that climate change is a hoax made up by governments to raise taxes, but that is because they believe what they want to believe, not because it is the truth.

Moral corruption especially affects some denominations of Protestantism. History and culture go a long way in explaining that. Catholic doctrine holds that faith and good works can save you. Catholics must perform good works, such as giving money to the Church, to atone for their sins. That 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 for their moral choices. 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.

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 Dutch culture, making the Netherlands a nation of merchants and vicars. For a vicar, money can never be the highest good, while successful merchants are morally depraved, as greed drives them. The merchant usually prevailed, so the Netherlands became the wealthiest nation before the Industrial Revolution started.

Roman Catholics didn’t suffer from that kind of gut-wrenching ethical dualism. It made Protestants seem sanctimonious and sneaky to them. They would take the moral high ground and lecture Catholics on trivial matters of the scripture while acting as greedy merchants. That is also a caricature. Protestants generally take ethical matters seriously. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have had idealists like Kant and Hegel seeking absolute truth and absolute morality. And it affected Roman Catholics in the Netherlands, making the Dutch Catholics think for themselves on ethical matters and rebel against Rome after the Church reversed progressive reforms. There is a profound difference between most Protestant vicars, also in the United States, and televangelists, who are the personification of America’s religious corruption. So, what is the origin of the Protestant moral corruption?

The Protestant doctrine also holds that faith alone suffices. And Protestants take the scriptures more seriously than Roman Catholics. That is why there are so many branches of Protestantism differing on the correct interpretation of the scriptures. It opened the door to a different form of moral corruption, more prevalent in the United States. What the Bible says is right and wrong is not always objectively so. Paul condemned homosexual acts in no uncertain terms. We don’t know Jesus’ opinion on this matter, but he said not to judge and that he who is without sin should cast the first stone.

Yet, there is no objective moral reason to condemn gays and lesbians or deny them the right to marry. It became a problem for Protestants, who take both scripture and moral conscience seriously. When you follow the scriptures on this matter, you shut down your moral conscience. And if only faith can save you, you don’t have to do good works to compensate for your misdeeds. Catholics merely followed the Church’s lead, and Catholics must do good works to compensate for their sins, so that gets them off the hook. And Catholics knew that many nuns and monks did it with each other, since joining a convent or becoming a priest was a way to avoid marriage. Priesthood also attracted paedophiles, as several scandals have revealed.

This morally problematic Protestantism also existed, but didn’t prevail in North-West Europe. Many of the least corrupt countries are there, while LGBTQ rights in these countries remain uncontested. Meanwhile, Catholic priests lived the good life, which the Dutch call ‘het Roomse leven’ or the Burgundian lifestyle. Jews, as Karl Marx observed, are amoral merchants, and this, rather than racism or religious bigotry, stands at the root of today’s anti-Semitism. Jews are often the merchants and usurers who buy the American politicians. It makes the moral corruption in the United States a sensitive issue, most notably because anti-Semitism has led to the Holocaust. Now we are at the bottom of the manure pit.

Idealism and realism

A society has rules, but to arrive at a good society, you need social trust. Social trust means that you can trust strangers, and everyone knows it. There are always people trying to take advantage of others, but when there are few of them, most people keep their end of the bargain, and social trust is high. If you believe that others are as trustworthy as you are, and you are trustworthy, you are more willing to contribute to the common good. Yet, if we believe that others are only interested in the best deal for themselves or are untrustworthy, we are more likely to assume the same attitude, so that degenerate morals become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A system of rewards and punishments can help to make people obey the rules and keep the group focused on the common good. It is why we have prisons and fines. As we are nearing an apocalypse, we face a global collective action problem. We can only save humanity if we do it together.

That is why we may be incredibly lucky to be simulations, with God controlling the script. Otherwise, we wouldn’t stand a chance. Even when most people are good, the outcome is terrible, driving us toward the apocalypse. Only one of the disciples betrayed Jesus. That already proved fatal. Judas must have seen for himself that Jesus was the messiah and had witnessed God’s power, but even then, he betrayed Jesus, either out of patriotism or greed. He may have hoped that Jesus would oust the Romans to establish a Jewish state, and grew disillusioned, or the lure of money proved stronger than his fear of God. Most Christians talk about Jesus, but are after the money, or they think their tribe is superior. Only one Indian patriot sufficed to murder Mahatma Gandhi. Since then, India and Pakistan have been one step away from a great patriotic war with nukes. So, without God controlling the script, being a messiah is a losing proposition of 100% certainty, not worth entertaining for any rational individual.

Muslims are no better. Money also turns their religion into a hollow custom. Most of them are poor, but where the oil money flows, the rich flaunt their excessive lifestyles, outdoing the excessive consumption in places like the United States, while leaving their less fortunate Muslim brothers to toil in misery. A few generously donate money to religious charities helping the poor or funding nutters who blow up things and randomly murder people in the name of Islam. They are, however, more interested in building the largest skyscrapers. And Jews? We don’t even have to discuss the Jews. So, what about the Dutch? Yeah, what about whataboutisms? It takes one to know one. So, if economic growth and competition are the problem, trade is the problem, and if that is what brings us down, trade is the greatest of all evils.

It doesn’t mean most merchants are evil. It is the system we work in. How to deal with that problem comes next, but solving it begins with acknowledging the true cause. It seems we can’t do without trade and money, so the odds of religion defeating money in a realistic scenario are zero at best. There is enough for everybody’s need, but not for everybody’s greed. The privileged never have enough. And those who have the money decide what happens. Greed will prevail unless brute force ends it. That force must be truly brutal, as even the communists weren’t up to that task. The salespeople are just too cheeky. You must be willing to murder billions of people and have the means to do so, like God, to frighten us to the point that we stop listening to the merchants.

Moral pragmatism is getting by and hoping that God will save the day. Moral idealism is not waiting for God and trying to create Paradise on Earth. A sizeable group of Christians holds the latter view, but also atheist progressives, ranging from communists to liberals. The cynical view is more prevalent among conservatives. Whether we try to prevent it or not, human nature makes the apocalypse a done deal. As Christianity points out, we are all sinners and need a saviour. Human nature is so depraved that a messiah wouldn’t be enough. God needs to control the script. That is indeed the case, so we can try to leave our cynicism behind and care for others and nature, while understanding that everything is interconnected, so that our actions affect others and nature, and that transgressions like usury that disturb the balance in Paradise are the most heinous crimes.

Moral pragmatism is getting by and hoping that God will save the day. Moral idealism is not waiting for God and trying to create Paradise on Earth. A sizeable group of Christians holds the latter view, but also atheist progressives, ranging from communists to liberals. The cynical view is more prevalent among conservatives. Whether we try to prevent it or not, human nature makes the apocalypse a done deal. As Christianity points out, we are all sinners and need a saviour. Human nature is so depraved that a messiah wouldn’t be enough. God needs to control the script. That is indeed the case, so we can try to leave our cynicism behind and care for others and nature, while understanding that everything is interconnected do that our actions affect others and nature, and that transgressions like usury that disturb the balance in Paradise are the most heinous crimes.

The pragmatic view is that trade, finance, and money are invincible until God intervenes. And that is correct. It has built the European empires, ranging from the Spanish to the Dutch and the British. And it has made America strong. There may be more graft in the United States than in Western Europe, but most countries are more corrupt than the United States. And the Hegelian dialectic is the way God sees social progress. The West has progressed the furthest on that path and must lead the way. My reason for focusing on the United States is not only that America has become an evil empire and the world’s gravest problem, but also that Americans are more pragmatic, get things done, and, above all, are the most eager to receive the messiah.

Europeans lack their pragmatic attitude and religious fervour. And so, the coming world revolution will probably start there. Compromising with the old, corrupt order is a dead end. We need a spiritual rebirth and must break away from the system run by merchants and usurers, and ground our society in ethical principles and make humankind part of nature rather than above it. Europe will probably be next, and the rest of the world will follow. So, don’t worry about the Muslims. They fear God and also expect Jesus to return. And don’t worry about the Chinese. It is their state’s official goal to run the Hegelian dialectic to its completion and abandon the market economy once the workers’ paradise arrives. That is my guess for now. Things hardly ever go the way I foresee. Yet, they go precisely according to God’s plan.

As for the question I asked myself as a teenager, ‘Is it possible that communists had good intentions?’ If you know how deep the problem runs, you can only appreciate their effort. If there is no God, we, the little people, are on our own, against the superior force of money and tribalism, and there is no chance at all that we will succeed. The elites will play us out by sowing divisions with religious and nationalist fairy tales. They make others toil for them so they get rich without working, and it will end in destruction, albeit creative destruction, economists tell us, so that our suicide will go down in memory as a form of concept art. The elites fund think tanks that tell us fairy tales about individual freedom, so that we will not question the order in which they are our masters, and we are their serfs. And we, the gullible people, need myths to believe in. The communists faced that brutal truth and tried to stamp out nationalism and religion. Maybe for that reason, they named their newspapers ‘The Truth’. Only, communism doesn’t change human nature, so new class societies arose in communist societies with elites and perks.

If this happens, you will have to deal with the consequences. Central planning of every detail doesn’t work. If we try that, it will become a disaster 100 times worse than the Great Leap Forward. Software engineers who have learned from their mistakes design, build, test, start small to see if it works, correct errors, scale up, and fix bugs until the system operates smoothly. That is, unless changes are required. Then, you have to do it all over again. And small changes can have a dramatic, unexpected impact. It is why the absence of further changes is the single most crucial success factor in this endeavour to build a world society for the coming 1,000 years. Future generations will have to resist pressures to make improvements if things were okay to begin with. Things were okay in Eden, and all that happened since then made matters worse.

Kicking off the revolution

A society has rules, but to arrive at a good society, you need social trust. Social trust means that you can trust strangers, and everyone knows. There are always people trying to take advantage of others, but when there are few of them, most people keep their end of the bargain, and social trust is high. If you believe that others are as trustworthy as you are, and you are trustworthy, you are more willing to contribute to the common good. Yet, if we believe that others are only interested in the best deal for themselves or are untrustworthy, we are more likely to assume the same attitude, so that degenerate morals become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A system of rewards and punishments can help to make people obey the rules and keep the group focused on the common good. It is why we have prisons and fines. As we are nearing an apocalypse, we face a global collective action problem. We can only save humanity if we do it together.

That is why we may be incredibly lucky to be simulations, with God controlling the script. Otherwise, there is no chance of success. Even when most people are good, the outcome is terrible, because in competition, the most unscrupulous win out. Only one of the disciples betrayed Jesus. That already proved fatal. Judas must have witnessed God’s power, yet he still betrayed Jesus, either out of patriotism or greed. He may have hoped that Jesus would oust the Romans to establish a Jewish state, and grew disillusioned, or the lure of money proved stronger than his fear of God. And only one Indian patriot sufficed to murder Mahatma Gandhi. Since then, India and Pakistan have been one step away from a great patriotic war with nukes. Without God controlling the script, being a messiah is a losing proposition, not worth entertaining for rational individuals.

Muslims are no better. Money turns their religion into a hollow custom. Most Muslims are poor, but where the oil money flows, the rich flaunt their excessive lifestyles, leaving their less fortunate Muslim brothers to toil in misery. A few might generously donate money to religious charities helping the poor or funding nutters who blow up things and randomly murder people in the name of God. Yet, they are more interested in building the largest skyscrapers. And Jews? We don’t even have to discuss the Jews. So, what about the Dutch? Yeah, what about whataboutisms? It takes one to know one. So, if economic growth and competition are the problem, trade is the problem, and if that is what brings us down, trade is the greatest of all evils.

It doesn’t mean merchants are evil people. Many are not. It is the system we work in. How to deal with that problem comes next, but solving it begins with acknowledging the true cause. It seems we can’t do without trade and money, so the odds of religion defeating money in a realistic scenario are zero at best. There is enough for everybody’s need, but not for everybody’s greed. The privileged never have enough. And those who have the money decide what happens. Greed will prevail unless brute force ends it. That force must be truly brutal, as even the communists weren’t up to that task. The salespeople are just too cheeky. You must be willing to murder billions of people and have the means to do so, like God, to frighten us to the point that we stop listening to the merchants.

Moral pragmatism is getting by and hoping that God will save the day. Moral idealism is not waiting for God and trying to create Paradise on Earth. A sizeable group of Christians holds the latter view, but also atheist progressives, ranging from communists to liberals. The cynical view is more prevalent among conservatives. Whether we try to make the world a better place or not, human nature makes the apocalypse a done deal. As Christianity points out, we are all sinners and need a saviour. We must leave our cynicism behind and care about other people and nature, while understanding that everything is interconnected, so that our actions affect others and nature, and that transgressions that disturb the balance in Paradise are the most heinous crimes.

As Hegelian dialectic is the way God sees social progress, and the West has progressed the furthest on that path, the West must lead the way. My reason for focusing on the United States is not only that America has become an evil empire and the world’s gravest problem, but also that Americans are more pragmatic, get things done, and are the most eager to receive the messiah. Many are literally begging for the Second Coming and are willing to perform the craziest acts to make it happen. Now, I am not going to criticise it, for only God can save us and God wrote the script.

It makes the United States the best place to start the coming world revolution. Europeans lack the religious fervour, but also the pragmatic attitude of Americans. Compromising with the old, corrupt order is a dead end. We need a spiritual rebirth and must break away from the system run by merchants and usurers, and ground our society in ethical principles and make humankind part of nature rather than above it. Europe will probably be next, and the rest of the world will follow. That is my guess for now. Things hardly ever go the way I foresee. Yet, they go precisely according to God’s plan.

The elites fund think tanks that tell us fairy tales about individual freedom and make us fear collectivism, so that we will not unite and overturn the order in which they are our masters, and we are their serfs. And we, the gullible people, need myths to believe in. The communists faced that brutal truth and tried to stamp out nationalism and religion. Maybe for that reason, they named their newspapers ‘The Truth’. Only, communism doesn’t change human nature, so their economic system performed poorly while a new class society with an elite of party bureaucrats arose.

Kicking off a revolution

Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ You can save yourself by following me, accepting that what I say is the truth, and that is how you survive. We need a fairy tale and a leader to believe in who tells us what the truth is. That is how we can save ourselves. Otherwise, we will continue to fight over our fair tales and not do what we must. The idea of being the messiah is an uneasy predicament for any sensible person. It also made me question my views. I have been proven wrong countless times. Progress comes from being proven wrong and learning from it. Minor oversights can have dramatic consequences. Preventing mistakes is better than correcting them afterwards. And correcting them sooner is better than correcting them later. Changes in society and its institutions have unexpected consequences. Still, God wrote the script, so we can only do our best, like Boy Scouts, and expect God to do the rest, like an Akela.

Many, perhaps most, US politicians are corrupt, but Donald Trump is Mr Graft himself. Between 2024 and 2026, his net worth nearly tripled from $2.3 billion to $6.5 billion, thereby outdoing the most brazen grifters in US politics. Unlike ordinary politicians who accept bribes to finance their campaigns, Trump and his entourage exploit the office for personal gain.² It seems to include insider trading preceding Trump’s social media posts.³ So much for draining the swamp and ridding US politics of corruption. By his own admission, Trump is a pussy grabber who would ‘do’ his daughter had she not been his daughter. At least 26 women have accused him of sexual misconduct.⁴

The United States today resembles France before the French Revolution. The system is broken. Reform is impossible. Cleaning the slate is all that remains. Dutch television once aired a fragment, probably because it was hilarious, of a preacher standing in front of Donald Trump, with Trump putting up his best sanctimonious face. The preacher thanked Trump for ‘saving America from Satan.’ Then my wife, Ingrid, said, ‘Look! There you have him! That’s Satan!’ She meant Donald Trump. She was joking, but that joke can only be funny if there is some truth to it.

My wife doesn’t dislike Trump and tends to look on the bright side of what he is doing. Forcing Ukraine to accept a bad deal? That’s fine with her if it stops the killing. Taking out Maduro? Things were bad in Venezuela already. And he ended the Gaza war. Invading Greenland? She didn’t express an opinion. Bombing Iran back to the Stone Age? They shouldn’t have a nuclear bomb. And so, my wife’s feelings didn’t get in the way of forming that opinion. At the very least, the orange madman is impulsive, vindictive and unwilling to listen to people with wisdom and experience. When I later recalled the moment, she said the preacher had said ‘Antichrist’ rather than ‘Satan.’

Donald Trump doesn’t seem to fall into the category of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Pol Pot from Cambodia murdered a quarter of the Cambodians. Had he run Russia or China, he might have outdone Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Still, we shouldn’t be too sure. Trump is a savage constrained by the United States’ political and judicial institutions. Had he free rein, things would probably have been much worse. And as far as the supposed qualities of the Antichrist go, few people qualify for all of them. Still, his lambasting of the pope’s peace efforts, while portraying himself as Jesus, and the religious display of Donald Trump and his circle of evil in the Oval Office, give him a great shot at the title of Antichrist. Is pride not the gravest sin, and is MAGA not all about pride? Not to mention money and patriotism, the likely reasons for Judas betraying Jesus. And what to think of all the hatred, while Christianity is about love. MAGA is the opposite of what Christianity stands for.

It shows that American conservatives are willing to let Satan run their country. Trump being a jerk is why people voted for him. It is natural human behaviour. When order falls apart, we revert to gangsterism and choose gangsters as our leaders. It is our survival mechanism at work. There might have been no second Trump term had there been no surge in immigration during Biden’s tenure. Millions of immigrants came in unchecked, and from a country ridden by gang violence. It was the issue that decided the election. Europe faces similar issues, and fascist movements gain momentum. The Democrats let Biden run for a second term, and when that fell apart, let Harris, who was part of Biden’s government, take over.

Cultural differences divide us, but none of today’s cultures is fit for our future. The outcome of all we do is a total disaster. We should define how we should live and seek those willing to go along with it. And because we will never agree, we need a messiah to tell us. We will have to separate the good people from the bad people. We must try to rehabilitate troublemakers, if necessary, in prison labour camps. It would be the end of human rights as we know it. And we cannot accept alternative myths because people fight and murder over them, so everyone needs to accept the same fairy tales. That is a great leap for a former liberal, but I need to think ahead. If I am indeed the messiah, I should aim to have a plan that will work for the next 1,000 years. I can’t foresee what will happen, but there is a script, so God is in full control, so that worrying is pointless.

Humans are a failed species. Christians would say that we are sinners, not worthy of God’s grace and in dire need of a saviour. Order can only come from the top down, and only by force, because force is humanity’s most convincing argument, and why humanity is a failure. I might be able to guide humanity to the future, not because I am a genius, but because it is the script of the story. And so, it will be a role I play, nothing more. It is up to you to do miracles. If you don’t get it, you are a moron. And you are either on my side or on the side of the morons. And we need a holy war against the morons.

On 15 May 2025, exactly 8647 days after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, former FBI director James Comey posted a photo of seashells on social media spelling ‘8647’, a code for removing Trump from office. That generated some media attention and drew the ire of the Trump administration after the MAGA movement had previously sold hats with ‘8646’ on them, calling for Biden’s removal from office. There is no evidence that Comey intended to create that 8647-day interval, but it could have been. Yet the incident is also part of the 11 September 2001 coincidence scheme, which is beyond the capabilities of human conspirators to organise. My home was formerly owned by the Tromp family, which is the Dutch equivalent of Trump, so that is quite odd given the situation at hand. The name means ‘trumpeter,’ and according to prophecies, trumpets would herald the end times. Removing Trump from office and me taking his place could be part of God’s plan for the End Times. That is by no means certain, but it is a cryptic message that you can see in these coincidences. And until it is disproven, it is worth considering.

Donald Trump should face trial in The Hague, Netherlands. The United States can’t give him a fair trial. Liberals may want to hang him, while conservatives might want to give him a pass. Whether trying to overthrow a legitimate election result constitutes treason may remain a matter of contention between liberals and conservatives, but that Donald Trump and his pal Bibi Netanyahu have violated international law and committed crimes against humanity by starting the Iran war cannot be in doubt. The ultimate expert on murders committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law, Vladimir Putin, called the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei a murder committed in cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.

How to bring the orange madman down? That hadn’t been on my mind, but in April 2025, I dreamed of being part of a crowd in The Hague during the NATO summit scheduled for that summer. The leaders of the NATO member states were all there. When Trump passed by in his car, I began to scold him in Dutch, ‘Hij is een hondenlul (He is a dog dick).’ It is an offensive slur that soccer fans sing when disagreeing with the referee’s decision. There was absolute silence. Bystanders were shocked, making me fear that the police would round me up. But then the crowd joined in, and the singing grew louder until it became a thundering chant. It made the news worldwide. From then on, no one called him President Trump anymore. Everyone called him dog dick. I don’t know the future, but I have to work with assumptions. Play time is over. Adults should run the world. As Adam reincarnate, I am 6,000 years old. There may be no one else left to save you.

Latest revision: 15 May 2026

Featured image: AI-generated

1. One in four Americans think Obama may be the Antichrist, survey says. The Guardian (2013).
2. The Corruption Chronicles: Donald Trump’s profiteering from public service, by the numbers. Kei Chin, Michael Beckel, and Oliver Ni (2025). Issue One.
3. The insider trading suspicions looming over Trump’s presidency. Nick Marsh (2026). BBC.
4. The 26 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Eliza Relman and Azmi Haroun (2017). Business Insider.

The Plan For The Future

There is a plan

Author: nivtric