US foreign policy community is unfit because they are unable and even unwilling to disentangle themselves from commercial interests that favor constant aggression under ever-changing, strange justifications. Thus, we get a world where the US has pushed Russia and China together. When it isn't commercial interests, domestic moral shifts that occur every year are reflected in aggressive foreign policy demands which come off as arrogant and unhinged. Also, it is the US itself that, via aiding China's rise, has created the conditions for escalating conflict.

The first step towards true knowledge is understanding that these are all the exact same picture.

The body and the city are metaphysically tied. Lack of basic self-respect and dignity also leads ppl to justify their cars being broken into 15 times and getting robbed and their city turned into a slum.

"I deserve this" - same as battered woman in toxic relationship

When u have society run by soft power, psyops, it produces and selects for ppl with lack of psychological integration, which is an abstraction above 'lack of cognitive dissonance,' which is to say that these ppl simultaneously hold contradictory beliefs in diff parts of mind Very, very hard to get ppl to fix those mind fractures, charges of hypocrisy are not processed well and quickly mindwiped and passed out of memory.

In effect, you select for delusion and a kind of autism that is unable to see the other side's perspective at all.

Democracy is a stage performance.

dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-0… No one in political science knows how to integrate these sorts of stories into their understanding of modern western liberal democracies because it's hard to get a systematic understanding of these dynamics, meaning they remain understudied, undertheorized, written off as causes.