In several ways, the Netherlands has been ahead of the rest of the world, such as in liberal reforms like gay marriage and the right to decide about ending one’s own life. It was the result of the political manoeuvring of the left-wing liberal party D66 and, most notably, its leader, Hans van Mierlo, who had schemed to make it happen. The Christian Democrats, who had always been in the government, had long blocked progressive reforms. In 1994, after the Christian Democrats had lost the election, D66 forged the purple coalition with the social democrats of the PvdA and the right-wing liberals of the VVD. These parties set aside their differences and focused on their shared progressive values to implement amendments. A large section of the Christian Democrat electorate supported these changes, including most Roman Catholics, so they remained uncontested afterwards.
The Netherlands is one of the least nationalist countries. In their preparedness to die for their country, the Dutch score particularly low, according to a Reddit survey. It is the most closely tied to both the continental European and the Anglo-Saxon world. Together with Great Britain, the Netherlands is oriented toward the United States. It may explain why the Dutch provided more NATO heads than any other country. If geographical distance indicates cultural distance, it is worth noting that the Netherlands lies between Great Britain, Germany, and France. Being close to Scandinavia, it was also one of the least corrupt countries, with a fiscally prudent government.
The Netherlands long ranked highly in sexual liberty. Prostitution is legal and performed openly in red light districts. It was not all good. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, paedophiles could operate in the open until the focus returned to the damage they do to children. On the work floor, equality is the norm, as the Dutch balance work and private life, which is uncommon in most countries. In many ways, the Netherlands has progressed the furthest. The Netherlands doesn’t lead on all fronts. For example, the country lags in the number of women on boards and in parliament.
On top of that, the border between the Roman Catholic and Protestant worlds runs through the Netherlands. And so, it became the crossroads of Western civilisation, and with more minorities coming in, the crossroads of world civilisation. That wasn’t on my mind at the time, but in hindsight, there is more to it. The Netherlands means ‘the Low Countries’ because half of it lies below sea level. The word ‘Nederland’ almost translates to ‘humble country’. The most unpretentious part of it might be Twente, the region I came from.
The Dutch are known for their tolerance, which is close to indifference. There had long been parallel societies with Protestants, Catholics and socialists living separate lives, so it was mind your own business. For long, Protestantism had been the official religion and Catholicism was illegal, but Catholics could hold masses in secret. That was tolerance. Today, smoking weed is not a problem. The Netherlands was also a haven for Jews until the German occupation during World War II. That same tolerance was the stance towards immigrants for a long time. In that sense, the Netherlands didn’t differ from several other Western European countries.
It was a fairy-tale society, with Van Kooten and De Bie seeking the nuance. Their characters represented the so-called conservative, ignorant and xenophobic undercurrent in the Dutch culture, and of course, hustlers, such as Jacobse and Van Es, infiltrating politics with their corrupt schemes and dubious deals. The undercurrent didn’t go away. Instead, it grew stronger. Immigrants continued to arrive, causing a growing unease. The progressive values many Dutch cherished didn’t agree with the conservative worldview of many immigrants, most notably Muslims. These feelings only needed a catalyst, like the Germans needed Hitler, to give the anger and discontent a voice.
The existing political parties had become complacent and didn’t see what was coming. Nor had I. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a maverick politician, Pim Fortuyn, rose to prominence with his strong views on immigration and Islam. Fortuyn claimed that leftists were to blame for immigration. He called them the Leftist Church for their moral superiority claims. They would call you a racist if you opposed immigration. Many wanted to contain immigration, most notably of groups that had trouble adapting. Only, no politician said it that plainly as Fortuyn did. The others were more careful not to promote division in society. Most immigrants did okay, and inciting hatred wouldn’t improve things. Keeping a good society is not a simple affair. It is like a juggling act of keeping many balls in the air. Fortuyn didn’t seem to understand or care and sought personal fame.
Balls on the ground
Fortuyn had terminated the fairy tale of the multicultural society. I had believed in it or wanted to believe in it, for if there will ever be world peace, the world must unite and become one multicultural society. Living with people from different cultures isn’t easy. I should have known that, given what happened to me as a student. Culture can be an unbridgeable gap. Some Fortuyn supporters seemed to anticipate civil war and hoped that it would start sooner rather than later, when the authentic white Dutch were still a majority. The atmosphere quickly turned grim. Under the guise of free speech, the sewers opened, and the rivers of hatred flooded freely into the open. Fortuyn’s rise made headlines in the international press because it represented a clear break with the past, occurring in what many believed was the most liberal country in the world.
Fortuyn supporters overran the IEX message board with their vile and racist comments. So when someone created a new account on IEX, started posting, while suggesting he was a Turk to test the mood, others viciously attacked him. Fortuyn was openly gay, and his objection to Islam was that it didn’t agree with Western liberal values. He further pointed out crimes committed by immigrant youth, especially those of Moroccan descent. Racists and bigots jumped on his bandwagon. However, and that was where leftists like me got it wrong, the movement was more than just bigotry and racism. Tribal identities are obstacles to unity, not only internationally, but also within countries. It is as problematic as the existence of nation-states. Fortuyn picked up one ball while dropping several others.
A leftist poster with the avatar Kingie started a new website, BeursKings (MarketKings), with the help of. Danger Money. A small group left IEX and joined the new message board. I was among them. Had BeursKings not started, I would have remained on IEX, and I was accustomed to hostility, so it was not really a case of fleeing. BeursKings remained in operation for several years. Kingie once posted several photographs of himself on the website. That was a shock. He looked like my double. In hindsight, that is remarkable because of his avatar name. Others who remained on IEX also joined the BeursKings message board. I was part of the so-called Leftist Church and had tried to rein in the bigotry. One of the IEX posters once called me ‘vicar’ for my moralising.
This particular individual believed that he was a genius. A spectacular profit he had made on a semiconductor stock might have reinforced that belief. He was not the only one. The Dot-Com bubble had made more people believe they were geniuses, beating investment gurus like Warren Buffett. My investment returns have never justified such ideas, but I could write stories that people liked. This guy was a physicist working in a laboratory, or so he once wrote, not Dutch, but a Czech, and a relative of Franz Kafka, he once wrote. He thought that investment results came from ‘observing the herd and anticipating where it would go next’ rather than from luck in picking a winning stock. He sometimes made negative comments about me, but later praised me for identifying interest charges on money and debts as a root cause of many evils ruining this world. The reason remains unclear, but he seemed like a fascist to me, and the struggle against international finance and usury is part of the Nazi ideology.
Shortly before the 2002 elections, a left-wing loner assassinated Fortuyn. Fortuyn had already hinted at it. If something were to happen to him, he claimed, it would be because establishment politicians had demonised him. The socialist-in-name-only Marcel van Dam, who lived in a luxurious mansion far away from multicultural neighbourhoods, and who had always been eager to take the moral high ground, once called Fortuyn an ‘exceptionally inferior human.’ And so, you may ask yourself, who of the two was the most superb Nazi? Fortuyn gave a presentable at-your-service salute that might do well in some fascist circles, but his ‘inferior human’ remark gave Van Dam the edge.
Others called Fortuyn ‘extreme’ or ‘demolishing society’ because he was stirring up public sentiment. Fortuyn was a man of theatre, hyping the wrongs others did to him while being a jerk himself. The Netherlands is not a violent country. It was the first political assassination in 400 years, so no one saw it coming. The civil war didn’t arrive, but death threats to politicians have become common. The attitudes toward immigrants and Islam have also changed. Fifteen years later, the United States saw the rise of a similar leader.
Fortuyn’s assassin, Volkert van der Graaf, was diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. He was someone like me. To him, Fortuyn may have been a new Hitler on the rise. He feared Fortuyn would tear down Dutch society so that the weak, such as the poor and refugees, would suffer, and also animals, as he had been an animal rights activist. Van der Graaf drew a logical conclusion from the facts, or so he believed. The problem with this kind of thinking is that we don’t know the future. Mass immigration can destabilise a country. Van der Graaf had good intentions, but Fortuyn also believed he was serving the Netherlands. Yet, there was something evil about Fortuyn. I am not a trained psychologist, but Fortuyn was someone who wanted to be the centre of attention and wield power, and didn’t care about the consequences of his actions, much like Donald Trump.
Harry Mens, a Dutch real estate tycoon whom you might call the Dutch Donald Trump, had promoted Fortuyn on his television show, Business Class. So, like Trump, Mens had a television show. Fortuyn’s appearance on his show foreshadowed a new type of politics, common in the United States but not in the Netherlands, in which wealthy money men run puppet politicians. I found Mr Mens to be a questionable character, boasting and flaunting his wealth. At the time, I didn’t think of Trump, but there are parallels. His programme was about investments with people in suits and dresses promoting their investment services. A few advertisers on his show turned out to be frauds, such as Palm Invest.
I think of Pim Fortuyn and Donald Trump as narcissistic psychopaths. These are not official diagnoses, but personal impressions. However, some psychoanalysts concluded that Fortuyn was a narcissist, possibly because of feelings of inferiority that he needed to compensate for with praise. It was all about him, and other people were just utensils. His neurotic disturbances and unresolved personality flaws made Pim Fortuyn such a powerful force. One psychoanalyst said, ‘Imagine if he had to go on a state visit to US President Bush. He would exhibit Sun King-like behaviour.’1 To Fortuyn, the US President would have been a mere extra in the Pim Fortuyn show. Even though the psychoanalysts didn’t raise that particular issue, Pim Fortuyn seemed to enjoy hurting other people’s feelings, so I suppose he was a psychopath as well.
If you consider the characteristics of narcissistic psychopaths, you might discover they are the opposite of Asperger’s syndrome. I name a few: (1) thriving on chaos versus thriving in order, (2) desiring to be the centre of attention versus not wanting attention or praise, (3) manipulative and lying versus honest and forthright and (4) charming versus impolite. At first glance, Fortuyn and Trump seemed impolite rather than charming. That needs further explanation. First, you don’t have to check all the boxes to be autistic or a psychopath. And second, the impoliteness of the autistic person comes from being honest. By being rude, Fortuyn and Trump catered to the fear and anger of their supporters. They told them what they wanted to hear. What can make psychopaths successful as leaders is that they are willing to hurt people, which may be required to do what is necessary. With these words, I conclude my psychoanalysis session.
Life went on
Beurkings attracted a few posters who remained on IEX. One of them, Xzorro, didn’t believe the 9/11 conspiracy theories and thought that the success of the attacks was due to the incompetence of the American authorities. Yet, he believed the allegations that a high-ranking Dutch Prosecution official, Joris Demmink, had had sex with underage male prostitutes and that there was a conspiracy within the Dutch government to cover it up. An investigative journalist and conspiracy theorist, Micha Kat, had pursued the matter relentlessly for many years. In the 1990s, there had been a police investigation into possible child abuse by four high-ranking government officials.
The investigation had collapsed after someone had leaked information. During raids, the police found no evidence on the suspects. Fred Teeven, who had led the investigation, later stated that Demmink had not been a person of interest. The Dutch newspaper AD claimed that Demmink had contact in the 1980s with a pimp of underage boys. Kat was onto something, but he was a nutter. Kat later claimed that children buried in a Bodegraven cemetery were the victims of Satanic child abusers, which was nonsense and easy to disprove. And Kat had a conviction for making death threats to a fellow journalist.
Another poster on BeursKings, Gung Ho, who lived in the Dutch countryside, favoured traditional US conservatism and posted lengthy pieces copied from American websites, some about US Neoconservatives being Leninist agitators. He enthusiastically promoted a penny stock, Clifton Mining, and believed that colloidal silver was a cure against many diseases. That made him the subject of mockery, most notably by Amoricano, an American of Dutch origin who long had been on IEX. Gung Ho might have been in the military and had friends in the American military, or so his sparse remarks about his personal life suggested.
Gung Ho regularly posted comments about the Neoconservatives being chicken hawks, so cowards who send others to war while having done no military service themselves. His use of language was odd. He didn’t express himself as most people would. That made his lengthy texts amusing. The connection between Neoconservatism and Leninism seemed obscure. Like the Leninists, the Neoconservatives use Hegel’s dialectic to promote social progress via revolutions and wars. The conflict between the West and Islam was their latest project, founded on the clash-of-civilisations ideology, and the Iraq War was one of its consequences. Traditional conservatives like Gung Ho opposed these methods. Fortuyn adhered to the neoconservative clash-of-civilisations ideology as well.
There was also a psychiatrist on BeursKings. He had quit his job and tried to make a living by day trading. He posted under the name Kindval, a soccer player from the 1970s. He didn’t seem to like me. When someone attacked me personally or for my political views, he upvoted these comments. The day trading probably didn’t go well. Once, Gung Ho went loose on him by suggesting he had psychological issues. I upvoted that comment. It was a rare occasion for me to upvote a negative comment. Kindval became agitated about Gung Ho’s comment, but even more about my upvote. It made me think that he was, as Gung Ho implied, on his way to a nervous breakdown.
No gain without pain
Fortuyn’s rise had made me curious about the troubles in the multicultural society. The fallout of my student years of not fitting in had made me interested in cultural differences. My view was that the multicultural society had to work because you can’t go back to nation-states. They are a thing of the past. So, what stands in the way of success? Is there really an unbridgeable gap between Islamic and Western culture? It made me interested in Muslims and what they were thinking. In 2004, I joined the message board Maroc.nl for people with a Moroccan background. They are a disregarded minority and face discrimination. Most notably, young Moroccan men are a source of trouble. There are other minorities with similar issues, but somehow Moroccans get most of the attention. They have a serious likability problem. So, when the nationalist politician Geert Wilders singled out one particular minority for deportation, he took the Moroccans in his infamous ‘fewer Moroccans’ quote, ‘Fewer Moroccans. Let us take care of that.’
The Dutch dislike Moroccans more than any other ethnic minority. As the most-hated child of the school, I have been there. It was not entirely my fault, but I was part of the problem. There is a lot of negativity that the mainstream media hardly reports on. Instead, they try to create a positive atmosphere, for example, by highlighting the neighbourhood father project that aims to involve parents in overseeing the neighbourhood. Focusing on the negativity and the problems makes matters worse, but ignoring the issue doesn’t help either. The point here, as in similar cases, is that the majority of Maroccans do alright. Still, the minority that causes trouble is large and problematic enough to affect the group’s image as a whole. The issues Moroccans in the Netherlands face, and how they see themselves and relate to society, compare to those of blacks in the United States. The message board was open. Everyone could join. It featured discussions about religion and social issues. Various people shared their opinions and discussed them with one another.
People came and went on the message board over the years. Occasionally, there were heated exchanges, with Moroccans complaining about the racism of the Dutch and the Dutch complaining about the misconduct of the Moroccans. There were a few agitators on both sides. But overall, the discussions were meaningful and insightful. That was probably because of the diversity of the posters. I suspect the message board had received a grant and was obliged to keep it open to a variety of opinions. There were Christians, Jews, Muslims, former Fortuyn supporters, and leftists.
There were also a few gays seeking to counter the hatred of LGBTQ people among Muslims because of street violence against LGBTQ people in areas where Moroccans lived. There was a diversity of opinions and an exchange of views. People argue over who is right and who is wrong. I didn’t need to have my own opinion to learn from others. I didn’t have strong views. I was more interested in the problem itself. I could watch others dispute and consider the merits of their opinions.
Traditional Muslims are strict on religion, much like conservative Christians. They have more in common with each other than with liberals. So, why many liberals like Muslims, and conservative Christians dislike them, is quite an enigma if you reason from their perspectives on life. Terrorists usually are young men high on testosterone who seek meaning in life and find it in Islam, and then fall prey to extremist preachers. There aren’t that many of them, but a few hundred can already become a serious threat. During my first year, there was uproar over the Dutch publicist Theo van Gogh, who was indeed kin to the famous Dutch painter. Under the guise of freedom of speech, he called Muslims ‘goat fuckers’ and Muhammad ‘a pimp’. The people on the message board didn’t care much about being called ‘goat fuckers,’ but insulting Muhammad was a red line that genuinely upset them.
Several posters also expressed fury about the Somali lady Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who had left Islam for a liberal lifestyle, and had, together with Van Gogh, made the short film Submission about the suppression and mistreatment of women by Muslims. To Muslims, the film was blasphemous as it showed the bodies of abused women with Quran verses on them that the filmmakers claimed Muslims use to justify mistreating women. Hirsi Ali also had called Muhammad a ‘pervert’ and a ‘paedophile.’ She faced death threats. The anti-immigration and anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders also faced death threats and requires security to this day.
Hirsi Ali had escaped an arranged marriage. The Dutch police prevented her family from abducting her from an asylum seeker centre in Almelo. She later moved to the United States to work for the neoconservative think tank. Van Gogh paid for his Islam-insulting binge with his life. A youngster of Moroccan descent slit his throat, precisely 911 days after the Fortuyn assassination. That was on 2 November, which refers to the European emergency services telephone number 112, the European equivalent of 911. So, in the first year, the atmosphere on the message board was tense, perhaps explosive even.
Western interventions in the Middle East and Western support for Israel also angered quite a few, or they used it as an excuse for their misconduct. Israel illegally occupied Palestinian land, and Palestinians kept on committing acts of terrorism. It has proven to be an irresolvable conflict due to violent extremists on both sides. Several posters on the message board viewed the West, including the Netherlands, as anti-Islamic. As I tried not to offend people with my opinions, I had positive karma on the message board. At first, I was making up my mind. It is a conflict between two worldviews, each with its own logic. There is an underlying truth, whatever that may be. In the first years, the American gangster heist called the Iraq War was still in progress. For me, the start of the Iraq War had been an unanticipated mental dip. The Americans had tricked me into believing that Saddam Hussein had a stash of WMDs.
Once I saw live on CNN how the bombs fell on Baghdad and how gung-ho Americans ran over the country’s defences, and murdered the defenceless Iraqis, my mood suddenly swung to dim. And then there were no WMDs. They had bombed a country into ruins and killed thousands for no good reason. Mission accomplished. Once again, Americans had confirmed the prejudice of being the trigger-happy cowboys who love their guns and shoot people for minor infringements like trespassing. And Iraq wasn’t even theirs. In the Wild West, it is the law of the gun, not the rule of law, that prevails.
The Netherlands has been a major contributor to the American war effort in Iraq as well as Afghanistan. The Dutch Prime Minister Balkenende had praised the Dutch VOC mentality of the former Dutch colonial enterprise that had invaded and looted the Indies under the guise of trade. The United States had merely copied that proud Dutch tradition of the looting oligarchic merchant republic of the Netherlands. The United States now has the VOC mentality. Shell was a Dutch company, so the Dutch had to be in on the action, or so Mr Balkenende may have reasoned.
Meanwhile, the American government told Americans it was their patriotic duty to purchase more planet-ruining gas-guzzling SUVs to make the scheme profitable. And of course, Americans are very patriotic when it comes to their excessive consumption. You can view the US dollar-based global economy as a scam that primarily benefits wealthy Americans. The whole world is subsidising their lavish lifestyles with their labour and resources. Western countries, including the Netherlands, benefited from this arrangement, as the American military provided peace and stability in Europe. But the world paid the Americans for it by using the US dollar as a reserve currency. The Americans were the leeches on the world’s dime, and they had the military to extort tribute.
That, and the liberal values, are reasons several posters found the West evil and hard to accept Dutch society. They may have used it as an excuse for their misconduct and crimes that they would have committed anyway. Some could easily get angry at you simply for being Dutch. Some Dutch came to the message board only to lecture the Moroccans about the backwardness of Islam or the misconduct of Moroccan youngsters. That didn’t work out so well. You wouldn’t change your mind when someone you have never seen before came out of the blue to tell you how stupid your religion is and that your community is a bunch of criminals. There was also a private messaging system. Over the years, two ladies contacted me as they preferred a Dutch husband and hoped that I was a Muslim.
A few posters have written that they had been in prison. One even posted from jail, so he had access to the Internet or a smartphone. They were discussing the Dutch police. Some were racist, they believed, but others were professional, of which they mentioned examples. There definitely is a problem. It doesn’t mean that most Moroccans are criminals, but if the crime levels in their community, as the statistics suggest, are three times as high as among native Dutch, their community stands out negatively. Some argued that you bear no blame for other people’s faults, which is what the law says. Still, if a group’s culture contributes to these issues, that group becomes a problem. There may be obstacles such as rejection and racism from the Dutch, but positive change begins with you. The Dutch have their own issues, such as misconduct in holiday venues.
Another issue causing some upheaval in the Dutch multicultural society was the tradition of Saint Nicholas, in which a long-bearded, centuries-old white man from Spain arrived with a group of black servants to deliver presents to children. For long, that didn’t cause trouble as it was an old tradition and there had not been slavery of blacks in the Low Countries itself, so the Dutch didn’t associate the helpers with enslavement of blacks. As a child, I believed their faces were black because they went down chimneys to deliver the presents. Americans who saw it were appalled as the tradition involved blackfacing. An American woman working at the United Nations raised the issue, and a group of activists in the Netherlands began protesting. The issue remained contentious for over a decade.
The compromise gradually became the soot-stain helper, a helper with soot-stain marks from going into chimneys. For the remainder, nothing changed. Yet a significant group of Dutch didn’t like black people telling them to change the tradition, which they claimed was part of Dutch cultural heritage. There had been some agitated encounters with the activists. The black activists had a point, but it was mainly a struggle between white egos and black egos. Whites could have accepted that the tradition had racist elements and that the soot-stain helper didn’t meaningfully change it, while blacks could have understood that it was a quaint relic of the past, and that altering it wouldn’t change the lives of blacks in the Netherlands. And so, the issue was, above all, a cock fight.
Some groups cause more problems than others. The Dutch have a bad name in Tyrol, Austria, where young Dutch men are regularly involved in violent incidents. The multicultural troubles weren’t constantly on my mind, but I couldn’t let the issue go. I remained on the Maroc.nl message board for two decades. In 2024, after more than twenty years, shortly after the Gaza War had started, the message board went offline permanently after being filled with anti-Israel messages. That was very suspicious indeed if you believe that the Jews are running this world. Jewish interest groups might have pulled some strings. By then, I had seen too many coincidences to believe that without evidence. And I had arrived at some conclusions. People aren’t willing to change. There will be no gain without pain, which I had already experienced firsthand as a student.
Featured image: Pim Fortuyn on 4 May 2002, two days before his assassination. Roy Beusker (2002). CC BY 3.0. Wikimedia Commons.
1. Een heel vervelend geval. Joris van Casteren (2002). Groene Amsterdammer.
In 2016, Trump fans took over the GodlikeProductions.com message board. The atmosphere turned grim, much as it had fifteen years earlier, when Fortuyn supporters flooded the IEX message board. Since then, the new fascism has grown stronger. This time, I stayed because I had missed out on something important. And given the job that may lie ahead, and me supposedly being Adolf Hitler reincarnate, not understanding fascism was no excuse. And so, I familiarised myself with the MAGA crowd, as I had previously with the Moroccan minority in the Netherlands. Hanging out with people helps you to understand them. Only GodlikeProductions.com had that annoying feature of banning you for no apparent reason, probably to get you to switch to a paid subscription. Fair enough, but the content wasn’t that great, over 99% crap even, so not worth paying for.
That eventually made me switch to Reddit. There, you can hang out with BLM and MAGA, and with others as well, like a fly on the wall, so to speak. And as you might well know, or maybe not, flies on walls like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel can arrive at superior insights. This particular fellow had somehow figured out how God’s plan would unfold over the next 200 years and how we would arrive in Paradise through a struggle between ideas that would lead to social progress. He did so by observing what happened around him, looking at history, and reasoning from there. That is no small feat. In hindsight, he was one of the greatest prophets of all time. Okay, God wrote the script and made him do it. 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, and there were no adults left to keep him in check. Trump had surrounded himself with sycophants. As there is no limit to Trump’s ego, his erratic and spiteful behaviour became a spectacle so hilarious that even Monty Python couldn’t have made it up, with Trump naming building after building after himself, declaring his birthday a public holiday, and numerous other self-aggrandising acts. His economic policies were like raising tariffs on Swiss imports because he didn’t like the way the Swiss leader spoke to him. And let’s not forget 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 Christmas message, ‘Merry Christmas to all, including the radical left scum that is doing everything possible to destroy our country, but are failing badly.’ And after MAGA made such a noise about DEI hires, the Trump administration was stuffed with individuals whose only qualities were being white and not LGBTQ.
His war threats against Denmark, for among other reasons, his not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for which he blamed Norway, by the way, and his going to war with Iran for allegedly not honouring the nuclear agreement he tore up, were also noteworthy. When gas prices rose while mid-term elections were nearing, fearing the wrath of furious car drivers who might vote Democrat out of pure rage, Mr Trump began bullying other countries and, once again, threatening to end NATO if other countries weren’t willing to put the lives of their military at risk for an adventure that he wasn’t willing to risk American lives for. He did so after being unwilling to help Europe with the Ukrainian war effort and letting Europe pay for the American weapons. He did so after helping Russia by allowing Russian oil exports, thereby raising funds for Russia to pay for its war against Ukraine, but only after threatening countries with serious consequences for buying Russian oil. Meanwhile, Mr Trump was already eying an invasion of Cuba. As a Swedish newspaper once put it, ‘This is the problem with having a giant baby in charge of the free world.’
No doubt that the second Trump administration will go down in history as the greatest joke in the history of government, and that the greatness of the joke will be remembered for eternity, so that there is some greatness in the second Trump administration after all. Trump sold his followers $3 made-in-China Trump Bibles for $60 and had several other schemes to cash in on his presidency at his followers’ expense. If exploiting God’s word in this way will not prompt God to act to end the depravity, then what will? And if this level of insanity is not forcing God’s hand to bring in the Messiah, then what will? Also, on the GodlikeProductions.com message board, I was cautious about expressing my opinions, which resulted in positive karma. I was there to learn, not to annoy others with my views. Many still believed that Obama was worse than any other president in American history. And arguing is pointless, for arguing with my father is also pointless, and he is more reasonable than they are.
There are people on the left as extreme as MAGA, but they don’t run the United States. The foundation of Western civilisation, and by extension world civilisation, is social progress through the Hegelian dialectic. MAGA marks the end of social progress, hence of Western civilisation, and civilisation in general. On the surface, MAGA may appear an orgy of hatred, nuttery and jerkism, but the end of social progress is a watershed moment, and one with apocalyptic potential. So, are the barbarians standing at the gates of civilisation? Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten has received threats every day for the past ten years because he is a homosexual. And that is in the Netherlands, perhaps the most civilised country in terms of social progress. So, it is not just Africa, even though on that continent, things are particularly uncivilised in these matters. It makes complaints about MAGA seem misdirected, for there are many less progressive places than the United States.
Still, civilisation is a mindset, from which practical consequences follow. Many Africans see witch doctors because they don’t trust science-based medicine, and some may believe things like having sex with virgins cures aids. However, many people in the West take their advice from influencers who peddle anything corporations wish to sell us, and some may believe that taking a deworming agent for horses protects them against the coronavirus. If there is anything significant that distinguishes us from the apes, it is culture, not genes. MAGA is switching off that mindset, and a return to gangsterism. It is the end of civilisation based on reasoned Socratic and Hegelian debates. African countries don’t have powerful militaries capable of blowing up anything anywhere in the world. The Chinese, who have seen twenty centuries of civilisation, have yet to grow that cheeky. America is still, in some ways, a frontier society, so a Wild West, and many Americans tend to see the world as a giant saloon, where they can start brawls and shoot people for offences like looking nasty. The priority is thus halting America’s further decline into barbarism. We are all savages, and culture is a thin veneer, because our genes rule our actions, including civilised conduct. And so, the barbarians are standing at the gates of civilisation. They always were.
The sad news is that, in any realistic scenario, there is likely no stopping our descent into savagery. Americans are just realistic, and Europeans are naive. The good news is that we live in a fairy-tale world running a script someone wrote. Social justice is the basis of civilisation. Yet in social justice, the law of diminishing returns also applies, and at some point, the net result becomes negative. Social justice hits the limits of human nature. More women than men may prefer to care for their children, which can affect their careers. Humans also can’t live up to high standards, especially when belief in them is lacking. Or there is overreach, thereby creating other injustices. To favour a disadvantaged group, the best candidate may not get the job.
On the other hand, the best candidate may not get the job because of being a member of that group. So, do these injustices cancel each other out, or do they add up? Social justice can turn into cock fights over respect and privileges. You can think of special toilets for people who feel they are neither men nor women. Think of what that would cost if you did it in every public building. People explode in rage over these things, deflecting attention from more serious issues. Trans women competing in women’s sports, despite it being an injustice, is not the most serious issue. And so, humans can’t fix themselves.
Non-Westerners, including Africans and Muslims, have not been brought up in a culture founded on social progress. There is no objective reason for Western culture, based on social progress, being superior. You could say that Western culture brought us to the mess we are in. Yet, social progress is God’s path towards Paradise. And so, they need an uplift. And it also follows that the West also doesn’t require a downlift like MAGA. Social justice advocates like to tell others what they should do, and would like us to use an Orwellian Newspeak in which words are blacklisted, including the word blacklisted, which does nothing to improve the lives of blacks. It is not only social justice advocates doing that. The abortion debate was another cock fight in which the hens had little say. Like the Woke, conservative Christians like to run other people’s lives. They want to breed even more planetary destroyers to ruin God’s creation because they believe that all life is precious.
Humans are savages, especially in groups. Nature has shaped us that way. In that sense, Woke is no different from MAGA. Stating a mere fact could get you cancelled, and furious Woke social justice warriors would treat you like a heretic from then on. We have reached the end of the line, and without an inspiring fairy tale to guide us, further progress is impossible, and we might soon decline into savagery. Knowing that God wrote the script, I kept my calm. In 2019, with no idea how the apocalypse might begin, I had a hunch it would be clear before 2025. That became a deadline, sort of, at least.
On 1 January 2025, I figured that Trump’s erratic conduct might destabilise the world and trigger mayhem. That, at first, didn’t seem to happen as the world adapted, but with no one to check the orange madman, things could spiral out of control. My preparations were not yet complete, but good enough had God called upon me at the time, and close to the finish line, where additional preparation would make little sense. I figured that preparations would be complete around 1 April 2027, and further surmised that the job would start before Trump’s second term was over. And so, the new deadline became 1 July 2028. So, is this going somewhere, or would I be setting deadlines until the Grim Reaper arrives to take me to the eternal hunting fields where death is beautiful all the time?
We have seen the collapse of liberalism, and with it, the so-called rules-based liberal world order, which was, of course, an order that favoured the West, but even more, the elites, which orders always do. Things will not return to what they were before. The liberal world order has ended. Liberal states have long had an edge because of capitalism and science. Liberalism is as much a part of the Western heritage as Christianity, perhaps even more so, for without liberalism, science, and social progress, Western civilisation wouldn’t be distinct from the others, and the Christian and Islamic worlds would have been the closest kin in cultural values and outlook. Science and capitalism thrived most in a liberal environment with freedom of expression and property rights. When the Nazis took over Germany, several Jewish German scientists fled to the United States, including a fellow named Einstein. They helped the United States develop the atomic bomb. And then Adolf Hitler made the error of invading the Soviet Union. That is how liberalism won the day.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, liberalism seemed to have won. Yet, it might be 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. And like nearly every previous president, Donald Trump has promised Americans more stuff. The modern consumer is not much unlike a drug addict who commits suicide by overdosing, and wants 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 all that merchandise, are like drug dealers selling opioids.
They made us believe in fairy tales of individual liberty and bribed us with a wide choice of products we could buy until the system breaks down and we die. The bribed suicidal ones would like to debate that claim, but it is insightful. As we are on our way to a collective suicide, the problem is not what is wrong with the critiques of capitalism, but rather what is right about them, as we live in a capitalist world. And so, I must take on the merchants and the salespeople, and make them look terrible. They are the greatest evil of all, even though most are ordinary people who care for their families. But so were most Nazis. Yet, as a group, they are a far more formidable danger to humanity than the Nazis ever were.
Complacency set in. High on delusion and lured by the prospect of profits for the businesses they represented, the neoconservatives, a breed of conservatives that had adopted Hegelian dialectic much to the horror of true conservatives, and therefore believed that Western culture is superior, so that after toppling the regime in Iraq, a liberal democracy would magically appear, made the United States invade Iraq. Since then, China has revised its economic model and now outcompetes the West, while mass migration of non-Westerners has eroded the West’s liberal foundations. Most Muslims, Africans, and Eastern Europeans show little interest in LGBTQ rights or women’s rights, in the liberal sense that is. They have no upbringing in a tradition of progress rooted in Hegelian dialectic. Liberalism was yet another fairy tale. It has just collapsed in front of us, and quite suddenly, also to my surprise, but liberals have yet to catch on.
We are at a turning point in history. One of Western civilisation’s foundational pillars, social progress, is collapsing. We have reached the limits of human nature. Savages as we are, we can’t keep up appearances for too long. 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. With the arrival of people from illiberal areas, where social progress has been lacking, this becomes increasingly difficult, as diversity requires everyone to accept society’s rules, including diversity, which is the hardest part. That is why fear is on the rise, the beast in us awakes, order collapses, the rule of law begins to look like a luxury we can’t afford, and gangsters like Donald Trump take over. Maintaining a good society is like a juggler keeping several balls in the air, as Denmark does. A juggler can only keep so many balls in the air, but more if no one makes his job more difficult.
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama used the phrase ‘Getting to Denmark’ for turning nations into stable, prosperous, and well-governed states with low corruption, rule of law, and accountability, an ideal yet difficult-to-achieve goal in the development of societies. Paradises don’t last because they try to regulate the forces of nature, and the competition never stops. Building a civilisation is a bit like building a house of cards. As long as there are no serious headwinds, we build storeys upon storeys, but at some point, the winds come. After some time, tensions build, either inside society or in its environment, and existing arrangements stop functioning properly. Change may require gathering people around a new myth, starting a revolution, and going to war to spread it. The myth I bring you could be the final one, the one ending all other myths, and thereby all wars, and forever, and a vision of Paradise that is concrete and has proven to work, a society like Denmark. Time is drawing close. The balls are falling to the ground. 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.
Peak Bullshit
In the early 2000s, I figured that we would soon see Peak Bullshit, the era when nonsense couldn’t reach higher levels, after seeing that the Internet is an ideal medium to spread misinformation, such as climate change denial. Social media didn’t exist at the time. It was a prophetic thought. But bullshit is everywhere, even in science, so many conservatives don’t trust science, including climate science, and see it as a hobby for progressives. Woke ideology has affected science, either by narrowing the range of subjects open to investigation or by limiting the range of acceptable conclusions.
A high-profile case in the Netherlands was Wouter Buikhuisen’s research into the causes of criminal behaviour. Buikhuisen concentrated on biological factors. In other words, could genes affect conduct? Leftist opinion makers in magazines attacked him, claiming that the modern capitalist society and authoritarian upbringing cause behavioural issues like crime. Buikhuisen had to deal with personal attacks that portrayed him as dumb and evil, as well as disturbances during his lectures, sometimes with violence. Partly due to the upheaval and its effect on Buikhuisen’s private life, the research project eventually faltered.
Woke ideology affecting science is an issue raised by MAGA. Science projects funded by businesses face the same problems. The profit motive may affect the research topics and acceptable conclusions. So, can you trust the vaccines Big Pharma profits from? The left long dominated the social sciences, possibly because, through science, we might achieve social progress, an idea that mostly appeals to progressives. Humans are programmable but also constrained. Progressives think we are programmable, while conservatives think we are constrained and that going against human nature does more harm than good.
It had long been politically incorrect to link conduct to genes because the Nazis used it as an excuse for exterminating entire population groups. If you link conduct to genes, social problems become unfixable, except by sterilisation or extermination. It casts some light on the emotional responses. Around 1980, the memory of World War II still shaped the Dutch mood, and anything remotely smelling like fascism was scary as hell and seemed profoundly evil. It is also a reason why America, which lacked this historical memory, went fascist at a faster pace. The general mood in society shapes what science can investigate and what it can conclude. MAGA sets up an alternative myth with alternative facts, so climate science has become the new politically incorrect. Still, the facts don’t depend on what we believe or society’s mood, and we can ignore them at our own peril.
After Peak Bullshit, things may collapse, and perhaps, The Truth comes out. We all have a model of reality that we use to make sense of the world. Without a model of reality, nothing makes sense. We cooperate based on myths we share, like liberalism and fascism, that provide us with a model of reality with instructions on how we should behave. We cling to our worldviews because once everything we believe collapses, we are out in the wilderness on our own, with nothing to guide us. I have been there. It is horrific, worse than dying, maybe, making us willing to die for our myths and go to war for them. And so we ignore facts that contradict our worldviews. Peak Bullshit has the following symptoms:
Outright fabrications: many claims were simply bogus, so untrue. But they riled up people nonetheless. Anti-vaccine posts were usually of that nature.
Improper sourcing: a Twitter account claims something has happened, but there is no other evidence. You have to trust the gutter on that one.
Hyping incidents: if a black guy molests a white guy or rapes a white woman, the fascists claim it is evidence of white genocide.
Distorting the truth: if you get access to the same news from regular sources, you find that the reporting of the alt-right paints a caricature of reality.
Finally, there are definitely things that the traditional media do not report on, and are worth knowing. You can think of what preceded the war in Ukraine.
It is not just MAGA. The left uses similar tactics. An example of a dubious cause is Black Lives Matter, which made an issue out of the police killings of black people. The incidents that inspired the movement were acts of police brutality and vigilante policing with fatal consequences. Compared to European police forces, American police are savage. In the United States, police fatalities are 33 per 10 million inhabitants per year, in league with countries like Angola, Colombia, Mali and Sudan, which is 30 times as much as countries like Germany, Portugal, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. That highlights the difference between civilisation and barbarism.
The incidents that gave rise to BLM were appalling, such as the police shooting an unarmed boy who was fleeing from the police. BLM made a race issue out of it, while the numbers indicate that it was brutal policing. It becomes clear when you take violent crime levels into account. Blacks are three times as likely to be killed by the police, but six times as likely to be convicted of murder. Relative to the number of murders they committed, the police killed fewer blacks. Parents will be angry if the police kill their unarmed son, and rightfully so, but when you misinterpret statistics in this way, you rile up people without probable cause. It undermines social trust. Fascists do the same by highlighting incidents where blacks molest or murder whites, making it appear that blacks are after whites, while blacks mostly molest and murder blacks. That is as divisive as what BLM did.
The primary cause of black fatalities at the hands of the police is not racism, but police brutality, which comes with the level of lethal violence Americans accept. In the United States, you can get away with shooting a cleaning lady trying to open the wrong door. In the Netherlands, that would be murder. And in the United States, everyone can carry a gun, so, understandably, the police are on edge, fearing for their lives, making them shoot first and ask questions later. Social justice issues can promote divisions in society, and if a cause lacks merit, such criticism is justified. Stressing that black lives matter, considering these numbers, gives others the impression that their lives matter less. Mentioning the crime levels amongst blacks or saying that white lives also matter riled up quite a few people, ‘That’s a racist thing to say.’ If you want to know why people voted for Trump, here is one reason. Triggered liberals were a favourite item of mockery among MAGA people.
You don’t have to doubt that MAGA is racist. The Trump social media post portraying President Obama and his wife as apes proves it. The barbarians are now in charge of the United States, but they came to power with a little help from BLM. Intentions don’t invalidate an argument. So, if you are black and a racist says to you that blacks cause trouble, it would be better to let that person be, accept the facts, stay positive, and help your community improve. Whatever society does wrong, you gain more from fixing your own problems. There is a bias against blacks in the United States justice system. They receive 10%-20% longer sentences for similar crimes and 10%-20% more wrongful convictions, but it is not the reason why blacks as a group lag in society. Even though blacks are overrepresented in the US prison population, most blacks do fine. Likewise, 95% of criminals are men, but that doesn’t mean 95% of men are criminals.
MAGA also riles up people without probable cause. Like BLM, MAGA thrives on anger. It would be better if sensible people made the best of it than let extremists run the show. The BLM cause is not comparable to that of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when whites were standing in the way of blacks. Social justice advocates hoped that equality could solve the issues plaguing black communities, but that is not the most serious issue plaguing blacks in the United States today. So, even when others wrong you, it often helps you most to focus on your own issues. And I speak from experience. It doesn’t guarantee success. And again, I speak from experience. I have given up several times and accepted the miserable deal my life seemed to be. But the evidence is clear. Other ethnic groups do better in American society. Some do better than whites. And the Jews, despite centuries of discrimination and persecution, do particularly well, too well even for their own good.
Believe it or not
For a long time, I found it hard to understand how people can believe things that have been proven wrong. Yet the proof is everywhere around me. It happened to me as well. We want to believe in something. That makes myths powerful. I hadn’t questioned my religion until becoming an adult, and only because of a crisis that made me question everything. And I had ignored signs that the multicultural society could be failing. The rise of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands served as a wake-up call, prompting me to investigate the issue, and even then, I didn’t give up on the idea. Myths control us like software controls computers. Our hardware may be wired to destroy other life on this planet at the fastest pace we can, but how we do it depends on myths. The capitalist myth helps us to optimise our performance by making creative destruction a goal in itself.
I didn’t understand human nature well enough, but thinking of the point of having a Messiah, I had to think about why this might work, even though only in fairy tales. We cooperate based on myths. Things are never precisely as our myths tell us, but our myths shape reality. In other words, our belief in the myth can make it work. Myths are often stronger than reality because we are religious animals. Myths can make us ignore reality until they collapse. Then we search for new myths. They can change our perception: what was once far-right becomes normal, while what was once normal becomes far-left. That is a matter of competing myths and how myths define how we see reality.
Here we arrive at the issue of conservatives distrusting the liberal mainstream press. Liberal media may not lie plainly, but forget to mention crucial facts like BLM did, so that they give you a distorted picture of reality, which is as bad. So when liberals say that MAGA people are idiots, it is because liberals don’t fall for Trump’s blatant lies, but require somewhat more sophisticated methods to get misguided. It requires even more intelligence, or experience, to see through sophisticated propaganda, so the jury is still out on which group is the dumbest. On the bright side, our intelligence doesn’t work to our advantage, so a high IQ is not something to be proud of. Worms don’t develop weapons of mass destruction or make themselves obsolete by inventing artificial intelligence. So, three hoorays for the worms. Their collective intelligence overclasses ours by a wide margin.
Mainstream journalists pay little attention to issues we learn about elsewhere because it is politically incorrect to do so. Not only is that to protect the myths that support society, but also because many people can’t handle the facts in an adult fashion. Just discuss the Israel lobby’s stranglehold on US politics and their efforts to control the debate on universities. Mearsheimer and Walt were among the few adults in the argument by stating the facts in no uncertain terms while not going down the road of Jew-hating. Most people don’t want a race war, so perhaps mainstream journalists are too cautious, or it was Jews owning the media after all, but leaving the matter untouched helps the case of the anti-Semites. If we can’t discuss these issues frankly without people going crazy, whether they are Jews or anti-Semites, it is obvious why the worms have an edge and will still be there long after humans are gone. There are many issues where our feelings get in the way. We are unfit to survive because we are intelligent enough to invent things that can terminate us and stupid enough to use them.
Our gut feelings are a survival mechanism, not a fact-finding instrument. If you suspect that someone is planning to murder you, waiting for proof can be a fatal mistake. Fascism appeals to our gut feelings and tribal instincts. We cooperate in groups to compete with other groups, and that competition includes warfare. Multiculturalism allows tribes within a country to coexist until they develop a common identity. That works as long as everyone respects the authorities, the national law supersedes tribal justice, and we all share the idea of a common destiny. Another issue is that a society’s institutions are built on the assumed behaviour of those who lived there at the time of foundation. Newcomers may not understand them and may miss out on benefits or exploit weaknesses in these systems, for example, with fraud schemes. Fraud and corruption are everywhere, but if immigrants do it, we are more alarmed because ‘they’ are robbing ‘us’.
That is why we have to be serious about fascism. Otherwise, things only get worse. Those who abuse a system may feel no connection to the society they live in and may be more loyal to their tribe. And so, society has reasons to expel them. If you are more loyal to your tribe, go home and live with them. We can only address these issues when we are candid, and if needed, politically incorrect, but also fair and truthful. The solution to the problem may also lie in fascism: turn humanity into a single tribe. That could be my mission, so one people, one nation, one leader, which was also a Nazi slogan by the way. And you must follow your leader without questioning, like the Germans followed Adolf Hitler, because we are too stupid to think for ourselves, and do stupid things like following Adolf Hitler without questioning. Perhaps, you get the point. Humans are a total joke. That is why worms, as a species, are so much smarter than humankind. And so, our path to salvation is accepting the truth: no matter how smart you think you are, you are less than a worm, even if you had been real.
Mediocre vision
Humanity’s lack of collective intelligence sets the bar for a prospective world leader at a rather unchallenging level. Someone with mediocre vision will already do much better, provided this individual has unlimited authority, which is the point of having a Messiah. Unlike politicians, he doesn’t need to promise you more stuff, for if we keep making decisions based on our pocketbooks, we won’t make it. Nearly everyone thinks, ‘What’s in it for me?’ Few think, ‘What can I do?’ There isn’t enough in the world to give everyone more. During their lifetimes, typical members of modern affluent societies own several million artefacts each, ranging from cars and houses to disposable nappies and milk cartons. For most of history, almost everyone survived and was often happy, with less than 1% of that. And so, there is ample room to make people content with less stuff, and if we can make everyone believe that we don’t need more than enough and that enough is far less than spoiled people think it is, we might survive.
Indeed, it doesn’t require a genius to see the solution. The real problem is making people comply, which is also obvious. We all like to listen to salespeople who sell us alternative versions of math and make us feel like geniuses who can cook the books and get away with it. What if we solve the problem of overconsumption with economic growth? And then we compliment ourselves for being brilliant. We ruin the world for money and suicide ourselves in the process, and we can’t stop ourselves, for what would otherwise be the point of a saviour? Jesus said that our allegiance should be with him, not with our family or friends. The Quran says that the angels had to bow before Adam. God made Jesus believe he was Adam reincarnate. That trick didn’t work as well on me, but well enough to make me think I could be the Messiah. If I must be your shepherd, you are my sheep. So, let’s practice on our baa, for if we all say baa together, the world will tremble.
For the job that may await me, I needed answers. So, let’s start with a warning. It is the truth as I see it. I try to have a fair and balanced view, but above all, an insightful one that presents solutions. It is not a neutral view, because every view is to some extent arbitrary, as we don’t know the future, but if I am your saviour, it is the truth that you should accept. It is no accident that I live in the Netherlands, the most advanced country in the Hegelian sense on issues like dealing with the limits of growth, LGBTQ rights, animal welfare, balancing work and private life, and the right to decide to terminate one’s own life. The truth has many sides. Different views can highlight different aspects of it and reveal errors in other views. You run into contradictions. Turning it into a consistent whole is challenging because it depends on the relative importance of the arguments.
We face fundamental disagreements about the direction we should take, leading to an authority crisis and a moral crisis that divides societies. Think of it. An Antifa activist is as concerned about the future as a neo-Nazi. Authority and morality come from the stories we believe in. The United States faces a moral corruption issue. Money has corrupted everything. Even protesters who show up at social justice rallies may receive pay for their attendance. Most Americans are ordinary people who feel that what they do is right. Yet, Americans live in a tradition of pragmatism, while Europeans live in a tradition of idealism, and that is a profound difference. Both paths are dead ends. Without a measure of truth and good and evil we all agree on, there remain only perspectives and views over which we will fight without end.
As Judgement Day could be approaching, it is not a coincidence that the International Court of Justice is in The Hague, the Netherlands. If I sound judgmental, it is because it seems to be my role to judge. For a long time, I believed myself to be a rather particular individual with a somewhat peculiar collection of views that somehow only seemed to make sense to me, nothing more. But then the monkey came out of the sleeve, which is a Dutch saying for the truth coming out. And like my father, I am very good at telling people the truth they don’t like to hear, but should. Only, I don’t like to offend others or make them feel miserable, so I became quite proficient at keeping my opinions to myself. But now, standing with my back against the wall, while knowing that the wall is so strong that no one can attack me from behind, there is no choice. You are a bunch of morons busy optimising your performance on committing collective suicide. And you will undoubtedly make an issue out of my use of the word morons, which only proves my point. If you really think that my choice of words is the problem here, you are unfit to survive. So, try to view it as a problem description.
Remember that I am a systems engineer appointed to fix the biggest clusterfuck in the history of humankind. There are several harsh truths to engage. One is that if you work hard to get ahead, you may live at the expense of the planet, other people and future generations by taking more than you need. So, there you are: hard-working, obeying the law, paying taxes, raising your children properly, giving money to charities, perhaps being faithful to your spouse, only to find out that your work and consumption ruin the world. That is hard to stomach, but the capitalist economy is about transforming energy and resources into waste and pollution to make the rich richer. As they say, no pain, no gain.
That is, by far, not the only issue. Whatever I am going to tell you, no matter how rude or harsh, it is said in good spirits, so that you might learn from it. Most of us aren’t intentionally evil. We all grew up in a particular tradition, believe in myths, and cherish values we hold dear. Yet the outcome of it all is a total disaster. We all think that the others are the problem, not us. This world is the stage for a story God wrote, so She has intended every bit of it. No one can blame you for who you are if you don’t know better. Unwillingness to change is an entirely different ballgame. It is the gravest crime. Only a brutal truth exercise that spares no one can solve the current predicament. I know first-hand that it can be excruciating. The most painful truth of all is that the truth doesn’t inspire us. We are religious beings who live by myths. And therefore, only a fairy tale that is far more powerful than all the others can save us. Coming from a family of farmers, I am not afraid of shit. These are shitty issues, and you can’t fix them without getting your hands dirty. Some of the most profound truths are at the bottom of a manure pit.
Wishful thinking
For a long time, I had hoped the world would one day become one happy multicultural society. In hindsight, that was wishful thinking, as that only happens in fairy tales. The same is true for an interest-free financial system. Despite being theoretically sound, a usury-free financial system would never have prevailed in the real world. It is not that hard to convince people that they deserve interest on their money, so the usurers have the edge. We all like money for free and let others work for it. And, despite the problems that come with unification, religions and nation-states create even more problems. Yet it is easy to make people believe that their nation is the greatest and that they deserve perks for that, like elite membership in the God Club, so being the chosen ones with a gold card and special perks in heaven. Like usurers, nationalists and religious sects, have the advantage. Even I, after a lengthy study of history, concluded that the Netherlands is by far the greatest nation on Earth, as it has progressed the furthest on the Hegelian scheme of social progress, and God chose to live there. It must be God’s chosen country. And the Netherlands also holds the most potent weapon of all, the Truth Bomb, that will end the world as we know it forever. Indeed, nobody fucks with the Netherlands. So, may he who is without sin cast the first stone.
The Netherlands is great for yet another reason, as it is not a particularly nationalistic country. When asked whether they would fight for their country, a measly 15% of the Dutch answered yes. Only in Japan was that number lower. I would be willing to fight and die for a cause if my sacrifice makes a meaningful difference, but nation-states and tribalism are the reasons why we have no peace, so they aren’t good causes to begin with. Had the Soviet Union still existed, Russia and Ukraine wouldn’t be fighting a bloody conflict. So, what is the point of Russia and Ukraine being independent countries, except for population reduction and generating profits for the arms industry? And this was not the only war fought within the borders of the former Soviet Union. The Soviet Union may have been bad, but this is worse. And let’s not forget former Yugoslavia. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox and Muslims had lived relatively peacefully together for centuries, until they didn’t when nationalism reared its ugly head.
Either we become one nation, or wars will continue to appear necessary, or really will be necessary. The United States and Israel attacked Iran, but experts generally agreed that the stated reasons for them to do so were dubious. There were no indications that Iran was close to making a nuclear bomb, but it had the intention to do so. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have produced 60% enriched uranium. Iran’s missiles were no threat to the United States, and the odds of a war leading to regime change were incalculable. The Iranian regime, however, brutally repressed its own population, supported terrorism, and had developed missiles that could reach Israel. It was up to no good, so for Israel and the United States, it was rational to try to take out the regime or ruin its military. Yet, the Trump regime decided to attack, quite suddenly, while negotiations were still ongoing. Indeed, the war was against international law, as was the murder of the Iranian leader. And so, 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. That also applies to much of what the Iranian regime did, so we are digging deeply into a pile of manure here. But then again, this is a shit-finding exercise.
Every regime is more or less evil, including the US regime and the Israeli regime. It is a choice between evils, and you choose the lesser evil, and also the strongest party, hoping that it will bring order. Most people want to live in peace. Iran has as much right as Israel to nuclear weapons, but Iran having these weapons is bad for peace, stability and order. The underlying problem is competition among states. We can only have peace in a single world order. Humans are violent animals, but states have reduced murders within their borders by over 99%. And so, for world peace, it would already have been better had the Iranian regime run the world, or the Israeli regime. And the problem with humans is that facts don’t inspire them. They must have fairy tales to believe in. Otherwise, they can’t have order. And so, your choice also depends on the myths you believe in.
So, do you believe in the Iranian or the Israeli myth? Is Israel a peaceful democracy threatened by evil regimes and terrorists, so that God has given them the right to take Palestinian land at will? Or is Israel built on land stolen from the Palestinians and a terrorist state that should disappear, and that same God had ordered all Muslims to help? Or is the existence of these myths the problem? For a hypothetical Martian without any stake in the conflict, either fairy tale might sound equally convincing. That Martian might eventually conclude that these competing myths are the problem, and that either one would have sufficed to bring peace and order if everyone had believed it. The Martian might then realise that only God can resolve that conflict, but only if this God is not just another of the mythical figures these humans have invented in the thousands. Otherwise, humans are doomed to fight until they are all dead.
There is no single world order, and with the existence of weapons of mass destruction, living under a global religious dictatorship like the Iranian one would already be better than allowing competing orders. We can do better, but in politics, might makes right, so we can only do better if a superior power makes it so. The US regime may be evil, but it is less oppressive than the Chinese or the Russian regimes. But it is evil nonetheless. Just before he ordered his troops to attack Iran, Mr Trump had threatened to invade Greenland, which is part of Denmark, and unlike Iran, a most peaceful country, and an ally of the United States, that would allow as many US troops on Greenland as the US deems necessary. So, there is no doubt that the United States, or at the very least, the Trump administration, is evil. And if you prefer the lesser evil, Denmark should invade the USA and take over its government. Denmark may be a better country than the United States, but that is also because the US has protected it with its military might for decades, allowing the Danes to build their house of cards of the best society the world has ever seen, but with a military that the Russians might be able to take out in a single day. The point is clear. Humans are the greatest disaster that has ever befallen this beautiful planet. You may have a different opinion, but that is why I am the Messiah, and you are not.
If we keep on going on like this, we will keep on inventing myths to murder each other in tribal wars, religious wars or other necessary wars, including wars to promote peace, and wars to end all wars. That made me willing to accept a considerable degree of inconvenience, while I hardly experienced any inconvenience when living in multicultural neighbourhoods, and later, near an asylum seeker centre. Taking personal experiences as a measure, I would think that the fascists exaggerate with their visions of hordes of barbarians overrunning the country. Yet, not everyone shares my experiences, and the statistics bear this out. Most immigrants don’t cause trouble, but it doesn’t take that many troublemakers to make the neighbourhood unsafe. And if the percentage of criminals rises from 2% to 4%, the number of criminals doubles, so you need twice as many police, prisons and the like. And there were so many newcomers that I would also have worried about the consequences had I not known that God had written the script.
So, what if I had been wrong? My best friend at secondary school sympathised with the anti-immigration party. I disagreed with him, but he presented his arguments reasonably. He was not a racist, but believed that foreigners have trouble adapting to Dutch society, and as a result, could become a problem. In the 1980s, the issues he raised seemed insignificant, and his worries overdone. Most Dutch felt the same, so the anti-immigration party remained a tiny faction. That was forty years ago. Yet, immigration continued, and its impact on society has become more visible, so more people feel uneasy about it.
Migrants not only want to escape misery but also want the good life. But if everyone lived like the Dutch, we would need four Earths, so that is impossible. The Dutch live at the expense of others, future generations, and life on Earth in general. And the migrants do the jobs the Dutch don’t like to do, or at least not for those low wages that make products cheaper, allowing the Dutch to buy more stuff. The same goes for Americans. Like the Dutch economy, the American economy depends on immigrants. Had the Dutch not pursued economic growth but lived sustainably, and had life in the countries these migrants come from been better, fewer would have come. That is not how the political economy operates. It is a struggle in which everyone tries to get the best deal for themselves at the expense of others and future generations. Had everyone lived like Mahatma Gandhi, migration wouldn’t be an issue. The challenge ahead is to turn humankind into a single society, to eliminate excessive planet-ruining lifestyles, which include having children, and not to aim for some measly average, but for the best possible society, so a world society like Denmark in terms of social and political development. Whatever problems may arise from that choice, the alternative is worse.
Over the years, the anti-immigration party PVV, led by Geert Wilders, gradually grew in popularity. In the 2023 elections, it became the largest faction. Wilders supported Trump and associated himself with gangsters like the Hungarian leader Orban. Still, the PVV differs from MAGA, partly because the Dutch tend to hold fewer conspiracy theory beliefs. And there is no Pizzagate, and no Epstein files. Belief in conspiracy theories is only lower in the Scandinavian countries, according to a European survey. The Netherlands is the exception, not the United States. It may be due to Dutch naivety, but it is also about social trust. Social trust is the glue of a society. It requires everyone to be trustworthy and to believe others are trustworthy. That is why sowing division with lies or painting caricatures of reality is as destructive as being untrustworthy, because lying is being untrustworthy. Those who promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory were as destructive to society as those who attended the Epstein Parties. MAGA rose to power by undermining trust in society, thereby doing the work foreign secret services used to do. History and culture go a long way in explaining the differences between the Netherlands and the United States. And so, I felt the need to come into touch with MAGA people and understand them like I previously did with Muslims. If you want to know MAGA, you must learn to know America and Americans.
Make America Go Apeshit
When Wilders tried to copy Trump’s ‘I lost because of election fraud’ tactic, even his supporters didn’t believe him, so he quickly backed down. Wilders faced the brutal reality that spreading false claims only works when they are believable. The Dutch elections are clean and uncontested, whereas in the United States, they are rife with innuendo and prone to manipulation, including gerrymandering. Democrats opposed voter identification requirements, even though they can help to prevent election fraud. Many poor people in the US don’t have IDs, and they mostly vote Democrat, so Democrats argued that ID requirements disadvantage poor people. Conversely, Republicans try to prevent these, mostly black, people from voting with measures that make it harder for them to vote.
On Godlikeproductions.com, people wrote that they are a ‘Free Shit Army’ of Democrat-voting welfare recipients who want more free stuff paid for by others and would vote for more welfare, and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to vote. But isn’t democracy not voting for free shit others work for? The rich don’t want their fortunes taxed, so they vote to gut social security, so that they are the ones who do nothing and let others work for them by living off their capital. They only have to convince enough poor people to vote against their interests or bribe politicians into doing their bidding. Both parties are interested only in winning, not in fair elections. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be so much gerrymandering.
In the Netherlands, district borders don’t matter, and everyone is required to have an ID, so the issue of ID requirements disadvantaging poor people doesn’t arise. And the United States has voter registries. The Dutch don’t have them. They use the civil registry, so you can be sure that only citizens can vote. And with proportional representation rather than win-or-lose elections, there is less to gain from fraud. Instead of fixing the problems in a joint effort, Democrats began accusing Republicans of trying to exclude poor people from the vote. And Republicans began accusing Democrats of allowing election fraud. There have been a few instances of election fraud in the US, or credible suspicions. Allegations of election fraud surfaced after the 1960 Presidential election, which the Democrat John F. Kennedy won. Investigations by Republicans indicated that fraud could not be proven or ruled out, but that it was unlikely to have swayed the outcome.1 In 2000, Republicans prevented a full recount of the votes in Florida. They didn’t want a fair election. They wanted to win. In the Netherlands, if there is any doubt, there is always a recount, and a full one if needed, to rule out all doubt.
In 2004, a voting machine in Ohio erroneously added nearly 4,000 votes to Bush’s total. That was likely a glitch. Concerns about voting machines led to their termination in the Netherlands. Due to these issues, lingering concerns remained about the integrity of the US elections. Republicans were already suspicious of the Democrats’ efforts to prevent ID requirements for voting, so Trump’s accusations fell on fertile ground. There was no evidence for Trump’s claims, while Trump phoned a Republican governor asking him to ‘find votes.’ Trump, because of the size of his ego, might have thought that he couldn’t lose, so he might have thought that his loss was due to fraud, and that the votes he asked the governor to find were somewhere lying around uncounted. Yet, we can’t be sure. Donald Trump has told more lies than all previous US presidents combined. That is not particularly surprising, because the only people less trustworthy than politicians are merchants and salespeople. The best thing you can do is ignore what the man says. Some of it is true, some of it is not, some of it is somewhat, and it takes too much effort to figure out, so it is a meaningless yada yada yada.
Not only do MAGA people believe in election rigging conspiracies. A 2016 poll suggested that nearly half of the Hillary Clinton voters believed that Russia had meddled with the election tallies and made Trump win. That was after Russian hackers targeted the Florida election company VR Systems, and after malfunctions occurred in Durham County, North Carolina.2 Like Donald Trump supporters in 2020, they found it hard to believe they had lost. In 2020, 74% of registered voters were concerned about organised voter fraud.3 So, it is not just MAGA. It is how deep the distrust in America runs. Yet, proof of voter fraud is virtually non-existent. In Pennsylvania, a contested state, data covering 32 elections with over 100 million votes cast show only 39 cases of proven voter fraud.4 Spreading false claims generates eyeballs, hence advertisement income, but also undermines trust in society and its institutions, so plenty of ‘investigative journalism’ websites were busy destroying America for profit.
Conspiracy thinking is more widespread in the United States than in the Netherlands. Acquaintances of mine who have regularly visited the United States and have spoken to Americans confirmed it. I could see it for myself on message boards. The conspiracy theories range from aliens, faked moon landings, who killed Kennedy, 9/11, vaccinations, Jews running the world, and the elites being a network of paedophiles. The Epstein files give us an insight into how the elites are interconnected and engaged in various questionable dealings, of which abusing underage girls is only one. And there are links between Epstein and the Israeli secret services that raise questions.
Conspiracy theories often relate to the facts, but if you investigate them, much would be unproven, inaccurate or wrong. Conspiracy theorists don’t mind. Pizzagate may be a fabrication, but they claim the Epstein files prove it. The logic of that appals the fact-checkers, but if you call conspiracy theories hunches rather than facts, they make more sense. Humans are political animals, so they scheme all the time. We don’t know what’s going on, so getting the direction right is already a success. The conspiracy theorists aren’t paranoid enough because they are duped into believing they are so smart and everyone else is stupid, which is a mistake that only the greatest fools would make. Everyone is a pawn in the game, so hold on to your hats for the final disclosure. 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 to make the country ready for the Messiah. And so I figured that MAGA stands for ‘Make America Go Apeshit’.
Compared to Dutch politics, US politics is filthy and corrupt, and on every level, which my acquaintance also confirmed. Even for local positions like sheriffs, candidates air advertisements in which they accuse each other of being a paedophile, or even worse, a communist. In other words, US elections are highly competitive, leading to a race to the bottom in ethical standards. Casting doubt on your opponent with false allegations works better than having plans. Child abuse is a widespread problem, and most of it remains under the radar. People sense that, which promotes moral panics, including witch hunts. Communists are also everywhere, busy scheming to make healthcare more affordable and of higher quality, so that you can trust no one. In such a competition, the filthiest and most corrupt win. The outcome of that race to the bottom called competition is Donald Trump.
There is widespread quid pro quo in US politics. In Europe, they call it bribery. That is why Europe can’t keep up with the competition. Businesspeople pay for political campaigns and expect something in return. That is unthinkable in much of Western Europe. A former French president went to prison for accepting foreign funds for his political campaign. And that is unthinkable in the United States: going to jail for receiving funds from foreign interest groups. Political corruption is legal and commonplace in the United States. Both political parties were equally corrupt. That is part of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of moral pragmatism, while continental Europe has a tradition of moral idealism. There was a long cultural divide between the Anglo-Saxon world and mainland Western Europe. While most Anglo-Saxon countries have grown closer to Western Europe, the United States drifted further away, until it committed cultural suicide by departing from the West’s civilisational project, Hegel’s grand scheme of social progress.
Culture: selling versus convincing
The corruption in the United States is a foundational cultural issue, not just a political one. You convince Europeans but sell to Americans. The difference is not just the wording. It reflects a cultural divide. Americans buy or don’t buy your argument. 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. Many salespeople have no problem whatsoever with blatant lying. That comes with their profession. And accepting a lie is not getting conned, because the liar and the one accepting the lie, like in any trade deal, might both profit, even though that might be at the expense of others. If an American likes your argument, he buys it as if it were a product. It is a different idea of truth, and a profoundly 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 made America powerful. Money represents power, and bullshit sells, as we are religious beings who need fairy tales to believe in.
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 climate change denial instead. 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. Many 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 affects some denominations of Protestantism, such as Evangelicalism. History and culture go a long way in explaining that. Catholic doctrine holds that faith and good works can save you. Catholics can 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 corruption and took moral integrity very seriously. That made morality a matter of personal choice. 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 Roman Catholics, the Dutch moral conflict, vicar versus 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, making the issue a Hegelian dialectical conflict. The Dutch were a nation of merchants and vicars. This dualism still profoundly affects the Dutch. For a vicar, money can never be the highest good. Successful merchants are morally depraved. Greed drives them. The merchant usually prevailed, so the Netherlands became the wealthiest nation before the Industrial Revolution started.
The Netherlands had a sizeable Roman Catholic minority. 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 like the veneration of the Virgin Mary while they acted as merchants who were after the money. That is also a caricature. Many Protestants take ethical matters very seriously. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have had idealists like Kant and Hegel seeking absolute truth and absolute morality. 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. Protestants also take the scriptures more seriously than Roman Catholics, which 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 words. 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. There is no objective moral reason to condemn gays and lesbians or deny them the right to marry. It became a problematic issue among Protestants, who take both scripture and moral issues seriously. When you follow the scriptures on this matter, you shut down your moral conscience and become evil. And if only faith can save you, you don’t have to do good works to compensate for that. That is moral corruption at its finest. 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.
This morally perverse Protestantism 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, stands at the root of anti-Semitism. They are the merchants and usurers with the money to buy the politicians. It makes moral corruption in the United States a complex issue with countless sensitivities, which only brutally exposing the truth might solve. An unpalatable fact may be that Adolf Hitler helped to prevent Europe from tilting towards the direction of becoming a cesspool of corruption. It came at the cost of mass destruction and industrial-scale murder, so sensible people would not like to see that happen once again. Now we are definitely at the bottom of the manure pit.
Idealism and realism
The basic problem that we all face looks like a prisoner’s dilemma. Let’s explain that with an example. Suppose that the police have arrested two gang members and have put them in solitary confinement so that they can’t communicate with each other. The police tell both that they don’t have enough evidence to convict them on the principal charge, so they plan to sentence them to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Both receive the same offer. If he testifies against his partner in crime, he will be acquitted, while the partner will be sentenced to three years in prison for the main charge. There is a catch. If both prisoners testify against each other, both will serve two years in jail. The prisoners get a little time to think this over, but don’t learn what the other has decided until both have made up their minds. And each of them knows that the other gets the same deal.
If they both stay silent, they are best off as a group by serving one year each, for a total of two years. If one defects, he is better off as he walks free. Yet, together they are worse off, with three years in prison. If both rat out the other, they are the worst off as a group, facing a total of four years in prison. If both are interested in the best deal for themselves and think the other is as well, they may both defect, believing that serving two years in prison is preferable to three. If they are best mates and think that the other will not defect, they may not defect. Being an idealist or not is a similar bargain.
The bargain depends on the group’s cohesion or social trust. There are always people trying to take advantage of others, but if there are few of them, most people keep their end of the bargain. 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. Had we all been idealists, we would be better off, but if we believe that others are only interested in the best deal for themselves, we are more likely to assume the same attitude, so degenerate morals become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A system of rewards and punishments can help to keep the group focused on the common good. Gangs torture and murder defectors. And somehow, that works quite well. That is why we have prisons and fines.
Our choice long seemed between murdering a few million more in a war to end all wars and locking up troublemakers in prison labour camps, or merely accepting that humans are depraved jerks because that is our nature, and just buy whatever those greedy merchants sell us. Yet the underlying choice remains God versus Mammon, or Jesus versus the thirty pieces of silver. It is gradually getting hotter due to global warming. Those who don’t believe in global warming, so it must be Satan and his minions heating the ovens, not realising that they are Satan’s minions by emitting greenhouse gases and releasing their brainfarts in the blogosphere. Like those proverbial frogs, we stay where we are. In any case, time is running out. And make no mistake: you can either be a slave in Paradise or free in hell. Humans are a failure. We are smart creatures, but we can’t control our urges, so every realistic scenario ends in a disaster.
That is why we may be incredibly lucky to be simulations, with God controlling the script. Otherwise, we wouldn’t stand a chance. Think of it, even when most people are good, the outcome is terrible. Evil always wins in the end. 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, the lure of money proved stronger than his fear of God. Most Christians are like him. They talk about Jesus, but are after the money. And only one Indian patriot sufficed to murder Mahatma Gandhi. Since then, India and Pakistan are one step away from a great patriotic war with nukes.
Muslims are no better. We are all human. If they can get their hands on it, they will go for the money, and their religion will become a hollow custom. The centre of the Islamic world, where the holy places are, is a graft hub with undeserving oligarch sheikhs bathing in oil money, while exploiting foreign labourers who often live in miserable conditions, leaving their less fortunate Muslim brothers to toil in misery. A few of them might generously donate money to religious charities helping the poor or funding nutters who blow up things and randomly murder people. 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? As they say, it takes one to know one. Still, if economic growth and competition are the problem, trade is the problem, and if that is what kills us, trade is the greatest of all evils. How to deal with the problem comes next, but solving a problem begins with acknowledging it.
And so, the odds of religion defeating money in a realistic world are zero at best. There is enough for everybody’s need, but there isn’t enough for everybody’s greed. And the privileged never have enough. They will convince themselves that transforming energy and resources into waste and pollution to facilitate their lavish lifestyles will work out well for everyone, as if filling their swimming pools will alleviate the water shortage, and that the water will somehow trickle down to the thirsty beggars in the streets, provided they are hardworking and dig deep enough holes in the ground. And they have the money, so they decide what happens. Then there are the merchants of the green fairy tale, who tell us that if we invest enough in solar energy, windmills and batteries, we will do fine. Well, if we cut world energy consumption by 75%, then perhaps. And so, it is just another myth to keep us believing in the fairy tale of economic growth.
Not only do the production and disposal of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries create toxic waste, but they also do not produce enough energy, so reducing energy consumption is the main way to mitigate climate change and pollution. And so, humans will continue to take more from the planet, just as cancer cells grow at the expense of their hosts. Greed always prevails unless brute force ends it. In the case of cancer, it is the demise of the host. So the force to end the madness must be truly brutal, so brutal that it is unimaginable, as even the communists weren’t up to the 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 and their lies.
Quite frequently, nothing good came out of good intentions, but even more often, nothing good came out of evil intentions. The argument in favour of the capitalist system is that greed is good and that doing evil somehow will produce good. Well, you can keep that fairy tale running until the consequences arrive. And the consequences have arrived. Idealists lack pragmatism, but pragmatists lack idealism. In a realistic scenario, nothing works, and humankind is doomed. There may be survivors of the apocalypse who become post-humans, living for thousands of years and building virtual universes to pass their time. At this point, the prospects are pretty bleak for the average individual. After the apocalypse, maybe humans come to their senses, but only if they can fulfil their infinite desires in personal virtual universes. You would probably be dead by then.
Had we all been idealists, we would already have lived in Paradise, but if no one reins us in, our desires have no limits, and if we can make it so, we would create worlds for ourselves where everyone does precisely what we want, and that is why we live in such a world. There will always be people taking more than they need at the expense of others if they can get away with it. The capitalist tactic is to present this evil as a virtue and to expand the available pie by making people compete for money, so that there is more for everyone until things collapse. That has worked so far, but it won’t work much longer because we are now entering the collapse phase. The only alternative that remains is to impose a Paradise by force, as the communists tried, but with much more force than they ever did. Only religion can save us, but that is not enough. Otherwise, Judas wouldn’t have betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver. Humans cannot handle freedom, which is why it may only work in a fairy-tale world like this one, where God wrote the script, so that it cannot fail unless God wants it to.
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, since letting things be is also a form of giving up on improvement. Yet good societies do exist. If the conditions are favourable, and with the backing of sufficient force, we could live in Paradise. That requires us to leave our cynicism behind and care for others and nature, while understanding that everything is interconnected, that our actions affect others and nature, and that transgressions that disturb the balance in Paradise are heinous crimes, warranting severe punishments like burning eternally, or, if we can manage, community service.
The differences between Western Europe and the United States are a matter of degree. They are patterns that reflect culture and are observable at the aggregate level, but they say little about individuals. Many Americans are morally upright, probably most, including many conservatives, and many Western Europeans are corrupt, including many liberals. And many Jews aren’t greedy merchants, most likely not even most. The same goes for Arabs. Money also erodes ethical standards in the Netherlands, and the country is becoming more corrupt, but most Dutch have yet to catch up. Europeans are more naive, also because their systems are less corrupt. That is partly due to Protestant ethics, but also to history, as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were a terrible blow to corruption on the European continent, from which, after 200 years, graft has yet to recover fully. America has never seen such a purge of the corrupt old order.
The pragmatic view is that trade, finance, and money are invincible until God intervenes. And that is correct. It helped to make America strong. America helped to save Europe from the Nazis and the communists. The United States may be more corrupt than Western Europe, but most countries are more corrupt than the United States, including China, India, Russia and nearly all Muslim countries. To tackle the corruption issue, Saudi oil sheikhs plan to set up an alternative corruption index run by an organisation they can bribe, like FIFA. Yet if we aim for the highest standards, Denmark should serve as a beacon for the rest of the world, not only in the fight against corruption.
Hegelian dialectic is the way in which God sees social progress. The West has progressed the furthest on that path and must lead the way. My reason to focus on the United States is that Americans may not only be the most willing to change but also get things done. Europeans lack their pragmatic attitude. And so, the coming world revolution could start there. That is why Americans should learn that the problem runs deep and what it takes to deal with it. Compromising with the old, corrupt order is a dead end. We need a spiritual rebirth and must build a separate economy that breaks away from the system run by merchants and usurers, based on ethical principles and where humankind is part of nature, not above it. I suspect that Europe will be next, and that the rest of the world will follow. Don’t worry about the Muslims. They fear God more than you do. And don’t worry about the Chinese. God wrote the script, and it is their state’s official goal to run the Hegelian dialectic to its completion. It is my guess for now. Things hardly ever go the way I foresee. Yet, they go precisely according to God’s plan.
Human nature is the destructive outcome of a brutal competition called the struggle for life. And so, there is a beast within all of us. Our natural condition is to live in a gang of some 150 individuals, cooperating and competing with similar groups. Our imagination can make us cooperate on a larger scale. That requires myths to unite us. Even then, greed prevails. Otherwise, Judas wouldn’t have betrayed Jesus, and communism would have worked. I have heard several people say, ‘If Jesus were to return today, they would murder him.’ Yes, they would try, and had we not lived in a fairy tale world, any Messiah would have failed. But God wrote the script, so there is some chance of survival and even success. If we let money rule the world, we will commit suicide. There must be an alternative. Otherwise, we are doomed. That is a truth hidden at the bottom of the manure pit. It is hard to envision another world because communist countries are miserable places, but the Old Order Amish are a better example of what our life could look like in the future, even though they are overdoing it. Still, they are fundamentally right about the issue of stopping time and banning products that don’t fit the lifestyle we envision.
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 there is no chance at all that we will succeed. The elites will play us out by sowing divisions. 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 by money 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 religion. Maybe for that reason, they named their newspapers ‘The Truth’. Communism doesn’t change human nature, so new class societies arose in communist societies with elites and perks.
Had communism prevailed, we would have seen poverty, pollution and stagnation, and also a secret police spying upon us, as well as political prisoners and show trials, a class of bureaucrats and intellectuals living the good life of our work, but not an apocalypse. In hindsight, communism may have been the last opportunity for humankind to save itself. Now, we need God. But communism is not an ideal system. It is only less suicidal than capitalism. The alternative is self-sufficient communities without trade, which also doesn’t sound particularly enticing. We can make a mix and then claim it’s the best combination of the three. The danger comes from freedom and personal initiative, because humans fuck up everything they can fuck up if no one stops them. Once you have a paradise, you must keep things as they are, which requires setting the rules in stone, including limits on personal initiative, thus creating a stable situation and preventing change, including technological change, so effectively halting time as the Old Order Amish did. Change will disturb the balance, and enterprising individuals will take advantage. Before you know it, the merchants will run the show again, and that will be the end of Paradise.
The problem I face, and I know that I shouldn’t call it a problem but a challenge, as that is what they have taught me at the Professional Skills course, so that you should rephrase ‘a total clusterfuck’ as ‘there is room for improvement,’ my position looks like becoming the captain of the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg. It has become technically impossible to save it. The only thing the captain can do is whatever it takes to keep the vessel afloat. If he succeeds at the expense of fewer than 2,000 fatalities, that would be success, but also a miracle and a supernatural event, as it was technically impossible to save the Titanic. It is also technically impossible to save humankind, given human nature, but this is a fairy-tale world where miracles can happen.
Saving humanity requires unthinkable measures, and we can only make it happen if we all accept that we are less than worms, which is a fact, not only because a single worm is already wiser than humankind, but also because real worms decide for themselves how to grovel and when, while we merely follow the script. We are not entitled to anything, and whatever befalls us is God’s will. Your ambitions and desires are problems, and in this problem-solving equation, I divide humans into problem-makers or problem-solvers, so people who pursue their personal ambitions are those who help make God’s plan a success. And I have thought a long time about it. It was a conclusion I arrived at in 2025, so after nearly 17 years of thinking of how to solve the problem, uhm, I mean, challenge.
I want to save every one of you, and would like to see no one suffer. Only, that is impossible. The only thing I can do is make the right decisions. Mao’s Great Leap Forward, in which 30 million Chinese died, is only child’s play compared to what we are about to do. If my decisions are as stupid as Mao’s were, a billion people might die. The only thing I can do is make good decisions. Still, you will have to deal with the consequences, and they will be unfathomable now, but I expect you to do what it takes to succeed and to help each other. There will be anxiety and stress. It is impossible to avoid. I must give you a chance at survival, which is up to you to take. In situations of survival, only results matter. As the Dutch say, ‘Death or the gladiolas.’ Success or death. I would rather die than fail. And my survival depends on God’s plans with me, not on what evil people are scheming. And I live only for Her love.
Kicking off the revolution
Americans sense there is something profoundly wrong in their society, but liberals and conservatives experience it in their own ways. The American government became corrupt through historical developments, and the interests that profit from the current arrangement have become entrenched. And it is not just a corrupt government. The government reflects society. And if someone wrote a report on the ailments and proposed recommendations, nothing would change. The situation in the United States today is comparable to that of France before the French Revolution. The system is broken, and reform is impossible. Efforts to change the system make it more corrupt. Entrenched interests own the politicians, so any change is yet another opportunity to profit at the public’s expense. Cleaning the slate, as the French did during the French Revolution, is all that remains.
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. He and his cronies do the same crimes they have accused the Democrats of, but on a larger scale and more brazenly. Rumours on MAGA social media have it that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s net worth is $29 million, which would already be a pittance in comparison to the MAGA corruption, while it is, in fact, only $49,000, so Ocasio-Cortez might be one of the few clean members of parliament who isn’t on the payroll of wealthy individuals and corporations, which only illustrates the moral depravity of US politics. There is no moral integrity in MAGA whatsoever. Donald Trump is an evil individual. 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!’
Ingrid meant Donald Trump. She was joking, but a joke like that can only be funny if there is some truth to it. She doesn’t dislike Trump and tends to look on the bright side of what he is doing. Forcing Ukraine to accept an unfavourable peace agreement? That’s fine with her if it stops the killing. Taking out Maduro? He didn’t win the election anyway. Things were bad in Venezuela already. Trump didn’t make it worse. And he ended the Gaza war. Greenland? Iran? She didn’t express an opinion. So, her feelings didn’t get in the way of forming an objective opinion. But after yet another bizarre act suggesting Trump is unfit, Ingrid said, ‘Who is going to dispose of him?’ Maybe I had the answer. My wife’s observation was relatively neutral and unemotional, making it more meaningful. When I later recalled the moment, she said the preacher had said ‘Antichrist’ rather than ‘Satan.’
Donald Trump may be a lowlife, but there have been far more evil people who have murdered millions, such as Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Pol Pot from Cambodia murdered a quarter of the Cambodians. Had that guy run Russia or China, he might have outdone Hitler, Stalin and Mao. So, have a little bit of perspective. We’re staring at a tuna while there are whales out there. As far as the supposed qualities of the Antichrist go, few people qualify for all of them. Donald Trump qualifies as egocentric and deceptive, but not as a genius, even though The Donald himself and his followers have an entirely different view. At least, the religious display of Donald Trump and his circle of evil in the Oval Office is more blasphemous than most of what those who have mocked Jesus have said, including Monty Python. It is indeed the greatest joke in the history of government, funnier than Monty Python even.
And is pride not the gravest sin, and is MAGA not about pride? Pride comes before the fall, as it now appears. Trump is a lowlife nonetheless. According to his own words, he 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.7 Indeed, American conservatives are willing to let Satan run their country if he promises them thirty pieces of silver. ‘We’re going to become so rich, you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money. I’m telling you: just watch!’ That is where the moral corruption of buying stories ends. If you don’t see it that way, hell is indeed a proper place for you to be in.
Trump is a jerk. That is also why people voted for him. It is natural human behaviour. When order falls apart, we revert to gangsterism and choose gangsters as our leaders. We believe that they will fight for us and rob and murder others for us. The United States had been murdering and robbing the world for decades via the US dollar reserve currency, so that America could get foreign goods and services for free because America owned the US dollar printing press. Donald Trump convinced Americans that it is not the elites, but the rest of the world that is scamming the United States, and that he will make foreign countries pay for the stuff they export to the United States, like he would make Mexico pay for the border wall. Americans are addicted to cheap stuff that the rest of the world pays for, and Trump promised them even more by making foreign countries pay for sending them that stuff. Some of them joined ICE, the MAGA Free Shit Army, to live off the government, so they can parade with guns and deport the working class. It heralds the end of the American Dream, built on the hard work of foreigners.
Many Americans can hardly make ends meet. That is due to their consumption addiction, but also because they are cogs in a system that squeezes them out. The rich have taken nearly everything, leaving the proletarians to fight over scraps. The rich have taken so much that even the cheap stuff from abroad can’t keep them afloat. The MAGA propaganda machine tells them not to question capitalism, but blame it on foreigners, while distractions like the Epstein files keep Americans aroused and glued to their screens so that they don’t see the truth and take matters into their own hands. The liberal order is falling apart, not because of Trump, but because the liberal story itself is collapsing.
There might have been no second Trump term had there been no surge in immigration during Biden’s tenure. The Democrats made the error of letting the incoherent Biden run for a second term, and when that fell apart, let Harris take over, who, as ‘border czar,’ had overseen the mass influx of immigrants. And the number of immigrants was epic, comparable to the Great Migration in Europe between 400 AD and 600 AD that brought down the Western Roman Empire. Like the Americans, the Romans had already brought in immigrants to promote economic growth and do the dirty work, like defending the borders. Letting foreigners defend their borders might have seemed like a brilliant plan to the Romans, and it worked for a while, until order fell apart and tribal allegiances took over.
Had Donald Trump, like a true entrepreneur, not taken advantage of the epic migration, the collapse of the liberal world order would have taken longer, but as the limits of growth kick in and the elites have gotten their greedy hands on nearly everything, precisely like that guy named Karl Marx prophecised 150 years ago, it would have happened sooner rather than later. In the Roman Empire, the elites had taken everything there, too. The barbarians are now at the gates of the last remains of civilisation. America has already fallen. A central pillar of Western civilisation is the fairy tale of social progress on the scales of liberty and equality. The 2025 RSF World Press Freedom Index, a reliable gauge of civilisation, shows that all that remains of civilisation, so where there is still freedom of the press, is that tiny, little green area that includes Denmark and the Netherlands.
And so, it is up to this tiny, little green area of civilisation to halt the onslaught from the barbarians and liberate the rest of the world. The success of that particular endeavour entirely depends on the superiority of our weaponry, for it must be powerful enough to wipe out these savages and let civilised life take over. And by some miraculous chance, that seems to be the case.
Racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism are all part of MAGA. MAGA people may have their reasons for their mischief. Blacks cause trouble. Liberal women are demanding. And Jews run the United States. And they run it so well that even their Great Leader is their puppet. Even if that is all correct, anger is not the answer. You gain more from fixing your problems than blaming others. MAGA is not so different from BLM. It is easier said than done, because we need a catalyst to do it, so a fairy tale that inspires us.
Humans are a strange lot. What liberals say about MAGA people is at least as true as what MAGA people say about liberals. A 2013 poll indicated 26% of Americans believed that Obama is the Antichrist or might be.8 Others claimed that he was a Muslim. Most of these people voted for Trump. Racism plays a role here, as might anxiety about the fate of their beloved cats and dogs, because you never know what those black Haitian immigrants are up to, doing those factory jobs that Trump is bringing to America, but are jobs whites don’t like to do. The same applies to the Netherlands. Plenty of Dutch do bullshit jobs, while migrants do the work we need, like harvesting crops.
Racism is not the entire story by far. The introduction of public healthcare insurance has infuriated conservatives. How could Obama do such a thing? Every other modern country has public healthcare that provides better care at lower cost. That somehow eludes conservatives, who believe that public healthcare is a communist scheme promoted by a Satanic influence. The hatred of progressive presidents has a long history. John F. Kennedy faced the John Birch Society’s Wanted for Treason campaign.8 This particular society is the origin of the MAGA ideology. 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 run by communists. The proof for that was the US administration’s attempt to prevent the spread of John Birch Society propaganda, which might have seemed like dangerous extremism to government bureaucrats at the time, but the act violated the freedom of speech.
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 relentlessly 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 help from Russia’s secret services, by making people believe these conspiracy theories. That was the true plot to destroy America. And it has succeeded marvellously. So, who has committed treason here?
By now, large groups of liberals and conservatives hate each other’s guts. To illustrate the point, there is a post I made on Reddit on 31 December 2025. Someone reposted a RealDonaldTrump social media post 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 hard to guess whether Trump haters or Trump lovers did it, but there is definitely something wrong with those who found it offensive.
Facts don’t motivate us enough to take adequate action. We cooperate based on shared beliefs, such as myths and religions. Myths help our genes survive and spread, which is our biological purpose. We don’t know the future. Unforeseen developments can endanger our genes. Our genes are our masters, and we are their slaves, so we do what they tell us to do. One way to help our genes survive and spread is to coexist in peace. The fairy tale of the multicultural society can help them with that. We can also murder others with different genes to create more living space for our own genes. The fairy tales of patriotism or religion can help our genes with that. To our genes, survival and spreading are of the essence, not the facts, and that is a crucial fact everyone should know about. There is no way we can escape the facts, but we may escape the control of our genes with the help of fairy tales if we choose to do so. And that is a glitch. If our genes had had any thinking capabilities, you could have called it an oversight.
Stories rather than facts inspire us. At best, our fairy tales highlight a part of the truth. They are models of reality at best. Our problem is that we can barely handle more than one model, while we must believe in something. So, you might believe in Christianity, and if you have some spare brain capacity left, you might also believe in capitalism. And if you add a fairy tale of national greatness, you might already be reaching brain overload. That is the limit for most people, and only if we eliminate the contradictions between them. Christianity, capitalism and nationalism disagree on particular issues, but we just ignore them. And so we had the great Hegelian conflicts between progressivism and conservatism, and between socialism and capitalism dominating Western civilisation for most of the last two centuries because people can’t handle conflicting truths.
The wars America has fought or been involved in to defend the property of the elites under the guise of freedom have come with millions of fatalities. The alternative seemed to be poverty under the guise of equality or communism. The communists murdered even more people. Liberalism is a belief like Christianity, and comes with infantile assumptions, such as that a maximum amount of liberty yields the best outcomes for society and that reasoned debates are a superior way of resolving issues. It has been a wonderful fairy tale for as long as it lasted. We are religious beings who believe in fairy tales like Christianity, Islam, liberalism or socialism. And we enforce conformity, either by exclusion or violence. That is why we can only have peace if we all believe in the same myths.
The fairy tales we believe in help us survive. The Jews have survived 2,500 years because they have the best fairy tales. Even after the Holocaust, they kept believing in a good God who had chosen them out of all peoples, which is a fairy tale that the Jews themselves had made up. It illustrates the success of fairy tales and why they are so powerful. Our belief in fairy tales makes us human. Only if we continue fighting over them will we keep on murdering each other. Borders are arbitrary, but according to a Chinese fairy tale, Taiwan belongs to China, whereas a Taiwanese fairy tale says it is an independent country. China may soon go to war, and the Chinese may soon savagely slaughter fellow-Chinese for these fairy tales, at least if we are to believe the Chinese fairy tale that the Taiwanese are Chinese. Israel versus Palestine is another case of endless senseless slaughter in the name of tribal and religious fairy tales. That will continue, unless a fairy tale unites us all.
Force rather than reason determines the course of history. The owner of the biggest gun is always right, provided he or she is willing to use it to win the argument. That is the most important lesson of history. The owner of the biggest gun thus has made me accept the mission of becoming your saviour after showing me Her gun and demonstrating Her willingness to murder far more people than is required to get what She desires. After all, if you wrote the script, everything could have been nice and peachy from the beginning, with flowers and rainbows, and even a smiling unicorn here and there, telling us that we are such wonderful creatures. So, let that be a warning to you all. We are nothing. Thinking of ourselves as mere worms would be a delusion of grandeur, for worms are smarter than we are, and real worms at least think for themselves, while we merely follow the script God wrote. The unthinkable is about to happen. If you accept what is coming and go along, you will probably do fine.
We are all part of the problem, and we can all become part of the solution. That requires a myth that unites us all. We are a failed species. Christians would say that we are sinners, not worthy of God’s grace and in dire need of a saviour. Otherwise, we would never agree. What is right and what is wrong is, to some extent, arbitrary, and what we should do depends on a future we don’t know. And order can only come from the top down, either through a social contract or through brute power. And so, I might be the only one who can guide humanity, not because I am a genius, but because it is the script of the story God wrote. Yet, it will be a role I play, nothing more, and things will still go wrong like they always did, or so I suppose. It is up to you to do the miracles. That begins with believing the fairy tales I tell you rather than those of others. If you don’t get it, you are a moron. You are either on my side or on the side of the morons.
My teacher, Donald Trump
In hindsight, I have been incredibly fortunate to have lived a peaceful, prosperous life in Western Europe during its most agreeable era. For most of my life, I have barely realised it. The situation you live in looks normal to you. It is not. Living in post-war Western Europe is like winning the lottery jackpot of history and geography. The welfare states of post-war Western Europe have been one of the brightest spots in an overall bleak history of humankind. I wish that everyone could live a life like that, but you can’t have a paradise if not all the right things are in place. And they hardly ever are. If you live in a Paradise, you can be naive. Barring a miracle, things aren’t going to stay pretty. The European Paradise is fading due to war, wealth inequality, environmental degradation, political instability, migration, and disruptive technological change. And it will be brutal, as the struggle for life has always been brutal. The Western Europeans aren’t ready for it. Paradises don’t last. Due to competition, we live in a ‘dynamic environment.’
Donald Trump was right when he recognised that competition was ruining the United States. Competition ruins everything. In the capitalist economy, trade and finance drive that competition. Tariffs are a measure to reduce it. The Soviet bloc could survive because it had irredeemable currencies, making trade with the rest of the world impossible. Had they chosen to do so, the Soviets could still be there, busy stagnating. Only, competition doesn’t end with implementing tariffs. It may help in the short term, but it will do nothing to change the outcome: destruction by competition. Tariffs will keep inefficient industries in operation, paid for by competitive industries, making the country less competitive. If the United States continues on that path, it will become like the Soviet Union. Yet, if we don’t end the competition, we need artificial intelligence to keep up with our rivals. Then we may need to terminate humans as they have become useless. When we allow competition, either between states or corporations, it might happen.
At the time of the psychosis, or if you prefer to formulate it differently, when receiving my revelation, I had no clue what to do. Perhaps my job would be to become a spiritual leader who would guide humanity toward its destined future. Only, I am a systems engineer and not a spiritual person, so not like Mahatma Gandhi. Mr Gandhi’s simple lifestyle should serve as an example for us all. Gandhi was also an economist with great foresight, and perhaps with more foresight than the entire Western economic profession, so my economic programme is similar to his. Yet today, India is moving away from Gandhi’s legacy and following the same path of trade-driven destruction as the rest of the world.
As an engineer, I see systems, relationships, variables, inputs, outputs, actions and their consequences, humans with properties, groups with properties, how they interact, and where that all leads. We are cogs in a system, not unique, wonderful, deserving individuals, as many people would like to think. If we were, we would all have been like Mahatma Gandhi, and humanity would have done fine. Gandhi was truly one of a kind. My ethical standards do not come close to his, and I am supposed to be the Messiah, which painfully illustrates the deplorable state of humankind. Yet, as an engineer, which Gandhi wasn’t, and with much more data at my disposal, I am pretty sure that the system runs us to our destruction, insofar as you can be sure, for nothing is certain. Only, what would otherwise be the point of a Messiah?
Donald Trump, the jerk he is, loves to hurt other people’s feelings. I am much better at hurting feelings than he is, but I don’t like to. But the joke is on me, as there is no choice. I am so good at it that you might soon forget that Donald Trump was such a jerk. In matters of survival, only results matter, and you are a bunch of delusional morons hell-bent on committing suicide, so what else can I do? And if I make a mistake, I correct my error without excusing myself. Trump has no plan, so he can’t fail, and whatever he does is a spectacular success, even if the result is that we are all dead. He is just a dick, but I must dig up the most painful truths from the bottom of the manure pit, and then smear all that shit on you, so that you stop being such stupid morons. I never chose this job in the first place, and if I start making excuses, there would be no end to it.
The thought that my previous life might have left me with some unfinished business made me preoccupied with history and learning lessons from it. The psychosis later suggested that I am Adolf Hitler reincarnate. Now, that was not the person you would have hoped to have been in a previous life. It was a horrible suggestion, to put it mildly, and calling that an understatement would be an understatement. I have no recollection of that, like I have no recollection of being Jesus, either. Despite my being good at hurting your feelings, God is so much better at it that any comparison fails to do it justice. It also reveals the sad truth about humans. We are a complete failure. There had been more than fifteen years to take it all in, and only results count, so we should deal with the facts as they are. Hitler was the most messianic figure in history, even surpassing Jesus, as his appearance led to an unprecedented rapture of the masses.
That Adolf Hitler, of all persons, moved the masses the most with his message of fuming hatred, so far more than Christ and Gandhi ever did, once again illustrates what depraved creatures humans are. No matter how crazy some conservative Christians have seemed to a liberal like me, they were right, as only following a Messiah can save us now. We don’t know the future. Only God does. I have trouble with people mindlessly following me like the Germans followed Hitler, as I make mistakes like everyone else. There is a script, so despite my mistakes, the outcome will probably be better than letting everyone decide for themselves. There is room to think for yourself because the script dictates your thoughts, but you can’t question my authority, and you must accept my decisions, unless you overthrow my rule, which would also be God’s will if you succeed. So that is the challenge for any enterprising individual who seeks to profit from the chaos.
Jokes helped to deal with that inconvenient truth, such as imagining coming on stage after an introduction by a lady in tight stockings and a hairdo like Helga from the comedy series Allo Allo, who would raise her hand to give the Hitler salute and scream, ‘Our Great Leader!’ Then, I would come up and say, ‘Oh, it’s me. Shame and scandal in the family.’ My mother wasn’t my mother, and she didn’t know. Perhaps, it isn’t as bad as it seems. Most Germans followed Hitler without questioning. Had he not started World War II and not murdered so many people in the Holocaust, history might have viewed him more favourably. If God wills it, you accept my leadership, and the repression could be minimal. And to prevent myths from spreading, or to pre-empt any malicious gossip, because nasty creatures will even find nasty things to say about Gandhi, I wrote down the story of my life, and left no matter of significance untouched.
Still, I have to become a dictator. Okay, most of you might follow me, but only because you know God sent me, not because you like me or my plans. In that regard, I have no illusions. I was never popular, nor were my viewpoints. Jesus faced similar issues, and that got him killed. Still, there appears to be a script, and God seems to have gone to such great lengths to make me believe I am the husband She desires, so there is a chance that I survive, and more importantly, succeed. Otherwise, I could be sure that I would either become a laughing stock or, if there was any chance of success, be murdered, so that there would be no point in trying. And if I have to go down anyway, I will do it laughing while looking at the bright side of life, as everyone dies and every joke has an ending.
To help me with the pressing issue of learning how to become a dictator, God has sent Donald Trump to prepare the arrival of the Messiah, precisely as conservative Christians in the United States had guessed. He was the best teacher, the very best. Trump attempted to impose a new reality by replacing the liberal myth with the MAGA fairy tale and depicting liberals as far-left extremists busy ruining the United States, thereby deflecting attention away from his divisive politics, which were politics that most Americans would have considered extremist and insane only a decade ago. That is the way to do it, for what is insane is not merely a matter of opinion. Hence, everyone who disagrees with me is a total moron, batshit crazy, completely deranged and totally insane. There is no other choice: the New Religion is The Truth that you must accept. There is no point in compromising with truth-denying nutters, hell-bent on creating divisions, starting wars, and destroying God’s Creation for personal gain with false fairy tales of economic growth.
It is a matter of survival. You are either with me or against me. You are either on my side or on the side of the psychopaths running this system. You either fit in Paradise, or you don’t. Living in Paradise requires caring for Creation and other people. There will still be harsh choices because resources are limited. There is only a place for sheep, not for goats, and definitely not for wolves. Judgment is coming. We need a holy war against the morons, who don’t accept the truth and live by it. Satire will be the weapon of choice, but that may not be enough, and we must do whatever it takes. We can’t deal with freedom, so the choice comes down to living as slaves in Paradise or dying as free people in hell. So, may I welcome you to God’s plantation, where you will own nothing and be happy?
Donald Trump went after his enemies, including some brutal regimes, even though his successes in regime change have remained limited so far. One of his tactics is intimidating those who stand in his way, with varying success, but under pressure, things become fluid. Donald Trump made NATO countries crank up their military budgets with his threats to leave NATO. Barack Obama has previously politely asked them, but to no avail. So, bullying works, even though in the case of Europe’s military spending, Trump had received help from Russia, which had invaded Ukraine, putting Europeans in the mood for increased military spending. Like him, I must go after all my enemies, and in a relentless pursuit, using any leverage I might find. They might soon find out that they are facing something they can’t possibly defeat, and will surrender at such a pace that Hitler’s lightning war might look like a snail’s pace in comparison. But unlike Trump’s words, mine aren’t bluster, also because of my repeated use of might.
We can’t have people believing alternative myths because that creates divisions and wars. We must eliminate alternative fairy tales, if it needs be, with re-education camps to brainwash dissenters into becoming good citizens who believe that they get what they deserve if they do what they should do. If you think that this new religion looks like a sect, you are right. I am only being honest with you, so that you know what you are signing up for if you follow me. But if you believe that individual freedom and critical thinking can save us, you suffer from a fatal lack of critical thinking.
I never desired this job, but if it must be, I will try to perform it professionally, so as someone who acts rationally based on the available information. Autism makes irrational conduct appear irrational, and if you are not autistic, rational behaviour can seem insane. Humans are social animals rather than rational beings. They see crazy as the opposite of normal rather than rational. So, if irrational is normal, they think that rational is insane. And normal is believing fairy tales that are proven untrue, and fighting over them until we are all dead. That is why we face a clusterfuck the likes of which the world has never seen before. That is why humans are a total failure. And it is why, if I don’t have unlimited authority, things will surely fail, and there will be no point in even trying, forcing me to decline the job.
On several occasions, Donald Trump has acted as if he were above the law. The joke is on me. As the Messiah, I would be above the law. That would be a l’état-c’est-moi situation, a term that the bureaucrats at my secondary school coined a long time ago, or as the former Dutch minister of immigration, Marjolein Faber, once put it, ‘I am policy.’ The Messiah has the divine right of kings, or as the Chinese would say, the mandate of heaven. That is an absolute rule no one should question. It can provide political stability that enabled the Chinese to administer a vast empire and survive as a nation for more than 2,000 years. I aim to set up a social contract and world institutions that can last 1,000 years. The main obstacle is that we live in a dynamic environment with permanent change driven by competition. Paradise requires a stable situation without technological development and with limited merit-based class differences.
The rule of law is something we should aspire to, but it can become an unaffordable luxury when criminals roam free. In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele declared a state of emergency and ordered the incarceration of suspected gang members, leading to a 95% drop in murders, turning El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries into one of the safest. There must be innocent people in prison, dozens at least, but also thousands of gangsters that would otherwise have been hanging around doing crimes and murders. In this case, the end justifies the means. And we need to take the money from billionaires, money in tax havens, and money owned by suspected criminals, even if they legally obtained it in the economic scam system aimed at enriching the rich. At this point, the rule of law has no meaning, and to restore it, we must first have order.
Humans are such a disaster that fewer humans are always better, even when a few million remain, so there is no point in setting a depopulation target. Preferably, we achieve population reduction without suffering, such as through low birth rates. We must terminate all non-essential industries that transform energy and resources into waste and pollution. And we should make sure that everyone has the necessities, which must be possible as only a small fraction of the money the rich waste on frivolous, wasteful, planet-destroying consumption would already suffice. Once you have enough, your material situation need not stand in the way of your happiness. If it does, it is your problem, and not someone else’s, and you shouldn’t make it someone else’s problem by taking more than you need.
No one should profit from harmful products like cigarettes, drugs, gambling, and social media. It may be impossible to eradicate these products, like you can’t end prostitution. In that case, the government should oversee or take control of the production and distribution, so that we can reduce their use and help addicts. Technologies that alter Creation, such as nuclear power, bioengineering, and artificial intelligence, will be off-limits. That has consequences, such as millions of preventable deaths from diseases that might have been curable otherwise. These choices are not based on science. They are choices of faith, founded on the belief that we cannot assess the risks that these technologies entail, that Paradise requires halting technological development, or that these technologies don’t fit into God’s vision of Paradise. For example, the route N666, which leads from Kwadendamme (Evildam) to Borssele, the site of the Dutch nuclear power plant, could be a hint that nuclear energy is evil. Taking it as a hint is a matter of faith, and perhaps of reason, because the hint is so clear that not taking it would be a risky bet.
Another of Donald Trump’s ambitions was to end more wars than anyone ever did in history, and so many wars that we can never stop counting. For his relentless efforts for world peace, and probably also for his contributions to the cause of world corruption, Donald Trump received FIFA’s peace prize from FIFA president Gianni Infantino at the draw for the 2026 men’s soccer World Cup. Ending all wars forever seems part of my job description, and if I had any doubts, there had been a clue suggesting so. Jesus said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life.’ You may save yourself by following me, accepting that what I say is the truth, and that is how you survive. And that is because we need a fairy tale to believe in. It is an uneasy predicament for me to be in, nonetheless, so I question my viewpoints and implore you to prove me wrong if you can. A ruthless pursuit of the truth requires an open debate. Minor oversights can have dramatic consequences. We must prevent mistakes when possible and correct our failures as soon as we can. Paradise is a social engineering project, and changes in a society and its institutions have unexpected consequences. Still, God wrote the script, so we might succeed.
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. That 8647-day interval is no coincidence, and it is unlikely that Comey intended to create that coincidence. The incident is part of the 11 September 2001 coincidence scheme, a vast scheme of coincidence that no group of human conspirators can ever hope to engineer. It is the hand of God. Removing Trump from office could be part of God’s plan.
Trump must go and 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 high 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.
So, how to bring that orange guy down? That hadn’t been on my mind, as more pressing matters occupied my mind, but God gave me a hint. 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. That should be the name by which we will remember him, as he surely is a dick. I don’t know what will happen. The script has unexpected turns. Still, I have to work with assumptions. Play time is over. Adults should run the world. If I am Adam reincarnate, I am 6,000 years old. And there may be no one else left to save you.
Latest revision: 12 March 2026
Featured image: AI-generated
1. The drama behind President Kennedy’s 1960 election win. Scott Bomboy (2017). National Constitution Center. 2. How Close Did Russia Really Come to Hacking the 2016 Election? Politico. 3. Exclusive: Republicans, Democrats agree on one thing: Doubt about fair election – Reuters/Ipsos poll. John Whitesides and Chris Kahn (2020). Reuters. 4. The 26 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Eliza Relman and Azmi Haroun (2017). Business Insider. 5. One in four Americans think Obama may be the antichrist, survey says. The Guardian (2013). 6. Race Alone Doesn’t Explain Hatred Of Obama, But It’s Part Of The Mix. Alan Greenblatt (2014). NPR.org. 7. The 26 women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Eliza Relman and Azmi Haroun (2017). Business Insider. 8. One in four Americans think Obama may be the antichrist, survey says. The Guardian (2013). 9. Race Alone Doesn’t Explain Hatred Of Obama, But It’s Part Of The Mix. Alan Greenblatt (2014). NPR.org.
Democracies are often called liberal democracies. So what is a liberal democracy and why might it be the best way of government? There are no easy answers to these questions nor is there agreement on these matters. Liberalism emphasises the value of individuals while democracy is rule by majority. These two principles can be at odds.
Liberal democracies have elections between multiple political parties, a separation of powers into different branches of government, the rule of law in everyday life, an open society, a market economy with private property, the protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and political freedoms for everyone.1
Liberals believe that individuals and social groups have conflicts of interest. The social order must deal with these conflicts and resolve them in a peaceful manner. To achieve such a feat, all parties must be reasonable and there should be a balance of powers. No party should be able to force its will upon others.2 It is an important reason why liberals stress the importance of individual rights.
Democracy means that government decisions require the consent of the majority of the citizens. In most cases the citizens elect a parliament that does the decision making for them. Sometimes citizens can vote for individual proposals in referendums. In reality many democratic countries aren’t fully democratic because not all government decisions are supported by a majority of the citizens.
Principles
Liberal democracy is based on a social contract, which is an agreement amongst the members of society to cooperate for mutual benefits. For instance, labourers may accept capitalism if they get a share of prosperity. That deal turned out to be more attractive than state ownership of the means of production.
Liberalism has two principles that can be at odds, namely non-interference with people’s lives and realising everyone’s potential. In this vein there are two branches of liberalism:
Economic liberalism promotes freedom of the markets as well as free trade and claims that the state should be of minimal size and not interfere with people’s lives.
Social liberalism claims that the state should help to realise the potential of people by promoting their freedom to make choices, which includes ending poverty.
Each liberal democracy more or less embraces these values. Liberal democracies come with a market economy and respect for the rights of individual citizens. Governments interfere with the lives of people and try to promote their happiness and to realise their potential. The conflicting nature of both principles makes liberal democracies differ with regard to freedom of markets and government interference.
In the United States liberalism has a different meaning. There it is another word for social liberalism or democratic socialism. In Europe the definition of liberalism is broader and this is also the definition used here. In the 17th century liberal ideas began to emerge in what is called the European Enlightenment. Around the year 1700 the philosopher John Locke came up with the following basic principles for a liberal state:
a social contract in which citizens accept the authority of the state in exchange for the protection of their rights and property and maintaining the social order;
consent of the governed, which means that state power is only justified when the people agree;
separation of church and state, which means that the state doesn’t favour a specific religion and does not require a religious justification.3
Is it the best form of government?
Liberal democracy is part of the European cultural heritage. Proponents claim that it is the best form of government. These universalist claims are sometimes contested on the ground that they are a form of western cultural imperialism. Another argument is that there is no guarantee that liberal democracy leads to better decisions. From a religious perspective people argue that our Creator may prefer a different kind of social order and government, possibly even a theocracy.
The argument in favour of the universalist claims is that liberal democracy emerged out of a historical process that took centuries in which rational arguments played a decisive role. The European Enlightenment challenged existing practices in government on the basis of reason. Ideas that emerged out of the European Enlightenment were tried out in different ways and refined further. Europeans also invested heavily in educating their citizens. This produced a culture of reason and compromise as well as a massive body of practical experience and best practises.
There is also no guarantee that other forms of government lead to better decisions. In an open society better information can be available so well-educated citizens in a culture of reason and compromise may make better decisions. There are a few democracies that live up to these expectations so it can work out that way. And we may not be able to determine what kind of order God desires. If our Creator is all-powerful then the emergence and spread of liberal democracy may not be God’s plan.
One of the biggest problems facing liberal democracy is high expectations. Liberal democracy itself does not guarantee a reliable government that is both efficient and effective nor does it ensure a flourishing economy. This has led to disappointments. A failed and corrupt government can’t simply be turned into a success by allowing elections. Liberal democracy works best with a well-educated population in a culture of reason and compromise that doesn’t allow for corruption and abuse of power.
On the moral front there are a few issues too. Liberal democracy promises equal treatment for all people. In reality people aren’t treated equal nor do they have equal opportunities. There is discrimination based on ethnicity, gender or sexual preferences. And poor people have fewer opportunities than rich people. Still, the goal of equal treatment and equal opportunities can be something to strive for. It may be better to aim for such goals and fail from time to time than not having these goals at all.
If liberalism promotes tolerance then how to deal to intolerant people? Should their intolerance be tolerated? If people do not accept liberal values, should they be educated or should these values be imposed? And are free markets the best way of organising the economy or is government involvement advised? If the economy is served by stability, should dissent that causes instability be suppressed? An excessive or unnecessary use of force can undermine the foundation of liberal democracy as liberal democracy is based on reason and convincing people by argument. And indeed it is possible that liberal democracy can be overturned.
History
The preconditions for liberalism had already emerged in Western Europe during the Middle Ages. There was a larger degree of individualism than elsewhere. Liberalism itself emerged during the sixteenth century. At the time Europe was ravaged by devastating religious wars. After several decades of warfare Europeans grew tired of the conflict and began to tolerate religious differences. Some catholic countries accepted protestant minorities while many protestant countries accepted catholic minorities. Germany was almost equally divided. At the time Germany consisted of small states that had either protestant or catholic rulers.
This religious tolerance was at first more or less an uneasy truce. No party had been able to gain the upper hand. Religious minorities at first didn’t receive equal rights. They were only tolerated. Over time the case for religious tolerance became more widely accepted. It was based on two major arguments.
The argument of ignorance which states that only God knows who is on the right path and who is doomed so humans shouldn’t judge others.
The argument of perversity which states that cruelty is at odds with Christian values and that religious persecution strengthens the resolve of the persecuted.1
The concept of tolerance expanded into a general concern for the rights of individual citizens. In the 17th century liberal ideas were spreading. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England limited the power of the king. The rights of individuals were written down in the Bill of Rights. Parliament became the most powerful political institution based on the principle of consent of the governed. The 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States was based on liberal principles too. It states that all men are created equal and have certain unalienable rights like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.2
The founding fathers of the United States were also early liberals. The United States Constitution reflects this view. The aim of the United States Constitution is, amongst others, to safeguard the rights of individuals against the state. A large group of Americans believe that individual rights should prevail against democratically elected governments. The widespread support for gun ownership in the United States comes from a distrust of the state as a protector of life, liberty and possessions.
Democracy had not been a seriously considered since classical antiquity. It was believed that democracies are inherently unstable and chaotic due to the changing whims of the people.1 The violence during the French Revolution supported these views. It began as a popular uprising incited by liberal ideas but it soon turned into chaos and bloodshed. Order was restored by a despot ruler named Napoleon Bonaparte who did much to spread liberal reforms throughout Europe by ending the feudal system, emancipating religious minorities and imposing a liberal code of law. The spread of liberal ideas proved to be lasting and democracy was to follow a century later.
The Industrial Revolution started a period of accelerated and constant change that was disastrous for many who found themselves on the losing side. The ruling class changed. Nobility was replaced by a new elite of business people. The position of craftsmen was undermined by factories. And workers in factories laboured under miserable conditions for low wages. There were three major ways of confronting these changes:
Conservatives tried to hold on the old order of community, religion and nobility.
Socialists tried to overturn the elite of business people by giving power to workers.
Liberals tried to manage the change, thereby implicitly supporting the order in which business people were the ruling class.
Liberalism often coincides with the interests of business people. They have possessions and some are rich. They feared that the poor might vote for handing over their possessions to the poor. Socialism became the embodiment of this fear. Liberals were at first inclined to limit the right to vote to people who pay taxes because this excluded poor people from voting. When the threat of socialism became subdued and socialists were willing to compromise, liberals came to accept democracy based on the principle of one person one vote.
In the 19th century European countries held vast colonial empires. These colonies were kept for profit. It was generally believed that the people in these colonies had to be educated before they would be able to govern themselves. The colonial era helped to modernise these countries and most Europeans at the time believed that the oppression and the economic exploitation were justified on these grounds. There were only a few dissenters, for instance the Dutch writer Multatuli.
Liberal democracy faced a few major crises like World War I, the Great Depression and World War II. World War I demonstrated that liberal democracy and free trade weren’t a guarantee for peace and stability. The Great Depression once again challenged liberal democracy as the Soviet Union remained unaffected while Nazi Germany was able to recover and achieve full employment while other countries were still struggling. And during World War II Nazi Germany overran most democratic countries in Europe.
After World War II the European colonies became independent. The Soviet Union came to dominate Eastern Europe and China became a communist country. The United States became the protector of liberal democracy but also a number of dictatorships. This era is called the Cold War and it lasted until the Soviet Union dismantled itself after allowing the peoples of Eastern Europe to make their own choices. Major challengers of liberal democracy nowadays are the one-party system in China and political Islam.
The citizens of Hong Kong and Taiwan don’t like to lose their freedoms. Chinese too probably prefer freedom if they have a choice. And the Islamic State has shown Muslims all around the globe that political Islam can easily turn into a reign of terror. The foundations of liberal democracy may be strong, but a collapse of the global economy may turn be a more serious threat to liberal democracy than the alternatives. Reason can easily disappear once people become fearful of the future.
Reasons for success and limitations
The success of liberal democracy is therefore not a historical necessity. Liberal democracy might never have been invented or dictatorships could have gained the upper hand. That didn’t happen. Communist and fascist dictatorships came and went. Perhaps liberal democracy is a temporary phenomenon but we can’t know that now. Only the future can tell. There are a number of causes that might explain the strength of liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy is based on the consent of the governed so it is has the consent of the governed by default while other forms of government do not.
Science greatly contributes to the success of states and science is best served with an open debate that liberal democracy provides.
The economy greatly contributes to the success of states and the economy is best served with individual rights that liberal democracy provides.
A despot ruler or a ruling party in a one-party system might have the consent of its subjects, but if not, only force remains for the ruler or the party to maintain power. Liberal democracies usually resolve such issues peacefully through elections, making liberal democracy more stable by default. Intellectual freedom is helpful to science while economic freedom is helpful for the economy, so liberal democracy can be a potent force. Only when leadership is required, liberal democracy might not always be adequate.
Liberalism has no higher moral value than the individual, which is peculiar because the individual human is an insignificant part of this universe. And individualism may be at odds with human nature as humans are social animals. Humans are not atomic beings that choose to cooperate for mutual benefit like liberalism supposes. Cooperation is part of human nature and not a choice individuals deliberately make.
It is the success in cooperation that makes a society win out. Liberalism gives a framework for living together in peace as long as all major parties are reasonable and willing to compromise. This makes larger scale cooperation possible and that can make a society successful. For instance, the United States integrated people from different cultural backgrounds, which contributed to the success of the United States as a nation.
It is said that history is written by the victors. Strength may be the reason why liberal democracy prevailed. Liberal philosophers have tried to provide a moral justification for liberal democracy or they may have opposed it or they may have tried to improve it. Liberal democracy emerged out of thought and action, experiment and failure, and it was a process that took centuries. Philosophers like Locke contributed to its success as they set out the goals people could strife for.
Apart from individualism, liberal societies lack a higher purpose. From a scientific viewpoint there is no higher purpose to this universe. The moral codes humans live by are not more than an agreement. Only when this universe is created for a purpose there is a reason for our existence. But moral individualism can be dangerous. The challenges humanity is currently facing, most notably living within the limits of this planet, most likely requires making individuals subject to a higher causes like the survival of humanity and caring for the planet.
1. Liberal democracy. Wikipedia.
2. Liberalism: The Life of an Idea. Edmund Fawcett (2015). Princeton University Press.
3. History of liberalism. Wikipedia.
The Plan For The Future 