The Truth, Not Myth

Across continents and centuries, one depressing magic trick keeps performing itself. Whenever people in power ( or those trying to get into power) feel even the slightest tremor under their feet, they reflexively point to the left and go, “Start with them, they’re always a safe warmup act.” The scenery changes, the costumes change, but the instinct stays as reliable as a fire alarm with a dying battery. As historian Timothy Snyder observes in On Tyranny , “The symbol of the twentieth century is the circle of people who agree to perform a lie. The symbol of the twenty-first century is the circle of people who agree to disregard the victim.” He may as well have added a footnote saying “and watch who gets cast as the victim first.” It is almost always the left. History does not even bother to hide it. In the United States, the Palmer Raids of 1919–1920 saw thousands of anarchists and immigrant communists rounded up and deported. Historian Adam Hochschild notes this set the tone, showi...

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a piece of 1960s mouse sociology . (A sentence I never thought I’d write. And yet, here we are.) It all started when I was at home, doomscrolling on Instagram , and a video about a mouse utopia hijacked my feed. In 1968, an ethologist named John B. Calhoun built a perfect world. He called it “ Universe 25 .” It was a sterile Eden , engineered for perfection: unlimited food, no predators, no disease. Its purpose was to answer a haunting question. What happens when all the old struggles vanish? The result was a catastrophe. The population surged, but society did not. Calhoun documented the unraveling: “The social organisation of the animals showed equal disruption… The one activity most rapidly disrupted was the emergence of organised maternal behaviour.” Mothers abandoned their pups. The enclosure was filled with bodies, yet it was utterly emptied of purpose. He called this collapse the “ behavioural sink ,” a process that “collects anima...