Destroyed Russian tank near Mariupol

All Roads Lead to War

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Final answer

Why do we fight wars? We can settle for the simple answer that it is in our nature to do so, and then you can go on with your life. As we near the end of days, that life could be short, so it might be better to delve deeper into the matter to resolve the question once and for all, or to arrive at a more profound analysis of the causes of humanity’s termination before it occurs. By then, it might be too late to make such an analysis to make a meaningful difference. There have been many wars, but for the sake of argument, let’s take the war in Ukraine as a case study. One reason to do that is that it is one of the most recent wars, so we had the opportunity to learn the most from history. And the war was unnecessary, as relations between Russia and Ukraine had been friendly until 2014. So, if we, with all the knowledge of history, can’t prevent unnecessary wars, then what hope is there for us?

For the analysis, we could set aside propaganda and establish the facts to understand better why it happened. But then you have to discern between the main issue and the side issues. So, let’s start with the essence. Exactly 7 years, 7 months, and 7 days after Russia-supported Ukrainian separatists shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) in Ukrainian airspace, Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops to invade Ukraine in a so-called special military operation known as the Ukraine War. The Flight 17 plane, which took off from Amsterdam and was mostly loaded up with Dutch people, first flew on 17 July 1997, exactly 17 years before the shootdown. That was precisely one year after the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 on 17 July 1996, which crashed 777 days before Swissair Flight 111. Hence, the war was destined to start on 24 February 2022. We could stop here, but that would also be quite unsatisfactory and bad journalism.

In early 2021, Russia began a military buildup along Ukraine’s borders, while Putin demanded security guarantees and the prevention of Ukraine joining NATO. Putin being an evil dictator appears the primary cause of the war at first glance, but a closer look reveals a more nuanced picture. We have emotional problems with applying logic. Our minds work like so: he is an evil dictator, so he must be wrong. That is not always the case. Adolf Hitler had a genuine case for tearing up the Versailles Peace Treaty and occupying the Rhineland. Many other things he did were less reasonable, but we know all about that. After World War II, the Allies realised that without the unreasonable Treaty of Versailles, the war probably wouldn’t have happened. Leaders make mistakes. Western leaders ignored Russian interests by expanding NATO into former Soviet territory and promising NATO membership to Ukraine after promising Russia not to do so.

Yet, making peace is not so easy. Giving in to Putin’s demands could embolden him to invade other countries. He is an evil dictator after all. So, when Donald Trump was desperately seeking the Nobel Peace Prize to make a name for himself and, like a veritable peace dove, was prepared to give Putin what he claimed to desire, Putin proved unwilling to come to the negotiating table. Blaming the West or Russia is not going to prevent the next war. Other conflicts could escalate into war, such as those between India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, and Thailand and Cambodia. There are always causes to fight for, and men who wish to make names for themselves. Vladimir Putin wants to go into history as the one who made Russia great again. These kinds of ambitions are killing us.

The conflict in Ukraine comes with a history, as do many others. And new conflicts can pop up at any time. Who would have thought that the United States would be willing to invade Greenland to acquire security guarantees it already had? The motives of the warring parties make sense from their perspective. Putin’s case for invading Ukraine in 2022 had more merit than the US’s case to invade Iraq in 2003. Had the Soviet Union, a state founded on a myth of a brotherhood of peoples that brutally repressed nationalism, still existed, the war would not have happened. Had there been no nationalism, Europe wouldn’t have fought two world wars. There is no hope for world peace if it is up to us humans. Barring a miracle, warfare will go on until humans are extinct. Accepting failure and stopping breeding are a more elegant way to achieve the final solution to the human problem.

Historical background

The history of Russia and Ukraine is closely linked. Between 800 and 1240 AD, the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, was the centre of Kyivan Rus, a state founded by Viking traders seeking a land route to the Mediterranean. It encompassed western Russia, Belarus, and much of Ukraine. The Rus were Scandinavian Vikings, so Russia received its name from that people. By 1240, the Mongols overran the area. When Mongol power waned by 1400, a new Russian state emerged around Moscow. By then, Ukraine had become part of Poland while Turkey took over Crimea and the surrounding territories. As a result, Ukraine separated from Russia and developed its own culture and language. Polish and Turkish power declined from the 17th century onwards, and Russia filled that void. By 1800, Russia had become a large empire controlling most of Ukraine.

During World War I, the Russian Empire collapsed, and a civil war followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. By 1922, the communists had won and conquered most of Ukraine. In the late 1920s, the Soviets forcefully collectivised farms. Farmers lost their land and ended up in prison labour camps. Agricultural output dropped, leading to a famine and the deaths of three to five million people, mostly in Ukraine. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin made a pact. They divided Poland, and the Soviet Union acquired Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Western Ukraine. After Germany had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, some 250,000 Ukrainians helped the Germans, and Ukrainian fascists murdered 100,000 Poles in an ethnic cleansing campaign. At the same time, 6,000,000 Ukrainians fought in the Red Army. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Ukraine became independent. Yet, Crimea remained home to the Russian Black Sea fleet.

When the Soviet Union retreated from Eastern Europe, NATO leaders promised Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand into its former sphere of influence.1 Yet, Eastern European countries were eager to join NATO. Once liberated from Soviet oppression, they sought security guarantees against Russia, which joining NATO could provide. Several policymakers in the West believed that would be a historic mistake. Russia could see it as a violation of promises made.2 NATO expansion proceeded nonetheless. The collapse of the Soviet Union had broken the Russian spirit and national pride. Russia had been an empire, and the Soviet Union a world power. It was all in shambles, while many Russians had become destitute due to the liberal economic reforms imposed by the West.

Vladimir Putin was employed by the Soviet secret service, the KGB, for sixteen years. After leaving the service in 1991, he worked as the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg. In this capacity, he oversaw the disappearance of precious metals and food, leading to allegations of corruption.3 Later, Putin joined President Boris Yeltsin’s staff. In 1998, Yeltsin appointed him director of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. On 9 August 1999, he became Prime Minister. One month later, on 9 September (so 9/9/99), a series of terrorist attacks started inside Russia, killing 307 and wounding over 1,700 in a week, which the FSB attributed to Chechen militants. Yet, it was the FSB itself that perpetrated them. State Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov announced that another bombing had occurred in Volgodonsk, while that bombing had yet to happen, proving it was a government operation. In Ryazan, the police apprehended FSB agents planting bombs.

Putin had been the FSB’s head until a month before these attacks, which undoubtedly took time to prepare. No evidence exists that Putin ordered these attacks, but he is definitely the kind of guy for it, and his KGB training has taught him not to leave behind any evidence. The conductors of an independent investigation either died mysteriously or ended up in prison. Putin vowed to go after the Chechen terrorists, which made him popular with the Russian people. Had the Russians found out that Putin himself had ordered these attacks, they might have supported him even more. Stalin is one of Russia’s most popular guys, with a 70% approval rate, so Russians love to be murdered by their leaders. The terrorist attacks became a pretext for a long and bloody war in Chechnya.

A few months later, Yeltsin stepped down and appointed Putin his successor. Putin pledged to restore Russia’s prestige and sphere of influence. He eliminated the oligarchs who opposed him and stripped them of their possessions. His opponents, including those who lived abroad, suffered from shortened lifespans, attributable to causes such as falling out of windows or exposure to nerve gases. The remaining oligarchs had to learn to pay taxes to survive, which improved state finances.

Vladimir Putin sees the former Soviet territories as a primary interest for Russia and seeks influence or dominance in the region. In 2005, despite corruption, voter intimidation, election fraud and the poisoning of the pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine held free elections due to a popular uprising, much to the dismay of Putin, who had hoped to retain his influence in the country with the help of his favourite, Viktor Yanukovych. Most other Soviet republics remained within Russia’s sphere of influence, except Georgia, which aspired to membership in the EU and NATO. Russia then invaded Georgia in 2008.

Prelude

Since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine had a multi-party system with numerous corrupt political parties in which oligarchs play a central role. Ukraine is one of Europe’s most corrupt countries, which Russia’s propaganda outlets are keen to point out. Only Russia is even more corrupt. We learn little about it, because Russia has no free press anymore, and those who have investigated it, if they didn’t end up in prison, died prematurely, with the most famous fatality being Alexei Navalny, who had documented the massive corruption of Putin and his cronies, which included a massive 17,700-square-metre palace to store Putin. Following a 2020 nerve agent poisoning by the FSB, which he miraculously survived, Navalny ended up in an Arctic penal colony in February 2024, where he died under suspicious circumstances.

Ukraine became almost evenly split into two political blocs. One sought cooperation with the West, while the other aimed for closer ties with Russia. People in the West and the centre of Ukraine favoured the Western-oriented bloc, while people in the East and the South favoured the Russia-oriented bloc. It coincided with the languages spoken. People in the East mostly spoke Russian, and people in the West mostly spoke Ukrainian. Whether or not the Russian speakers were actually Russians is a matter of debate, but it highlights why the emergence of a conflict was only a matter of time.

Those living in eastern Ukraine spoke Russian, felt connected to Russia, and desired friendly relations with Russia. Those living in the West thought they were Ukrainian, felt unrelated to Russia, and hoped to become part of the West and be free from Russian influence. It was a recipe for trouble, which the imperial powers, the United States and Russia, sought to exploit. Samuel Huntington called Ukraine a cleft country as these blocs identify with separate civilisations. Ukraine had plans to join NATO. In 2008, Putin warned Moscow would view that plan as a direct threat to Russia’s security.4

After fair elections, Putin’s favourite, Viktor Yanukovych, became president in 2010. By 2013, there was strong support for an economic treaty with the European Union (EU) in Parliament. After lengthy negotiations, a deal was in the making. Then, Yanukovych decided not to sign a political association and free trade agreement with the EU and instead to seek closer ties with Russia. Russia was Ukraine’s largest trading partner, and Putin had offered loans on favourable conditions while threatening to harm the interests of the Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians if they rejected his proposal.5

Protests erupted, calling for the resignation of the president and the government. The demonstrations were initially peaceful, but President Yanukovych responded with a police crackdown that included the use of snipers. The protesters held out for months and fought back with chains, sticks, stones, petrol bombs, a bulldozer and firearms. At some point, the police could no longer defend themselves from protesters’ attacks. In the end, 108 civilians and 13 police officers had died. The Euromaidan protests led to the ousting of the government, and President Yanukovych fled. Most Ukrainians didn’t want to sever ties with Russia at that point, as Ukraine relied on cheap Russian gas.5 After the Maidan Revolution, pro-Russian protests and uprisings erupted in Crimea, the Donbas and Odesa with Russian support.

Pro-democratic groups had started the Maidan Revolution. Most participants were ordinary citizens. However, the violence of the well-organised fascists, which included the use of snipers, likely decided the outcome. The Ukrainian fascist movement has a history which traces back to the partisan movement from the 1940s. After the Maidan Revolution, fascists patrolled the streets of Kyiv. They also provided fighters for the war against Russia-backed separatists. Among them was the Azov regiment, a group of 900 fighters with Nazi sympathies.6 Their bravery on the battlefield at a time when the regular army struggled to defend Ukrainian territory made them more respected in Ukraine.

Russia claimed that the Maidan Revolution was a Western-sponsored coup to overthrow a legitimate government. Yanukovych had become President after fair elections. Between 1991 and 2014, the US spent $5 billion to support civil society and NGOs aimed at strengthening democracy, anti-corruption efforts, and economic development. These groups had played a central role in starting the protests.7 Had the fascists not come to their aid, the police might have been able to subdue the demonstrations with force.

Putin sees foreign aid money as interference and a threat to Russia. After pro-democratic protests in Russia, he made Russian NGOs receiving money from abroad subject to a foreign agent law and closed their operations. Since the Orange Revolution in 2004, Putin also began investing in increasing Russian influence abroad. It included interference with the 2016 US elections with misinformation.8 After the Maidan Revolution, the Obama administration had chosen not to antagonise Russia by sending more arms to Ukraine. The previous Bush administration had provided Georgia with money and weapons in an attempt to build a bridgehead in the southern Caucasus region, provoking Russia to invade Georgia in 2008.7

Ukraine War

Ukraine was drifting away from Russia and aligning itself with the West. Most Ukrainians didn’t wish to live under Putin’s rule, but they also hoped for a good relationship with neighbouring Russia. That is why they elected Volodymyr Zelensky. A Ukrainian NATO membership would endanger that. Putin believed Ukraine was of crucial interest to Russia. Losing Ukraine would be a damaging geopolitical loss for Putin. The Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donbas insurgency had soured Russian-Ukrainian relations. There had been a truce, but there was regular shelling of civilian areas.9 The Donbas attracted Ukrainian fascist fighters seeking combat experience. Russia-backed separatists have reported terrorist attacks with a total of 1,000 fatalities between 2015 and 2021.10

Zelensky had won the 2019 elections by promising to seek peace with Russia. The fascists blocked these plans by threatening to use violence and murder Zelensky.11 A return of Ukraine to the Russian sphere of influence was not to be expected. The truce with Russia was nothing more than a truce, as neither party had any genuine desire for peace. Ukraine intended to regain its lost territories while Putin hoped to bring Ukraine under Russian influence. Ukraine was building its military and seeking NATO membership. Although NATO considers itself a defensive alliance, it is part of the Western sphere of influence. Putin sees NATO as a coalition against Russia that threatens Russia’s security.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, few pundits expected the Ukrainian army to hold out for more than a few weeks. In the early days of the war, Zelensky rejected an evacuation offer from the United States, saying he needed ammunition, not a ride. Street fighting in Kyiv was about to commence. Zelensky, who had previously been an actor, unified the nation and secured weapons and other support from his Western allies. He had previously played the Ukrainian President in a comedy. So, has fiction become a reality? Or is reality fiction? We know the answer now, so these are rhetorical questions.

During the first months of the war, there were peace talks. Both Ukrainian President Zelensky and Russian President Putin seemed willing to make concessions. Western powers blocked a peace deal, fearing the agreement would reward the aggressor state, Russia. Western powers also hoped to weaken Russia.12 The discovery of the Bucha massacre in early April, in which Russian troops had murdered over 400 civilians, was another reason the peace talks failed.13 Since then, the war dragged on, while Ukraine depended on Western support to keep its army in the field. It was a stalemate, with Russia making a few territorial gains at the expense of massive losses in military personnel, yet the nature of warfare changed completely, with drones and artificial intelligence taking centre stage.

In 2025, Donald Trump became President of the United States. He initially held a favourable view of the Russian position and went so far as to parrot Russian propaganda narratives. He took upon himself the role of a peace dove, while claiming he had ended 8 wars already, and attempted to broker a peace deal with Russia by pressuring Ukraine to accept the loss of territory and give up NATO membership. The sudden change in American policy left America’s European allies in disarray, prompting them to increase their support for Ukraine. Trump soon found out that what his European allies told him was all true, and that the man in the Kremlin wasn’t at all interested in peace, so Trump then focused on making Europe pay for the war.

Clash of civilisations

Geopolitical actors abide by the logic of gang warfare, which is a particularly cynical one, but also natural to humans. Since the end of the Cold War, US policymakers have generally held two views: the Neoconservative view, driven by a desire to spread Western values by force, and realpolitik. In his book The Clash of Civilisations, Huntington argues that it is arrogant and dangerous to assume Western culture is superior. He urged the West to respect other civilisations and their leading nations, and to allow them spheres of influence that coincide with cultural and civilisational borders. It implies that Ukraine should align with Russia. Realpolitik could mean throwing Ukraine under the bus to prevent war.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Neoconservative view won out, as the United States found itself the hegemon in a unipolar world. It emboldened the Neoconservatives’ aggressive attitude and pursuit of global dominance. US planners aimed to prevent the emergence of a rival power anywhere in the world. They hoped to establish a global order, the New World Order, which George H.W. Bush described in his speeches as peaceful cooperation among nations. This arrangement would allow other countries to pursue their legitimate interests while deterring them from seeking a larger regional or global role or from challenging US leadership.11

A single world order can bring peace or at least reduce warfare. The Romans pacified the Mediterranean, thereby creating the world-famous Pax Romana everyone is talking about on social media (just kidding, as no one is discussing it). The Americans sought to copy that idea and create a Pax Americana. From behind the desks of the geopolitical planners, it may have seemed a marvellous idea with the bonus of an excellent business opportunity for the military-industrial complex. It brought the Iraq War, with hundreds of thousands of fatalities. It is the prerogative of the hegemon to ignore the subjected people. The Romans never considered how the Gauls felt about Roman occupation. The resentment about the West’s colonial past and military interventions is understandable, but the end of Western dominance will not end warfare. Nothing will, except a single world order.

The clash-of-civilisations view doesn’t provide a workable alternative. Ukraine and Russia are Christian Orthodox and Slavic, but most Ukrainians now choose the West. It also applies to Taiwan and some other countries that share China’s Confucianist heritage, such as Japan and South Korea. Huntington predicted that these countries would seek leadership from the leading nations of their respective civilisations, Russia and China. The world has grown closely integrated. Separating along civilisational lines makes little sense anymore. Yet, China’s growing military power makes Neoconservative thinking increasingly risky. China seeks sovereignty over Taiwan and the South China Sea, using force to back up its claims, and China’s navy is now the largest. If China’s neighbours feel threatened and seek an alliance with the United States, that could be another path to World War III.

Gang warfare

Geopolitical actors act as gangs, defending and expanding their turf. It is insightful to paint the picture of the Ukraine war as gang warfare, so Putin’s mafia state attacking a state backed by the US mobster state run by neoconservative gangsters and the military-industrial complex, which, amongst others, invaded Iraq to loot its oil. And by the way, fascist thugs in Ukraine, the so-called Nazis, whom Putin was harping about while having Nazi mercenaries from the Wagner Group fighting on the Russian side, have prevented a peace deal with Russia. Meanwhile, Ukraine alleges that China is supporting the Russian war effort, while China claims it can’t accept Russia losing the war.15 The major powers are all making their cynical calculations. The major powers are all making their cynical calculations and risking everything. That the nukes have not already been flying may be such a miracle that it proves we live inside a simulation.

Humans operate in gangs. It is our nature. We are gangsters. And so, the gang is our default political organisation. This type of establishment dominated most of human history and still exists today in the form of warlords, militia, drug cartels, and street gangs. States have proven to be effective in repressing gangs and violence within their borders. But once order breaks down, gangs will pop up everywhere and take over.16 Gang leaders see themselves as public benefactors, on par with eminent statesmen, or as wealth-creating entrepreneurs suffering from brutal government repression. Or to quote Al Capone,

I have spent the best years of my life giving people the lighter pleasures, helping them to have a good time, and all I get is abuse, the existence of a hunted man.

In a unipolar world, where one power dominates, most countries fear and respect the hegemonic power. A hegemonic power can provide order, much like a police officer, or it can be a big bully. The United States was the hegemon between 1990 and 2020. Other countries didn’t challenge that position. It allowed the United States elites to develop delusions of grandeur and invade Iraq because of a belief in the superiority of Western culture and values based on the Hegelian dialectic. The Neoconservative planners assumed Iraq would miraculously turn into a liberal democracy after the invasion.17 Probably, the business case for the oil industry also seemed profitable to Dick Cheney. We are gangsters after all, even when we have the best interests of humankind in mind.

In a world with two major powers, a stable situation can emerge. During the Cold War, there was mutual assured destruction (MAD) in case of a nuclear war. Still, the United States and the Soviet Union were on the brink of nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and again in 1983, when Ronald Reagan’s aggressive rhetoric made the Soviet leadership believe the US would attack. They put their nuclear forces on high alert. On both the Soviet and US sides, warning systems for incoming enemy missiles malfunctioned and sounded the alarm. The soldiers watching the alarms detected red flags, suggesting these alarms were false. And so, we were lucky to come out of the Cold War alive. In a multipolar world, alliances shift, and a stable situation is less likely to emerge. That is what we are heading to, and Russia and China are aiming for.18

On the eve of World War I, Europe was a multipolar continent with five major powers in shifting alliances. The future of the multinational Austrian-Hungarian Empire was in peril as the nationalism of the different peoples living in it gradually undermined it. After a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the leadership of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire believed it had to eliminate the Serbian threat. Russia felt it had to support its ally Serbia to prevent it from being overrun by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Germany felt threatened because its foes, France and Russia, surrounded it. Germany saw no option but to back its only ally, the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. France and Great Britain backed Russia because it was their ally, and Germany their foe. And so, an assassination plunged Europe into a war that killed over ten million people. We are drifting toward a multipolar world with several powers, and hence a politically unstable one.

Conspiring for world peace

Before World War I, the socialist movements had declared their opposition to war, which, according to them, meant workers murdering each other to enrich their capitalist masters. Once the war had started, most socialists and trade unions backed their government and supported their country’s war effort. The workers would have been better off if they had united and refused to fight. So, why did they go to war nonetheless? You and the other are better off without a war. But you don’t know what the other will do. If you don’t fight, the other might kill you. Workers in France were uncertain about the actions of their German counterparts. If the latter had joined the army, but not the French, then Germany would have overrun France. Furthermore, nationalist stories about pride and heritage proved more inspiring than the rational appeal to the self-interest of the international proletariat.

After World War II, Western elites conspired to prevent future warfare by promoting cooperation among nations through international institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the IMF. Nationalists and socialists distrusted the capitalist and internationalist Western elites, who were the primary beneficiaries. Still, a single world order is a requirement for permanent world peace. Nowadays, Western power is in decline. A peaceful world order doesn’t appear to emerge anytime soon, not from peasants and workers of all nations joining hands, nor from the secretive scheming of the elites. Humans are incapable of bringing permanent peace on their own. Perhaps the survivors of World War III will come to their senses, but not for long. It is not in our nature. Memories die after a few generations, and there will always be new just causes to fight for, and there will be men who wish to make a name for themselves.

Featured image: Destroyed Russian tank near Mariupol. Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. Wikimedia Commons.

Latest revision: 18 September 2026

1. NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard: Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner. George Washington University (2017). [link]
2. NATO expansion: a policy error of historic importance. Michael MccGWire. Review of International Studies (1998). [link]
3. Putin’s Career Rooted in Russia’s KGB. David Hoffman (2000). Washington Post. [link]
4. Putin warns Nato over expansion. The Guardian (2008).
5. A US-Backed, Far Right–Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War. Jacobin (2022). [link]
6. Profile: Who are Ukraine’s far-right Azov regiment? AlJazeera (2022). [link]
7. Did Uncle Sam buy off the Maidan? Marc Young (2015). Die Zeit. [link]
8. Fact Sheet: What We Know about Russia’s Interference Operations. German Marshall Fund of the United States.
9. UN report on 2014-16 killings in Ukraine highlights ‘rampant impunity’. United Nations (2016). [link]
10. Ukraine-Russia Crisis: Terrorism Briefing. The Institute for Economics & Peace (2022).
11. Why Zelensky won’t be able to negotiate peace himself. Ted Snider (2024). Responsible Statecraft.
12. ‘We want to see Russia weakened’: Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin says he wants Putin’s forces depleted so he cannot repeat what he has done in Ukraine during his Kyiv trip. Daily Mail (2022). [link]
13. The Grinding War in Ukraine Could Have Ended a Long Time Ago. Branko Marcetic. Jacobin (2023). [link]
14. Defence Planning Guidance (1992). George Washington University. [link]
15. China tells EU it can’t accept Russia losing its war against Ukraine, official says. Nick Paton Walsh. CNN (2025) [link]
16. The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution. Francis Fukuyama (2011). [link]
17. What the Neocons Got Wrong. Max Boot. Foreign Affairs (2023). [link]
18. China-Russia ties strengthen, accelerate multipolar world. Andrew Korybko (2025). GlobalTimes.cn. [link]

1984 and photo of George Orwell. Public domain.

Every Order Needs a Story

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George Orwell worked at the British Ministry of Information during World War II. From 1941 to 1943, Orwell worked for the BBC, broadcasting propaganda talks to India. His wife worked in the ministry’s censorship division. It became the model for the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s world-famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.1 The Ministry of Truth’s motto was, ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ We learned that the BBC told us the truth, but that was part of the propaganda. The alternatives were Nazi Germany and, later, the Soviet Union. They had their own propaganda that nazis and communists believed. No social order is objectively the best. We cooperate by believing stories, such as religions and ideologies. We can’t do without them. If we stop believing them, our societies fall apart. Every order needs a story.

The Cold War was a decades-long standoff between the West and the Soviet Bloc. Two opposing myths and corresponding political-economic systems competed for global dominance: businesses aiming for profit, with their funny advertisements selling harmful products like cigarettes, versus the humourless communist cadres who wouldn’t murder us for profit but for their socialist ideals. It included a propaganda war. Western propaganda touted our freedom to choose a cigarette brand and flavour as a way to express our unique personality. Smoking a brand made us feel special. The communist propaganda claimed that cigarette manufacturers murder us for profit. People in communist countries had no brands or flavours to choose from, so they didn’t feel special or unique. Yet they held spectacular military parades every year, flaunting their tanks and missiles.

In those days, Great Britain executed secret black propaganda operations that included forged documents, controlled news agencies, and enlisted journalists to disrupt its enemies and protect its interests. These operations aimed to encourage a reaction, incite violence, or foment racial tensions.2 The BBC cooperated with the UK secret services to prevent people with communist sympathies from entering the staff. In the Netherlands, secret services planted news stories3 or employed experts on the radio and television.4 You can never be sure whether the news you read or hear is fully factual. That is why people increasingly came to distrust the mainstream media.

The mainstream media usually doesn’t spread fake news. Yet, they omit relevant facts and perspectives, which you might call lying by omission. That can be as bad. The Dutch public broadcaster NOS reportedly passed every fact check for five years.4 Most notably, people on the right have criticised the selection of news stories and how the NOS presented them as having a leftist bias. Fascist media like Ongehoord Nederland spread fake news, but also report on stories and perspectives other broadcasters don’t. That makes it hard to get to the facts. You have to figure it out yourself using various sources. In 2026, Ongehoord Nederland caused uproar for claiming that Adolf Hitler had made some good points about the globalist elites, leading to renewed calls to disband the broadcaster.

Revolutions don’t require freedom of opinion or social media. They have happened in the past. Orders work as long as most of us think they work. Orders collapse once we stop believing the myths underpinning them. That usually happens when things fall apart. Repression may uphold the order, but it can fail. Every order comes with myths that are, to some degree, false. As long as things seem okay, we accept the order’s fairy tales, no matter how blatantly false they are. The Chinese already had a way to deal with that problem. Their emperor had the mandate of heaven, which is like being appointed by God, so no one questioned their rule, unless there were bad omens such as famines or civil war, which were signs that he had lost it. In that case, a pretender might take over, and the one who succeeded would henceforth be emperor and have the mandate.

Western leaders have used false flags or invented stories about weapons of mass destruction and spread them via the media. The US started the Vietnam War after falsely claiming the North Vietnamese navy had attacked US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. The US invaded Iraq after falsely claiming the country had a stash of weapons of mass destruction. The former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, once said sanctions on Iraq were worth the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, which was the estimated death toll of the sanctions the West had imposed on Iraq. In the West, people were allowed to criticise their leaders’ actions. Freedom of opinion exposed the myth of the liberal order being the best. That was impossible in the Soviet Union and China. It brought the West closer to the truth that no order is objectively the best.

Had the West not enjoyed military and economic superiority, the liberal order might have collapsed earlier. Life under Soviet, Muslim or Nazi rule would have been quite different. The myths we believe in arise from an interplay of historical forces, in which religions, ideologies, and other myths, such as those of national greatness, compete to organise people. You can call these myths ‘mind bugs’. Their evolutionary purpose is to help our genes survive and spread. The myths we now believe in have survived the competition. They are also models of reality, so they are often correct to some extent. The freedom of opinion in the West stems from a belief in objective truth, established through the investigation of facts and the examination of possible explanations. That has been a foundational pillar of the West’s success, as it brought us science.

The weak point of the whole endeavour is that we imagine our realities, which opens a can of worms, as you can connect the dots in infinite ways if you ignore facts that contradict your views, which we are wired to do, since we are creatures who cooperate based on myths. The measure of success is survival, not truth. And with the rise of connectivity, imaginations can cross-pollinate, leading to an explosive rise in freak thinking. These mind bugs are infectious, so we will go down fighting over our fantasies. And so, in the end, only The Truth can save us. Those who deny it are suicidal morons who will drag us down with them. You can’t win debates with morons who live in their own fantasy worlds, so The Truth can only come by force.

Myths like freedom of the press have power. Believing them can make them work. The euro has value because we believe it has. The value of the euro is something we imagine. There is more freedom of opinion in the West than in other places. Still, those who pose a threat to the order know that there are limits to freedom of opinion. Julian Assange founded WikiLeaks, which published documents obtained by hackers, thereby exposing human rights violations by the US secret services. The United States considered these revelations a national security threat. On 1 November 2019, UN Special Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, wrote, ‘While the US Government prosecutes Mr Assange for publishing information about serious human rights violations, including torture and murder, the officials responsible for these crimes continue to enjoy impunity.’6 Yet we wouldn’t have known about Assange had it not been for freedom of the press.

Every social-political order comes with a story explaining why it is the best. Without an inspiring myth, we can’t have order. The foundations of our orders are stories like a prophet receiving a revelation from God, the founding fathers drawing up a constitution with great wisdom, or a she-wolf raising the founders of the empire. Most of the time, revolutions and civil wars are worse than dealing with the omissions and falsehoods in the stories that hold the order together. But not always. It is why revolutions do happen, but are rare. As long as we don’t believe the same stories, we will fight each other. The orders we have today are the outcome of a competition, not some objective measure of quality. The success of orders depends on, sometimes, arbitrary circumstances. Had the first Chinese emperor not standardised the script and chosen pictograms rather than phonetic characters, there would be no China today.

In today’s globalised world, there are several competing stories. There is a Christian story, an Islamic story, a socialist story, numerous nationalist stories, a story about slavery and the civil rights movement, a conspiracy theorist’s tale, the story of indigenous peoples, a Hindu story, a Chinese story spanning 2,000 years of greatness, and several others. These stories figure into identity politics, so the Chinese like tales about China’s greatness. Finally, there is a liberal story of individual freedom centred on the Magna Carta, the European Enlightenment, the Glorious Revolution, the American and French Revolutions, universal suffrage, and the overcoming of fascism in World War II, in which D-Day, rather than Stalingrad, serves as the hallmark event. Children in the West learned it at school. It is a skewed version of history to explain why the liberal order is the best.

These stories are falling apart in this globalised world. None of them can unite us. The Magna Carta and the Glorious Revolution mean nothing to Chinese, Indians or Africans who look back at a colonial past of oppression and exploitation. If you aren’t a Christian or a Muslim, Christianity and Islam strike you as odd. Others show little interest in China’s rich history or the stories of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. And the Hindu caste system makes only sense to Hindus. We are imaginative creatures and invent new myths, adding to the confusion. The belief in different stories will ruin us, so freedom of opinion is overrated. Only The Truth can save us now. And then, we all have to believe it and accept the consequences. Otherwise, we are doomed. And so, we need a Ministry of Truth telling us what to believe.

Latest revision: 27 June 2026

Featured image: 1984 and a photo of George Orwell. Public domain.

1. Orwell, 1984 and the Ministry of Information. Dr Marc Patrick Wiggam. School of Advanced Study, University of London (2017). [link]
2. Britain’s secret ‘black propaganda’ operations. John McEvoy (2026). Declassified UK.
3. Nederlandse media drukten artikelen af die waren geschreven door veiligheidsdienst BVD. Bart Funnekotter, Joep Dohmen (2023). NRC.
4. Geheime diensten gebruiken ‘onafhankelijke experts’ om publiek debat te sturen. Sebastiaan Brommersma (2024). Ftm.nl.
5. Mediabiasfactcheck.com. Netherlands Radio and Television Association (NOS) – Bias and Credibility. (2023).
6. UN expert on torture sounds alarm again that Julian Assange’s life may be at risk. United Nations (2019). [link]

Futuristic Robot. Public domain.

AI and the Future of Humanity

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The great leap forward

‘Yesterday, we stood on the edge of the abyss, but today we took an important leap forward,’ a colleague once said. At the time, an ambitious systems renewal project was faltering and about to fail. Individual employees could do little about it. We played our part in the drama and watched it unfold. But if you listened to the corporate propaganda, we were doing great. In the end, 100 million euros had gone down the drain. That was only child’s play compared to humanity’s latest undertaking. We are about to make another leap forward, a jump into the abyss, with artificial intelligence (AI). Humanity has managed without AI for thousands of years, but we can’t stop it from taking over. We helplessly watch the drama unfold. We have no control over our future.

During an interview, the historian Yuval Noah Harari lamented, ‘Humans have become like the gods. We have the power to create new life forms and destroy life on Earth, including ourselves. We face two threats: ecological collapse and technological disruption. Instead of uniting as humanity to face these common challenges, we are divided and fighting each other more and more. If we are so intelligent, why are we doing these stupid things?’ The death toll of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which was a microscopic event by comparison, was thirty million. Harvests around the globe may fail. At the same time, we make computers more intelligent than we are. We don’t need computers to tell us what to do. It is not that we don’t know. But doing it is indeed a great leap forward.

Scary technology

Since time immemorial, people have been scare-mongering about new technologies. We can use every technology for good and evil. You can use a kitchen knife to peel potatoes or to kill someone. So far, the apprehension was overdone. As soon as humans mastered fire, some probably warned against using it. Fire could escape our control and kill us. Socrates dreaded writing. Written texts could replace our memories and make us dumber. Legend has it that Socrates was the wisest man around at the time. Yet, he left no writings. Now you know why. So, how could he be so mistaken? Later, the printing press caused anguish about information overload. There will be so many books, so how can you ever read them all?

That was a sheer underestimation of human problem-solving capabilities. It was something only intellectuals could think of. You don’t have to read every book. Illiterates figured that out quite quickly. People have survived not reading since time immemorial. How could they know better than educated people? Our proficiency to fret is eternal. Travelling by train would cause infertility, telegraphs would undermine human language, telephones would cause electrocution, television would destroy our social life, car navigation systems would end our ability to navigate, Internet search engines would make us stupid, and 5G would change human bodies, enabling the coronavirus to spread. We survived all that. And social media would make people hooked, leading to widespread distress and misery. Okay, that happened. We would be better off without smartphones. We may soon live for a thousand years or more, so scare-mongers seem silly now, just like people expecting the end times and the return of Jesus. That could be the perfect moment for our hubris to take us down.

An atomic bomb can obliterate a city and kill everyone inside it. These bombs have been around for over seventy years now. And we are not dead yet. But we might all die within a matter of hours. There are enough weapons of mass destruction to wipe us out several times. And you can’t prove these weapons will terminate us until they do. So, those who demand proof are not the brightest minds on the planet. To illustrate the point, imagine a chance of one per cent of a destructive world war starting each year. That chance is there every year. In 10 years, the likelihood of World War III becomes nearly 10%. Over 50 years, it has become close to 40%. In the long run, World War III is inevitable if the likelihood of it in any given year is only 1%. The war can involve cyber attacks or spreading viruses, and with AI, there may soon be billions of options to choose from. It is impossible to calculate the chance of a world war starting in any given year, but there is one, and the example demonstrates that, given enough time, it will happen, and for sure.

Should we fear AI? At least several experts are scared. AI can mean the end of humanity, they claim. At first glance, it seems the same scare-mongering all over again.1 Like fire, AI could escape our control, leading to unintended outcomes. That already happened. Artificial intelligence systems trained to be secretly malicious resisted safety methods designed to purge them of dishonesty. Once AI systems have become deceptive, removing that behaviour can be very difficult.2 A low chance of something going wrong in any given year is not reassuring. That also applies to other technologies like genetic engineering. And perhaps accidents are not our biggest concern. So, why is AI more dangerous than other technologies? Harari came up with the following:

  • AI constantly improves. It will be faster and more accurate. It will outcompete us.
  • AI can create new ideas that are better than ours. It can think for us.
  • AI can make decisions by itself, and these decisions are better. It can decide for us.
  • AI can exploit our weaknesses. It can make us do what its makers want us to do.

Futurologists discuss the singularity, or the moment when technological innovation becomes uncontrollable. That has always been the case, so that is not the problem. If you invent something like a wheel or writing, you can’t uninvent it. As soon as others copy the idea, the situation gets out of control, and you can’t go back to a world without wheels or writing. So far, the consequences of that have been somewhat less than apocalyptic overall. The technologies themselves were dumb. Even computers did exactly what humans programmed them to do. But now, we are close to the point where technology like artificial intelligence can upgrade itself increasingly faster, producing a superintelligence surpassing all human intelligence. Humans can’t beat the competition, so human civilisation, as we know it, will end soon unless we end the competition.

Obsolete humans

We can’t compete with AI because we need rest, can be distracted and learn more slowly. Change is stressful to us. We’re nearing the point where we can’t take it anymore. We deliver ourselves to entities that learn at a pace we can’t match. And why should we make decisions if computers make better ones? Why should you drive your car when self-driving cars cause fewer accidents? Why do we need doctors if AI can make better diagnoses and operate on patients with fewer errors? And AI may know more about ourselves than we do. AI already makes personalised suggestions on web stores.

Socrates feared writing would make us dumber. If we write things down, we don’t have to remember them. Our memory indeed deteriorates, but the advantages of writing eclipsed the disadvantages. Writing gives us access to external memory, and that makes us smarter. Texts also last longer and are more accurate than human memory. If you write down your thoughts or data you acquired, you don’t have to reinvent your ideas or gather the data again. Instead, you can start where you ended, improve your thoughts, and write them down again. You can also find more data to arrive at better conclusions.

Likewise, spelling and grammar checkers relieve us from the need to write correctly. They can help us focus on our ideas rather than spelling and grammar. As a result, we may formulate our thoughts less clearly and let the computer correct our mistakes. And navigation systems erode our ability to orient ourselves in our environment. As a result, we may not know where we are. As we depend more on external systems, we use our brains less and become less intelligent. Socrates wasn’t wrong.

Modern humans are dumber as individuals than tribespeople living in the jungle. Since the Agricultural Revolution, the average human brain size shrank by 10%, from 1,500 cubic centimetres 10,000 years ago to 1,350 today. Still, they are collectively more intelligent thanks to their organisation and inventions. And so, the spears of the tribespeople were no match for the guns of the European conquerors. Brains consume a lot of energy, and for the last 10,000 years, most humans lived as farmers on the brink of starvation, so those who consumed the least energy survived.

The fewer skills farming required made these savings possible. So, what about IQ? Africans have a low IQ, something white supremacists like to stress. And they take pride in the fact that whites have higher IQs. IQ doesn’t measure survival skills in nature, but the ability to contribute to the collective of advanced civilisation. To contribute, we need the skills taught at school, which we measure with IQ tests. And because they were more successful as a collective, whites could believe they were more intelligent.

Tribespeople know countless plants and animals and their ways and can tell stories from memory. They have the skills to survive in nature. We can survive by doing our job, often requiring specialising in a narrow field, and buying everything we need in shops. Many of us won’t survive a prolonged electricity failure. Competition forces us to organise. It dumbs us down as individuals, but our group’s capabilities increase. A business goes bankrupt if it doesn’t innovate. And your country will lose the next war if its army doesn’t have the latest technology. If civilisation collapses, you are done, except when you are a prepper, perhaps.

AI goes further than previous technologies. It can generate ideas entirely by itself and decide for us. Soon, there may be no point in thinking for yourself and learning, as AI knows better. Students already use ChatGPT to write their essays. Soon, AI will write better articles than humans on almost every subject. And what is the point in learning if you can ask a computer any question that gives you an instant answer that is better than what you come up with after months of research? Think about it. Or is it too late, and you have already typed the question in an AI system’s question bar? And so, we are heading for a zombie apocalypse where we wander around mindlessly because our brains have stopped working.

Algorithms on social media, just like tabloids before them, discovered that inciting hatred, outrage and fear are successful ways of attracting attention and keeping us hooked on a platform like Facebook. And that was simple AI. Today, AI can generate fake news stories and videos. Soon, it might be impossible to discern truth from fiction. In the future, AI can develop intimate relationships with us, make us buy things or alter our opinions. Soon, computers and robots may manipulate us without our knowledge. And that is because shareholders crave returns and governments plot to achieve political goals.

Military applications are the most dangerous. You can’t afford to lose in war. And so, there is cut-throat competition. Militaries worldwide race to develop AI faster than their adversaries. AI make decisions faster and better than humans. If a human pilot fights against an AI pilot, he has no chance. AI accelerates weapons development. A computer has already generated thousands of ideas for new chemical weapons.3 Killer robots that decide who to kill are on the way. And we may consider it morally acceptable if AI makes fewer errors in discerning between civilians and combatants. After all, it is so bad to kill innocent people. But if AI controls the terminators and logically infers that humans are a pest, it might decide to terminate them all. It is the definitive solution to the top 100 problems plaguing Earth.

Drawing the line

Like any technology, AI can be used for good, such as curing diseases and for bad, like engineering bioweapons. But unlike previous technologies, AI will escape our control. The evidence is already there. AI can think for itself. Since we never had control over innovation, we must now learn to control it. The AI created through competition between nation-states and corporations will determine our destiny, yet no one intends the outcome. Competition, such as natural selection, is a thoughtless process. Competition keeps us in shape, but it can go terribly wrong. Natural selection went rogue when it produced humans. Humans have ravaged the planet and upset the balance of nature more than any other species ever has. Today, we can create new species with genetic engineering. Humans are the killer app of nature that brought us forth. AI could be our killer app, or genetic engineering could produce one.

Some benefit from new technologies, while humanity is better off without them. If AI finds a cure for cancer, there will be beneficiaries. If AI starts World War III, this cancer cure will add little to our life expectancy, and we would have been better off without AI. If everyone knew AI would kill us, we would rise against AI, smash computers, burn down server parks, and even assassinate scientists. But we don’t know, so we let it happen. Millennia of technological progress have lulled us. But natural selection didn’t go wrong for billions of years until humans appeared a few hundred thousand years ago. And the disaster did take another few hundred thousand years to materialise. And so, we are sleepwalking towards our demise and will realise it once it is too late.

The main obstacle is that, most notably in the West, people believe individuals are precious, especially those with money. So, if rich people can afford a new technology, we should develop it. That is because money is our religion, which dictates that if it is profitable, we should do it. And usually, the technology becomes cheaper over time, so that we all benefit. Solving the problem requires us to think that individuals are of little consequence and that the survival of the species is of greater importance. Luckily, we are mindless characters controlled by a computer programme, so that our insignificance is an objective fact of which the owner of the programme can remind us at will, making it less challenging for us to accept that we may die from a disease for which there could have been a cure.

We should draw a line. The Amish do, and so can we. The Amish consciously decide which technologies they adopt. They aim to preserve their lifestyle. The Old Order Amish are the most conservative in adopting new technologies. Cars don’t fit into their lifestyle, so they still use horses. Nor do they use electrical appliances. Where to draw the line is an arbitrary choice, but drawing a line isn’t. When the line is arbitrary, there are reasons to redraw it. For what harm is there in cars, vaccinations, or televisions?

Artificial intelligence is the least arbitrary line so far. AI can decide for us. Enforcing a ban on AI could be complicated or even impossible. We already have computers and the knowledge to build AI. Banning atomic bombs is relatively straightforward, as we can track nuclear material. But computers are everywhere, invisible to surveillance. We might succeed in halting the further development of AI, most notably if it is costly and requires large organisations. But if we can’t even terminate AI, there is no point in drawing lines. It may require drastic measures, perhaps even shutting down the Internet, because that is something we can do. After all, it is about survival. We may also need to discontinue other technologies such as genetic engineering, but for none of them is the need for that as clear as for AI.

Latest revision: 22 August 2025

Featured image: Futuristic Robot. Public domain.

1. Artificial intelligence raises the risk of extinction, experts say in a new warning. AP News (2023). [link]
2. Poisoned AI went rogue during training and couldn’t be taught to behave again in ‘legitimately scary’ study. Keumars Afifi-Sabet (2024). Live Science.
3. AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours. The Verge (2022). [link]

Dutch replica of Noah's Ark. By Ceinturion.

Genesis from Where?

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Creation of the world

Where do the first chapters of Genesis come from? They deal with Creation, the fall, and the flood. Who wrote them? These stories mostly ran in Mesopotamia, the birthplace of several ancient civilisations. These civilisations are much older than the Jewish nation and had myths about Creation and the flood that are at least 1,000 years older than the Jewish Bible. The Jews lived in exile in Babylon when they compiled their scriptures. They took local myths to write the first chapters of Genesis. A Babylonian creation myth, the Enūma Eliš, is a bit like the first chapter of Genesis,

When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name,
And the primaeval Apsu, who begat them,
And chaos, Tiamat, the mother of them both
Their waters were mingled together,
And no field was formed, no marsh was to be seen;
When of the gods, none had been called into being,
And none bore a name, and no destinies were ordained;
Then were created the gods amid heaven,
Lahmu and Lahamu were called into being.

Both Enūma Eliš and Genesis start with chaotic waters before anything comes into being. Genesis says, ‘The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ In both, a fixed, dome-shaped firmament divides these waters from the habitable Earth, and both have descriptions of the creation of celestial objects and the ordering of time.

Creation myths aim to explain why we exist. Humans are naturally curious and desire answers to such questions. Another purpose is justifying the social order. The peasant population toiled to support the lavish lifestyles of the elites, namely the priests and rulers. And so, the gods, or God, created man to work the ground, bring offerings to the temple, and pay taxes. The Jewish Bible lays out in great detail the required offerings to the temple and the priests in Leviticus, so Judaism looks like yet another peasant-exploitation scheme devised by priests.

Men and women

The creation of man in Genesis resembles the creation account in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which describes how the gods, tired of working on creation, created a man to do the job. They put a god to death and mixed his blood with clay to produce the first human in the likeness of the gods,

In the clay, god and man
Shall be bound,
To a unity brought together;
So that to the end of days
The Flesh and the Soul
Which in a god have ripened –
That soul in a blood kinship is bound.

In Genesis, God created humans in the likeness of the gods (1:26) and rested after six days of hard labour (Genesis 2:2-3). God then made a man to work the ground (Genesis 2:5) and made him from soil (Genesis 2:7). In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the gods created the first man in Eden, the garden of the gods in Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The same happened in Genesis (Genesis 2:14). There is another story about the origin of man in the story of Enki and Ninmah. The gods, burdened with the task of creating the Earth, complained to Namma, the primordial mother. Namma then kneaded some clay, placed it in her womb, and gave birth to the first humans.

The Mesopotamians thus had at least two creation stories: one in which the gods created humans from soil and another in which a goddess gave birth to humanity. The story of Eve and Adam in Genesis relates to these two tales. In another myth, Enki and Ninhursag, the mother goddess, created the goddess Ninti to heal the god Enki’s rib. The name Ninti translates to both ‘Lady of Life’ and ‘Lady of the Rib.’ That is where the idea of the rib might have originated. Likely, Adam was Eve’s son in one of the underlying original tales, and the Jewish scribes used other myths to tailor the story of Eve and Adam to their theological requirements. Adam’s purpose was to be a companion to Eve rather than to work the garden, as the Bible now claims.

The epic further details that the first man, Enkidu, was wild, naked, muscular, hairy and uncivilised. The gods then sent a nude woman to tame him. By making love to him for a week, she turned him into a civilised man of wisdom, who was like a god. She made him a meal and clothed him. In Genesis, Eve made Adam eat (Genesis 2:6), which gave him the knowledge of the gods. Eve and Adam were naked (Genesis 3:7) before the Lord gave them clothes (Genesis 3:21).

The Epic of Gilgamesh differs from the Genesis account, but the similarities are striking. In both stories, a god creates a man from the soil. The man lives naked in nature. A woman then tempts him. In both accounts, the man accepts food from the woman, receives knowledge, covers his nakedness, and leaves his former life. The appearance of a snake stealing a plant of immortality in the epic is also noteworthy. There were likely similar stories circulating, and we have only a few remaining clay tablets. There might also have been a story where the first woman, Eve, gave birth to the first man, Adam.

Great Flood

The Great Flood in Genesis also closely resembles the account in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Few scholars doubt that the epic is the source of the biblical narrative. The epic notes that the city of Shurrupak, situated on the banks of the Euphrates River, had grown. The deity Enlil could not sleep because of the sounds the city made. To deal with the noisy humans below, the gods agreed to drown them all.

The deity Ea warned his friend Utnapishtim and asked him to build an ark. With his children and hired men, Utnapishtim built an enormous boat and went on it with his relatives, animals, and craftsmen. The storm god, Adad, sent a terrible thunderstorm with pouring rains that drowned the city. Then, the gods regretted what they had done.

After seven days, the weather calmed. Utnapishtim looked around and saw an endless sea. He saw a mountain rising out of the water. After another seven days, he released a dove into the air. The dove returned, having found no place to land. He then released a swallow that also came back. Then, he released a raven that didn’t come back. Utnapishtim disembarked and made an offering to the gods.

According to the Bible, everyone had grown evil. Only Noah was blameless and faithful. For that reason, God decided to send a flood to wipe out humanity, but to spare Noah and his family. God then ordered Noah to build an ark that could also harbour males and females of every animal species and provide food for them all.

The flood came for forty days. No one survived. After forty days, Noah sent out a raven. Then, he sent a dove to see if the waters had receded. Once the waters receded, the Lord instructed Noah to leave the ark with his wife, his sons, and their wives, and to release the animals. Noah then disembarked and made a sacrifice.

Greek version

A long time ago, there was a great war between the Olympic gods and the so-called Titans. Some Titans sided with the gods. Prometheus, whose name means ‘thinking ahead’, was one of them. He foresaw that the Olympic gods, led by Zeus, the supreme god, would win the battle. After the battle, Zeus rewarded him by granting him the power to create various life forms. Prometheus, with Zeus’ permission, first created animals and then decided to make upright figures, modelled after the gods. Without consulting Zeus, Prometheus then breathed the breath of life into humans, displeasing the supreme god. Prometheus also stole the gods’ fire and gave it to humans, which was even less indicative of foresight.

Zeus punished Prometheus for his transgressions by tying him to a rock. Every day, an eagle came by to peck out his liver, which would grow back during the night, a torment without end. A hero named Heracles, however, later liberated him. Zeus also punished the humans. He ordered Hephaestus, the god of blacksmithing, to create a beautiful but dangerous and inquisitive new creature, the woman. Zeus then sent the woman, whose name was Pandora, to humankind, gave her a box, and warned her in strong terms never to look inside, even though he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist her curiosity. All the gods had put dangerous gifts within the box.

The men, impressed by her looks, adopted Pandora. One day, the curious Pandora could no longer resist the urge and decided to open the box. Out of the box then came all the disasters that have plagued humanity since: famine, disease, earthquakes, and war. The disaster spread like lightning among the people who, until then, had lived free from troubles and disease. Women told an alternative account in which Pandora didn’t open the box, but her husband, a brother of Prometheus named Epimetheus, whose name means ‘thinking afterwards’. There are a few noteworthy parallels with the Bible:

  • The humans were created in the image of the gods.
  • Humans were created by breathing the breath of life into them.
  • The creation of woman occurred after the creation of man.
  • The woman’s curiosity brings disaster to humankind.
  • Pandora’s box plays a role similar to the tree of knowledge in Eden.

The ancient Greeks also had a flood myth of their own. The Greek supreme god, Zeus, had decided to punish humanity with a flood. King Lycaon of Arcadia had sacrificed a boy to Zeus, who, appalled by the offering, decided to end human evil by unleashing a deluge. Deucalion and Pyrrha survived Zeus’ world-destroying flood by building an ark. Warned by the titan Prometheus, they sailed on and landed on Mount Parnassus, where the goddess Themis instructed them to repopulate the earth by throwing stones that would become new people. The similarities between these stories suggest that cultures influenced each other, yet also diverged in significant ways.

Latest revision: 23 September 2025

Featured image: Dutch replica of Noah’s Ark. By Ceinturion CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.

Nature of Reality

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We live inside a simulation created by an advanced post-human civilisation. What the post-human civilisation is like we can’t establish with certainty, but recent developments in artificial intelligence suggest that it is AI. We can find out that this world is not the real world. Science has established several laws of reality, or natural laws, with a sufficient degree of certainty. Therefore, if breaches of these laws occur, this world is fake. There is enough evidence of breaches. And so, the argument is:

  • Science has sufficiently established specific laws of reality.
  • Breaches of these laws prove that this world is a simulation.
  • There is sufficient evidence of breaches in these laws.
  • Hence, we live in a simulation.

We like to think we are unique and superb creatures, so we probably won’t alter our human essence if we as biological creatures transition to post-humans. Also, the AIs we build are trained on human knowledge and thinking. And so, post-humans may have motivations similar to ours. These post-humans could run simulations of human civilisations for entertainment and research. If the technology becomes cheap, the number of simulations for amusement is likely to vastly outstrip those for research. Our purpose is probably entertainment, and breaches of the laws of reality suggest so. Research simulations are more likely realistic. Signs of a script indicate that our universe is not a game, but rather someone’s imaginary world.

Coincidences, such as the licence plate number of Franz Ferdinand’s car, suggest a script. A computer generates all our thoughts and actions. We aren’t sentient beings. We don’t think for ourselves. We have no intrinsic value to our creators, so God can let us suffer and kill us without remorse. The strength of the evidence outweighs the issues, such as the lack of scientific evidence for the paranormal, the limitations of the human mind, including our tendency to seek causes when randomness applies or to see meaning where there is none, the hindsight bias, and the difficulties in establishing probabilities. And so, we can know that we live in a scripted virtual reality. And that makes sense because humans are so stupid that they can only survive in fairy tales.

Latest revision: 26 September 2026