In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond studied a dozen societies across thousands of years, from the Maya to the Vikings, to answer one question: why do great civilizations fall? What he found wasn't drought, war or bad luck. None of those were ever enough on their own. The one thing present in every collapse was how the people at the top responded to what was happening below them. The warning sign he found again and again was leaders who were completely insulated from the pain of ordinary people. When the powerful never feel the consequences, they stop seeing the problem, and when they stop seeing it, they stop fixing it. The Maya kings kept enriching themselves and building monuments while the farmers who fed them went hungry. Their civilization didn't fall because of one bad year. It fell because the people in charge had stopped living in the same world as everyone else. Diamond called them "distant managers." They are the people in power who live so far from the damage that they are the last to understand how bad it has gotten. By the time they notice, the fields are already empty. His most important finding was that collapse is a choice. Every society that fell had leaders who could have changed course and chose not to. The question for us is whether we will keep letting people who can't see us make that choice for us. Because we are there folks.

People keep saying Trump term II is the most corrupt administration ever, so I built a model to find out if it was true. I took the UN's definition of corruption, turned it into eight criteria and 100 points, and scored the leaders history remembers for looting their countries: Marcos, Suharto, Mobutu, Abacha, Obiang, Putin. Then I put every president since Eisenhower on the same scale, both parties, with every exoneration counted right alongside the convictions. Nixon scored 41 and no other American President scored over a 25. Trump's second term scored a 91, which ties him with Suharto and Mobutu and puts him above Marcos and Abacha. So he is not only the most corrupt president in American history. At this pace he finishes his term level with the most corrupt rulers of the last hundred years. PSA: don't come in my comments arguing about the results if you haven't read the full article, because ignorance is a choice. Full article is up now on my Substack (link in bio) and it's free.