Smoke signals from the Gaza Strip The historical Messiah Wars described in the preceding briefing papers came to a head in our time when a perfect storm in Gaza that no one seemed to anticipate rose up on October 7, 2023. It was typified by the tunnels hidden from view beneath the coastal Mediterranean enclave…

Rethinking economics to better sustain prosperity and peace Economic instability has been a fundamental source of social trauma and conflict throughout human history, as previous chapters have highlighted. Cultural Golden Ages—whether Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Asian, African, feudal, democratic, colonial, capitalist or Marxist/socialist—have all at some point left a trail of faltering or failed economies. Clearly,…

Forging global empires of the heart and mind Where emperors once levied taxes to fund territorial conquests, today’s imperial visionaries engineer virtual networks built on commercial revenues fueled by secular dreams of new ways of being human. Today, the world’s largest digital empires manage revenues larger than the annual  Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of most…

The Mufti meets Hitler and accelerates Jihad The saga of Yasser Arafat illustrates what happens when modern liberation ideology mixes with ancient jihadi religious beliefs. Here I want to add a sidebar that shows how deep and nefarious this blending really goes. The story begins with engagement between Jews and Germans that predates World War…

Reconfiguring the world through ideology and victimhood The 1960s are known to scholars as the Decade of Revolution. National wars of liberation broke out in many countries during that decade when Cold War tensions mounted between the Soviet Union and the U.S. As the two powers vied for global dominance, nations everywhere became oddly bi-polar,…

The brooding empire that propelled global revolutions The ancient quest for Russian identity birthed a violent empire and a rich literary tradition preoccupied with deep brooding about the “Russian Soul.” The writer Dostoevsky characterized it this way in A Writer’s Diary: The most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need…

Oppressing people to end oppression By any measure, 1848 was a year of high drama in Europe. That year the Treaty of Westphalia was signed bringing an end to the Thirty Years War that killed eight million people. The treaty established livable boundaries among the three leading religions jostling for power: Roman Catholics, Lutherans and…

Tethering freedom to logic instead of the Divine Logos Enthusiasm for the study of man and nature awakened in Europe during the Renaissance and transformed how empires were justified. This and succeeding briefs will draw our narrative closer to modern times, and you’ll begin hearing ideas that sound familiar today. The Renaissance in Europe was stirred…

Reckoning empires by death tolls and territory Historians count roughly 70 empires that have ruled multiple people groups across large regions of the world for distinct periods of time. In this brief, you’ll find metrics and maps of some of them to help picture the social cost of rulers’ efforts to secure and expand their…

A new imperial force contending for world dominance Around 570 AD, Muhammad was born to an aristocratic clan of the Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca, in what is now modern Saudi Arabia. His name means “praiseworthy” in Arabic. His father died before he was born, and his mother died when he was six, leaving Muhammad…