Changing The Paradigm of the 20th Century, In Order To Change Ourselves
The Current American Crisis Framed Via An Entirely Different Premise
Unfortunately, I still have laryngitis.
Sometimes you have an illness with only one or two symptoms. I have the fully Monty. Which includes migraines. And as a person who has never really had chronic headaches, I didn’t realize how much they create brain fog and affect memory.
I’ve been pretty much a goldfish for 8 or 9 days. I often forget what I was working on 5 minutes ago. And every time I have a great idea, if I don’t make an actual physical note of it, the entire idea just disappears into some kind of dark abyss where memories are lost.
Strangely, this means, I remember what I was doing two weeks ago better than I remember what I was doing two days ago.
This has made coping with the Trump presidency at the same time as being sick a bit brutal. Because each day I respond to the feelings of political crisis with a series of coping mechanisms.
And they work and they help.
But I’ve lost track of each and every one of those coping mechanisms. Which - as a writer - feels sad, and brutal.
My coping mechanisms are my fondest memories and I usually have a special memory bank for the thoughts and feelings I use to talk myself down from the ledge.
I just hope they’re buried in there somewhere and when my laryngitis passes, I’ll be able to retrieve them.
Wanting to pay attention to Trump’s incoming administration has, no doubt, extended my sickness. But it also makes planning my Sunday Philosophy discussion a little fragmented. Usually I let the ideas percolate throughout the week, before sitting down to write the article.
Yesterday, for a whole two hours I thought it was already Sunday. And I was just going about my business as usual.
Except that - not only was it Saturday - but it didn’t even occur to me that if it was, indeed, Sunday, I would be doing my Sunday Philosophy Discussion.
(What the heck is wrong with my brain right now?)
So - last night - not remembering anything that I had been pondering throughout the week, I pulled out a big stack of books on Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.
For example, Sartre’s War Diaries - which were his letters to Simone de Beauvoir during the first year of the war.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from Jean-Paul Sartre about taking responsibility for the moment you’re alive, whether or not it’s the most beautiful moment:
“There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Devil and the Good Lord
Last night, I began reading Sartre’s novel: Troubled Sleep. Which is set in 1940 during the fall of France to Nazi occupation.
Perhaps I thought I could glean some insight into how the French coped with that feeling of powerlessness from an incoming occupation.
In the book Creating A Feminist Existence In The World, Sandrine Sanos writes:
The year 1939 was a turning point for Beauvoir. In her own words:
“Suddenly, history fell upon her and she exploded. She found herself scattered to the four corners of the earth, connected to each and all.”
The first few months were anxious and fearful. The French waited for news of the war.
Beauvoir wrote, “War seemed to be nowhere.”
For nearly eight months, the average French citizen heard nothing. And they even began calling it ‘the phony war.’
This is why the subtitle of Jean-Paul Sartre’s War Diaries is Notebooks From a Phoney War, 1939-1940.
After eight months of calm, the German army came swiftly and defeated the French Army in just six weeks - beginning the Nazi occupation of France.
This occupation would last until the Allied armies broke ground and liberated France in 1944.
Given that I have the memory of a goldfish, I don’t quite remember what it was that I read last night that made me wake up at 4 or 5AM this morning and begin to think about the self-determination of nations.
Both Sartre & Beauvoir wrote extensively about World War II, because at that time they were in their 30s. Jean-Paul Sartre was 35 (the age I’ll be in a few months).
Which means they were only children during World War I.
But the horrors of World War II obscure something truly foundational about the first war. It’s a piece of the puzzle that, particularly, our American history omits.
And it’s part of something I believe we’re all missing every time we discuss fascism.
P.S. We interrupt this article to suddenly remember what we did this week:
It just dawned on me that I was reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book: Strongmen: Mussolini To The Present a few days ago.
I completely forgot all about it, because I’m a goldfish.
Welcome to laryngitis philosophy.
But no doubt this contributed to my 4AM realization. Because Ben-Ghiat spoke of the rise of Mussolini beginning not with World War II, but in 1922 when he became prime minister of Italy. And it reminded me that the end of the crisis doesn’t always explain what started it.
The pattern over this week, is that we often reflect on the Holocaust. We reflect on Hitler’s come to power in a specific country. But this always makes it seem like Hitler is some superhuman person who “invented” World War II out of the blue. Whose sole ambitions caused this continental crisis.
When the truth is that Adolf Hilter was the tipping point of many causes that preceded him.
He arose in a moment of forces concentrating and converging into an explosive crisis.
This means the war doesn’t reflect his consciousness. It reflects the many millions of people who were willing to die fighting for something they believed in.
Back in 2010, I took a tour of the Holocaust museum in Washington D.C. and as I was reading all of the timeline exhibits leading up to World War II, I just kept thinking: not even Hitler knew where this was going. Not even Hitler could have predicted the Holocaust.
Because he wasn’t in control of some grand strategy.
Each moment was a moment of desperation for him. Attempting to seize power to the maximum that he could, in that moment.
Crossing boundaries each and every day, but completely winging it.
Each day that he crossed another boundary, this opened up a new plain of unprecedented abuse.
Each time he gets away with one horror, he realizes another horror awaits to be conquered by him.
(And I do believe Trump is on that same ascent).
But I truly believe that Hitler, in a sense, had a random part to play. There have been many psychopaths before Adolf Hitler and there have been many since. But they don’t live in infamy because they didn’t get the opportunities Hilter got.
It’s clear that his own psychosis seized on an opportunity in the collective consciousness.
So the question is, what opportunity did he seize?
The parallel can be seen this week as well.
Donald Trump didn’t invent the American crisis. But he’s a psychopath who has seized on this crisis to satisfy his own personal needs.
And those needs also arose out of desperation. Most recently, the desperation to not go to jail.
And yet, all of the pieces of the puzzle were already put in place long before he arrived. And they continued even after he left office.
As I wrote last night on Bluesky,
Long before I was born, Republican voters had been taught to foolishly vote against their own interests. And Fox News has been waging a propaganda war for three decades.
Which means the Republican party was fated for the ultimate psychopath conman to come in and take advantage of this ripened electorate.
It was only a matter of whom & when.
The more we discuss Trump’s rise to power in its particularity, the less we talk about the pieces of the puzzle that existed in ourselves and in our democracy, that have given Trump & his lackeys the opportunity they have seized.
So why would I be interested in looking at the beginning seeds of World War I and the continental crisis or paradigm shift that it began?
Because it’s 2025 right now. Not 2039 or 2044. We are in the beginning seeds of a paradigm shift that will explode in my lifetime.
What paradigm shift that becomes… remains to be seen. But you can bet your ass it’s coming.
So we can at least look at some of the subtle paradigm shifts that happened in the 20th century.
And one of those was the Right to Self-Determination by Nation States.
I’m sure you think that the word “nation states” is terribly boring. But it is absolutely responsible for our current World Order. Our lives would be completely different if not for the gradual evolution of nation states.
I woke up at 4AM and wrote:
Hitler brought The Third Reich to power - not out of some personal insanity or whim. He brought it to power out of a dying premise that if you amassed the largest army on the European continent, then it was your destiny to rule the European continent.
When I was growing up, all I knew were the European countries that existed today. But World War I was the collapse of four existing empires. Including the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the German Empire.
This is what Third Reich means. It means “The Third Empire.” And it refers to the ambition of the Nazis to become the replacement of the German Empire, which was a replacement for the Holy Roman Empire. Three empires.
In the minds of Nazis, the concept of amassing power and exerting dominance over nearby countries was totally historically precedented, acceptable, and normal.
And yet, we look back on the attempt as completely insane. Why?
Because we’re in the after-effect of that particular paradigm shift.
We grew up believing in nation states and their right to self-determination already.
But 100 years ago this concept was very, very new.
William Mulligan describes how these empires of the 19th century had been considered ‘a European necessity’ that secured peace and political stability by requiring minorities within the empire to subordinate their identity and culture, in order to protect the empire’s universal goals.
And sure. It does seem like a single stable government that controls many territories is better than 200 warring factions.
The same premise is applied to the United States. 50+ territories with slightly different cultures and regional needs are overseen by a federal institution that maintains order and peace amongst them.
Although, the reason we’re not considered an Empire is because, in our case, the states are ruled by local governments, including state and city governments. While the federal government has limited interference over them.
But as William Mulligan writes:
These benefits [of the empires] had often been accompanied by discrimination, repression, and exclusion. On occasion, these empires had used extreme violence against groups, whom they considered a threat to their integrity.
The most notable example of this was the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman empire, during which an estimated 1.5 million Armenians died.
Here again, we find that Hitler wasn’t the first person to invent the concept of genocide in the name of “protecting an Empire.”
He was only learning from Europe’s own history.
This week I kept thinking about how empires were won by brute strength. Whoever had the muscle mass, the broad-shouldered army, the best shields, or the best guns was able to spearhead dominance via brute force.
For centuries brute force earned an empire their power and determined the destiny of who was in control of the surrounding territories.
The countries we have today were merely land that was brutally occupied by the strongest empire or the empire with the strongest army - all the way back to the Vikings.
And that’s what Hitler thought he could do - control the European continent by brute force.
I started thinking that one way the 20th century turned everything on its head is that World War II was the first war that wasn’t won by brute force.
In previous centuries, the bigger the army, the bigger the horse, the bigger the shield, the bigger the gun, the more dominance you were able to win.
But the technologies of the 20th century changed all of that. In many ways, it was no longer how many troops you had. It was about the technologies alongside those troops. Whether that was a long-range missile, a bomb dropped from a plane, or an atom bomb. (I discussed this a few weeks ago).
But think about the implications here. This means: some dorky scientist with zero muscle mass won the war.
And yes, some of those scientists were women. And also, some of those scientists were gay.
Hell, even Franklin D. Roosevelt was in a wheel chair!
For centuries, dominance was founded on the idea that the natural physical strength that men were endowed with at birth gave them the right to dominate others. An army was conceived of us as a collective expression of that strength. But this whole concept was basically a promotion of bullies. Whoever was the biggest bully won the empire.
The technologies of World War II began to level the playing field against brute force (cracking the enigma, the atom bomb, missile technology) all of those ushered in a softer, more human century, in which peace could be won - not merely by brute force, but by creating an entirely different technological strategy.
And this was very encouraging for an intellectual age of scientists, academics, and thinkers to flourish in a World Order created under the peace of these technological weapons - rather than the state of war and tension created under a traditional empire.
Is it true that winning the war by intelligence rather than amassing Gladiators may be the very thing that broke the spell of Mussolini & Hitler’s fascist, autocratic power?
It may be that they underestimated the New World Order. They may have even underestimated their own scientists - seeking to create a crueler and stronger army, rather than a more clever mathematician.
In any case, they had definitely defined power only as far as brute strength.
And were still representing the dying embers of the concept of an empire, constantly fighting battles, to win a fragile form of dominance.
(Until such time as a new army with new brute force comes and takes it away).
In a 1933 campaign speech, Franklin D. Roosevelt says:
When we look about us, we’re likely to forget how hard people have worked to win the privilege of government. The growth of the national governments of Europe was a struggle for the development of a centralized force in the nation, strong enough to impose peace upon ruling barons.
In many instances the victory of the central government was a haven of refuge to the individual. The people preferred the master far away to the exploitation and cruelty of the smaller master near at hand.
But the creators of national government were perforce ruthless men. They were often cruel in their methods.
But they did strive steadily toward something that society needed and very much wanted, a strong central state, able to keep the peace, to stamp out civil war, to put the unruly nobleman in his place, and to permit the bulk of individuals to live safely.
The man of ruthless force had his place in developing a pioneer country, just as he did in fixing the power of the central government in the development of nations.
Society paid him well for his services and its development.
However, when the development among the nations of Europe has been completed - ambition, and ruthlessness, having served its term, tended to overstep its mark.
Back in December, I wanted to write a Sunday question about the self-determination of nation states. I, instead, wrote an article on the technologies that contributed to WWII. But that article was going to discuss Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points speech to Congress.
(Woodrow Wilson was the American president during World War I. While Franklin D. Roosevelt was the American president during World War II.)
After World War I, Woodrow Wilson gave a speech on the 14 points to inspire the Treaty of Versailles to include aspects of self-determination in bringing peace to Europe.
The 14 Points helped to introduce the concept of self-determination.
And it ushered in the League of Nations, (which eventually became the United Nations after World War II).
His Fourteen Points opens:
“It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind.
The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world.
It is this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public man whose thoughts do not still linger in an age that is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and the peace of the world to avow the objects it has in view.
We entered this war because violations of right had occurred which touched us to the quick and made the life of our own people impossible unless they were corrected and the world secure once and for all against their recurrence.
What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit and safe to live in;
And particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, & be assured of justice and fair-dealing by the other peoples of the world… against force & selfish aggression.”
Why was self-determination a new concept? Think of an empire like the U.S.S.R. with a centralized government in Moscow in control of a dozen countries with various sub-ethnicities.
While a nation-state is a country like Denmark, which - even though it’s a country of only 6 million people and has similarities with Sweden and Norway, still has its own Danish government, Danish culture, and Danish society.
Denmark in 2025 has about 32,000 active military. It didn’t stand a chance against Hitler. And they were occupied for nearly six years. My grandparents lived through it.
Without the concept of Nation States, Denmark didn’t stand a chance at ruling themselves and determining their own fate, if an empire sought to take it away.
A nation state is a country with its own borders and its own government, that is ruled by the very people of that nationality. That way, the country, can serve the needs of the very people it rules. Rather than have, for example, a colonial rule - in which a different nationality or ethnicity rules over an oppressed people.
In fact, the 14 Points was the beginning seeds of undermining colonial rule in Europe. The United States had far less imperialism than England or France and was much more forthright in discussing a post-colonial world.
But the moment wasn’t quite there yet.
Europe couldn’t secure the freedom of India, if it couldn’t even secure the freedom of France, England, or Denmark, from the empires that threatened them.
The countries that were created in Europe over the 20th century were born from the premise that nation states could give self-governance to a single group identity, once they had parted with the empire’s rule.
A single nationality could attain its own borders, its own freedom, and become a self-determined unit of government.
This wasn’t a perfect transition. For example, Spain still owns the Basque region and Catalonia - who, in the tradition of nation states, would have gained their independence already.
Scotland and Northern Ireland might very well deserve to be their own self-governed countries (even though they’ve had referendums to remain a part of the UK).
And of course, there’s still colonial rule in Caribbean territories owned by France, England, and the United States.
But this was the beginning stages of understanding the idea that a nation should be ruled by those who possessed that nationality.
So that word; self-determination. It always speaks to me.
Because the self-determination we possess today for nation states and for citizens within nation states is relatively new.
For centuries, people lived in determined systems. Not in the way we use determinism in Philosophy of Mind. But in the concept of a pre-determined social order.
There were Caste Systems in India. Feudalism - with feudal overlords and serfdom - in Medieval Europe.
There was Monarchy. Imperial Chinese Dynasties. Roman Emperors. Egyptian Pharaohs.
And all of these were created and maintained out of determinism, in the sense that they created pre-determined social orders that couldn’t be changed after birth.
Some of these were fueled on religious or theological determinism - that gave an aura of “divine destiny.” Some of them were class determinism. In the sense that your status in society was decided at birth. You were not allowed to move freely or marry someone outside of your social class.
Those born a slave, remained a slave. Serfs remained serfs. In India, the concept of karma was used to justify The Caste System. To claim that people were born into their fate or their social stratification because of their actions in a previous life. And therefore poverty was earned and deserved by birthright.
With a few notable exceptions, such as Ancient Greece & the foundation of the United States, meritocracies weren’t the norm. Power wasn’t earned. It was inherited. (Or stolen by the armies of brute force).
Your opportunities in life were never otherwise chosen. They were chosen by structural status. And a huge portion of an individual’s destiny was carved out for them by the systems they belonged to.
I’d like to even point out that monarchy was the best example of this. Ruled almost entirely by the destiny of birthright. There was no way to earn your place as a leader by merit. The entire premise of the monarchy was a structure of destiny of the first born son and the lineage of cousins who might inherit the throne after those children passed away.
And this created an ever-lasting subterfuge of power, in which the only way for a future monarch to control their destiny was through murder. They simply couldn’t earn power any other way.
Killing or imprisoning cousins & siblings who were a threat to their throne was the only way to ensure their own destiny.
Admittedly, I’m not a monarchy expert. But I’ve never heard of a family who has killed or imprisoned more of their own blood than the House of Tudor. And those are the ones who were killed in official capacities. There were also quite a few unusual and suspicious deaths that I would not be surprised came from covert murder.
But what do you expect when you have no control over your destiny?
When it’s a lineage of birth, completely in disregard of capabilities or sensibilities.
The level of freedom and choice we possess worldwide, today, could be conceived as more worldwide freedom and self-determination than any version of human history.
And yes, World War II WON this for us.
When we talk about the rise of fascism in the 1940s, I think we’re missing the bigger picture here.
Empires were the norm. As was Monarchy.
The 20th century battles that were fought, were fought to either maintain or to demolish that type of institutional power.
And if the Axis had won, the fate of empires might have well been redeemed.
After World War II, the only remaining empire on the continent was the U.S.S.R.
Of course, they were a valuable part of the Allies and were given a lot of deference because of their partnership in winning the war.
But even though the U.S.S.R. tried to create their own communist empire (slightly different from the czarist empire, but only by a margin) - even this new type of empire lost its ability to sustain itself by the end of the century. Lasting only 70 years, before those countries reverted to their own nation states, ruled predominantly by the national identity of the people within them.
And that’s why the shock of Putin invading Ukraine shook the whole of Europe.
This was the first time in a long time that a country on that continent had decided to flagrantly fly in the face of The New World Order of Self-Determined Nation States.
In 2022, Ukraine made it very clear that they are a sovereign country, working to be healed and to be ruled by the Ukrainian people. Which many European leaders recognized as the lynchpin of their own freedom. A sacred concept of self-determination keeping the New World Order afloat.
You see, even though I’m in the United States and we worked on the tenants of self-sovereignty in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence…
The world order that we currently possess isn’t based on one country being free and self-determined while the rest of the world goes to war. There is no stability if that’s the state of things.
This is the premise that the League of Nations, the United Nations, and NATO were built from.
The concept of interdependence between sovereign nations in which we have to support the freedom of OTHER countries, in order to sustain the freedom of our own.
Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote in his 1944 State of the Union Address:
All our allies have learned by bitter experience that real development will not be possible if they are to be diverted from their purpose by repeated wars—or even threats of war.
The best interests of each Nation, large and small, demand that all freedom-loving Nations shall join together in a just and durable system of peace.
In the present world situation, evidenced by the actions of Germany, Italy, and Japan, unquestioned military control over disturbers of the peace is as necessary among Nations as it is among citizens in a community.
And an equally basic essential to peace is a decent standard of living for all individual men and women and children in all Nations. Freedom from fear is eternally linked with freedom from want.
There are people who burrow through our Nation like unseeing moles, and attempt to spread the suspicion that if other Nations are encouraged to raise their standards of living, our own American standard of living must of necessity be depressed.
The fact is the very contrary. It has been shown time and again that if the standard of living of any country goes up, so does its purchasing power- and that such a rise encourages a better standard of living in neighboring countries with whom it trades. That is just plain common sense.
Out of World War I, The League of Nations was created on the concept that there needed to be international peace organizations that worked to unify common goals across territories.
They couldn’t prevent the last ditch attempt of The Third Reich to try to create one last empire on the European continent.
But out of World War II, The United Nations absolutely worked to create a set of criteria, a creed that would establish those freedoms and self-determinations of both the nations, themselves, and the people within them.
This ushered in a lot more humanism than previous centuries - and as we work to liberate each other, we create humanistic frameworks to exist within, beyond national identity, ethnicity, race, or religion.
Humanism doesn’t just liberate others, it liberates ourselves from the need to use our differences as a source of tribal identity. The premise of Nation States was that we can live in peace, while still maintaining our own unique differences within our sovereign states.
Certainly, in the United States we still have tension from all of those things. We have nationalism, we have racial divides, we have religious oppression (which is blatantly anti-constitutional), and we clearly have persecution of people’s identities - whether from being Muslim, Black, Or immigrants.
So we’re not done, folks. This is only the beginning.
But isn’t that the lesson to be learned here? Self-determination of Nation States might have created a lasting peace in Europe for those with different nationalities residing in different borders.
But what happens to a country with a gradually ever-increasing influx of different nationalities living within it?
That might be the paradigm conflict of our new century.
So in 2025, let’s not focus too much on how we’re repeating the concept of fascism ‘as such.’
Let’s focus on how we’re repeating the concept of a paradigm crisis coming to an explosive head (which fascism has foolishly promised to fix).
Hitler and Mussolini also promised to fix rising tensions in their own countries.
What’s the rising tension in our own?
2025 is coming into a moment, an era, in which two worldviews cannot co-exist any longer.
One must be snuffed out.
The thing I see when I look at Trump is a scrambling, pathetic, last ditch attempt to stay out of prison by fanning the flames of dying institutions of power.
Those of patriarchy. Those of white supremacy. And those of Christianity.
All of which have been gradually losing their power over the past 50 years. Which scares the shit out of the people who seek to have dominance from within them.
I had intended to write about these dying institutions this week - but laryngitis made me unable to bring it all together.
What I know is coming: is that if the people within these ideologies refuse to change, they will get to the point in which they use brute force to solve their problems.
And thus, this crisis will get uglier and uglier.
But what I know already came before us: is that progress sometimes reaches a tipping point, in which it can’t be stopped. And that’s when brute force becomes the ugliest - out of the desperation to stop a natural progress from taking place.
For now, I’d like to open up a conversation about the 20th century:
Questions For Discussion:
What are some of the missing pieces I missed? (Please share)
What were some of the differences between the dominant systems of power or government that preceded the two World Wars, that began to shift and change with the 20th century? (For example, monarchy, colonialism, or empires).
How did the self-determined social systems we live in (for example Feudalism) turn into the societies of liberation and self-determination we have now?
How much work do we have to do to complete the transition away from colonial rule, and allow territories to transition into their own nation states?
What were the false promises that autocracy and fascism promised to fix for the German & Italian people? (What were their societal tensions?)
Is war forever changed by technologies? (And thus, the peace we can have as people is changed as well?)
7. If nation states created borders between different cultures, that allowed them to govern themselves in peace - how can we maintain peace in an ever-increasing blend of nationalities within a single country, due to immigration?
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