Prolegomenon: 2026

This time for real

Around a year ago, I wrote what can only be described as an exercise in self-delusion, I penned a plan in order to push myself to share the ideas I have been ruminating for years onto a community of intellectuals¹. I set up to explore four distinct analytical axes: American cultural hegemony and Europe, dating dynamics beyond the market framework and beyond it, demographic collapse in emerging nations, and a grab bag of heterodox ideas. I laid out specific topics, started drafts and then went to do nothing for half a year, woke up in November and got a small break before Christmas day.

In the end I just wrote two articles about Muslim immigration to Europe and one philosophical essay about civilizational dissolution on 2 opposing archetypes. As it seems all paths lead to immigration and Islam, the two topics I didn't even center in my original plan. As for the other three axes? Only touched superficially, mostly ignored, occasionally referenced in drafts that never shipped.

What I clearly didnt plan: a hundred of you decided that this accidental focus was worth your time. The articles got signal-boosted by people better than me, restacked and quoted. I seemed to stumble into what startup books call product-market fit. I honestly thought I would toil for years before I got a few people to see what I do but Substack is far more efficient than I thought.

So taking a few lessons of last years prolegomenon, this one starts with honesty to myself instead of delusion ambition: Im going to recap what happened in 2025, why the plan kinda collapsed, and what ideas I'm taking forward into 2026. This time intending to bring more polished articles.

What Actually Happened in 2025

The plan died within the first quarter. I started researching Americanization, drafted notes on dating dynamics, collected demographic data. Then winter depression hit and had to just focus on life. The motivation to write disappeared and I could barely get myself to do the minimum required for work and social obligations. Writing fell into the sideway so I just kept accumulating draft ideas and disconnected from Substack for a few months.

Then spring happened and my brown skin started synthetising Vitamin D. I had a productive blip where I managed to write the 5arki article in one sitting, driven by a conversation with a friend who made an offhand comment about integration that I could not let slide. Also published a take on Europe and its Jewish minority. I finished the piece, posted it, then disappeared again for 8 months. During that time I wrote a piece on my take of why Nick Fuentes blew up and tried to coin a neologism that went absolutely nowhere.

The long silence happened when the initial burst of energy faded and I returned to the baseline state of not being able to force myself to write as I have not had the habit to do so in English. In the meanwhile I wrote some articles in French about Liberalism as an illusion and a translation of Yarvin’s concept of the Cathedral in French. I kept collecting notes, kept having conversations, kept thinking about the topics, but the gap between thinking and writing kept constant.

Then recently DLA published his piece about Islam, claiming Muslims are not an issue, would rapidly secularize under Western exposure, posed no political threat to European liberalism and that the true problem was the far-right.
I personally snapped because something about the mix of confident wrongness and smug edginess, the projection of American immigration dynamics onto European reality, the dismissal of observable dysfunction as reactionary paranoia triggered something. I wrote a quick rebuttal in the evening, reread it and went to sleep. I just guessed that was it, I would probably reference it in a discussion in some future note but it picked a bit of steam over the few next days and boom, 1k views and 100 new subs. It got restacked and quoted by people better (and bigger) than me and got me called an illiterate liar which is correct. Guilty as charged, your honor. The monkeys at typewriters method is finally paying off. ²

The response proved there was appetite for granular, nuanced analysises with interesting uncovered anecdotes. People seemed to like it, so I will follow on that.

What I learned from 2025 is that I cannot force myself to writing on a schedule. The articles that worked were the ones written in bursts of energy triggered by external provocations or internal pressure that built up over months. The difference between 2025 and what I hope for 2026 is understanding this pattern and working with it instead of fighting it. Following the Dao of the river. I will not promise regular output because that ship has sailed. Instead I will write when something demands to be written, when spite or insight reaches critical mass.

This brings me to the ideas themselves. Last year I treated the prolegomenon more as a binding contract. This year I will treat it as an incomplete inventory, a map of things I find interesting enough to explore when the moment comes.

The Bag of Ideas

What follows is a sort of menu: ideas existing in a Platonic dimension, waiting for the right trigger (or enough popular demand) to crystalize into articles and collapse into unidimensional ink. I am not committing to all of these in this year because I am terrible at releasing anything. Instead, think of this as an intellectual inventory of drafts: topics developed enough to write, waiting for a catalyzing event to ship, categorized.

Islam in Transition

The Islamic Reformation were living through: A liberal point a lot of libtards in the early 2000s repeated is that Islam is stuck in the 1400s and needs a reformation. The issue is those people are not seeing that Islam indeed went through its reformation, and we got the Calvinist violent equivalent under the form of Salafi brands. The fracturing of religious authority, proliferation of competing interpretations, direct access to texts without institutional mediation is something classic within Islam. What is new is the injection of Marxsist ideas smuggling what Hussein calls “the German historicist spirit” into Islam. The result isnt gentle progress toward secularism but sectarian violence and ideological fragmentation. Urban educated Arabs seem to be abandoning religion at unprecedented rates altho not openly, and there is an increasing Christianisation in North Africa while subsaharan Africa and Southeast Asia continue undergoing Saudi-funded Salafization.

The wave of apostasy in MENA: Mass defection from Islam that state censorship obscures but which is palpable in the environments. Multiple mechanisms contribute: internet access providing alternative worldviews, education creating cognitive dissonance with dogma, economic failure breaking Islams social contract, womens rights movements colliding with religious patriarchy. States respond with intensified repression, which accelerates exit from religion and crystallizes in atheist groups online. The underground networks, the exile communities, the quiet individual departures that aggregate into civilizational shift which is unseen because the strenght comes from millenarian inertia.

How Islamic civilization reacted to colonization: The bifurcation between Westernized elites and atavistic traditionalist masses, failure of Arab nationalism/socialism, retreat into Islamism as anticolonial ideology. Why different regions (Maghreb, Levant, Gulf) processed defeat differently and why those differences persist. This will also be an introduction to the Muslim Brotherhood ideas, Sayid Qutbs Milestones and why Kissinger understood Islam better than most.

Why Islam is structurally weak, but appears strong³: Islams contemporary power is purely negative, and purely theatrical. It has ability to prevent things (blasphemy, apostasy, womens rights) and destroy them but not to build anything. Every majority Muslim state is either an authoritarian petrostate, failed state, or a pseudo democracy held together by a military strongman or a king. Zero Islamic civilizational achievements since contact with the Promethean West except inertic preservation. Today there are still less Arab nobel winners than Israeli ones, a nation born less than 100 years ago. The religion survives through state enforcement and social coercion, not by generating anything people want and why this is a deep metaphysical wound.

Hschuma, or shame in the context of Islamic societies: I want to explore the modern tyranny of the cousins, why nepotism and corruption are endemic and why it is hard to destroy corruption in a society deeply embedded in a shame culture.

The Algerian civil war and modern Jihad: 1991-2002, 44,000-200,000 dead. When Islamist FIS won 54% in 1991 elections, the Francophone military elite canceled results, decade of massacres followed. This became template for modern Jihadism, what happens when Islamists win democratically and secular militaries prevent them from governing. The GIA tactics, the civilian massacres, the factional splintering, all presaging Iraq/Syria dynamics and the Arab spring. It is also the triggering event for terrorism in Europe with the new wave of terrrorist attack starting in 1995.

The Chechen wars: How two brutal conflicts (1994-1996, 1999-2009) transformed Chechen secular nationalism into a Jihad endeavour. The radicalization of survivors, the influence on global Jihad networks, the chaotic interlude of the Ishkerian republic, and the Beslan school siege as turning point. Why Chechnya matters for understanding North Caucasus instability and Russian Muslim populations.

Early Zionism: Moshe Hess⁴ and the Dreyfus affair awakening Herzl to Jewish nationalism. How 19th century European nationalism provided a template for Jewish political consciousness. The specific intellectual genealogy from Moshe Hess to Ben Gurion.

European Cultural Death and Americanization

Russia as a misunderstood country⁵: Something that Putin and his Kremlinbots managed to convince the dissident right is that he is a white, trad based leader who keeps traditional values and reorients Russia. The reality is Russia is the most degenerate country in Europe, high divorce rates, highest HIV rates in Europe, plummeting fertility, mortality rate not recovered from USSR times, depression. Find a bad statistic and Russia is on top. Everything it projects onto the West it is itself, but worse. Also an explanation of Putin the Atlanticist, Putin the Duginist and why there is no real alternative to him.

All societies lie amongst 2 distinct poles: Every stable civilization balances between an equivalent of Apollonian order and Dionysian chaos, a ying and yang, between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, between rootedness and dynamism. The specific poles vary by civilization but the tension is universal. In the modern West it is left vs right, but in Islamic and Chinese societies the poles are radically different and equally interesting.

The Berlin effect and degeneracy as a phenomenon: I define degeneracy as disconnexion from reality. And Berlin epitomizes the European cultural exhaustion and degeneracy. A city that produces nothing except nightclubs and failing startups, attracted a creative underclass through cheap rent (not anymore), generates “culture” that’s American trends with worse production values and German brutalist aesthetics. Also Berlin seems to be the dumping ground for all the town weirdos of Germany. A phenomenon to explore.

Americanization of Europe series: How American cultural hegemony operates through material and immaterial infrastructure, status hierarchies imported from abroad and not just content.

Generation Z in PIGS countries: The cohort that came of age during European crisis (2008-2015) in Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain internalized that Europe offers no future. Countries like Spain and Greece have emigrating youths who go work in Germany or the Netherlands for a salary they can live on. Why also they seem to look on dictatorships with teary eyes.

Accounts of European crisis shaping Gen Z: How 50%+ youth unemployment in Spain/Greece/Italy created generation with zero faith in their institutions and huge brain drain. The brain drain, the precarious employment, the delayed family formation, the political radicalization (both left and right). What happens when entire generation concludes social contract is broken and no repair is coming.

Dating, Gender, and Demographic Collapse

Dating markets as a hyperfiction: The framework of dating as a market with inherent pricing via SMV becomes real only through collective belief, regadless of its correctness. Your grandparents didnt have to calculate their market position because they operated in embedded social structures with defined roles. We convinced ourselves that dating is market, started acting like traders, created the pathologies we claim to analyze and retroactively rewrote history shoehorning this thesis, thus falling into a self-fullfilling prophecy.

Traditional POV on dating: What actually worked across cultures: arranged introductions within trusted networks, parental vetting, community oversight, defined courtship rituals, economic transparency (dowry/bride making expectations explicit), quick marriage timelines. Not because people were better or worse but because structure reduced uncertainty and prevented hyper-optimization pathologies.

n-gear societies: Some societies operate on two (or more) gears, one for producing children/stability, one for innovation/disruption. Modernity forces everyone into same or infinite gears (individualistic optimization) regardless of suitability which contributes to collapsing fertility rates.

Why women are the intolerant conservative gender: Across cultures and history, women are the enforcers of social conformity and punish deviance more ruthlessly than men. Mechanisms: sexual selectivity creating higher standards, reputational concerns making women punish female deviance, greater parental investment creating conservative risk preferences, social network maintenance requiring norm enforcement. Modern feminism obscures this by framing women as oppressed by male conservatism, when women are primary enforcers of social conservatism in most domains.

Men are from Hobbes, women are from Rousseau: Male political philosophy trends Hobbesian (state of nature is war, order requires authority, peace is artificial). Female political philosophy trends Rousseauian (humans naturally good, society corrupts, proper environment produces harmony). Not a form of biological determinism but pattern recognition about tendencies explaining why male/female political preferences diverge on crime/punishment, immigration, welfare, foreign policy. A contribution and building on the feminization (or androgynation) theory of insitutions.

A personal essay on dating, nerdish elitism from inferiority complex, and a sort of guide for taking the best of redpill ideology, while avoiding its pitfalls, mixing a review of Sun and Steel by Mishima-san.

Political Theory and Miscellaneous

Tieboutian Democracy aligning consequences with actions: Allow genuine federalism where municipalities set dramatically different policies, and people vote directly with them. If people dont like it, they can move to another city. But to emigrate you need to give your whole history of voting and referendums and the city decided if you are a culture fit, or if you will import the disastrous thinking that led to your city becoming a shithole. This aligns choices to consequences, and artificially creates harmonious soceities where like minded individuals can live in peace. Think of it as a direct form of Tieboutian democracy with Talebian characteristics. If you vote retarded, you suffer retarded until you learn.

Atavistic tradition vs Chestertonian tradition: When people talk about tradition, they use a single word to describe two relationships to tradition: atavistic, a return to an imagined pure past, reactionary with different concepts and false idealism vs Chestertonian, understand why fence was built before tearing down and reform from within. Problem with modern conservatism is its attachment to atavism without understanding, leading to LARPing rather than true respect and resurrection of tradition. Democracy of the Dead deserves vote not because past was perfect but because dismissing all accumulated wisdom is hubris. Chesterton proves a better path to conservatism than any reactionary thinking.

A defense of Leninism and Lenin: Lenin understood power better than any 20th century figure. His organizational theory, notably vanguard party, democratic centralism and ruthless discipline was proven correct by his outcomes. His tactical flexibility vis-a-vis the NEP showed pragmatism missing from successive and contemporary movements. His ultimate success is he died to soon to have tainted his projects. His direct ideological descendant is not Stalin or Trotsky but Deng Xiaoping who grabbed the same pragmatism of the NEP and run with it.

Immaterial theory, status and class viewed through immaterial class appartenance: Status and class through more than cultural capital, not just economics. Why high-income workers identify as working class while low-income academics identify as elite. The immaterial markers that create real class divisions invisible to economic reductionism. This will build on Bourdieu and Girard, 2 french intellectual titans of the 20th century.

Decrepit immaterial infrastructures as an explanation for Weberian disenchantment in the developped world: one can see technology as the creation of humans in order to bring order from chaos and thus increase our mastery over the world. Most people stop at the material side of technologies: fire, wheel, steam engine, transistor but there is an equally, co-evolving cultural set of immaterial technologies that helps us manage our immaterial needs and increasing complexities of reality: marriage structure, rituals, traditions, community etc. The issue is through our techno-rationalist thinking we invested heavily in material infrastructure and developped a clear blindspot for immaterial infrastructures which give meaning and happiness to individuals. There is also a creative destruction where immaterial and material technologies mutually destroy each other, creating a fertile terrain for the next generation. This essay would be an exploration of the idea that to fix imbalances we must define the concept and build immaterial infrastructures that manage to bring order from chaos into social lives and immaterial dimmensions. Less doomerism and more hope for the future.

Why small groups change society (Ibn Khaldun/Gramsci from immaterial theory POV): Ideological minorities with high asabiyyah (group solidarity and cohesion) can capture institutions and reshape society despite demographic minority status. Why organized Islamists defeat disorganized secular majorities (Arab Spring), why woke activists capture institutions despite being 8% of population, why small disciplined cadres drive historical change while atomized majorities passively accept outcomes. Implications for European demographics: doesn't matter if Muslims are 10% if they're organized and Europeans atomized. This also joins the idea that Leninism (vanguard party) is a good political template for small groups seeking large effects. Archimedian lever for politics.

Confucian-legalistic axis to understand China: Chinese civilization oscillates between Confucian harmony (ritual, hierarchy, social cohesion) and Legalist control (law, punishment, state power). Understanding contemporary China requires seeing how CCP synthesizes both, Confucian rhetoric of harmony masking Legalist mechanisms of control.

The mimetism of tattoos: How tattoos shifted from deviance marker to conformity signal. The class inversion where working-class tattoos became middle-class status displays. What happens when rebellion becomes mass market.

A review of “The Great Replacement” from original French: Camus actual book versus the meme version. What he argued versus what people think he argued. Why the concept resonates despite (or because of) its imprecision.

A neutral take on Franco: Why American right-wing francophilia is bizarre projection. What Franco actually represented versus what reactionaries imagine. How he betrayed Falangists, Carlist etc The 50th anniversary of his death as opportunity for honest assessment, and why despite his reputation he is the Greatest Spaniard of the 20th century for the legacy he left.

And some surprise drafts that might happen or not. And inshallah collabs I dont even know about yet.

Forward

To everyone who subscribed recently, I am deeply grateful. This year has been quite a shit one for me and amidst the relative darkness I got a few lights on the form of validation that while I am indeed retarded, my ideas are unlikely to fall into deaf ears. To everyone who signalboosted, commented, restacked, or DMd me, I want to really thank you because every message truly fills my heart of joy, to understand that random people around the world took time from their busy lifes to read something that I wrote is a nice thought.
As an example of my gratitude, I will try to write more and try to at least put half of these ideas onto a form or another.

To 2026, where these seeds might grow into something more substantial. May the results of these seeds bloom into beautiful intellectual flowers.

1

2. Ah yes, the day after I published the Stilicho piece.

On Stilicho and Arminius

3. Or a story of how 5 Million jews beat 50 Million Arabs

4. I think I already mentioned it somewhere, but this man is underrated in the fact that he both inspired Marx and Hertzl and also had a prophetic explanation of the fate of European Jewry.

5. This but as an article