🌐 INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS REALISM
China is rising peacefully
And we can cooperate with them, right?
...right?
🎯 John Mearsheimer
"If China continues to grow economically, it will attempt to dominate Asia the way the US dominates the Western Hemisphere. The US will go to enormous lengths to prevent that."
Athens is growing more powerful
But Sparta won't feel threatened, right?
...right?
🏛️ Thucydides
"It was the rise of Athens and the fear which this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable." 431 BC. Still the best one-line explanation of great power conflict.
INTERNATIONAL LAW!! HUMAN RIGHTS!! COOPERATION!!
Interest defined as power.
⚖️ Hans Morgenthau vs. Liberal Internationalists
"The main signpost that helps political realism find its way: the concept of interest defined as power." The cat is unbothered.
One does not simply
Leave the state of nature without a Leviathan
📜 Thomas Hobbes
"The condition of man is a condition of war of everyone against everyone." You need the sovereign. There is no opt-out.
I receive: Absolute authority over you
You receive: Not dying in the state of nature
LEVIATHAN'S TRADE OFFER
📜 Thomas Hobbes — The Social Contract
"The only way to erect such a Common Power is to confer all their power and strength upon one Man, or Assembly of men." Deal or no deal? (There is no "no deal.")
They're building up arms
Must be offensive — increase our military
They respond by increasing theirs
It was defensive the whole time
🔍 Robert Jervis — The Security Dilemma
"What one state does to enhance its security causes other states to feel less secure." Congratulations, you just arms-raced yourself into the exact war you were trying to prevent.
Enemy is building up arms
It's probably just defensive posturing
What if it's actually offensive
🔍 Robert Jervis — Spiral vs. Deterrence
The eternal dilemma: treat it as a spiral and reassure (risk appeasement) or treat it as deterrence and stand firm (risk escalation). Misdiagnosis in either direction is catastrophe.
I bet he's thinking about other women
If you replaced every leader in history, the anarchic structure would still produce the same outcomes
📐 Kenneth Waltz
"In anarchy, there is no automatic harmony... A state has to rely on its own devices, the relative efficiency of which must be its constant concern." He's definitely thinking about structure.
⚡ PHILOSOPHY
But we SHOULD because—
YOU CAN'T DERIVE OUGHT FROM IS
📖 David Hume — The Guillotine
"In every system of morality... the author proceeds reasoning with IS and IS NOT, then suddenly shifts to OUGHT and OUGHT NOT." Hume's Guillotine. It cuts everything.
Let me explain the meaning of—
WHEREOF ONE CANNOT SPEAK THEREOF ONE MUST BE SILENT
📏 Early Wittgenstein — Tractatus 7
The last line of the Tractatus. He thought he'd solved all of philosophy with one book. Then he came back and destroyed his own work. Legend.
"It's about the leaders"
"It's about the system" — Waltz
"It's about perceptions of the system" — Jervis
"It's about the language game we use to describe the system" — Wittgenstein
🧠 The Escalating Levels of Analysis
From great man theory to structural realism to perception theory to linguistic philosophy. Each level peels back another layer. Wittgenstein watches everyone argue and says the argument itself is the problem.
Morality
The revaluation of all values
⚡ Friedrich Nietzsche
"What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power. What is bad? Everything that is born of weakness." Regular Pooh follows the rules. Tuxedo Pooh transvalues them.
Callicles:
The strong rule by nature. Convention is slavery for the superior.
Modern ethics:
Everyone deserves equal treatment 🥺
🏛️ Plato's Callicles vs. Modern Ethics
"Nature herself reveals that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker." 2,400 years and the herd still hasn't figured it out.
Callicles (400 BC)
Nietzsche (1888)
Conventional morality is a weapon of the weak
⚡ The Calliclean-Nietzschean Recognition
2,300 years apart. Same diagnosis. Both saw through the same lie — that "equality" and "justice" are genuine principles rather than strategies of the inferior to constrain the superior.
"Whatever feels true is true"
"Only empirically verified propositional knowledge counts"
"Whatever works in practice is true"
🔧 William James — Pragmatism
"The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief." The genius and the simpleton arrive at the same place. The midwit overthinks it.
🧠 PSYCHOLOGY
Sigmund Freud
Literally anything
Is this repressed sexual desire?
🛋️ Sigmund Freud
"The ego is not master in its own house." Everything is libido. Your career, your hobbies, your breakfast cereal choice — all sublimated Eros. Everything.
Be a good, moral, well-adjusted person
Integrate the Shadow
🌑 Carl Jung — The Shadow
"One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." Evil Kermit IS the Shadow. And he has a point.
Can't feel inferior
If you overcompensate until everyone thinks you're superior
🧗 Alfred Adler
"The greater the feeling of inferiority, the more powerful the urge to conquest." Every flex on Instagram. Every lifted truck. Every LinkedIn humble-brag. Adler saw you coming.
When someone gives you conditions of worth instead of unconditional positive regard
But you smile because incongruence is all you know
💚 Carl Rogers
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change." Harold can't change because no one ever accepted him. He just hides the pain.
🔥 BONUS
Kenneth Waltz
Any international event
Is this structural forces?
📐 Kenneth Waltz — Always Structural
"It's not about the butterfly. It was never about the butterfly. It's about the anarchic structure of the international system that produced the butterfly." — Waltz, probably.