Modern architecture is ugly. You’ve probably noticed we aren’t building anything on par with the great structures of the past. What’s going on?

One possibility is simply that we aren’t a great civilization anymore. Kenneth Clark’s hit series Civilization opens with him standing on the Pont des Art, the “Bridge of the Arts” in Paris. He leads with a disturbing thought for our times:

“If I had to say which was telling the truth about society, a speech by a Minister of Housing or the actual buildings put up in his time, I should believe the buildings.”

When it comes to judging a civilization, then, maybe we should believe its tangible results rather than its own claims.

A century before Clark’s time in the 1960s, a similar idea was expressed by the writer and art historian John Ruskin. He wrote:

“Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts — the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last.”

If we still want to hold onto the idea that we are still a great civilization — and I believe we are — we’re faced with a paradox: that while we might be great in terms of wealth and power, we produce ugly buildings. More fundamentally, we produce ugly art.

We have the means, but where is the architecture that proves we’re still a great civilization?

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When Architects Were Artists

While we can lay blame for modern architecture at the feet of modernism, a lack of belief in transcendental things, and other macro-ideas, sometimes the most grounded answers in history simply lay with the people who made it.

Great man theory has it that history is primarily shaped by those larger-than-life figures of their times, such as Charlemagne and Napoleon. Then, shouldn’t we assume movements of architecture to also be at the hands of its great (and not-so-great) architects? If so, then what happened to modern architects?

Clark points to an answer. He notes that the best Medieval and Renaissance architects didn’t begin as architects at all — they began as artists. The Gothic master masons first began as apprentice carvers; Brunelleschi began as a sculptor, Bramante as a painter, Ralphael, Peruzzi, and Romano as painters who all turned to architecture later in life.

This background in proper art is what gave these later architects a better sense of proportion and invention to apply at the grand scale of architecture. Clark believes their architecture is, in a way, more human than early-trained architects. By first learning to paint or sculpt the human body, the human traits of architecture are better executed. Training first to understand the strength of steel and other materials doesn’t help you do that.

St. Peter’s stands out as a prime example in Clark’s mind. It is Michelangelo’s most sculptural architecture because of its simplicity, vastness, and curvature which brings to mind the human torso. The principle behind many of these great Renaissance buildings was a proportion like those of the human body.

Further, Ruskin believed in the artist before the architect, too, stating it even stronger than Clark’s more measured opinion. Ruskin really believed being an artist first was a requirement, writing:

“No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.”

But what changes when architecture is separated from art?

Art-Less Architecture

There are many reasons why most modern architecture is ugly. A big part of it is because the architect separated from the artist as Ruskin and Clark acknowledge. But it’s not the only reason.

Even if architects did first become artists today, we may well end up in the same place. That’s because, in addition to ugly architecture, we have ugly art today, too — or perhaps we should call it a lack of art.

We should rightly ask how we ended up with both ugly architecture and ugly art. Well, the answer is complicated, but it’s primarily two things.

First, it’s rooted in a change in what our civilization believes. We paint, sculpt, and architect signs of what we believe. In the Medieval age, that was God. In the Renaissance, it was humanism. In the Enlightenment, it was measurement and mathematics. In the modern era afterward, it was doubt — about everything.

Because we couldn’t know anything anymore, after a long slide from the works of Bacon and Descartes, we couldn’t paint or sculpt anything other than abstractions — all open to interpretation and hence meaningless, because they can mean anything to anyone.

The second reason we have ugly art today is because of what I simply believe is pride. Art is a field where you generally only win by getting the most attention. To do that, the artist constantly looks for boundaries for push.

For a time, the boundaries pushed were technical, including experiments in perspective, color, texture, and raw detail. But I wonder if those technical aspects simply became saturated in the hands of the Renaissance and Baroque masters, at least when it came to painting and sculpting. Maybe, then, artists then had to find other boundaries to push on, chiefly the subjects of the paintings themselves. This kicked off, in my opinion, a race to the bottom in terms of ever more abstract and ridiculous styles, to the point where some scribbles on a nearly blank canvas, or a banana taped to a wall are considered art.

The cultural forces of relativism, nihilism, and pride pushed artists in a war of reductio ad absurdum to see who can make the biggest, boldest statement with the least amount of real art involved. This has plagued artists and architects alike over the last century…

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Elon Musk is dead set on colonizing Mars within our lifetime. If he pulls it off, it will undoubtedly be the greatest achievement in human history. But Musk’s accomplishment might also be something else, something he might not expect:

He will accidentally be jumpstarting a brand-new America — a more extreme, radical version of America. What do I mean? Think about it: who is actually going to give up their life on Earth to die on an inhospitable planet millions of miles from home?

Space travel is about to trigger the ultimate “great filter” event — one that selects for a very specific type of individual. And because history has already run a similar experiment before, we can actually predict who’s going to make it through the filter. This group will be the ones who build Martian civilization — and I think there’s good reason to believe they’ll construct American 2.0 in space.

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The Last Great Filter

To understand what a colonized Mars will be like, we need to go back to a pivotal time in Earth’s history, a time not so unlike our own. A time of new ideas, new technologies, and new frontiers to explore.

The period I’m referring to is the Age of Exploration, roughly the 15th to the 17th centuries. It’s when the invention of the printing press, the Protestant Reformation, and the discovery of America all coincided. The Age of Exploration was defined by a great physical expansion of European powers, as new lands were being discovered, and an incredible outpouring of human capital fled the Old World in hopes of reaching the New World.

But of course most people still stayed behind.,,,,

It was incredibly difficult to cross oceans and traverse new lands, so the vast majority of humanity remained where they always had. The Age of Exploration was, in one sense, a great filter.

And the important question here is: why did some people go through the filter and others didn’t? Were those who left the Old World fundamentally different from those who stayed behind? If we can answer this, we might better understand the type of people who will make it through the next great filter.

Risk Takers and Rebels

During the Age of Exploration, those who were willing to make the journey to the New World were typically risk takers and individualists to an extreme degree. Often they were men with something to prove, like disinherited nobility. They may have been lower status second sons who didn’t inherit any land, or simply financially strapped. Men with a chip on their shoulder.

Think of conquistadors like Francisco Pizarro or Hernan Cortez. They were each somewhat lower status nobles who sought to make names for themselves amidst the new opportunities of unexplored lands. The dark unknown is, after all, the perfect place to find fortune and fame, as long as you’re willing to brave the chaos and take risks.

And John Smith, one of the founders of Jamestown, was another such adventurer. If there’s anyone that embodied the individualist — may I call it a pre-American — spirit, it was him.

Smith’s father died at 16, whereupon he set about a life of adventure. He became a mercenary, then briefly a pirate, before being conscripted by the Habsburgs to fight the Ottoman Empire. Legend has it that he dueled 3 Ottoman warriors and beat them all in single combat. At one point, he was taken as a slave, but he killed his slavemaster and made his way back to England, whereupon he set sail on a voyage to the New World — and as Americans that’s typically where we pick up on the story.

These were the type of men who were willing to undertake the perilous journey to the Americas: self made men who had their own personal vision of the future.

It’s In the DNA

Ok so these are just a few of the most famous men, but what about the average person? Not everyone who travelled to America was a swashbuckling pirate or conquistador.

Well, there’s actually an interesting study that investigated immigrants from Scandinavia. It showed that, in general, the least risk averse, individualist people were the ones to leave for the New World, while those more predisposed to tradition and collectivism stayed behind. It supports the idea that these mass exploration and migration events are basically great filters for risk takers.

The study from the University of Copenhagen is called Those Who Stayed: Individualism, Self-Selection and Cultural Change during the Age of Mass Migration, and looked at immigrants form the the years 1850-1920. This period is a little later than the Age of Exploration, but still before modern times made travel and communication easy, so I think the results still apply.

The study looked at historical census records, passenger lists, and other sources of empirical data to compare and contrast the individuals who stayed behind vs those who emigrated, noting any fundamental differences in beliefs and temperament. It found the following results:

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Few go to their deathbeds wishing they had worked more, yet we live in a society that sometimes seems to worship work.

While you might not realize it, you likely work more than a Medieval English peasant, who worked around 150 days and spent the rest celebrating feast days, restful Sundays and seasonal leisure. Most fully employed Americans work more than 200 days per year, more than most Western Europeans and significantly more than our medieval predecessors.

Somewhere along the way, work became the most important thing in modern life. Somewhere along the way, we joined a cult — a cult of productivity.

And our membership in this cult is costing us more than we realize, personally and civilizationally. The problem is especially time sensitive with AI and robotics arriving to transform work. Before we look at what our obsession with productivity is costing us, let’s first look at work and productivity across history.

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How Productivity Became a Religion

For all of time, people have considered how to get more results for less work — it’s the basis of every machine and method invented, from the primitive wheel to the modern computer. The motivation was to get more product, money, and leisure for less time, cost, and work. This self-optimization is what builds economies of scale.

In the same year as America was born, Adam Smith highlighted the division of labor as one of the geniuses of industrial civilization. By his example, a pin factory which has one man drawing wire, another straightening it, another cutting it, and so on produces tens of thousands of pins per day. The factory that has each worker completing the full pin-making process alone outputs just a small fraction of this.

A century of industrialization after Smith would find a radically different world — one built not just by efficient division of labor but by steam power, too. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing.

Perhaps no one else summed up the direction of society so well as Frederick Winslow Taylor in his 1911 Principles of Scientific Management. Here, he attempted to describe the best methods of applying factory logic to human labor: with timed-work studies, standardization of tasks, and the overall attempt to optimize human labor as a unit. He wrote, quite prophetically:

“In the past man has been first. In the future the system must be first.”

Henry Ford’s 1913 Model T made the assembly line famous. By division of labor and his attention to optimizing every process as much as possible, Ford reduced the build-time for the world’s first mass produced automobile from 12.5 hours to just 93 minutes.

What the business world saw was scale: more products in less time meant more money. But we can’t forget the upside to efficiency, either. The consumer saw drastically cheaper prices, too. It seemed the entire world benefits from economies of scale, at least monetarily.

The industrialized vision was clear at this point: a civilizational mission toward ever greater productivity was set. A new god was erected by the Industrial Revolution. Efficiency was to be our highest aim. It would prove not only to make the elites rich, but seemingly all men rich in comparison. But it could do more than just that: efficiency could make the nation powerful and help it win wars, too.

And so, the Cults of Productivity and Efficiency were born, especially in America. But it came at a cost — one that I don’t think we’ve fully come to recognize even today. And it has been observed in America early in the days of the Industrial Revolution. Even in 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans in particular were a restless people, even in their leisure — seemingly obsessed with work and constant improvement. He saw a citizenry that was unable to simply be.

As an American, I can’t say that we’ve forgotten what leisure is; it seems America has never known leisure in the first place. We’ve always been a part of this cult of productivity whether we’ve known it or not. It’s part of the American DNA. Perhaps something about our foundation in a new world and a birth through revolution made us this way.

Or perhaps the Protestant work ethic has something to do with it. This emphasis on hard work in a religious light, despite its usefulness in founding a new nation, has maybe survived past its due. We keep working, working, working, but rarely stop to rest to consider what we’re working for.

Whatever the reason, I believe that our dive into this cult of productivity has only accelerated with time. So, perhaps it’s time for the first world, and America in particular, to learn what leisure is again — and why it’s critical to a healthy civilization…

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Throughout history, the elite class has recognized its duty to build culture.

Roman elites were virtually expected to build public baths, stadia, and other visible signs of their good will toward the people. Medieval nobles funded churches. The Carnegies and Rockefellers built great museums, libraries, and music halls.

But who is building culture today?

We assume culture is an organic development. But instead of growing as a rule of nature, culture is really the result of deliberate action: painting, sculpting, writing, and all the creative means at our disposal.

But genius requires something that precludes its visual and literary outputs — namely money, through patrons and institutions. Money goes where its owners put it, and so the movers and shakers of culture throughout history are the wealthy classes of kings, nobles, and moguls.

We have a growing elite class that has all the means to be great patrons of culture. Tech leaders like Mush, Zuckerberg, and Altman seem, to the average person, to have infinite resources. Yet they also seem to have little interest in investing in culture. Where are the great public monuments and murals funded by the deep pockets of Silicon Valley?

I have two answers to that question. But to get there, we need to first look at one of the greatest patrons — or rather a family of patrons — the world has ever known…

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The Mighty Medicis

Although we typically lay praise for some of the world’s greatest art at the feet of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael, genius alone doesn’t create culture, the face of a civilization. Behind Florence’s artistic explosion was a banking family that believed wealth could serve a better purpose than personal pursuits could express. The Medici family created the conditions for masterpieces to exist by putting money and resources behind some of the world’s most famous artists.

Lorenzo de Medici was born in the mid 15th century during a time when Florence was a wealthy merchant republic. This was a time and place where educated merchants, political competition, commercial ambition, and relative freedom created the conditions for amassing enormous private fortunes. The Medici family had engaged in banking ventures with these Italian merchants, princes, and even the Papacy. Thus, Lorenzo inherited great wealth and power over the Florentine region. He didn’t need a crown to wield influence, much like our tech leaders today. But crucially, Lorenzo saw his wealth as a vehicle rather than an end.

Lorenzo had a vision for Florence as the heir to Athens and Rome, not in terms of politics or military, but rather in terms of cultural significance. Lorenzo wanted Florence to be the center of artistic and intellectual vigor for Europe. But to do that, he needed a team.

His patronage invested directly and indirectly in many of the greatest artists to have ever lived: da Vinci, Botticelli, and Michelangelo, who lived in the Medici household as a teenager for a time. Lorenzo didn’t simply collect existing art like many other wealthy tend to do for their private collections; his vision was generative. He wanted new art, and he was willing to commission these great artists to paint Florence into the center of the artistic world. His interests didn’t stop at art, however.

Lorenzo also wanted to cultivate Florence’s intellectual depth. He funded scholars to translate and study the works of Plato, Plotinus, Greek literature, and Roman history to revive classical learning. The Medicis, like all great noble families, understood that looking back was critical to looking forward. I’d like to think Medici might just have become a patron of our channel for that very reason, too.

While most of today’s billionaires prefer to fund startups, Lorenzo funded civilization by supporting the region’s libraries, churches, academies, festivals, and public works. His mark on the city was virtually inescapable; whether rich or poor, you could find some benefit by his patronage of the city.

All of his cultural work brought him greater fame and respect than his wealth alone could. The Medicis were a magnet to politicians, foreign rulers, the intellectual and artisan classes, and collaborators because of his cooperation with society. Lorenzo understood art and intellectual activity to be a form of soft power, as civilizations compete culturally just as much as they do militarily — we saw that in spades in the Cold War.

So, why don’t we have another Lorenzo de Medici lurking in silicon valley today? Why don’t we have billionaires chomping at the bit to fund great statues, art, and public works?

The Digital Age

One reason patronage is largely dead is that culture is now largely driven through digital means. The vast majority of culture is now driven by social media and video streaming platforms. YouTube, X, Facebook, and Instagram are digital town squares where people engage in ideas and art more than they do offline.

To engage in the culture today, you don’t need to go anywhere — to music halls, libraries, the theater, in-person debates, or to sporting events. You can see, hear, and engage with (to a degree) all these things from your couch. The cultural spaces have not only been decentralized but removed entirely from a physical space at all. These are digital spaces, and so culture is largely being made digitally, too.

That might be through writing (as we do on our Substack), through video (as we do on YouTube), or through simply posting memes on X and images on Instagram. Meme-culture is an entirely new phenomenon that has arisen through the medium of culture changing from physical to digital spaces. Gaming has its own subculture. Even each individual massive-multiplayer online game has its own subculture. People can be on entirely opposite ends of the earth and now engage, very cheaply, in these digital cultural spaces.

Through these digital spaces, culture is driven through a mix of organic and inorganic means, too. Much of it is still driven through the 20th century dominant culture-maker called Hollywood, but increasingly video games are driving another large segment of culture.

But the big wave is in the overall democratization of culture-making. Because everyone found the power to upload and market video through YouTube, and everyone could suddenly post their thoughts on social media, and everyone could post their writing on their own blogs, the power to create culture has been diluted from the hands of the few into the many. Individual creators and influencers have just as much brand-power as Hollywood celebrities and entire companies. Mr. Beast, with just a camera and a lot of time, went from a nobody to a media empire that has more influence on youth today than the comic-book publishers and toymakers that ruled previous decades.

So this leaves us with some understanding for the billionaires of today. Where would they put their money anyway? If nobody goes to the opera anymore, there’s not much incentive to build a grand hall for it. If people would rather scroll through memes on reddit, there’s not much point in funding a local artist to make an exquisite sculpture for the city park.

Maybe, we might think it’s a chicken-and-egg problem: if the elites of today would fund beautiful artistic projects in cities, maybe more people would roll off the couch to go see them. As much as I’d like to see that happen, I can’t help but think that the attractions of Europe are usually empty of locals for a reason. Familiarity breeds a certain indifference, unfortunately.

The digital spaces have, in a way, provided the self-funding model for culture-building anyway. YouTube and X have seemingly built business models that encourage creators to create by making your labor pay (even if modestly) for itself. So, in a convoluted way, Silicon Valley is funding the creation of culture — but it’s more like they’ve unleashed a perpetual motion machine on culture, rather than anything in the spirit of real patronage. The next great age will not come from better algorithms, but rather from knowing what algorithms are for. Real patronage takes a vision — and that’s the next problem we’re facing today…

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In 1519, Hernan Cortez did something absolutely insane.

Thousands of miles from home, surrounded by enemies on a hostile continent, he gave his men a puzzling order: destroy their own ships. It ended all communication back home, cut off their supply lines, and erased any chance of reinforcements.

But why?

More than anything, Cortez did it so no one would be tempted to retreat. Now his small army had to march hundreds of miles inland to conquer the massive Aztec Empire without a backup plan. The only way out was complete victory.

Cortez and his men understood something that has been completely lost in the modern world: absolute commitment. Think about life today:

We scroll Netflix with thousands of shows and movies, yet struggle to pick one. We get anxious choosing a career path because it feels wrong to limit ourselves to a single interest when there are so many to choose from. We’re afraid to choose the wrong one. And most young people are now single, even though dating apps offer countless potential partners — more options than previous generations ever had access to.

In short, our options are paralyzing us.

So what can we do?

I want to show you why keeping all your options open is probably one of the worst things you can do for your personal growth. Throughout history, some of the greatest achievements happened not because people kept their doors open, but because they purposely closed them.

The great figures of history didn’t have an escape plan — they burned their ships.

No Other Option But to Conquer

When Cortez ordered his men to destroy their ships off the coast of Mexico, it wasn’t a spur of the moment, impulsive decision. Instead, it was a calculated move. And it was during an exceedingly difficult time for the expedition…

Immediately after Cortez’s men landed in Mexico in 1519, they split into two competing factions: those on the side of the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, and those loyal to Cortez. Cortez was technically an outlaw at this point, as Velázquez had revoked Cortez’s command right before the conquistadors set sail. Tensions heightened within the group, who were now caught between the hostile Aztecs, Cortez’s ambitions, and the Spanish crown. Some men thus conspired to mutiny by seizing a ship and escaping to Cuba.

The pressure was on Cortez to unite his men and prevent any thoughts of mutiny, but also to deter retreat by the rest of his men, many of whom were second-guessing the entire endeavor.

The conquistador Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, a member and direct eye-witness to the expedition, recorded in his work, Discovery and Conquest of Mexico and New Spain, that Cortez made the decision to destroy his ships shortly after consulting with some of his top men on the best course of action:

“This resolution was immediately adopted, and Cortez ordered…to take all the anchors, ropes, sails, in short everything that might be of use to us out of the vessels, and run the latter all on shore, with the exception of the boats.”

And in a letter to the King of Spain, Cortez described later why he destroyed his fleet:

“Believing, therefore, that if the ships remained there would be a rebellion... I devised a plan, under pretext of the ships being unfit for sea, to run them aground.”

One thing I should clarify here is that Cortez didn’t technically burn his ships — that was a myth that came about later. His men actually just dismantled and ran them aground (or sunk them, depending on the source.) Nonetheless Cortez’ actions cut off any possibility of second guessing by himself or his men. After the ships were stripped of useful materials, food, and metals, they were finally destroyed. There was no going back.

Cortez made this reality absolutely clear to his men before going forward with the mission. He wanted his men to fully understand the situation they were now in, and used examples from history to drive his point home.

In Bernal Diaz’s account, Cortez gave a speech where he mentions several heroic deeds from the ancient Romans, and his men compared themselves to Julius Caesar’s army crossing the Rubicon. Diaz writes:

“We answered him, one and all, that we would implicitly follow his orders, as the die had been cast, and we, with Cæsar, when he had passed the Rubicon, had now no choice left; besides which, everything we did was for the glory of God and his majesty the emperor.”

After the ships were destroyed, Cortez went on to lead one of history’s most successful military campaigns, defeating the Aztec empire with just a few hundred Spaniards and a coalition of native tribes. Their absolute commitment resulted in absolute victory.

The First Boat Burner

Cortez’s men alluded to another great leader to have metaphorically “burned his ships”, Julius Caesar, so Cortez’s decision wasn’t a one-off thing. In fact, there’s actually a decent historical precedent for this kind of activity. So let’s go back to long before Cortez and explore one of the very first generals to use this tactic.

In Western history, the first well known leader to use this technique was Agathocles, king of Syracuse in the late 4th/early 3rd centuries BC.

In 310 BC, Syracuse was embroiled in a bitter war against the Carthaginians. They had suffered a series of devastating losses which saw most of Sicily under Carthaginian control, except for the city of Syracuse itself.

With Carthage’s most experienced troops already garrisoned on Sicily, Agathocles hatched a daring plan. Instead of fighting Carthage on home turf, he believed his best bet was to take the fight to them: assault Libya, stir up dissent among Carthage’s allies, and plunder Carthaginian territory.

He thus led a fleet of 60 triremes to narrowly sneak past the Carthaginian blockade and land in Libya. He then set fire to his ships.

And, like Cortez, Agathocles had good reason to do so…

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Therapy apps are everywhere. Marketing for apps like BetterHelp and Headspace in the video and podcasting space have exploded over the last few years, offering virtual, on-demand therapy — but why?

For anyone paying attention, it’s clear that young people, especially young men, are struggling. Many today are anxious and lonely, searching for meaning, direction, purpose… anything. Whether they know it or not, they’re looking for someone who can help them figure out life.

We may be tempted to diagnose this as just another health crisis. Our medicalized concepts of well-being lead us to prescribe fixes to symptoms but steer away from the deeper causes of our social malaise.

After all, every generation has faced hardship. Previous generations suffered wars, economic collapse, disease, and personal tragedy on a scale that most will never experience. Yet they didn’t have on-demand therapy to talk through their problems. Instead, they relied on something else.

Enter Virgil in Dante’s Divine Comedy, the guide for the author through the hellscape of Inferno, the toils of Purgatorio, and the bliss of Paradiso. He plays the part of the wise mentor, the teacher to our lost protagonist. Virgil exemplifies what it means to guide another man in a way that has almost entirely disappeared from modern life…

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History’s Guides

For most of history, guidance was integral to ordinary life, because past societies understood that young men didn’t simply mature on their own. People need intentional formation to fully develop.

In ancient societies, young men were often expected to undergo some form of initiation. This was a process or event, such as a big-game hunt or spiritual ceremony, that tested them and marked a transition from dependence into service and leadership. These rites ensured future leaders of the tribe or village were up to the challenges of their times and deemed worthy of responsibility.

This knowledge that maturity was cultivated shaped nearly every major institution of the past. Because many craftsmen couldn’t read or write for much of history, learning was passed down from master to apprentice through training on the job. With that close relationship naturally came a regular demonstration of the habits and virtues required for that trade: patience, discipline, honesty, and responsibility. The goal extended beyond producing just another skilled blacksmith, but eventually a trustworthy master capable of leading a new generation of blacksmiths for service to town and country. The apprentice was learning how to accept responsibility.

Religious education operated with a similar emphasis on character formation. Churches and religious schools, with early 20th century Jewish and Catholic schools as prime examples, didn’t make the transfer of information the first aim. They prioritized the formation of the conscience, informed by long traditions in Jewish and Catholic culture. Scripture, theology, philosophy, and the lives of the prophets and saints provided models of virtue and examples of lives ordered toward a higher purpose. The young student wasn’t left on an island to invent his own concept of “goodness”. He inherited a vision of what a rightly ordered life looked like from longstanding traditions.

Even among upper classes, intentional formation was built into the culture. The Grand Tour, undertaken by many young European gentlemen from the 17th through 19th centuries, was designed as an education in civilization at large. When young men travelled through Rome, Vienna, and Florence, they gained exposure to art, history, politics, and the achievements of other peoples. They returned more cultivated, matured, and independent — ready to take up the multifaceted duties of Europe’s finest families.

All these educational experiences promoted a common vision of the actualized human person. Western societies, particularly those shaped by Christianity, had a more coherent answer on what maturity meant. A good man was not simply someone who achieved personal satisfaction, but rather someone who practiced virtue, fulfilled obligations, served others, and oriented their life toward the highest good.

Modern societies have gained many things, including greater freedom and opportunity. But we have become far less aware of the need for intentional formation and how to go about it, especially for young men who often enter adulthood without clear expectations, meaningful responsibilities, and personal examples to imitate. We’re very good at helping people acquire skills, pursue material needs, and manage symptoms of problems. But we’re much less certain about how to form people capable of wisdom, virtue, and purpose.

This older understanding of guidance is what Dante places at the center of The Divine Comedy, and it precludes the need for therapy in the first place. Therapy is the rescue operation when things have gone awry. Mentorship and formation are the way we, throughout our lives, gain the wisdom and virtues necessary to avoid falling into mental roadblocks, sins, and personal problems that require therapy.

I’m not saying that therapy is bad, or that it’s unhelpful or even unnecessary for some people and situations. But the whole industry of therapy is an avoidable fact in a culture of proper formation.

The Wisdom of Virgil

Dante understood the need for guidance as inherent to living well. His Divine Comedy (Inferno, specifically) begins with an admission — a midlife crisis — that he has lost his way.

“Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood, where the right way was lost.”

Like Dante, many young men today aren’t necessarily lacking intelligence or ability. Like Dante waking dazed in a wood, they are lacking direction. They have ambition and potential, but little vision of what to use those gifts for. Dante doesn’t discover the way himself; nor does he soon discover the right way through introspection, or as we might say today by “finding himself”. No, he must be led by a guide, and that person is the great Latin poet Virgil.

It might seem odd that a poet becomes the guide to Dante, but the poets of antiquity were not only well-respected because of their mastery over language, but because through beautiful language they could convey truths about the world and interior life. The best poets are really philosophers.

But Virgil was given a special place in the Medieval Christian world. Chaucer described Virgil’s prominence as “on a pillar that was of bright tin-plated iron”. To many Medieval scholars, he was thought of as a kind of pre-Christian prophet or an inspired pagan, more like a Hebrew figure of the Old Testament than as a Greek or Roman polytheist. Virgil’s assignment as the guide through Inferno and Purgatorio reflects this privilege.

And so, Virgil is Dante’s guide for much of his journey because he is the heaven-oriented torchbearer of earthly wisdom, a familiar guide to both the non-Christian and Christian worlds. But more personally, Dante credits Virgil as his door to a deeper understanding of not only the art of poetry, but of the beauty of Christianity, saying to him: “thou art alone the one from whom I took the beautiful style that has done honor to me”.

Dante understands Virgil as more than a poet. The great poet is his guide and moral instructor, teaching him how to see reality correctly, just as great poetry captures reality more viscerally than prose.

As the two descend through the circles of Hell, Dante often misunderstands the dismal scenes he encounters. He, recognizing many faces and names, often feels anger toward infamous individuals and confusion about particular punishments. Virgil corrects his understanding, showing him that Hell’s response to the sinner is always in alignment with ultimate justice. Sins that appeared attractive on earth are revealed in their fullness as ultimately hideous and destructive. The spiritual reality of the world is revealed in Dante’s journey, and Virgil is essential to interpret and safely guide him through dangers.

This is what makes the Divine Comedy a profound examination of conscience. It’s a tour through the darkest vices of humanity and their just correction. Each circle of Hell reveals a different way human beings can distort their desires. Virgil’s goal as a guide is a true understanding of the nature and gravity of sin, so that Dante ultimately becomes equipped to choose Paradise. Unfortunately, many of us don’t have a Virgil in our lives…

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While on the Third Crusade, Richard the Lionheart didn’t command from a tent — he was at the front of his army with a weapon in hand. And at Agincourt, Henry V literally stood over the body of his wounded brother, fending off French knights with a sword.

Now, imagine a modern president or world leader doing that today.

It feels entirely absurd. Because today, leadership often means sitting in an air-conditioned room, making calls and doing press conferences, divorced from the consequences of your decisions. But back then, leadership meant having absolute skin in the game – your own life often depended on the decisions you made.

Though we’re far removed from the medieval era, there are some lessons on leadership that medieval lords can still teach us. I’m not advocating that the president should go grab a gun and fight in the trenches, but the medieval expectations of leadership contain a lot of valuable insights for us today.

So If you want to become a truly elite leader, you need to stop copying modern politicians and CEOs. You need to start thinking like a medieval feudal lord. Here are 5 timeless, medieval leadership strategies that modern society forgot about — and how to apply them today.

Lead From the Front

The first strategy that we can learn from the medieval leadership style is to lead from the front. In the Middle Ages, the idea of leadership was deeply tied to martial duty — the responsibility to lead an army and risk one’s life in battle to inspire one’s men.

In fact, the willingness to fight was basically a prerequisite to have any leadership opportunity at all due to Feudal duties and obligations. So what were these duties and obligations?

Just as a brief background, Feudal society was structured around the relationship between a lord and a vassal. A lord was a noble who owned land; while a vassal was someone the lord granted possession of land in exchange for service to the lord. Vassals would get land and protection, while the lord would get a vassal he could call upon for military service — this was the “feudal relationship.”

The key here is that lords owed their vassals protection — when armies were sallied for defense, the lord was obligated to lead the armies into battle. Of course he called on his vassals to help him fight, but he was expected to be the one organizing and leading it in person.

We see this play out in famous battles throughout the period. Many kings personally fought in battles, emboldening their men and shaping the course of history.

William the conqueror led his army in many campaigns, most notably the battle of Hastings in 1066 to contest the English throne. After a shaky start, William rallied troops and eventually crushed his foe, Harold Godwinson, winning England for the Normans and becoming a national hero still remembered today. .

Likewise, another national hero, Robert the Bruce of Scotland, is well-remembered for his bravery during the war against England’s Edward I. As an outlaw king, Robert fought a guerrilla warfare campaign against the English invaders. But his greatest achievement was the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, where Robertd defeated the English forces to win Scottish independence.

His personal bravery became legendary, as Robert is recorded to have slammed his battle axe into the skull of an English knight, setting the tone for the battle and giving his men a boost in morale. Robert’s bravery in battle and willingness to lead his men from the front has solidified him as the classic warrior-king archetype.

An important fact that the medievals understood is that, in order to get “buy in” from followers, a leader must display some willingness to tackle problems head on rather than pass these difficulties on to their subordinates. No one would willingly charge into battle if they knew that their lord was going to run at the first sight of danger, expecting his men to hold their ground.

Today, leading from the front most likely won’t involve pitched combat, but we can still learn something from this feudal mindset. True leadership is shown when a leader is highly visible, not just when there are wins, but when things go wrong — when battle and confrontation arise. To lead from the front, a leader owns the challenge personally. The leader charges into the fray first and makes the team’s problem his problem.

Generational Mindset

Another important leadership strategy that the medievals mastered is long term thinking. This was a direct result of the aristocratic systems of governance that prevailed during the Middle Ages, and it forced leaders to think generationally rather than in terms of short election cycles.

Rulers knew that their children and grandchildren would inherit their positions of power, so it was important to leave them a stable fief and also train them to be effective future leaders. Lords thus heavily invested in the education of their successors from a young age.

Often this meant fostering — sending sons or daughters off to allied courts to learn courtly manners, horsemanship, and martial skills from their hosts. This solidified feudal allegiances and provided essential political networks for the young nobles.In this way, rulers ensured that the next generation was already prepared to take the lead when the time came to pass the torch.

Another way medieval nobles ensured the long term success of their family was by setting up strategic alliances via marriage. Perhaps no medieval dynasty was as skilled at securing marriage alliances as the Habsburgs….

Dating back the 11th century , the Habsburgs thrived for 1000 years, dominating European politics and shaping history, living by the famous maxim:

“Let others wage wars, but you, happy Austria, marry”.

The Habsburgs frequently arranged for their young archdukes and archduchesses to be married off as children to members of other dynasties to increase their lands. In the 15th century, Emperor Maximilian I secured a hugely consequential series of marriages that increased his lands from a regional power into a global empire.

He married the daughter of Charles the Bold, Mary of Burgundy, himself, gaining parts of modern day Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. And the marriages he arranged for his son and grandson acquired his dynasty the lands of Spain, Bohemia, and Hungary.

This long term strategic thinking was essential for dynasties to stay in power. Those that failed to think beyond their own immediate plans are now forgotten to history, but the Habsurgs and other families with a similar mindset still have power in European politics today.

In modern times, we organize our society around quarterly profits or weekend plans, often failing to develop long term strategies for our families and organizations. But thinking generationally — dynastically — is what any great head of household or leader needs to do in order to keep what they’ve built running for more than just a short time.

We don’t have the aristocratic system like in the Middle Ages, but we can still prepare our children to be caretakers of our homesteads or family business. And if we haven’t yet built anything, we can simply focus on not getting lost in the cyclical trends and short term highs of the modern world. Focus on the lasting: skillsets, relationships, and projects that will bear fruit in the future. Start building something worth passing down.

Moral Obligation

A third medieval approach to leadership is that the elite have a moral duty toward the lower classes. In medieval times, positions of power were understood as moral obligations. Nobles knew their subjects and the peasantry looked to them as physical representations of order, justice, and Christian virtue. Concepts like chivalry and noblesse oblige (the idea that the rich had an obligation to the poor) served as reminders to the upper class of their duties.

Perhaps the most influential king to take on this role was King Louis IX of France. He believed his position as king was a sacred duty that bound him to provide a moral example for his subjects. He is well known for his personal penance and works of charity: regularly washing the feet of the poor, feeding beggars at his own table, and building hospitals. He also dressed in plain, humble clothing rather than rich fabrics to model humility.

One of his most prominent acts of public justice was holding court under a large oak tree at Vincennes. Here he heard grievances directly from subjects of all walks of life — lord and peasant alike — ensuring that justice was not confined to just the rich but to the humblest subjects too.

Beyond individual rulers, medieval society used the code of chivalry to instill in their leaders this moral responsibility. Ramon Llull’s popular Book of the Order of Chivalry alongwith Geoffroi de Charny’s Book of Chivalry laid out expectations for nobles to live upright and moral lives.

For example, Charny gave practical advice to nobles on how to grow in virtue. He writes:

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As a child, you lived in an enchanted world. You were sure that superheroes were real. Maybe you waited for your letter from Hogwarts long after it was due. Or you wondered when you might wake up one day where you really belong, in a hobbit hole in the Shire — somewhere that inexplicably felt more real than your world.

Then, gradually, education and ordinary experience weakened our senses of the miraculous, the mysterious, and the enchanted. Mechanism and probability give us a tidier but somehow diminished picture of reality. The world became ordinary, and everything suddenly has a reductive explanation.

C.S. Lewis noticed something about that loss in his work The Discarded Image, his study of the medieval mind. When the modern person looks at the night sky, Lewis observed, he feels he is looking out into a void that has no interest in him.

The medieval person, in contrast, felt he was looking in, toward something ordered and inhabited. The medieval man believed himself inside an ordered cosmos, whereas the modern man sees himself adrift in a random universe.

Max Weber identified this change in 1917, in a lecture that has haunted Western thought since. He called it Entzauberung — disenchantment. He wrote “There are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted.” He was wrong, but the counter-enchantment would arise from unlikely places…

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What “Enchanted” Actually Meant

Chesterton captured the enchanted worldview better than anyone else in his book Orthodoxy, where he wrote “The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature, are the terms used in the fairy books — ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery. A tree grows fruit because it is a magic tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched.”

This sounds like typical whimsical Chesterton — and it is, but behind his wit, Chesterton always had a real metaphysical point. The fact that water runs downhill is not self-explanatory. Yes, we have gravity, but the forces of nature at the formation of the universe may well have made gravity a repulsive instead of attractive force. The fact that the sun rises is not inevitable if Earth were to adopt the rotation and orbit of some other far-off planets we’ve since discovered.

These things happen because the idea of causality first exists at all — the hand of God — keeping them in motion through the continuation of existence itself. The enchanted mind might understand probability, but doesn’t see it as the only ruling decision-maker in the universe. It leaves room for a story, a Creator, or at least an acknowledgement that there is still a great deal of mystery in the world, and these all allow the enchanted mind to maintain a sense of wonder and curiosity. A world experienced as intentional and storied generates the question why in a way a purely mechanical world eventually must ignore. If everything reduces to a blind process, the question “why” never really gets answered.

In the medieval world, belief in an enchanted world manifested in many ways: in a sure understanding of humanity’s place in the universe, in the Church’s teaching on spiritual truths, in fables, legends, and folklore, but also in less edifying forms as in village healers, snake-oil salesmen, and those believed to really be meddling in dark arts. The Church was not the source of all enchantment in medieval life, but it was the institution that discerned between what was holy, what was harmless superstition, and what was genuinely dangerous. But what really begins to poke holes in our modern disenchantment is the idea of miracles.

Discerning Miracles

Despite common accusations, the Church has always been its most rigorous skeptic when it comes to the miraculous.

The medieval Catholic Church built an entire apparatus — canonical investigations, medical examination boards, waiting periods measured in decades or longer — specifically to separate genuine miracles from wishful thinking, psychological episodes, mere coincidence, and fraud. The tradition of discernment of spirits, codified in the Rituale Romanum and refined across centuries of theological debate, was designed to distinguish authentic supernatural events from natural ones and, when necessary, from demonic counterfeits. Sacramentals like holy water, blessed medals, and relics gave ordinary Catholics a regular reminder of the ordinary infused with the extraordinary — that the world is more than mere matter. The proper Catholic sense of enchantment was disciplined, not a free-for-all of overactive imaginations.

The evidence it produced deserves at least a brief look — even for the nonreligious — to appreciate that miracles are not simply believed without evidence. The public miracle at Fátima, Portugal in October 1917 operated on a scale difficult to explain naturally. Three peasant children had predicted, months in advance, that a public miracle would occur on a specific date at a specific location. Approximately 70,000 people gathered in heavy rain — among them Avelino de Almeida, a senior correspondent for Portugal’s largest secular newspaper, who had mocked the predictions in print beforehand. He filed an eyewitness account describing the sun spinning, changing color, and plunging toward the earth. The article ran on the front page. The editorial staff of an actively anti-clerical publication had no interest in confirming a Catholic miracle. They simply reported what their correspondent saw.

There are many more such miraculous cases we could look at — the strange life of Padre Pio, the hundreds of thousands of miraculous healings associated with holy sites and Marian apparitions, or the many Eucharistic miracles like that of Lanciano. The point isn’t an apologetic one, though that’s certainly something to think about. These are things that happened, were reviewed by professionals, and found wanting for ordinary explanations. There still is a sense of an enchanted world in light of these. Maybe you could chalk it up to our still defective understanding of how the universe works — but that will always be the case. We’ll never understand everything.

The world keeps behaving as though it were enchanted, and so maybe there really is still a story to humanity that we shouldn’t have cast aside in the Enlightenment. But how did we go from an entire society believing that enchantment lay behind every corner to a society where that view is mocked and scoffed at?

Breaking Enchantment

Disenchantment didn’t arrive overnight. Our sense of enchantment was deconstructed piece by piece over several centuries.

The Reformation’s iconoclasm was perhaps the most visible starting point for the disenchantment of the West. The revolutionary spirit of the Reformers removed statues, relics, and much of Catholicism’s physical mementos from churches, schools, and common places. This wasn’t just the natural result of any religious revolution, however. The Reformers operated on a theological stance that matter carries no sacredness and that images risk idol worship. Whether you agree or disagree with the Reformation’s intent, the practical effect was to strip the physical world of spiritual weight. It began a process of de-spiritualizing the physical signs of Christianity — and this was the first major step in disenchanting the medieval world.

Once the physical marks were removed of their spiritual significance, the philosophers and scientists entered the picture to further drive a wedge between mechanistic and spiritual views of the world.

Descartes proposed a methodical approach to doubt and knowing, by essentially throwing away sure knowledge of anything that he couldn’t reduce to indisputable fact. This left him with just one thing: Cogito, ergo sum — I think therefore I am. The problem lies in the fact that Descartes assumes the only way to knowledge is by deduction — if it is not grounded logically, it cannot be known. But this entirely casts aside the reality of perception as a way of knowing. While Descartes rightly believed perception can be unreliable, we all know there are some things we know to be true because we perceive them first. Virtually all the forces of nature were understood by perception before we understood them by deducing physical principles. Gravity was felt long before Newton could describe its effects on objects.

The doubt of Descartes about perception threw into question all things related to an enchanted world; if it could not be deduced on logical grounds, we have reason for disbelief in even what we perceive directly. This was a huge blow to the common understanding of life and the world as fundamentally charged with mystery and miracles.

As the Enlightenment unfolded, advances in mathematics and formalized logic furthered the view of a mechanistic world — the planetary motions were accurately predicted by this point, chemistry was slowly emerging out of alchemy, Newton could describe gravity’s mysterious pull, and the mathematics of calculus was transforming our ability to capture nature on paper. All this pointed toward a universe guided by mathematics, leaving little room for explanations that defy descriptions by formula.

Weber watched the process reach its conclusion at the turn of the twentieth century and wasn’t pleased about it. His “iron cage” was indeed a trap — the condition of people who had rationalized every source of meaning out of existence and were left a cold, inert world.

And yet at the point where rationalism’s conclusions had been fully drawn out early in the century — giving voice to Nietzsche and foundation to Communism — the enchanted world mounted a comeback…

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Imagine the unthinkable: The United States, after a brutal, exhausting war with China, suffers the single worst defeat in American history.

Just a few miles outside Washington D.C., the final remnant of the US armed forces — tens of thousands soldiers — are wiped out in a single afternoon. But it gets worse. The President, the Vice President, and hundreds of congressmen are all killed in the chaos, too.

The military is gone. The government is completely decapitated. There is no resistance left, and no logical way to keep fighting. Faced with total annihilation, the only rational choice left is to surrender, finally putting a stop to the bloodshed to save civilian lives, right?

Well, this exact apocalyptic scenario actually did happen. But not in America — it happened to ancient Rome. Their response shocked the known world, and forces us to contemplate how our modern society might respond to a similar situation.

In 216 BC, Rome faced its own ultimate doomsday scenario: The Battle of Cannae. Hannibal, one of history’s greatest generals and sworn enemy of Rome, encircled and slaughtered 50,000 Roman soldiers in a single day. Rome also lost its leaders — a third of its entire governing senate as well as a consul were killed.

Hannibal soon sent a delegation to Rome offering terms. Rome would surely surrender right? But Rome refused to play ball.

Instead of negotiating, Rome did something that seemed to defy logic. They banned the idea of peace. They made it illegal to ransom prisoners. And with no military left, they looked at their most formidable enemy and said: We are going to fight you to the absolute death.

To us in the modern West, this level of raw grit feels completely alien. We live in comfort, sheltered from existential threats, never forced to choose between total surrender or fighting to the last man.

But Rome’s example forces an unsettling question: How does a society develop that kind of unbreakable willpower? Why was surrender a psychological impossibility for a Roman?

The answer lies in a rare cultural code that made Rome entirely unique — and it reveals a powerful truth about our own declining collective willpower today….

When the Unthinkable Happened

After the Battle of Cannae, the general state of Rome can only be described as chaotic: Rome’s major armies were destroyed, and their only surviving consul was completely discredited because of his poor decision making and failure to fight to the death alongside his men.

The people of Rome were horrified since so many of their countrymen had been killed. A national day of mourning was declared as there was apparently not a single person not either related to or acquainted with a soldier who had died. Some estimates show Rome lost one-fifth of its male citizens over the age of 17 during the few years of fighting the Carthaginians.

General panic flooded the city, and the population was desperate. Some blamed the gods, while others blamed a lack of piety on Rome’s part. There were even some gruesome attempts to get right with the gods, such as human sacrifice, where two Gauls were buried alive at the Forum Boarium. On another occasion, a baby was abandoned in the Adriatic Sea.

Politically, Rome’s allies jumped ship. To them, the once powerful city was now a lost cause. Portions of southern Italy even switched sides, like the Hellenic provinces of Arpi, Salapia, and Uzentum. These non-Latin regions pledged their loyalty to Hannibal and the Carthaginians instead.

The historian Livy sums up the conditions of Rome at the time, and shows his amazement that Rome did not give up, as any other nation surely would have:

“Never when the city was in safety was there so great a panic and confusion within the walls of Rome. I shall therefore shrink from the task, and not attempt to relate what in describing I must make less than the reality. The consul and his army having been lost at the Trasimenus the year before, it was not one wound upon another which was announced, but a multiplied disaster, the loss of two consular armies, together with the two consuls: and that now there was neither any Roman camp, nor general nor soldiery: that Apulia and Samnium, and now almost the whole of Italy, were in the possession of Hannibal. No other nation surely would not have been overwhelmed by such an accumulation of misfortune.”

As Livy indicated, Rome never considered formal surrender despite the turmoil. There are some practical reasons why they didn’t that we will touch on, but these are downstream from two more fundamental characteristics of Rome at the time.

These two reasons were crucially intertwined, and they created a social, political, and military framework that made waving the white flag unthinkable to Romans.

The Unwritten Code That Built Rome

The first reason has to do with Roman civic duty, and the cultural traditions that governed its citizenry. Rome was famous for its legal code — the 12 tables which served as the formal body of laws for the city — but at the root of these was an unwritten code that was imprinted upon every Roman child from a young age.

This unwritten code was ancient, and can only be described as an ancestral memory that the people of Rome shared — it was part of their DNA. This deep-seated memory was known as the mos maiorum, or “way of the ancestors.” It was the time-honoured principles and social practices that influenced everything from how Romans interacted with each other in the Forum to how military decisions were made.

Breaking of tradition was greatly frowned upon, and attempted changes to the “code” were generally met with resistance. Suetonius wrote in the 2nd century that:

“All new that is done contrary to the usage and customs of our ancestors, seems not to be right.”

So what were the ways of the ancestors? How did they contribute to a cultural ethos that rejected surrender?

The mos mairoum encompassed several virtues. Some of them dealt with piety toward the gods and faithfulness toward others in a legal and social sense, but there were a few that specifically impacted the upbringing of military and political leaders — the very men who had to make tough decisions in the aftermath of Cannae.

For example the virtue of disciplina related to education and training as well as maintaining an orderly way of life, especially in a military context.

The virtue of constantia was “steadiness or perseverance”. In the face of adversity, Romans were expected to display an unperturbed façade. Nothing should cause a good Roman to flinch – not even a catastrophic defeat.

The legend of Gaius Mucius Cordus was often recounted to reinforce this virtue. According to the tale, in 508 BC Mucius snuck into an invading Etruscan camp to kill the rival king, who was leading the siege against Rome. He was unfortunately captured before reaching his target, but showed his unyielding resolve during the interrogation. He declared to the Etruscans:

“I am a Roman citizen, men call me Gaius Mucius. I came here as an enemy to kill my enemy, and I am as ready to die as I am to kill. We Romans act bravely and, when adversity strikes, we suffer bravely. Watch so that you know how cheap the body is to men who have their eye on great glory”.

To back up his claims, Mucius then thrust his right hand into a fire and held it there without giving any indication of pain.

Another important Roman virtue was virtus, which is where we get the word “virtue” today. Virtus was the ideal of the true Roman male. It informed a man what was good, what was evil, useless, shameful or dishonorable. Importantly, it encompassed a refusal to be dominated and instilled a conquest mentality within Roman men.

Finally the concept of dignitas encompassed these other virtues and directed them toward the Roman state. Dignitas meant displaying disciplina, gravitas, and virtus in service to Rome. Simply mastering the virtues was not enough; the virtues needed to be aimed at something higher — the well being of the city.

It was this milieu of virtues that was instilled in every young Roman until they became second nature. Apprenticeships, ceremonies, and customs all reinforced these values constantly.

One particular custom stands out, and it underscores the idea that Romans should never abandon the customs of their ancestors. This is the practice of housing the imagines, or wax masks of the dead, inside the home. The atrium of every noble Roman house was lined with these masks of deceased family members who had achieved high status either through political office or military achievement.

Young Romans who viewed them were constantly reminded: Your ancestors are watching, and you must prove yourself worthy of their legacy.

The Psychology of Roman Leadership

The mos maiorum essentially created a highly unified and capable leadership class among the Roman people. Every young aristocrat had a shared understanding of his duties and the sacrifices he was expected to make for his people.

Thus when exploring a chaotic period of Rome’s history like the aftermath of Cannae, we have a better understanding just who the Roman leaders were. The senators who rallied the citizenry were forged in ancient traditions aimed at creating strong men who would deliver when it mattered.

And this is where the second piece of the puzzle falls into place. Because of the mos maiorum, Rome’s elite were second to none. They were prepared to make tough, creative decisions when confronted with a seemingly impossible uphill battle.

The resolve of Rome’s leadership was evident immediately after Cannae. The young Scipio, who would later defeat Hanniball at the battle of Zama and earn a place as one of the greatest Romans of all time, inspired some wavering tribunes and reminded them of their duty by saying:

“I swear with all the passion in my heart that I will never desert our homeland, or permit any other citizen of Rome to leave her in the lurch. If I willfully break my oath may Jupiter, Greatest and Best, bring me to a shameful death, with my house, my family, and all I possess!”

The courageous, impassioned attitude is nice, but what decisions did Rome’s leaders actually make that reinvigorated the city and altered the course of history?

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The most popular stories of the last generation were quest narratives for a reason.

The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher — all retell the hero’s journey in their own ways. These fantasy books, movies, and role-playing games follow a hero who receives a call, leaves the familiar, endures trials, is transformed, and returns changed.

As children, we dreamed of living inside these stories, imagining ourselves as the main protagonist. You wanted to be more than a consumer of it, and secretly — maybe even unconsciously — you saw yourself as the hero.

Millennials, Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha are the generations plagued worst by short attention spans and passive scrolling; but they are also the generations engaged in some of the most immersive and participatory quest narratives in history, found in video games. The number of hours logged, the enormity of the worlds explored, and the depth of characters defined speak to two facts: 1) that these generations don’t have real-life “quests”, but 2) they want a mission, badly.

Though media and tech may have accelerated the desire for a real-life quest, this is nothing new. In the 14th century, Geoffrey Chaucer illustrated the need for a quest in his tale of pilgrimage: knight, miller, prioress and pardoner, (every social rank traveling together) set out from a London inn toward the shrine of Thomas Beckett at Canterbury. They told stories along the way, competed, argued, laughed, and prayed. Pilgrimages like these were the real versions of many quests found in our modern fantasy literature, movies, and games.

These medieval pilgrims understood that humans don’t need unlimited freedom or comfort, but they do need quests. You need a quest, too, because a life without a quest quickly becomes empty and directionless…

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What a Quest Was and Why It Worked

The medieval pilgrimage was a well-defined but unpredictable experience of transformation. The departure required real commitments (much more so than simply a long vacation), often involving months of preparation, the settling of debts, and the writing of a will. The travel itself was of course challenging, as the routes to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela were long, dangerous, and physically demanding. But the journey’s end was acknowledged as much more than simply a visit to a far-off place. It was a personal and spiritual journey that would transform the pilgrim in a radical way.

The later idea of vaguely “finding yourself” through free travel and exploration might sound similar, but the two ideas are very different. Both seek change, but the latter is really seeking a new identity to be found somewhere in the world. On the other hand, the pilgrim knows his fundamental identity as a Christian, and to go deeper in that identity is what motivates his quest. There is also a distinction in the fact that the pilgrim or any adventurer with a goal brings his will in the journey. It’s not a passive experience of a place or people, but rather a mission that pushes him or her to act. The aimless wanderer isn’t rooted in any identity at the outset and thus sets off with an equally undefined quest (maybe one without an end) and a certain passivity in attitudes. Who knows what meaning you’ll adopt if you wander, hoping it will find you?

A basic sense of destination must be known for any meaningful quest. Bilbo and the dwarves had a map and a plan. Certainly, there were many unexpected twists and turns from that plan, but these surprises tested their will toward the quest’s end. The aimless wanderer might latch onto these diversions as a new path in their search for meaning. But for the pilgrim, rather than diverting your aims, these trials merely strain your resolve for the goal. This is how the quest works to reveal those great qualities you couldn’t have discovered by staying in your hobbit-hole.

Much like The Hobbit, the itinerarium, a pilgrimage journal, documented the transformation of the pilgrim throughout the quest. Pilgrims recorded distances and landmarks of course, but more importantly their interior movements: moments of doubt, breakthrough, understanding, and spiritual consolation. The journey was written down because spiritual growth was the expected result.

Anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, drawing on the medieval pilgrimage tradition, described this middle state as liminality — a threshold condition in which the traveler is neither who he was nor yet who he will become. He has left his old identity behind and hasn’t yet arrived at the new one. The pilgrim was between worlds — stripped of his social role, his familiar surroundings, and his ordinary comforts precisely so that something new could take shape in him.

The pilgrimage worked because it provided a tangible solution to man’s desire for purpose. Aristotle argued in the Nicomachean Ethics that every living thing has a telos — a proper end toward which it moves, and in the movement toward which it becomes most fully itself. A human without a telos is a failure of being. St. Augustine identified the same truth but identified the telos of man in knowing God: the heart is inherently restless, oriented naturally toward an ultimate destination, which is God. The pilgrimage externalized and ritualized that interior condition, giving the restless heart a direction to pursue.

Seeking Quests in Careers

For most, the only “quest” of the modern era is the path of earning of living. This, our culture teaches, is the aim of life: to perform a job, make money, and if we’d made enough money in our working lives, to retire.

Aside from the question of meaning, however, this end in itself satisfies nothing of the need of humanity for a true quest. As we become adults, we all recognize that the working world is much duller than life in stories. And even though most of life’s real quests may fall short in our perception of their significance, the typical career falls farther still — particularly the modern career, because it is more open-ended, less foreseeable than ever before.

The medieval world offered a clearer path to most people. Religious life had been shaped and structured for centuries already, offering young men respected paths into priesthood or monastic life. Women too were offered sensible paths in convents for a more structured participation within the Church. But even outside of the dominant institution of the Church, secular career paths were quite clear.

The guild system offered a young man entering a trade a path with clearly defined stages in apprentice, journeyman, and master. You knew where you were in the world, your career, and what was required to advance. At the least, the son typically knew he had a real path in the work of his father. The career outlook was reasonably predictable.

But modern life has replaced structured journeys with open systems, such as education without a career path and a career without clear milestones for advancement. This ambiguity in the working world is the natural result of a freer world (a good in itself), but not without the cost of clarity. Some thrive in this fog of war, but many others struggle with restlessness when presented with endless choice and no direction. They need a defined quest, but there is no quest-giver. In the grand scheme of things, a career is only a side-quest…

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You’ve seen the ads: sports betting apps, online casinos, and prediction markets. Your favorite podcaster is probably promoting them, and they’re plastered across supposedly family-friendly TV networks during prime time.

Gambling is absolutely everywhere, and it’s completely hijacking our culture.

At first glance, the rise in gambling looks like it’s simply the result of technological advancement — the internet and instant news updates make betting on sports, politics, and world events easier than ever. But widespread gambling is really a symptom of a much darker reality: whenever a civilization embraces extreme risk as a legitimate way to get rich, it’s a clear sign that society is desperate.

We are seeing this exact desperation play out right now, especially among young people who feel that the traditional paths of success have been permanently blocked — and many are turning to risky behaviors like online betting or crypto speculation in lieu of safe career opportunities.

So what happens to a society when its people stop investing in the future and start betting on it instead? To understand where we are headed, we have to look at what happens when power structures become so stifling that vice becomes the only plausible path for the disaffected.

Two thousand years ago, a similar gambling mania exploded across the dying Roman Republic. The powerful figures who took advantage of that desperation ended up plunging civilization into civil war and political chaos. Let’s see how it played out back then and why we need to be vigilant about this concerning trend today…

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Gambling Mania in the Late Republic

In the first century BC, right around the time the Roman Republic collapsed, the poet Horace made a surprising observation about the youth of his day. He noted that the upper class youth no longer cared for virtuous interests, like horseback riding and hunting, but were instead enthralled by games of chance, like gambling and dice. Horace writes:

“Now the noble’s first-born shuns the perilous chase, nor learns to sit his steed: Set him to the unlawful dice, or Grecian hoop, how skillfully he plays.”

To Horace, this abandonment of traditional, “manly” activities was a sure sign of decline. The youth of any civilization are the future after all, so what happens when an entire generation abandons the traditions that built society?

Horace was not the only one who observed this disturbing trend. Later, the 4th century Roman historian Marcellinus reflected on the last days of the Republic, describing a gambling mania that spread across all Roman social classes, and especially the wealthy.

These upper class gamblers called themselves tesserarii, meaning “dicer”, as the more common word for gambler, aleator, carried a somewhat negative connotation. Gambling, to them, wasn’t a major vice — but Marcellinus thought differently.

Marcellinus believed that the gambling mania that overtook Rome in the late Republic was a major factor in its fall. He claimed that the elite’s obsession with gambling prevented “anything memorable or serious from being done in Rome.” Rome’s upper classes were too busy squandering their wealth and time to actually address the serious matters of the day.

Horace’s and Marcellinus’ caution against gambling was nothing new, though. Romans had long been weary of the dangers of decadence. In 200 BC, long before the Roman Republic fell, the senate enacted a statewide ban on gambling, called the Lex Alearia. It had exceptions for certain holidays and was likely not enforced very heavily, but it served as a symbol that Roman citizens should follow the social customs and traditions of their virtuous ancestors — the mos maiorum — which taught discipline and temperance.

But roughly 100 years after the Lex Alearia was implemented, it was obvious to everyone that the traditional values of Rome were nothing more than an aspiration. So what was going on in Rome at the time that caused people to abandon social traditions and embrace degeneracy?

Oligarchs Vs. The People

Numerous historians have written about the general moral decay of the Late Republic, but perhaps what best exemplifies the cultural and economic issues of this period was the battle between the Optimates and Populares. Once we understand the fundamental divide of Roman politics in the Late Republic, we’ll realize why massive risk-taking became the only option for some….

The Optimates and Populares were two factions of the Roman political class that were mortal enemies. The Optimates were the conservative elite who aimed to keep power in the senate and protect aristocratic wealth. They valued tradition, bureaucratic means, and the continued oligarchy that those ensured.

Opposing them were the Populares who appealed to the needs of the people, like debt relief and expanded citizenship.They often tried to bypass the senate and took matters directly to the Plebeian Assembly to win the masses — while also securing personal influence, of course.

The major issue at the time was land reform for small farmers and dispossessed veterans. As Rome had expanded, it incorporated a large population of cheap labor — namely slaves. The increased slave populations could be used by wealthy citizens (generally supporters of the Optimates) to undercut their competition. Small farmers and land owners couldn’t compete with the wealthy oligarchs who could afford many slaves.

Likewise, veterans who had given up their farms to serve in long campaigns came back to nothing — they couldn’t afford to upkeep their estates while gone, and there were limited options when they finished their service. The Populares like Caesar sought to remedy this situation by giving plots of land to veterans and limiting the influx of slaves to Italy, but the Optimates opposed any reform.

A dangerous scenario emerged from these conditions: massive wealth disparity between the upper class, who benefited from the cheap labor of slaves, and the dispossessed soldiers, who had been stripped of their farms after while serving in the military. The sheer amount of these dispossessed soldiers was becoming a serious threat to stability, and tensions among the classes were heating up.

For the upper class, they felt untouchable — they were doing better than ever, and the vast wealth they were accumulating was leading to the vice and licentiousness we talked about earlier. They gambled and debauched out of sheer frivolity, but in increasingly reckless amounts.

On the other end of the spectrum, soldiers and farmers who had sacrificed for Rome now had no clear path to reclaim their livelihoods. They were becoming desperate, and surely more than a few made foolish gambles to recover their lost wealth.

Will and Ariel Durant in their work Lessons of History write of the economic desperation:

“Rome was full of men who had lost their economic footing and their moral stability: soldiers who had tasted adventure and had learned to kill; citizens who had seen their savings consumed in the taxes and inflation caused by war…”

With economic pressures reaching such high levels, traditional moral codes were brushed aside. “Why obey the cultural codes of our ancestors if we don’t have a future?” they asked. “Why sacrifice more for a Republic that will give us nothing? Radical change must be the only option.”

This is the desperate attitude that Caesar capitalized upon — and what would plunge the Republic into a full fledged civil war, ultimately ending it for good. It’s quite ironic that Caesar’s famous words before crossing the Rubicon, “the die is cast,” are a reference to the dice games that were so representative of the collapsing moral and economic framework of Rome.

The gambling and moral degeneracy of the late Republic was the outlet of a desperate people, frustrated that cold economic self-interest had become more important to the Roman elite than the well-being of their fellow citizens.

This pattern of monetary obsession morphing into political and moral chaos is a pattern that repeats throughout history. Elites abandon tradition for degeneracy due to a weakening of their moral constitution, while lower classes attempt novel political solutions to solve their economic woes out of sheer desperation. The root of the problem always lies in what the culture prioritizes above all else. Specifically, money….

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In our modern culture, the word “progress” is viewed as an inherent good. Anything done for the sake of progress is automatically assumed to be beneficial for humanity. It’s often the excuse to plunge head first into untrammeled territory.

Artifiical Intelligence, for example, is a field where we’ve abandoned caution in the anodyne name of progress. Many AI researchers are not guided by a well-developed philosophical or cultural tradition, but rather the vague platitude of “changing the world” — of progress for progress’ sake. For some people, that seems to be a good enough reason as any.

But what if we’re viewing true progress all wrong? What if, in order to advance as a civilization, we need to be looking backwards just as much as we are towards the next best thing?

Throughout history, some societies have actually been revitalized and pushed forward only because they drew inspiration and expertise from tradition. They didn’t outright reject what was old, but built upon previous foundations and used them as the basis for new development — for progress.

From the early medieval period to the founding of America, true Western progress has always been informed by a healthy respect — and even awe — of the past. So I’d like to share three periods of history where we advanced by drawing inspiration from our ancestors — and it’ll help us understand today why we need to be thinking about tradition whenever we try something new.

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Carolingian Renaissance

The first period of history I’d like to discuss is one that is often overlooked, sandwiched between the fall of Rome and the medieval period, but it was a great leap forward in cultural and organizational development for the Western world. In many ways, it was when the West finally gained its identity.

This is the period known as the Carolingian Renaissance — when Charlemagne gave birth to the first post-Roman Empire in the West. To understand how Charlemagne revitalized his empire by looking to the past, we first need to understand the landscape of the empire at the time…

In the late 8th and early 9th century, Charlemagne ruled vast lands from Northern Spain to the North Sea. He was a skilled administrator, but his newfound empire had problems. Though the empire was flourishing economically, the centuries since Rome’s fall took a toll on the cultural development of the West.

In particular, Latin literacy was falling, a blow to the administrative and scholarly classes since Latin was essential for empire-wide communication. Because of this, an uneducated clergy had difficulty interpreting and preaching on the Vulgate Bible, the universal biblical translation of the time.

And on an aesthetic level, there were no cohesive architectural or artistic styles that marked Charlemagne’s lands as a bonafide empire — empires need grand building projects and beautiful art, after all.

In short, the Frankish Kingdom wasn’t the beacon of culture that Charlemagne wanted it to be.

Charlemagne thus devised a plan to create a “cultural rebirth” and he did so by looking to ages past — to the high cultures of Greece and Rome — as models. Specifically, Charlemagne hoped to revive the Western Roman Empire, which he held as the ideal model of a Christian Empire. His coronation as the “Emperor of the Romans” showed his admiration for the ancient culture.

One of the main ways he hoped to return to the golden age of Rome was by promoting latin as the language of the intellectual class. By making latin widely understood again, ancient texts could be revisited and an educational revival would follow. It seems like an inconsequential move, but this shift in language jumpstarted a civilizational rebirth…

As antique manuscripts and religious texts were made more accessible, literature and law flourished, and newly established schools became effective centers of education as new editions of classic works were produced.

One of the ancient manuscripts that emerged was Vitruvius’ treatise on architecture, called The Ten Books on Architecture, which contained information about how the Romans built their massive structures. This provided the Carolingians with a template for lost stone-building techniques, and large stone structures were built in northern Europe for the first time since Rome’s occupation.

Between 768 and 855, an impressive 27 new cathedrals, 417 monastic buildings and 100 royal residences were built. And these Carolingian cathedrals and palaces still stand today as tributes to Vituvius’ influence.

Charlemagne created a bridge to the ancient past — the latin language — resulting in rediscoveries in literature, philosophy, and architecture, shaping Western culture in a new direction. Looking backwards actually progressed the Carolingian Empire.

I often question whether our modern teaching methods are creating similar bridges to the past, or are they actually putting up barriers? What rediscoveries could we make today if we insisted on studying the ancient works and figures with the idea of civilizational rebirth in mind?

Italian Renaissance

Interestingly enough, the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius was also a key figure in another rebirth that came a few centuries later, as artists and engineers looked back to the classical world for inspiration once again. This was the Italian Renaissance.

Artists like Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and da Vinci were all inspired by the classical world, and in particular, the architect Vitruvius.The 16th-century architect Andrea Palladio even considered the ancient roman his “master and guide.”

In 1416 Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture was repopularized by Florentine scholar Poggio Bracciolini after he republished it. The work soon prompted a rebirth of classical architecture, art, science, and engineering.

Brunelleschi, for example, was inspired to invent a new type of hoist to lift large stones for the dome of the cathedral in Florence. Da Vinci, deeply inspired by classical writings on math and science, dedicated one of his most famous works to Vitruvius. His drawing, aptly titled “the Vitruvian Man,” is based on the principles of body proportions developed by Vitruvius.

More consequentially, though, Palladio — whom many would consider the greatest architect of all time — drew inspiration from Vitruvius He was motivated to write his own treatise on the subject, The Four Books of Architecture, which pulled from and built upon Vitruvius’ methods. Palladio’s work is considered a seminal work in architectural history, offering a comprehensive guide to classical design principles, including the five classical orders which were first developed by Vitruvius.

His work is still studied in architectural programs today, a legacy that can be traced back to Vitruvius and the Renaissance’s obsession with the classical world. Thus Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical architectural styles all have roots in Vitruvius’ work.

But most of all, the rediscovery of Vitruvius’ works and the cultural rebirth they helped fuel underscores an important lesson:

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Thomas Carlyle argued that the history of the world is the biography of great men. But his critics replied instead that great men are products of their age — fulfillments of a cultural expectation.

However, the disagreement between them misses the more important point that great men and the movement of history are inextricably tied.

What I will side with Carlyle’s critics on is that the type of hero for each age appears formed by society. No civilization spawns heroes at random. A society’s laws reveal what it wishes were true, and its philosophy reveals what should be true. But the hero archetypes that emerge express what is true of their society. The hero — whether mythological or historical — represents what a civilization actually believes.

Let’s look at that belief across the centuries, specifically how the idea of the hero changed throughout Greek, barbarian, and Roman cultures, but dramatically shifted with the rise of Christianity, where the ideals of the hero reached their zenith. But as modern culture began a turn away from Christianity with the onset of the Enlightenment, we’ll also see how the heights of our modern hero archetypes have fallen with it…

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The Ancient World

Homer gave the Greeks their first and most enduring heroic template in Achilles — the prevailing warrior in the Trojan War against Hector. The Iliad is an extended meditation on what the early Greek imagination considered the highest human type: the man of excellence — of arete — in skill, physicality, courage, and loyalty.

But by the classical period, Athens had produced a different (but real) hero in Socrates. Plato’s works Apology, Crito, and Phaedo describe to us a man who dies for the sake of his philosophy. Socrates remains both loyal to his values and the law in his refusal to escape from prison and willingly accepts death with a composure that shamed his weeping friends. The heroic ideal had migrated from the body to the soul. Socrates and his student Plato launched the brightest era of Greek philosophy, as schools were begun and followed by droves of young, curious Greek minds. The culture was fading in its worship of the de facto Greek pantheon, and a groundswell of philosophic spirit was taking hold of wider Greece.

Rome’s ideal was in many ways itself, or rather specifically that of civic virtue. Plutarch’s Lives — the most influential collection of heroic biography in Western history — held up figures like Cincinnatus, who left his farm to save Rome and returned to it immediately after, as the Roman summit. Virgil’s Aeneas was defined by pietas: dutiful devotion to gods, family, and city. The Roman hero was the man who subordinates himself entirely to the purposes of the empire, much like John F. Kennedy’s proposal to Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”

The Medieval World

In the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the influences of barbarian warrior culture, Roman civic duty, and Christianity merged to create one the of most impactful heroic archetypes in world imagination — the knight, along with his chivalric ideal. In the knight, the warrior’s strength was directed by Christian virtue and placed in service of the local lords. The Song of Roland gives us one of its earliest expressions still extend today, with Roland dying at Roncevaux not merely as a brave soldier but as a Christian warrior. The Arthurian cycle refined the ideal further in the adventures of Lancelot, Gawain, and Galahad.

What the chivalric tradition understood was that the knight’s dignity depended not only his will and strength, but more acutely on his faith and moral uprightness. A knight who fought for glory alone was simply Achilles with a cross on his shield. The chivalric ideal demanded more in the adoption of a monastic-like attitude to martial excellence: placing it in service of the weak, the common good, and the Church.

By the late medieval period the knight had become a figure of self-serving vanity, confirmed by the misadventures of Don Quixote. Knighthood, though a lasting heroic ideal even through today, still lacked something in the highest hero archetype ever achieved.

The Modern Turn

The early American republic produced heroes in the mold of Plutarch’s Romans. Washington was like a Cincinnatus — the idealized farmer-soldier who saved the republic yet desired a return to his farm. Parson Weems’s hagiographic Life of Washington is essentially a secular saint’s life written in the Plutarchan mode. The heroic template was still recognizably classical, self-sacrificing statesmen, still oriented toward something beyond the self: the republic, the common good, the unprecedented experiment in self-governance. The Founding Fathers were flawed men, as all men are, but the heroic tradition they inhabited pointed toward an idea of ordered liberty that transcended any individual.

The 19th and 20th centuries gradually displaced the civic hero with the ideological one. The hero became the figure who advanced a cause — liberation, equality, justice, solidarity. These are genuine goods, and many of the figures elevated in their name were genuinely self-sacrificial, genuinely courageous, genuinely admirable. Martin Luther King Jr. is the most instructive modern example: a man of real moral seriousness and evident personal courage, elevated to a status of near-inviolable veneration in American culture. He is effectively a secular saint — a figure whose image confers moral authority and whose criticism is treated as a kind of sacrilege.

The theological difficulty lies in the structure of the veneration, and what that structure reveals about the culture doing the venerating. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris — rightly ordered love — holds that goods must be loved in proportion to their proximity to God, the highest good. Racial equality is a genuine good, rooted in the conviction that every human person bears the image of God. But when racial equality becomes the ultimate good — the summit of the moral hierarchy, the standard against which all other values are measured — it’s been elevated beyond its proper place. The religious impulse doesn’t disappear when God recedes, but instead resettles on whatever is next in line.

When it comes to heroes, the main result of this shifting of values is that our heroes narrow in their virtues. We make heroes out of individuals for smaller and smaller reasons. For example, the American Founding Fathers became heroes to us (on the tail of the Enlightenment) not because they were deemed heroic in a broad sense, but specifically in terms of a bravery and self-sacrifice that won political freedom for early America.

The latter half of the 20th century saw the hero archetype shrink further to one of political action — those actors who won us racial equality, or victory over the U.S.S.R, or some other specific political accomplishment rose to become the newest generation of secular saints. They are not saints in the personal sense in terms of exemplifying moral virtue; they’re secular saints for what they enacted, repealed, signed into law, marched in protest for, etc. While many of these ends may have been good, the idea of “hero” in the modern sense shrunk significantly to mean those who led this or that political action.

This is the modern heroic predicament: that our heroes continue to shrink in moral stature. The causes they serve may be real and important, but the grandness of the hero has been diminished, because the ruler by which we measure them has shrunk. They are not bigger in the minds of us today because they aimed at bigger things, but because we expect so much less.

Our culture’s heroic imagination has descended to merely global maxima — the best among what we can see simply with our own eyes. But there was a time when heroes really were measured by the highest things — and those heroes have been with us the entire time…

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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.

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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:

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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…

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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…

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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…

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