🌐 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS REALISM
International cooperation and shared values
Assume every state wants to destroy you
🎯 John Mearsheimer — Offensive Realist
"States operate in a self-help world. Those that don't look out for themselves get destroyed."
✨ THE ANARCHIC STRUCTURE OF THE SYSTEM ✨
Political scientists
Individual leaders and their decisions
📐 Kenneth Waltz — Structural Realist
"It's not about who leads — swap any leader in and the structure produces the same outcome."
Wait, it's all just a power struggle?
Always has been 🔫
🏛️ Thucydides
"The growth of Athenian power and the fear this caused in Sparta made war inevitable." Same story, 2,400 years on repeat.
"We should have a rules-based international order"
wE sHoULd HaVe A rULeS-bAsEd InTeRnAtIoNaL oRdEr
🕶️ Henry Kissinger
"Order should not have the illusion of permanence... Every international order must sooner or later face the impact of two tendencies: redefinition of legitimacy, or significant shift in balance of power."
Mearsheimer
Waltz
Liberals are delusional about international politics
🤝 Offensive Realism × Defensive Realism
They disagree on whether states maximize power or security. They absolutely agree the liberal institutionalists are living in a fantasy.
Study the enemy's capabilities
Understand their perceptions and intentions
Realize YOUR perceptions are also distorted
Realize YOUR perceptions are also distorted
🔍 Robert Jervis — Perceptions & Misperceptions
"Decision-makers tend to fit incoming information into their existing theories and images. Disconfirming evidence is explained away."
When there's no Leviathan
Nasty, brutish, and short
📜 Thomas Hobbes
"During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war."
I am once again asking you to define your interest in terms of power
⚖️ Hans Morgenthau
"The main signpost that helps political realism to find its way through the landscape of international politics is the concept of interest defined as power."
The ends
Justify the means
🦊 Niccolò Machiavelli
"Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are." The original 48 Laws of Power — 500 years early.
⚡ PHILOSOPHY
Accept conventional morality and be a good little sheep
Nietzsche holding 25 cards
⚡ Friedrich Nietzsche
"Morality is the herd instinct in the individual." He'd rather draw the entire deck than play by their rules.
Following convention like the herd because "equality"
Living by natural justice — the superior rule
🏛️ Plato's Callicles
"Convention is made by the weak and the many to restrain the naturally superior. Nature's justice says the strong should have more."
Keep debating abstract metaphysical truth
Whatever actually works in practice
WILLIAM JAMES 🚗💨
🔧 William James — Pragmatist
"The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief." If it doesn't cash out in experience, it's not worth arguing about.
When you realize every philosophical problem
Is just a language game
🔤 Late Wittgenstein
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language." He dismantled his own Tractatus. Respect.
Waiting for someone to actually find the golden mean
Between any two extremes
📐 Aristotle
"Virtue is the mean between two vices — excess and deficiency." Sounds simple. Takes a lifetime. Most people never get there.
I am once again asking you to stop deriving OUGHT from IS
📖 David Hume
"In every system of morality I have met with, the author proceeds for some time reasoning about IS and IS NOT, then suddenly shifts to OUGHT and OUGHT NOT." The guillotine drops.
🧠 PSYCHOLOGY
IT'S ABOUT YOUR MOTHER
IT'S ABOUT SEX
FREUD: WHY NOT BOTH?
🛋️ Sigmund Freud
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." — A quote he probably never said. Because for Freud, it was never just a cigar.
You
Your Shadow
You
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate" — Jung
🌑 Carl Jung
You can run from your shadow. It just gets bigger. Individuation means turning around and shaking its hand.
Y'all got any more of that
Compensatory striving for superiority?
🧗 Alfred Adler
"To be human means to feel inferior." Every flex, every hustle, every overachievement — Adler sees the inferiority underneath.
🤖 AI ADVISORS
Every problem can be solved with
Unconditional positive regard. Change my mind.
💚 Carl Rogers
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change." He won't change your mind. He'll accept it unconditionally until YOU change it.
Wrote the Tractatus. Declared all philosophy solved.
Came back and destroyed his own work.
📏 Early → Late Wittgenstein
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Then he came back and couldn't shut up about language games. The only philosopher to revolutionize the field twice — by refuting himself.
🔥 BONUS: THE SYNTHESIS
Callicles (400 BC)
Nietzsche (1888)
Conventional morality is a weapon of the weak against the strong
⚡ The Calliclean-Nietzschean Axis
2,300 years apart. Same diagnosis. The herd calls it "justice." They called it what it is: resentment dressed in noble language.
Reading one thinker and adopting their worldview
Running every problem through 26 minds and synthesizing the answer
⚡ The Advisory Panel Method
Nietzsche gives you fire. Waltz gives you structure. Jervis gives you doubt. Callicles gives you permission. The synthesis gives you power.