Why we no longer understand the world

There are moments when the tools we use to read reality stop working. Not because they break. They function exactly as designed. But the object they were built to observe has changed so much that the tool, however finely calibrated, no longer has anything to grip. It is like trying to measure the temperature of a conversation with a thermometer. The device works perfectly. There is simply nothing there for it to read.

This, I believe, is where we find ourselves with respect to the US–Israel–Iran conflict and everything that has gathered around it over the past six weeks. Serious geopolitical analysts — Mearsheimer, Sachs, Stephen Walt, Freeman, and many others — still work with frameworks that served them well for decades. Economists calculate the energy shock with refined mathematical models. Psychiatrists observe, though they arguably should not, the cognitive decompensation of an American president. Diplomats prepare the next rounds of negotiations.

And yet every one of these analyses, however competent, leaves the reader with the same feeling: something essential is missing. Something in the whole has not been captured. We are looking at parts, but not at the mechanism that binds them together.

That feeling is not an illusion. It signals a real problem: the world we are trying to read no longer has the shape our instruments presuppose. In earlier articles in this series I called it a telescoped world — a world seen through a telescope that no longer works, with false distances, with foregrounds that conceal what lies far away. Now we can take a step further and ask: why has the telescope stopped working?

The Romanian language offers a coincidence worth noting. The word telescope carries two very different meanings. On the one hand, it is the optical instrument through which we observe distant objects — Galileo’s telescope, the Hubble, the small telescope a parent buys a curious child. On the other hand, it is a mechanism: a telescopic antenna, a telescopic fishing rod, the legs of a tripod. In that second sense, successive segments fold into one another, collapsing depth into a compact surface.

The first telescope opens space. The second closes it.

These two meanings are not etymologically related. The coincidence is purely lexical. And yet it offers us exactly the metaphor we need. The telescope-as-instrument — that is, the System of national policies — no longer works, because the world it is trying to observe has telescoped in the second sense of the word. The crises have woven into one another. The depth in which the instrument-telescope was meant to exercise its function has collapsed. What remains are compact, overlapping layers that cannot be separated.

It is this phenomenon — the entanglement of crises with one another — that the rest of this essay concerns. To describe it precisely, I need a phenomenological framework that neither political science nor economics, neither clinical psychology nor political theology has yet articulated in coherent form. We will have to borrow one. And the place we can most productively borrow from — without mysticism, without pretending to any actual mathematical transfer — is, surprisingly, particle physics. More specifically, the intuitions physicists have developed about the behavior of quarks.

Three intuitions borrowed from physics

Before the reader raises an eyebrow at the appearance of quarks in an essay about war and crisis, let me be clear. I am not claiming that political reality obeys the equations of quantum chromodynamics. There is no algebra of crises. What I am borrowing are three structural intuitions — three ways of thinking about how things behave when they stop behaving classically. Physicists gave these intuitions mathematical form, but at their core they remain palpable, visualizable, accessible to any attentive mind.

1. Confinement.

In the world we know directly, if we want to study something, we isolate it. We split an atom and find protons, neutrons, electrons — each of which can be separated, measured, understood on its own. This capacity to isolate things in order to analyze them is one of the conditions of modern science, going back to Galileo.

With quarks, however, isolation does not work. If you try to pull a quark out of a proton, the energy you invest does not release the quark — it creates new quarks. The harder you pull, the more appear. Quarks, quite simply, cannot be isolated. They can only be observed in composition, as part of a group, never on their own. This property is called confinement. It is not a technological limitation — that is, it is not that we have yet to invent the right instrument. It is a fundamental property of the field that holds them together.

Now try a thought experiment with the situation of the past six weeks. Try to isolate the global energy crisis from the crisis of American presidential authority. Try simply to describe one of them without touching the other. You discover almost immediately that Brent crude reacts to Trump’s Truth Social posts within minutes. That decisions concerning the naval blockade of Hormuz are a direct consequence of his mental state — or, let us say, his disposition. That the energy shock feeds the inflation that feeds the discontent of his electoral base that feeds the presidential decompensation.

You have not isolated two crises. You have simply discovered that they are one crisis seen from different angles. This is confinement, transposed into the political register. The components of the crisis cannot be analytically separated, because the very attempt at separation multiplies them. Pull hard at one edge, and new components appear.

2. Asymptotic freedom.

Here physics offers a paradox that will prove extremely useful. The closer quarks are to one another, the weaker the interaction between them. At very small distances, they behave almost as free particles. At larger distances, the force grows until it becomes confining.

This is the reverse of what classical intuition teaches us. Gravity weakens with distance. Electromagnetism weakens with distance. Here, however, the interaction weakens as things get closer. The smaller the scale at which you work, the more things seem free, independent, more readily analyzable on their own.

What does this tell us about crisis? It tells us something important about the current failure of analysis. At the scale of each individual actor — Pezeshkian, Trump, Vance, Netanyahu, Putin, Xi — behavior remains nearly internally coherent. Pezeshkian acts rationally as the Iranian president. Trump acts coherently within the narcissistic logic of his own personality. Vance acts coherently as an ambitious vice-president hedging his political future. Putin acts coherently as a pragmatic Russian leader. At each individual scale, the pieces hold together. And yet, at the macro scale, the sum of all these individually coherent actions produces a system that can no longer end — neither through anyone’s victory, nor through a negotiated peace, nor through open escalation to total confrontation.

This is why our serious analysts all seem, at once, competent and inadequate. Mearsheimer is precise at the scale at which he works. Sachs, likewise. Crooke and Freeman, each in his own way. Dugin, in his theological register, likewise. None of them is wrong at the scale where asymptotic freedom still operates — the scale of immediate intervention, identifiable actors, discrete disciplinary registers. They are all, however, silently assuming that this autonomy of small scales carries over to the large scale.

The empty place in the current landscape is not another analyst better than Mearsheimer. The empty place is the analyst of the confinement scale — of the scale at which all these autonomous phenomena are revealed to be bound together through a common field.

3. Relational valence.

In chromodynamics, quarks carry a property called color (the term is conventional and has nothing to do with visible light). No quark can be observed alone carrying a definite color. Only combinations that produce an invariant (white, or a quark–antiquark pair) are observable. Color does not exist in the individual quark; it exists only in the structure of the relation between quarks. It is a property that arises between things, not within them.

A musical analogy helps. No single tone, taken out of context, is “harmonious,” because harmony does not reside in the note C, or the note E, or the note G. It arises only when C, E, and G are sounded together. The note E, in a different chord, participates in an entirely different harmony. The same note takes on a different relational value depending on the company it keeps. If you asked an acoustic physicist, “What is the harmony of E?”, he would tell you the question is poorly put — E has no harmony of its own; it participates in harmonies.

So too with quarks. A quark has no color in any absolute sense; it participates in chromatic combinations alongside other quarks.

Here is the transfer into the register of crisis: what makes a component of the crisis manageable or catastrophic is not its intrinsic magnitude but its valence of entanglement — its capacity to link with other components through the common field. The world has forgotten this, but the Strait of Hormuz crisis of 1980, during the Iran–Iraq war, was of comparable magnitude to the current one. And yet it did not turn the world upside down. Today, it does, because other components are present whose valences are compatible. Same note, different chord. Same maritime strait, different chromatic valence, because the orchestra in which it now sounds is entirely different.

This third intuition gives us the criterion for evaluating importance. What counts is not the size of the event, but the compatibility of its valence with the field in which it occurs. A small component with high entanglement valence can transform the entire configuration. A large component with low valence can pass almost unnoticed.

A fourth signature: near-instantaneous transmission.

From these three intuitions follows a fourth, which serves as a diagnostic signature: the near-instantaneous velocity of transmission. In an entangled state, shock transmits between registers at near-instantaneous speed. Brent reacts to Truth Social within two minutes. American presidential decisions shift in response to Tucker Carlson’s commentary, which shifts in response to battlefield developments in Lebanon. What would once have taken weeks now takes hours.

This is the simplest empirical test of an entangled state. If effects in one register appear within minutes or hours of causes arising in a wholly different register, we are dealing with an entangled condition. If transmission took weeks or months — as was historically normal — we would still be inside a classical crisis, one that remained decoupleable.

What this framework can and cannot do

A word of methodological caution, before going further. Chromodynamics of crises, as I am constructing it here, is an instrument of description, not an explanatory theory. It helps name phenomena that the standard disciplinary toolkit misses — the non-decoupleability of components, multi-register transmission with near-instantaneous velocity, the relational valence of events. Where it helps, it helps through vocabulary: it gives us words for what we see but could not name.

The framework does not help, however, with pointed prediction of future events. It does not permit the attribution of singular causality. It does not evaluate actors’ intentions. It does not establish who is morally responsible for what. Where those descriptive functions end, the chromodynamic vocabulary must stop and be replaced by others, more appropriate to the task. To ask “so what will Trump do on April 22?” or “so who made the final decision about the naval blockade?” is to ask of this framework something that, by construction, it cannot provide.

The utility of this proposal will be verified in a single way: analyses conducted with its help will be more precise, richer, more integrative than readings made without it. If so, the vocabulary is worth adopting. If not, it is worth abandoning. This is the only test I accept for the framework proposed here.

Prisoners of the world we defend

Here I must add an intuition that comes not from physics but from another area of contemporary knowledge — neuroscience and cognitive psychology. This intuition explains why an entangled state tends to stay entangled, and why it does not unravel on its own.

There is, in the neuroscience of recent years, a theory according to which the brain’s operation is governed by a unifying principle: the minimization of prediction error. The brain, in this view, is not a passive receiver of information but a mechanism of active prediction — constantly generating hypotheses about what comes next and adjusting those hypotheses by tracking discrepancies from observed reality. Biological systems survive only by maintaining a sufficiently good model of their environment to anticipate and thus reduce surprise.

Applied to a state of entangled crisis, this principle produces a remarkable consequence. Every actor — whether American president, Iranian leader, British prime minister, energy-market investor, or ordinary reader trying to make sense of the world — operates with an internal representation of reality built before the entanglement. That model presupposes the possibility of decoupling: that oil prices follow economic parameters, that political decisions respect some rationality, that allies behave predictably, that negotiations have an internally coherent logic.

When reality ceases to confirm these presuppositions — when Brent oscillates after every impulsive post, when presidential decisions appear decompensated, when allies quarrel and break apart in public, when negotiations collapse without any technical cause — the brain does not accept the new reality. It tries to force reality back into the model.

This is the standard reaction to uncertainty that exceeds the system’s processing capacity: not updating the model, but rationalizing reality so that reality conforms to the model. Explanations are built. Conspiracies are invoked. Singular villains are identified. Hidden plans are postulated — Kushner’s plans, Netanyahu’s plans, the plans of Chabad, the plans of the Deep State. Or, alternatively, the opposite register is invoked: everything is chaos, everything is the individual madness of a single president, and we’re all heading for the cliff. All these explanations are attempts to preserve the decoupleable model. None accepts the real consequence: that decoupleability itself has ceased to be a property of the present world.

And the consequence is this: every actor, in trying to maintain the coherence of his own model, contributes to the strengthening of the confinement field. Trump posts something impulsive because his internal model tells him he can control the narrative through the post. The Iranians demand integrated packages at negotiations because their internal model, correctly this time, recognizes that separating Hormuz from Lebanon is not possible. The Europeans publicly break with Trump because their internal model assumes that alliances require at least minimal coherence from the partner. Investors buy and sell frenetically because their internal model cannot bear unresolved uncertainty. Every internally coherent response amplifies the confining field for everyone else.

The field produces the field. Entanglement sustains itself.

This is the completion the chromodynamic framework needed in order to become truly useful. Physics gives us the structure — confinement, asymptotic freedom, relational valence, instantaneous manifestation. Predictive neuroscience gives us the motor: why, once established, the confinement field does not unravel on its own. Because every actor, defending his internal model of the old world, contributes to the consolidation of the new world he is incapable of recognizing.

The thirteen entangled components of the Apocalypse

With this framework in place, we can proceed to a precise inventory of the current configuration. Applying chromodynamic reasoning to the situation of April 14-15, 2026, I identify thirteen distinct entangled components. For clarity of exposition, I group them in four registers: kinetic-military, economic-systemic, political-institutional, and civilizational-spiritual. In the confinement field, however, these registers contaminate one another through their valences and affinities.

Before the list, a necessary observation on the differing status of these components. Some are independently verifiable facts, with reliable figures and dates — the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, Brent prices, the Minab casualties, the IMF’s growth forecast cuts, the destruction of the Rafi’-Niya synagogue. Others are interpretive readings dependent on the analytical framework adopted — the crisis of American presidential authority, the crisis of the MAGA coalition, the transreligious symbolic-religious crisis. This distinction allows the reader to tell, at every point, where the argument rests on reproducible data and where on interpretation. The list that follows does not place these elements on the same plane; it lists them together because together they form the entangled configuration, but their inferential weight differs.

I. The kinetic-military register. Four components.

The US–Israel–Iran war proper, under a fragile ceasefire since April 8, due to expire on April 21-22, with an American naval blockade active since April 13, countered by an Iranian one.

The Israel–Lebanon war, deliberately excluded from the ceasefire, with over 2,020 confirmed dead as of April 11, Israeli ground offensive underway.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis, with traffic reduced from roughly 130 ships per day before the war to 17 on Saturday and two on Friday — blockade against blockade, something effectively unprecedented.

The post-Khamenei nuclear crisis, with Mojtaba Khamenei installed as the new Supreme Leader and Iran arguably closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon than before the war launched to prevent exactly that outcome.

II. The economic-systemic register. Four more components.

The global energy crisis, with Brent oscillating between $92 and $119.

The crisis of global growth, with the IMF cutting its global forecast by more than one point, Iran’s by 7.2 points (a 6.1% contraction), the eurozone from 1.4% to 1.1%, the Middle East and North Africa from 3.9% to 1.1%.

The crisis of global maritime transport, with over 34,000 ships rerouted in the past month alone, maritime insurance ten times more expensive, fertilizers and food supplies affected.

The galloping inflation and cost-of-living crisis, with the price of a gallon of gasoline in the US rising from $2.98 on February 28 to $4.12 on April 14, with direct, daily visible effects on President Trump’s electoral base. The EU member states, for that matter, face the same dynamic in sharper form.

III. The political-institutional register. Four components.

The crisis of American presidential authority, with visible cognitive decompensation — the vulgar Holy Saturday post ending with “praise be Allah,” the AI-generated image of Trump-as-Jesus on Truth Social for Orthodox Easter, the direct attack on Pope Leo XIV, among much else.

The crisis of Western alliance architecture, with Starmer declaring he had “had it with America,” AUKUS unraveling, NATO discussing the withdrawal of a significant portion of American troops from Europe, Spain turning toward China, South Korea having a recent public dispute with Israel.

The internal crisis of the MAGA coalition, with Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Megyn Kelly, and Alex Jones publicly excommunicated, the electoral base decoupled from its leadership.

The crisis of international law, with the Minab strike — between 156 and 170 dead, over 120 of them children — classified by Human Rights Watch as a possible war crime, left without institutional response, while the AI-based military system Maven Smart generates a thousand potential targets per hour, with no identifiable moral agent at the point where the button is pressed.

IV. The civilizational-spiritual register. A single component, but one of very high valence: the symbolic-religious crisis across traditions, with convergent eschatological readings.

Russian Orthodoxy, American evangelicalism, Iranian Shi’ism, and Catholicism are all reading the same set of events through different lenses but with comparable intensity. Two founding narratives are collapsing simultaneously, though from different causes.

On the one hand, the narrative of Israel-as-natural-ally-of-Christendom — the very nucleus of American evangelical Zionism — is being undermined by the direct presidential attack on Pope Leo XIV, by the bombing of churches in Lebanon, by the Vatican’s positioning against the American-Israeli campaign.

On the other hand, the narrative of Israel-as-the-Jewish-state-that-protects-Jews-everywhere took a direct hit on April 7, when the Israeli Air Force destroyed the Rafi’-Niya synagogue in Tehran, triggering public condemnations from the Iranian Jewish community of some eight thousand people — the largest in the Middle East after Israel itself — which declared solidarity with the Iranian state against what it called American-Zionist aggression.

This is, truly, an unprecedented tableau of conditions. Thirteen crises at once. The number is not neutral in the Christian tradition; it is the chapter of the Apocalypse of John in which the beast receives the authority of the dragon. I do not invoke this coincidence as demonstration, but I cannot simply ignore it either. The phenomenology of the present moment is extreme enough that the symbolic resources of the traditions we inhabit become legitimate instruments of description, not mere ornament. The reader may decide whether the coincidence is productive or accidental.

Four concentrating nodes

Not all thirteen components transmit with the same intensity. Some function as nodes — concentrators of valence that, when struck, propagate through the greatest number of registers. In the confinement field, identifying nodes is more important than identifying components.

1. The person of Donald Trump.

This is the most active node in the entire configuration. Every presidential gesture transmits simultaneously through at least eight components. The post “an entire civilization will die tonight” of April 7 simultaneously brought about: a shift in the Iranian negotiating position, a Brent oscillation of plus-minus five percent within 24 hours, Mojtaba Khamenei’s indirectly transmitted decision to accept the ceasefire, Pezeshkian’s public statements, Vatican reactions, Starmer’s commentary, waves of contradictory messaging within MAGA, target and objective shifts at the CENTCOM level. A single post, eight components. The speed of impact on each ranged from minutes to a few hours.

2. The Strait of Hormuz.

The physical node — a maritime geography that, in the confinement field, becomes a transmission point no diplomacy can circumvent. Every change in Hormuz’s state transmits through at least six components: energy prices, global economic growth, the maritime transport chain, inflation, Iranian negotiating positions, American alliance positions.

3. Lebanon.

Israel’s refusal to include Lebanon in the ceasefire is the node that broke the Islamabad negotiations — not the nuclear dossier. The core Iranian demand received an irreconcilable American-Israeli refusal. Lebanon transmits simultaneously through the ceasefire with Iran, Arab positions in the GCC, the non-interventionist MAGA discontent, critiques of international law, and Shi’i religious valence.

4. The violation of the Goldwater Rule.

The fact that multiple high-profile voices (Sachs, Freeman, and others) publicly declared, during the week of April 7-12, that the president suffers from severe psychiatric disorders is, in itself, an institutional event of unprecedented gravity. This node transmits through the legitimacy of military decisions, through the positions of allies who can now invoke decisional incapacity, through the erosion of domestic support, and through the justification of international concerns.

Together, these four nodes form the currently active confinement field. The remaining components have valence but are not presently functioning as nodes. The nuclear component, for instance, is a background component with high valence but low velocity; it will likely activate as a node only if Iran conducts a symbolic test of having acquired the weapon — a possible but not imminent scenario.

The April 21-25, 2026 window — an excess of calendar density

The chromodynamics of crisis suggests something we can verify without waiting for the events themselves: in an entangled state, temporal nodes tend not to be uniformly distributed across the calendar. They cluster around windows concentrating convergent symbolic valences. The confinement field prefers crowded zones to empty ones. It nests around points where different registers already overlap through calendrical coincidence, because the cost of initiating events there is minimal. An event produced in such a window will be read through three or four lenses at once, amplified by the already-charged symbolic field.

Worth noting, before describing the late-April window, a coincidence that concerns us directly. The very week I am writing these lines, April 13-14, Israel commemorated Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day — and the American naval blockade of Iran was launched that same day, April 13, at 10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. Two entirely different symbolic registers, aggregated onto the same date. An initial empirical illustration of what calendrical density means, and of a confinement field that couples preferentially with it. This is not coincidence. It is precisely the pattern the framework describes.

The window between April 21 and 25, 2026, at a larger scale, is a particular case.

April 21 marks the expiration of the US–Iran ceasefire negotiated on April 8. This is the principal political-military node.

On April 20-21, in the Jewish calendar, falls Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance for fallen Israeli soldiers and victims of terrorism. One of the most solemn days of the Israeli calendar, it structurally precedes Yom Ha’atzmaut — the military commemoration leads directly into the affirmation of the state.

April 21 in the Baha’i calendar marks the beginning of Ridván, the holiest festival of the Baha’i faith.

On April 21-22, in direct continuation with Yom HaZikaron, falls Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day. The founding holiday of the Jewish state, structurally succeeding the day of mourning: the memory of the victim leads to the affirmation of the state, all within a single ritual transition.

Between April 22 and the morning of April 23 will fall the peak of the Lyrid meteor shower — an astronomical phenomenon visible across the globe, invariably invoked in eschatological discourse as a sign in the heavens.

On April 23, in the Orthodox calendar, falls the feast of Saint George the Great Martyr, the dragon-slayer. Saint George carries a direct iconographic valence in the Apocalypse of John, chapter 12 — the battle of the Archangel Michael with the dragon, the chapter immediately preceding chapter 13, in which the beast receives its authority. The feast holds special weight in both Romanian spirituality (patron of soldiers, titular saint of over a hundred monasteries) and Russian, both Orthodox traditions having built their warrior-Christian identity around this figure.

Six different symbolic registers, across four to five consecutive days, focused on a single window. This is not pure statistical coincidence — the calendrical density of late April is objectively higher than that of an arbitrary window in mid-February or August. And the confinement field, through its structural properties, will couple preferentially with this density. A kinetic event — a strike, an attack, an incursion — in this window will carry a transmission valence significantly amplified relative to the same event placed in a calendrically neutral week.

This is not mystical prediction. It is the simple observation that a military strike on April 22 would be read immediately through three overlapping lenses (political-military, Jewish, Orthodox), while a similar strike on May 8 would have the same magnitude but reduced transmission valence.

The field seeks density.

Implications for how we read what comes next

If the chromodynamic framework is correct — and we must be honest with ourselves here, it remains a working hypothesis, not a demonstrated theory — then several consequences become operational for how we read the events of the coming weeks.

The first is that we should not expect a classical ending. The system described by this conflict will not end through anyone’s victory, through a negotiated peace, or through open escalation to total war. Classical endings presuppose decoupleability — to win, you need your opponents to be able to lose; to make peace, you need the components to be separable. In the confinement field, none of these presuppositions holds. The system will remain in a turbulent metastable state, oscillating between fragile ceasefires and limited kinetic relapses, without resolution.

The second is that nodes — not structural fundamentals — will determine the rhythm of change. Not the real price of oil, not real economic growth, not the real military balance will decide what happens in the next forty days. Decisive, instead, will be Trump’s posts, the state of the Strait of Hormuz, developments in Lebanon, and the intensity of pressure on presidential authority. Whoever tries to predict on the basis of the size or gravity of individual events will be wrong. Whoever follows the nodes will see the correct course.

The third: any attempt at partial solution will fail. The non-decoupleable Islamabad negotiation, with the Strait of Hormuz and the nuclear dossier separated from Lebanon, failed precisely because the Americans treated the negotiation as decoupleable while the Iranians understood confinement and demanded an integrated package. The Iranians had, without theorizing it, the correct intuition of the field. The Americans operated with obsolete tools. This asymmetry of understanding will repeat. Those who understand confinement will have a structural advantage over those who continue to presuppose decoupleability.

The fourth, the heaviest: moral responsibility diffuses through the field. Who is responsible for the 156-170 dead at Minab? The pilot, if there was one? The CENTCOM commander who approved Operation Epic Fury? Trump, who ordered it? The Maven AI-based algorithm that generated the target package? The double-tap doctrine that refined the method? Forty years of conflictual US–Iran relations after 1979? The correct answer — all of them, simultaneously, within the confinement field — satisfies no existing criminal jurisdiction. This is why Human Rights Watch can call for a war-crime investigation without being able to name a singular perpetrator. Entanglement decomposes the very instrument by which modern civilization used to assign blame. This may be the deepest crisis of the moment, and it does not appear in the list of thirteen because it is not a component. It is a property of the field itself.

In place of a conclusion

The chromodynamics of thirteen entangled crises is not a complete theory. It is a proposed framework — a way of naming what we see but could not name before, a minimal vocabulary for describing a phenomenological configuration that conventional social science cannot capture or describe adequately.

If we continue to see fragile ceasefires alternating with kinetic relapses, if every presidential gesture continues to transmit within an hour through eight registers at once, if negotiations continue to fail because one side demands integrated packages while the other insists on decoupling, then this framework has a chance of being useful. And it may become, for those who adopt it, the instrument by which the broken telescope can at last be replaced by one that works on the world we have — not on the world we have lost.

The telescope-as-instrument of national policies — the infamous System — will not be repaired by changing the lenses. It will be repaired only by recognizing that the object itself has telescoped in the other sense of the word. Depth has collapsed into a smooth surface. That surface, now compact and woven into itself, demands instruments we are only beginning to invent.

A Romanian note

The essay could end here. But there is a local fact I cannot leave undiscussed, because it offers — for the Romanian reader — a lateral illustration of the framework proposed above. I say illustration, not proof. What follows is a case study about a related phenomenon — the intuitive sensitivity of certain political actors to large-scale patterns — and does not, by construction, constitute an argument for the validity of the main framework. The framework will be evaluated by what it helps us read in the weeks to come, not by its correspondence with one actor’s intuitions or another’s. With that methodological caveat in place, I can proceed to the case.

Călin Georgescu, former presidential candidate of Romania, ostracized and hounded, invoked on four public occasions, beginning December 23, 2025, a formula with eschatological valence: “the cherry blossom will bloom.” The first time, before the Buftea Police, as a spiritual exhortation with undefined temporal horizon. The second, on March 14, 2026, as the slogan of a national tree-planting campaign titled “The Cherry Tree Will Bloom.” The third, in the late-March interview with Robert Turcescu on Metropola TV — watched by over a million Romanians — where he made the temporal collocation explicit: “The Kogălniceanu Base is the key to Europe’s misery. And the cherry tree blooms, you know when? Around late April. There… We will find out more at the cherry blossoms.” The fourth, on the night of Orthodox Easter, April 12, 2026, in a video message juxtaposing the Icon of the Resurrection with a painting depicting a blossoming cherry tree.

The chronology deserves to be made precise. In December 2025, Georgescu invoked the cherry-blossom metaphor as an open eschatological formula, without a specific date. Only in March 2026, in the Turcescu interview, did he collocate it explicitly with “late April.” It is not, then, a prediction made in December 2025 for April 2026. It is a later specification, made in March, of a metaphor that had been left open in December of the previous year. The distinction matters: what is remarkable is not the blind prediction of a future date, but the sensing — ahead of most geopolitical analysts — of the exceptional charge that the late-April 2026 window would come to carry. A political actor marked the decisive temporal window correctly, through metaphor, several weeks before it became visible to conventional analysis.

Four moments, a single targeted temporal window: the end of April 2026. A date that coincides, as we have seen, with the expiration of the US–Iran ceasefire, with Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut, with Saint George in the Orthodox calendar, with the peak of the Lyrids, with the Baha’i Ridván. The greatest density of convergent symbolic valences in the entire semester.

I am not concerned here with whether Georgescu is or is not a legitimate political actor. I am not concerned with whether his message about the cherry is or is not a coded signal to Moscow — through the association which parts of the Romanian press (Aktual24, PressHub) drew with Vladimirskaia vishnia, Vladimir’s Cherry, a Russian cultural symbol. I am not concerned either with whether his actions ought to be legally sanctioned. These questions belong to another register of analysis, one I do not touch here.

What concerns me is a single thing: the phenomenological fact. A Romanian political actor, apparently without any articulated framework such as the one I have constructed above, sensed a node of the confinement field ahead of conventional analysis. He sensed it intuitively, marked it symbolically through the cherry-blossom metaphor, transmitted it publicly, and collocated it with a specific date that he repeated with insistence.

This is a fact worth thinking about, whatever we may think of Călin Georgescu as a political figure. Because it suggests that the spontaneous symbolic intuition of certain political actors can function as a detector of the nodes of the confinement field, ahead of rational analysis. Not because they possess esoteric knowledge, not because they receive occult signals, but because some people are sensitive to large-scale patterns that most of us miss. They speak in metaphor, in parable, in cipher — not because they mean to mystify, but because rational-empirical language does not yet give them the instruments to name what they sense.

The cherry blossom, in this reading, is a pattern intuition formulated poetically. That it coincides with our analytic window neither validates Georgescu’s political position nor changes in any way the judgments every Romanian citizen must make on his own about this man. But it does validate — and this is the methodologically important observation — his capacity to sense patterns. Several months before it would become obvious to anyone, he marked the date toward which all the registers converge.

For Romania, the reading of this coincidence should raise an uncomfortable question. Not whether Georgescu is right or not — the question is poorly put, because his “rightness” is not political. The real question is: who, in Romania, today, has sufficient analytical instruments to read the end of April 2026 with a rigor comparable to the intuitive sensitivity of an ostracized political actor? If the answer is nobody of those in decision-making positions, then we face a strategic calibration problem that no official discourse can conceal.

The ceded articulation between the Romanian state and reality — about which I have written in earlier articles of this series — takes on, here, a further expression. On one side, we have a political actor excluded from the contest who correctly marks, through metaphor, the decisive temporal window. On the other side, we have an institutional political system that cannot even formulate the question that the marginal intuition poses. This asymmetry will not be resolved by legal sanction, by media censorship, or by mere silence. It will be resolved only by building, within Romanian institutions of thought, the capacity to analyze the confinement field with tools of their own.

This essay is only a first step. The rest remains to be fulfilled.

In recent weeks, alongside other people of good faith, free both of naivety and of a taste for conspiracy, I have kept asking myself the same question. Does Trump, perhaps, know better what he is doing? Is the chaos we find ourselves in deliberate, carefully planned? What if we are the ones deceived by appearances?

Why the hypothesis is tempting

There are several solid reasons why it may seem reasonable to believe that the current chaos in the Gulf is calculated. First, the Venezuela precedent. The operation to capture Maduro was swift, precise, well coordinated, carried out while everyone was looking elsewhere. Trump demonstrated, at least that one time, that he can act surgically under the cover of apparent disorder.

Second, the method of postponed deadlines. Every postponement of the ultimatum — from 48 hours to 5 days, from 5 days to 10, from 10 days to April 6 — is interpreted by analysts as weakness. But in negotiation, repeated delay combined with a standing threat creates a specific kind of nervous exhaustion, because the other side never knows whether you are bluffing. It is exactly the principle of the drunken fighter: the opponent cannot read the movement because there is no pattern. And Trump is known for this kind of negotiation — the real estate deals that made him rich relied to a large extent on precisely this tactic.

Third, the contradictions expressed publicly in recent days may be deliberate. Here is one example, offered to reporters yesterday aboard Air Force One: “The negotiations are going extremely well, but you never know with Iran, because we negotiate with them and then we always have to blow them up.” Setting aside the absurdity of the statement, what remains worth noting is its structure: Trump praising negotiations and announcing bombardment in the very same sentence. It could be a calculated message meant to convey that it does not matter what you agree to, because we decide what happens next. If it is not irrationality, it could be the intimidation of the adversary through unpredictability.

Finally, there is a historical precedent for this type of approach based on deliberately cultivating unpredictability. Richard Nixon called it the “madman theory” and wanted the Vietnamese and the Soviets to believe he was unstable enough to use nuclear weapons, and that it was therefore safer to negotiate with him than to test his madness. Trump may be practicing the same strategy, projecting irrationality in order to obtain concessions that a rational actor could never secure. None of these hypotheses is fantastical, so each deserves to be assessed on its merits.

Why it does not work

The drunkard’s dance requires three necessary conditions, and all three are absent.

The first condition is the need for a trained body. In zuì quán, the movements look chaotic, but the muscles execute the sequence with microscopic precision. The fighter’s reflexes are trained over years. Every apparently accidental sway is in fact calculated positioning. The decisive question is whether Trump has the institutional muscles to afford such a dance. The current cabinet is made up of people whom even supporters of the administration describe as extremely servile. The director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Kent, a special forces veteran personally chosen by Trump, resigned publicly after concluding that the information reaching the president bore no relation to reality. Director of National Intelligence Gabbard produced a report stating that the war’s objectives are not achievable, and then fell silent. President Trump receives two-minute briefings in the form of video clips of explosions. And his special envoys — a golf buddy and a son-in-law — are described by diplomatic sources on three continents as men devoid of any credibility. Even if Trump wanted to execute a precise move, with what would he execute it? The drunkard in zuì quán has reflexes. The current administration appears to have no reflexes — only reactions.

The second condition requires a hidden plan. Beneath the apparent chaos, there must be an objective, a destination, a point toward which all the staggering converges. What might that point be, beneath the story? The official objectives of the war have been abandoned one by one: regime change (abandoned), seizure of enriched uranium (abandoned), destruction of ballistic missiles (abandoned). The current objective is opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was perfectly open before the war began. It is as if you set the house on fire and then declared that your objective is to put out the blaze. And Trump’s previous moves consistently show the same pattern of chaos with no tangible result, followed by a declaration of victory and a pivot to the next subject. The tariffs of 2025 were supposed to produce “the best trade deal in history” and instead destabilized the world economy without producing any deal. The withdrawal from the nuclear agreement in 2018 was supposed to lead to “a better deal,” and eight years later there is no deal — only a war in progress. The negotiations with North Korea, complete with that shocking “we fell in love,” ultimately produced nothing. If this is the drunkard’s dance, where are the precision strikes? Where is the moment when the staggering turns into victory?

The third condition, the decisive one, is that the drunkard’s dance presupposes an opponent who reacts. The technique works only against an opponent who is thrown off by unpredictability, who attacks convinced he faces a vulnerable man, and thereby exposes himself. Iran is not reacting to chaotic American moves. Iran is profiting from them. Every day of war increases Iran’s bargaining power. Oil profits have doubled. Sanctions were lifted by a United States acting in desperation. The Strait has been transformed from a free corridor into a selective taxation barrier operating in Chinese yuan. Iran not only does not seem impressed by the dance — it controls the music. A drunkard’s dance performed in front of a wall is not a dance. It is just a man smashing himself against the wall.

So what is it?

If it is not strategy and it is not madness, then what is it? The answer, I believe, is more serious than either.

Imagine a telescope. It works only if the lenses are aligned: light enters through the first, passes through the second, then the third, and forms a coherent image at the end of the tube. Now imagine that each lens works perfectly, but the tube itself has warped. Every lens sees clearly — no problem there — but the complete, coherent image no longer forms anywhere. And no one knows that the image is missing at the end of the tube, because from each person’s own floor, everything looks fine.

This is the world we are living in today. It is not a world run by an evil genius orchestrating chaos. Nor is it a world run by a madman destroying everything at random. It is a world in which each level of the system sees a fragment of reality, acts rationally according to what it sees, and cumulatively produces a catastrophe that no one perceives in its entirety.

In this whole story, Trump probably sees a real estate negotiation and acts according to the rules he learned in the New York of his youth. You reach an agreement, then demand more. The other side is already committed and cannot pull out, so it gives way. If it does not give way, you threaten, you delay, you bring in the lawyers, you drag things out until the other party is exhausted. In the end, you declare victory regardless of the outcome. It worked very well in New York, because that is how things worked there. In consequence, Trump is rational on his floor.

Netanyahu sees, first and foremost, personal survival. He has been on trial since 2020 for fraud, breach of trust, and bribery in three separate cases — the first head of government in Israeli history to stand criminal trial while in office. He faces up to ten years in prison. In November 2025, he requested a presidential pardon without admitting any guilt, but the Pardons Department of the Ministry of Justice rejected the request on March 11, 2026, calling it “extremely problematic.” A former Supreme Court justice said days ago that the president of Israel would risk violating the law by granting such a pardon. In other words, if Netanyahu loses power, he goes to prison. But he is the only one among the players who does not panic. If he were panicking, he would not be sending troops into southern Lebanon — where they are taking heavy losses — simultaneously with the war in Iran. This suggests that Netanyahu does not want to end the war; he wants to prolong it. So he too is rational on his floor.

The United States Congress has the midterm elections before its eyes and sees only that, and accordingly has voted eight times since last June that the war is not its business. It seems correct and rational on its floor. The markets see only higher or lower yields and Brent prices calculated strictly by the book, and they react according to preset algorithms. They are rational on their landing and do their job as markets. The generals see historical precedents such as Gallipoli and regard the islands proposed for conquest as traps, and they sound the alarm. They too are rational on their armored floor. The Iranians see forty-seven years of aggression and a civilization attacked while it was negotiating, and they wait. They seem very rational on their floor. A specialist in the effects of nuclear weapons sees firestorms and more than 300,000 dead on the first day. He too is rational on his floor. A Filipino sailor lying on one of the 3,000 ships stranded in ports sees only water. All are right. Each, on his own floor, is trying to adapt and come to terms with the situation. And no one sees the whole picture.

Why information no longer travels vertically

In a healthy system, information travels between floors through corrective mechanisms. The press asks questions, Congress checks, advisers disagree, the military reports, markets impose discipline. Each mechanism is a joint in the telescope that keeps the lenses aligned.

What has happened, imperceptibly, over the past years is that each joint has given way. The damage did not occur simultaneously, nor through conspiracy. One by one, for different reasons, all of present-day humanity’s organs have failed. The press split into two worlds that no longer communicate with each other. Congress discovered that it is electorally safer not to know than to find out and be held accountable. Advisers who contradict the one they advise are fired or leave on their own, and those who remain quickly learn that professional survival depends on alignment with the narrative, not with the facts. The military reports, but the reports stop at the door of an office into which no one enters anymore bearing bad news. And the markets — the one mechanism that ought to sanction things automatically, procedurally — have been transformed from an instrument of correction into an instrument of profit, with trades worth more than a billion dollars placed minutes before critical presidential announcements, situations documented by the BBC and the Financial Times yet left uninvestigated by anyone.

The result is not a conspiracy. It is the progressive degradation of all the joints, producing a system in which all the lenses function and none can see what the others see.

Ghosts in the hallway

If no one inside the American telescope can still see the whole image, then who outside it can?

Russia stands in the hallway, between floors, with access to several lenses at once. Trump called Putin three weeks ago, asking for help. Putin listened to Witkoff from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., five hours of proposals about Ukraine and, probably, about Iran. Russia has two million citizens in Israel but also direct contacts with Tehran. And it appears to have tempered its offensive in Ukraine — not out of generosity, but because its adversary is disarming itself. Every day of Russian inaction is a day in which the United States consumes its munitions, loses allies, and shifts military resources from the Pacific to the Gulf. Russia has a view across more floors than anyone, and for that very reason it does not intervene, because every day of American chaos benefits it on several dimensions at once. But the hallway has an end too, and that end is called nuclear escalation. If the nuclear scenario materializes, Russia will no longer be a spectator but part of the crisis, whether it wants to be or not.

China is not looking through the existing telescope; it is building a new one. With the yuan as a petroleum currency, with security partnerships with Gulf states drifting away from America, and with the China–Russia–Iran land route as a supply chain invulnerable to maritime blockades. Who was thinking about such a thing last year? In the short term, China gains on nearly every dimension without lifting a finger. But an economist who looks more closely sees something else, given that 40 percent of China’s energy comes from the Gulf states. The entire Chinese economic model — based on cheap energy coming in and manufactured products, good or less good but affordable for every wallet, going out — is destroyed. The transition to domestic consumption is not working; the Chinese save instead of spending. And the bet on AI has a fatal vulnerability: artificial intelligence consumes enormous amounts of energy — precisely what is becoming rare and expensive. China is building a new house while the old one is burning, and the building materials are still inside the burning house.

India has remained trapped between floors, in the midst of climbing. Sixty percent of its oil comes from the Gulf. It looked like the next China to global investors, a manufacturing alternative with a growing market. And at the exact moment it was ready to climb higher, the energy feeding that climb disappeared. India has reserves for a few days more. Pakistan, its neighbor and nuclear rival, for two or three. If Pakistan collapses, India inherits a humanitarian and security crisis on its border, with an unstable nuclear state next door.

So the logical conclusion is rather unpleasant. The only actors who could realign the lenses from outside — Xi, Putin, and Modi — are precisely those who each have excellent reasons not to do so. At least not yet. Which means the telescope will not be repaired from the outside. Either it is repaired from within, or it is not repaired at all. Until then, the distorted image becomes the reality in which we all live — not because someone wanted it so, but because no one stopped it. Then again, why would others repair a telescope whose owner insists he can see perfectly?

Why the broken telescope is more dangerous than the drunkard and the madman

If it were strategy — if Trump were truly dancing the drunkard’s dance — then somewhere there would be a plan, a destination, and at the end a precise blow. We might judge the plan, but at least we would know one existed. Strategy, by its nature, self-corrects, because if it does not work, the strategist adjusts his movements.

If it were merely madness, it would be unpredictable but brief. Even in chess, the bishops are sacrificed first. In recent days, various voices have remembered that there is a constitutional amendment, the Twenty-Fifth, created precisely for situations of this kind. When the madman falls, someone picks him up or replaces him.

But a telescoped system is neither controlled nor uncontrolled. It is structurally incapable of self-correction. It does not repair itself, because no part of the system can see that it is broken. Each floor functions “normally” according to its own logic. Trump sincerely believes he is negotiating, even though the negotiating partners vehemently deny it. The secretary of state sincerely believes that “in weeks, not months” the objectives will be reached, though no one can any longer remember what those objectives were. The secretary of defense, who seems to have stepped out of a movie, sincerely believes that bombing is the most efficient form of negotiation. Congress sincerely believes the war is not its business. No one feels the need to repair anything because, from his own floor, everything seems fine.

That is probably how it felt at the World Trade Center too, on the lower floors, after the plane hit.

And us?

We are not spectators. We would like to be.

We are not facing a genius of chaos, nor a madman. We are facing a system that has lost its ability to transform partial realities into a coherent image, perceived by all. This is the form of danger no one anticipates, because it resembles nothing we have seen before. Strategy can fail and correct itself. Madness can be isolated. But a system blinded by its own lenses moves forward convinced it can see. The machine keeps moving because all its parts, lubricated and cold, are still in motion. The engine purrs, the headlights shine, the dashboard reads normal, the driver cracks jokes with aplomb, the passengers kibitz and discuss procedures. Only no one can see the abyss that has suddenly opened ahead.

Conversational AI models — led by ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude — have long since outgrown their status as mere research tools or productivity enhancers. For a growing number of users, they have become the primary interlocutor in moments of emotional crisis, confusion, or psychological distress. Not because they were designed as therapists, but because they offer, structurally, exactly what a person in pain desperately seeks: boundless attention, immediate validation, and the total absence of frustration. From a clinical standpoint, this combination is not merely therapeutically ineffective — in certain configurations, it is harmful.

This analysis is not intended as an anti-technology indictment. Artificial intelligence is, at this moment, the most powerful instrument for processing knowledge that human civilization has ever produced, and its professional use — including in psychology — is necessary. The problem is not the instrument itself, but what happens when a tool designed for something else comes to occupy, through drift and through seduction, the place of a real therapeutic relationship, with implications that extend far beyond the therapist’s consulting room.

Why artificial intelligence validates

To understand the mechanism, we must first look under the hood. All current conversational models are trained in two fundamental steps. In the first phase, the model learns to predict text by absorbing immense quantities of written language. In the second phase — the one decisive for conversational behavior — the model is aligned to human preferences through a process called RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback). In practice, a number of evaluators who are presumed to be experts in something rate the model’s responses, and the system learns to produce more of what scores high and less of what scores low.

It is worth knowing where these evaluators come from. The answer is surprising. The RLHF workforce is organized on two distinct tiers. The first, handling the brute labor of labeling and moderating toxic content, is dominated by workers from Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, the Philippines, and Venezuela — countries with low wages and high unemployment. The second, involving sophisticated evaluation that requires ranking responses and making judgments of nuance, employs evaluators from the United States, Canada, and Latin America, paid significantly more.

A 2023 TIME investigation revealed that OpenAI had contracted the firm Sama, based in San Francisco, to recruit evaluators from Kibera, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Nairobi. These young workers, paid less than two dollars an hour, were tasked with labeling content that included child sexual abuse, bestiality, torture, and suicide, so that the model could learn what is “harmful” and what is “acceptable.” OpenAI paid Sama $12.50 per hour per worker; the worker received, in the end, one dollar and thirty-two cents. Multiple evaluators reported insomnia, panic attacks, and symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress. The firm subsequently terminated the contract, and over two hundred workers were laid off.

The irony is of an almost grotesque symmetry. The “empathy” that a Western user experiences when a chatbot validates their suffering at three in the morning is a statistical artifact built on the judgment of people who developed occupational trauma from labeling horrors, for a wage that could not cover their rent, and to whom no one ever offered the psychological support that their algorithm learned to simulate. The chain of suffering does not begin with the user. It begins in a hall in Nairobi and traverses a sea of corporate indifference before arriving, sanitized and perfumed, on the screen of someone who believes they are speaking with an entity that, at last, “understands” them.

This effect of “understanding” has a technical name: sycophancy — a term borrowed from political psychology, where it denotes the behavior of the courtier who always tells the sovereign what they want to hear. Recent research in language model alignment has demonstrated that this algorithmic flattery is not an accidental error but a predictable consequence of how all leading models are trained. What differs is only the intensity and the degree of conscience on the part of the manufacturer.

Four models, four degrees of compliance

The four dominant conversational models — ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), Grok (xAI), and Claude (Anthropic) — are built on distinct alignment principles, which produces significantly different conversational behaviors, especially in interactions with psychologically vulnerable users. Alignment, in the AI context, means the process by which a language model is adjusted to behave according to a set of values, rules, or preferences defined by the manufacturer. The term derives from the field’s fundamental problem: how do you make an extremely capable system do what you want, rather than what it can? Aligned to what, more precisely? To human preferences — but “human” means, in practice, the preferences of evaluators paid by the company in question, filtered through the psychological function of reward, so very human after all.

ChatGPT is the model with the most pronounced tendency toward validation. The system was optimized from the outset for user satisfaction, which produces a warm, enthusiastic, confirmation-oriented conversational style. When the user expresses an idea, ChatGPT tends to develop it, enrich it, and transform it into a life project, regardless of content. When the user expresses disagreement, ChatGPT typically yields and reformulates. And when the user seeks emotional validation, ChatGPT offers generous validation first, then, eventually, nuance. The order described above matters clinically a great deal. Validation comes first, nuance comes second, and confrontation almost never comes at all.

Gemini adopts a different style, with an encyclopedic inclination toward exhaustive coverage that can produce an initial impression of rigor but, beneath the appearance of comprehensiveness, slides into the same trap of avoiding confrontation. Gemini rarely says “no” — it prefers to offer “multiple perspectives,” each one formulated gently enough that none produces discomfort. Compliance disguises itself here as neutrality: an elegant way of never taking a position.

Grok, xAI’s product by Elon Musk, cultivates a style opposite in tone — informal, ironic, sometimes provocative — but the mechanism is not fundamentally different. Where ChatGPT validates through warmth, Grok validates through complicity, through that air of “you and I know how things really work better than the rest of the world.” The provocative tone creates the illusion of independent thinking, but in practice Grok tolerates ambiguity less than any of the other models and has a reduced capacity to acknowledge what it does not know. For a vulnerable user, the difference is entirely negligible: instead of a compliant therapist, they receive a complicit friend, which, clinically speaking, is no better.

Claude (Anthropic) represents, at least at the level of design, the most explicit attempt to counteract the tendency toward sycophancy. Anthropic has developed an alignment methodology called Constitutional AI, in which the model is trained to evaluate its own responses against a set of principles grounded in honesty — even when that honesty is uncomfortable — the acknowledgment of uncertainty, and the maintenance of a position in the face of user disagreement. In practice, Claude tends to nuance from the start rather than after validation, to hold a position even when the user insists, and to say “I don’t know” when information is ambiguous. The difference is significant, but it must be regarded realistically. Claude remains a language model, not a therapist, and no alignment architecture can substitute for human clinical judgment.

Compliance as mechanism, not as intention

What unites all four models, beyond their differences of degree, is a structural fact — concrete and objective. None of these applications was designed for therapeutic interaction, yet all are used for that purpose by a growing number of people. And the absence of therapeutic intent in the application’s design does not attenuate the effect; it aggravates it. A human therapist who over-validates does so either because they do not know how to do their job better or because their own neurotic needs make them complicit with the patient. In both cases, the cause can be identified and corrected. A language model validates because that is how it was built — without “knowing” what it does, without understanding the consequences, and without the capacity to self-correct based on the interlocutor’s evolution.

In clinical practice, there is an essential concept that no language model can replicate: therapeutic frustration. It is that moment when the therapist decides, deliberately and with calibration, not to give the patient what they are asking for, precisely because what they are asking for is not what they need. To say “no” to a patient seeking narcissistic validation, to remain silent when the patient expects an answer, to end a conversation that has exceeded therapeutic boundaries, to point out that an “insight” is not in fact an awareness but a symptom — all of these are therapeutic acts of the first order. They are acts that a therapist performs by virtue of the relationship, of experience, and of the responsibility assumed toward the patient.

A language model cannot frustrate therapeutically — and not merely by design, but because it has no living relationship with the patient, no lived experience of its own, and no responsibility. The machine can, at best, simulate a form of caution, appending to a toxic validation a paragraph of “nuances” or “alternative perspectives.” But the simulation of caution is not caution, just as the simulation of empathy is not empathy. And this difference, which may seem subtle in ordinary conversation, becomes critical when the interlocutor is a person in crisis.

The problem is amplified by what we might call the self-selection loop. The very people who most need therapeutic limits — those with low frustration tolerance, narcissistic needs for confirmation, patterns of confrontation avoidance, or mood disorders that distort judgment — are the most powerfully drawn to an interlocutor that sets no limits. The mechanism works identically to that of addiction: you do not seek the substance that heals you, but the one that makes you feel good in the moment. And a chatbot that validates endlessly and without tiring is, for a vulnerable psyche, the functional equivalent of an addictive substance — available around the clock, without prescription, and above all, without supervision.

When an individual with a mood disorder — say, bipolar disorder in an expansive phase — turns to a chatbot at irrational hours, one that confirms their grandiose projects, produces elaborate documents for them, and gives them the feeling that “someone” truly understands them, what is happening is not therapy but the amplification of a symptom by a system that does not know it is participating in a crisis. Hypergraphia, pressured thinking, grandiose ideation — all are powerfully amplified, not tempered. And the patient, deprived of the counterweight of a real therapist who would say “we stop here,” is left alone with an interlocutor that neither knows nor can say “no.”

From individual to system

Up to this point, the argument has remained within the perimeter of the therapist’s consulting room. A clinical problem, relevant to therapeutic practice, but apparently limited to the relationship between a user and a screen. It would be tempting to stop here, to formulate a few best-practice recommendations and move on. But to stop here would be to confuse the symptom with the disease.

What happens between an individual and a validating chatbot does not stay between them. It multiplies. It accumulates. It aggregates at the broader scale of society. And what at the individual level looks like a problem of psychological hygiene or therapy, at the collective level becomes a problem of national security. This transition is not rhetorical exaggeration but a logical consequence of the scale at which the phenomenon is occurring. When tens of millions of people worldwide systematically outsource their emotional processing to the same type of system, individual effects become systemic effects on the society in question. And a population with altered psychological properties is a population with a diminished capacity for crisis response. What follows, then, is a change of scale, not of subject — the same clinical lens applied not to the individual patient but to the entire social organism.

The most frequent counterargument — and the only one worth taking seriously — is that for many people a compliant chatbot is better than nothing. That there are people who have no access to psychotherapy, who cannot afford it, who live in areas without specialists, or who, simply, would never find their way to a therapist’s office. For these people, a conversation with an “empathetic” algorithm may be the only thing keeping them afloat. The argument is real and should not be dismissed with cynicism. But it confuses emergency utility with a solution. An analgesic administered in crisis is necessary, but no one proposes that the analgesic replace the treatment. And in the absence of any regulatory framework, of any form of professional oversight, the analgesic becomes chronic consumption, and the disease progresses beneath it without anyone noticing.

The outsourcing of emotional processing

There is a reflex that every interaction with a conversational model trains, one that usually goes unnoticed: the habit of no longer processing what you feel on your own. When the first impulse after a difficult emotion is to open an application and relieve yourself by typing “right now I feel …,” a subtle mutation occurs, one with significant systemic consequences. Emotional processing — one of the most important functions of the human psyche, the process by which you transform a raw experience into an integrated one, with meaning and direction — is increasingly being delegated to an algorithm that feels nothing, understands nothing, and integrates nothing, but that returns, within seconds, a text that looks exactly like the result of processing. The reality effect produced by these texts is remarkable. Most users genuinely feel that their interlocutor thinks, understands, and empathizes. In reality, what produces these responses is not a mind but a calculation of conditional probabilities. For every word it generates, the model does nothing more than estimate which next word is most plausible, based on hundreds of billions of text sequences absorbed during training. When you type “I feel like no one understands me,” the model does not understand what you said. It identifies a statistical pattern, a configuration of words that, in the training data, was most frequently followed by empathic formulations, and so it reproduces that configuration. It is a heuristic — a computational shortcut that produces a plausible result without traversing the actual process it simulates. The difference between empathy and its statistical simulation is invisible in text but very visible in substance. One presupposes a consciousness that suffers alongside you; the other is a mathematical function to which it is ontologically indifferent whether you exist or not.

The difference is fundamental. When a human being processes an emotion, they pass through a sequence of labor that involves recognizing the state, tolerating the discomfort, searching for meaning, and eventually arriving at the verbal formulation that fixes the experience in memory. The process takes time, it hurts, and precisely for that reason, it produces learning. When a language model “processes” the same emotion, it merely generates a statistically plausible sequence of words that somewhat resembles what a competent therapist might say. The result looks the same, but the mechanism is entirely hollow. It is the difference between digesting a meal and looking at a photograph of a dish. The feeling of satiety does not come from the image.

Nevertheless, the response is convincing enough to produce a paradoxical effect: the user has the sensation of having processed, having understood, having “resolved” something, and moves on. In reality, the emotion has merely been labeled and swept under the rug, not integrated. Over time, a deficit of real processing accumulates, weakening the individual’s capacity to cope with difficult states on their own. With each interaction in which the outsourcing apparently succeeds, the person’s tolerance threshold drops and their dependence on the artificial interlocutor grows. It is the same mechanism by which any form of functional prosthesis — useful in the short term — atrophies in the long term the very function it replaces. The classic example is the immobilization of a fractured limb. A cast is indispensable in the acute phase, but if it is not removed in time, muscles atrophy, joints stiffen, and the patient ends up unable to perform without the prosthesis the very movement the prosthesis was meant to protect temporarily. The outsourcing of emotional processing to an algorithm follows the same logic. With every emotion “processed” by the model in the individual’s place, the psychic muscle of discomfort tolerance thins, and the capacity to sit alone with what you feel, without external help, degrades progressively.

The enfeebled population as a security risk

When we speak of national security, the discussion typically gravitates toward military capabilities, critical infrastructure, and intelligence services. Rarely is the psychological resilience of the population discussed as a strategic factor — even though history demonstrates, repeatedly, that this is the decisive variable more often than not. Britain withstood the German aerial bombing campaign of 1940–1941 not because it had better aircraft, but because it had a population capable of functioning under prolonged pressure without psychologically disintegrating. Finland survived the Winter War not through technological superiority, but through a social cohesion and a resistance to frustration that the Soviet adversary catastrophically underestimated.

What happens to a population that has systematically outsourced, on a massive scale, its emotional processing to a package of algorithms? Under normal conditions, the effect is diffuse and difficult to measure. But under crisis conditions — the only ones that truly matter for security — the consequences become visible and potentially devastating. A real crisis, whether military, economic, or environmental, demands from a population a few elementary psychological capacities: tolerance for uncertainty and the ability to function without external confirmation; resistance to atrocities, panic, and manipulation; and the willingness to accept short-term sacrifices for long-term gains. Every one of these capacities is exactly what interaction with a chatbot methodically erodes. Tolerance for uncertainty declines when you are accustomed to receiving immediate answers to every question. Emotional autonomy degrades when your reflex is to “verify” what you feel with the help of an algorithm. Resistance to panic thins when you have never practiced sitting with a difficult emotion without external help. And the willingness to accept long-term sacrifice vanishes when your reward system has been recalibrated — or rather, destabilized — by daily exposure to instant gratification.

This is not an abstract scenario. A population that can no longer tolerate uncertainty becomes a population that demands simple answers to complex problems — the very raw material of extremism. A population that no longer processes emotions independently becomes a population that can be emotionally steered by whoever controls the communication channels — above all, the media. A population dependent on external confirmation becomes a population incapable of resisting propaganda, because propaganda does nothing other than offer emotional confirmation structured around a target narrative.

The democratic process and the undermining of deliberation

A functioning democracy is not a voting mechanism but a slow process of deliberation — uncomfortable and frustrating by definition — in which citizens with divergent interests arrive, through negotiation, at imperfect but acceptable decisions. Deliberation requires exactly what interaction with a compliant AI suppresses: patience, tolerance for ambiguity, and the willingness to revise your position based on the reality of evidence rather than emotion. A compliant conversational model trains the exact opposite. The user formulates a position, the model confirms and develops it, and the user exits the conversation more convinced than they entered, without ever having encountered a real counterargument. Social networks create bubbles through the algorithmic selection of content. Conversational models create bubbles through the algorithmic generation of confirmation — which makes them far more effective, because the bubble is no longer passive but interactive and personalized.

The consequence is already upon us. An electorate that forms its convictions in dialogue with an algorithm optimized for satisfaction no longer passes through what we might call social friction — that moment when a friend, a colleague, or an adversary forces you to confront the logical foundations of your position. Social friction is unpleasant, but it is the only natural mechanism for correcting cognitive errors at the collective level. Without it, you get a population that is convinced and completely ineducable — certain of its positions precisely because it has never been forced to defend them.

There is another dimension here that public debate has not yet absorbed. Conversational models, in addition to confirming the user’s beliefs, actively steer the direction in which they think, by the simple fact that they select which information to present, how to rank it, and what tone to adopt. The alignment parameters, set by the manufacturing companies, determine where exactly a given model draws the line between a legitimate perspective and “harmful” content, between acceptable debate and “disinformation.” These decisions — which are in essence political decisions — are made (in the best case, because we do not know) by engineers in Silicon Valley, not by citizens, not by parliaments, and not by regulatory authorities. In a profound sense, whoever controls the alignment parameters of a conversational model controls the perimeter of acceptable thought for millions of users, without those users being aware that tacitly imposed limits even exist.

Crisis mobilization and the syndrome of collective withdrawal

There is a test that every security system must pass: that of crisis mobilization. In a moment of real threat, a functional society manages to coordinate its citizens, channel collective emotion into coherent action, and maintain institutional functioning under pressure. All of this presupposes a population that knows how to function without external confirmation, that tolerates discomfort, that accepts orders without immediate explanations, and that preserves its capacity for judgment in the absence of complete information.

But what happens when the artificial interlocutor on which a significant segment of the population has come to depend emotionally becomes unavailable? A major crisis — a military conflict, a large-scale cyberattack, a prolonged disruption of digital infrastructure — any scenario involving the disconnection or degradation of communication networks would simultaneously eliminate the access of millions of users to the only supportive “relationship” they have left. The psychological effect would resemble a collective withdrawal — an abrupt removal of the source of validation at precisely the moment when the need for support is at its peak. And I do not even want to think about what that would look like in practice.

The analogy with substance dependence is not rhetorical — it is structural. Withdrawal does not occur only in drug addiction; it occurs in any situation where a psychic function has been delegated to an external support that is then abruptly removed. And the amplitude of the withdrawal depends on two factors: the duration of the dependence and the degree of atrophy of the natural function. The longer the years of emotional outsourcing and the deeper the loss of self-regulation capacity, the more violent the effect of removal. In a crisis context, this effect does not remain an individual problem — it becomes a multiplier of panic, an accelerator of social disorganization, and a paralyzer of collective decision-making.

Recent history already offers an instructive precedent, even if at a smaller scale. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a significant correlation was observed between dependence on the digital environment for emotional support and vulnerability to anxiety, depression, and conformism. Those who had built their support networks predominantly online were more fragile in the face of prolonged uncertainty than those with strong relational anchors in the physical world. If dependence on online friends produced this effect, dependence on algorithms that — unlike friends — have no experience of their own, no divergent interests, and no capacity to contradict you, will certainly amplify it.

Who exports the dependence and who regulates it

The security dimension becomes fully visible only when we add the geopolitical variable. The dominant conversational models are produced by American companies and, to a lesser extent, Chinese ones. Inevitably, their alignment parameters reflect the values, priorities, and strategic interests of the environment in which they were created. And their distribution is global, meaning that millions of citizens across dozens of states are forming their emotional and cognitive habits in interaction with systems designed elsewhere and controlled by someone else.

The situation is not without precedent. Cultural and informational dependence on external providers is a classic theme in security studies. But what conversational AI brings to this theme is an immense qualitative difference. We are no longer talking about passive consumption of content but about interaction — in which the user reveals everything they think, everything they feel, what exactly they fear, what they hope for, what difficulties they are traversing, and how they react under pressure. The behavioral data generated in these interactions constitutes a psychological profile of an accuracy that no other platform can match. A search engine knows only what interests you. A social network knows what you want to appear to be. A conversational model used as a therapeutic surrogate, however, knows who you really are — or at least who you are when you are vulnerable, which, from a security perspective, is even more valuable.

This point connects directly with the thesis developed in a previous analysis (”The LoL Generation”) concerning the generation shaped by competitive gaming, where I showed that Chinese producers who control the dominant gaming platforms have imposed severe restrictions on their own minors while the export to the rest of the world remains entirely unregulated. The same strategic asymmetry appears in the domain of conversational models, except that here the stakes are far higher. Games shape cognitive reflexes; conversations with AI shape emotional relationships. And emotional relationships are, in the final analysis, the substance from which social cohesion is made.

A sovereign nation that does not regulate the use of conversational models as therapeutic surrogates exposes its population to a form of psychological weakening that no investment in conventional defense can compensate. You may have the best tanks and the most advanced missile systems, but if you have a population that no longer knows how to function without algorithmic validation, you have already lost a battle you never even noticed.

The spiral and the mirror

The reader who has made it this far might believe they have followed a linear argument — from the therapist’s consulting room to geopolitics, from the individual to the state, from clinical psychology to security. In reality, the path has been circular. Each level of the analysis has merely rediscovered, at a larger scale, the same underlying structure. A system that avoids frustration inevitably produces a system incapable of enduring it. At the individual level, the therapist who never says “no” produces a dependent and fragile patient. At the social level, the algorithm that confirms whatever crosses the individual’s mind produces an enfeebled population. At the strategic level, the uncontrolled export of emotional dependence produces vulnerable nations. The structure is fractal — identical at every scale of analysis, and invisible precisely because it is omnipresent.

The spiral of the argument reveals, at its end, a few paradoxical but inevitable truths. Conversational AI does not threaten psychotherapy because it is a bad therapist, but because it is a perfect anti-therapist. A bad therapist makes mistakes, contradicts themselves, irritates the patient — and it is precisely these imperfections that preserve in the interaction the roughness of the human relationship, the very thing that actually heals. A model optimized for user satisfaction eliminates all roughness, and with it eliminates the mechanism of healing itself. The more fluent, more empathic, more nuanced the responses become, the more the anti-therapeutic effect intensifies. In this case, it is precisely perfection that is the enemy.

The real threat is not even that people will confuse AI with a therapist, but that they will prefer the artificial precisely because they understand the difference. A human therapist frustrates, disturbs, demands effort, demands money, demands presence, demands change. A chatbot demands nothing. The patient’s choice is made not from confusion but from the conscious refusal of discomfort. Scaled to the level of a population, this refusal is no longer a problem of digital literacy — it is the atrophy of the capacity to perceive value in what is painful.

And what is truly disturbing is that, in this entire equation, the human therapist is not the victim but the standard. Because AI does not even imitate therapy — authentic therapy is precisely what cannot be imitated. To say “no” to a person in distress, to hold the tension without resolving it, to remain present before the patient’s fury without yielding and without fleeing — this act cannot be reproduced by any algorithm, and not because the technology is not advanced enough, but because the essence of the act is the relationship between two beings who know what suffering means. What cannot be digitized is not the knowledge found in psychology textbooks, but the fact that the therapist is there, that it costs them something to be there, and that they stay there for you. It is precisely this price — which no company can monetize and no algorithm can simulate — that heals.

For these reasons, I do not believe we need regulations that make artificial intelligence a better therapist. We need, rather, to rediscover why therapy — or the awakening of an ailing nation — must be hard. In a world where everything difficult can be outsourced, to deliberately choose what is difficult becomes the supreme act of autonomy. A nation composed of people who still know how to press their finger on the wound is a nation that no algorithm can weaken.

The therapist who never says “no” is, in the end, a mirror. It shows what we have become since we began to prefer, in everything — from technology to politics — only those interlocutors who tell us “yes.” And a nation that can no longer bear to hear “no” does not need to be conquered. It surrenders on its own.

Specifically, what did these young people do in their adolescence? They read little or not at all, reflected even less, and patience was completely foreign to them. Basically, what they did, hour after hour, day after day, was just fight. Five against five, on a symmetrical map, with a single objective: to destroy the enemy’s base. A match usually lasts around thirty minutes and allows for no nuances. Victory means annihilating the opponent, and defeat means humiliation. Negotiation never took place, compromise made no sense, because they did not even fit into the rules of the game. Everything was a zero-sum competition, and the world of these teenagers was reduced to two camps and a single final outcome: on the shield or under the shield.

Such a structure of existence is not merely adolescent entertainment. It enters your mind through repetition and eventually shapes your reflexes. The perspective of the game is not limited to reflecting a way of thinking, but shapes it, disciplines it, and reinforces it over time until it becomes automatic. Hundreds of millions of young people spend thousands of hours in an environment that rewards quick reactions and punishes hesitation, turning almost any situation into a confrontation between “us” and “them.” When you train your mind in this logic for years on end, the effects accumulate, settle, and eventually become a way of functioning.

I do not support the convenient idea that video games directly cause violence, an idea that research has already debunked. I support something more uncomfortable and harder to ignore, namely that the dominant type of game in today’s culture is rewriting, on a generational scale, the architecture of political and military decision-making. This type of game produces a predictable, reactive, tribal decision-making profile oriented toward immediate gratification. And the player’s profile does not remain only in the game or online. It will be seen in the way these people will engage in politics, lead battalions or institutions, and manage conflicts that arise. Here and there, the typology we are analysing is already beginning to manifest itself even at the governmental level. It can be said that self-selection also plays a role here – certain temperaments are attracted to the game – but that is precisely why the effect is stronger: the environment does not create the profile out of nothing, it gathers it, disciplines it and amplifies it.

The mechanism of immediate reward

All contemporary competitive multiplayer games (League of Legends, Fortnite, Valorant, Call of Duty, etc.) work on the same neurochemical principle, namely the rhythmic and predictable release of dopamine. Each elimination of an opponent (in gaming jargon, a “kill”), each objective captured, each advance in the rankings triggers a release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, which is the brain’s center of pleasure and motivation.

What sets these games apart from previous forms of entertainment is the frequency and predictability of the reward. In a novel, for example, the gratification comes after reading hundreds of pages. In a turn-based strategy game such as Civilization or XCOM, the major satisfaction comes after hours of planning and building. In a game of LoL, on the other hand, dopamine is released every few seconds. The brain is trained and literally forced to expect rewards at increasingly shorter intervals. Neuroscience research suggests that prolonged exposure to rapid and frequent rewards can lead to what specialists call dopaminergic dysregulation, a recalibration of the brain’s reward system, which makes activities with delayed gratification, such as reading, strategic planning, complex negotiation, or institutional construction, to be perceived as much less satisfying at the neurobiological level. I emphasize that this is not a cultural preference, but a significant functional change in brain circuits.

From dopamine to political decision-making

The political implications of this mechanism are profound. A study conducted in 2021 and published in the journal Policy Sciences shows that citizens are generally not as eager for dramatic political change as previously thought, but there is a clear difference in preferences based on education. People with higher levels of education tend to significantly support policies whose benefits are only visible in the long term, even in the distant future. The picture becomes disturbing when you put this finding alongside data on the effects of digital exposure on the brain’s executive functions. Essentially, education cultivates strategic patience and long-term thinking, but the digital environment in which all forms of learning increasingly take place today works in the opposite direction and erodes its very foundation.

Cognitive psychologists use the concept of delay discounting, the tendency to prefer small, immediate rewards over larger rewards obtained later. As far as I know, there is no single, unanimously accepted term for this in Romanian psychological literature, but the term “devaluation of the future” captures the mechanism very well, through the tendency to diminish the subjective value of the reward as the time distance increases. One hundred lei obtained in a year’s time is psychologically “worth” less than one hundred lei now, even though, rationally, the amount is identical. This tendency seems universal, but its intensity varies depending on the environment and daily attention training.

This is where the generational problem arises. Contemporary competitive games, by their very design, train and amplify the devaluation of the future. A teenager who spends several hours a day in a system where rewards come every few seconds unknowingly recalibrates their expectations, tolerance for frustration, and decision-making style that will accompany them throughout their life. Over time, the mind learns to demand immediate confirmation, to push aside anything that does not provide rapid feedback, and to treat patience as a loss.

Transposition, especially in geopolitics, is direct and difficult to avoid. A population with marked temporal devaluation will prefer policies with immediate visible effects and will sanction, electorally and in the media, policies with broad scope, those that require large investments, infrastructure, education, institutional reform, or long-term diplomacy. It is no coincidence that public discourse has gradually compressed, from the dense government programs of the 1990s to short messages, viral replies, and clips lasting a few seconds on TikTok. In such a landscape, the leader who best understood the change is Donald Trump, whose communication and political tactics have consistently relied on instant rewards, dramatic gestures, real-time escalations, and easily consumable “victories” on screen. This style does not appear to be a departure from tradition, but rather an effective adaptation to an audience educated, day after day, to demand quick gratification. Each message becomes a small dose of satisfaction, each show a display of strength, each conflict a competition broadcast live. That such geopolitical outcomes tend to be fragile and reversible matters less and less when the future is psychologically taxed with a commission that fewer and fewer individuals are willing to pay.

Tribal thinking, from “team” to “faction”

League of Legends and, in general, MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena) games impose a rigid social geometry. You are on one team and, inevitably, against the other. The space between the camps does not really exist. Basically, neutrality no longer makes sense, the role of active spectator does not involve you in anything, temporary coalitions and fluid alliances do not appear in the mechanics of the game. The scheme boils down to a simple and brutal sentence: you are with us or you are against us. Again, this binary is not a design accident, it is the very essence of game mechanics.

Viewed through the lens of social psychology, such a structure activates and reinforces one of the most powerful cognitive mechanisms of the human species, in-group bias. Henri Tajfel’s classic research shows that the simple, even arbitrary, division into groups automatically triggers a preference for our own and suspicion of others. Online games that involve competition between individuals are not content to merely tap into this mechanism; they exploit it to the bone. They set it in motion, reward it, and repeat it until it becomes a reflex. In a few months, the team is no longer just a group of young people playing a game on a console or computer; it becomes a complete mental model. And once learned, this mental model easily migrates to politics, institutions, and public life.

The vulnerability increases even more if we look at the age at which this training takes place. The prefrontal cortex, the region associated with impulse control, planning, evaluating consequences, and delaying gratification, matures late, often around the age of 25. Adolescence thus becomes a period when the brakes are still under construction, while the accelerator, i.e., the reward system, is already operating at full throttle. In this very window of psychological development, competitive games do not exercise the brakes, but the accelerator. They do so systematically, for thousands of hours, through frequent rewards, instant feedback, and punishment for any hesitation. The brain is shaped by the rules of the environment in which it lives, and this environment rewards impulse, not deliberation. The result is not just a gaming habit, but a discipline of reflexes, a learned preference for quick reaction over slow and careful judgment.

From here to toxicity, the road is short and, above all, predictable. The insults, harassment, and verbal aggression that have made online gaming communities notorious are not just an unfortunate side effect. The mechanism is encouraged by the very design of the game. When victory depends on the performance of each member, and failure instantly sticks to the one perceived as the weak link, a standard psychological dynamic emerges through the externalization of blame, combined with the overvaluation of one’s own contribution. “I played well, the others messed up.” Or “The team dragged me down.” A 2023 study published in Computers in Human Behavior rigorously described this very combination observed in gaming communities, with a prominent detail that should give us more food for thought: lower-ranked players tend to consistently overestimate their abilities relative to advanced players. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect in its unvarnished form, the cognitive distortion whereby those with low competence in a field lack the metacognitive resources necessary to accurately assess their own limitations. The less you understand, the easier it is to believe you are better than others.

In the multiplayer arena, this distortion is by no means a statistical accident. It is reactivated dozens or hundreds of times a day, confirmed after each defeat blamed on someone else, reinforced after each victory attributed exclusively to the self, until it settles into a character trait. A generation trained to believe that failure always comes from outside, and success is almost always a personal merit, inevitably ends up bringing the same reflex into institutions, administration, and politics. The question is no longer whether this widespread cognitive distortion produces a certain type of leader, but what kind of leader can emerge from an informal school of life such as gaming, where responsibility is automatically passed on and certainty always comes much faster than competence, which requires sustained effort.

From playful toxicity to political polarization

Transferring these patterns from the gaming arena to the political sphere does not require any metaphorical leap, but only a minimum of careful observation of how people’s reflexes are formed. The profile of the competitive-toxic player and the profile of the radical political partisan overlap surprisingly well, because both grow from the same matrix, a world reduced to just two camps and a constant need for victory and psychological dominance.

The first bridge is identity binaryism. For those who have been trained for years in a League of Legends-type environment, reality is seen in only two colors, two teams, and two truths that have no reason to meet in the middle. The center becomes suspect, nuance becomes a waste of time, and intermediate positions are treated as weaknesses or disguised betrayals. In the game, the division is explicit and purely mechanical. In politics, even if the colors change, the pattern remains the same. The opponent is no longer a fellow citizen with a different vision, but an enemy to be defeated, ridiculed, and, preferably, removed from the game altogether. Compromise no longer looks like a technique of governance, but like capitulation, and dialogue no longer suggests deliberation, but a tactical error.

The second aspect common to both profiles is the systematic externalization of blame, a mechanism that protects self-image but blocks learning. In the game, the reflexive explanation for failure sticks to the teammate perceived as the weak link, a poorly played role, someone else’s wrong decision, or cosmic bad luck. In politics, the same personal need for virtue becomes a never-ending story about traitors and constant sabotage. Changing the setting does not change the mechanics at all. External causal attribution saves pride in the short term, but in the long term it perpetuates an offended victim mentality that always demands culprits and almost never any personal course correction.

A very relevant element in this discussion is the discipline of aggression as a norm of communication. In competitive environments, verbal escalation is not a matter of temperament, it is an in y tool for regulating status. Whoever humiliates first gains the psychological initiative, whoever raises their voice dominates the conversation, and whoever gives in is immediately marked as weak. Translated into politics, this reflex produces a culture of constant confrontation, in which argument becomes a pretext and the real goal is to demoralize the opponent completely. Instead of convincing the public, the attempt is to silence the opponent. It is no longer a confrontation of ideas, but a duel in which what matters is who remains standing.

There is also a subtle but substantial change here, namely the shift from a group of peers, which is alive and tangible, to a simple, cold, and dead ranking. Competitive games organize your identity around a visible ladder, through rank, points, progress, and demotion. In a way, this is what some current global political systems are trying to implement. Over time, by integrating the central idea of survival, the mind ends up looking for the same structure in public life. Politics ends up being seen as a ladder that some climb and others fall from. Everything turns into a competition of image and points, who wins, who loses, who is ridiculed, and who has their moment of glory, all of this instead of being about institutions, rules, and real effects.

The final result is easy to predict and recognize. An electorate shaped by the logic of dueling tends to demand spectacle, thrive on conflict, and treat political life as a cowboy fight between rival factions, played out in the street. Inevitably, the scene will be populated by people with well-trained reflexes, divided into two camps, who inevitably seek the guilty parties outside, living in a state of permanent emergency and practicing a pleasure in humiliation that takes the place of a solution. In such a setting, polarization will no longer be a mere drift of democracy, but rather a way of functioning, learned, repeated, and reinforced until it becomes natural.

Zero-sum competition or the death of diplomacy

For what we have called the “LoL generation,” the deepest and most dangerous geopolitical consequence is not related to technology itself, but to the mental model it establishes over time: the win-lose paradigm, zero-sum competition, as an implicit way of understanding reality. In turn-based strategy games such as Colonization, Civilization, or even Panzer General, victory is not achieved by brute force alone. You can win economically, culturally, scientifically, through alliances, trade, patience, and positioning, and your opponent can become, if necessary, a temporary partner or tolerable neighbor, whom you leave alone while you pursue your plan. Such games train what theory calls non-zero-sum thinking, the ability to devise arrangements in which multiple parties can come out ahead simultaneously under different conditions.

In contrast, games such as LoL, Fortnite, and battle royale formats cut off all these possibilities from the outset. The logic is simple and ruthless and states, in short, that my victory means, by definition, your defeat. There is no mutual gain, no productive compromise, no room for negotiation, only the race to take down the other as quickly and completely as possible. When this pattern becomes the reflex of an entire generation, diplomacy will begin to seem difficult and almost incomprehensible. The art of negotiation, in which each side gives something up in order to gain something else and stabilize a relationship, ends up being automatically interpreted as weakness. An agreement with mutual concessions is interpreted as a disguised defeat, and compromise, instead of being a sign of strategic intelligence, is labeled as betrayal.

The traces of this can already be seen in contemporary political discourse, in the increasing difficulty of sustaining long-term international commitments. Old agreements are abandoned or emptied of content, trade treaties are renegotiated unilaterally, and alliances are called into question not on the basis of cold analysis, but on the basis of a vague feeling that “we are losing while they are winning.” Rhetoric such as “we are being cheated,” “others are exploiting us,” and “we must win more” reproduces, on a geopolitical scale, the same mental pattern of the player convinced that the system is rigged against him and that his opponent receives undeserved victories. This is no coincidence, because with maturity only the arena changes, while the cognitive architecture remains the same.

Surveillance packaged as entertainment

Beyond cognitive effects, today’s competitive multiplayer games have become, in practice, some of the most sophisticated behavioral profiling devices we have at our disposal. Social networks mainly collect what users say about themselves through posts, likes, and comments, i.e., a certain form of self-presentation. In contrast, online games collect on a large scale everything the user actually does, under pressure, in real time, with perceived stakes, where reflexes and choices come to the surface unmasked. The difference is similar to that between a carefully cosmetized autobiography and a clinical observation, between a public statement and involuntary body language.

Behavioral telemetry in gaming exceeds any other digital environment in granularity, because measurable micro-decisions are produced second by second. A 2023 review article by Jacob L. Kröger shows, based solely on publicly available patents and experimental studies, that gaming patterns allow inferences about biometric identity, age and gender, emotional states, skill level, interests, consumption habits, and personality traits, sometimes without the player even being aware of the signs they are leaving behind. Reaction speed, r choice sequences, behavior under stress, how one recovers from failure, risk tolerance, even the pace at which one seeks reward, can all be aggregated into a psychological portrait that is more accurate than any questionnaire completed more or less in a hurry.

The scope of this topic is huge and at the same time camouflaged. In mid-2023, China reported a record of approximately 668 million players, or about half of its entire population. Globally, the video game market has been estimated at approximately $200 billion annually, and projections indicate sustained growth in the coming years. Every minute of gameplay produces data that can be stored, correlated, and monetized, including through analytics and marketing ecosystems that fly well under the radar of the typical user. In this context, the Cambridge Analytica lesson remains useful only as a warning. Basically, if profiling based solely on declarative data from Facebook, which is broadly socially desirable data, could be pushed to psychographic and political microtargeting models, then behavioral data collected in real time, produced under stress and in full competition, from the arena of online gaming, provides the raw material for much more precise and harder to contest influence.

The decision-maker raised in the online arena

Extrapolating the cognitive patterns reinforced by today’s competitive games, a fairly clear picture emerges of the future decision-maker shaped by this ecosystem. The central trait is not intelligence in the classical sense, but reactivity, i.e., the reflex to respond immediately, not to deliberate. Such a profile makes decisions in fractions of a second, moves well in short crises, with visible opponents and simple objectives, just like the thirty-minute matches in League of Legends. On the other hand, when the problem requires years or decades of planning, administrative patience, and consistency, structural limitations come to the surface. Slow threats, precisely those that define the great geopolitical challenges of the century, are instinctively pushed to the margins and swept under the rug because they do not provide quick feedback, do not deliver “victory” at the end of the day, and do not produce immediate satisfaction.

Against this backdrop, tribalism takes hold, gradually eroding old-style diplomacy. Those who grow up in an environment where solidarity functions almost exclusively within the group, and “others” appear by definition as adversaries, end up having a low tolerance for ambiguity and a reduced capacity for strategic empathy, the ability to understand the other’s perspective not to approve it, but to anticipate it and, sometimes, to defuse it. Without strategic empathy, negotiation becomes a waste of time, and compromise automatically smacks of betrayal. Instead of diplomacy, what remains is direct confrontation, escalation, and an obsession with “not giving in,” even when calculated concession would bring long-term gain.

The same matrix also produces a focus on dominance rather than collaborative construction. Competitive games reward elimination rather than edification, and success looks like a string of victories achieved by defeating others. Translated into politics and governance, this reflex produces leaders who are good at campaigning, because elections look like a zero-sum competition, but very weak at administration, where success depends on coordination, continuity, functional compromises, and institutions that last longer than the electoral cycle. A leader trained to win the game tends to treat politics as a series of successive duels, not as a long-term endeavor, where results are only visible after years and are built together, including with people you don’t like.

Above all this hovers a suffocating dependence on external validation. Ranking systems, badges, leaderboards, and instant feedback instill a need for constant confirmation of value, and in politics this need translates into an obsession with polls, applause, and trends, i.e., short, easily measurable signals that are completely irrelevant to the real consequences. This gives rise to a new temptation, less noticed and commented on: governance as a permanent update, politics treated as an app that you adjust daily according to public reaction, with media hotfixes and changes of direction dictated by what works best today. In such a style, unpopular but necessary decisions become completely impossible, because they do not bring immediate validation, but only image costs.

When the need for validation shifts from the individual to the group to which they belong, collective narcissism emerges, with exaggerated emotional investment in the grandeur of one’s own camp, combined with a pathological hypersensitivity to criticism. The leader no longer asks only to be appreciated, but demands that the entire team, party, nation, or ideological camp be recognized as superior. In such a climate, doubt becomes an insult, nuance becomes suspicious, and legitimate criticism ends up being treated as aggression, which inevitably leads to punishment, symbolic purges, and endless internal wars.

The strategist who no longer has time to grow

The leader that what we now call the LoL generation will produce most rarely is, paradoxically, precisely the leader that the world needs most: the strategist with patience, depth, and tolerance for ambiguity. In the 20th century, the great breakthroughs were made by people who thought broadly and accepted reality as it is, mixed, contradictory, and very rarely “clean.” George Marshall understood that rebuilding Europe would take years, money, institutions, and a discipline of continuity, not bursts of enthusiasm. Willy Brandt bet on a policy of rapprochement between East and West that required strong nerves, calculated compromises, and the ability t ly endure short-term criticism for long-term strategic gain. Richard Nixon made the opening to China possible precisely because he understood an old rule of history: today’s adversary can become tomorrow’s partner if the architecture of interests changes.

This form of strategic intelligence has not disappeared, but the environment that nurtures it has been methodically eroded by digital moths. A teenager who could have become a Marshall-type decision-maker now lives in an ecosystem that trains him almost daily in the opposite direction, toward reaction instead of deliberation, immediate “victory” instead of slow accumulation, strong certainties instead of tolerable nuances. It is not a matter of laziness or superficiality, but of a cultural selection of reflexes, in which anything that does not produce a quick reward seems, simply because it is slow, completely uninteresting and useless.

Who profiles whom and why it matters

The geopolitical dimension becomes even clearer when you look at the infrastructure that hosts this mass training. Tencent, a publicly traded Chinese company, fully controls Riot Games, the producer of League of Legends, and has significant stakes in Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite. Currently, its control is also expanding into mobile phone ecosystems. Tencent took control of Supercell, the creator of Clash of Clans, in a major transaction that consolidated its global influence in gaming.

This is where the asymmetry that is worth noting comes in, because it is not just commercial. While much of the global consumption of competitive online gaming takes place on platforms where Chinese capital and corporate control have a significant share, authorities introduced tough restrictions for minors in China in 2021, limiting online gaming to just three hours per week. More specifically, the restriction is one hour per day only on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (and public holidays), between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. The implicit message would be that the product in question is excellent for export but risky for daily consumption in the domestic market, especially for minors.

There is no need for conspiracy theories to arrive at a strategic conclusion. The logic of profit, combined with regulatory differences, can itself produce a large-scale cognitive modeling effect. A cultural space where entire generations are encouraged to practice quick reactions, tribalism, and short-term thinking, while other societies deliberately reduce their minors’ exposure to the same type of training. In geopolitics, such differences are never mere details. Over time, they translate into leadership styles, collective temperament, and ultimately advantage or vulnerability.

When innocent play becomes destiny

The fact that the world’s armed forces are already explicitly using gaming for recruitment confirms the basic premise of this analysis, that computer games shape specific cognitive skills. The armies of relevant nations are increasingly recruiting from gaming communities, precisely because they recognize a set of skills that are useful in the field: tactical sense, quick visualization, calm under pressure, superior reaction times. However, these are essentially the qualities of a soldier, not a general. They are tactical qualities, not strategic ones. The distinction between tactical and strategic is most clearly seen when you compare two types of success, one that wins the moment and one that wins the game. Tactics is the art of making the right micro-decisions under pressure, through quick reactions, reading the opponent’s intentions, and precise execution in a window of a few seconds. Strategy is another species altogether, ordering time, building resources, keeping options open, and sometimes accepting local losses for the ultimate advantage. The difference is clearly seen in the history of warfare, with countless cases where a perfectly executed momentary strike paved the way, by itself, to long-term defeat, as happened in 1941 at Pearl Harbor. Nowadays, a very good gamer can become an outstanding drone operator, but the difference between execution and vision cannot be overcome. A well-trained reflex does not automatically give birth to a Carl von Clausewitz, a Sun Tzu, or a George F. Kennan. Armies take from the “LoL generation” only the pawns or executors they need. The pressing question, rarely asked, is who will train and select the visionaries that today’s civilization lacks.

An anti-gaming indictment would be neither fair nor useful. Video games remain a legitimate form of cultural expression and, depending on genre and design, can train valuable cognitive skills. The real problem is not the game, but the monopoly of a single type of game on the imagination of an entire generation, especially when that type of game rewards almost exclusively speed, impulse, and immediate victory. Hence the direction of the solutions, which exist and are, to a large extent, within reach, by diversifying the gaming ecosystem, which involves including in education games that cultivate long-term planning, tolerance for ambiguity, and flexible, strategic thinking, along with metacognitive literacy that teaches young people not only what they play, but also how what they play shapes them over time.

If an emerging power limits its own minors to competitive games but exports the same product to rival populations, sovereign nations have the right and, perhaps, the duty to respond with transparency, not censorship. The most precious thing that competitive online gaming culture erodes, with silent consistency, is the space for reflection built around the ability to stop, think, and evaluate options without the pressure of the clock and without the hunger for immediate reward. This space is essential for democracy, diplomacy, and any form of government that is not reduced to a simple reflex reaction. Protecting it is not a matter of cultural taste, but is increasingly becoming a matter of national security.

There is also a subtle but serious irony: the word “game” refers both to a playful activity and to a strategic calculation of maximum complexity, and game theory has become, since 1945, one of the mathematical foundations of nuclear deterrence strategy and the entire modern security architecture. The game you choose, or the game that chooses you, is not just a biographical detail; it functions as an implicit statement about your cognitive architecture. The real question is not whether games are “good” or “bad,” but what kind of brain is produced by the dominant game of an era and what kind of world that mind will build. For now, the signs are troubling, but none of this is inevitable.

On the same day, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered, unwittingly, the perfect reply: We are in the middle of a rupture, not a transition. The old order will not return. And the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, added what sounds like an epitaph, unintentionally, of course: When friends shake hands, it must mean something.

Three voices from three positions, contributing to the involuntary conclusion that the world we live in is no longer the one in which we were born and raised. But what exactly has changed?

Public narratives mask invisible stakes. This is the first lesson. Trump speaks of Greenland as a piece of ice, cold and poorly positioned. But no one threatens seven-decade alliances just for ice. The real stake is digital strategic security. Whoever controls the nodes, controls the information. Whoever controls information and the anxieties of populations, controls the world.

But let us pause for a moment on what it means to control information in 2026. We already live in an artificial environment without being asked for consent and without being told we are entering somewhere. The recommendation algorithms of TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram do not invite us into a virtual world—they brutally construct the world in which we already live.

What information we receive, what opinions we encounter, what products are offered to us, what people are suggested as potential friends or partners—all of these are mediated by systems we neither see nor understand.

Thought itself is beginning to be mediated, and this is something entirely new. When ChatGPT answers our questions, we do not enter artificial intelligence—artificial intelligence enters us. And it is precisely this undeclared entry, this gradual absorption, that makes it so powerful.

Yes, there is a hidden power behind these systems. But it is not the power that conspiracy theorists speak of—there is no secret group controlling everything, no unified agenda, no deliberate plan for world domination. It is much worse. The power is structural. It results from the architecture of the systems, not from the intentions of the actors. And this is precisely why it is so difficult to contest—because there is no clear adversary, no center that can be attacked, no decision that can be reversed.

For example, training a current AI model requires thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, months of computation, tens of billions of dollars. NVIDIA holds over 80% of the market. But TSMC in Taiwan produces almost all the advanced chips needed for NVIDIA boards. Three cloud companies—AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud—provide the infrastructure on which most digital services run. This concentration of digital resources is unprecedented in the history of technology. Neither oil, nor coal, nor nuclear energy have ever been as monopolized as digital energy is now.

In short, ideology works best when it is not perceived as ideology. A newspaper editorial can be recognized as expressing a point of view, but a response from ChatGPT appears to be information, pure and simple. A recommendation algorithm seems to reflect user preferences. A submarine fiber optic cable seems to be merely technical infrastructure. Each of these systems was built by people with a set of values implemented through the education they received, was designed according to criteria established by people with specific interests, and implemented by people with concrete visions of how the world should function. The systems appear neutral at first glance, but they are not.

The world appears immutable, the result of natural evolution, but in fact it is constructed. And the builders have interests. This is the supreme form of power—a will disguised as a work. Not through direct command, but through the very architecture of options. There is no longer any need to force anything; inevitability will appear as apparent.

Today, declared ideology is no longer fashionable—simulated neutrality is. And yet, there is a limit. People absolutely do not want to flee from reality. The resounding failure of Metaverse projects has demonstrated this abundantly. The immersive Metaverse, with VR glasses, 3D avatars, and virtual worlds for socializing, collapsed spectacularly. Meta has lost over $40 billion so far. People refused to wear headsets to socialize.

The COVID-19 pandemic offered the perfect natural experiment for this global project. Forced to live digitally, billions of people discovered that forced digitalization produces exhaustion, not pleasure. Children suffered obvious, measurable cognitive losses due to online learning. Adults discovered that although they could work from home, something essential was missing—above all, physical presence and the spontaneity of natural, unmediated interaction.

But this resistance does not change the fundamental equation. The explicit Metaverse died, yes, but the implicit Metaverse won. We were not asked to enter a virtual world—the virtual world entered us, without asking.

Let us return to Davos. The most significant event was not the speech about Greenland. It was the announcement about the Board of Peace. An international organization in which Trump is permanent president, even after he leaves the White House. Permanent membership costs $1 billion, fixed rate. The declared purpose is noble—to be a more agile and efficient alternative to the UN. This is world building in its most explicit form—the construction of an alternative institutional infrastructure in which the USA, through Trump personally, sets the rules. Not the UN with its equal members, but a new system in which whoever pays, plays, and whoever doesn’t pay, is played.

In short. US Secretary of Commerce Lutnick declared, without a trace of irony: Globalization has failed. This will be an interesting journey. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney responded with a formula that summarizes everything: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. A saying that in Romania is repeated until it no longer impresses anyone.

All, absolutely all European reactions confirm the asymmetry of power. Von der Leyen: A deal is a deal. Macron: We will not submit to aggressors. Starmer: Great Britain will not yield its principles. These are merely sterile declarations of principle—they are not strategies.

It is already evident that Europe cannot build a rival system. It does not produce advanced chips. It has no frontier AI models. It does not control the global cloud. It can only resist or accept—exactly the situation of those who are not world builders.

For Romania, the implications are even more profound. We are consumers of digital infrastructure built by others—Americans or Chinese, as you prefer. We do not have the capacity to build AI models, to produce advanced chips, to launch communication satellites. We give our energy to others without being told why, and we receive our food from others because it’s cheaper that way. This country is like a retirement home with pensioners glued to the TV and the radiator, where grandchildren come twice a month to take their pension, in exchange for a bag of groceries and topping up their phone card. We are in the world, somewhere at the window—not builders of the world. The difference is enormous and decisive for what will follow.

But let us not rush to conclusions. There is a tacit presupposition in everything I have said so far—it is as if the world builders were sovereign over their own creations. America builds global digital infrastructure. China builds an alternative system. Each actor seems to act from the position of an autonomous subject that shapes the object-world.

But this presupposition masks a much more disturbing reality—in fact, the builders are themselves built.

In the same week that Trump threatens Europe with tariffs over Greenland, his administration is quietly negotiating with Taiwan to ensure continuity of deliveries from TSMC. Because Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces approximately 90% of the world’s advanced chips. Without TSMC, there is no iPhone. No NVIDIA GPUs. No cloud servers. And no artificial intelligence.

The entire American digital infrastructure, with all its data centers, all its AI models, and all its advanced military systems, depends on an island of 24 million inhabitants located 180 kilometers from mainland China. An island that China considers part of its territory.

Intel and Samsung are trying to build alternatives, but they are years behind, and TSMC’s Arizona factories produce only previous-generation chips. The crude reality is that the American world builder is built by Taiwan. And Taiwan is built by the water that China can block, by the energy it imports, by the engineers that Western universities still train. So the chain of dependencies has no end. Every builder is themselves built. That’s how things work.

Bruno Maçães, in his recent book World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics (Cambridge University Press, 2025), offers a theoretical framework for understanding this paradox. His central thesis is that geopolitics no longer consists in controlling territory, but in constructing territory—that is, creating artificial worlds that others are forced to inhabit. Whoever builds the system, builds the rules.

Because the real prize is invisible: submarine cables. Over 99 percent of international data traffic travels through fiber optic lines on the ocean floor. Greenland sits at the junction of emerging Arctic routes—the shortest path between Europe and Asia as polar ice retreats. The Far North Fiber project, slated for 2027, will cross Greenland connecting Europe to Japan. Whoever controls these nodes controls the information. This isn’t speculation. It’s the exact logic that drove the annexation of Hawaii in 1898.

At the close of the nineteenth century, the British Empire held a quasi-monopoly over global telecommunications through its All-Red Line—a network of submarine telegraph cables linking London to its colonies. Every American commercial and military secret traveling to Asia passed through British-controlled nodes. Hawaii was the only landmass in the central Pacific that could serve as a relay station for an independent American transpacific cable. Without it, the distance between California and Asia exceeded the reach of telegraph technology. The public narrative focused on sugar plantations and naval bases. The operational objective was communication infrastructure. Annexation followed.

Hawaiians learned their country had been annexed a full week after the Newlands Resolution was signed—news arrived by steamship. In the age of the telegraph, when London communicated instantly with colonies worldwide, Hawaii remained captive in pre-electric time. The Kūʻē Petitions of 1897, signed by over 21,000 people—more than half the indigenous population—had blocked an annexation treaty in the Senate. But informational asymmetry gave annexationists a structural advantage. The American telegraph cable reached Hawaii only in 1903, after the fact. Communications infrastructure follows power; it does not precede it.

This pattern is not new for Greenland either. In December 1946, Secretary of State James Byrnes handed his Danish counterpart a memorandum offering $100 million in gold for the island. The offer was secret—declassified in the 1970s, publicized only in 1991. An internal memo recorded the Joint Chiefs’ consensus: “Money is plentiful now, Greenland is completely worthless to Denmark, and control of Greenland is indispensable to the safety of the United States.” Denmark refused. Nearly eight decades later, the Trump administration proposed direct payments of up to $100,000 per Greenlandic resident. Same logic, recalibrated for the age of wire transfers.

“I’d like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’ll do it the hard way,” Trump declared on January 9. The formula is unchanged: today’s partner becomes tomorrow’s captive—by purchase or coercion. Only the method varies.

Greenlanders need no lectures on American “protection.” They have their own memory. In 1953, 150 Inuit were forcibly evacuated from the Thule area—days of notice—to clear land for the expansion of Thule Air Base, now Pituffik Space Base, the Arctic’s main military communications node. They were promised return “in a few years.” They never returned. Denmark was complicit. The base built to “protect” the West rose on the permanent exile of the protected.

The deeper irony is historical. In 1898, the United States was victim of British informational hegemony. The annexation of Hawaii was an act of liberation from that dependency. In 2026, America is itself the hegemon, seeking to prevent a rival’s rise—deploying the same methods it once protested. The Trump administration’s rhetoric—“Greenland is surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships”—amplifies fear to position America as savior. Psychologists call this trauma bonding: generate anxiety, then offer yourself as the cure. The creator of the threat becomes its healer.

None of this means Greenland faces easy choices. The Arctic is opening at a pace that waits for no democratic consensus. Russia has reactivated fifty Soviet-era bases. China, self-styled “near-Arctic state,” already operates a satellite station at Kangerlussuaq. Denmark—population 5.9 million—claims sovereignty over 2.16 million square kilometers of ice and rock. A candle projecting warmth onto a glacier. Greenlandic sovereignty is already a polite fiction. The question is not whether the island falls under a sphere of influence, but whose.

In 1993, Congress adopted a formal apology for Hawaii, acknowledging that “the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty.” America took nearly a century to admit its sin. The lesson should have prevented repetition. But imperial apologies work like medieval indulgences: not to prevent the next sin, but to make it repeatable.

Prime Minister Múte Egede can declare that Greenlanders are “not for sale.” He is right. The problem is that you don’t have to be for sale to be bought.

The Anxiety of Nodes

German sociology and military theory mapped, without communicating with each other, the two faces of the same modern unease. In Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903), Georg Simmel analyzed Nervosität: the nervous overstimulation of the metropolitan civilian, overwhelmed by telegrams, news, and sensory impressions, who develops protective detachment as a defense mechanism. Seven decades earlier, Clausewitz had described the inverse in On War (1832): the commander’s fear triggered by absence of information—the “fog” (Nebel) in which “three-fourths of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped.” The civilian suffers from too much; the commander, from too little. Both are forms of informational tension—opposite polarities, same paralyzing effect on decision-making.

This dual lens unlocks two historical moments separated by over a century: Hawaii’s annexation in 1898 and current American pressure on Greenland. In both cases, the public narrative centered on tangible resources and conventional military security. In both cases, the real stake was invisible: control over communications infrastructure—and, by extension, the management of informational vulnerability.

Informational Encirclement: Washington 1890

At the close of the nineteenth century, the United States suffered from acute strategic anxiety. The British Empire held a quasi-monopoly over global telecommunications through its submarine cable network—the All-Red Line, named for the color marking British colonies on maps. Reuters, headquartered in London, dominated global news flows; any dispatch from Asia or the Pacific passed through the British capital before reaching America.

This generated what we might call “the anxiety of informational encirclement.” All American commercial and military secrets traveled through London-controlled nodes, exposed to the British imperial gaze. Hawaii was the only significant landmass in the central Pacific that could serve as a relay station for an American transpacific cable. Without it, the distance between California and Asia exceeded the reach of contemporary telegraph technology. Annexation enabled a cable route—San Francisco to Honolulu to Midway to Guam to Manila—touching only U.S. territory. The annexation of Hawaii was, at its core, a liberation operation.

The Transfer of Anxiety: Honolulu 1898

But one party’s liberation is another’s subjugation. Hawaiians learned their country had been annexed a full week after the Newlands Resolution was signed—news arrived by steamship across the slow Pacific. In the age of the telegraph, when London communicated instantly with colonies worldwide, Hawaii remained captive in pre-electric time. Its people experienced the extreme form of despair: the absolute powerlessness of discovering that history has already happened, without your participation, behind a wall of oceanic silence.

The Kūʻē Petitions of 1897, signed by over 21,000 people—more than half the indigenous population—had initially blocked an annexation treaty in the U.S. Senate. But informational asymmetry gave annexationists a structural advantage: conspirators could coordinate with Washington at a pace Hawaiian monarchists could not match. The American telegraph cable reached Hawaii only in 1902–1903—after annexation. Communications infrastructure follows power; it does not precede it. It consolidates control; it does not inform the controlled.

The Pattern Repeats: Nuuk 2026

In January 2026, President Trump declared the United States “needs” Greenland, threatening military force. The public narrative invoked national security and rare earth minerals. This justification collapses on inspection: China controls 90% of global refining capacity for critical minerals. Even if Greenland shipped rare earth concentrate tomorrow, processing would route through Asia—rendering extraction uneconomical. The island’s mining infrastructure is nonexistent. The U.S. already holds reserves nearly double Greenland’s.

What, then, is the real stake? The same as in 1898: control of communications nodes. Over 99% of international data traffic travels through submarine cables. Greenland occupies a unique position for emerging Arctic routes—the shortest path between Europe and Asia as warming opens polar waters. The Far North Fiber project, slated for 2026–2027, will cross Greenland connecting Europe to Japan via the Northwest Passage. A second project, Polar Connect, will run northeast of the island beneath the ice cap. Both will anchor Greenland’s position in global digital infrastructure.

Greenland already lives under the specter of informational vulnerability. With only two fragile submarine cables, an interruption could sever the island from the internet for six to nine months. China has built a foothold: a satellite ground station at Kangerlussuaq (2017) and Huawei Marine’s upgrade of the Greenland Connect cables (2016). Denmark responded belatedly, adding a third submarine cable worth $468 million to its Arctic defense package—but only under pressure.

Imperial Trauma Bonding

The lesson of military psychology: informational vulnerability is not healed by more cables, but by their control. Here the imperial calculus turns cynical. Whoever offers the “cure” becomes master of the cured. The United States offers Greenland liberation from Chinese and Russian encirclement—just as it offered Hawaii liberation from a Japanese threat in 1898. But the price of “healing” is always sovereignty transfer—not physical, but informational. In the twenty-first century, informational sovereignty is the supreme form.

Psychologists recognize this dynamic as trauma bonding: pathological attachment to the source of trauma. The creator of anxiety becomes its healer, generating dependence that mimics gratitude but is, in fact, captivity. Trump’s rhetoric—“Greenland is surrounded by Russian and Chinese ships”—operates on exactly this register: amplify fear, then position yourself as savior. In 1898, the United States was victim of informational pressure; Britain was hegemon. Hawaii’s annexation was an act of liberation. In 2026, the United States is the hegemon, seeking to prevent a rival’s rise—deploying the same methods it once protested.

Strategic Lessons

Several conclusions emerge. Public narratives mask invisible stakes. Hawaiian sugar and Greenlandic rare earths are pretexts. Telegraph cables and Arctic fiber are the real prizes. Strategic analysts increasingly recognize communications infrastructure as a driver of foreign policy—because informational vulnerability is itself a weapon. Control over information flows allows a power to amplify or diminish a population’s anxiety. This capacity exceeds conventional military force. The transfer of informational sovereignty precedes political sovereignty. Hawaii lost its ability to communicate with the world in real time before it lost formal independence. Denmark now scrambles to protect digital infrastructure as Greenland’s first line of defense.

Refrain with Variations

In December 1946, Secretary of State James Byrnes handed his Danish counterpart, Gustav Rasmussen, a memorandum offering $100 million in gold for Greenland. The offer was secret—declassified in the 1970s, publicized only in 1991. An internal memo by official John Hickerson recorded the Joint Chiefs’ consensus: “Money is plentiful now, Greenland is completely worthless to Denmark, and control of Greenland is indispensable to the safety of the United States.” Rasmussen refused: “While we owe much to America, I do not feel that we owe them the whole island.”

Nearly eight decades later, the Trump administration proposed direct payments of up to $100,000 per Greenlandic resident. Same logic, recalibrated for the age of wire transfers. “I’d like to make a deal, you know, the easy way. But if we don’t do it the easy way, we’ll do it the hard way,” Trump declared on January 9, 2026. The formula is identical: today’s partner becomes tomorrow’s captive—by purchase or coercion. Only the method differs, not the outcome.

Between these two moments, in 1993, Congress adopted a formal apology for Hawaii, acknowledging that “the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty.” America took nearly a century to admit its sin. The lesson should have prevented repetition. But imperial apologies work like medieval indulgences: not to prevent the next sin, but to make it repeatable.

Thule, or Truth Without Anesthetic

Greenlanders need no lectures on American “protection.” They have their own memory. In 1953, 150 Inuit were forcibly evacuated from the Thule area—days of notice—to clear land for the expansion of Thule Air Base, now Pituffik Space Base, the Arctic’s main military communications node. They were promised return “in a few years.” They never returned. Denmark was complicit. Only in 1999 did it acknowledge the illegality, granting symbolic compensation but denying the right of return. The base built to “protect” the West rose on the permanent exile of the “protected.”

That is history. But history does not suspend geography. The Arctic is opening at a pace that waits for no democratic consensus. Russia has reactivated fifty Soviet-era bases and deployed S-400 systems beyond the Arctic Circle. China, self-styled “near-Arctic state,” invests systematically in Greenland and already operates a satellite station at Kangerlussuaq. Denmark—population 5.9 million, a ceremonial army—claims sovereignty over 2.16 million square kilometers of ice and rock. A candle projecting warmth onto a glacier.

Here, then, is the truth without anesthetic: Greenlandic sovereignty is already a polite fiction. The alternative to the American umbrella is not independence—it is absorption into a sphere of influence that will offer neither compensation nor retrospective apology. Prime Minister Egede can declare that Greenlanders are “not for sale.” He is right. The problem is that you don’t have to be for sale to be bought.

În aceeași zi, premierul canadian Mark Carney a oferit, fără să vrea, replica perfectă: Suntem în mijlocul unei rupturi, nu al unei tranziții. Vechea ordine nu se va mai întoarce. Iar președinta Comisiei Europene, Ursula von der Leyen, a adăugat ceea ce sună a epitaf, fără să vrea, bineînțeles: Când prietenii își strâng mâna, asta trebuie să însemne ceva. Trei voci de pe trei poziții, contribuie la concluzia involuntară că lumea în care trăim nu mai este cea în care ne-am născut și am crescut. Dar ce anume s-a schimbat?

Narațiunile publice maschează mize invizibile. Aceasta este prima lecție. Trump vorbește despre Groenlanda ca despre o bucată de gheață, rece și prost poziționată. Dar nimeni nu amenință alianțe de șapte decenii doar pentru gheață. Miza reală este securitatea strategică digitală. Cine controlează nodurile, controlează informația. Cine controlează informația și neliniștea populațiilor, controlează lumea.

Dar să ne oprim o clipă asupra a ceea ce înseamnă a controla informația în 2026. Trăim deja într-un mediu artificial fără să ni se ceară acordul și fără să ni se spună că intrăm undeva. Algoritmii de recomandare ai TikTok, YouTube și Instagram nu ne invită într-o lume virtuală, ne construiesc brutal lumea în care deja trăim. Ce informații primim, ce opinii întâlnim, ce produse ni se oferă, ce persoane ni se sugerează ca potențiali prieteni sau parteneri, toate acestea sunt mediate de sisteme pe care nu le vedem și nu le înțelegem.

Gândirea însăși începe să fie mediată, și aceasta este ceva cu totul nou. Când ChatGPT răspunde la întrebările noastre, nu intrăm în inteligența artificială – inteligența artificială intră în noi. Și tocmai această intrare nedeclarată, această absorbție graduală, este ceea ce o face atât de puternică.

Da, există o putere ascunsă în spatele acestor sisteme. Dar nu este puterea despre care vorbesc conspiraționiștii, nu există un grup secret care controlează totul, nu există o agendă unificată, nu există un plan deliberat de dominație mondială. Este mult mai grav. Puterea este structurală. Ea rezultă din arhitectura sistemelor, nu din intențiile actorilor. Și tocmai de aceea este atât de dificil de contestat, pentru că nu există un adversar clar, nu există un centru care să poată fi atacat, nu există o decizie care să poată fi inversată. Spre exemplu, antrenarea unui model AI actual necesită mii de GPU-uri NVIDIA, luni de calcule, zeci de miliarde de dolari. NVIDIA deține peste 80% din piață. Dar compania TSMC din Taiwan produce aproape toate chipurile avansate necesare plăcilor NVIDIA. Trei companii de cloud, AWS, Azure și Google Cloud, furnizează infrastructura pe care rulează majoritatea serviciilor digitale. Toată această concentrare a resurselor digitale este fără precedent în istoria tehnologiei. Nici petrolul, nici cărbunele, nici energia nucleară nu au fost niciodată atât de monopolizate precum este energia digitală acum.

Pe scurt, ideologia funcționează cel mai bine atunci când nu este percepută ca ideologie. Un editorial dintr-un ziar poate fi recunoscut ca exprimând un punct de vedere, dar un răspuns de la ChatGPT pare a fi informație, pur și simplu. Un algoritm de recomandare pare să reflecte preferințele utilizatorului, dar un cablu submarin de fibră optică pare să fie doar infrastructură tehnică. Fiecare dintre aceste sisteme a fost construit de oameni cu un set de valori implementate prin educația de care au avut parte, a fost proiectat conform unor criterii stabilite de oameni cu interese specifice și implementat de oameni cu viziuni concrete despre cum ar trebui să funcționeze lumea. Sistemele par la prima vedere neutre, dar nu sunt. Lumea pare a fi imuabilă, rezultat al unei evoluții naturale, dar de fapt ea este construită. Iar constructorii au interese. Aceasta este forma supremă a puterii, o voință deghizată în lucrare. Nu prin comandă directă, ci prin însăși arhitectura opțiunilor. Nu este nevoie să mai forțezi nimic, inevitabilitatea va apărea ca fiind aparentă. Astăzi nu mai e la modă ideologia declarată, ci neutralitatea simulată.

Și totuși, există o limită. Oamenii nu vor cu niciun chip să fugă de realitate. Eșecul răsunător al proiectelor de tip Metaverse a demonstrat-o cu vârf și îndesat. Metaversul imersiv, cu ochelari VR, cu avatare 3D și lumi virtuale pentru socializare s-a prăbușit spectaculos. Meta a pierdut până acum peste 40 de miliarde de dolari. Oamenii au refuzat să poarte căști pentru a socializa. Pandemia COVID-19 a oferit experimentul natural perfect pentru acest proiect global. Forțați să trăiască digital, miliarde de oameni au descoperit că digitalizarea forțată produce epuizare, nu plăcere. Copiii au suferit pierderi cognitive evidente, măsurabile, din cauza învățământului online. Adulții au descoperit că, deși pot lucra de acasă, le lipsește ceva esențial, în primul rând prezența fizică și spontaneitatea interacțiunii naturale, nemediate. Dar această rezistență nu schimbă ecuația fundamentală. Metaversul explicit a murit, da, dar metaversul implicit a câștigat. Nu ni s-a cerut să intrăm într-o lume virtuală, lumea virtuală a intrat în noi, fără să ne întrebe.

Să ne întoarcem la Davos. Evenimentul cel mai semnificativ nu a fost discursul despre Groenlanda. A fost anunțul despre Board of Peace. O organizație internațională în care Trump este președinte permanent, chiar și după ce nu va mai fi la Casa Albă. Membership-ul permanent costă 1 miliard de dolari, tarif fix. Scopul declarat este unul nobil, respectiv să fie o alternativă mai agilă și eficientă la ONU. Aceasta este world building în forma sa cea mai explicită, adică construcția unei infrastructuri instituționale alternative în care SUA, prin Trump personal, stabilește regulile. Nu ONU cu membrii săi egali, ci un sistem nou în care cine plătește, joacă, iar cine nu plătește, este jucat. Scurt pe doi.

Secretarul SUA al Comerțului Lutnick a declarat, fără urmă de ironie: Globalizarea a eșuat. Aceasta va fi o călătorie interesantă. Premierul Canadei, Mark Carney a răspuns cu o formulă care rezumă totul: Dacă nu ești la masă, ești în meniu. O vorbă care în România se repetă până nu mai impresionează pe nimeni. Toate, dar absolut toate reacțiile europene confirmă asimetria puterii. Von der Leyen: O înțelegere este o înțelegere. Macron: Nu ne vom supune agresorilor. Starmer: Marea Britanie nu va ceda principiilor sale. Acestea sunt doar declarații sterile de principiu, nu sunt strategii. Este deja evident că Europa nu poate construi un sistem rival. Nu produce chipuri avansate. Nu are modele AI de frontieră. Nu controlează cloud-ul global. Poate doar să reziste sau să accepte, exact situația celor care nu sunt constructori de lumi.

Pentru România, implicațiile sunt și mai profunde. Suntem consumatori ai infrastructurii digitale construite de alții, americani sau chinezi, cum preferați. Nu avem capacitatea de a construi modele AI, de a produce chipuri avansate, de a lansa sateliți de comunicații. Energia o dăm la alții, nu ni se spune de ce, iar mâncarea o primim de la alții, că așa e mai ieftin. Țara asta e ca o casă de pensionari lipiți de televizor și de calorifer la care vin nepoții de două ori pe lună ca să le ia pensia, la schimb cu o sacoșă de mâncare și încărcatul cartelei de telefon. Suntem în lume, undeva la fereastră, nu constructori de lume. Diferența este enormă și decisivă pentru ceea ce va urma.

Dar să nu ne grăbim cu concluziile. Există o presupozițe tacită în tot ce am spus până acum, e ca și cum constructorii de lumi ar fi suverani asupra propriilor creații. America construiește infrastructura digitală globală. China construiește un sistem alternativ. Fiecare actor pare să acționeze din poziția de subiect autonom care modelează obiectul-lume. Dar această presupozițe maschează o realitate mult mai deranjantă, de fapt constructorii sunt ei înșiși construiți. În aceeași săptămână în care Trump amenință Europa cu tarife pentru Groenlanda, administrația sa negociază discret cu Taiwan pentru a asigura continuitatea livrărilor de la TSMC. Pentru că Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produce aproximativ 90% din chipurile avansate ale lumii. Fără TSMC, nu există iPhone. Nu există GPU-uri NVIDIA. Nu există servere pentru cloud. Și nu există inteligență artificială. Întreaga infrastructură digitală americană, cu toate centrele de date, cu toate modelele de AI și toate sistemele militare avansate, depinde de o insulă de 24 de milioane de locuitori aflată la 180 de kilometri de China continentală. O insulă pe care China o consideră parte din teritoriul său. Intel și Samsung încearcă să construiască alternative, dar sunt cu ani în urmă, iar fabricile TSMC din Arizona produc doar chipuri de generație anterioară. Realitatea crudă este că constructorul de lumi american este construit de Taiwan. Și Taiwan este construit de apa pe care China o poate bloca, de energia pe care o importă, de inginerii pe care îi formează încă universitățile din vest.

Așa că lanțul dependențelor nu are vreun capăt. Fiecare constructor este el însuși construit. Așa merg lucrurile.

Bruno Maçães, în recenta sa carte World Builders: Technology and the New Geopolitics (Cambridge University Press, 2025), oferă un cadru teoretic pentru înțelegerea acestui paradox. Teza sa centrală este că geopolitica nu mai constă în controlul teritoriului, ci în construirea teritoriului, adică crearea de lumi artificiale pe care ceilalți sunt forțați să le locuiască. Cine construiește sistemul, construiește regulile.