The best man to lead through a crisis is the man who knows he won’t survive it. And history shows this is more true than you might expect.

Those rare leaders in history who faced declining health and a huge external crisis at the same time — logically, they should have failed faster. But many times, the double negative of inescapable death and military pressures created a form of leadership that defies all intuition.

The perfect case is that of Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, otherwise known as the Leper King.

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Leading as a Leper

Born in 1161, Baldwin’s signs of leprosy appeared early in childhood. Nonetheless, he was thrust into kingship over the crusader-controlled Jerusalem while young and bound for a tortuous rule with the debilitating disease.

Leprosy, as most of us know from Biblical accounts, was not only a painful and embarrassing disease. It came along with longstanding social implications, usually of isolation, destitution, and an inability to participate in normal life.

As a leader, it hampered him in other ways, too. He increasingly found it difficult to ride or fight, but it also meant he couldn’t marry or produce an heir to leave any familial legacy. Governing was difficult for any king, let alone one with leprosy and in one of the most precarious political situations of his day.

Nonetheless, despite challenges of his body, the internal political strife in Jerusalem, and the external threats to his kingdom, Baldwin held his own against imminent collapse. The Leper King, as he’d come to be known, turned out to be a surprisingly active ruler and competent commander, holding off the mighty Saladin for years.

This is proof enough that the barbarian elements of Medieval Europe’s infancy — that still valued strength and vigor as primary qualities of a leader — had been tempered by the influence of the late Roman Empire and the Church. No longer was physical strength required to win the loyalties of a people.

Baldwin’s kingdom in Jerusalem doesn’t end well. Following his death at a young age, it falls to the forces of internal strife and Guy de Lusignan’s foolish decisions to meet Saladin’s army on the battlefield.

Nonetheless, while Baldwin couldn’t solve the precarious situation of Jerusalem in the long run, he was the key that held it together while he lived. Only he commanded the loyalty, restraint, and wisdom to lead the kingdom during some of its most difficult times. He held off the collapse for as long as his short life allowed him to.

But what is it about a dying leader like the Leper King that made him such an effective leader during the kingdom’s most trying times?

Self-Interest Dies with Them

A mental shift happens to a leader when they know they’re going to die.

Baldwin knew the end for him would be swift. Yet this didn’t cause him to be rash. On the contrary, Baldwin displayed wisdom beyond what his relatively few years would suggest.

In ordinary politics, when a leader’s life isn’t threatened, his outlook is multifaceted for better or worse. His decisions will hinge on a range of factors: its morality, its tangible effects, its negative implications, its reflection on his country, but also its reflection on himself. He will have a significant concern for the next election, the next phase of life for himself, and his legacy. In effect, the leader’s self becomes a factor in every decision.

Will he have enough support to win another election? Will he be written of well in the history books? How will the media spin this or that phrase? And on and on, with nearly infinite questions as to the ultimate effects of his decisions while in power. Relationships, reputations, and personal alliances become a minefield to navigate, which take their toll of real decision-making for the good of the people.

But a dying leader’s decisions become much simpler. No longer is there another election, or future threat to his kingship to deal with. No longer is there much care for the reactions of critics and political enemies. Their purview focuses on just a few things: the good of the kingdom, his legacy, and the wellbeing of friends and family.

And this is why Baldwin could be so successful while knowing death awaited him around the corner. His decisions could be made with no concern for his own future political security. Baldwin, to secure future stability for the kingdom, crowned his nephew as co-king and arranged a regency under Raymond of Tripoli.

He was to lose power no matter what, so his decisions could be better attuned to what the good of the kingdom required, what served his close contacts well, and what would leave himself with a respectable legacy. This is what happens when a leader understands that someone else will inherit the consequences of his decisions. Self-interest is nearly removed from consideration.

But Baldwin had another advantage by his illness…

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If there’s any current trend that absolutely terrifies me, it’s the complete breakdown of marriage and the family.

It’s no secret that marriage and relationship rates are in a freefall. A recent poll showed that around 60% of men under 30 are still single. Women are a little better off, but still not pairing up at historic rates.

And this generation isn’t forming households at all. Less than 15% of adults under 30 are both married and own a home. Compare that to nearly 50% just a few generations ago and you’re looking at a massive decline. More young adults now live with their parents than with a spouse.

So what’s going on?

Well, part of it is economics. Wages have pretty much stagnated for young men in the workforce and housing costs have grown way faster than incomes, so the financial threshold to start a family has become out of reach for millions.

But at the same time there’s a cultural component. Recent polling shows that young women’s desire to marry has dropped significantly in a short period. For the first time in modern history, young men are actually more likely to desire marriage and children than young women. Men feel economically dispossessed and therefore struggle to provide; women feel that traditional partnerships offer no upside.

I believe this trend has potential civilization-ending consequences. How can we survive if such a basic aspect of society, the ability to get married and start a family, is no longer a priority — or a possibility — for millions?

To understand where we’re at now, we need to look back to a time that remains a haunting warning to the modern West. We’ll discover why, as marriage and family formation disintegrate, literally everything — our politics, culture, and economics — will only get more and more insane.

Because when people have no stake in the future, society gets reckless…

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The Cell of Human Civilization

But let’s first start with the basics: why is the family the cornerstone of society? And why is civilization absolutely dependent on the health of the family?

These questions go all the way back to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. He believed society couldn’t even exist without the family. Aristotle outlines in Book I of his work Politics that there is natural human hierarchy that emerges in even primitive societies. The family unit comes into existence because it allows the most basic survival needs to be met and it allows for a small amount of organization to develop.

The family to Aristotle was a microcosm of how the state should function. In a patriarchal society like Greece, Aristotle saw the husband and father as the natural leader. As a king rules over his subjects, so the father would rule over his household.

The relationships found within the family then extend into a village structure where people can achieve broader material flourishing and social complexity. Finally, the relationships found in a village extend into that of a city, or polis, which contains the necessary organization to allow citizens to achieve the full spectrum of human activity — art, culture, government, organized defense.

Without the family, then, you get no village, and no city. No organization higher than the fractured individual. No civilization.

The great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas arrived at a similar conclusion. He understood the family as the natural and foundational building block of human society that precedes the political state in development. Like Aristotle, Aquinas saw the family as rooted in nature – the drive to procreate and the need to share survival responsibilities first created the family, and the household came into existence long before any organized political community. This means the government, states, and nations all depend upon and require the family’s existence.

Zooming out from philosophy for a bit, we can see this on an interpersonal level. The family is where the first real transmission of what we call “civilization” actually happens – values, stories, cultural norms, and faith are handed from one generation to the next.

Every child born into a family learns what it means to have a place, a role in this little “tribe” —to be a part of something larger than themselves. To be a part of society. A family, then, is a little microcosm of the larger civilization. Perhaps Pope John XXIII said it best when he wrote: “The family is the first essential cell of human society.”

Now, this begs the question: what happens when families can no longer form? What happens to a civilization when these “essential cells” break down — when men and women don’t ever get married to create them in the first place?

Rome: Economic Woes and Family Struggles

Ancient Rome provides endless parallels to modern society, and it also gives us an example of our present situation regarding the decline in marriage and family formation. Just like today, there were basically two elements to the problem, one economic, and the other cultural.

To make a long story short, near the end of the Roman Republic, , around the 1st century BC, Rome had stratified into two distinct groups: 1) the dispossessed, landless lower classes; and 2) the ultra wealthy.

For most of Rome’s history, its economic backbone was the small, landowning farmer. Their ownership of land was key because it provided the economic means to start a household – to attract a wife and provide for children while providing needed goods for society.

But around the 2nd century BC, a major shift destroyed this class. As plunder from Rome’s incredible physical expansion allowed the wealthiest Romans, the patricians, to buy up large swathes of land, smaller farmers, who were often out at war fighting in these conquests, were left behind.

Their farms were either left in disrepair or were bought out while they were away. At the same time, a massive influx of cheap labor — usually slaves won from conquest — were being used by wealthy patricians to outcompete the small farmers.

This previously independent class of small farmers was basically left with nothing. Their farms were gone, and all the meaningful work was going to newly conquered slaves. With no options left, hundreds of thousands of these displaced rural Romans flooded into the city, becoming the urban poor.

With no land or stable wages, this class — mostly made up of young military aged men — could not meet the economic threshold to form households and create stable families. A family was no longer an economic asset like it was on a farm, but rather a huge financial liability for them living in an urban slum.

Even for those that wanted to get married and start families, the economic conditions made it difficult. Without land, these lower-class veterans and farmers lacked the financial security to offer a dowry, establish a permanent home, or ensure their children had food on the table.

Decadence Leads to an Abdication of Responsibility

As economic power was being ripped from the lower class, patricians were living in a completely different world. They were wealthy and had limitless options for entertainment and revelry. In this type of environment, the long-established norms that dominated Roman society gave way to decadence.

Traditionally among the aristocratic classes, marriage was seen as a duty — it was often an alliance between families to generate legitimate heirs and strengthen the political and social positions of the families involved. Strict monogamy was therefore essential.

However, as the patricians grew extremely wealthy and their power grew unchecked near the end of the Late Republic, their decadence got out of hand. Patricians knew it was a duty to get married and have children, but this was increasingly being delayed or even disregarded in favor of unofficial or casual partnerships that didn’t produce any legitimate heirs. It was simply a lot more fun to forego one’s family obligations.

This trend resulted in a depleting pool of patricians. The wealthy weren’t reproducing at replacement levels — so much so that politicians implored the elite to finally settle down. In 102 BC, the censor Metellus gave a speech trying to compel the Roman elite to marry and produce children. He argues that marriage is unpleasant and restrictive, but ultimately one’s civic duty:

“If we could survive without wives, Romans, we would all stay free of that nuisance. But since nature has arranged things so that we can neither live comfortably enough with them nor live at all without them, we must look to long-term well-being rather than short-term pleasure.”

So now we see that both economic and cultural factors were hollowing out Roman families during this time. The question is, what happened after? Did Rome ever recover?

Well, remember how I talked about how the family was where civilizational values and norms were handed from one generation to the next? It was precisely this function that had broken down, meaning a negative feedback loop had been created…

When Families Fracture, Tradition Dies

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We live in a world where everyone is offended and everything is unfair. We love playing the victim.

But allowing yourself to be a victim might be one of the most destructive things you can do. It puts you on the defensive; it biases you toward inaction; and it defeats you psychologically long before you’re ever defeated in reality. It’s avoiding this mentality that makes great success stories like that of Teddy Roosevelt.

While campaigning for president, Teddy was shot on his way to give a speech. The bullet punched through his steel eyeglass case and his folded speech, lodging in his chest. His response was legendary: “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot — but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose”. He would go on to carry that bullet inside him for the rest of his life.

Teddy Roosevelt was a different breed of man than we seem to have today. As we’ll see, he was a man willing to get in the arena and fight, despite all odds against him. What kind of culture and upbringing produce him? Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t always this way — his life had plenty of tragedy and hardship. He should’ve been a victim of society rather than its president. So, what happened?

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Born Weak, Made Strong

Roosevelt came into this world weak. Born to a wealthy family in New York City a few years before the Civil War kicked off, he suffered from severe asthma. In his own autobiography, he describes himself as a sickly, timid boy.

His father did what he could to help young Teddy manage his asthma, but he also played a pivotal role in making sure the young Roosevelt didn’t make it his identity. His father made him understand that his mind was strong and his body was weak, but that he could work to make his body strong.

What might quickly have become a victimhood mindset was turned into a challenge. His family set up a gym at home for him to train. While also training his body, he trained his mind through reading as well, recalling an impactful Marryat novel about a naval captain who determines to make fearlessness a habit by acting unafraid until it sticks.

But, despite his improvements thus far, his challenge was highlighted again during a trip as a young teenager to Maine, where two boys bullied him. Failing to defend himself, he then took up boxing lessons from a former prize-fighter, John Long. Roosevelt, wittingly or not, was taking up a mantra from Seneca’s On Providence that “all his adversities he counts mere training.”

Roosevelt would take boxing with him to Harvard in 1876. The timid, asthmatic boy was now ready to take on the world — but his tragedies weren’t over yet.

Tested by Tragedy

Adult life would test Roosevelt even more than his childhood had. At first, things started out well. He married, then had a daughter named Alice Lee Roosevelt, named after her mother. But a mere two days later — on Valentine’s Day of 1884 — his mother dies in the morning from typhoid and his wife dies in the afternoon from kidney disease. He’s only 25. Roosevelt records the day in his diary with a large X and a single sentence: “The light has gone out of my life.”

With their deaths, Teddy seems to have further leaned into to what was already a stoic demeanor. He rarely spoke of his wife again and later remarried. While his sister raised young Alice, Roosevelt headed out to ranch in the Dakota Badlands — very likely a way to take his mind off his recent tragedies.

He was already what Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics would call the great-souled man, someone who bears misfortune with dignity. Aristotle wrote:

“Nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation many great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but through nobility and greatness of soul.”

Roosevelt certainly bore his history of tragedy quietly, and not from a place of indifference. Importantly, while there’s certainly a time to grieve, Teddy didn’t let his tragedies sink him into inaction. What very likely could debilitate most people, didn’t stop Roosevelt.

A Strenuous Life

Two speeches highlight Roosevelt’s ethos on bearing hardship and a life of action. The first was his “Strenuous Life” speech in 1899, before his presidency. Despite his aristocratic upbringing Roosevelt rejected a “doctrine of ignoble ease”. He holds that it’s better to attempt great things, even if it risks several failures. This is to live a life of trying, of not being afraid to fail. And, so, Roosevelt attempted great things.

Roosevelt’s bouts with tragedy, hardship, and his love for the outdoors and ranching helped him identify with the common man, despite his affluent background. This helped him win the vice-presidency in 1901, assume the presidency after Mckinley’s assassination, and continue as U.S. president in 1905 — the height of power attainable in North America for any individual at the time. Despite bad health and terrible personal loss, Roosevelt was able to persevere to ascend to the pinnacle of American society. Instead of allowing himself to fall into a victim mentality, Roosevelt merely aimed higher and landed himself in the White House.

The next decade would solidify Teddy Roosevelt as not only a successful president, but also a cultural icon…

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Alexander the Great is one of the most complex figures in history. Was he a hero of Western civilization who spread Greek influence, or a power-mad tyrant who subjugated millions to satisfy his own ego?

He was no doubt a man of radical extremes. One day, he’d show empathy to his defeated enemies; the next, he’d burn an entire city full of fellow Greeks to the ground.

Modern historians still debate how to categorize him, but one fact is undeniable: Alexander set out to conquer the known world and he came closer than any human being in history to achieving his goal.

He succeeded where countless leaders failed before him. And since his death, the greatest commanders in history have tried — and failed — to replicate what he achieved.

So the question is: what made him so special? What made him unstoppable?

We can analyze his battle tactics, his logistics, or even his luck, but ultimately, when we analyze the great figures of history, it’s important to understand their character — what were the personality traits and daily habits that made them different?

Alexander operated on a set of linked characteristics that all built on each other to accomplish the extraordinary.

It’s a template that we can use to achieve our own goals today, even if we aren’t leading phalanxes into battle or naming cities after ourselves. So here’s how to think like Alexander the Great to win life’s biggest battles, and it all starts with what defined him the most: absolute obsession…

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Tunnel Vision For Conquest

The first thing to understand about Alexander is that he had a singular mind. He was completely focused on one mission: defeating the Persian empire and conquering the known world. And he evaluated everything by whether it helped or hindered this mission.

It’s quite likely that Alexander inherited this obsession with conquering the Persians from his father, Philip II. Philip, a great general in his own right, had already united most of the Greek city-states under the League of Corinth, and he planned an invasion of the Persian Empire as a sort of revenge mission for past transgressions against Greece.

Alexander had first-hand experience of Phillip’s hatred of the Persians as a young man. No doubt it rubbed off on him. When Phillip died, Alexander took the throne at age 20, and he also took up his father’s unfinished war plans — but he wouldn’t be content with simply defeating the Persians in a war, he had to completely annihilate them.

The more Persian lands Alexander conquered, the clearer this fact became.

No Half Victories

After the Battle of Issus, which the Macedonians won decisively, the weakened Persian king Darius sued for peace. Most victors would have happily taken the deal, as it gave Alexander considerable lands and kept the Persians at a safe distance from Macedonia

But Alexander did not do half-victories. His mind was always on the larger goal — not just to injure the Persians, but to destroy them outright.

The historian Arrian records in his work The Anabasis of Alexander, that the king replied to the Persian king’s offer with the following letter:

“Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I have now taken from you.”

He then warned Darius to surrender immediately or he would pursue him to the ends of the earth. Alexander was basically saying that the fight would never end until either himself or the Persians were annihilated.

It shows that Alexander would not let lesser victories cloud his vision of total victory. He was singularly focused on his grand conquest of Persia and beyond.

No Distractions

This singular focus showed itself in Alexander’s day to day actions in that he avoided many of the distractions that typically preoccupy men of his rank.

Most rulers would be content to enjoy the spoils of war — namely women, good wine, and wealth. But Alexander was different. In fact, before he left Macedonia after becoming king, he was encouraged to marry and sire an heir, but he wanted to invade Persia so quickly that he never made time for it. In his mind, women took second place to conquest.

Likewise, after his victories over Darius, Alexander was given the traditional 360 concubines fitting of a Persian king, but apparently he rarely — if ever — touched them. Again, his focus was on his mission.

The same went for food and wine, even though some fits of drinking did indeed get Alexander into trouble during his life. But Plutarch records that he was, in general, quite temperate in this area. And this directly contributed to his success as a leader and conqueror. Plutarch writes:

“In his diet, also, he was most temperate… He was much less addicted to wine than was generally believed…For when his affairs called upon him, he would not be detained, as other generals often were, either by wine, or sleep, nuptial solemnities, spectacles, or any other diversion whatsoever; a convincing argument of which is, that in the short time he lived, he accomplished so many and so great actions.”

Alexander’s teacher as a young child, Lenoidas of Epirus, is often credited with instilling this discipline in Alexander. He would take the young Macedonian prince deep into the wilderness on grueling expeditions to build toughness, and also check his room for hidden sweets the young king’s mother may have snuck him to avoid becoming soft.

Alexander certainly wouldn’t have been able to accomplish all he did if he was too distracted by the material aspects of life.

Yearning for the Edge of the World

There’s an ancient Greek word often associated with Alexander that I think perfectly describes where his focus was at all times. It’s called pothos.

Pothos basically means a deep, restless longing or desire for the unattainable and the unknown. But it’s almost a religious feeling, something that has a perhaps divine origin, in that it can’t be fully explained. Alexander had this pothos to push his army past the map’s boundaries and conquer the ends of the earth.

When you study Alexander’s life, you understand that his singular obsession with pushing further into the unknown was indeed almost like a calling — like he couldn’t help but pursue it even if he wanted to give up. .

And this yearning drove everything he did — whether it was never accepting half-victories or stripping his life of excess distraction — his goal remained front and center.

But even an obsessive mindset can only get you so far – you actually need to carry out your mission in the real world, not just long for something in your head. So you need something that separates the daydreamers from the doers, and that is courage.

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Many of us know deep down that our ancestors were tougher men than us — the generations of WWI and WWII were a different breed. They were more fit and seemingly braver, if also maybe a little more brash than we are today. What’s happened to men since then? What’s making men lose their masculinity?

One easy answer is the screen. Phones, TVs, and computers are at the heart of many of the problems men face today. It might sound boomer-ish, but the digital world has real effects on how we develop.

Here’s how we went from the likes of the Teddy Roosevelts of a bygone era to the de-masculinized men of today. And more importantly, we’ll see how we can reverse it.

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Destroying the Male Physique

Before screens, the average man worked very different jobs. They overwhelmingly worked in farming up until industrialization in the mid-1800s pushed them from the fields to the factories. Either way, man was doing physical labor for long periods of time. But post-WWII, things really started to change.

The inventions of telephone and radio communications, mass production machinery, and improved electric and gas-powered engines meant less physical effort was required in most occupations. This collected people into ever growing office spaces for largely sedentary work: writing, typing, calculating, talking. All these factors were shrinking men’s day-to-day physical exertion and their fitness.

But the real game-changer was the computer. This made sedentary, white-collar work the norm among men, not to mention also among the relatively new influx of women in the workforce.

Through the late 80s and especially in the 90s, the computer took over virtually every workplace. The physical body was now basically economically irrelevant for the first time in history. Computational power far exceeded bodily power in terms of making or breaking a company. This had real effects on men.

The most concerning measured result is the decline of testosterone among men at a rate of roughly 1% per year since the 1980s, suspected as a direct result of sedentary lifestyles. Even when men weren’t working, they were likely watching TV at home. The screens anchored men to office chairs and couches. Their bodies simply responded to the circumstances.

Muscle mass is another area, less measured, that men have likely lost significantly. Look at an early to mid-20th century picture of a gym class and you’ll see what I mean. This isn’t what you see in today’s schools.

Historically, being physically weak was somewhat marginalizing. In tribal societies, it made your participation in a hunt more difficult. You would’ve been at the bottom of the pack in any warrior-society like that of Sparta. And among the 90% of field laborers across time, it would’ve made you less effective and profitable in agriculture. But digital life removes that marginalization, allowing men’s bodies to atrophy or grow overweight without immediate consequence.

One sign of our times is the gym; while in the past, the Greeks coined the term for the places they might spar or wrestle with one another, today’s gym was effectively invented to recreate physical work. For most, it’s a hobby we pursue voluntarily to ward off the effects of sedentary life. The gym is an artificial environment where physical labor has no output other than the training of the body. Historically, it’s a little strange…but today, it’s almost necessary for millions to stay fit.

However, the changes to men don’t stop at the physical — they go much further, much deeper into the psyche of men.

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The modern world has fractured the human experience into two separate pieces. We’ve been conditioned to believe that the mind and the body are unconnected — that thinking and doing are fundamentally opposed.

This is how we ended up with the “nerd vs. jock” myth: the smart weakling who can’t protect himself, bullied by the strong blockhead who can’t think for himself. It’s been a trope in almost every Hollywood movie for decades.

But historically, this dichotomy would have been completely alien to the people who built our civilization. In fact, some of the greatest philosophers in history were also supreme athletes. They understood a mind-body connection — a synergistic relationship between intellectual and physical activity.

So let’s explore why the ancients believed that physical training was essential for even the most studious soul. They knew that you could not reach your final form — physically, mentally, or even morally — until you hit the gym…

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Duty to Family and Community

Socrates, the father of Western philosophy, had this to say about training the body:

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable.”

What’s really interesting is the context in which Socrates says these lines. It comes from Xenophon’s work Memorabilia, and Socrates is actually pointing out that physical training is a duty one has to the larger community.

In Xenophon’s work, Socrates approaches a weak young man and scolds him for neglecting his physique, explaining that each man has a duty to his city to become a capable warrior in case of attack. Socrates claims the man’s weak physical state is what has led many men to their deaths or a lifetime of slavery. They were not fit enough to fight well when the time came.

Socrates says:

“…they are not a few who, owing to a bad habit of body, either perish outright in the perils of war, or are ignobly saved. Many are they who….are taken prisoners, and being taken must…endure the pains of slavery for the rest of their days…”

During Socrates’ time, military service was an obligation that all male citizens had to be prepared for. There were few professional armies in ancient Greece, so when war came, every male citizen, regardless of occupation, was required to join the ranks.

And Socrates’ experienced this in his own life. He trained and fought as a hoplite — the Greek infantry — and is recorded to have fought in at least three battles. He was even praised for his physical courage by Alcibiades at the Battle of Potidaea in 432 BC. Alcibiades said that Socrates singlehandedly saved his life during the battle, and took the hardships of military life better than anyone else in the whole army.

So for Socrates, we see a great thinker who did not relegate himself strictly to books and debates, but believed that physical readiness was a duty to the larger community. After all, minds like his could not be free to contemplate if not for the strong bodies of soldiers that provided physical safety.

Socrates’ student Plato understood this too. Plato was actually a well respected wrestler, who even competed at the Isthmian Games — one of the four major Athletic Games alongside the Olympics.

Like Socrates, Plato believed one needed to be strong to be a good member of the community. When he envisioned the ideal state in his work, The Republic, Plato noted that the leaders of the community, whom he called ‘guardians’, must be strong in order to protect others:

Plato writes:

“Anyone who is going to be a truly good guardian of our community, then, will have a philosopher’s love of knowledge, and will be passionate, quick on his feet, and strong…..And our guardians are, in fact, both warriors and philosophers.”

Socrates and Plato connected physical fitness to the need to be battle-ready. Though physical combat is far less likely for your average person today, this does not mean that physical readiness is not a duty anymore. There are still dangers lurking about. There are still aggressors who can harm you or your family.

Though getting into a fight is usually the last thing you ever want to — or should — do, often simple physical presence is a deterrent against those who want to prey on the vulnerable. You should be fit enough so that, at the very least, you can escape a dangerous situation and lead others out of that situation quickly.

It’s not just about immediate physical danger, though. It’s also a duty to remain healthy for your family and community so that you can continue to be useful. You need to be an asset to them rather than a burden. If you have those who depend on you, then you have an obligation to remain in good health so that you can continue to provide for them and be there when needed.

We don’t like to hear the word “duty” in the modern world, and our society has done almost everything it can to absolve us from our duties, but ultimately I do think it is your duty to remain physically capable as long as you can. God did not give you a body so that you can abuse it, but to use it to its fullest.

But the next reason to train actually goes beyond the mere physical, and proves how our mental faculties are shaped by our bodily habits….

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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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