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Over the course of these hundred years socialism captured a large part of the intellectual leaders and came to be widely regarded as the ultimate goal toward which society was inevitably moving. This development reached its peak after the Second World War, when Britain plunged into her socialist experiment. This seems to have marked the high tide of the socialist advance. Future historians will probably regard the period from the revolution of 1848 to about 1948 as the century of European socialism.^[1]

Hayek is today known as one of socialism’s greatest critics. Even so, when he wrote these words few would have agreed that socialism had reached its “high tide” twelve years earlier. Even today, most historians would probably say that socialism was at its strongest both inside the west and outside it during the 1970s, before the reforms of Reagan in the US and Thatcher in Britain during the 80s, and the total collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90s. Despite that, it still remains normal for the state to directly control about 40 percent of each country’s economy, and most of the rest indirectly.

I disagree with Hayek about socialism’s date of death. But I also disagree about its date of birth. I do not believe socialism to have been born in 1848. Instead, I believe that the phenomenon is as old as civilization itself, and will remain until its final collapse. Perhaps we may get rid of the word “socialism”, or a specific intellectual tradition within it. But at its core, socialism is an idea, and a very tempting one for the human brain, and ideas do not die. Or at least they can always be resurrected.

Socialism is the idea that power ought to be centralized in the hands of an enlightened elite, to be used for the good of all. The details have varied infinitely throughout the ages, but these are largely the justifications and excuses of the elite. Curiously, that is how Karl Marx himself defined ideology.

Common elite-justifications are superior intelligence and knowledge, divine favor, tradition, a special insight into “the will of the people”, or ideological purity. Such arguments have echoed through history since the pyramids were built.

These demands of the powerful have always been opposed by mankind’s desire for freedom. That is, the belief that people generally know what is best for themselves, better than what distant rulers know. It is the denial of elitism. Throughout history, these two sides have been locked in battle with each other. Which one is right?

The bible puts it this way in Matthew 7:15-6: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”

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Decentralization/freedom has always led to prosperity, and centralization/elitism/socialism has always led to tyranny and poverty. This gives us the answer. Socialism should be judged by its fruits, rather than the endlessly inventive and clever arguments of its proponents.

Jakob Sjölander

^[1] F. A. Hayek. The Constitution of Liberty. Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1960). Chapter 17, page 253.

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The radio announcement was a great shock to Japan. But not only because it meant the end of the war. It was also the first time the vast majority of Japanese subjects ever heard the voice of their Divine Emperor. He had emerged from sublime seclusion to deliver the message.

Since the pyramids were built, the biggest beasts on the planet were the emperors. With divine claims, they ruled mighty states throughout history from Egypt to Mexico to Japan. Like the dinosaurs, just about every trace of them is now gone. The last ruling emperor is actually that of Japan, but he is now a well-adjusted constitutional monarch.

The pharaohs of Egypt claimed to be gods. The Roman emperors were only slightly humbler, and only claimed to become gods after they died. The emperor of China was the Son of Heaven. The Muslims had their “caliphs”, a word that literally means “successor”, as in the successor of the prophet Mohammed. The Byzantine emperor was “the Equal of the Apostles”. The Inca of the Incan Empire was so sacred that when his litter was attacked by the Spaniards, his people threw themselves forward to avoid letting it fall, being cut down by Spanish swords.

Often, the emperors were kept away from the view of their people except on the most important ceremonial occasions. People were not allowed to look at them, and even their servants had to do their jobs with downcast eyes. They met envoys seated behind screens. Heirs were often raised in imperial harems surrounded by courtiers, servants and concubines. The word “harem” literally means “forbidden”. The largest was that of the emperors of China, who lived in a palace called “The Forbidden City” with a supposed 9,999 rooms.

Why? For the sake of mystery and authority. Being thought a god increased the odds of being listened to. But no man is a god. Therefore, emperors were put to an impossible task. They had to pretend to be gods, while only being men. This meant that even though the God-Emperors were incredibly powerful, feared and admired, their power was brittle.

If people got to see their emperors and their bad teeth, smell their foul breath, hear their clumsy jokes and their snoring, experience their pettiness and mistakes – in short, everything that makes them human – the divine aura would dissipate. As Alexander the Great – a man who aspired to the divine respect of his Persian enemies – said, sleep and sex made him conscious of his mortality.

Ultimately, modern technology and communications have made this illusion of divinity impossible to uphold. The less knowledge subjects have of their leader, the more plausible that he is a god. But now we have television, radio and the internet. Social media has brought us closer to our leaders than ever before, for good and ill. This is still a long process, and even the printing press and the ease of travel have contributed. It is now much harder for leaders to aspire to divinity. The only place where semi-divine leaders still rule is North Korea, where the illusion is kept up by extreme repression and isolation.

Many democratic leaders now try the exact opposite path to power that the god-emperors did. Instead of pretending to be special, they present themselves as “the man of the people” or “one of you”. Often, this is also an act.

There is still more truth in the modern view of our leaders as regular human beings than in the idea of the god-emperor. But the change is still a part of what Max Weber called the “disenchantment” of the world, the disappearance of meaning-giving belief in magic. It probably made people happy to think they were ruled by wise and benevolent gods. Now we know this is not the case. But from the fact that we today seem to switch back and forth between lionizing our leaders to being disappointed in them, it is clear that we can’t quite shake the idea that leaders are supposed to be more than mortal.

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Immanuel Kant said that the Enlightenment was the world reaching its age of majority. But this also places a heavy burden of responsibility on us to handle our countries, communities and selves without divine assistance. This is the responsibility of knowledge.

Jakob Sjölander

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The most immediate reason for the Ukrainian successes is their increasing advantage in the drone war. They make more, better, cheaper and more accurate drones than the Russians. Especially the surgical strikes against oil infrastructure far into the vastness of Russia have impressed the world. The people of Moscow and St Petersburg are getting used to the sight of smoke pillars.

But the Ukrainians are also winning on the battlefield. Though casualty figures are secret, some estimates suggest a 1 to 8 kill ratio favoring Ukraine. Even if the real number was only 1 to 2, it would still be a huge advantage. Ukraine’s more defensive tactics are paying off, while the Russian human wave attacks are not.

But drones alone cannot explain this. Ukraine is learning. Russia is not. But why is that? The short answer is freedom. More specifically, freedom of information.

Ukraine is a democracy. That means that information flows up and down the hierarchy, and from side to side. If something goes wrong, soon everyone knows about it. Failures cannot be hidden, to the embarrassment of the people in charge. But it also means that the failures are fixed.

Russia is an autocracy. That means that information mainly flows down the hierarchy, with subordinates obeying their superiors. If something goes wrong, generally only the ones immediately involved learn about it. Often that means that they die. But even if they survive, it is often better for them personally to shut up about it

This is also reflected in the choices both sides have made in how to conduct the war. The Ukrainians are more careful with their troops. They do not send them on cannon fodder suicide missions, and for the most part they are on the defensive, slowly withdrawing when they have to. They slowly trade land to save their soldiers, no romantic last stands.

The Russians are doing the opposite. Poorly trained soldiers are herded like cattle against Ukrainian positions, sometimes for no better reason than to reveal where the machine gun nests are. Most of these are from the Russian slave peoples in Siberia, rather than the Muscovites themselves. Injured soldiers are sometimes executed to avoid the cost of caring for them.

Curiously, these different strategies were not entirely intentional. At the start of the war, there were still plenty of Ukrainian officers with the old soviet thinking where human lives are just resources. There are many stories of Ukrainian officers giving stupid orders causing the annihilation of entire battalions. But this grew politically unsustainable before it grew militarily unsustainable – the public would not accept it. Strategies changed, and the officers who did not adapt were removed. In autocratic Russia, incompetent, corrupt and vicious officers remain in place.

Even today the battle between Soviet and western military thinking is not entirely settled in Ukraine. This explains that recent conflict between defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov and commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi. Though the 35-year-old drone enthusiast Fedorov ultimately lost his job, the fact that people were demonstrating in the streets in his favor means that his work will live on. Syrskyi, who goes by “the Butcher of Bachmut” for the number of Ukrainians he got killed there in 2023, will have to adapt or be replaced.

[Edit: On 21 July, Oleksandr Syrskyi was dismissed].

It is hard to learn if you are dead. But if you stay alive, you will learn more and more and get better at staying alive. This creates a positive feedback-loop for the Ukrainians. They now have an army of veterans, most of whom have been at war for over four years. There is even a small but important core of veterans from 2014, who are the most experienced soldiers in the world at the moment.

The Russians cannot match this, since their soldiers don’t live long enough. Even if the Ukrainians didn’t have the technological edge, it would still be a fight between poor Siberians on their first day on the job and professional soldiers with years of experience of killing poor Siberians.

The only Russians who are safe and likely to have long careers are the officers comfortably behind the lines. But since they are never held personally accountable for their mistakes, they never learn. For them, corruption and pleasing their own bosses is more important than the lives of their troops. Nobody dares to bring bad news.

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It is often claimed that democracies can’t fight, that we are too soft. This belief is what tempted Russia to start the war in the first place. It is certainly true that there is less enthusiasm for war in democracies. But once war becomes an accepted reality for the electorate, democracies are quite capable of defending themselves. Especially long term, when their more intelligent and adaptable social systems start paying off.

Jakob Sjölander

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The big problem with hiding our opinions is that it creates a world where we have to hide. This may lead to a vicious circle, where hiding leads to problems that we deal with by more hiding. Or more correctly, do not deal with. Consider the old farce of someone praising the terrible cooking of a friend, which only encourages more terrible cooking.

By keeping silent about our opinions, we give free range to the people who do not keep silent about theirs. Since they are the only ones making noise, they win by default. And they are unlikely to be the people with the wisest opinion.

This may intimidate regular people. Since the radicals are making all the noise, normal people will start believing that they are abnormal, creating a “silent majority”. This may even affect the radicals, who will convince themselves that they are more numerous than they really are, encouraging them to be even louder. But ultimately, the bubble will burst. Sometimes, this surprises everyone involved.

In recent years, the best example of this phenomenon is Brexit, Donald Trump and the decline of wokeness. These have often come as a surprise to people on the left. In large part, this is because so few people shared their opinions with them that they never realized how many people disagreed with them.

But examples are everywhere. Historically, it can be seen in revolutions and in the sudden collapses of tyrannical regimes throughout history, from France in 1789 to the Eastern Bloc in 1989. Since regimes suppress dissent, they conceal both from themselves and from their peoples how hated they are.

Such regimes are fragile – they could collapse like a house of cards tomorrow. But all too often, they last decades. They are safe as long as the vicious circle of hiding remains unbroken. The regimes will defend those circles with great brutality, as it is a matter of life and death for them. This brutality is the very definition of tyranny, and that is why we respect freedom fighters and democracy activists for facing that brutality.

But the same phenomenon also exists on a much smaller scale, in the social circles of regular people. Too many people live their lives as if walking on eggshells, afraid of offending friends, family, coworkers, or even distant acquaintances on social media. But this ensures that we will keep being surrounded by people who would be offended or turn on us if they knew what we really thought.

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There is a simple solution. Just speak up about what you believe. People will be angry, and people will attack you, yes, but not as many people as you think. Probably. Most people won’t care, and a few will like it. And once those who cannot accept you are gone, the ones who are left will be those who can accept you. Eventually, you will be surrounded not by strangers, but by people who know you and like you anyway. In other words, by friends.

So go ahead, speak up about your belief in the flat earth, or that climate change is true/false, or that you are a wrestling fan, that you don’t like dogs, or that vaccination is for suckers, or whatever. Be a contrarian.

Through truth we create the community we want to live in.

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This is true of the swede Thomas Thorild, who between 1759 and 1808 was a poet, critic, philosopher and proto-feminist. Favored by the king, he was a great intellect who supposedly put his brilliant doctoral thesis together in a matter of hours. But today he is mainly remembered for some obscure words carved into the doorway to the auditorium of his alma mater Uppsala University:

Thinking freely is great

But thinking right is greater

(Sometimes translated as “To think freely is great, but to think rightly is greater”. In the original Swedish: “Tänka fritt är stort men tänka rätt är större”).

While Thorild himself is largely forgotten, people still wonder at these words. Or more correctly, wonder about them…

To some, the words are a call to conformity. People should stop thinking for themselves, and just do what is “right”. Which is whatever the state, the professors or the media tells them is right.

To others, it is a call to rigor. Free thought, creativity and originality are indeed great things. But if they lose all connection with what is right and true and good it turns into error. Perhaps harmful errors.

What did Thorild himself mean? Nobody knows, and while one may speculate, it will never be perfectly known. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from him.

The words capture an eternal struggle of all science and scholarship – the conflict between creativity and correctness. These are always in tension. This is because all learning, discovery and exploration as a matter of definition means heading into the unknown and uncontrollable chaos. This is dangerous. “Here be dragons”, as the ancient mapmakers wrote in the blank spaces.

If we only wanted to be right, we could be so by never taking any risks. Mathematicians might do nothing but add 2 and 2 together and get 4, over and over again. But whenever we depart from that safety, whenever we leave home literally or metaphorically, we take a risk. The risk of error.

This makes creativity hard. But that only applies as long as we stick to high standards. If we didn’t worry about being right, we could build the most fantastic house-of-cards of ideas and thought – postmodernism is a great example of this both in academia and art. That is what happens when we cut all moorings to reality, and make what we want the only measure of success. That is how we end up with a world where men can be women, where a banana duct-taped to a wall can be art, and where everything is oppression by the racist cis-heteronormative patriarchy.

If we cry “yes!” to everything, we will be right about everything which is true. But we will also be wrong about everything that isn’t true. It is also possible to err on the side of caution, where we say “no!” to everything except that which is absolutely certain. That cripples our ability to expand the field of certainty. The challenge of seeking truth, as a scientist, scholar, journalist, detective, politician or a regular person, is to find a balance between “yes!” and “no!”. We should be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains fall out.

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No matter how great freedom is, it must still be below the good, the true, the just and the beautiful. Freedom is valuable, but it is not valuable in itself. Instead it is what allows us to quest for truly good things. If we make freedom our only goal, we give ourselves, our wishes and our desires an importance we are not worthy of. Ultimately, whilst freedom is a great thing, being right is greater.

Jakob Sjölander

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1804. A young English sailor who had escaped from a prison in the interior of France, had succeeded in reaching the coast near Boulogne. Here he made a little skiff, miserably frail, of the branches and bark of trees. This bark he intended to cross the Channel in.

“Did you really intend,” Napoleon said, “to brave the terrors of the ocean in so frail a skiff?”

“Yes,” said the young man, “with your permission I will embark immediately.”

“Have you a sweetheart at home,” asked Napoleon, “that you are so desirous to go to your country again?”

“No,” replied the lad, “but I wish to se my mother, who is aged, poor and infirm.”

Napoleon’s heart was touched. “You shall see her,” he answered, “and give her this purse of gold from me. She can be no common woman to have brought up so good a son.”

A little research informed me that this was a well-known story in the nineteenth century with many versions circulating. Thomas Campbell wrote a poem about it, and in 1908 it was even made into a short film. From the fact that the story is still going around the internet, it has not lost its power.

Is the story true? It might be, though I wouldn’t bet on it. Napoleon was in the area around Boulogne at the time, preparing for an invasion of Britain that never happened. For my purpose here, the truth or lack of truth of the story doesn’t matter.

The story portrays Napoleon in a positive light. He is magnanimous to a man whose courage and love for his mother he respects, even as an enemy. There are many such stories about Napoleon, and by pure statistical probability at least a few of them must have been true. He was certainly a courageous man who also respected courage in others. That is admirable.

But let us not forget his legacy of massive bloodshed. At least three and quite possibly six million people died in the Napoleonic wars, and the name gives a clue as to who was responsible. It is hard to find excuses for Napoleon’s actions, except his lust for glory and power. You do not march your armies over Italy, Egypt, Germany, Spain and Russia for two decades by accident or without knowing the consequences. Napoleon easily betrayed the republican ideals of his youth to crown himself emperor in the same year the above anecdote supposedly took place. As the Swedish poet Esaias Tegnér (in his youth an admirer of Napoleon) allegedly said: “May he suffer in childbirth for everyone he killed!”.

Yet this is easily forgotten when we hear about Napoleon’s kindness to the British sailor. Why?

I believe that it has to do with the vividness of one action and the abstractness of the other. We humans are limited creatures, evolved for life in small tribes of about 150 people. The world of friends, rivals, cousins, siblings, fathers and mothers. These are relations we understand instinctively.

But anything above is just abstractions. The mind adapted to the tribe cannot truly comprehend the death of millions. The best we can do is to convince ourselves that we do. Cities, countries, economies and empires can be understood intellectually, but not instinctively. As Stalin is often quoted as having said: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic”.

Thus, in our minds, a single concrete act of kindness can outweigh the most enormous crimes. We punish murderers with life in prison, but a corrupt politician who has wasted money that could have saved thousands of lives gets off with a few years. Similarly, too many of us happily support Communist dictatorships in faraway lands. Piles and piles of bodies are easily forgotten when we see the man responsible hug his daughter.

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Suitably enough, the French have a phrase for the kind of magnanimous action that so impresses us: “Beau geste”. Collins English Dictionary defines it as “A noble or gracious gesture or act, especially one that is meaningless”.

Jakob Sjölander

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This text was partly inspired by something I wrote about Donald Trump a few weeks ago. That text made certain people angry, though for different reasons. Some thought it was obvious that Donald Trump was an idiot, and that I was an idiot too for not seeing that. Other people thought it was obvious that Trump was a genius, and that I was an idiot for not seeing that. Considering that the point of that piece was that skill is hard to judge, that was a good reaction.

See also: Is Trump a genius 4D-chess player? - by Jakob Sjölander

At its core, skill is the ability to do something well, to be good at something. Someone who is skilled can do things the unskilled cannot, or at least do them with a higher success rate.

But who is skilled? Sometimes this is easy to tell. In sports, for instance. But in other fields it is harder to identify skill. And in the modern world, those fields have seemingly become the most profitable.

For instance, being an idiot on the internet. Today it seems that half the world’s population are influencers in Dubai, making TikTok videos about cats for the other half of the world’s population to ogle at.

This is undoubtedly a skill, as demonstrated by the many people who fail to succeed in this cutthroat business. But often it is very, very hard to tell exactly what this skill is about. Being interesting is hard, and while there are many ways to be interesting, there are apparently many more ways to be uninteresting. Often, the skill of influencers seems to be selling their spectacular lack of skill.

Perhaps I am moralizing. But moral ideas do have a great influence on how we judge people and their skills. Think of the “good thief”, or the “good mobster” or the “good terrorist”. They can be very skilled, but these are skills most people would prefer not to have. For instance, ruthlessness, contempt for the law, and lying.

There is also the excellent example of the many martial arts with the emphasis on the “art”. It is just a fact that most venerable martial arts, such as aikido and tai chi, are mostly useless against modern martial arts with a real sparring component, such as MMA or Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

See also: The Bizarre World of Fake Martial Arts - YouTube

But this is not quite the same as venerable tai chi masters lacking skill. They are very good at what they do. It is just that what they are really good at isn’t what they (sometimes) claim. They are skilled dancers rather than skilled fighters.

Similar problems occur in all fields, such as finance. In his book Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb presents the “Green lumber fallacy”. He retells the story of one of the most successful green lumber traders who is so ignorant of green lumber that he thinks it is lumber painted green, rather than lumber that has yet to dry. It turns out that knowing stuff about actual green lumber is not necessary to trade it, or even very useful. The green lumber trader’s skill lay in other things.

Consider also the case of Brigitte Bardot, the famous actress and sex-symbol of the 60s. President Charles de Gaulle is supposed to have said that she was a French export just as important as Renault cars.

The examples could go on. But this shows how hard it is to define skill, and the kind of mistakes we might make if we try to develop it. The skill of Renault’s engineers and factory workers is easier to see than Bardot’s, which would certainly have been missed by “rational” economic planners.

We just cannot know what skills will be needed in the future. Furthermore, it will constantly change. In a quickly changing world, we do not want to be stuck with the wrong kind of skill, no matter how impressive these are.

Technological change provides infinite examples. Since the first textile workers rebelled against mechanization in the Luddite rebellion of 1811, technology has made many skills obsolete. Consider cavalrymen being replaced by tanks, or secretaries replaced by computers, or the millions of people who now worry about being made obsolete by AI. All of these are justifiably angry that their genuine skills are no longer worth anything. But it doesn’t change facts. Like the proverbial caravan, the world moves on, though the dogs bark.

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How do we handle this as a society? We handle it by not handling it. By doing nothing. We have to let people live their lives in freedom, to try new things and new ideas. This is the great advantage of capitalism and freedom over totalitarian systems.

Unfortunately, this is very hard to do. Creative destruction, as economists call it, is a horrible thing. Our desire to be fair, to rationalize, to be kind, gets in the way. It is too easy to lie to ourselves and convince ourselves that those with “merit” should rule and be rewarded. Usually, that just means replacing those who are good at doing with those who are good at talking.

Jakob Sjölander

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Consider the famous Latin phrase: “Quod est necessarium est licitum”. No Roman ever said it, but it sounds more impressive than the English “What is necessary is legal”. And to impress is very important, since claims of necessity are meant to persuade us to do something. This has been a great excuse of lawbreakers throughout history: “We MUST destroy the enemy”. “We NEED TO strike first.” “We HAVE TO ignore the law.” There is NO TIME to think.” “Trust me or WE DIE.” “The formalities are a WASTE OF TIME.”

In politics, claims of necessity are often used in power grabs. A great crisis, a war, a plague, or a climate catastrophe always looms. And if it doesn’t, it can be invented. Hitler just “had” to save the world from the Jews and Stalin from the capitalists. Often, ideologies justify their monstrosities by the necessity of rescuing the world from each other’s claimed “necessities”!

The importance of necessity in politics is well illustrated by the famous opening lines of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception”. In other words, who can decide when emergencies and necessity demand that we ignore the law. It is hardly a coincidence that Schmitt in the following decade would use this to justify the Nazi takeover of Germany, raising the country from the ashes and pulling it into the fire.

There is a romance to necessity. This comes from the fact that it portrays ourselves and our cause as so important that everything else has to stand back. It allows us to convince ourselves that other people are stupid not to see this necessity. This makes us feel important, and necessity turns into narcissism. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”, as revolutionaries have reasoned through history. I suspect that often the egg-breaking is itself a goal.

It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. It sure does provide a lot of inventive excuses for those who seek power. A test I would recommend is asking the panic monger: “If what you propose was NOT necessary, would you still want to do it?”. If the answer is “yes”, as it most likely would be for Nazis wanting to kill Jews or climate activists wanting to control the economy, there is good reason to be suspicious. Fanatics tend to confuse that which is necessary for that which they already want to do.

But surely, some things truly ARE necessary?

Yes. Though most often it is keeping fanatics from doing what THEY think is necessary.

But we should be aware that we humans are prone to seeing necessity when there is none. Hence the parade of error and lost causes and failed predictions known as “history”. In this world, few things are truly necessary.

Counting generously, I would say that false claims of necessity outnumber true claims at least ten to one, and more likely a hundred to one. Most often, when someone claims necessity, we should lean back, make ourselves comfortable, and call their bluff. These are the great advantages of things that slow down politics, like democracy, tradition, conservatism, due process and law, especially constitutions. And that is exactly why they are hated by radicals everywhere and throughout history.

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When time has passed and no disaster has struck, we can ask the panic mongers for an explanation. Most likely they will either push the expiry date of their prediction further into the future or move on to some other vision of doom. Sometimes they will claim that they at least had our best interest in mind.

In mind, perhaps. But their own best interest at heart.

Jakob Sjölander

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The most easily identifiable example of this flood of good news is YouTube. The site has many large and active pro-Ukrainian channels. I am thinking of Jake Broe, Denis Davydov, to some extent the British tabloid the Sun, Paul Warburg, Preston Stewart and, especially, The Military Show with its over two million subscribers.

Go to any of these channels and look at their list of videos, and you will be greeted with dramatic battle maps, explosions, smiling Zelenskyys, despairing Putins and bold print letters saying things like: “Ukraine is HIDING the Most TERRIFYING WEAPON That Will Win the War”, “Ukraine just Found a Way to DESTROY Russia for PENNIES”, Still Think Russia is Winning? WATCH THIS Before you speak again”, “Analyzing Russia’s Massive Failures in War Against Ukraine”,” Russian Soldiers Keep surrendering for Cash and Socks”, “This could become Putin’s Stalingrad”, Ukraine just Humiliated Russia in the Best Possible Way”.

(Note that videos like these have been posted for years. Therefore, they cannot be explained by the genuine Ukrainian successes in 2026, related to Star Link, new drone types, strikes on Russian refineries, and Russian economic troubles).

One might think that these videos are just propaganda, but that isn’t quite true. Click on them, and you will get surprisingly good information. Though it is all clearly pro-Ukrainian, the thumbnail is typically by far the most radical part of the video. Welcome to the internet.

The business model appears to be to draw people in with clickbait and then keep them coming back with high energy and positive but still reasonably reliable information about the viewer’s favorite team – Ukraine. I can’t deny that I find it enjoyable. There are always nuggets of truth behind the thumbnail.

But it takes more than that to win a war. This creates an apparent contradiction – a constant stream of good news but a stalemate at the front. How can this be explained?

Firstly, such partial news reporting ignores Russian victories and Ukrainian defeats. Secondly, the war in Ukraine is a huge affair. It involves two large countries, hundreds of billions of dollars every year, millions of soldiers, soon almost two million casualties, a thousand-kilometer frontline and a global political landscape. In such a titanic struggle, there can be huge victories and vast tragedies and remarkable heroics to report on that are still just another grain of sand on the beach.

The sheer size of the conflict means that numbers that seem impressive are evened out. A hundred deaths are in most cases an enormous tragedy, but in Ukraine it is just another Tuesday. Similarly, a hundred captured square kilometers sounds impressive, but on a map of Ukraine with its 600 000 square kilometers, you can barely see it. Still, it can be used to motivate thumbnails like “Ukraine liberates MASSIVE area!”.

There is also the problem that good news can be repeated indefinitely if it is not weighed against losses. For instance, Ukraine may capture 100 villages, and if you hear about that over several months it may sound like things are going great. But if the Russians also capture 100 villages, the result is a stalemate. Especially if we also consider that the 100 captured villages may actually be the same village captured and lost 100 times. Or at least the ruins of said village.

Is such warped news-reporting a problem? After all, most of us are not military commanders and have no direct influence on the war. Arguably, the reporting gives harmless entertainment and hope, and may encourage serious studies and support later.

On the other hand, losing touch with reality is rarely a good thing. In extreme cases, it may even lead to a shock if a war is “suddenly” lost. Remember “Baghdad Bob” talking about American defeat in Iraq in 2003 while bombs were falling around him. Similarly, parts of the migrant Japanese community in Brazil refused to accept that Japan had lost World War II. Some even sold their farms and gathered at the docks, awaiting the arrival of the Japanese Navy.

Bad news can lead to bitterness, disappointment, and conspiracy theories. An explanation for the failure must be found. This can lead to “Stab-in-the-back myths”. The most famous example is Germany after World War I. There, politicians and Jews were blamed for the defeat, rather than the complete exhaustion of the country after four years of war and the arrival of American reinforcements.

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Are we being deceived by good news? Yes. But we should not be too quick to try to find someone to blame. Or more precisely, we should realize that the person to blame is ourselves. Good news is addictive. We seek it out, and the market responds.

We deceive ourselves because we want to. The fog of war is thick in part because we want it to be.

Jakob Sjölander

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While there are many reasons to cheat, perhaps as many reasons as there are cheaters, the main reason is obviously that someone wants to pass a test. But why do we want to pass rather than to learn?

Studying, education, schools and universities exist for learning. That is their purpose. Or so one would think. But clearly, cheating at a test will not give any knowledge. (Except perhaps at cheating – which may actually be a very useful skill). But why bother to study in the first place only to cheat? Cheating, one might think, would be robbing oneself of the opportunity to learn.

This could be explained by a mix of laziness and stupidity. But are cheaters really so stupid as to act against their own self-interest? I suspect not. While people certainly make mistakes, as a general rule they know what is good for them. People are not as stupid as other people tend to think they are. It is all too human to dismiss humanity as stupid.

Let’s give the cheaters the benefit of the doubt and at least temporarily assume that they know what they are doing. That they prefer cheating to learning suggests that they believe at least one of the following two things: Either that it will be more convenient to acquire the knowledge in the future than now, or that they do not need to acquire it at all. Neither belief speaks well of the value of education, even if they should turn out to be wrong.

Will cheating come back to bite the students later? Sometimes, but clearly not frequently enough to discourage the cheating. Most useful knowledge is highly specific, while most schooling is highly general. While there are certainly many useful things taught in school, there are certainly also many useless things.

But why study at all? Because we have to. Children study because adults make them, and adults study because society makes them. Schools stop being the way past the obstacle, and instead become the obstacle.

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This doesn’t mean that knowledge is useless. But it does mean that we have failed to convince cheating students that it is useful. Or perhaps more likely, because we have failed to convince them that schools are the way to acquire it.

Perhaps because they aren’t.

Jakob Sjölander

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One might think that this would have been a short war. It still might be. But almost seven weeks after the devastating first strike, the Iranian regime remains defiant.

This raises questions about the importance of leadership. Or perhaps the unimportance of leadership. The Iranian regime does not appear overly inconvenienced by the death of its leaders. The same was, incidentally, true of Hamas and Hizbollah in their war with Israel.

Historically, the killing, capture or suicide of leaders has been the end of war. Hitler’s suicide in his bunker is the prime example. But this is something that has changed on modern battlefields. For the first time in history, missiles, drones and electronic surveillance have made leaders uniquely vulnerable. There is now a very realistic possibility that they are the first rather than the last to die.

Ethically, this is certainly an improvement. Leaders now have skin in the game in a way they didn’t before. While being a leader has never been exactly safe, they have always had the temptation and opportunity to use their people as human shields.

But this also changes the meaning of such deaths. Previously, the deaths of leaders were highly significant. But this was not necessarily because they themselves were actually important, but because their deaths were symptoms of major problems. Leaders only started dying when things were really, really bad.

But today it is possible for a country or other fighting organization to lose its leadership while still being materially intact. There may still be plenty of weapons, money, troops and fighting spirit. Thus far, Iran has only suffered a few thousand deaths out of a population of more than 90 million.

While there is still plenty of dust in the air, it is quite clear that neither Hamas, Hizbollah, nor Iran were paralyzed by the death of their leaders. It is hard to tell how different things would have been if the leaders had remained alive, but there is reason to suspect that it wouldn’t really have mattered. Even though the top brass is annihilated, most people in the organization, the bottom 99 percent, just keep fighting out of habit. Often, the fog of war is so thick that leaders can’t make well-judged decisions anyway.

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The hierarchy adapts. From the fact that Israel and the US have been able to keep killing even replacement leaders (and even the replacements of the replacements) we can tell that leaders are quite replaceable. There is no shortage of ambitious or fanatical people willing to take command. Death is just something that happens to other people. Targeted strikes may even radicalize the enemy, since the new leaders will be people willing to take major risks.

It is often said that we don’t know what we are missing until we lose it. This usually means that the things we have are more valuable than we think they are. But it also works the other way. Losing things, like leaders, sometimes lets us see that they actually weren’t that important. Or at least are more replaceable than they would like to think.

Jakob Sjölander

A big problem in modern society, and indeed in all societies, is that corruption hides in complexity. It is just too hard to pin down the criminals and to prove that they are such. And even if it can be done, and we can convince ourselves of the guilt of the guilty, it is often very hard to convince the public of it.

The case that has brought this to the forefront of my mind is the Swedish “money laundering scandal” and subsequent conviction of Swedbank’s CEO Birgitte Bonnesen for fraud. It is so complicated that I will here only have time for a summary of the summary. A convincing argument would take even longer. The book written by Jan Söderqvist, who first challenged the official narrative, is 300 pages long.

The scandal began as a fake scandal, with false accusations of money laundering from respected journalists. This caused a media storm, a coup inside the bank, abuse of the state’s control agencies, followed by a miscarriage of justice. The dramatis personae includes award-winning journalists, bank executives, bureaucrats, court officials and even a former Prime Minister. Though events stretch back to 2007, the story first broke in 2019. The final scenes have yet to play out, and it is doubtful whether even the upcoming supreme court decision will put an end to it.

I have put in some serious effort to understand the case. I have read Söderqvist’s book, interviewed the author, listened to podcasts, read many articles and even written a few myself. Even so, there are still question marks that haven’t been straightened into exclamation marks. Despite everything, I can’t claim perfect certainty.

This complexity is what made the scandal possible in the first place. There is no conspiracy. Instead, it is a story of laziness and opportunism. Journalists push a narrative they haven’t properly checked, and then it all snowballs. Nobody bothers to check whether it is true. Even the court conviction of former CEO Birgitte Bonnesen is based on such an elementary error as confusing 950 corporations investigated for money laundry for 950 corporations guilty of money laundering.

There are lots of hiding places in this complexity. To quote an interview I made with Söderqvist: “All the time they take the chance that I or someone else won’t know the material, so that they can make whatever stupid claims they want”. In his book he writes: “It puzzles me that Dyfvermark delivers claims that can only convince someone who is totally unfamiliar with the material, which also concerns many of my other questions. He refers to documents that simply does not show what he claims that they show, or documents that are flagrantly unreliable.”[1]

It would be unreasonable to demand that the public take the time needed to truly understand the case. I hear many complaints about the “ignorant public”, that people should “pay more attention” and “get educated”. But people have lives to live. And every second we spend paying attention to one thing is a second we can’t spend on another. Those who complain that people are ignorant about their own pet cause are typically ignorant of all the other causes that compete for attention.

This shows the importance of trust. Both as a problem and a solution. After all, even now I ask the reader to trust my judgement about the Bonnesen affair. Yet the whole affair began with misplaced trust. People trusted the wrong people, and because so many people seemed to trust the untrustworthy, their credibility grew like an avalanche.

But the case also shows the potential influence of individuals. Jan Söderqvist has not, like me, spent several dozen hours on this case. Instead, he has spent several years of his life. Even today, it is unclear whether that will be enough to resolve the case and bring the guilty to justice. It could still end in failure.

This is in large part because even checking his version of events is hard. While it wouldn’t take as long as his initial investigation, since one can follow in his footsteps, it would nonetheless be hard. Especially if one suspected that he was lying, a suspicion that too few people directed at the original claims that began the whole affair. To truly check everything would take a few hundred hours, and would include meetings with dozens of people, trips to Sweden and Estonia, reading bank reports and book-keeping accounts, and developing the skills to understand these.

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Almost nobody would even think about doing this. Which is why the trustworthiness of the people who claim to do this is so important. This is what makes it so important to follow corruption scandals like this to the bitter end.

Why should we care about a rich old lady like Birgitte Bonnesen not having to spend a few months in jail? The answer is that we must tear up corruption with the root. We must make an example of those who have abused the trust of the public. Without that trust AND that trustworthiness, the complexity of modern civilization becomes impossible.

Jakob Sjölander

[1] Jan Söderqvist. Avrättad: Swedbank, myndigheterna och mediemobben. Aniara. (2025). Chapter 4, page 109.

For many years, Hermann Göring was Hitler’s designated successor and in charge of economic planning. In 1946, awaiting execution, he said the following to the war correspondent Henry J. Taylor:

The answer to Göring’s final question appears to be “yes” – even in the postwar era democratic nations have tried to control prices and wages, despite constant proof that it does not work. The most common examples are rent control and minimum wages. Today, the newly elected mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, is leading the ancient fight of Man vs. Prices. There is still a chance that he will win. But if so he – or at least the people of New York – will bitterly regret that victory.

I found the above Göring-quote in a book called Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls: How Not to Fight Inflation, by Robert L. Schuettinger and David I. Meiselman. The title says it all. The book is short and well-written, but it still feels repetitive by the end. It also came out in 1979, but is just as relevant today as then. The reason for this is, in Göring’s words, that “countries will not learn from the mistakes of others and will continue to make the mistakes of others all over again and again”.

Why is this? Well, wages and price controls are somewhat complicated things. Which is also why I won’t go into it here in any detail. But this can’t be the whole story. People are quite capable of understanding complicated things. Or at least trust other people to do it. This is why our bridges do not collapse, why our smartphones don’t burst into flames, and our nuclear power plants do not blow up.

SE ALSO: Why it profits us to pay - by Jakob Sjölander - Ignorance

All of these things are much more complicated than basic price theory. Why can’t we just accept that if we want something, we must pay for it, and that if we don’t pay for it, we won’t get it?

Let us note just how reality-resistant this is. Again and again since ancient history, empires and regimes have impoverished and sometimes destroyed themselves trying to control prices. It was tried in Egypt, Babylon and Rome. In the winter of 1777-8, the American revolutionaries almost starved their own army to death at Valley Forge. Two centuries earlier, the city of Antwerp used price controls to blockade itself far more effectively than the besieging Spaniards, forcing itself to surrender.

The problem is clearly psychological rather than logical. Wrong is often very complicated, while right is often as simple as 2+2=4. There are many reasons why we struggle to understand prices. But the most important is the failure of tiny human minds to understand something as complicated as the vast million-headed human economies. The ant does not understand the anthill.

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This makes us short-sighted. At any given moment, forcing prices down is attractive. The benefits are immediate and obvious, the problems far less so. If only a few people buy cheaper than the seller would normally accept, it is even sustainable. But this is still stealing, and while stealing may make a few people rich, it can never make everybody rich. Even if the people who are being robbed are the “evil rich” or “the greedy capitalists”, we will eventually run out of other people’s money. And then our economies – networks of trust and trade – will break down.

Maybe we will learn our lesson. But even if we do, it will be forgotten in a few generations. When it comes to price controls, history really does repeat itself.

Jakob Sjölander

The late queen Elizabeth II did not seem very powerful, and by law she wasn’t. Just a sweet old lady with a funny hat. Even so, she was probably the single most famous, admired, and celebrated person of the twentieth century. Mighty leaders from Churchill to Trump by way of Nasser, Nehru, de Gaulle, Gorbachev and Putin lined up to kiss her ass hand.

Sure, the queen’s vicious posse of Welsh Corgis (ever ready to tear flesh from bone) explains 90 percent of this, but not all. The remaining 10 percent is a strong testament to the symbolic yet very real power of constitutional monarchy.

In political philosophy, the classical tripartite separation of powers is between legislation, adjudication, and execution. The reason for the separation of powers is that power is dangerous. Too dangerous to be left to the same person, or even the same group of people. As long as no politician gains ultimate power, they will have to keep plotting against each other rather than against us, the people.

For the same reason, it also makes sense to separate the symbols of power from actual power. For the glory of power is itself a form of power. It is a dangerous weapon. That weapon can be used to gain more power. Keeping the glory out of the hands of ambitious politicians helps safeguard the system.

But an even greater benefit is psychological – it keeps people from letting power get to their heads. Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Therefore, it is good that the ruler’s ego is kept in check. During the triumphal processions of conquering Roman generals, there was always a slave standing behind the general whispering in his ear, reminding him that he was mortal.

No matter how high a politician may climb, the monarch is still above him. The fact that there is no legal or moral way for a politician to get beyond that helps to calm his ambitions. The king will always take precedence at public ceremonies and such like. No matter how powerful a modern leader in a constitutional monarchy is, he can never become king. At least not without an obvious breach with the traditions and culture of his country – exactly what makes kingship valuable in the first place. In the modern world, this ultimate glory cannot be achieved without destroying it. This puts it beyond reach, which is a good thing.

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The Prime Minister of Britain has weekly audiences with the king to “discuss government matters”. The proceedings are secret. Perhaps because it involves getting ritually slapped, splashed in the face with scalding tea, having one’s teeth broken by hard British scones, having one’s feet nibbled by Corgis, and being scolded by a grumpy old man. This is an excellent memento mori for the Prime Minister.

It is not difficult to think of other modern rulers, such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, who would profit from such regular lessons in humility.

Jakob Sjölander

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Today there are people with extraordinary plans – or at least dreams – about mankind’s future. A notable example is Toby Ord, who in The Precipice gazes billions of years into the future, urging proper action before the speed of light and the expansion of the universe makes large parts of it forever inaccessible. We must do our best to secure mankind’s future by, for instance, not nuking ourselves into oblivion. Toby Ord has complained that mankind spends more on ice cream than on safeguarding our future.

But there are exceptions to this indifference – the most obvious being global warming, which we have spent trillions of dollars to combat. Fighting climate change is a great example of trying to make tomorrow better today. It is basically an attempt to give a gift to future generations. But – is this actually something we can do?

Let’s look back a hundred years, to 1926. If they had been trying to make decisions for us today, what would they have done? These were the roaring twenties. It was an age of electricity, airplanes, radio, films and cars. They also had their own visions. The Communist Soviet Union was the wave of the future. Eugenics was the key to avoiding the degeneration of the race. Disarmament would save civilization from another devastating world war.

Bright new dreams. A world without war – disarmament. A world without poverty – Communism. A world without frailty – eugenics. But today we know better. Disarmament led to the second world war, where Hitler’s dream of eugenics murdered millions. It allowed the communist dream to spill out of the Soviet Union and engulf large parts of the world, quickly turning into a nightmare. Looking back on 1926, it is clear that the greatest threats to the future were actually their attempts to make it better.

We do not know what will work. Our ability to see into the future is limited, and that also limits our ability to plan and prepare for it. There are traps hidden out in the darkness, in the form of wars, revolutions, novel technologies and errors, and these traps are baited with the promise of avoiding them. The future is murky and unpredictable as ever, if not more so.

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But something that we can do is to do well in the present, and in the immediate and just-visible future. This gives our children something to inherit – literally. The best we can do to improve the future is to improve the people and communities who are to face it – ourselves. Let us build better societies in the here and now, which we can see and touch, rather than in the future.

This is the path of humility. It is likely to do future generations more good than our feeble attempts to predict the future. The only realistic benefit that will give them is the opportunity to laugh at their ancestors.

Or curse their folly.

Jakob Sjölander

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We live in the Age of Trump. The man is everywhere, inescapable, invincible and utterly ridiculous. Mark Twain’s words come to mind, though uttered about the mining magnate, politician and colonialist Cecil Rhodes over a hundred years ago:

“He has done everything he could think of to pull himself down to the ground; he has done more than enough to pull sixteen common-run great men down; yet there he stands, to this day, upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an Archangel with wings to half the world, Satan with a tail to the other half.

I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.”[1]

I don’t know how Trump’s story will end. If he is hanged, the rope would certainly be a worthy keepsake. He is an archetypal “Great man”, as in someone with a clear individual influence on history.

But despite all of Trump’s achievements – for good and ill – there is still considerable doubt as to how much is skill and how much is luck. Many people still think him a fool. If so, has he achieved what he has achieved despite or because of his folly? He does have an uncanny ability to twist reality into what he wants it to be.

Perhaps Trump is the most underestimated man in history. Though it is hard not to fall into that trap when he keeps saying silly, petty and even monstrous things. Consider this extract from a letter to the Prime Minister of Norway during his recent attempt to seize Greenland. It is by no means the worst example:

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”[2]

Trump’s defenders often claim that this is just cunning strategy. The internet is overflowing with memes about Trump playing “4D chess”, totally outclassing his opponents.

Maybe. Trump, like everyone, has his moments. But usually, his petulance, childishness, and anger seem very real. That doesn’t mean it can’t be combined with genuine insight, ruthlessness and cunning. That Trump doesn’t care about the rules (or know about them?) means that he can often blindside more conventionally intelligent and informed people.

Whatever Trump’s skill or lack of such, it is fascinating that we are even having this discussion. Usually, it is far easier to tell whether someone has skill. Nobody would doubt that an Olympian is good at his sport, that a professor knows his field, or that a chess grandmaster is really good at chess.

Especially the example of the chess grandmaster is relevant, and not only because Trump’s supporters claim that he is playing “4D chess”. If Trump was playing regular chess, it would be easy to evaluate his skill.

The reason is that chess is simple. Now, that chess is simple is not the same as chess being easy. But chess is simple in that the rules are perfectly defined, there is no hidden information, and there is no (or extremely little) influence of chance. That makes it very different from the world of politics.

Politics is complex, mysterious and random. Luck plays a key role. That makes it unfair. The clever can fail, and the clueless can win. Perhaps it doesn’t even make sense to speak of “skill” in the context of politics – it is closer to lottery, rock-paper-scissors or a drunken bar brawl than to chess. Either way, it is difficult to judge a politician’s skill. Disaster might imply but not guarantee folly, and success might imply but not guarantee skill.

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History is littered both with politicians who first met with triumph and then disaster, like Heraclius, Napoleon and Hitler, and those who met with disaster and then triumph, like Francesco Sforza, George Washington and Winston Churchill. Other rulers had bumpy rides during their entire careers – Trump should take special note of the four-times excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. He was known as “Stupor mundi”, often translated as “The Wonder of the World”, but perhaps more appropriately as “The Stupefaction of the World”.[3]

So – is Trump skilled or not? Is he a genius pretending to be an idiot? An idiot pretending to be a genius? A genius pretending to be a genius? An idiot pretending to be an idiot? Or perhaps most plausible, a human being just trying to muddle through and ride the whirlwind?

I don’t know. And no-one will ever know for sure. Not even Trump himself.

Jakob Sjölander

[1] Mark Twain. Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World. The Floating Press. (2009)[1897]. Chapter LXIX, page 670.

[2] Michael Drummond. Trump’s extraordinary letter to Norway about Greenland – in full and fact-checked. Sky News. (19-01-2026). Trump’s extraordinary letter to Norway about Greenland - in full and fact-checked | US News | Sky News. (Accessed 07-02-2026).

[3] G. K. Chesterton. St. Thomas Aquinas. (1933). Chapter 2.

That is a familiar threat. And paying for stuff does have a bad reputation. Nobody likes it, and everybody likes free stuff. But in the real world, free stuff is rare. Usually, it only means that someone else is paying.

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The problem is easy to see. If something is “free”, it is either a gift or theft. In other words, someone else is paying either voluntarily or involuntarily. And while we don’t like paying, we do like getting paid.

No matter whether we receive our free stuff as a gift or through stealing, it is unlikely to be sustainable. If it is a matter of stealing, the person who is being robbed will eventually run out of things to steal. The same applies if it is a matter of gifts. Though in most cases, people’s patience is going to run out first. Sooner or later, it is “payback time”.

Paying makes things sustainable, since both parties of a trade profit by it. The buyer profits by getting what he bought, the seller by getting money. If both hadn’t seen it as a good deal, they would not have accepted. Thus, both parties are better off with the trade than before. They are richer, happier, and likely to be looking forward to more trading. That is sustainability.

Payments and prices are forms of communication. They are signals and rewards. Prices are loud voices screaming “Bring me more of this!”. The higher the price, the higher the voice. A low voice/price is less encouraging. It is in our interest to make that voice as loud as possible, to provide as much encouragement as possible to those who might get us what we want.

Ironically, high prices make a lot of people angry. We feel cheated. But it is unlikely that we actually are cheated, at least if we have the option to walk away. As long as there are different sellers that compete with each other, they will force each other to keep their prices down. If a seller starts charging more than his competitors without justifying it through something like quality or convenience or security, we the buyers will go someplace else.

The idea that we are being cheated by the seller is based on the assumption that they could have charged us a lot less – that they are “the big soulless rich evil multinational corporation”. Perhaps they charge 100 dollars for a product that only takes 10 dollars to make.

But generally, it isn’t true that corporations could afford to lower prices very much. In the third quarter of 2025, the Standard & Poor’s 500 (the 500 biggest companies traded on the US stock market) broke new records for highest net profit. This was 13.1 percent[1]. The record was driven by the very profitable real estate and tech sectors. Other companies even lost money.

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But this means that on average, even if we took away all the profits of the companies and demanded they make zero profit and therefore work for free, we would only reduce the price of something that cost 113 dollars to 100 dollars, on average. Nice – but not sustainable, fair, or even very profitable. Typically, there just isn’t much to gain from soaking the rich corporations, at least if we don’t want to push them into bankruptcy.

So let’s pay those extra 13.1 percent to keep the seller in business. It profits us to pay.

Jakob Sjölander

[1] John Butters. S&P Reporting Highest Net Profit Margin in Over 15 Years. Factset Insight. S&P 500 Reporting Highest Net Profit Margin in Over 15 Years. 17-11-2025. (Accessed 18-02-2026).

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John Davidson suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome. For him, one symptom is that he can’t stop himself from screaming naughty words at the top of his lungs. At the awards ceremony, this became “Shut the fuck up!”, “Fuck you!”, “Big tits!”, “Piss!”. To top it off, he even used (five times!) the dreaded “n-word” when black actors Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo were on stage. (And no, it wasn’t “Ni” or “Nincompoop”).

As I have been led to believe that the kids say these days: “Cringe”.

John Davidson was at the BAFTAs because he was being honored. For decades he has been a spokesperson about Tourette’s Syndrome, the subject of several documentaries, and he has even been made a “Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire”. Even more relevantly, the feature film “I Swear” about his life won several awards at the show. I haven’t seen it, but it has been widely praised. Partly for not “sugarcoating” the reality of Tourette’s or giving in to “sentimentality”.

John Davidson left the awards ceremony early.

This raises many difficult questions of real-world morality. Most immediately: What should have been done?

First, we have the question of whether to invite Davidson or not. If we do invite him, we have the question of what can be tolerated. We have to consider both Davidson himself and other people present. Obviously, it is not John Davidson’s fault that he behaved the way he did. That is the entire point of Tourette’s. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is a problem, and it would be a problem even if it was just regular shouting rather than racial slurs. The situation could be compared to bringing someone with a stomach bug to a party. If someone is puking like a fireman’s hose, they can’t be blamed, but it must be handled. In the real world, there must be limits to tolerance.

Yet there is something strange about not inviting someone to a celebration that is about him and his hardships. It reminds me of Hattie McDaniel, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Gone With the Wind in 1939, but was banned from many celebrations because she was black.

Of course, Davidson is the worst victim of his tics. One could argue that in Davidson’s case it would be kinder not to invite him, for his own sake. You wouldn’t, for example, drag someone suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s to a party, even if the point is to honor them. Especially if the point is to honor them. Sometimes, exclusion is more respectful than inclusion.

In the end, there is no clear-cut answer. We want to invite Davidson to the party, but we also want to avoid incidents. This involves inevitable risks. How well could we, before the event, expect Davidson to handle it? And once he was there, how much should we accept before asking him to leave? Both for his own sake and for others.

To answer this question, we have to answer four unanswerable questions:

1. What is an acceptable level of swearing from Davidson?

2. What are the odds of Davidson staying below that level?

3. Are those odds and that risk acceptable?

4. Given that we accept the bet, what do we do if things don’t work out?

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At the BAFTA awards, it seems that the organizers responsible lost that bet. Though this doesn’t necessarily mean that they were wrong in accepting it – maybe they just had bad luck, maybe they had good reason to believe it would work out.

Such is life. Ignorance is inevitable. We can only do our best to handle it, and accept that this will not always be enough.

Jakob Sjölander

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In 1932, Klaus Mann (son of Nobel Prize winner Thomas) was drinking tea in a Munich café. At the table next to him sat an up-and-coming politician. Mann was not impressed:

“You will not prevail, Schicklgruber – even if you scream your heart out. And you want to dominate Germany? You want to become a dictator – with that nose? I could die laughing! You are so pathetic that one could almost feel sorry for you – if your patheticness weren’t of such a particularly repulsive kind... Go ahead and have another strawberry pastry, Schicklgruber – is that the fifth one? In a couple of years you won’t be able to afford it anymore; you’ll be a beggar, a forgotten man in just a few short years. You will never come to power!”[1]

Less than a year later, Hitler (born Schicklgruber) was Reich Chancellor of Germany, and soon afterwards Klaus Mann was in exile. The above quote comes from his 1942 autobiography The Turning Point. Thus, he knew what would happen when he wrote it. Even so, he couldn’t help but add:

“I could never wrap my head around the fact that the Germans could seriously see Hitler as a great man, even as a Messiah. Him great? You only had to look at him!”[2]

But clearly it was not enough only to “look at him”. Hitler was constantly underestimated throughout his early career. Consider German president Paul von Hindenburg’s remarks after a boring meeting with Hitler, also in 1932:

“He was a strange figure, that Hitler. Never in my life do I believe he can become Reich Chancellor; at most he could become Postmaster General.”[3]

Mankind’s ability to predict the future wasn’t any better outside Germany’s borders. Consider this summary by Thomas Sowell in his Intellectuals and Society:

“In Britain, as in France, there was a strong resistance among the intelligentsia to recognizing the nature of the Nazi regime within Germany or the external threat that it posed to Western democracies. The influential Manchester Guardian said that, despite the Nazis’ radical ideas, they would act like “ordinary politicians” when they took office. Britain’s largest circulation newspaper at the time, the Daily Herald, dismissed Hitler as a “clown” and opined that he would share the fate of his immediate predecessors as Chancellor of Germany, whose terms had lasted only a matter of weeks. The Daily Telegraph likewise said that Hitler was “done for” and would be gone before the end of 1932. Harold Laski likewise declared in 1932 that “the Hitlerite movement has passed its apogee,” that Hitler was a “cheap conspirator rather than an inspired revolutionary, the creature of circumstances rather than the maker of destiny.” The most influential British newspaper, The Times of London, considered Hitler a “moderate,” at least compared to other members of his party.”[4]

Underestimating people is dangerous. This isn’t just because they may turn out better than we think, or as in Hitler’s case, far worse. It is because we live in an unpredictable world. Perhaps Mann’s judgement of Hitler was actually correct – perhaps his ascent to power was very unlikely and unrelated to his ability. But clearly, it wasn’t impossible. And a necessary condition to make it possible was that many people thought it impossible.

This also applied in reverse. Hitler clearly thought that his dreams were possible. He would not have tried otherwise. Though ultimately unsuccessful, his dream – the nightmare of Europe – almost came true.

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During World War II, Klaus Mann served in the US army, working mainly with psychological warfare and counterintelligence. He became one of the first eyewitnesses to the horrors of the Holocaust. He died in 1949, probably by suicide.

One shouldn’t underestimate people who eat strawberry pastries.

Jakob Sjölander

[1] Daniel Rydén. 101 historiska misstag. Historiska media. (2012). Section “Klaus Mann tar Hitler för en pajas”, page 296.

[2] Daniel Rydén. 101 historiska misstag. Historiska media. (2012). Section “Klaus Mann tar Hitler för en pajas”, page 298.

[3] Daniel Rydén. 101 historiska misstag. Historiska media. (2012). Section “Klaus Mann tar Hitler för en pajas”, page 297.

[4] Thomas Sowell. Intellectuals and Society. Basic Books. (2011). Chapter 7, page 232.

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I don’t know how sincere Putin’s claims of encirclement and plots against Russia were. Perhaps they were just for domestic consumption, to justify his planned conquest of Ukraine. Perhaps he himself doesn’t quite know. It is clear that Putin has on many occasions told lies – just consider his bizarre claims of the attempts to establish an “anti-Russia” in Ukraine, led by the Jewish Nazi Volodymyr Zelensky. But even liars do not always lie – though sometimes only because they have tricked even themselves.

If Putin wasn’t lying, he was mistaken. There were no Western designs on Russia. Quite the opposite, in fact. If the West did have designs on Russia, these could easily have been achieved in the 1990s, when Nato-forces could just have waltzed into Moscow – or bought it from the oligarchs’ bargain bin. Instead, foreign aid and generous loans kept Russia afloat. Indeed, American president George H. W. Bush in his 1991 “Chicken Kiev-speech” spoke against the breakup of the Soviet Union, fearing chaos.

Even after the 90’s, the generous treatment continued despite Russia’s wars in Chechnya and Putin’s ever more blatant dictatorship. The economic ties grew and Nato expansion was halted, despite pleas from Georgia and Ukraine. Not even the Russian invasion of the former in 2008 could keep Barack Obama from cancelling the proposed missile shield in Poland in 2009 to spare Russian feelings. The occupation of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014 met little opposition in the West.

Note that this was not because the West didn’t have a choice. Even today, with Russia involved in a huge war, Nato military spending is about 12 times higher. The economic advantage is even greater.

It is safe to say that there was no master plan to destroy Russia. The West genuinely wished for peace and trade, and was quite willing to tolerate Putin’s regime. But now, obviously, the West (or at least most European countries) really are plotting against Russia. Because Russia gave them no choice.

This is the tragedy of paranoia in politics. Putin’s pursuit of security has made both Russia and his regime less safe. The path of safety, the path of fear, can be a road to ruin. Russia has been Russia’s worst enemy. Indeed, it’s only enemy. Not even decades of Western friendship and appeasement could put Russia’s and Putin’s paranoia to rest. It is doubtful whether anything could.

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Trust is often safer than paranoia. Though if you are paranoid, you will answer that this is exactly what your enemies want you to believe…

Jakob Sjölander

[1] Simon Shuster. The Showman: Inside the Invasion that Shook the World and Make a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky. William Morrow. (2024). Chapter 1, page 11.