When benevolent hegemony turns awry 

The regime change fallacy 

For decades the tool has been the same: remove the bad actor, install something friendlier, let stability follow. The logic is clean on paper, and the intentions are often genuinely held.

But history doesn't support the clean version. Unintended consequences surface years later, sometimes catastrophically, and the underlying system that produced the original problem remains untouched.

Good intentions, examined too shallowly, produce consequences nobody intended and everybody suffers. That gap between intention and action is the thing we consistently fail to examine.

The anthropomorphic fallacy 

There's a second pattern operating underneath the first.

The Anthropomorphic Fallacy is the tendency to project human characteristics onto non-human entities. In geopolitics, this means demonising an entire population for the behaviour of its leadership. Label the government evil and the label migrates to the people. Once that migration happens, almost any action against them becomes justifiable.

It's neither logical nor evidentially true. But it bypasses analysis and activates emotion, which is precisely why it keeps working.

Why we let it happen 

The root condition is this: we've stopped thinking independently.

We consume what confirms our existing beliefs, defer to whoever sits at the top of our particular tribe, and treat speed of consumption as a substitute for understanding. Ideological certainty fills the space where evidence used to sit.

I watched this pattern in platform teams and government agencies for years, the same structure at every scale. The system drifts, leadership doubles down on the original diagnosis, the people closest to the problem say nothing because the tribe has spoken. It moves from a 50-person engineering team to a superpower without changing shape.

What I think 

I don't have a prescription, and I'm genuinely uncertain whether the drift reverses at the collective level.

But individually, the path is clear enough. Ask why, more than once, until you reach the root. Seek the perspective that contradicts yours, especially when it's uncomfortable. Demand evidence that challenges your current position, not just evidence that supports it.

We outsourced our thinking in the name of speed and productivity. The cost of that is playing out right now.

I guess the real question is whether enough people think the cost has finally gotten too high.