Corruption and nepotism have been the default setting for human nature, until a handful of societies adopted constitutional democracies with meritocratic systems and became the exception.
Yes, thank you for zooming all the way out, this was very instructive. In Germany, you can see both mindsets at the same time. Interestingly, there are also some positive traits I detect in the former East Germany, like more solidarity among the neighbors and such. I am living in Spain now, and that is a country that went from a very backward dictatorship to one of the most modern societies in a generation and a half. I think the lesson is that it can be done with a lot of support from the countries that already succeeded, but that progress is hard. I do agree with you that the process of joining the EU in itself is a very valuable exercise. The former East Germany never had to go through this and it might be one of the reasons it feels so dejected.
Another good article. And yes, human nature is an often-overlooked factor. Humans have been around for about 300,000 years. Since then, wars, corruption, nepotism, and the pursuit of power have shaped history. Even the biblical story of the the Genesis creation narrative (including the Fall and the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), offers a glimpse into this.
I’m quite skeptical that humanity will ever manage to come anywhere close to achieving the desired “paradise on earth.” I fear that Thomas Hobbes is right when he says that human beings are driven by a “thirst for glory,” “fear,” and the instinct for self-preservation. Desire is constitutive. Human instincts cannot be “reformed” and must be restrained from the outside, by force if necessary. This also means that utopias are impossible (an earthly paradise without an overarching coercive power is structurally impossible.) According to Hobbes, the result of all this is a miserable state of war of all against all (“bellum omnium contra omnes”).
Unlike Hobbes, for whom freedom is primarily a threat, Hannah Arendt sees a constitutive ambivalence in human freedom: natality is not only the source of the problem, but also of hope—every person can start anew, and every generation can reshape the world.
Historians in the distant future will see where humanity has evolved, if it does not first destroy its planet and thus the very basis of its existence…
To me, the best analogy at a smaller scale is how different people age. The ones that remain active - they walk daily, exercise, eat well, etc. - are able to retain a level of independence and mobility well into their old age. The ones that did not - for whatever reason - struggle to hold their baby grandchildren for more than a few minutes because something always aches.
Nothing in life is permanent, and everything requires maintenance.
Neglect and complacency may well be at the roots of the trouble.
I happen to be a grand papa and I have been very happy to be able to hold my grand-children and roll on floors with them. I can’t help but regret that I will be leaving them a much harder world than the one I was born in.
You describe the exception, but not the machinery. Let me supply that from the inside.
Denmark doesn't have one safeguard, it has several that overlap. A citizen can bring a case against the state and win. Parliament can bring down a government in a single vote. The press is free in practice, not only on paper. And most importantly: school teaches us to be critical of our own government, not just the neighbouring one. That last part is the real infrastructure. Institutions can be written down in a morning. A population that expects to be listened to takes generations.
Which is why your warning lands on us, not on you. We have been allowed to believe this is a condition. It is a habit. None of those mechanisms works by itself — they work because somebody shows up for the boring part, year after year. We have started talking about our institutions the way we talk about the weather.
So it isn't you who should learn from us. It is we who need to remember how we got here - while you still remember what it costs to work for it.
It’s a muscle that needs to be trained, otherwise it will atrophy. We can see that happening in real-time: some members of the “exceptional nations” are able to retain their democratic institutions from subversion and decay, maintain a relatively high trust in society, etc., while others are descending into the default settings. The United States being a very prominent example.
Its probably all the harder for Eastern European countries to reform depending on which imperial power they were under at the turn of the last century. Countries under the Ottoman and Russian empires got the full brunt of the nepotism and corruption those empires brought to bear. Ones under the Austro-Hungarian and German empires had it less bad. One can see the difference when one compares the corruption levels countries like Serbia or Belarus with ones like the Czech Republic and Slovenia.
There was a good study on this that I saw a while back, but lost the link. It showed how different nations that were part of different empires developed in the late 20th and early 21st century. The correlation is pretty obvious - the ones that got the Ottoman + Russian/Soviet combination were performing worst in almost every metric.
So even within the broad spectrum that is considered “Eastern Europe”, there are vast disparities.
Over the years, I found one particular Bulgarian trait to be VERY annoying - this constant scheming of how to evade the rules (in a legal way, preferably) and cheat the system. Found it very frustrating, but as I was researching the Ottoman times in the country, I figured it out.
The Ottomans dispersed people in smaller villages and towns - to make sure not too many of them cluster around, otherwise they might get some ideas about independence. The locals, loathing the rules, taxes and subjugation, started coming up with all sorta of schemes. When the Ottomans came to collect taxes, they’ll hide the sheep high up into the mountains and say that a plague killed them. Or they’ll find out what the local pasha liked - be it food, alcohol, whatever - and bribe him, so he can put them into a more favourable tax bracket. Many more examples, but you get the gist.
Repeating that for 500 years, it explains why we are the way we are.
A real concern in the US is that Gen Z has grown up in a time where institutions have not stayed clean, the rules on the powerful have not been enforced, parties have not punished their own political side when it steals, and have not shown up to the boring civic work. We are letting it slip for a generation, and human nature--the dark side--has reinstalled itself, but not in the background. My daughter, Gen Z, born in 2007, keeps reminding me that I grew up in an era when American democracy was still viable, but she has spent much of her life in an increasingly authoritarian and untrustworthy system that doesn't respect her rights. 2017-2021 and 2025-2026, six-ish years of American authoritarianism which is getting worse, not better, roughly a third of her life.
Gen Z is living this reality: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.” - Hannah Arendt
"Institutions stay clean only for as long as somebody keeps them clean: enforces the rules on the powerful, punishes their own political side when it steals, shows up to the boring civic work. Let that slip for a generation, and human nature quietly reinstalls itself in the background.
But on average, the social contract of the club of the exceptional produced several generations of people who benefited from this radical experiment, and it is understandable why they find it difficult to grasp why the rest of us - basically, the whole world - is lagging behind, trying to catch up with the program. A program that, while it doesn’t work perfectly, works pretty darn well for everyone. Our version works perfectly for a selected few."
Yes, thank you for zooming all the way out, this was very instructive. In Germany, you can see both mindsets at the same time. Interestingly, there are also some positive traits I detect in the former East Germany, like more solidarity among the neighbors and such. I am living in Spain now, and that is a country that went from a very backward dictatorship to one of the most modern societies in a generation and a half. I think the lesson is that it can be done with a lot of support from the countries that already succeeded, but that progress is hard. I do agree with you that the process of joining the EU in itself is a very valuable exercise. The former East Germany never had to go through this and it might be one of the reasons it feels so dejected.
Another good article. And yes, human nature is an often-overlooked factor. Humans have been around for about 300,000 years. Since then, wars, corruption, nepotism, and the pursuit of power have shaped history. Even the biblical story of the the Genesis creation narrative (including the Fall and the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), offers a glimpse into this.
I’m quite skeptical that humanity will ever manage to come anywhere close to achieving the desired “paradise on earth.” I fear that Thomas Hobbes is right when he says that human beings are driven by a “thirst for glory,” “fear,” and the instinct for self-preservation. Desire is constitutive. Human instincts cannot be “reformed” and must be restrained from the outside, by force if necessary. This also means that utopias are impossible (an earthly paradise without an overarching coercive power is structurally impossible.) According to Hobbes, the result of all this is a miserable state of war of all against all (“bellum omnium contra omnes”).
Unlike Hobbes, for whom freedom is primarily a threat, Hannah Arendt sees a constitutive ambivalence in human freedom: natality is not only the source of the problem, but also of hope—every person can start anew, and every generation can reshape the world.
Historians in the distant future will see where humanity has evolved, if it does not first destroy its planet and thus the very basis of its existence…
Got to that same place a while back. Democracy is conditional and provisional. It’s not a given and it’s not a right. It’s a permanent fight.
To me, the best analogy at a smaller scale is how different people age. The ones that remain active - they walk daily, exercise, eat well, etc. - are able to retain a level of independence and mobility well into their old age. The ones that did not - for whatever reason - struggle to hold their baby grandchildren for more than a few minutes because something always aches.
Nothing in life is permanent, and everything requires maintenance.
😀
That works for me!
😀
Neglect and complacency may well be at the roots of the trouble.
I happen to be a grand papa and I have been very happy to be able to hold my grand-children and roll on floors with them. I can’t help but regret that I will be leaving them a much harder world than the one I was born in.
You describe the exception, but not the machinery. Let me supply that from the inside.
Denmark doesn't have one safeguard, it has several that overlap. A citizen can bring a case against the state and win. Parliament can bring down a government in a single vote. The press is free in practice, not only on paper. And most importantly: school teaches us to be critical of our own government, not just the neighbouring one. That last part is the real infrastructure. Institutions can be written down in a morning. A population that expects to be listened to takes generations.
Which is why your warning lands on us, not on you. We have been allowed to believe this is a condition. It is a habit. None of those mechanisms works by itself — they work because somebody shows up for the boring part, year after year. We have started talking about our institutions the way we talk about the weather.
So it isn't you who should learn from us. It is we who need to remember how we got here - while you still remember what it costs to work for it.
Exactly this!
It’s a muscle that needs to be trained, otherwise it will atrophy. We can see that happening in real-time: some members of the “exceptional nations” are able to retain their democratic institutions from subversion and decay, maintain a relatively high trust in society, etc., while others are descending into the default settings. The United States being a very prominent example.
Of course you are right.
SHAME on the nutter or lazy Muricans who , too cossetted in material goods and abundant food, have forgotten the grand lesson of their constitution.
Its probably all the harder for Eastern European countries to reform depending on which imperial power they were under at the turn of the last century. Countries under the Ottoman and Russian empires got the full brunt of the nepotism and corruption those empires brought to bear. Ones under the Austro-Hungarian and German empires had it less bad. One can see the difference when one compares the corruption levels countries like Serbia or Belarus with ones like the Czech Republic and Slovenia.
There was a good study on this that I saw a while back, but lost the link. It showed how different nations that were part of different empires developed in the late 20th and early 21st century. The correlation is pretty obvious - the ones that got the Ottoman + Russian/Soviet combination were performing worst in almost every metric.
So even within the broad spectrum that is considered “Eastern Europe”, there are vast disparities.
Over the years, I found one particular Bulgarian trait to be VERY annoying - this constant scheming of how to evade the rules (in a legal way, preferably) and cheat the system. Found it very frustrating, but as I was researching the Ottoman times in the country, I figured it out.
The Ottomans dispersed people in smaller villages and towns - to make sure not too many of them cluster around, otherwise they might get some ideas about independence. The locals, loathing the rules, taxes and subjugation, started coming up with all sorta of schemes. When the Ottomans came to collect taxes, they’ll hide the sheep high up into the mountains and say that a plague killed them. Or they’ll find out what the local pasha liked - be it food, alcohol, whatever - and bribe him, so he can put them into a more favourable tax bracket. Many more examples, but you get the gist.
Repeating that for 500 years, it explains why we are the way we are.
A real concern in the US is that Gen Z has grown up in a time where institutions have not stayed clean, the rules on the powerful have not been enforced, parties have not punished their own political side when it steals, and have not shown up to the boring civic work. We are letting it slip for a generation, and human nature--the dark side--has reinstalled itself, but not in the background. My daughter, Gen Z, born in 2007, keeps reminding me that I grew up in an era when American democracy was still viable, but she has spent much of her life in an increasingly authoritarian and untrustworthy system that doesn't respect her rights. 2017-2021 and 2025-2026, six-ish years of American authoritarianism which is getting worse, not better, roughly a third of her life.
Gen Z is living this reality: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.” - Hannah Arendt
"Institutions stay clean only for as long as somebody keeps them clean: enforces the rules on the powerful, punishes their own political side when it steals, shows up to the boring civic work. Let that slip for a generation, and human nature quietly reinstalls itself in the background.
But on average, the social contract of the club of the exceptional produced several generations of people who benefited from this radical experiment, and it is understandable why they find it difficult to grasp why the rest of us - basically, the whole world - is lagging behind, trying to catch up with the program. A program that, while it doesn’t work perfectly, works pretty darn well for everyone. Our version works perfectly for a selected few."
How do you think Biden was pushed out of office?
"Human nature is the default setting everywhere". No, on the contrary. Never heard of the Enlightenment?
You just proved the point I was making in the essay. The Enlightenment wasn’t a worldwide phenomenon.
# 13.