You’ve probably heard it said: “it doesn’t matter what you read, just read something.” It’s a popular sentiment among teachers and librarians who earnestly want to inspire a life-long literary habit among the younger generations.

They have a noble aim, but there’s just one problem: their advice is dead wrong.

In actuality, what you read is extremely important. And if you’re reading in order to better understand the world, reading a bad book vs. a good one is the difference between believing outright falsehoods and seeing the world as it really is. The act of reading a book doesn’t shield you from the nonsense that’s present in any other form of media. Bad information is bad information, regardless of the source.

If you look at the bookshelves of any bookstore today or browse the trending category of online sellers, you’ll see a constant influx of new, enticing covers that promise you life-changing information. New tricks and techniques that have only just been discovered recently. You might think you’re missing out by not reading these books, but in most cases you’re better off completely ignoring them.

Your best bet of finding anything worth reading — information that is actually life-changing — is by looking back to books that were written long before you were born. You’ll learn that most new books aren’t really telling us anything new at all. At best they’re repeating watered down versions of what the ancients already told us, and at worst, spouting complete nonsense.

Here are three reasons why old books are where you should focus your time— and I’ll even give you some recommendations to get started.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Survivorship Bias

The first reason that you should read old books over new ones is for the very fact that we still have them around at all.

What do I mean?

If a book is worthless, it doesn’t stay in circulation for more than a few years. You don’t remember all the forgettable books you read when you were younger for the very reason that they were forgettable. They were useless or didn’t provide any real insight. You read them, but you didn’t retain anything from them, and you certainly didn’t recommend them to others..

Now imagine the flip side. Good books have staying power. They stay in circulation a long time, and are passed down for generations. If you read a good book as a child, it stays with you. You might even remember the cover, the illustrations, and the characters. You also remember how the book made you feel, and maybe have suggested it to others or plan on letting your children or future children read it.

Now imagine how useful or important a book has to be to be remembered hundreds or even thousands of years after it was written. So many people have read it and recommended it that it has been preserved for generations.

This is called survivorship bias. We only have the very best of the ancient books (in general) because they were the very best. They are not good because they are old. They are old because they are good. Something about them speaks to the human spirit or shed light on a vital topic that remains relevant generation after generation.

Shakespeare is still taught 400 years after his death because his characters embody human nature. We still read Machiavelli because his formula to obtain power remains relevant for leaders today. And we keep coming back to Aristotle and Plato after two millennia because they took on the big questions that we still wrestle with.

This is a humbling realization when you understand that even the great historical figures were reading the ancients, and those ancients were reaching back even further in time to read authors long before them. The same books have been shaping our civilization throughout its existence — generations have been reading and building upon the same canon of literature until only recently.

For example, Napoleon was obsessed with the work of Plutarch, Alfred the Great personally translated Boethius, and George Washington had a massive library of over 900 books, many of them historic works of the ancients. We’re continuously looking back to the same works because they’re timeless – they’ve stuck around so long for good reason.

I’d say it’s a good idea to continue this tradition and read what the greats did before us. Let’s reclaim this literary lineage. If a book has been around for a long time, it’s probably for a good reason.

Time Gives You a Wider Perspective Than Distance

The second reason you need to focus on old books is that the authors back then will give you a wider perspective on the world. Why?

The older an author is, the more likely it is that he or she will have had a life experience vastly different than yours or any other modern person. This means by reading them, you will gain a more exotic viewpoint than by reading someone similar to yourself.

Think of an ancient like Herodotus, whom Cicero called the “Father of History”. Instead of being an armchair historian, conducting his research via the internet, he personally travelled all over the Mediterranean world to collect first-hand accounts. His travels included Egypt, Persia, Syria, Babylon, and the Black Sea region.

Keep in mind this was a time when travel was extremely difficult and meant encountering dangerous situations like stormy seas, bandits, hunger, or disease — you couldn’t just hop a plane and arrive at your destination in a few hours. This breadth of experience made his writing much more in tune with his subject matter, and represents a worldview shaped by an environment vastly different than today.

A modern historian can’t relate to a classical Athenian, but Herodotus could — so by reading him you’ll gain an authentic classical Athenian perspective. That’s more valuable for understanding the human condition than just another modern attempt at making the ancients sound relatable.

Contrast this with the uniformity of thought today:

Read more

We don’t talk about death in a meaningful way anymore — and this is historically strange.

For most of Western Civilization, death was out in the open, visible to peasant, prince, and child alike. It was deliberately exposed to society as a means of teaching and wisdom. The skull on the philosopher’s desk, the hourglass on the painter’s table, and the ashes pressed into the forehead on Ash Wednesday were not expressions of a culture simply obsessed with the macabre. Instead, they were reminders of our limitations, our natural mortality.

The tradition that produced them was convinced that a life lived in awareness of its own ending was a better life than one lived in denial of it. Memento mori — remember your death — was actually an invitation to live with clarity and purpose…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

The Stoics

The phrase itself is Latin, and its origins are curiously institutional rather than philosophical. In accounts of the Roman triumph (a military victory parade), a slave would stand behind the successful general during the procession and remind him, from time to time, of his own mortality. At the height of his glory, surrounded by cheering crowds and the spectacle of conquest, the most powerful man in Rome was made to hear the words: remember, you will die. The reminder was built into the ceremony itself, because the Romans understood that a man is most tempted to forget his limits when on the heels of a great victory.

The Stoic philosophers habitualized what the Roman army acted out post-victory. Seneca, writing to his friend Lucilius, urged:

“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing. Let us balance life’s books each day.”

Similarly, Marcus Aurelius, running an empire from a military camp on the Danube, wrote to himself in private:

“You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.”

For Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the daily contemplation of death wasn’t pessimism. Regular contemplation of mortality was an antidote to procrastination and a motivation to action. If you believe death may fall upon you in the night, you would be wise not to waste the afternoon. You’ll also find yourself concerned with meaningful action, careful speech, and guarded thoughts.

Because the mind naturally drifts away from uncomfortable truths toward distraction, the Stoics viewed the contemplation of death as an act of the will, a discipline requiring daily effort. The memento mori corrects the passive slide into vices, especially sloth and pride. It compelled the Stoics to consider each day as potentially their last, giving them an urgency to live virtuously.

Memento Mori in Art

It should come with little surprise that when Renaissance artists looked back to the Romans, they picked up on the theme of the memento mori. The Renaissance welcomed death as a visual contemplation on our mortality for nearly three centuries.

But the memento mori first made its way into Medieval art through the Danse Macabre where Death appeared as a skeleton and danced with popes, emperors, merchants, peasants — even children. The imagery appeared on church walls across Europe, largely spurred by the grim events of the Black Death. The Grim Reaper, the hooded scythe-wielding figure of Death in, developed out of a darker 19th century take on Danse Macabre art.

The memento mori gained great popularity with the Renaissance artists, who, with centuries of Medieval backdrop to draw from, settled the skull naturally into scenes of learning and sanctity. The skull wasn’t used as a symbol for horror and fear as it is today, but rather as the philosopher’s or the saint’s companion, as the more piercing symbol of life’s finiteness than the benign hourglass.

St. Jerome, the great scholar of the early Church who translated the Bible into Latin, was among the most painted saints of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and he often appeared with a skull nearby. Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing places the skull directly on the saint’s desk, its profile deliberately counterbalancing Jerome’s own aged head. Beyond it reflecting merely the holy disposition of St. Jerome, however, it also reminds us of the gravity and longevity of his work — translation of the Latin Vulgate — that would long outlast himself.

In 1521, Dürer painted St. Jerome in his study surrounded by objects symbolizing transience — the skull, a snuffed-out candle, and a piece of paper tacked to the wall reading Respice Finem: consider the end. The painting was a sensation, and the type became a specialty of local workshops, spawning dozens of versions across Northern Europe.

St. Francis of Assisi was treated similarly across generations of painters, from Zurbarán to Guido Reni. The skull in Franciscan iconography carried specific theological weight because Francis himself called death his “sister,” and Franciscan sources consistently described death as the doorway to life. The skull on his desk reflected the Christian belief that death was not an end but rather a passage.

With the Enlightenment’s detraction from Christianity, Dutch painters of the seventeenth century took this further by removing the saints and letting the objects speak for themselves. A sputtering candle, half-eaten food, an hourglass — all gentle reminders of finitude. But somewhere among these objects would still rest the skull. Often these still paintings contrasted the beauty of fine tables and trinkets against the naked skull, emphasizing the futility of worldly possessions.

Holbein made a similar argument with particular brilliance in The Ambassadors, where a distorted skull stretches across the bottom of the canvas, visible only when viewed from an oblique angle. Death was in plain sight, but only comprehensible from the right angle, or in my own interpretation, the right theology.

The Church’s Reminder

No institution in Western history has done more to keep death visible than the Catholic Church. And it did so for theology rather than morbidity, because a faith hinging on death and resurrection can’t hide death away.

Christianity’s early history was naturally close to death. Aside from the obvious death and resurrection of Jesus, the early Christians were persecuted and killed for their Christian faith at certain junctures in their first four centuries. Often, to skirt death above, Christians worshiped among the dead below — in the catacombs surrounded by images of resurrection — fish, bread, the raising of Lazarus.

To many outsiders, the Christians likely appeared obsessed with death in a strange way. They eventually took up a method of Roman execution — the cross — as the central symbol of their faith, while their liturgies were full of the language of sacrifice. Christianity thus bears a duality of attitudes: a solemn knowledge of death but joyous hope in resurrection.

The liturgical calendar encoded this conviction into the rhythms of ordinary life. Once a year, on a Wednesday at the start of Lent, Christians come forward to receive ashes on the forehead and hear the words drawn from Genesis: “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” All receive the same public mark, as far back as the 13th century. The Bishop of Rome — the most powerful figure in Western Christendom — bowed his head to receive the same ashes and hear the same words as every peasant in every parish. It became a tradition for the popes to receive ashes at the Basilica of Santa Sabina on Aventine Hill. The Ash Wednesday form of memento mori flattened Church hierarchy for a moment, reminding all that death and judgement were impartial.

The Church’s treatment of death runs still deeper in its liturgical imagination: whenever it celebrates a saint’s feast day, it celebrates the dies natalis — the day of their birth into heaven, which is to say, the day they died. In this inversion lies a fundamental Christian theology: death is not the end of the story but its decisive turning point, the threshold of Heaven.

Among written works, the Ars Moriendi — the art of dying well — was among the most widely circulated texts of the medieval period. It was a practical guide to preparing for death that was read by ordinary Christians who understood that dying well required preparation and practice. St. Alphonsus Liguori extended this tradition into the 18th century with his Preparation for Death, a sustained meditation on mortality as a spiritual discipline.

The overarching premise of these saints, liturgies, and practices was that the person who has thought seriously about death is more capable of living well than the person who has not. Ecclesiastes recognized long ago the urgency that death forces upon life:

“Remember also your Creator in the days of your youth, . . . before the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Eccl. 12:1-7)

But much of what we used to know, we have since forgotten, especially on subject of death…

Read more

It’s popular now to say that the West is in decline — and it’s certainly something I’ve written about many times. The signs are all too apparent: a crushing cost of living, plummeting birthrates, and increasing political instability.

But most people make a huge mistake when they think about decline. They imagine it and feel a sense of impending doom. They think it means the end of their personal story.

History shows us a paradox, though. When Rome crumbled, there were certain groups of people who didn’t merely survive — they actually ascended. While the world spiraled into chaos, these groups built foundations that lasted for centuries, seemingly immune from the decline around them.

How did they do it? And what can we learn from them?

By examining history’s most chaotic periods, I’ve uncovered three principles that make an individual — and their lineage — truly resilient. These are the pillars that allowed the survivors of history’s dying empires to weather the storm and plant the seeds of new civilizations.

If you master these three things, you’ll be following in the footsteps of history’s greatest overcomers — those who didn’t let their environment slow them down. Like them, you also can ascend amidst the decline around you.

Faith First

The first pillar that allows individuals to transcend the chaos is an unflinching religious faith. At first this might sound like a cliché, but from a historical perspective, faith is the bedrock of every great civilization. There is no such thing as a great culture that is not, at its core, a religious culture.

Historian Will Durant claimed a culture’s success was intrinsically tied to its religiosity. Strong nations were born out of faithful people, but when religion dwindled, things started to fall apart. Durant, who had studied dozens of civilizations and wrote the classic work The Story of Civilization, claimed that cultures always begin with religious fervor which gives a nation strength to overcome great difficulty.

It’s their faith in a higher power that allows them to bear the initial “growth pains” that precede prosperity. In Greece and Rome, for example, mythologies told of heroes who battled overwhelming adversity to accomplish their goals. These myths inspired their peoples to overcome struggles while offering an ideal to strive for.

It’s also of note that a people’s religion is actually strengthened by hardship. Durant writes that “...a firm faith will explain that it was the sins of the people that turned their gods to an avenging wrath; evil does not destroy faith, but strengthens it.” Durant believed tough times were actually essential to building the character and faith of a nation.

And the reverse means the downfall of a civilization and its religion: once success and abundance are eventually attained, the seeds of a culture’s downfall has already been planted. Durant writes:

“If victory comes, if war is forgotten in security and peace, then wealth grows… toil and suffering are replaced by pleasure and ease; science weakens faith even while thought and comfort weaken virility and fortitude…”

When there are no great struggles left, people tend to lose their religiosity, and an analytical yet nihilistic ethos dominates the culture. Sound familiar? This certainly sounds like where we are today.

Durant was far from the only thinker to link a culture’s religiosity with its success. English historian Arnold Toynbee pointed toward religious faith as a key way for people to transcend decline. He used the early Christian saints and martyrs as examples of this overcoming. Though they faced hardship and persecution, their suffering was actually instrumental in reinforcing their faith and helping to spread Christianity. This religious foundation eventually forged Western civilization. Instead of hardship being an obstacle, it was directed in a new, creative way. Toynbee writes:

“It is not, then, by seeking to escape suffering, but by embracing and responding to it, that the soul born into a disintegrating society can win release and regain…the path of growth from which his society has strayed…”

So if religion is what allows cultures to overcome suffering and hardship, it follows that faith must be embraced by those who wish to flourish during the decline of a dying civilization. Only through true belief can one find the strength to carry on during hard times and help right the course of a wandering ship.

Think Like a Dynasty

The second pillar necessary to transcend the decay of modern culture is what I call a dynastic mindset. To ensure your efforts actually outlast the current instability, you need to start thinking generationally.

All of the great civilizations throughout history were built on the idea of family and dynasty — why build anything at all if it will simply disappear after you’re gone? Longevity requires thinking beyond mere lifespans and embracing a generational approach.

For example, there were families in ancient Rome who lasted throughout all of its political turmoil, wars of succession, and changes in government — dynasties that lasted centuries. They proved that family was more powerful than institutions.

You may have heard of the Julii clan who gave us Julius Caesar. This clan was one of the original patrician families that were present when Rome was still a kingdom. Some legends even connect them to the time of Rome’s founder Romulus. Despite their legendary origins, they sunk into relative obscurity for a century and a half. For a time, they didn’t have any notable members even though they were still an elite family who held considerable political power.

But this shows us how resilient generational thinking is. They reemerged in full force in the late republic, and once Julius Caesar burst on the scene, they became part of the Julio-Claudian dynasty which gave us Rome’s first imperial dynasty.

Families outlive institutions and governments when approached with a generational and deliberate mindset. Decades or even centuries of unassuming groundwork can shape entire societies. And some families can even outlive empires…

Read more

What are you doing with your mind? Ancient thinkers have been concerned with that question long before the advent of mindless scrolling on social media.

For most of Western history, how the mind was being used was central to the philosophy on living a good life. The quality of your attention was not incidental to who you were, but rather a reflection of your discipline and character.

Past thinkers recognized a duty to exercise your mind, seeing the sin of Sloth as applying equally to the mind and the body. The ancient world built entire disciplines around this conviction. We have built an entire economy — the attention economy — around destroying it.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Wisdom of the Philosophers

Plato recognized the impact of what we think about and how it affects our soul in Book VI of The Republic:

“The soul is like the eye: when resting upon that on which truth and being shine, the soul perceives and understands and is radiant with intelligence; but when turned towards the twilight of becoming and perishing, then she has opinion only, and goes blinking about.”

Typical of Plato, this is a metaphysical claim — that the inner life is not a fixed thing but a dynamic one, continuously shaped by whatever it is allowed to dwell upon. The soul, for Plato and for virtually all subsequent Western ideas, was something being formed, moment by moment, by the direction of its own gaze.

This wasn’t simply an abstract conviction confined to the circles of the philosophers, either. Instead, it shaped how the Greeks organized education. The paideia, the classical formation of the young, was built on the premise that what a child was exposed to, what stories he heard, what music he absorbed, what images surrounded him, would form him at a deeper level than instruction. Plato famously wanted certain poets (not all of them) censored from his ideal city because he thought Homer’s gods, quarrelsome and petty, were shaping the souls of Athenian boys in the wrong direction. Even the enemies of Socrates argued for his condemnation on allegations of poisoning the minds of the youth with his ideas. The Greeks were particularly sensitive to the intellectual influences on their youth, because they recognized their power in shaping whole generations.

Marcus Aurelius returned to the same conviction in the Meditations, a private journal never intended for publication, written while campaigning on the Danube frontier:

“Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

Marcus was reminding himself, in the midst of war and administration, that the interior life required its own discipline.

Aristotle went further, arguing in the Nicomachean Ethics that contemplation was not merely a useful habit but the highest activity available to a human being, the one most fully expressing what we are. To be chronically distracted, in this framework, was not merely to be inefficient in the modern sense that everyone believes they have ADHD. It was to fail at being human in the most fundamental sense — a failure to truly live.

Engineered Attention

Against this classical backdrop, we question (to Aristotle’s point) whether modern man is really living at all. Our attention today is ruled by screens, apps, and social media feeds. The last is a comical term, as we’re clearly being fed content, like hogs to grain.

The attention economy is not a neutral development or an inevitable consequence of technological progress. It is an engineered system, built around human attention as a finite resource, and whoever captures it can monetize it. Every feed, notification, and algorithmically-optimized scroll is the product of huge investments and some of the sharpest technical minds of a generation, all directed toward one end: to keep you from leaving.

The mechanisms are now well documented. Sean Parker, one of Facebook’s founding presidents, admitted in 2017 that the platform was deliberately designed to consume as much of users’ time and attention as possible — exploiting the dopamine hit that comes with someone liking or commenting on their post. Intermittent variable rewards like these (the same structure that makes slot machines effective) keep our fingers scrolling instead of powering off our phones. Further, content engineered for outrage and anxiety are privileged in our feeds because these topics hold attention longer than uplifting content. The infinite scroll was designed without a stopping point because stopping points allow people to leave.

While these highly addictive apps have earned plenty of criticism over the years, the bigger questions are typically never asked. The wasting of hours a day in a virtual town center is one thing. But a larger concern of mine is how the constant consumption of short, viral media degrades the capacity for the kind of attention that the ancient world considered essential to a fully human life. Sustained focus, the ability to stay with a difficult text, a long argument, a moment of silence: these skills all atrophy without practice. Older generations raised without these addictive technologies but getting sucked into them later is one thing — they may become rusty on such skill they had in their youth. But what happens when generations are now raised that never attained these skills in the first place? All the later generations will know is an 8 second attention span. A mind trained from childhood to expect constant stimulation might not simply be delayed in the skills of contemplation: I fear they may lose the capability of deep thought altogether.

A New Era of Soft Minds

The losses are harder to see because they are interior.

Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, produced across decades of sustained intellectual labor, was a teaching document. It assumed students who could hold an intricate argument in mind across sessions, return to it, dispute it, and be changed by it. The letters of Erasmus, Thomas More, of later figures like Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke often contained careful arguments, sometimes running to thousands of words. That organization of the mind has not disappeared because people devolved naturally. It has been dismantled by an environment that rewards speed and punishes depth.

John Cassian, writing in the fifth century, described the wandering of the mind during prayer (what he called logismoi) as the central spiritual struggle of the interior life and prescribed specific disciplines for it. The Desert Fathers, the Benedictine lectio divina, the hesychast tradition of the Eastern Church all built their practice around the same premise that inner quiet was not a natural state but a victory for the contemplative, prayerful soul. The modern person has not escaped that struggle. We have simply lost the disciplines and multiplied the distractions.

Two decades of the attention economy softened the mind’s tolerance for difficulty itself. The capacity to sit with a hard question, to read against resistance, to follow a long argument without relief, quietly eroded through the accumulated habit of always reaching for the easier thing. By the time AI arrived, the ground had already been long prepared by smart phones, social media, and video games.

While AI didn’t cause the crisis of attention, it arrived at precisely the moment when the mind, already softened, was most vulnerable to the offer it presents: hand over the hard work of thinking. The friction that once forced the mind to slow down and actually engage with difficulty has been engineered away. The temptation is no longer merely distraction, but rather complete abdication from challenging thought.

Aristotle’s claim was not that contemplation produces good results, or (by extension) that it will ever outperform AI in terms of efficiency, speed, and completeness. He posed instead that contemplation is a fundamentally human activity. A person who permanently outsources that activity then becomes in many ways less human and more vegetative.

Read more

There is something in the Western soul that can’t sit still. Other civilizations built empires, yes — but they built them to stabilize rather than to expand. The West built empires and then kept going. It crossed oceans not merely to trade but to discover. It mapped the stars not merely to navigate but to understand. The West asked not just “how do we survive?” but “what lies beyond that horizon?”.

But this Western ethos is not simply ambition. It is something praiseworthy in moral judgement until it gets polluted into ambition — that is a central danger the West is wrestling with which we will return to.

Christopher Dawson, the great Catholic historian of culture, identified what he called the “missionary character” of Western civilization: a compulsion to transform the world. The West, uniquely among civilizations, has always exported itself. Its ideas, faith, institutions, and art were not made for itself, but for the whole world. There was always another people to convert, another land to civilize, another problem to solve, another frontier to push.

Similarly, Oswald Spengler, writing from a more aloof vantage point, said much the same thing. The defining symbol of Western culture, he argued, was not the Greek temple or any other tangible figure but the infinite plane. The West, in his mind, is Faustian: always reaching, always expanding, oriented not toward harmony or stillness like in the East but toward the unlimited. Its mathematics invented calculus — the mathematics of infinitesimal change and limits to infinity. Its architecture built cathedrals that pointed to heaven. Its music reached for ever greater grandeur.

Both men were describing the same energy. The question neither fully answered was: what happens to that energy when it has nowhere transcendent to go?

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

When the Hunger Turns Inward

The frontier, in every meaningful sense, has closed. The age of earthly discovery is over. The entire world is not only just mapped, but constantly photographed by satellites orbiting above and displayed to anyone via Google. But more importantly, the inner frontier that once gave Western expansion its moral weight has also receded. The idea that the West carried something worth giving — a faith, a civilization, a vision of human dignity — has been largely abandoned by the West itself, hollowed out by self-doubt and historical guilt.

What remains is the West’s quest for the infinite, with nothing big enough left to accommodate it. Stripped of its orientation toward something beyond itself, the old Faustian drive simply turned inward, resulting in a practice of extraction rather than transformation.

Look at where the bulk of our best Western minds now direct their energy. They don’t seek to build institutions that outlast them, nor complete the kinds of civilizational projects that once consumed the best of a generation. Instead, an enormous portion of Western intellectual horsepower is devoted to a single obsessive question: how do I make money without making anything? The ideal is no longer the explorer or the builder or even the industrialist. The idea for many early 20-30 year olds is the man who has found the algorithm, the loophole, or the pattern in the market that will make him rich beyond imagination. Entire subcultures are organized around decoding the stock market not as a mechanism for allocating capital toward productive ends, but as a puzzle to be solved before the next man beats can. The vocabulary is telling, too: plays, positions, edges. That is a language of strategy without purpose.

This is not an attack on capitalism. Capitalism, at its best, was itself a Faustian enterprise — building, risking, creating. What we are describing is something more parasitic: the Faustian drive fully unmoored, seeking infinite return for minimal creation. It searches for expansion without exploration and gain without effort.

The Destroyer of Just Society

The ancient Greeks had identified this pathology long before it became civilizational.

They called it pleonexia, the desire to have more than one’s share. Aristotle placed it at the center of his political philosophy as the great destroyer of just communities. It was not merely greed in the vulgar sense; it was the disposition of the soul that could never be satisfied, that measured its own worth entirely in terms of accumulation relative to others. The pleonektes (the one afflicted with this desire) was not simply rich, but actually incapable of the kind of self-control that makes friendship, justice, and genuine community possible.

What Aristotle understood, and what we have largely forgotten, is that unchecked desire is both a personal failing and a political one. A civilization biased toward pleonexia does not merely produce unhappy individuals; it produces institutions, cultures, and incentive structures that systematically reward the wrong things and punish the right ones. It elevates the schemer above the builder, the extractor above the creator, the man who found the shortcut above the man who did the work.

The West’s aimless hunger also mirrors how personal self-focus relates to depression. As the renowned psychologist Jordan Peterson has said, “There’s a direct relationship between how much you’re thinking about yourself and how miserable you are.” Likewise, when a civilization with an inherently outward-facing character turns its focus to its interior, it loses the vitality that made it great in the first place.

The Greeks did not think this was inevitable. They thought it was a choice made collectively, over time, through cultural habits and the virtues a people chooses to honor. If enough people choose to put their energy into building, exploring, and creating a healthy culture, they become the proof of a civilization once again looking outward rather than inward.

Read more

We live in an age of pure convenience — an age where human effort has, in some sense, been conquered. But what feels effortless to us as end consumers belies an extraordinarily complex underbelly. Every one of our comforts rests on immense networks of human beings: systems built, maintained, and advanced by millions of minds working in coordination.

This complexity has a cost, too. As civilizations grow, they do not simply become more advanced; they also become more dependent. More people build more infrastructure. More infrastructure enables more comfort and interdependence. That interdependence allows for further specialization, and specialization produces still greater complexity.

But there is a second half to this equation.

As civilizations become more complex, they require more people to sustain them. A small society can remain simple, but a large one can’t. Modern life is not something a small group could recreate or even maintain. Then, every leap in technology requires a critical population to achieve it. For example, the modern semiconductor fab could never be built by a thousand-person village. Ninety percent or more of that village would be farmers or hunters simply to survive. Only sufficient scale can advance civilization.

And that raises a question we have only recently begun to recognize: what happens when the number of people begins to fall?

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

The Scaling of Civilization

The smaller the society, the more self-sufficient it tends to be. The earliest human groups — small, nomadic bands — lived close to the edge of survival. Most members contributed directly to food, water, shelter, and defense. There was little room for specialization because survival demanded nearly everyone’s full attention.

These societies were resilient in the sense that they were insular. Their smallness allowed them to move and adapt to local crises, but it also limited their ability to develop complex systems. There were no spare hands to build them. Even today, the pattern holds: the more isolated a family becomes, the more its time must be devoted to survival.

As populations grew into the thousands, agriculture emerged (or perhaps more accurately, enabled that growth). This was not merely a dietary change, but a civilizational one. Farming required permanence, and permanence demanded coordination. In the Nile River Valley, irrigation cycles required shared labor and timing; in Mesopotamia, early cities like Ur depended on grain storage and redistribution to function.

Most importantly, agriculture introduced surplus, and surplus introduced specialization. Not everyone needed to farm anymore. A portion of the population could instead craft tools, organize governance, conduct trade, or shape religious life. For the first time, societies could sustain roles dedicated to advancement over mere survival. Complex civilizations required numbers.

Classical Civilizations

This trend toward increasing non-survival labor reached new heights in the classical world.

The early Greek city-states (not forgetting the Mycenaeans as a critical precedent), some numbering in the hundreds of thousands, developed systems of governance, philosophy, and military organization that still shape the world today. Their scale allowed for many thinkers, soldiers, artisans, and administrators, each of these categories with their own slew of subcategories. They reached a societal complexity that no single individual could fully comprehend in all its moving parts.

Rome only brought that complexity to new heights, to awe the world not only in its complexity but most acutely in applying that complexity across such a vast territory: a true pan-continental empire.

At its height, Rome governed tens of millions. Its roads stretched over 250,000 miles. Its aqueducts delivered running water into cities like Rome itself, which likely exceeded one million inhabitants. Grain shipments from Egypt fed the capital, while legions secured borders from Britain to the Near East.

None of this was accidental, nor natural, because the building and shaping of our environment in ways never before seen is a hallmark of humanity. Humans question, imagine, and create — not merely repeat patterns as other creatures do.

Back to Rome, it took generations of engineers, laborers, soldiers, and administrators all operating within a system so vast that its stability depended on constant maintenance. Food could not stop being produced while aqueducts were being built. The soldiers could not stop defending the Roman borders while the Colosseum was constructed.

All parts of the society were intertwined, and if just one thread were pulled loose, even a civilization as mighty as Rome could — and did — collapse. The belief that Rome was invincible was no different than the claim that the Titanic was unsinkable: there is no true law of “too big to fail.”

In its later days, populations declined, trade networks fractured, and infrastructure deteriorated. Without the maintainers of a complex society, a civilization reverses into simpler modes of existence. The “dark ages” were not primarily the result of religious backwardness, but of fragmentation: political, cultural, and demographic. As unity dissolved, so too did the ability to sustain large-scale systems.

Complexity is contingent; it exists only so long as there are enough unified people to sustain it…

Read more

Your choice of heroes is the most important decision you’ll ever make.

Why? Because Napoleon spent his entire life trying to be Caesar. Caesar idolized Alexander the Great, and Alexander imagined himself as the next Achilles. Who you idolize shapes who you become.

From a historical perspective, focusing on “the greats” can force us to wrestle with difficult yet vital questions on a societal level: Who should we hold up as exemplary figures in our society? Who should we teach our young men and women to emulate?

The framing of history that addresses these questions head on is the Great Man Theory of history. It’s a controversial idea proposed by 19th-century historian Thomas Carlyle, who argued that “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.”

Carlyle believed that history isn’t shaped by the masses, but by the will of heroes — elite figures who should be followed and revered for their inherent genius. But this isn’t simply a history lesson. If Carlyle is right, it means your choice of who to follow is the single most important factor in who you will become.

So let’s uncover the secrets of the Great Man Theory — how you can use it to unlock your full potential, and also, why you’ve probably never been taught it in your school’s history class….

The Driving Force of History

So first, where did Great Man Theory come from, and just what exactly does it say?

Thomas Carlyle first gave a series of lectures on the topic of heroism in 1840. These lectures were later published into a book entitled On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History. One of the book’s main theses was the Great Man Theory of history.

Carlyle argued that heroes shape history through both their personal attributes and “divine inspiration” — the world essentially turns on the ideas and decisions of elite men. Carlyle writes:

“Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here. They were the leaders of men, these great ones; the modelers, patterns, and in a wide sense creators, of whatsoever the general mass of men contrived to do or to attain…the soul of the whole world’s history, it may justly be considered, were the history of these.”

But how do these great men emerge? Where do they come from? And what makes one great in the first place?

Carlyle based his theory on a couple assumptions. The first assumption is that great leaders are born, not made — Carlyle emphasized nature over nurture. Heroes inherently possess the traits that enable them to rise to the occasion and lead on instinct. Therefore, those who rise to power usually deserve to lead because of their abilities.

The second assumption is that great men rise only when a unique set of circumstances plays out — they don’t emerge in a vacuum. Though every aspect of history isn’t necessarily dependent on great men, heroes are the decisive factor in solving the problems of societies. They’re the weight that tips the scales one way or another.

What Defines a Great Man?

Carlyle’s heroes are utterly unique and possess a certain creative genius that can’t be made up for with any amount of raw manpower. How many Roman legions are the equivalent to a Julius Caesar? How many minor poets will give us a Shakespeare? The hero is unquantifiable.

Carlyle’s hero is somewhat similar to Aristotle’s conception of the magnanimous, or “great-souled,” man. The great-souled man is a man who possesses archetypal human virtue in the active sense, meaning he acts upon the world as opposed to having a more contemplative nature. The magnanimous man is a person of action.

In Carlyle’s conception, the hero isn’t perfect, though. The world is filled with contradictions that the hero has to deal with. Thus, all heroes will be flawed.

But here’s the key…

It’s precisely because they aren’t perfect that they can serve as a pattern for others to imitate. This imitation is the force that moves history forward. For example, Alexander the Great and his phalanxes set the template for ancient warfare. It would be hundreds of years before his methods were defeated. Likewise, Napoleon used artillery in an overwhelming fashion in a way no one had done before. Future generals took note and copied his tactics.

But Carlyle’s heroes aren’t just military or political figures. He identified six types of hero, encompassing all facets of human life:

1. the divine hero (like Odin)

2. the prophet (like Muhammad)

3. the poet (like Shakespeare)

4. he priest (like Martin Luther)

5. the man of letters (like Rousseau) and

6. the king (like Napoleon)

Thus there is a hero for every interest one can have. And this is where it gets personal, because Carlyle believed that who our heroes are shapes us…

Read more

We often assume our world of technology and relative peace is the default state of human affairs — but it isn’t.

For most of history, life was brutal and short. Civilization is not a guarantee. As Kenneth Clark lamented in his acclaimed 1969 television series Civilisation, “however complex and solid it seems, [civilization] is actually quite fragile. It can be destroyed.”

Civilization, then, is a delicate achievement that requires constant maintenance. When that maintenance fails — as it did during the fall of Rome or the Bronze Age collapse — the darkness of illiteracy and violence becomes the historical norm once again.

So that means that in order to maintain a civilization, each generation must do its part. Fathers and mothers must pass on accumulated wisdom to their children, and when those children grow up, they must do the same in turn. Now today, Gen Z is the next generation to take the mantle. If you’re in this group, you’re beginning to have an impact on society at large. This is a great responsibility, and also a great challenge because our civilization is seemingly in such a fragile state.

With this in mind, I want to show you why, even as a seemingly advanced society, collapse is never far off. And it is only by understanding history that we can predict our future and arm ourselves with the tools to become great men and women of consequence who will stave off civilizational decline and build a better future.

So here are 3 ways that understanding history will change the way you see the world — and hopefully help you play a part in solving the challenges we face today.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

A Warning System For Decline

We can only understand the state of our current civilization in light of the cycles of history. To the casual observer, we are wealthy, well-fed, and entertained. Life is good right?

But to the historical mind, cracks are everywhere. One only needs to read a classic like Edwards Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to see them.

Gibbon basically performed a “civilizational autopsy.” He posited that Rome didn’t necessarily suffer a sudden death from a single powerful blow. Rather, it eroded over centuries. The warning signs — currency debasement, reliance on mercenaries, political instability, a widening gap between rich and poor, and plummeting birth rates— were all present long before Rome officially collapsed. Yet, most Romans failed to notice as they continued their daily lives nearly uninterrupted.

Gibbon called this the “natural effect of immoderate greatness.” Success bred a complacency that made self-correction impossible. Why sacrifice for the common good when prosperity feels guaranteed? This is precisely how decline arrives unannounced through the path of least resistance.

This pattern is not unique to antiquity, of course, and the symptoms Gibbon identified probably ring a bell to you. Other cultures have undergone the same cycle, and the signs are present in our own civilization. Rampant inflation, a faltering middle class, and plummeting birth rates are all too common news items in the West today.

Historical literacy serves as an early-warning system for these symptoms, though.

The person who has studied Gibbon or the collapse of the Weimar Republic possesses a pattern recognition that others lack. They realize that we are not fundamentally different from the Romans. They, too, assumed that because their world had always endured, it always would.

They were wrong.

A Blueprint For Survival

Ok, so history provides a detection system for failure, but it also offers a blueprint for survival, which is the second reason you need to understand history

History shows us how civilizations endure. Only when they treat their survival as a serious problem to be solved each and every day do societies make it through the many “great filters” that stand in their way.

One example is the long-lasting Byzantine Empire. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the East thrived for another thousand years. The Byzantines survived because they understood that civilization requires active maintenance…

Read more

What we know about history is an illusion. We often speak about ancient peoples as “primitive” and “unsophisticated”, but these broad characterizations really only reveal our own simplicity.

Our “modernity bias” presupposes that we are the most intelligent generation to ever exist, and human intelligence is a declining metric as we peer backward in time. This leaves us with the assumption that cavemen were stupid, we are smart, and everyone in between was, well, in between.

But what serious historians know (and rarely tell us) is that history, anthropology, archaeology, and its sisters are inherently limited. They study the scattered writings, ruins, and tools that haven’t been given quite enough time to return to dust before being pulled into a museum

Hence, what we know of the past is not merely based on what existed, but instead of the much smaller category of what survived.

Our picture of the past, then, is not only incomplete, but naturally biased toward incompleteness — and that inherent incompleteness means that modern historians (and the public alike) will always underestimate the intelligence, capabilities, and complexities of past humanity.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

The Problem of Survivorship

Most human activity leaves no trace: conversations, daily habits, clothing, and local knowledge can fade away in merely a generation. Some artifacts may last many generations with careful storage, things like letters, paper, various heirlooms, wooden tools, and the like. But fewer items can last beyond a millennium: coins, weapons, armor, jewelry, etc. Of things that last several millennia, we are typically only left with what is large and therefore slow to return to dust: megalithic structures, buried cities, and deep engravings in stone.

As we look back into recent history, what survives is largely accidental, perhaps simply those knickknacks left by a grandparent in a chest in the attic. But as we look back farther into history, we find relatively fewer artifacts as a result of mere accident and more as a result of past peoples to create permanence. While this is stating the obvious, the implication then is that our knowledge of peoples further back in history is proportionally overinfluenced by the grand structures (aimed at permanence) that have survived. It’s no surprise, then, that we tend to think of “primitive” peoples as dominated culturally by purely religious or superstitious belief and cartoonishly void of practical, political, and personal qualities.

As an example, when we think of the pyramids at Giza, we assume they were the central focus of Egyptian society, ignoring the probable idea that it was very likely only one (admittedly impressive) feature of an ancient city. We are very likely to see the pyramids as a holy and serious site, and very unlikely to see that the children of the surrounding town probably enjoyed bouncing balls off its faces. This particular fact is conjecture, of course, but it’s entirely more reasonable to assume past humans did human things than to assert past humans only did what we can know from the dirt.

The survivorship bias will always result in an inadequate picture of past human society; alone, survivorship bias will lead us to the conclusion that more ancient humans must be dumber humans. Entire domains of intelligence (practical skills, social complexity, moral reasoning) are largely invisible archaeologically. Drawing conclusions about the intelligence of past mankind from merely what is found in the dirt risks judging a civilization by its trash heap or a handful of ruins.

Misreading the Evidence

Archaeologists and historians often interpret artifacts as representative of a whole culture. G.K. Chesterton noted in The Everlasting Man that the historians of his day assigned deep religious significance to some crude cave drawings. But Chesterton scoffed at these assumptions that limited the sophistication of prehistoric man to these drawings, offering that the sketches could equally well have been the drawings of a prehistoric child. The danger here is that we project meaning (or lack of it) onto ambiguous evidence. When we look for meaning in prehistoric doodles, we might equally wonder what our grandchildren might think of us if the only thing they inherit is our drawings made in boredom.

The sophistication of the caveman must surpass our understanding of them based on the limited drawings, tools, and other random artifacts we have discovered. What if the more sophisticated aspects of ancient societies simply didn’t survive?

Then, we also might realize that what cavemen had in their heads might not be represented by the physical evidence, even if all of it were well-preserved. The mind of the caveman was likely no lesser to ours. Perhaps we have merely been afforded the luxury to think about it, while they were using their minds constantly for survival. Few modern men would even survive the world of the cavemen (at least our understanding of it). Most today can’t make a fire without a lighter, forage the local flora, skin an animal, or construct even simple tools from purely natural products. But the caveman could — and probably could do much more that we can say.

Read more

In 1787 Alexander Hamilton argued that the United States should resemble an elective monarchy, featuring a strong national leader elected for life. It might sound like heresy to modern Americans, but his idea had some merit — and exposes a shortcoming of modern democracy.

Although Hamilton enjoys pride of place among historical figures as a founding father of the United States, his support for centralized government and a powerful executive has tarnished his image today. This isn’t surprising considering he referred to the British governmental system — which America fought a war to disentangle itself from — as the “best in the world.”

Despite his blemished reputation, Hamilton advocated for “good government” which pursued longevity and stability. And his original plan for America sheds light on the weaknesses of today’s political systems…

Hamilton’s King

Hamilton gave an impassioned, six-hour-long speech at the constitutional convention laying out his plan for the government and a powerful executive head. Despite his zeal, though, it was resoundingly voted down in favor of the system the U.S. has today. But what did Hamilton advocate for exactly?

Sympathetic to Britain’s strong monarchy, Hamilton proposed a system that was similar to his former allegiance’s government. But unlike the British monarchy, where power was transferred via bloodline, Hamilton’s leader — referred to as the national “governor” — would be an elected figure.

Hamilton lays out his vision for the executive during his speech:

“The supreme Executive authority of the United States to be vested in a Governor, to be elected to serve during good behavior; the election to be made by Electors chosen by the people in the Election Districts aforesaid.”

Essentially, the governor would retain power for life as long as misconduct did not force an impeachment by congress i.e. “to serve during good behavior.” And he would have a broad swathe of powers, including the ability to veto any law, make treaties, and appoint all chief officers of the Departments of Finance, War, Foreign Affairs, etc. Notably, the executive would also appoint state governors, giving him more power than today’s president.

Hamilton’s monarch-like governor would wield enough power domestically to resist foreign influence, while the possibility of impeachment prevented tyranny. It was a balance of incentives, Hamilton envisioned, that ensured a functional, yet limited rule.

Historical Precedent

As a well-educated man, Hamilton drew from history for much of his worldview. Like other founding fathers, he admired the Roman Republic specifically, calling it the “utmost height of human greatness” in the Federalist Papers. But before Rome was a republic, it was a kingdom with an elective monarch…

After the first legendary king of Rome Romulus, who took power by killing his brother Remus, monarchs were elected by the Roman people via the Curiate Assembly, who voted on candidates pre-selected by the senate. Though it was ultimately up to the Roman citizenry who became king, the senate held much of the power during the process.

Touted as the successor of Rome, the Holy Roman Empire (HRE), likewise had an elective monarchy. In the HRE the emperor was appointed by a small body of the most powerful princes, or “prince-electors.” Once a leader was selected, the coronation of the emperor took place in either Aachen or Frankfurt, whereupon the prince would become monarch.

The longevity of the Holy Roman Empire, spanning hundreds of years, was a testament to the strength of the system. In fact, it was still intact during the time of the constitutional convention. Though Hamilton critiqued the HRE’s fractured structure, he clearly had no qualms with its monarchical system.

Another contemporary elective monarchy to Hamilton was that of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Poles held “free elections” upon the death of a monarch, where any Catholic nobleman might be considered for the position. The Polish system was not as successful as the HRE’s, though, as infighting and even full on battle often occurred between candidates. Historian Norman Davies recorded that “in 1764, when only thirteen electors were killed, it was said that the Election was unusually quiet.”

Though uncommon today, elective monarchies were not unheard of when Hamilton made his speech to the constitutional convention in 1787.

So why specifically did Hamilton want a monarch-like system? And could it work in America today?

Read more

Every great civilization eventually reaches a point where its power remains visible, but its foundations begin to erode.

Fiscal strain, social fragmentation, and declining confidence in leadership signal that the empire’s contraction has arrived. The military commander and writer John Glubb argued that empires often pass through predictable stages: from expansion and confidence to wealth, complacency, and eventual decline.

But history also offers another lesson. Sometimes decline is not the end. Occasionally, a leader emerges that manages to stabilize things — sometimes even reverse the downward trend. Figures like Augustus and Alfred the Great inherited power facing real crises. Yet through a mix of discipline and reform, they managed to buy their civilizations decades (or even centuries) more life.

Here’s how a leader facing a failing empire can reverse the decline…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Restore Virtue

To save an empire, it first needs to be worth saving. That comes by instilling a sense of virtue in the culture again. At the point that the empire is crumbling already, it’s well into the Age of Decadence according to Glubb, where there is wealth without sacrifice, rights without duty, and spectacle in place of achievement.

If we look back to Rome, Augustus inherited a world exhausted by civil war. At the root of the issue was moral and civic decay. In response, August promoted the formation of families, a religious revival, a rededication to public duty, and military discipline. All fronts worked to remake the culture of Rome into one of decency, respect, and order. The result was the famed Pax Romana — an era of general peace in the empire.

But on this point, it’s much easier to say virtue should be restored than to actually do it. Ultimately, virtue is something chosen by each individual. A leader can’t force anyone to be a good person, especially if there’s disagreement on what good even is. But, a leader can provide the breeding ground on which virtue is better fostered, by establishing a common law across the land, enforcing laws equally, and by communicating a common moral framework.

The latter has most effectively been accomplished through organized religion. This has worked well historically because a religion that stands apart from a government separates the enforcement arm of a society from the moral authority, increasing the trust of everyone in a common moral understanding. So, the leader concerned with the decline of his empire can do nothing better than to restore organized religion’s high standing in society.

Lastly, a people will not turn to virtue if their leader shows extreme vices. Thus, the leader, if he truly wants to restore virtue to his empire, must reflect the attitudes and behaviors that will inspire his people to right action. He can’t be a hypocrite; the best rulers lead from the front.

Rebuild Institutions

Another sign of an empire in decay is the weakening of its institutions. When its legal, religious, and civic institutions lose credibility to the public, the gears that make an empire work stop turning. Part of the problem is bureaucratic: large empires usually require more labor and infrastructure to manage its many moving parts, but every level of control adds friction — slowing progress and diverting public funds away from other places where it might be more useful. Another part of the problem is that these weakened institutions no longer attract the best, brightest, and rightly motivated individuals. The institutions become filled with people who simply want a position of status or ease. Bulky institutions increasingly tax their populations to support the infrastructure, and people begin to view the institutions not as movers and shakers in the empire, but rather as roadblocks to its success.

Looking back to Rome again, Diocletian was a successful reformer. He wasn’t afraid to rethink Roman organization from the ground up. The emperor restructured many of the provinces, stabilized taxation, reordered the military, and reformed the administration as a whole to better serve the empire.

But institutions extend beyond government. The establishment of a strong religion is infinitely more important than the establishment of a provincial tax administration. As we said earlier, the institutions of religion provide a common moral framework for a people. They provide trust, community, and a long-lasting bond between generations. So, a leader must support strong religious communities if he wishes to have a strong empire.

Further, an empire thrives on the health of its most fundamental unit cell: the family. In its latter days, wealthy Romans were reluctant to marry and start families, preferring decadence and freedom from responsibility to a life of domestic purpose and meaning. But that meant civilizational suicide, as Rome’s old families dwindled among crowds of newcomers in the empire. Cultural cohesion eroded quickly, and political instability driven by cultural nihilism took over the Roman town square. An empire needs a strong base of patriotic families, not only to provide for a future citizenry, but also to instill a generational mindset in the culture. Mothers and fathers naturally care for where their society is headed, because their children have to inherit that world. So, an emperor should encourage marriage and families to ensure that patriotism is inherently tied to love for their families.

The successful empire needs strong institutions to make it work; these fundamental institutions of law, executive government, religion, marriage, and family are critical to renew a faltering empire. However, institutions need protection to function…

Read more

When did Western Civilization peak, exactly? A subscriber recently asked this very question. At first an answer came quickly, but the more I think about it, the more difficult the question reveals itself to be.

The meaning of a “peak” of civilization is ambiguous. By which metric do we judge? My first instinct, as a traditionally minded thinker, is to suggest a moral or spiritual metric: when was the bulk of society aligned in a common moral understanding or religion? That quickly takes us farther back in history.

Or, by “peak”, do we mean an intellectual summit, perhaps in achievement or at least in literary, artistic, or scientific activity?

Another metric we might judge civilization by is for its peacefulness. When did the West avoid conflict for an extended period of time? Or similarly, do we judge the pinnacle of a society to be when average living conditions rise above an established norm?

And, lastly, perhaps the “peak” of a civilization lies where its essence was most clearly defined. What time period most embodies the characteristics of the West?

All appear as valid metrics. Let’s now look at which time periods stand out when filtering by these metrics of religious unity, intellectual activity, peace, living conditions, and essence.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Peak of the Western Religion

The “Western religion” is undoubtedly Catholicism. While we may extend the title to all Christianity, it is hard to imagine a “peak” of a religion in times where it is so divided, as Christianity has become so fragmented since the Protestant Reformation. We might fairly point to the East/West Schism of the 11th century as another division (into Orthodox vs Catholic), but as we are only concerned with “Western Civilization”, Catholicism has remained undivided in the West proper for its entire history.

While any careful study of history reveals cracks and signs of disunity in every age, Catholicism stood taller and stronger in some periods than others. The 1200s were a high point, as it was this century that the intellectual foundations of Catholicism were best summarized, synthesized with Aristotelian thought, and born out in the many writings of the Scholastics. St. Albertus Magnus, his student St. Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus were Catholic intellectual giants of the era.

Further, society itself was wholly organized around the Church at this point. The Popes has gained power not only over the spiritual leadership Western Europe, but also over many of the temporal matters later only held by kings. While kings and popes did come to blows at some points, still nearly every king acknowledged the legitimacy of the papal power and thought long before challenging it.

Cathedrals and monasteries were central to the landscapes; the Franciscans and Dominicans both emerged to revitalize the Church’s mission; and pilgrimages were common to the Holy Land still under some protection from late Crusaders.

It was during this century that Western Europe was Catholic through and through.

Peak of the Intellect

A peak period of intellectual life is more challenging to determine, as we are not looking for the time period which has the most information available (obviously today) but the one in which the most relative progress or activity was made. A few periods stand out: 1) the Scholastic period of the 1200s, but only really for the intellectual life of the Church, 2) the late Renaissance period of the 1600s, 3) the late 1800s with the spread of steam engines and electricity, or 4) the late 1900s with the advent of the internet and computer.

Comparing these diverse periods is difficult because the kinds of advances made in each are so different. The 1200s reconciled theology with secular philosophy. The Renaissance adopted and applied the “new” methods of rationalism to science and philosophy, while simultaneously exploding in artistic vigor. The 1800s witnessed built the great machines that multiplied human labor tenfold and hundredfold. But the late 1900s began the project of building man’s most cherished gift, his intellect, into a machine of its own.

Then, in terms of scientific achievement, I must defer to our most recent advent of the computer and internet, which are now being transformed by AI, as the most revolutionary in human development. In artistic intellect, however, I would point instead to the Renaissance; in theological intellect, to the 1200s. And, I will add, that in literary intellect, I personally hold the early 20th century as a high point because of its perfect balance of artistic language and clarity.

Peak of Peace

The high point of peace in Western Civilization is much less contested than that of the intellect. Generally, 1800s Europe was known as a time of relative peace across the continent. The United States may have thought differently with the War of 1812 and the Civil War, but overall, Western Civilization was relatively content during this period. The chaos of the French Revolution had subsided, and the British Empire continued to rule the seas. Further, the Industrial Revolution was propelling economies to new heights — why wage war when technology could accelerate the European economies?

Next, let’s take a look at living conditions and what we’ll call the “Western character”.

Read more

The Church may be in crisis. Without diving into all the political forces at play, Christianity has undoubtedly experienced a sharp decline in participation over the last 60 years — but maybe this challenging era of Christianity at hand is part of something bigger. Just as there are political and social cycles of highs and lows, so too are there rhythms in the life of Christianity.

The Greeks, like Polybius and Plato, recognized patterns of evolution between the many forms of government in what they called the kyklos. Later thinkers would apply the same concepts of a “cycle” to other aspects of historical development, too. Sir John Glubb believes empires to exhibit a six-stage lifecycle lasting approximately 250 years. Authors Howe and Strauss applied this cyclical thinking to social history, noting the rise and inevitable crisis experienced by American society every 85 years in four stages: a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and a Crisis.

In a similar vein of thought, we can think of the life of the Church as a progression of highs and lows across its history. The Church has, as perhaps all complex institutions have, a lifecycle, too. Historian Christopher Dawson proposed six ages in the life of the Catholic Church, each lasting between 250 and 500 years long and marked by a period of ascendancy and ending with a major crisis.

Dawson’s ages of the Church are a break with typical historical organization of Church history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras, and he explains why thinking of Church history in these six stages is more useful:

“One of the main reasons why I dissent from the current threefold division or periodization of Church history as ancient, medieval, and modern is that it is apt to make us lose sight of the multiplicity and variety of the life of the Church, and of the inexhaustible fecundity with which God continually calls new peoples into the divine society.”

Dawson doesn’t just divide Church history merely into periods of its organizational, philosophical, or relational aspects. Rather, Dawson views Church history by its periods of ascent or decline — when was the Church growing in power, prestige, spirituality, and philosophy?

Each age has its period of waxing ascendancy, peak in the vibrancy or prestige of the Church, and finally a waning due to internal spiritual decline or external crisis. Just as Christ died and rose again, many believe this dying and rising is a sequence the Church itself must experience. Let’s look at Dawson’s six ages and where our current age might be heading…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive of content: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

First Age: Early Church

30 - 300 AD: The First Age of the Church begins with Christ and the arrival of the Holy Spirit upon the early church at Pentecost. It’s from this point onward that the Church began its first wave of ascendancy, converting Romans, Jews, and other Gentiles across the Mediterranean. While it would be difficult to name a “high point” of the Church between its beginning and endpoint, the First Age, according to Dawson, ends in crisis with the heavy persecutions of the third and fourth centuries, particularly the persecution of Diocletian.

Second Age: A Christian Empire

300 - 650 AD: The next age of the Church kicks off with the victory of Constantine at Milvian Bridge. The Roman Emperor then granted religious freedom to the growing number of Christianity via the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, leading to an acceleration of conversions throughout the empire. Further this age reaches new heights through the many spiritual and theological writings of many Church Fathers, such as St. Augustine. This age declines with the political decline of the Western Roman Empire by the many invasions of barbarian tribes and culminates in the conquest of Jerusalem in 643 AD.

Third Age: Carolingian Era

650 - 1000 AD: The Third Age of the Church began with the conversion of formerly pagan tribes of central and western Europe, most notably the Franks. Clovis I became a greater defender of Catholicism and aided its spread in the region, as did his descendants in the Merovingian dynasty. The age climaxed with the rise of Charlemagne in central Europe, who oversaw the Carolingian Renaissance and formed the basis of the Holy Roman Empire. Church and State ruled together in this age. After his death, the age entered a period of decline due to external threats (e.g. the Magyars to the East, Vikings to the North), and the empire for a time appeared finished.

Fourth Age: Medieval Reign

1000-1500 AD: The next age began with the humble monasteries, particularly the renewal of monasticism forged at Cluny in 910. Reforms swept through the Church under the papacy of Gregory VII in 1073. Then, the 1200s saw the pinnacle of Medieval spirituality, thought, and culture with the rise of Scholasticism, the synthesis of Christian and Aristotelian thought. Further, the well-known mendicant orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans were birthed, and many of the great Catholic universities emerged. Unfortunately, the greatness of the age stagnated in the face of increasingly difficult political realities, the Black Death, and finally the winds of change in the Protestant Reformation.

Fifth Age: Reformation & Rationalism

1500 - 1750 AD: Out of the turmoil of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, a great renewal of the Church began to take shape. The Catholic Reformation addressed many of the grievances that spurred the Protestant Reformation and brought many back to the fold. Additionally, orders like the Jesuits were founded to help in the efforts of re-conversion. However, the heights of this era were never near those of the previous age. The effects of rationalism and the Enlightenment spelled dark times for the Church (and all Christianity) ahead. Philosophically, politically, spiritually, the Church entered a new low point in the latter 18th century.

Now, we turn to our age, the sixth age of the Church, where modernity is reconciled or conquered with Christianity…

Read more

Christianity built Western Civilization.

Or, at least, Christianity unified it. Before the Church, in fact, there was no unified Western identity at all – just a collection of warring chieftains, lords, and petty kings who obtained power via force. A lord in France, for example, felt no connection to another halfway across the continent in Hungary or Poland.

But the Church found a way to rally all of Europe behind a common cause, and create Christendom, a grand union of Christians across the continent. The key was to harness — rather than stifle — the power of its internal factions and use it for the Church’s goals.

So how did this unification happen? Here’s the story of how Christendom came to be…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive of content: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

A Dual Tension Between Church and Tribe

Historian Christopher Dawson makes the case in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture that after the fall of Rome, Europe was under a dualistic tension: a barbarian power structure stood in contrast to a Christian ethos. On one side rested the secular authority of local lords and kings, who largely maintained control through aggressive means. On the other lay the cultural influence of the Church, who remained powerful in spite of the collapse of nearly all other Roman institutions. This dichotomy between secular and religious authority lies at the root of the West’s origins…

Dawson called the West a “missionary culture” because it was only via the Church that the transmission of higher cultural elements occurred. He writes:

“…it was only in so far as the different peoples of the West were incorporated in the spiritual community of Christendom that they acquired a common culture.”

Dawson contrasts this development with Eastern civilizations like China and India, whose cultures developed internally over centuries with little outside influence. Their religion and culture grew together like roots in the same soil.

But Western civilization was a clash from the start: missionaries like the saints Boniface, Patrick, and Gregory brought a new culture — and a new authority — into the existing power structures of the Northern barbarian kingdoms. Though nearly all of Western Europe converted to Christianity, the Church’s influence did not create a utopia, but rather an uneasy tension…

Kings and lords still maintained their power via force while serving vital functions: levying taxes, ensuring security, and administering justice. But it was in the Christian Church where most turned for cultural direction. Dawson writes:

“The new barbarian kingdoms had taken over the military and political functions of the Empire…but everything else belonged to the Church — moral authority, learning and culture, the prestige of the Roman name and the care of the people.”

While kings held military and administrative power, bishops had the institutional backing of the Church. Often bishops held just as much — if not more — authority as the kings.

And this tension was not merely a practical reality, but a theological vision of the world accepted by medieval Christians. For example St. Augustine, a theologian who influenced the medieval mind perhaps more than any other, argued in his work “City of God” that the world was always at tension between two opposing forces: the City of Man and the City of God.

All of history was a war between God and Satan. As the “prince of this world,” according to the Bible, Satan would continue to influence the world until Christ’s return. In the meantime, Christians accepted that earthly authority would never be completely just, hence the allowance of a non-ecclesial power alongside the Church.

Despite this dualistic understanding of secular and religious power, there were many who sought to unify them. In the late 8th and early 9th centuries, one man tried to create a unified Church and State…a Christian empire.

The Hope of a Christian Empire

Charlemagne, famously crowned emperor by the pope in 800 AD, attempted to create a more unified system that encompassed both secular and religious authority. Throughout his reign he implemented a series of reforms that blurred the lines between ecclesial and political power.

His reforms focused on strengthening the Church’s hierarchical structure, improving clerical education, standardizing liturgical practices, and rooting out paganism. Eventually, Charlemagne’s powers covered ground that only the Church had occupied previously such as disciplining clerics, appointing bishops and abbots, and defining orthodox doctrine.

What’s more, he did it all with support from the papacy. Some even referred to Charlemagne’s realm as the “new Israel,” recalling the Biblical kingdom where little distinction between religious and civil law existed. Charlemagne’s dreams of creating a Christian Europe unified under common religion seemed within reach…

But this unity did not endure.

Read more

The Black Death wiped out a third of Europe — possibly as many as 50 million people perished as a result of the deadly plague. The word apocalyptic doesn’t even cover it. It’s a wonder it didn’t actually spell the end of European civilization.

From the perspective of a 14th-century peasant on the ground, it would have been a traumatic experience on a scale we can’t comprehend today: dozens of your friends and family covered in blisters and sores before succumbing to fever and eventually death. And you might be next. The Final Judgement surely felt near!

But if you managed to survive, your life may have actually improved from the conditions you were in beforehand. You had more food, pay, and maybe some land, too. Your station in life instantly skyrocketed. Sounds impossible, right?

Well, for some it’s exactly what happened. Though the Black Death almost ended European civilization, it actually contributed to a rebirth in many ways. For one, it reordered society, allowing for upward mobility of peasants previously locked in a stagnant hierarchy.

Here’s how the Black Death helped create a brighter future for those who remained…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Agent of Chaos

Supposedly first introduced to Europe during the siege of Caffa in 1347, the disease was likely carried by fleas that hitched rides on Genoese ships sailing around the Mediterranean. At the time, no one could have guessed the damage these little fleas would cause…

Major population centers like Constantinople, Sicily, and Italy were rich targets and eventually launching pads for the plague to reach mainland Europe. Once on land, the Black Death jumped from a flea-born disease to humans, spreading from person-to-person as a type of lung infection.

The speed at which the plague spread is perhaps what is most remarkable about the disease. Just a few years after reaching Caffa, it had spread to every corner of Europe — from Russia to England to Spain. And everyone became acutely aware of the plague’s symptoms: swollen lymph nodes, fever, skin sores, then death.

Estimates are that between 30-60% of the population succumbed to the illness. Entire towns and families were wiped out. Mass graves were dug to keep up with the staggering amount of corpses. Italian chronicler Agnolo di Tura wrote in 1348:

“Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices...great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night”

It sounds like Hell on earth — or divine punishment — and that’s exactly how many interpreted the events. For some, the plague could only be explained as wrath from God for their sins. Others saw it as the end of the world, referencing the book of Revelation where it states “a third of mankind was killed” due to plague.

In some ways it was the end of the world, though. Or at least the end of a certain type of society…

Rapid Social Changes

The effects of the Black Death on the medieval world have been the topic of wide speculation. Everything from climate change to advances in medical science have been attributed to the plague.

Some scholars have even theorized the Renaissance got its jumpstart from the Black Death. The plague hit especially hard in Florence and other Italian cities, and it’s possible a worldview shift occurred — familiarity with death caused thinkers to dwell on matters of religion and spirituality. This wave of piety then manifested in the widespread sponsorship of religious art, leading to an explosion in painting, sculpting, and architecture. Much of Renaissance art was a contemplation of death and the possibility of life anew in Christianity.

Though the plague’s role in the birth of the Renaissance is conjecture, what’s more concrete is that it contributed to feudalism’s downfall and the rise in upward mobility for the peasant class.

Read more

The Renaissance was the culmination of centuries of progress combined with a rediscovery of the classical spirit. Architectural feats like Florence’s Duomo and St. Peter’s Basilica remain recognizable icons of the cultural “rebirth” that swept through Western Europe.

But did you know much of Renaissance architecture was inspired by a single man — one who…

Read more

Andrew Carnegie is often credited with ushering in America’s “Gilded Age” via the industrial empire he forged. His reputation is one of a cunning capitalist who helped transform the nation into an economic powerhouse at the turn of the 20th century. He became one of the wealthiest men in American history.

But his wealth wasn’t just for his private use — he believed he had a responsibility to care for the common man, too. Thus he patronized the arts, built over 3,000 public libraries, and funded museums and music halls at his own expense. He even claimed that providing education and beauty to the masses was the “noblest possible use of wealth.” — why?

Though he might not have called it by name, Carnegie followed the principle of noblesse oblige — the idea that the wealthy or powerful in a society have an obligation to lift up the poor and weak.

It’s a forgotten virtue that sorely needs to be resurrected. Here’s an introduction to noblesse oblige and how we can implement it today.

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

Classical Origins

The meaning of noblesse oblige can be summed up simply: privilege entails responsibility. More precisely, though, it can be described by two principles:

1. Whoever claims to be noble must conduct himself nobly.

2. One must act in a fashion that conforms to one’s position and privileges with which one has been born, bestowed, or has earned.

Noblesse oblige is a French term literally translating to “nobility obliges,” but its origins go way back to at least ancient Greece. For example, Homer’s Iliad hints at the concept when, in Book XII, the hero Sarpedon urges his comrade Glaucus to fight with him in the front ranks of battle. Homer writes:

“’Tis ours, the dignity they give to grace

The first in valour, as the first in place;

That when with wondering eyes our confidential bands

Behold our deeds transcending our commands,

Such, they may cry, deserve the sovereign state,

Whom those that envy dare not imitate!”

Homer is pointing out how those “first in place” — the privileged class or the elite warriors — have an obligation to lead their soldiers from the front, to be “first in valor.” It’s a call to earn the position that they occupy so that they are deemed deserving of their privilege.

Aside from mythology, the ancient Greeks had a version of noblesse oblige called euergetism (roughly translated as “do good deeds”), a social expectation that wealthy individuals should distribute part of their wealth to the community. This often took the form of funding public institutions, which derived their legitimacy from the backing of wealthy individuals. This is evidenced in 355 BC, when the Athenian statesman Demosthenes mentioned how the rich had failed in their duty to contribute to the community in his work Against Leptines, and Xenophon hints at similar themes in some of his works.

A more formal instantiation of euergetism was the position of choregos — a wealthy Athenian citizen who took on the public duty of financing the chorus and other aspects of the production of plays that were not funded by the polis, or city state.

Though philanthropic on its surface, many speculate that euergetism did not come from a genuine love for the people, but rather was a way of placating the masses, ensuring poor citizens didn’t revolt. The philosopher Aristotle supports this theory in his work Politics:

“[the rich] will make magnificent sacrifices, and build some monuments and the people, then taking part in the banquets and feasts, and seeing the city splendidly decorated temples and buildings, wish to maintain the constitution [government]…”

Ancient Rome adopted the patron-client system, a practice where high status Romans offered favors for clients in return for political support. Though initially transactional in nature, this generosity toward clients eventually expanded into a more general charity toward the poor.

Wealthy Romans often supported public entertainment like games, or built amenities like theaters, libraries, or baths. It’s not uncommon to find the inscription D.S.P.F. (de sua pecunia fecit, “done with his own money”) on a building indicating a wealthy Roman had funded it.

These types of charitable customs were precursors to noblesse oblige, but they didn’t encompass the entire concept. Christianity would be instrumental in establishing noblesse oblige in its fullest form…

A Biblical Expectation

Despite having roots in antiquity, the medieval and modern conceptions of noblesse oblige stem mostly from Biblical teaching. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says:

“Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.”

Thus a clear expectation is established from privileged members of society toward the poor. And like other commandments of Christ, these words were not taken lightly especially by the earliest Christians…

Read more

Tolkien had good reason to be a bitter nihilist and materialist.

Losing both his parents before adulthood, no one would have blamed the young Tolkien for taking up a dark view of the world. Add to this early tragedy the horrors of the Great War and — somehow — what you end up with is not a Tolkien bent on tearing down the old ideas of Good and Evil, bu…

Read more

Young Napoleon was bullied by his aristocratic peers. He was aloof, spoke French with a funny accent, and was considered of low nobility due to his Corsican origin.

But he sought refuge in books — igniting a lifelong obsession with reading. It eventually became a “matter of power” for him, shaping how he commanded armies and ruled his empire. According to Louis Sarkozy, author of Napoleon’s Library, books were crucial to his early formation and later military acumen: “…they molded his adolescent mind and influenced his statesmanship. They made him the general he would become and accompanied him to his grave.” Later, his official portraits even reflected his love of reading as he’s often depicted in front of books and libraries.

Though Napoleon read on a wide range of topics, it was history in particular — especially accounts of the great conquerors before him — that gave him an edge in life and on the battlefield.

Here’s how books, and learning about the great men of history, guided Napoleon’s every move…

Reminder: You can support us in forming minds and rebuilding the West by unlocking our members-only content:

✔️ Full premium articles every Tuesday + Free content Thursdays

✔️ The entire archive: Western history, literature, and culture

✔️ The Great Books lists (Hundreds of titles that influenced Western thought)

Join to start reading and support the mission today 👇

Subscribe now

A Refuge Among Conquerors

Born on the island of Corsica in 1769, Napoleon inherited an interest in reading from his father Carlo, a learned man of minor nobility who rose to become Corsica’s representative to the court of Louis XVI. As a young boy, he emigrated to mainland France and was enrolled at a religious school in Autun to improve his French.

Here his love of reading blossomed out of sheer necessity. At his new school, Napoleon struggled to fit in with other boys his age. He was described as melancholic and reserved, so in lieu of a large friend group he found solace in books. Sarkozy writes:

“The great conqueror discovered reading first as a safe haven…At the tender age of 12 he had already dozens of authors, principally, those of antiquity, which left a lasting impact on his perception of the world.”

He read about geography, philosophy, and astronomy, but his great love was history. Specifically, Plutarch’s famous work Parallel Lives had more of an impact on the future emperor than perhaps any other. A series of biographies of the greatest men of antiquity, it explores the vices and virtues of its subjects in an effort to reveal the character traits that contributed to their successes and failures. Plutarch endeavored “not to write histories, but lives.”

Napoleon especially drew inspiration from the lives of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, figures who he continues to be compared with today. At the time, though, he dreamed of measuring up to them, fascinated by Alexander’s lightning conquest or how Caesar occasionally slept in his chariots. From Plutarch’s legendary accounts, Napoleon learned a formative lesson:

“The world is for the taking. Ambition and determination are the means of achieving it. Imitate great men of history, and the world can be yours.”

A Tool For Victory

Besides the merely aspirational benefits, Napoleon’s abilities as a statesman and general were heavily influenced by his reading, too. He took an immensely practical approach to reading as he saw it as a means to an end — a way to extract valuable information that he could use to further his ambitions. Sarkozy writes:

“His many literary adventures, at least as an adult, revolved around the practical. He wanted to quickly get to the nucleus of a book and then move on.”

For this reason, Napoleon never stopped reading. Even on military campaigns, he brought books along, commissioning travel libraries which were assembled by his personal librarian Antoine-Alexandre Barbier. These contained volumes on military tactics, history, and geography. The emperor’s generals benefited from his propensity to read on campaign, too, as they were gifted their own book sets.

Much of Napoleon’s leadership style was imprinted on him by literature. The way he interacted with his men was directly motivated by his books. To inspire his troops, he told them they were the “heirs of the great phalanxes of Alexander and the legions of Rome”. He believed he and his men were a continuation of the ancient conquerors he’d read about.

Read more