A gentle guide to slowing down while the world gallops past

There comes a point in life — somewhere around 67, give or take a few dents and scratches — when you realise the world has become a horse in full gallop. Everyone is rushing: rushing to buy things, rushing to build things, rushing to comment on things, rushing to be outraged by things. The whole planet seems to be spinning faster and faster, as if someone has quietly turned up the speed without asking permission.

But then I sit down at my modelling table.

And the world… stops.

Not metaphorically. Not poetically. It simply stops. Time flattens out, the noise fades, and the only thing that exists is the part in front of me — a wing root, a canopy frame, a tiny piece of plastic that demands nothing except my full attention. In that moment, the world ceases its mad rotation and becomes still.

I sometimes think everyone should experience that feeling, even for a minute. If they did, perhaps we’d all treat the world — and each other — with a little more care. Perhaps we’d stop galloping and start walking again.

I once knew a Korean diplomat at university. His friend told me, with a mixture of admiration and disbelief, that he could take half an hour to peel an orange. Half an hour! At the time I thought it was eccentric. Now I understand it completely. He wasn’t peeling an orange — he was refusing to be rushed by the world’s tempo.

Perhaps his Buddhist religion or philosophy had something to do with it:

He was living at the speed of attention.

That’s what modelling has become for me. Not a race to finish, not a competition, not a stash‑building exercise. Just a slow, attentive act. A way of being present. A way of reminding myself that life is finite, precious, and best lived one careful brushstroke at a time.

Each model I make now, I treat as if it might be my last — not in a morbid way, but in a grateful way. A way that says: I’m still here. I’m still making something. I’m still paying attention.

And if the hobby has become a galloping horse, then perhaps someone needs to stand by the fence and say, “You know… you don’t need a thousand parts. You don’t need to build hundreds of kits. You don’t need to rush. You can just slow down, breathe, and enjoy the feeling of making something with care.”

A Note on Three Kits Found in a Hospice Shop

Not long ago, I found three kits in the local Hospice shop — an Italeri 1/48 Sabre, an ICM Spitfire, and a Red Arrows Hawk. Nothing exotic, nothing rare, nothing engineered to within an inch of its life. Just simple, honest kits from a quieter era, before the hobby ballooned into mega‑monster monstrosities of parts, stress, and over‑engineering.

They reminded me of what modelling used to be: a few sprues, a handful of parts, and the promise of a weekend well spent.

And one of them — the Sabre — did something more. It took me straight back to the child I was, spinning around in St Thomas Park with a little Sabre I’d found, pretending it was flying. I can still feel the weight of it in my hand, still remember the joy of that moment. Funny how a single shape, a single nose ring, can carry a lifetime of memory.

Those three kits felt like a quiet message: Slow down. Enjoy this. Remember why you started.

They’re not just models. They’re reminders of a simpler rhythm — one worth returning to.

Addendum: Three Small Summits

And since every philosophy benefits from a practical footnote, here are mine — the three modest peaks I still hope to climb:

1. A true natural‑metal finish, with panels that shift subtly in the light.
2. A perfect gloss coat, smooth as still water.
3. A delicate Italian squiggle or dot camouflage, confident and alive.

If I reach even one of them, I’ll feel as though I’ve sat on a small summit for a moment, looking around, quietly satisfied.

And perhaps that’s all any of us can hope for: a few small summits, climbed slowly, with care.

The other day, I had someone clear the mass of weeds that had overrun my small back garden. On Easter Sunday, I stood outside with a cup of coffee, looking over the newly turned soil, when I noticed a greyish shape half-emerging from the earth. I bent down, and immediately recognised it: an Airfix 1/72 scale figure – a German soldier from the First World War, kneeling, rifle raised.

Time had not been kind to him. The tip of his Mauser Gewehr 98 carbine was gone, and soon after I picked him up, the spike of his helmet fell away. He must have lain there for fifty years or more, buried, forgotten, and now – quite suddenly – returned, as if blinking in the light, into a world entirely changed.

I felt, almost at once, that this small figure – whom I named Feldwebel Hermann – might stir something beyond myself. So I took a photograph and shared it, along with the story of his discovery. What followed surprised me. Messages began to arrive from across the world: Bavaria, Australia, England – each carrying echoes of childhood. Stories of beaches and gardens, of lost toys and rediscovered ones; of small battles fought in sandpits and fields; of plastic soldiers, Matchbox cars, farm animals, and the quiet, imaginative worlds children once inhabited so completely.

It became clear, very quickly, that Hermann was no longer simply mine.

He had become a point of recognition.

Not because of what he is – but because of what he carries.

A fragment of plastic, no larger than a thumbnail, and yet within him something vast seemed to reside: a store of memory, of time, of shared experience that transcended place and language, something close to what Carl Jung might have called a shared symbolic layer of experience – not abstract, but deeply lived.

In him, people did not see a soldier so much as themselves – children again, absorbed in play, in a world that felt whole, continuous, and unbroken.

It is a curious thing, that in an age of boundless communication, it should be something so small, so ordinary, that draws people together. We are surrounded by devices that promise connection, yet so often leave us dispersed – each in our own stream of images and impressions, our own fragment of the present, endlessly renewed and just as quickly forgotten.

And yet Hermann endured.

For decades he lay beneath the soil, outside of time, untouched by the acceleration that has since overtaken us. When he re-emerged, he seemed to carry with him not only the past, but a different quality of time – slower, deeper, more continuous. The kind of time in which memory and meaning are allowed to gather.

Perhaps that is why he resonated.

For beneath all the noise and fragmentation of the present, there remains, I think, a quiet yearning – for simplicity, for continuity, for those small, human things that do not demand attention, but offer recognition. Hermann does not speak loudly. He does not compete. He simply is. And in that stillness, something in us answers.

It brings to mind an old Chinese adage: “The right man sitting in his house and thinking the right thought will be heard a hundred miles distant.”

Perhaps that is what happened here. Not through noise or intention, but through the quiet truth of the moment – a small figure, a simple thought, travelling farther than one might ever expect.

“Vergesst mich nicht,” he seems to say.

Do not forget me.

But perhaps what he asks us not to forget is not himself, but what he has come to represent: a world in which experience was shared more easily, in which meaning was not endlessly deferred, in which even the smallest object could hold a universe of imagination.

I have not forgotten him.

In time, I may place him on a small plinth, or perhaps set him in a quiet corner of the garden, something like a veteran’s shelter – half memorial, half offering. Not to honour the figure alone, but the thread he has uncovered: the fragile continuity between past and present, between one life and another, between memory and meaning.

For a moment, through him, something of that continuity returned.

And perhaps, in his own modest way, Feldwebel Hermann has done what so much else struggles to do: he has brought people, however briefly, back into relation – with themselves, with each other, and with the deeper currents of time that run beneath the surface of our hurried lives.

He sits on my desk as I write this, small, battered, uncomplaining – a fragment of the past that somehow made its way back. Perhaps that is all any of us hope for: that something of what we were might one day be found again.

For some time now, I have felt that the we’ve slipped into a new human condition that the old vocabulary  cannot hold anymore.

The philosophy I grew up with, Existentialism, with its absurdism, alienation, angst – those belonged to a world where reality still behaved like a novel with a coherent plot.

Now we’re living in something stranger, faster, more contradictory, and more theatrical than anything Sartre or Camus ever imagined. Even Kafka would look at 2026 and say, “No, that’s way too much.”

Why we need a new word

Because the world has changed in ways language hasn’t caught up with:

• Absurdity used to be the exception; now it’s the baseline.
• Alienation used to be a feeling; now it’s a global operating system.
• Angst used to be personal; now it’s ambient.
• Surrealism used to be art; now it’s the news.

We’re living in a time where:

• ceasefires aren’t peace
• victories aren’t victories
• truth is optional
• narratives contradict themselves before they finish being spoken
• tiny plastic soldiers become international mascots
• and super tanker captains can’t decide whether to go forward or reverse

Language wasn’t built for this.

I have been trying to coin a new word that captures the flavour of this new era:

1. Transabsurdity

Beyond absurdity. Where the absurd becomes normalised and self‑aware.

2. Meta‑chaos

Chaos that knows it’s chaos and performs it theatrically.

3. The Unwordable

A state of reality that resists description.

4. Hyper‑real dissonance

Where everything is real, unreal, and contradictory at the same time.

5. Post‑sense

A world that has moved beyond the need for things to make sense.

6. Surreality

Not surrealism – surreality: the condition of living inside something that behaves like a dream.

Two realities at once

We are living in two realities at once, and the gap between them has become so wide that the old vocabulary –  existentialism, absurdity, alienation – simply can’t bridge it anymore. Philosophers haven’t yet named it, but ordinary people feel every day.

Reality One: The Window World

The world outside my window is coherent, continuous, embodied:

• a little old lady walking past
• a bus rumbling by
• the weather doing what weather does
• the same street I’ve known for decades
• the physical, sensory, grounded world

This world has narrative continuity. It behaves like reality always used to behave.

It’s slow, legible, human.

Reality Two: The Screen World

The world on my screen is the opposite:

• a torrent of events
• contradictory statements
• no single truth
• no shared narrative
• opinions masquerading as facts
• facts treated as opinions
• noise, noise, noise

It’s fragmented, accelerated, and disembodied. It behaves like a dream written by a committee.

This world has no continuity. It resets every hour.

The fracture between the two

For most of human history, the world we saw and the world we heard about were roughly aligned. Now they’re not even in the same universe.

I look out the window and see a quiet street. I look at the screen and see a world on fire.

My nervous system doesn’t know which one to believe.

This is the new human condition

Existentialism doesn’t cover it. Absurdism doesn’t cover it. Alienation doesn’t cover it.

Those philosophies assumed a single shared reality that felt meaningless or hostile.

But we now live in dual realities:

• one stable
• one chaotic
• one embodied
• one digital
• one continuous
• one fragmented

We need a new word for this.

Possible candidates for the new modality:

1. Bi-reality

Living in two incompatible realities at once.

2. Split‑realism

A world divided between the physical and the digital.

3. Duality Drift

The psychological slide between window‑truth and screen‑truth.

4. Hyper fragmentation

A condition where narrative coherence collapses.

5. The Noise Epoch

An era defined not by events, but by the overabundance of them.

6. The Two‑World Condition

Simple, clear, and accurate.

7. Post‑objective reality

Where objectivity hasn’t disappeared – it’s just drowned.

What has shifted?

Is it the world, or us, or both?

It’s both.

The world has become hyperreal

Events now happen at a speed and scale that no human nervous system can integrate. The screen-world is not reality – it’s a simulation of reality, amplified, accelerated, and stripped of continuity.

We have become divided selves

Part of us lives in the physical world. Part of us lives in the digital one. And the two no longer match.

This mismatch is the source of the new condition.

The Past: A Single Narrative World

Even in crisis, people shared:

• one reality
• one set of facts
• one pace of information
• one emotional rhythm
• one sense of “we”

That’s why collective effort was possible. Not because people were better but because their world was simpler.

The Present: A Fragmented Hyperreal

We now live in:

• a shattered information environment
• multiple incompatible realities
• no shared truth
• no stable narrative
• no common emotional tempo
• a constant flood of noise

The window-world is still sane. The screen-world is a kaleidoscope dropped on the floor.

And we flicker between them dozens of times a day.

This is the new condition I am trying to name.

We need a word that captures all of this

A term that holds:

• fragmentation
• hyperreality
• unreality
• simultaneity
• cognitive overload
• narrative collapse
• the impossibility of returning to the old world
• the sense that both the world and the self have shifted

Many people have described their sense of  emotional exhaustion living in this world – shattered, knackered, basically ruined, but that only describes how we feel, not what the condition is.

I am trying to describe the cognitive problem, the sense of cognitive dislocation. I am trying to name something deeper, something structural, something that sits beneath the emotional weather. The people of the past lived inside a single, stable narrative world. Even when it was frightening or unjust, it was coherent. It had continuity. It had a shared frame.

The psychological infrastructure that made collective action possible – shared narrative, shared truth, shared purpose – has dissolved. Not because people are weaker, but because the world has split into incompatible realities.

The Past: A Single Narrative World

Even in crisis, people shared:

• one reality
• one set of facts
• one pace of information
• one emotional rhythm
• one sense of “we”

That’s why collective effort was possible. Not because people were better – but because the world was simpler.

The Present: A Fragmented Hyperreal

We now live in:

• a shattered information environment
• multiple incompatible realities
• no shared truth
• no stable narrative
• no common emotional tempo
• a constant flood of noise

The window-world is still sane. The screen-world is a kaleidoscope dropped on the floor.

And we flicker between them dozens of times a day.

This is the new condition I am trying to name.

The Perpetual Present: a defining symptom of our new condition

In the past, people lived inside a continuum:

• yesterday shaped today
• today shaped tomorrow
• history was a guide
• memory was a map
• the future was something you could imagine

Now, for millions of people, especially those immersed in the digital world, time has collapsed into a perpetual present:

• news resets every hour
• narratives don’t continue, they restart
• nothing accumulates
• nothing resolves
• everything is “now”, and only “now”

It’s not that people have forgotten the past – it’s that the screen-world erases continuity.

The window-world still has continuity. The screen-world has none.

And we are living in both.

Why this is so disorienting

I am trying to hold together:

1. A world with time

The one outside my window:

• seasons
• aging
• routines
• familiar faces
• continuity

2. A world without time

The one on my screen:

• endless updates
• no memory
• no narrative arc
• no stable truth
• no shared past

This is the cognitive split.

We have moved from a narrative reality to a fragmented, perpetual-present hyperreality.

The old world was built on continuity. The new world is built on interruption.

The old world had a shared story. The new world has millions of competing micro-stories.

The old world had a past. The new world has a feed.

This is why existentialism feels outdated. It assumed a stable world that felt meaningless.

We now have an unstable world that feels unreal.

I have already identified:

• fragmentation
• hyperreality
• dual realities
• narrative collapse
• cognitive overload
• the impossibility of mapping past to present

Now add:

• the collapse of temporal continuity
• the perpetual present

I am trying to live in:

1. The Continuous Frame

Books. Philosophy. The world outside my window. The old lady walking past. The bus. The weather. Time that flows. Meaning that accumulates.

This frame is coherent, slow, narrative, embodied.

2. The Discontinuous Frame

The screen. The feed. The noise. The perpetual present. Events that appear and vanish. Opinions that contradict themselves. A world with no memory and no future.

This frame is fragmented, hyperreal, timeless, disembodied.

Why the bridge keeps collapsing

When I read a book, I enter a world with:

• continuity
• depth
• time
• structure
• argument
• coherence

When I switch to my screen, I enter a world with:

• interruption
• acceleration
• contradiction
• simultaneity
• emotional overload
• no temporal anchor

My brain tries to integrate the two, but they operate on different logics, almost like different physical laws.

It’s like trying to combine Newtonian mechanics with quantum mechanics in your head. They describe different universes.

No wonder it feels disjointed.

The deeper truth: I am living in two incompatible temporalities:

• the world of books: past → present → future
• the world of screens: now → now → now → now

This is why the past feels unreachable. This is why the present feels unreal. This is why the future feels unimaginable.

It’s the structure of the world.

We now have all the components:

• dual realities
• incompatible temporalities
• narrative collapse
• hyper fragmentation
• the perpetual present
• cognitive dissonance
• emotional exhaustion
• the impossibility of integration

This is the new human condition

The two words for it:

1.The Analytical Term

Bireal Hyperpresentism

This one is clean, exact, and captures everything I’ve been describing:

• Bireal — living in two incompatible realities (the continuous world outside the window, and the fragmented hyperreal world on the screen)
• Hyperpresent — trapped in a perpetual present with no past or future (the screen-world’s endless “now-now-now”)
• ‑ism — signalling a philosophical condition, not just a mood

Bireal Hyperpresentism = the condition of living in two incompatible realities, one continuous and one hyperreal, while being cognitively trapped in a perpetual present.

2. The Catchy, Slogan‑Like Term

The Great Disjunction

Short. Memorable. Punchy.

And it captures the feeling perfectly:

• the split between window-world and screen-world
• the split between past and perpetual present
• the split between meaning and noise
• the split between coherence and fragmentation

Last night, I switched off the PC and dozed off. It was my nervous system saying:

Let me rest in a world with only one reality for a while.

Sleep is the last unified frame we have.

A final note.

The reality we have created was created by us, humans. But no one designed it, no one intended it, and no one is steering it.

That’s the part that makes our condition feel so strange, so unnameable. We’re living inside a human‑made reality that emerged, rather than being built. It’s like a weather system: made of us, but not controlled by us.

And that’s why it feels uncanny.

The unintended world

Think of it this way:

• No one intended the internet to become a perpetual present.
• No one intended social media to fragment truth.
• No one intended news to become a firehose.
• No one intended attention to become the world’s most valuable commodity.
• No one intended the screen‑world to replace the narrative world.

But each small step – each innovation, each convenience, each platform – nudged us toward a reality that no individual or institution ever consciously planned.

We built the machine. But the machine built the world.

And now we’re trying to live inside it.

Why it feels so disorienting.

Because humans evolved for:

• continuity
• narrative
• shared truth
• embodied experience
• slow time

But we accidentally created:

• fragmentation
• competing realities
• no shared truth
• disembodied experience
• perpetual present

We are creatures of the window‑world, trapped in the gravity of the screen‑world.

And the two worlds don’t meet.

This is why the new terms matter.

I am not just naming a passing mood. I’m naming a structural shift in human consciousness.

Bireal Hyperpresentism – the analytical term The Great Disjunction – the cultural shorthand

These work because they capture the unintendedness of it all.

We didn’t choose this. We drifted into it.

Earlier today I read Jeremy Bowen’s analysis on the BBC site of the unfolding war between the United States, Israel, and Iran. It left me with a deep and unmistakable unease. Not simply because of the scale of destruction already unleashed, but because of the pattern behind it—a pattern Bowen described with a clarity that is rare in public discourse. He wrote of decisions made on instinct rather than thought, of advisers who fall silent, of institutions bypassed, of consequences unimagined until they arrive. A war waged without strategy, without preparation, without humility.

As I read, I felt something shift inside me. The crisis Bowen described was not merely geopolitical. It was psychological. It was moral. It was a vivid example of what happens when power is exercised without inner order—when the people making decisions are governed not by reflection, but by impulse; not by imagination, but by grievance; not by humility, but by pride.

I am old enough now to recognise the pattern. We have seen versions of it before, though rarely in such concentrated form. To understand this moment—and to avoid despair—we have to step back, look at history, and then look deeper still, into the structure of human nature itself. This essay is my attempt to gather those fragments into a coherent whole.

Geopolitical analysis: when narrative meets reality and the façade cracks

1. The trap revealed by Bowen: war by instinct.

Bowen’s analysis makes something painfully clear: the United States has manoeuvred itself into a position where every exit is bad. The trap is visible, structural, and entirely predictable.

• Declare victory → hollow, transparent, strategically meaningless.
• Escalate → ground forces, amphibious landings, a long war of attrition Iran has spent decades preparing for.
• Negotiate → requires concessions neither side is psychologically ready to make.

This is the classic Clausewitzian nightmare: the political aim is undefined, so the military means expand to fill the vacuum. Force is used first, and only afterwards does anyone ask what it was meant to achieve.

And the trap is not hidden. There is no fog of war here. The impulsiveness, the misreading of Iran, the belief that a regime forged in the Iran–Iraq War would collapse like a fragile petro‑state — all of it was visible from the start.

Reality always arrives. And when it does, rhetoric collapses under its own weight.

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2. A war without a plan—and the catastrophic misreading of Iran

Bowen shows that this war is being fought “from the bones”—from instinct, not from thought. There is no clearly defined political objective, no serious attempt to understand the adversary, no sense of the end state. Iran, meanwhile, has spent decades preparing for exactly this kind of confrontation: dispersing assets, hardening infrastructure, cultivating proxies, deep strategic patience, and turning geography itself into a weapon.

To expect such a state to fold quickly was not merely naïve. It was historically illiterate.

3. The credibility trap

Previous US administrations — Republican and Democrat — all reached the same conclusion: Iran could be contained, but not destroyed.

That consensus was not ideological. It was strategic realism.

Breaking with it was not boldness. It was hubris.

Now the United States faces the credibility trap:

• Back down → appear weak.
• Escalate → risk losing even more.

This is how great powers make decisions that, from the outside, look senseless — but from the inside feel inevitable.

4. Loyalty over competence: the silencing of truth

Bowen highlights a deeper structural flaw: the inner circle built for loyalty, not competence.

• No one contradicts the leader.
• No one challenges assumptions.
• No one risks telling the truth.

Silence becomes the culture. Deference becomes the norm. The system loses its ability to self‑correct.

You cannot run a country — let alone a war — on instinct and impulse. That is how rational states drift into irrational outcomes. The results can even be catastrophic.

5. The military instinct — and the need to restrain it

In 1962, the generals wanted to strike Cuba immediately. They were certain it would work. They were certain it was necessary. They were certain they could control the consequences.

Kennedy, having seen war firsthand, understood something they didn’t: military confidence is not strategic wisdom.

He knew:

• once force is unleashed, events outrun intentions
• the people who pay the price are never the ones in the room
• the role of a statesman is to restrain the military instinct, not amplify it

That kind of restraint — born of experience, humility, and imagination — is almost entirely absent today.

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6. The loss of historical memory

This is one of the most dangerous elements of the present moment: the absence of lived historical memory in those making decisions.

Kennedy had the Pacific.
Eisenhower had Normandy.
Even Johnson, for all his flaws, had the shadow of Korea and the early Cold War.

They felt the cost of escalation in their bones. They had seen what happens when events slip beyond control—when mobilisation timetables, alliance commitments, pride and fear combine into a machinery no one can stop.

Kennedy had just read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August before the Cuban Missile Crisis. He understood how the First World War had not been chosen in a single moment, but assembled—step by step—by men who thought they were still in control. He was determined not to let history repeat itself.

He also did something almost unimaginable today: he kept Eisenhower in the loop. A sitting president, in the middle of the gravest crisis of the nuclear age, consulting his predecessor out of respect for his experience of war and world affairs. There was humility in that gesture, and a shared seriousness about history.

Today’s leadership class—across much of the West—has grown up in an era where war is something that happens on screens, not in their own lives. That distance breeds a kind of strategic carelessness. Decisions are made in a vacuum, without the visceral sense of consequence that shaped earlier statesmen.

When you don’t feel the weight of history, you repeat it.

Barbara Tuchman later called this pattern The March of Folly: the recurring human tendency to pursue policies that are clearly against one’s own interests, even as the evidence mounts. We are watching another chapter being written.

7. Suez, again — but this time with China watching

Bowen ends with a comparison to Suez — the moment Britain discovered the limits of its power and the beginning of its eclipse by the United States.

He suggests this war may be remembered as a similar inflection point in the US–China rivalry.

And the comparison is sobering if not chilling:

China has not fired a shot. It has not spent a dollar. It has not taken a risk.

Yet it stands to gain the most from a weakened, distracted, economically strained United States.

History is full of moments where the real victor is the one who stays out of the fight.

8. The trust deficit: diplomacy after a decapitation strike

Even if Iran negotiates, why would it trust the United States not to strike again?

The war began with a surprise decapitation strike. That kind of opening move destroys the foundation of diplomacy — the belief that agreements will be honoured.

Diplomacy without trust is not diplomacy. It is theatre.

9. The deeper question: belief or avoidance?

This is the question Bowen cannot answer, but which hangs over the entire crisis:

Does the US leadership genuinely believe it can still force a decisive outcome, or is this now about avoiding humiliation rather than achieving victory?

History suggests that when leaders cannot admit error, they double down. Not because they believe in the strategy, but because they cannot bear the alternative.

This is the essence of The March of Folly: the refusal to change course even when the evidence is overwhelming.

Bowen reminds us that previous US administrations — Republican and Democrat — all reached the same conclusion: Iran could be contained, but not destroyed.

That consensus wasn’t ideological. It was strategic realism.

Breaking with it wasn’t boldness. It was hubris.

And now the United States faces the credibility trap:

• If it backs down, it looks weak.
• If it escalates, it risks losing even more.

This is the logic that has pulled empires into ruin throughout history. From the outside, the decisions look senseless. From the inside, they feel inevitable.

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10. Midgley: the human machinery behind folly

Philosopher Mary Midgley helps us see the human architecture beneath the crisis. She distinguishes between:

• Instigators, whose motives become unbalanced—ambition without humility, pride without restraint, certainty without doubt.
• Followers, who drift into complicity through lack—lack of imagination, lack of reflection, lack of moral courage.

Neither group is monstrous.
They are simply unbalanced or unthinking.

And when such people occupy positions of power, the consequences are predictable. The machinery of harm is built not from evil geniuses, but from ordinary human failings left unchecked.

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11. Arendt: the thoughtlessness that enables harm

Hannah Arendt deepens the diagnosis. She observed that great harm is often done not by villains, but by people who have stopped thinking.

Thoughtlessness is not stupidity.
It is the failure to:

• imagine consequences
• see the humanity of others
• step outside one’s own narrow perspective

This is precisely what we are witnessing: decisions made without imagination, without proportion, without the ability to see beyond the immediate emotional impulse.

The danger is not only in what is done, but in what is not done: the questions not asked, the doubts not entertained, the alternatives not considered.

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12. Augustine: evil as absence, not presence

St Augustine offers the most profound insight of all. For him, evil is not a force. It is a privation—an absence of something that should be there.

The crisis we face is not driven by some grand, coherent malevolence.
It is driven by lack:

• lack of humility
• lack of order
• lack of imagination
• lack of restraint
• lack of love for the common good

This is why the situation feels so unstable. We are watching the consequences of absence, not the presence of some dark genius.

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13. Disordered loves: when virtues lose their balance

Augustine’s idea of disordered loves explains the moral architecture of this moment. Harm arises not from loving the wrong things, but from loving things in the wrong order.

When:

• pride outranks humility
• impulse outranks wisdom
• loyalty outranks truth
• victory outranks justice
• strength outranks restraint

the result is predictable: disorder, escalation, and folly.

Tuchman’s March of Folly and Augustine’s disordered loves are, in a sense, describing the same phenomenon from different angles: the way human beings, individually and collectively, let their priorities slip out of alignment until catastrophe becomes almost inevitable.

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14. The restless heart: power without inner peace

Augustine’s “restless heart” describes the temperament behind the disorder.

A restless leader:

• cannot tolerate limits
• cannot sit with uncertainty
• cannot reflect
• cannot imagine consequences

Restlessness plus power = instability.

This is the psychological engine of the moment we are living through: a leadership class that cannot be still long enough to think, to read, to listen, to imagine. Action becomes a substitute for thought. Escalation becomes a substitute for strategy.

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15. Humility: the ordering virtue

Humility is not weakness. It is the virtue that keeps all others in balance.

Without humility:

• ambition becomes domination
• instinct becomes recklessness
• confidence becomes arrogance

Humility is what allowed past leaders to step back, to imagine catastrophe, to restrain themselves. It is what allowed Kennedy to say “no” to his generals, and “yes” to history. Its absence now is what makes this moment so dangerous.

---

16. Hope: the refusal to let disorder win

And yet—we must not despair.

Hope, in Augustine’s sense, is not optimism. It is steadiness:

• the refusal to let fear dictate our actions
• the refusal to collapse into cynicism
• the refusal to let the world’s disorder become our own

Hope is the stance that allows us to see clearly without being crushed by what we see. It is not a prediction that things will turn out well. It is a decision to remain human, proportionate, and thoughtful even when they may not.

---

17. Courage: the quiet strength to remain human

Courage is not heroics. It is the daily refusal to be swept away by the world’s noise.

Courage is:

• thinking when others react
• imagining consequences when others refuse to
• staying humane when others harden
• remaining proportionate when others exaggerate

This is the courage that sustains hope. It is quiet, undramatic, often unnoticed—but it is the difference between drifting with the current and standing, however modestly, against it.

---

18. Presence: inner order made visible

When humility, hope, and courage come together, they create presence—the quiet steadiness that others feel.

Presence:

• calms
• steadies
• widens perspective
• restores proportion

Presence is influence without force. It is leadership without noise. It is the atmosphere created by a person whose inner life is ordered, even when the outer world is not.

---

19. Legacy: the quiet imprint of a steady life

Legacy is not achievement. It is the imprint your presence leaves on others:

• the steadiness you give them
• the clarity you offer
• the humanity you preserve
• the proportion you model

This is the legacy that matters—and the legacy that endures. Not the legacy of headlines or monuments, but the legacy of having lived in such a way that others, however few, saw more clearly and stood more steadily because you were there.

---

20. Conclusion: diagnosis as the first step toward healing

We are at a dangerous moment in history. But danger is not destiny.

By tracing the crisis back to its roots—to the absence of humility, imagination, and thought—we recover the possibility of healing. Because if the crisis is rooted in human nature, then the remedy is too.

Humility, imagination, courage, presence—these are not abstract ideals.
They are lived virtues.
And they are still possible, even now.

Especially now.

The Course Already Set

There is a moment—often difficult to identify at the time—when a decision ceases to be a proposal and becomes a trajectory.

Before that moment, alternatives exist in a meaningful sense. After it, they remain only in theory.

Large organisations, like great ships, do not turn easily. A supertanker, once committed to a course, requires miles of open water to alter direction. The helm may shift in an instant, but the vessel itself responds slowly, reluctantly, and always at a cost. To turn too sharply risks instability; to delay the turn risks collision. And so adjustment becomes gradual, even when urgency demands otherwise.

This is not merely a metaphor. It describes something structural about how power operates in time.

At the outset, decisions are made in conditions of compression. Information is simplified, risks are abstracted, and the future appears open to shaping. Action is favoured over hesitation; clarity over doubt. In such moments, scepticism can seem like an impediment—an unnecessary drag on momentum. The decision, once taken, acquires its own gravity.

From that point on, the system begins to reorganise itself around the choice already made.

Resources are committed. Reputations become entangled with outcomes. Lines of communication subtly adjust, so that what rises upward is not always what is most true, but what is most compatible with the established direction. Dissent does not vanish, but it becomes quieter, more cautious, often internalised. Few wish to be the one who stands against a course that has already been set in motion.

It is in this phase that the illusion of control is at its strongest.

Externally, the system appears decisive, coherent, purposeful. Internally, however, its capacity for self-correction may already be narrowing. The question is no longer, “Is this the right course?” but rather, “How do we make this course succeed?” The distinction is subtle, but decisive.

History offers many variations of this pattern. During Operation Torch, in World War Two, the Allied powers, Britain and the USA—despite their growing strength—were deeply divided over strategy. American planners pushed for a direct return to continental Europe, while the British, shaped by different constraints and experiences, favoured a more indirect approach through North Africa and the Mediterranean. Beneath these disagreements lay not simply competing plans, but competing perceptions of risk, time, and geography.

Even the sea itself imposed its own logic. The Mediterranean, constrained and exposed, was viewed by many naval planners as a dangerous environment—too narrow, too close to hostile shores, too easily dominated by land-based threats. It resembled, in their minds, less an open ocean than an enclosed and watchful space, where movement invited vulnerability.

In this, there is a distant but instructive echo in the modern Strait of Hormuz. Here too, geography compresses choice. The passage is narrow, the margins for error small, and the proximity of potential adversaries constant. Control, even for a stronger power, is never absolute—only contingent, contested, and temporary. What appears, from a distance, as a manageable problem reveals itself, up close, as a condition of enduring risk.

The parallel is not exact. The Allied coalition of the Second World War possessed an overwhelming industrial and military superiority that, in time, could be brought to bear decisively. In the present, power is more diffuse, and the capacity of weaker actors to impose disruption—through proximity, persistence, and asymmetry—is far greater.

Yet the deeper continuity lies elsewhere.

In both cases, decisions were made within one temporal horizon and experienced within another.

The short term demands action: commitment, clarity, resolve. The long term imposes consequence: accumulation, complication, and often, unintended escalation. What is decided quickly must be lived with slowly.

And once events begin to unfold, they acquire a resistance of their own.

War, as Carl von Clausewitz observed, is governed not only by intention but by friction—the countless small impediments that separate plans from reality. But friction is not confined to the battlefield. It exists within institutions, within hierarchies, within the very process of decision-making itself.

It is here that another, quieter dynamic emerges.

In systems where power is concentrated, where decisions are made by a few and carried out by many, a subtle culture can take hold. Not always one of overt fear, but of caution—of an unspoken understanding that to question too directly is to risk standing apart. The sceptic, who might once have served as a corrective, becomes instead an inconvenience. Doubt is not refuted so much as it is displaced.

And so the system continues forward.

Not because uncertainty has been resolved, but because commitment has already been made.

It is only later, often much later, that the question arises: how did this happen? Why were the risks not seen, the warnings not heeded, the alternatives not pursued?

But by then, the answer is already embedded in the process itself.

The course was set long before the consequences became visible.

And by the time the need to turn was fully understood, there was no longer enough sea room left to do so.

---

The Resultant of Many Wills

There is, however, a deeper way of understanding this process—one that moves beyond strategy and decision-making, and looks instead at the nature of history itself.

We often speak as though events are directed: that leaders decide, states act, and outcomes follow. But this language, though necessary, imposes a coherence that reality rarely possesses.

For in truth, each actor operates within limits they do not fully perceive.

They act on incomplete knowledge, guided by assumptions they have not chosen, responding to pressures they cannot entirely resist. Their intentions are real, but they are also narrow—bounded by time, circumstance, and perspective. And as they act, they encounter others doing the same: other states, other institutions, other individuals, each pursuing their own aims, each moving within their own horizon.

What emerges from this is not the execution of a plan, but the interaction of many.

It is here that the insight of Leo Tolstoy remains enduring. In his reflections on war, he rejects the idea that history is directed by the will of great men. Instead, he sees events as the product of countless small actions, each insignificant in isolation, yet together forming a movement that no one intends and no one controls.

The course of events, in this sense, is not chosen. It is arrived at.

And yet human agency does not disappear. As Karl Marx observed, men make their own history—but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Action remains, but it is always situated within conditions already given.

Between these two insights—Tolstoy’s dispersal of agency and Marx’s insistence upon it—something essential becomes visible.

History is neither fully directed nor wholly accidental.

It unfolds within constraints, but not according to a script. It is shaped by human will, but never reducible to it. Each decision enters a field already in motion, where it combines with others, is deflected, amplified, or undone, and contributes to an outcome that exceeds all of them.

This is why outcomes so often appear, in retrospect, both inevitable and unforeseen.

Inevitable, because once the forces were in motion, they followed a certain logic. Unforeseen, because no single actor ever grasped that logic in its entirety.

And so we arrive again at the limits of control.

Not as a failure of intelligence, or even of judgment, but as a condition of human affairs. The belief that complex realities can be directed with precision belongs to the moment before action. It is part of the language in which decisions are made.

But history itself speaks in another register.

It is slower, more resistant, and composed not of singular acts of will, but of their accumulation and collision over time.

No one determines its course entirely.

And yet, once set in motion, it carries all along with it.

On the mismatch of time and the fatal consequences of treating history as a transaction

There is a persistent temptation in every age to believe that reality has finally become legible—that the world, in all its complexity, can be grasped, managed, and, ultimately, resolved. In our own time, this temptation often takes a particular form: the belief that events unfold within a single, shared horizon, accessible to calculation and decision, and that what resists settlement today may, with sufficient clarity and resolve, be brought to conclusion tomorrow. And yet, beneath this confidence, there are signs that we are not inhabiting one coherent sense of time, but several—moving alongside one another, occasionally intersecting, yet never fully aligning. What appears, in one register, as a problem awaiting resolution, emerges in another as something far less tractable: a continuity without clear beginning or end, shaped not only by decisions, but by memory, inheritance, and return.

It is within this deeper, more enduring sense of time that much of human history unfolds—rarely announced, seldom resolved, yet always present beneath the surface of events.

My Father lived within such a horizon. His life, shaped by war, displacement, and the arbitrary violence of competing powers, did not proceed in the orderly sequence that official histories so often suggest. Instead, it was marked by ruptures that did not remain in the past, but persisted—reappearing in memory, in silence, in the quiet, unspoken knowledge of what had been endured. The categories imposed upon him—enemy, ally, labourer, refugee—shifted with bewildering speed, each carrying consequences that could neither be anticipated nor contained. What appeared, from above, as decisions or settlements belonged to one kind of time; what was lived below unfolded in another altogether, where nothing was ever fully concluded, and where the past remained an active presence within the present.

And yet, it is precisely this deeper continuity—this persistence of lived time—that seems increasingly absent from the language through which the present seeks to understand itself. In its place, another register asserts itself: one that speaks not of endurance, but of resolution; not of memory, but of outcome. It is a language in which complexity is recast as negotiation, and negotiation as something that can be brought, decisively and finally, to a close.

It is here that the word “deal” enters with such force. So often invoked by figures such as Donald Trump, it carries with it the assumptions of a particular kind of reasoning: that actors are defined by interests, that interactions are transactional, and that resolution lies in the successful alignment of terms. Within its own domain, this reasoning possesses a certain clarity, even an appeal. But when extended into the realm of history, identity, and long-standing conflict, it begins to displace more than it reveals.

Consider, for example, the relationship between the United States and Iran. It is not a discrete problem awaiting closure, but a layered accumulation of events, stretching back through the Iranian Revolution and into more recent episodes such as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Each moment leaves its trace. Each action is remembered, reframed, and folded into a narrative that cannot simply be set aside. A deal presumes closure. History does not permit it.

What is revealed here is not merely a mismatch of language, but a divergence in how reality itself is apprehended. On one side, a world of discrete actors and negotiable outcomes; on the other, a world of interconnections, in which actions reverberate across time and cannot be isolated from their consequences. Increasingly, it is the latter vision that seems closer to the truth.

Reality does not present itself as a collection of separate things, but as a web of relations. What appears isolated at one level reveals itself, at another, as deeply entangled. The idea that one can act upon the world, extract an advantage, and step away untouched becomes difficult to sustain. There is no outside position from which the consequences of action can be escaped. Even withdrawal is a form of engagement.

This has profound implications for how we think about power. If the world is relational, then the exercise of power is never purely external. To dominate, to coerce, to treat others as disposable is not simply to alter their condition—it is to reshape the network of relations in which one is oneself embedded. The effects return, often in unexpected and magnified forms.

The reduction of politics to transaction, then, is not merely inadequate—it is dangerous. It encourages a form of reasoning highly effective in identifying means, but largely indifferent to ends. It asks what can be done, but not what ought to be done, or what kind of world such actions bring into being. At its limit, it risks collapsing into the pursuit of power for its own sake—not as a means, but as the only end it can recognise.

And yet, there remain dimensions of human life that resist such reduction. Call them moral, historical, even spiritual. They are the dimensions in which meaning is formed, memory preserved, and the past continues to shape the present in ways that cannot be negotiated away.

The tragedy of our moment may lie here: not merely in misjudged policies, but in the collision of temporal frameworks that cannot be reconciled. A language of immediacy and closure encounters a world structured by duration and return. A logic of transaction meets a reality that cannot be transacted without remainder.

Decisions may be made with confidence in one register, while their consequences unfold in another.

My Father’s life, in its quiet and unassuming way, stands as a counterpoint: a reminder that history is not an abstraction, nor a problem to be solved, but a lived reality that resists simplification and demands attention.

The mismatch of time is not an abstract problem; it is alive in the decisions that shape our world today. When leaders perceive the world as a series of transactions, as problems with endpoints to be closed, they may act with certainty—but not with understanding. History, memory, and the web of human relations do not submit to schedules or leverage. They respond, inevitably, to what has been done, and their consequences unfold in ways that cannot be fully controlled.

To treat crises as if they were deals is to act upon a world one has already misunderstood. And a misunderstood world does not remain static; it returns, often amplified, often in forms that no negotiation can fully contain. The danger is not speculative—it is visible in the fractures, the escalations, the unseen reverberations of past action.

If we cannot perceive the depth and persistence of time, if we cannot reckon with the forces of memory and relational consequence, then even our best intentions may produce the worst outcomes. This is not a matter of ideology or policy preference. It is a law of consequences: when one framework of time meets another, unaligned, the results are unavoidable, and they are often tragic.

To recognize this is not to despair—it is to awaken. The task is not simply to act, but to act within a reality that endures beyond our immediate reach; to reckon with what cannot be closed, and to move with attention, restraint, and humility. Ignoring this is not a mistake—it is a danger whose costs we may only glimpse when it is too late.

Perhaps, then, the deeper task is not merely to act wisely, but to think and write differently about time and history altogether. There can never be a single narrative; there can only be layers—intersecting, overlapping, sometimes contradictory, yet always alive.

It is precisely because we attend only to the surface that history continually surprises us. Beneath the visible events lie currents, resonances, and consequences that remain unseen until they re-emerge, demanding recognition. Only now, in the confrontation with these layers, do we begin to catch up with history—or perhaps it is history itself that has finally caught up with us.

Чьё время? Чей мир?

О несоответствии времён и фатальных последствиях, когда историю воспринимают как сделку

Во все времена существует соблазн думать, что реальность, наконец, стала читаемой — что мир во всей своей сложности можно охватить, управлять им и, в конечном счёте, разрешить. В наши дни этот соблазн часто принимает особую форму: убеждённость, что события разворачиваются в рамках единого, общего горизонта, доступного расчёту и решению, и что то, что сегодня сопротивляется урегулированию, завтра может быть завершено при достаточной ясности и решимости.

И всё же под этой уверенностью скрыты признаки того, что мы не существуем в рамках одного согласованного времени, а в нескольких — движущихся рядом, иногда пересекающихся, но никогда полностью не совпадающих. То, что в одном регистре представляется проблемой, ожидающей разрешения, в другом проявляется как нечто гораздо более сложное: непрерывность без явного начала или конца, формируемая не только решениями, но и памятью, наследием и возвращением.

Именно в этом глубоком, долговечном ощущении времени разворачивается большая часть человеческой истории — редко объявляемая, редко разрешаемая, но всегда присутствующая под поверхностью событий.

Мой отец жил в таком горизонте. Его жизнь, сформированная войной, изгнанием и произвольным насилием конкурирующих сил, не развивалась в том упорядоченном порядке, который так часто изображают официальные истории. Она была отмечена разрывами, которые не оставались в прошлом, а сохранялись — проявлялись снова в памяти, в тишине, в тихом, невысказанном знании того, что было пережито. Категории, навязанные ему — враг, союзник, рабочий, беженец — менялись с поразительной скоростью, каждая неся последствия, которые невозможно было предвидеть или ограничить. То, что сверху выглядело как решения или соглашения, принадлежало одному времени; то, что переживалось снизу, разворачивалось в совершенно другом, где ничего никогда не завершалось полностью, и где прошлое оставалось живым в настоящем.

И всё же именно эта глубинная непрерывность — постоянство переживаемого времени — всё больше отсутствует в языке, через который настоящее пытается себя понять. На её месте звучит другой регистр: говорящий не о выносливости, а о завершении; не о памяти, а о результате. Это язык, в котором сложность превращается в переговоры, а переговоры — в то, что можно решительно и окончательно закрыть.

Именно здесь с силой появляется слово «сделка». Часто используемое такими фигурами, как Дональд Трамп, оно несёт с собой предположения определённого типа мышления: что действующие лица определяются интересами, что взаимодействия носят транзакционный характер, и что разрешение заключается в успешном согласовании условий. В своей области такое мышление обладает ясностью, даже привлекательностью. Но когда оно переносится в сферу истории, идентичности и долгосрочных конфликтов, оно скрывает больше, чем раскрывает.

Возьмём, например, отношения между Соединёнными Штатами и Ираном. Это не отдельная проблема, ожидающая закрытия, а многослойное накопление событий, уходящее корнями в Иранскую революцию и более недавние эпизоды, такие как Совместный комплексный план действий. Каждый момент оставляет свой след. Каждое действие запоминается, переосмысливается и вплетается в повествование, которое нельзя просто отложить. Сделка предполагает завершение. История этого не позволяет.

Здесь проявляется не просто несоответствие языка, но и расхождение в том, как реальность воспринимается. С одной стороны — мир отдельных акторов и согласованных результатов; с другой — мир взаимосвязей, где действия резонируют во времени и не могут быть изолированы от своих последствий. Всё чаще именно вторая картина оказывается ближе к истине.

Реальность не представляет собой набор отдельных вещей, а скорее сеть отношений. То, что на одном уровне выглядит изолированным, на другом раскрывается как глубоко переплетённое. Идея о том, что можно действовать в мире, извлекать преимущество и остаться неповреждённым, становится трудноосуществимой. Нет внешней позиции, с которой последствия действий можно было бы избежать. Даже уход в сторону — это форма участия.

Это имеет глубокие последствия для понимания власти. Если мир реляционен, то осуществление власти никогда не является полностью внешним. Доминировать, принуждать, обращаться с другими как с расходным материалом — значит не просто менять их положение; это значит перестраивать сеть отношений, в которой сам человек встроен. Эффекты возвращаются, часто неожиданно и в усиленной форме.

Сведение политики к транзакциям не просто недостаточно — оно опасно. Оно поощряет мышление, эффективное в выявлении средств, но равнодушное к целям. Оно спрашивает, что можно сделать, но не что следует сделать и какой мир создают эти действия. В пределе оно рискует превратиться в стремление к власти ради самой власти — не как средство, а как единственную цель.

И всё же остаются измерения человеческой жизни, которые противостоят такому упрощению. Моральные, исторические, духовные — именно в них формируется смысл, сохраняется память, и прошлое продолжает влиять на настоящее таким образом, который невозможно согласовать.

Трагедия нашего времени может заключаться именно здесь: не только в ошибках политики, но и в столкновении временных рамок, которые невозможно примирить. Язык немедленного завершения сталкивается с миром, структурированным длительностью и возвратом. Логика транзакции встречает реальность, которую нельзя обработать без остатка.

Решения могут приниматься с уверенностью в одном регистре, а их последствия разворачиваться в другом.

Жизнь моего отца, в своей тихой и скромной манере, служит контрапунктом: напоминанием о том, что история не абстрактна и не является проблемой, которую нужно решить, а переживаемая реальность, сопротивляющаяся упрощению и требующая внимания.

Несоответствие времён — это не абстрактная проблема; оно живо в решениях, формирующих наш мир сегодня. Когда лидеры воспринимают мир как серию транзакций, как проблемы с конечной точкой закрытия, они могут действовать с уверенностью — но не с пониманием. История, память и сеть человеческих отношений не подчиняются расписаниям или рычагам давления. Они реагируют неизбежно на то, что было сделано, и последствия разворачиваются таким образом, который невозможно полностью контролировать.

Обращаться с кризисами, как с обычными сделками, значит действовать в мире, который уже был неправильно понят. А непонятый мир не остаётся статичным; он возвращается, часто усиленно, часто в формах, которые никакие переговоры не могут полностью охватить. Опасность не спекулятивна — она видна в трещинах, эскалациях и невидимых отголосках прошлых действий.

Если мы не способны воспринять глубину и стойкость времени, если мы не можем учитывать силы памяти и последствия взаимосвязей, то даже лучшие намерения могут породить наихудшие результаты. Это не вопрос идеологии или политических предпочтений. Это закон последствий: когда одна временная рамка сталкивается с другой, несогласованной, результаты неизбежны, и они часто трагичны.

Признать это — не значит впасть в отчаяние; это значит пробудиться. Задача не просто действовать, а действовать в реальности, которая существует за пределами нашей непосредственной досягаемости; учитывать то, что невозможно закрыть, и двигаться с вниманием, сдержанностью и смирением. Игнорирование этого — не ошибка, а опасность, цену которой мы можем ощутить лишь тогда, когда будет уже слишком поздно.

Возможно, более глубокая задача — не только действовать мудро, но и думать и писать о времени и истории иначе. Не может существовать единого нарратива; могут быть только слои — пересекающиеся, накладывающиеся, иногда противоречивые, но всегда живые.

Именно потому, что мы видим только поверхность, история продолжает нас удивлять. Под видимыми событиями скрываются течения, резонансы и последствия, которые остаются незамеченными, пока вновь не проявляются, требуя признания. И только когда мы сталкиваемся с этими слоями, мы начинаем догонять историю — или, возможно, сама история наконец догнала нас.

Она возвращается не как память, не как урок и не как фигура речи, а как живой, неотвратимый мир, который требует внимания, уважения и мудрости. Игнорировать его — значит ставить на карту всё, что мы считаем стабильным. Время не прощает, и реальность не ждёт, пока мы её поймём.

The genuine tension between two very different ways of understanding politics.

When Donald Trump talks about a “deal,” he is drawing from a business mindset: discrete parties, clear interests, measurable outcomes, and—crucially—a relatively short time horizon. In that world, a deal is something you close. Success is defined by terms agreed and value extracted.

But diplomacy and international relations operate in a very different register.

First, they are not finite transactions. They are ongoing relationships. A treaty, an agreement, even a ceasefire is not the end of something—it’s the beginning of a new phase. Think of the Treaty of Versailles: on paper, it was a “deal” ending World War I. In reality, it sowed grievances and instabilities that helped lead to another, even more destructive war. The “deal” was not wrong because it failed as a transaction—it failed because it misunderstood the deeper historical and psychological landscape.

Second, diplomacy involves layers that cannot be priced or quantified:

a) historical memory

b) identity and humiliation

c) domestic political pressures

d) long-term strategic positioning

These are not negotiable in the same way as money or assets. A state may accept material loss but reject symbolic defeat—or vice versa.

Third, there is the issue of time. Business deals often assume a relatively stable environment. International politics unfolds across decades, sometimes centuries. Consider something like the Cold War—there was no single “deal” that defined it. Instead, there were shifting understandings, tacit rules, crises, and recalibrations. Stability came not from one decisive agreement, but from a continuous process of interpretation and restraint.

Fourth, framing everything as a deal risks flattening moral and existential questions. Not everything can—or should—be reduced to exchange. Questions about war, sovereignty, or national survival aren’t just negotiations over “who gets what.” They are often about who we are, what we remember, and what we refuse to become. That’s why leaders like Henry Kissinger—for all their flaws—spoke less about “deals” and more about order, balance, and legitimacy.

Something is missing.

What’s missing is the recognition that diplomacy is not just about closing—it’s about sustaining. Not just about exchange, but about coexistence over time.

A deal ends a negotiation; diplomacy begins where the deal proves insufficient.

Or even more sharply:

In business, you close the deal and walk away. In politics, you live inside the consequences.

This is not just a critique of style—it’s a critique of ontology, of what politics is. A purely transactional frame does not just simplify reality, it misdescribes it.

When Donald Trump speaks of a “deal” with Iran, the language suggests closure, symmetry, and control. It implies that the situation can be bounded, negotiated, and resolved in a way analogous to a contract. But crises like this are not bounded—they are historically sedimented. They carry within them decades of mistrust, humiliation, intervention, ideology, and memory.

Even to speak of “the crisis” risks flattening it. One could trace a line back through the Iranian Revolution, the hostage crisis, the long shadow of external interference, and more recent ruptures such as the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Each moment leaves a residue. None of it disappears when a “deal” is signed.

The intangible—even the spiritual—becomes essential rather than ornamental.

Because what is at stake in such relationships is not only:

a) centrifuge counts

b) sanctions relief

c) inspection regime

but also:

a) dignity

b) recognition

c) historical injury

d) narratives of betrayal and survival

These are not abstractions. They are lived realities that shape how agreements are interpreted, honoured, or quietly undermined.

A transactional mindset tends to assume that once interests are aligned on paper, behaviour will follow. But history suggests something closer to the opposite: if the deeper, less tangible dimensions are ignored, the agreement may become a shell—form without trust, structure without legitimacy.

I find it useful not to contrast this just as business vs politics, but as two different experiences of time:

Transactional time: immediate, outcome-driven, focused on closure (“the deal is done”).

Historical time: layered, recursive, shaped by memory and anticipation (“nothing is ever fully done”).

In that sense, the danger is not only that a “deal” might fail. It is that it may create the illusion of resolution, allowing one party to disengage while the underlying tensions continue to evolve—often in more dangerous forms.

“Walking away”

A deal, in the business sense, permits exit. But in geopolitics, there is no true exit. Even withdrawal is a form of presence; it reshapes the field for others. The vacuum left behind becomes part of the story.

 Impoverishment of imagination:

To reduce diplomacy to the language of deals is to imagine that nations meet as traders across a table, rather than as histories encountering one another.

Or, extending a more spiritual intuition:

What is absent in the language of the deal is not merely nuance, but depth—the recognition that human beings, and the nations they form, do not act only out of interest, but out of memory, pride, fear, and the longing to be seen on their own terms.

I  connect this back to my Father’s story.

His life, shaped by forces far beyond any “deal,” stands as a quiet refutation of the idea that history can be managed through neat transactions. The categories imposed on him—enemy, ally, displaced person—were themselves bureaucratic “settlements” that failed to capture the human reality beneath them.

In that sense, my essay becomes more than commentary. It becomes a kind of resistance to reduction—to the idea that the world can be adequately understood, or governed, through the logic of exchange alone.

What we are seeing has the shape of tragedy precisely because it isn’t just a disagreement over policies—it’s a divergence over how reality itself is read.

It can feel almost like two different languages. But perhaps even more starkly: two different grammars of action.

In one grammar—the one I’m critiquing, often associated with figures like Donald Trump—the world is composed of actors with interests, and interaction is a sequence of moves aimed at advantage. Clarity comes from simplification: Who wins? Who loses? What are the terms? It is a language of immediacy, leverage, and closure.

In the other grammar—the one I am reaching toward—the world is not reducible to interests. It is composed of histories, identities, wounds, inheritances. Action is not just strategic, but interpretive. One does not simply act; one responds to what has been, and anticipates how that response will be remembered.

These two grammars don’t easily translate into one another.

An image comes to mind where one is not just using the wrong tool, but not recognising that the tool is wrong. A screwdriver used as a hammer doesn’t merely fail—it damages what it touches, often without the user understanding why.

And here is where the danger deepens. It is not only that such a mindset is “one-dimensional,” but that it can be closed to correction. If everything is interpreted through the same transactional lens, then:

a) gestures of goodwill are seen as weakness

b) historical grievances are dismissed as excuses

c) symbolic acts are undervalued or misread

d) long-term consequences are discounted in favour of immediate gain

This creates a kind of epistemic isolation: others see meanings that the actor does not even register as existing.

This makes response extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible.  Because how does one negotiate with a framework that does not acknowledge the dimensions you consider essential? If one side is speaking in terms of memory, legitimacy, and historical continuity, and the other in terms of leverage and closure, then even apparent agreement may conceal profound misunderstanding.

There is a concept—without naming it too formally—that one might articulate in this context: incommensurability. Not total incomprehensibility, but a lack of a shared measure. The same event, the same agreement, is not the same thing to each side.

And this is where the tragic element enters.

Because tragedy, in its classical sense, is not simply catastrophe—it is collision without resolution. Two logics, each internally coherent, meet in a way that cannot be harmonised. The result is not synthesis, but fracture.

It is not that one side is entirely blind and the other fully sees, but that they are looking at different orders of reality. One sees terms; the other sees time. One seeks closure; the other knows that nothing, once lived, is ever fully closed.

Or, developing my  metaphor:

It is not merely that the wrong tool is being used, but that the craftsman does not believe any other tools exist.

And perhaps the most unsettling part of what I’m sensing is this: such a mindset does not necessarily appear irrational to itself. It can even appear effective in the short term. That is what allows it to persist—and what makes its longer-term consequences so hard to avert.

The deeper danger is not that the world will be mismanaged in the moment, but that it will be misunderstood across time. And what is misunderstood in time has a way of returning—often with greater force, and always at a cost.

Just Publish’d by T. Quillworthy, Bookseller at the Sign of the Flying Tub, in Paternoster Row

A Most Necessary Acquisition of Greenland — Now in its First Impression, with a Preface apologising for undue moderation, and Notes for the Satisfaction of the Curious. Price: Four Pence, or Six for those desirous of the Sheet with Marginal Illustrations of Tubs and Flying Alliances.

This Work, containing Observations of such Severity that no Gentleman of Wit may read it without a Smile, is humbly recommended to all Lovers of Truth, Enemies of Falsehood, and those who, having already purchas’d Greenland in Imagination, are desirous to know the full Measure of its Safety.

The Publisher certifies that the Work hath met with the approbation of several persons of extraordinary Gravity (or at least of their Servants), and may be read aloud in Drawing Rooms, Coffee-Houses, or Glass Ballrooms, with minimal Risk of Indignation — though such Risk is not wholly preventable.

Notice to the Curious: Second Edition Now Imminent

Due to the great Offence taken by certain Persons of Dignity, who may perhaps reside in the White House of Laputa, or thereabouts, a Second Edition is in Preparation. This Edition shall contain additional Remarks on the Obedience of Allies, an Appendix on Tubs and Boats of Five Hundred Years Past, and a Forewarning to all Nations that Objection shall be taken as Proof of Unreliability.

The Author, whose Moderation in the First Edition hath been much lamented by Admirers of Outrage, is compelled by Publick Demand to pursue the Work with the Full Vigour and Severity which so extraordinary a Subject justly warrants.

All Purchasers of the First Impression are entreated to retain it for Comparison, that they may observe how Justice and Satire, like Ice and Tubs, may float together, and how the State of Affairs, however absurd, is faithfully chronicl’d.

A MOST NECESSARY ACQUISITION OF GREENLAND

Humbly Propos’d for the Greater Security of All Alliances

Being an Examination of the Present Doctrine,
That Friendship is Best Preserv’d by Possession,
and Trust by the Removal of Those Trusted

By a Lover of Peace,
and Well-wisher to Order

“Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words.”
— Hobbes

Printed in the Year MDCCXXVI
For the Consideration of the Curious,
and Such as Are Willing to Be Convinced

The Author’s Apology to the Reader

The Author holds himself oblig’d, before entering upon the following Discourse, to beg the Reader’s Indulgence for the extraordinary Moderation he hath everywhere affected. He is sensible that many Passages might have been rendered more lively, and several Conclusions drawn with greater Force, had he permitted himself the Freedom of speaking plainly; but he was restrain’d by a tender Regard for those Gentlemen whose Feelings might suffer Injury from an unvarnish’d Representation of their own Reasoning.

He must further confess, with some Shame, that he hath omitted divers Observations of great Importance, not for want of Materials (which were plentiful), but from an Apprehension that the Publick, being already over-burthen’d with Clarity, could ill sustain an additional Load. The Author therefore contented himself with laying out the Argument in its mildest Dress, hoping that the Reader, by supplying the omitted Absurdities from his own Experience, might arrive at the fuller Truth with less Fatigue.

It will perhaps be objected that the Author hath treated Matters of high Policy with an Air too jocular for their Dignity. To this he answers, that when Reason is employ’d in Defence of Conclusions already determin’d, Gravity serves only to conceal the Jest. He thought it therefore an Act of Charity to preserve some Appearance of Earnestness, lest the Argument, expos’d nakedly, should provoke Laughter where Deference was intended.

Should any Person find himself aggriev’d by the Resemblance between the Principles here examin’d and those he hath publicly maintain’d, the Author assures him that such Likeness is entirely accidental. For it was never his Design to satirise any living Statesman; he hath only describ’d a certain Mode of Thinking, which appears, by great Misfortune, to be extremely popular at present.

Lastly, the Author entreats the Reader to consider that, had he follow’d the Example of some ancient Satirists, he might have propos’d Measures far more effectual, including the outright Purchase of Allies, the Leasing of Sovereignty by the Decade, or the Reduction of Treaties to Memoranda of Convenience. That he hath forborne such Improvements must be attributed, not to Want of Imagination, but to a lingering, and perhaps unfashionable, Respect for the Limits of Decency.

If, notwithstanding these Restraints, the Reader should discover any Sentiment offensive to common Sense, mutual Trust, or the Idea of Alliance itself, the Author begs that it be ascrib’d not to Malice, but to the Times — which have already outdone all Satire, and left the Writer little Credit but that of transcription.

---

**A Most Necessary Acquisition of Greenland, Humbly Explained.

With Authorities Cited for the Avoidance of Doubt**

It hath of late been pronounc’d, with great seriousness and a straight countenance, suitable to the weight of Empire, that the Island of Greenland must be annex’d, and that forthwith, for the better securing of its safety. Denmark, a Kingdom hitherto reckon’d among the Allies of the United States, and bound by Treaty, Oath, and Common Defence, is now discover’d to be unequal to the guardianship of its own dominions.

This discovery is the more remarkable, in that no Enemy Fleet darkens Greenland’s Seas, no Hostile Army encamps upon its Ice, nor any Foreign Power makes the least shew of Covetous Intent. The sole Disturbance presently observable proceeds, by a most fortunate Coincidence, from the very Power most eager to provide Relief.

We are advis’d, upon the Authority of several Persons of Gravity, that Treaties, though once esteem’d sacred, are in Truth but brittle Vessels, apt to founder when Interests shift; that Alliances are Conveniences rather than Obligations; and that true Security resides not in Cooperation, but in Possession. One must not content oneself with Hospitality, but prudently seize the Freehold, lest Friendship one day be mistaken for Independence.

This Doctrine, though novel in Application, is not without Precedent in Philosophy.
Mr Hobbes, that severe Examiner of Mankind, long ago instructed us that Trust is but Fear mislaid, and that Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words.¹ It would therefore be imprudent to rely upon Allies, unless one first deprive them of the Capacity to dissent.

Mr Grotius, likewise, hath much discours’d upon the Law of Nations; yet even he allow’d, in several Passages much esteem’d by the Learned, that Necessity is a Law unto itself — a Principle now happily extended to include all Circumstances in which a Powerful State desires the Property of a Smaller.²

It is further alledged that Greenland’s Title is of dubious Antiquity, having been first encounter’d by certain Persons who arrived, some five hundred Years past, in Boats — or, as one might more properly style them, Tubs — an Origin now judg’d sufficient to vitiate any present Claim to Sovereignty.
*This Observation is deliver’d with particular Confidence by those who govern a Nation founded entirely by Persons who likewise arriv’d in Tubs, Boats, and other Floating Expedients of the same Century.*³

Should Europe, startled by these Discoveries, express Unease or Objection, such Disquiet is immediately produc’d as Proof of Europe’s Unreliability; for, as a Learned Doctor of the Law hath lately observ’d, *“Nothing so betrays a want of fidelity as protest against dispossession.”*⁴ Thus Suspicion, having industriously manufactur’d its own Evidence, stands triumphantly confirm’d.

Denmark, meanwhile, is reproach’d for insufficient Zeal in Defence, even as the very Alliance sworn to its Defence is dismiss’d as inadequate. NATO, it seems, subsists only until it becomes inconvenient; at which point it is discover’d never to have subsisted at all.

Should any Person object that this Reasoning tends not to Security but to the Dissolution of all Alliances whatsoever, he may be answer’d thus: that Alliances are indeed most secure when they are no longer Alliances, but Possessions; and that Sovereignty is best respected when it is overridden with Confidence.

If this excellent Scheme be pursu’d with suitable Vigour, there will be no need to dismantle the Atlantic Alliance, for it shall expire quietly of Irrelevance. Greenland, in this most Rational Arrangement, is not the Prize, but the Proof — a small, icy Theatre upon which the Obsolescence of Mutual Trust may be convincingly perform’d.

I submit this Proposal with the utmost Humility, being confident it will greatly strengthen Friendships abroad, provided one understands Friendship to mean Obedience, and Security to mean Ownership.⁵

---

Authorities & Notes (For the Satisfaction of the Curious)

¹ Hobbes, Leviathan, Chap. XVII (or thereabouts): wherein it is made plain that Peace is best preserv’d when all Parties but one are rendered harmless.

² Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, variously cited when convenient, and silently neglected when not.

³ It is to be observ’d that Arrival by Boat is condemnable only when undertaken by Others; when undertaken by One’s Own Forebears, it is retroactively ennobled and renamed Foundation.

⁴ Learned Doctor of the Law, whose Name is suppress’d out of Modesty, though his Opinions are much quoted in Policy Memoranda, hath lately remark’d that “Nothing so betrays a want of Fidelity as Resistance to Correction.”

⁵ I profess myself confident that this expedient, once adopted, will greatly strengthen alliances, provided one understands alliance to mean obedience, and security to mean possession. This Method, if universally adopted, promises to abolish Hypocrisy in Foreign Affairs, by rendering it entirely unnecessary.

Imprimatur

This Pamphlet may be safely publish’d,
there being nothing in it but what hath already been practis’d,
and very little more than what hath already been said aloud.

Errata, Corrections, and Adjustments

• Page 3: “security” → obedience; the former being the Name by which Governors entreat it, and the latter the Manner in which it is commonly understood.
• Page 7: “treaties” → instruments of convenient Fiction; employ’d chiefly to assure all Parties that nothing shall be done, whilst preparing the Means to do quite otherwise.
• Page 12: “boats” → tubs of extraordinary perseverance. Early vessels, heroic yet fundamentally inconvenient, employ’d in Ages past as Proofs of Right, Titles of Dominion, and other such Claims as no sober Man would advance without the Assistance of Timber, Brine, and a stout Imagination. Much celebrated by Posterity, though seldom by those obliged to sit in them.
• Page 18: “allies” → temporarily tolerable Possessions; esteem’d chiefly for their Use, and relinquish’d the Moment they require Consideration in return.
• Page 27: “NATO” → The Northern Agreement for the Toleration of Outrage. An optional Society of Umbrellas
• Page 31: “friendship” → pre-emptive submission
• Page 36: “danger” → Where the Word “danger” is employ’d, the Reader is desir’d to substitute “a Fabrication necessary for Self‑justification”; the former being too mild, and the latter more consonant with the Practice of the Age.
• Page 42: “Europe” → Where the Word “Europe” occurs, the Reader is desir’d to understand “those who protest at proper Annexation”; the former being too general, and the latter more agreeable to the present Usage of States, who are never so united as when objecting to the Claims of Others.
• Page 44: “Greenland” → the Icy Theatre of Proof
• Page 47: “Author” → humble Chronicler of the Inevitably Absurd

Glossary of Laputan Political Terms

• Obedience: The preferred alternative to security, trust, or good sense.
• Credentials: Tokens exchang’d between Parties without Regard to Authority, Expertise, or the least Connection to the Thing signify’d.
• Possession: The state of having allies, lands, or moral high ground in one’s control, usually prior to objection.
• Temporary Alliance: A convenience for which one is willing to manufacture reasons for eventual dismissal.
• Tubs of Perseverance: Early vessels, heroic yet fundamentally inconvenient, used as pretexts or proofs of right.
• Icy Theatre of Proof: Greenland, or any distant territory where one demonstrates superiority of principle over friendship.
• Optional Society of Umbrellas: NATO; only serviceable until the Rain begins.
• Pre-emptive Submission: What allies are expected to offer before being advised of the full measure of their incompetence.
• Glass Ballrooms: Seats of deliberation, observation, and oratory, often disconnected from common Sense or Ice-bound Realities.
• White House of Laputa: A seat of visionary Reasoning, high above the concerns of Earthly folly, prone to sudden flights of Practicality.
• Yahoos: Those vulgar mortals who complain about annexation, sovereignty, or logical absurdity; usually correct in their instincts, yet lamentably unheeded.