The Library

History driven by logistics, energy, geography, institutions, demography, and incentives — not moral arcs or heroic individuals. The instinct for root causes and second-order consequences.

Repeated deep dives into Rome, Byzantium, early modern Europe, and modern great powers. Collapse treated as a recurring problem of political economy, security dilemmas, and legitimacy crises.

Great-power competition is inevitable because the system compels it. Geography, technology, and anarchy matter more than ideals. The default question: what are states forced to do?

Both market-sceptical and market-fundamentalist authors, plus state-capacity realists. A deliberate tension between markets, incentives, and price signals on one side, and institutions, industrial policy, and state capacity on the other.

Societies run on stories — and stories can become weapons. Acute sensitivity to moral panics, status games, institutional capture, and sacred concepts that cannot be questioned.

Not devotional reading — analytical. Christianity's role in cohesion, legitimacy, time preference, and moral structure. Secular modernity often replicates religious forms without acknowledging it.

Energy, materials, supply chains, and physics trump wishful thinking. Progress depends on supply chains and physics, not vibes. Existential risk is procedural and systemic, not villain-driven.

Explicit investment in better reasoning, argumentation, strategy, and decision-making. Not just consuming content — upgrading the operating system that processes it.

Evolutionary psychology, sex differences, ageing, epigenetics, mitochondria. The bedrock beneath institutions and ideologies: human nature itself.

Not escapism — chosen for institutional depth, decay scenarios, and power dynamics. Science fiction as sociology; historical fiction as ground-level perspective on the forces studied in non-fiction.