What do Progressives want to progress towards?

Compassion, justice, equality, progress — the language of the left always sounds noble.

But to understand what modern wokeness actually is, you have to follow the lineage back nearly 200 years.

🧵 Ideas evolve like viruses.

As society builds immunity to a bad idea, academics gain-of-function it.

The scientists of ideology tinker until it mutates into something more contagious, more destructive, and harder to detect.

2/15

I've read hundreds of books on psychology, philosophy, history, economics, and power.

Here are my top 10.

They will rewire how you interpret people, institutions, and events.

🧵 1. The Undiscovered Self — Carl Jung (1957)

Jung warned that when people stop understanding themselves, they become raw material for mass movements.

This book is a blueprint for psychological self-defence.

It shows how collective ideologies swallow individual identity — and why confronting your own shadow is the only real protection against groupthink.

Start here.

Canada still looks like a democracy.

Elections are held, parliament exists, and parties "compete."

But over the years, those institutions have been inverted.

They do not to represent Canadians, but protect the people in power from them.

A thread. 🧵 ELECTIONS AS ESCAPE ROUTES

In 2021, the House of Commons ordered the Trudeau government to release documents about a national security breach at the Winnipeg Lab — where a scientist transferred live Ebola and Henipah viruses to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and collaborated with the Chinese military.

The government defied four House orders, sued the Speaker of the House, then called a snap election.

This dissolved Parliament and ended the investigation.

Three years later, the Auditor General exposed ~$390 million in conflicts of interest and ineligible spending at the federal green tech fund. The House demanded documents. The Liberals refused. And Parliament ground to a halt for EIGHT MONTHS.

Same playbook. Twice.

Elections are supposed to hold leaders accountable, instead they did the opposite.

If the Western world feels like it’s gone insane over the last decade, you’re not imagining it.

Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski called this phenomenon Political Ponerology.

The study of how psychologically disordered individuals capture institutions.

Every pathological regime ends up with the same cast of characters.

Here they are.

🧵 1. Psychopaths: The Apex Operators

Psychopaths see society as a playground for power.

They lack empathy and feel no moral restraint. Manipulation, intimidation, and cruelty are simply tools.

Their traits aren’t liabilities in a corrupt system — they’re advantages.

When institutions weaken, these are the people who rise to the top.

Historical examples: Joseph Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria, Heinrich Himmler, Ali Khamenei, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Augusto Pinochet.

Pop culture analogues: Emperor Palpatine (Star Wars), Littlefinger (Game of Thrones), Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter), Ozymandias (Watchmen), Logan Roy (Succession), Agent Smith (The Matrix).

How to maintain Self-Respect in a Corrupt Society

A communist‐era dissident created a guide for staying free in a world built on lies.

🧵 2/ The Concept

Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident who lived under one of the most suffocating Soviet puppet regimes in Europe, cracked the code:

When you can’t overthrow a corrupt system… you can make it look ridiculous.