The left/right political divide is a modern invention with a birth date — the French National Assembly, May 5, 1789. It wasn’t a philosophical discovery or a natural political law. It was a seating arrangement hastily prepared by carpenters the night before the first assembly.

As the delegates began their first day as the National Assembly, a peculiar thing began to happen. The deputies who were aligned with the King and the monarchy, what we call conservatives, traditionalists, or royalists, lined up along the right side of the speaker.

Meanwhile, those who were in favour of the revolution, the progressives, liberals, constitutional monarchists, or republicans, lined up along the left side of the speaker. In the center were the moderates — literally, the centrists.

And as the days went by, this seating arrangement gradually became the norm. One right-wing member, Baron de Gauville, exclaimed:

“I tried to sit in different parts of the hall and not to adopt any marked spot, so as to remain more the master of my opinion ... but I was compelled absolutely to abandon the left or else be condemned always to vote alone and thus be subjected to jeers from the galleries.”

A seating arrangement accidentally became the basis for the political spectrum of Western politics for the next two centuries. It spread worldwide and the party system followed in the wake of this seating arrangement — the Blue Team and the Red Team.

The initial political clubs during the French Revolution, such as the Jacobins, Cordeliers, Exagerés and Montagnards, evolved into full-fledged political parties over time. Although there are additional teams, such as the Green Team fighting on behalf of the environment or the Orange Team fighting for labor, the main two divisions of right and left have remained constant to this day.

To be fair, these simple party distinctions give the governing body and the general public some real benefits: it simplifies understanding the issues and offers a clear, visual way to categorize ideologies—left for progressive/reformist views, right for conservative/traditionalist ones. Every issues is quickly divided up between the left and the right, for or against.

This greatly facilitates public debate. It enables dialogue and discussion by identifying core disagreements on state intervention, equality, taxation and social issues. Having a dedicated opposition ensures that each side is always under scrutiny by the other, and held in check. The opposition acts as the watchdog of the ruling party.

Everyone understands the playing field of every country because the left/right divide has become universal globally and it helps to understand and compare political systems across national borders.

Why the Great Divide Failed

The Left/Right divide has failed because capital went overseas and politics didn’t.

The globalization of money has not resulted in the globalization of politics. We are still debating nationally, vainly attempting to force our national leaders to deliver policy changes that will benefit the working class and middle class, but our national leaders are impotent, helpless and compromised by the Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) who do not have to answer to them.

BlackRock manages $14 trillion in assets across 100 countries, making it the world’s largest asset manager. Larry Fink cannot be reigned in and forced to comply with many national regulations, tax requirements or financial oversight because the assets he manages are not strictly national. These assets are sourced globally from U.S. institutional investors, foreign governments, pension funds, endowments, and individual investors. While BlackRock is headquartered in New York and subject to U.S. regulatory oversight, over one third of BlackRock’s $14 trillion, a considerable share, is invested outside the direct control of U.S. law.

When Apple makes profits on products sold in Ireland, created by California innovation using Taiwanese manufacturing, it is difficult, if not impossible for the left/right model to apply. Which nation owns which slice of Apple pie?

When a Russian oligarch buys a yacht with Euros, built in Germany, registered in the Cayman Islands and docked in Monaco — the left/right framework has no tools to regulate this.

The party system was built for a world where wealth had a national address.

The political consequences are complicated. The left keeps fighting for higher taxes on corporations that have escaped national taxation. The right keeps defending “national” industries that are owned by shareholders who do not owe allegiance to any nation. Both are shadowboxing with a capitalism that no longer resembles the one their ideologies were created to engage.

Transnational capitalism does not need to answer to national interests.

The culture war issues that dominate American politics — abortion, guns, immigration, gender, crime — are the issues where the TCC has no real stake. They are genuinely contested among ordinary people, they generate enormous emotional energy, and they consume the political bandwidth that might otherwise be directed at wealth inequality, cost of living crisis, homelessness and the declining quality of healthcare. Added to this, the distraction of cultural angst keeps the billionaires off the radar.

Meanwhile the actual defining questions of our times — who governs transnational capital flows, who sets the rules for AI development, who controls digital currency infrastructure, who has authority over pandemic response — exist entirely outside the national left/right framework. Neither Chuck Schumer nor JD Vance has a coherent answer to these questions because their political models were built for a different economic geography.

Added to this is the glaring observation that the Transnational Capitalist Class is not listening to the public and doesn’t care what they think or want. A widely cited Princeton/Northwestern study analyzed over 1,800 policy issues. It found that the preferences of the average American has a near-zero, statistically non-significant impact on public policy, while economic elites and organized interest groups have substantial near total influence.

This study reveals the painful reality that public opinion in the USA has virtually no impact on policy creation, especially on high-profile issues, where legislation is frequently passed in favor of the TCC rather than the general populace.

The Reality Theory

The truth is that the billionaires are taking over, or they already have taken over. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a reality theory. The data points to an unprecedented upward wealth transfer and the adjacent destruction of the working class. The mechanism is not hidden, and the causation is not complex: when wealth concentrates upward, the working class is pushed downward — into precarity, into poverty, into homelessness.

As of recent data, America’s billionaires hold a record-level concentration of wealth, with estimates placing their total net worth at $5.8 trillion to $7.8 trillion depending on the source and year of analysis. According to Americans for Tax Fairness and Forbes data cited in 2024, the 806 U.S. billionaires collectively held $5.8 trillion, nearly double their total from 2017, following major tax cuts. More recent estimates from 2025 suggest this figure may have risen to $7.8 trillion held by 905 billionaires.

This means that less than 0.001% of the U.S. population controls a sum comparable to the bottom 50% of households. While billionaires represent a tiny fraction of the wealthy, they are a key component of the broader top 1%, who control the majority of national wealth.

Media organizations owned by billionaires naturally emphasize stories that generate engagement. Critics of the TCC argue that mainstream media often downplays structural causes of wealth concentration. A 2021 FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting) analysis noted that major studies on racial and gender wealth gaps received minimal coverage, despite their significance.

Media outlets, operating as profit-driven businesses, may prioritize sensational or consumer-oriented content over in-depth economic reporting, which is resource-intensive and less commercially rewarding.

Additionally, research suggests media frames wealth inequality more as “individual success” than systemic advantage, reinforcing cultural narratives that favor the wealthy.

This “advantage frame” (as opposed to a “disadvantage frame”) can subtly normalize extreme wealth accumulation while obscuring policy-driven mechanisms like tax loopholes, stock buybacks, and deregulation that facilitate it.

Politicians dependent on donor networks naturally avoid issues that threaten these networks. The result is a political system that produces intense conflict about everything, except the distribution of economic power. According to Oxfam’s 2026 report, billionaires are 4,000 times more likely than ordinary citizens to hold political office, and 100 American billionaire families funded one-sixth of all election spending in the 2024 election.

This deep entanglement creates a “cone of silence” around wealth concentration—politicians avoid policies like wealth taxes or anti-monopoly reforms that could threaten their funding.

The blue team and red team give ordinary people the psychological experience of political participation — a blue jersey, a red hat, political identity and tribal solidarity — a deep delusion that results in eventual disillusionment with the political process. You might feel like you’re in the good fight, but you’re in the wrong boxing ring. The fight is happening somewhere else, between people who don’t care about your issues.

The Real Axis — Vertical Not Horizontal

The horizontal war between left and right has almost completely obscured the vertical war between the top and the bottom. This is true on the national scale, as well as on the international level.

The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is not a new idea, and may even seem like a cliché, but what is new is the scale, the speed, and the degree to which the vertical war has been decisively won by one side, while the other side was too busy fighting a horizontal war that can’t be won, and only serves to obscure the real battle.

The numbers are unambiguous and worth stating plainly:

The Oxfam data shows the world’s ten richest men doubled their fortunes during the COVID pandemic, while the incomes of 99% of humanity fell. Former Canadian finance minister and WEF Trustee, Chrystia Freeland, in her book, Plutocrats, compares today’s rise of the global super-rich to the late 19th-century Gilded Age—the era of American "robber barons" like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. She argues that, just as rapid industrialization and new technologies concentrated immense wealth and power in the hands of a few during that period, today’s convergence of globalization and technological innovation has created a new transnational elite.

Oxfam International Executive Director Amitabh Behar is on record saying, “The capture of our global economy by a privileged few has reached heights once considered unimaginable. The failure to stop billionaires is now spawning soon-to-be trillionaires. Not only has the rate of billionaire wealth accumulation accelerated — by three times — but so too has their power. The crown jewel of this oligarchy is a billionaire president, backed and bought by the world’s richest man Elon Musk, running the world’s largest economy … a stark wake-up call that ordinary people the world over are being crushed by the enormous wealth of a tiny few.”

The raw data of wealth transfer only tells part of the story. The more important metric is power transfer — and here, the case is even starker.

Wealth Transfer Equals Power Transfer

It is not possible to separate extreme wealth accumulation from political power acquisition. Those who actively hoard wealth are also actively hoarding power. Wealth can buy legislative access, regulatory capture, media ownership, think tank production, academic chair endowments, judicial appointments through donor networks, and the revolving door between the government and the private sector.

Chrystia Freeland documented this mechanism in Plutocrats. What has happened since 2012, when she wrote it, is that the mechanism has accelerated and become more visible — and the billionaire class has stopped feeling the need to hide it. “Political decisions helped to create the super-elite in the first place, and as the economic might of the super-elite class grows, so does its political muscle.”

Elon Musk didn’t just lobby the government. He was the government — running DOGE with no democratic mandate, no Senate confirmation, no accountability structure. Musk donated a whopping $288 million to a constellation of Trump-aligned and Republican-aligned efforts, enough to buy him a seat at the White House, making him a de facto co-president.

Peter Thiel didn’t just fund think tanks to influence policy — he installed his former employee as Vice President. Thiel hired Vance at his venture capital firm, Mithril Capital, and donated $15 million to his 2022 Senate campaign—the largest single contribution ever to a U.S. Senate candidate. Thiel also introduced Vance to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2021, and reportedly lobbied Trump to select Vance as his running mate in 2024.

Parallel to this, on the international level, the TCC has gained enormous structural power over states and political processes, promoting deregulation, privatization, and free trade — policies that weaken national sovereignty and labor power. The World Economic Forum in Davos is often cited as the key venue where this class consolidates influence.

According to scholars, like William I. Robinson, who has done intense studies of the TCC: “An epochal shift is underway to a new phase in the on-going and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, global capitalism, characterized by the rise of truly transnational capital and the integration of every country into a new globalized system of production and finance, a transnational capitalist class as would be global ruling class, and transnational state apparatuses.”

The Social Wreckage — Evidence the Vertical War Has Been Won

The cost of living crisis, the housing crisis, the homelessness epidemic, the substance abuse crisis — these are not policy failures in the conventional sense. Policy failures imply governments tried and fell short. These are the predictable outcomes of a political economy that has been systematically optimized for capital accumulation at the expense of everything else.

Housing is the clearest case. In Vancouver, Canada, for a real world example, the housing crisis is not mysterious. It is the direct result of real estate being treated as an investment asset rather than shelter infrastructure. The Vancouver housing crisis is characterized by extreme unaffordability, with a recent Royal Bank of Canada report describing the market as being in a "full-blown crisis" where median-income households need over 106% of their income to cover ownership costs.

When Blackstone and its equivalents can purchase residential housing at scale, when offshore capital can park wealth in empty condominiums, when zoning law is shaped by development industry lobbying — the outcome is inevitable. Workers cannot afford to live in the cities their labor built.

Blackstone is actively acquiring single-family rental homes and other residential properties in the United States, having added tens of thousands of units to its portfolio through recent major acquisitions. The firm purchased Tricon Residential in 2024 for $3.5 billion (adding ~37,000 homes) and Home Partners of America in 2021 for $6 billion (adding ~17,000 homes), bringing its total single-family portfolio to approximately 58,000–60,000 homes.

The homelessness and substance abuse crises are downstream of the housing crisis, which is downstream of the wage stagnation crisis, which is downstream of the union-busting and labor deregulation agenda that the billionaire class pursued systematically from the 1970s onward — through both red and blue governments, in both conservative and progressive jurisdictions.

This is the evidence that the Transnational Capitalist Class are winning the vertical war. There is resistance, there are partial reversals, the outcome is not yet fully locked, but the trajectory is unambiguous and has been unambiguous for fifty years.

The left blamed the right for it. The right blamed the left.

Both were wrong — or rather, both were fighting the wrong war. In order to point our guns at the correct target, we need to have an understanding of the nature and current status of the opposition.

This is the first article in a series on the Transnational Capitalist Class — who they are, how they operate, and why their internal conflicts matters more than the conflicts between the left and the right.

The story we tell ourselves

Most of us in the West grew up with some simple ideas instilled in our heads that makes us feel better than the Rest:

We live in the so-called free world (us) and everyone else lives in unfree countries (them). The world is divided into democracies and dictatorships. We have rights and the Rest are oppressed.

This isn’t entirely wrong. But it’s incomplete in ways that matter profoundly.

In the West we have the ability and permission to criticize the government. This is real. The right to a fair trial is real (if you can afford a good lawyer.) Freedom of the press is real (if you don’t mind that the press is managed and owned by corporations that serve the interests of the corporate state.)

But ask the question: free to do what, exactly? Free to vote between two parties both funded by the same billionaire donor class? Free to protest in a designated zone while the policy you are protesting passes anyway?

The Eastern Mirror: Tyranny Without Rights

In China, Steven Chen, a Chinese lawyer, activist, and citizen journalist went missing on February 6, 2020 after reporting on the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, and did not reappear until a year and half later. He covered the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests and the COVID-19 pandemic which included criticism of the government response. He posted on Twitter: “Over the past year and eight months, I have experienced a lot of things. Some of it can be talked about, some of it can’t, I believe you understand.”

China doesn’t bother hiding what it’s doing. The West is more subtle but the message is the same. An American journalist who exposed government corruption — think of what happened to Julian Assange — faced a different but still very real kind of destruction. The methods differ. The message is similar: there are limits.

The East and the West are not the same — and that matters enormously to anyone living under either system.

The point is that both systems involve concentrated power serving elite interests. The difference is what comes with it. In the West you get rights alongside the domination. In the East you get the domination without the rights. The rights are real and valuable — ask any dissident who lost them. But they don’t change the fundamental question of who actually runs things and the fact that the average person has zero political capital.

What Tyranny Looks Like When It Wears a Suit

Power doesn’t need Nazis anymore.

That’s the thing they don’t tell you. The image most of us carry of tyranny is dramatic — secret police, midnight arrests, dissidents disappearing into unmarked vans. And that version exists. But it’s not the version most relevant to people living in Western democracies in 2025. Our version is quieter, more comfortable, and in some ways harder to resist precisely because it’s so difficult to point at.

Modern Western power doesn’t rule through fear. It rules through management.

Think about how your political reality is actually constructed. You’re not told what to think — that would be too obvious, too Soviet. Instead you’re given a menu. Two parties, or three, each representing slightly different flavors of a consensus that was decided before you entered the voting booth. The range of genuine policy options available to you through electoral politics is narrow in ways that have nothing to do with what’s technically possible or what the majority of people actually want.

Consider healthcare. For decades, consistent majorities of Americans — somewhere between sixty and seventy percent depending on the poll — have supported some form of universal healthcare. It has never seriously advanced through the legislative process. The money arrayed against it — from insurance companies, pharmaceutical corporations, and the politicians whose campaigns they fund — has been more politically decisive than the sustained preferences of the majority of the population. This is not a failure of democracy. It is democracy functioning exactly as currently designed, which is the more uncomfortable thought.

Or consider 2008.

The American financial system collapsed under the weight of its own fraud. Mortgage-backed securities, knowingly sold as safe investments while internally described by the bankers selling them in terms that cannot be reprinted in a family publication, wiped out the savings and homes of millions of ordinary people. The architects of this fraud were not prosecuted. They were bailed out — to the tune of several trillion dollars of public money — and within a few years were paying themselves record bonuses again. One senior banker went to prison. His name was Kareem Serageldin, and he was a mid-level trader at Credit Suisse. The executives who designed and approved the systems that caused the collapse returned to their offices, their clubs, and their philanthropic galas. Good times.

In the same period, approximately ten million American families lost their homes.

This is not ancient history. Most people reading this lived through it, and remember feeling helpless and angry — the feeling of watching something obviously, flagrantly wrong happen in full public view, while the mechanisms that were supposed to prevent it either looked away, or actively facilitated it.

Now ask yourself: what is the word for a system in which the people nominally in charge of making decisions serve the interests of a small financial class, rather than the majority of the population, and in which the legal system is applied with full force to the powerless, while the powerful operate with effective immunity?

The most accurate definition is plutocracy. A plutocracy is a system of government in which power is held or controlled by people of great wealth or income. While leaders may be elected or formally accountable, their policies and actions disproportionately favour the wealthy class that supports them financially or socially.

Another word is tyranny. We just don’t use it because the image doesn’t match — no uniforms, no rallies, no cult of personality. Just men in expensive suits making decisions in rooms you’ll never enter, about systems you can’t meaningfully vote on, with consequences that will shape your life whether you consent or not.

The cage, in other words, isn’t made of bars.

It’s made of debt — student loans that mortgage your twenties before you’ve had a chance to develop a political consciousness independent of your economic anxiety. It’s made of distraction — an entertainment ecosystem of extraordinary sophistication and indulgence that also happens to consume the hours that previous generations spent in union halls, civic organizations, and political clubs.
It’s made of the destruction of the precariat working class — the escalating homelessness and cost of living crisis.
It’s made of drugs that numb the population into political apathy. America is the undisputed king of consumption of illegal drugs. The dirty little secret of the Mexican cartel drug wars is that they are fuelled by Americans who keep buying illegal drugs.

Facts.

The rights remain. You can write this article. You can vote. You can protest, within designated parameters. You can sue, if you can afford to. You can read leaked documents, access court filings, follow the money through public records. The infrastructure of rights is real and its value is not nothing — ask anyone who has lived without it.

But the rights exist within a system whose fundamental power structures we do not and cannot touch. You are free to say almost anything. The question is whether saying it changes anything. You are free to vote. The question is whether the realistic options on the ballot represent a genuine choice about who actually governs. You are free to know, in considerable detail, how the system works. The question is whether knowing is the same as having power over it.

Tyranny with Rights means the rights are genuine and the tyranny is genuine and both are true simultaneously.

That is harder to hold in your head than a simple story about freedom or a simple story about oppression. But it is the accurate description of where we live. And accurate description is, as any writer knows, the necessary first step toward anything resembling change.

Prince Andrew: The Sacrificial Lamb

If everything above still feels too surreal, consider Jeffrey Epstein.

He ran a sophisticated child trafficking operation for decades, his social and client network included presidents, prime ministers, princes, billionaires, and some of the most celebrated scientists and media figures of our era. His first prosecution in 2005 gave new meaning to the phrase Club Fed: He did thirteen months in a private wing of a county jail with work release privileges — a deal negotiated by a federal prosecutor who later testified that Epstein "belonged to intelligence" and to leave it alone.

His second arrest in 2019, which threatened to expose his full network, ended with his death in a maximum security federal facility while on suicide watch, with two surveillance cameras malfunctioning simultaneously and two guards asleep at their posts.

Thousands of documents have since been released. The flight logs exist. The black book exists. The testimony exists. The names in those documents read like the guest list of Davos crossed with a royal garden party. The total number of additional prosecutions resulting from all of this evidence: ZERO.

And they all repeat the same mantra: “I never went to Epstein’s Island, and when I did, there were no underage girls there… I had no idea Epstein was such a douchebag etc”

One prominent figure has faced real consequences — Prince Andrew, a British royal, sufficiently foreign to American power to be sacrificed and sufficiently eccentric to be politically expendable. In a country without rights, Epstein is never arrested at all. In a country with genuine accountability, the people in those flight logs face consequences. What we got was the middle option — enough process to look legitimate, not enough to threaten anyone with real power — that is Tyranny with Rights.

Where It’s Heading

Rights are not permanent. They exist to protect the people from the State. The State has no need of rights so it is up to the people to enforce their rights upon the State.

Our freedoms and rights are being quietly eroded, through mass surveillance, emergency powers that never get rolled back, the privatization of censorship through social media platforms, and financial systems that can exclude you without due process. The trajectory is toward a system that keeps the language of rights while hollowing out their substance.

In Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau invoked emergency powers to freeze the bank accounts of truckers' protest participants without judicial process — no charges, no trial, no court order. The accounts were unfrozen when the protest ended. The precedent remained.

If Orwell were alive today, he would need to write a sequel to 1984—call it 2044. It would be about a technologically advanced society that had stock phrases like:

Technology is freedom. The media loves you. Billionaires are perfect.

In the East there is Tyranny without rights, but in the West we have Tyranny with rights. And though it is true that what we have in the West is genuinely better than the alternative, it is still genuinely not good enough. Tyranny with Rights. It’s where we live. Knowing that seems like the minimum requirement for changing it.

Taking the road less travelled, my partner and I were accidental tourists in Mexico City—we got a good deal on a flight and hotel, and we were desperate to escape the late northern winter and soak up some much needed sunshine.

Mexico City is a vast sprawling metropolitan ghetto of 25 million people with chronic urban decay and millions of working poor. The whole city exudes a fortress vibe—stores are boarded up, windows barred and barbed wire everywhere. The overall feeling is that Mexico City is not a safe place, and criminals, especially petty thieves are lurking everywhere.

Realistically though, the murder rate is half of what it was 10 years ago. Homicide deaths in CDMX (Mexico City) in 2023 were 7 for every 100,000 residents, which is a decrease of more than half from 2016 when it was 14 per 100,000 inhabitants. That is lower compared to Houston’s rate of 19 for every 100,000 or according to the Rochester Institute of Technology, Chicago’s rate of 24 for every 100,000, or Los Angeles’ rate of 8.8 homicides per 100,000.

Compare this to the largest city in Canada—Toronto, with a homicide rate of 1.73 per 100,000.

Daily newscasts are often a shock though—they don’t censor the never-ending drug wars between Mexican military/police and the drug cartels, which began in earnest in 2006, and has resulted in anywhere from 60,000 to 120,000 deaths and 124,000 missing persons. Last year, the discovery of a cartel “extermination center” sparked protests across the country, demanding justice for the victims.

According to our tour guide, most of the drug violence is in the north, along the US border, and not local to Mexico City. Mexico is the distribution hub of cocaine trafficking, shipped up from Columbia. In 2012, it was estimated that Mexican cartels employed over 450,000 people directly, and a further 3.2 million people’s livelihoods depended on various parts of the drug trade.

The Mexican cartels operate in over 100 nations. The majority of cocaine goes to the USA, who are the world’s largest consumers of cocaine and other drugs.

One of the main factors driving the Mexican drug war is widespread poverty. Mexico has the second highest economic disparity, between the extremely poor and the extremely rich. The bottom 10% in the income hierarchy own 1.36% of the country's resources, whereas the upper 10% have almost 36%. Compounding this, the low education standards drive poor and uneducated youth into the waiting arms of the drug cartels.

From a recent study:

“Mexico’s most vulnerable population due to the violence of the drug cartels is its youth, who are the most at risk to become victims of homicides, disappearances, and recruitment. Youth from marginalized communities and youth who drop out of school are especially targeted by drug cartel recruiters because they desire a sense of belonging and a quick escape from poverty.

Intricately involved in the vulnerability of youth is the education system, which has been negatively impacted by the cartel conflicts in several aspects. Mexico's education system suffers from school closures, decreases in teacher and student attendance rates, and lower academic achievement due to exposure and persistence of organized crime.”

Riot police are in regular attendance at the large outdoor market at the Alameda Central Park. There is a strong military culture with cops and military visible everywhere. CDMX currently has over 80,000 police, and the three boroughs with the highest crime rates have the highest number of officers. There are also 3,777 soldiers and air force officers, 2,094 marines and 2,840 National Guard members who operate in the capital.

Our guide, a young law student named Alex (Alejandro) works as a tour guide on the weekends, and goes to law school during the week. He was born and raised in Mexico City, and says he “knows the city like the back of his hand.” He provided us with a wealth of history, culture, politics, and lots of streetwise advice about where to go and where not to go.

Alex explained that Mexicans, especially in the capital city, protest everything. There are continual signs of protests waiting to happen. A recent protest at the US Embassy, witnessed a Trump figure beaten and then burned in effigy.

Don’t go to Tepito, he said, because it is the black market of Mexico City, a great place to get Made in China copies (fayuca) of brand names like Nike or Gucci, but also a risky place where you may be targeted by pickpockets or muggers. It is located just off the Centro Histórico, well-known for its vast tianguis (street markets). Many Mexico City locals won’t even visit Tepito, and if you’re a white foreigner, you’re putting yourself at risk.

THE MEXICAN DIRTY WAR

Alex teared up when he related the Massacre of ‘68 (La Masacre de Tlatelolco), a deep scar on the history of CDMX. At least 250-300 students were murdered, just 10 days before the Olympic Games in 1968. These numbers are according to official government sources, though others claim the death toll was in the thousands.

In response to the Mexican government’s concerns over the security of the Olympic Games, the Pentagon sent military radios, weapons, ammunition and riot control training material to Mexico before and during the crisis. The CIA station in Mexico City produced almost daily reports concerning developments within the university community and the Mexican government from July to October.

The massacre occurred next to one of the most famous sites in Mexico, the Plaza de los Tres Culturas, (Plaza of Three Cultures). The US-backed Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) squashed a series of student protests by opening fire on unarmed protesters.

This event was part of a greater conflict, known as the Mexican Dirty War, which was part of the Cold War struggle between the US and the eastern communist block. The US backed the repressive PRI, who controlled Mexico for 71 years in total from 1929 to 2000, and the second term was for six years, from 2012 to 2018. The party acted as a de facto one-party state for much of its existence, until recently getting trounced by Claudia Sheinbaum, who has installed greater democratic rights and freedoms.

The PRI ruled Mexico under an autocratic, chronically corrupt, nepotistic government, favouring the ruling elites, who controlled the police and the judicial system. During its time in power, the PRI became a symbol of corruption, repression, economic mismanagement, and electoral fraud.

MEXICO’S FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT

President Claudia Sheinbaum is a Berkeley-educated PhD engineer, who is a major climate change advocate, having worked with the IPCC panel. “Sheinbaum has always been disciplined and strategic,” said Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a Mexican political analyst. “She’s not going to be as radical as AMLO” (her political mentor, former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO.)

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is the first female President of Mexico. Her parents are Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. Her parents were also communists involved in the student protests in the 1960’s. She often credits her parents’ involvement in the 1968 student protests as an inspiration for her own work.

“I have always said it: I am a daughter of ’68,” she wrote on social media in April 2024.

During her tenure as mayor of Mexico City, she presented Julian Assange’s family with the keys to the city, in September 2022. Speaking about the award, Julian’s father, John Shipton said that it reinvigorated the campaign to free Julian, and it lifted the spirits of his brother, who was still incarcerated in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison at the time.

“The significance of this is that Mexico understands the importance of Julian’s work,” he said. “Mexico has been a leading advocate for Julian’s freedom and the president is leading the charge among world leaders to free Julian.”

Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum presented the keys to the city to the family, saying: “For us, Julian represents truth and freedom of expression. We are a progressive city that has always defended great freedoms and the right to free access to information.”

Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton and his father John were invited to Mexico along with the families of Cesar Chavez, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., as part of the Independence Day celebrations.

Cablebús

The city built a gondola system known as the Cablebús to connect the poor barrios in the hills, where transit is sporadic. Many of the houses we checked out had no roads, only steep staircases to climb to your apartment up the hill. The Cablebús network was initiated under the administration of the current president, Claudia Sheinbaum, who was mayor of CDMX at the time. Completed in 2021, there are 3 lines, with more lines planned.

Alex, our tour guide, told us the Cablebús has been a godsend for those who work down the hills in the central Mexico City valley. It cuts travel time by half for most commuters. It is the longest gondola ride in the world, and for the low price of 7 pesos, with spectacular views of the city, you can’t beat it for instant tourist gratification.

The sounds of chickens, roosters and barking dogs are heard along the length of the ride, combined with the traffic noise, wind shear and calls of the streets sellers, announcing their wares in a sing songy voice: “enchiladas y tamales y gorditas y sopas.”

SANTA FE

We took an Uber up the mountain to Santa Fe to see how the other half lives in Mexico City. Santa Fe is the super wealthy business district on the west side of the city. The largest mall in Mexico is there surrounded by high rise office and condos, that overlook a manmade lake adorned with a row of gourmet restaurants.

And just a stone’s throw away, the residential barrios are seen from the tops of the high-rise buildings. The elegant and luxurious Santa Fe Centro shopping mall is in striking contrast to the soul crushing poverty in the rest of the city. Strolling through the mall was an exercise in guilt and indifference as we witnessed the affluent Mexicans, who seem oblivious to the status of the rest of their countrymen.

The Unequal Scenes Project was created to share the wealth gap around the world:

“Mexico is also one of the most unequal countries in the world. The wealthiest 1% of the population earns 21% of the nation’s total income, a percentage higher than any other country in the world. Significantly, much of that wealth is concentrated in just a few multimillionaires (at one point, the world’s wealthiest man was a Mexican). By some measures, the top 4 richest men in Mexico concentrate 9% of the wealth, a staggering amount in a country this large.

Significantly, as shown by the 2022 World Inequality Report, inequality levels have not been meaningfully reduced, and actually increased, during the 2000s.”

Another quote from the project:

“Special mention must be paid to private golf clubs in the city, which in Mexico are the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Average costs to join are between $16,000 and $35,000 per year, with the most expensive club over $100,000. That's striking in a country which has an average annual income of only $15,314.”

Wealth inequality in Mexico is extremely high. Although Mexico is among the top 14 richest countries as calculated by GDP, over half the population lives in poverty. Consuelo Lopez-Zuriaga, the Oxfam Mexico Executive Director states that “while the wealth of Mexican multimillionaires is multiplied by five, 48 percent of state schools have no access to sewage, 31 percent have no drinking water, 12.8 percent have no bathrooms or toilets and 11.2 percent have no access to electricity.”

TEOTIHUACAN PYRAMIDS

One of the most amazing attractions in CDMX is the Teotihuacán pyramids, just 40 kms outside the city. The area was a religious and cultural city with a population of approximately 125,000 people, at its height around 350 AD. The city contained roughly 2000 multilevel apartment buildings and a collective government system with a multi-ethnic community.

In 2003, archeologists discovered a tunnel underneath the pyramid, leading to a series of underground galleries that may have housed the ruling elite. Evidence of human sacrifice was found inside the Feathered Serpent pyramid—more than 100 warriors, kneeling with their hands bound behind their backs, are believed to have died there.

DINING EXPERIENCES

On a less than ideal note, we found it difficult to get a good cup of coffee in Mexico, a frustrating first world problem I know, but the watery black swill with strange brown coloured cream (fake cream?) and white sugar was a drag. We eventually broke down and went to Starbucks for a double espresso latte, despite our rule of limiting our dining to only the authentic Mexican cuisine.

On our last day, we dined next to the Museo Nacional de Arte, at Los Girasoles restaurant. We ordered Tangerine salad, Jamaica enchiladas and Huauzontle pancakes. My partner had Traditional Raven Rested Tequila and I had a Bird of Paradise lager.

One thing about Mexican waiters, I’d like to mention—they don’t hover, and badger you every three minutes like most North American waiters. They generally leave you alone and let you enjoy your meal. What a pleasant surprise!

Total cost, including a tip, for three-course meal, plus Tequila and premium Mexican beer (cerveza) was only $50 USD.

Serving staff don’t expect big tips. When showing your credit card, the terminal gives you options of 5%, 10% or 15%, compared to Canada or America, where often restaurants expect a tip of 18%. Uber drivers do not expect more than 20 pesos as a gratuity.

Overall, Mexico City has much to offer for those looking for culture, history and some fine dining for a reasonable price. Travelling to European cities will bite into your pocketbook, especially considering the cost of dining, transportation and general cost of admission to museums and other attractions.

Smart people need an understanding of this phenomenon to navigate social and political life without constant frustration and friction.

Schopenhauer’s essays on “The Wisdom of Life” and “On Noise,” collected in Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) laid out a philosophy that is both bleak and liberating. Intelligence, he believed, is rare. Most people function on an instinctual level, responding to social triggers and group pressures rather than engaging in genuine discussion, analysis and debate. It is a biological fact that we are mammals, and we continue to operate like animals in social groups (herds), whether we care to admit it or not.

Most people form opinions based on emotion, cultural trends, media influence and tribal values—then reverse-engineer reasoning to justify what they already feel.

In short, most people don’t think.

This seems contrary to our scientifically advanced, techno-obsessed society. The illusion exists—because we have cool phones, AI, and social media—that people’s intelligence level has risen dramatically. But the truth is, the advances in science and tech were driven by a small segment of the population and everyone has benefitted without any real input.

This is echoed by Carl Sagan:

“We’ve arranged a society on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology, and this combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces.”

Ouch.

Even more devastating, Schopenhauer argued that some people simply cannot understand certain concepts. You can’t explain calculus to a chimpanzee, and though it sounds arrogant (and maybe it is), we are not all created equal in the IQ department. Neither are we all created equal in the athletic department. The vast majority of people are never going to compete in the Olympics because they don’t have the natural ability. The idea that “all men are created equal” is demonstrably false.

Logical arguments rarely penetrate some people—we’re not dealing with positions arrived at through logic, so logic won’t change anything. Some people’s cognitive architecture doesn’t support abstract or nuanced thinking, making deeper explanations not just futile but a waste of energy. We assume, in the West, that because over 50% of people have post-secondary education, it means most people are intelligent.

But post-secondary education refers to structured learning where individuals acquire specific knowledge, skills, and credentials through formal instruction. It is an external process shaped by institutions, curricula, and assessments.

Intelligence, on the other hand, is an innate cognitive capacity—your natural ability to understand, reason, solve problems, learn from experience, and adapt to new situations. It includes various forms such as logical, creative, and emotional intelligence and is influenced by both genetics and environment.

Unintelligence (or stupidity, if we want to be blunt) according to Schopenhauer, comes with aggressive confidence—the less people know, the more certain they are, and reason cannot penetrate that certainty. Try reasoning with a Flat Earther and see how far you get. Meanwhile, those who lack intelligence cannot recognize it in themselves or others. Seeking their validation, therefore, is a reliable source of unnecessary suffering.

Intelligent people often are not as confident in their opinions as those less endowed, because the intelligent understand that our modern world is complex—things are not black and white, there are a lot of grey areas, and thus, they have more doubt in their minds.

It should also be noted that well-educated people are by no means immune from unintelligence and black and white thinking. Conformity to established knowledge, even in the face of contradictory information, can occur with the intelligentsia. Those who followed Stalin, Mao and even Hitler were often from the educated classes.

Anyone can memorize information. Doctors, lawyers, engineers or scientists may be able to process sophisticated information, but they may still be unable to think for themselves on any other subject unless there is an authority telling them that something is true or not.

For more on authority’s effect on intelligence, see my previous article on Dr. Douglas Kelley and the Nuremberg Trials:

Enlightenment

A better word to describe what we are witnessing might be enlightenment. Some people’s minds are turned on and others are not. Raw processing power is an asset for anyone, and our techno-science society favours those with superior math skills, but anyone can be enlightened, regardless of IQ level. Anyone can have common sense, and anyone can sort through information and discern whether something is true or not, with the disclaimer that truth and facts are not necessarily the same thing, and that specialized knowledge, such as quantum physics, excludes the majority of people.

Schopenhauer claimed the bigger the group, the lower the IQ. Individual intelligence diminishes in group settings, where conformity and emotional reaction are rewarded over independent thought. Schopenhauer saw crowds as intelligence-dampening forces, pulling everyone toward the lowest common denominator.

In short, most people are intellectual sheep.

Add to this the uncomfortable fact that many people prefer comforting lies over uncomfortable truths, and you have a recipe for intellectual isolation. Minds are not easily changed—core opinions are tied to cultural identity, and factual evidence rarely shifts them. Cognitive capacity, in Schopenhauer’s view, is largely fixed. You cannot educate someone into a different level of intelligence.

Our society is increasingly polarized, and people are being forced into political and religious boxes. These boxes are often programmed echo chambers where people repeat slogans and dogmas, instead of engaging in serious and honest discussion about issues.

The Necessity of Solitude

Given this, Schopenhauer concluded that intelligent people naturally gravitate toward solitude—not out of misanthropy but necessity. “A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial,” he wrote. This wasn’t a character flaw but an inevitable consequence of possessing a rich inner world. “The more a man has in himself, the less he needs from the outside.” Intelligent people find stimulation in reflection, art, books, and ideas. They don’t need constant companionship to distract them from boredom because they’re rarely bored when alone.

Though I would caution against isolation and anti-social behaviour because it just isn’t healthy, Schopenhauer reluctantly admitted that “Solitude is the fate of all great minds.” Superior intellects are misunderstood by the masses and thus inevitably isolated. Schopenhauer believed that the more intelligent a person is, the more they suffer—not despite their intelligence, but because of it. A higher capacity for thought leads to greater awareness of life’s suffering and futility. You see through the comfortable illusions that sustain most people, and this awareness is isolating.

This is nothing new, the Hebrew prophet lamented this thousands of years ago:

"For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
The more knowledge, the more grief.”
~ Ecclesiastes 1:18

Yet here lies a paradox: the enlightened person needs solitude for clarity, but cannot afford complete isolation if they wish to fulfill any moral purpose. For enlightened people, social interaction often feels burdensome and inauthentic. Small talk seems tedious, ego-driven motives appear transparent, and the general shallowness of most conversation may be exhausting for smart people who value quality over quantity in relationships, seeking meaningful connections but finding them rare. Compatible minds are scarce, making deep intellectual connection infrequent. When it does occur, it’s precious. More often, enlightened people find more profound companionship in books and ideas than in crowds.

Strategic Engagement

Schopenhauer suggested a simple strategy: accept these limitations and act accordingly. Understand that many people are driven by programming—social conditioning and biological drives—rather than conscious deliberation. Recognize that displaying intelligence can invite hostility from those who feel threatened by it, so conceal it strategically when necessary. Avoid futile debates that can compromise your own clarity and substance. Don’t offer unwanted truths to people who prefer comfortable lies.

This isn’t about bitterness or superiority. It’s about understanding reality and operating within it effectively. By accepting the predictability of emotionally driven, non-critical thinking, enlightened individuals can conserve energy and navigate interactions with precision. You stop expecting people to be what they’re not. You stop being frustrated when they can’t follow you into abstraction or nuance. You accept that many decisions around you are made without the deliberation you assume is universal.

The freedom comes from letting go. You stop seeking validation from those incapable of recognizing what you’re doing. You stop trying to change minds that cannot be changed. You embrace solitude not as loneliness, but as the space where you can think clearly, create meaningfully, and connect with truth. Find your tribe of like-minded people who resonate with you and treasure those connections while accepting their scarcity.

Schopenhauer offered no utopian vision. People are what they are and intelligence is distributed unevenly. You can still build a life around your strengths rather than exhausting yourself trying to bridge unbridgeable gaps.

Finally, the enlightened person is morally obligated to help turn on the light in the minds of others. This requires serious diplomacy and tact. And patience and the humble commitment to help others cross the bridge to the promised land. This removes any intellectual pride and gives the enlightened person the attitude of a servant instead of an attitude of superiority.

Molotov states, “…the Hitler Government is a gang of murderers and that it aims at the extermination of our citizens [which] may be seen also from the monstrous crimes of the Hitlerites with regard to Soviet war prisoners.”

He continues through pages and pages of incidents, that combined, reveal a program of systematic genocide of the Russian people. Just a few examples: [warning: graphic content:]

On March 2 and 6, 1942, nine bodies of captured Red Army men were found on the Crimean front in the region of Height 66.3 and the village of Jantora. The bodies had been so badly mutilated that only two could be identified. Fingernails were torn out, eyes gouged out, and one body had the whole right side of its chest cut away. Others showed evidence of torture by fire, numerous knife wounds and broken jaws. [p. 23]

The liberation of Kerch made it possible to reveal the following heinous crime of the occupants, a crime which stands out even among other innumerable bloody atrocities: The local German commandant's office ordered parents to send their children to school. Obeying the order, 245 children with textbooks and composition books in their hands started to classes. None of them returned home. Only after the city was liberated were 245 bodies of these children found in a deep ditch eight kilometers from the city. [p. 22]

In the village of Burashevo, Kalinin Region, German officers and soldiers put to death 530 patients in Dr. Litvinov's hospital. When the Hitlerites occupied the hospital on November 15, 1941, they first looted all the food supplies, thereby condemning the patients to death by hunger. Then they ordered several sections of the hospital "cleaned out" and proceeded to throw out some of the patients who were too weak to move by themselves. Many patients were bayoneted and shot to death. Eighty who escaped by being removed to the village of Brednevo were shot the next day. The remaining patients were poisoned and put to death with lethal doses of narcotic drugs such as morphine, scopolamine, veronal and sodium-amytal. [p.23]

There are countless other atrocities that Molotov testified to in the document. It was apparent to the Russian high command that: “All these facts testify that the gang of brigands which goes under the name of the German Government has set as its goal the extermination of our people.” [p.23]

It is estimated that the Russian deaths in World War 2 accounted for close to half the total deaths during the conflict.

A 1995 analysis by the Russian Academy of Science, which estimated Soviet civilian deaths during World War II at 13.7 million in German-occupied territories. This figure includes:

• 7.4 million victims of Nazi genocide and reprisals.

• 2.2 million deaths of people deported to Germany for forced labor.

• 4.1 million deaths from famine and disease in occupied areas.

The Academy also estimated an additional 3 million civilian deaths from famine and disease in non-occupied regions, bringing the total civilian death toll to approximately 16.7 million.

According to Colonel-General Grigori F. Krivosheev's 1997 study Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century, the estimated total military dead and missing for the Soviet Union during World War II were 8,668,400. This figure includes those killed in action, died of wounds, non-combat deaths, and missing in action, based on data from Soviet field reports and declassified archives. The study also notes that the Soviet Union suffered approximately 14,685,593 wounded during the war.

These estimates are considered by many scholars to be conservative estimates, and most likely the numbers were higher. Historian David Glantz maintains that “the war with Nazi Germany cost the Soviet Union at least 29 million military casualties”(dead, wounded and sick) “The exact numbers can never be established, and some revisionists have attempted to put the number as high as 50 million.”

The question that haunted psychiatrist Dr. Douglas Kelley at the Nuremberg Trials was: How did ordinary Germans become capable of this? The answer lay not in exceptional evil but in national trauma.

For further exploration into Dr. Douglas Kelley:

How Did it Happen?

The conditions that led to World War 2, based on the consensus of historians, was firstly, the unjust Treaty of Versailles and secondly the financial crisis Germany suffered as a result of the war and the reparations imposed on them by the allies. This period was marked by escalating inflation, epidemic unemployment and acute homelessness and poverty. The Weimar Republic was incapable of dealing with the situation which led to the radicalization of German public opinion, inspiring widespread sentiments of nationalism, militarism, and anti-democracy, and an intense desire to reclaim lost Germany territory. People sought to find scapegoats for the national catastrophe, sparking the rise of racial supremacism and xenophobia.

These same factors are present in contemporary America. The American national pride has been deeply wounded by decades of job loss, stagnant wages and the escalating cost of living and rents. Homelessness in the United States has reached alarming proportions, with estimates of 770,000 homeless people living in makeshift tents and sleeping in their cars.

Wounded national pride combined with economic crisis is a recipe for disaster, or more ominously, for the rise of a political saviour who promises to fix everything.

America Has PTSD

As a Canadian observing from outside, I see America's trauma with both distance and concern. Distance allows perspective; concern arises because what happens in America affects us all. Canada has shared in much of America's trauma - we sent troops to Afghanistan, we've experienced deindustrialization, we've felt COVID's devastation.

America’s trauma is also multilayered, but it began with the Vietnam War, the first major military defeat that created deep social division and loss of innocence of the American youth who witnessed daily the carnage of the American war machine.

The Economic decline that has seen jobs moved overseas, combined with deindustrialization, wage stagnation, and the 2008 crash that rewarded the bankers with “quantitative easing.” America was devastated and traumatized by 9/11, exposed to sudden vulnerability. It shattered America’s sense of safety and exceptionalism and created a permanent fear state, surveillance apparatus, endless wars, and xenophobic fear of Islamic militants.

The fabricated weapons of mass destruction that led to a decade in Iraq and twenty years in Afghanistan, and more unwinnable conflicts, bombings of sovereign nations, more disillusionment and trillions of dollars dumped into a war machine, while the domestic situation was in serious arrears.

Then in 2020, COVID resulted in mass death, institutional failure and social breakdown. The big box stores stayed open, billionaires like Jeff Bezos profited from the crisis. The wealth of the global billionaire class significantly increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the world’s billionaires collectively gaining approximately $4 trillion in wealth between March 2020 and March 2021, representing a 54% increase in their fortunes.

This institutional failure is recent enough to feel raw with a million dead, institutional incompetence and political polarization over basic health measures, combined with economic disruption, social isolation and the loss of a shared reality when a virus became a political weapon.

There is a burning resentment within the American population that the nation has been hijacked and the American Dream has been stolen. And in a sense, they're right. The social contract is broken. For forty years, productivity has risen while wages stagnated. Healthcare, education, and housing - once accessible to the middle class - are now luxuries. The system that promised 'work hard and succeed' has been replaced by one where birth circumstances determine outcomes more than effort. This isn't paranoia. This is lived experience for millions of Americans watching their children inherit a diminished future.

National trauma affects everyone, left and right: Rural communities have been devastated by opioids and economic decline, and urban communities are facing violence and inequality, with escalating homelessness. Homelessness reached a record 770,000 in 2024 - an 18% increase in a single year. This marks the largest single-year increase on record and continues a multi-year upward trend driven by a shortage of affordable housing, rising rents, natural disasters, and a surge in migration.

American veterans feel betrayed by endless wars, the working class of all races are facing downward mobility, and everyone is living with pandemic grief and institutional distrust.

The US is engaged in a cultural debate and identity crisis. Do Americans know who they are anymore? The culture war between traditional and pluralist visions of America appears to be a bitter divorce with irreconcilable differences on both sides.

The Rise of a Strong Man

Traumatized populations seek strong leaders who promise to “make us great again” and restore national honor by returning the nation to a mythic past when things were “better.” Authoritarian leaders give simple explanations for complex problems, in the form of scapegoats, such as immigrants or other ethnic groups who are held responsible for all the woes of the society. The strongman promises certainty in place of chaos, and belonging in place of social disintegration.

We have seen this in history. Philosopher and politician Edmund Burke predicted the rise of a military dictator following the French Revolution, specifically foreseeing the emergence of a "popular general" who would command the allegiance of the army and ultimately become "master of your whole republic". This prediction was remarkably accurate, as Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power through a coup d'état in 1799, just eight years after Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Edmund Burke emphasizes the dangers of radical change, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, advocating for gradual reform rooted in tradition and historical continuity. He argued that society should respect established institutions and customs, fearing that abrupt upheaval leads to chaos and tyranny. Burke championed the importance of generational wisdom and the social contract of the people and the state as the foundation for a stable and just society.

This pattern repeats across history and cultures. China's 'Century of Humiliation' - defeat by Japan, Western colonial exploitation, civil war, and famine - created the conditions for Mao Zedong to promise national restoration through revolutionary rebirth. A traumatized population embraced totalitarian rule, leading to the Cultural Revolution's catastrophic violence. Wounded national pride combined with economic desperation makes populations vulnerable to authoritarian promises.

Unprocessed trauma seeks outlets. A population suffering from PTSD, unable to grieve its losses or address its systemic failures, will turn that pain outward. It will search for enemies to blame: immigrants 'invading' our borders, establishment elites 'betraying' the nation, foreign powers 'stealing' our jobs. It will embrace simple solutions to complex problems. It will trade freedom for the promise of security. It will follow anyone who promises to restore what was lost.

The Kelley Connection

From my previous article, Dr. Douglas Kelley and Hannah Arendt both understood that atrocities don’t require exceptionally evil people. They require ordinary people under extraordinary stress. A traumatized population is a vulnerable population. The Nazis weren’t monsters, according to Kelley—they were Germans in a society that had been traumatized, humiliated, and economically destroyed. Given the right conditions, they became genocidal monsters.

To be fair, America is not Nazi Germany. But America is a traumatized nation that has never properly processed its wounds. The reckoning with Vietnam hasn’t been resolved, nor with 9/11 and the wars that followed. There isn’t a national debate to deal with the deliberate destruction of the working class. There was no inquiry or national review of the pandemic losses. America has been lurching from crisis to crisis, accumulating scar tissue, growing more angry and afraid.

The Bogeyman Theory of evil tells us that if we just get rid of the bad leader, everything will be fine. But Kelley’s research reveals a harder truth: the leader is a symptom, not the cause. The conditions create the demand for authoritarianism. Trauma makes populations vulnerable to demagogues.

Addressing “Both Sides”

This trauma manifests differently across the political spectrum:

On the right, it appears as anger at ‘replacement,’ fear of demographic change, embrace of strongman politics, and the promise to restore a mythical Golden Age when America was ‘great.’

On the left, it appears as rage at systemic injustice, demands to ‘burn it all down,’ despair about climate catastrophe, and a conviction that the entire American project is irredeemably corrupt.

Both are responses to genuine pain. Both contain elements of truth. Both are also dangerous when they descend into absolutism and dehumanization and demonization of the other team. Democracy is ideally a civil debate where the rights and opinions of others are respected, in the interest in achieving consensus or compromise to advance progressive policies for the benefit of all.

A nation can’t progress in a protracted civil war.

A Nation in Denial

I’m not suggesting America is on the brink of genocide. The democratic institutions, while strained, are still functioning. Civil society, though fractured, remains robust and has not descended into civil war. America is not Weimar Germany.

But America is a traumatized nation in denial about the trauma. And traumatized populations are vulnerable to authoritarianism, to scapegoating, to violence, to the erosion of democratic norms in the name of ‘emergency’ or ‘security’ or ‘restoration.’

The question is not whether America will become Nazi Germany— the question is: Will America recognize and address the national trauma before it consumes the nation?

What does healing national trauma actually look like?

The solutions to complex problems are often embedded in the problems themselves, once the problems have been identified:

1. Economic reconstruction: Not just talking about it but actually rebuilding working-class prosperity - this is material, not just psychological. Deporting immigrants does not address nor solve the domestic cost of living crisis. The biggest economic issue is wealth inequality, not illegal immigration.

2. Institutional reform: Rebuild trust by making institutions actually work for people. Easier said than done, but ignoring the problem won’t make it go away.

3. Collective grieving: America never properly mourned - not Vietnam vets, not 9/11 victims, not COVID dead, not deindustrialization. Ungrieved loss becomes rage. Why not a national day of mourning to commemorate the losses?

4. Truth-telling: America needs an actual reckoning with Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan - what happened, what it cost, what was learned. There has been no national reckoning, no truth and reconciliation commission, no public accounting of what these wars cost and what they accomplished.

5. Shared Purpose. Trauma heals through meaningful collective action. After WWII, there was rebuilding, a New Deal, and new institutions such as the United Nations and the UN Declaration on civil rights.

6. Critical thinking education: Kelley’s prescription to teach people to question authority, resist propaganda, think critically through public school programs that address the issues, so the youth don’t repeat the same mistakes of their fathers and mothers.

7. Resist the scapegoat: Refuse to let pain be weaponized against vulnerable populations.

Of these, economic reconstruction may be the most urgent. You cannot heal psychological trauma while people are materially desperate. Truth-telling and collective grieving matter, but they ring hollow to someone who can't afford rent or medical care. Material security creates the stability necessary for psychological healing.

The scariest truth is this: the Germans who committed those atrocities documented in Molotov’s 1942 note weren’t cartoon villains. They were traumatized people who found someone to blame for their pain. They were ordinary people who became capable of extraordinary evil, they were transformed from ordinary people into genocidal lunatics.

And if America doesn't address its own national trauma, Americans are vulnerable to a similar descent. Not because they are uniquely evil, but because they are human. And humans under enough stress, with enough fear, with enough unprocessed grief, are capable of terrible things.

The warning from history isn’t beware the dictator. It’s beware the conditions that make populations welcome dictators. It’s beware unhealed trauma.

It’s beware the Bogeyman Theory that lets us ignore systemic rot.

As a fiction writer, I understand the appeal of the simple story: the hero, the villain, the battle, the resolution. But the story of national trauma is neither simple nor satisfying. It’s messy, systemic, and requires collective effort to resolve. There’s no single hero who can fix it, no single villain whose defeat would restore the nation.

The question is whether Americans have the courage to face that harder truth - and the will to do the difficult work of healing.

This wasn’t the screenplay. This was something more fundamental: a multi-layered map of the novel’s structure, its weaknesses, and its landmines.

From Disappointment to Discovery

When Coppola first read The Godfather, he was disappointed. He’d expected Puzo to be “an intellectual on the order of Italo Calvino or Umberto Eco.” Instead, his first impression was “surprise and dismay; this was more like a Harold Robbins or Irving Wallace book, a potboiler filled with sex and silliness.”

However, Coppola didn’t trust his initial impressions. He understood something crucial: first impressions matter, but so does systematic analysis. He created what he called a “prompt book”—a theatrical tradition adapted for filmmaking. He sat with scissors and glue, cutting apart his annotated copy of the novel and pasting each page onto loose-leaf sheets with wide margins. He added sturdy grommets to both sides of every page, knowing this document would become his master reference throughout production.

The result was a “multi-layered road map” that examined the novel on multiple levels: the original text, his initial instincts, his analytical categories, and eventually his production notes. When he directed the film, he didn’t carry the screenplay. He carried this notebook.

“I totally dissected everything in that book,” Coppola explained, “what the novel was saying, how it would look, what the imagery was. And when I directed the film, I didn’t have the script with me. I had that book, and that book was what I would review when I set up every scene.”

Coppola broke down each section of the novel using five key criteria:

1. Synopsis - A brief summary of the story up to that point.

2. The Times - How the historical period influenced the story. For The Godfather, this meant understanding post-WWII America, the 1940s aesthetic, the specific cultural moment. Paramount originally wanted to update the setting to the 1970s and shoot the film in Kansas City to save money, Coppola fought them. He’d already done the systematic work of analyzing why the 1940s mattered to every scene—how the period shaped the characters’ choices, opportunities, and constraints.

3. Imagery and Tone - Visual elements and the overall feeling of each section.

4. The Core - The central essence of the scene, a concept he borrowed from Elia Kazan’s published notes on directing A Streetcar Named Desire. What is this scene really about?

5. Pitfalls - The dangers, the clichés, the specific ways this scene could fail.

Coppola’s Secret Weapon

Of all the categories Coppola used to dissect The Godfather, the most revealing is the one he called “Pitfalls.” For each section of the novel, he listed the specific ways the scene could fail. Not general principles—concrete failure conditions:

“Italians who would talk like a this” - The danger of ethnic stereotype, of leaning into Hollywood’s cartoon version of Italian-Americans rather than creating authentic voices.

“Boring people” - Audiences “must feel that they’re seeing the real thing with hundreds and hundreds of interesting specifics.” He notes examples: “the children sliding around, the sandwich man throwing the sandwich, ‘hey boino, two gabag and one p.’”

“Losing a basic humanity to all these people” - The risk that the violence and criminality would make the Corleones monsters rather than recognizable human beings.

“Failure to set up a tension between Godfather and Michael” - The structural spine that makes the story work.

“Too much exposition” - The screenwriter’s constant temptation.

For the scene where Michael meets Apollonia in Sicily, Coppola’s pitfall list becomes even more forensic:

• “If Apollonia doesn’t make your heart stop just to look at her”

• “If the coincidence that the innkeeper is the father of the girl they have just seen seems contrived”

• “If it is funny it will not be”

• “If Michael’s quick decision to marry her seems unlikely”

• “If Michael in a subtle way does not have the quality of a don”

These aren’t vague warnings about “maintaining tension” or “developing character.” They’re predictions of exactly how the scene dies. Before he shot a frame, Coppola imagined the specific ways each scene could fail, then designed around those failure points.

The Restaurant Scene

Consider the restaurant scene where Michael kills Sollozzo and McCluskey—the moment when the college war hero transforms into his father’s son. Coppola’s notes reveal his method at its most sophisticated.

The Core: “To show the killing as terrifying and explicitly as possible, having taken the tension to an unbearable degree, to further define Michael’s character in regards to his cool, totally calm execution of these men.”

Pitfalls: “Rushing this would ruin it. Otherwise the scene can’t be ruined.”

That last line is remarkable. Coppola recognized that the underlying structure was so strong—Michael’s transformation, the mounting tension, the violence that changes everything—that there was only one way to fail: rushing it. The scene had perfect internal pressure. His job was to let it breathe.

So he designed the scene shot by shot, making detailed notes in his notebook’s wide margins:

• “Designed shot for shot, important the audience knows he is not following Clemenza’s instructions”

• “He chokes, frozen, time hit hard and bloody, his fork frozen in midair”

• “Gun almost against Sollozzo’s head, really close, get this for the audience”

• “Mist of blood”

• “McCluskey’s fork frozen midair as he watches Sollozzo’s brains fly through the air”

• “His own choking when shot in the throat”

• “The gun in his hand, he starts to leave without dropping it” [the audience should be thinking: drop it, drop it, drop it]

Coppola even notes “how would Hitchcock design this?” Because Hitchcock was the master of manipulating information—of giving audiences just enough knowledge to maximize tension.

How Manuscripts Fail

While Coppola was diagnosing The Godfather’s unique vulnerabilities, he was also avoiding universal pitfalls—the accumulated wisdom about the reasons manuscripts collapse:

UNEARNED INFORMATION

Information means nothing without context that makes it matter.

Don’t info-dump before stakes exist, or explain your magic system before we care about the character who needs to use it because it is narrative death. Three paragraphs about a character’s childhood before we’ve seen them do anything in the present trains readers to skip backstory.

World-building disconnected from immediate stakes reads as background noise, however elaborate. If you’re describing your empire’s political structure during a knife fight, you’ve lost the reader.

Why it fails: The human brain prioritizes immediate threats and desires. Abstract information without emotional context is rejected as background noise.

Coppola’s version: “Boring people”—he knew audiences needed “hundreds of interesting specifics” but only specifics that mattered to what was happening right now in front of them.

INAUTHENTIC BEHAVIOR

Characters are not information delivery systems. They’re people under pressure, so they must act according to their knowledge, pressures, and nature—not the author’s need to communicate.

Don’t use “As-you-know-Bob” dialogue: “As you know, Bob, our father was killed by the Zorblaxians in the Great War of 2089.” Don’t have characters explain their own psychology: “I’m doing this because of my abandonment issues.”

Watch for convenient stupidity—smart characters missing obvious solutions because the plot needs them to. Avoid sentences where body parts act independently: “Her eyes found the doorway” (eyes don’t search; people do).

Why it fails: Readers unconsciously detect when characters are puppets serving the plot, rather than people responding to circumstances.

Coppola’s version: “Italians who would talk like a this”—he knew ethnic caricature would destroy the film’s humanity and authenticity.

UNHEROIC CHARACTERS WITH NO AGENCY

Readers want characters who engage, struggle, act, and argue. Passive characters defeat the reader’s goal.

Readers are looking for heroes, even if those heroes are flawed, make mistakes, and make terrible decisions. Even villains need agency and competence—they must be worthy opponents or the protagonist’s victory means nothing.

If your character faces a weak antagonist they can defeat easily, the reader becomes bored. If your protagonist lets the world roll over them without resistance, you’ve violated the fundamental contract of storytelling.

Why it fails: Stories are about people making consequential choices under pressure. Remove the pressure or the choices, and you have a report, not a story.

NO CONFLICT, DRAMA, OR TENSION

Every scene must contain resistance—either external conflict or internal tension that matters.

Common violations include:

• Scenes of pure exposition where characters sit and explain

• Placeholder scenes that move characters from A to B without anything happening

• Reaction without complication—characters process events but nothing changes

• False activity—characters doing things (cooking breakfast, driving to work) that don’t advance or reveal anything

Why it fails: Stories are compression machines. Real life has downtime; fiction cannot. Every scene must be pressurized or the reader’s attention dissipates.

Coppola’s version: “Rushing this would ruin it. Otherwise the scene can’t be ruined.” He knew the restaurant scene had perfect internal pressure—the only way to fail was to not let the pressure build and not let it explode.

STRUCTURAL INCOHERENCE

Every story makes promises about how its world works. Breaking those promises breaks the spell. The reader’s mind builds a model of your story’s rules—its logic, its cause-and-effect, its internal consistency. Violating those rules shatters immersion.

Common violations:

• POV violations - Switching whose thoughts we’re in mid-scene without clear breaks

• Tense shift - Sliding from past to present tense unconsciously

• False simultaneity - “Opening the door, she rushed down the stairs” (you can’t be at the top opening a door while already rushing down)

• Mood whiplash - Tonal shifts that aren’t earned (comedy immediately after tragedy without acknowledgment)

Why it fails: The reader’s unconscious mind is constantly predicting what comes next based on patterns you’ve established. When you break those patterns arbitrarily, the prediction engine stalls and they’re thrown out of the dream.

FICTION FULL OF FRICTION

Every word that reminds readers they’re reading weakens the reader’s experience and breaks the spell. The goal is transparency, not verbal virtuosity.

The reader experiences the story through sensory immediacy, not reported observation. Every layer of mediation—every word that draws attention to itself—creates friction that degrades the experience.

Avoid:

• Filter words - “He saw the tree falling” vs. “The tree fell”

• Reported emotion - “She felt sad” vs. “Her throat tightened”

• Purple prose - Ornate description that draws attention to the writing rather than the experience

• Fancy dialogue tags - “He expostulated” draws attention to the word, not what was said

• Sesquipedalian vocabulary - If you have to choose between a one-syllable word and a three-syllable word, generally pick the one-syllable word

Words like “perspicacious,” “exacerbate,” “quintessential” slow the reader’s processing and create distance from the story.

Why it fails: Reading should feel like experiencing, not like decoding. Every moment of conscious effort pulls the reader out of the fictional dream.

Coppola’s version: “Gun almost against Sollozzo’s head, really close, get this for the audience”—he wanted viewers in the moment, experiencing it viscerally, not observing it from a distance.

OVERSPENDING THE WORD BUDGET

In the economy of language, operate on a tight budget. Treat each paragraph as a stand-alone poem.

Poetry is ultra-respectful of the need to not waste a single word. Fiction should be too. Build your paragraph-poems one by one, eliminating every unnecessary word, and creating images with your words.

Examples:

• “He saw the tree falling” → “The tree fell”

• “She felt sad” → “Her throat tightened”

• “In my opinion, I think that...” → “I think...”

Every unnecessary word is a small betrayal of the reader’s attention. They accumulate. Readers have limited patience for inefficiency. Tight prose signals confidence and control. Bloated prose signals an amateur who doesn’t know what matters.

RUSHING THE JOURNEY

A fiction novel work because it is long—it gives readers time to become engrossed over days or weeks, capturing their imagination and engaging their emotions.

The story is a journey the reader joins you on, taking them out of their mundane existence into another world. This requires patience. You must slowly unravel the story like a ball of yarn, revealing it a bit at a time.

The temptation is to compress—to give readers disconnected highlights instead of sustained experience. Some writers mistake velocity for urgency. They cut connective tissue, skip emotional processing, rush from plot point to plot point.

Readers don’t just want to know what happens—they want to live through what happens. Compression without development produces “sound bites” that don’t allow true catharsis. The novel form exists because some experiences require time and space to develop properly.

PLOT VIOLATIONS

Readers have consumed thousands of stories. Familiar patterns register as lazy unless subverted with careful detail.

Recognition without surprise is boredom. Readers tolerate familiar structures but demand fresh execution and unexpected moments that make them sit up and think: “I’ve never seen it done this way before.”

Common violations:

• Unearned coincidences - The right person appears exactly when needed

• Deus ex machina - Problems solved by forces outside the character’s agency

• Stock characters - The wise mentor, the manic pixie dream girl, the noble savage

• Mechanical plotting - Following Save the Cat beat sheets so rigidly the story feels algorithmic

According to narrative theorists, there are only a handful of fundamental plots: Rags to Riches, Heroic Journey, Tragic Flaw, Boy Meets Girl—Boy Loses Girl, Defeating the Monster and Redemption. But forcing characters into these templates produces paint-by-numbers fiction.

Readers are looking for the ah-ha moment that excites their imagination. They want to feel the story could only happen this way, with these characters, in this sequence. When they see the scaffolding, the magic dies.

Coppola’s version: “If the coincidence that the innkeeper is the father of the girl they have just seen seems contrived”—he knew the plot point was borderline and needed perfect execution to work.

NO EMOTIONAL INVESTMENT

Emotion is like a bank account. You cannot withdraw what you haven’t deposited.

Reader investment must be earned through accumulated specificity and pressure before you can demand emotional payoff. Readers need time and detail to build models of characters before those characters’ fates matter.

Common pitfalls:

• Starting with the Earth destroyed - Enormous stakes before we care about anyone

• Immediate grief - Character deaths that should devastate but don’t because we just met them

• Abrupt endings - Stopping the story to force sequel purchases

• Blank slate protagonists - “Everyman” characters with no specific desires, fears, or contradictions

We don’t care about abstract people facing abstract threats. We care about specific people we’ve come to know facing specific threats we understand. The specificity and the time investment are what create the emotional bond.

Coppola’s version: “If Apollonia doesn’t make your heart stop just to look at her”—he understood the Sicilian sequence only works if we fall in love with her instantly, just as Michael does. The casting had to be perfect because the emotional investment had to be immediate and overwhelming.

Coppola’s Legacy

Years later, Coppola could look back at his notebook and see the map of his thinking—the layers of analysis, the evolution of his understanding, the specific vulnerabilities he’d identified and designed around. The sheer amount of notes he made on certain pages told him where the movie’s heart was.

The notebook represented something more than preparation. It was a dialogue between gut reaction and rigorous thinking. It preserved his initial instincts—the things that excited or worried him on first reading—while building systematic understanding on top of them.

Before you finish your next chapter, try Coppola’s method:

What are the three ways THIS scene fails? Not scenes in general—this one.

What laws does it risk violating?

What’s the single pitfall that, if you get it wrong, collapses everything?

Coppola carried his notebook in a canvas bag, thick with multi-colored annotations and asterisks marking scenes that “cannot be ruined.” He knew both his scene-specific vulnerabilities and the universal craft pitfalls.

The scene might powerful. But only if you know exactly how it could be ruined.

The film is based on the book, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, billed as the “improbable relationship between the fallen Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goering, and ambitious US Army physician, Douglas Kelley, [that] becomes a hazardous quest into the nature of evil.”

The focus of the film is the show trial at Nuremberg where Göring was sentenced to hang for war crimes. Contrary to accepted American history, it was Russian jurist Aron Trainin who played a central role in establishing the legal framework for the Nuremberg Trials that were used to hold Nazi Germany’s military and political leadership accountable through his proposal of a new legal concept, "the crime of aggression."

The central protagonist, Douglas Kelley, a U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to examine the Nazi leaders held at Nuremberg, particularly Hermann Göring, reached a deeply unsettling conclusion that challenged prevailing assumptions about the nature of evil. These prevailing assumptions exist today because the majority of people subscribe to the “bogeyman theory” of evil, that all the problems in the world are caused by bogeymen, and if we could just get rid of the bogeymen, everything would be ice cream and lollipops.

Kelley’s Core Theory

Kelley’s central argument was that the Nazi leaders were psychologically normal. After conducting extensive psychiatric evaluations, Rorschach tests, and intelligence assessments on the prisoners, he concluded that these men were not psychopaths, not mentally ill, and not fundamentally different from anyone else. They had average to high intelligence, came from various backgrounds, and displayed a range of personalities—some were bureaucratic and pedantic, others charismatic, still others cold and calculating.

His most disturbing claim was that the conditions that produced the Nazis could produce similar results in any society, including America. He believed that ordinary people, under certain social, economic, and political pressures, could commit extraordinary atrocities. The Nazis weren’t monsters—they were men, which made them far more dangerous as a cautionary tale.

Kelley published his findings in 1947, in a book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg. He found Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring to be “positively jovial over my daily coming.” Kelley concluded in his book 22 Cells in Nuremberg that the Nazis “were not spectacular types, not personalities such as appear once in a century. They simply had three quite unremarkable characteristics in common combined with the opportunity to seize power. These three characteristics were: overweening ambition, low ethical standards, a strongly developed nationalism which justified anything done in the name of Germandom.”

Why His Theory Was Rejected

Kelley’s theory was deeply unpopular for several reasons:

The Western world, particularly in the immediate aftermath of WWII, needed to believe that the Nazis represented an aberration—a uniquely German or uniquely evil phenomenon. Accepting that they were psychologically normal meant accepting that such horrors could emerge anywhere, including democratic societies.

The psychiatric and legal establishments were heavily invested in the idea that they could identify dangerous individuals through psychological assessment. Kelley’s thesis undermined this assumption, and suggested that traditional diagnostic categories might miss the most dangerous social dynamics entirely.

Kelley’s colleague, psychologist Gustave Gilbert, of Jewish descent, also examined the prisoners, and reached the opposite conclusion. Gilbert argued in his book, The Nuremberg Diary, that the Nazis did show evidence of sadistic personality traits and moral deficiency. His interpretation was far more palatable—it suggested the problem was with these particular men, not with human nature or societal structures more broadly.

Gustave’s famous exchange between him and Göring is worth mentioning:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

You can take a test, pioneered by UBC professor Robert Hare to determine if you are a sociopath. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist has become the standard of the psychology profession. The test is widely used despite criticisms by professionals, claiming it is an ineffective and unreliable tool.

If Kelley was right, it meant constant vigilance was required in any society, and that the social conditions, propaganda techniques, and authoritarian structures that enabled Nazism needed to be actively guarded against everywhere. This was a more complex and uncomfortable message than simply prosecuting evil individuals.

The early Cold War period favoured clear moral binaries. Along with Aron Trainin, the Soviet Union played a pivotal and often under-appreciated role in the establishment and conduct of the Nuremberg Trials. Historian Francine Hirsch in her book, Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II emphasizes that the Soviet Union was the primary driver behind the creation of the International Military Tribunal (IMT), with Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov formally calling for a special international tribunal as early as October 1942 to bring Nazi leaders to justice.

Kelley’s nuanced view that emphasized systemic and situational factors over individual pathology didn’t fit the emerging narrative framework of American exceptionalism.

Tragically, Kelley’s later life seemed to confirm some of his own theories about the fragility of psychological resilience—he became increasingly alcoholic and eventually died by suicide in 1958, using the same method (cyanide) that Göring had used to avoid execution.

Kelley's findings would find an unlikely echo sixteen years later in the work of political philosopher Hannah Arendt.

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The Banality of Evil

There are striking parallels between Kelley’s conclusions and Hannah Arendt’s famous “banality of evil” concept, though they arrived at them through different paths and with somewhat different emphasis.

Both Kelley and Arendt reached the deeply uncomfortable conclusion that perpetrators of massive evil can be terrifyingly ordinary people. Neither found the psychiatric pathology, demonic nature, or exceptional wickedness that the public expected and wanted to see.

Kelley examined the top Nazi leadership at Nuremberg and found them psychologically normal. Arendt observed Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial in Jerusalem and was struck by his ordinariness—he wasn’t a monster but rather a mundane bureaucrat who never deeply questioned his role in genocide.

Both emphasized that this ordinariness made the phenomenon more dangerous, not less, because it meant that such horrors could happen again, because ordinary people could potentially become perpetrators. Simply identifying “bad individuals” wouldn’t prevent future atrocities.

Arendt focused more on thoughtlessness—the inability or refusal to think critically, to view things from someone else’s perspective, to question orders. For Arendt, Eichmann’s evil lay not in sadism but in his “inability to think,” his complete absorption in bureaucratic role-playing and clichéd language.

Both Arendt and Kelley’s work were later confirmed in experiments like Milgram’s obedience studies and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment—that ordinary people can commit terrible acts under certain conditions of authority and social pressure. People are willing to do whatever they are told to do without engaging their moral compass, if they are ordered to do so by an authority figure.

Stanley Milgram maintained that “Arendt became the object of considerable scorn, even calumny” because she highlighted Eichmann’s “banality” and “normalcy”, and accepted Eichmann’s claim that he did not subjectively experience himself as having evil intents or motives to commit such horrors; nor did he have a thought to the immorality and evil of his actions, or indeed, display, as the prosecution depicted, that he was a sadistic “monster”.

The Lasting Impact

Kelley and Arendt fundamentally challenged how we understand evil:

The old model that evil requires exceptional wickedness, sadism, or psychological pathology is in sharp contrast to their model that evil can emerge from ordinary people through thoughtlessness, bureaucratic systems, social pressures, and moral abdication. Evil is potential at all times, given the right, or we should say, wrong circumstances.

This has profound implications for prevention because we can’t just screen out the bogeymen—we need to build systems, cultures, and educational approaches that promote critical thinking, moral courage, and resistance to authority when authority demands immoral action.

Totalitarian regimes emerge from the vacuum created by a society that abandons its spiritual, religious, philosophical and cultural values. The ultimate safeguard against Nazism, or any other similar destructive political regime is protecting, fostering and sponsoring its value-based moral foundation—whether that's critical thinking in education, genuine community connection, spiritual depth, or economic systems that don't reduce human beings to units of production.

The West has been bleeding out its foundations for decades, prioritizing efficiency and profit over meaning, connection and community.

Any society, including our own, contains the potential for such horror if conditions align. The film Nuremberg is perhaps a stark cautionary tale for our current times where political extremism on both sides of the fence are stretching the limits of the social fabric. A recent review of the film, Rethinking Nuremberg for the 21st Century, ends with the ominous warning:

“The screenplay suggests that casting people into legal limbo is a harbinger of darker times to come. In other words, it could happen here—and just maybe, it will.”

This understanding of evil's ordinariness poses a challenge for fiction writers like myself: How do we dramatize moral catastrophe when the perpetrators aren't monsters but clerks? When the danger isn't the dramatic villain but the thoughtless bureaucrat? It’s far easier to create monsters and make bogeymen, but maybe these are only cartoon characters, and they don’t do justice in describing the real world we live in.