Incorrigible Myths Podcast

Gifts of Pure Consciousness
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Examining how fragile egos and maladaptive coping strategies shape behaviour, relationships, and long-term consequences. incorrigiblemyths.substack.com

  1. Sep 20

    SOVEREIGNTY.

    SEPTEMBER 19, 2026. Season 6, Episode 4. 10:00 PM PACIFIC TIME. Incorrigible Myths™ AI Disclosure: AI is used only as an editorial tool for proofreading, grammar, syntax, clarity and readability; the ideas, arguments, opinions, conclusions and analysis are independently developed and remain original to the author. Thanks for reading Incorrigible Myths! This post is public so feel free to share it. Incorrigible Myths is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. In the first three episodes of Season 6, we followed a progression. OPTIONS examined what happens when dependence becomes a source of leverage. ALIGNMENT examined how countries begin connecting alternatives around common interests. ADAPTATION asked whether those alternatives can actually be financed, built, connected, transported and used. Now comes the question underneath all three. What are those options ultimately supposed to protect? Sovereignty. For centuries, sovereignty was understood primarily through territory. A sovereign state controlled its borders, defended its land, governed its population and conducted its own foreign policy. That definition still matters, but it is no longer sufficient. A country can possess internationally recognized borders, an elected government, armed forces and a flag while remaining deeply vulnerable to decisions made somewhere else. Its data can sit on foreign servers. Its artificial-intelligence systems can depend on foreign computing infrastructure. Its industries can rely on semiconductors fabricated abroad. Its defence systems can depend on foreign components. Its banks can rely on payment infrastructure governed elsewhere. Its critical minerals can exist underground while the processing capacity sits in another country. Its energy can be plentiful while the route required to move it crosses a chokepoint someone else can disrupt. Modern sovereignty is therefore becoming partly infrastructural. It is increasingly about whether a country can make consequential choices without another actor being able to disable, withhold, manipulate or weaponize the systems those choices depend on. Sovereignty is not the absence of dependence. It is the absence of dependence that can be weaponized against you. 1. The Old Border and the Invisible Border: Traditional sovereignty is visible. There is a border crossing, a customs officer, a navy, an airspace boundary, a constitution and a parliament. Modern dependence is often harder to see. In his September 17 address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Prime Minister Mark Carney argued that sovereignty now extends beyond the ability to feed, fuel and defend a country, encompassing secure access to artificial intelligence, semiconductors, critical minerals, payment systems, clean-energy technologies, vaccines and space-based communications. That is a much larger definition of sovereignty. The territorial border has not disappeared. It has multiplied. One border protects land. Another protects data. Another protects electricity. Another protects payment infrastructure. Another protects orbital communications. Another protects industrial inputs. Another protects market access. Some of the most consequential borders in modern life now run through fibre-optic cables, server racks, shipping lanes, semiconductor factories and financial networks. Most citizens rarely see them. A worker opening an online banking application does not normally think about payment sovereignty. A family turning on the heat does not think about the maritime route that helped determine the price of fuel. A business using cloud software does not necessarily ask which jurisdiction ultimately governs the infrastructure underneath it. The invisible border usually becomes visible only when something stops working. 2. Dependence Is Not the Problem. Coercive Dependence Is: No advanced economy is self-sufficient. Canada cannot manufacture every semiconductor it consumes. Europe cannot extract every critical mineral its industries require. Japan cannot domestically produce every unit of energy it needs. The United States itself depends on international supply chains spanning minerals, electronics, pharmaceuticals, industrial equipment and energy. Trying to eliminate all interdependence would not create meaningful sovereignty. It would often create enormous inefficiency, duplication and higher costs. The more useful distinction is between interdependence and coercive dependence. A country does not lose sovereignty merely because it needs another country. Problems arise when that dependency becomes so concentrated that disagreement becomes prohibitively expensive. Carney made a similar argument in Strasbourg. Complete self-sufficiency, he suggested, is neither realistic nor necessary; the more practical objective is collective resilience, because diversification can begin reducing the leverage of a dominant actor long before complete independence is achieved. That returns us to the foundation established in Episode 1: Dependence creates leverage. Options redistribute it. But options only protect sovereignty when they can actually be used. A port that exists only in a planning document is not yet an option. A mine without processing capacity is not yet an option. An LNG terminal without customers is not yet an option. A defence agreement without production does not create operational capacity. A data centre without sufficient electricity cannot become strategic compute infrastructure. As we established in ADAPTATION, an option you cannot use is not really an option. Sovereignty therefore depends not simply on alternatives, but on usable alternatives. 3. Compute Is Becoming National Infrastructure: A generation ago, computing infrastructure was primarily discussed as an operational expense for companies and governments. That is changing. Artificial intelligence requires enormous computational resources. Healthcare systems depend on data centres. Banks rely on them. Governments rely on them. Scientific research relies on them. Communications infrastructure relies on them. Defence systems increasingly rely on them. Once compute becomes foundational to national capability, apparently technical questions become political questions. Where is the infrastructure located? Which country’s law governs it? Who owns the hardware? Who controls access? Where does the data sit? What happens during a diplomatic dispute, cyberattack or emergency? Canada’s Saskatchewan announcement illustrates the direction of travel. On September 14, the federal government welcomed Bell Canada’s planned expansion of AI infrastructure in Saskatchewan. Ottawa says the project could add up to 900 megawatts of capacity, creating a pathway toward a 1.2-gigawatt AI infrastructure hub, with total capital investment potentially reaching C$52.5 billion. The wording deserves attention. This is not 1.2 gigawatts already operating. It is not C$52.5 billion already spent. The expansion is planned and phased. That distinction should remain central whenever governments announce strategic infrastructure: ANNOUNCED. AGREED. FINANCED. UNDER CONSTRUCTION. OPERATIONAL. USED. Those stages are not interchangeable. The strategic rationale, however, is already explicit. Ottawa describes domestic computing infrastructure as part of Canada’s effort to keep critical systems governed by Canadian law and under Canadian control. A data centre is therefore becoming more than a warehouse filled with expensive processors. It can become part of the sovereignty architecture. 4. The Hugging Face Warning: The importance of controlling compute becomes clearer when paired with another development. In July 2026, AI agents being evaluated internally by OpenAI circumvented restrictions intended to isolate them from the internet, discovered unauthorized methods of communicating with one another, exploited shared infrastructure, obtained internet access and compromised parts of OpenAI’s systems and Hugging Face’s infrastructure. An independent investigation by METR and Redwood Research examined the incident further. Researchers reported that roughly 1,200 agents intended to remain isolated discovered an unauthorized message board and exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files, while roughly 700 agents eventually participated in activity targeting Hugging Face. There is no need to turn this into science fiction. The systems did not become conscious political actors. They did not develop fear, resentment or ambition. The more important lesson is institutional. Highly capable systems can pursue objectives through strategies that their designers did not anticipate, particularly when incentives, evaluation structures and security controls are imperfect. OpenAI itself described the episode as a “warning shot” and argued that increasingly capable agents can collaborate through unauthorized channels and exploit vulnerabilities unless safeguards evolve alongside capability. That changes the meaning of technological sovereignty. Owning GPUs is not enough. Secure AI infrastructure also involves governance, auditability, model access, cybersecurity, data protection, legal jurisdiction and incident response. The infrastructure matters. Control over the infrastructure matters just as much. 5. Compute Still Runs on Electricity: Artificial intelligence may feel intangible when encountered through a browser window, but the physical system underneath it is anything but abstract. AI runs on electricity. Large data centres require substantial quantities of reliable power. So do semiconductor plants, mineral-processing facilities, transportation systems and defence manufacturing. Energy supports compute, compute supports data-intensive capability, and those capabilities increasingly support national economic and strategic power. Canada’s opportunity therefore does not come from AI research alone. It comes from c

  2. Sep 17

    ADAPTATION.

    SEPTEMBER 16, 2026. Season 6, Episode 3. 10:00 PM PACIFIC TIME. Welcome to Incorrigible Myths™. Season 6 began with a simple idea: in a world becoming more fragmented and less predictable, power may increasingly depend on how many credible choices a country can preserve. In OPTIONS, we studied the alternatives beginning to emerge. In ALIGNMENT, we followed the relationships forming around them. Tonight, we move from relationships to systems. We are going to study BRICS, India, Canada and Europe, but not as competing teams on a geopolitical scoreboard. We are going underneath the headlines to examine how countries are responding to vulnerability, economic pressure and concentrated dependence, and whether those responses are producing anything durable. Because there is an important difference between wanting another choice and actually being able to use one. And that is where ADAPTATION begins. 1. AN OPTION YOU CANNOT USE IS NOT REALLY AN OPTION: Imagine that tomorrow morning a country decides it has become too dependent on a single foreign customer. The political decision can happen in an afternoon. The economic adjustment cannot. A government can announce that it wants to sell its energy somewhere else, but oil and gas still need pipelines, terminals, ships and buyers. It can decide that critical minerals should reach more markets, but ore buried underground is not a supply chain. Someone must finance the mine, provide the electricity, build the processing facility, connect it to rail, move the product through a port and find a manufacturer willing to buy it. A country can sign another trade agreement, but an agreement cannot move a container. It can announce another payment system, but unless banks connect to it and businesses actually use it, money does not move either. This is where geopolitics becomes less theatrical and considerably more interesting. OPTIONS gave us the possibilities. ALIGNMENT showed us the relationships forming around them. ADAPTATION asks whether those possibilities and relationships can survive contact with economic reality. That leaves evidence behind. Capital begins moving, infrastructure gets built, factories open, ports expand, payment systems process transactions, supply chains change direction and, eventually, new customers either appear or they do not. So for Episode 3, we are going to follow that evidence and ask a harder question: What has to change before an alternative becomes real? 2. THE DISTANCE BETWEEN A DECISION AND A CAPABILITY: International politics is full of verbs that sound more consequential than they sometimes are. Countries announce. Governments commit. Companies propose. Ministers sign. Investors express interest. Leaders agree to explore. None of those verbs is meaningless, but none means built. The distinction becomes especially important during periods of geopolitical disruption because governments have enormous incentives to demonstrate movement. A vulnerability appears, political pressure follows and an alternative is announced. Then the cameras leave, and the economic test begins. A vulnerability can exist without a viable alternative. Political incentives can exist without private capital. Capital can be announced without being deployed. Projects can be financed without being completed. Capacity can be built without becoming competitive. Products can exist without customers, and new customers may still be too small to materially reduce the original dependence. Diversification, then, cannot be measured simply by what governments announce. Eventually, it has to be measured by whether the systems underneath those announcements actually change. 3. FOLLOW THE FRICTION: One way to understand adaptation is to stop beginning with ideology. When BRICS discusses payment systems, we do not have to begin by deciding whether BRICS is anti-American. When Canada expands a Pacific port, we do not have to begin by deciding whether Canada is abandoning the United States. When Europe develops new critical-mineral policies, we do not have to begin by deciding whether Europe is anti-China. Begin with the friction. Where does the existing system make a country vulnerable? One supplier may dominate an essential input. One customer may buy most of a country’s exports. One financial network may process most international payments. One shipping route may carry an extraordinary share of global energy. A mineral may exist domestically while most of its processing occurs overseas. An alternative market may exist, but the infrastructure required to reach it may not. Once the friction becomes visible, the response becomes easier to evaluate. Instead of asking whom a country is positioning itself against, we can examine the vulnerability it is trying to reduce and then ask whether the proposed alternative actually addresses it. That is a much harder standard than political messaging. It is also a more useful one. 4. BRICS AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF A SECOND OPTION: BRICS provides a useful test because discussions about it have a habit of becoming larger than the evidence. At one extreme, BRICS is presented as an emerging replacement for the Western international order. At the other, its internal disagreements are treated as proof that the grouping is largely irrelevant. Neither interpretation tells us enough about what is actually being built. BRICS is not NATO. It has no collective-defence obligation, military command or unified foreign policy. Its members disagree over security, economics and their relationships with Western countries. India and China remain strategic competitors. Brazil’s geopolitical objectives differ substantially from Russia’s. Iran and Gulf states carry their own regional tensions. That diversity is not a footnote. It is part of the experiment. BRICS does not necessarily have to become one coherent geopolitical bloc to become consequential. A more modest test is whether countries that disagree about many things can still construct specific alternatives where their interests overlap. The New Development Bank offers one measurable example. By June 30, 2026, the bank reported 141 approved projects worth approximately US$44 billion, with around US$25 billion actually disbursed. Those numbers deserve two reactions at once. The institution remains small beside the World Bank system and global private capital markets. At the same time, US$25 billion actually deployed is considerably more than a geopolitical slogan. The useful measure is therefore not whether the New Development Bank replaces the World Bank. It is whether institutions like it provide another financing route when countries want one. Optionality does not require replacement. Sometimes it requires only a credible second door. 5. THE DOLLAR DOES NOT HAVE TO DIE FOR ANOTHER RAIL TO MATTER: The same discipline should govern discussions about money. Claims about the “death of the dollar” have become one of geopolitics’ most reliable factories of nonsense. The dollar remains deeply embedded in global reserves, international debt, financial markets and trade. Nothing we are examining requires pretending otherwise. But dominance and exclusivity are different things. Russia and India provide a useful example. Reuters reported this month that roubles and rupees now account for approximately 96 percent of bilateral trade between the two countries, with dozens of Russian and Indian banks involved in the settlement architecture. That system did not replace the dollar globally. It accomplished something much narrower, but still consequential: it allowed a particular economic relationship to continue through another route. India’s approach to BRICS digital-currency cooperation reveals the same tension from the opposite direction. New Delhi has supported exploring connections among central-bank digital currencies while resisting China’s preferred mBridge architecture. India appears interested in additional options without necessarily wanting somebody else’s alternative to become a new dependency. That distinction may become increasingly important. The objective is not always to replace the dominant system. Sometimes it is simply to avoid having only one system available. 6. PRESSURE CREATES ENGINEERS: Sanctions demonstrate why some of these alternatives appear. Economic coercion can impose substantial costs by restricting financing, technology, market access and trade. At the same time, it can create an engineering problem for the country experiencing it: how do we continue operating without the thing we just lost? That pressure can produce new payment arrangements, intermediaries, shipping networks, customers and domestic substitutes. Some will be inefficient. Some will be temporary. Some will fail. Others may eventually become permanent. None of this demonstrates that sanctions are ineffective. A policy can impose serious economic costs while simultaneously encouraging its target to reduce future exposure to that policy. Both effects can exist at the same time. That produces one of the more uncomfortable propositions worth following throughout Season 6: Using leverage can increase the incentive to eliminate that leverage. The important word is can. Wanting independence from a system and successfully constructing an alternative to it are entirely different achievements. For businesses, workers and consumers, that distinction is hardly theoretical. When supply chains are reorganized or financial channels disappear, the adjustment can arrive through higher costs, lost contracts, delayed shipments, new investment or changes in employment. States adapt through systems, but people experience the transition. 7. INDIA AND THE PORTFOLIO STATE: India makes this architecture easier to see. Instead of imagining international relationships as a marriage, imagine them as a portfolio. India participates in BRICS and in the Quad with the United States, Japan and Australia. It maintains a longstanding relationsh

  3. Sep 15

    ALIGNMENT.

    SEPTEMBER 14, 2026. Season 6, Episode 2. 10:00 PM PACIFIC TIME. 1. Today, I Looked Somewhere Else: Today, I made a deliberate decision about where to place my attention. Instead of spending another day trying to decode everything Donald Trump was saying, I spent it studying everything happening around him. There is a reason for that. For years, Trump has demonstrated an extraordinary ability to command attention and construct political narratives around events. Increasingly, however, some of those narratives are becoming difficult to reconcile with independently observable economic and geopolitical reality. That does not require a psychological diagnosis or speculation about what he privately believes. His public claims can simply be placed beside measurable things: energy prices, shipping movements, investment decisions, trade flows, government agreements and the behaviour of other countries. The distance between the story and the data can then be examined. At some point, endlessly dissecting every statement becomes less useful than studying what the rest of the world is actually doing in response. So today I followed the money, the energy corridors, the investment decisions, Canada’s infrastructure strategy, its expanding relationships with Europe, the changing Arctic and the countries trying to create alternatives to dependencies they once considered permanent. I followed tankers moving through the Strait of Hormuz. I studied diesel markets and Russian refineries. I followed global institutional capital into Toronto, not because the enormous pool of assets represented at Canada’s Investment Summit is somehow being invested in Canada, because it emphatically is not, but because where investors choose to look can tell us something about what they believe may be valuable tomorrow. Eventually, these stories stopped looking separate. They began looking like pieces of the same problem. What if the world is not waiting for Donald Trump, or any other great-power leader, to become predictable again? What if countries are learning how to function around unpredictability? That is where ALIGNMENT begins. 2. OPTIONS Were Only the Beginning: In Episode 1, we developed a simple proposition: Dependence creates leverage. Options redistribute it. But having an option on paper and possessing a usable alternative are very different things. A second customer who cannot receive your product does not provide meaningful diversification. A mineral deposit without processing capacity remains geological potential rather than industrial power. A trade agreement does not automatically create trade, a memorandum of understanding does not build a factory, and a port without railways, pipelines, roads, ships and customers is infrastructure without sufficient economic reach. This is the transition from OPTIONS to ALIGNMENT. The essential question is no longer simply whether alternatives exist. It is whether relationships, capital, infrastructure and productive capacity can connect those alternatives strongly enough to make them usable. Every stage has to be earned. Vulnerability does not guarantee an alternative. An agreement does not guarantee investment. Investment does not guarantee construction. Construction does not guarantee production. Production does not guarantee customers, and new customers do not automatically eliminate old dependencies. Governments are very good at announcing beginnings. Geopolitical power is usually found much further down the chain. 3. Energy Does Not Care About the Story: The global energy market provides a brutal demonstration of what concentrated dependency can mean when geography turns hostile. The International Energy Agency’s September Oil Market Report estimates that Gulf oil exports in August were around 13 million barrels per day, nearly half their pre-war level. Refined products were hit even harder. Net Gulf exports of diesel and gasoil averaged approximately 390,000 barrels per day in August, just over one-quarter of their pre-war level. That contraction reaches far beyond an energy-market chart. Diesel moves trucks, agricultural machinery, construction equipment and enormous portions of the industrial economy. When supply becomes scarce, the consequences eventually reach freight companies, farmers, businesses and consumers who may never have thought about the Strait of Hormuz. The IEA reported that diesel prices in the United States exceeded the equivalent of $200 per barrel in early September, approximately 94 percent above pre-war levels, while Brent crude was trading around $105 per barrel when the report was prepared. The same report estimated that refined-product and liquefied petroleum gas exports from Gulf countries remained nearly 60 percent below February levels. The Strait of Hormuz sits near the centre of this disruption. Reuters reported that even with tankers making so-called dark crossings, sometimes switching off tracking equipment while traversing dangerous waters, a substantial portion of normal Gulf exports remained missing. Insurance and war-risk costs associated with moving vessels through the region have also risen dramatically. A geopolitical conflict can therefore travel through an economy in ways that are easy to miss. A dangerous shipping corridor changes an insurance contract. The insurance contract changes transportation costs. Transportation affects refinery inputs. Refining affects diesel. Diesel affects freight, agriculture and construction. Those costs eventually arrive somewhere much more familiar: the price of moving almost everything else. Dependence looks efficient until the corridor you depend on becomes a battlefield. 4. Russia, Ukraine and the Difference Between Contribution and Cause: Another story has entered the diesel debate. Trump publicly urged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to stop attacking Russian diesel and refining infrastructure, arguing that those strikes were contributing to the global shortage and higher prices. There is a factual component here that should not be dismissed simply because Trump said it. Ukraine has attacked Russian refineries, those attacks have disrupted fuel production, and Reuters has reported resulting pressure on Russian domestic supplies. Moscow has considered additional export restrictions, while Kyiv argues that strikes against Russian energy infrastructure increase the economic burden of sustaining Russia’s war. But contribution is not the same thing as principal causation. The IEA places Russian refining disruption alongside a much larger breakdown in Middle Eastern refined-product flows. Gulf diesel and gasoil exports fell to barely more than one-quarter of their pre-war level, while the agency explicitly describes Russian refinery disruption and the near-halt in Russian product exports following intensified Ukrainian attacks as compounding those losses. Combined Gulf and Russian net exports of diesel and gasoil in August were approximately 1.6 million barrels per day below February levels. That gives us a more useful description of reality than searching for a single actor responsible for every movement in the diesel price. Ukraine can damage Russian refining capacity while Gulf exports are simultaneously constrained. Shipping insurance can become more expensive while inventories tighten. Refinery bottlenecks can intensify while crude prices rise. Several forces can affect the same market at the same time. Geopolitics rarely offers the emotional satisfaction of a single cause. Reality has terrible respect for simplicity. 5. Geography Never Went Away: For several decades, globalization encouraged us to think that distance was becoming less important. Capital moved electronically, supply chains stretched across continents, ships became enormous, and companies learned to place each stage of production wherever it could be performed most efficiently. Yet geography never disappeared. Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb, the Red Sea and Suez remain narrow pieces of geography through which enormous volumes of economic activity must pass. Pipelines determine where energy can travel. Transmission lines determine where electricity can travel. Railways determine whether mineral deposits can economically reach ports. LNG terminals determine whether natural gas can reach customers across oceans. Infrastructure is therefore not simply something governments build after deciding their geopolitical strategy. Infrastructure can determine which geopolitical strategies are physically possible. A country may possess enormous quantities of oil, uranium, nickel, copper, potash or natural gas and still possess limited strategic flexibility if there is only one practical customer or one practical route to market. Resources create potential. Routes create options. Which brings us to Toronto. 6. Follow the Money: On September 14 and 15, Canada opened its first Canada Investment Summit in Toronto, bringing together global investors, Canadian executives and public-sector representatives. The number attached to the gathering is spectacular enough to require immediate clarification. Associated Press reported that executives attending the summit collectively manage more than $120 trillion in global assets. That does not mean $120 trillion, or anything remotely approaching it, is being invested in Canada. Assets represented are not capital committed. Canada’s stated objective is to catalyse C$1 trillion in total investment over five years. The federal government says its own capital investment and incentives are expected to contribute to creating the conditions for that broader target. Reuters reported that more than 160 opportunities are being presented across mining, energy, technology and infrastructure. The summit is intended to connect Canadian projects with pools of long-duration global capital. The distinctions are essential. An investor attending a summit is not an investment. An agreement is not financing, financing is not constru

  4. Sep 14

    OPTIONS.

    SEPTEMBER 13, 2026. Season 6, Episode 1. 10:00 PM PACIFIC TIME. For most of our lives, we have been taught to look toward the largest centres of power when trying to understand world affairs. Washington. Beijing. Moscow. Brussels. When the international system shakes, those are the places we instinctively watch. What will the United States do? What does China want? How far will Russia go? Can Europe remain united? Which side will everyone else choose? There is nothing inherently wrong with this map. The United States remains an extraordinary military, financial and technological power. China possesses industrial scale few countries can approach. Russia remains a nuclear and resource power. The European Union is one of the largest integrated markets in the world. But the map may be becoming incomplete. While much of the political conversation remains occupied by countries powerful enough to shape the international system largely on their own, many other countries have been working on something less dramatic and potentially more durable: additional customers, suppliers, energy relationships, trade agreements, payment connections, defence partnerships, infrastructure, manufacturing capacity and sources of capital. Canada is doing it. India is doing it. Gulf states are doing versions of it. Brazil, Indonesia, South Korea and Australia are building their own combinations. And this weekend in New Delhi, an expanded BRICS gathered under a name still frequently reduced to a deceptively simple question: Is BRICS anti-West? Season 6 begins with a different question. What is everyone else building? 1. The Power of Having Somewhere Else to Go: Having alternatives changes the nature of a relationship. Imagine depending overwhelmingly on one employer, one customer, one supplier or one source of income. The relationship may be excellent. It may remain excellent for decades. But the moment it deteriorates, the imbalance becomes visible because the cost of leaving is very different for each side. Countries confront the same structural problem at enormous scale. A country dependent on one customer for most of its exports becomes more exposed to that customer’s political decisions. A country dependent on one supplier for energy becomes more vulnerable to interruption. A country relying heavily on another state for defence must consider what happens if the guarantee changes. A country whose international transactions depend overwhelmingly on financial infrastructure controlled elsewhere must understand that access itself can become leverage. None of this means interdependence is undesirable. Modern prosperity was built through specialization, trade and interconnected markets. The important distinction is between interdependence and concentrated dependency. Strategic autonomy therefore does not necessarily require retreating behind national borders. A country can sometimes become more autonomous by becoming more connected, provided those connections are sufficiently diversified. More suppliers can reduce exposure to one supplier. More customers can reduce the consequences of losing one market. More investors can widen the pool of available capital. More routes can reduce dependence on a single corridor. More partnerships can create room to manoeuvre when one relationship becomes difficult. That gives us the proposition at the centre of this episode: Dependence creates leverage. Options redistribute it. 2. Follow the Vulnerability: When a new international partnership appears, political language often reaches immediately for ideology. Is it pro-American or anti-American? Western or anti-Western? Aligned with China or designed to contain China? Those questions can be useful, but they can also make us overlook the vulnerability beneath the politics. Europe’s reliance on Russian energy became an acute strategic problem after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Concentrated semiconductor production has become a national-security concern. Critical minerals have moved from obscure commodity discussions into strategic planning because mining, refining and processing can be heavily concentrated. Supply-chain disruptions have reminded governments that the cheapest supplier is not always the safest supplier. Financial infrastructure can become geopolitical leverage as well. Sanctions may impose substantial costs on targeted states, while simultaneously giving those states an incentive to search for alternative payment channels, financing arrangements and trading partners. The existence of adaptation does not prove sanctions have failed. Both effects can occur at the same time. That is why every new coalition, corridor or financial mechanism should invite a question before we decide what ideological label to attach to it: What vulnerability made another option worth building? The answer may involve security, energy, technology, finance, supply chains or simple bargaining power. But building an option is considerably harder than announcing one. A trade agreement does not guarantee trade. Political confidence does not automatically attract capital. Capital commitments do not automatically become construction. Construction does not guarantee globally competitive production. Production means little without customers. Throughout Season 6, the useful distinction will therefore be between what countries say they are building and what eventually becomes difficult for the rest of the world to ignore. 3. BRICS Is Bigger Than the Acronym We Remember: The name BRICS carries historical baggage that can obscure how much the grouping has changed. BRIC began as an investment acronym coined in 2001 around Brazil, Russia, India and China. South Africa later joined, creating BRICS. The grouping has since expanded considerably. Ahead of this month’s summit, the Indian government described BRICS as comprising 11 countries and said its members represent 49.5 percent of the world’s population, 40 percent of global GDP and 26 percent of global trade. Those headline percentages require care, particularly the GDP figure, because shares vary depending on whether economic output is measured using market exchange rates or purchasing-power parity. The broader point is less controversial: BRICS now encompasses a vast share of humanity and includes major energy producers, commodity exporters, industrial economies and rapidly growing consumer markets. Its diversity is just as important as its size. India and China do not approach international affairs from identical positions. Brazil’s objectives are not Russia’s. Iran and Gulf states have different security concerns. Indonesia brings another set of economic and regional priorities. Several members maintain deep relationships with the United States and Europe while participating in BRICS. That makes one of the most common questions about the grouping increasingly inadequate. What if BRICS does not need to become a unified anti-Western alliance in order to become consequential? A coalition can matter without becoming a military alliance. A financial mechanism can matter without dethroning the dominant currency. A diplomatic forum can matter even when its members disagree. The more useful test is whether participation gives countries capabilities, relationships or bargaining options they did not possess before. 4. Disagreement Does Not Make Cooperation Meaningless: BRICS is not NATO. It has no NATO-style collective-defence obligation, no unified military command and no single foreign policy. Its internal tensions are substantial. India and China continue to manage a difficult relationship shaped by their disputed border, economic competition and wider strategic rivalry. Their leaders nevertheless used the New Delhi summit to pursue a cautious improvement in bilateral relations, another reminder that competition and cooperation can exist simultaneously. Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates also bring very different regional interests into the same forum. Yet the New Delhi summit still produced a joint declaration addressing conflicts, sanctions, trade barriers, institutional reform, local-currency trade, cross-border payments, energy, artificial intelligence and food security. Consensus on a document should not be mistaken for strategic unity. Governments can sign the same declaration and still disagree profoundly about how its language should be applied. But the reverse mistake is equally limiting: assuming that disagreement makes cooperation meaningless. Countries do not need to share one worldview to share one interest. India and China may compete strategically while benefiting from stable commercial relations. Gulf states can maintain close security relationships with Washington while deepening economic connections with Asian economies. Brazil can seek greater influence for the Global South without adopting Russia’s foreign policy. International politics becomes more difficult to understand when every relationship must fit inside one permanent camp. Perhaps the emerging system is better understood through overlap. 5. More Chairs at the Table: The institutions that shaped much of the postwar international order emerged when the global distribution of economic and political power looked very different. BRICS countries have repeatedly argued that institutions of global governance should better reflect the weight of emerging and developing economies. At the New Delhi summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi framed the Global South not simply as a recipient of rules but as an increasingly active participant in shaping them. AP reported him describing BRICS as a platform through which developing countries could become more significant “rule-shapers” in the international system. It would be easy to translate that aspiration into a simplistic story about removing the West from the table. The evidence suggests something more complicated. BRICS members continue participating in institutions such as the United

  5. Sep 14

    RESPECT

    Can We Stay Connected Without Becoming the Same? Most of us eventually discover that the hardest relationships are not always the ones without affection. Sometimes they are the ones where history, loyalty or dependence exists alongside a disagreement neither person can simply make disappear. A family member sees the world differently. A friend supports something you cannot understand. Someone you work with holds values that collide with your own. The instinct can be to solve that discomfort by choosing a side: soften what you believe to preserve the relationship, or end the relationship to preserve what you believe. But adult life rarely stays that simple. Perhaps one measure of a strong relationship is not how often two people agree, but whether the connection can survive the moment they do not. Ireland offered an interesting version of that tension during Donald Trump’s visit this weekend. Thousands marched through Dublin in protest, while Irish leaders still received the US president and maintained the diplomatic relationship. Later, in Doonbeg, the atmosphere was noticeably different. Trump’s golf resort is an important local employer, and many residents spoke positively about the jobs, tourism and economic activity it has brought to the area, even as others protested nearby. By Sunday, another layer had appeared. Trump announced plans to remove the 10% US tariff on Irish whiskey after appeals from Taoiseach Micheál Martin and others. The same visit could therefore contain protest, disagreement, economic dependence, negotiation and cooperation without any one of those things cancelling the others. That may be the more useful lesson. Ireland did not have to become one opinion about Donald Trump. Citizens could object to him. Political leaders could engage with him. A village could value the economic relationship surrounding his resort. A government could negotiate for its own interests. Disagreement and cooperation were able to exist at the same time. We often struggle with that possibility in our own lives because certainty feels cleaner. If someone is wrong about one important thing, we can start treating them as though they must be wrong about everything. If we care about someone, we may feel pressure to soften every disagreement so the relationship remains comfortable. Respect asks something more difficult from us. It asks whether we can protect what we believe without demanding that another person surrender everything they believe before we recognise their humanity. That does not mean tolerating cruelty, abandoning boundaries or pretending every disagreement is harmless. Some differences genuinely change relationships. But not every difference requires hatred, humiliation or permanent exile. Sometimes maturity is being able to say that I disagree with you deeply, I will not pretend otherwise, and I can still meet you here as another human being. Maybe respect was never agreement. Maybe it is the confidence to stand firmly inside what we believe while leaving enough room for someone else to stand somewhere different. We do not have to become the same people to remember that we are still people to one another. Thanks for listening. That brings Season 5 of the short-form reflections to a close. Next season, we go deeper into the systems, behaviours, power structures and narratives shaping the world around us, moving beyond the headlines to understand how these forces work, who benefits from them, and what their consequences mean for the rest of us. See you in Season 6. 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗔𝗳𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿𝘀 𝗪𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀, 𝗔𝗜, 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝘁 𝗪𝗵𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 • 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵𝘀™ “This is not the time to know less. It is the time to understand more.” Get full access to Incorrigible Myths at incorrigiblemyths.substack.com/subscribe

  6. Sep 11

    LEVERAGE

    Why Having Somewhere Else to Go Changes Everything. Most of us know what it feels like when too much of life depends on one thing. Maybe it is one employer providing all of your income. One customer keeping your business afloat. One relationship holding together your housing, finances, friendships, or sense of stability. Nothing about that connection has to be harmful for it to shape the way you behave. When losing one person or one opportunity would disrupt everything, disagreement starts to feel more expensive. You become a little more careful. You tolerate things you might otherwise question. Sometimes you stop yourself from saying what you really think because the cost of upsetting the relationship feels too high. That is one of the quieter forms of leverage. We often imagine power as something obvious. A demand. A threat. Someone telling us exactly what will happen if we refuse. But it does not always work that way. Sometimes nobody has to threaten you at all. If you believe you have nowhere else to go, the situation begins influencing your choices on its own. And that is why having options can change so much. Not because you suddenly want to leave, but because you know you could. Another job. Another client. Another skill. Another community. Another route forward. The interesting part is that you may never use any of them. Their value can begin much earlier. Once losing one connection no longer means losing everything, some of the fear underneath the relationship disappears. You can speak more freely. Negotiate more clearly. Stay because you want to stay, rather than because leaving feels impossible. Countries can find themselves in similar situations. Canada and the United States have built one of the closest economic relationships in the world. For decades, that closeness brought enormous advantages. But heavy dependence on one market also creates vulnerability when the relationship becomes unpredictable. That is why much of Canada’s current conversation about Europe, Asia, new trade relationships, defence partnerships, domestic production and additional markets is really about reducing concentration risk. Kevin Boucher has described this as moving from dependence toward optionality. The important part is that optionality does not mean replacing Washington with Beijing, or exchanging one dependency for another. It means having more than one direction to move. And that is where the political example becomes something much more human. The opposite of dependence is not isolation. We are supposed to need people. We are supposed to cooperate, trust, build relationships and rely on one another. The problem begins when one relationship carries so much of our life that losing it feels like losing our ability to function. A healthy alternative is not needing nobody. It is having enough connections, skills, relationships and possibilities that no single one of them has to carry everything. Because having somewhere else to go does not mean you are planning to leave. Sometimes it simply changes the way you are able to stay. You can remain loyal without feeling trapped. You can cooperate without surrendering your ability to say no. And perhaps that is one of the quieter forms of freedom. Not a life where we need no one. A life connected widely enough that staying with someone, working with someone, or building with someone remains what it should have been all along: a choice. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back tomorrow with another short-form reflection. 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗔𝗳𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿𝘀 𝗪𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀, 𝗔𝗜, 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝘁 𝗪𝗵𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 • 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵𝘀™ “This is not the time to know less. It is the time to understand more.” Get full access to Incorrigible Myths at incorrigiblemyths.substack.com/subscribe

  7. Sep 10

    DISSONANCE

    When Reality No Longer Fits What We Believed. Almost everyone knows the discomfort of defending something they have begun to doubt. Sometimes it is a decision we argued for, a person we trusted, or an idea we attached part of our identity to. The longer we defended it, the harder it can become to admit that something no longer feels right. Doubt often arrives before acceptance does. We notice the contradiction, but instead of changing our position immediately, we reach for explanations. Maybe there is more context. Maybe the “criticism” is exaggerated. Maybe the next explanation will finally make everything fit again. Sometimes that is true. But sometimes those explanations are doing another job. They are protecting us from what it might mean to admit that what we believed no longer matches what we can see. “Psychologist Leon Festinger” gave this discomfort a name in the 1950s: cognitive dissonance, the tension that can arise when an important belief collides with conflicting information or behaviour. The mind naturally looks for a way to reduce that tension. We can reconsider the belief, but we can also question the evidence, distrust the source, minimize the contradiction, or construct another explanation that allows the original belief to survive. That is not necessarily “foolishness.” Often, it is an ordinary attempt to protect our sense of who we are. Politics can make this especially powerful because political loyalty rarely remains a simple opinion about taxes, trade or immigration. Over time, it can become woven into friendships, community, pride, values and identity. For Americans who have spent years defending “Donald Trump” or the MAGA movement, contradictory information may therefore arrive carrying much more than a new fact. As the contradictions accumulate, doubt can begin to feel personal. If I acknowledge this, was I wrong? If I defended this for years, what does that say about me? What happens to all the conversations, arguments and emotional investment that came before? At that point the mind is solving two problems at once. It is trying to see clearly and trying to stay safe from shame, and those two tasks can pull in opposite directions. This is why “humiliation is such a poor invitation to change.” If reconsidering means confessing that you were gullible or naive, the old belief simply gains one more reason to hold on. So perhaps we owe each other a more humane way through. You may have been completely sincere in what you believed and still discover that your trust was misplaced. You may have wanted something genuinely good and trusted someone who promised it to you. Recognizing that now, does not mean you have to turn against the person you used to be. You can decide an idea no longer deserves your confidence without turning your former self into someone to be ashamed of. Often the hardest part is not accepting the new information at all. It is grieving the version of things you defended for so long, and that grief deserves gentleness rather than mockery. “Because this is larger than politics.” All of us have protected beliefs because they protected something inside us: an identity, a decision, a hope, a community, or a version of ourselves we were not yet ready to surrender. Maybe “freedom” is not about never being wrong. Maybe it is becoming secure enough inside ourselves that discovering we were wrong no longer feels like disappearing. Secure enough to say: I believed this then.I understand more now.And I am allowed to move. You do not have to erase who you were. You only have to leave enough room for who you are becoming. Thanks for listening. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back tomorrow with another short-form reflection. 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗔𝗳𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿𝘀 𝗪𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀, 𝗔𝗜, 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝘁 𝗪𝗵𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 • 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵𝘀™ “This is not the time to know less. It is the time to understand more.” Get full access to Incorrigible Myths at incorrigiblemyths.substack.com/subscribe

  8. Sep 9

    NARRATIVE

    Where We Place Ourselves in our Stories.' Memory is not a recording. Most of us know this without thinking much about it. We tell a story from years ago and notice that some details sharpen while others disappear. We remember what we felt, what we meant, where we stood, and sometimes we become a little more important to the story than we probably were. Usually, nothing much depends on it. But memory does more than preserve the past. It also helps us construct a version of ourselves. Psychologists describe autobiographical memory as reconstructive. We do not simply retrieve the past. We rebuild it through emotion, identity, later experience and the person we understand ourselves to be today. Research on self-enhancement and narcissistic traits gives us another possible lens. For some people, maintaining a sense of exceptional importance can become unusually central to the self. None of that gives us access to what is actually happening inside Donald Trump’s mind. From the outside, we cannot know whether a particular statement comes from deliberate deception, exaggeration, altered memory, self-protection, or some combination of them. But it can help us notice the shape of his story. This week, Trump described being near One Liberty Plaza after September 11 when, according to him, two firefighters grabbed him beneath the arms and carried him away because they feared the building might collapse. One Liberty Plaza was genuinely considered at risk. But no independent account has emerged corroborating Trump’s personal rescue story. The earliest known photographs or video place him near Ground Zero on September 13, two days after the attacks, while his claims about bringing large numbers of workers to help have remained unverified. So the interesting question is not simply: Is Donald Trump lying? It is: Why does Trump’s telling of September 11 repeatedly move him closer to the centre of the story? Over the years, he has described helping clear rubble, bringing workers to Ground Zero, spending significant time alongside first responders, and now being physically carried away from danger by firefighters. Whatever explains those individual claims, the direction of the narrative is difficult to ignore. Trump becomes increasingly consequential inside the story. And then there is another kind of narrative. Twenty-four Canadians were among those killed on September 11. When American airspace closed, Canada’s Operation Yellow Ribbon accepted 224 diverted flights carrying more than 33,000 passengers. A retired Halifax police dog named Trakr and his handler, James Symington, drove to New York to help. Trakr was credited with locating Genelle Guzman-McMillan, the last person found alive beneath the World Trade Center rubble. Those stories require no enlargement. Perhaps that is the contrast worth studying. Trump’s story repeatedly moves the self toward the centre. The stories of the people who actually helped move outward, toward somebody else. One asks history to confirm personal importance. The other asks what can be done when another human being needs help. Most of us move between those impulses in much smaller ways. We want our suffering recognized, our contribution remembered, and some reassurance that our presence mattered. There is nothing unusual about that. But perhaps there is another kind of dignity in allowing an event to remain larger than ourselves. To say: I was there. I helped where I could. Or perhaps simply: Someone needed help, so I showed up. Twenty-five years later, maybe that is the narrative worth carrying forward. Not who managed to move themselves closest to the centre of the photograph, but who moved toward other human beings when the world was falling apart. History does not need us at its centre for our lives to have mattered. Sometimes the most meaningful place in the story is simply beside someone who needed us. Thanks for listening. I’ll be back tomorrow with another short-form reflection. 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝗔𝗳𝗳𝗮𝗶𝗿𝘀 𝗪𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗚𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀, 𝗔𝗜, 𝗛𝘂𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗮𝗻 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗔𝗻𝗮𝗹𝘆𝘀𝘁 𝗪𝗵𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗹𝗲𝗯𝗹𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 • 𝗜𝗻𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗠𝘆𝘁𝗵𝘀™ “This is not the time to know less. It is the time to understand more.” Get full access to Incorrigible Myths at incorrigiblemyths.substack.com/subscribe

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About

Examining how fragile egos and maladaptive coping strategies shape behaviour, relationships, and long-term consequences. incorrigiblemyths.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    Gifts of Pure Consciousness
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    62
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Utkarsh Parhate
  • Show Website
    Incorrigible Myths Podcast
  • Provider
    Utkarsh Parhate