Communism and the Herostratus Instinct – They Couldn’t Build It. So They Burned It.

In 356 BC, a man named Herostratus burned the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus — one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world — because he could never build something that magnificent and needed the world to know his name. The Athenians made it a capital offense to speak it. We still know it. The first man to destroy a Wonder of the World. It is the same story as Cain and Abel.

1. Every civilization produces two types in permanent tension. Those who build – who create, who reach, who transmit excellence forward. And those consumed by the fact that others build better than they do. They cannot bear the height. Cannot match it. And eventually decide that if they cannot reach it, nobody should have it. The name for this is envy – the specific, corrosive pain caused not by your own suffering but by another’s excellence. Nietzsche called it ressentiment. Genesis called it Cain. Same wound, every century, different clothes.

2. The lie is the first weapon – not to win the argument but to poison it. Not merely strategic propaganda deployed to seize power, but deployed to corrupt, to stain, to contaminate. To make the great seem like thieves, the builder an exploiter, the cathedral oppression, the excellence privilege. The goal is not to defeat the excellent in open debate. It is to make admiring them shameful and transmitting them suspect – so the child who might have reached toward them never learns they existed. Zakłamanie aimed specifically at height (explained below). Not managing reality – poisoning the wells from which excellence drinks.

3. The targets are never accidental. Always the best – the cathedral, not the barn. The scholar, not the clerk. Colonel Ciepliński, not the collaborator who signed the confession. Excellence is the specific offense. Height is the specific wound. The destruction is always aimed upward – which is how you know it is envy and not justice.

4. Communism is the Herostratus instinct given a five-year plan, a secret police, and a philosophy that makes destruction sound like justice. The most organized mobilization of ressentiment in human history. It gave envy a manifesto, an army, and the moral high ground – the most dangerous combination ever assembled. Previous destroyers burned one temple. Communism burned the concept of the temple.

5. The pattern is unbroken across centuries. The French Revolution scattered the bones of French kings – not military necessity, ideological purification. Mao’s Red Guards burned libraries and killed scholars because five thousand years of Chinese excellence was an implicit rebuke to the revolution’s mediocrity. Today’s version cancels Shakespeare, pulls down Newton, erases Jefferson – not despite their greatness but because of it. Same wound. Same response. Updated vocabulary.

6. The lie does not stop at winning. It keeps working after victory – corrupting memory, rewriting history, staining reputations across generations. A civilization that cannot point to its greatest achievements and say — this is what we are capable of — is a civilization that has been successfully poisoned. The envy wins not when it tears down the statue. It wins when the children no longer know what the statue was.

7. You cannot build from envy. Which is why every revolution driven by it produces the same result: the heights are not replaced by new heights but by the flat, the administered, the carefully mediocre – the Idiocracy, the Last Man blinking. Not a failure of implementation. The intended output of the Herostratus instinct at civilizational scale. The Temple of Artemis was rebuilt twice before the destroyers finally won. Western civilization has been rebuilt before. The question is whether enough people understand what is being burned — and why — before the last stones are gone.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2078434122515538256

Communism: Zakłamanie – The Systemic Lie

https://twitter.com/kristof_poland/status/2064309615651668179

Groundhog Day is one of the most beloved films ever made. And yes, Andie MacDowell is cute and charming. But that is not why it hits a chord thirty years later with people who can’t quite explain why they keep rewatching it.

The reason is Aristotle. And almost nobody knows it.

1. Phil Connors wakes up on February 2nd. Again. And again. Infinitely. No consequences, no memory from others, no tomorrow. He has been given what every hedonist, every utopian, every system that promises liberation through freedom from constraint has always promised: complete freedom from accountability. The result is not paradise. It is the most precise laboratory experiment in the history of cinema – what does a human being actually become when freed from all consequences?

2. He tries pleasure first. Eats everything, seduces women, steals money. It works, briefly, the way soma works. Then it stops working, the way soma always stops working. He tries knowledge — learns piano, French poetry, ice sculpture — not yet for virtue, but for manipulation. Still instrumental. Still empty. Then he tries suicide. Repeatedly. The groundhog always wakes him. The void cannot be escaped. It can only be filled.

3. This is Aristotle’s laboratory. Not theoretical – experimental. Eudaimonia (read below) cannot be purchased, stolen, or stumbled into. It is not a feeling. It is not a peak experience. It is the condition that results from becoming, through practice, the kind of person capable of it. Phil has infinite time and zero character at the start. The loop is not his prison. It is his curriculum.

4. The turn is the most important moment in the film and the easiest to miss. Phil stops trying to escape the loop and starts trying to improve within it. He learns piano not to impress anyone – nobody will remember tomorrow. He helps people not for reward – there is none. He becomes good with no audience, no record, no consequence. This is virtue in its purest Aristotelian form: the action done for its own sake, repeated until it becomes character.

5. Rousseau would say Phil is naturally good and the loop is oppressing him. The film says the opposite: left completely free, with no social pressure, no consequences, no system to blame, Phil reveals everything that needs work before anything worth keeping emerges. The loop doesn’t corrupt him. It shows him to himself. That is the most anti-Rousseau statement in popular cinema – and nobody noticed, because Bill Murray is just very funny.

6. He falls in love with Rita not by manipulating her — he tried that, it failed spectacularly — but by becoming someone worth loving. You cannot love your way to virtue. You can only become virtuous and discover that love becomes possible. The film gets the causality exactly right – which almost no film does.
Virtue gets you true love.

7. The loop ends when Phil has become genuinely good – not performing goodness, not strategically good, but actually virtuous through ten thousand repetitions of the right choice with no reward attached. Aristotle said virtue is a habit formed through practice. Groundhog Day is the proof of concept. The film hits a chord because everyone senses, somewhere beneath the comedy, that this is how it actually works – that there is no shortcut, no hack, no liberation through freedom from consequence. Only the truth of it. Only the practice. Only becoming, slowly and without an audience, the person you were supposed to be.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2074975710821879865

Here on soma:

https://twitter.com/kristof_poland/status/2072591564988182812

“God is dead.” Nietzsche didn’t say this as a celebration. He said it as a warning – and then spent his remaining sane years screaming that nobody understood what it meant.

1. What dies with God is not just religion. It is the entire civilizational foundation – the shared metaphysical ground on which Western values, Western ethics, and Western meaning were constructed. Remove the foundation and the building doesn’t immediately collapse. It stands on habit, on inertia, on the assumption that the values will survive without the roots. They won’t. Nietzsche knew this. He said so. Nobody listened.

2. The replacement religions arrived immediately. Socialism. Nationalism. Progressivism. Wokism. Climatism. Each one borrowed the deep structure of what it replaced — sin, redemption, heretics, chosen people, apocalypse, salvation — and filled it with secular content. The climate activist has the End Times. The woke movement has original sin — called privilege — and ritual confession. The socialist has the promised land and the class enemy. Same architecture. No foundation. Running on stolen moral capital from the civilization they claim to have transcended.

3. Nietzsche is the most stolen philosopher in history. His sister took his manuscripts after his mental collapse and edited them for the Nazis. They took Übermensch as racial superiority – the precise opposite of what he meant (he meant the moral man and had a Polish Noble in mind). The self-help industry took Will to Power as motivational rhetoric. Academics took perspectivism as relativism. Nobody took the actual point: that without genuine values rooted in something deeper than political preference, the will to power produces not greatness but barbarism.

4. Ressentiment — slave morality — is his most precise and least quoted insight. The weak define virtue as whatever the strong are not. Goodness becomes the inversion of power rather than its expression. Merit becomes suspect. Excellence becomes privilege. Achievement becomes something to apologize for. He described this in 1887. It is the operating system of contemporary progressive culture, running at full speed in every HR department and university admissions office in the Western world.

5. The Last Man is his most devastating image – the creature at the end of history who invented happiness and blinks. No aspiration, no risk, no greatness, no tragedy. Warm, safe, comfortable, and completely hollow. Brave New World’s population. Demolition Man’s San Angeles. Tocqueville’s soft despotism taken to its biological conclusion.

6. Nihilism is coming, he said. Into the emptiness left by the dead foundations rush the worst possible substitutes – ideology, group identity, outrage, apocalyptic movements that need an enemy to replace the meaning they cannot generate themselves. He predicted it would take centuries to work through. He was optimistic about the timeline. We are living inside the working-through – and the replacement religions are multiplying faster than anyone is building anything to replace them with.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2073453578119757897

The rest of the series is under this post:

https://twitter.com/kristof_poland/status/2076663737122001400

Here is a list in case you missed any:

26 pieces – Animal Farm, LOTR, 1984, Brave New World, Plato, Rousseau, Voltaire, The Odyssey, Network, Demolition Man, Aristotle, Tocqueville, Marcus Aurelius, Monte Cristo, Epicurus, Idiocracy, The Little Prince, Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, Hayek, Bastiat, What You See and Don’t, The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment, Greek Gods, Citizen Vigilante and now Star Wars.

And then there are the pieces on communism.
Each one is a different angle on the same argument…

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2076655864002330885

As recommended by @elonmusk:

https://twitter.com/kristof_poland/status/2072348839898501365

On communism – in summary:

1. Communism no longer comes for your property. It comes for your reality. The West still pictures bread lines and gulags, a failed economic theory safely buried in 1989 – that was only ever the surface symptom. Leftism-communism is the most insidious destructive force in our world today, and it survives every empirical refutation for one reason: it was never really an economic theory. It doesn’t care about the truth. It only seeks power.

2. At its core it is a civilizational cancer – a machine for distorting reality through constant lies, rewritten history, and the systematic corruption of truth. It practices negative selection: it promotes the ambitious sociopaths, the ideologues, and the conformists, while the honest and the competent are sidelined or destroyed. Talent, integrity, and productivity become liabilities. The body count runs to roughly a hundred million. But the deeper kill is spiritual – trust eroded, excellence punished, reality itself subordinated to raw power.

3. What has changed is the method, not the logic. Tanks and gulags were crude, visible, self-defeating. Today it does not confiscate – it destabilizes. Chaos is the new collectivization. Every manufactured crisis follows the same structural logic: disorder is produced, fear is maximized, and in the panic that follows, transfers of power occur that would have been politically impossible in calm times. You do not notice the expropriation, because you are too busy surviving the emergency they built for you.

4. The fuel running this engine is the Systemic Lie – not ordinary propaganda, but a managed reality in which the categories of thought themselves are corrupted. Productivity is renamed exploitation. Order is renamed fascism. Resistance is renamed hate. A population that cannot name extraction cannot resist it – that is the design, not a side effect. Polish has a word for what results: zakłamanie, a society so saturated with lies that truth becomes almost inaccessible. Obłuda is the mask of falsehood worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

5. This is why the ideology did not die in 1989. It mutated, migrated, and entrenched itself inside the institutions of the civilization it had set out to destroy. Under a system of institutionalized lying, the loyal are promoted and the honest are pushed out, until the institution fills, top to bottom, with people selected specifically for their unreliability. That is not inefficiency. That is institutional rot at the genetic level. People learn to say the words, attend the meetings, sign the statements – and inwardly check out entirely.

6. The damage was never only in the ideology. It was in the people – the habits of mind that decades inside a system of lies produce, habits that do not evaporate with a change of government. The decisive terrain now is institutional: the schools, the media, the corporations, and above all the artificial intelligence systems being trained at civilizational scale on values that half the civilization never chose and was never consulted on. Whoever writes the values into the machines will have more influence over the next century than any election result.

7. This is where civilizations are actually won and lost – not in grand gestures, but in millions of daily, invisible decisions about whether to say what you actually see. Every person who refuses to perform the lie one more time is doing something larger than they know. Name the chaos. Name the lie. The naming is the resistance.

Tell the truth, have courage, and build.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2064309615651668179

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the original Woke

He invented it. Every premise of contemporary progressive ideology traces directly back to one man who had never met a "noble savage", never raised a child, and never lived according to a single principle he preached.

1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual.
Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.

2. The "Noble Savage" is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.

3. The "General Will" is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were "properly enlightened". Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.

4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every "liberation" movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.

5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.

6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda (remember the obłuda of communism?👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.

7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2075495544986669275

Here is about Communism, obłuda and zakłamanie:

https://twitter.com/kristof_poland/status/2064309615651668179

Aristotle wrote the operating system Western civilization ran on for two thousand years – and quietly abandoned in the twentieth century, around the same time all the catastrophes we have been describing began.

1. His central question is not “what are your rights?” It is “what are you for?”
Eudaimonia — flourishing, not happiness — is the answer: the full realization of what a human being can become. The moment a civilization stops asking this question and starts asking only about rights, equality, and safety, it has already chosen administration over life.

2. Virtue is not a rule you follow. It is a habit you form – through practice, through the right environment, through a community that models and rewards excellence. This is why negative selection is so catastrophic in Aristotelian terms: it doesn’t just promote the wrong people. It corrupts the very mechanism by which virtue is transmitted across generations.

3. Man is a political animal – not in the sense that man should be governed, but that man is constituted by his community. You cannot flourish alone. But the corollary is equally precise: the polis exists for man’s flourishing, not the other way around. The moment the state becomes the end and the citizen becomes the means, you have not just bad government – you have the inversion of the natural order.

4. Aristotle catalogued the corruptions of every form of government: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, polity becomes mob rule. The pattern in every case is identical – the rulers stop ruling for the common good and start ruling for themselves. This is not a modern insight. It is the oldest political observation in the Western tradition. Every system contains the seed of its own corruption. The question is always: who is it for?

5. Phronesis — practical wisdom — the ability to judge particular situations correctly, without a rulebook. The bureaucratic state destroys phronesis systematically, replacing judgment with procedure, wisdom with compliance, the experienced man with the certified one. This is Aristotle’s explanation for why the credentialed class produces so many wrong decisions with such complete confidence.

6. He identified the middle class as the foundation of the stable republic – the ballast that prevents the ship from capsizing toward oligarchy above or mob rule below. Not as a sociological observation. As a structural necessity. Destroy the middle class and you have not just inequality – you have the preconditions for every tyranny he ever described.

7. The West replaced Aristotle with procedure, utility, and rights. It gained a framework for managing conflict but lost the vocabulary for saying what a good life is. The system can optimize for GDP, equality of outcome, measured safety – but it cannot tell you what you are for. Aristotle could. Every civilization that forgot that question discovered, eventually, that someone else was happy to answer it for them.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2057136307110064206

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The Brave New World made simple:

1. The World State’s motto is Community, Identity, Stability. These words are lies. There is no community – only interchangeable units. No identity – it is assigned before birth and conditioned before thought. Stability is the only honest word, because stability is the only actual goal, and everything else was sacrificed to achieve it.

2. Mustapha Mond, the Controller, has read Shakespeare. He has read the Bible. He has read everything that was ever great or true or painful about being human – and he locked it in a safe and runs the system anyway. He is not a true believer. He is the man who knows exactly what he buried and considers it a reasonable trade. He is the fattest pig, with better manners and a longer bookshelf.

3. The conditioning doesn’t break you. It makes you enjoy your cage. This is the upgrade from every previous tyranny – you don’t need guards if the prisoner has been engineered, from conception, to find the cell comfortable. Soma — the drug that makes obedience pleasant — is just the maintenance dose. The real work was done before anyone was born.

4. “Everyone belongs to everyone else” – the most totalitarian sentence ever dressed as liberation. It does not mean you are free to love everyone. It means you are forbidden to love anyone in particular. Depth, loyalty, grief, true love — all the things that make a person irreplaceable to another person — are the first things the system removes, because they are the first things that would make you resist it.

5. The man born outside the system — the Savage — asks for the right to be unhappy. To be cold, dirty, afraid, and alive in the full sense. Mond grants him, graciously, that the right exists – and explains, patiently, why no one wants it anymore. This is presented as a debate. It is not a debate. It is a man explaining to a relic why relics are no longer made.

6. Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, the Savage – all three feel that something is missing. None of them can fully name it. This is precise: the system doesn’t suppress the hunger, it removes the vocabulary for it. You cannot demand what you cannot describe. You cannot mourn what you have been engineered not to know you lost.

7. Huxley’s message: Orwell feared they would ban the books. Huxley feared no one would want to read them. The boot on the face is easy to recognize and resist. The silly entertainment — the soma tablet, the orgy-porgy, the centrifugal bumble-puppy — these are harder, because they feel like enough, and by the time they don’t, you no longer have the words for what’s missing. The most complete tyranny is the one that makes abolishing itself unthinkable. Not forbidden. Unthinkable.
"You will own nothing and be happy"

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2072348839898501365

Communism: The Systemic Lie

https://twitter.com/kristof_poland/status/2064309615651668179

Animal Farm by George Orwell, in short:

1. Old Major, the fattest pig on the farm, delivers a sermon about "liberation." He has never missed a meal in his life – but he is the most envious of the Man – the producer, the entrepreneur…

2. “Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy” – the ideology is manufactured from the start, designed not to free the animals but to direct their resentment away from the pigs and toward a useful target. Every revolution needs an enemy. The pigs chose the farmer.

3. The revolution’s commandments were never a constitution. They were a management tool – sacred enough to motivate, vague enough to rewrite, and controlled from the beginning by the only ones who could read – the pigs.

4. Boxer the horse, the most honest creature on the farm, decent, loyal yet naive, totally devoted, responds to every setback with the same answer: “I will work harder!” He means it completely. He works himself half to death. It is the most heartbreaking sentence in the book – because the new system is perfectly designed to absorb exactly that kind of devotion and give nothing back.
When he finally collapses from exhaustion, he is sold to the knacker. For cash. The pigs buy more whisky with the proceeds.
The other animals are told he died in a hospital receiving the best care. The most useful animal on the farm is the one who never once suspects he is the product.

5. The commandments get rewritten at night not because power corrupted the revolution – the rewriting was always the plan. Language was the weapon from the first speech Old Major ever gave.

6. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” – this is not the system’s failure. It is the system’s true face, finally visible once the animals are too exhausted and confused to object.

7. Orwell’s message: the lie came first. And the "liberation" it promised delivered something far worse than what came before – because the fattest pig was merely selfish at the start, but by the end is selfish and fluent in the language of "justice." He took all the eggs. He took everything. And made the hens thank him for it.
The fattest pig knew what he was doing all along…

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2071948517837353292

Communism: The Systemic Lie

https://twitter.com/kristof_poland/status/2064309615651668179

Atlas Shrugged made simple:

1. Society runs on a small number of highly capable producers – industrialists, inventors, engineers – whose work everyone depends on but takes for granted.

2. The system starts rewarding need over achievement: the more capable you are, the more you’re expected to sacrifice for those who aren’t.

3. Success gets treated like a debt – taxed, regulated, resented – until the most capable start asking why they bother trying at all.

4. One by one, led by a man named John Galt, they simply withdraw – walking away rather than keep propping up a system that punishes them for producing.

5. Without them, the whole structure collapses, revealing that the “automatic” prosperity everyone assumed was actually being generated by specific, irreplaceable people.

6. Atlas is the Titan from Greek myth, condemned to carry the sky on his shoulders forever – Rand’s stand-in for the producer class, holding up civilization while getting blamed for it.

7. “Shrugged” is the whole argument in one word: Atlas doesn’t fight, doesn’t protest – he just quietly sets the weight down. Nobody realized the sky was being held up by anyone in particular, until the day it isn’t.
You don’t want us? We just go…🤷🏻‍♂️

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2071927323624956144

In fact we don’t shrug – communism has to be actively fought, as it is not only taking property – it is a Systemic Lie:

https://twitter.com/kristof_poland/status/2064309615651668179

The Road to Serfdom made simple:

1. Plan the whole economy: someone must decide what gets made and who gets what, since people don’t naturally agree on one set of priorities.

2. These decisions are too big and detailed for normal democratic debate, so power shifts to a smaller group who can just act – technocrats.

3. Fixed laws everyone can rely on get replaced by case-by-case rulings, because a plan needs flexibility, not predictability.

4. Dissent becomes a problem to manage, not an opinion to vote on – the plan can’t work if people are free to ignore it.

5. Enforcing all that selects for people most willing to be ruthless – Hayek’s “worst get on top” – i.e. negative moral selection.

6. Since economics touches everything (your job, home, speech), controlling the economy ends up controlling your whole life.
That’s the "serfdom."

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2071872074889429162

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What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:

Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie

Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.

This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.

Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.

The Words We’re Missing

The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.

And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.

The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism

What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.

That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.

This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.

The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.

Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It

People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.

The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.

1/2 This system does not just produce liars – it produces people who can no longer clearly distinguish truth from the narrative they have been trained to emit.

This environment also produces a kind of cognitive adaptation often described as doublethink – the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, and to accept both as true when required. It is not merely lying to others, but a learned internal tolerance toward contradiction itself, where inconsistencies are tolerated because survival depends on it.
Literally twisting the minds.

Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and others who lived through this recognize the pattern immediately when they see it in Western institutions today. The show trials of Twitter mobs. The compelled speech. The ideological litmus tests for employment. The memory-holing of inconvenient facts. The ritualistic confessions of privilege. To a post-communist eye, it is unmistakable.

To eyes that have only known freedom, it looks like a passionate, if misguided, social movement.

That gap in perception – between those who have vocabulary for zakłamanie and those who do not – may be one of the most consequential fault lines in the Western world today. Because you cannot fight a disease you cannot name. And you cannot name what your language was never built to describe.

The first task, then, is translation – not just of words, but of the lived understanding those words carry. The lie is not a bug in this system. It is the system. Until that is understood, the West will keep arriving, perpetually surprised, to find that the institutions it trusted have been quietly hollowed out from within.

2/2

Why are so many rich European families socialists?

For some it’s probably guilt and moral posturing – most of them did not create their wealth themselves after all.

But it’s mainly about preserving their position – the status quo – the subsidies, the government contracts, and the networks that protect their influence, all while fooling the population that they are being cared for.

Many American conservatives misunderstand the European Left.

These people are not stupid. They are not naïve idealists. They are highly educated, strategically minded, and remarkably effective at advancing their interests.

In many European countries, progressive activists and institutions represent small minorities, yet they have succeeded in shaping legislation, media narratives, educational institutions, and immigration policy. That is not evidence of incompetence – it is evidence of organization.

At its core, this is a conflict between merit and status preservation.

A healthy society asks: “Who is the best person for the job?”

An ossified society rather asks: “Who belongs in the room?”

The European establishment often speaks the language of equality while protecting inherited advantages, credentials, connections, and networks.

That is why their version of “socialism” is not about empowering ordinary people, but rather about managing society in a way that preserves existing elites.

The biggest mistake is to laugh at them.

You do not defeat a determined and organized elite by dismissing it as foolish.

You defeat it by understanding how it maintains power – and by offering a better alternative.

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2063702797929832830

x.com/kristof_poland… x.com/Kristof_Poland…

Nie wszyscy rozumieją, dlaczego tak się skupiam na tym chłopaku.

No bo po pierwsze to on mnie atakuje – najpierw tutaj, razem z chmarą niebywale perfidnych trolli – wylewali z siebie totalny moralny ściek – a teraz "prawnikami"…

Ale przecież nie o niego tutaj chodzi, tylko o ogromne SYSTEMOWE KŁAMSTWO, którego wszyscy jesteśmy ofiarami.

Chodzi o fałszowanie przestrzeni publicznej i w efekcie o fałszowanie i psucie obrazu nas samych👇🏻
Także poprzez ten generowany ściek, który ludzie później myślą, że jest naturalny, autentyczny, a każdy uczciwy głos podważający ich narracje jest zaszczuwany i atakowany w tak perfidny sposób, że mało kto ma odwagę i wytrwałość żeby to znosić…

Niebywałe moralne bagno, ale ma ono swój cel i niestety osiąga ten cel dosyć skutecznie:

Przez to godzimy się później na te wszystkie systemowe szwindle i nawet na brak realnej suwerenności.
Czyli jest to sprawa wagi ogromnej. Ogromne systemowe oszustwo kosztujące nas miliardy, a w efekcie i naszą niepodległość.

Poniżej tłumaczę tego mechanizmy👇🏻

Więc trzeba się tym zajmować, bo to ważne. A on się tu tylko napatoczył jako przykład – zobrazowanie tego zjawiska.
Dlatego to będzie Wielki Proces o Prawdę i kłamstwo w naszej przestrzeni publicznej, w polskim internecie – a nie cokolwiek oni tam sobie wymyślili za pretekst, żeby poczuć się obrażonym…

Więc podawajcie to dalej, bo ważne jest żebyśmy to jak najliczniej zrozumieli…

https://x.com/Kristof_Poland/status/2052653553433329987

x.com/kristof_poland… x.com/kristof_poland…

Mój poradnik dla młodych mężczyzn sprzed kilku lat:

Poniższe rady nie są koniecznie łatwe ani przyjemne, a niektóre mogą zabrzmieć nieskromnie, ale będą szczere i prawdziwe...

Są to głównie rady z mojego doświadczenia, dla chłopaków i młodych mężczyzn, którzy w przestrzeni publicznej widzą niestety wiele szkodliwych i toksycznych wzorców i idei, lub słyszą po prostu straszne głupoty na te tematy...

Są oczywiście też takie osoby jak Jordan Peterson, który ma trochę dobrych rad dla młodych mężczyzn, ale też nie jest do końca szczery, trochę wydziwia, a i też nie do końca umie, jadąc na jakiejś chemii jak 1/4 dorosłych Amerykanów...

Oczywiście taki Marek Aureliusz (polecam) czy inni Stoicy też mogą być pomocni, tylko że jednak brakowało im dużo wiedzy o biologicznej i ewolucyjnej naturze człowieka, no a także świadomości obecnych realiów.

Piszę to z perspektywy facetów – jak to wygląda z drugiej strony bardzo trudno jest odgadnąć – kobiety to niesamowicie złożone stworzenia:), ale choć relacje damsko-męskie zawierają pewną dozę konfliktu interesów i wynikające z niej zdrowe napięcie, to dominuje jednak ewolucyjnie powstałe harmonijne dopasowanie kobiet i mężczyzn w imię reprodukcji, czyli można podejrzewać, że dobrze dla kobiet będzie działać to, co stanowi odbicie tego co działa dla mężczyzny, stanowiąc w połączeniu tę harmonię...

Zacznijmy od paru oczywistości: życie po tvn-owsku (marynarki w kratę, lunche we Flamingu, jeżdżenie Ferrari po Monaco, Bentleye i Saint-Tropez) radości nie daje, choć może stanowić jakiś etap w życiu czy cel pośredni – warto spróbować, odhaczyć, ale ogólnie odradzam...

Życie ogólnie nie jest łatwe – jest wręcz cholernie trudne i trzeba się cholernie nastarać żeby nie być nieszczęśliwym, gdyż z grubsza wymaga to zaspokojenia wszystkich najgłębszych potrzeb naszej natury – inaczej zawsze któraś będzie uwierać i nie da spokoju (taka już rola tych mechanizmów – popychać nas do działania aż je zaspokoimy) – tak jesteśmy skonstruowani, dopóki się nie poddamy...
(a nierzadko jest jeszcze gorzej i brak stworzenia harmonijnego życia prowadzi do rozżalenia, zgorzknienia, a stąd już prosta droga do nienawistnej, destrukcyjnej wściekłości, która prowadzi do wszelkich najgorszych rzeczy... Podobnie zresztą jak walczenie z tymi potrzebami i naturą w imię różnych ideologii, co z kolei skutkuje znienawidzeniem siebie, innych, i całego świata... Dużo lepiej niż z nimi walczyć jest je zrozumieć – zrozumieć dokąd naprawdę prowadzą... I po to jest ten tekst…)

I tak:
Do 10-12 lat to czas na naukę podstaw – o tym już pisałem.
Pomiędzy 10 a 20 rokiem życia warto starać się być w czymś najlepszym – sport, nauka, jakakolwiek dziedzina – jest ich mnóstwo do wyboru – daje to tymczasową satysfakcję, ale jest głównie celem pośrednim – uczy dyscypliny, współzawodnictwa, rywalizacji (też i trochę agresji, której całkowicie się wyzbywać nie powinno, a jedynie umieć nad nią panować), i pozwala myśleć o sobie jako o osobie zdolnej do bycia w czymś dobrym, w czymkolwiek, co z kolei pomaga w tym żeby siebie polubić, co jest bardzo pomocne w dalszych etapach – w moim przypadku była to matematyka i gry matematyczne i logiczne (łamigłówki) – polecam:)

Pomiędzy 20 a 35 rokiem życia: jest się wtedy najbardziej twórczym, ma się najwięcej energii – warto nie marnować za dużo z tego czasu na studia (no może oprócz przypadków gdy buduje się prawdziwie wartościową wiedzę i umiejętności, co na dzisiejszych studiach jest raczej rzadkością) – warto wtedy coś stworzyć, zbudować – firmę, karierę, dzieła sztuki – coś wartościowego, co pozwala również zarobić na dalsze życie – lepiej też nie za dużo, żeby pieniądze nie przestały mieć wartości i pozostały jedną ze zdrowych motywacji do działania, ale optymalnie na tyle, żeby móc dalej już na tym budować i w miarę spokojnie robić to co się uznaje za wartościowe...

I teraz najważniejsze – relacje z drugą płcią i szukanie partnerki do wspólnego życia i rozmnażania👇🏻

1/n I teraz najważniejsze – relacje z drugą płcią i szukanie partnerki do wspólnego życia i rozmnażania:

Po pierwsze istnieje tutaj mnóstwo strasznie szkodliwych i wypaczających wzorców – od konceptu "zaliczania" aż po wyidealizowaną miłość – a to zupełnie tak nie działa...
To pierwsze to nic innego jak wyraz frustracji młodych mężczyzn, którzy nie są w stanie znaleźć odpowiadającej im partnerki – no i nic dziwnego – dopóki nie zrealizowali swojego potencjału, nie pokazali że są coś warci, to są warci niewiele, więc bardzo słusznie że żadna kobieta na odpowiadającym im poziomie nie chce mieć z nimi do czynienia – niech się najpierw postarają!
Nie ma zresztą lepszej motywacji która by popychała świat do przodu, popychała do działania – jest to mechanizm stanowiący najgłębsza naturę wszelkiego świata żywego... Frustracja ta jest dodatkowo wzmacniana przez brak zrozumienia dlaczego tak jest – i temu próbujemy tutaj zaradzić.

No więc z tej frustracji, poczucia bezsilności i braku zrozumienia, a zarazem popychani bardzo silnym instynktem i potrzebą, młodzi ludzie często nazywają i traktują tę najważniejszą w życiu sferę obraźliwie, co jest tylko sposobem na radzenie sobie z tym, że sobie z tym nie radzą... Krzywdzą w ten sposób przede wszystkim siebie, niszcząc w sobie zdrowe podejście do tej delikatnej sfery...
Innym z kolei sposobem na ucieczkę od rzeczywistości jest popadanie w klimaty romantyczno-baśniowe – polecam pozostawić to dziewczynom:), i ewentualnie starać się dla nich stworzyć takie warunki, ale samemu twardo stąpając po ziemi...

A co to znaczy sobie z tym radzić – czym w zasadzie jest ten instynkt, gdy go oskubać z tych mechanizmów wyparcia?

Jedyne co o sobie wiemy bezsprzecznie, to że jesteśmy potomkami bardzo długiej linii ludzi, którzy chcieli i którym udało się rozmnożyć... Nic dziwnego że ewolucyjnie ustanawia to naszą najgłębszą naturę...

Chęć seksu u młodych mężczyzn to coś jak pragnienie słodyczy u małych dzieci – prymitywne instynktowne narzędzie służące popychaniu nas w kierunku tego, czego naprawdę chcemy i potrzebujemy...
W przypadku słodyczy to mechanizm gratyfikacji który popycha do tego żeby dostarczać organizmowi kalorii – tylko że tak naprawdę chodzi tu o to, żeby się odżywiać zdrowo, w sposób który służy życiu, a tego odpowiednikiem w tej analogii jest chęć i pragnienie rozmnożenia się z osobą, z którą najbardziej chcemy się rozmnożyć…
Nie ma nic bardziej pięknego i wzniosłego, i to na tym nam prawdziwie zależy, a poddawanie się owemu instynktowi, czyli mylne redukowanie i zniżanie tego do instynktu, który jest tylko narzędziem, które nas w tym kierunku popycha, jest równie głupie i prymitywne jak opychanie się słodyczami...
Zatem odżywiajcie się zdrowo!!
(gdyż także koncepcję "rozsiewania genów" jak najszerzej można spokojnie wsadzić między bajki, jako że zasadnicze jest tu wychowanie dzieci i spędzanie z nimi czasu, żeby przekazać im siebie, swoją formę życia, a to trudno dobrze zrobić poza jedną rodziną, co de facto w praktyce powoduje monogamię (co najwyżej seryjną) i co czyni "strategię reprodukcyjną" podobną do tej, która jest postrzegana jako wynikająca z uwarunkowań ewolucyjnych przypisywanych kobietom)

Podobnie jest zresztą z innymi takimi odczuwanymi potrzebami – takimi jak imponowanie innym ludziom, pokazywanie się, czy nawet zwyciężanie – to wszystko mechanizmy popychające nas ku zdobyciu zasobów i pozycji, żeby dać sobie jak najlepsze szanse na reprodukcję – nie warto zatem tych mechanizmów negować jako "złe", mieć poczucie winy np. z jakichś powodów ideologicznych czy religijnych, ale warto zachować świadomość, że są to jedynie cele pośrednie, i się w nich nie zagubić... (czyli robić swoje, realizując własne cele, a nie pod postrzeganie przez innych, których zresztą niewiele tak naprawdę obchodzimy...)

Zatem w skrócie chodzi tu o pogodzenie rozumu z instynktami, poprzez dogłębne ich zrozumienie – zrozumienie że prowadzą nas one ku dobremu, gdyż w sumie po prostu służą życiu.

2/n

Mikołaj Kopernik jest rażąco niedoceniany.

Nie był tylko astronomem – był uniwersalnym geniuszem, jak Leonardo da Vinci.

Jego odkrycia i działalność wykraczały daleko poza astronomię: był polimatem działającym na najwyższym poziomie w ekonomii, medycynie i sprawach wojskowych.

Nitka od Daniela Fouberta 🧵👇 2/ Kopernik spędził młodość na kolekcjonowaniu dyplomów niczym Pokemonów.

Studiował nauki ścisłe w Krakowie, prawo kanoniczne w Bolonii oraz medycynę w Padwie.
Nie tylko uczył się "nauki" – opanował też grekę, matematykę i prawo.

Był ucieleśnieniem ideału Wysokiego Renesansu.

Introducing "Heart and Crown – The Unyielding Spirit": A Journey Through Polish Heritage

Dear readers,

Are you searching for purpose? Look no further than the essence of Polishness—the most noble culture on Earth, defined by radiant family warmth, the flame of personal liberty, and the unbreakable spirit of sacrifice and solidarity to defend these cherished values.

Welcome to Heart and Crown – The Unyielding Spirit, a captivating new series that invites you into the rich tapestry of Polish history, culture, and resilience. Crafted with the help of Grok, this enchanting saga begins with The Year of Chrobry and unfolds across multiple tomes, blending timeless legends with the vibrant spirit of modern-day Poland. Set against the mystical backdrop of the Vistula River and the rolling fields of Kujawy, this story is more than a tale—it’s a celebration of identity, courage, and the unbreakable bond between a people and their land.

Follow the adventures of Kuba, Zosia, Franek, Basia, and little Tadzio—five spirited children from a quaint manor house—as they are whisked through time by the magical currents of the Vistula. Guided by a mysterious rusalka (a haunting river spirit) and the wisdom of their ancestors, they encounter legendary figures like Bolesław Chrobry, King Jagiełło, Queen Jadwiga, Copernicus, King Sobieski, Kościuszko, Frédéric Chopin, and Maria Curie-Skłodowska. From the rugged forests of Gniezno in 980 to the battlefields of Grunwald in 1410, and the intellectual havens of Renaissance Poland to the romantic salons of the 19th century and the laboratories of scientific discovery, these young heroes learn lessons of faith, sacrifice, strategy, and unity—lessons that empower them to face modern challenges threatening their heritage.

In a world where globalization whispers change, Heart and Crown explores the subtle threats to tradition—be it land-hungry outsiders in the first tome or cultural erosion in the second, The Time of Jagiełło. Yet, it’s not just a story of defense; it’s a vibrant ode to Polish customs—Christmas Eve feasts with pierogi and carols, summer festivals with dances and songs—woven with threads of mystery and hope. The children’s journey mirrors a universal quest: what makes us who we are, and how do we preserve it?

Perfect for readers young and old, this series offers a window into Poland’s soul, narrated with the poetic flair of a Sienkiewicz epic, yet accessible to a global audience. Whether you’re drawn to historical intrigue, magical realism, or the warmth of family tales, Heart and Crown promises an unforgettable voyage. The first tome, The Year of Chrobry, is available now, with more adventures to come as the saga unfolds.

Join us on this global odyssey—discover the heart and crown of Poland, and let its spirit inspire your own.

The first chapter is below ⬇️ – enjoy! Volume 1: "The Year of Chrobry" – Beginnings

Chapter 1: Christmas Eve at the Manor by the Vistula

Snow fell softly as Kuba and Zosia, bundled in woolen coats, raced toward the Vistula, their breaths rising like wisps in the frosty air. The wind carried the scent of hay and gingerbread, while the Kujawy fields around the manor gleamed white in the December twilight. Kuba, a sturdy ten-year-old, adjusted his sister’s scarf, which had slipped from her slender neck. “Zosieńko, don’t lose it, or Grandma will nag again,” he said with a grin, his eyes sparkling like the first star they sought. Zosia, eight years old, with braids peeking from beneath a woolen cap, stretched her hand toward the sky. “Kubek, look, there!” she cried, pointing to a twinkling point on the horizon that seemed to wink at them.

Winter 2025 had settled over Kujawy with gentle resolve, draping fields and forests in a snowy mantle that crunched beneath their boots like an ancient carol. The manor by the Vistula, crafted from dark oak and light stone, stood proudly on its hill, its windows aglow with the warm flicker of lanterns, its snow-laden roof guarding the memories of generations. In the garden, frost-covered apple trees slept, awaiting spring, while the Vistula, encased in a thin sheet of ice, shimmered under the starlight, murmuring tales of old Poland. Willows along the bank, entwined with frost, bowed toward the river, safeguarding its secrets. Kuba and Zosia, exhilarated, dashed back to the manor, the snow crunching underfoot. They burst into the vestibule, where the aroma of spruce, wax, and freshly baked bread enveloped them like a warm embrace. “A star! We saw a star!” Zosia exclaimed, tossing her cap onto a bench. Kuba, unbuttoning his coat, nodded, his cheeks flushed from the run and chill.

The salon buzzed with final preparations for Christmas Eve. Mama, a history teacher at the local high school, wore a navy dress with an embroidered collar as she arranged an extra place setting for the wanderer, humming softly to “Silent Night.” Tata, an engineer designing bridges, adjusted lanterns on the windowsills in a linen shirt, chuckling at a jest from Stryj, his brother and father to Franek, Basia, and Tadzio. Stryj, a robust man with a bushy mustache, sliced poppy seed cake on a wooden board, his booming voice filling the room. “Franek, leave that gingerbread, or your ears will shake!” he called, though his eyes twinkled with warmth. Franek, twelve and mischievous, bit into a piece and winked at Kuba as if to say, “Watch this!” Basia, nine, with braids adorned with red ribbons, wove a mistletoe wreath, humming a carol. Little Tadzio, barely five, toddled underfoot, stretching for a jug of dried fruit compote on the table, its ruby hue catching the candlelight.

“Come now, you’ve seen the star, so sit!” commanded Babcia, entering with a platter of cabbage and mushroom pierogi, her gray hair pinned in a bun and gleaming in the candlelight. Her voice, though stern, carried the warmth of a hearth. Prababcia Helena, the eldest, sat at the table, her hands clasped around a rosary of amber. “Heart and crown, children—the land remembers those who love it,” she whispered, her voice a quiet prayer. Kuba and Zosia exchanged glances, sensing a mystery in her words, as if she held secrets beyond their grasp. The family took their places, the room filling with chatter and laughter. The table groaned under Kujawy delicacies: steaming borscht with dumplings, cabbage and mushroom pierogi, carp in aspic shimmering like the moon, honey cakes redolent of cinnamon, kutia with poppy seeds and nuts, and a jug of dried fruit compote evoking summer orchards. The Christmas tree in the corner, adorned with straw stars, glass baubles, and hand-woven angels, seemed to breathe with magic, its clay angel atop gazing at the children as if privy to the night’s enigmas.

1/3

Seria „Serce i Korona – Niezłomny Duch” – na 1000-lecie Korony Polskiej – czas by dzisiejsze dzieci poznały Chrobrego…

Tom 1: „Rok Chrobrego“

Rozdział 1: Wigilia w dworku nad Wisłą

Śnieg prószył cicho, gdy Kuba i Zosia, wciśnięci w wełniane płaszcze, pędzili nad Wisłę… Tom 1: „Rok Chrobrego“

Rozdział 1: Wigilia w dworku nad Wisłą

Śnieg prószył cicho, gdy Kuba i Zosia, wciśnięci w wełniane płaszcze, pędzili nad Wisłę, ich oddechy unosiły się w mroźnym powietrzu jak obłoczki. Wiatr niósł zapach siana i pierników, a kujawskie pola wokół dworku lśniły bielą w grudniowym zmierzchu. Kuba, krzepki dziesięciolatek, poprawił siostrze szalik, który zsunął się z jej drobnej szyi. „Zosieńko, nie zgub go, bo babcia znów będzie gderać” – powiedział z uśmiechem, a jego oczy błyszczały jak pierwsza gwiazdka, której szukali. Zosia, ośmioletnia, z warkoczykami wystającymi spod wełnianej czapki, wyciągnęła rękę ku niebu. „Kubek, patrz, tam!” – zawołała, wskazując migoczący punkt nad horyzontem, który zdawał się puszczać do nich oko.

Zima 2025 roku rozgościła się na Kujawach z łagodną stanowczością, otulając pola i lasy śnieżną szatą, która skrzypiała pod butami niczym stara kolęda. Dworek nad Wisłą, zbudowany z ciemnego dębu i jasnego kamienia, stał dumnie na wzgórzu, jego okna migotały ciepłym światłem lampionów, a dach, przysypany śniegiem, zdawał się strzec wspomnień pokoleń. W ogrodzie jabłonie, nagie i oszronione, czekały na wiosnę, a Wisła, skuta cienką taflą lodu, lśniła w blasku gwiazd, szumiąc cicho, jakby opowiadała historie dawnej Polski. Wierzby na brzegu, oplecione mrozem, chyliły się ku rzece, strzegąc jej tajemnic. Kuba i Zosia, uradowani, pędzili z powrotem do dworku, śnieg chrzęścił pod ich butami. Wpadli do sieni, gdzie zapach świerku, wosku i świeżo pieczonego chleba witał ich jak ciepły uścisk. „Gwiazdka! Widzieliśmy gwiazdkę!” – zawołała Zosia, zrzucając czapkę na ławę. Kuba, rozpinając płaszcz, kiwnął głową, a jego policzki płonęły od biegu i chłodu.

W salonie trwały ostatnie przygotowania do Wigilii. Mama, nauczycielka historii w miejscowym liceum, w granatowej sukni z haftowanym kołnierzem, układała na stole dodatkowe nakrycie dla wędrowca, nucąc cicho „Wśród nocnej ciszy”. Tata, inżynier projektujący mosty, w lnianej koszuli, poprawiał lampiony na parapetach, śmiejąc się z żartu stryja, swojego brata i ojca Franka, Basi i Tadzia. Stryj, postawny mężczyzna z sumiastym wąsem, w koszuli z ludowym haftem, kroił makowiec na drewnianej desce, a jego donośny głos rozbrzmiewał w sali. „Franek, zostaw ten piernik, bo ci się uszy zatrzęsą!” – rzucił, choć jego oczy śmiały się serdecznie. Franek, dwunastoletni, z psotnym błyskiem w oku, odgryzł kawałek ciasta i mrugnął do Kuby, jakby chciał powiedzieć: „Patrz, ja mogę!” Basia, dziewięcioletnia, z warkoczykami ozdobionymi czerwonymi wstążkami, plotła wianek z jemioły, nucąc kolędę. Mały Tadzio, ledwie pięcioletni, plątał się pod nogami, próbując dosięgnąć dzbanka z kompotem z suszu, który stał na stole i mienił się jak rubin w świetle świec.

„No, gwiazdkę widzieliście, to siadać do stołu!” – zarządziła babcia, w haftowanej chuście, wnosząc półmisek pierogów z kapustą i grzybami. Jej siwe włosy, upięte w kok, lśniły w blasku świec, a głos, choć surowy, niósł ciepło domowego ogniska. Domownicy ruszyli na miejsca, a sala wypełniła się gwarem i śmiechem. Blat stołu uginał się od kujawskich smaków: parujący barszcz z uszkami, pierogi z kapustą i grzybami, karp w galarecie, miodowniki pachnące cynamonem, kutia z makiem i orzechami, a obok dzbanek z kompotem z suszu, którego aromat przypominał letnie sady. Choinka w rogu, ubrana w słomiane gwiazdki, szklane bombki i ręcznie plecione aniołki, zdawała się oddychać magią, a gliniany aniołek na jej wierzchołku spoglądał na dzieci, jakby znał sekrety nadchodzącej nocy.
Kuba spojrzał na Zosię i szepnął: „Patrz, jak pięknie, Zosieńko!” Zosia kiwnęła głową. „Kubek, to najlepsza Wigilia!”
Prababcia Helena, najstarsza w rodzinie, siedziała przy stole, splatając dłonie na bursztynowym różańcu. „Serce i korona, dzieci – ziemia pamięta tych, co ją kochają” – szepnęła, a jej głos brzmiał jak cicha modlitwa.

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Ever wondered what it feels like to be at different levels of intelligence?

Here Grok explains:

Below is the description of the entire IQ spectrum (from the lowest to the highest level, including a subdivision of the 160+ category). I maintain a detailed, compassionate tone, covering cognitive, emotional, and social experiences, as well as challenges and strengths at each level.

---

### 1. Profound Intellectual Disability (IQ < 20)
- **Cognitive Experience:** The world is experienced primarily through immediate sensory input—sights, sounds, touches, and basic needs like hunger or comfort. Abstract thinking, language, and complex problem-solving are virtually absent. Daily life revolves around routines, and understanding cause-and-effect or time is minimal.
- **Emotional Experience:** Emotions are intense and immediate, often tied to physical sensations or the presence/absence of caregivers. Joy, fear, or frustration can be profound but fleeting, with little capacity for reflection or long-term emotional memory.
- **Social Experience:** Connections with others depend deeply on caregivers or family. Nonverbal communication (smiles, cries, physical touch) is central, and there’s a strong need for consistent, loving support. The world can feel overwhelming without structure, but simple interactions (e.g., being held, hearing a familiar voice) bring comfort.
- **Challenges & Strengths:** Challenges include extreme vulnerability and reliance on others for survival. Strengths lie in the capacity for simple joys, unconditional trust, and emotional presence in the moment, often teaching caregivers profound lessons about love and patience.

### 2. Severe Intellectual Disability (IQ 20–34)
- **Cognitive Experience:** Basic language and recognition of familiar people or objects emerge, but abstract concepts (e.g., numbers, time, future planning) remain elusive. Problem-solving is limited to immediate, concrete tasks, and learning requires extensive repetition and support.
- **Emotional Experience:** Emotions are still immediate and reactive, but there may be rudimentary recognition of others’ emotions (e.g., sadness in a caregiver’s face). There’s a desire for connection, often expressed through gestures or simple words, but frustration can arise from miscommunication.
- **Social Experience:** Relationships center on caregivers or close family, with limited ability to form complex social bonds. The world feels safer with routine and familiar faces, but unfamiliar situations can cause distress or confusion.
- **Challenges & Strengths:** Challenges include difficulty communicating needs and navigating change. Strengths include a deep capacity for affection, loyalty, and finding joy in repetitive, familiar activities (e.g., music, touch).

### 3. Moderate Intellectual Disability (IQ 35–49)
- **Cognitive Experience:** Basic language skills develop, allowing simple conversations and recognition of routines (e.g., “time to eat”). Problem-solving is concrete, and abstract thinking (e.g., hypothetical scenarios) is minimal. Learning is slow and requires hands-on guidance, but functional skills (e.g., dressing, eating) can be mastered with support.
- **Emotional Experience:** Emotions are more recognizable and expressible, though still tied to the present moment. There’s a growing awareness of others’ feelings, but misinterpretations or overreactions can occur. Frustration or sadness may arise from feeling misunderstood or unable to keep up.
- **Social Experience:** Social bonds with caregivers and family deepen, and there may be some ability to form simple friendships based on shared activities. The world feels manageable with structure but overwhelming without it, leading to anxiety in new situations.
- **Challenges & Strengths:** Challenges include limited independence and difficulty with complex social cues. Strengths include warmth, trust, enjoyment of routine, and the ability to learn practical skills with patience.

1/6 ### 4. Mild Intellectual Disability (IQ 50–69)
- **Cognitive Experience:** Language and reasoning improve, allowing for basic conversations, simple problem-solving, and functional literacy (e.g., recognizing words, counting money with assistance). Abstract thinking is limited, but there’s a growing ability to understand cause-and-effect in familiar contexts.
- **Emotional Experience:** Emotions are more nuanced, with some ability to reflect on feelings and recognize others’ emotions. There may be frustration or insecurity about not keeping up with peers, but also moments of pride in mastering new skills.
- **Social Experience:** Friendships can form, though they often rely on shared activities rather than deep intellectual connection. There’s a desire for acceptance, but social misunderstandings or exclusion can lead to loneliness. The world feels navigable with support but daunting without it.
- **Challenges & Strengths:** Challenges include academic struggles and limited independence in complex tasks. Strengths include resilience, warmth, and the ability to find joy in simple pleasures and relationships.

### 5. Below Average (IQ 70–84)
- **Cognitive Experience:** Thinking is slower and more concrete than average, but functional literacy, basic math, and problem-solving are possible with effort. Abstract concepts (e.g., politics, philosophy) may be difficult, but practical tasks are manageable. Learning requires more time and repetition.
- **Emotional Experience:** Emotions are relatable and expressive, with growing self-awareness and sensitivity to others’ feelings. There may be frustration or self-doubt about intellectual limitations, but also a strong capacity for empathy and connection.
- **Social Experience:** Friendships and social navigation are possible, though misunderstandings or feeling “left out” can occur. The world feels familiar and manageable in routine settings but challenging in novel or abstract situations.
- **Challenges & Strengths:** Challenges include academic or job-related struggles and occasional social isolation. Strengths include practicality, loyalty, and a grounded, relatable perspective on life.

### 6. Average Intelligence (IQ 85–115)
- **Cognitive Experience:** The world is navigable with typical problem-solving, social understanding, and adaptability. Abstract thinking is possible for everyday tasks (e.g., planning, following news), but complex or highly technical concepts may require effort or education. Learning is steady, and reasoning balances concrete and abstract aspects.
- **Emotional Experience:** Emotions are well-understood and manageable, with a balance of self-awareness, empathy, and resilience. There’s curiosity about the world but also pragmatism about daily life.
- **Social Experience:** Social bonds form easily, with the ability to navigate friendships, work relationships, and community roles. The world feels approachable, though stress or overwhelm can arise from life’s complexities.
- **Challenges & Strengths:** Challenges include occasional self-doubt or difficulty with highly abstract or technical fields. Strengths include versatility, relatability, and a balanced approach to life’s challenges.

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Wkrótce ich nie będzie, więc napiszmy jeszcze o brytyjskim premierze i francuskim prezydencie, póki są:)

Rishi Sunak był w Goldmanie w Londynie mniej więcej wtedy kiedy ja - on był jednym z setek juniorów w Corporate Finance (tzw. "empty suits", zatrudniani w setkach), ja byłem traderem derywatów (zatrudnia się mniej więcej jednego rocznie)

Emmanuel Macron był na École Nationale d’Administration pięć lat po mnie (mamy tyle samo lat), wcześniej nie zrobiwszy nic szczególnego - ja wcześniej byłem na École Polytechnique, gdzie wszedłem na pierwszym miejscu…

Tu nie chodzi o to, żeby się chwalić, tylko żeby pokazać jakie są efekty zaprzedania się zastałemu, zakłamanemu systemowi - i jakim poświęceniem jest nie zrobienie tego…

Ale przede wszystkim jest to kwestia posiadania własnego państwa, w którym jest w miarę uczciwa merytokracja - my tego nie mamy, więc nie ma żadnych struktur, w których by można uczciwie robić karierę na tym poziomie…

I dlatego trzeba walczyć o suwerenną Polskę - żeby takie struktury zbudować - dla naszych dzieci…

https://x.com/kristof_poland/status/1801284582899155209

Z wczorajszych sond wynika, że są tu głównie młodzi mężczyźni na etapie zajmowania się głównie zarabianiem - i bardzo słusznie…

Podzielę się zatem poradnikiem dla młodych mężczyzn napisanym z okazji moich poprzednich urodzin - dajcie znać co sądzicie?

Jest to dosyć długie, więc przekleję w odcinkach - zaczynamy:

Z okazji urodzin - mam już trochę lat - podzielę się paroma radami, z doświadczenia:

Będą to głównie rady dla chłopaków i młodych mężczyzn, którzy w przestrzeni publicznej widzą niestety wiele szkodliwych i toksycznych wzorców i idei, lub słyszą po prostu straszne głupoty na te tematy...

Są oczywiście też takie osoby jak Jordan Peterson, który ma dużo dobrych rad dla młodych mężczyzn, ale też nie jest do końca szczery, trochę wydziwia, a i też nie do końca umie, jadąc na jakiejś chemii jak 1/4 dorosłych Amerykanów...

Oczywiście taki Marek Aureliusz (polecam) czy inni Stoicy też mogą być pomocni, tylko że jednak brakowało im dużo wiedzy o biologicznej i ewolucyjnej naturze człowieka, no a także świadomości obecnych realiów

1/17 Poniższe rady nie są koniecznie łatwe ani przyjemne, a niektóre mogą zabrzmieć nieskromnie, ale będą szczere i prawdziwe...

Piszę to z perspektywy facetów - jak to wygląda z drugiej strony bardzo trudno jest odgadnąć - kobiety to niesamowicie złożone stworzenia:), ale choć relacje damsko-męskie zawierają pewną dozę konfliktu interesów i wynikające z niej zdrowe napięcie, to dominuje jednak ewolucyjnie powstałe harmonijne dopasowanie kobiet i mężczyzn w imię reprodukcji, czyli można podejrzewać, że dobrze dla kobiet będzie działać to, co stanowi odbicie tego co działa dla mężczyzny, stanowiąc w połączeniu tę harmonię...

2/17