The critical drivers or currents of Western life right now? Populism, the deliberate destruction of…

The critical drivers or currents of Western life right now? Populism, the deliberate destruction of hierarchies that run societies, the destruction of trust built upon experience and expertise. And the severing of the circle of life by the cultural separation of child from…

Populism replaces centuries of hard-won knowledge and experience not with its claimed ‘democratic’ flattening of all hierarchy. It creates a new hierarchy, based only on popularity. High school culture. This is where the two currents link. A culture for which only a present…

Replacing institutional life embedding multi-generational insights, not rationally created but constructed out of the ruins of cataclysmic destruction and death, throughout history. Our institutions always emerge to repair cataclysms. /3

The lethal overlay upon this populist shift which exists throughout history, is the relatively modern separation of child from adult life. Only a century ago that was new. Until that point in history, children were mostly little adults. They shared adult work. /4

Mass schooling shifted this profoundly. Now children were extracted from adult life for their entire childhood, and placed in schools. More than anything they learned there, they learned a culture. School culture, which they largely created. /5

Emerging from school as young adults, that’s the culture they then re-made adult life with. The boomers were the vanguard, and their phenomenal numbers created the tipping point which overturned adult life. Now everything is a high school. At all ages. /6

In the West at least, we have entire populations of adults who are incapable of conceiving of adult life except in adolescent ways. That’s the culture they were raised in. They’re not bad people. They’re ordinary people, enacting a dysfunctional culture. /7

Like the often maligned 60s hippies, who confronted existential problems as old as time, like violence and war, with sweet flower-power requests for everybody to just stop doing it. Often to some soundtrack, popular music became a substitute for action. /8

Tragically, even comically naive. And yet to this day our ‘activist’ culture is still this, unalloyed. When married to populism, which pre-dates this split by millennia, the whole Western edifice faces collapse. /9

It was one thing for a populist like Caesar to use the ‘power to the people’ schtick to overturn a Senate. Populist insurgencies like that always returned to an adult life when they ran out of puff. But there is no adult life now for us to return to, when populists like Trump…

Just whole populations of permanent teenagers, who sweetly think electing a new Prom King will fix it. This populist-kidult assault is so universal and entrenched that we don’t see it. Fish don’t know water is exists until they’re beached. Culture is invisible to those living…

For example the idea that the task of a family is to raise their kids, who then each individually go out into the world to ‘make their own way’, creating their own families. That’s the child-adult split above. The cultural mechanism here is designed to permanently upend and…

The culture can’t consolidate or build when the task of every new child is to become a revolutionary, a counter-cultural stormtrooper, continuing the 60s revolution. To forge the world anew in their own image, disconnected from the world of their parents or grandparents. /13

Every single component of that mechanism leads to social collapse. Welcome to 2026. /end