Monday, August 24, 2026, 9:30 PM Pacific Time You’re listening to Incorrigible Myths, an independent public-interest publication built around current affairs, human behaviour, and pattern recognition through long-form analysis. Through this publication, the aim is to move past the headline and look more closely at what is driving the decision underneath it: status, power, money, political pressure, institutional incentives, grievance, the fear of looking weak, and the very human tendency to mistake a dramatic show of control for actual strategic strength. Incorrigible Myths is published in Canada as independent public-interest commentary and analysis, protected by the freedoms of thought, belief, opinion and expression recognized under Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I begin many of these long-form analysis pieces with Socrates and Plato for a reason, and I have come to think of it almost as a small prayer: a moment to remember two minds who left humanity extraordinary lessons centuries ago, long before any of us arrived to inherit them. My hope is that, with time, their ideas become familiar enough to stay with us beyond these pages, and that we approach their wisdom with enough grace, humility and curiosity to recognize how easily distraction, certainty and our own ignorance can keep us from engaging with what they were trying to teach us. Socrates believed that a meaningful life requires us to question what we are told and examine how we think. Plato approached the same problem through the allegory of the cave, where people exposed only to shadows for long enough eventually began to mistake those shadows for reality. Thanks for reading Incorrigible Myths! This post is public so feel free to share it. Thousands of years later, that warning remains especially useful in politics, where the appearance of strength can become more persuasive than the consequences of the decision itself. Volume can be mistaken for conviction, threats for leverage, retaliation for strategy and domination for leadership, even when the move being celebrated today may be gradually weakening the position from which tomorrow’s decision will have to be made. That is the question running through DECISIONS: not simply whether a leader appears to have won the moment, but what drove the choice, what incentives shaped it, what response it produced, and what behaviour it makes more likely next. Because every political decision does more than produce an immediate outcome. It changes the next move. Note For Spotify & Apple Podcast Listeners: The reporting, research, public data and primary sources referenced throughout this analysis are linked in the written edition of DECISIONS on Incorrigible Myths. The audio is designed to stand on its own, while the written version allows you to examine the evidence behind the analysis and follow the sources for yourself. Let’s begin. For the next 30 minutes, give this your full attention. Geopolitics can be difficult to stay with because it often arrives wrapped in percentages, debt figures, trade balances, sanctions, military terminology and economic language that feels far removed from ordinary life. Our minds were never designed to absorb an endless stream of information at this speed, especially when much of it seems disconnected from the routines of work, family, groceries, rent, commuting and simply trying to get through the day. But the distance is becoming harder to maintain. Decisions made inside governments, markets and institutions eventually travel downstream into prices, jobs, interest rates, immigration, energy, security and the general sense of stability people carry into their daily lives. Even when we try to tune the system out, our phones keep delivering fragments of it until the noise itself begins shaping what we fear, what we believe and what we stop questioning. The political decisions being made today will shape the world the next generation grows up in, so understanding today’s chaos is really about understanding the future your kids are going to inherit. Since the Iran war began, I have found myself returning repeatedly to one word beneath my writing: Whistleblower. I do not use it because I possess classified intelligence, privileged access to government deliberations or some hidden archive unavailable to everyone else; I use it because there are moments when publicly available facts, political behaviour, institutional reactions and economic consequences begin forming a pattern that becomes increasingly difficult to ignore once the pieces are placed beside one another. That distinction has become important to me because much of what concerns me is not hidden at all. It appears in government statements, Reuters dispatches, economic data, court records, presidential speeches, market reactions and the decisions governments make after those statements are delivered. The information exists in public, yet it often arrives fragmented across different news cycles, which can make the larger pattern harder to see than any individual fact. My concern since Iran has therefore become less about one military decision than about the architecture of decision-making itself, particularly when extraordinary institutional power is concentrated around Trump being Trump, whose public behaviour has become so predictably theatrical that cataloguing every contradiction would require its own federal archive. At this point, the performance is doing most of the writing for us: the grievance, the chest-thumping, the threats, the insistence on being seen as the biggest man in every room, followed by the familiar scramble to explain why the outcome somehow still counts as winning. So I am making myself one small editorial promise for the rest of this piece: I am retiring his name for the next few thousand words. Canada has heard it enough, the world has watched the performance long enough, and the pattern no longer needs an introduction because it keeps introducing itself. What interests me now is the pattern rather than the personality label, because the behaviour is already visible enough: an obsession with winning, dominance, grievance, personal loyalty, retaliation, and the avoidance of perceived weakness, all of which raise a more consequential question about what happens when the need to preserve an image of strength begins influencing decisions with national and international consequences. I cannot know the private architecture of another person’s mind, and political analysis becomes unreliable when it pretends otherwise. What can be examined are recurring behaviours, including sensitivity to humiliation, the personalization of disagreement, the presentation of compromise as weakness, the persistent need to frame outcomes as victories, and the tendency to translate political disputes into contests in which one participant must visibly dominate another. Those patterns become especially consequential when the person displaying them controls the executive machinery of the world’s most powerful state. 1. When Power Begins Protecting the Story: One psychological framework that has influenced how I think about this problem comes from Professor Sam Vaknin’s work on narcissistic defenses, grandiosity, the False Self and what he has described as forms of narcissistic immunity. I use that work as an interpretive lens rather than a clinical diagnosis of Donald Trump or any other public figure, because no responsible analysis can establish a psychiatric condition from political behaviour observed at a distance. And even if an entire room of experts could somehow sit him down, explain the pattern in perfect language and place the consequences neatly in front of him, there is little reason to imagine that revelation alone would suddenly reorganize the behaviour we are watching. Self-reflection is not a switch that can be flipped by better evidence, especially when the political environment surrounding a leader has spent years rewarding certainty, escalation and the performance of invulnerability. That is where the word incorrigible becomes useful. Something incorrigible is not simply stubborn; it is resistant to correction, difficult to bend, reform or redirect, even when reality keeps supplying reasons to change course. It is less like a door waiting for the right key and more like a concrete bollard planted in the middle of the road, forcing everyone else to redesign the traffic pattern around it. There is some satire in that image because the behaviour can eventually become strangely familiar. Think of the neighbourhood dog that barks at every passing bicycle, delivery van and falling leaf until the barking stops communicating danger and becomes part of the background noise. The neighbours eventually stop organizing themselves around the dog and start organizing themselves around one another. That may be the more interesting political question anyway. What happens when the performance becomes so repetitive that the audience stops reacting to the performer and begins adapting to the pattern? The conceptual question is nevertheless useful. If an individual becomes heavily invested in an identity organized around exceptional strength, superiority or invulnerability, information that contradicts that identity may no longer arrive simply as information. Defeat can feel like humiliation, limits can become personal affronts, compromise can resemble submission, and a decision intended to solve an external problem can gradually become entangled with the need to preserve the internal narrative of the person making it. That creates a potentially dangerous feedback loop: The pattern can feed itself. An image of strength collides with a reality that contradicts it, the contradiction feels intolerable, and the next decision becomes increasingly focused on restoring control rather than solving the original problem. The restoration rarely lasts, because reality eventually pushes ba
