He was not unlike the untold
Millions that came before him, and he will serve as a bridge. A bridge that will unfortunately lead to the untold millions that following him. His name is Lonnie Wayman, and this is his story. Lonnie was born April 8th, 1952. USA. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy around the age of 18 at end of the Vietnam War. He achieved the rank of Chief Boatswain’s Mate, a senior enlisted position involving leadership in deck operations and seamanship.

There are novels that diagnose the human condition, and then there is The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It is almost unbearable in its innocence. Prince Myshkin enters the world not as a hero of strength, but as man stripped of every ounce armor. He carries no irony, no plan, no protective cynicism. And because of that, he appears like a fool. Yet the beauty of the novel lies in this reversal, the so called idiot the only sane one in a room full of those wounded by pride, envy, resentment, and a hunger for status.

Where did all the babies go?

Across nearly all of human history, sex was an extraordinarily high cost, high risk activity. It carried the risk of pregnancy, social consequences, abandonment risk, reputational damage, and profound resource burdens if a baby was conceived. For women, reproduction required immense biological investment and risk; for men, the risk of uncertain paternity shaped strategy and behavior. Marriage norms, courtship rituals, religious prohibitins, family involvement, emerged as stabilizing mechanisms around those risks.

Philosophical inquiry begins with Heraclitus. He stands at the true beginning of philosophy because he discovered the problem that makes philosophy unavoidable. Heraclitus major accomplishment is his break with myth through the discovery of logos the claim that reality possesses a rational order independent of custom, poetry, or divine narrative, even though most human beings live unaware of it. Born in Ephesus roughly 500 BCE Heraclitus brought philosophy into light.

The Human Problem: Mimetic Rivalry

Human beings imitate not only behavior but desire. We want what others want. This imitation escalates into rivalry. Rivalry spreads. Crisis follows. When crisis becomes uncontrollable, societies resolve it through a scapegoat. The community converges on a single victim. The victim is blamed for the chaos. The victim is expelled or killed. Peace returns. The victim is later mythologized as either monster or god. This pattern, lies beneath archaic religion, myth, and even early political order.

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet it questions whether the ghost is real, or if revenge is justified. We mush ask the dangerous question… why does everyone in this world suddenly want the same thing, and why does it turn them hollow? Hamlet is not a story about a prince frozen by thought, but a man drowning in borrowed desire. It’s about a kingdom where no one wants anything on their own anymore. A court infected by imitation, where violence spreads not because men are evil, but because they are mirrors.

In Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky’s Sonya is not merely a character, but the symbol of innocence in a world of blame. Human societies stabilize themselves through scapegoating, collective violence is justified by assigning guilt to a victim whose suffering restores order. Modern societies, do not escape this, they refine it. Dostoevsky saw Sonya as his most radical answer to it. Raskolnikov’s crime is a scapegoat act. He murders a life in the name of progress & reason, repeating the ancient sacrificial logic while believing himself enlightened.

In Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky was not writing a crime novel in the modern sense. He was staging a moral experiment, almost a trial, asking a single, dangerous question… What happens if a human being believes they stands beyond moral law? Dostoevsky is attacking the 19th century faith that human reason, detached from conscience, can replace moral truth. Raskolnikov’s crime is not merely murder, it is the attempt to think himself above humanity. Above the people around him

Why the Greeks? The Egyptians built for eternity and the Mesopotamians built for order, and both succeeded so completely that they froze themselves in time, a time before civilization. Stone pyramids rose to outlast memory, and clay tablets hardened law into fate. Truth descended from gods and kings, not from argument. To question was not courage but blasphemy. These societies learned how to remember, how to obey, how to survive. What they never learned was how to revise themselves. They achieved permanence at the cost of ascent.

Karl Popper, the man who made science falsifiable. And has been lauded as one of the smartest people ever to live. The creator metaphysics and epidemiology, believed he was rescuing the West from dogma, but in truth he rescued it only from conviction when he penned Open Societies. He mistake the excesses of certainty for the sin of belief itself, and reducing a civilization born of moral courage into a machine for endless correction. He taught that truth must always kneel before procedure, that justice is forever provincial.

Do not ask whether God exists. Ask whether you are willing to love without question and guarantee. The answer to that question will decide everything in your life Dostoevsky taught me that in The Brothers Karamazov, perhaps the second most important book ever put to press. He finished it in November 1880.

Everyone knows the story of Washington, Jefferson, Adam’s, and other prominent founding fathers, but the American revolution did not begin with them. It began with one man, one pen, and no name. Just a pamphlet, 47 pages in total. A pamphlet, that by 1776 had out sold the Bible. His name was Thomas Paine. He was not born of greatness nor by title or protected by power, he was a poor immigrant, a failed corset maker, a man who had already lost more than he’d won, and yet he carried within him a vision so clear it terrified empires

I don’t how, or why, all I know is, this story turned me into the man I am today. I usually fall in love with the book, but this time, it was the movie. I was 8 years old, it was Christmas, my parents thought it was the right time to introduce me to Russian tragedy. My parents thought I would just fall asleep, within minutes I was laying on the floor in front of the tv. My dad said it was because of my intellect and curiosity, my mom said it was because I had fallen in love. My mom was right, as usual

The World Order:

And in it, your history lesson on political philosophy. I won’t bother you with all the Greeks, all Romans, Cryus, or the Holy Roman Empire. We will skip past the reformation and the enlightenment too. This is how the world works, a history lesson for you. The Greeks said, when a rising power starts leaning into the lane of an established power, the road gets mucky, and miscalculation becomes a weapon all by itself. That’s the Thucydides Trap, thank the Greeks , the pattern people point to when they talk about a rising challenger and a reigning king, and how for 2000yrs, it’s been proven correct

Nathan Hale, a young American spy caught by the British in a New York City tavern while gathering intel for General Washington’s army. The young Hale stood at the gallows, a noose around his neck. He spoke his last words with the strength that belied his situation, “My only regret is that I have but one life to lose for my country”

A road collapsed of the brokenhearted
A faded symphony never started
An empty pew on the blinding day
Of reclamation gone away Hollowed benches lost not charted
Castles burned by sands departed
Ravens dancing on fears of pain
Watchmen looking going insane