You’re not crazy. The world really does feel unhinged.

Then a border crisis. A sudden riot. A market panic. A “historic” headline… every other day.

And the most exhausting part is this: everyone has an explanation — and most of them are slogans.

So let’s clear the fog.

The invisible engine that used to hold the world together is sputtering, and we’re still trying to live by rules that no longer match reality.

The real task now is to understand what is actually happening.

Today, I’ll show you how I read the global political landscape — and the deeper forces I see driving today’s disorder.

If I do my job right, you’ll finish this episode with clarity rather than anxiety.

Here’s our roadmap for today:

• The Postwar World Order — how two competing ideas of justice and morality shaped alliances after World War II
  
• Mass Migration — why inequality is now “solved” by moving, not fixing
  
• Environment Over Merit — how success stopped being individual and became a product of birthplace, networks, and supportive systems
  
• Double Standards and the Collapse of Morality — how moral language survived while moral behavior quietly disappeared from Western politics
  
• The Forgotten People — why millions feel locked out of the “successful world” and turn to nationalism and radical politics for dignity
  
• A New Formula — why the old rules no longer work, and what a new system of justice, morality, and global cooperation must be built around
  

The Postwar World Order

You often hear that the old world order is collapsing. Before we can talk about its collapse, we need to be clear about what that order actually was.

After World War II, the United States was genuinely terrified of the Soviet Union. Not rhetorically—structurally. Washington tried to gather as many countries as possible into a single coalition to prevent the expansion of the socialist bloc and to contain Soviet influence.

Moscow did exactly the same thing.

To attract allies, both sides needed three things: money, technology, and ideology.

The Soviet Union offered a beautiful promise: let’s build a society without exploitation, where no one lives off another person’s labor, and all property belongs to “the people.”

In reality, exploitation inside the socialist camp exceeded anything seen under the tsars. Property did not belong to the people; it belonged to officials who controlled it. The USSR gradually recreated an old and familiar system—a massive feudal estate. There was one permanent lord at the top, his loyal retainers managed everything beneath him, and the population lived like serfs. No one asked their opinion. Their role was to work diligently and wait for communism to arrive someday.

Suffering would end later. Liberation was always postponed.
In other words, paradise was promised after death. Medieval theology with modern slogans.

The Soviet moral formula was simple: justice means no one is rich, and morality means individual desires must be sacrificed to the needs of the collective. Once you accept that logic, almost anything becomes permissible—mass purges, deportations, executions, and invasions. The goal justifies the method.

America had to offer a competing idea of justice and morality.

In the American model, justice means reward for individual achievement. You can rise in the social hierarchy through intelligence, effort, and discipline. You are judged by what you do, not by who you were born as. Morality, in turn, means that the strong help the weak and try—imperfectly, inconsistently, but sincerely—to make life better for others.

At its core, America offered the world a radical proposition: you could achieve a level of success your ancestors could not even imagine—if you invested effort. The Soviet Union offered something very different: wait patiently, and someday the system itself will raise everyone’s standard of living.

The American model appealed to those who believed in their own capacity to grow.
The Soviet model appealed to those who expected wealth to be redistributed to them.

That is how alliances formed.

America’s message was: contribute, and you will be respected, valued, and treated as an equal partner. This applied primarily to countries capable of making such contributions—Western Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. With others, the equation did not work. If a country could not produce results, why grant it high status?

Poor countries were helped—but not elevated. American humanitarian missions operated worldwide and genuinely reduced disease, hunger, and postwar suffering. But charity did not translate into prestige. High status without contribution would have contradicted the very idea of fairness.

The Soviet model, by contrast, was attractive to states that had little to offer beyond votes at the United Nations. This allowed Moscow to assemble a large circle of paid loyalty—friends who vanished the moment the patron’s economy began to fail.

That was the postwar world order.
And everything we see today begins with its slow, uneven collapse.

Mass Migration

The American idea of justice—later adopted by many U.S. allies—produced another powerful and unexpected phenomenon: mass migration.

If people are judged by merit, then skin color should not matter. Caste should not matter. It should not matter that your father worked the land with a hoe and your mother washed the dead. There are places on Earth where you can obtain what would have been unthinkable for your ancestors: a home, a stable job, good education for your children, a safe and predictable future.

That’s the promise. And in theory, it’s true.

Countries that embraced the American formula of justice and morality opened their doors to migrants.

But in the modern world, status often comes automatically with the right symbols of success: a luxury apartment, a pricey car, or vacation photos on Instagram. Wealthy people from the developing world and the former socialist bloc began moving west in large numbers. The West accepted them, reluctantly but consistently. Everyone profited from it. And after all, abandoning your principles would have looked… immoral. Principles, after all, are sacred.

The result was a world of staggering inequality—one that can be overcome in only one reliable way: by moving to a more prosperous country.

Capital was earned anywhere and by any means—through wars, through exploitation, through near-slave labor in mines—and then transported into “islands of stability and civilization.”

At the same time, millions of desperately poor migrants arrived. States had to spend resources on them. After all, all people are equal before God. Treat others as you would want to be treated yourself.

Resources were directed to those who suffered the most: those who were oppressed, those attacked by war. That felt moral.

The Power of Environment—and the Collapse of Fairness

Over time, something uncomfortable became obvious: in the modern world, “individual merit” is largely a myth.

For anything to work out, you must be born into the right family. You need decent health, basic emotional stability, and adults who can support you—financially and psychologically. You need time to study, space to think, and money that buys you options.

In the past, children were raised by extended families and neighbors. You became a functioning member of society simply by growing up inside it. Today, success usually requires the right university, the right network, or years of self-education—which again presupposes free time and resources.

You must grow up surrounded by people who teach you that pleasure can come from a good book rather than a dose of heroin. Someone has to see value in you—before you can see it yourself.

In short, modern success is produced by environment.

The environment creates you, supplies energy and resources, and sustains you along the way. That makes the environment itself a form of capital.

If you lack it, effort alone rarely helps.

If you are the greatest singer on Earth but live in the mountains of Afghanistan, you won’t become the next Taylor Swift or Maria Callas. If you are a brilliant inventor from Samara, your ideas are unlikely to reach mass production—because Russia lacks a developed system for commercializing inventions. If you want to build a truly large business, you must go where that is structurally possible.

As a result, regions with strong environments attract more brains and more capital, while weak regions lose both. The gap keeps widening.

If you are intelligent, ambitious, and possess even modest resources, investing them in your home country often makes little sense. At best, you will serve as an accessory to a larger neighbor. At worst, local criminal elites will control you.

Everything changes if you emigrate in time—secure money, documents, and rebuild your life inside a supportive environment.

And so we arrive at an uncomfortable conclusion: origin and inherited wealth still matter. They provide the launchpad that allows you to export your mind and capital from one country—or region—to another.

Which brings us back to a very old formula:
To those who have, more will be given.
From those who have little, even that will be taken away.

So much for justice.

Double Standards and the Collapse of Morality

For decades, the West maintained the appearance of moral leadership. Any action that was even slightly immoral required a moral curtain—some justification that allowed everyone to sleep at night.

We invaded Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.
We invaded Afghanistan to destroy al-Qaeda and ended up handing power back to the Taliban.

We proclaim that we accept refugees without discrimination, turn a blind eye to illegal immigration, and at the same time create conditions where those same migrants are worked to exhaustion, trapped for years without legal status, and stripped of basic rights. We build vast social programs that are supposed to help the vulnerable and enable corruption, abuse, and entire shadow economies.

In the name of morality, we obsess over pronouns, devote endless energy to debates over transgender bathrooms, smash shop windows to prove that all races are equal, tolerate harassment of Jewish students at universities, and—after October 7—somehow manage to side with Hamas despite what it openly did.

The moral framework finally collapsed with the war in Ukraine.

The expectation was that the civilized world would stand shoulder to shoulder with the victim of aggression. Instead, we saw hesitation, back-channel calls to the aggressor, continued purchases of oil and gas, and a steady refusal to provide Ukraine with the weapons it needed to win. The unspoken logic was cynical but clear: let Russia bleed itself out against Ukraine, and we’ll wait on the sidelines.

The final insult came in the form of the political performances of Donald Trump and his circle, people for whom moral questions barely exist at all.

Why does this resonate?

Because they stand on very solid ground.

Not just among tech billionaires or oil interests, but among millions of people who were forgotten by those who “earned success through intellect and hard work,” who made it into the right environments and climbed out of reach.

The Forgotten People

Between the glittering skyscrapers of New York City and the dusty houses of Winslow, there is an abyss. These are not simply different locations on a map—they are different universes.

Half the country—if not more—has no realistic way to improve its life. There is no nourishing environment, no capital, and often no youth or health left to start over.

Everyone wants respect and status—especially when your life story boils down to a bleak formula: “I worked hard all my life and got nothing.”

The problem is not money. The problem is position in the social hierarchy.

Successful people define themselves in opposition to “losers” left behind in poor, decaying towns with rusted playgrounds and the pipes of abandoned factories. They want nothing in common with them. They don’t listen, they don’t ask, and they don’t care much what they think.

Naturally, the forgotten crave moral support. They feel stronger when they belong to a nation, a great country, something vast, powerful, and meaningful. That is why “patriotism” becomes so important in this environment.

They have no real resource left except one: the vote. And they use it to support those who promise to take care of them.

This is the real reason ultra-right movements are rising across the world. They are not led by saints or genuine defenders of the poor. The space is simply empty, and it is being claimed by those who, for one reason or another, also do not fit into the polished world of elite success.

They offer a different version of justice:
America for Americans.
Russia for Russians.
Germany for Germans.

Translated, it means: “Let’s finally spend resources on ourselves, not on outsiders.”

Morality, in this framework, does not apply to strangers. They are not to be pitied. Justice means living the way you are used to, receiving respect, and maintaining an acceptable social status. You feel that the state cares about you. Somewhere up there, “ours” are defeating “theirs.” It doesn’t affect your daily life—but it feels good to live in a great country.

A New Formula

Everything we are seeing in politics today is the result of a simple mismatch: the old formula of justice no longer reflects reality, and moral norms have been discarded because no one actually follows them.

It’s like traffic rules. If everyone crosses on a red light, waiting patiently feels foolish. You do what everyone else does—even if it’s dangerous.

To rebuild the world on new terms, we need a new formula of justice and morality—one accepted not by everyone, but by a clear majority. Without that, reconciliation between opposing political camps is impossible. This applies equally to North America and Europe.

A workable formula would allow new international coalitions to form. In the past, alliances were built on geography or convenience. Now they must be built around values.

We also need a new system of checks and balances in global politics—one that reflects current realities. The old world revolved around the confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union. Today, the central problem is authoritarian regimes. Their elites do not want reform. They want permanent power, unrestricted extraction of resources, and safe havens abroad for their money and families.

They always start wars—because war is what sustains their legitimacy. An authoritarian ruler without victories loses authority, and eventually power.

There is another urgent task.

If we do not want endless waves of refugees at our borders—and if we do not want growing hatred between those who have and those who don’t, both domestically and globally—we must invest in creating productive environments not only at home, but elsewhere.

This is not done with grants. Grants get stolen or wasted.
It is not done through resource trade. Authoritarian rulers capture it, buy weapons, and threaten their neighbors.

What’s needed is a subtle game of status and recognition.

If you make your country—or even your small town—truly impressive, you earn legitimacy and respect. Not a Nobel Prize, but something closer to an Olympics of development—where ambitious people can gain status not by looting everything in sight, but by demonstrating extraordinary governance and creativity.

More than money, people want respect.
Respect from those they themselves respect.

The task is simple in theory: define clear rules and show a path to earning that respect. Without rules, everything collapses into primitive behavior—bullying enemies and allies alike, boasting about the biggest car, the most beautiful camel, or the largest missile.

And that is the world we are drifting toward—unless we choose otherwise.

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