Happy new year to you all, may 2026 treat us all better than 2025 did. Please do pardon my absence, the Holiday season caught me in its throes and I have been spending my free moments over the last month attempting to gather my scattered ideas into a unified whole.
I'd like to introduce you to that unified whole now.
If you've been reading my work over the last month, you've probably noticed a through-line—lovelessness, materialism, the manufactured psychology, White supremacy, the failure of communities, the systems which keep us imprisoned while convincing us we're free. These weren't random musings. Although I was too close to the picture at the time, I was mapping the terrain of a much larger project that I've finally gained the perspective to see fully.
So, here it is. The thesis. The framework. The thing I'll be spending the foreseeable future trying to communicate, develop, and actualize.
The Western world order is rotten to its core, and it cannot be reformed from within. The economic systems, the political systems, and the spirit that animates them have fused into a machine that is working exactly as designed. Asking it to change is begging your oppressor for mercy they will never grant. The only path forward is total revolution.
Total Football
I'm a big fan of Ted Lasso. (If you haven't watched it, stop reading and go do that. I'll wait.)
There's a moment in the show where the club is struggling and in dire need of a new strategy. Ted—who is going through a tough time in his personal life—takes a batch of shrooms. Of course, he would later find out the batch was a dud, but while believing himself to be on shrooms he (re)invents the Dutch football philosophy called "Total Football," pioneered by Johan Cruyff. The idea is that every player on the pitch can play every position. The striker drops back to defend. The defender pushes up to score. There are no rigid roles—just fluid, interconnected movement where everyone understands the whole system and can contribute anywhere. Perfect for Richmond.
That's what I mean by Total Revolution.
Every struggle is connected to every other struggle. Anti-racism, feminism, queer rights, disability justice, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, anti-zionism, decolonization, de-dollarization, labor rights, immigrant rights, constitutional rights—these aren't separate movements fighting separate battles. They're positions on the same pitch, and the system we're up against requires us to play all of them, fluidly, together. You can't win by mastering one position while ignoring the others. The opposing team will just exploit the gaps.
If you take all these movements and you actually win all of them simultaneously, there is no existing world order left to integrate into. Every system of oppression is structurally linked. Pull one thread, and you must pull them all. The fabric doesn't reform; it unravels.
Frantz Fanon was the first (as far as I am aware) to apply Marxist ideas specifically to race. We must continue the tradition he began and apply the Marxist theoretical foundation to the diverse reality of social oppressions. 2026 has just begun—it's about time the left develops contemporary theory for a kind of Intersectional Marxism and puts it into practice.
A revolution that does not address and understand the entire system it revolts against is not a revolution. It is a rearrangement of the furniture in a burning house.
The Western Imperial World Order
Revolution implies an existing structure to revolt against. To understand this structure, we need to do our due diligence as Marxists and explain the distinction between base and superstructure.
The base (or foundation) of any society refers to its mode of production—the material, economic foundation upon which everything else is built. This includes the forces of production (technology, resources, labor power) and the relations of production (who owns what, who works for whom, how wealth is distributed). The base is the machinery of material life: how goods are produced, who controls that production, and how the fruits of labor are divided.
The superstructure refers to everything built atop this material foundation: culture, ideology, religion, law, politics, media, education, art—the realm of ideas, beliefs, and institutions that don't directly produce material goods but shape how we think about and relate to the world. The superstructure emerges from the base and, in turn, works to justify, legitimize, and reproduce the base.
For us, the base we must revolt against is the Western Imperial World Order—I've started calling it WIWO. It is the global capitalist system as it actually exists: a hierarchical arrangement of nations, institutions, and economic relationships designed to extract wealth from the many and concentrate it in the hands of the few.
The Material Reality of WIWO
WIWO is not an ideology. It is a machine. It is the concrete, material structure of global capitalism in its imperialist phase. Let me be precise about what this includes:
1. The Global Capitalist Mode of Production
At its core, WIWO is capitalism extended to planetary scale. The means of production—factories, farms, mines, intellectual property, digital infrastructure—are privately owned, predominantly by corporations and individuals concentrated in the imperial core (North America, Western Europe, and their vassal states like Japan, South Korea, and Australia). The vast majority of humanity sells their labor to survive, creating value that flows upward to owners.
But WIWO is not simply capitalism; it is capitalism organized imperially. The global economy is structured so that wealth flows systematically from the periphery (the Global South, the "developing world") to the core. Raw materials are extracted from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Manufacturing is offshored to exploit cheaper labor. Profits are repatriated to shareholders in New York, London, and Zurich. This is the system's primary function.
2. Dollar Hegemony and Financial Control
The architecture of global finance is designed to enforce WIWO. The US dollar serves as the world's reserve currency, meaning nations must accumulate dollars to participate in international trade. This gives the United States extraordinary power—the ability to print the currency the world needs, to impose sanctions that exclude nations from the global economy, and to run deficits that would collapse any other country.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank function as enforcers. When nations in the Global South face economic crisis (often caused by the very terms of global trade), these institutions offer "assistance"—loans with strings attached. These strings, called "structural adjustment programs," (SAP's) typically require privatization of public assets, deregulation, austerity, and opening markets to foreign capital. The result is the transfer of national wealth to international creditors and the permanent dependency of debtor nations.
However, in 2015 BRICS founded the New Development Bank—NBD, as an alternative to the World Bank for funding development projects without the SAP's.
The SWIFT banking system allows the United States to monitor and control international financial transactions. Nations can be cut off at will—as Russia discovered in 2022, as Iran has known for decades. Financial exclusion is a weapon of war without bullets.
Again, BRICS is deploying an alternative banking system called CIPS which is already being used to conduct 90% of international trade between China, Russia, and India.
3. Control of the Means of Production
The imperial core maintains control not just through ownership but through technological dependency. Advanced manufacturing, pharmaceutical production, semiconductor fabrication (although this is being shaken up by China and Xi's new years "unstoppable" assurance that Taiwan—the primary producer of semiconductors—will be reunified with China), aerospace engineering—the commanding heights of the modern economy remain concentrated in the West and its allies. The Global South is permitted to assemble, to extract, to manufacture low-value goods, but the patents, the profits, and the power remain elsewhere.
BRICS, and especially China, is narrowing this gap every year—and may soon take an indisputable lead.
Intellectual property law—enforced through trade agreements and international institutions—ensures this arrangement continues. A farmer in India cannot save seeds patented by Monsanto. A nation cannot produce generic medications without permission from pharmaceutical giants. Knowledge itself has been enclosed and privatized.
4. The Military Enforcement Apparatus
WIWO is ultimately backed by violence. The United States maintains over 750 military bases in at least 80 countries. NATO serves as the military arm of Western capital, expanding relentlessly eastward despite promises to the contrary. "Humanitarian intervention" provides cover for regime change when governments prove insufficiently cooperative with Western interests.
The invasions of Iraq, Libya, and the ongoing operations across Africa and South America are not aberrations—they are WIWO functioning as intended. Nations that attempt to exit the system (Cuba, Venezuela, Iran) face sanctions designed to immiserate their populations and delegitimize their governments. Those that succeed in building alternatives (BRICS, but especially China and Russia) are designated enemies.
The "rules-based international order" invoked by Western leaders is simply WIWO's self-description. The rules exist to maintain the order. When the rules inconvenience Western powers, they are ignored. When they can be weaponized against rivals, they are sacred.
5. Supply Chain Dependency Structures
Global supply chains are not neutral networks of trade; they are chains of dependency. The Global South produces raw materials and components; the Global North captures the value-added and controls the final products. A smartphone assembled in China generates profits for Apple in Cupertino. Cobalt mined by children in the Congo powers electric vehicles sold in California.
These dependencies are actively maintained. Trade agreements prevent nations from developing domestic industries that would compete with Western corporations. Agricultural subsidies in the US and EU undercut farmers in Africa and Asia, destroying local food sovereignty and creating import dependency. The "comparative advantage" praised by economists is often simply the comparative advantage of having been colonized versus having done the colonizing.
This is WIWO: the material base of global society. It is not a conspiracy—it is the system. It does not require shadowy cabals to function; it operates through the ordinary logic of capital accumulation extended to planetary scale. It is the water we swim in, invisible precisely because it is everywhere.
The Western Imperial Spirit
If WIWO is the machine, the Western Imperial Spirit—WIS—is the story we tell ourselves about the machine. It is the ideological superstructure that makes WIWO seem natural, inevitable, even desirable. It is the set of ideas, beliefs, values, and cultural assumptions that legitimize the base and reproduce it in each generation.
The superstructure is not simply a passive reflection of the base. It actively shapes how we think, what we believe is possible, and who we understand ourselves to be. It is transmitted through every institution that forms human consciousness: schools, churches, media, sports, families, and increasingly, algorithms. The superstructure is why most people cannot imagine alternatives to WIWO—because WIS has colonized their imagination.
The Ideological Architecture of WIS
1. Liberalism and the Myth of the Individual
At the heart of WIS lies liberal ideology—not in the American sense of "left-leaning," but in the classical sense: the belief that society is fundamentally composed of free, rational individuals pursuing their self-interest, and that the role of institutions is to protect individual rights and facilitate free exchange.
This ideology serves WIWO perfectly. If we are all just individuals competing in a market, then structural inequality is simply the aggregate result of individual choices. Poverty reflects personal failure, not systemic extraction. Billionaires are "self-made," not beneficiaries of a system designed to concentrate wealth. Your inability to afford healthcare is a personal problem, not a political one.
Hyper-individualism—the pathological extreme of this ideology—atomizes society into disconnected units incapable of collective action. You are alone. Your problems are your own. The very concept of solidarity becomes foreign, naive, a relic of less enlightened times.
2. Meritocracy: The Noble Lie
The myth of meritocracy tells us that position reflects desert—that the wealthy earned their wealth, that the powerful deserve their power, that the poor have simply failed to work hard enough. It is the ideological glue holding all hierarchies together.
Meritocracy transforms systemic barriers into personal failures. The Black American trapped in a neighborhood starved of investment didn't face structural racism—they just didn't try hard enough. The Indian farmer driven to suicide by debt wasn't crushed by global commodity markets—they just made poor choices. The working-class kid who didn't get into an elite university wasn't failed by an educational system designed to reproduce class—they just weren't smart enough.
This myth is essential to WIS because it legitimizes inequality while offering the tantalizing promise that you might rise. Meritocracy is a lottery that sells tickets to everyone while paying out to almost no one.
3. Systematic Bigotry as Divide and Conquer
Racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, xenophobia—these are not simply prejudices. They are structural features of WIS, ideological weapons that, not only divide the exploited against themselves, but also shape who the ruling class allow into their circle's in their own minds—they are not divorced from WIS. The straight, CIS, able-bodied, white man stands atop the hierarchy.
Here's how it works: WIWO systematically traumatizes people through poverty, alienation, exploitation, and precarity. This trauma needs an outlet. WIS provides one—but not the ruling class that actually causes the suffering. Instead, WIS offers scapegoats: immigrants, Black people, women, queer people, foreigners. They are the reason you're suffering. They are taking your jobs, threatening your family, destroying your culture.
Hurt people hurt people. And WIS ensures there's always someone "beneath" you to kick. This is social control through manufactured horizontal hostility. Poor whites are taught to blame poor Blacks instead of the rich who exploit them both. Men are taught to dominate women rather than question the system that alienates them from their own humanity. Citizens are taught to fear immigrants rather than the corporations that exploit labor across borders.
Systematic bigotry is not incidental to WIS—it is essential. Without it, the exploited might recognize their common enemy and WIWO couldn't reproduce itself next generation.
4. American Exceptionalism and the Civilizing Mission
WIS tells a story about the West: that it represents the pinnacle of human development, the bearer of civilization, the engine of progress. Other cultures are at best historical artifacts, at worst obstacles to be overcome.
America holds a unique place in this story. We're the people who won our freedom from the old imperialists—only to later become the new face of imperialism. Now, this takes the form of American exceptionalism—the belief that the United States is uniquely good, uniquely free, uniquely destined to lead the world. This ideology justifies intervention abroad ("bringing democracy") and inequality at home ("land of opportunity"). Any evidence to the contrary—slavery, genocide, imperialism, poverty—is framed as aberration rather than foundation.
The European origin is the "civilizing mission"—the belief that colonialism was ultimately beneficial, that the global spread of Western institutions represents progress, that the ongoing subordination of the Global South is simply the natural order of development. This ideology did not end with formal decolonization; it simply changed costumes into neo-colonialism through debt bondage.
5. The Manufactured Psychology
WIS does not simply tell us what to think—it shapes how we think, who we understand ourselves to be, what we believe is possible. I explored some of this in my Thanksgiving essay as the mechanisms of lovelessness: atomization, externalized thinking, imprisoned imagination, consumerism as religion.
The self under capitalism is perceived as inherently insufficient—a broken thing requiring constant optimization to maximize its interests by efficiently extracting from the world. You are never enough. You must always be improving, performing, competing. This is not human nature; this is a psychological operating system installed by WIS.
The manufactured psychology produces subjects who are:
- Atomized: disconnected from community, family, tradition—dependent on the market for all needs
- Externalized: trusting authority over their own perception, looking outward for validation and meaning
- Imagination-imprisoned: unable to conceive of alternatives to the present order
- Consumer-identified: defining themselves through what they buy rather than what they create or contribute
- Passively entertained: spectators of their own lives, reacting rather than acting
- Ironically detached: shielded from genuine emotion and commitment by layers of performative cynicism
This is WIS in its most intimate form—not just an ideology you believe but a self you become.
6. CANS: The American Franchise
Within America, WIS takes a specific form I call CANS—the Contemporary American National Spirit. It's WIS tailored for domestic consumption: American exceptionalism cranked to eleven, the meritocracy myth fused with prosperity gospel, the pathological individualism that makes solidarity feel like weakness on steroids.
CANS adds distinctly American flavors to the WIS cocktail:
- The particular fusion of racism and anti-Black terror that has structured American society since 1619
- Gun culture as a substitute for genuine security or community
- The religious right's capture of Christianity in service of capital
- The two-party duopoly that channels all political energy into managed contests between slightly different flavors of neoliberalism
- The cult of the entrepreneur, the "self-made man," the billionaire as hero
But CANS is just a regional franchise of the global operation. The same logic operates wherever WIS has spread—it simply wears different cultural costumes.
The Class Structure Under WIWO
WIWO and WIS do not affect everyone equally. The system requires different classes to play different roles, and understanding these roles reveals both how the machine reproduces itself and where it might be vulnerable.
The Bourgeoisie (The Ruling Class)
Marx identified the bourgeoisie as those who own the means of production and therefore control the labor of others. In contemporary terms, these are people whose wealth derives from ownership rather than work—shareholders, financiers, state officials, tech founders who've captured entire markets.
What's worth noting is the psychology that accompanies this position. Watch Elon Musk buy a social media platform and immediately gut its workforce while posting memes. Watch Amazon's internal documents reveal that the company prefers high turnover to prevent organizing. Watch private equity firms acquire hospitals, slash staff, and extract fees while patient outcomes decline. These aren't aberrations—they're patterns that emerge from a structural position in which other people's labor and wellbeing become line items to optimize.
Marx called this alienation, and it works both ways. Workers are alienated from the products of their labor, but owners are alienated from the humanity of their workers. The relationship becomes purely instrumental. When Leon Cooperman cried on television over Elizabeth Warren's proposed wealth tax, comparing it to persecution, he revealed something true: the bourgeoisie experience any redistribution as existential threat because their identity depends on the hierarchy that places them at the top.
The "self-made billionaire" myth obscures how this class actually reproduces itself. Bezos started Amazon with a $300,000 loan from his parents. Kylie Jenner was declared "self-made" while being born into a family worth hundreds of millions. The bootstrap narrative of meritocracy legitimizes fortunes that were never bootstrapped.
The Proletariat (The Working Class)
The proletariat are those who own nothing but their labor power and must continuously sell it to survive. Marx understood that this relationship to production shapes consciousness, and we'll get more into that in a moment—but I want to focus on a specific mechanism: what happens to agency under conditions of chronic precarity.
When 78% of American workers live paycheck to paycheck, every decision becomes a calculation of immediate survival. Can I afford to call in sick? Can I risk asking for a raise? Can I take time to organize? The margin between stability and catastrophe is so thin that long-term thinking becomes a luxury.
I'm not talking abstract philosophy here either, there's a neurological dimension to this. Chronic stress shifts brain function away from the prefrontal cortex (planning, reasoning, future consideration) and toward the amygdala (fear, immediate reaction). Survival mode isn't a metaphor—it's a measurable state that suppresses exactly the cognitive capacities needed for political consciousness and collective action.
The gig economy has perfected this trap. Uber and DoorDash offer "flexibility" that actually means constant availability, algorithmic manipulation, and zero security. Workers chase surge pricing, check ratings compulsively, and live in perpetual uncertainty. The "freedom" to work whenever you want becomes the necessity to work whenever work appears.
This precarity is maintained deliberately. WIWO benefits from a working class too exhausted and anxious to organize. Meanwhile, WIS offers a compensating narrative: the promise of individual escape. Every LinkedIn post about someone's "journey" from broke to six figures reinforces the fantasy that the ladder is real. This keeps workers directing energy into competition with each other rather than solidarity—what Marx called false consciousness, the adoption of bourgeois ideology by those it harms.
The Petty Bourgeoisie (The Middle Class Buffer)
Marx viewed the petty bourgeoisie with some ambivalence. To me, they're the linchpin of this whole operation. They're neither owners nor fully proletarianized workers—professionals, managers, small business owners, credentialed workers with some accumulated stability. Their class position is contradictory, and so is their political role.
COVID made this visible. Some people worked from home without pants while others had to keep showing up to stock shelves, deliver packages, and care for the sick. The "laptop class" possessed something the "essential workers" lacked: enough material security to exercise genuine choice about their lives.
WIWO requires this class to serve as a buffer. The systems must encourage the petty bourgeoisie to identify upward—to see themselves as potential bourgeoisie rather than as workers with slightly better conditions. They must believe that their position reflects their merit, that they earned what they have, that they are fundamentally different from the proletariat below them. This belief keeps them sympathizing with the ruling class and acting against the interests of the working class, even when objectively they have far more in common with workers than with billionaires.
And yet, the petty bourgeoisie are also the class most capable of developing genuine class consciousness—precisely because they have the resources that survival mode denies. They have education, time, access to information, and enough security to take risks. When a software engineer realizes their "disruption" destroys livelihoods, or a nonprofit worker sees how the foundation model contains rather than challenges injustice, these recognitions happen because material conditions permit them.
Those of us in this class who see through WIS face a choice. We can use our privilege to climb further, or we can turn our resources toward building alternatives: materially supporting workers' struggles, constructing parallel institutions, spreading counter-hegemonic consciousness. Our position is contradictory, but contradictions are where change becomes possible.
The petty bourgeoisie were designed to be WIWO's guardians. We can become its gravediggers instead.
The Dialectic of Base and Superstructure
Here I must address a potential objection from orthodox Marxists: Am I not overemphasizing the superstructure? Does not Marxism teach that the base is primary, that material conditions determine consciousness rather than the reverse?
Yes—and no.
Marx himself recognized that base and superstructure are mutually influential, even if the base is "determinant in the last instance." The relationship is dialectical, not mechanical. The superstructure does not simply reflect the base like a mirror; it actively shapes, legitimizes, and reproduces the base. Ideas matter. Culture matters. Consciousness matters—not as free-floating abstractions but as forces that influence how humans act within and upon material conditions.
"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force". —The German Ideology
Antonio Gramsci developed this insight further through his concept of hegemony. The ruling class maintains power not simply through economic control or state violence but through cultural and ideological leadership. Hegemony is achieved when the worldview of the ruling class becomes "common sense"—when the exploited internalize the beliefs that justify their exploitation, when alternatives become literally unthinkable.
Gramsci distinguished between a "war of maneuver" (direct assault on state power) and a "war of position" (the slow work of building counter-hegemonic culture, institutions, and consciousness). In advanced capitalist societies where WIS has thoroughly saturated civil society, the war of position becomes primary. We must build alternative ways of thinking, being, and organizing before a direct challenge to WIWO becomes possible.
Louis Althusser extended this analysis with his concept of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)—institutions like schools, churches, media, and families (operated by the petty bourgeoisie) that reproduce the conditions of production by shaping subjects who accept their place within the system. Unlike the Repressive State Apparatuses (police, military, prisons) that maintain order through violence, ISAs function primarily through ideology. They produce subjects who want to be exploited, who identify with their exploiters, who cannot even imagine being otherwise.
Crucially, Althusser emphasized the relative autonomy of the superstructure. While ultimately shaped by the base, ideological and cultural formations have their own dynamics, their own contradictions, their own possibilities for transformation. This is why cultural struggle is not a distraction from "real" politics—it is a necessary front in the war of position.
This theoretical framework explains why I believe WIS must fall first—or at least crack significantly—before WIWO can be dismantled. The material base of global capitalism is deeply entrenched, backed by immense violence, and will not simply collapse on its own. But the ideological superstructure is more vulnerable. It depends on belief, on consent, on the reproduction of "common sense" in each generation. If enough people stop believing the story, the machine loses its legitimacy. If counter-hegemonic consciousness spreads widely enough, the conditions for challenging the base itself become possible.
Let me be clear, this is not idealism—the belief that changing ideas automatically changes material reality. It is strategic analysis of where the contradictions are most acute, where intervention is most possible, where the cracks are already showing.
And the cracks are showing.
Why Reform Will Never Work
I wrote about this in my essay on legacies when I discussed how we're taught the "Great Man" theory of history instead of Historical Materialism. We're trained to see the world as something shaped by exceptional individuals—and therefore beyond our collective power to change. But the real engine of change lies in the collective human activity centered around material conditions. Power lies with the community of people, but is voluntarily offered to a small group due to cultural delusions about how civilization develops.
Here's the thing about those people we've given power to: they do not respect us as human beings. They see us as labor to exploit, consumers to manipulate, resources to extract, and problems to manage. You cannot appeal to the conscience of those who lack one. You cannot negotiate with those who see you as beneath negotiation.
Kwame Ture said it best: "In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none."
And, remember, the United States is just the enforcer. The whole Western imperial project operates on this logic. The IMF doesn't have a conscience. The World Bank doesn't have a conscience. NATO doesn't have a conscience. The UN doesn't have a conscience. These institutions exist to maintain the flow of wealth and power from the many to the few, from the periphery to the core. Of course, some delegates may have a conscience; however, the institutions are designed in such a way that a minority of delegates with a conscience—especially those from the Global South—cannot influence decisions. I'm looking at you, UN Security Council P5.
Power is only shared when those holding it believe others are deserving AND equal in fundamental worth. The ruling class of WIWO—by the very psychology that enabled their rise—is afflicted with pathologies of entitlement and superiority. They believe they are entitled to your labor and obedience. They believe they are fundamentally superior to you.
They will never give you anything willingly.
Fragmented attacks on singular aspects of WIWO—this policy, that law, this representation—are doomed. You're asking a machine working exactly as intended to adjust a part of itself. The machine says no. The machine has always said no. The machine will always say NO.
The Rainbow Coalition
I shared a much earlier version of this essay with a dear friend of mine, and one of the questions he brought up was who I was considering for revolutionaries. Given the focuses of my past essays this is a fair question. So, I'll be perfectly explicit:
This project is not for only Asian Americans. It's not for only Americans. It's not for just any single group. This project and work is for everyone. Actually, it HAS to be.
The Black Panthers understood this when they built the original Rainbow Coalition—uniting Black, Puerto Rican, and poor White communities in Chicago against their common oppressors. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale knew that the revolution required solidarity across every line the system uses to divide us when they founded the party. Fred Hampton, formalized this when he founded the Rainbow Coalition. He was drugged, shot, and murdered by the FBI in his own home precisely—along with fellow panther Mark Clark—because he was succeeding. They killed him because he was showing that solidarity across racial lines was possible—and that terrified them.
We must remember their lesson almost 60 years later.
For better or worse, I'm American. I write from my lived experience, which means I have the most direct knowledge of America's role in WIWO—the CANS version of WIS, the domestic propaganda, and the ways American consciousness is manufactured. But this analysis applies everywhere. WIS has spread its tentacles over effectively the entire globe.
The revolution will not be American. It will be international—or it will fail.
I wrote about this in my brainstorming post—the recognition that the next step in revolutionizing the world will come from the liberation of the Global South from Western imperialism and neocolonialism. When the Global South achieves liberation, the West can no longer exploit them for cheap resources and labor and WIWO begins to crack. This will force internal revolutions in the imperial core. The dominoes fall together.
This is Total Revolution. We play every position. We support every struggle. We recognize that my liberation is bound up with yours, that the worker in Kitwe and the worker in Detroit are on the same team whether they know it or not, that borders are lies designed to prevent us from seeing our common enemy.
The Humanistic Renaissance
I believe we are on the cusp of a renaissance. Literally—a rebirth. And I don't say this as wishful thinking. I say it because I understand when renaissances happen, and we're meeting the conditions.
Why Now?
Historically, renaissances emerge from two conditions: societal collapse and cultural exhaustion—a widespread sense that the existing frameworks for meaning have failed, that the old answers no longer satisfy, that something fundamental must change.
Look around. We're meeting both conditions across the Western world.
But there's a more specific historical parallel that illuminates our moment: the printing press.
When Gutenberg's press spread across Europe in the 15th century, it triggered an epistemic crisis. The Catholic Church had maintained a monopoly on knowledge production for centuries—they controlled which texts existed, who could read them, and how they should be interpreted. The printing press shattered this monopoly. Suddenly, books were everywhere. Vernacular translations of the Bible let ordinary people read scripture without priestly mediation. Competing interpretations proliferated. The authority of the Church cracked.
The result was not immediate liberation but chaos—followed by transformation. The Reformation fractured Christendom. Wars of religion devastated Europe. But the Renaissance also emerged: a flowering of art, science, philosophy, and human self-understanding that laid the groundwork for modernity.
The internet was our printing press. It shattered the monopoly of established media, academia, and cultural gatekeepers on knowledge production. Suddenly, anyone could publish. Competing narratives proliferated. The authority of experts cracked.
We are now in the chaos phase. Misinformation and disinformation flood the zone. Conspiracy theories and genuine critique become nearly indistinguishable. The old authorities have lost legitimacy but no new consensus has emerged to replace them. This is the interregnum—the period of monsters, as Gramsci put it.
And now AI is accelerating the crisis to breaking point.
The AI Moment
Artificial intelligence is not neutral technology. It is the final, most complete expression of WIS's logic: extraction, automation, the replacement of human judgment with algorithmic efficiency, the dream of production without producers.
The tech oligarchs building AI are explicit about their goals. Sam Altman talks about AGI replacing most human labor. Elon Musk funds Neuralink to merge humans with machines. The accelerationists in Silicon Valley fantasize about obsoleting humanity itself. This is the anti-humanist endgame—the logical conclusion of a system that has always valued profit over people, efficiency over meaning, accumulation over life.
But here's the dialectic: AI is also exposing the contradictions of WIS so starkly that people are beginning to see through it.
The internet is becoming uninhabitable. AI-generated slop floods every platform—SEO garbage, engagement-bait, synthetic content that says nothing. Human attention is being strip-mined for advertising revenue. The digital public square is drowning in noise. And people are noticing. The more the digital space degrades, the more precious authentic human expression becomes.
AI is forcing the question that WIS has always tried to obscure: What is the value of human beings?
If a machine can write, paint, compose, analyze, and converse—what is left? The anti-humanists answer: nothing. Humans are just inefficient machines, soon to be optimized away or merged with something better.
But this answer is monstrous, and most people sense it. The coming years will see a massive reaction against the anti-humanist vision—a desperate, vital reassertion of what makes human life meaningful. This is the opening for the humanistic renaissance.
AI is the printing press of our era, but accelerated—a lot. The printing press took decades to transform European society. AI is transforming global culture in years. The compression of this timeline means the chaos will be more intense—but so will the potential for transformation.
The contradictions are sharpening. The center cannot hold. Something will break.
What Will Define It?
If the renaissance is coming, what will it look like? What values, practices, and orientations will characterize the new culture struggling to be born?
Ad Fontes—"To the Sources"
Renaissance humanists of the 14th-17th centuries rejected the accumulated commentary that had encrusted classical texts and went back to the originals. They learned Greek to read Plato and Aristotle directly, not through the distortions of medieval scholasticism.
We need the same move. We're drowning in takes about takes about takes. Hot takes on tweets about articles summarizing studies that no one has read. Commentary that has stripped all substance from original thought. AI-generated summaries of AI-generated summaries.
The humanistic renaissance will demand primary sources. Direct engagement with foundational texts, original thinkers, lived experience. Not what someone said about what someone said about Marx—but Marx himself, read carefully and critically. Not influencer wisdom about meditation—but actual contemplative practice. Not content about life—but life itself.
Common Vernacular Over Corporate Speak
Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in Tuscan Italian rather than Latin because he understood that living language has soul. Latin was the language of institutions, of power, of the dead. The vernacular was the language of the people, of passion, of life.
AI is the master of corporate speak—the empty, sanitized, SEO-optimized language of press releases and HR memos. It can generate infinite quantities of fluent text that says absolutely nothing. The more AI-generated content floods the zone, the more we will recognize and treasure authentic human voice.
The humanistic renaissance will reject the language of institutions in favor of living speech—passionate, personal, idiosyncratic, flawed. We will learn to recognize the soul in language and flee the soulless.
The Death of Irony
For decades, ironic detachment has been the dominant mode of cultural engagement—particularly among millennials and younger generations. Sincerity is cringe. Earnestness is embarrassing. Passion is naive. Everything must be qualified with layers of irony, hedged with self-aware humor, shielded from genuine commitment.
This was a defense mechanism, and an understandable one. When the world seems hopeless, when idealism has been repeatedly crushed, irony offers protection. You can't be disappointed if you never hoped. You can't fail if you never tried. You can't be hurt if you never cared.
But irony is also a cage. It makes genuine action impossible. It forecloses the vulnerability required for authentic connection. It keeps us trapped in spectator mode, commenting on the game we refuse to play.
The taboo of trying hard is breaking. I see it in my generation and in Gen Alpha coming up behind us. The shields of ironic detachment are cracking. People are hungry for earnestness, for conviction, for passion that isn't wrapped in five layers of protective humor.
The humanistic renaissance will embrace sincerity. It will take the risk of caring. It will find courage not just to critique but to create, not just to deconstruct but to build.
Embodied Experience Over Digital Abstraction
As the internet becomes increasingly contaminated with AI-generated content, stock in human presence will rise. Physical community—being in the same room, sharing the same air, looking into actual eyes—will become the ultimate luxury.
WIS has spent decades abstracting human experience into digital simulacra. Social media friendships instead of neighbors. Pornography instead of intimacy. Streaming instead of live performance. The metaverse instead of the world. Well, that one didn't catch on, thank god.
The humanistic renaissance will reassert the primacy of embodied experience. Flesh and blood. Sweat and tears. The irreplaceable reality of human beings in physical proximity, doing things together that cannot be mediated, cannot be optimized, cannot be faked.
Human Error as Proof of Consciousness
When AI can produce flawless prose, perfect images, seamless music—what becomes valuable? Paradoxically: imperfection.
Human error will become proof of consciousness, evidence that a genuine being made choices, took risks, expressed something from within rather than pattern-matching from training data. The fingerprints of human limitation will be treasured as marks of authenticity.
We will develop new literacies for detecting the human—not just CAPTCHA tests but aesthetic sensitivities, attunement to the subtle signs of genuine experience that machines cannot (yet) replicate.
Where Will It Happen?
The renaissance will not start in the academy. The academy has been captured—by vocationalism on one side (education as job training, humanities as useless), by orthodoxy on the other (humanities reduced to ideological symptoms). Both tendencies have drained the life from humanistic inquiry. Nobody is coming to save us from inside the institutions.
The renaissance will be born on social media but actualized offline.
This seems paradoxical given what I've said about the internet's degradation. But we must meet people where they are, and they are on social media. It remains the most powerful system for shaping consciousness, for spreading ideas, for finding others who share your vision. The humanistic renaissance will use these tools while we still can—spreading counter-hegemonic consciousness, building networks, finding each other.
But social media alone is insufficient. The establishment will eventually try to isolate people again with more force—regulation, censorship, platform capture, or simply the degradation of the space until it's unusable for genuine connection. My hope is that by then, the seed will have been planted deeply enough and nurtured enough that we organize new institutions and actualize the renaissance in physical reality.
This means parallel power structures: community organizations, mutual aid networks, alternative educational institutions, worker cooperatives, intentional communities. Real-world infrastructure that can survive a digital dark age if it comes.
The humanistic renaissance is not going to be just a content trend. It will be a civilizational reorientation. It will take root in ideology, but it will flower in material reality.
The Revolutionary Spirituality
Theory without transformation is the academic's masturbation. The revolution requires new human beings—people who have done the inner work to become agents of collective liberation.
I wrote about this in my metal concert essay—the difference between defining yourself through judgment versus defining yourself through dialectical engagement with the world. The soldiers versus the vagabonds. The idea that we've been deprived of the methods of internal self-definition and so we substitute judgment as a way to maintain a sense of self.
The revolutionary must develop something different. Not just correct analysis, but transformed being.
The Divine Choice
There is an ancient insight, appearing across philosophical and spiritual traditions, that human nature is threefold—that we contain within us three distinct modes of being, and that the task of becoming fully human involves choosing which mode will govern us.
Plato described the tripartite soul: the appetitive part (desires, bodily needs), the spirited part (emotions, will, the drive to act), and the rational part (reason, wisdom, the capacity for truth). The just person, for Plato, is one in whom reason rules, with spirit as its ally, governing the appetites.
Aristotle distinguished three types of life: the life of pleasure (pursuing bodily satisfaction), the life of honor (pursuing recognition and action), and the life of contemplation (pursuing truth and wisdom). Only the last, he argued, leads to genuine flourishing.
Christian anthropology developed the trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit—with the spiritual dimension representing our capacity for relationship with the divine and the transcendent.
I offer my own variation on this ancient theme, tailored to our current condition:
The Passive Life
This is the default under WIS: passive, consuming, drifting. Scroll, consume, react, sleep, repeat. The passive person does not act upon the world; the world acts upon them. They are spectators of their own existence, carried along by algorithms and appetites, never asking what they truly want because wanting itself has been reduced to craving whatever is placed before them.
The empty state is not natural—it is manufactured by taking away real life and filling the void with shit, pardon my French. WIS produces passive subjects because they are easy to control. They consume without questioning, obey without resisting, die without having truly lived.
The Reactive Life
This is rebellion without direction: reactive, destructive, driven by appetite and rage. The reactive person breaks free from pure passivity but only into unfocused action. They sense that something is wrong, they feel the anger and despair, but they lack the framework to understand their condition or act effectively to change it.
WIS can manage the reactive response. Unfocused rage dissipates. Hedonistic rebellion reinforces the system (buy your way to freedom!). Nihilistic destruction harms the powerless more than the powerful. Hateful fire has become the fuel for the engine of horizontal class division. The reactive life is a trap—the illusion of resistance that leaves the underlying order untouched. Think MAGA.
The Creative Life
This is the revolutionary choice: creative, life-affirming, building toward liberation. The creative person acts with consciousness and direction. They understand the system they're in, they have done the inner work to free themselves from its psychological operations, and they choose to live in service of collective liberation.
The creative is not mindless acceptance but thoughtful critique. Not reactive destruction but constructive transformation. Not individual escape but collective liberation.
WIS wants you passive. Failing that, it will accept reactive—managed rebellion is containable. What WIS cannot tolerate is the creative: conscious, directed, non-dogmatic agency aimed at transformation.
The choice is ours. It is always ours. No matter how thoroughly WIS has colonized your psychology, you retain the capacity to choose otherwise. This is the irreducible kernel of human freedom that no system can fully capture.
What Must Be Overcome
The path from passive or reactive to creative requires overcoming specific obstacles—patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that WIS has installed in us and that prevent revolutionary becoming.
Moral Superiority
This is a trap that catches many who begin awakening to the reality of WIS. Having seen through some of the lies, they feel superior to those who haven't. They look down on the masses as sheep, as dupes, as complicit in their own oppression.
This attitude is poison to revolutionary work. It alienates potential comrades. It substitutes self-righteousness for effectiveness. It makes you insufferable to precisely the people you need to reach. It's the modern left's biggest problem.
The revolutionary must overcome moral superiority with humility and compassion. Most people are not stupid—they are exhausted, propagandized, surviving within impossible conditions. They are our fellow victims of WIS, not its architects or eager contributors. Our task is not to judge them but to reach them, to invite them, and to teach them.
Ironic Detachment
I've touched on this already, but it deserves deeper treatment because it is the signature psychological affliction of my generation.
Millennials came of age watching their parents' optimism—the "end of history," the triumph of liberal democracy—crash into the reality of 9/11, endless wars, financial crisis, and climate catastrophe. Their response was protective irony: expect nothing, hope for nothing, invest in nothing, and you can't be disappointed.
Gen Z inherited this irony but intensified it further. Social media made us perpetual performers, always aware of being watched, always calculating how we appear. Sincerity became impossible because everything became content. Even our genuine moments were framed for an imagined audience.
And now Gen Alpha is growing up in a world where the distinction between authentic and synthetic, real and performed, has collapsed entirely. They've never known anything but the hall of mirrors.
This trajectory must be reversed. The revolutionary cannot maintain ironic distance and still act with full commitment. You cannot build while hedging. You cannot risk while protecting yourself with layers of performative skepticism.
The path beyond irony is not naive sincerity—pretending the world is fine when it isn't. It is tragic sincerity: acknowledging that things are terrible and committing to action anyway. Knowing you might fail and trying regardless. Caring despite the cost. Revolutionaries need life-affirming courage.
Passivity
Not only a manufactured nature, but it is also the deepest and oldest of the obstacles, and it has been systematically cultivated since the generation of the Boomers.
The post-war settlement in the West offered material comfort in exchange for political quiescence. The working class was bought off with consumer goods, suburban homes, and the promise of endless growth. Activism was channeled into acceptable forms—vote, donate, share—while genuine challenges to power were crushed (ask the Black Panthers, ask the labor radicals, ask anyone who threatened the fundamental order).
Generation X grew up in the shadow of this settlement, watching their Boomer parents consume while the world burned. They developed cynicism and disengagement—whatever, it's all corrupt, nothing matters. This wasn't laziness; it was a rational response to feeling utterly powerless.
Millennials and Gen Z inherited this passivity but reframed it as irony and despair. We know the world is dying. We know the system is rigged. We feel it in our bones—and we feel equally in our bones that nothing we do can change it.
This is learned helplessness, manufactured at scale. And it is a lie.
The revolutionary must overcome passivity not through naive optimism—believing change is easy or guaranteed—but through willed commitment to action despite uncertainty. We act not because we know we'll win but because we know we must try. We act not because the outcome is certain but because refusing to act is its own choice, its own complicity, its own form of death. I hate to sound like a broken record here, but this is critical.
Waiting for perfect conditions is a recipe for eternal inaction. Waiting for permission is waiting for those in power to approve their own overthrow. Waiting for someone else to go first is a collective action problem we must solve by acting ourselves.
The revolutionary acts. That's it. That's the irreducible core.
The New Psychology
Against the capitalist psychology of the insufficient self endlessly optimizing for extraction, the revolutionary must develop something different:
- Confidence as an agent of change—not arrogance, but the deep certainty that action matters, that you can contribute, that history is not determined without you.
- Satisfaction in contribution rather than accumulation—finding meaning in what you give, not what you take; in what you build, not what you hoard.
- Identity rooted in community rather than competition—understanding yourself as part of a collective project, defined by your relationships and commitments rather than your individual achievements or possessions.
- Strength drawn from solidarity rather than dominance—knowing that power shared is power multiplied, that we rise together or not at all.
- Meaning found in liberation rather than consumption—orienting your life toward the freedom of all rather than the comfort of yourself alone.
This is not self-denial or martyrdom. The revolutionary does not hate themselves or their life. They simply understand that genuine flourishing is collective, that authentic satisfaction comes from meaningful work in service of something larger, that the hedonic treadmill of consumption leads nowhere. They identify with humanity and life itself above their own ego.
The revolutionary spirituality is not opposed to joy—it is the path to the deepest joy: the satisfaction of living a life that matters, of being part of something greater than yourself, of knowing that your brief existence contributed to the long struggle for human liberation.
What's Coming
So, what does this mean for Gen Z Socrates?
Everything I write from here forward will be in service of this project. Not every post will be a manifesto—that would exhaust us both—but everything will connect back to the framework I've just described. I've made myself five primary pillars to explore:
- The manufactured psychology—how mass media and bourgeoisie ideology generate specific psychologies in populations worldwide
- The humanistic renaissance—what it looks like, how it will happen, who will drive it
- Dialectical materialism—the method for seeing reality clearly and acting as an agent of change
- Internationalism and intersectionality—why the revolution must be global and where the pressure points that must all be pressed are
- The revolutionary spirituality—the inner transformation necessary to become an agent of liberation
Some posts will be theoretical. Some will be discussions of current events. Some will be personal—my own journey through this work. Some will be excavations of history, reclaiming the legacies that have been distorted to serve power.
My pedagogy remains the same: give people a grounded understanding of concepts by exposing the way the world works with a dialectical materialist and humanist lens, and let them connect things together themselves. People aren't stupid—if able to see reality without propaganda, they will figure out what is true.
I'm not asking you to agree with everything I've said. I'm asking you to stay curious, to engage, to push back where you think I'm wrong, and to hold me accountable to developing these ideas with rigor and honesty.
The world is shaped by what we nurture. Let's stop nurturing broken systems and social assumptions.
Every person. Every struggle. Total Revolution.
Until next communion, all my love! <3
Micah Xavier Probst
Gen Z Socrates is a people's project. Everything I write will always be free. Support is appreciated but optional.