Another proof? Look at South America. It's the live experiment, running right now in front of us.
For two decades, the continent was the showroom of 21st-century socialism. Chávez, Maduro, Morales, Correa, Kirchner, Petro. Endless promises, endless crises, endless enemies to blame.
Then voters turned. Argentina elected Milei, who inherited 211% inflation and brought it down to around 34%. Bolivia ended nearly twenty years of socialist MAS rule. Chile elected José Antonio Kast with 58% of the vote. Ecuador kept Noboa. Peru moved right. And Colombia, after four years of Gustavo Petro, elected Abelardo de la Espriella.
Look closely at Colombia, because it's the clearest case. Petro's flagship policy was "Total Peace": negotiating with guerrillas and narco organizations, treating armed groups as political partners. De la Espriella did the opposite. Within weeks he ordered a "total offensive" against the ELN guerrilla and the FARC dissidents and ruled out any negotiation with what he calls narco-terrorism. Daily arrests. Strikes against the Clan del Golfo, the country's largest cartel. Same country, same army, same cartels. Different will.
That's the question that should keep you up at night. If crime can be confronted the moment someone actually decides to confront it, why wasn't it?
My answer: because the problem was the business model.
A left that solves problems makes itself unnecessary. Its entire apparatus, the parties, the unions, the NGOs, the consultants, the international conferences, the careers built on "managing" poverty, violence and inequality, lives off the problem continuing. Solve crime and you lose the fear that justifies your programs. Solve inflation and you lose the state that controls prices. Solve poverty and you lose your clients. I'm not saying they plotted it in a back room. I'm saying every incentive points the same way, and people follow incentives. A movement that lives off chaos will never be in a hurry to end it. Its status, its funding, its standard of living depend on the problem never going away.
And that's what is collapsing today. Across South America, voters looked at decades of problems that were "managed" but never solved, and they fired the managers. Brazil is the last big piece. If it follows, the five largest economies on the continent will all be governed from the right.
The lesson for the rest of us, for Americans voting in a few days, for Europeans watching their countries drift: a problem that is never solved is not always a failure. Sometimes it's the product.
Free people solve problems because they have something to lose when problems persist. Collectivists manage problems because they have something to lose when problems end.
https://x.com/brivael/status/2114306917434540138?s=20
Once you see the world through this lens, a lot of things that looked random suddenly make sense.
You understand why Macron recognized a Palestinian state at the UN. Not a state with borders it controls, a single government, or elections. A symbol. A gesture for domestic consumption, performed on the world stage. That's the politics of posture over reality, the obłuda I described earlier: what matters isn't what is true on the ground, it's the narrative you get to emit.
You understand why Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France's hard left and a man trained in Trotskyist organizations in his youth, made Gaza the center of his politics and refused for months to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Look at the mechanism. He doesn't address French Muslims as individuals with their own jobs, families, ambitions and disagreements. He addresses them as a bloc. A mass to be mobilized. That's the collectivist reflex in its purest form: you don't speak to people, you herd categories. Yesterday the proletariat, today identity blocs. The individual disappears every time.
You understand why Zohran Mamdani built his rise on the Democratic Socialists of America. The mayor of New York isn't just a progressive Democrat. He's a DSA member, and DSA doesn't hide what it is: an organization that openly calls itself socialist and treats the Democratic Party as a vehicle. His campaign promised a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses. Every one of those ideas has the same shape: the individual steps back, the city steps in. The price is set by the planner, the store is run by the planner, and voters are addressed as categories, tenants, riders, communities, rather than as free people who can build something of their own.
And Mamdani didn't come out of nowhere. The same movement helped send Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018, and Bernie Sanders spent decades making the word "socialist" respectable in American politics. Different faces, same software. The lie isn't that they hide their ideology. It's the promise attached to it: that you can freeze prices without killing supply, that the state can run what entrepreneurs run, that someone else will always pay. That promise has been tested on every continent. It has never been kept.
And you understand the most important thing: collectivists need chaos.
This isn't a metaphor. It's their own doctrine. Lenin's strategy in 1914 was to turn the war between nations into a civil war inside them. The Soviet Union spent decades arming and funding movements across the Middle East and pushed through the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The KGB had an entire doctrine, "active measures," dedicated to amplifying every division inside Western societies. A stable, prosperous, confident society is the collectivist's worst enemy. Chaos is his natural habitat.
Why? Because chaos is the perfect justification. It justifies emergency powers. It justifies more state. It turns citizens into frightened masses looking for a shepherd. It replaces individual judgment with tribal loyalty. A society at peace with itself asks the planner: what do we need you for?
Look at the two great conflicts of our time through this lens.
Russia's war in Ukraine was launched by a former KGB officer who called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the century. A man formed in the exact school that treated chaos as a weapon. He doesn't just wage war on Ukraine. He wages it on Western cohesion, feeding every division he can find in our elections, our streets, our feeds.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the perfect fuel for Western politics. It splits every campus, every party, every city. It lets politicians like Mélenchon build an electoral base on permanent outrage. And for everyone who lives off that outrage, a real peace would be a disaster. Ask yourself honestly: who in our political class actually has an interest in this conflict ending?
That's the pattern. The people who live off chaos never solve it. They manage it, they feed it, they posture around it. Because a solved problem is a lost lever.
Freedom produces order from the bottom up: people who own things, build things, trade with each other and have something to lose. Collectivism produces disorder from the bottom up and then sells you order from the top down.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
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