A few days ago I watched a film about the young George Washington. One scene stayed. A commander attacks without declaring war — the enemy commander and his men are killed. The other side answers; the battle turns; the attacker, seeing he is losing, raises a white flag. They take the weapons from his whole party — and let them go. Not hanged. Released. Because that is what one did.
Careful: the code that spared a surrendering officer applied only within one narrow class — gentlemen toward gentlemen. Toward everyone else those men had an entirely different relationship: the peasant, the native, the man in chains were treated roughly the way we treat animals on a farm, without cruelty being anyone's intention. But inside that class there was a code, and the class governed everything. The decency wasn't universal. At the very top, it was real.
Now ask: who is an opinion leader? A century ago — a general, a scientist, a writer. Today — a musician, a blogger, a face on a short video. And you become one now not by doing something complex but by doing something often outrageous. Unexpected, slightly wrong. Human nature didn't change. The institution that decides who gets heard did. The old one rewarded depth. The new one rewards a spike.
Which brings me to the most vivid specimen of the new species. Where I stand: I am not a citizen of the United States, I do not vote there, and I don't judge the politics of a house I'm not a member of. This is not about whether Donald Trump is right. It is about why a man in his position now can do what he does — and why nothing stops him.
Is he a bad man? I couldn't say. Stupid? Plainly not. But he does things that fifty years ago were unthinkable for anyone in his chair — not immoral, unthinkable. He renames the Gulf of Mexico by decree. With his navy controlling a strait that carries half the world's oil, he posts that Hormuz should be the Trump Strait, and the White House prints maps. In a trade dispute he floats "Lake America" and circulates machine-made cartoons of Canadian geese wearing his hair — then calls it light irony. A century ago that would have ended a career by lunchtime. Not by law — the governing class would have quietly closed its doors. There is no such class now.
Why does he do it? Set aside markets and pressure — they don't explain the pattern, because the pattern is bigger than him. He has read the current and rides it. The strange part is why everyone else accepts it. Why not one foreign ministry has said aloud what every one of its officials has said behind a closed door. Everyone sees it and goes along, as if some inertial scenario were rehearsing us for a surreal world.
Not a conspiracy. There is a more precise name: a phase crisis. Not economic or political — those a system survives. A phase crisis is when the system itself is exhausted: institutions, elites, rules stop working all at once, because the principle beneath them ran out. Rome fell that way; the Bronze Age ended that way. Its chief symptom: everyone knows they are doing something wrong and keeps doing it, because "right" no longer exists in the old coordinates and the new ones aren't there yet. Not stupidity or malice — inertia, where inertia is all that's left. Look the term up. My image for it: the leash is off. Not cut — unclipped, by no one in particular.
And the machines are not a separate story. The attention economy — where scandal travels ten times faster than thought — was built before AI and had already chosen the provocateur over the statesman. Then we handed him ammunition: a model made those geese in seconds and will make ten thousand more. The machine didn't create the current. It put an engine on a boat already drifting.
We are in that boat. The current is real but not strong — the banks are close, we could row. We've chosen not to. Now and then someone dips an oar on the other side, once, for the look of it, so from the shore it seems we steer.
Everyone in the boat sees the current. Everyone knows the oar is for show.
Why does no one stop rowing for show — and start rowing?
