On mass psychology, emotional dependency, and the quiet art of remaining sane.
When I was twenty-two, I worked in Cairo for a wealthy Saudi prince. It was my first prolonged encounter with the Egyptian megalopolis and I fell in love with it almost immediately. I have always been drawn toward gigantic cities because population density reveals humanity in a less curated state. Small towns still possess enough intimacy to maintain illusions. Megacities do not. Once ten or twenty million people are compressed into a furnace of noise, pressure, dust, ambition, exhaustion, heat, fumes, and endless negotiation with reality, civilization begins shedding its makeup.
And Cairo, God bless that magnificent collapsing beast, had no interest whatsoever in pretending.
It overwhelmed the senses from the first moment. The noise alone felt alive. Car horns screamed in endless operatic argument. The streets moved like bloodstream under pressure. Men hauled impossible weights through traffic that looked less regulated than spiritually improvised. Buildings appeared permanently caught halfway between construction and decomposition. Everything smelled simultaneously of spices, diesel, sweat, old stone, tobacco, coffee, and human proximity.
I adored it.
I lived there a little over a year. Downtown Cairo became my territory. Taalat Harb Square. Sherif Street. Zamalek. Gezirah. I wandered endlessly whenever work allowed it, absorbing the city with the appetite of someone still young enough to confuse exhaustion with vitality.
And somewhere during those wanderings I discovered Lehnert & Landrock, the old foreign-established bookstore near the end of Sherif Street. An oasis of paper and dust tucked inside the chaos like a forgotten embassy of civilization. I have always loved bookstores. Good bookstores feel less like commercial spaces and more like sanctuaries for the intellectually displaced.
Naturally, I became a regular.
The adjacent coffee shop soon followed. And there, buried among volumes that looked as though they had survived several empires and at least two nervous breakdowns, I stumbled across a strange little book from sixteenth-century Japan.
The Go Rin No Sho.
The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.
At the time I knew almost nothing about Musashi except the broad outlines: swordsman, duelist, strategist, professional dispenser of violent enlightenment. But the book fascinated me immediately because it did not read like philosophy in the modern sense. Modern philosophy often resembles emotionally exhausted academics arguing inside airless university corridors while civilization burns quietly outside. Musashi felt different. Condensed. Hard. Functional. Like advice carved into stone by someone who had personally watched men die in the mud.
One principle especially lodged itself deep inside my mind.
Do not become emotionally consumed by things outside your control.
Accept reality. Move around it. Adapt to it. Become fluid instead of brittle. Be like water finding cracks in stone rather than screaming at the mountain for existing.
At twenty-two, I found the idea elegant.
At fifty-something, I increasingly suspect it may have been one of the few genuinely useful observations human beings ever produced.
Because mass psychology functions very much like celestial mechanics.
At some point I had to accept that certain phenomena exist beyond meaningful individual influence. Becoming emotionally consumed by them begins to resemble screaming at gravity for insufficient inclusivity. The Earth does not renegotiate orbit because activists disapprove of winter. Reality continues operating with majestic indifference toward our emotional preferences.
Human mass behavior follows very similar laws.
Large populations will reliably prioritize comfort over discipline, emotional reassurance over truth, and immediate gratification over long-term stability because human beings are wired for precisely those tendencies. We flatter ourselves endlessly about rationality, enlightenment, and moral sophistication, but scratch modern civilization lightly enough and the ancient software still runs underneath almost untouched.
We remain tribal apes with smartphones and debt.
And perhaps the most seductive luxury modern civilization has produced is not wealth.
It is victimhood.
Not genuine suffering. Genuine suffering is usually too exhausted for performance. Truly broken people rarely have the energy to curate identities around their pain because survival itself consumes all available bandwidth.
No, modern civilization increasingly rewards performative victimhood. Imagined oppression. Curated fragility. Competitive grievance. Entire social hierarchies are now organized around who can most convincingly present themselves as wounded by existence.
Victimhood became status.
Which is one of the strangest inversions in civilized history.
Once upon a time status emerged primarily through competence, contribution, courage, craftsmanship, endurance, military achievement, family legacy, or sacrifice. Even aristocracies at least pretended superiority through cultivation and obligation. The modern aristocracy increasingly derives legitimacy through cultivated helplessness.
And the richer societies become, the more aggressively this tendency metastasizes.
Because comfort produces fragility with astonishing reliability.
Human beings adapt poorly to abundance. We romanticize hardship endlessly while structuring entire societies around avoiding every conceivable inconvenience. And once populations grow accustomed to unsustainable comfort, even small reductions begin feeling apocalyptic.
A society raised on golden plates eventually experiences ordinary tableware as oppression.
Which is why genuinely difficult reforms become almost impossible inside wealthy democracies.
The problem is not merely cowardly politicians, though there is certainly no global shortage of those. The deeper issue is that populations themselves increasingly lack the psychological tolerance for prolonged discomfort.
People want mutually contradictory things simultaneously.
Low taxes and enormous welfare systems.
Cheap imported goods and protected domestic labor.
Endless freedom and total safety.
Balanced budgets and permanently expanding entitlements.
They want consequences for others and exemptions for themselves.
And politicians quickly learn how to weaponize those contradictions.
There is very little reward for realism, moderation, prudence, or long-term stewardship. There are enormous rewards, however, for emotional manipulation. Fear generates obedience. Outrage generates engagement. Victimhood generates solidarity. Promise enough emotional comfort and populations will forgive almost any structural insanity.
The Romans understood this perfectly two thousand years ago.
Panem et circenses.
Bread and circus.
The Senate and emperors alike understood the mob was fickle, emotionally volatile, and fundamentally easier to govern when distracted, entertained, and adequately fed. Stability was good for business. Disruption was expensive. And Rome had already observed how democratic Athens repeatedly injured itself through populist hysteria and emotional crowd dynamics.
Nothing fundamental has changed since.
Only the delivery system evolved.
The Coliseum became television.
Television became social media.
The mob remained the same.
Nothing is more dangerous than a frightened, emotionally agitated population. And nothing is easier to manipulate than populations conditioned to prioritize emotional stimulation over disciplined thought.
Which brings us to the most uncomfortable realization of all.
The elites are not separate from the population.
They emerge from it.
This is the fig leaf modern societies cling to desperately because it preserves the comforting fantasy that civilization would function beautifully if only the “right people” occupied positions of power. Corrupt elites become universal explanation for every social failure while the population itself remains conveniently absolved of responsibility.
But political systems do not materialize independently from culture.
They are distilled from it.
A civilization obsessed with emotional comfort will inevitably produce institutions optimized around emotional management. A population addicted to grievance will inevitably produce political actors specializing in grievance monetization. A society rewarding dependency will inevitably produce bureaucracies dedicated to expanding dependency.
The relationship is symbiotic.
And people resist this realization almost violently because it threatens the emotional rewards attached to victimhood itself.
Victimhood grants moral insulation.
Once someone successfully adopts victim identity, responsibility becomes negotiable. Failures can be externalized. Weakness transforms into virtue. Dependency becomes evidence of sensitivity rather than incapacity. Entire psychological cathedrals are constructed atop refusal to acknowledge agency.
And modern societies reward this behavior constantly.
Do not expect populations emotionally invested in victimhood to voluntarily embrace sacrifice, hardship, discipline, or accountability. Those things are not on the menu. Public performance is. Symbolic gestures are. Moral theater is. Endless projection of virtue into the social ether while institutions quietly decay underneath.
And the public accepts it because populations forget with terrifying speed.
One example burned itself permanently into my memory.
After eight years in Paris, I returned to Vienna. The city initially felt strange to me. Familiar, yet subtly altered, as though someone had rearranged the emotional furniture while I was away.
One afternoon I crossed a bridge connecting one of Vienna’s larger shopping centers. Above the walkway stood a gigantic illuminated advertisement encouraging people to invest money into a well-known trust fund.
There was only one small issue.
Less than six months earlier, that same fund had imploded in scandal. Bankruptcy. Reorganization. Executives receiving prison sentences for fraud. A financial corpse barely cold in the grave.
And yet there it stood again, dangling fresh bait before the public like nothing had happened. What astonished me even more was the reaction when I expressed disbelief. People genuinely looked at me as though I were the irrational one. I was informed — quite seriously — that I was “living under a rock” for failing to recognize the investment opportunity.
The flies were already buzzing back toward the honey.
People had learned absolutely nothing.
Or more accurately: they were psychologically incapable of learning because genuine learning requires abandoning emotionally convenient illusions. And most people cling to illusions with astonishing ferocity right until reality physically rips them away.
Illusions behave like moon dust.
They cling.
History demonstrates this endlessly.
When the Second World War approached its final collapse, enormous parts of the German population still clung desperately to fantasies of victory long after defeat had become mathematically unavoidable. Women committed suicide because they literally could not psychologically imagine existence outside the ideological framework surrounding them. Entire populations remained emotionally trapped inside narratives visibly collapsing around them in real time.
Only once reality became fully unavoidable did psychological realignment begin.
Not before.
And that pattern repeats throughout history with depressing consistency.
Human beings rarely abandon destructive illusions voluntarily. Usually reality must beat the illusion out of them physically. Pain becomes the final educator after all softer methods fail.
Which explains why societies almost never reform themselves during periods of relative comfort.
Reform requires confronting painful truths honestly while sacrificing present comfort for future stability. Democracies optimized around emotional management are structurally terrible at this.
So civilizations drift.
Not because solutions were unavailable.
But because emotionally satisfying narratives proved more attractive than psychologically difficult realities.
And once you understand this properly, only two meaningful paths remain.
The first is permanent outrage.
Many choose this route.
They spend their lives emotionally entangled in systems too large, too psychologically embedded, and too incentive-protected to meaningfully change within one lifetime. Politics becomes substitute religion. Every election transforms into apocalyptic battle between salvation and catastrophe. Every news cycle becomes existential theater. Doomscrolling replaces contemplation. Rage becomes identity.
And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the inner world becomes colonized entirely by external forces.
The second path is harder initially but infinitely healthier over time.
Radically abandoning hope in things possessing no realistic probability of happening.
Not despair.
Clarity.
There is enormous difference between hopelessness and detachment. Hopelessness collapses inward. Detachment liberates energy previously consumed by fantasy.
Once impossible expectations die, perception sharpens considerably.
And strangely enough, life often becomes richer afterward.
Because once you stop expecting politics, institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, ideological movements, or media systems to provide meaning or psychological stability, attention quietly returns toward the ordinary texture of existence itself.
A shared laugh with someone you love.
Rain against windows.
Competent work done properly.
A good meal.
The smell of old books.
The beauty hidden inside routine.
The profound dignity of ordinary life.
Modern civilization trains people to overlook these things because consumer societies require perpetual dissatisfaction to sustain themselves. A psychologically content person is economically dangerous. Someone deriving meaning primarily from family, craftsmanship, friendship, discipline, and inward stability becomes difficult to manipulate through spectacle.
And perhaps that is why I increasingly think about my forebears.
The craftsmen, clerks, laborers, farmers, and small shopkeepers scattered across the old Austro-Hungarian Empire from whom I descend. They were not rich. Their lives were physically harsher than ours in countless ways. Many lived under permanent uncertainty and relentless exertion.
Yet they built lives anyway.
They married. Worked. Buried relatives. Raised children. Celebrated holidays. Grew old. Endured hardship without requiring ideological reassurance that history was progressing correctly.
They possessed something modern societies increasingly lack.
Psychological resilience independent of institutions.
And perhaps that is the only truly durable freedom available to human beings.
Not merely political freedom.
Not merely economic freedom.
But inward sovereignty.
The ability to remain psychologically upright while systems fluctuate around you like weather. In Musashi’s case, this ultimately culminated not only in the Book of Five Rings but later in the Dokkōdō — The Path of Aloneness — where he emphasized detachment, radical acceptance, discipline, and self-mastery over obsession with external circumstances.
Culturally, Musashi could hardly have been further removed from the European Stoics. Yet through observation of himself and others, he arrived at remarkably similar conclusions. Accept reality. Master the self. Do not emotionally chain inner stability to external chaos.
He remained composed even standing before lethal situations most modern people would require three therapists and a podcast deal to process.
That is not optimism.
Nor is it pessimism.
It is adaptation.
The way of water.
It fills every mold.
