COVID-19 Bioweapon Failure, Mundane Stupidity and the Importance of Being Earnest?
COVID-19 Bioweapon Failure, Mundane Stupidity and the Importance of Being Earnest?The Rent of Power: Why Every Hierarchy Ends in Incompetence Except That For Retaining Power:
SARS-CoV-2 probably escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was probably gene-printed at an American university. It was probably funded by the National Institutes of Health. It was probably laundered through a British medical charity, because nothing says transparency like routing military-adjacent virus research through a cancer foundation. And it was probably part of a bioweapons programme dressed up as biodefence, and dressed up again as mundane medical research because the best way to guard against a monster is apparently to build one first. Did Dr Fauci know? Did the presidents and prime ministers who stood at podiums telling us to trust the science? Was the official story a pack of lies, polished and repeated until it hardened into consensus? Are we just pawns, kept busy arguing with each other so nobody looks too closely at the incompetence, the arrogance, and the sheer institutional self-protection running through the whole affair? Probably.
Yesterday a colleague asked me if there was a cover-up going on about mRNA COVID vaccines causing cancer; to be frank, I do not know the answer, and the evidence is of third-order validity. Three Papers doing some statistical testing, the sort of thing that happens all the time and is no smoking gun. Some minor correlations that could easily be dismissed or turn out to be important. As I tell many of my co-workers, correlation is not causality, and there is always a plurality of causality - basically, science is complicated, and it takes a triangulation of good evidence to verify a claim. The Importance of Being EarnestAlthough in science we say causality, the actual term comes from one of the intellectual colossi, one of those whose shoulders I stand on in all my thinking and writing. John Stuart Mill coined “plurality of causes” in 1843, in A System of Logic; it cuts through a type of intellectual laziness I see everywhere, be that in the conspiracy theory YouTube channels or in the highest echelons of government. The doctrine is simple. The same phenomenon can have many different causes, be part of a complex and interrelated web of causes. A death can follow an mRNA vaccine, but there are thousands of contributory factors, or there may be no factor at all. It does not follow that one death has many causes stacked on top of each other, but it does mean we cannot assume a single tidy explanation applies every time. I love this phrase because it is a discipline against monocausal thinking, the simple narrative that humans crave. The simple fundamental truth in a narrative is the holy grail so many strive for. It infects economics, politics and public health in equal measure. People want one villain, one lever, one story. Mill’s phrase reminds me that reality rarely obliges. The truth is rarely pure and never simple. I have found few exceptions to this rule, except for the Henry George argument on the causes of poverty, which Mill had already deduced, and the Aristotelian philosophy of political power. Read on to discover why. For those of a more literary nature, the phrase was popularised at the end of that century by the character Algernon in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which reads: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” I think this discipline should sit at the back of every investigator’s mind. Drill down into the correlations to discover causality is like peeling an onion, layer by layer, until you reach the bedrock cause, if one exists at all. That is my mission in this essay, and I invite you to join me on the journey. I want to find the fundamental causes behind poverty, war, and environmental destruction. Aggressive lymphomasSince 2021, individual case reports and small case series have documented lymphomas, and to a lesser extent leukaemias, appearing shortly after mRNA COVID vaccination. A systematic review pooled 143 such cases: median time from vaccination to symptom onset was 37 days, most followed the second dose, and the subtypes varied widely: diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, cutaneous lymphoma, one paediatric acute lymphoblastic leukaemia case. A separate 2025 review of a smaller subset of 15 cases graded the vaccine-lymphoma link “probable” using a standard causality scale. So all the YouTube conspiracy channels will parrot this research and claim we are all getting cancer, but have they looked at the evidence properly? Maybe the rise in lymphomas was because mRNA vaccines cause swelling in lymph glands, and this caused an increase in biopsies that led to earlier detection, so there was no increase in the actual rate. This is a simple issue you can understand. But there are many more complications when looking at any real research. Until we actually look at excess death data, it is very hard to be certain. Any investigation is incomplete without it, and we should not rely on conspiracy headlines… BUT! BUT!!!But… that’s what ‘they’ said about mRNA vaccines not causing myocarditis, but the evidence that it did is actually strong and getting stronger My own partner suffered myocarditis after getting the jab; she could not climb stairs, and it affected her career. It was not just covered up but actively suppressed at the time. Someone not trained or knowledgeable about reading medical research papers could easily jump to all kinds of conclusions, but the truth in this case was subverted until it was out of the headlines. ‘They’…We should examine what we mean by ‘they’, the powers that be, the blob, the illuminati, the old boys’ network, the gay mafia, Oxbridge graduates, the swamp, the interdepartment. When we say ‘they ’, we mean a power structure that operates in its own self-interest and selects its members based on some criteria of identity and self-protection. I examine group selection theory in this essay, and it is worth a read for anyone interested in evolutionary and selection theory.
What has this got to say about COVID? A lot; in fact, it has a lot to say about everything and is fundamental to all the world’s problems. I trained as a medical biochemist, worked in genetics, then spent years modelling wild animal populations as an ecologist. None of that makes me a virologist or an epidemiological expert, although I hold my own with experts and have my own specialism in disease ecology. But it teaches you to understand what the words mean and to read scientific papers and assess statistical evidence, which I do nearly every day and have done for nearly 40 years. So I have enough knowledge to get myself into trouble but also a keen eye for what is real and what is fantasy, and once you see the system behind the COVID-19 response, you start seeing the same system everywhere else. In sports governance. In churches. In academic publishing. In Parliament. The costume changes. The mechanism does not. My real conspiracy theory is this: most conspiracy theories are seeded by the power hierarchies themselves. They exist to discredit and ridicule anyone uncovering or discussing the real conspiracies happening in plain sight. The pattern:Concentrated, unaccountable power does not produce evil geniuses. It produces incompetence that nobody can correct, because the people who could correct it are the same people benefiting from it staying uncorrected. Case study: the pandemic a series of conspiracies to hide incompetenceOn the balance of evidence, SARS-CoV-2 probably escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, It was probably gene printed in a research university in America, it was probably funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and laundered through a British medical research charity, it was probably part of an ongoing programme of bioweapons research using civilian medical research programmes to answer military questions that were part of a programme to defend against a bioweapon attack. Did Dr Fauci know of this? Did Presidents and Prime Ministers, was the story we were fed a pack of lies? Are we but pawns, with our opinions manipulated to ignore the rampant incompetence in our political and scientific establishments… probably… I hold this view provisionally. The zoonotic hypothesis has evidence, but it is weak and does not stand up to proper scrutiny, nor to the history of investigation into zoonotic pandemics. But when looked at holistically, the institutions responsible for evaluating the two hypotheses did not behave like institutions trying to find out which was true. They behaved like institutions trying to protect a secret. Consider the shape of the failure, not just its outcome. Gain-of-function research on dangerous pathogens requires biosecure facilities so costly that even wealthy governments struggle to build enough of them. Adults in the room did ban such research under the Obama administration, and they foresaw the calamity. What they did not foresee was their own scientific administrators and the defence research establishment finding inventive ways around the ban. Subcontract it through a foreign charity. Change the definition of gain-of-function and get compliant voices to support that new definition. Do the actual testing in a dodgy Chinese lab that could not even pass a BSL-2 inspection, when work of this kind should never have left a level-4 facility. Here I will concede a point to the defence research apparatus, because if I held their power, I would agree with at least this much of their reasoning. It is far too easy to manufacture a bioweapon today, and that fact presents an existential threat in its own right. Any mid-rank researcher, or any government with modest resources, could do it. That should frighten you. Modern gene-printing technology can read the sequence off a highly infectious virus and splice it into another virus for a deadlier effect. The result is a global, unstoppable killer, built to order. So imagine if the people who took this threat seriously asked a genuine question: how do you research your way to a defence against something like that, without building the very thing you are trying to defend against? How do you subvert the civilian medical research budget to achieve your aim, and how do you obscure it from regulation, knowing just how much this is playing with fire? The American funding and regulatory apparatus potentially answered with a workaround rather than a solution. It kept the base gene-printing work inside American institutions, where oversight was strongest, then moved the gain-of-function research and live trials, the most dangerous part of the process, to where the facilities were cheaper and the oversight thinner. That work was probably routed through a British medical charity and subcontracted to the laboratory in Wuhan, one with a documented history of safety lapses. This is a conspiracy theory but one that more and more people are taking seriously. Then the pandemic happened, and the second failure began. Scientific journals that would ordinarily treat the origin of a novel pathogen as an open empirical question instead published early, forceful statements dismissing the lab-origin hypothesis, some written by researchers with funding ties to the laboratory in question who did not disclose them. Health agencies discouraged public discussion of a hypothesis their own internal assessments treated as live. Social media platforms, at the direct request of government health bodies, suppressed the topic outright. None of this proves the lab-origin hypothesis correct. It proves that the institutions did not want the public following the evidence back to them and reaching for the pitchforks. The Letter to The LancetIn February 2020, the Lancet letter on COVID’s origins was published. It was never retracted. It should have been. Twenty-seven scientists signed it. It condemned what it called conspiracy theories suggesting COVID-19 does not have a natural origin, and declared that scientists from multiple countries overwhelmingly concluded the virus originated in wildlife. It offered no data to support that conclusion. It cited no papers refuting a lab origin. It was not a scientific finding. It was a statement of authority, dressed in the language of consensus, and the press treated it as though the matter were now closed. The man who organised it was Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance. For years, his organisation had funnelled American research funding, much of it from the National Institutes of Health, to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, for exactly the kind of bat coronavirus research now under suspicion. He had a working relationship stretching back years with Shi Zhengli, the WIV virologist known as the bat lady. None of this appeared in the letter. The signatories declared they had no competing interests. Emails later obtained under public records requests showed Daszak drafting the letter himself and deliberately shaping how it would be read. He wanted it to look like a spontaneous statement from leading scientists, not a document traceable to any one organisation or person. He wanted, in his own words, to avoid the appearance of a political statement. That is a strange thing to worry about if the science really was as settled as the letter claimed. The pressure here was the pressure to foreclose a question before it could be properly investigated, from a man whose own career and funding stream depended on that question never being asked. If the lab leak hypothesis had gained ground in February 2020, Daszak’s life’s work sat directly in the blast radius, along with the potential exposure of the whole medical research and defence establishment as not just fraudulent and incompetent, but directly responsible for millions of deaths. At the time, people feared the eventual death toll could be far higher still. The death toll from rioting and civil unrest could have been higher, of course. It took sixteen months for him to expand his disclosure and admit the extent of his ties to the Wuhan lab. By then, the letter had already done its work. It became the citation journalists reached for whenever the lab leak theory surfaced. It became the reason platforms like Facebook flagged lab leak discussion as misinformation. A single unreferenced letter, organised by a man with a direct financial and professional stake in its conclusion, shaped how an entire pandemic’s origin was discussed in public for well over a year. That is not to say the conspiracy theorists were all cranks chasing shadows. I suspect some were following the pattern of schizotypal traits, especially those parading with banners and earnestly talking about the pictures of the ‘greys’ in Area 51. But we have neurodivergence for a reason: different views that see things differently and can protect humanity as an evolutionary advantage, and the establishment narrative should always be challenged and investigated When the conflict of interest finally became too visible to ignore, The Lancet’s editor Richard Horton eventually acknowledged it under questioning from a parliamentary committee. Daszak was recused from the journal’s own COVID-19 origins commission, a commission he had been chairing. But the letter itself stood. It was never withdrawn, never formally corrected, and it continued to carry the authority of the journal that published it. That is the real scandal here. The fraud was not in fabricated numbers. There were no numbers to fabricate. The fraud was in the authority the letter borrowed and the debate it closed, achieved simply by not disclosing who wrote it, and why. The Jab…Then came the vaccines, rushed through under the same structural incentive to appear decisive rather than be careful. mRNA vaccines are now established, by the most cautious review body that examines these questions, to cause myocarditis. This was not a fringe claim. It took over a year of mounting evidence, much of it visible in early data, before regulators acknowledged it plainly. The risk turned out to be real, and just as the COVID origin was suppressed, so was this until the evidence was overwhelming and the powerful people could avoid public and legal accountability. Put the three failures together, and you do not get a bioweapons plot. You get something more mundane, more frightening: a system in which nobody with power over the pandemic response had any personal exposure to being wrong. The funders, the journal editors, the health agencies managing public messaging were never brought to public account, because by the time the wrongness became undeniable, attention had moved on. Concentrated power, in every one of these instances, means power without proximity to consequence. Power CorruptsMy thesis for this essay is not that there is a wave of cover-ups trying to hide an mRNA vaccine cancer epidemic, as my colleague suggested. It is that the power structures we live under continuously cover up their own incompetence, terrified of losing their power. This societal trait is chiefly responsible for the many ills in this world, be that poverty, war, or environmental harm. That problem still needs to be tackled. It is not that Dr Fauci and Peter Daszak are evil villains. They are simply the product of a system that seeks to retain power at any cost, and is fundamentally mundane and incompetent at everything except holding onto organisational power. The politicians on the right slinging mud at Dr Fuaci are just as bad and could be much worse and guilty of the same failings; they just tussle for power.; Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. Ambrose Bierce (Another Georgist) That incompetence extends to every institution in the world, be that a school board, a football governing body, a church, or a political party. Every charity, every senior management team, every trustee board. It is everywhere. We do not fix the problem by finding more moral leaders. We fix it by changing the structures through which hierarchies attain power, keep it and receive funding. This is not new. Solon already knew it.Athens in 594 BC had its own version of this problem. A small class of aristocratic creditors held effective control over the state, not through formal office alone but through debt bondage that let them treat the rest of the population as an asset class. Solon’s response was not moral. He did not ask the aristocracy to be better people. He cancelled the debts, opened political office to a wider band of wealth rather than birth, and broke the specific mechanism by which concentrated power had entrenched itself in the monopoly and misuse of land. That is what we must learn from the great sage Solon, and his successor Cleisthenes, founder of democracy. Now twenty-six centuries later we must stop treating the corruption of powerful institutions as a character problem to be solved by finding more honest scientists, more honest bishops, more honest sports administrators. It is a structural problem, and it responds to structural solutions or not at all. Power always concentrates; it is the enemy of meritocracy, and we must be ever vigilant to remove undue power wherever it forms. Going for goldFor any student of political theory, FIFA and the International Olympic Committee are the perfect reductionist experiment. They are the epitome of how not to organise an institution. Strip away the sport, and what remains is a structure that concentrates power in the hands of a tiny, self-selecting elite, insulates that elite from any real accountability, and hands out enormous financial prizes on the say-so of a small voting bloc. The corruption that follows is not an aberration. It is the predictable output of the design. FIFA’s own history makes the case. In May 2015, the US Department of Justice unsealed an indictment charging seven senior FIFA officials, arrested at dawn in a Zurich hotel, as part of a wider case eventually naming fourteen individuals. The allegation was straightforward: over two decades, football executives had taken roughly $150 million in bribes and kickbacks tied to broadcasting deals, sponsorship contracts, and the awarding of World Cup hosting rights. Jack Warner, once vice-president of FIFA and head of the CONCACAF confederation, was accused of taking a suitcase of cash in exchange for a vote on the 2010 World Cup host. Sepp Blatter, FIFA’s president for seventeen years, was never personally charged in that case, but he resigned days after the arrests, having presided over an organisation that the US attorney general described as corrupt in a manner that was rampant, systemic, and deep-rooted. The IOC ran through the same script a decade and a half earlier, which tells you this is structural rather than a quirk of one sport. In 1998, the Swiss IOC member Marc Hodler blew the whistle on what he called the systematic buying and selling of votes in Olympic bidding, most notably around Salt Lake City’s campaign for the 2002 Winter Games. Investigators found that IOC members and their families had received cash, gifts, medical bills, and university tuition for their children, paid for by the city desperate to win their vote. Ten members were eventually expelled and ten more sanctioned, the first disciplinary action of its kind in the IOC’s history. Further digging turned up similar practices behind the bids for the 1998 Nagano Games and the 2000 Sydney Games. The pattern repeats itself because the incentive structure that produces it was never actually dismantled, only patched. Notice what both scandals have in common. In each case, a small number of unelected or barely accountable officials controlled an enormously valuable prize, the right to host a global sporting event or the right to broadcast one, and were asked to award it based on nothing more binding than their own discretion. Bidding cities and rights-holders responded rationally to that incentive. They paid. The officials responded rationally too. They took the money, because the system offered no real cost for doing so and an obvious benefit. Neither organisation needed villains in any special sense. It needed ordinary, status-seeking people placed inside a structure that rewarded exactly this behaviour, and it got what it was built to produce. This is why moralising about FIFA or the IOC misses the point so badly. The reform packages both organisations adopted after their scandals; ethics committees, travel bans, audit commissions, treat the problem as a shortage of virtue among the people involved. But you do not fix a structural incentive with a code of conduct. You fix it by removing the concentrated, unaccountable discretion that makes corruption the rational choice in the first place: broaden who holds the power to decide, make the decision transparent and reviewable, and reduce the size of the single prize any one vote can hand out. Change the structure, and you change what kind of person the structure selects for and rewards. Leave the structure in place, and the next Blatter or the next Salt Lake City is only a matter of time. Why elections do not fix thisAristotle, writing a century after Solon, made an observation modern democratic theory has forgotten: he classified election by vote as an oligarchic device and selection by lot, sortition, as the genuinely democratic one. His reasoning was simple. An election selects for the capacity to win elections: fundraising, media presence, factional coalition-building, name recognition. None of these correlate with the capacity to evaluate gain-of-function research risk, or referee a doping case fairly, or review a paper honestly. A modern regulator, journal editor or federation president is selected, promoted and retained by exactly the skills that have nothing to do with getting the underlying judgment right. Over enough cycles, the people who rise to the top of any concentrated hierarchy are the people best adapted to rising within it, not the people best suited to exercising the power once they arrive. This is not a flaw in the system. It is what the system is for, once captured. Fixing DemocracyFour mechanisms recur across the history of people who took this problem seriously, and each corrects a specific failure mode rather than appealing to better character. Sortition corrects selection bias. If oversight panels for gain-of-function research, or disciplinary panels in sport, or editorial boards in contested fields, were staffed partly by qualified people chosen by lot rather than by internal appointment, the panel stops being selected for loyalty to the institution that appointed it. Modern advocates such as David Van Reybrouck and Hélène Landemore have revived this as a live proposal rather than a historical curiosity, and citizens’ assemblies using sortition have already been used, with reasonable success, on constitutional questions in Ireland and elsewhere. Short terms and rotation The single clearest failure in the pandemic response was regulatory and editorial bodies becoming, over years, financially and professionally entangled with the institutions they were meant to oversee. Term limits do not eliminate this, but they interrupt it, because capture takes time and rotation resets the clock before it completes. Be that Sepp Blatter or Dr Facui, any real power must be held briefly before it corrupts. Wide voter and stakeholder bases correct narrow-interest capture, which is the disease Solon was treating in the first place. A funding decision reviewed only by specialists with career and financial stakes in the field will differ systematically from one that also has to survive scrutiny from a broader, disinterested constituency. This is the same principle behind jury trials: competence is not the only value worth protecting; independence from the interested party is another, and sometimes the more important one. Political parties should not just present 5 versions of the same insider candidate; the selectorate must be abolished - Jack Johnson on John Jackson is not a real choice for voters at any level. Structural separation of funding, execution and evaluation corrects the specific COVID failure. The same institutional ecosystem funded gain-of-function research, conducted it, and was then asked to evaluate whether it had caused a pandemic. No serious system of internal control anywhere else, financial auditing, criminal justice, even corporate governance, allows the funder and the evaluator to be the same body. Biosecurity research was allowed to violate a rule everyone accepts everywhere else, and the result was exactly what you would predict. The problem of marking your own homework is well documented, and rating agencies and auditors have shown the same complacency in their own domains. I suspect we will see it again. Later this year, if the AI sector begins to falter, I expect we will discover some very interesting accounting standards and internal auditing arrangements, the same circus of cross-funding and mutual borrowing unravelling and contributing to a wider economic collapse we are entering into. The Financial Incentive FixThe biggest problem with corruption is the incentive structure beneath it. The capture of economic rent, unearned income drawn from scarcity and monopoly in all its many forms rather than from productive work, sits behind almost every incentive to destroy nature, go to war, and profit from other people’s misery and poverty. If government revenue were drawn from that stream instead of from wages and enterprise, a stream created collectively by all of us simply by turning up and working in the free market, we would go a long way towards solving the problem. Shrink the prize on offer to those chasing unearned wealth and undeserved authority, combine that with the structural limits on power described earlier, and you get a system that is efficient in the way it matters: it stops manufacturing the crises it is supposed to be managing. Start with the theory, because it is older and better tested than people assume. Economic rent is the income that flows to the owner of a scarce asset simply because they own it, not because they improved it or worked for it. Land is the clearest example. A landowner in central London earns a fortune from location alone, from proximity to jobs, transport, and amenities that the whole surrounding community built, not from anything they personally added. The same logic extends to oil fields, mineral deposits, broadcast spectrum, and monopoly licences of every kind. Henry George’s insight, over a century old now, and one shared in different forms by Mill, Smith and other great political economists, was that taxing this kind of unearned value does not distort the economy the way taxing wages or profit does, because the supply of land, or a natural monopoly, does not shrink when you take the rent from it. You cannot manufacture more central London. Take the rent as public revenue and the land is still there, still worked, still productive. Tax wages instead and you get less work, less pay and fewer jobs .This matters for corruption specifically because rent-seeking, the effort spent capturing an existing pot of value rather than creating new value, is not a marginal inefficiency. The economist Gordon Tullock pointed out that the resources people spend lobbying for a monopoly, a licence, or a favourable ruling are resources wasted twice over: once because they produce nothing, and again because they were diverted from something that would have. Every FIFA vote bought, every planning permission fixed, every regulatory carve-out lobbied into existence, is rent-seeking in exactly this sense. The bigger the pool of capturable rent sitting around ungoverned, the more talent and money gets pulled into capturing it rather than building anything. The same mechanism scales up to war. Researchers looking at the drivers of civil conflict, most notably Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler at Oxford, found that countries dependent on natural resource exports faced a measurably higher risk of civil war onset than resource-poor countries at similar income levels. Their explanation was not that resources cause greed in some crude sense, but that a large, geographically fixed pool of capturable rent, oil, diamonds, minerals, gives any faction that seizes the state, or a piece of territory, a prize worth fighting for and worth funding an army to hold. It is worth saying plainly that this finding has been contested. Other researchers have argued the statistical link is fragile, or that the causal story runs through weak institutions rather than resources themselves. But even the critics tend to agree on the underlying mechanism: concentrated, capturable rent, wherever it sits ungoverned, invites violence and patronage in a way that broadly distributed income from ordinary trade does not. There are also working examples of the alternative, which is more than this argument usually gets credit for. Norway taxes the rent from its oil and gas extraction at a high rate and channels the proceeds into a sovereign wealth fund held for the whole population, rather than letting the prize sit there for politicians and executives to fight over. Alaska runs a smaller version of the same idea through its Permanent Fund, paying a share of oil rent directly to residents as a dividend. Neither country is free of corruption; no country is, but neither has produced the kind of resource-fuelled civil conflict or state capture seen in resource-rich states that left the rent ungoverned and up for grabs. The difference is not the presence of the resource. It is who captures the rent from it, and how. Put the pieces together, and the policy writes itself. Shift the base of government revenue away from taxing labour and enterprise, which punishes the very activity we want more of, and onto the collection of economic rent, land value, resource extraction, monopoly privilege, spectrum, the value society creates and currently lets private interests and political insiders capture for free. Do this, and you shrink the prize that corruption, war, and rent-seeking all compete over. Combine it with the structural limits on concentrated power argued for above, term limits on discretion, transparent allocation, broader distribution of decision-making, and you are attacking the same problem from both ends: less unearned prize to fight over, and fewer unaccountable hands positioned to hand it out. That is not a utopian claim. It is closer to basic mechanism design. You do not need better people to run the system. You need a system that stops manufacturing the incentive for bad behaviour in the first place. The Chime of HistoryNone of this is really about virology, or vaccines, or even about the pandemic. It is about what happens whenever society lets power concentrate without proximity to consequence, whether that power sits in a research funding body, a sports federation, a diocese or a newspaper group. The specific corruptions differ. Rent-seeking, in the economic sense, the extraction of value without the creation of it, is the common thread running through all of them, and it survives because politics, academia and the media, which ought to be the mechanisms that expose it, have themselves become rent-seeking institutions with every incentive to leave the underlying structure alone. Solon understood that you cannot moralise your way out of this. You have to change who holds the power, how long they hold it, and how far removed they are allowed to be from the consequences of what they enact. Twenty-six centuries on, we have mostly forgotten the lesson and paid for it again as history rhymes through the aeons. You're currently a free subscriber to Peter Smith Rewilding. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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