If I had to choose one lesson that outweighs the rest, it would be this. You are responsible for your own life, even for the parts you did not cause. This is not a fair arrangement. Bad luck happens. People fail you. Circumstances arrive that you never chose and never deserved. None of that changes…
One of the most enduring meditations on wealth was set not in a modern city of glass and steel, but in Babylon, a city of dust and rivers, long returned to the earth. George S. Clason could have written a manual. Instead, he wrote something closer to a fable. And in doing so, he stumbled…
In 401 BCE, a Greek mercenary army of roughly 10,000 soldiers found itself stranded deep in enemy territory after the failure of a Persian dynastic coup. Their leader had been killed and they were surrounded. Their only way home was north through the mountains. And what they met there changed history’s record forever. The Greek…
Most people who pick up Plato’s Republic expect philosophy. What they get in the first book is something closer to a bar argument. Socrates walks into a room, gets pulled into a conversation he didn’t ask for, and ends up in a war of ideas with three very different men. Plato designed Book I as…
The present insists on its own novelty. It frames its crises as self contained, detached from deeper continuities. A potential war involving the United States, Israel, and Iran is often interpreted in this way, reduced to questions of deterrence, nuclear capability, and shifting alliances. Such a reading is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. It…
For anyone interested in politics and philosophy, there must be an understanding that we do not study these fields only to learn from them, but also to teach others how to think about power. The purpose is not to accumulate passive knowledge, but to raise awareness around virtues and vices of life. When we speak…
Invasion rarely begins as ambition, and it is almost never admitted as fear. It is instead framed as necessity that more or less has everything to do with power and nothing to do with logic. States do not describe their actions as expansion, for instance. They describe them as prevention, stabilization, or response to pressure…
The phrase “the blonde beast” comes from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and it appears most notably in his book On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche used “the blonde beast” to describe a type of human being, not a race or ethnicity. He was pointing most basically to a powerful, instinct-driven individual- someone who lives…
There are men who say that war is a necessity, as though necessity were a law of nature and not a confession of failure. They speak of defense and honor and survival, and in their speech there is the comfort of order, as if by naming a thing just they have already made it so….
The Greek historian Thucydides is widely regarded as one of the earliest thinkers to explore the nature of power not as an abstract idea but as a lived and shaping force in human life. His classic work “History of the Peloponnesian War” is not only a record of conflict between Athens and Sparta but also…