How To Break A Society, Part I

“Half measures are the curse of it.  A rational society would either kill me or put me to some use.” – Red Dragon

The Andrew formerly known as Prince.

Picture this:  I leave my keys in the truck overnight.  Windows down.  Wallet on the dash.  Next morning?  Still there.  Nothing missing, though a cat might have explored an empty burger wrapper.  No viral TikTok™ of some “youth” doing donuts in my F-150®.

Absurd?  No.

And not because Big Brother has cameras up the backside of every squirrel, but because back in the day people just didn’t do that crap.  The neighbors would have known who did it.  Moms would have heard about it at church, and the father of the kid would have heard about it from his boss.

Shame, accountability, and consequences work better than ankle monitors.

That was the power of societal norms.  Invisible fences made of “What will people think?”  And the Founding Fathers knew it.  They told us so.

Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention and some lady asked what they’d given us. “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.” Not “if the government keeps it for you.” Not “if we pass enough laws.” If you can keep it.

John Adams was even blunter in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

They weren’t kidding.

I shocked the postman by opening the door completely nude.  I think what surprised him the most was that I knew where he lives.

Just like the Constitution, the libertarian dream only works when people self-circumscribe their own behavior.  An 85,000-page federal code of regulations telling me not to steal if my conscience (and the fear of my neighbors shunning me like a rabid raccoon with diarrhea at a picnic) already does the job.  The Constitution assumed a pretty genetically homogeneous people who spoke the same language, mostly went to the same church, read the same Bible, and agreed that punching your neighbor over a fence line was a last resort, not the premise of a YouTube™ video.

Some people broke the rules.  Always have, always will no matter the civilization.  But back then the system didn’t turn justice into a CBS® series lasting twenty years.  The mean time from sentence to rope?

Often weeks or a few months, not the decades-long death-row vacation with three hots, cable, and taxpayer-funded lawyers we enjoy today.  Were innocents sometimes executed?

Almost certainly.

But swift, mostly impartial justice beat the hell out of vigilante posses or letting killers out on technicalities to murder yet again.  A society that can’t punish the guilty quickly loses the ability to protect the innocent at all.

I stand behind Alec.  It’s safer than standing in front of him.

Fast-forward to post-World War II America.  Streets were so safe kids rode bikes until the streetlights came on.  Doors stayed unlocked.  Factories hummed, wages rose, and the biggest scandal in most towns was somebody skipping the church potluck.  Prosperity wasn’t just money:  it was a stable and predictable life.

That bored the revolutionaries of the 1960s half to death.

They looked at this overwhelmingly safe, secure, prosperous society made of families in traditional family roles and said, “Nah, too square.”  The GloboLeftist project kicked into high gear with the Great Society.

Lyndon Johnson and his crew didn’t just want to help the poor.  No.  They wanted to remake society.  The guardrails of conformity had to go.  Why?  Because the norms of self-restraint, local reputation, and actual community stood in the way of central control.

Take lending, for example.  Let’s say I wanted a home loan in 1955.  My local banker didn’t just run a credit score, because they didn’t exist.  He would have called my pastor:  “Does Wilder show up on Sundays,?  He does?  Any rumors about his behavior?  PEZ®, eh?  That’s a bit odd.”

Local money stayed local. My mortgage would have literally been made from the savings of the people I saw at the grocery store.  Or, rather that The Mrs. saw at the grocery store, since why would a married man go to the store?

Good families got a break if junior was speeding?  Sure.  Outsiders had to prove themselves?  Absolutely.  But it worked because everyone was playing the same cultural game.

If King Charles was anymore inbred, he’d be a sandwich.

Then came the 1960s and beyond.

Mass migration became deliberate policy.  Civil rights were the noble public excuse, but the real play was splintering the old society so it could be replaced with something more compliant. Free association?

Gone.

You can’t choose who you hire or rent to without risking a lawsuit. Schools?

Prayer out, social engineering in.

Education standards?

Lowered faster than a politician’s principles.

Family?

Oh, boy.

Women used to save themselves for marriage.  Even when I was a kid, that was still the norm in most places and led to more than one frustrating Saturday night.

Body count back in the 1950s?  Usually one, and it came with a ring and a white dress.  Fast-forward one lifetime from the Great Society:  sophomore year of college and some girls are racking up body count numbers higher than a Call of Duty™ leaderboard.

No-fault divorce, welfare that paid better for single moms than married couples, and a nonstop cultural drumbeat that “settling down” was oppression led not to the Great Society but the Great Breakdown.  The nuclear family, once our bedrock, got nuked.  Fatherless homes exploded.  The Great Society didn’t cure poverty:  it subsidized it while making dads optional and government mandatory.

My WIFI router is in the basement.  You could say this post comes from a LAN down under.

Every facet of life got the treatment.

Religion was pushed out of the public square.  “Under God” became hate speech.  Local norms replaced by federal mandates.  You couldn’t even form a private club without worrying about quotas.

The explicit goal?

Fragment the connections that made America 1960 a powerhouse.  Replace them with government strings.  Make people dependent on D.C. instead of their neighbors, their church, or their own character.

And it worked.

One generation. That’s all it took.

We went from “mind your own business but don’t be a jerk” to needing sensitivity training to say “good morning” without committing a microaggression.  We went from “your reputation follows you” to “my truth” where accountability is optional and consequences are for white men.

The absurdity peaks when you realize the same people who tore down the norms now act shocked at the results.

“Why is crime up? Why are families falling apart? Why can’t we have nice things?”

Because they spent 60 years telling people the guardrails were bigotry.  They replaced “don’t do that, people will talk” with “do whatever feels good, you slay, queen.”  They swapped local bankers who knew your grandma for algorithms that approve loans based on your zip code, skin tone, and whether your social media likes the right causes.

A fragmented society built on ephemeral values:  “my feelings, my identity, my government check” cannot magically produce the disciplined, self-restrained people who built the 1960 powerhouse. We can’t have a republic of free men when half the population thinks “freedom” means no consequences and the other half thinks the Constitution constrains the government too much.

The fall wasn’t accidental.

I ate in an all-you-can-eat Italian restaurant buffet.  There were endless pastabilities.

It was engineered during a time of plenty, when people were fat and happy enough to believe the sales pitch.  “Break the old norms, they’re oppressive!” Turns out the oppression was mostly keeping humans from doing what humans do when they’re not in a civilization and are left unchecked.

I don’t think we can keep the republic Franklin talked about from where we are.  Adams knew the reason: paper and ink don’t enforce morality.  People do.

Or they don’t.  And when they don’t, the government is happy to step in with a smile and a 10,000-page regulation.

The norms are gone. The absurdity remains. And the bill?

It’s due, with interest.

The Defeat Of The West?

“Victory has defeated you.” – The Dark Knight Rises

I once forgot the rules to chess, but they told me it was okay to check.

I just wrapped up Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (that’s “The Defeat of the West” for those of us that hate the metric system), and it lines up perfectly with what I’ve been posting about for years here.  In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Dr. Todd, having written about his Family Structure/Geopolitics Theory.

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

The book isn’t in English yet, but somebody cut and pasted it into Google® to have it translated, and you can find it out there if you look.

In this book, Todd is using the Ukraine mess as a lens to autopsy what he calls the West’s self-inflicted doom.  In Todd’s view, the collective West is collapsing, compared to “stable” powers like Russia and China.  The West’s decline isn’t from bad luck or Russian super-spies, nope.  It comes from the rotting foundations of the West itself.

Why did Princess Diana cross the road?  She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

I’ve written extensively about the deindustrialization that’s left the economy hollowed out, so that should be familiar.  Add to that a slide into nihilism stemming from the death of Protestant Christianity in the United States.  Protestants used to stand for something, but the last time I went to a Protestant church it was very much them not wanting to be against anything and the female pastor went on a long “men are bad” speech.

On the other side, Russia, lagging on almost everything by about 50 years, is experiencing a resurgence in families, a religious revival, and an ethnonational cohesion that allowed them to (mostly) take the hit from sanctions and keep going.  The Ukraine war?  It’s the litmus test exposing our bluff:  we’re great at low-intensity or short duration conflicts with things like coups, sanctions, and drone strikes on weaklings (Iran, Venezuela, you name it), but don’t have the industry for real, prolonged industrial slugfests.

One example:  Russia can produce three million rounds of artillery a year, with one recent estimate that they produced seven million rounds last year.  Even at the lower three million number, that is three times the amount that the United States and other NATO countries, combined can produce.  And, yeah, Russia is fighting Ukraine and the United States has lots of amazing tech that nobody but people with top clearance or Chinese spies know about.

That’s why Ukraine keeps facing ammo droughts.  The West’s “superior” economies are finance-bloated illusions where we just keep swapping pictures of silver for electronic dollars that we’re too cheap to bother printing anymore.

I am really good at predicting the scores of the Super Bowls® before they start.  0-0.

US manufacturing jobs?  These dropped from 20 million in 1980 to 13 million today, with 80% of GDP now in services and Wall Street Pokémon® card swapping.

Russia simply isn’t the basketcase the MSM paints.  Yes, their nominal GDP’s around $2T vs. the US’s $27T and EU’s $20T, but in purchasing parity (what their money can really buy them) terms, Russia’s at $6T, edging out Germany as the world’s fourth largest economy.

Why?  The sanctions (starting in 2014) forced them to become independent.  After nearly a decade, when the United States hit them with sanctions after their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine, well, they were ready to survive without trade from the West.  Even though Russia has a much smaller population (roughly half) than the United States, Russia has more engineers aged 20 to 34 than the United States.  Russia has 2 million, the United States around 1.3 million.

Once a European midget asked me to hide him.  I guess I can cache a small Czech.

Contrast that with what Todd calls the West’s “shallow state” since it’s (his view) an oligarchic mess lacking soul or cohesion.  Todd mainly blames this on religious evolution:  Protestantism (Weber’s ethic of work, literacy, discipline) powered the rise of the West, but we’ve hit the stage where the United States is a secular void.  Zombie Protestant churches linger, channeling energy into welfare states.

Now we find that culture in the West is pure nihilism: no morals, just primitive urges for pleasure, cash, and violence.  Todd’s view is that the moral low point where we finally jumped the shark was around 2015.  “Marriage for all” symbolizing the final shredding of Christian norms and rise of GloboLeftism.  In Todd’s words, “If the people and the elite no longer agree to function together, the notion of representative democracy no longer makes sense:  we end up with an elite who no longer wants to represent the people and a people who are no longer represented.”

This certainly defines the state of the West now.  A huge majority of the people want all illegals gone, and some want legals gone, too.  And yet, the illegals are here and we fight to make the line up and to the right in what is now, according to Todd, a “liberal oligarchy”.  That leads to a national weakness.

This weakness is structural and has been building for decades as the United States in particular (and the West in general) worked as fast as it could to de-industrialize.  This offshoring has consequences, and can’t be changed in a heartbeat.  To rebuild, we have to build factories, build supply chains, build up a workforce, and remember how to make stuff.  To explain how difficult this may prove to be, in 2024 China reached 10,000 Terawatt hours of electrical production.  That’s more than the United States, Europe and India combined.

My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.

Back to Todd:  “Producing the world’s currency, at minimal or no cost, makes all activities other than monetary creation unprofitable and therefore unattractive.”  Why do we spend so much effort on finance in the United States?  It’s just so profitable and so much easier than making stuff, which requires real effort.

Todd’s conclusion:  Ukraine was a trap for the United States. The United States, flush from the victory over the Soviets was unbound.  It could do whatever it wanted.  The United States expanded its global reach from the early 90s to 2022.  But we ignored Russia’s 2021 ultimatum because we thought sanctions would crush them like they did in 2014.

The opposite happened.  Ukraine remains resilient but allowing 60+ year olds into the army isn’t really a sign that you expect when you’re winning.  I expect the end of Ukraine’s resistance to be amazingly abrupt and to occur sometime in the next year, with August being a midpoint.  Russia will win, and as near as I can see, their economy is stronger and more independent than it was before the start of the war.

I asked Sydney “How do you get into that tight shirt?” and she said, “For starters, you could buy me a drink.”

Now, my two cents:  Todd’s spot-on that West’s weakness is structural, not just spineless leaders.  Pain is coming.  NATO/EU has ceased to be a bloc; it’s a squabbling conglomerate with clashing interests and seems to have lost its will to live.

Todd’s book substantiates the politically incorrect that I’ve been championing forever:  nationalism trumps globalism.  The West is exhausted, defeated not by conquest but by its own nihilism leading to that most Evil philosophy of all:  “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

As for me?  I still refuse to learn to speak or read French.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Stochastic Warfare

“Don’t you know we in a war here?” – Forrest Gump

War isn’t always about who is right, but it always is about who is left.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. Open War.

Volume VII, Issue 8

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., given the open support of assassination and criminality by the GloboLeft and the increase in violence as well as direct interference with ICE and the insertion of the military into law enforcement.  Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Stochastic Warfare – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Stochastic Warfare

The Tweet® really does outline what many readers have been saying, namely, that we are under attack.  Is it open warfare?  Not exactly.  It’s 5th or 6th generation warfare, fought on a civilizational scale on the timeline of generations.  Against you.

And the person being attacked is . . . you.  You don’t have to die now.  First, they’ll encourage feminism and promote the idea of female empowerment meaning, “hey, let’s whore ourselves out during our twenties so we can’t pair-bond with men in our most fertile years” to create an environment where there is a “shortage” of people.

Again, this is not a company.  It’s a country.  A business can have a shortage of workers, a country can’t have a shortage of its own citizens.  That’s nonsensical.  It’s like saying my family has a shortage of members, so I’ll bring in an Indian.  See?  Nonsense.  A country is much closer to a family than a company.  If there’s a shortage of workers, the answer is to do things that increase native childbirth.

That’s it.  If they liked you.  Instead they work white men and women to pay for people who hate them.

This is how Stochastic War works.

No, their next step is to import millions of people that support the ideology of the progressive state, of globalism, of communalism.  When these people arrive, inject them with the idea that they deserve the country.  Now, since they don’t want to be American, and since they would fight against America if (say) America entered a war against Somalia or India they’re not committed to America.  They’re just here to extract economic resources.

Once these people are imported, what then?  They take your money.  Your world is made poorer as the grift/scam/cash grab continues and recycles that money to foreigners and to GloboLeftist politicians.  If you look at the graph below, you see that race plays a part in the way people vote and in who the Democrats want to import to retain power.  Why do they want a lot of Indians (Gujarati)?  Because they vote for the warmth of collectivism because more government systems mean more scams and corruption.  Also, they have never had to deal with the Berlin Wall, which was built to contain the warmth of collectivism behind concrete and barbed wire, as collectivism always ends up.

This is how Stochastic War works.

There are ramifications of this war against you.  If you didn’t hear, a black man stabbed a white guy.  The white guy then said the evil gamer-word after being stabbed.  This is not an unreasonable reaction, and is a far lesser offense than stabbing someone.  The jury acquitted the black man, despite clear video of the attack.

This is Stochastic Warfare.  Blacks learn that they can stab with impunity.

Black jurors, though, aren’t a jury of “peers” since statistically, they have been proven to be biased in favor of blacks.  This destroys the justice system:  it’s supposed to be blind, and your skin color or wealth or age or sex shouldn’t matter.  We’re human, though, and rich guys can buy great lawyers, so the system has always had a skew to it.  But without a functioning justice system, or worse, a justice system skewed to convict white people for crimes that are far beyond the offense (Derek Chauvin for murder) vigilantism will return.

Not might.  Will.

Even when people are found not guilty, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a murder case, and Daniel Penny rightly walked free, but what’s the cost?

This is how Stochastic War works.

This bias applies everywhere and you can see that black people hate white people, a lot, in Great Britian.

And The Washington Times story, below, is behind a paywall, but the headline speaks for itself:

The problem of a multicultural society isn’t limited to blacks.  Other racial/ethnic groups like themselves best.  Hispanics like Hispanics most.  Blacks like blacks most.  Asians like Asians most.  But whites?  They like everyone the same.  That egalitarianism is crucial to making a multicultural society work, but multicultural societies never work.

And Great Britain now realizes this.  Would they ask their moslem or Indian invaders to fight for them?  Of course not, because they know that the moslems want to conquer the English rather than Crimea.  The Indians?  The Indians mostly are there for a buck and would run away back to Mumbai if they felt even slightly threatened.  That leaves the white guys.  Who will, once again, be faced with disproportionate death and injury.

Which is how Stochastic War works.

The mayor of London, who isn’t British, wants to make white people disappear.  Literally:

And, you have people like this.  This is in America.

It’s time to push back.  It appears that the rapes and killings and theft have been enough and the Irish are pushing back against Stochastic War.

I think that @dystopiangf is right.  We are in the midst of a quiet, Stochastic War that has been going on for decades, almost certainly since before I was born.  What we are sensing right now is the time when people realize, and finally accept that this Forgotten War (I wrote a song about this LINK, you should listen to it because it’s pretty badass) against cultures we vanquished centuries or thousands of years ago is going on.

As people awaken, we’ll see what people have always seen as demographic changes occur:  open war.  Remigration is the kindest choice, but here we are.

Buckle up.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers.  The advance is at a near minimum, given the Fed®’s policy.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators are up slightly this month, and still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down this month after the budget fight ended.  I think the Somilisota scandal may increase pressures in a few months.

Economic:

The economy up just a smidge this month, but I think this is still cloaking the middle-class crunch and perhaps a bubble.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month.  Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1998766070623252802
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2006823362182394125

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/StealthQE4/status/2006266481001001437
https://x.com/nickshirleyy/status/2004642794862961123

ONE GUY
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/oklahoma-man-target-practice-backyard-accused-fatally-shooting/story?id=128707327
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/12/13/wsjs_fearmongering_doesnt_survive_contact_with_evidence_153631.html

BODY COUNT
https://wir2026.wid.world/insight/executive-summary/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/All_the_Worlds_Births_Web-1.jpg?itok=z3Ci7zG4
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/business/us-immigration-trump-1920s.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFA.WFF9.w9QS69D5L2fG&smid=url-share
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Homicide_Rates_Web.jpg?itok=rn1aSBmf
https://studyfinds.org/churches-kept-americans-alive-states-made-a-decision/
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/business/entertainment-media-layoffs-2025-analysis/
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/19/dumber-sicker-poorer/

VOTE COUNT
https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/17/fulton-county-we-dont-dispute-315000-votes-lacking-poll-workers-signatures-were-counted-in-2020/
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/longtime-trump-pollster-reveals-ugly-forecast-for-republicans-heading-into-2026/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/fight-young-men-2026-midterm-elections-rcna249513
https://www.cnn.com/politics/state-redistricting-maps-vis

CIVIL WAR
https://financialpreparedness.substack.com/p/who-are-the-bad-guys
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/12/the-eu-could-be-gone-in-four-years-a-revolutionary-eruption-is-coming/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/the_stages_of_a_color_revolution_and_where_the_u_s_is_right_now.html
https://rollcall.com/2025/10/08/civil-war-national-guard-midterm-elections/
https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/12/is-a-civil-war-possible-in-america-or-hawaii/
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/08/mass-collective-societal-suicide/
https://victorhanson.com/can-the-dark-ages-return/

Tranquility Was Never The Goal

“Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives.” – Fight Club

The ultimate participation award.

As humans, we’re wired wrong.  Or right, depending on how you look at it.

We chase peace like it’s the ultimate prize at the carnival of life.  We say that we want a world without war, without struggle, where everyone has a comfy couch, unlimited Wi-Fi, more liver capacity, and steak that cooks and delivers itself.

Sounds like Heaven, right?

Wrong.  When I was a wee Wilder, Grandma McWilder would talk about how I should do nice things in life rather than bathing the cat in a paste made from DDT® and Lysol™ so I could go to Heaven.  Obviously, I asked, “What is Heaven like?”

Grandma told me it was nice and peaceful and that nothing bad ever happened up there.  I believe I said something like, “That sounds boring.”  Grandma did not look pleased, but I don’t know if it was about my statement or the cat.

Let’s just say I was a technicolor handful as a kid.  Oh, the stories I could tell.

But I wasn’t wrong.

But wait, there’s more!

Tranquility isn’t the goal.  Tranquility is the trap.

Peace isn’t just boring; it is deadly to the human spirit.  We need the fight, the blood, the steel. Without it, we rot from the inside out.  And that’s not me, John Wilder making crap up again.  We have actual studies where the government tortured mice to verify that I’m right.

Take John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments, please.  I’ve written about them a couple times before, you can use the search thingy in the upper right hand of the screen to find them.  I would have done that for you but you’re not my supervisor and I could type this sentence way faster.  Short summary:

In the 1960s, Calhoun built paradise for mice: unlimited food, water, space, unlimited beef jerky, no predators, SNAP benefits.

What happened?  At first, boom, the population soared.  But then, the weirdness set in.  The mice stopped breeding normally.  Males became either passive or hyper-aggressive or “beautiful ones,” preening themselves instead of fighting or mating.

Females abandoned pups.  Society collapsed into violence, isolation, and extinction.  All of this happened in a “utopia”.

No threats, no struggles:  just free cheese forever.  And they died out.  Stop me if you’ve seen this recently in other mammals.

I’m not going sugarcoat my jokes about diabetes.

Humans aren’t mice, but we’re close enough if you ask my parole officer.  Look at the downward spiral of the United States after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.  The Cold War ended.  We “won.”  Yay!  No more Soviet boogeyman lurking with nukes and unibrows.

Instead?  Peace!  Prosperity!

What did we do?  Got fat, lazy, bored and divided:  music went from “I’m gonna kick your ass” in the 1980s to “Oh, man, I need lithium because I’m sad”.  The ‘90s brought endless economic booms, but also the seeds of today’s mess:  identity politics, endless entertainment, and a generation starting to get hooked on screens instead of life.

Without a real enemy, we turned inward, fighting over pronouns and safe spaces.  Tranquility bred complacency, and complacency bred decay.

Same story with the Moon landing. July 20, 1969:  Armstrong steps on the lunar surface.  Humanity’s greatest leap.  We beat gravity, the Soviets, and the odds.  Then?  Crickets as the ratings dropped.

We went back a few times, planted flags, played golf (shoutout to Alan Shepard), and then just . . .stopped.

And then she refused to talk to them for six hours.

NASA shifted to the gay space trucks shuttles and looking for non-binary muslims and lesbians to shoot into orbit.  No more bold frontiers.  Why?  We won.  The Sea of Tranquility turned space exploration into a budget line item.

Need another example:  a Syrian teen in London.

Picture this:  an eighteen-year-old from war-torn Syria, resettled in a taxpayer-funded flat in London.  Free food.  Free education.  Free X-Box®.

Utopia, right?

Wrong.  He drops the controller and goes to Syria andjoins ISIS or stays in London and joins a gang and becomes a rapefugee with a machete.

Why?

Blood calls to blood.  Iron to Iron.  That flat was Mouse Utopia 2.0:  safe, soft, soulless and, let’s face it, that kid was inbred and not very bright to start with.  He craved the jihad, the struggle, the validation of existence through fire and fight.  Comfort didn’t kill his spirit, comfort starved it.  In part, this is why allowing refugees from incompatible countries is immoral.

I played hide and seek and ended up in the hospital.  ICU!

Why do we have wars?

We want wars.  If they weren’t popular, we’d have stopped having them a very long time ago.

Why do we want them?  Not because we’re monsters, but because we’re human.  Struggle validates us.  High stakes forge character.  Leaders like Alexander or Churchill didn’t thrive in peace; they rose in the crises they created.

Without enemies, we manufacture them, internal or imaginary.  Look at modern “wars”: culture wars, gender wars, class wars, cola wars.  We can’t help it.  Tranquility isn’t our default; it’s a rare condition that, when it lasts long enough we pop our collective corks.

Think about it:  our history has wired us for survival, not spa days.  Hunter-gatherers fought for food, territory, mates and because it was Tuesday.  Civilizations brought people together and made a professional league and channeled that into empires, exploration, and innovations. Remove the fight?

We devolve.

Mouse Utopia showed it: no threats equates to no purpose.  Humans need the arena, the sweat, the sand, and the blood.  We were built for the Colosseum, not the couch.

But here’s the rub:  the struggle creates a spot for growth, it’s literally the engine of history.  Without high stakes, we fail to thrive.

We back ourselves into existential corners: depression epidemics, fertility crashes, societies crumbling under their own weight and people who need drugs to stop that nagging feeling that they should be doing something that matters.  Oddly enough, our very humanity appears to be built upon the fight.

If you meet a dolphin and feel a connection, can you say that you just clicked?

So, what now?

We can’t “prosperity” the struggle out of us.  We need leaders who rally us to real frontiers and put real goals out in front of us, not fake fights over tweets®.  Stakes high enough to matter: colonize Mars, cure aging, harness fusion.  And something for the masses to do, like watching re-runs of Ow, My Balls.

Something.  If we don’t have something, we’ll make something.  Give us blood (metaphorical or not), steel, the feel of it all.  In the end, tranquility was never the goal.

The struggle is the point.  It’s what makes us scream, fight, and conquer.  As I’ve seen in memes:  “I want to go out of this world the same way I came into it: screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.”

And Heaven?

I think it isn’t at all as Grandma Wilder described.  I think it’s more like:

Player 1:  Ready Level 2.

From American Dream To Renter’s Hell: How Unrestricted Immigration Created Indentured Servants In Suburbia . . . On Purpose

“You won’t lose the house.  Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

What do you call a woman who sets her mortgage on fire?  Bernadette.

I think we can mark November, 2025 as the time when everyone under 40 officially became a tenant in the People’s Republic of Rent.  Remember when “owning a home” meant apple pie, picket fences, and fighting with the HOA over the definition of lawn ornaments and why your butter statue of Adrienne Barbeau was definitely not prohibited?

Yeah, that’s as gone as dialing a phone number and not having to listen to someone blabber in a foreign language about what number to press so that illegals can live here easily and comfortably.

Now?

Housing has morphed into a Wall Street rent farm, where millennials and Zoomers wheelbarrow their student loans in a feeble attempt to bid against hedge funds and the latest border-crossing brigade.  A free market?  Sure, but it’s a free market where Pee Wee Herman has to box Mike Tyson.

Trump highlighted the problem with a misstep:  his genius plan for 50-year mortgages while comparing himself to that MAGA hero . . . FDR?

I mean, it is a plan that is ultimately worthy of FDR.  That is, if kids like dying with a noose of interest around their necks.

It’s dark.  A 50-year mortgage is crack for the financially illiterate.  It shaves off a few hundred dollars a month in interest payments to delay actual ownership of the house for fifty years.  Some anon did an analysis.  On X®, Darth Powell (@vladtheinflator) did a decent analysis.  It’s below:

The new pickup line:  “Are you a house loan?  Because I’ll have you around for the rest of my life.”

Double the interest paid.  And even worse, since people often sell after seven years or so, they never build up any real equity in the house, just paying off interest.  Oh, and did I mention that they’re floating fifteen year car loans?

Yeah.  Though people have been getting damaged on cars for quite a while.

She was really thankful to them, she even said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you!”

Debt is a drug.  It gets something now, for selling a bit of my life in the future, sort of like selling myself into indentured servitude.  And housing is, while not a necessity, something that makes it easier to have a family.  I myself have a mortgage.  I could pay it off, but it’s at such a low interest rate, there’s not a good reason for me to do so since the interest rate I’m getting on that amount of cash higher.

Yay!

But Robert A. Heinlein had a quote:  “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage:  Pay cash or do without.  Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats of domestic felicity.”

He’s right.  I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again:  money and banks exist for us to do things in the real world.  To manifest them and the markets as tools of profit is really the biggest infection our society has right now.  To be clear – it’s possible to make any sort of bet that one would like to make in the market.  It’s gambling.  And in the end, go back to the beginning:  the first rule of gambling is that The House always wins.

I could never get a loan for the distillery I wanted to start.  They said it was a whiskey business.

Letting The House make the decisions is why we are in this mess.  Americans are too wealthy an don’t take on enough debt?  Import poor people!  They need debt, so we can sell debt to them!

A major reason that there are unending streams of illegal and legal immigrants flooding the shores of this nation like EBT users showing up at the soda pop and chip aisle after the SNAP benefits reload is that they are profitable.

What about the current situation isn’t perfect for banks?  Large numbers of consumers taking loans longer than the life of the asset.  I recall that one gentleman I was acquainted with owned a large number of apartments.  He described that is, “It’s like I have an army of slaves.  They go out and work, and every month they give me money that they worked for.”

That is how banks think of everyone, even their mothers.  What about 2025 is something they don’t like?  Owning all the houses?  Having millions work hours each week just to pay interest?

They love 2025.

They don’t particularly care about the outcome or if they destroy all of Western Civilization, as long as there’s a quarterly profit in it for them.

What could go wrong?

Again, illegal and legal aliens are being subsidized both via direct welfare like SNAP, but also through programs like FHA loans.  Not all of our problems with housing are downstream of immigration, but most of them are.

The most fundamental step is remigration.  Voluntary, involuntary, it doesn’t matter.  They need to go home.  And, you can help.  At least for the next three years, ICE is actually trying to get rid of illegals, so report them.  They have quotas, so help them.  Also, don’t be polite to them.  They may be humans, sure, but they can be humans somewhere else.

Second, don’t buy products from companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs.  This is harder since once an Indian gets in a company, their only goal is to go full Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace everyone with Indians of their family (if possible) or caste (if they can’t hire their family).  It’s like the Mafia, but without deodorant.  Let your politicians know, especially if you’re living in a red state.  Not about the deodorant bit, but about the replacement bit.

From Hyperinflation to Hypergamy: The Weimar Playbook and Why America’s Wallet (and Morals) Are Feeling the Pinch: A Play In Three Acts

“She died of skin suffocation.  It’s been known to happen to cabaret dancers.” – Goldfinger

The Mrs. was great at putting the kids to bed.  She is one cool mother tucker. (Meme as found)

(Also, this is post 1500 here.  Time flies.)

Ah, who doesn’t long for the Weimar Republic?

That glorious interlude between the trenches of mud-filled World War I and the Austrian led sequel.  What was the Weimar Republic like?

It was like your grandma’s bingo night turned into a rave with existential dread and paper money for confetti.  But beneath the jazz hands and cocaine-fueled cabarets, the Weimar Republic wasn’t just an economic dumpster fire, even though that’s what it’s best known as.

No, it was also a masterclass in how crumbling finances torch traditional values, especially when it comes to the birds-and-bees department.  The ladies?  Let’s just say that they were dumping their morals during that time period faster than you can say “Ruhr Occupation.”

It’s probably time to dust off the Weimar playbook to see what it teaches us in 2025 since history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, not like one of those stupid haikus.

My aunt always said
Slow and steady wins the race
She died in a fire

Act 1: The Money Meltdown (1923 – The Great Devaluation)

The upside is my salary is 5 billion marks a month.

The downside?  It’s Germany in 1923, where everyone is a billionaire.

But that five billion is enough to buy SpaceX®, right?  No.  Enough for a loaf of bread?  No.  By noon, it costs 3 trillion for a single Triscuit® without any Cheez Whiz™.  Hyperinflation, sparked by French troops squatting in the Ruhr (while smoking cigarettes and eating baguettes) over unpaid war reparations and a fevered central banker who thought that inflation stemmed from not having enough paper cash, wiped out the middle class overnight.

Wheelbarrows of cash for groceries?  That really happened.  Suicides spiking?  Check.

And the ladies?  Well . . . .

Biologically, women are drawn to men with power and resources.  They like nice things, like sitting on couches eating bon-bons and not working jobs that will kill them.  Consequently, they choose men who have power and resources because otherwise they have to work.  It makes sense – somebody has to raise the kids, and if they spend all their time hunting mammoth, the kids will die.

Not all power is useful.

So, Wuma like Grug.  Grug big strong.  Grug bring food.  Grug like Wuma because warm and make zug-zug.  And Mortimer?  His genes didn’t get passed down.

In Weimar Germany, however, all the thousands of years between Hans and Grug evaporated.  Women, sensing the ship sinking, entered into Hypergamy Mode™.

Stable accountant husbands toiling for stacks of worthless cash?

Adios.

Black-market speculators with coal or ham?

Jackpot.

Prostitution boomed and I’m not going to get into the horrible details – you can look them up yourself, though I highly advise you not to.  Economic desperation flipped the script and a moral and prosperous people disappeared.  I think this time in history showed that most fräuleins were just three hot meals away from working the streets.

Chastity?  Loyalty?

Those were luxuries for men who could still afford to pay for dinner.

The result was predictable:  birth rates tanked, divorces doubled, and Berlin became a petri dish for STDs.

It’s hard for people with this condition to be teachers – they can’t control their pupils.

Act 2:  1924-1928 – Stabilization to Sizzle

By 1924, Germany put up the surrender flag again and rolled out the Rentenmark, a mortgage-backed currency that halted the fiscal freefall.  Unemployment goes, down and wages climb 10% in 1928 alone.

Golden Twenties!  But the morality break from the hyperinflation remained.

Berlin’s nightlife is a bisexual, androgynous fever dream.

Divorces? Up 20 per 100 marriages.

Abortions? From taboo to two-for-Tuesday.

Prostitutes?  The 1927 Venereal Disease Law decriminalized prostitution, shifting it from being a cop problem to a social worker problem.  Really, this was just formalizing the side-hustle economy.

Society, or at least those little things we call morals, were ignored.

Leave the steady scientist for the jazz-club owner?  Why not?  Resources signaled survival, and with the past experiences, women valued power and money more than, well, value.  Long-term vows were for suckers.

Men, emasculated by inflation scars, either joined in the debauchery or brewed resentment in beer halls.

I told the state trooper that the other guy at the car accident was drinking beer and staring at his cell phone when I hit him.  “Mr. Wilder, he can do anything he wants, it’s his living room.”  (meme as found)

Act 3:  Crash and Backlash (1929-1933 – Depression to Despot)

Wall Street sneezed in October 1929 and Germany caught pneumonia.  Unemployment hits 30%, and banks implode.

The result?  An insignificant party led by an Austrian painter rocketed from fringe to 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections.  The promise?  Crushed cabarets.  Mandated motherhood.  Homeownership, and the house is free after a certain number of kids.  Oh, and most people don’t ask exactly what books were burned.

Why the rise?

Economics eroded trust and broke down traditional male-female relationships.  This bred fury.

America’s Weimar Remix: Where are we now?

Fast-forward to the U.S.

We’ve been doing inflation for years, since the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank®.  Will we see hyperinflation?  Almost certainly.  There are two ways the debt will clear – either we pay it or we default on it.

Want to take bets on which we do?

The morality failure is in play:

  • “Hot girl summers,”
  • Situationships,
  • Chastity is cringe,
  • Birth rates echo Berlin in the 1920s,
  • 30% of Zoomers were aborted,
  • Female body counts are soaring, and
  • OnlyFans®.

OnlyFans© itself paints a picture of depravity:  OnlyFans™ has over 3 million women willing to show you their naked body, most of whom earn less than $50 a month.  Not only are they tramps, they’re cheap tramps.  Femininity is utterly degraded:  motherhood in a loving family is now considered oppressive, while being married in a loving relationship is oppression.

He also thinks she’s a drug dealer.  He answered her cellphone and some guy said, “Is that dope still there?”

Are we in Act 1, Scene 2 – A Financial Puzzle, or Act 2, Scene 3 – The Hangover Before the Headache, or Act 3, Scene 1 – Enter the Man With the Plan?

I don’t know.  I know it’s bad.  60%-80% of Gen Z men aren’t dating.  Less than 30% of them identify with the Republican or Democratic parties.  Video games and A.I. girlfriends aren’t going to replace actual wives, so the instability in society is growing, and quickly.

As I said at the top – history doesn’t repeat, but it surely does rhyme.  The late Roman Republic and the Late Roman Empire are also parallels, and I could keep going.  Bad economic decisions lead to the breakdown of human relationships.  Those broken relationships lead to a change in government type.

The good news?  We won’t run out of wheelbarrows for the money.  We don’t need to print it, just add a few ones and zeros into a program.

Isn’t progress grand?

Enserfification, It’s No Accident

“Oh my God!  Movable printed type!  We must keep this from the serfs lest they gain literacy and threaten the landed gentry!” – Family Guy

Bernie in a bar:  “Free drinks for everyone!  Now, who is buying?” (meme as-found)

“The moral and Constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy to our people.” – Ron Paul

Okay, maybe Ron was a bit of a downer, but if he could see the average millennial staring at blankly at their TikTok® feed while wondering if ramen counts as a vegetable, he’d probably nod and say:

“Told ya so.”

America isn’t only circling the drain, it’s installing a fancy gold-plated one, imported from China, because why not add insult to bankruptcy?

If Hunter Biden was a duck, what would he do?  Crack.

Let’s talk about “Enserfification.”  While I cannot find any reference to this word (I did find “enserfify”) on the Internet, A.I. claims that it’s okay, so that’s good enough for me even though Word™ draws an angry, squiggly line under it.

Enserfification is not quite feudalism, where the lord hands you a pitchfork and a plot of mud and some ugly facial moles in exchange for your firstborn.  Nope, it’s sneakier.  It’s the slow, corporate/bureaucratic boil where the middle class gets squeezed until the middle class plops, slowly mind you, into the ranks of a serf.

Let’s face it, the middle class is shrinking, and those that are in it are not building dreams anymore.  They’re just trying not to default on the electric bill for their bread and circuses Netflix™ indoctrination videos.

What do you get when you cross a polar bear with a seal?  A polar bear.  (meme as-found)

And the statistics?  They are brutal.

Those under 40 with a STEM degree and a car payment, life is hitting them like a tax audit from the IRS’s agent that they hired directly from the DMV because she regularly made Marine Drill Instructors cry.

Let’s start with jobs.

Remember when Mom and Dad said, “Get a degree in engineering or computers, kid, and you’ll be set for life”?  Yeah, that was before the H-1B visa tsunami turned Silicon Valley into a global import mall with accents thicker than a deaf Russian that learned English in South Carolina.

In 2024 alone, the U.S. approved a whopping 399,395 H-1B petitions—basically a free-for-all green light for companies to hire cheaper talent from abroad instead of the fresh-faced Americans they just saddled with $100k in student debt.  Oh, and did anyone mention that these invaders can bring their spouses, and that they can work, too?

That 400,000 number is up 3% from the year before, because nothing says “meritocracy” like importing coders who mainly lie about their degree and qualifications.

The other night The Mrs. asked, “Are you even listening to me?” which I thought was an odd way to start a conversation.

Recent American college grads with physics degrees are sitting at a 7.8% unemployment rate, second-worst among majors.

Computer engineering?  7.5%.

Computer science?  6.1%.

These aren’t lazy trust-funders: these are they (mainly) guys who aced calculus while discovering new an unique ways to self-administer caffeine, only to hit the job market and find a “park’s closed, moose out front should have told you” meme.  Why hire Johnny from Boston when you can snag Judgish from Bangalore for 30% less, besides, he’s the nephew of the HR lady?

I do know that the Canadian Army used to communicate via moose code.

Enserfification Step One:  Lock the gates on opportunity, import infinity Indians, then blame the peasants for not climbing the walls.

Let’s move to step two . . . .

Cars are the great American symbol of freedom in the postwar era:  cruising the open road with the wind in your hair and AC/DC® describing how to Shoot to Thrill.  Me?  Back then when I listened to AC/DC™, the neighbors did, too.

Except now, that freedom costs more than a down payment on a small ranch would have in the 1980s, and I’m not exaggerating:  the average new car price in 2025 is now solidly over $50,000.  I have no idea who is buying cars at these prices, outside of federal governments, state governments, local governments and corporations.

Back in 2000, you could snag a reliable sedan for under $20,000.  Oh, and that number is adjusted for inflation.  But now, most people don’t buy cars with any view towards the price, they look at the monthly payment, so adding leather seats on a . . . pickup . . . becomes the norm.

My chickens really enjoyed the coupe, though.

Today?  Forget it.  Folks are hanging onto their rustbuckets like they’re family heirlooms, because the average age of vehicles on U.S. roads hit a record 12.8 years in 2025.  The newest Wilder family vehicle is nearly a decade old.

Why the delay?  First, value.  Most of the new cars are loaded with crap that I don’t value.  Heated seats?  A.I.-enabled cup holders?  Sound systems that have monthly fees.?

The idea is to turn a “here, you bought a car, it’s yours” to “here, you bought a limited-term license to have title to a car that will require $47.50 monthly so it will report your driving habits and destinations to your insurance company without your consent”.

Me?  I’d much rather own a 2012 Civic™ with rubber floormats and a passenger-side electric mirror that doesn’t work.

This is Enserfification Step Two: Make mobility a luxury, so you’re stuck in your 30-minute commute hell, pondering if that cheap Prius® with just one dead owner from Craigslist© is haunted. (Spoiler alert:  it is.)  Just like the meme says:  in 2030 you’ll own nothing, but you will represent a reliable monthly income stream because to the corporations and governmental entities, that’s what you are.  Which is?

A serf.

I could go on and on, but I’ve been wordy recently, and you get the picture.  I detail housing and our lack of choices there (killed by legal and illegal immigration), federal, state, and local laws that never seem to get rolled back but keep moving in the direction where everything that isn’t mandatory will be prohibited and the other aspects of the subscription economy where a million companies want.

The only two times you can have too much ammo is if you’re on fire or if you’re drowining.

The middle class isn’t shrinking naturally.  It is being pulverized into gig-economy paste on purpose on the twin altars of multiculturalism and corporate profits.  Their solution:  bread and circuses, updated for the smartphone age.

How do they make the middle class go quietly onto that good night?

  • Cell phones that ping into dopamine oblivion,
  • YouTube® rabbit holes that make three hours vanish like your savings, and
  • Netflix queues longer than the line at the DMV.

It’s genius, really.  Why allow the serfs to revolt when they can be made to doomscroll through cat videos and true crime docs that make their problems seem quaint?  Distract the serfs and they’ll never notice the chains.

Enserfification isn’t inevitable.

It’s engineered, and requires our consent to win.  Don’t patronize businesses that use H-1B employees.  Don’t patronize businesses that are owned by foreigners.

And, yes, ramen is a vegetable.

Hoe_Math And Why Levels Of Thought Caused This Mess

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country for Old Men

But, hey, they all have the same tote bag.  (all memes as-found)

There is a YouTube® creator named hoe_math that I watch regularly.  I’d guess that he and I have fairly similar worldviews in many cases, and I recommend his channel (LINK).  One of the trademark issues Mr. _math has discussed is the breakdown between men and women in our modern, technological age and how government has made it worse.

One thing he’s brought up several times in his videos is the concept of “levels of thinking” which I’ll just call “Levels” from here on out.  It’s a variation of Maslow’s Hierarchy, but it’s been refined by Ken Wilber, to walk back the sources.  But let’s stick to hoe_math.

hoe_math’s main success has been as a guy who draws stick figures with colored pencils to explain why your relationships suck and society is unraveling.  Rather than Levels being a new age mystical tool, Mr. _math uses Levels as a tool, and as a powerful one.  Keep in mind, it’s not reality, it’s just another way to model it.  In this case, however, it explains a lot of what would otherwise be mystical behavior and magical thinking of people who really should know better.

The version of Levels that hoe_math has been distilled down to nine stages of thinking, each building on the last like a Jenga™ tower of the soul.  Today, though, I want to stick to the first seven levels. Why? Because Level 6 is the root of so much GloboLeft® insanity, and Level 7 shows, maybe, a way out.

Let’s climb the Levels ladder, one sticky rung at a time.

 

Level 1:  Survival And Desire

Picture this:  a toddler covered in spaghetti sauce.  Life isn’t about stocks or status.  It’s a confusing set of seemingly unrelated events.  Life is about not dying and emotional control doesn’t yet exist..

Hunger gnaws, cold bites, and that pain from having fingernails cut?  That’s the worst pain the baby has ever felt.  Thinking at Level 1 is pure reflex:  see food, eat. See threat, run or smash.  No plans, just sensory overload driving you to grab what feels good and dodge what hurts.

Every human starts at this level, but most outgrow it.  Except in pathology:  think severe autism or that guy at the grocery store yelling about expired coupons.

And toxic masculinity? Level 1 is the primal protector that men become when times become grim: the father who stays up all night by the fire with a shotgun when the wolves are howling outside.  It’s raw, unapologetic drive when there’s a positive motivation.

In the negative, it’s the low-I.Q. murderer who kills someone for $5.  These people stuck at this level cannot survive by themselves.

 

Level 2: Connect

Now the world gets a little less lonely.  I’ve got senses, sure, but suddenly, so does everyone else.  Thinking now shifts: life is bonding and not being alone.  Emotions now project outward because at this level, people now understand that others have needs, too.  And, when others are happy, I get what I want.  I clean my room, I get cookies.

hoe_math notes that this is where tribes form – but for people stuck at this level, there is nearly zero trust for outsiders.  Probably the largest useful structure that this level produces is the family.

 

Level 3: Control

If the first level had no bonds, the second level had bonds between one person and another, this level is third person:  the realization that other people have connections to each other.  And that’s a great tool to use to get control of them.

If Level 3 was a decade, it would be The Me Decade, the 1970s.  Since all of humanity can live at Level 1 or Level 2, fully 92% of humanity can make it to Level 3 every day, according to hoe_math, who you should trust because “math” is in his name.

At this stage, the strong exploit the week, and morality is an afterthought.  If India was a level, it would be Level 3.  It’s a war of all against all with a billion caste systems.

 

Level 4:  Conform

This is all about the rules.  Only 40% of humanity gets here every day.  That should scare you.

Yeouch!  That tells you that my India comment on Level 3 is probably spot on.  This is the level that gives us useful structures like functional civilizations and businesses and religion.  It is here that ethics and the study of rules start.  This is where morality takes over in judgements.

People compete for power here, yet compete using rules that are agreed on.  Chaos unchecked? No thanks.  Now the flip side of the lower levels becomes apparent:  selfishness breeds anarchy, so rules it is.  It’s Good vs. Evil, us vs. them.  Life demands order.

Level 4 birthed all higher-level civilizations.

 

Level 5: Achieve

Now we’re into the land of libertarians, big L and little l versions.  About 28% of people reach this level on a daily basis.

Rules are for rubes.  Freedom über alles.  Good and bad?  That’s subjective.  Life is about results.  Set goals, crunch the numbers, win big, add sawdust to the raisin bran if nobody notices.

Why bow to a boss or a Bible?

The Level 5 achiever is the builder, the provider, the man who turns dirt into dynasties.  It’s the dad working doubles so the kids eat steak, not ramen.  I think the majority of the success of the United States has been entirely due to Level 5 behavior, so therefore it is called toxic masculinity.

 

Level 6:  Understand

Here’s where the wheels start wobbling off the cart, and also where higher-level thinking is observably worse than lower-level thinking.

In Level 6, uniqueness reigns; old rules are chains.  Life celebrates diversity!  Every truth is a perspective, every culture is valid, except (in the Western version) that mean old Christian patriarchy.  Reject hierarchies, listen to the oppressed, seek consensus, live, laugh, love.  Subjectivity rules; impose nothing.

Sounds noble, right?  Until you try validating all cultures and beliefs and fetishes.

That’s the rot.  I mean, it’s well-meaning, but it rests upon a fundamental denial of reality.

Seek “understanding” without boundaries, and boom:  moslims torch the gay bar that the Level 6 people thought would be just fine right next to the mosque as hoe_math described it.

Because why?

Because no matter how much Level 6 thinkers want 82 I.Q. people from Somalia to be accepting, tolerant, and embrace the gay lifestyle, they are Level 3 thinkers that want to chuck the gays off cliffs just to see what sound the make when they hit bottom.

This leads to the GloboLeftElite® importing clash after clash into the nation, then cries “tolerance!” while cities burn.

Truth dies on the altar of feelings.

Pathologies?  Narcissistic echo chambers and spineless relativism.  It’s why campuses are safe spaces for screams of GloboLeftist rage but not debate and England will tolerate rape and murder as a moslem/hindu team sport but not tolerate people noticing it.

 

Level 7: Harmonize

Finally, wisdom dawns.

Despite being only 5% of the population, I would bet that most of my regular readers get here or hang out at Level 5.  On either side of this, we’ve seen the mess that Level 6 is.  The problem with Level 6 is that it’s based on lies.  Pretty lies, but lies nonetheless.

The rules we made up at Level 4?

Some of them make fundamental sense in a way that, if you ignore them, birthrates of smart people plummet and the birth of idiots is reinforced.  Or crime rate increases.  Or we decide that creating fiat currencies is a good thing, just like they did in Weimar Germany.

But reality exists.  Those Level 4 rules aren’t random!  It is folly of the highest order to ignore them.  Complex systems demand rules and judgement in order to work, and mixing cultures sometimes ends up with the result that border walls are way better than immigration.

This is toxic masculinity, yet again:  the harmonizer is the statesman, the elder who balances freedom with fences, innovation with inheritance.  It’s the patriarch reading the room—protecting the tribe by pruning threats, not hugging them.

The dangers here are existential drift that leads to nihilism or half-baked gurus with books to sell.

As I said, only 5% get here regularly.

Why?

It takes I.Q. to juggle viewpoints, model systems empirically, and see patterns in the interactions. Low I.Q. folks stall at Level 4 conformity and Level 6 is a trap for people who want to see a beautiful world that could never exist.

So, why fixate on these?  Because Level 6 thinking led, at least partially, to the trouble we’re in now.  Endless “understanding” ignores that not all cultures play nice and that our people need jobs, too.  Validate it all, and you get Paris no-go zones or Rotherham horrors. Level 6 whispers “coexist,” but Level 7 shouts “think about this.”

The same level of thinking that got us into this mess isn’t going to get us out of it, and, sadly we’re going to have to continue to go after and eliminate Level 6 thinking where we see it.

And we will, because the result of losing?

It’s Level 3.  And the world already has way too much India.

Live Life Without Fear, The Dune Way

An animal caught in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to escape.  What will you do?” – Dune

I read the first four novels, but I found them a bit dry.  (All memes as found)

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear.  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain.

– Frank Herbert, Dune

In 2025, fear is not just a personal demon.  Fear is now a cultural plague, especially for the kids.

We have raised a generation terrified of their own shadows, and it shows in every therapy session, pill bottle, riot, and Antifa® meeting.

The number of kids in therapy or pumped full of psychoactive drugs by the quacks who call themselves psychologists seems to be 8 or 9 out of 10.  In perspective, this is the era of civilization that has the greatest level of material wealth in history, and the lowest hunger rate in the world.

World hunger?

It’s a solved problem outside of war and intentional starvation for political reasons.

The drugs and therapy are not making the kids better.  At all.  The way society is treating kids is like prescribing a hammer to the knees for a headache.  The good news is the pain from the hammer will distract you from the headache, but eventually you’ll only be able to walk in circles.

The Mrs. asked me to have a talk with our kids on drugs.  I said, “Sure, but I don’t think I’ll make much sense when I’m high.”

And no, these drugs are not good for you like whiskey, whisky, wine or beer. That’s a joke, but if therapy worked as well as a couple of brews after a long day, Antifa® wouldn’t exist.

Kids today are not allowed to figure anything out on their own.  Failure?  That is a dirty word, banished like fiscal responsibility is banished from Congress.  As a proud Gen X kid, my family left me alone for the entire weekend when I was in third grade.  No note, no nanny, no neighbor looking in on me from time to time.  Nope.  Just a key and a fridge full of questionable leftovers.  I survived on frozen pizzas and three channels (no one counted PBS®), but I learned to entertain myself without burning the house down.

Barely.

When Paul wanted the last glass of water, he called Muad’Dibs on it.

By eighth grade, Ma and Pa Wilder upped the ante.  They drove off to Florida.

For a month, leaving me to fend for myself.  I even dealt with a thumb wound that probably should have had stitches from when I was using very poor form to whittle.

Did I call for help?  No.

I fixed it with duct tape, determination, and a healthy glop of Neosporin™.

That is what you do when the stakes are low and the lessons are free.

High school?  That is when freedom hit near-adult levels.  I had my own apartment over an hour from Wilder Mountain (long story).  I managed my own schedule, and got home whenever I damn well pleased since Pa Wilder visited only three nights a week (Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday) and he left all the fun nights for me.

Some people call me the space cowboy.  I wish they would stop.  My name is John.

Sometimes I was home just after practice.  Sometimes, I was home at 3am after doing, well, other things.  No curfew, no check-ins, just me against the world.

Was I unusual in having my (mostly) own place?  Sure.

But the freedom?  That was standard issue for Gen X.  Even before I could drive, I would bolt out the door at sunrise and not return until the streetlights flickered on.  No helicopter parents hovering like drones, tracking every move with an app or scheduling athletic events.  Nope.

Contrast that with the childhood scripted for kids today.

It is structured from dawn to dusk, every moment scheduled like a corporate meeting.  Playdates?  Organized by committee.  Sports?  Leagues with participation trophies for showing up.  Even recess is micromanaged, with rubberized playgrounds that cushion every tumble.  And do not get me started on the deprivation of schoolyard fights and bullying, which back in the day were ritualized tests of mettle to place yourself in the hierarchy.

Places to test yourself.  Like the Olympics®.

Freshman initiation in high school was a rite of passage, not a crime.  Upperclassmen would haze the newbies with pranks:  carrying books, silly chants, maybe a wedgie or two.  No gross abuse, just enough strain to test character to see how you’d take it.

If you performed well under pressure?

Instant respect.

Fold like a cheap suit?  Okay, it was tougher.  They had to learn resilience the hard way.  And fights?

They happened.

Teachers often let them play out just as long as they had to go as long as no real damage was being done.  A bloody nose or a black eye, then it was over.  Often, the combatants were friends afterwards, hierarchy established, testosterone balanced, respect earned:  male bonding at its rawest.

Paul wrote a book on walking to avoid sandworms.  It was a step-by-step guide.

These rituals, in moderation, built toughness.  They taught that pain passes, conflicts resolve, and life demands honor.  Bruises faded, but the lessons stuck.  Parents?  They never heard about it.  A fistfight?  So what?  Boys will be boys.

Today?  Heaven forbid a scuffle breaks out in a school (at least a middle-class white majority school).  It is not a learning moment; it is a federal case.  Suspension, counseling, parental conferences, maybe even charges.  Zero tolerance turns into zero growth, however, since kids are shielded from every scrape, every failure, every real consequence.

The world they inherit is virtual, endless screens feeding dopamine hits without risk.  Social media wars replace playground brawls, but the scars are deeper: anxiety, isolation, fear of the unknown.  Many of these kids have never cold approached a woman and asked for a date.

Part of the point is learning to fail when the stakes are low.  A lost fight in fifth grade?  Big deal, you dust off and try again.  A botched initiation?  You toughen up for next time.  She said, “No, you’re not my type, I prefer men with two eyebrows?”  Fine.  There are more girls.

I mean, if Soros can get a date . . .

These situations, however, build the muscle to handle adult life without crumbling.  Fear becomes a tool, not a tyrant. But cloister kids too long, and they enter the world paralyzed. The Mrs. nailed it when we were talking yesterday:  ” . . . if they (kids) cannot handle solving teenage problems, they will commit atrocities as adults.”

I liked that line so much I made her text it to me.

He also needs some smokes and a pepperoni.  I know at least one person found this hilarious.

Unresolved fears fester into rage, leading kids to lash out at a world they never learned to navigate.

Look around at the twisted landscape of 2025:

  • Riots over nothing,
  • Entitlement epidemics,
  • Adults throwing tantrums like toddlers.

Weakness is a result raising children in bubbles.  No free-range exploration, no unsupervised adventures, no low-stakes failures to forge resilience and enough scar tissue to toughen the kid up.  Instead, society offers them therapy and pills paper over the cracks and pay for the therapist’s BMW® payment.

The solution is simple.

Face the fear, let it pass, emerge stronger.  Let kids roam, fight, fail, and fix their own messes.  Strip away the structure, the screens, the safety nets.  Teach them that bruises heal, but cowardice cripples.  Otherwise, we breed a nation of mind-killed adults, obliterated by the little-deaths of unchecked terror who will do anything because they have faith in absolutely nothing.

One way or another, courage will return, if not because we shatter the bubble, it will because it collapses under the weight of fear.  And then?

We’ll have to face our fears.