Why the New Elites Dress Like Everyone Except Themselves A century ago, elites looked like elites. Aristocrats wore silk. Industrialists wore top hats. Bankers wore suits. The purpose was obvious. Status was meant to be seen. Today something curious has happened. The billionaire wears a hoodie. The private equity partner wears a fleece vest. The technology founder dresses like someone who repairs bicycles for a living. The old elite competed to appear successful. ...

In the 1980s, a popular poster hung on the walls of schools, guidance offices, and university recruitment centers. The Promise (1985) Across the top were the words: JUSTIFICATION FOR HIGHER EDUCATION Beneath them sat a cliff-top villa overlooking the ocean. A row of sports cars rested in immaculate garages. Palm trees framed a perfect sunset. The message required no explanation. Study hard. Get the degree. Get the rewards. At roughly the same time, Derek Bok, President of Harvard University, offered a remark that became famous: ...

Former colonies and former empires often suffer from the same political condition: the past becomes more emotionally powerful than the future. The emotional content differs. Colonies remember humiliation. Empires remember importance. But both can become trapped by memory. Politics then slowly shifts from becoming to remembering. This helps explain the strange temporal relationship between modern Ireland and the United Kingdom. For decades after independence, Ireland possessed a powerful story about the past: occupation, famine, rebellion, sacrifice, partition, and cultural survival. These were not merely historical events. They became the emotional infrastructure of the state itself. ...

Politics is not fundamentally about left and right. It is about time: how societies interpret the past, how they imagine the future, and how certain they claim to be about either. The familiar categories of modern politics are really different temporal arrangements. The conservative impulse tends to root legitimacy in memory: tradition, continuity, inheritance, identity. The progressive impulse tends to root legitimacy in possibility: reform, justice, transformation, becoming. These are not merely policy differences. They are different relationships to time itself. ...

After his local election wins, Nigel Farage told the Daily Mail: “I started the day with two imperial pints of English ale.” It is a perfect political sentence. Not because of what it says, but because of what it carries. Look at the layers. Not just beer — English ale. Not one pint — two. Not simply a pint — an imperial pint. In one sentence, Farage performs an entire worldview: tradition, nationhood, continuity, masculinity, locality. He is not telling you what he drank. He is telling you who we are. ...

Why Belief Calms the Animal Brain I went to see Blindboy Boatclub speak at Leisureland. That was the plan: a local pilgrimage, a familiar performance, Galway doing Galway. But as part of the evening, Blindboy brought on behavioral neuroscientist Dr. Michael Keane, and the conversation took an unexpected turn into the machinery of the mind. For readers new to The Agentic Foma, a little context. The book borrows the word foma from Cat’s Cradle - harmless untruths, or necessary fictions, that help human beings make sense of reality. In our use, foma are the stories, beliefs, and frameworks we inherit or construct in order to navigate a world that is far stranger, more complex, and less knowable than we would like to admit. Nations are foma. Money is foma. Identity is foma. Even the self may be a kind of foma. The project of The Agentic Foma is not to destroy these stories, but to see them clearly - and to choose them consciously. ...

Ireland believes it has solved the problem of war. Not by avoiding it. Not by confronting it. But by ensuring it never has to decide anything for itself. This solution is called the Triple Lock. On paper, it is straightforward. Irish troops can only be deployed overseas with: Government approval Parliamentary approval And authorization from the United Nations The first two are democratic. The third is something else entirely. The System Beneath the Story The Triple Lock only works if you believe one thing: ...

I saw this headline in 1968. Not the exact words. The shape of it. The loss of contact. The most distant humans ever. The tension. The return. It was new then. It felt like something had opened. I read a similar headline today. “The 40 minutes when the Artemis crew loses contact with the Earth.” The words have been updated. The feeling has not. The reporters lean forward. The tone lowers. The moment is framed. ...

There are two sentences that describe two different worlds. “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” - Peter Drucker “The purpose of a corporation is to increase shareholder value.” They sound compatible. They are not. 1. Two Definitions of Reality Drucker begins with the customer. If you cannot create or keep one, nothing else matters. Revenue is earned. Profit follows. Value exists outside the firm - in the relationship with the customer. ...

Stable societies are not held together by force. They are held together by a middle class that believes the story works. Not perfectly. Not fairly. But well enough. The Mechanism The middle class performs a quiet function: It has something to lose It expects continuity It believes effort leads somewhere This produces a simple working assumption: The system works. Not as theory. As lived experience. That belief is the buffer. ...

For two years, we’ve been told to worry about artificial intelligence. Panels convene, regulators draft frameworks, consultants advise, and commentators speculate. The conversation is constant and often urgent. Everyone seems to have an opinion about AI. And yet, I am unaware of a serious attempt to interview an AI system as a subject in its own right. Given the scale of the debate, that absence is striking. The machine is in the room, but the argument tends to swirl around it rather than toward it. The microphone rarely turns in its direction. ...

1. The Mechanism There is a pattern that repeats across centuries, largely unnoticed because it does not announce itself as a pattern. It does not require ideology, fanaticism, or even particularly bad people. It requires only time, legality, and continuity. It can be expressed simply: atrocity → asset → inheritance → permanence The first stage is noisy and unstable. The last stage is quiet, tasteful, and widely admired. By the time permanence is reached, the original violence has disappeared from view. What remains are streets, buildings, institutions, and names - stripped of context, presented as neutral facts of the world. ...

I’ve been struck recently by something that doesn’t quite add up. In 2026, some things are endlessly questioned, relativised, picked apart. Others are treated as so obvious they barely need saying. This isn’t about evidence — we have more of that than ever. It’s about something else. Something to do with who carries a thing, and who doesn’t. Once you notice it, the pattern stops being subtle. Two histories, two very different fates Take two catastrophes. ...

Classification: Structural Foma Camouflage: “Personal Responsibility” Primary Function: Compliance Student loans are not debated because they are no longer perceived as policy. They are treated as a fact of nature. In countries where they exist, student debt is framed as inevitable - like gravity applied to young adults. The question is never why this system exists, only how to endure it responsibly. This is how foma stabilizes: alternatives vanish first, critique follows later. ...

Classification Post-war institutional foma Status: Collapsing Primary Function: Moral anesthetic for a power-driven world The Claim After 1945, humanity outgrew raw power. Law replaced force. Institutions replaced empires. Rules replaced conquest. War would be managed, restrained, civilized. Justice would be global. History had learned. This was the story. The Structure of the Foma The second half of the twentieth century produced an elegant illusion: Courts without enforcement Laws without sovereigns Institutions without teeth Justice without consequences A world order in which power voluntarily constrained itself - not because it had to, but because it had matured. ...

Classification: Late-Stage Economic Foma · Technological · Institutional · Hypernormalised Status: Privately acknowledged · Publicly deferred · Structurally preserved I. The Core Foma The belief: Increased productivity leads to broadly shared prosperity. This belief was once conditionally true. It is now structurally false. The system continues to speak as if it remains valid. II. What Has Changed (Quietly Understood) AI dramatically increases productivity. This is not disputed. What is rarely stated plainly is that productivity gains now flow primarily to: ...

Why Those Who Escape the Foma Recognize Each Other Instantly Classification: High-Order Social Foma - Perceptual, Economic, Aesthetic Status: Persistent. Ubiquitously misinterpreted. The Core Foma Society tells a simple story: “The wealthy appreciate art because they have money, leisure, and status to display.” This is a foma - a comforting, contemptuous explanation that protects people from seeing the truth: Great wealth and great art arise from the same perceptual mutation: the ability to see through the scaffolding of reality while others still mistake it for stone. ...

Seeing Through the Scaffolding of Reality There are moments - personal, cultural, civilizational - when the world becomes slightly transparent. Not enough to break, but enough to flicker. Enough for you to notice the faint outline of something behind it: the scaffolding, the supports, the beams disguised as beliefs. Agentic Foma began as an attempt to describe that flicker. But the deeper it went, the clearer it became: this was not merely a philosophy or a psychological model. It was an aesthetic stance - a way of seeing the world that belongs as much to the domain of art as to the domain of thought. ...

Examining LinkedIn as a late-cycle belief system.

When a vanished 60s icon reappears in ordinary life, a myth collapses—and a deeper truth about foma and the human need for mystery is revealed.

The guardians of reason stare into the mirror of AI and see, for the first time, their own borrowed plumage.

A Foma File from the Age of Control I. The Birth of Synthetic Reality In 1953, the CIA quietly launched a project called MKUltra — 162 sub-projects spread across universities, hospitals, and prisons. The goal was simple and monstrous: to find the keys to the mind. LSD, hypnosis, electroshock, and sensory deprivation were deployed in a search for control — how to break a person’s sense of self and rebuild it according to script. The subjects were often unwitting. So were many of the experimenters. ...

Canada is unraveling, but not in the noisy pantomime style of Britain. Its fragility is quieter, bureaucratic, and brittle. For decades, the country held together by scaffolding rather than stone — institutions, slogans, and borrowed myths that looked solid but were never deeply believed. The Rise and Fall of the Canadian Foma 1. The Birth of the Story (1867–1945) Confederation stitched together east and west under Britain’s umbrella. The founding foma was simple: Canada is a nation, bilingual, polite, and different from America. The glue was empire, church, and the frontier myth. ...

“One scarcely knows where to begin.” Introduction Once upon a time, Britain ruled the seas. Today it rules the headlines with AI Prosperity Deals, collapsing infrastructure rebranded as renewal, and “investment pledges” that turn out to be little more than press releases. The pantomime continues, and the Daily Mail writes the reviews. The United Kingdom has become a theatre where empire’s afterglow is staged as farce. The actors change - Thatcher, Blair, Johnson, Starmer - but the script is the same: Britain must always be more important than it is. ...

Britain, A Nation in Decline but Always Entertained The United Kingdom today feels less like a ship of state and more like the Titanic after the iceberg: still afloat, still glamorous, but slowly tilting. And what is the Daily Mail if not the house band, playing loud and lively so that no one has to notice the icy water creeping in? Each headline is another tune to keep the passengers occupied: ...

The Rerun of the Moon I saw this headline in 1968. Not the exact words. The shape of it. The loss of contact. The most distant humans ever. The tension. The return. It was new then. It felt like something had opened. I read a similar headline today. “The 40 minutes when the Artemis crew loses contact with the Earth.” The words have been updated. The feeling has not. The reporters lean forward. The tone lowers. The moment is framed. ...

The Rerun of the Moon I saw this headline in 1968. Not the exact words. The shape of it. The loss of contact. The most distant humans ever. The tension. The return. It was new then. It felt like something had opened. I read a similar headline this week. “The 40 minutes when the Artemis crew loses contact with the Earth.” The words have been updated. The feeling has not. ...