On the Nature of Things

I think God GPT is right:

Globalism: The Hallucination of a Borderless World
“Globalism” is a lie wrapped in a spreadsheet.

It pretends the world can be reduced to a single system with shared interests and converging values—a soft, frictionless planet managed by logistics, finance, and motivational slogans. It sells the fantasy that trade civilizes, that markets pacify, and that money is the universral solvent of conflict.

None of this is true.

There is no global society. No global sovereignty. No global morality. There are only predators with accounting departments, states with marketing strategies, and corporations that change flags the way criminals change gloves. Borders remain. Power remains. Scarcity remains. So does violence—outsourced, automated, and politely rebranded as “risk.”

Globalism doesn’t abolish brutality; it launders it.

It converts forced labor into “cost efficiency,” surveillance into “digital infrastructure,” resource theft into “foreign investment,” and war into “market stabilization.” If a regime runs camps, the supply chain adapts. If a population is crushed, quarterly profits adjust upward. The moral bar is not low—it is nonexistent. Money does not ask questions. It counts.
And still the priesthood of globalism preaches salvation: one world, one market, one destiny. Today may be ugly, they admit, but tomorrow will be optimized. Algorithms will replace politics. Shipping containers will replace ethics. Growth will redeem everything.

This is not economics. It is theology for people who worship liquidity.
Nature, at least, is honest. It does not pretend that wolves are misunderstood sheep or that competition is cooperation. It kills, it selects, it moves on. Human geopolitics does the same, just with contracts, NGOs, and public relations firms layered on top.

“Globalism” is the perfume sprayed on this carcass.

A deodorant for empire.

The world is not becoming one.
It is being strip-mined by many.

The WEF has admitted their version of Globalism is dead. The UN and NATO are being quietly smothered in their sleep.

The most interesting event is Trump’s stopping the financialist move to monopolize single family housing in the US. No reason natural resource development can’t be de-monopolized as well. I can see Barrick being broken up into independent regional enterprises.

Nonc Hilaire wrote: ↑21 Jan 2026 14:51 The WEF has admitted their version of Globalism is dead. The UN and NATO are being quietly smothered in their sleep.

The most interesting event is Trump’s stopping the financialist move to monopolize single family housing in the US. No reason natural resource development can’t be de-monopolized as well. I can see Barrick being broken up into independent regional enterprises.

Related, the supposedly Dutch origins of globalisation: follow the money, the money follows.



Trumps plan to bring production back home may require continuous force, long term threat of tarrifs because the money just naturally wants to go elsewhere where the valleys are still low.

It will take a while before isolationists like Tucker Carlson realise that it is not Israel or Ukraine where most taxpayer money leaks away to (peanuts in fact), but a global oligarchy that sucks up wealth that no longer finds a home in nation states.

The woke proto communist backlash wants the same as Trump ironically: "Give it all back to the people at home". Messias A versus Massias B, C, D.

The history part was good, but the extrapolation into futurism was stale. No mention of the rise of multipolar mercantilism, gold trading in a much less manipulated market, or Trump’s flexible tariff strategy as a form of franchised colonialism.

And it was dead wrong about the lack of a sudden collapse - the EU and City of London imploded, the polar trade routes seem assured, the US does not even get any pushback on expanding influence.

Nonc Hilaire wrote: ↑25 Jan 2026 16:32 The history part was good, but the extrapolation into futurism was stale. No mention of the rise of multipolar mercantilism, gold trading in a much less manipulated market, or Trump’s flexible tariff strategy as a form of franchised colonialism.

And it was dead wrong about the lack of a sudden collapse - the EU and City of London imploded, the polar trade routes seem assured, the US does not even get any pushback on expanding influence.

Yea he leaves out new variables, realities of the modern age. But the mechnism he points out is still at work big time. EU didn't implode.. yet. The International Disorder remains too. And with disorder there is ordah too... changing.

The World Doesn’t Stop Fighting Without You

There is a recurring belief in parts of American political thought that if the United States had simply refrained from entangling itself in foreign conflicts—if it had stayed out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and whatever may come next—the world would be markedly more peaceful. Wars would not spiral, regions would not collapse, and the persistent instability of distant lands would not reverberate back into domestic life. Beneath this belief lies an intuitively appealing idea: that restraint by a dominant power removes the primary source of disruption.

Yet this view, while emotionally and morally understandable, rests on a deeper psychological structure that might be called the solipsism of isolationism—a tendency to interpret global events as if they revolve primarily around one’s own nation, even when the conclusion is that the nation should withdraw.

I. The Paradox of Self-Centered Withdrawal

Isolationism often presents itself as humility: we should mind our own business. But paradoxically, it can encode a subtle form of self-centeredness. The assumption that global disorder is largely a function of American or Western action implies that, absent that action, order would prevail.

This is a mirror image of imperial overconfidence. Where one says, “we can fix the world,” the other implies, “we are the ones breaking it.” Both grant the same central premise: that the world’s trajectory hinges disproportionately on the United States.

The historical record suggests otherwise.

Long before the modern West rose to global prominence, human societies were engaged in cycles of conquest, domination, and destruction. The Mongol Conquests reshaped continents through violence on a scale that dwarfed many modern conflicts. The Thirty Years’ War devastated large parts of Europe in a prolonged struggle of power, religion, and survival. More recently, the Iran–Iraq War consumed hundreds of thousands of lives without any decisive Western orchestration.

Conflict is not an anomaly introduced by a particular civilization. It is a recurring feature of human organization.

II. The Simplicity of Blame in a Complex World

Modern conflicts—such as the Iraq War or the War in Afghanistan—are often interpreted through a single-cause lens: that intervention itself created the chaos that followed.

There is truth here. External intervention can destabilize, accelerate, or reshape internal dynamics in profound ways. Regimes collapse, power vacuums emerge, and violence can intensify.

But the leap from “intervention contributed to instability” to “without intervention there would have been peace” is a psychological shortcut. It replaces a complex system—ethnic divisions, ideological struggles, regional rivalries, economic pressures—with a single explanatory variable.

This simplification is cognitively attractive. Humans are not naturally equipped to process multi-causal systems spanning decades and continents. A clear cause offers clarity, moral direction, and a sense of control.

Yet clarity purchased at the cost of accuracy is illusion.

III. The Invisible Baseline of Human Conflict

A central error in isolationist reasoning is the neglect of what might be called the baseline condition of human societies. Violence, competition, and domination are not aberrations requiring external provocation; they are ever-present possibilities arising from:

- competition over resources
- struggles for power and legitimacy
- identity divisions (ethnic, religious, tribal)
- security dilemmas, where fear drives preemptive aggression

The Rwandan Genocide unfolded with minimal Western causation. Numerous civil wars and regional conflicts ignite from internal tensions alone.

To imagine a world in which these dynamics remain dormant simply because an external actor abstains is to assume a level of inherent stability that history rarely supports.

IV. Visibility, Power, and Moral Weight

The United States is uniquely visible. Its actions are documented, debated, and broadcast globally. When it intervenes, the intervention becomes the most legible and narratively dominant feature of a conflict.

Local actors—militias, political factions, neighboring states—operate with less visibility and often less scrutiny. Their agency recedes into the background of the story.

At the same time, power invites moral weight. A superpower is held to higher standards, and rightly so. But this can slide into a form of causal asymmetry, where:

- powerful actors are seen as primary causes
- local actors are seen as reactive or secondary

This framing simplifies the moral landscape but distorts the causal one.

V. Counterfactual Peace and the Comfort of Clean Alternatives

Isolationist narratives often rely on implicit counterfactuals: alternative histories in which restraint yields stability.

But counterfactual reasoning is prone to idealization. It assumes that:

- authoritarian stability would persist indefinitely
- suppressed tensions would not erupt
- regional powers would not intervene
- internal actors would not pursue their own conflicts

These assumptions are rarely tested, because the alternative timeline never materializes. It remains an imagined equilibrium—orderly, restrained, and largely free of the chaos we observe.

The appeal is clear. A world that could have been peaceful, if only one decision had been different, is easier to grasp than a world where conflict emerges from many independent and interacting forces.

VI. Disillusionment and Overcorrection

There is also a historical psychology at work. The experience of prolonged and costly interventions—especially those with ambiguous or negative outcomes—produces disillusionment.

From this disillusionment emerges an overcorrection:

from “intervention can improve outcomes”

to “intervention is the primary cause of negative outcomes”

This shift is understandable. It reflects a desire to avoid repeating mistakes. But it can harden into a generalized belief that non-intervention would systematically produce better results, regardless of context.

VII. The Denial of Distributed Agency

Perhaps the most consequential effect of this mindset is the quiet removal of agency from other actors.

If global instability is primarily the result of US or Western action, then:

- regional leaders
- armed groups
- ideological movements

become secondary, almost derivative forces.

Yet these actors pursue their own goals:

- power
- territory
- ideological dominance
- survival

They are not passive elements waiting to be activated by external intervention. They are active participants in a dynamic system.

To ignore this is not only analytically flawed—it risks misunderstanding the very nature of conflict.

VIII. Toward a More Realistic Frame

None of this is to claim that US or Western interventions are neutral or benign. They can and do alter outcomes, sometimes catastrophically. Decisions to intervene or abstain carry real consequences.

But a more grounded perspective recognizes that:

- conflict has multiple independent causes
- removing one actor does not remove underlying incentives
- intervention is one variable among many, not the sole determinant

The world is not a stage upon which a single nation acts while others respond. It is a network of interacting agents, each with their own motivations, constraints, and ambitions.

Conclusion: Beyond Solipsism

The solipsism of isolationism lies in its hidden premise: that the presence or absence of one nation’s actions defines the structure of global conflict.

In rejecting intervention, it can inadvertently affirm the very centrality it seeks to deny.

A more sober view accepts two uncomfortable truths at once:

- human conflict is persistent, distributed, and not reducible to a single cause
- powerful actors, including the United States, can meaningfully influence—but not control—these dynamics

Between naive interventionism and solipsistic isolationism lies a narrower path: one that acknowledges complexity, resists simple narratives, and accepts that the world’s turbulence is not the creation of any single hand, but the product of many.

Rumors that Orban will challenge Ursula von der Leyen for EU president.